Title,Paragraph
History of rail transport in Australia,"Australians generally assumed in the 1850s that railways would be built by the private sector. Private companies built railways in the then colonies of Victoria, opened in 1854, and New South Wales, where the company was taken over by the government before completion in 1855, due to bankruptcy. South Australia's railways were government owned from the beginning, including a horse-drawn line opened in 1854 and a steam-powered line opened in 1856. In Victoria, the private railways were soon found not to be financially viable, and existing rail networks and their expansion were taken over by the colony. Government ownership also enabled railways to be built to promote development, even if not apparently viable in strictly financial terms. The railway systems spread from the colonial capitals, except for a few lines that hauled commodities to a rural port.
Railways in Australia date from the 10 December 1831 when the Australian Agricultural Company officially opened Australia's first railway, located at the intersection of Brown and Church Streets, Newcastle, New South Wales. Privately owned and operated to service the A Pit coal mine, it was a cast iron fishbelly rail on an inclined plane as a gravitational railway.
The colonial railways were built to three different gauges, which became a problem once lines of different systems met at Albury in 1881 and Wallangarra in 1888. In the 20th century, the lines between major cities were converted to standard gauge and electrified suburban networks were built in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. In the second half of the 20th century, many rural branch lines were closed to passenger traffic or altogether in all states. On the other hand, long heavy-haul railways were built to transport iron ore in Western Australia and coal in Queensland to ports. In Western Australia these railways are privately owned.
In the 1990s and the early 21st century, the traditional networks were reorganised and partially privatised. The interstate standard gauge network came largely under the control of the Australian Rail Track Corporation and private companies were allowed to operate on it for the first time. Some non-metropolitan intrastate networks became privately controlled and the operation of private freight and passenger trains commenced. The Melbourne suburban railways became the first urban rail system to be operated by private sector franchisees."
History of rail transport in Australia,"Development of state-based networks
Railways in Australia date from the 10 December 1831 when the Australian Agricultural Company officially opened Australia's first railway, located at the intersection of Brown and Church Streets, Newcastle, New South Wales. Privately owned and operated to service the A Pit coal mine, it was a cast-iron fishbelly rail on an inclined plane as a gravitational railway.
The earliest railway in South Australia consisted of the seven-mile horse-drawn freight line between Goolwa and Port Elliot, which began service on 18 May 1854, allowing steam ships to avoid the treacherous mouth of the Murray River. The first steam locomotive began service soon afterward on the Port Melbourne line between Sandridge (now Port Melbourne), and Flinders Street in Melbourne.
In 1848, the Sydney Railway Company was established to connect Goulburn and Bathurst to Sydney, mainly to convey wool for export to the United Kingdom. The company proposed that standard gauge (4 ft 8+1⁄2 in (1,435 mm)) be used but had considerable difficulty in raising sufficient funds to commence construction and the first section of the line, between Granville and Sydney was not opened until 1855. This area is now part of Sydney's western suburbs and the railway line became the first section of what is now the Main Suburban line. The Sydney Railway Company went bankrupt building it and as a result the line was taken over by the government, leading to the establishment of the New South Wales Government Railways. Part of the reason for the delay in starting construction and the Company's eventual bankruptcy was the start of the Australian gold rushes in 1851—these created a labour-shortage and forced up prices. In fact the railway did not reach Goulburn until 1869 and Bathurst until 1876, both lines having had to cross difficult topography.
Victoria was the main beneficiary of the gold rushes, with the major discoveries around the state but particularly at Ballarat and Bendigo (then called Sandhurst) in the early 1850s. While this created a labour shortage in the colony (which had separated from New South Wales in 1851), it also caused great development in Melbourne, first settled in 1835 and declared a city in 1847.  As a result, Australia's first steam-powered railway was a suburban line opened by the Melbourne & Hobson's Bay Railway Company from Melbourne to Sandridge in 1854. This line and almost all subsequent Victorian lines were built to broad gauge (1,600 mm (5 ft 3 in), gauge). In 1856, the government-owned South Australian Railways opened its first 1600 mm (5 ft 3 in) gauge line from Adelaide to Port Adelaide."
History of rail transport in Australia,"The three major Australian colonies at the time failed to follow advice from the British Government to adopt a uniform gauge in case the lines of the various states should ever meet. In 1850 the original Irish engineer, Francis Sheilds persuaded the Government of New South Wales to require that all railways in the colony be of the Irish broad gauge. In 1853 a Scots engineer persuaded the legislature to change back to standard gauge. Unfortunately although New South Wales had informed Victoria of the change, the government there decided to continue with 1,600 mm (5 ft 3 in) gauge and South Australia then followed Victoria. Suggestions and proposals respectively that Victoria should follow New South Wales or New South Wales should convert to the Victorian gauge were made soon after but the states followed their initial choice.
Queensland's first line (3 ft 6 in (1,067 mm) gauge—known in Australia as ""narrow gauge"") from Ipswich to Bigge's Camp, the first stage of a railway between Brisbane and Toowoomba, opened in 1865. This gauge was intended to save money and was subsequently followed by Tasmania and Western Australia. As a result, in the middle of the 20th century Australia had almost equal amounts of each gauge. Tasmania's first 1,600 mm (5 ft 3 in) gauge line opened in 1871 from Deloraine to Launceston and was converted to 1,067 mm (3 ft 6 in) gauge in 1888. Finally, Western Australia opened its first Government-owned line in 1879 between Geraldton and Northampton. Lines spread in all the states from these first lines, connecting ports to farmland and ports.
The mainline systems of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Queensland met (albeit with three breaks of gauge) in the 1880s. Only Victoria and South Australia shared a common gauge, and even so they opted to change engines at the border. The other mainland colony, Western Australia, was isolated by 2,000 km of desert.
The first break of gauge was created when the New South Wales and Victorian lines met at Albury in 1883. The railways of  Victoria and South Australia meet at Serviceton in 1887, but these lines were both broad gauge. In 1888 the railways of New South Wales and Queensland meet at Wallangara. Meanwhile, in 1889, the first line (1,067 mm (3 ft 6 in) gauge) in the Northern Territory was opened from Darwin to Pine Creek. In 1914, an eight kilometre extension of the New South Wales Railways from Queanbeyan to Canberra was opened to  create the Australian Capital Territory's first and only line."
History of rail transport in Australia,"New South Wales
New South Wales' railways date from the 10 December 1831 when the Australian Agricultural Company officially opened Australia's first railway, located at the intersection of Brown and Church Streets, Newcastle. Privately owned and operated to service the A Pit coal mine, it was a cast iron fishbelly rail on an inclined plane as a gravitational railway"
History of rail transport in Australia,"New South Wales' railways were standard gauge lines built to connect the ports of Sydney and Newcastle to the rural interior. The first public railway was the Main Suburban line from Sydney to Parramatta Junction and after two decisions to change the rail gauge, problems in raising capital and difficulties in construction, the line was opened in 1855. The Main Southern line was built in stages from Parramatta Junction to the Victorian border at Albury between 1855 and 1881 and connected to the Victorian Railways at a break-of-gauge in 1883. The standard gauge connection from Albury to Melbourne was finally completed in 1962.  Meanwhile, the Main Western line was built in stages to the north west of the state, starting in 1860 at Parramatta Junction and reaching Bourke in 1885."
History of rail transport in Australia,"The Main North line was built in sections over several years. The Sydney to Newcastle section was connected with the conclusion of the final two stages, Mullet Creek to Gosford (opened 16 January 1888) and Hawkesbury to Mullet Creek (opened 1 May 1889), of the Homebush to Waratah line, these final two stages required the construction of the Woy Woy Tunnel and the original Hawkesbury River Railway Bridge. The Newcastle to Wallangarra section was constructed between 1857 and 1888 with a break-of-gauge required at the New South Wales and Queensland border. The North Coast line, constructed between 1905 and 1932 with the completion of the Grafton Bridge, brought about the closure of the northern end of the Main North line at the Maitland junction due to its shorter distance.
The last main line, the Broken Hill line was completed to Broken Hill in 1927, connecting with the South Australian Railways at a break of gauge.  Meanwhile, branch lines proliferated over the settled east of the state, including the Illawarra line to Wollongong and Bomaderry completed in 1893. In 1926 work began on electrifying Sydney's urban railways and connecting them together via new lines."
History of rail transport in Australia,"Victoria
Victoria's first railway was a suburban railway opened from Melbourne to Port Melbourne in 1854. The Melbourne & Suburban Railway Company's line from Princes Bridge to Punt Road (Richmond) opened in 1859.  In the same year the  Geelong and Melbourne Railway Company opened its line from Melbourne to Geelong.  Subsequently the Victorian Railways built new railways to connect farming and mining communities to the ports of Melbourne, Geelong and Portland.  In 1862 lines reached the great gold rush towns of Bendigo and Ballarat. In 1864 a line was opened to the Murray River port of Echuca.  In 1883 the first connection with another State's rail system was made when the North East line was completed to the New South Wales Government Railways station at Albury, requiring a break-of-gauge to New South Wales' 4 ft 8+1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) standard gauge Main Southern line.  In 1887, Victorian Railways met South Australian Railways at Serviceton, although both systems used broad gauge.
In 1919, electrification and development of the Melbourne suburban lines commenced. Minor extensions to suburban lines have continued, but patronage fell as road transport gained favour from the 1960s. In recent years, patronage has risen substantially, with more than 200 million trips on the network in 2007–2008.  In 1981, Melbourne's only underground railway, the City Loop was opened.  On the country network, a large number of uneconomic branch line railways have been closed since the 1950s, leaving a skeleton network by the time of the Lonie Report of 1980. Privatisation of the Victorian railway network was carried out by the Kennett Government in the 1990s, with freight, suburban and country rail services split into separate companies. This was later followed by the Regional Fast Rail project that saw track upgrades, new trains, and an improved timetable to major regional cities."
History of rail transport in Australia,"Queensland
The first line opened in 1865 from Ipswich to Grandchester, a temporary terminus in the foothills of the Darling Downs. It was built to narrow gauge 3 ft 6 in (1,067 mm) in order to reduce costs through the steep escarpment. This was subsequently applied to all the railways built in Queensland, except for the Sydney–Brisbane line and the Weipa mining railway, both built in the 20th century. This was the first 1,067 mm (3 ft 6 in) railway in the world, but the gauge subsequently spread to Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand, Japan, Indonesia and several African countries. The line was extended from Grandchester to Toowoomba at the top of a steep climb in 1867  and was connected from Ipswich to Brisbane in 1875.  From Toowoomba it was extended in stages to meet the New South Wales standard gauge line at Wallangarra in 1887 and to Charleville in outback southern Queensland in 1888.
Independent lines were commenced from the east coast ports of Maryborough, Bundaberg, Gladstone, Rockhampton, Mackay, Bowen, Townsville, Cairns and Cooktown. The central line opened from Rockhampton to Westwood in 1887 and reached Winton in central western Queensland in 1928. The northern line opened from Townsville to Charters Towers in 1882 and reached Mount Isa in 1929.  In 1888 the east-west lines began to be connected with the opening of the first section of the North Coast line to Petrie.  It was not until 1924 that this line finally reached Cairns, Cooktown was never connected.
Many heavy haul coal lines were built in the late 20th century from the ports of Gladstone (beginning in 1968) and Hay Point (beginning in 1971). Electrification of some of the heavy haul coal lines commenced in 1986. Finally an electrified rail system was developed in suburban Brisbane from 1979. Eventually the North Coast line between Brisbane and Rockhampton was electrified. This, together with the central Queensland mining railway, constitutes Australia's only significant rural rail electrification."
History of rail transport in Australia,"Western Australia
The first railway in Western Australia was the Ballaarat Tramline, a private timber railway from Lockville to Yoganup near Busselton, south of Perth. In 1879, the Western Australian Government Railways opened a 1,067 mm (3 ft 6 in) gauge line to connect the copper mine at Northampton and the port of Geraldton. Subsequently lines also developed from the ports of Fremantle (the port of Perth), Bunbury, Albany and Esperance, mainly for carrying grain and minerals. The line between Fremantle, Perth and Guildford (about 15 km further east) was opened in 1881. In 1893, Perth was connected to the port of Bunbury, 175 kilometres south of Perth. In the following year the Midland Railway Company opened a line from Perth to Walkaway, which connected with the Government line to Geraldton, 424 km north of Perth. In 1896, the railway connected Perth to Kalgoorlie, where gold had been discovered in 1893.
In the 20th century, Perth was finally connected to the eastern states. In 1917, the standard gauge Trans-Australian Railway connected eastern Australia with the narrow gauge network at Kalgoorlie. The nationalisation of non-paying branch lines started in 1957, with the closure of many lines. Commencing in the 1960s, a number of long distance heavy-haul railways have been built in the Pilbara region by major iron mining companies, particularly BHP and Hamersley Iron. New lines are still being built in this area, particularly to supply the booming Chinese market. In 1986, the electrification of Perth suburban lines with a 25 kV 50 Hz AC overhead power supply commenced. The longest new line was opened on 23 December 2007 from Perth to Mandurah."
History of rail transport in Australia,"South Australia
In 1854, South Australia opened a horse-drawn tramway from the port of Goolwa on the Murray River to an ocean harbour at Port Elliot to transfer freight between  shallow-draft vessels and coastal and ocean-going vessels, which later became part of the steam-powered network. The South Australia line was later extended to a safer harbour at Victor Harbor.
The first South Australian steam-operated line was built as a broad gauge 1,600 mm (5 ft 3 in) line in 1856 between the city and Port Adelaide stopping at Bowden, Woodville and Alberton, followed by a broad gauge line to Gawler the next year 1857. This line was extended to Kapunda, a copper mining town in 1860 and then to Burra the great copper centre in 1870. Gradually, a network of lines spread out from Adelaide, Port Wakefield, Wallaroo, Port Broughton, Port Augusta, Kingston SE, Beachport, Whyalla, Port Pirie and Port Lincoln. Some of these were built initially to carry ore, particularly copper. Some lines later carried freight from the Murray River and grain from the broadacre lands. All but the lines radiating from Adelaide were initially narrow 1,067 mm (3 ft 6 in) gauge lines. The first narrow  gauge line was completed in 1870 from Port Wakefield to Hoyleton but was soon upgraded to broad gauge and extended to Blyth, the station nearest the township of Clare.
The first interstate connection was completed in 1887, when the South Australian and Victorian broad gauge railways met at Serviceton. In 1888 a narrow gauge line was opened from Port Pirie to Broken Hill, with a connection at Peterborough to Adelaide. The broad gauge line was completed from Adelaide to Terowie in 1880. The line north of Terowie was built as a narrow gauge line in stages to Peterborough and Quorn in 1882 and Oodnadatta in 1891. This was extended to Alice Springs by the Commonwealth Railways in 1929, when it was renamed the Central Australia Railway."
History of rail transport in Australia,"Tasmania
The first railway in Tasmania was a broad gauge 1,600 mm (5 ft 3 in) line opened between Deloraine and Launceston in 1871 by the Launceston and Western Railway. It quickly went bankrupt and was effectively taken over by the Tasmanian Government in 1872. In 1876 the Tasmanian Main Line Company opened a narrow gauge 1,067 mm (3 ft 6 in) line from Hobart to Evandale (near Launceston), connecting with an extension of the Launceston and Western line at a break-of-gauge. Further gauge confusion was added in 1885 when the Tasmanian Government built a narrow gauge line west of Deloraine to Devonport. This was resolved in 1888 by the conversion of the Launceston–Deloraine line to narrow gauge.
The Tasmanian Government bought the Tasmanian Main Line Company in 1890, creating the Tasmanian Government Railways. In 1901 the line to Devonport line was extended to Burnie, connecting with the Emu Bay Railway's Melba line to Zeehan. Other branches were built but the Tasmanian system has always been small and unprofitable. Operated by the Tasmanian Government owned TasRail since 2009, previous owners include Australian National, Australian Transport Network and Pacific National."
History of rail transport in Australia,"Off network gauges
Development of the national network
In the 19th century, railways were created to enable agricultural and minerals traffic to be carried to ports for export, and to allow passenger and freight operations between colonial capitals and regional areas.  Coastal shipping handled most passenger and freight traffic between the colonies. John Whitton was appointed Engineer in Chief of the New South Wales Government Railways in 1856 and immediately advised his government that the short railway that had been opened in Sydney be converted to broad gauge in case the railways of New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia ever joined, but he was refused because ""... his political masters ... were unable to envisage intercolonial traffic ever developing.""  However, the problem of different gauges became apparent with the meeting of lines of the different systems at Albury in 1883 and Wallangarra in 1888.
In the 1890s, the establishment of an Australian Federation from the six colonies was debated. One of the points of discussion was the extent that railways would be a federal responsibility. A vote to make it so was lost narrowly, instead the new constitution allows ""the acquisition, with the consent of a State, of any railways of the State on terms arranged between the Commonwealth and the State"" (Section 51 xxxiii) and ""railway construction and extension in any State with the consent of that State"" (Section 51 xxxiv). However, the Australian Government is free to provide funding to the states for rail upgrading projects under Section 96 (""the Parliament may grant financial assistance to any State on such terms and conditions as the Parliament thinks fit"").
The Australian Government has full responsibility for railways in the federal territories, although the Northern Territory's railway is now owned and operated by the private AustralAsia Rail Corporation and the only railway in the Australian Capital Territory, the Canberra-Queanbeyan railway is now operated by NSW TrainLink.
In 1910, a conference of Railway commissioners chose 4 ft 8+1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) to be the standard gauge. Over the decades, many plans were floated to fix the break of gauge. These failed, mainly because they were too ambitious and proposed to convert all lines, even lines of little economic value."
History of rail transport in Australia,"Creating a standard gauge network
In the 20th century, the different state rail systems became more integrated, initially creating more breaks of gauge. In 1917, the Federal Government's standard gauge Trans-Australian Railway was completed between Kalgoorlie and Port Augusta.  However, this required a break of gauge at Kalgoorlie to reach Perth and breaks of gauge at both Port Augusta and Terowie to reach Adelaide. In 1927, the last section of the Sydney–Broken Hill line was completed between Trida and Menindee meeting the South Australian Railways line at a break of gauge and requiring a further break of gauge at Terowie to reach Adelaide."
History of rail transport in Australia,"In 1932 the first progress in reducing the gauge conflict was made with the completion of the standard gauge Sydney–Brisbane railway with the opening of a bridge at Grafton. The first standard gauge line in South Australia, Trans-Australian Railway, was completed in 1917 between Port Augusta and Kalgoorlie, requiring break-of-gauges at Terowie, Port Augusta and Kalgoorlie to reach Perth. This line was extended to Port Pirie Junction in 1937 and the broad gauge line from Adelaide to Redhill was extended to Port Pirie, removing one break-of gauge.
In the 1950s, a parliamentary committee chaired by William Wentworth recommended a much more modest and affordable plan to gauge convert the three main missing links:"
History of rail transport in Australia,"Albury to Melbourne standard gauge track added parallel to broad gauge to complete the Sydney–Melbourne railway.
Kalgoorlie to Perth – narrow gauge converted to standard gauge.
Broken Hill to Port Pirie – narrow gauge converted to standard.
In 1962 the Albury to Melbourne standard gauge line was opened, completing the Sydney–Melbourne railway. In 1966, a new mixed standard and narrow gauge Eastern Railway route was completed through the Avon Valley, east of Perth. In 1968 the Kalgoorlie to Perth line was completed and in 1969 the Broken Hill to Port Pirie standard gauge railway were opened, completing Sydney–Perth railway.
The Whyalla line was opened between Port Augusta and Whyalla in 1972. In October 1980, a new standard gauge railway was completed from Tarcoola to Alice Springs, replacing the former narrow gauge railway. Adelaide was connected to the standard gauge network with the opening of the line to Crystal Brook in 1982 and the Melbourne–Adelaide railway was converted to standard gauge in 1995. Meanwhile, the Tarcoola to Alice Springs railway was extended to Darwin in 2004 to complete the Adelaide–Darwin rail corridor."
History of rail transport in Australia,"Private railways
There have always been niches for private railways in most colonies, such as:"
History of rail transport in Australia,"timber – private timber lines have occurred in most forested areas of Australia since the late 19th century
mining – private iron mining railways alone now account for most Australian rail freight by tonnage, but private coal railways have been important since the early years of coal mining in the mid 19th century
quarrying
major factory sites, such as steel works
temporary lines at construction sites
agriculture, especially the sugar industry"
History of rail transport in Australia,"Timber railways
Most timber railway operations across Australia were transitory, only existing for the time that timber was extracted. Some lines were moved regularly to the areas of forest to be exploited. A few 19th century operations were horse hauled, but most were steam powered.  Very few timber railways lasted into the 1960s with the advent of more versatile and stronger road based haulage."
History of rail transport in Australia,"Mining railways
Starting in the 1960s, four heavy duty railways were developed in the Pilbara region of the far north of Western Australia for the haulage of iron ore from several mines to the nearest ports. These railways are isolated from  each other and from the national system, carrying no other traffic.
The very heavy traffic on these lines, up to 100 million tonnes per year, push wheel/rail technology to its limits, and has resulted in considerable research and development that has been of value to railways worldwide.
These iron ore railways are all 1,435 mm (4 ft 8+1⁄2 in) gauge, and started off using American standards for track, locomotives and wagons.
In 2008, the Fortescue Metals Group (FMG) commenced operating a fifth iron ore railway in the Pilbara.
The railway lines are:"
History of rail transport in Australia,"Hamersley & Robe River railway (Rio Tinto)
Mount Newman railway (BHP)
Goldsworthy railway (BHP)
Fortescue railway (FMG)"
History of rail transport in Australia,"1990s and recent developments
Privatisation
In 1992, the largely Federal Government owned National Rail Corporation took over interstate rail freight operations from Australian National, FreightCorp and the Public Transport Corporation, and commenced operations on the interstate network. National Rail Corporation's freight operations and rolling stock (not infrastructure) were combined with the New South Wales Government owned FreightCorp and sold to Toll Holdings and Patrick Corporation as Pacific National in 2002.
Australian National was privatised in 1997. Its Tasmanian operations and infrastructure (TasRail) were sold to Australian Transport Network, which was taken over by Pacific National in 2004. South Australian branch lines were sold to Genesee & Wyoming Australia. Its passenger operations were taken over by Great Southern Railway.
State freight and country passenger operations were privatised. Urban passenger trains remained in government ownership, except in Victoria, because such services are politically sensitive and could not operate profitably.
New operating companies that appeared included:"
History of rail transport in Australia,"Aurizon
Australian Railroad Group
Australian Southern Railroad, eventually named One Rail Australia
Bowmans Rail
FreightLink
Magnetic Rail Group
Patrick Rail Operations
Qube Logistics
Rail First Asset Management
SCT Logistics
Silverton Rail
South Spur Rail Services
Southern Shorthaul Railroad
Watco Australia
Licensing of personnel with nationally recognised credentials facilitates the transfer of those people from one state or operator to another, as traffic demands."
History of rail transport in Australia,"Separation of infrastructure and operations
Construction and maintenance of network infrastructure were consolidated into non-profit government bodies, in the case of the interstate network and the non-urban railways of New South Wales (Australian Rail Track Corporation) and Western Australia (WestNet Rail). This was intended to provide access to new and existing players.
The interstate rail network of the former Australian National Railways was transferred to the newly established Australian Rail Track Corporation in 1998. In 2002, the Tarcoola–Alice Springs line was leased to the AustralAsia Rail Corporation. The ARTC track consists of the track from Kalgoorlie to Broken Hill and Serviceton. The ARTC also manages under lease the interstate standard gauge rail network in New South Wales and Victoria and has rights to sell access between Kalgoorlie and Kwinana to interstate rail operators under a wholesale access agreement with the Western Australian track owner and operator, Brookfield Rail. It also ""has a working relationship with Queensland Rail about the use of the 127 kilometres of standard gauge line between the Queensland border and Fisherman Islands. ARTC intends to start discussions with Queensland about leasing this track once the NSW arrangements are bedded down"". The ARTC also maintains the NSW rural branch lines under contract.
Other railways continue to be integrated, although access to their infrastructure is generally required under National Competition Policy principles agreed by the Federal, State and Territory governments:"
History of rail transport in Australia,"Queensland – Queensland Rail
Tasmania – Pacific National
Victorian non-interstate lines – Pacific National
Western Australian non-interstate lines – Australian Railroad Group
South Australian non-interstate lines – Genesee & Wyoming Australia
Tarcoola-Darwin railway – FreightLink
Much maintenance of tracks were contracted out."
History of rail transport in Australia,"Australian Government funding
The Australian Government has provided substantial funding for the upgrading of roads since the 1920s, but it has not regularly funded investment in railways except for its own railway, the Commonwealth Railways, which was established in 1911 to build the standard gauge Trans-Australian Railway between Kalgoorlie and Port Augusta, and to take over the 1,067 mm (3 ft 6 in) gauge railways between Port Augusta and Oodnadatta (used by the old ""Ghan"") and the Palmerston and Pine Creek Railway. Commonwealth Railways became part of Australian National Railways in 1975, which was privatised in 1997. Although the Australian Government has considered the funding of railways owned by State Government to be a State responsibility, it has made loans to the States for gauge standardisation projects from the 1920s to the 1970s. From the 1970s to 1996, the Australian Government has provided some grant funding to the States for rail projects."
History of rail transport in Australia,"One Nation program
Under the Keating government's One Nation program:"
History of rail transport in Australia,"the Melbourne-Adelaide line was converted to standard gauge in 1995.
the 1,067 mm (3 ft 6 in) gauge Fisherman Islands line to the Port of Brisbane was converted to dual 1,435 mm (4 ft 8+1⁄2 in) / 1,067 mm gauge and extended in parallel with the duplicated passenger line to Dutton Park.
a standard gauge link was built to the port at Fremantle.
new standard gauge sidings were provided at Adelaide Outer Harbor.
a separate freight line was built between Ingleburn and Glenfield as the first stage of what is now known as the Southern Sydney Freight Line. It was extended in 2013 to connect with the Metropolitan Goods line near Sefton with funds provided by the Australian Government under AusLink.
the Sydney–Brisbane line was upgraded with longer passing loops, the replacement of wooden trestles with concrete bridges, concrete resleepering, some minor deviations and bank stabilisation.
passing loops were extended between Wodonga and Melbourne."
History of rail transport in Australia,"Alice Springs to Darwin railway
In 2004, the final link in the Adelaide-Darwin rail corridor – the long-awaited 1420 km Alice Springs to Darwin line – was opened by the AustralAsia Rail Corporation with assistance from the Australian Government and the governments of South Australia and the Northern Territory. The Northern Territory expected that the line would open up mining ventures that would otherwise be uneconomic without a heavy duty rail line.
See Rail transport in Australia for current Australian Government rail funding."
History of rail transport in Australia,"Single regulator
In 2009, it was proposed to combine the seven separate state rail regulators into a single regulator."
History of rail transport in Australia,"See also
History of rail transport
Rail transport in Australia"
History of rail transport in Australia,"References
Further reading
Brown, Sid. ""Tracks Across the State"". Newsrail (Australian Railway Historical Society (Victorian Division)) (March 1990).  18 (3): 71–76.
Carroll, Brian. Australia's Railway Days: Milestones in Railway History (Macmillan Company of Australia, 1977).
Hearn, Mark. Working Lives: A History of the Australian Railways Union (NSW Branch) (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1990).
Hill, William (1894). ""State Railways in Australia"". Journal of Political Economy. 3 (1): 1–23.
Lee, Robert. ""A Fractious Federation: Patterns in Australian Railway Historiography."" Mobility in History 4#1 (2013): 149–158.
Rowe, Denis. ""The Robust Navvy: The Railway Construction Worker in Northern New South Wales, 1854–1894."" Labour History (1980): 28–46.  in JSTOR
Taksa, Lucy. ""'About as popular as a dose of clap': Steam, diesel and masculinity at the New South Wales Eveleigh railway workshops."" The Journal of Transport History 26#2 (2005): 79–97.
Testro, Ron. A Pictorial History of Australian Railways (Lansdowne Press,  1971)
Wills-Johnson, Nick. ""Competition Policy and Railway Investment in Australia."" Planning and Transport Research Centre Working Paper 12 (2007). online
Wotherspoon, Garry. ""The determinants of the pattern and pace of railway development in New South Wales, 1850–1914."" Australian Journal of Politics & History 25.1 (1979): 51–65."
History of rail transport in Australia,"External links
John L. Buckland collection of railway transport photographs / National Library collection that covers all aspects of Australian railway history
A history of the Australian railway / Covers several aspects of railway development in Australia, with nice images"
Immigration to Australia,"The Australian continent was first settled when ancestors of Indigenous Australians arrived  via the islands of Maritime Southeast Asia and New Guinea over 50,000 years ago.
European colonisation began in 1788 with the establishment of a British penal colony in New South Wales. Beginning in 1901, Australia maintained the White Australia policy for much of the 20th century, which forbade the entrance in Australia of people of non-European ethnic origins. Following World War II, the policy was gradually relaxed, and was abolished entirely in 1973. Since 1945, more than 7 million people have settled in Australia.
Between 1788 and the mid-20th century, the vast majority of settlers and immigrants came from Britain and Ireland (principally England, Ireland and Scotland), although there was significant immigration from China and Germany during the 19th century. In the decades immediately following World War II, Australia received a large wave of immigration from across Europe, with many more immigrants arriving from Southern and Eastern Europe than in previous decades. Since the end of the White Australia policy in 1973, Australia has pursued an official policy of multiculturalism, and there has been a large and continuing wave of immigration from across the world, with Asia being the largest source of immigrants in the 21st century. In 2019–20, immigration to Australia came to a halt during the COVID-19 pandemic, which in turn saw a shrinkage of the Australian population for the first time since World War I, though in the following period 2021–22 showed a very strong recovery of migrant arrivals. 
Net overseas migration has increased from 30,042 in 1992–93 to 178,582 persons in 2015–16. The largest components of immigration are the skilled migration and family re-union programs. A 2014 sociological study concluded that: ""Australia and Canada are the most receptive to immigration among western nations."" In 2023, BCG ranked Australia as the top country destination for individuals seeking to work and live a high-quality life based on global assessments.
Australia is a signatory to the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and has resettled many asylum seekers. In recent years, Australia's policy of mandatory detention of unauthorised arrivals by boat has attracted controversy."
Immigration to Australia,"Immigration history of Australia
The first migration of humans to the continent took place around 65,000 years ago via the islands of Maritime Southeast Asia and Papua New Guinea as part of the early history of human migration out of Africa."
Immigration to Australia,"Penal transportation
European migration to Australia began with the British convict settlement of Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788. The First Fleet comprised 11 ships carrying 775 convicts and 645 officials, members of the crew, marines, and their families and children. The settlers consisted of petty criminals, second-rate soldiers and a crew of sailors. There were few with skills needed to start a self-sufficient settlement, such as farmers and builders, and the colony experienced hunger and hardships. Male settlers far outnumbered female settlers. The Second Fleet arrived in 1790 bringing more convicts. The conditions of the transportation was described as horrific and worse than slave transports. Of the 1,026 convicts who embarked, 267 (256 men and 11 women) died during the voyage (26%); a further 486 were sick when they arrived of which 124 died soon after. The fleet was more of a drain on the struggling settlement than of any benefit. Conditions on the Third Fleet, which followed on the heels of the Second Fleet in 1791, were a bit better. The fleet comprised 11 ships. Of the more than 2000 convicts brought onto the ships, 173 male convicts and 9 female convicts died during the voyage. Other transport fleets bringing further convicts as well as freemen to the colony would follow. By the end of the penal transportation in 1868, approximately 165,000 people had entered Australia as convicts."
Immigration to Australia,"Bounty Immigration
The colonies promoted migration by a variety of schemes. The Bounty Immigration Scheme (1835-1841) boosted emigration from the United Kingdom to New South Wales. The South Australia Company was established to encourage settlement in South Australia by labourers and skilled migrants."
Immigration to Australia,"Gold rush and population growth
The Gold Rush era, beginning in 1851, led to an enormous expansion in population, including large numbers of British and Irish settlers, followed by smaller numbers of Germans, other Europeans, and Chinese. This latter group was subject to increasing restrictions and discrimination, making it impossible for many to remain in the country. With the federation of the Australian colonies into a single nation, one of the first acts of the new Commonwealth Government was the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, otherwise known as the White Australia policy, which was a strengthening and unification of disparate colonial policies designed to restrict non-White settlement. Because of opposition from the British government, an explicit racial policy was avoided in the legislation, with the control mechanism being a dictation test in a European language selected by the immigration officer. This was selected to be one the immigrant did not know; the last time an immigrant passed a test was in 1909. Perhaps the most celebrated case was Egon Erwin Kisch, a left-wing Austrian journalist who could speak five languages, who was failed in a test in Scottish Gaelic and deported as illiterate.
The government also found that if it wanted immigrants, it had to subsidise migration. The great distance from Europe made Australia a more expensive and less attractive destination than Canada and the United States. The number of immigrants needed during different stages of the economic cycle could be controlled by varying the subsidy. Before Federation in 1901, assisted migrants received passage assistance from colonial government funds. The British government paid for the passage of convicts, paupers, the military, and civil servants. Few immigrants received colonial government assistance before 1831. However, young women were receiving assisted passages from state governments to migrate to Australia in the early years of Federation."
Immigration to Australia,"With the onset of the Great Depression, the Governor-General proclaimed the cessation of immigration until further notice. The next group to arrive were 5,000 Jewish refugee families from Germany in 1938. Approved groups such as these were assured of entry by being issued a Certificate of Exemption from the Dictation Test."
Immigration to Australia,"Post-war immigration to Australia
After World War II Australia launched a massive immigration program, believing that having narrowly avoided a Japanese invasion, Australia must ""populate or perish"". Hundreds of thousands of displaced Europeans migrated to Australia and over 1,000,000 British subjects immigrated under the Assisted Passage Migration Scheme, colloquially becoming known as Ten Pound Poms.  The scheme initially targeted citizens of all Commonwealth countries; after the war it gradually extended to other countries such as the Netherlands and Italy. The qualifications were straightforward: migrants needed to be in sound health and under the age of 45 years. There were initially no skill restrictions, although under the White Australia Policy, people from mixed-race backgrounds found it very difficult to take advantage of the scheme.
In 1973, multiculturalism largely displaced cultural selectivity in immigration policy."
Immigration to Australia,"Overview
Current immigration programs
Migration program
There are a number of different types of Australian immigration, classed under different categories of visa:"
Immigration to Australia,"Skilled Occupation visas - Australian working visas are most commonly granted to highly skilled workers. Candidates are assessed against a points-based system, with points allocated for certain standards of education. These visas are often sponsored by individual States, which recruit workers according to specific needs. Visas may also be granted to applicants sponsored by an Australian business. The most popular form of sponsored working visa was the 457 visa set in place in 1996 which has now been abolished by the Turnbull government.
Student visas - The Australian Government actively encourages foreign students to study in Australia. There are a number of categories of a student visa, most of which require a confirmed offer from an educational institution.
Family visas - Visas are often granted on the basis of family ties in Australia. There are a number of different types of Australian family visas, including Contributory Parent visas and Spouse visas.
Working holiday visa - This visa is a residence permit allowing travelers to undertake employment (and sometimes study) in the country issuing the visa to supplement education.
Employment and family visas can often lead to Australian citizenship; however, this requires the applicant to have lived in Australia for at least four years with at least one year as a permanent resident."
Immigration to Australia,"Investor visas - Foreign investors could invest the business or fund in Australia to acquire the Permanent Residential of Australia, after 4 years (including the year which acquire the visa), they need to take the exam and make a declaration in order to be a citizen of Australia.
Claims have been made that Australia's migration program is in conflict with anti age-discrimination legislation and there have been calls to remove or amend the age limit of 50 for general skilled migrants."
Immigration to Australia,"Humanitarian program
Australia grants two types of visa under its humanitarian program:"
Immigration to Australia,"Refugee-category visas for refugees under the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees
Special Humanitarian Programme (SHP) visas for persons who are subject to substantial discrimination amounting to gross violation of their human rights in their home country
The cap for visas granted under the humanitarian program was 13,750 for 2015–16, plus an additional 12,000 visas available for refugees from the conflicts in Syria and Iraq."
Immigration to Australia,"Migration and settlement services
The Australian Government and the community provide a number of migration-assistance and settlement-support services: "
Immigration to Australia,"The Adult Migrant English Program, available to eligible migrants from the humanitarian, family and skilled-visa streams, provides free English-language courses for those who do not have functional English. Up to 510 hours of English language courses are provided during the first five years of settlement in Australia.
The Department of Home Affairs operates a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week telephone-based interpreting service called the Translating and Interpreting Service National, which facilitates contact between non-English speakers and interpreters, enabling access to government and community services.
The Settlement Grants Program provides funding to assist humanitarian entrants and migrants settle in Australia and to participate equitably in Australian society as soon as possible after arrival. The program is targeted to deliver settlement services to humanitarian entrants, family migrants with low levels of English proficiency and dependants of skilled migrants in rural and regional areas with low English-proficiency.
The Australian Cultural Orientation program provides practical advice and the opportunity to ask questions about travel to and life in Australia to refugee and humanitarian visa holders who are preparing to settle in Australia. The program is delivered overseas over five days before the visa holder begins his or her journey.
Refugee and humanitarian visa holders are also eligible to receive on-arrival settlement support through the Humanitarian Settlement Services program, which provides intensive settlement-support and equips individuals with the skills and knowledge to independently access services beyond the initial settlement period.
The Immigration Advice and Application Assistance Scheme provides professional assistance, free of charge, to disadvantaged visa-applicants, to help with the completion and submission of visa applications, liaison with the department, and advice on complex immigration matters. It also provides migration advice to prospective visa-applicants and sponsors.
In response to the needs of asylum seekers, the Asylum Seeker Assistance Scheme was established in 1992 to address Australia's obligations under the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. The Australian Red Cross administers the scheme under contract to the Department of Immigration and Citizenship. It provides financial assistance to asylum seekers in the community who satisfy specific eligibility criteria, and also facilitates access to casework assistance and to other support services for asylum seekers through the Australian Red Cross.
A variety of community-based services cater to the needs of newly-arrived migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. Some of these services, such as Migrant Resource Centres, receive funding from the Commonwealth Government."
Immigration to Australia,"Country of birth of Australian residents
As of 2019, 30% of the Australian resident population, or 7,529,570 people, had been born overseas.
The following table shows Australia's population by country of birth as estimated by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2020. It shows only countries or regions or birth with a population of over 100,000 residing in Australia."
Immigration to Australia,"The separate Australian States show some differences in settlement patterns, as demonstrated in the statistics compiled during the 2006 Census:"
Immigration to Australia,"New South Wales had the largest population, and the largest foreign-born population, in Australia (1,544,023). Certain nationalities concentrated notably in this state: 74.5% of Lebanese-born, 63.1% of Iraqi-born, 63.0% of South Korean-born, 59.4% of Fijian-born, and 59.4% of Chinese-born Australian residents lived in New South Wales.
Victoria, the second-most populous state, also had the second-largest number of overseas-born persons (1,161,984). 50.6% of Sri Lankan-born, 50.1% of Turkish-born, 49.4% of Greek-born and 41.6% of Italian-born Australian residents lived in Victoria.
Western Australia, with 528,827 overseas-born residents, had the highest proportion of foreign-born population. The state attracted 29.6% of all Singaporean-born Australian residents, and narrowly trailed New South Wales in having the largest population of British-born Australian residents.
Queensland had 695,525 overseas-born residents, and attracted the greatest proportion of persons born in Papua New Guinea (52.4%) and in New Zealand (38.2%)."
Immigration to Australia,"Impacts and concerns
There are a range of views in the Australian community on the composition and level of immigration, and on the possible effects of varying the level of immigration and population growth.
In 2002, a CSIRO population study commissioned by the former Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, outlined six potential dilemmas associated with immigration-driven population growth. These included: the absolute numbers of aged residents continuing to rise despite high immigration off-setting ageing and declining birth-rates in a proportional sense; a worsening of Australia's trade balance due to more imports and higher consumption of domestic production; increased greenhouse gas emissions; overuse of agricultural soils; marine fisheries and domestic supplies of oil and gas; and a decline in urban air quality, river quality and biodiversity."
Immigration to Australia,"Environment
Some environmental movements believe that as the driest inhabited continent, Australia cannot continue to sustain its current rate of population growth without becoming overpopulated. The Sustainable Population Australia (SPA) argues that climate change will lead to a deterioration of natural ecosystems through increased temperatures, extreme weather events and less rainfall in the southern part of the continent, thus reducing its capacity to sustain a large population even further.  The Australia Institute has concluded that Australia's population growth has been one of the main factors driving growth in domestic greenhouse gas emissions. It concluded that the average emissions per capita in the countries that immigrants come from is only 42 percent of average emissions in Australia, finding that as immigrants alter their lifestyle to that of Australians, they increase global greenhouse gas emissions. The Institute calculated that each additional 70,000 immigrants will lead to additional emissions of 20 million tonnes of greenhouse gases by the end of the Kyoto target period (2012) and 30 million tonnes by 2020."
Immigration to Australia,"Housing and infrastructure
A number of economists, such as Macquarie Bank analyst Rory Robertson, assert that high immigration and the propensity of new arrivals to cluster in the capital cities is exacerbating the nation's housing affordability problem. According to Robertson, Federal Government policies that fuel demand for housing, such as the currently high levels of immigration, as well as capital gains tax discounts and subsidies to boost fertility, have had a greater impact on housing affordability than land release on urban fringes.
The Productivity Commission in its 2004 Inquiry Report No. 28, First Home Ownership, concluded: ""Growth in immigration since the mid-1990s has been an important contributor to underlying demand, particularly in Sydney and Melbourne."" The Reserve Bank of Australia in its submission to the same Productivity Commission report stated that ""rapid growth in overseas visitors such as students may have boosted demand for rental housing"". However, the Commission found that ""the ABS resident population estimates have limitations when used for assessing housing demand. Given the significant influx of foreigners coming to work or study in Australia in recent years, it seems highly likely that short-stay visitor movements may have added to the demand for housing. However, the Commissions are unaware of any research that quantifies the effects.""
Some individuals and interest groups have also argued that immigration causes overburdened infrastructure."
Immigration to Australia,"Employment
Australia maintains a list of skilled occupations that are currently acceptable for immigration to Australia.
In 2009, following the global financial crisis, the Australian government reduced its immigration target by 14%, and the permanent migration program for skilled migrants was reduced to 115,000 people for that financial year. In 2010–2011, the migration intake was adjusted so that 67.5% of the permanent migration program would be for skilled migrants, and 113,725 visas were granted.
According to Graduate Careers Australia, there have been some declines in full-time employment between 2012–2015 for recent university graduates of various degrees, including dentistry, computer science, architecture, psychology, and nursing. In 2014, a number of the professional associations for some of these fields criticised the immigration policy for skilled migrants, contending that these policies have contributed to difficulties for local degree holders in obtaining full-time employment. In 2016, the Department of Health forecast a shortfall in nurses of approximately 85,000 by 2025 and 123,000 by 2030.
In 2016, Monash University academics published a report which contended that Australia's immigration program is deeply flawed. The government's Medium to Long-Term Strategic Skill List allows immigration by professionals who end up competing with graduates of Australian universities for scarce positions. On the other hand, Australia's shortage of skilled tradespeople is not being addressed."
Immigration to Australia,"Economic growth and aging population
Another element in the immigration debate is a concern to alleviate adverse impacts arising from Australia's ageing population. In the 1990s, the former Federal Treasurer Peter Costello stated that Australia is underpopulated due to a low birth rate, and that negative population growth will have adverse long-term effects on the economy as the population ages and the labour market becomes less competitive. To avoid this outcome the government increased immigration to fill gaps in labour markets and introduced a subsidy to encourage families to have more children. However, opponents of population growth such as Sustainable Population Australia do not accept that population growth will decline and reverse, based on current immigration and fertility projections.
There is debate over whether immigration can slow the ageing of Australia's population. In a research paper entitled Population Futures for Australia: the Policy Alternatives, Peter McDonald claims that ""it is demographic nonsense to believe that immigration can help to keep our population young."" However, according to Creedy and Alvarado (p. 99), by 2031 there will be a 1.1 per cent fall in the proportion of the population aged over 65 if net migration rate is 80,000 per year. If net migration rate is 170,000 per year, the proportion of the population aged over 65 would reduce by 3.1 per cent. As of 2007 during the leadership of John Howard, the net migration rate was 160,000 per year.
According to the Commonwealth Treasury, immigration can reduce the average age of the Australian population: ""The level of net overseas migration is important: net inflows of migrants to Australia reduce the rate of population ageing because migrants are younger on average than the resident population. Currently, around 85 per cent of migrants are aged under 40 when they migrate to Australia, compared to around 55 per cent for the resident population."" Ross Gittins, an economics columnist at Fairfax Media, has said that the Government's focus on skilled migration has in fact reduced the average age of migrants. ""More than half are aged 15 to 34, compared with 28 per cent of our population. Only 2 per cent of permanent immigrants are 65 or older, compared with 13 per cent of our population."" Because of these statistics, Gittens claims that immigration is slowing the ageing of the Australian population and that the ""net benefit to the economy is a lot more clear-cut.""
Robert Birrell, director of the Centre for Population and Urban Research at Monash University, has argued: ""It is true that a net migration intake averaging around 180,000 per year will mean that the proportion of persons aged 65 plus to the total population will be a few percentage points lower in 2050 than it would be with a low migration intake. But this ‘gain’ would be bought at the expense of having to accommodate a much larger population. These people too, will age, thus requiring an even larger migration intake in subsequent years to look after them.""
In July 2005 the Productivity Commission launched a commissioned study entitled Economic Impacts of Migration and Population Growth, and released an initial position paper on 17 January 2006 which states that the increase of income per capita provided by higher migration (50 percent more than the base model) by the 2024–2025 financial year would be $335 (0.6%), an amount described as ""very small."" The paper also found that Australians would on average work 1.3 percent longer hours, about twice the proportional increase in income.
Using regression analysis, Addison and Worswick found in a 2002 study that ""there is no evidence that immigration has negatively impacted on the wages of young or low-skilled natives."" Furthermore, Addison's study found that immigration did not increase unemployment among native workers. Rather, immigration decreased unemployment. However, in 2005 the Productivity Commission concluded that higher immigration levels would result in lower wage growth for existing Australian residents. On the impact of immigration on unemployment levels, the Commission said: ""The conclusion that immigration has not caused unemployment at an aggregate level does not imply that it cannot lead to higher unemployment for specific groups. Immigration could worsen the labour market outcomes of people who work in sectors of the economy that have high concentrations of immigrant workers.""
Gittins claims there is considerable opposition to immigration in Australia by ""battlers"" because of the belief that immigrants will steal jobs. Gittins claims though that ""it's true that immigrants add to the supply of labour. But it's equally true that, by consuming and bringing families who consume, they also add to the demand for labour – usually by more."" Overall, Gittins has written that the ""economic case for rapid population growth though immigration is surprisingly weak,"" noting the diseconomies of scale, infrastructure costs and negative environmental impacts associated with continued immigration-driven population growth.
Robert Birrell has asserted that high immigration levels are being used by the Federal Government to stimulate aggregate economic growth, but that per capita growth is more important to Australians. Birrell concluded that high migration does not benefit existing residents, because it dilutes the benefit that can accrue from the export of non-renewable resources which form a large part of the Australian economy. As well, Birrell argues that a slowdown in labour force growth would require employers to pay greater attention to training, wages and conditions of workers."
Immigration to Australia,"Social cohesion
The impact that immigration has on social cohesion in Australia is not clear. According to a 2018 report by the Scanlon Report, between 80 and 82% of Australians felt that immigration had a positive impact on Australian society. Australians under the age of 30 were twice as likely to feel positively about immigration as Australians over the age of 60 were. A follow-up report in 2019 found that 85% of Australians polled felt that multiculturalism had made a positive impact on Australia, but 40% admitted negative or very negative feelings towards Muslims."
Immigration to Australia,"Politics and public debate
Over the last decade, leaders of the major Federal political parties have demonstrated support for high level immigration (including John Howard, Peter Costello and Kim Beazley). There was, overall, an upward trend in the number of immigrants to Australia over the period of the Howard Government (1996–2007). The Rudd Labor Government (elected 2007) increased the quota again once in office. In 2010, both major parties continue to support high immigration, with former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd advocating a 'Big Australia'; and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott stating in a 2010 Australia Day speech that: ""My instinct is to extend to as many people as possible the freedom and benefits of life in Australia"". On 7 August 2018, the Australian Bureau of Statistics population clock reached 25 million 33 years ahead of predictions, with 62% of the growth in the last ten years being a result of immigration.
In 2003, economist Ross Gittins, a columnist at Fairfax Media, said former Prime Minister John Howard had been ""a tricky chap"" on immigration, by appearing ""tough"" on illegal immigration to win support from the working class, while simultaneously winning support from employers with high legal immigration. In 2006, the Labor Party under Kim Beazley took a stance against the importation of increasingly large numbers of temporary skilled migrant workers by employers, arguing that this is simply a way for employers to drive down wages.
In 2019, a Lowy Institute poll found that 49% of Australians say that ‘the total number of migrants coming to Australia each year is too high’, while a minority said it is ‘too low’ (13%), representing a 10-point rise in opposition to immigration since 2014. Furthermore, 67% say that 'overall, immigration has a positive impact on the economy’, while 65% say that ‘immigrants strengthen the country because of their hard work and talents’, and 62% believe that ‘accepting immigrants from many different countries makes Australia stronger’.
Senator Pauline Hanson has called for a national plebiscite asking voters if they think immigration is too high. The Australian Senate voted the proposal down 54 votes to 2."
Immigration to Australia,"See also
Asylum in Australia
Demography of Australia
Department of Immigration and Border Protection
Europeans in Oceania
Immigrant benefits urban legend, a hoax regarding benefits comparison
Immigrant health in Australia
Immigration to New Zealand
Mental health and immigration detention
Multiculturalism in Australia
Post war immigration to Australia
Visa policy of Australia"
Immigration to Australia,"Notes
References
Citations
Sources
Further reading
Betts, Katharine. Ideology and Immigration: Australia 1976 to 1987 (1997)
Burnley, I.H. The Impact of Immigration in Australia: A Demographic Approach (2001)
Foster, William, et al. Immigration and Australia: Myths and Realities (1998)
Jupp, James. From White Australia to Woomera: The Story of Australian Immigration (2007) Excerpt and text search
Jupp, James. The English in Australia (2004) Excerpt and text search
Jupp, James. The Australian People: An Encyclopedia of the Nation, its People and their Origins (2002) Excerpt about Sydney
Markus, Andrew, James Jupp and Peter McDonald, eds. Australia's Immigration Revolution (2010) Excerpt and text search
O'Farrell, Patrick. The Irish in Australia: 1798 to the Present Day (3rd ed. Cork University Press, 2001)
Wells, Andrew, and Martinez, Theresa (ed.) Australia's Diverse Peoples: A Reference Sourcebook (ABC-CLIO, 2004)
Migration history
""Chinese Museum"". Museum of Chinese Australian History. (Melbourne)
""Immigrants and Emigrants"". Culture Victoria.
""Migration Museum"". Migration Museum, Adelaide.
Origins: Immigrant Communities in Victoria – Immigration Museum, Victoria, Australia
NSW Migration Heritage Centre, Australia (archived)
Richards, Eric (12 August 2015). ""Migration"". SA History Hub. (South Australia)
State immigration websites
Australian State of Queensland skilled and business migration information site
Australian State of Victoria official site for skilled and business migrants"
Immigration to Australia,"External links
Department of Immigration and Border Protection of Australia
Office of The Migration Agents Registration Authority (OMARA) (archived 17 August 2018)"
Australian Defence Force,"The Australian Defence Force (ADF) is the military organisation responsible for the defence of the Commonwealth of Australia and its national interests. It has three branches: the Royal Australian Navy (RAN), Australian Army and the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). The ADF has a strength of just over 89,000 personnel and is supported by the Department of Defence alongside other civilian entities.
During the first decades of the 20th century, the Australian Government established the armed services as separate organisations, with each service having an independent chain of command. In 1976, the government made a strategic change and established the ADF to place the services under a single headquarters. Over time, the degree of integration has increased, and tri-service headquarters, logistics, and training institutions have supplanted many single-service establishments. The ADF has been deployed around the world in combat, peacekeeping and disaster-relief missions.
The ADF is technologically sophisticated but relatively small for its landmass. Although the ADF's 57,346 full-time active-duty personnel and 32,049 active reservists as of 30 June 2023 make it the largest military in Oceania, it is smaller than most Asian military forces. However with a national population of just over 27 million, the ADF has an average ratio of military personnel per capita. The ADF is supported by a significant budget by worldwide standards and is well equipped and trained, with defence spending at 2.04% of GDP (as of 2023/24)."
Australian Defence Force,"Command and role
The ADF's legal standing draws on the executive government sections of the Australian Constitution. Section 51(vi) gives the Commonwealth Government the power to make laws regarding Australia's defence and defence forces. Section 114 of the Constitution prevents the States from raising armed forces without the permission of the Commonwealth and section 119 gives the Commonwealth responsibility for defending Australia from invasion and sets out the conditions under which the government can deploy the defence force domestically.
Section 68 of the Constitution sets out the ADF's command arrangements. The section states that ""the command in chief of the naval and military forces of the Commonwealth is vested in the Governor-General as the Queen's representative"". The Governor-General serves as the commander-in-chief as part of their role as Australia's head of state. In practice, the Governor-General does not play an active part in the ADF's command structure and the elected government controls the ADF through the Minister for Defence. The Minister for Defence exercises control of the ADF under section 8 of the Defence Act 1903 that states ""the Minister has general control and administration of the Defence Force"". The National Security Committee of Cabinet (NSC), which is chaired by the Prime Minister, considers important matters. The Minister for Defence is required to implement decisions made by the NSC and the full Cabinet.
Under the Defence Act the Minister for Defence has the power to deploy ADF personnel overseas on ""active service"". The Commonwealth Government has never been required by the Constitution or legislation to seek parliamentary approval for decisions to deploy military forces overseas or go to war."
Australian Defence Force,"History
Formation
By 1870, each of the then Australian colonies maintained their own military forces. On 1 January 1901, the colonies federated into a new nation and on 1 March 1901, these colonial forces were amalgamated to establish the Australian Army and Commonwealth Naval Force. In 1911, the government established the Royal Australian Navy, which absorbed the Commonwealth Naval Force. The Army established the Australian Flying Corps in 1912 which was separated to form the Royal Australian Air Force in 1921. The services were not linked by a single chain of command, as they each reported to their own separate Minister and had separate administrative arrangements. The three services saw action around the world during World War I and World War II, and took part in conflicts in Asia during the Cold War.
The importance of joint warfare was made clear to the Australian military during World War II when Australian naval, ground and air units frequently served as part of single commands. Following the war, several senior officers lobbied for the appointment of a commander-in-chief of the three services. The government rejected this proposal and the three services remained fully independent. The absence of a central authority resulted in poor coordination between the services, with each service organising and operating under different military doctrine.
The need for an integrated command structure received more emphasis due to inefficient arrangements during the Vietnam War which at times hindered the military's efforts. In 1973, the Secretary of the Department of Defence, Arthur Tange, submitted a report to the Government that recommended the unification of the separate departments supporting each service under a single Department of Defence, and the creation of the position of Chief of the Defence Force Staff. The government accepted these recommendations, and the Australian Defence Force was established on 9 February 1976."
Australian Defence Force,"Defence of Australia era
Until the 1970s, Australia's military strategy centred on the concept of ""forward defence"", in which the role of the Australian military was to co-operate with allied forces to counter threats in Australia's region. In 1969, when the United States began the Guam Doctrine and the British withdrew east of Suez, Australia developed a defence policy which emphasised self-reliance and the defence of continental Australia. This was known as the Defence of Australia Policy. Under this policy, the focus of Australian defence planning was to protect Australia's northern maritime approaches (the Air-Sea Gap) against enemy attack. In line with this goal, the ADF was restructured to increase its ability to strike at enemy forces from Australian bases and to counter raids on continental Australia. The ADF achieved this by increasing the capabilities of the RAN and RAAF and relocating regular Army units to northern Australia.
At this time, the ADF had no military units on operational deployment outside Australia. In 1987, the ADF made its first operational deployment as part of Operation Morris Dance, in which several warships and a rifle company deployed to the waters off Fiji in response to the 1987 Fijian coups d'état. While broadly successful, this deployment highlighted the need for the ADF to improve its capability to rapidly respond to unforeseen events.
Since the late 1980s, the Government has increasingly called upon the ADF to contribute forces to peacekeeping missions around the world. While most of these deployments involved only small numbers of specialists, several led to the deployment of hundreds of personnel. Large peacekeeping deployments were made to Namibia in early 1989, Cambodia between 1992 and 1993, Somalia in 1993, Rwanda between 1994 and 1995 and Bougainville in 1994 and from 1997 onwards.
The Australian contribution to the 1991 Gulf War was the first time Australian personnel were deployed to an active war zone since the establishment of the ADF. Although the warships and clearance diving team deployed to the Persian Gulf did not see combat, the deployment tested the ADF's capabilities and command structure. Following the war the Navy regularly deployed a frigate to the Persian Gulf or Red Sea to enforce the trade sanctions imposed on Iraq."
Australian Defence Force,"East Timor deployment
In 1996, John Howard led the Liberal Party's election campaign and became Prime Minister. Subsequently, there were significant reforms to the ADF's force structure and role. The new government's defence strategy placed less emphasis on defending Australia from direct attack and greater emphasis on working in co-operation with regional states and Australia's allies to manage potential security threats. From 1997 the Government also implemented a series of changes to the ADF's force structure to increase the proportion of combat units to support units and improve the ADF's combat effectiveness.
The ADF's experiences during the deployment to East Timor in 1999 led to significant changes in Australia's defence policies and, an enhancement of the ADF's ability to conduct operations outside Australia. This successful deployment was the first time a large ADF force had operated outside of Australia since the Vietnam War and revealed shortcomings in its ability to mount and sustain such operations.
In 2000, the Government released a new Defence White Paper, Defence 2000 – Our Future Defence Force, that placed a greater emphasis on preparing the ADF for overseas deployments. The Government committed to improve the ADF's capabilities by improving the readiness and equipment of ADF units, expanding the ADF and increasing real Defence expenditure by 3% per year; in the event, expenditure increased by 2.3% per annum in real terms in the period to 2012–13. In 2003 and 2005, the Defence Updates emphasised this focus on expeditionary operations and led to an expansion and modernisation of the ADF."
Australian Defence Force,"Iraq and Afghanistan
Since 2000, the ADF's expanded force structure and deployment capabilities have been put to the test on several occasions. Following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, Australia committed a special forces task group and an air-to-air refuelling aircraft to operations in Afghanistan, and naval warships to the Persian Gulf as Operation Slipper. In 2003, approximately 2,000 ADF personnel, including a special forces task group, three warships and 14 F/A-18 Hornet aircraft, took part in the invasion of Iraq.
The ADF was subsequently involved in the reconstruction of Iraq. From 2003 until 2005 this was mainly limited to a Security Detachment which protected the Australian embassy, the attachment of officers to multi-national headquarters, small numbers of transport and maritime patrol aircraft, and teams of air traffic controllers and medical personnel. From 2005 until 2008 a battalion-sized Australian Army battle group (initially designated the Al Muthanna Task Group, and later Overwatch Battle Group (West)) was stationed in southern Iraq. In addition, teams of ADF personnel were deployed to train Iraqi military units. In line with a 2007 election commitment, the Rudd government withdrew combat-related forces from Iraq in mid-2008, and most of the remaining Australian units left the country the next year."
Australian Defence Force,"The ADF also undertook several operations in Australia's immediate region during the 2000s. In 2003, elements of all three services were dispatched to the Solomon Islands as part of the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands. Regular deployments of Australian forces continued to the islands until 2017. Between December 2004 and March 2005, 1,400 ADF personnel served in Indonesia as part of Operation Sumatra Assist, which formed part of Australia's response to the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake. In May 2006, approximately 2,000 ADF personnel deployed to East Timor in Operation Astute following unrest between elements of the Timor Leste Defence Force. This deployment concluded in March 2013.
From 2006 until 2013 a battalion-sized Australian Army task force operated in Urozgan Province, Afghanistan; this unit was primarily tasked with providing assistance for reconstruction efforts and training Afghan forces, but was frequently involved in combat. In addition, Special Forces Task Groups were deployed from 2005 to 2006 and 2007 until 2013. Other specialist elements of the ADF, including detachments of CH-47 Chinook helicopters and RAAF radar and air traffic control units, were also periodically deployed to the country. A total of 40 ADF personnel were killed in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2013, and 262 wounded. Following the withdrawal of the combat forces in 2013, ADF training teams have continued to be stationed in the country to train Afghan forces.
The Australian Labor Party (ALP) governments led by Prime Ministers Rudd and Julia Gillard between 2007 and 2013 commissioned two defence white papers, which were published in 2009 and 2013. The 2009 document, Defending Australia in the Asia Pacific Century: Force 2030, had a focus on responding to China's rapidly growing influence. It included commitments to expand the RAN, including acquiring twelve submarines, and increasing defence spending by three percent per year in real terms. This increase in spending did not occur, however. The Defence White Paper 2013 had similar strategic themes, but set out a more modest program of defence spending which reflected the government's constrained finances. As part of an election commitment, the  Liberal–National Coalition Abbott government commissioned a further defence white paper that was published in 2016. This document also included a commitment to expand the ADF's size and capabilities. There has generally been bipartisan agreement between the ALP and the Liberal–National Coalition on the ADF's role since the mid-1970s. Both political groupings currently support the ADF's focus on expeditionary operations, and the broad funding target set out in the 2016 Defence White Paper. The ADF's broad force structure has also experienced little change since the 1980s. For instance, throughout this period the Army's main combat formations have been three brigades and the RAAF has been equipped with around 100 combat aircraft. Most of the equipment used by the services has been replaced or upgraded, however."
Australian Defence Force,"It is stated in the 2016 Defence White Paper that Australia's changing security environment will lead to new demands being placed on the Australian Defence Force. Although it is not expected that Australia will face any threat of direct attack from another country, terrorist groups and tensions between nations in East Asia pose threats to Australian security. More broadly, the Australian Government believes that it needs to make a contribution to maintaining the rules-based order globally. There is also a risk that climate change, weak economic growth and social factors could cause instability in South Pacific countries.
The ADF has developed strategies to respond to Australia's changing strategic environment. The 2016 Defence White Paper states that ""the Government will ensure Australia maintains a regionally superior ADF
with the highest levels of military capability and scientific and technological sophistication"". To this end, the government intends to improve the ADF's combat power and expand the number of military personnel. This will include introducing new technologies and capabilities. The ADF is also seeking to improve its intelligence capabilities and co-operation between the services.
Beginning in August 2014, RAAF combat forces, an Army special forces task force and an Army training unit were deployed to the Middle East during Operation Okra as part of the international war against the Islamic State. The RAAF aircraft conducted air strikes in Iraq and Syria and provided airborne command and control and air-to-air refuelling for the coalition forces. The special forces advised the Iraqi Army and the training unit trained Iraqi soldiers. The RAAF combat aircraft completed operations in January 2018, and the other aircraft were withdrawn in September 2020. The Army training force departed in mid-2020."
Australian Defence Force,"2020–present
The Australian Government believes that the country's strategic circumstances are worsening due to the threat posed by China. This has led to decisions to expand the ADF and enhance its ability to participate in high intensity combat. The 2020 Defence Strategic Update called for the ADF's efforts to be focused on the Indo-Pacific region. It also concluded that there was no longer a ten-year period of strategic warning before Australia could be involved in a major war. The document stated that the ADF's funding would be expanded, and its capacity to strike at targets from a long distance be improved. In September 2021, Australia entered into the AUKUS trilateral security partnership with the United Kingdom and United States. As part of this partnership, Australia will obtain nuclear attack submarines to significantly improve the RAN's capabilities - this replaced a plan to acquire 12 conventionally powered Attack-class submarines in partnership with France. The three AUKUS countries also agreed to collaborate on a range of military technologies.
An investigation of allegations of Australian war crimes in Afghanistan was completed in November 2020. The Brereton Report found that there was evidence that 25 Australian special forces personnel committed war crimes on 25 occasions, resulting in the deaths of 39 people and the mistreatment of two others. General Angus Campbell accepted all of the 143 recommendations made in the report. An Office of the Special Investigator was subsequently established to conduct criminal investigations, and the first soldier was charged with war crimes in March 2023.
During August 2021, RAAF aircraft participated in an international airlift to evacuate people from Kabul in Afghanistan after it fell to the Taliban. An Army infantry company was deployed to Kabul as part of this operation. More than 3,500 people were evacuated by the RAAF. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 Australia provided military assistance to Ukraine. As of April 2023, this included the transfer of military equipment from the ADF worth $A475 million and the deployment of an Army training team to the United Kingdom to train Ukrainian soldiers.
The election of the ALP Albanese government in May 2022 did not significantly change Australia's defence posture, as the ALP and Coalition parties have broadly similar defence policies. This includes an agreement on China posing a threat to Australia's security. The main difference is that the ALP sees climate change as an important security issue. After coming to power, the Albanese government commissioned the Defence Strategic Review that was publicly released in April 2023. The review found that the security challenges facing Australia had continued to worsen, and called for the ADF to be restructured to meet the threats. This includes transitioning the ADF from its traditional structure of a ""balanced force"" capable of a range of activities to a ""focused force"" tailored mainly to protecting Australia from military attack or coercion. As part of this change, the review recommended reducing the planned size of the Army's mechanised forces and expanding its long-range firepower. The review also identified climate change as a threat to Australia and called for a ""whole of nation effort"" to defending Australia that goes beyond the ADF. The government accepted most of the review's recommendations."
Australian Defence Force,"Structure
The Australian Defence Force and Department of Defence make up the Australian Defence Organisation (ADO), which is often referred to as 'Defence'. A diarchy of the Chief of the Defence Force (CDF) and the Secretary of the Department of Defence administers the ADO. The Department of Defence is staffed by both civilian and military personnel, and includes agencies such as the Defence Intelligence Organisation (DIO) and Defence Science and Technology Group (DST Group)."
Australian Defence Force,"Command arrangements
The ADF's command arrangements are specified in the Defence Act 1903 and subordinate legislation. This act states that the Minister for Defence ""has general control and administration of the Defence Force"" and that the CDF and the Secretary of the Department of Defence must ""comply with any directions of the Minister"". The leaders of the ADO are also responsible to the junior ministers who are appointed to manage specific elements of the defence portfolio. Under the Albanese Ministry two cabinet-level ministers have been responsible for the Defence portfolio since May 2022: the position of Minister for Defence held by the Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, and Matt Keogh is the Minister for Defence Personnel and the Minister for Veterans' Affairs. In addition, there are two junior ministers: Matt Thistlethwaite is the Assistant Minister for Defence and Assistant Minister for Veterans' Affairs and Pat Conroy is the Minister for Defence Industry.
The CDF is the most senior appointment in the ADF and commands the force. The CDF is the only four-star officer in the ADF and is a general, admiral or air chief marshal. As well as having command responsibilities, the CDF is the Minister for Defence's principal military adviser. General Angus Campbell is the current CDF, and assumed this position on 1 July 2018. Hugh White, a prominent academic and former Deputy Secretary in the Department of Defence, has criticised the ADF's current command structure. White argues that the Minister plays too large a role in military decision-making and does not provide the CDF and Secretary of Defence with necessary and sufficient authority to manage the ADO effectively.
Under the current ADF command structure the day-to-day management of the ADF is distinct from the command of military operations. The services are administered through the ADO, with the head of each service (the Chief of Navy, Chief of Army and Chief of Air Force) and the service headquarters being responsible for raising, training and sustaining combat forces. Each chief is also the CDF's principal adviser on matters concerning the responsibilities of their service. The CDF chairs the Chiefs of Service Committee which comprises the service chiefs, Vice Chief of the Defence Force and the Chief of Joint Operations (CJOPS). The CDF and service chiefs are supported by an integrated ADF Headquarters, which replaced separate service headquarters on 1 July 2017.
While the individual members of each service ultimately report to their service's Chief, the Chiefs do not control military operations. Control of ADF operations is exercised through a formal command chain headed by the CJOPS, who reports directly to the CDF. The CJOPS commands the Headquarters Joint Operations Command (HQJOC) as well as temporary joint task forces. These joint task forces comprise units assigned from their service to participate in operations or training exercises."
Australian Defence Force,"Joint forces
Operational command of the ADF is exercised by HQJOC, which is located at a purpose-built facility near Bungendore, New South Wales. This is a joint headquarters comprising personnel from the three services and includes a continuously manned Joint Control Centre. HQJOC's main role is to ""plan, monitor and control"" ADF operations and exercises, and it is organised around groups of plans, operations and support staff. HQJOC also monitors the readiness of the ADF units which are not assigned to operations and contributes to developing Australia's military doctrine.
As well as HQJOC, the ADF has permanent joint operational commands responsible to the CJOPS. Joint Operations Command (JOC) includes the two headquarters responsible for patrolling Australia's maritime borders on a day-to-day basis, Northern Command and Maritime Border Command. Other JOC units include the Joint Movements Group and the Air and Space Operations Centre. Individual ADF units and Joint Task Groups are assigned to JOC during operations, and HQJOC includes officers responsible for submarine and special operations forces.
The ADF includes a number of joint operational and training units. These include the Joint Military Police Unit and the Joint Helicopter Aircrew Training School.
In 2023, after the release of the Defence Strategic Review (DSR) and a recommendation to consolidate the ADF's guided weapons and explosive ordnance (GWEO) across the services, leading to the creation of the Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance Group (GWEOG), and the appointment of Air Marshal Leon Phillips, OAM as its head. This moved the responsibility of acquisition and sustainment of the ADF's explosive materiel from CASG to the newly formed GWEOG."
Australian Defence Force,"Royal Australian Navy
The Royal Australian Navy is the naval branch of the Australian Defence Force. The RAN operates just under 50 commissioned warships, including destroyers, frigates, submarines, patrol boats and auxiliary ships, as well as a number of non-commissioned vessels. In addition, the RAN maintains a force of combat, logistics and training helicopters.
There are two parts to the RAN's structure. One is an operational command, Fleet Command, and the other is a support command, Navy Strategic Command. The Navy's assets are administered by five ""forces"" which report to the Commander Australian Fleet. These are the Fleet Air Arm, the Mine Warfare, Clearance Diving, Hydrographic, Meteorological and Patrol Force, Shore Force, Submarine Force and Surface Force."
Australian Defence Force,"Australian Army
The Army is organised into three main elements which report to the Chief of Army; the Headquarters of the 1st Division, Special Operations Command and Forces Command. As of 2017, approximately 85% of Army personnel were in units assigned to Forces Command, which is responsible for preparing units and individuals for operations. Headquarters 1st Division is responsible for high-level training activities and is capable of being deployed to command large scale ground operations. Only a small number of units are permanently assigned to the 1st Division; these include the 2nd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment which forms the pre-landing force for the Australian Amphibious Force, a signals regiment and three training and personnel support units.
The Australian Army's main combat forces are grouped in brigades. Its main conventional forces are three regular combat brigades which are organised on a common structure; the 1st, 3rd and 7th Brigades. Support for the units in these formations is provided by an aviation brigade (16th Aviation Brigade), a combat support and ISTAR brigade (6th Brigade) and a logistics brigade (the 17th Sustainment Brigade). Under a restructure of the Army's health capability, a new health brigade, designated the 2nd Health Brigade, will be raised in 2023. In addition, there are six Army Reserve brigades; these brigades are administered by the 2nd Division and ""paired"" with the three regular combat brigades. The Army's main tactical formations are combined arms battlegroups made up of elements drawn from different units.
The Special Operations Command commands the Army's special forces units. It comprises the Special Air Service Regiment, the 2nd Commando Regiment, the reserve 1st Commando Regiment and the Special Operations Engineer Regiment as well as logistics and training units. The Army's special forces units have been expanded since 2001 and are well equipped and capable of being deployed by sea, air or land. As of 2014, Special Operations Command comprised approximately 2,200 personnel."
Australian Defence Force,"Royal Australian Air Force
The Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) is the air power branch of the ADF. The RAAF has modern combat and transport aircraft and a network of bases in strategic locations across Australia.
The RAAF has a single operational command, Air Command. Air Command is the operational arm of the RAAF and consists of Air Combat Group, Air Mobility Group, Surveillance and Response Group, Combat Support Group, Air Warfare Centre and Air Force Training Group. Each group consists of several wings.
The RAAF has nineteen flying squadrons; five combat squadrons, two maritime patrol squadrons, six transport squadrons, six training squadrons (including three Operational Conversion Units and a forward air control training squadron) as well as one Airborne Early Warning & Control squadron and a Joint Terminal Attack Controller squadron. The ground units supporting these flying squadrons include three expeditionary combat support squadrons, three security force squadrons and a range of intelligence, air traffic control, communications, radar and medical units."
Australian Defence Force,"Logistic support
The ADF's logistics are managed by the Department of Defence's Capability Acquisition and Sustainment Group (CASG). The CASG was established in 2015 from the previously semi-independent Defence Materiel Organisation. CASG is responsible for the acquisition of all materiel (except guided weapons and explosive ordnance) and services used by the ADF and maintaining this equipment throughout its life of type.
CASG is not directly responsible for supplying deployed ADF units; this is the responsibility of the Joint Logistics Command (JLC) and the single service logistic units, instead CASG has responsibility for the supply and transport of materiel from manufacturers to supply depots. These units include the Navy's Strategic Command and replenishment ships, the Army's 17th Sustainment Brigade and Combat Service Support Battalions, and the Combat Support Group RAAF.
The ADF maintains stockpiles of ammunition, fuel and other supplies. Since the late 1990s, ammunition for the three services has been stored in a network of facilities managed by the JLC. The creation of a GWEO Group moved the responsibility of acquisition and sustainment of Explosive Materiel within the ADF from JLC and CASG to itself. The ADF also holds several months' worth of fuel for the Navy's vessels and several weeks' worth for aircraft and vehicles. A number of defence analysts have raised concerns over the adequacy of the fuel stockpile, especially as Australia is largely dependent on imports which could be disrupted in the event of war.
The increasing role of the private sector forms an important trend in the ADF's logistics arrangements. During the 1990s many of the ADF's support functions were transferred to the private sector to improve the efficiency with which they were provided. Since these reforms most of the ""garrison"" support services at military bases have been provided by private firms. The reforms also led to many of the ADF's logistics units being disbanded or reduced in size. Since this time private firms have increasingly been contracted to provide critical support to ADF units deployed outside Australia. This support has included transporting equipment and personnel and constructing and supplying bases."
Australian Defence Force,"Military intelligence and surveillance
The Australian Defence Force's intelligence collection and analysis capabilities include each of the services' intelligence systems and units, two joint civilian-military intelligence gathering agencies and two strategic and operational-level intelligence analysis organisations."
Australian Defence Force,"Each of the three services has its own intelligence collection assets. RAN doctrine stresses the importance of collecting a wide range of information and combining it to inform decisions. It also notes that the Collins-class submarines are particularly effective sources of ""acoustic, electromagnetic and environmental information"". The Army's intelligence and surveillance units include the 1st Intelligence Battalion, 7th Signal Regiment (Electronic Warfare), 20th Surveillance and Target Acquisition Regiment, three Regional Force Surveillance Units and the Special Air Service Regiment. The RAAF monitors the airspace of Australia and neighbouring countries using the Vigilare system, which combines input from the service's Jindalee Operational Radar Network, other ADF air defence radars (including airborne and naval systems) and civilian air traffic control radars. The RAAF's other intelligence assets include No. 87 Squadron and the AP-3C Orion aircraft operated by No. 92 Wing. A C band radar and a telescope located at Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt provide a space situational awareness capability, which includes tracking space assets and debris. Australia also provides personnel to the US Joint Space Operations Center in Colorado Springs which tracks and identifies any man-made object in orbit.
The Defence Strategic Policy and Intelligence Group within the Department of Defence supports the services and co-operates with the civilian agencies within the Australian Intelligence Community. This Group consists of the Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation (AGO), Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) and Defence Intelligence Organisation (DIO). The AGO is responsible for geospatial intelligence and producing maps for the ADF, the ASD, originally the Defence Signals Directorate, is Australia's signals intelligence agency, and the DIO is responsible for the analysis of intelligence collected by the other intelligence agencies. The three agencies are headquartered in Canberra, though the AGO has staff in Bendigo and the ASD maintains permanent signals collection facilities in other locations.
The ASD also includes the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) which is responsible for protecting Defence and other Australian Government agencies against cyberwarfare attacks. The ACSC was established in January 2010 and is jointly staffed by the ASD and personnel from the Attorney-General's Department, Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, and Australian Federal Police. Unlike the United States military, the ADF does not class cyberwarfare as being a separate sphere of warfare. In July 2017 an Information Warfare Division was raised, tasked with both defensive and offensive cyber operations.
The Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) has been involved in ADF operations since the Vietnam War including East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan.  In 2012, the Director-General of ASIS stated that the service's agents had saved the lives of Australian soldiers, enabled special forces operations and that ""it's difficult to see a situation in the future where the ADF would deploy without ASIS alongside"". It has been reported that one of the Special Air Service Regiment's squadrons works with ASIS and has undertaken independent covert intelligence-collection operations outside Australia."
Australian Defence Force,"Personnel
The Australian military has been an all-volunteer force since the abolition of conscription in 1972. Both men and women can enlist in the ADF, with women being able to apply for all roles. Only Australian citizens and permanent residents who are eligible for Australian citizenship can enlist. Recruits must be aged at least 17, and meet health, educational and aptitude standards. The ADF is one of the few areas of the Australian Government to continue to have compulsory retirement ages: permanent personnel must retire at 60 years of age and reservists at 65. Both permanent and reserve personnel can work through flexible arrangements, including part-time hours or remotely from their duty station, subject to approval. Discipline of defence personnel is guided by the Defence Force Discipline Act 1982, ultimately overseen by the Judge Advocate General of the ADF.
Australian demographic trends will put pressure on the ADF in the future. Excluding other factors, the ageing of the Australian population will result in smaller numbers of potential recruits entering the Australian labour market each year. Some predictions are that population ageing will result in slower economic growth and increased government expenditure on pensions and health programs. As a result of these trends, the ageing of Australia's population may worsen the ADF's manpower situation and may force the Government to reallocate some of the Defence budget. Few young Australians consider joining the military and the ADF has to compete for recruits against private sector firms which are able to offer higher salaries."
Australian Defence Force,"Personnel numbers
As of the June 2023, the ADF comprised 57,346 permanent (full-time) and 32,049 active reserve (part-time) personnel. Compared to 56,172 permanent and 25,680 active reserve personnel ten years prior in June 2013. The Army is the largest service, followed by the RAAF and RAN. The ADO also employed 18,126 civilian Australian Public Service (APS) staff as at 30 June 2023. During the 2022–23 financial year 5,537 people enlisted in the ADF on a permanent basis and 6,397 left, representing a net loss of 860 personnel. 
The distribution of ADF personnel between the services and categories of service on 30 June 2023 was as follows:"
Australian Defence Force,"The number of ADF personnel has changed over the last 20 years. During the 1990s the strength of the ADF was reduced from around 70,000 to 50,000 permanent personnel as a result of budget cuts and the outsourcing of some military functions. The ADF began to grow from 2000 after the defence white paper released that year called for an expansion to the military's strength, though the size of the military decreased between the 2003–04 to 2005–06 financial years due to problems with attracting further recruits. By 2009–10 the ADF was above its budgeted size, leading to reductions until 2014–15. The size of the ADF grew between the 2014–15 and 2016–17 financial years. The ADF has not met its recruitment targets over the period since the 1995–96 financial year.
In March 2022 Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced that by 2040 the strength of the ADF would grow by around 30% to be almost 80,000 permanent personnel. The expansion is estimated to cost at least A$38 billion which includes increasing the number of APS personnel.
In June 2024, the government announced a new policy to grow the ADF as outlined in the National Defence Strategy released in April 2024. Under the policy, permanent residents who have lived in Australia for 12 months from countries in the Five Eyes alliance will become eligible to join the ADF. From July 2024, New Zealand permanent residents will be eligible to join the ADF. From January 2025, permanent residents from the United Kingdom, United States and Canada will be eligible to join the ADF. Once the person has served 90 days in the ADF they will become eligible for Australian citizenship and would be expected to apply.
The ADF is small compared to many other national militaries. Both the number of personnel in the ADF and the share of the Australian population this represents is smaller than that in many countries in Australia's immediate region. Several NATO member countries, including France and the United States, also have a higher share of their population in the military. This is a continuation of long-term trends, as outside of major wars Australia has always had a relatively small military. The size of the force is a result of Australia's relatively small population and the military being structured around a maritime strategy focused on the RAN and RAAF rather than a manpower-intensive army."
Australian Defence Force,"Reserves
Each of the branches of the ADF has a reserve component. These forces are the Royal Australian Naval Reserve, Australian Army Reserve and Royal Australian Air Force Reserve. The main role of the reserves is to supplement the permanent elements of the ADF during deployments and crises, including natural disasters. This can include attaching individual reservists to regular units or deploying units composed entirely of reserve personnel. As reservists serve on a part-time basis, they are less costly to the government than permanent members of the ADF, but the nature of their service can mean that reservists have a lower level of readiness than regular personnel and require further training before they can be deployed. It has historically proven difficult to set a level of training requirements which allows reservists to be rapidly deployable yet does not act as a disincentive to recruitment and continued participation. Successive governments since the 1960s have also been reluctant to use the ""call out"" powers to require reservists to undertake active service."
Australian Defence Force,"There are two main categories of reserve personnel; those in the active reserve and those in the standby reserve. Members of the active reserve have an annual minimum training obligation. Reservists can volunteer to undertake more than the minimum periods of training and active service. Members of the standby reserve are not required to undertake training, and would only be called up in response to a national emergency or to fill a specialised position. Most standby reservists are former full-time members of the ADF.
While Australian Naval Reserve personnel are assigned to permanent units, most members of the Army Reserve and Air Force Reserve are members of reserve units. Most of the RAAF's reserve units are not intended to be deployed, and reserve personnel are generally attached to regular air force units during their periods of active service. The Army Reserve is organised into permanent combat and support units, though most are currently manned at levels well below their authorised strengths and are not capable of deploying as formed units.
The ADF's increased activities since 1999 and shortfalls in recruiting permanent personnel has led to reservists being more frequently called to active service. This has included large scale domestic deployments, which have included providing security for major events such as the 2000 Summer Olympics and responding to natural disasters. Large numbers of reserve personnel have also been deployed as part of ADF operations in Australia's region; this has included the deployment of Army Reserve rifle companies to East Timor and the Solomon Islands. Smaller numbers of reservists have taken part in operations in locations distant from Australia. Notably, companies of the Army Reserve 1st Commando Regiment were regularly deployed to Afghanistan as part of the Special Operations Task Group."
Australian Defence Force,"Training
Individual training of Australian servicemen and women is generally provided by the services in their own training institutions. Each service has its own training organisation to manage this individual training. Where possible, however, individual training is increasingly being provided through tri-service schools.
Military academies include HMAS Creswell for the Navy, Royal Military College, Duntroon, for the Army, and the Officers' Training School for the Air Force. The Australian Defence Force Academy is a tri-service university for officer cadets of all services who wish to attain a university degree through the ADF. Navy recruit training is conducted at HMAS Cerberus, Army recruits are trained at the Army Recruit Training Centre and Air Force recruits at RAAF Base Wagga."
Australian Defence Force,"Women in the ADF
Women first served in the Australian military during World War II when each service established a separate female branch. The RAAF was the first service to fully integrate women into operational units, doing so in 1977, with the Army and RAN following in 1979 and 1985 respectively. The ADF initially struggled to integrate women, with integration being driven by changing Australian social values and Government legislation rather than a change in attitudes within the male-dominated military."
Australian Defence Force,"The number of positions available to women in the ADF has increased over time. Although servicewomen were initially barred from combat positions, these restrictions began to be lifted in 1990. In September 2011 Minister for Defence Stephen Smith announced that the Cabinet had decided to remove all restrictions on women serving in combat positions, and that this change would come into effect within five years. This decision was supported by the CDF and the chiefs of the services. Serving women became able to apply for all positions on 1 January 2013 except special forces roles in the Army which became open to women in January 2014. In January 2016, civilian women became able to be directly recruited to all positions.
Despite the expansion in the number of positions available to women and other changes which aim to encourage increased female recruitment and retention, the growth in the proportion of female permanent defence personnel has been slow. In the 1989–1990 financial year women made up 11.4% of the ADF personnel. In the 2008–2009 financial year women occupied 13.5% of ADF positions. During the same period the proportion of civilian positions filled by women in the Australian Defence Organisation increased from 30.8% to 42.8%. In 2017–2018, women made up 17.9% of the ADF's permanent force. The proportion of women in the permanent force differs by service: 14.3% of members of the Army are female, compared to 21.5% of the RAN and 22.1% for the RAAF. In 2015 the ADF adopted targets to increase the proportion of service personnel who are female by 2023: by this time it is planned that women will make up 25% of the RAN, 15% of the Army and 25% of the RAAF.
There continue to be concerns over the incidence of sexual abuse and gender-based discrimination in the ADF. In 2014 the Defence Abuse Response Taskforce estimated that around 1,100 currently-serving ADF personnel had abused other members of the military, and recommended that a royal commission be conducted to investigate long-running allegations of sexual abuse and assault of servicewomen at the Australian Defence Force Academy. In 2013 Chief of Army General David Morrison publicly released a video in which he warned against gender-based discrimination, and stated that he would dismiss members of the Army who engaged in such conduct."
Australian Defence Force,"Ethnic and religious composition
A high percentage of ADF personnel are drawn from the Anglo-Celtic portion of Australia's population. In 2011 the proportion of ADF personnel born in Australia and the other predominately Anglo-Celtic countries was higher than this population group's share of both the Australian workforce and overall population. As a result, analyst Mark Thomson has argued that the ADF is unrepresentative of Australia's society in this regard and that recruiting more personnel from other ethnic backgrounds would improve the ADF's language skills and cultural empathy. In 2013, the ADF launched the Defence Diversity and Inclusion Strategy 2012-2017 to recruit more volunteers from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds and to improve statistics collection.
On 30 June 2020, 3.2% of ADF permanent personnel and 2.6% of Reserves were Indigenous Australians. The Defence Reconciliation Action Plan 2019-2022 aims to increase the number of Indigenous Australians the ADF recruits and to improve their retention rate, and has set a target of 5% Indigenous representation by 2025. Restrictions on Indigenous Australians' ability to enlist in the military existed until the 1970s, though hundreds of Indigenous men and women had joined the military when restrictions were reduced during the world wars. By 1992 the representation of Indigenous Australians in the ADF was equivalent to their proportion of the Australian population, though they continue to be under-represented among the officer corps. Two of the Army's three Regional Force Surveillance Units (NORFORCE and the 51st Battalion, Far North Queensland Regiment) are manned mostly by Indigenous Australian reservists. In 2015 Indigenous Australians made up around 2% of ADF personnel, which was smaller than the Indigenous share of the total Australian population.
In line with trends across the broader Australian population, the proportion of ADF personnel who are not religious has increased considerably over recent years. The proportion of ADF personnel who reported that their religion was Christianity in service censuses and human relations databases decreased from around 66% in 2003 to just over 52% in 2015. Over this period, the proportion who stated that they do not have a religious affiliation increased from 31% to 47%. Only 1% of ADF members reported having a non-Christian religious affiliation in 2015. In 2023 it was reported that 80% of new ADF recruits did not have religious beliefs."
Australian Defence Force,"Sexuality and gender identity
Australia allows gay men and lesbians to serve openly. Openly gay and lesbian personnel were banned from the ADF until November 1992 when the Australian Government decided to remove this prohibition. The heads of the services and most military personnel opposed this change at the time, and it caused considerable public debate. Opponents of lifting the ban on gay and lesbian personnel argued that doing so would greatly harm the ADF's cohesiveness and cause large numbers of resignations. This did not eventuate, and the reform caused few problems. A 2000 study found that lifting the ban on gay service did not have any negative effects on the ADF's morale, effectiveness or recruitment and retention, and may have led to increased productivity and improved working environments. Few members of the ADF came out as lesbian, gay or bisexual until the late 1990s, however, and those who did were not always welcomed by their comrades.
ADF personnel in same-sex relationships experienced discriminatory treatment until the 2000s. This included Defence not recognising same-sex spouses, which prevented these couples from receiving the financial entitlements available to opposite-sex couples and could be a barrier to the spouse being treated as their partner's next of kin. The ADF officially recognised same-sex relationships in 2005, and since 1 January 2009 these couples have had the same access to military retirement pensions and superannuation as opposite-sex couples. Transgender personnel have been permitted to serve in the ADF since 2010, and are provided with support when necessary. Despite the removal of restrictions on gay and lesbian personnel, harassment and discrimination continued to occur; for instance a 2013 survey found that 10% of gay soldiers had experienced discrimination and more than 30% hid their sexuality. The ADF has actively encouraged the inclusion of LGBTI personnel since the mid-2010s, with its leadership highlighting the importance of the issue and the military justice system being strongly used to prevent harassment and discrimination. Defence Force Recruiting also encourages LGBTI people to enlist. As of 2023, 4.8 percent of ADF personnel identified as members of the LGBTI+ community."
Australian Defence Force,"Defence expenditure and procurement
Current expenditure
The Australian Government allocated A$34.7 billion to the Australian Defence Organisation in the 2017–18 financial year. This level of expenditure is equivalent to approximately 1.9% of Australian Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and 7.28% of total Australian Government expenditure. This was an increase in nominal terms from the A$32 billion allocated in the 2016–17 financial year which represented approximately 1.83% of GDP. In broad terms the Defence budget is divided into expenditure on personnel, operating costs and capital investment; in 2016–17 37% of expenditure was on personnel, 36% on operational costs and 27% on capital investments. It is expected that by 2030 defence spending will account for 2.4% of GDP.
Australia's defence expenditure is much larger in dollar terms to that of most countries in Australia's immediate region. The share of GDP Australia spends on defence is also larger than that in most developed economies and major South-East Asian countries. China allocates approximately the same proportion of GDP to Defence as Australia does, and has been rapidly increasing its nominal expenditure. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has estimated that Australia's defence spending in 2017 was the 13th highest of any country in real terms. As a proportion of GDP Australia's defence spending ranks as 49th of the countries for which data is available."
Australian Defence Force,"Long term procurement projects
The 2016–17 budget forecasts that defence expenditure will increase to $42 billion in 2020–21, which is estimated to represent 2.03% of GDP. This reflects a bipartisan commitment to increase defence expenditure to 2% of GDP. The 2016 Defence White Paper included a commitment to further increases in spending beyond this time, with nominal expenditure being projected to be around $58.8 billion in 2020–25; the Australian Strategic Policy Institute has estimated that this would represent about 2.16% of GDP.
The Integrated Investment Program that was released alongside the 2016 Defence White Paper sets out the ADF's long term capital programs. This document is the successor to the Defence Capability Plans which were regularly produced from 2000. The total value of the projects in the Integrated Investment Program over the period to 2025–26 is $162 billion."
Australian Defence Force,"Equipment
The ADF seeks to be a high-technology force. Although most of the ADF's weapons are only used by single service, there is an increasing emphasis on commonality. The three services use the same small arms and the FN Herstal 35 is the ADF's standard hand gun, the F88 Austeyr the standard rifle, the F89 Minimi the standard light support weapon, the FN Herstal MAG-58 the standard light machine gun and the Browning M2HB the standard heavy machine gun.
The ADF is equipped with conventional weapons only. Australia does not possess weapons of mass destruction and has ratified the Biological Weapons Convention, Chemical Weapons Convention and Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The Australian Government is committed to encouraging nuclear disarmament internationally. Australia is also a party to international agreements which prohibit land mines and cluster munitions.
As of 2023, the Royal Australian Navy operated a large number of ships and submarines. The Navy's main surface combatants were eight Anzac-class frigates and three Hobart-class destroyers. The RAN's submarine force had six Collins-class submarines. There were ten Armidale-class and five Cape-class patrol boats for border security and fisheries patrol duties in Australia's northern waters. The RAN's amphibious force comprises the two Canberra-class landing helicopter docks and the dock landing ship HMAS Choules. The Navy's minesweeping force is equipped with four Huon-class minehunters. Two Supply-class replenishment oilers support these combatants. The RAN also operated four survey vessels (the Leeuwin and Paluma classes). Non-commissioned ships operated by the RAN include the sail training ship Young Endeavour. There were also four auxiliary ships operated by private companies on behalf of the RAN. The Fleet Air Arm's helicopter force comprised 24 MH-60R Seahawk anti-submarine and 6 MRH 90 transport helicopters and a training force equipped with 15 EC 135T2+ helicopters. The Navy also operated S-100 Camcopter and ScanEagle uncrewed aerial vehicles.
The Australian Army is equipped with a wide range of equipment in order to be able to employ combined arms approaches in combat. As of 2023, the Army's armoured fighting vehicle holdings included 59 M1A1 Abrams main battle tanks, 416 M113 armoured personnel carriers, 221 ASLAV armoured reconnaissance vehicles and 25 Boxer combat reconnaissance vehicles. Approximately 950 Bushmaster Protected Mobility Vehicles were in service and 1,000 Hawkei protected mobility vehicles were in service and on order. The Army's artillery holdings consisted of 48 155 mm towed M777 howitzers, 216 81 mm mortars, RBS-70 surface-to-air missiles and FGM-148 Javelin anti-tank missiles. Australian Army Aviation operated several different models of helicopters. These included 22 Eurocopter Tiger armed reconnaissance helicopters, 14 CH-47F Chinook and 41 MRH 90 transport helicopters. The Army also operated 15 RQ-7B Shadow 2000 uncrewed aerial vehicles. The Army's fleet of watercraft at this time included 15 LCM-8 landing craft."
Australian Defence Force,"The Royal Australian Air Force operates combat, maritime patrol, transport and training aircraft. As 2023 the combat aircraft force comprised 56 F-35A Lightning IIs with another 16 on order, 24 F/A-18F Super Hornets and 11 EA-18G Growlers with another on order. The intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance force was equipped with 12 P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft with 2 more on order, 6 E-7A Wedgetail AEW&C aircraft and 2 AP-3C Orions. The air transport force operated 12 C-130J-30 Super Hercules, 8 C-17 Globemaster IIIs and 10 C-27J Spartans. A further 12 Super King Air 350s were used in both the transport and training roles. The RAAF also operated 3 Challenger and 2 Boeing 737 aircraft as VIP transports. The RAAF had seven KC-30 Multi-Role Tanker Transports. The RAAF's training units were equipped with  49 PC-21s and 33 Hawk 127s. In October 2022 the RAAF received its first MQ-4C with a further 6 on order, and plans to acquire 6 MQ-28 Ghost Bat UCAV"
Australian Defence Force,"Bases
The Australian Defence Force maintains 60 major bases and many other facilities across all the states and territories of Australia. These bases occupy millions of hectares of land, giving the ADO Australia's largest real estate portfolio. Defence Housing Australia manages around 19,000 residences occupied by members of the ADF. While most of the Army's permanent force units are based in northern Australia, the majority of Navy and Air Force units are based near Sydney, Brisbane and Perth. Few ADF bases are currently shared by different services. Small Army and RAAF units are also located at Royal Malaysian Air Force Base Butterworth. The administrative headquarters of the ADF and the three services is located in Canberra alongside the main offices of the Department of Defence.
The Royal Australian Navy has two main bases; Fleet Base East (HMAS Kuttabul) in Sydney and Fleet Base West (HMAS Stirling) near Perth. The Navy's operational headquarters, Fleet Headquarters, is located adjacent to Fleet Base East. The majority of the Navy's patrol boats are based at HMAS Coonawarra in Darwin, Northern Territory, with the remaining patrol boats and the hydrographic fleet located at HMAS Cairns in Cairns. The Fleet Air Arm is based at HMAS Albatross near Nowra, New South Wales.
The Australian Army's regular units are concentrated in a few bases, most of which are located in Australia's northern states. The Army's operational headquarters, Forces Command, is located at Victoria Barracks in Sydney. Most elements of the Army's three regular brigades are based at Robertson Barracks near Darwin, Lavarack Barracks in Townsville, Queensland, and Gallipoli Barracks in Brisbane. The 1st Division's Headquarters is also located at Gallipoli Barracks. Other important Army bases include the Army Aviation Centre near Oakey, Queensland, Holsworthy Barracks near Sydney, Woodside Barracks near Adelaide, South Australia, and Campbell Barracks in Perth. Dozens of Army Reserve depots are located across Australia.
The Royal Australian Air Force maintains several air bases, including three which are only occasionally activated. The RAAF's operational headquarters, Air Command, is located at RAAF Base Glenbrook near Sydney. The Air Force's combat aircraft are based at RAAF Base Amberley near Ipswich, Queensland, RAAF Base Tindal near Katherine, Northern Territory, and RAAF Base Williamtown near Newcastle, New South Wales. The RAAF's maritime patrol aircraft are based at RAAF Base Edinburgh near Adelaide and most of its transport aircraft are based at RAAF Base Richmond in Sydney. RAAF Base Edinburgh is also home to the control centre for the Jindalee Operational Radar Network. Most of the RAAF's training aircraft are based at RAAF Base Pearce near Perth with the remaining aircraft located at RAAF Base East Sale near Sale, Victoria, and RAAF Base Williamtown. The RAAF also maintains a network of bases in northern Australia to support operations to Australia's north. These bases include RAAF Base Darwin and RAAF Base Townsville and three 'bare bases' in Queensland and Western Australia. Of the RAAF's operational bases, only Tindal is located near an area in which the service's aircraft might feasibly see combat. While this protects the majority of the RAAF's assets from air attack, most air bases are poorly defended and aircraft are generally hangared in un-hardened shelters."
Australian Defence Force,"Domestic responsibilities
In addition to its military role, the ADF contributes to domestic security as well as disaster relief efforts in Australia and overseas. These functions are primarily the responsibility of civilian agencies, and the ADF's role in them requires specific justification and authorisation.
Elements of the ADF are frequently called out to contribute to relief efforts following natural disasters in Australia or overseas. The ADF's role in these efforts is set out in Australia's emergency management plans. The ADF typically contributes specialist capabilities, such as engineers or transport, to support the civil authorities. For major disasters, this can involve a large-scale deployment of personnel and assets. While the ADF has a commitment to assist relief efforts, several defence white papers have specified that this is a secondary responsibility to the force's focus on maintaining combat capabilities. As a result, requests for assistance have to be balanced against military priorities. No elements of the ADF are specifically tasked with or equipped for disaster relief efforts.
The ADF can also be tasked with providing aid to civil authorities outside of natural disasters; for instance in response to industrial action or to assist civilian police maintain law and order. This rarely occurs, however, and most Australians consider the use of military personnel to break strikes or undertake law enforcement to be inappropriate. Due to the political sensitivities associated with strike breaking, the ADF conducts little planning or other preparations for this role and the Defence Act explicitly states that reservists may not be called out or deployed in response to industrial action."
Australian Defence Force,"Over recent years, the ADF has been frequently committed to disaster relief. This has included deployments of large numbers of personnel to support fire fighting efforts during the 2019–20 Australian bushfire season and to assist state police and healthcare services during the COVID-19 pandemic. The scale of these deployments and the disruption they have caused to military training has led to suggestions that either elements of the Army Reserve be dedicated to disaster relief or a separate civilian organisation be established to take on the duties the ADF is undertaking.
The ADF makes a significant contribution to Australia's domestic maritime security. ADF ships, aircraft and Regional Force Surveillance Units conduct patrols of northern Australia in conjunction with the Australian Border Force (ABF). This operation, which is code-named Operation Resolute, is commanded by the Maritime Border Command which is jointly manned by members of the ADF and ABF. This operation involves a considerable proportion of the ADF's assets, with the forces assigned typically including two major naval vessels, multiple patrol boats, Regional Force Surveillance Unit patrols and AP-3 Orion aircraft. The ADF also often contributes to search and rescue efforts coordinated by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority and other civilian agencies.
While the ADF does not have a significant nation-building role, it provides assistance to remote Indigenous Australian communities through the Army Aboriginal Community Assistance Program. Under this program, which has been conducted since 1997, an engineer squadron works with one community for several months each year to upgrade local infrastructure and provide training. The ADF also took part in the intervention in remote Northern Territory Indigenous communities between June 2007 and October 2008. During this operation more than 600 ADF personnel provided logistical support to the Northern Territory Emergency Response Task Force and helped conduct child health checks.
The ADF shares responsibility for counter-terrorism with civilian law enforcement agencies. Under Australia's Counter-Terrorism Strategy, the state and territory police and emergency services have the primary responsibility for responding to any terrorist incidents on Australian territory. If a terrorist threat or the consequences of an incident are beyond the capacity of civilian authorities to resolve, the ADF may be called out to provide support following a request from the relevant state or territory government. The Commonwealth Government has responsibility for responding to offshore terrorist incidents. ADF liaison officers are posted to civilian law enforcement agencies, and the military offers specialised training to police counter-terrorism teams. To meet its counter-terrorism responsibilities the ADF maintains two elite Tactical Assault Groups, the Special Operations Engineer Regiment as well as a company-sized high readiness group in each Army Reserve brigade and the 1st Commando Regiment. ADF intelligence assets also work with other Australian Government and police agencies to counter foreign terrorist threats. While these forces provide a substantial counter-terrorism capability, the ADF does not regard domestic security as being part of its ""core business""."
Australian Defence Force,"Foreign defence relations
The Australian Defence Force cooperates with militaries around the world. Australia's formal military agreements include the ANZUS Alliance with the United States, the Closer Defence Program with New Zealand, the Five Power Defence Arrangements with Malaysia, Singapore, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, and the ABCA Armies Standardisation Program with the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand. Australia has also established a partnership with NATO. ADF activities under these agreements include participating in joint planning, intelligence sharing, personnel exchanges, equipment standardisation programs and joint exercises. Australia is also a member of the UKUSA signals intelligence gathering agreement. Members of the ADF are posted to Australian diplomatic missions around the world as defence attachés; in 2016 the role of these officers was expanded to include promoting export sales for the Australian defence industry. The 2016 Defence White Paper stated that the Government will seek to further expand the ADF's international engagement.
Singapore and the United States maintain military units in Australia. Two Republic of Singapore Air Force pilot training squadrons with a total of 230 personnel are based in Australia. The Singapore Armed Forces also uses the Shoalwater Bay Military Training Area in Queensland for large-scale exercises; under the terms of a bilateral agreement, these run for up to 18 weeks each year and involve as many as 14,000 Singaporean personnel."
Australian Defence Force,"The United States maintains intelligence and communications facilities in Australia which are staffed by 1,700 personnel. The intelligence facilities comprise the Pine Gap satellite tracking station near Alice Springs and Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt near Exmouth, Western Australia. Pine Gap is jointly operated by Australian and United States personnel and Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt has been an exclusively Australian-operated facility since 1999. In early 2007 the Australian Government approved the construction of a new US communications installation at the Defence Signals Directorate Australian Defence Satellite Communications Station facility near Geraldton, Western Australia, to provide a ground station for the US-led Wideband Global System which Australia is partly funding. The United States Military also frequently uses Australian exercise areas and these facilities have been upgraded to support joint Australian-United States training.  In November 2011, the Australian and American Governments announced plans to base on rotational basis a United States Marine Corps Marine Air-Ground Task Force in the Northern Territory for training and exercise purposes and  increase rotations of United States Air Force (USAF) aircraft through northern Australia. As part of this agreement, the Marine Rotational Force – Darwin has been deployed to Australia for six months each year since 2012. It is planned for this force to eventually comprise around 2,500 personnel with supporting aircraft and equipment. The expanded rotations of USAF units to Australia began in early 2017.
The ADF provides assistance to militaries in Australia's region through the Defence Cooperation Program. Under this program the ADF provides assistance with training, infrastructure, equipment and logistics and participates in joint exercises with countries in South East Asia and Oceania. The Pacific Patrol Boat Program is the largest Defence Cooperation Program activity and supports 22 Pacific class patrol boats operated by twelve South Pacific countries. Other important activities include supporting the development of the Timor Leste Defence Force and Papua New Guinea Defence Force and supplying watercraft to the Armed Forces of the Philippines. Australia also directly contributes to the defence of Pacific countries by periodically deploying warships and aircraft to patrol their territorial waters; this includes an annual deployment of RAAF AP-3 Orions to the region as part of a multi-national maritime surveillance operation. Under an informal agreement Australia is responsible for the defence of Nauru."
Australian Defence Force,"See also
List of military equipment of Australia
Defence Space Command"
Australian Defence Force,"References
Notes
Citations
Works consulted
External links"
Australian Defence Force,Official website of the Australian Defence Organisation
List of Australian Academy Award winners and nominees,"This list details Australians working in the film industry who have been nominated for, or won, Academy Awards (also known as Oscars). These awards honored outstanding achievements in theatrically released motion pictures and were first presented by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) in 1929.
As of 2016, a total of 55 awards from 192 nominations had been won by Australians. Additionally, four special awards for scientific and engineering achievements have been given."
List of Australian Academy Award winners and nominees,"Nominees and winners
In the following tables, the years correspond to the year in which the films were released; the Academy Award ceremony is held the following year."
List of Australian Academy Award winners and nominees,"Production
Best Picture
Best International Feature Film
Note: The Academy Award in this category is awarded to countries, not individuals. This list contains directors of nominated films, who typically accept the award on behalf of their country."
List of Australian Academy Award winners and nominees,"Best Documentary Feature Film
Best Documentary Short Film
Best Animated Feature
Best Animated Short Film
Best Live Action Short Film
Performance
Best Actor
Best Actress
Best Supporting Actor
Best Supporting Actress
Craft
Best Cinematography
Best Costume Design
Best Director
Best Film Editing
Best Makeup and Hairstyling
Best Music, Original Score
Best Music, Original Song
Best Production Design
Best Sound Mixing
Best Sound Editing
Best Visual Effects
Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay
Best Writing, Original Screenplay
Non-competitive awards
Academy Honorary Award
Scientific and Engineering
Records
Art director and costume designer Catherine Martin has won four awards from nine nominations, making her the most decorated Australian. She was nominated for Best Picture, Best Costume Design, and Best Production Design, winning the latter two categories. Cate Blanchett is the most nominated individual on this list with eight nominations, which resulted in two wins: for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress, making her the only Australian to win both acting categories. Peter Weir has received five competitive nominations in the Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay categories without a win; however, he was awarded the Academy Honorary Award in 2022.
May Robson was the first Australian-born person to be nominated for an Academy Award. She received a Best Actress nomination for Lady for a Day in 1933. In 1942, Ken G. Hall became the first Australian to win an Oscar for his documentary Kokoda Front Line! in the Best Documentary category. Suzanne Baker was the first Australian woman to win an Oscar after winning Best Animated Short for Leisure in 1977. Peter Finch was the first Australian to win an acting Oscar and the first performer ever to be awarded posthumously, winning Best Actor for his performance in 1976 for Network. Fellow Australian Heath Ledger became only the second posthumous acting winner when his performance in The Dark Knight earned him Best Supporting Actor in 2008, about  32 years later. Cate Blanchett was the first Australian actor to win more than once in acting categories. Out of the six total Australian performers who have won acting Oscars, only Blanchett, Ledger and Geoffrey Rush were born in Australia; with Finch, Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe being born outside of Australia, in England, the United States and New Zealand, respectively, and raised in Australia.
Australians have been nominated at least once in all categories. The Oscar for Best Costume Design has been the most successful category for Australians with seven wins from 17 nominations. The Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film, Best Original Score, and the Best Documentary (Short Subject) are the only categories in this list where Australians have been nominated without winning."
List of Australian Academy Award winners and nominees,"See also
Cinema of Australia
List of Australian submissions for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film"
List of Australian Academy Award winners and nominees,"References
External links
The official website of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS)
Further reading
Academy Awards® Nominations and Awards for Australian projects and people at Screen Australia
O stands for Oscar and also for Oz at The Age"
Australian federal budget,"An Australian federal budget is a document that sets out the estimated revenues and expenditures of the Australian Treasury in the following financial year, proposed conduct of Australian government operations in that period, and its fiscal policy for the forward years. Budgets are called by the year in which they are presented to Parliament and relate to a financial year that commences on the following 1 July and ends on 30 June of the following year, so that the 2024 budget brought down in May 2024 relates to the 2024/25 financial year (1 July 2024 – 30 June 2025, FY2025).
Revenue estimates detailed in the budget are raised through the Australian taxation system, with government spending (including transfers to the states) representing a sizeable proportion of the overall economy. Besides presenting the government's expected revenues and expenditures, the federal budget is also a political statement of the government's intentions and priorities, and has profound macroeconomic implications.
Australia follows, to a great extent, the conventions of the Westminster system. For example, the prime minister must have the support of a majority in the House of Representatives, and must in any case be able to ensure the existence of no absolute majority against the government. In relation to the budget, that requires that if the House fails to pass the government's budget, even by one dollar, then the government must either resign so that a different government can be appointed or seek a parliamentary dissolution so that new general elections may be held in order to re-confirm or deny the government's mandate.
The 2024–25 federal budget was delivered on Tuesday, 14 May 2024 at 7:32pm."
Australian federal budget,"Process
The process of putting together the budget begins in November when the Central Budget Management System (CBMS) is updated with the latest estimates, and the senior ministers' review, where the Prime Minister, Treasurer, and Minister for Finance meet to establish the policy priorities and strategy for the coming financial year.
The outcome of the senior ministers' review determines how the different portfolios will prepare their budget submissions for cabinet. Agencies within each portfolio do not submit a request for new funding, because their potential savings within the agency are unfounded. After Finance has agreed to the costings, the submissions are circulated for coordination comments and lodged with the cabinet office by late February.
The Expenditure Review Committee (ERC), a committee of Cabinet, meets in March to consider all submissions. They decide which proposals will be funded and the level of funding each will receive. At the end of the ERC, the ad hoc revenue committee meets to make decisions on the revenue streams of the budget. A pre-budget review of the estimates is conducted after all decisions have been finalised to ensure that they are reflected in CBMS.
Budget documentation commences at the end of the ERC process. Agencies prepare two components: the portfolio budget statements and the mid-year economic and fiscal outlook.
The portfolio budget statements provide additional details and explanations of the budget and the statement of risks, which is included in Budget Paper No. 1.
The final budget is presented and tabled in Parliament by the Treasurer on budget night as part of the Second Reading of the Appropriation Bill (No. 1), which ""appropriates money out of the Consolidated Revenue Fund for the ordinary annual services of the government""."
Australian federal budget,"Charter of Budget Honesty Act
The budget has to be presented within the framework that has been established by the Charter of Budget Honesty Act (1998).
The charter provides for:"
Australian federal budget,"sound fiscal management of the Australian economy
open dissemination about the status of public finances
transparency in Australia's fiscal policy"
Australian federal budget,"Budget night
Between 1901 and 1993, the practice was for the budget to be brought down in August, on the first Tuesday night of the Spring session. 
Since 1994, the Treasurer has presented the budget on the second Tuesday in May, with the exceptions of 1996 (due to an election and a change of government in March, the budget was brought down in August), 2016 (it was held on the first Tuesday in May to allow the government to potentially call a double dissolution election following the presentation of the budget), 2019 (when an election called for 18 May caused the budget to be brought forward to 2 April), 2020 (when it was postponed to October due to the COVID-19 pandemic and 2022 (when an election called for May caused the budget to be brought forward to 29 March).
On budget day, but before the presentation of the budget, the Treasurer spends the day behind locked doors briefing media and interest groups on various aspects of the budget. This is known as the budget lock-up. Because of the market sensitive nature of some of the information which they are being provided, those invited to attend the briefings are not allowed access to the outside world until the budget has been presented in Parliament by the Treasurer, which normally commences at 7.30 pm.
In modern times, the budget has been broadcast live from Parliament House on the ABC and Sky News Australia. It is hosted on the ABC, without interruption from 7:30 pm to 8 pm, normally followed up with a report by a panel assessing the changes, benefits and flaws in the budget. Additional budget documents and materials are available on the government budget website for other interested parties.
A convention in Australian politics is that the Leader of the Opposition is given a ""right of reply"", which they deliver in Parliament two days after the government's budget speech, and which is also broadcast on television."
Australian federal budget,"Budgetary policy developments
In comparison with similar economies, Australia's government spending is relatively low. For the twenty-year period from 1960 to 1980, the growth in spending roughly matched percentages in the much higher populated nations of Japan and the United States.
In the first half of the 1980s, spending increased by approximately 3% of gross domestic product and the tax rate surpassed that of Ronald Reagan's administration. However, government accountability was a highly contentious issue in the late 1970s, and John Howard maintains that under Fraser ""spending went up... at about two per cent per year in real terms... Reagan [didn't do] better than that"".
As the debate played out, the free-market politicians turned to attacking the political parties which were in power in the Australian states, and public sector medium enterprises came to be seen as inefficient. The economic term ""current account deficit"" was in vogue.
Riding on strong economic growth in the latter part of the 1980s, the Hawke government brought forward an agenda for public sector reform that had been pioneered in the US. Declaring a number of debt reduction strategies ranging from tariff rate reductions to privatisation and competitive tendering, Australia's public sector significantly declined in the period of his tenure.
Spending in the 1990s saw significant shifts in social policy expenditure as part of a broader scheme of ""low inflation targeting"". Although outlays for services to industry increased, the budget outcome remained the same throughout the early 1990s recession. The Howard government reduced expenditure by 1.3% of gross domestic product in its first two years, making large cutbacks to outlays for the hospital system and education. Overall the government continued to run down public debt and promote asset trading in the private sector."
Australian federal budget,"See also
Australian Government Future Fund
Australian government debt
Commonwealth Grants Commission
Fiscal imbalance in Australia
Taxation in Australia
International:"
Australian federal budget,Government budget by country
Australian federal budget,"Footnotes
References
External links
Australia Federal Budget
Charter of Budget Honesty Act (1998) at ComLaw"
Template talk:Australia topics,"== Sports And Media ==
Australia has been known for it's sport Cricket which is like an Australian version of baseball.
--Vishal 21:48, 6 May 2006 (UTC)"
Superannuation in Australia,"Superannuation in Australia, or ""super"", is a savings system for workplace pensions in retirement. It involves money earned by an employee being placed into an investment fund to be made legally available to members upon retirement. Employers make compulsory payments to these funds at a proportion of their employee's wages. From July 2024, the mandatory minimum ""guarantee"" contribution is 11.5%, rising to 12% from 2025. The superannuation guarantee was introduced by the Hawke government to promote self-funded retirement savings, reducing reliance on a publicly funded pension system. Legislation to support the introduction of the superannuation guarantee was passed by the Keating Government in 1992. 
Contributions to superannuation accounts are subject to a concessional income tax rate of 15%. This means that for most Australians, the tax on their money sent to a superannuation account is less than the tax on money sent to their bank account. Australians can contribute additional superannuation beyond the 11% minimum, subject to limits. The maximum amount that may be contributed per year is $27,500. Contributions higher than this are taxed at the person's ordinary marginal tax rate, meaning there is no tax benefit for contributing beyond that amount. Ultimately, superannuation is a system of mandatory saving coupled with tax concessions. 
As of 30 March 2022, Australians have AU$3.5 trillion invested as superannuation assets, making Australia as a nation the 4th largest holder of pension fund assets in the world. The vast majority of this money is in defined contribution funds."
Superannuation in Australia,"History
For many years until 1976, what superannuation arrangements were in place were set up under industrial awards negotiated by the union movement or individual unions.
A change to superannuation arrangements came about in 1983 through an agreement between the government and the trade unions. In the Prices and Incomes Accord, the trade unions agreed to forgo a national 3% pay increase which would be put into the new superannuation system for all employees in Australia. This was matched by employers' contributions. Employers' and employees' contributions were originally set at 3% of the employees' income, and has been gradually increased. Though there is general widespread support for compulsory superannuation today, at the time of its introduction it was met with strong resistance by small business groups who were fearful of the burden associated with its implementation and its ongoing costs.
In 1992, under the Keating Labor government, the compulsory employer contribution scheme became a part of a wider reform package addressing Australia's retirement income dilemma. It had been demonstrated that Australia, along with many other Western nations, would experience a major demographic shift in the coming decades, of the ageing of population, and it was claimed that this would result in increased age pension payments that would place an unaffordable strain on the Australian economy. The proposed solution was a ""three pillars"" approach to retirement income:"
Superannuation in Australia,"compulsory employer contributions to superannuation funds,
further contributions to superannuation funds and other investments, and
if insufficient, a safety net consisting of a means-tested government-funded age pension.
The compulsory employer contributions were branded ""Superannuation Guarantee"" (SG) contributions.
The Keating Labor government had also intended for a compulsory employee contribution beginning in 1997-98, with employee contributions beginning at 1%, then rising to 2% in 1998-99 and reaching 3% in 1999-2000. However this planned compulsory 3% employee contribution was cancelled by the Howard Liberal government when it took office in 1996. The employer SG contribution was allowed to continue to rise to 9%, which it did in 2002-03. The Howard government also limited employer SG contributions from 1 July 2002 to an employee's ordinary time earnings (OTE), which includes wages and salaries, as well as bonuses, commissions, shift loading and casual loadings, but does not include overtime paid.
The SG rate was 9% from 2002-03 to 2013-14 when the Rudd-Gillard Labor government passed legislation to increase SG contributions slowly to 12% starting on 1 July 2015 and ending on 1 July 2019. However, the succeeding Abbott Liberal government deferred starting this planned increase by six years, to 1 July 2021. The SG rate has been 9.5% of employee earnings since 1 July 2014, and after 30 June 2021 the rate is planned to increase by 0.5% each year until it reaches 12% in 2025.
Initially, superannuation accounts were considered an employer matter but over time have evolved considerably. Superannaution is portable mainly through a system of preservation until a condition of release occurs (typically retirement) but a superannuation account maintains benefits while retired such as concessional tax on earnings. A member may move from fund to fund and can consolidate accounts. The October 2020 budget included a proposal (to become law) to mandate portability to encourage and support each Australian holding one account, which would remain portable. Further proposals are to mandate underperforming funds to be barred from accepting new members. The intention is to encourage performance to benchmarks for returns and fees.
Significant updates were made to the superannuation system in Australia in 2023 and 2024. The Superannuation Guarantee (SG) rate, which had been gradually increasing over the years, reached 10.5% in 2022 and is set to continue rising by 0.5% each year until it hits 12% by 2025. This change aims to enhance retirement savings for Australian workers, ensuring better financial security in retirement."
Superannuation in Australia,"Operation
Accumulation phase
Superannuation is compulsory for all employed people working and residing in Australia. Federal law dictates minimum amounts that employers must contribute to the superannuation accounts of their employees, on top of standard wages or salaries.
Most employees have their superannuation contributed to large funds - either industry funds (not-for-profit mutual funds, managed by boards composed of industry stakeholders), or retail funds (for-profit commercial funds, principally managed by financial institutions). However, some Australians can have their superannuation deposited into self-managed superannuation funds.
The Australian Government outlines a set percentage of employee income that should be paid into a superannuation account. Since July 2002, this rate has increased from 9% to 10% in July 2021, and will stop increasing at 12% in July 2025. Employees are also encouraged to supplement compulsory superannuation contributions with voluntary contributions, including diverting their wages or salary income into superannuation contributions under so-called salary sacrifice arrangements."
Superannuation in Australia,"Retirement phase
There is no standard retirement age in Australia. As of July 2023, members can start to draw some money from their superannuation once they reach age 60 (people born before 1 July 1964 will have already reached their required age under older rules). On reaching age 65, or on ceasing employment after age 60 members have total access to their superannuation balance. In most cases this can be taken as a tax-free lump sum or a tax-free income stream.
Decisions on when to retire are likely to be influenced by the government Age Pension which, as of July 2023, commences at age 67.
At retirement, each member has a lump sum balance. Most superannuation funds offer an account-based (drawdown) product for drawing retirement income. Some funds provide access to lifetime annuities purchased using the member's balance.
An individual can withdraw funds out of a superannuation fund when the person meets one of the conditions of release, such as retirement, terminal medical condition, or permanent incapacity, contained in Schedule 1 of the Superannuation Industry (Supervision) Regulations 1994. As of 1 July 2018, members have also been able to withdraw voluntary contributions made as part of the First Home Super Saver Scheme (FHSS)."
Superannuation in Australia,"Employer contributions
Superannuation guarantee contributions
Under Australian federal law, employers must pay superannuation contributions to approved superannuation funds. Called the ""superannuation guarantee"" (SG), the contribution percentage as of July 2021 is 10 per cent of the employees' ordinary time earnings, generally consisting of salaries/wages, commissions, allowances, but not overtime. SG is only mandated for employees that generally make more than $450 in a calendar month, or when working more than 30 hours a week for minors and domestic workers. The main exception is under the NDIS where an individual manages their own insurance plan, and therefore hires their own carers. SG is not required for non-Australians working for an Australian business overseas, for some foreign executives, for members of the Australian Defence Force working in that role, or for employees covered under bilateral superannuation agreements.
SG contributions are paid on top of an employee's pay packet, meaning that they do not form part of wage or salaries. Contributions must be paid at least once every quarter, and can only be paid into approved superannuation funds registered with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.
Initially, between 1993-1996, a higher contribution rate applied for employers whose annual national payroll for the base year exceeded $1 million, with the employer's minimum superannuation contribution percentage set out in the adjacent table with an asterisk. The contribution rate increased over time. The SG rate was 9.5% on 1 July 2014, and was supposed to increase to 10% on 1 July 2018; and then increase by 0.5% each year until it reached 12% on 1 July 2022. The 2014 federal budget deferred the proposed 2018 SG rate increases by 3 years, with the 9.5% rate remaining until 30 June 2021, and is set to have five annual increases, where the SG rate will increase to 12% by July 2025. However, there have been lobbying that suggests that the SG rate should remain at the current rate of 9.5% or make superannuation voluntary."
Superannuation in Australia,"“Defined benefit"" superannuation schemes
Special rules apply in relation to employers operating ""defined benefit"" superannuation schemes, which are less common traditional employer funds where benefits are determined by a formula usually based on an employee's final average salary and length of service. Essentially, instead of minimum contributions, employers need to make contributions to provide a minimum level of benefit."
Superannuation in Australia,"Salary sacrifices contributions
An employee may request that their employer makes all or part of future payments of earnings into superannuation in lieu of making payment to the employee. Such an arrangement is known as ""salary sacrifice"", and for income tax purposes the payments are treated as employer superannuation contributions, which are generally tax deductible to the employer, and are not subject to the superannuation guarantee (SG) rules. The arrangement offers a benefit to the employee because the amount so sacrificed does not form part of the taxable income of the employee.
For some purposes, however, such contributions are called ""reportable superannuation contributions"", and for those purposes they are counted back as a benefit of the employee, such as for calculation of ""income for Medicare levy surcharge purposes"".
To be valid, a salary sacrifice arrangement must be agreed between employer and employee before the work is performed. This agreement is usually documented in writing in pro forma form."
Superannuation in Australia,"Personal contributions
People can make additional voluntary contributions to their superannuation and receive tax benefits for doing so, subject to limits. Since the 2021/22 financial year, the concessional contribution cap has been $27,500. This figure is indexed to the Average Weekly Ordinary Times Earnings (AWOTE), but will only increase in increments of $2,500. Any contributions above the limit are called ""excess concessional contributions"".
Unused concessional contributions cap space can be carried forward from 1 July 2018, if the total superannuation balance is less than $500,000 at the end of 30 June in the previous year. Unused amounts are available for a maximum of five years."
Superannuation in Australia,"Access to superannuation
Employer and personal superannuation contributions are income of the superannuation fund and are invested over the period of the employees' working life and the sum of compulsory and voluntary contributions, plus earnings, less taxes and fees are paid to the person when they retire.
As superannuation is money invested for a person's retirement, strict government rules prevent early access to preserved benefits except in very limited and restricted circumstances. These include major dental, and drug and alcohol addiction recovery. In general people can seek early release superannuation for severe financial hardship or on compassionate grounds, such as for medical treatment not available through Medicare.
Generally, superannuation benefits fall into three categories: "
Superannuation in Australia,"Preserved benefits
Restricted non-preserved benefits
Unrestricted non-preserved benefits
Preserved benefits are benefits that must be retained in a superannuation fund until the employee's ""preservation age"". Currently, all workers must wait until they are at least 55 before they may access these funds. The actual preservation age varies depending on the date of birth of the employee. All contributions made after 1 July 1999 fall into this category.
Restricted non-preserved benefits although not preserved, cannot be accessed until an employee meets a condition of release, such as terminating their employment in an employer superannuation scheme.
Unrestricted non-preserved benefits do not require the fulfilment of a condition of release, and may be accessed upon the request of the worker. For example, where a worker has previously satisfied a condition of release and decided not to access the money in their superannuation fund."
Superannuation in Australia,"Preservation age and conditions of release
Benefit payments may be a lump sum or an income stream (pension) or a combination of both, provided the payment is allowed under superannuation law and the fund's trust deed. Withholding tax applies to payments to members who are under 60 or over 60 and the benefit is from an untaxed source. In either case, eligibility for access to preserved benefits depends on a member's preservation age and meeting one of the conditions of release. Until 1999, any Australian could access their preserved benefits once they reached 55 years of age.  In 1997, the Howard Liberal government changed the preservation rules to induce Australians to stay in the workforce for a longer period of time, delaying the effect of population ageing. The new rules progressively increased the preservation age based on a member's date of birth, and came into effect in 1999. The result is that by 2025 all Australian workers would need to be at least 60 years of age to access their superannuation.
To access their super, a member must also meet one of the following ""conditions of release"". Before age 60, workers must be retired — i.e., cease employment — and sign off that they intend never to work again (not work more than 40 hours in a 30-day period). Those aged 60 to 65 can access superannuation if they cease employment regardless of their future employment intentions, so long as they are not working at the time. Members over 65 years of age can access their superannuation regardless of employment status. Employed individuals who have reached preservation but are under age 65 may access up to 10% of their superannuation under the Transition to Retirement (TRIS) pension rules.
An Australian worker who has transferred funds from their New Zealand KiwiSaver scheme into their Australian superannuation scheme, cannot access the ex-New Zealand portion of their superannuation until they reach the age of 65, regardless of their preservation age. This rule also applies to New Zealand citizens who have transferred funds from their New Zealand Kiwisaver scheme into an Australian superannuation fund."
Superannuation in Australia,"Reasonable benefit limits
Reasonable benefit limits (RBL) were applied to limit the amount of retirement and termination of employment benefits that individuals may receive over their lifetime at concessional tax rates.  There were two types of RBLs - a lump sum RBL and a higher pension RBL. For the financial year ending 30 June 2005, the lump sum RBL was $619,223 and the pension RBL was $1,238,440.  RBLs were indexed each year in line with movements in Average Weekly Ordinary Time Earnings published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The lump sum RBL applied to most people. Generally, the higher pension RBL applied to people who took 50% or more of their benefits in the form of pensions or annuities that met certain conditions (for example, restrictions on the ability to convert the pension back into a lump sum). RBLs were abolished from 1 July 2007."
Superannuation in Australia,"Superannuation taxes
Contributions
Contributions made to superannuation, either by an individual or on behalf of an individual, are taxed differently depending on whether that contribution was made from ""pre-tax"" or ""post-tax"" money. ""Pre-tax"" contributions are contributions on which no income tax has been paid at time of contribution, and are also known as ""before-tax"" contributions or as ""concessional"" contributions. They are mainly compulsory employer SG (""Superannuation Guarantee"", see above) contributions and additional salary sacrifice contributions. These contributions are taxed by the superannuation fund at a ""contributions tax"" rate of 15%, which is regarded as ""concessional"" rate. For individuals who earn more than $250,000, the contributions tax is levied at 30%.
""Post-tax"" contributions are also referred to as ""after-tax"" contributions, ""non-concessional"" contributions or as ""undeducted"" contributions. These contributions are made from money on which income tax or contributions tax has already been paid, and typically no further tax is required to be withheld from that contribution when it is made to a fund.
Both contribution types are subject to annual caps. Where the annual cap is exceeded, additional tax is payable, either at the marginal tax rate for concessional contributions, or an additional 31.5% for non-concessional contributions, which is in addition to the standard tax rate of 15% payable on contributions, making a total of 46.5%.
Over time various measures have allowed other forms of contribution to encourage saving for retirement. These include small business CGT contributions and rollovers and Downsizer superannuation contributions Each contribution type has specific rules and limits."
Superannuation in Australia,"Investments in the fund
Investment earnings of the superannuation fund (i.e. dividends, rental income etc.) are taxed at a flat rate of 15% by the superannuation fund. In addition, where an investment is sold, capital gains tax is payable by the superannuation fund at 15%.
Much like the discount available to individuals and other trusts, a superannuation fund can claim a capital gains tax discount where the investment has been owned for at least 12 months. The discount applicable to superannuation fund is 33%, reducing the effective capital gains tax from 15% to 10%.
Superannuation funds pool the contributions from multiple individuals and invest these funds in a wide range of assets such as stocks, bonds, real estate, and more. These investments aim to generate returns and grow the fund over time.
A fund which is paying a pension to a  member aged 60+ has exempt pension income and pays no tax on that portion of the earnings of the fund. Its deductions for that same percentage is denied and cannot create a tax loss. An actuarial certificate may be required to support the proportion of exempt pension income based on member balances and numbers of days. Earnings on accumulation (i.e., non pension) balances remain proportionately subject to tax. Asset segregation may be used by some funds so that specific income is attributed to a specific member.  A fund with only pension member accounts which pay the minimum complying pension for the whole year have a tax rate of 0%.
These taxes contribute over $6 billion in annual government revenue. Superannuation is a tax-advantaged method of saving as the 15% tax rate on contributions is lower than the rate an employee would have paid if they received the money as income. The federal government announced in its 2006/07 budget that from 1 July 2007, Australians over the age of 60 will face no taxes on withdrawing monies out of their superannuation fund if it is from a taxed source."
Superannuation in Australia,"Discontinued superannuation surcharge
In 1996, the federal government imposed a ""superannuation surcharge"" on higher income earners as a temporary revenue measure. During the 2001 election campaign, the Howard government proposed to reduce the surcharge from 15% to 10.5% over three years. The superannuation surcharge was abolished by the Howard government from 1 July 2005."
Superannuation in Australia,"Superannuation co-contribution scheme
From 1 July 2003, the Howard Liberal government made available incentives of a Government co-contribution with a maximum value of $1,000.
From the 2012-2013 financial year to the 2016-2017 financial year, superannuation contributions are available for individuals with income not in excess of $37,000.  The Government offsets a maximum of $500 and a minimum of $20, calculated at 15% of a low income earners total superannuation contributions.
As at 1 July 2017, The Low Income Superannuation Contribution (LISC) scheme will be replaced with the renamed Low Income Superannuation Tax Offset (LISTO).  Under this new scheme, the minimum amount of Government contributions for low income earners with income not in excess of $37,000 is lowered to $10 but the $500 maximum remains."
Superannuation in Australia,"Effect on income tax
One of the reasons that people contribute to superannuation is to reduce their income tax liability, and possibly to be able to receive an age pension while still receiving supplementary income.
The following is a general summary of the tax rules relating to superannuation. The full details are extremely complex."
Superannuation in Australia,"Employer superannuation contributions
Employer superannuation contributions are generally tax deductible if paid to a ""complying superannuation fund"". This includes compulsory employer contributions as well as ""salary sacrifice"" contributions. Employees may choose to make additional contributions at the same rate as a ""salary sacrifice"", but only if their employer agrees to do so."
Superannuation in Australia,"Taxation of superannuation fund (contributions)
Employer contributions received by a superannuation fund and income earned in the fund are taxed at the concessional rate of 15%, or more for higher income earners. Additional contributions made without the cooperation of an employer or paid to a non-complying superannuation fund are taxed at the top marginal tax rates and are subject to different rules."
Superannuation in Australia,"Taxation of superannuation in the US
Under the U.S.-Australia Income Tax Treaty, there is an opportunity to lawfully avoid U.S. taxation on gains within Australian superannuation funds. By taking this legal position, Australia would have exclusive taxing rights over Australian superannuation funds, which effectively allows Australian nationals residing in the U.S. to lawfully exclude from their U.S federal income tax returns any gain from their Australian Superannuation Fund or even future distributions."
Superannuation in Australia,"Benefits paid
Income retrieved from the fund by a member after preservation age is generally tax free.[1]"
Superannuation in Australia,"Exceeding the concessional contributions cap
The concessional contribution cap for the 2017-2018 financial year is $25,000. For later financial years, the cap is worked out by indexing annually this amount. From 1 July 2019 a taxpayer who meets a maximum  balance condition who does not use their cap in full may carry forward the unused cap for a limited time period. The tax laws and rules concerning concessional contributions are complex and not  automatic entitlement. In the 2021 year a theoretical concessional contribution (tax deductible) of three years could be permitted ($75,000) representing unused caps from 2019 and 2020 in addition to the 2021 cap.
Excess concessional contribution (ECC) is included in the assessable income for corresponding income year, and the taxpayer is entitled to a tax offset for that income year equal to 15% of the excess concessional contributions (S 291-15  of the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997). This offset cannot be refunded, transferred, or carried forward. Excess Contributions Tax can be paid by the member by release of funds from the superannuation account."
Superannuation in Australia,"Excess concessional contribution charge
ECC charge is applied to the additional income tax liability arising due to excess concessional contributions included in the income tax return- Division 95 in Schedule 1 to the Taxation Administration Act 1953. The ECC charge period is calculated from the start of the income year in which the excess concessional contributions were made and ends the day before the tax is due to be paid under the first income tax assessment for that year. The compounding interest formula is applied against the base amount (the additional income tax liability) for each day of the ECC charge period. The ECC charge rates are updated quarterly and for January - March 2019 it is 4.94% per annum."
Superannuation in Australia,"Concessional contributions and taxable income, exceeding the threshold - Division 293 tax
Division 293 tax (additional tax on concessional contributions) is payable if income for surcharge purposes (other than reportable superannuation contributions), plus concessionally taxed superannuation contributions (also known as low tax contributions) are greater than $250,000. Division 293 tax levies 15% tax on either the earner's total concessional contributions, or the amount (Concessional Contributions + Gross Income) that is over the $250,000 threshold – whichever amount is lower. Div 293 tax can be paid by the member by a release from the superannuation fund account."
Superannuation in Australia,"Non-concessional contributions
Non-concessional contributions include excess concessional contributions for the financial year. Non-concessional contributions are amounts contributed which an employer or taxpayer has not claimed a tax deduction. They do not include superannuation co-contributions, structured settlements and orders for personal injury or capital gains tax (CGT) related payments that the member has validly elected to exclude from their non-concessional contributions. 
Non-concessional contributions are made into the superannuation fund from after-tax income. These contributions are not taxed in the superannuation fund.
As of 1 July 2021, the non-concessional contributions cap is $110,000 per annum. Members 66 years or younger have the option of utilizing the ""bring-forward"" rule which allows an eligible person to contribute 3 years' worth of contributions in the one year. If a member's non-concessional contributions exceed the cap, they are taxed at the top marginal tax rate."
Superannuation in Australia,"Effect on age pensions
Australian resident citizens over 67 years of age are entitled to an age pension if their income and assets are below specified levels. The full pension, as at March 2022, is $882.20 per fortnight for singles, and $665 each for couples. 
Pension recipients are assessed under an Asset test and an Income test and their pension is reduced by whichever test lowers their pension amount the most. As at March 2022, to be eligible for the full pension single homeowners must have assets less than $270,500 and single non-homeowners assets less than $487,000. Couple homeowners must have assets less than $405,000 and non-homeowners $621,500. The Income test will apply to singles who earn more than $180 per fortnight and couples who earn more than $320 per fortnight. Pension payments will by reduced by 50 cents for each dollar over these limits."
Superannuation in Australia,"Superannuation funds
Trustee structure
Superannuation funds operate as trusts with trustees being responsible for the prudential operation of their funds and in formulating and implementing an investment strategy. Some specific duties and obligations are codified in the Superannuation Industry (Supervision) Act 1993 - other obligations are the subject of general trust law.  Trustees are liable under law for breaches of obligations. Superannuation trustees have, inter alia, an obligation to ensure that superannuation monies are invested prudently with consideration given to diversification and liquidity."
Superannuation in Australia,"Investments
Other than a few very specific provisions in the Superannuation Industry (Supervision) Act 1993 (largely related to investments in assets related to the employer or impacting a self-managed superannuation fund) funds are not subject to  specific asset requirements or investment rules. A fund must maintain an investment strategy and comply with specific covenants contained in law at all times.  A fund must not lend to a related party and must not acquire investments from a related party unless permitted. There are no minimum rate of return requirements, nor a government guarantee of benefits. There are some restrictions on borrowing and the use of derivatives and investments in the shares and property of employer sponsors of funds.
As a result, superannuation funds tend to invest in a wide variety of assets with a mix of duration and risk/return characteristics. The recent investment performance of superannuation funds compares favourably with alternative assets such as ten year bonds."
Superannuation in Australia,"Types of superannuation funds
There are about 500 superannuation funds operating in Australia. Of those, 362 have assets totalling greater than $50 million. Superannuation assets totalled $2.7 trillion at the end of the June 2018 quarter, a new record according to the Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia.
There are different types of superannuation funds:"
Superannuation in Australia,"Industry Funds are multiemployer funds run by employer associations and/or unions. Unlike Retail/Wholesale funds they are run solely for the benefit of members, as there are no shareholders.
Wholesale Master Trusts are multiemployer funds run by financial institutions for groups of employees. These are also classified as Retail funds by APRA.
Retail Master Trusts/Wrap platforms are funds run by financial institutions for individuals.
Employer Funds are funds established by employers for their employees. Each fund has its own trust structure that is not necessarily shared by other employers. APRA has been encouraging employer funds to windup and are less popular in recent years. The cost of compliance and maintaining services at a competitive cost is the key driver.
Public Sector Funds are largely funds establish by Governments. Some are unfunded and the Future Fund was specifically established to set aside savings to meet this future liability. Many but not all schemes are defined benefit funds which give a life pension rather than a balance that is paid down as a pension. Newer employees in Public Sector jobs are typically members of a modern accumulation scheme.
Self Managed Superannuation Funds (SMSFs) are funds established under a specific portion of the same laws that govern larger funds. A SMSF allows a small number of individuals (limited to 6) and is regulated by the Australian Taxation Office, not APRA.  Generally the Trustees (OR Trustee Directors) of the fund are the fund members and the members are all trustees (or Trustee Directors). Where there is a Corporate Trustee, the members are the directors of that company). SMSFs are the most numerous funds in the Australian superannuation industry, with 99% of the number of funds and 25% of the $2.7 trillion total superannuation assets as of 30 June 2013. SMSFs may be specially structured so that they are an accepted QROPS fund capable of receiving a transfer of a UK pension benefit.
2015 changes to the SIS act has allowed SMSFs to borrow under limited recourse borrowing rules. Lenders have developed SMSF loans to enable SMSF's to borrow for residential property, commercial property and industrial property, however funds cannot acquire vacant land or change the asset eg develop, improve or construct using borrowed money. Trustees are also require to value the assets in their funds on a regular basis to ensure accurate reporting. SMSF Property Valuation services are required from independent parties to ensure arms length valuations. There are restrictions placed upon the fund that the trustees of the fund cannot gain a personal advantage from asset acquired by the fund, or purchase from what's known as a ""related party"". For example, earners would not be able to live in the home that is owned by their SMSF. SMSF loans are generally available up to 80% of the purchase price and attract a high margin to the interest rate in comparison to standard occupier home loans. Major Banks have withdrawn from the SMSF loan market and loans are costly versus traditional loans as the loan must be a limited recourse loan product that also uses a bare trust to hold the property until the loan is repaid. "
Superannuation in Australia,"SMSF property investment has gained considerable momentum since the amendment of borrowing provisions to allow for the purchase of residential real estate. The ability to obtain a limited recourse loan to buy income-producing property in a favourably low tax environment has influenced a rapidly emerging incidence of direct property investment within SMSF structures in recent times.
Small APRA Funds (SAFs) are funds established for a small number of individuals (fewer than 5) but unlike SMSFs the Trustee is an Approved Trustee, not the member/s, and the funds are regulated by APRA.  This structure is often used for members who want control of their superannuation investments but are unable or unwilling to meet the requirements of Trusteeship of an SMSF.
Public Sector Employees Funds are funds established by governments for their employees.
Industry, Retail and Wholesale Master Trusts are the largest sectors of the Australian Superannuation Market by net asset with 217 funds.
SMSFs are the largest number of funds with 596,225 funds (2019) representing 32.8% of the $2.7 trillion market."
Superannuation in Australia,"Choice of superannuation funds
From 1 July 2005, many Australian employees have been able to choose the fund their employer's future superannuation guarantee contributions are paid into. Employees may change a superannuation fund. They may choose to change funds, for example, because:"
Superannuation in Australia,"one when their current fund is not available with a new employer,
consolidate superannuation accounts to cut costs and paperwork,
a lower-fee and/or better service superannuation fund,
a better performing superannuation fund, or
a fund invests in assets and companies that align with their personal beliefs.
Where an employee has not elected to choose their own fund, employers must since 1 January 2014 make ""default contributions"" only into an authorised MySuper product, which is designed to be a simple, low-cost superannuation fund with few, standardised fees and a single balanced investment option."
Superannuation in Australia,"List of superannuation entities by funds under management
Below is a list of superannuation trustees by funds under management. Most figures are derived from entity's 2022 annual report."
Superannuation in Australia,"Superannuation industry
Legislation
Superannuation funds are principally regulated under the Superannuation Industry (Supervision) Act 1993 and the Financial Services Reform Act 2002.  Compulsory employer contributions are regulated via the Superannuation Guarantee (Administration) Act 1992"
Superannuation in Australia,"Superannuation Industry (Supervision) Act 1993 (SIS)
The Superannuation Industry (Supervision) Act sets all the rules that a complying superannuation fund must obey (adherence to these rules is called compliance). The rules cover general areas relating to the trustee, investments, management, fund accounts and administration, enquiries and complaints.
SIS also:"
Superannuation in Australia,"regulates the operation of superannuation funds; and
sets penalties for trustees when the rules of operation are not met.
In June 2004 the SIS Act and Regulations were amended to require all superannuation trustees to apply to become a Registrable Superannuation Entity Licensee (RSE Licensee) in addition each of the superannuation funds the trustee operates is also required to be registered.  The transition period is intended to end 30 June 2006.  The new licensing regime requires trustees of superannuation funds to demonstrate to APRA that they have adequate resources (human, technology and financial), risk management systems and appropriate skills and expertise to manage the superannuation fund.  The licensing regime has lifted the bar for superannuation trustees with a significant number of small to medium size superannuation funds exiting the industry due to the increasing risk and compliance demands."
Superannuation in Australia,"MySuper
MySuper is part of the Stronger Super reforms announced in 2011 by the Julia Gillard Government for the Australian superannuation industry.  From 1 January 2014, employers must only pay default superannuation contributions to an authorised MySuper product. Superannuation funds have until July 2017 to transfer accrued default balances to MySuper.
A MySuper default is one which complies to a regulated set of features, including:"
Superannuation in Australia,"a single investment option (although lifecycle strategies are permitted),
a minimum level of insurance cover,
an easily comparable fee structure, with a short prescribed list of allowable fee types,
restrictions on how advice is provided and paid for, and
rules governing fund governance and transparency."
Superannuation in Australia,"The Financial Services Reform Act 2002 (FSR)
The Financial Services Reform Act covers a very broad area of finance and is designed to provide standardisation within the financial services industry. Under the FSR, to operate a superannuation fund, the trustee must have a licence to run a fund and the individuals within the funds require a licence to perform their job.
With regard to superannuation, FSR:"
Superannuation in Australia,"provides licensing of ""dealers"" (providers of financial products and services);
oversees the training of agents representing dealers;
sets out the requirements regarding what information must be provided on any financial product to members and prospective members; and
sets out the requirements that determine good-conduct and misconduct rules for superannuation funds."
Superannuation in Australia,"Regulatory bodies
Four main regulatory bodies keep watch over superannuation funds to ensure they comply with the legislation:"
Superannuation in Australia,"The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) is responsible for ensuring that superannuation funds behave in a prudent manner. APRA also reviews a fund's annual accounts to assess their compliance with the SIS.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) ensures that trustees of superannuation funds comply with their obligations regarding the provision of information to fund members during their membership. ASIC is also responsible for consumer protection in the financial services area (including superannuation). It also monitors funds' compliance with the FSR. MoneySmart is a website run by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) to help people make smart choices about their personal finances. They provide a number of tools such as the Superannuation Calculator.
The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) ensures that self-managed superannuation funds adhere to the rules and regulations. It also makes sure that the right amount of tax is taken from the superannuation savings of all Australians.
The Superannuation Complaints Tribunal (SCT) administers the Superannuation (Resolution of Complaints) Act. This Act provides the formal process for the resolution of complaints. The SCT will try to resolve any complaints between a member and the superannuation fund by negotiation or conciliation. The SCT only deals with complaints when no satisfactory resolution has been reached. The SCT ceased handling new complaints from 31 October 2018.
The Australian Financial Complaints Authority (AFCA) now manages superannuation complaints from November 2018. AFCA manages complaints concerning financial products."
Superannuation in Australia,"Similar schemes in other countries
Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP) and Tax-Free Savings Account (TSFA) (Canada)
Individual Retirement Account (IRA) and 401K (United States)
Self-Invested Personal Pension (SIPP) and Stakeholder Pension (United Kingdom)
Personal Retirement Savings Account (PRSA) - (Ireland)
KiwiSaver (New Zealand) – Australia and New Zealand have a reciprocal agreement allowing Australians moving to New Zealand to transfer their KiwiSaver funds to an approved Australian superannuation scheme, and vice versa.
Nippon individual savings account (NISA) (Japan)
Mandatory Provident Fund (Hong Kong)
Vanuatu National Provident Fund (Vanuatu) - The Vanuatu National Provident Fund is a compulsory savings scheme for Employees who receive a salary of Vt3, 000 or more a month, to help them financially at retirement.
Central Provident Fund (Singapore)
Employees Provident Fund (Malaysia)
Pensions in Chile"
Superannuation in Australia,"Criticism and issues
The interaction between superannuation, tax and pension eligibility is complex, meaning that many Australians struggle to engage with their superannuation accounts and utilise them effectively.
The Australian superannuation industry has been criticised for pursuing self-interested re-investment strategies, and some funds have been accused of choosing investments that benefit related parties ahead of the investor.
Some superannuation providers provide minimal information to account holders about how their money has been invested. Usually, only vague categories are provided, such as ""Australian Shares"", with no indication of which shares were purchased.
Losses to the superannuation funds from the 2007–2008 financial crisis have also been a cause for concern, said to be around $75 billion.
An avoidable issue with Australia's superannuation system is employees failing to consolidate multiple accounts, thus being charged multiple account fees. In 2018, of Australia's 15 million superannuation fund members, 40% had multiple accounts, which collectively cost them $2.6 billion in additional fees per year. Government initiatives to make consolidating accounts easier have reduced the percentage to 24% in 2022."
Superannuation in Australia,"See also
Industry superannuation fund
Australian Government Future Fund
German pensions
Pension system
Social Security (Australia)
UK pensions
US pensions"
Superannuation in Australia,"Notes
References
External links
ASIC's consumer and investor website MoneySmart - Superannuation and Retirement
Australian Taxation Office - Superannuation
Super bailout of $59m - excludes DIY investors
Government compensates most trio capital losses
Business Spectator - Legality and Constitutional grounds for Mandatory Superannuation in Australia
Road Map Release My Super
Proactive superannuation planning"
Censorship in Australia,"Certain subject-matter in Australia is subject to various forms of government censorship. These include matters of national security, judicial non-publication or suppression orders, defamation law, the federal Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth), film and literature (including video game) classification, and advertising restrictions.
Some forms of censorship are not administered directly by the government or courts. For example, some foreign websites have on occasion been blocked by Australian internet service providers. More recently, concerns have been raised as to the level of academic freedom enjoyed at Australia's public universities. Outside of these matters, standards for television, radio, recorded music, the press and most commercial advertising are enforced, in the first instance, by means of industry self-regulation."
Censorship in Australia,"Legal protections
Australia does not have explicit freedom of speech in any constitutional or statutory declaration of rights, with the exception of political speech which is protected from criminal prosecution at common law per Australian Capital Television Pty Ltd v Commonwealth. There is however an ""implied freedom of political communication"" that was recognised in Lange v Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
In 1992 the High Court of Australia judged in the case of Australian Capital Television Pty Ltd v Commonwealth that the Australian Constitution, by providing for a system of representative and responsible government, implied the protection of political communication as an essential element of that system. This freedom of political communication is not a broad freedom of speech as in other countries, but rather a freedom that only protects political free speech. This freedom of political free speech is a shield against government prosecution, not a shield against private prosecution (civil law). It is also less a causal mechanism in itself, rather than simply a boundary which can be adjudged to be breached. Despite the court's ruling, however, not all political speech appears to be protected in Australia and several laws criminalise forms of speech that would be protected in republic countries such as the United States.
In 1996, Albert Langer was imprisoned for advocating that voters fill out their ballot papers in a way that was invalid. Amnesty International declared Langer to be a prisoner of conscience. The section which outlawed Langer from encouraging people to vote this way has since been repealed and the law now says only that it is an offence to print or publish material which may deceive or mislead a voter.
The Howard government expanded sedition law as part of the war on terror. Media Watch ran a series on the amendments on ABC television.
In 2003, CSIRO senior scientist Graeme Pearman was reprimanded and encouraged to resign after he spoke out on global warming. The Howard government was accused of limiting the speech of Pearman and other scientists.
In 2010, journalist Andrew Bolt was sued in the Federal Court over two posts on his Herald Sun blog in 2009. Bolt was found to have contravened the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (RDA) in 2011 following comments regarded to be representative of a ""eugenic"" approach to aboriginal identity. This prompted the federal government to propose changes to the Racial Discrimination Act but this has been met with stiff resistance.
In 2014 the Supreme Court of Victoria issued a blanket media gag order on the reporting of a high-profile international corruption case. The gag order prevented the publishing of articles regarding bribes presented to high-ranking officials of Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam by senior executives of the Reserve Bank of Australia in order to secure the adoption of the Australian invented and produced polymer banknote technology."
Censorship in Australia,"Australian Classification Board
Certain films, books and video games have, in effect, been banned from sale in Australia because they have been “refused classification” by the Australian Classification Board which was founded in 1970. Materials are generally refused classification because of explicit violent or sexual content.
Although the Australian Classification Board Guidelines state that ""adults should be able to read, hear and see what they want"", many books are apparently banned or given a restricted classification simply because they may offend certain segments of the population. Under particularly frequent attacks are books containing erotica, those concerning illegal drugs, and those discussing end-of-life issues (particularly those discussing or condoning assisted suicide). For example, in December 2006 the voluntary euthanasia book The Peaceful Pill Handbook was classified by the OFLC as X18+ and approved for publication. A month later, on appeal from the Australian Attorney General Philip Ruddock and Right to Life NSW, the book's classification was reviewed by the Literature Classification Board and rated RC (refused classification).
In 2000, Liberal Party of Australia Prime Minister John Howard had the Australian Classification Board prohibit depictions of certain sexual fetishes including candle wax, bondage, spanking, fisting, and golden showers. Sexually explicit depictions of adults who appeared to look under 18 years of age were also prohibited by the Board. The Australian Sex Party accused these actions of censoring depictions of female ejaculation and censoring adult women with small breasts."
Censorship in Australia,"Banned publications
Imports
Publications, films, computer games and any other goods that describe, depict, express or otherwise deal with matters of sex, drug misuse or addiction, crime, cruelty, violence, terrorist acts or revolting or abhorrent phenomena in such a way that they offend against the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults are not allowed.
In Australia, the importation of certain books, video games, and media are prohibited based on its non-fictional or fictional contents. It was reported on in 2021, that the Australian Border Force stated that any depictions of sex, drug misuse or addiction, crime cruelty, violence, terrorist acts, or revolting content that offends moral standards and decency, are prohibited."
Censorship in Australia,"Book censorship until 1970
Book censorship has existed in Australia since the 19th century. Each state had its own legislation, including:"
Censorship in Australia,"Obscene and Indecent Publications Act 1901 (later Indecent Articles and Publications Act 1975)
Police Offences Act 1958  (Victoria)
Indecent Publications and Articles Act 1902-1983 (Western Australia)
Norman Lindsay's Redheap was the first book to be banned from import into Australia, in May 1930, under the Commonwealth Customs Act 1901. This was before the establishment of the Commonwealth Book Censorship Board in 1933 by Prime Minister Joseph Lyons' United Australia Party, which was  renamed the Literature Censorship Board in 1937. The novel Upsurge, written by J. M. Harcourt and published in 1934, became the first Australian book to be officially banned  under the guidelines of the Commonwealth Book Censorship Board It was initially banned as seditious, later reviewed and the ban confirmed, ostensibly on grounds of indecency and explicit depictions of sex under the Indecent Publications Act. However the main cause of its ban was its socialist tone and subversive agenda which criticised capitalism, featuring Communist characters in its portrayal of life in the relief camps of the Depression.
In the 1960s, censorship laws came under pressure when ""three intrepid Sydney activists,"" Alexander William Sheppard, Leon Fink and Ken Buckley, locally published D. H. Lawrence's The Trial of Lady Chatterley (Sydney, 1965), which was at that time banned in Australia, and Sheppard then published James Baldwin's Another Country (1966). In 1970, Penguin Books had three copies of Portnoy's Complaint smuggled into Australia and then secretly printed 75,000 copies of the book. In the early 1970s Don Chipp, the federal Minister of Customs and Excise, largely ended censorship of printed material in the country, with Australians being able to read such books as Portnoy’s Complaint and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer."
Censorship in Australia,"Press freedom
Freedom House reported in 2021 that although Australia's ""constitution does not explicitly protect press freedom, journalists scrutinise lawmakers and the government, covering controversial topics generally without serious obstacles or risk of harassment or violence."" However, it expressed concern about two police raids conducted in 2019, and the widespread use of judicial suppression orders. Press freedom may also be affected by the provisions of defamation law and the Commonwealth RDA, which are discussed in the following sections.
Australia has been on a decline on the Press Freedom Index curated by the Reporters Without Borders, in reflection of rising media censorship and intimidation of journalists in the country, including media companies maintaining close ties to political leaders, fueling doubts about editorial independence. Two giant firms dominate mass media in Australia – Nine Entertainment and News Corp Australia, a subsidiary of American-based News Corp. The country was ranked 19th out of 180 countries in 2018, before subsequently dropping to 26th out of 180 countries for 2020 and 39th in 2022."
Censorship in Australia,"National security
The Australian Government has occasionally acted against media outlets for reasons of national security. In June 2019, federal police raided the Sydney offices of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the home of Sunday Telegraph political editor Annika Smethurst, seeking evidence against officials who may have leaked sensitive government information to journalists. Both raids were widely condemned in media and legal circles, and led to a review."
Censorship in Australia,"Suppression and non-publication orders
Commonwealth, State and territory law provides for the suppression or non-publication of certain information regarding legal proceedings. This can be to avoid contaminating the jury pool, or to protect the identities of children and sexual assault victims. While these orders are generally targeted at journalists, in the past the transmission of television crime dramas has been delayed as a result.
The case of Cardinal George Pell is one cited by Freedom House. The conviction of one of the Vatican's most senior officials made headlines around the world, yet a suppression order banned all Australian media outlets from reporting the story. The order was intended to avoid the verdict influencing a future trial involving separate charges (these were later dropped). Australians could, however, readily find the news on foreign websites. Melbourne's Herald Sun newspaper posted on its front page ""CENSORED"" in large print in protest of the ban, noting that international sources were reporting on a ""very important story that is relevant to Victorians"". Victorian authorities later charged 36 individual journalists and news organisations with breaching suppression orders related to the verdict."
Censorship in Australia,"Defamation
Australian law of defamation developed primarily out of the English law of defamation and its cases, though now there are differences introduced by statute and by the implied constitutional limitation on governmental powers to limit speech of a political nature established in Lange v Australian Broadcasting Corporation (1997).
On 10 December 2002, the High Court of Australia delivered judgment in the Internet defamation case of Dow Jones v Gutnick. The judgment established that internet-published foreign publications that defamed an Australian in their Australian reputation could be held accountable under Australian defamation law. The case gained worldwide attention and is often said, inaccurately, to be the first of its kind. A similar case that predates Dow Jones v Gutnick is Berezovsky v Forbes in England.
Among the various common law jurisdictions, some Americans have presented a visceral and vocal reaction to the Gutnick decision. On the other hand, the decision mirrors similar decisions in many other jurisdictions such as England, Scotland, France, Canada and Italy.
In 2006, uniform defamation laws came into effect across Australia. In addition to fixing the problematic inconsistencies in law between individual States and Territories, the laws made a number of changes to the common law position, including:"
Censorship in Australia,"Abolishing the distinction between libel and slander.
Providing new defenses including that of triviality, where it is a defense to the publication of a defamatory matter if the defendant proves that the circumstances of publication were such that the plaintiff was unlikely to sustain any harm.
The defenses against defamation may be negated if there is proof the publication was actuated by malice.
Greatly restricting the right of corporations to sue for defamation (see e.g. Defamation Act 2005 (Vic), s 9). Corporations may, however, still sue for the tort of injurious falsehood, where the burden of proof is greater than in defamation, because the plaintiff must show that the defamation was made with malice and resulted in economic loss.
The 2006 reforms also established across all Australian states the availability of truth as an unqualified defense; previously a number of states only allowed a defense of truth with the condition that a public interest or benefit existed. The defendant however still needs to prove that the defamatory imputations are substantially true."
Censorship in Australia,"Racial Discrimination Act
Advertising bans
Commonwealth and State governments ban or restrict certain types of advertising in order to maintain the integrity of elections, personal injury law and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme."
Censorship in Australia,"Personal injury lawyers
Lawyers in most Australian states are censored in respect of public statements they are allowed to publish concerning personal injury compensation law. Non-lawyers are also prohibited from publishing statements on the subject in some states. The laws are described as a ban on advertising of personal injury compensation but go much further.
The censorship must be self-administered, and breaches render a lawyer liable to prosecution, disbarment and, potentially, even jail. These laws coincided with the Insurance Crisis, the Ipp report and Civil Liability laws.
In New South Wales all lawyer public statements concerning personal injury compensation are prohibited."
Censorship in Australia,"Queensland
In Queensland television and radio advertising is banned and lawyer statements concerning personal injury compensation law must be censored so as to contain only:"
Censorship in Australia,"The lawyer's name, contact details and area of speciality (print and other ""allowed publications"" only);
The operation of the law of negligence and a person's rights under that law (lawyers' websites only);
The lawyer's terms of service (lawyers' websites only).
The Queensland censorship provisions were originally intended to ban distasteful advertisements by some personal injury law firms that promoted ""cash for injuries"". The Queensland Attorney-General stated in his Second Reading speech when introducing the legislation in 2002 as follows:"
Censorship in Australia,"The bill also better regulates provocative advertising by lawyers in relation to personal injury services ... the sort of advertising currently broadcast on radio and television does not enhance clients' rights or portray the profession in a particularly positive light.
Section 4 (2) (f) of the Queensland Act refers to ""regulating inappropriate advertising...""
However the Queensland government has since given the censorship provisions the strictest possible interpretation and threatened hundreds of lawyers with prosecution.
One of the many outcomes that impact on freedom of expression and free speech is that concerning lawyers' web sites. A lawyer must not even list ""personal injury"" even merely as a link on a webpage that has no relation to the prohibited subject matter.
In practice, lawyers are prohibited from listing even on their website homepage some of the areas of law they practise in. Photos, images, slogans are prohibited. All references to personal injury compensation law must be censored out of website staff profiles containing anything more than the person's name, contact details and area of expertise.
Some other subject matter that must be censored out of web sites and other publications includes: winning verdicts and settlements; mention of the law firms reputation, expertise and history; testimonials; case histories; the standard of service and many other things that would allow consumers to differentiate among competitors.
The Queensland censorship provisions have not yet been judicially interpreted. It is unknown whether the ultra-strict interpretation contended for by the Queensland government will be upheld by a court."
Censorship in Australia,"New South Wales
In New South Wales, all statements by lawyers concerning personal injury compensation including on websites are banned and strict penalties apply. One lawyer has already been professionally punished and fined $20,000 for making a website statement.
The New South Wales version of the censorship law which is stricter than that of Queensland was considered by the High Court of Australia in 2005. The plaintiffs argued that the law was invalid because it infringed the implied constitutional freedom of political communication and secondly that it infringed Chapter III of the Constitution and the rule of law.
In a majority decision the court held that the New South Wales censorship law was valid. It did not accept that statements merely about personal injury compensation law were of a political nature. It implied however that any statements criticising the censorship itself and tort ""reform"" would be in the nature of political communication that was protected. The majority also ruled against the plaintiffs on the second argument (but the minority were strongly of the view) that the law unreasonably interfered with lawyers going about their constitutionally protected vocation.
On 20 June 2008, Justice Adams of the Supreme Court of NSW held that clause 34 of the Legal Profession Regulation 2005 which bans personal injury advertising in NSW by non-lawyers, was void because it was Ultra Vires the Legal Profession Act 2004."
Censorship in Australia,"Victoria
No censorship applies in Victoria."
Censorship in Australia,"Western Australia
The Western Australian censorship rules are similar to those in Queensland. However, television advertising is permitted by ACMA."
Censorship in Australia,"Consumer opposition
The Australian Lawyers Alliance opposes the censorship and believes that ""content-rich statements"" concerning the availability of all legal services are in the public interest.
Consumer groups (e.g. Tort Reform Institute, Insurance Reform) argue that any restriction on lawyer communication is adverse to the public interest. They argue that the public should be fully informed about their rights particularly under consumer protection laws that generate compensation payments, and that censorship that keeps the public under-informed cannot be justified. In their view, the protection of insurance company profits is not a sufficient ""public purpose"" to warrant the interference in personal freedoms by way of censorship. The ultimate aim of the government and insurers, according to such consumer groups, is to eliminate the expression ""personal injury compensation"" from the Australian vocabulary and to dissuade citizens from exercising compensation rights by making it ""distasteful"" to do so.
Exceptions to the censorship provision apply to:"
Censorship in Australia,"Insurance companies, who are permitted to advertise that personal injury claims can be made directly with them; or
Statements concerning the defence of personal injury claims as opposed to the pursuit of those claims (except in New South Wales)"
Censorship in Australia,"Internet censorship
Some activists consider Australia's laws on Internet censorship to be amongst the most restrictive in the western world. However, the restrictive nature of the laws has been combined with almost complete lack of interest in enforcement from the agencies responsible.
Some of the interesting exceptions include an attempt by then NSW Police Minister Michael Costa to shut down Melbourne Indymedia, a case in 2001 involving the US Secret Service that was eventually pleaded out, and an attempt by the FBI using the Australian Federal Police to censor a Victorian they alleged was posting threats to the US.
A collection of both federal and state laws apply, but the most important is the federal legislation which came into effect on 1 January 2000.
If a complaint is issued about material on the Internet, the ACMA is empowered to examine the material under the guidelines for film and video. If it is found that a) the material would be classified X18+, or b) the material would classified R18+ and the site does not have an adult verification system, or c) the material would be refused classification:"
Censorship in Australia,"If the site is hosted in Australia, the ACMA is empowered to issue a ""takedown notice"" under which the material must be removed from the site.
If the site is hosted outside Australia, the site is added to a list of banned sites.
This list of banned sites is then added to filtering software, which must be offered to all consumers by Internet Service Providers and the Australian Government.
On 31 December 2007 the Telecommunications Minister of the newly elected Labor government, Stephen Conroy, announced that Australia would introduce mandatory internet filtering. Once more the reason given is that mandatory filtering is required to ""provide greater protection to children from online pornography and violent websites"".
As of November 2008, the plan includes two blacklists, one of which will filter illegal content according to internet content laws as well as other ""unwanted"" content, and the other will also filter content unsuitable for children. Internet users will be able to opt out of the secondary blacklist for children, but will not be able to opt out of the primary filter, sparking free speech concerns. No statement has been made about what content will be considered ""illegal"", or what Stephen Conroy means by ""unwanted"".
Slated for blocking, should the ""Clean Feed"" Act be passed by Australia's Federal Parliament, is the website of Dr Philip Nitschke's banned book, The Peaceful Pill Handbook. The inclusion of Nitschke's euthanasia book's website came to light after the Government's list of would-be banned websites was leaked to wikileaks.org. The Peaceful Pill Handbook was listed on the leaked internet website blacklist, wedged in alphabetical order between the porn sites panty-ass.com and pickyourperversion.com.
This produced a huge backlash from the community, including the Get Up advertisement Censordyne. Conroy eventually abandoned the proposal, saying that the relevant authority was already invested in ACMA, which didn't take any action in accordance.
Since the election of the Coalition government in 2013, there has been one act passed, that allows the blocking of websites that host pirated content, if the content provider has contacted the Australian government about it and they've gone through the procedures set out through the act, then the website will be blocked under s.115a of the Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Bill 2015.
There has been two applications to Section.115a, one by Foxtel and another by Village Roadshow, which would prohibit an Australian pirate site from functioning and block The Pirate Bay respectively. The Federal Court has recently ruled that ISP's must block a range of Torrent sites including The Pirate Bay using either DNS Hijacking, URL blocking or some other mutually agreed method by ISPs and rights holders.
There are some reports said Australia has also been collaborating with Chinese Great Firewall security officials and other officials from Cyberspace Administration of China in implementing its data retention and filtering infrastructure and possibly obtained surveillance technology from China.
On 20 March 2019 Australian telecom company Telstra denied access to millions of Australians to the websites 4chan, 8chan, Zero Hedge, Voat, Archive.today, and Liveleak as a reaction to the Christchurch mosque shootings."
Censorship in Australia,"Non-government forms of censorship
Universities
Concerns have been expressed by Freedom House and others about protections for freedom of speech and academic freedom at Australia's universities. In 2018, the Australian Government asked former Chief Justice Robert French to conduct an independent review of freedom of speech and academic freedom in Australian higher education. While French disagreed that there was a ""freedom of speech crisis"" on campuses, he nonetheless noted the risks to freedom posed by the various and vaguely-worded protections then in place. Concerns include the influence of the People's Republic of China on university administrations; 'deplatforming' of controversial speakers and viewpoints; and demands that academics refrain from contesting one another's conclusions."
Censorship in Australia,"Deplatforming
Many Australian university campuses have seen protests by students and faculty against unorthodox or controversial viewpoints. Several universities refused to host Copenhagen Consensus or Ramsay research centres following left-wing protests."
Censorship in Australia,"Internal criticism
Another threat is action by universities to silence internal criticism. In 2016, James Cook University sacked marine scientist Peter Ridd for publishing an article questioning the reproducibility of his colleagues' work on the Great Barrier Reef. The Federal Court later ruled the University had acted unlawfully, awarding Ridd more than $1 million in damages."
Censorship in Australia,"Advertising boycotts
Campaigners including the anonymous American group Sleeping Giants have attempted to force certain conservative and libertarian commentators off Australian radio and television by threatening to boycott broadcasters' advertisers. Targets of this approach have included both hosts, such as radio presenter Alan Jones and former Northern Territory Chief Minister Adam Giles, and guests, such as former senator David Leyonhjelm."
Censorship in Australia,"Advertising standards
Standards for commercial advertising in Australia are enforced via industry self-regulation."
Censorship in Australia,"See also
Laws governing public demonstrations in Australia
2024 Cumberland book ban"
Censorship in Australia,"References
Further reading
Patrick Mullins, The Trials of Portnoy: How Penguin Brought Down Australia’s Censorship System, Scribe, 2020."
Censorship in Australia,"External links
Office of Film and Literature Classification
Australia extending censorship to Mobile platforms Archived 12 February 2006 at the Wayback Machine
Amir Butler: Why I have changed my mind on anti-vilification laws (An article originally published in The Age newspaper)
Refused Classification – an online database of media either censored or banned in Australia
Internet Censorship in Australia  by Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA), a group that opposes government attempts to censor the Internet.
Libertus Australia, a website maintained by Irene Graham, the executive director of EFA.
Polyester books, stockists of banned and controversial material.
Chronology of censorship in Australia and New Zealand
Porn Banned from Mobile Phones 30 June 2005. The Age.
Intense Hammer Rage News Clippings that describe their legal troubles.
Banned Magazine the Online Journal of Censorship and Secrecy
Philip Nitschke, aka Dr. Death, talks about the banning of his euthanasia book, The Peaceful Pill Handbook
Media Censorship in Australia, Facebook news page."
Department of Home Affairs (Australia),"The Department of Home Affairs is the Australian Government interior ministry with responsibilities for national security, protective services, emergency management, border control, immigration, refugees, citizenship, transport security and multicultural affairs. The Home Affairs portfolio reports to the Minister for Home Affairs, currently held by Tony Burke, and was led by the Secretary of the Department of Home Affairs, Mike Pezzullo, until his sacking in November 2023 for breaching the code of conduct. 
The Department was officially established on 20 December 2017, building on the former Department of Immigration and Border Protection and bringing policy responsibilities and agencies from the Attorney-General's Department, Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, and Department of Social Services. The Department of Home Affairs was seen at the time as the Australian version of the United Kingdom's Home Office or the United States Department of Homeland Security.
In 2022, the Australian Federal Police, Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission and Australian Transaction and Analysis Center were de-merged from the department and moved to the Attorney General portfolio, and in July 2024 the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation was also moved to the Attorney General portfolio."
Department of Home Affairs (Australia),"History
One of the seven inaugural Australian Public Service departments at the federation of Australia was the Department of Home Affairs (1901–16) with wide-ranging responsibilities for public works, elections, census, the public service, pensions, and inter-state relations. This department was followed by the Department of Home and Territories (1916–1928), the Department of Home Affairs (1928–32), the Department of the Interior (1932–39), the Department of the Interior (1939–72), the Department of Home Affairs (1977–80), and the Department of Home Affairs and Environment (1980–84). Prior to the formation of the current Department of Home Affairs, the Attorney-General's Department had responsibility for national security, law enforcement, emergency management as well as border protection alongside the various forms of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship.
The proposed establishment of the Department of Home Affairs was announced by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on 18 July 2017 to be headed by Immigration Minister Peter Dutton as the designated Minister for Home Affairs to bring together all national security, border control and law enforcement agencies of the government. The Department was officially stood up on the 20 December 2017 through an Administrative Arrangements Order."
Department of Home Affairs (Australia),"Ministers
The following are the ministers of the Home Affairs portfolio:"
Department of Home Affairs (Australia),"Minister for Home Affairs, Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs and Minister for Cyber Security: Tony Burke
Minister for Emergency Management: Jenny McAllister"
Department of Home Affairs (Australia),"Portfolio responsibilities
The Department is responsible for the following functions:"
Department of Home Affairs (Australia),"Immigration and migration, including
border security
entry, stay and departure arrangements for non-citizens
customs and border control other than quarantine and inspection
Citizenship
Ethnic affairs
National security policy and operations
Multicultural affairs
Transport Security
Cyber policy coordination
Protective security policy
Protective Services at Commonwealth establishments and diplomatic and consular premises in Australia
Critical infrastructure protection co-ordination
Commonwealth emergency management
Arrangements for the settlement of migrants and humanitarian entrants
Adult migrant education
Natural disaster relief, recovery and mitigation policy and financial assistance including payments to the States and Territories and the Australian Government Disaster Recovery Payment"
Department of Home Affairs (Australia),"Departmental functions
Counter-Terrorism
The Commonwealth Counter-Terrorism Coordinator and the Centre for Counter-Terrorism Coordination within the Department of Home Affairs (formerly within the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet) provides strategic advice and support to the Minister for Home Affairs and the Prime Minister on all aspects of counterterrorism and countering violent extremism policy and co-ordination across government. The Office was created after recommendations from the Review of Australia's Counter-Terrorism Machinery in 2015 in response to the 2014 Sydney hostage crisis. The Commonwealth Counter-Terrorism Coordinator also serves as the Co-Chair and or Chair of the Australian and New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee and the Joint Counter-Terrorism Board, with the Centre for Counter-Terrorism Coordination providing secretariat support to the Australian Counter-Terrorism Centre and the Australian and New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee. Along with the Deputy Counter-Terrorism Coordinator, the Centre for Counter-Terrorism Coordination is also composed of the Counter-Terrorism Operational Coordination and Evaluation Branch, the Counter-Terrorism Strategic Coordination Branch, the Counter-Terrorism Capability Branch, and the Home Affairs Counter-Terrorism Policy Branch."
Department of Home Affairs (Australia),"Cyber Security
The inaugural National Cyber Security Coordinator was Air Marshal Darren Goldie from 3 July 2023 to 14 November 2023, Hamish Hansford (Deputy Secretary of Cyber and Infrastructure Security) acted in the position after Goldie was recalled to Defence. Lieutenant General Michelle McGuinness was appointed to the role from 26 February 2023. The  National Cyber Security Coordinator  and the Cyber Security Policy Division within the Department of Home Affairs (formerly within the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet) are responsible for cyber security policy and the implementation of the Australian Government Cyber Security Strategy. The National Cyber Coordinator also ensures effective partnerships between Commonwealth, state and territory governments, the private sector, non-governmental organisations, the research community and international partners. The National Cyber Coordinator also works closely with the Australian Cyber Security Centre and the Australian Ambassador for Cyber Issues.
CERT Australia is the national computer emergency response team responsible for cybersecurity responses and providing cyber security advice and support to critical infrastructure and other systems of national interest. CERT Australia works closely with other Australian Government agencies, international CERTs, and the private sector. It is also a key element in the Australian Cyber Security Centre, sharing information and working closely with ASIO, the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Signals Directorate, the Defence Intelligence Organisation and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission."
Department of Home Affairs (Australia),"Aviation and Maritime Security
The Aviation and Maritime Security Division (formerly the Office of Transport Security within the Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development) is led by the Executive Director of Transport Security and is responsible for aviation security, air cargo security, maritime security, and various transport security operations."
Department of Home Affairs (Australia),"Transnational Serious and Organised Crime
The Commonwealth Transnational Serious and Organised Crime Coordinator is responsible for policy development and strategic coordination of the disruption of transnational serious organised crime across the Australian Government including the Australian Federal Police, Australian Border Force, Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre, and state and territory law enforcement agencies. The Coordinator is held concurrently by an Australian Federal Police Deputy Commissioner."
Department of Home Affairs (Australia),"Counter Child Exploitation
The Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation is a whole-of-government initiative within the Australian Federal Police responsible to the Commonwealth Transnational Serious and Organised Crime Coordinator to investigate, disrupt and prosecute child exploitation and online child abuse crimes."
Department of Home Affairs (Australia),"Counter Foreign Interference
The National Counter Foreign Interference Coordinator is responsible for policy development and strategic coordination of countering foreign interference and counter-espionage to protect the integrity of Australian national security and interests. The Coordinator is responsible for interagency and intergovernmental strategy and coordination to counter coercive, clandestine or deceptive activities undertaken on behalf of foreign powers. Accordingly, the Coordinator acts as an intergovernmental focal point for the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Attorney-General's Department, and elements of the Department of Defence such as the Defence Security and Vetting Service and Australian Defence Force Investigative Service."
Department of Home Affairs (Australia),"Critical Infrastructure
The Australian Government Critical Infrastructure Centre (CIC) is responsible for whole-of-government coordination of critical infrastructure protection and national security risk assessments and advice. It was established on 23 January 2017 originally within the Attorney-General's Department and brings together expertise and capability from across the Australian Government and functions in close consultation states and territory governments, regulators, and the private sector. The Centre also supports the Foreign Investment Review Board and brings together staff from across governmental authorities including from the Australian Treasury, the Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development, and the Department of the Environment and Energy."
Department of Home Affairs (Australia),"Crisis Coordination
The Australian Government Crisis Coordination Centre (CCC) is an all-hazards coordination facility, which operates on a 24/7 basis, and supports the Australian Government Crisis Committee (AGCC) and the National Crisis Committee (NCC). The CCC provides whole-of-government all-hazards monitoring and situational awareness for domestic and international events and coordinates Australian Government responses to major domestic incidents. The Crisis Coordination Centre is managed by the Crisis Management Branch of Emergency Management Australia which was within the Attorney-General's Department before its transfer."
Department of Home Affairs (Australia),See also
Department of Home Affairs (Australia),"Department of Home Affairs (1901–16)
Department of Home and Territories (1916–1928)
Department of Home Affairs (1928–32)
Department of the Interior (1932–39)
Department of the Interior (1939–72)
Department of Home Affairs (1977–80)
Department of Home Affairs and Environment (1980–84)"
Department of Home Affairs (Australia),"
== References =="
Military history of Australia during the War in Afghanistan,"The Australian contribution to the war in Afghanistan has been known as Operation Slipper (2001–2014) and Operation Highroad (2015–2021).
Australian Defence Force (ADF) operations and the size of the forces deployed have varied and ADF involvement has included two major areas of activity: Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf. These activities have seen the deployment of naval, air and land forces that have taken part in combat and combat support operations as part of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).
In mid-2014, the naval and logistic support operations in the Persian Gulf were re-designated as Operation Manitou and Operation Accordion respectively."
Military history of Australia during the War in Afghanistan,"Operation Slipper
Operation Slipper began in late 2001 and ended on 31 December 2014."
Military history of Australia during the War in Afghanistan,"First phase
During the first phase of Operation Slipper, the Australian Defence Force (ADF) commitment to Afghanistan consisted of a Special Forces Task Group and two Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) Boeing 707 air-to-air refuelling aircraft from No. 33 Squadron.  These aircraft and associated support personnel operated from Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan and provided support to coalition aircraft operating in Afghan airspace. Two RAAF AP-3C Orion aircraft flew maritime patrol missions in support of maritime interdiction operations in the Persian Gulf. These aircraft were temporarily retasked to Operations Falconer and Catalyst in 2003.
RAAF C-130 Hercules transport aircraft were also involved in providing logistic support for deployed forces.  The Special Forces were involved with the establishment of the US-led coalition's first Forward Operating Base (Camp Rhino) southwest of Kandahar in November 2001, followed by the capture of Kandahar International Airport in December 2001. The initial ADF commitment in Afghanistan concluded in December 2002 when the Special Air Service Task Group was withdrawn. Following this date until 2005 Australia's total contribution to efforts in Afghanistan were two officers attached to the United Nations and the Coalition land mine clearing force.
All three squadrons of the Australian Special Air Service Regiment (SASR) were deployed to Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002. The dates of these deployments were:"
Military history of Australia during the War in Afghanistan,"1 Squadron Group, SASR: (October 2001 – April 2002)
3 Squadron Group, SASR: (April 2002 – August 2002)
2 Squadron Group, SASR: (August 2002 – November 2002)"
Military history of Australia during the War in Afghanistan,"Second phase
An Australian Special Forces Task Group was re-deployed to Afghanistan in August or September 2005. This Task Group consisted of elements from the SASR, 4th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (Commando), the Incident Response Regiment and logistic support personnel. As well as heavily modified Land Rovers, the Special Forces Task Group was also equipped with some Bushmaster infantry mobility vehicles. A detachment of two CH-47 Chinook helicopters from the 5th Aviation Regiment was deployed to Afghanistan in March 2006 to support the Special Forces Task Group. The Australian Special Forces Task Group was withdrawn from Afghanistan in September 2006 and the helicopter detachment returned to Australia in April 2007."
Military history of Australia during the War in Afghanistan,"Third phase
A Reconstruction Taskforce-based around the 1st Combat Engineer Regiment with protective elements from the 5th/7th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, 6th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment and 2nd Cavalry Regiment began arriving in Uruzgan Province in southern Afghanistan in early September 2006. The Australian Reconstruction Taskforce formed part of a Dutch-led Provincial Reconstruction Team, operating as part of the Dutch-led Task Force Uruzgan and based at Forward Operating Base Ripley, outside of Tarin Kowt.
A 300-strong Special Operations Task Group was deployed to support the Reconstruction Taskforce in April 2007, including a Commando company-group, elements of the SASR, and an integral combat service support team. In addition to radar crews, logistics and intelligence officers, and security personnel, this brought the number of Australian personnel in Afghanistan to 950 by mid-2007, with further small increases to 1,000 in mid-2008, 1,100 in early 2009 and 1,550 in mid-2009. These increases occurred in spite of opinion polls indicating that public support for the deployment was decreasing, with a poll released in September 2008 finding that a majority of those surveyed were opposed to Australia's continued military involvement in the country.
In early 2009, a number of Operational Mentoring and Liaison Teams (OMLTs) were embedded into the Afghan National Army battalions serving in the 4th (ANA) Brigade, 205th Hero Corps, in Uruzgan as part of the Australian mission to mentor and partner the ANA within the province. Consequently, the RTF was renamed the Mentoring and Reconstruction Task Force. On 16 January 2009, Trooper Mark Donaldson, a member of the SASR, was awarded Australia's highest gallantry medal, the Victoria Cross for Australia. Donaldson was awarded the medal for exposing himself to enemy fire to protect injured Australian troops and then rescuing an Afghan interpreter under heavy enemy fire during a contact on 2 September 2008.
A modest Australian force remained in Afghanistan over this period and was involved in counter-insurgency operations in Uruzgan province in conjunction with Dutch, US and other coalition forces. MRTF was again renamed to the Mentoring Task Force in early 2010. Based around a combined arms battalion-sized battle group, it consisted of motorised infantry and cavalry force elements supported by engineers, as well as coalition enablers including artillery and aviation assets. The Rotary Wing Group flying CH-47D Chinooks, the Force Logistics Asset and an RAAF air surveillance radar unit were also based in Kandahar. A further 800 Australian logistic personnel were also based outside of Afghanistan, in locations in the Middle East. Meanwhile, detachments of maritime patrol and transport aircraft continued to support operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, based out of Al Minhad Air Base in the United Arab Emirates."
Military history of Australia during the War in Afghanistan,"Order of battle
Over the course of the operation, as the size of Australia's contribution has fluctuated and the scope of operations undertaken has evolved, the number and type of units deployed has also changed. A snapshot of the order of battle from March 2011, when approximately 1,550 Australians were deployed to Afghanistan, is as follows:"
Military history of Australia during the War in Afghanistan,"National Command Element
Mentoring Task Force 2 (MTF-2)
Headquarters, 5th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (5 RAR)
4 x Combat Teams including infantry, cavalry, engineers and offensive support
5 x Operational Mentoring and Liaison Teams
Force Communications Unit IV (1st Combat Signal Regiment)
Logistics and support units
Detachment, 20th Surveillance and Target Acquisition Regiment, Royal Australian Artillery (operates ScanEagle UAVs)
Special Operations Task Group
Elements of the SASR, 2nd Commando Regiment, Reserve 1 Commando Regiment and Special Operations Engineer Regiment
Rotary Wing Group (including two CH-47D Chinooks helicopters).
Detachment, 1st Regiment, Royal Australian Artillery (16 gunners attached to the British Army)
RAAF Control and Reporting Centre (Kandahar International Airport)
Two AP-3C Orion maritime patrol aircraft and three C-130 Hercules transports
Personnel embedded with various coalition units
Force Level Logistic Asset (Kandahar International Airport)"
Military history of Australia during the War in Afghanistan,"Departure of Australian combat forces
At the end of October 2013, Prime Minister Tony Abbott traveled to Afghanistan with Opposition Leader Bill Shorten for a special ceremony at the Australian base in Tarin Kowt in Uruzgan. He told a gathering of troops and Afghan leaders that ""Australia's longest war is ending. Not with victory, not with defeat, but with, we hope, an Afghanistan that is better for our presence here."" Afghan forces were scheduled to take over running of the camp in mid-December. The last combat troops were withdrawn on 15 December 2013; however, approximately 400 personnel remained in Afghanistan as trainers and advisers, and were stationed in Kandahar and Kabul.
On 1 July 2014, as part of the restructuring of Australian operations in the Middle East, Operation Slipper was split into three different operations: ongoing operations in Afghanistan as part of ISAF under Operation Slipper; maritime security operations in the Middle East and counter piracy in the Gulf of Aden under Operation Manitou; and support operations to Slipper and Manitou from a number of locations in the Gulf States, primarily the United Arab Emirates, under Operation Accordion. Approximately 400 personnel were deployed on Operation Slipper, another 550 as part of Accordion, and 250 on Manitou. Australian operations in Afghanistan were scheduled to continue until the ISAF mission concluded in December 2014, while its contribution to the NATO-led ""train, advise, assist"" mission post-2014 was still to be confirmed at that time. The final Heron UAV detachment left Afghanistan in December 2014.
Operation Slipper concluded on 31 December 2014, with Australia's ""train, advise and assist"" mission in Afghanistan as part of the NATO-led Resolute Support Mission being conducted under the code-name Operation Highroad after this date. Approximately 400 Australian personnel were deployed as part of the new mission, including personnel in mentoring and advisory roles, as well as medical personnel, force protection and logistic support. Over 26,000 Australian personnel have served in Afghanistan.
In June 2018, ABC News published photographs depicting Australian soldiers flying Nazi swastikas on their vehicles in Afghanistan. Their actions were subsequently denounced by then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull."
Military history of Australia during the War in Afghanistan,"War crimes inquiry
In May 2016 the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force, Major General Paul Brereton, launched an inquiry into allegations that some Australian special forces personnel committed war crimes in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016. In February 2020 it was announced that 55 incidents were being investigated and, in November 2020, the inspector-general concluded that 36 incidents ought to be referred to the Australian Federal Police for criminal investigation and possible prosecution by the Department of Home Affairs' Office of the Special Investigator and Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions.
According to Brereton's report, there is credible information that 25 Australian Defence Force personnel were involved in serious crimes in Afghanistan. Of the soldiers, 19 were directly implicated in the murder of 39 prisoners and civilians, and cruel treatment of 2 others, while the other military personnel were believed to be accessories to the incidents. Brereton noted that some of the soldiers were ordered by their patrol commanders to kill prisoners. Some soldiers are also believed to have planted evidence next to civilian corpses to imply that the civilians were armed, and thus could be classified as legitimate targets in post-incident investigations. The report describes a 2012 incident as having been ""possibly the most disgraceful episode in Australia's military history"", but the specifics were redacted in the version released to the public.
Upon the report's release, Chief of the Australian Defence Force, General Angus Campbell, apologised for ""any wrongdoing by Australian soldiers"". He announced that the 2nd Squadron of the Special Air Service Regiment (SASR) would be disbanded as a result of the investigation, citing a ""distorted culture"" that undermined the moral authority of the Australian Defence Force, through all three SASR squadrons were implicated in poor conduct.) According to one reporter's correspondence with a former patrol commander, ""EVERYONE KNEW [emphasis in the original]"" that war crimes had been committed, but when it was reported regiment leadership decided to handle the matter internally. General Campbell also explained that he and the Chief of Army, Lieutenant General Rick Burr, would take further action with respect to the commanders of units apparently involved in war crimes.
Journalist Mark Willacy estimates that prosecutions related to these findings may not be concluded until approximately the year 2030."
Military history of Australia during the War in Afghanistan,"Final withdrawal
A contingent of around 80 ADF personnel remained in Afghanistan as late as 2021 to train and advise Afghan forces. The Australian embassy in Kabul was closed on 28 May that year. The last ADF personnel and diplomats in Afghanistan departed on 18 June 2021. This formed part of the withdrawal of international forces from the country.
Following the fall of Kabul in August 2021, ADF personnel were used to evacuate Australians and Afghans who had assisted the Australian forces from Afghanistan. Three RAAF aircraft and 250 personnel were deployed from Australia to the Middle East as part of this effort. The first evacuation flight from Kabul took place on the night of 17/18 August. Prime Minister Scott Morrison stated that it would not be possible to evacuate all the Afghans who had assisted the Australian forces due to the situation in the country."
Military history of Australia during the War in Afghanistan,"Persian Gulf
Since October 2001 the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) has maintained a continuous presence in and around Iraqi territorial waters as part of Operation Slipper and subsequent operations.  There were four major rotations of RAN ships to this area of operations between December 2001 and March 2003.  The primary focus of these rotations was to conduct Maritime Interception Operations as part of a US, Australian and British force enforcing United Nations Security Council resolutions against Iraq.  The first rotation consisted of Her Majesty's Australian Ships (HMAS) Sydney, Adelaide and Kanimbla.  These ships were followed in February 2002 by HMA Ships Canberra, Newcastle and Manoora and again in July 2002 by HMAS Arunta and Melbourne.
HMAS Kanimbla departed from Sydney, Australia on 20 January 2003 again bound for the Persian Gulf under the mission objectives of Operation Bastille. On arriving in Bahrain on 16 February she reverted to the original mission objects of Operation Slipper (that of enforcing UN sanctions against Iraq). On 20 March 2003, HMA Ships Kanimbla, Anzac and Darwin participated in the combat phase of the 2003 Iraq War, codenamed Operation Falconer; in April Kanimbla supported Operation Baghdad Assist, delivering medical supplies that were transported to Baghdad. During these operations the Australian ships pioneered a number of techniques that increased the effectiveness of Maritime Interception Force operations leading to them intercepting and boarding about 1,700 vessels in this period. Four Australian naval officers commanded the multinational force at various times during the course of the operation. Detachments from the Army's 16th Air Defence Regiment provided point defence to the Kanimbla and Manoora during their deployments.
From 2009 Australian warships and aircraft in the Middle East have also been involved in counter-piracy operations and maritime interdiction off the Horn of Africa as part of Combined Task Force 151."
Military history of Australia during the War in Afghanistan,"Diego Garcia
A detachment of four Australian F/A-18 Hornet fighter aircraft provided air defence for the US military base on the island of Diego Garcia, British Indian Ocean Territory during the campaign against the Taliban. The initial detachment was provided by No. 77 Squadron RAAF between December 2001 and 10 February 2002. This was replaced by a detachment from No. 3 Squadron RAAF which was deployed between 10 February 2002 and 20 May 2002. No further Australian units were deployed to Diego Garcia."
Military history of Australia during the War in Afghanistan,"Casualties
Operation Slipper is notable for the first Australian combat deaths since the Vietnam War, and to date all casualties have occurred during operations in Afghanistan. 41 Australian soldiers have been killed and 261 wounded, the majority since October 2007. Another Australian was killed while serving with the British Army."
Military history of Australia during the War in Afghanistan,"Timeline
Cost
The cost of operations in Afghanistan has represented the largest operational expenditure by the ADF in most financial years since 2001/02. The yearly expenditure on Afghanistan by the ADF includes the figures below."
Military history of Australia during the War in Afghanistan,"^1  While Operation Slipper ceased on 31 December 2014, funds have been allocated to repair equipment returned to Australia and to contribute to the sustainment of the Afghan National Security Forces."
Military history of Australia during the War in Afghanistan,"See also
Australian Army
Civilian casualties of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan
Coalition casualties in Afghanistan
International public opinion on the war in Afghanistan
Taliban insurgency
Afghan Files (Australia)
Defence Honours and Awards scandal"
Military history of Australia during the War in Afghanistan,"Notes
References
Australian Department of Defence Operation Slipper
Callinan, Rory (6 June 2005). ""In the Valley of Death"". Time. Archived from the original on 26 October 2007. Retrieved 21 September 2008.
Connery, David; Cran, David; Evered, David (2012). Conducting Counterinsurgency – Reconstruction Task Force 4 in Afghanistan. Newport, New South Wales: Big Sky Publishing. ISBN 9781921941771.
Dennis, Peter; et al. (2008). The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History (Second ed.). Melbourne: Oxford University Press Australia & New Zealand. ISBN 978-0-19-551784-2.
Luck, Darryl. ""3 Squadron's involvement in Operation Enduring Freedom and the War Against Terrorism"". 3 Squadron Association official website. Archived from the original on 20 August 2008. Retrieved 21 September 2008.
Neville, Leigh (2008). Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan. Botley: Osprey. ISBN 978-1-84603-310-0."
Military history of Australia during the War in Afghanistan,"Further reading
Australian Army (2012). War in the Valleys - 7th Battalion Battle Group (MRTF-1) Afghanistan October 2008 to June 2009. Wilsonton: Mesh Publishing. ISBN 9780646564111. Archived from the original on 8 February 2015. Retrieved 8 February 2015.
Australian Defence Force (2008). Rebuilding Afghanistan - The Story of Australia's 2nd Reconstruction Task Force. Salisbury, Queensland: Boolarong Press. ISBN 9781921054778. Archived from the original on 8 February 2015. Retrieved 8 February 2015.
Blaxland, John (2014). The Australian Army from Whitlam to Howard. Port Melbourne, Victoria: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-04365-7.
Connolly, Colonel Peter J. (Winter 2011). ""Counterinsurgency in Uruzgan 2009"" (PDF). Australian Army Journal. VIII (2): 9–34. Retrieved 31 December 2011.
Crawley, Rys (2019). ""Afghanistan Lessons: Part II. Australia's Lessons"" (PDF). The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters. 49 (4): 49–64. doi:10.55540/0031-1723.3119. S2CID 226740924.
Department of Defence (2012). Mentoring Task Force 3: 25 June 2011 to 24 Jan 2012. Fremantle, Western Australia: Fontaine Press.
Lee, Sandra (2006). 18 Hours:The true story of an SAS war hero. Sydney: Harper Collins. ISBN 978-0-7322-8246-2.
MRTF-2 (2010). Mentoring and Reconstruction Task Force 2 - June 2009 to February 2010. MRTF-2. OCLC 671456369.{{cite book}}:  CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
Mentoring Task Force Four Afghanistan 2012. 2013.
McPhedran, Ian; Ramage, Gary (2014). Afghanistan: Australia's War. South Sydney, New South Wales: Harper Collins Publishers. ISBN 9780732299132."
Military history of Australia during the War in Afghanistan,External links
Military history of Australia during the War in Afghanistan,"""Australian Government Fact Sheets on Afghanistan"".
Australia's military involvement in Afghanistan since 2001: a chronology – Australian Parliamentary Library
Australian War Memorial: Afghanistan, 2001–present"
Taxation in Australia,"Income taxes are the most significant form of taxation in Australia, and collected by the federal government through the Australian Taxation Office. Australian GST revenue is collected by the Federal government, and then paid to the states under a distribution formula determined by the Commonwealth Grants Commission.
Australians pay tax for the provision of healthcare, education, defense, roads and railways and for payments to welfare, disaster relief and pensions."
Taxation in Australia,"Definition
The ""classic definition"" of a tax used by the High Court derived from Matthews v Chicory Marketing Board (Vic) (1938), where Chief Justice John Latham stated that a tax was ""a compulsory exaction of money by a public authority for public purposes, enforceable by law, and is not a payment for services rendered"". In a series of judgments under the Mason court – including Air Caledonie International v Commonwealth (1988), Northern Suburbs General Cemetery Reserve Trust v Commonwealth (1993), and Australian Tape Manufacturers Association Ltd v Commonwealth (1993) – the court broadened the Matthews definition to include amounts not payable to public authorities, such as non-government collection agencies."
Taxation in Australia,"History
When the first Governor, Governor Phillip, arrived in New South Wales in 1788, he had a Royal Instruction that gave him power to impose taxation if the colony needed it. The first taxes in Australia were raised to help pay for the completion of Sydney's first jail and provide for the orphans of the colony. Import duties were put on spirits, wine and beer and later on luxury goods.
After 1824 the Government of New South Wales raised extra revenue from customs and excise duties. These were the most important sources of revenue for the colony throughout the 19th century. Taxes were raised on spirits, beer, tobacco, cigars and cigarettes. These taxes would vary between each of the Australian colonies, and this state of affairs remained in place after the colonies achieved statehood.
Thomas de la Condamine was appointed as the first Collector of the Internal Revenue on 7 April 1827 with the actual office of the Collector of the Internal Revenue established on 1 May 1827 by Governor Ralph Darling. When de la Condamine's appointment was not confirmed by the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies William Huskisson, the duties fell to James Busby who held the position until December 1835 when the position was filled by William McPhereson. The Collector of the Internal Revenue collected all revenue, such as moneys received from the sale or rental of land except that from customs duties and court fees. The Internal Revenue Office was abolished on 4 January 1837 with its business becoming the responsibility of the Colonial Treasurer.
Colonial governments also raised money from fees on wills and stamp duty, which is a tax imposed on certain kinds of documents. In 1880, the Colony of Tasmania imposed a tax on earnings received from the profits of public companies.
Income taxes were introduced in the late 19th century in a few of the colonies before Federation. In 1884, a general tax on income was introduced in South Australia, and in 1895 income tax was introduced in New South Wales at the rate of six pence in the pound, or 2.5%. Federal income tax was first introduced in 1915, in order to help fund Australia's war effort in the First World War. Between 1915 and 1942, income taxes were levied at both the state and federal level.
The Taxation Administration Act 1953 was assented to on 4 March 1953.
In 1972, the government of William McMahon appointed the NSW Supreme Court judge Kenneth Asprey to conduct a full and wide-ranging review of the tax system. Although controversial when completed for the Whitlam Government in 1975, the Asprey report on taxation has acted ""as a guide and inspiration to governments and their advisers for the following 25 years."" The main recommendations of the report have all been implemented and are today part of Commonwealth taxation in Australia.
On 20 September 1985, Capital gains tax was introduced. The GST replaced the older wholesale sales tax in 2000. In July 2001, the Financial Institutions Duty was abolished. Between 2002 and 2005, Bank Account Debits Tax was abolished.
On 1 July 2012 the Federal government introduced a Carbon price, requiring large emitters of carbon dioxide to purchase permits, the government also introduced a Minerals Resource Rent Tax, originally called a resources 'super profits' tax in the Henry Tax Report. The revenue from the carbon pricing regime was used to reduce income tax by increasing the tax-free threshold and increase pensions and welfare payments, as well as introducing compensation for some affected industries. The Carbon Tax and associated Resources Rent tax were repealed in 2014.
The Government has brought back a duty on financial institutions in the form of a 'major bank levy' on the five largest banks in Australia."
Taxation in Australia,"Forms of taxes and excises, both Federal and State
Personal income taxes
Income taxes on individuals are imposed at the federal level. This is the most significant source of revenue in Australia. State governments have not imposed income taxes since World War II.  Personal income taxes in Australia are imposed on the personal income of each person on a progressive basis, with higher rates applying to higher income levels. Unlike some other countries, personal income tax in Australia is imposed on an individual and not on a family unit.
Individuals are also taxed on their share of any partnership or trust profits to which they are entitled for the financial year. A tax file number is a personal reference number required to pay tax in Australia. TFNs are used for identification and record keeping purposes. A tax return is due once per financial year."
Taxation in Australia,"Capital gains tax
Capital Gains Tax (CGT) in the context of the Australian taxation system applies to the capital gain made on disposal of any asset, except for specific exemptions. The most significant exemption is the family home. Rollover provisions apply to some disposals, one of the most significant is transfers to beneficiaries on death, so that the CGT is not a quasi death duty.
CGT operates by having net gains treated as taxable income in the tax year an asset is sold or otherwise disposed of. If an asset is held for at least 1 year then any gain is first discounted by 50% for individual taxpayers, or by 331⁄3% for superannuation funds. Net capital losses in a tax year may be carried forward and offset against future capital gains.  However, capital losses cannot be offset against income.
Personal use assets and collectables are treated as separate categories and losses on those are quarantined so they can only be applied against gains in the same category, not other gains. This works to stop taxpayers subsidising hobbies from their investment earnings."
Taxation in Australia,"Corporate taxes
A company tax is paid by companies and corporations on its net profit, but the company’s loss is carried forward to the next financial year. Unlike personal income taxes which use a progressive scale, company tax is calculated at a flat rate of 30% (25% for small businesses, which are defined below). Corporate tax is paid on the corporation’s profit at the corporate rate and is generally available for distribution, in addition to any retained earnings it may have carried forward, to shareholders as dividends.
A tax credit (called a franking credit) is available to resident shareholders who receive the dividends to reflect the tax paid by the corporation (a process known as dividend imputation). A withholding tax applies on unfranked dividends paid to non-resident shareholders.
From 2015/16, designated ""small business entities"" with an aggregated annual turnover threshold of less than $2 million were eligible for a lower tax rate of 28.5%. Since 1 July 2016, small business entities with aggregated annual turnover of less than $10 million have had a reduced company tax rate of 27.5%. From 2017/18, corporate entities eligible for the lower tax rate have been known as ""base rate entities"". The small business threshold has remained at $10 million since 2017/18; but the base rate entity threshold (the aggregated annual turnover threshold under which entities will be eligible to pay a lower tax rate) has continued to rise until the base rate entities have an annual turnover of $50 million giving a tax rate of 25% to the entities below this threshold."
Taxation in Australia,"Trustee liability taxes
Where all or part of the net trust income is distributed to either non-residents or minors, the trustee of that trust is assessed on that share on behalf of the beneficiary. In this case, the beneficiaries must declare that share of net trust income on their individual income tax returns, and also claim a credit for the amount of tax the trustee paid on their behalf.
Where the trust accumulates net trust income, the trustee is assessed on that accumulated income at the highest individual marginal rate.
In both cases the trustee will be issued a notice of assessment subsequent to lodging the trust tax return."
Taxation in Australia,"Goods and Services taxes
A goods and services tax (GST) is a value added tax levied by the federal government at 10% on the supply of most goods and services by entities registered for the tax. The GST was introduced in Australia on 1 July 2000 by the then Howard Liberal government. A number of supplies are GST-free (e.g., many basic foodstuffs, medical and educational services, exports), input-taxed (residential accommodation, financial services, etc.), exempt (Government charges) or outside the scope of GST.
The revenue from this tax is distributed to the States.
State governments do not levy any sales taxes though they do impose stamp duties on a range of transactions.
In summary, the GST rate of 10% is charged on most goods and services consumed in Australia. A business which is registered for GST would include the GST in the sale prices it charges. However, a business can claim a credit for the GST paid on business expenses and other inputs (called a GST credit). The business would pay to the Tax Office the difference between GST charged on sales and GST credits.
Two types of sales are treated differently:"
Taxation in Australia,"Suppliers of GST-free goods and services will not have to pay GST when they make a sale but they will be entitled to GST credits.
Suppliers of input taxed goods and services do not have to charge GST on sales but they will not be entitled to claim GST credits from their purchases of inputs."
Taxation in Australia,"Property taxes
Local governments are typically funded largely by taxes on land value (council rates) on residential, industrial and commercial properties. In addition, some State governments levy tax on land values for investors and primary residences of high value. The State governments also levy stamp duties on transfers of land and other similar transactions.
Fire Service Levies are also commonly applied to domestic house insurance and business insurance contracts. These levies are required under State Government law to assist in funding the fire services in each State."
Taxation in Australia,"Departure tax
The Passenger Movement Charge (PMC) is a fee levied by the Australian government on all passengers departing on international flights or maritime transport. The PMC replaced the departure tax in 1995 and was initially described as a charge to partially offset the cost to government of the provision of passenger facilitation at airports, principally customs, immigration and quarantine functions. It is classified by the International Air Transport Association as a departure tax, rather than an airport charge, as its revenue does not directly contribute to passenger processing at airports or sea ports. Since 2017, the PMC has been a flat rate of A$60 per passenger over 12 years of age, with a few limited exemptions."
Taxation in Australia,"Excise taxes
The Federal Government imposes excise taxes on goods such as cigarettes, petrol, and alcohol.  The rates imposed may change in February and August each year in response to changes in the consumer price index.  Australians pay some of the highest tobacco taxes in the world. National tobacco-specific taxes already make up more than 65% of the retail price of a cigarette in Australia.  The aim is to reduce the number of daily smokers to below 5% by 2030."
Taxation in Australia,"Fuel taxes in Australia
The excise tax on commonly used fuels in Australia from 5 February 2024 are as follows:"
Taxation in Australia,"A$0.496 per litre on Unleaded Petrol fuel (Petrol used in aviation is excised at a different rate)
A$0.496 per litre on Diesel fuel
A$0.162 per litre on Liquified petroleum gas used as fuel (Autogas or LPG as it is commonly known in Australia)
A$0.163 per litre on Ethanol fuel (not including blended fuels)
A$0.132 per litre on Biodiesel (not including blended fuels)
Notes: "
Taxation in Australia,"Petrol when used for aviation is excised at $0.03556 per litre.
Diesel/Gasoline when blended with ethanol and/or biodiesel are excised at a rate calculated based on the excise of the constituent components."
Taxation in Australia,"Luxury Car Tax
Luxury Car Tax is payable by businesses which sell or import luxury cars, where the value of the car is above $80,567 or $91,387 for fuel-efficient cars (defined as a car with a fuel consumption of less than 7L per 100km)"
Taxation in Australia,"Customs duties
Customs duties are imposed on many imported goods, such as alcohol, tobacco products, perfume, and other items. Some of these goods can be purchased duty-free at duty-free shops."
Taxation in Australia,"Payroll taxes
Payroll taxes in Australia are levied by state governments on employers based on wages paid by them. Payroll tax rates vary between states. Typically, payroll tax applies to wages above the threshold, which also varies. Groups of companies may be taxed as a single entity where their operations are significantly integrated or related. This has significance in the grouping of payroll amounts in determining whether the threshold had been reached.
Current Payroll Tax Rates and Thresholds"
Taxation in Australia,"Queensland and the Northern Territory payroll tax rates are effective rates on payrolls above $5.5 million and $5.75 million respectively. All other jurisdictions levy marginal rates. Some companies may be eligible for deductions, concessions and exemptions."
Taxation in Australia,"Payroll taxes in Australian Capital Territory
From 1 July 2014:"
Taxation in Australia,"The rate of payroll tax is 6.85%.
The annual threshold is $1,850,000.
The monthly threshold is $154,166.66."
Taxation in Australia,"Payroll taxes in New South Wales
From 1 July 2013:"
Taxation in Australia,"The rate of payroll tax is 5.45%.
Medicare payments are up to 12%
Pension Fund contribution is 9.5%
The annual threshold is $750,000.
The monthly threshold is:
28 days = $57,534
30 days = $61,644
31 days = $63,699
Employers, or a group of related businesses, whose total Australian wages exceed the current NSW monthly threshold, are required to pay NSW payroll tax.
Each monthly payment or 'nil' remittance is due seven days after the end of each month or the next business day if the seventh day is a weekend (i.e. August payment is due by 7 September). The annual reconciliation and payment or 'nil' remittance is due by 21 July.
Effective July 2007 – In NSW, payroll tax is levied under the Payroll Tax Act 2007 and administered by the Taxation Administration Act 1996.
Prior to 1 July 2007 – In NSW, payroll tax was levied under the Payroll Tax Act 1971 and administered by the Taxation Administration Act 1996."
Taxation in Australia,"Payroll taxes in Northern Territory
From 1 July 2012:"
Taxation in Australia,"The rate of payroll tax is 5.50%.
The annual threshold is $1,500,000.
The monthly threshold is $125,000."
Taxation in Australia,"Payroll taxes in Queensland
Companies or groups of companies that pay $1,100,000 or more a year in Australian wages must pay payroll tax. There are deductions, concessions and exemptions available to those that are eligible.
From 1 July 2012:"
Taxation in Australia,"The rate of payroll tax is 4.75%.
The annual threshold is $1,100,000.
The monthly threshold is $91,666."
Taxation in Australia,"Payroll taxes in South Australia
A Payroll Tax liability arises in South Australia when an employer (or a Group of employers) has a wages bill in excess of $600,000 for services rendered by employees anywhere in Australia if any of those services are rendered or performed in South Australia.
From 1 July 2012:"
Taxation in Australia,"The rate of payroll tax is 4.95%.
The annual threshold is $600,000.
The monthly threshold is $50,000."
Taxation in Australia,"Payroll taxes in Tasmania
From 1 July 2013:"
Taxation in Australia,"The rate of payroll tax is 6.1%.
The annual threshold is $1,250,000.
The monthly threshold is:
28 days = $95,890
30 days = $102,740
31 days = $106,164"
Taxation in Australia,"Payroll taxes in Victoria
From 1 July 2021:"
Taxation in Australia,"The rate of payroll tax is 4.85% (1.2125% for regional employers)
The annual threshold is $700,000.
The monthly threshold is $58,333."
Taxation in Australia,"Payroll taxes in Western Australia
Payroll tax is a general purpose tax assessed on the wages paid by an employer in Western Australia. The tax is self-assessed in that the employer calculates the liability and then pays the appropriate amount to the Office of State Revenue, by way of a monthly, quarterly or annual return.
From 1 July 2014:"
Taxation in Australia,"The rate of payroll tax is 5.5%.
The annual threshold is $800,000.
The monthly threshold is $66,667.
On 8 December 2004 new legislation was passed making it mandatory for an employer that has, or is a member of a group that has, an expected payroll tax liability equal to or greater than $100,000 per annum, to lodge and pay their payroll tax return via Revenue Online (ROL). This amendment to the Payroll Tax Assessment Act 2002 was effective 1 July 2006."
Taxation in Australia,"Fringe Benefits Tax
Fringe Benefits Tax is the tax applied by the Australian Taxation Office to most, although not all, fringe benefits, which are generally non-cash benefits. Most fringe benefits are also reported on employee payment summaries for inclusion on personal income tax returns that must be lodged annually."
Taxation in Australia,"Inheritance tax
There is no inheritance tax in Australia, with all states in Australia abolishing what was known as death duties in 1979 following the lead of the Queensland Government led by Joh Bjelke-Petersen.
Private pensions (known as superannuation in Australia) may be taxed at up to three points, depending on the circumstances: at the point of contribution to a fund, on investment income and at the time benefits are received.
The compulsory nature of Australian Superannuation means that it is sometimes regarded as being similar to social security taxes levied in other nations. This is more frequently the case when comparisons are being made between the tax burden of respective nations."
Taxation in Australia,See also
Taxation in Australia,"Australia Tax
Negative gearing in Australia
Office of State Revenue (New South Wales)
Salary packaging
Tax Institute (Australia)
History:"
Taxation in Australia,"Bottom of the harbour tax avoidance
Cherry-picking tax avoidance
Darwin Rebellion
Tax law:"
Taxation in Australia,"Constitutional basis of taxation in Australia
Bank Notes Tax Act 1910
Related:"
Taxation in Australia,"Australian federal budget
List of countries by tax rates"
Taxation in Australia,"
== References =="
Assisted dying in Australia,"Laws regarding euthanasia or assisted suicide in Australia are matters for state and territory governments. As of June 2024 all states and the Australian Capital Territory have passed legislation creating an assisted suicide and euthanasia scheme for eligible individuals. These laws typically refer to the practices as ""voluntary assisted dying"".
Voluntary assisted dying schemes have been in effect in the following states; Victoria since 19 June 2019, Western Australia since 1 July 2021, Tasmania since 23 October 2022, Queensland since 1 January 2023, South Australia since 31 January 2023 and New South Wales since 28 November 2023. A voluntary assisted dying scheme will go into effect in the Australian Capital Territory on 3 November 2025.
Voluntary euthanasia and assisted dying is currently unlawful in the Northern Territory. Federal law prohibited the Northern Territory and Australian Capital Territory from legislating for the practice between 1997 and 2022. This federal ban was in response to the legalisation of euthanasia for a period between 1996 and 1997 in the Northern Territory.
Throughout Australia a patient can elect not to receive any treatment for a terminal illness and can also elect to have their life support turned off. Advance care planning is also available throughout Australia."
Assisted dying in Australia,"History
Although historically it was usually a crime to assist in euthanasia and suicide, prosecutions were rare. In 2010, the New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeal quashed a manslaughter conviction of a Sydney woman who had previously been found guilty of killing her partner of 18 years with a euthanasia drug. In 2002, relatives and friends who provided moral support to an elderly woman who committed suicide were extensively investigated by police, but no charges were laid. 
In Tasmania in 2005 a nurse was convicted of assisting in the death of her elderly father, who had terminal cancer, and trying to kill her mother, who was in the early stages of dementia. She was sentenced to two and a half years in jail but the judge later suspended the conviction because he believed the community did not want the woman jailed. This sparked debate about decriminalising euthanasia.
In 2009 Shirley Justins and Caren Jennings, were found guilty of manslaughter and accessory to manslaughter respectively for providing Nembutal to former pilot Graeme Wylie in 2006. Justins stated that Wylie wanted to ""die with dignity"". The prosecution argued that Graeme Wylie did not have the mental capacity to make the crucial decision to end his life, classing it as involuntary euthanasia.
Exit International made TV ads arguing for voluntary euthanasia, which were banned just before they were scheduled to broadcast in September 2010. The following year the Supreme Court of New South Wales gave a two-year suspended sentence to a 66-year-old man who had facilitated the death of his long-term 78-year-old partner by helping her overdose on drugs and suffocating her. The deceased suffered from severe pain arising from a spinal condition. Furthermore, the deceased had expressed a wish to die in a suicide note written prior to her death. The court convicted the man of manslaughter. The court accounted for the accused's substantial impairment at the time the act was committed as well the fact that he voluntarily revealed his involvement in the commission of the offence.
As of November 2014, 29 bills had been presented in Australian parliaments that sought to legalise access to voluntary euthanasia or physician-assisted dying.
An omission to provide life-sustaining medical treatment is lawful in Australia, unless the patient is deemed mentally incapable of consent."
Assisted dying in Australia,"Federal law
As euthanasia is not a legislative power granted to the Federal Parliament under Section 51 of the Constitution of Australia, federal law cannot explicitly legalise or criminalise the practice. The subject is a matter for state parliaments."
Assisted dying in Australia,"Euthanasia Laws Act 1997
Despite the power to legislate for euthanasia being held by the states, under Section 122 of the Constitution of Australia the Federal Parliament has the power to override any law passed by a territory parliament. This occurred in 1997, when the Federal Parliament passed the Euthanasia Laws Act 1997, originally introduced as a private member's bill by Liberal MP Kevin Andrews. The legislation passed the Senate by 38 votes to 33 in March 1997, having previously passed the House of Representatives by 88 votes to 35 in December 1996. The law amended the Northern Territory (Self-Government) Act 1978 and Australian Capital Territory (Self-Government) Act 1988 to explicitly prevent the Northern Territory Parliament and Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly from legislating to allow euthanasia or assisted suicide. An identical ban was placed into the Norfolk Island Act 1979, which was later repealed as part of the abolition of self-government on Norfolk Island by the Abbott government in 2015. As well as removing the power of those territories to legalise euthanasia, the Act specifically repealed the provisions of the Rights of the Terminally Ill Act 1995 (NT), which had previously been passed by the Northern Territory Parliament and allowed euthanasia to occur in the territory in the intervening period."
Assisted dying in Australia,"Restoring Territory Rights (Assisted Suicide Legislation) Bill 2015
Over the following 20 years there were nine bills introduced to the parliament to repeal Andrews' legislation, though at no point did any repeal legislation come to a vote on the floor of either chamber of parliament. In 2018 the then Liberal Democratic Party (now called the Libertarian Party) Senator, David Leyonhjelm re-introduced a bill into the Senate to remove the federal ban on the ACT and Northern Territory legislating for euthanasia. Leyonhjelm's bill was given priority in the Senate after he secured the Turnbull government's agreement for a conscience vote in the Senate and possibly the House of Representatives (the question of the government permitting a vote in the House was unresolved), in exchange for his support to reinstate the Australian Building and Construction Commission. The Liberal/National government, opposition Labor Party and several minor party crossbenchers held a conscience vote on the legislation. Despite Leyonhjelm expressing optimism for the bill's prospects, it was defeated in the Senate by 36 votes to 34."
Assisted dying in Australia,"Restoring Territory Rights Act 2022
The Euthanasia Laws Act remained in effect, even as all six state parliaments passed their own versions of assisted dying legislation between 2017 and 2022. The former Morrison government rejected requests by the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and Northern Territory governments to repeal the law. The Albanese Government, elected in May 2022, endorsed a conscience vote on repeal legislation that was introduced by Labor MPs Luke Gosling and Alicia Payne on 1 August 2022. The bill, titled the Restoring Territory Rights Bill 2022, removed the sections of the federal self-government acts for the ACT and Northern Territory that prevented those legislatures from passing euthanasia laws. It did not restore the Northern Territory's euthanasia law that was nullified by the federal parliament in 1997. Debate of the bill was prioritised by the government, and was approved by 99 votes to 37 in the House of Representatives on 3 August 2022. The bill passed its second reading in the Senate on 24 November 2022 by 41 votes to 25. It passed its third reading in the Senate on 1 December 2022, with no division called. The legislation received royal assent on 13 December 2022 and took immediate effect."
Assisted dying in Australia,"Carriage services
The Howard government oversaw the passage of the Criminal Code Amendment (Suicide Related Material Offences) Act 2005, which passed the Federal Parliament in June 2005, and made it a crime to use a telephone, fax, email or internet carriage service to discuss the practicalities of suicide-related material. The law prompted the Victorian Health Minister to recommend doctors discuss voluntary assisted dying exclusively in person with their patients, so they would not run foul of the federal law. Western Australia's assisted dying law explicitly states that voluntary assisted dying is not suicide. 
The presence of the federal law and its relationship with state laws that created lawful assisted dying schemes resulted in a legal grey area over whether voluntary assisted dying, as authorised by a state/territory law, constitutes ‘suicide’ within the meaning of the carriage service offences contained in the Commonwealth Criminal Code. In 2023 a Melbourne GP pursued legal action in the Federal Court to clarify the definition of suicide in the federal criminal code and its applicability to state-based assisted dying legisaltion. In November 2023 the court ruled that the law made it illegal for telehealth consultations concerning assisted dying to be conducted. Justice Wendy Abraham found that the term suicide, as used in the criminal code, applies to the ending of a person’s life through voluntary assisted dying. The ruling prompted independent MP Kate Chaney to introduce a bill to federal parliament in February 2024, to amend the Code to make it clear that voluntary assisted dying services are not within the definition of suicide and therefore can be accessed via telehealth and carriage services according to state assisted dying laws."
Assisted dying in Australia,"State and territory laws
Summary of current laws
Past laws
Australian Capital Territory
Australian Capital Territory (ACT) governments had regularly advocated for the right to legalise euthanasia-related schemes between 1997 and 2022, when the federal ban was in practice. Shortly after the federal ban was repealed, the ACT government confirmed it would seek to introduce legislation into the ACT Legislative Assembly in 2023 to permit voluntary assisted dying. A formal consultation period was opened by the government in February 2023, which culminated in a report endorsing the establishment of a voluntary assisted dying scheme, published on 29 June 2023. On 31 October 2023, the Voluntary Assisted Dying Bill 2023 was introduced into the Legislative Assembly. Under the legislation, a person would be eligible for voluntary assited dying if they are aged over 18, seeking it voluntarily with decision-making capability, intolerably suffering an advanced-progressive condition expected to cause death, and lives local to the ACT for at least 12 months or with a significant Canberra connection. The bill was referred to a select committee for further consultation, which reported back on 29 February 2024. The committee recommended several alterations to the bill including clarifying terms such as ‘advanced’ and ‘last stages of life’. Liberals committee members Leanne Castley and Ed Cocks recommended that the bill not be passed, describing it as “the most ideological and extreme assisted dying legislation in the country”, while Greens member Andrew Braddock supported the bill and recommended it be expanded to include people with dementia who had lost individual decision-making capacity.
The legislation returned for debate in the Assembly and was passed by the chamber on 5 June 2024, with 20 votes in favour and five against. Under the finalised legislation, people will become eligible to begin the process of accessing the scheme if they are at least 18 years old and seeking voluntary assisted dying voluntarily with decision-making capability. Further, they will have to show that they are intolerably suffering an advanced, progressive condition expected to cause death and that they have been local to the ACT for at least 12 months, or have a significant Canberra connection. The individual then accesses a ""multi-step request and assessment process"", requiring independent assessment by two qualified health professionals. The scheme differs from the tenets of other state-based schemes, namely; patients do not need to have a specific time frame until they are expected to die, one of the two health practitioners who assess someone’s eligibility may be a nurse practitioner, and patients who receive treatment in institutions (such as hospitals) that object to voluntary assisted dying will have a greater ability to access it than in the states. The legislation was notified on 19 June 2024 and will go into effect on 3 November 2025."
Assisted dying in Australia,"New South Wales
On 21 September 2017 National Party MLC Trevor Khan introduced the Voluntary Assisted Dying Bill 2017 into the New South Wales Parliament. The Bill was modelled on the Oregon Death With Dignity Act, and was developed by a cross party working group that considered 72 ""substantial"" submissions. The Bill contained what advocates labelled a ""raft of safeguards"" including a seven-person oversight board to review all assisted deaths. The upper house debated the bill throughout several sittings in November 2017, and on 16 November the bill was voted down 20 votes to 19.
In October 2021 independent MLA Alex Greenwich introduced the Voluntary Assisted Dying Bill into the lower house of the Parliament. The legislation was subjected to a cross-party conscience vote, after Premier and Liberal Party leader Dominic Perrottet indicated he would grant Liberal members a conscience vote. The legislation was passed in the Legislative Assembly on 26 November 2021 by 52 votes to 32, and proceeded to the Legislative Council. The bill passed the Legislative Council by 23 votes to 15 on 19 May 2022,  with amendments attached, that were agreed to by the Assembly that same day. The legislation received royal assent on 27 May 2022, and went into effect 18 months thereafter (i.e: 28 November 2023). New South Wales was the last of the six Australian states to legislate for assisted dying.
Under the provisions of the legislation, a person may make a request for a voluntary assisted death to a specialist doctor, which is lodged with the Voluntary Assisted Dying Board. If the doctor is satisfied that the person has the capacity to make the decision and is doing so voluntarily and determines that the person meets the criteria (i.e: they have a terminal illness that will result in death within six months, or a neurodegenerative condition that will result in death within 12 months, and whose suffering is such that it creates a painful condition that cannot be tolerably relieved), they can approve the request. The same process must then be followed by a second independent doctor. The person may then make a written request declaring their intention to end their life, which must be witnessed by two people and then be submitted to the board. A final request must be made five days later and a review done by the first doctor, who can then apply to the Voluntary Assisted Dying Board to allow access to a substance to end their patient's life. The person may administer the relevant substance themselves or have a health practitioner do it."
Assisted dying in Australia,"Northern Territory
Euthanasia was legalised in Australia's Northern Territory, by the Rights of the Terminally Ill Act 1995. It passed the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly by a vote of 15 to 10. In August 1996 a repeal bill was brought before the Parliament but was defeated by 14 votes to 11. The law was later voided by the federal Euthanasia Laws Act 1997, which is a federal law that was in effect until 13 December 2022 and prevented parliaments of territories (Specifically the Northern Territory, the Australian Capital Territory and Norfolk Island) from legalising euthanasia or assisted dying. Before the federal override occurred, three people died through physician assisted suicide under the legislation, aided by Dr Philip Nitschke. The first person was a carpenter, Bob Dent, who died on 22 September 1996."
Assisted dying in Australia,"Following the repeal of the federal ban on territory-based euthanasia legislation, the Northern Territory government announced the formation of a community consulation process ""for developing a framework for voluntary assisted dying"", submissions for which closed in February 2024. The process culminated in the release of a report by an independent expert advisory panel, co-chaired by the Hon Vicki O’Halloran AO CVO and Duncan McConnel SC, which recommended a voluntary assisted dying scheme be established in the Northern Territory. No legislation was brought to the parliament prior to the 2024 general election, at which the incumbent Labor government committed to tabling an assisted dying bill in the next parliament and the opposition Country Liberal Party was noncommittal on the issue."
Assisted dying in Australia,"Queensland
In November 2018, the Premier of Queensland, Annastacia Palaszczuk, launched an inquiry considering the possible legalisation of voluntary assisted dying in the state. The inquiry also took into account care of the aged, end of life, and palliative care.
In May 2021, Palaszczuk announced that voluntary assisted dying legislation would be introduced to the Queensland Parliament for consideration. The bill would allow euthanasia, if the patient meets the following criteria:"
Assisted dying in Australia,"Has an eligible condition that is advanced and progressive, with the potential for death within the subsequent 12 months;
Is capable of making a decision with sound mind;
Is acting voluntarily and without coercion;
Is at least 18 years old; and
Is a resident of Australia and has lived in Queensland for at least twelve months.
On 16 September 2021, the Queensland Legislative Assembly passed the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2021 with 61 votes in favour and 31 opposed. The legislation was subject to a conscience vote. It received royal assent on 23 September 2021 went into effect on 1 January 2023."
Assisted dying in Australia,"South Australia
In November 2016, the South Australian House of Assembly narrowly rejected a private member's bill which would have legalised a right to request voluntary euthanasia in circumstances where a person is in unbearable pain and suffering from a terminal illness. The bill was the first ever euthanasia bill to pass a second reading stage (27 votes to 19) though the bill was rejected during the clauses debate of the bill (23 votes all, with the Speaker's casting vote against the bill).
In late June 2021, a voluntary euthanasia bill similar to that of other states passed the Parliament of South Australia. The legislation mirrors most of the provisions of the Victorian law, though also allows private hospitals and individual practitioners to conscientiously object from participating in the scheme, provided they refer patients to a place where they can access the scheme. Residents in aged care and retirement villages can also access the scheme in their own homes or units. The Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2021 went into effect on 31 January 2023."
Assisted dying in Australia,"Tasmania
Tasmania came close to legalising voluntary euthanasia in November 2013, when a Greens-initiated voluntary euthanasia bill was narrowly defeated in the House of Assembly by a vote of 13–12. The bill would have allowed terminally ill Tasmanians to end their lives 10 days after making three separate requests to their doctor. Although both major parties allowed a conscience vote, all ten Liberals voted against the legislation, with Labor splitting seven in favour and three against, and all five Greens voting in favour.
In December 2019, independent Legislative Council member Mike Gaffney announced he would introduce a private member's bill to legalise voluntary assisted dying the following year. The End of Life Choices (Voluntary Assisted Dying) Bill was introduced to the Council on 27 August and was passed on 10 November 2020, without a formal vote being recorded. It proceeded to the Legislative Assembly, where it was passed with amendments attached on 4 March 2021 by 16 votes to 6. After the Council approved of the Assembly's amendments, the legislation received royal assent on 22 April 2021. The legislation went into effect on 23 October 2022.
Under the provisions of the legislation, in order to access the scheme a person must be at least 18 years of age, have decision-making capacity, be acting voluntarily and be suffering intolerably from a medical condition that is advanced, incurable, irreversible and will cause the person's death in the next six months, or 12 months for neurodegenerative disorders. The person must also be an Australian citizen or have resided in the country for at least three continuous years, and for at least 12 months in Tasmania immediately before making their first request. In total three separate requests must be made to access the scheme, each of which comes with progressively more stringent checks and balances."
Assisted dying in Australia,"Victoria
Since 19 June 2019, Victoria permits assisted dying. On 20 September 2017, the Voluntary Assisted Dying Bill 2017 was introduced into the Victorian Parliament by the Andrews Labor Government, permitting assisted suicide. The bill was modelled on the recommendations of an expert panel chaired by former Australian Medical Association president Professor Brian Owler. The bill passed the parliament, with amendments made in the Legislative Council, on 29 November 2017. The upper house voted in favour 22 votes to 18. The lower house voted in favour 47 votes to 37. In passing the bill, Victoria became the first state to legislate for voluntary assisted dying (VAD). The law received royal assent on 5 December 2017 and came into effect on 19 June 2019. Implementation of the legislation was an ongoing process which took approximately 18 months. Challenges identified with implementation which were by noted by the Medical Journal of Australia included restricting access to those who were eligible, while ensuring it did not unfairly prevent those who were eligible from accessing it and translating the legislation into appropriate clinical practice, as well as supporting and managing doctors with conscientious objections.
Under the provisions of the legislation, assisted suicide (otherwise referred to as voluntary assisted dying) may be available in Victoria under the following conditions: "
Assisted dying in Australia,"A person must be suffering from an incurable, advanced and progressive disease, illness or medical condition, and experiencing intolerable suffering.
The condition must be assessed by two medical practitioners to be expected to cause death within six months (an exception exists for a person suffering from a neurodegenerative condition, where instead the condition must be expected to cause death within 12 months).
A person must be over the age of 18 and have lived in Victoria for at least 12 months and have decision-making capacity.
Though mental illness or disability are not grounds for access, people who meet all other criteria and who have a disability or mental illness will not be denied access to assisted dying.
Other processes and safeguards associated with the scheme are in place."
Assisted dying in Australia,"Western Australia
In November 2018 the McGowan Government announced it would introduce an assisted dying bill early in the new year.
On 10 December 2019, the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2019 passed the Western Australian Parliament. The legislation had passed the Legislative Council by 24 votes to 11, having previously passed the Legislative Assembly 45 votes to 11. Under the legislation, an eligible person would have to be terminally ill with a condition that is causing intolerable suffering and is likely to cause death within six months, or 12 months for a neurodegenerative condition. The person would have to make two verbal requests and one written request, with each request signed off by two independent doctors. Self-administration of lethal medication is then permitted, though in a departure from the Victorian system, a patient can choose for a medical practitioner to administer the drug. The legislation goes into effect on a day to be fixed by proclamation, though the government has advised of an 18-month implementation period. The law went into effect on 1 July 2021."
Assisted dying in Australia,"Organisations
The euthanasia advocacy group YourLastRight.com is the peak organisation nationally representing the ""Dying with Dignity"" associations of Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania, as well as the South Australian Voluntary Euthanasia Society (SAVES), the Western Australian Voluntary Euthanasia Society (WAVES) and the Northern Territory Voluntary Euthanasia Society (NTVES).
Exit International is an Australian euthanasia advocacy group founded by Philip Nitschke. Other Australian groups include Christians Supporting Choice for Voluntary Euthanasia and Doctors for Voluntary Euthanasia Choice.
Australian institutions and organisations that oppose the legalisation of euthanasia include the Australian Medical Association, HOPE, Right to Life Australia and the Australian Catholic Church. A contemporary Catholic viewpoint is available in a 2020 moral compass style document, expanding on the theme of the parable of the Good Samaritan.
Decriminalisation of euthanasia in Australia is supported by multiple political parties such as the Australian Greens, the Fusion Party, the Libertarian Party, and Reason Australia. Though it is usually a conscience vote for the major parties such as the Australian Labor Party and the Liberal/National Coalition."
Assisted dying in Australia,"See also
Health care in Australia
Oregon Death With Dignity Act
California End of Life Option Act
Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2017 (Victoria)
Voluntary Euthanasia Party
Euthanasia in New Zealand"
Assisted dying in Australia,"Notes
References
Further reading
Bartels L, Otlowski M (February 2010). ""A right to die? Euthanasia and the law in Australia"". J Law Med. 17 (4): 532–55. PMID 20329456.
Victoria's hub for health services and business - Voluntary Assisted Dying Bill Archived 20 September 2017 at the Wayback Machine"
Australian frontier wars,"The Australian frontier wars were the violent conflicts between Indigenous Australians (including both Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders) and primarily British settlers during the colonial period of Australia. 
The first conflict took place several months after the landing of the First Fleet in January 1788, and the last conflicts occurred in the early 20th century following the federation of the Australian colonies in 1901, with some occurring as late as 1934. Conflicts occurred in a number of locations across Australia.
Estimates of the number of people killed in the fighting vary considerably."
Australian frontier wars,"Background and population
In 1770 an expedition from Great Britain under the command of then-Lieutenant James Cook made the first voyage by the British along the Australian east coast. On 29 April, Cook and a small landing party fired on a group of the local Dharawal nation who had sought to prevent them from landing at the foot of their camp at Botany Bay, described by Cook as ""a small village"". Two Dharawal men made threatening gestures and threw a stone at Cook's party. Cook then ordered ""a musket to be fired with small-shot"" and the elder of the two was hit in a leg. This caused the two Dharawal men to run to their huts and seize their spears and shields. Subsequently, a single spear was thrown toward the British party, which ""happily hurt nobody"". This then caused Cook to order ""the third musket with small-shots"" to be fired, ""upon which one of them threw another lance and both immediately ran away"".
Some historians have argued that under prevailing European legal doctrine such land was deemed terra nullius or land belonging to nobody or land ""empty of inhabitants"" (as defined by Emerich de Vattel). However, terra nullius was not part of British law at the time and Cook was instructed only to take possession of land if he found it uninhabited. Nevertheless, Cook took possession of the east coast of New Holland for Britain on 22 August 1770 when on Possession Island off the west coast of Cape York Peninsula.
The British Government decided to establish a prison colony in Australia in 1786. The law system practiced by Indigenous Australians was not necessarily understood or recognised in any official respect by settlers (language barriers made communication extremely difficult), and the English-speaking colony abided by its own legal doctrine. The colony's Governor, Captain Arthur Phillip, was instructed to ""live in amity and kindness"" with Indigenous Australians and sought to avoid conflict.
The British colonisation of Australia commenced when the First Fleet established a penal colony at Sydney Cove in January 1788. Colonisation spread to present-day Tasmania and Victoria from 1803 onward. Since then the population density of non-Indigenous people has remained highest in this region of the Australian continent. However, conflict with Aboriginal people was never as intense and bloody in the south-eastern colonies as in Queensland and the continent's northeast. More settlers, as well as Indigenous Australians, were killed on the Queensland frontier than in any other Australian colony. The reason is simple, and is reflected in all evidence and sources dealing with this subject: there were more Aboriginal people in Queensland. The territory of Queensland was the single most populated section of pre-contact Indigenous Australia, reflected not only in all pre-contact population estimates but also in the mapping of pre-contact Australia (see Horton's Map of Aboriginal Australia).
The Indigenous population distribution illustrated below is based on two independent sources, firstly on two population estimates made by anthropologists and a social historian in 1930 and in 1988, and secondly on the basis of the distribution of known tribal land."
Australian frontier wars,"All evidence suggests that the territory of Queensland had a pre-contact Indigenous population density more than double that of New South Wales, at least six times that of Victoria, and at least twenty times that of Tasmania. Equally, there are signs that the population density of Indigenous Australia was comparatively higher in the north-eastern sections of New South Wales, and along the northern coast from the Gulf of Carpentaria and westward including certain sections of the Northern Territory and Western Australia."
Australian frontier wars,"Impact of disease
The effects of disease, loss of hunting grounds and starvation of the Aboriginal population were significant. There are indications that smallpox epidemics may have impacted heavily on some Aboriginal communities, with depopulation in large sections of what is now Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland up to 50% or more, even before the move inland from Sydney of squatters and their livestock. Other diseases hitherto unknown in the Indigenous population—such as the common cold, flu, measles, venereal diseases and tuberculosis—also had an impact, significantly reducing their numbers and tribal cohesion, and so limiting their ability to adapt to or resist invasion and dispossession."
Australian frontier wars,"Traditional Aboriginal warfare
According to the historian John Connor, traditional Aboriginal warfare should be examined on its own terms and not by definitions of war derived from other societies. Aboriginal people did not have distinct ideas of war and peace, and traditional warfare was common, taking place between groups on an ongoing basis, with great rivalries being maintained over extended periods of time. The aims and methods of traditional Aboriginal warfare arose from their small autonomous social groupings. The fighting of a war to conquer enemy territory was not only beyond the resources of any of these Aboriginal groupings, it was contrary to a culture that was based on spiritual connections to a specific territory. Consequently, conquering another group's territory may have been seen to be of little benefit. Ultimately, traditional Aboriginal warfare was aimed at continually asserting the superiority of one's own group over its neighbours, rather than conquering, destroying or displacing neighbouring groups. As the explorer Edward John Eyre observed in 1845, whilst Aboriginal culture was ""so varied in detail"", it was ""similar in general outline and character"", and Connor observes that there were sufficient similarities in weapons and warfare of these groups to allow generalisations about traditional Aboriginal warfare to be made.
In 1840, the American-Canadian ethnologist Horatio Hale identified four types of Australian Aboriginal traditional warfare; formal battles, ritual trials, raids for women, and revenge attacks. Formal battles involved fighting between two groups of warriors, which ended after a few warriors had been killed or wounded, due to the need to ensure the ongoing survival of the groups. Such battles were usually fought to settle grievances between groups, and could take some time to prepare. Ritual trials involved the application of customary law to one or more members of a group who had committed a crime such as murder or assault. Weapons were used to inflict injury, and the criminal was expected to stand their ground and accept the punishment. Some Aboriginal men had effective property rights over women and raids for women were essentially about transferring property from one group to another to ensure the survival of a group through women's food-gathering and childbearing roles. The final type of Aboriginal traditional warfare described by Hale was the revenge attack, undertaken by one group against another to punish the group for the actions of one of its members, such as a murder. In some cases these involved sneaking into the opposition camp at night and silently killing one or more members of the group.
Connor describes traditional Aboriginal warfare as both limited and universal. It was limited in terms of:"
Australian frontier wars,"the number of members of each group, which restricted the number of warriors in any given engagement;
the fact that their non-hierarchical social order militated against one leader combining many groups into a single force; and
duration, due to social groups needing to regularly hunt and forage for food.
Traditional Aboriginal warfare was also universal, as the entire community participated in warfare, boys learnt to fight by playing with toy melee and missile weapons, and every initiated male became a warrior. Women were sometimes participants in warfare as warriors and as encouragers on the sidelines of formal battles, but more often as victims.
While the selection and design of weapons varied from group to group, Aboriginal warriors used a combination of melee and missile weapons in traditional warfare. Spears, clubs and shields were commonly used in hand-to-hand fighting, with different types of shields favoured during exchanges of missiles and in close combat, and spears (often used in conjunction with spear throwers), boomerangs and stones used as missile weapons.
Available weapons had a significant influence over the tactics used during traditional Aboriginal warfare. The limitations of spears and clubs meant that surprise was paramount during raids for women and revenge attacks, and encouraged ambushing and night attacks. These tactics were offset by counter-measures such as regularly changing campsites, being prepared to extinguish camp-fires at short notice, and posting parties of warriors to cover the escape of raiders."
Australian frontier wars,"General history
First occupation
Initial peaceful relations between Indigenous Australians and Europeans began to be strained several months after the First Fleet established Sydney on 26 January 1788. The local Indigenous people became suspicious when the British began to clear land and catch fish, and in May 1788 five convicts were killed and an Indigenous man was wounded. The British grew increasingly concerned when groups of up to three hundred Indigenous people were sighted at the outskirts of the colony in June. Despite this, Phillip attempted to avoid conflict, and forbade reprisals after being speared in 1790. He did, however, authorise two punitive expeditions in December 1790 after his huntsman was killed by an Indigenous warrior named Pemulwuy, but neither was successful."
Australian frontier wars,"Coastal and inland expansion
During the 1790s and early 19th century the British occupied areas along the Australian coastline. These settlements initially occupied small amounts of land, and there was little conflict between the colonisers and Indigenous peoples. Fighting broke out when the settlements expanded, however, disrupting traditional Indigenous food-gathering activities, and subsequently followed the pattern of European invasion in Australia for the next 150 years. Whilst the reactions of the Aboriginal inhabitants to the sudden invasion by the British were varied, they became hostile when their presence led to competition over resources, and to the occupation of their lands. European diseases decimated Indigenous populations, and the occupation or destruction of lands and food resources sometimes led to starvation. By and large neither the Europeans nor the Indigenous peoples approached the conflict in an organised sense, with the conflict more one between groups of colonisers and individual Indigenous groups rather than systematic warfare, even if at times it did involve British soldiers and later formed mounted police units. Not all Indigenous Australians resisted European encroachment on their lands either, whilst many also served in mounted police units and were involved in attacks on other tribes. Colonisers in turn often reacted with violence, resulting in a number of indiscriminate massacres.
European activities provoking significant conflict included pastoral squatting and gold rushes."
Australian frontier wars,"Unequal weaponry
Opinions differ on whether to depict the conflict as one-sided and mainly perpetrated by Europeans on Indigenous Australians or not. Although tens of thousands more Indigenous Australians died than Europeans, some cases of mass killing were not massacres but quasi-military defeats, and the higher death toll was also caused by the technological and logistic advantages enjoyed by Europeans. Indigenous tactics varied, but were mainly based on pre-existing hunting and fighting practices—utilizing spears, clubs and other simple weapons. Unlike the cases with the American Indian Wars and New Zealand Wars, in the main, the indigenous peoples failed to adapt to meet the challenge of the Europeans, and although there were some instances of individuals and groups acquiring and using firearms, this was not widespread. In reality, the Indigenous peoples were never a serious military threat, regardless of how much the settlers may have feared them. On occasions large groups attacked Europeans in open terrain and a conventional battle ensued, during which the Aboriginal residents would attempt to use superior numbers to their advantage. This could sometimes be effective, with reports of them advancing in crescent formation in an attempt to outflank and surround their opponents, waiting out the first volley of shots and then hurling their spears whilst settlers reloaded. Usually, however, such open warfare proved more costly for the Indigenous Australians than the Europeans.
Central to the success of the Europeans was the use of firearms, but the advantages this afforded have often been overstated. Prior to the 19th century, firearms were often cumbersome muzzle-loading, smooth-bore, single shot weapons with flint-lock mechanisms. Such weapons produced a low rate of fire, whilst suffering from a high rate of failure and were only accurate within 50 metres (160 ft). These deficiencies may have given the Aboriginal residents some advantages, allowing them to move in close and engage with spears or clubs. However, by 1850 significant advances in firearms gave the Europeans a distinct advantage, with the six-shot Colt revolver, the Snider single shot breech-loading rifle and later the Martini-Henry rifle as well as rapid-fire rifles such as the Winchester rifle, becoming available. These weapons, when used on open ground and combined with the superior mobility provided by horses to surround and engage groups of Indigenous Australians, often proved successful. The Europeans also had to adapt their tactics to fight their fast-moving, often hidden enemies. Strategies employed included night-time surprise attacks, and positioning forces to drive Aboriginal people off cliffs or force them to retreat into rivers while attacking from both banks."
Australian frontier wars,"Dispersed frontiers
Fighting between Indigenous Australians and European settlers was localised, as Indigenous groups did not form confederations capable of sustained resistance. Conflict emerged as a series of violent engagements, and massacres across the continent. According to the historian Geoffrey Blainey, in Australia during the colonial period: ""In a thousand isolated places there were occasional shootings and spearings. Even worse, smallpox, measles, influenza and other new diseases swept from one Aboriginal camp to another ... The main conqueror of Aborigines was to be disease and its ally, demoralization"".
The Caledon Bay crisis of 1932–34 saw one of the last incidents of violent interaction on the ""frontier"" of indigenous and non-indigenous Australia, which began when the spearing of Japanese poachers who had been molesting Yolngu women was followed by the killing of a policeman. As the crisis unfolded, national opinion swung behind the Aboriginal people involved, and the first appeal on behalf of an Indigenous Australian, Dhakiyarr Wirrpanda, was launched to the High Court of Australia in Tuckiar v The King. Following the crisis, the anthropologist Donald Thomson was dispatched by the government to live among the Yolngu. Elsewhere around this time, activists like Sir Douglas Nicholls were commencing their campaigns for Aboriginal rights within the established Australian political system and the age of frontier conflict closed."
Australian frontier wars,"Frequent friendly relations
Frontier encounters in Australia were not universally negative. Positive accounts of Aboriginal customs and encounters are also recorded in the journals of early European explorers, who often relied on Aboriginal guides and assistance: Charles Sturt employed Aboriginal envoys to explore the Murray-Darling; the lone survivor of the Burke and Wills expedition was nursed by local Aboriginal residents, and the famous Aboriginal explorer Jackey Jackey loyally accompanied his ill-fated friend Edmund Kennedy to Cape York. Respectful studies were conducted by such as Walter Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen in their renowned anthropological study The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899); and by Donald Thomson of Arnhem Land (c.1935–1943). In inland Australia, the skills of Aboriginal stockmen became highly regarded."
Australian frontier wars,"New South Wales
Hawkesbury and Nepean Wars
The first frontier war began in 1795 when encroaching British settlers established farms along the Hawkesbury River west of Sydney. Some of these settlements were established by soldiers as a means of providing security to the region. Local Darug people raided farms until Governor Macquarie dispatched a detachment of the 46th Regiment of Foot in 1816. This detachment patrolled the Hawkesbury Valley and ended the conflict by killing 14 Indigenous Australians in an ambush on their campsite. Indigenous Australians led by Pemulwuy also conducted raids around Parramatta during the period between 1795 and 1802. These attacks led Governor Philip Gidley King to issue an order in 1801 which authorised settlers to shoot Indigenous Australians on sight in Parramatta, Georges River and Prospect areas."
Australian frontier wars,"Bathurst War
Conflict began again when the British expanded into inland New South Wales. Settlers who crossed the Blue Mountains were harassed by Wiradjuri warriors, who killed or wounded stock-keepers and stock and were subjected to retaliatory killings. In response, Governor Brisbane proclaimed martial law on 14 August 1824 to end ""the Slaughter of Black Women and Children, and unoffending White Men"". It remained in force until 11 December 1824, when it was proclaimed that ""the judicious and humane Measures pursued by the Magistrates assembled at Bathurst have restored Tranquillity without Bloodshed"". There is a display of the weaponry and history of this conflict at the National Museum of Australia. This includes a commendation by Governor Brisbane of the deployment of the troops under Major Morisset: "
Australian frontier wars,"I felt it necessary to augment the Detachment at Bathurst to 75 men who were divided into various small parties, each headed by a Magistrate who proceeded in different directions in towards the interior of the Country ... This system of keeping these unfortunate People in a constant state of alarm soon brought them to a sense of their Duty, and ... Saturday their great and most warlike Chieftain has been with me to receive his pardon and that He, with most of His Tribe, attended the annual conference held here on the 28th Novr....
Brisbane also established the New South Wales Mounted Police, who began as mounted infantry from the third Regiment, and were first deployed against bushrangers around Bathurst in 1825. Later they were deployed to the upper Hunter Region in 1826 after fighting broke out there between Wonnarua and Kamilaroi people and settlers."
Australian frontier wars,"Wars on the plains
From the 1830s settlers spread rapidly through inland eastern Australia, leading to widespread conflict. War took place across the Liverpool Plains, with 16 British and up to 500 Indigenous Australians being killed between 1832 and 1838. The violence in this region included several massacres of Indigenous people, including the Waterloo Creek massacre and Myall Creek massacres in 1838, and did not end until 1843. Further violence took place in the New England region during the early 1840s."
Australian frontier wars,"Tasmania
The British established a settlement in Van Diemen's Land (modern Tasmania) in 1803. Relations with the local Indigenous people were generally peaceful until the mid-1820s when pastoral expansion caused conflict over land. This led to sustained frontier warfare (the ""Black War""), and in some districts farmers were forced to fortify their houses. Over 50 British were killed between 1828 and 1830 in what was the ""most successful Aboriginal resistance in Australia's history"".
In 1830 Lieutenant-Governor Arthur attempted to end the ""Black War"" through a massive offensive. In an operation which became known as the ""Black Line"" ten percent of the colony's male civilian population were mobilised and marched across the settled districts in company with police and soldiers in an attempt to clear Indigenous Australians from the area. While few Indigenous people were captured, the operation discouraged the Indigenous raiding parties, and they gradually agreed to leave their land for a reservation which had been established at Flinders Island."
Australian frontier wars,"Western Australia
The first British settlement in Western Australia was established by a detachment of soldiers at Albany in 1826. Relations between the garrison and the local Minang people were generally good. Open conflict between people of the Noongar nation and European settlers broke out in Western Australia in the 1830s as the Swan River Colony expanded from Perth. The Pinjarra massacre, the best known single event, occurred on 28 October 1833 when a party of British colonisers led by Governor Stirling attacked an Indigenous campsite on the banks of the Murray River.
The Noongar nation, forced from traditional hunting grounds and denied access to sacred sites, turned to stealing settlers' crops and killing livestock to survive. In 1831 a Noongar person was murdered for taking potatoes; this resulted in Yagan killing a servant of the household, as was the response permitted under Noongar law. In 1832 Yagan and two others were arrested and sentenced to death, but settler Robert Menli Lyon argued that Yagan was defending his land from invasion and therefore should be treated as a prisoner of war. The argument was successful and the three men were exiled to Carnac Island under the supervision of Lyon and two soldiers. The group later escaped from the island.
Fighting continued into the 1840s along the Avon River near York.
In the Busselton region, relations between white settlers and the Wardandi people were strained to the point of violence, resulting in several Aboriginal deaths. In June 1841, George Layman was speared to death by Wardandi Elder Gaywal. According to one source, Layman had got involved in an argument between Gaywal and another Wardandi person over their allocation of damper, and had pulled Gaywal's beard, which was considered a grave insult. According to another source, Layman had hired two of Gaywal's wives to work on his farm and would not let them go back to their husbands. A manhunt for Layman's killer went on for several weeks, involving much bloodshed as Captain John Molloy, the Bussell brothers, and troops murdered unknown numbers of Aboriginal residents in what has become known as the Wonnerup massacre. The posse eventually murdered Gaywal and abducted his three sons, two of whom were imprisoned on Rottnest Island."
Australian frontier wars,"The discovery of gold near Coolgardie in 1892 brought thousands of prospectors onto Wangkathaa land, causing sporadic fighting.
Continued European settlement and expansion in Western Australia led to further frontier conflict, Bunuba warriors also attacked European settlements during the 1890s until Bunuba leader Jandamarra was killed in 1897. Sporadic conflict continued in northern Western Australia until the 1920s, with a Royal Commission held in 1926 finding that at least eleven Indigenous Australians had been murdered in the Forrest River massacre by a police expedition in retaliation for the death of a European."
Australian frontier wars,"South Australia
South Australia was settled in 1836 with no convicts and a unique plan for settlers to purchase land in advance of their arrival, which was intended to ensure a balance of landowners and farm workers in the colony. The Colonial Office was very conscious of the recent history of the earlier occupations in the eastern states, where there was a significant conflict with the Aboriginal population. On the initial Proclamation Day in 1836 Governor Hindmarsh, made a brief statement that explicitly stated how the native population should be treated. He said in part:"
Australian frontier wars,"It is also, at this time especially, my duty to apprize the Colonists of my resolution, to take every lawful means of extending the same protection to the native population as to the rest of His Majesty's Subjects, and of my firm determination to punish with exemplary severity, all acts of violence or injustice which may in any manner be practiced or attempted against the natives, who are to be considered as much under the Safeguard of the law as the Colonists themselves, and equally entitled to the privileges of British Subjects.
Governor Gawler declared in 1840 that Aboriginal people ""have exercised distinct, defined, and absolute right or proprietary and hereditary possession ... from time immemorial"". The Governor ordered land to be set aside for the Aboriginal population, but there was bitter opposition from settlers who insisted on a right to choose the best land. Eventually, the land was available to Aboriginal people only if it promoted their ""Christianisation"" and they became farmers.
The designation of the Aboriginal population as British citizens gave them rights and responsibilities of which they had no knowledge and ignored existing Aboriginal customary law. However, Aboriginal people could not testify in court, since, not being Christians, they could not swear an oath on a bible. There was also great difficulty in translation. The intentions of those establishing and leading the new colony soon came into conflict with the fears of Aboriginal people and the new settlers. ""In South Australia, as across Australia's other colonies, the failure to adequately deal with Aboriginal rights to land was fundamental to the violence that followed.""
Soon after the colony was established, large numbers of sheep and cattle were brought overland from the eastern colonies. There were many instances of conflict between Aboriginal people and the drovers, with the former desiring the protection of the Country and the latter quick to shoot to protect themselves and their flocks. One expedition leader (Buchanan) recorded at least six conflicts and the deaths of eight Aboriginal people.
In 1840 the ship Maria was wrecked at Cape Jaffa, on the southeast coast. A search party found that all 26 survivors of the wreck had been massacred. The Governor summoned the Executive Council under martial law and a police party was sent to the district to deliver summary justice against the local Indigenous people. The police party apprehended a number of Aboriginal people; two men were implicated, tried by a tribunal from members of the expedition, found guilty, and hanged. There was a vigorous debate in the colony between those approving the immediate punishment for the massacre and those condemning this form of justice outside the normal law.
The town of Port Lincoln, which was readily accessible by sea from Adelaide, became an early new settlement. A small number of shepherds began to steal land that was home to a large Aboriginal population. Deaths on both sides occurred and settlers demanded better protection. Police and soldiers were sent to the Eyre Peninsula but were often ineffective due to the size of the area and the number of isolated settlements. By the mid-1840s, after conflicts sometimes involving large numbers of Aboriginal people, the greater lethality of the white people's weapons had an effect. Several alleged leaders of attacks by Aboriginal people were tried and executed in Adelaide.
The experience of the Port Lincoln settlement on the Eyre Peninsula was repeated in the South East of the state and in the north as settlers encroached on the Aboriginal population. The government attempted to apply the sentiments of the state's proclamation, but the contradictions between these sentiments and the dispossession that the settlement involved made conflict inevitable."
Australian frontier wars,"Victoria
Fighting also took place in early pre-separation Victoria after it was settled in 1834.
In 1833–34, the battle for rights to a beached whale between whalers and people of the Gunditjmara nation resulted in the Convincing Ground massacre near Portland, Victoria.
The 1836 Mount Cottrell massacre was a reprisal for the killing of a prominent Van Diemen's Land squatter Charles Franks who squatted on land west of the Melbourne's fledgling settlement.
A clash at Benalla in 1838 known as the Battle of Broken River of which at least seven white settlers were killed, marked the beginning of the frontier conflict in the colony which lasted for fifteen years.
In 1839 the reprisal raid against Aboriginal resistance in central Victoria resulted in the Campaspe Plains massacre.
The Indigenous groups in Victoria concentrated on economic warfare, killing tens of thousands of sheep. Large numbers of British settlers arrived in Victoria during the 1840s and rapidly outnumbered the Indigenous population.
From 1840, the Eumerella Wars took place in southwest Victoria, and many years of violence occurred during the Warrigal Creek and Gippsland massacres.
In 1842, white settlers from the Port Fairy area wrote a letter to the Charles Latrobe requesting the government improve security from ""outrages committed by natives"" and listing many incidents of conflict and economic warfare. An excerpt of the letter printed on 10 June:"
Australian frontier wars,"We, the undersigned, settlers, and inhabitants of the district of Port Fairy, beg respectfully to represent to your Honor the great and increasing want of security to life and property which exists here at present, in consequence of the absence of any protection against the natives.
Their number, their ferocity, and their cunning render them peculiarly formidable, and the outrages of which they are daily and nightly guilty, and which they accomplish generally with impunity and success, may, we fear, lead to a still more distressing state of things, unless some measures, prompt and effective, be immediately taken to prevent matters coming to that unhappy crisis.
In the late 1840s, frontier conflict continued in the Wimmera."
Australian frontier wars,"Queensland
The frontier wars were particularly bloody and bitter in Queensland, owing to its comparatively large Indigenous population. This point is emphasised in a 2011 study by Ørsted-Jensen, which by use of two different sources calculated that colonial Queensland must have accounted for upwards of one-third and close to forty percent of the Indigenous population of the pre-contact Australian continent.
Queensland represents the single bloodiest colonial frontier in Australia. Thus the records of Queensland document the most frequent reports of shootings and massacres of Indigenous people, the three deadliest massacres on white settlers, the most disreputable frontier police force, and the highest number of white victims to frontier violence on record in any Australian colony. In 2009 professor Raymond Evans calculated the Indigenous fatalities caused by the Queensland Native Police Force alone as no less than 24,000. In July 2014, Evans, in cooperation with the Danish historian Robert Ørsted-Jensen, presented the first-ever attempt to use statistical modeling and a database covering no less than 644 collisions gathered from primary sources, and ended up with total fatalities suffered during Queensland's frontier wars being no less than 66,680—with Aboriginal fatalities alone comprising no less than 65,180—whereas the hitherto commonly accepted minimum overall continental deaths had previously been 20,000. The 66,680 covers Native Police and settler-inflicted fatalities on Aboriginal people, but also a calculated estimate for Aboriginal inflicted casualties on whites settlers and their associates. The continental death toll of Europeans and associates has previously been roughly estimated as between 2,000 and 2,500, yet there is now evidence that Queensland alone accounted for an estimated 1,500 of these fatal frontier casualties.
The European settlement of what is now Queensland commenced as the Moreton Bay penal settlement from September 1824. It was initially located at Redcliffe but moved south to Brisbane River a year later. Free settlement began in 1838, with settlement rapidly expanding in a great rush to take up the surrounding land in the Darling Downs, Logan and Brisbane Valley and South Burnett onwards from 1840, in many cases leading to widespread fighting and heavy loss of life. The conflict later spread north to the Wide Bay and Burnett River and Hervey Bay region, and at one stage the settlement of Maryborough was virtually under siege. Both sides committed atrocities, with settlers poisoning a large number of Indigenous people, for example at Kilcoy on the South Burnett in 1842 and on Whiteside near Brisbane in 1847, and Indigenous warriors killing 19 settlers during the Cullin-La-Ringo massacre on 17 October 1861. At the Battle of One Tree Hill in September 1843, Multuggerah and his group of warriors ambushed one group of settlers, routing them and subsequently others in the skirmishes which followed, starting in retaliation for the Kilcoy poisoning.
Queensland's Native Police Force was formed by the Government of New South Wales in 1848, under the well-connected Commandant Frederick Walker."
Australian frontier wars,"Major massacres
The largest reasonably well-documented massacres in southeast Queensland were the Kilcoy and Whiteside poisonings, each of which was said to have taken up to 70 Aboriginal lives by use of a gift of flour laced with strychnine. Central Queensland was particularly hard hit during the 1860s and 1870s, several contemporary writers mention the Skull Hole, Bladensburg, or Mistake Creek massacre on Bladensburg Station near Winton, which in 1901 was said to have taken up to 200 Aboriginal lives."
Australian frontier wars,"In 1869 the Port Denison Times reported that ""Not long ago 120 aboriginals disappeared on two occasions forever from the native records"". Frontier violence peaked on the northern mining frontier during the 1870s, most notably in Cook district and on the Palmer and Hodgkinson River goldfields, with heavy loss of Aboriginal lives and several well-known massacres. Battle Camp and Cape Bedford belong among the best-known massacres of Aboriginal people in the Cook district, but they were certainly not the only ones. The Cape Bedford massacre on 20 February 1879 alone was reported to have taken as many as 28 lives, this was retaliation for the injuring (but not killing) of two white ""cedar-getters"" from Cooktown. In January 1879 Carl Feilberg, the editor of the short-lived Brisbane Daily News (later editor-in-chief of the Brisbane Courier), conveyed a report from a ""gentleman, on whose words reliance can be placed"" that he had after just ""one of these raids ... counted as many as seventy-five natives dead or dying upon the ground"".
Raids conducted by the Kalkadoon held settlers out of Western Queensland for ten years until September 1884 when they attacked a force of settlers and native police at Battle Mountain near modern Cloncurry. The subsequent battle of Battle Mountain ended in disaster for the Kalkadoon, who suffered heavy losses. Fighting continued in North Queensland, however, with Indigenous raiders attacking sheep and cattle while native police mounted punitive expeditions. Two reports from 1884 and 1889 written by one of the prime combatants of the Kalkadoons, Sub-inspector of Native Police (later Queensland Police Commissioner) Frederic Charles Urquhart described how he and his detachment pursued and killed up to 150 Aboriginal people in just three or four so-called ""dispersals"" (he provided numbers up to about 80 of these killings, the rest was just described without estimating the actual toll).
The conflict in Queensland was the bloodiest in the history of colonial Australia. Some studies give evidence of some 1,500 whites and associates (meaning Aboriginal servants, as well as Chinese, Melanesian, and other non-Europeans) killed on the Queensland frontier during the 19th century, while others suggest that upwards of 65,000 Aboriginal people were killed, with sections of Central and North Queensland witnessing particularly heavy fighting. 65,000 is, of course, an estimate, and notably much higher than the more commonly-held belief of a national minimum of 20,000 colonial Aboriginal casualties.
Some sources have characterised these events as genocide."
Australian frontier wars,"Northern Territory
The British made three early attempts to establish military outposts in northern Australia. The initial settlement at Fort Dundas on Melville Island was established in 1824 but was abandoned in 1829 due to attacks from the local Tiwi people. Some fighting also took place near Fort Wellington on the Cobourg Peninsula between its establishment in 1827 and abandonment in 1829. The third British settlement, Fort Victoria, was also established on the Cobourg Peninsula in 1838 but was abandoned in 1849.
The final battles took place in the Northern Territory. A permanent settlement was established at modern-day Darwin in 1869 and attempts by pastoralists to occupy Indigenous land led to conflict. This fighting continued into the 20th century, and was driven by reprisals against European deaths and the pastoralists' desire to secure the land they had stolen from Indigenous people. At least 31 Indigenous men were killed by police in the Coniston massacre in 1928 and further reprisal expeditions were conducted in 1932 and 1933."
Australian frontier wars,"Historiography
Armed resistance to British invasion was generally given little attention by historians until the 1970s, and was not regarded as a ""war"". In 1968 anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner wrote that historians' failure to include Indigenous Australians in histories of Australia or acknowledge the Frontier Wars constituted a ""great Australian silence"". Works which discussed the conflicts began to appear during the 1970s and 1980s, and the first history of the Australian frontier told from an Indigenous perspective, Henry Reynolds' The Other Side of the Frontier, was published in 1982.
Between 2000 and 2002 Keith Windschuttle published a series of articles in the magazine Quadrant and the book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. These works argued that there had not been prolonged frontier warfare in Australia, and that historians had in some instances fabricated evidence of fighting. Windschuttle's claims led to the so-called ""history wars"" in which historians debated the extent of the conflict between Indigenous Australians and European settlers.
The frontier wars are not commemorated at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. The Memorial argues that the Australian frontier fighting is outside its charter as it did not involve Australian military forces. This position is supported by the Returned and Services League of Australia but is opposed by many historians, including Geoffrey Blainey, Gordon Briscoe, John Coates, John Connor, Ken Inglis, Michael McKernan and Peter Stanley. These historians argue that the fighting should be commemorated at the Memorial as it involved large numbers of Indigenous Australians and paramilitary Australian units. In September 2022, after the premiere of the SBS documentary series The Australian Wars, the War Memorial's outgoing chair, former government minister Brendan Nelson announced the Memorial's governing council would work towards a ""much broader, a much deeper depiction and presentation of the violence committed against Indigenous people, initially by British, then by pastoralists, then by police, and then by Aboriginal militia"". In response to the announcement, filmmaker Rachel Perkins said, ""In the making of our series, we worked closely with the War Memorial ... [but] I never saw this coming. I thought, 'Maybe in a generation'... but not right now ... It is a watershed moment in Australian history. It can't be underestimated, the change that this heralds."""
Australian frontier wars,"See also
Gulf Country#History
Historical Records of Australia, publications by the Library Committee of the Commonwealth Parliament
List of massacres of Indigenous Australians
List of conflicts in Australia"
Australian frontier wars,"Aboriginal Australian warriors
Multuggerah, Ugarapu warrior in Queensland
Musquito, Gai-Mariagal warrior in Tasmania
Pemulwuy, Bidjigal warrior in NSW
Tarenorerer, also known as Walyer, Waloa or Walloa, a rebel leader in Tasmania
Tedbury, Dharug warrrio in NSW
Tunnerminnerwait, Parperloihener resistance fighter in Tasmania
Windradyne, Wiradjuri warrior and resistance leader, NSW"
Australian frontier wars,"Comparable events in other countries
Arauco War, conflict between Spanish and Mapuche people in Chile
Conquest of the Desert, Argentine military campaign
The Great Trek, Xhosa Wars, and Anglo-Zulu war; comparable events in South Africa
Russian conquest of the Caucasus; comparable events in Russia"
Australian frontier wars,"Footnotes
Citations
References
Further reading
External links
Telling the Stories of Queensland - Frontier Wars, State Library of Queensland Vimeo
History and Fiction: Mapping Frontier Violence in Colonial Queensland Writing, State Library of Queensland blog
Stories from the Archive: Queensland Frontier Wars, Queensland State Archives
The South Australian Frontier and its Legacies, with interactive map"
1975 Australian constitutional crisis,"The 1975 Australian constitutional crisis, also known simply as the Dismissal, culminated on 11 November 1975 with the dismissal from office of the prime minister, Gough Whitlam of the Australian Labor Party (ALP), by Sir John Kerr, the Governor-General who then commissioned the leader of the Opposition, Malcolm Fraser of the Liberal Party, as caretaker prime minister. It has been described as the greatest political and constitutional crisis in Australian history.
The Labor Party under Gough Whitlam came to power in the election of 1972, ending 23 consecutive years of Liberal-Country Coalition government. Labor won a majority in the House of Representatives of 67 seats to the Coalition's 58 seats, but faced a hostile Senate. In May 1974, after the Senate voted to reject six of Labor's non-supply bills, Whitlam advised then-Governor General, Sir Paul Hasluck, to call a double dissolution election. The election saw Labor re-elected with its House of Representatives majority reduced from 9 to 5 seats, although it gained seats in the Senate. With the two houses of Parliament still deadlocked, pursuant to section 57 of the Australian Constitution, Whitlam was able to narrowly secure passage of the six ""trigger bills"" of the earlier double dissolution election in a joint sitting of Parliament on 6–7 August 1974, the only such sitting held in Australia's history.
Whitlam's tenure in office proved highly turbulent and controversial, and in October 1975, the Opposition under Malcolm Fraser used its control of the Senate to defer passage of appropriation bills needed to finance government expenditure, which had already been passed by the House of Representatives. Fraser and the Opposition stated that they would continue to block supply in the Senate unless Whitlam called a fresh election for the House of Representatives, and urged Governor-General Sir John Kerr, who had been appointed governor-general on Whitlam's advice in July 1974, to dismiss Whitlam unless Whitlam acceded to their demand. Whitlam believed that Kerr would not dismiss him as prime minister, and Kerr did nothing to make Whitlam believe that he might be dismissed.
On 11 November 1975, the crisis came to a head as Whitlam went to seek Kerr's approval to call a half-Senate election in an attempt to break the parliamentary deadlock. Kerr did not accept Whitlam's request, and instead dismissed him as prime minister and appointed the leader of the Opposition, Malcolm Fraser, as caretaker prime minister on the understanding that Fraser would immediately call a general election. Acting quickly before all ALP parliamentarians became aware of the change of government, Fraser and his parliamentary allies were able to secure passage of the supply bills through the Senate and advised Kerr to dissolve Parliament for a double dissolution election. Fraser and his Liberal-Country Coalition were elected with a massive majority in the federal election held the following month.
The events of the Dismissal led to only minor constitutional change. The Senate retained its power to block supply, and the governor-general the power to dismiss government ministers; however, these powers have not since been used to force a government from office. Despite being denied by both Kerr and Whitlam, allegations have repeatedly been made about CIA involvement in the Whitlam dismissal, but remain unsubstantiated. Kerr was widely criticised by Labor supporters for his actions, resigned early as governor-general, and lived much of his remaining life abroad."
1975 Australian constitutional crisis,"Background
Constitutional
As established by the Constitution of Australia, the Parliament of Australia is composed of two houses, the House of Representatives and the Senate, together with the monarch. The monarch is represented through the governor-general, who has the executive power granted in the Constitution, as well as rarely exercised reserve powers. The reserve powers are those exercised by the governor-general without requiring advice, which is usually signified by the phrase ""Governor-General in Council"". Under The Australian Constitution the governor-general acts ""with the advice of the Federal Executive Council"" in the appointment of government ministers, although ministers serve at his pleasure, and the Executive Council is appointed by the governor-general alone. The governor-general is ordinarily bound by convention to act only upon the advice of the government and the prime minister, but can act independently and against advice in exercising the reserve powers. The governor-general can be removed by the King on the advice of the Australian prime minister. As Liberal Party leader Malcolm Fraser, who played a large part in the crisis, put it, ""The Queen has tenure, and she couldn't be sacked. But a Governor-General holds office at pleasure, and if he ceases to please then he can be removed by a Prime Minister"".
As in most Westminster system parliaments, Australia's government is ordinarily formed by the party enjoying the confidence of the lower House of Parliament, the House of Representatives. However, Australia's Parliament also has a powerful upper house, the Senate, which must pass any legislation initiated by the House of Representatives if it is to become law. The composition of the Senate, in which each state has an equal number of senators regardless of that state's population, was originally designed to attract the Australian colonies into one Federation. The Constitution forbids the Senate from originating or amending a money bill, but places no limitation on the Senate's ability to defeat one. In 1970, Gough Whitlam, as Leader of the Opposition, stated of a budget bill, ""Let me make it clear at the outset that our opposition to this Budget is no mere formality. We intend to press our opposition by all available means on all related measures in both Houses. If the motion is defeated, we will vote against the Bills here and in the Senate. Our purpose is to destroy this Budget and destroy the Government which has sponsored it"".
The federal Senate had never blocked supply before 1975, even when it had been controlled by the opposition. In 1947, in response to the federal Chifley government's attempt to nationalise the banks, the coalition-controlled upper house of the Parliament of Victoria blocked the state budget in order to force a premature election. Labor Premier John Cain called a snap election and was defeated.
Prior to the 1975 crisis, the governor-general's power to dismiss a prime minister against the incumbent's will under Section 64 of the Constitution had never been exercised. However, in 1904 Labour Prime Minister Chris Watson advised an early election, but Governor-General Lord Northcote refused, triggering Watson's resignation and the appointment of Opposition Leader George Reid as prime minister. Twice since Federation, conflicts between state premiers and state governors, who perform analogous functions to the prime minister and governor-general respectively at the state level, had resulted in the departure of one or the other. In 1916, New South Wales Premier William Holman was expelled from the Australian Labor Party for supporting conscription. He managed to hold on to power with the aid of opposition parties and consulted the Governor, Sir Gerald Strickland, proposing to pass legislation to extend the term of the lower house of the state legislature by a year. When Strickland objected, stating that such a course was unfair to Labor, Holman had him replaced. In 1932 the New South Wales Labor premier, Jack Lang, refused to pay money owed to the Federal government, which froze the state's bank accounts, causing Lang to order that payments to the state government be only in cash. The governor, Sir Philip Game, wrote to Lang, warning him that ministers were breaking the law, and that if they continued, he would have to obtain ministers who could carry on government within legal bounds. Lang replied that he would not resign, and Game dismissed his government and commissioned the leader of the Opposition, Bertram Stevens, to form a caretaker government pending a new election, in which Labor was defeated.
Among the powers granted to the governor-general is the power to dissolve both houses of Parliament under Section 57 of the Constitution in the event that the House of Representatives twice passes a bill at least three months apart and the Senate refuses to pass it. In both instances where those circumstances arose prior to the Whitlam government, in 1914 and 1951, the governor-general dissolved Parliament for a ""double dissolution"" election on the advice of the prime minister."
1975 Australian constitutional crisis,"Political
Gough Whitlam's Labor government was elected in 1972 after 23 years of rule by a coalition formed by the Liberal and Country parties. The ALP Government enjoyed a nine-seat majority in the House of Representatives, but did not control the Senate, which had been elected in 1967 and 1970 (as Senate elections were then out of synchronisation with House of Representatives elections). In accordance with pre-election promises, it instituted a large number of policy changes, and offered much legislation. The Opposition, which still controlled the Senate, allowed some Government bills to pass the Senate, and blocked others.
In April 1974, faced with attempts by the Opposition under Billy Snedden to block supply (appropriation bills) in the Senate, Whitlam obtained the concurrence of the governor-general, Sir Paul Hasluck, to a double dissolution. Labor was returned at the election on 18 May with a reduced House majority of five seats. The Coalition and Labor each had 29 Senate seats, with the balance of power held by two independents. Snedden later told author Graham Freudenberg when being interviewed for the book A Certain Grandeur – Gough Whitlam in Politics: ""The pressure [to block supply] was on me from Anthony. We thought you had a chance of getting control of the Senate at the half-Senate election or at least enough to get a redistribution through. With a gerrymander, you'd be in forever.""
Hasluck had been governor-general since 1969, and his term was shortly due to expire. Whitlam wanted him to remain a further two years, but Hasluck declined, citing the refusal of his wife, Alexandra, to remain at Yarralumla longer than the originally agreed five years. Whitlam offered the post to businessman Ken Myer, who turned it down. Whitlam then offered the position to his treasurer, Frank Crean, and his own deputy, Lance Barnard, neither of whom was keen to move on from parliament. Finally, Whitlam turned to his fifth choice, Sir John Kerr, the chief justice of New South Wales. Kerr was reluctant to give up the chief justiceship, in which he intended to remain another ten years, for the governor-general's post, which traditionally lasted five years. At Kerr's request, Whitlam informally agreed that if both men were still in office in five years, Kerr would be reappointed. Whitlam also secured legislation to address Kerr's financial concerns about the position, including authorising a pension for the governor-general or his widow. The leader of the Opposition, Billy Snedden, was enthusiastic about the appointment and also agreed to reappoint Kerr in five years, were he prime minister at the time. Kerr then agreed to take the post, was duly appointed by Queen Elizabeth II, and was sworn in on 11 July 1974.
Six of the bills that had been the subject of the double dissolution were introduced in Parliament a third time and, as expected, were again rejected by the Senate. Section 57 of the Constitution provides that, after a double dissolution election, if bills that had been rejected twice by the Senate in the previous parliament were again passed by the House and again rejected by the Senate, they could then be put to a joint sitting of both houses. On 30 July, Whitlam gained Kerr's agreement for a joint sitting, which was set for 6–7 August 1974. The joint sitting, the only one in Australia's history under Section 57, passed all six bills, including the enabling legislation for Medibank."
1975 Australian constitutional crisis,"Controversy and vacancies
In December 1974, Whitlam was anxious to find new sources of money to finance his development plans. After a meeting at the prime minister's residence, The Lodge, Whitlam and three of his ministers (Deputy Prime Minister and Treasurer Jim Cairns, Attorney-General Senator Lionel Murphy, and Minister for Minerals and Energy Rex Connor) signed a letter of authority for Connor to borrow up to US$4 billion. This letter was described by author and journalist Alan Reid as the ""death warrant of the Whitlam ALP government"".
Connor and other ministers had made contact with a hitherto obscure Pakistani financier, Tirath Khemlani, as early as November 1974. Khemlani was said to have contacts in the newly enriched Arab oil nations. None of the efforts to secure a loan, whether through Khemlani or by other routes, bore fruit, but, as information about the ""Loans Affair"" trickled out, the government lost support.
In February 1975, Whitlam decided to appoint Senator Murphy a justice of the High Court of Australia, even though Murphy's Senate seat would not be up for election if a half-Senate election were held. Under proportional representation, Labor could win three of the five New South Wales seats, but if Murphy's seat was also contested, it was most unlikely to win four out of six. Thus, appointing Murphy would almost certainly cost the ALP a Senate seat at the next half-Senate election. Whitlam appointed Murphy anyway. By convention, senators appointed by the state legislature to fill casual vacancies were from the same political party as the former senator. The New South Wales premier, Tom Lewis, a member of the Liberal Party, felt that this convention only applied to vacancies caused by deaths or ill-health, and arranged for the legislature to elect Cleaver Bunton, former mayor of Albury and an independent.
By March 1975, many Liberal parliamentarians felt that Snedden was doing an inadequate job as Leader of the Opposition and that Whitlam was dominating him in the House of Representatives. Malcolm Fraser challenged Snedden for the leadership on 21 March, and defeated him by 37 votes to 27. At a press conference after winning the leadership, Fraser stated:"
1975 Australian constitutional crisis,"The question of supply—let me deal with it this way. I generally believe if a government is elected to power in the lower House and has the numbers and can maintain the numbers in the lower House, it is entitled to expect that it will govern for the three-year term unless quite extraordinary events intervene ... Having said that ... if we do make up our minds at some stage that the Government is so reprehensible that an Opposition must use whatever power is available to it, then I'd want to find a situation in which Mr Whitlam woke up one morning finding the decision had been made and finding that he had been caught with his pants well and truly down."
1975 Australian constitutional crisis,"Whitlam's original deputy prime minister, Lance Barnard, had been challenged and defeated for his post by Cairns in June 1974 shortly after the May 1974 election. Whitlam then offered Barnard a diplomatic post; in early 1975 Barnard agreed to this. If the appointment went through, Barnard's resignation from the House of Representatives would trigger a by-election in his Tasmanian electorate of Bass. ALP officials felt that, given the party's weakened state, Barnard should remain in Parliament and be given no preferment if he resigned; party president and future Prime Minister Bob Hawke described the decision to appoint Barnard as ""an act of lunacy"". Barnard had been losing support over the last several elections, and the Liberals needed only a swing of 4% to take Bass off Labor. The Liberals had a candidate, Kevin Newman, who had been nursing the electorate; Labor had no candidate selected and a bitter preselection in the offing. Barnard resigned and was appointed the ambassador to Sweden. The election on 28 June proved a disaster for Labor, with Newman winning the seat on a swing of over 17%.
The next week, Whitlam fired Cairns for misleading Parliament regarding the Loans Affair amid innuendo about his relationship with his Principal Private Secretary, Junie Morosi. He was replaced as deputy by Frank Crean. At the time of Cairns' dismissal, one Senate seat was vacant, following the death on 30 June of Queensland ALP Senator Bertie Milliner. The state Labor party nominated Mal Colston, who was the highest unelected candidate on the party's Queensland list in 1974. This resulted in deadlock in Brisbane; the unicameral Queensland legislature twice voted against Colston, and the party refused to submit any alternative candidates. Queensland Country Party Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen had evidence that Colston, a schoolteacher by trade, had set a school on fire during a labour dispute, though the police had refused to prosecute. After the legislature voted Colston down a second time, Bjelke-Petersen instructed his majority in the legislature to elect a low-level union official, Albert Field, who had contacted his office and expressed a willingness to serve. In interviews, Field made it clear he would not support Whitlam. Field was expelled from the ALP for standing against Colston, and Labor senators boycotted his swearing-in. Whitlam argued that because of the vacancies being filled as they were, the Senate was ""corrupted"" and ""tainted"", with the Opposition enjoying a majority they did not win at the ballot box. When Labor learned that Field had not given the required three weeks' notice to the Queensland Department of Education, it challenged his appointment in the High Court, arguing that he was still technically a public servant–and thus ineligible to serve in the Senate. With Field on leave throughout the remainder of the crisis, the Coalition refused to provide a ""pair"" to account for his absence, giving it an effective majority of 30–29 in the Senate. Whitlam remarked that if Milliner had not died or had he been replaced by a [pro Whitlam] senator, the crisis would not have happened."
1975 Australian constitutional crisis,"Deadlock
Deferral of supply
On 10 October, the High Court ruled that the act passed at the joint sitting that gave the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and the Northern Territory two senators each was valid. A half-Senate election needed to be held by June 1976; most senators-elect would take their seats on 1 July, but the territorial senators and those filling Field's and Bunton's seats would take their places at once. The ruling meant that it was possible for the ALP to gain a temporary majority in the Senate, at least until 1 July 1976. To do so, the ALP would have to win Field's and Bunton's seats, and one seat in each territory, and have the second ACT seat fall to either a Labor candidate or an independent, former Liberal Prime Minister John Gorton, now estranged from his party. If this happened, Labor would have an effective 33–31 margin, would be able to pass supply if that was still an issue, and also could pass electoral redistribution laws (which had been passed by the House, though twice defeated by the Senate) that would give it an advantage at the next election.
The journalist and author Alan Reid described the position of the Government and Opposition as the crisis became acute in mid-October:"
1975 Australian constitutional crisis,"While it was possibly an overstatement to describe the 1975 position as a choice between evils, neither of the two major political groupings reached the 15 October 1975 crunch position with completely clean hands. Fraser and the Liberal-CP senators ... lacked the numbers to defer the Budget until the arrival in the Senate of Albert Patrick Field, whose arrival was not due to any decision by the Australian voters but to a decision by one of the rulers, the Whitlam-hating Bjelke-Petersen ... Whitlam for his part had decided even before the Budget was deferred to embark upon the bold, Cromwellian project of changing the Australian Constitution, not through the vote of the mass electorate ... but through prodigious personal exertions backed by the support of his parliamentary followers."
1975 Australian constitutional crisis,"In the wake of the High Court ruling, and with the appropriation bills due to be considered by the Senate on 16 October, Fraser was undecided whether to block supply. His biographer, Philip Ayres, contends that, had there been no further government scandals, he would not have done so. Khemlani, however, had alleged – contrary to government statements – that Connor had never revoked his authority to obtain loans and had been in regular contact with him even into mid-1975. On 13 October, the Melbourne Herald printed documents in support of Khemlani's allegations, and on the following day, Connor resigned. Fraser determined to block supply, convened a shadow cabinet meeting and received the unanimous support of the Coalition frontbench. At a press conference, Fraser cited the poor state of the economy and the continuing scandals as reasons for his decision. Without the passage of fresh appropriations, supply would be exhausted on 30 November.
On 15 October the Governor of Queensland, Sir Colin Hannah, gave a speech denigrating the Whitlam government, in violation of the convention that state governors remain neutral. Hannah held a dormant commission as Administrator of the Commonwealth to act as Governor-General in the event of Kerr's death, resignation, or absence from Australia. Whitlam immediately contacted Buckingham Palace to arrange for Hannah's dormant commission to be revoked, a process which took ten days to complete. Although Whitlam later alleged that he never contemplated dismissing Kerr during the crisis, on 16 October, while speaking with Kerr and visiting Malaysian Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak, he told Kerr that if the crisis continued, ""It could be a question of whether I get to the Queen first for your recall, or whether you get in first with my dismissal"". Kerr saw the statement as a threat; Whitlam later stated the comment was ""flippant"" and designed to turn the conversation to another subject.
On 16 and 17 October, the Senate, with the unanimous support of the Coalition majority, deferred the appropriation bills. The Coalition took the position that Kerr could dismiss Whitlam if the Government could not secure supply. Whitlam's former solicitor-general Bob Ellicott, now a Liberal member of the House, issued a legal opinion on 16 October stating that the Governor-General had the power to dismiss Whitlam, and should do so forthwith if Whitlam could not state how he would obtain supply. Ellicott indicated that Whitlam was treating Kerr as if he had no discretion but to follow prime ministerial advice, when in fact the Governor-General could and should dismiss a ministry unable to secure supply. Ellicott stated that Kerr"
1975 Australian constitutional crisis,"should ask the Prime Minister if the Government is prepared to advise him to dissolve the House of Representatives and the Senate or the House of Representatives alone as a means of assuring that the disagreement between the two Houses is resolved. If the Prime Minister refuses to do either, it is then open to the Governor-General to dismiss his present Ministers and seek others who are prepared to give him the only proper advice open. This he should proceed to do."
1975 Australian constitutional crisis,"Consultations and negotiations
Kerr's major confidante and secret adviser regarding the dismissal was a member of the High Court and friend of Kerr, Sir Anthony Mason whose role was not revealed until 2012 when Whitlam's biographer Jenny Hocking detailed Kerr's archival record of their extensive consultations. Kerr described Mason as playing ""a most significant part in my thinking"" and wrote of confiding in Mason ""to fortify myself for the action I was to take"". Mason's role included drafting a letter of dismissal for Kerr and he also claimed to have advised Kerr that he should ""as a matter of fairness"" warn Whitlam of his intention to dismiss him, which Kerr refused to do. Mason writes that his discussions with Kerr began in August 1975 and concluded on the afternoon of 11 November 1975. He declined Kerr's requests to allow his role to be publicly known. Kerr rang Whitlam on Sunday 19 October, asking permission to consult with the Chief Justice of the High Court, Sir Garfield Barwick, concerning the crisis. Whitlam advised Kerr not to do so, noting that no Governor-General had consulted with a Chief Justice under similar circumstances since 1914, when Australia was at a much earlier stage of her constitutional development. Whitlam also noted that in all of the recent unsuccessful High Court challenges to Whitlam government legislation, Barwick had been in the minority in finding against the government. On 21 October, Kerr phoned Whitlam regarding the Ellicott opinion, and asked, ""It's all bullshit, isn't it?"". Whitlam agreed with Kerr's view. Kerr then requested that the Government provide him with a written legal opinion rebutting Ellicott's views. Kerr would receive no written advice from the Government until 6 November. Journalist and author Paul Kelly, who wrote two books on the crisis, paints this delay as a major mistake by Whitlam, given Kerr's judicial background. Kerr also asked on 21 October for Whitlam's permission to interview Fraser, which the Prime Minister readily granted, and the two men met that night. Fraser told Kerr that the Opposition were determined to block supply. Fraser indicated that the Opposition's decision to defer the appropriation bills, rather than defeating them, was a tactical decision, since then the bills would remain in the control of the Senate and could be passed at any time. He stated that the Coalition agreed with the Ellicott opinion, and proposed to continue deferring supply while it awaited events. The media were not told of the substance of the conversation, and instead reported that Kerr had reprimanded Fraser for blocking supply, causing the Governor-General's office to issue a denial.
Throughout the crisis, Kerr did not tell Whitlam of his increasing concerns, nor did he suggest that he might dismiss Whitlam. He believed nothing he said would influence Whitlam, and feared that, if Whitlam perceived him as a possible opponent, the Prime Minister would procure his dismissal from the Queen. Accordingly, though Kerr dealt with Whitlam in an affable manner, he did not confide his thinking to the Prime Minister. Labor Senator Tony Mulvihill later related that ""Whitlam would come back to each caucus meeting and say, 'I saw His Excellency ... No worry. He's got to do it his way.' ... at no time did he hint that the Governor-General was frowning.""
There was intense public interest and concern at the stalemate, and Fraser and his Liberals acted to shore up support. Liberal frontbenchers worked to build unity for the tactic in state organisations. The former longtime Premier of South Australia Sir Thomas Playford was speaking out against the blocking of supply, causing South Australia Senator Don Jessop to waver in his support for the tactic. Fraser was able to co-ordinate a wave of communications from party members which served to neutralise both men. Fraser sought the backing of the retired longtime Liberal Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies, and went to see Menzies in person, taking with him a 1947 statement by Menzies supporting the blocking of supply in the upper house of the Victorian Parliament. He did not have to use the paper; Menzies stated that he found the tactic distasteful, but in this case necessary. The former prime minister issued a statement in support of Fraser's tactics.
Kerr invited Whitlam and Minister for Labour Senator Jim McClelland to lunch on 30 October, immediately preceding an Executive Council meeting. At that meal, Kerr proposed a possible compromise. If the Opposition were to allow supply to pass, Whitlam would not advise a half-Senate election until May or June 1976, and the Senate would not convene until 1 July, thus obviating the threat of a possible temporary Labor majority. Whitlam, who was determined to destroy both Fraser's leadership and the Senate's right to block supply, refused any compromise."
1975 Australian constitutional crisis,"Decision
Because of the federal nature of our Constitution and because of its provisions the Senate undoubtedly has constitutional power to refuse or defer supply to the Government. Because of the principles of responsible government a Prime Minister who cannot obtain supply, including money for carrying on the ordinary services of government, must either advise a general election or resign. If he refuses to do this I have the authority and indeed the duty under the Constitution to withdraw his Commission as Prime Minister. The position in Australia is quite different from a position in the United Kingdom. Here the confidence of both Houses on supply is necessary to ensure its provision. In the United Kingdom the confidence of the House of Commons alone is necessary. But both here and in the United Kingdom the duty of the Prime Minister is the same in a most important aspect – if he cannot get supply he must resign or advise an election.
Fraser chaired a summit of leaders of the Coalition parties on 2 November. The resulting communiqué urged the Coalition senators to continue deferring supply. It also threatened, should Kerr grant Whitlam a half-Senate election, that the Coalition state premiers would advise their governors not to issue writs, thus blocking the election from taking place in the four states with non-Labor premiers. After the meeting, Fraser proposed a compromise: that the Opposition would concede supply if Whitlam agreed to hold a House of Representatives election at the same time as the half-Senate election. Whitlam rejected the idea.
On 22 October, Whitlam had asked the Attorney-General, Kep Enderby, to have a paper drafted rebutting the Ellicott opinion for presentation to Kerr. Enderby delegated this task to the Solicitor-General, Maurice Byers, and other officials. On 6 November, Enderby was to see Kerr to give him a legal opinion regarding the Government's alternative plans in case supply ran out. Vouchers were to be issued to Commonwealth employees and contractors instead of cheques, to be redeemed from banks after the crisis ended—transactions which were to be rejected by major banks as ""tainted with illegality"". Enderby decided to present Kerr with the rebuttal to Ellicott. When Enderby reviewed the document, he found that, while it argued for the Government's position, it recognised both that the Senate had the constitutional right to block supply, and that the reserve powers were still extant—matters with which Enderby did not agree. He presented Kerr with the rebuttal, but crossed out Byers' signature on it and told Kerr of his disagreement. Enderby told Kerr that the Byers rebuttal was ""background"" for formal written advice, to be presented by Whitlam. Later that day, Kerr met with Fraser again. The Opposition leader told him that if Kerr did not dismiss Whitlam, the Opposition planned to criticise him in Parliament for failing to carry out his duty.
Kerr concluded on 6 November that neither Government nor Opposition would yield and had received advice that day from Treasurer Bill Hayden that supply would run out on 27 November. The Governor-General decided that, as Whitlam could not secure supply, and would not resign or advise an election for the House of Representatives, he would have to sack him. As Kerr feared that Whitlam might advise the Queen to dismiss him, he considered it important that Whitlam be given no hint of the impending action. Kerr later stated that were Whitlam to seek his dismissal, it would involve the Queen in politics. Seeking confirmation of his decision, he contacted Chief Justice Barwick, met with him and asked for his views of a dismissal of Whitlam. Barwick furnished him with written advice containing his view that a governor-general could and should dismiss a prime minister who was unable to obtain supply. Barwick specified that the prime minister should also not have refused either to resign or to advise a general election, with which Kerr agreed.
On 9 November, Fraser contacted Whitlam and invited him to negotiations with the Coalition aimed at settling the dispute. Whitlam agreed, and a meeting was set for 9 am on Tuesday 11 November, at Parliament House. That Tuesday was also the deadline for an election to be called if it were to be held before Christmas. Both Government and Opposition leaders were in Melbourne on the night of 10 November for the Lord Mayor's banquet. To ensure the Opposition leaders could reach Canberra in time for the meeting, Whitlam brought them back in his VIP aircraft, which arrived in Canberra at midnight."
1975 Australian constitutional crisis,"Dismissal
Meeting at Yarralumla
At 9 a.m. on 11 November, Whitlam, together with deputy prime minister Frank Crean and Leader of the House Fred Daly, met with Fraser and Country Party leader Doug Anthony. No compromise could be reached. Whitlam informed the Coalition leaders that he would be advising Kerr to hold a half-Senate election on 13 December, and he would not be seeking interim supply for the period before the election. Thinking it unlikely that Kerr would grant the election without supply, Fraser warned Whitlam that the Governor-General might make up his own mind about the matter. Whitlam was dismissive and after the meeting broke, telephoned Kerr to tell him that he needed an appointment to advise him to hold a half-Senate election. Both men were busy in the morning, Kerr with Remembrance Day commemorations, and Whitlam with a caucus meeting and a censure motion in the House which the Opposition had submitted. The two discussed a meeting for 1:00 p.m., though Kerr's office later called Whitlam's and confirmed the time as 12:45. Word of this change did not reach the Prime Minister. Whitlam announced the request for a half-Senate election to his caucus, which approved it.
After hearing from Whitlam, Kerr called Fraser. According to Fraser, Kerr asked him whether he, if commissioned prime minister, could secure supply, would immediately thereafter advise a double-dissolution election, and would refrain from new policies and investigations of the Whitlam government pending the election. Fraser stated that he agreed. Kerr denied the exchange took place via telephone, though both men agree those questions were asked later in the day before Kerr commissioned Fraser as prime minister. According to Kerr, Fraser was supposed to come to Yarralumla at 1.00 pm.
Whitlam was delayed in leaving Parliament House, while Fraser left slightly early, with the result that Fraser arrived at Yarralumla first. He was taken into an anteroom, and his car was moved. Whitlam maintained that the purpose in moving Fraser's car was to ensure that the Prime Minister was not tipped off by seeing it, stating, ""Had I known Mr. Fraser was already there, I would not have set foot in Yarralumla"". Kelly doubted Whitlam would have recognised Fraser's car, which was an ordinary Ford LTD from the car pool. According to Fraser biographer Philip Ayres, ""A white car pulled up at the front would signify nothing in particular—it would simply be in the way"".
Whitlam arrived just before 1:00 p.m. and was taken to Kerr's office by an aide. He brought with him the formal letter advising a half-Senate election, and after the two men were seated, attempted to give it to Kerr. According to Kerr, he interrupted Whitlam and asked if, as a result of the failure to find a compromise between party leaders, he intended to govern without parliamentary supply, to which the Prime Minister answered, ""Yes"". In their accounts of their meeting, both men agree that Kerr then told Whitlam about the decision to withdraw his commission as prime minister under Section 64 of the Constitution. Kerr later wrote that at this point Whitlam got to his feet, looked at the office's phones, and stated, ""I must get in touch with the Palace at once"". According to Kerr, this indicated that Whitlam would not try to negotiate with him about a general election but contact the Queen for his recall, which gave him the final reason to carry out the dismissal; he answered that it was too late to get in touch with the Palace because Whitlam was not prime minister any more. Whitlam, however, later disputed that such words were spoken, and stated that he asked Kerr whether he had consulted the Palace, to which Kerr replied that he did not need to, and that he had the advice of Barwick. Both accounts agree that Kerr then handed Whitlam a letter of dismissal and statement of reasons, stating that they would both have to live with this, to which Whitlam replied, ""You certainly will"". The dismissal concluded with Kerr wishing Whitlam luck in the election, and offering his hand, which the former prime minister took.
After Whitlam left, Kerr called Fraser in, informed him of the dismissal, and asked if he would form a caretaker government, to which Fraser agreed. Fraser later stated that his overwhelming sensation at the news was relief. Fraser left to return to Parliament House, where he conferred with Coalition leaders, while Kerr joined the luncheon party that had been waiting for him, apologising to his guests and offering the excuse that he had been busy dismissing the Government."
1975 Australian constitutional crisis,"Parliamentary strategy
Whitlam returned to The Lodge, where he had lunch. When his aides arrived, he informed them of his sacking. Whitlam drafted a resolution for the House, expressing confidence in his Government. No ALP Senate leaders were at The Lodge, nor did Whitlam and his party contact any when they drove back to Parliament House, confining their strategy to the House of Representatives.
Prior to Whitlam's dismissal, the Labor leadership decided to introduce a motion that the Senate pass the appropriation bills. With ALP senators unaware of Whitlam's sacking, that plan went ahead. Senator Doug McClelland, manager of the ALP Government's business in the Senate, informed Coalition Senate leader Reg Withers of Labor's intent at about 1.30 pm. Withers then attended a leadership meeting where he learned of Fraser's appointment and assured the new prime minister he could secure supply. When the Senate convened, the ALP Senate leader, Ken Wriedt, made the motion to pass the appropriation bills. As Wriedt did so, he was told that the government had been sacked, which he initially refused to believe. Authoritative word did not reach Wriedt until 2.15 pm, by which time it was too late to withdraw the motion and instead obstruct his party's appropriation bill to hinder Fraser. At 2.24 pm, Labor's appropriation bills passed the Senate, fulfilling Fraser's first promise of providing supply.
In the House, desultory debate on Fraser's censure motion ended with it being amended by the ALP majority into a condemnation of Fraser and passed on a party line vote. By 2.34 pm, when Fraser rose and announced that he had been commissioned as prime minister, word of the dismissal had spread through the House. Fraser announced his intent to advise a double dissolution, and moved that the House adjourn. His motion was defeated. Fraser's new government suffered repeated defeats in the House, which passed a motion of no confidence in him, and asked the Speaker, Gordon Scholes, to urge the Governor-General to recommission Whitlam. Scholes, attempting to communicate this to the Governor-General, was initially told that an appointment might not be possible that day, but after stating that he would reconvene the House and tell them of the refusal, was given an appointment with Kerr for 4.45 pm."
1975 Australian constitutional crisis,"Dissolution
After the appropriation bills were approved by both Houses, they were sent over to Yarralumla where Kerr gave them Royal Assent. With supply assured, Kerr then received Fraser, who advised him that 21 bills (including the electoral redistribution bills) which had been introduced since the last election fulfilled the double dissolution provisions of Section 57. Fraser asked that both Houses be dissolved for an election on 13 December. Kerr signed the proclamation dissolving Parliament, and sent his Official Secretary, David Smith, to proclaim the dissolution from the front steps of Parliament House.
At 4.45, Kerr received Scholes, and informed him of the dissolution. Kerr wrote that ""nothing else of relevance"" took place between the two men, but Scholes's account is that he accused Kerr of bad faith for making an appointment to receive the Speaker, and then not waiting to hear from him before dissolving Parliament. Whitlam later stated that it would have been wiser for Scholes to take the appropriation bills with him, rather than having them sent ahead. Kerr's action was based on the advice he had received from two High Court judges (Mason and Chief Justice Barwick) and the Crown Law Officers (Byers and Clarence Harders, the Secretary of the Attorney-General's Department).
As Scholes and Kerr spoke, Smith reached Parliament House. The dismissal was by then publicly known, and an angry crowd of ALP supporters had gathered, filling the steps and spilling over both into the roadway and into Parliament House itself. Many of the demonstrators were ALP staffers; others were from the Australian National University. Smith was forced to enter Parliament House through a side door and make his way to the steps from the inside. He read the proclamation, though the boos of the crowd drowned him out, and concluded with the traditional ""God save the Queen"". Former Prime Minister Whitlam, who had been standing behind Smith, then addressed the crowd:"
1975 Australian constitutional crisis,"Well may we say ""God save the Queen"", because nothing will save the Governor-General! The Proclamation which you have just heard read by the Governor-General's Official Secretary was countersigned Malcolm Fraser, who will undoubtedly go down in Australian history from Remembrance Day 1975 as Kerr's cur. They won't silence the outskirts of Parliament House, even if the inside has been silenced for a few weeks ... Maintain your rage and enthusiasm for the campaign for the election now to be held and until polling day."
1975 Australian constitutional crisis,"Aftermath
Campaign
The news that Whitlam had been dismissed spread across Australia during the afternoon, triggering immediate protest demonstrations. On 12 November, Scholes wrote to the Queen, asking her to restore Whitlam as prime minister. The reply from her private secretary, Sir Martin Charteris, dated 17 November 1975, stated:"
1975 Australian constitutional crisis,"As we understand the situation here, the Australian Constitution firmly places the prerogative powers of the Crown in the hands of the Governor-General as the representative of the Queen of Australia. The only person competent to commission an Australian Prime Minister is the Governor-General, and The Queen has no part in the decisions which the Governor-General must take in accordance with the Constitution. Her Majesty, as Queen of Australia, is watching events in Canberra with close interest and attention, but it would not be proper for her to intervene in person in matters which are so clearly placed within the jurisdiction of the Governor-General by the Constitution Act."
1975 Australian constitutional crisis,"On 12 November 1975, the First Fraser Ministry was sworn in by Kerr. By some accounts, Kerr sought reassurance at that meeting that the Coalition senators would not have given in before supply ran out, ""The Senate would never have caved in, would it?"" According to those accounts, Senator Margaret Guilfoyle laughed and said to a colleague, ""That's all he knows"". Guilfoyle later stated that, if she did make such a remark, it was not meant to imply that the Coalition senators would have broken. However, Kelly lists four Coalition senators who stated, in subsequent years, that they would have crossed the floor and voted for the appropriation bills.
Labor believed it had a chance of winning the election, and that the dismissal would be an electoral asset for them. However, some Labor strategists believed the party was heading for a disaster, with few economic accomplishments to point to and an electorate whose emotions would have cooled before polling day. Nonetheless, Whitlam, who began campaigning almost immediately after the dismissal, was met with huge crowds wherever he went; 30,000 people overspilled the Sydney Domain for the official campaign launch on 24 November. That evening, Whitlam made a major speech at Festival Hall in Melbourne before 7,500 people and a national TV audience, calling 11 November ""Fraser's day of shame—a day that will live in infamy"".
Polls were released at the end of the first week of campaigning, and showed a nine-point swing against Labor. Whitlam's campaign did not believe it at first, but additional polling made it clear that the electorate was turning against the ALP. The Coalition attacked Labor for the economic conditions, and released television commercials ""The Three Dark Years"" showing images from the Whitlam government scandals. The ALP campaign, which had concentrated on the issue of Whitlam's dismissal, did not begin to address the economy until its final days. By that time Fraser, confident of victory, was content to sit back, avoid specifics and make no mistakes. There was little violence in the campaign, but three letter bombs were placed in the post; one wounded two people in Bjelke-Petersen's office, while the other two, addressed to Kerr and Fraser, were intercepted and defused.
During the campaign, the Kerrs purchased a Sydney apartment, as Sir John was prepared to resign in the event that the ALP triumphed. In the 13 December election, the Coalition won a record victory, with 91 seats in the House of Representatives to the ALP's 36 and a 35–27 majority in the expanded Senate."
1975 Australian constitutional crisis,"Reactions
The dismissal is considered the greatest political and constitutional crisis in Australia's history. In 1977, the Fraser government proposed four constitutional amendments via referendum, three of which passed—the last time that the Australian Constitution has been amended. One of the amendments requires that a senator appointed to fill a casual vacancy be from the same party as the former senator. The Senate retains the power to block supply; the governor-general retains the power to dismiss ministers (including the prime minister). However, these powers have not since been used to force a government from office.
In the wake of the dismissal, the ALP turned its anger on Kerr. Demonstrations marked his appearances, while the remaining ALP parliamentarians boycotted his opening of the new parliament. Whitlam, now Leader of the Opposition, refused all invitations to events at Yarralumla, which the Kerrs continued to extend until his refusal of an invitation during the Queen's 1977 visit caused them to feel that no further efforts need be made. Whitlam never spoke with Kerr again. Even ALP parliamentarians who had been friends of Kerr broke off their relationships, feeling Kerr had betrayed the party and had ambushed Whitlam. Lady Kerr stated that she and her husband confronted a ""new irrational scene swarming with instant enemies"".
Whitlam repeatedly castigated Kerr for his role in the dismissal. When Kerr announced his resignation as governor-general on 14 July 1977, Whitlam commented: ""How fitting that the last of the Bourbons should bow out on Bastille Day"". After Kerr resigned as governor-general, he still sought a government position, reasoning that it had been his intent to remain for ten years as governor-general. However, Fraser's attempt to appoint Kerr as ambassador to UNESCO (a position later held by Whitlam) provoked such public outcry that the nomination was withdrawn. The Kerrs spent the next several years living in Europe, and when he died in Australia in 1991, his death was not announced until after he was buried. In 1991, Whitlam stated that no future governor-general was likely to act as Kerr did lest he also became the subject of ""contempt and isolation"". In 1997 he said that the letter of dismissal ""had the shortcomings of being ex tempore, ex parte, ad hoc and sub rosa"". In 2005, Whitlam called Kerr ""a contemptible person"". On the other hand, Country Party leader and deputy prime minister Doug Anthony said: ""I can't forgive Gough for crucifying him"". Sir Garfield Barwick was not spared Whitlam's invective; the former Prime Minister described him as ""evil"". Though denied by both Kerr and Whitlam, unsubstantiated allegations have been made about CIA involvement in the Whitlam dismissal.
Whitlam resigned as ALP leader after the party suffered its second successive electoral defeat in 1977. Fraser served over seven years as prime minister, and left the Liberal leadership after the Coalition was defeated in the March 1983 election. Years later, Whitlam and Fraser put aside their differences; Whitlam wrote in 1997 that Fraser ""did not set out to deceive me"". The two campaigned together in support of the 1999 referendum that would have made Australia a republic. According to Whitlam speechwriter Graham Freudenberg, ""the residual rage over the conduct of the Queen's representative found a constructive outlet in the movement for the Australian Republic"".
Freudenberg summed up Kerr's fate after the dismissal:"
1975 Australian constitutional crisis,"The beneficiaries of the Dismissal scarcely bothered to defend Kerr and in the end abandoned him. In the personal sense, Sir John Kerr himself became the real victim of the Dismissal, and history has accorded a brutal if poignant truth to Whitlam's declaration on the steps of Parliament House on 11 November 1975: ""Well may we say 'God Save the Queen' – because nothing will save the Governor-General""."
1975 Australian constitutional crisis,"Assessment
In his 1995 survey of the events of the crisis, November 1975, Kelly places blame on Fraser for initiating the crisis and on Whitlam for using the crisis to try to break Fraser and the Senate. However, he places the most blame on Kerr, for failing to be candid with Whitlam about his intentions, and for refusing to offer a clear, final warning before dismissing him. According to Kelly,"
1975 Australian constitutional crisis,"[Kerr] should have unflinchingly and courageously met his responsibility to the Crown and to the Constitution. He should have spoken frankly with his Prime Minister from the start. He should have warned wherever and whenever appropriate. He should have realised that, whatever his fears, there was no justification for any other behaviour."
1975 Australian constitutional crisis,"Kerr's predecessor as governor-general, Sir Paul Hasluck, believed that the fundamental reason for the crisis was the lack of trust and confidence between Whitlam and Kerr, and that the proper role of the governor-general had been to provide counsel, advice and warning.
Future Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating, who was Minister for Northern Australia in Whitlam's ministry, called the dismissal a ""coup"" and raised the idea to ""arrest [Kerr]"" and ""lock him up"", adding that he would not have ""[taken] it lying down"" if he was prime minister, during a 2013 interview with Kerry O'Brien."
1975 Australian constitutional crisis,"Royal involvement
Neither Whitlam nor Kerr ever suggested there had been any covert royal involvement. According to Whitlam's biographer Jenny Hocking, Kerr's papers in the National Archives of Australia reveal that he discussed with the Prince of Wales (now Charles III) his reserve powers and the possibility that he would dismiss the Whitlam government, in September 1975. Kerr asked what would happen if he dismissed Whitlam and the prime minister retaliated by dismissing him. According to Kerr, Charles had responded: ""But surely, Sir John, the Queen should not have to accept advice that you should be recalled at the very time when you were considering having to dismiss the government"". Kerr writes in his journal that Prince Charles informed the Queen's Private Secretary, Sir Martin Charteris, of this. Charteris then wrote to Kerr to say that, should this ""contingency"" arise, ""although the Queen would try to delay things, in the end she would have to take the Prime Minister's advice"". Heseltine confirmed this account. Among the documents Hocking cites from Kerr's papers is a list prepared by Kerr of key points on the dismissal which includes his discussion with Prince Charles and ""Charteris' advice to me on dismissal"". Paul Kelly has rejected Hocking's allegations. He wrote that the September 1975 conversation is not mentioned in Kerr's other memoirs, that it would have taken place before the crisis began, and that it would have only revealed Kerr's paranoia about being dismissed by Whitlam. Kelly noted accounts of surprise at the palace when they heard of Kerr's decision.
Beginning in 2012, Hocking attempted to gain the release of correspondence between the Queen's advisors and Kerr regarding the dismissal, held by the National Archives. In 2016, Hocking launched a federal court action against the National Archives seeking the release of the ""Palace letters"", correspondence between Kerr, the Queen and Charteris held by the Archives but not available for view. The action was lost in the full court, but on 29 May 2020 Hocking's appeal to the High Court succeeded: in a majority 6:1 decision the High Court held that the Palace letters are ""Commonwealth records"" (not personal property) and therefore available for public release under the provisions of the Archives Act 1983.
On 14 July 2020, the letters were released online without redaction. They revealed that, although Kerr had corresponded with Charteris about whether he had the constitutional authority to dismiss Whitlam, he had not informed the Queen in advance of his decision to do so. However, the letters also revealed that Kerr had discussed the possibility of dismissing Whitlam as early as July 1975. Also, on 2 October 1975, Sir Martin Charteris confirmed in a letter that Kerr had discussed with Prince Charles the possibility that Whitlam could ask the Queen to dismiss Kerr."
1975 Australian constitutional crisis,"Popular culture
The 1983 miniseries The Dismissal dramatised the events of the crisis. It featured Max Phipps as Whitlam, John Meillon as Kerr and John Stanton as Fraser. A musical adaptation of the events was staged by the Sydney Theatre Company in 2023."
1975 Australian constitutional crisis,"See also
Philip Game § Dismissal, New South Wales, 1932
Easter Crisis of 1920 in Denmark
King–Byng Affair, a similar Canadian constitutional crisis in 1926
1953 Pakistani constitutional coup
2008–09 Canadian parliamentary dispute
2011–12 Papua New Guinean constitutional crisis
Tuvaluan constitutional crisis of 2013
2018 Sri Lankan constitutional crisis
Government shutdowns in the United States
Alleged CIA involvement in the Whitlam dismissal"
1975 Australian constitutional crisis,"Notes
Bibliography
Further reading
Bach, Stanley (2003). Platypus and Parliament: The Australian Senate in Theory and Practice: Chapter 4: The crisis of 1974–75. Department of the Senate. ISBN 978-0-642-71291-2.
Hocking, Jenny (2012), Gough Whitlam: His Time, The Miegunyah Press, ISBN 978-0-522-85793-1
Hocking, Jenny (2017), The Dismissal Dossier: Everything You Were Never Meant to Know about November 1975 - the Palace Connection, Melbourne University Publishing, ISBN 978-0-522-87301-6
Hocking, Jenny (2020), The Palace Letters:The Queen, the governor-general, and the plot to dismiss Gough Whitlam, Scribe Publications, ISBN 9781922310248
Kelly, Paul; Bramston, Troy (2015). The Dismissal: In the Queen's Name: A Groundbreaking New History. Penguin. ISBN 9780143574088.
Kelly, Paul; Bramston, Troy (2020). The Truth of the Palace Letters: Deceit, Ambush and Dismissal in 1975. Melbourne University Press. ISBN 9780522877557.
Markwell, Donald (2016). Constitutional Conventions and the Headship of State: Australian Experience. Connor Court. ISBN 9781925501155.
Smith, Sir David (2005), The Head of State, Macleay Press, ISBN 978-1-876492-15-1
Twomey, Anne (2018). The Veiled Sceptre: Reserve Powers of Heads of State in Westminster Systems. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781107297845."
1975 Australian constitutional crisis,"External links
Statement from John Kerr (dated 11 November 1975) explaining his decisions.
Australian Biography – Malcolm Fraser, part 6 and Australian Biography – Malcolm Fraser, part 7, a 1994 interview in which Fraser gives his perspective on his actions.
Official site of The Whitlam Institute – contains many news reports and speeches from the time under ""Whitlam Government"" tab.
The Malcolm Fraser Collection at the University of Melbourne
whitlamdismissal.com – privately maintained web site with background, source documents and audio/video clips.
Video clip of Norman Gunston at ""The Dismissal"" on YouTube
Listen to an excerpt of Gough Whitlam's 'Kerr's Cur' speech on australianscreen online
The Kerr Palace Letters at the National Archives of Australia"
Communist Party of Australia,"The Communist Party of Australia (CPA), known as the Australian Communist Party (ACP) from 1944 to 1951, was an Australian communist party founded in 1920. The party existed until roughly 1991, with its membership and influence having been in a steady decline since its peak in 1945. Like most communist parties in the West, the party was heavily involved in the labour movement and the trade unions. Its membership, popularity and influence grew significantly during most of the interwar period before reaching its climax in 1945, where the party achieved a membership of slightly above 22,000 members. Although the party did not achieve a federal MP, Fred Paterson was elected to the Parliament of Queensland (for Bowen) at the 1944 state election. He won re-election in 1947 before the seat was abolished. The party also held office in over a dozen local government areas across New South Wales and Queensland.
After nineteen years of activity, the CPA was formally banned on 15 June 1940 under the relatively new Menzies government (1939–1941). The party was banned under the National Security (Subversive Associations) Regulations 1940. Two-and-a-half years later, the party was again a lawful organisation. When the party contested the federal election eight months later, it received its biggest vote total. Getting a total of 81,816 votes (1.93–2.00%), the party received over 20,000 in Victoria and Queensland, and over 19,000 in New South Wales. It was the party's biggest vote total since the 1934 federal election. However, by the late 1960s the party fell into single digit numbers before a brief spike in the mid 1970s. By the mid to late 1980s, the party was effectively stagnant and the party was soon dissolved. To the present, the party is the fourth-oldest political party in Australian political history since Federation, lasting for 70 years, 122 days."
Communist Party of Australia,"History
Foundation and early years
The Communist Party of Australia (CPA) was founded at the Australian Socialist Party Hall in Sydney, New South Wales on 30 October 1920 socialists inspired by reports of the Russian Revolution. The estimates for attendees at the founding ranges from below thirteen (Alistair Davidson) to twenty-six (Stuart Macintyre). Sixty invitations were issued. Groups included the Australian Socialist Party (ASP), some members from the Victorian Socialist Party (although the party itself did not join), as well as a variety of militant trade unionists. Among the party's founders were a prominent Sydney trade unionists, Jock Garden, Tom Walsh, and William Paisley Earsman, and suffragettes and anti-conscriptionists including Adela Pankhurst (daughter of the British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst), Christian Jollie Smith and Katharine Susannah Prichard.
Most of the then illegal Australian section of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) joined, but the IWW soon left the Communist Party, with its original members, over disagreements with the direction of the Soviet Union and Bolshevism. In its early years, mainly through Garden's efforts, the party achieved some influence in the trade union movement in New South Wales, but by the mid-1920s it had dwindled to an insignificant group.
A visits to the 1924 New Zealand conference by CPA executive members Hetty and Hector Ross got the (also small) Communist Party of New Zealand (CPNZ) agreeing to temporary affiliation with the CPA, and were followed by visits in 1925 by Harry Quaife, and by Norman Jeffery a bow-tie wearing former ""Wobbly"" (IWW member).
Garden and other communists were expelled from the Labor Party (ALP) in 1924. The CPA ran candidates including Garden (for Sydney) at the 1925 New South Wales state election in working-class seats against the ALP but was decisively defeated. This prompted Garden to leave the party in 1926 and return to the Labor Party. The leadership of the party went to Jack Kavanagh, an experienced Canadian communist activist who had moved to Australia in 1925, and Esmonde Higgins, a talented Melbourne journalist who was the nephew of then-High Court Justice, H. B. Higgins.
But in 1929 the party leadership fell into disfavour with Communist International (Comintern), which under orders from Joseph Stalin had taken a turn to radical revolutionary rhetoric (the so-called ""Third Period""), and an emissary, the American Communist Harry M. Wicks, was sent to correct the party's perceived errors. Kavanagh was expelled in 1930 and Higgins resigned. A new party leadership, consisting of Jack Miles, Lance Sharkey and Richard Dixon, was imposed on the party by the Communist International, and remained in control for the next 30 years. During the 1930s the party experienced some growth, particularly after 1935 when Communist International changed its policy in favour of a “united front against fascism.” The Movement Against War and Fascism (MAWF) was founded to bring together all opponents of fascism under a communist controlled umbrella organisation. The movement instigated the events which led to the attempted exclusion of Egon Kisch from Australia in late 1934 and early 1935. Alongside this, the CPA formed the Workers Defence Corps (WDC).
In the 1930s the CPA began a campaign to create mass organisations to organise militancy in the working-class, while ostensibly independent, the CPA remained in control of such organisations. This result in the creation of the Unemployed Workers Movement which at its height had 30,000 members and was infamous nationally for its anti-eviction campaign in Sydney.
The CPA was the first Australian political party to make a commitment to Aboriginal rights, which were included in its manifesto from 1931 onwards. The CPA, discussing in great detail the abuses suffered by Aboriginals, published a lengthy list of demands, calling for ""full economic, political and social rights"" for Aboriginal people."
Communist Party of Australia,"Rise during World War II
The Communist Party began to win positions in trade unions such as the Miners' Federation and the Waterside Workers' Federation of Australia, although its parliamentary candidates nearly always polled poorly at elections. The party also set up an organization of the unemployed to resist evictions. Activists from the party joined the International Brigades to defend the Second Republic against Franco's troops. Throughout this time, members of the CPA were under constant surveillance by police and intelligence forces and harassed by the courts.
In 1939, after Soviet efforts to contain Nazi aggression through co-operation and alliance with France and Britain were rejected by the French and British, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a Non-Aggression Treaty. Despite ideological opposition between the countries, the USSR agreed not to engage in hostilities against Germany at the outbreak of World War II (Australia declared war on Nazi Germany for invading Poland). Consequently, the Communist Party of Australia opposed and sought to disrupt Australia's war effort against Germany in the early stages of the War under orders of the Communist International on the grounds that it was a war between Imperialist nations, and not in the interests of the working class. Menzies banned the CPA after the fall of France in 1940, but by 1941 Stalin was forced to join the allied cause when Hitler reneged on the Pact and invaded the USSR. The USSR came to bear the brunt of the carnage of Hitler's war machine and the Communist Party in Australia lost its early war stigma as a result. Its membership rose to 20,000, it won control of a number of important trade unions, and a Communist candidate, Fred Paterson, was elected to the Queensland parliament. The Communist Party achieved a majority of seats in the New South Wales' Kearsley Shire from 1944 to 1947. The Shire was committed to municipal socialism, advocating nationalisation of electricity and the expansion of the social wage, and was unique for its commitment to activism around federal and international affairs. But the party remained marginal to the Australian political mainstream. The Australian Labor Party remained the dominant party of the Australian left."
Communist Party of Australia,"Postwar
After 1945 and the onset of the Cold War, the party entered a steady decline. Following the new line from Moscow, and believing that a new ""imperialist war"" and a new depression were imminent, and that the CPA should immediately contest for leadership of the working class with the Australian Labor Party, the CPA launched an industrial offensive in 1947, culminating in a prolonged strike in the coal mines in 1949. The Chifley Labor government saw this as a Communist challenge to its position in the labour movement, and used the army and strikebreakers to break the strike. The Communist Party never again held such a strong position in the union movement."
Communist Party of Australia,"In 1949, the USSR detonated its first atomic bomb and Mao Zedong gained control in China. A year later, North Korea invaded South Korea and in 1951, during the Korean War, the Liberal government of Robert Menzies tried to ban the Communist Party of Australia, first by legislation that was declared invalid by the High Court, then by referendum to try to overcome the constitutional obstacles to that legislation. The 1951 referendum was opposed by the Communist Party as well as the Australian Labor Party, and was narrowly defeated. The issue of Communist influence in the unions remained potent and led to the Australian Labor Party split of 1955 and the formation of the Democratic Labor Party comprising disaffected ALP members who were concerned over Communist influence in Australian unions."
Communist Party of Australia,"Internal division and defections
In 1956, three years after Stalin died, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave the Secret Speech, denouncing Stalin and Stalinism as fostering a cult of personality, and revealing many abuses of power Stalin had committed while in power. The Australian party leadership—entirely committed to Stalinism—was confused about what to do. It tried to suppress discussions of the speech, which was widely reported in the press. According to Ralph Gibson, several high-ranking members including Ted Hill had received a copy of Krushchev's secret speech directly from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union However, the party denied the criticisms of Stalin within the party newspaper, Tribune.
Disillusioned members began to leave the party. More left after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. In 1961, the leader of the ""pro-China"" faction of the party during the Sino-Soviet split, Ted Hill, was expelled from the party. Hill proceeded to lead a split of pro-China members of the party, which culminated in the formation of the smaller Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist).
By the 1960s, the party's membership had fallen to around 5,000 members, but it continued to hold positions in a number of trade unions, and it was also influential in the various protest movements of the period, especially the movement against the Vietnam War. This period also saw the establishment of the National Training Centre in Minto, NSW, ostensibly for the purpose of educating in the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. The party became more openly critical about the Soviet Union and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In 1966, the party started their own magazine called Australian Left Review. In 1967, the party ceased receiving payments from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union following a seminar by Laurie Aarons in the Soviet Union which argued that ""ideas require free contest, not confined in a framework of established dogmas that can become a rigid or even ossified edifice"". But the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 triggered another crisis. Sharkey's successor as party leader, Laurie Aarons, denounced the invasion, and a group of pro-Soviet hardliners left in 1971 to form a new party, the Socialist Party of Australia.
Through the 1970s and 1980s the party continued to decline, despite adopting Eurocommunism and democratising its internal structures so that it became a looser radical party rather than a classic Marxist-Leninist one. The CPA conducted campaigns against nuclear weapons and the extraction of uranium, and supported the demands of indigenous peoples in Australia and abroad, especially in Papua New Guinea. It thus militated for the abolition of legislation judged repressive regarding indigenous people, for equal pay and for land rights. Its members helped Aboriginal workers in Pilbara lead the longest industrial strike ever in Australia. Internationally, the Communist Party of Australia was close to the Revolutionary Front for the Independence of East Timor (Fretilin) who resisted the Indonesian occupation in the 1970s and 1980s. By 1990, membership had declined to below the one thousand mark."
Communist Party of Australia,"Dissolution
At the party's 31st Congress in Sydney, New South Wales (2–3 March 1991), the Communist Party was dissolved and the New Left Party formed. The New Left Party was intended to be a broader party which would attract a wider range of members, which did not happen, and the New Left Party disbanded in 1992. The assets of the Communist Party were thereafter directed into the SEARCH Foundation (acronym for ""Social Education, Action and Research Concerning Humanity""), a not-for-profit company set up in 1990 ""to preserve and draw on the resources of the Communist Party of Australia and its archives."" The archives of the party are now held at the State Library of NSW and can be accessed with the written permission of the SEARCH Foundation. The State Library of New South Wales holds an extensive collection of material related to the Communist Party of Australia including oral history recordings, business papers, the personal papers of a range of men and women involved in the Party and a collection of images that were published in Tribune, the Party's newspaper. The Victoria University Library holds the Crow Collection, donated by long-time Communist Party member Ruth Crow, which includes materials from her years campaigning for the Communist Party. The University of Melbourne collection is ""one of the most significant from the CPA held in Australia"", containing 20th-century materials from the Victorian branch."
Communist Party of Australia,"Successor Party
In 1996 at the 8th National Congress the Socialist Party of Australia was renamed to Communist Party of Australia, thereby becoming the successor of the original party."
Communist Party of Australia,"Search Foundation
The SEARCH Foundation is a left-wing Australian not-for-profit company that was established in 1990 as a successor organisation of the Communist Party of Australia to preserve and draw on its resources and archives. It inherited over 3 million dollars from the CPA.
SEARCH is an active membership-based organisation that runs speaking tours, publications and training programs. Members are welcome from across the Australian Left and include prominent political figures such as Australian Council of Trade Unions Secretary Sally McManus, and former NSW Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon. SEARCH maintains an office at Sydney Trades Hall and holds events across Australia. Its archives are held by the State Library of NSW.
SEARCH is an acronym for ""Social Education, Action and Research Concerning Humanity""."
Communist Party of Australia,"Youth movement
Its youth wing worked under several different names at different times, including the Young Communist League (YCL); the Young Comrades Club (YCC); the League of Young Democrats (LYD); the Eureka Youth League (EYL); and lastly the Young Socialist League, which in 1984 became part of the Left Alliance.
The youth wing of CPA worked under several different names in different periods from the 1920s onwards, including the Young Communist League (YCL), which was created in 1923 and published its own newspaper, The Young Worker, and the Young Comrades Club (YCC), founded in 1927. At a meeting in Melbourne in 1937 attended by 1,500 people, the YCL changed its name to the League of Young Democrats (LYD). After the LYD was banned by the Menzies government in 1941, the Eureka Youth League (EYL) was established in December of that year, whose membership grew to 1,000 with a year. The EYL published a newspaper called Youth Voice, and undertook activities relating to World War II and the working and living conditions of young people, as well as the peace movement during this war and the Korean War later. In 1952 it held the ""Youth Carnival for Peace and Friendship"" in Sydney, attracting 30,000 attendees. EYL opposed the introduction of National Service in Australia in the 1950s.
The Eureka Youth League also had an important role in the early promotion of jazz music in Australia in the 1940s under the leadership of Harry Stein.
EYL collaborated with the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) and helped to arrange its Youth Weeks, and also ran youth camps across Australia, attended by thousands of young people. It protested the Vietnam War actively, but by 1968 membership had declined, and a change of name to the Young Socialist League did not last long.
Camp Eureka, created in 1973, is still maintained as an historic and usable camp for up to 32 people.
The Eureka Youth League was a founding member of the World Federation of Democratic Youth, a membership later taken over by the Young Communist Movement. In 1984 (or 1987?) the Young Socialist League became part of Left Alliance."
Communist Party of Australia,"Elected representatives
New South Wales
Broken Hill
Bill Flynn, Alderman of the City of Broken Hill (1953–1974).
Bill Whiley, Alderman of the City of Broken Hill (1962–1974)."
Communist Party of Australia,"Bulli
Andrew Speed, Councillor of Bulli Shire for B Riding (1944–1947)."
Communist Party of Australia,"Cessnock
Charles Evans, Alderman of the Municipality of Cessnock (1944–1947).
Herbert Wilkinson, Alderman of the Municipality of Cessnock (1944–1947).
Thomas Gilmour, Alderman of the Municipality of Cessnock (1944–1947, 1953–1962)."
Communist Party of Australia,"Coonabarabran
Walter Frater, Councillor of Coonabarabran Shire (1953–1956)."
Communist Party of Australia,"Kearsley
Jock Graham, Councillor of the Kearsley Shire (1944–1947).
Allan Opie, Deputy Shire President and Councillor of Kearsley Shire (1944–1947).
James Palmer, Councillor of Kearsley Shire (1944–1947).
Mary Ellen ""Nellie"" Simm, Councillor of Kearsley Shire (1944–1947).
William Varty, Shire President and Councillor of Kearsley Shire (1944–1947)."
Communist Party of Australia,"Lake Macquarie
William Quinn, Councillor of Lake Macquarie Shire for B Riding (1944–1947, 1953–1959).
R. Chapman, Councillor of Lake Macquarie Shire for B Riding (1944–1947), Deputy Shire President (1945–1946) and Shire President (1946–1947).
J. Thomson, Councillor of Lake Macquarie Shire for B Riding (1944–1947)."
Communist Party of Australia,"Lithgow
Jock King, Alderman of the Lithgow City Council (1952–1956)"
Communist Party of Australia,"North Illawarra
Jack Martin, Alderman of the Municipality of North Illawarra (1944–1947)."
Communist Party of Australia,"Penrith
Mel McCalman, Alderman of the Municipality of Penrith for St. Mary's Ward (1953–1962)."
Communist Party of Australia,"Randwick
Richard Ernest Wilson, Alderman of the Municipality of Randwick (1944–1948) and Deputy Mayor (1947–1948)."
Communist Party of Australia,"Redfern
Patrick Levelle, Alderman of the Municipality of Redfern for Redfern Ward (1947–1948)."
Communist Party of Australia,"Sydney
Ronald Maxwell, Alderman of the City of Sydney for City Ward (1953–1956).
Thomas Wright, Alderman of the City of Sydney for City Ward (1953–1959).
Jack Mundey, Alderman of the City of Sydney (1984–1987)."
Communist Party of Australia,"Queensland
Jim Henderson, Councillor of the Shire of Wangaratta for Collinsville (1939–1944).
Fred Paterson, Alderman of the Townsville City Council (1939–1944) and Member of the Legislative Assembly for Bowen (1944–1950) (the only member elected at state or federal level)."
Communist Party of Australia,"Western Australia
Joan Williams, Councillor of the City of Perth (1973–1977)"
Communist Party of Australia,"Election results
Federal
Average number of votes p/candidate (both houses)"
Communist Party of Australia,"New South Wales
Queensland
South Australia
Tasmania
Victoria
Western Australia
See also
Socialism in Australia
Communist party"
Communist Party of Australia,"References
Notes:"
Communist Party of Australia,Footnotes:
Communist Party of Australia,Further reading
Communist Party of Australia,"Stuart Macintyre, The Reds, 1998, Allen and Unwin. 1st volume of a major history covering foundation to 1941.
Alastair Davidson, The Communist Party of Australia: A short history, 1969. Covers foundation to the late 1960s.
Bennett, James (2004). Rats and Revolutionaries:The Labour Movement in Australia and New Zealand 1890–1940. Dunedin, NZ: University of Otago Press. ISBN 1-877276-49-9.
Tom O'Lincoln, Into the Mainstream: The Decline of Australian Communism, January, 1985. ISBN 0-9590486-1-8.
Daisy Marchisotti, Land Rights: The Black Struggle, Brisbane: Queensland State Committee, Communist Party of Australia, 1978. ISBN 0909913323"
Kimberley (Western Australia),"The Kimberley is the northernmost of the nine regions of Western Australia. It is bordered on the west by the Indian Ocean, on the north by the Timor Sea, on the south by the Great Sandy and Tanami deserts in the region of the Pilbara, and on the east by the Northern Territory.
The region was named in 1879 by government surveyor Alexander Forrest after Secretary of State for the Colonies John Wodehouse, 1st Earl of Kimberley."
Kimberley (Western Australia),"History
The Kimberley was one of the earliest settled parts of Australia, with the first humans landing about 65,000 years ago. They created a complex culture that developed over thousands of years. Yam (Dioscorea hastifolia) agriculture was developed, and rock art suggests that this was where some of the earliest boomerangs were invented. The worship of Wandjina deities was most common in this region, and a complex theology dealing with the transmigration of souls was part of the local people's religious philosophy.
During the 18th century, Dutch explorers named the region of Kimberley and nearby Darwin variations of Van Diemen's Land after the VOC governor-general Anthony van Diemen. This should not be confused with the more general and prolonged use of the same name for Tasmania.
In 1837, with expedition support from the Royal Geographical Society of Great Britain, Lieutenants George Grey and Franklin Lushington and 12 men sailed on the schooner Lynher from Cape Town, South Africa. They reached Hanover Bay on 2 December 1837. The exploring party started inland on 19 January 1838. Leaders and men were totally inexperienced, their progress was delayed by flooded country, and they abandoned many stores along the way. The party was constantly split up although they had to contend with large numbers of hostile Aboriginals. On 11 February, Grey was speared and became critically ill but, after two weeks, continued the exploration. The party found and named the Gairdner River, the Glenelg River, the Stephen and Whately ranges and Mount Lyell before returning to Hanover Bay in April. There they were picked up by HMS Beagle and Lynher and taken to Mauritius to recuperate.
In 1879, Western Australian government surveyor Alexander Forrest led a party of seven from the west coast at Beagle Bay to Katherine, Northern Territory. Forrest explored and named the Kimberley district, the Margaret and Ord rivers and the King Leopold Ranges (now the Wunaamin-Miliwundi Ranges), and located well watered pastoral lands along the Fitzroy and Ord rivers. He subsequently set himself up as a land agent specialising in the Kimberley during a period to 1883 when over 21,000,000 hectares (51,000,000 acres) of land were taken up as pastoral leaseholds in the region.
In 1881, Philip Saunders and Adam Johns, in the face of great difficulties and dangers, found gold in various parts of the Kimberley. Early in 1881, the first five graziers, who called themselves the Murray Squatting Company, took up 49,000 hectares (120,000 acres) behind Beagle Bay and named it Yeeda Station. In 1883 they were the first men to shear sheep in the southern Kimberley. Additional Anglo-European settlement occurred in 1885, when ranchers drove cattle across Australia from the eastern states in search of good pasture lands. After gold was discovered around Halls Creek, many other erstwhile European miners arrived rapidly.
In the 1890s, the area was the site of an armed insurrection of indigenous people led by Jandamarra, a Bunuba warrior.
During World War II, when Australia was among the nations at war with the Axis powers, the Japanese invaded the nation with only a small reconnaissance party in The Kimberley on 19 January 1944; they were investigating reports that the Allies were building large bases in the region. Four Japanese officers were on board a small fishing boat. They investigated the York Sound region for a day and a night before returning to Kupang in Timor on 20 January. After returning to Japan in February, the junior officer, who had commanded the party, suggested using 200 Japanese prison inmates to launch a guerrilla campaign in Australia.  No superior adopted his suggestion, and the officer was posted to other duties."
Kimberley (Western Australia),"Demographics
The 2011 estimated permanent population of The Kimberley was 34,794 but it rises dramatically during winter when it attracts a seasonal population. On Census night in 2011 (9 August), it was 50,113. The population is fairly evenly distributed, with only three towns having populations in excess of 2,000: Broome (12,766), Derby (3,261), and Kununurra (4,573). Approximately 40% of the region's population is of Aboriginal descent."
Kimberley (Western Australia),"Urban centres and localities
Indigenous languages
The Kimberley has been noted as a region of great linguistic diversity, rivalled in Australia only by the Top End. Depending on the geographical boundaries of The Kimberley, and the definition of what constitutes a ""language"" (as opposed to a ""dialect""), about 50-60 Aboriginal languages were once spoken in this region. The vast majority of these do not belong to the family of Pama-Nyungan languages. Four endemic, primary language families are recognised within the core Kimberley region:"
Kimberley (Western Australia),"Nyulnyulan languages, including languages spoken on the Dampier Peninsula and along the Fitzroy River
Bunuban languages, including languages spoken in the Fitzroy River Basin
Worrorran languages, including languages spoken in the northern Kimberley, north of King Sound, up to Wyndham
Jarrakan languages, including languages spoken along the Ord River, from Halls Creek up to Wyndham and Kununurra.
Pama-Nyungan languages spoken in and around the Kimberley region include the Marrngu languages (such as Karajarri and Nyangumarta, the Ngumpin languages (such as Walmajarri and Jaru), the Yapa languages (such as Warlpiri) and the Western Desert languages (including Wangkajunga and Kukatja). Non-Pama-Nyungan languages spoken around the Kimberleys (but speakers of which today live within the Kimberley) include the Daly language Murrinh-Patha and Western Mirndi language Jaminjung.
Presently, many indigenous languages are no longer spoken on a daily basis. In addition to Australian English, post-contact languages spoken in the Kimberley include Aboriginal English, Kriol, Pidgin English and the Malay-based Broome Pearling Lugger Pidgin (not spoken on a daily basis any more)."
Kimberley (Western Australia),"Politics
At the federal level, the Kimberley is represented by the member for Durack. At state level, the Kimberley electorate takes in all of the region and its towns.
The Kimberley region consists of the local government areas of Broome, Derby-West Kimberley, Halls Creek and Wyndham-East Kimberley."
Kimberley (Western Australia),"Art
The Kimberley region is extremely rich in art, mainly that of Indigenous rock art. Considering the area's size, it is no surprise that there are tens of thousands of rock art examples coming from a variety of different cultural groups within the region. The diversity of peoples has allowed for many different art styles to develop with some of the most widely known examples being Wandjina and Gwion Gwion. In addition to the variation in styles, there are almost equally diverse fabrication techniques. The earliest form of Kimberley rock art was hand stencils, but techniques such as engraving, painting, scratchwork, pecking, drawing, and later beeswax applique have also been used. In addition to the varying styles and techniques, there are united visual depictions that reflect the changes and persistence within the cultural and natural environment.
The changing and expanding complexity of styles and techniques has caught the attention of many, paving the way for mass amounts of archaeological and anthropological research. Much of the artwork in the area has been gone over with similar or alternative methods to preserve the art, add to it, or enhance it. Rock shelters are some of the best locations for preservation. The oldest category known as the Irregular Infill Animal or the Naturalistic period is responsible for the region's life-size animal depictions. A rock shelter in Kimberley's northeastern territory is home to a perfect example of this, a two-meter-long kangaroo painting on the ceiling. This case was extremely rare as archaeologist found remains of mud wasp nests that could be used for dating. These nests were located both below and on top of the painting making them prime for determining an accurate age of the kangaroo art itself. They analysed samples from 6 of the nests and settled on a date between 17,500 years old and 17,100 years old, making the kangaroo rock art the oldest in Australia.
Based on oral accounts from Aboriginal people in the region it has been confirmed that many of the works that have been re-touched maintain a much deeper significance. There is a complex performative aspect that goes hand-in-hand with the art that remains today. The re-touching/re-marking actions are considered a performance and act as a retelling of the story behind the art. The performance is a way for people to reconnect with the cultural significance behind the work itself and maintain the connection of person to place. This process highlights indigenous beliefs about the land and the position that native people have within that space. Identity plays a major role in understanding the rock art in the region. There are many different sectors within the Kimberley region that allow for a dispersal of cultural thought and expression unique to the group in their respected areas. This differentiation of style may have been socially necessary, but there was a unifying aspect in regard to the Wandjinas and the meaning behind them. They are seen throughout the region at many different sites and are the most repainted rock art in Kimberley. This is due to the fact that indigenous groups believe in the power that Wandjina holds. Creation stories, migrational patterns, and clothing style of the figures emphasise  their importance and integration into the sociocultural groups inhabiting the area."
Kimberley (Western Australia),"Geography
The Kimberley is an area of 423,517 square kilometres (163,521 sq mi), which is about three times the size of England, twice the size of Victoria, or just slightly smaller than California.
The Kimberley consists of the ancient, steep-sided mountain ranges of northwestern Australia cut through with sandstone and limestone gorges and steep ridges, from which the extreme monsoonal climate has removed much of the soil. The southern end of the Kimberley beyond the Dampier Peninsula is flatter with dry tropical grassland and is used for cattle ranching. In parts of the Kimberley, such as the valleys of the Ord and Fitzroy Rivers in the south, the soils are relatively usable cracking clays, whilst elsewhere they are lateritic Orthents. Although none of the mountains reach even 1,000 metres (3,281 ft), there is so much steep land as to make much of the region difficult to traverse, especially during the wet season, when even sealed roads are often flooded. The coast is typically steep cliffs in the north but flatter in the south, all subject to high tides."
Kimberley (Western Australia),"Climate
The Kimberley has a tropical monsoon climate. The region receives about 90% of its rainfall during the short wet season, from November to April, when cyclones are common (especially around Broome) and the rivers flood. The annual rainfall is highest in the northwest, where Kalumburu and the Mitchell Plateau average 1,270 millimetres (50 in) per year, and lowest in the southeast where it is around 520 millimetres (20 in). In the dry season, from May to October, south easterly breezes bring sunny days and cool nights. Climate change since 1967 has led to large increases of as much as 250 millimetres (10 in) per year in annual rainfall over the whole region. A 2007 study suggests Asian pollution may be a key contributory factor to this increased rainfall. In 1997 and 2000, the region received especially heavy rains, leading to record flooding of the Fitzroy and other rivers.
The Kimberley is one of the hottest parts of Australia, with the average annual mean temperature around 27 °C (81 °F), and with mean maximum temperatures almost always above 30 °C (86 °F), even in July. The hottest part of the year is November before the rains break, when temperatures frequently reach above 37 °C (99 °F) on the coast and well over 40 °C (104 °F) inland. Mean minimum temperatures in July range from around 12 °C (54 °F) in the south to 16 °C (61 °F) along the coast, whilst in November and December they are generally around 26 °C (79 °F). Record high temperatures range from around 47 to 48 °C (117 to 118 °F), while record lows are around 2 to 3 °C (36 to 37 °F), although some parts of the central Kimberly plateau can drop below 0 °C (32 °F) during the dry season.
The Aboriginal people of the Kimberley recognise six traditional seasons based on meteorological events, as well as on observations of flora and fauna."
Kimberley (Western Australia),"Geology
During the Devonian period, a barrier reef system formed before a subsequent drop in sea levels over the Kimberley. This reef system was similar to the Great Barrier Reef and is still visible today in the form of the Napier Range and the Ningbing Range. Some of the features are Tunnel Creek, Windjana Gorge and Geikie Gorge.
This area is also known as the Kimberley Block physiographic province, of which it is part of the larger West Australian Shield division. This province contains the Wunaamin-Miliwundi Range, Durack Range, Leveque Rise, Browse Depression, and Londonderry Rise physiographic sections."
Kimberley (Western Australia),"Coastline
In Bureau of Meteorology weather reports the ""North Kimberley Coast"" is the WA border to Kuri Bay section of the coast, while the ""West Kimberley Coast"" is from Kuri Bay to Wallal Downs.  Significant sections of the coastline between Broome and Wyndham have no means of road access, and boat or helicopter are the only means.  Due to the isolation, a number of tourist operations on the coastline have been called ""wilderness"" locations."
Kimberley (Western Australia),"Ecology
The rugged and varied sandstone landscape is home to a distinctive mixture of wildlife, which has been thoroughly mapped and described by the Western Australian Department of Conservation and Land Management. There are habitats similar to the Kimberley across the border in the Northern Territory, including the valleys of the Victoria and Daly Rivers but these have been less carefully studied."
Kimberley (Western Australia),"Flora
Much of the Kimberley is chiefly covered in open savanna woodland dominated by low bloodwood and boab trees (Adansonia gregorii) with Darwin stringybark and Darwin woollybutt eucalyptus in the wetter areas. The red sandy soil of the Dampier Peninsula in the south is known for its characteristic pindan wooded grassland, while in the more fertile areas like the Ord Valley, the trees are found in grasslands of Chrysopogon, Aristida, Dichanthium and Xerochloa (rice grass) in the wetter valleys. The banks of the Ord, Fitzroy River and other rivers are home to a greater variety of vegetation, while in sheltered gorges of the high rainfall north there are patches of tropical dry broadleaf forest, called monsoon forests, deciduous vine forest or vine thicket in Australia (often mistakenly called ""dry rainforest""), which were unknown to science until 1965, and are one of the most floristically rich parts of Australia outside the Wet Tropics and southwestern WA. There are also areas of mangrove in river estuaries where the coast is flatter."
Kimberley (Western Australia),"Flora regions
In 1979, Beard identified four phytogeographic districts within the Northern Botanical Province:"
Kimberley (Western Australia),"Gardner District (Ga) in the north (and further divided into the West Gardner (WGa), Central Gardner (CGa) and East Gardner (EGa))
Fitzgerald District (Fi) in the centre
Dampier (Da) and Hall (Ha) Districts in the south"
Kimberley (Western Australia),"Fauna
Animals found here include the huge saltwater crocodile and a rich variety of birds such as the channel-billed cuckoo, Pacific koel, purple-crowned fairywren and the bowerbird. The sandstone gorges of north Kimberley are an important refuge for a particularly rich collection of endemic species including some that have disappeared from the flatter areas, including the purple-crowned fairywren, the endangered Gouldian finch and a large number of amphibians: flat-headed frog, cave-dwelling frog, magnificent tree frog, Derby toadlet, small toadlet, fat toadlet, the unconfirmed marbled toadlet, Mjoberg's toadlet, mole toadlet and stonemason's toadlet. Mammals that have declined especially in the flatlands include the bilby, northern quoll, pale field rat, golden-backed tree-rat, and golden bandicoot. Megabats such as the black flying foxes and little red flying foxes are common and perform important pollination and seed dispersal work for many species of native trees and shrubs.
A species of endemic gecko, Gehyra kimberleyi, is named after the Kimberley region.
The gorges of central Kimberley are known for their fossils and for their large colonies of bats, including Windjana, Tunnel Creek, and Geikie Gorges. Lake Argyle and other wetlands of the Ord and the Kimberley are important habitats while there are important populations of shorebirds in the Ord estuary, Eighty-mile Beach and Roebuck Bay, which has been described as ""one of the most important stop-over areas for shorebirds in Australia and globally"". Finally there are a number of rocky islands off the north coast that are home to seabirds and turtles."
Kimberley (Western Australia),"Threats and preservation
Little of the Kimberley has been subject to wholesale clearance other than particularly fertile parts of the Ord Valley (and areas of Kimberley-type habitat across in the Daly River basin in the Northern Territory) but the pastureland in the southern areas has been affected by 100 years of livestock grazing and other threats including introduced weeds (such as cocklebur, parkinsonia, bellyache bush and castor oil plant), feral cats and changes to traditional Aboriginal fire regimes (the way grassland is burnt and allowed to renew). However, the remote sandstone areas to the north have valuable original habitats in good condition providing shelter for much wildlife."
Kimberley (Western Australia),"The largest protected areas are the Prince Regent National Park and the Drysdale River National Park along with Gregory National Park and Keep River National Park across in the Northern Territory, which preserves similar habitats. (Keep River's nearest town is Kununurra in the Kimberley.)
The Kimberley is a popular tourist destination, with areas such as the Bungle Bungle Range, the Gibb River Road, Lake Argyle, El Questro Station, Mornington Sanctuary, Horizontal Falls and Cape Leveque. The Gibb River Road and the road into the Bungle Bungles can at times be accessed in a two-wheel drive car, although one can access many additional areas in a four-wheel drive vehicle.
Other parks in the region include Geikie Gorge National Park, Mirima National Park, Mitchell River National Park, Point Coulomb National Park, Purnululu National Park, Tunnel Creek National Park, Windjana Gorge National Park and Wolfe Creek Meteorite Crater National Park. In 2012 the Western Australian government announced the creation of the 7,062 square kilometre Camden Sound Marine Park with a further three to come.
Visitors to the area should be aware that the area can be subject to controlled burns at any time of year. In September 2011, a fire burned five people, two severely, who had been competing in the Kimberley Ultramarathon, an endurance cross country footrace."
Kimberley (Western Australia),"Save the Kimberley campaign
The Wilderness Society has led a campaign to protest a proposal to industrialise the James Price Point area of Broome. Woodside Energy, with the additional involvement of BHP and the Government of Australia, has sought to build a gas industrial complex, and those in opposition believe that such a development threatens the region. The campaign has received support from public figures such as John Butler, Clare Bowditch, Missy Higgins and former leader of the Australian Greens, Bob Brown.
On 5 October 2012, a concert was held at Federation Square in Melbourne, Australia, to raise awareness of the campaign; the protest event attracted approximately 6,000 people.
On 24 February 2013, an estimated 20,000 people gathered for a charity concert in Fremantle, Western Australia to raise awareness and funds to help protect the Kimberley, with performances from Ball Park Music, Missy Higgins, and John Butler."
Kimberley (Western Australia),"Economy
The Kimberley region has a diverse regional economy. Mining, construction, tourism, retail, agriculture, and pearling are major contributors to the region's economic output.
The town of Broome has a flourishing pearling industry, which operates around the Kimberley coast. Some of the major farmers are Paspaley Pearls, Clipper Pearls, Broome Pearls and the Willie Creek Pearl Farm.
One third of the world's annual production of diamonds is mined at the Argyle and the Ellendale diamond mines. Oil is extracted from the Blina oil field and natural gas is expected to be taken from offshore sources soon. Zinc and lead were mined at the Pillara and Cadjebut mines near Fitzroy Crossing, with nickel still being mined at Sallay Mallay near Halls Creek. Derby is the nearest export base for shipping these metals.
Traditionally, the economy depended on pastoral leases, with most of the region covered by the leases.
More recently agriculture has been focused on the Ord River Irrigation Area near Kununurra. Irrigation was also trialled in the West Kimberley by way of the now defunct Camballin Irrigation Scheme. There are also fruit growers in Broome and in other areas in the West Kimberley. Beef cattle are grown in the Kimberley and exported live. Wyndham features the last remaining meatworks in the Kimberley - there were formerly works at Broome and Derby but financial constraints have caused these to be closed.
Barramundi are bred in Lake Argyle, and Broome features a fully equipped Aquaculture Park near the port; tenants include Paspaley Pearls and Broome TAFE. The Kimberley also has a thriving fishing industry.
Some of Australia's most prominent indigenous artists and art centres are in or adjacent to the Kimberley region. Artists such as Paddy Bedford and Freddie Timms have an international profile, and there are a number of Aboriginal-owned and controlled art centres and companies that assist artists, arrange exhibitions and sell works. The art centres in the region are also organized through the Association of Northern, Kimberley and Arnhem Aboriginal Artists. Issues have been raised regarding the exploitation of indigenous artists by businesses and individuals, including in the Kimberley, which were canvassed in an Australian Senate parliamentary committee report.
Tourism is expected to remain one of the Kimberley region's major growth industries. Averaged across 2010, 2011, and 2012, there were 292,600 domestic and international visitors to the Kimberley annually."
Kimberley (Western Australia),"See also
List of pastoral leases in Western Australia
Kimberley-Perth Canal
Kimberley Plan"
Kimberley (Western Australia),"References
Grey, Sir George (1812–1898)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/grey-sir-george-2125/text2691, published first in hardcopy 1966, accessed online 29 May 2024."
Kimberley (Western Australia),External links
Kimberley (Western Australia)," Kimberley, Western Australia travel guide from Wikivoyage
Kimberley Development Commission
Kununurra Historical Society Inc. Archive, Library, Museum & Research for links to history images of the Kimberley"
Football in Australia,"Football in Australia refers to numerous codes which each have major shares of the mainstream sports market, media, broadcasting, professional athletes, financial performance and grassroots participation: Australian rules football, rugby league, rugby union and soccer (known in many other countries as ""football""). There are four pre-eminent professional football competitions played in Australia: the Australian Football League (Australian football), the National Rugby League (rugby league), Super Rugby (rugby union) and the A-League (soccer). Rugby League is the most watched sport in Australia based on television viewership, however, Australian football attracts larger live attendences. In the states of New South Wales and Queensland, rugby football (including league and union) is overall the most watched and receives the most media coverage, especially the Rugby League State of Origin contested between the two states referred to as ""Australian sport's greatest rivalry"". In recent times, there has been an increase in popularity in Australian football and corresponding decrease in popularity of Rugby union in New South Wales and Queensland. Soccer, while extending its lead in participation rate, particularly in the large cities, and improving its performance at the FIFA World Cup and at the FIFA Women's World Cup, continues to attract the overall lowest attendance, as well as media and public interest, of the four codes.
In Australia, it is not unusual for football fans to follow or play more than one code of football and spectate major events from multiple different codes, though strong lifelong allegiances are evident in some where football cultures are most ingrained. Immigration to Australia and internal migration have had a significant effect on football followings in parts of Australia, and even have an influence on where Australians move.
Prior to the Federation of Australia, there was no dominant football code and football was played under a variety of rules since 1829. By the 1860s, Australian football and rugby became entrenched in Melbourne and Sydney, respectively. The first intercolonial football matches were being played by the 1870s and led to the formation of the first intercolonial governing bodies in Australian rules and rugby. Soccer or ""British Association Football"" was first introduced in the 1870s; although it has struggled against the full contact codes, it has increased in popularity since the 1890s. Women's soccer dominated female participation from the 1920s until recent times, when the organisation of Women's Australian football saw it boom in popularity. Strong Australian regional rivalries have helped keep a regional football code divide in Australia, popularly known as the ""Barassi Line"", strong for generations. This divide was still strongly evident in the 1980s after the first national competitions became established. Rugby continued to dominate in Queensland and New South Wales and Australian football, while still being played throughout, dominated the rest of the country. Other traditional divisions have also continued to some extent, including rugby league and rugby union's class/socio economic division and soccer's dominance amongst some minority migrant communities. Most attempts to move outside these traditional boundaries have been largely unsuccessful.
The different codes attract different participation levels that reflect historical trends. Soccer, nationally, has substantially more participants than any other code, and is particularly popular with junior participants. However, Australian football now has much higher participation rates amongst Australia's indigenous communities and women than the other codes.
Australia competes internationally in almost all football codes with national football teams. Nationally the most popular are the ""Matildas"" & ""Socceroos"" (soccer), the ""Wallabies"" (rugby union) and ""Kangaroos"" (rugby league)."
Football in Australia,"Terminology
In Australia, ""football"" may refer to any of several popular codes. These include Australian Football, rugby league, rugby union, and association football.
As is the case in the United States and Canada, association football has traditionally been referred to in Australia as soccer. Historically, the sport has been referred to as association football, English association football, British association rules and British football. It is also sometimes referred to in the media as ""the round ball game"", ""the world game"" and ""international football"".
The governing body for association football is 'Football Australia' and the term football is becoming more popular.
Australian Football can be referred to as ""Australian rules football"", ""Australian football"" (the official name of the sport), ""Aussie rules"", ""football"" or ""footy"" (Particularly in Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania). In its developing states (Queensland, New South Wales and the ACT) is referred to as ""AFL"" (the AFL markets the sport under the name of its premier competition in these areas). Historically, the sport outside Victoria has been referred to as Victorian rules, the Victorian game and association football (after its first intercolonial governing body, the Victorian Football Association).
Rugby league can be referred to as league, footy, football, league football or rugby.
Rugby union can be referred to as union, rugby football, football, footy or rugby."
Football in Australia,"National governing bodies and competitions
All the major football codes are represented by national governing bodies which run the major competitions and game development initiatives in the country."
Football in Australia,Minor codes
Football in Australia,The timeline below outlines the history and evolution of the governing bodies and the respective major competitions of each code.
Football in Australia,"National club competitions
Although contemporary professional competitions are represented by clubs from multiple states and national governing bodies, there are currently no truly national club competitions with clubs in all states due to the exclusion of Tasmania. This may change as the two competitions that are closest to national competitions (AFL/AFLW and A-League/W-League) expand to include Tasmania (see: Tasmanian AFL bid and Tasmanian A-League bid). A truly national competition would include territories as well. The AFL has to date declined to award licenses to bids for proposed clubs in the ACT and Northern Territory, while the A-League has declined bids from the ACT (see Canberra A-League Bid)."
Football in Australia,"Men's
Table below shows current fully professional clubs numbers in men's senior competitions for the big four football codes in each state and territory as at 2021 in the most populous states. This list includes full season competitions only (including finals systems) and excludes shorter season and knock-out type competitions. Some codes have second tier leagues, or reserves competitions with semi-professional teams competing in other state/territories (for example the Victorian Football League) however there are currently no such competitions which are national. This does not give a breakdown of metropolitan and regional clubs. TV viewership and participation numbers are generally determined by the number of clubs in the big 3 states: New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland."
Football in Australia,"Women's
Table below shows current semi-professional clubs numbers in women's senior competitions for the big four football codes in each state and territory as at 2021 in the most populous states."
Football in Australia,"National audience
Australian sport fans have historically attended events in large numbers, dating back to the country's early history. An early football game played in Melbourne in 1858 had 2,000 spectators. Australian sport fans have behaved unruly at times, with police being required at football games dating back to the 1860s. By 1897, tens of thousands of spectators attended an early Australian Football match at a time when top level soccer matches in England would draw six thousand fans. A finals match between the Carlton Football Club and Collingwood in 1938 drew 96,834 fans.  In 1909, at a time when rugby union had not yet become professionalised, 52,000 people in Sydney attended a game between New South Wales and New Zealand. The spectators accounted for 10% of the total population of Sydney at the time. In 2000 during the Bledisloe cup opener, rugby union drew its largest ever crowd in Australia for what many have since labelled as ""the greatest Test ever played"" with 109,874 crowding into stadium Australia.   The 1914 Great Britain Lions tour of Australia and New Zealand included a match in Melbourne, the first rugby league game to be played in Victoria. The match between England and New South Wales drew 12,000 spectators.
Total average game attendance for the Australian Football League and the National Rugby League increased between 1970 and 2000, with the AFL going from an average attendance of 24,344 people per match in 1970 to 27,325 by 1980 to 25,238 in 1990 and 34,094 by 2000. The National Rugby League had an average per game attendance of 11,990 in 1970, saw a decrease in 1980 to 10,860 but increased to 12,073 by 1990 and improved on that to 14,043 by 2000.
Australian Bureau of Statistics survey Spectator Attendance at Sporting Events, 2009–10 reported the following findings regarding female attendance at football sporting events. Survey found that an estimated 3.3 million females attended one or more sporting events as spectators. This represented 37% of females aged 15 years and over in Australia and 54% of females aged 15–17 years. The top football sports in attendance were: Australian Football (1,171,100), rugby league (594,700), soccer (354,800), and rugby union (209,300)."
Football in Australia,"Men's
Broadcast audience
Attendance
Attendance records
Record attendances are sometimes an indication of each code's popularity but not always, as it can be restricted by capacity of the state/territory's available stadiums, however typically regular demand drives the requirement for larger stadiums."
Football in Australia,"Women's
Broadcast audience
The Matildas vs England semi-final in the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup set the record television audience for a sports program in Australia, 11.15 million. AFLW's free to air television audience fell from an average of 180,000 per game to 53,000 in 2022, with total viewership falling by 70%."
Football in Australia,"Attendance
Note: NRLW does not currently publish standalone attendance figures as the majority of matches are still NRL double-headers, with the first standalone fixtures held in 2023 including a small percentage of matches. In 2023, NRLW standalone matches attracted an average of 2,252 per match, just short of the AFLW's 2,853. AFLW attendance in 2023 despite growing since the COVID-19 pandemic was down 60% on its first season.
In April 2024, the 2023–24 A-League Women season set the record for the most attended season of any women's sport in Australian history, with the season recording a total attendance of 284,551 on 15 April 2024, and finishing with a final total attendance of 312,199."
Football in Australia,"Attendance records
Note that many women's matches are played as curtain-raisers or multi-headers (most women's AFL matches prior to 2017 AFLW season; all NRL Women's premiership and State of Origin matches prior to 2022 and Rugby's Wallaroos vs New Zealand match) - only stand alone attendances are counted. Note that prior to 2021 there was free entry to AFLW matches."
Football in Australia,"Participation
Establishment and participation by state/territory
The following gives a summary of each football code by state/territory, along with foundation dates and summaries. (Some Australian colonies, early in their history, for example South Australia and Tasmania), had football competitions and clubs as early as the 1840s but played what are now defunct codes and later adopted one of the existing codes.) This also includes the earliest dates for areas where a code was dormant for long periods of time (such as Australian rules in New South Wales and Queensland and rugby in Tasmania). Highlighted dates for the earliest code established in that territory (not an indication of current popularity). Although Rugby league began in 1908, as a breakaway from rugby union, with most of its following initially coming from that code."
Football in Australia,"Participation and regional variation
Recent surveys have shown that while the number of football participants has more than doubled in Australia with more than 3.1 million Australians participating in one of the four major football codes in 2019, the overall participation rate in outdoor football codes has declined slightly over the course of the 2010s. Australian Bureau of Statistics figures from 2011 which showed that in 2009 and 2010, 1.2 million Australians over the age of fifteen participated in one football code or another. Outdoor soccer and Australian Football were the most popular football codes played by Australian children in 2009, with 13% and 8.6% participation total respectively.
Soccer has the highest participation rate in every state and territory except South Australia and the Northern Territory where Australian Football is the most played. Soccer has the highest participation nationally in New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, where more than 7% of the population regularly play it. Participation in soccer follows most closely Australia's demographic distribution being strongest in the major cities (6%) with more than 3 in 4 of its players found in Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane. In remote areas, Australian Football (5.7%) and Rugby League (2.4%) dominate. Almost 90% of all the rugby football players can be found in New South Wales and Queensland.
Since the 2010s the strongest participation growth has been posted by soccer which has grown its national marketshare through large participation increases in the eastern states of New South Wales, Queensland and the ACT. Rugby league has grown its hold in New South Wales and strengthened its position in the Australian Capital Territory as well as its participation across the Barassi Line in Victoria and Western Australia. Rugby Union has defied a downward national trend posting strong growth in Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory, areas where Australian Football has been declining. Australian Football outgrew rugby union in New South Wales and Queensland between 2016 and 2019 however it has since stagnated while experiencing a sharp decline in South Australia and Tasmania with recent growth limited to its traditional strongholds of Victoria and Western Australia."
Football in Australia,"There was historically a regional variation in the spread of Australian Football and rugby: the Barassi Line is a rough dividing line between areas where Australia rules is most popular and where rugby union and rugby league are most popular. Rugby league participation was historically high in New South Wales and Queensland, and both rugby league and rugby union continue to be popular in these states. Some of the relative popularity of one football code over another in terms of participation was a result of media influence on coverage of the two major professional games, Rugby league and Australian Football. This influence and their media market desires drove some of the regional patterns for these codes.
Football in Australia has also been historically drawn across class and ethnic lines. For example soccer participation was for many years confined to Australia's newly arriving European ethnic groups. Most rugby union players are developed at private schools with it having the notable reputation of a sport for the privileged."
Football in Australia,"Indigenous
Australian Football has traditionally been one of the most popular football codes played by Australia's Indigenous community With more than 100,000 players in 2021, it has more than twice as many Indigenous participants as any other code. Prior to European settlement, Indigenous men and women played a similar game called Marngrook. Records of indigenous participation in Victoria's major clubs date back to the early decades of the game in Victoria.  Indigenous pioneers include Harry Hewitt, Jimmy Melbourne, Joe Johnson, Douglas Nicholls and Graham Farmer. 11% of Australian Football League players identified themselves as Indigenous Australians in 2011. The Brownlow Medal, the most prestigious individual best and fairest award has been awarded to Gavin Wanganeen and Adam Goodes (twice), while Madison Prespakis and Ally Anderson have been named AFL Women's best and fairest. All-indigenous sides have been documented as early the turn of the 19th Century and the first representative teams began playing matches after World War II. Indigenous Australia has been represented by the senior Indigenous All-Stars (founded 1973 to compete against Papua New Guinea) who have defeated numerous AFL clubs and the Flying Boomerangs junior team (founded 1973) who have competed internationally.
The popularity of soccer began to grow in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in the 2000s with more than 40,000 participants in 2021. One of the first Indigenous Australians to make the national team was John Kundereri Moriarty, who was supposed to tour with the team in 1961 but the national federation was unable to hold the tour as they were facing FIFA sanctions at the time. Other notable indigenous soccer players included Charlie Perkins who played and coached Pan-Hellenic and Harry Williams who was a member of the Australian team at the 1974 FIFA World Cup.
Rugby League has around 30,000 indigenous participants in 2021. 12 percent of NRL-contracted players are Indigenous compared with the just 2.8 percent of Australians who identify as having Aboriginal heritage according to the latest Census in 2016. And on top of that, 17 percent of grassroots players are Indigenous. The Rugby League Koori Knockout is the biggest single gathering of indigenous people in Australia. In 1944, the first Aboriginal rugby league club was founded in Redfern, New South Wales the Redfern All Blacks. The first All Indigenous Australian National Rugby League team was named in 2009.
Arthur Beetson became the first indigenous Australian to captain the national team of any football code when in 1973 he was selected to lead the Australian rugby league team.
Rugby Union too has a rich history of Aboriginal participation with notable indigenous athletes such as the Ella brothers, Mark, Gary and Glen as well as Kurtley Beale all past members of the Wallabies."
Football in Australia,"Female
Among females, Australian Football is by far the most participated code, followed by soccer, rugby union and rugby league.
Women's Australian rules has exploded since the advent of the national AFLW competition. In 2017, a record number of 463,364 females were playing Australian Football across the nation, making up 30% of all participants and overtaking women's soccer for the first time in history. The number of female Australian Football teams reached 1,690 nationally, a huge 76% increase on the previous year  In 2018 and 2019, nationally there were 156,893 registered women's and girls soccer participants 63,443 female rugby union participants and 16,337 female rugby league participants.
There are national professional competitions for females including the AFLW (Australian Football), A-League Women (Soccer), Super W (Rugby Union), NRLW (Rugby league) competitions and national women's teams for each of the codes."
Football in Australia,"Safety
The issue of safety around football in Australia is driven by the situation in American sport. Concussions are a problem for all four major football codes in Australia. A summit was held by leadership in the big four professional football leagues to address these issues in 2011.
In Brisbane, Queensland in 1980, 63% of all sport related injuries were as a result of one of the four major football codes. 10.2% of football players in one medical study had a head or neck injury. The most common injury for an Australian Football player is a lower limb injury, accounting for about 60% of all injuries. In Australian Football, injuries as a result of contact occurred 71% of the time compared to other causes of injury."
Football in Australia,"History of football codes in Australia
Forms of football were played prior to European colonization, most notably the indigenous game known as Marn Grook among the Wurundjeri. The earliest historical observations date to the Australia's convict colonial period. It is not clear how long these traditional games were played or how widespread they were practiced elsewhere on the continent.
With the arrival of Europeans, forms of football were played very early on in the Australian colonies with matches being played by 1829 in the Colony of New South Wales at Sydney, in Van Diemen's Land at Hobart and the Port Phillip District at Melbourne by 1840, the Colony of South Australia at Adelaide by 1843, and the Colony of Queensland at Brisbane by 1849. Most of these early games took part at local festivals and the rules under which they played (if any) not recorded. However hacking shins was a common practice and as such some are considered to have been comparable to mob football.
Immigrants from England brought with them an awareness particularly of Rugby football (codified 1845) as well as Eton football (codified 1847) and Harrow football (codified 1858), Cambridge rules (codified 1856) and a variety of other games.
Regular football competitions were organised in the colony of New South Wales by 1850 (an early form of Rugby). Accounts from the Colony of Tasmania of football in the 1850s indicate that matches were played under mostly English public school football games rules, but particularly Rugby, Eton and Harrow rules.
In the Colony of South Australia from 1854 a version of Harrow football was also being played. The rules under which the Old Adelaide Football Club played in 1860, while published, are now lost, however many assume that they were also along the lines of Harrow. Harrow rules at the time featured the absence of an 'off-side', kicking from the hand, marking (fair catch), carrying the ball in hand, tackling or shoulder charging the player with the ball and kicking through upright goals to score, all elements of South Australia's most popular code to this day.
In the Colony of Victoria the merits of these different schools and their footballing traditions were also known on the Victorian goldfields in 1858 particularly the Cambridge rules which were popular. Most notably, 1856 Cambridge laws permitted players to catch the ball, with a free kick awarded for a fair catch. Accounts of early football in Victoria in the 1850s was that football was particularly popular on the goldfields with the English playing school football, Scottish immigrants played a game similar to soccer and Irish immigrants playing a game of high punt kicking. The use of Cambridge and Harrow rules meant that the forms of football being played in Victoria, South Australia and to a lesser extent Tasmania would have appeared relatively familiar in comparison to rugby.
By 1858 a handful of Melbourne clubs, mostly schools, were also experimenting with public school football, particularly rugby, though concerns were growing about its suitability for adults. Among the rugby dissenters in Melbourne were Tom Wills, (himself a rugby player educated at the Rugby School), William Hammersley and J. B. Thompson who would form Australia's oldest football club, the Melbourne Football Club and begin to popularise a new Australian code. The Melbourne rules of football (later Victorian and Australian Football) were first codified and played in 1859. The current Australian Football League features some of the earliest football clubs in the country, Melbourne Football Club and Geelong Football Club (founded 1859), these remain Australia's longest running football clubs. By 1864 the code grew rapidly and there were as many as a dozen clubs throughout Victoria."
Football in Australia,"Football in New South Wales began in earnest in the 1860s. Australian rules first appeared in the Riverina region in 1861. The Sydney University Football Club, established between 1863 and 1865 was the first rugby club in New South Wales. Between 1865 and 1866, fledgling Sydney clubs began to adop Australian rules however quickly turned its back on the Victorian code mainly due to the strong intercolonial rivalry and pushed for the adoption of rugby. The first Sydney rugby competition was established in 1874. The Victorian code was eventually banned in Sydney, but continued to grow in the Riverina.
In 1866, the Colony of Queensland adopted Australian Football and by the 1870s, it was the most popular code of football. Sydney also took up the Australian code in 1866, though by 1867 newly formed clubs there had disbanded. As part of its charter, the newly formed New South Wales Rugby Union in 1874 banned its clubs from playing matches under Victorian rules. As such by 1874 rugby union was unopposed and well established in Sydney.: 175  After news that Sydney had chosen rugby, Brisbane clubs soon began to follow, though the code continued to co-exist with Victorian rules for some time. By 1879 rugby was also the dominant form of football in Perth. Australian Football was for a time was only dominant in Victoria, however the first intercolonial between Victoria vs South Australia (1879) saw the colonies of South Australia and Tasmania formally adopt it, helping them form the longest surviving competitions and governing bodies, the South Australian Football Association and the Victorian Football Association (VFA).
Soccer was also being played in Australia by the mid 1870s.: 175  However it became established in Sydney in 1880 with the founding of the first club, the Wanderers."
Football in Australia,"In 1884, rugby challenged Australian for its primacy in Queensland as the popularity of rugby intercolonials against New South Wales rose. The following year on the other side of the continent in the Colony of Western Australia, Australian Football began challenging rugby in popularity culminating in the formation of the popular West Australian Football League (and remains the colony's preferred sport to this day). By this time Australian Football had permanently established itself in all of the Australian colonies including short lived governing bodies in New South Wales (NSWFA) and Queensland (QFA). The collapse of these two bodies in the 1890s saw rugby union gain a firm stronghold in these states. The major exception was the Riverina area of New South Wales close to the Victorian border, and closer to Melbourne than Sydney.
Like rugby, soccer also grew through the 1880s with the establishment of strong governing bodies. In 1884, Victoria formed its own association, the Anglo-Australian Football Association (now Football Victoria), as did Queensland, in the Anglo-Queensland Football Association (now, Football Queensland), and Northern New South Wales, in the Northern District British Football Association (now, Northern New South Wales Football). In 1896, the Western Australian Soccer Football Association was formed. In 1900, a Tasmanian association was formed,  and later, the South Australian British Football Association was formed in 1902.
In 1897 the Victorian Football League formed as a breakaway from the VFA, the league would exert significant influence and became the country's most significant nationally in terms of interest and attendance.
Following Federation of Australia in 1903 Australian Football experienced a national revival with the formation of the NSW Australian Football Association (NSWAFA) and Queensland Football League (QFL) which have continued to the present day. The nationalisation of the game led to the first national governing body, the Australasian Football Council and the first national carnival in 1908."
Football in Australia,"In 1914 and 1915 an amalgamation of rugby league and Australian Football was considered and trialled.
After the war, Australian Football became popular in both the Northern Territory and Australian Capital Territory.
In 1922, a committee in Australia investigated the benefits of physical education for girls. They came up with several recommendations regarding what sports were and were not appropriate for girls to play based on the level of fitness required. Football was completely medically inappropriate for girls to play. It was medically appropriate for all girls to be able to participate in, so long as they were not done in an overly competitive manner, swimming, rowing, cycling and horseback riding.
In 1928 Australia national rugby league team adopted the national colours of green and gold for the first time, having previously used blue and maroon, making the Kangaroos the first national football team of any code to do so. All others have adopted the colours since.
During the 1930s, rugby league, which had gone professional, began to overtake rugby union in popularity in Queensland, with the league being the dominant spectator code by 1937.
The 1951 French rugby league tour of Australia and New Zealand saw the first tour of Australia by a French football team of any code.
The 1954 Rugby League World Cup saw the first time that any Australia national football team participated in a World Cup tournament. The Australian rugby league team then won the cup in the following tournament in 1957 which was held in Australia. This was also the first World Cup tournament for any code of football to be hosted in the country.
The regional football code divide in Australia was still present in the 1980s, with rugby league being the dominant code in Queensland and New South Wales while Australian Football dominated in the rest of the country. When codes went outside of their traditional geographic home, they had little success in gaining new fans and participants. During the 1980s and 1990s both Australian Football and Rugby league's major peak governing bodies changed their names to reflect a more nation-wide approach and added expansion teams outside their traditional areas. While the VFL attempted to expand into Sydney, Australian Football lost its dominance in the ACT in 1982 to rugby league, and became a minor sport in both places.
During the 1990s, soccer faced a challenge in attracting youth players because of the ethnic nature of the sport at the highest levels of national competition. The sport's governing body made an effort to make the game less ethnically oriented. At the same time, rival football codes were intentionally trying to bring in ethnic participants in order to expand their youth playing base.
73,811 people attended a gridiron National Football League game between the Denver Broncos and San Diego Chargers at ANZ Stadium in Sydney in 1999. In March 1999, 104,000 fans attended a double header match in the National Rugby League at Stadium Australia four days after the venue formally opened.
In 2006, both Sydney's and Melbourne's grand finals featured teams from interstate, reflecting the shift in professional football in Australia.
In the late 2000s, Karmichael Hunt made history by becoming the first professional footballer to change codes from rugby league to rugby union to Australian Football.
The COVID-19 pandemic had an immense effect on both Australian Football and Rugby league, causing the two code's flagship events to leave their traditional host cities for the first time. Despite a contract with the Melbourne Cricket Ground until 2059, the AFL was forced to relocate the 2020 AFL Grand Final to Brisbane. Likewise the 2021 NRL Grand Final was hosted by Brisbane due to pandemic restrictions. While the AFL followed some of the NRL's responses to the pandemic, continued restrictions in Victoria saw the 2021 AFL Grand Final hosted in Perth."
Football in Australia,"History of National competition
Intercolonial and interstate representative competition
Inter-club competition
Football codes in Australia have aspired to national competition since prior to Federation of Australia, however the first truly national competitions began post Federation.
The ANFC (Australian Football, founded 1906) was the first national governing body of any football code in Australia. The 1908 Melbourne Carnival was the first national representative competition involving all Australian states.
Prior to the modern national club football competitions, the first club competitions to feature clubs from more than two states were the Championship of Australia (1888-1975) (Australian Football) and the Australia Cup (1962–1968) (soccer)."
Football in Australia,"Professionalism
The first professional football leagues in Australia were the Australian Football League, and the National Rugby League.  Up until the late 2000s, there were three major football codes competing every weekend, which included Australian Football, Rugby league and Rugby union. Unlike in Europe and the United States, professional clubs tend to be member run organisations instead of single owner, for profit businesses. The major football codes and professional leagues in the country all watch what their competition does in order to improve their own strategic picture in the Australian sporting landscape.
The Australian Football League saw money pour into the sport during the 1990s and 2000s. In 1993, total player payments were A$24 million but reached A$95 million by 2003. In 2007, the Australian Football League had the greatest financial stability of all the leagues in Australia with turnover of A$280 million, with the National Rugby League coming in second with A$120 million. At the same time, the AFL had highest level of corporate support with major national and international sponsors such as Air Emirates, Vodafone and Toyota. The AFL also beat the NRL in terms of geographic spread of their teams, with the AFL having teams in five states while the NRL had teams in three states in 2007. In 2007, the AFL was also spending A$30 million in youth player development compared to the NRL's A$15 million.
The National Rugby League traces its roots back to the 1890s when rugby league split from rugby union as the code went professional. By 1908, the professional New South Wales Rugby League was created. Collective player bargaining came to the professional game by 1982, with 95% of all played having joined the player union by 1991. Media access to the sport was one of the main reasons for a split in the sport in the 1990s that resulted in the New South Wales Rugby League facing competition from the Rupert Murdoch backed Super League, and the ""Super League war"" in 1997, which ended with the founding of the National Rugby League which had become a national, not state based, professional competition."
Football in Australia,"Media coverage
There is a long history of television coverage of football in Australia. From 1957 to 2001, the Seven Network was the network for the Australian Football League. The only year that Seven was not the network for the league was in 1987 when the AFL was on the ABC. An exclusive deal was agreed upon by Seven in 1976 for a five-year deal worth A$3 million. Not all football television deals have been good. The deal made by Ten Network to the New South Wales Rugby League was worth considerably more, worth A$48 million for a five-year deal that also included broadcasting rights for the State of Origin and the Australia national rugby league team. This deal was terminated early because the network could not afford to pay out. The 1967 NSWRFL season's grand final became the first football grand final of any code to be televised live in Australia. The Nine Network had paid $5,000 for the broadcasting rights. Rugby league, which includes NRL, State of Origin and national team matches, had the highest aggregate television ratings of any sport in 2009 and 2010. Also, in a world first, the Nine Network broadcast free-to-air the first match of the 2010 State of Origin series live in 3D in New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria.
There are few Australian films which incorporate Australia's football codes. When football is depicted, the primary codes presented are Australian Football and rugby. The sports often appear in the background in an attempt to make a film more authentically Australian. They include The Club. The film was based on a play produced in 1977, in Melbourne. It has been in the senior English syllabi for four Australian states for many years. The film was written by David Williamson, directed by Bruce Beresford and starring John Howard, Jack Thompson, Graham Kennedy and Frank Wilson. The Final Winter, released in 2007, is another Australian film incorporating football. It was directed by Brian Andrews and Jane Forrest and produced by Anthony Coffee, and Michelle Russell, while independently produced it is being distributed by Paramount Pictures. It was written by Matthew Nable who also starred as the lead role 'Grub' Henderson. The film, which earned praise from critics, focuses around Grub who is the captain of the Newtown Jets rugby league team in the early 1980s and his determination to stand for what rugby league traditionally stood for while dealing with his own identity crisis. Other Australian films incorporating football include Australian Rules and Footy Legends."
Football in Australia,"National teams
National football teams include the Australia national soccer team (""Socceroos"") who compete in FIFA World Cup / AFC Asian Cup / Olympic Football qualification and finals tournaments, the Australia national rugby union team (""Wallabies"") who compete in The Rugby Championship and the World Cup while the Australian rugby league team (""Kangaroos"") compete in various Ashes, ANZAC, Four Nations and World Cup rugby league test matches. The Australian Football League (Australia national team) and Gaelic Athletic Association (Ireland national team) compete in the International Rules Series under the hybrid code of International Rules Football."
Football in Australia,"See also
Sport in Australia
American football in Australia
Australian rules football in Australia
Rugby league in Australia
Rugby union in Australia
Soccer in Australia"
Football in Australia,References
Football in Australia,"
=== Bibliography ==="
Energy in Australia,"Energy in Australia is the production in Australia of energy and electricity, for consumption or export. Energy policy of Australia describes the politics of Australia as it relates to energy.
In 2021, Australia was a net exporter of energy commodities, with notable exports in liquefied natural gas (LNG), coal, and minerals.
Energy in Australia is sourced largely from coal and natural gas, however, recently, due to the increasing effects of global warming and human-induced climate change on the global environment, there has been a shift towards renewable energy such as solar power and wind power both in Australia and abroad. In 2022, renewable energy accounted for 35.9% of the total amount of electricity generated in Australia."
Energy in Australia,"Overview
In 2009, Australia had the highest per capita CO2 emissions in the world. At that time, Maplecroft's CO2 Energy Emissions Index (CEEI) showed that Australia releases 20.58 tons of CO2 per person per year, more than any other country. However, emissions have since been reduced. From 1990 to 2017, emissions per capita fell by one-third, with most of that drop occurring in the more recent years. Additionally, the emissions intensity of the economy fell by 58.4 percent during the same time period. These are the lowest values in 27 years.
The energy sector in Australia increased its carbon dioxide emissions by 8.2% from 2004 to 2010 on average."
Energy in Australia,"Fuels
Coal
In 2009, Australia was the fourth-highest coal producer in the world, producing 335 megatonnes (Mt) of anthracite (black coal) and 64 Mt of lignite (brown coal). Australia was the biggest anthracite exporter, with 31% of global exports (262 Mt out of 836 Mt total). Lignite is not exported. 78% of its 2009 anthracite production was exported (262 Mt out of 335 Mt total). In this respect, Australia is an exception to most anthracite exporters. Australia's global anthracite export share was 14% of all production (836 Mt out of 5,990 Mt total).
In 2015, Australia was the biggest net exporter of coal, with 33% of global exports (392 Mt out of 1,193 Mt total). It was still the fourth-highest anthracite producer with 6.6% of global production (509 Mt out of 7,709 Mt total). 77% of production was exported (392 Mt out of 509 Mt total).
In 2021, Australia was the world's fifth-largest hard coal producer, following China, India, the United States, and Indonesia. Coal remained important to Australia's energy sector, representing 64% of domestic energy production, 32% of the Total Energy Supply (TES), and 53% of electricity generation. Moreover, Australia had the second-highest usage of coal in energy production and electricity generation among International Energy Agency (IEA) countries. Between 2010 and 2020, the share of coal in energy production dropped from 76% to 65%, in TES from 40% to 30%, and in electricity generation from 71% to 55%.
In 2020, Australia operated 91 hard coal and three lignite mines, with over 200 coal deposits. Most hard coal mines were in Queensland (67%) and New South Wales (30%), while lignite mines were mainly in Victoria's Gippsland Basin, notably the Latrobe Valley."
Energy in Australia,"Natural gas
Australia's natural-gas reserves are an estimated 3,921 billion cubic metres (bcm), of which 20% are considered commercially proven (783 bcm). The gas basins with the largest recoverable reserves are the Carnarvon and Browse basins in Western Australia; the Bonaparte Basin in the Northern Territory; the Gippsland and Otway basins in Victoria and the Cooper-Eromanga basin in South Australia and Queensland. In 2014–2015 Australia produced 66 bcm of natural gas, of which approximately 80% was produced in Western Australia and Queensland regions. Australia also produces LNG; LNG exports in 2004 were 7.9 Mt (10.7 bcm), 6% of world LNG trade. Australia also has large deposits of coal seam methane (CSM), most of which are located in the anthracite deposits of Queensland and New South Wales.
On 19 August 2009, Chinese petroleum company PetroChina signed a A$50 billion deal with American multinational petroleum company ExxonMobil to purchase liquefied natural gas from the Gorgon field in Western Australia, the largest contract signed to date between China and Australia. It ensures China a steady supply of LPG fuel for 20 years, forming China's largest supply of relatively clean energy. The agreement was reached despite relations between Australia and China being at their lowest point in years after the Rio Tinto espionage case and the granting of an Australian visa to Rebiya Kadeer.
In 2021, natural gas was a significant component of Australia's energy sector, making up 29% of its energy production, 28% of the Total Energy Supply (TES), 19% of electricity generation, and 17% of Total Final Consumption (TFC). Sector-wise, natural gas usage was highest in electricity and heat generation at 33.9%, followed by the industrial sector at 23.3%. Residential buildings accounted for 10.8% of natural gas consumption, while service sector buildings and the transport sector had smaller shares at 2.9% and 1.3%, respectively."
Energy in Australia,"Oil
Australia's oil production peaked in 2000, after gradually increasing since 1980. Net oil imports rose from 7% of total consumption in 2000 to 39% in 2006. Decreasing domestic oil production is the result of the decline of oil-producing basins and few new fields going online.
In 2021, oil comprises 52% of the Total Final Consumption (TFC) and 32% of the Total Energy Supply (TES). It contributes to 4% of domestic energy production and 1.8% of electricity generation. Oil consumption in 2020 was 892.3 thousand barrels per day (kb/d), with domestic transport consuming 65.4% of this amount. Industry, including non-energy consumption, accounted for 22.4%, international bunkering for 9.1%, buildings for 2.4%, and electricity and heat generation for 0.4%."
Energy in Australia,"Oil shale
Australia's oil shale resources are estimated at 58 billion barrels, or 4,531 million tonnes of shale oil. The deposits are located in the eastern and southern states, with the greatest feasibility in the eastern Queensland deposits. Between 1862 and 1952, Australia mined four million tonnes of oil shale. The mining stopped when government support ceased. Since the 1970s, oil companies have been exploring possible reserves. From 2000 to 2004, the Stuart Oil Shale Project near Gladstone, Queensland produced over 1.5 million barrels of oil. The facility, in operable condition, is on care and maintenance and its operator (Queensland Energy Resources) is conducting research and design studies for the next phase of its oil-shale operations. A campaign by environmentalists opposed to the exploitation of oil-shale reserves may also have been a factor in its closure.
As of 2021, Australia no longer engages in the commercial production of oil shale."
Energy in Australia,"Uranium
Australia has many Uranium deposits. However, Australia does not have any nuclear power plants."
Energy in Australia,"Electricity
Since 2005, wind power and rooftop solar have led to an increasing share of renewable energy in total electricity generation. Due to its large size and the location of its population, Australia lacks a single grid."
Energy in Australia,"Electricity supply
As of 2011, electricity producers in Australia were not building gas-fired power stations, while the four major banks were unwilling to make loans for coal-fired power stations, according to EnergyAustralia (formerly TRUenergy). In 2014, an oversupply of generation was expected to persist until 2024. However, a report published in 2017 by the Australian Energy Market Operator projected that energy supply in 2018 and 2019 is expected to meet demands, with a risk of supply falling short at peak demand times.
From 2003 to 2013 real electric prices for households increased by an average of 72%. Much of this increase in price has been attributed to over-investment in increasing distribution networks and capacity. Further price increases are predicted to be moderate over the next few years (2017 on) due to changes in the regulation of transmission and distribution networks as well as increased competition in electricity wholesale markets as supply and demand merge.
In 2021, Australia generated a total of 265 Terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity. The breakdown of the electricity generation mix was as follows: coal at 52.9%, natural gas at 18.8%, solar at 10.5%, wind at 9.3%, hydro at 5.6%, oil at 1.8%, and bioenergy and waste at 1.3%. Electricity consumption for the year was 239 TWh, with the industry sector consuming 43%, residential buildings and service sector buildings each contributing 27% to the total consumption, and the transport sector accounting for 3%."
Energy in Australia,"Renewable energy
Renewable energy has potential in Australia, and the Climate Change Authority is reviewing the 20-percent Renewable Energy Target (RET). The production of 50 megawatts of wind power (power for nearly 21,000 homes annually) creates about 50 construction jobs and five staff positions. In recent years, wind and solar power have been the fastest growing source of energy in Australia. Geothermal energy is also growing, but at the present time, it only accounts for a small portion of energy in Australia."
Energy in Australia,"Energy efficiency
Lower energy use could save A$25 billion, or A$840 per electricity customer, according to EnergyAustralia."
Energy in Australia,"Climate change
Australian total emissions in 2007 were 396 million tonnes of CO2. That year, the country was among the top polluter nations of the world per capita. Australian per-capita emissions of carbon dioxide in 2007 were 18.8 tons of CO2, compared to the EU average of 7.9 tons. The change in emissions from 1990 to 2007 was +52.5 percent, compared to the EU's -3.3 percent. The per-capita carbon footprint in Australia was rated 12th in the world by PNAS in 2011.
Due to climate change, Australia is expected to experience harsher extreme weather events, mainly bush-fires and floods during summer. Rising sea levels are of particular concern for Australia, because most of the population lives on the coast (around 85%)."
Energy in Australia,"Employment
When analysing employment data, the Australian Bureau of Statistics classifies the electricity and gas supply industry as part of the Electricity, Gas, Water and Waste Services Division. That division is the smallest industry in Australia in terms of employment.
In November 2017, the number of people employed in electricity supply, which includes electricity generation, transmission and distribution, was 64,200 (47,700 males, 16,600 females). The number of people employed in gas supply was 11,200 (9,000 males, 2,200 females). The total number of persons employed in electricity and gas supply industries was 75,400. This represents about 0.67 percent of all employed persons in Australia.
In 2016, the major occupations in this division were truck drivers (9,900), electricians (7,700), electrical distribution trades workers (5,400), and electrical engineers (4,400)."
Energy in Australia,"Employment in renewable energy activities
In 2015–16, annual direct full-time equivalent employment in renewable energy in Australia was estimated at 11,150. Employment in renewables peaked in 2011–12, probably due to the employment of construction workers to build renewable energy facilities. However, it decreased by 36 percent in 2014–15, and by a further 16 percent in 2015–16. The decline is attributed to a decrease in the number of roof-top solar photovoltaic systems being installed on houses. Once construction of renewable energy facilities is completed, and only ongoing maintenance is required, employment falls quite significantly.
For most Australian states and territories the major contributor to employment in renewable energy is solar power. Employment in roof-top solar photovoltaic systems, including solar hot water systems, comprised half of all employment in renewable energy in 2015–16. Employment in large scale solar and wind power is driven primarily by installation activity, rather than ongoing operation and maintenance.
In Western Australia, 93 percent of all jobs in renewable energy are in solar power. The proportion of employment in biomass is significantly greater in Queensland (42 percent), where the sugar industry makes great use of sugar cane to generate electricity for sugar milling and to feed into the grid. Most jobs in Tasmania's renewable energy industry are in hydropower (87 percent).
Jobs in the renewable energy industry are forecast to grow substantially by 2030, driven by growth in electricity demand and new renewable energy capacity.: 16  Conversely, jobs associated with coal-fired power stations are forecast to decline as those plants age and close. Such job losses would disproportionately affect some regional areas, such as the Latrobe Valley in Victoria, Newcastle and the Hunter Valley in New South Wales, Gladstone and Rockhampton in Queensland, and Collie in Western Australia. However, it is expected that the number of jobs created in renewable energy will far exceed the number of jobs lost in coal-based generation.: 35"
Energy in Australia,"Energy policy of Australia
Finkel Report
In June 2017 Alan Finkel released The Independent Review into the Future Security of the National Electricity Market (commonly referred to as the Finkel Report), which proposed an approach to increasing energy security and reliability through four outcomes. These would be: increased security, future reliability, rewarding consumers, and lower emissions. The report ultimately recommended a Clean Energy Target (CET) to provide incentives for growth in renewable energies.
The reaction to the report by scientific experts in the field leaned more towards positive. Positive reactions to the Report were due to the national strategy plan that provides a CET for Australia, creating customer incentives, and takes politics out of energy policy to help meet the Paris Agreement. Additionally, the Finkel Report was commended for recognizing the current technologies available and including market forces in its solutions by the Australian Academy of Technology Engineering."
Energy in Australia,"National Energy Guarantee
On 17 October 2017, the Australian Government rejected Finkel's CET proposal, in favour of what it called the National Energy Guarantee (NEG), to reduce power prices and prevent blackouts. The strategy calls on electricity retailers to meet separate reliability and emissions requirements, rather than Dr Finkel's CET recommendation. Under the plan, retailers have to provide a minimum amount of baseload power from coal, gas or hydro, while also providing a specified level of low emissions energy. NEG has been criticised as turning away from renewable energy. In October 2018, the Australian Government announced that it would not continue with the Guarantee."
Energy in Australia,"Carbon tax
On 1 July 2012, the Australian Federal government introduced a carbon tax of A$23 (US$17.29) per tonne on selected fossil fuels consumed by major industrial emitters and government bodies such as councils. To offset the tax, the government reduced income tax (by increasing the tax-free threshold) and increased pensions and welfare payments slightly, while introducing compensation for some affected industries. On 17 July 2014, a report by the Australian National University estimated that the Australian scheme had cut carbon emissions by as much as 17 million tonnes. The tax notably helped reduce pollution from the electricity sector.
On 17 July 2014, the Abbott government passed repeal legislation through the Senate, and Australia became the first nation to abolish a carbon tax. In its place, the government set up the Emission Reduction Fund."
Energy in Australia,"See also
Fossil-fuel phase-out
List of coal-fired power stations in Australia
List of natural gas fired power stations in Australia
Australian Renewable Energy Agency 
Energy in individual states and territories:
Energy in New South Wales
Energy in South Australia
Energy in Queensland
Energy in Tasmania
Energy in Western Australia
Energy in Victoria"
Energy in Australia,Notes
Energy in Australia,"
== References =="
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia totalled 533 million tonnes CO2-equivalent based on greenhouse gas national inventory report data for 2019; representing per capita CO2e emissions of 21 tons, three times the global average. Coal was responsible for 30% of emissions. The national Greenhouse Gas Inventory estimates for the year to March 2021 were 494.2 million tonnes, which is 27.8 million tonnes, or 5.3%, lower than the previous year. It is 20.8% lower than in 2005 (the baseline year for the Paris Agreement). According to the government, the result reflects the decrease in transport emissions due to COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, reduced fugitive emissions, and reductions in emissions from electricity; however, there were increased greenhouse gas emissions from the land and agriculture sectors.
Australia uses principally coal power for electricity, accounting for 66% of grid-connected electricity generation in 2020, but this is rapidly decreasing with a growing share of renewables making up the energy supply mix, and most existing coal-fired power station scheduled to cease operation between 2022 and 2048. Emissions by the country have started to fall and are expected to continue to fall in coming years as more renewable projects come online.
Climate Action Tracker rates Australia's overall commitment to emissions reduction as ""insufficient"". Policies and action is ""insufficient"", domestic target is ""almost sufficient"",  fair share target is ""insufficient"", and climate finance is ""critically insufficient"". This is because the Australian government has continued to invest in natural gas projects, refused to increase its 2030 domestic emissions target, and is not on track to meet its current target.
Climate change in Australia is caused by greenhouse gas emissions, and the country is generally becoming hotter, and more prone to extreme heat, bushfires, droughts, floods and longer fire seasons because of climate change."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"Contribution
Total contributions
The Australian government calculates that Australia's net emissions (including Land use, land-use change, and forestry) for the 12-month period to September 2020 were 510.10 million tonnes CO2-equivalent. The sectoral contributions based on the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report metrics were as follows: electricity 170.36Mt, 33.4%; stationary energy (excluding electricity) 101.83Mt, 20.%; transport 89.83Mt, 17.6%;  agriculture 72.04Mt, 14.1%; fugitive emissions 51.23Mt, 10.0%; industrial processes 30.29Mt, 5.9%; waste 13.28Mt, 2.6%, and LULUCF -18.76Mt, -3.7% (due to carbon sequestration).
In 2017, the electricity sector emissions totaled 190 million tons, of which 20 million tons was for primary industry, 49 million tons for manufacturing (which might include aluminum smelting), 51 million tons Commercial, Construction and Transport, and 33 million tons Residential.
The Australian National Greenhouse Gas Inventory (NGGI) indicated in 2006 that the energy sector accounts for 69 per cent of Australia's emissions, agriculture 16 per cent and LULUCF six per cent. Since 1990, however, emissions from the energy sector have increased 35 per cent (stationary energy up 43% and transport up 23%). By comparison, emissions from LULUCF have fallen by 73%. However, questions have been raised about the veracity of the estimates of emissions from the LULUCF sector because of discrepancies between the Australian Federal and Queensland Governments’ land clearing data. Data published by the Statewide Landcover and Trees Study (SLATS) in Queensland, for example, show that the total amount of land clearing in Queensland identified under SLATS between 1989/90 and 2000/01 is approximately 50 per cent higher than the amount estimated by the Australian Federal Government’s National Carbon Accounting System (NCAS) between 1990 and 2001."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"Cumulative historical contribution
The World Resources Institute estimates that Australia was responsible for 1.1% of all CO2 emissions between 1850 and 2002. Consolidated historical data measures Australia's total fossil fuels and cement production emissions (excluding LULUCF) at 18.18 billion tons out of the world's 1.65 trillion tons, or 1.10%. However noting that Australia has significant negative emissions from LULUCF relative to other countries, it is likely the net cumulative contribution proportion of Australia is much lower."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"Projected contribution
According to the no-mitigation scenario in the Garnaut Climate Change Review, Australia's share of world emissions, at 1.5% in 2005, declines to 1.1% by 2030, and to 1% by 2100."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"Responsibility
According to the polluter pays principle, the polluter has ecological and financial responsibility for the climate change consequences. The climate change is caused cumulatively and today's emissions will have effect for decades forward."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"The CO2 emissions per capita was 15.22-15.37 tonnes in 2020, which made Australia the 11th largest [[CO2 emissions per capita]] just ahead of the United Arab Emirates and United States.(Citation 15 does not match new data)"
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"Emission sources
Some of the reasons for Australia's high levels of emissions include:"
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"In 2020, 73.5% of electricity was generated from fossil fuels (66% of electricity was generated from coal, and 7.5% from gas).
A warm climate results in high use of air conditioning.
Agriculture, such as methane from sheep and cow belches.
High levels of automobile and aeroplane use among the population.
Continued deforestation."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"Production and export of carbon products
Australian emissions are monitored on a production rather than a consumption basis. This means that the emissions from the manufacture of goods imported into and consumed within Australia, for example many motor vehicles, are allocated to the country of manufacture. Similarly, Australia produces aluminium for export, which emits carbon dioxide during refining. While the aluminium is mainly consumed overseas, the emissions of its production are allocated to Australia."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"Coal
In 2018 Australia was the world's 2nd largest exporter of coal. Australia is the world's largest exporter of metallurgical coal accounting for 55% of the world's supply in 2019."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"LNG
Australia became the world's largest exporter of liquefied natural gas in 2020."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"Mitigation (technology aspects)
Mitigation of global warming involves taking actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to enhance sinks aimed at reducing the extent of global warming. This is in distinction to adaptation to global warming, which involves taking action to minimize the effects of global warming. Scientific consensus on global warming, together with the precautionary principle and the fear of non-linear climate transitions, is leading to increased effort to develop new technologies and sciences and carefully manage others in an attempt to mitigate global warming.
In order to make a significant change, coal from Australia needs to be replaced with alternatives.
Carbon capture and storage in Australia has been put forward as a solution for production of clean hydrogen from natural gas. Following the introduction of government mandatory renewable energy targets, more opportunities have opened up for renewable energy technologies such as wind power, photovoltaics, and solar thermal technologies. Accelerating deployment of these technologies provides opportunities for mitigating greenhouse gases.
A carbon price was introduced in 2012 by the government of Julia Gillard with the purpose of reducing Australia's carbon emissions. It required large businesses (defined as those with annual carbon dioxide equivalent emissions over 25,000 tonnes annually) to pay a price for emissions permits. The tax was scrapped by the Abbott government in 2014 in what was a widely criticised and highly publicized move."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"Coal
Coal is the most polluting of all fossil fuels, and the single greatest threat to the climate. Every stage of coal use brings substantial environmental damage. Phasing out fossil fuel energy is one of the most important elements to climate change mitigation. Today coal supplies over one third of the Australia's energy. Brown coal is by far the most polluting, and is currently used in Victoria. In order to have significant effects on greenhouse gas emissions, there needs to be a replacement of coal with alternatives.
Reduction in the mining, use and export of coal is favored by environmental groups such as Greenpeace. Almost all of the coal emissions were emitted by coal fired power stations. Coal was responsible for 30% (164 million tonnes) of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions, not counting methane and export coal, based on 2019 GHG inventory.
Two forms of coal are mined in Australia, depending on the region: high quality black coal and lower quality brown coal. Black coal is mainly found in Queensland and New South Wales, and is used for both domestic power generation and for export overseas. It is normally mined underground before being transported to power stations, or export shipping terminals. Brown coal is mainly found in Victoria and South Australia, and is of lower quality due a higher ash and water content. Today there are three open cut brown coal mines in Victoria used for baseload power generation."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"Carbon capture and storage
The Rudd-Gillard government stated support for research into carbon capture and storage CCS as a possible solution to rising greenhouse gas emissions. CCS is an integrated process, made up of three distinct parts: carbon capture, transport, and storage (including measurement, monitoring and verification). Capture technology aims to produce a concentrated stream of CO2 that can be compressed, transported, and stored. Transport of captured CO2 to storage locations is most likely to be via pipeline. Storage of the captured carbon is the final part of the process. The vast majority of CO2 storage is expected to occur in geological sites on land, or below the seabed.
However, according to the Greenpeace False Hope Report, CCS cannot deliver in time to avoid a dangerous increase in world temperatures.
The Report also states that CCS wastes energy, and uses between 10 and 40% of the energy produced by a power station. It also asserts that CCS is expensive, potentially doubling plant costs, and is very risky, as permanent storage cannot be guaranteed."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"Nuclear energy
Australia has approximately 40% of the world's uranium deposits, and is the world's third largest producer of uranium. Life-cycle greenhouse-gas emissions from nuclear power are low.
The only nuclear reactor in Australia is currently operated by ANSTO in the Sydney suburb of Lucas Heights. The main argument against building more is that the cost of electricity from new nuclear is more expensive than new solar power. Other perceived problems include that enriched uranium can also be used as a nuclear weapon, prompting security issues such as nuclear proliferation. Also, nuclear waste requires extensive waste management because it can remain radioactive for centuries."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"Renewable energy
Renewable energy technologies currently contribute about 6.2% of Australia's total energy supply and 21.3% of Australia's electricity supply, with hydro-electricity the largest single contributor and wind power a close second. Initiatives are also being taken with ethanol fuel and geothermal energy exploration."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"Renewable energy targets
Moving towards long-term mitigation policies is a requirement of government, and the Australian energy sectors remains a central area in national emissions. The International Energy Agency (IEA) reviewed the Australian energy sectors policies in 2018, the findings identified needed improvements to the country's emissions reduction targets, and further the energy sectors resilience. The IEA identified needed improvements in government leadership by establishing a well-defined long-term integrated energy policy and climate toolkit for policy development and deployment.
The Australian Government has announced a mandatory renewable energy target (MRET) to ensure that renewable energy obtains a 20% share of electricity supply in Australia by 2020. To ensure this, the government has committed that the MRET will increase from 9,500 gigawatt-hours to 45,000 gigawatt-hours by 2020. After 2020 the proposed ETS and improved efficiencies from innovation and in manufacture are expected to allow the MRET to be phased out by 2030.
Following the introduction of government Mandatory Renewable Energy Targets, more opportunities have opened up for renewable energies such as wind power, photovoltaics, and solar thermal technologies. The deployment of these technologies provides opportunities for mitigating greenhouse gases."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"Solar power
By 2020 installed solar power by country was more in each of Italy, Japan and Germany than Australia despite their lower potentials."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"Wind power
Wind farms are highly compatible with agricultural and pastoral land use."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"Bioenergy
Bioenergy is energy produced from biomass. Biomass is material produced by photosynthesis, or is an organic by-product from a waste stream. Thus it can be seen as stored solar energy. In terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, biomass offers four different types of contribution:"
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"liquid and gaseous biofuels can substitute for oil in transportation;
biomass can be used in place of many greenhouse intensive materials;
biomass can be converted to biochar, an organic char coal that greatly enhances the ability of soil to sequester carbon.
Sustainable energy expert Mark Diesendorf suggests that bioenergy could produce 39% of Australia's electricity generation."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"Solar heat and electricity
Solar heat and electricity together have the potential for supplying all of Australia's energy, whilst using less than 0.1% of land. With suitable government policies, particularly at the state and local levels, solar hot water could cost-effectively provide the vast majority of hot water systems in Australia, and make considerable reductions in residential electricity consumption. Solar electricity's potential scale of application is huge and its prospects for further substantial cost reductions are excellent."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"Energy efficiency
The most important energy saving options include improved thermal insulation and building design, super efficient electrical machines and drives, and a reduction in energy consumption by vehicles used for goods and passenger traffic. Industrialized countries such as Australia, which currently use energy in the least efficient way, can reduce their consumption drastically without the loss of either housing comfort or amenity. Increased energy efficiency of buildings had the support of the former leader of the federal opposition, Malcolm Turnbull."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"Energy storage
Hydrogen may become an important export."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"Biochar
Biochar has been promoted as a technique for mitigation of global warming. The former leader of the federal opposition, Malcolm Turnbull brought biochar into the political debate by announcing that burying agricultural waste was one of three under-invested areas that his mitigation strategy was committed to opening up.
Publications and interest groups which track the fledgling Australian industry are divided over the suitability of biochar to the economy. Brian Toohey of The Australian Financial Review has said it is yet to be proven commercially viable. Friends of the Earth Australia, one of the larger environmental lobby groups, is fundamentally opposed to biochar, calling it ""part of a series of false solutions to climate change"" which will be ""based on large-scale industrial plantations and will lead to the acquisition of large tracts of land, furthering the erosion of indigenous peoples' and community rights while not adequately addressing the climate crisis"".
Green Left Weekly has published several editorials supporting the development of a large-scale biochar industry."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"Reforestation
Reforestation programs have adaptation and mitigation strategy overlap, and in 2014, the ""20 million Trees Programme"" was announced as a national strategy. The plan aimed to further native resilience against climatic changes by creating a self-sustaining tree-based ecosystem by planting 20 million native trees across Australia by 2020. The Programme falls under the authority of the Australian Government's National Landcare Programme. Increasing the coverage of flora range has the potential and capability to increase the habitability potential of areas threatened by climatic change and improve ecological communities that may be threatened or endangered.
The Commonwealth government announced a plan in 2019 which would invest in Australia's forestry industry by planting 1 billion trees in nine forestry hubs throughout Australia by 2030. Land management and biodiversity programs have emissions reduction benefits to both agricultural and environmental. Advantages stem from the land's ability to adapt to climatic changes by helping to fight soil erosion and stabilize soil as well as providing shelter to native and agricultural animals. AUD 1 billion will be invested the National Landcare program between 2018 and 2019 and 2022–23."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"Mitigation (policy aspects)
The economic impact of a 60% reduction of emissions by 2050 was modeled in 2006 in a study commissioned by the Australian Business Roundtable on Climate Change. The World Resources Institute identifies policy uncertainty and over-reliance on international markets as the top threats to Australia's GHG mitigation."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"Domestic
After contributing to the development of, then signing but not ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, action to address climate change was coordinated through the Australian Greenhouse Office. The Australian Greenhouse Office released the National Greenhouse Strategy in 1998. The report recognized climate change was of global significance and that Australia had an international obligation to address the problem. In 2000 the Senate Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts References Committee conducted an inquiry that produced The Heat is On: Australia's Greenhouse Future.
One of Australia's first national attempt to reduce emissions was the voluntary-based initiative called the Greenhouse Challenge Program which began in 1995. A collection of measures which focused on reducing the environmental impacts of the energy sector were released by Prime Minister John Howard on 20 November 1997 in a policy statement called Safeguarding Our Future: Australia's Response to Climate Change. One measure was the establishment of the Australian Greenhouse Office, which was set up as the world's first dedicated greenhouse office in April 1998.
Domestically, the Clean Energy Act 2011 addresses GHG with an emissions cap, carbon price, and subsidies. Emissions by the electric sector are addressed by Renewable Energy targets at multiple scales, Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC), carbon capture and storage flagships, and feed-in tariffs on solar panels. Emissions by the industrial sector are addressed by the Energy Efficiency Opportunities (EEO) program. Emissions by the building sector are addressed by building codes, minimum energy performance standards, Commercial Building Disclosure program, state energy-saving obligations, and the National Energy Saving Initiative. Emissions by the transportation sector are addressed by reduced fuel tax credits and vehicle emissions performance standards. Emissions by the agricultural sector are addressed by the Carbon Farming Initiative and state land-clearing laws. Emissions by the land use sector are addressed by the Clean Energy Future Package, which consists of the Carbon Farming Futures program, Diversity Fund, Regional Natural Resources Management Planning for Climate Change Fund, Indigenous Carbon Farming Fund, Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS), and Carbon Farming Skills program. State energy saving schemes vary by state, with the Energy Saving Scheme (ESS) in North South Wales, Residential Energy Efficiency Scheme (REES) in South Australia, Energy Saver Incentive Scheme (ESI) in Victoria, and Energy Efficiency Improvement Scheme (EEIS) in Australian Capital Territory."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"Carbon Trading and Emission Trading Scheme
In June 2007, former Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, announced that Australia would adopt a Carbon Trading Scheme by 2012. The scheme was expected to be the same as the counterpart in United States and European Union using carbon credits, where businesses must purchase a license in order to generate pollution.
The scheme received broad criticism from both the ALP and Greens. The ALP believed that the scheme was too weak as well as a bad political move by the government. The lack of clear target by the government for this scheme before the 2007 federal election produced a high degree of skepticism on the willingness of the government on mitigation of global warming in Australia.
In March 2008, the newly elected Labor government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced that the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (a cap-and-trade emissions trading system) would be introduced in 2010, however this scheme was initially delayed by a year to mid-2011, and subsequently delayed further until 2013.
In April 2010, Kevin Rudd announced the delay the CPRS until after the commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, which ends in 2012. Reasons given were the lack of bipartisan support for the CPRS and slow international progress on climate action for the delay.
The Federal Opposition strongly criticised the delay as did community and grassroots action groups such as GetUp."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"Prime Ministerial Task Group
Carbon taxation
Another method of mitigation of global warming considered by the Australian Government is a carbon tax. This method would involve imposing an additional tax on the use of fossil fuels to generate energy. Compared to the CPRS and CTS/ETS, a carbon tax would set the cost for all carbon emissions, while the cap itself would be left unattended, allowing free market movements.
This tax would primarily be aimed to reduce the use of fossil fuels for energy generation, and also look to increase efficient energy use and increase demand for alternative energies.
A carbon tax was introduced by the government of Julia Gillard on 1 July 2012. It requires businesses emitting over 25,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions annually to purchase emissions permits, which initially cost A$23 for one tonne of CO2 equivalent. The tax was repealed by the Australian senate on 17 July 2014. The reason given for the repeal by Australia's 2014 prime minister Tony Abbot was that the tax cost jobs and increased energy prices. Opponents to the repeal say that there has been an increase in Australian pollution since the tax's repeal. Since the repeal there has been several calls to re-implement the tax from multiple public figures, including Woodside Petroleum CEO Peter Coleman."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"Pathways for climate change mitigation
Greenpeace energy revolution
Greenpeace calls for a complete energy revolution. There are some fundamental aspects to this revolution, aimed as changing the way that energy is produced, distributed and consumed. The five principles of this revolution are:"
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"implement renewable solutions, especially through decentralized energy systems;
respect the natural limits of the environment;
phase out dirty, unsustainable energy sources;
create greater equity in the use of resources;
decouple economic growth from the consumption of fossil fuels.
Other goals of the energy revolution are:"
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"renewable energy: 40% of electricity provided by renewable sources by 2020;
coal-fired power will be phased out entirely by 2030;
using electricity for the transport system and cutting consumption of fossil fuels through efficiency.
The energy revolution report also looks at policy suggestions for the Australian Government in regards to climate change. Policy suggestions of the report include:"
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"legislate a greenhouse gas reduction target of greater than 40% below 1990 levels by 2020;
establish an emissions trading scheme that delivers a decrease of our emissions in line with legislated interim targets;
legislate a national target for 40% of electricity to be generated by renewable energy sources by 2020;
massively invest in the deployment of renewable energy and strongly regulate for energy efficiency measures;
establish an immediate moratorium on new coal-fired power stations and extensions to existing coal-fired power stations, and phase out existing coal-fired power stations in Australia by 2030;
set a target of 2% per year to reduce Australia's primary energy demand;
ensure transitional arrangements for coal dependent communities that might be affected by the transition to a clean energy economy;
redirect all public subsidies that encourage the use and production of fossil fuels towards implementing energy efficiency programs, deploying renewable energy and supporting the upgrading of public transport infrastructure;
develop a highly trained “green” workforce through investment in training programs and apprenticeships."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"Climate Code Red: The case for a sustainability emergency
Climate Code Red states that the key strategies for cutting greenhouse gas emissions to zero are resource efficiency backed up by the substitution of renewable energy for fossil fuel sources. The report sites ultra-efficient technologies and synergies, and wind power as ways in which to tackle the climate change problem within Australia.
Climate Code Red also has an outline for a rapid transition to a safe-climate economy. This plan includes:"
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"having the building capacity to plan, coordinate and allocate resources for high priority infrastructure projects and to invest sufficiently in the means to make safe-climate producer and consumer goods;
fostering research and innovation to produce, develop and scale up the necessary technologies, products and processes;
national building and industry energy efficiency programmes, including mandatory and enforceable minimum standards for domestic and commercial buildings, and the allocation of public resources to help householders, especially those with limited financial capacity, to reduce energy use;
the rapid construction of capacity across a range of renewable technologies at both a national and micro level to produce sufficient electricity to allow the closure of the fossil fuel-fired generating industry;
the conversion and expansion of Australia's car industry to manufacture zero-emission vehicles for public and private transport;
the renewal and electrification of national and regional train networks to provide the capacity to shift all long-distance freight from road and air to rail;
Further information: High-speed rail in Australia"
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"providing safe-climate expertise, technologies, goods and services to less developed nations to support their transition to the post-carbon world;
adjustment and reskilling programmes for workers, communities and industries affected by the impacts of global warming and by the transition to the new economy."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"Garnaut climate change review
Green paper 2008
Climate Change Authority review
The Australian Climate Change Authority made recommendations to the Commonwealth government in 2016 to develop a toolkit of policies to guide the country into the future, the focal point for the 'toolkit' is Australia's Paris Agreement obligations. In 2017, the Commonwealth government commissioned an effectiveness' assessment of emissions reductions policies to meet its Paris Agreement obligations by 2030. The results of the evaluation were to develop both adaptation and mitigation measure which would cover all sectors of the economy, under the Paris Agreement these measure fall under ""ratchet mechanism"". To meet the 2030 Paris Agreements 2 °C limit of global median temperature rise a five-year review and adjustment cycle will commence beginning in 2023."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"Solutions
There are a number of ways to achieve the goals outlined above. This includes implementing clean, renewable solutions and decentralizing energy systems. Existing technologies are available to use energy effectively and ecologically, including the use of solar, wind, and other renewable technologies, which have experienced double digit market growth globally in the last decade.
A large section of the scientific community believe that one of the real solutions to avoiding dangerous climate change lies in renewable energy and energy efficiency that can start protecting the climate today. Technically accessible renewable energy sources such as wind, wave, and solar, are capable of providing six times more energy than the world currently consumes. As coal is one of the highest emitters of greenhouse gases, closing coal power stations is one of the most powerful tools for carbon emission reduction.
The city of Melbourne is working with the wider Australian government to make Melbourne carbon neutral by the year 2050. The name of the plan is Melbourne Together for 1.5°C. The plan includes ways for Melbourne to reduce the impact of waste, and models for how to reduce transport and building emissions to zero. This is a continuation off of a plan created in 2003 to have Melbourne carbon neutral by 2020, but this did not succeed."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"Federal Government action
Howard government
The Howard government was resistant to taking action to prevent global warming that would harm Australia's economy, a policy continued from the prior Keating government. In 1996 in the lead up to the Kyoto treaty this slow going attitude caused conflict with the US and EU who at that time were proposing legally binding emissions targets as part of Kyoto. Australia was unwilling to accept stricter timeframes and emissions reductions targets, such as the 20% cut (from 1990 to 2005) proposed by smaller pacific island states, because of its carbon-intensive economy. Increasingly, in the lead up to the Kyoto conference, the Howard government became internationally isolated on its climate change policy. With Australia's opposition to binding targets ""figur[ing] prominently in the prime minister's [recent] discussions in Washington and London"" as highlighted in a Cabinet memo. In 1997 the Cabinet agreed to establish a climate change taskforce to strengthen its Kyoto bargaining position. In 1998 the Australian Government, under Prime Minister John Howard, established the Australian Greenhouse Office, which was then the world's first government agency dedicated to cutting greenhouse gas emissions, And, also in 1998, Australia signed but did not ratify the Kyoto protocols.
The Australian Greenhouse Office put forward proposals for emissions reductions in 2000 (rejected in cabinet), 2003 (vetoed by Howard) and 2006 which was accepted by Howard and became the basis for his pre election emissions trading scheme proposal.
Rudd government
In 2007, after the first Rudd government was sworn in, the new Department of Climate Change was established under the Prime Minister and Cabinet portfolio and entrusted with coordinating and leading climate policy. The Kyoto protocol was ratified nine days after. The 2009 budget committed the government to a 25% reduction by 2020 on 2000 levels if ""the world agrees to an ambitious global deal to stabilise levels of CO2 equivalent at 450 parts per million or lower by mid-century"".
On 1 December 2009, Malcolm Turnbull the then opposition leader was unseated by Tony Abbot, voiding a speculated deal on an emissions trading scheme between the opposition and the government. This happened a day before the second rejection of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme bill by the Senate on 2 December 2009. On 2 February 2010, the Emissions Trading Scheme legislation was introduced for the third time, it was voted down again and the Liberal party unveiled its own climate mitigation legislation, the Direct Action Plan.
On 27 April 2010, the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced that the Government has decided to delay the implementation of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) until the end of the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol (ending in 2012). The government cited the lack of bipartisan support for the CPRS and the withdrawal of support by the Greens, and slow international progress on climate action after the Copenhagen Summit, as the reasons for the decision. The delay of the implementation of the CPRS was strongly criticised by the Federal Opposition under Abbott and by community and grassroots action groups such as GetUp.
Gillard (and second Rudd) government
To reduce Australia's carbon emissions, the government of Julia Gillard introduced a carbon tax on 1 July 2012, which required large businesses, defined as those emitting over 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent annually, to purchase emissions permits. The Carbon Tax reduced Australia's carbon dioxide emissions, with coal generation down 11% since 2008–09.
Abbot government
The subsequent Australian Government, elected in 2013 under then Prime Minister Tony Abbott was criticised for being ""in complete denial about climate change"". Abbott became known for his anti-climate change positions as was evident in a number of policies adopted by his administration. In a global warming meeting held in the United Kingdom, he reportedly said that proponents of climate change are alarmists, underscoring a need for ""evidence-based"" policymaking. The Abbott government repealed the carbon tax on 17 July 2014 in a heavily criticised move. The renewable energy target (RET), launched in 2001, was also modified.
Turnbull government
However, under the government of Malcolm Turnbull, Australia attended the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference and adopted the Paris Agreement, which includes a review of emission reduction targets every 5 years from 2020.
Australia's Clean Energy Target (CET) came under threat in October 2017 from former Prime Minister Tony Abbott. This could lead to the Australian Labor Party withdrawing support from the Turnbull government's new energy policy.
Climate policy continues to be controversial. Following the repeal of the carbon price in the last parliament, the Emissions Reduction Fund (ERF) is now Australia's main mechanism to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, two-thirds of the ERF's allocated $2.5 billion funding has now been spent. The ERF, and other policies, will need further funding to achieve our climate targets.
Morrison government
Under the Morrison government, Australia experienced some criticism as it plans to use a carbon accounting loophole from the expiring Kyoto Protocol agreement to fulfill its (already modest) Paris commitments. According to Climate Analytics, Australia pledged in Paris to cut its emissions between 26% and 28% below 2005 levels by 2030 but it is currently on track for a 7% cut.
The Coalition government repeatedly claimed in 2019 that it turned around Australia's greenhouse gas emissions that it inherited from the Labor government. Scott Morrison, Angus Taylor and other senior Coalition figures repeated this claim. The Coalition actually inherited a strong position from the Labor government which had enacted the carbon tax.
There are suggestions that disinformation is spread about the cause of Australia bushfires.
On 1 November 2019, Scott Morrison outlined in a speech of mining delegates at the Queensland Resources Council that he planned to legislate to outlaw climate boycotts."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"State government actions
Per person emissions vary considerably by state."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"Victoria
The state of Victoria, in particular, has been proactive in pursuing reductions in GHG through a range of initiatives. In 1989 it produced the first state climate change strategy, ""The Greenhouse Challenge"". Other states have also taken a more proactive stance than the federal government. One such initiative undertaken by the Victorian Government is the 2002 Greenhouse Challenge for Energy Policy package, which aims to reduce Victorian emissions through a mandated renewable energy target. Initially, it aimed to have a 10 per cent share of Victoria's energy consumption being produced by renewable technologies by 2010, with 1000 MW of wind power under construction by 2006. The government legislated to ensure that by 2016 electricity retailers in Victoria purchase 10 per cent of their energy from renewables. This was ultimately overtaken by the national Renewable Energy Target (RET). By providing a market incentive for the development of renewables, the government helps foster the development of the renewable energy sector. A Green Paper and White Paper on Climate Change was produced in 2010, including funding for a number of programs. A Climate Change Act was passed including targets for 50% reduction in emissions. A recent review of this Act has recommended further changes.
The supreme court of Australia stopped a logging project in Victoria because it will be particularly destructive after the bushfires. The premier of Victoria Daniel Andrews announced that by 2030 logging in the state will be banned."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"South Australia
Former Premier Mike Rann (2002–2011) was Australia's first Climate Change Minister and passed legislation committing South Australia to renewable energy and emissions reduction targets. Announced in March 2006, this was the first legislation passed anywhere in Australia committed to cutting emissions. By the end of 2011, 26% of South Australia's electricity generation derived from wind power, edging out coal-fired power for the first time. Although only 7.2% of Australia's population live in South Australia, in 2011, it had 54% of Australia's installed wind capacity. Following the introduction of solar feed-in tariff legislation South Australia also had the highest per-capita take-up of household rooftop photo-voltaic installations in Australia. In an educative program, the Rann government invested in installing rooftop solar arrays on the major public buildings including the Parliament, Museum, Adelaide Airport, Adelaide Showgrounds pavilion and public schools. About 31% of South Australia's total power is derived from renewables. In the five years to the end of 2011, South Australia experienced a 15% drop in emissions, despite strong employment and economic growth during this period.
In 2010, the Solar Art Prize was created by Pip Fletcher, and has run annually since, inviting artists from South Australia to reflect subjects of climate change and environmentalism in their work. Some winning artists receive renewable energy service prizes which can be redeemed as solar panels, solar hot water or battery storage systems."
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"See also
Climate change in Australia
Coal mining in Australia
Environmental issues in Australia
Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the environment
Plug-in electric vehicles in Australia"
Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia,"References
External links
Australia's Mandatory Renewable Energy Target (Australia's MRET)
Garnaut Review (Garnaut Climate Change Review)"
Australians,"Australians, colloquially known as Aussies, are the citizens, nationals and individuals associated with the country of Australia. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or ethno-cultural. For most Australians, several (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of their being Australian. Australian law does not provide for a racial or ethnic component of nationality, instead relying on citizenship as a legal status, though the Constitutional framers considered the Commonwealth to be ""a home for Australians and the British race alone"".  Since the postwar period, Australia has pursued an official policy of multiculturalism and has the world's eighth-largest immigrant population, with immigrants accounting for 30 percent of the population in 2019.
Between European colonisation in 1788 and the Second World War, the vast majority of settlers and immigrants came from the British Isles in the United Kingdom and Ireland (principally England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland), although there was significant immigration from China and Germany during the 19th century. Many early settlements were initially penal colonies to house transported convicts. Immigration increased steadily, with an explosion of population in the 1850s following a series of gold rushes. 
In the decades immediately following the Second World War, Australia received a large wave of immigration from across Europe, with many more immigrants arriving from Southern and Eastern Europe than in previous decades. Since the late 1970s, following the end of the White Australia policy in 1973, a large and continuing wave of immigration to Australia from around the world has continued into the 21st century, with Asia now being the largest source of immigrants. A smaller proportion of Australians are descended from indigenous people, comprising Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders.
The development of a distinctive Australian identity and national character began in the 19th century. The primary language is Australian English. Australia is home to a diversity of cultures, a result of its history of immigration. Since 1788, Australian culture has primarily been a Western culture strongly influenced by early Anglo-Celtic settlers. The cultural divergence and evolution that has occurred over the centuries since European settlement has resulted in a distinctive Australian culture. 
As the Asian Australian population continues to expand and flourish as a result of changes in the demographic makeup of immigrants and as there has been increased economic and cultural intercourse with Asian nations, Australia has observed the gradual emergence of a ""Eurasian society"" within its major urban hubs, blending both European and Asian material and popular culture within a distinctly Australian context. Other influences include Australian Aboriginal culture, the traditions brought to the country by waves of immigration from around the world, and the culture of the United States."
Australians,"History
The Colony of New South Wales was established by the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1788, with the arrival of the First Fleet, and five other colonies were established in the 19th century, now forming the six present-day Australian states. Large-scale immigration occurred following a series of gold rushes in the 1850s and after the First and Second World Wars, with many post-World War II migrants coming from Southern Europe, Eastern Europe and The Middle East. Since the end of the White Australia policy in 1973, immigrants to Australia have come from around the world, and from Asia in particular.
The predominance of the English language, the existence of a parliamentary system of government drawing upon the Westminster system, constitutional monarchy, American constitutionalist and federalist traditions, Christianity as the dominant religion, and the popularity of sports including cricket, rugby football and tennis are evidence of a significant Anglo-Celtic heritage derived from the descendants of early settlers who form an ancestral group known as Anglo-Celtic Australians. As a result of many shared linguistic, historical, cultural and geographic characteristics, Australians have often identified closely with New Zealanders in particular. Australian citizenship prior to 1949 was a social, moral, and political concept. Prior to the introduction of Australian citizenship, Australians had the status of ""British subjects"". The High Court of Australia in Potter v Minahan (1908) stated that ""Although there is no Australian nationality as distinguished from British nationality, there is an Australian species of British nationality."""
Australians,"Ancestries
The Australian Bureau of Statistics does not collect data on race, but asks each Australian resident to nominate up to two ancestries each census. These ancestry responses are classified into broad standardised ancestry groups. At the 2021 census, the number of ancestry responses within each standardised group as a proportion of the total population was as follows: 57.2% European (including 46% North-West European and 11.2% Southern and Eastern European), 33.8% (including 29.9% Australian) Oceanian, 17.4% Asian (including 6.5% Southern and Central Asian, 6.4% North-East Asian, and 4.5% South-East Asian), 3.2% North African and Middle Eastern, 1.4% Peoples of the Americas, and 1.3% Sub-Saharan African. At the 2021 census, the most commonly nominated individual ancestries as a proportion of the total population were:"
Australians,"European Australians
European Australians are Australians of whose descent is wholly or partially European. Australians of European descent are the majority in Australia, with the number of ancestry responses categorised within the European groups as a proportion of the total population amounting to 57.2% (including 46% North-West European and 11.2% Southern and Eastern European). The proportion of Australians with European ancestry is thought to be higher than the numbers captured in the census as those nominating their ancestry as ""Australian"" are classified within the Oceanian group, and the Australian Bureau of Statistics has stated that most who nominate ""Australian"" as their ancestry are Anglo-Celtic Australians. Since soon after the beginning of British settlement in 1788, people of European descent have formed the majority of the population in Australia.
The largest statistical grouping of European Australians are Anglo-Celtic Australians, Australians whose ancestors originate wholly or partially in the British Isles. This includes English Australians, Irish Australians, Scottish Australians and Welsh Australians. Anglo-Celtic Australians have been highly influential in shaping the nation's character. By the mid-1840s, the numbers of freeborn settlers had overtaken the convict population. Although some observers stress Australia's convict history, the vast majority of early settlers came of their own free will. Far more Australians are descended from assisted immigrants than from convicts, the majority of Colonial Era settlers being British and Irish. About 20 percent of Australians are descendants of convicts. Most of the first Australian settlers came from London, the Midlands and the North of England, and Ireland. 
Settlers that arrived throughout the 19th century were from all parts of the United Kingdom and Ireland, a significant proportion of settlers came from the Southwest and Southeast of England, from Ireland and from Scotland. In 1888, 60 percent of the Australian population had been born in Australia, and almost all had British ancestral origins. Out of the remaining 40 percent, 34 percent had been born in the British Isles, and 6 percent were of European origin, mainly from Germany and Scandinavia. The census of 1901 showed that 98 percent of Australians had Anglo-Celtic ancestral origins. In 1939 and 1945, still 98 percent of Australians had Anglo-Celtic ancestral origins. Until 1947, the vast majority of the population were of British origin.
Germans formed the largest non-British Isles ancestry for most of the 19th century. Between 1901 and 1940, 140,000 non-British European immigrants arrived in Australia (about 16 percent of the total intake). Before World War II, 13.6 percent were born overseas, and 80 percent of those were British. Following the Second World War, large numbers of continental Europeans immigrated to Australia, with Italian Australians and Greek Australians being among the largest immigrant groups during the post-war era. During the 1950s, Australia was the destination of 30 per cent of Dutch emigrants and the Netherlands-born became numerically the second largest non-British group in Australia. In 1971, 70 percent of the foreign born were of European origin.
Italian Australians are Australians of Italian ancestry, and comprise the largest non Anglo-Celtic European ethnic group in Australia, with the 2021 census finding 4.4% of the population claiming ancestry from Italy be they migrants to Australia or their descendants born in Australia of Italian heritage. Australia's long-history of Italian immigration has given rise to an Italo-Australian dialect of the Italian language. German Australians are Australians of German ancestry. The German community constitutes the second largest non-Anglo Celtic European ethnic group in Australia, amounting to 4% of respondents in the 2021 Census. Germans formed the largest non-English-speaking group in Australia up to the 20th century. Although a few individuals had emigrated earlier, the first large group of Germans arrived in South Australia 1838, not long after the British colonisation of South Australia."
Australians,"Asian Australians
Asian Australians are Australians with ancestry wholly or partially from the continent of Asia. At the 2021 census, the number of ancestry responses categorised within the Asian groups as a proportion of the total population amounted to 17.4% (including 6.5% Southern and Central Asian, 6.4% North-East Asian, and 4.5% South-East Asian). This figure excludes Australians of Middle Eastern ancestry, who are separately categorised within the North African and Middle Eastern group.
Chinese Australians are Australians of Chinese ancestry, forming the single largest non Anglo-Celtic ancestry in the country, constituting 5.5% of those nominating their ancestry at the 2021 census. Chinese Australians are one of the largest groups of Overseas Chinese people, forming the largest Overseas Chinese community in Oceania, and are the largest Asian-Australian community. Per capita, Australia has more people of Chinese ancestry than any country outside Asia. Many Chinese Australians have immigrated from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan as well as Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines, while many are descendants of such immigrants. The very early history of Chinese Australians involved significant immigration from villages of the Pearl River Delta in Southern China. 
More recent Chinese migrants include those from Mandarin and other Chinese dialects or forms. Less well-known are the kinds of society Chinese Australians came from, the families they left behind and what their intentions were in migrating. Gold rushes lured many Chinese to the Australian colonies. From the mid-19th century, Chinese dubbed Australia the New Gold Mountain after the Gold Mountain of California in North America. They typically sent money to their families in the villages, regularly visited their families, and retired to their home villages after many years working as market gardeners, shopkeepers or cabinet-makers. As with many overseas Chinese groups the world over, early Chinese immigrants to Australia established several Chinatowns in major cities, such as Sydney (Chinatown, Sydney), Melbourne (Chinatown, Melbourne, since the 1850s) and Brisbane (Chinatown, Brisbane), Perth (Chinatown, Perth), as well as in regional towns associated with the goldfields such as Cairns (Cairns Chinatown).
Indian Australians are Australians of Indian ancestry, and are the second-largest Asian Australian ancestry, comprising 3.1% of the total population. Indian Australians are one of the largest groups within the Indian diaspora. Indians are the youngest average age (34 years) and the fastest growing community both in terms of absolute numbers and percentages in Australia. Migration of Indians to Australia followed the pattern of ""from 18th-century sepoys and lascars (soldiers and sailors) aboard visiting European ships, through 19th-century migrant labourers and the 20th century's hostile policies to the new generation of skilled professional migrants of the 21st century... India became the largest source of skilled migrants in the 21st century."""
Australians,"Indigenous Australians
Indigenous Australians are descendants of the original inhabitants of the Australian continent. Their ancestors are believed to have migrated from Africa to Asia around 70,000 years ago and arrived in Australia around 50,000 years ago. The Torres Strait Islanders are a distinct people of Melanesian ancestry, indigenous to the Torres Strait Islands, which are at the northernmost tip of Queensland near Papua New Guinea, and some nearby settlements on the mainland. The term ""Aboriginal"" is traditionally applied to only the indigenous inhabitants of mainland Australia and Tasmania, along with some of the adjacent islands. Indigenous Australians is an inclusive term used when referring to both Aboriginal and Torres Strait islanders (the ""first peoples"").
Dispersing across the Australian continent over time, the population expanded and differentiated into hundreds of distinct groups, each with its own language and culture. More than 400 distinct Australian Aboriginal peoples have been identified across the continent, distinguished by unique names designating their ancestral languages, dialects, or distinctive speech patterns.
In 1770, fearing he had been pre-empted by the French, James Cook changed a hilltop signal-drill on Possession Island in Torres Strait, into a possession ceremony, fabricating Britain's claim of Australia's east coast. Eighteen years later, the east coast was occupied by Britain and later the west coast was also settled by Britain. At that time, the indigenous population was estimated to have been between 315,000 and 750,000.
At the 2021 census, 3.2% of the Australian population identified as being Indigenous — Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders. Indigenous Australians experience higher than average rates of imprisonment and unemployment, lower levels of education, and life expectancies for males and females that are, respectively, 11 and 17 years lower than those of non-indigenous Australians. Some remote Indigenous communities have been described as having ""failed state""-like conditions."
Australians,"Country of birth
In 2019, 30% of the Australian resident population, or 7,529,570 people, were born overseas. The following table shows Australia's population by country of birth as estimated by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2021. It shows only countries or regions or birth with a population of over 100,000 residing in Australia (for more information about immigration see Immigration to Australia and Foreign-born population of Australia):"
Australians,"Language
Although Australia has no official language, English has always been entrenched as the de facto national language. Australian English is a major variety of the language with a distinctive accent and lexicon, and differs slightly from other varieties of English in grammar and spelling. General Australian serves as the standard dialect.
At the 2021 census, English was the only language spoken in the home for 72% of the population. The next most common languages spoken at home are Mandarin (2.7%), Arabic (1.4%), Vietnamese (1.3%), Cantonese (1.2%) and Punjabi (0.9%). Over 250 Indigenous Australian languages are thought to have existed at the time of first European contact, of which fewer than twenty are still in daily use by all age groups. About 110 others are spoken exclusively by older people. At the time of the 2006 census, 52,000 Indigenous Australians, representing 12% of the Indigenous population, reported that they spoke an Indigenous language at home. Australia has a sign language known as Auslan, which is the main language of about 10,112 deaf people who reported that they use Auslan language at home in the 2016 census."
Australians,"Religion
Australia has no official religion; its Constitution prohibits the Commonwealth government, but not the states, from establishing one, or interfering with the freedom of religion. At the 2021 Census, 38.9% of the population identified as having ""no religion"", up from 15.5% in 2001. The largest religion is Christianity (43.9% of the population). The largest Christian denominations are the Roman Catholic Church (20% of the population) and the Anglican Church of Australia (9.8%). Multicultural immigration since the Second World War has led to the growth of non-Christian religions, the largest of which are Islam (3.2%), Hinduism (2.7%), Buddhism (2.4%), Sikhism (0.8%), and Judaism (0.4%).
In 2021, just under 8,000 people declared an affiliation with traditional Aboriginal religions. According to Australian Aboriginal mythology and the animist framework developed in Aboriginal Australia, the Dreaming is a sacred era in which ancestral totemic spirit beings formed The Creation. The Dreaming established the laws and structures of society and the ceremonies performed to ensure continuity of life and land."
Australians,"Population
The current Australian resident population is estimated at 27,713,000 (18 August 2024). This does not include Australians living overseas. In 2015, 2.15% of the Australian population lived overseas, one of the lowest proportions worldwide. This ratio is much lower than many other countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (an intergovernmental organisation with 38 member developed countries)."
Australians,"Historical population
The data in the table is sourced from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The population estimates do not include the Aboriginal population before 1961. Estimates of Aboriginal population prior to European settlement range from 300,000 to one million, with archaeological finds indicating a sustainable population of around 750,000."
Australians,"See also
Australian Americans
Australian Canadians
Australian New Zealanders
Australian Paraguayans
Australians in the United Kingdom
Australians in China
Australians in Greece
Australians in India
Australians in Italy
Australians in Japan
Australians in Turkey
Australians in Thailand
List of prime ministers of Australia
Australians in the United Arab Emirates
Australians in Pakistan
Australians in Singapore
Australians in Hong Kong
Australians in Saudi Arabia"
Australians,"Notes
References
Citation
External links
 Media related to People of Australia at Wikimedia Commons"
Education in Australia,"Education in Australia encompasses the sectors of early childhood education (preschool) and primary education (primary schools), followed by secondary education (high schools), and finally tertiary education, which includes higher education (universities and other higher education providers) and vocational education (registered training organisations). Regulation and funding of education is primarily the responsibility of the States and territories; however, the Australian Government also plays a funding role.
Education in Australia is compulsory between the ages of four, five, or six and fifteen, sixteen or seventeen, depending on the state or territory and the date of birth.
For primary and secondary education, government schools educate approximately 65 per cent of Australian students, with approximately 35 per cent in non-government schools. At the tertiary level, the majority of Australia's universities are public, and student fees are subsidised through a student loan program where payment becomes due when debtors reach a certain income level.
Underpinned by the Australian Qualifications Framework, implemented in 1995, Australia has adopted a national system of qualifications, encompassing higher education, vocational education and training (VET), and school-based education. For primary and secondary schools, a national Australian Curriculum has been progressively developed and implemented since 2010.
Australia is a leading global provider of education to international students, and in 2012 was ranked as the third-largest provider of international education after the United States and the United Kingdom. Australia has the highest ratio of international students per head of population in the world by a large margin, with 812,000 international students enrolled in the nation's universities and vocational institutions in 2019.
However, Australian students placed 16th in the world in reading, 29th in maths and 17th in science in the 2018 PISA study by the OCED. This continues a sharp decline in educational standards.
The Education Index, published with the UN's Human Development Index in 2018, based on data from 2017, listed Australia as 0.929, the second-highest in the world."
Education in Australia,"Regulation and funding
The regulation, operation, and funding of education is the responsibility of the states and territories, because the Australian Government does not have a specific constitutional power to pass laws with concerning education. However, the federal government helps to fund non-government schools, helps to fund public universities and subsidises tertiary education through a national student loan scheme, and regulates vocational education providers.
Post-compulsory education is regulated within the Australian Qualifications Framework, a unified system of national qualifications in schools, vocational education and training, and the tertiary education sector.
The Australian Government's involvement in education has been the responsibility of several departments over the years,[note a] with the Department of Education, Skills and Employment being formed in 2020.
The academic year in Australia varies between States and institutions; however, it generally runs from late January/early February until early/mid-December for primary and secondary schools, with slight variations in the inter-term holidays and TAFE colleges, and from late February until mid-November for universities with seasonal holidays and breaks for each educational institute."
Education in Australia,"Preschool
Historically, preschool and pre-prep programs in Australia were relatively unregulated and not compulsory.  While still not mandatory for children to attend, the Federal Government has had a focus since 2009 on encouraging families to enrol their children (from around 4 years of age) in a preschool or kindergarten that delivers quality early childhood education and care Federal and state legislation now requires preschool services to implement and deliver programming based on the nationally approved Early Years Learning Framework  The first exposure many Australian children have to learn with others outside of traditional parenting is daycare or a parent-run playgroup. This sort of activity is not generally considered schooling, as preschool education is separate from primary school in all states and territories, except Western Australia where pre-school education is taught as part of the primary school system and Victoria where the state framework, the Victorian Early Years Learning and Development Framework (VEYLDF) covers children from birth to 8 years old, is used by some schools over the national framework. In Queensland, preschool programs are often called Kindergarten or Pre-Prep and are usually privately run but attract state government funding if run for at least 600 hours a year and delivered by a registered teacher.
Preschools are usually run by the state and territory governments, except in Victoria, South Australia and New South Wales where they are more often run by local councils, community groups or private organisations. Preschool is offered to three- to five-year-olds; attendance numbers vary widely between the states, but 85.7% of children attended preschool the year before school. The year before a child is due to attend primary school is the main year for preschool education. This year is far more commonly attended and may take the form of a few hours of activity during weekdays.  Most states of Australia now fund government preschools to offer 15 hours per week (600 hours over a year) for each enrolled child in the year before they commence formal schooling"
Education in Australia,"Primary and secondary education
10,584 registered schools were operating in Australia in 2019, of which 7,092 were government schools. As of 2019, government schools educated 65.4% of all students. In 2017, there were just under 282,000 teachers in Australian primary and secondary schools. Of the non-government schools, nearly two-thirds were Catholic schools. The major part of government-run schools' costs is met by the relevant state or territory government.  The Australian Government provides the majority of public funding for non-government schools, which is supplemented by states and territories.
Non-government schools, both religious or secular typically charge compulsory tuition and other fees. Government schools provide education without compulsory tuition fees, although many government schools ask for payment of 'voluntary' fees to defray particular expenses.
Regardless of whether a school is government or non-government, it is regulated by the same curriculum standards framework. The framework is administered by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority. Most schools require students to wear prescribed school uniforms. A school year in Australia starts in January and finishes in December."
Education in Australia,"History of school education in Australia
The first formal education in Australia began when the European convicts and settlers began to build the first public infrastructure, in the 19th century. The first schools were either built by ex-convicts or members of the Church. Beginning in approximately 1905, many children of the Stolen Generations were educated like non-aboriginal children, with the aim of effectively assimilating them into the non-aboriginal community. This was made illegal in 1969."
Education in Australia,"Compulsory attendance requirements
School education in Australia is compulsory between certain ages as specified by state or territory legislation. Depending on the state or territory, and date of birth of the child, school is compulsory from the age of five to six to the age of fifteen to seventeen.
In the ACT, NSW, the Northern Territory, Queensland, South Australia, Victoria, and Western Australia, children are legally required to attend school from the age of six years old, until the minimum leaving age. In Tasmania, the compulsory school starting age is 5 years old. However, most children commence the preliminary year of formal schooling, in Pre-Year 1, between four and a half and five and a half years of age, variously called kindergarten (sometimes called Year K), reception, preparation (also abbreviated as ""prep"") and transition.
As of 2010, the national apparent retention rate (ARR), a measure of student engagement that provides an indicator of the success of education systems in keeping students in school beyond the minimum leaving age, was 78 per cent for all full-time students in Year 12."
Education in Australia,"Australian Curriculum
While state and territory governments are responsible for the regulation and delivery of school-based education within their jurisdiction, through the Council of Australian Governments, the Commonwealth Government has, since 2014, played an increasing role in the establishment of the Australian Curriculum that sets the expectations for what all young Australians should be taught, regardless of where they live in Australia or their background. The development of the Australian Curriculum is based on the principles of improving the quality, equity and transparency of Australia's education system. The Australian Curriculum, for pre-Year 1 to Year 10, is made up of the following eight learning areas: English; Mathematics; Science; Humanities and Social Sciences; The Arts; Technologies; Health and Physical Education as well as Languages. In the senior secondary Australian Curriculum, for Year 11 and Year 12, fifteen senior secondary subjects across English, Mathematics, Science, History and Geography were endorsed between 2012 and 2013. The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority has mandated the achievement standards that describe the quality of learning (including the depth of understanding, the extent of knowledge, and the sophistication of skill) expected of students who have studied the content for each subject."
Education in Australia,"Types of schools
The types of schools in Australia fall broadly into two categories: government schools, being those schools operated by state or territory departments or agencies; and non-government schools, being those schools that are not operated by government departments or agencies. Non-government schools can be further classified, based on self-identification of the school's affiliation. Non-government schools are grouped for reporting as Catholic schools (including Catholic-affiliated private schools) or private (other non-government schools).
Government schools receive funding from the relevant state or territory government. Non-government schools receive funding from the Australian Government and relevant state or territory government; and in most cases, parents are required to make a co-payment for their child's education.
As of 2019 across primary and secondary education, approximately two-thirds of all school students attended government schools; with the remaining one-third of students educated in non-government schools.
A small portion of students are legally home-schooled, particularly in rural areas."
Education in Australia,"School years
Primary schools
Also sometimes called infants schools, Australia adopts the UNESCO term of primary school that generally covers a child's education from pre-Year 1 and finish with Year 6. The duration of primary school years varies across each Australian state and territory, with most adopting seven years; except in South Australia, where, until 2022, students finish with Year 7, making the duration of primary school eight years;: [see ""Primary""]  until they are 11, 12 or 13 years of age. Primary schools focus on developing essential literacy, numeracy and social skills, and provide foundational knowledge to children about the world around them."
Education in Australia,"Secondary schools
Secondary schools in Australia are also called high schools[note b] and colleges (or junior, intermediate, or senior colleges). Secondary schools vary across each Australian state and territory, but they generally cover Year 7 to Year 10 (compulsory period of education) and senior secondary schools continue to Year 12."
Education in Australia,"Middle schools
In the majority of Australian states and territories, middle schools are relatively uncommon. Students progress from primary school to secondary school. As an alternative to the middle school model, some secondary schools divided their grades into ""junior high school"" (Years 7, 8, 9 and 10) and ""senior high school"" (Years 11 and 12). Some have three levels, ""junior"" (Years 7 and 8), ""intermediate"" (Years 9 and 10), and ""senior"" (Years 11 and 12).
In June 2006 the Northern Territory Government introduced a three-tier system featuring middle schools for Year 7 to Year 9 (approximate age 12–15) and high school for Year 10 to Year 12 (approximate age 15–18)."
Education in Australia,"Combined and central schools
In Australia, combined schools are schools that have classes from both primary and secondary year levels.: [see ""Combined school""]  These schools may be located in an urban, regional or rural area and can be government or non-government schools. As of 2019 there were approximately 500 Australian combined government schools: [search ""Combined school""]  and approximately 850 Australian combined non-government schools.: [search ""Combined school""] 
Central schools are predominantly, but not exclusively, government schools located in a rural area that provides both primary and lower secondary education to students, usually concluding at Year 10. As of 2019 there were 62 Australian central schools, and all except one were located in rural New South Wales.: [search ""Central school""]  In Western Australia, the term district high school is synonymous with central school."
Education in Australia,"Organisational structures
Schools are broadly categorised into government and non-government schools. The non-government schools are further categorised into Catholic schools and private schools. As of 2018, 65.7% of students were enrolled in government schools, 19.7% in catholic schools and 14.6% in private schools."
Education in Australia,"Government schools
Also called state schools or public schools, government schools educate approximately two-thirds of all school students in Australia. If a student elects to attend a government school, they are required to attend a school within their local school district unless the student has dispensation to attend another school, usually approved based on academic merit, specialisation, or other reasons, such as a student disability.
Government schools are run by the respective state government agency. They offer free education; however, many government schools ask parents to pay a contribution fee and a materials and services charge for stationery, textbooks, sports, uniforms, school camps and other schooling costs that are not covered under government funding. In 2010 the additional cost for schooling was estimated to be on average $316 per year per child.
Government schools may be further categorised into open or comprehensive schools, selective, special, and specialist schools; all defined below. In 2009 the Western Australia government introduced Independent Public Schools to describe a government school that, while a part of the state education system, was granted a higher degree of decision-making authority than a regular government school. A similar reform was introduced in Queensland and, as of December 2018, 250 government schools commenced as independent public schools in Queensland. In February 2014 the then Federal Education Minister, Christopher Pyne, announced a $70 million Independent Public Schools Initiative to support 1,500 Australian government schools to become more autonomous.
Government hospital schools are located at some major hospitals and provide access to tuition for students who have extended stays in hospitals.
Across Australia, the Federal Department of Education sets the overall national policy and direction for education in Australia. The following state and territory government departments are responsible for the administration of education within their respective jurisdictions:"
Education in Australia,"Non-government schools
Schools from the non-government sector operate under the authority of state or territory governments but are not operated by government education departments. Schools from the non-government sector may operate as individual schools, in small groups or as a system such as those coordinated by the Catholic Education Commission in each state and territory.: [see ""non-government sector""]   All non-government schools in Australia receive funding from the Commonwealth government."
Education in Australia,"Catholic schools
The education system delivered by the Roman Catholic Church in Australia has grown from 18th-century foundations to be the second-biggest provider of school-based education in Australia. As of 2018, one in five Australian students attended Catholic schools. There are over 1,700 Catholic schools in Australia with more than 750,000 students enrolled, employing almost 60,000 teachers.
Administrative oversight of Catholic education providers varies depending on the origins, ethos, and purpose of each education provider. Oversight of Catholic systemic schools may rest with a Catholic parish, diocese, or archdiocese; while religious institutes have oversight of Catholic independent schools.
The National Catholic Education Commission (NCEC), established by the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference through the Bishops Commission for Catholic Education, is tasked with maintaining liaison with the federal government and other key national education bodies and complements and supports the work of the state and territory Catholic education commissions. While some Catholic schools operate independently via religious institutes, the majority of Catholic schools, called systemic schools, operate under the Canon Law jurisdiction of an ecclesiastical public juridic person, such as a bishop.: 7  In practice, the bishop assigns a Catholic Education Office (CEO), Catholic Education Commission, Catholic Schools Offices, or a similar body: 4  with daily operational responsibility for the leadership, efficient operation, and management of the Catholic systemic schools which educate in parish primary and regional secondary schools in Australia. These diocesan bodies are charged with the implementation and management of the policies of the diocese and the allocation and administration of the funds provided by the government and private sources to Catholic systemic schools, as well as the financial responsibilities for the administration of salaries for staff members.
Most Catholic schools (96 per cent) are systemically funded, meaning that the government funding they nominally attract is provided to the relevant state Catholic Education Commission for needs-based distribution. Sixty-one Australian Catholic schools are non-systemically funded (independent schools) and receive government grants directly."
Education in Australia,"Private schools
Private schools are non-government schools that are not operated by government authority and have a system of governance that ensures their independent operation. Such schools are typically operated by an independently elected school council or board of governors and range broadly in the type of school education provided and the socio-economics of the school community served. Some private schools are run by religious institutes; others have no religious affiliation and are driven by a national philosophy (such as international schools), pedagogical philosophy (such as Waldorf-Steiner schools), or specific needs (such as special schools). As of 2018, including private schools run by Catholic religious institutes, of the 9,477 schools in Australia 1,140 schools (12 per cent) are in the private sector. In the same year, private schools enrolled over 617,000 students or 16 per cent of the Australian student population.
Private school fees can vary from under $100 per month to $3,200, depending on the student's year level, the school's size, and the socioeconomics of the school community. In late 2018 it was reported that the most expensive private schools (such as the APS Schools, the AGSV Schools in Melbourne, the GPS Schools, QGSSSA Schools in Brisbane and the NSW GPS Schools, Combined Associated Schools and the ISA Schools in Sydney and New South Wales) charge fees of up to $500,000 for the thirteen years of private school education.
Australian private schools broadly fall into the following categories:"
Education in Australia,"Specialist organisational structures
Special schools
A special school is a school catering for students who have special educational needs due to learning difficulties, physical disabilities, developmental disabilities or social/emotional disturbance, or who are in custody, on remand or in hospital. Special schools may be specifically designed, staffed and resourced to provide appropriate special education for children with additional needs. Students attending special schools generally do not attend any classes in mainstream schools. The schools cater for students with mild, moderate and profound intellectual disabilities, deaf and hard of hearing students, students with Autism and students with a physical disability. Class sizes at specialist schools are smaller than at mainstream schools, and there is a much lower ratio of teaching and support staff to students. Some specialist schools also have therapists on staff. Specialist schools generally already have an accessible environment and curriculum for their student population; this may mean that there are limited subjects on offer."
Education in Australia,"Selective schools
A selective school is a government school that enrols students based on some sort of selection criteria, usually academic. The term may have different connotations in different systems and is the opposite of an open or comprehensive school, which accepts all students, regardless of aptitude.
In New South Wales, student placement in fully and partially selective high schools is highly competitive, with approximately 3,600 places offered to the 15,000 students who sit the Selective High School Test. As of 2019 there were 47 fully or partially selective government high schools, including 17 fully selective high schools (some of which are co-educational and others provide a single-sex educational environment); 25 partially selective high schools (high schools with both selective and comprehensive classes); four selective agricultural high schools; and one virtual selective high school. Of the 47 schools, 34 are located in greater metropolitan Sydney. Of the government selective high schools in New South Wales, James Ruse Agricultural High School is renowned for its academic achievements and competitiveness, as well as a near-perfect record of all students gaining university admission, especially in medicine, law and science. The school has outperformed every high school in New South Wales in the past 20 years in public university entrance examinations.
In Victoria, selective government high schools select all of their students based on an entrance examination. As of 2011, there were four selective schools: Melbourne High School, Mac.Robertson Girls' High School, Nossal High School and Suzanne Cory High School. In addition, there are three special schools namely Victorian College of the Arts Secondary School, John Monash Science School and Elizabeth Blackburn School of Sciences which cater to students opting for focused education in arts and science respectively.
In Queensland, there are four selective entry high schools. Brisbane State High School, established in 1921, is partially selective; and the three Queensland Academies which are fully selective and were formed during 2007 and 2008. All require entry based on academic entry tests, NAPLAN results, primary school grades, interviews and other considerations.
In Western Australia, selective secondary education (officially named Gifted and Talented Education (GATE)) is operated by the Western Australian Department of Education through the Gifted and Talented Selective Entrance Programs for Year 7, and subject to limited placement availability for year-levels upward to Year 11. All applicants are required to sit the Academic Selective Entrance Test and possibly complete combined interviews, auditions and/or workshops depending on the program(s) applied for. The programs are categorised into three strands: academic, language, and arts. Eighteen government schools participate in the Gifted and Talented Programs, each specialising in one of the strands. All participating schools are partially selective and partially local intake, except for Perth Modern School which is fully selective."
Education in Australia,"Specialist schools
Schools that operate specialist education programs exist in all Australian states and territories. These schools are typically associated with the arts or elite sports programs. In South Australia, specialist schools cover the arts, gifted and talented programs, languages, agricultural schools, science, technology, engineering and mathematics, advanced technology project schools, sports schools, and trade training centres. In Victoria, examples of specialist government schools include those focused on science and maths (John Monash Science School), performing arts (Victorian College of the Arts Secondary School), sports (Maribyrnong Secondary College), and leadership and enterprise (The Alpine School). An alternative model is those sporting organisations that deliver specialist programs to a narrow selection of schools, such as Cricket Australia's Specialist School Program to three Western Australian schools."
Education in Australia,"International schools
In Australia, international schools promote international education and may be operated by the government of the country of origin, the government of the state or territory in which the school is located, or be operated as an private school. International schools include those schools that have received international accreditation such as from the Council of International Schools, the International Baccalaureate Organization, or the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, or other similar organisations. As of 2019, approximately 80 Australian schools meet that definition, with the vast majority being schools that offered one or more of the International Baccalaureate programs. Other schools are affiliated with specific cultures or languages, most notably French (e.g. Telopea Park School (ACT), Lycée Condorcet (NSW), Auburn High School (VIC)), German (e.g. German International School Sydney (NSW) and Deutsche Schule Melbourne (VIC)), or Japanese (e.g. Sydney Japanese International School (NSW), The Japanese School of Melbourne (VIC) and The Japanese School in Perth (WA)) schools, including Japanese supplementary weekend schools; or may generally be international in their outlook, including the International Grammar School (NSW) or the International School of Western Australia (WA)."
Education in Australia,"Mixed-sex and single-sex education
In Australia, both government and non-government schools operate co-educational and single-sex educational environments for students. The overwhelming number of schools are co-educational, with a small proportion of government schools operating single-sex schools, sometimes with a separate boys' and girls' school in the same suburb. All government single-sex schools are secondary schools. Examples of adjacent single-sex government secondary schools include Asquith Boys' and Asquith Girls', Canterbury Boys', North Sydney Boys' and North Sydney Girls', Randwick Boys' and Randwick Girls', and Sydney Boys' and Sydney Girls' (all in Sydney);  and Melbourne High, Canterbury Girls', and Mac.Robertson Girls' (in Melbourne).
The majority of single-sex schools in Australia are non-government schools, heavily weighted towards private schools, some of which are Catholic private schools. Some Catholic systemic schools are also single-sex schools; however, like government schools, the overwhelming majority are co-educational schools."
Education in Australia,"Day and boarding schools
In Australia, both government and non-government schools operate day and boarding schools. As of 2019, of the 10,584 registered schools operating in Australia, approximately 250 schools (or less than 2.5 per cent) were boarding schools. Boarding schools can provide a valuable platform for students to achieve their potential academically along with providing support and guidance with their psychological, social, emotional and spiritual development. Some Australian schools offer gender-specific (boys' [approximately 21 per cent] or girls' [approximately 28 per cent]) and co-educational boarding schools (51 per cent); with multi-modal options, such as full-time boarding and part-time boarding (for example, going home on the weekends) offered by some schools. Some specialist education schools, such as The Australian Ballet School, offer boarding facilities. The largest peak body for boarding schools in Australia, the Australian Boarding Schools Association, claimed that, in 2017, there were 22,815 students in boarding schools covered by the association, an increase from 19,870 in 2014."
Education in Australia,"Qualifications
Within the context of the Australian Qualifications Framework, each state and territory is responsible for issuing certificates and/or qualifications to secondary students, collectively referred to as the Senior Secondary Certificate of Education. The following table serves as a summary of the qualifications issued by each state or territory:"
Education in Australia,"As an alternative form (or as an addition to) the government-endorsed certification path, students, by approval, may elect to receive certification under the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme."
Education in Australia,"Basic skills tests
The National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (abbreviated as NAPLAN) is a series of tests focused on basic skills that are administered annually to Australian students. These standardised tests assess students' reading, writing, language (spelling, grammar and punctuation) and numeracy. Introduced in 2008, NAPLAN is administered by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) and is overseen by the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) Education Council. The tests are designed to determine if Australian students are achieving outcomes. The tests are designed to be carried out on the same days across Australia in any given year. Parents can decide whether their children take the test or not. The vast majority of Year 3, 5, 7 and 9 students participate. One of the aims of NAPLAN is to prepare young children for competitive examinations."
Education in Australia,"Provider of school education to international students
In Australia, a student is considered as an international student if he/she studies at an approved educational institution and he/she is not an Australian citizen, Australian permanent resident, New Zealand citizen, or a holder of an Australian permanent resident humanitarian visa. Under the Education Services for Overseas Students Act 2000  (Cth), the Australian Government regulates the delivery of school and tertiary education to international students who are granted a student visa to study in Australia. The government maintains the Commonwealth Register of Institutions and Courses for Overseas Students (CRICOS) and, as of 2018, there were 396 school providers with an overall approved capacity of 88,285 students.: 6  While Australia as an education destination showed strong and sustained growth over many years, as of June 2019, school-based education fell by three per cent for the year, and represented approximately three per cent of all international student enrolments; with tertiary education, vocational education and training, and English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students (ELICOS) comprised 93 per cent of all enrolments and recorded 21 per cent annual growth."
Education in Australia,"Issues in Australian school education
Government education policy
Despite a substantial increase in government spending per student over ten years (after correcting for inflation), the proportion of students who are proficient in maths, reading and science has actually declined over that same period. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the Menzies Research Centre have both concluded that increasing school funding above a basic level has little effect on student proficiency. Instead, they both recommend greater autonomy. That is, the states should merely monitor the performance of the schools. Individual principals should have full authority and responsibility for ensuring student proficiency in core areas.
In 2010 the Gillard government commissioned David Gonski to the chair a committee to review funding of Australian schools. Entitled the Gonski Report, through the Council of Australian Governments the Gillard government sought to implement the National Education Reform Agreement that would deliver an A$9.4 billion school funding plan. Despite some states and territories becoming parties to the Agreement, the plan was shelved following the 2013 federal election. The Turnbull government commissioned Gonski in 2017 to chair the independent Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools, commonly called Gonski 2.0. The government published the report on 30 April 2018. Following negotiation, bilateral agreements between the Commonwealth of Australia with each state and territory commenced on 1 January 2019, with the exception of Victoria, whose bilateral agreement commenced on 1 February 2019. The funding agreements provide states with funding for government schools (20 percent) and non-government schools (80 percent) taking into consideration annual changes in enrolment numbers, indexation and student or school characteristics. A National School Resourcing Board was charged with the responsibility of independently reviewing each state's compliance with the funding agreement(s).
Australian students placed 16th in the world in reading, 29th in maths and 17th in science in the 2018 PISA study by the OCED. The Australian education system has suffered from the years of minimisation of funding, too often relying upon the full fee paying students from abroad across all levels of education, to prop up the short falls created by funding cuts. International full fee paying students, from primary school right through to Australia's universities have shown a slow decline in education standards."
Education in Australia,"Indigenous primary and secondary education
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are at a significant disadvantage when compared to non-Indigenous Australians across a number of key school educational measures.  In 2008, the Council of Australian Governments announced seven[note e] ""closing the gap"" targets, of which four related to education, namely:"
Education in Australia,"participation in early childhood education: with the goal of 95 per cent of all Indigenous four-year-olds enrolled in early childhood education by 2025;[note f]
reading, writing and numeracy levels: with the goal to halve the gap for Indigenous students in reading, writing and numeracy within a decade (by 2018);
Year 12 attainment: with the goal to halve the gap for Indigenous 20–24 year olds in year 12 or equivalent attainment rates (by 2020); and
school attendance: with the aim to close the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous school attendance within five years (by 2018).[note c]
As of 2018, the target results were:"
Education in Australia,"Bilingual education in schools
Bilingual education in Australia may be divided into three different types, or target audiences, each having somewhat different purposes: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples; immigrant (CALD) groups; and English speakers looking to add another language to their education. The first two are interested in language maintenance and language revitalisation for ensuing generations.
The first recorded government support for bilingual education came under the Menzies government in 1950, when the first government schools for Aboriginal students were opened at four sites in the Northern Territory (NT), where instruction ""should include English Language, Native Language (where appropriate)"". Policies and practices varied in the following years, with the first five pilot programs introduced in 1973 after the Whitlam government came to power and brought in new federal policies.
In the Northern Territory (the jurisdiction with the greatest proportion of Indigenous people, and many remote communities), bilingual programs for Indigenous students begun with Federal Government support in the early 1970s. Yirrkala Community School was identified as the first to undergo bilingual accreditation in 1980, and bilingual students outperformed the non-bilingual students. However, by December 1998 the Northern Territory Government had announced its decision to shift A$3 million away from the 29 bilingual programs to a Territory-wide program teaching English as a second language. Within 12 months though the government had softened its position, after people took to the streets in protest.
From around 2000, most bilingual programs were allowed to continue under the names ""two-way education"", or ""both-ways"" learning. Other programs included language maintenance and language revitalisation in remote schools across the NT.
Then on 24 August 2005, the Minister for Employment, Education and Training announced that the government would be ""revitalising bi-lingual education"" at 15 Community Education Centres: Alekarenge, Angurugu, Borroloola, Gapuwiyak, Gunbalanya, Kalkaringi, Lajamanu, Maningrida, Milingimbi, Ramingining, Ngukurr, Shepherdson College, Numbulwar, Yirrkala and Yuendumu. This revitalisation is conceived as part of an effort aimed at ""providing effective education from pre-school through to senior secondary at each of the Territory's 15 Community Education Centres"".
However, in October 2008, in the first year of NAPLAN testing, despite the NT Indigenous Education Strategic Plan 2006-2009 supporting bilingual instruction, it was mandated by the NT Government that English should be the language of instruction in all NT schools for the first four hours of the school day. After legal challenges, an AIATSIS Symposium on Bilingual Education in 2009, media coverage and much debate, the policy was replaced by a new policy: ""Literacy for Both Worlds"", but that was soon withdrawn again. There was intervention by the Australian Human Rights Commission, and in 2012 the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs issued a report which included the recommendation that: ""Indigenous language education should be introduced to all schools with Aboriginal students, and indigenous languages included as an official Closing the Gap measure"".
Prominent schools involved in bilingual education programs in the NT include Yirrkala Community Education Centre (CEC) and Shepherdson College on Galiwin'ku. Yirrkala School and its sister school ignored the government directive, and has continued to teach its ""both ways"" methodology. The students' first language, Yolngu Matha, is taught alongside English. The method has proven effective against reducing the drop-out rate, and in 2020 eight students were the first in their community to graduate year 12 with scores enabling them to attend university. Yirrkala School and its sister school, Laynhapuy Homelands School, are now being looked to as models for learning in remote traditional communities. Areyonga School, in Areyonga, was still using both-ways education in August 2023, 50 years since it had begun there, teaching in Pitjantjatjara language and culture."
Education in Australia,"Religious education in government schools
Constitutionally, Australia is a secular country. Section 116 of Chapter V. The States in the Australian Constitution reads: The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.
Nevertheless, Australia maintains one of the highest concentrations of religious schools, when compared with other OECD countries. Historically, the teaching of religion in Australian government schools has been a contentious issue and was a motivator for the foundation of the government schooling system.
While the National School Chaplaincy Programme provides an overarching framework based on pastoral care, not religious instruction, the practices and policies of religious instruction in Australian schools vary significantly from state to state. In New South Wales, the Special Religious Education classes are held in the government school sector that enable students to learn about the beliefs, practices, values and morals of a chosen religion. In Queensland, religious organisations may apply to school principals and, if approved, deliver approved religious instruction programs in government schools. In Victoria, legislation prescribes that government schools must not promote any particular religious practice, denomination or sect, and must be open to adherents of any philosophy, religion or faith. However, individual school principals may permit approved organisations to deliver non-compulsory special religious instruction classes of no more than 30 minutes per week per student, during lunchtime or in the hour before or after usual school hours. In Western Australia, both special religious education (not part of the general curriculum) and general religious education (as part of the general curriculum) are offered in government schools."
Education in Australia,"School violence
In July 2009, the Queensland Minister for Education said that the rising levels of violence in schools in the state were ""totally unacceptable"" and that not enough had been done to combat violent behaviour. In Queensland, 55,000 school students were suspended in 2008, nearly a third of which were for ""physical misconduct"".
In South Australia, 175 violent attacks against students or staff were recorded in 2008. Students were responsible for deliberately causing 3,000 injuries reported by teachers over two years from 2008 to 2009."
Education in Australia,"ESOS Act
The Education Services for Overseas Students Act 2000 (or ESOS Act) sets out the legal framework governing delivery of education to international students visiting Australia on a student visa."
Education in Australia,"Tertiary education
Tertiary education (or higher education) in Australia is primarily study at university or a registered training organisation studying Diploma or above in order to receive a qualification or further skills and training. A higher education provider is a body that is established or recognised by or under the law of the Australian Government, a State, the Australian Capital Territory or the Northern Territory. VET providers, both public and private are registered by state and territory governments.
There are 42 universities in Australia: 37 public universities, 3 private universities and 2 international private universities. As of 2015, the largest university in Australia was Monash University in Melbourne: with five campuses and 75,000 students.
There are non-self-accrediting higher education providers accredited by state and territory authorities, numbering more than 132 as listed on state and territory registers. These include several that are registered in more than one state and territory.
All students doing nationally recognised training need to have a Unique Student Identifier (USI)."
Education in Australia,"International tertiary students
Australia has the highest ratio of international students per head of population in the world by a large margin, with 812,000 international students enrolled in the nation's universities and vocational institutions in 2019. Accordingly, in 2019, international students represented on average 26.7% of the student bodies of Australian universities. International education, therefore, represents one of the country's largest exports and has a pronounced influence on the country's demographics, with a significant proportion of international students remaining in Australia after graduation on various skill and employment visas. The Australian onshore international education sector is predicted to rise to 940,000 by 2025. The biggest source markets for onshore international learner enrolments in 2025 are expected to be China, India, Vietnam, Thailand, Nepal, Malaysia, Brazil and South Korea. According to a 2016 report by Deloitte Access Economics for the Australian Trade and Investment Commission, higher education and Vocational Education and Training (VET) were projected to be the fastest-growing sectors in onshore international education by 2025. Australian Government is also planning to add another 1.46 billion AUD according to Modern Manufacturing Strategy, which predicts a high jump in job growth and migration of people."
Education in Australia,"Rankings
36 Australian tertiary educational institutions were listed in the QS World University Rankings for 2021; and 37 institutions were listed in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings in the same year. As of 2020, 34 Australian universities were listed in China's Academic Ranking of World Universities ranking, with The University of Melbourne achieving the highest global ranking, at 35th. In the same year, according to the U.S. News & World Report Best Global Universities Rankings, 38 Australian universities were ranked, ranging from the University of Melbourne, at 25th place, to Bond University, at 1133th place.
The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) evaluation in 2006 ranked the Australian education system as sixth for reading, eighth for science and thirteenth for mathematics, on a worldwide scale including 56 countries. The PISA evaluation in 2009 ranked the Australian education system as sixth for reading, seventh for science and ninth for mathematics, an improvement relative to the 2006 rankings. In 2012, education firm Pearson ranked Australian education as thirteenth in the world.
The Education Index, published with the UN's Human Development Index in 2018, based on data from 2017, listed Australia as 0.929, the second-highest in the world."
Education in Australia,"See also
Notes
^[note a]  These include: Department of Education, Employment and Training (DEET) (1988), Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs (DEETYA) (1996), Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs (DETYA) (1997), Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) (2001), Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) (2007), Department of Education (Australia, 2019–2020) (2013), Department of Education and Training (Australia) (2014).
^[note b] : In Western Australia, the term district high school refers to schools that enrol students from Year K to Year 10.
^[note c] : The schools listed here are Catholic schools that are private schools and administered by a religious institute. It does not include Catholic schools that are systemically administered by a diocese, Catholic Education Office, or Catholic Education Commission.
^[note d] : The South Australian Certificate of Education is also taught in Northern Territory secondary schools, where it is known as the Northern Territory Certificate of Education and Training.
^[note e] : Initially six targets were set; with the school attendance target set at a subsequent COAG meeting.
^[note f] : The initial target of 95% was set in 2008 with the aim to be achieved by 2013. The target was not achieved and was renewed in December 2015 with the aim to be achieved by 2025.
^[note g] : The 2018 NAPLAN data were unavailable at the time of publication of the 2017-18 National Indigenous Reform Agreement Performance data report."
Education in Australia,"References
Further reading
Campbell, Craig; Proctor, Helen (2014). A history of Australian schooling. Allen & Unwin. ISBN 978-1-74237-182-5.
Arthur Patchett Martin (1889). ""The State Schoolmaster"". Australia and the Empire: 157–187. Wikidata Q107340726.
Passow, A. Harry et al. The National Case Study: An Empirical Comparative Study of Twenty-One Educational Systems.  (1976) online"
Education in Australia,"External links
""School education: a quick guide to key internet links"". Research Papers: 2018-2019. Parliament of Australia. 21 August 2018.
Australian Qualifications Framework website
Australia: Education GPS  – published by the OECD
""The Australian Education System: Foundation Level"" (PDF). Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade: Diplomatic Academy. Australian Government. 2018. Archived from the original (PDF) on 19 June 2018. Retrieved 9 September 2019.
Australian Bureau of Statistics – Education"
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"Same-sex marriage has been legal in Australia since 9 December 2017. Legislation to allow it, the Marriage Amendment (Definition and Religious Freedoms) Act 2017, passed the Parliament of Australia on 7 December 2017 and received royal assent from Governor-General Peter Cosgrove the following day. The law came into effect on 9 December, immediately recognising overseas same-sex marriages. The first same-sex wedding under Australian law was held on 15 December 2017. The passage of the law followed a voluntary postal survey of all Australians, in which 61.6% of respondents supported legalisation of same-sex marriage.
Other types of recognition for same-sex couples are also available. Under federal law, same-sex couples can also be recognised as de facto relationships. De facto couples have most of the same rights and responsibilities afforded to married couples, although these rights may be difficult to assert and are not always recognised in practice. Although there is no national civil union or relationships register scheme in Australia, most states and territories have legislated for civil unions or domestic partnership registries. Registered unions are recognised as de facto relationships under federal law.
Prior to legalisation, 22 bills to allow same-sex marriage were introduced to Parliament between September 2004 and May 2017. These failed attempts came after the Howard government in 2004 amended the Marriage Act 1961 to codify the then exclusively heterosexual common law definition of marriage. The Australian Capital Territory passed a same-sex marriage law in December 2013 that was struck down by the High Court for inconsistency with federal law. Australia was the second country in Oceania to allow same-sex couples to marry after New Zealand."
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"De facto relationships
De facto relationships, defined in the federal Family Law Act 1975, are available to both same-sex and opposite-sex couples. De facto relationships provide couples who live together on a genuine domestic basis with many of the same rights and benefits as married couples. Two people can become a de facto couple by entering into a registered relationship (i.e. a civil union or domestic partnership) or by being assessed as a de facto couple by the Federal Circuit and Family Court. Couples who live together are generally recognised as a de facto relationship, even if they have not registered or officially documented their relationship."
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"Rudd government 2008–2009 reforms
Following the Australian Human Rights Commission's 2007 report ""Same-Sex: Same Entitlements"", and an audit of federal legislation, in 2009 the Rudd government introduced several reforms designed to equalise treatment for same-sex couples and same-sex families. The reforms amended 85 Commonwealth laws to eliminate discrimination against same-sex couples and their children in a wide range of areas. The reforms came in the form of two pieces of legislation, the Same-Sex Relationships (Equal Treatment in Commonwealth Laws—General Law Reform) Act 2008 and the Same-Sex Relationships (Equal Treatment in Commonwealth Laws—Superannuation) Act 2008. These laws, which passed the Parliament in November 2008, amended 70 other existing Commonwealth acts to equalise treatment for same-sex couples and their children. 
As a result of these reforms, same-sex couples were treated equally with heterosexual couples in most areas of federal law. For instance, with relation to social security and general family law, same-sex couples were previously not recognised as a couple for social security or family assistance purposes. A person who had a same-sex de facto partner was treated as a single person. The reforms ensured that same-sex couples were, for the first time under Australian law, recognised as a couple akin to opposite-sex partners. Consequently, a same-sex couple receives the same rate of social security and family assistance payments as an opposite-sex couple."
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"Legislative history prior to de facto recognition
In 2004, the Superannuation Industry (Supervision) Act 1993 was amended to allow tax free payment of superannuation benefits to be made to the surviving partner in an interdependent relationship, including same-sex couples, or a relationship where one person was financially dependent on another person. Prior to 2008, same-sex couples were only recognised by the Federal Government in very limited circumstances. For example, since the 1990s, same-sex foreign partners of Australian citizens have been able to receive residence permits in Australia known as ""interdependency visas"". Following a national inquiry into financial and work-related discrimination against same-sex relationships, on 21 June 2007, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) released its Same-Sex: Same Entitlements report. The Commission identified 58 Commonwealth law statutes and provisions that explicitly discriminated against same-sex couples by using the term 'member of the opposite sex'.
The previous conservative Howard government banned its departments from making submissions to the HREOC inquiry regarding financial discrimination experienced by same-sex couples.
The report found that 100 statutes and provisions under federal law discriminated against same-sex couples by using the term ""member of the opposite sex"", from aged care, superannuation, childcare, Medicare (including the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme) through to pensions. ""All the basics that opposite-gender couples are legally entitled to and take for granted"" were things same-sex couples were effectively barred from utilising under the former system."
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"Differences between de facto relationships and marriages
Since 1 March 2009, some legal differences remain with respect to treatment of couples in a de facto relationship and heterosexual couples in a marriage. Differences exist between the rights of a de facto couple and a married couple in relation to family law matters, including property settlements and entitlements to spousal maintenance. A de facto relationship must have ended for the court to make an order for property settlement or spousal maintenance, though this requirement does not exist for married couples. For a de facto partner to seek an order for property settlement, the court must be satisfied of at least one of the following:"
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"The period of the de facto relationship was for at least two years; or
There is a child in the de facto relationship; or
The relationship is or was registered under a prescribed law of a State or Territory; or
That failure to make an order would result in serious injustice due to the significant contributions made by one party.
By way of comparison, for a married couple, it is enough merely to have been married to attract the jurisdiction of the court for property and spousal maintenance. Furthermore, it is possible that individuals in a de facto relationship can be treated substantively different to a person in a marriage. In the event of an unexpected end to a de facto relationship (such as the death of a partner), the surviving partner must often prove the existence of a relationship in order to be registered as the next of kin on a death certificate and receive government bereavement payments and access to a partner's superannuation. These requirements vary on a state by state basis. Given that, prior to the legalisation of same-sex marriage, same-sex couples did not have the option to marry, as heterosexual couples did, these discrepancies could have a particularly discriminatory impact on same-sex couples. The rights of a de facto partner may be poorly understood by government departments, resulting in occasions where said couples have not had their rights upheld.
In April 2014, a federal court judge ruled that a heterosexual couple who had a child and lived together for 13 years were not in a de facto relationship and thus the court had no jurisdiction to divide up their property under family law following a request for separation. In his ruling, the judge stated that ""de facto relationship(s) may be described as ""marriage-like"" but it is not a marriage and has significant differences socially, financially and emotionally.""
De facto relationships often face an onerous burden of proof before rights that are automatically granted to married couples can be accessed. This means partners may have to provide evidence about their living and childcare arrangements, sexual relationship, finances, ownership of property, commitment to a shared life and how they present as a couple in public. This can present difficulties when de facto relationships are legally contested by other people, usually other family members. Marriages rarely encounter such difficulties as they are generally regarded as immediate and incontrovertible."
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"Same-sex marriage
Federal law
The federal Marriage Act 1961 governs marriage in Australia. The Act defines marriage as ""the union of 2 people to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life""."
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"History
The Marriage Act 1961 did not explicitly define the legal meaning of the word ""marriage"" prior to 2004. Section 46(1) of the Act, however, has always included a provision requiring celebrants to state the legal nature of marriage in Australia. Prior to the legalisation of same-sex marriage, the requirement was to state marriage is the union of ""a man and a woman"", or words to that effect, in line with the 1866 English case of Hyde v Hyde. The words in section 46(1) have been seen as a description or exhortation rather than a legal definition.
In August 2004, the Howard government introduced a bill to insert a definition of marriage in the Interpretation section (section 5) of the Act; as ""the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life"". The bill also inserted a new provision in the Act (section 88EA) which stipulated any foreign marriages of same-sex couples ""must not be recognised as a marriage in Australia"". The bill was supported by the opposition Labor Party and came amidst increased public debate on the issue following the judicial legalisation of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts and Canada. Prime Minister Howard later stated that the amendments were partially motivated by a desire to prevent same-sex couples having their marriages recognised by the courts, as was being litigated at the time. Additional amendments to the Family Law Act 1975 prevented same-sex couples from adopting children in inter-country adoption arrangements, although these restrictions were eventually relaxed in 2014. The bill passed the Parliament on 13 August 2004 and went into effect on the day it received royal assent, 16 August 2004.
Between 2004 and 2017, there were 22 unsuccessful bills to legalise same-sex marriage in the Parliament. Labor governments of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard between 2007 and 2013 were divided on the issue. Despite passing a resolution at the party's national conference in December 2011 to support same-sex marriage, the party held a conscience vote when two private member's bills to legalise same-sex marriage were debated in the Parliament in September 2012. The legislation was opposed by Prime Minister Julia Gillard and several other Labor MPs, as well as by the opposition Coalition, led by Tony Abbott. The first bill failed in the House of Representatives by 98 votes to 42 and a similar bill was rejected by the Senate by 41 votes to 26.
Same-sex marriage caused significant tension within the Abbott government. It resolved in August 2015 to hold a national vote on same-sex marriage sometime after the 2016 federal election, in the form of either a plebiscite or constitutional referendum. This policy was maintained by the Turnbull government after Malcolm Turnbull (a supporter of same-sex marriage) replaced Abbott as prime minister following a leadership challenge. A bill providing for the plebiscite (which would have been held on 11 February 2017) passed the House of Representatives by 76 votes to 67 on 20 October 2016, but was rejected by the Senate on 7 November 2016 by 33 votes to 29, as the government had failed to attract the support of the opposition Labor Party, the Greens and several Senate crossbenchers, who demanded that same-sex marriage be legalised through a parliamentary vote.
Despite initially suggesting the government had ""no plans to take any other measures on this issue"", Prime Minister Turnbull came under increasing pressure to change policy and allow a conscience vote in the Parliament. By August 2017, several Liberal Party MPs stated they would consider crossing the floor to suspend standing orders and force debate on same-sex marriage legislation against the government's wishes. Consequently, at a Liberal party room meeting on 7 August 2017, the government resolved to conduct a voluntary postal survey on the matter later in the year. The government stated the survey would only occur in the event the Senate again rejected the legislation enabling the plebiscite, which it did on 9 August 2017. "
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"On 9 August 2017, the government directed the Australian Statistician to conduct a survey of all enrolled voters to measure support for same-sex marriage. The direction was given to bypass the need for the Parliament to approve a plebiscite. The direction was legally challenged, but was upheld by the High Court. The survey was held between 12 September and 7 November 2017 and returned a 61.6% vote in favour of same-sex marriage. The government responded by confirming it would facilitate the passage of a private member's bill legalising same-sex marriage before the end of the year.
The Marriage Amendment (Definition and Religious Freedoms) Act 2017 was introduced by openly gay Liberal Party backbencher, Senator Dean Smith. The bill amended Section 5 of the Marriage Act to define marriage in Australia as the union of ""2 people"". It also removed the ban on overseas same-sex marriages being recognised in Australia, including ones that occurred before the law change. Additionally, the bill included protections for religious celebrants, ministers of religion and bodies established for a religious purpose, to not be obligated to perform or provide services and facilities to marriages they object to. The bill passed the Senate by 43 votes to 12 on 29 November 2017 and passed the House of Representatives on 7 December 2017 by a vote of 131 to 4; there were 11 abstentions. The bill received royal assent on 8 December 2017 and went into effect the following day. Same-sex marriages lawfully entered into overseas automatically became recognised from that date, and the first weddings after the normal one-month waiting period occurred from 9 January 2018. Several same-sex couples successfully applied for an exemption from the one-month waiting period, and the first legal same-sex wedding under Australian law was held on 15 December 2017, with further weddings taking place the following day."
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"State and territory law
The federal legalisation of same-sex marriage extended to all of Australia's states and territories, including external territories.
States and territories have long had the ability to create laws with respect to relationships, though Section 51 (xxi) of the Constitution of Australia prescribes that marriage is a legislative power of the Parliament.
Since the Parliament introduced the Marriage Act 1961, marriage laws in Australia were generally regarded as an exclusive Commonwealth power. The precise rights of states and territories with respect to creating state-based same-sex marriage laws was complicated further by the Howard government amendment to the Marriage Act in 2004 to define marriage as the exclusive union of one man and one woman, to the exclusion of all others. The Australian Capital Territory (ACT) provided a test case on the matter, when in October 2013, the territory's Legislative Assembly passed a law allowing same-sex marriage. The Abbott government immediately challenged the law in the High Court of Australia. The High Court ruled on the matter in December 2013, five days after the first same-sex weddings were celebrated in the ACT, striking down the ACT's same-sex marriage law. The court determined that all laws with respect to marriage were an exclusive power of the Commonwealth and that no state or territory law creating any other type of marriage could operate concurrently with the federal Marriage Act; ""the kind of marriage provided for by the [Marriage] Act is the only kind of marriage that may be formed or recognised in Australia"". The court also ruled that a same-sex marriage law passed by the Parliament could operate lawfully. The ruling closed off the possibility for a state or territory to legislate for same-sex marriage in the absence of a federal same-sex marriage law.
Prior to that ruling, reports released by the New South Wales Parliamentary Committee on Social Issues and the Tasmanian Law Reform Institute found that a state parliament ""has the power to legislate on the topic of marriage, including same-sex marriage. However, if [New South Wales] chooses to exercise that power and enact a law for same-sex marriage, the law could be subject to challenge in the High Court of Australia"", and that no current arguments ""present an absolute impediment to achieving state-based or Commonwealth marriage equality"". The ACT Government received legal advice supporting the lawfulness of its same-sex marriage law prior to the High Court ruling, though several legal experts expressed doubts.
Aside from the Australian Capital Territory, Tasmania is the only other state or territory to have passed same-sex marriage legislation in a chamber of its legislature. The Tasmanian House of Assembly passed same-sex marriage legislation by 13 votes to 11 in September 2012, though the Legislative Council subsequently voted against the legislation a few weeks later by 8 votes to 6. Both chambers later passed motions giving in-principle, symbolic support for same-sex marriage.
Prior to the federal legalisation of same-sex marriage, six Australian jurisdictions (Tasmania, the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria and South Australia), comprising 90% of Australia's population, recognised same-sex marriages and civil partnerships performed overseas, providing automatic recognition of such unions in their respective state registers."
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"Constitutional and legal issues
There is an important difference in the source of power of the Commonwealth to legislate over married and de facto relationships. Marriage and ""matrimonial causes"" are supported by sections 51(xxi) and (xxii) of the Constitution. The legal status of marriage is also internationally recognised whereas the power to legislate for de facto relationships and their financial matters relies on referrals by states to the Commonwealth in accordance with Section 51(xxxvii) of the Australian Constitution, where it states the law shall extend only to states by whose parliaments the matter is referred, or which afterward adopt the law."
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"Transgender and intersex issues
In the 2001 case of Re Kevin – validity of marriage of transsexual, the Family Court of Australia recognised the right of transsexual people to marry according to their current gender as opposed to their sex assigned at birth; this did not permit same-sex marriage from the perspective of the genders the prospective partners identified as, but it did mean that a trans woman could legally marry a cisgender man, and a trans man could legally marry a cisgender woman.
In October 2007, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal overturned a decision by the Foreign Affairs Department refusing to issue a transgender woman a passport listing her as female because she was married to a woman. The tribunal ordered that she be issued a passport listing her as female, in accordance with her other official documents, thereby recognising the existence of a marriage between two persons who are legally recognised as female. Same-sex marriage advocates noted that same-sex marriage legislation should be inclusive of the rights of transgender and intersex people, with intersex people being sceptical of the term same-sex marriage. These concerns were addressed by the federal legalisation of same-sex marriage in December 2017, which amended the definition of marriage to ""2 people"".
As of 2017, only South Australia and the Australian Capital Territory did not require transgender people to divorce before registering an official change of gender on a birth certificate. This requirement was removed by federal law in December 2018. Victoria passed legislation removing the forced divorce requirement in May 2018, and similar legislation was passed in New South Wales and Queensland the following month. The Northern Territory passed similar laws in November 2018, and it was followed by Western Australia in February 2019. Tasmania was the last jurisdiction to reform its laws. The state passed legislation removing the forced divorce requirement in April 2019, and it joined some of the other states and territories in also removing the requirement for a person to have undergone sex reassignment surgery prior to having a change of sex recognised on a birth certificate."
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"Australian marriage legislation
Marriage Act 1961
The Marriage Act 1961 is a federal act of the Parliament of Australia. It has been in effect since 1961 and governs the laws and regulations regarding lawful marriages in Australia. With respect to the recognition of same-sex unions, the Act has been amended in 2004 and 2017."
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"2004 amendments
On 27 May 2004, Attorney-General Philip Ruddock introduced a bill, intending to incorporate the-then common law definition of marriage into the Marriage Act 1961. In June 2004, the bill passed the House of Representatives and the Senate passed the amendment by 38 votes to 6 on 13 August 2004. The bill subsequently received royal assent from Governor-General Michael Jeffery, becoming the Marriage Amendment Act 2004. The amendment specified that marriage meant ""the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life."" In addition, the bill banned the recognition of same-sex marriages entered into in other jurisdictions.
Attorney-General Ruddock and other Liberals argued that the bill was necessary to protect the institution of marriage, by ensuring that the common law definition was put beyond legal challenge. Labor Shadow Attorney-General Nicola Roxon on the same day the amendment was proposed said that the party would not oppose the amendment, arguing that it did not affect the legal situation of same-sex relationships, merely putting into statute law what was already common law. The Family First senator supported the bill.
Despite having support of the major parties, the bill was contested by sections of the community, human rights groups and some minor political parties. The Greens opposed the bill, calling it the ""Marriage Discrimination Act"". The Australian Democrats also opposed the bill. Democrat Senator Andrew Bartlett stated that the legislation devalues his marriage, and Greens Senator Bob Brown (himself openly gay) referred to John Howard and the legislation as ""hate[ful]"". Brown was asked to retract his statements, but refused. Bob Brown additionally described Australia as having a ""straight Australia policy"", in reference to the 1901 immigration policy of a similar name. Not all Labor members were in support of the bill. During the bill's second reading, Anthony Albanese, Labor MP for Grayndler said, ""what has caused offence is why the Government has rushed in this legislation in what is possibly the last fortnight of parliamentary sittings. This bill is a result of 30 bigoted backbenchers who want to press buttons out there in the community."""
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"2017 amendments
Senator Dean Smith introduced into Parliament a private senator's bill to alter the definition of marriage to allow same-sex couples to marry, after 61.6% of Australians who responded in the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey voted to support same-sex marriage. The bill amended the definition of ""marriage"" in the Act, omitting the words ""man and a woman"" and replacing it with the gender-neutral wording ""2 people"". The amendment which prevented overseas same-sex marriages from being recognised in Australia was repealed. The bill passed the Senate by 43 votes to 12 on 29 November and passed the House of Representatives by 131 votes to 4 on 7 December 2017.
The bill received royal assent from Governor-General Peter Cosgrove on 8 December 2017 and came into effect the following day. As a result of the law, the definition of marriage in Australia is now ""the union of 2 people to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life.""
Under section 46 of the Marriage Act 1961, a celebrant is required to say these words, or words to this effect, in every marriage ceremony."
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"Marriage Equality (Same Sex) Act 2013 (ACT)
On 13 September 2013, the Australian Capital Territory Government announced that it would introduce a bill to legalise same-sex marriage, following a decade-long attempt to legislate in the area. ""We've been pretty clear on this issue for some time now and there's overwhelming community support for this"", Chief Minister Katy Gallagher said. ""We would prefer to see the federal parliament legislate for a nationally consistent scheme, but in the absence of this, we will act for the people of the ACT. The bill would have enabled couples who are not able to marry under the Commonwealth Marriage Act 1961 to enter into marriage in the ACT. It will provide for solemnisation, eligibility, dissolution and annulment, regulatory requirements and notice of intention in relation to same-sex marriages."" On 10 October 2013, federal Attorney-General George Brandis confirmed that the federal government would challenge the proposed ACT bill, stating that it had significant constitutional concerns with respect to the bill. The bill was debated in the ACT Legislative Assembly on 22 October 2013, and passed by 9 votes to 8. Under the legislation, known as the Marriage Equality (Same Sex) Act 2013, same-sex marriages were legally permitted from 7 December 2013.
As soon as the ACT's law had been passed, the federal government launched a challenge to it in the High Court, which delivered judgment on 12 December 2013. As to the relation between the ACT act and federal legislation, the court found that the ACT act was invalid and of ""no effect"", because it was ""inconsistent"", in terms of the Australian Capital Territory Self-Government Act 1988 (Cth), and the federal Marriage Act 1961 (Cth). It was inconsistent both because its definition of marriage conflicted with that in the federal act and because the federal act was exclusive, leaving no room for any other definition in the legislation of a state or a territory. However, the court went on to determine that the word ""marriage"" in section 51(xxi) of the Constitution means ""a consensual union formed between natural persons in accordance with legally prescribed requirements"" where that union is ""intended to endure and be terminable only in accordance with law"" and ""accords a status affecting and defining mutual rights and obligations"". Therefore, it included same-sex marriage thus clarifying that there is no constitutional impediment to the Commonwealth legislating for same-sex marriage in the future. It can do so by amending the definition of ""marriage"" in the Marriage Act, which it did in December 2017."
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"Marriage statistics
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, approximately 3.5% of all marriages officiated in Australia have been marriages of same-sex couples since 1 January 2018. The data for the year 2018 indicated that the overwhelming majority of same-sex weddings were administered by a civil celebrant, and that the median age of same-sex couples entering into marriages was notably older than heterosexual couples. The figures for 2018–2021 do not include any marriages where one or both of the parties do not identify as either male or female."
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"Dual British-Australian couples have been able to marry in British diplomatic missions in Australia since the United Kingdom legalised same-sex marriage in 2014. The first couple to marry were Peter Fraser and Gordon Stevenson on 27 June 2014 in Sydney. From June 2014 to October 2017, 445 same-sex couples married in British diplomatic offices across Australia."
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"State and territory recognition schemes
Same-sex couples have access to different relationship recognition schemes in Australia's eight states and territories. Under federal law, they are treated as de facto relationships. Despite Australia having passed a federal same-sex marriage law, these schemes remain in place as an option for couples."
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"Civil unions/partnerships
Same-sex couples can enter into civil partnerships in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and Queensland. The schemes include state-sanctioned ceremonies that are similar to marriage ceremonies.
 Australian Capital Territory"
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"Previously, same-sex couples could enter into civil unions in the Australian Capital Territory. In August 2012, a civil union bill passed the territory Legislative Assembly. The Civil Union Act 2012 granted many of the same rights to same-sex couples as people married under the Marriage Act 1961. The Act was not challenged by the Gillard government. It was to be repealed and civil unions were to be no longer accessible to same-sex couples upon commencement of the Marriage Equality (Same Sex) Act 2013, which (if not struck down by the High Court) would have permanently legalised same-sex marriage in the territory. Due to the High Court's ruling striking down the ACT's same-sex marriage law as invalid, the repeal of the Act was of no effect and civil unions continued to take place in the ACT until 2017. As of 2017, forming a new civil union is not possible as section 7 of the Civil Union Act 2012 requires that potential couples be unable to marry under the Marriage Act 1961. When same-sex marriage was legalised, it became legally impossible to form a civil union, though existing ones remain valid.
Since 2008, the ACT has recognised civil partnerships which provide same-sex couples with increased rights regarding superannuation, taxation and social security. Although the Civil Partnerships Act 2008 was repealed upon passage of the aforementioned Civil Unions Act 2012, entering into civil partnerships, which are now regulated under part 4A of the Domestic Relationships Act 1994, remains an option for same-sex couples (and opposite-sex couples). Couples can also enter into domestic relationships, which were enacted in 1994.
 Queensland"
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"Civil partnerships, commonly referred to as civil unions, have been legal in Queensland since April 2016. The Queensland Parliament passed the Discrimination Law Amendment Act 2002 in December of that year, which created non-discriminatory definitions of ""de facto partner"" with respect to 42 pieces of legislation. This gave same-sex couples the same rights as de facto couples in most instances.
On 30 November 2011, the Queensland Parliament passed a bill allowing civil partnerships in the state. The legislation passed by a vote of 47 to 40, with those against including four votes from the Labor Party. The Civil Partnerships Act 2011 allowed for same-sex couples who are Queensland residents to enter into a civil partnership. Shortly after the change of government in the 2012 state elections, and following high profile advertisements for repeal of the law by Katter's Australian Party, the centre-right LNP government passed the Civil Partnerships and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2012. The new law changed the name from ""civil partnership"" to ""registered relationship"" and prohibited the state from offering ceremonies for those who do register their relationship in this manner. Following the 2015 state election, which saw Labor form minority government, the Parliament passed the Relationships (Civil Partnerships) and Other Acts Amendment Act 2015 in December 2015, which restored state-sanctioned ceremonies for same-sex and opposite-sex couples and once more changed regulations referring to ""registered relationships"" with ""civil partnerships"". The law came into effect following a number of administrative matters occurring, with civil partnerships resuming in the state on 2 April 2016."
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"Registered relationships
Same-sex couples have access to domestic partnership registries (otherwise known as registered relationships) in the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales, Tasmania, Victoria and South Australia.
 New South Wales"
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"New South Wales, Australia's most populous state, has recognised domestic partnerships since July 2010. The Relationships Register Act 2010 was passed by the New South Wales Parliament in May and came into effect on 1 July 2010. The Act provides conclusive proof of the existence of a relationship and ensures participants gain all the rights afforded to de facto couples under state and federal law. Previously, in June 2008, the Parliament passed the Miscellaneous Acts Amendment (Same Sex Relationships) Act 2008. The Act amended several other state laws to recognise co-mothers as legal parents of children born through donor insemination and ensure birth certificates allow both mothers to be recognised. Additionally, the Act amended 57 pieces of state legislation to ensure de facto couples, including same-sex couples, are treated equally with married couples. Finally, the Act amended the New South Wales Anti-Discrimination Act 1977 to ensure same-sex couples are protected from discrimination on the basis of their ""marital or domestic status"" in employment, accommodation and access to other goods and services.
New South Wales has also sought to legislate with respect to same-sex marriage. In November 2013, a bill was introduced to the Legislative Council to legalise same-sex marriage at a state level, thought it was narrowly defeated. The external territory of Norfolk Island has, since 1 July 2016, been incorporated into New South Wales legislation.
 Victoria"
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"Victoria has recognised domestic partnerships since December 2008. The Victoria Parliament passed the Relationships Act 2008 on 10 April 2008 and came into effect on 1 December 2008. This has allowed same-sex couples to register their relationships with the state Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages and provide conclusive proof of a de facto relationship, allowing them to receive all the benefits and rights of such a couple under state and federal law. In 2016, the Parliament passed reforms to the state's domestic partnerships legislation, allowing for the recognition of overseas same-sex marriages on official documents and also allowing couples the option of having an official ceremony when registering for a domestic partnership.
The earliest legislative reform in the state designed to provide equal treatment of same-sex couples came in August 2001, in the form of the Statute Law Amendment (Relationships) Act 2001 and the Statute Law Further Amendment (Relationships) Act 2001. The acts amended 60 laws in Victoria to give same-sex couples, called ""domestic partners"", many rights equal to those enjoyed by de facto couples, including hospital access, medical decision making, superannuation, inheritance rights, property tax, landlord and tenancy rights, mental health treatment and victims of crime procedures.
 South Australia"
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"In South Australia, the Statutes Amendment (Domestic Partners) Act 2006 (Number 43), which took effect 1 June 2007, amended 97 acts, dispensing with the term ""de facto"" and categorising couples as ""domestic partners"". This meant same-sex couples and any two people who live together are covered by the same laws. In December 2016, the South Australia Parliament passed a law which created a relationship register for same-sex couples and recognises the relationships of same-sex couples who had married or entered into an official union in other states and nations. This law went into effect on 1 August 2017. Prior to that reform, same-sex couples could make a written agreement called a ""domestic partnership agreement"" about their living arrangements. This may be prepared at any time and is legal from the time it is made, but must meet other requirements, such as joint commitments, before being recognised as domestic partners.
 Tasmania"
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"In Tasmania, beginning on 1 January 2004, the state's Relationships Act 2003 has allowed same-sex couples to register their union as a type of domestic partnership in two distinct categories, ""significant relationships"" and ""caring relationships"", with the state's Registry of Births, Death and Marriages. The new definition of partner or spouse, ""two people in a relationship whether or not it's sexual"", was embedded into 80 pieces of legislation, giving same-sex couples rights in making decisions about a partner's health, provides for guardianship when a partner is incapacitated, and gives same-sex couples equal access to a partner's public sector pensions. It also allows one member of a same-sex couple to adopt the biological child of their partner. In September 2010, the Tasmanian Parliament unanimously passed legislation to recognise same-sex marriages performed in other jurisdictions as registered partnerships under the Relationships Act 2003, making it the first Australian state or territory to do so.
In August 2012, a bill was introduced to the Tasmanian Parliament to legalise same-sex marriage. The bill passed the House of Assembly, but was later rejected by the Legislative Council on 28 September 2012. In October 2013, the bill was re-introduced into the Legislative Council and was defeated once more.
Registered partnership recognition in state governments"
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"No local scheme
Same-sex and opposite-sex de facto couples exist in all states and territories. Before the introduction of same-sex marriage nationally, the inability of de facto couples to have conclusive evidence of their relationships in Western Australia and the Northern Territory made it more difficult for them to access rights accorded to them under the law. This section briefly discusses the historical situation in those jurisdictions, which lack registered partnerships for same-sex (or opposite-sex) couples.
 Northern Territory"
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"In the Northern Territory, in March 2004, the Parliament enacted the Law Reform (Gender, Sexuality and De Facto Relationships) Act 2003 to remove legislative discrimination against same-sex couples in most areas of territory law (except the Adoption of Children Act 1994) and recognise same-sex couples as de facto relationships. The Act removed distinctions based on a person's gender, sexuality or de facto relationship in approximately 50 acts and regulations. As in New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, the reforms also enabled the lesbian partner of a woman to be recognised as the parent of her partner's child across state law.
 Western Australia"
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"In Western Australia, the Acts Amendment (Lesbian and Gay Law Reform) Act 2002 removed all remaining legislative discrimination toward sexual orientation by adding the new definition of ""de facto partner"" into 62 acts, provisions and statutes and created new family law designed to recognise same-sex couples as de facto relationships."
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"Local government schemes
A number of local government councils in Australia have created relationship recognition schemes, which allow couples to register their relationship and provide conclusive proof of a de facto union for the purposes of federal law. These are the City of Sydney since 2004, the Municipality of Woollahra since 2008, the City of Blue Mountains since 2010, the City of Vincent since 2012, and the Town of Port Hedland since 2015.
In Victoria, the cities of Melbourne and Yarra established relationship declaration registers in 2007. Both local governments discontinued the registers in 2018, after the federal legalisation of same-sex marriage."
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"Local government motions
Local government groups have also published official positions in favour of same-sex marriage. In June 2016, the Australian Local Government Association (ALGA) approved a motion supporting the legalisation of same-sex marriage. The motion was put forward by the Lord Mayor of Darwin, Katrina Fong Lim, and Meghan Hopper, a member of the Council of Moreland. It was approved by a strong majority at ALGA's National General Assembly. ALGA's board approved it on 21 July 2016. The motion read:"
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"That this National General Assembly call on the Federal Government to treat with dignity and respect all members of the community regardless of gender or sexuality by supporting changes to the Marriage Act to achieve marriage equality for same-sex couples.
As of 1 January 2018, of the 546 local governments (also known as ""councils"" or ""shires"") in Australia, a total of 62 were known to have passed formal motions in support of the legalisation of same-sex marriage."
Same-sex marriage in Australia,Those local governments were:
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"City of Sydney, City of Greater Geelong, City of Hobart, City of Moreland, City of Vincent, Camden Council, City of Hawkesbury, Coonamble Shire, City of Randwick, Tenterfield Shire, Inner West Council, Lachlan Shire, Bega Valley Shire, City of Blue Mountains, Surf Coast Shire, Shire of Hepburn, City of Lismore, City of Albury, City of Ballarat, City of Wodonga, City of Glenorchy, Byron Shire, City of Port Phillip, City of Glen Eira, City of Hobsons Bay, City of Darebin, Shire of Buloke, City of Greater Shepparton, City of Maribyrnong, Central Coast Council, Kingborough Council, Shire of Strathbogie, Richmond Valley Council, City of Melbourne, City of Banyule, City of Yarra, Shire of Indigo, Town of Port Hedland, City of Darwin, City of Brisbane, City of Lake Macquarie, City of Shoalhaven, City of Monash, City of Kingston, City of Whittlesea, City of Fremantle, City of Bayswater, Bass Coast Shire, Shire of Cardinia, City of Willoughby, North Sydney Council, City of Warrnambool, Shire of Noosa, Municipality of Woollahra, Shire of Douglas, Shire of Campaspe, City of Newcastle, City of Moonee Valley, City of Stonnington, Waverley Municipal Council, City of Greater Bendigo, Bellingen Shire, and Shire of Nillumbik
At least two local governments rejected motions to support same-sex marriage:"
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"City of Launceston, and Shire of Campaspe (later voted to support same-sex marriage)"
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"Indigenous Australians
While many Indigenous Australian cultures historically practiced polygamy, there are no records of same-sex marriage as understood from a Western persepective being performed in those cultures. However, there is evidence for identities and behaviours that may be placed on the LGBT spectrum. For instance, the Arrernte people adhered to a ""boy bride"" custom whereby many young men, usually younger than 14 years of age, would be given to older adult men. The relationship was understood to include some sexual relations between both men, usually only masturbation, as well as sleeping, hunting and eating together. At puberty, the younger partner would undergo a series of ceremonies into adulthood, and the ""boy bride"" relationship would end. The Arrernte also recognised people fulfilling a third gender role, known as kwarte kwarte (pronounced [ˈkʷaʈə ˈkʷaʈə]). Similar cultural third gender roles existed among the Warlpiri people as karnta-piya (pronounced [ˈkaɳdapi.ja]), the Pitjantjatjara as kungka kungka (pronounced [ˈkʊŋkɐ ˈkʊŋkɐ]), the Pintupi as kungka wati (pronounced [ˈkuŋka ˈwati], the Warumungu as girriji karrti (pronounced [ˈgiɾi.ji ˈgaʈːi]), and the Wiradjuri as yamadi (pronounced [ˈjəmədɪ]). The Tiwi people similarly recognised formal structures and roles for the murrulawamini (pronounced [ˌmurulawaˈmini]), often translated in English as ""sistergirls"".
In 2015, a group of Aboriginal elders delivered a petition, called the ""Uluru Bark Petition"", opposing same-sex marriage and calling it ""an affront to the Aboriginal People of Australia"" to the Parliament House. The petition also stated that ""all Aboriginal people oppose changing the definition of marriage to allow same-sex couples to wed"". Aboriginal writer Dameyon Boyson widely criticised the petition, saying, ""The Uluru Bark Petition misrepresents Aboriginal culture, and that it's only the voice of a few leaders excessively influenced by white man's religion and influence. Behind these authentic faces that you see holding up these pieces of bark and standing in front of Parliament House you will find the mechanics of white influence."" A Darumbal Aboriginal who was asked to comment by the National Indigenous Television said, ""Colonisation and Christianity ha[ve] pretty much shaped Indigenous culture today. In particular, it has hidden the voices of Indigenous lesbians and gays, and downplayed the importance of their relationships in traditional culture."" During the marriage postal survey, about 50 survey forms were burned by local community members in Ramingining because they thought ""it meant a man should be 'compelled' to marry another man"". Indigenous activists also worried that survey forms would not be understood in remote Aboriginal communities as locals are not always fluent in English or ""familiar with the process"". A 2018 article from the Australian Institute of Family Studies showed that support for equal rights did not vary significantly between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians."
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"Religious performance
Most major religious organisations in Australia do not perform same-sex marriages in their places of worship. The Catholic Church opposes same-sex marriage and ""views marriage as a unique relationship between a woman and a man"". Likewise, the Australian Baptist Ministries ""rejects moves to extend the definition of marriage to include same-sex relationships"", and the Eastern Orthodox Church considers marriage ""a sacrament ... through which the union of man and woman is sanctified by God"". The Australian Christian Churches opposes same-sex marriage, and the Presbyterian Church opposes same-sex marriage and responded to the results of the same-sex marriage survey by stating it ""continues to hold to the biblical definition of marriage as between one man and one woman as we believe it best reflects the Lord's creational design for human flourishing"".
The Anglican Church's official position is that marriage is ""an exclusive and lifelong union of a man and a woman"", though a number of prominent members of the church have stated support for same-sex marriage, and the prospect of a formal split on the issue has been canvassed. In October 2018, the Anglican Diocese of Sydney banned same-sex marriages and events that might advocate ""expressions of human sexuality contrary to our doctrine of marriage"" on about a thousand church-owned properties. In November 2020, the church's Appellate Tribunal approved the right of individual dioceses to formally bless the weddings of same-sex couples married in civil ceremonies.
In December 2023, the Holy See published Fiducia supplicans, a declaration allowing Catholic priests to bless couples who are not considered to be married according to church teaching, including the blessing of same-sex couples. The Australian Confraternity of Catholic Clergy reacted to the declaration, stating, ""Ordained priests are ministers of God's blessings given to sanctify the human person and build up all that is true, good, and beautiful in human life. While sinful human persons who seek God's mercy are authentic recipients of God's blessings, such blessings of their nature are ordered to communion with God; to conversion and sanctification, and so can never be bestowed on sinful acts nor legitimize relationships that are intrinsically incompatible with the divine plan.""
In July 2018, the National Assembly of the Uniting Church approved the creation of marriage rites for same-sex couples. The change incorporated a gender-neutral definition of marriage in the church's official statement, though also retained the existing statement on marriage as a heterosexual union, which the church describes as an ""equal yet distinct"" approach to the issue. Same-sex marriages have been permitted in the church since 21 September 2018.
Most Islamic scholars are in agreement that homosexuality is ""incompatible with Islamic theology"". The Australian National Imams Council ""affirms that Islam sanctifies marriage as only being between a man and a woman"". The Australian Council of Hindu Clergy issued a clarifying statement in September 2017 stating that marriage under Hinduism is between ""a man and a woman""; the group having come to the position after a formal vote was taken indicating 90% approval for the position. The Federation of Australian Buddhist Council states there is no fixed or pre-ordained form of marriage, though it ""has been consistent in its support for same-sex marriage since 2012"". Same-sex marriages can be performed in Reform Jewish synagogues, but are not permitted in Orthodox or Conservative traditions."
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"Public opinion
The table below shows the results of opinion polls conducted to ascertain the level of support for the introduction of same-sex marriage in Australia."
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"According to a survey, published in late January 2018 by the Social Research Center along with the Australian National University, same-sex marriage was ranked the most historic event to have shaped the lives of Australians. 30% of the survey participants named the legalisation of same-sex marriage as the most historic event in their lifetime, 27% named the September 11 attacks, 13% named former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's apology to Indigenous Australians and another 13% named the Port Arthur massacre.
A Pew Research Center poll conducted between March and May 2023 showed that 75% of Australians supported same-sex marriage, 23% were opposed and 2% did not know or refused to answer. When divided by age, support was highest among 18–39-year-olds at 80% and lowest among those aged 40 and above at 73%. When divided by political affiliation, support was highest among those on the left of the political spectrum at 94%, followed by those at the centre at 74% and those on the right at 57%."
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"See also
Australian family law
Gay and Lesbian Kingdom of the Coral Sea Islands
LGBT rights in Australia
Marriage in Australia
History of same-sex marriage in Australia
Same-sex marriage in the Australian Capital Territory
Recognition of same-sex unions in Tasmania
Recognition of same-sex unions in Oceania
He never married"
Same-sex marriage in Australia,"Notes
References
Further reading
External links
Parliament of Australia – Same-sex marriage: issues for the 44th Parliament – publication detailing the same-sex marriage issue in Australia and recent developments
Parliament of Australia – Chronology of same-sex marriage legislation – extensive timeline of same-sex marriage related legislation introduced in the Australian Parliament
Tasmanian Law Reform Institute – The Legal Issues Relating to Same-Sex Marriage, October 2013 report"
Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology,"Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology is the sacred spirituality represented in the stories performed by Aboriginal Australians within each of the language groups across Australia in their ceremonies. Aboriginal spirituality includes the Dreamtime (the Dreaming), songlines, and Aboriginal oral literature.
Aboriginal spirituality often conveys descriptions of each group's local cultural landscape, adding meaning to the whole country's topography from oral history told by ancestors from some of the earliest recorded history. Most of these spiritualities belong to specific groups, but some span the whole continent in one form or another."
Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology,"Antiquity
An Australian linguist, R. M. W. Dixon, recording Aboriginal myths in their original languages, encountered coincidences between some of the landscape details being told about within various myths, and scientific discoveries being made about the same landscapes. In the case of the Atherton Tableland, myths tell of the origins of Lake Eacham, Lake Barrine, and Lake Euramoo. Geological research dated the formative volcanic explosions described by Aboriginal myth tellers as having occurred more than 10,000 years ago. Pollen fossil sampling from the silt which had settled to the bottom of the craters confirmed the Aboriginal myth-tellers' story. When the craters were formed, eucalyptus forests dominated rather than the current wet tropical rainforests.
Dixon observed from the evidence available that Aboriginal myths regarding the origin of the Crater Lakes might be dated as accurate back to 10,000 years ago. Further investigation of the material by the Australian Heritage Commission led to the Crater Lakes myth being listed nationally on the Register of the National Estate, and included within Australia's World Heritage nomination of the wet tropical forests, as an ""unparalleled human record of events dating back to the Pleistocene era.""
Since then, Dixon has assembled a number of similar examples of Australian Aboriginal myths that accurately describe landscapes of an ancient past. He particularly noted the numerous myths telling of previous sea levels, including:"
Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology,"the Port Phillip myth (recorded as told to Robert Russell in 1850), describing Port Phillip Bay as once dry land, and the course of the Yarra River being once different, following what was then Carrum Carrum swamp.
the Great Barrier Reef coastline myth (told to Dixon) in Yarrabah, just south of Cairns, telling of a past coastline (since flooded) which stood at the edge of the current Great Barrier Reef, and naming places now completely submerged after the forest types and trees that once grew there.
the Lake Eyre myths (recorded by J. W. Gregory in 1906), telling of the deserts of Central Australia as once having been fertile, well-watered plains, and the deserts around present Lake Eyre having been one continuous garden. This oral story matches geologists' understanding that there was a wet phase to the early Holocene when the lake would have had permanent water.
Other volcanic eruptions in Australia may also be recorded in Aboriginal myths, including Mount Gambier in South Australia, and Kinrara in northern Queensland."
Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology,"Aboriginal mythology: whole of Australia
The stories enshrined in Aboriginal mythology variously ""tell significant truths within each Aboriginal group's local landscape. They effectively layer the whole of the Australian continent's topography with cultural nuance and deeper meaning, and empower selected audiences with the accumulated wisdom and knowledge of Australian Aboriginal ancestors back to time immemorial""."
Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology,"David Horton's Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia contains an article on Aboriginal mythology observing: A mythic map of Australia would show thousands of characters, varying in their importance, but all in some way connected with the land. Some emerged at their specific sites and stayed spiritually in that vicinity. Others came from somewhere else and went somewhere else.
Many were shape changing, transformed from or into human beings or natural species, or into natural features such as rocks but all left something of their spiritual essence at the places noted in their stories.
Australian Aboriginal mythologies have been characterised as ""at one and the same time fragments of a catechism, a liturgical manual, a history of civilization, a geography textbook, and to a much smaller extent a manual of cosmography."""
Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology,"Diversity across a continent
There are 900 distinct Aboriginal groups across Australia,
each distinguished by unique names usually identifying particular languages, dialects, or distinctive speech mannerisms. Each language was used for original myths, from which the distinctive words and names of individual myths derive.
With so many distinct Aboriginal groups, languages, beliefs and practices, scholars cannot attempt to characterise, under a single heading, the full range and diversity of all myths being variously and continuously told, developed, elaborated, performed, and experienced by group members across the entire continent. Attempts to represent the different groupings in maps have varied widely.
The Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia nevertheless observes: ""One intriguing feature [of Aboriginal Australian mythology] is the mixture of diversity and similarity in myths across the entire continent."""
Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology,"Public education about Aboriginal perspectives
The Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation's booklet, Understanding Country, formally seeks to introduce non-Indigenous Australians to Aboriginal perspectives on the environment. It makes the following generalisation about Aboriginal myths and mythology: ...they generally describe the journeys of ancestral beings, often giant animals or people, over what began as a featureless domain. Mountains, rivers, waterholes, animal and plant species, and other natural and cultural resources came into being as a result of events which took place during these Dreamtime journeys. Their existence in present-day landscapes is seen by many Indigenous peoples as confirmation of their creation beliefs...
The routes taken by the Creator Beings in their Dreamtime journeys across land and sea... link many sacred sites together in a web of Dreamtime tracks criss-crossing the country. Dreaming tracks can run for hundreds, even thousands of kilometres, from desert to the coast [and] may be shared by peoples in countries through which the tracks pass..."
Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology,"An anthropological generalisation
Australian anthropologists willing to generalise suggest Aboriginal myths still being performed across Australia by Aboriginal peoples serve an important social function amongst their intended audiences: justifying the received ordering of their daily lives; helping shape peoples' ideas; and assisting to influence others' behaviour. In addition, such performance often continuously incorporates and ""mythologises"" historical events in the service of these social purposes in an otherwise rapidly changing modern world.
It is always integral and common... that the Law (Aboriginal law) is something derived from ancestral peoples or Dreamings and is passed down the generations in a continuous line. While... entitlements of particular human beings may come and go, the underlying relationships between foundational Dreamings and certain landscapes are theoretically eternal ... the entitlements of people to places are usually regarded strongest when those people enjoy a relationship of identity with one or more Dreamings of that place. This is an identity of spirit, a consubstantiality, rather than a matter of mere belief...: the Dreaming pre-exists and persists, while its human incarnations are temporary."
Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology,"An Aboriginal generalisation
Aboriginal specialists willing to generalise believe all Aboriginal myths across Australia, in combination, represent a kind of unwritten (oral) library within which Aboriginal peoples learn about the world and perceive a peculiarly Aboriginal 'reality' dictated by concepts and values vastly different from those of western societies:"
Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology,"Aboriginal people learned from their stories that a society must not be human-centred but rather land centred, otherwise they forget their source and purpose ... humans are prone to exploitative behaviour if not constantly reminded they are interconnected with the rest of creation, that they as individuals are only temporal in time, and past and future generations must be included in their perception of their purpose in life.
People come and go but the Land, and stories about the Land, stay. This is a wisdom that takes lifetimes of listening, observing and experiencing ... There is a deep understanding of human nature and the environment... sites hold 'feelings' which cannot be described in physical terms... subtle feelings that resonate through the bodies of these people... It is only when talking and being with these people that these 'feelings' can truly be appreciated. This is... the intangible reality of these people..."
Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology,"Sacred sites
Aboriginal people observe some places as sacred, owing to their central place in the mythology of the local people."
Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology,"Pan-Australian mythology
Rainbow Serpent
In 1926 a British anthropologist specialising in Australian Aboriginal ethnology and ethnography, Professor Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, noted many Aboriginal groups widely distributed across the Australian continent all appeared to share variations of a single (common) myth telling of an unusually powerful, often creative, often dangerous snake or serpent of sometimes enormous size closely associated with the rainbows, rain, rivers, and deep waterholes.
Radcliffe-Brown coined the term 'Rainbow Serpent' to describe what he identified to be a common, recurring myth. Working in the field in various places on the Australian continent, he noted the key character of this myth (the 'Rainbow Serpent') is variously named: Kanmare (Boulia, Queensland); Tulloun: (Mount Isa); Andrenjinyi (Pennefather River, Queensland), Takkan (Maryborough, Queensland); Targan (Brisbane, Queensland); Kurreah (Broken Hill, New South Wales);Wawi (Riverina, New South Wales), Neitee & Yeutta (Wilcannia, New South Wales), Myndie (Melbourne, Victoria); Bunyip (Western Victoria); Arkaroo (Flinders Ranges, South Australia); Wogal (Perth, Western Australia); Wanamangura (Laverton, Western Australia); Kajura (Carnarvon, Western Australia); Numereji (Kakadu, Northern Territory).
This 'Rainbow Serpent' is generally and variously identified by those who tell 'Rainbow Serpent' myths, as a snake of some enormous size often living within the deepest waterholes of many of Australia's waterways; descended from that larger being visible as a dark streak in the Milky Way, it reveals itself to people in this world as a rainbow as it moves through water and rain, shaping landscapes, naming and singing of places, swallowing and sometimes drowning people; strengthening the knowledgeable with rainmaking and healing powers; blighting others with sores, weakness, illness, and death.
Even Australia's 'Bunyip' was identified as a 'Rainbow Serpent' myth of the above kind. The term coined by Radcliffe-Brown is now commonly used and familiar to broader Australian and international audiences, as it is increasingly used by government agencies, museums, art galleries, Aboriginal organisations and the media to refer to the pan-Australian Aboriginal myth specifically, and as a shorthand allusion to Australian Aboriginal mythology generally."
Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology,"Captain Cook
A number of linguists, anthropologists and others have formally documented another common Aboriginal myth occurring across Australia. Predecessors of the myth tellers encounter a mythical, exotic (most often English) character who arrives from the sea, bringing western colonialism, either offering gifts to the performer's predecessors or bringing great harm upon the performer's predecessors.
This key mythical character is most often named ""Captain Cook"", this being a mythical character shared with the broader Australian community, who also attribute James Cook with playing a key role in colonising Australia. The Aboriginal Captain Cook is attributed with bringing British rule to Australia, but his arrival is not celebrated. More often within the Aboriginal telling, he proves to be a villain.
The many Aboriginal versions of this Captain Cook are rarely oral recollections of encounters with the Lieutenant James Cook who first navigated and mapped Australia's east coast on HM Bark Endeavour in 1770. Guugu Yimidhirr predecessors, along the Endeavour River, did encounter James Cook during a 7-week period beached at the site of the present town of Cooktown while the Endeavour was being repaired. From this time the Guugu Yimidhirr did receive present-day names for places occurring in their local landscape; and the Guugu Yimmidhir recollect this encounter.
The pan-Australian Captain Cook myth, however, tells of a generic, largely symbolic British character who arrives from across the oceans sometime after the Aboriginal world was formed and the original social order founded. This Captain Cook is a harbinger of dramatic transformations in the social order, bringing change and a different social order, into which present-day audiences have been born. (see above regarding this social function played by Aboriginal myths)
In 1988 Australian anthropologist Kenneth Maddock assembled several versions of this Captain Cook myth as recorded from a number of Aboriginal groups around Australia. Included in his assemblage are:"
Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology,"Batemans Bay, New South Wales: Percy Mumbulla told of Captain Cook's arriving on a large ship which anchored at Snapper Island, from which he disembarked to give the myth-teller's predecessors clothes (to wear) and hard biscuits (to eat). Then he returned to his ship and sailed away. Mumbulla told how his predecessors rejected Captain Cook's gifts, throwing them into the sea.
Cardwell, Queensland: Chloe Grant and Rosie Runaway told of how Captain Cook and his group seemed to stand up out of the sea with the white skin of ancestral spirits, returning to their descendants. Captain Cook arrived first offering a pipe and tobacco to smoke (which was dismissed as a 'burning thing... stuck in his mouth'), then boiling a billy of tea (which was dismissed as scalding 'dirty water'), next baking flour on the coals (which was rejected as smelling 'stale' and thrown away untasted), finally boiling beef (which smelled well, and tasted okay, once the salty skin was wiped off). Captain Cook and group then left, sailing away to the north, leaving Chloe Grant and Rosie Runaway's predecessors beating the ground with their fists, fearfully sorry to see the spirits of their ancestors depart in this way.
South-eastern side of the Gulf of Carpentaria, Queensland: Rolly Gilbert told of how Captain Cook and others sailed the oceans in a boat, and decided to come to see Australia. There he encountered a couple of Rolly's predecessors whom he first intended to shoot, but instead tricked them into revealing the local population's main camping area, after which they:
set up the people [cattle industry] to go down the countryside and shoot people down, just like animal, they left them lying there for the hawks and crows... So a lot of old people and young people were struck by the head with the end of a gun and left there. They wanted to get the people wiped out because Europeans in Queensland had to run their stock: horses and cattle.
Victoria River: it is told in a Captain Cook saga that Captain Cook sailed from London to Sydney to acquire land. Admiring the country, he landed bullocks and men with firearms, following which local Aboriginal peoples in the Sydney area were massacred. Captain Cook made his way to Darwin, where he sent armed horsemen to hunt down the Aboriginal people in the Victoria River country, founding the city of Darwin and giving police plus cattle station managers orders on how to treat Aboriginal people.
 Kimberley: Numerous Aboriginal myth-tellers say that Captain Cook is a European culture hero who landed in Australia. Using gunpowder, he set a precedent for the treatment of Aboriginal peoples throughout Australia, including the Kimberley. On returning to his home, he claimed he had not seen any Aboriginal peoples, and advised that the country was a vast and empty land which settlers could come and claim for themselves. In this myth, Captain Cook introduced 'Cook's Law', upon which the settlers rely. The Aboriginal people note, however, that this is a recent, unjust and false law compared to Aboriginal law."
Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology,"Views on death
The response to death in Aboriginal religion may seem similar in some respects to that to be found in European traditions - notably in regard to the holding of a ceremony to mark the death of an individual and the observance of a period of mourning for that individual. Any such similarity, however, is, at best, only superficial (with ceremony and mourning of some kind being common to most, if not all, human cultures). In death - as in life - Aboriginal spirituality gives pre-eminence to the land and sees the deceased as linked indissolubly, by a web of subtle connections, to that greater whole: ""For Aboriginal people when a person dies some form of the persons spirit and also their bones go back to the country they were born in"". ""Aborigine people [sic] believe that they share their being with their country and all that is within it"". ""So when a person dies their country suffers, trees die and become scarred because it is believed that they came into being because of the deceased person"".
When an Aboriginal person dies the families have death ceremonies called the ""Sorry Business"". During this time the person is mourned for days by the family and whole community, crying together and sharing their grief. Often the deceased person's family stay in one room and mourn together.
Naming a person after their death is often taboo, as it is thought that it could disturb their spirit. Photos of the deceased are often not allowed, for the same reason. A smoking ceremony may be conducted, using smoke on the belongings and in the home of the deceased, which is believed to aid in releasing the spirit. The cause of death, often of a spiritual nature, may be determined by Aboriginal elders.
Ceremonies and mourning periods can last days, weeks and even sometimes months depending upon the social status of the deceased person.  It is culturally inappropriate for a non-Aboriginal person to contact and inform the next of kin of a person's passing. When someone passes away, the family of the deceased move out of their house and another family then moves in. Some families will move to ""sorry camps"", which are usually further away. Mourning includes the recital of symbolic chants, the singing of songs, dance, body paint, and cuts on the bodies of the mourners. In some Aboriginal cultures, the body is placed on a raised platform for several months, covered in native plants, or in a cave or tree. When only the bones remain, family and friends scatter them in various ways, or place them in a special place.
Many Aboriginal people believe in a place called the ""Land of the Dead"". This place was also commonly known as the ""sky-world"", which is really just the sky. As long as certain rituals were carried out during their life and at the time of their death, the deceased is allowed to enter The Land of the Dead in the ""Sky World"".  The spirit of the dead is also a part of different lands and sites and then those areas become sacred sites. This explains why the Aboriginal people are very protective of sites they call sacred.
The rituals that are performed enable an Aboriginal person to return to the womb of all time, which is ""Dreamtime"". It allows the spirit to be connected once more to all nature, to all their ancestors, and to their own personal meaning and place within the scheme of things. ""The Dreamtime is a return to the real existence for the aborigine"". ""Life in time is simply a passing phase – a gap in eternity"". It has a beginning and it has an end. ""The experience of Dreamtime, whether through ritual or from dreams, flowed through into the life in time in practical ways"". ""The individual who enters the Dreamtime feels no separation between themselves and their ancestors"". ""The strengths and resources of the timeless enter into what is needed in the life of the present"". ""The future is less uncertain because the individual feels their life as a continuum linking past and future in unbroken connection"". Through Dreamtime the limitations of time and space are overcome. For the Aboriginal people, dead relatives are very much a part of continuing life. It is believed that in dreams dead relatives communicate their presence."" At times they may bring healing if the dreamer is in pain"". ""Death is seen as part of a cycle of life in which one emerges from Dreamtime through birth, and eventually returns to the timeless, only to emerge again. It is also a common belief that a person leaves their body during sleep, and temporarily enters the Dreamtime""."
Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology,"Link to astronomy
There are many songlines which include reference to the stars, planets and the Moon, although the complex systems which go to make up Australian Aboriginal astronomy also serve practical purposes, such as navigation."
Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology,"Group-specific mythology
Yolngu
Murrinh-Patha people
The Murrinh-Patha people (whose country is the saltwater country immediately inland from the town of Wadeye) describe a Dreamtime in their myths which anthropologists believe is a religious belief equivalent to, though wholly different from, most of the world's other significant religious beliefs.
In particular, scholars suggest the Murrinh-Patha have a oneness of thought, belief, and expression unequalled within Christianity, as they see all aspects of their lives, thoughts and culture as under the continuing influence of their Dreaming. Within this Aboriginal religion, no distinction is drawn between things spiritual/ideal/mental and things material; nor is any distinction drawn between things sacred and things profane: rather all life is 'sacred', all conduct has 'moral' implication, and all life's meaning arises out of this eternal, everpresent Dreaming."
Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology,"In fact, the isomorphic fit between the natural and supernatural means that all nature is coded and charged by the sacred, while the sacred is everywhere within the physical landscape. Myths and mythic tracks cross over.. thousands of miles, and every particular form and feature of the terrain has a well-developed 'story' behind it.
Animating and sustaining this Murrinh-patha mythology is an underlying philosophy of life that has been characterised by Stanner as a belief that life is ""... a joyous thing with maggots at its centre."" Life is good and benevolent, but throughout life's journey, there are numerous painful sufferings that each individual must come to understand and endure as he grows. This is the underlying message repeatedly being told within the Murrinh-patha myths. It is this philosophy that gives Murrinh-patha people motive and meaning in life.
The following Murrinh-patha myth, for instance, is performed in Murrinh-patha ceremonies to initiate young men into adulthood."
Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology,"""A woman, Mutjinga (the 'Old Woman'), was in charge of young children, but instead of watching out for them during their parents' absence, she swallowed them and tried to escape as a giant snake. The people followed her, spearing her and removing the undigested children from the body."""
Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology,"Within the myth and in its performance, young, unadorned children must first be swallowed by an ancestral being (who transforms into a giant snake), then regurgitated before being accepted as young adults with all the rights and privileges of young adults."
Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology,"Pintupi people
Scholars of the Pintupi peoples (from within Australia's Gibson Desert region) believe they have a predominantly 'mythic' form of consciousness, within which events occur and are explained by the preordained social structures and orders told of, sung about, and performed within their superhuman mythology, rather than by reference to the possible accumulated political actions, decisions and influences of local individuals (i.e. this understanding effectively 'erases' history). The Dreaming.. provides a moral authority lying outside the individual will and outside human creation.. although the Dreaming as an ordering of the cosmos is presumably a product of historical events, such an origin is denied.
These human creations are objectified – thrust out – into principles or precedents for the immediate world.. Consequently, current action is not understood as the result of human alliances, creations, and choices, but is seen as imposed by an embracing, cosmic order.
Within this Pintupi world view, three long geographical tracks of named places dominate, being interrelated strings of significant places named and created by mythic characters on their routes through the Pintupi desert region during the Dreaming. It is a complex mythology of narratives, songs and ceremonies known to the Pintupi as Tingarri. It is most completely told and performed by Pintupi peoples at larger gatherings within Pintupi country."
Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology,"Newer belief systems
In principle, census information could identify the extent of traditional Aboriginal beliefs compared to other belief systems such as Christianity; however the official census in Australia does not include traditional Aboriginal beliefs as a religion, and includes Torres Strait Islanders, a separate group of Indigenous Australians, in most of the counts.
In the 1991 census, almost 74 percent of Aboriginal respondents identified with Christianity, up from 67 percent in the 1986 census. The wording of the question changed for the 1991 census; as the religion question is optional, the number of respondents reduced. The 1996 census reported that almost 72 percent of Aboriginal people practised some form of Christianity, and that 16 percent listed no religion. The 2001 census contained no comparable updated data.
The Aboriginal population also includes a small number of followers of other mainstream religions."
Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology,"See also
Australian Aboriginal culture
Bush medicine
Cultural landscape
Indigenous Australians § Belief systems
Indigenous Australian literature
Indigenous Australian traditional custodianship
Quinkan rock art"
Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology,"Notes
Citations
Bibliography
Further reading
Waterman, Patricia Panyity (1987). A Tale-type Index of Australian Aboriginal Oral Narratives. Folklore Fellows’ Communications. Vol. 238. Academia scientiarum Fennica. ISBN 9789514105319.
""Dreamtime Stories and The Dreaming in Aboriginal Art"". ARTARK. Retrieved 28 August 2023.|"
Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology,External links
Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology,"""Dust Echoes"". ABC Education. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 16 May 2017. a series of twelve beautifully animated Dreamtime stories from Central Arnhem Land... − 12 Episodes, each with accompanying Study Guide: Whirlpool, Mermaid, Brolga, Morning Star, Namorrodor, Curse, Moon Man, Be, Spear, Wawalag (or Wagalak) sisters, Bat and the Butterfly, and Mimis. Yolngu mythology.
Australian Government 'portal' on Aboriginal 'Dreamings' and associated mythology
Ngadjonji Antiquity and Social Organisation Ngadjonji History of the Rainforest People"
Index of Australia-related articles,The following is an alphabetical list of articles related to Australia.
Index of Australia-related articles,"A
Aboriginal:
Aboriginal Australians
Aboriginal breastplate
Aboriginal deaths in custody
Aboriginal Tasmanians
Aboriginal title
Aboriginal Tent Embassy
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984
Adelaide
Alfred Deakin
Andrew Fisher
Aquaculture in Australia
Arnhem Land
Arthur Fadden
Arthur Phillip
Australia
Australian:
Australian actors
Australian archaeology
Australian birds
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Australian Capital Territory
Australian Constitutional history
Australian cuisine
Australian Dollar
Australian electoral system
Australian English
Australian fauna
Australian Fellowship of Faith Churches and Ministers International
Australian flora
Australian Football League
Australian Greens Party
Australian hardcore
Australian House of Representatives
Australian Labor Party
Australian literature
Australian nationality law
Australian public holidays
Australian rules football
Australian Senate
Australians
States and territories of Australia"
Index of Australia-related articles,"B
Ballarat
Banksia
Belfast Coastal Reserve
Belinda (film)
Ben Chifley
Bennelong
Bill Hayden
Billy Hughes
Black Saturday bushfires (February 2009 in Victoria)
Bland Oak
Bob Hawke
Brisbane
Burke and Wills expedition"
Index of Australia-related articles,"C
Cairns
Campdrafting
Canberra
Carbon capture and storage in Australia
Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme
Central Coast
Chain Valley Colliery
Charles Kingsford Smith
Christ Watson
Cinema of Australia
City West Housing
Climate change in Australia
Coal in Australia
Coal mining in Australia
Commonwealth Heritage
Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act
Communications in Australia
Constitution of Australia
Contribution to global warming by Australia
Convicts in Australia
Council of Australian Humanist Societies
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia
CSIRO
Culture of Australia"
Index of Australia-related articles,"D
Darwin
Date and time notation in Australia
Demographics of Australia
Deserts of Australia
Dharug language
Diminutives in Australian English
Don Bradman
The Dreaming
Drought in Australia"
Index of Australia-related articles,"E
Earle Page
Economy of Australia
Edmund Barton
Effects of global warming on Australia
Electoral systems of the Australian states and territories
Energy policy of Australia
Energy Sources in Victoria
Environment of Australia
Eucalyptus"
Index of Australia-related articles,"F
Fairfield Showground
Feed-in tariffs in Australia
Foreign relations of Australia
Forests of Australia
Frank Forde"
Index of Australia-related articles,"G
Garnaut Climate Change Review
Geelong
George Reid
Gender inequality in Australia
Geography of Australia
Geology of Australia
Geothermal energy exploration in Central Australia
Gija people
Gold Coast
Government of Australia
Governor-General of Australia
Grand Final
Great Barrier Reef"
Index of Australia-related articles,"H
Harold Holt
Health of prisoners in Australia
High Court of Australia
History of Australia
History of Australia before 1901
History of Australia since 1901
History of Western Australia
Hobart
Hospitals in Australia
Human rights in Australia"
Index of Australia-related articles,"I
IDS Enterprise Systems
Indigenous Australians
List of Australian inventions
Indonesia Project (ANU)
IPP-SHR
ITCRA."
Index of Australia-related articles,"J
James Cook
James Scullin
John Curtin
John Dawkins
John Dawkins (South Australian politician)
John Gorton
John Howard
John Kerin
John McEwen
Joseph Cook
Joseph Lyons
Julia Gillard
Julian Assange"
Index of Australia-related articles,"K
Kangaroo
Kangaroo paw
Kata Tjuta
Kevin Rudd"
Index of Australia-related articles,"L
Australian Labor Party
LGBT rights in Australia
Liberal Party of Australia
List of Australians in international prisons
List of cities in Australia
List of people who have walked across Australia
List of political parties in Australia
List of proposed coal-fired power stations in Australia
List of cities and towns in South Australia
List of Western Australian towns
List of wind farms in Australia
List of wettest known tropical cyclones in Australia"
Index of Australia-related articles,"M
Malcolm Turnbull
Martu Wangka dialect
Melaleuca
Melbourne
Melocco and Moore
Metrication in Australia
Michael Jeffery (Australian Army officer)
Military of Australia
Military history of Australia during World War I
Military history of Australia during World War II
Mining in Australia
Mitigation of global warming in Australia
Monkey Mia
Mosie Burton
Music of Australia"
Index of Australia-related articles,"N
National Basketball League
National Party of Australia
National Sorry Day
Native Plants
Newcastle
New South Wales
Ngarigo language
Ngarinyin language
Ngunnawal language
Noongar language
North Australia
Northern Territory
NSW Minerals Council
Northmead"
Index of Australia-related articles,"O
One Nation Party (Pauline Hanson's One Nation)
Optometrists Association Australia"
Index of Australia-related articles,"P
Paul Keating
Pauline Hanson's One Nation
Parliament of Australia, Perth
Perth
Photovoltaic engineering in Australia
Pipeline Authority Act
Pitjantjatjara
Politics of Australia
Prime Minister of Australia
Prisons
Prospect Hill
Protected areas of Australia"
Index of Australia-related articles,"Q
Queensland
Queensland Telugu Association"
Index of Australia-related articles,"R
Renewable energy commercialization in Australia
Renewable energy in Australia
Republicanism in Australia
Revenue stamps of Australia
Revenue stamps of the Australian Capital Territory
Revenue stamps of New South Wales
Revenue stamps of the Northern Territory
Revenue stamps of Queensland
Revenue stamps of South Australia
Revenue stamps of Tasmania
Revenue stamps of Victoria
Revenue stamps of Western Australia
Road transport in Australia
Robert Menzies"
Index of Australia-related articles,"S
SAFTAG
Scott Morrison
Seafood in Australia
Seven Network
Simpson Desert
Site of Ficus superba var. henneana tree
South Australia
Sydney
Sydney Central Courier
Schapelle Corby
Solar Cities in Australia
Solar hot water in Australia
Solar power in Australia
Solar power plants in Central Australia
Solar power station in Victoria
Solar thermal energy in Australia
Stanley Bruce
Sunshine Coast
Shipwrecks of Western Australia"
Index of Australia-related articles,"T
Taronga Zoo
Tasmania
Television in Australia
Time in Australia
Torres Strait Islanders
Thomas Keneally
Transportation in Australia
Tent boxing
Townsville"
Index of Australia-related articles,"U
Uluru
Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park"
Index of Australia-related articles,"V
Victoria
Visa policy of Australia
Visa requirements for Australian citizens"
Index of Australia-related articles,"W
Walkabout
Warlpiri people
Waste management in Australia
Water security in Australia
Western Australia
Whaling in Australia
William McMahon
Wind power in Australia
Wind power in South Australia
Wollongong"
Index of Australia-related articles,"X
Xantippe, Western Australia
XXXX (beer)"
Index of Australia-related articles,"Y
Yarra Valley
Yarra River"
Index of Australia-related articles,"Z
Zetland"
Index of Australia-related articles,"Search
Search all pages with prefix"
Index of Australia-related articles,"All pages with titles beginning with Australia
All pages with titles beginning with Australian
Search all pages with title"
Index of Australia-related articles,"All pages with titles containing Australia
All pages with titles containing Australian"
Index of Australia-related articles,"See also
Outline of Australia
Lists of country-related topics
International rankings of Australia
Commonwealth of Nations"
Index of Australia-related articles,External links
Index of Australia-related articles, Wikimedia Atlas of Australia
History of Asian Australians,"Asian Australian history is the history of Asian ethnic and racial groups in Australia who trace their ancestry to Asia. The term Asian Australian, was first used in the 1950s by European Australians who wanted to strengthen diplomatic and trade ties with Asia for the benefit of the Australian community. The term was not originally used to describe or recognise the experiences of people of Asian descent living in Australia. It was only in the late 1980s and 1990s that the term ""Asian Australian"" was adopted and used by Asian Australians themselves to discuss issues related to racial vilification and discrimination. Today, the term ""Asian Australian"" is widely accepted and used to refer to people of Asian descent who are citizens or residents of Australia, though its usage and meaning may vary within the Asian Australian community."
History of Asian Australians,"Hostility to immigration
Hostility towards Asian immigration in Australia has a long history, dating back to the implementation of the ""White Australia"" policy in 1901. This policy, which was in place until 1973, consisted of laws and policies aimed at excluding non-white immigrants, particularly those from Asia, from settling in the country. Despite efforts to reform or repeal the policy over the years, the legacy of the White Australia policy and hostility towards Asian immigration has persisted in various forms, including instances of racism and discrimination towards Asian Australians"
History of Asian Australians,"Chronology
Early immigration
Around 4,000 years ago, genetic and archaeological evidence suggests contact and potential migration between India and Australia.This influx is believed to have influenced the genetic makeup of Aboriginal Australians."
History of Asian Australians,"17th century
Filipinos have been present in Australia since at least the 17th century, with some sources suggesting possible arrivals as early as the 16th century."
History of Asian Australians,"19th century
1867: The arrival of Indian indentured labourers in Queensland marked the beginning of a significant period of Indian migration to Australia. This period also saw other forms of migration beyond indentured labour.
1806: The first Chinese-born person, William Ah Sing, arrives in Australia.
1817: Filipino sailors known as ""Manilamen"" begin to work on British and American whaling ships, including some that sail to Australia.
1818: Mak Sai Ying, also known as John Shying, arrived in Australia in 1818 as a free settler, becoming the first known Chinese immigrant to the country.
1823 : First recorded Nepalese migrant to Australia, Darjee Doulat, arrives in New South Wales.
1830s-1850s: Afghan traders, known as ""Afghan cameleers,"" begin arriving in Australia to participate in the trade of goods and animals between South Australia and Western Australia
1850s: The discovery of gold in New South Wales and Victoria leads to a significant influx of Chinese immigrants to Australia.
1851: The first recorded Japanese person arrives in Australia.
1860s: Japanese pearl divers begin working in the pearling industry in Northern Australia.
1861: The Chinese Immigration Act is passed, which imposes a tax on Chinese immigrants in an effort to restrict their migration to Australia.
1878: The first Japanese embassy to Australia is established.
1880s: The first recorded arrival of Pakistanis in Australia is in the 1880s, when a small number of camel drivers, known as ""Afghans,"" arrived in the country. These men were primarily from what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan and were hired to help explore and open up new areas of Australia.
1881: The Chinese Immigration Act is amended to exclude ""all Chinese from entering the colony"".
1882: The first recorded Korean immigrants to Australia arrive in the country. John Corea, a sailor from the Korean peninsula, arrives in Sydney and becomes the first known Korean Australian."
History of Asian Australians,"20th century
Early 1900s: Indian migration to Australia slowed down and largely stopped due to the White Australia Policy, which restricted non-white immigration
1900s: Pakistani immigration to Australia continues to be small and sporadic throughout the early 20th century Many Pakistanis who do come to Australia at this time are students or professionals, rather than labourers.
1900-1945: During this time, a small number of Korean immigrants come to Australia to work as labourers, particularly on sugarcane farms in Queensland.
1901: The Australian colonies unite to form the Commonwealth of Australia, and the new federal government passes the Immigration Restriction Act, which effectively bans non-European immigration to Australia.
1901: Australia becomes a nation and the first federal parliament is established. Afghan cameleers and their families become Australian citizens.
1914-1918: During World War I, Japan is an ally of Australia and many Japanese Australians serve in the Australian military.
1920s-1930s: The construction of railways and improved transportation infrastructure leads to a decrease in the demand for cameleers and many Afghans return to Afghanistan or settle in other parts of Australia
1939-1945: During World War II, Japan becomes a enemy of Australia and many Japanese Australians are interned as ""enemy aliens"".
1942: The Australian government begins interning Japanese Australians, most of whom are Australian citizens. Many are sent to camps in New South Wales, Queensland, and South Australia.
1945: World War II ends and the internment of Japanese Australians ends.
1945: The Chinese Immigration Act is repealed and Chinese people are allowed to migrate to Australia again.
1947: The first group of Afghan students arrive in Australia to study at Australian universities.
1950s: The immigration policies of Australia become more relaxed in the 1950s, and the number of Pakistani immigrants begins to increase. Many of these immigrants are skilled workers who are recruited to help rebuild Australia after World War II
1950s: Filipinos begin to migrate to Australia as students, professionals, and skilled workers.
1950s-1960s: More Afghan students come to Australia to study, and some stay to work and settle permanently in the country.
1952: The White Australia Policy is officially dismantled.
1950-1953: The Korean War takes place, leading to a large number of Korean refugees seeking asylum in countries around the world, including Australia.
1954-1975: Vietnam War takes place, causing significant numbers of Vietnamese people to flee the country as refugees.
1956: The first recorded arrival of Vietnamese immigrants in Australia took place, with three Vietnamese students arriving to study in Sydney.
1960s : The Immigration Restriction Act 1901, also known as the White Australia Policy, is dismantled, leading to a rise in Indian immigration to Australia.
1960s: The number of Pakistani immigrants to Australia continues to increase in the 1960s, with many settling in larger cities such as Sydney and Melbourne
1960s : Some Nepalese students come to Australia to study.
1960s: Japanese immigration to Australia increases and the Japanese community begins to establish itself more permanently in the country.
1960s: Taiwanese students begin studying in Australia, with the first group arriving in 1963 
1962: The Australian government passes the Migration Act, which allows for the non-discriminatory selection of immigrants based on their skills and qualifications. This helps to increase the number of Korean immigrants coming to Australia.
1970s: Indian students start coming to Australia for higher education.
1970s: The Korean community in Australia begins to grow and become more established, with the opening of Korean language schools, churches, and cultural organizations.
1970s: In the 1970s, the Pakistani community in Australia becomes more established and begins to form cultural and social organizations.
1970s: Cambodia experiences political instability and violence during the Khmer Rouge regime, leading many Cambodians to flee the country as refugees.
1970s: The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan leads to an increase in the number of Afghan refugees seeking asylum in Australia.
1970s: The Taiwanese government begins encouraging emigration to developed countries, including Australia. Many Taiwanese migrate to Australia for economic and political reasons.
1971: Australia's first formal refugee program is established, which allows Vietnamese people displaced by the war to apply for entry to Australia.
1971: The first Nepalese community organization, the Nepal Australia Association, is established in Adelaide, South Australia.
1972: The first group of Vietnamese refugees arrive in Australia, consisting of 29 people sponsored by the Red Cross.
1973: The Whitlam government formally apologises to the Chinese community for the discriminatory legislation passed in the past.
1973-1975: The number of Vietnamese refugees arriving in Australia increases significantly, with many arriving by boat.
1975: The Fall of Saigon on April 30 leads to a significant increase in the number of Vietnamese refugees arriving in Australia, with over 5,000 people arriving in the following months.
1978: The first generation of Vietnamese Australians, who arrived as refugees in the 1970s, become eligible for citizenship.
1979: Australia begins accepting Cambodian refugees for resettlement.
1980s: Indian migration to Australia increases, with many Indians settling in Sydney and Melbourne.
1980s- Nepal becomes a major source of refugees due to political instability and human rights abuses. Many Nepalese refugees come to Australia through the Humanitarian Program.
1980s: The Vietnamese Australian community begins to establish itself, with Vietnamese businesses and community organizations being established.
1980s: In the 1980s, Pakistan becomes one of the top ten countries of origin for immigrants to Australia. Many Pakistanis come to the country as skilled workers or through family reunification programs.
1980s: Cambodian Australians begin to arrive in Australia in significant numbers, with many settling in Sydney and Melbourne.
1989: The Australian government apologises to Japanese Australians for their internment during World War II.
1990s: The number of Indians in Australia reaches 100,000.
1990s: The second generation of Vietnamese Australians, who were born in Australia to Vietnamese refugee parents, come of age.
1990s: The number of Filipinos in Australia increases significantly, with many working as healthcare professionals and in other industries.
1990s: The Korean community in Australia continues to grow, with many young Koreans coming to study at Australian universities.
1990s: The Pakistani community in Australia continues to grow and thrive in the 1990s. Many Pakistanis who arrived in the country in earlier decades become Australian citizens and work to preserve their cultural heritage while also participating in mainstream Australian society.
1990s: The number of Taiwanese immigrants to Australia increases significantly, with many settling in Melbourne and Sydney
1992: The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission releases the report ""Nation to Nation"", which documents the experiences of Chinese Australians and makes recommendations for reconciliation.
1997: The Nepalese Australian Welfare Association is established in Adelaide to support newly arrived Nepalese refugees.
1998: The Nepal Australia Community Services organization is established in Sydney to support the Nepalese community in New South Wales.
1999: The Australia-Cambodia Migration and Cooperation Agreement is signed, allowing for the recruitment of Cambodian workers to fill labour shortages in certain industries in Australia."
History of Asian Australians,"21st century
Early 2000s: Indian migration to Australia continues to grow, with many Indians coming to Australia as skilled workers and professionals
2000s- The Nepalese community in Australia continues to grow, with many Nepalese students coming to study in Australian universities.
2000s: The Korean community in Australia becomes more diverse, with a mix of immigrants from both North and South Korea. The number of Korean-born Australians also increases, as more Korean couples choose to have children in Australia.
2000s: The Taiwanese Australian community becomes more established and begins to actively participate in Australian society.
2001: The September 11th terrorist attacks in the United States lead to the invasion of Afghanistan by coalition forces. This results in a further increase in the number of Afghan refugees seeking asylum in Australia</ref>
2001: Vietnam is officially recognised as a source country for refugees in Australia.
2002: The first Cambodian-born member of the Australian Parliament, Hong Lim, is elected.
2006: The Australian government apologises to the Chinese community for the White Australia policy and the effects it had on the Chinese community.
2010s: The number of Indians in Australia reaches over 500,000, making it one of the largest migrant communities in Australia.
2010s: The Filipino community in Australia continues to grow, with Filipinos now making up the fourth largest group of overseas-born residents in the country.
2010s: The Vietnamese Australian community continues to grow and thrive, with Vietnamese Australians making significant contributions to Australian society in a variety of fields.
2010s: The Korean community in Australia continues to thrive, with a strong presence in many major cities and a vibrant culture that includes food, music, and festivals.
2010s: The number of Afghan refugees arriving in Australia begins to decrease as conditions in Afghanistan improve. Afghan Australians continue to make significant contributions to Australian society in a variety of fields, including business, education, and the arts
2010s: Taiwanese Australians continue to contribute to Australian culture and economy, with many running successful businesses and participating in various cultural and community events
2018: The Australian government marks the 200th anniversary of Mak Sai Ying's arrival in Australia and the contribution of Chinese Australians to the country.
2020s: Indian migration to Australia continues to grow, with Indians making up a significant portion of the Australian population. Many Indian Australians have achieved success in various fields, including business, politics, and the arts.
2020s: The Nepalese community in Australia continues to thrive, with Nepalese cultural organizations and events held throughout the country. The Nepalese Australian Women's Association is established to support and empower Nepalese women in Australia."
History of Asian Australians,"Timeline of key legislation and judicial rulings
1855 Chinese Immigration Act, which imposed a tax on Chinese immigrants in Victoria.
1861 Chinese Immigration Act, imposed a tax on Chinese immigrants in an effort to restrict their migration to Australia, is later amended to exclude ""all Chinese from entering the colony"".
1870 Naturalization Act, which granted British subjects the right to become naturalised citizens of Australia, but excluded ""any person of Asiatic race"" from this right.
1877 Chinese Immigration Amendment Act, which extended the tax to all of Australia and required Chinese immigrants to obtain a certificate of exemption from the tax before landing.
1881 Influx of Chinese Restriction Act, which imposed a tax on Chinese immigrants in an attempt to limit their numbers in Australia.
1901 Immigration Restriction Act, effectively bans non-European immigration to Australia.
1914 War Precautions Act, restricted the freedom of groups and individuals thought to be a threat, including those critical of Australia's involvement in World War I. These measures required individuals with connections to enemy nations to register as 'aliens' and many were interned in camps across the country. During World War II, Japanese Australians, many of whom were Australian citizens, were also interned as ""enemy aliens"" and sent to camps in New South Wales, Queensland, and South Australia.
1945 Darwin Lands Acquisition Act, forcibly acquired land owned by Chinese Australians in Darwin, ending the local Chinatown. Proposed as a means of ""eliminating undesirable elements,"" the act resulted in the destruction of homes and businesses in the area.
1948 Nationality and Citizenship Act, established Australian citizenship as a legal status separate from British nationality. It also established the process for acquiring Australian citizenship through birth, descent, adoption, or naturalisation. The act also included provisions for the loss of Australian citizenship, such as through marriage to a foreign national or through membership in a foreign military organization.
1958 Migration Act, which established the legal framework for the management of immigration to Australia.
1975 Racial Discrimination Act, made it unlawful to discriminate against a person on the grounds of their race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin. This act also established the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) to deal with complaints of racial discrimination and to promote understanding and acceptance of the principle of equal rights. The act applies to various areas of public life, including employment, education, and the provision of goods and services.
This is not an exhaustive list, and there may be other legislation and judicial rulings that are relevant to the history of Asians in Australia."
History of Asian Australians,"See also
Asian Australians
Asian immigration to Australia
History of Asian Americans"
History of Asian Australians,"Notes
References
Citations
Works cited
Ikegami, Shigehiro (2005). ""A Profile of Indonesian People in Australia"". Memoirs of the Shizuoka University of Art and Culture. 6: 21–30. Retrieved 10 March 2010.
Lockwood, Rupert (October 1970). ""The Indonesian Exiles in Australia, 1942–1947"". Indonesia. 10 (10): 37–56. doi:10.2307/3350634. hdl:1813/53499. JSTOR 3350634."
Chapter II of the Constitution of Australia,Chapter II of the Constitution of Australia establishes the executive branch of the Commonwealth of Australia. It provides for the exercise of executive power by the Governor-General of Australia advised by a Federal Executive Council.
Chapter II of the Constitution of Australia,"Sections
Section 61: Executive power
The executive power of the Commonwealth is vested in the Queen and is exercisable by the Governor‑General as the Queen's representative, and extends to the execution and maintenance of this Constitution, and of the laws of the Commonwealth.
Section 61 vests the executive power of the Commonwealth in the monarch of Australia, and makes this power exercisable by the governor-general on behalf of the monarch as their representative. In practice, the governor-general only exercises this power on the advice of the Federal Executive Council which he or she presides over."
Chapter II of the Constitution of Australia,"Section 62: Federal Executive Council
There shall be a Federal Executive Council to advise the Governor‑General in the government of the Commonwealth, and the members of the Council shall be chosen and summoned by the Governor‑General and sworn as Executive Councillors, and shall hold office during his pleasure.
Section 62 establishes the Federal Executive Council which advises the governor-general. In practice the governor-general is bound by convention to follow this advice, and although he or she is described as having the power to choose the members of the Federal Executive Council, generally all parliamentarians who are appointed a ministerial portfolio automatically become members and remain so for life."
Chapter II of the Constitution of Australia,"Section 63: Provisions referring to Governor-General
The provisions of this Constitution referring to the Governor‑General in Council shall be construed as referring to the Governor‑General acting with the advice of the Federal Executive Council."
Chapter II of the Constitution of Australia,"Section 64: Ministers of State
The Governor‑General may appoint officers to administer such departments of State of the Commonwealth as the Governor‑General in Council may establish.
Such officers shall hold office during the pleasure of the Governor‑General. They shall be members of the Federal Executive Council, and shall be the Queen's Ministers of State for the Commonwealth."
Chapter II of the Constitution of Australia,After the first general election no Minister of State shall hold office for a longer period than three months unless he is or becomes a senator or a member of the House of Representatives.
Chapter II of the Constitution of Australia,"Section 65: Numbers of Ministers
Until the Parliament otherwise provides, the Ministers of State shall not exceed seven in number, and shall hold such offices as the Parliament prescribes, or, in the absence of provision, as the Governor‑General directs."
Chapter II of the Constitution of Australia,"Section 66: Salaries of Ministers
There shall be payable to the Queen, out of the Consolidated Revenue Fund of the Commonwealth, for the salaries of the Ministers of State, an annual sum which, until the Parliament otherwise provides, shall not exceed twelve thousand pounds a year."
Chapter II of the Constitution of Australia,"Section 67: Appointment of civil servants
Until the Parliament otherwise provides, the appointment and removal of all other officers of the Executive Government of the Commonwealth shall be vested in the Governor‑General in Council, unless the appointment is delegated by the Governor‑General in Council or by a law of the Commonwealth to some other authority."
Chapter II of the Constitution of Australia,"Section 68: Command of naval and military forces
The command in chief of the naval and military forces of the Commonwealth is vested in the Governor‑General as the Queen's representative.
Section 68 vests command of the Australian Defence Force in the governor-general, as the representative of the Sovereign. In practice this role is limited to ceremonial duties, including attending military parades and services, and appointing the chiefs of the Defence Force, Army, Navy, and Air Force, which (along with all decisions made by the governor-general in his or her capacity as commander-in-chief) is done on the advice of the Federal Executive Council. Actual command of the armed forces is wielded by the Minister for Defence, who is responsible for defence policy, and the Chief of the Defence Force, who is responsible for the administration and operation of the military."
Chapter II of the Constitution of Australia,"Section 69: Transfer of certain departments
On a date or dates to be proclaimed by the Governor‑General after the establishment of the Commonwealth the following departments of the public service in each State shall become transferred to the Commonwealth:—
Posts, telegraphs, and telephones:
Naval and military defence:
Lighthouses, lightships, beacons, and buoys:
Quarantine.
But the departments of customs and of excise in each State shall become transferred to the Commonwealth on its establishment."
Chapter II of the Constitution of Australia,"Section 70: Certain powers of Governors to vest in Governor-General
In respect of matters which, under this Constitution, pass to the Executive Government of the Commonwealth, all powers and functions which at the establishment of the Commonwealth are vested in the Governor of a Colony, or in the Governor of a Colony with the advice of his Executive Council, or in any authority of a Colony, shall vest in the Governor‑General, or in the Governor‑General in Council, or in the authority exercising similar powers under the Commonwealth, as the case requires."
Chapter II of the Constitution of Australia,"References
External links"
Chapter II of the Constitution of Australia,Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act: Chapter II – The Executive Government
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"The COVID-19 pandemic in Australia was a part of the worldwide pandemic of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The first confirmed case in Australia was identified on 25 January 2020, in Victoria, when a man who had returned from Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, tested positive for the virus. As of 6 August 2022, Australia has reported over 11,350,000 cases and 19,265 deaths, with Victoria's 2020 second wave having the highest fatality rate per case.
In March 2020, the Australian government established the intergovernmental National Cabinet and declared a human biosecurity emergency in response to the outbreak. Australian borders were closed to all non-residents on 20 March, and returning residents were required to spend two weeks in supervised quarantine hotels from 27 March. Many individual states and territories also closed their borders to varying degrees, with some remaining closed until late 2020, and continuing to periodically close during localised outbreaks. Social distancing rules were introduced on 21 March, and state governments started to close ""non-essential"" services. ""Non-essential services"" included social gathering venues such as pubs and clubs but unlike many other countries did not include most business operations such as construction, manufacturing and many retail categories. The number of new cases initially grew sharply, then levelled out at about 350 per day around 22 March, and started falling at the beginning of April to under 20 cases per day by the end of the month.
Australia was one of few countries to pursue a zero-COVID ""suppression"" strategy until late 2021, meaning it aimed to minimise domestic community transmission. Implementation involved strict controls on international arrivals and aggressively responding to local outbreaks with lockdowns and exhaustive contact tracing of domestic COVID-19 clusters. A second wave of infections emerged in Victoria during May and June 2020, which was attributed to an outbreak at a Melbourne quarantine hotel. The second wave, though largely localised to Melbourne, was much more widespread and deadlier than the first; at its peak, the state had over 7,000 active cases. Victoria underwent a second strict lockdown which eventually lasted almost four months. The wave ended with zero new cases being recorded on 26 October 2020. No deaths from COVID-19 were recorded in Australia from 28 December 2020 until 13 April 2021, when one death occurred in Queensland.
The nationwide vaccination program began with the first doses of the Pfizer–BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine being administered in Sydney on 21 February 2021. The country's vaccine rollout, which fell short of its initial targets and was described as slow, was criticised. Further cluster outbreaks occurred in late 2020 and mid-2021, with several brief ""snap lockdowns"" announced in certain states to contain their spread, particularly as novel variants of SARS-CoV-2 arrived in Australia.
In July 2021, the Australian government after continually stating COVID-zero was not sustainable, published the 'National Plan' to live with COVID. As outbreaks of SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant which started in June 2021 in New South Wales spread, almost half of Australia's population and most major cities were in lockdown for at least 3 days during July 2021. The outbreak worsened in New South Wales and spread to Victoria in the following weeks causing new record daily cases in both stated later in 2021. Lockdowns were phased out after 70% of the population was vaccinated in October with most public health restrictions removed after vaccinating 90% of its population in December 2021, as the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant drove further records of infections. International travel began to resume in November 2021 and returned to normal in early 2022. 
The government declared the emergency response ""finished"" in September 2022 and removed all restrictions including the requirement to isolate if one was infected from 14 October 2022. On 20 October 2023, the Australian Chief Medical Officer declared that COVID-19 was no longer a Communicable Disease Incident of National Significance (CDINS) and ended all national emergency response and coordination, shifting COVID-19 management to a more general infectious disease framework."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Background
A novel coronavirus that caused a respiratory illness was identified in Wuhan, Hubei, China, in December 2019, and was reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) on 31 December 2019, which confirmed its concern on 12 January 2020. WHO declared the outbreak a Public health emergency of international concern on 30 January, and a pandemic on 11 March.
The case fatality rate of COVID-19 is much lower than that of SARS, a related disease which emerged in 2002, but its transmission has been significantly greater, leading to a much greater total death toll.
The widespread reporting of the bushfire season in major media and social media around the world caused a significant drop in the number of tourists coming to Australia, including those from China. The absence of tourist arrivals during this time could have played a significant role in sparing Australia from the spread of COVID-19 in the early stages of the pandemic. This is in contrast to other major cities in Europe and North America, where the early spread of the virus continued undetected until late February 2020 or early March 2020."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Timeline
On 23 January 2020, biosecurity officials began screening arrivals on flights from Wuhan to Sydney. Two days later the first case of a SARS-CoV-2 infection was reported, that of a Chinese citizen who arrived from Guangzhou on 19 January. The patient was tested and received treatment in Melbourne. On the same day, three other patients tested positive in Sydney after returning from Wuhan."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"First wave: March–April 2020
Australia reported its 100th case on 10 March 2020 roughly corresponding to the start of Australia's first wave. Case numbers and deaths continued to climb during March and April, but by late April the first wave had effectively ended. On 6 June, both New South Wales and Victoria reported no new cases for the previous 24 hours, with only Queensland and Western Australia reporting one new (international) case each, the lowest national total since February."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Second wave: June–October 2020
On 20 June, the Victorian Government announced the re-tightening of restrictions on household gatherings following a spike in community transmitted cases over the previous week, reported to be mainly caused by family-to-family transmission in large household gatherings. Most easing of restrictions that were to take place were postponed. The same day restrictions were re-tightened in Victoria, the Western Australian Government announced the state would move into ""Phase 4"" from 27 June, permitting some of the most relaxed restrictions in the country.
On 26 October, the ""second wave"" ended when Victoria recorded zero new cases and zero deaths statewide for the first time since 9 June. On the same day, Daniel Andrews announced a significant easing of restrictions to take effect over the coming weeks. From 11.59 pm on 27 October, people no longer required a reason to leave home, all retail, restaurants, hotels, cafes and bars were allowed to open with capacity limits, beauty, personal services and tattooing were allowed to reopen, outdoor community sport for under 18 and outdoor non-contact sport for adults recommenced, a maximum of 10 people were allowed to attend weddings, a maximum of 20 mourners were allowed to attend funerals, and faith and religious gatherings were allowed to resume, subject to patron limitations. With a length of 112 days, this Victorian COVID-19 lockdown was the longest continuous lockdown world-wide, as of October 2020."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Third wave: June 2021 – October 2021
Victoria recorded no deaths between late October 2020 and August 2021. New South Wales recorded their first death of the 2021 wave on 10 July 2021.
On 18 June in NSW, a SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant COVID-19 cluster in Sydney's Eastern Suburbs had grown to 4 cases. On 25 June in NSW, after 22 new cases of the Delta variant brought infections linked to the Bondi cluster to 65 total, an initial lockdown was announced for four Sydney local government areas (LGAs).
New South Wales recorded its ""worst day"" of its continuing June 2021 outbreak of the COVID-19 Delta variant on 29 August 2021, with six deaths, and a record 1,218 new local confirmed cases. Whilst the daily number of cases continues to increase, at the time this was the highest daily confirmed case total Australia had received on a single day, surpassing Victoria's record in the previous wave. However, the recorded COVID-19 deaths is significantly lower than the 41 daily deaths recorded in Victoria during its peak.
On 30 August in NSW, the Ministry of Health reported four deaths in the previous 24 hours of people confirmed to have had COVID-19. One of them, a man in his 50s who died at Dubbo Hospital, is believed to be the first Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander COVID-19 related death. He was not vaccinated. The total number of COVID related deaths in NSW reached 149 since the beginning of the pandemic, and 93 during the NSW Delta outbreak. The official national death toll broke 1,000 at 1,002.
On 31 August in Victoria, the deaths of two women were reported, the first COVID deaths in that state since 30 November 2020, which ended a nine-month streak with no fatalities.
On 3 October 2021, Melbourne surpassed Buenos Aires as the city with the most cumulative days spent in lockdown in the entire world, having spent 245 days in lockdown since the start of the pandemic. The sixth lockdown ended in Melbourne at midnight on 21 October 2021 after a record 262 cumulative days throughout the pandemic. The lockdown in Sydney ended on 11 October 2021 after 106 days, following the initial Delta variant outbreak.
Australia began to re-open to the world from 1 November 2021, with vaccinated Australian citizens and permanent residents allowed to enter NSW and Victoria without being restricted by strict flight cap numbers or long hotel quarantine stays from that date.
On 8 November, Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk announced that as of 17 December, all eligible unvaccinated citizens over the age of 16 would be banned from pubs, clubs, cafes, restaurants, cinemas, theatres, music festivals and stadiums, government-owned galleries, museums and libraries, and they would not be allowed to visit hospitals, aged care facilities, prisons or disability services, among other restrictions. The premier described this as ""a reward for the fully vaccinated and a precaution for when the borders open"", and stated that restrictions were expected to continue into 2022."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Omicron wave: November 2021 – February 2022
On 28 November 2021, NSW Health confirmed that two returned travellers had tested positive for the new Omicron COVID-19 variant in Sydney, making them the first known cases of the strain in Australia. On 29 November, a positive case of the Omicron variant was recorded at the Howard Springs quarantine facility, from a return traveller who arrived at Darwin on 25 November from Johannesburg, South Africa. The same day, two passengers who had flown to Sydney from southern Africa via Singapore also tested positive for the Omicron variant.
On 30 November, a positive case of the Omicron variant was recorded in Sydney. The person had visited southern Africa before arriving in Sydney prior to travel restrictions, and was subsequently active in the community in Sydney and the Central Coast.
On 3 December, a positive Omicron variant case was confirmed in the ACT.
Most public health restrictions were lifted in December 2021, after 90% of the Australian population were vaccinated. The SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant drove a record rise in infections, leading to New South Wales to have one of the highest infection rates worldwide."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"2022
On 18 January 2022, 77 COVID-19 deaths were reported in Australia, the highest number to that point far, though not all had occurred on the same day (17 January). There were 36 in New South Wales, 22 in Victoria, 16 in Queensland, 2 in South Australia, and 1 in the Australian Capital Territory.
On 22 January 2022, Australia exceeded 3,000 deaths related to COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic.
By 4 February 2022, 4,000 COVID-19 related deaths were exceeded. This increased to 5,000 by 23 February.
On 21 February 2022 border restrictions were removed for all vaccinated people, including non-citizens such as tourists and new immigrants, effectively opening Australia up to the world. On 18 April 2022 further restrictions on international travel that had been imposed under the Biosecurity Act were removed, allowing cruise ships to operate in Australia for the first time in over 2 years (although only in states where the state government was willing to allow cruise ships, such as NSW, Queensland and Victoria).
In May the requirement to wear a mask in the airport was removed.
On 9 September 2022 a host of restrictions were removed. This included the requirement to wear masks on aircraft, in Western Australia the requirement to wear masks on passenger transport was removed as well. The COVID-19 mandatory isolation period was also reduced to 5 days
On 21 September 2022 South Australia, New South Wales, Queensland ended the mask mandate on passenger transport
On 22 September 2022 Victoria ended the mask mandate on passenger transport.
On 14 October 2022 the mandatory COVID-19 isolation period was scrapped entirely and replaced with recommendations.
Public Health Emergencies, Pandemic declerations and States of Emergencies were ended in each states over the following month with Victoria on 13 October, Queensland on 1 November, Western Australia on 4 November, Northern Territory on 11 November, South Australia on 23 November, New South Wales on 30 November and the Australian Capital Territory on 28 February 2023"
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Post pandemic
On 23 June 2023, Queensland ended the COVID-19 traffic light advice as the disease became managed in-line with other viral diseases"
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Statistics
Clusters
The largest cluster in Australia from the start of the pandemic until 5 November 2021, when Australia reached its 80 percent vaccination target and entered the consolidation phase of its COVID-19 transition plan, was the Flemington/North Melbourne public housing cluster with 310 cases. The deadliest cluster in Australia was at St Basil's Homes for the Aged in Victoria, where 45 residents died."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Responses
Australia pursued a zero-COVID strategy until late 2021; the stated goal of the National Cabinet was ""suppression"", meaning continually trying to drive community transmission to zero but expecting that new outbreaks may occur. This was in contrast to the mitigation strategies implemented by most other nations. Compared to other Western countries, notably the United States and European countries, Australia's handling has been commended for its effectiveness, but has been criticised by some for its curbing of civil liberties. Distinctive aspects of that response included early interventions to reduce reflected transmission from countries other than China during late January and February 2020; early recruitment of a large contact tracing workforce; comparatively high public trust in government responses to the pandemic, at least compared to the US and later on, the use of short, intense lockdowns to facilitate exhaustive contact tracing of new outbreaks. Australia's international borders have also remained largely closed, with limited numbers of arrivals strictly controlled, for the duration of the pandemic. Australia sought to develop a Bluetooth-based contact tracing app that does not use the privacy-preserving Exposure Notification framework supported natively by Android and Apple smartphones, and while these efforts were not particularly effective, QR code-based contact tracing apps became ubiquitous in Australia's businesses. These apps, which are effectively required by State Governments, give government health departments the ability to reconstruct the presence and possible contacts of anyone carrying a mobile telephone handset that was capable of checking-in using a QR code at the time of visiting shops, bars, restaurants or similar venues, generally for 28 days after the visit. Furthermore, venues are required to provide alternative contact registration for anyone unable to use the app."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Travel restrictions
2020
On 1 February 2020, Australia banned the entry of foreign nationals who had been in mainland China, and ordered its own returning citizens who had been in China to self-quarantine for 14 days. The country also began to assess the relative risk of reflected transmission through third countries, and to ask travelers arriving from higher-risk countries to monitor for symptoms. Australia subsequently imposed bans on Iran (1 March), South Korea (5 March), and Italy (11 March). From 16 March, all travellers arriving in or returning to Australia were required to self-isolate for 14 days. Failure to self-isolate could result in a fine of A$11,000 to A$50,000 and a possible prison sentence, depending on the state. Cruise ships were also barred from docking in the country for 30 days.
On 20 March, Australia closed its borders to all non-residents and non-Australian citizens. With limited exceptions, a ban was imposed on Australians travelling overseas.
By late March 2020, 62% of Australia's more than 3,000 coronavirus cases were among people who had returned from overseas. From then, Australians returning from overseas were subject to two weeks compulsory quarantine in hotels. The New South Wales quarantine program was helped by 150 Australian Defence Force personnel, including 30 who were stationed at hotels. In Victoria, three private security operators were contracted to provide the security, while the other states and territories used their police resources. The states and territories carried the costs of hotel quarantine. By 19 June, since the policy came into force 81,000 people had entered Australia. Of those, 63,000 had undergone hotel quarantine, while the rest, including flight crews, international businesspeople and defence members, fell under different rules. Hotel quarantine had cost $118 million as at 19 June.
Interstate border closures began on 19 March, with Tasmania imposing a mandatory 14-day quarantine on all ""non-essential"" travellers to the state, including returning residents. On 24 March, Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory closed their borders, with all interstate arrivals being required to self-isolate for 14 days. On 11 April, Queensland banned interstate arrivals, with only Queensland residents and those granted 'exemption' being allowed entry. On 8 July, the Victorian and NSW governments, jointly closed their common border, following a large spike in cases in parts of Melbourne.
With the spike in coronavirus infections in Victoria linked to the hotel quarantine program, a judicial inquiry into the program in Victoria was called on 2 July; and all international arrivals into Melbourne were suspended. On 9 July, other state and territory leaders agreed to reduce flights and arrivals into Australia from 8,000 to 4,000 a week to ease the burden on the hotel quarantine system. States started to charge travellers for hotel quarantine. In mid-September, the states agreed to increase the number of arrivals to 6,000 a week, to help in the repatriation of tens of thousands of Australians stranded overseas. By 15 December 2020, 39,000 Australians were registered with the government as stranded, with more unregistered (as the government advised registration only for those needing assistance to return). After repeated flight cancellations and without access to government-provided health care or welfare benefits, many families reported being forced to overstay visas, and burn down savings and incur debt to pay for accommodations. Having to pay thousands of dollars for return tickets and mandatory hotel quarantine, some chose to send one family member back to resume work and earn enough money to pay the way of the rest. Between 13 March and 15 July 2020, more than 357,000 people returned to Australia. As of 15 January 2021 over 37,000 Australians were stranded abroad. On 29 January 2021, the ability of Australians stuck overseas to return was further hampered when the UK banned direct flights from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) over the possible spread of the South African COVID-19 variant. Both Etihad Airways and Emirates airlines are UAE-based.
An overnight curfew was introduced in Victoria on 2 August 2020, extended on 13 September and suspended on 27 September. A Supreme Court judge has ruled the curfew was legal."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"2021
On 25 January 2021, Health Minister Greg Hunt suspended Australia's travel bubble with New Zealand for a period of 72 hours after New Zealand authorities confirmed a community transmission case in the country's Northland Region. On 28 January the suspension of the travel bubble was extended for 3 more days.
On 5 February 2021, National Cabinet decided to increase the number of international passenger arrivals to Australia as from mid-February. New South Wales returned to a weekly cap of 3,010 people and Queensland to 1,000. South Australia increased by 40 people a week to 530, and Victoria by almost 200 to 1,310. Western Australia remained at a reduced arrival cap. The total national weekly cap of 4,100 increased to approximately 6,300.
On 11 February 2021, the airline Cathay Pacific decided that, excepting Sydney, from 20 February it would cease all flights to Australia until the end of the month. This was in response to the Hong Kong government's new COVID rules requiring Hong Kong based aircrew to quarantine for 14 days on return to HK.
On 24 February, Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria suspended their travel bubble arrangements with New Zealand in response to a recent community outbreak in South Auckland. As a result, New Zealanders traveling to these states would have to enter quarantine.
On 2 March 2021, the general closure of Australia's international borders to travel was extended another three months to 17 June 2021. Australia's borders had now already been closed for 12 months. The border could reopen earlier if the closure was ""no longer needed"". Despite the border closure, between 25 March and 31 December 2020 over 105,000 exemptions were approved for people to leave Australia.
By April 2021, there were still about 40,000 Australians stranded overseas by the high cost of plane tickets and the cap on the number of people in the quarantine system, which was criticised for special treatment of sportspeople and celebrities. Australia was chastised by the United Nations Human Rights Committee, which requested a prompt return for the country's citizens; the government has given out A$29 million to about 3,900 stranded people as a last resort, and operated 28 repatriation flights.
On 23 April, Prime Minister Morrison announced that travellers to Australia from ""high risk"" countries, in particular India, were to be reduced by 30 per cent. This decision was based on an increase in positive results for COVID-19 among travellers from India at the Howard Springs, Northern Territory quarantine facility. Travel to such countries was also to be limited.
In general, the border restrictions had had broad public support, though critics suggested safety could be improved by constructing more outdoor quarantine centres rather than relying on urban hotels, which had suffered 16 leaks to the surrounding communities as of April 2021, out of about half a million quarantined. The government did not have an ordered queue of returnees; outside of repatriation flights, the order in which people returned was determined by commercial airlines, resulting in Australian citizens making up fewer than half of incoming travellers in February 2021.
On 27 April, due to the ""record-breaking"" outbreak of COVID-19 in India, with 323,000 new infections that day after five days with new cases peaking above 350,000, and another 2,771 COVID deaths there, the Federal Government ""paused"" all incoming flights from India until at least 15 May. The pause includes repatriation flights into the Howard Springs quarantine facility near Darwin with more than 9,000 Australians in India at this date wanting to come to Australia.
Late on 30 April, the Federal Government announced a ban on Australian citizens and permanent residents in India from entering Australia via any route. These measures came into effect on 3 May and would remain in force until 15 May. Breaches would be subject to punishment under the Biosecurity Act 2015, with penalties for breaches including up to five years' jail, a fine of A$66,600,or both. Foreign Minister Marise Payne reported that 57% of positive cases in quarantine had come from India in April, compared with 10% in March. Unlike the prior travel bans imposed in 2020 on Iran, South Korea and Italy, and the interstate travel bans regularly imposed as outbreaks occur, the move was branded as racist by some critics, and a potential breach of international human rights law. On 3 May 2021 the government announced that it would review this decision earlier than originally intended, possibly within the same week. There were about 9,000 Australian citizens in India, of whom 650 were considered vulnerable.
On 26 June 2021 at 8:30 pm (AEST), due to multiple outbreaks across Australia of the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant, New Zealand immediately paused trans-Tasman travel with Australia until 10 pm (AEST) on 30 June.
On 2 July, National Cabinet decided that from 14 July, the number of airline passengers allowed into Australia would be capped at 3,035, half what it was before. The Victorian, Western Australian and Queensland governments had been advocating a large decrease in incoming passenger numbers because of the highly infectious nature of the Delta COVID strain. More repatriation flights to the Howard Springs quarantine facility were to be organised in response.
The states would receive passengers thus:"
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Sydney: 1,505
Perth: 265
Adelaide: 265
Melbourne: 500
Brisbane: 500 (additional 150 surge capacity)
On 1 November, Australia began to re-open to the world, with vaccinated Australian citizens and permanent residents allowed to enter NSW and Victoria without being restricted by strict flight cap numbers or long hotel quarantine stays. Other states and territories followed over the next few months."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"2022
On 21 February 2022, border restrictions were removed for all vaccinated people, including non-citizens such as tourists and new immigrants, effectively opening Australia up to the world.
On 18 April 2022 further restrictions on international travel that had been imposed under the Biosecurity Act were removed, allowing cruise ships to operate in Australia for the first time in over 2 years (although only in states where the state government was willing to allow cruise ships, such as NSW, Queensland and Victoria)."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"National Cabinet
On 13 March 2020, the National Cabinet, a form of national crisis cabinet akin to a war cabinet, was created following a meeting of the Council of Australian Governments (COAG). This is the first time such a cabinet has been proclaimed since World War II, and the only time in Australian history that a crisis cabinet has included state and territory leaders. The cabinet consists of the premiers and chief ministers of the Australian states and territories and meets weekly during the crisis. At its first meeting on 13 March, the National Cabinet announced that gatherings of more than 500 people should be cancelled from 15 March. Schools, universities, workplaces, public transport and airports were not included in this recommendation. Prime Minister Morrison also announced that he intended to attend a Rugby League match on 14 March; ""I do still plan to go to the football on Saturday"" but later decided against attending the match.
On 29 March, the Cabinet agreed to stricter limits to apply from midnight on 30 March: a limit on both indoor and outdoor gatherings of two people except weddings (5) and funerals (10), and people of the same household or family; strong guidance to all Australians is to stay home unless for necessary shopping, health care, exercise, and work and study that can't be done remotely; public playgrounds, skate parks and outside gyms to be closed. It was left to individual states to enforce these guidelines. They also agreed to a moratorium on evictions for six months for both commercial and residential tenancies suffering financial distress.
On 2 April 2020, the Federal government announced the temporary provision of free childcare so that people could continue working, and to prevent closure of childcare centres. The Government paid half each centre's operating costs. The free childcare ended on 12 July, and the previous Child Care Subsidy was reintroduced."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Human biosecurity emergency declaration
On 18 March 2020 a human biosecurity emergency was declared in Australia owing to the risks to human health posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, after a National Security Committee meeting the previous day. The Biosecurity Act 2015 specifies that the Governor-General may declare such an emergency exists if the Health Minister (currently Greg Hunt) is satisfied that ""a listed human disease is posing a severe and immediate threat, or is causing harm, to human health on a nationally significant scale"". This gives the minister sweeping powers, including imposing restrictions or preventing the movement of people and goods between specified places, and evacuations. The Biosecurity (Human Biosecurity Emergency) (Human Coronavirus with Pandemic Potential) Declaration 2020 was declared by the Governor-General, David Hurley, under Section 475 of the Act. The Biosecurity (Human Biosecurity Emergency) (Human Coronavirus with Pandemic Potential) (Emergency Requirements) Determination 2020, made by the Health Minister on the same day, forbids international cruise ships from entering Australian ports. This ban remains in place until 17 December 2021 at the earliest. 
A social distancing rule of four square metres (43 sq ft) per person in any enclosed space was agreed by National Cabinet on 20 March, to be implemented through State and Territory laws. On 22 March 2020, the State governments of New South Wales and Victoria imposed a mandatory closure of non-essential services, while the Governments of Western Australia and South Australia imposed border closures.
On 22 March Morrison announced a closure of places of social gathering, including registered and licensed clubs, licensed premises in hotels and bars, entertainment venues, including but not restricted to cinemas, casinos and nightclubs and places of worship. Cafes and restaurants could remain open but were limited to takeaway food. Similarly, enclosed spaces for funerals and things of that nature would have to follow the strict four-square-metre rule. These measures (labelled stage 1 in anticipation of possible future measures) were effective immediately at midday, 23 March. Morrison stated that he would like schools to remain open, but parents could keep children at home if they wished to.
On 25 March 2020, the Health Minister made a second determination under the Biosecurity Act 2015, the Biosecurity (Human Biosecurity Emergency) (Human Coronavirus with Pandemic Potential) (Overseas Travel Ban Emergency Requirements) Determination 2020, which ""forbids Australian citizens and permanent residents from leaving Australian territory by air or sea as a passenger"". On the same day, the Prime Minister announced a further set of restrictions, labelled stage 2 restrictions, effective midnight that night. These involved mainly smaller businesses, such as nail salons and tattoo parlours, while some, such as personal training sessions, were limited to 10 people. At the same time, other gatherings were restricted, such as weddings (5 people) and funerals (10 people).
At 12:00 am on Tuesday 31 March, restrictions were announced on indoor and outdoor gatherings, which were called stage 3 by the media, although the label ""stage 3"" was not part of the official announcement. The new rule limited gatherings to two people, although it did not apply to members of the same household.
On 14 April, the Federal government announced the ""COVIDSafe"" digital contact tracing app.
On 25 April 2020, the Biosecurity (Human Biosecurity Emergency) (Human Coronavirus with Pandemic Potential) (Emergency Requirements—Public Health Contact Information) Determination 2020, made under subsection 477(1) of the Act, was signed into law by the Health Minister. The purpose of the new legislation was ""to make contact tracing faster and more effective by encouraging public acceptance and uptake of COVIDSafe"", COVIDSafe being the new mobile app created for the purpose. The function of the app was to record contact between any two people who both had the app on their phones when they come within 1.5 metres (4.9 ft) of each other. The encrypted data would remain on the phone for 21 days of not encountering a person logged with confirmed COVID-19.
On 3 September 2020, the human biosecurity emergency period under the Biosecurity Act 2015 was extended until 17 December."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"National COVID-19 Commission Advisory Board
On 25 March, the National COVID-19 Coordination Commission (NCCC) was established by the Prime Minister as a strategic advisory body for the national response to the pandemic. (On 27 July 2020, the Prime Minister renamed the organisation to the ""National COVID-19 Commission Advisory Board"" (NCC).) The NCC's role includes providing advice on public-private partnerships and coordination to mitigate the social and economic impacts of the pandemic.
On 29 March, Prime Minister Morrison announced in a press conference following a National Cabinet meeting that public gatherings would be limited to two people, while also urging Australians over the age of 70, Australians with chronic illness over the age of 60 and Indigenous Australians over the age of 50 to stay home and self-isolate. Morrison also clarified that there were only four acceptable reasons for Australians to leave their houses: shopping for essentials; for medical or compassionate needs; exercise in compliance with the public gathering restriction of two people; and for work or education purposes."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"National COVID-19 Clinical Evidence Taskforce
In March 2020 the National COVID-19 Clinical Evidence Taskforce was set up, which is an independent consortium of 34 national peak clinical groups. Hundreds of health professionals from around the country review the latest research on the disease, and maintain evidence-based data and recommendations for clinicians to enable them to provide the best care for people with COVID-19. Initial funding came from the Commonwealth Department of Health, Victorian Department of Health, the Ian Potter Foundation, the Walter Cottman Endowment Fund, and the Lord Mayors' Charitable Foundation. As of September 2022 it is funded by the Commonwealth Department of Health."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Vaccine supply
The Australian government entered into agreements with Pfizer/BioNTech, University of Oxford/AstraZeneca, Novavax, the University of Queensland and COVAX for the supply of vaccines. The University of Queensland vaccine was abandoned in December 2020 after trials revealed that, while it was safe, it triggered false positives on HIV tests. The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) provisionally approved the Pfizer vaccine in January 2021. The Australian government ordered 10 million doses, with the first 80,000 to be delivered in February 2021, but production problems and the imposition of export controls by the European Union (EU) onto deliveries to countries outside Europe made meeting the delivery schedule problematic.
Delivery issues also affected deliveries of the Oxford–AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, which was provisionally approved by the TGA in February, and received final approval in March. Orders were reduced from 3.8 million to 1.2 million doses of this vaccine, which was manufactured in Belgium, and arrival was pushed back to March 2021. CSL Limited began manufacturing 50 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine in Melbourne in November 2020. Deliveries were expected to commence in March. The AstraZeneca vaccine could be stored at normal refrigeration temperatures of 2 to 8 °C (36 to 46 °F), whereas the Pfizer vaccine required storage at −70 °C (−94 °F). However, concerns were raised about the efficacy of the AstraZeneca vaccine. The Immunology & Cell Biology called for a pause in its rollout, as the efficacy of the vaccine reported by trials was insufficient to achieve the desired herd immunity effect. CSL management declined an invitation to appear before an Australian Senate inquiry.
Although the Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison, said that Australia would be ""at the front of the queue"", and the Minister for Health and Aged Care, Greg Hunt, claimed that Australia would be among the first countries to receive COVID-19 vaccines, 61 other countries had already commenced vaccinating their citizens by the end of January 2021, while the Australian vaccination rollout was not scheduled to commence for another month.
On 15 February 2021, 142,000 doses of the Pfizer–BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine arrived in Australia. The first doses were due to be administered on 22 February. The world-wide distribution of the vaccine has been described as ""the largest logistics effort in the world since World War"" by Dr Roberto Perez-Franco of the Deakin University's Centre for Supply Chain and Logistics. This was followed, on 28 February, by 300,000 doses of the Oxford–AstraZeneca vaccine, which arrived at Sydney airport. It was planned that most Australians would be vaccinated with this vaccine, the majority manufactured in Australia by CSL Limited. On 5 March, Italy and the European Union blocked a shipment of 250,000 doses of the Oxford−AstraZeneca vaccine from Italy to Australia, citing low COVID-19 case numbers in Australia and the limited availability of vaccines in the EU.
Local manufacturing began in November 2020. On 16 February, the first vials of COVID-19 vaccine produced in Australia came off the production line at the CSL Behring plant in Broadmeadows, Melbourne. This is the active raw vaccine material. The vaccine vials are filled and packaged into doses by Seqirus, a CSL subsidiary in Parkville, Melbourne. Production of the AstraZeneca vaccine in Australia received its final approval from the TGA on 21 March. Some front line health care workers were reported to have preferred the Pfizer vaccine over the AstraZeneca one.
The Australian government had also signed a deal with Novavax for 51 million doses of its vaccine, with supply originally slated for ""mid-2021"". As of April 2021, it had yet to be approved by the TGA. It is not manufactured in Australia, so like the other imported vaccines, its availability was uncertain. In trials it was reported to be 95.6 per cent effective against COVID-19, and an 86.3 per cent effective against the variant identified in the UK. Australia's first human trials of a candidate COVID-19 vaccine was Novavax's NVX-CoV2373 which began in Melbourne by 26 May 2020.
In a February 2021 pre-budget submission, the Australian Academy of Science renewed its call for the government to develop the capability to produce mRNA vaccine technology in Australia. The ability to mass-produce such vaccines onshore would insulate Australia against supply shocks, and cater for future pandemics and potential biosecurity situations. The mRNA coronavirus vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer showed strong results in clinical trials and are expected to be easier to reconfigure to cater for new virus variants than more conventional vaccines.
The US Moderna company entered an agreement with the Australian Federal government, announced on 13 May 2021, to provide 25 million doses of its COVID-19 vaccine 'mRNA-1273', subject to TGA approval."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Vaccinations
The first public COVID-19 vaccination in Australia, with the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine, took place on 21 February 2021 in Sydney. An 84-year-old aged care resident was the first Australian to receive the vaccine following TGA approval. Prime Minister Morrison and Chief Medical Officer Professor Paul Kelly also received vaccinations.
The first Australian to receive the Oxford–AstraZeneca vaccine was a doctor in regional South Australia on 5 March 2021 at Murray Bridge Hospital.
More than 2 million COVID-19 vaccinations had been administered in Australia by 28 April 2021, but this was 3 million short of original plans. By 6 June, over 5 million vaccinations had been administered. Approximately 4.45 million were first doses, nearly 570,000 were second doses.
On 5 October 2021, Australia reached 80% of the eligible population (aged 16 and older) having had at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Adverse reactions
As of 18 July 2021, there have been a total of over 10.125 million vaccine doses administered of which 41,406 adverse events following vaccination have been reported. However, not all reported adverse events were attributable to and associated with vaccination. The most common adverse effects following immunisation as reported to the TGA are predictable and have been observed with many other vaccines. They include headache, muscle pain, fever, chills and injection site reactions. The TGA reviews reports of deaths in people who have recently been vaccinated and as of 22 July 2021 found six that were linked to immunisation. These deaths were all related to a first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine – five had thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS) and one had immune thrombocytopenia (ITP) out of 6.1 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Vaccine hesitancy and messaging
There were calls for a more effective advertising campaign that would go beyond presenting facts that inform, to use of emotion to change people's behaviour to overcome apparent lack of ""trust in the government"". On 23 May 2021 Health Minister Greg Hunt reiterated that a sufficient supply of Pfizer is expected to begin arriving in October, with AMA president Omar Khorshid adding this promised supply means ""everyone who wanted it could have both doses by Christmas"" of 2021. Nevertheless, government, AMA and ATAGI advice remains for everyone to vaccinate as soon as possible and not to wait, because the (potentially future) risk of community transmission in Australia remains a possibility, and which until 17 June 2021 over 9 million Australian residents over 50 had to weigh against the 'tiny' risk of death associated with the AstraZeneca vaccine that (according to best data available at the time) was probable to manifest for approximately 9–14 Australians, or approximately 19 Australians according to EMA data.
Health Minister Greg Hunt said on 17 June 2021 that the recommended advice from ATAGI was that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine should be administered only to people aged 60 years and over. The advice also stated that second doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca were still recommended for those under 60 years of age. Everyone under 60 would be offered the Pfizer vaccine. Hunt stated that about 815,000 Australians between ages 50 and 59 had already received a first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine, with Pfizer now available to the approximately 2.1 million remaining Australians in that age group.
In a survey conducted in June 2021, about 15 percent of respondents not yet vaccinated identified wanting a different vaccine ""to what was available to them"" as a factor holding them back from getting vaccinated. Since only 18–39 and 60+ year-olds are eligible for one vaccine (i.e., AstraZeneca) but not the other (i.e., Pfizer-BioNTech), making Pfizer-BioNTech available to everyone would obviate one factor holding back vaccination uptake."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"National Plan to transition Australia's National COVID-19 Response
Transition to endemic stage
On 11 October 2021, New South Wales ended the lockdown and became the first jurisdiction in Australia to begin Phase B of the national plan and endemic management of COVID-19. A week later on 18 October restrictions were again relaxed. Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory began a similar staggered easing of restrictions from mid-October ultimately culminating with all three jurisdictions ending international travel quarantine, density restrictions along with COVID-19 close contact and isolation rules being reduced throughout November.
South Australia, Tasmania, Queensland and the Northern Territory managed to remain in a state of COVID-19 elimination (albeit the later two suffering minor controlled outbreaks in the week before opening) prior to their transition to 'living with COVID' and thus voluntarily introduced COVID-19 into the community to allow for resumption of domestic and international travel.
In December the arrival of the Omicron variant prompted states to return to low-level restrictions such as mask wearing and hospitality density limits with even COVID-free Western Australia introducing restrictions to fight small scale outbreaks. However, due to the shear number of people being infected with COVID-19, the rules for people exposed to COVID-19 was significantly reduced to alleviate worker shortages. Queensland's Chief Health Officer John Gerrard stated that spreading COVID-19 was ""necessary"" in order to transition from the ""pandemic stage to an endemic stage"", noting that measures in place were intended to reduce strain on hospitals and buy time for booster shots.
Western Australia delayed its transition from COVID-zero on 20 January 2022 citing the risk from the Omicron variant. However a significant COVID outbreak in February made the government re-open the border after modelling showed that it would have little impact on the cases of COVID-19 due to the outbreak being uncontrolled."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Lifting measures
On 1 January, former Australian Deputy Chief Medical Officer Nick Coatsworth who served in the first year of the pandemic, declared that 2022 would be the year the pandemic ended in Australia as restrictions eased and immunity built up throughout the year.
Restrictions began slowly easing all across Australia throughout 2022 with Victoria and New South Wales returning to pre-omicron restrictions from February 2022. Other jurisdictions followed suit shortly after in easing rules such as mask mandates. South Australia dropped its overtly harsh close contact 14 day isolation requirement in March following the election of Peter Malinauskas. The definition of close contact was changed from 15 minutes with a COVID-19 case to the nationally defined 4 hours On 25 March 2022, the Minister for Health Greg Hunt announced that the Biosecurity Emergency Determination, as well as pre-flight COVID-19 tests for international arrivals would end on 17 April. Close contact 7-day isolation was dropped in most states from mid April with the rule replaced with 7 days of mask wearing and testing throughout the week. In late April Western Australia brought COVID-19 restrictions in line with the rest of the country with close contacts only required to wear a mask for 7 days, while mask mandates were dropped in all settings except public/private transport and healthcare settings. In June Australian health officials agreed to end the mask mandate in airport terminals but not on aircraft.
On 2 July, as COVID-19 cases began increasing due to the colder months, it was revealed that Australian health officials were discussing the return of the indoor mask mandate. This ultimately never came to fruition. In mid-July, New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet pushed for COVID-19 isolation requirements to be dropped all together or at least reduced to 5 days. This was rejected due to the ongoing winter wave. On 9 September restrictions again began relaxing. The mask mandate on aircraft was scrapped nationwide and Western Australia ended the mask mandate on passenger transport. At the same time the isolation time for COVID-19 cases was reduced to 5 days. 9 September was also the last day cases were reported daily in Australia as the country transitioned to weekly reporting instead. On 14 September, COVID-19 disaster payment for people who had to isolate due to COVID-19 was extended so long as isolating was mandated by the government. South Australia, New South Wales, Queensland all ended the mask mandate on passenger transport on 21 September. Victoria ended the mandate on 22 September after it had been in place since June 2020.
On 30 September, all Australian leaders declared the emergency response finished and announced the end of the requirement for people to isolate from 14 October if they had COVID-19. This was due in part due to high levels of 'hybrid immunity' and very low case numbers. For all legal intents and purposes, the pandemic was declared over. Victoria ended its pandemic declaration on 13 October and testing was as a result also scaled back, as Rapid Antigen Tests would no longer need to be reported in Victoria, and also New South Wales.
On 1 November Queensland's state of emergency was left to expire and the last restrictions were removed, however a recommendation 'traffic light' system was introduced to advise Queenslanders on when it was recommended to isolate for COVID-19 or when they were advised to wear a mask. Western Australia let its state of emergency expire on 4 November and also ended the last restrictions. The Northern Territory ended the last post-emergency directions on 11 November. South Australia allowed the remaining public health directions to expire on 23 November. New South Wales ended its state public health emergency on 30 November. The last COVID-19 restriction in Australia was ended on 28 December with the Australian Capital Territory repealing its COVID-19 management direction, used just for enforcing test reporting."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Post pandemic
In the winter of 2023, for the first time since before the pandemic, other viral diseases such as influenza and respiratory syncytial virus were more prevalent in the community and hospitals. Queensland as a result, dropped its traffic light system which had been on green and not recommending mask wearing anywhere for several months. Cost of living pressures and the fatigue caused by the pandemic were blamed on low influenza vaccination uptake in 2023."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Impacts
Arts
Before the crisis, 600,000 Australians were employed in the arts, an industry which added around A$3.2 billion to export revenues. The rate of employment in the sector grew at a faster rate than the rest of the economy. According to government figures, ""cultural and creative activity contributed to A$112 billion (6.4% of GDP) to Australia's economy in 2016–17"".
Beginning in the second week of March 2020, Australian institutions began announcing reduced services, and then complete closures. One of the first casualties was the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, with organisers announcing on 13 March 2020 that the 2020 festival had been cancelled entirely. Opera Australia announced it would close on 15 March. The national closure of all cultural institutions was mandated on 24 March, with subsequent restrictions on public gatherings. Consequently, many cultural events were also cancelled, including the Sydney Writers' Festival. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, by the beginning of April, ""Arts and Recreation services"" was the sector of the national economy with the smallest proportion of its business still in operation—at 47%. A graph in Guardian Australia showing businesses by sector that had ceased trading between June 2019 and 30 March 2020 shows over 50% of arts and recreation services, the hardest hit of any sector (information media and telecommunications is next, at about 34%). Adrian Collette, CEO of the Australia Council for the Arts, the government's arts funding and advisory body, described the impact on the cultural and creative sectors as ""catastrophic"".
The Australian film industry has been severely impacted, with at least 60 shoots being halted and about 20,000 people out of work. On Monday 23 March, all productions funded by Screen Australia were postponed. As of 15 April 2020, after some improvement in COVID-19 statistics in Australia, Screen Australia continues to fund work and process applications, intending to use all of its 2019–20 budget. Film industry organisations such as Screen Producers Australia (SPA) and the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) have been lobbying the government for a support package specific to the screen industry, and to expand the JobKeeper requirements so that those in the screen industry are better covered. Many in the film industry are employed by Special-purpose entities—temporary companies that cease trading once production has finished—which cannot easily prove that their turnover has fallen by 30% or more. SPA said that the industry shutdown had cost more than A$500 million, with about A$20 million of lost export revenue.
One hundred and nineteen films and TV shows have been halted, with only a few shows (such as MasterChef Australia and Shaun Micallef's Mad as Hell) continuing production through the pandemic. The TV soap Neighbours was the first English-language TV drama series in the world to announce that resumption of production would begin soon after 20 April 2020.
Like other governments around the world, the Australian government has acknowledged the economic, cultural and social value of the arts industry. The Australia Council has redirected about A$5 million to ""new programs designed to provide immediate relief to Australian artists, arts workers and arts organisations to support their livelihoods, practice and operations during the COVID-19 pandemic"" (the ""Resilience Fund""), and is also hosting weekly meetings to address the concerns of specific sections of the industry, such as Indigenous creatives and organisations, live performance and public gatherings, and various peak bodies. Several state governments have also provided relief packages.
In early April, the federal government announced a package of A$27 million in specific arts funding: A$7 million for the Indigenous Visual Arts Industry Support program, A$10 million for Regional Arts Australia's regional arts fund, and A$10 million for Support Act, a charity founded in 1997 that provides financial support and counselling to people in the music industry in Australia. However, the ""JobKeeper"" scheme specifically excluded ""freelancers and casuals on short-term contracts, or who have worked for a series of employers in the last year"", thus excluding a large proportion of arts and cultural sector professionals, who rely on short-term contracts.
However, most of the arts sector's more than 193,000 workers were still unable to access the JobKeeper payments, despite being defined as sole traders, and an estimated A$330 million worth of paid performances cancelled. The Australia Institute recommended a A$750 million rescue package for the industry, while Arts Minister Paul Fletcher said that arts workers should utilise existing support measures.
On 4 May 2020, the company operating the Carriageworks multi-arts venue in Sydney declared it would be entering voluntary administration and closing, citing an ""irreparable loss of income"" due to government bans on events during the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent negative impact on the arts sector. Carriageworks was the first major arts venue in the country to collapse suddenly after the hit to income caused by the strict social distancing rules enforced by state and federal governments, but others feared the same fate, after being forced to shut their doors in late March.
On 13 May 2020, the Art Gallery of South Australia announced that it would reopen on 8 June.
On 24 June 2020, the federal government announced a $250 million rescue package for the arts, comprising grants and loans. The package includes $75m for a grants program for new festivals, concerts, tours and events; $90m in loans to help fund new productions; $50m to help film and television producers unable to access insurance due to the pandemic, to enable them to restart production; and $35 million in direct financial assistance for struggling Commonwealth-funded organisations, including theatre, dance, music and circus. The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) welcomed the boost, but critics said that it was not nearly enough, especially with so many workers in the industry still ineligible for JobKeeper payments."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Economic
On 3 March 2020, the Reserve Bank of Australia became the first central bank to cut interest rates in response to the outbreak. Official interest rates were cut by 0.25% to a record low of 0.5%.
On 12 March, the federal government announced a planned A$17.6 billion stimulus package. The package consists of multiple parts: a one-off payment to pensioners, social security recipients, veteran and other income support recipients and eligible concession card holders, payments of A$2,000–A$25,000 to affected small businesses, an increase to the threshold for the Instant Asset Write-off Program, tax concessions for investments, a small business 50% wage subsidy for 120,000 trainees and apprentices, and A$1 billion in subsidies for heavily affected industries.
On 17 March, the New South Wales government announced a A$2.3 billion stimulus package, including A$700 million for health services. A$450 million was allocated to waive payroll tax for 3 months, and $250 million was allocated so state-owned buildings and public schools could employ more cleaners. Seven hundred and fifty million dollars was allocated for capital works and public asset maintenance.
On 18 March, the Northern Territory government announced an economic stimulus package of A$60 million.
On 19 March, the Reserve Bank again cut interest rates by a further 0.25%, from 0.5% to 0.25%, the lowest in Australian history.
In March 2020, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) began releasing a number of additional statistical products to assess the economic impacts on the outbreak on the Australian economy. Data on retail trade turnover indicated a 0.4% rise in turnover in February 2020. Negative effects on some areas of the retail sector (particularly tourism-dependent businesses) were offset by a rise in food retail turnover, with supermarkets showing a large rise in sales, mainly arising from panic buying.
On 22 March, the Federal government announced a second stimulus package of A$66 billion, increasing the amount of total financial package offered to A$89 billion. This included several new measures like an extra A$550 'Coronavirus Supplement' payment to those on income support, paid from 27 April to 24 September 2020, and relaxed eligibility criteria for individuals on JobSeeker Payment, granting A$100,000 to small and medium-sized businesses and A$715 million to Australian airports and airlines. It also allowed individuals affected by the outbreak to access up to A$10,000 of their superannuation during 2019–2020 and also being able to take an additional same amount for the next year.
On 30 March, the Australian Government announced a six-month, A$130 billion JobKeeper payment. The JobKeeper payment provides businesses with up to A$1,500 a fortnight per full-time or part-time employee, or casual employee that has worked for that business for over a year. To be eligible, a business with an annual revenue of under A$1 billion must have lost 30% turnover since 1 March, or 50% for businesses over A$1 billion. The entire payment made to businesses for an employee must then, by law, be paid to that employee in lieu of normal pay. This response came after the enormous job losses seen just a week prior when an estimated 1 million Australians lost their jobs. The program was backdated to 1 March with the aim of re-employing many people who had lost their jobs in the weeks before. In the first hour of the scheme, over 8,000 businesses registered to receive the payments. The program is one of the largest economic packages ever implemented in modern Australian history. JobKeeper ended on 28 March 2021.
On 11 April, the South Australian state government announced its own A$350 million economic stimulus measures.
In late April, the Federal government announced A$94.6 million of support was available for zoos, wildlife parks and aquariums forced to close by coronavirus restrictions. This was part of previously announced economic stimulus measures.
The 2020 Federal Budget, normally delivered in May, was delayed until 6 October because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
On 22 May 2020, the Treasury and Australian Taxation Office announced there had been a miscalculation of A$60 billion in the planned cost of the JobKeeper program. Blaming 1,000 businesses for making ""significant errors"" on the application form, the Australian Government revealed it had overbudgeted the program, and that it was forecast to cost A$70 billion, not A$130 billion. The Treasury also announced that its original forecast of 6.5 million recipients was inaccurate, and closer to 3.5 million. Prime Minister Scott Morrison celebrated the saving, while the Opposition announced a parliamentary inquiry in an attempt to compel Treasurer Josh Frydenberg to explain the overestimation.
In July 2020, Australian Finance Minister Mathias Cormann, in an interview with the US CNBC news channel, vowed that the government's budget deficit was expected to increase to A$85.8 billion Australian dollars in the financial year ended on 30 June and further widen to A$184.5 billion in the new fiscal year.
On 2 September, the Australian economy went into recession for the first time in nearly thirty years. The country's gross domestic product (GDP) fell 7 per cent in the June quarter. In December, it was announced Australia had pulled out of recession after experiencing a 3.3% growth in GDP in the September quarter. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg stated the effects of the recession had lasting impacts and the recovery was far from over. Australia is set to avoid an economic depression as forecast earlier in 2020, though GDP is likely to have experienced a contraction from 2019 figures.
The 2020 Australian federal budget, delayed from May, is finally delivered on 6 October."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"""Dine and Discover NSW""
On 17 November 2020, the NSW Government announced in the state budget that all NSW residents over 18 years of age would be eligible to receive four A$25 vouchers through Service NSW to help stimulate the economy. Two vouchers are for dining, Monday to Thursday only, excluding public holidays. The other two are to be spent on entertainment, excluding on public holidays. Businesses need to be COVID-safe registered, and sign-up for the scheme. The vouchers cannot be used for gambling, alcohol, cigarettes, retail purchases or accommodation. The program was originally called ""Out and About"".
Residents will need to have a Service NSW account to receive their vouchers. After trials in Sydney and regional areas, full rollout was scheduled for March. The trials began in Broken Hill, and the Rocks in Sydney on 11 February 2021.
As early as mid-April 2021, the scheme was said by some regional NSW residents to be ""city centric'. At this time, the vouchers had been used by less than 10% of the 5 million who can use it. There were calls by NSW opposition political parties for the scheme to be extended beyond its initial 30 June 2021 deadline to use the vouchers. On 9 June 2021, the Dine & Discover scheme was extended by a month to 31 July. The scheme was then extended again to 31 August due to the lockdown in NSW, and then eventually to 30 June 2022. In November 2021, two extra vouchers were granted, one for dining and one for entertainment."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"2021
On 22 February 2021, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced that the JobSeeker Payment base rate would be increased by A$50 a fortnight from April 2021. The payment will rise to A$614 a fortnight, with an estimated cost over forward estimates of A$9 billion. It is also intended to increase the threshold amount recipients can earn before their payment starts to be reduced.
On 26 February 2021, the chief executive of the Australian Airports Association, James Goodwin, said that Australian airports had been losing A$320 million every month during the COVID-19 pandemic. He also said over the past 12 months, job losses amounted to 25 per cent of the airports' workforce.
On 10 March 2021, the Federal Government announced steps worth A$1.2 billion to encourage Australians to holiday within Australia to assist ailing tourist destinations. Between April and July, up to 800,000 airfares to 13 regions normally favoured by international tourists will be halved for domestic travellers.
On 3 June 2021, the Federal Government announced that people who lose work as a result of lockdowns, of at least 7 days' length, may be eligible for a A$325 or A$500 per week Temporary COVID Disaster Payment. To be eligible:"
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Person must be older than 17
Live/ work in a Commonwealth defined hot-spot
Have less than A$10,000 liquid assets
Would have worked except for lockdown, and,
Will lose income due to lockdown
Can't access special pandemic or sick leave, or,
Have used it up
Those on other types of income support from the Commonwealth, like JobSeeker, are ineligible.
To get the full A$500 payment, the lost work must be at least 20 hours. If the lost work is under 20 hours, the payment is $325.
Victoria announced A$30 million of financial support on 7 June 2021 for residents ""locked out of work"" by COVID lockdowns. The Victorian government also extended it emergency ""hardship support payment"" to October. This helps those on temporary or provisional visas who are not able get income from the Commonwealth."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Employment
The pandemic had significant negative effect on the Australian labour market. In July 2019, unemployment was 5.1%, by July 2020 it peaked at 7.5%, during the pandemic, by the end of 2020 it had fallen to 6.6%. Figures for February to March 2021, released in April, showed unemployment had reduced to 5.8%, 0.4 points higher than at the start to the pandemic."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Agricultural worker shortage
In September 2020, a report from Ernst & Young stated that pandemic related border restrictions could result in a shortfall of 26,000 pickers over Australia's summer harvest season. Such work is typically reliant on seasonal staff from overseas. As a trial in early September 2020, 160 workers from Vanuatu were allowed into the Northern Territory (NT) to pick mangoes. They arrived on a specially chartered aircraft, and had to undergo the usual 14-day quarantine. It was estimated that the Vanuatuan workers saved A$100 million of fruit from the NT mango harvest being left to rot. The mango industry in the NT was valued at more than A$128 million in 2019, and produces more than half of Australia's mangoes.
On 30 September 2020, PM Scott Morrison announced that: ""backpackers, Pacific Islanders and seasonal workers will be able to extend their visas to stay in Australia"" and ""welfare recipients will be offered incentives to pick fruit.""
In late October 2020, some farmers found that they had to plough their produce back into the ground because it could not be harvested, at a loss of A$150,000.
The ""Relocation Assistance to Take Up a Job"" (RATTUAJ) program, scheduled to run from 1 November 2020 to 31 December 2021, offered A$6,000 for transport, moving expenses, accommodation and work clothing for welfare recipients willing to relocate to a regional area for a minimum of 6 weeks for short term agricultural jobs. Up to early December 2020, the relocation incentives for unemployed Australians appeared to be failing. After operating for a month, Federal Department of Employment figures showed only 148 people had taken up the offer.
Shortage of workers for harvesting can not only mean unpicked produce being left to rot or be ploughed back into fields, and farmers possibly not planting the next year, it creates an economic loss to those farmers, and can also noticeably increase prices for consumers.
To encourage potential workers to return to Australia, on 19 January 2022, the Australian Government offered to repay visa fees, about A$600, to backpackers on working holiday-maker visas, who come to Australia in the following 12 weeks, and to international students who arrive within the following 8 weeks. There are about 23,000 backpackers and 150,000 students who have a visa but are not in Australia."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Health
Influenza
In 2020, due to international travel restrictions, social distancing and lockdowns because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the rate of influenza in Australia, and deaths from it, were at ""record lows"". In mid-June 2021 the flu was said to be almost non-existent. In May 2019 there were over 30,000 cases, in May 2021, only 71. Professor Ian Barr of the Peter Doherty Institute remarked that influenza was ""either eradicated, or it's at such low levels we're having trouble detecting it."" 2019 in Australia was particularly bad with 800 flu deaths, below 40 in 2020, and no reported deaths as of June 2021.
In a March 2022 statement, the ATAGI noted that they expect a resurgence in influenza for the 2022 flu season due to the opening of borders."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Health checks
On 4 February 2021, World Cancer Day, the government organisation Cancer Australia said that in 2020 between January and September, there were nearly 150,000 less diagnostic tests for cancer performed, compared to the same period in 2019.
In August 2021, breast cancer screening appointments were being cancelled by BreastScreen NSW due to the lockdown in Sydney that began in late June.
Some nurses were retasked to pandemic response, leading to some screening clinics and mobile clinics being closed."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Indigenous Australians
Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders have poorer health outcomes and a lower life expectancy than the non-Indigenous Australian population, particularly those living in remote areas, which, along with overcrowded housing, makes them one of the communities most vulnerable to the virus. The remote Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY lands) in South Australia, whose population has many comorbidities, high rates of tobacco use, overcrowded housing and overall poor hygiene, introduced restricted access to the lands in early March to protect their people, especially elders, from the virus. The Minister for Indigenous Australians, Ken Wyatt, said it was a sensible move, and that the federal government would work with them. (A later call to evacuate elders to Adelaide by the APY Art Centre Collective was not put into operation.)
The federal government set up a national Indigenous advisory group in early March 2020, to create an emergency response plan for Aboriginal communities. The 43-page plan was published in March, and in late March, the Prime Minister that advised that Indigenous Australians over the age of 50 (along with everyone over 70 and those with a chronic illness over 60), should stay at home as much as possible. The Department of Health created a web page dedicated to advice for Indigenous people and remote communities, and the National Indigenous Australians Agency has one dedicated to the government's response to COVID-19. On 18 April the NIAA announced a government package of A$123 million of ""targeted measures to support Indigenous businesses and communities to increase their responses to COVID-19"", for the coming two financial years.
The Northern Territory developed a remote health pandemic plan, with NT Health setting up a number of remote clinics across the Territory. All non-essential travel to 76 remote communities was banned, and a 14-day isolation period imposed for those residents wanting to return home from regional centres, and in May 2020, health officials suggested that these controls should stay in place for the foreseeable future. In mid-March 2020 a group of senior NT clinicians called for 16 measures to be implemented as soon as possible to help protect vulnerable communities. Other states and territories have provided advice on their health agency websites.
In May 2020 a group of Paakantyi families set up a tent town on the banks of the Darling River near Wilcannia in New South Wales, to escape the threat of the disease from overcrowded accommodation in the town.
In late August 2021 a man in his 50s who died at Dubbo Hospital, is believed to be the first Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander COVID-19 related death. He was not vaccinated. By 7 September 2021, there had been 2 more deaths of indigenous Australians, who were also not vaccinated."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Medication supply
The pandemic created shortages of some medications since it began, initially related to panic buying. The most commonly used antidepressant in Australia, sertraline, is one of many such as the brand Zoloft, that have been affected by a global shortage. Olmesartan and irbesartan, both blood pressure medications were short in Australia as were hormone replacement therapy (HRT) patches and carbimazole, a thyroid medication. As of February 2021 the contraceptive pill ""Norimin"" (norethisterone) was hard for pharmacists to acquire, supply had been intermittent for 6–12 months. Shortages of Norimin and Ethinylestradiol/norethisterone, both Pfizer products, were reported in August 2020 and first predicted to last until December 2020, the shortage was then expected by the TGA ""to be resolved in March or April 2021"". In the case of sertraline a Serious Shortage Substitution Notice (SSSN) was issued by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA). SSSNs were also issued in Australia for Prazosin (blood pressure), Metformin (diabetes), and Estrogen path (HRT), which in theory allows substitutions like issuing twice the number of 25-milligram (0.39 gr) tablets in place of the prescribed 50-milligram (0.77 gr) tablets, without a new prescription, but with the patients' consent. Chris Moy, Vice President of the Australian Medical Association (AMA) said medicine shortages in Australia were a ""pre-existing problem"" before COVID-19."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"I think somewhere in the order of 89 percent of all day-to-day prescription medications are supplied from overseas; they often say 'patented in Australia' but they are actually made overseas.
Moy also said ""A lot of our medications are made in China and India. Sovereign capability and protecting supply of our medications is something that should be seriously considered.""
The TGA gave short-term approval for the import of some medicines that are ""not on the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods (ARTG) that are approved for import and supply in Australia because: there is a shortage of a medicine registered in Australia; and the medicine is needed in the interest of public health."""
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Politics
In 2020, local council elections were  impacted by the pandemic. In Victoria candidates could only campaign online. NSW elections due in September were postponed a year.
In 2021, NSW local council elections due on 4 September, already postponed from 2020, were postponed again to 4 December due to a wave of Delta variant infections that caused numerous lockdowns in the state.
On 31 January 2021, Federal politicians flying into Canberra from Western Australia had to quarantine for five days when a sudden lockdown was declared in Perth and two adjoining regions. Federal Parliament was scheduled to resume on 2 February.
On 26 July 2021 it was announced that, from 2 August, Parliament House in Canberra would come under COVID-19 restrictions to ""minimise non-essential activity"" for the next legislative sitting that day. All public galleries were closed and the general public was unable to enter the building. The number of politicians attending, and their staff, was ""substantially reduced"" and remote participation technology was used. Physical distancing returned. Use of the Check-in CBR app was extended to all food and beverage venues open under takeaway only restrictions. The restrictions lasted until 3 September."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Protests
Throughout 2020 and 2021, several protests against COVID-19 lockdown restrictions were held in several state capitals including Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney. In addition, protests were held in February 2021 against the Federal Government's national vaccine programme. Police responded to these protests by arresting demonstrators and issuing fines."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Sport
The major sporting leagues (A-League Men, AFL, AFL Women's, and the National Rugby League) initially stated that their 2020 seasons would not be suspended but would continue behind closed doors, with some games being played under those conditions. However, all the leagues were later suspended."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Athletics
Initially the 2020 Stawell Gift was postponed until later in the year; however, in May it was cancelled entirely for 2020."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Australian rules football
The 2020 AFL season was initially curtailed to a maximum of 17 games, with clubs expected to take at least a 10% revenue hit from coronavirus related issues. However, on 22 March, just before the end of round 1 of the 2020 season, AFL CEO Gillon McLachlan announced that the AFL season would be suspended until at least 31 May, citing the shutting of state borders as the primary cause for this decision. The AFL season restarted on 11 June, with the Grand Final being played on 24 October at the Gabba in Brisbane, Queensland, the first Grand Final to be held outside Victoria. The 2020 AFL Women's season was cancelled midway through the finals series, with no premiership awarded to any team."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Baseball
The 2020–2021 playoffs were shortened and the 2021–2022 season of the Australian Baseball League was cancelled due to travel restrictions and Victoria being in lockdown, respectively."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Basketball
The 2020 NBL Finals began with game two, although it was stated that the competition would be immediately suspended if any participants were to be diagnosed. The best of five series was subsequently cancelled after the third game was played with the title awarded to Perth Wildcats.
All second-tier state basketball leagues were either postponed or cancelled."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Cricket
The remaining two One Day Internationals between Australia and New Zealand in March 2020 were cancelled, and the first match was played without spectators. Cricket Australia also cancelled the Australian women's cricket team's tour of South Africa due to the virus."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Motorsports
The first major sporting event in Australia to be affected was the 2020 Australian Grand Prix, which was cancelled on 13 March 2020 after McLaren withdrew when a team member tested positive for COVID-19. This was also enforced on the support races which included the 2020 Melbourne 400, which was the second round of the 2020 Supercars Championship to be cancelled. The 2021 Australian Grand Prix was postponed from its original March date to November to allow for the easing of travel restrictions. On 6 July 2021, it was cancelled for the second consecutive year due to ""restrictions and logistical challenges"" related to the pandemic."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Rugby league
Following the implementation of travel restrictions by New Zealand, the Australian Rugby League Commission (ARLC) announced that the New Zealand Warriors would be based in Australia for the foreseeable future. The 2020 season was suspended indefinitely on 23 March. Chairman of the ARLC Peter V'landys requested a government bailout for the National Rugby League, a request that was struck down, and caused a considerable negative reaction.
On 22 April 2020, the NRL announced that they planned for the season to restart on 28 May, with training beginning on 4 May, and has planned for 18 rounds (giving a 20-round season) and a State of Origin series, with the Grand Final rescheduled for 25 October.
The NRL season recommenced on 28 May 2020 with a round 3 game played in Brisbane between the Brisbane Broncos and Parramatta Eels. The match was played behind closed doors without any crowd, although the broadcasters (Channel 9 and Fox Sports) used fake crowd noise during the broadcast. The return match rated highly on TV as it was the first TV match of a team sport in Australia for 8 weeks. The Grand Final was played in front of a limited crowd on 25 October at ANZ Stadium.
The 2020 State of Origin series took place after the NRL season, with Game 3 holding a capacity crowd at Brisbane's Suncorp Stadium."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Rugby union
The 2020 Super Rugby season was suspended following the conclusion of play on 15 March 2020, due to the outbreak and the imposition of mandatory quarantine for international travellers to New Zealand."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Soccer
In 2020, the A-League initially announced a continuation of the league with the Wellington Phoenix FC being based in Australia; however, on 24 March 2020, suspended the remaining matches indefinitely. On 17 July, the season resumed in a NSW-based hub, where the season finished with the Grand Final occurring at Bankwest Stadium on 30 August in front of a limited crowd."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Yacht racing
The 2020 Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race was cancelled on 19 December due to an outbreak in the Greater Sydney region."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Tourism
Economic modelling in May 2020 by Tourism Research Australia predicted that the domestic tourism industry would drop in value from A$138 billion to $83 billion."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Travel restrictions
On 2 October 2020, Prime Minister Morrison announced that the Australian Government had formalised a deal allowing New Zealanders ""one-way quarantine-free travel"" into New South Wales and the Northern Territory from 16 October as part of initial steps to establish a ""travel bubble"" between the two countries. However, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has ruled out extending reciprocal ""quarantine-free travel"" for Australians in order to contain the spread of COVID-19 into New Zealand.
On 17 October 2020, Stuff reported that 17 New Zealanders who had entered New South Wales traveled to Melbourne despite Victoria not being a party to the travel bubble arrangement with New Zealand. The Victorian Department of Health and Human Services confirmed the arrival of the group but stated that it did not have the authority to detain them. In response, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews threatened to close his state's borders unless the Australian Federal Government blocked travellers using the Trans-Tasman bubble from traveling to Victoria. The Federal Government has disagreed with the Victorian Government's stance. In addition, New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian announced that her government would not prevent New Zealand passengers from travelling to Victoria.
On 11 December 2020, the Premier of Queensland Annastacia Palaszczuk announced that her state would open its borders to travelers from New Zealand from 1:00 am the following day (12 December), exempting them from quarantine restrictions.
On 14 December 2020, the New Zealand Prime Minister Ardern announced that the New Zealand Government had approved plans to establish a quarantine free travel bubble with Australia in the first quarter of 2021. Australian Health Minister Greg Hunt welcomed the move, describing it as the ""first step"" in normalising international travel and reiterated the Australian Government's support for measures to establish the travel bubble.
On 25 January 2021, the Federal government immediately suspended the ability of New Zealanders to travel to Australia that they had since 16 October 2020, without quarantining, for at least 72 hours. This followed the discovery of a NZ resident with the SARS-CoV-2 Beta variant. The woman was not known to be infectious, having twice tested negative to COVID-19 before leaving quarantine, then visited many places in northern NZ, but she was then found to have the new strain.
On 19 April 2021, Australians were allowed quarantine-free travel to New Zealand for the first time in more than a year. To fly under the bubble's rules, passengers must have spent 14 days before departure in either Australia or New Zealand; however, they are not required to spend the full 14-day period or more in the other country, i.e. a person has spent at least 14 days in Australia, flies to New Zealand and returns to Australia after 7 days. They must not be awaiting the results of a COVID-19 test, nor have any COVID-19 symptoms, amongst other criteria."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Geo-tracking app
In late August 2021, the state of South Australia launched an app with facial recognition software that Australians subject to mandatory 14-day quarantines could opt to use in lieu of being quarantined at a hotel under police guard. The app randomly prompted users to take a picture of their face and submit geo-location data within 15 minutes of the prompt to prove to the South Australian government that the user was in an approved location. Users who refuse to comply or who fail to respond to a prompt within 15 minutes are checked on by local police and may be subject to fines."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Demand for investigation
On 19 April 2020, Australia questioned China's handling of the pandemic, questioned the transparency of its disclosures, and demanded an international investigation into the origins of the virus and its spread. The Chinese Ambassador Cheng Jingye, in a rare breach of diplomatic protocol, leaked details of his telephone conversation with Frances Adamson, Secretary of Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, on the embassy website. He warned that the demand for an inquiry could result in a consumer boycott of students and tourists visiting Australia, and could affect sales of major exports. A trade dispute involving improperly labelled beef and barley dumping ensued, which seriously affected Australian exports. On 26 August 2020, China's deputy ambassador to Australia, Wang Xining, expressed that Australia's co-proposal for an independent investigation into the causes of the pandemic ""hurts the feelings of the Chinese people"" during his address to the National Press Club of Australia."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Event cancellations
Numerous events in 2020 and 2021 were cancelled, rescheduled, postponed, reduced in size, or had their location changed. Some went to an online or streaming format. In 2021, events such as Skyfire, regional agricultural shows, and music festivals (Byron Bay Bluesfest and Groovin' the Moo) were cancelled for the second year. By 16 January 2021, twenty regional town shows scheduled for January or February 2021 had been postponed or cancelled in New South Wales alone. Many subsequent events were cancelled deep into 2021 and even into early 2022, especially as the new Omicron variant posed new risks."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"The World Surf League cancelled all events in March 2020.
All Anzac Day marches in 2020 were cancelled. In 2021, most major state marches went ahead, some states as per pre-pandemic, but most with ticketing and/or restrictions on numbers marching and watching. Overseas services were not held. On 24 April 2021, Perth city and the Peel region entered a sudden 3-day COVID-19 lockdown, and Anzac Day services in the affected areas were cancelled.
The 15 May 2020 School Strike for Climate rally and march was cancelled.
The Australian Border Force suspended all deportations to New Zealand between 16 and 30 March 2020.
National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) tests for 2020 were cancelled on 20 March.
The national regional touring music festival Groovin' the Moo announced on 17 March that the 2020 festival was cancelled whilst confirming dates for 2021. On 4 February 2021, that year's festival was also ""postponed"".
The 26th Australian Scout Jamboree, scheduled for January 2022 in Elmore, Victoria, was cancelled.
Many music events were cancelled, including tours by Jimmy Barnes, Harry Styles, and Rod Stewart. Other cancelled events include Full Tilt Adelaide, Grapevine Gathering, HomeBrewed Festival, and Rainbow Spirit Festival, with many more events postponed until further notice."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"See also
Timeline of the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia
COVID-19 vaccination in Australia
COVID-19 protests in Australia
COVID-19 clusters in Australia
Chart of COVID-19 cases in Australia (template)
COVID-19 pandemic by country and territory
COVID-19 pandemic in Oceania
COVID-19 pandemic in New Zealand
Biosecurity in Australia
National Cabinet (Australia)
National COVID-19 Commission Advisory Board
National Security Committee (Australia)
Coronavirus Australia
Xenophobia and racism related to the COVID-19 pandemic#Australia"
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"State and territory articles
COVID-19 pandemic in the Australian Capital Territory
COVID-19 pandemic in New South Wales
COVID-19 pandemic in the Northern Territory
COVID-19 pandemic in Queensland
COVID-19 pandemic in South Australia
COVID-19 pandemic in Tasmania
COVID-19 pandemic in Victoria
COVID-19 pandemic in Western Australia"
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Notes
References
Further reading
Press Conference by the Prime Minister of Australia on 27 February 2020 Archived 9 March 2020 at the Wayback Machine Transcript of the Press Conference held on 27 February 2020 by The Hon Scott Morrison MP, the Prime Minister of Australia, from Australian Parliament House alongside Dr Paul Kelly, Deputy Chief Medical Officer and The Hon. Greg Hunt MP, Minister For Health, announcing the activation of the Australian Health Sector Emergency Response Plan for Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19).
Australian Health Sector Emergency Response Plan for Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) The Australian Health Sector Emergency Response Plan for Novel Coronavirus (the COVID-19 Plan) guides the Australian health sector response."
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,External links
COVID-19 pandemic in Australia,"Coronavirus (COVID-19) health alert by the Australian Government Department of Health
Q&A on coronaviruses (COVID-19) by the World Health Organization
Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) situation reports by the World Health Organization (official numbers of confirmed cases by country)
Map of global confirmed coronavirus COVID-19 cases and historical data in near real-time by the Johns Hopkins University
COVID-19 Epidemiologic and genetic data from the Wolfram data repository.
2019-nCoV Data Portal by Virus Pathogen Resource
Coronavirus Australia updates and news Archived 8 April 2020 at the Wayback Machine. Australia at the Coronavirus Global international portal. Available in 11 languages.
Coronatracker – Coronavirus news aggregator and tracking portal
CoVid-19 Updates – AUS Archived 9 March 2020 at the Wayback Machine – Near real-time coronavirus tracker for different states and territories in Australia
Coronavirus pandemic – Near real-time coronavirus statistics for the world and Australia
COVID Live – Statistics tracking of the number of coronavirus cases, tests and deaths in Australia
Wikiversity:COVID-19/All-cause deaths/Australia"
Obesity in Australia,"According to 2007 statistics from the World Health Organization (WHO), Australia has the third-highest prevalence of overweight adults in the English-speaking world. Obesity in Australia is an ""epidemic"" with ""increasing frequency."" The Medical Journal of Australia found that obesity in Australia more than doubled in the two decades preceding 2003, and the unprecedented rise in obesity has been compared to the same health crisis in America. The rise in obesity has been attributed to poor eating habits in the country closely related to the availability of fast food since the 1970s, sedentary lifestyles and a decrease in the labour workforce."
Obesity in Australia,"Classification of obesity
Weight is measured by using the Body Mass Index scale (BMI). This is determined by dividing weight in kilograms by height in metres, squared. If someone is overweight their BMI will be at 25 or more. If someone is obese their BMI will be at 30 or more."
Obesity in Australia,"Prevalence of obesity in the Australian population
As of 2017, 8% of children and 28% of adults in Australia are obese."
Obesity in Australia,"Demographic summary
Queensland
Australian adults
In a study published in 2015 by the US Journal of Economics and Human Biology, obesity is found to have the largest impact on men aged over 75, and women aged between 60 and 74.
In 2005, a study was conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics that compared the results of a 2004-05 survey with those conducted in the preceding 15 years. The results showed an increase in the number and proportion of adults who are overweight or obese. Over the four surveys, the number of overweight or obese adults increased from 4.6 million in 1989–90 to 5.4 million in 1995, 6.6 million in 2001 and 7.4 million in 2004–05.
In 2007, the World Health Organization (WHO) found that 67.4% of Australian adults are overweight, ranking 21st in the world, and third out of the major countries in the English-speaking world, behind the United States (ranked 9th) and New Zealand (ranked 17th). A 2005 WHO study found that just over 20% of Australian adults are obese, that number increased to about 29 to 30% being obese in 2017.
In the 2005 National Health Survey, 53.6% of Australians reported being overweight with 18% falling into the ""obese"" category. Those numbers rose to 65% overweight and 29% obese in 2016. This is nearly double the reported number from 1995, when 30% of adults were overweight and 11% were obese. Such representations would be skewed downward as people tend to overestimate their height and under-report their weight, the two key criteria to determine a BMI reading. In the National Health Survey, obesity reports were fairly common across the board, with no major outliers. Victoria had the lowest incidence of obesity, at 17.0% of the population, with South Australia reporting the highest numbers at 19.6%. By 2014, Canberra recorded an obesity rate of 25% which was placing significant strain on ageing health care infrastructure.
In a study conducted by The Obesity Society, between 2001 and 2025, the adult population prevalence of normal healthy weight will decrease from 40.6% to 22.9%. In conjunction with this, the prevalence of obesity will increase from 20.5% to 33.9%. It is also estimated that by the time 25- to 29-year-olds of 2000 reach the age of 60–64 (2040), over one third will be obese.
A recent study reported that based on figures from the National Health Survey and/or Australian Health Survey the prevalence of overweight and obesity increased from 56.3% in 1995 to $61.2 in 2007–2008 and 62.8% in 2011–2012. This was attributed largely to an increase in the level of obesity from 18.7% to 27.5% over the period, with the proportion of overweight adults remaining similar (35.3–37.6%). The study argues for preventive health measures to be gender-specific and specific to socioeconomic disadvantage within populations.
Age-standardization of the 2011–12 Australian Health Survey was done in a recent study which reported 28.3% of Australian adults to be obese with 63.4% adults being overweight or obese. A subsequent analysis published in 2016 reported that despite obesity and overweight together being the second highest contributor to the burden of disease in Australia the regular screening and recording of measures of obesity and overweight in primary care setting especially within regional Australian catchments was much lower than optimal."
Obesity in Australia,"Indigenous population
Indigenous Australians have Australia's highest level of obesity. A 2001 study showing that 31% of Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders were obese, nearly double the national average at that time.
The health and well being of Australian Indigenous youth is becoming increasingly concerning.  A cross sectional study (Valery, Moloney, Cotterill, Harris, Sinha & Green, 2009) found that 46% of the total population, of participants, were overweight or obese. Of that population, 38% had enlarged waist circumferences, 43% had acanthosis nigricans present and 27% had hypertension. With this high population of overweight and obese Indigenous youth, it puts major implications on the public health system.
A University of Alberta study, conducted in 2006, noted that 60% of Aboriginal Australians over the age of 35 in Western Australia tested positive for diabetes. Health issues such as heart disease, obesity, and diabetes have lowered the life expectancy for Aboriginal Australians to 17 years below the national life expectancy, a gap that continues to grow.
Professor Paul Zimmet at Monash University, who conducted the aforementioned study of diabetes rates amongst Asian immigrants, released figures at the Diabetes in Indigenous People Forum in Melbourne, estimating the rate of diabetes from poor diet at 24% of all Torres Strait Islanders and remarked that unless extra steps are taken with these groups, Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders will die out within 100 years."
Obesity in Australia,"Immigrant populations
Individuals who migrate to Australia moving from a low income nation, have a greater tendency to undergo an increase in weight. A study done by Delavari et al. (2012) suggested that many immigrant groups showed signs of obesogenic lifestyle behaviours after migrating from low-HDI to high-HDI. It has also been found that Sudanese refugees in Australia have an increased risk of obesity compared to the general population. (Rezaho et al. 2014)
First-generation immigrants to Australia are more obese and have higher rates of obesity-related behaviours than white Australians or Australians of foreign ancestry whose families have been in the country at least two generations. A study conducted by the International Diabetes Institute at Monash University showed that Asians, Pacific Islanders, and Middle Eastern immigrants who moved to Australia were diagnosed with diabetes at a higher level than the average. The increase was explained by the adoption of a Western diet in place of a more healthy ""traditional"" diet more common in their native countries, as well as adopting a more sedentary lifestyle which is ubiquitous in developed countries."
Obesity in Australia,"Australian children
The percentage of overweight and obese children in Australia, despite rapid increases in the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, have remained mostly steady for the past 10 years, with 23 to 24% of Australians under the age of 18 classified as overweight, and 5 to 6% of the same demographic classified as obese.
A study done by Nichols et al. (2011) found there has been a decreasing trend in overweight and obese preschool children, in Victoria, between 1999 and 2007. Among 2-year-old children, there was a decrease in the obesity of these children from 13.5% in 1999 to 12.4% in 2007 and in the 3.5-year-old children a substantial decrease from 18.5% in 1999 to 15.4% in 2007.
Increased media attention on childhood obesity, in 2007 and 2008 especially, caused many researchers to print findings that the rate of obesity for children has reached a plateau or that the claims are simply ""exaggerated."" The reports caused Dr. Rosanna Capolingua, President of the Australian Medical Association, to issue a statement admonishing people and media outlets for ""trivialising"" the issue.
A Western Australian study (Bell et al. 2011) showed that overweight and obese primary school children have greater medical complications due to their weight status.  Overweight and obese children were more likely to complain and suffer from depression, anxiety, bullying, headaches, enuresis and musculoskeletal pain. The most common site of the musculoskeletal pain was in the knees with overweight children 1.3 times and obese children 3 times more likely to complain about it than the control children.  Overweight and obese children also had significantly higher levels of hypertension (control 3.4%, overweight 7.3%, obese 19%), impaired glucose tolerance (control: normal, overweight 1.3%, obese 5.3%) and hyperinsulinism (control 8%, overweight 19.5%, obese 38.9%).
The implementation of public health interventions in child care services has been recommended in Australia as a key strategy in the prevention of children becoming overweight or obese, especially in rural and remote areas of Australia. Quantifying the prevalence of obesity among children attending child care from non-metropolitan areas throughout Australia may be particularly important as the access to obesity prevention resources and professional development opportunities for child care service staff is limited. Financial constraints often experienced by smaller rural and remote child care services may limit their capacity to promote and encourage physical activity and health care to children participating in the child care services provided to them.
The study conducted by Wolfenden et al. found that approximately 17% of all children and 25% of indigenous children attending rural and regional child care services in the study area were overweight or obese. Such prevalence rates remain unacceptably high and confirm the need of prevention interventions targeting obesity in this setting.
For childhood obesity, the influence of broader parental and community contexts needs to be considered. Studies have found that young overweight boys spent significantly less time away from their parents than non-overweight boys, this potentially relates to the socio-economic status of the parents, as children residing from parents with a lower education level are at a higher risk of suffering from being overweight. It is possible that this is because young boys that spent a lot of their time with their parents were more likely to participate in sedentary activities, such as watching television or playing video games, than they were to participate in any kind of physical activity.
Jones et al. (2010) study found that early school years may be the time when child, parent and community characteristics begin to differ between overweight and non-overweight children, and may be an ideal time to target broader parental and community contexts influencing overweight and obese children.
A recent study conducted by The Swiss School of Public Health in 2014, found a clear association between the prevalence of obesity in low socio-economic standing school children within Australia. In 2006, it was found that children of low socio-economic standing were 2.22 times more likely to be obese compared to their high socio-economic standing counterparts. It was also discovered that these children of low socio-economic standing were 2.20 times more likely to be obese in 2012."
Obesity in Australia,"Diabetes and cost of obesity
In May 2008, Diabetes Australia, the national body for diabetes awareness and prevention, told the House of Representatives that the cost of obesity on the country's health system in 2005 was an estimated A$25 billion (US$20 billion), In August 2008, Diabetes Australia's estimation more than doubled to $58 billion (US$46 billion), this time taking into account not just health care but job productivity and other related quality of living costs.
In 2003, the number of Australians with type 2 diabetes rose to nearly a million for the first time. In addition, the number of type 2 diabetes patients who were diagnosed solely on their weight was calculated at 242,000 in 2007, a 137% increase in cases in the previous three years.
In 2008 using the Body Mass Index scale, obese Australians (indirectly and directly) cost the nation $8.3 billion. Out of the $8.3 billion, $2.0 billion was the cost of the health system."
Obesity in Australia,"Government response
In April 2008, the Australian Federal Government added obesity to its list of ""national health priorities"", officially elevating it to the same standard of attention given to other deadly ailments such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes. On 1 June 2009, the first Parliamentary comment on obesity in Australia was published, with the Standing Committee on Health and Ageing recommending 20 acts for the Federal Government to consider, including tax incentives to make healthier fruits and vegetables more affordable for Australians, and pressing the government to work with the food industry to lower fat and sugar levels in existing processed food. These recommendations covered a range of issues affecting obesity in Australia. The government agreed to the majority of the recommendations including to continue supporting the Active After-School communities program which lead more children to have more positive attitude towards physical activity and agreeing to develop consistent urban planning guidelines that focus on creating environments that encourage Australians to be healthy and active.
The former ALP government under Prime Minister Julia Gillard wanted to tackle the obesity problem in Australia by giving tax subsidies which would fund gym memberships to people who wish to lose weight. Her watchdog group, the National Preventative Health Taskforce, also wants to target childhood obesity by banning ads for junk food during the daytime when most children's television programs air.
In August 2008, the government of New South Wales announced that it would pay for morbidly obese patients to receive weight loss surgery, the first state to make such an announcement. Most Australians who wish to have such surgery have to go to a private hospital and pay for the procedure themselves, which costs $10,000 (US$10,000). A survey in Western Australia suggests that the number of patients who have undergone weight loss surgery has increased 20-fold in the past 20 years, with nine out of ten patients opting for the lap band procedure.
According to The Obesity Society Australia, if obesity rates continue to grow in Australia at this current rate over the next few decades, it is conceivable that the health and economic cost due to obesity will also grow to overwhelming portions."
Obesity in Australia,See also
Obesity in Australia,"Australian paradox
Cardiovascular disease in Australia
Diabetes in Australia
General:"
Obesity in Australia,"Health in Australia
Epidemiology of obesity"
Obesity in Australia,"
== References =="
The bush,"""The bush"" is a term mostly used in the English vernacular of South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand where it is largely synonymous with hinterland or backwoods respectively, referring to a natural undeveloped area.  The fauna and flora contained within this area may be mostly indigenous to the region, although exotic species will often also be present.
The expression has been in use in Australia from the earliest years of British settlement. The Sydney Gazette reported in 1804 that: ""One of the ringleaders was apprehended and two others escaped into the bush."" (Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 10 June 1804, page 4). 
The term is also widely used in Canada to refer to the large, forested portion of the country. The same usage applies in the US state of Alaska."
The bush,"Usage by country
The Australian bush
The concept of ""the bush"" has become iconic in Australia. In reference to the landscape, ""bush"" refers to any sparsely-inhabited region, regardless of vegetation. ""The bush"" in this sense was something that was uniquely Australian and very different from the green European landscapes familiar to many new immigrants. The term ""Outback"" is also used, but usually in association with the more arid inland areas of Australia. ""The bush"" also refers to any populated region outside of the major metropolitan areas, including mining and agricultural areas. Consequently, it is not unusual to have a mining town in the desert such as Port Hedland (population 14,000) referred to as ""the bush"".
Indigenous Australians lived a nomadic life in remote areas of the bush for thousands of years, and during that time developed ways of utilising natural resources for survival, mainly with bush tucker and the spiritual healing of bush medicine. For more than a century after the first British settlement in 1788 onwards, land was granted or sold to settlers, resulting in many generally small but permanent human settlements in vast tracts of bush. Closer settlement in Australia has often resulted in fragmentation of the bush, and bushfires, an ever-present hazard in many areas in summer months, have also increased with increasing suburbanisation of the Australian population.
Bush poets such as Henry Lawson (1867–1922) and Banjo Paterson (1864–1942) revered the bush as a source of national ideals, as did contemporaneous painters in the Heidelberg School such as Tom Roberts (1856–1931), Arthur Streeton (1867–1943) and Frederick McCubbin (1855–1917). Romanticising the bush in this way through folklore was a big step forward for 19th-century Australians in developing a distinct self-identity.
Australians and New Zealanders attach the term ""bush"" to any number of other entities or activities to describe their rural, country or folk nature through terms such as ""bush telegraph"", an informal human network through which news is passed on; ""bush carpenter"", a rough-and-ready builder; ""to go bush"", to escape from your usual haunts; ""bush cricket"", ""bush music"" (Australian folk music); ""bush doof""; and bushrangers, 19th-century criminals mainly in the eastern colonies who hid in the bush to escape from authorities."
The bush,"New Zealand
In New Zealand, bush primarily refers to areas of native trees rather than exotic forests. However, the word is also used in the Australian sense of anywhere outside urban areas, encompassing grasslands as well as forests.
Areas with bush (i.e. native forest) are found in both the North Island and the South Island, some of it bordering towns and cities, but the majority of bush is found in large national parks. Examples of predominantly bush clad areas are Whanganui National Park, on Taranaki volcano, on which the bush extends in a uniformly circular shape to the surrounding farmland, and Fiordland in the South Island. Much of Stewart Island/Rakiura is bush-covered. In the North Island, the largest areas of bush cover the main ranges stretching north-northeast from Wellington towards East Cape, notably including the Urewera Ranges, and the catchment of the Whanganui River. Significant stands remain in Northland and the ranges running south from the Coromandel Peninsula towards Ruapehu, and isolated remnants cap various volcanoes in Taranaki, the Waikato, the Bay of Plenty and the Hauraki Gulf.
From the word comes many phrases including:"
The bush,"bush-bash – to make one's way through the forest, rather than on a track or trail (cf. American English ""bushwhack[ing]"", ""bushwack[ing]"", or ""bush-whack[ing]"").
bush shirt – a woolen shirt or Swanndri, often worn by forest workers.
bush lawyer – the name of a number of native climbing plants or a layman who expounds on legal matters.
bush walk – short day walks (hikes) in the bush
going bush – to live in the bush for an extended period of time, which may include ""living off the land"" by means of hunting or fishing.
bushman – Used in the 19th century for New Zealand loggers. The term still stands for someone that lives in the bush as a means of preferable lifestyle."
The bush,"South Africa
In South Africa, the term (Afrikaans: die bos) has specific connotations of rural areas which are not open veldt. Generally, it refers to areas in the north of the country that would be called savanna. ""Going to The Bush"" (Bos toe Gaan) often refers to going to a game park or game reserve. Areas most commonly referred to as The Bush are the Mpumalanga and Limpopo Lowveld, The Limpopo River Valley, northern KwaZulu-Natal or any other similar area of wilderness."
The bush,"Alaska and Canada
The Bush in Alaska is generally described as any community not ""on the road system"", making it accessible only by more elaborate transportation. Usage is similar in Canada; it is called la brousse or colloquially le bois in Canadian French. In Canada, ""the bush"" refers to large expanses of forest and swampland which sprawl undeveloped, as well as any forested area."
The bush,"Related terms
The term ""to go bush"" has several similar meanings all connected with the supposed wildness of the bush. It can mean to revert to a feral nature (or to ""go native""), and it can also mean to deliberately leave normal surroundings and live rough, with connotations of cutting off communication with the outside world – often as a means of evading capture or questioning by the police. The term bushwhacker is used in Australia and New Zealand to mean someone who spends his or her time in the bush.
The verb to bushwhack has two meanings. One is to cut through heavy brush and other vegetation to pass through tangled country: ""We had to do quite a bit of bushwhacking today to clear the new trail."" The other meaning is to hide in such areas and then attack unsuspecting passers-by: ""We were bushwhacked by the bandits as we passed through their territory and they took all of our money and supplies.""
The Bushwhackers were also a New Zealand professional wrestling tag team that was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame class of 2015.
In New Zealand, ""The Bush"" is a nickname for the Wairarapa Bush provincial rugby team. The team was formed by an amalgamation of two earlier teams, Wairarapa and Bush. The latter team had represented an area on the boundaries of the Wairarapa and Hawke's Bay which was in former times known as Bush due to its dense vegetation cover.
In the United States, minor league baseball, which is typically played in smaller cities, is sometimes derisively called ""bush league baseball"".
In Australia,""Sydney or the bush"" equates with such terms as ""Hollywood or bust"" to mean staking total success or failure on one high-risk event. This usage appears in several Peanuts cartoons, causing Charlie Brown much confusion."
The bush,See also
The bush,"
== References =="
History of Australia,"The history of Australia is the history of the land and peoples which comprise the Commonwealth of Australia. The modern nation came into existence on 1 January 1901 as a federation of former British colonies. The human history of Australia, however, commences with the arrival of the first ancestors of Aboriginal Australians by sea from Maritime Southeast Asia between 50,000 and 65,000 years ago, and continues to the present day multicultural democracy.
Aboriginal Australians settled throughout continental Australia and many nearby islands. The artistic, musical and spiritual traditions they established are among the longest surviving in human history. The ancestors of today's ethnically and culturally distinct Torres Strait Islanders arrived from what is now Papua New Guinea around 2,500 years ago, and settled the islands on the northern tip of the Australian landmass.
Dutch navigators explored the western and southern coasts in the 17th century and named the continent New Holland. Macassan trepangers visited Australia's northern coasts from around 1720, and possibly earlier. In 1770, Lieutenant James Cook charted the east coast of Australia and claimed it for Great Britain. He returned to London with accounts favouring colonisation at Botany Bay (now in Sydney). The First Fleet of British ships arrived at Botany Bay in January 1788 to establish a penal colony. In the century that followed, the British established other colonies on the continent, and European explorers ventured into its interior. This period saw a decline in the Aboriginal population and the disruption of their cultures due to introduced diseases, violent conflict and dispossession of their traditional lands. From 1871, the Torres Strait Islanders welcomed Christian Missionaries, and the islands were later annexed by Queensland, choosing to remain a part of Australia when Papua New Guinea gained independence from Australia a century later.
Gold rushes and agricultural industries brought prosperity. Transportation of British convicts to Australia was phased out from 1840 to 1868. Autonomous parliamentary democracies began to be established throughout the six British colonies from the mid-19th century. The colonies voted by referendum to unite in a federation in 1901, and modern Australia came into being. Australia fought as part of British Empire and later Commonwealth in the two world wars and was to become a long-standing ally of the United States through the Cold War to the present. Trade with Asia increased and a post-war immigration program received more than 7 million migrants from every continent. Supported by immigration of people from almost every country in the world since the end of World War II, the population increased to more than 25.5 million by 2021, with 30 per cent of the population born overseas."
History of Australia,"Indigenous prehistory
The ancestors of Aboriginal Australians moved into what is now the Australian continent about 50,000 to 65,000 years ago,  during the last glacial period, arriving by land bridges and short sea crossings from what is now Southeast Asia.
The Madjedbebe rock shelter in Arnhem Land, in the north of the continent, is perhaps the oldest site of human occupation in Australia. From the north, the population spread into a range of very different environments. Devil's Lair in the extreme south-west of the continent was occupied around 47,000 years ago and Tasmania by 39,000 years ago. The oldest human remains found are at Lake Mungo in New South Wales, which have been dated to around 41,000 years ago. The site suggests one of the world's oldest known cremations, indicating early evidence for religious ritual among humans."
History of Australia,"The spread of the population also altered the environment. From 46,000 years ago, firestick farming was used in many parts of Australia to clear vegetation, make travel easier, and create open grasslands rich in animal and vegetable food sources. The Aboriginal population faced significant changes in the climate and environment. About 30,000 years ago, sea levels began to fall, temperatures in the south-east of the continent dropped by as much as 9 degrees Celsius, and the interior of Australia became more arid. About 20,000 years ago, New Guinea and Tasmania were connected to the Australian continent, which was more than a quarter larger than today.
About 19,000 years ago temperatures and sea levels began to rise. Tasmania became separated from the mainland some 14,000 years ago, and between 8,000 and 6,000 years ago thousands of islands in the Torres Strait and around the coast of Australia were formed.
The warmer climate was associated with new technologies. Small back-bladed stone tools appeared 15–19 thousand years ago. Wooden javelins and boomerangs have been found dating from 10,000 years ago. Stone points for spears have been found dating from 5–7 thousand years ago. Spear throwers were probably developed more recently than 6,500 years ago.
Aboriginal Tasmanians were isolated from the mainland from about 14,000 years ago. As a result, they only possessed one quarter of the tools and equipment of the adjacent mainland. Coastal Tasmanians switched from fish to abalone and crayfish and more Tasmanians moved to the interior.
Around 4,000 years ago the first phase of occupation of the Torres Strait Islands began. By 2,500 years ago more of the islands were occupied and a distinctive Torres Strait Islander maritime culture emerged. Agriculture also developed on some islands and by 700 years ago villages appeared."
History of Australia,"Aboriginal society consisted of family groups organised into bands and clans averaging about 25 people, each with a defined territory for foraging.  Clans were attached to tribes or nations, associated with particular languages and country. At the time of European contact there were about 600 tribes or nations and 250 distinct languages with various dialects. Estimates of the Aboriginal population at this time range from 300,000 to one million. Aboriginal society was egalitarian with no formal government or chiefs. Authority rested with elders and group decisions were generally made through the consensus of elders. The traditional economy was cooperative, with males generally hunting large game while females gathered local staples such as small animals, shellfish, vegetables, fruits, seeds and nuts. Food was shared within groups and exchanged across groups. Some Aboriginal groups engaged in fire-stick farming, fish farming, and built semi-permanent shelters. The extent to which some groups engaged in agriculture is controversial. Some Anthropologists describe traditional Aboriginal Australia as a ""complex hunter-gatherer"" society.
Aboriginal groups were semi-nomadic, generally ranging over a specific territory defined by natural features. Members of a group would enter the territory of another group through rights established by marriage and kinship or by invitation for specific purposes such as ceremonies and sharing abundant seasonal foods. As all natural features of the land were created by ancestral beings, a group's particular country provided physical and spiritual nourishment.
Aboriginal Australians developed a unique artistic and spiritual culture. The earliest Aboriginal rock art consists of hand-prints, hand-stencils, and engravings of circles, tracks, lines and cupules, and has been dated to 35,000 years ago. Around 20,000 year ago Aboriginal artists were depicting humans and animals. According to Australian Aboriginal mythology and the animist framework, the Dreaming is a sacred era in which ancestral totemic spirit beings formed The Creation. The Dreaming established the laws and structures of society and the ceremonies performed to ensure continuity of life and land."
History of Australia,"Early European exploration
Dutch discovery and exploration
The Dutch East India Company ship, Duyfken, captained by Willem Janszoon, made the first documented European landing in Australia in 1606. Later that year, Luís Vaz de Torres sailed to the north of Australia through Torres Strait, along New Guinea's southern coast.
In 1616, Dirk Hartog, sailing off course, en route from the Cape of Good Hope to Batavia, landed on an island off Shark Bay, Western Australia. In 1622–23 the ship Leeuwin made the first recorded rounding of the southwest corner of the continent.
In 1627, the south coast of Australia was discovered by François Thijssen and named after Pieter Nuyts. In 1628, a squadron of Dutch ships explored the northern coast particularly in the Gulf of Carpentaria.
Abel Tasman's voyage of 1642 was the first known European expedition to reach Van Diemen's Land (later Tasmania) and New Zealand, and to sight Fiji. On his second voyage of 1644, he also contributed significantly to the mapping of the Australian mainland (which he called New Holland), making observations on the land and people of the north coast below New Guinea.
Following Tasman's voyages, the Dutch were able to make almost complete maps of Australia's northern and western coasts and much of its southern and south-eastern Tasmanian coasts."
History of Australia,"British and French exploration
William Dampier, an English buccaneer and explorer, landed on the north-west coast of New Holland in 1688 and again in 1699, and published influential descriptions of the Aboriginal people.
In 1769, Lieutenant James Cook in command of HMS Endeavour, travelled to Tahiti to observe and record the transit of Venus. Cook also carried secret Admiralty instructions to locate the supposed Southern Continent. Unable to find this continent, Cook decided to survey the east coast of New Holland, the only major part of that continent that had not been charted by Dutch navigators.
On 19 April 1770, the Endeavour reached the east coast of New Holland and ten days later anchored at Botany Bay. Cook charted the coast to its northern extent and formally took possession of the east coast of New Holland on 21/22 August 1770 when on Possession Island off the west coast of Cape York Peninsula.
He noted in his journal that he could ""land no more upon this Eastern coast of New Holland, and on the Western side I can make no new discovery the honour of which belongs to the Dutch Navigators and as such they may lay Claim to it as their property [italicised words crossed out in the original] but the Eastern Coast from the Latitude of 38 South down to this place I am confident was never seen or viseted by any European before us and therefore by the same Rule belongs to great Brittan"" [italicised words crossed out in the original].
In March 1772 Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne, in command of two French ships, reached Van Diemen's land on his way to Tahiti and the South Seas. His party became the first recorded Europeans to encounter the Indigenous Tasmanians and to kill one of them.
In the same year, a French expedition led by Louis Aleno de St Aloüarn, became the first Europeans to formally claim sovereignty over the west coast of Australia, but no attempt was made to follow this with colonisation."
History of Australia,"Colonisation
Plans for colonisation before 1788
Although various proposals for the colonisation of Australia were made prior to 1788, none were attempted. In 1717, Jean-Pierre Purry sent a plan to the Dutch East India Company for the colonisation of an area in modern South Australia. The company rejected the plan with the comment that, ""There is no prospect of use or benefit to the Company in it, but rather very certain and heavy costs"".
In contrast, Emanuel Bowen, in 1747, promoted the benefits of exploring and colonising the country, writing:"
History of Australia,"It is impossible to conceive a Country that promises fairer from its Situation than this of TERRA AUSTRALIS, no longer incognita, as this Map demonstrates, but the Southern Continent Discovered. It lies precisely in the richest climates of the World... and therefore whoever perfectly discovers and settles it will become infalliably possessed of Territories as Rich, as fruitful, and as capable of Improvement, as any that have hitherto been found out, either in the East Indies or the West.John Harris, in his Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca, or Voyages and Travels (1744–1748, 1764) recommended exploration of the east coast of New Holland, with a view to a British colonisation. John Callander put forward a proposal in 1766 for Britain to found a colony of banished convicts in the South Sea or in Terra Australis. Sweden's King Gustav III had ambitions to establish a colony for his country at the Swan River in 1786 but the plan was stillborn.
The American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) saw Britain lose most of its North American colonies and consider establishing replacement territories. Britain had transported about 50,000 convicts to the New World from 1718 to 1775 and was now searching for an alternative. The temporary solution of floating prison hulks had reached capacity and was a public health hazard, while the option of building more jails and workhouses was deemed too expensive.
In 1779, Sir Joseph Banks, the eminent scientist who had accompanied James Cook on his 1770 voyage, recommended Botany Bay as a suitable site for a penal settlement. Banks's plan was to send 200 to 300 convicts to Botany Bay where they could be left to their own devices and not be a burden on the British taxpayer."
History of Australia,"Under Banks's guidance, the American Loyalist James Matra, who had also travelled with Cook, produced a new plan for colonising New South Wales in 1783. Matra argued that the country was suitable for plantations of sugar, cotton and tobacco; New Zealand timber and hemp or flax could prove valuable commodities; it could form a base for Pacific trade; and it could be a suitable compensation for displaced American Loyalists. Following an interview with Secretary of State Lord Sydney in 1784, Matra amended his proposal to include convicts as settlers, considering that this would benefit both ""Economy to the Publick, & Humanity to the Individual"".
The major alternative to Botany Bay was sending convicts to Africa. From 1775 convicts had been sent to garrison British forts in west Africa, but the experiment had proved unsuccessful. In 1783, the Pitt government considered exiling convicts to a small river island in Gambia where they could form a self-governing community, a ""colony of thieves"", at no expense to the government.
In 1785, a parliamentary select committee chaired by Lord Beauchamp recommended against the Gambia plan, but failed to endorse the alternative of Botany Bay. In a second report, Beauchamp recommended a penal settlement at Das Voltas Bay in modern Namibia. The plan was dropped, however, when an investigation of the site in 1786 found it to be unsuitable. Two weeks later, in August 1786, the Pitt government announced its intention to send convicts to Botany Bay. The Government incorporated the settlement of Norfolk Island into their plan, with its attractions of timber and flax, proposed by Banks's Royal Society colleagues, Sir John Call and Sir George Young.
There has been a longstanding debate over whether the key consideration in the decision to establish a penal colony at Botany Bay was the pressing need to find a solution to the penal management problem, or whether broader imperial goals — such as trade, securing new supplies of timber and flax for the navy, and the desirability of strategic ports in the region — were paramount. Christopher and Maxwell-Stewart argue that whatever the government's original motives were in establishing the colony, by the 1790s it had at least achieved the imperial objective of providing a harbour where vessels could be careened and resupplied."
History of Australia,"The colony of New South Wales
Establishment of the colony: 1788 to 1792
The territory of New South Wales claimed by Britain included all of Australia eastward of the meridian of 135° East. This included more than half of mainland Australia. The claim also included ""all the Islands adjacent in the Pacific"" between the latitudes of Cape York and the southern tip of Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania). In 1817, the British government withdrew the extensive territorial claim over the South Pacific, passing an act specifying that Tahiti, New Zealand and other islands of the South Pacific were not within His Majesty's dominions. However, it is unclear whether the claim ever extended to the current islands of New Zealand.
The colony of New South Wales was established with the arrival of the First Fleet of 11 vessels under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip in January 1788. It consisted of more than a thousand settlers, including 778 convicts (192 women and 586 men). A few days after arrival at Botany Bay the fleet moved to the more suitable Port Jackson where a settlement was established at Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788. This date later became Australia's national day, Australia Day. The colony was formally proclaimed by Governor Phillip on 7 February 1788 at Sydney. Sydney Cove offered a fresh water supply and a safe harbour, which Phillip described as being, 'with out exception the finest Harbour in the World [...] Here a Thousand Sail of the Line may ride in the most perfect Security'."
History of Australia,"Governor Phillip was vested with complete authority over the inhabitants of the colony. His intention was to establish harmonious relations with local Aboriginal people and try to reform as well as discipline the convicts of the colony. Early efforts at agriculture were fraught and supplies from overseas were scarce. Between 1788 and 1792 about 3546 male and 766 female convicts were landed at Sydney. Many new arrivals were sick or unfit for work and the condition of healthy convicts also deteriorated due to the hard labour and poor food. The food situation reached crisis point in 1790 and the Second Fleet which finally arrived in June 1790 had lost a quarter of its passengers through sickness, while the condition of the convicts of the Third Fleet appalled Phillip. From 1791, however, the more regular arrival of ships and the beginnings of trade lessened the feeling of isolation and improved supplies.
In 1788, Phillip established a subsidiary settlement on Norfolk Island in the South Pacific where he hoped to obtain timber and flax for the navy. The island, however, had no safe harbour, which led the settlement to be abandoned and the settlers evacuated to Tasmania in 1807. The island was subsequently re-established as a site for secondary transportation in 1825.
Phillip sent exploratory missions in search of better soils, fixed on the Parramatta region as a promising area for expansion, and moved many of the convicts from late 1788 to establish a small township, which became the main centre of the colony's economic life. This left Sydney Cove only as an important port and focus of social life. Poor equipment and unfamiliar soils and climate continued to hamper the expansion of farming from Farm Cove to Parramatta and Toongabbie, but a building program, assisted by convict labour, advanced steadily. Between 1788 and 1792, convicts and their gaolers made up the majority of the population; however, a free population soon began to grow, consisting of emancipated convicts, locally born children, soldiers whose military service had expired and, finally, free settlers from Britain. Governor Phillip departed the colony for England on 11 December 1792, with the new settlement having survived near starvation and immense isolation for four years."
History of Australia,"Consolidation: 1793 to 1821
After the departure of Phillip, the colony's military officers began acquiring land and importing consumer goods obtained from visiting ships. Former convicts also farmed land granted to them and engaged in trade. Farms spread to the more fertile lands surrounding Paramatta, Windsor, Richmond and Camden, and by 1803 the colony was self-sufficient in grain. Boat building developed in order to make travel easier and exploit the marine resources of the coastal settlements. Sealing and whaling became important industries."
History of Australia,"The New South Wales Corps was formed in England in 1789 as a permanent regiment of the British Army to relieve the marines who had accompanied the First Fleet. Officers of the Corps soon became involved in the corrupt and lucrative rum trade in the colony. Governor William Bligh (1806 – 1808) tried to suppress the rum trade and the illegal use of Crown Land, resulting in the Rum Rebellion of 1808. The Corps, working closely with the newly established wool trader John Macarthur, staged the only successful armed takeover of government in Australian history, deposing Bligh and instigating a brief period of military rule prior to the arrival from Britain of Governor Lachlan Macquarie in 1810.
Macquarie served as the last autocratic Governor of New South Wales, from 1810 to 1821, and had a leading role in the social and economic development of New South Wales which saw it transition from a penal colony to a budding civil society. He established a bank, a currency and a hospital. He employed a planner to design the street layout of Sydney and commissioned the construction of roads, wharves, churches, and public buildings. He sent explorers out from Sydney and, in 1815, a road across the Blue Mountains was completed, opening the way for large scale farming and grazing in the lightly wooded pastures west of the Great Dividing Range.
Central to Macquarie's policy was his treatment of the emancipists, whom he considered should be treated as social equals to free-settlers in the colony. He appointed emancipists to key government positions including Francis Greenway as colonial architect and William Redfern as a magistrate. His policy on emancipists was opposed by many influential free settlers, officers and officials, and London became concerned at the cost of his public works. In 1819, London appointed J. T. Bigge to conduct an inquiry into the colony, and Macquarie resigned shortly before the report of the inquiry was published."
History of Australia,"Expansion: 1821 to 1850
In 1820, British settlement was largely confined to a 100 kilometre radius around Sydney and to the central plain of Van Diemen's land. The settler population was 26,000 on the mainland and 6,000 in Van Diemen's Land. Following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 the transportation of convicts increased rapidly and the number of free settlers grew steadily. From 1821 to 1840, 55,000 convicts arrived in New South Wales and 60,000 in Van Diemen's Land. However, by 1830, free settlers and the locally born exceeded the convict population of New South Wales.
From the 1820s squatters increasingly established unauthorised cattle and sheep runs beyond the official limits of the settled colony. In 1836, a system of annual licences authorising grazing on Crown Land was introduced in an attempt to control the pastoral industry, but booming wool prices and the high cost of land in the settled areas encouraged further squatting. By 1844 wool accounted for half of the colony's exports and by 1850 most of the eastern third of New South Wales was controlled by fewer than 2,000 pastoralists.
In 1825, the western boundary of New South Wales was extended to longitude 129° East, which is the current boundary of Western Australia. As a result, the territory of New South Wales reached its greatest extent, covering the area of the modern state as well as modern Queensland, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and the Northern Territory.
By 1850 the settler population of New South Wales had grown to 180,000, not including the 70–75 thousand living in the area which became the separate colony of Victoria in 1851."
History of Australia,"Establishment of further colonies
After hosting Nicholas Baudin's French naval expedition in Sydney in 1802,  Governor Phillip Gidley King decided to establish a settlement in Van Diemen's Land (modern Tasmania) in 1803, partly to forestall a possible French settlement. The British settlement of the island soon centred on Launceston in the north and Hobart in the south. From the 1820s free settlers were encouraged by the offer of land grants in proportion to the capital the settlers would bring. Van Diemen's Land became a separate colony from New South Wales in December 1825 and continued to expand through the 1830s, supported by farming, sheep grazing and whaling. Following the suspension of convict transportation to New South Wales in 1840, Van Diemen's land became the main destination for convicts. Transportation to Van Diemen's Land ended in 1853 and in 1856 the colony officially changed its name to Tasmania.Pastoralists from Van Diemen's land began squatting in the Port Phillip hinterland on the mainland in 1834, attracted by its rich grasslands. In 1835, John Batman and others negotiated the transfer of 100,000 acres of land from the Kulin people. However, the treaty was annulled the same year when the British Colonial Office issued the Proclamation of Governor Bourke. The proclamation meant that from then, all people found occupying land without the authority of the government would be considered illegal trespassers.
In 1836, Port Phillip was officially recognised as a district of New South Wales and opened for settlement. The main settlement of Melbourne was established in 1837 as a planned town on the instructions of Governor Bourke. Squatters and settlers from Van Diemen's Land and New South Wales soon arrived in large numbers. In 1851, the Port Phillip District separated from New South Wales as the colony of Victoria.In 1826, the governor of New South Wales, Ralph Darling, sent a military garrison to King George Sound  to deter the French from establishing a settlement in Western Australia. In 1827, the head of the expedition, Major Edmund Lockyer, formally annexed the western third of the continent as a British colony. In 1829, the Swan River colony was established at the sites of modern Fremantle and Perth, becoming the first convict-free and privatised colony in Australia. However, by 1850 there were a little more than 5,000 settlers. The colony accepted convicts from that year because of the acute shortage of labour. The Province of South Australia was established in 1836 as a privately financed settlement based on the theory of ""systematic colonisation"" developed by Edward Gibbon Wakefield. Convict labour was banned in the hope of making the colony more attractive to ""respectable"" families and promote an even balance between male and female settlers. The city of Adelaide was to be planned with a generous provision of churches, parks and schools. Land was to be sold at a uniform price and the proceeds used to secure an adequate supply of labour through selective assisted migration. Various religious, personal and commercial freedoms were guaranteed, and the Letters Patent enabling the South Australia Act 1834 included a guarantee of Aboriginal land rights.
The colony, however, was badly hit by the depression of 1841–44. Conflict with Indigenous traditional landowners also reduced the protections they had been promised. In 1842, the settlement became a Crown colony administered by the governor and an appointed Legislative Council. The economy recovered and by 1850 the settler population had grown to 60,000. In 1851, the colony achieved limited self-government with a partially elected Legislative Council.
In 1824, the Moreton Bay penal settlement was established on the site of present-day Brisbane. In 1842, the penal colony was closed and the area was opened for free settlement. By 1850 the population of Brisbane had reached 8,000 and increasing numbers of pastoralists were grazing cattle and sheep in the Darling Downs west of the town. Frontier violence between settlers and the Indigenous population became severe as pastoralism expanded north of the Tweed River. A series of disputes between northern pastoralists and the government in Sydney led to increasing demands from the northern settlers for separation from New South Wales. In 1857, the British government agreed to the separation and in 1859 the colony of Queensland was proclaimed."
History of Australia,"Convicts and colonial society
Convicts and emancipists
Between 1788 and 1868, approximately 161,700 convicts were transported to the Australian colonies of New South Wales, Van Diemen's Land and Western Australia. The literacy rate of convicts was above average and they brought a range of useful skills to the new colony including building, farming, sailing, fishing and hunting. The small number of free settlers meant that early governors also had to rely on convicts and emancipists for professions such as lawyers, architects, surveyors and teachers.
Convicts initially worked on government farms and public works such as land clearing and building. After 1792, the majority were assigned to work for private employers including emancipists. Emancipists were granted small plots of land for farming and a year of government rations. Later they were assigned convict labour to help them work their farms. Some convicts were assigned to military officers to run their businesses. These convicts learnt commercial skills which could help them work for themselves when their sentence ended or they were granted a ""ticket of leave"" (a form of parole).
Convicts soon established a system of piece work which allowed them to work for wages once their allocated tasks were completed. By 1821 convicts, emancipists and their children owned two-thirds of the land under cultivation, half the cattle and one-third of the sheep. They also worked in trades and small business. Emancipists employed about half of the convicts assigned to private masters.
A series of reforms recommended by J. T. Bigge in 1822 and 1823 worsened conditions for convicts. The food ration was cut and their opportunities to work for wages restricted. More convicts were assigned to rural work gangs, bureaucratic control and surveillance of convicts was made more systematic, isolated penal settlements were established as places of secondary punishment, the rules for tickets of leave were tightened, and land grants were skewed to favour free settlers with large capital.  As a result, convicts who arrived after 1820 were far less likely to become property owners, to marry, and to establish families."
History of Australia,"Free settlers
The Bigge reforms also aimed to encourage free settlers by offering them land grants in proportion to their capital. From 1831, the colonies replaced land grants with land sales by auction at a fixed minimum price per acre, the proceeds being used to fund the assisted migration of workers. From 1821 to 1850, Australia attracted 200,000 immigrants from the United Kingdom. However, the system of land allocations led to the concentration of land in the hands of a small number of affluent settlers.
Two-thirds of the migrants to Australia during this period received assistance from the British or colonial governments. Families of convicts were also offered free passage and about 3,500 migrants were selected under the English Poor Laws. Various special-purpose and charitable schemes,  such as those of Caroline Chisholm and John Dunmore Lang, also provided migration assistance."
History of Australia,"Women
Women comprised only about 15% of convicts transported. Due to the shortage of women in the colony they were more likely to marry than men and tended to choose older, skilled men with property as husbands. The early colonial courts enforced the property rights of women independently of their husbands, and the ration system also gave women and their children some protection from abandonment. Women were active in business and agriculture from the early years of the colony, among the most successful being the former convict turned entrepreneur Mary Reibey and the agriculturalist Elizabeth Macarthur. One-third of the shareholders of the first colonial bank (founded in 1817) were women.
One of the goals of the assisted migration programs from the 1830s was to promote migration of women and families to provide a more even gender balance in the colonies. Caroline Chisholm established a shelter and labour exchange for migrant women in New South Wales in the 1840s and promoted the settlement of single and married women in rural areas.
Between 1830 and 1850 the female proportion of the Australian settler population increased from 24 per cent to 41 per cent."
History of Australia,"Religion
The Church of England was the only recognised church before 1820 and its clergy worked closely with the governors. Richard Johnson, (chief chaplain 1788–1802) was charged by Governor Arthur Phillip, with improving ""public morality"" in the colony and was also heavily involved in health and education. Samuel Marsden (various ministries 1795–1838) became known for his missionary work, the severity of his punishments as a magistrate, and the vehemence of his public denunciations of Catholicism and Irish convicts. About a quarter of convicts were Catholics. The lack of official recognition of Catholicism was combined with suspicion of Irish convicts which only increased after the Irish-led Castle Hill Rebellion of 1804. Only two Catholic priests operated temporarily in the colony before Governor Macquarie appointed official Catholic chaplains in New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land in 1820.
The Bigge reports recommended that the status of the Anglican Church be enhanced. An Anglican archdeacon was appointed in 1824 and allocated a seat in the first advisory Legislative Council. The Anglican clergy and schools also received state support. This policy was changed under Governor Burke by the Church Acts of 1836 and 1837. The government now provided state support for the clergy and church buildings of the four largest denominations: Anglican, Catholic, Presbyterian and, later, Methodist.
Many Anglicans saw state support of the Catholic Church as a threat. The prominent Presbyterian minister John Dunmore Lang also promoted sectarian divisions in the 1840s. State support, however, led to a growth in church activities. Charitable associations such as the Catholic Sisters of Charity, founded in 1838, provided hospitals, orphanages and asylums for the old and disabled. Religious organisations were also the main providers of school education in the first half of the nineteenth century, a notable example being Lang's Australian College which opened in 1831. Many religious associations, such as the Sisters of St Joseph, co-founded by Mary MacKillop in 1866, continued their educational activities after the provision of secular state schools grew from the 1850s."
History of Australia,"Exploration of the continent
In 1798–99 George Bass and Matthew Flinders set out from Sydney in a sloop and circumnavigated Tasmania, thus proving it to be an island. In 1801–02 Matthew Flinders in HMS Investigator led the first circumnavigation of Australia. Aboard ship was the Aboriginal explorer Bungaree, who became the first person born on the Australian continent to circumnavigate it."
History of Australia,"In 1798, the former convict John Wilson and two companions crossed the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, in an expedition ordered by Governor Hunter. Hunter suppressed news of the feat for fear that it would encourage convicts to abscond from the settlement. In 1813, Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and William Wentworth crossed the mountains by a different route and a road was soon built to the Central Tablelands.
In 1824, Hamilton Hume and William Hovell led an expedition to find new grazing land in the south of the colony, and also to find out where New South Wales' western rivers flowed. Over 16 weeks in 1824–25, they journeyed to Port Phillip and back. They discovered the Murray River (which they named the Hume) and many of its tributaries, and good agricultural and grazing lands.
Charles Sturt led an expedition along the Macquarie River in 1828 and discovered the Darling River. Leading a second expedition in 1829, Sturt followed the Murrumbidgee River into the Murray River. His party then followed this river to its junction with the Darling River. Sturt continued down river on to Lake Alexandrina, where the Murray meets the sea in South Australia.
Surveyor General Sir Thomas Mitchell conducted a series of expeditions from the 1830s to follow up these previous expeditions. Mitchell employed three Aboriginal guides and recorded many Aboriginal place names. He also recorded a violent encounter with traditional owners on the Murray in 1836 in which his men pursued them, ""shooting as many as they could.""
The Polish scientist and explorer Count Paul Edmund Strzelecki conducted surveying work in the Australian Alps in 1839 and, led by two Aboriginal guides, became the first European to ascend Australia's highest peak, which he named Mount Kosciuszko in honour of the Polish patriot Tadeusz Kościuszko."
History of Australia,"The German scientist Ludwig Leichhardt led three expeditions in northern Australia in the 1840s, sometimes with the help of Aboriginal guides. He and his party disappeared in 1848 while attempting to cross the continent from east to west. Edmund Kennedy led an expedition into what is now far-western Queensland in 1847 before being speared by Aborigines in the Cape York Peninsula in 1848.
In 1860, Burke and Wills led the first south–north crossing of the continent from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria. Lacking bushcraft and unwilling to learn from the local Aboriginal people, Burke and Wills died in 1861, having returned from the Gulf to their rendezvous point at Coopers Creek only to discover the rest of their party had departed the location only a matter of hours previously. They became tragic heroes to the European settlers, their funeral attracting a crowd of more than 50,000 and their story inspiring numerous books, artworks, films and representations in popular culture.
In 1862, John McDouall Stuart succeeded in traversing central Australia from south to north. His expedition mapped out the route which was later followed by the Australian Overland Telegraph Line.
The completion of this telegraph line in 1872 was associated with further exploration of the Gibson Desert and the Nullarbor Plain. While exploring central Australia in 1872, Ernest Giles sighted Kata Tjuta from a location near Kings Canyon and called it Mount Olga. The following year Willian Gosse observed Uluru and named it Ayers Rock, in honour of the Chief Secretary of South Australia, Sir Henry Ayers.
In 1879, Alexander Forrest trekked from the north coast of Western Australia to the overland telegraph, discovering land suitable for grazing in the Kimberley region."
History of Australia,"Impact of British settlement on Indigenous population
When the First Fleet arrived in Sydney Cove with some 1,300 colonists in January 1788 the Aboriginal population of the Sydney region is estimated to have been about 3,000 people. The first governor of New South Wales, Arthur Phillip, arrived with instructions to: ""endeavour by every possible means to open an Intercourse with the Natives and to conciliate their affections, enjoining all Our Subjects to live in amity and kindness with them."""
History of Australia,"Disease
The relative isolation of the Indigenous population for some 60,000 years meant that they had little resistance to many introduced diseases. An outbreak of smallpox in April 1789 killed about half the Aboriginal population of the Sydney region. The source of the outbreak is controversial; some researchers contend that it originated from contact with Indonesian fisherman in the far north while others argue that it is more likely to have been inadvertently or deliberately spread by settlers.
There were further smallpox outbreaks devastating Aboriginal populations from the late 1820s (affecting south-eastern Australia), in the early 1860s (travelling inland from the Coburg Peninsula in the north to the Great Australian Bight in the south), and in the late 1860s (from the Kimberley to Geraldton). According to Josphine Flood, the estimated Aboriginal mortality rate from smallpox was 60 per cent on first exposure, 50 per cent in the tropics, and 25 per cent in the arid interior.
Other introduced diseases such as measles, influenza, typhoid and tuberculosis also resulted in high death rates in Aboriginal communities. Butlin estimates that the Aboriginal population in the area of modern Victoria was around 50,000 in 1788 before two smallpox outbreaks reduced it to about 12,500 in 1830. Between 1835 and 1853, the Aboriginal population of Victoria fell from 10,000 to around 2,000. It is estimated that about 60 per cent of these deaths were from introduced diseases, 18 per cent from natural causes and 15 per cent from settler violence.
Venereal diseases were also a factor in Indigenous depopulation, reducing Aboriginal fertility rates in south-eastern Australia by an estimated 40 per cent by 1855. By 1890 up to 50 per cent of the Aboriginal population in some regions of Queensland were affected."
History of Australia,"Conflict and dispossession
The British settlement was initially planned to be a self-sufficient penal colony based on agriculture. Karskens argues that conflict broke out between the settlers and the traditional owners of the land because of the settlers' assumptions about the superiority of British civilisation and their entitlement to land which they had ""improved"" through building and cultivation."
History of Australia,"Conflict also arose from cross-cultural misunderstandings and from reprisals for previous actions such as the kidnapping of Aboriginal men, women and children. Reprisal attacks and collective punishments were perpetrated by colonists and Aboriginal groups alike. Sustained Aboriginal attacks on settlers, the burning of crops and the mass killing of livestock were more obviously acts of resistance to the loss of traditional land and food resources.
There were intense conflicts between settlers and the Darug people from 1794 to 1800 in which 26 settlers and up to 200 Darug were killed. Conflict also erupted in Dharawal country from 1814 to 1816, culminating in the Appin massacre (April 1816) in which at least 14 Aboriginal people were killed.
In the 1820s, the colony spread over the Great Dividing Range, opening the way for large scale farming and grazing in Wiradjuri country. From 1822 to 1824 Windradyne led a group of 50-100 Aboriginal men in raids which resulted in the death of 15-20 colonists. Estimates of Aboriginal deaths in the conflict range from 15 to 100.
In Van Diemen's land, the Black War broke out in 1824, following a rapid expansion of settler numbers and sheep grazing in the island's interior. Martial law was declared in November 1828 and in October 1830 a ""Black Line"" of around 2,200 troops and settlers swept the island with the intention of driving the Aboriginal population from the settled districts. From 1830 to 1834, George Augustus Robinson and Aboriginal ambassadors including Truganini led a series of ""Friendly Missions"" to the Aboriginal tribes which effectively ended the war.  Around 200 settlers and 600 to 900 Aboriginal Tasmanians were killed in the conflict and the Aboriginal survivors were eventually relocated to Flinders Island."
History of Australia,"The spread of settlers and pastoralists into the region of modern Victoria in the 1830s also sparked conflict with traditional landowners. Broome estimates that 80 settlers and 1,000–1,500 Aboriginal people died in frontier conflict in Victoria from 1835 to 1853.
The growth of the Swan River Colony in the 1830s led to conflict with Aboriginal people, culminating in the Pinjarra massacre in which some 15 to 30 Aboriginal people were killed. According to Neville Green, 30 settlers and 121 Aboriginal people died in violent conflict in Western Australia between 1826 and 1852."
History of Australia,"The spread of sheep and cattle grazing after 1850 brought further conflict with Aboriginal tribes more distant from the closely settled areas. Aboriginal casualty rates in conflicts increased as the colonists made greater use of mounted police, Native Police units, and newly developed revolvers and breech-loaded guns. Conflict was particularly intense in NSW in the 1840s and in Queensland from 1860 to 1880. In central Australia, it is estimated that 650 to 850 Aboriginal people, out of a population of 4,500, were killed by colonists from 1860 to 1895. In the Gulf Country of northern Australia five settlers and 300 Aboriginal people were killed before 1886. The last recorded massacre of Aboriginal people by settlers was at Coniston in the Northern Territory in 1928 where at least 31 Aboriginal people were killed.
The spread of British settlement also led to an increase in inter-tribal Aboriginal conflict as more people were forced off their traditional lands into the territory of other, often hostile, tribes. Butlin estimated that of the 8,000 Aboriginal deaths in Victoria from 1835 to 1855, 200 were from inter-tribal violence.
Broome estimates the total death toll from settler-Aboriginal conflict between 1788 and 1928 as 1,700 settlers and 17–20,000 Aboriginal people. Reynolds has suggested a higher ""guesstimate"" of 3,000 settlers and up to 30,000 Aboriginals killed. A project team at the University of Newcastle, Australia, has reached a preliminary estimate of 8,270 Aboriginal deaths in frontier massacres from 1788 to 1930."
History of Australia,"Accommodation and protection
In the first two years of settlement the Aboriginal people of Sydney mostly avoided the newcomers.  In November 1790, Bennelong led the survivors of several clans into Sydney, 18 months after the smallpox epidemic that had devastated the Aboriginal population. Bungaree, a Kuringgai man, joined Matthew Flinders in his circumnavigation of Australia from 1801 to 1803, playing an important role as emissary to the various Indigenous peoples they encountered.
Governor Macquarie attempted to assimilate Aboriginal people, providing land grants, establishing Aboriginal farms, and founding a Native Institution to provide education to Aboriginal children. However, by the 1820s the Native Institution and Aboriginal farms had failed. Aboriginal people continued to live on vacant waterfront land and on the fringes of the Sydney settlement, adapting traditional practices to the new semi-urban environment."
History of Australia,"Following escalating frontier conflict, Protectors of Aborigines were appointed in South Australia and the Port Phillip District in 1839, and in Western Australia in 1840. The aim was to extend the protection of British law to Aboriginal people, to distribute rations, and to provide education, instruction in Christianity, and occupational training. However, by 1857 the protection offices had been closed due to their cost and failure to meets their goals. In 1825, the NSW governor granted 10,000 acres for an Aboriginal Christian mission at Lake Macquarie. In the 1830s and early 1840s there were also missions in the Wellington Valley, Port Phillip and Moreton Bay. The settlement for Aboriginal Tasmanians on Flinders Island operated effectively as a mission under George Robinson from 1835 to 1838.
In New South Wales, 116 Aboriginal reserves were established between 1860 and 1894. Most reserves allowed Aboriginal people a degree of autonomy and freedom to enter and leave. In contrast, the Victorian Board for the Protection of Aborigines (created in 1869) had extensive power to regulate the employment, education and place of residence of Aboriginal Victorians, and closely managed the five reserves and missions established since self government in 1858. In 1886, the protection board gained the power to exclude ""half caste"" Aboriginal people from missions and stations. The Victorian legislation was the forerunner of the racial segregation policies of other Australian governments from the 1890s.
In more densely settled areas, most Aboriginal people who had lost control of their land lived on reserves and missions, or on the fringes of cities and towns. In pastoral districts the British Waste Land Act of 1848 gave traditional landowners limited rights to live, hunt and gather food on Crown land under pastoral leases. Many Aboriginal groups camped on pastoral stations where Aboriginal men were often employed as shepherds and stockmen. These groups were able to retain a connection with their lands and maintain aspects of their traditional culture.
Foreign pearlers moved into the Torres Strait Islands from 1868 bringing exotic diseases which halved the Indigenous population. In 1871, the London Missionary Society began operating in the islands and most Torres Strait Islanders converted to Christianity which they considered compatible with their beliefs. Queensland annexed the islands in 1879."
History of Australia,"From autonomy to federation
Colonial self-government and the gold rushes
Towards representative government
Imperial legislation in 1823 had provided for a Legislative Council nominated by the governor of New South Wales, and a new Supreme Court, providing additional limits to the power of governors. A number of prominent colonial figures, including William Wentworth. campaigned for a greater degree of self-government, although there were divisions about the extent to which a future legislative body should be popularly elected. Other issues included traditional British political rights, land policy, transportation and whether a large population of convicts and former convicts could be trusted with self-government. The Australian Patriotic Association was formed in 1835 by Wentworth and William Bland to promote representative government for New South Wales.Transportation to New South Wales was suspended in 1840. In 1842 Britain granted limited representative government to the colony by reforming the Legislative Council so that two-thirds of its members would be elected by male voters. However, a property qualification meant that only 20 per cent of males were eligible to vote in the first Legislative Council elections in 1843.
The increasing number of free settlers and people born in the colonies led to further agitation for liberal and democratic reforms. In the Port Phillip District there was agitation for representative government and independence from New South Wales. In 1850, Britain granted Van Diemen's Land, South Australia and the newly created colony of Victoria semi-elected Legislative Councils on the New South Wales model."
History of Australia,"The gold rushes of the 1850s
In February 1851, Edward Hargraves discovered gold near Bathurst, New South Wales. Further discoveries were made later that year in Victoria, where the richest gold fields were found. New South Wales and Victoria introduced a gold mining licence with a monthly fee, the revenue being used to offset the cost of providing infrastructure, administration and policing of the goldfields.
The gold rush initially caused inflation and labour shortages as male workers moved to the goldfields. Immigrants als poured in from Britain, Europe, the United States and China. The Australian population increased from 430,000 in 1851 to 1,170,000 in 1861. Victoria became the most populous colony and Melbourne the largest city.
Chinese migration was a particular concern for colonial officials due to the widespread belief that it represented a danger to white Australian living standards and morality. Colonial governments responded by imposing taxes and restrictions on Chinese migrants and residents. Anti-Chinese riots erupted on the Victorian goldfields in 1856 and in New South Wales in 1860."
History of Australia,"The Eureka stockade
Faced with increasing competition, Victorian miners increasingly complaint about the licence fee, corrupt and heavy-handed officials, and the lack of voting rights for itinerant miners. Protests intensified in October 1854 when three miners were arrested following a riot at Ballarat. Protesters formed the Ballarat Reform League to support the arrested men and demanded manhood suffrage, reform of the mining licence and administration, and land reform to promote small farms. Further protests followed and protesters built a stockade on the Eureka Field at Ballarat. On 3 December troops overran the stockade, killing about 20 protesters. Five troops were killed and 12 seriously wounded.
Following a Royal Commission, the monthly licence was replaced with a cheaper annual miner's right which gave holders the right to vote and build a dwelling on the goldfields. The administration of the Victorian goldfields was also reformed. The Eureka rebellion soon became a part of Australian nationalist mythology."
History of Australia,"Self-government and democracy
Elections for the semi-representative Legislative Councils, held in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Van Diemen's Land in 1851, produced a greater number of liberal members who agitated for full self-government. In 1852, the British Government announced that convict transportation to Van Diemen's Land would cease and invited the eastern colonies to draft constitutions enabling self-government.
The constitutions for New South Wales, Victoria and Van Diemen's Land (renamed Tasmania in 1856) gained Royal Assent in 1855, that for South Australia in 1856. The constitutions varied, but each created a lower house elected on a broad male franchise and an upper house which was either appointed for life (New South Wales) or elected on a more restricted property franchise. When Queensland became a separate colony in 1859 it immediately became self-governing. Western Australia was granted self-government in 1890.
The secret ballot was adopted in Tasmania, Victoria and South Australia in 1856, followed by New South Wales (1858), Queensland (1859) and Western Australia (1877). South Australia introduced universal male suffrage for its lower house in 1856, followed by Victoria in 1857, New South Wales (1858), Queensland (1872), Western Australia (1893) and Tasmania (1900). Queensland excluded Aboriginal males from voting in 1885.  In Western Australia a property qualification for voting existed for male Aboriginals, Asians, Africans and people of mixed descent.
Societies to promote women's suffrage were formed in Victoria in 1884, South Australia in 1888 and New South Wales in 1891. The Women's Christian Temperance Union also established branches in most Australian colonies in the 1880s, promoting votes for women and a range of social causes. Female suffrage, and the right to stand for office, was first won in South Australia in 1895. Women won the vote in Western Australia in 1899, with racial restrictions. Women in the rest of Australia only won full rights to vote and to stand for elected office in the decade after Federation, although there were some racial restrictions."
History of Australia,"The long boom (1860 to 1890)
From the 1850s to 1871 gold was Australia's largest export and allowed the colony to import a range of consumer and capital goods. The increase in population in the decades following the gold rush stimulated demand for housing, consumer goods, services and urban infrastructure."
History of Australia,"In the 1860s, New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia introduced Selection Acts intended to promote family farms and mixed farming and grazing. Improvements in farming technology and the introduction of crops adapted to Australian conditions eventually led to the diversification of rural land use. The expansion of the railways from the 1860s allowed wheat to be cheaply transported in bulk, stimulating the development of a wheat belt from South Australia to Queensland.The period 1850 to 1880 saw a revival in bushranging. The resurgence of bushranging from the 1850s drew on the grievances of the rural poor (several members of the Kelly gang, the most famous bushrangers, were the sons of impoverished small farmers). The exploits of Ned Kelly and his gang garnered considerable local community support and extensive national press coverage at the time. After Kelly's capture and execution for murder in 1880 his story inspired numerous works of art, literature and popular culture and continuing debate about the extent to which he was a rebel fighting social injustice and oppressive police, or a murderous criminal.
By the 1880s half the Australian population lived in towns, making Australia more urbanised than the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada. Between 1870 and 1890 average income per person in Australia was more than 50 per cent higher than that of the United States, giving Australia one of the highest living standards in the world.
The size of the government sector almost doubled from 10 per cent of national expenditure in 1850 to 19 per cent in 1890. Colonial governments spent heavily on infrastructure such as railways, ports, telegraph, schools and urban services. Much of the money for this infrastructure was borrowed on the London financial markets, but land-rich governments also sold land to finance expenditure and keep taxes low.
In 1856, building workers in Sydney and Melbourne were the first in the world to win the eight hour working day. The 1880s saw trade unions grow and spread to lower skilled workers and also across colonial boundaries. By 1890 about 20 per cent of male workers belonged to a union, one of the highest rates in the world.
Economic growth was accompanied by expansion into northern Australia. Gold was discovered in northern Queensland in the 1860s and 1870s, and in the Kimberley and Pilbara regions of Western Australia in the 1880s. Sheep and cattle runs spread to northern Queensland and on to the Gulf Country of the Northern Territory and the Kimberley region of Western Australia in the 1870s and 1880s. Sugar plantations also expanded in northern Queensland during the same period.
From the late 1870s trade unions, Anti-Chinese Leagues and other community groups campaigned against Chinese immigration and low-wage Chinese labour. Following intercolonial conferences on the issue in 1880–81 and 1888, colonial governments responded with a series of laws which progressively restricted Chinese immigration and citizenship rights."
History of Australia,"1890s depression
Falling wool prices and the collapse of a speculative property bubble in Melbourne heralded the end of the long boom. A number of major banks suspended business and the economy contracted by 20 per cent from 1891 to 1895. Unemployment rose to almost a third of the workforce. The depression was followed by the ""Federation Drought"" from 1895 to 1903.
In 1890, a strike in the shipping industry spread to wharves, railways, mines and shearing sheds. Employers responded by locking out workers and employing non-union labour, and colonial governments intervened with police and troops. The strike failed, as did subsequent strikes of shearers in 1891 and 1894, and miners in 1892 and 1896.
The defeat of the 1890 Maritime Strike led trade unions to form political parties. In New South Wales, the Labor Electoral League won a quarter of seats in the elections of 1891 and held the balance of power between the Free Trade Party and the Protectionist Party. Labor parties also won seats in the South Australian and Queensland elections of 1893. The world's first Labor government was formed in Queensland in 1899, but it lasted only a week.
At an Intercolonial Conference in 1896, the colonies agreed to extend restrictions on Chinese immigration to ""all coloured races"". Labor supported the Reid government of New South Wales in passing the Coloured Races Restriction and Regulation Act, a forerunner of the White Australia Policy. However, after Britain and Japan voiced objections to the legislation, New South Wales, Tasmania and Western Australia instead introduced European language tests to restrict ""undesirable"" immigrants."
History of Australia,"Growth of nationalism
By the late 1880s, a majority of people living in the Australian colonies were native born, although more than 90 per cent were of British and Irish heritage. The Australian Natives Association, campaigned for an Australian federation within the British Empire, promoted Australian literature and history, and successfully lobbied for the 26 January to be Australia's national day."
History of Australia,"Many nationalists spoke of Australians sharing common blood as members of the British ""race"". Henry Parkes stated in 1890, ""The crimson thread of kinship runs through us all...we must unite as one great Australian people.""
A minority of nationalists saw a distinctive Australian identity rather than shared ""Britishness"" as the basis for a unified Australia. Some, such as the radical magazine The Bulletin and the Tasmanian Attorney-General Andrew Inglis Clark, were republicans, while others were prepared to accept a fully independent country of Australia with only a ceremonial role for the British monarch.
A unified Australia was usually associated with a white Australia. In 1887, The Bulletin declared that all white men who left the religious and class divisions of the old world behind were Australians. A white Australia also meant the exclusion of cheap Asian labour, an idea strongly promoted by the labour movement.
The growing nationalist sentiment in the 1880s and 1890s was associated with the development of a distinctively Australian art and literature. Artists of the Heidelberg School such as Arthur Streeton, Frederick McCubbin and Tom Roberts followed the example of the European Impressionists by painting in the open air. They applied themselves to capturing the light and colour of the Australian landscape and exploring the distinctive and the universal in the ""mixed life of the city and the characteristic life of the station and the bush"".
In the 1890s Henry Lawson, Banjo Paterson and other writers associated with The Bulletin produced poetry and prose exploring the nature of bush life and themes of independence, stoicism, masculine labour, egalitarianism, anti-authoritarianism and mateship. Protagonists were often shearers, boundary riders and itinerant bush workers. In the following decade Lawson, Paterson and other writers such as Steele Rudd, Miles Franklin, and Joseph Furphy helped forge a distinctive national literature. Paterson's ballad ""The Man from Snowy River"" (1890) achieved popularity, and his lyrics to the song ""Waltzing Matilda"" (c. 1895) helped make it the unofficial national anthem for many Australians."
History of Australia,"Federation movement
Growing nationalist sentiment coincided with business concerns about the economic inefficiency of customs barriers between the colonies, the duplication of services by colonial governments and the lack of a single national market for goods and services. Colonial concerns about German and French ambitions in the region also led to British pressure for a federated Australian defence force and a unified, single-gauge railway network for defence purposes."
History of Australia,"A Federal Council of Australasia was formed in 1885 but it had few powers and New South Wales and South Australia declined to join.
An obstacle to federation was the fear of the smaller colonies that they would be dominated by New South Wales and Victoria. Queensland, in particular, although generally favouring a white Australia policy, wished to maintain an exception for South Sea Islander workers in the sugar cane industry.
Another major barrier was the free trade policies of New South Wales which conflicted with the protectionist policies dominant in Victoria and most of the other colonies. Nevertheless, the NSW premier Henry Parkes was a strong advocate of federation and his Tenterfield Oration in 1889 was pivotal in gathering support for the cause.
In 1891, a National Australasian Convention was held in Sydney, with all the colonies and New Zealand represented. A draft constitutional Bill was adopted, but the worsening economic depression and opposition in colonial parliaments delayed progress.
Citizen Federation Leagues were formed, and at a conference in Corowa in July 1893 they developed a new plan for federation involving a constitutional convention with directly elected delegates and a referendum in each colony to endorse the proposed constitution. The new NSW premier, George Reid, endorsed the ""Corowa plan"" and in 1895 convinced the majority of other premiers to adopt it.
All of the colonies except Queensland sent representatives to a constitutional convention which held sessions in 1897 and 1898. The convention drafted a proposed constitution for a Commonwealth of federated states under the British Crown.
Referendums held in 1898 resulted in solid majorities for the constitution in Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania. However, the referendum failed to gain the required majority in New South Wales. The premiers of the other colonies agreed to a number of concessions to New South Wales (particularly that the future Commonwealth capital would be located in that state), and in 1899 further referendums were held in all the colonies except Western Australia. All resulted in yes votes.
In March 1900, delegates were dispatched to London, including leading federation advocates Edmund Barton and Alfred Deakin. Following negotiations with the British government, the federation Bill was passed by the imperial parliament on 5 July 1900 and gained Royal Assent on 9 July. Western Australia subsequently voted to join the new federation."
History of Australia,"From federation to war (1901—1914)
The Commonwealth of Australia was proclaimed by the Governor-General, Lord Hopetoun on 1 January 1901, and Barton was sworn in as Australia's first prime minister. The first Federal elections were held in March 1901 and resulted in a narrow plurality for the Protectionist Party over the Free Trade Party with the Australian Labor Party (ALP) polling third. Labor declared it would support the party which offered concessions to its program, and Barton's Protectionists formed a government, with Deakin as Attorney-General.
The Immigration Restriction Act 1901 was one of the first laws passed by the new Australian parliament. This centrepiece of the White Australia policy, the act used a dictation test in a European language to exclude Asian migrants, who were considered a threat to Australia's living standards and majority British culture.
With federation, the Commonwealth inherited the small defence forces of the six former Australian colonies. By 1901, units of soldiers from all six Australian colonies had been active as part of British forces in the Boer War. When the British government asked for more troops from Australia in early 1902, the Australian government obliged with a national contingent. Some 16,500 men had volunteered for service by the war's end in June 1902."
History of Australia,"In 1902, the government introduced female suffrage in the Commonwealth jurisdiction, but at the same time excluded Aboriginal people from the franchise unless they already had the vote in a state jurisdiction."
History of Australia,"The government also introduced a tariff on imports, designed to raise revenue and protect Australian industry. However, disagreements over industrial relations legislation led to the fall of Deakin's Protectionist government in April 1904 and the appointment of the first national Labor government under prime minister Chris Watson. The Watson government itself fell in April and a Free Trade government under prime minister Reid successfully introduced legislation for a Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Court to settle interstate industrial disputes.
In July 1905, Deakin formed a Protectionist government with the support of Labor. The new government embarked on a series of social reforms and a program dubbed ""new protection"" under which tariff protection for Australian industries would be linked to their provision of ""fair and reasonable"" wages. In the Harvester case of 1907, H. B. Higgins of the Conciliation and Arbitration Court set a basic wage based on the needs of a male breadwinner supporting a wife and three children. By 1914 the Commonwealth and all the states had introduced systems to settle industrial disputes and fix wages and conditions.
The base of the Labor Party was the Australian Trade Union movement which grew from under 100,000 members in 1901 to more than half a million in 1914. The party also drew considerable support from clerical workers, Catholics and small farmers. In 1905, the Labor party adopted objectives at the federal level which included the ""cultivation of an Australian sentiment based upon the maintenance of racial purity"" and ""the collective ownership of monopolies"". In the same year, the Queensland branch of the party adopted an overtly socialist objective."
History of Australia,"After the December 1906 elections Deakin's Protectionist government remained in power, but following the passage of legislation for old age pensions and a new protective tariff in 1908, Labor withdrew its support for the government. In November, Andrew Fisher became the second Labor prime minister. In response, opposition parties formed an anti-Labor coalition and Deakin became prime minister in June 1909.
In the elections of May 1910, Labor won a majority in both houses of parliament and Fisher again became prime minister. The Labor government introduced a series of reforms including a progressive land tax (1910), invalid pensions (1910) and a maternity allowance (1912). The government established the Commonwealth Bank (1911) but referendums to nationalise monopolies and extend Commonwealth trade and commerce powers were defeated in 1911 and 1913. The Commonwealth took over responsibility for the Northern Territory from South Australia in 1911. The government increased defence spending, expanding the system of compulsory military training which had been introduced by the previous government and establishing the Royal Australian Navy.
The new Commonwealth Liberal Party won the May 1913 elections and former Labor leader Joseph Cook became prime minister. The Cook government's attempt to pass legislation abolishing preferential treatment for union members in the Commonwealth Public Service triggered a double dissolution of parliament. Labor comfortably won the September 1914 elections and Fisher resumed office.
The prewar period saw strong growth in the population and economy. The economy grew by 75 per cent, with rural industries, construction, manufacturing and government services leading the way. The population increased from four million in 1901 to five million in 1914. From 1910 to 1914 just under 300,000 migrants arrived, all white, and almost all from Britain."
History of Australia,"First World War
Australia at war 1914–18
When the United Kingdom declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, the declaration automatically involved all of Britain's colonies and dominions.  Both major parties offered Britain 20,000 Australian troops. As the Defence Act 1903 precluded sending conscripts overseas, a new volunteer force, the Australian Imperial Force (AIF), was raised to meet this commitment."
History of Australia,"Public enthusiasm for the war was high, and the initial quota for the AIF was quickly filled. The troops left for Egypt on 1 November 1914, one of the escort ships, HMAS Sydney, sinking the German cruiser Emden along the way. Meanwhile, in September, a separate Australian expeditionary force had captured German New Guinea.After arriving in Egypt, the AIF was incorporated into an Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC). The Anzacs formed part of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force with the task of opening the Dardanelles to allied battleships, threatening Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire which had entered the war on the side of the Central Powers. The Anzacs, along with French, British and Indian troops, landed on the Gallipoli peninsula on 25 April 1915. The Australian and New Zealand position at Anzac Cove was vulnerable to attack and the troops suffered heavy losses in establishing a narrow beachhead. After it had become clear that the expeditionary force would be unable to achieve its objectives, the Anzacs were evacuated in December, followed by the British and French in early January.
The Australians suffered about 8,000 deaths in the campaign. Australian war correspondents variously emphasised the bravery and fighting qualities of the Australians and the errors of their British commanders. The 25 April soon became an Australian national holiday known as Anzac Day, centring on themes of ""nationhood, brotherhood and sacrifice""."
History of Australia,"In 1916, five infantry divisions of the AIF were sent to the Western Front. In July 1916, at Fromelles, the AIF suffered 5,533 casualties in 24 hours, the most costly single encounter in Australian military history. Elsewhere on the Somme, 23,000 Australians were killed or wounded in seven weeks of attacks on German positions. In Spring 1917, Australian troops suffered 10,000 casualties at the First Battle of Bullecourt and the Second Battle of Bullecourt. In the summer and autumn of 1917, Australian troops also sustained heavy losses during the British offensive around Ypres. Overall, almost 22,000 Australian troops were killed in 1917.In November 1917 the five Australian divisions were united in the Australian Corps, and in May 1918 the Australian general John Monash took over command. The Australian Corps was heavily involved in halting the German Spring Offensive of 1918 and in the allied counter-offensive of August that year.
In the Middle East, the Australian Light Horse brigades were prominent at the Battle of Romani in August 1916. In 1917, they participated in the allied advance through the Sinai Peninsula and into Palestine. In 1918, they pressed on through Palestine and into Syria in an advance that led to the Ottoman surrender on 31 October.
By the time the war ended on 11 November 1918, 324,000 Australians had served overseas. Casualties included 60,000 dead and 150,000 wounded—the highest casualty rate of any allied force. Australian troops also had higher rates of unauthorised absence, crime and imprisonment than other allied forces."
History of Australia,"The home front
In October 1914, the Fisher Labor government introduced the War Precautions Act which gave it the power to make regulations ""for securing the public safety and defence of the Commonwealth"". After Billy Hughes replaced Fisher as prime minister in October 1915, regulations under the act were increasingly used to censor publications, penalise public speech and suppress organisations that the government considered detrimental to the war effort. Anti-German leagues were formed and 7,000 Germans and other ""enemy aliens"" were sent to internment camps during the war.
The economy contracted by 10 per cent during the course of hostilities. Inflation rose in the first two years of war and real wages fell. Lower wages and perceptions of profiteering by some businesses led, in 1916, to a wave of strikes by miners, waterside workers and shearers.
Enlistments in the military also declined, falling from 35,000 a month at its peak in 1915 to 6,000 a month in 1916. In response, Hughes decided to hold a referendum on conscription for overseas service. Following the narrow defeat of the October 1916 conscription referendum, Hughes and 23 of his supporters left the parliamentary Labor party and formed a new Nationalist government with the former opposition. The Nationalists comfortably won the May 1917 elections and Hughes continued as prime minister.
From August to October 1917 there was a major strike of New South Wales railway, transport, waterside and coal workers which was defeated after the Commonwealth and New South Wales governments arrested strike leaders and organised special constables and non-union labour. A second referendum on conscription was also defeated in December. Enlistments in 1918 were the lowest for the war, leading to the disbandment of 12 battalions and mutinies in the AIF."
History of Australia,"Paris peace conference
Hughes attended the Imperial War Conference and Imperial War Cabinet in London from June 1918 where Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa won British support for their separate representation at the eventual peace conference. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Hughes argued that Germany should pay the full cost of the war, but ultimately gained only £5 million in war reparations for Australia. Australia and the other self-governing British dominions won the right to become full members of the new League of Nations, and Australia obtained a special League of Nations mandate over German New Guinea allowing Australia to control trade and immigration. Australia also gained a 42 per cent share of the formerly German-ruled island of Nauru, giving access to its rich superphosphate reserves. Australia argued successfully against a Japanese proposal for a racial equality clause in the League of Nations covenant, as Hughes feared that it would jeopardise the White Australia policy. As a signatory to the Treaty of Versailles and a full member of the League of Nations, Australia took an important step towards international recognition as a sovereign nation."
History of Australia,"Inter-war years
1920s: men, money and markets
After the war, Prime Minister Billy Hughes led a new conservative force, the Nationalist Party, formed from the old Liberal party and breakaway elements of Labor (of which he was the most prominent), after the deep and bitter split over Conscription. An estimated 12,000 Australians died as a result of the Spanish flu pandemic of 1919, almost certainly brought home by returning soldiers."
History of Australia,"The success of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia posed a threat in the eyes of many Australians, although to a small group of socialists it was an inspiration. The Communist Party of Australia was formed in 1920 and, though remaining electorally insignificant, it obtained some influence in the trade union movement and was banned during World War II for its support for the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the Menzies Government unsuccessfully tried to ban it again during the Korean War. Despite splits, the party remained active until its dissolution at the end of the Cold War.
The Country Party (today's National Party) formed in 1920 to promulgate its version of agrarianism, which it called ""Countrymindedness"". The goal was to enhance the status of the graziers (operators of big sheep ranches) and small farmers, and secure subsidies for them. Enduring longer than any other major party save the Labor party, it has generally operated in coalition with the Liberal Party (since the 1940s), becoming a major party of government in Australia—particularly in Queensland.
Other significant after-effects of the war included ongoing industrial unrest, which included the 1923 Victorian Police strike. Industrial disputes characterised the 1920s in Australia. Other major strikes occurred on the waterfront, in the coalmining and timber industries in the late 1920s. The union movement had established the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) in 1927 in response to the Nationalist government's efforts to change working conditions and reduce the power of the unions.
The consumerism, entertainment culture, and new technologies that characterised the 1920s in the United States were also found in Australia. Prohibition was not implemented in Australia, though anti-alcohol forces were successful in having hotels closed after 6 pm, and closed altogether in a few city suburbs.
The fledgling film industry declined through the decade, despite more than 2 million Australians attending cinemas weekly at 1250 venues. A Royal Commission in 1927 failed to assist and the industry that had begun so brightly with the release of the world's first feature film, The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), atrophied until its revival in the 1970s.
Stanley Bruce became Prime Minister in 1923, when members of the Nationalist Party Government voted to remove W.M. Hughes. Speaking in early 1925, Bruce summed up the priorities and optimism of many Australians, saying that ""men, money and markets accurately defined the essential requirements of Australia"" and that he was seeking such from Britain. The migration campaign of the 1920s, operated by the Development and Migration Commission, brought almost 300,000 Britons to Australia, although schemes to settle migrants and returned soldiers ""on the land"" were generally not a success. ""The new irrigation areas in Western Australia and the Dawson Valley of Queensland proved disastrous""
In Australia, the costs of major investment had traditionally been met by state and Federal governments and heavy borrowing from overseas was made by the governments in the 1920s. A Loan Council was set up in 1928 to co-ordinate loans, three-quarters of which came from overseas. Despite Imperial Preference, a balance of trade was not successfully achieved with Britain. ""In the five years from 1924. .. to ... 1928, Australia bought 43.4% of its imports from Britain and sold 38.7% of its exports. Wheat and wool made up more than two-thirds of all Australian exports"", a dangerous reliance on just two export commodities.
Australia embraced the new technologies of transport and communication. Coastal sailing ships were finally abandoned in favour of steam, and improvements in rail and motor transport heralded dramatic changes in work and leisure. In 1918, there were 50,000 cars and lorries in the whole of Australia. By 1929 there were 500,000. The stage coach company Cobb and Co, established in 1853, finally closed in 1924. In 1920, the Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Service (to become the Australian airline Qantas) was established. The Reverend John Flynn, founded the Royal Flying Doctor Service, the world's first air ambulance in 1928. Daredevil pilot, Sir Charles Kingsford Smith pushed the new flying machines to the limit, completing a round Australia circuit in 1927 and in 1928 traversed the Pacific Ocean, via Hawaii and Fiji from the US to Australia in the aircraft Southern Cross. He went on to global fame and a series of aviation records before vanishing on a night flight to Singapore in 1935."
History of Australia,"Dominion status
Australia achieved independent Sovereign Nation status after World War I, under the Statute of Westminster. This formalised the Balfour Declaration of 1926, a report resulting from the 1926 Imperial Conference of British Empire leaders in London, which defined Dominions of the British empire in the following way: ""They are autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations.""; however, Australia did not ratify the Statute of Westminster until 1942. According to historian Frank Crowley, this was because Australians had little interest in redefining their relationship with Britain until the crisis of World War II.
The Australia Act 1986 removed any remaining links between the British Parliament and the Australian states.
From 1 February 1927 until 12 June 1931, the Northern Territory was divided up as North Australia and Central Australia at latitude 20°S. New South Wales has had one further territory surrendered, namely Jervis Bay Territory comprising 6,677 hectares, in 1915. The external territories were added: Norfolk Island (1914); Ashmore Island, Cartier Islands (1931); the Australian Antarctic Territory transferred from Britain (1933); Heard Island, McDonald Islands, and Macquarie Island transferred to Australia from Britain (1947).
The Federal Capital Territory (FCT) was formed from New South Wales in 1911 to provide a location for the proposed new federal capital of Canberra (Melbourne was the seat of government from 1901 to 1927). The FCT was renamed the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) in 1938. The Northern Territory was transferred from the control of the South Australian government to the Commonwealth in 1911."
History of Australia,"Great Depression
Australia was deeply affected by the Great Depression of the 1930s, particularly due to its heavy dependence on exports, especially primary products such as wool and wheat. Exposed by continuous borrowing to fund capital works in the 1920s, the Australian and state governments were ""already far from secure in 1927, when most economic indicators took a turn for the worse. Australia's dependence of exports left her extraordinarily vulnerable to world market fluctuations"", according to economic historian Geoff Spenceley. Debt by the state of New South Wales accounted for almost half of Australia's accumulated debt by December 1927. The situation caused alarm amongst a few politicians and economists, notably Edward Shann of the University of Western Australia, but most political, union and business leaders were reluctant to admit to serious problems. In 1926, Australian Finance magazine described loans as occurring with a ""disconcerting frequency"" unrivalled in the British Empire: ""It may be a loan to pay off maturing loans or a loan to pay the interest on existing loans, or a loan to repay temporary loans from the bankers..."" Thus, well before the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the Australian economy was already facing significant difficulties. As the economy slowed in 1927, so did manufacturing and the country slipped into recession as profits slumped and unemployment rose."
History of Australia,"At elections held in October 1929, the Labor Party was swept into power in a landslide victory; Stanley Bruce, the former prime minister, lost his own seat. The new Prime Minister, James Scullin, and his largely inexperienced government were almost immediately faced with a series of crises. Hamstrung by their lack of control of the Senate, a lack of control of the banking system and divisions within their party about how best to deal with the situation, the government was forced to accept solutions that eventually split the party, as it had in 1917. Some gravitated to New South Wales Premier Lang, others to Prime Minister Scullin.
Various ""plans"" to resolve the crisis were suggested; Sir Otto Niemeyer, a representative of the English banks who visited in mid-1930, proposed a deflationary plan, involving cuts to government spending and wages. Treasurer Ted Theodore proposed a mildly inflationary plan, while the Labor Premier of New South Wales, Jack Lang, proposed a radical plan which repudiated overseas debt. The ""Premier's Plan"" finally accepted by federal and state governments in June 1931, followed the deflationary model advocated by Niemeyer and included a reduction of 20 per cent in government spending, a reduction in bank interest rates and an increase in taxation. In March 1931, Lang announced that interest due in London would not be paid and the Federal government stepped in to meet the debt. In May, the Government Savings Bank of New South Wales was forced to close. The Melbourne Premiers' Conference agreed to cut wages and pensions as part of a severe deflationary policy but Lang renounced the plan. The grand opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932 provided little respite to the growing crisis straining the young federation. With multimillion-pound debts mounting, public demonstrations and move and counter-move by Lang and then Scullin, then Lyons federal governments, the Governor of New South Wales, Philip Game, had been examining Lang's instruction not to pay money into the Federal Treasury. Game judged it was illegal. Lang refused to withdraw his order and, on 13 May, he was dismissed by Governor Game. At June elections, Lang Labor's seats collapsed.
May 1931 had seen the creation of a new conservative political force, the United Australia Party formed by breakaway members of the Labor Party combining with the Nationalist Party. At Federal elections in December 1931, the United Australia Party, led by former Labor member Joseph Lyons, easily won office. They remained in power until September 1940. The Lyons government has often been credited with steering recovery from the depression, although just how much of this was owed to their policies remains contentious. Stuart Macintyre also points out that although Australian GDP grew from £386.9 million to £485.9 million between 1931 and 1932 and 1938–39, real domestic product per head of population was still ""but a few shillings greater in 1938–39 (£70.12), than it had been in 1920–21 (£70.04)."""
History of Australia,"Australia recovered relatively quickly from the financial downturn of 1929–1930, with recovery beginning around 1932. The Prime Minister, Joseph Lyons, favoured the tough economic measures of the Premiers' Plan, pursued an orthodox fiscal policy and refused to accept the proposals of the Premier of New South Wales, Jack Lang, to default on overseas debt repayments. According to author Anne Henderson of the Sydney Institute, Lyons held a steadfast belief in ""the need to balance budgets, lower costs to business and restore confidence"" and the Lyons period gave Australia ""stability and eventual growth"" between the drama of the Depression and the outbreak of the Second World War. A lowering of wages was enforced and industry tariff protections maintained, which together with cheaper raw materials during the 1930s saw a shift from agriculture to manufacturing as the chief employer of the Australian economy—a shift which was consolidated by increased investment by the commonwealth government into defence and armaments manufacture. Lyons saw restoration of Australia's exports as the key to economic recovery."
History of Australia,"The extent of unemployment in Australia, often cited as peaking at 29 per cent in 1932 is debated. ""Trade union figures are the most often quoted, but the people who were there...regard the figures as wildly understating the extent of unemployment"" wrote historian Wendy Lowenstein in her collection of oral histories of the depression; however, David Potts argued that ""over the last thirty years ...historians of the period have either uncritically accepted that figure (29% in the peak year 1932) including rounding it up to 'a third', or they have passionately argued that a third is far too low."" Potts himself though suggested a peak national figure of 25 per cent unemployed. Measurement is difficult in part because there was great variation, geographically, by age and by gender, in the level of unemployment. Statistics collected by historian Peter Spearritt show 17.8 per cent of men and 7.9 per cent of women unemployed in 1933 in the comfortable Sydney suburb of Woollahra. This is not to say that 81.9 per cent of women were working but that 7.9 per cent of the women interested/looking for work were unable to find it, a much lower figure than maybe first thought, as many women stayed home and were not in the job force in those years, especially if they were unable to find work.
In the working class suburb of Paddington, 41.3 per cent of men and 20.7 per cent of women were listed as unemployed. Geoffrey Spenceley stated that apart from variation between men and women, unemployment was also much higher in some industries, such as the building and construction industry, and comparatively low in the public administrative and professional sectors.
In country areas, worst hit were small farmers in the wheat belts as far afield as north-east Victoria and Western Australia, who saw more and more of their income absorbed by interest payments.
Extraordinary sporting successes did something to alleviate the spirits of Australians during the economic downturn. In a Sheffield Shield cricket match at the Sydney Cricket Ground in 1930, Don Bradman, a young New South Welshman of just 21 years of age wrote his name into the record books by smashing the previous highest batting score in first-class cricket with 452 runs not out in just 415 minutes. The rising star's world beating cricketing exploits were to provide Australians with much needed joy through the emerging Great Depression in Australia and post-World War II recovery. Between 1929 and 1931 the racehorse Phar Lap dominated Australia's racing industry, at one stage winning fourteen races in a row. Famous victories included the 1930 Melbourne Cup, following an assassination attempt and carrying 9 stone 12 pounds weight. Phar Lap sailed for the United States in 1931, going on to win North America's richest race, the Agua Caliente Handicap in 1932. Soon after, on the cusp of US success, Phar Lap developed suspicious symptoms and died. Theories swirled that the champion race horse had been poisoned and a devoted Australian public went into shock. The 1938 British Empire Games were held in Sydney from 5–12 February, timed to coincide with Sydney's sesqui-centenary (150 years since the foundation of British settlement in Australia)."
History of Australia,"Indigenous policy
Following federation Aboriginal affairs was a state responsibility, although the Commonwealth became responsible for the Aboriginal population of the Northern Territory from 1911. By that date the Commonwealth and all states except Tasmania had passed legislation establishing Protectors of Aborigines and Protection Boards with extensive powers to regulate the lives of Aboriginal Australians including their ownership of property, place of residence, employment, sexual relationships and custody of their children. Reserves were established, ostensibly for the protection of the Aboriginal population who had been dispossessed of their land. Church groups also ran missions throughout Australia providing shelter, food, religious instruction and elementary schooling for Indigenous people.
Some officials were concerned by the growing number of Aboriginal children of mixed heritage, particularly in northern Australia where large Indigenous, South Sea Islander and Asian populations were seen as inconsistent with the white Australia policy. Laws concerning Aboriginal Australians were progressively tightened to make it easier for officials to remove Aboriginal children of mixed descent from their parents and place them in reserves, missions, institutions and employment with white employers.
The segregation of Aboriginal people on reserves and in institutions was never systematically accomplished due to funding constraints, differing policy priorities in the states and territories, and resistance from Aboriginal people. In the more densely settled areas of Australia, about 20 per cent of Aboriginal people lived on reserves in the 1920s. The majority lived in camps on the fringes of country towns and a small percentage lived in cities. During the Great Depression more Aboriginal people moved to reserves and missions for food and shelter. By 1941 almost half of the Aboriginal population of New South Wales lived on reserves.
In northern Australia, the majority of employed Aboriginal people worked in the pastoral industry where they lived in camps, often with their extended families. Many also camped on the margins of towns and reserves where they could avoid most of the controls imposed by the administrators of reserves, compounds and missions."
History of Australia,"The 1937 Native Welfare conference of state and Commonwealth officials endorsed a policy of biological absorption of mixed-descent Aboriginal Australians into the white community.[T]he destiny of the natives of aboriginal origin, but not of the full blood, lies in their ultimate absorption by the people of the Commonwealth and it therefore recommends that all efforts be directed to that end.The officials saw the policy of Aboriginal assimilation by absorption into the white community as progressive, aimed at eventually achieving civil and economic equality for mixed-descent Aboriginal people.... efforts of all State authorities should be directed towards the education of children of mixed aboriginal blood at white standards, and their subsequent employment under the same conditions as whites with a view to their taking their place in the white community on an equal footing with the whites.The following decades saw an increase in the number of Aboriginal Australians of mixed descent removed from their families, although the states and territories progressively adopted a policy of cultural, rather than biological, assimilation, and justified removals on the grounds of child welfare. In 1940, New South Wales became the first state to introduce a child welfare model whereby Aboriginal children of mixed descent were removed from their families under general welfare provisions by court order. Other jurisdictions introduced a welfare model after the war."
History of Australia,"Second World War
Defence policy in the 1930s
Until the late 1930s, defence was not a significant issue for Australians. At the 1937 elections, both political parties advocated increased defence spending, in the context of increased Japanese aggression in China and Germany's aggression in Europe; however, there was a difference in opinion about how the defence spending should be allocated. The United Australia Party government emphasised co-operation with Britain in ""a policy of imperial defence"". The lynchpin of this was the British naval base at Singapore and the Royal Navy battle fleet ""which, it was hoped, would use it in time of need"". Defence spending in the inter-war years reflected this priority. In the period 1921–1936 totalled £40 million on the Royal Australian Navy, £20 million on the Australian Army and £6 million on the Royal Australian Air Force (established in 1921, the ""youngest"" of the three services). In 1939, the Navy, which included two heavy cruisers and four light cruisers, was the service best equipped for war."
History of Australia,"Fearing Japanese intentions in the Pacific, Menzies established independent embassies in Tokyo and Washington to receive independent advice about developments. Gavin Long argues that the Labor opposition urged greater national self-reliance through a buildup of manufacturing and more emphasis on the Army and RAAF, as Chief of the General Staff, John Lavarack also advocated. In November 1936, Labor leader John Curtin said ""The dependence of Australia upon the competence, let alone the readiness, of British statesmen to send forces to our aid is too dangerous a hazard upon which to found Australia's defence policy."" According to John Robertson, ""some British leaders had also realised that their country could not fight Japan and Germany at the same time."" But ""this was never discussed candidly at...meeting(s) of Australian and British defence planners"", such as the 1937 Imperial Conference.
By September 1939 the Australian Army numbered 3,000 regulars. A recruiting campaign in late 1938, led by Major-General Thomas Blamey increased the reserve militia to almost 80,000. The first division raised for war was designated the 6th Division, of the 2nd AIF, there being 5 Militia Divisions on paper and a 1st AIF in the First World War."
History of Australia,"War
On 3 September 1939, the prime minister, Robert Menzies, made a national radio broadcast: ""My fellow Australians. It is my melancholy duty to inform you, officially, that, in consequence of the persistence by Germany in her invasion of Poland, Great Britain has declared war upon her, and that, as a result, Australia is also at war.""
Thus began Australia's involvement in the six-year global conflict. Australians were to fight in an extraordinary variety of locations, including withstanding the advance of German Panzers in the Siege of Tobruk, turning back the advance of the Imperial Japanese Army in the New Guinea Campaign, undertaking bomber missions over Europe, engaging in naval battles in the Mediterranean. At home, Japanese attacks included mini-submarine raids on Sydney Harbour and very heavy air raids on and near the Northern Territory's capital, Darwin.
The recruitment of a volunteer military force for service at home and abroad was announced, the 2nd Australian Imperial Force and a citizen militia organised for local defence. Troubled by Britain's failure to increase defences at Singapore, Menzies was cautious in committing troops to Europe. By the end of June 1940, France, Norway, Denmark and the Low Countries had fallen to Nazi Germany. Britain stood alone with its dominions. Menzies called for ""all-out war"", increasing federal powers and introducing conscription. Menzies' minority government came to rely on just two independents after the 1940 election.
In January 1941, Menzies flew to Britain to discuss the weakness of Singapore's defences. Arriving in London during The Blitz, Menzies was invited into Winston Churchill's British War Cabinet for the duration of his visit. Returning to Australia, with the threat of Japan imminent and with the Australian army suffering badly in the Greek and Crete campaigns, Menzies re-approached the Labor Party to form a War Cabinet. Unable to secure their support, and with an unworkable parliamentary majority, Menzies resigned as prime minister. The coalition held office for another month, before the independents switched allegiance and John Curtin was sworn in as prime minister. Eight weeks later, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor."
History of Australia,"From 1940 to 1941, Australian forces played prominent roles in the fighting in the Mediterranean theatre, including Operation Compass, the Siege of Tobruk, the Greek campaign, the Battle of Crete, the Syria–Lebanon Campaign and the Second Battle of El Alamein.
A garrison of around 14,000 Australian soldiers, commanded by Lieutenant General Leslie Morshead was besieged in Tobruk, Libya, by the German-Italian army of General Erwin Rommel between April and August 1941. The Nazi propagandist Lord Haw Haw derided the defenders as 'rats', a term the soldiers adopted as an ironic compliment: ""The Rats of Tobruk"". Vital in the defence of Egypt and the Suez Canal, the siege saw the advance of the German army halted for the first time and provided a morale boost for the British Commonwealth, which was then standing alone against Hitler.
The war came closer to home when HMAS Sydney was lost with all hands in battle with the German raider Kormoran in November 1941.
With most of Australia's best forces committed to fight against Hitler in the Middle East, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the US naval base in Hawaii, on 8 December 1941 (eastern Australia time). The British battleship HMS Prince of Wales and battlecruiser HMS Repulse sent to defend Singapore were sunk soon afterwards. Australia was ill-prepared for an attack, lacking armaments, modern fighter aircraft, heavy bombers, and aircraft carriers. While demanding reinforcements from Churchill, on 27 December 1941 Curtin published an historic announcement: ""The Australian Government... regards the Pacific struggle as primarily one in which the United States and Australia must have the fullest say in the direction of the democracies' fighting plan. Without inhibitions of any kind, I make it clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom."""
History of Australia,"British Malaya quickly collapsed, shocking the Australian nation. British, Indian and Australian troops made a disorganised last stand at Singapore, before surrendering on 15 February 1942. Around 15,000 Australian soldiers became prisoners of war. Curtin predicted that the ""battle for Australia"" would now follow. On 19 February, Darwin suffered a devastating air raid, the first time the Australian mainland had ever been attacked by enemy forces. For the following 19 months, Australia was attacked from the air almost 100 times."
History of Australia,"Two battle-hardened Australian divisions were already steaming from the Middle East for Singapore. Churchill wanted them diverted to Burma, but Curtin refused, and anxiously awaited their return to Australia. US President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered his commander in the Philippines, General Douglas MacArthur, to formulate a Pacific defence plan with Australia in March 1942. Curtin agreed to place Australian forces under the command of General MacArthur, who became ""Supreme Commander of the South West Pacific"". Curtin had thus presided over a fundamental shift in Australia's foreign policy. MacArthur moved his headquarters to Melbourne in March 1942 and American troops began massing in Australia. In late May 1942, Japanese midget submarines sank an accommodation vessel in a daring raid on Sydney Harbour. On 8 June 1942, two Japanese submarines briefly shelled Sydney's eastern suburbs and the city of Newcastle.
In an effort to isolate Australia, the Japanese planned a seaborne invasion of Port Moresby, in the Australian Territory of New Guinea. In May 1942, the US Navy engaged the Japanese in the Battle of the Coral Sea and halted the attack. The Battle of Midway in June effectively defeated the Japanese navy and the Japanese army launched a land assault on Moresby from the north. Between July and November 1942, Australian forces repulsed Japanese attempts on the city by way of the Kokoda Track, in the highlands of New Guinea. The Battle of Milne Bay in August 1942 was the first Allied defeat of Japanese land forces."
History of Australia,"Meanwhile, in North Africa, the Axis Powers had driven Allies back into Egypt. A turning point came between July and November 1942, when Australia's 9th Division played a crucial role in some of the heaviest fighting of the First and Second Battle of El Alamein, which turned the North Africa Campaign in favour of the Allies.
The Battle of Buna–Gona, between November 1942 and January 1943, set the tone for the bitter final stages of the New Guinea campaign, which persisted into 1945. The offensives in Papua and New Guinea of 1943–44 were the single largest series of connected operations ever mounted by the Australian armed forces. On 14 May 1943, the Australian Hospital Ship Centaur, though clearly marked as a medical vessel, was sunk by Japanese raiders off the Queensland coast, killing 268, including all but one of the nursing staff, further enraging popular opinion against Japan.
Australian prisoners of war were at this time suffering severe ill-treatment in the Pacific Theatre. In 1943, 2,815 Australian Pows died constructing Japan's Burma-Thailand Railway. In 1944, the Japanese inflicted the Sandakan Death March on 2,000 Australian and British prisoners of war—only 6 survived. This was the single worst war crime perpetrated against Australians in war.
MacArthur largely excluded Australian forces from the main push north into the Philippines and Japan. It was left to Australia to lead amphibious assaults against Japanese bases in Borneo. Curtin suffered from ill health from the strains of office and died weeks before the war ended, replaced by Ben Chifley.
Of Australia's wartime population of seven million, almost one million men and women served in a branch of the services during the six years of warfare. By war's end, gross enlistments totalled 727,200 men and women in the Australian Army (of whom 557,800 served overseas), 216,900 in the RAAF and 48,900 in the RAN. More than 39,700 were killed or died as prisoners of war, about 8,000 of whom died as prisoners of the Japanese."
History of Australia,"Australian home front
While the Australian civilian population suffered less at the hands of the Axis powers than did other Allied nations in Asia and Europe, Australia nevertheless came under direct attack by Japanese naval forces and aerial bombardments, particularly through 1942 and 1943, resulting in hundreds of fatalities and fuelling fear of Japanese invasion. Axis naval activity in Australian waters also brought the war close to home for Australians. Austerity measures, rationing and labour controls measures were all implemented to assist the war effort. Australian civilians dug air raid shelters, trained in civil defence and first aid, and Australian ports and cities were equipped with anti aircraft and sea defences.
The Australian economy was markedly affected by World War II. Expenditure on war reached 37 per cent of GDP by 1943–44, compared to 4 per cent expenditure in 1939–1940. Total war expenditure was £2,949 million between 1939 and 1945."
History of Australia,"Although the peak of army enlistments occurred in June–July 1940, when more than 70,000 enlisted, it was the Curtin Labor government, formed in October 1941, that was largely responsible for ""a complete revision of the whole Australian economic, domestic and industrial life"". Rationing of fuel, clothing and some food was introduced, (although less severely than in Britain) Christmas holidays curtailed, ""brown outs"" introduced and some public transport reduced. From December 1941, the Government evacuated all women and children from Darwin and northern Australia, and more than 10,000 refugees arrived from South East Asia as Japan advanced. In January 1942, the Manpower Directorate was set up ""to ensure the organisation of Australians in the best possible way to meet all defence requirements."" Minister for War Organisation of Industry, John Dedman introduced a degree of austerity and government control previously unknown, to such an extent that he was nicknamed ""the man who killed Father Christmas"".
In May 1942 uniform tax laws were introduced in Australia, ending state governments' control of income taxation. ""The significance of this decision was greater than any other... made throughout the war, as it added extensive powers to the Federal Government and greatly reduced the financial autonomy of the states.""
Manufacturing grew significantly because of the war. ""In 1939, there were only three Australian firms producing machine tools, but by 1943 there were more than one hundred doing so."" From having few front line aircraft in 1939, the RAAF had become the fourth largest allied Air force by 1945. A number of aircraft were built under licence in Australia before the war's end, notably the Beaufort and Beaufighter, although the majority of aircraft were from Britain and later, the US. The Boomerang fighter, designed and built in four months of 1942, emphasised the desperate state Australia found itself in as the Japanese advanced.
Australia also created, virtually from nothing, a significant female workforce engaged in direct war production. Between 1939 and 1944 the number of women working in factories rose from 171,000 to 286,000. Dame Enid Lyons, widow of former Prime Minister Joseph Lyons, became the first woman elected to the House of Representatives in 1943, joining the Robert Menzies' new centre-right Liberal Party of Australia, formed in 1945. At the same election, Dorothy Tangney became the first woman elected to the Senate."
History of Australia,"Post-war boom
Menzies and Liberal dominance: 1949–72
Politically, Robert Menzies and the Liberal Party of Australia dominated much of the immediate post war era, defeating the Labor government of Ben Chifley in 1949, in part because of a Labor proposal to nationalise banks and following a crippling coal strike led by the Australian Communist Party. Menzies became the country's longest-serving prime minister and the Liberal party, in coalition with the rural based Country Party, won every federal election until 1972.
As in the United States in the early 1950s, allegations of communist influence in society saw tensions emerge in politics. Refugees from Soviet dominated Eastern Europe immigrated to Australia, while to Australia's north, Mao Zedong's Chinese Communist Party won the Chinese Civil War in 1949 and in June 1950, Communist North Korea invaded South Korea. The Menzies government responded to a United States led United Nations Security Council request for military aid for South Korea and diverted forces from occupied Japan to begin Australia's involvement in the Korean War. After fighting to a bitter standstill, the UN and North Korea signed a ceasefire agreement in July 1953. Australian forces had participated in such major battles as Kapyong and Maryang San. 17,000 Australians had served and casualties amounted to more than 1,500, of whom 339 were killed."
History of Australia,"During the course of the Korean War, the Liberal government attempted to ban the Communist Party of Australia, first by legislation in 1950 and later by referendum, in 1951. While both attempts were unsuccessful, further international events such as the defection of minor Soviet Embassy official Vladimir Petrov, added to a sense of impending threat that politically favoured Menzies' Liberal-CP government, as the Labor Party split over concerns about the influence of the Communist Party on the trade union movement. The tensions led to another bitter split and the emergence of the breakaway Democratic Labor Party (DLP). The DLP remained an influential political force, often holding the balance of power in the Senate, until 1974. Its preferences supported the Liberal and Country Party. The Labor party was led by H.V. Evatt after Chifley's death in 1951. Evatt had served as President of the United Nations General Assembly during 1948–49 and helped draft the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Evatt retired in 1960 amid signs of mental ill-health, and Arthur Calwell succeeded him as leader, with a young Gough Whitlam as his deputy.
Menzies presided during a period of sustained economic boom and the beginnings of sweeping social change, which included youth culture and its rock and roll music and, in the late 1950s, the arrival of television broadcasting. In 1958, Australian country music singer Slim Dusty, who would become the musical embodiment of rural Australia, had Australia's first international music chart hit with his bush ballad ""Pub With No Beer"", while rock and roller Johnny O'Keefe's ""Wild One"" became the first local recording to reach the national charts, peaking at No. 20. Australian cinema produced little of its own content in the 1950s, but British and Hollywood studios produced a string of successful epics from Australian literature, featuring home grown stars Chips Rafferty and Peter Finch.
Menzies remained a staunch supporter of links to the monarchy and Commonwealth of Nations and formalised an alliance with the United States, but also launched post-war trade with Japan, beginning a growth of Australian exports of coal, iron ore and mineral resources that would steadily climb until Japan became Australia's largest trading partner.
When Menzies retired in 1965, he was replaced as Liberal leader and prime minister by Harold Holt. Holt drowned while swimming at a surf beach in December 1967 and was replaced by John Gorton (1968–1971) and then by William McMahon (1971–1972)."
History of Australia,"Post-war immigration
Following World War II, the Chifley Labor government instigated a massive programme of European immigration. In 1945, Minister for Immigration, Arthur Calwell wrote ""If the experience of the Pacific War has taught us one thing, it surely is that seven million Australians cannot hold three million square miles of this earth's surface indefinitely."" All political parties shared the view that the country must ""populate or perish"". Calwell stated a preference for ten British immigrants for each one from other countries; however, the numbers of British migrants fell short of what was expected, despite government assistance.
Migration brought large numbers of southern and central Europeans to Australia for the first time. A 1958 government leaflet assured readers that unskilled non-British migrants were needed for ""labour on rugged projects ... work which is not generally acceptable to Australians or British workers"". The Australian economy stood in sharp contrast to war-ravaged Europe, and newly arrived migrants found employment in a booming manufacturing industry and government assisted programmes such as the Snowy Mountains Scheme. This hydroelectricity and irrigation complex in south-east Australia consisted of sixteen major dams and seven power stations constructed between 1949 and 1974. It remains the largest engineering project undertaken in Australia. Necessitating the employment of 100,000 people from more than 30 countries, to many it denoted the birth of multicultural Australia.
Some 4.2 million immigrants arrived between 1945 and 1985, about 40 per cent of whom came from Britain and Ireland. The 1957 novel They're a Weird Mob was a popular account of an Italian migrating to Australia, although written by Australian-born author John O'Grady. The Australian population reached 10 million in 1959–with Sydney its most populous city.
In May 1958, the Menzies Government passed the Migration Act 1958 which replaced the Immigration Restriction Act's arbitrarily applied dictation test with an entry permit system, that reflected economic and skills criteria. Further changes in the 1960s effectively ended the White Australia Policy. It legally ended in 1973."
History of Australia,"Economic growth and suburban living
Australia enjoyed significant growth in prosperity in the 1950s and 1960s, with increases in both living standards and in leisure time. The manufacturing industry, previously playing a minor part in an economy dominated by primary production, greatly expanded. The first Holden motor car came out of General Motors-Holden's Fisherman's Bend factory in November 1948. Car ownership rapidly increased—from 130 owners in every 1,000 in 1949 to 271 owners in every 1,000 by 1961. By the early 1960s, four competitors to Holden had set up Australian factories, employing between 80,000 and 100,000 workers, ""at least four-fifths of them migrants"".
In the 1960s, about 60 per cent of Australian manufacturing was protected by tariffs. Pressure from business interests and the union movement ensured these remained high. Historian Geoffrey Bolton suggests that this high tariff protection of the 1960s caused some industries to ""lapse into lethargy"", neglecting research and development and the search for new markets. The CSIRO was expected to fulfil research and development.
Prices for wool and wheat remained high, with wool the mainstay of Australia's exports. Sheep numbers grew from 113 million in 1950 to 171 million in 1965. Wool production increased from 518,000 to 819,000 tonnes in the same period. Wheat, wool and minerals ensured a healthy balance of trade between 1950 and 1966.
The great housing boom of the post war period saw rapid growth in the suburbs of the major Australian cities. By the 1966 census, only 14 per cent lived in rural Australia, down from 31 per cent in 1933, and only 8 per cent lived on farms. Virtual full employment meant high standards of living and dramatic increases in home ownership, and by the sixties, Australia had the most equitable spread of income in the world. By the beginning of the sixties, an Australia-wide McNair survey estimated that 94% of homes had a fridge, 50% a telephone, 55% a television, 60% a washing machine, and 73% a vacuum cleaner. In addition, most households had now acquired a car. According to one study, ""In 1946, there was one car for every 14 Australians; by 1960, it was one to 3.5. The vast majority of families had access to a car.""
Car ownership flourished during the postwar period, with 1970/1971 census data estimating that 96.4 per cent of Australian households in the early Seventies owned at least one car; however, not all felt the rapid suburban growth was desirable. Distinguished Architect and designer Robin Boyd, a critic of Australia's built surroundings, described Australia as ""'the constant sponge lying in the Pacific', following the fashions of overseas and lacking confidence in home-produced, original ideas"". In 1956, dadaist comedian Barry Humphries performed the character of Edna Everage as a parody of a house-proud housewife of staid 1950s Melbourne suburbia (the character only later morphed into a critique of self-obsessed celebrity culture). It was the first of many of his satirical stage and screen creations based around quirky Australian characters: Sandy Stone, a morose elderly suburbanite, Barry McKenzie a naive Australian expat in London and Sir Les Patterson, a vulgar parody of a Whitlam-era politician.
Some writers defended suburban life. Journalist Craig Macgregor saw suburban life as a ""...solution to the needs of migrants..."" Hugh Stretton argued that ""plenty of dreary lives are indeed lived in the suburbs... but most of them might well be worse in other surroundings"". Historian Peter Cuffley has recalled life for a child in a new outer suburb of Melbourne as having a kind of joyous excitement. ""Our imaginations saved us from finding life too humdrum, as did the wild freedom of being able to roam far and wide in different kinds of (neighbouring) bushland...Children in the suburbs found space in backyards, streets and lanes, playgrounds and reserves...""
In 1954, the Menzies Government formally announced the introduction of the new two-tiered TV system—a government-funded service run by the ABC, and two commercial services in Sydney and Melbourne, with the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne being a major driving force behind the introduction of television to Australia. Colour TV began broadcasting in 1975."
History of Australia,"Indigenous civil rights, assimilation and child removal
The Menzies era (1949–1972) saw significant strides in civil rights for indigenous Australians. Over the period, Menzies and his successors dismantled remaining restrictions on voting rights for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples culminating in the Menzies Government's 1962 Commonwealth Electoral Act, while the Holt Government's landmark 1967 Referendum received overwhelming public support for the transfer of responsibility for Aboriginal Affairs to the Federal Government, and the removal of discriminatory provisions regarding the national census from the Australian Constitution. By 1971, the first Aboriginal Senator was sitting on the government benches, with Neville Bonner becoming a Liberal Senator for QLD."
History of Australia,"During this period, the policy of assimilation attracted increasing criticism from Aboriginal people and their supporters on the grounds of its negative effects on Aboriginal families and its denial of Aboriginal cultural autonomy. Removals of Aboriginal children of mixed descent from their families slowed by the late 1960s and by 1973 the Commonwealth had adopted a policy of self-determination for Indigenous Australians.
The 1951 Native Welfare Conference of state and Commonwealth officials had agreed on a policy of cultural assimilation for all Aboriginal Australians. Paul Hasluck, the Commonwealth Minister for Territories, stated: ""Assimilation means, in practical terms, that, in the course of time, it is expected that all persons of aboriginal blood or mixed blood in Australia will live like other white Australians do.""
Controls over the daily lives of Aboriginal people and the removal of Aboriginal children of mixed descent continued under the policy of assimilation, although the control was now largely exercised by Welfare Boards and removals were justified on welfare grounds. The number of Aboriginal people deemed to be wards of the state under Northern Territory welfare laws doubled to 11,000 from 1950 to 1965.
In 1997, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission estimated that between 10 per cent and one-third of Aboriginal children had been removed from their families from 1910 to 1970. Regional studies indicate that 15 per cent of Aboriginal children were removed in New South Wales from 1899 to 1968, while the figure for Victoria was about 10 per cent. Robert Manne estimates that the figure for Australia as a whole was closer to 10 per cent.
Summarising the policy of assimilation and forced removals of Aboriginal children of mixed descent, Richard Broome concludes: ""Even though the children's material conditions and Western education may have been improved by removal, even though some removals were necessary, and even though some people were thankful for it in retrospect, overall it was a disaster....It was a rupturing of tens of thousands of Aboriginal families, aimed at eradicating Aboriginality from the nation in the cause of homogeneity and in fear of difference."""
History of Australia,"Alliances 1950–1972
In the early 1950s, the Menzies government saw Australia as part of a ""triple alliance"" in concert with both the US and traditional ally Britain. At first, ""the Australian leadership opted for a consistently pro-British line in diplomacy"", while at the same time looking for opportunities to involve the US in South East Asia. Thus, the government committed military forces to the Korean War and the Malayan Emergency and hosted British nuclear tests after 1952. Australia was also the only Commonwealth country to offer support to the British during the Suez Crisis.
Menzies oversaw an effusive welcome to Queen Elizabeth II on the first visit to Australia by a reigning monarch, in 1954. He made the following remarks during a light-hearted speech to an American audience in New York, while on his way to attend her coronation in 1953: ""We in Australia, of course, are British, if I may say so, to the boot heels...but we stand together – our people stand together – till the crack of doom."""
History of Australia,"As British influence declined in South East Asia, the US alliance came to have greater significance for Australian leaders and the Australian economy. British investment in Australia remained significant until the late 1970s, but trade with Britain declined through the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1950s the Australian Army began to re-equip using US military equipment. In 1962, the US established a naval communications station at North West Cape, the first of several built during the next decade. Most significantly, in 1962, Australian Army advisors were sent to help train South Vietnamese forces, in a developing conflict in which the British had no part.
According to diplomat Alan Renouf, the dominant theme in Australia's foreign policy under Australia's Liberal–Country Party governments of the 1950s and 1960s was anti-communism. Another former diplomat, Gregory Clark, suggested that it was specifically a fear of China that drove Australian foreign policy decisions for twenty years. The ANZUS security treaty, which had been signed in 1951, had its origins in Australia's and New Zealand's fears of a rearmed Japan. Its obligations on the US, Australia and New Zealand are vague, but its influence on Australian foreign policy thinking, at times has been significant. The SEATO treaty, signed only three years later, clearly demonstrated Australia's position as a US ally in the emerging Cold War.
As Britain struggled to enter the Common Market in the 1960s, Australia saw that its historic ties with the mother country were rapidly fraying. Canberra was alarmed but kept a low profile, not wanting to alienate London. Russel Ward states that the implications of British entry into Europe in 1973: ""seemed shattering to most Australians, particularly to older people and conservatives."" Carl Bridge, however, points out that Australia had been ""hedging its British bets"" for some time. The ANZUS treaty and Australia's decision to enter the Vietnam War did not involve Britain and by 1967 Japan was Australia's leading export partner and the US her largest source of imports. According to Bridge, Australia's decision not to follow Britain's devaluation of her currency in 1967 ""marked the demise of British Australia."""
History of Australia,"Vietnam War
By 1965, Australia had increased the size of the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam (AATTV), and in April the Government made a sudden announcement that ""after close consultation with the United States"", a battalion of troops was to be sent to South Vietnam. In parliament, Menzies emphasised the argument that ""our alliances made demands on us"". The alliance involved was presumably, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), and Australia was providing military assistance because South Vietnam, a signatory to SEATO, had apparently requested it. Documents released in 1971 indicated that the decision to commit troops was made by Australia and the US, not at the request of South Vietnam. By 1968, there were three Australian Army battalions at any one time at the 1st Australian Task Force (1ATF) base at Nui Dat in addition to the advisers of the AATTV placed throughout Vietnam, and personnel reached a peak total of almost 8,000, comprising about one third of the Army's combat capacity. Between 1962 and 1972 almost 60,000 personnel served in Vietnam, including ground troops, naval forces and air assets.
In July 1966, new Prime Minister Harold Holt expressed his government's support for the US and its role in Vietnam in particular. ""I don't know where people would choose to look for the security of this country were it not for the friendship and strength of the United States."" While on a visit in the same year to the US, Holt assured President Lyndon B. Johnson ""...I hope there is corner of your mind and heart which takes cheer from the fact that you have an admiring friend, a staunch friend, [Australia] that will be all the way with LBJ.""
The Liberal-CP Government was returned with a massive majority in elections held in December 1966, fought over national security issues including Vietnam. The opposition Labor Party had advocated the withdrawal of all conscripts from Vietnam, but its deputy leader Gough Whitlam had stated that a Labor government might maintain regular army troops there. Arthur Calwell, who had been leader of the Labor Party since 1960, retired in favour of Whitlam a few months later.
Despite Holt's sentiments and his government's electoral success in 1966, the war became unpopular in Australia, as it did in the United States. The movements to end Australia's involvement gathered strength after the Tet Offensive of early 1968 and compulsory national service (selected by ballot) became increasingly unpopular. In the 1969 elections, the government hung on despite a significant decline in popularity. Moratorium marches held across Australia in mid-1970 attracted large crowds—the Melbourne march of 100,000 being led by Labor MP Jim Cairns. As the Nixon administration proceeded with Vietnamization of the war and began the withdrawal of troops, so did the Australian Government. In November 1970 1st Australian Task Force was reduced to two battalions and in November 1971, 1ATF was withdrawn from Vietnam. The last military advisers of the AATTV were withdrawn by the Whitlam Labor government in mid-December 1972.
The Australian military presence in Vietnam had lasted 10 years, and in purely human cost, more than 500 had been killed and more than 2,000 wounded. The war cost Australia $218 million between 1962 and 1972."
History of Australia,"Reform and reaction: 1972–1996
The Whitlam government: 1972–75
Elected in December 1972 after 23 years in opposition, Labor won office under Gough Whitlam, introducing significant reforms and expanding the federal budget. Welfare benefits were extended and payment rates increased, a national health insurance scheme was introduced, and divorce laws liberalised. Commonwealth expenditure on schools trebled in the two years to mid-1975 and the Commonwealth assumed responsibility for funding higher education, abolishing tuition fees. In foreign affairs, the new government prioritised the Asia Pacific region, formally abolishing the White Australia Policy, recognising Communist China and enhancing ties with Indonesia. Conscription was abolished and the remaining Australian troops in Vietnam withdrawn. The Australian national anthem was changed from God Save the Queen to Advance Australia Fair, the imperial honours system was replaced at the Commonwealth level by the Order of Australia, and Queen Elizabeth II was officially styled Queen of Australia. Relations with the US, however, became strained after government members criticised the resumption of the US bombing campaign in North Vietnam.
In Indigenous affairs, the government introduced a policy of self-determination for Aboriginal people in economic, social and political affairs.  Federal expenditure on Aboriginal services increased from $23 million to $141 million during the three years of the government. One of the first acts of the Whitlam government was to establish a Royal Commission into land rights in the Northern Territory under Justice Woodward. Legislation based on its findings was passed into law by the Fraser government in 1976, as the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976.
As the Whitlam government did not control the Senate, much of its legislation was rejected or amended. After Labor was re-elected with a reduced majority at elections in May 1974, the Senate remained an obstacle to its political agenda. The government's popularity was also harmed by deteriorating economic conditions and a series of political scandals. Increased government spending, rapid wage growth, booming commodity prices and the first OPEC oil shock led to economic instability. The unemployment rate reached post-war high of 3.6 per cent in late 1974 and the annual inflation rate hit 17 per cent.
In 1974–75 the government began negotiations for US$4 billion in foreign loans to fund state development of Australia's mineral and energy resources. Minister Rex Connor conducted secret discussions with a loan broker from Pakistan, and Treasurer Jim Cairns misled parliament about the issue. Arguing the government was incompetent following the Loans Affair, the opposition Liberal-Country Party Coalition delayed passage of the government's money bills in the Senate, until the government would promise a new election. Whitlam refused and the deadlock ended when his government was controversially dismissed by the Governor-General, John Kerr on 11 November 1975. Opposition leader Malcolm Fraser was installed as caretaker prime minister, pending an election."
History of Australia,"Fraser government: 1975–83
The Federal elections of December 1975 resulted in a landslide victory for the Liberal-Country Party coalition and Malcolm Fraser continued as prime minister. The coalition government won subsequent elections in 1977 and 1980, making Fraser the second longest serving Australian prime minister up to that time. The Fraser government espoused a policy of administrative competence and economic austerity leavened by progressive humanitarian, social and environmental interventions. The government enacted the Whitlam government's land rights bill with few changes, increased immigration, and resettled Indochinese refugees. It promoted multiculturalism and in 1978 established the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) as a multicultural broadcaster. In foreign policy, the government continued Labor's friendly relations with China and Indonesia, repaired the frayed relationship with the US and opposed white minority rule in South Africa and Rhodesia. Environmental policies included banning resource development on Fraser Island and the Great Barrier Reef, creating Kakadu National Park and banning whaling. However, the government refused to use Commonwealth powers to stop the construction of the Franklin Dam in Tasmania in 1982 and the resulting grassroots campaign against the dam contributed to the emergence of an influential environmental movement in Australia.
On the economic front, the Fraser government followed a ""fight inflation first"" strategy centred on budget cuts and wage restraint. Welfare benefits were restricted, the universal healthcare system was partially dismantled, and university funding per student cut. However, by the early 1980s economic conditions were deteriorating. The second oil shock in 1979 increased inflation which was exacerbated by a boom in commodity prices and a sharp increase in real wages. An international recession, the collapse of the resources boom and a severe drought in eastern Australia saw unemployment rise. The government responded with Keynesian deficit spending in its 1982 Budget, but by 1983 both unemployment and annual inflation exceeded 10 per cent. At the Federal elections in March 1983 the coalition government was comfortably defeated by Labor under its popular new leader Bob Hawke."
History of Australia,"Labor governments: 1983–1996
The Hawke government pursued a mixture of free market reforms and consensus politics featuring ""summits"" of government representatives, business leaders, trade unions and non-government organisations in order to reach consensus on key issues such as economic policy and tax reform. The centrepiece of this policy mix was an Accord with trade unions under which wage demands would be curtailed in return for increased social benefits. Welfare payments were increased and better targeted to those on low incomes, and a retirement benefits scheme (superannuation) was extended to most employees. A new universal health insurance scheme, Medicare, was introduced. The Treasurer Paul Keating oversaw a program of deregulation and micro-economic reforms which broke with the Keynesian economics that had traditionally been favoured by the Labor party. These reforms included floating the Australian dollar, deregulating capital markets and allowing competition from foreign banks. Business regulation and competition policy was streamlined, tariffs and quotas on imports were reduced, and a number of government enterprises were privatised. The higher education system was restructured and significantly expanded, partly funded by the reintroduction of fees in the form of student loans and ""contributions"" (HECS). Paul Kelly concludes that, ""In the 1980s both Labor and non-Labor underwent internal philosophical revolutions to support a new set of ideas—faith in markets, deregulation, a reduced role for government, low protection and the creation of a new cooperative enterprise culture."""
History of Australia,"The government's environmental interventions included stopping the Franklin Dam in Tasmania, banning new uranium mines at Jabiluka, and proposing Kakadu National park for world heritage listing. In foreign policy, the government maintained strong relations with the US and was instrumental in the formation of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) group. Australia contributed naval ships and troops to UN forces in the Gulf War after Iraq had invaded Kuwait in 1990.The government took other initiatives aimed at fostering national unity. The Australia Act 1986 eliminated the last vestiges of British legal authority at the federal level. The Australian Bicentenary in 1988 was the focus of year-long celebrations with multicultural themes. The World Expo 88 was held in Brisbane and a new Parliament House in Canberra was opened.
Strong economic growth, falling unemployment, an unstable opposition, and Bob Hawke's popularity with the public contributed to the re-election of the Hawke government in 1984, 1987 and 1990. However, the economy went into recession in 1990 and by late 1991 the unemployment rate had risen above 10 per cent. With the government's popularity falling, Paul Keating successfully challenged for the leadership and became prime minister in December 1991.
The Keating government's first priority was economic recovery. In February 1992 it released the ""One Nation"" job creation package and later legislated tax cuts to corporations and individuals to boost economic growth. Unemployment reached 11.4 per cent in 1992—the highest since the Great Depression in Australia. The Liberal-National opposition had proposed an ambitious plan of economic reform to take to the 1993 Election, including the introduction of a Goods and Services Tax. Keating campaigned strongly against the tax and was returned to office in March 1993."
History of Australia,"In May 1994 a more ambitious ""Working Nation"" jobs program was introduced. The Keating government also pursued a number of ""big picture"" issues throughout its two terms including increased political and economic engagement in the Asia Pacific region, Indigenous reconciliation, and an Australian republic. The government engaged closely with the Indonesian President, Suharto and other regional partners, and successfully campaigned to increase the role of APEC as a major forum for strategic and economic co-operation. A Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation was established and, following the High Court of Australia's historic Mabo decision in 1992, the first national Native Title legislation was introduced to regulate claims and provide compensation for loss of native title. In 1993, Keating established a Republic Advisory Committee to examine options for Australia becoming a republic. The government also introduced family payments and a superannuation guarantee with compulsory employer contributions.
Under the Hawke government the annual migration intake had more than doubled from 54,500 in 1984–85 to more than 120,000 in 1989–90. The Keating government responded to community concerns about the pace of immigration by cutting the immigration intake and introducing mandatory detention for illegal immigrants arriving without a valid visa. Immigration fell to 67,900 in 1992–93.
With foreign debt, inflation and unemployment still stubbornly high, Keating lost the March 1996 Election to the Liberals' John Howard."
History of Australia,"Australia in a globalised world: 1996–2022
Howard government: 1996–2007
John Howard with a Liberal–National Party coalition served as Prime Minister from 1996 until 2007, winning re-election in 1998, 2001 and 2004 to become the second-longest serving prime minister after Menzies. The Howard government introduced a nationwide gun control scheme following a mass shooting at Port Arthur. The coalition introduced industrial relations reforms in 1996 which promoted individual contracts and enterprise bargaining. In 2006, it introduced the WorkChoices legislation, which made it easier for small businesses to terminate employment. After the 1996 election, Howard and treasurer Peter Costello proposed a Goods and Services Tax (GST) which they successfully took to the electorate in 1998 and implemented in July 2000.
The government responded to the populist anti-immigration policies of Pauline Hanson and her One Nation party by publicly criticising elites and political correctness and emphasising Australian values.  The coalition initially cut immigration intakes, abolished the Office of Multicultural Affairs and other multicultural agencies, and introduced citizenship tests for migrants. Following a sharp increase in unauthorised arrivals by boat from 1999, the government opened new mandatory detention centres in remote areas of Australia and issued temporary visas for those found to be refugees. Following the Children Overboard affair and the Tampa Affair in 2001, the government introduced the Pacific Solution, which involved moving unauthorised immigrants to detention centres in Nauru and Papua New Guinea while their refugee status was determined, as well as a policy of turning back vessels intercepted at sea.
In Indigenous affairs the Prime Minister rejected calls for a treaty with Indigenous Australians and an apology for past actions which had harmed them. Instead, the government pursued a policy of ""practical reconciliation"" involving specific measures to improve Indigenous education, health, employment and housing. In response to the High Court's decision in Wik Peoples v Queensland, in 1996, the government amended native title legislation to limit native title claims. In 2007, following the release of the ""Little Children are Sacred"" report detailing widespread abuse in Aboriginal communities, the Howard government launched the Northern Territory Intervention in order to create a safe environment for Indigenous children. The government's response was criticised by the co-chairs of the report, but was supported by the Labor opposition.
Honouring an election commitment, the Howard government set up a people's convention on an Australian republic. The resulting 1999 referendum on a republic failed. Howard, a monarchist, became the only Australian Prime Minister to publicly oppose a constitutional amendment he had put to the people."
History of Australia,"In 1999, Australia led a United Nations force into East Timor to help establish democracy and independence for that nation, following political violence. Australia also committed to other peacekeeping and stabilisation operations: notably in Bougainville, including Operation Bel Isi (1998–2003); as well as Operation Helpem Fren and the Australian-led Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) in the early 2000s; and the 2006 East Timorese crisis. Following the September 2001 terrorist attacks on the US and the subsequent War on Terror, Australia committed troops to the Afghanistan War and the Iraq War. These events, along with the 2002 Bali Bombings and other terrorist incidents, led to the creation of a National Security Committee and further anti-terrorist legislation.
In foreign affairs, the government advocated a policy of  ""Asia first, but not Asia only"", emphasising traditional links to the Commonwealth and the US. Relations with Indonesia became strained over East Timor but generally improved after the Bali bombings. Australia's support of US policy during the War on Terror was followed by an Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement in 2004. Trade agreements with Singapore and Thailand were also secured and relations with China improved. Australia joined the US in refusing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions, arguing that it would harm Australia's economy and would be ineffective without the participation of China and India.
After initial cuts, the immigration intake increased steadily, with a bias towards skilled workers to meet the needs of a rapidly growing economy. Immigration also became more diverse, with the proportion of immigrants from South Asia increasing from 8 per cent in 1996–97 to 20 per cent in 2007–08. Inbound tourism also grew, helped by the Sydney Olympic games in 2000.
The economy continued its uninterrupted expansion since the early 1990s recession, with record jobs growth and the lowest unemployment rates since the 1970s. Exports, imports and foreign investment grew, and China became Australia's second largest trading partner after Japan. The coalition delivered budget surpluses in most years which, along with the proceeds of government asset sales, were partly invested in a Future Fund to reduce the national debt. Income inequality and private debt increased as the economy expanded, with the biggest increase in incomes accruing to the top 10 per cent of income earners.
By 2007, the Howard government was consistently trailing the Labor opposition in opinion polls, with key issues being rising interest rates, the unpopular Work Choices industrial relations reforms, and climate change policy. There were also leadership tensions between Howard and Costello, and opinion polls indicated a desire for a generational change in leadership. Labor won the November 2007 election with a swing of more than 5 per cent and Howard became only the second sitting prime minister to lose his seat in an election."
History of Australia,"Labor governments: 2007–2013
The Rudd government moved quickly to ratify the Kyoto protocols, dismantle the previous government's Work Choices industrial relations reforms, and issue an apology to Aboriginal Australians for past policies, particularly the removal of Aboriginal children from their families. The government was soon confronted by the Global Financial Crisis and subsequent global recession, responding with a series of economic stimulus measures worth A$75 billion. Although economic growth slowed in 2008, Australia was one of the few advanced economies in the world to avoid recession.
The Rudd government proposed an emissions trading scheme (ETS) to address climate change, but the legislation was twice rejected in the Senate. After the failed December 2009 UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, the government decided to postpone its ETS until 2013, a decision which saw Labor lose some electoral support to the Greens. The government's proposed a Resources Super Profits Tax adversely affected Labor's support in the resource-rich states of Queensland and Western Australia."
History of Australia,"The government changed its predecessor's asylum seeker policy by closing the Nauru processing centre, abolished temporary protection visas and improving the legal rights and processing time for applicants for asylum. However, unauthorised arrivals by boat increased sharply from 2009 and the number in mandatory detention stretched capacity. The new leader of the opposition, Tony Abbot, promised that a coalition government would ""stop the boats.""
In June 2010, with the government behind the opposition in polls and Rudd's popularity falling, the Labor caucus replaced Rudd with Julia Gillard as leader: Australia's first female prime minister. The new leader was able to negotiate concessions on a new mining tax with large mining companies but failed to reach agreement with East Timor on a proposed migration processing centre there.
Following the August 2010 federal election, Gillard formed a minority Labor government with the support of the Australian Greens and three independents. The Gillard government passed enabling legislation for a National Broadband Network, a carbon pricing scheme, a mining tax, a National Disability Insurance Scheme, and school funding reforms. The government negotiated an agreement with Malaysia to process some asylum seekers there but the plan was struck down by the High Court. In response, the government reopened offshore processing centres on Manus Island and Nauru.
Following mounting leadership speculation and poor polling for the government, Rudd defeated Gillard in a leadership ballot in June 2013 and returned as prime minister, promising to replace the carbon tax with an emissions trading scheme and to ensure that people arriving without authority by boat would not be settled in Australia. The opposition, promising to ""stop the boats,"" abolish the carbon tax and mining tax, and reduce the Budget deficit and government debt, won the September 2013 election."
History of Australia,"Liberal-National Coalition governments (2013–2022)
The return of the Liberal-National Coalition to power after six years in opposition initially failed to restore stability to the office of prime minister. Prime Minister Tony Abbott's rival Malcolm Turnbull challenged for and won the leadership of the Liberals within Abbott's first term. After Turnbull narrowly returned the coalition to office in 2016, Party dissatisfaction with his leadership saw him replaced by Scott Morrison in 2018."
History of Australia,"Abbott government (2013–2015)
Prime Minister Tony Abbott's government began implementing its policies on unauthorised maritime arrivals, including Operation Sovereign Borders, boat turnbacks, the reintroduction of temporary protection visas, and the resettlement in third countries of those found to be refugees. The number of people arriving by boat fell from 20,587 in 2013 to none in 2015. The government continued Australia's economic engagement with Asia, signing trade agreements with China, South Korea and Japan. The government also embraced the intervention against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, joining the air campaign, sending special forces and providing training for the Iraqi army.
The government's May 2014 Budget proved unpopular, with the perception that it had involved breaking a number of election promises. The government secured the passage of legislation abolishing the carbon tax (July 2014) and the mining tax (September 2014).
The Prime Minister announced a number of decisions – most notably the reintroduction of knighthoods and a knighthood for Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh – which had not been approved by cabinet and which were widely criticised in the media. By September 2015 the government had lost 30 Newspolls in a row and Malcolm Turnbull successfully challenged for the leadership."
History of Australia,"Turnbull government (2015–2018)
The new Turnbull government announced a National Innovation and Science Agenda and delivered a Budget featuring cuts to company tax. However, the elections of July 2016 saw the government returned with a majority on only one and a minority in the Senate. Following a national postal plebiscite, the government legalised same-sex marriage in December 2017.
In foreign affairs, Australia signed a refugee exchange deal with the US in September 2016, allowing those in detention on Manus Island and Nauru to be settled in the US. There was increased tension with China over its policies in the South China Sea, Australia's new laws targeting foreign influence in domestic politics, and a ban, on national security grounds, on Chinese companies supplying Australia's 5G communications network.
In 2017, the United States, Japan, India and Australia agreed to revive the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue in order to counter Chinese ambitions in the South China Sea. Australia signed a modified Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement with 10 other nations in March 2018 after the US withdrew from the original agreement.
The government lost five by-elections in July 2018. When, in August, the government made a commitment to meet Australia's emissions target under the Paris Agreement, a number of coalition members rebelled. The controversy harmed the government, which had already lost more than 30 consecutive Newspolls. The parliamentary Liberal Party elected Scott Morrison as its new leader and he was sworn in as prime minister."
History of Australia,"Morrison government (2018–2022)
The Morrison government committed to remaining in the Paris Agreement, but promised a greater focus on reduction of energy prices. In foreign affairs the government signed the Indonesia–Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (IA-CEPA) in March 2019. The government was returned at the elections of May 2019 with a three-seat majority.
In 2017, a convention of 250 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander delegates had issued the Uluru Statement from the Heart, calling for constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians and a ""voice to parliament"". In 2019, the government announced a process to ensure that Indigenous Australians would be heard at all levels of government.
In 2020, the government was confronted with the world COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent recession, Australia's first in 29 years. The government banned foreign nationals entering Australia and formed a National Cabinet to address the crisis. The national cabinet announced restrictions on non-essential business, travel and gatherings of people. These restrictions were eased from May, although individual states and territories reimposed restrictions in response to particular outbreaks of COVID-19.
The Australian government made provision for $267 billion in economic stimulus measures, and $16.6 billion in health measures in response to COVID-19.  As a result of the COVID-19 recession, the unemployment rate peaked at 7.5 per cent in July 2020 before falling to 5.6 per cent in March 2021."
History of Australia,"In June 2021, Australia and the United Kingdom announced that they had struck a preliminary deal on a free-trade agreement. On 16 September 2021, the government announced that Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States had agreed to the creation of an enhanced trilateral security partnership, dubbed AUKUS. The first initiative under AUKUS would be for Australia to acquire nuclear-powered submarine technology. As a result of the agreement, Australia cancelled its 2016 contract for the diesel-electric Attack-class submarine with the French company Naval Group. The decision drew rebukes from China and France."
History of Australia,"Post-pandemic: 2022–present
Albanese government (2022–present)
On 23 May 2022, Anthony Albanese was sworn in as Australia's new prime minister. His Labor Party defeated Scott Morrison's conservative government in the election. Prime Minister Albanese formed Australia's first Labor government in almost a decade. 
The global surge in inflation that began in 2021, continued. The Australian inflation rate peaked at 7.5% at the end of 2022: a 32 year high. By November 2023, the Reserve Bank of Australia had raised interest rates to 4.35%, a 12-year high.  
A referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament was held on the 14 October 2023 and was rejected nationally. The Yes23 campaign co-chair Rachel Perkins called for a week of silence ""to grieve this outcome and reflect on its meaning and significance""."
History of Australia,"Society and culture: 1960s–present
Social developments
Indigenous Australians
The 1960s proved a key decade for Indigenous rights in Australia, with the demand for change led by Indigenous activists and organisations such as the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, and embraced by the wider population as citizenship rights were extended.
At the start of the decade, Aboriginal affairs were still regulated by state governments and, in the Northern Territory, by the Australian government. In most states Aboriginal Australians were banned from drinking alcohol and their freedom of association, movement and control of property was restricted. Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory banned Aboriginal people from voting and Queensland and Western Australia controlled their right to marry. Aboriginals were often subjected to unofficial ""colour bars"" restricting their access to many goods, services and public facilities, especially in country towns.
The official policy of the Australian government and most state governments, however, was the assimilation of Aboriginal people into mainstream culture. In 1962, the Menzies Government's Commonwealth Electoral Act gave Indigenous people the right to vote at federal elections. In 1965, Queensland became the last state to confer state voting rights on Aboriginal people.
In 1963, the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land sent a bark petition to the Australian parliament asking for recognition of their traditional land rights. They subsequently took their case to the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory which ruled against them in September 1971. In 1965, Charles Perkins, helped organise freedom rides into parts of Australia to expose discrimination and inequality. In 1966, the Gurindji people of Wave Hill station commenced the Gurindji strike in a quest for equal pay and recognition of land rights.
In 1966, the Australian government gave Aboriginal people the same rights to social security benefits as other Australians. A 1967 referendum changed the Australian constitution to include all Aboriginal Australians in the national census and allow the Federal parliament to legislate on their behalf. A Council for Aboriginal Affairs was established.
Popular acclaim for Aboriginal artists, sportspeople and musicians also grew over the period. In 1968, boxer Lionel Rose was proclaimed Australian of the Year. That same year, artist Albert Namatjira was honoured with a postage stamp. Singer-songwriter Jimmy Little's 1963 Gospel song ""Royal Telephone"" was the first No.1 hit by an Aboriginal artist. Women's Tennis  World No. 1 Evonne Goolagong Cawley was celebrated as Australian of the Year in 1971."
History of Australia,"Neville Bonner was appointed Liberal Senator for QLD in 1971, becoming the first federal parliamentarian to identify as Aboriginal. Eric Deeral (QLD) and Hyacinth Tungutalum (NT) followed at a state and territory level in 1974. In 1976, Sir Doug Nicholls was appointed Governor of South Australia, the first indigenous Australian to hold vice-regal office. By the 2020s, Aboriginal representation in the federal parliament had exceeded the proportion of Aboriginal people in the general population, and Australia had its first Aboriginal leader of a state or territory in 2016, when the Country Liberal Party's Adam Giles became Chief Minister of the Northern Territory.
In January 1972, Aboriginal activists erected an Aboriginal ""tent embassy"" on the lawns of parliament house, Canberra and issued a number demands including land rights, compensation for past loss of land and self-determination. The leader of the opposition Gough Whitlam was among those who visited the tent embassy to discuss their demands.
The Whitlam government came to power in December 1972 with a policy of self-determination for Aboriginal people. The government also passed legislation against racial discrimination and established a Royal Commission into land rights in the Northern Territory, which formed the basis for the Fraser government's Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976."
History of Australia,"Following this, some states introduced their own land rights legislation; however, there were significant limitations on the returned lands, or that available for claim. In 1985, the Hawke government handed over Uluru (Ayers Rock) to traditional owners with a lease back to the Commonwealth.
In 1992, the High Court of Australia handed down its decision in the Mabo Case, holding that Indigenous native title survived reception of English law and continued to exist unless extinguished by conflicting law or interests in land. The Keating government passed a Native Title Act in 1993 to regulate native title claims and established a Native Title Tribunal to hear those claims. In the subsequent Wik decision of 1996, the High Court found that a pastoral lease did not necessarily extinguish native title. In response, the Howard government amended the Native Title Act to provide better protection for pastoralists and others with an interest in land.  By March 2019 the Native Titles Tribunal had determined that 375 Indigenous communities had established native title over 39 per cent of the Australian continent, with one third under exclusive title.
From 1960 the Indigenous population grew faster than the Australian population as a whole. The Aboriginal population was 106,000 in 1961 (1 per cent of the total population) but by 2016 had grown to 786,900 (3 per cent of the population) with a third living in major cities. Despite the drift to large cities, the period from 1965 to 1980 also saw a movement of Indigenous Australians away from towns and settlements to small outstations (or homelands), particularly in Arnhem Land and Central Australia. The movement to outstations was associated with a wider trend for the revival of traditional culture. However, the expense of providing infrastructure to small remote communities has seen pressure from federal, state and territory governments to redirect funding towards larger Indigenous communities.
From 1971 to 2006, indicators for Indigenous employment, median incomes, home ownership, education and life expectancy all improved, although they remained well below the level for those who were not indigenous. High rates of Indigenous incarceration and deaths in custody were highlighted by the report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in April 1991. The Keating government responded with $400 million in new spending to address some of the recommendations of the report. However, by 2001 Indigenous incarceration rates and deaths in custody had increased. Deaths in custody continued at an average of 15 per year during the decade to 2018.
Richard Broome has concluded: ""To close the gap [between Indigenous and other Australians] on inequality and well being will take many years; some despairingly say generations. Compensation for lost wages, for missing out on native title settlements and for being removed from one's family and kin remain unresolved."""
History of Australia,"Women
Holmes and Pinto point out that in 1960 domesticity and motherhood were still the dominant conceptions of femininity. In 1961, women made up only 25 per cent of employed adults and twice as many women described their occupation as ""home duties"" compared with those in paid employment. The fertility rate fell from a post-war high of 3.5 to less than 2 in the 1970s and 1980s.
The reforming drive of the 1960s and the increasing influence of the women's movement led to a series of legislative and institutional changes. These included the abolition of the ""marriage bar"" in the Australian public service in 1966, the Arbitration Commission's equal pay decisions of 1969 and 1972, the introduction of paid maternity leave in the Australian public service in 1973, and the enactment of the federal Sex Discrimination Act in 1984 and the Affirmative Action Act of 1986.
Single mothers' benefits were introduced in 1973 and the Family Law Act 1975 bought in no-fault divorce. From the 1980s there was an increase in government funding of women's refuges, health centres, rape crisis centres and information services. The Australian government began funding child care with the Child Care Act of 1972, although state, territory and local government were still the main providers of funding. In 1984, the Australian government introduced standardised fee relief for child care, and funding was greatly expanded in 1990 by the decision to extend fee relief to commercial child care centres.
According to Holmes and Pinto, reliable birth control, increased employment opportunities, and improved family welfare and childcare provision increased opportunities for women outside motherhood and domesticity. In 2019–20, women were more likely than men to hold a bachelor's degree or higher qualification. 68 per cent of women aged 20–74 years old participated in the labour force, compared with 78 per cent of men. However, 43 per cent of employed women were working part-time, compared with 16 per cent of men, and the average earnings of women working full-time was 14 per cent below that of men.
In the five-to-ten years to 2020, the number of women in private sector leadership roles, female federal Justices and Judges, and federal parliamentarians have all increased gradually. However, between 1999 and 2021, Australia has fallen from ninth to 50th in the Inter-Parliamentary Union's ranking of countries by women's representation in national parliaments."
History of Australia,"Migrants and cultural diversity
In 1961, just over 90 per cent of the Australian population had been born in Australia, New Zealand, the UK or Ireland. Another eight per cent had been born in continental Europe. The White Australia policy was in force and migrants were expected to assimilate into the Australian way of life. As the White Australia policy was gradually dismantled in the 1960s and formally abolished in 1973, governments developed a policy of multiculturalism to manage Australia's increasing cultural diversity. In August 1973 Labor's immigration minister Al Grassby announced his vision of A Multi‐Cultural Society for the Future and a policy of cultural pluralism based on principles of social cohesion, equality of opportunity and cultural identity soon gained bipartisan support. The Galbally Report on migrant services in 1978 recommended that: ""every person should be able to maintain his or her culture without prejudice or disadvantage and should be encouraged to understand and embrace other cultures."" In response to the report, the Fraser government expanded funding for settlement services, established the Australian Institute of Multicultural Affairs (AIMA), funded multicultural and community language education programs in schools and established the multi-lingual Special Broadcasting Service (SBS). State and territory government programs to support multiculturalism followed.
By the late 1980s Australia had a high migrant intake which included significant numbers of new arrivals from Asian and Middle‐Eastern countries, leading to public debate on immigration policy. In 1984, the historian Geoffrey Blainey called for a reduction in Asian immigration in the interests of social cohesion. In 1988, the opposition Leader, John Howard called for the abandonment of multiculturalism, a reduction in Asian immigration, and a focus on 'One Australia'. In the same year, the government's FitzGerald review of immigration recommended a sharper economic focus in the selection of immigrants. In 1989, the Hawke government released its National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia which endorsed respect for cultural diversity and the need for settlement services, but indicated that pluralism was limited by the need for ""an overriding and unifying commitment to Australia""."
History of Australia,"Multicultural programs continued to expand between 1986 and 1996 with an emphasis on addressing disadvantage in migrant communities as well as settlement services for recent migrants. James Walter argues that the Hawke and Keating governments (1983–96) also promoted high migration as a means of improving Australia's competitive advantage in a globalised market.
In 1996, Pauline Hanson, a newly elected independent member of parliament, called for a cut in Asian immigration and an end to multiculturalism. In 1998, her One Nation Party gained 23 per cent of the vote in the Queensland elections. The Howard government (1996 to 2007) initially abolished a number of multicultural agencies and reduced funding to some migrant services as part of a general program of budget cuts. In 1999, the government adopted a policy of ""Australian multiculturalism"" with an emphasis on citizenship and adherence to ""Australian values"".
Following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in the US, the Bali bombings and other terrorist incidents, some media and political commentary sought to link terrorism with Islam. In 2004, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) reported an increase in vilification and violence against Australian Muslims and some other minority ethnic groups. The government increased funding for multicultural, citizenship and settlement programs, with an emphasis on the promotion of social cohesion and security. The annual immigration intake also increased substantially as the economy boomed, from 67,900 in 1998–99 to 148,200 in 2006–07. The proportion of migrants selected for their skills increased from 30 per cent in 1995–96 to 68 per cent in 2006–07.
Immigration continued to grow under the Labor government (2007–13) with prime minister Kevin Rudd proclaiming a ""big Australia"" policy. The immigration intake averaged around 190,000 a year from 2011–12 to 2015–16, a level based on research indicating the optimum level to increase economic output per head of population. India and China became the largest source countries of new migrants. The immigration intake was reduced to 160,000 in 2018–19 as some State governments complained that high immigration was adding to urban congestion. The opposition also linked high immigration with low wages growth while the One Nation party continued to oppose high immigration while proclaiming: ""It's okay to be white."".
By 2020, 30 per cent of the Australian population were born overseas. The top five countries of birth for those born overseas were England, China, India, New Zealand and the Philippines. Australia's population encompassed migrants born in almost every country in the world."
History of Australia,"Arts and culture
The 1960s and 1970s saw increased government support for the arts and the flourishing of distinctively Australian artistic works. The Gorton government (1968–71) established the Australian Council for the Arts, the Australian Film Development Corporation (AFDC) and the National Film and Television Training School. The Whitlam government (1972–75) established the Australia Council with funding to promote crafts, Aboriginal arts, literature, music, visual arts, theatre, film and television.
In 1966, a television drama quota was introduced requiring broadcasters to show 30 minutes of locally produced drama each week. The police series Homicide (1964–67) became the highest rating program and the family drama Skippy the Bush Kangaroo became a local and international success. By 1969 eight of the twelve most popular television programs were Australian. With these successes, locally produced dramas became a staple of Australian television in the 1970s and 1980s. Notable examples include Rush (1973–76), The Sullivans (1976–83) and Neighbours (1985–present).
From the late 1960s a ""new wave"" of Australian theatre emerged, initially centred on small theatre groups such as the Pram Factory, La Mama and the Australian Performing Group in Melbourne and the Jane Street Theatre and Nimrod Theatre Company in Sydney. Playwrights associated with the new wave included David Williamson, Alex Buzo, Jack Hibberd and John Romeril. Features of the new wave were the extensive use of Australian colloquial speech (including obscenities), the exploration of the Australian identity, and the critique of cultural myths. By the end of the 1970s new Australian plays were a feature of small and large theatre companies in most states."
History of Australia,"Support through the AFDC (from 1975 the Australian Film Commission) and state funding bodies, and generous tax concessions for investors introduced in 1981, led to a large increase in Australian produced films. Almost 400 were produced between 1970 and 1985. Notable films include The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972), Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), My Brilliant Career (1979), Breaker Morant (1980), Gallipoli (1981), the Mad Max trilogy (1979–85) and Crocodile Dundee (1986).
In 1973, Patrick White became the first Australian to win a Nobel Prize for Literature. While there were only around twenty Australian novels published in 1973, this had grown to around 300 in 1988. By 1985 more than 1,000 writers had received grants and more than 1,000 books had been subsidised by the Literature Board. Writers who published their first book between 1975 and 1985 include Peter Carey, David Malouf, Murray Bail, Elizabeth Jolley, Helen Garner and Tim Winton.
There was also a growing recognition of Indigenous cultural movements. In the early 1970s Aboriginal elders at Papunya began using acrylic paints to make ""dot"" paintings based on the traditional Honey Ant Dreaming. Indigenous artists from other regions also developed distinctive styles based on a fusion of modern art materials and traditional stories and iconography. Indigenous writers such as Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker), Jack Davis and Kevin Gilbert produced significant work in the 1970s and 1980s. A National Black Theatre was established in Sydney in the early 1970s. The Aboriginal Islander Dance Theatre was established in 1976 and the Bangarra Dance Theatre in 1989. In 1991, the rock band Yothu Yindi, which drew on traditional Aboriginal music and dance, achieved commercial and critical success.
In music, ABC television's popular music show Countdown (1974–87) helped promote Australian music while radio station 2JJ (later JJJ) in Sydney promoted live performances and recordings by Australian independent artists and record labels.
Carter and Griffen-Foley state that by the end of the 1970s: ""There was a widely shared sense of Australian culture as independent, no longer troubled by its relationship with Britain."" However, by 1990 commentators as diverse as P. P. McGuiness and Geoffrey Serle were complaining that the large increase in artistic works had led to the celebration of mediocrity. Poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe questioned whether Australia had overcome its former ""cultural cringe"" only to fall into cultural overconfidence.
In the new millennium, the globalisation of the Australian economy and society, and developments in jet travel and the internet have largely overcome the ""tyranny of distance"" which had influenced Australian arts and culture. Overseas cultural works could be more readily accessed in person or virtually. Australian performers such as the Australian Ballet and Australian Chamber Orchestra frequently toured abroad. The growing number of international art exhibitions, such as Art Basel Hong Kong and the Queensland Art Gallery's Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, have increased the exposure of Australian art in the region and the wider global market.
In film, the number of Australian productions averaged 14 per year in the 1970s but grew to 31 per year in the 2000s and 37 per year in the 2010s. A number of Australian directors and actors, including Baz Luhrmann, George Miller, Peter Weir, Cate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman, Geoffrey Rush and others, have been able to establish careers both in Australia and abroad. The technical expertise developed in the Australian industry, and the increasing number of internationally successful Australian directors and actors, encouraged foreign producers to make more films in Australia. Major international productions made in Australia in the past decade include Mad Max: Fury Road and The Great Gatsby.
Carter and Griffen-Follet conclude: ""Australia is no longer a Dominion or client state within a closed imperial market, but a medium-sized player, exporter as well as importer, within globalised cultural industries and markets."""
History of Australia,"Historiography
The first Australian histories, such as those by William Wentworth and James Macarthur, were written to influence public opinion and British policy in the colony. After the Australian colonies became self-governing in the 1850s, colonial governments commissioned histories aimed at promoting migration and investment from Britain. The beginning of professional academic history in Australian universities from 1891 saw the dominance of an Imperial framework for interpreting Australian history, in which Australia emerged from the successful transfer of people, institutions, and culture from Britain. Typical of the imperial school of Australian history was the Australian volume of the Cambridge History of the British Empire published in 1933.
Military history received government support after the First World War, most prominently with Charles Bean's 12 volume History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 (1921–42). Bean's earlier work as Australia's official war correspondent had helped establish the Anzac legend which, according to McKenna: ""immediately supplanted all other narratives of nationhood – the march of the explorers, the advance of settlement, Eureka, Federation and Australia's record of progressive democratic legislation."""
History of Australia,"Radical nationalist interpretations of Australian history became more prominent from the 1930s. Brian Fitzpatrick published a series of histories from 1939 to 1941 which sought to demonstrate the exploitative nature of Britain's economic relationship with Australia and the role of the labour movement in a struggle for social justice and economic independence. Russel Ward's The Australian Legend (1958) which sought to trace the origins of a distinctive democratic national ethos from the experiences of the convicts, bushrangers, gold-diggers, drovers and shearers. In the 1960s, Marxist historians such as Bob Gollan and Ian Turner explored the relationship of the labour movement to radical nationalist politics. In the first two volumes of his History of Australia (1962, 1968) Manning Clark developed an idiosyncratic interpretation of Australian history telling the story of ""epic tragedy"" in which ""the explorers, Governors, improvers, and perturbators vainly endeavoured to impose their received schemes of redemption on an alien, intractable setting"". Donald Horne's The Lucky Country (1964) was scathing in its observations of a complacent, dull, anti-intellectual and provincial Australia, with a swollen suburbia and absence of innovation. Geoffrey Blainey's The Tyranny of Distance (1966) argued that Australia's distance from Britain had shaped its history and identity.
Humphrey McQueen in A New Britannia (1970) attacked radical nationalist historical narratives from a Marxist New Left perspective. Anne Summers in Damned Whores and God's Police (1975) and Miriam Dixson in The Real Matilda (1976) analysed the role of women in Australian history. Others explored the history of those marginalised because of their sexuality or ethnicity. Oral histories, such as Wendy Lowenstein's Weevils in the Flour (1978) became more prominent.
From the 1970s, histories of the Aboriginal–settler relationship became prominent. Charles Rowley's The Destruction of Aboriginal Society (1970), Henry Reynolds' The Other Side of the Frontier (1981) and Peter Reid's work on the ""stolen generations"" of Aboriginal children are notable.
Post-structuralist ideas on the relationship between language and meaning were influential in the 1980s and 1990s, for example, in Greg Dening's Mr Bligh's Bad Language (1992). Memory studies and Pierre Nora's ideas on the relationship between memory and history influenced work in a number of fields including military history, ethnographic history, oral history and historical work in Australian museums. Interdisciplinary histories drawing on the insights of fields such as sociology, anthropology, cultural studies and environmental studies have become more common since the 1980s. Transnational approaches which analyse Australian history in a global and regional context have also flourished in recent decades.
In the 21st century, most historical works are not created by academic historians, and public conceptions of Australia's history are more likely to be shaped by popular histories, historical fiction and drama, the media, the internet, museums and public institutions. Popular histories by amateur historians regularly outsell work by academic historians. Local histories and family histories have proliferated in recent decades."
History of Australia,"See also
Australian archaeology
Australian telegraphic history
Economic history of Australia
Europeans in Oceania
History of Oceania
History of broadcasting#Australia
History of monarchy in Australia
Immigration history of Australia
LGBT history in Australia
List of conflicts in Australia
List of towns and cities in Australia by year of foundation
Military history of Australia
Territorial evolution of Australia
Timeline of Australian history
Whaling in Australia
Women in Australia"
History of Australia,"References
Reference books
Historical surveys
Early recorded history
Books
Journal articles, scholarly papers, essays
Primary sources
Further reading
External links"
History of Australia,"Australia: The Official History, by John Hirst, February 2008, The Monthly
History of the Australian nation – State Library of NSW
The Australian History page at Project Gutenberg of Australia
Bush Poetry a source of Australian History
Australian Historical Studies, a scholarly journal
Historical Primary Sources
""State Library of New South Wales Online Collections""
""Australian War Memorial Collections"" Archived 7 December 2013 at the Wayback Machine
""Some Inspirational (Australian) People"" Profiled by Laurence MacDonald Muir.
""The Australian Empire"" by Rob Robinson, 2009
From Terra Australis to Australia, State Library of New South Wales
European discovery and the colonisation of Australia – Australian Government
Looking For Blackfellas Point History of European settlement and relations with Aboriginal people of South Eastern Australia, Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Royal Australian Historical Society"
LGBT rights in Australia,"Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights in Australia rank among the highest in the world; having significantly advanced over the latter half of the 20th century and early 21st century. Opinion polls and the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey indicate widespread popular support for same-sex marriage within the nation. A 2013 Pew Research poll found that 79% of Australians agreed that homosexuality should be accepted by society, making it the fifth-most supportive country surveyed in the world. With its long history of LGBT activism and annual Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras festival, Sydney has been named one of the most gay-friendly cities in the world.
Australia is a federation, with most laws affecting LGBT and intersex rights made by its states and territories. Between 1975 and 1997, the states and territories progressively repealed anti-homosexuality laws that dated back to the colonial era. Since 2016, each jurisdiction has an equal age of consent for all sexual acts. All jurisdictions offer expungement schemes to clear the criminal records of people charged or convicted for consensual sexual acts that are no longer illegal. All jurisdictions of Australia have legally abolished the gay panic defence, based within common law, since 1 April 2021. Since March 2024, conversion therapy is legally banned in jurisdictions representing approximately 75% of the Australian population: Queensland, New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory and Victoria.
Australia legalised same-sex marriage on 9 December 2017. States and territories began granting domestic partnership benefits and relationship recognition to same-sex couples from 2003 onwards, with federal law recognising same-sex couples since 2009 as de facto relationships. Alongside marriage, same-sex relationships may be recognised by states or territories in various ways, including through civil unions, domestic partnerships, registered relationships and/or as unregistered de facto relationships.
Joint and stepchild same-sex adoption is legal nationwide, with the Northern Territory the last jurisdiction to pass an adoption equality law in March 2018. Discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity or expression is prohibited in every state and territory, with concurrent federal protections for sexual orientation, gender identity and intersex status since 1 August 2013. Transgender rights in Australia and intersex rights in Australia vary between jurisdictions, from the Australian Capital Territory banning intersex surgery on children in 2023 to with NSW since 1996 – being the only jurisdiction within Australia that still legally requires an individual to undergo ""sex reassignment surgery"" before changing sex on an official birth certificate. Non-binary Australians can legally register a ""non-specific"" sex on federal legal documents and in the records of some states and territories."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Terminology
The term LGBTI is increasingly used in Australia, rather than just LGBT, with the I denoting intersex people. Organisations that include intersex people as well as LGBT people include the National LGBTI Health Alliance and community media. Also used are the terms LGBTQI, and LGBTQIA, with the A denoting asexual people, and Q queer people. According to the 2020 Commonwealth Style Manual, Australian government agencies use both the LGBTI and LGBTIQ+ initialisms, with ""SOGIESC"" (sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics) used by writers in relation to legal and policy issues.
Some far-right politicians have criticised longer initialisms for being too long, preferring LGBT over longer initialisms, such as Bob Katter, Pauline Hanson and Mark Latham."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Legality of same-sex sexual activity
Colonial and 20th century persecution
As part of the British Empire, Australian colonies inherited anti-homosexuality laws such as the Buggery Act 1533. These provisions were maintained in criminal sodomy laws passed by 19th century colonial parliaments, and subsequently by state parliaments after Federation. Same-sex sexual activity between men was considered a capital crime, resulting in the execution of people convicted of sodomy until 1890. [Citation needed] The laws also punished sodomy between heterosexual partners, but did not apply to lesbian relationships. Oral sex as well as manual sex, whether heterosexual or homosexual, public or private, were also criminal offences.
Different jurisdictions gradually began to reduce the death penalty for sodomy to life imprisonment, with Victoria the last state to reduce the penalty in 1949. Community debate about decriminalising homosexual activity began in the 1960s, with the first lobby groups Daughters of Bilitis, the Homosexual Law Reform Society and the Campaign Against Moral Persecution formed in 1969 and 1970."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Decriminalisation of homosexuality
In October 1973, former Prime Minister John Gorton put forward a motion in the federal House of Representatives that ""in the opinion of this House homosexual acts between consenting adults in private should not be subject to the criminal law"". All three major parties were given a conscience vote, and the motion was passed by 64 votes to 40."
LGBT rights in Australia,"However, Gorton's motion had no legal effect as the legality of homosexuality was a matter for state governments. Over a 22-year span between 1975 and 1997, the states and territories gradually repealed their sodomy laws as support for gay law reform grew."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Under the premiership of Don Dunstan, South Australia became the first jurisdiction to decriminalise male homosexual activity on 17 September 1975, with the Australian Capital Territory's decriminalisation, first proposed in 1973, approved by the Fraser Federal Government with effect from 4 November 1976. Victoria followed on 23 December 1980, although a ""soliciting for immoral purposes"" provision added by conservatives saw police harassment continue in that state for some years.
Other jurisdictions to decriminalise male homosexuality were the Northern Territory (effective 4 October 1983), New South Wales (22 May 1984) and (after four failed attempts) Western Australia (7 December 1989). In exchange for decriminalisation, Western Australian conservatives required a higher age of consent and an anti-proselytising provision similar to the United Kingdom's section 28, both since repealed.
Queensland legalised male same-sex activity with effect from 19 January 1991 after the long-standing Nationals government had lost power.
The Tasmanian Government refused to repeal its sodomy law, which led to the case of Toonen v Australia, in which the United Nations Human Rights Committee ruled that sodomy laws violated the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Tasmania's continued refusal to repeal the offending law led the Keating government to pass the Human Rights (Sexual Conduct) Act 1994, which legalised sexual activity between consenting adults throughout Australia and prohibited laws that arbitrarily interfered with the sexual conduct of adults in private.
In the 1997 case of Croome v Tasmania, Rodney Croome applied to the High Court of Australia to strike down the Tasmanian anti-gay law as inconsistent with federal law; after having failed to have the matter thrown out, the Tasmanian Government decriminalised homosexuality on 1 May 1997, becoming the final Australian jurisdiction to do so."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Age of consent equalisation
The age of consent laws of all states and territories of Australia apply equally regardless of the gender and sexual orientation of participants. The age of consent in all states, territories and on the federal level is 16, except for Tasmania and South Australia where it is 17. The age of consent was equalised in 2002 by Western Australia and in 2003 by New South Wales and the Northern Territory. The last state to equalise its age of consent was Queensland in 2016, when it brought the age of consent for anal intercourse into line with vaginal intercourse and oral sex from 18 to 16 years of age."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Historical conviction expungement
All Australian jurisdictions have passed legislation that allows men charged or convicted under historical anti-homosexuality laws to apply for expungement, which clears the charge or conviction from their criminal record, and in South Australia, men can apply to have their convictions spent, but not expunged. After expungement, the conviction is treated as having never occurred, with the individual not required to disclose it and the conviction not showing up on a police records check. Without expungement laws, men who had been convicted of historical sodomy offences were at a disadvantage, including being subject to restrictions on travel and in applying for some jobs.
The dates when these laws took effect were as follows:"
LGBT rights in Australia,"South Australia — 22 December 2013;
New South Wales — 24 November 2014;
Victoria — 1 September 2015;
Australian Capital Territory — 7 November 2015;
Tasmania — 9 April 2018;
Queensland — 30 June 2018;
Western Australia — 15 October 2018;
Northern Territory — 14 November 2018."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Recognition of same-sex relationships
Australian law allows the recognition of same-sex relationships in a multitude of forms, depending on the couple's wishes. Same-sex couples can marry, enter into a civil union or domestic partnership in most states and territories, or can simply live together in an unregistered de facto relationship. Couples who enter into a civil union or domestic partnership are recognised as being in a de facto relationship for the purpose of federal law. According to the 2016 Census, there were around 46,800 same-sex couples in Australia."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Federal de facto relationship recognition
Following the Australian Human Rights Commission's report Same-Sex: Same Entitlements, and an audit of Commonwealth legislation, in 2009, the federal Rudd government introduced several reforms designed to equalise treatment for same-sex couples and their families. The reforms took the form of two pieces of amending legislation, the Same-Sex Relationships (Equal Treatment in Commonwealth Laws-General Law Reform) Act 2008 and the Same-Sex Relationships (Equal Treatment in Commonwealth Laws-Superannuation) Act 2008. These laws amended 85 other existing federal laws to equalise the treatment of same-sex couples, and any children raised by those couples, in a range of areas including taxation, superannuation, health, social security, aged care and child support, immigration, citizenship and veterans' affairs.
For instance, in relation to social security and general family law, same-sex couples were not previously recognised as a couple for social security or family assistance purposes. A person who had a same-sex de facto partner was treated as a single person. The reforms ensured that, for the first time under Australian law, same-sex couples were recognised as a couple akin to opposite-sex partners. Consequently, a same-sex couple receives the same rate of social security and family assistance payments as a mixed-sex couple. Generally speaking, a couple in a de facto relationship is treated equally to a married couple in legal proceedings, with a few small differences in family law disputes, including property settlements and entitlements to spousal maintenance. A partner in a de facto relationship may also be required to prove the existence of a relationship before a court in order to access benefits, a process which is automatic for married couples and consequently had a discriminatory impact on same-sex couples before they were able to marry in Australia.
De facto relationships also have different time eligibility requirements than marriages under laws relating to Centrelink, migration, family law matters and assisted reproduction. The higher burden of proof for de facto relationships relative to marriages can impact on a person's ability to arrange their partner's funeral, and the rights of a de facto partner may be poorly understood by government departments.
From 1 July 2009, amendments to the Social Security Act 1991 meant that customers in a same-sex de facto relationship are recognised as partners for Centrelink and Family Assistance Office purposes. All customers who are assessed as being a member of a couple have their rate of payment calculated in the same way."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Inheritance and property rights
Before same-sex marriage provided the automatic legal protections that married couples received under the law with regard to inheriting assets from their partners, same-sex couples had to take specific legal actions. Individuals were not entitled to a partial pension after their same-sex partner's death. Same-sex and de facto couples who separated also did not have the same property rights as married couples under federal law and were required to use more expensive state courts, rather than the Family Court, to resolve disputes. The plan to grant equivalent rights to gays and de factos had been up for discussion since 2002, and all states eventually agreed, but the change was blocked because the Howard government insisted on excluding same-sex couples.
In June 2008, the Rudd government introduced the Family Law Amendment (De Facto Financial Matters and Other Measures) Act 2008 to allow same-sex and de facto couples access to the federal Family Court on property and maintenance matters, rather than the state Supreme Court. This reform was not part of the 100 equality measures promised by the Government but stemmed from the 2002 agreement between the states and territories that the previous Howard government did not fulfill. Coalition amendments to the bill failed and it was passed in November 2008."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Same-sex marriage
The Marriage Act 1961 defines marriage as ""the union of 2 people to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life"". The Act was amended in 2004 by the Howard government to recognise only marriages between a man and a woman. Many subsequent attempts to legalise same-sex marriage nationwide failed in the Federal Parliament. The Turnbull government put legislation to the Parliament establishing a plebiscite on same-sex marriage, to be held in February 2017, though this was rejected by the Senate after it failed to attract the support of the opposition Labor Party and minor parties.
Several years beforehand, the Australian Capital Territory had passed laws instituting same-sex marriage in the territory. These laws were rejected by the High Court of Australia in December 2013, shortly after they came into effect. The Court held that Section 51 of the Constitution of Australia grants the Federal Parliament the power to legislate with regard to marriage, and the federal definition of marriage overrides any state or territory definition under Section 109. The court did find, however, that ""marriage"" for the purposes of Section 51 includes same-sex marriage, thus clarifying that there is no constitutional impediment to the Federal Parliament legislating for same-sex marriage in the future. Before the legalisation of same-sex marriage in December 2017, same-sex couples who married overseas were prevented from divorcing in Australia."
LGBT rights in Australia,"After its plebiscite proposals were twice rejected by the Senate, the Turnbull government instead held a non-binding voluntary postal survey, asking Australians if same-sex couples should be allowed to marry. The survey, held between September and November 2017, did not require parliamentary approval. It returned a 61.6% ""Yes"" response in favour of same-sex marriage. A bill to legalise same-sex marriage was introduced into the Parliament shortly after the results were announced. The bill, titled the Marriage Amendment (Definition and Religious Freedoms) Act 2017, passed the Senate by 43 votes to 12 on 29 November 2017, and passed the House of Representatives on 7 December 2017. The bill received royal assent on 8 December 2017 and went into effect the following day. Same-sex marriages lawfully entered into overseas automatically became recognised and the first marriages under the amended law were to occur on 9 January 2018. However, several couples successfully applied for an exemption from the normal one-month waiting period, and the first legal same-sex wedding under Australian law was held on 15 December 2017, with further weddings occurring the following day."
LGBT rights in Australia,"State and territory recognition
Aside from Western Australia and the Northern Territory, all other states and territories in Australia have their own state-based civil union or domestic partnership laws. Cohabiting same-sex couples are otherwise recognised as de facto couples for the purposes of state or territory law.
Same-sex couples may enter into civil partnerships in the Australian Capital Territory and Queensland. Both unions allow couples to have state-sanctioned ceremonies and both laws are commonly referred to as civil unions. In New South Wales, Tasmania, Victoria and South Australia, same-sex couples can enter into domestic registered partnerships/relationships. These provide conclusive proof of the existence of the relationship, thereby gaining the same rights afforded to de facto couples under state and federal law without having to prove any further factual evidence of the relationship. In this way, a registered relationship is similar to a registered partnership or civil union in other parts of the world. Victoria and Tasmania's domestic partnership laws also allow any couple the option of having an official ceremony when registering their relationship. South Australia's law allowing registered relationships and recognised overseas and interstate same-sex unions went into effect on 1 August 2017. In Western Australia and the Northern Territory, same-sex couples must often seek judicial approval to prove a de facto relationship exists. Norfolk Island, from 1 July 2016, has been incorporated into NSW legislation, under both the Norfolk Island Legislation Amendment Act 2015 and the Territories Legislation Amendment Act 2016.
Prior to the federal legalisation of same-sex marriage, six Australian jurisdictions (Tasmania, Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria and South Australia), comprising 90% of Australia's population, recognised same-sex marriages and civil partnerships performed overseas, providing automatic recognition of such unions in their respective state registers."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Adoption and parenting
States and territories make laws with respect to adoption and child-rearing. Since April 2018, same-sex couples can adopt children in all jurisdictions in Australia. The 2021 Australian census counted 13,554 (or 17.3%) children living in same-sex couple families, up from 6,915 in 2016 (or 14.8%). Altruistic surrogacy is legal in all Australian jurisdictions – except Western Australia (where it is legal for heterosexual couples but illegal for singles and same-sex couples). Commercial surrogacy is banned nationwide. The Northern Territory has no laws on surrogacy at all. In recent years, a dramatic increase in the use of overseas surrogacy programs has occurred amongst both same-sex and opposite-sex couples, creating some unique legal concerns with respect to citizenship and parenting rights. It is believed that only 1 in 20 surrogacy arrangements occur in Australia, with almost all involving foreign surrogates mainly from Southeast Asia and the United States. Assisted reproductive technology/treatment (ART) is accessible to same-sex couples in all states and territories, with South Australia being the final jurisdiction to pass such a law, in March 2017. Female same-sex partners of mothers are usually considered the automatic co-parent of children born as a result of assisted reproduction."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Discrimination protections
Federal law protections
Prior to 1 August 2013, Australia did not comprehensively outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation at the federal level. However, in response to Australia's agreement to implement the principle of non-discrimination in employment and occupation pursuant to the International Labour Organisation Convention No.111 (ILO 111), the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Act 1986 established the HREOC, and empowers it to investigate complaints of discrimination in employment and occupation on various grounds, including sexual orientation, and to resolve such complaints by conciliation. If it cannot be conciliated, the Commission prepares a report to the federal Attorney-General who then tables the report in Parliament. Employment discrimination on the ground of ""sexual orientation"" is also rendered unlawful in the Fair Work Act 2009, allowing complaints to be made to the Fair Work Ombudsman.
The Human Rights (Sexual Conduct) Act 1994 provided that sexual conduct involving only consenting adults (18 years or over) acting in private would not be subject to arbitrary interference by law enforcement. This applies to any law of the Commonwealth, State or Territory.
In late 2010, the Gillard Labor government announced a review of federal anti-discrimination laws, with the aim of introducing a single equality law that would also cover sexual orientation and gender identity. This approach was abandoned and instead on 25 June 2013, the Federal Parliament added marital or relationship status, sexual orientation, gender identity and intersex status as protected attributes to the existing Sex Discrimination Act 1984 by passing the Sex Discrimination Amendment (Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Intersex Status) Act 2013.
From 1 August 2013, discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex people became illegal for the first time under national law. Aged care providers who are owned by religious groups will no longer be able to exclude people from aged care services based on their LGBTI or same-sex relationship status. However, religious owned private schools and religious owned hospitals are exempt from gender identity and sexual orientation provisions in the Sex Discrimination Amendment (Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Intersex Status) Act 2013. No religious exemptions exist on the basis of intersex status."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Religious exemptions
In introducing federal discrimination protections for LGBTI people, the Gillard government promised that religious bodies would be exempt, unless they were aged care providers receiving Commonwealth funding. The main exemptions are in sections 37 and 38 of the Sex Discrimination Act 1984, which include the ability for religious educational institutions to discriminate against LGBT students and teachers ""in good faith in order to avoid injury to the religious susceptibilities of adherents of that religion"". In 2017, Perth teacher Craig Campbell was dismissed from a Baptist school after he revealed his sexuality on social media. The Greens promised to repeal religious exemptions to LGBT anti-discrimination protections before the 2016 election, while in January 2018 the Labor Party announced it had no plans to act upon the issue. In the wake of the same-sex marriage debate, the Turnbull government commissioned a review of religious freedoms chaired by Phillip Ruddock, after conservative Coalition politicians called for increased religious freedoms to discriminate against LGBT people. A need to protect religious freedom was emphasised by Scott Morrison after he replaced Malcolm Turnbull as Prime Minister.
In October 2018, various portions of the Ruddock Review report were leaked, which included recommendations to clarify how religious schools could discriminate against LGBT teachers and students. This led to media backlash and polling showed that legal religious discrimination against gay students and teachers was opposed by most Australians, with majorities from every party's voters opposed. The Greens moved to repeal the religious school exemptions altogether, with Labor offering to work with the Coalition to repeal the student discrimination exemptions. After initially defending the status quo, Morrison stated the Coalition would remove the exemption allowing LGBT children to be discriminated against. Labor subsequently offered to repeal the exemptions allowing LGBT teachers' dismissal as well, which gained supported from Liberals Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and Wentworth by-election candidate Dave Sharma, but split the broader Liberal Party. Despite a promise to move rapidly on the issue, the Government and Opposition disagreed on the amendments to be made, blaming each other for the impasse. In 2019, the Morrison government referred the issue to the Australian Law Reform Commission. The Morrison government shifted its focus to introducing a Religious Discrimination Act, with its proposals criticised by Equality Australia and Ian Thorpe as providing a ""licence to discriminate"" against LGBT people and others in the name of religion, though the legislation failed to pass the parliament and the government was defeated at the 2022 election.
Following the Labor Party's victory at the 2022 election, the Albanese Government tasked the Australian Law Reform Commission with investiging the topic of religious exemptions in federal law. In January 2023 the commission released a consultation paper, recommending the law be amended to explicitly outlaw discrimination against both students and teachers on the grounds of sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, and other traits. The commission also recommended allowing religious schools to maintain their religious character by being permitted to give preference to prospective staff on religious grounds where the teaching, observance, or practice of religion is a part of their role (and it is not discriminatory on other grounds); and
require all staff to respect the educational institution's religious ethos."
LGBT rights in Australia,"State and territory law protections
Each of the states and territories introduced their own anti-discrimination laws to protect LGBTI people from discrimination before the Commonwealth did so in 2013. The first anti-discrimination protections were enacted in New South Wales by the Wran Government in 1982, two years before the decriminalisation of homosexuality in that state. All have religious exemptions, although discrimination by religious schools against LGBT students is not permitted in Queensland, the Northern Territory or Tasmania. South Australia requires a religious school discriminating against LGBT students to set out its position in a written policy. Tasmanian discrimination laws have the fewest exemptions, prohibiting discrimination by religious schools against both LGBT staff and students."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Gay panic defence abolition
Historically Australian courts applied the provocation doctrine to allow the use of the ""homosexual advance defence"", more commonly known as the ""gay panic defence"". This meant that for violent crimes such as murder, a male killer could argue that an unwanted homosexual advance from another man provoked him to lose control and respond violently, which could lead to his criminal responsibility being downgraded from murder to manslaughter and therefore a reduced penalty.
The first recorded use of the defence in Australia was the 1992 Victorian case of R v Murley, in which a man was acquitted of murder after killing a gay man who had allegedly made a sexual advance towards him. The defence was recognised nationwide by a majority of the High Court of Australia in the 1997 case of Green v the Queen. This led to calls for the defence to be abolished by legislation.
Several states and territories subsequently abolished the defence of provocation altogether, including Tasmania, New South Wales, Western Australia and Victoria. The Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory took a more targeted approach to reform, specifically abolishing the availability of non-violent homosexual advances as a defence. Queensland took a similar approach in 2017 by removing the ""unwanted sexual advance"" from the defence of provocation, while allowing courts to consider circumstances of an ""exceptional character"".
South Australia was the last state to retain the gay panic defence; however, following a review by the South Australian Law Reform Institute state Attorney General, Vickie Chapman, committed to its abolition. In December 2020, South Australia repealed the common-law gay panic defence – the last jurisdiction of Australia to do so."
LGBT rights in Australia,"School anti-bullying programs
One of the earliest recorded attempts to create organised activism and support on behalf of LGBT+ students came with the creation of the short-lived GAYTAS, attempted at a time when same-sex relationships were still illegal in New South Wales. Following decriminalisation in 1984 through the passing of Neville Wran's private member's bill, the onset of the AIDS epidemic abruptly reversed what had been a growing public acceptance of LGBT+ Australians in mainstream discourse. By the 1990s, in a wave of gay gang murders that killed as many as 88 gay men, homicides and gay-bashings were being committed at nearly three times the rate of police capacity or willingness to solve them, with some being committed by teenaged students. Both to prevent children from becoming involved with gangs perpetrating such assaults, and to protect their potential targets, the Gay and Lesbian Teachers and Students Association was formed to lobby the government for reform and to provide support for LGBT+ students and teachers. Active from 1991 to 1998, GaLTaS had direct dialogue with the Minister of Education, Virginia Chadwick, and relevant administrations, including the New South Wales Department of Education, the New South Wales Parents and Citizens Association, the New South Wales Police Force gay liaison service and the New South Wales Anti-discrimination Board. Prior to the launch at Randwick Boys High School by Chadwick of Jacqui Griffin's 'SchoolWatch Report', the NSW Department of School Education had already begun introducing measures such as the 'Mates' video, and the Books in Schools programme to support the Minister's School Anti-discrimination Grievance Procedures for Students, that provided a means for LGBT+ students to obtain legal redress and complete their education. GaLTaS also assisted students suing their schools, both state and private, for breach of duty of care and anti-gay vilification.
Initially established in Victorian schools in 2010, the Safe Schools Coalition Australia seeks to combat anti-LGBTI abuse or bullying, which research suggested has remained prevalent across Australian schools. Launched nationwide in 2014 under the Abbott government, the program has received support from a majority of state governments, LGBTI support groups and other religious and non-governmental organisations such as beyondblue, headspace and the Australian Secondary Principals Association.
However, the program faced criticism in 2015 and 2016 from social conservatives including the Australian Christian Lobby, LNP politicians such as Cory Bernardi, George Christensen, John Howard, Brendan Nelson, Scott Morrison, Eric Abetz, Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott, Kevin Andrews and former Labor Senator Joe Bullock for indoctrinating children with ""Marxist cultural relativism"", and age-inappropriate sexuality and gender concepts in schools, while others criticised the Marxist political views of Roz Ward, a key figure in the program. Petitions were also delivered against the program by members of Australia's Chinese and Indian communities.
The concerns led to a review under the Turnbull government, which implemented a number of changes such as restricting the program to high schools, removing role playing activities and requiring parental consent before students take part. The federal changes were rejected by the governments of Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory, who persisted with the original program and announced they would fund it independently of the Federal Government. The federal changes were supported in New South Wales, Western Australia and Tasmania, while Queensland and South Australia have voiced criticism without announcing whether they would implement the federal changes. In December 2016, the Federal Government confirmed that it would not renew funding for the program after it expired in mid-2017. The program operates extensively in Victoria and is fully funded by the State Government. State governments are also fully responsible for directly funded programs in South Australia, and the Australian Capital Territory. Several schools in Western Australia, Queensland, Tasmania and the Northern Territory remain signed up to the national Safe Schools registry."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Transgender rights
Gender recognition
Birth certificates and driver licences are within the jurisdiction of the states, whereas Medicare and passports are matters for the Commonwealth. The requirements for a person's change of sex to be recognised and amended in government records and official documents depend on the jurisdiction. Sex and gender recognition for purposes such as Medicare and passports require only a letter. By contrast, some states impose additional requirements for gender recognition that have been criticised by the Australian Human Rights Commission and LGBT advocates. In some states, the person must undergo sex reassignment surgery. The requirement to divorce before transitioning was removed following the legalisation of same-sex marriage in 2017. State and territory governments had until 9 December 2018 to remove the forced divorce requirement. Advocates argue that marital status and surgery requirements are irrelevant to the recognition of a person's sex or gender identity, and instead should rely on their self-identification.
The Australian Capital Territory and South Australia were the first two Australian jurisdictions to allow a person to change the sex recorded on their birth certificate without undergoing sex reassignment surgery or divorce if already married. The Northern Territory followed suit by removing both requirements in November 2018. Western Australia removed the forced divorce requirement in February 2019, having already allowed hormonal therapy as an alternative to sex reassignment surgery for a legal gender change since 2011. Victoria passed legislation removing only the forced divorce requirement in May 2018 and later in August 2019 removed the sex reassignment surgery requirement from law.
Queensland and New South Wales abolished the forced divorce provisions from the statute books in June 2018, though both jurisdictions still require an individual to have undergone surgery before being permitted to alter their sex descriptor on a certificate. In October 2020, the NSW Parliament lower house passed a ""non-binding bipartisan motion"" unanimously – calling for the human rights, dignity and respect for transgender individuals within NSW.
In Tasmania, a bill was introduced in the Parliament in October 2018 by the Hodgman Liberal government to repeal only the forced divorce requirement. However, amendments moved by the Labor opposition and the Greens were passed by the House of Assembly in November 2018 over government opposition, which: repealed the requirement for sex reassignment surgery, recognised non-binary genders, made the inclusion of gender optional on a birth certificate, lowered the age a person can change their legal gender without parental permission to 16, allowed parents of children of any age to apply for gender change consistent with the ""will and preference"" of the child, extended the time limit after birth for parents of intersex children to register their child's birth to 120 days and updated anti-discrimination law. The bill passed the Parliament in April 2019 and received royal assent the following month, with the majority of the bill commencing on the same day. The part that contains amendments to the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act 1999 commenced on 5 September 2019."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Summary table of birth certificates by jurisdiction
Birth certificates are issued by states and territories. In many states, sterilisation is (or has been) required for transgender people to obtain recognition of their preferred gender in cardinal identification documents."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Gender dysphoria treatment
Medical treatment for gender dysphoria in pubescent children is generally divided into two stages:"
LGBT rights in Australia,"Stage 1 treatment involves the use of puberty blockers, which are reversible and can be accessed by children who have reached stages 2 or 3 of pubertal development on the Tanner Scale – this may occur as early as 10 years old;
Stage 2 treatment involves administering hormone replacement therapy such as testosterone or oestrogen. This has irreversible effects (such as a deepened voice following masculinizing hormone therapy or breast growth after feminizing hormone therapy). It is usually available once a person has reached 16 years of age.
Transgender Australians are generally not eligible for sex reassignment surgery until they turn 18 years old.
Medicare provides cover for many of the major surgeries needed for sex reassignment surgery. However, there can often be a gap between the Medicare benefit paid and the amount the surgeon will charge, sometimes in the amount of thousands of dollars. However, many Australian private health insurance policies provide private hospital cover policy that includes any SRS procedure that is also covered by Medicare. There is typically a waiting period before insurers allow people to claim for these services, usually about 12 months.
Since November 2017, a transgender child is able to access both puberty blockers and hormone treatment without court approval if there is agreement between the child, their parents and treating doctors. The first ""Australian Standards of Care and Treatment Guidelines for trans and gender diverse children and adolescents"" were released in 2018."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Intersex rights
Although Australian terminology has expanded from ""LGBT"" to ""LGBTI"" to include intersex people, their experience remain poorly understood in the absence of substantial research in the area. Intersex status was previously considered a subset of gender identity, as reflected in the anti-discrimination law definitions of most states and territories of ""gender identity"" to include people with indeterminate sexual characteristics. Organisation Intersex International Australia considers this inaccurate on the basis that ""intersex"" people are defined by their biological sexual characteristics rather than their gender identities.
A key concern regarding intersex human rights is that intersex infants, who are unable to give consent, may be subjected to medical operations to reduce the prominence of non-binary sex characteristics of their genitalia. These procedures are criticised by intersex advocates who argue that they compromise the individual rights to bodily autonomy, integrity and dignity, drawing parallels to female genital mutilation, in contrast to the position that parents of intersex children may consent on their behalf to having medical interventions conducted in that they believe it to be in the best interests of their children.
In October 2013, the Australian Senate published a report entitled ""Involuntary or coerced sterilisation of intersex people in Australia"". The Senate found that ""normalising"" surgeries are taking place in Australia, often on infants and young children. The report made 15 recommendations, including ending cosmetic genital surgeries on infants and children and providing for legal oversight of individual cases. The recommendations have not been implemented.
Intersex individuals may apply for an Australian passport and other Commonwealth documentation with an ""X"" sex descriptor. Since 2011, the Australian Passport Office has issued such identity documents to all individuals with documented ""indeterminate"" sex. Their guidelines state that ""sex reassignment surgery is not a prerequisite to issue a passport in a new gender. Birth or citizenship certificates do not need to be amended"". Birth certificates are issued by states and territories. As of 2019, the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales, the Northern Territory, South Australia and Tasmania have introduced ""X"" sex descriptors on birth certificates.
In March 2017, representatives of Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome Support Group Australia and Organisation Intersex International Australia participated in an Australian and Aotearoa/New Zealand consensus ""Darlington Statement"" by intersex community organisations and others. The statement calls for legal reform, including the criminalisation of deferrable intersex medical interventions on children, and improved access to peer support. It calls for an end to legal classification of sex and stating that legal third classifications, like binary classifications, were based on structural violence and failed to respect diversity and a ""right to self-determination""."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Immigration policy
Sponsorship of same-sex partners
In 1985, changes were made to the Migration Act 1958 (Cth), after submissions from the Gay and Lesbian Immigration Task Force (GLITF), to create an interdependency visa for same-sex couples. The visa allows Australian citizens and permanent residents to sponsor their same-sex partners into Australia. Unlike married couples, immigration guidelines require de facto and interdependent partners to prove a twelve-month committed relationship, but it can be waived if the couple is registered by a state or territory's Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages. The temporary and permanent visas (Subclasses 310 and 110) allow the applicant to live, work, study and receive Medicare benefits in Australia."
LGBT rights in Australia,"LGBT asylum policy
Australia is a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention, which obliges member states to offer protection to those seeking asylum due to a well-founded fear of persecution in their home countries due to, among other things, their membership of a particular social group. Australia first recognised ""sexual preference"" as a ""social group"" for the purposes of refugee protection in 1992 in Morato's Case. In 2003, a majority of the High Court of Australia held that Australia should not withhold asylum from gay refugees on the basis that they could protect themselves in their home countries by hiding their sexuality. The decision-making process for assessing LGBT asylum claims lacks consistency and relies on stereotypes such as whether the person attended gay clubs or joined lesbian groups.
In 2013, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd introduced a new asylum policy which meant that all asylum seekers arriving by boat would be sent offshore to Manus Island in Papua New Guinea for processing and resettlement. This included gay refugees, even though they face persecution under Papua New Guinean law with homosexual acts criminalised and a potential penalty of 14 years imprisonment. Asylum seekers are warned in an orientation presentation on arrival by the Salvation Army that ""Homosexuality is illegal in Papua New Guinea. People have been imprisoned or killed for performing homosexual acts."" This places them in the position of being required to declare their sexuality to be eligible for refugee protection yet liable to face persecution from other people and under local laws. Gay asylum seekers also face bullying, assault and sexual abuse on Manus Island from others, including officials and other refugees, due to their sexuality. Australia faces accusations from refugee advocates that it has violated its non-refoulement obligations under international law by exposing LGBT asylum seekers to such dangers. After the Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea in 2016 ordered the closure of Manus Island immigration detention centre on the basis that it breached constitutional guarantees of liberty, the Australian Government confirmed the closure but not what would happen to the detainees.
In practice, the protections for refugees seeking asylum on the basis of sexual orientation are limited, depending largely on invasive personal questions and the whim of the immigration officials involved. In 2014, then-immigration minister Scott Morrison introduced further changes which made it even more difficult for LGBTI refugees to prove the merits of their claim for asylum, such as narrowing the scope of protections and implementing a fast-track mechanism that may make it more difficult to gather necessary evidence to support an asylum claim. Australia's strict policy of mandatory detention and offshore processing for unauthorised boat arrivals has been criticised by non-government organisations including the ILGA, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, with particularly severe consequences for LGBT asylum seekers. The 2016 ILGA report on state-sponsored homophobia also describes the case of two gay Iranian asylum seekers resettled by Australia on Nauru who were ""virtual prisoners"" because they were ""subjected to physical attacks and harassment by the local community, as they have been identified as being in a same-sex relationship"", which was illegal at the time. In May 2016, Nauru decriminalised homosexuality by removing ""carnal knowledge against the order of nature"" as a criminal offence."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Military service
The Australian Defence Force (ADF) allows LGBT service members to serve openly and access the same entitlements as other personnel. LGBT personnel were effectively banned from the Australian armed forces until 1992; they could be subject to surveillance, interviews, secret searches and discharge from the military if discovered. The ban tended to be more strictly enforced during peacetime than wartime. Many homosexual personnel served in the military during the World Wars, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, with their comrades often being aware of their orientation and accepting of it.
In 1992, the Keating government overturned the ban on LGB personnel after a lesbian Australian Army reservist complained to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission that she was dismissed on the grounds of her sexuality. A 2000 study found that the lifting of the ban on gay service had not led to any identifiable negative effects on troop morale, combat effectiveness, recruitment and retention or other measures of military performance. The study also found that the lifting of the ban may have contributed to improvements in productivity and working environments for service members.
By the 2000s, the ADF was seeking to actively engage the gay and lesbian community. An official defence contingent joined the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras for the first time in 2008 and the contingent marched in uniform for the first time in 2013. Unofficial support groups had marched in the parade from 1996, initially against the wishes of the ADF's headquarters.
The ADF also recognises ""interdependent relationships"", which include same-sex relationships, regarding benefits available to active duty members. This means equal benefits in housing, moving stipends, education assistance and leave entitlements. To be recognised as interdependent, same-sex partners will have to show they have a ""close personal relationship"" that involves domestic and financial support. The ADF also gives equal access to superannuation and death benefits for same-sex partnerships.
Defence Force policy was amended to allow transgender Australians to openly serve in 2010. The policy was updated following the advocacy of Bridget Clinch, who sought to transition from male to female while serving in the Australian Army.
LGBTI personnel and their families are also supported and represented by the DEFGLIS, the Defence LGBTI Information Service Incorporated. Established in 2002, DEFGLIS has facilitated reforms in the ADF leading to improved recognition of same-sex partners, development of policy and guidance for members transitioning gender, and enhanced education about sexual orientation, gender identity and intersex people."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Conversion therapy
Conversion therapy has a negative effect on the lives of LGBT people, and can lead to low self-esteem, depression and suicide ideation. The pseudoscientific practice has long been performed in Australia. In the 1950s in New South Wales, men convicted of same-sex sexual activity would often be segregated and ""medicalised"" within the prison system. The patients were subjected to apomorphine injections and electric shocks. At the time, conversion therapy was supported by public officials, who viewed homosexuality as a ""curable disease"". There is, however, no scientific or medical evidence to support the use of conversion therapy.
Nowadays, reports suggest that conversion therapy is more ""secret"" and ""insidious"", and is run by religious groups or medical health practitioners. State governments have come under increasing pressure to enact legislation to ban and crack down on the use of the pseudoscientific practice. On 9 February 2016, for instance, the Health Complaints Act 2016 was introduced to the lower house of the Victorian Parliament. The bill created a Health Complaints Commissioner with increased powers to take action against groups performing conversion therapy; these powers ranging from issuing public warnings to banning them from practicing in Victoria. The bill passed the lower house on 25 February 2016, passed the upper house on 14 April 2016 with minor amendments and passed the lower house with the attached amendments on 27 April 2016. Royal assent was granted on 5 May 2016. The law went into effect on 1 February 2017. In May 2018, the Victorian Government announced tougher regulations to crack down on people practicing conversion therapy. In May 2018, ACT Health Minister Meegan Fitzharris said ""The ACT government will ban gay conversion therapy. It is abhorrent and completely inconsistent with the inclusive values of Canberrans.""
A Fairfax Media investigation in 2018 reported that ""across Australia, organisations who believe that LGBTI people can or should change are hard at work. Conversion practices are hidden in evangelical churches and ministries, taking the form of exorcisms, prayer groups or counselling disguised as pastoral care. They're also present in some religious schools or practised in the private offices of health professionals. They're pushed out through a thriving network of courses and mentors in the borderless world of cyberspace, cloaked in the terminology of 'self improvement' or 'spiritual healing.'"" A study of Pentecostal-Charismatic churches found that LGBTI parishioners were faced with four options: remain closeted, come out but commit to remaining celibate, undergo conversion therapy, or leave the church ... the majority took the last option, though typically only after ""agonising attempts to reconcile their faith and their sexuality"". The study provides corroboration that conversion therapy remains practiced within religious communities.
Following the Fairfax investigation, Victorian premier Daniel Andrews called on the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, to support outlawing conversion therapy as part of the national mental health strategy. Federal health minister Greg Hunt declared that the issue is one for the states as no Commonwealth funding goes to sexual orientation change efforts—though ""gay conversion ideology has been quietly pushed in schools as part of the federal government's chaplaincy program"". The report noted that the Victorian law applies only to people offering health services and so does not catch religious groups and charities ""who say they are helping same-sex attracted people to live in accordance with their faith"".
Chris Csabs, a survivor of conversion therapy and LGBT+ advocate, joined Andrews in calling for the federal government to outlaw conversion therapy, declaring that ""praying the gay away nearly killed me"". He established a petition calling on Turnbull and Hunt to act to outlaw conversion therapy, declaring: ""I prayed to God asking him to either heal me, or kill me. I was so depressed, I wanted to die."" In April 2018, shadow health minister Catherine King wrote a response to the petition: ""I'm writing to let you know that Labor stands with you, Chris Csabs and the medical experts in opposing gay conversion therapy ... two Turnbull Government ministers—the Acting Prime Minister and the Health Minister—have now failed to condemn the practice when given the chance."" Shortly after Catherine King's response, the Queensland health minister, Steven Miles, voiced his concerns over the practise and stated that the federal health minister should be working with the states to enact change.
In April 2018, Health Minister Greg Hunt came under fire after he called conversion therapy ""freedom of speech"" and ""a different view"". After much criticism, he affirmed that the Federal Government does not support conversion therapy. In April 2018, the Victorian Liberal Party were set to debate a motion expressing support for conversion therapy at a party conference, but the motion was later removed from the agenda, following outrage from many Liberal politicians who called the motion an ""embarrassment"" and a ""return to the 19th century"".
In May 2018, the Victorian health minister, Jill Hennessy, called for an inquiry into gay conversion therapies. In an unprecedented move, the state government indicated it would not only investigate health professionals but will focus on religious and faith-based ministries propagating gay conversion ideologies. The following day, the health minister of the Australian Capital Territory, Meegan Fitzharris, followed Catherine King's lead by also responding to the petition, stating that, ""The ACT government will ban gay conversion therapy. It is abhorrent and completely inconsistent with the inclusive values of Canberrans.""
In September a 2018 SOCE (Sexual orientation Change Efforts) Survivor Statement, a document written by a coalition of survivors of conversion practices and calling on the Australian government to intervene to stop conversion practices occurring, was sent with the petition to key members of parliament. The authors of the SOCE Survivor Statement, which became known as the SOGICE (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Conversion Efforts) Survivor Statement in 2019, coined new terms such as ""LGBTQA+ conversion practices"", ""conversion movement"" and ""conversion ideology"" to more accurately reflect their experiences. The SOGICE Survivors Statement lists survivor-led recommendations to the Australian government to stop conversion practices in Australia."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Efforts to ban conversion therapy
In September 2018, the Australian Senate unanimously passed a motion expressing opposition to the pseudoscientific practice and calling on the state governments to enact laws prohibiting it.
At the 2019 federal election, the Australian Labor Party promised to introduce a national ban on conversion therapy if elected to government. In response, Coalition leader Scott Morrison said that while he opposed the practice, it was a matter for states and territories.
In August 2020, Queensland and the Australian Capital Territory became the first jurisdictions to pass legislation banning conversion therapy with 18 months imprisonment and 1 year imprisonment respectively.
On 11 November 2020, the Premier of Victoria Daniel Andrews and the Australian Labor Party announced the Change or Suppression (Conversion) Practices Prohibition Bill denouncing conversion practices as cruel, harmful and deceptive. The introduced legislation would outlaw the 'therapy' with fines up to $10,000 (AUD) or up to 10 years jail time. Along with the introduction of this legislation the government will provide increased support for those who have already been forced to experience the harmful practices. The bill passed the Legislative Council on 4 February 2021 and received royal assent and came into force in February 2022. The Legislative Council vote was 27 in favour and 9 against.
On 22 March 2024, New South Wales parliament passed a bill banning conversion therapy. The bill will take effect in 12 months. The Legislative Council vote was 22 in favour and 4 against. 
Bans have been proposed by the governments of Tasmania and Western Australia."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Blood donation
Since 1 February 2021, Australian Red Cross Lifeblood bans blood donations from men who have had sex with men (MSM) in the previous three months. Before this date the deferral period for MSM's was twelve months, a policy that had been in place since 2000. There is an exception for MSM's consuming pre-exposure prophylaxis medication, who currently remain bound to the 12 month deferral policy.
Several other countries also have MSM bans ranging from three months to lifetime or permanent deferral. The 12 month deferral policy was challenged in 2005 to the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Tribunal. Four years later in May 2009, the tribunal dismissed the complaint saying that it was ""unsubstantiated"". The Victorian Government called on the Federal Government to remove the 12-month MSM donation ban in 2016, and in April 2020 the Therapeutic Goods Administration agreed to revise the deferral period for MSM down to three months. The revision required approval of the federal, state and territory governments before it could go into effect."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Positions of religious faiths
Australian faith communities vary widely in their official positions towards LGBT rights, including the legalisation of same-sex marriage. The official position of several major denominations of the Abrahamic faiths – Christianity, Judaism and Islam – is to oppose LGBT rights such as same-sex marriage, although this is not uniform across all denominations or clergy, with a number of religious leaders speaking out in favour of LGBT rights. The Australian Christian Lobby, formed in 1995, and the Catholic Australian Family Association, formed in 1980, strongly oppose LGBT access to adoption and marriage. The official positions of religious organisations are not necessarily shared by their adherents, with a 2005 study finding that along with members of the Anglican and Uniting churches, Australian Catholics were among the Australians most supportive of LGBTI people and their rights. Australia's peak Buddhist and Hindu organisations have expressed support for LGBT rights such as same-sex marriage.
With the advance of LGBT rights in Australia, religious opponents have increasingly used religious freedom arguments to justify continuing opposition against LGBT people on the grounds of their personal beliefs. Religious people in favour of LGBTI rights have also become more visible in the media, with the first interfaith pro-equality forum held in 2016.
In 2017, over 500 religious leaders in Australia wrote an open letter to the Australian Government to support marriage for same-sex couples, saying, ""As people of faith, we understand that marriage is based on the values of love and commitment and we support civil marriage equality, not despite, but because of our faith and values."""
LGBT rights in Australia,"Christianity
The leaders of several Christian denominations, such as Roman Catholicism and the Anglican Church, have opposed LGBT rights. In 2007, then-Catholic Archbishop of Sydney Cardinal George Pell, stated the Roman Catholic Church continues to teach that sexual activity should be confined to married opposite-sex couples and continues to oppose legitimising any extra-marital sexual activity and any ""homosexual propaganda"" among young people. Similarly, the former archbishop of the Evangelical Anglican Diocese of Sydney Peter Jensen vigorously opposed homosexuality, stating that accepting homosexuality is ""calling holy what God called sin"". Their successors, Anthony Fisher and Glenn Davies, continued to speak against LGBT rights, particularly in the context of opposing same-sex marriage. The Exclusive Brethren have also advertised against LGBT rights, such as in the lead up to the 2006 Tasmanian election. However, a number of moderate Anglican leaders have called for greater debate, noting that Australian Anglicans are divided with many supporting LGBT rights. Further, Catholic priest Father Paul Kelly advocated since 2008 for the abolition of the gay panic defence in Queensland to protect LGBT people from violence. As a direct result of his advocacy and online petition, the gay panic defence was abolished from Queensland law on 21 March 2017.
Since 2003, the Uniting Church in Australia has allowed sexually active gay and lesbian people to be ordained as ministers, with each individual presbyteries given discretion to decide the matter on a case-by-case basis. The Uniting Church has allowed ministers to conduct same-sex weddings at their discretion since 2018. Other LGBT-affirming Christian organisations include the Metropolitan Community Church, Acceptance for LGBT Roman Catholics and Freedom2b for Christians generally. On 13 July 2018, the Uniting Church in Australia voted to permit same-sex marriage and approve the creation of official marriage rites for same-sex couples.
A number of individual ministers of religion have publicised their support for LGBT rights and same-sex marriage without their denomination taking an official position. Father Frank Brennan has published an essay in Eureka Street arguing that while religious institutions should be legally exempt from ""any requirement to change their historic position and practice that marriage is exclusively between a man and a woman"", drawing a distinction between civil law and the Catholic sacrament of marriage, he added that recognition of civil unions or same-sex marriages in civil law may become necessary if the overwhelming majority of the population supported such a change. The Anglican Dean of Brisbane, Peter Catt, states that same-sex marriage is needed for ""human flourishing and good order in society"". Baptist minister Carolyn Francis asserted that churches needed to remain relevant and welcoming, including support for LGBTI rights and same-sex marriage."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Buddhism
Buddhist support for LGBT rights such as same-sex marriage was confirmed in 2012 by the Federation of Australian Buddhist Councils, which represents laypeople, and the Australian Sangha Association, which represents religious leaders. Bodhinyana Monastery abbot Ajahn Brahm also wrote to Parliament in support of same-sex marriage, noting that the institution of marriage pre-dates religion and that legalisation would alleviate human suffering."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Judaism
The Progressive Jewish community in Australia broadly supports LGBT rights, whereas the Orthodox branches remain opposed. Rabbi Shimon Cohen drew criticism for comparing homosexuality to incest and bestiality, and stating his support for gay conversion therapy. In 2007, the Council of Progressive Rabbis of Australia, New Zealand and Asia overturned their ban on same-sex commitment ceremonies. The North Shore Temple Emmanuel in Sydney began offering same-sex commitment ceremonies from 2008. In 2011, the Rabbinic Council of Progressive Rabbis of Australia, Asia and New Zealand announced their support for same-sex marriage under Australian law. This news was broadly publicised via a media release issued by Australian Marriage Equality on 25 May 2011. In May 2018, five months after the legalisation of same-sex marriage, Ilan Buchman and Oscar Shub became the first Jewish same-sex couple to marry in an Australian synagogue, the North Shore Temple Emmanuel in Sydney, after being in a relationship for 47 years."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Islam
The Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, a peak umbrella body for Muslim organisations, strongly opposed removing discrimination against same-sex couples in federal law. Chairman Ikebal Patel said such moves would threaten the ""holy relationship"" of marriage and the core values of supporting families. The Sunni Grand Mufti of Australia since 2011, Ibrahim Abu Mohamed, has maintained that Islam opposes what he has termed ""sexual perversions"" as a ""religious fact"". One imam sitting on the Sunni Australian National Imams Council described homosexuality as an ""evil act"" that spread diseases, while another stated that death is the Islamic penalty for homosexuality.
Nur Warsame is a gay imam in Melbourne who seeks to help LGBT Muslims reconcile their faith with their sexuality. In 2018, Warsame announced his intention to open an LGBTI-friendly mosque in Melbourne.
An Australian branch of the LGBT-friendly Muslims for Progressive Values was established in Australia by Professor Saher Amer from the University of Sydney and Reem Sweid from Deakin University who claim Australia is home ""to some of the most conservative Muslims in the western world"". Other Australian Muslims including Osamah Sami, and Muslims Against Homophobia Australia founder Alice Aslan have noted the need to address deep-seated homophobia in Australian Muslim communities."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Hinduism
Having previously been opposed, in 2015, the Hindu Council of Australia declared it would support same-sex marriage in future after a wide-ranging consultation process on the basis that it desired to support freedom and that the issue is not considered at all in Hindu scriptures.
In 2017, a spokesman for the Australian Council of Hindu Clergy announced its support for same-sex marriage. The Australian Council of Hindu Clergy later issued a clarifying statement stating that it considered marriage to be between a man and a woman, after a formal vote indicated 90% opposition of its members to same-sex marriage."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Politics
Australian political parties are polarised on LGBT rights issues, with stronger support from left-of-centre parties such as the Australian Greens and the Australian Labor Party, as well as among moderate members of the centre-right Liberal Party. At state and territory level, most LGBTI law reform has been undertaken by Australian Labor Party governments. The number of openly LGBTI politicians has been increasing since the election of the first openly gay federal politician, former Greens leader Bob Brown, in 1996."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Coalition
The conservative Coalition has mixed views on LGBT rights, but its senior partner the Liberal Party of Australia has fielded an increasing number of LGBTI candidates in federal elections, including the first openly gay man elected to the House of Representatives, Trent Zimmerman. After the 2016 Australian federal election, he was joined by fellow gay Liberals Tim Wilson and Trevor Evans, with gay Senator Dean Smith representing Western Australia for the Liberals in the Senate since 2012. Each differs in their level of activism on LGBT issues, considering themselves members of the Liberal Party first and foremost.
The Coalition's history on LGBT issues is mixed; during the 1970s, Liberal politicians such as John Gorton and Murray Hill worked across party lines in supporting the decriminalisation of homosexuality. In the 1990s and early 2000s during the leadership of John Howard, LGBT rights became part of the culture wars over social policy and were used as wedge politics to separate social conservatives from the Australian Labor Party. Describing himself as ""somewhere in the middle"" on the acceptance of homosexuality, Howard refused to support the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras and stated he would be ""disappointed"" if one of his sons were gay. He also stated that ""homosexual liaisons"" did not deserve recognition as marriages and opposed LGBT adoption. Howard was also accused by a former ComCar driver of plotting with fellow politician Bill Heffernan to force the resignation of openly gay High Court judge Michael Kirby by having Heffernan make baseless allegations of misconduct against Kirby in Parliament. Howard refused to apologise to Kirby and continued to support Heffernan after the alleged evidence was proven fake. In 2004, the Howard government introduced laws allowing same-sex partners to inherit their partner's superannuation. Later that year, the Government passed laws to prevent same-sex marriages being performed or recognised in Australia. In 2007, Howard stated that HIV-positive immigrants should be banned from entering the country.
Following the loss of government in the 2007 Australian federal election, new leader Brendan Nelson flagged the Coalition's support for removing legal discrimination against same-sex couples in all areas except marriage, adoption and fertility services. Nelson was replaced by Tony Abbott, who maintained a socially conservative approach to LGBT issues and stated he felt a ""bit threatened"" by homosexuality but supported ""enduring"" gay unions. In 2015, Abbott addressed the tension between moderate and conservative members over a potential conscience vote on same-sex marriage with a joint Coalition party room meeting, which resolved that the matter required a vote by the Australian public first and prevented its members exercising a conscience vote on the issue. Abbott was accused by Christopher Pyne of ""branch stacking"" the party room by calling a joint meeting with the largely socially conservative Nationals, as this reduced the prospects of a free vote being endorsed.
Abbott was replaced in a leadership spill by same-sex marriage supporter Malcolm Turnbull, who had to maintain the plebiscite requirement as part of his elevation to the leadership. Under the Turnbull government, conservative members used the Safe Schools program and same-sex marriage as proxy issues to oppose the party's progressive wing after moderate Malcolm Turnbull's successful leadership challenge to Tony Abbott. Conservatives prevailed over progressives in the party by denying a conscience vote in the Parliament on same-sex marriage and successfully advocating for changes and the removal of federal funding to the Safe Schools anti-bullying program.
Aside from Darren Chester and Nigel Scullion, the Liberals' junior coalition partner, the National Party of Australia, was more uniformly opposed to same-sex marriage.
The subsequent Morrison government was relatively hostile to LGBT rights, including proposing ""religious discrimination"" laws to legalise certain forms of discrimination against LGBT people, refusing to protect LGBT teachers and students from discrimination by religious schools, banning Australian Defence Force morning teas supporting LGBT rights and Morrison endorsing the opposition to trans participation in women's sport, as expressed by Senator Claire Chandler and 2022 election candidate Katherine Deves.
The Liberal Party of Australia now supports recognition of LGBT people and a ban on conversion therapy."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Australian Labor Party
The Australian Labor Party's position has increasingly shifted in favour of pro-LGBTI policies, in part to counter the electoral rise of the Australian Greens, and in part through internal lobbying by LGBT supporters such as Penny Wong, Anthony Albanese and Tanya Plibersek. Under the leadership of Mark Latham in 2004, Labor supported the Howard government's ban on same-sex marriage to appease its right-wing factions and avoid losing electorates in western Sydney. The party platform continued to oppose same-sex marriage and civil unions until the 2011 National Conference, which passed motions supporting same-sex marriage while allowing its politicians a conscience vote. By 2013, the Labor Right faction also supported same-sex marriage. Opponents of LGBT rights in the party gradually departed, with Senator Joe Bullock leaving in 2016 after party policy changed in 2015 to bind members in favour of same-sex marriage from 2019 onwards. At the 2019 election, the party announced a range of LGBTI policies including a national conversion therapy ban, removing exemptions that allow for discrimination by religious schools against LGBT staff and students, a dedicated LGBTI human rights commissioner, increased HIV funding and increasing legal protections for transgender and intersex people."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Australian Greens
The Australian Greens are strongly supportive of LGBTI rights, with their first federal leader Bob Brown being the first openly gay politician elected to the Federal Parliament. The party has found significant electoral support among LGBTI Australians. They have consistently supported same-sex marriage and are in favour of adoption rights for same-sex couples. The Greens were also the first party to call for the legalisation of same-sex marriage and Greens MPs often use the slogan, ""every vote, every time"" in support. The Greens support calls to ban conversion therapy due to the harmful mental health impacts of sexual orientation and gender identity change efforts.
In education, the Greens have expressed strong support for the Safe Schools program and believe that staff and students should not face discrimination in the education system. The party supports increased access to hormone treatments for transgender and gender diverse people, and support the processing of refugees in Australia who have been criminally charged with homosexual acts in their home countries. The party has supported the removal of the gay blood ban and the gay panic defence.
The Greens would like to establish a federal Office for LGBTI People, as part of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, and believe Australia should have a dedicated Commissioner for Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Intersex Rights at the Australian Human Rights Commission with powers equivalent to existing commissioners."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Pauline Hanson's One Nation
Whilst Pauline Hanson's One Nation party does not have any specific published policies regarding LGBT people, Senator Pauline Hanson voted 'no' in the same-sex marriage plebiscite and against the same-sex marriage bill in parliament. Pauline Hanson has voted consistently in federal parliament against increasing legal protections for LGBTI people. Pauline Hanson has also spoken out against same-sex adoption.
James Ashby who is the General Secretary of One Nation and chief of staff for Pauline Hanson since 2017, is gay.
During the 2017 Queensland state election, One Nation disendorsed its Bundamba candidate Shan Ju Lin after her anti-gay social media post. Lin accused James Ashby of deciding on Hanson's behalf that Lin should be disendorsed. In December 2016, Andy Semple withdrew as a candidate for Currumbin, after the party told him to delete an LGBT joke on Twitter.
In 2023, Hanson criticised NSW One Nation leader Mark Latham tweet in response to fellow politician Alex Greenwich, who is openly gay and called for him to apologise."
LGBT rights in Australia,"Summary table
Federal jurisdiction
State/Territory jurisdiction
See also
LGBT in Australia
Human rights in Australia
LGBT rights in Oceania
Same-sex marriage in Australia
Category:Australian LGBT rights activists
Category:Intersex rights activists
LGBT history in Australia
LGBT rights in Australian states and territories:"
LGBT rights in Australia,"LGBT rights in the Australian Capital Territory
LGBT rights in New South Wales
LGBT rights in the Northern Territory
LGBT rights in Queensland
LGBT rights in South Australia
LGBT rights in Tasmania
LGBT rights in Victoria
LGBT rights in Western Australia"
LGBT rights in Australia,"Notes
References
External links
Reviews of Laws and Rights
Australian Human Rights Commission – Resilient Individuals: Sexual Orientation Gender Identity & Intersex Rights 2015
Special Broadcasting Service – A definitive timeline of LGBT+ rights in Australia Archived 14 April 2019 at the Wayback Machine (Last updated 15 November 2017)
History and Activism
Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives
Living Out Loud: A History of Gay and Lesbian Activism in Australia by Graham Willett, ISBN 1-86448-949-9, 2000.
Mapping Homophobia In Australia Study
Queen City of the South Melbourne Queer History radio series
Support services
QLife – national LGBTI counselling and referral service
Adoption and Parenting
Gay Dads Australia Surrogacy Guide
Same Sex Couple Adoption: The Situation in Canada and Australia Archived 17 January 2008 at the Wayback Machine Parliament of Australia
NSW Law Reform Commission Report, 1988 – Artificial Conception: In Vitro Fertilization
Same Sex Parenting by Paul Boers, Senior Associate of Dimocks Family Lawyers. FindLaw.com (April 2005)
Other
Marriage aside, what laws still discriminate against gays?
Australia National Laws
Federal and State Anti-Discrimination Law
Legal Recognition of Same-Sex Relationships Briefing Paper 9/2006 New South Wales Parliament
World conference on LGBT rights
Interdependency Visa: Offshore Temporary and Permanent (Subclasses 310 and 110)
Sinnes, G.R. Australia Encyclopaedia of Homosexuality. Dynes, Wayne R. (ed.), Garland Publishing, 1990. pp. 93–97"
Separation of powers in Australia,"The separation of powers in Australia is the division of the institutions of the Australian government into legislative, executive and judicial branches. This concept is where legislature makes the laws, the executive put the laws into operation, and the judiciary interprets the laws; all independently of each other. The term, and its occurrence in Australia, is due to the text and structure of the Australian Constitution, which derives its influences from democratic concepts embedded in the Westminster system, the doctrine of ""responsible government"" and the United States version of the separation of powers. However, due to the conventions of the Westminster system, a strict separation of powers is not always evident in the Australian political system, with little separation between the executive and the legislature, with the executive required to be drawn from, and maintain the confidence of, the legislature; a fusion. 
The first three chapters of the Australian Constitution are headed respectively ""The Parliament"", ""The Executive Government"", and ""The Judicature"". Each of these chapters begins with a section by which the relevant ""power of the Commonwealth"" is ""vested"" in the appropriate persons or bodies. On the other hand, the Constitution incorporates responsible government, in which the legislature and the executive are effectively united. This incorporation is reflected in sections 44, 62 and 64 of the Constitution."
Separation of powers in Australia,"Legislature and executive
Currently in Australia, there is no constitutional system where there is a complete separation of powers. In the Westminster system, ministers (executive) are required to sit in Parliament (legislative). This is to adhere with the concept of Responsible Government, which is a requirement of section 64 of the Constitution.
The specific requirement for ministers to sit in Parliament established the connection between executive and legislative, though any person may be appointed a Minister, their appointment lapses if they do not gain a seat in either house of the Parliament within three months. This provision was necessary in 1901, as the first government was sworn in on 1 January but the first parliament was not elected until late March (see 1901 Australian federal election). However, the provision is still relevant, such as the appointment of Bob Carr as Foreign Minister in 2012 prior to his appointment to the Senate. It also applies when a minister in the House of Representatives loses their seat at a general election; despite no longer being a member of parliament, the Minister will typically retain their portfolio for some days after the election, until the new government is sworn in. It also applied when John Gorton became Prime Minister in 1968; he was sworn in while a member of the Senate, then he resigned to contest a by-election for a lower house seat, which he won, but between his resignation from the Senate and being elected to the House of Representatives, he remained Prime Minister without holding any seat in Parliament.
In Victorian Stevedoring & General Contracting Co Pty Ltd v Dignan, the High Court of Australia held that it was impossible, consistent with the British tradition, to insist upon a strict separation between legislative and executive powers. It was found that legislative power may be delegated to the executive, and as a result upheld the validity of delegated legislation. By contrast, in its insistence on a strict separation of ""judicial power"", the High Court has been less willing to compromise. Furthermore, the role of the courts was discussed in Kable v Director of Public Prosecutions (NSW), whereby a NSW statute was invalidated since it purported to confer not-judicial functions to court. The principle that a State Court cannot be assigned powers that are incompatible with its constitutionally protected independence was extended to Territory Courts in Ebner v Official Trustee in Bankruptcy (2000).
The legislature can allocate the executive some of its powers, such as of the making of regulations under an Act passed by Parliament. Similarly, the legislature could restrict or over-rule some powers held by the executive by passing new laws to that effect, though these could be subject to judicial review.
The exceptionally strong party discipline in Australia, especially in the lower house, has had the effect of weakening scrutiny of the executive by the legislature since within the lower house, every member of the numerically larger party will almost always support the executive and its propositions on all issues.
On the other hand, the Senate has had the effect of restraining the power of the executive through its ability to query, amend and block government legislation. The result of the adoption of a proportional system of voting in 1949 has been that the Senate in recent decades has rarely been controlled by governments. Minor parties have gained greater representation and Senate majorities on votes come from a coalition of groups on a particular issue, usually after debate by the Opposition and Independents.
The Constitution does, moreover, provide for one form of physical separation of executive and legislature. Section 44, concerning the disqualifications applying to membership of Parliament, excludes from Parliament government employees (who hold ""an office of profit under the crown"" (iv)) along with people in certain contractual arrangements with the Commonwealth. This was demonstrated in 1992 after Independent MP, Phil Cleary, had won the Victorian seat of Wills. Cleary, on leave without pay from the Victorian Education Department at the time of his election, was held in Sykes v Cleary to be holding an office of profit under the Crown and disqualified. The Court noted that that Section 44's intention was to separate executive influence from the legislature."
Separation of powers in Australia,"Judiciary
As early as New South Wales v Commonwealth (The Wheat Case), the High Court decided that the strict insulation of judicial power was a fundamental principle of the Constitution. This also applies to tribunals and commissions set up by Federal Parliament which, unlike some of their equivalents in the states, can only recommend consequences. The Federal Parliament itself has the rarely used privilege of being able to act as a court in some circumstances, primarily where it may regard a non-member as acting ""in contempt"" of parliament.
The reasoning in the Wheat Case was taken further in Waterside Workers' Federation of Australia v J W Alexander Ltd where a decisive distinction between judicial and arbitral functions was drawn. The High Court made reference to the separation of powers again in R v Kirby; Ex parte Boilermakers' Society of Australia (Boilermakers' Case), highlighting that only a Chapter III Court can exercise judicial powers and, that a Chapter III Court is only permitted to exercise judicial power.
A consequence of the Australian version of the separation of powers is its role in encouraging judicial deference to the ""political"" arms of government. The normal propensity of the High Court is to recognise that separation of powers requires not only that the ""political branches"" should not interfere with judicial activity, but also that the judiciary should leave politicians and administrators alone. The importance of deference has been acknowledged in extrajudicial writings, and in decisions such as Drake v Minister for Immigration & Ethnic Affairs (No 2).
As a manifestation of the separation of powers, a 'Chapter III Court' cannot make administrative decisions. In administrative law this means that the courts cannot substitute an original decision of the executive, but can only decide on its correctness.
The doctrine of persona designata permits non-judicial functions to be conferred on judges in their personal capacity, as opposed to their judicial capacity. However, in Hindmarsh Island Bridge case, it was held that this is subject to the compatibility of the conferred non-judicial function with judicial office."
Separation of powers in Australia,"Prevalence in States
While there are strong textual and structural bases for the independence of the judiciary in the Commonwealth Constitution, the same is not true of the State constitutions. State courts, unlike their federal counterparts, are therefore capable of exercising non-judicial functions. For example, the District Court of South Australia, through its Administrative and Disciplinary Division, conducts merits review of administrative decisions, a function which at Commonwealth level can only be exercised by Executive tribunals. Nevertheless, a degree of judicial independence is maintained at State level by convention.
The federal separation of powers also has implications for State courts, due to the fact that State courts may be invested with federal judicial power under section 71 of the Commonwealth Constitution. On this basis it was held in Kable v Director of Public Prosecutions (NSW) that a State court could not be given a function inconsistent with its status as a potential repository of federal judicial power. The doctrine was rarely applied in the early years following Kable, leading Justice Kirby to describe it as ""a constitutional guard-dog that would bark but once."" However, there has been a revival in the High Court's application of the doctrine since 2009. One recent case was South Australia v Totani, which involved a challenge to the validity of the Serious and Organised Crime (Control) Act 2008 (SA). Section 14(1) of the Act required members of the Magistrates' Court of South Australia to make control orders on application by the Commissioner of Police, provided only that the Magistrate was satisfied that the person subject to the control order was a member of a declared organisation. Even though the functions of the Magistrates' Court under the Act are purely a matter of South Australian law, the fact that the Court is also capable of exercising federal jurisdiction was held to require that it maintain certain standards of independence and impartiality so that it retain the character of a court.
Parliamentary scrutiny of the executive and, in particular, by the New South Wales Legislative Council, was tested in the 1990s when Treasurer Michael Egan, on behalf of Cabinet, refused to table documents in the Legislative Council of which he was a member. The Council, determined to exercise its scrutiny of the executive, pressed the issues and eventually adjudged the Treasurer in contempt, suspending him from the house twice. The matters were disputed in three cases in the High Court and the Supreme Court of New South Wales. The results upheld that principle that the Legislative Council does have the power to order the production of documents by a member of the House, including a minister, and can counter obstruction. However, the extent of the Legislative Council's power in relation to Cabinet documents remains unclear.
In 2018 the High Court held that all matters falling within section 75, and section 76, of the Constitution formed part of the judicial power of the Commonwealth, including a dispute between the residents of different States. It followed that the federal separation of powers meant that a State tribunal was unable to determine a dispute between residents of different States."
Separation of powers in Australia,"Prevalence in Territories
One of the bases for the separation of powers in the Constitution is that the powers of the Parliament are found in Chapter I, executive powers are in Chapter II and judicial powers are in Chapter III. In 1915 it had been held that the separation of powers precluded the exercise of judicial power by the Inter-State Commission, provided for at section 101, in Chapter IV Finance and Trade. The power to make laws for the government of the territories is found in section 122, located in Chapter VI New States. How section 122 relates to Chapter III is ""a problem of interpretation ... which has vexed judges and commentators since the earliest days of Federation"" Three of the six judges in the Stolen Generations case, held that the separation of powers doctrine did not apply to the power to make laws for a territory under section 122 of the Constitution. The High Court went on to hold in 2004 that federal jurisdiction can be invested by the Australian Parliament in a Territory court as well as in a State court. In 2015 the question was again considered by the High Court where Gageler J,: at [118]  and Keane J,: at [161]  held that the power under section 122 was not constrained by the doctrine of separation of powers enshrined in Chapter III of the Constitution. Keane J similarly held . The other members of the Court, French CJ, Kiefel and Bell JJ,: at [46]  and Nettle and Gordon JJ,: at [194]  found it was unnecessary to answer the question."
Separation of powers in Australia,"
== References =="
Australian Journal of Political Science,"The Australian Journal of Political Science is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal that covers a wide range of fields political studies and international relations, including Australian politics, comparative politics, policy studies, political theory and foreign policy. The journal was established in 1966 as Politics and obtained its current name in 1990. It is published by Routledge and is the official journal of the Australian Political Studies Association. The editors-in-chief are Renee Jeffery and Annika Werner (Griffith University)."
Australian Journal of Political Science,"Abstracting and indexing
The journal is abstracted and indexed in:"
Australian Journal of Political Science,"According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2017 impact factor of 0.722."
Australian Journal of Political Science,"References
External links
Official website"
New Holland (Australia),"New Holland (Dutch: Nieuw-Holland) is a historical European name for mainland Australia.
The name was first applied to Australia in 1644 by the Dutch seafarer Abel Tasman. The name came for a time to be applied in most European maps to the vaunted Southern Land, or Terra Australis, even after its coastline was finally explored.
The continent of Antarctica, later named in the 1890s, was still in largely speculative form; it resumed the name Terra Australis (sometimes suffixed Non Cognita, meaning unknown). Its existence had been speculated on in some maps since the 5th century, under the theory of ""balancing hemispheres"".
Lieutenant James Cook, captain of HMS Endeavour, claimed the eastern portion of the Australian continent for the British Crown in 1770, naming it New South Wales. The British settlement of Sydney as a colony in 1788 prompted Britain to formally claim the east coast as New South Wales, leading to a search for a new collective name. New Holland was never settled by the Dutch people, whose colonial forces and buoyant population had a settled preference for the Dutch Cape Colony, Dutch Guyana, the Dutch East Indies, Dutch Ceylon and the Dutch West Indies.
New Holland continued to be used semi-officially and in popular usage as the name for the whole land mass until at least the mid-1850s."
New Holland (Australia),"History
Dutch exploration and discovery (c. 1590s–1720s)
The name New Holland was first applied to the western and northern coast of Australia in 1644 by the Dutch seafarer Abel Tasman, best known for his discovery of Tasmania (called by him Van Diemen's Land). The English Captain William Dampier used the name in his account of his two voyages there: the first arriving on 5 January 1688 and staying until 12 March; his second voyage of exploration to the region was made in 1699. Except for giving its name to the land, neither the Netherlands nor the Dutch East India Company claimed any territory in Australia as its own. Although many Dutch expeditions visited the coast during the 200 years after the first Dutch visit in 1606, there was no lasting attempt at establishment of a permanent settlement. Most of the explorers of this period concluded that the apparent lack of water and fertile soil made the region unsuitable for colonisation."
New Holland (Australia),"British colonisation
On 22 August 1770, after sailing north along Australia's east coast, James Cook claimed the entire ""Eastern coast of New Holland"" that he had just explored as British territory. Cook first named the land New Wales, but revised it to New South Wales. With the establishment of a settlement at Sydney in 1788, the British solidified its claim to the eastern part of Australia, now officially called New South Wales. In the commission to Governor Phillip the western boundary was defined as the 135th meridian east longitude (135° east) (map from 25 April 1787), taking the line from Melchisédech Thévenot's chart, Hollandia Nova—Terre Australe, published in Relations de Divers Voyages Curieux (Paris, 1663).
The term New Holland was more often used to refer only to that part of the continent that had not yet been annexed to New South Wales; namely it referred to the western half of the continent. In 1804, the British navigator Matthew Flinders proposed the names Terra Australis or Australia for the whole continent, reserving ""New Holland"" for the western part of the continent. He continued to use Australia in his correspondence, while attempting to gather support for the term. Flinders explained in a letter to Sir Joseph Banks:"
New Holland (Australia),"The propriety of the name Australia or Terra Australis, which I have applied to the whole body of what has generally been called New Holland, must be submitted to the approbation of the Admiralty and the learned in geography. It seems to me an inconsistent thing that captain Cooks New South Wales should be absorbed in the New Holland of the Dutch, and therefore I have reverted to the original name Terra Australis or the Great South Land, by which it was distinguished even by the Dutch during the 17th century; for it appears that it was not until some time after Tasman's second voyage that the name New Holland was first applied, and then it was long before it displaced T’Zuydt Landt in the charts, and could not extend to what was not yet known to have existence; New South Wales, therefore, ought to remain distinct from New Holland; but as it is requisite that the whole body should have one general name, since it is now known (if there is no great error in the Dutch part) that it is certainly all one land, so I judge, that one less exceptionable to all parties and on all accounts cannot be found than that now applied."
New Holland (Australia),"His suggestion was initially rejected, but the new name was approved by the British government in 1824. The western boundary of New South Wales was changed to 129° east in 1825 (16 July 1825 – map). In 1826, to pre-empt a French settlement and claim to the territory, because of the importance of the route to New South Wales the British established a settlement, now called Albany, in south-west New Holland. Governor Ralph Darling of New South Wales put Edmund Lockyer in command of the expedition and gave him the order that if he encountered the French anywhere he was to land troops, to signify to them that ""the whole of New Holland is subject to His Britannic Majesty's Government."" In 1828 a further settlement was made, this time on the Swan River, and the name Swan River Colony was soon the term used to refer to the whole western part of the continent. The name New Holland was still invoked as the name for the whole continent when Charles Fremantle on 9 May 1829 took formal possession in the name of King George IV of ""all that part of New Holland which is not included within the territory of New South Wales."": 11  In 1832, the territory was officially renamed Western Australia.
Even as late as 1837, in official correspondence between the British government in London and New South Wales, the term ""New Holland"" was still being used to refer to the continent as a whole."
New Holland (Australia),"French exploration
From 1800 to 1803, France conducted an expedition to map the coast of New Holland, led by Nicolas Baudin. The Baudin expedition was intended to be a voyage of discovery that would further scientific knowledge and perhaps eclipse the achievements of James Hook.
Many Western Australian places still have French names today from Baudin's expedition: for example, Peron Peninsula, Depuch Island, Boullanger Island and Faure Island."
New Holland (Australia),"Change of name
After British colonisation, the name New Holland was retained for several decades and the south polar continent continued to be called Terra Australis, sometimes shortened to Australia. However, in the 19th century, the colonial authorities gradually removed the Dutch name from the island continent and, instead of inventing a new name, they took the name Australia from the south polar continent, leaving a gap in continental nomenclature for eighty years. Even so, the name New Holland survived for many decades, used in atlases, literature and in common parlance.
In the Netherlands, the continent continued to be called Nieuw Holland until about the end of the 19th century. The Dutch name today is Australië.
One place where the name persists is in taxonomy. Many Australian species named in previous centuries have the specific name novaehollandiae or novae-hollandiae, for example the emu, Dromaius novaehollandiae."
New Holland (Australia),"In literature
Description
Dutch politician and cartographer Nicolaes Witsen describes the south west Australian coast in a detailed description in a letter titled ""Some late observations of New Holland"" written to English naturalist Martin Lister, dated from 3 October 1698:"
New Holland (Australia),"On this Voyage nothing hath been discovered which can be any way serviceable to the Company. The Soil of this Country hath been found very barren, and as a Desart; no Fresh-water Rivers have been found, but some Salt-water Rivers, as also no Fourfooted Beasts, except one as great as a Dog, with long Ears, living in the Water as well as on the Land.
Black Swans, Parrots, and many Sea-Cows were found there; as also a Lake, whose Water seemed to be Red, because of the Redness of the Bottom of it: and round along the Shore there was some Salt. Our People had seen but Twelve of the Natives, all as black as Pitch, and stark naked, so terrified, that it was impossible to bring them to Conversation, or a Meeting: They lodge themselves as the Hottentots, in Pavilions of Small Branches of Trees. By Night our People saw Fires all over the Country; but when they drew near, the Natives were fled. The Coast is very low, but the Country far from the Sea is high.
Upon the Island near the coast have been seen Rats as great as Cats, in an innumerable Quantity; all which had a kind of Bag or Purse hanging from the Throat upon the Brest downwards. There were found many well-smelling Trees, and out of their Wood is to be drawn Oyl smelling as a Rose, but for the rest they were small and miserable Trees. There were also found some Birds nests of prodigious greatness, so that Six Men could not, by stretching out their Arms, encompass One of them; but the Fowls were not to be found."
New Holland (Australia),"There was great Store of Oysters, Lobsters, and Crabs; and also strange sorts of Fish. There were also Millions of Flies, very much troubling Men. They saw a great many Footsteps of Men and Children, but all of an ordinary bigness. The Coast is very foul and full of Rocks."
New Holland (Australia),"Other literature
In Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift, the title character, travelling from Houyhnhnms Land, spends a few days on the southeast coast of New Holland before he is chased away by the natives.
The American author Edgar Allan Poe used the name New Holland to refer to Australia in his prize-winning 1833 short story ""MS. Found in a Bottle"":"
New Holland (Australia),"the hulk flew at a rate defying computation ... and we must have run down the coast of New Holland.
In 1851, Herman Melville wrote, in a chapter of his novel Moby-Dick entitled ""Does the Whale's Magnitude Diminish? – Will He Perish?"":"
New Holland (Australia),"... may the great whale outlast all hunting, since he has a pasture to expatiate in, which is precisely twice as large as all Asia, both Americas, Europe and Africa, New Holland, and all the Isles of the sea combined.
In 1854, another American writer, Henry David Thoreau, used the term New Holland (referring to the territory of the ""wild"" indigenous Australians) in his book Walden; or, Life in the Woods, in which he writes:"
New Holland (Australia),"So, we are told, the New Hollander goes naked with impunity, while the European shivers in his clothes."
New Holland (Australia),See also
New Holland (Australia),"History of Western Australia
Terra Australis
European exploration of Australia"
New Holland (Australia),"
== References =="
Australian cuisine,"Australian cuisine is the food and cooking practices of Australia and its inhabitants. Australia has absorbed culinary contributions and adaptations from various cultures around the world, including British, European, Asian and Middle Eastern.
Indigenous Australians have occupied Australia for some 65,000 years, during which they developed a unique hunter-gatherer diet, known as bush tucker, drawn from regional Australian plants and animals. Australia became a collection of British colonies from 1788 to 1900, during which time culinary tastes were strongly influenced by British and Irish migrants, with agricultural products such as beef cattle, sheep and wheat becoming staples in the local diet. The Australian gold rushes introduced more varied immigrants and cuisines, mainly Chinese, whilst post-war immigration programs led to a large-scale diversification of local food, mainly due to the influence of migrants from the Mediterranean, East Asia and South Asia.
Australian cuisine in the 21st century reflects the influence of globalisation, with many fast-food restaurants and international trends becoming influential. Organic and biodynamic foods have also become widely available alongside a revival of interest in bush tucker. Australia exports many agricultural products, including cattle, sheep, poultry, milk, vegetables, fruit, nuts, wheat, barley and canola. Australia also produces wine, beer and soft drinks.
While fast food chains are abundant, Australia's metropolitan areas have restaurants that offer both local and international foods. Restaurants which include contemporary adaptations, interpretations or fusions of exotic influences are frequently termed Modern Australian."
Australian cuisine,"History
Indigenous Australian bush food
Indigenous Australians have lived off native flora and fauna of the Australian bush for over 60,000 years. In modern times, this collection of foods and customs has become known as bush tucker.
It is understood that up to 5,000 species of Australian flora and fauna were eaten by Indigenous Australians. Hunting of kangaroo, wallaby and emu was common, with other foods widely consumed including bogong moths, witchetty grubs, lizards and snakes. Bush berries, fruits, and nuts were also used, including the now widely cultivated macadamia nut, and wild honeys were also exploited. Fish were caught using tools such as spears, hooks and traps; in some areas, the construction of complex weir systems allowed the development of forms of aquaculture.
Resource availability and dietary make-up varied from region to region and scientific theories of bush tucker plants being spread by hand have recently emerged. Food preparation techniques also varied; however, a common cooking technique was for the carcass to be thrown directly on a campfire to be roasted.
Native food sources were used to supplement the colonists' diet following the arrival of the First Fleet in Botany Bay in 1788."
Australian cuisine,"Development of Australian cuisine
Following the pre-colonial period, European colonisers began arriving with the First Fleet at Sydney harbour in 1788. The diet consisted of ""bread, salted meat and tea with lashings of rum (initially from the West Indies but later made from the waste cane of the sugar industry in Queensland)."" The British found familiar game in Australia including swan, goose, pigeon and fish, but the new settlers often had difficulty adjusting to the prospect of native fauna as a staple diet.  Meat constituted a large proportion of the Australian diet during the colonial era and into the 20th century.
After initial difficulties, Australian agriculture became a major global producer and supplied fresh produce for the local market. Stock grazing (mostly sheep and cattle) is prevalent throughout the continent. Queensland and New South Wales became Australia's main beef cattle producers, while dairy cattle farming is found in the southern states, predominantly in Victoria. Wheat and other grain crops are spread fairly evenly throughout the mainland states. Sugar cane is also a major crop in Queensland and New South Wales. Fruit and vegetables are grown throughout Australia and wheat is a main component of the Australian diet. Today there are over 85,681 farm businesses in Australia, 99 percent of which are locally owned and operated.
Barbecued meat is almost synonymous with Australian cuisine, though it is estimated that more than 10% of Australians are now vegetarian."
Australian cuisine,"Modern Australian cuisine
After World War II, subsequent waves of multicultural immigration, with a majority drawn from Asia and the Mediterranean region, and the strong, sophisticated food cultures these ethnic communities have brought with them influenced the development of Australian cuisine.  This blending of ""European techniques and Asian flavours"" came to be known as Modern Australian cuisine.
Arguably the first Modern Australian restaurant was Sydney's Bayswater Brasserie (est. 1982), which offered Mediterranean dishes with Asian and Middle Eastern influences and ""showed Sydney [...] that food can be adventurous without being expensive"".  The term itself was first used in print in the 1993 edition of the Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide, which placed 34 restaurants under this heading, and was quickly adopted to describe the burgeoning food scene in Sydney in the 1990s.  Leading exponents of the style include Tetsuya Wakuda, Neil Perry and Peter Gilmore.
As of 2014, the term is considered somewhat dated, with many restaurants preferring to call their style ""contemporary Australian cuisine"" instead."
Australian cuisine,"Fruit and vegetables
Fruit
There are many species of Australian native fruits, such as quandong (native peach), wattleseed, muntries/munthari berry, Illawarra plums, riberry, native raspberries, and lilli pillies, as well as a range of native citrus species including the desert lime and finger lime. These usually fall under the category of bush tucker, which is used in some restaurants and in commercial preserves and pickles but not generally well known among Australians due to its low availability.
Australia also has large fruit-growing regions in most states for tropical fruits in the north, and stone fruits and temperate fruits in the south which has a mediterranean or temperate climate. The Granny Smith variety of apples originated in Sydney in 1868. Another well-known Western Australian apple variety is the Cripps Pink, known locally and internationally as ""Pink Lady"" apples, which was first cultivated in 1973.
Fruits cultivated and consumed in Australia include apples, banana, kiwifruit, oranges and other citrus, mangoes (seasonally), mandarin, stonefruit, avocado, watermelons, rockmelons, lychees, pears, nectarines, plums, apricots, grapes, melons, papaya (also called pawpaw), pineapple, passionfruit and berries (strawberries, raspberries, etc.)."
Australian cuisine,"Vegetables
In the temperate regions of Australia vegetables are traditionally eaten seasonally, especially in regional areas, although in urban areas there is large-scale importation of fresh produce sourced from around the world by supermarkets and wholesalers for grocery stores, to meet demands for year-round availability. Spring vegetables include artichoke, asparagus, bean shoots, beetroot, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, cucumber, leek, lettuce, mushrooms, peas, rhubarb, and spinach; summer vegetables include capsicum, cucumber, eggplant, squash, tomato, and zucchini."
Australian cuisine,"Meat and poultry
Chicken is the most commonly consumed of all meats or poultry by weight, with approximately 47 kilograms of chicken consumed by the average Australian per year."
Australian cuisine,"As of July 2018 Australians ate around 25 kilograms of beef per person with beef having a 35% share of fresh meat sales by value, the highest of any fresh meat in 2018–19.
Lamb is very popular in Australia, with roasting cuts (legs and shoulders), chops, and shanks being the most common cuts. Lamb will often form part of either a Sunday roast or a barbecue. It is also commonly found as an ingredient in gyros and doner kebabs, brought by Greek and Turkish  immigrants in the 1960s and 1970s. Australia consumes more lamb and mutton than any other country listed by the OECD-FAO (with Kazakhstan in second place). In 2017, Australians consumed an average of 8.5 kilograms (19 lb) per person. By way of comparison, New Zealanders average 3.2 kilograms (7.1 lb) and Americans just 0.4 kilograms (0.88 lb).
Lunch at an Australian pub is called a counter lunch, while the term counter meal is used for either lunch or dinner. Common dishes served at counter lunches and counter meals are steak and chips, chicken parmigiana and chips, a mixed grill (an assortment of grilled meats), and roast lamb or beef with roast vegetables."
Australian cuisine,"Game
Kangaroo meat is available as game in Australia, although it is not among the most commonly eaten meats. In colonial-era recipes, kangaroo was treated much like ox tail, and braised until tender forming a rich gravy. It is available today in various cuts and sausages. Kangaroo is, however, a common commercial dog food in Australia.
Other less commonly eaten forms of game are emu and crocodile."
Australian cuisine,"Fish and seafood
Seafood consumption is increasing, but it is less common in the Australian diet than poultry and beef. 
Australian cuisine features Australian seafood such as southern bluefin tuna, King George whiting, Moreton Bay bugs, mud crab, jewfish, dhufish (Western Australia) and yabby. Australia is one of the largest producers of abalone and rock lobster."
Australian cuisine,"Fish and chips is a take-away food that originated in the United Kingdom and remains popular in Australia. It generally consists of battered deep-fried fish with deep-fried chipped (slab-cut) potatoes. Rather than cod which is more common in the UK, the most popular fish at Australian fish and chips shops, at least in southern Australian states, is flake, a fillet of gummy shark (Mustelus antarcticus).
Flathead is also a popular sport and table fish found in all parts of Australia. Barramundi is a fish found in northern Australian river systems. Bay lobsters, better known in Australia as Moreton Bay bugs, are common in seafood restaurants, or may be served with steak as ""surf and turf"".
The most common species of the aquaculture industry are salmon, tuna, oysters, and prawns. Other food species include abalone, freshwater finfish (such as barramundi, Murray cod, silver perch), brackish water or marine finfish (such as barramundi, snapper, yellowtail kingfish, mulloway, groupers), mussels, mud crabs and sea cucumbers.
While inland river and lake systems are relatively sparse, they nevertheless provide freshwater game fish and crustacea suitable for dining. Fishing and aquaculture constitute Australia's fifth most valuable agricultural industry after wool, beef, wheat and dairy. Approximately 600 varieties of marine and freshwater seafood species are caught and sold in Australia for both local and overseas consumption. European carp, common in the Murray River as an invasive species, is not considered edible by most Australians despite being common in cuisines across Europe."
Australian cuisine,"Dairy
Ever since the first British settlement of 1788, Australia has had a dairy industry. Today, the Australian dairy industry produces a wide variety of milk, cream, butter, cheese and yoghurt products.
Australians are high consumers of dairy products, consuming on average some 102.4 litres (22.5 imp gal; 27.1 US gal) of milk per person a year, 12.9 kilograms (28 lb) of cheese, 3.8 kilograms (8.4 lb) of butter (a small reduction from previous year, largely for dietary purposes) and 7.1 kilograms (16 lb) of yoghurt products."
Australian cuisine,"Beverages
Tea
For most of Australia's history following the arrival of British settlers, black tea was the most commonly consumed hot beverage; however, in the 1980s, coffee overtook tea in popularity. Since the 19th century, billy tea was a staple drink for those out in the Australian bush, such as those working on the land or travelling overland. Boiling water for tea in a billy over a camp fire and adding a gum leaf for flavouring remains an iconic traditional Australian method for preparing tea. Famously, it was prepared by the ill-fated swagman in the renowned Australian folksong ""Waltzing Matilda"".
Tea and biscuits or freshly home-baked scones are common for afternoon tea between friends and family."
Australian cuisine,"Coffee
Today's Australia has a distinct coffee culture. The coffee industry has grown from independent cafes since the early 20th century. The flat white  became popular in Australia some time after 1985, and its invention is claimed by a Sydneysider (although this claim is disputed by a New Zealand-based barista). The iconic Greek cafés of Sydney and Melbourne were the first to introduce locally roasted coffees in 1910. US military personnel stationed in Australia during the Second World War helped to spread the habit of coffee drinking, initially in the form of instant coffee.
In 1952, the first espresso machines began to appear in Australia and a plethora of fine Italian coffee houses were emerging in Melbourne and Sydney. Pellegrini's Espresso Bar and Legend Café often lay claim to being Melbourne's first 'real' espresso bars, opening their doors in 1954 and 1956 respectively. This decade also saw the establishment of one of Australia's most iconic coffee brands, Vittoria, which remains the country's largest coffee maker and distributor. The brand has existed in Australia since 1958, well before it moved to the US."
Australian cuisine,"To this day, international coffee chains such as Starbucks have very little market share in Australia, with Australia's long established independent cafés existing along with homegrown franchises such as The Coffee Club, Michel's Patisserie, Dôme in WA, and Zarraffas Coffee in Queensland. One reason for this is that unlike with the United States and Asia, Australia for many decades had already had an established culture of independent cafés before coffee chains tried to enter the market."
Australian cuisine,"Other hot beverages
The chocolate and malt powder Milo, which was developed by Thomas Mayne in Sydney in 1934 in response to the Great Depression, is mixed with cold or hot milk to produce a popular beverage. In recent years, Milo has been exported and is also commonly consumed in Southeast Asia even becoming a major ingredient in some desserts produced in the region."
Australian cuisine,"Alcohol
Beer in Australia has been popular since colonial times. James Squire is considered to have founded Australia's first commercial brewery in 1798 and the Cascade Brewery in Hobart, Tasmania, has been operating since the early 19th century. Since the 1970s, Australian beers have become increasingly popular globally – with Foster's Lager being an iconic export brand. However, Fosters is not a large seller on the local market, with alternatives such as Victoria Bitter and Carlton Draught outselling the popular export. Craft beer is popular, as well as distinctive products from smaller breweries such as Coopers and Little Creatures.
The Australian wine industry is the fifth largest exporter of wine around the world, with 760 million litres a year to a large international export market and contributes $5.5 billion per annum to the nation's economy. Australians consume over 530 million litres annually with a per capita consumption of about 30 litres – 50% white table wine, 35% red table wine. Wine is produced in every state, with more than 60 designated wine regions totalling approximately 160,000 hectares. Australia's wine regions are mainly in the southern, cooler parts of the country, in New South Wales, South Australia, Victoria and Western Australia. Amongst the most famous wine districts are the Barossa Valley, Hunter Valley, Margaret River and Yarra Valley, and among the best known wine producers are Lindeman's, Penfolds, Rosemount Estate, Wynns Coonawarra Estate. In Australia's tropical regions, wine is produced from exotic fruits such as mango, passion fruit and lychees.
In modern times, South Australia has also become renowned for its growing number of premium spirits producers, with the South Australian Spirits industry quickly emerging as a world leader with producers being recognised globally such as Seppeltsfield Road Distillers, Never Never Distilling, Adelaide Hills Distilling and many more.
Rum served as a currency during the late 18th and early 19th centuries in Australia when metallic currency was in short supply."
Australian cuisine,"Take-away and convenience foods
The traditional places to buy take-away food in Australia has long been at a local milk bar, fish and chip shop, or bakery, though these have met with stiff competition from fast food chains and convenience stores in recent decades.
Iconic Australian take-away food (i.e. fast food) includes meat pies, sausage rolls, pasties, Chiko Rolls, and dim sims. Meat pies, sausage rolls, and pasties are often found at milk bars, bakeries, and petrol stations, often kept hot in a pie warmer or needing to be microwaved; meat pies are also a staple at AFL football matches. Chiko Rolls, dim sims and other foods needing to be deep-fried are to be found at fish and chip shops, which have the necessary deep fryers in which to cook them.
Bread rolls, with a variety of fillings, are a common alternative to sandwiches, with double-cut rolls (effectively two sandwiches) a South Australian specialty.
The Australian hamburgers and steak sandwiches are also found at fish and chip shops. Australian hamburgers consist of a fried beef patty, served with shredded lettuce and sliced tomato in a (usually toasted) round bread roll or bun. Tomato sauce or barbecue sauce are almost always included. Bacon, cheese and fried onions are also common additions, as is a slice of beetroot and/or a fried egg, with other options including sliced pineapple. Pickles are rarely included, except in burgers from American chains. Steak sandwiches come with the same options, but instead of a beef patty they consist of a thin steak and are served in two slices of toast, not buns.
Pizza has also become a popular take-away food item in Australia.
Commonly found at community and fundraising events are sausage sizzle stalls – a stall with a barbecue hot plate on which sausages are cooked. At a sausage sizzle the sausage is served in a slice of white bread, with or without tomato sauce and with the option of adding fried onions, and eaten as a snack or as a light lunch. A sausage sizzle at a polling station on any Australian state or Federal election day has humorously become known as a Democracy sausage. Similar stalls are held in the car parks of most Bunnings hardware stores on weekends, by volunteers fund-raising for service clubs, charities, societies or sporting groups. The company supplies the infrastructure and enforces standards, including prices.
The halal snack pack (""HSP"", also known in South Australia as an AB) originated in Australia as a fusion of Middle Eastern and European flavours, common at kebab shops around Australia. It consists of doner kebab meat served over hot chips and covered in sauces (such as chilli, garlic, or barbecue sauce)."
Australian cuisine,"Baked goods and desserts
Damper is a traditional Australian bread prepared by swagmen, drovers and other travellers. It is a wheat-flour-based bread, traditionally baked in the coals of a campfire. Toast is commonly eaten at breakfast. An iconic commercial spread is Vegemite, a salty, B vitamin-rich savoury spread made from brewers yeast eaten on buttered toast, commonly at breakfast, or in sandwiches. A common children's treat dating back to the 1920s is fairy bread, appearing around the same time as the Boston bun.
A classic Australian biscuit is the ANZAC biscuit, which are often homemade and so-called as they were sent by families and friends to Australian soldiers fighting in Europe and the Dardanelles in the First World War. A popular commercial brand of biscuit are Arnott's Tim Tams.
A classic Australian cake is the lamington, made from two squares of butter cake or sponge cake coated in an outer layer of chocolate sauce and rolled in desiccated coconut. Another popular cake and dessert dish is the pavlova, a meringue-based dessert; however, the origins of this are contested as New Zealand also lays claim to its invention.
The mango pancake, a stable of Yum Cha restaurants in Sydney and elsewhere in Australia, is believed to have originated in Sydney in the late 1980s and early 1990s."
Australian cuisine,"Regional foods
As well as national icons there are many regional iconic foods.
South Australia has FruChocs, King George whiting, and a range of foods of German origin including mettwurst, Bienenstich (beesting), streuselkuchen (German cake) and fritz. The state has its own iconic brands such as Farmers Union Iced Coffee, YoYo biscuits and Balfours frog cakes. Jubilee cake is a specialty of South Australia. In Adelaide, a variant on the meat pie is the pie floater, which is a meat pie served in a bowl of pea soup.
Victoria is famous for its home-grown Melbourne invention, the dim sim. Melbourne is also the home of the hot jam donut. Tasmania has leatherwood honey, abalone, and savoury toast. Queensland has Weis Fruit Bar and claims the lamington."
Australian cuisine,"Cities
Brisbane
The cuisine of Brisbane derives from mainstream Australian cuisine, as well as many cuisines of international origin. Major native foods of the Brisbane region and commonly used in local cuisine include the macadamia, lemon-scented myrtle, Australian finger lime, bunya nut, and Moreton Bay bug. The city's cuisine culture is often described as casual with an emphasis on outdoor dining. Roof-top dining has become an iconic part of the culinary landscape, as well as a large street food scene with food trucks and pop-up bars common. Brisbane also lays claim to several foods including ""smashed avo""; although popularised in Sydney in the 1990s, smashed avocado was a common dish in Brisbane and Queensland dating back to the 1920s. Brisbane also claims the lamington and the Conut."
Australian cuisine,"See also
List of Australian and New Zealand dishes
Australian wine
Australian whisky
Chinese restaurants in Australia
Culture of Australia
Bush tucker
Cuisine of Brisbane
Australian Aboriginal sweet foods"
Australian cuisine,"References
Further reading
External links"
Australian cuisine,"Australian food and drink – Native Australians and early settlers
Australian Flavour – Recipes verified as having been cooked in Australian in the late 1800s and 1900s plus others considered iconic"
Exclusive economic zone of Australia,"Australia's exclusive economic zone (EEZ) was declared on 1 August 1994 and extends from 12 to 200 nautical miles (22 to 370 km) from the coastline of Australia and its external territories, except where a maritime delimitation agreement exists with another state. To the 12 nautical-mile boundary is Australia's territorial waters. Australia has the third-largest exclusive economic zone, behind  France  and the United States but ahead of Russia, with the total area of 8,148,250 square kilometres (3,146,060 sq mi), which exceeds its land territory.
The United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS) confirmed, in April 2008, Australia's rights over an additional 2.5 million square kilometres (970,000 sq mi) of seabed beyond the limits of Australia's EEZ. Australia also claimed, in its submission to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, additional Continental Shelf past its EEZ from the Australian Antarctic Territory, but these claims were deferred on Australia's request. However, Australia's EEZ from its Antarctic Territory is approximately 2 million square kilometres (770,000 sq mi)."
Exclusive economic zone of Australia,"Maritime boundary
North and east of Australia is an extensive maritime boundary with Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, New Caledonia (France), Solomon Islands, and New Zealand.
It starts in the Indian Ocean, then runs through the Timor Sea, Arafura Sea, Torres Strait, Coral Sea and ends in the Pacific Ocean.
There is also a maritime border between Australia and Indonesia in the Indian Ocean between Australia's external territory of Christmas Island and the Indonesian island of Java."
Exclusive economic zone of Australia,"Geography
See also
Australia–Indonesia border
Australian marine parks
Australian Whale Sanctuary
Geography of Australia
Timor Sea Treaty"
Exclusive economic zone of Australia,"Notes
References
External links
Continental Shelf Submission of Australia"
Australian Convict Sites,"Australian Convict Sites is a World Heritage property consisting of 11 remnant penal sites originally built within the British Empire during the 18th and 19th centuries on fertile Australian coastal strips at Sydney, Tasmania, Norfolk Island, and Fremantle; now representing ""...the best surviving examples of large-scale convict transportation and the colonial expansion of European powers through the presence and labour of convicts""."
Australian Convict Sites,"Penal sites included
The 11 penal sites constituting the Australian Convict Sites World Heritage listed property are:"
Australian Convict Sites,"Kingston and Arthur's Vale Historic Area (""KAVHA""), Norfolk Island.
Old Government House and Domain (""Old Government House""), New South Wales.
Hyde Park Barracks, New South Wales.
Brickendon and Woolmers Estates (""Brickendon-Woolmers""), Tasmania.
Darlington Probation Station (""Darlington""), Tasmania.
Old Great North Road, New South Wales.
Cascades Female Factory (""Cascades""), Tasmania.
Port Arthur Historic Site (""Port Arthur""), Tasmania.
Coal Mines Historic Site (""Coal Mines""), Tasmania.
Cockatoo Island Convict Site (""Cockatoo Island""), New South Wales.
Fremantle Prison, Western Australia.
These properties were all individually included on the Australian National Heritage List before inclusion on the World Heritage list."
Australian Convict Sites,History of World Heritage listing
Australian Convict Sites,"Out of over 3,000 convict sites remaining in Australia, the 11 constituting the Australian Convict Sites were selected as the pre-eminent examples of the world's convict era satisfying World Heritage selection criteria IV & VI, as follows:"
Australian Convict Sites,"Preparations began in 1995, and a World Heritage nomination was first made in January 2008. That attempt failed, and the nomination was subsequently reworked."
Australian Convict Sites,"
== References =="
Elections in Australia,"Elections in Australia take place periodically to elect the legislature of the Commonwealth of Australia, as well as for each Australian state and territory and for local government councils. Elections in all jurisdictions follow similar principles, although there are minor variations between them. The elections for the Australian Parliament are held under the federal electoral system, which is uniform throughout the country, and the elections for state and territory Parliaments are held under the electoral system of each state and territory.
Part IV of Chapter 1 of the Australian Constitution briefly deals with eligibility for voting and election to the federal Australian Parliament. It does not prescribe how elections should be conducted. Election campaigns and associated political advertisements are subject to some regulation. Public funding of political parties and party registration was introduced in 1983.
Voting for the federal and each state and territory parliament is compulsory for Australian citizens over the age of 18. Voting is almost entirely conducted using paper ballots. The informal vote is not usually significant, but a donkey vote is more common, and may have a deciding impact in marginal seats."
Elections in Australia,"Parliaments
Voting for the federal and each state and territory parliament is compulsory for Australian citizens over the age of 18."
Elections in Australia,"Federal Parliament
The Australian Parliament consists of two chambers, the House of Representatives (commonly also referred as the lower house) and the Senate (also referred as the upper house). The House of Representatives has 151 members, elected for a maximum term of three years in single-member constituencies (each approximately equal in voters). Elections are conducted by a system of preferential voting (also called alternative voting or instant-runoff voting).
The Senate has 76 senators, elected through a preferential system of proportional representation with a system of single transferable vote, with each state constituting a single constituency normally returning 6 senators every three years and each territory constituting a single constituency returning two senators. Electors in the two territories elect senators for non-fixed terms that are defined by the term of the House of Representatives. State senators normally serve fixed six-year terms, with half of the seats in each State expiring every three years. In the event of a double dissolution, the terms of all the members of the Senate and the House of Representatives seats end immediately."
Elections in Australia,"State Parliaments and Territory Legislative Assemblies
South Australia
The Parliament of South Australia is a bicameral legislature. The House of Assembly (lower house) comprises 47 members elected by preferential voting every 4 years from single member electorates. The Legislative Council (upper house) comprises 22 members elected by proportional representation of single transferable vote every 8 years."
Elections in Australia,"Queensland
The Parliament of Queensland is unicameral, consisting of the Legislative Assembly of 93 members elected for a 4 year term from single member electorates using fully preferential voting."
Elections in Australia,"Western Australia
The Parliament of Western Australia consists of the Legislative Assembly and the Legislative Council. The Legislative Assembly has 57 members elected for a four-year term, unless dissolved earlier, from single member electorates using fully preferential voting. The Legislative Council has 37 members elected for a fixed term of 4 years, in a 'whole of state' electorate using preferential proportional representation."
Elections in Australia,"Electoral Commissions
Elections in Australia (Commonwealth, State or Territory) are organised by their respective electoral commissions, as follows:"
Elections in Australia,"The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) is the federal government agency responsible for organising, conducting and supervising federal elections, by-elections and referendums. The AEC is also responsible for setting electoral boundaries and redistributions, and maintains the Commonwealth electoral roll. State and Territory Electoral Commissions perform an equivalent role for State and Territory elections. The Australian electoral roll is also used by the state and territory Electoral Commissions to conduct State, Territory and local government elections, except Western Australia which maintains its own electoral roll."
Elections in Australia,"Voter enrollment
Enrolment on the electoral roll, known in some other countries as registration, is compulsory for all Australian citizens aged 18 years and over. Residents in Australia who had been enrolled as British subjects on 25 January 1984 continue to be enrolled and vote. (Almost 163,000 voters were recorded as British subjects on the electoral roll in 2009.)
As of 2024, the deadline to enroll or update enrolment information such as address is 7 days after the writ of election is issued."
Elections in Australia,"Election day
Each jurisdiction has its own laws and customs as to when elections in the jurisdiction will take place. However, state and territory elections cannot, by federal law, take place within a week before or after a federal election.
Since 1912, federal elections have been held on Saturdays.
Although elections for the House of Representatives have usually corresponded to half-elections of the Senate, the rules which determine when the elections occur differ. Under the Constitution, the House of Representatives lasts no more than three years after it first meets, but may be dissolved earlier. After the House is dissolved or expires, writs for election must be issued within 10 days and the election must be held on a Saturday between 33 and 58 days after the writs have been issued. The next House must meet within 140 days of the writs being issued.
The terms of senators representing the states are of fixed duration (unless Parliament is dissolved in a double dissolution), and elections must occur within a year before the term expires. The terms of senators representing the territories are not fixed, and are tied to the dates of elections for the House of Representatives. Where a House is dissolved early, House and Senate elections may be asynchronous until either the House is again dissolved sufficiently early or a double dissolution occurs.
The Australian Constitution requires that in half-Senate elections the election of State senators must take place within one year before the places become vacant. As the terms of half the senators end on 30 June, the writs for a half-Senate election cannot be issued earlier than the previous 1 July. There is no constitutional requirement for simultaneous elections for the Senate and the House of Representatives, and elections for half the Senate only have taken place in the past. There is a government and electorate preference for Senate elections to take place simultaneously with those of the House of Representatives. Except in the case of a double dissolution, the Senate is not dissolved when elections for the Senate are called and can continue to sit until the term expires. However, it is now a practice for the Senate to be prorogued when the House is dissolved, so that it does not sit during the election period.
By Westminster convention, the decision as to the type of election and date on which an election is to take place is that of the Prime Minister, who 'advises' the Governor-General to set the process in motion by dissolving the House of Representatives (if it has not expired) and then issuing writs for election.
Writs for the election of House of Representatives and territory senators are issued by the Governor-General, while writs for the election of state senators are issued by the respective state governors."
Elections in Australia,"Voting
Voting in federal, state and territory elections is compulsory for all persons on the electoral roll. Voting can take place by a person attending in person at any polling place in their State on the election day or in early voting locations, or by applying for and mailing in a postal vote. Absentee voting is also available, but not proxy voting.
At the 2007 federal election there were 7,723 polling places open for voting. In remote areas, mobile polling places have been used since the 1980s. The visually impaired can use electronic voting machines.
Voting is almost entirely conducted by paper ballot. If more than one election takes place at the same time (for example, for the House of Representatives and the Senate), separate ballot papers are used. These are usually of different colours and are deposited into separate boxes.
How-to-vote cards are usually handed out at polling places by party volunteers. They suggest how a party supporter might vote for other candidates or parties. Electors now routinely receive how-to-vote materials through the mail or by other means.
In practice, privacy arrangements allow informal and protest votes to take place. At the 2010 federal election more than 1.5 million people did not vote or voted incorrectly. Academic Brian Costar from Swinburne University claims the rate of donkey votes in Australia is around 2% of all votes, but the figure is hard to determine accurately.
Most polling places are schools, community halls or churches. Supporters of these places very commonly take advantage of the large number of visitors undertaking fund raising activity, often including raffles, cake stalls and sales of democracy sausages."
Elections in Australia,"Parties
Political parties have certain benefits in Australia's electoral system, including public funding. Political parties must register with the electoral commission in the jurisdiction in which it is proposing to field or endorse candidates. To be eligible for federal registration a party must have at least one member in the Australian Parliament or 1,500 members, and independent candidates are required to provide 50 signatures to be eligible to stand. An unsuccessful challenge to the 500 member requirement was heard by the High Court of Australia in 2004. Other Australian jurisdictions require political parties to have a minimum number of members. For example, New South Wales requires at least 750 members while the ACT and the Northern Territory require 100 members. There are deadlines for registration of a political party.
Australia has a de facto two-party system, with the Australian Labor Party and the Coalition of the Liberal Party of Australia, National Party of Australia, the Liberal National Party and Country Liberal Party dominating Parliamentary elections. It is very difficult for other parties to win representation in the House, let alone form the government, though they may have a strong influence if they hold the ""balance of power"". However, minor parties and independent candidates have been elected to the Senate by virtue of its more favourable voting system. In recent decades, several parties besides the ALP and the Coalition have secured significant representation in the Senate, notably the DLP (1955–1974); the Australian Democrats (1977–2007); and the Australian Greens and its predecessors (1990–present). Independent and other individual senators have also exercised influence, e.g., Brian Harradine (1975–2005), Family First's Steve Fielding (2005–2011), and Nick Xenophon (2008–2017); and, variously from 1984, representatives of the Nuclear Disarmament Party and One Nation.
Many voters use elections to reaffirm their party allegiance. Party affiliation has declined in recent decades. Voters who voted for the same party each election made up 72% of the electorate in 1967. This figure had declined to 45% by 2007. Minor parties have played a greater role in the politics of Australia since proportional representation was progressively introduced.
Elections in Australia are seen by parties as a chance to develop and refine policies. Rather than a procedure where the best policies win the day, elections are contests where parties fight for power. Elections are not part of the process in which specific decisions on policy are made. Control of policy and platforms are wholly determined within the party.
Candidate selection, in Australia typically called preselection, is a significant factor in the democratic process in Australia because the majority of voters base their decision at election time on the party rather than the candidate. In Australia the decision of who may be a candidate is decided by the party in any manner they choose. It can range from a postal vote to the whole party membership through to a decision made by a small select committee."
Elections in Australia,"Election campaigns
Election campaigns typically involve a televised policy launch, which, despite the name, have increasingly been held towards the end of the campaign.  In the 2013 federal election campaign, for example, the Liberal/National and Labor launches were held only 13 days and 6 days respectively prior to election day. From the 1980s onwards direct mailing was seen as a successful way to market, particularly in marginal seats. Major political parties in Australia use databases created from census data, voting records and their own canvassing to shape their direct mail. Quantitative surveys of samples from the wide population as well as focus groups are used by the parties for market research during election campaigns.
The Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 stipulates that political advertisements display the name and address of the individual authorising them. The Broadcasting Services Act 1922 bans the broadcast of advertisements in the three days prior to an election. A ban on broadcast election advertising was imposed under the Political Broadcasts and Political Disclosures Act 1991 but was overturned by the High Court of Australia in 1992. Party registration rules have become stricter, especially in New South Wales.
Television is the preferred medium for campaign news in Australia. At the 2004 federal election more than three-quarters of money spent on advertising was television based.
Incumbent candidates and government have significant benefits compared to non-incumbents. These include substantial allowances and access to staff whose travel is covered by parliamentary allowances.
The Australian Election Study coordinated by the Australian National University was introduced in 1987. The series of surveys are conducted post election and provide a unique take on political behaviour during election campaigns."
Elections in Australia,"Public funding
Australia's first partial public election funding was introduced in 1981 by the then Premier of New South Wales Neville Wran. The Commonwealth Electoral Legislation Amendment Act 1983 brought forward by the Hawke government introduced public election funding and the requirement that all minor donations to parties be disclosed. Amendments to legislation were needed due to the changing nature of election campaigns in the late 1960s and 1970s. Opinion polling, widespread advertising and the rise of the hired campaign professionals meant campaigning had become far more expensive than in previous decades.
Public funding is the preferred means to cover costs rather than corporate donations. However, the majority of the major parties funding is still sourced from private donors. If a candidate or party receives at least 4% of the primary vote at a federal election they are eligible for public funding. The amount of funding paid is calculated by multiplying the number of first preference votes received by the rate of payment at that time, which is indexed in line with the Consumer Price Index.  It is possible for a candidate to receive more public funding than what was spent on campaigning as was the case in Pauline Hanson's 2004 attempt to win a seat in the Australian Senate.
In Queensland, the threshold for public funding is 6% of the primary vote. The threshold in Victoria, Western Australia and the Australian Capital Territory is 4%. South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory do not have public funding for parties and candidates at elections."
Elections in Australia,"Caretaker convention
A series of conventions has evolved covering the conduct of the business of government by ministers, their departments of state, and the Public Service during the ""caretaker period"" of the election. This period begins after the announcement of the election date, when the Governor-General of Australia dissolves the federal parliament on advice from the Prime Minister. It ends after the election result is known and clear, when a newly elected government is sworn into office."
Elections in Australia,"Federal lower house primary, two-party and seat results
A two-party system has existed in the Australian House of Representatives since the two non-Labor parties merged in 1909. The 1910 election was the first to elect a majority government, with the Australian Labor Party concurrently winning the first Senate majority. Prior to 1909 a three-party system existed in the chamber. A two-party-preferred vote (2PP) has been calculated since the 1919 change from first-past-the-post to preferential voting and subsequent introduction of the Coalition. ALP = Australian Labor Party, L+NP = grouping of Liberal/National/LNP/CLP Coalition parties (and predecessors), Oth = other parties and independents."
Elections in Australia,"See also
List of Australian federal elections
List of Australian federal by-elections
Proportional Representation Society of Australia"
Elections in Australia,"References
External links"
Elections in Australia,"Australian Electoral Study
Adam Carr's Election Archive
Archived websites from Australian electoral campaigns since 1996
Guidance on Caretaker Conventions – Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (Australia)
Australian Politics and Elections Database (University of Western Australia)
Full text (HTML) file of the Constitution. From the Parliament of Australia web site."
Advance Australia Fair,"""Advance Australia Fair"" is the national anthem of Australia. Written by Scottish-born Australian composer Peter Dodds McCormick, the song was first performed as a patriotic song in Australia in 1878. It replaced ""God Save the Queen"" as the official national anthem in 1974, following a nationwide opinion survey, only for ""God Save the Queen"" to be reinstated in January 1976. However, a plebiscite to choose the national song in 1977 preferred ""Advance Australia Fair"", which was in turn reinstated as the national anthem in 1984. ""God Save the Queen"" became the royal anthem (later ""God Save the King"" on the accession of King Charles III), and is used at public engagements attended by the King or members of the monarchy of Australia. The lyrics of the 1984 version of ""Advance Australia Fair"" were modified from McCormick's original and its verses were trimmed down from four to two. In January 2021, the official lyrics were changed once again, in recognition of the long habitation of Indigenous Australians."
Advance Australia Fair,"History
Origin
""Advance Australia Fair"" was published in early December 1878 by Scottish-born Australian composer Peter Dodds McCormick (1833–1916) under the pen-name ""Amicus"" (which means ""friend"" in Latin). It was first sung by Andrew Fairfax, accompanied by a concert band conducted by McCormick, at a function of the Highland Society of New South Wales in Sydney on 30 November 1878 (Saint Andrew's Day). The song gained in popularity and an amended version was sung by a choir of around 10,000 at the inauguration of the Commonwealth of Australia on 1 January 1901. In 1907 the Australian Government awarded McCormick £100 for his composition.
In a letter to R.B. Fuller dated 1 August 1913, McCormick described the circumstances that inspired him to write ""Advance Australia Fair"" to be sung by a large choir with band accompaniment. McCormick had attended a concert at Sydney's Exhibition Building where various national anthems were played."
Advance Australia Fair,"This was very nicely done, but I felt very aggravated that there was not one note for Australia. On the way home in a bus, I concocted the first verse of my song & when I got home I set it to music. I first wrote it in the Tonic Sol-fa notation, then transcribed it into the Old Notation, & I tried it over on an instrument next morning, & found it correct. Strange to say there has not been a note of it altered since. Some alteration has been made in the wording, but the sense is the same. It seemed to me to be like an inspiration, & I wrote the words & music with the greatest ease.
The earliest known sound recording of ""Advance Australia Fair"" appears in The Landing of the Australian Troops in Egypt (c. 1916), a short commercial recording dramatizing the arrival of Australian troops in Egypt en route to Gallipoli.
Before its adoption as Australia's national anthem, ""Advance Australia Fair"" had considerable use elsewhere. For example, Australia's national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Commission, used it to announce its radio news bulletins from 1942 to 1952. It was also frequently played at the start or end of official functions. Towards the end of World War II it was one of three songs played in certain picture theatres, along with ""God Save the King"" and the US national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner."
Advance Australia Fair,"Influence
Other songs and marches have been influenced by ""Advance Australia Fair"", such as the Australian vice-regal salute."
Advance Australia Fair,"Competitions, plebiscite and adoption
In 1973, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and his government, desiring to forge a new nationalism separate from the United Kingdom, decided that Australia needed a national anthem that could represent the country with ""distinction"", and they held a competition to find one to replace the existing anthem, ""God Save the Queen"". In January of that year, Whitlam dedicated an entire Australia Day speech to the search for a new anthem, referring to it as a ""symbolic expression of our national pride and dignity"". The Australia Council for the Arts organised the contest, which was dubbed the ""Australian National Anthem Quest"". The contest was held in two stages, the first seeking lyrics and the second music, each having a large prize of A$5,000 for the winning entry. Despite around the 2500 entries received for lyrics and 1300 for music, the Council for the Arts could only produce a shortlist of 6 lyrics and no music, reduced from the 12 originally requested. The lyrics selected were ""We'll Keep the Faith"", ""Advance, Australia"", ""Song of Australia"" and three untitled verses. The songs were not well received, with judge David Williamson stating ""if you think these are bad, you should have seen the rest of the 2500 or so we rejected"". Ultimately, the government did not include any of the new entries in the final vote, with the poll only including ""Advance Australia Fair"", ""Waltzing Matilda"" and ""The Song of Australia"".
In 1974 the Whitlam government performed a nationwide opinion survey to determine the song to be sung on occasions of national significance. Conducted through the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the survey polled 60,000 people (0.05% of Australians at the time) nationally. ""Advance Australia Fair"" was chosen by 51.4% of respondents and, on 9 April 1974, Whitlam announced in parliament that it was the national anthem. It was to be used on all occasions excepting those of a specifically regal nature. A spokesman for Whitlam later stated that the Government regarded the tune, primarily, as the national anthem. The choice came under attack almost immediately, with an editorial noting that ""For Australians, the only consolation is that there will be very few occasions when the words are sung,"" and the Anglican Dean of Sydney commenting ""This second-rate secular song is completely inappropriate for use in churches."" Officials in four states said that Advance Australia Fair would not be played at official functions and that ""God Save the Queen"" would not be replaced, with Sir Harry Budd of New South Wales saying that the lyrics ""are foolish and banal and their sentiments ridiculous.""
During the 1975 election campaign following the dismissal of Whitlam by Sir John Kerr, David Combe proposed that the song be played at the start of the Labor Party's official campaign launch on 24 November 1975 at Festival Hall, Melbourne. Whitlam's speechwriter Graham Freudenberg rejected this idea because, among other reasons, the status of the anthem at that point was still tentative.
On 22 January 1976 the Fraser government reinstated ""God Save the Queen"" as the national anthem for use at royal, vice-regal, defence and loyal toast occasions. Fraser stated that ""Advance Australia Fair"", ""Song of Australia"" or ""Waltzing Matilda"" could be used for non-regal occasions. This choice was also mocked, with The Age declaring the new anthem as ""God Save Australia's Fair Matilda"". His government made plans to conduct a national poll to find a song for use on ceremonial occasions when it was desired to mark a separate Australian identity. This was conducted as a plebiscite to choose the National Song, held as an optional additional question in the 1977 referendum on various issues. On 23 May the government announced the results, ""Advance Australia Fair"" received 43.29% of the vote, defeating the three alternatives, ""Waltzing Matilda"" (28.28%), ""The Song of Australia"" (9.65%) and the existing national anthem, ""God Save the Queen"" (18.78%).
""Advance Australia Fair"", with modified lyrics and reduced to two verses (see development of lyrics), was adopted as the Australian national anthem by the Labor government of Bob Hawke, coming into effect on 19 April 1984. At the same time, ""God Save the King/Queen"" became known as the royal anthem, and continues to be played alongside the Australian national anthem at public engagements in Australia that are attended by the King or any other members of the Royal Family.
Even though any personal copyright of Peter Dodds McCormick's original lyrics has expired, as he died in 1916, the Commonwealth of Australia claims copyright on the official lyrics and particular arrangements of music. Non-commercial use of the anthem is permitted without case-by-case permission, but the Commonwealth government requires permission for commercial use.
The orchestral arrangement of ""Advance Australia Fair"" that is now regularly played for Australian victories at international sporting medal ceremonies, and at the openings of major domestic sporting, cultural and community events, is by Tommy Tycho, an immigrant from Hungary. It was commissioned by ABC Music in 1984 and then televised by Channel 10 in 1986 in their Australia Day broadcast, featuring Julie Anthony as the soloist."
Advance Australia Fair,"Legislative basis
The national anthem was changed on 1 January 2021 by proclamation of the Governor-General on the advice of the Federal Executive Council. The change prior to that was on 19 April 1984."
Advance Australia Fair,"Lyrics
The lyrics of ""Advance Australia Fair"", as modified by the National Australia Day Council, were officially adopted in April 1984. The lyrics were updated on 1 January 2021 in an attempt to recognise the legacy of Indigenous Australians, with the word ""one"" in the second line replacing the previous ""young"". The lyrics are now as follows:"
Advance Australia Fair,"Development of lyrics
Since the original lyrics were written in 1878, there have been several changes, in some cases with the intent of altering the anthem's political focus especially in regard to gender neutrality and Indigenous Australians. Some of these have been minor while others have significantly altered the song. The original song was four verses long. For its 1984 adoption as the national anthem, the song was cut from the four verses to two. The first verse was kept largely as the 1878 original, except for the change in the first line from ""Australia's sons let us rejoice"" to ""Australians all let us rejoice"". The second, third and fourth verses of the original were dropped, in favour of a modified version of the new third verse which was sung at Federation in 1901.
The lyrics published in the second edition (1879) were as follows:"
Advance Australia Fair,The 1901 Federation version of the third verse was originally sung as:
Advance Australia Fair,"The lyrics of ""Advance Australia Fair"", as modified by the National Australia Day Council and officially adopted on 19 April 1984, were as follows:"
Advance Australia Fair,"These lyrics were updated on 1 January 2021 to the current version, in which ""young"" in the second line is replaced with ""one"" to reflect the pre-colonial presence of Indigenous Australians, who have lived in Australia much longer than Europeans."
Advance Australia Fair,"Criticism
General criticism
In May 1976, after reinstating ""God Save the Queen"", Fraser advised the Australian Olympic Federation to use ""Waltzing Matilda"" as the national anthem for the forthcoming Montreal Olympic Games. Fraser responded to criticism of ""Waltzing Matilda"" compared with ""Advance Australia Fair"", and countered, ""in the second verse... we find these words, 'Britannia rules the waves'."" Despite the outcome of the 1977 plebiscite to choose the National Song favouring ""Advance Australia Fair"", successive Fraser Ministries did not implement the change.
The fourth line of the anthem, ""our home is girt by sea"", has been criticised for using the so-called archaic word ""girt"". Additionally, the lyrics and melody of the Australian national anthem have been criticised in some quarters as being dull and unendearing to the Australian people. National Party senator Sandy Macdonald said in 2001 that ""'Advance Australia Fair' is so boring that the nation risks singing itself to sleep, with boring music and words impossible to understand"".
Political sentiment is divided. Craig Emerson of the Australian Labor Party has critiqued the anthem, former MP Peter Slipper has said that Australia should consider another anthem, in 2011 former Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett suggested ""I Am Australian"", while former Australian Labor Party leader Kim Beazley defended it."
Advance Australia Fair,"Recognition of Indigenous Australians
The song has been criticised for failing to represent or acknowledge Australia's Indigenous peoples and aspects of the country's colonial past, leading to modification. The lyrics have been accused of celebrating British colonisation and perpetuating the concept of terra nullius; the now-changed second line of the anthem (""for we are young and free"") was criticised in particular for ignoring the long history of Indigenous Australians. It has also been suggested that the word ""fair"" celebrates the ""civilising"" mission of British colonists.
Since about 2015, public debate about the anthem has increased. Boxer Anthony Mundine stated in 2013, 2017 and 2018 that he would not stand for the anthem, prompting organisers not to play it before his fights. In September 2018 a 9-year-old Brisbane girl was disciplined by her school after refusing to stand for the national anthem; her actions were applauded by some public commenters, and criticised by others. In 2019, several National Rugby League football players decided not to sing the anthem before the first match of the State of Origin series and before the Indigenous All-Stars series with New Zealand; NRL coach and celebrated former player Mal Meninga supported the protesting players and called for a referendum on the subject.
Several alternative versions of ""Advance Australia Fair"" have been proposed to address the alleged exclusion of Indigenous Australians. Judith Durham of The Seekers and Mutti Mutti musician Kutcha Edwards released their alternative lyrics in 2009, replacing ""for we are young and free"" with the opening lines ""Australians let us stand as one, upon this sacred land"". In 2015, Aboriginal Australian soprano Deborah Cheetham declined an invitation to sing the anthem at the 2015 AFL grand final after the AFL turned down her request to replace the words ""for we are young and free"" with ""in peace and harmony"". She has advocated for the lyrics being rewritten and endorsed Durham and Edwards' alternative version.
In 2017 the Recognition in Anthem Project was established and began work on a new version, with lyrics written by poet and former Victorian Supreme Court judge Peter Vickery following consultation with Indigenous communities and others. Vickery's proposed lyrics replaced ""we are young and free"" with ""we are one and free"" in the first verse, deleted the second and added two new ones; the second verse acknowledging Indigenous history, immigration and calls for unity and respect, and the third adapting lines from the official second verse. It was debuted at the Desert Song Festival in Alice Springs by an Aboriginal choir. Former prime minister Bob Hawke endorsed Vickery's alternative lyrics in 2018. In 2017, the federal government under then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull granted permission for Vickery's lyrics to be sung at certain occasions as a ""patriotic song"", but said that before making any official change to the anthem, ""The Government would need to be convinced of a sufficient groundswell of support in the wider community"".
In November 2020, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian proposed changing one word in the opening couplet, from ""we are young and free"" to ""we are one and free"", to acknowledge Australia's Indigenous history. The proposal was supported by the federal Minister for Indigenous Australians, Ken Wyatt, and in December 2020 Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced that this change would be adopted from 1 January 2021, having received approval from Governor-General David Hurley.  The new wording was highlighted in the No case of the official referendum pamphlet of the Voice to Parliament referendum to support arguments against purported ""divisive"" constitutional changes."
Advance Australia Fair,"Dharawal lyrics
Lyrics for the anthem have been written twice in the Dharug language, an Australian Aboriginal language spoken around Sydney by the Dharawal people.
A first version was first performed in July 2010, at a Rugby League State of Origin match in Sydney, though there was some opposition:
In December 2020, another setting, in Dharug, followed by the anthem in English, was sung before a Rugby Union international between Australia and Argentina:"
Advance Australia Fair,"Other unofficial variants
In 2011, about fifty different Christian schools from different denominations came under criticism for singing an unofficial version of the song written by the Sri Lankan immigrant Ruth Ponniah in 1988. The song replaced the official second verse of ""Advance Australia Fair"" with lyrics that were Christian in nature."
Advance Australia Fair,"With Christ our head and cornerstone, we'll build our nation's might;
    Whose way and truth and light alone, can guide our path aright;
    Our lives a sacrifice of love, reflect our master's care;
    With faces turned to heav'n above, Advance Australia Fair;"
Advance Australia Fair,"    In joyful strains then let us sing, Advance Australia Fair.
Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth Peter Garrett and chief executive of the National Australia Day Council Warren Pearson admonished the schools for modifying the lyrics of the anthem, and the Australian Parents Council and the Federation of Parents and Citizens' Association of NSW called for a ban on the modified song. Stephen O'Doherty, chief executive of Christian Schools Australia, defended the use of the lyrics in response."
Advance Australia Fair,"References
Notes
External links"
Advance Australia Fair,"Lyrics on official government website
Streaming audio of Advance Australia Fair with links and information (archive link)
Australian Government websites:
Official published lyrics, music with band parts and sound recordings
Four-part musical score & lyrics PDF 169 KB Archived 21 March 2019 at the Wayback Machine
Australian National Anthem Audio for download (MP3 2.04 MB) Archived 21 March 2019 at the Wayback Machine
Department of Foreign Affair and Trade's webpage on Advance Australia Fair
Online scores held by Australian government libraries (The MusicAustralia collaboration)
Advance Australia Fair (Original Lyrics) – Australian singer Peter Dawson (c. 1930)"
History of Australia (1945–present),"The history of Australia since 1945 has seen long periods of economic prosperity and the introduction of an expanded and multi-ethnic immigration program, which has coincided with  moves away from Britain in political, social and cultural terms and towards increasing engagement with the United States and Asia."
History of Australia (1945–present),"End of the 1940s
In 1944, the Liberal Party of Australia was formed, with Robert Menzies as its founding leader. The party would come to dominate the early decades of the post-war period. Outlining his vision for a new political movement in 1944, Menzies said:"
History of Australia (1945–present),"""…[W]hat we must look for, and it is a matter of desperate importance to our society, is a true revival of liberal thought which will work for social justice and security, for national power and national progress, and for the full development of the individual citizen, though not through the dull and deadening process of socialism."
History of Australia (1945–present),"In April 1945, Prime Minister John Curtin despatched an Australian delegation which included attorney-general and minister for external affairs H. V. Evatt to discuss formation of the United Nations. Australia played a significant mediatory role in these early years of the United Nations, successfully lobbying for an increased role for smaller and middle-ranking nations and a stronger commitment to employment rights into the U.N. Charter. Evatt was elected president of the third session of the United Nations General Assembly (September 1948 to May 1949).
When Labor Prime Minister John Curtin passed away in July 1945. Frank Forde served as Prime Minister from 6–13 July, before the party elected Ben Chifley as Curtin's successor. Chifley, a former railway engine driver, won the 1946 election. His government introduced national projects, including the Snowy Mountains Scheme and an assisted immigration program and pursued centralist economic policies – making the Commonwealth the collector of income tax, and seeking to nationalise the private banks. At the conference of the New South Wales Labor Party in June 1949, Chifely sought to define the labour movement as having:"
History of Australia (1945–present),"[A] great objective – the light on the hill – which we aim to reach by working for the betterment of mankind... [Labor would] bring something better to the people, better standards of living, greater happiness to the mass of the people’."
History of Australia (1945–present),"With an increasingly uncertain economic outlook, after his attempt to nationalise the banks and the coal strike by the Communist-dominated Miners Federation, Chifley lost office at the 1949 federal election to Menzies' newly established Liberal Party, in coalition with the Country Party."
History of Australia (1945–present),"Immigration and the post-war boom
After World War II, Australia launched a massive immigration program, believing that having narrowly avoided a Japanese invasion, Australia must ""populate or perish."" As Prime Minister Ben Chifley would later declare, ""a powerful enemy looked hungrily toward Australia. In tomorrow's gun flash that threat could come again. We must populate Australia as rapidly as we can before someone else decides to populate it for us."" Hundreds of thousands of displaced Europeans, including for the first time large numbers of Jews, migrated to Australia. More than two million people immigrated to Australia from Europe during the 20 years after the end of the war.
From the outset, it was intended that the bulk of these immigrants should be mainly from the British Isles, and that the post-war immigration scheme would preserve the British character of Australian society. Although Great Britain remained the predominant source of immigrants, the pool of source countries was expanded to include Continental European countries in order to meet Australia's ambitious immigration targets. From the late 1940s onwards, Australia received significant waves of people from countries such as Greece, Italy, Malta, Germany, Yugoslavia and the Netherlands. Australia actively sought these immigrants, with the government assisting many of them and they found work due to an expanding economy and major infrastructure projects.
The Australian economy stood in sharp contrast to war-ravaged Europe, and newly arrived migrants found employment in a booming manufacturing industry and government assisted programs such as the Snowy Mountains Scheme. This hydroelectricity and irrigation complex in south-east Australia consisted of sixteen major dams and seven power stations constructed between 1949 and 1974. It remains the largest engineering project undertaken in Australia. Necessitating the employment of 100,000 people from over 30 countries, to many it denotes the birth of multicultural Australia.
In 1949 the 1941–1949 Labor government (led by Ben Chifley after John Curtin's death in 1945) was defeated by a Liberal–National Party Coalition government headed by Menzies. Politically, the Menzies government and the Liberal Party of Australia dominated much of the immediate post-war era, defeating the Chifley government in 1949, in part over a Labor proposal to nationalise banks and following a crippling coal strike influenced by the Australian Communist Party. Menzies became the country's longest-serving Prime Minister and the Liberal party, in coalition with the rural based Country Party, won every federal election until 1972.
As in the United States in the early 1950s, allegations of communist influence in society saw tensions emerge in politics. Refugees from Soviet dominated Eastern Europe immigrated to Australia, while to Australia's north, Mao Zedong won the Chinese Civil War in 1949 and in June 1950, Communist North Korea invaded South Korea. The Menzies government responded to a United States led United Nations Security Council request for military aid for South Korea and diverted forces from occupied Japan to begin Australia's involvement in the Korean War. After fighting to a bitter standstill, the UN and North Korea signed a ceasefire agreement in July 1953. Australian forces had participated in such major battles as Kapyong and Maryang San. Seventeen thousand Australians had served and casualties amounted to more than 1,500, of whom 339 were killed."
History of Australia (1945–present),"During the course of the Korean War, the Menzies government attempted to ban the Communist Party of Australia, first by legislation in 1950 and later by referendum, in 1951. While both attempts were unsuccessful, further international events such as the defection of minor Soviet Embassy official Vladimir Petrov, added to a sense of impending threat that politically favoured Menzies’ Liberal-CP government, as the Labor Party pushed centralist economics and split over concerns about the influence of the Communist Party over the Trade Union movement, resulting in a bitter split in 1955 and the emergence of the breakaway Democratic Labor Party (DLP). The DLP remained an influential political force, often holding the balance of power in the Senate, until 1974; its preferences supported the Liberal and Country Party. The Labor party was led by H. V. Evatt after Chifley's death in 1951. Evatt retired in 1960, and Arthur Calwell succeeded him as leader, with a young Gough Whitlam as his deputy.
Menzies presided over a period of sustained economic boom and the beginnings of sweeping social change – with the arrivals of rock and roll music and television in the 1950s. In 1956, television in Australia began broadcasting, Melbourne hosted the Olympics and, for the first time, performing artist Barry Humphries performed the character of Edna Everage as a parody of a house-proud housewife of staid 1950s Melbourne suburbia (the character only later morphed into a critique of self-obsessed celebrity culture). It was the first of many of his satirical stage and screen creations based around quirky Australian characters.
In 1958, Australian country music singer Slim Dusty, who would become the musical embodiment of rural Australia, had Australia's first international music chart hit with his bush ballad ""A Pub with No Beer"", while rock and roller Johnny O'Keefe's Wild One became the first local recording to reach the national charts,  peaking at #20. Before sleeping through the 1960s Australian cinema produced little of its own content in the 1950s, but British and Hollywood studios produced a string of successful epics from Australian literature, featuring home grown stars Chips Rafferty and Peter Finch.
Menzies remained a staunch supporter of links to the monarchy and British Commonwealth and formalised an alliance with the United States, but also launched post-war trade with Japan, beginning a growth of Australian exports of coal, iron ore and  mineral resources that would steadily climb until Japan became Australia's largest trading partner.
In the early 1950s, the Menzies government saw Australia as part of a ""triple alliance"", in concert with both the US and traditional ally Britain. At first, ""the Australian leadership opted for a consistently pro-British line in diplomacy"", while at the same time looking for opportunities to involve the US in South East Asia. Thus, other than the Korean War, the government also committed military forces to the Malayan Emergency and hosted British nuclear tests after 1952. Australia was also the only Commonwealth country to offer support to the British during the Suez Crisis.
Menzies oversaw an effusive welcome to Queen Elizabeth II on the first visit to Australia by a reigning monarch, in 1954. However, as British influence declined in South East Asia, the US alliance came to have greater significance for Australian leaders and the Australian economy. British investment in Australia remained significant until the late 1970s, but trade with Britain declined through the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1950s the Australian Army began to re-equip using US military equipment. In 1962, the US established a naval communications station at North West Cape, the first of several built over the next decade. Most significantly, in 1962, Australian Army advisors were sent to help train South Vietnamese forces, in a developing conflict the British had no part in.
The ANZUS security treaty, which had been signed in 1951, had its origins in Australia's and New Zealand's fears of a rearmed Japan, but found new impetus through anti-communism. Its obligations on the US, Australia and New Zealand are vague, but its influence on Australian foreign policy thinking, at times significant. The SEATO treaty, signed only three years later, clearly demonstrated Australia's position as a US ally in the emerging cold war. On 26 November 1967, Australia became the seventh nation to put a satellite into Earth orbit, launching WRESAT from Woomera.
When Menzies retired in January 1966, he was replaced as Liberal leader and Prime Minister by Harold Holt. The Holt government increased Australian commitment to the growing War in Vietnam; oversaw conversion to decimal currency and faced Britain's withdrawal from Asia by visiting and hosting many Asian leaders and by expanding ties to the United States, hosting the first visit to Australia by an American president, his friend Lyndon B. Johnson. Significantly, Holt's government introduced the Migration Act 1966, which effectively dismantled the vestigial mechanisms of the White Australia policy and increased access to non-European migrants, including refugees fleeing the Vietnam War. Holt also called the 1967 Referendum which removed the discriminatory clause in the Constitution of Australia which excluded Aboriginal Australians from being counted in the census – the referendum was one of the few to be overwhelmingly endorsed by the Australian electorate (over 90% voted 'yes').
Holt won the 1967 election with the largest parliamentary majority in 65 years, but Holt drowned while swimming at a surf beach in December 1967 and was replaced by John Gorton (1968–1971). The Gorton government began winding down Australia's commitment to Vietnam, increased funding for the arts, standardised rates of pay between the men and women and continued moving Australian trade closer to Asia. The Liberals suffered a decline in voter support at the 1969 election and internal party division saw Gorton replaced by William McMahon (1971–1972) and, facing a reinvigorated Australian Labor Party led by Gough Whitlam, the Liberals entered their final stretch in office of a record 23 straight years period."
History of Australia (1945–present),"1960s and 1970s: The ""Australian New Wave""
From the mid-1960s, evidence of a new and more independent sense of national pride and identity began to emerge in Australia. In the early 1960s, the National Trust of Australia began to be active in preserving Australia's natural, cultural and historic heritage. Australian TV, while always dependent on US and British imports, saw locally made dramas and comedies appear, and programs such as Homicide developed strong local loyalty while Skippy the Bush Kangaroo became a global phenomenon. Liberal Prime Minister John Gorton, a battle scarred former fighter pilot, described himself as ""Australian to the bootheels"" and the Gorton government established the Australian Council for the Arts, the Australian Film Development Corporation and the National Film and Television Training School.
The late 1960s and early 1970s are often associated with a flowering of Australian culture. Indigenous Australians achieved greater rights, immigration restrictions and censorship laws were swept aside, theatre and opera companies were established across the country, and Australian rock music blossomed. The 1971 Springbok tour was influential in raising awareness of Aboriginal injustice in Australia and also led Australia to become the first Western nation to cut sporting ties with South Africa. In a significant move against South Africa's apartheid regime, many Australians (including Wallabies) demonstrated against tours by the racially selected South African team. The Australian media tycoon Kerry Packer altered the traditionalist ethos of the game of cricket in the 1970s, inventing World Series Cricket from which have evolved many aspects of the various modern international forms of the game.
The iconic Sydney Opera House finally opened in 1973 after numerous delays. In the same year, Patrick White became the first Australian to win a Nobel Prize for Literature. Australian History had begun to appear on school curriculums by the 1970s and from the early 1970s, the Australian cinema began to produce the Australian New Wave of feature films based on uniquely Australian themes. Film funding began under the Gorton government, but it was the South Australian Film Corporation that took the lead in supporting filmmaking and among their great successes were quintessential Australian films Sunday Too Far Away (1974) Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), Breaker Morant (1980) and Gallipoli (1981). The national funding body, the Australian Film Commission, was established in 1975.
Significant changes also occurred to Australia's censorship laws after the new Liberal Minister for Customs and Excise, Don Chipp, was appointed in 1969. In 1968, Barry Humphries and Nicholas Garland's cartoon book featuring the larrikin character Barry McKenzie was banned. Yet only a few years later, the book had been made as a film, partly with the support of government funding. Anne Pender suggests that the Barry Mckenzie character both celebrated and parodied Australian nationalism. Historian Richard White also argues that ""while many of the plays, novels and films produced in the 1970s were intensely critical of aspects of Australian life, they were absorbed by the ‘new nationalism’ and applauded for their Australianness."""
History of Australia (1945–present),"Australia and the Vietnam War
The Menzies government despatched the first small contingent of Australian military training personnel to aid South Vietnam in 1962, so beginning Australia's decade long involvement in the Vietnam War. Ngo Dinh Diem, the leader of the government in South Vietnam, had requested security assistance from the US and its allies. The Australian government supported the commitment as part of global effort to stem the spread of communism in Europe and Asia."
History of Australia (1945–present),"Initially popular, Australia's participation in Vietnam, and particularly the use of conscription, later became politically contentious and saw massive protests, though they were for the most part peaceful. The United States launched a major escalation of the war in 1965 and the Holt government which succeeded Menzies, increased Australia's military commitment to the conflict. Holt won a massive majority in the 1967 Election. By 1969 however, anti-war protests were gathering momentum and opposition to conscription was growing, with more people believing the war could not be won. The Gorton government (returned with a reduced majority at the 1969 Election) ceased to replace Australian personnel from 1970. There were large Moratorium marches in 1970 and 1971 and Australia's troop commitment continued to wind down through 1971 with the last battalion leaving Nui Dat in November. The election of the Whitlam government in 1972 brought Australia's small remaining involvement in the war to an official close in June 1973 with the withdrawal of the last platoon guarding the Australian Embassy in Saigon. Australian forces were largely based at Nui Dat, Phước Tuy province, and participated in such notable battles as the Battle of Long Tan against the Viet Cong in 1966 and defending against the 1968 Tet Offensive. Almost 60,000 Australians had served in Vietnam and 521 had died as a result of the war. As the war became unpopular, protestors and conscienscious objectors became prominent and soldiers often met a hostile reception on their return home in the later stages of the conflict.
In early 1975 the communists launched a major offensive resulting in the fall of Saigon on 30 April. The Royal Australian Air Force assisted in final humanitarian evacuations. In the aftermath of the communist victory, Australia assisted in re-settlement of Vietnamese refugees, with thousands making their way to Australia through the 1970s and 1980s."
History of Australia (1945–present),"Papua New Guinea and Nauru independence
Australia had administered Papua New Guinea and Nauru for much of the 20th century. British New Guinea (Papua) had passed to Australia in 1906. German New Guinea was captured by Australia during the First World War, becoming a League of Nations mandate after the war. Following the bitter New Guinea campaign of World War II which saw occupation of half the island by the Empire of Japan, the Territory of Papua and New Guinea was established by an administrative union between the Australian-administered Territory of Papua and Territory of New Guinea in 1949. Under Liberal Minister for External Territories Andrew Peacock, Papua and New Guinea adopted self-government in 1972 and on 15 September 1975, during the term of the Whitlam government in Australia, the Territory became the independent nation of Papua New Guinea.
Australia had captured the island of Nauru from the German Empire in 1914. After Japanese occupation during World War II, it became a UN Trust Territory under Australia and remained so until achieving independence in 1968. In 1989 Nauru sued Australia in the International Court of Justice in The Hague for damages caused by mining. Australia settled the case out of court agreeing to a lump sum settlement of A$107 million and an annual stipend of the equivalent of A$2.5 million toward environmental rehabilitation."
History of Australia (1945–present),"Whitlam, Fraser and the dismissal
Elected in December 1972 after 23 years in opposition, Labor won office under Gough Whitlam and  introduced a significant program of social change and reform. Whitlam said before the election: ""our program has three great aims. They are – to promote equality; to involve the people of Australia in … decision making…; and to liberate the talents and uplift the horizons of the Australian people.""
Whitlam's actions were immediate and dramatic. Within a few weeks the last milichlentary advisors in Vietnam were recalled, and national service ended. The People's Republic of China was recognised (Whitlam had visited China while Opposition Leader in 1971) and the embassy in Taiwan closed. Over the next few years, university fees were abolished and a national health care scheme established. Significant changes were made to school funding, something Whitlam regarded as ""the most enduring single achievement"" of his government. Divorce and family law was liberalised.
Whitlam's radical and imperious style eventually alienated many voters, and some of the state governments were openly hostile to his government. As it did not control the senate, much of its legislation was rejected or amended. The Queensland Country Party government of Joh Bjelke-Petersen had particularly bad relations with the Federal government. Even after it was re-elected at elections in May 1974, the Senate remained an obstacle to its political agenda. At the only joint sitting of parliament, in August 1974, six keys pieces of legislation wering passed."
History of Australia (1945–present),"In 1974, Whitlam selected John Kerr, a former member of the Labor Party and presiding Chief Justice of New South Wales to serve as Governor-General. The Whitlam government was re-elected with a decreased majority in the lower house in the 1974 Election. In 1974–75 the government thought about borrowing US$4 billion in foreign loans. Minister Rex Connor conducted secret discussions with a loan broker from Pakistan, and the Treasurer, Jim Cairns, misled parliament over the issue. Arguing the government was incompetent following the Loans affair, the opposition Liberal-Country Party Coalition delayed passage of the government's money bills in the Senate, until the government would promise a new election. Whitlam refused, Malcolm Fraser, leader of the Opposition insisted. The deadlock came to an end when the Whitlam government was dismissed by the Governor-General, John Kerr on 11 November 1975 and Fraser was installed as caretaker Prime Minister, pending an election. The ""reserve powers"" granted to the Governor General by the Constitution of Australia, had allowed an elected government to be dismissed without warning by a representative of the Monarch.
At elections held in late 1975, Malcolm Fraser and the Coalition were elected in a landslide victory."
History of Australia (1945–present),"The Fraser government won two subsequent elections. Fraser maintained some of the social reforms of the Whitlam era, while seeking increased fiscal restraint. His government included the first Aboriginal federal parliamentarian, Neville Bonner, and in 1976, Parliament passed the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976, which, while limited to the Northern Territory, affirmed ""inalienable"" freehold title to some traditional lands. Fraser established the multicultural broadcaster SBS, welcomed Vietnamese boat people refugees, opposed minority white rule in Apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia and opposed Soviet expansionism. A significant program of economic reform however was not pursued and, by 1983, the Australian economy was in recession, amidst the effects of a severe drought. Fraser had promoted ""states’ rights"" and his government refused to use Commonwealth powers to stop the construction of the Franklin Dam in Tasmania in 1982. A Liberal minister, Don Chipp had split off from the party to form a new social liberal party, the Australian Democrats in 1977 and the Franklin Dam proposal contributed to the emergence of an influential Environmental movement in Australia, with branches including the Australian Greens, a political party which later emerged from Tasmania to pursue environmentalism as well as left-wing social and economic policies."
History of Australia (1945–present),"1980s and 1990s
Bob Hawke, a less polarising Labor leader than Whitlam, defeated Fraser at the 1983 Election. The new government stopped the Franklin Dam project via the High Court of Australia. The 1980s saw severe concerns about Australia's future economic health take hold, with severe current account deficits and high unemployment at times. Hawke, together with treasurer Paul Keating undertook micro-economic and industrial relations reform designed to increase efficiency and competitiveness. After the initial failure of the Whitlam model and partial dismantling under Fraser, Hawke re-established a new, universal system of health insurance called Medicare. Hawke and Keating abandoned traditional Labor support for tariffs to protect industry and jobs. They moved to deregulate Australia's financial system and ‘floated’ the Australian dollar. An agreement was reached with trade unions to moderate wage demands and accept more flexible working condition arrangements by accepting tax cuts in return. Ultimately, many of the reforms, continued by successive governments, appear to have been successful in pushing the economy along.
The Australian Bicentenary was celebrated in 1988 along with the opening of a new Parliament House in Canberra. The following year the Australian Capital Territory achieved self-government and Jervis Bay became a separate territory administered by the Minister for Territories.
A supporter of the US alliance, Hawke committed Australian naval forces to the Gulf War, following the 1990 invasion of Kuwait by Iraq. After four successful elections, but amid a deteriorating Australian economy and rising unemployment, the intense rivalry between Hawke and Keating led the Labor Party to replace Hawke as leader and Paul Keating became Prime Minister in 1991.
Unemployment reached 11.4% in 1992 – the highest since the Great Depression. The Liberal-National Opposition had proposed an ambitious plan of economic reform to take to the 1993 Election, including the introduction of a goods and services tax. Keating shuffled treasurers and campaigned strongly against the tax and won the 1993 Election. During his time in office, Keating emphasised links to the Asia Pacific region, co-operating closely with the President of Indonesia, Suharto, and campaigned to increase the role of APEC as a major forum for economic co-operation. Keating was active in indigenous affairs and the High Court of Australia's historic Mabo decision in 1992 required a legislative response to recognition of Indigenous title to land, culminating in the Native Title Act 1993 and the Land Fund Act 1994. In 1993, Keating established a Republic Advisory Committee, to examine options for Australia becoming a republic. With foreign debt, interest rates and unemployment still high, and after a series of ministerial resignations, Keating lost the 1996 Election to the Liberals' John Howard."
History of Australia (1945–present),"Full sovereignty from the United Kingdom
The Australia Act 1986 led to the severing of nearly all constitutional ties between Australia and the UK. This was achieved by the passing of the  which removed the right of the British Parliament to make laws for Australia and ended any British role in the government of the Australian States. It also removed the right of appeal from Australian courts to the British Privy Council in London. Most important, the Act transferred into Australian hands full control of all Australia's constitutional documents."
History of Australia (1945–present),"Indigenous Australia
Campaigns for indigenous rights in Australia have a long history. In the modern era, 1938 was an important year. With the participation of leading indigenous activists like Douglas Nicholls, the Australian Aborigines Advancement League organised a protest ""Day of Mourning"" to mark the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the First Fleet of British in Australia and launched its campaign for full citizenship rights for all Aborigines. In the 1940s, the conditions of life for Aborigines could be very poor. A permit system restricted movement and work opportunities for many Aboriginal people. In the 1950s, the government pursued a policy of ""assimilation"" which sought to achieve full citizenship rights for Aborigines but also wanted them to adopt the mode of life of other Australians (which very often was assumed to require suppression of cultural identity)."
History of Australia (1945–present),"From the 1950s onwards, Australians began to rethink their attitudes towards racial issues. An Aboriginal rights movement was founded and supported by many liberal white Australians and a campaign against the White Australia policy was also launched. The 1967 referendum was held and overwhelmingly approved to amend the Constitution, removing discriminatory references and giving the national parliament the power to legislate specifically for Indigenous Australians. Contrary to frequently repeated mythology, this referendum did not cover citizenship on Aboriginal people, nor did it give them the vote: they already had both. However, transferring this power away from the State parliaments did bring an end to the system of Aboriginal reserve which existed in each state, which allowed Indigenous people to move more freely, and exercise many of their citizenship rights for the first time. From the late 1960s a movement for Indigenous land rights also developed.
Various groups and individuals were active in the pursuit of equality and social justice from the 1960s. In the mid-1960s, one of the earliest Aboriginal graduates from the University of Sydney, Charles Perkins, helped organise freedom rides into parts of Australia to expose discrimination and inequality. In 1966, the Gurindji people of Wave Hill station (owned by the Vestey Group) commenced strike action led by Vincent Lingiari in a quest for equal pay and recognition of land rights.
Indigenous Australians began to take up representation in Australian parliaments during the 1970s. In 1971 Neville Bonner of the Liberal Party was appointed by the Queensland Parliament to replace a retiring senator, becoming the first Aborigine in Federal Parliament. Bonner was returned as a Senator at the 1972 election and remained until 1983. Hyacinth Tungutalum of the Country Liberal Party in the Northern Territory and Eric Deeral of the National Party of Queensland, became the first Indigenous people elected to territory and state legislatures in 1974. In 1976, Sir Douglas Nicholls was appointed Governor of South Australia, becoming the first Aborigine to hold vice-regal office in Australia. Aiden Ridgway of the Australian Democrats served as a senator during the 1990s, but No indigenous person was elected to the House of Representatives, until West Australian Liberal Ken Wyatt, in August 2010.
In 1984, a group of Pintupi people who were living a traditional hunter-gatherer desert-dwelling life were tracked down in the Gibson Desert in Western Australia and brought in to a settlement. They are believed to be the last uncontacted tribe in Australia. In 1985, the Hawke government returned ownership of Uluru (formerly known as Ayers Rock) to the local Pitjantjatjara Aboriginal people.
In 1992, the High Court of Australia handed down its decision in the Mabo Case, declaring the previous legal concept of terra nullius to be invalid. That same year, Prime Minister Paul Keating said in his Redfern Park Speech that European settlers were responsible for the difficulties Australian Aboriginal communities continued to face: ‘We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practiced discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice’. In 1999 Parliament passed a Motion of Reconciliation drafted by Prime Minister John Howard and Aboriginal Senator Aden Ridgeway naming mistreatment of Indigenous Australians as the most ""blemished chapter in our national history"".
A great many indigenous Australians have been prominent in sport and the arts. Several styles of Aboriginal art have developed in modern times, including the watercolour paintings of Albert Namatjira's Hermannsburg School, and the acrylic Papunya Tula ""dot art"" movement. The Western Desert Art Movement became a globally renowned 20th-century art movement. Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920–1995) was a famous Aboriginal poet, writer and rights activist credited with publishing the first Aboriginal book of verse: We Are Going (1964). Sally Morgan's novel My Place was considered a breakthrough memoir in terms of bringing indigenous stories to wider notice. Leading Aboriginal intellectuals Marcia Langton (First Australians, 2008) and Noel Pearson (""Up From the Mission"", 2009) are active contemporary contributors to Australian literature. 1955's Jedda, was the first Australian feature film to star Aboriginal actors in lead roles and the first to be entered at the Cannes Film Festival. 1976's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith directed by Fred Schepisi was an award-winning historical drama from a book by Thomas Keneally about the tragic story of an Aboriginal Bushranger. The canon of films related to Indigenous Australians also increased over the period of the 1990s and early 21st century. In 2006, Rolf de Heer's Ten Canoes became the first major feature film to be shot in an indigenous language and the film was recognised at Cannes and elsewhere. In sport Evonne Goolagong Cawley became the world number-one ranked tennis player in 1971 and won 14 Grand Slam titles during her career. In 1973 Arthur Beetson became the first Indigenous Australian to captain his country in any sport when he first led the Australian National rugby league team, the Kangaroos. In 1982, Mark Ella became captain of the Australia national rugby union team. Olympic gold medalist Cathy Freeman lit the Olympic flame at the 2000 Summer Olympics opening ceremony in Sydney.
In the early 21st century, much of indigenous Australia continued to suffer lower standards of health and education than non-indigenous Australia. In 2007, the Close the Gap campaign was launched by Olympic champions Cathy Freeman and Ian Thorpe with the aim of achieving Indigenous health equality within 25 years. In 2007, Prime Minister John Howard and Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough launched the Northern Territory National Emergency Response. In response to the Little Children are Sacred Report into allegations of child abuse among indigenous communities in the Territory, the government banned alcohol in prescribed communities in the Northern Territory; quarantined a percentage of welfare payments for essential goods purchasing; despatched additional police and medical personnel to the region; and suspended the permit system for access to indigenous communities.
During much of the twentieth century, Australian governments had removed many aboriginal children from their families. This practice did great damage to the Aboriginal people, culturally and emotionally, giving rise to the term stolen generations to describe these families. Since the publication in 1997 of a federal government report, Bringing Them Home all state governments have followed the recommendation of the report in issuing formal apologies for their past practices to the Aboriginal people, as have many local governments. The Howard government refused to make such an apology on behalf of the federal government, despite pleas from the Aboriginal people and from many sections of the wider community, saying that it implied intergenerational guilt on modern non-indigenous Australia. However, the new government under Kevin Rudd led a formal bi-partisan apology on 13 February 2008."
History of Australia (1945–present),"Republicanism
In the early 21st century, Australia remains a constitutional monarchy under the Constitution of Australia adopted in 1901, with the duties of the monarch performed by a Governor-General selected by the Australian Government. Australian republicanism which had been a feature of the 1890s faded away during the First World War.  Support for the Monarchy of Australia  peaked during the Menzies years with the wildly successful 1954 tour by Queen Elizabeth II. Prince Charles attended school in Australia during the 1960s. The issue of a republic did not arise again until the 1970s. In the 1990s it was brought to the forefront of national debate by Prime Minister Paul Keating, who promised in 1993 to introduce an ""Australian federal republic"" by the centenary of Federation in 2001.
The Howard government called a Constitutional Convention to examine the issue in 1998. Delegates included appointees and elected representatives representing republicans, monarchists and neutral parties. The Convention proposed a republican model and a referendum was called for the approval of the Australian electorate. The referendum held on 6 November 1999 failed to achieve the support of either a majority of voters or a majority of states. The national vote of the electors in favour of Australia becoming a republic was 45.13%, with 54.87% against.
The Australian Labor Party advocated for the republic, while the Liberals permitted members to campaign for either side.  Notable campaigners for the republic included all the living former Labor Prime Ministers and former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser and incumbent Treasurer Peter Costello. Notable Monarchists included Prime Minister John Howard, Justice Michael Kirby of the High Court of Australia, former Labor opposition leader Bill Hayden and Liberal Aboriginal elder Neville Bonner. Future leaders of the Liberal Party Malcolm Turnbull who led the Australian Republic Movement and Tony Abbott who supported Australians for Constitutional Monarchy took opposing views.
Justice Michael Kirby (a monarchist and leading figure in progressive Australian jurisprudence) ascribed the failure of the republic referendum to ten factors: lack of bi-partisanship; undue haste; a perception that the republic was supported by big city elites; a ""denigration"" of monarchists as ""unpatriotic"" by republicans; the adoption of an inflexible republican model by the convention; concerns about the specific model proposed (chiefly the ease with which a Prime Minister could dismiss a president); a republican strategy of using big ""names"" attached to the Whitlam era to promote their cause; strong opposition to the proposal in the smaller states; a counter-productive pro-republican bias in the media; and an instinctive caution among the Australian electorate regarding Constitutional change.
Some republicans blamed the conservative and monarchist Prime Minister John Howard (elected in 1996), whose leadership certainly did not aid the republican cause. But there were other significant factors, including a split between ""minimalist"" republicans who wanted an Australian president to be chosen by the federal Parliament (as happens in, for example, Germany), and more ""radical"" republicans who wanted a directly elected president, as in the Irish Republic.  Public opinion suggested that a republic would only be acceptable if a president was directly elected. Since the referendum proposal was for an indirectly elected president, many radicals opposed it.
The Gillard government which took power in a hung parliament following the 2010 Australian Election has indicated an intention not to revisit the issue of a vote for an Australian republic during the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, while the Opposition Liberal-National Coalition is led by Tony Abbott, a supporter of the constitutional monarchy. Cultural interest in the Royal Family endures, with 7 million Australians (one third of the population) tuning in to watch the Wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton in April 2011.
In 2011, Australian public support for a republic fell to its lowest level since March 1994. Support for a republic outright was 41%, with support rising to 48% of respondents in a scenario with Charles on the throne and his wife, Camilla, as princess consort."
History of Australia (1945–present),"Military engagements in the late 20th century
Following the Vietnam War, Australian military forces were largely kept at home through the rest of the 1970s and 1980s, other than service in United Nations peacekeeping missions. RAAF helicopters operated in the Sinai; and Australian forces assisted in a British Commonwealth operation when Zimbabwe won its independence; as well as a similar operation in Namibia.
Bob Hawke was Prime Minister at the time of the Fall of the Berlin Wall and end of the Cold War which ushered in a new era of international relations. Royal Australian Navy warships were deployed to the Gulf War by the Hawke government in 1991 and remained in the region to enforce UN-imposed sanctions against Iraq."
History of Australia (1945–present),"Peacekeeping
Australian forces were very active in UN peacekeeping through the 1990s. In 1993, Foreign Minister Gareth Evans was active in the search for a settlement to ongoing troubles in Cambodia in the aftermath of the genocidal 1970s Pol Pot regime. Australia contributed the force commander and the operation's communications component to the UN operation. In the ultimately unsuccessful Somalia intervention, a battalion-level Australian contingent was employed to aid in the delivery of humanitarian aid in the Baidoa area. In 1994, Australia deployed medical staff to the UN force in Rwanda sent to deal with the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. A UN Peacekeeping engagement  in Bougainville began in 1997, to aid in resolving the long-running conflict between the Papua New Guinea government Bougainville separatists.
There have been a number of other peacekeeping and stabilisation operations: notably in Bougainville, including Operation Bel Isi (1998–2003); as well as Operation Helpem Fren and the Australian led Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) in the early 2000s; and the 2006 East Timorese crisis"
History of Australia (1945–present),"East Timor
Australia led an important international military mission to East Timor in 1999. Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975 and annexed the former Portuguese colony. Successive Australian governments, concerned to maintain good relations with Indonesia, had accepted Indonesia control of the territory, however the fall of Indonesian President Suharto and a shift in Australian policy by the Howard government in 1998 precipitated a proposal for a referendum on the question of independence. New Indonesian President B. J. Habibie was prepared to consider a change of status for East Timor. In late 1998, Australian Prime Minister John Howard with Foreign Minister Alexander Downer drafted a letter Indonesia setting out a major change in Australian policy, suggesting that the East Timor be given a chance to vote on independence within a decade. The letter upset President Habibie, who saw it as implying Indonesia was a ""colonial power"" and he decided in response to announce a snap referendum. A UN sponsored  referendum held in August 1999 showed overwhelming approval for independence. After the result was announced, violent clashes, instigated by a suspected anti-independence militia, sparked a humanitarian and security crisis in the region.
John Howard consulted UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and lobbied U. S. President Bill Clinton to support an Australian led peace keeper force to end the violence. Australia, who contributed 5,500 personnel and the force commander, Major General Peter Cosgrove, to the UN-backed International Force East Timor and began deploying on 20 September 1999 and successfully restored order. The operation had been politically and militarily tense. Australia re-deployed frontline combat aircraft northward and detected an Indonesian submarine within the vicinity of Dili Harbour as INTERFET forces approached. While the intervention was ultimately successful, Australian-Indonesian relations would take several years to recover."
History of Australia (1945–present),"Al-Qaeda
In 1998, a wealthy dissident Saudi Islamist, Osama bin Laden, declared a fatwa calling for the killing of ""Americans and their allies -- civilians and military... in any country in which it is possible to do it"" in order to bring to an end the ongoing enforcement of the sanctions against Iraq and presence of US troops in the Arabian Peninsula, thus bringing Australians into the line of fire in what would latterly grow to be defined as the War on Terror. Following the 11 September terrorist attacks by Al-Qaeda in 2001,  On 14 September 2001, the Australian Government cited the terrorist attacks against the US as sufficient basis for invoking the mutual-defence clauses of the ANZUS Treaty. This was the first time the Treaty's clauses on acting to meet a common danger had been invoked since it was enacted in 1952.
The Howard government committed troops to the Afghanistan War (with bi-partisan support) and the Iraq War (meeting with the disapproval of other political parties). SAS troops formed the most high-profile part of Operation Slipper, Australia's contribution to the invading force in the 2001 United States war in Afghanistan. A small number of Australians, including David Hicks, were captured in and around the Afghan Theatre having spent time training or fighting with Al-Qaeda aligned Islamist paramilitaries.  Islamists following the Al-Qaeda modus operandi bombed a nightclub in Bali in 2002 and killed 88 Australian civilians. The following year, the Iraq War was launched  by a U.S.-British led coalition to overthrow the Saddam Hussein government of Iraq for its non-compliance with the 1991 Gulf War Peace Treaty. Australian contribution to the 2003 invasion of Iraq lasted until 2009 and was highly controversial.  Following the death of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden at the hands of US forces in May 2011, Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced that Australian forces would remain in Afghanistan and said that Bin Laden's death offered a ""small measure of justice"" to the families of the 105 Australians who been killed in Al-Qaeda attacks in New York, Bali, London and Mumbai since the commencement of the conflict. As of May 2011, a further 24 Australian military personnel had been killed while serving in the Afghanistan conflict (including one with the British Armed Forces)."
History of Australia (1945–present),"Australia in the 21st century
John Howard served as Prime Minister from 1996 until 2007, the second-longest prime ministerial term after Robert Menzies. One of the first programs instigated by the Howard government was a nationwide gun control scheme, following a mass shooting at Port Arthur. The government sought to reduce Australia's government deficit and introduced industrial relations reforms, particularly as regards efficiency on the waterfront. After the 1996 election, Howard and treasurer Peter Costello proposed a goods and services tax (GST) which they successfully took to the electorate in 1998. In 1999, Australia led a United Nations force into East Timor to help establish democracy and independence for that nation, following political violence.
The government also accelerated the pace of privatisation, beginning with the government-owned telecommunications corporation, Telstra. Howard's government continued some elements of the foreign policy of its predecessors, based on relations with four key countries: the United States, Japan, China, and Indonesia.  The Howard administration strongly supported US engagement in the Asia-Pacific region.
Australia hosted the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney to great international acclaim. The Opening Ceremony featured a host of iconic Australian imagery and history and the flame ceremony honoured women athletes, including swimmer Dawn Fraser, with Aboriginal runner Cathy Freeman lit the Olympic flame. At the Closing Ceremony, President of the International Olympic Committee, Juan Antonio Samaranch, declared:"
History of Australia (1945–present),"""I am proud and happy to proclaim that you have presented to the world the best Olympic Games ever."""
History of Australia (1945–present),"Few international tourists came to Melbourne in 1956 for the Olympics that year, but Sydney gained global attention for a well-attended, efficiently organised world-class event. Prince Philip, representing Queen Elizabeth II opened the 1956 games but neither was invited in 2000, as the spirit of republicanism was too strong. In the long run, as Toohey (2008) reports, many of the hoped-for benefits failed to materialize. Nationwide levels of participation in physical activity and sport did not rise, although passive spectatorship (such as TV watching) did increase. Many of the costly facilities built for the games remained underutilized in their wake."
History of Australia (1945–present),"Sydney played host to other important world events over the decade including the 2003 Rugby World Cup, the APEC Leaders conference of 2007 and Catholic World Youth Day 2008. Melbourne hosted the 2006 Commonwealth Games.
In 2001, Australia celebrated its Centenary of Federation, with a program of events, including the creation of the Centenary Medal to honour people who have made a contribution to Australian society or government.
The Howard government expanded immigration overall but instituted often controversial tough immigration laws to discourage unauthorised arrivals of boat people. While Howard was a strong supporter of traditional links to the Commonwealth and to the United States alliance, trade with Asia, particularly China, continued to increase dramatically, and Australia endured an extended period of prosperity.  Howard's term in office coincided with the 2001 11 September attacks. In the aftermath of this event, the government committed troops to the Afghanistan War (with bi-partisan support) and the Iraq War (meeting with the disapproval of other political parties).
Southern Australia was affected by a very severe drought, through much of the first decade of the 21st century.  By late 2006 water storage throughout southern Australia were at record low levels. Severe restrictions on urban water usage were put in place in every state capital city (except Hobart and Darwin) in 2005–06, and irrigation in the Murray–Darling basin was heavily curtailed.  Consequently, issues relating to fresh water supply became an important topic for political discussion, though the economic impact of the drought was felt most keenly only in Australia's sparsely populated agricultural areas.
Howard lost his substantial majority at the 1998 Federal election, improved on it at the 2001 Federal election and at the 2004 election against Labor's Mark Latham. The government however resoundingly lost the 2007 Federal election to the Labor Party led by Kevin Rudd with a wave of support for change and a slogan for ""new leadership"" for the country.
Kevin Rudd held the office until June 2010, when he was replaced following internal Labor Party coup by his colleague and deputy Julia Gillard. Rudd used his term in office to symbolically ratify the Kyoto Protocol and lead an historic parliamentary apology to the Stolen Generation (those Indigenous Australians who had been removed from their parents by the state during the early 20th century to the 1960s). The mandarin Chinese speaking former diplomat also pursued energetic foreign policy and initially sought to instigate a price on carbon in the Australian economy to combat global warming. His prime ministership coincided with the initial phases of the Financial crisis of 2007–2010, to which his government responded through a large package of economic stimulus – the management of which later proved to be controversial.
The Black Saturday bushfires struck Victoria on and around Saturday 7 February 2009. The fires occurred during extreme bushfire-weather conditions, and resulted in Australia's highest ever loss of life from a bushfire; 173 people died and 414 were injured as a result of the fires.
Amidst increasing controversy on management of stimulus spending over policy directions on taxation, immigration and climate change, the Labor Party replaced Rudd with Julia Gillard, who became the first woman Prime Minister of Australia and narrowly retained office against the Liberal-National Coalition led by Tony Abbott, at the 2010 Federal election by securing the support of independent members of the first hung parliament in Australia since the 1940 election."
History of Australia (1945–present),"The drought was broken definitively by severe flooding associated with the La Niña weather effect in the summer of 2010–2011. Queensland in particular suffered dramatic flooding which swept through parts of the capital city of Brisbane and caused some deaths and serious financial loss. Soon after tropical cyclone Yasi struck the already beleaguered coast.
Following two and half decades of economic reform and amidst booming trade with Asia, Australia—in stark contrast to most other Western nations—avoided recession following the 2008 collapse of financial markets. Following the 2010 election, the Gillard government entered an alliance with the Australian Greens and was destabilized by breaking an election promise not to introduce a carbon tax, by leadership rivalry and by lacking the numbers to push some controversial legislation through the Parliament. Nevertheless, the cross-bench alliance continued to operate and though facing declining poll support and firm opposition from the Liberal-National Coalition, in October the government successfully passed its Clean Energy Bill 2011 aimed to restructure the Australian economy in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with global warming by increasing costs to industry for carbon emissions. A carbon tax was introduced in Australia on 1 July 2012. Kevin Rudd was reinstated as prime minister in a Labor leadership spill on 27 June 2013. After the 2013 Australian General Election, Rudd lost the role of Prime Minister to Tony Abbott, the Liberal Leader. On 15 December 2013, 95% of the Australian military had withdrawn from Afghanistan with the remaining 5% presently training locals in Kabul. The Clean Energy Bill 2011 was repealed by the Abbott government on 17 July 2014, backdated to 1 July 2014. Malcolm Turnbull of the Liberal Party of Australia was elected as Tony Abbott's successor and served as Prime Minister from 2015 until 2018 where he resigned and was replaced by Scott Morrison.
The last months of 2019 and into early 2020 were marked by intense bushfires on the east coast that became known as the ""Black Summer"". The fires directly killed 34 people. Approximately 9,352 buildings were destroyed. The fires are very likely Australia's costliest natural disaster at about A$100 billion. They were also notable for the smoke that enveloped areas within Australia well away from the fires for months, and even places 12,000 km (7,500 mi) overseas, reaching as far as South America.  Air quality dropped to hazardous levels in all southern and eastern states. Health researcher's modelling indicated that 80 per cent of Australians were affected by bushfire smoke at some point over the fire season. 445 people may have died indirectly from smoke inhalation.
Late January 2020 was also notable for the first local infections of a new virus, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). This led into the world-wide COVID-19 pandemic, and the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia that by the end of 2020 had killed 909 in Australia, but as of 5 February 2021, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) had caused more than 2.29 million deaths world-wide.
In the early morning hours of 9 September 2022 Australia Eastern Standard Time, Queen Elizabeth II died. The Queen was succeeded by her eldest son, King Charles III, who now reigns as the King of Australia."
History of Australia (1945–present),"See also
History of broadcasting in Australia"
History of Australia (1945–present),"References
Further reading
References
Bambrick, Susan ed. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Australia (1994)
Basset, Jan. The Oxford Illustrated Dictionary of Australian History (1998)
Davison, Graeme, John Hirst, and Stuart Macintyre, eds. The Oxford Companion to Australian History (2001) online at many academic libraries; also excerpt and text search
Day, David. Claiming a Continent: A New History of Australia (2001);
Dennis, Peter, Jeffrey Grey, Ewan Morris, and Robin Prior. The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History. 1996
Jupp, James, ed. The Australian People: An Encyclopedia of the Nation, its People and their Origins (2nd ed. 2002) 960pp excerpt and text search
Macintyre, Stuart. A Concise History of Australia. (2009)  excerpt and text search
O'Shane, Pat  et al. Australia: The Complete Encyclopedia (2001)
Robinson GM, Loughran RJ, and Tranter PJ. Australia and New Zealand: economy, society and environment.(2000)
Shaw, John, ed. Collins Australian Encyclopedia (1984)
Welsh, Frank. Australia: A New History of the Great Southern Land (2008)"
History of Australia (1945–present),"History
Bennett, Bruce et al. The Oxford Literary History of Australia (1999)
Bennett, Tony, and David Carter. Culture in Australia: Policies, Publics and Programs (2001) excerpt and text search
Bolton, Geoffrey. The Oxford History of Australia: Volume 5: 1942–1995. The Middle Way (2005)
Bramble, Tom. Trade Unionism in Australia: A History from Flood to Ebb Tide (2008) excerpt and text search
Bridge, Carl ed., Munich to Vietnam: Australia's Relations with Britain and the United States since the 1930s, Melbourne University Press 1991
Carey, Hilary. Believing in Australia: A Cultural History of Religions (1996)
Edwards, John. Curtin's Gift: Reinterpreting Australia's Greatest Prime Minister, (2005) online edition Archived 23 November 2011 at the Wayback Machine
Firth, Stewart. Australia in International Politics: An Introduction to Australian Foreign Policy (2005) online edition
Grant, Ian. A Dictionary of Australian Military History – from Colonial Times to the Gulf War (1992)
Hearn, Mark, Harry Knowles, and Ian Cambridge. One Big Union: A History of the Australian Workers Union 1886–1994  (1998)
Hutton, Drew, and Libby Connors. History of the Australian Environment Movement (1999) excerpt and text search
Kelly, Paul. The End of Certainty: Power, Politics and Business in Australia, (1994), history of the 1980s
Kleinert, Sylvia. and Margo Neale. The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture (2001)
Lee, David. Search for Security: The Political Economy of Australia's Postwar Foreign and Defence Policy (1995)
Lowe, David. Menzies and the 'Great World Struggle': Australia's Cold War 1948–54  (1999) online edition
Martin, A. W. Robert Menzies: A Life (2 vol 1993–99), online at ACLS e-books
McIntyre, Stuart. The History Wars (2nd ed. 2004), historiography
McLachlan, Noel. Waiting for the Revolution: A History of Australian Nationalism (1989)
McLean, David. ""Australia in the Cold War: a Historiographical Review."" International History Review (2001) 23(2): 299–321. ISSN 0707-5332
McLean, David. ""From British Colony to American Satellite? Australia and the USA during the Cold War"", Australian Journal of Politics & History  (2006) 52 (1), 64–79. Rejects satellite model. online at Blackwell-Synergy
Megalogenis, George. The Longest Decade (2nd ed. 2009), politics 1990–2008
Moran, Albert. Historical Dictionary of Australian Radio and Television (2007)
Moran, Anthony. Australia: Nation, Belonging, and Globalization Routledge, 2004 online edition
Murphy, John. Harvest of Fear: A History of Australia's Vietnam War (1993)
Watt, Alan. The Evolution of Australian Foreign Policy 1938–1965, Cambridge University Press, 1967
Webby, Elizabeth, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature (2006)"
Australia national cricket team,"The Australia men's national cricket team represents Australia in men's international cricket. As the joint oldest team in Test cricket history, playing in the first ever Test match in 1877, the team also plays One-Day International (ODI) and Twenty20 International (T20I) cricket, participating in both the first ODI, against England in the 1970–71 season and the first T20I, against New Zealand in the 2004–05 season, winning both games. The team draws its players from teams playing in the Australian domestic competitions – the Sheffield Shield, the Australian domestic limited-overs cricket tournament and the Big Bash League. Australia are the current ICC World Test Championship and ICC Cricket World Cup champions. They are regarded as most successful cricket teams in the history of Cricket.
The national team has played 866 Test matches, winning 414, losing 232, 218 draw and 2 Tie. As of May 2022, Australia is ranked first in the ICC Test Championship on 128 rating points. Australia is the most successful team in Test cricket history, in terms of overall wins, win–loss ratio and wins percentage. Australia have won the ICC World Test Championship once, defeating India in 2023.
Test rivalries include The Ashes (with England), the Border–Gavaskar Trophy (with India), the Frank Worrell Trophy (with the West Indies), the Trans-Tasman Trophy (with New Zealand), and with South Africa.
The team has played 1,000 ODI matches, winning 609, losing 348, tying 9 and with 34 ending in a no-result. As of May 2022, Australia is ranked third in the ICC ODI Championship on 107 rating points, though have been ranked first for 141 of 185 months since its introduction in 2002. Australia is one of the most successful team in ODI cricket history, winning more than 60 per cent of their matches, with a record eight World Cup final appearances (1975, 1987, 1996, 1999, 2003, 2007, 2015 and 2023) and have won the World Cup a record six times: 1987, 1999, 2003, 2007, 2015 and 2023. Australia is the first (and only) team to appear in four consecutive World Cup finals (1996, 1999, 2003 and 2007), surpassing the old record of three consecutive World Cup appearances by the West Indies (1975, 1979 and 1983) and the first and only team to win 3 consecutive World Cups (1999, 2003 and 2007). The team was undefeated in 34 consecutive World Cup matches until the 2011 Cricket World Cup where Pakistan beat them by 4 wickets in the Group stage. It is also the second team to win a World Cup (2015) on home soil, after India (2011). Australia have also won the ICC Champions Trophy twice (2006 and 2009) making them the first and the only team to become back to back winners in the Champions Trophy tournaments.
The national team has played 195 Twenty20 International matches, winning 105, losing 83, tying 3 and with 4 ending in a no-result. As of May 2022, Australia is ranked fifth in the ICC T20I Championship on 251 rating points. Australia have won the ICC Men's T20 World Cup once, defeating New Zealand in the 2021 Final.
On 12 January 2019, Australia won the first ODI against India at the Sydney Cricket Ground by 34 runs, to record their 1,000th win in international cricket.
Australia are the reigning World Test Champions and World Cup Champions, winning both titles in 2023, the former against India at The Oval in London and the latter at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad, also against India."
Australia national cricket team,"History
Early history
The Australian cricket team participated in the first Test match at the MCG in 1877, when defeating an English team by 45 runs, allowed Charles Bannerman to make the first Test century, a score of 165, allowing the team to win. retired hurt. Test cricket, which only occurred between Australia and England at the time, was limited by the long distance between the two countries, which would take several months by sea. Despite Australia's much smaller population, the team was very competitive in early games, producing stars such as Jack Blackham, Billy Murdoch, Fred ""The Demon"" Spofforth, George Bonnor, Percy McDonnell, George Giffen and Charles ""The Terror"" Turner. Most cricketers at the time were either from New South Wales or Victoria, with the notable exception of George Giffen, the star South Australian all-rounder.
One of the highlights of Australia's early history was the 1882 Test match against England, which began at The Oval. In this match, Fred Spofforth took 7/44 in the game's fourth innings, saving the match by preventing England from making their 85-run target.
After this match, The Sporting Times, a major newspaper in London at the time, printed a mock obituary in which the death of English cricket was proclaimed and the announcement made that ""the body was cremated and the ashes taken to Australia.""
The major newspaper was also the start of the famous Ashes series in which Australia and England play a series of Test matches to decide the holder of the Ashes. To this day, the contest is one of the fiercest rivalries in sport."
Australia national cricket team,"Golden age
The 'Golden Age' of Australian Test cricket occurred around the end of the 19th century, concluding to the beginning of the 20th century with the team under the captaincy of Joe Darling, Monty Noble and Clem Hill, winning eight of ten tours. It is considered to have lasted from the 1897–98 English tour of Australia and the 1910–11 South African tour of Australia.
Outstanding batsmen such as Joe Darling, Clem Hill, and Reggie Duff, all helped Australia to become the dominant cricketing nation for most of this period.
Victor Trumper became one of Australia's first sporting heroes, who was widely considered Australia's greatest batsman before Bradman became one of the most popular players. He played a record (at the time) of a number of Tests at 49, and scored 3163 runs at a high for the time average of 39.04. He died in 1915 at the age of 37 from kidney disease, causing national mourning. The Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, in its obituary for him, called him Australia's greatest batsman: ""Of all the great Australian batsmen Victor Trumper was by general consent the best and most brilliant.""
The years leading up to the start of World War was marred by conflict between the players, led by Clem Hill, Victor Trumper and Frank Laver, the Australian Board of Control for International Cricket, led by Peter McAlister, who was attempting to gain more control of tours from the players.
This led to six leading players (the so-called ""Big Six"") walking out on the 1912 Triangular Tournament in England, with Australia fielding what was generally considered a second-rate side. This was the last series before the war, and no more cricket was played by Australia for eight years; Tibby Cotter was killed in Palestine during the war."
Australia national cricket team,"Inter-war period
Test cricket resumed in the 1920/21 season in Australia with a touring English team captained by Johnny Douglas losing all five Tests to Australia, captained by the ""Big Ship"" Warwick Armstrong. Several players from before the war, including Warwick Armstrong, Charlie Macartney, Charles Kelleway, Warren Bardsley and the wicket-keeper Sammy Carter, were instrumental in the team's success, as well as new players Herbie Collins, Jack Ryder, Bert Oldfield, the spinner Arthur Mailey and the so-called ""twin destroyers"" Jack Gregory and Ted McDonald. The team continued its success on the 1921 tour of England, winning three out of the five Tests in Warwick Armstrong's last series. The side was, on the whole, inconsistent in the latter half of the 1920s, losing its first home Ashes series since the 1911–12 season in 1928–29."
Australia national cricket team,"Bradman era
The 1930 tour of England heralded a new age of success for the Australian team. The team, led by Bill Woodfull – the ""Great Un-bowlable"" – featured legends of the game including Bill Ponsford, Stan McCabe, Clarrie Grimmett and the young pair of Archie Jackson and Don Bradman. Bradman was the outstanding batsman of the series, scoring a record 974 runs, including one century, two double centuries and one triple century, a massive score of 334 at Leeds which including 309 runs in a day. Jackson died of tuberculosis at the age of 23 three years later, after playing eight Tests. The team was widely considered unstoppable, winning nine of its next ten Tests.
The 1932–33 England tour of Australia is considered one of the most infamous episodes of cricket, due to the England team's use of bodyline, where captain Douglas Jardine instructed his bowlers Bill Voce and Harold Larwood to bowl fast, short-pitched deliveries aimed at the bodies of the Australian batsmen. The tactic, although effective, was widely considered by Australian crowds as vicious and unsporting. Injuries to Bill Woodfull, who was struck over the heart, and Bert Oldfield, who received a fractured skull (although from a non-bodyline ball), exacerbated the situation, almost causing a full-scale riot from the 50 000 fans at the Adelaide Oval for the third Test. The conflict almost escalated into a diplomatic incident between the two countries, as leading Australian political figures, including the Governor of South Australia, Alexander Hore-Ruthven, protested to their English counterparts. The series ended in a 4–1 win for England but the bodyline tactics used were banned the year after.
The Australian team put the result of this series behind them, winning their next tour of England in 1934. The team was led by Bill Woodfull on his final tour and was notably dominated by Ponsford and Bradman, who twice put on partnerships of over 380 runs, with Bradman once again scoring a triple century at Leeds. The bowling was dominated by the spin pair of Bill O'Reilly and Clarrie Grimmett, who took 53 wickets between them, with O'Reilly twice taking seven-wicket hauls.
Sir Donald Bradman is widely considered the greatest batsman of all time. He dominated the sport from 1930 until his retirement in 1948, setting new records for the highest score in a Test innings (334 vs England at Headingley in 1930), the most runs (6996), the most centuries (29), the most double centuries and the highest Test and first-class batting averages. His record for the highest Test batting average – 99.94 – has never been beaten. It is almost 40 runs per innings above the next highest average. He would have finished with an average of over 100 runs per innings if he had not been dismissed for a duck in his last Test. He was knighted in 1949 for services to cricket. He is generally considered one of Australia's all-time greatest sporting heroes, if not the greatest.
Test cricket was again interrupted by war, with the last Test series in 1938 made notable by Len Hutton scoring a world record 364 for England, and with Chuck Fleetwood-Smith conceding 298 runs in England's world record total of 7/903. Ross Gregory, a notable young batsman who played two Tests before the war, was killed in the war."
Australia national cricket team,"Post-war era
The team continued its success after the end of the Second World War with the first Test (also Australia's first against New Zealand) being played in the 1945–46 season against New Zealand. Australia was by far the most successful team of the 1940s, being undefeated throughout the decade, winning two Ashes series against England and its first Test series against India. The team capitalised on its ageing stars Bradman, Sid Barnes, Bill Brown and Lindsay Hassett while new talent, including Ian Johnson, Don Tallon, Arthur Morris, Neil Harvey, Bill Johnston and the fast bowling pair of Ray Lindwall and Keith Miller, who all made their debut in the latter half of the 1940s, and were to form the basis of the team for a good part of the next decade. The team that Don Bradman led to England in 1948 gained the moniker The Invincibles, after going through the tour without losing a single game. Of 31 first-class games played during the tour, they won 23 and drew 8, including winning the five-match Test series 4–0 with one draw. The tour was particularly notable for the fourth Test of the series, in which Australia won by seven wickets chasing a target of 404, setting a new record for the highest run chase in Test cricket, with Arthur Morris and Bradman both scoring centuries, as well as for the final Test in the series, Bradman's last, where he finished with a duck in his last innings after needing only four runs to secure a career average of 100.
Australia was less successful in the 1950s, losing three consecutive Ashes series to England, including a horrendous 1956 Tour of England, where the 'spin twins' Laker and Lock destroyed Australia, taking 61 wickets between them, including Laker taking 19 wickets in the game (a first-class record) at Headingley, a game dubbed Laker's Match.
However, the team rebounded to win five consecutive series in the latter half of the 1950s, first under the leadership of Ian Johnson, then Ian Craig and Richie Benaud. The series against the West Indies in the 1960–61 season was notable for the Tied Test in the first game at the Gabba, which was the first in Test cricket. Australia ended up winning the series 2–1 after a hard-fought series that was praised for its excellent standards and sense of fair play. Stand-out players in that series as well as through the early part of the 1960s were Richie Benaud, who took a then-record number of wickets as a leg-spinner and who also captained Australia in 28 Tests, including 24 without defeat; Alan Davidson, who was a notable fast-bowler and also became the first player to take 10 wickets and make 100 runs in the same game in the first Test; Bob Simpson, who also later captained Australia for two different periods of time; Colin McDonald, the first-choice opening batsman for most of the 1950s and early '60s; Norm O'Neill, who made 181 in the Tied Test; Neil Harvey, towards the end of his long career; and Wally Grout, an excellent wicket-keeper who died at the age of 41."
Australia national cricket team,"World Series Cricket and Restructuring
The Centenary Test was played in March 1977 at the MCG to celebrate 100 years since the first Test was played. Australia won the match by 45 runs, an identical result to the first Test match.
In May 1977, Kerry Packer announced he was organising a breakaway competition – World Series Cricket (WSC) – after the Australian Cricket Board (ACB) refused to accept Channel Nine's bid to gain exclusive television rights to Australia's Test matches in 1976. Packer secretly signed leading international cricketers to his competition, including 28 Australians. Almost all of the Australian Test team at the time were signed to WSC – notable exceptions including Gary Cosier, Geoff Dymock, Kim Hughes and Craig Serjeant – and the Australian selectors were forced to pick what was generally considered a third-rate team from players in the Sheffield Shield. Former player Bob Simpson, who had retired 10 years previously after a conflict with the board, was recalled at the age of 41 to captain Australia against India. Jeff Thomson was named deputy in a team that included seven debutants. Australia managed to win the series 3–2, mainly thanks to the batting of Simpson, who scored 539 runs, including two centuries; and the bowling of Wayne Clark, who took 28 wickets. Australia lost the next series 3–1 against the West Indies, which was fielding a full strength team; and also lost the 1978–79 Ashes series 5–1, the team's worst Ashes result in Australia. Graham Yallop was named as captain for the Ashes, with Kim Hughes taking over for the 1979–80 tour of India. Rodney Hogg took 41 wickets in his debut series, an Australian record. WSC players returned to the team for the 1979–80 season after a settlement between the ACB and Kerry Packer. Greg Chappell was reinstated as captain.
The underarm bowling incident of 1981 occurred when, in an ODI against New Zealand, Greg Chappell instructed his brother Trevor to bowl an underarm delivery to New Zealand batsman Brian McKechnie with New Zealand needing a six to tie off the last ball. The aftermath of the incident soured political relations between Australia and New Zealand, with several leading political and cricketing figures calling it ""unsportsmanlike"" and ""not in the spirit of cricket"".
Australia continued its success up until the early 1980s, built around the Chappell brothers, Dennis Lillee, Jeff Thomson and Rod Marsh. The 1980s was a period of relative mediocrity after the turmoil caused by the Rebel Tours of South Africa and the subsequent retirement of several key players. The rebel tours were funded by the South African Cricket Board to compete against its national side, which had been banned—along with many other sports, including Olympic athletes—from competing internationally, due to the South African government's racist apartheid policies. Some of Australia's best players were poached: Graham Yallop, Carl Rackemann, Terry Alderman, Rodney Hogg, Kim Hughes, John Dyson, Greg Shipperd, Steve Rixon and Steve Smith amongst others. These players were handed three-year suspensions by the Australian Cricket Board which greatly weakened the player pool for the national sides, as most were either current representative players or on the verge of gaining honours."
Australia national cricket team,"Golden era
The so-called 'Golden Era' of Australian cricket occurred around the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. This was a period in which Australian cricket recovered from the disruption caused by World Series Cricket to create arguably the strongest Test team in history.
Under the captaincy of Allan Border and the new fielding standards put in place by new coach Bob Simpson, the team was restructured and gradually rebuilt their cricketing stocks. Some of the rebel players returned to the national side after serving their suspensions, including Trevor Hohns, Carl Rackemann and Terry Alderman. During these lean years, it was the batsmen Border, David Boon, Dean Jones, the young Steve Waugh and the bowling feats of Alderman, Bruce Reid, Craig McDermott, Merv Hughes and to a lesser extent, Geoff Lawson who kept the Australian side afloat.
With the emergence of players such as Ian Healy, Mark Taylor, Geoff Marsh, Mark Waugh, and Greg Matthews in the late 1980s, Australia was on the way back from the doldrums. Winning the Ashes in 1989, the Australians got a roll on beating Pakistan, Sri Lanka and then followed it up with another Ashes win on home soil in 1991. The Australians went on to the West Indies and had their chances but ended up losing the series. However, they bounced back and beat the Indians in their next Test series; with the retirement of the champion but defensive Allan Border, a new era of attacking cricket had begun under the leadership of firstly Mark Taylor and then Steve Waugh.
The 1990s and early 21st century were arguably Australia's most successful periods, unbeaten in all Ashes series played bar the famous 2005 series and achieving a hat-trick of World Cups. This success has been attributed to the restructuring of the team and system by Border, successive aggressive captains, and the effectiveness of several key players, most notably Glenn McGrath, Shane Warne, Justin Langer, Matthew Hayden, Steve Waugh, Adam Gilchrist, Michael Hussey and Ricky Ponting."
Australia national cricket team,"21st century
Following the 2006–07 Ashes series which Australia won 5 nil, Australia slipped in the rankings after the retirements of key players. In the 2013/14 Ashes series, Australia again defeated England 5 nil and climbed back to third in the ICC International Test rankings. In February/March 2014, Australia beat South Africa, the number 1 team in the world, 2–1 and overtook them to return to the top of the rankings. In 2015, Australia won the World Cup, losing just one game for the tournament.
As of December 2020, Australia are ranked first in the ICC Test Championship, fourth in the ICC ODI Championship and second in the ICC T20I Championship."
Australia national cricket team,"2018 ball-tampering incident
On 25 March 2018, during the third Test match against hosts South Africa; players Cameron Bancroft, Steve Smith, David Warner and the leadership group of the team were implicated in a ball tampering scandal. Smith and Bancroft admitted to conspiring to alter the condition of the ball by rubbing it with a piece of adhesive tape containing abrasive granules picked up from the ground (it was later revealed that sandpaper was used). Smith stated that the purpose was to gain an advantage by unlawfully changing the ball's surface in order to generate reverse swing. Bancroft had been filmed tampering with the ball and, after being informed he had been caught, he was seen to transfer a yellow object from a pocket to the inside front of his trousers to hide the evidence. Steve Smith and David Warner were stood down as captain and vice-captain during the third Test while head coach, Darren Lehmann was suspected to have assisted Cameron Bancroft to tamper the ball. The ICC imposed a one-match ban and 100%-match-fee fine on Smith, while Bancroft was fined 75 percent of his match fee and received 3 demerit points.
Smith and Warner were both stripped of their captaincy roles by Cricket Australia and sent home from the tour (along with Bancroft). Tim Paine was appointed as captain for the fourth Test. Cricket Australia then suspended Smith and Warner from playing for 12 months and Bancroft for 9 months. Smith and Bancroft could not be considered for leadership roles for 12 months after the suspension, while Warner is banned from leadership of any Cricket Australia team for life. In the aftermath of these events, Darren Lehmann announced his resignation as head coach at the end of the series, with Justin Langer replacing him. On 8 May 2018, Tim Paine was also named as the ODI captain while Aaron Finch was reinstated as T20I captain hours later, although Finch replaced Paine as the ODI captain after the 5–0 ODI series whitewash in England in June 2018."
Australia national cricket team,"October 2018–present
On 7 October 2018, Australia played their first Test match under new coach Justin Langer and a new leadership group, which included Tim Paine as Australia's 46th Test captain. After a 1–0 loss to Pakistan in a two match Test series against Pakistan in the UAE and a 2–1 defeat against India in a four match Test series, they found success against Sri Lanka, winning the two Test match series 2–0.
In 2019, Australia played in the Cricket World Cup, where they finished second in the group stage before being knocked out by England at Edgbaston in the semi-final. Australia later went on to retain the Ashes during the 2019 Ashes series, the first time on English soil since 2001, by winning the fourth Test at Old Trafford.
In 2020–21, Australia hosted India for 3 ODIs, 3 T20Is, and 4 Tests. They won the ODI series 2–1, but lost the T20I series 2–1. Then, the two teams competed for the Border-Gavaskar Trophy which saw one of the greatest overseas Test triumphs by India in the 4th Test to win the series 2–1, with the 3rd Test being drawn.
In 2021, Australia named a 15-member squad for the upcoming T20 World Cup with regular limited overs captain Aaron Finch leading the side. In finals, they would face their trans-Tasman rivals New Zealand and win the match to claim their maiden T20 World Cup Trophy.
On 19 November 2021, Tim Paine resigned from the captaincy due to off-the-field misconduct, and was replaced by Pat Cummins, who became Australia's 47th Test captain, with Steve Smith named as his deputy. Under Pat Cummins, Australia retained 2021-22 Ashes at home by winning the series 4-0. 
Australia then toured Pakistan in March 2022 for the first time since 1998 to play 3 test matches and 3 ODIs and one-off T20. Australia won all the series. Australia failed to advance to knockouts in 2022 T20 World Cup. Australia's white ball captain Finch retired from international cricket. Afterwards, Pat Cummins was made ODI captain.
2023 was a memorable year for Australia where they won their maiden ICC World Test Championship title (which made them the first team in history to win all major ICC Trophies across all formats), and retained the Ashes. In November, they won the World Cup for the 6th time, defeating the host India in the final."
Australia national cricket team,"International grounds
Australia currently plays International cricket at each of the following grounds:"
Australia national cricket team,"Team colours
For Test matches, the team wears cricket whites, with an optional sweater or sweater-vest, with a green and gold V-neck for use in cold weather. The sponsor's (currently Toyota for home matches and Qantas for away matches) logo is displayed on the right side of the chest while the Cricket Australia emblem is displayed on the left. If the sweater is being worn the Cricket Australia emblem is displayed under the V-neck and the sponsor's logo is again displayed on the right side of the chest. The baggy green, the Australian Test cricket cap, is considered an essential part of the cricketing uniform and as a symbol of the national team, with new players being presented with one upon their selection in the team. The cap and the helmet both prominently display the Australian cricketing coat-of-arms instead of the Cricket Australia emblem. At the end of 2011, ASICS was named the manufacturer of the whites and limited over uniforms from Adidas, with the ASICS logo being displayed on the shirt and pants. Players may choose any manufacturer for their other gear (bat, pads, shoes, gloves, etc.).
In One Day International (ODI) cricket and Twenty20 International cricket, the team wears uniforms usually coloured green and gold, the national colours of Australia. There has been a variety of different styles and layouts used in both forms of the limited-overs game, with coloured clothing (sometimes known as ""pyjamas"") being introduced for World Series Cricket in the late 1970s. The Toyota or Qantas logo is prominently displayed on the shirts and other gears. The current T20I kit consists of green as the primary colour and gold as the secondary colour. The ODI is the opposite of the T20I kit, with gold as the primary colour and green as the secondary colour. However, since Australia beat New Zealand at the MCG in the 2015 Cricket World Cup wearing the gold uniform, it has also become their primary colour, with the hats used being called 'floppy gold', formerly known as 'baggy gold', a limited-overs equivalent to a baggy green. Until the early 2000s and briefly in early 2020, in ODIs, Australia wore yellow helmets, before using green helmets as in test matches.
Former suppliers were Asics (1999), ISC (2000–2001), Fila (2002–2003) and Adidas (2004–2010) among others. Before Travelex (and 3 in test matches), some of the former sponsors were XXXX (1990–1992), Coca-Cola (1993–1998), Fly Emirates (1999) and Carlton & United Breweries (2000–2001)."
Australia national cricket team,"Squad
Cricket Australia released the list of their 2024–2025 national contracts on 28 March 2024. Players can still be upgraded to national contracts throughout the year by receiving 12 upgrade points. A Test is worth five points, while each ODI and T20 international is worth two.
This is a list of every active player who is contracted to Cricket Australia, has played for Australia since June 2023 or was named in the recent Test, ODI or T20I squads. Uncapped players are listed in italics."
Australia national cricket team,"David Warner appeared in all formats during this period however has retired from international cricket.
Last updated: 24th June 2024"
Australia national cricket team,"Forms – This refers to the forms they've played for Australia in the past year, not over their whole Australia career
S/N – Shirt number
C – Contracted to Cricket Australia (Y = Holds contract)"
Australia national cricket team,"Coaching staff
National selection panel
Coaching history
1986–1996:  Bob Simpson
1996–1999:  Geoff Marsh
1999–2007:  John Buchanan
2007–2011:  Tim Nielsen
2010–2013:  Mickey Arthur
2013–2018:  Darren Lehmann
2018–2022:  Justin Langer
2022–present:  Andrew McDonald"
Australia national cricket team,"Test match records
Team
Australia is the most successful Test team in cricketing history. It has won more than 350 Test matches at a rate of almost 47%. The next best performance is by South Africa at 37%.
Australia have been involved in the only two Tied Tests played. The first occurred in December 1960, against the West Indies in Brisbane. The second occurred in September 1986, against India in Madras (Chennai).
Australia's largest victory in a Test match came on 24 February 2002. Australia defeated South Africa by an innings and 360 runs in Johannesburg.
Australia holds the record for the most consecutive wins, with 16. This has been achieved twice; from October 1999 to February 2001 and from December 2005 to January 2008.
Australia shares the record for the most consecutive series victories winning 9 series from October 2005 to June 2008. This record is shared, with England.
Australia's highest total in a Test match innings was recorded in Kingston, Jamaica against the West Indies in June 1955. Australia posted 758/8 in their first innings, with five players scoring a century.
Australia's lowest total in a Test match innings was recorded in Birmingham against England in May 1902. Australia were bowled all out for 36.
Australia are one of only two teams to have lost a Test match after enforcing the follow-on, having been the losing side in the first three of four such matches, with England becoming the second team to follow a similar fate with their loss to New Zealand in 2023:
The first Test of the 1894–95 Ashes.
The third Test of the 1981 Ashes.
The second Test of the 2000–01 Border-Gavaskar Trophy series against India.
The second Test of the 2023 English Tour of New Zealand
Against India in March 2013, Australia became the first team in Test history to declare in their first innings and then lose by an innings.
In the 2013–14 Ashes series, Australia took all 100 wickets on offer in the 5–0 sweep over England."
Australia national cricket team,"Appearances
Ricky Ponting and Steve Waugh have played in the most Test matches for Australia, both playing in 168 matches."
Australia national cricket team,"Batting
Charles Bannerman faced the first ball in Test cricket, scored the first runs in Test cricket and also scored the first Test century.
Charles Bannerman also scored 67.34% of the Australian first innings total in match 1. This record remains to this day as the highest percentage of a completed innings total that has been scored by a single batsman.
Ricky Ponting has scored the most runs for Australia in Test cricket, with 13,378 runs. Allan Border is second, with 11,174 runs in 265 innings, a record which was broken by Brian Lara during his innings of 226 against Australia, while Steve Waugh has 10,927 from 260 innings.
Allan Border was the first Australian batsman to pass 10,000 and the first ever batsman to pass 11,000 Test runs.
Ricky Ponting was the first Australian batsman to pass 12,000 and 13,000 Test runs.
Matthew Hayden holds the record for the most runs in a single innings by an Australian, with 380 in the first Test against Zimbabwe in Perth in October 2003.
Donald Bradman holds the record for the highest average by an Australian (or any other) cricketer of 99.94 runs per dismissal. Bradman played 52 Tests, scoring 29 centuries and a further 13 fifties.
Ricky Ponting holds the record for the most centuries by an Australian cricketer, with 41. Former Australian captain Steve Waugh is in second position, with 32 centuries from 260 innings.
Allan Border holds the record for the most fifties by an Australian cricketer, with 63 in 265 innings.
Adam Gilchrist holds the record for the fastest century by an Australian.
Glenn McGrath holds the record for the most ducks by an Australian cricketer, with 35 in 138 innings."
Australia national cricket team,"Bowling
Billy Midwinter picked up the first five-wicket haul in a Test innings in match 1.
Fred Spofforth performed Test cricket's first hat-trick by dismissing Vernon Royle, Francis McKinnon and Tom Emmett in successive balls.
Fred Spofforth also took the first 10-wicket match haul in Test cricket.
Shane Warne holds the record for the most wickets by an Australian cricketer, with 708 wickets in 145 Test matches.
Arthur Mailey holds the record for the best bowling figures in an innings by an Australian cricketer, with 9/121 against England in February 1921.
Bob Massie holds the record for the best bowling figures in a match by an Australian cricketer, with 16/137 against England in June 1972. That was also his first Test match for Australia.
J. J. Ferris holds the record for the best bowling average by an Australian bowler, taking 61 wickets at 12.70 in his career.
Clarrie Grimmett holds the record for the most wickets in a Test series, with 44 against South Africa in 1935–36."
Australia national cricket team,"Fielding and wicketkeeping
Ricky Ponting holds the record for the most catches in a career by an Australian fielder, with 196 in 168 matches.
Jack Blackham performed the first stumping in Test cricket in match 1.
Adam Gilchrist holds the record for the most dismissals in a career by an Australian wicketkeeper, with 416 in 96 matches."
Australia national cricket team,"One-Day International records
Team
Australia's highest total in a One-Day International innings is 434/4, scored off 50 overs against South Africa in Johannesburg on 12 March 2006. This was a world record score before the South Africans later surpassed it in the same match.
Australia's lowest total in a One-Day International innings is 70. This score has occurred twice; once against England in 1977 and once against New Zealand in 1986.
Australia's largest victory in One-Day International cricket is 309 runs. This occurred against The Netherlands at the 2023 World Cup in India.
Australia are the only team in the history of the World Cup to win 3 consecutive tournaments; 1999, 2003 and 2007.
Australia went undefeated at the World Cup for a record 34 consecutive matches. After being defeated by Pakistan in 1999, Australia would remain unbeaten until they were again defeated by Pakistan in 2011.
Australia have won the most ODI World Cups – 6."
Australia national cricket team,"Appearances
Ricky Ponting has played in the most One-Day International matches for Australia, playing 375 matches."
Australia national cricket team,"Batting
Ricky Ponting has the most One-Day International runs by an Australian batsman, with 13,291.
Ricky Ponting has the most One-Day International centuries by an Australian batsman, with 30.
Ricky Ponting has the most One-Day International fifties by an Australian batsman, with 82.
Ricky Ponting is the first Australian batsman to pass 10,000 One-Day International runs.
Glenn Maxwell has the highest individual not out score in an innings by an Australian batsman, with 201*.
Shane Watson has hit the most sixes in a single innings by an Australian player, with 15.
Phillip Hughes was the only Australian player to score a century on debut in One-Day International cricket."
Australia national cricket team,"Bowling
Glenn McGrath has the most One-Day International wickets by an Australian bowler, with 381.
Glenn McGrath has the best bowling figures by an Australian bowler, with 7/15.
Brett Lee has the most five-wicket hauls by an Australian bowler, with 9."
Australia national cricket team,"Fielding and wicketkeeping
Ricky Ponting has the most catches taken by an Australian fielder, with 154.
Adam Gilchrist has the most dismissals by an Australian wicketkeeper, with 470.
Adam Gilchrist has the most catches taken by an Australian wicketkeeper, with 416.
Adam Gilchrist has the most stumpings made by an Australian wicketkeeper, with 54."
Australia national cricket team,"Twenty20 International records
Tournament history
A red box around the year indicates tournaments played within Australia"
Australia national cricket team,"ICC World Test Championship
ICC World Cup
ICC T20 World Cup
ICC Champions Trophy
Commonwealth Games
Honours
ICC
World Test Championship:
Champions (1): 2021–2023
World Cup:
Champions (6): 1987, 1999, 2003, 2007, 2015, 2023
Runners-up (2): 1975, 1996
T20 World Cup:
Champions (1): 2021
Runners-up (1): 2010
Champions Trophy:
Champions (2): 2006, 2009"
Australia national cricket team,"Others
Commonwealth Games:
Silver medal (1): 1998"
Australia national cricket team,"Under the Southern Cross I Stand
The team song is ""Under the Southern Cross I Stand"", which is sung by the players after every victory and ""treated with reverential consideration and respect"" within the team. The official lyrics are as follows, though when it is sung by the players, the word ""little"" in the last line is instead replaced by ""bloody"" or the expletive ""fucking""."
Australia national cricket team,"Under the Southern Cross I Stand
A sprig of wattle in my hand,
A native of my native land,
Australia you little beauty.
The authorship of this ""Under the Southern Cross I Stand"" is credited to former wicketkeeper Rod Marsh, who was apparently inspired by Henry Lawson's 1887 poem, ""Flag of the Southern Cross"". Marsh initially had the role of leading the team in singing it and, on his retirement, passed it on to Allan Border. The other players to have taken on the role are David Boon (when Border took over the captaincy), Ian Healy (on Boon's retirement), Ricky Ponting (on Healy's retirement), Justin Langer (when Ponting took over the captaincy). The role was then passed on to Michael Hussey, who took it on when Langer retired in January 2007. Following Hussey's retirement on 6 January 2013, he announced that he would be handing the duties over to Nathan Lyon. With Nathan Lyon's departure from the team due to injury after the Second Ashes Test at Lord's in 2023 , custody of the song has passed to wicketkeeper Alex Carey."
Australia national cricket team,"See also
Allan Border Medal
Australia A cricket team
Australia national women's cricket team
Australian Cricket Hall of Fame
List of Australia national cricket captains
List of Australia ODI cricketers
List of Australia Test cricketers
List of Australia Test wicket-keepers
List of Australia Twenty20 International cricketers"
Australia national cricket team,"References
Further reading
Townsend, Stephen; Osmond, Gary; Phillips, Murray G. ""Wicked Wikipedia? Communities of Practice, the Production of Knowledge and Australian Sports History."" International Journal of the History of Sport (2013) 30#5 pp 545–559. How Wikipedia covers Australian cricket."
Australia national cricket team,External links
Australia national cricket team,Official website
Australian Council of Social Service,"The Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) is an Australian organisation that advocates for action to reduce poverty and inequality, and is the peak body for the community services sector in Australia. It was formed in 1956.
ACOSS is active in areas of social policy, including community sector policy, climate and energy, economics and tax, income support and employment, health, housing and homelessness, and poverty and inequality.
Cassandra Goldie became CEO of ACOSS in 10 July 2010. She was previously the Director of the Sex Discrimination Unit at the Australian Human Rights Commission (HREOC).
The  CEO  of ACOSS is often interviewed by Australian media for comment and analysis on social matters and policies of the Australian Government."
Australian Council of Social Service,"Governance
ACOSS has a 9-person volunteer Board of Governors, elected according to the constitution [1] adopted in August 2019."
Australian Council of Social Service,"Controversies
In 1991 Federal Opposition leader John Hewson accused
ACOSS of seeking to acquire more money than for welfare and making bureaucracies bigger than in helping those in poverty.[[2]]"
Australian Council of Social Service,"Presidents
March 2023 - present: Hang Vo
June 2020 - December 2022: Peter McNamara
January 2016 - June 2020: Tony Reidy
January 2015 - December 2016: Micaela Cronin
December 2013 - January 2015: Francis Lynch
November 2009 – November 2013: Simon Schrapel
May–November 2009: David Thompson (interim)
2005-May 2009: Lin Hatfield Dodds
2001-2005: Andrew McCallum
1997-2000: Michael Raper
1993-1997: Robert Fitzgerald
1989-1993: Merle Mitchell 
1985-1989: Julian Disney"
Australian Council of Social Service,"Members
Source:"
Australian Council of Social Service,"State and Territory Councils of Social Service
ACT Council of Social Service (ACTCOSS)
NSW Council of Social Service (NCOSS)
South Australian Council of Social Service (SACOSS)
Northern Territory Council of Social Service (NTCOSS)
Queensland Council of Social Service (QCOSS)
Tasmanian Council of Social Service (TasCOSS)
Victorian Council of Social Service (VCOSS)
Western Australia Council of Social Service (WACOSS)"
Australian Council of Social Service,"National constituency organization members
Anti-Poverty Network SA
Australian Unemployed Workers' Union
Children and Young People with Disability Australia
National Council of Single Mothers and their Children
Women With Disabilities Australia
YOUNG Campaigns
People with Disability Australia
Women With Disabilities Australia"
Australian Council of Social Service,"National organization members
Adult Learning Australia
Anglicare Australia
Anti-poverty Week
Asylum Seeker Resource Centre
Australian Alcohol and other Drugs Council
Australian Association of Social Workers
Australian Baha’i Community
Australian Communications Consumer Action Network
Australian Community Workers Association
Australian Council of State School Organisations
Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations
Australian Federation of Disability Organisations
Australian Health Promotion Association
Australian Insulation Foundation
Australian Men’s Health Forum
Australian Pensioners & Superannuants Federation
Australian Red Cross
Australian Youth Affairs Coalition
Baptist Care Australia
Better Renting
Brotherhood of St Laurence
Carers Australia
Catholic Social Services Australia
Centre for Social Impact
CHOICE
Christians Against Poverty
cohealth
Community Colleges Australia
Community Housing Industry Association
Community Legal Centres Australia
Community Mental Health Australia
Community Transport Organisation
Consumer Action Law Centre
Consumers Health Forum of Australia
COTA Australia
DCSS Australia
Disability Advocacy Network Australia
Down Syndrome Australia
Economic Justice Australia
Edmund Rice Centre
Family Relationship Services Australia
Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia
Financial Counselling Australia
Foodbank Australia
Foundation for Young Australians
Good Shepherd Australia New Zealand
Good Things Foundation Australia
Goodstart Early Learning
Health Justice Australia
Homelessness Australia
Homes for Homes
HOST International
Indian (Sub-Cont) Crisis & Support Agency
InfoXchange
Jobs Australia
Justice Connect
LGBTIQ+ Health Australia
Life Without Barriers
Lojic Institute
MacKillop Family Services
Mind Australia
Mission Australia
MS Australia
National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service
National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation
National Association of People with HIV Australia
National Association of Tenant Organisations
National Ethnic Disability Alliance
National Family Violence Prevention Legal Services Forum
National Shelter
Office for Social Justice, Australian Catholic Bishops Conference
Oxfam Australia
Playgroup Australia
Public Health Association of Australia
Rape & Domestic Violence Services Australia
Reconciliation Australia
Relationships Australia
Save the Children
Secretariat of National Aboriginal & Islander Child Care
Settlement Council of Australia
Settlement Services International
Social Ventures Australia
Society of St Vincent de Paul National Council
Syndromes Without a Name (SWAN) Australia
The Benevolent Society
The Salvation Army Australia
The Smith Family
UnitingCare Australia
Volunteering Australia
WESNET
YMCA Australia
YWCA Australia"
Australian Council of Social Service,"Associate Members
Accordwest
ADRA Australia Limited
Anglicare Community Services
Anglicare Victoria
Association of Children’s Welfare Agencies Ltd. (ACWA)
Australian Education Union (AEU)
Australian Refugee and Migrant Care Services Ltd
Australian Services Union (ASU)
AWARE Community
Berry Street
BeyondHousing
Blue Sky Community Services
Caboolture Community Care Inc
Cairns Alliance of Social Services
Canberra Community Law
Catholic Social Services Victoria
CentaCare New England North West
Centre for Excellence in Child and Family Welfare
Centre for Women’s Economic Safety
Churches Housing Incorporated
Community Housing Industry Association NSW
Community Industry Group
Community Information and Support Victoria
Community Resources Limited
Container of Dreams
CORE Community Services
Cowra Information & Neighbourhood Centre
Energetic Communities
Family Support Newcastle
Family Violence Legal Service Aboriginal Corporation
Financial Counsellors’ Association of WA
Financial Rights Legal Centre
Glebe Youth Service
Homelessness NSW
Illawarra Legal Centre
Institute of Child Protection Studies
Jannawi Family Centre
Lifetime Renewable Energy Pty Ltd
Lutheran Community Care
Melbourne’s Leading Nanny Agency
Mountains Community Resource Network (MCRN)
Muru Mittigar Limited
Nepean Community and Neighbourhood Services (NCNS)
One Future
Orphans and Widows West Africa Inc.
PeakCare Queensland Inc
Peninsula Community Legal Centre Inc.
Penrith City Council
Queensland Youth Housing Coalition
Rainbow Families Inc
Samaritans Foundation
Sector Connect
Single Mothers Lobby Alliance
Social Futures (Northern Rivers Social Development Council)
South East Community Links
South Port Community Housing Group Inc
Southern Youth and Family Services
St John’s Youth Services
Sydney Community Forum
Tangentyere Council Inc.
Tenants Queensland
Think+DO Tank Foundation
United Workers Union
Uniting Communities
Uniting Country SA
Welfare Rights Centre
Westgate Community Initiatives Group
WESTIR Ltd"
Australian Council of Social Service,"References
External links
Official website"
European land exploration of Australia,"European land exploration of Australia deals with the opening up of the interior of Australia to European settlement which occurred gradually throughout the colonial period, 1788–1900. A number of these explorers are very well known, such as Burke and Wills who are well known for their failed attempt to cross the interior of Australia, as well as Hamilton Hume and Charles Sturt."
European land exploration of Australia,"Crossing the Blue Mountains
For many years, plans of westward expansion from Sydney were thwarted by the Great Dividing Range, a large range of mountains which shadows the east coast from the Queensland-New South Wales border to the south coast. The part of the range near Sydney is called the Blue Mountains. After numerous attempts 
William Paterson led an expedition northward along the coast to the Hunter Region in 1801 and up the Paterson River (later named in his honour by Governor King) and in 1804 Paterson led an expedition to Port Dalrymple, in what is now Tasmania, exploring the Tamar River and going up the North Esk River farther than any European had previously gone.
Despite King's pronouncement, some settlers continued to try crossing the mountains. Gregory Blaxland was the first to successfully lead an expedition to cross them in 1813, accompanied by William Lawson, William Wentworth and four servants. This trip paved the way for numerous small expeditions which were undertaken in the following few years.
On 13 November 1813 Governor Lachlan Macquarie sent Government Surveyor, George Evans, across the Blue Mountains to confirm the findings of Blaxland's exploration party. Evans generally followed Blaxland's route, reaching the end of their route on 26 November 1813 at a point Evans named Mount Blaxland. Evans's party then moved on and discovered the Fish River area and further west near the junction of the now named Fish and Campbell Rivers and described two plains in his view, the O'Connell Plains and the Macquarie Plains. On 9 December he reached the site of present-day Bathurst. After the explorations that took seven weeks Governor Macquarie awarded Evans £100 and 1000 acres of land near Richmond in Van Diemens Land (Tasmania). Evans departed for Tasmania in 1814.
In 1814, Governor Lachlan Macquarie approved an offer by William Cox to build a road crossing the Blue Mountains, from Emu Plains, the existing road terminus west of Sydney, to the Bathurst Plains. The first road to cross the Blue Mountains was 12 feet (3.7 m) wide by 101+1⁄2 miles (163.3 km) long, built between 18 July 1814 to 14 January 1815 using 5 freemen, 30 convict labourers and 8 soldiers as guards. Governor Macquarie surveyed the finished road in April 1815, and as a reward Cox was awarded 2,000 acres (810 ha) of land near what is now Bathurst.
On 7 May 1815, Governor Macquarie proclaimed the name of the future town of Bathurst, the first inland town in Australia and intended to be the administrative centre of the western plains of New South Wales."
European land exploration of Australia,"Inland exploration
Evans was back in New South Wales by 1815 to continue inland explorations. In 1815, Evans was the first colonial explorer to enter the Lachlan Valley, naming the area the Oxley Plains after his superior the Surveyor-General, John Oxley. He also discovered the Abercrombie and Belubula River Valleys. He was the first explorer through the areas that now include the towns of Boorowa and Cowra.
On 1 June 1815 in Eugowra, a town in the Central West region of New South Wales, George William Evans and his group marked a tree at the junction of Lachlan river and a creek which they named Byrnes Creek. This was the furthest west any Europeans had travelled into the country. On 1 June 1815 he was running short of provisions and returned to Bathurst where he arrived on 12 June. This journey opened the way for later explorations, mainly by John Oxley. Evans took part in some of Oxley's expeditions.
Evans returned to Tasmania in 1817 but was again to return to New South Wales to journey with his superior John Oxley on travels into the Lachlan River areas, along the path of the Macquarie River to the Macquarie Marshes and eastwards to the coast to Port Macquarie.
In March 1817, Oxley was instructed to take charge of an expedition to explore and survey the course of the Lachlan River. He left Sydney on 6 April with Evans, as second-in-command, and Allan Cunningham as botanist. Oxley's party reached Bathurst after a week, where they were briefly detained by bad weather. They reached the Lachlan River on 25 April 1817 and commenced to follow its course, with part of the stores being conveyed in boats. As the exploring party travelled westward the country surrounding the rising river was found to be increasingly inundated. On 12 May, west of the present township of Forbes, they found their progress impeded by an extensive marsh. After retracing their route for a short distance they then proceeded in a south-westerly direction, intending to travel overland to the southern Australian coastline. By the end of May the party found themselves in a dry scrubby country. Shortage of water and the death of two horses forced Oxley's return to the Lachlan River.  On 23 June the Lachlan River was reached: "
European land exploration of Australia,"""we suddenly came upon the banks of the river… which we had quitted nearly five weeks before"".
They followed the course of the Lachlan River for a fortnight. The party encountered much flooded country, and on 7 July Oxley recorded that: "
European land exploration of Australia,"""it was with infinite regret and pain that I was forced to come to the conclusion, that the interior of this vast country is a marsh and uninhabitable"".
Oxley resolved to turn back and after resting for two days Oxley's party began to retrace their steps along the Lachlan River. They left the Lachlan up-stream of the present site of Lake Cargelligo and crossed to the Bogan River and then across to the upper waters of the Macquarie River, which they followed back to Bathurst (arriving on 29 August 1817).
Oxley travelled to Dubbo on 12 June 1818. He wrote that he had passed that day ""over a very beautiful country, thinly wooded and apparently safe from the highest floods..."" Later in 1818 Oxley and his men explored the Macquarie River at length before turning west. On 26 August 1818 they climbed a hill and saw before them rich, fertile land (Peel River), near the present site of Tamworth. Continuing further east they crossed the Great Dividing Range passing by the Apsley Falls on 13 September 1818 which he named the Bathurst Falls. He described it as ""one of the most magnificent waterfalls we have seen"". He discovered and named the Arbuthnot Range, since renamed the Warrumbungle Range. Upon reaching the Hastings River they followed it to its mouth, discovering that it flowed into the sea at a spot which they named Port Macquarie.
In 1824, Governor Thomas Brisbane asked Hamilton Hume and William Hovell to travel from Hume's station, near modern-day Canberra, to Spencer Gulf (west of modern-day Adelaide). However, they were required to pay their own costs. Hume and Hovell decided that Western Port (in present-day Victoria) was a more realistic goal, and they left with a party of six men. After discovering and crossing the Murrumbidgee and Murray rivers, they eventually reached a site near modern-day Geelong, somewhat west of their intended destination."
European land exploration of Australia,"Inland sea
After the Great Dividing Range had been crossed at numerous points and many rivers were discovered—the Darling, Macquarie, Murray and Murrumbidgee rivers—all of which flowed west, a theory was developed of a vast inland sea into which these rivers flowed. Another reason behind the idea of an inland sea was that Matthew Flinders, who had very carefully mapped much of Australia's coast had discovered no great river delta where these rivers should have emerged had they reached the coast. The Murray-Darling basin actually drains into Lake Alexandrina. Matthew Flinders had noted this on his maps but viewed from the sea does not look like the outfall of a large watershed, but instead as a gentle tidal basin.
The mystery was solved by Charles Sturt, who in 1829–30 undertook an expedition similar to the one which Hume and Hovell had refused: a trip to the mouth of the Murray River. They followed the Murrumbidgee until it met the Murray, and then found the junction of the Murray and the Darling before continuing on to the mouth of the Murray. The search for an inland sea was an inspiration for many early expeditions west of the Great Dividing Ranges. This quest drove many explorers to extremes of endurance and hardship. Charles Sturt's expedition explained the mystery. It also led to the opening of South Australia to settlement.
The theory of the inland sea had some supporters. Major Thomas Mitchell, the Surveyor-General of New South Wales, set out in 1836 to disprove Sturt's claims and in doing so made a significant discovery. He led an expedition to 'fill in the gaps' left by these previous expeditions. He set off  along the Lachlan River, down to the Murray River. He then set off for the southern coast, mapping what is now western Victoria. There he discovered the richest grazing land ever seen to that time and named it Australia Felix. He was knighted for this discovery in 1837. When he reached the coast at Portland Bay, he was surprised to find a small settlement. It had been established by the Henty family, who had sailed across Bass Strait from Van Diemen's Land in 1834, without the authorities being informed. He was meticulous in seeking to record the original Aboriginal place names around the colony, for which reason the majority of place names to this day retain their Aboriginal titles.
The Polish scientist/explorer Count Paul Edmund Strzelecki conducted surveying work in the Australian Alps in 1839 and became the first European to ascend Australia's highest peak, which he named Mount Kosciuszko in honour of the Polish patriot Tadeusz Kosciuszko."
European land exploration of Australia,"The vast interior
From 1858 onwards, the so-called ""Afghan"" cameleers and their beasts played an instrumental role in opening up the outback and helping to build infrastructure.
The competition to chart a route for the Australian Overland Telegraph Line spurred a number of cross-continental expeditions. Perhaps the most famous of these was the  Burke and Wills expedition led by Robert O'Hara Burke and William John Wills who in 1860–61 led a well equipped expedition from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria. Due to an unfortunate run of bad luck, oversight and poor leadership, Burke and Wills both died on the return trip."
European land exploration of Australia,"List of expeditions 1804–1897
Expeditions (in chronological order):"
European land exploration of Australia,"Other 19th-century explorers
Other explorers by land (in alphabetical order):"
European land exploration of Australia,"20th-century explorers
By the turn of the 20th century, most of the major geographical features of Australia had been discovered by European explorers.  However, there are some 20th-century people who are considered explorers.  They include:"
European land exploration of Australia,"Ted Colson (First to cross the Simpson Desert in 1936.)
Donald George Mackay (Five major expeditions to survey and accurately map the Northern Territory, discoverer of Lake Mackay)
Cecil Madigan (Major scientific expedition to the Simpson Desert in 1939. In 1930, Madigan coined the name ""Simpson Desert"" after Alfred Allen Simpson, following an aerial survey.)
Len Beadell (Surveyor, road builder, author.)
In 1928, the Royal Australian Air Force started photographing Australian land features from aircraft, and in 1929, the Australian Survey Corps had aerial photos of coastal areas north of Sydney. Urbanized areas were generally first photographed from aircraft during World War II, and the Air Force produced imagery of 1.25 million square miles of northern and central Australia between 1947 and 1952."
European land exploration of Australia,"21st-century activity
Google Street View sent cars across Australia to create a visual map of the country's streetscapes, starting in urban areas around 2008. While the service had a brief hiatus due to concerns over collecting wi-fi data from 2010 to 2011, mapping with the Google cars resumed and continued until at least 2015."
European land exploration of Australia,"Indigenous Australians participating in European exploration
A number of Indigenous Australians participated in the European exploration of Australia.  They include:"
European land exploration of Australia,"Jackey Jackey (aka Galmahra), who accompanied Kennedy's expedition
Tommy Windich, who joined John Forrest in his search for Ludwig Leichhardt
Wylie, who accompanied Eyre's expedition across the Nullarbor"
European land exploration of Australia,"Naturalists and other scientists
There are a number of naturalists and other scientists closely associated with European exploration of Australia.  They include:"
European land exploration of Australia,"Daniel Solander, accompanied Cook's 1770 expedition
Jacques Labillardière, accompanied Bruni d'Entrecasteaux
Allan Cunningham, accompanied Oxley's 1817 expedition
John Gilbert, accompanied Leichhardt's expedition
Ferdinand von Mueller, accompanied Augustus Gregory's expedition
Jean Baptiste Leschenault de la Tour, François Péron and Charles Alexander Lesueur, accompanied Nicolas Baudin's 1801 expedition
John Lhotsky
Gerard Krefft
Olive Pink
Scientists of the Horn Expedition of 1894, including Walter Baldwin Spencer, Edward Charles Stirling and Ralph Tate"
European land exploration of Australia,"Uncategorised explorers
References
Further reading
Bennett, S. (1867). The history of Australian discovery and colonisation. Sydney: Hanson and Bennett.
Ridpath, J. C. (1899). Ridpath's universal history; an account of the origin, primitive condition, and race development of the greater divisions of mankind, and also of the principal events in the evolution and progress of nations from the beginnings of the civilized life to the close of the nineteenth century. Cincinnati: Jones Brothers Pub."
European land exploration of Australia,"External links
Explorers page at Project Gutenburg Australia
Australian Discovery page at Project Gutenburg Australia"
Parliament of Australia,"The Parliament of Australia (officially the Parliament of the Commonwealth and also known as Federal Parliament) is the legislative body of the federal level of government of Australia. It consists of three elements: the monarch (represented by the governor-general), the Senate and the House of Representatives. It combines elements from the UK Parliament (the Westminster system in which the party with a majority in the lower house is entitled to form a government) and the US Congress (equal representation of each state in a powerful upper house). 
The upper house, the Senate, consists of 76 members: twelve for each state, and two for each of the self-governing territories. Senators are elected using the proportional system and as a result, the chamber features a multitude of parties vying for power. The governing party or coalition has not held a majority in the Senate since 1981 (except between 2005 and 2007) and usually needs to negotiate with other parties and independents to get legislation passed.
The lower house, the House of Representatives, currently consists of 151 members, each elected using full preferential voting from single-member electorates (also known as electoral divisions or seats). This tends to lead to the chamber being dominated by two major political groups, the centre‑right Coalition (consisting of the Liberal and National parties) and the centre‑left Labor Party. The government of the day must achieve the confidence of this House in order to gain and remain in power.
The House of Representatives has a maximum term of three years, although it can be dissolved early. The Senate has fixed terms, with half of the state senators' terms expiring every three years (the terms of the four territory senators are linked to House elections). As a result, House and Senate elections almost always coincide. A deadlock-breaking mechanism known as a double dissolution can be used to dissolve the full Senate as well as the House if the Senate refuses to pass a piece of legislation passed by the House.
The two houses of Parliament meet in separate chambers of Parliament House (except in rare joint sittings) on Capital Hill in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory."
Parliament of Australia,"History
Temporary home in Melbourne (1901–1927)
The Commonwealth of Australia came into being on 1 January 1901 with the federation of the six Australian colonies. The inaugural election took place on 29 and 30 March and the first Australian Parliament was opened on 9 May 1901 in Melbourne by Prince George, Duke of Cornwall and York, later King George V. The only building in Melbourne that was large enough to accommodate the 14,000 guests was the western annexe of the Royal Exhibition Building. After the official opening, from 1901 to 1927 the Parliament met in Parliament House, Melbourne, which it borrowed from the Parliament of Victoria (which sat, instead, in the Royal Exhibition Building until 1927). During this time, Sir Frederick Holder became the first speaker and also the first (and thus far only) parliamentarian to die during a sitting. On 23 July 1909 during an acrimonious debate that had extended through the night to 5 am, Holder exclaimed: ""Dreadful, dreadful!"" before collapsing as a result of a cerebral haemorrhage."
Parliament of Australia,"Old Parliament House (1927–1988)
The Constitution provided that a new national capital would be established for the nation. This was a compromise at Federation due to the rivalry between the two largest Australian cities, Sydney and Melbourne, which both wished to become the new capital. The site of Canberra was selected for the location of the nation's capital city in 1908. A competition was announced on 30 June 1914 to design Parliament House, with prize money of £7,000. However, due to the start of World War I the next month, the competition was cancelled. It was re-announced in August 1916, but again postponed indefinitely on 24 November 1916. In the meantime, John Smith Murdoch, the Commonwealth's chief architect, worked on the design as part of his official duties. He had little personal enthusiasm for the project, as he felt it was a waste of money and expenditure on it could not be justified at the time. Nevertheless, he designed the building by default.
The construction of Old Parliament House, as it is called today, commenced on 28 August 1923 and was completed in early 1927. It was built by the Commonwealth Department of Works, using workers and materials from all over Australia. The final cost was about £600,000, which was more than three times the original estimate. It was designed to house the parliament for a maximum of 50 years until a permanent facility could be built, but was actually used for more than 60 years."
Parliament of Australia,"The building was opened on 9 May 1927 by the Duke and Duchess of York (later King George VI and Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother). The opening ceremonies were both splendid and incongruous, given the sparsely built nature of Canberra of the time and its small population. The building was extensively decorated with Union Jacks and Australian flags and bunting. Temporary stands were erected bordering the lawns in front of the Parliament and these were filled with crowds. A Wiradjuri elder, Jimmy Clements, was one of only two Aboriginal Australians present, having walked for about a week from Brungle Station (near Tumut) to be at the event. Dame Nellie Melba sang ""God Save the King"". The Duke of York unlocked the front doors with a golden key, and led the official party into King's Hall where he unveiled the statue of his father, King George V. The Duke then opened the first parliamentary session in the new Senate Chamber."
Parliament of Australia,"New Parliament House (1988–present)
In 1978 the Fraser government decided to proceed with a new building on Capital Hill, and the Parliament House Construction Authority was created. A two-stage competition was announced, for which the Authority consulted the Royal Australian Institute of Architects and, together with the National Capital Development Commission, made available to competitors a brief and competition documents. The design competition drew 329 entries from 29 countries.
The competition winner was the Philadelphia-based architectural firm of Mitchell/Giurgola, with the on-site work directed by the Italian-born architect Romaldo Giurgola, with a design which involved burying most of the building under Capital Hill, and capping the edifice with an enormous spire topped by a large Australian flag. The façades, however, included deliberate imitation of some of the patterns of the Old Parliament House, so that there is a slight resemblance despite the massive difference of scale. The building was also designed to sit above Old Parliament House when seen from a distance.
Construction began in 1981, and the House was intended to be ready by Australia Day, 26 January 1988, the 200th anniversary of European settlement in Australia. It was expected to cost $220 million. Neither the deadline nor the budget was met. In the end it cost more than $1.1 billion to build.
New Parliament House was finally opened by Elizabeth II, Queen of Australia, on 9 May 1988, the anniversary of the opening of both the first Federal Parliament in Melbourne on 9 May 1901 and the Provisional Parliament House in Canberra on 9 May 1927.
In March 2020, the 46th Parliament of Australia was suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia; an adjournment rather than prorogation. Its committees would continue to operate using technology. This unprecedented move was accompanied by two motions raised by the Attorney-General of Australia, Christian Porter, and passed on 23 March 2020. One motion was designed to allow MPs to participate in parliament by electronic means, if agreed by the major parties and the speaker; the second determined that with the agreement of the two major parties, the standing orders could be amended without requiring an absolute majority."
Parliament of Australia,"Composition and electoral systems
The Constitution establishes the Commonwealth Parliament, consisting of three components: the King of Australia, the Senate and the House of Representatives."
Parliament of Australia,"Monarch
All of the constitutional functions of the King are exercisable by the governor-general (except the power to appoint the governor-general), whom the King appoints as his representative in Australia on the advice of the prime minister. However, by convention, the governor-general exercises these powers only upon the advice of ministers, except for limited circumstances covered by the reserve powers."
Parliament of Australia,"Senate
The upper house of the Australian Parliament is the Senate, which consists of 76 members. Like the United States Senate, on which it was partly modelled, the Australian Senate includes an equal number of senators from each state, regardless of population. Unlike it however, the Australian Senate has always been directly elected. 
The Constitution allows Parliament to determine the number of senators by legislation, provided that the six original states are equally represented. Furthermore, the Constitution provides that each original state is entitled to at least six senators. However, neither of these provisions applies to any newly admitted states, or to territories. Since an act was passed in 1973, senators have been elected to represent the territories. Currently, the two Northern Territory senators represent the residents of the Northern Territory as well as the Australian external territories of Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. The two Australian Capital Territory senators represent the Australian Capital Territory, the Jervis Bay Territory and since 1 July 2016, Norfolk Island. While only half of the state Senate seats go up for re-election each three years (except in the case of a double dissolution) as they serve six-year terms, all of the territory senators must face the voters every three years.
Until 1949, each state elected the constitutional minimum of six senators. This number increased to ten from the 1949 election, and was increased again to twelve from the 1984 election. The system for electing senators has changed several times since Federation. The original arrangement used a first-past-the-post block voting or ""winner takes all"" system, on a state-by-state basis. This was replaced in 1919 by preferential block voting. Block voting tended to produce landslide majorities and even ""wipe-outs"". For instance, from 1920 to 1923 the Nationalist Party had 35 of the 36 senators, and from 1947 to 1950, the Australian Labor Party had 33 of the 36 senators.
In 1948, single transferable vote proportional representation on a state-by-state basis became the method for electing senators. This change has been described as an ""institutional revolution"" that has led to the rise of a number of minor parties such as the Democratic Labor Party, Australian Democrats and Australian Greens who have taken advantage of this system to achieve parliamentary representation and the balance of power. From the 1984 election, group ticket voting was introduced in order to reduce a high rate of informal voting but in 2016, group tickets were abolished to end the influence that preference deals amongst parties had on election results and a form of optional preferential voting was introduced.
Section 15 of the Constitution provides that a casual vacancy of a senator shall be filled by the state Parliament. If the previous senator was a member of a particular political party the replacement must come from the same party, but the state Parliament may choose not to fill the vacancy, in which case section 11 requires the Senate to proceed regardless. If the state Parliament happens to be in recess when the vacancy occurs, the Constitution provides that the state governor can appoint someone to fill the place until fourteen days after the state Parliament resumes sitting. The state Parliament can also be recalled to ratify a replacement."
Parliament of Australia,"House of Representatives
The lower house of the Australian Parliament, the House of Representatives, is made up of single member electorates with a population of roughly equal size. As is convention in the Westminster system, the party or coalition of parties that has the majority in this House forms the government with the leader of that party or coalition becoming the prime minister. If the government loses the confidence of the House, they are expected to call a new election or resign.
Parliament may determine the number of members of the House of Representatives but the Constitution provides that this number must be ""as nearly as practicable, twice the number of Senators""; this requirement is commonly called the ""nexus clause"". Hence, the House presently consists of 151 members. Each state is allocated seats based on its population; however, each original state, regardless of size, is guaranteed at least five seats. The Constitution does not guarantee representation for the territories. Parliament granted a seat to the Northern Territory in 1922, and to the Australian Capital Territory in 1948; these territorial representatives, however, had only limited voting rights until 1968. Federal electorates have their boundaries redrawn or redistributed whenever a state or territory has its number of seats adjusted, if electorates are not generally matched by population size or if seven years have passed since the most recent redistribution.
From 1901 to 1949, the House consisted of either 74 or 75 members (the Senate had 36). Between 1949 and 1984, it had between 121 and 127 members (the Senate had 60 until 1975, when it increased to 64). In 1977, the High Court ordered that the size of the House be reduced from 127 to 124 members to comply with the nexus provision. In 1984, both the Senate and the House were enlarged; since then the House has had between 148 and 151 members (the Senate has 76).
First-past-the-post voting was used to elect members of the House of Representatives until in 1918 the Nationalist Party government, a predecessor of the modern-day Liberal Party of Australia, changed the lower house voting system to full preferential voting for the subsequent 1919 election. This was in response to Labor unexpectedly winning the 1918 Swan by-election with the largest primary vote, due to vote splitting among the conservative parties. This system has remained in place ever since, allowing the Coalition parties to safely contest the same seats. Full-preference preferential voting re-elected the Bob Hawke government at the 1990 election, the first time in federal history that Labor had obtained a net benefit from preferential voting."
Parliament of Australia,"Both houses
It is not possible to be simultaneously a member of both the Senate and the House of Representatives, but a number of people have been members of both houses at different times in their parliamentary career.
Only Australian citizens are eligible for election to either house. They must not also be a subject or citizen of a ""foreign power"". When the Constitution was drafted, all Australians (and other inhabitants of the British empire) were British subjects, so the word ""foreign"" meant outside the Empire. But, in the landmark case Sue v Hill (1999), the High Court of Australia ruled that, at least since the passage of the Australia Act 1986, Britain has been a ""foreign power"", so that British citizens are also excluded.
Compulsory voting was introduced for federal elections in 1924. The immediate justification for compulsory voting was the low voter turnout (59.38%) at the 1922 federal election, down from 71.59% at the 1919 federal election. Compulsory voting was not on the platform of either the Stanley Bruce-led Nationalist/Country party coalition government or the Matthew Charlton-led Labor opposition. The actual initiative for change was made by Herbert Payne, a backbench Tasmanian Nationalist Senator who on 16 July 1924 introduced a private Senator's bill in the Senate. Payne's bill was passed with little debate (the House of Representatives agreeing to it in less than an hour), and in neither house was a division required, hence no votes were recorded against the bill. The 1925 federal election was the first to be conducted under compulsory voting, which saw the turnout figure rise to 91.4%. The turnout increased to about 95% within a couple of elections and has stayed at about that level since.
Since 1973, citizens have had the right to vote upon turning 18. Prior to this it was 21.
Australian Federal Police officers armed with assault rifles have been situated in the Federal Parliament since 2015. It is the first time in Australian history that a parliament has possessed armed personnel."
Parliament of Australia,"Procedure
Each of the two Houses elects a presiding officer. The presiding officer of the Senate is called the President; that of the House of Representatives is the Speaker. Elections for these positions are by secret ballot. Both offices are conventionally filled by members of the governing party, but the presiding officers are expected to oversee debate and enforce the rules in an impartial manner.
The Constitution authorises Parliament to set the quorum for each chamber. The quorum of the Senate is one-quarter of the total membership (nineteen); that of the House of Representatives is one-fifth of the total membership (thirty-one). In theory, if a quorum is not present, then a House may not continue to meet. In practice, members usually agree not to notice that a quorum is not present, so that debates on routine bills can continue while other members attend to other business outside the chamber. Sometimes the Opposition will ""call a quorum"" as a tactic to annoy the Government or delay proceedings, particularly when the Opposition feels it has been unfairly treated in the House. Proceedings are interrupted until a quorum is present. It is the responsibility of the government whip to ensure that, when a quorum is called, enough government members are present to form a quorum.
Both Houses may determine motions by voice vote: the presiding officer puts the question, and, after listening to shouts of ""Aye"" and ""No"" from the members, announces the result. The announcement of the presiding officer settles the question, unless at least two members demand a ""division"", or a recorded vote. In that case the bells are rung throughout Parliament House summoning Senators or Members to the chamber. During a division, members who favour the motion move to the right side of the chamber (the side to the Speaker's or President's right), and those opposed move to the left. They are then counted by ""tellers"" (government and opposition whips), and the motion is passed or defeated accordingly. In the Senate, in order not to deprive a state of a vote in what is supposed to be a states' house, the president is permitted a vote along with other senators (however, that right is rarely exercised); in the case of a tie, the president does not have a casting vote and the motion fails. In the House of Representatives, the Speaker does not vote, but has a casting vote if there is a tie.
Most legislation is introduced into the House of Representatives and goes through a number of stages before it becomes law. The legislative process occurs in English, although other Australian parliaments have permitted use of Indigenous languages with English translation. Government bills are drafted by the Office of Parliamentary Counsel.
The first stage is a first reading, where the legislation is introduced to the chamber, then there is a second reading, where a vote is taken on the general outlines of the bill. Although rare, the legislation can then be considered by a House committee, which reports back to the House on any recommendations. This is followed by a consideration in detail stage, where the House can consider the clauses of the bill in detail and make any amendments. This is finally followed by a third reading, where the bill is either passed or rejected by the House. If passed, the legislation is then sent to the Senate, which has a similar structure of debate and passage except that consideration of bills by Senate committees is more common than in the House and the consideration in detail stage is replaced by a committee of the whole. Once a bill has been passed by both Houses in the same form, it is then presented to the governor-general for royal assent."
Parliament of Australia,"Functions
The principal function of the Parliament is to pass laws, or legislation. Any parliamentarian may introduce a proposed law (a bill), except for a money bill (a bill proposing an expenditure or levying a tax), which must be introduced in the House of Representatives. In practice, the great majority of bills are introduced by ministers. Bills introduced by other members are called private members' bills. All bills must be passed by both houses and assented to by the governor-general to become law. The Senate has the same legislative powers as the House, except that it may not amend or introduce money bills, only pass or reject them. The enacting formula for acts of Parliament since 1990 is simply ""The Parliament of Australia enacts:"".
Commonwealth legislative power is limited to that granted in the Constitution. Powers not specified are considered ""residual powers"", and remain the domain of the states. Section 51 grants the Commonwealth power over areas such as taxation, external affairs, defence and marriage. Section 51 also allows state parliaments to refer matters to the Commonwealth to legislate.
Section 96 of the Australian Constitution gives the Commonwealth Parliament the power to grant money to any State, ""on such terms and conditions as the Parliament thinks fit"". In effect, the Commonwealth can make grants subject to states implementing particular policies in their fields of legislative responsibility. Such grants, known as ""tied grants"" (since they are tied to a particular purpose), have been used to give the federal parliament influence over state policy matters such as public hospitals and schools.
The Parliament performs other functions besides legislation. It can discuss urgency motions or matters of public importance: these provide a forum for debates on public policy matters. Senators and members can move motions on a range of matters relevant to their constituents, and can also move motions of censure against the government or individual ministers. On most sitting days in each house there is a session called question time in which senators and members address questions without notice to the prime minister and other ministers. Senators and members can also present petitions from their constituents. Both houses have an extensive system of committees in which draft bills are debated, matters of public policy are inquired into, evidence is taken and public servants are questioned. There are also joint committees, composed of members from both houses."
Parliament of Australia,"Conflict between the houses
In the event of conflict between the two houses over the final form of legislation, the Constitution provides for a simultaneous dissolution of both houses – known as a double dissolution. Section 57 of the Constitution states that, If the House of Representatives passes any proposed law, and the Senate rejects or fails to pass it, or passes it with amendments to which the House of Representatives will not agree, and if after an interval of three months the House of Representatives, in the same or the next session, again passes the proposed law with or without any amendments which have been made, suggested, or agreed to by the Senate, and the Senate rejects or fails to pass it, or passes it with amendments to which the House of Representatives will not agree, the Governor-General may dissolve the Senate and the House of Representatives simultaneously.
In an election following a double dissolution, each state elects their entire 12-seat Senate delegation, while the two territories represented in the Senate each elect their two senators as they would in a regular federal election. Because all seats are contested in the same election, it is easier for smaller parties to win seats under the single transferable vote system: the quota for the election of each senator in each Australian state in a full Senate election is 7.69% of the vote, while in a normal half-Senate election the quota is 14.28%.
If the conflict continues after such an election, the governor-general may convene a joint sitting of both houses to consider the bill or bills, including any amendments which have been previously proposed in either house, or any new amendments. If a bill is passed by an absolute majority of the total membership of the joint sitting, it is treated as though it had been passed separately by both houses, and is presented for royal assent. With proportional representation, and the small majorities in the Senate compared to the generally larger majorities in the House of Representatives, and the requirement that the number of members of the lower house be ""nearly as practicable"" twice that of the Senate, a joint sitting after a double dissolution is more likely than not to lead to a victory for the lower house over the Senate. This provision has only been invoked on one occasion, after the election following the 1974 double dissolution. However, there are other occasions when the two houses meet as one."
Parliament of Australia,"Committees
In addition to the work of the main chambers, both the Senate and the House of Representatives have a large number of investigatory and scrutiny committees which deal with matters referred to them by their respective houses or ministers. They provide the opportunity for all members and senators to ask questions of witnesses, including ministers and public officials, as well as conduct inquiries, and examine policy and legislation. Once a particular inquiry is completed the members of the committee can then produce a report, to be tabled in Parliament, outlining what they have discovered as well as any recommendations that they have produced for the government or house to consider."
Parliament of Australia,"The ability of the houses of Parliament to establish committees is referenced in section 49 of the Constitution, which states that, The powers, privileges, and immunities of the Senate and of the House of Representatives, and of the members and the committees of each House, shall be such as are declared by the Parliament, and until declared shall be those of the Commons House of Parliament of the United Kingdom, and of its members and committees, at the establishment of the Commonwealth.
Parliamentary committees can be given a wide range of powers. One of the most significant powers is the ability to summon people to attend hearings in order to give evidence and submit documents. Anyone who attempts to hinder the work of a Parliamentary committee may be found to be in contempt of Parliament. There are a number of ways that witnesses can be found in contempt, these include; refusing to appear before a committee when summoned, refusing to answer a question during a hearing or to produce a document, or later being found to have lied to or misled a committee. Anyone who attempts to influence a witness may also be found in contempt. Other powers include, the ability to meet throughout Australia, to establish subcommittees and to take evidence in both public and private hearings.
Proceedings of committees are considered to have the same legal standing as proceedings of Parliament, they are recorded by Hansard, except for private proceedings, and also operate under the protections of parliamentary privilege. Every participant, including committee members and witnesses giving evidence, is protected from being prosecuted under any civil or criminal action for anything they may say during a hearing. Written evidence and documents received by a committee are also protected.
Types of committees include:
Standing committees, which are established on an ongoing basis and are responsible for scrutinising bills and topics referred to them by the chamber or minister; examining the government's budget and activities (in what is called the budget estimates process); and for examining departmental annual reports and activities.
Select committees, which are temporary committees, established in order to consider a particular matter. A select committee expires when it has published its final report on an inquiry.
Domestic committees, which are responsible for administering aspects of the Parliament's own affairs. These include the Selection Committees of both Houses that determine how the Parliament will deal with particular pieces of legislation and private members' business, and the Privileges Committees that deal with matters of parliamentary privilege.
Legislative scrutiny committees, which examine legislation and regulations to determine their impact on individual rights and accountability.
Joint committees are also established to include both members of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Joint committees may be standing (ongoing) or select (temporary) in nature."
Parliament of Australia,"Relationship with the Government
Under the Constitution, the governor-general has the power to appoint and dismiss ministers who administer government departments. In practice, the governor-general chooses ministers in accordance with the traditions of the Westminster system. The governor-general appoints as prime minister the leader of the party that has a majority of seats in the House of Representatives; the governor-general then, on the advice of the prime minister, appoints the other ministers, chosen from the majority party or coalition of parties.
These ministers then meet in a council known as Cabinet. Cabinet meetings are strictly private and occur once a week where vital issues are discussed and policy formulated. The Constitution does not recognise the Cabinet as a legal entity; it exists solely by convention. Its decisions do not in and of themselves have legal force. However, it serves as the practical expression of the Federal Executive Council, which is Australia's highest formal governmental body. In practice, the Federal Executive Council meets solely to endorse and give legal force to decisions already made by the Cabinet. All members of the Cabinet are members of the executive council. The governor-general is bound by convention to follow the advice of the executive council on almost all occasions, giving it de facto executive power. A senior member of the Cabinet holds the office of vice-president of the executive council and acts as presiding officer of the executive council in the absence of the governor-general. The Federal Executive Council is the Australian equivalent of the executive councils and privy councils in other Commonwealth realms such as the King's Privy Council for Canada and the Privy Council of the United Kingdom.
A minister is not required to be a senator or member of the House of Representatives at the time of their appointment, but their office is forfeited if they do not become a member of either house within three months of their appointment. This provision was included in the Constitution (section 64) to enable the inaugural ministry, led by Edmund Barton, to be appointed on 1 January 1901, even though the first federal elections were not scheduled to be held until 29 and 30 March.
After the 1949 election, John Spicer and Bill Spooner became ministers in the Menzies Government on 19 December, despite their terms in the Senate not beginning until 22 February 1950.
The provision was also used after the disappearance and presumed death of the Liberal prime minister Harold Holt in December 1967. The Liberal Party elected John Gorton, then a senator, as its new leader, and he was sworn in as prime minister on 10 January 1968 (following an interim ministry led by John McEwen). On 1 February, Gorton resigned from the Senate to stand for the 24 February by-election in Holt's former House of Representatives electorate of Higgins due to the convention that the prime minister be a member of the lower house. For 22 days (2 to 23 February inclusive) he was prime minister while a member of neither house of parliament.
On a number of occasions when ministers have retired from their seats prior to an election, or stood but lost their own seats in the election, they have retained their ministerial offices until the next government is sworn in."
Parliament of Australia,"Role of the Senate
Unlike upper Houses in other Westminster system governments, the Senate is not a vestigial body with limited legislative power. Rather it was intended to play – and does play – an active role in legislation. Rather than being modelled solely after the House of Lords, as the Canadian Senate was, the Australian Senate was in part modelled after the United States Senate, by giving equal representation to each state. The Constitution intended to give less populous states added voice in a federal legislature, while also providing for the revising role of an upper house in the Westminster system.
One of the functions of the Senate, both directly and through its committees, is to scrutinise government activity. The vigour of this scrutiny has been fuelled for many years by the fact that the party in government has seldom had a majority in the Senate. Whereas in the House of Representatives the government's majority has sometimes limited that chamber's capacity to implement executive scrutiny, the opposition and minor parties have been able to use their Senate numbers as a basis for conducting inquiries into government operations.
The Constitution prevents the Senate from originating or amending the annual appropriation bills ""for the ordinary annual services of the Government""; they may only defer or reject them. As a result, whilst the framers of the Constitution intended that the executive government would require the support of the House of Representatives, the text of the Constitution also effectively allows the Senate to bring down the government once a year by blocking the annual appropriations bills, also known as blocking supply. 
The ability to block supply was the origin of the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis. The Opposition used its numbers in the Senate to defer supply bills, refusing to deal with them until an election was called for both Houses of Parliament, an election which it hoped to win. The prime minister, Gough Whitlam, contested the legitimacy of the blocking and refused to resign. The prime minister argued that a government may continue in office for as long as it has the support of the lower house, while the opposition argued that any government who has been denied supply is obliged to either call new elections or resign. In response to the deadlock, the governor-general Sir John Kerr dismissed Whitlam's government and appointed Malcolm Fraser as caretaker prime minister on the understanding that he could secure supply and would immediately call new elections. This action in itself was a source of controversy and debate continues on the proper usage of the Senate's ability to block supply and on whether such a power should even exist.
The blocking of supply alone cannot force a double dissolution. There must be legislation repeatedly blocked by the Senate which the government can then choose to use as a trigger for a double dissolution."
Parliament of Australia,"Parliamentary departments
There are four parliamentary departments supporting the Australian Parliament:"
Parliament of Australia,"Department of the Senate, which consists of seven Offices and whose work is determined by the Senate and its committees.
Department of the House of Representatives, which provides various services to support the smooth operation of the House of Representatives, its committees and certain joint committees.
Department of Parliamentary Services (DPS), which performs diverse support functions, such as research; the Parliamentary Library of Australia; broadcasting on radio and TV; Hansard transcripts; computing services; and general maintenance and security.
Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO), which ""improves transparency around fiscal and budget policy issues"" and provides costing services to parliamentarians."
Parliament of Australia,"Privileges
Members of the Australian Parliament do not have legal immunity: they can be arrested and tried for any offence. They do, however, have parliamentary privilege: they cannot be sued for anything they say in Parliament about each other or about persons outside the Parliament. This privilege extends to reporting in the media of anything a senator or member says in Parliament. The proceedings of parliamentary committees, wherever they meet, are also covered by privilege, and this extends to witnesses before such committees.
From the beginning of Federation until 1987, parliamentary privilege operated under section 49 of the Constitution, which established the privileges of both houses and their members to be the same as the House of Commons of the United Kingdom at the time of the Constitution's enactment. The Parliament was also given the power to amend its privileges. In 1987, the Parliament passed the Parliamentary Privileges Act, which clarified the meaning and extent of privilege as well as how the Parliament deals with breaches.
There is a legal offence called contempt of Parliament. A person who speaks or acts in a manner contemptuous of the Parliament or its members can be tried and, if convicted, imprisoned. The Parliament previously had the power to hear such cases itself, and did so in the Browne–Fitzpatrick privilege case, 1955. This power has now been delegated to the courts. There have been few convictions. In May 2007, Harriet Swift, an anti-logging activist from New South Wales was convicted and reprimanded for contempt of Parliament, after she wrote fictitious press releases and letters purporting to be from Federal MP Gary Nairn as an April Fools' Day prank."
Parliament of Australia,"Broadcasting
Radio broadcasts of parliamentary proceedings began on 10 July 1946. They were originally broadcast on Radio National. Since August 1994 they have been broadcast on ABC News, a government-owned channel set up specifically for this function. It operates 24 hours a day and broadcasts other news items when parliament is not sitting.
The first televised parliamentary event was the historic 1974 Joint Sitting. Regular free-to-air television broadcasts of question time began in August 1990 from the Senate and February 1991 from the House of Representatives. Question time from the House of Representatives is televised live, and the Senate question time is recorded and broadcast later that day. Other free-to-air televised broadcasts include: the Treasurer's Budget speech and the Leader of the Opposition's reply to the Budget two days later; the opening of Parliament by the governor-general; the swearing-in of governors-general; and addresses to the Parliament by visiting heads of state.
In 2009, the pay TV company Foxtel launched A-SPAN, now called Sky News Extra, which broadcasts live sittings of the House of Representatives and the Senate, parliamentary committee meetings and political press conferences.
The Parliament House official website provides free extensive daily proceedings of both chambers as well as committee hearings live on the Internet."
Parliament of Australia,"Current parliament
The current Parliament is the 47th Australian Parliament. The most recent federal election was held on 21 May 2022 and the 47th Parliament first sat on 26 July.
The outcome of the 2022 election saw the Labor Party return to government for the first time in nine years, winning 77 seats in the 151-seat House of Representatives (an increase of 9 seats compared to the 2019 election), a majority government. The Liberal/National Coalition, which had been in power since the 2013 election, lost 19 seats compared to the previous election to finish with 58 seats, and went into opposition. The crossbench grew to its largest ever size, with 16 members; 4 Greens, 1 Centre Alliance MP, 1 Katter's Australian Party MP, and 12 independents.
In the Senate, the Labor government retained 26 seats, the Liberal/National Coalition dropped to 32 seats, the Greens increased to 12 seats, the Jacqui Lambie Network had 2 seats, One Nation had 2 seats, the United Australia Party won 1 seat, and independent David Pocock won 1 seat in the Australian Capital Territory.
On 17 February 2023, Alan Tudge announced that he would retire from Parliament and resign as the member for the Division of Aston.  This triggered a by-election held on 1 April 2023, contested by Liberal Roshena Campbell and Labor's Mary Doyle. Doyle was declared elected, marking the first time in 103 years that a government won a by-election in a seat held by the opposition. This increased the balance of the government's power by one in the lower house from 77 to 78."
Parliament of Australia,"Historical compositions
Senate
The Senate has included representatives from a range of political parties, including several parties that have seldom or never had representation in the House of Representatives, but which have consistently secured a small but significant level of electoral support, as the table shows.
Results represent the composition of the Senate after the elections. The full Senate has been contested on eight occasions; the inaugural election and seven double dissolutions. These are underlined and highlighted in puce."
Parliament of Australia,"House of Representatives
A two-party system has existed in the Australian House of Representatives since the two non-Labor parties merged in 1909. The 1910 election was the first to elect a majority government, with the Australian Labor Party concurrently winning the first Senate majority. Prior to 1909 a three-party system existed in the chamber. A two-party-preferred vote (2PP) has been calculated since the 1919 change from first-past-the-post to preferential voting and subsequent introduction of the Coalition. ALP = Australian Labor Party, L+NP = grouping of Liberal/National/LNP/CLP Coalition parties (and predecessors), Oth = other parties and independents."
Parliament of Australia,"See also
2022 Australian federal election
Chronology of Australian federal parliaments
List of legislatures by country
List of official openings by Elizabeth II in Australia
Members of the Australian House of Representatives, 2022-2025
Members of the Australian Senate, 2022-2025
List of longest-serving members of the Parliament of Australia"
Parliament of Australia,"Notes
References
Further reading
External links"
Parliament of Australia,"Australian House of Representatives YouTube official channel 
The Parliament of Australia's website
The Australian Constitution from the Federal Register of Legislation
Australian Parliament – live broadcasting
Parliament of Australia Committees"
Australian House of Representatives,"The Australian House of Representatives is the lower house of the bicameral Parliament of Australia, the upper house being the Senate. Its composition and powers are set down in Chapter I of the Constitution of Australia.
The term of members of the House of Representatives is a maximum of three years from the date of the first sitting of the House, but on only one occasion since Federation has the maximum term been reached. The House is almost always dissolved earlier, usually alone but sometimes in a double dissolution alongside the Senate. Elections for members of the House of Representatives are often held in conjunction with those for the Senate. A member of the House may be referred to as a ""member of parliament"" (""MP"" or ""member""), while a member of the Senate is usually referred to as a ""senator"". Under the conventions of the Westminster system, the government of the day and the prime minister must achieve and maintain the confidence of this House in order to gain and remain in power.
The House of Representatives currently consists of 151 members, elected by and representing single member districts known as electoral divisions (commonly referred to as ""electorates"" or ""seats""). The number of members is not fixed but can vary with boundary changes resulting from electoral redistributions, which are required on a regular basis. The most recent overall increase in the size of the House, which came into effect at the 1984 election, increased the number of members from 125 to 148. It reduced to 147 at the 1993 election, returned to 148 at the 1996 election, increased to 150 at the 2001 election, and stands at 151 as of the 2022 Australian federal election.
The House of Representatives chamber is designed to seat up to 172 members, with provision for an ultimate total of 240 to be accommodated. 
Each division elects one member using full-preferential instant-runoff voting. This was put in place after the 1918 Swan by-election, which Labor unexpectedly won with the largest primary vote and the help of vote splitting in the conservative parties. The Nationalist government of the time changed the lower house voting system from first-past-the-post to full-preferential voting, effective from the 1919 general election."
Australian House of Representatives,"Origins and role
The Constitution of Australia of 1900 established the House of Representatives in a newly federated Australia. The House is presided over by the speaker. Members of the House are elected from single member electorates (geographic districts, commonly referred to as ""seats"" but officially known as ""Divisions of the Australian House of Representatives""). One vote, one value legislation requires all electorates to have approximately the same number of voters with a maximum 10% variation. However, the baseline quota for the number of voters in an electorate is determined by the number of voters in the state in which that electorate is found. Consequently, the electorates of the smallest states and territories have more variation in the number of voters in their electorates. Meanwhile, all the states except Tasmania have electorates approximately within the same 10% tolerance, with most electorates holding 85,000 to 105,000 voters. Federal electorates have their boundaries redrawn or redistributed whenever a state or territory has its number of seats adjusted, if electorates are not generally matched by population size or if seven years have passed since the most recent redistribution. Full preferential voting is used in elections, a type of instant-runoff voting. A full allocation of preferences is required for a vote to be considered formal. This allows for a calculation of the two-party-preferred vote.
Under section 24 of the Constitution, each state is entitled to members based on a population quota determined from the ""latest statistics of the Commonwealth"". These statistics arise from the census conducted under the auspices of section 51(xi). Until its repeal by the 1967 referendum, section 127 prohibited the inclusion of Aboriginal people in section 24 determinations as including the Indigenous peoples could alter the distribution of seats between the states to the benefit of states with larger Aboriginal populations. Section 127, along with section 25 (to discourage, but still allow, racial prohibitions on voting by reducing a state's representation if they did so) and the race power, have been described as racism built into Australia's constitutional DNA, and modifications to prevent lawful race-based discrimination have been proposed.
The parliamentary entitlement of a state or territory is established by the electoral commissioner dividing the number of the people of the Commonwealth by twice the number of senators. This is known as the ""nexus provision"". The reasons for this are twofold, to maintain a constant influence for the smaller states and to maintain a constant balance of the two Houses in case of a joint sitting after a double dissolution. The population of each state and territory is then divided by this quota to determine the number of members to which each state and territory is entitled. Under the Australian Constitution all original states are guaranteed at least five members. The federal Parliament itself has decided that the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory should have at least one member each.
According to the Constitution, the powers of both Houses are nearly equal, with the consent of both Houses needed to pass legislation. The difference mostly relates to taxation legislation. In practice, by convention, the person who can control a majority of votes in the lower house is invited by the governor-general to form the government. In practice that means that the leader of the party (or coalition of parties) with a majority of members in the House becomes the prime minister, who then can nominate other elected members of the government party in both the House and the Senate to become ministers responsible for various portfolios and administer government departments. Bills appropriating money (supply bills) can only be introduced or amended in the lower house and thus only the party with a majority in the lower house can govern. In the current Australian party system, this ensures that virtually all contentious votes are along party lines, and the government party usually has a majority in those votes in the lower house.
The opposition party's main role in the House is to present arguments against the government's policies and legislation where appropriate and attempt to hold the government accountable as much as possible by asking questions of importance during question time and during debates on legislation. By contrast, the only period in recent times during which the government of the day has had a majority in the Senate was from July 2005 (when the senators elected at the 2004 election took their seats) to July 2008 (when the senators elected at the 2007 election took their seats). Hence, votes in the Senate are usually more meaningful. The House's well-established committee system is not always as prominent as the Senate committee system because of the frequent lack of Senate majority."
Australian House of Representatives,"In a reflection of the United Kingdom House of Commons, the predominant colour of the furnishings in the House of Representatives is green. However, the colour was tinted slightly in the new Parliament House (opened 1988) to suggest the colour of eucalyptus trees. Also, unlike the House of Commons, the seating arrangement of the crossbench is curved, similar to the curved seating arrangement of the United States House of Representatives. This suggests a more collaborative, and less oppositional, system than in the United Kingdom parliament (where all members of parliament are seated facing the opposite side).
Australian parliaments are notoriously rowdy, with MPs often trading colourful insults. As a result, the speaker often has to use the disciplinary powers granted to him or her under standing orders.
Since 2015, Australian Federal Police officers armed with assault rifles have been present in both chambers of the federal Parliament."
Australian House of Representatives,"Electoral system
From the beginning of Federation until 1918, first-past-the-post voting was used in order to elect members of the House of Representatives but since the 1918 Swan by-election which Labor unexpectedly won with the largest primary vote due to vote splitting amongst the conservative parties, the Nationalist Party government, a predecessor of the modern-day Liberal Party of Australia, changed the lower house voting system to instant-runoff voting, which in Australia is known as full preferential voting, as of the subsequent 1919 election. This system has remained in place ever since, allowing the Coalition parties to safely contest the same seats. Full-preference preferential voting re-elected the Hawke government at the 1990 election, the first time in federal history that Labor had obtained a net benefit from preferential voting.
From 1949 onwards, the vast majority of electorates, nearly 90%, are won by the candidate leading on first preferences, giving the same result as if the same votes had been counted using first-past-the-post voting. The highest proportion of seats (up to 2010) won by the candidate not leading on first preferences was the 1972 federal election, with 14 of 125 seats not won by the plurality candidate."
Australian House of Representatives,"Allocation process for the House of Representatives
The main elements of the operation of preferential voting for single-member House of Representatives divisions are as follows:"
Australian House of Representatives,"Voters are required to place the number ""1"" against their first choice of candidate, known as the ""first preference"" or ""primary vote"".
Voters are then required to place the numbers ""2"", ""3"", etc., against all of the other candidates listed on the ballot paper, in order of preference. Every candidate must be numbered, otherwise the vote becomes ""informal"" (spoiled) and does not count.)
Prior to counting, each ballot paper is examined to ensure that it is validly filled in (and not invalidated on other grounds).
The number ""1"" or first preference votes are counted first. If no candidate secures an absolute majority (more than half) of first preference votes, then the candidate with the fewest votes is excluded from the count.
The votes for the eliminated candidate (i.e. from the ballots that placed the eliminated candidate first) are re-allocated to the remaining candidates according to the number ""2"" or ""second preference"" votes.
If no candidate has yet secured an absolute majority of the vote, then the next candidate with the fewest primary votes is eliminated. This preference allocation is repeated until there is a candidate with an absolute majority. Where a second (or subsequent) preference is expressed for a candidate who has already been eliminated, the voter's third or subsequent preferences are used.
Following the full allocation of preferences, it is possible to derive a two-party-preferred figure, where the votes have been allocated between the two main candidates in the election. In Australia, this is usually between the candidates from the Coalition parties and the Australian Labor Party."
Australian House of Representatives,"Relationship with the government
Under the Constitution, the governor-general has the power to appoint and dismiss the ""Queen's Ministers of State"" who administer government departments. In practice, the governor-general chooses ministers in accordance with the traditions of the Westminster system that the government be drawn from the party or coalition of parties that has a majority in the House of Representatives, with the leader of the largest party becoming prime minister.
A sub-set of the most important ministers then meet in a council known as Cabinet. Cabinet meetings are strictly private and are frequently held to discuss vital issues and make policy decisions. The Constitution does not recognise the Cabinet as a legal entity; it exists solely by convention. Its decisions do not in and of themselves have legal force. However, it serves as the practical expression of the Federal Executive Council, which is Australia's highest formal executive body. In practice, the Federal Executive Council meets solely to endorse and give legal force to decisions already made by the Cabinet. All members of the Cabinet are members of the Executive Council. While the governor-general is the nominal presiding officer, he almost never attends Executive Council meetings. A senior Cabinet member holds the office of Vice-President of the Executive Council and acts as presiding officer of the Executive Council in the absence of the governor-general. The Federal Executive Council is the Australian equivalent of the executive councils and privy councils in other Commonwealth realms such as the King's Privy Council for Canada and the Privy Council of the United Kingdom.
A minister must be a senator or member of the House of Representatives at the time of their appointment, or become one within three months of their appointment. This provision was included in the Constitution (section 64) to enable the inaugural ministry, led by Edmund Barton, to be appointed on 1 January 1901, even though the first federal elections were not scheduled to be held until 29 and 30 March.
After the 1949 election, Bill Spooner was appointed a minister in the Fourth Menzies ministry on 19 December, however his term as a Senator did not begin until 22 February 1950.
The provision was also used after the disappearance and presumed death of the Liberal prime minister Harold Holt in December 1967. The Liberal Party elected John Gorton, then a senator, as its new leader, and he was sworn in as prime minister on 10 January 1968 (following an interim ministry led by John McEwen). On 1 February, Gorton resigned from the Senate to stand for the 24 February by-election in Holt's former House of Representatives electorate of Higgins due to the convention that the prime minister be a member of the lower house. For 22 days (2 to 23 February inclusive) he was prime minister while a member of neither house of parliament.
On a number of occasions when ministers have retired from their seats prior to an election, or stood but lost their own seats in the election, they have retained their ministerial offices until the next government is sworn in."
Australian House of Representatives,"Committees
In addition to the work of the main chamber, the House of Representatives also has a large number of committees which deal with matters referred to them by the main House. They provide the opportunity for all MPs to ask questions of ministers and public officials as well as conduct inquiries, examine policy and legislation. Once a particular inquiry is completed the members of the committee can then produce a report, to be tabled in Parliament, outlining what they have discovered as well as any recommendations that they have produced for the government to consider.
The ability of the chambers of Parliament to establish committees is given in section 49 of the Constitution, which states that, ""The powers, privileges, and immunities of the Senate and of the House of Representatives, and of the members and the committees of each House, shall be such as are declared by the Parliament, and until declared shall be those of the Commons House of Parliament of the United Kingdom, and of its members and committees, at the establishment of the Commonwealth.""
Parliamentary committees can be given a wide range of powers. One of the most significant powers is the ability to summon people to attend hearings in order to give evidence and submit documents. Anyone who attempts to hinder the work of a Parliamentary committee may be found to be in contempt of parliament. There are a number of ways that witnesses can be found in contempt. These include refusing to appear before a committee when summoned, refusing to answer a question during a hearing or to produce a document, or later being found to have lied to or misled a committee. Anyone who attempts to influence a witness may also be found in contempt. Other powers include, the ability to meet throughout Australia, to establish subcommittees and to take evidence in both public and private hearings.
Proceedings of committees are considered to have the same legal standing as proceedings of Parliament, they are recorded by Hansard, except for private hearings, and also operate under parliamentary privilege. Every participant, including committee members and witnesses giving evidence, are protected from being prosecuted under any civil or criminal action for anything they may say during a hearing. Written evidence and documents received by a committee are also protected.
Types of committees include:
Standing committees, which are established on a permanent basis and are responsible for scrutinising bills and topics referred to them by the chamber; examining the government's budget and activities and for examining departmental annual reports and activities.
Select committees, which are temporary committees, established in order to deal with particular issues.
Domestic committees, which are responsible for administering aspects of the House's own affairs. These include the Selection Committee that determines how the House will deal with particular pieces of legislation and private members business and the Privileges Committee that deals with matters of parliamentary privilege.
Legislative scrutiny committees, which examine legislation and regulations to determine their impact on individual rights and accountability.
Joint committees are also established to include both members of the House of Representatives and the Senate."
Australian House of Representatives,"Federation Chamber
The Federation Chamber is a second debating chamber that considers relatively uncontroversial matters referred by the House. The Federation Chamber cannot, however, initiate or make a final decision on any parliamentary business, although it can perform all tasks in between."
Australian House of Representatives,"The Federation Chamber was created in 1994 as the Main Committee, to relieve some of the burden of the House: different matters can be processed in the House at large and in the Federation Chamber, as they sit simultaneously. It is designed to be less formal, with a quorum of only three members: the deputy speaker of the House, one government member, and one non-government member. Decisions must be unanimous: any divided decision sends the question back to the House at large."
Australian House of Representatives,"The Federation Chamber was created through the House's standing orders: it is thus a subordinate body of the House, and can only be in session while the House itself is in session. When a division vote in the House occurs, members in the Federation Chamber must return to the House to vote.
The Federation Chamber is housed in one of the House's committee rooms; the room is customised for this purpose and is laid out to resemble the House chamber.
Due to the unique role of what was then called the Main Committee, proposals were made to rename the body to avoid confusion with other parliamentary committees, including ""Second Chamber"" and ""Federation Chamber"". The House of Representatives later adopted the latter proposal.
The concept of a parallel body to expedite Parliamentary business, based on the Australian Federation Chamber, was mentioned in a 1998 British House of Commons report, which led to the creation of that body's parallel chamber Westminster Hall."
Australian House of Representatives,"Current House of Representatives
The current Parliament is the 47th Australian Parliament. The most recent federal election was held on 21 May 2022, with the 47th Parliament first sitting in July 2022.
The 2022 election saw the incumbent Liberal/National Coalition government defeated, with the opposition Albanese-led Labor Party gaining 77 seats in the 151 seat House of Representatives, for a two-seat majority government, while the Coalition lost 18 seats to finish with 58 seats, their worst result since 1946 (the first election after the formation of the current Liberal Party). 
On the crossbench, the Australian Greens gained three seats, upping their total from one to four, while the Centre Alliance and Katter's Australian Party held their current standing of one seat each, and independents gained seven seats to bring their total to ten, six of these being teal independents.
On 23 December 2022, Andrew Gee MP quit the National Party to become an independent, citing his disappointment over the party's opposition to the proposed Indigenous Voice to Parliament.
On 1 April 2023, Labor's Mary Doyle was elected in a by-election for the division of Aston, replacing former Liberal cabinet minister Alan Tudge and increasing the Labor majority to three seats."
Australian House of Representatives,"House of Representatives primary, two-party and seat results
Prior to the 1909 merger of the two non-Labor parties, a three-party system existed in the chamber, with a two-party system in place since. 
The 1910 election was the first to elect a majority government, with the Australian Labor Party also winning the first Senate majority. 
A two-party-preferred vote (2PP) has been calculated since the 1919 change from first-past-the-post to preferential voting, and subsequent introduction of the Coalition. ALP = Australian Labor Party, L+NP = grouping of Liberal/National/LNP/CLP Coalition parties (and predecessors), Oth = other parties and independents."
Australian House of Representatives,"See also
2022 Australian federal election
Australian House of Representatives committees
Canberra Press Gallery
Chronology of Australian federal parliaments
Clerk of the Australian House of Representatives
Father of the Australian House of Representatives
List of Australian federal by-elections
Members of the Australian House of Representatives
Members of the Australian Parliament who have served for at least 30 years
Members of the Australian Parliament who have represented more than one state or territory
Speaker of the Australian House of Representatives
Women in the Australian House of Representatives
Browne–Fitzpatrick privilege case, 1955"
Australian House of Representatives,"Notes
References
Further reading
External links"
Australian House of Representatives,"House of Representatives – Official website.
Australian Parliament – live broadcasting"
Coalition (Australia),"The Liberal–National Coalition, commonly known simply as the Coalition or the LNP, is an alliance of centre-right to right-wing political parties that forms one of the two major groupings in Australian federal politics. The two partners in the Coalition are the Liberal Party of Australia and the National Party of Australia (the latter previously known as the Country Party and the National Country Party). Its main opponent is the Australian Labor Party (ALP); the two forces are often regarded as operating in a two-party system. The Coalition was last in government from 2013 to 2022. The group is led by Peter Dutton, who succeeded Scott Morrison after the 2022 federal election.
The two parties in the Coalition have different geographical voter bases, with the Liberals – the larger party – drawing most of their vote from urban areas and the Nationals operating almost exclusively in rural and regional areas. They occupy a broadly similar place on the right of the political spectrum. The partnership between the two current parties dates back to 1946, shortly after the Liberal Party was formed, and has continued almost uninterrupted since then. The Country Party also maintained similar alliances with the Liberal Party's predecessors, the United Australia Party and Nationalist Party, and similar parties at state level. The first such federal arrangement was formed in 1923, as a solution to the hung parliament that resulted from the 1922 federal election.
The Liberals and Nationals maintain separate organisational wings and separate parliamentary parties, but co-operate in various ways determined by a mixture of formal agreements and informal conventions. There is a single Coalition frontbench, both in government and in opposition, with each party receiving a proportionate number of positions. By convention, the leader of the Liberal Party serves as the overall leader, serving as prime minister when the Coalition is in government and leader of the opposition when the Coalition is in opposition. The leader of the National Party becomes the deputy prime minister during periods of Coalition government. The two parties co-operate on their federal election campaigns, run joint Senate tickets in most states, and generally avoid running candidates against each other in the House of Representatives.
A merger of the Liberals and Nationals has been suggested on a number of occasions, but has never become a serious proposition. The relationship between the two parties varies at state and territory level. The situation in New South Wales and Victoria broadly mirrors that at federal level, while in Western Australia the parties are much more independent of each other. In the Northern Territory the territorial parties merged in 1974 to form the Country Liberal Party (CLP), and in 2008 the Queensland state-level parties merged, forming the Liberal National Party of Queensland (LNP). LNP and CLP members elected to federal parliament do not form separate parliamentary parties, joining either the Liberals or Nationals. In South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT, the Nationals have no sitting MPs and little or no organisational presence."
Coalition (Australia),"History
The origins of the Coalition date back to the 1922 federal election, when the Nationalist Party, the main middle-class non-Labor party of the time, lost the absolute majority it had held since its formation in 1917. The Nationalists could only stay in office with the support of the two-year-old Country Party. It soon became apparent that a confidence and supply agreement would not be enough to keep the Nationalists in office.
However, Country Party leader Earle Page had never trusted the Nationalist Prime Minister, Billy Hughes. Indeed, the Country Party had been formed in part due to discontent with Hughes' rural policy. Page not only let it be known that he would not serve under Hughes, but demanded Hughes' resignation before he would even consider coalition talks. Hughes resigned, and Page then entered negotiations with the new Nationalist leader, Stanley Bruce. The Country Party's terms were unusually stiff for a prospective junior partner in a Westminster system (and especially so for a relatively new party) – five seats in an 11-member cabinet, as well as the Treasurer's post and second rank in the ministry for Page. Nonetheless, Bruce agreed rather than force a new election. Since then, the leader of the Country Party, which evolved into the National Party, has ranked second in nearly all non-Labor governments, a status formalised in 1967 when the post of Deputy Prime Minister was formally created to denote Country leader John McEwen's status as the number-two man in the government.
The Nationalist–Country Coalition was reelected twice, and continued in office until its defeat in 1929.
The Country Party and the Nationalists' successor party, the United Australia Party, fought the 1931 federal election with a joint Senate ticket, though they ran separate House tickets. The UAP came up only four seats short of a majority in its own right. The Emergency Committee of South Australia, which stood for the UAP and Country Party in South Australia, joined the UAP party room, giving the UAP enough support to rule alone. However, the parties once again joined in a full Coalition government following the 1934 federal election.
After the death of Prime Minister Joseph Lyons in April 1939, Page was appointed as his successor on an interim basis, pending the new election of a new UAP leader. Despite Page's misgivings, the UAP elected Robert Menzies – who was known to dislike the Country Party. Page subsequently made a vitriolic speech in parliament attacking Menzies's character, and withdrew his party from the coalition – the most recent occasion on which the coalition has been broken while in government. However, a number of Page's colleagues disagreed with his stance, and he resigned as leader in September 1939. He was replaced by Archie Cameron, and after months of negotiations the coalition was revived in March 1940, with five Country MPs joining the second Menzies ministry.
After losing eight seats at the 1940 federal election, the Coalition was plunged into minority government for the first time in its history. Archie Cameron was an immediate victim of the election result, being replaced by Arthur Fadden and later defecting to the UAP. Menzies increasingly struggled to balance his management of Australia's war effort with domestic concerns, and his party began to rebel against him. However, the UAP was bereft of leadership despite having been in power for a decade. With this in mind, in August 1941 the Coalition collectively decided that Fadden and Menzies should swap positions, with Menzies becoming Minister for Defence Co-ordination and Fadden becoming prime minister. It was the first and only occasion on which the Coalition was led by the leader of the junior party. However, the Fadden government only lasted a few months before losing a confidence motion and being replaced by the Labor Party in the form of the Curtin government.
After the demise of the Fadden government, the Coalition voted to continue on under his leadership in opposition. Menzies had opposed this, and resigned as UAP leader, to be replaced by the ageing Billy Hughes. Up until the 1943 election, the Coalition effectively operated as a single unit, with separate party meetings being extremely rare. However, the landslide defeat it suffered – under Fadden as opposition leader – led to an immediate change in strategy. The UAP voted to break off its ties with the Country Party in opposition, and re-elected Menzies as its leader. This is the most recent occasion on which the senior partner in the Coalition has opted to withdraw.
The UAP was folded into the Liberal Party in 1945, with Menzies as leader. In the lead-up to the 1946 federal election, Menzies renewed the Coalition with the Country Party, which was still led by Fadden. They won the 1949 federal election as a Coalition, and stayed in office for a record 23 years. Since 1946, the Coalition has remained intact with two exceptions, both in opposition. The parties decided not to form a coalition opposition following their defeat in 1972, but went into the 1974 federal election as a Coalition. The Coalition remained together upon entering opposition in 1983 federal election. The Coalition suffered another break, related to the ""Joh for Canberra"" campaign, from April to August 1987, the rift healing after the 1987 federal election.
The solidity of the Coalition is so strong that when the Liberals won parliamentary majorities in their own right in the 1975, 1977 and 1996 federal elections, the Coalition was retained.
In the 2007 federal election, the Coalition lost to the Labor Party and went into opposition. The Coalition regained office in the 2013 federal election as a majority government. In October 2018, the Coalition went into minority government for the second time in its history, when the seat of Wentworth was won by Independent Kerryn Phelps in the by-election. The by-election was triggered by the resignation of incumbent Liberal MP Malcolm Turnbull, who was ousted as Prime Minister and Liberal Party leader during a spill motion earlier in August 2018. The coalition formed majority government again following the 2019 federal election. In the 2022 Australian federal election, the Coalition lost to the Labor Party and returned to opposition."
Coalition (Australia),"Suggestions to merge
In March 1973, former Prime Minister William McMahon publicly announced his support for a merger. McMahon reiterated his view after Labor won the 1974 election, and Billy Snedden, his successor as leader of the Liberal Party, also stated that he favoured a merger.
During the 1980s, former Nationals MP Peter Nixon reviewed the party and ""concluded it should seriously consider amalgamating with the Liberals"". Former Nationals leader Doug Anthony wrote not long afterward, ""Any objective and rational National Party member who read this report would have to accept that amalgamation was the only realistic course. Regrettably, there are still too many who don't want to read it and who don't want to face reality, that the role of a specialist party looking after the needs of rural people is in decline."" Nationals leader Ian Sinclair publicly rejected calls for a merger, citing the incompatibility of the National Party's conservatism and the ""small-l liberal"" wing of the Liberal Party.
In July 1989, Senator Fred Chaney, the deputy leader of the Liberal Party, stated his tentative support for a merger, but noted that it could not be led by politicians and should come from the grassroots.
In the wake of their 2007 federal election loss, there was again talk of a merger in 2007 and 2008, as a result of a shrinking National Party vote. It was argued that the decline in the National vote is linked to a declining rural population, and National Party policies have become increasingly similar to those of the Liberal Party. However no merger took place outside of Queensland."
Coalition (Australia),"Electoral organisation
Coalition arrangements are facilitated by Australia's preferential voting systems which enable Liberals and Nationals to compete locally in ""three-cornered-contests"", with the Australian Labor Party (ALP), while exchanging preferences in elections. Such contests would weaken their prospects under first-past-the-post voting. From time to time, friction is caused by the fact that the Liberal and National candidates are campaigning against each other, without long-term damage to the relationship.
Indeed, the whole point of introducing preferential voting was to allow safe spoiler-free, three-cornered contests. It was a government of the Nationalist Party, a forerunner to the modern Liberal Party which introduced the legislation, following Labor's unexpected win at the 1918 Swan by-election where the conservative vote split. Two months later, the Corangamite by-election held under preferential voting caused the initially leading ALP candidate to lose after some lower-placed candidates' preferences had been distributed.
As a result of variations on the preferential voting system used in every state and territory, the Coalition has been able to thrive, wherever both its member parties have both been active. The preferential voting system has allowed the Liberal and National parties to compete and co-operate at the same time. By contrast, a variation of the preferential system known as optional preferential voting has proven a significant handicap to coalition co-operation in Queensland and New South Wales, because significant numbers of voters do not express all useful preferences."
Coalition (Australia),"Nomenclature
Due to a disciplined coalition between the parties and their predecessors being in existence for almost 100 years with only a few brief cessations within a parliamentary system, most commentators and the general public often refer to the Coalition as if it were a single party. Polling and electoral results contain a two-party-preferred (TPP) vote which is based on Labor and the Coalition. The Australian Electoral Commission has distinguished between ""traditional"" (Coalition/Labor) two-party-preferred (TPP/2PP) contests, and ""non-traditional"" (Independent, Greens, Liberal vs National) two-candidate-preferred (TCP/2CP) contests. At the 2010 federal election, all eight seats which resulted in a two-candidate-preferred result were re-counted to also express a statistical-only ""traditional"" two-party-preferred result."
Coalition (Australia),"Electorate
As of 2022, the biggest voting blocs of the Coalition are men, the Greatest Generation (people born between 1901–1927), the middle class (as opposed to the working class), who make between A$45,001–A$80,000 per year, and have a non-tertiary qualification or no educational qualification. Homeowners vote more for the Coalition than any other party, and the State of Queensland is its biggest electorate by two-party-preferred vote percentage (though by primary vote, Tasmania is the state with the highest Coalition vote).
The Coalition also gathers significant support from Australians in regional, rural and remote areas, whilst lacking significant support in most parts of the capital cities. However, there are regions of capital cities that do still vote for the Coalition; such as the Hills District and Sutherland and most of the Eastern Suburbs and Northern Suburbs of Sydney; some areas of Melbourne's east and northeast; many areas of Brisbane and Perth; and the southern part of Darwin.
The Coalition has below-average support among Indian and Muslim voters. Historically, Chinese Australians have voted for the Coalition over Labor, due to a perception that Liberal Party was more business-oriented than Labor. However, this has declined in recent years. In the 2022 Australian federal election, electorates with a higher concentration of Chinese-Australian voters experienced larger swings against the Coalition compared to other electorates; in the top 15 seats by Chinese ancestry, the swing against the Coalition on a two-party-preferred basis was 6.6 per cent, compared to 3.7 per cent in other seats. This resulted in the Liberal Party losing many federal seats with large Chinese communities in 2022 to Labor (losing Bennelong and Reid in Sydney and Chisholm in Melbourne to Labor and Kooyong in Melbourne to a teal independent), as well as losing Aston in 2023, which was the first time in over a century in which the government won a seat off the opposition in a by-election. In the 2023 New South Wales state election, the top 10 electorates in terms of Chinese ancestry all saw big swings to Labor. However, the New South Wales division of the Liberal Party managed to hold many state seats with large Chinese communities (such as the Sydney seats of Drummoyne, Epping, Holsworthy, Lane Cove, Miranda, Oatley and Ryde)."
Coalition (Australia),"Chronology
Federal election results
House of Representatives
States and territories
New South Wales
A Coalition between the Liberal (and predecessors) and National parties has existed without interruption in New South Wales since 1927.  Predecessors of the NSW Liberal Party, including the UAP, Nationalist Party and the Democratic Party, maintained a coalition with the Country Party (old name of National Party).
The Liberal Party is led by Mark Speakman and the National Party by Dugald Saunders. The Coalition won the 2011 state election in a massive swing under Barry O'Farrell, the 2015 election with a reduced majority under Mike Baird, and the 2019 election under Gladys Berejiklian. The Coalition led by Dominic Perrottet lost the 2023 state election and is in opposition since.
New South Wales is the only state where the non-Labor Coalition has never broken, and yet has also never merged. This remained the case even in 2011, when the Liberals won a majority in their own right but still retained the Coalition. On 10 September 2020, the Nationals threatened to move to the crossbench over a dispute regarding koala protection laws, but the issue was resolved the next day and the Nationals remained in the Coalition."
Coalition (Australia),"Queensland
Due to Brisbane having a much smaller share of Queensland's population compared to the other state capitals, Queensland is the only state in which the Nationals have consistently been the stronger non-Labor party.  The Nationals were the senior partner in the non-Labor Coalition from 1925 until the Coalition was broken in 1983. At an election held two months later, the Nationals under Joh Bjelke-Petersen came up one seat short of a majority, but later gained a majority when two Liberal MLAs crossed the floor to join the Nationals. The Nationals then governed in their own right until 1989. The Coalition was renewed in 1991, and won power under Rob Borbidge from 1996 to 1998.
The Queensland Liberals and Nationals had contested separately for the Senate in federal elections until the 2007 election, when they ran a join Senate ticket for the first time in 30 years. In 2008, the two parties agreed to merge, forming the Liberal National Party (LNP), under the leadership of former National Lawrence Springborg.  Although it is dominated by former Nationals, it has full voting rights within the Liberal Party and observer status within the National Party. Springborg stood down in 2009, and was succeeded by former Liberal John-Paul Langbroek.  The LNP won an overwhelming majority government in the 2012 state election under the leadership of former Liberal Campbell Newman, who had taken over from Langbroek a year earlier.  However, it lost power in 2015, and Springborg returned to the leadership, only to lose a challenge by former Liberal Tim Nicholls in May 2016. Following another loss in the 2017 election, Nicholls stood down as LNP party leader and was succeeded by Deb Frecklington, who holds the ancestrally National seat of Nanango, Bjelke-Petersen's old seat.
At the federal level, 15 LNP MPs sit with the Liberals, including federal Liberal leader Peter Dutton; six sit with the Nationals, including federal Nationals leader David Littleproud. LNP Senator Matt Canavan sits with the Nationals, while the LNP's four other senators sit with the Liberals. The highest-profile LNP MP in recent years has been former federal Nationals leader and Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss.  The LNP has an informal agreement with its federal counterparts as to which party room in which LNP members will sit. Incumbent MPs retain their previous federal affiliations, whereas members who win seats from the ALP that previously belonged to the Coalition will sit with the previous member's party. An amicable division of seats was decided upon for new seats or seats that have never been won by the Coalition.  In practice, all LNP MPs from Brisbane and most LNP MPs from the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast sit with the Liberals, while those from rural seats usually sit with the Nationals."
Coalition (Australia),"South Australia
The state branch of the Country Party merged with the Liberal Federation, the state branch of the UAP, in 1932 to form the Liberal and Country League. It later became the state division of the Liberal Party when the latter was formed in 1945. A separate Country Party (later Nationals SA) was revived in 1963, though the main non-Labor party in South Australia continued to use the LCL name until it was also renamed to the Liberal Party in 1974. The revived SA Nationals have never been successful in South Australia, due to the state's highly centralised population (some three-quarters of the population lives in Adelaide) and the Liberals' strong support in rural areas that would tilt National in most of the rest of Australia. The party's current incarnation has only elected two representatives: Peter Blacker from 1973 to 1993, and Karlene Maywald from 1997 to 2010.
From 2004 to 2010, Maywald was a Minister in the Rann Labor government, before losing her seat at the 2010 South Australian state election, thereby informally creating a Labor-National coalition in South Australia. The National Party, at the time, rejected the notion that it was in a coalition with Labor at the state level. State National Party President John Venus told journalists, ""We (The Nationals) are not in coalition with the Labor Party, we aren't in coalition with the Liberals, we are definitely not in coalition with anyone. We stand alone in South Australia as an independent party."" Flinders University political scientist Haydon Manning disagreed, saying that it is ""churlish to describe the government as anything but a coalition"". The party did not run candidates at the 2010 federal election, but ran one candidate in the seat of Barker and two for the Senate at the 2013 election. The Nationals candidate for Barker and several other Coalition figures assured electors that any Nationals elected from South Australia would be part of the Coalition, after comments from the Liberal candidate to the contrary."
Coalition (Australia),"Tasmania
The National Party has never done well in Tasmania, even though its first leader, William McWilliams, was a Tasmanian. It has elected only two other lower house members. A Tasmania branch of the then-Country Party was formed in 1922 and briefly held the balance of power, but merged with the Nationalists in 1924.  It was refounded in 1962, but never gained much ground. In 1969, Liberal MHA Kevin Lyons, the son of former Prime Minister Lyons, pulled together most of the Tasmanian Country Party into the Centre Party, which held the balance of power in that year's state election. It threw its support to the Liberals, and Lyons – the Centre Party's lone MHA – became Deputy Premier.  The Liberal–Centre alliance fell apart in 1972, forcing an early election.  In 1975, what remained of the Centre Party became the Tasmanian chapter of what was by now the National Country Party before fading away completely.  A Tasmanian National Party branch was briefly revived in the 1990s before it too disappeared, leaving the Liberal Party as the sole major non-Labor party in the state. In 2018, Senator Steve Martin, formerly of the Jacqui Lambie Network, joined the Nationals, becoming the party's first federal member from Tasmania in either chamber in 90 years. However, Martin lost his bid for a new term."
Coalition (Australia),"Victoria
A Coalition between the Liberal and National parties exists in Victoria. The Liberal Party is led by John Pesutto and the National Party by Peter Walsh.
The Country Party was the stronger coalition partner on multiple occasions from the 1920s through to the 1950s, and Country leaders served as Premier of Victoria on five separate occasions. However, the relationship between the two parties was somewhat strained for most of the second half of the 20th century. In 1948, the coalition was broken when the Liberal leader and Premier Thomas Hollway sacked Country leader John McDonald as Deputy Premier. In March 1949, the Liberals renamed themselves the Liberal and Country Party as part of an effort to merge the two non-Labor parties in Victoria. However, McDonald saw this as an attempted Liberal takeover of the Country Party, and the Country Party turned the proposed merger down. As a result, both parties competed against each other and fought elections separately from 1952 to 1989. The presence of John McEwen, a Victorian, as number-two man in the federal government from 1958 to 1971 (including a brief stint as interim Prime Minister) did little to change this.
The Liberals and Nationals reached a Coalition agreement in 1990. They fought and won the 1992 and 1996 elections as a Coalition under the leadership of Jeff Kennett. Although the Liberals won enough seats to govern alone, Kennett retained the Nationals in his government. When Peter Ryan became leader of the Nationals shortly after the Kennett government's 1999 election defeat, he terminated the Coalition agreement and led the Nationals into the 2002 and 2006 elections separately from the Liberals. However, the Coalition agreement was renewed in 2008 and the Victorian Liberal and National parties went into the 2010 election as a Coalition. The Coalition ended up winning the 2010 election with a one-seat margin under the leadership of Ted Baillieu, who resigned in 2013 and was succeeded by Denis Napthine. The Coalition lost power at the 2014 election. The Coalition arrangement was maintained while the two parties were in opposition.
According to The Age, between November 2018 and November 2021, the Coalition's Legislative Council members voted with the Andrews Government's position 28.9% of the time; of the parties in the Legislative Council, only the Liberal Democratic Party had a lower figure (22.1%)."
Coalition (Australia),"Western Australia
The Country Party was the stronger coalition partner from the 1933 state election to the 1947 state election, although the Coalition did not form government during this period. Western Australia has never had a premier from the Country/National Party.
In May 1949, the Liberal and Country League was formed to attempt to merge Country Party (then called County Democratic League or CDL) and Liberal Party together. This did not eventuate and the CDL did not join the new party.
The National Party was in Coalition with the Liberal Party government from 1993 to 2001 (see Hendy Cowan), but the Coalition was subsequently broken. In 2008, the Liberals under Colin Barnett, the Nationals under Brendon Grylls, and independent John Bowler formed a minority government after the 2008 election. However, it was not characterised as a ""traditional coalition"", with limited cabinet collective responsibility for National cabinet members. Tony Crook was elected as the WA Nationals candidate for the seat of O'Connor at the 2010 federal election. Although some reports initially counted Crook as a National MP, and thus part of the Coalition, Crook sat as a crossbencher.
The Liberals won enough seats for a majority in their own right in the 2013 state election, but Barnett had announced before the election that he would retain the coalition with the Nationals. However, Barnett would have likely had to keep the Nationals in his government in any event. According to the ABC's Antony Green, the rural weighting in the Legislative Council all but forces the WA Liberals to depend on National support even when the Liberals have enough support to govern alone. The Barnett government was heavily defeated at the 2017 state election, and the two parties went their separate ways with Liberal Party being the sole opposition party.
In the 2021 election, the Liberal Party ended up winning fewer seats than the National Party, headed by Mia Davies, with the National Party gaining opposition status and Davies becoming the first Nationals opposition leader since 1947. Following the election, the Liberal Party and Nationals Party entered into a formal alliance to form opposition, with National Party being the senior party and the Liberal Party being the junior party in the alliance. Shadow ministerial positions were also held by parliamentary members of both parties. This was similar to the agreements between both parties when they were in government following the 2008 and 2013 elections. Similar to the 2008 and 2013 agreements, the deputy leader of the senior party, Nationals deputy leader Shane Love, was the deputy opposition leader, instead of the leader of the junior party, Liberal Party leader David Honey. Under the alliance, each party maintained their independence, and could speak out on issues when there was a disagreement with their partner."
Coalition (Australia),"Territories
Australian Capital Territory: The National Party is not affiliated in the Australian Capital Territory, leaving the Liberal Party as the sole major non-Labor party in the territory.
Northern Territory: The two parties' branches in the Northern Territory merged in 1974, forming the Country Liberal Party. The CLP governed the Territory from 1974 to 2001 and from 2012 to 2016. The CLP retains full voting rights within the federal National Party, and has observer status with the federal Liberal Party. The CLP directs its federal members of the House and Senate whether to sit with the federal Liberals or Nationals. In practice, since the mid-1980s, CLP House members have sat with the Liberals while CLP Senators sit with the Nationals. For example, Natasha Griggs sat with the Liberals when she held the Darwin-area seat of Solomon from 2010 to 2016. CLP Senator Nigel Scullion was the leader of the Nationals in the Senate from 2007 to 2008, when he was succeeded by Barnaby Joyce.  He was the federal deputy leader of the Nationals, alongside Truss, from 2007 to 2013. Joyce became federal Nationals deputy leader after his successful transition to the House of Representatives at the 2013 election, and Scullion returned as the Nationals Senate leader."
Coalition (Australia),"See also
Two-party system"
Coalition (Australia),Notes
Coalition (Australia),"
== References =="
National symbols of Australia,"National symbols of Australia are the official symbols used to represent Australia as a nation or the Commonwealth Government. Additionally, each state and territory has its own set of symbols."
National symbols of Australia,"List of symbols
See also
District tartans of Australia
List of Australian flags"
National symbols of Australia,"References
External links
National symbolsaustralia.gov.au Retrieved 18 March 2018.
Australian National Symbolspmc.gov.au Retrieved 18 March 2018.
Australia's National Symbolsdfat.gov.au Retrieved 18 March 2018."
Christianity in Australia,"Christianity is the largest religion in Australia, with a total of 43.9% of the nation-wide population identifying with a Christian denomination in the 2021 census. The first presence of Christianity in Australia began with British colonisation in what came to be known as New South Wales in 1788.
The Christian footprint in Australian society and culture remains broad, particularly in areas of social welfare and education provision and in the marking of festivals such as Easter and Christmas. Though the Australian Constitution of 1901 protects freedom of religion and separation of church and state, the Church of England held legal privileges in the early British colonial period, when Catholicism in particular was suppressed. Sectarianism was a feature of Australian politics well into the 20th century, as was collaboration by church and state in seeking the conversion of the Indigenous population to Christianity. Today, the Catholic Church is second only to government itself as a provider of government-funded social services, through organisations such as Catholic Social Services Australia and the St Vincent De Paul Society. The Anglican Church's Anglicare network is similarly engaged in areas such as emergency relief, aged care, family support service and help for the homeless. Other denominations assist through networks like UnitingCare Australia and the Salvation Army, and around a quarter of students attend church owned schools.
Historically significant Australian Christians have included the Reverend John Dunmore Lang, Saint Mary MacKillop, Catherine Helen Spence, Pastor David Unaipon, the Reverend John Flynn, Pastor Sir Doug Nicholls and General Eva Evelyn Burrows of the Salvation Army. High-profile contemporary Australian Christians include Tim Costello; Baptist minister and current CEO of World Vision Australia; Frank Brennan, Jesuit human rights lawyer; John Dickson, historian and founder of The Centre for Public Christianity; Phillip Aspinall the current Archbishop of Brisbane, Philip Freier the current Anglican Primate of Australia and Archbishop of Melbourne; and recent Prime Ministers John Howard, Kevin Rudd, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison.
Like much of the Western world, Australia has been affected by the widespread decline in religiosity that has lowered the number of professing Christians and a diversifying immigration intakes that have lowered the overall percentage that Christians comprise in the Australian population, resulting in a national census decline from 96.1% at the time of the Federation of Australia in the 1901 census, to 43.9% in the 2021 census Census.
According to the 2021 census, religious distribution is 43.9% Christian (47.3% of those who answered the question, 7.3% did not), 38.9% none or secular belief system (41.9% of those who answered), 3.2% Islam (or 3.5% of those who answered), 2.7% Hinduism (2.9% of those who answered), 2.4% Buddhism (or 2.6% of those who answered), and 1.7% other (or 1.8% who answered). The largest Christian denominations (those with at least 1% of the population) were Catholic at 20.0% (21.5% of those who answered), Anglican at 9.8% (10.6% of those who answered), Uniting Church at 2.7% (2.9% of those who answered), Eastern Orthodox at 2.1% (2.3% of those who answered), Presbyterian/Reformed at 1.6% (1.8% of those who answered), Baptist at 1.4% (1.5% of those who answered) and Pentecostal at 1.0% (1.1% of those who answered). Those who answered Christian with no denomination were 2.7% of the population (2.0% of those who answered).
Post-war immigration has grown the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia and there are large and growing Pentecostal groups, such as Sydney's Hillsong Church. According to the 2016 census, Queensland (56.03%) and New South Wales (55.18%) had Christian majorities, while the lowest proportion of Christians were found in the Northern Territory (47.69%) and the Australian Capital Territory (45.38%)."
Christianity in Australia,"History
Introduction of Christianity
Before European contact, indigenous people had performed the rites and rituals of the animist religion of the Dreamtime. Portuguese and Spanish Catholics and Dutch and English Protestants were sailing into Australian waters from the seventeenth century.
Among the first Catholics known to have sighted Australia were the crew of a Spanish expedition of 1605–6. In 1606, the expedition's leader, Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, landed in the New Hebrides and, believing it to be the fabled southern continent, he named the land: Austrialis del Espiritu Santo (""Southern Land of the Holy Spirit""). Later that year, his deputy Luís Vaz de Torres sailed through Australia's Torres Strait. The English navigator James Cook's favourable account of the fertile east coast of Australia in 1770 ultimately ensured that Australia's Christian foundations were to reflect the British denominations (with their Protestant majority and largely Irish, Catholic minority).
The permanent presence of Christianity in Australia began with the arrival of the First Fleet of British convict ships at Sydney in 1788. The Reverend Richard Johnson of the Church of England was licensed as chaplain to the Fleet and the settlement. In early colonial times, Church of England clergy worked closely with the governors. Johnson was charged by the governor, Arthur Phillip, with improving ""public morality"" in the colony, but he was also heavily involved in health and education.
According to Manning Clark, the early colonial officials of the colony had disdain for the ""consolations of religion"", but shared a view that ""the Protestant religion and British institutions were the finest achievements of the wit of man for the promotion of liberty and a high material civilization."" Thus they looked to Protestant ministers as the ""natural moral policemen of society"", of obvious social use in a convict colony for preaching against ""drunkenness, whoring and gambling"". Chaplain Johnson was an evangelical priest of the Church of England, the first of a series of clergymen, according to Clark, through whom ""evangelical Christianity dominated the religious life of Protestant Christianity in Australia throughout the whole of the nineteenth century"".
Chaplain Johnson led what is regarded as his first service under a tree in Sydney Cove on the first Sunday after arrival, 3 February 1788. On 7 February 1788, Arthur Phillip was sworn in over the Bible as the first Governor of the colony, and delivered a speech to the convicts counselling the Christian virtues of marriage and an end to promiscuity. Johnson celebrated the colony's first Lord's Supper in an officer's tent on Sunday 17 February 1788.
Johnson's successor, the Reverend Samuel Marsden (1765–1838), had magisterial duties and so was equated with the authorities by the convicts. He became known as the ""flogging parson"" for the severity of his punishments."
Christianity in Australia,"Early history of the Catholic Church in Australia
Some of the Irish convicts had been transported to Australia for political crimes or social rebellion in Ireland. This was due to the colonisation of the Irish people by the English, and resultant dispossession and cruel conditions forced on them by the English. Irish Catholics had been forced to pay tithes to the protestant churches, even though they were Catholics. Authorities were prejudiced against Catholics and Catholic convicts were compelled to attend Church of England services, with no provision or respect for Catholicism.
One-tenth of all the convicts who came to Australia on the First Fleet were Catholic and at least half of them were born in Ireland. A small proportion of British marines were also Catholic. Other groups were also represented, for example, among the Tolpuddle martyrs were a number of Methodists.
It was the crew of the French explorer La Pérouse who conducted the first Catholic ceremony on Australian soil in 1788 – the burial of Father Louis Receveur, a Franciscan friar, who died while the ships were at anchor at Botany Bay, while on a mission to explore the Pacific. The first Catholic priest colonists arrived in Australia as convicts in 1800 – James Harold, James Dixon and Peter O'Neill, who had been convicted for ""complicity"" in the Irish 1798 Rebellion. Dixon was conditionally emancipated and permitted to celebrate Mass. On 15 May 1803, in vestments made from curtains and with a chalice made of tin he conducted the first Catholic Mass in New South Wales. The Irish led Castle Hill Rebellion of 1804 alarmed the British authorities and Dixon's permission to celebrate Mass was revoked. Fr Jeremiah Flynn, an Irish Cistercian, was appointed as Prefect Apostolic of New Holland (Australia) and set out from Britain for the colony  uninvited. Watched by authorities, Flynn secretly performed priestly duties before being arrested and deported to London. Reaction to the affair in Britain led to two further priests being allowed to travel to the colony in 1820 – John Joseph Therry and Philip Conolly. The foundation stone for the first St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney was laid on 29 October 1821 by Governor Lachlan Macquarie.
The absence of a Catholic mission in Australia before 1818 reflected the legal disabilities of Catholics in Britain. The government therefore endorsed the English Benedictines to lead the early church in the colony. William Bernard Ullathorne (1806–1889) was instrumental in influencing Pope Gregory XVI to establish a Catholic hierarchy in Australia. Ullathorne was in Australia from 1833 to 1836 as vicar-general to Bishop William Morris (1794–1872), whose jurisdiction extended over the Australian missions."
Christianity in Australia,"Foundations of diversification and equality
The Church of England lost its legal privileges in the Colony of New South Wales by the Church Act of 1836. Drafted by the Catholic attorney-general John Plunkett, the act established legal equality for Episcopalians, Catholics and Presbyterians and was later extended to Methodists. Nevertheless, social attitudes were slow to change. Catholic laywoman Caroline Chisholm (1808–1877) faced discouragements and anti-papal feeling when she sought to establish a migrant women's shelter and worked for women's welfare in the colonies in the 1840s, though her humanitarian efforts later won her fame in England and great influence in achieving support for families in the colony.
John Bede Polding, a Benedictine monk, was Sydney's first Catholic bishop (and then archbishop) from 1835 to 1877. Polding requested a community of nuns be sent to the colony and five Irish Sisters of Charity arrived in 1838. The sisters set about pastoral care in a women's prison and began visiting hospitals and schools and establishing employment for convict women. The sisters went on to establish hospitals in four of the eastern states, beginning with St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney in 1857 as a free hospital for all people, but especially for the poor. At Polding's request, the Christian Brothers arrived in Sydney in 1843 to assist in schools. In 1857, Polding founded an Australian order of nuns in the Benedictine tradition – the Sisters of the Good Samaritan – to work in education and social work. While Polding was in office, construction began on the ambitious Gothic Revival designs for St Patrick's Cathedral, Melbourne and the final St Mary's Cathedral in Sydney.
Since the 19th century, immigrants have brought their own expressions of Christianity with them. Particular examples are the Lutherans from Prussia who tended to settle in the Barossa Valley, South Australia and in Queensland, Methodists in South Australia, with notable pockets coming from Cornwall to work the copper mines in Moonta. Other groups included the Presbyterian, Congregationalist and Baptist churches. Establishing themselves first at Sevenhill, in the newly established colony of South Australia in 1848, the Jesuits were the first religious order of priests to enter and establish houses in South Australia, Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory. While the Austrian Jesuits traversed the Outback on horseback to found missions and schools, Irish Jesuits arrived in the east in 1860 and had by 1880 established the major schools which survive to the present.
In 1885, Patrick Francis Moran became Australia's first cardinal. Moran believed that Catholics' political and civil rights were threatened in Australia and, in 1896, saw deliberate discrimination in a situation where ""no office of first, or even second, rate importance is held by a Catholic""."
Christianity in Australia,"The Churches became involved in mission work among the Aboriginal people of Australia in the 19th century as Europeans came to control much of the continent and the majority of the population was eventually converted. Colonial clergy such as Sydney's first Catholic archbishop, John Bede Polding, strongly advocated for Aboriginal rights and dignity
With the withdrawal of state aid for church schools around 1880, the Catholic Church, unlike other Australian churches, put great energy and resources into creating a comprehensive alternative system of education. It was largely staffed by nuns, brothers and priests of religious orders, such as the Christian Brothers (who had returned to Australia in 1868); the Sisters of Mercy (who had arrived in Perth in 1846); Marist Brothers, who came from France in 1872 and the Sisters of St Joseph, founded in Australia by Saint Mary MacKillop and Fr Julian Tenison Woods in 1867. MacKillop travelled throughout Australasia and established schools, convents and charitable institutions but came into conflict with those bishops who preferred diocesan control of the order rather than central control from Adelaide by the Josephite order. MacKillop administered the Josephites as a national order at a time when Australia was divided among individually governed colonies. She is today the most revered of Australian Catholics, canonised by Benedict XVI in 2010.
Also from Britain came the Salvation Army (its members sometimes called ""Salvos"" in Australia), which had been established in the slums of East London in 1865 to minister to the impoverished outcasts of the city. The first Salvation Army meeting in Australia was held in 1880. Edward Saunders and John Gore led the meeting from the back of a greengrocer's cart in Adelaide Botanic Park with an offer of food for those who had not eaten. The Salvos also involved themselves in finding work for the unemployed and in re-uniting families. In Melbourne from 1897 to 1910, The Army's Limelight Department was established as Australia's first film production company. From such diverse activities, The Salvos  have grown to be one of Australia's most respected charitable organisations, with a 2009 survey by Sweeney Research and the advertising group Grey Global finding the Salvation Army and the nation's Ambulance Service to be Australia's most trusted entities. Australia's George Carpenter was General of the Salvation Army (worldwide leader) from 1939 to 1946 and  Eva Burrows during the 1980s and 1990s."
Christianity in Australia,"Commonwealth of Australia
Section 116 of the Australian Constitution of 1901 provided for freedom of religion. With the exception of the indigenous population, descendants of gold rush migrants and a small but significant Lutheran population of German descent,  Australian society was predominantly Anglo-Celtic, with 40% of the population being Church of England, 23% Catholic, 34% other Christian and about 1% professing non-Christian religions. The first census in 1911 showed 95.95 per cent identified themselves as Christian.
Sectarianism in Australia tended to reflect the political inheritance of Britain and Ireland. Until 1945, the vast majority of Catholics in Australia were of Irish descent, causing the Anglo-Protestant majority to question their loyalty to the British Empire. The Church of England remained the largest Christian church until the 1986 census. After World War II, the ethnic and cultural mix of Australia diversified and the Church of England gave way to the Catholic Church as the largest. The number of Anglicans attending regular worship began to decline in 1959 and figures for occasional services (baptisms, confirmations, weddings and funerals) started to decline after 1966."
Christianity in Australia,"Further waves of migration and the gradual winding back of the White Australia Policy, helped to reshape the profile of Australia's religious affiliations over subsequent decades. The impact of migration from Europe in the aftermath of World War II led to increases in affiliates of the Orthodox churches, the establishment of Reformed bodies, growth in the number of Catholics (largely from Italian migration) and Jews (Holocaust survivors). More recently (post-1970s), immigration from South-East Asia and the Middle East has expanded Buddhist and Muslim numbers considerably and increased the ethnic diversity of the existing Christian churches.
Russian sailors visiting Sydney celebrated the Divine Liturgy as long ago as 1820 and a Greek Orthodox population emerged from the mid-19th century. The Greeks of Sydney and Melbourne had a priest by 1896 and the first Greek Orthodox church was opened at Surry Hills in Sydney in 1898. In 1924, the Metropolis of Australia and New Zealand was established under the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Greek immigration increased considerably following World War II, and the Metropolis of Australia and New Zealand was elevated to Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia and Metropolitan Ezekiel was appointed archbishop in 1959. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew visited Australia in November 1996.
In the 1970s, the Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregational churches in Australia united to form the Uniting Church in Australia. The church remains prominent in welfare services and noted for its innovative ministry initiatives such as those pioneered at centres like Sydney's Wayside Chapel in King's Cross.
1970 saw the first visit to Australia by a pope, Paul VI. John Paul II was the next pope to visit Australia in 1986. At Alice Springs, the pope made an historic address to indigenous Australians, in which he praised the enduring qualities of Aboriginal culture, lamented the effects of dispossession of and discrimination; called for acknowledgment of Aboriginal land rights and reconciliation in Australia; and said that the Christian Church in Australia would not reach its potential until Aboriginal people had made their ""contribution to her life and until that contribution has been joyfully received by others"". In July 2008, Sydney hosted the massive international youth festival ""World Youth Day"" led by Benedict XVI. Around 500,000 welcomed the pope to Sydney and 270,000 watched the Stations of the Cross. More than 300,000 pilgrims camped out overnight in preparation for the final Mass, where final attendance was between 300,000 and 400,000 people.
In recent times, the Christian churches of Australia have been active in ecumenical activity. The Australian Committee for the World Council of Churches was established in 1946 by the Anglican and mainline Protestant churches. The movement evolved and expanded with Eastern and Oriental Orthodox churches later joining and by 1994 the  Catholic Church was also a member of the national ecumenical body, the National Council of Churches in Australia.
A 2015 study estimates some 20,000 Muslim converted to Christianity in Australia, most of them belonging to some form of Protestantism."
Christianity in Australia,"Percentage of population since 1901
Data for table up to 2006 from Australian Bureau of Statistics."
Christianity in Australia,"Indigenous Australians and Christianity
Christianity and European culture have had a significant impact on Indigenous Australians, their religion and their culture. As in many colonial situations the churches both facilitated the loss of Indigenous Australian culture and religion and also facilitated its maintenance. The involvement of Christians in Aboriginal affairs has evolved significantly since 1788. Around the year 2000, many churches and church organisations officially apologised for past failures to adequately respect indigenous cultures and address the injustices of the dispossession of indigenous people.
Christian missionaries often witnessed to Indigenous people in an attempt to convert them to Christianity. The Presbyterian Church of Australia's Australian Inland Mission, the Lutheran mission at Hermannsburg, Northern Territory, and many Catholic missions in remote areas being examples. Many missionaries often studied Aboriginal society from an Anthropological perspective. Missionaries have made significant contributions to anthropological and linguistic understanding of Indigenous Australians and aspects of Christian services have been adapted when there is Aboriginal involvement – even masses during Papal visits to Australia will include traditional Aboriginal smoking ceremonies. It was the practice of some Missions to enforce a 'forgetting' of Aboriginal culture. Others, like Fr Kevin McKelson of Broome encouraged aboriginal culture and language while also promoting the merits of western style education in the 1960s.
Prominent Aboriginal activist Noel Pearson, himself raised at a Lutheran mission in Cape York, has written that missions throughout Australia's colonial history ""provided a haven from the hell of life on the Australian frontier while at the same time facilitating colonisation""."
Christianity in Australia,"In the Torres Strait Islands, the Coming of the Light Festival marks the day the Christian missionaries first arrived on the islands on 1 July 1871 and introduced Christianity to the region. This is a significant festival for Torres Strait Islanders, who are predominantly Christian. Religious and cultural ceremonies are held across Torres Strait and mainland Australia.
Prominent Aboriginal Christians have included Pastor David Unaipon, the first Aboriginal author; Pastor Sir Douglas Nicholls, athlete, activist and former Governor of South Australia; Mum (Shirl) Smith, a celebrated Redfern community worker who, assisted by the Sisters of Charity, worked in the courts and organised prison visitations, medical and social assistance for Aboriginal peoples, and former Senator Aden Ridgeway, the first Chairman of the Aboriginal Catholic Ministry. The Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress, associated with the Uniting Church in Australia, is an organisation developed and managed by Indigenous people to ""provide spiritual, social and economic pathways for Australia's First People"".
In recent times, Christians like Fr Ted Kennedy of Redfern, Jesuit human rights lawyer Fr Frank Brennan and the Josephite Sisters have been prominent in working for Aboriginal rights and improvements to standards of living.
The National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Catholic Council is the peak body representing Indigenous Catholics in Australia and was formed in Cairns in January 1989 at the first National Conference of the Aboriginal and Islander Catholic Councils. In 1992 the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference officially recognised and welcomed it as the national representative and consultative body to the church on issues concerning Indigenous Catholics.
The members of the council stand down every three years and a new council is appointed. NATSICC's funding comes in the form of Voluntary contributions from schools, parishes and religious orders. In addition, Caritas Australia provides ongoing funding.
Encouraged by Pope John Paul II's words in the Post Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Ecclesia in Oceania NATSICC is determined to continue, as the peak Indigenous Catholic representative body, to actively support and promote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander participation in the Catholic Church in Australia."
Christianity in Australia,"Social and political engagement
History
Christian charitable organisations, hospitals and schools have played a prominent role in welfare and education since Colonial times, when the First Fleet's Church of England chaplain, Richard Johnson, was credited as ""the physician both of soul and body"" during the famine of 1790 and was charged with general supervision of schools.  The Catholic laywoman Caroline Chisolm helped single migrant women and rescued homeless girls in Sydney. In his welcoming address to the Catholic World Youth Day 2008 in Sydney the then Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, said that Christianity had been a positive influence on Australia: ""It was the church that began first schools for the poor, it was the church that began first hospitals for the poor, it was the church that began first refuges for the poor and these great traditions continue for the future."""
Christianity in Australia,"Welfare
A number of Christian churches are significant national providers of social welfare services (including residential aged care and the Job Network) and education. These include:"
Christianity in Australia,"The Salvation Army. In 2012, the Australian prime minister, Julia Gillard (herself not religious but with family connections to the work of Salvation Army), praised the welfare work of the Salvation Army in Australia as ""Christianity with its sleeves rolled up"" and which, she said, was each week reuniting 40 Australian families; assisting 500 drug, alcohol or gambling addiction affected people; providing 2000 homeless with shelter; and counselling thousands more.
The Uniting Church in Australia does extensive community work in aged care, hospitals, nursing, family support services, youth services and with the homeless. Services include UnitingCare Australia, Exodus Foundation, the Wesley Missions and Lifeline counseling.
The Anglican Church of Australia has organisations working in education, health, missionary work, social welfare and communications. Organisations include Anglicare and the Samaritans.
The Catholic Church: Catholic Social Services Australia is the church's peak national body. Its 63 member organisations help more than a million Australians each year. Catholic organisations include: Centacare, Caritas Australia, Jesuit Refugee Service, St Vincent de Paul Society, Josephite Community Aid; Fr. Chris Riley's Youth Off The Streets; Edmund Rice Camps; and the Bob Maguire Foundation. Two religious orders founded in Australia which engaged in welfare and charity work are the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart and the Sisters of the Good Samaritan. Many international orders also work in welfare, such as the Little Sisters of the Poor who work in aged care and the Sisters of Charity of Australia, who have played a prominent role in healthcare and women's welfare in Australia since the 1830s.
Hillsong Church's Hillsong Emerge is a local example in Sydney, New South Wales.
The Baptist Church's Tim Costello is CEO of World Vision Australia.
Other Christian humanitarian aid organisations operating in Australia include: Christian Children's Fund, Christian Blind Mission International; Mission Australia; St Luke's, the Christian Blind Mission; Compassion Australia; St John Ambulance Australia;"
Christianity in Australia,"Health
Catholic Health Australia is the largest non-government provider grouping of health, community and aged care services in Australia. These do not operate for profit and range across the full spectrum of health services, representing about 10% of the health sector and employing 35,000 people. Catholic religious orders founded many of Australia's hospitals. Irish Sisters of Charity arrived in Sydney in 1838 and established St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney in 1857 as a free hospital for the poor. The Sisters went on to found hospitals, hospices, research institutes and aged care facilities in Victoria, Queensland and Tasmania. At  St Vincent's they trained leading surgeon Victor Chang and opened Australia's first AIDS clinic.  In the 21st century, with more and more lay people involved in management, the sisters began collaborating with Sisters of Mercy Hospitals in Melbourne and Sydney. Jointly the group operates four public hospitals; seven private hospitals and 10 aged care facilities. The English Sisters of the Little Company of Mary arrived in 1885 and have since established public and private hospitals, retirement living and residential aged care, community care and comprehensive palliative care in New South Wales, the ACT, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and the Northern Territory. The Little Sisters of the Poor, who follow the charism of Saint Jeanne Jugan to 'offer hospitality to the needy aged' arrived in Melbourne in 1884 and now operate four aged care homes in Australia.
An example of a Christian Welfare agency is ADRA (Adventist Development and Relief Agency). This welfare agency is an internationally recognized agency run by the Seventh-day Adventist Church.  ADRA is operational in more than 120 countries, around the world, providing relief and development, where ever needed.  Within Australia they provide shelter, relief, and services to those in need.  They have numerous refuges set up those suffering abuse, as well as shelters for those in need.  As well many other things such as food distribution, op-shops etc.
The Reverend John Flynn, a minister of the Presbyterian Church founded what was to become the Royal Flying Doctor Service in 1928 in Cloncurry, Queensland, to bring health services to the isolated communities of the Australian The Bush."
Christianity in Australia,"Education
There are substantial networks of Christian schools associated with the Christian churches and also some that operate as parachurch organisations.  The Catholic education system is the second biggest sector after government schools and has more than 730,000 students and around 21 per cent of all secondary school enrolments. The Catholic Church has established primary, secondary and tertiary educational institutions in Australia. The Anglican Church has around 145 schools in Australia, providing for more than 105,000 children. The Uniting Church has around 48 schools as does the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
Mary MacKillop was a 19th-century Australian nun who founded an educational order, the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart, and has recently become the first Australian to be canonised as a saint by the Catholic Church. Other Catholic religious orders involved in education in Australia have included: Sisters of Mercy, Marist Brothers, Christian Brothers, Benedictine Sisters, Jesuits and The Missionaries of the Sacred Heart.
Church schools range from elite, high cost schools to low fee locally based schools. Churches with networks of schools include:"
Christianity in Australia,"Anglican
Catholic
Uniting Church
Baptist
Eastern Orthodox
Lutheran
Nondenominational
The Australian Catholic University opened in 1991 following the amalgamation of four Catholic tertiary institutions in eastern Australia. These institutions had their origins in the 19th century, when religious orders and institutes became involved in preparing teachers for Catholic schools and nurses for Catholic hospitals. The University of Notre Dame Australia opened  in Western Australia in December 1989, and now has over 9,000 students on three campuses in Fremantle, Sydney and Broome."
Christianity in Australia,"Politics
Church leaders have often involved themselves in political issues in areas they consider relevant to Christian teachings. In early Colonial times, Catholicism was restricted but Church of England clergy  worked closely with the governors. The Reverend Samuel Marsden had magisterial duties and so was equated with the authorities by the convicts. He became known as the ""flogging parson"" for the severity of his punishments. An early Catholic missionary, William Ullathorne, criticised the convict system, publishing a pamphlet, The Horrors of Transportation Briefly Unfolded to the People, in Britain in 1837. Australia's first Catholic cardinal, Patrick Francis Moran (1830–1911), was politically active.  As a proponent of Australian Federation he denounced anti-Chinese legislation as ""unchristian""; became an advocate for women's suffrage and alarmed conservatives by supporting trade unionism and ""Australian socialism"". Archbishop Daniel Mannix of Melbourne was a controversial voice against conscription during World War I and against British policy in Ireland.
Aboriginal pastors David Unaipon and Sir Douglas Nicholls, former Catholic priest Pat Dodson and Jesuit priest Frank Brennan have been high-profile Christians engaged in the cause of Aboriginal rights.
The Australian Labor Party had largely been supported by Catholics until prominent layman B. A. Santamaria formed the Democratic Labor Party over concerns of Communist influence over the trade union movement in the 1950s.
In 1999, Catholic cardinal Edward Clancy wrote to the prime minister, John Howard, urging him to send an armed peacekeeping force to East Timor to end the violence engulfing that country. Previous Archbishops of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell (Catholic) and Peter Jensen (Anglican), have concerned themselves with traditional issues of Christian doctrine, such as marriage or abortion, but have also raised questions about government policies such as the Work Choices industrial relations reforms and the mandatory detention of asylum seekers.
Tim Costello, a Baptist minister and the CEO of World Vision Australia, has often been vocal on issues of welfare, foreign aid and climate change.
Christian political parties in Australia include Australian Christians."
Christianity in Australia,"Politicians
When taking their oath of office, ministers in the Australian federal government may elect to swear that oath on the Bible. In 2007, half of the 40 member cabinet of the Rudd Government chose to do so. Historically most Australian prime ministers have been Christians of varying denominations. Of recent prime ministers, Bob Hawke was an agnostic son of a Congregational minister; Paul Keating is a practising Catholic; John Howard and Kevin Rudd are practising Anglicans, and Tony Abbott is a practising Catholic. Former prime minister Julia Gillard was raised by Christian parents but is herself an atheist.
Religion is often kept ""low-key"" as topic of discussion in politics in Australia, but a number of current and past politicians present themselves as Christian in public life, these include:"
Christianity in Australia,"Federally: Scott Morrison (Pentecostal, former prime minister), Tony Abbott (Catholic, former prime minister), Kevin Rudd (Anglican, former Catholic, former prime minister), Joe Hockey, (Catholic, treasurer) Christopher Pyne (Catholic, Liberal MP), Andrew Robb, (Catholic, Liberal Party of Australia), Kevin Andrews, (Catholic, Liberal Party of Australia MP). Historically, most Australian prime ministers have been Christians and recent oppositions leaders Kim Beazley (Anglican); Brendan Nelson and Malcolm Turnbull (Catholic) were all practising Christians. Prominent senators Brian Harradine, Tasmanian independent (1975–2005) and Steve Fielding (Pentecostal, Family First former senator) often referred to their Christianity and Brian Howe Labor deputy prime minister (1991–1995). Though the monarch is not the head of the Anglican Church of Australia, the monarch must be an Anglican. In recent decades, Pastor Sir Doug Nicholls served as Governor of South Australia and Archbishop Peter Hollingworth served as Governor General of Australia.
State: Former New South Wales premier Kristina Keneally is a theology graduate and another former premier, John Fahey, had been a seminarian. Victorian premier Daniel Andrews is a practising Catholic. The Reverend Fred Nile and the Reverend Gordon Moyes have been two long serving members of the New South Wales Legislative Council. Andrew Evans in the South Australian Legislative Council and Joh Bjelke-Petersen Premier of Queensland (1968 to 1987) were also Christians. NSW premier Mike Baird and NSW Commissioner of Police Andrew Scipione are both Christians.
The Parliamentary Christian Fellowship, also known as the parliamentary prayer group, is a gathering of Christian politicians in Parliament House, Canberra. The group organises informal prayer, as well as the ecumenical service for the commencement of the Parliamentary year, along with the annual National Prayer Breakfast."
Christianity in Australia,"Culture and the arts
Festivals
The Christian festivals of Christmas and Easter are marked as public holidays in Australia."
Christianity in Australia,"Christmas
The Christian festival of Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ. As in most Western nations, Christmas in Australia is an important time even for non-religious people and is generally celebrated on 25 December. Churches of the Western Christian tradition hold Christmas Day services on this day but most churches of Eastern Christian tradition – Ethiopian Orthodox, Russian Orthodox or the Armenian Church celebrate Christmas on 6 or 7 January. Both Christmas Day and 26 December (Boxing Day) are public holidays throughout Australia.
Although Christmas in Australia is celebrated during the Southern Hemisphere summer, many Northern Hemisphere traditions are observed in Australia – families and friends exchange Christmas cards and gifts and gather for Christmas dinners; sing songs about snow and sleighbells; decorate Christmas trees; and tell stories of Santa Claus. Nevertheless, local adaptations have arisen – large open-air carol concerts are conducted on summer evenings before Christmas – such as the Carols by Candlelight in Melbourne and Sydney's Carols in the Domain. The Christmas song Six White Boomers, by Rolf Harris, tells of Santa undertaking his flight around Australia hauled by six white-boomer kangaroos in place of reindeer. Christian carols such as Three Drovers or Christmas Day by John Wheeler and William G. James place the hymns of praise firmly in an Australian context of warm, dry Christmas winds and red dust. Although a hot roast dinner remains a favourite Christmas meal, the summer temperatures can tempt some Australians toward the nearest watercourses to cool down between feasts. It is a tradition for international visitors to gather en masse at Sydney's Bondi Beach on Christmas Day.
The Assyrian Church of the East is also known to be a crowd drawer for the special Christmas Eve midnight mass. More than 15,000 faithful gather at churches in Sydney, notably the St Hurmizd Cathedral in Sydney's west."
Christianity in Australia,"Easter
The Christian festival of Easter commemorates the Bible's account of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In Australia, in addition to the religious significance of Easter for Christians, the festival is marked by a four-day holiday weekend starting on Good Friday and ending on Easter Monday – which generally coincides with school holidays and is an opportunity for family and friends to travel and reunite. Across Australia, church services are well attended, as are secular music festivals, fairs and sporting events. One such Easter event is Easterfest an annual Christian Music Festival in Queen's Park Toowoomba and known as the largest drug and alcohol free festival in Australia.
Traditional Easter foods commonly consumed in Australia include hot cross buns, recalling the cross of the crucifixion, and chocolate Easter eggs – symbolic of the promise of new life offered by the resurrection. Although chocolate eggs are now eaten throughout the period, eggs were traditionally exchanged on Easter Sunday and, as in other nations,  young children believe their eggs to be delivered by the Easter Bunny. A local variant on this tradition is the story of the Easter Bilby, which seeks to raise the profile of an endangered Australian native, the Bilby whose existence is threatened by the imported European rabbit population.
Other Easter traditions have been brought by migrant communities to Australia. Greek Orthodox traditions have a wide following among descendants of Greek immigrants; and a fishermen's tradition brought from Sicily, the Ulladulla Blessing of the Fleet, takes place on the New South Wales South Coast with St Peter as patron."
Christianity in Australia,"Architecture
See also 
Most towns in Australia have at least one Christian church. One of Australia's oldest is St. James Church, Sydney, built between 1819 and 1824. The historic Anglican church was designed by Governor Macquarie's architect, Francis Greenway – a former convict – and built with convict labour. It is  set on a sandstone base and built of face brick with the walls articulated by brick piers. Sydney's Anglican Cathedral of St Andrew was consecrated in 1868 from foundations laid in the 1830s. Largely designed by Edmund Thomas Blacket in the Perpendicular Gothic style reminiscent of English cathedrals. Blacket also designed St Saviour's Goulburn Cathedral, based on the Decorated Gothic style of a large English parish church and built between 1874 and 1884.
The ""mother church"" of Catholicism in Australia is St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney. The plan of the cathedral is a conventional English cathedral plan, cruciform in shape, with a tower over the crossing of the nave and transepts, and twin towers at the West Front, with impressive stained glass windows. 106.7 metres in length and a general width 24.4 metres, it is Sydney's largest church. Built to a design by William Wardell from a foundation stone laid in 1868, the spires of the cathedral were not finally added until the year 2000.
Wardell also worked on the design of St Patrick's Cathedral, Melbourne – considered among the finest examples of ecclesiastical architecture in Australia. Wardell's overall design was in Gothic Revival style, paying tribute to the mediaeval cathedrals of Europe. Largely constructed between 1858 and 1897, the nave was Early English in style, while the remainder of the building is in Decorated Gothic. St Paul's Anglican Cathedral, from a foundation stone laid in 1880, is another Melbourne landmark. It was  designed by distinguished English architect William Butterfield in Gothic Transitional.
Tasmania is home to a number of significant colonial Christian buildings including those located at Australia's best preserved convict era settlement, Port Arthur. According to 19th century notions of prisoner reform, the ""Model Prison"" incorporates a grim chapel into which prisoners in solitary confinement were shepherded to listen (in individual enclosures) to the preacher's Sunday sermon – their only permitted interaction with another human being. Adelaide, the capital of South Australia has long been known as the ""City of Churches"" and its St Peter's Anglican Cathedral is a notable city landmark. 130 km north of Adelaide is  the Jesuit old stone winery and cellars at Sevenhill, founded by Austrian Jesuits in 1848."
Christianity in Australia,"The oldest building in the city of Canberra is the picturesque St John the Baptist Anglican Church in Reid, consecrated in 1845. This church long pre-dates the city of Canberra and is not so much representative of urban design as it is of the Bush chapels which dot the Australian landscape and stretch even into the far Outback, such as that which can be found at the Lutheran Mission Chapel at Hermannsburg in the Northern Territory. A rare Australian example of Spanish missionary style exists at New Norcia, Western Australia. Founded by Spanish Benedictine monks in 1846.
A number of notable Victorian era chapels and edifices were also constructed at church schools across Australia.
Along with community attitudes to religion, church architecture changed significantly during the 20th century. Urban churches such as that at the Wayside Chapel (1964) in Sydney differed markedly from traditional ecclesiastical designs. St Monica's Cathedral in Cairns was designed by architect Ian Ferrier and built in 1967–68 following the form of the original basilica model of the early churches of Rome, adapted to a tropical climate and to reflect the changes to Catholic liturgy mandated at Vatican 2. The cathedral was dedicated as a memorial to the Battle of the Coral Sea which was fought east of Cairns in May 1942. The ""Peace Window"" stained glass was installed on the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II.
In the later 20th century, distinctly Australian approaches were applied at places such as Jambaroo Benedictine Abbey, where natural materials were chosen to ""harmonise with the local environment"". The chapel sanctuary is of glass overlooking rainforest. Similar design principles were applied at Thredbo Ecumenical Chapel built in the Snowy Mountains in 1996."
Christianity in Australia,"Film
The Salvation Army founded one of the world's first ever movie studios in Melbourne in the 1890s: the Limelight Department. First filming A Melbourne Street Scene in 1897, they went on to make large scale Christian themed audio-visual presentations such as Soldiers of the Cross in 1900, and documented the Australian Federation ceremonies of 1901.
Australian films on Christian themes have included:"
Christianity in Australia,"Molokai: The Story of Father Damien (1999), directed by Paul Cox and starring David Wenham. The film recounts the life of a Belgian saint, Fr Damien of Molokai who devoted his life to care of lepers on a Hawaiian Island.
Mary (1994), directed written and directed by Kay Pavlou and starring Lucy Bell. A biopic recounting the life and works of Saint Mary MacKillop, Australia's first canonised saint of the Catholic Church.
The Passion of the Christ (2004) was directed, co-produced and co-written by Australian trained actor-director Mel Gibson (who was raised a Traditionalist Catholic in Australia)."
Christianity in Australia,"Media
A number of current and past media personalities present themselves as Christian in public life, these include Brooke Fraser, Dan Sweetman, and Guy Sebastian.
Father Bob Maguire and Reverend Gordon Moyes have hosted radio programs.
Coverage of religion is part of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Charter obligation to reflect the character and diversity of the Australian community. Its religious programs include coverage of worship and devotion, explanation, analysis, debate and reports.
Catholic Church Television Australia is an office with the Australian Catholic Office for Film & Broadcasting and develops television programs for Aurora Community Television on Foxtel and Austar in Australia."
Christianity in Australia,"Literature
A Bush Christening is a popular comic bush ballad by renowned Australian poet Banjo Paterson which makes light of the sparsity of Christian preachers and houses of worship on the Australian frontier, beginning:"
Christianity in Australia,"On the outer Barcoo where the churches are few,
And men of religion are scanty...
Nevertheless, the body of literature produced by Australian Christians is extensive. During colonial times, the Benedictine missionary William Ullathorne (1806–1889) was a notable essayist writing against the Convict Transportation system. Later Cardinal Moran (1830–1911), a noted historian, wrote a History of the Catholic Church in Australasia. More recent Catholic histories of Australian include The Catholic Church and Community in Australia (1977) by Patrick O'Farrell and Australian Catholics (1987), by Edmund Campion.
Notable Christian poets have included Christopher Brennan (1870–1932) and James McAuley (1917–1976), Bruce Dawe (born 1930). Dawe is among Australia's foremost contemporary poets, noted for his use of vernacular and everyday Australian themes.
Australian literature for a long time assumed knowledge of Biblical stories, even where works of literature are not overtly Christian in character. The writings of great 20th century authors like Manning Clark or Patrick White are therefore filled with allusions to biblical or Christian themes.
Many Australian writers have examined the lives of Christian characters, or have influenced by Christian educations. Best selling author Tim Winton.s early novel That Eye, the Sky tells the story of a family's conversion to Christianity in the face of tragedy. Australia's best selling novel of all time, The Thornbirds, by Colleen McCullough writes of the temptations encountered by a priest living in the Outback.
Many contemporary Australian writers including Peter Carey and Robert Hughes; leading screenwriters Nick Enright, Bruce Beresford, Peter Weir, Santo Cilauro and Tom Gleisner; and notable poets and authors like Kenneth Slessor, Helen Garner and Gerard Windsor attended Anglican, Presbyterian or Catholic schools in Australia.
In 2011, Prime Minister and atheist Julia Gillard, said that it was important for Australians to have knowledge of the Bible, on the basis that ""what comes from the Bible has formed such an important part of our culture. It's impossible to understand Western literature without having that key of understanding the Bible stories and how Western literature builds on them and reflects them and deconstructs them and brings them back together."""
Christianity in Australia,"Art
The story of Christian art in Australia began with the arrival of the first British settlers at the end of the 18th Century. During the 19th Century, Gothic Revival Cathedrals were built in the Colonial capitals, often containing stained glass art works, as can be seen at St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney and St Patrick's Cathedral, Melbourne. Rupert Bunny (1864–1947), one of the first Australian painters to gain international fame, often painted Christian themes (see Annunciation, 1893). Roy de Maistre (1894–1968) was an Australian abstract artist who obtained renown in Britain, converted to Catholicism and painted notable religious works, including a series of Stations of the Cross for Westminster Cathedral. Among the most acclaimed of Australian painters of Christian themes was Arthur Boyd. Influenced by both the European masters and the Heidelberg School of Australian landscape art, he placed the central characters of the bible within Australian bush scenery, as in his portrait of Adam and Eve, The Expulsion (1948). Artist Leonard French, who designed a stained glass ceiling of the National Gallery of Victoria, has drawn heavily on Christian story and symbolism through his career.
From the 1970s, Australian Aboriginal artists of the Western Desert began to paint traditional style artworks in acrylic paints. This distinctively Australian style of painting has been fused with biblical themes to produce a uniquely Australian contribution to the long history of Christian art: integrating the mysterious dot designs and evocative circular patterns of traditional Aboriginal art with popular Christian subjects.
The Blake Prize for Religious Art was established in 1951 as an incentive to raise the standard of religious art in Australia and was named after the artist and poet William Blake."
Christianity in Australia,"Music
Christian music arrived in Australia with the First Fleet of British settlers in 1788 and has grown to include all genres from traditional Hymns of Praise to Christian Rock and country music. St Mary's Cathedral Choir, Sydney is the oldest musical institution in Australia, from origins in 1817. Major recording artists from Johnny O'Keefe (the first Australian Rock and Roll star) to Paul Kelly (folk rock), Nick Cave (the critically acclaimed brooding rocker) and Slim Dusty (the King of Australian country music) have all recorded Christian themed songs. Other performing artists such as Catholic nun Sister Janet Mead, Aboriginal crooner Jimmy Little and Australian Idol contestant Guy Sebastian have held Christianity as central to their public persona.
Church music also ranges widely across genres, from Melbourne's St Paul's Cathedral Choir who sing choral evensong most weeknights; to the Contemporary music that is a feature of the evangelical Planetshakers and Hillsong congregation. The Ntaria Choir at Hermannsburg, Northern Territory, has a unique musical language which mixes the traditional vocals of the Ntaria Aboriginal women with Lutheran chorales (tunes that were the basis of much of Bach's music). Baba Waiyar, a popular traditional Torres Strait Islander hymn shows the influence of gospel music mixed with traditionally strong Torres Strait Islander vocals and country music.
Annually, Australians gather in large numbers for traditional open-air Christmas music Carols by Candlelight concerts in December, such as the Carols by Candlelight of Melbourne, and Sydney's Carols in the Domain. Australian Christmas carols like the Three Drovers or Christmas Day by John Wheeler and William G. James place the Christmas story firmly in an Australian context of warm, dry Christmas winds and red dust.
New South Wales Supreme Court Judge George Palmer was commissioned to compose the setting of the Mass for Sydney's World Youth Day 2008 Papal Mass. The Mass, Benedictus Qui Venit, for large choir, soloists and orchestra, was performed in the presence of Pope Benedict XVI and an audience of 350,000  with singing led by soprano Amelia Farrugia and tenor Andrew Goodwin. ""Receive the Power"" a song written by Guy Sebastian and Gary Pinto was chosen as official anthem for the XXIII World Youth Day (WYD08) held in Sydney in 2008."
Christianity in Australia,"Denominations
Church affiliation
The churches with the largest number of members are the Catholic Church in Australia, the Anglican Church of Australia and the Uniting Church in Australia. Pentecostal churches are growing with megachurches, predominantly associated with Australian Christian Churches (the Assemblies of God in Australia), being found in most states (for example, Planetshakers Church, Hillsong Church and Paradise Community Church)."
Christianity in Australia,"Australian Bureau of statistics
As at the 2021 census, 11,148,814, representing 43.9% of the total population, declared a religious affinity with Christianity."
Christianity in Australia,"Church attendance
While church affiliation as reported in the census identifies the largest denominations, there is no overarching study that shows how active the members are.   Some smaller studies include the National Church Life Survey which researches weekly church attendance among other items through a survey done in over 7000 congregations in many but not all Christian denominations every Australian Census year and from that estimates figures for those denominations nationally.
From the survey about 8.8% of the Australian population attended a church in one of the covered denominations in a given week in 2001.
The Catholic Church represents the highest number of church attenders, with over 50 percent.  While church attendance is generally decreasing the Catholic Church attendance in Australia is declining at a rate of 13 percent. Pentecostal denominations such as Australian Christian Churches (formerly Assemblies of God) and Christian City Churches continue to grow rapidly, growing by over 20 per cent between 1991 and 1996. Some Protestant denominations such as the Baptist Union of Australia and the Churches of Christ in Australia grew at a smaller rate, less than 10 per cent, between 1991 and 1996. McCrindle Research has found that Pentecostals grew to a larger denomination (12%) than Anglicans (11%) in 2014. Roy Morgan Research has found in a survey of 4840 Australians between October and December 2013 that 52.6% of Australians were Christian, while 37.6% had no religion."
Christianity in Australia,"Bible Belts
Several areas in Australia have been described as ""Bible Belts"".  These include:"
Christianity in Australia,"Brisbane's suburbs, where rapid population growth was accompanied by the establishment of large, pentecostal, mega-churches.  These catered to young families.  The churches became politically active in the 1980's by supporting a number of candidates based on their moral beliefs.  The churches' political influence then waned when a number of the church leaders resigned for reasons that can be ""linked to the weakness of giving a great deal of autocratic power to charismatic leaders with insufficient systems of accountability.""
Toowoomba and the surrounding rural area of Queensland.
Melbourne's suburbs surrounding its airport."
Christianity in Australia,"Christianity and the wider culture
Christianity held strong influence in Australia society after British colonisation, but the influence of Christianity declined in the latter part of the 20th century."
Christianity in Australia,"Marriage
The Anglican Church has said that churches are being sidelined in the wider debate on same-sex marriage.
The ACT Attorney-General, Simon Corbell has said, in the ACT, it will be, ""unlawful for those who provide goods, services and facilities in the wedding industry to discriminate against another person on the basis of their sexuality or their relationship status. This includes discrimination by refusing to provide or make available those goods, services or facilities."" During the short time that same-sex marriages took place in ACT a Uniting Church minister sought and acquired permission to perform same sex marriages."
Christianity in Australia,"Media
Liberal senator Eric Abetz has said that media felt comfortable vilifying Christian politicians. Conservative politicians are often described as being ""extreme"" or from the ""Religious Right"".  He said that the Canberra press gallery gives, ""more positive coverage to politicians and policies they agreed with""."
Christianity in Australia,"Schools
The Anglican Church has criticised the Victorian government for cutting religious education in state schools.
Some Christians have criticised the Safe Schools program (which is used in 400 primary and secondary schools)  as ""radical sexual experimentation"". The program includes information about human sexuality and sexual orientations, as well as gender identity."
Christianity in Australia,"Life issues
Some Christians have objected to proposals to establish buffer zones around abortion clinics in both Victoria and Tasmania saying they limit the freedom to protest."
Christianity in Australia,"See also
National Council of Churches in Australia
Separation of church and state in Australia"
Christianity in Australia,"References
Further reading
Hebart, Friedemann (1999), ""Australia"", in Fahlbusch, Erwin (ed.), Encyclopedia of Christianity, vol. 1, Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, pp. 165–168, ISBN 978-0802824134"
Christianity in Australia,"External links
National Council of Churches
Australian Catholic Historical Society
Evangelical History Association"
Governor-General of Australia,"The governor-general of Australia is the representative of the monarch of Australia, currently King Charles III. They have many constitutional and ceremonial roles in the Australian political system, in which they act independently, not  as monarch's delegate or agent. They also have a significant community role, through recognising meritorious individuals and groups, and representing the nation as a whole. The current governor-general is Sam Mostyn.
Significant functions of the governor-general include giving royal assent to bills passed by the houses of parliament, issuing writs for elections, exercising executive power on the advice of the Federal Executive Council, formally appointing government officials (including the prime minister, other ministers, judges and ambassadors), acting as commander-in-chief of the Australian Defence Force, and bestowing Australian honours. However, in almost all instances the governor-general only exercises de jure power in accordance with the principles of the Westminster system and responsible government. This requires them to remain politically neutral and to only act in accordance with Parliament (such as when selecting the prime minister and providing royal assent) or on the advice of ministers (when performing executive actions). However, in certain limited circumstances, the governor-general can act independently without or against formal advice by exercising reserve powers, most notably during the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis. These situations are often controversial and the use of and continued existence of these powers remains highly debated.
In their ceremonial and community roles, the governor-general represents the nation as a whole. Domestically, this role entails attending services and commemorations, sponsoring community organisations and hosting events at one of the two official residences (Government House in Canberra and Admiralty House in Sydney). Internationally, the governor-general represents Australia by travelling to significant events and by performing and receiving state visits. The governor-general is supported by a staff (of 80 in 2018) headed by the official secretary to the governor-general of Australia.
The governor-general is selected by the prime minister, but formally appointed by the monarch of Australia on the prime minister's advice. Their term is not fixed, but they typically serve for five years. From Federation in 1901 until 1965, 11 out of the 15 governors-general were British aristocrats; however all since then have been Australian citizens. The current governor-general, Samantha Mostyn, is the second woman to hold the post, after Dame Quentin Bryce (2008–2014)."
Governor-General of Australia,"Appointment
The governor-general is formally appointed by the monarch of Australia with a commission made under the authority of section 2 of the Constitution and regulated by letters patent issued by the monarch. When a new governor-general is to be appointed, the current prime minister recommends a name to the monarch, who by convention accepts that recommendation. Prior to the 1940s, the recommendation was made and decided by the Cabinet as a whole. The monarch then permits the recommendation to be publicly announced, usually several months before the end of the existing governor-general's term. After receiving their commission, the new governor-general takes an oath or affirmation of allegiance to the monarch and an oath or affirmation of office. These oaths are administered by the chief justice of Australia or another justice of the High Court. Traditionally, the ceremony takes place in the Senate chamber."
Governor-General of Australia,"Tenure
The Constitution does not set a term of office, so a governor-general may continue to hold office for any agreed length of time. In recent decades the typical term of office has been five years. Some early governors-general were appointed to terms of just one year (Lord Tennyson) or two years (Lord Forster; later extended). At the end of this initial term, a commission may be extended for a short time, usually to avoid conflict with an election or during political difficulties.
Three governors-general have resigned their commission. The first governor-general, Lord Hopetoun, asked to be recalled to Britain in 1903 over a dispute about funding for the post. Sir John Kerr resigned in 1977, with his official reason being his decision to accept the position of Australian ambassador to UNESCO in Paris, a post which ultimately he did not take up, but the resignation also being motivated by the 1975 constitutional controversy. In 2003, ex-archbishop Peter Hollingworth voluntarily stood aside while controversial allegations against him were managed, and the letters patent of the office were amended to take account of this circumstance. He later stepped down over the church's handling of allegations of sexual abuse of boys, for which he apologised before the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in 2016. In 1961, Lord Dunrossil became the first and, to date, only governor-general to die while holding office.
A vacancy occurs on the resignation, death, or incapacity of the governor-general. A temporary vacancy occurs when the governor-general is overseas on official business representing Australia. A temporary vacancy also occurred in 2003 when Peter Hollingworth stood aside.
Section 4 of the Constitution allows the monarch to appoint an administrator to carry out the role of governor-general when there is a vacancy. By convention, the longest-serving state governor holds a dormant commission, allowing an assumption of office to commence whenever a vacancy occurs. In 1975, Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam advised the Queen that Sir Colin Hannah, then governor of Queensland, should have his dormant commission revoked for having made public and partisan anti-Whitlam government political statements, in violation of the convention that state governors and federal governors-general remain neutral and above politics."
Governor-General of Australia,"Dismissal
A governor-general may be recalled or dismissed by the monarch before their term is complete. By convention, this may only be upon advice from the prime minister, who retains responsibility for selecting an immediate replacement or letting the vacancy provisions take effect. The constitutional crisis of 1975 raised the possibility of the prime minister and the governor-general attempting to dismiss each other at the same time. According to William McMahon, Harold Holt considered having Lord Casey dismissed from the governor-generalship, and went as far as to have the necessary documents drawn up. Casey had twice called McMahon into Yarralumla to give him a ""dressing down"" over his poor relationship with deputy prime minister John McEwen, which he believed was affecting the government. Holt believed that this was an improper use of his authority, but no further action was taken."
Governor-General of Australia,"Constitutional role
The governor-general has a key role in performing constitutional duties in all branches of government."
Governor-General of Australia,"Role in the Australian Parliament
The Constitution defines the Parliament of the Commonwealth as consisting of the monarch, the Senate and the House of Representatives. However, the monarch's role is no more than titular, with the governor-general responsible under the Constitution for most of the functions undertaken by the monarch in regard to the UK parliament. These include the power to summon, dissolve and prorogue the Parliament, to issue writs for lower house elections, to convene a joint sitting, as well as the power to give royal assent to bills in the monarch's name. 
The governor-general also has a ceremonial role in swearing in and accepting the resignations of members of Parliament. All members must make an oath or affirmation of allegiance to the King in the presence of the governor-general or someone appointed by them before they take their seats. On the day parliament opens, the governor-general makes a speech in the Senate (similar to the King's Speech in the UK), entirely written by the government, explaining the government's proposed legislative program.
One of the most significant powers of the governor-general is the power to grant royal assent in the King's name. This assent gives bills that have been passed by the houses of parliament the force of law, with effect either 28 days after being signed, on a date to be fixed later by proclamation or otherwise as provided in the act. The government does not formally advise the governor-general to grant assent, but it is expected that they will act in accordance with the democratically elected houses of Parliament and assent has never been refused.
Apart from assenting to a bill, the governor-general can also reserve a bill for the King's pleasure, that is allow the monarch to give royal assent personally to a proposed bill. When the governor-general acted as a representative of the British government, this provision allowed for the governor-general to refer a bill back to the British government for review, which would then advise the monarch whether or not to grant assent. The British government could also advise the monarch to disallow a law passed within the last two years, which would annul the law on the governor-general's proclamation or message to the houses. However, since the assumption of full sovereignty and the emergence of an independent Crown of Australia, the British government no longer has these powers and the reservation power has only occasionally been used for bills that affect the monarch personally, such as the Royal Styles and Titles Act (1953 and 1973) and other bills of national significance such as the Flags Act 1953 and the Australia Act 1986.
Finally, the governor-general can refer a bill back to the houses with suggested changes. This has only happened when once passed, the government has realised a bill requires further amendment and requests the governor-general return the bill to the house."
Governor-General of Australia,"Role in executive government
Under the Constitution, the executive power of the Commonwealth is vested in the monarch, but is exercisable by the governor-general. However, such power is only exercised on the advice of ministers in accordance with the principles of responsible government. This occurs formally through the Federal Executive Council, a body of all current (and technically former) ministers that advises the governor-general. Such advice is generally the result of decisions already made in Cabinet, the de facto highest executive body in Australia. While some provisions in the Constitution refer the ""Governor-General"" and others to the ""Governor-General in Council"", this does not mean that there is in element of discretion in the former; this distinction merely indicates that that the former powers were those that were historically classified as belonging to the prerogative of the monarch alone.
Many executive powers are also bestowed on the governor-general by statute. This allows the government of the day (acting through the governor-general) to perform certain acts that would otherwise require legislation. Such provision are often made where legislating may be too slow, as for the declaration of emergencies. An example this was the declaration on the advice of the health minister of a human biosecurity emergency under the Biosecurity Act 2015 in March 2020, due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Formally, the governor-general may exercise the traditional rights of the monarch as identified by Bagehot: the right to be consulted, to encourage and to warn. However, the practical ability to exercise this right is limited. Unlike in Canada or the UK, there is no tradition of regular weekly meetings between the governor-general and the prime minister, with meetings instead sporadically held at the request or either party. There is a greater capacity to exercise influence at the regular meetings of the Federal Executive Council at Government House; however this requires the governor-general to have existing legal experience due to the volume of material, the lack of any requirement for executive-councillors to be briefed or otherwise senior in the government, and the expectation by some governments that the governor-general should only act as a rubber stamp."
Governor-General of Australia,"Reserve powers
The reserve powers are those powers that the governor-general may exercise independently, that is in the absence of or against ministerial advice. While most of these powers are listed in the Constitution, the circumstances in which they can be used with discretion is not prescribed and is a matter of convention.
The reserve powers that are generally accepted are:"
Governor-General of Australia,"the discretion to select a prime minister if an election results in a parliament in which no party or coalition has a clear majority
the power to dismiss a prime minister that has lost the support of the House of Representatives
the power to refuse to dissolve the House of Representatives
The reserve powers that are the subject of greater debate are:"
Governor-General of Australia,"the power to refuse a double-dissolution
the discretion to select a prime minister following the dismissal of a prime minister that has lost the support of the House of Representatives
the power to dismiss a prime minister who is unable to obtain supply and refuses to resign or advise a dissolution
the power to dismiss a prime minister that has broken the law
the power to refuse royal assent
The most prominent use of the reserve powers occurred in the course of the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis, in which governor-general Sir John Kerr dismissed the government of Gough Whitlam and appointed opposition leader Malcolm Fraser as a caretaker prime minister while an election was held. Kerr acted following the blocking of supply by the opposition controlled Senate, arguing that this gave him both the right and duty to dismiss the government when they did not resign or advise an election. The event remains one of the most highly debated and controversial in Australian political history."
Governor-General of Australia,"Ceremonial role
In addition to the formal constitutional role, the governor-general has a representative and ceremonial role, though the extent and nature of that role has depended on the expectations of the time, the individual in office at the time, the wishes of the incumbent government, and the individual's reputation in the wider community. Governors-general generally become patrons of various charitable institutions, present honours and awards, host functions for various groups of people including ambassadors to and from other countries, and travel widely throughout Australia. Sir William Deane (governor-general 1996–2001) described one of his functions as being ""Chief Mourner"" at prominent funerals. In Commentaries on the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia, Garran noted that, since the Australian executive is national in nature (being dependent on the nationally elected House of Representatives, rather than the Senate), ""the Governor-General, as the official head of the Executive, does not in the smallest degree represent any federal element; if he represents anything he is the image and embodiment of national unity and the outward and visible representation of the Imperial relationship of the Commonwealth"".
That role can become controversial, however, if the governor-general becomes unpopular with sections of the community. The public role adopted by Sir John Kerr was curtailed considerably after the constitutional crisis of 1975; Sir William Deane's public statements on political issues produced some hostility towards him; and some charities disassociated themselves from Peter Hollingworth after the issue of his management of sex abuse cases during his time as Anglican archbishop of Brisbane became a matter of controversy."
Governor-General of Australia,"Diplomatic role
The governor-general makes state visits overseas on behalf of Australia, during which an administrator of the government is appointed. The right of governors-general to make state visits was confirmed at the 1926 Imperial Conference, as it was deemed not feasible for the sovereign to pay state visits on behalf of countries other than the United Kingdom. However, an Australian governor-general did not exercise that right until 1971, when Paul Hasluck visited New Zealand. Hasluck's successor John Kerr made state visits to eight countries, but Kerr's successor Zelman Cowen made only a single state visit – to Papua New Guinea – as he wished to concentrate on travelling within Australia. All subsequent governors-general have travelled widely while in office and made multiple state visits. Occasionally governors-general have made extended tours visiting multiple countries, notably in 2009 when Quentin Bryce visited nine African countries in 19 days.
The governor-general accredits (i.e. formally validates) Australia's ambassadors through sending a formal letter of credence (and a letter of recall at the end of a tenure) to heads of state and government and similarly formally receives foreign letters during credentials ceremonies for heads of mission on their arrival in Canberra. Before 1987, ambassador and high commisioner appointments were formally made by the monarch instead."
Governor-General of Australia,"Military role
Under section 68 of the Constitution, the command-in-chief of Australia's military forces is ""vested in the Governor‑General as the Queen's representative"". Views on the effect of this section vary, from merely making the governor-general ""in effect no more than a glorified Patron of the Defence Forces"" to alternatively making the governor-general the ultimate head of military chain of command who may influence or deny the use of the military if it is to be used for domestic political ends. Ex-governor-general Sir Ninian Stephen stated that his view of the section was that it vests command of the military in the governor-general personally, but only to the extent that the power to give orders or call out the military does not require formal advice from the Federal Executive Council but instead the direct advice of the relevant minister. Other powers exist in the Defence Force Act 1903, such as the power to appoint the chief of the Defence Force, to call out the Defence Force, and declare a time of war, exercised as ordinary executive powers on advice. Additionally, all officers are appointed by the governor-general on behalf of the monarch with a personally signed commission.
In World War II, there was some ambiguity about whether the governor-general had the power to declare war, with it initially assumed by Robert Menzies that the declaration of war by the United Kingdom automatically applied to Australia as well as a part of the British Empire. However, in 1941 opinion had shifted and the Curtin government advised the governor-general to declare war on several Axis powers. However, it was still unclear whether the governor-general had the constitutional power to declare war, so in addition to requesting the assignment of powers by the monarch to the governor-general, the government also requested King George V make similar proclamations of war on Australia's behalf. No formal declarations of war have been made since World War II, although other declarations on the start and end of time of ""active service"" have been made in other conflicts.
The powers of command-in-chief are vested in the governor-general rather than the ""Governor-General in Council"", however this does not denote an element of personal discretion in their exercise. However, in 1970 governor-general Paul Hasluck refused prime minister John Gorton's request to authorise a Pacific Islands Regiment peacekeeping mission in the Territory of Papua and New Guinea, on the grounds that cabinet had not been consulted. Gorton agreed to put the matter to his ministers, and a cabinet meeting agreed that troops should only be called out if requested by the territory's administrator; this did not occur. Defence minister Malcolm Fraser, who opposed the call out, was responsible for informing Hasluck of the prime minister's lack of consultation. The incident contributed to Fraser's resignation from cabinet in 1971 and Gorton's subsequent loss of the prime ministership."
Governor-General of Australia,"Community role
The governor-general is generally invited to become patron of various charitable and service organisations. Historically the governor-general has also served as Chief Scout of Australia. The chief scout is nominated by the Scouting Association's National Executive Committee and is invited by the president of the Scout Association to accept the appointment. Bill Hayden declined the office on the grounds of his atheism, which was incompatible with the Scout Promise. He did however serve as the association's patron during his term of office."
Governor-General of Australia,"Relationship with the monarch
While the governor-general is the monarch's representative, as provided by section 2 of the Constitution, the powers they exercise are solely granted by the Constitution. This was not always seen to be the case however, with section 2 also providing that the governor-general may exercise other powers, subject to the Constitution, that the monarch may assign them. Additionally, the initial letters patent of Queen Victoria purported to create and empower the office of governor-general, despite their assignment already in the Constitution. This was raised as early as 1901, by Quick and Garran in their authoritative commentary of the Constitution, noting that the governor-general of Australia was distinguished from other imperial governors-general by the fact that ""[t]he principal and most important of his powers and functions, legislative as well as executive, are expressly conferred on him by the terms of the Constitution itself ... not by Royal authority, but by statutory authority"". This view was also held by Andrew Inglis Clark, senior judge of the Supreme Court of Tasmania, who with W. Harrison Moore (a contributor to the first draft of the constitution put before the 1897 Adelaide Convention and professor of law at the University of Melbourne), postulating that the letters patent and the royal instructions issued by Queen Victoria were unnecessary ""or even of doubtful legality"".
Additionally, it was also previously believed that the monarch retained certain powers, such as the power to declare war, appoint diplomatic officers and to grant charters of incorporation and as such these powers were assigned separately to the governor-general under section 2. However, the current interpretation of the Constitution is that all royal prerogatives are exercisable by the governor-general under section 61 and in recognition of this, the vesting of additional powers ended in 1987. While separate letters-patent still exist for the governor-general, these merely provide for the appointment of administrator in the case of the governor-general's absence or incapacity and requires the governor-general to make an oath or affirmation of allegiance and one of office.
Certain provisions in the Constitution provide that the governor-general, specifically as the monarch's representative, is vested with the command in chief of the military and is able to exercise the executive power of the federal government.
Australian solicitor-general Maurice Byers stated in 1974: ""The constitutional prescription is that executive power is exercisable by the governor-general although vested in the Queen. What is exercisable is original executive power: that is, the very thing vested in the Queen by section 61. And it is exercisable by the Queen's representative, not her delegate or agent.""
The 1988 Constitutional Commission report explained: ""the governor-general is in no sense a delegate of the Queen. The independence of the office is highlighted by changes which have been made in recent years to the Royal Instruments relating to it"". The changes occurred in 1984 when Queen Victoria's letters patent and instructions were revoked and replaced with new letters patent, on prime minister Bob Hawke's advice, who stated that this would clarify the governor-general's position under the constitution.
This remains the case even when the sovereign is in the country: solicitor-general Kenneth Bailey, prior to the first tour of Australia by its reigning monarch in 1954, explained the position by saying: "
Governor-General of Australia,"the Constitution expressly vests in the Governor-General the power or duty to perform a number of the Crown's functions in the Legislature and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth ... The executive power of the Commonwealth, by section 61 of the Constitution, is declared to be vested in the Queen. It is also, in the same section, declared to be ""exercisable"" by the Governor-General as the Queen's representative. In the face of this provision, I feel it is difficult to contend that the Queen, even though present in Australia, may exercise in person functions of executive government which are specifically assigned by the constitution to the Governor-General.The monarch did not overturn the actions of governor-general Sir John Kerr in his dismissal of the prime ministership and government of Gough Whitlam during the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis, with the Queen's private secretary arguing that the power to commission the prime minister was ""clearly placed within the jurisdiction of the governor-general, and The Queen has no part in the decisions which the Governor-General must take in accordance with the Constitution"". In an address to the Sydney Institute, January 2007, in connection with that event, Sir David Smith, a retired official secretary to the governor-general of Australia who had been Kerr's official secretary in 1975, described the constitution as conferring the powers and functions of Australia's head of state on the governor-general in ""his own right"". He stated that the governor-general was more than a representative of the sovereign, explaining: ""under section 2 of the Constitution the Governor-General is the Queen's representative and exercises certain royal prerogative powers and functions; under section 61 of the Constitution the Governor-General is the holder of a quite separate and independent office created, not by the Crown, but by the Constitution, and empowered to exercise, in his own right as Governor-General ... all the powers and functions of Australia's head of state""."
Governor-General of Australia,"Privileges
Governors-general are entitled to various privileges by virtue of holding the office. These include the right to live in Government House (also known as Yarralumla), or Admiralty House, Sydney the two official residences of the office-holder. For transportation, the governor-general has access to a Rolls-Royce Phantom VI limousine for ceremonial occasions or an armoured BMW 7 Series for ordinary official business. These cars fly the flag of the governor-general of Australia and display St. Edward's Crown instead of number plates. Originally, two Phantoms were available after being purchased in the 1970s to be used for royal tours. One of these cars was sold in 1995 to a Sydney doctor, having previously carried the Queen during a royal tour and later being pelted with eggs when it carried Sir John Kerr following the Dismissal in 1975. The car was then entered into the almost 15,000 km long Peking to Paris rally, where it became known as ""Lizzie's Taxi"" and secured fourth place. The car is now owned by Lindsay Fox and is often on display as a part of the Fox Classic Car Collection at Queens Warehouse, Melbourne."
Governor-General of Australia,"Salary
The salary of the governor-general was initially set by the Constitution, which fixed an annual amount of A£10,000 until the parliament decided otherwise. The Constitution also provides that the salary of the governor-general cannot be changed during their term of office. Their pay is now set by Governor-General Act 1974, which has been amended on each new commission to set the governor-general's salary to an amount slightly higher than the average salary of the chief justice of the High Court over the next five years. Since 1995, this has been reduced to take into account any existing pension the incoming governor-general currently receives. This provision led to the salary increase of current governor-general Samantha Mostyn (of $495,000 to $709,017) being significantly greater than other new governors-general, as unlike previous governor-general David Hurley, she does not  receive a military pension.
The governor-general also receive a generous pension. Until 2001, governors-general did not pay income tax on their salary; this was changed after Elizabeth II agreed to pay tax."
Governor-General of Australia,"Official dress
Governors-general before the 1970s wore traditional court uniforms, consisting of a dark navy wool double-breasted coatee with silver oak leaf and fern embroidery on the collar and cuffs trimmed with silver buttons embossed with the Royal Arms and with bullion edged epaulettes on the shoulders, dark navy trousers with a wide band of silver oak-leaf braid down the outside seam, silver sword belt with ceremonial sword, bicorne cocked hat with plume of ostrich feathers, black patent leather Wellington boots with spurs, etc., that is worn on ceremonial occasions. There is also a tropical version made of white tropical wool cut in a typical military fashion worn with a plumed helmet. However, that custom fell into disuse during the tenure of Sir Paul Hasluck with governors-general now observing informal wear day-to-day. Tasmanian governor Sir Stanley Burbury extensively lobbied his government in an attempt to regain the right to wear a uniform, going as far to contact Sir John Kerr in desparation, hoping he could contact the Palace directly. However, it does not appear that he was successful."
Governor-General of Australia,"Titles and honours
Governors-general have during their tenure the style His/Her Excellency the Honourable and their spouses have the style His/Her Excellency. Since May 2013, the style used by a former governor-general is the Honourable; it was at the same time retrospectively granted for life to all previous holders of the office.
From the creation of the Order of Australia in 1975, the governor-general was, ex officio, Chancellor and Principal Companion of the order, and therefore became entitled to the post-nominal AC. In 1976, the letters patent for the order were amended to introduce the rank of Knight and Dame to the order, and from that time the governor-general became, ex officio, the Chancellor and Principal Knight of the order. In 1986 the letters patent were amended again, and governors-general appointed from that time were again, ex officio, entitled to the post-nominal AC (although if they already held a knighthood in the order that superior rank was retained).
Until 1989, all governors-general were members of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom and thus held the additional style The Right Honourable for life. The same individuals were also usually either peers, knights, or both (the only Australian peer to be appointed as governor-general was the Lord Casey; and Sir William McKell was knighted only in 1951, some years into his term, but he was entitled to the style The Honourable during his tenure as premier of New South Wales, an office he held until almost immediately before his appointment). In 1989, Bill Hayden, a republican, declined appointment to the British Privy Council and any imperial honours. From that time until 2014, governors-general did not receive automatic titles or honours, other than the post-nominal AC by virtue of being Chancellor and Principal Companion of the Order of Australia. Quentin Bryce was the first governor-general to have had no prior title or pre-nominal style. She was in office when, on 19 March 2014, then prime minister Tony Abbott advised the Queen to amend the letters patent of the Order of Australia to reinstate knighthoods into the Order, with the governor-general becoming the Principal Knight or Dame of the order. However, in 2015 knighthoods were once again abolished by new prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, with all subsequent governors-general appointed as Companions.
Spouses of governors-general have no official duties but carry out the role of a vice-regal consort. They are entitled to the courtesy style Her Excellency or His Excellency during the office-holder's term of office. Most spouses of governors-general have been content to be quietly supportive. Some, however, have been notable in their own right, such as Dame Alexandra Hasluck, Lady Casey and Michael Bryce."
Governor-General of Australia,"History
Other offices named governor-general were previously used in Australia in the mid-19th century. Sir Charles FitzRoy (governor of New South Wales from 1846 to 1855) and Sir William Denison (governor of New South Wales from 1855 to 1861) also carried the additional title of governor-general because their jurisdiction extended to other colonies in Australia."
Governor-General of Australia,"The office of governor-general of Australia was conceived during the debates and conventions leading up to federation. The first governor-general, the Earl of Hopetoun, was a previous governor of Victoria. He was selected in July 1900, returning to Australia shortly before the inauguration of the Commonwealth of Australia on 1 January 1901. After the initial confusion of the Hopetoun Blunder, he appointed the first prime minister of Australia, Edmund Barton, to a caretaker government, with the inaugural 1901 federal election not occurring until March.
Early governors-general were British and were appointed by the queen or king on the recommendation of the Colonial Office. The Australian Government was merely asked, as a matter of courtesy, whether they approved of the choice or not. Governors-general were expected to exercise a supervisory role over the Australian Government in the manner of a colonial governor. In a very real sense, they represented the British Government. They had the right to reserve legislation passed by the Parliament of Australia: in effect, to ask the Colonial Office in London for an opinion before giving the royal assent. They exercised this power several times. The monarch, acting upon advice of the British Government, could also disallow any Australian legislation up to a year after the governor-general had given it the assent; although this power has never been used. These powers remain in section 59 of the Constitution of Australia, but today are regarded as dead letters.
The early governors-general frequently sought advice on the exercise of their powers from judges of the High Court of Australia, Sir Samuel Griffith and Sir Edmund Barton.
In 1919, prime minister Billy Hughes sent a memorandum to the Colonial Office in which he requested ""a real and effective voice in the selection of the King's representative"". He further proposed that the Dominions be able to nominate their own candidates and that ""the field of selection should not exclude citizens of the Dominion itself"". The memorandum met with strong opposition within the Colonial Office and was dismissed by Lord Milner, the Colonial Secretary; no response was given. The following year, as Ronald Munro Ferguson's term was about to expire, Hughes cabled the Colonial Office and asked that the appointment be made in accordance with the memorandum. To mollify Hughes, Milner offered him a choice between three candidates. After consulting his cabinet he chose Henry Forster, 1st Baron Forster. In 1925, under prime minister Stanley Bruce, the same practice was followed for the appointment of Forster's successor Lord Stonehaven, with the Australian government publicly stating that his name ""had been submitted, with others, to the Commonwealth ministry, who had selected him"".
During the 1920s, the importance of the position declined. As a result of decisions made at the 1926 Imperial Conference, the governor-general ceased to represent the British Government diplomatically, and the British right of supervision over Australian affairs was abolished. As a result of the Balfour Declaration of 1926, which declared that the UK and the Dominions to be ""autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another"", the declaration further stated:"
Governor-General of Australia,"the Governor-General of a Dominion is the representative of the Crown, holding in all essential respects the same position in relation to the administration of public affairs in the Dominion as is held by His Majesty the King in Great Britain, and that he is not the representative or agent of His Majesty's Government in Great Britain or of any Department of that Government.
However, it remained unclear just whose prerogative it now became to decide who new governors-general would be. In 1930, King George V and the Australian prime minister James Scullin discussed the appointment of a new governor-general to replace Lord Stonehaven, whose term was coming to an end. The King maintained that it was now his sole prerogative to choose a governor-general, and he wanted Field-Marshal Sir William Birdwood for the Australian post. Scullin recommended the Australian jurist Sir Isaac Isaacs, and he insisted that George V act on the advice of his Australian prime minister in this matter. Scullin was partially influenced by the precedent set by the Government of the Irish Free State, which always insisted upon having an Irishman as the governor-general of the Irish Free State.
Scullin's proposed appointment of Sir Isaac Isaacs was fiercely opposed by the British government. This was not because of any lack of regard for Isaacs personally, but because the British government considered that the choice of governors-general was, since the 1926 Imperial Conference, a matter for the monarch's decision alone. (However, it became very clear in a conversation between Scullin and King George V's private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, on 11 November 1930, that this was merely the official reason for the objection, with the real reason being that an Australian, no matter how highly regarded personally, was not considered appropriate to be a governor-general.) Scullin was equally insistent that the monarch must act on the relevant prime minister's direct advice (the practice until 1926 was that Dominion prime ministers advised the monarch indirectly, through the British government, which effectively had a veto over any proposal it did not agree with). Scullin cited the precedents of the prime minister of South Africa, J. B. M. Hertzog, who had recently insisted on his choice of the Earl of Clarendon as governor-general of that country, and the selection of an Irishman as governor-general of the Irish Free State. Both of these appointments had been agreed to despite British government objections.
Despite these precedents, George V remained reluctant to accept Scullin's recommendation of Isaacs and asked him to consider Field Marshal Sir William Birdwood. However, Scullin stood firm, saying he would be prepared to fight a general election on the issue of whether an Australian should be prevented from becoming governor-general because he was Australian. On 29 November, the King agreed to Isaacs's appointment, but made it clear that he did so only because he felt he had no option. Lord Stamfordham had complained that Scullin had ""put a gun to the King's head"".
The usual wording of official announcements of this nature read ""The King has been pleased to appoint ..."", but on this occasion the announcement said merely ""The King has appointed ..."", and his private secretary (Lord Stamfordham) asked the Australian solicitor-general, Sir Robert Garran, to make sure that Scullin was aware of the exact wording. The opposition Nationalist Party of Australia denounced the appointment as ""practically republican"", but Scullin had set a precedent. The convention gradually became established throughout the British Commonwealth that the governor-general is a citizen of the country concerned, and is appointed on the advice of the government of that country.
At the same time as the appointment of Isaacs as the first Australian-born governor-general, a separate role of British Representative in Australia (as the representative of the British government) was established, with Ernest Crutchley the first appointee. 1935 saw the appointment of the first British High Commissioner to Australia, Geoffrey Whiskard (in office 1936–1941).
This right not only to advise the monarch directly, but also to expect that advice to be accepted, was soon taken up by all the other Dominion prime ministers. This, among other things, led to the Statute of Westminster 1931 and to the formal separation of the Crowns of the Dominions.
After Scullin's defeat in 1931, non-Labor governments continued to recommend British people for appointment as governor-general, but such appointments remained solely a matter between the Australian government and the monarch. In 1947, Labor appointed a second Australian governor-general, William McKell, who was in office as the Labor premier of New South Wales. The then leader of the Opposition, Robert Menzies, called McKell's appointment ""shocking and humiliating"".
In 1965 the Menzies conservative government appointed an Australian, Lord Casey, and thereafter only Australians have held the position. However, when the Palace Papers were released in 2020, it was revealed that the Fraser government in 1976 considered it ""highly desirable"" that Prince Charles become governor-general; however the Queen strongly indicated her disapproval of her son taking up the role until ""such time as he has a settled married life"". Additionally, in 2007 media outlets reported that Prince William might become governor-general of Australia. However, both the prime minister, John Howard, and Clarence House repudiated the suggestion."
Governor-General of Australia,"Backgrounds of governors-general
All the governors-general until 1965 were British-born, except for Australian-born Sir Isaac Isaacs (1931–1936) and Sir William McKell (1947–1953). They included six barons, two viscounts, two earls, and one prince. There have been only Australian occupants since then, although Sir Ninian Stephen (1982–1989) had been born in Britain. Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, was a senior member of the royal family. Dame Quentin Bryce (2008–2014) was the first woman to be appointed to the office. Sir Isaac Isaacs and Sir Zelman Cowen were Jewish; Bill Hayden was an avowed atheist during his term and he made an affirmation rather than swear an oath at the beginning of his commission; the remaining governors-general have been Christian.
Various governors-general had previously served as governors of an Australian state or colony: Lord Hopetoun (Victoria 1889–1895); Lord Tennyson (South Australia 1899–1902); Lord Gowrie (South Australia 1928–34; and New South Wales 1935–1936); major general Michael Jeffery (Western Australia 1993–2000); Dame Quentin Bryce (Queensland 2003–2008); general David Hurley (New South Wales 2014–2019). Sir Ronald Munro Ferguson had been offered the governorship of South Australia in 1895 and of Victoria in 1910, but refused both appointments. Lord Northcote was governor of Bombay. Lord Casey was governor of Bengal in between his periods of service to the Commonwealth Parliament.
Former leading politicians and members of the judiciary have figured prominently. Lord Dudley was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (1902–1905). Lord Stonehaven (as John Baird) was minister for Transport in the cabinets of Bonar Law and Stanley Baldwin; and after his return to Britain he became chairman of the UK Conservative Party. Sir Isaac Isaacs was successively Commonwealth attorney-general, a High Court judge, and chief justice. Sir William McKell was premier of New South Wales. Lord Dunrossil (as William Morrison) was Speaker of the UK House of Commons. Lord De L'Isle was secretary of State for Air in Winston Churchill's cabinet from 1951 to 1955. More recent governors-general in this category include Lord Casey, Sir Paul Hasluck, Sir John Kerr, Sir Ninian Stephen, Bill Hayden and Sir William Deane.
Of the eleven Australians appointed governor-general since 1965, Lord Casey, Sir Paul Hasluck and Bill Hayden were former federal parliamentarians; Sir John Kerr was the chief justice of the Supreme Court of New South Wales; Sir Ninian Stephen and Sir William Deane were appointed from the bench of the High Court; Sir Zelman Cowen was a vice-chancellor of the University of Queensland and constitutional lawyer; Peter Hollingworth was the Anglican Archbishop of Brisbane; and major-general Michael Jeffery was a retired military officer and former governor of Western Australia. Quentin Bryce's appointment was announced during her term as governor of Queensland; she had previously been the Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner. General David Hurley was a retired chief of Defence Force and former governor of New South Wales.
Significant post-retirement activities of earlier governors-general have included: Lord Tennyson was appointed deputy governor of the Isle of Wight; Sir Ronald Munro Ferguson (by now Lord Novar) became secretary of State for Scotland; and Lord Gowrie became chairman of the Marylebone Cricket Club (Lord Forster had also held this post, before his appointment as governor-general)."
Governor-General of Australia,"Timeline of governors-general
See also
History of Australia
Constitutional history of Australia
Chapter II of the Constitution of Australia
Governors of the Australian states
Viceregal consort of Australia
Armorial of the governors-general of Australia
British Empire
Royal Australian Air Force VIP aircraft
Governor-general (links to other countries which have governors-general)
Australian VIP transport
Musical composition Earl's March written by Australian author Walter J. Turner in 1889 dedicated to Adrian Hope, while in office."
Governor-General of Australia,"Notes
References
Further reading
Cowen, Sir Zelman (2006). A Public Life: The Memoirs of Zelman Cowen. Melbourne: Miegunyah Press.
Cunneen, Christopher (1983). King's Men: Australia's Governors-General from Hopetoun to Isaacs. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. ISBN 0-86861-238-3.
Gerangelos, George A., ed. (2013). Winterton's Australian Federal Constitutional Law (3 ed.). Pyrmont, NSW: Thomson Reuters. ISBN 978-0-45523-041-2.
Hayden, Bill (1996). Hayden: an Autobiography. Pymble, NSW: Angus & Robertson. ISBN 0-207-18769-X. (pp 515, 519, 548)
Markwell, Donald (1999). ""Griffith, Barton and the Early Governor-Generals: Aspects of Australia's Constitutional Development"". Public Law Review. 10: 280.
Markwell, Donald (2016). Constitutional Conventions and the Headship of State: Australian Experience. Connor Court. ISBN 9781925501155.
Williams, George; Brennan, Sean; Lynch, Andrew (2014). Blackshield and Williams Australian Constitutional Law and Theory (6 ed.). Annandale, NSW: Federation Press. ISBN 978-1-86287-918-8."
Governor-General of Australia,External links
Governor-General of Australia,Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia – Official website
Australian English vocabulary,"Australian English is a major variety of the English language spoken throughout Australia. Most of the vocabulary of Australian English is shared with British English, though there are notable differences. The vocabulary of Australia is drawn from many sources, including various dialects of British English as well as Gaelic languages, some Indigenous Australian languages, and Polynesian languages.
One of the first dictionaries of Australian slang was Karl Lentzner's Dictionary of the Slang-English of Australia and of Some Mixed Languages in 1892. The first dictionary based on historical principles that covered Australian English was E. E. Morris's Austral English: A Dictionary of Australasian Words, Phrases and Usages (1898). In 1981, the more comprehensive Macquarie Dictionary of Australian English was published. Oxford University Press published the Australian Oxford Dictionary in 1999, in concert with the Australian National University. Oxford University Press also published The Australian National Dictionary.
Broad and colourful Australian English has been popularised over the years by 'larrikin' characters created by Australian performers such as Chips Rafferty, John Meillon, Paul Hogan, Barry Humphries, Greig Pickhaver and John Doyle, Michael Caton, Steve Irwin, Jane Turner and Gina Riley.  It has been claimed that, in recent times, the popularity of the Barry McKenzie character, played on screen by Barry Crocker, and in particular of the soap opera Neighbours, led to a ""huge shift in the attitude towards Australian English in the UK"", with such phrases as ""chunder"", ""liquid laugh"" and ""technicolour yawn"" all becoming well known as a result."
Australian English vocabulary,"Words of Australian origin
The origins of some of the words are disputed."
Australian English vocabulary,"Battler – a person with few natural advantages, who works doggedly and with little reward, who struggles for a livelihood and who displays courage. The first citation for this comes from Henry Lawson in While the Billy Boils (1896): ""I sat on him pretty hard for his pretensions, and paid him out for all the patronage he'd worked off on me... and told him never to pretend to me again he was a battler"".
Bludger – a person who avoids working, or doing their share of work, a loafer, scrounger, a hanger-on, one who does not pull his weight; originally, a pimp.
Bogan – an Australian term for describing someone who may be a yobbo (redneck). The major difference between the two is that yobbo tends to be used as a noun, whereas bogan can also be used adjectivally to describe objects pertaining to people who are bogans. Regional variations include ""Bevan"" in and around Brisbane, and ""Boonah"" around Canberra. It's usually an uncultured person with vulgar behavior, speech, clothing, etc. 
Cooker – a derogatory term for conspiracy theorist; according to the National Dictionary Centre, ""a derogatory term for a person involved in protests against vaccine mandates, lockdowns and a range of other issues perceived to be infringing on personal freedom"". Emerging during the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia, the word made the shortlist for ""Word of the Year"" in 2022. The term is also loosely associated with the far right. An explanation of the term given by an Australian in answer to a question on Twitter is that ""It refers to soneone(sic) whose brain has been cooked by overexposure to conspiracy theories and unhinged online rhetoric"".
Didgeridoo is a wind instrument that was originally found only in Arnhem Land in northern Australia. It is a long, wooden, tubular instrument that produces a low-pitched, resonant sound with complex, rhythmic patterns but little tonal variation.
Digger – an Australian soldier. The term was applied during the First World War to Australian and New Zealand soldiers because so much of their time was spent digging trenches. An earlier Australian sense of digger was ""a miner digging for gold"". Billy Hughes, prime minister during the First World War, was known as the Little Digger. First recorded in this sense 1916.
Dinkum or fair dinkum – ""true"", ""the truth"", ""speaking the truth"", ""authentic"" and related meanings, depending on context and inflection. The Evening News (Sydney, NSW) 23 August 1879 has one of the earliest references to fair dinkum. It originated with a now-extinct dialect word from the East Midlands in England, where dinkum (or dincum) meant ""hard work"" or ""fair work"", which was also the original meaning in Australian English.
Dunny – a privy, toilet or lavatory (from British dunnekin). To many Australians ""bathroom"" is a room with a bath or shower.
Fair go – a reasonable chance, a fair deal. Australia often sees itself as an egalitarian society, the land of the fair go, where all citizens have a right to fair treatment.
Jackaroo – a type of agricultural worker.
Nasho (plural nashos) – a person undergoing National Service, mandatory military service in Australia. The word is often used for Vietnam War soldiers when conscription became controversial. Since that time, conscription has not been implemented in Australia.
Nork – a female breast (usually in plural); etymology disputed, but has been linked to Norco, a NSW milk company.
Outback – a ""remote, sparsely-populated area""."
Australian English vocabulary,"Words of Australian Aboriginal origin
Some elements of Aboriginal languages have been incorporated into Australian English, mainly as names for flora and fauna (for example koala, dingo, kangaroo).
Some examples are cooee and yakka. The former is a high-pitched call () which travels long distances and is used to attract attention, which has been derived from Dharug, an Aboriginal language spoken in the Sydney region. Cooee has also become a notional distance: if he's within cooee, we'll spot him. Yakka means work, strenuous labour, and comes from 'yaga' meaning 'work' in the Yagara indigenous language of the Brisbane region. Yakka found its way into nineteenth-century Australian pidgin, and then passed into Australian English. First recorded 1847.
Boomerang is an Australian word which has moved into International English. It was also borrowed from Dharug."
Australian English vocabulary,"Words of British, Irish or American origin
Many such words, phrases or usages originated with British and Irish settlers to Australia from the 1780s until the present. For example: a creek in Australia (as in North America), is any ""stream or small river"", whereas in England it is a small watercourse flowing into the sea; paddock is the Australian word for ""field"", while in England it is a small enclosure for livestock. Bush (as in North America) or scrub means ""wooded areas"" or ""country areas in general"" in Australia, while in England they are commonly used only in proper names (such as Shepherd's Bush and Wormwood Scrubs). Australian English and several British English dialects (e.g., Cockney, Scouse, Geordie) use the word mate to mean a friend, rather than the conventional meaning of ""a spouse"", although this usage has also become common in some other varieties of English."
Australian English vocabulary,"Billy – a tin or enamel cooking pot with a lid and wire handle, used outdoors, especially for making tea. It comes from the Scottish dialect word billy meaning ""cooking utensil"".
Fair dinkum – reliable; genuine; honest; true, comes from British dialect. The phrase is recorded in a north Lincolnshire dialect for the first time meaning ""fair play"" or ""fair dealing"", although ""dinkum"" on its own had been used in Derbyshire and Lincolnshire, meaning ""work"" or ""punishment"". ""Fair dinkum"" was first used in England in 1881, and is the equivalent of West Yorkshire ""fair doos"". The word ""dinkum"" is first recorded in Australia in the 1890s.
G'day – a greeting, meaning ""good day"".
Manchester (frequently lower-case) – household linen (sheets, pillow cases etc.), as in ""manchester department"" of a department store. From ""Manchester wares"" with exactly the same meaning.
Sheila – slang for ""woman"", derived from the feminine Irish given name Síle (pronounced [ˈʃiːlʲə]), commonly anglicised Sheila).
Yobbo – an Australian variation on the UK slang yob, meaning someone who is loud, rude and obnoxious, behaves badly, anti-social, and frequently drunk (and prefixed by ""drunken"")."
Australian English vocabulary,"Rhyming slang
Rhyming slang is more common in older generations though modern examples exist amongst some social groupings.  It is similar, and in some cases identical, to Cockney rhyming slang, for example plates (of meat) for ""feet"" and china (plate) for ""mate"". Some specifically Australian examples are dead horse for ""sauce"", Jack Holt for ""salt"" (one famous Jack Holt was a horse trainer, another a boxing promoter), Barry Crocker for ""shocker"" (Crocker is a well-known entertainer). as well as  do a Harold Holt meaning ""to do a bolt"" (Harold Holt being a former Prime Minister who disappeared whilst swimming at sea, giving a double meaning to the term). Chunder for ""vomit"" most likely comes from Chunder Loo = ""spew"" (""Chunder Loo of Akim Foo"" was a Norman Lindsay character; ""spew"" is synonym for ""vomit""). See."
Australian English vocabulary,"Diminutives and abbreviations
Australian English vocabulary draws heavily on diminutives and abbreviations. These may be confusing to foreign speakers when they are used in everyday conversations.
There are over 5,000 identified diminutives in use. While other English dialects use diminutives in a similar way, none are so prolific or diverse. A large number of these are widely recognised and used by Australian English speakers. However, many are used only by specific demographic groups or in localised areas. Researchers are now beginning to study what psychological motivations cause Australians to abbreviate so many words."
Australian English vocabulary,"Colloquial phrases
Numerous idiomatic phrases occur in Australian usage, some more historical than contemporary in usage.
Send her down, Hughie is an example of surfie slang. Australian Football League spectators use the term ""white maggot"" (derived from their formerly white uniforms) towards umpires at games."
Australian English vocabulary,"Alcohol
Amber is generic term for any beer (lager/stout/ale) in general, but especially cold and on-tap.
Not only has there been a wide variety of measures in which beer is served in pubs in Australia, the names of these glasses differ from one area to another. However, the range of glasses has declined greatly in recent years."
Australian English vocabulary,"Pre-decimal currency
Prior to decimalisation, Australian monetary units closely reflected British usage: four farthings (obsolete by 1945) or two halfpence to a penny; 12 pence to a shilling; 20 shillings to a pound, but terms for the coinage were uniquely Australian, particularly among working-class adult males: ""Brown"": a penny (1d.); ""Tray"": threepence (3d.); ""Zac"": sixpence (6d.); ""Bob"" or ""Deener"": a shilling (1s.); ""Two bob bit"": a florin (2s.)
Slang terms for notes mostly followed British usage: ""Ten bob note"": ten shillings (10s.); ""Quid"" (or ""fiddly did""): pound note (£1); ""Fiver"": five pound note (£5); ""Tenner"" or ""Brick"": ten pound note (£10). Other terms have been recorded but rarely used outside the racetrack.  One confusing matter is that five shillings prior to decimal currency was called a ""Dollar"", in reference to the Spanish Dollar and ""Holey Dollar"" which circulated at a value of five shillings, but the Australian Dollar at the introduction of decimal currency was fixed at 10 shillings."
Australian English vocabulary,"Sport
Football
Australia has four codes of football, rugby league, rugby union, Australian rules football, and Association football. Generally, rugby league is called football in New South Wales and Queensland, while rugby union is called either rugby or union throughout. Both rugby league and rugby union are often collectively referred to as rugby in other states where Australian rules football is called football. Australian rules football is commonly referred to as ""Aussie Rules"" throughout Australia, but may also in Victoria and South Australia be loosely called ""footy"" outside the context of the Australian Football League.
Association football was long known as ""soccer"" in Australia and still persists. In 2005, the governing body changed its name to Football Federation Australia. Association Football in Australia is called ""football'"" only when mentioned in conjunction with a specific league, such as the A-League or Premier League, otherwise ""football"" on its own means either Australian football or rugby on its own depending on the region of Australia."
Australian English vocabulary,"Horse racing
Bookie is, in Australia as elsewhere, a common term for an on-course bookmaker, but ""metallician"" was once a (semi-humorous or mock-intellectual) common synonym."
Australian English vocabulary,"Comparison with other varieties
Where British and American vocabulary differs, Australians sometimes favour a usage different from both varieties, as with footpath (for US sidewalk, UK pavement), capsicum (for US bell pepper, UK green/red pepper), or doona (for US comforter, UK duvet) from a trademarked brand. In other instances, it either shares a term with American English, as with truck (UK: lorry) or eggplant (UK: aubergine), or with British English, as with mobile phone (US: cell phone) or bonnet (US: hood).
Terms shared by British and American English but not so commonly found in Australian English include (Australian usage in bold): abroad (overseas); cooler/ice box (Esky); flip-flops (thongs); pickup truck (ute); wildfire (bushfire).
Australian English is particularly divergent from other varieties with respect to geographical terminology, due to the country's unique geography. This is particularly true when comparing with British English, due to that country's dramatically different geography. British geographical terms not in common use in Australia include (Australian usage in bold): coppice (cleared bushland); dell (valley); fen (swamp); heath (shrubland); meadow (grassy plain); moor (swampland); spinney (shrubland); stream (creek); woods (bush) and village (even the smallest settlements in Australia are called towns or stations).
In addition, a number of words in Australian English have different meanings from those ascribed in other varieties of English. Clothing-related examples are notable. Pants in Australian English follows American usage in reference to British English trousers but in British English refer to Australian English underpants; vest in Australian English pass also in American refers to British English waistcoat but in British English refers to Australian English singlet. Thong in both American and British English refers to underwear (known in Australia as a G-string), while in Australian English it refers to British and American English flip-flop (footwear). There are numerous other examples, including biscuit which refers in Australian and British English to what in American English is cookie or cracker but to a savoury cake in American English (though cookie is often used for American-styled biscuits such as chocolate chip cookies); Asian, which in Australian and American English commonly refers to people of East Asian heritage, as opposed to British English, in which it commonly refers to people of South Asian descent; (potato) chips which refers both to British English crisps (which is not used in Australian English) and to American English French fries (which is used alongside hot chips); and football, which in Australian English refers to Australian rules football, Rugby league or Rugby union – what British refer to as football is referred to as soccer and what Americans term football is referred to as gridiron.
In addition to the large number of uniquely Australian idioms in common use, there are instances of idioms taking differing forms in the various Anglophone nations, for example (Australian usage in bold): Home away from home, take with a grain of salt and wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole (which in British English take the respective forms home from home, take with a pinch of salt and wouldn't touch with a barge pole), or a drop in the ocean and touch wood (which in American English take the forms a drop in the bucket and knock on wood)."
Australian English vocabulary,"British and American English terms not widely used in Australian English
There are extensive terms used in other varieties of English which are not widely used in Australian English. These terms usually do not result in Australian English speakers failing to comprehend speakers of other varieties of English, as Australian English speakers will often be familiar with such terms through exposure to media or may ascertain the meaning using context.
Non-exhaustive selections of British English and American English terms not commonly used in Australian English together with their definitions or Australian English equivalents are found in the collapsible table below:
British English terms not widely used in Australian English"
Australian English vocabulary,American English terms not widely used in Australian English
Australian English vocabulary,"See also
Australian English
Australian comedy
Diminutives in Australian English
List of English words of Australian Aboriginal origin
List of Australian place names of Aboriginal origin
List of Australian plants termed ""native""
Strine
Languages of Australia"
Australian English vocabulary,"Notes
Further reading
Hornadge, Bill.(1989) The Australian slanguage: a look at what we say and how we say it (foreword by Spike Milligan). Richmond, Vic: Mandarin ISBN 1-86330-010-4"
Australian English vocabulary,External links
Australian English vocabulary,"Aussie English, The Illustrated Dictionary of Australian English
Macquarie Dictionary"
Governors of the Australian states,"Each Australian state has a governor to represent Australia's monarch within it. The governors are the nominal chief executives of the states, performing the same constitutional and ceremonial functions at the state level as does the governor-general of Australia at the national or federal level. In practice, with notable exceptions the governors are generally required by convention to act on the advice of the state premiers or the other members of a state's cabinet.
Unlike lieutenant governors in Canada's provinces, Australia's state governors are not subject to the constitutional authority of the governor-general, but are directly responsible to the monarch. This means, for example, that the governor-general may not issue pardons or commutations of sentence for any state offences, or issue any state honours."
Governors of the Australian states,"Origins
The office of governor (""governor in chief"" was an early title) is the oldest constitutional office in Australia. The title was first used with the Governor of New South Wales, and dates back to 1788 to the day on which the area (which is now the city of Sydney) became the first British settlement in Australia. Each of the subsequent five states in Australia was also founded as a British colony, and a governor was appointed by the British government to exercise executive authority over the colony. The first governors of the colonies, and their dates of appointment, are as follows:"
Governors of the Australian states,"New South Wales: Captain Arthur Phillip (7 February 1788)
Western Australia: Captain James Stirling (6 February 1832)
South Australia: Captain John Hindmarsh (28 December 1836)
Tasmania: Sir Henry Fox Young (8 January 1855)
Victoria: Sir Charles Hotham (22 May 1855)
Queensland: Sir George Bowen (10 December 1859)
Only in New South Wales and South Australia was the date of the appointment of the first governor the actual date of the colony's foundation. The settlement which became Queensland was founded in 1824, but was not separated from New South Wales until 1859. In Tasmania, Victoria and Western Australia executive authority was exercised by a Lieutenant-Governor for some years before the first Governor was appointed; Tasmania was founded in 1804, Western Australia in 1828 and Victoria in 1835.
New South Wales and Tasmania (which was known as Van Diemen's Land until 1855) were founded as penal colonies, and their governors (lieutenant-governors in Tasmania) exercised more or less absolute authority. Tasmania in particular was run as a virtual prison camp in its early years. The Governors were also commanders-in-chief, and the troops under their command were the real basis of their authority.
From the 1820s, however, the increasing number of free settlers in the colonies led to a process of constitutional reform which gradually reduced the powers of the governors. New South Wales was given its first legislative body, the New South Wales Legislative Council, in 1825. Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia, which were not founded as penal settlements, moved rapidly towards constitutional government after their establishment."
Governors of the Australian states,"Federation
When the six colonies federated to form the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901, there were some suggestions that the position of state governor should be abolished or that its appointment be made by the Governor-General as was (and still is) done in Canada. However, the states insisted on retaining their separate links to the Crown, a concept that can be compared to the American system of separate sovereignty for state and federal governments. The states were concerned that Commonwealth-appointed governors might be used to do the federal government's bidding, up to and including use of a Governor's reserve powers to dismiss a recalcitrant state government. To ensure that state governments would be free from such extra-constitutional intervention or coercion, state governors continued to be appointed by the monarch on the advice of the Colonial Secretary in London, usually after an informal consultation with the state government.
The post of governor was again called into question during the Depression of the 1930s, when the cost of maintaining six vice-regal establishments (as well as a governor-general in Canberra) drew criticism from the labour movement and others. During this period some states (notably Western Australia) left the position unfilled as an economy measure for some years, and the vice-regal functions were filled by the state chief justices with the title of administrator. But no state attempted to abolish the post of governor, and this could not have been done at this time without the consent of the Crown (acting on the advice of the British government).
The political role of the governor became a matter of controversy in 1932 when the Governor of New South Wales, Sir Philip Game, used his reserve power to dismiss the premier, Jack Lang, on the grounds that Lang was acting illegally. All governors at this time were British, and most were from the upper classes and political conservatives, and Labor governments always suspected that they had an enemy in Government House. Most governors, however, tried to act impartially, and some were genuinely popular.
From the 1940s the states, particularly those with Labor governments, began to appoint Australians to the post of governor. The first Australian governors of each of the states, and their dates of appointment, were:"
Governors of the Australian states,"New South Wales: Sir John Northcott (1 August 1946)
Queensland: Sir John Lavarack (1 October 1946)
Western Australia: Sir James Mitchell (5 October 1948)
South Australia: Sir James Harrison (4 December 1968)
Tasmania: Sir Stanley Burbury (5 December 1973)
Victoria: Sir Henry Winneke (3 June 1974)
The first colonies were penal settlements and the early colonial governors were military officers who ruled under martial law. Once the governors' role moved from the executive to the ceremonial, most governors were drawn from the ranks of retired officers. Although a few members of the peerage served as governors (the most prominent being Earl Beauchamp in New South Wales), the Australian colonial capitals were small towns and considered not grand enough to attract senior members of the British aristocracy. Even when Australians replaced Britons as governors, most continued to be retired Army, Navy or Air Force officers until the 1970s. The last British-born governor of an Australian state was Rear Admiral Sir Richard Trowbridge, who was Governor of Western Australia from 1980 to 1983.
From the 1960s onward the governors were appointed by the Monarch of the United Kingdom, acting on the advice of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary, but effectively acting on the advice of the state premiers. It was not until 1986, with the passage of the Australia Acts through the state, Australian and British parliaments, that governors became appointed by the Monarch of Australia on the direct advice of the relevant premier."
Governors of the Australian states,"The Australia Acts 1986
Although the Commonwealth of Australia legally became a sovereign nation when it adopted the Statute of Westminster in 1942, the states had been established separately from (and prior to) the Commonwealth and retained their separate subordination to the British Government. The British Government retained the authority to intervene in the governments of the individual states under the Colonial Laws Validity Act 1865. As a result, the state governors continued to be formally appointed by the Queen on the advice of the British Foreign Secretary, as had been the case prior to 1942. In practice, however, the premier of each state recommended a prospective governor to the foreign secretary, who almost always acted in accordance with that recommendation. However, in 1976 the Foreign Secretary refused to transmit to the Queen the advice of the Premier of Queensland, Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, to extend the term of Sir Colin Hannah as governor, on the grounds of the Governor's partisanship against the previous Commonwealth Government.
In 1978, the Parliament of New South Wales passed the Constitutional Powers (New South Wales) Act, requesting that the Commonwealth Parliament legislate to address the constitutional anomaly of the United Kingdom Government's role in the constitutional affairs of the state. Eventually, identical Australia Acts were passed by the Commonwealth Parliament and the Parliament of the United Kingdom in 1986, thus removing what remaining authority London had over affairs in Canberra. Under section 7 of these Acts, the King now receives advice on the appointment and termination of appointments of state governors from the relevant state premier."
Governors of the Australian states,"Role of the governors
The role of state governor in modern times is broken down into constitutional, ceremonial and social responsibilities. Regarding constitutional practices, in most cases the governor observes the convention to act on the advice of the state's cabinet (and/or premier). Nevertheless, the state governors, like the governor-general, retain the full panoply of the reserve powers of the Crown. This has been shown on two recent occasions.
In 1987 the Governor of Queensland, Sir Walter Campbell, refused to accept the advice of the National Party premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, to dismiss five of his ministers and call fresh elections. Campbell believed that Bjelke-Petersen had lost the confidence of his own party and was behaving irrationally. He was also reluctant to call an election for a legislature that was barely a year old, and felt that the situation was a political rather than a constitutional matter. Bjelke-Petersen subsequently resigned.
In 1989 the Governor of Tasmania, Sir Phillip Bennett, refused to grant a fresh dissolution to the Liberal premier, Robin Gray, after Gray lost his majority in the recent election. Although no one party had a majority in the new House of Assembly, Bennett had already been assured that the Tasmanian Greens would support a minority Labor government under Michael Field. Bennett thus took the view that Gray no longer had enough support to govern and could not advise him to call a second election. Gray then resigned; Bennett then commissioned Field as premier.
In the event of a Governor-General's death, incapacity, removal, resignation or absence overseas, each of the state governors has a dormant commission to become the Administrator of the Commonwealth, that is, to take on the Governor-General's duties until he returns from overseas or a new appointment is made. The convention has been that the longest-serving state governor is appointed administrator. When Peter Hollingworth resigned in May 2003, Sir Guy Green, Governor of Tasmania, took on that role, serving until Major-General Michael Jeffery took office in August 2003."
Governors of the Australian states,"Lieutenant-governors and administrators
A lieutenant-governor takes on the responsibilities of a governor when that post is vacant or when the governor is out of the state or unable to act. In some states the lieutenant governor is also the chief justice. An administrator takes on those duties if both the governor and lieutenant-governor are not able to act for the above reasons."
Governors of the Australian states,"Backgrounds of governors
In 1976, South Australia appointed Sir Douglas Nicholls as the first (and, to date, the only) Aboriginal governor of an Australian state. Governors of non-Anglo-Australian background have been appointed in recent years. These include Ken Michael (Greek; Western Australia), Sir James Gobbo (Italian; Victoria), David de Kretser (Sri Lankan/Ceylonese; Victoria), Dame Marie Bashir (Lebanese; New South Wales), Alex Chernov (Russian: Victoria), and Hieu Van Le (Vietnamese; South Australia). Sir Matthew Nathan, Governor of Queensland from 1920 to 1925, was Australia's only Jewish governor until the appointment of Linda Dessau as Governor of Victoria in 2015.
South Australia was also the first state to appoint a woman as governor, when Dame Roma Mitchell took office in 1991. With the appointment of Jeannette Young on 1 November 2021, Queensland currently has four female governors, more than any other state. Queensland is also the first state to have had two female governors in succession (Penelope Wensley succeeded Quentin Bryce), followed by Tasmania (Kate Warner in 2014 and Barbara Baker in 2021) and then Victoria in 2023. South Australia now has three female governors following the appointment of Frances Adamson who was sworn in on 7 October 2021. With the appointment of Margaret Gardner who was sworn in on 9 August 2023; New South Wales, Tasmania and Victoria will have had two each whilst Western Australia has only one so far. The Northern Territory, the only mainland territory to have an administrator, has had two female administrators (Sally Thomas and Vicki O'Halloran). Since 2021, every state Governor apart from that of Western Australia has been a woman. 
John Landy, a former governor of Victoria, and Marjorie Jackson-Nelson, a former governor of South Australia, are former Australian Olympic medallists."
Governors of the Australian states,"Contemporary changes and prospects
The Northern Territory received self-government on 1 July 1978 under its own administrator appointed by the governor-general. The Commonwealth prime minister, not the Chief Minister of the Northern Territory, advises the governor-general on the appointment of the administrator.
In the lead up to the 1999 republican referendum, state governments were required to consider state links to the Crown and thus the validity of appointing the governor through the Queen. At a constitutional convention in Gladstone, Queensland, the states indicated that, if the referendum was successful, governors should be appointed by the parliament, although agreement on the exact method of appointment was not reached. As the referendum failed, no state altered the appointment method."
Governors of the Australian states,"Current state and territory governors
Current state governors
Current administrators of the territories
See also"
Governors of the Australian states,"Governor-General of Australia
Lieutenant governor (Canada)"
Governors of the Australian states,"
== References =="
Agriculture in Australia,"Although Australia is mostly arid, the nation is a major agricultural producer and exporter, with over 325,300 people employed in agriculture, forestry and fishing as of February 2015. Agriculture and its closely related sectors earn $155 billion a year for a 12% share of GDP. Farmers and grazers own 135,997 farms, covering 61% of Australia's landmass. Across the country, there is a mix of irrigation and dry-land farming.  The success of Australia in becoming a major agricultural power despite the odds is facilitated by its policies of long-term visions and promotion of agricultural reforms that greatly increased the country's agricultural industry."
Agriculture in Australia,"There are three main zones: the high rainfall zone of Tasmania and a narrow coastal zone (used principally for dairying and beef production); wheat, sheep zone (cropping (principally winter crops), and the grazing of sheep (for wool, lamb and mutton) plus beef cattle) and the pastoral zone (characterised by low rainfall, less fertile soils, and large scale pastoral activities involving the grazing of beef cattle and sheep for wool and mutton). An indicator of the viability of agriculture in the state of South Australia is whether the land is within Goyder's Line."
Agriculture in Australia,"History
Agriculture in Australia has a lively history. Aboriginal Australians have been variously described as hunter-gatherer-cultivators and proto-farmers, as there is evidence that farming activities were undertaken prior to the arrival of Europeans, including tilling, planting and irrigating. However, these practices were non-industrialised and complementary to hunting, gathering and fishing. Whether the people could be termed agriculturalists is controversial. In 1788, the first European settlers brought agricultural technology from their homelands which radically changed the dominant practices. After some initial failures, wool dominated in the 19th century and, in the first half of the 20th century, dairying increased in its popularity, driven by technological changes like canning and refrigeration.
Meat exports were very significant in the development of Australian agriculture. By 1925, there were 54 export freezing works, capable of killing 6000 cattle and 90,000 sheep and lambs daily. Initially, the meat for British markets had to be frozen, but later beef could be exported chilled."
Agriculture in Australia,"2000-2019
At the turn of the millennium, Australia produced a large variety of primary products for export and domestic consumption. Australia's production in the first five years was as follows:"
Agriculture in Australia,"Australia's main crops were contrasting in preferred climate: sugar cane (typical of tropical countries), wheat and barley (typical of cold countries).
In 2018, Australia was the world's largest producer of lupin bean (714 thousand tons), the world's second largest producer of chickpeas (1 million tons), the world's fourth largest producer of barley (9.2 million tons) and oats (1.2 million tons), the 5th largest producer of rapeseed (3.9 million tons), the 9th largest producer of sugarcane (33.5 million tons) and wheat (20.9 million tons) and the 13th largest producer of grape (1.66 million tons). In the same year, the country also produced 1.2 million tons of sorghum, 1.1 million tons of potato, in addition to smaller productions of other agricultural products, such as rice (635 thousand tons), maize (387 thousand tons), tomato (386 thousand tons), orange (378 thousand tons), fava beans (377 thousand tons), banana (373 thousand tons), pea (317 thousand tons), carrot (284 thousand tons), onion (278 thousand tons), apple (268 thousand tons), lentils (255 thousand tons), melon (224 thousand tons), watermelon (181 thousand tons), tangerine (138 thousand tons) etc."
Agriculture in Australia,"2019
Late in 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic began, and Australian agriculture was heavily impacted by the resulting supply chain issues. The scarcity of freight space and disruption to Chinese New Year purchases was particularly painful, with China being Australia's largest export market and a particularly large buyer of live seafood."
Agriculture in Australia,"China Tariffs
In May, the Australian government proposed an independent investigation of the origin of COVID-19. Shortly afterwards, China placed large restrictions on their imports of a number of Australian agricultural products, as well as coal. Agriculture is one of Australia's most trade-exposed economic sectors."
Agriculture in Australia,"Labour shortages
The agricultural workforce was heavily reliant on international workers, and by the end of 2020, the pandemic resulted in a severe shortage of farm workers across the country. Much produce could not be picked, with losses estimated at $22 million, thanks to a backpacker workforce diminished from 200,000 to 52,000. The shortage lingered through 2021, with skilled labour also in short supply, leading to calls to double Australia's skilled migrant uptake."
Agriculture in Australia,"Products
Crops
Cereals, oilseeds and grain legumes are produced on a large scale in Australia for human consumption and livestock feed.  Wheat is the cereal with the greatest production in terms of area and value to the Australian economy. Sugarcane, grown in tropical Australia, is also an important crop; however, the unsubsidised industry (while lower-cost than heavily subsidised European and American sugar producers) is struggling to compete with the huge and much more efficient Brazilian sugarcane industry."
Agriculture in Australia,"Horticulture
In 2005, McDonald's Australia Ltd announced it would no longer source all its potatoes for fries from Tasmanian producers and announced a new deal with New Zealand suppliers. Subsequently, Vegetable and Potato Growers Australia (Ltd.) launched a political campaign advocating protectionism."
Agriculture in Australia,"Viticulture
Although the Australian wine industry enjoyed a large period of growth during the 1990s, overplanting and oversupply led to a large drop in the value of wine, forcing out of business some winemakers, especially those on contracts to large wine-producing companies. At the time, the future for some Australian wine producers seemed uncertain, but by 2015 a national study showed that the industry had recovered and the combined output of grape growing and winemaking were major contributors to the Australian economy's gross output while the associated industry of wine tourism had also expanded. A follow-up report from 2019 demonstrated further consolidation, by which stage wine had become Australia's fifth-largest agricultural export industry, with domestic and international sales contributing AU$45.5 billion to gross output.
Wine producers were impacted by the 2019–20 Australian bushfire season, with Adelaide Hills losing 30% of its vineyards. Grapes around the country were affected by smoke, with the smell affecting the wine produced."
Agriculture in Australia,"Beef industry
The beef industry is the largest agricultural enterprise in Australia, and it is the second largest beef exporter, behind Brazil, in the world. All states and territories of Australia support cattle breeding in a wide range of climates. Cattle production is a major industry that covers an area in excess of 200 million hectares. The Australian beef industry is dependent on export markets, with over 60% of Australian beef production exported, primarily to the United States, Korea and Japan."
Agriculture in Australia,"In southern Australia (NSW, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and south-western Western Australia) beef cattle are often reared on smaller properties as part of a mixed farming or grazing operation, but some properties do specialise in producing cattle. The southern calves are typically reared on pasture and sold as weaners, yearlings or steers at about two years old or older. Artificial insemination and embryo transfer are more commonly used in stud cattle breeding in Australia, but may be used in other herds.
In the Top End, sub-tropical areas and in arid inland regions, cattle are bred on native pastures on expansive cattle stations. Anna Creek Station in South Australia, Australia is the world's largest working cattle station. The North Australian Pastoral Company Pty Limited (NAPCO) is now one of Australia's largest beef cattle producers, with a herd of over 180,000 cattle and fourteen cattle stations in Queensland and the Northern Territory. The Australian Agricultural Company (AA Co) manages a cattle herd of more than 585,000 herd. Heytesbury Beef Pty Ltd owns and manages over 200,000 herd of cattle across eight stations spanning the East Kimberley, Victoria River and Barkly Tablelands regions in Northern Australia.
Prior to European settlement, there were no cattle in Australia. The present herd consists principally of British and European breeds (Bos taurus) in the southern regions, with Aberdeen Angus and Herefords being the most common. In northern Australia, Bos indicus breeds predominate along with their crosses. They were introduced to combine the resistance to cattle ticks and greater tolerance to hot weather.
In 1981, the industry was shaken by the Australian meat substitution scandal, which revealed that horse and kangaroo meat had been both exported overseas and sold domestically as beef."
Agriculture in Australia,"Dairy
Domestic milk markets were heavily regulated until the 1980s, particularly for milk used for domestic fresh milk sales. This protected smaller producers in the northern states who produced exclusively for their local markets. The Kerin Plan (named after politician John Kerin) began the process of deregulation in 1986. The final price supports were removed in 2000 with the assistance of Pat Rowley, head of the Australian Dairy Farmers Federation and the Australian Dairy Industry Council. Deregulation ultimately saw 13,000 Australian dairy farmers produce 10 billion litres of milk in comparison to the 5 billion litres of milk produced by 23,000 farmers prior to deregulation, a 30% reduction in farmers with a 55% rise in milk production. As the Australian dairy industry grows, feedlot systems are becoming more popular."
Agriculture in Australia,"Fisheries
The fisheries in Australia is a very large scale industry. Australia produces many species of fish, including farmed, sustainable and intensive, and wild caught such as tuna and other schooling fish."
Agriculture in Australia,"Seaweeds
The shorelines, especially the Great Barrier Reef, are providing motivation to help the continent by using seaweed (algae) to absorb nutrients. Because of the giant number of natural Australian seaweeds, not only could seaweed cultivation be used to help absorb nutrients around the GBR and other Australian shores, cultivation could also help feed a large part of the world. Even the Chinese, who could be considered far more advanced in seaweed cultivation, are interested in the future of Australian seaweeds. Lastly, the GBR itself, because of the delicate corals, has lent itself to utilising seaweed/algae purposely as a nutrient reduction tool in the form of algae."
Agriculture in Australia,"Olives
Olives have been grown in Australia since the early 1800s. Olive trees were planted by the warden of the self-funded penal settlement on St Helena Island, Queensland in Moreton Bay. By the mid-90s, there were 2,000 hectares (4,900 acres) of olives, and from 2000 to 2003 passed 20,000 hectares (49,000 acres). By 2014 (Ravetti and Edwards, 2014) there were 2000 plantations, covering over 35,000 hectares (86,000 acres), and producing 93,500 tonnes (92,000 long tons; 103,100 short tons) of olives. 3,000 tonnes (3,000 long tons; 3,300 short tons) were used as table olives and around 5–7,000 tonnes (4.9–6,889.4 long tons; 5.5–7,716.2 short tons) exported to the United States, China, the European Union, New Zealand and Japan. Between 2009 and 2014, Australia imported an average of 31,000 tonnes (31,000 long tons; 34,000 short tons) predominantly from Spain, Italy and Greece. China's olive oil consumption is increasing, and Chinese investors have begun to buy Australian olive farms. Olive cultivars include Arbequina, Arecuzzo, Barnea, Barouni, Coratina, Correggiola, Del Morocco, Frantoio, Hojiblanca, Jumbo Kalamata, Kalamata, Koroneiki, Leccino, Manzanillo, Pendulino, Picholine, Picual, Sevillano, UC13A6, and Verdale. Manzanillo, Azapa, Nab Tamri and South Australian Verdale produce table olives."
Agriculture in Australia,"Wool
Australia is the world's largest producer of wool.  The Australian wool industry was worth $3.6 billion in 2022. The total number of sheep is estimated to be 75 million. In the late 1980s, the sheep flock was 180 million. Only 5% of Australia's wool clip is processed onshore.  The Merino produces fine wool and was first introduced to Australia in 1797, with the breed being well-suited to the Australian environment. By the 1870s Australia had become the world's greatest wool-growing nation."
Agriculture in Australia,"Issues facing Australian agriculture
Political values
Historian F.K. Crowley finds that:"
Agriculture in Australia,"Australian farmers and their spokesman have always considered that life on the land is inherently more virtuous, more healthy, more important and more productive than living in the towns and cities. The farmers complained that something was wrong with an electoral system which produced parliamentarians who spent money beautifying vampire-cities instead of developing the interior.
The Country Party, from the 1920s to the 1970s, promulgated its version of agrarianism, which it called ""countrymindedness"".  The goal was to enhance the status of the graziers (operators of big sheep ranches) and small farmers and justified subsidies for them."
Agriculture in Australia,"Water management
Water management is a major issue in Australia. The nation is struggling with over-allocation issues and increasing variability. Effectively governing such issues has proven to be problematic. Public institutions responsible for water management include the Murray–Darling Basin Authority, which manages water resources in the Murray–Darling basin, Australia's largest river catchment.
Because of Australia's large deserts and irregular rainfall, irrigation is necessary for agriculture in some parts of the country. The total gross value of irrigated agricultural production in 2004-05 was A$9,076 million compared to A$9,618 million in 2000–01. The gross value of irrigated agricultural production represents around a quarter (23%) of the gross value of agricultural commodities produced in Australia in 2004–05, on less than 1% of agricultural land.
Of the 12,191 GL of water consumed by agriculture in 2004–05, dairy farming accounted for 18% (2,276 GL), pasture 16% (1,928 GL), cotton 15% (1,822 GL) and sugar 10% (1,269 GL)."
Agriculture in Australia,"Environmental issues
In 2006, the CSIRO, the federal government agency for scientific research in Australia, forecast that climate change will cause decreased precipitation over much of Australia and that this will exacerbate existing challenges to water availability and quality for agriculture.
Climate change has damaged farming productivity, reducing broadacre farm profits by an average of 22% since 2000. In 2023, the Department of Agriculture published a National Statement on Climate Change and Agriculture, exploring resilience in the agriculture sector.
Agriculture contributes 13% of Australia's total greenhouse emissions, however, much of this is methane of biological origin, rather than from fossil fuels.
Although native, kangaroos have been known to destroy fences and eat cattle feed, sometimes in problematic numbers."
Agriculture in Australia,"Organic farming
As of 2021, $2.3 billion worth of commodities were produced in Australia by the organic agriculture sector, representing approximately 3% of agricultural output.
Australia leads the world with 35 million hectares certified organic, which is 8.8% of Australia's agricultural land and Australia now accounts for more than half (51%) of the world's certified organic agriculture hectares."
Agriculture in Australia,"Genetic modification
GM grains are widely grown in all states and territories in Australia with the exception of Tasmania, which is the last state to maintain a moratorium against GM. GM crops are regulated under a national scheme by the Gene Technology Regulator, through the Gene Technology Act 2000. As of 2022, there are four GM crops approved to be grown in Australia: cotton, safflower, carnations and canola. In particular, 99.5% of cotton growers in Australia use GM cotton."
Agriculture in Australia,"Foreign land ownership
Australia has seen a major increase in foreign ownership of agriculture in the 2010s. According to a report in 2020, it was found that the amount of Australian agricultural land in foreign ownership, increased slightly from 13.4 to 13.8 percent.
A 2016 Lowy Institute poll found that 87% of respondents were against the Federal Government allowing foreign companies to buy Australian agricultural land a 6% points higher than a similar survey four years ago.
A 2022 ABC's Vote Compass Poll found that 88% of Australians want tighter controls on foreign ownership of farm land, which is an increase from Compass poll results in 2013 and 2016."
Agriculture in Australia,"Animal welfare and live exports
Animal welfare has caused public concern, with exports of live animals particularly scrutinised. The practice of exporting live animals has received strong public opposition (a petition carrying 200,000 signatures of people opposed to live export was tabled in parliament) and opposition from the RSPCA because of cruelty.
In 2022, the Labor Party committed to ending live exports of sheep, if elected. In 2023, they commenced the process, however, it is not likely to be completed within the government's first term.
In 2006, animal rights organisations including PETA promoted a boycott of Merino wool, as a protest against the practice of mulesing, a procedure used to prevent the animals from becoming fly blown with maggots. In 2004, due to the worldwide attention, AWI proposed to phase out the practice by the end of year 2010; this promise was retracted in 2009.
In 2022, new regulations for chicken welfare were introduced."
Agriculture in Australia,"Farm safety
Farming is the most dangerous occupation in Australia.  55 farmers died while working in 2022. Accidents involving tractors accounted for 20 per cent and quad bikes for 14 per cent of deaths."
Agriculture in Australia,"Information Technology
Drone technology, Self driver tractors, Online Marketplaces are recent and growing trends. There is little standardisation and no accreditation authorities, though the CSIRO and other independent organisations have evaluated individual developments, the lack of a coordinated approach and lead agency restricts developments and risks Australia's competitiveness."
Agriculture in Australia,"Public governance
Before the Federation of Australia in 1901, individual state governments bore responsibility for agriculture. As part of the federation, the Department of Commerce and Agriculture was created to help develop the agricultural industry. The newly created Department of Trade and Customs had additional responsibilities for sugar agreements, as well as cotton.
These responsibilities were merged into a single agricultural department in 1956. Since the merger, the department responsible for agriculture has been renamed and re-structured many times:"
Agriculture in Australia,"1956–1974 - Department of Primary Industry
1974–1975 - Department of Agriculture
1975–1987 - Department of Primary Industry
1987–1998 - Department of Primary Industries and Energy
1998–2013 - Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry
2013–2015 - Department of Agriculture
2015–2019 - Department of Agriculture and Water Resources
2019–2020 - Department of Agriculture
2020–2022 - Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment
2022– Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry"
Agriculture in Australia,"See also
Effects of global warming on agriculture in Australia
History of wheat industry regulation in Australia
Wheatbelt
Gardening in Australia"
Agriculture in Australia,"References
External links"
Agriculture in Australia,"Farm Facts 2011
Agricultural Statistics - Australian Bureau of Statistics page.
Peterborough
SA History - Goyder
The History Trust of South Australia has a map of Goyder's Line.
Agricultural industry strength in Australia"
Asian Australians,"Asian Australians are Australians of Asian ancestry, including naturalised Australians who are immigrants from various regions in Asia and descendants of such immigrants. At the 2021 census, the proportion of the population identifying as Asian amounted to approximately 17.4 percent with breakdowns of 6.5 percent from Southern and Central Asia, 6.4 percent from North-East Asia, and 4.5 percent from South-East Asia."
Asian Australians,"Terminology
The term Asian Australian was first coined in the 1950s by European Australians who sought to strengthen diplomatic and trade ties with Asia. However, the term was not originally used to describe or recognise the experiences of people of Asian descent living in Australia. It was not until the late 1980s and 1990s that the term was adopted and used by Asian Australians themselves to discuss issues related to racial vilification and discrimination. Today, the term is widely accepted and used to refer to people of Asian descent who are citizens or residents of Australia, although its usage and meaning may vary within the Asian Australian community.
When people use the term Asians in everyday conversation, they are usually referring to two main groups: East Asians (including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Mongolian) and Southeast Asians (including Filipinos, Cambodians, Vietnamese, Laotians, Indonesians, Thais, and Singaporeans). Additionally, South Asians (including Indians, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Nepalese, and Pakistanis) may also be included."
Asian Australians,"Census definition
Information relating to the racial composition of the population was collected for the first time at the Census of 1911. The following were classified as ""Asiatic"":"
Asian Australians,At censuses prior to 1966 the instructions relating to race were insufficient to enable respondents to classify themselves according to the degree of racial mixture. As one report for the 1966 Census of Population and Housing details:
Asian Australians,"For example, from 1933 to 1961 persons were asked the following question: 
""For persons of European race, wherever born, write ""European "". For non-Europeans state the race to which they belong, for example, ""Aboriginal"", ""Chinese"", ""Negro"", ""Afghan"", etc. If the person is half-caste with one parent of European race, write also ""H.C."", for example ""H.C. Aboriginal"", ""H. C. Chinese"", etc.""
At the 1966 Census the instructions were re-designed ... in an endeavour to obtain precise data on racial mixture and also to avoid the opprobrium attaching to the term ""half-caste"" ...
The Australian Bureau of Statistics and Australian Census no longer collect data on race as a standalone category. Instead, they collect information on distinct ancestries, of which census respondents can select up to two. The ABS has classified certain ancestries into categories for the purposes of aggregating data, including:	"
Asian Australians,"North-East Asian (including Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, etc.);
South-East Asian (including Vietnamese, Filipinos, Indonesians, etc.); and
Southern and Central Asian (including Indians, Sri Lankans, Afghans, etc.).
Ancestry is the primary statistical measure of ethnicity or cultural origins in Australia. The different ancestry groups may have distinct histories, cultures, and geographical origins. Therefore, information on Australians with ancestry from Asia can be found in the respective articles for each separate article (e.g., Chinese Australians, Indian Australians, etc.).
It is important to note that Australians of Middle Eastern ancestries are not classified as part of the Asian category under the ABS's Australian Standard Classification of Cultural and Ethnic Groups (ASCCEG). Instead, they are separately classified under North African and Middle Eastern. This includes Australians of Arab, Turkish and Iranian ancestries. However, Armenians, for example, are classified as Central Asian and therefore part of the Asian category."
Asian Australians,"History
Gold rush
The Victorian gold rush of the 1850s and 1860s witnessed a significant rise in Chinese immigration to Australia. While small numbers of Chinese settlers had arrived as early as 1818, the gold rush triggered a dramatic increase in their presence. However, existing prejudices and cultural misunderstandings led to conflict between Chinese and European communities, culminating in violent riots at Lambing Flat and Buckland. These tensions resulted in the enactment of anti-Chinese legislation by various Australian colonies, foreshadowing the implementation of the discriminatory White Australia policy from 1901 to 1973."
Asian Australians,"Afghan cameleers
During the period from the 1860s to 1900, small groups of cameleers, mostly from British India but also from other countries including Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, and Turkey, were shipped in and out of Australia on three-year contracts to service the inland pastoral industry. These workers, who were commonly referred to as ""Afghans"" or ""Ghans"", were responsible for carting goods and transporting wool bales by camel train. Most of the cameleers were Muslims, with a sizeable minority being Sikhs from the Punjab region. They established camel-breeding stations and rest house outposts, known as caravanserai, throughout inland Australia, creating a permanent link between the coastal cities and remote cattle and sheep grazing stations. This practice continued until around the 1930s, when the cameleers were largely replaced by automobiles."
Asian Australians,"Immigration restriction
During the 1870s and 1880s, the trade union movement in Australia raised concerns about the impact of foreign labour particularly from Asia, on the lives of Australian workers. These concerns, fuelled by anxieties about economic competition and cultural differences, led to calls for restrictions on immigration. While some argued that Asian labourers were essential for development in tropical regions, union pressure ultimately led to the introduction of legislation between 1875 and 1888 aimed at curbing Chinese immigration. These policies, though motivated by a mix of economic and social factors, also contributed to the marginalization and exploitation of non-European workers, including Asian and Chinese immigrants, by limiting their access to better wages and working conditions."
Asian Australians,"Internment during WWII
During WWII, Japanese and Taiwanese (the latter due to the fact that Taiwan was then under Japanese colonial rule) from various locations were interned in Tatura and Rushworth, two towns in Victoria, due to government policies. Roughly 600 Taiwanese civilians, including entire families, were held at ""Internment Camp No. 4"" in Rushworth, between January 1942 and March 1946. Most Japanese and Taiwanese were arrested for racist reasons. Some Japanese and Taiwanese people were born in the camp and received birth certificates. During internment, some adults operated businesses and schools in the camp. Filipinos, Koreans, Manchus,  New Caledonians, New Hebrideans, and people from various locations were also held at the camp, as well as mixed-Japanese Aboriginal Australians. Schools mainly taught English, Japanese, Mandarin and Taiwanese languages (Hokkien, Hakka, indigenous Formosan)."
Asian Australians,"Repatriation after WWII
After the war, internees were resettled in their country of ethnic origin, with the exception of Japanese Australians. Non-Australian Japanese were repatriated to Japan, while Taiwanese were repatriated to Occupied Taiwan. The repatriation caused public outcry due to the poor living conditions on the ship, known as the ""Yoizuki Hellship scandal"". The government wanted to expel non-citizen Japanese internees, including most Taiwanese. Many believed the Taiwanese should be seen as citizens of the Republic of China (ROC) and hence allies, not expelled under poor conditions. This debate further inflamed outrage at the treatment of Taiwanese internees, and there was a minor controversy regarding the destination of repatriation for some Taiwanese internees. Despite public pressure, the Australian government ultimately still deported the Taiwanese internees."
Asian Australians,"Post-war immigration
The government began to expand access to citizenship for non-Europeans and increase immigration numbers from non-European countries in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1973, the prime minister implemented a more non-discriminatory immigration policy.
In 1957, the government allowed access to citizenship for 15-year residents. In 1958, the Migration Act was reformed to allow skilled and professional non-Europeans to immigrate and temporarily reside in the country. During the Fraser government, the country experienced the largest intake of Asian immigrants since the 1850s and 1860s due to an increase in Vietnamese refugees after the Vietnam War. In 1983, British immigration was lower than Asian immigration for the first time in Australian history. Overall, immigration policy has evolved towards non-discrimination and broadening pathways to citizenship for Asians, following the dismantling of European-only policies."
Asian Australians,"Notable contributions
Arts, culinary and entertainment
Asian Australians have been involved in the entertainment industry since the first half of the 19th century. One notable example is comedian Anh Do, who is of Vietnamese descent.  Do has gained widespread recognition for his work as an author, actor, comedian, and painter. His 2011 memoir The Happiest Refugee has won multiple awards, including the 2011 Australian Book of the Year, Biography of the Year and Newcomer of the Year, as well as the Indie Book of the Year Award 2011, Non-fiction Indie Book of the Year 2011, and it was shortlisted for the 2011 NSW Premier's Literary Awards, Community Relations Commission Award. Another prominent Asian Australian artist is, Australian singer and songwriter Dami Im. Im rose to fame after winning the fifth season of The X Factor Australia in 2013. On 3 March 2016, it was announced Im would represent Australia at the Eurovision Song Contest 2016. Her song was ""Sound of Silence"".
Cook and television presenter Poh Ling Yeow, gained national attention as a contestant for the first series of MasterChef Australia. Yeow signed with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for a cooking series (Poh's Kitchen) and a two-book publishing deal with ABC Books. The production on the series began in November 2009 in her home town of Adelaide. The series was aired from 10 February 2010. Yeow was nominated for the Logie Awards of 2011 in the category of Most Popular New Female Talent. Yeow has appeared in four films: Human Touch (2004), Peaches (2004), Hey, Hey, It's Esther Blueburger (2008) and the Tropfest short film Jackie's Spring Palace (2009). She is also credited as production designer on Jackie's Spring Palace. Aside from her cooking programs, Yeow had substantial roles in Room 101, Can of Worms, Reality Check. She appeared in the 2013 ABC comedy series It's a Date, along with Dave Lawson.
YouTuber, actress, and comedian Natalie Tran, began posting to her YouTube channel in 2006, initially posting responses to other videos she had seen on the site. Her content then consisted of observational comedy skits and vlogs, which lampooned everyday situations, in which she played all of the characters and gave monologues throughout. By 2009, Tran was the most subscribed-to YouTuber in Australia and the 37th most subscribed-to globally. In 2010, she became the 18th most subscribed-to YouTuber globally. She became an ambassador for YouTube's Creators for Change initiative in September 2016. In December 2017, as part of the program, she released White Male Asian Female, a 40-minute documentary about negative perceptions of relationships between Asian women and Caucasian men such as her own, on her YouTube channel. She hosted a video guide segment for the 2019 Sydney Film Festival called the Launch Show, released in May 2019. From 2010 to 2011, Tran worked as a Sydney correspondent for The Project's The Whip segment. The Daily Telegraph called her ""one of Australia’s original success stories on YouTube"".
Australian author and journalist Benjamin Law,  best known for his books The Family Law, a family memoir published in 2010, and the TV series of the same name. The six-part series, loosely adapted from Law's 2010 book of the same name, was written by Law and Marieke Hardy. The program has received critical acclaim from critics. One critic from Daily Review Australia said ""the core challenge is making a captivating comedy series about normal people living normal lives. The Family Law gives it a good crack, and has an amiable quality that many viewers will find endearing."" Another critic from The Guardian said ""there’s so much detail, warmth and gentle humour to the script, direction and production design that the characters and settings are relatable for anyone who grew up – or is growing up – in Australia."" She gave the program 4 out of 5 stars. In 2018, Sashi Cheliah was the winner of the tenth series of Masterchef Australia."
Asian Australians,"Journalism
Asian Australians have made significant contributions to the field of journalism in Australia, bringing new perspectives and challenging mainstream media narratives. Notable journalists of Asian heritage include Yalda Hakim, a BBC World News presenter who has contributed to SBS's Dateline program, Benjamin Law, an accomplished writer and journalist known for his insightful commentary on Australian society, Lee Lin Chin, a prominent Australian journalist and television presenter, Iskhandar Razak, an award-winning investigative journalist who has worked for the ABC and SBS, and Fauziah Ibrahim, a journalist and presenter for ABC News who has reported on a wide range of stories across Australia and Asia."
Asian Australians,"Sports
Asian Australians have contributed to sports in Australia through much of the 20th Century. Some of the most notable contributions include Olympic sports, but also in professional sports, particularly in the post-World War II years. As the Asian Australian population grew in the late 20th century, Asian Australian contributions expanded to more sports. Examples of female Asian Australian athletes include Lisa Sthalekar,  Catriona Bisset, Alexandra Huynh, Setyana Mapasa, Priscilla Hon, and Cheltzie Lee. Examples of male Asian Australian athletes include Jason Day, Massimo Luongo, Geoff Huegill, Usman Khawaja, Peter Bell, and Martin Lo."
Asian Australians,"Data collection and demographics
Overview
The Australian government collects data on distinct ancestries rather than race at each census, and at the 2021 census, approximately 17.4 percent of the population identified as having Asian ancestry.
At the 2021 census the most commonly nominated Asian ancestries were as set out in the following table. The largest group are Chinese Australians."
Asian Australians,"Details
Thirty percent of Asian Australians go to university, 20 percent of all Australian doctors are Asian, and 37 percent of Asian Australians participate in some form of organised sport. Chinese and Indian Australians, particularly second and third generation immigrants, are present in large numbers in Sydney and Melbourne, with Chinese Australians constituting Sydney's fourth largest ancestry group."
Asian Australians,"Political representation
Members of minority groups make up about 6 percent of the federal Parliament. Both Labor and Greens voters were more likely to agree that Asian Australians experience discrimination, but more than three-quarters of those who said they would vote for the Liberal/National Coalition also agreed."
Asian Australians,"Social and political issues
Discrimination and violence against Asian Australians
Asian Australians have faced discrimination and racial violence based on their race and ethnicity. Some Sikh Australians have experienced discrimination due to their religious garments being mistaken for those worn by Arabs or Muslims, particularly after the September 11 attacks."
Asian Australians,"COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an increase in anti-Asian sentiment in Australia."
Asian Australians,"Racial stereotypes
There are racial stereotypes that exist towards Asian Australians. Some view Asian Australians as ""perpetual foreigners"" and not as truly ""Australian""."
Asian Australians,"Model minority
The term ""model minority"" refers to a minority group whose members are perceived to have achieved a higher level of socio-economic success than the population average. In the case of Asian Australians, this stereotype is often applied to groups such as Chinese Australians, Indian Australians, and Korean Australians. While it is true that some members of these groups have achieved success in education and income, it is important to note that the model minority stereotype is an oversimplification that ignores the diversity and challenges faced by individuals within these groups."
Asian Australians,"Bamboo ceiling
The bamboo ceiling is a term used to describe the barriers that prevent Asian Australians from achieving leadership positions in the workplace. Despite making up 9.3 percent of the Australian labour force, Asian Australians are significantly underrepresented in senior executive positions, with only 4.9 percent achieving these roles. This disparity is often attributed to unconscious bias and discrimination within the workplace."
Asian Australians,"Disparities among Asian Australians
There are social and economic disparities among Asian Australians. While Asian Australians are over-represented in high-performing schools and university courses, some ethnic groups face challenges. For example, Cambodian Australians have lower rates of educational qualifications and higher participation in semi-skilled and unskilled occupations compared to the general Australian population. Laotian Australians also have lower rates of higher non-school qualifications and higher unemployment rates compared to the total Australian population.
Vietnamese Australians have slightly lower participation in the labour force and higher unemployment rates compared to the national average. Hmong Australians have historically had high unemployment rates and a large proportion in unskilled factory jobs, though this has improved somewhat in recent years. In contrast, Bangladeshi Australians have higher educational levels and a higher participation in skilled managerial, professional, or trade occupations compared to the total Australian population."
Asian Australians,"See also
Notes
References
External links"
Asian Australians,"The Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA)
The ASIAN AUSTRALIAN ALLIANCE (AAA)
The Asian Australian Project (AAP)
Museums Victoria Origins
The Melbourne Asia Review (MAR)
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art"
List of prime ministers of Australia,"The prime minister of Australia is the leader of the Australian Government and the Cabinet of Australia, with the support of the majority of the House of Representatives. Thirty-one people (thirty men and one woman) have served in the position since the office was created in 1901. The role of prime minister is not mentioned in the Constitution of Australia, but the prime minister is still appointed by the governor-general who under Section 64 of the constitution has the executive power to appoint ministers of state. The governor-general is appointed by the monarch of Australia based on the advice of the incumbent prime minister. Governors-general do not have fixed terms, but usually serve for five years. 
Federal elections must be held every three years, although prime ministers may call elections early. Prime ministers do not have fixed terms, and generally serve the full length of their term unless they lose the majority of the House or are replaced as the leader of their party. Three former prime ministers lost a majority in the House (Alfred Deakin on two occasions, George Reid and Andrew Fisher), six resigned following leadership spills (John Gorton, Bob Hawke, Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull) and three died in office (Joseph Lyons, John Curtin and Harold Holt, who disappeared and is presumed to have died). Two prime ministers also lost their role in a double dissolution election, a snap election where the entire Senate stands for re-election rather than the typical half to resolve deadlocks between the two houses. These were Joseph Cook in 1914 and Malcolm Fraser in 1983. One prime minister, Gough Whitlam, was controversially dismissed by the governor-general during a constitutional crisis.
Since the office was established in 1901, thirty men and one woman have been prime minister. Robert Menzies and Kevin Rudd served two non-consecutive terms in office while Alfred Deakin and Andrew Fisher served three non-consecutive terms.
The prime ministership of Frank Forde, who was prime minister for seven days in 1945, was the shortest in Australian history. Menzies served the longest, with eighteen years over two non-consecutive periods.
The 31st and current prime minister is Anthony Albanese, who assumed office on 23 May 2022. There are currently seven living former prime ministers. The most recent former prime minister to die was Hawke, on 16 May 2019."
List of prime ministers of Australia,"List of prime ministers
The parties shown are those to which the prime ministers belonged at the time they held office, and the electoral divisions shown are those they represented while in office. Several prime ministers belonged to parties other than those given and represented other electorates before and after their time in office."
List of prime ministers of Australia,"Political parties
Status
  Background indicates caretaker prime minister"
List of prime ministers of Australia,"Timeline
Career-based timeline
This timeline shows most of the early life, the political career and death of each prime minister from 1901.  The first prime minister was Edmund Barton in the early 20th century."
List of prime ministers of Australia,"Key
Each dark coloured bar denotes the time spent as prime minister
A light colour denotes time spent in Parliament before or after serving as prime minister
A grey colour bar denotes the time the prime minister spent outside Parliament, either before or after their political career"
List of prime ministers of Australia,"Notable moments
changed party: Cook (pre-office), Watson (post-office), Hughes (in office and post-office), Lyons (pre-office)
died in office: Lyons, Curtin, Holt
died shortly after leaving office: Chifley
left Parliament on leaving office: Barton, Bruce, Menzies, Fraser, Hawke, Keating, Howard, Gillard, Turnbull
long career after being prime minister: Cook, Hughes, Scullin, Page, Fadden, McMahon
was prime minister after an interruption to their service in Parliament: Scullin, Curtin, Chifley
lived for more than twenty years after leaving Parliament: Watson, Cook, Bruce, Forde, Gorton, Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke, Keating
former prime minister still living: Keating, Howard, Rudd, Gillard, Abbott, Turnbull, Morrison"
List of prime ministers of Australia,"Timeline
See also
History of Australia
List of prime ministers of Australia by birthplace
List of prime ministers of Australia by time in office
Politics of Australia
Spouse of the prime minister of Australia"
List of prime ministers of Australia,"Notes
References
External links
Official website of the Prime Minister of Australia
Museum of Australian Democracy Prime Minister Information"
Military history of Australia,"The military history of Australia  spans the nation's 230-year modern history, from the early Australian frontier wars between Aboriginal people and Europeans to the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 21st century. Although this history is short when compared to that of many other nations, Australia has been involved in numerous conflicts and wars, and war and military service have been significant influences on Australian society and national identity, including the Anzac spirit. The relationship between war and Australian society has also been shaped by the enduring themes of Australian strategic culture and the unique security challenges it faces.
The six British colonies in Australia participated in some of Britain's wars of the 19th century. In the early 20th century, as a federated dominion and later as an independent nation, Australia fought in the First World War and Second World War, as well as in the wars in Korea, Malaya, Borneo and Vietnam during the Cold War. In the Post-Vietnam era Australian forces have been involved in numerous international peacekeeping missions, through the United Nations and other agencies, including in the Sinai, Persian Gulf, Rwanda, Somalia, East Timor and the Solomon Islands, as well as many overseas humanitarian relief operations, while more recently they have also fought as part of multi-lateral forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. In total, nearly 103,000 Australians died during these conflicts."
Military history of Australia,"War and Australian society
For most of the last century military service has been one of the single greatest shared experiences of white Australian males, and although this is now changing due to the professionalisation of the military and the absence of major wars during the second half of the 20th century, it continues to influence Australian society to this day. War and military service have been defining influences in Australian history, while a major part of the national identity has been built on an idealised conception of the Australian experience of war and of soldiering, known as the Anzac spirit. These ideals include notions of endurance, courage, ingenuity, humour, larrikinism, egalitarianism and mateship; traits which, according to popular thought, defined the behaviour of Australian soldiers fighting at Gallipoli during the First World War. The Gallipoli campaign was one of the first international events that saw Australians taking part as Australians and has been seen as a key event in forging a sense of national identity.
The relationship between war and Australian society has been shaped by two of the more enduring themes of Australian strategic culture: bandwagoning with a powerful ally and expeditionary warfare. Indeed, Australian defence policy was closely linked to Britain until the Japanese crisis of 1942, while since then an alliance with the United States has underwritten its security. Arguably, this pattern of bandwagoning—both for cultural reasons such as shared values and beliefs, as well as for more pragmatic security concerns—has ensured that Australian strategic policy has often been defined by relations with its allies. Regardless, a tendency towards strategic complacency has also been evident, with Australians often reluctant to think about defence issues or to allocate resources until a crisis arises; a trait which has historically resulted in unpreparedness for major military challenges.
Reflecting both the realist and liberal paradigms of international relations and the conception of national interests, a number of other important themes in Australian strategic culture are also obvious. Such themes include: an acceptance of the state as the key actor in international politics, the centrality of notions of Westphalian sovereignty, a belief in the enduring relevance and legitimacy of armed force as a guarantor of security, and the proposition that the status quo in international affairs should only be changed peacefully. Likewise, multilateralism, collective security and defence self-reliance have also been important themes. Change has been more evolutionary than revolutionary and these strategic behaviours have persisted throughout its history, being the product of Australian society's democratic political tradition and Judaeo-Christian Anglo-European heritage, as well its associated values, beliefs and economic, political and religious ideology. These behaviours are also reflective of its unique situation as a largely European island on the edge of the Asia-Pacific, and the geopolitical circumstances of a middle power physically removed from the centres of world power. To be sure, during threats to the core Australia has often found itself defending the periphery and perhaps as a result, it has frequently become involved in foreign wars. Throughout these conflicts Australian soldiers—known colloquially as Diggers—have often been noted, somewhat paradoxically, for both their fighting abilities and their humanitarian qualities."
Military history of Australia,"History and services
Colonial era
British Forces in Australia, 1788–1870
From 1788 until 1870 the defence of the Australian colonies was mostly provided by British Army regular forces. Originally Marines protected the early settlements at Sydney Cove and Norfolk Island, however they were relieved of these duties in 1790 by a British Army unit specifically recruited for colonial service, known as the New South Wales Corps. The New South Wales Corps subsequently was involved in putting down a rebellion of Irish convicts at Castle Hill in 1804. Soon however shortcomings in the corps convinced the War Office of the need for a more reliable garrison in New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land. Chief of these shortcomings was the Rum Rebellion, a coup mounted by its officers in 1808. As a result, in January 1810 the 73rd (Perthshire) Regiment of Foot arrived in Australia. By 1870, 25 British infantry regiments had served in Australia, as had a small number of artillery and engineer units.
Although the primary role of the British Army was to protect the colonies against external attack, no actual threat ever materialised. The British Army was instead used in policing, guarding convicts at penal institutions, combating bushranging, putting down convict rebellions—as occurred at Bathurst in 1830—and to suppress Aboriginal resistance to the extension of European settlement. Notably British soldiers were involved in the battle at the Eureka Stockade in 1854 on the Victorian goldfields. Members of British regiments stationed in Australia also saw action in India, Afghanistan, New Zealand and the Sudan.
During the early years of settlement the naval defence of Australia was provided by units detached by the Royal Navy's Commander-in-Chief, East Indies, based in Sydney. However, in 1859 Australia was established as a separate squadron under the command of a commodore, marking the first occasion that Royal Navy ships had been permanently stationed in Australia. The Royal Navy remained the primary naval force in Australian waters until 1913, when the Australia Station ceased and responsibility handed over to the Royal Australian Navy; the Royal Navy's depots, dockyards and structures were given to the Australian people."
Military history of Australia,"Frontier warfare, 1788–1934
The reactions of the native Aboriginal inhabitants to the sudden arrival of British settlers in Australia were varied, but were inevitably hostile when the settlers' presence led to competition over resources, and to the occupation of the indigenous inhabitants' lands. European diseases decimated Aboriginal populations, and the occupation or destruction of lands and food resources sometimes led to starvation. By and large neither the British nor the Aborigines approached the conflict in an organised sense and conflict occurred between groups of settlers and individual tribes rather than systematic warfare. At times, however, the frontier wars did see the involvement of British soldiers and later mounted police units. Not all Aboriginal groups resisted white encroachment on their lands, while many Aborigines served in mounted police units and were involved in attacks on other tribes.
Fighting between Aboriginal people and Europeans was localised as the Aboriginal people did not form confederations capable of sustained resistance. As a result, there was not a single war, but rather a series of violent engagements and massacres across the continent. Organised or disorganised however, a pattern of frontier warfare emerged with Aboriginal resistance beginning in the 18th century and continuing into the early 20th century. This warfare contradicts the popular and at times academic ""myth"" of peaceful settlement in Australia. Faced with Aboriginal resistance settlers often reacted with violence, resulting in a number of indiscriminate massacres. Among the most famous is the Battle of Pinjarra in Western Australia in 1834. Such incidents were not officially sanctioned however, and after the Myall Creek massacre in New South Wales in 1838 seven Europeans were hanged for their part in the killings. However, in Tasmania the so-called Black War was fought between 1828 and 1832, and aimed at driving most of the island's native inhabitants onto a number of isolated peninsulas. Although it began in failure for the British, it ultimately resulted in considerable casualties amongst the native population.
It may be inaccurate though to depict the conflict as one sided and mainly perpetrated by Europeans on Aboriginal people. Although many more Aboriginal people died than British, this may have had more to do with the technological and logistic advantages enjoyed by the Europeans. Aboriginal tactics varied, but were mainly based on pre-existing hunting and fighting practices—using spears, clubs and other primitive weapons. Unlike the indigenous peoples of New Zealand and North America, on the main Aboriginal people failed to adapt to meet the challenge of the Europeans. Although there were some instances of individuals and groups acquiring and using firearms, this was not widespread. The Aboriginal people were never a serious military threat to European settlers, regardless of how much the settlers may have feared them. On occasions large groups of Aboriginal people attacked the settlers in open terrain and a conventional battle ensued, during which the Aboriginal people would attempt to use superior numbers to their advantage. This could sometimes be effective, with reports of them advancing in crescent formation in an attempt to outflank and surround their opponents, waiting out the first volley of shots and then hurling their spears while the settlers reloaded. However, such open warfare usually proved more costly for the Aboriginal people than the Europeans."
Military history of Australia,"Central to the success of the Europeans was the use of firearms. However, the advantages afforded by firearms have often been overstated. Prior to the late 19th century, firearms were often cumbersome muzzle-loading, smooth-bore, single shot muskets with flint-lock mechanisms. Such weapons produced a low rate of fire, while suffering from a high rate of failure and were only accurate within 50 metres (160 ft). These deficiencies may have initially given the Aboriginal people an advantage, allowing them to move in close and engage with spears or clubs. Yet by 1850 significant advances in firearms gave the Europeans a distinct advantage, with the six-shot Colt revolver, the Snider single shot breech-loading rifle and later the Martini-Henry rifle, as well as rapid-fire rifles such as the Winchester rifle, becoming available. These weapons, when used on open ground and combined with the superior mobility provided by horses to surround and engage groups of Aboriginal people, often proved successful. The Europeans also had to adapt their tactics to fight their fast-moving, often hidden enemies. Tactics employed included night-time surprise attacks, and positioning forces to drive the natives off cliffs or force them to retreat into rivers while attacking from both banks.
The conflict lasted for over 150 years and followed the pattern of British settlement in Australia. Beginning in New South Wales with the arrival of the first Europeans in May 1788, it continued in Sydney and its surrounds until the 1820s. As the frontier moved west so did the conflict, pushing into outback New South Wales in the 1840s. In Tasmania, fighting can be traced from 1804 to the 1830s, while in Victoria and the southern parts of South Australia, the majority of the violence occurred during the 1830s and 1840s. The south-west of Western Australia experienced warfare from 1829 to 1850. The war in Queensland began in the area around Brisbane in the 1840s and continued until 1860, moving to central Queensland in the 1850s and 1860s, and then to northern Queensland from the 1860s to 1900. In Western Australia, the violence moved north with European settlement, reaching the Kimberley region by 1880, with violent clashes continuing until the 1920s. In the Northern Territory conflict lasted even later still, especially in central Australia, continuing from the 1880s to the 1930s. One estimate of casualties places European deaths at 2,500, while at least 20,000 Aboriginal people are believed to have perished. Far more devastating though was the effect of disease which significantly reduced the Aboriginal population by the beginning of the 20th century; a fact which may also have limited their ability to resist."
Military history of Australia,"New Zealand Wars, 1861–64
Taranaki War
In 1861, the Victorian ship HMCSS Victoria was dispatched to help the New Zealand colonial government in its war against Māori in Taranaki. Victoria was subsequently used for patrol duties and logistic support, although a number of personnel were involved in actions against Māori fortifications. One sailor died from an accidental gunshot wound during the deployment."
Military history of Australia,"Invasion of the Waikato
In late 1863, the New Zealand government requested troops to assist in the invasion of the Waikato province against the Māori. Promised settlement on confiscated land, more than 2,500 Australians (over half of whom were from Victoria) were recruited to form four Waikato Regiments. Other Australians became scouts in the Company of Forest Rangers. Despite experiencing arduous conditions the Australians were not heavily involved in battle, and were primarily used for patrolling and garrison duties. Australians were involved in actions at Matarikoriko, Pukekohe East, Titi Hill, Ōrākau and Te Ranga. Fewer than 20 were believed to have been killed in action. The conflict was over by 1864, and the Waikato Regiments disbanded in 1867. However, many of the soldiers who had chosen to claim farmland at the cessation of hostilities had drifted to the towns and cities by the end of the decade, while many others had returned to Australia."
Military history of Australia,"Colonial military forces, 1870–1901
From 1870 until 1901, each of the six colonial governments was responsible for their own defence. The colonies had gained responsible government between 1855 and 1890, and while the Colonial Office in London retained control of some affairs, the Governor of the each colony was required to raise their own colonial militia. To do this, they were granted the authority from the British crown to raise military and naval forces. Initially these were militias in support of British regulars, but when military support for the colonies ended in 1870, the colonies assumed their own defence responsibilities. The colonial military forces included unpaid volunteer militia, paid citizen soldiers, and a small permanent component. They were mainly infantry, cavalry and mounted infantry, and were neither housed in barracks nor subject to full military discipline. Even after significant reforms in the 1870s—including the expansion of the permanent forces to include engineer and artillery units—they remained too small and unbalanced to be considered armies in the modern sense. By 1885, the forces numbered 21,000 men. Although they could not be compelled to serve overseas many volunteers subsequently did see action in a number conflicts of the British Empire during the 19th century, with the colonies raising contingents to serve in Sudan, South Africa and China.
Despite a reputation of colonial inferiority, many of the locally raised units were highly organised, disciplined, professional, and well trained. During this period, defences in Australia mainly revolved around static defence by combined infantry and artillery, based on garrisoned coastal forts. However, by the 1890s, improved railway communications between the mainland eastern colonies led Major General James Edwards—who had recently completed a survey of colonial military forces—to the belief that the colonies could be defended by the rapid mobilisation of brigades of infantry. As a consequence he called for a restructure of defences, and defensive agreements to be made between the colonies. Edwards argued for the colonial forces to be federated and for professional units—obliged to serve anywhere in the South Pacific—to replace the volunteer forces. These views found support in the influential New South Wales Commandant, Major General Edward Hutton, however suspicions held by the smaller colonies towards New South Wales and Victoria stifled the proposal. These reforms remaining unresolved however, and defence issues were generally given little attention in the debate on the political federation of the colonies."
Military history of Australia,"With the exception of Western Australia, the colonies also operated their own navies. In 1856, Victoria received its own naval vessel, HMCSS Victoria, and its deployment to New Zealand in 1860 during the First Taranaki War marked the first occasion that an Australian warship had been deployed overseas. The colonial navies were expanded greatly in the mid-1880s and consisted of a number of gunboats and torpedo-boats for the defence of harbours and rivers, as well as naval brigades to man vessels and forts. Victoria became the most powerful of all the colonial navies, with the ironclad HMVS Cerberus in service from 1870, as well as the steam-sail warship HMS Nelson on loan from the Royal Navy, three small gunboats and five torpedo-boats. New South Wales formed a Naval Brigade in 1863 and by the start of the 20th century had two small torpedo-boats and a corvette. The Queensland Maritime Defence Force was established in 1885, while South Australia operated a single ship, HMCS Protector. Tasmania had also a small Torpedo Corps, while Western Australia's only naval defences included the Fremantle Naval Artillery. Naval personnel from New South Wales and Victoria took part in the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900, while HMCS Protector was sent by South Australia but saw no action. The separate colonies maintained control over their military and naval forces until Federation in 1901, when they were amalgamated and placed under the control of the new Commonwealth of Australia."
Military history of Australia,"Sudan, 1885
During the early years of the 1880s, an Egyptian regime in the Sudan, backed by the British, came under threat from rebellion under the leadership of native Muhammad Ahmad (or Ahmed), known as Mahdi to his followers. In 1883, as part of the Mahdist War, the Egyptians sent an army to deal with the revolt, but they were defeated and faced a difficult campaign of extracting their forces. The British instructed the Egyptians to abandon the Sudan, and sent General Charles Gordon to co-ordinate the evacuation, but he was killed in January 1885. When news of his death arrived in New South Wales in February 1885, the government offered to send forces and meet the contingent's expenses. The New South Wales Contingent consisted of an infantry battalion of 522 men and 24 officers, and an artillery battery of 212 men and sailed from Sydney on 3 March 1885.
The contingent arrived in Suakin on 29 March and were attached to a brigade that consisted of Scots, Grenadier and Coldstream Guards. They subsequently marched for Tamai in a large ""square"" formation made up of 10,000 men. Reaching the village, they burned huts and returned to Suakin: three Australians were wounded in minor fighting. Most of the contingent was then sent to work on a railway line that was being laid across the desert towards Berber, on the Nile. The Australians were then assigned to guard duties, but soon a camel corps was raised and 50 men volunteered. They rode on a reconnaissance to Takdul on 6 May and were heavily involved in a skirmish during which more than 100 Arabs were killed or captured. On 15 May, they made one last sortie to bury the dead from the fighting of the previous March. Meanwhile, the artillery were posted at Handoub and drilled for a month, but they soon rejoined the camp at Suakin.
Eventually the British government decided that the campaign in Sudan was not worth the effort required and left a garrison in Suakin. The New South Wales Contingent sailed for home on 17 May, arriving in Sydney on 19 June 1885. Approximately 770 Australians served in Sudan; nine subsequently died of disease during the return journey while three had been wounded during the campaign."
Military history of Australia,"Second Boer War, 1899–1902
British encroachment into areas of South Africa already settled by the Afrikaner Boers and the competition for resources and land that developed between them as a result, led to the Second Boer War in 1899. Pre-empting the deployment of British forces, the Afrikaner Republics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal Republic under President Paul Kruger declared war on 11 October 1899, striking deep into the British territories of Natal and the Cape Colony. After the outbreak of war, plans for the dispatch of a combined Australian force were subsequently set aside by the British War Office and each of the six colonial governments sent separate contingents to serve with British formations, with two squadrons each of 125 men from New South Wales and Victoria, and one each from the other colonies. The first troops arrived three weeks later, with the New South Wales Lancers—who had been training in England before the war, hurriedly diverted to South Africa. On 22 November, the Lancers came under fire for the first time near Belmont, and they subsequently forced their attackers to withdraw after inflicting significant casualties on them.
Following a series of minor victories, the British suffered a major setback during Black Week between 10 and 17 December 1899, although no Australian units were involved. The first contingents of infantry from Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, and Tasmania arrived in Cape Town on 26 November and were designated the Australian Regiment under the command of Colonel John Charles Hoad. With a need for increased mobility, they were soon converted into mounted infantry. Further units from Queensland and New South Wales arrived in December and were soon committed to the front. The first casualties occurred soon after at Sunnyside on 1 January 1900, after 250 Queensland Mounted Infantry and a column of Canadians, British and artillery attacked a Boer laager at Belmont. Troopers David McLeod and Victor Jones were killed when their patrol clashed with the Boer forward sentries. Regardless, the Boers were surprised and during two hours of heavy fighting, more than 50 were killed and another 40 taken prisoner. Five hundred Queenslanders and the New South Wales Lancers subsequently took part in the Siege of Kimberley in February 1900.
Despite serious set-backs at Colenso, Stormberg, Magersfontein, and Spion Kop in January—and with Ladysmith still under siege—the British mounted a five division counter-invasion of the Orange Free State in February. The attacking force included a division of cavalry commanded by Lieutenant General John French with the New South Wales Lancers, Queensland Mounted Infantry and New South Wales Army Medical Corps attached. First, Kimberley was relieved following the battles of Modder River and Magersfontein, and the retreating Boers defeated at Paardeberg, with the New South Wales Mounted Rifles locating the Boer general, Piet Cronjé. The British entered Bloemfontein on 13 March 1900, while Ladysmith was relieved. Disease began to take its toll and scores of men died. Still the advance continued, with the drive to Pretoria in May including more than 3,000 Australians. Johannesburg fell on 30 May, and the Boers withdrew from Pretoria on 3 June. The New South Wales Mounted Rifles and Western Australians saw action again at Diamond Hill on 12 June. Mafeking was relieved on 17 May."
Military history of Australia,"Following the defeat of the Afrikaner republics still the Boers held out, forming small commando units and conducting a campaign of guerrilla warfare to disrupt British troop movements and lines of supply. This new phase of resistance led to further recruiting in the Australian colonies and the raising of the Bushmen's Contingents, with these soldiers usually being volunteers with horse-riding and shooting skills, but little military experience. After Federation in 1901, eight Australian Commonwealth Horse battalions of the newly created Australian Army were also sent to South Africa, although they saw little fighting before the war ended. Some Australians later joined local South African irregular units, instead of returning home after discharge. These soldiers were part of the British Army, and were subject to British military discipline. Such units included the Bushveldt Carbineers which gained notoriety as the unit in which Harry ""Breaker"" Morant and Peter Handcock served in before their court martial and execution for war crimes.
With the guerrillas requiring supplies, Koos de la Rey lead a force of 3,000 Boers against Brakfontein, on the Elands River in Western Transvaal. The post held a large quantity of stores and was defended by 300 Australians and 200 Rhodesians. The attack began on 4 August 1900 with heavy shelling causing 32 casualties. During the night the defenders dug in, enduring shelling and rifle fire. A relief force was stopped by the Boers, while a second column turned back believing that the post had already been relieved. The siege lasted 11 days, during which more than 1,800 shells were fired into the post. After calls to surrender were ignored by the defenders, and not prepared to risk a frontal attack, the Boers eventually retired. The Siege of Elands River was one of the major achievements of the Australians during the war, with the post finally relieved on 16 August.
In response the British adopted counter-insurgency tactics, including a scorched earth policy involving the burning of houses and crops, the establishment of concentration camps for Boer women and children, and a system of blockhouses and field obstacles to limit Boer mobility and to protect railway communications. Such measures required considerable expenditure, and caused much bitterness towards the British, however they soon yielded results. By mid-1901, the bulk of the fighting was over, and British mounted units would ride at night to attack Boer farmhouses or encampments, overwhelming them with superior numbers. Indicative of warfare in last months of 1901, the New South Wales Mounted Rifles travelled 1,814 miles (2,919 km) and were involved in 13 skirmishes, killing 27 Boers, wounding 15, and capturing 196 for the loss of five dead and 19 wounded. Other notable Australian actions included Slingersfontein, Pink Hill, Rhenosterkop and Haartebeestefontein.
Australians were not always successful however, suffering a number of heavy losses late in the war. On 12 June 1901, the 5th Victorian Mounted Rifles lost 19 killed and 42 wounded at Wilmansrust, near Middleburg after poor security allowed a force of 150 Boers to surprise them. On 30 October 1901, Victorians of the Scottish Horse Regiment also suffered heavy casualties at Gun Hill, although 60 Boers were also killed in the engagement. Meanwhile, at Onverwacht on 4 January 1902, the 5th Queensland Imperial Bushmen lost 13 killed and 17 wounded. Ultimately the Boers were defeated, and the war ended on 31 May 1902. In all 16,175 Australians served in South Africa, and perhaps another 10,000 enlisted as individuals in Imperial units; casualties included 251 killed in action, 267 died of disease and 43 missing in action, while a further 735 were wounded. Six Australians were awarded the Victoria Cross."
Military history of Australia,"Boxer Rebellion, 1900–01
The Boxer Rebellion in China began in 1900, and a number of western nations—including many European powers, the United States, and Japan—soon sent forces as part of the China Field Force to protect their interests. In June, the British government sought permission from the Australian colonies to dispatch ships from the Australian Squadron to China. The colonies also offered to assist further, but as most of their troops were still engaged in South Africa, they had to rely on naval forces for manpower. The force dispatched was a modest one, with Britain accepting 200 men from Victoria, 260 from New South Wales and the South Australian ship HMCS Protector, under the command of Captain William Creswell. Most of these forces were made up of naval brigade reservists, who had been trained in both ship handling and soldiering to fulfil their coastal defence role. Amongst the naval contingent from New South Wales were 200 naval officers and sailors and 50 permanent soldiers headquartered at Victoria Barracks, Sydney who originally enlisted for the Second Boer War. The soldiers were keen to go to China but refused to be enlisted as sailors, while the New South Wales Naval Brigade objected to having soldiers in their ranks. The Army and Navy compromised and titled the contingent the NSW Marine Light Infantry.
The contingents from New South Wales and Victoria sailed for China on 8 August 1900. Arriving in Tientsin, the Australians provided 300 men to an 8,000-strong multinational force tasked with capturing the Chinese forts at Pei Tang, which dominated a key railway. They arrived too late to take part in the battle, but were involved in the attack on the fortress at Pao-ting Fu, where the Chinese government was believed to have found asylum after Peking was captured by western forces. The Victorians joined a force of 7,500 men on a ten-day march to the fort, once again only to find that it had already surrendered. The Victorians then garrisoned Tientsin and the New South Wales contingent undertook garrison duties in Peking. HMCS Protector was mostly used for survey, transport, and courier duties in the Bohai Sea, before departing in November. The naval brigades remained during the winter, unhappily performing policing and guard duties, as well as working as railwaymen and fire-fighters. They left China in March 1901, having played only a minor role in a few offensives and punitive expeditions and in the restoration of civil order. Six Australians died from sickness and injury, but none were killed as a result of enemy action."
Military history of Australia,"Australian military forces at Federation, 1901
The Commonwealth of Australia came into existence on 1 January 1901 as a result of the federation of the Australian colonies. Under the Constitution of Australia, defence responsibility was now vested in the new federal government. The co-ordination of Australia-wide defensive efforts in the face of Imperial German interest in the Pacific Ocean was one of driving forces behind federalism, and the Department of Defence immediately came into being as a result, while the Commonwealth Military Forces (early forerunner of the Australian Army) and Commonwealth Naval Force were also soon established."
Military history of Australia,"The Australian Commonwealth Military Forces came into being on 1 March 1901 and all the colonial forces—including those still in South Africa—became part of the new force. 28,923 colonial soldiers, including 1,457 professional soldiers, 18,603 paid militia and 8,863 unpaid volunteers, were subsequently transferred. The individual units continued to be administered under the various colonial Acts until the Defence Act 1903 brought all the units under one piece of legislation. This Act also prevented the raising of standing infantry units and specified that militia forces could not be used in industrial disputes or serve outside Australia. However, the majority of soldiers remained in militia units, known as the Citizen Military Forces (CMF). Major General Sir Edward Hutton—a former commander of the New South Wales Military Forces—subsequently became the first commander of the Commonwealth Military Forces on 26 December and set to work devising an integrated structure for the new army. In 1911, following a report by Lord Kitchener the Royal Military College, Duntroon was established, as was a system of universal National Service.
Prior to federation each self-governing colony had operated its own naval force. These navies were small and lacked blue water capabilities, forcing the separate colonies to subsidise the cost of a British naval squadron in their waters for decades. The colonies maintained control over their respective navies until 1 March 1901, when the Commonwealth Naval Force was created. This new force also lacked blue water capable ships, and ultimately did not lead to a change in Australian naval policy. In 1907 Prime Minister Alfred Deakin and Creswell, while attending the Imperial Conference in London, sought the British Government's agreement to end the subsidy system and develop an Australian navy. The Admiralty rejected and resented the challenge, but suggested diplomatically that a small fleet of destroyers and submarines would be sufficient. Deakin was unimpressed, and in 1908 invited the American Great White Fleet to visit Australia. This visit fired public enthusiasm for a modern navy and in part led to the order of two 700-ton River-class destroyers. The surge in German naval construction prompted the Admiralty to change their position however and the Royal Australian Navy was subsequently formed in 1911, absorbing the Commonwealth Naval Force. On 4 October 1913, the new fleet steamed through Sydney Heads, consisting of the battlecruiser HMAS Australia, three light cruisers, and three destroyers, while several other ships were still under construction. And as a consequence the navy entered the First World War as a formidable force.
The Australian Flying Corps (AFC) was established as part of the Commonwealth Military Forces in 1912, prior to the formation of the Australian Military Forces in 1916 and was later separated in 1921 to form the Royal Australian Air Force, making it the second oldest air force in the world. Regardless, the service branches were not linked by a single chain of command however, and each reported to their own minister and had separate administrative arrangements and government departments."
Military history of Australia,"First World War, 1914–18
Outbreak of hostilities
When Britain declared war on Germany at the start of the First World War, the Australian government rapidly followed suit, with Prime Minister Joseph Cook declaring on 5 August 1914 that ""...when the Empire is at war, so also is Australia"" and reflecting the sentiment of many Australians that any declaration of war by Britain automatically included Australia. This was itself in part due to the large number of British-born citizens and first generation Anglo-Australians that made up the Australian population at the time. Indeed, by the end of the war almost 20% of those who served in the Australian forces had been born in Britain.
As the existing militia forces were unable to serve overseas under the provisions of the Defence Act 1903, an all-volunteer expeditionary force known as the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) was formed and recruitment began on 10 August 1914. The government pledged 20,000 men, organised as one infantry division and one light horse brigade plus supporting units. Enlistment and organisation was primarily regionally based and was undertaken under mobilisation plans drawn up in 1912. The first commander was Major General William Bridges, who also assumed command of the 1st Division. Throughout the course of the conflict Australian efforts were predominantly focused upon the ground war, although small air and naval forces were also committed."
Military history of Australia,"Occupation of German New Guinea
Following the outbreak of war Australian forces moved quickly to reduce the threat to shipping posed by the proximity of Germany's Pacific colonies. The Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force (AN&MEF), a 2000-man volunteer force—separate from the AIF—and consisting of an infantry battalion plus 500 naval reservists and ex-sailors, was rapidly formed under the command of William Holmes. The objectives of the force were the wireless stations on Nauru, and those at Yap in the Caroline Islands, and at Rabaul in German New Guinea. The force reached Rabaul on 11 September 1914 and occupied it the next day, encountering only brief resistance from the German and native defenders during fighting at Bita Paka and Toma. German New Guinea surrendered on 17 September 1914. Australian losses were light, including six killed during the fighting, but were compounded by the mysterious loss offshore of the submarine AE1 with all 35 men aboard."
Military history of Australia,"Gallipoli
The AIF departed by ship in a single convoy from Albany on 1 November 1914. During the journey one of the convoy's naval escorts—HMAS Sydney—engaged and destroyed the German cruiser SMS Emden at the Battle of Cocos on 8 November, in the first ship-to-ship action involving the Royal Australian Navy. Although originally bound for England to undergo further training and then for employment on the Western Front, the Australians were instead sent to British-controlled Egypt to pre-empt any Turkish attack against the strategically important Suez Canal, and with a view to opening another front against the Central Powers."
Military history of Australia,"Aiming to knock Turkey out of the war the British then decided to stage an amphibious lodgement at Gallipoli and following a period of training and reorganisation the Australians were included amongst the British, Indian and French forces committed to the campaign. The combined Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC)—commanded by British general William Birdwood—subsequently landed at Anzac Cove on the Gallipoli peninsula on 25 April 1915. Although promising to transform the war if successful, the Gallipoli Campaign was ill-conceived and ultimately lasted eight months of bloody stalemate, without achieving its objectives. Australian casualties totalled 26,111, including 8,141 killed.
For Australians and New Zealanders the Gallipoli campaign came to symbolise an important milestone in the emergence of both nations as independent actors on the world stage and the development of a sense of national identity. Today, the date of the initial landings, 25 April, is known as Anzac Day in Australia and New Zealand and every year thousands of people gather at memorials in both nations, as well as Turkey, to honour the bravery and sacrifice of the original Anzacs, and of all those who have subsequently lost their lives in war."
Military history of Australia,"Egypt and Palestine
After the withdrawal from Gallipoli the Australians returned to Egypt and the AIF underwent a major expansion. In 1916 the infantry began to move to France while the cavalry units remained in the Middle East to fight the Turks. Australian troops of the Anzac Mounted Division and the Australian Mounted Division saw action in all the major battles of the Sinai and Palestine Campaign, playing a pivotal role in fighting the Turkish troops that were threatening British control of Egypt. The Australians first saw combat during the Senussi uprising in the Libyan Desert and the Nile Valley, during which the combined British forces successfully put down the primitive pro-Turkish Islamic sect with heavy casualties. The Anzac Mounted Division subsequently saw considerable action in the Battle of Romani against the Turkish between 3–5 August 1916, with the Turks eventually pushed back. Following this victory the British forces went on the offensive in the Sinai, although the pace of the advance was governed by the speed by which the railway and water pipeline could be constructed from the Suez Canal. Rafa was captured on 9 January 1917, while the last of the small Turkish garrisons in the Sinai were eliminated in February."
Military history of Australia,"The advance entered Palestine and an initial, unsuccessful attempt was made to capture Gaza on 26 March 1917, while a second and equally unsuccessful attempt was launched on 19 April. A third assault occurred between 31 October and 7 November and this time both the Anzac Mounted Division and the Australian Mounted Division took part. The battle was a complete success for the British, over-running the Gaza-Beersheba line and capturing 12,000 Turkish soldiers. The critical moment was the capture of Beersheba on the first day, after the Australian 4th Light Horse Brigade charged more than 4 miles (6.4 km). The Turkish trenches were overrun, with the Australians capturing the wells at Beersheeba and securing the valuable water they contained along with over 700 prisoners for the loss of 31 killed and 36 wounded. Later, Australian troops assisted in pushing the Turkish forces out of Palestine and took part in actions at Mughar Ridge, Jerusalem and the Megiddo. The Turkish government surrendered on 30 October 1918. Units of the Light Horse were subsequently used to help put down a nationalist revolt in Egypt in 1919 and did so with efficiency and brutality, although they suffered a number of fatalities in the process.
Meanwhile, the AFC had undergone remarkable development, and its independence as a separate national force was unique among the Dominions. Deploying just a single aircraft to German New Guinea in 1914, the first operational flight did not occur until 27 May 1915 however, when the Mesopotamian Half Flight was called upon to assist in protecting British oil interests in Iraq. The AFC was soon expanded and four squadrons later saw action in Egypt, Palestine and on the Western Front, where they performed well."
Military history of Australia,"Western Front
Five infantry divisions of the AIF saw action in France and Belgium, leaving Egypt in March 1916. I Anzac Corps subsequently took up positions in a quiet sector south of Armentières on 7 April 1916 and for the next two and a half years the AIF participated in most of the major battles on the Western Front, earning a formidable reputation. Although spared from the disastrous first day of the Battle of the Somme, within weeks four Australian divisions had been committed. The 5th Division, positioned on the left flank, was the first in action during the Battle of Fromelles on 19 July 1916, suffering 5,533 casualties in a single day. The 1st Division entered the line on 23 July, assaulting Pozieres, and by the time that they were relieved by the 2nd Division on 27 July, they had suffered 5,286 casualties. Mouquet Farm was attacked in August, with casualties totalling 6,300 men. By the time the AIF was withdrawn from the Somme to re-organise, they had suffered 23,000 casualties in just 45 days."
Military history of Australia,"In March 1917, the 2nd and 5th Divisions pursued the Germans back to the Hindenburg Line, capturing the town of Bapaume. On 11 April, the 4th Division assaulted the Hindenburg Line in the disastrous First Battle of Bullecourt, losing over 3,000 casualties and 1,170 captured. On 15 April, the 1st and 2nd Divisions were counter-attacked near Lagnicourt and were forced to abandon the town, before recapturing it again. The 2nd Division then took part in the Second Battle of Bullecourt, beginning on 3 May, and succeeded in taking sections of the Hindenburg Line and holding them until relieved by the 1st Division. Finally, on 7 May the 5th Division relieved the 1st, remaining in the line until the battle ended in mid-May. Combined these efforts cost 7,482 Australian casualties.
On 7 June 1917, the II Anzac Corps—along with two British corps—launched an operation in Flanders to eliminate a salient south of Ypres. The attack commenced with the detonation of a million pounds (454,545 kg) of explosives that had been placed underneath the Messines ridge, destroying the German trenches. The advance was virtually unopposed, and despite strong German counterattacks the next day, it succeeded. Australian casualties during the Battle of Messines included nearly 6,800 men. I Anzac Corps then took part in the Third Battle of Ypres in Belgium as part of the campaign to capture the Gheluvelt Plateau, between September and November 1917. Individual actions took place at Menin Road, Polygon Wood, Broodseinde, Poelcappelle and Passchendaele and over the course of eight weeks fighting the Australians suffered 38,000 casualties.
On 21 March 1918 the German Army launched its Spring Offensive in a last-ditched effort to win the war, unleashing sixty-three divisions over a 70 miles (110 km) front. As the Allies fell back the 3rd and 4th Divisions were rushed south to Amiens on the Somme. The offensive lasted for the next five months and all five AIF divisions in France were engaged in the attempt to stem the tide. By late May the Germans had pushed to within 50 miles (80 km) of Paris. During this time the Australians fought at Dernancourt, Morlancourt, Villers-Bretonneux, Hangard Wood, Hazebrouck, and Hamel. At Hamel the commander of the Australian Corps, Lieutenant General John Monash, successfully used combined arms—including aircraft, artillery and armour—in an attack for the first time."
Military history of Australia,"The German offensive ground to a halt in mid-July and a brief lull followed, during which the Australians undertook a series of raids, known as Peaceful Penetrations. The Allies soon launched their own offensive—the Hundred Days Offensive—ultimately ending the war. Beginning on 8 August 1918 the offensive included four Australian divisions striking at Amiens. Using the combined arms techniques developed earlier at Hamel, significant gains were made on what became known as the ""Black Day"" of the German Army. The offensive continued for four months, and during Second Battle of the Somme the Australian Corps fought actions at Lihons, Etinehem, Proyart, Chuignes, and Mont St Quentin, before their final engagement of the war on 5 October 1918 at Montbrehain. The AIF was subsequently out of the line when the armistice was declared on 11 November 1918.
In all 416,806 Australians enlisted in the AIF during the war and 333,000 served overseas. 61,508 were killed and another 155,000 were wounded (a total casualty rate of 65%). The financial cost to the Australian government was calculated at £376,993,052. Two referendums on conscription for overseas service had been defeated during the war, preserving the volunteer status of the Australian force, but stretching the reserves of manpower available, particularly towards the end of the fighting. Consequently, Australia remained one of only two armies on either side not to resort to conscription during the war.
The war had a profound effect on Australian society in other ways also. Indeed, for many Australians the nation's involvement is seen as a symbol of its emergence as an international actor, while many of the notions of Australian character and nationhood that exist today have their origins in the war. 64 Australians were awarded the Victoria Cross during the First World War."
Military history of Australia,"Inter-war years
Russian Civil War, 1918–19
The Russian Civil War began after the Russian provisional government collapsed and the Bolshevik party assumed power in October 1917. Following the end of the First World War, the western powers—including Britain—intervened, giving half-hearted support to the pro-tsarist, anti-Bolshevik White Russian forces. Although the Australian government refused to commit forces, many Australians serving with the British Army became involved in the fighting. A small number served as advisors to White Russian units with the North Russian Expeditionary Force (NREF). Awaiting repatriation in England, about 150 Australians subsequently enlisted in the British North Russia Relief Force (NRRF), where they were involved in a number of sharp battles and several were killed.
The Royal Australian Navy destroyer HMAS Swan was also briefly engaged, carrying out an intelligence gathering mission in the Black Sea in late 1918. Other Australians served as advisers with the British Military Mission to the White Russian General, Anton Denikin in South Russia, while several more advised Admiral Alexander Kolchak in Siberia. Later, they also served in Mesopotamia as part of Dunsterforce and the Malleson Mission, although these missions were aimed at preventing Turkish access to the Middle East and India, and did little fighting.
Although the motivations of those Australian's that volunteered to fight in Russia can only be guessed at, it seems unlikely to have been political. Regardless, they confirmed a reputation for audacity and courage, winning the only two Victoria Crosses of the land campaign, despite their small numbers. Yet Australian involvement was barely noticed at home at the time and made little difference to the outcome of the war. Total casualties included 10 killed and 40 wounded, with most deaths being from disease during operations in Mesopotamia."
Military history of Australia,"Malaita, 1927
In October 1927, HMAS Adelaide was called to the British Solomon Islands Protectorate as part of a punitive expedition in response to the killing of a district officer and sixteen others by Kwaio natives at Sinalagu on the island of Malaita on 3 October, known as the Malaita massacre. Arriving at Tulagi on 14 October, the ship proceeded to Malaita to protect the landing of three platoons of troops, then remained in the area to provide personnel support for the soldiers as they searched for the killers. The ship's personnel took no part in operations ashore, providing only logistic and communications support. Adelaide returned to Australia on 23 November."
Military history of Australia,"Spanish Civil War, 1936–39
A small number of Australian volunteers fought on both sides of the Spanish Civil War, although they predominantly supported the Spanish Republic through the International Brigades. The Australians were subsequently allocated to the battalions of other nationalities, such as the British Battalion and the Lincoln Battalion, rather than forming their own units. Most were radicals motivated by ideological reasons, while a number were Spanish-born migrants who returned to fight in their country of origin. At least 66 Australians volunteered, with only one—Nugent Bull, a conservative Catholic who was later killed serving in the RAF during the Second World War—known to have fought for General Francisco Franco's Nationalist forces.
While a celebrated cause for the Australian left—particularly the Communist Party of Australia and the trade union movement—the war failed to spark particular public interest and the government maintained its neutrality. Australian opposition to the Republican cause was marshalled by B. A. Santamaria on an anti-communist basis, rather than a pro-Nationalist basis. Equally, although individual right wing Australians may have served with the Nationalist rebels, they received no public support. Service in a foreign armed force was illegal at the time, however as the government received no reports of Australians travelling to Spain to enlist, no action was taken. Consequently, returned veterans were neither recognised by the government or the Returned and Services League of Australia (RSL). Although the number of Australian volunteers was relatively small compared to those from other countries, at least 14 were killed."
Military history of Australia,"Second World War, 1939–45
Europe and the Middle East
Australia entered the Second World War on 3 September 1939. At the time of the declaration of war against Germany the Australian military was small and unready for war. Recruiting for a Second Australian Imperial Force (2nd AIF) began in mid-September. While there was no rush of volunteers like the First World War, a high proportion of Australian men of military age had enlisted by mid-1940. Four infantry divisions were formed during 1939 and 1940, three of which were dispatched to the Middle East. The RAAF's resources were initially mainly devoted to training airmen for service with the Commonwealth air forces through the Empire Air Training Scheme (EATS), through which almost 28,000 Australians were trained during the war.
The Australian military's first major engagements of the war were against Italian forces in the Mediterranean and North Africa. During 1940 the light cruiser HMAS Sydney and five elderly destroyers (dubbed the ""Scrap Iron Flotilla"" by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels—a title proudly accepted by the ships) took part in a series of operations as part of the British Mediterranean Fleet, and sank several Italian warships. The Army first saw action in January 1941, when the 6th Division formed part of the Commonwealth forces during Operation Compass. The division assaulted and captured Bardia on 5 January and Tobruk on 22 January, with tens of thousands of Italian troops surrendering at both towns. The 6th Division took part in the pursuit of the Italian Army and captured Benghazi on 4 February. In late February it was withdrawn for service in Greece, and was replaced by the 9th Division."
Military history of Australia,"The Australian forces in the Mediterranean endured a number of campaigns during 1941. During April, the 6th Division, other elements of I Corps and several Australian warships formed part of the Allied force which unsuccessfully attempted to defend Greece from German invasion during the Battle of Greece. At the end of this campaign, the 6th Division was evacuated to Egypt and Crete. The force at Crete subsequently fought in the Battle of Crete during May, which also ended in defeat for the Allies. Over 5,000 Australians were captured in these campaigns, and the 6th Division required a long period of rebuilding before it was again ready for combat. The Germans and Italians also went on the offensive in North Africa at the end of March and drove the Commonwealth force there back to near the border with Egypt. The 9th Division and a brigade of the 7th Division were besieged at Tobruk; successfully defending the key port town until they were replaced by British units in October. During June, the main body of the 7th Division, a brigade of the 6th Division and the I Corps headquarters took part in the Syria-Lebanon Campaign against the Vichy French. Resistance was stronger than expected; Australians were involved in most of the fighting and sustained most of the casualties before the French capitulated in early July.
The majority of Australian units in the Mediterranean returned to Australia in early 1942, after the outbreak of the Pacific War. The 9th Division was the largest unit to remain in the Middle East, and played a key role in the First Battle of El Alamein during June and the Second Battle of El Alamein in October. The division returned to Australia in early 1943, but several RAAF squadrons and RAN warships took part in the subsequent Tunisia Campaign and the Italian Campaign from 1943 until the end of the war."
Military history of Australia,"The RAAF's role in the strategic air offensive in Europe formed Australia's main contribution to the defeat of Germany. Approximately 13,000 Australian airmen served in dozens of British and five Australian squadrons in RAF Bomber Command between 1940 and the end of the war. Australians took part in all of Bomber Command's major offensives and suffered heavy losses during raids on German cities and targets in France. Australian aircrew in Bomber Command had one of the highest casualty rates of any part of the Australian military during the Second World War and sustained almost 20 percent of all Australian deaths in combat; 3,486 were killed and hundreds more were taken prisoner. Australian airmen in light bomber and fighter squadrons also participated in the liberation of Western Europe during 1944 and 1945 and two RAAF maritime patrol squadrons served in the Battle of the Atlantic."
Military history of Australia,"Asia and the Pacific
From the 1920s Australia's defence thinking was dominated by British Imperial defence policy, which was embodied by the ""Singapore strategy"". This strategy involved the construction and defence of a major naval base at Singapore from which a large British fleet would respond to Japanese aggression in the region. To this end, a high proportion of Australian forces in Asia were concentrated in Malaya during 1940 and 1941 as the threat from Japan increased. However, as a result of the emphasis on co-operation with Britain, relatively few Australian military units had been retained in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. Measures were taken to improve Australia's defences as war with Japan loomed in 1941, but these proved inadequate. In December 1941, the Australian Army in the Pacific comprised the 8th Division, most of which was stationed in Malaya, and eight partially trained and equipped divisions in Australia. The RAAF was equipped with 373 aircraft, most of which were obsolete trainers, and the RAN had three cruisers and two destroyers in Australian waters.
The Australian military suffered a series of defeats during the early months of the Pacific War. The 8th Division and RAAF squadrons in Malaya formed a part of the British Commonwealth forces which were unable to stop a smaller Japanese invasion force which landed on 7 December. The British Commonwealth force withdrew to Singapore at the end of January, but was forced to surrender on 15 February after the Japanese captured much of the island. Smaller Australian forces were also overwhelmed and defeated during early 1942 at Rabaul, and in Ambon, Timor, and Java. The Australian town of Darwin was heavily bombed by the Japanese on 19 February, to prevent it from being used as an Allied base. Over 22,000 Australians were taken prisoner in early 1942 and endured harsh conditions in Japanese captivity. The prisoners were subjected to malnutrition, denied medical treatment and frequently beaten and killed by their guards. As a result, 8,296 Australian prisoners died in captivity."
Military history of Australia,"The rapid Allied defeat in the Pacific caused many Australians to fear that the Japanese would invade the Australian mainland. While elements of the Imperial Japanese Navy proposed this in early 1942, it was judged to be impossible by the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters, which instead adopted a strategy of isolating Australia from the United States by capturing New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Fiji, Samoa, and New Caledonia. This fact was not known by the Allies at the time, and the Australian military was greatly expanded to meet the threat of invasion. Large numbers of United States Army and Army Air Forces units arrived in Australia in early 1942, and the Australian military was placed under the overall command of General Douglas MacArthur in March.
Australians played a central role in the New Guinea campaign during 1942 and 1943. After an attempt to land troops at Port Moresby was defeated in the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Japanese attempted to capture the strategically important town by advancing overland across the Owen Stanley Ranges and Milne Bay. Australian Army units defeated these offensives in the Kokoda Track campaign and Battle of Milne Bay with the support of the RAAF and USAAF. Australian and US Army units subsequently assaulted and captured the Japanese bases on the north coast of Papua in the hard-fought Battle of Buna-Gona. The Australian Army also defeated a Japanese attempt to capture the town of Wau in January 1943 and went onto the offensive in the Salamaua-Lae campaign in April. In late 1943, the 7th and 9th Divisions played an important role in Operation Cartwheel, when they landed to the east and west of Lae and secured the Huon Peninsula during the Huon Peninsula campaign and Finisterre Range campaign."
Military history of Australia,"The Australian mainland came under attack during 1942 and 1943. Japanese submarines operated off Australia from May to August 1942 and January to June 1943. These attacks sought to cut the Allied supply lines between Australia and the US and Australia and New Guinea, but were unsuccessful. On 14 May 1943 the hospital ship AHS Centaur was sunk by a Japanese submarine off Brisbane with the loss of 268 lives. Japanese aircraft also conducted air raids against Allied bases in northern Australia which were being used to mount the North Western Area Campaign against Japanese positions in the Netherlands East Indies (NEI).
Australia's role in the Pacific War declined from 1944. The increasing size of the US forces in the Pacific rendered the Australian military superfluous and labour shortages forced the Government to reduce the size of the armed forces to boost war production. Nevertheless, the Government wanted the Australian military to remain active, and agreed to MacArthur's proposals that it be used in relatively unimportant campaigns. In late 1944, Australian troops and RAAF squadrons replaced US garrisons in eastern New Guinea, New Britain, and Bougainville, and launched offensives aimed at destroying or containing the remaining Japanese forces there. In May 1945, I Corps, the Australian First Tactical Air Force and USAAF and USN units began the Borneo Campaign, which continued until the end of the war. These campaigns contributed little to Japan's defeat and remain controversial.
Following Japan's surrender on 15 August 1945 Australia assumed responsibility for occupying much of Borneo and the eastern Netherlands East Indies until British and Dutch colonial rule was restored. Australian authorities also conducted a number of war crimes trials of Japanese personnel. 993,000 Australians enlisted during the war, while 557,000 served overseas. Casualties included 39,767 killed and another 66,553 were wounded. 20 Victoria Crosses were awarded to Australians."
Military history of Australia,"Post-war period
Demobilisation and peace-time defence arrangements
The demobilisation of the Australian military following the end of the Second World War was completed in 1947. Plans for post-war defence arrangements were predicated on maintaining a relatively strong peacetime force. It was envisioned the Royal Australian Navy would maintain a fleet that would include two light fleet carriers, two cruisers, six destroyers, 16 others ships in commission and another 52 in reserve. The Royal Australian Air Force would have a strength of 16 squadrons, including four manned by the Citizen Air Force. Meanwhile, in a significant departure from past Australian defence policy which had previously relied on citizen forces, the Australian Army would include a permanent field force of 19,000 regulars organised into a brigade of three infantry battalions with armoured support, serving alongside a part-time force of 50,000 men in the Citizen Military Forces. The Australian Regular Army was subsequently formed on 30 September 1947, while the CMF was re-raised on 1 July 1948."
Military history of Australia,"Occupation of Japan, 1946–52
In the immediate post-war period Australia contributed significant forces to the Allied occupation of Japan as part of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF), which included forces from Australia, Britain, India and New Zealand. At its height in 1946 the Australian component consisted of an infantry brigade, four warships and three fighter squadrons, totalling 13,500 personnel. The Australian Army component initially consisted of the 34th Brigade which arrived in Japan in February 1946 and was based in Hiroshima Prefecture. The three infantry battalions raised for occupation duties were designated the 1st, 2nd and 3rd battalions of the Royal Australian Regiment in 1949, and the 34th Brigade became the 1st Brigade when it returned to Australia in December 1948, forming the basis of the post-war Regular Army. From that time the Australian Army contribution to the occupation of Japan was reduced to a single under-strength battalion. Australian forces remained until September 1951 when the BCOF ceased operations, although by that time the majority of units had been committed to the fighting on the Korean peninsula following the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. The RAAF component consisted of Nos. 76, 77 and 82 Squadrons as part of No. 81 Wing RAAF flying P-51 Mustangs, initially based at Bofu from March 1946, before transferring to Iwakuni in 1948. However, by 1950 only No. 77 Squadron remained in Japan. A total of ten RAN warships served in Japan during this period, including HMA Ships Australia, Hobart, Shropshire, Arunta, Bataan, Culgoa, Murchison, Shoalhaven, Quadrant and Quiberon, while HMAS Ships Manoora, Westralia and Kanimbla also provided support."
Military history of Australia,"Cold War
Early planning and commitments
During the early years of the Cold War, Australian defence planning assumed that in the event of the outbreak of a global war between the Western world and Eastern bloc countries it would need to contribute forces under collective security arrangements as part of the United Nations, or a coalition led by either the United States or Britain. The Middle East was considered the most likely area of operations for Australian forces, where they were expected to operate with British forces. Early commitments included the involvement of RAAF aircrew during the Berlin Airlift in 1948–49 and the deployment of No. 78 Wing RAAF to Malta in the Mediterranean from 1952 to 1954. Meanwhile, defence preparedness initiatives included the introduction of a National Service Scheme in 1951 to provide manpower for the citizen forces of the Army, RAAF and RAN."
Military history of Australia,"Korean War, 1950–53
On 25 June 1950, the North Korean Army (KPA) crossed the border into South Korea and advanced for the capital Seoul, which fell in less than a week. North Korean forces continued toward the port of Pusan and two days later the United States offered its assistance to South Korea. In response the United Nations Security Council requested members to assist in repelling the North Korean attack. Australia initially contributed P-51 Mustang fighter-bomber aircraft from No. 77 Squadron RAAF and infantry from the 3rd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (3 RAR), both of which were stationed in Japan as part of the BCOF. In addition, it provided the majority of supply and support personnel to the British Commonwealth Forces Korea. The RAN frigate HMAS Shoalhaven, and the destroyer HMAS Bataan, were also committed. Later, an aircraft carrier strike group aboard HMAS Sydney was added to the force.
By the time 3 RAR arrived in Pusan on 28 September, the North Koreans were in retreat following the Inchon landings. As a part of the invasion force under the UN Supreme Commander, General Douglas MacArthur, the battalion moved north and was involved in its first major action at Battle of Yongju near Pyongyang on 22 October, before advancing towards the Yalu River. Further successful actions followed at Kujin on 25–26 October 1950 and at Chongju on 29 October 1950. North Korean casualties were heavy, while Australian losses included their commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Green, who was wounded in the stomach by artillery fire after the battle and succumbed to his wounds and died two days later on 1 November. Meanwhile, during the last weeks of October the Chinese had moved 18 divisions of the People's Volunteer Army across the Yalu River to reinforce the remnants of the KPA. Undetected by US and South Korean intelligence, the 13th Army Group crossed the border on 16 October and penetrated up to 100 kilometres (62 mi) into North Korea, and were reinforced in early November by 12 divisions from the 9th Army Group; in total 30 divisions composed of 380,000 men. 3 RAR fought its first action against the Chinese at Pakchon on 5 November. The fighting cost the battalion heavily and despite halting a Chinese division the new battalion commander was dismissed in the wake. Following the Chinese intervention, the UN forces were defeated in successive battles and 3 RAR was forced to withdraw to the 38th parallel."
Military history of Australia,"A series of battles followed at Uijeongbu on 1–4 January 1951, as the British and Australians occupied defensive positions in an attempt to secure the northern approaches to the South Korean capital. Further fighting occurred at Chuam-ni on 14–17 February 1951 following another Chinese advance, and later at Maehwa-San between 7–12 March 1951 as the UN resumed the offensive. Australian troops subsequently participated in two more major battles in 1951, with the first taking place during fighting which later became known as the Battle of Kapyong. On 22 April, Chinese forces attacked the Kapyong valley and forced the South Korean defenders to withdraw. Australian and Canadian troops were ordered to halt this Chinese advance. After a night of fighting the Australians recaptured their positions, at the cost of 32 men killed and 59 wounded. In July 1951, the Australian battalion became part of the combined Canadian, British, Australian, New Zealand, and Indian 1st Commonwealth Division. The second major battle took place during Operation Commando and occurred after the Chinese attacked a salient in a bend of the Imjin River. The 1st Commonwealth Division counter-attacked on 3 October, capturing a number of objectives including Hill 355 and Hill 317 during the Battle of Maryang San; after five days the Chinese retreated. Australian casualties included 20 dead and 104 wounded.
The belligerents then became locked in static trench warfare akin to the First World War, in which men lived in tunnels, redoubts, and sandbagged forts behind barbed wire defences. From 1951 until the end of the war, 3 RAR held trenches on the eastern side of the division's positions in the hills northeast of the Imjin River. Across from them were heavily fortified Chinese positions. In March 1952, Australia increased its ground commitment to two battalions, sending 1 RAR. This battalion remained in Korea for 12 months, before being replaced by 2 RAR in April 1953. The Australians fought their last battle during 24–26 July 1953, with 2 RAR holding off a concerted Chinese attack along the Samichon River and inflicting significant casualties for the loss of five killed and 24 wounded. Hostilities were suspended on 27 July 1953. 17,808 Australians served during the war, with 341 killed, 1,216 wounded and 30 captured."
Military history of Australia,"Malayan Emergency, 1950–60
The Malayan Emergency was declared on 18 June 1948, after three estate managers were murdered by members of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). Australian involvement began in June 1950, when in response to a British request, six Lincolns from No. 1 Squadron and a flight of Dakotas from No. 38 Squadron arrived in Singapore to form part of the British Commonwealth Far East Air Force (FEAF). The Dakotas were subsequently used on cargo runs, troop movement, as well as paratroop and leaflet drops, while the Lincoln bombers carried out bombing raids against the Communist Terrorist (CT) jungle bases. The RAAF were particularly successful, and in one such mission known as Operation Termite, five Lincoln bombers destroyed 181 communist camps, killed 13 communists and forced one into surrender, in a joint operation with the RAF and ground troops. The Lincolns were withdrawn in 1958, and were replaced by Canberra bombers from No. 2 Squadron and CAC Sabres from No. 78 Wing. Based at RAAF Base Butterworth they also carried out a number ground attack missions against the guerrillas.
Australian ground forces were deployed to Malaya in October 1955 as part of the Far East Strategic Reserve. In January 1956, the first Australian ground forces were deployed on Malaysian peninsula, consisting of the 2nd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (2 RAR). 2 RAR mainly participated in ""mopping up"" operations over the next 20 months, conducting extensive patrolling in and near the CT jungle bases, as part of 28th British Commonwealth Brigade. Contact with the enemy was infrequent and results small, achieving relatively few kills. 2 RAR left Malaysia October 1957 to be replaced by 3 RAR. 3 RAR underwent six weeks of jungle training and began driving MCP insurgents back into the jungle of Perak and Kedah. The new battalion extensively patrolled and was involved in food denial operations and ambushes. Again contact was limited, although 3 RAR had more success than its predecessor. By late 1959, operations against the MCP were in their final phase, and most communists had been pushed back and across the Thailand border. 3 RAR left Malaysia October 1959 and was replaced by 1 RAR. Though patrolling the border 1 RAR did not make contact with the insurgents, and in October 1960 it was replaced by 2 RAR, which stayed in Malaysia until August 1963. The Malayan Emergency officially ended on 31 July 1960.
Australia also provided artillery and engineer support, along with an air-field construction squadron. The Royal Australian Navy also served in Malayan waters, firing on suspected communist positions between 1956 and 1957. The Emergency was the longest continued commitment in Australian military history; 7,000 Australians served and 51 died in Malaya—although only 15 were on operations—and another 27 were wounded."
Military history of Australia,"Military and Naval growth during the 1960s
At the start of the 1960s, Prime Minister Robert Menzies greatly expanded the Australian military so that it could carry out the Government's policy of ""Forward Defence"" in South East Asia. In 1964, Menzies announced a large increase in defence spending. The strength of the Australian Army would be increased by 50% over three years from 22,000 to 33,000; providing a full three-brigade division with nine battalions. The RAAF and RAN would also both be increased by 25%. In 1964, conscription or National Service was re-introduced under the National Service Act, for selected 20-year-olds based on date of birth, for a period of two years' continuous full-time service (the previous scheme having been suspended in 1959).
In 1961, three Charles F. Adams-class destroyers were purchased from the United States to replace the ageing Q-class destroyers. Traditionally, the RAN had purchased designs based on those of the Royal Navy and the purchase of American destroyers was significant. HMAS Perth and HMAS Hobart joined the fleet in 1965, followed by HMAS Brisbane in 1967. Other projects included the construction of six River-class frigates, the conversion of the aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne to an anti-submarine role, the acquisition of ten Wessex helicopters, and the purchase of six Oberon-class submarines.
The RAAF took delivery of their first Mirage fighters in 1967, equipping No. 3, No. 75 and No. 77 Squadrons with them. The service also received American F-111 strike aircraft, C-130 Hercules transports, P-3 Orion maritime reconnaissance aircraft and Italian Macchi trainers."
Military history of Australia,"Indonesia-Malaysia Confrontation, 1962–66
The Indonesia-Malaysia confrontation was fought from 1962 to 1966 between the British Commonwealth and Indonesia over the creation of the Federation of Malaysia, with the Commonwealth attempting to safeguard the security of the new state. The war remained limited, and was fought primarily on the island of Borneo, although a number of Indonesian seaborne and airborne incursions onto the Malay Peninsula did occur. As part of Australia's continuing military commitment to the security of Malaysia, army, naval and airforce units were based there as part of the Far East Strategic Reserve. Regardless the Australian government was wary of involvement in a war with Indonesia and initially limited its involvement to the defence of the Malayan peninsula only. On two occasions Australian troops from 3 RAR were used to help mop up infiltrators from seaborne and airborne incursions at Labis and Pontian, in September and October 1964.
Following these raids the government conceded to British and Malaysian requests to deploy an infantry battalion to Borneo. During the early phases, British and Malaysian troops had attempted only to control the Malaysian/Indonesian border, and to protect population centres. However, by the time the Australian battalion deployed the British had decided on more aggressive action, crossing the border into Kalimantan to obtain information and conduct ambushes to force the Indonesians to remain on the defensive, under the codename Operation Claret. The fighting took place in mountainous, jungle-clad terrain, and a debilitating climate, with operations characterised by the extensive use of company bases sited along the border, cross-border operations, the use of helicopters for troop movement and resupply, and the role of human and signals intelligence to determine enemy movements and intentions."
Military history of Australia,"3 RAR deployed to Borneo in March 1965, and served in Sarawak until the end of July, operating on both sides of the border. The battalion had four major contacts with Indonesian forces and several smaller ones—including at Sungei Koemba, Kindau and Babang during which they inflicted heavy casualties on the Indonesians—as well as suffering casualties in two mine incidents. 4 RAR served a less-eventful tour between April and August 1966, and also operated over the border, successfully clashing with the Indonesians on a number of occasions. A squadron of the Special Air Service Regiment (SASR) was also deployed in 1965 and again in 1966, taking part in cross-border operations and inflicting significant casualties on the Indonesians, even though they were often tasked with covert reconnaissance. Other units included artillery and engineers, while a number of RAN ships were involved in shelling Indonesian positions in Borneo and in repelling infiltrators in the Singapore Strait. The RAAF played a relatively minor role, although it would have been used far more extensively had the war escalated.
Operations in Borneo were extremely sensitive and they received little press coverage in Australia, while official acknowledgement of involvement in cross-border missions only occurred in 1996. Following a military coup in Indonesia in early 1966 which brought General Suharto to power, a peace treaty was signed in August 1966 which ended the conflict. 3,500 Australians served during Confrontation; casualties included 16 dead, with seven killed in action and eight wounded."
Military history of Australia,"Vietnam War, 1962–73
Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War was driven largely by the rise of communism in Southeast Asia after the Second World War, and the fear of its spread which developed in Australia during the 1950s and early 1960s. As a consequence, Australia supported South Vietnam throughout the early 1960s. In 1961 and 1962, the leader of the South Vietnamese government, Ngo Dinh Diem, asked for assistance from the US and its allies in response to a growing insurgency supported by communist North Vietnam. Australia offered 30 military advisors from the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam, which became known simply as ""The Team"". They arrived in July and August 1962, beginning Australia's involvement in the war. Later in August 1964, the RAAF sent a flight of Caribou transport aircraft to the port city of Vung Tau.
However, with the security situation in South Vietnam continuing to deteriorate, the US increased its involvement to 200,000 combat troops by early 1965. Australia also committed ground forces, dispatching the 1 RAR to serve with the US 173rd Airborne Brigade in Bien Hoa province in June 1965 and it subsequently fought a number of significant actions, including Gang Toi, Operation Crimp and Suoi Bong Trang. In March 1966, the Australian government announced the deployment of a brigade-sized unit—the 1st Australian Task Force (1 ATF)—to replace 1 RAR. Included were a large number of conscripts, under the increasingly controversial National Service Scheme. Consisting of two infantry battalions as well as armour, aviation, artillery and other support arms, the task force was assigned primary responsibility for its own area and was based at Nui Dat, in Phuoc Tuy Province. Included were the Iroquois helicopters of No. 9 Squadron RAAF. At the Battle of Long Tan on 18 August 1966, D Company, 6 RAR with considerable artillery support held off and defeated a Viet Cong force that was at least six times bigger than itself. 18 Australians were killed and 24 wounded, while 245 communist dead were later recovered from the battlefield. The battle allowed the Australians to gain dominance over Phuoc Tuy Province and 1 ATF was not fundamentally challenged again. Regardless, during February 1967 the Australians suffered their heaviest casualties in the war to that point, losing 16 men killed and 55 wounded in a single week, the bulk during Operation Bribie."
Military history of Australia,"Yet with the Phuoc Tuy province coming progressively under control throughout 1967, the Australians increasingly spent a significant period of time conducting operations further afield. 1 ATF was subsequently deployed astride infiltration routes leading to Saigon to interdict communist movement against the capital as part of Operation Coburg during the 1968 Tet Offensive and later during the Battle of Coral–Balmoral in May and June 1968. At Fire Support Bases Coral and Balmoral the Australians had clashed with regular North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong main force units operating in battalion and regimental strength for the first time in near conventional warfare, ultimately fighting their largest, most hazardous and most sustained battle of the war. During 26 days of fighting Australian casualties included 25 killed and 99 wounded, while communist casualties included 267 killed confirmed by body count, 60 possibly killed, 7 wounded and 11 captured. Other significant Australian actions included Binh Ba in June 1969, Hat Dich in late-December 1968 and early 1969 and Long Khanh in June 1971. At the height of the Australian commitment, 1 ATF numbered 8,500 troops, including three infantry battalions, armour, artillery, engineers, logistics and aviation units in support. A third RAAF unit, No. 2 Squadron RAAF, flying Canberra bombers, was sent in 1967, and four RAN destroyers joined US patrols in the waters off North Vietnam.
The Australian withdrawal effectively commenced in November 1970. As a consequence of the overall allied strategy of Vietnamization and with the Australian government keen to reduce its own commitment to the war, 8 RAR was not replaced at the end of its tour of duty. 1 ATF was again reduced to just two infantry battalions, albeit with significant armour, artillery and aviation support remaining. Australian combat forces were further reduced during 1971 as part of a phased withdrawal, and 1 ATF ceased operations in October. Meanwhile, the advisors remained to train South Vietnamese troops until withdrawn on 18 December 1972 by the newly elected Labor government of Gough Whitlam. The last Australian forces were finally withdrawn in 1973. The Vietnam War was Australia's longest and most controversial war and although initially enjoying broad support, as the nation's military involvement increased a vocal anti-war movement developed. More than 50,000 Australians served in Vietnam; 519 were killed and 2,398 were wounded. Four were awarded the Victoria Cross."
Military history of Australia,"Post-Vietnam era
Creation of the Australian Defence Force, 1976
Although the importance of 'joint' warfare had been highlighted during Second World War when Australian naval, ground and air units frequently served as part of single commands, the absence of a central authority continued to result in poor co-ordination between the services in the post-war era, with each organising and operating on the basis of a different military doctrine. The need for an integrated command structure received more emphasis during the Australian military's experiences in the Vietnam War. In 1973, the Secretary of the Department of Defence, Arthur Tange, submitted a report to the Government that recommended the unification of the separate departments supporting each service into a single department and the creation of the post of Chief of the Defence Force Staff.
The Whitlam Labor Government subsequently amalgamated the five defence ministries (Defence, Navy, Army, Air Force, and Supply) into a single Department of Defence in 1973, while conscription under the National Service scheme was abolished. On 1 January 1976, the three branches of the Australian military were brought together as a unified, all-volunteer, professional force known as the Australian Defence Force (ADF). Today, the ADF is headquartered at Russell Offices in Canberra and is divided into Air, Land, Maritime and Special Operations Commands. In addition, Northern Command is based in Darwin, and is responsible for operations in Northern Australia."
Military history of Australia,"Defence of Australia, 1980s and 1990s
Until the 1970s, Australia's military strategy centred on the concept of Forward Defence, in which the role of Australian military and naval forces were to co-operate with Allied forces to counter threats in Australia's region. Following the adoption of the Guam Doctrine by the United States in 1969, and the British withdrawal 'east of Suez' in the early 1970s, Australia developed a defence policy emphasising self-reliance and the defence of the Australian continent. Known as the Defence of Australia Policy, it focused Australian defence planning on protecting the nation's northern maritime approaches (the 'air-sea gap') against possible attack.
In line with this goal, the ADF was restructured to increase its ability to strike at enemy forces from Australian bases and to counter raids on continental Australia. This was achieved by increasing the capabilities of the RAN and RAAF, and relocating regular Army units to Northern Australia. During this time the ADF had no military units on operational deployment outside Australia. However, in 1987 the ADF made its first operational deployment as part of Operation Morris Dance, in which several warships and a rifle company deployed to the waters off Fiji in response to the 1987 Fijian coups d'état. While broadly successful, this deployment highlighted the need for the ADF to improve its capability to rapidly respond to unforeseen events.
During this period Australia continued to retain forces in Malaysia as part of the Five Power Defence Arrangements (FPDA) agreed in 1971 to defend it in the event of external attack, with this commitment initially including significant air, ground and naval forces. However, these forces were gradually reduced with the infantry battalion withdrawn from Singapore in 1973, and the two Mirage fighter squadrons in 1988. Since then a detachment of Orion maritime patrol aircraft, support personnel, and an infantry company known as Rifle Company Butterworth have been maintained, as well as occasional deployments of F/A-18 Hornet fighter aircraft. Australian submarines reportedly undertook a number of clandestine surveillance missions throughout Asian waters in the last decades of the Cold War. Airforce and Navy units were also involved in tracking Soviet ship and submarine movements in the region. Since then the Orions have continued to participate in maritime security operations as part of Operation Gateway, conducting patrols over the Indian Ocean, Strait of Malacca and South China Sea. They have reportedly also been involved in freedom of navigation flights."
Military history of Australia,"Gulf War, 1991
Australia was a member of the international coalition which contributed military forces to the 1991 Gulf War, deploying a naval task group of two warships, a support ship and a clearance diving team; in total about 750 personnel. The Australian contribution was the first time Australian personnel were deployed to an active war zone since the establishment of the ADF and the deployment tested its capabilities and command structure. However, the Australian force did not see combat, and instead playing a significant role in enforcing the sanctions put in place against Iraq following the invasion of Kuwait. Some ADF personnel serving on exchange with British and American units did see combat, and a few were later decorated for their actions. Following the war, the Navy regularly deployed a frigate to the Persian Gulf or Red Sea to enforce the trade sanctions which continued to be applied to Iraq. A number of Australian airmen and ground crew posted to or on exchange with US and British air forces subsequently participated in enforcing no-fly zones imposed over Iraq between 1991 and 2003."
Military history of Australia,"Global security, late-1990s
Since the late 1980s, the Australian government had increasingly called upon the ADF to contribute forces to peacekeeping missions around the world. While most of these deployments involved only small numbers of specialists, several led to the deployment of hundreds of personnel. Large peacekeeping deployments were made to Namibia in early 1989, Cambodia between 1992 and 1993, Somalia in 1993, Rwanda between 1994 and 1995 and Bougainville in 1994 and from 1997 onwards. The 1996 election of the Howard Liberal government resulted in significant reforms to the ADF's force structure and role, with the new government's defence strategy placed less singular emphasis on defending Australia from direct attack and greater emphasis on working in co-operation with regional states and Australia's allies to manage potential security threats in recognition of Australia's global security interests. In line with this new focus, the ADF's force structure changed in an attempt to increase the proportion of combat units to support units and to improve the ADF's combat effectiveness."
Military history of Australia,"New Millennium
East Timor, 1999–2013
The former-Portuguese colony of East Timor was invaded by Indonesia in 1975, however, following years of violent struggle the new Indonesian government of President B.J. Habibie subsequently agreed to allow the East Timorese to vote on autonomy in 1999. The United Nations Mission in East Timor (UNAMET) was established to organise and conduct the vote, which was held at the end of August 1999 and resulted with 78.5% of voters deciding in favour of independence. However, following the announcement of the results pro-Indonesian militias supported by elements of the Indonesian military, launched a campaign of violence, looting and arson and many East Timorese were killed, while perhaps more than 500,000 were displaced. Unable to control the violence, Indonesia subsequently agreed to the deployment of a multinational peacekeeping force. Australia, which had contributed police to UNAMET, organised and led an international military coalition, known as the International Force for East Timor (INTERFET), a non-UN force operating in accordance with UN resolutions. The total size of the Australian force committed numbered 5,500 personnel, and included a significant ground force, supported by air and naval forces, in the largest single deployment of Australian forces since 1945.
Under the overall command of Australian Major General Peter Cosgrove, INTERFET began arriving on 12 September 1999 and was tasked with restoring peace and security, protecting and supporting UNAMET, and facilitating humanitarian assistance operations. With the withdrawal of the Indonesian armed forces, police and government officials from East Timor, UNAMET re-established its headquarters in Dili on 28 September. On 19 October 1999, Indonesia formally recognised the result of the referendum and shortly thereafter a UN peacekeeping force, the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) was established, becoming fully responsible for the administration of East Timor during its transition to independence. The hand-over of command of military operations from INTERFET to UNTAET was completed on 28 February 2000. Australia continued to support the UN peacekeeping operation with between 1,500 and 2,000 personnel, as well as landing craft and Blackhawk helicopters and remained the largest contributor of personnel to the peacekeeping mission. During these operations Australian forces regularly clashed with pro-Indonesian militia and on a number of occasions Indonesian forces as well, especially along the border with West Timor. Significant actions occurred in Suai, Mota'ain and at Aidabasalala in October 1999. However, with the security situation stabilised the bulk of the Australian and UN forces were withdrawn by 2005. Two Australians died from non-battle related causes, while a number were wounded in action."
Military history of Australia,"The unexpected deployment to East Timor in 1999 led to significant changes in Australian defence policy and to an enhancement of the ADF's ability to conduct operations outside Australia. This successful deployment was the first time a large Australian military force had operated outside of Australia since the Vietnam War and revealed shortcomings in the ADF's ability to mount and sustain such operations. In response, the 2000 Defence White Paper placed a greater emphasis on preparing the ADF for overseas deployments. The Australian government committed to improve the ADF's capabilities by improving the readiness and equipment of ADF units, expanding the ADF to 57,000 full-time personnel and increasing real Defence expenditure by 3% per year.
In May 2006, 2,000 ADF personnel were again deployed to East Timor as part of Operation Astute, following unrest between elements of the Timor Leste Defence Force. Australian forces were involved in a number skirmishes during this time, including a heavy clash with rebels commanded by Alfredo Reinado at Same on 4 March 2007. However, by early-2010 the security situation had been stabilised and just 400 Australian personnel remained to train the local security forces as part of a small international force. Following a drawdown, the International Stabilisation Force commenced withdrawing from Timor-Leste in November 2012, a process which was completed in April 2013."
Military history of Australia,"Afghanistan, 2001–2021
Shortly after the Islamist inspired terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, Australian forces were committed to the American-led international coalition against terrorism. The ADF's most visible contribution—codenamed Operation Slipper—has been a special forces task group operating in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2002 and again from mid-2005 to fight against the Taliban. Over time the Australian commitment has grown, with the addition of further ground forces in the form of a Reconstruction Task Force from 2006 to provide security, reconstruction and to mentor and train the Afghan National Army. Australia has also contributed a frigate and two AP-3C Orion surveillance aircraft and three C-130 Hercules transport aircraft to international operations in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean since 2001, supporting both the operations in Afghanistan and those in Iraq under Operation Catalyst. A detachment of four F/A-18 Hornet fighter-bombers was based at Diego Garcia from late-2001 to mid-2002, while two Boeing 707 air-to-air refuelling aircraft were also based in Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan to provide support to coalition aircraft operating in Afghan airspace but were later withdrawn. A Special Operations Task Group was deployed to support the Reconstruction Taskforce in April 2007. In addition to radar crews, logistics and intelligence officers, and security personnel, this brought the number of Australian personnel in Afghanistan to 950 by mid-2007, with further small increases to 1,000 in mid-2008, 1,100 in early 2009 and 1,550 in mid-2009."
Military history of Australia,"A modest force remained in Afghanistan over this time and was involved in counter-insurgency operations in Uruzgan Province in conjunction United States and other coalition forces, including the Dutch prior to their withdrawal. The force consisted of motorised infantry, special forces, engineers, cavalry, artillery and aviation elements. By 2010 it included a combined arms battalion-sized battle group known as the Mentoring Task Force, and the Special Operations Task Group, both based at Forward Operation Base Ripley outside of Tarin Kowt, as well as the Rotary Wing Group flying CH-47D Chinooks, the Force Logistics Asset and an RAAF air surveillance radar unit based in Kandahar. In addition, a further 800 Australian logistic personnel were also based in the Middle East in support, but located outside of Afghanistan. Meanwhile, detachments of maritime patrol and transport aircraft continued to support operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, based out of Al Minhad Air Base in the United Arab Emirates. Also included was one of the RAN's frigates deployed to the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Aden on counter piracy and maritime interdiction duties.
Australian forces were at times involved in heavy fighting, and significant actions included Operation Anaconda in 2002 and Operation Perth in 2006, as well as actions in Chora in 2007, Kakarak in 2009, the Shah Wali Kot and Derapet in 2010, and Doan in 2011; although others have yet to be publicly acknowledged due to operational security requirements. Casualties include 41 killed and 256 wounded, while another Australian also died serving with the British Army. Four Australians have been awarded the Victoria Cross for Australia, the first such decorations in forty years. Following a drawdown in forces, the last combat troops were withdrawn on 15 December 2013; however, approximately 400 personnel remain in Afghanistan as trainers and advisers, and are stationed in Kandahar and Kabul. Over 26,000 Australian personnel have served in Afghanistan.
In November 2020, a report for the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force by Major General Paul Brereton, a New South Wales Court of Appeal judge, found credible information that 25 current or former members of the ADF were involved in, or accessories to, the murder of 39 Afghan prisoners and civilians, and the cruel treatment of two others. None of these matters occurred in the ""heat of battle"". Brereton's inquiry took four and a half years to complete, and involved the interviewing of 423 witnesses, the examination of more than 20,000 documents and 25,000 images, regarding conduct in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016. It recommended that 36 incidents be referred to the AFP for criminal investigation. The report, released in heavily redacted form on 19 November by the Chief of the Defence Force, General Angus Campbell. Campbell offered an apology for ""any wrongdoing by Australian soldiers"", and highlighted that the matters predominantly involved the SASR. He summarised the report by saying that ""It is alleged that some patrols took the law into their own hands, rules were broken, stories concocted, lies told and prisoners killed"", and said that practices developed in order to conceal deliberate unlawful killings. On 26 November, it was reported that Defence had commenced administrative action against at least 10 serving members of the SASR, issuing them with ""show cause"" notices for their dismissal."
Military history of Australia,"Iraq, 2003–11
Australian forces later joined British and American forces during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The initial contribution was also a modest one, consisting of just 2,058 personnel—codenamed Operation Falconer. Major force elements included special forces, rotary and fixed wing aviation and naval units. Army units included elements from the SASR and 4th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (Commando), a CH-47 Chinook detachment and a number of other specialist units. RAN units included the amphibious ship HMAS Kanimbla and the frigates HMAS Darwin and HMAS Anzac, while the RAAF deployed 14 F/A-18 Hornets from No. 75 Squadron, a number of AP-3C Orions and C-130 Hercules. The Australian Special Forces Task Force was one of the first coalition units forces to cross the border into Iraq, while for a few days, the closest ground troops to Baghdad were from the SASR. During the invasion the RAAF also flew its first combat missions since the Vietnam War, with No. 75 Squadron flying a total of 350 sorties and dropping 122 laser-guided bombs."
Military history of Australia,"The Iraqi military quickly proved no match for coalition military power, and with their defeat the bulk of Australian forces were withdrawn. While Australia did not initially take part in the post-war occupation of Iraq, an Australian Army light armoured battlegroup—designated the Al Muthanna Task Group and including 40 ASLAV light armoured vehicles and infantry—was later deployed to Southern Iraq in April 2005 as part of Operation Catalyst. The role of this force was to protect the Japanese engineer contingent in the region and support the training of New Iraqi Army units. The AMTG later became the Overwatch Battle Group (West) (OBG(W)), following the hand back of Al Muthanna province to Iraqi control. Force levels peaked at 1,400 personnel in May 2007 including the OBG(W) in Southern Iraq, the Security Detachment in Baghdad and the Australian Army Training Team—Iraq. A RAN frigate was based in the North Persian Gulf, while RAAF assets included C-130H Hercules and AP-3C elements. Following the election of a new Labor government under Prime Minister Kevin Rudd the bulk of these forces were withdrawn by mid-2009, while RAAF and RAN operations were redirected to other parts of the Middle East Area of Operations as part of Operation Slipper.
Low-level operations continued, however, with a small Australian force of 80 soldiers remaining in Iraq to protect the Australian Embassy in Baghdad as part of SECDET under Operation Kruger. SECDET was finally withdrawn in August 2011, and was replaced by a private military company which took over responsibility for providing security for Australia's diplomatic presence in Iraq. Although more than 17,000 personnel served during operations in Iraq, Australian casualties were relatively light, with two soldiers accidentally killed, while a third Australian died serving with the British Royal Air Force. A further 27 personnel were wounded. Two officers remained in Iraq attached to the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq as part of Operation Riverbank. This operation concluded in November 2013."
Military history of Australia,"Military intervention against ISIL, 2014–present
In June 2014 a small number of SASR personnel were deployed to Iraq to protect the Australian embassy when the security of Baghdad was threatened by the 2014 Northern Iraq offensive. Later, in August and September a number of RAAF C-17 and C-130J transport aircraft based in the Middle East were used to conduct airdrops of humanitarian aid to trapped civilians and to airlift arms and munitions to forces in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq. In late September 2014 an Air Task Group (ATG) and Special Operations Task Group (SOTG) were deployed to Al Minhad Air Base in the United Arab Emirates as part of the coalition to combat Islamic State forces in Iraq. Equipped with F/A-18F Super Hornet strike aircraft, a KC-30A Multi Role Tanker Transport, and an E-7A Wedgetail Airborne Early Warning & Control aircraft, the ATG began operations on 1 October. The SOTG is tasked with operations to advise and assist Iraqi Security Forces, and was deployed to Iraq after a legal framework covering their presence in the country was agreed between the Australian and Iraqi Governments. It began moving into Iraq in early November. In April 2015 a 300-strong unit known as Task Group Taji was deployed to Iraq to train the regular Iraqi Security Forces. In September 2015 airstrikes were extended to Syria. Strike missions concluded in December 2017."
Military history of Australia,"Peacekeeping and humanitarian relief operations
Australia's involvement in international peacekeeping operations has been diverse, and included participation in both United Nations sponsored missions, as well as those as part of ad hoc coalitions. Australians have been involved in more conflicts as peacekeepers than as belligerents; however ""in comparative international terms, Australia has only been a moderately energetic peacekeeper."" Although Australia has had peacekeepers in the field continuously for 60 years—being among the first group of UN military observers in Indonesia in 1947—its commitments have generally been limited, consisting mostly of small numbers of high-level and technical support troops such as signallers, engineers, medics, observers, and police. One significant commitment has been Australia's ongoing involvement with the long running Multinational Force and Observers in the Sinai. The operational tempo started increasing in the mid-1990s, when Australia became involved in a series of high-profile operations, deploying significantly larger combat units in support of a number of missions including Cambodia, Rwanda, Somalia, East Timor, and the Solomon Islands. Australia has been involved in close to 100 separate missions, involving more than 30,000 personnel; 14 Australians have died during these operations. In addition, approximately 7,000 personnel have been involved in 66 different overseas humanitarian relief operations between 1918 and 2006. Eleven personnel lost their lives during these missions."
Military history of Australia,"Military statistics
Notes
Footnotes"
Military history of Australia,Citations
Military history of Australia,"References
Further reading
External links"
Military history of Australia,Australian War Memorial
Military history of Australia,.
Australia Day,"Australia Day is the official national day of Australia. Observed annually on 26 January, it marks the 1788 landing of the First Fleet and raising of the Union Flag of Great Britain by Arthur Phillip at Sydney Cove, a small bay on the southern shore of Sydney Harbour. In present-day Australia, the government Australia Day Council organises events that seeks to recognise the contributions of Australians to the nation, while also encouraging reflection on past wrongs including towards Indigenous Australians and also giving respect and celebrating the diversity and achievements of Australian society past and present. The presentation of community awards and citizenship ceremonies are also commonly held on the day. The holiday is marked by the presentation of the Australian of the Year Awards on Australia Day Eve, announcement of the Australia Day Honours list and addresses from the governor-general and prime minister. It is an official public holiday in every state and territory. With community festivals, concerts and citizenship ceremonies, the day is celebrated in large and small communities and cities around the nation. Australia Day has become the biggest annual civic event in Australia.
The meaning and significance of Australia Day has evolved since the first records of celebration in 1808, with contested views on the day existing since at least 1888. Previously, the states celebrated different days that acknowledged their founding, such as Regatta Day in Tasmania, Queensland Day in Queensland or Foundation Day in Western Australia, and the celebration of the first Anniversary Day or Foundation Day (as the day was called) by New South Wales in 1818 was seen in a similar light. Following Federation in 1901, moves for a national holiday gained pace (prompted by lobbying by the Australian Natives' Association which celebrated ANA Day), with the name Australia Day and the date of 26 January finally selected in 1935, with a public holiday at or around that date in all states in 1940. The first prominent protest also occurred around this time in 1938, with the first Day of Mourning held by the Australian Aborigines' League. In 1994 the date was fixed in all jurisdictions on 26 January when the practice by some states of holding the holiday on a Friday in late January for a long weekend was dropped.
Since at least 1938, the date of Australia Day has also been a day of protest and of mourning the start of the British colonisation of Australia, characterised as an invasion in which Indigenous Australians had the land that they had occupied for millennia forcibly taken. These groups observe 26 January as Invasion Day, Survival Day or as a Day of Mourning, as a counter-observance to the national day. Both some members of these groups and those outside of them have called for the date of Australia Day to be changed or the holiday to be abolished entirely. Support for changing the date has been a minority position; however, polls from 2021 have indicated that Australians under the age of 30 are much more supportive of the change than older generations."
Australia Day,"History
Arrival of the First Fleet: 1788
On 13 May 1787 a fleet of 11 ships, which came to be known as the First Fleet, was sent by the British Admiralty from England to New Holland. Under the command of Naval Captain Arthur Phillip, the fleet sought to establish a penal colony at Botany Bay on the coast of New South Wales, which had been explored and claimed by Lieutenant James Cook in 1770. The settlement was seen as necessary because of the loss of the Thirteen Colonies in North America. The Fleet arrived between 18 and 20 January 1788, but it was immediately apparent that Botany Bay was unsuitable.
On 21 January, Phillip and a few officers travelled to Port Jackson, 12 kilometres (7.5 mi) to the north, to see if it would be a better location for a settlement. They stayed there until 23 January; Phillip named the site of their landing Sydney Cove, after the Home Secretary, Thomas Townshend, 1st Viscount Sydney. They also made contact with the local Aboriginal people.
They returned to Botany Bay on the evening of 23 January, when Phillip gave orders to move the fleet to Sydney Cove the next morning, 24 January. That day, there was a huge gale blowing, making it impossible to leave Botany Bay, so they decided to wait till the next day, 25 January. However, during 24 January, they spotted the ships Astrolabe and Boussole, flying the French flag, at the entrance to Botany Bay; they were having as much trouble getting into the bay as the First Fleet was having getting out.
On 25 January the gale was still blowing; the fleet tried to leave Botany Bay, but only HMS Supply made it out, carrying Arthur Phillip, Philip Gidley King, some marines and about 40 convicts; they anchored in Sydney Cove in the afternoon. Meanwhile, back at Botany Bay, Captain John Hunter of HMS Sirius made contact with the French ships, and he and the commander, Captain de Clonard, exchanged greetings. Clonard informed Hunter that the fleet commander was Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse. Sirius successfully cleared Botany Bay, but the other ships were in great difficulty. Charlotte was blown dangerously close to rocks, Friendship and Prince of Wales became entangled, both ships losing booms or sails, Charlotte and Friendship collided, and Lady Penrhyn nearly ran aground. Despite these difficulties, all the remaining ships finally managed to clear Botany Bay and sail to Sydney Cove on 26 January. The last ship anchored there at about 3 pm."
Australia Day," 
So it was on 26 January that a landing was made at Sydney Cove and clearing of the ground for an encampment immediately began. Then, according to Phillip's account: In the evening of the 26th the colours were displayed on shore, and the Governor, with several of his principal officers and others, assembled round the flag-staff, drank the king's health, and success to the settlement, with all that display of form which on such occasions is esteemed propitious, because it enlivens the spirits, and fills the imagination with pleasing presages.
The formal establishment of the Colony of New South Wales did not however occur on 26 January as is commonly assumed. It did not occur until 7 February 1788, when the formal proclamation of the colony and of Arthur Phillip's governorship were read out. The vesting of all land in the reigning monarch King George III also dates from 7 February 1788."
Australia Day,"1788–1838
Although there was no official recognition of the colony's anniversary, with the New South Wales Almanacks of 1806 and 1808 placing no special significance on 26 January, by 1808 the date was being used by the colony's immigrants, especially the emancipated convicts, to ""celebrate their love of the land they lived in"" with ""drinking and merriment"". The 1808 celebrations followed this pattern, beginning at sunset on 25 January and lasting into the night, the chief toast of the occasion being Major George Johnston. Johnston had the honour of being the first officer ashore from the First Fleet, having been carried from the landing boat on the back of convict James Ruse. Despite suffering the ill-effects of a fall from his gig on the way home to Annandale, Johnston led the officers of the New South Wales Corps in arresting Governor William Bligh on the following day, 26 January 1808, in what became known as the ""Rum Rebellion"".
Almanacs started mentioning ""First Landing Day"" or ""Foundation Day"" and successful immigrants started holding anniversary dinners. In 1817 The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser reported on one of these unofficial gatherings at the home of Isaac Nichols:"
Australia Day,"On Monday the 27th ult. a dinner party met at the house of Mr. Isaac Nichols, for the purpose of celebrating the Anniversary of the Institution of this Colony under Governor Philip, which took place on 26 Jan. 1788, but this year happening upon a Sunday, the commemoration dinner was reserved for the day following.  The party assembled were select, and about 40 in number. At 5 in the afternoon dinner was on the table, and a more agreeable entertainment could not have been anticipated. After dinner a number of loyal toasts were drank, and a number of festive songs given; and about 10 the company parted, well gratified with the pleasures that the meeting had afforded.
In 1818, the 30th anniversary of the founding of the colony, Governor Lachlan Macquarie chose to acknowledge the day with the first official celebration. The governor declared that the day would be a holiday for all government workers, granting each an extra allowance of ""one pound [450 grams] of fresh meat"", and ordered a 30-gun salute at Dawes Point – one for each year that the colony had existed. This began a tradition that was retained by the Governors that were to follow."
Australia Day,"Foundation Day, as it was known at the time, continued to be officially celebrated in New South Wales, and in doing so became connected with sporting events. One of these became a tradition that is still continued today: in 1837 the first running of what would become the Australia Day regatta was held on Sydney Harbour. Five races were held for different classes of boats, from first class sailing vessels to watermen's skiffs, and people viewed the festivities from both onshore and from the decks of boats on the harbour, including the steamboat Australian and the Francis Freeling—the latter running aground during the festivities and having to be refloated the next day. Happy with the success of the regatta, the organisers resolved to make it an annual event. However, some of the celebrations had gained an air of elitism, with the ""United Australians"" dinner being limited to those born in Australia. In describing the dinner, the Sydney Herald justified the decision, saying:"
Australia Day,"The parties who associated themselves under the title of ""United Australians"" have been censured for adopting a principle of exclusiveness. It is not fair so to censure them. If they invited emigrants to join them they would give offence to another class of persons – while if they invited all they would be subject to the presence of persons with whom they might not wish to associate. That was a good reason. The ""Australians"" had a perfect right to dine together if they wished it, and no one has a right to complain.
The following year, 1838, was the 50th anniversary of the founding of the colony, and as part of the celebrations Australia's first public holiday was declared. The regatta was held for a second time, and people crowded the foreshores to view the events, or joined the five steamers (Maitland, Experiment, Australia, Rapid, and the miniature steamer Firefly) to view the proceedings from the water. At midday 50 guns were fired from Dawes' Battery as the Royal Standard was raised, and in the evening rockets and other fireworks lit the sky. The dinner was a smaller affair than the previous year, with only 40 in attendance compared to the 160 from 1837, and the anniversary as a whole was described as a ""day for everyone""."
Australia Day,"1839–1935
Prior to 1888, 26 January was very much a New South Wales affair, as each of the colonies had its own commemoration for its founding. In Tasmania, Regatta Day occurred initially in December to mark the anniversary of the landing of Abel Tasman. South Australia celebrated Proclamation Day on 28 December. Western Australia had its own Foundation Day (now Western Australia Day) on 1 June.
The decision to mark the occasion of the First Fleet's arrival in 1788 at Sydney Cove and Captain Arthur Phillip's proclamation of British sovereignty over the eastern continent on 26 January was first made outside NSW by the Australian Natives' Association (ANA), a group of white ""native-born"" middle-class men formed in Victoria in 1871. They dubbed the day ""ANA Day"".
In 1888, all colonial capitals except Adelaide celebrated ""Anniversary Day"". In 1910, South Australia adopted 26 January as ""Foundation Day"", to replace another holiday known as Accession Day, which had been held on 22 January to mark the accession to the throne of King Edward VII, who died in May 1910.
The first Australia Day was established in response to Australia's involvement in World War I. In 1915, Ellen ""Ellie"" Wharton Kirke MBE, née Clements, mother of four servicemen, thought up the idea of a national day, with the specific aim of raising funds for wounded soldiers, and the term was coined to stir up patriotic feelings. In 1915 a committee to celebrate Australia Day was formed, and the date chosen was 30 July, on which many fund-raising efforts were run to support the war effort. It was also held in July in subsequent years of World War I: on 28 July 1916, 27 July 1917, and 26 July 1918."
Australia Day,"The idea of a national day to be celebrated on 26 January was slow to catch on, partly because of competition with Anzac Day. Victoria adopted 26 January as Australia Day in 1931, and by 1935, all states of Australia were celebrating 26 January as Australia Day (although it was still known as Anniversary Day in New South Wales). The name ""Foundation Day"" persisted in local usage."
Australia Day,"1936–1960s
The 150th anniversary of British settlement in Australia in 1938 was widely celebrated. Preparations began in 1936 with the formation of a Celebrations Council. In that year, New South Wales was the only state to abandon the traditional long weekend, and the annual Anniversary Day public holiday was held on the anniversary day – Wednesday 26 January. However, it was also a declared a Day of Mourning by the Aborigines Progressive Association and the Australian Aborigines League as a protest against the ""Whiteman's seizure of our country"".
The Commonwealth and state governments agreed to unify the celebrations on 26 January as ""Australia Day"" in 1946, although the public holiday was instead taken on the Monday closest to the anniversary.
The Nationality and Citizenship Act 1948 came into effect on 26 January 1949, creating Australian citizenship for the first time. Previously, Australian nationals were simply British subjects alongside all other members of Commonwealth of Nations; now they were both British subjects and Australian citizens.
Historian Ken Inglis wrote in 1967 that Australia Day was not celebrated publicly in Canberra at that time."
Australia Day,"1988: Bicentenary
In 1988, the celebration of 200 years since the arrival of the First Fleet was organised on a large scale as the Australian Bicentenary, with many significant events taking place in all major cities. Over 2.5 million people attended the event in Sydney. These included street parties, concerts, including performances on the steps and forecourt of the Sydney Opera House and at many other public venues, art and literary competitions, historic re-enactments, and the opening of the Powerhouse Museum at its new location. A re-enactment of the arrival of the First Fleet took place in Sydney Harbour, with ships that had sailed from Portsmouth a year earlier taking part."
Australia Day,"Contemporary celebrations
The various celebrations and civic ceremonies such as citizenship ceremonies, the Australian of the Year awards and the Australia Day Honours (introduced in 1975) only started to be performed on Australia Day from around the 1950s onwards.
After 1988, participation in Australia Day increased, and in 1994 all states and territories began to celebrate a unified public holiday on 26 January – regardless of the day of the week –  for the first time. Previously, some states had celebrated the public holiday on a Monday or Friday to provide a long weekend. Research conducted in 2007 reported that 28% of Australians polled attended an organised Australia Day event and a further 26% celebrated with family and friends. This reflected the results of an earlier research project where 66% of respondents anticipated that they would actively celebrate Australia Day 2005.
Outdoor concerts, community barbecues, sports competitions, festivals and fireworks are some of the many events held in communities across Australia. These official events are presented by the National Australia Day Council, an official council or committee in each state and territory, and local committees.
In Sydney, the harbour is a focus and boat races are held, such as a ferry race and the tall ships race. In Adelaide, the key celebrations are ""Australia Day in the City"" which is a parade, concert and fireworks display held in Elder Park, with a new outdoor art installation in 2019 designed to acknowledge, remember and recognise Aboriginal people who have contributed to the community. Featuring the People's March and the Voyages Concert, Melbourne's events focus strongly on the celebration of multiculturalism. In Perth, for many years until 2022, the Skyworks were the largest single event presented each Australia Day.
Since 2012, with the exceptions of 2015 and 2020–22, a Big Blue match between Melbourne Victory FC and Sydney FC has been played annually on Australia Day.
Citizenship ceremonies are also commonly held, with Australia Day now the largest occasion for the acquisition of Australian citizenship. On 26 January 2011, more than 300 citizenship ceremonies took place and around 13,000 people from 143 countries took Australian citizenship. In recent years many citizenship ceremonies have included an affirmation by existing citizens. Research conducted in 2007 reported that 78.6% of respondents thought that citizenship ceremonies were an important feature of the day. In September 2019, the Morrison government amended the Australian Citizenship Ceremonies Code to require local councils to hold a citizenship ceremony on Australia Day.
The official Australia Day Ambassador Program supports celebrations in communities across the nation by facilitating the participation of high-achieving Australians in local community celebrations. In 2011, 385 ambassadors participated in 384 local community celebrations. The Order of Australia awards are also a feature of the day. The Australia Day Achievement Medallion is awarded to citizens by local governments based on excellence in both government and non-government organisations. The governor-general and prime minister both address the nation. On the eve of Australia Day each year, the Prime Minister announces the winner of the Australian of the Year award, presented to an Australian citizen who has shown a ""significant contribution to the Australian community and nation"" and is an ""inspirational role model for the Australian community"". Subcategories of the award include Young Australian of the Year and Senior Australian of the Year, and an award for Australia's Local Hero.
Research in 2009 indicated that Australians reflect on history and future fairly equally on Australia Day. Of those polled, 43% agreed that history is the most important thing to think about on Australia Day and 41% said they look towards ""our future"", while 13% thought it was important to ""think about the present at this time"" and 3% were unsure. Despite the date reflecting the arrival of the First Fleet, contemporary celebrations are not particularly historical in their theme. There are no large-scale re-enactments and the national leader's participation is focused largely on events such as the Australian of the Year Awards announcement and Citizenship Ceremonies.
Possibly reflecting a shift in Australians' understanding of the place of Indigenous Australians in their national identity, Newspoll research in November 2009 reported that ninety percent of Australians polled believed ""it was important to recognise Australia's indigenous people and culture"" as part of Australia Day celebrations. A similar proportion (89%) agreed that ""it is important to recognise the cultural diversity of the nation"". Despite the strong attendance at Australia Day events and a positive disposition towards the recognition of Indigenous Australians, the date of the celebrations remains a source of challenge and national discussion."
Australia Day,"Debate
Some Australians regard Australia Day as a symbol of the adverse impacts of British settlement on Australia's Indigenous peoples. In 1888, prior to the first centennial anniversary of the First Fleet landing on 26 January 1788, New South Wales premier Henry Parkes was asked about inclusion of Aboriginal people in the celebrations. He replied: ""And remind them that we have robbed them?""
The 150th anniversary celebrations in 1938 were accompanied by an Aboriginal Day of Mourning, declared by the Aborigines Progressive Association and the Australian Aborigines League as a protest against the ""Whiteman's seizure of our country"".  At the bicentennial celebrations in 1988, large gathering of Aboriginal people in Sydney led an ""Invasion Day"" commemoration marking the loss of Indigenous culture. Some Indigenous figures and others continue to label Australia Day as ""Invasion Day"", and protests occur almost every year, sometimes at Australia Day events. Thousands of people participate in protest marches in capital cities on Australia Day; estimates for the 2018 protest in Melbourne ranged into tens of thousands.
The anniversary is also termed by some as ""Survival Day"" and marked by events such as the Survival Day concert, first held in Sydney in 1992, celebrating the fact that the Indigenous people and culture have survived despite colonisation and discrimination. In 2016, National Indigenous Television chose the name ""Survival Day"" as its preferred choice on the basis that it acknowledges the mixed nature of the day, saying that the term ""recognises the invasion"", but does not allow that to frame the entire story of the Aboriginal people.
In response, official celebrations have tried to include Indigenous people, holding ceremonies such as the Woggan-ma-gule ceremony, held in Sydney, which honours the past and celebrates the present. Several major employers, both public and private, including the Australian Public Service, permit employees to work on Australia Day and take another day off.
Polling by Essential Media since 2015 suggested that the number of people celebrating Australia Day was declining, indicating a shift in attitudes. In 2019, 40% celebrated the day; in 2020, 34%. In 2021 it was down to 29%, and in that year, 53% said that they were treating the day as just a public holiday.
Polls by a team at Deakin University found in November 2021 that 60% of all respondents strongly disagreed or disagreed with changing the date, whereas in June 2023 this figure had dropped to 56%.  Asked whether they approved of celebrating Australia Day on 26 January, respondents under the age of 35 disapproved respectively by 53% and 57%, while those aged 35 to 54 disapproved respectively by 35% and 42%.  The authors observe: ""while younger Australians might be leading the push for change, there is a shift towards change in all age groups""."
Australia Day,"See also
Culture of Australia
Australian nationalism
Reconciliation in Australia"
Australia Day,"Notes
References
External links"
Australia Day,"National Australia Day Council
Official History of Australia Day
Australia Day Council of NSW"
Australian Signals Directorate,"The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), formerly the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD), is the federal statutory agency in the Australian Government responsible for foreign signals intelligence, support to military operations, cyber warfare, and information security. ASD is part of the Australian Intelligence Community. ASD's role within UKUSA Agreement (Five Eyes) is to monitor signals intelligence (""SIGINT"") in South and East Asia. The ASD also houses the Australian Cyber Security Centre.
The unit was established in 1947 by executive order as the Defence Signals Bureau within the Department of Defence, and underwent several name changes until its current name ASD was adopted in 2013. ASD was converted to a statutory body by the Intelligence Services Act 2001. ASD is based in Canberra, at the Defence Department Headquarters at Russell Offices. As of February 2020, Rachel Noble is the Director-General of ASD, replacing Mike Burgess, who was appointed Director-General of Security in September 2019.
In April 2018, a proposal to empower ASD to collect intelligence on Australians was backed by former Minister for Home Affairs Peter Dutton, but was strongly opposed by some in Cabinet who argued it was not necessary. Under legislation, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and the Australian Federal Police (AFP) are already allowed to seek assistance from ASD in conducting investigations on Australian citizens and businesses."
Australian Signals Directorate,"History
The Directorate has operated under a number of different names since its founding:"
Australian Signals Directorate,"1947 – Defence Signals Bureau established within the Department of Defence
1949 – name changed to Defence Signals Branch
1964 – name changed to Defence Signals Division
1977 – name changed to Defence Signals Directorate on recommendation of the Royal Commission on Intelligence and Security (Hope Commission)
2013 – name changed to Australian Signals Directorate
ASD commissioned an official history in 2019, which will cover the organisation's history from its establishment to 2001."
Australian Signals Directorate,"Roles and responsibilities
The principal functions of ASD are to collect and disseminate foreign signals intelligence (SIGINT) and to provide information security products and services to the Australian Government and Australian Defence Force (ADF), its foreign partners and militaries.
ASD operates at least three receiving stations: "
Australian Signals Directorate,"the Australian Defence Satellite Communications Station (ADSCS), located at Kojarena, near Geraldton, Western Australia,
the Shoal Bay Receiving Station, located at Shoal Bay, Northern Territory, and
a small station on the Cocos (Keeling) Islands.
ASD also maintains a workforce at Pine Gap in central Australia.
ADSCS and Shoal Bay are part of the United States signals intelligence and ECHELON analysis network. These stations also contribute signals intelligence for many Australian Government bodies, as well as the other UKUSA partners.
Electronic warfare operators in the Royal Australian Corps of Signals work closely with ASD. 7 Signal Regiment (Electronic Warfare) at Borneo Barracks, Cabarlah, Queensland is also associated with ASD..
In addition, it has been reported that many Australian embassies and overseas missions also house small facilities which provide a flow of signals intelligence to ASD."
Australian Signals Directorate,"UKUSA Agreement (Five Eyes)
Australia joined the UKUSA Agreement in 1948, a multilateral agreement for cooperation in signals intelligence between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The alliance is also known as the Five Eyes. Other countries, known as ""third parties"", such as West Germany, the Philippines, and several Nordic countries also joined the UKUSA community. As the Agreement was a secret treaty, its existence was not even disclosed to the Australian Prime Minister until 1973, when Gough Whitlam insisted on seeing it. The existence of the UKUSA Agreement was discovered by the Australian government during the 1973 Murphy raids on the headquarters of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). After learning about the agreement, Whitlam discovered that Pine Gap, a secret surveillance station close to Alice Springs, Australia, had been operated by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Pine Gap is now operated jointly by both Australia and the United States.
The existence of the Agreement was not disclosed to the public until 2005. On 25 June 2010, for the first time, the full text of the agreement was publicly released by the United Kingdom and the United States, and can now be viewed online. Under the agreement, ASD's intelligence is shared with UKUSA signals intelligence partner agencies: "
Australian Signals Directorate,"the National Security Agency (NSA) – United States,
the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) – United Kingdom,
the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) – Canada, and
the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) – New Zealand."
Australian Signals Directorate,"Organisational structure
The Australian Signals Directorate is led by a Director-General and a Principal Deputy Director-General who oversee strategy. The ASD also comprises the Australian Cyber Security Centre, a Signals Intelligence and Network Operations Group, and a Corporate and Capability Group."
Australian Signals Directorate,"SIGINT and Network Operations Group
The Signals Intelligence and Network Operations Group is responsible for signals intelligence collection, analysis and production, and ASD's network based access and effects operations. The Group comprises an Intelligence Division and a Network Operations and Access Division responsible for foreign signals intelligence and offensive cyber operations."
Australian Signals Directorate,"Defence SIGINT and Cyber Command
The Defence Signals-Intelligence (SIGINT) and Cyber Command (DSCC) was established in January 2018 by the Chief of the Defence Force consolidating all ADF personnel within the ASD within the Joint Cyber Unit and Joint SIGINT Unit. The Commander of the DSCC is responsible to the Head of Information Warfare under the Chief of Joint Capabilities to the Chief of the Defence Force. The Commander is currently Commodore James McCormack of the Royal Australian Navy who was previously the Director-General for Support to Military Operations within the Australian Signals Directorate."
Australian Signals Directorate,"Leadership
Director/Director-General
See also
Australian Intelligence Community
Defence Signal Intelligence and Cyber Command
List of intelligence agencies
Espionage
ECHELON"
Australian Signals Directorate,"References
External links
Australian Signals Directorate official website
Open Australia Search: Parliamentary records mentioning 'signals directorate'."
Australian nationality law,"Australian nationality law details the conditions by which a person is a national of Australia. The primary law governing nationality regulations is the Australian Citizenship Act 2007, which came into force on 1 July 2007 and is applicable in all states and territories of Australia. 
All persons born in Australia before 20 August 1986 were automatically citizens at birth regardless of the nationalities of their parents. Individuals born in the country after that date receive Australian citizenship at birth if at least one of their parents is an Australian citizen or permanent resident. Children born in Australia to New Zealand citizens since 1 July 2022 also receive Australian citizenship at birth. Foreign nationals may be granted citizenship after living in the country for at least four years, holding permanent residency for one year, and showing proficiency in the English language.
Australia is composed of several former British colonies founded in the 18th and 19th centuries whose residents were British subjects. After federation as a Dominion within the British Empire in 1901, Australia was granted more autonomy over time and gradually became independent from the United Kingdom. Although Australian citizens have no longer been British subjects since 1984, they continue to hold favoured status when residing in the UK. As Commonwealth citizens, Australians are eligible to vote in UK elections and serve in public office there."
Australian nationality law,"Terminology
The distinction between the meaning of the terms citizenship and nationality is not always clear in the English language and differs by country. Generally, nationality refers a person's legal belonging to a state and is the common term used in international treaties when referring to members of that polity; citizenship refers to the set of rights and duties a person has in that nation. Despite this distinction, the Australian Government uses these two terms interchangeably."
Australian nationality law,"Colonial-era history
Fragmented development
The Kingdom of Great Britain established its first colony in Australia with the founding of New South Wales in 1788. Over the course of the 19th century, the British presence expanded throughout the continent. By 1890, there were six separate self-governing territories in Australia. British nationality law applied to each of these colonies, as was the case elsewhere in the British Empire. Australians and all other imperial citizens were British subjects; any person born in the Australian colonies, the United Kingdom, or anywhere else within Crown dominions was a natural-born British subject. Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders became British subjects as the colonies were settled throughout the continent.
British nationality law during this time was uncodified and did not have a standard set of regulations, relying instead on precedent and common law. Until the mid-19th century, it was unclear whether naturalisation rules in the United Kingdom were applicable in other parts of the Empire. Each colony had wide discretion in developing their own procedures and requirements for admitting foreign settlers as subjects. New South Wales and Tasmania respectively enacted legislation in 1828 and 1834 enabling denization, a process that partially granted foreign citizens the rights of British subjects, most notably property rights. Denizens were not considered aliens, but could not pass subject status to their children by descent and were barred from Crown service and public office.
Naturalisation in Britain was achieved through individual Acts of Parliament until 1844, when a more streamlined administrative process was introduced. The Australian colonies emulated this system in their own naturalisation legislation, which was enacted in all local legislatures by 1871. In 1847, the Imperial Parliament formalised a clear distinction between subjects who naturalised in the UK and those who did so in other territories. Individuals who naturalised in the UK were deemed to have received the status by imperial naturalisation, which was valid throughout the Empire. Those naturalising in colonies were said to have gone through local naturalisation and were given subject status valid only within the relevant territory; a subject who locally naturalised in New South Wales was a British subject there, but not in England or Victoria. Nevertheless, locally naturalised British subjects were still entitled to imperial protection when travelling outside of the Empire.
Married women generally followed the nationality status of their husbands. Beginning with New South Wales in 1848, each colony enacted legislation that automatically naturalised foreign women who married British subjects, mirroring regulations enacted in the UK in 1844. After Britain established marital denaturalisation for British subject women who married non-British men in 1870, New South Wales adapted its rules to match this in 1875. The other Australian colonies did not adopt this in legislation but in practice, women who married foreign men were automatically stripped of British subject status throughout Australia.
The Federal Council of Australasia, created in 1885, was a first attempt at forming a unified governing body in the region and consisted of four Australian colonies (Queensland, Tasmania, Victoria, and Western Australia), along with Fiji. Legislation passed by the Federal Council in 1897 allowed British subjects who had naturalised in a colony under its authority to be considered as naturalised in other such colonies."
Australian nationality law,"Discriminatory policies against non-European migrants
Regulations regarding non-European migrants varied by colony but clearly favoured immigrants of European descent over members of any other ethnic groups. Queensland created two different sets of requirements in 1867 for naturalisation of ""Asiatic and African aliens"" and ""European and North American aliens"". Asian and African applicants seeking to become subjects were required to have lived in the colony for three years, and be married and living together with their wives. Chinese migrants were specifically targeted in colonial legislation that charged fees for entry to or residence in the colonies, and banned them from naturalising as British subjects. In 1889, entrance fees for Chinese in each of the Australasian colonies were standardised at £10, except for Queensland which required £30."
Australian nationality law,"Post-federation policies
The Federal Council of Australasia was abolished in 1900 and replaced on 1 January 1901 by the Commonwealth of Australia, a federation of the six Australian colonies. The status of Australians as British subjects (including Indigenous Australians) remained unchanged despite the creation of this union. Commonwealth nationality legislation enacted in 1903 superseded laws of the new states; naturalisation in one of the states became automatically valid in all of them.
The federal government continued and extended restrictions on persons of non-European descent as part of its White Australia policy. The Immigration Restriction Act 1901 created the legal basis for administering dictation tests in any European language as determined by an immigration officer. Any person who failed was denied entry into Australia. While Māori from New Zealand technically fell under the exclusion criteria of this Act, representations made by the New Zealand government pressured the Commonwealth government into exceptionally relaxing restrictions for Māori. The Naturalization Act 1903 explicitly prohibited naturalisation of anyone with ancestry from Africa, Asia, or Oceania (except New Zealand)."
Australian nationality law,"Imperial common code
The Imperial Parliament brought regulations for British subject status into codified statute law for the first time with passage of the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act 1914. British subject status was standardised as a common nationality across the Empire. Dominions that adopted this Act as part of local legislation were authorised to grant subject status to aliens by imperial naturalisation. Australia adopted the common code in 1920.
The 1914 regulations codified the doctrine of coverture into imperial nationality law, where a woman's consent to marry a foreign national was also assumed to be intent to denaturalise; British women who married foreign men automatically lost their British nationality. There were two exceptions to this: a wife married to a husband who lost his British subject status was able to retain British nationality by declaration, and a British-born widow or divorcée who had lost her British nationality through marriage could reacquire that status without meeting residence requirements after the dissolution of her marriage.
Australia's version of the common code regulations contained extensive measures for revoking British subject status from naturalised persons. Individuals who showed disloyalty to the monarch, were sentenced to imprisonment for at least one year or received a fine of more than £100 within five years of naturalising, had been deemed to be ""not of good character"" when subject status was granted, or lived outside of the British Empire for more than seven years were liable to have their naturalisation revoked.
Unlike the 1903 Act, the common code enacted in 1920 did not explicitly bar migrants on the basis of race. It instead allowed the government to deny naturalisation to any person without cause. Only 45 people of Asian descent were naturalised between 1904 and 1953. Migrants of non-European ancestry were effectively barred from permanent residency and naturalisation until 1957.
By the end of the First World War, the Dominions had exercised increasing levels of autonomy in managing their own affairs and each by then had developed a distinct national identity. Britain formally recognised this at the 1926 Imperial Conference, jointly issuing the Balfour Declaration with all the Dominion heads of government, which stated that the United Kingdom and Dominions were autonomous and equal to each other within the British Commonwealth of Nations. Full legislative independence was granted to the Dominions with passage of the Statute of Westminster 1931.
Women's rights groups throughout the Empire pressured the imperial government during this time to amend nationality regulations that tied a married woman's status to that of her husband. Because the British government could no longer enforce legislative supremacy over the Dominions after 1931 and wanted to maintain a strong constitutional link to them through the common nationality code, it was unwilling to make major changes without unanimous agreement among the Dominions on this issue, which it did not have. Imperial legal uniformity was nevertheless eroded during the 1930s; New Zealand and Australia amended their laws in 1935 and 1936 to allow women denaturalised by marriage to retain their rights as British subjects, and Ireland changed its regulations in 1935 to cause no change to a woman's nationality after her marriage."
Australian nationality law,"Australian citizenship created
Diverging developments in Dominion nationality laws, as well as growing assertions of local national identity separate from that of Britain and the Empire, culminated with the creation of Canadian citizenship in 1946, unilaterally breaking the system of a common imperial nationality. Combined with the approaching independence of India and Pakistan in 1947, comprehensive nationality law reform was necessary at this point to address ideas that were incompatible with the previous system. The Dominion governments agreed on the principle of equal standing for women in a reformed nationality system at the 1946 Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Conference and Australia amended its law to grant equal nationality rights in that same year.
Australia enacted the Nationality and Citizenship Act 1948 to create its own citizenship, which came into force on 26 January 1949, shortly after the British Nationality Act 1948 became effective throughout the Empire on 1 January 1949. All British subjects who were born, naturalised, or resident for at least five years in Australia automatically acquired Australian citizenship on that date. British subjects born to a father who himself was born or naturalised in Australia and British subject women who were married to someone qualifying as an Australian citizen also automatically acquired citizenship on that date.
All other noncitizens could acquire citizenship by naturalisation after fulfilling a general residence requirement. Candidates must have resided in Australia (including Papua) or New Guinea for at least four of the previous eight years, with one year of continuous residence immediately preceding an application. This was reduced to two of the previous eight years in 1973. Non-Europeans were allowed to apply for residency and naturalisation from 1957, if they were legally admitted and living in Australia for 15 years (reduced to five years in 1966).
Almost all provisions to revoke citizenship from naturalised individuals were repealed in 1958. On the other hand, Australian citizens who acquired a foreign citizenship other than through marriage were automatically denaturalised and lost their Australian citizenship under this Act. Individuals who naturalised as Australian citizens conversely were not required to renounce their previous nationalities."
Australian nationality law,"Reform and abolition of British subject status
The 1948 Act redefined the term British subject as any citizen of Australia or another Commonwealth country. Commonwealth citizen is defined in this Act to have the same meaning. British subject/Commonwealth citizen status co-existed with the citizenships of each Commonwealth country. Irish citizens were treated as if they were British subjects, despite Ireland's exit from the Commonwealth in 1949. All Commonwealth citizens were eligible to become Australian citizens by registration, rather than naturalisation, after residing in Australia for at least five of the preceding seven years. Commonwealth citizens who became Australian citizens by registration were not required to swear an oath of allegiance because they were already subjects of the Crown.
All British subjects under the reformed system initially held an automatic right to settle in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Non-white immigration into the UK was systemically discouraged, but strong economic conditions in Britain following the Second World War attracted an unprecedented wave of colonial migration. In response, the British Parliament imposed immigration controls on any subjects originating from outside the British Islands with the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962. Ireland had continued to allow all British subjects free movement despite independence in 1922 as part of the Common Travel Area arrangement, but moved to mirror Britain's restriction in 1962 by limiting this ability only to people born on the islands of Great Britain or Ireland. Britain somewhat relaxed these measures in 1971 for patrials, subjects whose parents or grandparents were born in the United Kingdom, which gave effective preferential treatment to white Commonwealth citizens.
As a sign of Australia's changing relationship with Britain, Australian passports were no longer labelled with the phrase ""British passport"" beginning in 1967. Legislative changes in 1969 meant that Australian citizens technically ceased to be British subjects in that year, but retained ""the status of British subjects"" instead. Preferences that were afforded to citizens from other Commonwealth countries and restrictions on migrants of non-European descent were abolished in a further 1973 amendment. The name of the Nationality and Citizenship Act 1948 itself changed to the Australian Citizenship Act 1948 in 1973 as well; the anniversary of this event has been celebrated since 2001 as Australian Citizenship Day.
By the 1970s and 1980s, most colonies of the British Empire had become independent and remaining ties to the United Kingdom had been significantly weakened. The UK itself updated its nationality law to reflect the more modest boundaries of its remaining territory and possessions with the British Nationality Act 1981, which redefined British subject to no longer also mean Commonwealth citizen. Australian citizens remain Commonwealth citizens in British law and are still eligible to vote and stand for public office in the UK.
Further reforms in 1984 fully abolished British subject status in Australian law and removed remaining gender imbalances in nationality regulations. Voting eligibility rules were changed to require Australian citizenship instead of British subject status, but any British subject without citizenship already enrolled to vote before 26 January 1984 had the right to continue participating in elections. Noncitizen British subjects could no longer apply for Australian passports beginning in that year.
After passage of the Australia Act 1986, the High Court has considered any persons without Australian citizenship to be aliens. While British subjects could not have been considered foreign at the time of federation, the severing of constitutional ties with the United Kingdom created a definitive separation between the two countries; British citizens have since been considered subjects of a foreign power and are ineligible to serve in the Parliament of Australia under section 44 of the Constitution of Australia. The eligibility of 10 sitting legislators was questioned under this section of the Constitution during the 2017–18 Australian parliamentary eligibility crisis, leading to eight disqualifications under subsequent court proceedings."
Australian nationality law,"Heightened citizenship requirements
The general residence requirement for acquiring citizenship was relaxed in 1984. Naturalisation candidates were required to have lived in Australia for two of the five years preceding an application, while holding permanent residency for at least one year during that aggregate period. However, concerns over an influx of unintended immigration and the perceived exploitation of nationality law by illegal migrants to gain residence in Australia created the impetus for ending unrestricted birthright citizenship in 1986. Children born in the country since then are only granted citizenship by birth if at least one parent is a citizen or permanent resident. Naturalisation candidates have been required since 1993 to recite a citizenship pledge in which they commit their loyalty to the country of Australia, rather than swear an oath of allegiance to the Australian monarch. Automatic denaturalisation of Australians acquiring foreign nationalities was repealed in 2002. Citizenship tests were introduced in 2007 and the general residence requirement was increased back to four years as well.
Government powers for citizenship deprivation were greatly expanded in 2015. Australians holding another nationality and engaged in terrorist activities were subject to automatic loss of citizenship. These measures were amended in 2020 to require an explicit revocation order from the Minister for Home Affairs."
Australian nationality law,"Territorial changes
Papua, New Guinea, and Nauru
Queensland attempted to preemptively counter German colonial interests in the Pacific by annexing Papua in 1883, though this was met with disapproval from imperial authorities. Following the establishment of German New Guinea, Britain claimed Papua in 1884 and formally annexed it in 1888. After Australian federation in 1901, Britain ceded administrative control of the territory to the Commonwealth government in 1902, which was accepted by Australia in 1905. New Guinea and Nauru remained German colonies until the First World War, after which New Guinea became a League of Nations mandate under Australian control while Nauru's mandate was split between Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. In practice, Australia held sole governing authority over Nauru.
While residents of Papua became British subjects, that status was not extended to those from the mandated territories under the recommendation of the Permanent Mandates Commission. Residents of New Guinea and Nauru were instead treated as British protected persons. When Australian citizenship was created in 1949, Papuans automatically became Australian citizens while New Guinea and Nauru residents became ""Australian protected persons"". Despite their status as British subjects/Australian citizens, Papuans of indigenous descent did not have an automatic right to reside in mainland Australia and were required to apply for that separately. Persons with non-indigenous ancestry held that right automatically.
Papua New Guinea became independent in 1975. Indigenous residents born in Papua or New Guinea with two grandparents also born in either territory or surrounding area, who did not have right of residence in mainland Australia, and did not hold foreign nationality automatically became citizens of the new country. Former Australian citizens born in Papua before independence seeking to resume citizenship cannot reacquire that status by descent. Because Papua fell within the definition of ""Australia"" before 1975, applicants cannot claim citizenship through their birth overseas. Since 2007, Papua New Guinean citizens who lost Australian citizenship on independence but have a parent born on the Australian mainland can apply for a special resumption of citizenship."
Australian nationality law,"Indian Ocean territories
The Cocos (Keeling) Islands and Christmas Island were respectively annexed into the Empire in 1857 and 1888. The Cocos Islands were first directly administered by the UK until 1878, when it was transferred to Ceylon, then to the Straits Settlements in 1886, and finally devolved to the settlement of Singapore in 1903. Christmas Island was similarly incorporated into Singapore in 1900. Following the Second World War, the Australian government expressed its interest in acquiring both territories for strategic and commercial reasons; the Cocos Islands for its airstrip and Christmas Island for its phosphate. Sovereignty over the Cocos Islands was transferred to Australia in 1955. Island residents became Australian citizens at time of transfer while retaining UK citizenship. Christmas Island was transferred to Australia in 1958 under largely the same terms. Citizens from these territories did not have automatic right of residence on the Australian mainland, as was the case with citizens from Papua, until this restriction was repealed in 1984. No Australian citizen has been required to obtain an entry permit to enter the country since that year."
Australian nationality law,"Burmese independence
Burma gained independence from the United Kingdom on 4 January 1948. The British Parliament enacted the Burma Independence Act 1947 to remove British subject status from all individuals who held that status solely through their connection with Burma. Burmese resident in the UK or its colonies could make formal claims to retain subject status.
The Australian Parliament did not pass similar legislation addressing this event, leaving only common law to apply. Australian common law at the time dictated that only Burmese resident in Burma at the time of independence lost British nationality, while every Burmese person who left Burma permanently before its independence or ""within a reasonable time thereafter"" retained British subject status. This created an anomalous situation where Burmese living in Australia ceased to be British subjects under UK law, but continued that status in Australian law.
The Nationality and Citizenship (Burmese) Act 1950 addressed this discrepancy, removing British subject status from persons connected with Burma. Individuals who lost subject status through this Act but had become Australian citizens in 1949 could retain their citizenship by making formal declarations within two years of the Act's passage."
Australian nationality law,"Acquisition and loss of citizenship
Entitlement by birth, descent, or adoption
All persons born in Australia before 20 August 1986 automatically received citizenship at birth regardless of the nationalities of their parents. Individuals born in the country since that date receive Australian citizenship at birth if at least one parent is a citizen or permanent resident. Children born in Australia to New Zealand citizens since 1 July 2022 also receive Australian citizenship at birth.
A person born outside Australia to an Australian citizen parent is eligible to acquire Australian citizenship by descent through application. If the parent acquired citizenship by descent or adoption, the parent must have resided in Australia for at least two years at the time of application.
Adopted children are treated as if they were naturally born to the adopting parents at the time and location of adoption; those adopted in Australia automatically receive citizenship, while those adopted overseas are eligible to apply. Children who are born in Australia but did not acquire citizenship at birth may otherwise automatically acquire citizenship if they are ordinarily resident in the country for the 10-year period immediately following their birth. Stateless children born in the country are entitled to citizenship without further residence requirements."
Australian nationality law,"Voluntary acquisition
Noncitizens over the age of 18 may become Australian citizens by conferral after legally residing in the country for more than four years and holding permanent residency for at least 12 months. Applicants must not have been outside of Australia for longer than 12 months in the preceding four years, with absences totaling less than 90 days in the final year. Candidates who are overseas while enlisted in the Australian Defence Force, deemed to be engaged in activities for Australia's benefit, or employed in a position that requires regular travel abroad can be considered to have fulfilled special residence requirements. Members of the Australian Commonwealth Games team and holders of distinguished talent visas have also been eligible for special residence considerations since 2021.
Applicants between the ages of 18 and 59 must complete a citizenship test in which they demonstrate basic competency in the English language as well as sufficient knowledge of the country and citizenship. Successful candidates aged 16 and older are required to make a citizenship pledge in which they commit their loyalty to the country of Australia; these are usually administered by local government at citizenship ceremonies that take place about six months after approval. Between 1 July 2020 and 30 June 2021, over 140,000 people obtained Australian citizenship by conferral."
Australian nationality law,"Pathway for New Zealand citizens
New Zealand citizens are generally exempt from immigration restrictions under the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement and fall under unique regulations. Any New Zealander who settled in Australia on or before 26 February 2001 is automatically considered a permanent resident for nationality purposes, while those who arrive after that date were required to first obtain permanent residency before they may naturalise. Beginning on 1 July 2023, all New Zealand citizens holding a Special Category Visa (SCV) who have been resident in Australia for at least four years will no longer be required to obtain permanent residency before naturalisation.
Children born in Australia to New Zealand citizens between the end of unrestricted birthright citizenship on 20 August 1986 and 31 August 1994 were ""exempt non-citizens"" and considered to have been permanent residents for any time spent living in the country during this period. The SCV was introduced for New Zealand citizens on 1 September 1994; all New Zealand citizens already in the country on that date were automatically granted this visa and it is issued on arrival to New Zealanders after that date. A child born in Australia between 1 September 1994 and 26 February 2001 to a New Zealand parent with an SCV or permanent visa is an Australian citizen by birth. Between 27 February 2001 and 30 June 2022, children born to New Zealand citizens in Australia only received Australian citizenship at birth if at least one parent held an SCV issued before 27 February 2001, a permanent Australian visa, or dual Australian-New Zealand citizenship. Since 1 July 2022, children born in Australia to New Zealand citizens are automatically Australian citizens by birth.
Since 1 January 2023, New Zealand citizens holding an SCV who are granted the Skilled Independent (subclass 189) permanent resident visa under the New Zealand stream are considered to have been permanent residents in Australia since 1 January 2022, making them immediately eligible for Australian citizenship by conferral without a further term of residence. Any New Zealand citizen who already held this type of visa before 2023 is also considered to have their permanent residence backdated. Children born between 1 January 2022 and 30 June 2023 to SCV holders who are later granted the subclass 189 visa between those dates retroactively acquire Australian citizenship by birth.
By 15 August 2023, over 15,000 New Zealand citizens residing in Australia had applied for Australian citizenship under the new criteria, with 500 passing the Australian citizenship test at the time of publication."
Australian nationality law,"Loss and resumption of citizenship
Australian citizenship can be relinquished by making a declaration of renunciation, although this may be denied at the discretion of the Minister for Home Affairs. Citizenship may be involuntarily deprived from individuals who fraudulently acquired it, or from dual citizens who actively serve in the military of another country at war with Australia. Children of former citizens may also be stripped of citizenship, except in cases where another parent remains an Australian citizen or deprivation would cause statelessness. Dual citizens who are engaged in terrorist activities, part of a known terror group, or have been convicted of terrorism offences for imprisonment sentences totaling at least three years may also be stripped of their citizenship at the discretion of the Minister.
Until 4 April 2002, Australians who became citizens of another country automatically lost Australian citizenship. This restriction did not apply to those who acquired a foreign citizenship by marriage, and did not require naturalisation candidates to relinquish their former nationalities. Children born to individuals who lost their citizenship under this provision for automatic loss before 2002 are eligible for a special conferral of citizenship.
Former citizens may subsequently apply for nationality restoration, provided that they would have been subject to hardship had they not renounced Australian citizenship, or were automatically deprived of their Australian citizenship before 2002. Individuals resuming citizenship regain the same type of citizenship they held previously; a person who had acquired citizenship by descent, relinquishes it, then resumes citizenship would regain citizenship by descent. Citizens of Papua New Guinea who lost Australian citizenship on independence in 1975 but have a parent born on the Australian mainland have been able to apply for a special resumption of citizenship since 2007."
Australian nationality law,"See also
Visa policy of Australia
Visa requirements for Australian citizens"
Australian nationality law,"References
Citations
Sources
Publications
Legislation
External links
Citizenship pathways, Department of Home Affairs"
Anglo-Celtic Australians,"Anglo-Celtic Australians is a contested ancestral grouping of Australians whose ancestors originate wholly or partially in the British Isles - predominantly in England (including Cornish), Ireland, Scotland and Wales, as well as the Isle of Man and Channel Islands.
While Anglo-Celtic Australians do not form an official ethnic grouping in the Australian Bureau of Statistics' Australian Standard Classification of Cultural and Ethnic Groups, due to the long historical dominance and intermixture of Australians with ancestries from the British Isles, it is commonly used as an informal ethnic identifier.
The term has received criticism for erasing historical distinctions between English and Celtic settlers. In particular, it does not account for the political and social segregation of English and Irish Australians which some scholars have labelled an apartheid or the fact that while many English arrived in Australia as willing immigrants, many Irish were forcibly transported as prisoners or refugees.
At the 2021 census, the number of ancestry responses from the following groups as a proportion of the total Australian population amounted to 51.7%: English Australian, Irish Australian, Scottish Australian, Welsh Australian, Cornish Australians, British Australian (so described), Manx Australian, Channel Islander Australian. The precise number of Anglo-Celtic Australians is unknown due to the way in which ancestry data is collected in Australia. For instance, many census recipients nominated two Anglo-Celtic ancestries due to the long history of these ancestries in Australia, tending towards an overcount. Conversely, the Australian Bureau of Statistics has stated that most people nominating ""Australian"" ancestry have at least partial Anglo-Celtic European ancestry despite ""Australian"" ancestry being classified as part of the Oceanian ancestry group, tending towards an undercount."
Anglo-Celtic Australians,"History
Pre-Federation
The British Government initiated European settlement of the Australian continent by establishing a penal settlement at Sydney Cove in 1788. Between then and 1852, about 100,000 convicts (mostly tried in England) were transported to eastern Australia. Scotland and Wales contributed relatively few convicts.
Native-born Australians of British and Irish descent were approximately a quarter of the population of the colony of New South Wales in both 1817 and 1828.: 17  There were slightly more native-born than free settlers in 1850. They were nearly half of the population in 1868. Their proportion of the population decreased during the times of the rapid population growth brought on by the goldrushes.: 17  The convicts were augmented by free settlers, including large numbers who arrived during the gold-rush in the 1850s. As late as 1861, people born in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland outnumbered even the Australia-born population. The number of settlers in Australia who were born in the United Kingdom (UK) peaked at 825,000 in 1891, from which point the proportion of British among all immigrants to Australia steadily declined.
Until 1859, 2.2 million (73%) of the free settlers who immigrated were British."
Anglo-Celtic Australians,"Post-Federation
From the beginning of the colonial era until the mid-20th century, the vast majority of settlers to Australia were from Britain and Ireland, with the English being the dominant group, followed by the Irish and Scottish. Among the leading ancestries, increases in Australian, Irish, and German ancestries and decreases in English, Scottish, and Welsh ancestries appear to reflect such shifts in perception or reporting. These reporting shifts at least partly resulted from changes in the design of the census question, in particular the introduction of a tick box format in 2001.
Those born in the United Kingdom were the largest foreign group throughout the 20th century. Prior to the last quarter of the century, the United Kingdom was strongly favoured as a source country by immigrant selection policies and remained the largest single component of the annual immigration intake until 1995–96, when immigrants from New Zealand surpassed it in number.
However, their share of the total immigrant population is in decline. Those from the United Kingdom comprised 58 per cent of the total overseas-born population in 1901, compared to 27 per cent in 1996. An even greater decline has occurred for those born in Ireland. In 1901, those born in Ireland comprised 22 per cent of all immigrants, while in 1996 the Ireland-born
represented just 1 per cent of the immigrant population.
While those born in England have formed the largest component of the British immigrant population, Australia has also received significant numbers of immigrants from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Up until the First World War the Irish were, in their own right, the second largest immigrant population.
The most dramatic increase in the British immigrant population occurred between 1961 and 1971. The number of British-born people living in Australia exceeded one million at the 1971 Census and has remained above one million to this day. The United Kingdom-born population in Australia reached a peak of 1,107,119 in 1991."
Anglo-Celtic Australians,"Demographics
Anglo-Celtic is not an official ancestry category in the Australian census. Census respondents may nominate up to two ancestries. The number of ancestry responses from the following groups as a proportion of the total Australian population amounted to 51.7% at the 2021 census: English Australian, Irish Australian, Scottish Australian, Cornish Australians, Welsh Australian, British Australian (so described), Manx Australian, Channel Islander Australian. The precise number of Anglo-Celtic Australians is unknown due to the way in which ancestry data is collected in Australia. For instance, many census recipients nominated two Anglo-Celtic ancestries due to the long history of these ancestries in Australia, tending towards an overcount. Conversely, the Australian Bureau of Statistics has stated that most people nominating ""Australian"" ancestry have at least partial Anglo-Celtic European ancestry despite ""Australian"" ancestry being classified as part of the Oceanian ancestry group, tending towards an undercount.
At the 2021 census, the most commonly nominated Anglo-Celtic ancestries were:"
Anglo-Celtic Australians,"The United Kingdom remains a significant source of immigrants to Australia. In 2005–06, 22,143 persons born in the United Kingdom settled in Australia, representing 21.4% of all migrants. At the 2006 Census (excluding overseas visitors) 1,038,165 persons identified themselves as having been born in the United Kingdom (5.2% of the Australian population), while 50,251 identified themselves as Irish born.
Melbourne and Sydney have the lowest rates of Anglo-Celtic Australians, particularly in certain regions of each city (such as Western Sydney). Tasmania could have the nation's highest proportion of citizens of Anglo-Celtic origin, possibly as high as 85 percent. On the evidence of statistics of ethnic derivation Tasmania could also be considered more British than New Zealand (where the Anglo-Celtic majority has fallen below 75 percent)."
Anglo-Celtic Australians,"Historical demographics
British and Irish population per census
The following table shows the British and Irish-born population for every national Australian census as a proportion of the total foreign-born population at various points."
Anglo-Celtic Australians,"Notes: From 1954 onwards people from ""Northern Ireland"" and ""Ulster"" were recorded separately from the people of ""Ireland"". The 1966 census (is Republic of Ireland & Ireland (undefined)."
Anglo-Celtic Australians,"Self-identified census data
The following table shows various Anglo-Celtic ancestries since 1986, the first census to include as a question on ancestry. The aim of the question was to measure the ethnic composition of the population as a whole. Very little use was made of the ancestry data from the 1986 Census. As a consequence, ancestry was not included in either the 1991 or 1996 Censuses. Between 1987 and 1999, the Anglo-Celtic component of Australia's population declined from 75 per cent to 70 per cent. In 1999, the Anglo-Celtic share of the Australian population was calculated as 69.9%."
Anglo-Celtic Australians,"Maps
Controversy and criticism
Some have argued that the term is entirely a product of multiculturalism that ignores the history of sectarianism in Australia. For example, historian John Hirst wrote in 1994: ""Mainstream Australian society was reduced to an ethnic group and given an ethnic name: Anglo-Celt.""
According to Hirst:"
Anglo-Celtic Australians,"In the eyes of multiculturalists, Australian society of the 1940s, 150 years after first settlement, is adequately described as Anglo-Celtic. At least this acknowledges that the people of Australia were Irish and Scots as well as English, but it has nothing more substantial than a hyphen joining them. In fact a distinct new culture had been formed. English, Scots and Irish had formed a common identity – first of all British and then gradually Australian as well. In the 1930s the historian W. K. Hancock could aptly describe them as Independent Australian Britons.
The Irish-Australian journalist Siobhán McHugh has argued that the term ""Anglo-Celtic"" is ""an insidious distortion of our past and a galling denial of the struggle by an earlier minority group"", Irish Australians, ""against oppression and demonisation... In what we now cosily term ""Anglo-Celtic"" Australia, a virtual social apartheid existed at times between [Irish] Catholics and [British] Protestants"", which did not end until the 1960s.
The term was also criticised by the historian Patrick O'Farrell as  ""a grossly misleading, false, and patronising convenience, one crassly present-oriented. Its use removes from consciousness and recognition a major conflict fundamental to any comprehension not only of Australian history but of our present core culture."""
Anglo-Celtic Australians,"Culture
Streams of migration from the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland to Australia played a key role in Australia's cultural development, despite the last substantial scheme for preferential migration from Britain to Australia ending in 1972.
There is a long history of cultural exchange between the countries and many Australians have used Britain as a stepping-stone to international success, e.g., Nellie Melba, Peter Dawson, Clive James, Robert Hughes.
In 1967, British migrants in Australia formed an association to represent their special interests: the United Kingdom Settlers' Association, which subsequently became the British Australian Community.
On 10 July 2017, at a press conference in London, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said:"
Anglo-Celtic Australians,"""Australians feel at home in the United Kingdom and Britons feel at home in Australia. Most Australians have some of their ancestry at least from the United Kingdom and five per cent of Australians were actually born in the United Kingdom.
The culture, the laws the traditions of Britain were brought to Australia with the European settlement, British settlement that were brought as part of the heritage of the men and women, including my forebears, that founded what we know today as modern Australia"". . . There are no two nations in the world that trust each other more than the United Kingdom and Australia. We are family in a historical sense. We're family in a genetic sense. But we are so close and that trust is getting stronger all the time."
Anglo-Celtic Australians,"Place names of British origin
There are many places in Australia named after people and places in the United Kingdom as a result of the many British settlers and explorers; in addition, some places were named after the British royal family."
Anglo-Celtic Australians,"New South Wales
New South Wales – Cook first named the land ""New Wales"", named after Wales. However, in the copy held by the Admiralty, he ""revised the wording"" to ""New South Wales""."
Anglo-Celtic Australians,"Hyde Park – was named after the original Hyde Park in London, England and is the oldest public parkland in Australia
Newcastle, New South Wales – is named after Newcastle, England
The state capital city of Sydney is named in honour of English politician Thomas Townshend, 1st Viscount Sydney."
Anglo-Celtic Australians,"Northern Territory
The state capital city of Darwin. A Scottish naval officer named the region ""Port Darwin"" in honour of English naturalist Charles Darwin."
Anglo-Celtic Australians,"Queensland
Queensland – The state was named in honour of Queen Victoria, who on 6 June 1859 signed Letters Patent separating the colony from New South Wales."
Anglo-Celtic Australians,Brisbane – is named after Scotsman Thomas Brisbane.
Anglo-Celtic Australians,"South Australia
The state capital city of Adelaide founded in 1836, is named in honour of Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, queen consort to King William IV."
Anglo-Celtic Australians,"Tasmania
Hobart – city named after the English politician Robert Hobart 4th Earl of Buckinghamshire who was British Secretary of State for War and the Colonies in 1804 at the time of its settlement.
Launceston – was named in honour of the New South Wales Governor Captain Philip Gidley King, who was born in Launceston, Cornwall, England."
Anglo-Celtic Australians,"Victoria
Victoria – like Queensland, was named after Queen Victoria, who had been on the British throne for 14 years when the colony was established in 1851."
Anglo-Celtic Australians,"Melbourne – was named in honour of William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, Queen Victoria's first Prime Minister, and thus indirectly takes its name from the village of Melbourne, Derbyshire, England."
Anglo-Celtic Australians,"Western Australia
Perth – The city is named after Perth, Scotland, by influence of Sir George Murray, then British Secretary of State for War and the Colonies. in Murray's honour."
Anglo-Celtic Australians,"External territories
Norfolk Island - Captain James Cook named it after Mary Howard, Duchess of Norfolk (c. 1712 – 1773)."
Anglo-Celtic Australians,"See also
Anglo-Celtic
Anglo
Demographics of Australia
European Australians
Europeans in Oceania
Irish Australians
Scottish Australians
Cornish Australians
English Australians
Welsh Australians
British diaspora"
Anglo-Celtic Australians,Notes
Anglo-Celtic Australians,"
== References =="
Sport in Australia,"Sport is an important part of Australia that dates back to the early colonial period. Australian rules football, rugby league, rugby union, association football, cricket and tennis are among the earliest organised sports in Australia. Sport has shaped the Australian national identity through events such as the Melbourne Cup and the America's Cup. Australia also holds the record for the largest attendance at a rugby union match; almost 110,000 spectators watched the Wallabies play the All Blacks in 2000.
There are a number of professional sport leagues in Australia, including the Australian Football League (AFL) and AFL Women's (Australian rules football), National Rugby League (NRL) and NRL Women's (rugby league), Super Rugby Pacific (Australia/New Zealand) (Rugby Union), the National Basketball League and the Women's National Basketball League, A-League Men and A-League Women (soccer), the Australian Baseball League (baseball), the Big Bash League (cricket), Women's Big Bash League (cricket) and Sheffield Shield (cricket), Suncorp Super Netball and the Supercars Championship (touring car racing). Attendance for the AFL in 2019 attracted more than 7.5 million people to games, while the NRL drew just over 4 million people for the 2023 season.  Rugby league in Australia was watched by a cumulative television audience of over 174 million people for the 2023 season, whereas the AFL managed to attract only 142 million viewers. 
Historically, rugby league and rugby union football codes have been more popular than Australian rules football in New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory and Queensland, whereas Australian rules football has been more popular in Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia, Northern Territory and Western Australia. 
Australia boasts 7 former world number one squash players, along with a history of success in the Commonwealth Games.
As a nation, Australia has competed in many international events, including the Olympics and Paralympics. The country has also twice hosted the Summer Olympics in Melbourne (1956) and Sydney (2000), as well as the Commonwealth Games on five occasions. A third Olympics will be held in Brisbane in 2032.
The city of Melbourne is famous for its major sports events and has been described as the 'sporting capital of the world',  and one of its stadiums, the Melbourne Cricket Ground, is considered the home of Australian rules football and one of the world's premier Cricket grounds. Australia is considered one of the best sports nations in the world."
Sport in Australia,"History
Sport came to Australia in 1810 when the first athletics tournament was held; soon after cricket, horse racing and sailing clubs and competitions started. Australia's lower classes would play sports on public holidays, with the upper classes playing more regularly on Saturdays. Sydney was the early hub of sport in the colony. Early forms of football were played there by 1829. Early sport in Australia was played along class lines. In 1835, the British Parliament banned blood sports except fox hunting in a law that was implemented in Australia; this was not taken well in the country as it was seen as an attack on the working classes. By the late 1830s, horse racing was established in New South Wales and other parts of the country, and enjoyed support across class lines. Gambling was part of sport from the time horse racing became an established sport in the colony. Horse racing was also happening in Melbourne at Batman's Hill in 1838, with the first race meeting in Victoria taking place in 1840. Cricket was also underway with the Melbourne Cricket Club founded in 1838. Sport was being used during the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s as a form of social integration across classes. Victorian rules football (later known as Australian rules) was codified in 1859. Australian football clubs still around in the current Australian Football League were founded by 1858. Originally formed as the South Australian Football Association on 30 April 1877, the SANFL (South Australian National Football League) is the oldest surviving football league of any code in Australia.  The Melbourne Cricket Ground, Australia's largest sporting arena, opened in 1853.  The Melbourne Cup was first run in 1861. A rugby union team was established at the University of Sydney in 1864. Regular sport did not begin to be played in South Australia, Tasmania and Western Australia until the late 1860s and early 1870s."
Sport in Australia,"The first Australian cricket team to go on tour internationally did so in 1868. The Australian side was an all Aboriginal one and toured England where they played 47 games, where they won 14 games, drew 19 and lost 14.Australia's adoption of sport as a national pastime was so comprehensive that Anthony Trollope remarked in his book, Australia, published in 1870, ""The English passion for the amusements which are technically called 'sports', is not a national necessity with the Americans, whereas with the Australians it is almost as much so as home.""
The first team formally organised soccer team was formed in Sydney in 1880 and was named the Wanderers. Sport was receiving coverage in Australian newspapers by 1876 when a sculling race in England was reported in the Sydney Morning Herald. In 1877, Australia played in the first Test Cricket match against England. In 1882, The Ashes were started following the victory of the Australia national cricket team over England. Field hockey teams for men and women were established by 1890. The Sheffield Shield cricket competition was first held in 1891 with New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia participating in the inaugural competition. The remaining states would not participate until much later, with Queensland first participating in 1926–27, Western Australia in 1947–48 and Tasmania in 1982–83.   In 1897 the Victorian Football League, which later became the AFL the Australian Football League, was founded after breaking away from the Victorian Football Association.
The first badminton competition in Australia was played in 1900. The first ice hockey game was played in Melbourne on 12 July 1906 between a local Melbourne team and a team from the crew of the visiting US warship USS Baltimore.
Motor racing began in the first years of federation with motorcycle racing beginning at the Sydney Cricket Ground in 1901 with automobile motorsport following in 1904 at Aspendale Racecourse in Melbourne. A dedicated race track was added to Aspendale's horse racing track in 1906, although it fell into disuse almost immediately.
Rugby league has been the overwhelmingly dominant rugby code in Australia since 1908 (this position remains unchallenged to this day). When Messenger and the All Golds returned from Great Britain in 1908, they helped the new clubs adapt to the rules of rugby league prior to the inaugural 1908 NSWRFL season. The Queensland Rugby Football League also formed early in 1908 by seven rugby players who were dissatisfied with the administration of the Queensland Rugby Union. The Australia national rugby union team had their first international test against New Zealand in 1903, and first international tour in 1908, earning their nickname of the Wallabies after two British journalists used it to refer to the team. The team won gold at the 1908 Summer Olympics; however the majority of the squad joined rugby league clubs upon returning to Australia.
Women represented Australia for the first time at the Olympics in 1912. Surfing came to Australia by 1915 with the first surf life saving competition being held that year. Les Darcy began his boxing career in 1915, with some of his later fights taking place at Sydney Stadium. The following year, an American promoter encouraged Darcy to go to the United States at a time when Australia was actively recruiting young men for the armed services. Controversy resulted and Darcy died at the age of 21 in the United States. When his body was returned to Australia, 100,000 people attended his Sydney funeral. Darcy would remain significant to Australians into the 2000s, when Kevin Rudd mentioned his story."
Sport in Australia,"In 1922, a committee in Australia investigated the benefits of physical education for girls. They came up with several recommendations regarding what sports were and were not appropriate for girls to play based on the level of fitness required. It was determined that for some individual girls that for medical reasons, the girls should probably not be allowed to participate in tennis, netball, lacrosse, golf, hockey, and cricket. Football was completely medically inappropriate for girls to play. It was medically appropriate for all girls to be able to participate in, so long as they were not done in an overly competitive manner, swimming, rowing, cycling and horseback riding. Dick Eve won Australia's first Olympic diving gold medal in 1924.  In 1924 the Australian Rugby League Board of Control, later to be known as the Australian Rugby League, was formed to administer the national team (the Kangaroos), and later as the national governing body for the sport of Rugby league. In 1928 the team also adopted the national colours of green and gold for the first time, having previously used blue and maroon, making the Kangaroos the third national sporting body to do so after cricket (from 1899) and the Australian Olympic team (from 1908). Netball Australia was founded in 1927 as the All Australia Women's Basket Ball Association."
Sport in Australia,"During the 1930s, the playing of sport on Sunday was banned in most of the country outside South Australia. The Bodyline cricket series between Australia and England took place in 1932–33. The English side were determined to win and employed physical intimidation against Australia to ensure victory. The bowling style used by the team known as body-line bowling was devised by Douglas Jardine with advice from Frank Foster in England ahead of the series in order to defeat Australian batsman Donald Bradman. Going into the start of the series, Bill Voce told the media ""If we don't beat you, we'll knock your bloody heads off."" The style of play was such that the Australians contemplated cancelling the series after the Adelaide test.
Following a successful Australian racing career, the race horse Phar Lap went to the United States where he died. There were many conspiracy theories at the time and later that suggested people in the United States poisoned the horse to prevent him from winning.
Australian women's sports had an advantage over many other women's sport organisations around the world in the period after World War II. Women's sports organisations had largely remained intact and were holding competitions during the war period. This structure survived in the post war period. Women's sport were not hurt because of food rationing, petrol rationing, population disbursement, and other issues facing post-war Europe. In September 1949, Australian Canoeing was founded as the Australian Canoe Federation.
By the 1960s, Australia had an international identity as a sport-obsessed country, an identity which was embraced inside the country. This was so well known that in a 1962 edition of Sports Illustrated, Australia was named the most sports-obsessed country in the world. In 1967, Australia hosted the second World Netball Championships in Perth. That same year, South Australia became the last state to lift its ban on the playing of sports on Sunday.
Starting in the early 1970s, Australian sport underwent a paradigm shift with sponsorship becoming one of the fundamental drivers of earnings for Australian sport on amateur and professional levels. By the mid-1980s, the need for the ability to acquire sponsorship dollars in sport was so great that job applicants for sport administrator positions were expected to be able to demonstrate an ability to get it.
During the 1970s, Australia was being routinely defeated in major international competitions as Eastern Bloc countries enjoyed strong government support for sport. The Liberal governments at the time were opposed to similar intervention in Australia's sporting system as they felt it would be government intrusion into an important component of Australian life. In the 1974 elections, several Australian sporting competitors endorsed the Liberal party in advertisements that ran on television. Competitors involved included Ron Barassi, NSWRL player Johnny Raper and horse trainer Tommy Smith. That year, the Australian team qualified for the 1974 FIFA World Cup, the first successful qualification to the FIFA World Cup in the country's history after failing to qualify to the 1966 and 1970 tournaments. It would prove to be the only appearance for the Australian team for more than three decades."
Sport in Australia,"The regional football code divide in Australia was still present in the 1980s, with rugby league football being the dominant code in Queensland, ACT and New South Wales while Australian rules football dominated in the rest of the country. When codes went outside of their traditional geographic home, they had little success in gaining new fans and participants. The Australian Institute of Sport was founded in 1981. In the lead up to and during the 1982 Commonwealth Games, the police were called upon to stop protests by Aboriginal land rights activists who staged protests timed with the event in order to politicise the event. Australia had competitors in the America's Cup yacht race for a number of years. Going into the 1983 race, the Australian media was not that interested in the race as they expected a similar result and in the media lead-up to the event, made it out to be a race for rich people. This lack of interest continued throughout the early races. Near the end, when Australia finally appeared poised to win it, millions of Australians turned on their television to watch the Australia II win the competition. That year, the Liberals used Australian tennis star John Newcombe and race car drivers Peter Brock and Alan Jones in their political advertising. Athletes would again be used, this time by the Labor Party, in the 1989 elections. During the 1980s, Australian soccer players began to start playing regularly in overseas professional leagues, with the most successful player of the decade being Craig Johnston who scored a goal in the 1986 FA Cup Final for Liverpool. During the 1980s, the federal government created a number of sport programs including Aussie Sports and Active Australia. The Australia women's national field hockey team began their run as one of the top teams in the world in 1985, a place they would hold until 2000.
In 1990, the Victorian Football League changed its name to the Australian Football League. During the 1990s, soccer in Australia faced a challenge in attracting youth players because of the ethnic nature of the sport at the highest levels of national competition. The sport's governing body made an effort to make the game less ethnically oriented. At the same time, rival football codes were intentionally trying to bring in ethnic participants in order to expand their youth playing base. Doping became a concern during the 1980s and more active steps were taken to combat it in Australia in the early 1990s. In 1990, the Australian Sports Drug Agency Act 1990 was passed and took control of doping test away from the Australian Sport Commission and put it into the hands of an independent doping control agency as of 17 February 1991."
Sport in Australia,"In 2006, Melbourne hosted the 2006 Commonwealth Games. Later that year, the Australian team competed in the 2006 FIFA World Cup, their second FIFA World Cup appearance after 32 years of failing to qualify for the tournament."
Sport in Australia,"In 2012, the Australian Rugby League Commission was formed, bringing to an end the involvement of News Limited in the administration of Rugby League and the media companies' conflict of interests in the sport, finally concluding the fall-out from the Super League war in the 1990s. From 2008 until 2013, the Australian thoroughbred mare Black Caviar was undefeated for her entire 25-race career, a record not equaled in over 100 years. Notable wins include the 2012 Diamond Jubilee Stakes, as well as being named the top sprinter from 2010 to 2012 in the World Thoroughbred Racehorse Rankings and entering the Australian Racing Hall of Fame while still in training. Another thoroughbred mare, Winx, though not finishing unbeaten for her career, surpassed Black Caviar's record for consecutive wins by winning the last 33 races of her career, a streak running from May 2015 to April 2019. She also entered the Hall of Fame while in training, and set a world record for most Group 1 wins with 25. Among her wins were four consecutive Cox Plates."
Sport in Australia,"Organisation
The organisation of sport in Australia has been largely determined by its Federal system of government – Australian Government and six states and two territories governments and local governments.
State and Territory governments have a department with responsibility for sport and recreation. These departments provide assistance to state sports organisations, develop and manage sporting facilities, provide financial assistance for major sporting events and develop policies to assist sports across their state or territory.  Each Australian State and Territory has established its own institute/academy of sport – ACT Academy of Sport (established 1989), New South Wales Institute of Sport (1996), Northern Territory Institute of Sport (1996), Queensland Academy of Sport (1991), South Australian Sports Institute (1982), Tasmanian Institute of Sport (1985), Victorian Institute of Sport (1990) and Western Australian Institute of Sport (1984).
There are 560 local councils across Australia. Local governments generally focus on the provision of facilities such as swimming pools, sporting fields, stadiums and tennis courts.
Government involvement in sport up until the 1970s was fairly limited with local governments playing a major role through the provision of sporting facilities. However, this changed over the next two decades with an Australian Bureau of Statistics survey in 2001–2002 finding that approximately $2 billion was spent on sport by three levels of government – 10 per cent from the Australian Government, 40 per cent from state and territory governments, and the remaining 50 per cent from local government. State, territory and local government spending was predominantly directed to facilities and their upkeep.  In 1973, the Recreation Minister's Council was established to provide a forum for Australian Government and State and Territory Minister's responsible for sport and recreation to discuss matters of interest. With government's taking an increased involvement in sport, it became the Sport and Recreation Minister's Council. More recently is referred to as Meeting of Sport and Recreation Ministers.  The Meeting is assisted by the Committee of Australian Sport and Recreation Officials (CASRO) previously called the Standing Committee on Sport and Recreation (SCORS). The Meeting works cooperatively on issues such as match fixing, sport participation and water safety. In 2011, Minister's signed the National Sport and Active Recreation Policy Framework. The framework ""provides a mechanism for the achievement of national goals for sport and active recreation, sets out agreed roles and responsibilities of governments and their expectations of sport and active recreation partners.""  In 1993, National Elite Sports Council was established to provide a forum for communication, issues management and national program coordination across the high performance in Australia. It includes representatives from AIS, State Institute /Academies, Australian Olympic Committee, Australian Paralympic Committee, and the Australian Commonwealth Games Association.
In 2011, National Institute System Intergovernmental Agreement provides ""guidance on how the sector will operate, with a principal focus on the delivery of the high performance plans of national sporting organisations.""
The Australian government provided small amounts of funding in the 1950s and 1960s through the support of the National Fitness Council and international sporting teams such as the Australian Olympic team. The Australian Government's serious involvement and investment into sport came with it establishing the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) in 1981. AIS was set up to improve Australia's performances in international sport which had started to decline in the 1960s and 1970s culminating in Australia winning no gold medals at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. In 1985, the Australian Sports Commission (ASC) was established to improve the Australian Government's administration of sport in terms of funding, participation and elite sport. The 1989 Senate Inquiry into drugs in sport resulted in the establishment of the Australian Sport Drug Agency  (now called Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority (ASADA)) in 1990 to manage Australia's anti-doping program."
Sport in Australia,"Participation
The most popular sports in Australia by adult participation are: swimming, athletics, cycling, soccer, golf, tennis, basketball, surfing, netball and cricket.
The highest rates of participation for Australian sport and recreation are informal, non-organised sports with bike riding, skateboarding, rollerblading or riding a scooter topping the list of activities for children, with 66% of all boys bike riding and 55.9% of all boys skateboarding, rollerblading or riding a scooter in 2009 and 2010. Girls also participated in these activities at high rates with 54.4% of them doing bike riding and 42.4% skateboarding, rollerblading or riding a scooter. Other sports popular for Australian girls include dancing, which had 26.3% participation, swimming with 19.8% participation and netball at 17%. For boys, the other popular sports for participation included soccer with a rate of participation of 19.9%, swimming with a participation rate of 17.2%, Australian rules at 16%."
Sport in Australia,"Participation rates for adults in Australia were much lower than that of Australian children. For adult women in Australia, the number one sport activity they participate in is walking with 30% having done this in 2009 and 2010. The second most popular form of exercise and sport was Aerobics/fitness/gym with a rate of 16.7%. The third most popular for adult women was swimming and diving with 8.4%. For men, the most popular sport activity was also walking with a participation rate of 15.6%. This was followed by Aerobics/fitness/gym with 11.2%. The third most popular sport for adult males was cycling/BMXing with a participation rate of 8.2%.
There are 34,000 athletes, officials and coaches currently registered with the Athletics Australia. A 2007 estimate claimed that Australian football had 615,549 participants, Basketball has become one of the most popular participation sports in Australia. In Victoria, and Melbourne, particularly, it has more participants than any other sport. Australia's warm climate and long coastline of sandy beaches and rolling waves provide ideal conditions for water sports such as swimming. The majority of Australians live in cities or towns on or near the coast, and so beaches are a place that millions of Australians visit regularly.
According to the National Cricket Census, a record 1,650,030 people played Cricket across Australia in 2018–19. Women participation also reached record figures in  growing to 496,484 players."
Sport in Australia,"Amateur sport
Amateur sport in Australia follows a corporate management system, with the national tier composed of national sport organisations that support and fund elite sport development. These organisations include the Australian Institute of Sport and the Australian Sports Commission. Below them is the state level, which includes state sporting organisations, state institute of sport and state departments of sport. The last level is district/regional associations and local clubs and community sports along with local government. At the national level, the national sport organisations govern most sports in Australia, with over 120 different national sports organisation overseeing sport in Australia. The role of government in this structure is important as government funding for most sport in Australia comes from the national government, state and territory governments, and local governments. In the late 1990s, government support for sport was double that of public non-financial corporations.
Amateur sport was transformed in Australia in the 1980s with the creation of the AIS Australian Institute of Sport. The institute, formally opened by Malcolm Fraser in 1981, was designed to make Australian amateur sport at major world competitions, like the Olympics, competitive with the rest of the world and increase the number of medals won by the country. A few years later, in 1984, the Australian Sports Commission was created to better address the distribution of funds to support sport. It had a budget of A$109 million in 2000. By 2009, the Australian Sports Commission had a budget of A$150 million, up from A$5 million when it first was created.
Amateur sport has been able to draw large audiences. In the 1950s, 120,000 fans would go to the MCG to watch major athletics events.
Australian amateur sport has dealt with financial problems. In the 2000s, Athletics Australia was facing duel problems of financial problems and failure for the sport to consistently medal at major international sporting events compared to other sports and their representative organisations like Swimming Australia and Rowing Australia."
Sport in Australia,"National Leagues
Major professional sports leagues in Australia are similar to major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada in that they are closed leagues that do not practice promotion and relegation, unlike sports leagues in Europe and Latin America."
Sport in Australia,"Male Major Leagues
Female Major Leagues
Other Significant National Leagues
Spectators
Australian sport fans have historically attended events in large numbers, dating back to the country's early history. An early football game played in Melbourne in 1858 had 2,000 spectators. By 1897, tens of thousands of spectators attended an early Australian rules football match at a time when top level soccer matches in England would draw six thousand fans. A finals match between the Carlton Football Club and Collingwood in 1938 drew 96,834 fans. In 1909, at a time when rugby union had not yet become professionalised, 52,000 people in Sydney attended a game between New South Wales and New Zealand. The spectators accounted for 10% of the total population of Sydney at the time. 60,922 fans attended the 1943 NSWRFL Grand Final between Norths and Newtown, and 78,056 attended the 1965 Grand Final between Souths and the then 9-time champion St George, 
although estimates including those who climbed onto roofs and over the perimeter fence put the actual crowd as high as 200,000.  A world record was set for cricket attendance on 30 December 1932 when 63,993 fans watched England take on Australia at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. In 2010, the National Rugby League's premiership set its record for regular season attendance, with 3,490,778 attending across the season, at an average of 17,367 people at each match.
Total average game attendance for the Australian Football League and the National Rugby League increased between 1970 and 2000, with the AFL going from an average attendance of 24,344 people per match in 1970 to 27,325 by 1980 to 25,238 in 1990 and 34,094 by 2000. The National Rugby League had an average per game attendance of 11,990 in 1970, saw a decrease in 1980 to 10,860 but increased to 12,073 by 1990 and improved on that to 14,043 by 2000. Founded later, the National Basketball League had an average per game attendance of 1,158 in 1985, increased this to 4,551 by 1990, and kept attendance steady with 4,636 average fans per game in 2000.
In March 1999, 104,000 fans attended a double header match in the National Rugby League at Stadium Australia four days after the venue formally opened. In 2000, during the soccer gold medal match between Cameroon and Spain, 114,000 fans watched the game live inside Stadium Australia. In the 2006–07 season, the A-League Melbourne Victory averaged 27,728 people to their home matches throughout the season. The 2009–10 regular season was considerably lower. 
In 2019, the Australian Football League achieved its highest total attendance for any season of 7,594,302, a record for the competition, at an average attendance of 36,687 for each match. 
The Big Bash League (BBL) was established in 2011. The first season attracted an average of 18,021 spectators per match. In the 2014–15 season, the average attendance for each match was 23,590 with the Adelaide Strikers attracting a record average home crowd of 36,023 spectators each game. The 2015 Cricket World Cup final was played in front of 93,013 spectators, a record crowd for a day of cricket in Australia. BBL in its sixth season in 2016–17, drew an average crowd in excess of 30,000 for the first time in history, with overall count crossing 1 million for 35 matches. 
In April 2024, the 2023–24 A-League Women season set the record for the most attended season of any women's sport in Australian history, with the season recording a total attendance of 284,551 at 15 April 2024, and finishing with a final total attendance of 312,199."
Sport in Australia,"Sports media
Media coverage of Australian sport and athletes predates 1876. The first all Australian sport publication, The Referee, was first published in 1886 in Sydney. The major newspapers for sport coverage in the country include the Sydney Morning Herald, The Courier Mail, the Herald Sun and The West Australian.
There is a long history of television coverage of sports in Australia. From 1957 to 2001, the Seven Network was the network for the Australian Football League. The only year that Seven was not the network for the league was in 1987 when the AFL was on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). An exclusive deal was agreed upon by Seven in 1976 for a five-year deal worth A$3 million.
The media plays an important part in Australia's sporting landscape, with many sporting events televised or broadcast on radio. The government has anti-siphoning laws to protect free-to-air stations. Beyond televising live events, there are many sport-related television and radio programs, as well as several magazine publications dedicated to sport. Australian sport has also been the subject of Australian-made films such as The Club, Australian Rules, The Final Winter and Footy Legends
World Series Cricket was a break away professional cricket competition staged between 1977 and 1979 and organised by Kerry Packer for his TV network, Nine. The matches ran in opposition to international cricket. It drastically changed the nature of cricket and its influence continues to be felt today.
Not all sports have had favourable deals with networks. The first television offer for the National Basketball League was worth A$1 in an offered made by Seven that the league accepted. The deal made by Ten Network to the New South Wales Rugby League was worth considerably more, worth A$48 million for a five-year deal that also included broadcasting rights for the State of Origin and the Australia national rugby league team. This deal was terminated early because the network could not afford to pay out.
The 1967 NSWRFL season's grand final became the first football grand final of any code to be televised live in Australia. The Nine Network had paid $5,000 for the broadcasting rights.
SBS and FoxSports are two of the most important television networks in Australia in terms of covering all Australian sports, not just the popular professional leagues. Administrators for less popular spectator sports, such as basketball and netball, believe that getting additional television and newspaper coverage is fundamental for the growth and success of their sports going forward.
Anti-siphoning laws in Australia regulate the media companies' access to significant sporting events. In 1992, when the country experienced growth in paid-subscription media, the Parliament of Australia enacted the Broadcasting Services Act that gave free-to-air broadcasters preferential access to acquire broadcasting rights to sporting events. The anti-siphoning list is a list of major sporting events that the Parliament of Australia has decided must be available for all Australians to see free of charge and cannot be ""siphoned off"" to pay TV where people are forced to pay to see them. The current anti-siphoning list came into effect in 2006 and expires 31 December 2010. The Minister for Communications can add or remove events from the list at his discretion. There are currently ten sports on the anti-siphoning list plus the Olympic and Commonwealth Games. Events on the anti-siphoning list are delisted 12 weeks before they start to ensure pay TV broadcasters have reasonable access to listed events, if free-to-air broadcasters decide not to purchase the broadcast rights for a particular event. Any rights to listed sporting events that are not acquired by free-to-air broadcasters are available to pay TV. For multi-round events where it is simply not possible for free-to-air networks to broadcast all matches within the event (e.g. the Australian Open) complementary coverage is available on pay television. The Federal Government is obliged by legislation to conduct a review of the list before the end of 2009. The current anti-siphoning list requires showing listed sports on the broadcaster's main channel.
Rugby league, which includes NRL, State of Origin and national team matches, had the highest aggregate television ratings of any sport in 2022 (also 2009 and 2010.) Also, in a world first, the Nine Network broadcast free-to-air the first match of the 2010 State of Origin series live in 3D in New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria. It has consistently been a highly-watched sports event in the country over the last decade in terms of television ratings and is currently the highest rating sport competition in Australia as at 2022.
Rugby union is currently aired on numerous Nine Entertainment platforms, including Channel 9, 9Gem, and Stan Sport, as part of a A$100 million deal starting in 2021. Super Rugby games are broadcast on 9Gem every Saturday, while all other games are available on Stan Sport. Within a year of the deal starting, the Super Rugby Final had increased its ratings by 13-fold to 1.3 million, with Wallabies International games also experiencing growth.
Cricket Australia announced an unprecedented $590 million deal with free-to-air television networks Nine and Ten in 2013 to broadcast the sport – a 118 per cent increase on the previous five-year contract.
BBL games are currently broadcast in Australia by the free-to-air Network Ten. In 2013 Ten paid $100 million for BBL rights over five years, marking the channel's first foray in elite cricket coverage. Fox Sports had previously covered the Big Bash League.
Network Ten's BBL coverage has become a regular feature of Australian summers and last season attracted an average audience of more than 943,000 people nationally in 2014–15 season, including a peak audience of 1.9 million viewers for the final between the Perth Scorchers and Sydney Sixers.
There are a number of Australian sport films. They include The Club. The film was based on a play produced in 1977, in Melbourne. It has been in the senior English syllabi for four Australian states for many years. The film was written by David Williamson, directed by Bruce Beresford and starring John Howard, Jack Thompson, Graham Kennedy and Frank Wilson. Another Australian sport film is The Final Winter, released in 2007. It was directed by Brian Andrews and Jane Forrest and produced by Anthony Coffee, and Michelle Russell, while independently produced it is being distributed by Paramount Pictures. It was written by Matt Nable who also starred as the lead role 'Grub' Henderson. The film, which earned praise from critics, focuses around Grub who is the captain of the Newtown Jets football team in the early 1980s and his determination to stand for what rugby league traditionally stood for while dealing with his own identity crisis. Other Australian sport films include Australian Rules and Footy Legends.
Sport is popular on the radio. This Sporting Life was a culturally iconic Triple J radio comedy program created by actor-writer comedians John Doyle and Greig Pickhaver, who performed as their characters Roy and HG. Broadcast from 1986 to 2008, it was one of the longest-running, most popular and most successful radio comedy programs of the post-television era in Australia. It was the longest-running show in Triple J's programming history and commanded a large and dedicated nationwide audience throughout its 22-year run. 2KY is a commercial radio station based in Sydney, broadcasting throughout New South Wales and Canberra on a network of over 140 narrowcast transmitters as well as the main 1017 AM frequency in Sydney. 2KY broadcasts live commentary of thoroughbred, harness and greyhound racing. Over 1500 races are covered each week, including the pre and post race form and TAB betting information.
There are a number of Australian sport magazines. One is the AFL Record. The magazine is published in a sports magazine style format. Eight different versions, one for each game, are published for each weekly round, 60,000 copies in total, and Roy Morgan Research estimates that the Record has a weekly readership of over 200,000. As of 2009, the week's records are published and are able to be viewed in an online magazine format. Another Australian sporting magazine is Australia's Surfing Life, a monthly magazine about surfing published in Australia. It features articles about surf trips in Australia and overseas, surfing technique, board design and wetsuits. The magazine was founded in 1985."
Sport in Australia,"International competitions
Australian representative teams participate in many international competitions, such as the Olympics, Commonwealth Games, Cricket World Cup, Rugby World Cup, Rugby League World Cup, FIFA World Cup, the Basketball World Cup for both men's and women's, Netball World Cup, World Baseball Classic and the Hockey World Cup.
The Australia national cricket team have participated in every edition of the Cricket World Cup. Australia have been the most successful in the event, winning the tournament six times out of thirteen editions held.
The Australia national rugby league team have also participated in every edition of the Rugby League World Cup. Australia have been very successful in the event, winning the tournament a record 12 times.
The Australia national rugby union team have participated in every Rugby World Cup. Australia have been very successful in the tournament, winning it two times despite it not being the most popular sport in Australia.
Australia's women have repeatedly won at the highest level. The Australia national netball team have won the Netball World Cup a record 11 times.  The Australian women's national cricket team have won the Women's Cricket World Cup a record five times. The Australian women's national field hockey team have won the gold medal at the Olympics and the Women's Hockey World Cup three and two times respectively.
The Australia women's national basketball team, known as the Opals, regularly compete well against the world elite at the FIBA Women's Basketball World Cup, having won the event in 2006, finished second in 2018 and finished third three times, and at the Summer Olympics Basketball Tournament, where they have won silver medals three times and bronze medals twice."
Sport in Australia,"The Australia national soccer team, nicknamed the Socceroos, have appeared at the FIFA World Cup in 1974, 2006, 2010, 2014, 2018 and 2022. At the 2006 World Cup, the Socceroos surprised many by reaching the Round of 16, losing 1–0 in injury time to the eventual champions, Italy. At the 2022 World Cup, an unfancied Socceroos team again advanced to the knockout stage after winning 2 of 3 group stage matches, including a 1–0 upset victory against Denmark. In the round of 16 they were defeated 1–2 by eventual champions Argentina. They also hold the unusual distinction of having won continental soccer championships of two confederations – Oceania's OFC Nations Cup four times between 1980 and 2004 and, after moving to the Asian Football Confederation in 2005, the AFC Asian Cup in 2015. The Australia women's national soccer team, the Matildas, have appeared in all FIFA Women's World Cups except the first in 1991. They have advanced past the group stage in each of the last four editions of the competition (2007, 2011, 2015 and 2019), losing in the quarter-finals in the first three of these editions and the round of 16 in 2019. In 2015, they became the first senior Australian national team of either sex to win a World Cup knockout stage match, specifically in the round of 16, newly instituted for the Women's World Cup in that year. The Matildas have also enjoyed success at the AFC Women's Asian Cup, advancing at least to the semi-finals in all five competitions since joining the AFC in 2006 and winning in 2010. Australia co-hosted the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup alongside New Zealand, finishing with a best-ever fourth place result. Their run in the tournament attracted widespread community support, dubbed by the media as ""Matildas fever"".
Australia are the most successful side at the Underwater Hockey World Championships, winning 25 titles including 11 men's elite championships and 8 women's elite championships. Australia has also hosted the 2003 Rugby World Cup, with the event generating around A$1 billion in economic activity while bringing in 2 million visitors to the country. 
Australia has also hosted a number of major international sporting events, including the 1956 Summer Olympics and the 2000 Summer Olympics. The country also regularly hosts a major tennis Grand Slam event, the Australian Open, an FIA Formula One World Championship round (Australian Grand Prix), motorcycle MotoGP round (Australian motorcycle Grand Prix), as well as rounds of the Superbike World Championship, World Rally Championship alongside major domestically created, internationally recognised events including the Melbourne Cup and the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race.
Australia has hosted the 1992 Cricket World Cup and the 2015 Cricket World Cup along with New Zealand. The 2015 Cricket World Cup generated more than A$1.1 billion in direct spending, created the equivalent of 8,320 full-time jobs, and had a total of 2 million bed nights across the two host countries. Australia is the most successful team in the ICC Men's Cricket World Cup, finishing as champions 6 times in 1987, 1999, 2003, 2007, 2015 and 2023. It has also won the ICC Men's T20 World Cup once in 2021.
The 1868 Aboriginal cricket tour of England was the first tour by any sports team from Australia."
Sport in Australia,"Olympics
The Olympic movement in Australia started out during the 1900s and 1910s. The first organisations for the Olympics in Australia came out of the athletics governance system and resulted in the creation of state based Olympic committees. The first national governing body for Australian Olympics was created in 1914 and was a joint effort with New Zealand though New Zealand was a less than able partner. The movement in Australia then stagnated as a result of the Great War. The New Zealand and Australian organisation was disbanded and an Australian only national organisation was founded in 1920 called the Australian Olympic Federation. The early goals of the organisation were to ratify team selection and to fundraise to assist Olympians in paying for their travel to compete at the Games. By the 1980s, the organisation had issues on the international level as the IOC wanted them to re-structure; until this time, the organisation followed governance models similar to that of other Australian sporting organisations with a federated model of governance. Changes were made the organisation ended up with an executive board with a president, two vice presidents, a secretary general and a 14-member executive board which had 10 elected members, 4 IOC members and 2 members of the Athlete's Commission.
Australia has hosted the Olympics twice, in 1956 in Melbourne and in 2000 in Sydney. These were the first Games hosted in the southern hemisphere. Brisbane will host the 2032 Summer Games.
Australia has been influential in the Olympic movement, with four Australian representatives who are members of the International Olympic Committee.
The government has provided monetary support for the Olympics. In the lead up to the 1924 Games, they provided 3,000 pounds and in 1936 provided 2,000 pounds. This support was seen as a way of supporting national identity, but no formal system existed for the funding wider sport at the time.
The 1956 Games were the first time Australia had an Equestrian competitor when Victorian Ernie Barker competed. Australia has generally been a world power in Olympic swimming since the 1956 Melbourne Olympics: swimmers like Shane Gould, Dawn Fraser, Ian Thorpe, Kieren Perkins and Ariarne Titmus have taken multiple gold medals.
Australia performed relatively poorly at the 1976 Summer Olympics. This upset the nation as it challenged a fundamental part of Australian identity. The following Olympics, the 1980 Summer Olympics, some Australian sports sat out as part of a boycott and the country earned only nine medals, two of them gold, in Moscow. To prevent a recurrence of this, the Australian Institute of Sport was created to help improve Australia's medal tally at the Games.
Channel Seven had exclusive Australian free-to-air, pay television, online and mobile telephone broadcast rights to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. The live telecast of the 2008 Summer Olympics was shared by the Seven Network and SBS Television. Seven broadcast the opening and closing ceremonies and mainstream sports, including swimming, athletics, rowing, cycling, and gymnastics. In contrast, SBS TV provided complementary coverage focused on long-form events such as soccer, road cycling, volleyball, and table tennis."
Sport in Australia,"Paralympics
Australia has attended every Summer Paralympics and hosted the 2000 Sydney Games. Australia sent a delegation of 170 athletes to compete at the 2008 Summer Paralympics in Beijing, and a team of 11 competitors to compete in two disciplines at the 2010 Winter Paralympics in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. A team of 161 members was sent to the 2012 Summer Paralympics in London."
Sport in Australia,"Commonwealth Games
Australians take the Commonwealth Games seriously because, on one level of national thinking, the event offers the country an opportunity to prove they are superior to the ""original country"", the United Kingdom. By the 1938 British Empire Games, Australia's combined medal total was already greater than that of the Home Nations tallies combined. Australia would go on to beat England in total medals at the Commonwealth Games in 1950, 1962, 1970, 1974 and 1982. This rivalry with England continued to be an important component of the games up until the mid 2010s. Since then the importance of the Commonwealth Games has declined in the minds of the Australian public, due to the decreasing relevance of the Commonwealth in Australia as well as the perceived lack of competition. The Olympics Games has now become the primary way for Australians to measure themselves against the world."
Sport in Australia,"Events
January"
Sport in Australia,"United Cup
Brisbane International
Adelaide International
Hobart International
Australian Open
February – August"
Sport in Australia,"Super Rugby Season
March – August"
Sport in Australia,"Super Netball Season
March – September"
Sport in Australia,"NRL Season
AFL Season
March – November "
Sport in Australia,"Supercars Championship
June"
Sport in Australia,"A-League Grand Final
June – July"
Sport in Australia,"State of Origin series (rugby league)
July – October"
Sport in Australia,"NRL Women's Season
August – November "
Sport in Australia,"AFL Women's Season
September"
Sport in Australia,"AFL Grand Final
September – February"
Sport in Australia,"One-Day Cup
September – March"
Sport in Australia,"Sheffield Shield
Women's National Cricket League
October"
Sport in Australia,"NRL Grand Final
October – November"
Sport in Australia,"WBBL Season
October – January"
Sport in Australia,"WNBL Season
October – March"
Sport in Australia,"NBL Season
October – April"
Sport in Australia,"A-League Men Season
November"
Sport in Australia,"Australian Open, Golf
November – February"
Sport in Australia,"ABL Season
December – January"
Sport in Australia,BBL Season
Sport in Australia,"See also
Concussions in Australian sport"
Sport in Australia,"By demographic
Women's sport in Australia
Sport in rural and regional Australia
Disabled sport in Australia"
Sport in Australia,"By social and cultural context
By sport
References
External links"
Sport in Australia,"Australian Sports Commission
Australian Institute of Sport"
Post-war immigration to Australia,"Post-war immigration to Australia deals with migration to Australia in the decades immediately following World War II, and in particular refers to the predominantly European wave of immigration which occurred between 1945 and the end of the White Australia policy in 1973. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, Ben Chifley, Prime Minister of Australia (1945–1949), established the federal Department of Immigration to administer a large-scale immigration program. Chifley commissioned a report on the subject which found that Australia was in urgent need of a larger population for the purposes of defence and development and it recommended a 1% annual increase in population through increased immigration.
The first Minister for Immigration, Arthur Calwell, promoted mass immigration with the slogan ""populate or perish"". It was Billy Hughes, as Minister for Health and Repatriation, who had coined the ""populate or perish"" slogan in the 1930s. Calwell coined the term ""New Australians"" in an effort to supplant such terms as Balt, pommy (Englishman) and wog.
The 1% target remained a part of government policy until the Whitlam government (1972–1975), when immigration numbers were substantially cut back, only to be restored by the Fraser government (1975–1982).
Some 4.2 million immigrants arrived between 1945 and 1985, about 40 percent of whom came from Britain and Ireland. 182,159 people were sponsored by the International Refugee Organisation (IRO) from the end of World War II up to the end of 1954 to resettle in Australia from Europe—more than the number of convicts transported to Australia in the first 80 years after European settlement."
Post-war immigration to Australia,"""Populate or perish"" policy
The Chifley years
Following the attacks on Darwin and the associated fear of Imperial Japanese invasion in World War II, the Chifley government commissioned a report on the subject which found that Australia was in urgent need of a larger population for the purposes of defence and development and it recommended a 1% annual increase in population through increased immigration. In 1945, the government established the federal Department of Immigration to administer the new immigration program. The first Minister for Immigration was Arthur Calwell. An Assisted Passage Migration Scheme was also established in 1945 to encourage Britons to migrate to Australia. The government's objective was summarised in the slogan ""populate or perish"". Calwell stated in 1947, to critics of mass immigration from non-British Europe: ""We have 25 years at most to populate this country before the yellow races are down on us.""
The post-war immigration program of the Chifley government gave them preference to migrants from Great Britain, and initially an ambitious target was set of nine British out of ten immigrants. However, it was soon apparent that even with assisted passage the government target would be impossible to achieve given that Britain's shipping capacity was quite diminished from pre-war levels. As a consequence, the government looked further afield to maintain overall immigration numbers, and this meant relying on the IRO refugees from Eastern Europe, with the US providing the necessary shipping. Many Eastern Europeans were refugees from the Red Army and thus mostly anti-Communist and so politically acceptable."
Post-war immigration to Australia,"Menzies years
The 1% target survived a change of government in 1949, when the Menzies government succeeded Chifley's. The new Minister of Immigration was Harold Holt (1949–56).
The British component remained the largest component of the migrant intake until 1953. Between 1953 and late 1956, migrants from Southern Europe outnumbered the British, and this caused some alarm in the Australian government, causing it to place restrictions on Southern Europeans sponsoring newcomers and to commence the ""Bring out a Briton"" campaign. With the increase in financial assistance to British settlers provided during the 1960s, the British component was able to return to the top position in the overall number of new settlers.
Hundreds of thousands of displaced Europeans migrated to Australia and over 1,000,000 Britons immigrated with financial assistance. The migration assistance scheme initially targeted citizens of Commonwealth countries; but it was gradually extended to other countries such as the Netherlands and Italy. The qualifications were straightforward: migrants needed to be in sound health and under the age of 45 years. There were initially no skill requirements, although under the White Australia policy, people from mixed-race backgrounds found it very difficult to take advantage of the scheme.
Migration brought large numbers of southern and central Europeans to Australia for the first time. A 1958 government leaflet assured voters that unskilled non-British migrants were needed for ""labour on rugged projects ...work which is not generally acceptable to Australians or British workers."" The Australian economy stood in sharp contrast to war-ravaged Europe, and newly arrived migrants found employment in a booming manufacturing industry and government assisted programmes such as the Snowy Mountains Scheme. This hydroelectricity and irrigation complex in south-east Australia consisted of sixteen major dams and seven power stations constructed between 1949 and 1974. It remains the largest engineering project undertaken in Australia. Necessitating the employment of 100,000 people from over 30 countries, to many it denotes the birth of multicultural Australia.
In 1955 the one-millionth post-war immigrant arrived in Australia.  Australia's population reached 10 million in 1959, up from 7 million in 1945."
Post-war immigration to Australia,"End to the White Australia policy
In 1973, Whitlam government (1972–1975) adopted a completely non-discriminatory immigration policy, effectively putting an end to the White Australia policy.  However, the change occurred in the context of a substantial reduction in the overall migrant intake. This ended the post-war wave of predominantly European immigration which had started three decades before with the end of the Second World War and would make the beginnings of the contemporary wave of predominantly Asian Immigration to Australia which continues to the present day."
Post-war immigration to Australia,"International agreements
Financial assistance was an important element of the post war immigration program and as such there were a number of agreements in place between the Australian government and various governments and international organisations."
Post-war immigration to Australia,"United Kingdom – free or assisted passages.  Immigrants under this scheme became known as Ten Pound Poms.
Assisted passages for ex-servicemen of the British Empire and the United States.  This scheme was later extended to cover ex-servicemen and members of resistance movements from certain other Allied countries.
An agreement with the International Refugee Organization (IRO) to settle at least 12,000 displaced people a year from camps in Europe. Australia accepted a disproportionate share of refugees sponsored by IRO in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Formal migration agreements, often involving the grant of assisted passage, with the United Kingdom, Malta, the Netherlands, Italy, West Germany, Turkey and Yugoslavia.
There were also informal migration agreements with a number of other countries including Austria, Greece, Spain, and Belgium."
Post-war immigration to Australia,"Timeline
Settler arrivals by top 10 countries of birth
Migrant reception and training centres
On arrival in Australia, many migrants went to migrant reception and training centres where they learned some English while they looked for a job. The Department of Immigration was responsible for the camps and kept records on camp administration and residents. The migrant reception and training centres were also known as Commonwealth Immigration Camps, migrant hostels, immigration dependants' holding centres, migrant accommodation, or migrant workers' hostels.
Australia's first migrant reception centre opened at Bonegilla, Victoria near Wodonga in December 1947. When the camp closed in 1971, some 300,000 migrants had spent time there.
By 1951, the government had established three migrant reception centres for non-English speaking displaced persons from Europe, and twenty holding centres, principally to house non-working dependants, when the pressure of arrival numbers on the reception centres was too great to keep families together.  The purpose of reception and training centres was to:"
Post-war immigration to Australia,"provide for general medical examination and x-ray of migrants, issue of necessary clothing, payment of social service benefits, interview to determine employment potential, instruction in English and the Australian way of life generally.
The centres were located throughout Australia (dates are those of post office opening and closing.)"
Post-war immigration to Australia,"Queensland
Stuart
Wacol
Yungaba Immigration Centre (known today as Yungaba House)"
Post-war immigration to Australia,"New South Wales (NSW)
Bathurst (1948 to 1952)
Bradfield Park, now Lindfield
Chullora, a suburb of Sydney (1 August 1949 to 31 October 1967)
Greta, near Newcastle (1 June 1949 to 15 January 1960)
Uranquinty (1 December 1948 to 31 March 1959)
Other hostels in New South Wales included Adamstown, Balgownie, Bankstown, Berkeley, Bunnerong, Burwood, Cabramatta, Cronulla, Dundas, East Hills, Ermington, Goulburn, Katoomba, Kingsgrove, Kyeemagh, Leeton, Lithgow, Mascot, Matraville, Mayfield, Meadowbank, Nelson Bay, North Head, Orange, Parkes, Port Stephens, Randwick, St Marys, Scheyville, Schofields, Unanderra, Villawood, Wallerawang and Wallgrove."
Post-war immigration to Australia,"Victoria
Bonegilla (December 1947 to 17 March 1971)
Benalla (9 June 1949 to 30 May 1952)
Mildura (1950 to 17 July 1953)
Rushworth (1 June 1949 to 15 June 1953)
Sale West (1950 to 30 November 1953)
Somers (18 August 1949 to 14 February 1957)
Fishermans Bend (1952)"
Post-war immigration to Australia,"South Australia
Elder Park
Gepps Cross
Glenelg
Pennington/Finsbury
Rosewater
Smithfield
Willaston
Elphinstone
Woodside"
Post-war immigration to Australia,"Western Australia
Northam Holden (15 August 1949 to 30 June 1957)
Graylands
Cunderdin
Point Walter"
Post-war immigration to Australia,"Breakdown of arrivals by decade
Immigrants who arrived in Australia (by decade of arrival) as a percentage of the total population, subdivided geographically by statistical local area, as of the 2011 census
		
			
			
		
		
			
			
		
		
			
			
		
		
			
			
		"
Post-war immigration to Australia,In the post-war wave of immigration Australia has experienced average arrivals of around one million per decade. The breakdown by decade is as follows:
Post-war immigration to Australia,"1.6 million between October 1945 and 30 June 1960;
about 1.3 million in the 1960s; and
about 960.000 in the 1970s;
The highest number of arrivals during the period was 185,099 in 1969–70 and the lowest was 52,752 in 1975–76."
Post-war immigration to Australia,"2006 demographics of post-war period non-English speaking immigrant groups
In the 2006 census, birthplace was enumerated as was date of arrival in Australia for those not born in Australia.  For the major post-war period non-English speaking immigrant groups enlarged by the arrival of immigrants to Australia after World War II, they are still major demographic groups in Australia:"
Post-war immigration to Australia,"Not all of those enumerated would have arrived as post-war migrants, specific statistics as at 2006 are not available."
Post-war immigration to Australia,"Numbers
See also
Demographics of Australia
European Australians
Europeans in Oceania
Immigration history of Australia"
Post-war immigration to Australia,"Notes
References
Further reading
Markus, Andrew (1984). ""Labour and Immigration 1946-9: The Displaced Persons Program"". Labour History (47). Australian Society for the Study of Labour History: 73–90. doi:10.2307/27508686. ISSN 0023-6942. JSTOR 27508686."
Post-war immigration to Australia,"External links
""Migration"". National Museum of Australia.
""History of migration to Australia"". NSW Migration Heritage Centre. (archived website)
""Home page"". Migration Museum. (South Australia)
""Immigration Museum"". Museums Victoria.
""Immigration Stories"". Western Australian Museum.
""Home page"". Museum of Chinese Australian History.
""World War II Refugees to Australia"". Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild. Ships and passenger lists"
Racism in Australia,"Racism in Australia comprises negative attitudes and views on race or ethnicity which are held by various people and groups in Australia, and have been reflected in discriminatory laws, practices and actions (including violence) at various times in the history of Australia against racial or ethnic groups.
Racism against various ethnic or minority groups has existed in Australia since British colonisation. Throughout Australian history, the Indigenous peoples of Australia have faced severe restrictions on their political, social, and economic freedoms, and suffered genocide, forced removals, and massacres, and continue to face discrimination. African, Asian, Pacific Islander, and Middle Eastern"
Racism in Australia,"In addition, Jews, Italians, and the Irish were often subjected to xenophobic exclusion and other forms of religious and ethnic discrimination."
Racism in Australia,"Racism has manifested itself in a variety of ways, including segregation, racist immigration and naturalisation laws, and internment camps."
Racism in Australia,"Background
White Australia policy
Following the establishment of autonomous parliaments, a rise in nationalism and improvements in transportation, the Australian colonies voted to unite in a Federation, which came into being in 1901. The Australian Constitution and early parliaments established one of the most progressive governmental systems on the earth at that time, with male and female suffrage and series of checks and balances built into the governmental framework. National security fears had been one of the chief motivators for the union and legislation was quickly enacted to restrict non-European immigration to Australia – the foundation of the White Australia policy – and voting rights for Aboriginal people were denied across most states.
Australia's official World War One historian Charles Bean defined the early intentions of the policy as ""a vehement effort to maintain a high Western standard of economy, society and culture (necessitating at that stage, however it might be camouflaged, the rigid exclusion of Oriental people).""
The new Parliament quickly moved to restrict immigration to maintain Australia's ""British character"", and the Pacific Island Labourers Bill and the Immigration Restriction Bill were passed shortly before parliament rose for its first Christmas recess. Nevertheless, the Colonial Secretary in Britain made it clear that a race-based immigration policy would run ""contrary to the general conceptions of equality which have ever been the guiding principle of British rule throughout the Empire"", so the Barton government conceived of the ""language dictation test"", which would allow the government, at the discretion of the minister, to block unwanted migrants by forcing them to sit a test in ""any European language"". Race had already been established as a premise for exclusion among the colonial parliaments, so the main question for debate was who exactly the new Commonwealth ought to exclude, with the Labor Party rejecting Britain's calls to placate the populations of its non-white colonies and allow ""aboriginal natives of Asia, Africa, or the islands thereof"". There was opposition from Queensland and its sugar industry to the proposals of the Pacific Islanders Bill to exclude ""Kanaka"" labourers, however Barton argued that the practice was ""veiled slavery"" that could lead to a ""negro problem"" similar to that in the United States and the Bill was passed."
Racism in Australia,"Demise of the White Australia policy
The restrictive measures established by the first parliament gave way to multi-ethnic immigration policies only after the Second World War, with the ""dictation test"" itself being finally abolished in 1958 by the Menzies Government.
The Menzies Government instigated migrants over all others since the time of Australian Federation in 1901 and abolished restrictions on voting rights for Aboriginal people, which had persisted in some jurisdictions. In 1950 External Affairs Minister Percy Spender instigated the Colombo Plan, under which students from Asian countries were admitted to study at Australian universities, then in 1957 non-Europeans with 15 years' residence in Australia were allowed to become citizens. In a watershed legal reform, a 1958 revision of the Migration Act introduced a simpler system for entry and abolished the ""dictation test"" which had permitted the exclusion of migrants on the basis of their ability to take down a dictation offered in any European language. Immigration Minister, Sir Alexander Downer, announced that 'distinguished and highly qualified Asians' might immigrate. Restrictions continued to be relaxed through the 1960s in the lead up to the Holt government's watershed Migration Act, 1966.
Holt's government introduced the Migration Act 1966, which effectively dismantled the White Australia policy and increased access to non-European migrants, including refugees fleeing the Vietnam War. Holt also called the 1967 Referendum which removed the discriminatory clause in the Australian Constitution which excluded Aboriginal Australians from being counted in the census;– the referendum was one of the few to be overwhelmingly endorsed by the Australian electorate (over 90% voted 'yes').
The legal end of the White Australia Policy is usually placed in 1973, when the Whitlam Labor government implemented a series of amendments preventing the enforcement of racial aspects of the immigration law. These amendments:"
Racism in Australia,"Legislated that all migrants, regardless of origin, be eligible to obtain citizenship after three years of permanent residence.
Ratified all international agreements relating to immigration and race.
Issued policy to totally disregard race as a factor in selecting migrants.
The 1975 Racial Discrimination Act made the use of racial criteria for any official purpose illegal (with the exception of census forms)."
Racism in Australia,"2000s
A 2003 Paper by health economist Gavin Mooney said that ""Government institutions in Australia are racist"". The paper evidenced this opinion by stating that the Aboriginal Medical Service was underfunded and under supported by government.
In 2007, What's the Score? A survey of cultural diversity and racism in Australian sport conducted by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) said that ""racial abuse and vilification is commonplace in Australian sport... despite concerted efforts to stamp it out"". The report said that Aboriginal and other ethnic groups are under-represented in Australian sport, and suggests they are turned off organised sport because they fear racial vilification. Despite the finding, indigenous participation in Australian sport is widespread. In 2009, about 90,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders were participating in Australian Rules Football alone and the Australian Football League (AFL) encouraged their participation through the Kickstart Indigenous programs ""as the vehicle to improve the quality of life in Indigenous communities, not only in sport, but in the areas of employment, education and health outcomes"". Similarly, Australia's second most popular football code encourages participation through events like the NSW Aboriginal Rugby League Knockout and the Indigenous All Stars Team."
Racism in Australia,"2005 UN report
The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in its report, released in 2005 was complimentary on improvements in race-related issues since its previous report five years prior, namely: "
Racism in Australia,"the criminalising of acts and incitement of racial hatred in most Australian states and territories
progress in the economic, social and cultural rights by Indigenous peoples
programmes and practices among the police and the judiciary, aimed at reducing the number of Indigenous juveniles entering the criminal justice system
the adoption of a Charter of Public Service in a Culturally Diverse Society to ensure that government services are provided in a way that is sensitive to the language and cultural needs of all Australians
and the numerous human rights education programmes developed by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC)
The committee expressed concern about the abolishment of ATSIC; proposed reforms to HREOC that may limit its independence; the practical barriers Indigenous peoples face in succeeding in claims for native title; a lack of legislation criminalising serious acts or incitement of racial hatred in the Commonwealth, the State of Tasmania and the Northern Territory; and the inequities between Indigenous peoples and others in the areas of employment, housing, longevity, education and income."
Racism in Australia,"Overview
Studies
Housing
Throughout the entire rental system, from property procurement and investment prior to the search for a rental property, through to eviction, discrimination in the private rental sector (PRS) occurs."
Racism in Australia,"Indigenous Australians
Indigenous peoples of Australia, comprising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders peoples, have lived in Australia for at least 65,000 years before the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788. The colonisation of Australia and development into a modern nation, saw explicit and implicit racial discrimination against Indigenous Australians.
Indigenous Australians continue to be subjected to racist government policy and community attitudes. Racist community attitudes towards Aboriginal people have been confirmed as continuing both by surveys of Indigenous Australians and self-disclosure of racist attitudes by non-Indigenous Australians.
Since 2007, government policy considered to be racist include the Northern Territory Intervention which failed to produce a single child abuse conviction, cashless welfare cards trialled almost exclusively in Aboriginal communities, the Community Development Program that has seen Indigenous participants fined at a substantially higher rate than non-Indigenous participants in equivalent work-for-the-dole schemes, and calls to shut down remote Indigenous communities despite the United Nation's Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples specifying governments must facilitate the rights of Indigenous people to live on traditional land.
In 2016, police raids and behaviour on Palm Island following a death in custody were found to have breached the Racial Discrimination Act 1975, with a record class action settlement of $30 million awarded to victims in May 2018. The raids were found by the court to be ""racist"" and ""unnecessary, disproportionate"" with police having ""acted in these ways because they were dealing with an Aboriginal community."""
Racism in Australia,"Legal status
Despite Indigenous peoples being recognised under British common law as British subjects, with equal rights under the law, colonial government policy and public opinion treated Aboriginal peoples as inferior. The Nationality and Citizenship Act 1948, which came into force on 26 January 1949, created an Australian citizenship, but which co-existed with the continuing status of British subject. Aboriginal people became Australian citizens under the 1948 Act in the same way as other Australians, but they were not counted in the Australian population until after the 1967 referendum. The same applied to Torres Strait Islanders and the indigenous population of the Territory of Papua (then a part of Australia).
In 1770 and again in 1788, the British Empire claimed Eastern Australia as its own on the basis of the now discredited doctrine of terra nullius. The implication of the doctrine became evident when John Batman purported to make Batman's Treaty in 1835 with the Wurundjeri Elders of the area around the future Melbourne. Governor Bourke of New South Wales proclaimed the Treaty null and void and that indigenous Australians could not sell or assign land, nor could an individual person or group acquire it, other than through distribution by the Crown. Though the so-called Treaty was objectionable on many grounds, it was the first, and until the 1990s, the only time that an attempt was made to deal directly with the Indigenous peoples."
Racism in Australia,"Historical relations
English navigator James Cook claimed the east coast of Australia for the British Empire in 1770, without conducting negotiations with the existing inhabitants. The first Governor of New South Wales, Arthur Phillip, was expressly instructed to establish friendship and good relations with Aboriginal people and interactions between the early settlers and the Indigenous people varied considerably throughout the colonial period – from the mutual curiosity displayed by the early interlocutors Bennelong and Bungaree of Sydney, to outright hostility of Pemulwuy and Windradyne of the Sydney region, and Yagan around Perth. Bennelong and a companion became the first Australians to sail to Europe, where they met King George III. Bungaree accompanied the explorer Matthew Flinders on the first circumnavigation of Australia. Pemulwuy was accused of the first killing of a white settler in 1790, and Windradyne resisted colonial settlement beyond the Blue Mountains.
With the establishment of European settlement and its subsequent expansion, the Indigenous populations were progressively forced into neighbouring territories, or subsumed into the new political entities of the Australian colonies. Violent conflict between Indigenous peoples and European settlers, described by some historians as frontier wars, arose out of this expansion: by the late 19th century, many Indigenous populations had been forcibly relocated to land reserves and missions. The nature of many of these land reserves and missions enabled disease to spread quickly and many were closed as resident numbers dropped, with the remaining residents being moved to other land reserves and missions in the 20th century.
According to the historian Geoffrey Blainey, in Australia during the colonial period: ""In a thousand isolated places there were occasional shootings and spearings. Even worse, smallpox, measles, influenza and other new diseases swept from one Aboriginal camp to another ... The main conqueror of Aborigines was to be disease and its ally, demoralisation"".
From the 1830s, colonial governments established the now controversial offices of the Protector of Aborigines in an effort to conduct government policy towards them. Christian churches sought to convert Aboriginal people, and were often used by government to carry out welfare and assimilation policies. Colonial churchmen such as Sydney's first Catholic archbishop, John Bede Polding, strongly advocated for Aboriginal rights and dignity and prominent Aboriginal activist Noel Pearson, who was raised at a Lutheran mission in Cape York, has written that Christian missions throughout Australia's colonial history ""provided a haven from the hell of life on the Australian frontier while at the same time facilitating colonisation"".
The Coniston massacre, which took place near the Coniston cattle station in the then Territory of Central Australia (now the Northern Territory) from 14 August to 18 October 1928, was the last known officially sanctioned massacre of Indigenous Australians and one of the last events of the Australian Frontier Wars.
The Caledon Bay crisis of 1932–34 saw one of the last incidents of violent interaction on the ""frontier"" of Indigenous and non-indigenous Australia, which began when the spearing of Japanese poachers who had been molesting Yolngu women was followed by the killing of a policeman. As the crisis unfolded, national opinion swung behind the Aboriginal people involved, and the first appeal on behalf of an Indigenous Australian to the High Court of Australia was launched. Following the crisis, the anthropologist Donald Thomson was dispatched by the government to live among the Yolngu. Elsewhere around this time, activists like Sir Douglas Nicholls were commencing their campaigns for Aboriginal rights within the established Australian political system and the age of frontier conflict closed.
Frontier encounters in Australia were not universally negative. Positive accounts of Aboriginal customs and encounters are also recorded in the journals of early European explorers, who often relied on Aboriginal guides and assistance: Charles Sturt employed Aboriginal envoys to explore the Murray-Darling; the lone survivor of the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition, John King, was helped by local Aboriginal people, and the famous tracker Jackey Jackey accompanied his ill-fated friend Edmund Kennedy to Cape York. Respectful studies were conducted by such as Walter Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen in their renowned anthropological study The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899); and by Donald Thomson of Arnhem Land (c. 1935 – 1943). In inland Australia, the skills of Aboriginal stockmen became highly regarded and in the 20th century, Aboriginal stockmen like Vincent Lingiari became national figures in their campaigns for better pay and conditions.
1938 was an important year for Indigenous rights campaigning. With the participation of leading indigenous activists like Douglas Nicholls, the Australian Aborigines Advancement League organised a protest ""Day of Mourning"" to mark the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the First Fleet of British in Australia and launched its campaign for full citizenship rights for all Aboriginal people. In the 1940s, the conditions of life for Aboriginal people could be very poor. A permit system restricted movement and work opportunities for many Aboriginal people. In the 1950s, the government pursued a policy of ""assimilation"" which sought to achieve full citizenship rights for Aboriginal people but also wanted them to adopt the mode of life of other Australians (which very often was assumed to require suppression of cultural identity)."
Racism in Australia,"World War II to the 2000s
The White Australia policy was dismantled in the decades following the Second World War and legal reforms undertaken to address indigenous disadvantage and establish Land Rights and Native Title.
In 1962, Robert Menzies' Commonwealth Electoral Act provided that all Indigenous people should have the right to enrol and vote at federal elections (prior to this, indigenous people in Queensland, Western Australia and ""wards of the state"" in the Northern Territory had been excluded from voting unless they were ex-servicemen). In 1965, Queensland became the last state to confer state voting rights on Aboriginal people, whereas in South Australia Aboriginal men had had the vote since the 1850s and Aboriginal women since the 1890s.  A number of South Australian Aboriginal women took part in the vote selecting candidates for the constitutional conventions of the 1890s. The 1967 referendum was held and overwhelmingly approved to amend the Constitution, removing discriminatory references and giving the national parliament the power to legislate specifically for Indigenous Australians.
In 1965, one of the earliest Aboriginal graduates from the University of Sydney, Charles Perkins, helped organise the Freedom Ride into parts of Australia to expose discrimination and inequality. In 1966, the Gurindji people of Wave Hill Station (owned by the Vestey Group) commenced strike action, known as the Gurindji strike, led by Vincent Lingiari, in a quest for equal pay and recognition of Indigenous land rights.
From the 1960s, Australian writers began to re-assess European assumptions about Aboriginal Australia – with works including Alan Moorehead's The Fatal Impact (1966) and Geoffrey Blainey's landmark history Triumph of the Nomads (1975). In 1968, anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner described the lack of historical accounts of relations between European and Aboriginal people as ""the great Australian silence"". Historian Henry Reynolds argues that there was a ""historical neglect"" of Aboriginal people by historians until the late 1960s. Early commentaries often tended to describe Aboriginal people as doomed to extinction following the arrival of Europeans. William Westgarth's 1864 book on the colony of Victoria observed; ""the case of the Aborigines of Victoria confirms ...it would seem almost an immutable law of nature that such inferior dark races should disappear."""
Racism in Australia,"The Stolen Generations
The Stolen Generations were the children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were removed from their families by the Australian Federal and State government agencies and church missions, under acts of their respective parliaments. The removals of those referred to as ""half-caste"" children were conducted in the period between approximately 1905 and 1967, although in some places mixed-race children were still being taken into the 1970s. Official government estimates are that in certain regions between one in ten and one in three Indigenous Australian children were forcibly taken from their families and communities between 1910 and 1970.
In April 2000, the Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Herron, presented a report in the Australian Parliament that questioned whether there had been a ""Stolen Generation"", arguing that only 10% of Aboriginal children had been removed, and they did not constitute an entire ""generation"". The report received media attention and there were protests against the claimed racism in this statement, and was countered by comparing use of this terminology to the World War 2 Lost Generation which also did not comprise an entire generation. On 13 February 2008 Prime Minister Kevin Rudd presented an apology for the ""Stolen Generation"" as a motion in Parliament."
Racism in Australia,"Mabo Case
In 1992, the High Court of Australia handed down its decision in the Mabo Case, declaring the previous legal concept of terra nullius to be invalid. That same year, Prime Minister Paul Keating said in his Redfern Park Speech that European settlers were responsible for the difficulties Australian Aboriginal communities continued to face: ""We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice"". In 1999 Parliament passed a Motion of Reconciliation drafted by Prime Minister John Howard and Aboriginal Senator Aden Ridgeway naming mistreatment of Indigenous Australians as the most ""blemished chapter in our international history""."
Racism in Australia,"Current issues
In response to the Little Children are Sacred Report the Howard government launched the Northern Territory National Emergency Response in 2007, to reduce child molestation, domestic violence and substance abuse in remote Indigenous communities. The measures of the response which have attracted most criticism comprise the exemption from the Racial Discrimination Act 1975, the compulsory acquisition of an unspecified number of prescribed communities (Measure 5) and the partial abolition of the permit system (Measure 10). These have been interpreted as undermining important principles and parameters established as part of the legal recognition of indigenous land rights in Australia.
The intervention, widely condemned as racist, failed to produce a single child abuse conviction in its first six years Professor James Anaya, a United Nations Special Rapporteur, alleged in 2010 that the policy was ""racially discriminating"" because measures like banning alcohol and pornography and quarantining a percentage of welfare income for the purchase of essential goods represented a limitation on ""individual autonomy"". The Rudd government, the Opposition and a number of prominent indigenous activists condemned Anaya's allegation. Central Australian Aboriginal leader Bess Price criticised the UN for not sending a female repporteur and said that Abaya had been led around by opponents of the intervention to meet with opponents of the intervention.
In the early 21st century, much of Indigenous Australia continued to suffer lower standards of health and education than non-indigenous Australia. In 2007, the Close the Gap campaign was launched by Olympic champions Cathy Freeman and Ian Thorpe with the aim of achieving Indigenous health equality within 25 years."
Racism in Australia,"European Australians
Early British and Irish settlers
In the early decades of the establishment of British colonies in Australia, attitudes to race and ethnicity were imported from the British Isles. The ethnic mix of the early colonists consisted mainly of the four nationalities of the British Isles (English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh), but also included some Jewish and black African convicts. Sectarianism, particularly anti-Irish-Catholic sentiment was initially enshrined in law, reflecting the difficult position of Irish people within the British Empire. One-tenth of all the convicts who came to Australia on the First Fleet were Catholic and at least half of them were born in Ireland. With Ireland often in revolt against British rule, the Irish enthusiasts of Australia faced surveillance and were denied the public practice of their religion in the early decades of settlement.
Governor Lachlan Macquarie served as the last autocratic Governor of New South Wales, from 1810 to 1821 and had a leading role in the social and economic development of New South Wales which saw it transition from a penal colony to a budding free society. He sought good relations with the Aboriginal population and upset British government opinion by treating emancipists as equal to free-settlers. Soon after, the reformist attorney general, John Plunkett, sought to apply Enlightenment principles to governance in the colony, pursuing the establishment of equality before the law, first by extending jury rights to emancipists, then by extending legal protections to convicts, assigned servants and Aboriginal people. Plunkett twice charged the colonist perpetrators of the Myall Creek massacre of Aboriginal people with murder, resulting in a conviction and his landmark Church Act of 1836 disestablished the Church of England and established legal equality between Anglicans, Catholics, Presbyterians and later Methodists.
While elements of sectarianism and anti- sentiment persisted into the 20th century in Australia, the integration of the Irish, English, Scottish and Welsh nationalities was one of the first notable successes of Australian immigration policy and set a pattern for later migrant intakes of suspicion of minorities giving way to acceptance."
Racism in Australia,"Asian Australians
Early Asian and Pacific Islander immigration
The Australian colonies had passed restrictive legislation as early as the 1860s, directed specifically at Chinese immigrants. Objections to the Chinese originally arose because of their large numbers, their religious beliefs, the widespread perception that they worked harder, longer and far more cheaply than European Australians and the view that they habitually engaged in gambling and smoking opium. It was also felt they would lower living standards, threaten democracy and that their numbers could expand into a ""yellow tide"". Later, a popular cry was raised against increasing numbers of Japanese (following Japan's victory over China in the Sino-Japanese War), South Asians and Kanakas (South Pacific islanders). Popular support for White Australia, always strong, was bolstered at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 when the Australian delegation led the fight to defeat a Japanese-sponsored racial-equality amendment to the League of Nations Covenant.  The Japanese amendment was closely tied to their claim on German New Guinea and so was very largely refuted on security grounds."
Racism in Australia,"Buckland riot
The Buckland riot was an anti-Chinese race riot that occurred on 4 July 1857, in the goldfields of the Buckland Valley, Victoria, Australia, near present-day Porepunkah. At the time approximately 2000 Chinese and 700 European migrants were living in the Buckland area."
Racism in Australia,"Lambing Flat Riots
The Lambing Flat Riots (1860–1861) were a series of violent anti-Chinese demonstrations that took place in the Burrangong region, in New South Wales, Australia. They occurred on the goldfields at Spring Creek, Stoney Creek, Back Creek, Wombat, Blackguard Gully, Tipperary Gully, and Lambing Flat. Anti-Chinese sentiment was widespread during the Victorian gold rush. This resentment manifested on 4 July 1857 when around 100 European rioters attacked Chinese settlements. The rioters had just left a public meeting at the Buckland Hotel where the riot ringleaders decided they would attempt to expel all the Chinese in the Buckland Valley. Contemporaneous newspaper reports claim that the riot was ""led by Americans 'inflamed by liquor'"".
During the riot Chinese miners were beaten and robbed then driven across the Buckland River. At least three Chinese miners died reportedly of ill-health and entire encampments and a recently constructed Joss house were destroyed.
Police arrested thirteen European accused rioters, however the empaneled juries acquitted all of major offences ""amid the cheers of bystanders"". The verdicts of the juries were later criticised in the press.
Events in the Australian goldfields in the 1850s led to hostility toward Chinese miners on the part of many Europeans, which was to affect many aspects of European-Chinese relations in Australia for the next century. Some of the sources of conflict between European and Chinese miners arose from the nature of the industry they were engaged in. Most gold mining in the early years was alluvial mining, where the gold was in small particles mixed with dirt, gravel and clay close to the surface of the ground, or buried in the beds of old watercourses or ""leads"". Extracting the gold took no great skill, but it was hard work, and generally speaking, the more work, the more gold the miner won. Europeans tended to work alone or in small groups, concentrating on rich patches of ground, and frequently abandoning a reasonably rich claim to take up another one rumoured to be richer. Very few miners became wealthy; the reality of the diggings was that relatively few miners found even enough gold to earn them a living."
Racism in Australia,"Internment of Japanese and Taiwanese people in Australia during WWII
Historically, Taiwanese Australians have had a significant presence in Tatura and Rushworth, two neighbouring countryside towns respectively located in the regions of Greater Shepparton and Campaspe (Victoria), in the fertile Goulburn Valley. During World War II, ethnic-Japanese (from Australia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific) and ethnic-Taiwanese (from the Netherlands East Indies) were interned nearby to these towns as a result of anti-espionage/collaboration policies enforced by the Australian government (and WWII Allies in the Asia-Pacific region). Roughly 600 Taiwanese civilians (entire families, including mothers, children and the elderly) were held at ""Internment Camp No. 4"", located in Rushworth but nominally labeled as being part of the ""Tatura Internment Group"", between January 1942 and March 1946. Most of the Japanese and Taiwanese civilians were innocent and had been arrested for racist reasons (see the related article ""Internment of Japanese Americans"", an article detailing similar internment in America). Several Japanese and Taiwanese people were born in the internment camp and received British (Australian) birth certificates from a nearby hospital. Several Japanese people who were born in the internment camp were named ""Tatura"" in honour of their families' wartime internment at Tatura. During wartime internment, many working age adults in the internment camp operated small businesses (including a sewing factory) and local schools within the internment camp. Regarding languages, schools mainly taught English, Japanese, Mandarin and Taiwanese languages (Hokkien, Hakka, Formosan). Filipinos are purported to have also been held at the camp, alongside Koreans, Manchus (possibly from Manchukuo), New Caledonians, New Hebrideans, people from the South Seas Mandate, people from Western New Guinea (and presumably also Papua New Guinea) and Aboriginal Australians (who were mixed-Japanese).
After the war, internees were resettled in their country of ethnic origin, rather than their country of nationality or residence, with the exception of Japanese Australians, who were generally allowed to remain in Australia. Non-Australian Japanese, who originated from Southeast Asia and the Pacific, were repatriated to Occupied Japan. On the other hand, Taiwanese, most of whom originated from the Netherlands East Indies, were repatriated to Occupied Taiwan. The repatriation of Taiwanese during March 1946 caused public outcry in Australia due to the allegedly poor living conditions aboard the repatriating ship ""Yoizuki"", in what became known as the ""Yoizuki Hellship scandal"". Post-WWII, the Australian government was eager to expel any Japanese internees who did not possess Australian citizenship, and this included the majority of Taiwanese internees as well. However, the Republic of China (ROC) was an ally of Australia, and since the ROC had occupied Taiwan during October 1945, many among the Australian public believed that the Taiwanese internees should be deemed citizens of the ROC, and, therefore, friends of Australia, not to be expelled from the country, or at least not in such allegedly appalling conditions. This debate concerning the citizenship of Taiwanese internees—whether they were Chinese or Japanese—further inflamed public outrage at their allegedly appalling treatment by the Australian government. Additionally, it was technically true that several ""camp babies""—internees who had been born on Australian soil whilst their parents were interned—possessed Australian birth certificates, which made them legally British subjects. However, many of these camp babies were also deported from the country alongside their non-citizen parents. There was also a minor controversy regarding the destination of repatriation, with some of the less Japan-friendly Taiwanese fearing that they would be repatriated to Japan, though this was resolved when they learnt that they were being repatriated to Taiwan instead.
On January 5, 1993, a plaque was erected at the site of the internment camp at Tatura (Rushworth) to commemorate the memory of wartime internment. Forty-six Japanese and Taiwanese ex-internees, as well as a former (Australian) camp guard, are listed on the plaque."
Racism in Australia,"Assaults against Indian students
Australia is a popular and longstanding destination for international students. End of year data for 2009 found that of the 631,935 international students enrolled in Australia, drawn from more than 217 different countries, some 120,913 were from India, making them the second largest group. That same year, protests were conducted in Melbourne by Indian students and widescale media coverage in India alleged that a series of robberies and assaults against Indian students should be ascribed to racism in Australia. According to a report tabled by the Overseas Indian Affairs Ministry, in all some 23 incidents were found to have involved ""racial overtones"" such as ""anti Indian remarks"". In response, the Australian Institute of Criminology in consultation with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Department of Immigration and Citizenship sought to quantify the extent to which Indians were the subject of crime in Australia and found overall that international students as recorded victims of crime in Australia, were either ""less likely"" or ""as likely"" to be victims of physical assault and other theft, but that there was a ""substantial over-representation of Indian students in retail/commercial robberies"". The report found however that the proficiency of Indians in the English language and their consequent higher engagement in employment in the services sector (""including service stations, convenience stores, taxi drivers and other employment that typically involves working late night shifts alone and come with an increased risk of crime, either at the workplace or while travelling to and from work"") was a more likely explanation for the crime rate differential than was any ""racial motivation"".
On 30 May 2009, Indian students protested against what they claimed were racist attacks, blocking streets in central Melbourne. Thousands of students gathered outside the Royal Melbourne Hospital where one of the victims was admitted. The protest, however, was called off early on the next day morning after the protesters accused police of ""ramrodding"" them to break up their sit-in. On 4 June 2009, China expressed concern over the matter – Chinese are the largest foreign student population in Australia with approximately 130,000 students. In light of this event, the Australian Government started a Helpline for Indian students to report such incidents. Australian High Commissioner to India John McCarthy said that there may have been an element of racism involved in some of the assaults reported upon Indians, but that they were mainly criminal in nature. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, termed these attacks ""disturbing"" and called for Australia to investigate the matters further. In the aftermath of these attacks, other investigations alleged racist elements in the Victorian police force.
However, in 2011, the Australian Institute of Criminology released a study entitled Crimes Against International Students:2005–2009. This found that over the period 2005–2009, international students were statistically less likely to be assaulted than the average person in Australia. Indian students experienced an average assault rate in some jurisdictions, but overall they experienced lower assault rates than the Australian average. They did, however, experience higher rates of robbery, overall. The study could not sample incidents of crime that were not reported. Additionally, multiple surveys of international students over the period of 2009–10 found a majority of Indian students felt safe."
Racism in Australia,"Current issues
Middle Eastern Australians
Cronulla riots
The Cronulla riots of 2005 were a series of racially motivated mob confrontations which originated in and around Cronulla, a beachfront suburb of Sydney, New South Wales. Soon after the riot, ethnically motivated violent incidents occurred in several other Sydney suburbs.
On Sunday, 11 December 2005, approximately 5,000 people gathered to protest against alleged incidents of assaults and intimidatory behaviour by groups of Middle Eastern-looking youths from the suburbs of South Western Sydney. The crowd initially assembled without incident, but violence broke out after a large segment of the mostly white crowd chased a man of Middle Eastern appearance into a hotel and two other youths of Middle Eastern appearance were assaulted on a train.
The following nights saw several retaliatory violent assaults in the communities near Cronulla and Maroubra, with large gatherings around south western Sydney, and an unprecedented police lock-down of Sydney beaches and surrounding areas, between Wollongong and Newcastle.
SBS / Al Jazeera (for Al Jazeera) explores these events in 2013 (2015) four-part documentary series ""Once Upon a Time in Punchbowl"", specifically in last two episodes, ""Episode three, 2000–2005"" and ""Episode four, 2005-present"".
In 2012, shock jock Alan Jones lost an appeal against charges that he deliberately incited the riots on his 2GB radio show."
Racism in Australia,"Contemporary issues
Asylum seekers
Commentators such as writer Christos Tsiolkas have accused the Australian Government of racism in its approach to asylum seekers in Australia. Both major parties have supported a ban on asylum seekers who arrive by boat. For many years Australia operated the Pacific Solution, which included the relocation of asylum seekers arriving by boat in offshore detention centres on Manus and Nauru. Social justice advocates and international organisations such as Amnesty International have condemned Australia's policies, with one describing them as ""an appeal to fear and racism""."
Racism in Australia,"Anti-Semitism in Australia
From 2013 to 2017 over 673 incidents of anti-Semitic behaviour were reported, with an increase of such incidents in recent years. Incidents include spitting, such as a woman in her 60s who was spat on after being called ""Jewish scum""."
Racism in Australia,"Far-right and neo-Nazi groups
The 21st century has seen the creation of several groups with racist manifestos in Australia, from street gangs (Australian Defence League) through loosely grouped protest groups (Reclaim Australia) to far-right political parties (Fraser Anning's Conservative National Party). The ideology of the Antipodean Resistance, a neo-Nazi clan headquartered in Melbourne, is based on homophobia, anti-Semitism, white supremacism and Australian nationalism. Some groups, such as the True Blue Crew, are committed to violence. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) monitors this and other groups for signs of far-right terrorism.
The National Socialist Network (NSN) was formed by members of the Lads Society and Antipodean Resistance in late 2020. It is a neo-Nazi group headquartered in Melbourne."
Racism in Australia,"Pauline Hanson and One Nation
Senator Pauline Hanson, in her 1998 maiden speech to Parliament called for the abolition of multiculturalism and said that ""reverse racism"" was being applied to ""mainstream Australians"" who were not entitled to the same welfare and government funding as minority groups. She has said that Australia was in danger of being ""swamped by Asians"", and that these immigrants ""have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate"". She was widely accused of racism. In 2006, she achieved notoriety by asserting that Africans bring disease into Australia. In June 2021, following media reports that the proposed national curriculum was ""preoccupied with the oppression, discrimination and struggles of Indigenous Australians"", Hanson tabled a motion in the Australian Senate calling on the federal government to reject critical race theory (CRT), despite it not being included in the curriculum."
Racism in Australia,"Alleviation
Western Sydney, a suburban region with a long history of migrant settlement, became one of the first regions in Australia to enact public planning to counter  cultural racism.
In 2020, the Victorian Government set up an Anti-Racism Taskforce, designed to advise and consider issues such as unconscious bias, privilege, and how race intersects with other forms of discrimination, as well as how racism manifests through employment and in access to services."
Racism in Australia,"Closing the Gap
Uluru Statement from the Heart
Legislation relating to racism
Racist legislation in Australian history
Some notable legislation which has been claimed to have been based on racist theories include:"
Racism in Australia,"The Immigration Restriction Act 1901, to prescribe where migrants to Australia were accepted from (this in part became the basis for the White Australia Policy). This law effectively prevented almost all immigration from Asia for approximately 50 years.
The Pacific Island Labourers Act 1901, a law designed to facilitate the deportation of Pacific Island workers (then known as ""Kanakas"") from Australia. These workers were originally from Melanesia and were sent to work on farms in Queensland. Descendants of the workers that remained in Australia are today known as South Sea Islanders.
The Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902 gave women the vote across all states, but allowed states to restrict voting rights for ""natives"" (i.e Indigenous Australians)."
Racism in Australia,"Anti-racist legislation in contemporary Australia
The following constituted important legal reforms in the movement towards racial equality:"
Racism in Australia,"1958 revision of the Migration Act, introduced a simpler system for entry and abolished the ""dictation test"".
1962 Commonwealth Electoral Act, provided that all Indigenous Australians should have the right to enrol and vote at federal elections (previously this right had been restricted in some states other than for Aboriginal ex-servicemen, who secured the right to vote in all states under 1949 legislation).
Migration Act 1966, effectively dismantled the White Australia Policy and increased access to non-European migrants.
Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976, was a significant step in legal recognition of Aboriginal land ownership.
The following Australian Federal and State legislation relates to racism and discrimination:"
Racism in Australia,"Commonwealth Racial Discrimination Act 1975
Commonwealth Racial Hatred Act (1995)
Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Act (1986)
New South Wales: Anti-Discrimination Act (1977)
South Australia: Prohibition of Discrimination Act 1966 (SA) under Don Dunstan, then Attorney-General of South Australia (now Equal Opportunity Act (1984)) and Racial Vilification Act (1996). The Prohibition of Discrimination Act 1966 (SA) made race discrimination on the basis of skin colour and country of origin and in circumstances such as the provision of food, drink, services and accommodation and in the termination of employment a criminal offence.
Western Australia: Equal Opportunity Act (1984) and Criminal Code
Australian Capital Territory: Discrimination Act (1991)
Queensland: Anti-Discrimination Act (1991)
Northern Territory: Anti-Discrimination Act (1992)
Victoria: Equal Opportunity Act (1995) and Racial and Religious Tolerance Act 2001
Tasmania: Anti-Discrimination Act (1998)"
Racism in Australia,"See also
Aboriginal deaths in custody
George Floyd protests in Australia
Institutional racism
Institutional racism in Australia
List of massacres of Indigenous Australians
Racism by country
RacismNotWelcome, a grassroots campaign
Racial violence in Australia
White privilege in Australia
Initiatives by South Australian Premier Don Dunstan"
Racism in Australia,"Indigenous advocates
Notes
References
Bibliography
Further reading
Amin, Mridula (20 June 2020). ""Why explaining racism to white Australians can be 'exhausting'"". ABC News. Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Henriques-Gomes, Luke (12 June 2020). ""Indigenous inequality in spotlight as Australia faces reckoning on race"". The Guardian.
Justin Healey: Racism in Australia, Published by Spinney Press, 2003 ISBN 1-876811-89-7 [2]
Racism in Australia: findings of a survey on racist attitudes and experiences of racism, University of Hawaii
Mathias Royce: The Rise and Propagation of Political Right-Wing Extremism: The Identification and Assessment of Common Sovereign Economic and Socio-Demographic Determinants, SMC – Swiss Management Center, Working Paper Series, 5 August 2010, Available at SSRN [3]
""Once Upon a Time in Punchbowl"", SBS (for Al Jazeera) TV series, about the history of the Arab and Lebanese communities in Australia, their struggle to be accepted as Australians, etc.
Australia Says Sorry TIME
CERD concluding observation on Australia, 2010
Report of the UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance on his visit to Australia, 2002
All Together Now, charity focussed on erasing racism in Australia
Racism. It Stops With Me, a government campaign to address racism
Racism No Way, a program for schools"
The Australian Ballet,"The Australian Ballet (TAB) is the largest classical ballet company in Australia. It was founded by J. C. Williamson Theatres Ltd and the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust in 1962, with the English-born dancer, teacher, repetiteur and director Dame Peggy van Praagh as founding artistic director. Today, it is recognised as one of the world's major international ballet companies and performs upwards of 150 performances (both in Australia and overseas) a year."
The Australian Ballet,"History
The roots of the Australian Ballet can be found in the Borovansky Ballet, a touring repertory company founded in 1940 by the Czech dancer Edouard Borovansky. Borovansky had been a dancer in the touring ballet company of the famous Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova and, after visiting Australia on tour with the Covent Garden Russian Ballet, he decided to remain in Australia, establishing a ballet school in Melbourne in 1939, out of which he developed a performance group which became the Borovansky Ballet. The company was supported and funded by J. C. Williamson Theatres Ltd from 1944. Following Borovansky's death in 1959, the British dancer and administrator Dame Peggy van Praagh was invited to become artistic director of the company. J. C. Williamson Theatres Ltd decided to disband the Borovansky Ballet in 1961. 
In 1961, J. C. Williamson Theatres Ltd and the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust received federal subsidy towards the establishment of a national ballet company. These organisations established the Australian Ballet Foundation to assist with the establishment of a new company, which in 1962 became the Australian Ballet. Peggy van Praagh, who had been kept on a retainer by J. C. Williamson Theatres Ltd through the intervening year between the disbanding of the Borovansky Ballet and the establishment of the Australian Ballet, was invited to become the founding artistic director of the company. The majority of the dancers employed by the fledgling company were drawn from former members of the Borovansky Ballet. The company was founded with a charter to use Australian choreographers and produce Australian work. 
The first performance by the Australian Ballet was Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, staged at Her Majesty's Theatre, Sydney on 2 November 1962. The principal dancers in the first season were Kathleen Gorham, Marilyn Jones, Garth Welch, and the Swedish-born Caj Selling (1935–2005). Van Praagh also invited the Royal Ballet's Ray Powell to temporarily become the company's first ballet master, with Leon Kellaway (brother of Cecil Kellaway), a former dancer with the Covent Garden Russian Ballet, as the company's first ballet teacher. In later years Sir Robert Helpmann, Marilyn Jones and Maina Gielgud made major contributions as artistic directors of the Australian Ballet.
In 1964, the first fully Australian performance, Helpmann's The Display was performed. In the same year, van Praagh established the Australian Ballet School, which was formed specially to train dancers for the company. Dame Margaret Scott was the founding director of the school, followed by Gailene Stock, Marilyn Rowe, and then Lisa Pavane, all three former company principal artists.
Choreographers including Graeme Murphy, Meryl Tankard, and Natalie Weir rose to prominence at TAB from the 1970s to the 1990s."
The Australian Ballet,"Former artistic directors
The company's previous artistic directors were:"
The Australian Ballet,"Dame Peggy van Praagh (1962–74; 1978)
Sir Robert Helpmann (1965–76)
Anne Woolliams (1976–77)
Marilyn Jones (1979–82)
Maina Gielgud (1983–96)
Ross Stretton (1996–2001)
David McAllister (2001-2021)"
The Australian Ballet,"Description and governance
The Australian Ballet (TAB) is based in Melbourne; its Southbank headquarters is the Primrose Potter Australian Ballet Centre, named after its long-term supporter Lady (Primrose) Potter. The company tours to mainland state capital cities within Australia, with annual seasons in Melbourne at the State Theatre (accompanied by Orchestra Victoria) and in Sydney at the Sydney Opera House accompanied by the Opera Australia Orchestra. Other venues are the Lyric Theatre at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre in Brisbane, and the Adelaide Festival Centre in Adelaide. The company also tours internationally.
The Australian Ballet works in close cooperation with the Australian Ballet School, of which many of the company's dancers are graduates. Giving approximately 200 performances a year, the Australian Ballet claims to be the busiest ballet company in the world. Its artistic vision is ""Caring for Tradition, Daring to be Different"". Each year, the company also presents an extensive national education and outreach programme.
The company's income is derived from box office sales, along with funding from the Australian, Victorian, and New South Wales governments; corporate sponsors; private donors; and bequests."
The Australian Ballet,"People
Since 2021 and as of 2023 the company's artistic director is David Hallberg, who was a principal dancer with the American Ballet Theatre until 2020. 
In December 2022, Lissa Twomey was appointed as Executive Director of the Company. An arts industry leader with extensive experience domestically and internationally in management of top tier performing arts organisations. 
The music director and chief conductor of The Australian Ballet appointed in 2022 is Jonathan Lo, replacing Nicolette Fraillon, the world's only woman chief conductor of a ballet company."
The Australian Ballet,"Telstra Ballet Dancer Award
The Telstra Ballet Dancer Awards have been made annually since 2003, in support of the aspirations of The Australian Ballet's elite young dancers. It is the biggest prize available specifically to a dancer in Australia, with a cash prize of $20,000 to the winner. The Telstra People's Choice Award is made to the most popular of the nominees in that year, using internet and SMS voting. The winner of the People's Choice receives a cash prize of $5,000."
The Australian Ballet,"Notable performances
In 1964, Robert Helpmann's work The Display was the first TAB production in which the music, designer, theme, and choreographer were all Australian; included were Australian rules football, lyrebirds, and a picnic in the bush.
In 1992, Clara, an adaptation of The Nutcracker by choreographer Graeme Murphy, was a significant work, as he turned it into a story about migration to Australia.
In 1997, TAB commissioned Stephen Page, artistic director of Indigenous dance company Bangarra Dance Theatre, to choreograph a piece for dancers from both companies, which resulted in Rites, which was set to Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring.
For its 60th anniversary in 2023, TAB presented Identity, a double bill commissioned by Hallberg, which premiered in May 2023 at the Sydney Opera House before moving to Arts Centre Melbourne in June. The performance comprises two works: The Hum, composed by Yorta Yorta woman Deborah Cheetham Fraillon and with costumes designed by Taungurung designer Annette Sax (the first Indigenous women to perform these roles in a TAB production), by Wiradjuri choreographer Daniel Riley of ADT; and Paragon, by resident choreographer Alice Topp. While The Hum represents Indigenous dance, Paragon focuses on the history of The Australian Ballet."
The Australian Ballet,"Orchestra Victoria
Following a period of turmoil, Orchestra Victoria became a wholly owned subsidiarity of The Australian Ballet in July 2014"
The Australian Ballet,"See also
Australian Archives of the Dance, created by TAB in 1972"
The Australian Ballet,"References
External links
Official website
The Australian Ballet School
The Australian Ballet Collection at the Arts Centre Melbourne"
Public housing in Australia,"Public housing in Australia is one part of social housing and the other is  community housing. Public housing is provided by departments of state governments. Australian public housing (often historically referred to as ""Housing Commission"") operates within the framework of the Commonwealth-State Housing Agreement, by which funding for public and community housing is provided by both federal and state governments. According to the 2006 census, Australia's public housing stock consisted of some 304,000 dwellings out of a total housing stock of more than 7.1 million dwellings, or 4.2% of all housing stock (compared with 20% in Denmark, 46% ""low rent housing"" in France and 50% public housing in the UK at peak).
Housing advocates have urged construction of new public housing dwellings to meet the rising numbers of families seeking public housing.  Existing public housing stock has been severely underfunded, and older buildings demolished. There are also moves towards privatisation and transition into community and social housing models, reinforced through government policies which aim to sell large amounts of public homes into the private market. This has led to recent campaigns to save public housing marked for demolition, and advocate for upgrades and maintenance and construction of new public housing dwellings, such as the Bendigo street housing campaign in which homeless people were housed by community in homes left empty by the Victorian state government."
Public housing in Australia,"Overview
The state government departments which are responsible for providing public housing have been known by a variety of names due to their history in each state, such as the Office of Housing (Victoria), the Department of Housing (Queensland) and Housing SA (formerly known as the Housing Trust, South Australia). Their official name tends to change with the way each state government prioritises public housing within its departmental structure. For example, for a time in the 1980s, Victoria's public housing had its own department (Department of Planning and Housing). Since the early 1990s, departmental restructuring under the Kennett government relegated its status to the ""Office of Housing"" within the Department of Planning and Development. It has since been moved from a ""bricks and mortar"" issue to one of health and welfare, now being an office within the Department of Human Services. The management of some public housing has been outsourced to not-for-profit management companies as part of a demand management philosophy to target it towards people with special needs."
Public housing in Australia,"Dwelling types
Australian public housing has traditionally been of two main types – inner-city medium to high-rise apartments, and low-density townhouses or fully detached houses on master-planned estates located on, what were at the time of construction, the suburban fringes of cities and towns. The inner-city public housing is mostly found in Melbourne, Sydney and to an extent, Perth, with a high-rise tower block development in Stainforth Court, Hobart. These estates generally comprise 3-5 story walk-up flats and 8-22 story high-rise towers. Since the late 1990s, the Victorian government has embarked on a process of redeveloping its inner-city estates with a mix of public and private housing. Low-density suburban estates can be found in nearly every city and town in Australia. Some of the low-density housing has been sold off over the years to long term tenants, and some has begun to circulate on the private property market at high prices in gentrified suburbs such as Port Melbourne."
Public housing in Australia,"History
Public housing from the 1890s to 1970s
While many Australian housing affordability academics attribute the ""Golden Age"" of affordable housing in Australia from 1945 to 1975, issues of affordable housing and housing conditions in state capitals for workers had become a concern of governments from early in the 20th century. In the first decade of the 1900s, Australia was still feeling the effects of the 1890s economic depression. At the time, the only housing options available were private leasehold (accounting for 45% of tenure arrangements in Australia in 1911), owner-occupier freehold (accounting for 50% of tenure arrangements), and other informal tenure arrangements. Before economic recovery was achieved, however, all progress was halted by World War I from 1914 to 1918.
From 1912 to 1918, several state governments commissioned reports investigating their state’s housing system failures, resulting in the establishment of various financial schemes across all states that focused on making home ownership more attainable for more of the working class. In addition, the Commonwealth government established the War Service Homes Scheme in 1919 which offered very competitive loans to returned war servicemen for the purpose of constructing or buying a home. Although the 1920s saw a rebound in terms of economic and housing activity, the Great Depression of the 1930s saw economic and housing conditions returned to that of the worst days of the 1890s.
During the Great Depression, unemployment in Australia rose to over 30%. In addition to the rising level of poverty, the lack of new housing stock in Australia left an unprecedented number of workers left powerless in the face of merciless private landlords who at the time had the legal right to take as ransom the belongings of renters to cover unpaid rent and rapidly deteriorating living conditions. This resulted in a significant amount of urban renters turning to informal settlements and ""slums"" for shelter, such as Melbourne's Dudley Flats. The state of the housing system nationwide and the squalor in which those who were subject to it lived drew protests from the working class and the criticism of reformists from various backgrounds.
The Australian Labour Movement laid the blame for the poor social conditions of the 1930s in the capital cities squarely at the feet of the private landlords as well as the state and Commonwealth banks, which were popularly understood to also have played a critical role in the 1890s economic crash.  Resistance to evictions during the 1930s, which involved tactics ranging from demonstrations to the occupation of real estate offices and homes, led to the introduction of government rental assistance in some states and fuelled demands for public housing.  From the political right, there was slowly amounting pressure to reclaim the slum sites (often formed in seaside areas in Australian capital cities) for more economically productive activities. At the same time, proponents of the emerging town planning movement in Australia began actively arguing for state and national government involvement in developing town plans as a means of slum eradication. Inspired by the garden city movement in the United Kingdom, it was thought that the rationalization of urban development via town planning could not only improve the urban environment, but also social behavior. In the case of Victoria, Methodist social reformer Frederick Oswald Barnett during this period was particularly influential in creating wider popular concern (as well as voyeuristic interest) in the awful condition of the slums in Melbourne.
Another round of reports was commissioned by federal and state governments in the mid to late 1930s, including those of the Housing Investigation and Slum Abolition Board (Victoria, 1936), the Housing Slums Investigations Committee (NSW, 1936), and the Building Act Inquiry Committee (South Australia, 1937). These reports uniformly pointed to the proven inability of finance schemes directed towards home ownership to improve the housing system for the working class. This in combination with growing social pressure for housing reform drove the Tasmanian Government to establish a housing division via the Agricultural Bank in 1935, as well as prompted the creation of the 1937 South Australian Housing Trust, the 1938 Victorian Housing Commission, and the 1942 NSW Housing Commission. And then World War II broke out.
Against the backdrop of World War II and a housing market that had been at near standstill for a decade, the Commonwealth Housing Commission was established in 1943. Arguing that “it has been apparent, for many years, that private enterprise, the world over has not adequately and hygienically been housing the low income group”, the Commission promoted housing as a right for all Australians that should be targeted to low-income workers on a user-pays basis. While most recommendations of the 1944 Commonwealth Housing Commission Report were ignored by the federal government, the 1945 Commonwealth State Housing Agreement (CSHA) allowed the states to establish and operate public housing as funded by the Commonwealth via cheap loans, as well as encouraged states to provide rental rebates for low-income workers. While all states operated their public housing schemes in varying ways and with different objectives (for New South Wales and Victoria in particular, a major focus was slum clearance and rehousing of the poverty stricken), preference for public housing was given to large families and recently returned servicemen.
Under the first CSHA which was in place from 1945 to 1956, public housing stock nationwide rose from next to zero to 96,292 dwellings.    Getting construction under way took time however and a continuing shortfall meant that many people squatted disused housing during the mid to late 1940s while others lived in former military properties up until the late 1950s.  During this period, Australia recovered from the economic effects of World War II and, like many other Western nations at the same time, enjoyed a period of uninterrupted economic development. As the economy strengthened, the private housing market once again became a significant supplier of new housing stock. In 1956, the recently elected Liberal-Country Coalition Party leader Robert Menzies renegotiated the 1945 CSHA, sounding the death knell to the golden age of public housing in Australia. Under the new CSHA, federal money was diverted away from public housing and rental assistance schemes, states were allowed to sell public housing via any means they saw fit, and private home ownership was encouraged once more. From 1956 onwards, roughly 90,000 public housing built under the CSHA were sold across Australia.
Further heralding the end of public housing was the emergence of economic rationalism in the 1960 and 1970s. Replacing the post-War Keynesian idea that government intervention in the housing markets was a necessary virtue, public opinion was swaying to the neoliberal idea that government intervention by the way of public housing was one of the causes of the problem. This idea was helped along by the 1975 Royal Commission into Poverty that claimed that “Of the total 183,000 housing authority tenants the total poor numbered only 51,000; 132,000 housing commission rented dwellings (72%) were occupied by people with incomes more than 120% of the poverty line”."
Public housing in Australia,"Community housing
In recent years, not-for-profit community housing providers have developed a more prominent role in providing affordable housing to eligible tenants. These community housing providers are usually registered charities and include not for profit housing associations and rental housing co-operatives. Organisations such as the Brisbane Housing Company, a not-for-profit corporation operated by the Queensland Government and the Brisbane City Council is an example of a housing association. Cooperation between state housing departments and community housing providers is increasing, as in Queensland where prospective tenants who are on the waiting list for public housing are now also on the waiting list for community housing."
Public housing in Australia,"Public housing today
Construction of new public housing dwellings is currently at its lowest rate for 40 years and existing public housing stock is severely underfunded. The average Sydney local government area (LGA) lost 30% of its public housing between 2006 and 2021. In real terms the average LGA lost 17.8% of its public housing dwellings. The public housing waiting list in Victoria, for example, was at 45,600 applications, representing 99,000 people, as of June 2020. This represents a dramatic increase in applications in recent years. There is a severe lack of new public housing dwellings.
There are also moves towards privatisation through transition into community housing models. This can create tension between non-government organisations working on housing and homelessness, with some vying for management or ownership of previously state-owned or managed public housing, while other organisations resist privatisation and advocate for the expansion of public housing as the preferred model to alleviate waiting lists and homelessness. 
There have been a number of recent campaigns to save public housing marked for demolition, advocate for upgrades and maintenance and construction of new public housing dwellings. State governments will occasionally announce funding policies for upgrades and maintenance. The issue of empty state government-owned homes is increasing as every state has hundreds or thousands of empty homes that could be transferred to public housing registers. In Melbourne, Victoria, this issue led to the Bendigo street housing campaign in which homeless people were housed by community campaigns in homes left empty by the Victorian state government."
Public housing in Australia,"Suburbs with public housing
Some suburbs of Australian cities with a high concentration of public housing, with at least 15% of all occupied dwellings recorded as being rented from a state or territory housing authority include:"
Public housing in Australia,"See also
Housing Commission of Victoria
Housing NSW
Public housing in the Australian Capital Territory
Bendigo street housing campaign
American Radburn design for public housing"
Public housing in Australia,"Australian housing
Australian residential rental market
Australian property bubble
Homelessness in Australia
Home ownership in Australia
Housing in Victoria"
Public housing in Australia,"References
External links
State and territory housing departments
Housing & Community Services ACT
Housing NSW
Territory Housing (Northern Territory)
Queensland Department of Housing
Housing SA
Housing Tasmania
Victorian Office of Housing
Western Australian Department of Housing & Works"
Irreligion in Australia,"Atheism, agnosticism, scepticism, freethought, secular humanism or general irreligion are increasing in Australia. Post-war Australia has become a highly secularised country. Religion does not play a major role in the lives of much of the population.
In the country's 2021 census, 38.9% of Australians (or 9,886,957 people) selected either ""no religion"" or specified their form of irreligion, almost nine percent higher (and 2,846,240 more people) than the 2016 census. 7.2% did not state their religion, or gave an unclear response, meaning that over 46% of Australians did not state a religious affiliation in the 2021 census, a 6.4% increase from the last census.
When asked of their religious affiliation in the 2016 census, 29.6% of Australians (or 6,933,708 people) selected ""no religion."" This was more than seven percent higher (and 2,240,546 more people), than in the 2011 census. Additionally, in 2016, another 0.5% instead opted to specify their form of irreligion, writing it under ""other,"" hence resulting in 30.1% of Australians (or just over 7,040,700 people) selecting ""no religion."" A further 9.6% either did not state a religion, or gave a response that was unclear, meaning that 39.7% of Australians did not expressly state a religious affiliation in the 2016 census.
In the 2011 census, 22.3% of Australians (or 4,796,787 people) described themselves as having ""no religion."" This was more than three percent higher (and 1,090,232 people more) than in the 2006 census and was the second largest category. Another 2.014 million (9.4%) were in the ""not-stated or inadequately-defined"" category: so more than 31% of Australians did not state a religious affiliation in the 2011 census.
In the 2006 census, 18.7% of Australians (or 3,706,555 people) had described themselves as having ""no religion."" This was three percent higher than in the 2001 census and was the largest growth in total number of any religious option in that census (800,557 people). A further 2.4 million (11.9%) did not state a religion (or inadequately described it).  So just over 30% of Australians did not state a religious affiliation in the 2006 census.
In a 2004 worldwide study by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, 25% of Australians stated they do not believe in any gods."
Irreligion in Australia,"History
The first systematic recording of the religious affiliation of non-aboriginal Australians took place in the 1901 census. Since the 1901 census, the percentage of the census population not aligned with a religion has grown from 0.4% to just over 30% of the population. The census question about religion has been clearly labelled as ""optional"" since 1933. In 1971 the census instructed, ""If no religion, write none."" This was followed by ""a seven-fold increase"" in the figures from previous years for those declaring lack of religious beliefs.
Melbourne hosted the 2010 Global Atheist Convention (branded as the largest event of its kind in the world), sponsored by the Atheist Foundation of Australia and Atheist Alliance International. It took place at the Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre from 12 to 14 March 2010. Over 2,000 delegates attended, with all available tickets selling out more than five weeks prior to the event.
In 2010 The Australian Book of Atheism was published as ""the first collection to explore atheism from an Australian viewpoint"". The book was prompted by the disparity between Australia's increasing secularism and the increasing political and educational influence and funding of religion in Australia and contains essays by 33 authors (including Leslie Cannold, Robyn Williams, Tim Minchin, Graham Oppy, Philip Nitschke, Ian Hunter, Lyn Allison, Russell Blackford and Ian Robinson) on atheism-related topics in areas including history, law, education, philosophy and neurobiology."
Irreligion in Australia,"Irreligion in politics
Section 116 of the Constitution of Australia established Freedom of religion in 1901."
Irreligion in Australia,"Australians tend to be very suspicious of religion being intertwined with politics. Critic and commentator Robert Hughes stated ""Any Australian political candidate who declared their God was on their side would be laughed off the podium as an idiot or a wowser (prude, intrusive bluenose)."" Conversely, Australia has had many openly atheist or agnostic political figures elected to high positions, including prime ministers Gough Whitlam (whose philosophical position has been called ""post-Christian"") John Curtin, John Gorton, Bob Hawke and Julia Gillard. Governor-General Bill Hayden was voted as the Australian Humanist of the Year by the Council of Australian Humanist Societies (although he subsequently converted to Catholicism in 2018, many years after leaving office). Politicians Gareth Evans, Olive Zakharov and Lionel Murphy have also received this award.
A 2010 survey by The Sunday Age asked all 30 members of the First Rudd Ministry about their religious beliefs. Fifteen declined to comment, ten said they were ""Christian"" and three stated that they were atheists: health minister Nicola Roxon, defence personnel minister Greg Combet and financial services minister Chris Bowen. The remaining two, finance minister Lindsay Tanner and treasurer Wayne Swan, both described themselves as agnostic Christians, with Swan believing that ""values, rather than religion, are important in public life"". Tanner added, ""I doubt whether it would make much difference to a political career for someone to describe themselves as atheist.""
According to a 2009 Nielsen survey, 84% of 1000 respondents agree that religion and politics should be separate.
The Fusion Party refers to itself as a secular humanist party. It supports the separation of church and state and removing religious prayers, rituals, and bias from government and public institutions and their documentation, and abolishing blasphemy laws.
The political party, Reason Australia, supports a secular Australia."
Irreligion in Australia,"Polls, surveys and statistics
Although many Australians identify themselves as religious, the majority consider religion the least important aspect of their lives when compared with family, partners, work and career, leisure time and politics. This is reflected in Australia's church attendance rates, which are among the lowest in the world and in decline (reference from 2004). In explaining this phenomenon, writer and broadcaster Paul Collins said ""Australians are quietly spiritual rather than explicitly religious"" and the prominent historian Manning Clark defined Australian spirituality as ""a shy hope in the heart ... understated, wary of enthusiasm, anti-authoritarian, optimistic, open to others, self-deprecating and ultimately characterized by a serious quiet reverence, a deliberate silence, an inarticulate awe and a serious distaste for glib wordiness.""
Donald Horne, one of Australia's well-known public intellectuals, believed rising prosperity in post-war Australia influenced the decline in church-going and general lack of interest in religion. ""Churches no longer matter very much to most Australians. If there is a happy eternal life it's for everyone ... For many Australians the pleasures of this life are sufficiently satisfying that religion offers nothing of great appeal"", said Horne in his landmark work The Lucky Country (1964)."
Irreligion in Australia,"The 2021 census found that 38.9% of Australian-born Australians claim no religion. In 2011 adults aged 18–34 were more than twice as likely as those in 1976 to have no religion (29% compared with 12%). The highest proportion of people who had no religion were young adults. The ABS has revealed that in 2011, the number of males claiming no religion was higher than females, that women claiming no religion were more likely to have no children, and that marriages were mostly performed by civil celebrants. Tasmania had the highest rate of citizens reporting no religion, at 50% while the rate was lowest in New South Wales (33%)."
Irreligion in Australia,"Census data
Irreligious declarations of Australians by State or Territory according to the censuses from 2001 to 2021"
Irreligion in Australia,"Marriage data
Irreligious marriages in Australia accounted for 80.3% of marriages in 2019 and 2020  slightly more than in England and Wales in 2017 (78 per cent). The Australian figure is up from 41.3% of marriages in 1988 and just over 50% in 1999. Secular funerals have also risen in popularity: in 2014 the Sydney Morning Herald surveyed 104 funeral directors and 514 people over 50, finding that 6 in 10 funerals were conducted by civil celebrants."
Irreligion in Australia,"Belief
A Roy Morgan survey of 4,840 Australians between October and December 2013 found that 52.6% of Australians were Christian, while 37.6% had no religion. Norman Morris, the company's communications director, noted that the change in religious affiliation could indicate a growth of atheism and agnosticism, or a move away from identification with organised Christianity by theistic believers. He identified possible causes for the change, including ""morally conservative religious doctrines"" contrasting with progressive attitudes on abortion, same-sex marriage, the use of condoms in the global fight against the HIV pandemic. He also noted the drop coincided with public media attention around alleged religious cover-ups of child sexual abuse in the Child Abuse Royal Commission.
A 2006 study by Monash University, the Australian Catholic University and the Christian Research Association found that 52 per cent of Australians born between 1976 and 1990 had no belief in a god.
A 2008 global Gallup poll found nearly 70% of Australians stated religion as having no importance, much higher than their American counterparts and on par with similarly secular countries such as Japan, the Netherlands, Finland and France. Only a few Scandinavian countries (Norway, Sweden, Denmark) and post-Soviet states (Estonia) are markedly less religious. A 2008 Christian Science Monitor survey of 17 countries reported that youth from Australia and the United Kingdom were the least likely to observe religious practice or see any ""spiritual dimension"" to life.
A 2002 study by Gregory Paul found that 24% of Australians are atheist or agnostic. A 2009 Nielsen survey of 1,000 respondents, found 68% of Australians believe in god and/or a ""universal spirit"", while 24% believe in neither. The survey found that 49% of respondents claimed religion was not important in their lives. A 2009 survey of 1,718 Australians conducted by NCLS research found that 61.5% say that ""religious faith or spirituality"" was of little or no importance to career and lifestyle decisions.
In 2011, an Ipsos MORI survey found that 32% claimed no religion, while a Galaxy poll found 43% claimed no religion. A 2011 report by the American Physical Society claimed that religion may die out in Australia and eight other Western world countries.
According to NORC of Chicago, 20.6% of Australians don't believe in God and never have, while 9.7% are ""strong atheists"". Of those aged under 28, 26.8% have never believed in God and just 14.7% are certain God exists. A 2012 poll by Win-Gallup International found that 48% of Australians were not religious; 37% were religious; 10% declared themselves ""convinced atheists"". Australia placed in the bottom 14 for religiosity and in the top 11 for atheism.
An October 2011 McCrindle survey polled 1,094 respondents on attitudes Christianity, finding 50% of the respondents did not identify with a religion, and 17% claimed Jesus did not exist. A follow-up survey that 30% claimed no religion, 64% identified with Christianity and 6% belonged to other religions. 9% of the Christians were actively practising and regularly attending.
A 2011 survey by McCrindle Research found that for Australians, Christmas is predominantly secular. 46% of respondents said the highlights of Christmas were celebrations with family and friends, 36% said gift giving, Christmas trees and the general Christmas spirit; and 15% said attending religious services, carol singing and nativity plays. 19% said they would ""definitely"" attend a religious service, while 38% have never attended. 87% of people who are not religious celebrated Christmas to some extent."
Irreligion in Australia,"Religious attendance
According to the National Church Life Survey, between 1950 and 2007 monthly church attendance declined from 44% to 17%. A 2009 Christian Research Association survey of 1,718 Australians concurred, finding that 16% attended a religious service at least once a month, down from 23% in 1993. Subsequently, there have been claims that the rate of decline in church attendance has slowed; in 2016 there was a claim that monthly attendance at church was 16%. Yet, a 2013 survey by McCrindle Research found just 8% of Christians attend church at least once a month. The McCrindle survey also discovered that 47% of respondents do not go to church because it is ""irrelevant to my life"", 26% ""don't accept how it's taught"", while 19% ""don't believe in the bible"".
In 1996, 17.9% of Roman Catholics attended Mass on a typical Sunday, falling to 12.2% in 2011. In 2006, the median age of all Catholics aged 15 years and over was 44 years. In 1996, 27% of Roman Catholics aged 50 to 54 years regularly attended Mass, falling to 15% in 2006. While 30% aged 55–59 years regularly attended in 1996, only 19% attended in 2006. From 1996 to 2006 Mass attendance for Roman Catholics aged between 15 and 34 declined by just over 38%, going from 136,000 to 83,760 attendees.
In 2009, more than 40% of those brought up as Anglicans or Lutherans, 36% of those brought up in the Uniting Church and 28% of those brought up as Roman Catholics described themselves as having no religion. 33% of 15- to 29-year-olds identified with a Christian denomination in 2009, down from 60% in 1993.
A study in 2011 by the Christian Research Association discovered that the attendance of Uniting churches has declined by 30% over the previous 10 years. The association's president, Philip Hughes, has predicted that the decline in church attendance would continue ""at least for the next 20 years"". The study also found that the average age of people attending Catholic and Anglican churches is around 60 years."
Irreligion in Australia,See also
Irreligion in Australia,"
== References =="
Australian dollar,"The Australian dollar  (sign: $; code: AUD; also abbreviated A$ or sometimes AU$ to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies; and also referred to as the dollar or Aussie dollar) is the official currency and legal tender of Australia, including all of its external territories, and three independent sovereign Pacific Island states: Kiribati, Nauru, and Tuvalu. In April 2022, it was the sixth most-traded currency in the foreign exchange market and as of Q4 2023 the seventh  most-held reserve currency in global reserves.
The Australian dollar was introduced as a decimal currency on 14 February 1966 to replace the non-decimal Australian pound, with the conversion rate of two dollars to the pound (A£1 = A$2). It is subdivided into 100 cents. The $ symbol precedes the amount. On the introduction of the currency, the $ symbol was intended to have two strokes, but the version with one stroke has also always been acceptable. 
In 2023, there were A$4.4 billion in coins and A$101.3 billion in notes of Australian currency in circulation, or around A$6,700 per person in Australia, which includes cash reserves held by the banking system and cash in circulation in other countries or held as a foreign exchange reserve."
Australian dollar,"Constitutional basis
Section 51(xii) of the Constitution of Australia gives the Commonwealth (federal) Parliament the power to legislate with respect to ""currency, coinage, and legal tender"". The states are not allowed to coin money, in accordance with section 115 which provides that ""[a] State shall not coin money, nor make anything but gold and silver coin a legal tender in payment of debts"". Australian coins are now produced at the Royal Australian Mint in Canberra."
Australian dollar,"History
Background
Before Federation in 1901, the six colonies that comprised Australia had separate currencies, all of which closely replicated the British currency system, and were usually exchangeable with each other on a one-to-one basis. Hence Federation was not seen as urgently requiring a single, unified currency. For another 10 years, colonial banknotes and coins continued to be the main circulating currencies.
In 1902, a select committee of the House of Representatives, chaired by George Edwards, had recommended that Australia adopt a single, national decimal currency, with a pound divided into ten florins and each florin comprising 100 cents. However, the recommendation was not acted upon.
The Australian pound (A£) was introduced in 1910, at par with the pound sterling (A£1 = UK£1). Like the UK pound, it was divided into 240 pence, or 20 shillings (each comprising 12 pence). In December 1931, the Australian currency was devalued by 25%, so that one pound five shillings Australian was equivalent to one pound sterling.
In 1937, a banking royal commission, appointed by the Lyons government, recommended that Australia adopt ""a system of decimal coinage ... based upon the division of the Australian pound into 1000 parts"". This recommendation was not accepted either."
Australian dollar,"Adoption of the dollar
In February 1959, treasurer Harold Holt appointed a Decimal Currency Committee, chaired by Walter D. Scott, to examine the merits of decimalisation. The committee reported in August 1960 in favour of decimalisation and proposed that a new currency be introduced (from February 1963), to be modelled on South Africa's replacement of the South African pound with the rand (worth 10 shillings or 1⁄2 pound). The Menzies government announced its support for decimalisation in July 1961, but delayed the process in order to give further consideration to the implementation process. In April 1963, Holt announced that a decimal currency was scheduled to be introduced in February 1966, with a base unit equal to 10 shillings, and that a Decimal Currency Board would be established to oversee the transition process.
A public consultation process was held in which over 1,000 names were suggested for the new currency. This was reduced to a shortlist of seven names: austral, crown, dollar, pound, regal, tasman and royal. In June 1963, Holt announced that the new currency would be called the ""royal"". This met with widespread public disapproval, and three months later it was announced that it would instead be named the ""dollar"".
The pound was replaced by the dollar on 14 February 1966 with the conversion rate of A$2 = A£1. For example, a pre-decimal amount of nine pounds, sixteen shillings and sixpence (£9 16s 6d) became $19.65 in terms of dollars and cents. Since Australia was still part of the fixed-exchange sterling area, the exchange rate was fixed to the pound sterling at a rate of A$1 = 8s sterling (or £1 stg = A$2.50, and in turn £1 stg = US$2.80). In 1967, Australia effectively left the sterling area when the pound sterling was devalued against the US dollar from US$2.80 to US$2.40, but the Australian dollar chose to retain its peg to the US dollar at A$1 = US$1.12 (hence appreciating in value versus sterling).
The Australian dollar is legal tender in its external territories: Christmas Island, Cocos (Keeling) Islands, and Norfolk Island; and is also official currency in Kiribati, Nauru, and Tuvalu. It was legal tender in Papua New Guinea until 31 December 1975 when it was replaced by the kina, and in Solomon Islands until 1977 when it was replaced by the Solomon Islands dollar."
Australian dollar,"Coins
In 1966, coins were introduced in denominations of 1 and 2 cents (bronze); 5, 10, and 20 cents (cupronickel; 75% copper, 25% nickel); and 50 cents (silver, then cupronickel). The 50-cent coins in 80% silver were no longer minted after March 1968 due to the intrinsic value of the silver content rising to exceed the face value of the coins. Aluminium bronze (92% copper, 6% aluminium, 2% nickel) 1 dollar coins were introduced in 1984, followed by aluminium bronze 2 dollar coins in 1988, to replace the banknotes of that value. In everyday Australian parlance, these coins collectively are referred to as ""gold coins"". 1 and 2 cent coins were discontinued in 1991 and withdrawn from circulation in 1992; since then cash transactions have been rounded to the nearest 5 cents."
Australian dollar,"Australia's coins are produced by the Royal Australian Mint, which is located in the nation's capital, Canberra. Since opening in 1965, the Mint has produced more than 14 billion circulating coins, and has the capacity to produce more than two million coins per day, or more than 600 million coins per year.
Current Australian 5, 10 and 20 cent coins are identical in size to the former Australian, New Zealand, and British sixpence, shilling, and two shilling (florin) coins. Pre-decimal Australian coins remain legal tender for 10 cents per shilling. Before 2006 the old New Zealand 5, 10 and 20 cent coins were often mistaken for Australian coins of the same value, and vice versa, and therefore circulated in both countries. The UK replaced these coins with smaller versions from 1990 to 1993, as did New Zealand in 2006. Still, some confusion occurs with the larger-denomination coins in the two countries; Australia's $1 coin is similar in size to New Zealand's $2 coin, and the New Zealand $1 coin is similar in size to Australia's $2 coin.
With a mass of 15.55 grams (0.549 oz) and a diameter of 31.51 millimetres (1+1⁄4 in), the Australian 50-cent coin is one of the largest coins used in the world today."
Australian dollar,"Commemorative coins
The Royal Australian Mint also has an international reputation for producing quality numismatic coins. It has first issued commemorative 50-cent coins in 1970, commemorating James Cook's exploration along the east coast of the Australian continent, followed in 1977 by a coin for Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee, the wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer in 1981, the Brisbane Commonwealth Games in 1982, and the Australian Bicentenary in 1988. Issues expanded into greater numbers in the 1990s and the 21st century, responding to collector demand. Commemorative designs have also been featured on the circulating two dollar, one dollar, and 20 cent coins.
In commemoration of the 40th anniversary of decimal currency, the 2006 mint proof and uncirculated sets included one- and two-cent coins. In early 2013, Australia's first triangular coin was introduced to mark the 25th anniversary of the opening of Parliament House. The silver $5 coin is 99.9% silver, and depicts Parliament House as viewed from one of its courtyards."
Australian dollar,"Banknotes
First series
The first paper issues of the Australian dollar were issued in 1966. The $1, $2, $10 and $20 notes had exact equivalents in the former pound notes. The $5 note was issued in 1967, the $50 was issued in 1973 and the $100 was issued in 1984.
The $1 banknote was replaced by a $1 coin in 1984, while the $2 banknote was replaced by a smaller $2 coin in 1988. Although no longer printed, all previous notes of the Australian dollar remain legal tender.
Shortly after the changeover, substantial counterfeiting of $10 notes was detected. This provided an impetus for the Reserve Bank of Australia to develop new note technologies jointly with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, culminating in the introduction of the first polymer banknote in 1988."
Australian dollar,"First polymer series
Australia was the first country to produce polymer banknotes, more specifically made of polypropylene polymer, which were produced by Note Printing Australia. These revolutionary polymer notes are cleaner than paper notes, are more durable and easily recyclable.
The first polymer banknote was issued in 1988 as a $10 note commemorating the bicentenary of European settlement in Australia. The note depicted on one side a young male Aboriginal person in body paint, with other elements of Aboriginal culture. On the reverse side was the ship Supply from the First Fleet, with a background of Sydney Cove, as well as a group of people to illustrate the diverse backgrounds from which Australia has evolved over 200 years.
The first polymer series was rolled out starting 1992 and featured the following persons:"
Australian dollar,"The $100 note features world-renowned soprano Dame Nellie Melba (1861–1931), and the distinguished soldier, engineer and administrator General Sir John Monash (1865–1931).
The $50 note features Aboriginal writer and inventor David Unaipon (1872–1967), and Australia's first female parliamentarian, Edith Cowan (1861–1932).
The $20 note features the founder of the world's first aerial medical service (the Royal Flying Doctor Service), the Reverend John Flynn (1880–1951), and Mary Reibey (1777–1855), who arrived in Australia as a convict in 1792 and went on to become a successful shipping magnate and philanthropist.
The $10 note features the poets Banjo Paterson (1864–1941) and Dame Mary Gilmore (1865–1962). This note incorporates micro-printed excerpts of Paterson's and Gilmore's work.
The $5 note features Queen Elizabeth II and Parliament House, Canberra, the national capital.
A special centenary issue of the $5 note in 2001 featured Sir Henry Parkes and Catherine Helen Spence. In 2015–2016 there were petitions to feature Fred Hollows on the upgraded $5 note, but failed to push through when the new note was introduced on 1 September 2016.
Australia also prints polymer banknotes for a number of other countries through Note Printing Australia, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Reserve Bank of Australia. Note Printing Australia prints polymer notes or simply supplies the polymer substrate for a growing number of other countries including Bangladesh, Brunei, Chile, Kuwait, Malaysia, Mexico, Nepal, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Romania, Samoa, Singapore, Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka and Vietnam. Many other countries are showing a strong interest in the new technology."
Australian dollar,"Second polymer series
On 27 September 2012, the Reserve Bank of Australia stated that it had ordered work on a project to upgrade the current banknotes. The upgraded banknotes would incorporate a number of new future proof security features and include tactile features like Braille dots for ease of use of the visually impaired. All persons featured on the first polymer series were retained on the second polymer series. However, following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the government has announced that the $5 note will be replaced with a design reflecting Indigenous history and culture."
Australian dollar,"Exchange rates
Exchange rate history
Prior to 1983, Australia maintained a fixed exchange rate. The Australian pound was initially at par from 1910 with the British pound or A£1 = UK£1; from 1931 it was devalued to A£1 = 16s sterling. This reflected its historical ties as well as a view about the stability in value of the British pound.
From 1946 to 1971, Australia maintained a peg under the Bretton Woods system, a fixed exchange rate system that pegged the U.S. dollar to gold, but the Australian dollar was effectively pegged to sterling until 1967 at £1 sterling = A£1 5s = A$2.50 = US$2.80. In 1967 Australia did not follow the pound sterling devaluation and remained fixed to the U.S. dollar at A$1 = US$1.12.
With the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, Australia converted the traditional peg to a fluctuating rate against the US dollar. In September 1974, Australia valued the dollar against a basket of currencies called the trade weighted index (TWI) in an effort to reduce the fluctuations associated with its tie to the US dollar. The daily TWI valuation was changed in November 1976 to a periodically adjusted valuation.
The highest valuation of the Australian dollar relative to the U.S. dollar was during the period of the peg to the U.S. dollar.  On 9 September 1973, the peg was adjusted to US$1.4875, the fluctuation limits being changed to US$1.485–US$1.490; on both 7 December 1973 and 10 December 1973, the noon buying rate in New York City for cable transfers payable in foreign currencies reached its highest point of 1.4885 U.S. dollars to one dollar."
Australian dollar,"In December 1983, the Australian Labor government led by Prime Minister Bob Hawke and Treasurer Paul Keating floated the dollar, with the exchange rate reflecting the balance of payments as well as supply and demand on international money markets. The decision was made on 8 December 1983 and announced on 9 December 1983.
In the two decades that followed, its highest value relative to the US dollar was $0.881 in December 1988. The lowest ever value of the dollar after it was floated was 47.75 US cents in April 2001. It returned to above 96 US cents in June 2008, and reached 98.49 later that year. Although the value of the dollar fell significantly from this high towards the end of 2008, it gradually recovered in 2009 to 94 US cents.
On 15 October 2010, the dollar reached parity with the US dollar for the first time since becoming a freely traded currency, trading above US$1 for a few seconds. The currency then traded above parity for a sustained period of several days in November, and fluctuated around that mark into 2011. On 27 July 2011, the dollar hit a record high since floating, at $1.1080 against the US dollar. Some commentators speculated that its high value that year was related to Europe's sovereign debt crisis, and Australia's strong ties with material importers in Asia and in particular China.
Since the end of China's large-scale purchases of Australian commodities in 2013, however, the Australian dollar's value versus the US dollar has since plunged to $0.88 as of end-2013, and to as low as $0.57 in March 2020. As of 2024, it has traded at a range of $0.63 to $0.68."
Australian dollar,"Determinants of value
In 2016, the Australian dollar was the fifth most traded currency in world foreign exchange markets, accounting for 6.9% of the world's daily share (down from 8.6% in 2013) behind the United States dollar, the euro, the Japanese yen and the pound sterling.
The Australian dollar is popular with currency traders, because of the comparatively high interest rates in Australia, the relative freedom of the foreign exchange market from government intervention, the general stability of Australia's economy and political system, and the prevailing view that the Australian dollar offers diversification benefits in a portfolio containing the major world currencies, especially because of its greater exposure to Asian economies and the commodities cycle.
Economists posit that commodity prices are the dominant driver of the Australian dollar, and this means changes in exchange rates of the Australian dollar occur in ways opposite to many other currencies. For decades, Australia's balance of trade has depended primarily upon commodity exports such as minerals and agricultural products. This means the Australian dollar varies significantly during the business cycle, rallying during global booms as Australia exports raw materials, and falling during recessions as mineral prices slump or when domestic spending overshadows the export earnings outlook. This movement is in the opposite direction to other reserve currencies, which tend to be stronger during market slumps as traders move value from falling stocks into cash.
The Australian dollar is a reserve currency and one of the most traded currencies in the world. Other factors in its popularity include a relative lack of central bank intervention, and general stability of the Australian economy and government. In January 2011 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Alexey Ulyukaev announced that the Central Bank of Russia would begin keeping Australian dollar reserves."
Australian dollar,"Current exchange rates
Legal tender
Within Australia
Australian notes are legal tender throughout Australia by virtue of section 36(1) of the Reserve Bank Act 1959 without an amount limit. Section 16 of the Currency Act 1965 similarly provides that Australian coins intended for general circulation are also legal tender, but only for the following amounts:"
Australian dollar,"1c and 2c coins (withdrawn from circulation from February 1992, but still legal tender): for payments not exceeding 20c
5c, 10c, 20c and 50c (of any combination): for payments not exceeding $5
$1 coins: for payments not exceeding $10
$2 coins: for payments not exceeding $20
Non-circulating $10 coins: for payments not exceeding $100
Coins of other denominations: no lower limit
However, being legal tender does not necessarily oblige businesses to accept cash. The Reserve Bank states that businesses can set commercial terms for a transaction that requires the use of a non-cash payment. However, a business may technically be required to accept cash if they are taken to court, but this is usually not a viable option for consumers."
Australian dollar,"Outside Australia
Australian notes and coins are also legal tender in the independent sovereign states of Kiribati, Nauru, and Tuvalu. Nauru never had its own currency. Tuvalu and Kiribati additionally had their respective Tuvaluan and Kiribati dollars at par with the Australian dollar. They are legal tender in their respective countries but not in Australia. However, both countries no longer produce coinage since the 1990s and have never produced their own banknotes. As a result, the Australian dollar is the dominant currency in both countries.
Tuvalu also issues non-circulating commemorative bullion coins produced by the Perth Mint."
Australian dollar,"See also
Banking in Australia
Brass razoo
Coins of Australia
Economy of Australia
Note Printing Australia
Section 51 (xii) of the Constitution of Australia"
Australian dollar,"Explanatory notes
References
Citations
Sources
External links"
Australian dollar,"Sound recording of 1966 Decimal Currency radio advertisement held at the National Archives of Australia
Reserve Bank of Australia: Current Banknotes
The Perth Mint is Australia's precious metals mint, making non-circulating/collector coins in silver, gold, and platinum.
Note Printing Australia is the printer of Australia's notes, and also inventor of the abovementioned polymer banknotes, and world exporter of this technology.
The Money Tracker site allows users to track Australian banknotes as they circulate around Australia.
Images of historic and modern Australian bank notes
Reserve Bank of Australia – daily value of AUD against 13 currencies, special drawing right and trade weighted index
Reserve Bank of Australia – historical data of AUD since 1969 (various .xls files)
The banknotes of Australia (in English and German)"
South Australia,"South Australia (commonly abbreviated as SA) is a state in the southern central part of Australia. It covers some of the most arid parts of the country. With a total land area of 984,321 square kilometres (380,048 sq mi), it is the fourth-largest of Australia's states and territories by area, and second smallest state by population. It has a total of 1.8 million people. Its population is the second most highly centralised in Australia, after Western Australia, with more than 77 percent of South Australians living in the capital Adelaide, or its environs. Other population centres in the state are relatively small; Mount Gambier, the second-largest centre, has a population of 26,878.
South Australia shares borders with all the other mainland states. It is bordered to the west by Western Australia, to the north by the Northern Territory, to the north-east by Queensland, to the east by New South Wales, to the south-east by Victoria, and to the south by the Great Australian Bight. The state comprises less than 8 percent of the Australian population and ranks fifth in population among the six states and two territories. The majority of its people reside in greater Metropolitan Adelaide. Most of the remainder are settled in fertile areas along the south-eastern coast and River Murray. The state's colonial origins are unique in Australia as a freely settled, planned British province, rather than as a convict settlement. Colonial government commenced on 28 December 1836, when the members of the council were sworn in near the Old Gum Tree.
As with the rest of the continent, the region has a long history of human occupation by numerous tribes and languages. The South Australian Company established a temporary settlement at Kingscote, Kangaroo Island, on 26 July 1836, five months before Adelaide was founded. The guiding principle behind settlement was that of systematic colonisation, a theory espoused by Edward Gibbon Wakefield that was later employed by the New Zealand Company. The goal was to establish the province as a centre of civilisation for free immigrants, promising civil liberties and religious tolerance. Although its history has been marked by periods of economic hardship, South Australia has remained politically innovative and culturally vibrant. Today, it is known for its fine wine and numerous cultural festivals. The state's economy is dominated by the agricultural, manufacturing and mining industries."
South Australia,"History
Evidence of human activity in South Australia dates back as far as 20,000 years, with flint mining activity and rock art in the Koonalda Cave on the Nullarbor Plain. In addition wooden spears and tools were made in an area now covered in peat bog in the South East. Kangaroo Island was inhabited long before the island was cut off by rising sea levels. According to mitochondrial DNA research, Aboriginal people reached Eyre Peninsula 49,000-45,000 years ago from both the east (clockwise, along the coast, from northern Australia) and the west (anti-clockwise).: 189 
The first recorded European sighting of the South Australian coast was in 1627 when the Dutch ship the Gulden Zeepaert, captained by François Thijssen, examined and mapped a section of the coastline as far east as the Nuyts Archipelago. Thijssen named the whole of the country eastward of the Leeuwin ""Nuyts Land"", after a distinguished passenger on board; the Hon. Pieter Nuyts, one of the Councillors of India.
The coastline of South Australia was first mapped by Matthew Flinders and Nicolas Baudin in 1802, excepting the inlet later named the Port Adelaide River which was first discovered in 1831 by Captain Collet Barker and later accurately charted in 1836–37 by Colonel William Light, leader of the South Australian Colonization Commissioners' 'First Expedition' and first Surveyor-General of South Australia.
The land which now forms the state of South Australia was claimed for Britain in 1788 as part of the colony of New South Wales. Although the new colony included almost two-thirds of the continent, early settlements were all on the eastern coast and only a few intrepid explorers ventured this far west. It took more than forty years before any serious proposal to establish settlements in the south-western portion of New South Wales were put forward.
On 15 August 1834, the British Parliament passed the South Australia Act 1834 (Foundation Act), which empowered His Majesty to erect and establish a province or provinces in southern Australia. The act stated that the land between 132° and 141° east longitude and from 26° south latitude to the southern ocean would be allotted to the intended colony, and it would be convict-free."
South Australia,"In contrast to the rest of Australia, terra nullius did not apply to the new province. The Letters Patent, which used the enabling provisions of the South Australia Act 1834 to fix the boundaries of the Province of South Australia, provided that ""nothing in those our Letters Patent shall affect or be construed to affect the rights of any Aboriginal Natives of the said Province to the actual occupation and enjoyment in their own Persons or in the Persons of their Descendants of any Lands therein now actually occupied or enjoyed by such Natives."" Although the patent guaranteed land rights under force of law for the indigenous inhabitants, it was ignored by the South Australian Company authorities and squatters. Despite strong reference to the rights of the native population in the initial proclamation by the Governor, there were many conflicts and deaths in the Australian Frontier Wars in South Australia."
South Australia,"Survey was required before settlement of the province, and the Colonization Commissioners for South Australia appointed William Light as the leader of its 'First Expedition', tasked with examining 1500 miles of the South Australian coastline and selecting the best site for the capital, and with then planning and surveying the site of the city into one-acre Town Sections and its surrounds into 134-acre Country Sections.
Eager to commence the establishment of their whale and seal fisheries, the South Australian Company sought, and obtained, the Commissioners' permission to send Company ships to South Australia, in advance of the surveys and ahead of the Commissioners' colonists.
The company's settlement of seven vessels and 636 people was temporarily made at Kingscote on Kangaroo Island, until the official site of the capital was selected by William Light, where the City of Adelaide is currently located. The first immigrants arrived at Holdfast Bay (near the present day Glenelg) in November 1836.
The commencement of colonial government was proclaimed on 28 December 1836, now known as Proclamation Day.
South Australia is the only Australian state to have never received British convicts. Another free settlement, Swan River colony was established in 1829 but Western Australia later sought convict labour, and in 1849 Western Australia was formally constituted as a penal colony. Although South Australia was constituted such that convicts could never be transported to the Province, some emancipated or escaped convicts or expirees made their own way there, both prior to 1836, or later, and may have constituted 1–2% of the early population.
The plan for the province was that it would be an experiment in reform, addressing the problems perceived in British society. There was to be religious freedom and no established religion. Sales of land to colonists created an Emigration Fund to pay the costs of transferring a poor young labouring population to South Australia. In early 1838 the colonists became concerned after it was reported that convicts who had escaped from the eastern states may make their way to South Australia. The South Australia Police was formed in April 1838 to protect the community and enforce government regulations. Their principal role was to run the first temporary gaol, a two-room hut.
The current flag of South Australia was adopted on 13 January 1904, and is a British blue ensign defaced with the state badge. The badge is described as a piping shrike with wings outstretched on a yellow disc. The state badge is believed to have been designed by Robert Craig of Adelaide's School of Design."
South Australia,"Geography
The terrain consists largely of arid and semi-arid rangelands, with several low mountain ranges. The most important (but not tallest) is the Mount Lofty-Flinders Ranges system, which extends north about 800 kilometres (500 mi) from Cape Jervis to the northern end of Lake Torrens. The highest point in the state is not in those ranges; Mount Woodroffe (1,435 metres (4,708 ft)) is in the Musgrave Ranges in the extreme northwest of the state. 
The south-western portion of the state consists of the sparsely inhabited Nullarbor Plain, fronted by the cliffs of the Great Australian Bight. Features of the coast include Spencer Gulf and the Eyre and Yorke Peninsulas that surround it. The Temperate Grassland of South Australia is situated to the east of Gulf St Vincent."
South Australia,"The principal industries and exports of South Australia are wheat, wine and wool. More than half of Australia's wines are produced in the South Australian wine regions which principally include Barossa Valley, Clare Valley, McLaren Vale, Coonawarra, the Riverland and the Adelaide Hills. See South Australian wine."
South Australia,"South Australian boundaries
South Australia has boundaries with every other Australian mainland state and territory except the Australian Capital Territory and the Jervis Bay Territory. The Western Australia border has a history involving the South Australian government astronomer, G.F. Dodwell, and the Western Australian Government Astronomer, H.B. Curlewis, marking the border on the ground in the 1920s.
In 1863, that part of New South Wales to the north of South Australia was annexed to South Australia, by letters patent, as the ""Northern Territory of South Australia"", which became shortened to the Northern Territory on 6 July 1863. The Northern Territory was handed to the federal government in 1911 and became a separate territory.
According to Australian maps, South Australia's south coast is flanked by the Southern Ocean, but official international consensus defines the Southern Ocean as extending north from the pole only to 60°S or 55°S, at least 17 degrees of latitude further south than the most southern point of South Australia. Thus the south coast is officially adjacent to the south-most portion of the Indian Ocean. See Southern Ocean: Existence and definitions."
South Australia,"Climate
The southern part of the state has a Mediterranean climate, while the rest of the state has either an arid or semi-arid climate. South Australia's main temperature range is 29 °C (84 °F) in January and 15 °C (59 °F) in July. 
The highest maximum temperature ever recorded was 50.7 °C (123.3 °F) at Oodnadatta on 2 January 1960, which is the highest official temperature recorded in Australia. The lowest minimum temperature was −8.2 °C (17.2 °F) at Yongala on 20 July 1976. The region's overall dry weather is owed to the Australian High on the Great Australian Bight."
South Australia,"Economy
As of 2016, South Australia had 746,105 people employed out of a total workforce of 806,593, giving an unemployment rate of 7.5%. South Australia's largest employment sector is health care and social assistance, making up 14.8% of the state's total employment, followed by retail (10.7%), education and training (8.6%), manufacturing (8%), and construction (7.6%). South Australia's economy relies on exports more than any other state in Australia.
South Australia's credit rating was upgraded to AAA by Standard & Poor's in September 2004 and to AAA by Moody's in November 2004, the highest credit ratings achievable by any company or sovereign. The state had previously lost these ratings in the State Bank collapse. However, in 2012 Standard & Poor's downgraded the state's credit rating to AA+ due to declining revenues, new spending initiatives and a weaker than expected budgetary outlook.
South Australia receives the least amount of federal funding for its local road network of all states on a per capita and a per kilometre basis."
South Australia,"During 2019-20: South Australia's gross state product (GSP) fell 1.4% in chain volume (real) terms (nationally, gross domestic product (GDP) fell 0.3%). South Australia came out of the COVID-19 recession better than the other Australian states, with the economy growing by 3.9% in the 2020–21 financial year. This was the first time since the Australian Bureau of Statistics began collecting data in 1990 that South Australia had outperformed the other states. The recovery was driven in part by growth in the agricultural sector, which increased its production by almost 24% thanks to the end of a drought."
South Australia,"Agriculture
Cereals, legumes and oilseeds
Wheat, barley, oats, rye, peas, beans, chickpeas, lentils and canola are grown in South Australia."
South Australia,"Fruit and vegetables
Apples, pears, cherries and strawberries are grown in the Adelaide Hills. Tomatoes, capsicums, cucumbers, brassicas, lettuce and carrots are grown on the Northern Adelaide Plains at Virginia. Almonds, citrus and stone fruit are grown in the Riverland. Potatoes, onions and carrots are grown in the Murray Mallee region. Potatoes are grown on Kangaroo Island."
South Australia,"Viticulture
South Australia produces more than half of all Australian wine, including almost 80% of Australia's premium wines."
South Australia,"Energy
South Australia has the lead over other Australian states for its commercialisation and commitment to renewable energy. It is now the leading producer of wind power in Australia. Renewable energy is a growing source of electricity in South Australia, and there is potential for growth from this particular industry of the state's economy. The Hornsdale Power Reserve is a bank of grid-connected batteries adjacent to the Hornsdale Wind Farm in South Australia's Mid-North region. At the time of construction in late 2017, it was billed as the largest lithium-ion battery in the world."
South Australia,"Mining
The Olympic Dam mine near Roxby Downs in northern South Australia is the largest deposit of uranium in the world, possessing more than a third of the world's low-cost recoverable reserves and 70% of Australia's. The mine, owned and operated by BHP, presently accounts for 9% of global uranium production. The Olympic Dam mine is also the world's fourth-largest remaining copper deposit, and the world's fifth largest gold deposit. There was a proposal to vastly expand the operations of the mine, making it the largest open-cut mine in the world, but in 2012 the BHP Billiton board decided not to go ahead with it at that time due to then lower commodity prices.
The remote town of Coober Pedy produces more opal than anywhere else in the world. Opal was first discovered near the town in 1915, and the town became the site of an opal rush, enticing immigrants from southern and eastern Europe in the aftermath of World War II."
South Australia,"Education and research
Higher education and research in Adelaide forms an important part of South Australia's economy. The South Australian Government and educational institutions have attempted to position Adelaide as Australia's education hub and have marketed it as a Learning City. The number of international students studying in Adelaide has increased rapidly in recent years to 30,726 in 2015, of which 1,824 were secondary school students. Foreign institutions have been attracted to set up campuses to increase its attractiveness as an education hub. Adelaide is the birthplace of three Nobel laureates, more than any other Australian city: physicist William Lawrence Bragg and pathologists Howard Florey and Robin Warren, all of whom completed secondary and tertiary education at St Peter's College and the University of Adelaide.
Adelaide is home to research institutes, including the Royal Institution of Australia, established in 2009 as a counterpart to the two-hundred-year-old Royal Institution of Great Britain. Most of the research organisations are clustered in the Adelaide metropolitan area:"
South Australia,"The east end of North Terrace: SA Pathology; Hanson Institute; National Wine Centre.
The west end of North Terrace: South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute (SAHMRI), located next to the Royal Adelaide Hospital.
The Waite Research Precinct: SARDI Head Office and Plant Research Centre; AWRI; ACPFG; CSIRO research laboratories. SARDI also has establishments at Glenside and West Beach.
Edinburgh, South Australia: DSTO; BAE Systems (Australia); Lockheed Martin Australia Electronic Systems.
Technology Park (Mawson Lakes): BAE Systems; Optus; Raytheon; Topcon; Lockheed Martin Australia Electronic Systems.
Research Park at Thebarton: businesses involved in materials engineering, biotechnology, environmental services, information technology, industrial design, laser/optics technology, health products, engineering services, radar systems, telecommunications and petroleum services.
Science Park (adjacent to Flinders University): Playford Capital.
The Basil Hetzel Institute for Translational Health Research in Woodville the research arm of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Adelaide
The Joanna Briggs Institute, a global research collaboration for evidence-based healthcare with its headquarters in North Adelaide."
South Australia,"Government
South Australia is a constitutional monarchy with King  Charles III as sovereign, and the Governor of South Australia as his
representative. It is a state of the Commonwealth of Australia. The bicameral Parliament of South Australia consists of the lower house known as the House of Assembly and the upper house known as the Legislative Council. General elections are held every four years, the last being the 2022 election.
Initially, the Governor of South Australia held almost total power, derived from the letters patent of the imperial government to create the colony. He was accountable only to the British Colonial Office, and thus democracy did not exist in the colony. A new body was created to advise the governor on the administration of South Australia in 1843 called the Legislative Council. It consisted of three representatives of the British Government and four colonists appointed by the governor. The governor retained total executive power.
In 1851, the Imperial Parliament enacted the Australian Colonies Government Act, which allowed for the election of representatives to each of the colonial legislatures and the drafting of a constitution to properly create representative and responsible government in South Australia. Later that year, propertied male colonists were allowed to vote for 16 members on a new 24 seat Legislative Council. Eight members continued to be appointed by the governor."
South Australia,"The main responsibility of this body was to draft a constitution for South Australia. The body drafted the most democratic constitution ever seen in the British Empire and provided for universal manhood suffrage. It created the bicameral Parliament of South Australia. For the first time in the colony, the executive was elected by the people, and the colony used the Westminster system, where the government is the party or coalition that exerts a majority in the House of Assembly. The Legislative Council remained a predominantly conservative chamber elected by property owners."
South Australia,"Women's suffrage in Australia took a leap forward – enacted in 1895 and taking effect from the 1896 colonial election, South Australia was the first government in Australia and only the second in the world after New Zealand to allow women to vote, and the first in the world to allow women to stand for election. In 1897 Catherine Helen Spence was the first woman in Australia to be a candidate for political office when she was nominated to be one of South Australia's delegates to the conventions that drafted the constitution. South Australia became an original state of the Commonwealth of Australia on 1 January 1901.
Although the lower house had universal suffrage, the upper house, the Legislative Council, remained the exclusive domain of property owners until the Labor government of Don Dunstan managed to achieve reform of the chamber in 1973. Property qualifications were removed and the Council became a body elected via proportional representation by a single state-wide electorate.
Since the following 1975 South Australian state election, no one party has had control of the state's upper house with the balance of power controlled by a variety of minor parties and independents."
South Australia,"Local government
Local government in South Australia is established by the Constitution Act 1934 (SA), the Local Government Act 1999 (SA), and the Local Government (Elections) Act 1999 (SA). South Australia contains 68 councils and 6 Aboriginal and outback communities. Local councils, elected on a four-yearly basis, are responsible for local roads and stormwater management, waste collection, planning and development, fire prevention and hazard management, dog and cat management and control, parking control, public health and food inspections, and other services for their local communities. Councils have the power to raise revenue for their activities, which is mostly achieved through ""council rates"", a tax based on property valuations. Council rates make up about 70% of council revenue, but account for less than 4% of total taxes paid by Australians."
South Australia,"Demographics
As at December 2021 the population of South Australia was 1,806,599.
A majority of the state's population lives within Greater Adelaide's metropolitan area which had an estimated population of 
1,333,927 in June 2017. Other significant population centres include Mount Gambier (29,505), Victor Harbor-Goolwa (26,334), Whyalla (21,976), Murray Bridge (18,452), Port Lincoln (16,281), Port Pirie (14,267), and Port Augusta (13,957)."
South Australia,"Ancestry and immigration
At the 2016 census, the most commonly nominated ancestries were: "
South Australia,"28.9% of the population was born overseas at the 2016 census. The five largest groups of overseas-born were from England (5.8%), India (1.6%), China (1.5%), Italy (1.1%) and Vietnam (0.9%).
2% of the population, or 34,184 people, identified as Indigenous Australians (Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders) in 2016."
South Australia,"Language
At the 2016 census, 78.2% of the population spoke only English at home. The other languages most commonly spoken at home were Italian (1.7%), Standard Mandarin (1.7%), Greek (1.4%), Vietnamese (1.1%), and Cantonese (0.6%)."
South Australia,"Religion
At the 2016 census, overall 53.9% of responses identified some variant of Christianity. 9% of respondents chose not to state a religion. The most commonly nominated responses were 'No Religion' (35.4%), Catholicism (18%), Anglicanism (10%) and Uniting Church (7.1%).
South Australia was the first Australian colony not to have an official state religion, and the colony became attractive to people who had experienced religious discrimination, including Methodists and Unitarians. South Australia also had thousands of Prussian Old Lutheran immigrants, some of whom established their own form of Lutheranism. As a result, the Lutheran Church of Australia remains separate from the German Lutheran church to this day. South Australia was the location of the first Muslim mosque in Australia.
Most of the state's original colonists were Christian, but of many denominations, most with their own meeting place in the city square. Adelaide has been known as the ""City of Churches"" since at least 1868. Some of the oldest remaining buildings in the city are churches."
South Australia,"Education
Primary and secondary
On 1 January 2009, the school leaving age was raised to 17 (having previously been 15 and then 16). Education is compulsory for all children until age 17, unless they are working or undergoing other training. The majority of students stay on to complete their South Australian Certificate of Education (SACE). School education is the responsibility of the South Australian government, but the public and private education systems are funded jointly by it and the Commonwealth Government.
The South Australian Government provides, to schools on a per student basis, 89 percent of the total Government funding while the Commonwealth contributes 11 percent. Since the early 1970s it has been an ongoing controversy that 68 percent of Commonwealth funding (increasing to 75% by 2008) goes to private schools that are attended by 32% of the states students. Private schools often counter this by saying that they receive less State Government funding than public schools, and in 2004 the main private school funding came from the Australian government, not the state government.
On 14 June 2013, South Australia became the third Australian state to sign up to the Australian Federal Government's Gonski Reform Program. This will see funding for primary and secondary education to South Australia increased by $1.1 billion before 2019.
The academic year in South Australia generally runs from the end of January until mid-December for primary and secondary schools. The SA schools operate on a four-term basis. Schools are closed for the South Australia public holidays."
South Australia,"Tertiary
There are three public and four private universities in South Australia. The three public universities are the University of Adelaide (established 1874, third oldest in Australia), Flinders University (est. 1966) and the University of South Australia (est. 1991). The four private universities are Torrens University Australia (est. 2013), Carnegie Mellon University - Australia (est. 2006), University College London's School of Energy and Resources (Australia), and Cranfield University. All six have their main campus in the Adelaide metropolitan area: Adelaide and UniSA on North Terrace in the city; CMU, UCL and Cranfield are co-located on Victoria Square in the city, and Flinders at Bedford Park.
The University of Adelaide is part of the Group of Eight, a company of Australia's eight leading research universities. As of 2022, it is ranked by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings as one of the top 100 universities in the world. It was the first university in Australia to admit women to academic courses, doing so in 1881. In 2018, the University of Adelaide and the University of South Australia announced plans to merge, but these plans did not come to fruition due in part to disagreements over what to name the new university and which of the university's vice-chancellors would become the vice-chancellor of the amalgamated university."
South Australia,"Vocational education
Tertiary vocational education is provided by a range of Registered Training Organisations (RTOs) which are regulated at Commonwealth level. The range of RTOs delivering education include public, private and 'enterprise' providers i.e. employing organisations who run an RTO for their own employees or members.
The largest public provider of vocational education is TAFE South Australia which is made up of colleges throughout the state, many of these in rural areas, providing tertiary education to as many people as possible. In South Australia, TAFE is funded by the state government and run by the South Australian Department of Further Education, Employment, Science and Technology (DFEEST). Each TAFE SA campus provides a range of courses with its own specialisation."
South Australia,"Transport
Historical transport in South Australia
After settlement, the major form of transport in South Australia was ocean transport. Limited land transport was provided by horses and bullocks. In the mid 19th century, the state began to develop a widespread rail network, although a coastal shipping network continued until the post war period.
Roads began to improve with the introduction of motor transport. By the late 19th century, road transport dominated internal transport in South Australia."
South Australia,"Railway
South Australia has four interstate rail connections, to Perth via the Nullarbor Plain, to Darwin through the centre of the continent, to New South Wales through Broken Hill, and to Melbourne–which is the closest capital city to Adelaide.
Rail transport was important for many mines in the north of the state.
The capital Adelaide has a commuter rail network made of electric and diesel electric powered multiple units, with 6 lines between them."
South Australia,"Roads
South Australia has extensive road networks linking towns and other states. Roads are also the most common form of transport within the major metropolitan areas with car transport predominating. Public transport in Adelaide is mostly provided by buses and trams with regular services throughout the day."
South Australia,"Air transport
Adelaide Airport provides regular flights to other capitals, major South Australian towns and many international locations. The airport also has daily flights to several Asian hub airports. Adelaide Metro buses J1 and J1X connect to the city (approx. 30 minutes travel time), as well as other services to other parts of Adelaide. Standard fares apply and tickets may be purchased from a ticket machine at the airport bus stop. Maximum charge (September 2016) for Metroticket is $5.30; off-peak and seniors discounts may apply."
South Australia,"River transport
The River Murray was formerly an important trade route for South Australia, with paddle steamers linking inland areas and the ocean at Goolwa."
South Australia,"Sea transport
South Australia has a container port at Port Adelaide. There are also numerous important ports along the coast for minerals and grains.
The passenger terminal at Port Adelaide periodically sees cruise liners.
Kangaroo Island is dependent on the Sea Link ferry service between Cape Jervis and Penneshaw."
South Australia,"Cultural life
South Australia has been known as ""the Festival State"" for many years, for its abundance of arts and gastronomic festivals. While much of the arts scene is concentrated in Adelaide, the state government has supported regional arts actively since the 1990s. One of the manifestations of this was the creation of Country Arts SA, created in 1992.
Diana Laidlaw did much to further the arts in South Australia during her term as Arts Minister from 1993 to 2002, and after Mike Rann assumed government in 2002, he created a strategic plan in 2004 (updated 2007) which included furthering and promoting the arts in South Australia under the topic heading ""Objective 4:
Fostering Creativity and Innovation"".
In September 2019, with the arts portfolio now subsumed within the Department of the Premier and Cabinet (DPC) after the election of Steven Marshall as Premier, and the 2004 strategic plan having been deleted from the website in 2018, the ""Arts and Culture Plan, South Australia 2019–2024"" was created by the department. Marshall said when launching the plan: “The arts sector in South Australia is already very strong but it's been operating without a plan for 20 years”. However the plan does not signal any new government support, even after the government's A$31.9 million cuts to arts funding when Arts South Australia was absorbed into DPC in 2018. Specific proposals within the plan include an “Adelaide in 100 Objects” walking tour, a new shared ticketing system for small to medium arts bodies, a five-year-plan to revitalise regional art centres, creation of an arts-focussed high school, and a new venue for the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra.
South Australia has a public library system, and state library. Some public libraries in South Australia in rural areas are joint school and community libraries."
South Australia,"Sport
Australian rules football
Australian rules football is the most popular spectator sport in South Australia. In 2006, South Australians had the highest attendance rate for the sport of any state, with 31% of South Australians attending a match in the previous twelve months. South Australia fields two teams in the Australian Football League (AFL): the Adelaide Football Club and Port Adelaide Football Club. The two teams have an intense rivalry called the Showdown. The traditional home of Australian rules football in South Australia was Football Park in the western suburb of West Lakes, which was the home ground of both AFL teams until 2013. Since 2014, both teams have used Adelaide Oval, near the city centre, as their home ground.
The South Australian National Football League (SANFL), which was the premier league in the state before the advent of the Australian Football League, is a popular local league comprising ten teams: Sturt, Port Adelaide, Adelaide, West Adelaide, South Adelaide, North Adelaide, Norwood, Woodville/West Torrens, Glenelg and Central District.
The Adelaide Footy League comprises 68 member clubs playing over 110 matches per week across ten senior divisions and three junior divisions. It is one of Australia's largest and strongest Australian rules football associations."
South Australia,"Cricket
Cricket has a long history in South Australia, with the first matches being played in 1839. Regular club matches were organised following the establishment of the South Australian Cricket Association (SACA) in 1871. Presently, SACA governs the South Australian Premier Cricket competition in addition to all forms of domestic cricket in the state. Cricket is the most popular summer sport in South Australia, with 39,000 club players at both junior and senior levels in 2023.
At the professional level, the West End Redbacks represent the men's state team, competing in the Sheffield Shield and the Marsh One-Day Cup. The South Australian Scorpions represent the women's team and compete in the Women's National Cricket League. South Australia also hosts the Adelaide Strikers in the Big Bash League and their women's team in the Women's Big Bash League. Matches are held at Adelaide Oval and Karen Rolton Oval in the Adelaide Parklands.
International cricket is also held in South Australia, with matches being played at Adelaide Oval. The venue was used to host matches in both the men's 1992 Cricket World Cup and 2015 Cricket World Cup. Adelaide Oval also saw use during the 2022 ICC Men's T20 World Cup. Outside of Adelaide, international cricket has also been played in Berri, South Australia with Berri Oval hosting a singular match during the 1992 Cricket World Cup."
South Australia,"Association football
Adelaide United represents South Australia in soccer in the men's A-League and women's W-League. The club's home ground is Hindmarsh Stadium (Coopers Stadium), but it occasionally plays games at the Adelaide Oval.
The club was founded in 2003 and are the 2015–16 season champions of the A-League. The club was also premier in the inaugural 2005–06 A-League season, finishing 7 points clear of the rest of the competition, before finishing 3rd in the finals. Adelaide United was also a Grand Finalist in the 2006–07 and 2008–09 seasons. Adelaide is the only A-League club to have progressed past the group stages of the Asian Champions League on more than one occasion.
Adelaide City remains South Australia's most successful club, having won three National Soccer League titles and three NSL Cups. City was the first side from South Australia to ever win a continental title when it claimed the 1987 Oceania Club Championship and it has also won a record 17 South Australian championships and 17 Federation Cups.
West Adelaide became the first South Australian club to be crowned Australian champion when it won the 1978 National Soccer League title. Like City, it now competes in the National Premier Leagues South Australia and the two clubs contest the Adelaide derby."
South Australia,"Basketball
Basketball also has a big following in South Australia, with the Adelaide 36ers playing in the Adelaide Entertainment Centre. The 36ers have won four championships in the last 20 years in the National Basketball League. The Adelaide Entertainment Centre, located in Hindmarsh, is the home of basketball in the state.
Mount Gambier also has a national basketball team – the Mount Gambier Pioneers. The Pioneers play at the Icehouse (Bern Bruning Basketball Stadium), which seats over 1,000 people and is also home to the Mount Gambier Basketball Association. The Pioneers won the South Conference in 2003 and the Final in 2003; this team was rated second in the top five teams to have ever played in the league. In 2012, the club entered its 25th season, with a roster of 10 senior players (two imports) and three development squad players."
South Australia,"Motorsport
Australia's premier motorsport series, the Supercars Championship, has visited South Australia each year since 1999. South Australia's Supercars event, the Adelaide 500, is staged on the Adelaide Street Circuit, a temporary track laid out through the streets and parklands to the east of the Adelaide city centre. Attendance for the 2022 event totalled 258,200. An earlier version of the Adelaide Street Circuit played host to the Australian Grand Prix, a round of the FIA Formula One World Championship, each year from 1985 to 1995.
Mallala Motor Sport Park, a permanent circuit located near the town of Mallala, 58 km north of Adelaide, caters for both state and national level motor sport throughout the year.
The Bend Motorsport Park, is another permanent circuit, located just outside of Tailem Bend."
South Australia,"Rugby league
The state rugby league federation is the South Australian Rugby League. The game traces its roots in the state back to the 1940s, when the Port Adelaide rugby union team split in four, and defected to rugby league.
South Australia's only professional rugby league team, the Adelaide Rams, had a short but eventful existence. After debuting in the Super League competition in 1997, in 1998 they were selected to join the 20-team National Rugby League; however they were to be axed from the 1999 season as part of a rationalisation of teams (from 20 to 14) in the competition. 
At present however, the South Australian Rugby League still operates a local semi-professional competition consisting of both junior and adult teams from across Adelaide.
Adelaide Oval hosted State of Origin series games in both 2020 and 2023, with the latter drawing a state record rugby league attendance of 48,613."
South Australia,"Other sports
Sixty-three percent of South Australian children took part in organised sports in 2002–2003.
The ATP Adelaide was a tennis tournament held from 1972 to 2008 that then moved to Brisbane. Since 2020, South Australia has hosted the Adelaide International tennis tournament. Also, the Royal Adelaide Golf Club has hosted nine editions of the Australian Open, with the most recent being in 1998.
The state has hosted the Tour Down Under cycle race since 1999."
South Australia,"Places
Crime
Crime in South Australia is managed by the South Australia Police (SAPOL), various state and federal courts in the criminal justice system and the state Department for Correctional Services, which administers the prisons and remand centre.
Crime statistics for all categories of offence in the state are provided on the SAPOL website, in the form of rolling 12-month totals. Crime statistics from the 2017–18 national ABS Crime Victimisation Survey show that between the years 2008–09 and 2017–18, the rate of victimisation in South Australia declined for assault and most household crime types.
In 2013, Adelaide was ranked the safest capital city in Australia."
South Australia,"See also
Australia
Outline of Australia
Index of Australia-related articles"
South Australia,"Adelaide
Country Fire Service
Proclamation Day: 28 December 1836
South Australian Ambulance Service
South Australian English
Symbols of South Australia"
South Australia,"Food and drink
Farmers Union Iced Coffee
Pie floater
South Australian food and drink
South Australian wine"
South Australia,"Lists
List of amphibians of South Australia
List of cities and towns in South Australia
List of festivals in Australia#South Australia
List of films shot in Adelaide
List of highways in South Australia
List of people from Adelaide
Local Government Areas of South Australia
List of public art in South Australia
Tourist attractions in South Australia"
South Australia,"Notes
Footnotes
Further reading
External links
 Media related to South Australia at Wikimedia Commons
 South Australia travel guide from Wikivoyage
 Geographic data related to South Australia at OpenStreetMap
sa.gov.au
Official Insignia and Emblems Page
South Australia's greenhouse (climate change) strategy (2007–2020)
Ground Truth – towards an Environmental History of South Australia. Archived 7 October 2001 at the Wayback Machine."
Poverty in Australia,"Poverty in Australia deals with the incidence of relative poverty in Australia and its measurement. Relative income poverty is measured as a percentage of the population that earns less in comparison to the median wage of the working population.
In 2020 the Australian Council of Social Service released a report stating that relative poverty was growing in Australia, with an estimated 3.2 million people, or 13.6% of the population, living below an internationally accepted relative poverty threshold of 50% of a country's median income. It also estimated that there were 774,000 (17.7%) children under the age of 15 in relative poverty."
Poverty in Australia,"Defining poverty
The main way of measuring poverty is to set a poverty line and then determine how many people fall below this line. Poverty lines can be set as either absolute poverty lines or relative poverty lines. Australia does not have an official poverty line, either absolute or relative. The ACOSS/UNSW report series entitled Poverty in Australia uses two poverty lines and also took account of people's housing costs. One poverty line used by The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and in this study, referred to half of the middle income for all households, that is, 50% of median household income and the other is 60% of median income."
Poverty in Australia,"Absolute poverty, extreme poverty
First introduced in 1990, the dollar a day poverty line measured absolute poverty by the standards of the world's poorest countries. The World Bank defined the new international poverty line as $1.27 a day for 2005 (equivalent to $1.00 a day in 1996 US prices) but have recently been updated to be $1.25 and $2.50 per day. Absolute poverty, extreme poverty, or abject poverty is ""a condition characterised by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information. It depends not only on income but also on access to services.""
The term 'absolute poverty', when used in this fashion, is usually synonymous with 'extreme poverty': Robert McNamara, the former President of the World Bank, described absolute or extreme poverty as, ""...a condition so limited by malnutrition, illiteracy, disease, squalid surroundings, high infant mortality, and low life expectancy as to be beneath any reasonable definition of human decency"". Australia is one of the world's wealthier nations. In his article published in Australian Policy Online, Robert Tanton notes that ""While this amount is appropriate for third world countries, in Australia, the amount required to meet these basic needs will naturally be much higher because prices of these basic necessities are higher."""
Poverty in Australia,"However, as the amount of wealth required for survival is not the same in all places and time periods, particularly in highly developed countries where few people would fall below the World Bank's poverty lines, countries often develop their own national poverty lines."
Poverty in Australia,"Relative poverty
Poverty can also be measured in relative terms, where the poverty line is set as some proportion of the average income or wealth of the society.
There are many different ways to calculate relative poverty, resulting in different levels of poverty, and researchers often argue about where the line should be drawn.  For example, a Smith Family and NATSEM (The National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling) report in 2000 indicated as many as 1 in 8 Australians are experiencing poverty. The Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) argues that their research indicates the figure is at least 1 in 12 and could even be as low as 1 in 20. This is because their poverty lines were determined in different ways:"
Poverty in Australia,"The Smith family researchers ""added up all the pay packets in Australia and divided them by the number of wage earners. That average is then halved to find the poverty line"" (the Mean).
The CIS ""ranks all the pay packets in descending order, finds the wage in the very middle of that range and then halves that... wage to find the poverty line"" (the Median). This gives very different results.
The problem of these measures is that they focus exclusively on income. But poverty is also defined through other indicators such as education, health, access to services and infrastructure, vulnerability, social exclusion, access to social capital, etc.
The most widely used indicator to take non-income factors into consideration is the Human Development Index (HDI) compiled yearly by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which combines measures for income, health, and education. For advanced economies, the Human Poverty Index (HPI-2) was developed, which takes into consideration the higher levels of income, health, and education in these countries. Australia ranks very high on these global indexes.
A relative poverty line was calculated in Australia for the Henderson poverty inquiry in 1973. It was $62.70 a week, which was the disposable income required to support the basic needs of a family of two adults and two dependent children at the time. This poverty line has been updated regularly by the Melbourne Institute according to increases in average incomes; for a single unemployed person, it was $445.40 per week (including housing costs) in March 2020. In Australia, the OECD poverty would equate to a ""disposable income of less than $358 per week for a single adult (higher for larger households to take account of their greater costs)."
Poverty in Australia,"Incidence of relative poverty in Australia
2001 poverty line
According to the Smith Family in 2001:"
Poverty in Australia,"13.0% of Australians live in relative poverty (2.86). (13.4% as at 2022)
2.9% of children live in relative poverty. (761,000 as at 2022)
6.8% of single-parent families live in relative poverty.
This report highlighted the relationship between poverty and unemployment with the under-employed facing greater risks of poverty particularly with the increasing casualization of the workforce."
Poverty in Australia,"Child poverty
Australia's child poverty rate falls in the middle of the international rankings. In 2007, UNICEF's report on child poverty in OECD countries revealed that Australia had the 14th highest child poverty rate.
The child poverty rate is estimated at 0.13 (under 17 years of age) according to OECD statistics (using the median income) from 2013 - 2017. According to ACOSS, children under the age of 15 have a poverty rate of 17.3%, and young people aged 15 to 24 have a rate of 13.9%. They suggest the high poverty rate is related to the high poverty rate among single adults (estimated 25%). This is high compared to the total national poverty rate of 12.8% according to OECD statistics. National Centre For Social And Economic Modeling (NATSEM) suggests another reason for high child poverty rates could be the unavailability of affordable housing for low-income adults. They found that 39% of families with children under the age of 15 were presented with unaffordable mortgages, which suggests rising mortgage prices in Australia may be increasing the child poverty rate."
Poverty in Australia,"Elderly Poverty
According to statistics by the OECD (using median household income), the poverty rates of citizens over 66 are more than double the national average at 0.257. To look at Australia's elderly poverty rate comparatively, it ranks #4 among the OECD nations, 8 times the lowest ranking of 0.031 for France, the Netherlands, and Denmark. The rate is more comparable to that of other liberal economies, with the US at 0.229 and the UK at 0.142. Although these elderly poverty rates are low, some sources indicate this may be because homeownership is high in Australia among the elderly. For example, Australian Bureau of Statistics’ 2009-10 Survey of Income and Housing indicates that 33% of households own their homes without a mortgage, whereas 36% own a home with a mortgage (that's 21% of homeowners with a mortgage). This is relevant when compared with the Home-ownership in the United States, where the Washington Post estimates 66% of US homeowners have some type of mortgage. Australia's high homeownership rates and low mortgage rates may be a factor in determining the wealth of citizens over 66 years of age, not reflected in the elderly poverty rate."
Poverty in Australia,"Poverty among Indigenous Australians
In 2016, 31% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians lived in households whose income was below the poverty line (using the '50% of the median equivalised disposable household income before housing' poverty line). Nationally, Indigenous poverty rates in Australia declined slowly over the decade 2006–2016, falling from 34% in 2006 to 33% in 2011 and 31% in 2016. However, there is substantial geographical variation in Indigenous poverty rates and trends, with poverty rates being lowest in more urban areas. In very remote areas, where poverty rates increased between 2006 and 2016, the Indigenous poverty rate was 53% in 2016."
Poverty in Australia,"History of poverty in Australia
20th century
In the years following the end of the Second World War, and during Australia's long post-war economic boom, it was widely believed that the introduction of the welfare state together with the emergence of the affluent society had finally put an end to poverty in ""the lucky country"". The mid-to-late Sixties, however, saw a ""rediscovery"" of poverty, as it was found that many Australians had failed to share in the post-war economic boom.
A number of researchers and organizations highlighted the persistence of poverty in Australia. According to one academic in 1960, Helen Hughes, about a third of the half a million widows and aged and invalid pensioners in Australia were estimated by social workers to be living in poverty. In 1959, another academic by the name of James Jupp wrote about the ""submerged tenth"" of the Australian population left out of the country's economic prosperity, including Aborigines, shack dwellers, deserted wives, unemployed migrants, slum dwellers, pensioners, and ""no-hopers"". Research into the extent of poverty in Australia was also undertaken by the Victorian and Australian Councils of Social Service, while the church-based welfare agency, the Brotherhood of St. Laurence, carried out a number of studies into the needs of low-income families and pensioners.
In 1963, a Melbourne university lecturer called Ray Brown estimated that 5% of Australians lived in chronic poverty, with articles published in the radical magazine ""Dissent"" by David Scott, Leon Glezer, and Michael Keating coming to similar conclusions. In 1966 popular awareness of poverty was further extended by the publication of John Stubb's ""The Hidden People"", where he estimated that half a million Australians lived in poverty.
Housing conditions also remained underdeveloped for many Australians. A census carried out in 1954 revealed that 49,148 families were living in huts and sheds, while by the end of 1972, more than 1.5  million people in the major cities were living in flats and houses that were not connected to a complete sewerage reticulation system. In 1971, the Institute of Applied Economic Research estimated that at least 1 million Australians lived in poverty. A report by Justice John A. Nimmo from the start of the Seventies estimated that there were about a million Australians living below a ""miserably poor poverty line.""
Other studies on poverty carried out by the International Labour Office in Geneva also revealed high incidences of poverty in Australia. In 1973, using a national poverty line, it was estimated that 20.8% of Australians lived in poverty before benefits were taken into account, and 11.0% after benefits were taken into account. By contrast, using a standard poverty line, it was estimated that 24.3% of Australians lived in poverty before benefits, and 19.3% after benefits."
Poverty in Australia,"Henderson Inquiry
In 1966, the Melbourne University Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, headed by Professor Ronald Henderson, set out to measure the extent of poverty in the city of Melbourne. A poverty line was set at $33, which was close to the basic wage plus child endowment for two children. Based on this figure, 7.7% of all family units in Melbourne lived on or below the poverty line, while an additional 5.2% ""hovered dangerously close to the minimum level"". This has been cited as the ""first systematic attempt to estimate the extent of poverty in Australia"".
A Commission of Inquiry into Poverty was set up in August 1972 by the Liberal Prime Minister William McMahon, and Henderson was appointed as Chairman of the inquiry, which came to be known as the ""Henderson Commission"". The Whitlam Government elected later that year expanded the size of the Commission and scope, giving it specific responsibility to focus on the extent of poverty in Australia together with the groups most at risk of experiencing poverty, the income needs of those living in poverty, and issues relating to housing and welfare services. These issues were addressed in the commission's first main report, ""Poverty in Australia"", which was released in April 1975.
In this report, the Commission sought to identify the extent of poverty in Australia in terms of inadequate income relative to need, and the poverty line was defined as a percentage of average earnings, adjusted for household size. The poverty line was set at 56.5% of average earnings for a ""standard"" family (consisting of a male breadwinner, a woman not in paid employment, and two dependent children). According to the report, 8.2% of the population lived in poverty in 1972–73, or 6.4% when housing costs were taken into account. Before housing costs, over 10% of income units in 1972–73 were below the commission's poverty line, while a further 8% were defined as 'rather poor', having an income of less than 20% above that line. After housing costs were taken into account, the percentage of income units living below the poverty line was about 7%.
The Commission also estimated that more than 50% of Aboriginal Australians had living standards below the poverty line and less than 20% above it. The infant mortality rates among Aboriginal Australians in the period 1973–77 were 63 deaths per thousand live births in the Northern Territory and 71 per thousand in Queensland. This compared with a rate of 62 per thousand in South America, 59 per thousand in Africa, 41 per thousand in Central America, 68 per thousand in Asia, and 15 per thousand amongst non-Aboriginal Australians."
Poverty in Australia,"21st century
Australia's Human Poverty Index was given as 12.1 in the UN's final calculation of the index, which was published in 2007. The rating was the 13th lowest of the 19 OECD countries for which the index was calculated.
Reports released by the Australian Council of Social Service in 2016 and 2020 stated that poverty was growing in Australia, respectively estimating that 2.9 million people (13.3% of total) and 3.2 million people (13.6%  of total) had an income below 50% of the national median. The reports also respectively estimated that there were 731,000 (17.5%) and 774,000 (17.7%) children under the age of 15 that were in poverty."
Poverty in Australia,"See also
Homelessness in Australia
Home ownership in Australia
Median household income in Australia and New Zealand
Social security in Australia
General:"
Poverty in Australia,Poverty by country
Poverty in Australia,Notes
Poverty in Australia,"
== References =="
Lebanese Australians,"Lebanese Australians (Arabic: اللبنانيون الأستراليون) refers to citizens or permanent residents of Australia of Lebanese ancestry. The population is diverse, having a large Christian religious base, being mostly Maronite Catholics, while also having a large Muslim group of Sunni and Shia branches. 
Lebanon, in both its modern-day form as the Lebanese state (declared 1920; independent 1943), and its historical form as the region of the Lebanon, has been a source of migrants to Australia since the 1870s. 248,430 Australians (about 1% of the total population) claimed some Lebanese ancestry in 2021. The 2021 census reported 87,343 Lebanese-born people in Australia, with nearly 66,000 of those resident in Greater Sydney."
Lebanese Australians,"Diaspora history
19th-century migration
As part of a large-scale emigration in the 1870s,  Lebanese Christians fleeing Ottoman persecution migrated to the United Kingdom, Brazil, Argentina and other Latin American nations, particularly Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador. Many also went to the United States, Canada and  Australia, primarily  the eastern states, and New South Wales in particular.
In the 1890s, the numbers of Lebanese immigrants to Australia rose, part of the mass emigration from the area of Lebanon that became the modern Lebanese state and  the Anti-Lebanon Mountains region that became Syria."
Lebanese Australians,"White Australia policy
Under the White Australia policy of the late nineteenth century (and with Lebanon being located in the Middle East, geographically known as South West Asia) Lebanese migrants were classified as Asians and came within the scope of the so-called White Australia policy, which intentionally restricted non-white immigration to Australia. Lebanese migrants, like others deemed non-white by various colony laws from 1875–1888, were excluded from citizenship, the right to vote and employment, and were treated as enemy aliens during World War I and World War II. In 1897 Lebanese store keepers and businesses were accused of fraud by state border Customs officers during Queensland customs prosecution cases.
Prior to 1918, Lebanese immigrants to Australia were not habitually distinguished from Turks because the area of modern Lebanon was a province of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. Administration then passed to the French Mandate for several decades, which ruled it together with what would become Syria, its neighbour. Hence, for that period, the Lebanese were not distinguished from Syrians. "
Lebanese Australians,"From 1920, people from Lebanon (and Syria) were granted access to Australian citizenship as the Nationality Act 1920 removed the racial disqualification from the naturalisation laws.
By 1947, there were 2,000 Lebanese-born in Australia, almost all Christian."
Lebanese Australians,"Second wave of migration
The Lebanese-born population numbered 5,000 in 1971. Following the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975–1990, this wave of migrants were often poor and for the first time, over half of them were Muslim. This influx of new migrants changed the character of the established Lebanese community in Australia significantly, especially in Sydney where 70% of the Lebanese-born population were concentrated.
Christian Maronite and Orthodox Lebanese Christians that settled in Australia over the last two centuries were able to gain some influence within Australian politics. In late 1975, unrest in Lebanon caused a group of influential Maronite Australians to approach Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser and his immigration minister, Michael MacKellar regarding the resettling of Lebanese civilians with their Australian relatives. Immediate access to Australia could not be granted under normal immigration categories, thus the Lebanese people were categorised as refugees. This was not in the traditional sense as the Lebanese people were not fleeing from persecution but escaping from internal conflict between Muslim and Christian groups. This action was known as the ""Lebanon Concession"".
Between 1975–1990, more than 30,000 civil war refugees arrived in Australia. Most immigrants were Muslim Lebanese from deprived rural areas who learned of Australia's Lebanon Concession and decided to seek a better life. They were Muslims from northern Lebanon as Christian and Muslim Lebanese were unwilling to leave the capital city, Beirut. Immigrants of the Lebanese Concession primarily settled in south-west Sydney; Sunnis in Lakemba and Shias in Arncliffe."
Lebanese Australians,"21st century
Following the trials for a series of gang rape attacks in Sydney in 2000 by a group of Lebanese Muslims, the Lebanese Muslim Australian community came under significant scrutiny by the tabloid media and ""Shock jocks"", in addition to a more general anti-Muslim backlash after the 11 September attacks in 2001. Community concern and divisiveness continued in the wake of the 2005 Cronulla riots in Sydney, in which an altercation between some youths of Middle Eastern appearance and local surf livesavers blew up into a full-blown racially-motivated riot the following weekend, helped along by tabloid journalism and shock jocks.
In November 2016, Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton said that it was a mistake of a previous Liberal administration to have brought out Lebanese Muslim immigrants. Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop said Dutton was making a specific point about those charged with terrorism offences, but Dutton was criticised for his comments in the media by politicians, terrorism experts and others."
Lebanese Australians,"Return migration
Lebanese Australians have a moderate rate of return migration to Lebanon. In December 2001, the Department of Foreign Affairs estimated that there were 30,000 Australian citizen residents in Lebanon. During the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict, the Australian Government organised mass evacuations of Australian residents in Lebanon."
Lebanese Australians,"Demographics
Worldwide, most people of Lebanese ancestry today live outside Lebanon, and are known as the Lebanese diaspora which numbers from 8 to possibly 14 million."
Lebanese Australians,"Locations
In New South Wales, most Lebanese Australians were reported to reside in the Western Sydney council areas of City of Bankstown, with City of Holroyd, City of Canterbury and City of Parramatta (all pre-2016 council areas). The area included suburbs such as Lakemba, Greenacre and Punchbowl. 
In Victoria, like most Middle-Easterners, Lebanese Australians are mostly found in the Northern Melbourne council areas such as the City of Merri-bek and the City of Hume, particularly in neighbourhoods such as Broadmeadows, Coburg and Altona North."
Lebanese Australians,"Religious diversity
According to the 2021 census, 48.2% of Australians with Lebanese ancestry were Catholics, 9.9% were Eastern Orthodox, 3.4% were Protestant, 35.1% were Muslims, and 3.4% followed secular or no religious beliefs."
Lebanese Australians,"Business
Lebanese in Sydney have followed a distinctive occupational pattern characterised by high levels of self-employment, particularly in petty commercial activities such as hawking and shopkeeping. In 1901, '80 per cent of Lebanese in NSW were concentrated in commercial occupations' – in 1947, little had changed, as 60 per cent of Lebanese were 'either employers or self-employed'. The Lebanese in Melbourne have opened restaurants and groceries and Middle Eastern shops and Lebanese bars on Sydney Road which is sometimes called ""Little Lebanon"".
The peak business body is the Australian Lebanese Chamber of Commerce, with associations in both Sydney and Melbourne."
Lebanese Australians,"Arts, culture, terminology
In 1996, Lebanon...Imprisoned Splendour the first Australian documentary about the impact of the Lebanese Civil War on Australian Lebanese was released by journalist Daizy Gedeon who was deputy foreign editor at The Australian newspaper. The film featured Omar Sharif and won global acclaim. In 2014, a series of documentaries on Lebanese Australians was presented by SBS under the title Once Upon a Time in Punchbowl.
The Lebanese Film Festival was launched in Sydney in 2012. Every year since then, it has showcases films which are either filmed or based in Lebanon, or made by Lebanese film makers throughout the world. The organisation is based in Bankstown, but the film festival travels to cinemas in Newcastle and Bowral in NSW, as well as Adelaide, Canberra, Melbourne and Brisbane from August to November each year.
In 2017–8, two seasons of the sitcom Here Come the Habibs, featuring a Lebanese Australian family who win the lottery and move to the posh eastern suburbs of Sydney, aired on Channel 9.
Michael Mohammed Ahmad's 2018 comic novel The Lebs was shortlisted for the 2019 Miles Franklin Award. He had previously written an essay entitled ""Lebs and Punchbowl Prison"", the prison referring to his alma mater, Punchbowl Boys' High School. At his school, the term ""Lebs"" did not refer just to boys from Lebanese family, but to anyone whose family came from the Middle East, and even included boys with African and Indonesian backgrounds. The term ""Leb"" or ""Lebo"" has been used as a derogatory term, mostly in Sydney, and gained more widespread use after the 2005 Cronulla Riots. It is listed in the Collins English Dictionary as ""Australian (offensive, slang), a person from Lebanon or of Lebanese origin"". Ahmad wishes to help reclaim the word through his writing."
Lebanese Australians,"Notable Lebanese Australians
See also
List of Lebanese people in Australia
Arab Australian"
Lebanese Australians,"References
Further reading
""Lebanese Settlement"". Migration Heritage Centre, NSW.
Australian Lebanese Historical Society
Lebanese-Australian Embassy
United Australian Lebanese movement
World Lebanese Cultural Union (WLCU) Geographic-Regional Council (GRC) for Australia and New Zealand 
Anne Monsour and Paul Convy - Australian Lebanese Historical Society (2008). ""Lebanese"". Dictionary of Sydney. Retrieved 4 October 2015. (History of Lebanese in Sydney)"
National Security Committee (Australia),"The National Security Committee (NSC), also known as the National Security Committee of Cabinet, is the peak decision-making body for national security and major foreign policy matters in the Australian Government. It is a committee of the Cabinet of Australia, though decisions of the NSC do not require the endorsement of the Cabinet itself."
National Security Committee (Australia),"History
The origins of the NSC stem from the 1977 tabled recommendations of the Royal Commission on Intelligence and Security, established on 21 August 1974 by Australia's Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and led by Justice Robert Hope, for the creation of a ""ministerial committee on intelligence and security to give general oversight and policy control to the intelligence community"".
Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser consequently established the National and International Security Committee in 1977. Prime Minister Bob Hawke also continued the format of the National and International Security Committee as a subcommittee of the Defence and External Relations Committee to consider and report on national security, defence and international relations."
National Security Committee (Australia),"The current format of the National Security Committee was created by Prime Minister John Howard in 1996 with a broad national security mandate including foreign policy and international economic issues. Under Howard the NSC also played a central role in the lead up and during the International Force for East Timor deployment, the formulation of Defence White Papers, and the Australian involvement in the War in Afghanistan and the Iraq War.
In 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd revamped the Australian national security framework with the creation of the intergovernmental officials-level National Intelligence Coordination Committee (NICC) and the public service position of National Security Adviser (NSA) within the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. The National Intelligence Coordination Committee plays a central role in advising national intelligence priorities and supporting a coordinated approach by the National Intelligence Community to directions by the NSC.
The National Security Adviser was created without a statutory footing but was tasked with ranging responsibilities including counterterrorism, emergency management, and defence strategic policy. The role of National Security Adviser was disbanded by Prime Minister Tony Abbott in 2013."
National Security Committee (Australia),"Role
The responsibilities of the National Security Committee include to deliberate and decide on Australia's national security issues, including international security issues of strategic relevance, Australian border security, national responses to domestic and international crises and terrorism, military operations and the deployment of the Australian Defence Force, and the operation and activities of the National Intelligence Community.
The NSC also considers issues of defence acquisition and recommendations from the Department of Defence's Capability Acquisition and Sustainment Group.
Its decisions do not require the endorsement of Cabinet."
National Security Committee (Australia),"War powers
The Parliament of Australia is not vested with authority for the declaration of war or the authorisation of military operations. As such the NSC, and ultimately the Prime Minister via the Governor-General through royal prerogative under Section 68 of the Constitution of Australia, has the power to deploy and use the Australian Defence Force in offensive operations without legislative authorisation. Therefore, the NSC decides on the use of the most extreme powers available to government, including to kill, capture or destroy.
As such, the deployment of the Australian Defence Force is decided by the NSC through consultation with the Chief of the Defence Force and the Secretary of Defence and input from the National Intelligence Community."
National Security Committee (Australia),"Biosecurity
2020 coronavirus state of emergency
The NSC met numerous times in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia, with attendance by the Minister for Health, Greg Hunt, and former Chief Medical Officer, Brendan Murphy, who began Australia's health response to COVID-19.
On 5 March 2020, the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, announced that the NSC had agreed to new travel restrictions, updated travel advice and implemented new screening measures for COVID-19, aimed to ""slow the importation of COVID-19 cases into Australia to enable preparatory measures to continue and to enable a public health response to the initial cases"". 
On 18 March 2020, a human biosecurity emergency was declared in Australia owing to the risks to human health posed by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, after the NSC had met the previous day. The Biosecurity Act 2015 specifies that the Governor-General may declare such an emergency exists if the Health Minister (then Greg Hunt) is satisfied that ""a listed human disease is posing a severe and immediate threat, or is causing harm, to human health on a nationally significant scale"". This gives the Minister sweeping powers, including imposing restrictions or preventing the movement of people and goods between specified places, and evacuations. The Biosecurity (Human Biosecurity Emergency) (Human Coronavirus with Pandemic Potential) Declaration 2020 was declared by the Governor-General, David Hurley, under Section 475 of the Act."
National Security Committee (Australia),"Ministerial membership
The Prime Minister determines the membership of NSC. Under the current Albanese Government, the NSC is chaired by the Prime Minister with the Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister as deputy chair. In July 2022, Albanese added Chris Bowen, the Minister for Climate Change to the committee.
Members of the Committee as of July 2022 are:"
National Security Committee (Australia),"Formerly under the Turnbull government, the ministerial Cabinet Secretary was also a member."
National Security Committee (Australia),"Other attendees
As the peak decision-making body on national security, the NSC is also attended and advised by the Secretaries for each respective public service department represented by a Minister on the NSC. As such, NSC attendance also includes the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Department of Defence, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Department of the Treasury, and the Department of Home Affairs.
The Chief of the Defence Force and other senior ADF officers also attend if requested or required by the NSC.
Other government ministers, such as the Minister for Trade, Tourism and Investment, are invited to attend meetings as required. The Leader of the Opposition is also sometimes invited to attend for important briefings.
As mentioned above, the NSC met numerous times during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic with attendance by the Minister for Health and the Chief Medical Officer."
National Security Committee (Australia),"Secretaries Committee on National Security
The Secretaries Committee on National Security (SCNS) (formerly the Secretaries Committee on Intelligence and Security) serves as the peak officials-level committee considering national security matters and directly supports the NSC. It is an interdepartmental committee which considers all major matters to be put before the NSC and supports the whole-of-government coordination of national security policy.
The SCNS membership is composed of the secretaries for each respective public service department represented by a Minister on the NSC as well as the heads of Australian Intelligence Community agencies and other national security related agencies."
National Security Committee (Australia),"Secretariat
The National Security and International Policy Group of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet provides secretariat support functions for the NSC and SCNS."
National Security Committee (Australia),"See also
National Intelligence Community
National Cabinet of Australia
National COVID-19 Coordination Commission
National Intelligence Coordination Committee
United Kingdom National Security Council
United States National Security Council"
National Security Committee (Australia),"
== References =="
Environmental issues in Australia,"Environmental issues in Australia describes a number of environmental issues which affect the environment of Australia and are the primary concern of the environmental movement in Australia. 
There are a range of such issues, some of the relating to conservation in Australia. Others, for example the deteriorating state of Murray-Darling Basin, have a direct and serious effect on human land use and the economy. Many human activities including the use of natural resources have a direct impact on the Australian environment and its ecology. Additionally Aboriginal culture has a strong connection to the land, with some landscape features considered sacred, and as such environmental damage to Australian Aboriginal sacred sites can also have significant cultural repercussions.
Some of the key issues include: Climate Change; Contamination and Pollution; Ozone Depletion; Conservation; Invasive Species; Land Degradation; Waterway health; Urbanisation and Mining Issues among others."
Environmental issues in Australia,"Climate change
Attribution, Public concerns and Emissions reduction
Australia ranks within the top ten countries globally with respect to greenhouse gas emissions per capita.
The current federal and state governments have all publicly stated their belief that climate change is being caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Vocal minority groups within the population campaign against mining and coal-fired power stations in Australia, and such demonstrations are widely reported by the mainstream media. Similarly, vocal minority groups concurrently oppose wind energy schemes, despite being 'carbon neutral', on the grounds of local visual and noise impact and concern for the currently high cost and low reliability of wind energy.
Despite the publication of the Garnaut report and the Green Paper on the proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, public belief in anthropogenic climate change has noticeably eroded following the leaking of e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit. Nevertheless recent climate events such as extremely high temperatures and widespread drought have focused government and public attention on the effects.
There is claimed to be a net benefit to Australia in stabilising greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at 450ppm CO2 eq in line with the prevailing political stance. Public disagreement with this opinion is generally dismissed as expression of vested interests, for example from the coal industry."
Environmental issues in Australia,"Energy use
Most of Australia's demand for electricity depends upon coal-fired thermal generation, owing to the plentiful indigenous coal supply, limited potential electric generation and political unwillingness to exploit indigenous uranium resources (although Australia accounted for the world's second highest production of uranium in 2005 to fuel a 'carbon neutral' domestic nuclear energy program.
Australia does not require its vehicles to meet any fuel efficiency standards, in spite of its emissions reduction target under the Paris Agreement."
Environmental issues in Australia,"Contamination and Pollution
Australia is affected by significant contamination and pollution including soil and goundwater contamination as well as water and air pollution. Researchers currently estimate that between 16,000 and 80,000 significantly sites have been identified as affected by up to 7,500 different contaminants. Some of these are toxic byproducts of government land use and private industry. The country has several notable exclusion zones due to heavy contamination. Some substances have significant half lifes making remediation and sequestering expensive and complicated. There is also a serious ongoing risk of contamination incidents particularly from mining related activities.
Significant types of contamination affecting Australia include:"
Environmental issues in Australia,"plastics - particularly microplastics affecting soils and estimated as much as 85% of all waterways leaking more than 130,000 tonnes into the environment each year though much of the ocean plastic originates from elsewhere
hydrocarbons - more than 16,000 significant sites
herbicides and pesticides - more than 3,500 significant sites identified
heavy metals - including lead, arsenic, cadmium and mercury across thousands of significant urban and remote sites
radioactive elements in soils and radioactive waste - more than 100 significant sites including large exclusion zones due to high radiation levels from nuclear fallout, high risk of nuclear contamination due to a significant nuclear element mining industry, more than 5000 cubic metres of radioactive waste which requires long term safe handling, more than 46 cubic metres generated each year
per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) - more than 90 significant sites identified requiring remediation particularly government training centres and surrounding catchments from use of fire fighting foams
asbestos - over 6.2 million tonnes across more than 50 siginificant major urban sites and several exclusion zones in remote locations
landfill leachate
diesel exhaust and wood smoke persisting for long periods in ambient air in both urban areas and remote locations contribute to 4,880 premature deaths every year"
Environmental issues in Australia,"Ozone depletion
Due to its position in the Southern Hemisphere close to Antarctica, Australia is one of the parts of the world most affected by ozone depletion, which results in dangerous increases to solar radiation, particularly ultraviolet radiation. Increased UV levels compromise the genetic integrity and immune systems of living organisms, impairs photosynthesis, contributes to climate change, and to one of the highest mortality rates of skin cancer in the world. It is generally believed that the Montreal Protocol (1987) has helped alleviate anthropogenic ozone depletion by banning destructive chlorofluorocarbon emissions, and this has helped protect Australia from exposure to catastrophic levels of UV radiation. Though the ""hole"" in the ozone which the Protocol sought to prevent has not reached Australia, it has experienced significant sustained thinning at its latitudes, causing elevated levels of solar irradiation. Increased incidence of large scale bushfires in Australia has contributed to recent ozone depletion, contributing to a sort of solar irradiation feedback loop."
Environmental issues in Australia,"Conservation
Conservation in Australia is an issue of state and federal policy. Australia is one of the most biologically diverse countries in the world, with a large portion of species endemic to Australia. Preserving this wealth of biodiversity is important for future generations.
A key conservation issue is the preservation of biodiversity, especially by protecting the remaining rainforests. The destruction of habitat by human activities, including land clearing, remains the major cause of biodiversity loss in Australia. The importance of the Australian rainforests to the conservation movement is very high. Australia is the only western country to have large areas of rainforest intact. Forests provide timber, drugs, and food and should be managed to maximise the possible uses. Currently, there are a number of environmental movements and campaigners advocating for action on saving the environment, one such campaign is the Big Switch.
Land management issues including clearance of native vegetation, reafforestation of once-cleared areas, control of exotic weeds and pests, expansion of dryland salinity, and changed fire regimes. Intensification of resource use in sectors such as forestry, fisheries, and agriculture are widely reported to contribute to biodiversity loss in Australia. Coastal and marine environments also have reduced biodiversity from reduced water quality caused by pollution and sediments arising from human settlements and agriculture. In central New South Wales where there are large plains of grassland, problems have risen from—unusual to say—lack of land clearing.
The Daintree Rainforest, a tropical rainforest near Daintree, Queensland covering around 1200 square kilometres, is threatened by logging, development, mining and the effects of the high tourist numbers.
There are some government programs in Australia which are the opposite of conservation (such as killing wildlife); an example of this is shark culling, which currently occurs in New South Wales and Queensland."
Environmental issues in Australia,"Native fauna
Over a hundred species of fauna are currently under serious threat of extinction. The plight of some of these species receives more attention than others and recently the focus of many conservation organisations has been the critically endangered northern hairy-nosed wombat, the endangered Tasmanian devil, northern tiger quoll, south eastern red-tailed black cockatoo, southern cassowary, Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle, Leadbeater's possum and southern corroboree frog.
Australia has a poor record of conservation of native fauna. The extinction of Australian megafauna is attributed to the arrival of humans and since European settlement, 23 birds, 4 frogs, and 27 mammal species are also known to have become extinct."
Environmental issues in Australia,"Marine conservation
One of the notable issues with marine conservation in Australia is the protection of the Great Barrier Reef. The Great Barrier Reef's environmental pressures include water quality from runoff, climate change and mass coral bleaching, cyclic outbreaks of the crown-of-thorns starfish, overfishing, and shipping accidents. The government of Queensland currently kills sharks in the Great Barrier Reef using drum lines, causing damage to the marine ecosystem.
In 2021 Australia announced the creation of 2 national marine parks in size of 740,000 square kilometres. With those parks 45% of the Australian marine territory will be protected."
Environmental issues in Australia,"Whaling
Whaling in Australia took place from colonisation in 1788. In 1979 Australia terminated whaling and committed to whale protection. The main varieties hunted were humpback, blue, right and sperm whales."
Environmental issues in Australia,"Shark culling
Western Australia culled sharks in 2014, killing dozens of tiger sharks and causing public protest. Later that year it was abandoned, and the government of Western Australia continued to shoot and kill sharks it believed to be an ""imminent threat"" to humans from 2014 to 2017; this policy was criticised by senator Rachel Siewart for being environmentally damaging.
From 1962 to the present, the government of Queensland has killed sharks on drum lines and shark nets, a process that also kills other animals such as dolphins and dugongs. From 1962 to 2018, Queensland's ""shark control"" program killed roughly 50,000 sharks, including sharks in the Great Barrier Reef. Queensland's shark-killing program has been called ""outdated, cruel and ineffective"".
New South Wales has a shark net program that kills sharks as well as other marine life. Between 1950 and 2008, 352 tiger sharks and 577 great white sharks were killed in the nets in New South Wales – also during this period, a total of 15,135 marine animals were killed in the nets, including whales and turtles. There has been a very large decrease in the number of sharks in eastern Australia in recent years, and the shark-killing programs in Queensland and New South Wales are partly responsible for this decrease.
Jessica Morris of Humane Society International calls shark culling a ""knee-jerk reaction"" and says, ""sharks are top order predators that play an important role in the functioning of marine ecosystems. We need them for healthy oceans."""
Environmental issues in Australia,"Oil spills
While there have been no oil spill environmental disasters of the scale of the Exxon Valdez in the country, Australia has a large oil industry and there have been several large oil spills [1]. Spills remain a serious threat to the marine environment and Australian coastline. The largest spill to date was the Kirki tanker in 1991 which dropped 17,280 tonnes of oil off the coast of Western Australia.
In March 2009, the 2009 southeast Queensland oil spill occurred, where 200,000 litres were spilled from the MV Pacific Adventurer spilling more than 250 tonnes of oil, 30 tonnes of fuel and other toxic chemicals on Brisbane's suburban beaches. Premier Anna Bligh described the spill as ""worst environmental disaster Queensland has ever seen""."
Environmental issues in Australia,"Ocean dumping
A serious issue to the Australian marine environment is the dumping of rubbish from ships. There have been a number of cases, particularly involving the navy of Australian and other countries polluting Australian waters including the dumping of chemical warfare agents. Recently documented cases include the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan in 2006 which was found to be dumping rubbish off the shores of Moreton Island. In Victoria, a large number of toxic drums containing 1,2-Dichlorobenzene xylenol, a substance very toxic to aquatic creatures washed up on beaches during May 2009 presumably fallen off a passing container ship."
Environmental issues in Australia,"Invasive species
Australia's geographical isolation has resulted in the evolution of many delicate ecological relationships that are sensitive to foreign invaders and in many instances provided no natural predators for many of the species subsequently introduced. The introduction and prolific breeding of animal species such as the cane toad (Rhinella marina) and rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) had greatly disrupted native species populations. Introduced species in Australia are problematic in that they may outcompete or, in the case of the can toad, red fox (Vulpes vulpes) and feral domestic cats (Felis catus), directly kill native species. Rabbits in Australia along with feral beasts of burden disrupt native species by destroying vulnerable habitat requiring drastic pest-exclusion measures such as the Rabbit-proof fence. The cane toad invasion is particularly concerning due to them having few predators and apart from extensively outcompeting native species their toxicity kills thousands of native apex predators each year. The threat of the ongoing cane toad invasion has seen the establishment of a national taskforce despite its potential range being limited to the north of the continent. Likewise Tasmania takes the threat of the species so seriously that it has a government sponsored taskforce to prevent fox populations from taking hold on the island. The species has single-handedly caused the extinction of several native species on the mainland.
Australia is also vulnerable to invasive weeds. Controlling the invasion of prickly pears in Australia is one of the success stories of invasive species control. The government maintains a Weeds of National Significance (WONS) list of problematic plant species."
Environmental issues in Australia,"Land degradation
According to Jared Diamond, ""Australia's number-one environmental problem [is] land degradation"". Land degradation results from nine types of damaging environmental impacts:"
Environmental issues in Australia,"Clearance of native vegetation
Overgrazing by sheep
Rabbits
Soil nutrient exhaustion
Soil erosion
Man-made droughts
Weeds
Misguided governmental policies
Salinization"
Environmental issues in Australia,"Logging and woodchipping
Clearcutting of old growth forests is continuing in parts of Australia primarily in the eastern states of Tasmania, Victoria and New South Wales. This often involves the destruction of natural ecosystems and the replacement with monoculture plantations.
Australia had a 2018 Forest Landscape Integrity Index mean score of 7.22/10, ranking it 46th globally out of 172 countries."
Environmental issues in Australia,"Land clearing and Soil Salinity
In the prehistory of Australia the Indigenous Australians used fire-stick farming which was an early form of land clearing which caused long term changes to the ecology. With European colonisation land clearing continued on a larger scale for agriculture – particularly for cattle, cotton and wheat production. Since European settlement a total of 13% of native vegetation cover has been lost. The extinction of 20 different mammals, 9 bird and 97 plant species have been partially attributed to land clearing. Land clearing is a major source of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions, and contributed to approximately 12 percent of Australia's total emissions in 1998.
The consequences of land clearing include dryland salinity and soil erosion. These are a major concern to the landcare movement in Australia. Soil salinity affects 50,000 km2 of Australia and is predominantly due to land clearance.
The clearing of native vegetation is controlled by Federal laws (indirectly), State law and local planning instruments. The precise details of regulation of vegetation clearing differ according to the location where clearing is proposed."
Environmental issues in Australia,"Waterway health
The protection of waterways in Australia is a major concern for various reasons including habitat and biodiversity, but also due to use of the waterways by humans.
The Murray-Darling Basin is under threat due to irrigation in Australia, causing high levels of salinity which affect agriculture and biodiversity in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. These rivers are also affected by pesticide run-off and drought. Low oxygen levels in the water combined with high temperatures has led to fish kills in the Darling River in 2018, 2019 and 2023. The worst was in March 2023 in which millions of dead bony bream, golden perch silver perch and some Murray cod flowed down the river."
Environmental issues in Australia,"Australian waterways facing environmental issues
Rivers and creeks in urban areas also face environmental issues, particularly pollution."
Environmental issues in Australia,"Victoria
Port Phillip (contamination – silt; sediment; toxins; household chemicals; garden chemicals; E. coli; litter; flotsam and jetsam)
Yarra River (contamination – E. coli; litter – 13 traps; logging; erosion; salinity)
Maribyrnong River (contamination – arsenic and heavy metals; litter – 1 trap)
Mullum Mullum Creek (contamination – E. coli; litter)
Moonee Ponds Creek (contamination - predominantly plastic and polystrene; multiple traps)
Murray River (salinity, erosion)"
Environmental issues in Australia,"New South Wales
Parramatta River (contamination – dioxins, arsenic, coal tars, chromium, lead and phthalates)
Darling River (salinity, erosion)
Murray River (salinity, erosion)
Cooks River (pollution, algal blooms)"
Environmental issues in Australia,"Queensland
Bremer River (water grading F – lowest possible)
Brisbane River
Oxley Creek (water grading D)
Bulimba Creek (threatened species due to land degradation; pollution; litter)"
Environmental issues in Australia,"South Australia
River Torrens (contaminants – E. coli; algal bloom)"
Environmental issues in Australia,"Urbanisation
Australia is one of the most urbanised countries in the world. Many Australian cities have large urban footprints and are characterised by an unsustainable low density urban sprawl. This places demand on infrastructure and services which contributes to the problems of land clearing, pollution, transport related emissions, energy consumption, invasive species, automobile dependency and urban heat islands."
Environmental issues in Australia,"The urban sprawl continues to increase at a rapid rate in most Australian cities, particularly the state capital cities, all of which (with the exception of Hobart) are metropoleis. In some centres, such as Sydney and Greater Western Sydney, Greater Melbourne and South East Queensland large metropolitan conurbations threaten to extend for hundreds of kilometres and based on current population growth rates are expected to become megacities in the 21st century. Most Australian cities population growth is a result of migration in contrast to the Birth rate and fertility rate in Australia, which is contributing to the ongoing trend of urbanisation.
In recent years, some cities have implemented transit-oriented development strategies to curb the urban sprawl. Notable examples include Melbourne 2030, South East Queensland Regional Plan and the Sydney Metropolitan Strategy. There are also population decentralisation programs at state and federal levels aimed at shifting populations out of the major centres and stemming the drivers to rapid urbanisation. Albury-Wodonga was part of the federal government's program of decentralisation begun in the 1970s, which has at times had relocation policies for immigration. The Victorian government has run a decentralisation program since the 1960s, having had a ministerial position appointed and ongoing promotional and investment programs for stimulating growth in Regional Victoria. However policy has swung over the decades, primarily due to local development priorities and agendas and a lack of federal co-ordination to the problem.
Issues include large quantities of e-waste and toxic waste going into landfill. Australia does not have restrictions on the dumping of toxic materials that are common in other countries, such as dumping Cathode Ray Tubes which leach heavy metals into water catchments. Due to the lack of sufficient sites for toxic waste disposal large quantities of toxic waste are trucked between states to remote dumping grounds or exported overseas in ships."
Environmental issues in Australia,"Mining issues
Australia has some of the largest mining operations in the southern hemisphere and is a major exporter of several resources that have significant environmental effects, most notably coal and uranium.
Australia has the largest reserves of uranium in the world and there has been a number of enquiries on uranium mining. The anti-nuclear movement in Australia actively opposes mining and seeks to prevent the construction of nuclear power plants.
At least 150 leaks, spills and licence breaches occurred at the Ranger uranium mine between 1981 and 2009."
Environmental issues in Australia,"Controversial land use projects
The following is a list of development projects that have been controversial due to concerns of environmental effects. This list includes projects required to submit an Environmental Effects Statement."
Environmental issues in Australia,"See also
Fusion Party
List of environmental issues
List of environmental issues in Victoria
List of threatened flora of Australia
Litter in Australia
Odour pollution in Australia
Recycling in Australia
Sustainable Australia Party
Timbarra Gold Mine – a highly controversial gold mine
World Uranium Hearing"
Environmental issues in Australia,"Notes and references
External links
Australian Environment Portal
Envirotalk – Australia's largest environmental discussion forum
Environment Victoria"
Amnesty International Australia,"Amnesty International Australia is a section of the Amnesty International network, and is part of the global movement promoting and defending human rights and dignity."
Amnesty International Australia,"Concerns and campaigns
Human rights in the Asia-Pacific region is a key concern for Amnesty International Australia. Amnesty International Australia searches out facts about human rights abuses and raises awareness of these abuses in Australia, the Asia-Pacific and around the world. The organisation undertakes advocacy and mobilises people to put pressure on governments and others to end rights violations.
Amnesty International Australia campaigns on international and domestic human rights issues. Past campaigns include calling for an end to the human rights abuses that drive and deepen poverty, through the ""Demand Dignity"" campaign;
Craig Foster became the face of the ""Game Over"" (#GameOver) campaign in late 2019, which has been supported by high-profile sportspeople such as Liz Ellis, Benny Elias, Paul Roos, Ian Chappell, Lisa Sthalekar, Paul Wade, Frank Farina, Alex Tobin, Craig Moore; musician Jimmy Barnes, actors Bryan Brown and Anthony La Paglia musicians and many others, and continues as of 2022. Sally McManus, and many others. The campaign centres on the plight of asylum seekers kept in indefinite detention by the Australian Government, for many years after 2013 at detention centres on Manus Island, (PNG), and Nauru.
As of March 2022, campaign focus areas were Indigenous youth incarceration under the campaign name of ""Community Is Everything""; fair treatment of refugees and asylum seekers; and gender and sexuality; women's rights; climate justice; anti-racism; taking action for individuals around the world who are in imminent danger; crisis response; calling for the end the death penalty around the world; and protection of health and human rights during the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia."
Amnesty International Australia,"Governance and funding
The National Board of Amnesty International, which ensures that its constitution is upheld, comprises seven elected directors and up to two additional co-opted directors. As of July 2024 the board is headed by Mario Santos, with directors Lisa Annese, Michael Dundon, Ajoy Ghosh, Terence Jeyaretnam, Belinda Neal, Anne Wright.
In 2018, the organisation introduced new structures and procedures for governance, which increased the impact of members by making more members eligible to vote at the AGM, as well as creating a forum in which members could participate and add their ideas. Membership is broken into seven regions, more or less based on the states and territories of Australia, with each region headed by Activism Leadership Committees.
There are also local groups, with members drawn from universities or local suburbs.
In 2019, National Director Claire Mallinson announced she was stepping down from her role in October after 12 years with the organisation. The Board appointed Samantha Klintworth as National Director, commencing in November 2019. As of July 2024 she remains in this position.
Amnesty International Australia is 100% independent and funded by donors. The organisation does not accept money from governments or political organisations and is impartial and independent of any political ideologies, economic interests or religions. The 2020 Council comprises a group of leaders in business, philanthropy and the arts to raise the profile of Amnesty in Australia, and help to raise funds. The organisation reported over AUD $22M in revenue in 2023."
Amnesty International Australia,"Collaborations
To celebrate International Women's Day on 8 March 2015, Amnesty International Australia collaborated with youth dating app Tinder to raise awareness of women's rights. Slogans included ""Not all women have the power to choose like you do"" and ""You pick your partner. Many women aren't given the choice."".
Holmesglen Institute of TAFE's Community Services students – presentation by Julian Burnside  in 2018
In 2019 Amnesty International Australia partnered with The Body Shop and Indigenous artist Emma-Louise Mulganai Hollingsworth to produce a range of gift cards and tags for sale in stores, with proceeds donated to Amnesty.
Charity Greeting Cards (ongoing as of March 2022)"
Amnesty International Australia,"References
External links
Official website"
List of regions of Australia,"This is a list of regions of Australia that are not Australian states or territories. The most commonly known regionalisation is the governmental division of the state into regions for economic development purposes.
Others regionalisations include those made for purposes of land management, such as agriculture or conservation; information gathering, such as statistical or meteorological. Although most regionalisations were defined for specific purposes and give specific boundaries, many regions will have similar names and extents across different regionalisations. As a result, the names and boundaries of regions can vary and may overlap in popular places.
Not all the regions in this list have official status as an economic or administrative region."
List of regions of Australia,"Types of Australian regionalisation
A regionalisation of Australia is a system by which Australia is divided into regions. There are a great many different regionalisations, created for a range of purposes, including political, administrative, statistical and biological."
List of regions of Australia,"Political and administrative regionalisations
The most prominent regionalisation of Australia is the division into the various states and territories. For electoral purposes, the Australian Senate uses states and territories, but the Australian House of Representatives breaks the country into Divisions. Each state is similarly divided into electoral ""regions"", ""districts"" or ""provinces"", each of which elects members to the house or houses of the state's parliament. Finally, the country is divided into local government areas, each of which is administered by a council.
Other administrative regionalisations may exist within each state. For example, the whole of mainland Western Australia other than the Perth metropolitan area, is divided into regions for the purposes of administration of the Regional Development Commissions Act 1993."
List of regions of Australia,"Statistical regionalisations
For the purposes of statistical geography, the Australian Bureau of Statistics uses the Australian Standard Geographical Classification, a hierarchical regionalisation whose coarsest level is the states and territories, then statistical divisions, statistical subdivisions, statistical local areas, and finally, census collection districts."
List of regions of Australia,"Biogeographical regionalisations
Until recently, most biogeographical and phytogeographical regionalisations of Australia were individually defined for each state and territories; for example: Gwen Harden's botanical regionalisation of New South Wales; Orchard's ""natural regions"" regionalisation of Tasmania; and John Stanley Beard's division of Western Australia into Botanical Provinces and Botanical Districts.
More recently, two regionalisations that cover the entire country have been put in place. The World Wildlife Fund's regionalisation of the world into 825 terrestrial ecoregions created 40 ecoregions in Australia. Within Australia, however, the de facto standard regionalisation is now the Interim Biogeographic Regionalisation for Australia (IBRA). This divides Australia into 85 bioregions, which are further divided into 404 subregions."
List of regions of Australia,"Others
There are a range of other regionalisations of Australia, including:"
List of regions of Australia,"meteorological and climatic regionalisations, as defined and used by the Bureau of Meteorology;
catchment areas and drainage systems;
geological regionalisation
cadastral divisions of Australia"
List of regions of Australia,"Multi-state/territorial
Capital Country – ACT/NSW
Eastern Australia – NSW/QLD/VIC/ACT, sometimes including SA and TAS
East Coast of Australia – also known as an Eastern seaboard
Lake Eyre basin – QLD/SA/NT/NSW
Murray–Darling basin – NSW/ACT/VIC/QLD/SA
Northern Australia – NT/QLD/part of WA
The Nullarbor – SA/WA
Outback – mainly NT and WA, but all territories except ACT and TAS
Southern Australia – TAS/VIC/SA, sometimes including NSW and WA
Sunraysia – a portion of NSW and VIC"
List of regions of Australia,"New South Wales
See also the Bureau of Meteorology's NSW regions map."
List of regions of Australia,"Blue Mountains
Central Coast
Central Tablelands
Central West
Greater Western Sydney
Far South Coast
Far West
Hunter Region (Newcastle)
Illawarra (Wollongong)
Lord Howe Island
New England (north-west)
Murray
Mid North Coast
North West Slopes
Northern Rivers
Northern Tablelands
Orana
Riverina
Sapphire Coast
Snowy Mountains
South Coast
Southern Highlands
Southern Tablelands
South West Slopes
Sunraysia
Sydney"
List of regions of Australia,"Northern Territory
See also the Bureau of Meteorology's NT region map"
List of regions of Australia,"Arnhem Land
Barkly Tableland
Central Australia/Alice Springs Region/Red Centre
Darwin Region
Katherine Region
Top End
Victoria River"
List of regions of Australia,"Queensland
See also the Bureau of Meteorology's Queensland region map"
List of regions of Australia,"Central Queensland
Channel Country
Capricorn Coast
Darling Downs
Granite Belt
Maranoa
Far North Queensland
Torres Strait Islands
Gulf Country
North Queensland
Whitsunday
Townsville
South East Queensland
Brisbane
Gold Coast
Sunshine Coast
West Moreton
Wide Bay–Burnett
South Burnett
Central West Queensland
South West Queensland
Channel Country"
List of regions of Australia,"South Australia
See also the Bureau of Meteorology's South Australia regions map"
List of regions of Australia,"Adelaide Plains
Adelaide Hills/Mount Lofty Ranges
Barossa Valley
Eyre Peninsula
Far North
Fleurieu Peninsula
Flinders Ranges
Kangaroo Island
Limestone Coast
Mid North
Clare Valley
Murray Mallee
Murraylands
Riverland
Yorke Peninsula
Copper Triangle"
List of regions of Australia,"Tasmania
See also the Bureau of Meteorology's Tasmania regions map"
List of regions of Australia,"Central Highlands
Midlands
West Coast
Hobart"
List of regions of Australia,"Victoria
See also the Bureau of Meteorology's Victoria regions map"
List of regions of Australia,Official
List of regions of Australia,The six official regions of Victoria are:
List of regions of Australia,"Barwon South West
Barwon
Great South Coast
Gippsland
Grampians
Central Highlands
Wimmera Southern Mallee
Greater Melbourne
Hume
Goulburn
Ovens Murray
Loddon Mallee
Loddon Campaspe
Mallee
Unofficial"
List of regions of Australia,"Central Victoria
Yarra Valley
Upper Yarra
The Bays
Port Phillip
Mornington Peninsula
Bellarine Peninsula
Western Port
Goldfields
Spa Country
Central Coast
Bass Coast
Northern Country/North Central
Central Murray
Lower Goulburn
Goulburn Valley
Southern Riverina
Upper Goulburn
Northeast
Victorian Alps
Upper Murray
High Country
Bogong High Plains
Gippsland
East Gippsland
West Gippsland
South Gippsland
Central Gippsland
Gippsland Lakes
Central Gippsland Coast
East Gippsland Coast
Victorian Alps
Western District
Central Highlands/Tablelands
Pyrenees
The Grampians
Goldfields
Spa Country
Southwest
The Otways
West Coast
Shipwreck Coast
Great Ocean Road
Surf Coast
Northwest
The Mallee
Sunraysia
Millewa
The Wimmera"
List of regions of Australia,"Western Australia
See also the Bureau of Meteorology's Western Australia regions map.
The Western Australian system of regions defined by the Government of Western Australia for purposes of economic development administration, which excludes the Perth metropolitan area, is a series of nine regions.
The nine defined regions are:"
List of regions of Australia,"Gascoyne
Goldfields–Esperance
Great Southern
Kimberley
Mid West
Peel
Pilbara
South West
Wheatbelt"
List of regions of Australia,"See also
Australian regional rivalries
Interim Biogeographic Regionalisation for Australia
Local government in Australia"
List of regions of Australia,"References
External links
MyRegion.gov.au – an Australian government website dedicated to providing information about the 55 regions of the nation
RDA.gov.au – Regional Development Australia sets regional priorities and helps guide local development and policy"
Federation of Australia,"The Federation of Australia was the process by which the six separate British self-governing colonies of Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia (which also governed what is now the Northern Territory), and Western Australia agreed to unite and form the Commonwealth of Australia, establishing a system of federalism in Australia. The colonies of Fiji and New Zealand were originally part of this process, but they decided not to join the federation. Following federation, the six colonies that united to form the Commonwealth of Australia as states kept the systems of government (and the bicameral legislatures) that they had developed as separate colonies, but they also agreed to have a federal government that was responsible for matters concerning the whole nation. When the Constitution of Australia came into force, on 1 January 1901, the colonies collectively became states of the Commonwealth of Australia.
The efforts to bring about federation in the mid-19th century were dogged by the lack of popular support for the movement. A number of conventions were held during the 1890s to develop a constitution for the Commonwealth. Sir Henry Parkes, Premier of the Colony of New South Wales, was instrumental in this process. Sir Edmund Barton, second only to Parkes in the length of his commitment to the federation cause, was the caretaker Prime Minister of Australia at the inaugural national election in March 1901. The election returned Barton as prime minister, though without a majority.
This period has lent its name to an architectural style prevalent in Australia at that time, known as Federation architecture, or Federation style."
Federation of Australia,"Early calls for federation
As early as 1842, an anonymous article in the South Australian Magazine called for a ""Union of the Australasian Colonies into a Governor-Generalship.""
In September 1846, the NSW Colonial Secretary Sir Edward Deas Thomson suggested federation in the New South Wales Legislative Council. The Governor of New South Wales, Sir Charles Fitzroy, then wrote to the United Kingdom's Colonial Office suggesting a ""superior functionary"" with power to review the legislation of all the colonies. In 1853, FitzRoy was appointed as Governor of Van Diemen's Land, South Australia and Victoria – a pre-federation governor-general of Australia, with wide-ranging powers to intervene in inter-colonial disputes. This title was also extended to his immediate successor, William Denison.
In 1847 the Secretary of State for the Colonies Earl Grey drew up a plan for a ""General Assembly"" of the colonies. The idea was quietly dropped. However, it prompted the statesman William Wentworth to propose in the following year the establishment of ""a Congress from the various Colonial Legislatures"" to legislate on ""inter-colonial questions"".
On 28 July 1853, a select committee formed by Wentworth to draft a new constitution for New South Wales proposed a General Assembly of the Australian Colonies. This assembly was proposed to legislate on intercolonial matters, including tariffs, railways, lighthouses, penal settlements, gold and the mail. This was the first outline of the future Australian Commonwealth to be presented in an official colonial legislative report.
On 19 August 1857, Deas Thomson moved for a NSW Parliamentary Select Committee on the question of Australian federation. The committee reported in favour of a federal assembly being established, but the government changed in the meantime, and the question was shelved.
Also in 1857, in England, William Wentworth founded the ""General Association for the Australian Colonies"", whose object was to obtain a federal assembly for the whole of Australia. While in London, Wentworth produced a draft Bill proposing a confederation of the Australian colonies, with each colony given equal representation in an intercolonial assembly, a proposal subsequently endorsed by his association. He further proposed a ""permissive Act"" be passed by Parliament allowing the colonies of Australia or any subset of them which was not a penal settlement to federate at will. Wentworth, hoping to garner as broad support as possible, proposed a loose association of the colonies, which was criticised by Robert Lowe. The secretary of state subsequently opted not to introduce the Bill stating it would probably lead to ""dissension and discontent"", distributing it nonetheless to the colonies for their responses. While there was in-principle support for a union of the colonies, the matter was ultimately deferred while NSW Premier Charles Cowper and Henry Parkes preferred to focus on liberalising Wentworth's squatter-friendly constitution."
Federation of Australia,"Federal Council of Australasia
A serious movement for Federation of the colonies arose in the late 1880s, a time when there was increasing nationalism amongst Australians, the great majority of whom were native-born. The idea of being Australian began to be celebrated in songs and poems. This was fostered by improvements in transport and communications, such as the establishment of a telegraph system between the colonies in 1872. The Australian colonies were also influenced by other federations that had emerged around the world, particularly the United States and Canada.
Sir Henry Parkes, then colonial secretary of New South Wales, first proposed a Federal Council body in 1867. After it was rejected by the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, the Duke of Buckingham, Parkes brought up the issue again in 1880, this time as the premier of New South Wales. At the conference, representatives from Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia considered a number of issues including federation, communication, Chinese immigration, vine diseases and uniform tariff rates. The Federation had the potential to ensure that throughout the continent, trade and interstate commerce would be unaffected by protectionism and measurement and transport would be standardised.
The final (and successful) push for a Federal Council came at an Intercolonial Convention in Sydney in November and December 1883. The trigger was the British rejection of Queensland's unilateral annexation of New Guinea and the British Government wish to see a federalised Australasia. The convention was called to debate the strategies needed to counter the activities of the German and French in New Guinea and in New Hebrides. Sir Samuel Griffith, the premier of Queensland, drafted a bill to constitute the Federal Council. The conference successfully petitioned the Imperial Parliament to enact the Federal Council of Australasia Act 1885.
As a result, a Federal Council of Australasia was formed, to represent the affairs of the colonies in their relations with the South Pacific islands. New South Wales and New Zealand did not join. The self-governing colonies of Queensland, Tasmania and Victoria, as well as the Crown Colonies of Western Australia and Fiji, became involved. South Australia was briefly a member between 1888 and 1890. The Federal Council had powers to legislate directly upon certain matters, and did so to effect the mutual recognition of naturalisations by colonies, to regulate labour standards in the employment of Pacific Island labour in fisheries, and to enable a legal suit to be served outside the colony in which it was issued, ""a power valuable in matters ranging from absconding debtors to divorce proceedings"". But the Council did not have a permanent secretariat, executive powers, or any revenue of its own. Furthermore, the absence of the powerful colony of New South Wales weakened its representative value."
Federation of Australia,"Nevertheless, it was the first major form of inter-colonial co-operation. It provided an opportunity for Federalists from around the country to meet and exchange ideas. The means by which the Council was established endorsed the continuing role that the Imperial Parliament would have in the development of Australia's constitutional structure. In terms of the Federal Council of Australia Act, the Australian drafters established a number of powers dealing with their common interests which would later be replicated in the Australian Constitution, especially section 51."
Federation of Australia,"Early opposition
The individual colonies, Victoria excepted, were somewhat wary of Federation. Politicians, particularly those from the smaller colonies, disliked the very idea of delegating power to a national government; they feared that any such government would inevitably be dominated by the more populous New South Wales and Victoria. Queensland, for its part, worried that the advent of race-based national legislation would restrict the importing of kanaka labourers, thereby jeopardising its sugar cane industry.
These were not the only concerns of those resistant to federation. Smaller colonies also worried about the abolition of tariffs, which would deprive them of a large proportion of their revenue, and leave their commerce at the mercy of the larger states. New South Wales, traditionally free-trade in its outlook, wanted to be satisfied that the federation's tariff policy would not be protectionist. Victorian Premier James Service described fiscal union as ""the lion in the way"" of federation.
A further fundamental issue was how to distribute the excess customs duties from the central government to the states. For the larger colonies, there was the possibility (which never became an actuality) that they could be required to subsidise the struggling economies of Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia.
Even without the concerns, there was debate about the form of government that a federation would take. Experience of other federations was less than inspiring. In particular, the United States had experienced its traumatic civil war.
The nascent Australian labour movement was less than wholly committed in its support for federation. On the one hand, nationalist sentiment was strong within the labour movement and there was much support for the idea of White Australia. On the other hand, labour representatives feared that federation would distract attention from the need for social and industrial reform, and further entrench the power of the conservative forces. The federal conventions included no representatives of organised labour. In fact, the proposed federal constitution was criticised by labour representatives as being too conservative. These representatives wanted to see a federal government with more power to legislate on issues such as wages and prices. They also regarded the proposed senate as much too powerful, with the capacity to block attempts at social and political reform, much as the colonial upper houses were quite openly doing at that time.
Religious factors played a small but not trivial part in disputes over whether federation was desirable or even possible. As a general rule, pro-federation leaders were Protestants, while Catholics' enthusiasm for federation was much weaker, not least because Parkes had been militantly anti-Catholic for decades (and because the labour movement was disproportionately Catholic in its membership). For all that, many Irish could feel an attractive affinity between the cause of Home Rule in Ireland – effectively federalizing the United Kingdom – and the federation of the Australian colonies. Federationists such as Edmund Barton, with the full support of his righthand man Richard O'Connor, were careful to maintain good relations with Irish opinion."
Federation of Australia,"Early constitutional conventions
In the early 1890s, two meetings established the need for federation and set the framework for this to occur. An informal meeting attended by official representatives from the Australasian colonies was held in 1890. This led to the first National Australasian Convention, meeting in Sydney in 1891. New Zealand was represented at both the conference and the Convention, although its delegates indicated that it would be unlikely to join the Federation at its foundation, but it would probably be interested in doing so at a later date."
Federation of Australia,"Australasian Federal Conference of 1890
The Australasian Federal Conference of 1890 met at the instigation of Parkes. Accounts of its origin commonly commence with Lord Carrington, the Governor of New South Wales, goading the ageing Parkes at a luncheon on 15 June 1889. Parkes reportedly boasted that he ""could confederate these colonies in twelve months"". Carrington retorted, ""Then why don't you do it? It would be a glorious finish to your life."" Parkes the next day wrote to the Premier of Victoria, Duncan Gillies, offering to advance the cause of Federation. Gillies's response was predictably cool, given the reluctance of Parkes to bring New South Wales into the Federal Council. In October Parkes travelled north to Brisbane and met with Griffith and Sir Thomas McIlwraith. On the return journey, he stopped just south of the colonial border, and delivered the historic Tenterfield Oration on 24 October 1889, stating that the time had come for the colonies to consider Australian federation.
Through the latter part of 1889, the premiers and governors corresponded and agreed for an informal meeting to be called. The membership was: New South Wales, Parkes (Premier) and William McMillan (Colonial Treasurer); Victoria, Duncan Gillies (Premier) and Alfred Deakin (Chief Secretary); Queensland, Sir Samuel Griffith (Leader of the Opposition) and John Murtagh Macrossan (Colonial Secretary); South Australia, Dr. John Cockburn (Premier) and Thomas Playford (Leader of the Opposition); Tasmania, Andrew Inglis Clark (Attorney-General) and Stafford Bird (Treasurer); Western Australia, Sir James George Lee Steere (Speaker); New Zealand, Captain William Russell (Colonial Secretary) and Sir John Hall."
Federation of Australia,"When the conference met at the Victorian Parliament in Melbourne on 6 February, the delegates were confronted with a scorching summer maximum temperature of 39.7 °C (103.5 °F) in the shade. The Conference debated whether or not the time was ripe to proceed with federation.
While some of the delegates agreed it was, the smaller states were not as enthusiastic. Thomas Playford from South Australia indicated the tariff question and lack of popular support as hurdles. Similarly, Sir James Lee Steere from Western Australia and the New Zealand delegates suggested there was little support for federation in their respective colonies."
Federation of Australia,"A basic question at this early assembly was how to combine federalism and responsible government. Parkes suggested the Canadian model, which federated with the British North America Act, 1867, to be similarly adopted in Australia. However, delegates from the smaller states were not enthusiastic, with John Alexander Cockburn of South Australia seeing the Canadian model as a ""coercive"" and ""homogeneous National Union"". Andrew Inglis Clark, a long-time admirer of American federal institutions, introduced the US Constitution as an example of the protection of States' rights. He presented it as an alternative to the Canadian model, arguing that Canada was ""an instance of amalgamation rather than Federation."" A model closer to that of the United States was endorsed, with states able to act completely independently apart from those limited powers transferred to the federal government and where each state would be represented equally in a strong second chamber—the Senate."
Federation of Australia,"Clark's draft constitution
Andrew Inglis Clark had given considerable thought towards a suitable constitution for Australia. In May 1890, he travelled to London to conduct an appeal on behalf of the Government of Tasmania before the Privy Council. During this trip, he began writing a draft constitution, taking the main provisions of the British North America Act, 1867 and its supplements up through 1890, the US Constitution, the Federal Council of Australasia Act, and various Australian colonial constitutions. Clark returned from London by way of Boston, Massachusetts, where he held discussions about his draft with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and Moncure Conway among others.
Clark's draft introduced the nomenclature and form which was subsequently adopted:"
Federation of Australia,"The Australian Federation is described as the Commonwealth of Australia
There are three separate and equal branches – the Parliament, the Executive, and the Judicature.
The Legislature consists of a House of Representatives and a Senate
It specified the separation of powers and the division of powers between the Federal and State governments.
Upon his return to Hobart in early November 1890, with the technical aid of W. O. Wise, the Tasmanian Parliamentary Draftsman, Clark completed the final form of the Draft Constitution and had a number of copies printed. In February 1891, Clark circulated copies of his draft to Parkes, Barton and probably Playford as well. This draft was always intended to be a private working document, and was never published."
Federation of Australia,"The National Australasian Convention of 1891
The Parliament proposed at the Convention of 1891 was to adopt the nomenclature of the United States Congress; a House of Representatives and a Senate. The House of Representatives was to be elected by districts drawn up on the basis of their population, while in the Senate there was to be equal representation for each ""province"". This American model was mixed with the Westminster system by which the Prime Minister and other ministers would be appointed by the representative of the British Crown from among the members of the political party holding a majority in the lower House.
Griffith identified with great clarity at the Sydney Convention perhaps the greatest problem of all: how to structure the relationship between the lower and upper houses within the Federal Parliament. The main division of opinion centred on the contention of Alfred Deakin, that the lower house must be supreme, as opposed to the views of Barton, John Cockburn and others, that a strong Senate with co-ordinate powers was essential. Griffith himself recommended that the doctrine of responsible government should be left open, or substantially modified to accord with the Federal structure.
Over the Easter weekend in 1891, Griffith edited Clark's draft aboard the Queensland Government's steam yacht Lucinda. (Clark was not present, as he was ill with influenza in Sydney). Griffith's draft Constitution was submitted to colonial parliaments but it lapsed in New South Wales, after which the other colonies were unwilling to proceed."
Federation of Australia,"Griffith or Clark?
The importance of the draft Constitution of 1891 was recognised by John La Nauze when he flatly declared that ""The draft of 1891 is the Constitution of 1900, not its father or grandfather."" In the twenty-first century, however, a lively debate has sprung up as to whether the principal credit for this draft belongs to Queensland's Sir Samuel Griffith or Tasmania's Andrew Inglis Clark. The debate began with the publication of Peter Botsman's The Great Constitutional Swindle: A Citizen's Guide to the Australian Constitution in 2000, and a biography of Andrew Inglis Clark by F.M. Neasey and L.J. Neasey published by the University of Tasmania Law Press in 2001.
The traditional view attached almost sole responsibility for the 1891 draft to Griffith. Quick and Garran, for instance, state curtly that Griffith ""had the chief hand in the actual drafting of the Bill"". Given that the authors of this highly respected work were themselves active members of the federal movement, it may be presumed that this view represents—if not the complete truth—then, at least, the consensus opinion among Australia's ""founding fathers"".
In his 1969 entry on ""Clark, Andrew Inglis (1848–1907)"" for the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Henry Reynolds offers a more nuanced view: "
Federation of Australia,"Before the National Australasian Convention in Sydney in 1891 [Clark] circulated his own draft constitution bill. This was practically a transcript of relevant provisions from the British North American Act, the United States Constitution and the Federal Council Act, arranged systematically, but it was to be of great use to the drafting committee at the convention. Parkes received it with reservations, suggesting that ""the structure should be evolved bit by bit"". George Higinbotham admitted the ""acknowledged defects & disadvantages"" of responsible government, but criticized Clark's plan to separate the executive and the legislature. Clark's draft also differed from the adopted constitution in his proposal for ""a separate federal judiciary"", with the new Supreme Court replacing the Privy Council as the highest court of appeal on all questions of law, which would be ""a wholesome innovation upon the American system"". He became a member of the Constitutional Committee and chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Although he took little part in the debates he assisted (Sir) Samuel Griffith, (Sir) Edmund Barton and Charles Cameron Kingston in revising Griffith's original draft of the adopted constitution on the Queensland government's steam yacht, Lucinda; though he was too ill to be present when the main work was done, his own draft had been the basis for most of Griffith's text.Clark's supporters are quick to point out that 86 Sections (out of a total of 128) of the final Australian Constitution are recognisable in Clark's draft, and that ""only eight of Inglis Clark's ninety-six clauses failed to find their way into the final Australian Constitution""; but these are potentially misleading statistics. As Professor John Williams has pointed out:
It is easy to point to the document and dismiss it as a mere ""cut and paste"" from known provisions. While there is some validity in such observations it does tend to overlook the fact that there are very few variations to be added once the basic structure is agreed. So for instance, there was always going to be parts dealing with the executive, the parliament and the judiciary in any Australian constitution. The fact that Inglis Clark modelled his on the American Constitution is no surprise once that basic decision was made. Issues of the respective legislative powers, the role of the states, the power of amendment and financial questions were the detail of the debate that the framers were about to address in 1891.
As to who was responsible for the actual detailed drafting, as distinct from the broad structure and framework of the 1891 draft, John Williams (for one) is in no doubt:"
Federation of Australia,"In terms of style there can be little argument that Inglis Clark's Constitution is not as crisp or clean as Kingston's 1891 draft Constitution. This is not so much a reflection on Inglis Clark, but an acknowledgement of the talents of Charles Kingston and Sir Samuel Griffith as drafters. They were direct and economical with words. The same cannot always be said of Inglis Clark."
Federation of Australia,"Australasian Federal Convention of 1897–98
The apparent enthusiasm of 1891 rapidly ebbed in the face of opposition from Henry Parkes' rival, George Reid, and the sudden advent of the Labor Party in NSW, which commonly dismissed federation as a ""fad"". The subsequent revival of the federal movement owed much to the growth of federal leagues outside of capital cities, and, in Victoria, the Australian Natives' Association. The Border Federation League of Corowa held a conference in 1893 which was to prove of considerable significance, and a ""People's Convention"" in Bathurst in 1896 underlined the cautious conversion of George Reid to the federal cause. At the close of the Corowa Conference John Quick had advanced a scheme of a popularly elected convention, tasked to prepare a constitution, which would then be put to a referendum in each colony. Winning the support of George Reid, premier of NSW from 1894, the Quick scheme was approved by all premiers in 1895. (Quick and Robert Garran later published The Annotated Constitution of the Australian Commonwealth in 1901, which is widely regarded as one of the most authoritative works on the Australian Constitution.) In March 1897 took place the Australasian Federal Convention Elections, and several weeks later the delegates gathered for the Convention's first session in Adelaide, later meeting in Sydney, and finally in Melbourne in March 1898. After the Adelaide meeting, the colonial parliaments took the opportunity to debate the emerging bill and to suggest changes. The basic principles of the 1891 draft constitution were adopted, modified by a consensus for more democracy in the constitutional structure. It was agreed that the Senate should be chosen, directly, by popular vote, rather than appointed by state governments.
On other matters there was considerable disagreement. State interests inevitably fractured the unity of delegates in matters involving rivers and railways, producing legalistic compromises. And they had few guides, at a conceptual level, to what they were doing. Deakin greatly praised James Bryce's  appreciation of American federalism, The American Commonwealth. And Barton cited the analysis of federation of Bryce's Oxford colleagues, E.A. Freeman and A.V. Dicey. But neither of these two writers could be said to be actual advocates of Federation. For delegates less given to reading (or citing) authors, the great model of plural governance would always be the British Empire, which was not a federation.
The Australasian Federal Convention dissolved on 17 March 1898 having adopted a bill ""To Constitute the Commonwealth of Australia."""
Federation of Australia,"Federation referenda
Referendums on the proposed constitution were held in four of the colonies in June 1898. There were majority votes in all four, however, the enabling legislation in New South Wales required the support of at least 80,000 voters for passage, equivalent to about half of enrolled voters, and this number was not reached. A meeting of the colonial premiers in early 1899 agreed to a number of amendments to make the constitution more acceptable to New South Wales.  These included the limiting Braddon Clause, which guaranteed the states 75 percent of customs revenue, to just ten years of operation; requiring that the new federal capital would be located in New South Wales, but at least a hundred miles (160 km) distant from Sydney; and, in the circumstances of a double dissolution, reducing from six tenths to one half the requisite majority to legislate of a subsequent joint meeting of Senate and House. In June 1899, referendums on the revised constitution were held again in all the colonies except for Western Australia, where the vote was not held until the following year. The majority vote was yes in all the colonies."
Federation of Australia,"1898 referendums
1899 and 1900 referendums
The bill as accepted by the colonies (except Western Australia, which voted after the act was passed by the British parliament) was sent to Britain to be enacted as an act passed by British Parliament."
Federation of Australia,"Federal Constitution
The Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900 (Imp) was passed on 5 July 1900 and given royal assent by Queen Victoria on 9 July 1900. It was proclaimed on 1 January 1901 in Centennial Park, Sydney. Sir Edmund Barton was sworn in as the interim Prime Minister, leading an interim Federal ministry of nine members.
The new constitution established a bicameral Parliament, containing a Senate and a House of Representatives. The office of governor-general was established as the Queen's representative; initially, as a representative of the British Government.
The Constitution also provided for the establishment of a High Court, and divided the powers of government between the states and the new Commonwealth government. The states retained their own parliaments, along with the majority of existing powers, but the federal government would be responsible of issues defence, immigration, quarantine, customs, banking and coinage, among other powers."
Federation of Australia,"Landmarks named after Federation
The significance of Federation for Australia is such that a number of landmarks, natural and man-made, have been named after it. These include:"
Federation of Australia,"Federal Highway, between Goulburn, New South Wales and Canberra
Federation Creek, near Croydon, Queensland
Federation Peak, Tasmania
Federation Range, on the Royston River, about 90 kilometres (56 mi) east-northeast of Melbourne, Victoria
Federation Square, Melbourne, Victoria
Federation Trail, Melbourne, Victoria
Federation University, Ballarat, Victoria"
Federation of Australia,"See also
Government of Australia
Federalism in Australia
Australian Capital Territory
Secessionism in Western Australia
History of monarchy in Australia
Australian nationality law
Australian Bicentenary
Federation Drought"
Federation of Australia,"Notes
References
Bibliography
Further reading
Baker, Richard Chaffey (1891). A Manual Of Reference To Authorities For The Use Of The Members Of The National Australasian Convention Which Will Assemble At Sydney On March 2, 1891 For The Purpose Of Drafting A Constitution For The Dominion of Australia (PDF). Adelaide: W.K. Thomas & Co.
Bennet, Scott Cecil (1969). Annotated documents on the making of the Commonwealth of Australia (PDF). Australian National University.
Cockburn, John A. (1905). ""Imperialism and Australian Conditions"" . The Empire and the century. London: John Murray. pp. 446–461."
Federation of Australia,"Hunt, Lyall (editor) (2000)Towards Federation: Why Western Australia joined the Australian Federation in 1901 Nedlands, W.A. Royal Western Australian Historical Society ISBN 0-909845-03-4
McQueen, Humphrey, (1970/2004), A New Britannia, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane.
Arthur Patchett Martin (1889). ""Australian Democracy"". Australia and the Empire: 77–114. Wikidata Q107340686.
Quick, John, Historical Introduction to The Annotated Constitution of the Australian Commonwealth (Sydney: University of Sydney Library, 2000)
Deakin, Alfred, 1880–1900 (Legislative Assembly politician) The Federal Story, The Inner History of the Federal Cause, Deakin 175 page eyewitness report. Edited by J. A. La Nauze published by Melbourne University Press.
Wise, Bernard Ringrose (1913). The Making of The Australian Commonwealth. Longmans, Green, and Co."
Federation of Australia,External links
Federation of Australia,"Federation and the Constitution – resource of the National Archives of Australia
Records of the Australasian Federal Conventions of the 1890s
Australian Federation Full Text Database – primary source material"
Federation of Australia,v
Liberal Party of Australia,"The Liberal Party of Australia is a right-wing political party in Australia. It is one of the two major parties in Australian politics, the other being the Australian Labor Party. The Liberal Party was founded in 1944 as the successor to the United Australia Party. Historically the most successful political party in Australia's history, the party is now in opposition at a federal level and does not hold government in any Australian state or territory with the exception of the state of Tasmania.
The Liberal Party is the dominant partner in the Coalition with the National Party of Australia. At the federal level, the Liberal Party has been in coalition with the National Party (under various names) in both government and opposition since its creation, with only brief interruptions. The Coalition was most recently in power from the 2013 federal election to the 2022 federal election, forming the Abbott (2013–2015), Turnbull (2015–2018) and Morrison (2018–2022) governments. The current party leader is Peter Dutton, who replaced former prime minister Scott Morrison as leader after the Coalition's defeat at the 2022 federal election. Two past leaders of the party, Sir Robert Menzies and John Howard, are Australia's two longest-serving Prime Ministers.
The Liberal Party has a federal structure, with autonomous divisions in all six states and the Australian Capital Territory (ACT). The Country Liberal Party (CLP) of the Northern Territory is an affiliate. Both the CLP and the Liberal National Party (LNP), the Queensland state division, were formed through mergers of the local Liberal and National parties. At state and territory level, the Liberal Party is in office in only one state: Tasmania, as of 2014. The party is in opposition in the states of New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, and Western Australia, and in both the ACT and Northern Territory.
The party's ideology has been referred to as liberal, conservative, liberal-conservative, conservative-liberal, and classical liberal. The Liberal Party tends to promote economic liberalism and social conservatism. The National Right faction of the party has also been referred to as right-wing, and right-wing populist."
Liberal Party of Australia,"History
Party foundation
The Liberals' immediate predecessor was the United Australia Party (UAP). More broadly, the Liberal Party's ideological ancestry stretched back to the anti-Labor groupings in the first Commonwealth parliaments. The Commonwealth Liberal Party was a fusion of the Free Trade (Anti-socialist) Party and the Protectionist Party in 1909 by the second prime minister, Alfred Deakin, in response to Labor's growing electoral prominence. The Commonwealth Liberal Party merged with several Labor dissidents (including Billy Hughes) to form the Nationalist Party of Australia in 1917. That party, in turn, merged with Labor dissidents to form the UAP in 1931.
The UAP had been formed as a new conservative alliance in 1931, with Labor defector Joseph Lyons as its leader. The stance of Lyons and other Labor rebels against the more radical proposals of the Labor movement to deal the Great Depression had attracted the support of prominent Australian conservatives. With Australia still suffering the effects of the Great Depression, the newly formed party won a landslide victory at the 1931 Election, and the Lyons government went on to win three consecutive elections. It largely avoided Keynesian pump-priming and pursued a more conservative fiscal policy of debt reduction and balanced budgets as a means of stewarding Australia out of the Depression. Lyons' death in 1939 saw Robert Menzies assume the Prime Ministership on the eve of war. Menzies served as Prime Minister from 1939 to 1941 but resigned as leader of the minority World War II government amidst an unworkable parliamentary majority. The UAP, led by Billy Hughes, disintegrated after suffering a heavy defeat in the 1943 election.  In New South Wales, the party merged with the Commonwealth Party to form the Democratic Party, In Queensland the state party was absorbed into the Queensland People's Party.
From 1942 onward Menzies had maintained his public profile with his series of ""The Forgotten People"" radio talks—similar to Franklin D. Roosevelt's fireside chats of the 1930s—in which he spoke of the middle class as the ""backbone of Australia"" but as nevertheless having been ""taken for granted"" by political parties.
Menzies called a conference of conservative parties and other groups opposed to the ruling Australian Labor Party, which met in Canberra on 13 October 1944 and again in Albury, New South Wales in December 1944. Outlining his vision for a new political movement, Menzies said:"
Liberal Party of Australia,"[W]hat we must look for, and it is a matter of desperate importance to our society, is a true revival of liberal thought which will work for social justice and security, for national power and national progress, and for the full development of the individual citizen, though not through the dull and deadening process of socialism.
The formation of the party was formally announced at Sydney Town Hall on 31 August 1945. It took the name Liberal in honour of the old Commonwealth Liberal Party. The new party was dominated by the remains of the old UAP; with few exceptions, the UAP party room became the Liberal Party room. The Australian Women's National League, a powerful conservative women's organisation, also merged with the new party. A conservative youth group Menzies had set up, the Young Nationalists, was also merged into the new party. It became the nucleus of the Liberal Party's youth division, the Young Liberals. By September 1945 there were more than 90,000 members, many of whom had not previously been members of any political party.
In New South Wales, the New South Wales division of the Liberal Party replaced the Liberal Democratic Party and Democratic Party between January and April 1945. In Queensland, the Queensland People's Party did not become part of the Liberal Party until July 1949, when it became the Queensland division of the Liberal Party."
Liberal Party of Australia,"Menzies era
After an initial loss to Labor at the 1946 election, Menzies led the Liberals to victory at the 1949 election, and the party stayed in office for a record 23 years— the longest unbroken run ever in government at the federal level. Australia experienced prolonged economic growth during the post-war boom period of the Menzies government (1949–66) and Menzies fulfilled his promises at the 1949 election to end rationing of butter, tea and petrol and provided a five-shilling endowment for first-born children, as well as for others. While himself an unashamed Anglophile, Menzies' government concluded a number of major defence and trade treaties that set Australia on its post-war trajectory out of Britain's orbit; opened up Australia to multi-ethnic immigration; and instigated important legal reforms regarding Aboriginal Australians.
Menzies was strongly opposed to Labor's plans under Ben Chifley to nationalise the Australian banking system and, following victory at the 1949 election, secured a double dissolution election for April 1951, after the Labor-controlled Senate rejected his banking legislation. The Liberal-Country Coalition was returned with control of the Senate. The Government was re-elected again at the 1954 election; the formation of the anti-Communist Democratic Labor Party (DLP) and the consequent split in the Australian Labor Party early in 1955 helped the Liberals to secure another victory in December 1955. John McEwen replaced Arthur Fadden as leader of the Country Party in March 1958 and the Menzies-McEwen Coalition was returned again at elections in November 1958—their third victory against Labor's H. V. Evatt. The Coalition was narrowly returned against Labor's Arthur Calwell in the December 1961 election, in the midst of a credit squeeze. Menzies stood for office for the last time at the November 1963 election, again defeating Calwell, with the Coalition winning back its losses in the House of Representatives. Menzies went on to resign from parliament on 26 January 1966.
Menzies came to power the year the Communist Party of Australia had led a coal strike to improve pit miners' working conditions. That same year Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb, and Mao Zedong led the Chinese Communist Party to power in China; a year later came the invasion of South Korea by Communist North Korea. Anti-Communism was a key political issue of the 1950s and 1960s. Menzies was firmly anti-Communist; he committed troops to the Korean War and attempted to ban the Communist Party of Australia in an unsuccessful referendum during the course of that war. The Labor Party split over concerns about the influence of the Communist Party over the trade union movement, leading to the foundation of the breakaway Democratic Labor Party whose preferences supported the Liberal and Country parties.
In 1951, during the early stages of the Cold War, Menzies spoke of the possibility of a looming third world war. The Menzies government entered Australia's first formal military alliance outside of the British Commonwealth with the signing of the ANZUS Treaty between Australia, New Zealand and the United States in San Francisco in 1951. External Affairs Minister Percy Spender had put forward the proposal to work along similar lines to the NATO Alliance. The Treaty declared that any attack on one of the three parties in the Pacific area would be viewed as a threat to each, and that the common danger would be met in accordance with each nation's constitutional processes. In 1954, the Menzies government signed the South East Asia Collective Defence Treaty (SEATO) as a South East Asian counterpart to NATO. That same year, Soviet diplomat Vladimir Petrov and his wife defected from the Soviet embassy in Canberra, revealing evidence of Russian spying activities; Menzies called a Royal Commission to investigate.
In 1956, a committee headed by Sir Keith Murray was established to inquire into the financial plight of Australia's universities, and Menzies injected funds into the sector under conditions which preserved the autonomy of universities.
Menzies continued the expanded immigration programme established under Chifley, and took important steps towards dismantling the White Australia Policy. In the early-1950s, external affairs minister Percy Spender helped to establish the Colombo Plan for providing economic aid to underdeveloped nations in Australia's region. Under that scheme many future Asian leaders studied in Australia. In 1958, the government replaced the Immigration Act's arbitrarily applied European language dictation test with an entry permit system, that reflected economic and skills criteria. In 1962, Menzies' Commonwealth Electoral Act provided that all Indigenous Australians should have the right to enrol and vote at federal elections (prior to this, indigenous people in Queensland, Western Australia and some in the Northern Territory had been excluded from voting unless they were ex-servicemen). In 1949, the Liberals appointed Dame Enid Lyons as the first woman to serve in an Australian Cabinet. Menzies remained a staunch supporter of links to the monarchy and British Commonwealth but formalised an alliance with the United States and concluded the Agreement on Commerce between Australia and Japan which was signed in July 1957 and launched post-war trade with Japan, beginning a growth of Australian exports of coal, iron ore and mineral resources that would steadily climb until Japan became Australia's largest trading partner.
Menzies retired in 1966 as Australia's longest-serving Prime Minister in history."
Liberal Party of Australia,"Holt government
Harold Holt replaced the retiring Robert Menzies in 1966 and the Holt government went on to win 82 seats to Labor's 41 at the 1966 election. Holt remained prime minister until 19 December 1967, when he was declared presumed dead two days after disappearing in rough surf in which he had gone for a swim. His body has never been found.
Holt increased Australian commitment to the growing War in Vietnam, which met with some public opposition. His government oversaw conversion to decimal currency. Holt faced Britain's withdrawal from Asia by visiting and hosting many Asian leaders and by expanding ties to the United States, hosting the first visit to Australia by an American president, his friend Lyndon B. Johnson. Holt's government introduced the Migration Act 1966, which effectively dismantled the White Australia Policy and increased access to non-European migrants, including refugees fleeing the Vietnam War. Holt also called the 1967 Referendum which removed the discriminatory clause in the Australian Constitution which excluded Aboriginal Australians from being counted in the census – the referendum was one of the few to be overwhelmingly endorsed by the Australian electorate (over 90% voted ""Yes""). By the end of 1967, the Liberals' initially popular support for the war in Vietnam was causing increasing public protest."
Liberal Party of Australia,"Gorton government
The Liberals chose John Gorton to replace Holt. Gorton, a former World War II Royal Australian Air Force pilot, with a battle scarred face, said he was ""Australian to the bootheels"" and had a personal style which often affronted some conservatives.
The Gorton government increased funding for the arts, setting up the Australian Council for the Arts, the Australian Film Development Corporation and the National Film and Television Training School. The Gorton government passed legislation establishing equal pay for men and women and increased pensions, allowances and education scholarships, as well as providing free health care to 250,000 of the nation's poor (but not universal health care). Gorton's government kept Australia in the Vietnam War but stopped replacing troops at the end of 1970.
Gorton maintained good relations with the United States and Britain, but pursued closer ties with Asia. The Gorton government experienced a decline in voter support at the 1969 election. State Liberal leaders saw his policies as too centralist, while other Liberals didn't like his personal behaviour. In 1971, Defence Minister Malcolm Fraser, resigned and said Gorton was ""not fit to hold the great office of Prime Minister"". In a vote on the leadership the Liberal Party split 50/50, and although this was insufficient to remove him as the leader, Gorton decided this was also insufficient support for him, and he resigned."
Liberal Party of Australia,"McMahon government and Snedden leadership
Former treasurer William McMahon replaced Gorton as prime minister. Gorton remained a front bencher but relations with Fraser remained strained.
The economy was weakening. McMahon maintained Australia's diminishing commitment to Vietnam and criticised Opposition leader, Gough Whitlam, for visiting Communist China in 1972—only to have the US President Richard Nixon announce a planned visit soon after.
During McMahon's period in office, Neville Bonner joined the Senate and became the first Indigenous Australian in the Australian Parliament. Bonner was chosen by the Liberal Party to fill a Senate vacancy in 1971 and celebrated his maiden parliamentary speech with a boomerang throwing display on the lawns of Parliament. Bonner went on to win election at the 1972 election and served as a Liberal Senator for 12 years. He worked on Indigenous and social welfare issues and proved an independent minded Senator, often crossing the floor on Parliamentary votes.
The McMahon government ended when Gough Whitlam led the Australian Labor Party out of its 23-year period in Opposition at the 1972 election. Following Whitlam's victory, John Gorton played a further role in reform by introducing a Parliamentary motion from Opposition supporting the legalisation of same-gender sexual relations.
Billy Snedden led the party against Whitlam in the 1974 federal election, which saw a return of the Labor government. When Malcolm Fraser won the Liberal Party leadership from Snedden in 1975, Gorton walked out of the Party Room."
Liberal Party of Australia,"Fraser years
Following the 1974–75 Loans Affair, the Malcolm Fraser-led Liberal-Country Party Coalition argued that the Whitlam government was incompetent and so delayed passage of the Government's money bills in the Senate, until the government would promise a new election. Whitlam refused, yet Fraser insisted, leading to the divisive 1975 Australian constitutional crisis. The deadlock came to an end when the Whitlam government was controversially dismissed by the governor-general, Sir John Kerr on 11 November 1975 and Fraser was installed as caretaker prime minister, pending an election. Fraser won in a landslide at the resulting 1975 election.
Fraser maintained some of the social reforms of the Whitlam era, while seeking increased fiscal restraint. His majority included the first Aboriginal federal parliamentarian, Neville Bonner, and in 1976, Parliament passed the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976, which, while limited to the Northern Territory, affirmed ""inalienable"" freehold title to some traditional lands. The Fraser government also established the multicultural broadcaster SBS, accepted Vietnamese refugees, opposed minority white rule in apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia and opposed Soviet expansionism, but Liberal minister Don Chipp split off from the party to form a new centrist-social liberal party, the Australian Democrats in 1977.
The Liberals under Fraser won substantial majorities at the 1977 and 1980 elections, but a significant program of economic reform was never pursued. By 1983, the Australian economy was suffering with the early 1980s recession and amidst the effects of a severe drought. Fraser had promoted ""states' rights"" and his government refused to use Commonwealth powers to stop the construction of the Franklin Dam in Tasmania in 1982. The Liberal Party lost to the Bob Hawke-led Australian Labor Party in the 1983 election."
Liberal Party of Australia,"Opposition (1983–1996)
A period of division for the Liberals followed, with former Treasurer John Howard competing with former foreign minister Andrew Peacock for supremacy. The Australian economy was facing the early 1990s recession. Unemployment reached 11.4% in 1992. Under Dr John Hewson, in November 1991, the opposition launched the 650-page Fightback! policy document—a radical collection of dry (economic liberal) measures including the introduction of a goods and services Tax (GST), various changes to Medicare including the abolition of bulk billing for non-concession holders, the introduction of a nine-month limit on unemployment benefits, various changes to industrial relations including the abolition of awards, a $13 billion personal income tax cut directed at middle and upper income earners, $10 billion in government spending cuts, the abolition of state payroll taxes and the privatisation of a large number of government owned enterprises − representing the start of a very different future direction to the keynesian economic policies practised by previous Liberal/National Coalition governments. The 15 percent GST was the centrepiece of the policy document. Through 1992, Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating mounted a campaign against the Fightback package, and particularly against the GST, which he described as an attack on the working class in that it shifted the tax burden from direct taxation of the wealthy to indirect taxation as a broad-based consumption tax. Pressure group activity and public opinion was relentless, which led Hewson to exempt food from the proposed GST—leading to questions surrounding the complexity of what food was and wasn't to be exempt from the GST. Hewson's difficulty in explaining this to the electorate was exemplified in the infamous birthday cake interview, considered by some as a turning point in the election campaign. Keating won a record fifth consecutive Labor term at the 1993 election. A number of the proposals were later adopted into law in some form, to a small extent during the Keating Labor government, and to a larger extent during the Howard Liberal government (most famously the GST), while unemployment benefits and bulk billing were re-targeted for a time by the Abbott Liberal government."
Liberal Party of Australia,"Howard government
Labor's Paul Keating lost the 1996 Election to the Liberals' John Howard. The Liberals had been in Opposition for 13 years. With John Howard as prime minister, Peter Costello as treasurer and Alexander Downer as foreign minister, the Howard government remained in power until their electoral defeat to Kevin Rudd in 2007.
Howard generally framed the Liberals as being conservative on social policy, debt reduction and matters like maintaining Commonwealth links and the American Alliance but his premiership saw booming trade with Asia and expanding multiethnic immigration. His government concluded the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement with the Bush administration in 2004.
Howard differed from his Labor predecessor Paul Keating in that he supported traditional Australian institutions like the monarchy in Australia, the commemoration of ANZAC Day and the design of the Australian flag, but like Keating he pursued privatisation of public utilities and the introduction of a broad based consumption tax (although Keating had dropped support for a GST by the time of his 1993 election victory). Howard's premiership coincided with Al Qaeda's 11 September attacks on the United States. The Howard government invoked the ANZUS treaty in response to the attacks and supported America's campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In the 2004 federal elections the party strengthened its majority in the lower house and, with its coalition partners, became the first federal government in twenty years to gain an absolute majority in the Senate. This control of both houses permitted their passing of legislation without the need to negotiate with independents or minor parties, exemplified by industrial relations legislation known as WorkChoices, a wide-ranging effort to increase deregulation of industrial laws in Australia.
In 2005, Howard reflected on his government's cultural and foreign policy outlook in oft repeated terms:"
Liberal Party of Australia,"When I became Prime Minister nine years ago, I believed that this nation was defining its place in the world too narrowly. My Government has rebalanced Australia's foreign policy to better reflect the unique intersection of history, geography, culture and economic opportunity that our country represents. Time has only strengthened my conviction that we do not face a choice between our history and our geography.
The 2007 federal election saw the defeat of the Howard federal government, and the Liberal Party was in opposition throughout Australia at the state and federal level; the highest Liberal office-holder at the time was Lord Mayor of Brisbane Campbell Newman. This ended after the 2008 Western Australian state election, when Colin Barnett became premier of that state."
Liberal Party of Australia,"State and territory level up to 2007
At the state level, the Liberals have been dominant for long periods in all states except Queensland, where they have always held fewer seats than the National party. The Liberals were in power in Victoria from 1955 to 1982. Jeff Kennett led the party back to office in that state in 1992, and remained premier until 1999.
In South Australia, initially a Liberal and Country Party affiliated party, the Liberal and Country League (LCL), mostly led by Premier of South Australia Tom Playford, was in power from the 1933 election to the 1965 election, though with assistance from an electoral malapportionment, or gerrymander, known as the Playmander. The LCL's Steele Hall governed for one term from the 1968 election to the 1970 election and during this time began the process of dismantling the Playmander. David Tonkin, as leader of the South Australian Division of the Liberal Party of Australia, became premier at the 1979 election for one term, losing office at the 1982 election. The Liberals returned to power at the 1993 election, led by Premiers Dean Brown, John Olsen and Rob Kerin through two terms, until their defeat at the 2002 election. They remained in opposition for 16 years, under a record five opposition leaders, until Steven Marshall led the party to victory in 2018.
The dual aligned Country Liberal Party governed the Northern Territory from 1978 to 2001.
The party has held office in Western Australia intermittently since 1947. Liberal Richard Court was premier of the state for most of the 1990s.
In New South Wales, the Liberal Party has not been in office as much as its Labor rival, and just three leaders have led the party from opposition to government in that state: Sir Robert Askin, who was premier from 1965 to 1975, Nick Greiner, who came to office in 1988 and resigned in 1992, and Barry O'Farrell who led the party out of 16 years in opposition in 2011.
The Liberal Party does not officially contest most local government elections, although many members do run for office in local government as independents. An exception is the Brisbane City Council, where both Sallyanne Atkinson and Campbell Newman have been elected Lord Mayor of Brisbane."
Liberal Party of Australia,"Opposition (2007–2013)
Following the 2007 federal election, Dr Brendan Nelson was elected leader by the Parliamentary Liberal Party. On 16 September 2008, in a second contest following a spill motion, Nelson lost the leadership to Malcolm Turnbull. On 1 December 2009, a subsequent leadership election saw Turnbull lose the leadership to Tony Abbott by 42 votes to 41 on the second ballot. Abbott led the party to the 2010 federal election, which saw an increase in the Liberal Party vote and resulted in the first hung parliament since the 1940 election.
Through 2010, the party remained in opposition at the Tasmanian and South Australian state elections and achieved state government in Victoria. In March 2011, the New South Wales Liberal-National Coalition led by Barry O'Farrell won government with the largest election victory in post-war Australian history at the State Election. In Queensland, the Liberal and National parties merged in 2008 to form the new Liberal National Party of Queensland (registered as the Queensland Division of the Liberal Party of Australia). In March 2012, the new party achieved Government in an historic landslide, led by former Brisbane Lord Mayor, Campbell Newman.
In March 2013, the Western Australian Liberal-National government won re-election, and Tony Abbott led the party to government at the 2013 Australian federal election."
Liberal Party of Australia,"Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison governments
The party won government in Tasmania in 2014 and lost their fourth election in a row at the South Australian election. However, the Victorian Liberal-National government, now led by Denis Napthine, became the first one term government in Victoria in 60 years. Similarly, just two months later, the Liberal National government in Queensland was defeated just three years after its historic landslide victory. The New South Wales Liberal-National Coalition, however, managed to win re-election in March 2015. In 2016 the Federal Liberals narrowly won re-election in July 2016 while the Liberal-affiliated Country Liberals suffered a historic defeat in the Northern Territory and Canberra Liberals lost their fifth election in a row in October 2016. The Liberals fared little better in 2017 with the Barnett-led Liberal-National government in Western Australia also suffered a landslide defeat in March."
Liberal Party of Australia,"Abbott government
Turnbull government
Turnbull's time in office saw tensions between Moderate and Conservative factions within the Liberal Party.
On 21 August 2018 after a week of mounting pressure on Turnbull's leadership over his handling of energy policy and election strategy, the prime minister used the regular party-room meeting to spill the party leadership in an attempt to head off a growing conservative-led move against him by Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton.  Turnbull survived the challenge, winning 48 votes to Dutton's 35. A further spill was called by Turnbull, in which he declined to stand and the leadership of the party was decided in favour of Treasurer Scott Morrison, over Dutton."
Liberal Party of Australia,"Morrison government
In August 2018, Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton unsuccessfully challenged Turnbull for the leadership of the Liberal Party. Leadership tension continued, and the party voted to hold a second leadership ballot on 24 August, with Turnbull choosing not to stand. In that ballot, Morrison was seen as a compromise candidate and defeated both Dutton and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop to become leader of the Liberal Party. He was sworn in as prime minister by the governor-general later that day. Morrison went on to lead the Coalition to an unexpected victory in the 2019 election."
Liberal Party of Australia,"The Morrison government was defeated at the 2022 election, after which Peter Dutton was elected to succeed Morrison as party leader."
Liberal Party of Australia,"Ideology and factions
Ideology
The Liberal Party generally advocates conservative policies including economic liberalism. Historically, the party has supported a higher degree of economic protectionism and interventionism than it has in recent decades. However, from its foundation the party has identified itself as an anti-socialist grouping of liberals and conservatives. Strong opposition to socialism and communism in Australia and abroad was one of its founding principles. The party's founder and longest-serving leader Robert Menzies envisaged that Australia's middle class would form its main constituency.
Towards the end of his term as Prime Minister of Australia and in a final address to the Liberal Party Federal Council in 1964, Menzies spoke of the ""Liberal Creed"" as follows:"
Liberal Party of Australia,"As the etymology of our name ""Liberal"" indicates, we have stood for freedom ... We took the name 'Liberal' because we were determined to be a progressive party, willing to make experiments, in no sense reactionary but believing in the individual, his right and his enterprise, and rejecting the socialist panacea. We have realised that men and women are not just ciphers in a calculation, but are individual human beings whose individual welfare and development must be the main concern of government ... We have learned that the right answer is to set the individual free, to aim at equality of opportunity, to protect the individual against oppression, to create a society in which rights and duties are recognised and made effective.
Soon after the election of the Howard government the new Prime Minister John Howard, who was to become the second-longest serving Liberal Prime Minister, spoke of his interpretation of the ""Liberal Tradition"" in a Robert Menzies Lecture in 1996:"
Liberal Party of Australia,"Menzies knew the importance for Australian Liberalism to draw upon both the classical liberal as well as the conservative political traditions. He believed in a liberal political tradition that encompassed both Edmund Burke and John Stuart Mill—a tradition which I have described in contemporary terms as the broad church of Australian Liberalism.
Until the 2022 election, the Liberals were in electoral terms largely the party of the middle class (whom Menzies, in the era of the party's formation called ""The forgotten people""), though such class-based voting patterns are no longer as clear as they once were. In the 1970s a left-wing middle class emerged that no longer voted Liberal. One effect of this was the success of a breakaway party, the Australian Democrats, founded in 1977 by former Liberal minister Don Chipp and members of minor liberal parties. During the prime ministership of John Howard, the Liberals did increasingly well among socially conservative working-class voters. Until 2022 the Liberal Party's key support base remained the upper-middle classes—in 2010, 16 of the 20 richest federal electorates were held by the Liberals, most of which were safe seats. Following the 2022 election, 16 of the 20 poorest seats in Australia were held by the Liberal Party,  while it held only five of the 20 wealthiest electorates. In country areas they either compete with or have a truce with the Nationals, depending on various factors.
Menzies was an ardent constitutional monarchist, who supported the monarchy in Australia and links to the Commonwealth of Nations. Today the party is divided on the question of republicanism, with some (such as current leader Peter Dutton) being monarchists, while others (such as his predecessor Malcolm Turnbull) are republicans. The Menzies government formalised Australia's alliance with the United States in 1951 and the party has remained a strong supporter of the mutual defence treaty.
Domestically, Menzies presided over a fairly regulated economy in which utilities were publicly owned, and commercial activity was highly regulated through centralised wage-fixing and high tariff protection. Liberal leaders from Menzies to Malcolm Fraser generally maintained Australia's high tariff levels. At that time the Liberals' coalition partner, the Country Party, the older of the two in the coalition (now known as the National Party), had considerable influence over the government's economic policies. It was not until the late 1970s and through their period out of power federally in the 1980s that the party came to be influenced by what was known as the New Right—a conservative liberal group who advocated market deregulation, privatisation of public utilities, reductions in the size of government programs and tax cuts.
Socially, while liberty and freedom of enterprise form the basis of its beliefs, elements of the party include both what is termed small-l liberalism and social conservatism. Historically, Liberal governments have been responsible for the carriage of a number of notable socially liberal reforms, including the opening of Australia to multiethnic immigration under Menzies and Harold Holt; Holt's 1967 Referendum on Aboriginal Rights; John Gorton's support for cinema and the arts; selection of the first Aboriginal Senator, Neville Bonner, in 1971; and Malcolm Fraser's Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976. A West Australian Liberal, Ken Wyatt, became the first Indigenous Australian elected to the House of Representatives in 2010. He become the first Aboriginal frontbencher in federal parliament in 2015, and the first Aboriginal appointed as an Australian Government minister in 2017. On 6 April 2023 he resigned his membership of the Liberal Party over its stance on the Voice.
The Liberal Party is a member of the International Democracy Union and the Asia Pacific Democrat Union."
Liberal Party of Australia,"Factions
During the Morrison government years, the Liberal Party consisted of three broad factional groupings: a moderate wing, a centre-right wing and a right wing, led by Simon Birmingham, Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton respectively, with the Centre-Right being the largest faction, with 32 of 91 Liberal MPs belonging to the group. The 2022 Australian federal election saw a significant realignment of factional affiliations within the Liberal Party: the National Right became the largest faction with 27 of 65 Liberal MPs aligned with the faction, the Centre-Right went from being the largest faction to the smallest faction, plummeting from 32 members to just 6, the Moderates' membership dropped from 22 members to 14, while a Centrist faction emerged, comprising 11 members."
Liberal Party of Australia,"Organisation
The Liberal Party's organisation is dominated by the six state divisions, reflecting the party's original commitment to a federalised system of government (a commitment which was strongly maintained by all Liberal governments bar the Gorton government until 1983, but was to a large extent abandoned by the Howard government, which showed strong centralising tendencies). Menzies deliberately created a weak national party machine and strong state divisions. Party policy is made almost entirely by the parliamentary parties, not by the party's rank-and-file members, although Liberal party members do have a degree of influence over party policy.
The Liberal Party's basic organisational unit is the branch, which consists of party members in a particular locality. For each electorate there is a conference—notionally above the branches—which coordinates campaigning in the electorate and regularly communicates with the member (or candidate) for the electorate. As there are three levels of government in Australia, each branch elects delegates to a local, state, and federal conference.
All the branches in an Australian state are grouped into a Division. The ruling body for the Division is a State Council. There is also one Federal Council which represents the entire organisational Liberal Party in Australia. Branch executives are delegates to the Councils ex-officio and additional delegates are elected by branches, depending on their size.
Preselection of electoral candidates is performed by a special electoral college convened for the purpose. Membership of the electoral college consists of head office delegates, branch officers, and elected delegates from branches."
Liberal Party of Australia,"Federal parliamentary leaders
State and territory divisions
Federal presidents
Networks and party wings
The Liberal Party has several party wings and networks. Major party wings include:"
Liberal Party of Australia,"The Australian Liberal Student's Federation (the students' wing)
The Federal Women's Committee (the women's wing)
The Young Liberals (the youth wing)
Other networks include an overseas wing (Australian Liberals Abroad) and a Norfolk Island wing (operated by the Canberra Liberals)."
Liberal Party of Australia,"Federal election results
House of Representatives
Donors
For the 2015–2016 financial year, the top ten disclosed donors to the Liberal Party were: Paul Marks (Nimrod resources) ($1,300,000), Pratt Holdings ($790,000), Hong Kong Kingson Investment Company ($710,000), Aus Gold Mining Group ($410,000), Village Roadshow ($325,000), Waratah Group ($300,000), Walker Corporation ($225,000), Australian Gypsum Industries ($196,000), National Automotive Leasing and Salary Packaging Association ($177,000) and Westfield Corporation ($150,000).
The Liberal Party also receives undisclosed funding through several methods, such as ""associated entities"". Cormack Foundation, Eight by Five, Free Enterprise Foundation, Federal Forum and Northern Sydney Conservative forum are entities which have been used to funnel donations to the Liberal Party without disclosing the source."
Liberal Party of Australia,"See also
Country Liberal Party (Northern Territory)
Liberal National Party (Queensland)
Liberal Party of Australia (New South Wales Division)
Liberal Party of Australia (South Australian Division)
Liberal Party of Australia (Tasmanian Division)
Liberal Party of Australia (Victorian Division)
List of political parties in Australia
Turnbull Government
Abbott Government
Liberalism in Australia
Moderates
Young Liberal Movement of Australia"
Liberal Party of Australia,"Notes
References
Further reading
External links"
Liberal Party of Australia,"Official website
Liberal Party of Australia ephemera Archived 7 January 2005 at the Wayback Machine digitised and held by the National Library of Australia
Records of the Victorian division of the Liberal Party held at the University of Melbourne Archives"
New Australians,"New Australians were non-British migrants to Australia who arrived in the wave of immigration following World War II. The term initially referred to newly arrived immigrants, generally refugees, who were expected to eventually become mainstream Australians. It was coined by Arthur Calwell, Australia's first Minister for Immigration, to promote the assimilation of migrants to Australia from continental Europe. Its use was intended to be positive, and to discourage use of pejorative terms such as ""reffo"" or ""Balt"" that were then in frequent use. The term has fallen into disuse since the 1970s.
The Democratic Labor Party in Victoria, under state leader Jack Little, is credited with being the first Australian political party to promote New Australian candidates in parliamentary elections in the period after the end of World War II. Prominent candidates were Hungarian-Australian Vilmos Kormos for the Australian Senate in 1958, and Italian-Australian Nino Randazzo for the electoral district of Fitzroy in the Victorian Legislative Assembly in 1964."
New Australians,"See also
Anglo-Celtic Australian
White ethnic"
New Australians,"References
External links
Article exploring the term ""New Australian"" and its use in found footage cinema"
Cinema of Australia,"The cinema of Australia began with the 1906 production of The Story of the Kelly Gang, arguably the world's first feature film. Since then, Australian crews have produced many films, a number of which have received international recognition. Many actors and filmmakers with international reputations started their careers in Australian films, and many of these have established lucrative careers in larger film-producing centres such as the United States.
Commercially successful Australian films include: Crocodile Dundee, the George Miller's Mad Max trilogy, Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge!, and Chris Noonan's Babe. Award-winning productions include Picnic at Hanging Rock, Gallipoli, The Tracker, Shine and Ten Canoes.
Cinema in Australia is subject to censorship, called classification. Films may be refused classification, which means they are effectively banned."
Cinema of Australia,"History
The Australian film critic David Stratton characterized the history of the country's film as one of ""boom and bust"": there have been deep troughs, during which few films were made for decades, and high peaks, during which a glut of films reached the market."
Cinema of Australia,"Pioneer days – 1890s to 1910
The first public screenings of films in Australia took place in October 1896, within a year of the world's first screening in Paris by Lumière brothers. On 22 August 1896, the first films projected to a paying audience in Australia were at Harry Rickards' Melbourne Opera House (later known as the Tivoli Theatre). The film by magician Carl Hertz was screened as part of a variety show act. Australian tours with similar projection machines followed.
Australia's first cinema, the Salon Lumière at 237 Pitt Street, Sydney, was operating in October 1896, and showed the first Australian-produced short film on 27 October 1896.
The Athenaeum Hall in Collins Street, Melbourne, operated as a dance hall from the 1880s, and from time to time would provide alternative entertainment to patrons. In October 1896 it exhibited the first movie film shown in Australia, within a year of the first public screening of a film in Paris on 28 December 1895 by the French Lumière brothers. The Athenaeum would continue screenings, such as Life in Our Navy, a 60,000 foot film of life on HMS Jupiter, shown on 26 January 1901 by G. H. Snazelle, who provided additional entertainment.
A landmark of newsreel photography was in 1897, when films of both the Caulfield Cup and Melbourne Cup were screened at the Melbourne Opera House on the evenings of the race. The events had been captured on film for W. C. Baxter and developed the same day by photographer Robert William Harvie (died 5 October 1922) and inventor Ernest J. Thwaites (c. 1873 – 12 July 1933).
Some of the earliest movie film shot in Australia consisted of films of Aboriginal dancers in Central Australia, shot by anthropologists Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen between 1900 and 1903. They pioneered sound recording on wax cylinders and shot their films under very difficult conditions.
The earliest feature-length narrative film in the world was the Australian-produced The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), shown at the Athenaeum. The film, written and directed by Charles Tait, included several of his family members. The film was also exhibited in the United Kingdom in January 1908.
Melbourne also hosted one of the world's first film studios, the Limelight Department, operated by the Salvation Army in Australia between 1897 and 1910. The Limelight Department produced evangelical material for use by the Salvation Army, as well as carrying out private and government contracts. In its 19 years of operation the Limelight Department produced about 300 films of various lengths, making it the largest film-producer of its time. The major innovation of the Limelight Department came in 1899 when Herbert Booth and Joseph Perry began work on Soldiers of the Cross, described by some as the first feature-length film ever produced. Soldiers of the Cross fortified the Limelight Department as a major player in the early film-industry. The Limelight Department also produced a film recording of the Federation of Australia."
Cinema of Australia,"Boom and bust – 1910s to 1920s
The 1910s were a ""boom"" period in Australian cinema. Activity had begun slowly in the 1900s, and 1910 saw four narrative films released, then 51 in 1911, 30 in 1912, and 17 in 1913, and back to four in 1914, when the beginning of World War I brought a temporary pause in film-making. While these numbers may seem small in the 21st century, Australia was one of the most prolific film-producing countries at the time. In all, between 1906 and 1928 Australia made 150 narrative feature films, almost 90 of them between 1910 and 1912.
A general consolidation took place in the early 1910s in the production, distribution and exhibition of films in Australia. By 1912 numerous independent producers had merged into Australasian Films and Union Theaters (now known as Event Cinemas), which established control over film distributors and cinemas and required smaller producers to deal with the cartel. Some view the arrangement as opening the way for American distributors in the 1920s to sign exclusive deals with Australian cinemas to exhibit only their own products, thereby shutting out the local product and crippling the local film-industry.
Various other explanations attempt to account for the decline of the industry in the 1920s. Some historians point to falling audience numbers, a lack of interest in Australian product and narratives, and Australia's participation in the war. Also, an official ban on bushranger films occurred in 1912. With the suspension of local film-production, Australian cinema-chains sought alternative products in the United States and realised that Australian-produced films were much more expensive than the imported product, which were priced cheaply as production expenses had already been recouped in the home market. To redress this imbalance, the federal government of Australia imposed a tax on imported film in 1914, but this was removed by 1918.
Whatever the explanation, by 1923 American films dominated the Australian market, with 94% of all exhibited films coming from the United States."
Cinema of Australia,"1930s–1960s
In 1930, F. W. Thring (1883–1936) established the Efftee Studios based in Melbourne to make talking films using optical sound equipment imported from the United States. The first Australian sound films appeared  in 1931: the company produced Diggers (1931), A Co-respondent's Course (1931), The Haunted Barn (1931) and The Sentimental Bloke (1932). During the five years of its existence, Efftee produced nine features, over 80 shorts and several stage-productions. Notable collaborators included C. J. Dennis, George Wallace and Frank Harvey. Film production continued only until 1934, when it ceased as a protest over the refusal of the Australian government to set Australian film-quotas, followed soon by Thring's death in 1936. It was estimated that Thring lost over £75,000 of his own money on his filmmaking and theatrical ventures.
Ken G. Hall became a driving force in establishing Cinesound Productions in 1931. The company became one of Australia's first feature-film production companies and operated into the early 1940s, becoming Australia's leading domestic studio based on the Hollywood model. The company also used the Hollywood model for the promotion of its films and attempted to promote a star system. It was particularly successful with the On Our Selection (1932) series of comedies, based on the popular writings of author Steele Rudd, which featured the adventures of a fictional Australian farming family, the Rudds, and the perennial father-and-son duo, ""Dad and Dave"". Despite its ambitions, Cinesound produced only 17 feature-films, all but one of them directed by Ken Hall. Though financially successful, the company ceased making feature films following the 1939 outbreak of World War II."
Cinema of Australia,"In the Wake of the Bounty (1933), directed by Charles Chauvel, starred Tasmanian-born Errol Flynn, who went on to Britain and later became a celebrated Hollywood star. Chauvel directed a number of successful Australian films, including 1944's World War II classic The Rats of Tobruk (which starred Peter Finch and Chips Rafferty) and 1955's Jedda, which was notable as the first Australian film shot in colour, and as the first to feature Aboriginal actors in lead roles and to enter the Cannes Film Festival.
In Britain, the Cinematograph Films Act 1927 established a quota of films that had to be shown in British cinemas.  One could shoot compliant films in the British Empire as well as in Great Britain;  this stimulated Australian film-production. However the Cinematograph Films Act 1938 mollified the British film industry by including only films made by and shot in Great Britain in the quota - this removed Australian films from the film quota in the UK, and saw the loss of a guaranteed market for Australian films.
Kokoda Front Line! (1942), directed by Ken G. Hall, won Australia's first Oscar. Chips Rafferty and Peter Finch became prominent international stars of the period. Rafferty's onscreen image as a lanky, laconic bushman struck a chord with Australian filmgoers, and he appeared in iconic early Australian films such as Forty Thousand Horsemen (1940), The Rats of Tobruk (1944), The Overlanders (1946) and Eureka Stockade (1949) (Overlanders and Eureka were part of a series of Australian-themed films produced by Britain's iconic Ealing Studios). In Hollywood, Rafferty also appeared in Australian-themed films, including The Desert Rats (1953), The Sundowners (1960) and Mutiny on the Bounty (1962). Similarly, Peter Finch starred in quintessentially Australian roles (such as ""digger"" and stockman) through a series of popular films and had a successful and diverse screen career in Britain and the United States.
Both Ron Randell and Rod Taylor began their acting careers in Australia - initially in radio and on stage before appearing in such Australian films as Smithy (1946) for the former and Long John Silver (1954) for the latter. They each transferred to the United States to become Hollywood leading men in a number of films of the late 1940s (Randell) and both from the 1950s onwards. Taylor had starring roles in The Time Machine (1960) and The Birds (1963) as well as in several American television-series such as Hong Kong (1960-1961).
In the 1950s British and American production-companies made several notable films in Australia based on stories from Australian literature (generally with strong rural themes). These included A Town Like Alice (1956, which starred Virginia McKenna and Peter Finch); The Shiralee (1957, also starring Peter Finch with Australian actors Charles Tingwell, Bill Kerr and Ed Devereaux in supporting roles); Robbery Under Arms (1957, again starring Finch); and Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1959, starring Ernest Borgnine, John Mills and Angela Lansbury). In 1960, The Sundowners was shot partly in the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales with foreign leads Deborah Kerr, Robert Mitchum, and Peter Ustinov but a supporting cast including Australians - Chips Rafferty, John Meillon and Leonard Teale.
In 1958, Australian Film Institute was formed and in the same year began awarding the Australian Film Institute Awards.
After filming Whiplash in the country in 1960, Peter Graves said that the biggest problem was the shortage of Australian actors. Australian film-production reached a low ebb with few notable productions during the 1960s. The 1966 comedy They're a Weird Mob, starring Walter Chiari, Chips Rafferty and Claire Dunne, was a rare hit of the period which also documented something of the changing face of Australian society: telling the story of a newly-arrived Italian immigrant who, working as a labourer in Sydney, becomes mates with his co-workers, despite some difficulties with Australian slang and culture. The film foreshadowed the successful approaching ""New Wave"" of Australian cinema of the 1970s that would often showcase colloquial Australian culture.
Overseas cinema continued to attract Australian actors as ""action-men"" with the casting of Australian George Lazenby to replace Sean Connery in portraying the superspy James Bond in the 1969 U.K. film On Her Majesty's Secret Service."
Cinema of Australia,"Renaissance – 1970s and 1980s
John Gorton, Prime Minister of Australia from 1968 to 1971, initiated several forms of government support for film and the arts, including the Australian Film Development Corporation. The Gough Whitlam government (1972–75) continued the support via its successor the Australian Film Commission, and state governments also established assistance programs. These measures led to a resurgence of Australian film-making in both the low budget 16mm format and 35mm cinema - the Australian New Wave - which lasted until the mid-to-late 1980s. The era also marked the emergence of the ""Ozploitation"" style – characterised by the exploitation of colloquial Australian culture."
Cinema of Australia,"Also notable during this era was the effect of the  growing feminist movement. The role of women's films was discussed at the Women's Liberation Conference in Melbourne in 1970, and groups such as the Feminist Film Workers collective (1970s and 1980s), Sydney Women""s Film Group (SWFG, 1972–), Melbourne Women's Film Group (1973–), Reel Women (1979 to 1983 in Melbourne), and  Women's Film Unit (Sydney and Melbourne, 1984/5) were established. A number of filmmakers, including Jeni Thornley, Sarah Gibson, Susan Lambert, Martha Ansara, Margot Nash and Megan McMurchy, were involved in these groups. The 1975 International Women's Film Festival, the first of its kind, was initiated by the SWFG, but groups around the country organised screening events in other state capitals. In Melbourne and Sydney the festivals ran for nine days (with an audience of around 56,000), and in the other states they spanned two to three days.
Films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock (directed by Peter Weir, 1975) and Sunday Too Far Away (Ken Hannam, 1975) made an impact on the international scene. The 1970s and 1980s are regarded by many as a ""golden age"" of Australian cinema, with many successful films, from the dark dystopian fiction of Mad Max (George Miller, 1979) to the romantic comedy of Crocodile Dundee (Peter Faiman, 1986) and the emergence of such film-directing auteurs as Gillian Armstrong, Phillip Noyce and Bruce Beresford.
A major theme of Australian cinema which matured in the 1970s was one of survival in the harsh Australian landscape. A number of thrillers and horror-films - dubbed ""outback gothic"" - have appeared, including Wake in Fright, Walkabout, The Cars That Ate Paris and Picnic at Hanging Rock in the 1970s, Razorback, Long Weekend and Shame in the 1980s and Japanese Story, The Proposition and Wolf Creek in the 2000s. These films depict the Australian bush and its creatures as deadly, and its people as outcasts and psychopaths. These elements combine with futuristic post-apocalyptic themes in the Mad Max series. 1971's Walkabout was a British film, set in Australia, which became a forerunner to many Australian films related to indigenous themes; it introduced David Gulpilil to cinematic audiences. 1976's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith directed by Fred Schepisi re-told an award-winning historical drama from the book by Thomas Keneally about the tragic story of an Aboriginal bushranger.
Classic stories from Australian literature and Australian history continued to provide popular cinematic adaptations during the 1970s and 1980s. Gillian Armstrong's My Brilliant Career (1979) featured Judy Davis and Sam Neill in early lead-roles. 1982's We of the Never Never followed up on the theme of the female experience of life in the Australian bush. 1982's The Man from Snowy River, starring Tom Burlinson and Sigrid Thornton, dramatised the classic Banjo Paterson poem of that name and became one of the all-time box-office successes of Australian cinema. In addition to the serious historical dramas popular in the 1970s, a number of films celebrating and satirizing Australian colloquial culture appeared over the decade, including: The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972), Alvin Purple (1973), and Barry McKenzie Holds His Own (1974). The Barry McKenzie films saw performing-artist and writer Barry Humphries collaborating with director Bruce Beresford. In 1976, Peter Finch won a posthumous Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in the American satire Network, thus becoming the first Australian to win an Oscar for best actor.
1980's Breaker Morant (starring Jack Thompson and Edward Woodward) dramatised the controversial trial of an Australian soldier during the Boer War of 1899-1902; there followed 1981's World War I drama Gallipoli (directed by Peter Weir and starring Mel Gibson). These films, now considered classics of Australian cinema, explored contemporary Australian identity through dramatic episodes in Australian history. Gibson went on to further success in 1982's The Year of Living Dangerously before transferring to pursue his Hollywood career as an actor and director. Many other Australian stars would follow his path to international stardom in the coming decades. The director of The Year of Living Dangerously, Peter Weir, also made a successful transition to Hollywood. Weir contributed to the screenplay along with its original author, Christopher Koch, and playwright David Williamson. Williamson rose to prominence in the early 1970s, and has gone on to write several other original scripts and screenplays made into successful Australian films, including: Don's Party (1976); Gallipoli (1981), Emerald City (1988), and Balibo (2009).
Actor/comedian Paul Hogan wrote the screenplay and starred in the title role in his first film, Crocodile Dundee (1986), about a down-to-earth hunter who travels from the Australian outback to New York City. The movie became the most successful Australian film ever, and launched Hogan's international film career. Following the success of Crocodile Dundee, Hogan starred in the sequel, Crocodile Dundee II in 1988. 1988 also saw the release of the drama Evil Angels (released outside of Australia and New Zealand as A Cry in the Dark) about the Lindy Chamberlain saga, in which a dingo took a baby at Ayers Rock and her mother was accused of having murdered the child.
Nicole Kidman began appearing in Australian children's TV and film in the early 1980s – including starring roles in BMX Bandits and Bush Christmas. During the 1980s she appeared in several Australian productions, including Emerald City (1988), and Bangkok Hilton (1989). In 1989 Kidman starred in Dead Calm alongside Sam Neill and Billy Zane. The thriller garnered strong reviews, and Hollywood roles followed."
Cinema of Australia,"1990–2000
The 1990s proved a successful decade for Australian film and introduced several new stars to a global audience. Low budget films such as the comedy/drama Muriel's Wedding, starring Toni Collette, the gently satirical suburban comedy The Castle directed by Rob Sitch (which cast Eric Bana in his first prominent film role), and Baz Luhrmann's flamboyant Strictly Ballroom each attained commercial and critical success, and explored quirky characters inhabiting contemporary Australian suburbia – marking something of a departure from the Outback and historical sagas which obtained success in the 1970s and 1980s. Stephan Elliott's 1994 film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert mixed traditional outback cinematography and landscape with contemporary urban sub-culture: following three drag queens on a road trip to Central Australia.
While a number of major international stars gained early prominence in Australia over the period, an important stable of established and emerging local stars with prodigious film credits remained prominent, including screen veterans Charles Tingwell, Bill Hunter, Jack Thompson, Bryan Brown and Chris Haywood.
The World War II drama Blood Oath (1990) debuted both Russell Crowe and Jason Donovan, in minor cinematic roles. Crowe demonstrated his versatility as an actor in this early period of his career by starring soon after as a street gang Melbourne skinhead in 1992's Romper Stomper and then as an inner-Sydney working-class gay man in 1994's The Sum of Us before transferring to the US to commence his Hollywood career.
George Miller's Babe (1995) employed new digital effects to make a barnyard come alive and went on to become one of Australia's highest-grossing films. The 1996 drama Shine achieved an Academy Award for Best Actor award for Geoffrey Rush and Gregor Jordan's 1999 film Two Hands gave Heath Ledger his first leading role."
Cinema of Australia,"2001–2019
After Ledger's successful transition to Hollywood, Jordan and Ledger collaborated again in 2003, with Ledger playing the iconic bushranger title role in the film Ned Kelly, co-starring Australian actress Naomi Watts.
The canon of films related to Indigenous Australians also increased over the period of the 1990s and early 21st Century, with Nick Parsons' 1996 film Dead Heart featuring Ernie Dingo and Bryan Brown; Rolf de Heer's The Tracker, starring Gary Sweet and David Gulpilil; and Phillip Noyce's Rabbit-Proof Fence in 2002. In 2006, Rolf de Heer's Ten Canoes became the first major feature film to be shot in an Indigenous language and the film was recognised at Cannes and elsewhere.
The shifting demographics of Australia following post-war multicultural immigration was reflected in Australian cinema through the period and in successful films like 1993's The Heartbreak Kid; 1999's Looking for Alibrandi; 2003's Fat Pizza; the Wog Boy comedies and 2007's Romulus, My Father which all dealt with aspects of the migrant experience or Australian subcultures.
Fox Studios Australia and Warner Roadshow Studios had hosted large international productions like George Lucas's Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones and Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, and the Wachowskis's The Matrix.
Rob Sitch and Working Dog Productions followed the success of The Castle with period comedy The Dish, which was the highest grossing Australian film of the Year 2000 and entered the top ten list of highest grossing Australian films. Big budget Australian-international co-productions Moulin Rouge! (Baz Luhrmann, 2001) and Happy Feet (which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature for filmmaker George Miller in 2006) also entered the top ten list during the first decade of the new century. Baz Luhrmann directed a series of international hits and returned to Australia for the production of 2008's Australia, which showcased a host of Australian stars including Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman and David Wenham and went on to become the second highest-grossing film in Australian cinematic history.
Lantana, directed by Ray Lawrence attained critical and commercial success in 2001 for its examination of a complex series of relationships in suburban Sydney, and events surrounding a mysterious crime. It won seven AFI Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor for Anthony LaPaglia and Best Actress for Kerry Armstrong.
Emerging star Sam Worthington had early lead roles in the 2002 mobster black comedy Dirty Deeds and 2003's crime caper Gettin' Square. Gettin Square also featured rising star David Wenham who demonstrated versatility with a string of critically acclaimed roles including the title role in Paul Cox's 1999 biopic Molokai: The Story of Father Damien and the 2001 thriller The Bank, directed by the politically conscious film director Robert Connolly.
In 2005, Little Fish marked a return to Australian film for actress Cate Blanchett and won five Australian Film Institute Awards including Best Actor for Hugo Weaving, Best Actress for Blanchett and Best Supporting Actress for screen veteran Noni Hazlehurst.
In 2008 following Ledger's death, the documentary film celebrating the romps of the Australian New Wave of 1970s and 1980s low-budget cinema: Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! The film was directed by Mark Hartley and interviews filmmakers including Quentin Tarantino, Dennis Hopper, George Miller and Barry Humphries.
The early 2000s were generally not successful years for Australian cinema, with several confronting dramas proving unpopular at the box office. In 2008, no Australian movies made $3 million at the box office, but a conscious decision by filmmakers to broaden the types of films being made as well as the range of budgets produced a series of box-office hits at the close of the decade. Strong box office performances were recorded in 2009–10 by Bruce Beresford's Mao's Last Dancer; the Aboriginal musical Bran Nue Dae the dramatization of John Marsden's novel Tomorrow, When the War Began; and the crime drama Animal Kingdom which featured major Australian screen stars Ben Mendelsohn, Joel Edgerton, Guy Pearce and Jacki Weaver. Animal Kingdom achieved success at the 2010 Australian Film Institute Awards and was acclaimed at film festivals around the world. Tomorrow, When the War Began became the highest-grossing domestic film of 2010 and it was nominated for nine Australian Film Institute Awards.
Other award-winning films of the period included Balibo (2009) starring Anthony LaPaglia; Middle Eastern crime flick Cedar Boys (2009) directed by Serhat Caradee; and animated comedy drama Mary and Max."
Cinema of Australia,"World War I drama Beneath Hill 60 (2010), directed by Jeremy Sims and starring Brendan Cowell, was nominated for numerous awards and won three.
Sally Riley, as inaugural head of the Indigenous department at ABC Television, after her previous role at the Australian Film Commission (later Screen Australia), has done much to develop Indigenous talent in the film and television industry. Contemporary Indigenous film-makers include Warwick Thornton, Wayne Blair, Trisha Morton-Thomas and Rachel Perkins.
The Australian film industry continues to produce a reasonable number of films each year, but in common with other English-speaking countries, Australia has often found it difficult to compete with the American film industry, the latter helped by having a much larger home market. The most successful Australian actors and filmmakers are easily lured by Hollywood and rarely return to the domestic film industry. The South Australian Film Corporation continues to produce quality films, and Adelaide has been chosen as the location for films such as Hotel Mumbai (2019)."
Cinema of Australia,"2020–present
An Australian film and TV industry was afflicted by COVID-19 pandemic, with at least 60 shoots being halted and about 20,000 people out of work. On Monday 23 March, all productions funded by Screen Australia were postponed. As of 15 April 2020, after some improvement in COVID-19 statistics in Australia, Screen Australia continues to fund work and process applications, intending to use all of its 2019/20 budget.
Sometimes after reopening movies and TV industries, two other several films including Escape from Pretoria (2020) and James Wan's reboot of video game franchise Mortal Kombat (2021), a feature film production in the state's history, who were delaying the films during the pandemic."
Cinema of Australia,"Genres
Australian Gothic films
Gothic films incorporate Gothic elements and can be infused within different genres such as horror, romance, science fiction, and comedy. Australian Gothic films have been an accordant genera ever since the 1970s. Gothic Australian films means to make films that are diverse and use camera techniques in different ways to question what the audience may perceive. One of the Australian Gothic films created by female filmmakers Suzan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka called The Screening of Australia (1987), shows different stylistic thematic terms and was the most successful at showing what is called the ocker, a term to describe a (white) Australian savage man. Other than this, there is a strong relationship between Australian Gothic films and Gothic literature. The characters and the actions that happen in a Gothic novel is created into a Gothic film. Most Gothic novels during the 1970s referred to female characters and their Australian cultural values.
Although the film Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) was directed by a male filmmaker, it was written by  storyteller Joan Lindsay. Lindsay decided to make this film culturally related to Australian societal issues of day-to-day lives. Her film included Gothic materials and gave a twist of horror that later the director will showcase through the mise-en-scene and cinematography. The use of Gothic materials were offered by the filmmakers Dermody and Jacka to other Australian Gothic films that have opened up to a more thematic analysis. Other Gothic films were made to broaden Australian characteristics and features. Smoke Em If You Got ‘Em (1988), produced by Jennifer Hooks, showcased the protagonist in a supernatural horrific way, but also added a comedic twist to not lose its characterization of film style."
Cinema of Australia,"Government support
John Gorton, Prime Minister of Australia from 1968–1971, initiated several forms of Government support for Australian film and the arts, establishing the Australian Council for the Arts, the Australian Film Development Corporation and the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. Prime Minister Gough Whitlam continued to support Australian film. The South Australian Film Corporation was established in 1972 to promote and produce films, while the Australian Film Commission was created in 1975 to fund and produce internationally competitive films.
The federal Australian government had supported the Australian film industry through the funding and development agencies of Film Finance Corporation Australia, the Australian Film Commission and Film Australia. In 2008 the three agencies were consolidated into Screen Australia."
Cinema of Australia,"Government funding bodies
Screen Australia, successor to
Australian Film Commission,
Film Australia and
Film Finance Corporation Australia
Queensland Film Corporation (defunct)
Screen NSW
Screenwest
South Australian Film Corporation
Tasmanian Film Corporation (defunct)
VicScreen"
Cinema of Australia,"Highest-grossing Australian films
Other financial hits
High-grossing Australian films from earlier decades include:"
Cinema of Australia,"1900s – The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906) (gross £20,000)
1910s – The Fatal Wedding (1911) (£18,000), The Life Story of John Lee, or The Man They Could Not Hang (1912) (£20,000), The Martyrdom of Nurse Cavell (1915) (£25,000)
1920s – For the Term of His Natural Life (1927) (over £40,000)
1930s – On Our Selection (1932) (£60,000), The Silence of Dean Maitland (1934) (£50,000)
1940s – Forty Thousand Horsemen (1940) (£130,000), Smithy (1946) (over £50,000), The Overlanders (1946) (£250,000), Sons of Matthew (1949)
1950s – Walk Into Paradise (1956)
1960s – They're a Weird Mob (1966) (over $2 million)
1970s – Alvin Purple (1973) ($4.72 million), Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) (over $5 million), Mad Max (1979) ($100 million)"
Cinema of Australia,"Directors
Actors
The Australian film industry has produced a number of successful actors, actresses, writers, directors and filmmakers many of whom have been known internationally.
Actors"
Cinema of Australia,Actresses
Cinema of Australia,"See also
References
Literature
Encyclopedia and reference
Goldsmith, Ben, Ryan, Mark David, and Lealand, Geoff Eds. ""Directory of World Cinema : Australia and New Zealand 2"". Bristol: Intellect, 2014. ISBN 9781841506340
Murray, Scott, ed. Australian Film: 1978–1994. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1995. ISBN 978-0-19-553777-2
Pike, Andrew and Ross Cooper. Australian Film: 1900–1977. revised ed. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998. ISBN 978-0-19-550784-3
McFarland, Brian, Geoff Mayer and Ina Bertrand, eds. The Oxford Companion to Australian Film. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1999. ISBN 978-0-19-553797-0
Moran, Albert and Errol Vieth. Historical Dictionary of Australian and New Zealand Cinema. Lanham, Md: Scarecrow Press, 2005. ISBN 978-0-8108-5459-8
Reade, Eric. Australian Silent Films: A Pictorial History of Silent Films from 1896 to 1926. Melbourne: Lansdowne Press, 1970.
Verhoeven, Deb, ed. Twin Peeks: Australian and New Zealand Feature Films. Melbourne: Damned Publishing, 1999. ISBN 978-1-876310-00-4"
Cinema of Australia,"Critique and commentary
Ryan, Mark David and Goldsmith, Ben, Australian Screen in the 2000s. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, Switzerland. ISBN 978-3-319-48299-6
Collins, Felicity, and Theresa Davis. Australian Cinema After Mabo. Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Dawson, Jonathan, and Bruce Molloy, eds. Queensland Images in Film and Television. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1990.
Dermody, Susan and Elizabeth Jacka, eds. The Screening of Australia, Volume 1: Anatomy of a Film Industry. Sydney: Currency Press, 1987.
——— . The Screening of Australia, Volume 2: Anatomy of a National Cinema. Sydney: Currency Press, 1988.
Moran, Albert and Tom O'Regan, eds. An Australian Film Reader (Australian Screen Series). Sydney: Currency Press, 1985.
Moran, Albert and Errol Vieth. Film in Australia: An Introduction Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
O'Regan, Tom. Australian National Cinema. London: Routledge, 1996.
Ryan, Mark, David (2009),'Whither Culture? Australian Horror Films and the Limitations of Cultural Policy', Media International Australia: Incorporating Culture and Policy, no. 133, pp. 43–55.
Stratton, David. The Avocado Plantation: Boom and Bust in the Australian Film Industry. Sydney : Pan Macmillan, 1990. 465p. ISBN 978-0-7329-0250-6
Verhoeven, Deb. Sheep and the Australian Cinema. Melbourne : MUP, 2006. ISBN 978-0-522-85239-4"
Cinema of Australia,"External links
Commonwealth and State Government Sites
australianscreen – Australia's audiovisual heritage online
Screen Australia
National Film and Sound Archive of Australia
Australian Government site on Film in Australia
Pacific Film and Television Corporation (Queensland)
New South Wales Film and Television Office
Australian Centre for the Moving Image (Victoria)
South Australia Film Corporation
Filmwest (Western Australia)
Australian Film, Television and Radio School
Film Making studies in Australia"
Cinema of Australia,"Non-government sites
film.org.au: the best of Australian Films
Internet Movie Database, Australia
Australian Cinemas Map
Ozmovies Australian Film Database, Australia
TV Cream on Australian films
Anything Oz or New Zealand Films site
Cinema and Audiences Research Project (CAARP)"
Vietnamese Australians,"Vietnamese Australians (Vietnamese: Người Úc gốc Việt) are Australians of Vietnamese descent. Vietnamese Australians are one of the largest groups within the global Vietnamese diaspora. 
At the 2021 census, 334,781 people stated that they had Vietnamese ancestry (whether alone or in combination with another ancestry), representing 1.3% of the Australian population. In 2021, the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated that there were 268,170 Australian residents who were born in Vietnam."
Vietnamese Australians,"History
Up until 1975 there were fewer than 2,000 Vietnam-born people in Australia. Following the takeover of South Vietnam by the North Vietnamese communist government in April 1975, Australia, being a signatory to the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, agreed to resettle its share of Vietnam-born refugees under a refugee resettlement plan between 1975 and 1985.  After the initial intake of refugees in the late 1970s, there was a second immigration peak in 1983–84, most likely a result of the 1982 agreement between the Australian and Vietnamese governments (the Orderly Departure Program) which allowed relatives of Vietnamese Australians to leave Vietnam and migrate to Australia.  A third immigration peak in the late 1980s seems to have been mainly due to Australia's family reunion scheme."
Vietnamese Australians,"Demographics
At the 2021 census, 334,781 people stated that they had Vietnamese ancestry (whether alone or in combination with another ancestry), representing 1.3% of the Australian population. In 2021, the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated that there were 268,170 Australian residents who were born in Vietnam. In 2021, Vietnamese Australians were the fourth largest Asian Australian ancestry after Chinese Australians, Indian Australians and Filipino Australians. In 2021, Vietnam was the sixth most common foreign country of birth.
In the 2001 census, first generation Australians of Vietnamese ancestry outnumbered second generation Australians with Vietnamese ancestry (74% to 26%) Relatively few people of Vietnamese ancestry stated another ancestry (6%). Among the leading ancestries, the proportion of people who spoke a language other than English at home was highest for those of Vietnamese (96%).
In Melbourne the suburbs of Richmond, Footscray, Springvale, Sunshine and St Albans have a significant proportion of Vietnamese Australians, while in Sydney they are concentrated in Cabramatta, Cabramatta West, Canley Vale, Canley Heights, Bankstown, St Johns Park and Fairfield. In Brisbane they are concentrated in Darra and Inala. There are also significant Vietnamese Australian communities in Adelaide, Canberra and Perth."
Vietnamese Australians,"Socioeconomics
Vietnamese Australians used to vary in income and social class levels. Australian born Vietnamese Australians are highly represented in Australian universities and many professions (particularly as information technology workers, optometrists, engineers, doctors and pharmacists), whilst in the past, some members in the community were subjected to poverty and crime."
Vietnamese Australians,"Religions
According to the 2016 census, 40.46% of Vietnamese Australians are Buddhist, 28.77% are Christian, and 26.46% follow secular or no religious beliefs.
As of the 2021 census, 44.7% of Vietnamese Australians are Buddhist, 29.2% are unaffiliated, 23.5% are Christian (with 19.8% Catholic), 0.7% are other religion and 2.5% are not stated."
Vietnamese Australians,"Language
In the 2001 census, the Vietnamese language was spoken at home by 174,236 people in Australia, making it the sixth most widely spoken language after English, Italian, Greek, Cantonese,  and Arabic.
According to the 2021 census, the Vietnamese language was spoken at home by 320,760 people in Australia, making it the fourth most widely spoken language after English, Mandarin and Arabic."
Vietnamese Australians,"Vietnamese-Australian to Vietnam relationship
Media
During October 2003, government owned SBS TV began airing a Vietnamese news program called Thoi Su ('News'). The stated purpose was to provide a news service to cater for Australia's Vietnamese population. This was received poorly by the significant portion of the older generations of the Vietnamese community had previously fled after the fall of South Vietnam and still harboured resentment to the ruling government and its institutions, including the state-controlled media, such as Thoi Su. The program was also claimed to lack reports that include political arrests or religious oppression in Vietnam.  A large protest was convened outside SBS's offices. SBS decided to drop Thoi Su (which was being provided at no cost to SBS through a satellite connection).  SBS subsequently began broadcasting disclaimers before each foreign news program stating it does not endorse their contents."
Vietnamese Australians,"Culture
Besides local Vietnamese news from SBS Australia, variety shows such as Paris By Night, a mostly overseas Vietnamese production, has become well-renowned amongst Vietnamese-Australians and well as Vietnamese content from Vietnam. Figures from the show such as Nguyen Ngoc Ngan and Nguyen Cao Ky Duyen are beloved personalities by Vietnamese at large as well as many other figures such as the late Chi Tai and Hoai Linh."
Vietnamese Australians,"Notable Australians of Vietnamese ancestry
Anh Do – Comedian, actor, author of The Happiest Refugee and brother of Khoa Do
Khoa Do – Young Australian of the Year in 2005, writer, director and brother of Anh Do
Kim-Anh Do – Mathematician
Alexandra Huynh – Soccer player, member of the Australia national women's football team
Tien Kieu – ALP politician, member of the Legislative Council of Victoria, physicist
Charles Tran Van Lam – Former Foreign Minister of South Vietnam (1969–1972), first Vietnamese Ambassador to Australia (late 1950s), President of the Senate of South Vietnam (1973), one of signatories of the Paris Peace Accord (1973)
Hieu Van Le, AO – 35th governor of South Australia and Chairman of the South Australian Multicultural and Ethnic Affairs Commission (SAMEAC)
Dai Le – Liberal Party-turned independent politician, first refugee and Vietnamese Australian to be elected to federal parliament.
Nam Le – author of The Boat, winner of the 2008 Dylan Thomas Prize for The Boat
Tan Le – 1998 Young Australian of the Year
Giang Le-Huy – Actor
Tony Le-Nguyen – Actor, writer, Director and producer
Martin Lo – Soccer player
Trung Ly – Martial artist/action director
Phuong Ngo – ALP politician (member of Fairfield Council, NSW), Catholic community leader convicted for the homicide of John Paul Newman, and suspected drug lord
Thang Ngo – Fairfield councillor (1999–2008), cast member of Once Upon a Time in Cabramatta documentary, food writer and publisher of Noodlies food blog
Tung Ngo – ALP politician, member of the Legislative Council of South Australia
Giang Nguyen – Mathematician and chess player
Jillian Nguyen – actress
Jordan Nguyen – engineer
Luke Nguyen – chef and owner of Red Lantern in Surry Hills, Sydney and host of Luke Nguyen's Vietnam on SBS
Nam-Trung Nguyen – Scientist
Peter Nguyen Van Hung – Catholic priest and human rights activist on Taiwan
Martin Nguyen – MMA Featherweight World Champion
Rob Nguyen – Formula 3000 driver
Sang Nguyen – Victorian ALP Upper House politician
Tach Duc Thanh Nguyen – Convicted drug smuggler and member of the Bali Nine
Tai Nguyen – Actor
Van Tuong Nguyen – Executed drug trafficker
Vincent Long Van Nguyen – Roman Catholic bishop of Parramatta
Ngan Phan-Koshnitsky – chess player
Anathan 'Ana' Pham – professional video game player
Batong Pham – ALP Upper House politician in Western Australia
Hanni Pham – member of South Korean group NewJeans
Hoa Pham – Writer
Helen Quach – Music conductor
Hoan Ton-That – Computer programmer and start-up entrepreneur
Caroline Tran – Triple J announcer
Maria Tran – actress and filmmaker
Natalie Tran – video blogger on YouTube. The most subscribed to YouTuber from Australia. Our Natalie raking in $100,000 a year from YouTube
Andy Trieu – Actor and martial artist
Vivienne Nguyen – Chairperson, Victorian Multicultural Commission
Huong Truong – Australian Greens former politician, MLC in Victoria
Van Thanh Rudd – Political artist, nephew of Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd
Vico Thai – Television and Film Actor
San Hoa Thang, AC – Polymer chemist
Tran My Van – Academic
Catherine Van-Davies – Actress
Tracy Vo – Journalist and newsreader
Tri Vo – Lawyer and Politician
Quan Yeomans – Lead singer and guitarist of Regurgitator"
Vietnamese Australians,"See also
Asian Australians
Australia–Vietnam relations"
Vietnamese Australians,"References
External links"
Vietnamese Australians,"Vietnamese Community in Australia
The Vietnamese in Australia 
Gold & Silver: Vietnamese migration and relationships with environments in Vietnam and Sydney
Vietnamese Queenslanders. Short (3-4mins) digital stories from 5 Vietnamese Queenslanders, a project from the Queensland Vietnamese community and the State Library of Queensland.
Ashley Carruthers – Australian National University (2008). ""Vietnamese"". Dictionary of Sydney. Dictionary of Sydney Trust. Retrieved 4 October 2015. [CC-By-SA] (History of Vietnamese in Sydney)"
1898–1900 Australian constitutional referendums,"A series of referendums on the proposed constitution of Australia were held between 2 June 1898 and 31 July 1900 in the six colonies that were to become the states of the Commonwealth of Australia. The first four referendums were held in New South Wales, South Australia, Tasmania and Victoria in June 1898. Although all four saw a majority vote in favour, the majority in New South Wales was insufficient. Knowledge of the result in New South Wales led to  low voter turnout in South Australia.
Following a series of amendments made to the proposed constitution at the Secret Premiers meeting on 31 January and 1 February 1899, a second referendum was required in the four states, whilst on 2 September, Queensland held a referendum on the constitution for the first time.  All five states saw a majority vote in favour.
Three weeks after the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act became law in 1900, Western Australia held a referendum on the constitution, which was also approved.  The constitution came into force on 1 January 1901."
1898–1900 Australian constitutional referendums,"Background
Following the National Australasian Convention in 1891, support for federalism reduced in the face of opposition from George Reid and the sudden advent of the Labor Party in NSW, which commonly dismissed federation as a ""fad"". However, a subsequent revival of the federal movement owed much to the growth of federal leagues outside of capital cities, and, in Victoria, the Australian Natives' Association. The Border Federation League of Corowa held a conference in 1893 which was to prove of considerable significance, and a ""People's Convention"" in Bathurst in 1896 underlined the cautious conversion of George Reid to the federal cause. At the close of the Corowa Conference John Quick had advanced a scheme of a popularly elected convention, tasked to prepare a constitution, which would then be put to a referendum in each colony. Winning the support of George Reid, the new premier of NSW, the Quick scheme was approved by all premiers in 1895. (Quick and Robert Garran later published The Annotated Constitution of the Australian Commonwealth in 1901, which is widely regarded as one of the most authoritative works on the Australian Constitution.) The election of delegates took place in March 1897, and several weeks later the Convention gathered for its first session in Adelaide, later meeting in Sydney, and finally in Melbourne in March 1898. After the Adelaide meeting, the colonial Parliaments took the opportunity to debate the emerging Bill and to suggest changes. The basic principles of the 1891 draft constitution were adopted, modified by a consensus for more democracy in the constitutional structure. It was agreed that the Senate should be chosen, directly, by popular vote, rather than appointed by State governments. 
On other matters there was considerable disagreement. 'Interests' inevitably fractured the unity of delegates in matters involving rivers and railways, producing legalistic compromises. And they had few guides, at a conceptual level, to what they were doing. Deakin greatly praised James Bryce's sage appreciation of American federalism, The American Commonwealth. And Barton cited the analysis of federation of Bryce's Oxford colleagues, E.A. Freeman and A.V. Dicey. But neither of these two writers could be said to be actual advocates of Federation. And for delegates less given to reading (or citing) authors, the great model of plural governance was always the British Empire, which, obviously was no federation at all.  
The Australasian Federal Convention dissolved on 17 March 1898 having adopted a bill ""To Constitute the Commonwealth of Australia"". Referendums on the proposed constitution were held in four of the colonies in June 1898. There were majority votes in all four, however, the enabling legislation in New South Wales required the support of at least 80,000 voters for passage, equivalent to about half of enrolled voters, and this number was not reached. A meeting of the colonial premiers in early 1899 agreed to a number of amendments to make the constitution more acceptable to New South Wales.  These included the limiting ""Braddon Clause"", which guaranteed the states 75 percent of customs revenue, to just ten years of operation; requiring that the new federal capital would be located within New South Wales, but at least a hundred miles (160 km) distant from Sydney; and, in the circumstances of a ""double dissolution"", reducing from six tenths to one half the requisite majority to legislate of a subsequent joint meeting of Senate and House . In June 1899, referendums on the revised constitution were again held again in all the colonies except for Western Australia, where the vote was not held until the following year. The majority vote was ""yes"" in all the colonies."
1898–1900 Australian constitutional referendums,"South Australia
Residents of South Australia were staunchly opposed to federation in the mid-19th century due to the dominance of the colonies of Victoria and New South Wales in issues such as trade and tariffs, as well as a desire to keep unique elements of South Australia intact. The mood had shifted by the 1890s, with what was seen as the looming inevitability of federation a motivator to negotiating a good deal for the less populous colonies, with the argument by the Yes campaign that they may never have such favourable terms again. The No campaign however focused on the potential for increased costs for South Australians, as well as decreased land values."
1898–1900 Australian constitutional referendums,"Results
1898 referendums
1899 and 1900 referendums
Notes"
1898–1900 Australian constitutional referendums,"
== References =="
Military history of Australia during the Malayan Emergency,"Australian involvement in the Malayan Emergency lasted 13 years, between 1950 and 1963, with army, air force and naval units serving. The Malayan Emergency (Anti-British National Liberation War) was a guerrilla war fought between Commonwealth armed forces and the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA), the military arm of the Malayan Communist Party, from 1948 to 1960 in Malaya. The Malayan Emergency was the longest continuous military commitment in Australia's history. Thirty-nine Australians were killed and 27 wounded.
The Australian Government sent Royal Australian Air Force Dakota transport aircraft of No. 38 Squadron and Lincoln bombers of No. 1 Squadron to Malaya in June 1950. The 2nd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (2 RAR), arrived in 1955. The battalion was later replaced by 3 RAR, which in turn was replaced by 1 RAR. In 1955, the RAAF extended Butterworth air base, from which Canberra bombers of No. 2 Squadron (replacing No. 1 Squadron) and CAC Sabres of No. 78 Wing carried out ground attack missions against the guerillas.
The Royal Australian Navy destroyers Warramunga and Arunta joined the force in June 1955. Between 1956 and 1960, the aircraft carriers Melbourne and Sydney and destroyers Anzac, Quadrant, Queenborough, Quiberon, Quickmatch, Tobruk, Vampire, Vendetta and Voyager were attached to the Commonwealth Strategic Reserve forces for three to nine months at a time. Several of the destroyers fired on Communist positions in Johor State.
In 1973 an Australian Army infantry company, known as Rifle Company Butterworth, was deployed to RAAF Base Butterworth to provide a protective and quick-reaction force for the base during a resurgence of the Communist insurgency in Malaysia. While the base was handed to the Royal Malaysian Air Force in 1988 and the insurgency officially ended in 1989, Rifle Company Butterworth was maintained as a means of providing Australian soldiers with training in jungle warfare and cross-training with the Malaysian Army."
Military history of Australia during the Malayan Emergency,"Notes
References"
Military history of Australia during the Malayan Emergency,"
== Further reading =="
Indigenous Australians,"Indigenous Australians are people with familial heritage from, and/or recognised membership of, the various ethnic groups living within the territory of  present day Australia  prior to British colonisation. They consist of two distinct groups, which includes many ethnic groups: the Aboriginal Australians of the mainland and many islands, including Tasmania, and the Torres Strait Islanders of the seas between Queensland and Papua New Guinea, located in Melanesia. The term Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples or the person's specific cultural group, is often preferred, though the terms First Nations of Australia, First Peoples of Australia and First Australians are also increasingly common; 812,728 people self-identified as being of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander origin in the 2021 Australian Census, representing 3.2% of the total population of Australia. Of these Indigenous Australians, 91.4% identified as Aboriginal; 4.2% identified as Torres Strait Islander; while 4.4% identified with both groups. Since 1995, the Australian Aboriginal flag and the Torres Strait Islander flag have been official flags of Australia.
The time of arrival of the first human beings in Australia is a matter of debate and ongoing investigation. The earliest conclusively human remains found in Australia are those of Mungo Man LM3 and Mungo Lady, which have been dated to around 40,000 years ago, although Indigenous Australians have most likely been living in Australia for upwards of 65,000 years. Isolated for millennia by rising sea water after the last Ice Age, Australian Aboriginal peoples developed a variety of regional cultures and languages, invented distinct artistic and religious traditions, and affected the environment of the continent in a number of ways through hunting, fire-stick farming, and possibly the introduction of the dog. Technologies for warfare and hunting like the boomerang and spear were constructed of natural materials, as were musical instruments like the didgeridoo.
Although there are a number of cultural commonalities among Indigenous Australians, there is also a great diversity among different communities. The 2022 Australian census recorded 167 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages used at home by some 76,978 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. At the time of European colonisation, it is estimated that there were over 250 Aboriginal languages. It is now estimated that all but 13 remaining Indigenous languages are considered endangered. Aboriginal people today mostly speak English, with Aboriginal phrases and words being added to create Australian Aboriginal English (which also has a tangible influence of Indigenous languages in the phonology and grammatical structure). Around three quarters of Australian place names are of Aboriginal origin.
The Indigenous population prior to European settlement was small, with estimates ranging widely from 318,000 to over 3,000,000 in total, with the distribution being similar to that of the current Australian population, the majority living in the south-east, centred along the Murray River. The First Fleet of British settlers arrived on instructions to ""live in amity and kindness"" with the Aboriginal population. Nevertheless, a population collapse principally from disease followed European colonisation, beginning with a smallpox epidemic spreading three years after the arrival of Europeans. Massacres and frontier conflicts involving European settlers also contributed to depopulation. From the 19th to the mid-20th century, government policy removed many mixed heritage children from Aboriginal communities, which was judged ""genocidal"" in the Bringing Them Home report (1997)."
Indigenous Australians,"Terminology
Variations
There are a number of appropriate terms to use when referring to Aboriginal peoples of Australia, but there is general agreement that it is important to respect the ""preferences of individuals, families, or communities, and allow them to define what they are most comfortable with"" when referring to Aboriginal people.
The word 'aboriginal' has been in the English language since at least the 16th century to mean ""first or earliest known, indigenous"". It comes from the Latin ab (from) and origo (origin, beginning). The term was used in Australia to describe its Aboriginal peoples as early as 1789. It became capitalised and was employed as the common name to refer to both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, although today the latter are not included in the term. The term ""Aborigine"" (as opposed to ""Aboriginal"") is often disfavoured, being regarded as having colonialist connotations.
While the term ""Indigenous Australians"" has grown in popularity since the 1980s, many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples dislike it, feeling that it is too generic and removes their identity. However, many people think that the term is useful and convenient, and can be used where appropriate.
In recent years, ""First Nations"", ""First Peoples"" and ""First Australians"" have become more common.
Being as specific as possible, for example naming the language group (such as Arrernte), demonym relating to geographic area (such as Nunga), is considered best practice and most respectful."
Indigenous Australians,"Terms ""Black"" and ""Blackfella""
The term ""Black"" has been used to refer to Aboriginal Australians since European colonisation. While originally related to skin colour and often used pejoratively, the term is used today to indicate Aboriginal heritage or culture in general and refers to any people of such heritage regardless of their level of skin pigmentation. In the 1970s, many Aboriginal activists, such as Gary Foley, proudly embraced the term ""Black"", and writer Kevin Gilbert's book from the time was entitled Living Black. The book included interviews with several members of the Aboriginal community, including Robert Jabanungga, reflecting on contemporary Aboriginal culture. Use of this term varies depending on context and its use needs care as it may be deemed inappropriate. The term ""Black"" has sometimes caused confusion with African immigrants.
Living Black is an Australian news and current affairs program covering ""issues affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians"". It is presented and produced by Karla Grant, an Arrernte woman.
A significant number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people use the term ""Blackfella"" and its associated forms to refer to Aboriginal Australians."
Indigenous Australians,"""Blak""
The term blak is sometimes used as part of a wider social movement (seen in terms such as ""Blaktivism"" and ""Blak History Month""). The term was coined in 1991 by photographer and multimedia artist Destiny Deacon, in an exhibition entitled Blak lik mi. For Deacon's 2004 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, blak was defined in a museum guide as: ""a term used by some Aboriginal people to reclaim historical, representational, symbolical, stereotypical and romanticised notions of Black or Blackness. Often used as ammunition or inspiration."" Deacon said that removing the c from black to ""de-weaponise the term 'black cunt'"" was ""taking on the 'colonisers' language and flipping it on its head"".
Contemporary Aboriginal arts are sometimes referred to as a ""Blak"" arts movement, reflected in names such as BlakDance, BlakLash Collective, the title of Thelma Plum's song and album, Better in Blak, the Blak & Bright literary festival in Melbourne, Blak Dot Gallery, Blak Markets and Blak Cabaret."
Indigenous Australians,"Regional groups
Aboriginal groups
Aboriginal peoples of Australia are the various peoples indigenous to mainland Australia and associated islands, excluding the Torres Strait Islands.
The broad term Aboriginal Australians includes many regional groups that may be identified under names based on local language, locality, or what they are called by neighbouring groups. Some communities, cultures or groups may be inclusive of others and alter or overlap; significant changes have occurred in the generations after colonisation. The word ""community"" is often used to describe groups identifying by kinship, language or belonging to a particular place or ""country"". A community may draw on separate cultural values and individuals can conceivably belong to a number of communities within Australia; identification within them may be adopted or rejected. An individual community may identify itself by many names, each of which can have alternative English spellings."
Indigenous Australians,"The naming of peoples is complex and multi-layered, but a few examples are Anangu in northern South Australia, and neighbouring parts of Western Australia and Northern Territory; Arrernte in central Australia; Koori (or Koorie) in New South Wales and Victoria (Aboriginal Victorians); Goorie (variant pronunciation and spelling of Koori) in South East Queensland and some parts of northern New South Wales; Murri used in parts of Queensland and northern New South Wales where specific collective names are not used; Tiwi people of the Tiwi Islands off Northern Territory; and Palawah in Tasmania. The largest Aboriginal communities – the Pitjantjatjara, the Arrernte, the Luritja and the Warlpiri – are all from Central Australia.
Throughout the history of the continent, there have been many different Aboriginal groups, each with its own individual language, culture, and belief structure. At the time of British settlement, there were over 200 distinct languages."
Indigenous Australians,"The Tasmanian Aboriginal population are thought to have first crossed into Tasmania approximately 40,000 years ago via a land bridge between the island and the rest of mainland Australia during the last glacial period. Estimates of the population of the Aboriginal people of Tasmania, before European arrival, are in the range of 3,000 to 15,000 people although genetic studies have suggested significantly higher figures, which are supported by Indigenous oral traditions that indicate a reduction in population from diseases introduced by British and American sealers before settlement. The original population was further reduced to around 300 between 1803 and 1833 due to disease, warfare and other actions of British settlers. Despite over 170 years of debate over who or what was responsible for this near-extinction, no consensus exists on its origins, process, or whether or not it was genocide. However, according to Benjamin Madley, using the ""UN definition, sufficient evidence exists to designate the Tasmanian catastrophe genocide"". A woman named Trugernanner (often rendered as Truganini) who died in 1876, was, and still is, widely believed to be the last of the ""full-blooded"" Tasmanian Aboriginal people. However, in 1889 Parliament recognised Fanny Cochrane Smith (d. 1905) as the last surviving ""full-blooded"" Tasmanian Aboriginal person.
The 2016 census reported 23,572 Indigenous Australians in the state of Tasmania."
Indigenous Australians,"Torres Strait Islanders
The Torres Strait Islander people possess a heritage and cultural history distinct from Aboriginal traditions. The eastern Torres Strait Islanders in particular are related to the Papuan peoples of New Guinea, and speak a Papuan language. Accordingly, they are not generally included under the designation ""Aboriginal Australians"". This has been another factor in the promotion of the more inclusive term ""Indigenous Australians"". Six percent of Indigenous Australians identify themselves fully as Torres Strait Islanders. A further 4% of Indigenous Australians identify themselves as having both Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal heritage.
The Torres Strait Islands comprise over 100 islands which were annexed by Queensland in 1879. Many Indigenous organisations incorporate the phrase ""Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander"" to highlight the distinctiveness and importance of Torres Strait Islanders in Australia's Indigenous population.
Eddie Mabo was from ""Mer"" or Murray Island in the Torres Strait, which the famous Mabo decision of 1992 involved."
Indigenous Australians,"Other groupings
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people also sometimes refer to themselves by descriptions which relate to their ecological environment, such as saltwater people for coast-dwellers (including Torres Strait Islander people), freshwater people, rainforest people, desert people, or spinifex people, (the latter referring to the Pila Nguru of Western Australia)."
Indigenous Australians,"History
Migration to Australia
Aboriginal peoples
Several settlements of humans in Australia have been dated around 49,000 years ago. Luminescence dating of sediments surrounding stone artefacts at Madjedbebe, a rock shelter in northern Australia, indicates human activity at 65,000 years BP. Genetic studies appear to support an arrival date of 50–70,000 years ago.
The earliest anatomically modern human remains found in Australia (and outside of Africa) are those of Mungo Man; they have been dated at 42,000 years old. The initial comparison of the mitochondrial DNA from the skeleton known as Lake Mungo 3 (LM3) with that of ancient and modern Aboriginal peoples indicated that Mungo Man is not related to Australian Aboriginal peoples. However, these findings have been met with a general lack of acceptance in scientific communities. The sequence has been criticised as there has been no independent testing, and it has been suggested that the results may be due to posthumous modification and thermal degradation of the DNA. Although the contested results seem to indicate that Mungo Man may have been an extinct subspecies that diverged before the most recent common ancestor of contemporary humans, the administrative body for the Mungo National Park believes that present-day local Aboriginal peoples are descended from the Lake Mungo remains. Independent DNA testing is unlikely as the Indigenous custodians are not expected to allow further invasive investigations.
It is generally believed that Aboriginal people are the descendants of a single migration into the continent, a people that split from the ancestors of East Asians.
Recent work with mitochondrial DNA suggests a founder population of between 1,000 and 3,000 women to produce the genetic diversity observed, which suggests that ""initial colonisation of the continent would have required deliberate organised sea travel, involving hundreds of people"". Aboriginal people seem to have lived a long time in the same environment as the now extinct Australian megafauna.
Some evidence from the analysis of charcoal and artefacts revealing human use suggests a date as early as 65,000 BP. Luminescence dating has suggested habitation in Arnhem Land as far back as 60,000 years BP. Evidence of fires in South-West Victoria suggest ""human presence in Australia 120,000 years ago"", although more research is required."
Indigenous Australians,"Genetics
Genetic studies have revealed that Aboriginal Australians largely descended from an Eastern Eurasian population wave during the Initial Upper Paleolithic, and are most closely related to other Oceanians, such as Melanesians. The Aboriginal Australians also show affinity to other Australasian populations, such as Negritos or Ancient Ancestral South Indians groups, such as the Andamanese people, as well as to East Asian peoples. Phylogenetic data suggests that an early initial eastern non-African (ENA) or East-Eurasian meta-population trifurcated, and gave rise to Australasians (Oceanians), the Ancient Ancestral South Indians, Andamanese and the East/Southeast Asian lineage including the ancestors of Native Americans,  although Papuans may have also received some geneflow from an earlier group (xOOA) as well, around 2%, next to additional archaic admixture in the Sahul region."
Indigenous Australians,"Rasmussen et al 2011 shows that Aboriginal Australian have a lower proportion of European alleles compared to Asians, which they believe is indicative of a multiple dispersal model. Genetically, while Aboriginal Australians are most closely related to Melanesian and Papuan people, McEvoy et al 2010 believed there is also another component that could indicate Ancient Ancestral South Indian admixture or more recent European influence. Research indicates a single founding Sahul group with subsequent isolation between regional populations which were relatively unaffected by later migrations from the Asian mainland, which may have introduced the dingo 4–5,000 years ago. The research also suggests a divergence from the Papuan people of New Guinea and the Mamanwa people of the Philippines about 32,000 years ago, with a rapid population expansion about 5,000 years ago. A 2011 genetic study found evidence that the Aboriginal, Papuan and Mamanwa peoples carry some of the alleles associated with the Denisovan peoples of Asia, (not found amongst populations in mainland Asia) suggesting that modern and archaic humans interbred in Asia approximately 44,000 years ago, before Australia separated from New Guinea and the migration to Australia. A 2012 paper reports that there is also evidence of a substantial genetic flow from India to northern Australia estimated at slightly over four thousand years ago, a time when changes in tool technology and food processing appear in the Australian archaeological record, suggesting that these may be related. Mallick et al. 2016 and Mark Lipson et al. 2017 study found that the bifurcation of Eastern Eurasian and Western Eurasian dates back to least 45,000 years ago, with Australasians nested inside the Eastern Eurasian clade.
Aboriginal Australian men have Haplogroup C-M347 in high frequencies with peak estimates ranging from 60.2% to 68.7%. In addition, the basal form K2* (K-M526) of the extremely ancient Haplogroup K2 – whose subclades Haplogroup R, haplogroup Q, haplogroup M and haplogroup S can be found in the majority of Europeans, Northern South Asians, Native Americans and the Indigenous peoples of Oceania – has only been found in living humans today amongst Aboriginal Australians. 27% of them may carry K2* and approximately 29% of Aboriginal Australian males belong to subclades of K2b1, a.k.a. M and S.
Aboriginal Australians possess deep rooted clades of both mtDNA Haplogroup M and Haplogroup N."
Indigenous Australians,"Torres Strait Islands
Although it is estimated that people migrated from the Indonesian archipelago and New Guinea to mainland Australia about 70,000 years ago,
as of 2020 evidence of human settlement in the Torres Strait has only been uncovered by archaeologists dating back to about 2500 years ago."
Indigenous Australians,"Before European contact
Aboriginal people
Aboriginal people in some regions lived as foragers and hunter-gatherers, hunting and foraging for food from the land. Although Aboriginal society was generally mobile, or semi-nomadic, moving according to the changing food availability found across different areas as seasons changed, the mode of life and material cultures varied greatly from region to region, and there were permanent settlements and agriculture in some areas. The greatest population density was to be found in the southern and eastern regions of the continent, the River Murray valley in particular. Canoes were made out of bark for use on the Murray."
Indigenous Australians,"There is some evidence that, before outside contact, some groups of Aboriginal Australians had a complex subsistence system with elements of agriculture, that was only recorded by the first European explorers. One early settler took notes on the life styles of the Wathaurung people whom he lived near in Victoria. He saw women harvesting Murnong tubers, a native yam that is now almost extinct.  However, the area that they were harvesting from was already cleared of other plants, making it easier to harvest Murnong (also known as yam daisy) exclusively.
Along the northern coast of Australia, parsnip yams were harvested by leaving the bottom part of the yam still stuck in the ground so that it would grow again in the same spot. Similar to many other farmers in the world, Aboriginal peoples used slash and burn techniques to enrich the nutrients of their soil. However, sheep and cattle later brought over by Europeans would ruin this soil by trampling on it. To add on the complexity of Aboriginal farming techniques, farmers deliberately exchanged seeds to begin growing plants where they did not naturally occur. In fact there were so many examples of Aboriginal Australians managing farm land in a complex manner that Australian Anthropologist, Dr. Norman Tindale was able to draw an Aboriginal grain belt, detailing the specific areas where crops were once produced.
In terms of aquaculture, explorer Thomas Mitchell noted large stone fish traps on the Darling River at Brewarrina.  Each trap covers a pool, herding fish through a small entrance that would later be shut.  Traps were created at different heights to accommodate different water levels during floods and droughts.
Technology used by Indigenous Australian societies before European contact included weapons, tools, shelters, watercraft, and the message stick. Weapons included boomerangs, spears (sometimes thrown with a woomera) with stone or fishbone tips, clubs, and (less commonly) axes. The Stone Age tools available included knives with ground edges, grinding devices, and eating containers. Fibrecraft was well-developed, and fibre nets, baskets, and bags were used for fishing, hunting, and carrying liquids. Trade networks spanned the continent, and transportation included canoes. Shelters varied regionally, and included wiltjas in the Atherton Tablelands, paperbark and stringybark sheets and raised platforms in Arnhem Land, whalebone huts in what is now South Australia, stone shelters in what is now western Victoria, and a multi-room pole and bark structure found in Corranderrk. A bark tent or lean-to is known as a humpy, gunyah, or wurley. Clothing included the possum-skin cloak in the southeast, buka cloak in the southwest and riji (pearl shells) in the northeast.
There is evidence that some Aboriginal populations in northern Australia regularly traded with Makassan fishermen from Indonesia before the arrival of Europeans.
At the time of first European contact, it is generally estimated that the pre-1788 population was 314,000, while recent archaeological finds suggest that a population of 500,000 to 750,000 could have been sustained, with some ecologists estimating that a population of up to a million or even two million people was possible.
More recent work suggests that Aboriginal populations exceeded 1.2 million 500 years ago, but may have fallen somewhat with the introduction of disease pathogens from Eurasia in the last 500 years. The population was split into 250 individual nations, many of which were in alliance with one another, and within each nation there existed separate, often related clans, from as few as 5 or 6 to as many as 30 or 40. Each nation had its own language, and a few had several.
There is some evidence to suggest that the section of the Australian continent now occupied by Queensland was the single most densely populated area of pre-contact Australia. There are also signs that the population density of Aboriginal Australia was comparatively higher in the north-eastern sections of New South Wales, and along the northern coast from the Gulf of Carpentaria and westward including certain sections of Northern Territory and Western Australia."
Indigenous Australians,"Torres Strait Island people
The Torres Strait peoples' fishing economy relied on boats, which they built themselves. There is also evidence of the construction of large, complex buildings on stilts and domed structures using bamboo, with thatched roofs, which catered for extended family members living together."
Indigenous Australians,"British colonisation
First contact
British exploration of the Australian coastline began with the buccaneer William Dampier in 1688 and 1699. Dampier was impressed neither by the country nor the people of the west Australian coast. Almost a century later, the explorer James Cook mapped the east coast of Australia and claimed the territory for Britain in the name of King George III. Cook was impressed both by the land and the people whom he encountered, writing in his journal: ""From what I have said of the Natives of New Holland they may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth, but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans; being wholy unacquainted not only with the superfluous but the necessary conveniencies so much sought after in Europe, they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in a Tranquillity which is not disturb'd by the Inequality of Condition"".
Nevertheless, Cook also noted in his journal two men at Botany Bay who ""seem'd resolved to oppose"" his first landing. According to Cook, after one of the men threw a rock, Cook fired a musquet loaded with small shott, which struck him with little effect. Some shott was lodged into one of the men's shields and was taken back to England by Cook, where it remains in the British Museum.
Cook spent a greater period of time among the Guugu Yimithirr people around modern Cooktown in Queensland, where his ship was nearly wrecked on the Great Barrier Reef. Here relations were generally amicable and Cook recorded words from their language including ""kangaroo"", though a fight broke out when the British took turtles from the river without sharing them. Peace was restored when an elder presented Cook with a broken-tipped spear as a peace offering – remembered as a first ""act of reconciliation"". The encounter is commemorated annually by the Guugu Yimithirr to this day.
Cook's favourable impression of the East Coast of Australia led directly to the commencement of the British colonisation of Australia, commencing at Sydney in 1788. The First Fleet of British ships was commanded by Governor Arthur Phillip, who had been instructed to ""endeavour by every possible means to open an intercourse with the natives, and to conciliate their affections"", and to enjoin his British subjects to ""live in amity and kindness with them"" so as ""to cultivate an acquaintance with them without their having an idea of our great superiority over them""."
Indigenous Australians,"Dates by area
British colonisation of Australia began with the arrival of the First Fleet in Botany Bay, New South Wales, in 1788. Settlements were subsequently established in Tasmania (1803), Victoria (1803), Queensland (1824), Western Australia (1826), and the Colony of South Australia (1836).
The first settlement in the Northern Territory was built after Captain Gordon Bremer took possession of the Tiwi Islands of Bathurst and Melville, claiming them for the colony of New South Wales, although that settlement failed after a few years, along with a couple of later attempts; permanent settlement was only finally achieved at Darwin in 1869.
Australia was the exception to British imperial colonisation practices, in that no treaty was drawn up setting out terms of agreement between the settlers and native proprietors, as was the case in North America and New Zealand. Many of the men on the First Fleet had had military experience among Native American tribes in North America, and tended to attribute to the Aboriginal people alien and misleading systems or concepts like chieftainship and tribe with which they had become acquainted in the northern hemisphere.
British administrative control began in the Torres Strait Islands in 1862, with the appointment of John Jardine, police magistrate at Rockhampton, as Government Resident in the Torres Straits. He originally established a small settlement on Albany Island, but on 1 August 1864 he went to Somerset Island. English missionaries arrived on Erub (Darnley Island) on 1 July 1871. In 1872 the boundary of Queensland was extended to include Thursday Island and some other islands in Torres Strait within 60 miles (97 km) of the Queensland coast, and in 1879 Queensland annexed the other islands, which became part of the British colony of Queensland."
Indigenous Australians,"Impact
One immediate consequence was a series of epidemics of European diseases such as measles, smallpox and tuberculosis. In the 19th century, smallpox was the principal cause of Aboriginal deaths, and vaccinations of the ""native inhabitants"" had begun in earnest by the 1840s. This smallpox epidemic in 1789 is estimated to have killed up to 90% of the Darug people. The cause of the outbreak is disputed. Some scholars have attributed it to European settlers, but it is also argued that Macassan fishermen from South Sulawesi and nearby islands may have introduced smallpox to Australia before the arrival of Europeans. A third suggestion is that the outbreak was caused by contact with members of the First Fleet. A fourth theory is that the epidemic was of chickenpox, not smallpox, carried by members of the First Fleet, and to which the Aboriginal people also had no immunity. Moreover, Aboriginal people were infected with sexually transmitted infections, especially syphilis and gonorrhea.
Another consequence of British colonisation was European seizure of land and water resources, with the decimation of kangaroo and other food sources which continued throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries as rural lands were converted for sheep and cattle grazing. Settlers also participated in the rape and forcible prostitution of Aboriginal women.
Some Europeans, for example escaped convicts, lived in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.
In 1834 there occurred the first recorded use of Aboriginal trackers, who proved very adept at navigating their way through the Australian landscape and finding people.
During the 1860s, Tasmanian Aboriginal skulls were particularly sought internationally for studies into craniofacial anthropometry. The skeleton of Truganini, a Tasmanian Aboriginal who died in 1876, was exhumed within two years of her death despite her pleas to the contrary by the Royal Society of Tasmania, and later placed on display. Campaigns continue to have Aboriginal body parts returned to Australia for burial; Truganini's body was returned in 1976 and cremated, and her ashes were scattered according to her wishes.
Place names sometimes reveal discrimination, such as Mount Jim Crow in Rockhampton, Queensland (now Mount Baga), as well as racist policies, like Brisbane's Boundary Streets, which used to indicate boundaries where Aboriginal people were not allowed to cross during certain times of the day. There is ongoing discussion about changing many of these names."
Indigenous Australians,"Throughout most of the 19th and 20th centuries, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people had their lives under the jurisdiction of various state-based protection laws. These Acts of Parliament appointed Protectors of Aborigines and Aboriginal Protection Boards, whose role was to control the lives of Indigenous Australians. Wages were controlled by the Protectors, and Indigenous Australians received less income than their non-Indigenous counterparts in employment.
During this time, many Aboriginal people were victims of slavery by colonists alongside Pacific Islander peoples who were kidnapped from their homes, in a practice known as blackbirding. Between 1860 and 1970, under the guise of protectionist policies, people, including children as young as 12, were forced to work on properties where they worked under horrific conditions and most did not receive any wages. In the pearling industry, Aboriginal peoples were bought for about 5 pounds, with pregnant Aboriginal women ""prized because their lungs were believed to have greater air capacity"". Aboriginal prisoners in the Aboriginal-only prison on Rottnest Island, many of whom were there on trumped up charges, were chained up and forced to work. In 1971, 373 Aboriginal men were found buried in unmarked graves on the island. Up until June 2018, the former prison was being used as holiday accommodation."
Indigenous Australians,"From 1810, Aboriginal peoples were moved onto mission stations, run by churches and the state. After this period of protectionist policies that aimed to segregate and control Aboriginal populations, in 1937 the Commonwealth government agreed to move towards assimilation policies. These policies aimed to integrate Aboriginal persons who were ""not of full blood"" into the white community in an effort to eliminate the ""Aboriginal problem"". As part of this, there was an increase in the number of children forcibly removed from their homes and placed with white people, either in institutions or foster homes."
Indigenous Australians,"Frontier wars and massacres
As part of the colonisation process, there were many conflicts and clashes between colonists and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people across the continent and islands. In Queensland, the killing of Aboriginal peoples was largely perpetrated by civilian ""hunting"" parties and the Native Police, armed groups of Aboriginal men who were recruited at gunpoint and led by government officers to eliminate Aboriginal resistance. There is evidence that massacres of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, which began with arrival of British colonists, continued until the 1930s. Researchers at the University of Newcastle under Lyndall Ryan have been mapping the massacres.  as of 2020 they have mapped almost 500 places where massacres happened, with 12,361 Aboriginal people killed and 204 Colonists killed, numbering at least 311 massacres over a period of about 140 years. After losing a significant number of their social unit in one blow, the survivors were left very vulnerable – with reduced ability to gather food, reproduce, or fulfill their ceremonial obligations, as well as defend themselves against further attack.
Estimating the total number of deaths during the frontier wars is difficult due to lack of records and the fact that many massacres of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander were kept secret. It is often quoted that 20,000 Aboriginal Australians and 2000 colonists died in the frontier wars; however, recent research indicates at least 40,000 Aboriginal dead and 2,000 to 2,500 settlers dead. Other research indicates a minimum of 65,000 Aboriginal peoples may have been killed in Queensland alone.
There have been arguments over whether deaths of Aboriginal peoples, particularly in Tasmania, as well as the forcible removal of children from Aboriginal communities, constitutes genocide. There has been broad range of historical research on the massacres and treatment of Aboriginal peoples, including by Lyndall Ryan at the Centre for 21st Century Humanities, the Frontier Conflict Database, and the Australian Commonwealth government's Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children From their Families.
According to the analysis of Justice Ronald Wilson in the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Report Australia's policy of forcible removal was genocidal in nature. Quoting Raphael Lemkin, Wilson defined genocide as ""a coordinated plan of different actions aimed at the destruction of the essential foundations of the lives of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves."" The objectives of which were ""the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, the destruction of personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.""
Wilson states that ""Genocide can be committed by means other than actual physical extermination. It is committed by the forcible transfer of children, provided the other elements of the crime are established."" He points out that ""Genocide is committed even when the destruction has not been carried out. A conspiracy to commit genocide and an attempt at genocide are both crimes which are committed whether or not any actual destruction occurred."" Further, Wilson found that ""The debates at the time of the drafting of the Genocide Convention establish clearly that an act or policy is still genocidal when it is motivated by a number of objectives. To constitute an act of genocide the planned extermination of a group need not be solely motivated by animosity or hatred.""...and that ""reasonable foreseeability...is sufficient to establish the Convention's intent element."" He concluded that ""The policy of forcible removal of children from Indigenous Australians to other groups for the purpose of raising them separately from and ignorant of their culture and people could properly be labelled 'genocidal' in breach of binding international law from at least 11 December 1946...The practice continued for almost another quarter of a century.""
There are few memorials in Australia acknowledging the widespread massacres of Aboriginal Peoples, and no memorials describing it as genocide. However, the massacres were often recorded by Australians  as place names, for example: Murdering Gully in Newcastle, Murdering Creek at Lake Weyba, Skull Pocket and Skeleton Creek near Cairns, Rifle Creek near Mt Molloy Qld, Skull Lagoon near Mt Carbine Qld, Skull Hole near Winton Qld, Battle Camp Road, Range and Station east of Laura Qld, Slaughterhouse Creek (Waterloo Creek) NSW."
Indigenous Australians,"Political resistance
There has always been Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander resistance, from the arrival of colonists through to the present."
Indigenous Australians,"In 1938, over 100 Aboriginal people protested one of the first Australia Day celebrations by gathering for an ""Aborigines Conference"" in Sydney and marking the day as the ""Day of Protest and Mourning""; the day is now often referred to as ""Survival Day"" or ""Invasion Day"" by Indigenous peoples.
In 1963 the Yolngu people of Yirrkala in Arnhem Land sent two bark petitions to the Australian government to protest the granting of mining rights on their lands. The Yirrkala Bark petitions were traditional Aboriginal documents to be recognised under Commonwealth law.
On Australia Day in 1972, 34 years after the first ""Day of Protest and Mourning"", Indigenous activists set up the Aboriginal Tent Embassy on the lawn of Old Parliament House to protest the state of Aboriginal land rights. The Tent Embassy was given heritage status in 1995, and celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2012, making it the longest, unanswered protest camp in the world."
Indigenous Australians,"1871–1969: Stolen Generations
The term Stolen Generations refers to those children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were forcibly removed from their families by the Australian Federal and State government agencies and church missions for the purpose of eradicating Aboriginal culture, under acts of their respective parliaments. The forcible removal of these children occurred in the period between approximately 1871 and 1969, although, in some places, children were still being taken in the 1970s."
Indigenous Australians,"Early 20th century
By 1900, the recorded Indigenous population of Australia had declined to approximately 93,000. However, this was only a partial count, as both Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders were poorly covered, with desert Aboriginal peoples not counted at all until the 1930s. During the first half of the twentieth century, many Indigenous Australians worked as stockmen on sheep stations and cattle stations for extremely low wages. The Indigenous population continued to decline, reaching a low of 74,000 in 1933 before numbers began to recover. By 1995, population numbers had reached pre-colonisation levels, and in 2010 there were around 563,000 Indigenous Australians.
Although, as British subjects, all Indigenous Australians were nominally entitled to vote, generally only those who merged into mainstream society did so. Only Western Australia and Queensland specifically excluded Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from the electoral rolls. Despite the Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902, which excluded ""Aboriginal natives of Australia, Asia, Africa and Pacific Islands except New Zealand"" from voting unless they were on the roll before 1901, South Australia insisted that all voters enfranchised within its borders would remain eligible to vote in the Commonwealth, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people continued to be added to their rolls, albeit haphazardly."
Indigenous Australians,"Despite efforts to bar their enlistment, over 1,000 Indigenous Australians fought for Australia in the First World War.
1934 saw the first appeal to the High Court by an Aboriginal Australian, and it succeeded. Dhakiyarr was found to have been wrongly convicted of the murder of a white policeman, for which he had been sentenced to death; the case focused national attention on Aboriginal rights issues. Dhakiyarr disappeared upon release. In 1938, the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the British First Fleet was marked as a Day of Mourning and Protest at an Aboriginal meeting in Sydney, and has since become marked around Australia as ""Invasion Day"" or ""Survival Day"" by Aboriginal protesters and their supporters.
Hundreds of Indigenous Australians served in the Australian armed forces during World War Two – including with the Torres Strait Light Infantry Battalion and The Northern Territory Special Reconnaissance Unit, which were established to guard Australia's North against the threat of Japanese invasion. However, most were denied pension rights and military allotments, except in Victoria, where each case was judged individually, without a blanket denial of rights accruing from their service."
Indigenous Australians,"Late 20th century
The 1960s was a pivotal decade in the assertion of Aboriginal rights and a time of growing collaboration between Aboriginal activists and white Australian activists. In 1962, Commonwealth legislation specifically gave Aboriginal people the right to vote in Commonwealth elections. A group of University of Sydney students organised a bus tour of western and coastal New South Wales towns in 1965 to raise awareness of the state of Aboriginal health and living conditions. This Freedom Ride also aimed to highlight the social discrimination faced by Aboriginal people and encourage Aboriginal people themselves to resist discrimination.
As mentioned above, Indigenous Australians received lower wages than their non-Indigenous counterparts in employment. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Queensland in particular had their income quarantined by the Protector and were allowed a minimal amount of their income. In 1966, Vincent Lingiari led the famous Wave Hill walk-off (Gurindji strike) of Indigenous employees of Wave Hill Station in protest against poor pay and conditions (later the subject of the Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody song ""From Little Things Big Things Grow""). Since 1999, the Queensland Government, under pressure from the Queensland Council of Unions, has established a number of schemes to give any earned income not received at the time back to Indigenous Australians.
The landmark 1967 referendum called by Prime Minister Harold Holt allowed the Commonwealth to make laws with respect to Aboriginal people by modifying section 51(xxvi) of the Constitution, and for Aboriginal people to be included when the country does a count to determine electoral representation by repealing section 127. The referendum passed with 90.77% voter support.
In the controversial 1971 Gove land rights case, Justice Blackburn ruled that Australia had been terra nullius before British settlement, and that no concept of native title existed in Australian law. Following the 1973 Woodward commission, in 1975 the federal government under Gough Whitlam drafted the Aboriginal Land Rights Bill. This was enacted the following year under the Fraser government as the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976, which recognised Aboriginal Australians' system of land rights in the Northern Territory, and established the basis upon which Aboriginal people in the NT could claim rights to land based on traditional occupation.
In 1985, the Australian government returned ownership of Uluru (Ayers Rock) to the Pitjantjatjara Aboriginal people. In 1992, the High Court of Australia reversed Justice Blackburn's ruling and handed down its decision in the Mabo Case, declaring the previous legal concept of terra nullius to be invalid and confirming the existence of native title in Australia.
Indigenous Australians began to serve in parliaments from the late 1960s. In 1971, Neville Bonner joined the Australian Senate as a Senator for Queensland for the Liberal Party, becoming the first Indigenous Australian in the Federal Parliament. A year later, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy was established on the steps of Parliament House in Canberra. In 1976, Sir Douglas Nicholls was appointed as the 28th Governor of South Australia, the first Aboriginal person appointed to vice-regal office. In the general election of 2010, Ken Wyatt of the Liberal Party became the first Indigenous Australian elected to the Australian House of Representatives. In the general election of 2016, Linda Burney of the Australian Labor Party became the second Indigenous Australian, and the first Indigenous Australian woman, elected to the Australian House of Representatives. She was immediately appointed Shadow Minister for Human Services.
In sport Evonne Goolagong Cawley became the world number-one ranked tennis player in 1971 and won 14 Grand Slam titles during her career. In 1973 Arthur Beetson became the first Indigenous Australian to captain his country in any sport when he first led the Australian National Rugby League team, the Kangaroos. In 1982, Mark Ella became captain of the Australia national rugby union team. In 2000, Aboriginal sprinter Cathy Freeman lit the Olympic flame at the opening ceremony of the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, and went on to win the 400 metres at the Games. In 2019, tennis player Ashleigh Barty was ranked world number one.
In 1984, a group of Pintupi people who were living a traditional hunter-gatherer desert-dwelling life were tracked down in the Gibson Desert in Western Australia and brought in to a settlement. They are believed to have been the last uncontacted tribe in Australia.
During this period, the federal government enacted a number of significant, but controversial, policy initiatives in relation to Indigenous Australians. A representative body, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), was set up in 1990."
Indigenous Australians,"Reconciliation
Reconciliation between non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australians became a significant issue in Australian politics in the late 20th century. In 1991, the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation was established by the federal government to facilitate reconciliation. In 1998, a Constitutional Convention which selected a Republican model for a referendum included just six Indigenous participants, leading Monarchist delegate Neville Bonner to end his contribution to the convention with his Jagera tribal ""Sorry Chant"" in sadness at the low number of Indigenous representatives.
An inquiry into the Stolen Generations was launched in 1995 by the Keating government, and the final report delivered in 1997 – the Bringing Them Home report – estimated that around 10% to 33% of all Aboriginal children had been separated from their families for the duration of the policies. The succeeding Howard government largely ignored the recommendations provided by the report, one of which was a formal apology to Aboriginal Australians for the Stolen Generations.
The republican model, as well as a proposal for a new Constitutional preamble which would have included the ""honouring"" of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, was put to referendum but did not succeed. In 1999, the Australian Parliament passed a Motion of Reconciliation drafted by Prime Minister John Howard in consultation with Aboriginal Senator Aden Ridgeway naming mistreatment of Indigenous Australians as the most ""blemished chapter in our national history"", although Howard refused to offer any formal apology.
On 13 February 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd issued a formal apology to Australia's Indigenous peoples, on behalf of the federal government of Australia, for the suffering caused by the Stolen Generations."
Indigenous Australians,"21st century
In 2001, the Federal Government dedicated Reconciliation Place in Canberra. On 13 February 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd reversed Howard's decision and issued a public apology to members of the Stolen Generations on behalf of the Australian Government.
ATSIC was abolished by the Australian Government in 2004 amidst allegations of corruption."
Indigenous Australians,"Emergency Response/Stronger Futures
The Northern Territory National Emergency Response (also known as the Intervention) was launched in 2007 by the government of Prime Minister John Howard, in response to the Little Children are Sacred report into allegations of child abuse among Aboriginal communities in the NT. The government banned alcohol in prescribed communities in the Territory; quarantined a percentage of welfare payments for essential goods purchasing; dispatched additional police and medical personnel to the region; and suspended the permit system for access to Aboriginal communities. In addition to these measures, the army were released into communities and there were increased police powers, which were later further increased with the so-called ""paperless arrests"" legislation.
In 2010, United Nations Special Rapporteur James Anaya found the Emergency Response to be racially discriminatory, and said that aspects of it represented a limitation on ""individual autonomy"". These findings were criticised by the government's Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin, the Opposition and Indigenous leaders like Warren Mundine and Bess Price.
In 2011, the Australian government enacted legislation to implement the Stronger Futures policy, which is intended to address key issues that exist within Aboriginal communities of the Northern Territory such as unemployment, school attendance and enrolment, alcohol abuse, community safety and child protection, food security and housing and land reforms. The policy has been criticised by organisations such as Amnesty International and other groups, including on the basis that it maintains ""racially-discriminatory"" elements of the Emergency Response Act and continues control by the federal government over ""Aboriginal people and their lands""."
Indigenous Australians,"Constitutional change proposed
In 2010, the federal government appointed a panel comprising Indigenous leaders, other legal experts and some members of parliament (including Ken Wyatt) to provide advice on how best to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the federal Constitution. The panel's recommendations, reported to the federal government in January 2012, included deletion of provisions of the Constitution referencing race (Section 25 and Section 51(xxvi)), and new provisions on meaningful recognition and further protection from discrimination. Subsequently, a proposed referendum on Constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians was ultimately abandoned in 2013.
The Uluru Statement from the Heart was released 26 May 2017 by delegates to an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Referendum Convention, held near Uluru in Central Australia. The statement calls for a ""First Nations Voice"" in the Australian Constitution and a ""Makarrata Commission"" to supervise a process of ""agreement-making"" and ""truth-telling"" between government and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The statement references the 1967 referendum which brought about changes to the Constitution to include Indigenous Australians."
Indigenous Australians,"Population
Pre-colonisation
It has been variously estimated that before the arrival of British settlers, the population of Indigenous (probably Aboriginal only) Australians was approximately 318,000–1,000,000 with the distribution being similar to that of the current Australian population, the majority living in the south-east, centred along the Murray River."
Indigenous Australians,"Definition
Over time Australia has used various means to determine membership of ethnic groups such as lineage, blood quantum, birth and self-determination. From 1869 until well into the 1970s, children under 12 years of age with 25% or less Aboriginal blood were considered ""white"" and were often removed from their families by the Australian Federal and State government agencies and church missions, under acts of their respective parliaments in order that they would have ""a reasonable chance of absorption into the white community to which they rightly belong"". Grey areas in determination of ethnicity led to people of mixed ancestry being caught in the middle of divisive policies which often led to absurd situations: In 1935, an Australian of part Indigenous descent left his home on a reserve to visit a nearby hotel where he was ejected for being Aboriginal. He returned home but was refused entry to the reserve because he was not Aboriginal. He attempted to remove his children from the reserve but was told he could not because they were Aboriginal. He then walked to the next town where he was arrested for being an Aboriginal vagrant and sent to the reserve there. During World War II he tried to enlist but was rejected because he was an Aborigine so he moved to another state where he enlisted as a non-Aborigine. After the end of the war he applied for a passport but was rejected as he was an Aborigine, he obtained an exemption under the Aborigines Protection Act but was now told he could no longer visit his relatives as he was not an Aborigine. He was later told he could not join the Returned Servicemens Club because he was an Aborigine.
In 1983 the High Court of Australia (in the Commonwealth v Tasmania or ""Tasmanian dam(s) case"") defined an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander as ""a person of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent who identifies as an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander and is accepted as such by the community in which he or she lives"". The ruling was a three-part definition comprising descent, self-identification and community identification. The first part – descent – was genetic descent and unambiguous, but led to cases where a lack of records to prove ancestry excluded some. Self- and community identification were more problematic as they meant that an Indigenous person separated from his or her community due to a family dispute could no longer identify as Aboriginal.
As a result, there arose court cases throughout the 1990s where excluded people demanded that their Aboriginality be recognised. As a result, lower courts refined the High Court test when subsequently applying it. In 1995, Justice Drummond in the Federal Court held in Gibbs v Capewell ""...either genuine self-identification as Aboriginal alone or Aboriginal communal recognition as such by itself may suffice, according to the circumstances."" This contributed to an increase of 31% in the number of people identifying as Indigenous Australians in the 1996 census when compared to the 1991 census. In 1998 Justice Merkel held in Shaw v Wolf that Aboriginal descent is ""technical"" rather than ""real"" – thereby eliminating a genetic requirement. This decision established that anyone can classify him or herself legally as an Aboriginal, provided he or she is accepted as such by his or her community."
Indigenous Australians,"Demographics
Inclusion in the national Census
Indigenous Australians have been counted in every census albeit only approximately and using inconsistent definitions. Section 127 of the Constitution, which was repealed in 1967, had excluded ""aboriginal natives"" from being counted in the overall population statistics for each state and territory and nationally with the Attorney-General providing a legal advice that a person was an 'aboriginal native' if they were a 'full-blood aboriginal'. As a consequence of section 127, Indigenous Australians in remote areas uninhabited by non-Indigenous Australians were not counted prior to 1967 in censuses and sometimes estimated.
Post 1967, Torres Strait Islanders were considered a separate Indigenous people. Prior to 1947, Torres Strait Islanders were considered to be Aboriginal in censuses. In the 1947 census, Torres Strait Islanders were considered to be Polynesian and in the 1954 and 1961 censuses were considered to be Pacific Islanders. In the 1966 census, Torres Strait Islanders were considered to be Aboriginal.
A ""Commonwealth working definition"" for Indigenous Australians was developed from 1968 and endorsed by Cabinet in 1978 which contains elements of descent, self-identification and community recognition in contrast to the earlier preponderance of Aboriginal blood definition.
As there is no formal procedure for any community to record acceptance, the primary method of determining Indigenous population is from self-identification on census forms. The Australian Census includes counts based on questions relating to individuals' self-identification as Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, or of both origins. Owing to various difficulties which lead to under-counting, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) follows a set method to estimate total numbers."
Indigenous Australians,"Distribution and growth
The 2006 Australian census showed growth in the Indigenous population (recorded as 517,000) at twice the rate of overall population growth since 1996, when the Indigenous population stood at 283,000. In the 2011 census, there was a 20% rise in people who identify as Aboriginal. In the 2016 census, there was another 18.4% rise on the 2011 figure. 590,056 respondents identified themselves as Aboriginal, 32,345 Torres Strait Islander, and a further 26,767 both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. In the 2021 Australian census, 812,000 people identified as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander, representing 3.2% of the population. This was an increase from 2.8% in 2016 (i.e. about 25% increase), and 2.5% in 2011. However, the net undercount of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people was 17.4%, and the estimated Indigenous population is around 952,000 to 1,000,000, or just under 4 per cent of the total population.
Growth to 2016 was mainly in major cities and along the eastern coast of Australia. In 2018 the ABS published a report exploring the reasons for these findings, with some of the factors behind the increase being higher fertility rates of Indigenous women; people entering the population through migration; variation in census coverage and response rates; and people changing how they self-identify between census years. Another factor might be the children of mixed marriages: the proportion of Aboriginal adults married (de facto or de jure) to non-Aboriginal spouses increased to 78.2% in the 2016 census, (up from 74% in 2011, 64% in 1996, 51% in 1991 and 46% in 1986); it was reported in 2002 that up to 88% of the offspring of mixed marriages subsequently self-identify as Indigenous Australians.
In the 2016, over 33% of the Indigenous population lived in major cities, compared with about 75% of the non-Indigenous population, with a further 24% in ""inner regional"" areas (compared with 18%), 20% in ""outer regional"" (8%), while nearly 18% lived in ""remote"" or ""very remote"" areas (2%). (Ten years earlier, 31% were living in major cities and 24% in remote areas.)"
Indigenous Australians,"Indigenous Australians by state
Queensland
Languages
Aboriginal languages
According to the 2005 National Indigenous Languages Survey (NILS), at the time the Australian continent was colonised, there were around 250 different Indigenous languages, with the larger language groups each having up to 100 related dialects. Some of these languages were only ever spoken by perhaps 50 to 100 people. Indigenous languages are divided into language groups with from ten to twenty-four language families identified. It is currently estimated that up to 145 Indigenous languages remain in use, of which fewer than 20 are considered to be strong in the sense that they are still spoken by all age groups. All but 13 Indigenous languages are considered to be endangered. Several extinct Indigenous languages are being reconstructed. For example, the last fluent speaker of the Ngarrindjeri language died in the late 1960s; using recordings and written records as a guide, a Ngarrindjeri dictionary was published in 2009, and the Ngarrindjeri language is today spoken in complete sentences.
Linguists classify many of the mainland Australian languages into one large group, the Pama–Nyungan languages. The rest are sometimes lumped under the term ""non-Pama–Nyungan"". The Pama–Nyungan languages form the majority, covering most of Australia, and are generally thought to be a family of related languages. In the north, stretching from the Western Kimberley to the Gulf of Carpentaria, are found a number of non-Pama–Nyungan groups of languages which have not been shown to be related to the Pama–Nyungan family nor to each other. While it has sometimes proven difficult to work out familial relationships within the Pama–Nyungan language family, many Australian linguists feel there has been substantial success. Against this, some linguists, such as R. M. W. Dixon, suggest that the Pama–Nyungan group – and indeed the entire Australian linguistic area – is rather a sprachbund, or group of languages having very long and intimate contact, rather than a genetic language family.
It has been suggested that, given their long presence in Australia, Aboriginal languages form one specific sub-grouping. The position of Tasmanian languages is unknown, and it is also unknown whether they comprised one or more than one specific language family.
Nearly three quarters of Australian place names have origins in Aboriginal languages. However, the method of recording names used by early colonial surveyors was often unreliable. When a surveyor was seeking the name of a river, the Aboriginal responder might have given the word for ""sand"" or ""water"". Unless living speakers of the original languages remained when systematic research of Indigenous languages began in the 1930s, the meaning of many place names was therefore lost, or is now open to several interpretations. The word ""Canberra"" was chosen for the national capital. It is popularly believed to mean ""meeting place"", but this is contested. According to the anthropologist Aldo Massola, the name comes from the word nganbirra meaning ""a camping place""."
Indigenous Australians,"Cross-cultural communications
Cross-cultural miscommunication can sometimes occur between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. According to Michael Walsh and Ghil'ad Zuckermann, Western conversational interaction is typically ""dyadic"", between two particular people, where eye contact is important and the speaker controls the interaction; and ""contained"" in a relatively short, defined time frame. However, traditional Aboriginal conversational interaction is ""communal"", broadcast to many people, eye contact is not important, the listener controls the interaction; and ""continuous"", spread over a longer, indefinite time frame."
Indigenous Australians,"Torres Strait Island languages
There are three languages spoken in the Torres Strait Islands, two indigenous languages and an English-based creole.  The indigenous language spoken mainly in the western and central islands is Kalaw Lagaw Ya, a language related to the Pama–Nyungan languages of the Australian mainland. The other indigenous language spoken mainly in the eastern islands is Meriam Mir: a member of the Trans-Fly languages spoken on the nearby south coast of New Guinea and the only Papuan language spoken on Australian territory. Both languages are agglutinative; however Kalaw Lagaw Ya appears to be undergoing a transition into a declensional language while Meriam Mìr is more clearly agglutinative. Yumplatok, or Torres Strait Creole, the third language, is a non-typical Pacific English Creole and is the main language of communication on the islands."
Indigenous Australians,"Belief systems
Traditional beliefs
Aboriginal
In Aboriginal communities knowledge and decision making is shared between tribal elders. Travellers had to seek elder recognition and acknowledge local Elders – this is increasingly practiced in public events in Australia. Within Aboriginal belief systems, a formative epoch known as ""the Dreaming"" or ""the Dreamtime"" stretches back into the distant past when the creator ancestors known as the First Peoples travelled across the land, and naming as they went. Indigenous Australia's oral tradition and religious values are based upon reverence for the land and a belief in this Dreamtime. The Dreaming is at once both the ancient time of creation and the present-day reality of Dreaming. Different language and cultural groups each had their own belief structures; these cultures overlapped to a greater or lesser extent, and evolved over time. Major ancestral spirits include the Rainbow Serpent, Baiame, Dirawong and Bunjil. Knowledge contained in the Dreaming has been passed down through different stories, songlines, dances and ceremonies, and even today provides a framework for ongoing relationships, kinship responsibilities and looking after country.
Traditional healers (known as Ngangkari in the Western desert areas of Central Australia) were highly respected men and women who not only acted as healers or doctors, but were generally also custodians of important Dreaming stories."
Indigenous Australians,"Torres Strait Islander
Torres Strait Islander people have their own traditional belief systems. Stories of the Tagai represent Torres Strait Islanders as sea people, with a connection to the stars, as well as a system of order in which everything has its place in the world. Some Torres Strait Islander people share beliefs similar to the Aboriginal peoples' Dreaming and ""Everywhen"" concepts, passed down in oral history."
Indigenous Australians,"After colonisation
Christianity and European culture have had a significant impact on Indigenous Australians, their religion and their culture. As in many colonial situations, the churches both facilitated the loss of Indigenous culture and religion and also facilitated its maintenance. In some cases, such as at Hermannsburg, Northern Territory and Piltawodli in Adelaide, the work of missionaries laid the foundations for later language revival. The German missionaries Christian Teichelmann and Schürmann went to Adelaide and taught the local Kaurna people only in their own language and created textbooks in the language. However, some missionaries taught only in English, and some Christian missions were involved in the placement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children after they were removed from their parents upon orders of the government, and are therefore implicated in the Stolen Generations."
Indigenous Australians,"Aboriginal peoples
The involvement of Christians in Aboriginal affairs has evolved significantly since 1788. The Churches became involved in mission work among Aboriginal peoples in the 19th century as Europeans came to control much of the continent, and the majority of the population was eventually converted. Colonial clergy such as Sydney's first Catholic archbishop, John Bede Polding, strongly advocated for Aboriginal rights and dignity. Around the year 2000, many churches and church organisations officially apologised for past failures to adequately respect Indigenous cultures and address the injustices of the dispossession of Indigenous people.
A small minority of Aboriginal people are followers of Islam as a result of intermarriage with ""Afghan"" camel drivers brought to Australia in the late 19th and early 20th century to help explore and open up the interior."
Indigenous Australians,"Torres Strait Islander peoples
From the 1870s, Christianity spread throughout the Torres Strait Islands, and it remains strong today among Torres Strait Islander people everywhere. The London Missionary Society mission led by Rev. Samuel Macfarlane arrived on Erub (Darnley Island) on 1 July 1871, establishing its first base in the region there. The Islanders refer to this as ""The Coming of the Light"", or ""Coming of Light"" and all Island communities celebrate the occasion annually on 1 July. However the coming of Christianity did not spell the end of the people's traditional beliefs; their culture informed their understanding of the new religion, as the Christian God was welcomed and the new religion was integrated into every aspect of their everyday lives."
Indigenous Australians,"Recent census figures
In the 2016 Census, Australia's Indigenous and non-Indigenous population were broadly similar with 54% (vs 55%) reporting a Christian affiliation, while less than 2% reported traditional beliefs as their religion, and 36% reported no religion. The proportion of Indigenous people who reported no religion has increased gradually since 2001, standing at 36% in 2016. According to ""Table 8: Religious Affiliation by Indigenous Status"", 347,572 Indigenous people (out of the total 649,171 in Australia) declared an affiliation to some form of Christianity, with a higher proportion of Torres Strait Islander than Aboriginal people in this number. 7,773 reported traditional beliefs; 1,511 Islam; other religions numbered less than 1,000 each. However the question is optional; 48,670 did not respond, and in addition, nearly 4,000 were reported as ""inadequately described"".
(In the 2006 census, 73% of the Indigenous population reported an affiliation with a Christian denomination, 24% reported no religious affiliation and 1% reported affiliation with an Australian Aboriginal traditional religion.)"
Indigenous Australians,"Culture
Art
Australia has a tradition of Aboriginal art which is thousands of years old, the best known forms being Australian rock art and bark painting. Evidence of Aboriginal art can be traced back at least 30,000 years, with examples of ancient rock art throughout the continent. Some of these are in national parks such as those of the UNESCO listed sites at Uluru and Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory, but examples can also within protected parks in urban areas such as at Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park in Sydney. The Sydney rock engravings are between 5000 and 200 years old. Murujuga in Western Australia was heritage listed in 2007.
In terms of age and abundance, cave art in Australia is comparable to that of Lascaux and Altamira (Upper Paleolithic sites in Europe), and Aboriginal art is believed to be the oldest continuing tradition of art in the world. There are three major regional styles: the geometric style found in Central Australia, Tasmania, the Kimberley and Victoria, known for its concentric circles, arcs and dots; the simple figurative style found in Queensland; and the complex figurative style found in Arnhem Land and the Kimberley. These designs generally carry significance linked to the spirituality of the Dreamtime. Paintings were usually created in earthy colours, from paint made from ochre. Such ochres were also used to paint their bodies for ceremonial purposes.
Several styles of Aboriginal art have developed in modern times, including the watercolour paintings of the Hermannsburg School and the acrylic Papunya Tula ""dot art"" movement. Some notable Aboriginal artists include William Barak (c. 1824–1903) and Albert Namatjira (1902–1959).
Since the 1970s, Indigenous artists have employed the use of acrylic paints – with styles such as that of the Western Desert Art Movement becoming globally renowned 20th-century art movements.
The National Gallery of Australia exhibits a great many Indigenous art works, including those of the Torres Strait Islands who are known for their traditional sculpture and headgear.
Aboriginal art has influenced many non-Indigenous artists, such as Margaret Preston (1875–1963) and Elizabeth Durack (1915–2000)."
Indigenous Australians,"Music, dance and ceremony
Music and dance have formed an integral part of the social, cultural and ceremonial observances of people through the millennia of the individual and collective histories of Australian Indigenous peoples to the present day. Around 1950, the first research into Aboriginal music was undertaken by the anthropologist A. P. Elkin, who recorded Aboriginal music in Arnhem Land.
The various Aboriginal peoples developed unique musical instruments and styles. The didgeridoo, which is widely thought to be a stereotypical instrument of Aboriginal people, was traditionally played by Aboriginal men of the eastern Kimberley region and Arnhem Land (such as the Yolngu). Bullroarers and clapsticks were used across Australia. Songlines relate to the Dreamtime in Aboriginal culture, overlapping with oral lore. Corroboree is a generic word to explain different genres of performance, embracing songs, dances, rallies and meetings of various kinds.
Indigenous musicians have been prominent in various contemporary styles of music, including creating a sub-genre of rock music as well as participating in pop and other mainstream styles. Hip hop music is helping preserve some Indigenous languages.
The Aboriginal Centre for the Performing Arts in Brisbane teaches acting, music and dance, and the Bangarra Dance Theatre is an acclaimed contemporary dance company.
For Torres Strait Islander people, singing and dancing is their ""literature"" – ""the most important aspect of Torres Strait lifestyle. The Torres Strait Islanders preserve and present their oral history through songs and dances;... the dances act as illustrative material and, of course, the dancer himself is the storyteller"" (Ephraim Bani, 1979)."
Indigenous Australians,"Literature
There was no written form of the many languages spoken by Indigenous peoples before colonisation. A letter to Governor Arthur Phillip written by Bennelong in 1796 is the first known work written in English by an Aboriginal person. The historic Yirrkala bark petitions of 1963 are the first traditional Aboriginal documents recognised by the Australian Parliament.
In the 20th century, David Unaipon (1872–1967), known as the first Aboriginal author, is credited for providing the first accounts of Aboriginal mythology written by an Aboriginal person, in his Legendary Tales of the Aborigines (1924–1925). Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920–1995) was a famous Aboriginal poet, writer and rights activist, credited with publishing the first book of verse by an Aboriginal author, We Are Going (1964). Sally Morgan's novel My Place (1987) was considered a breakthrough memoir in terms of bringing Indigenous stories to a wider audience. The talents of playwrights Jack Davis and Kevin Gilbert were recognised. Poetry by Indigenous poets, including traditional song-poetry – ranging from sacred to everyday – has been published since the late 20th century.
Writers coming to prominence in the 21st century include Alexis Wright; Kim Scott (twice winner of the Miles Franklin Award); Tara June Winch; Melissa Lucashenko; playwright and comedy writer Nakkiah Lui; in poetry Yvette Holt; and in popular fiction Anita Heiss. Leading activists Marcia Langton, who wrote First Australians (2008) and Noel Pearson (Up From the Mission, 2009) are as of 2020 active contemporary contributors to Australian literature. Journalist Stan Grant has written several non-fiction works on what it means to be Aboriginal in contemporary Australia, and Bruce Pascoe has written both fiction and non-fiction works. AustLit's BlackWords project provides a comprehensive listing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Writers and Storytellers. The Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages contains stories written in traditional languages of the Northern Territory."
Indigenous Australians,"Film and television
Australian cinema has a long history, and the ceremonies of Indigenous Australians were among the first subjects to be filmed in Australia – notably a film of Aboriginal dancers in Central Australia, shot by the anthropologist Baldwin Spencer and F.J. Gillen in 1900–1903.
Jedda (1955) was the first Australian feature film to be shot in colour film, the first to star Aboriginal actors in lead roles (Ngarla Kunoth and Robert Tudawali), and the first to be entered at the Cannes Film Festival. 1971's Walkabout was a British film set in Australia; it was a forerunner to many Australian films related to indigenous themes and introduced David Gulpilil to cinematic audiences. Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1976), directed by Fred Schepisi, was an award-winning historical drama from a book by Thomas Keneally, about the tragic story of an Aboriginal bushranger. Peter Weir's 1977 mystery drama The Last Wave, also starring Gulpilil and featuring elements of Aboriginal beliefs and culture, won several AACTA Awards.
The canon of films related to Indigenous Australians increased from the 1990s, with Nick Parson's film Dead Heart (1996) featuring Ernie Dingo and Bryan Brown; Rolf de Heer's The Tracker (2002), starring Gary Sweet and David Gulpilil; and Phillip Noyce's Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002).
The soundtrack of the 2006 film Ten Canoes directed by Rolf de Heer was filmed entirely in dialects of the Yolŋu Matha language group, with the main version featuring subtitles and English narration by David Gulpilil. The film won the Un Certain Regard Special Jury Prize at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival.
The Straits, a 2012 drama series for TV based on an idea by Torres Strait Islander actor Aaron Fa'aoso, was partly filmed in the Torres Strait Islands and starred Fa'aoso and Jimi Bani (from Mabuiag Island), as well as Papua New Guinean actors. The documentary TV series Blue Water Empire (aired 2019), featuring Fa'aoso and Bani, tells the story of Torres Strait Islands from pre-colonial era up to contemporary times.
Many Indigenous actors, directors, producers and others have been involved in the production of film and TV series in the 21st century: Ivan Sen, Rachel Perkins (with her company Blackfella Films), Aaron Pedersen, Deborah Mailman, Warwick Thornton, Leah Purcell, Shari Sebbens, Sally Riley, Luke Carroll and Miranda Tapsell, Wayne Blair, and Trisha Morton-Thomas, among others, with many of them well-represented in award nominations and wins. The films Sweet Country (2017), Top End Wedding (2019) and TV series Cleverman and Total Control (2019), all made by Aboriginal film-makers and featuring Aboriginal themes, were well-received and in some cases won awards.
The third series of the sketch comedy TV series Black Comedy, co-written by Nakkiah Lui, Adam Briggs, Steven Oliver and others, and featuring many Indigenous actors, began to air in January 2020."
Indigenous Australians,"Theatre
Recreation and sport
Though lost to history, many traditional forms of recreation were played and while these varied from tribe to tribe, there were often similarities. Ball games were quite popular and played by tribes across Australia, as were games based on use of weapons. There is extensive documented evidence of traditional football games being played. Perhaps the most documented is a game popularly played by tribes in western Victorian regions of the Wimmera, Mallee and Millewa by the Djab wurrung, Jardwadjali and Jarijari people. Known as Marn Grook, it was a type of kick and catch football game played with a ball made of possum hide. According to some accounts, it was played as far away as the Yarra Valley by the Wurundjeri people, Gippsland by the Gunai people, and the Riverina in south-western New South Wales. Some historians claim that Marn Grook had a role in the formation of Australian rules football, and many Aboriginal people, from children in remote communities to professional players at the highest level, the Australian Football League, play the modern game. Well-known players include Graham Farmer, Gavin Wanganeen, Adam Goodes and Lance Franklin. Goodes was also the Australian of the Year for 2014."
Indigenous Australians,"A team of Aboriginal cricketers from the Western District of Victoria toured England in 1868, making it the first Australian sports team to travel overseas. Cricketer and Australian rules football pioneer Tom Wills coached the team in an Aboriginal language he learnt as a child, and Charles Lawrence accompanied them to England. Johnny Mullagh, the team's star player, was regarded as one of the era's finest batsmen.
Evonne Goolagong became the world number-one ranked female tennis player, with 14 major tennis titles. Ashleigh Barty, inspired by Goolagong, also reached number-one and won three major singles titles. Sprinter Cathy Freeman earned gold medals in the Olympics, World Championships, and Commonwealth Games. Lionel Rose earned a world title in boxing. Arthur Beetson, Laurie Daley and Gorden Tallis captained Australia in rugby league, while Mark Ella captained Australia in rugby union. Nathan Jawai and Patty Mills have played in the National Basketball Association.
Sporting teams include the Indigenous All-Stars, Flying Boomerangs and Indigenous Team of the Century in Australian rules football, and the Indigenous All Stars, NSW Koori Knockout and the Murri Rugby League Team in rugby league."
Indigenous Australians,"Contemporary issues
Closing the Gap
To this day, the forced removal of children known as the Stolen Generations has had a huge impact on the psyche, health and well-being of Indigenous Australians; it has seriously impacted not only the children removed and their parents, but their descendants as well. Not only were many of the children abused – psychologically, physically, or sexually – after being removed and while living in group homes or adoptive families, but were also deprived of their culture alongside their families. This has resulted in the disruption of oral culture, as parents were unable to communicate their knowledge to their children, and thus much has been lost.
There are many issues facing Indigenous people in Australia today when compared with the non-Indigenous population, despite some improvements. Several of these are interrelated, and include health (including shorter life expectancy and higher rates of infant mortality), lower levels of education and employment, inter-generational trauma, high imprisonment rates, substance abuse and lack of political representation.
Some demographic facts are related to these issues, as cause and/or result:"
Indigenous Australians,"In the 2016 Australian Census, over 33% of the Indigenous population lived in major cities, compared with about 75% of the non-Indigenous population, with a further 24% in ""inner regional"" areas (compared with 18%), 20% in ""outer regional"" (8%), while nearly 18% lived in ""remote"" or ""very remote"" areas (2%).
The Indigenous population of Australia is much younger than the non-Indigenous population, with an estimated median age of 21 years (37 years for non-Indigenous), due to higher rates of birth and death. For this reason, age standardisation is often used when comparing Indigenous and non-Indigenous statistics.
The federal government's Closing the Gap strategy, created in 2008 and coordinated by the National Indigenous Australians Agency since July 2019, aims to address multiple areas to improve the lives of Indigenous peoples. Draft targets for 2019 were created by the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) in December 2018. These were in the following areas:"
Indigenous Australians,"families, children and youth
health
education
economic development
housing
justice (including youth justice)
land and water, ""where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' land, water and cultural rights are realised""
cross-system priorities, which ""addresses racism, discrimination and social inclusion, healing and trauma, and the promotion of culture and language for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples"""
Indigenous Australians,"Health
Social and cultural determinants such as discrimination, lack of education or employment (and therefore income), and cultural disconnection can impact both physical and mental health, and contemporary disadvantage is related to colonisation and its ongoing impact.
Successive censuses have shown, that (after adjusting for demographic structures) Indigenous Australians experience greater rates of renal disease, several communicable diseases (such as tuberculosis and hepatitis C virus), type 2 diabetes, respiratory disease, poor mental health and other illnesses than the general population."
Indigenous Australians,"Life expectancy
The life expectancy of Indigenous Australians is difficult to quantify accurately. Indigenous deaths are poorly identified, and the official figures for the size of the population at risk include large adjustment factors. Two estimates of Indigenous life expectancy in 2008 differed by as much as five years. The ABS introduced a new method in 2009, but problems remained. A 2013 study, referring to the national Indigenous reform policy, Closing the Gap, looked at the difficulties in interpreting the extent of the gap because of differing methods of estimating life expectancy between 2007 and 2012. The 2019 report by the Close the Gap campaign reported that the gap in life expectancy was ""widening rather than closing"". Life expectancy for Aboriginals and Torres Strait islanders was 71.6 for men and 75.6 for women as of 2016-17.
Infant mortality (ages 0–4) was twice as high as for non-Indigenous children in 2014–6."
Indigenous Australians,"Mental health
Mental health, suicide and self-harm remain major concerns, with the suicide rate being double that of the non-Indigenous population in 2015, and young people experiencing rising rates of mental health difficulties. There are high incidences of anxiety, depression, PTSD and suicide amongst the Stolen Generations, with this resulting in unstable parenting and family situations."
Indigenous Australians,"Substance abuse
Many Indigenous communities suffer from a range of health, social and legal problems associated with substance abuse of both legal and illegal drugs, including but not limited to alcohol abuse, petrol sniffing, the use of illegal drugs such as methamphetamine (""ice"") and cannabis and smoking tobacco. Tobacco use has been estimated to be the ""greatest contributor (23%) to the gap in the disease burden between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians"", with Indigenous people 2.5 times more likely to smoke daily than non-Indigenous Australians.
Indigenous Australians were 1.6 times as likely to abstain completely from alcohol than non-Indigenous people in 2012–3. Foetal alcohol syndrome has been a problem, but the rate of pregnant women drinking had halved between 2008 and 2015 (from 20% to 10%).
Petrol sniffing has been a problem among some remote communities. A 2018 longitudinal study by the University of Queensland (UQ), commissioned by the National Indigenous Australians Agency, reported that the number of people sniffing petrol in the 25 communities studied had declined by 95.2%, from 453 to just 22, related to the distribution of a new, low aromatic petrol, Opal, in NT in 2005.
The 2018 UQ study also reported that alcohol and cannabis were the drugs causing most concern. Ice was reported present in 8 of the 25 communities, but nearly all only occasional use."
Indigenous Australians,"Education
There is a significant gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in educational attainment. This presents significant issues for employment. As of 2018, Indigenous students or adults, when compared with non-Indigenous peers:"
Indigenous Australians,"Have a lower school attendance rate, with these rates at 82% and 93% respectively (in remote areas, as low as 63%)
Have lower literacy and numeracy, although rates had improved significantly on some NAPLAN (standardised school testing) measures
Reach Year 12 at a lower rate, with improvement from 59% to 74% between 2006 and 2016, with the gap at 24% in 2016
Are underrepresented in higher education and have lower completion rates
Closing the Gap has focused on improving education for Indigenous people, with some success. Attainment of Year 12 or equivalent for ages 20–24 has increased from 47.4% in 2006 to 65.3% in 2016. This has led to more Indigenous people undertaking higher or vocational education courses. According to the Closing the Gap report, Indigenous students in higher education award courses more than doubled in number over the decade from 2006 (9,329) to 2017 (19,237).
However, most of the Closing the Gap targets for education are not on track. In general, the gaps have improved (such as in NAPLAN results) or not devolved (school attendance rate remaining stable for several years) have not met targets. Remoteness seems to be a factor; students in isolated or remote communities do not perform or attend as well as students in urban areas. The Closing the Gap Report 2019 reported that of the seven targets, only two – early childhood education and Year 12 attainment – had been met. Only Year 9 numeracy was on track in all states and territories, with variations among them.
The Aboriginal Centre for the Performing Arts was established as a training centre by the state and federal governments in 1997."
Indigenous Australians,"Employment
Compared to the national average, Indigenous people experience high unemployment and poverty rates. As of the 2018 Closing the Gap Report, the Indigenous employment rate had decreased from 48% to 46.6% between 2006 and 2016, while the non-Indigenous employment rate remained steady at around 72% (a 25.4% gap). The employment rate for Indigenous women, however, increased from 39% to 44.8% in the same period.
The Racial Discrimination Act was introduced in 1975, and the Anti-Discrimination Act, in 1977. Legal action alone cannot prevent all forms of racism, however, these Acts were put into law to place checks on the system.
A 2016 ABS report on labour force characteristics show low employment rates. An analysis of the figures suggested significant barriers to Indigenous people gaining employment, possibly including job location, employer discrimination, and lack of education and others. A big factor is education. Those with a degree had an employment probability of 85% (for males) and 74% (for females) for gaining employment, decreasing along with qualifications, so that those who have completed Year 9 and below have a 43% (male) and 32% (female) probability of gaining employment. Other factors, unlike education, are not covered by government policy, such as discrimination and unfair treatment. Employed Indigenous Australians were more likely to experience discrimination than those who are unemployed, and it has been found that the second most common source of unfair treatment (after members of the public) is at work or applying for work. There was also a significant lack of consultation with Indigenous peoples on the methods they think best to tackle issues like unemployment."
Indigenous Australians,"Crime
Indigenous Australians are over-represented in Australia's criminal justice system. As of September 2019, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners represented 28% of the total adult prisoner population, while accounting for 3.3% of the general population. In May 2018, Indigenous women made up 34% of all women imprisoned in Australia. A 2017–2018 report into youth justice undertaken by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reported that about half (a total of 2,339) of the young people aged 10–17 under supervision in 2016–17 were Indigenous, although of that age group, Indigenous youth represent 5% of the general population. It concludes from the data that there is a clear issue occurring not only within Australia's criminal justice system, but within communities as a whole.
Explanations given for this over-representation include the economic position of Indigenous Australians, the knock-on effects of the stolen generations and disconnection from land, the effects of their health and housing situations, their ability to access an economic base such as land and employment, their education, and the use of alcohol and other drugs.
Indigenous Australians are also over-represented as victims of crime, in particular, assault. Indigenous women are highly over-represented in this figure, accounting for a higher proportion of assault victims than the non-Indigenous category.
In 2007, the Northern Territory Government commissioned a Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse, which produced a report known as the Little Children are Sacred report. This suggested, based largely on anecdotal evidence, that children in remote Aboriginal communities in NT were suffering from widespread sexual abuse. The Australian Human Rights Commission's Social Justice Report 2008 said that the 2005–2006 ABS statistics did not appear to support the ""allegations of endemic child abuse... that was the rationale for the NTER"" (""The Intervention"" by the Howard government) that followed."
Indigenous Australians,"Family violence
The rate of family violence in Indigenous Australian communities, especially in the Northern Territory, has been high for many years, and under-reported. It has been estimated to be around 34 times greater than the national rate, and, in the worst areas, up to 80 times. There is no single cause for this high rate, but several probable causes or aggravating factors have been suggested by various researchers and stakeholders, including: dispossession of land and subsequent displacement of communities; childhood abuse experienced by the Stolen Generations, along with intergenerational trauma; economic disadvantage; violent family environments; poor health; inadequate housing; racism; loss of Aboriginal identity; and many others. An AIHW survey covering eight years to 2019, published in December 2021, revealed that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people accounted for 28 per cent of all hospitalisations due to family violence, despite only making up 3.3% of the total population. Various reasons were suggested by experts, including Aboriginal men's control of decision-making, and limited independence for women owing to economic factors; barriers in access to services; racism by some police and other services; and lack of enough Aboriginal-run organisations providing culturally safe services.
As the federal government, upon being urged by experts to create the means to halt the violence in 2021, announced an extra A$10.7 million ""to boost frontline services in the Northern Territory... and to work towards our Closing the Gap commitments"", in addition to other funding already committed to the states and NT under the National Partnership on Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence Responses."
Indigenous Australians,"Efforts towards recognition and reparations
In 2021, Australia's government, led by Prime Minister Scott Morrison, announced the creation of a reparations fund for members of the Stolen Generations—Indigenous Australians who were forcibly removed from their homes as children. This policy of forced assimilation, which continued into the 1970s, has had lasting impacts on Indigenous communities. The reparations fund includes one-off payments of 75,000 Australian dollars to victims, as part of a broader initiative to address the serious disadvantages faced by Australia's Indigenous population.
In addition, there's an emerging solidarity between Black and Indigenous communities for finding land justice and reparations. Initiatives like the Indigenous-led Land Back movement and various Black community organizations are working towards reclaiming land and advocating for financial restitution for civil and human rights violations. These movements utilize cooperative structures to advance land justice, emphasizing the importance of communal wealth and regenerative systems that are not extractive of people or the planet."
Indigenous Australians,"Political issues
Timeline
Since the 20th century there have been a number of individuals and organisations who have instigated significant events in the struggle for political representation, land rights and other political issues affecting the lives of Indigenous Australians:"
Indigenous Australians,"1937: Yorta Yorta man William Cooper collects 1800 signatures to petition King George VI for representation of the original occupants of Australia in federal Parliament.
26 January (Australia Day) 1938: The Aborigines Progressive Association holds a Day of Mourning, to protest 150 years of callous treatment and the seizure of land."
Indigenous Australians,"Political representation
Under Section 41 of the Australian Constitution, Aboriginal Australians always had the legal right to vote in Australian Commonwealth elections if their State granted them that right. This meant that all Aboriginal peoples outside Queensland and Western Australia had a legal right to vote. The right of Indigenous ex-servicemen to vote was affirmed in 1949 and all Indigenous Australians gained the unqualified right to vote in Federal elections in 1962. Unlike other Australians, however, voting was not made compulsory for Indigenous people, and it was not until the repeal of Section 127 of the Constitution of Australia following the 1967 referendum that Indigenous Australians were counted in the population for the purposes of distribution of electoral seats.
As of January 2020, six Indigenous Australians have been elected to the Australian Senate: Neville Bonner (Liberal, 1971–1983), Aden Ridgeway (Democrat, 1999–2005), Nova Peris (Labor, 2013–2016), Jacqui Lambie (2014–2017, 2019–incumbent), Pat Dodson (Labor, 2016–incumbent), and former Northern Territory MLA Malarndirri McCarthy (Labor, 2016–incumbent).
Following the 2010 Australian Federal Election, Ken Wyatt of the Liberal Party won the Western Australian seat of Hasluck, becoming the first Indigenous person elected to the Australian House of Representatives. His nephew, Ben Wyatt, was concurrently serving as Shadow Treasurer in the Western Australian Parliament and in 2011 considered a challenge for the Labor Party leadership in that state. Linda Burney became the second Indigenous person, and the first woman, to serve in the federal House of Representatives.
In March 2013, Adam Giles of the Country Liberal Party (CLP) became Chief Minister of the Northern Territory – the first Indigenous Australian to become head of government in a state or territory of Australia. Hyacinth Tungutalum, also of the CLP, was the first Indigenous person elected to any Australian (state or territory) parliament. A Tiwi man from Bathurst Island, he was elected to the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly in October 1974 as the member for Tiwi.
A number of Indigenous people represent electorates at state and territory level, and South Australia has had an Aboriginal Governor, Sir Douglas Nicholls.  The first Indigenous Australian to serve as a minister in any government was Ernie Bridge, who entered the Western Australian Parliament in 1980. Carol Martin was the first Aboriginal woman elected to a State parliament in Australia (the Western Australian Legislative Assembly) in 2001, and the first woman minister was Marion Scrymgour, who was appointed to the Northern Territory ministry in 2002 (she became Deputy Chief Minister in 2008). Representation in the Northern Territory has been relatively high, reflecting the high proportion of Aboriginal voters. The 2012 Territory election saw large swings to the conservative CLP in remote Territory electorates, and a total of five Aboriginal CLP candidates won election to the Assembly, along with one Labor candidate, in a chamber of 25 members. Among those elected for the CLP were high-profile activists Bess Price and Alison Anderson.
Forty people identifying as being of Indigenous Australian ancestry have been members of the ten Australian legislatures. Of these, 22 have been in the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly. The Northern Territory has an exceptionally high Indigenous proportion (about one third) of its population. Adam Giles, who was Chief Minister of the Northern Territory from 2013 to 2016, was the first Indigenous head of government in Australia. In 1974, the year of its creation, the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly was also the first Australian parliament to have an Indigenous member elected to it.
The 2022 election featured the largest number of Indigenous candidates in Australian history, with four running for the Coalition, eleven for Labor, and seventeen for the Greens. The Greens Victorian senate ticket were all Aboriginal.
As of 2023, Indigenous Australians members of the senate represent 10.5% of the 76 Senate seats, and 1.9% in the House. The total representation is at 4.8%, far above the national population of 3.3%."
Indigenous Australians,"Federal government initiatives
The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) was set up as a representative body in 1990 under the Hawke government. In 2004, the Howard government disbanded ATSIC and replaced it and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Services (ATSIS) Regional and State Offices with an appointed network of Indigenous Coordination Centres (ICC) that administer Shared Responsibility Agreements and Regional Partnership Agreements with Aboriginal communities at a local level. ICCs operate as whole-of-government centres, housing staff from a number of departments to deliver services to Indigenous Australians.
Major political parties in Australia have tried to increase Indigenous representation within their parties. One suggestion for achieving this is to introduce seat quotas, as in the Maori electorates in New Zealand.
In October 2007, just before the calling of a federal election, the then Prime Minister, John Howard, revisited the idea of bringing a referendum to seek recognition of Indigenous Australians in the Constitution (his government having previously sought to include recognition of Indigenous peoples in the Preamble to the Constitution in the 1999 Australian republic referendum). His announcement was seen by some as a surprising adoption of the importance of the symbolic aspects of the reconciliation process, and reaction was mixed. The Australian Labor Party initially supported the idea; however Kevin Rudd withdrew this support just before the election, earning a rebuke from activist Noel Pearson.
The Gillard government (2010–2013), with bi-partisan support, convened an Expert Panel to consider changes to the Australian Constitution that would see recognition for Indigenous Australians, who delivered their report, which included five recommendations for changes to the Constitution as well as recommendations for the referendum process, in January 2012. The Government promised to hold a referendum on the constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians on or before the federal election due for 2013. The plan was abandoned in September 2012, with Minister Jenny Macklin citing insufficient community awareness for the decision.
In December 2015, the 16-member Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Referendum Council was jointly appointed by the Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, and Leader of the Opposition, Bill Shorten. After six months of consultation, the First Nations National Constitutional Convention met over four days from 23 to 26 May 2017, and ratified the Uluru Statement from the Heart by a standing ovation from the gathering of 250 Indigenous leaders. The Statement calls for a ""First Nations Voice"" in the Australian Constitution and a ""Makarrata Commission"" (Makarrata is a Yolngu word ""describing a process of conflict resolution, peacemaking and justice"")."
Indigenous Australians,"2019: Indigenous voice to government
In May 2019, Prime Minister Scott Morrison created the position of Minister for Indigenous Australians, a Cabinet portfolio in the Second Morrison Ministry, with Ken Wyatt as the inaugural officebearer. On 30 October 2019, Wyatt announced the commencement of a ""co-design process"" aimed at providing an Indigenous voice to Parliament. The Senior Advisory Group is co-chaired by Professor Tom Calma , Chancellor of the University of Canberra, and Professor Dr Marcia Langton, Associate Provost at the University of Melbourne, and comprises a total of 20 leaders and experts from across the country. The other members are Father Frank Brennan, Peter Buckskin, Josephine Cashman, Marcia Ella-Duncan, Joanne Farrell, Mick Gooda, Chris Kenny, Vonda Malone, June Oscar, Alison Page, Noel Pearson, Benson Saulo, Pat Turner, Maggie Walter, Tony Wurramarrba, Peter Yu, and Dr Galarrwuy Yunupingu. The first meeting of the group was held in Canberra on 13 November 2019."
Indigenous Australians,"Native title, sovereignty and treaties
About 22% of land in Northern Australia (Kimberley, Top End and Cape York) is now Aboriginal-owned. In the last decade, nearly 200 native title claims covering 1.3 million km2 of land – approximately 18% of the Australian continent – have been approved.
In 1992, in Mabo v Queensland, the High Court of Australia recognised native title in Australia for the first time. The majority in the High Court rejected the doctrine of terra nullius, in favour of the concept of native title.
In 2013, an Indigenous group describing itself as the Murrawarri Republic declared independence from Australia, claiming territory straddling the border between the states of New South Wales and Queensland. Australia's Attorney General's Department indicated it did not consider the declaration to have any meaning in law.
In 2014, another Indigenous group describing itself as the Sovereign Yidindji Government declared independence from Australia.
Unlike in other parts of the former British Empire, like the Treaty of Waitangi in New Zealand, no treaty has ever been concluded between Indigenous Australians and an Australian government. However, although there is still no move toward a treaty at federal level, it is contended that the Noongar Settlement (South West Native Title Settlement) in Western Australia in 2016 constitutes a treaty, and at the state and territory levels there are currently (early 2018) other negotiations and preparatory legislation. In South Australia, however, following the 2018 state election negotiations have been ""paused"". In June 2018, the Parliament of Victoria passed a bill to advance the process of establishing a treaty with Aboriginal Victorians. The Victorian First Peoples' Assembly was elected in November 2019 and sat for the first time on 10 December 2019."
Indigenous Australians,"Prominent Indigenous Australians
After the arrival of European settlers in New South Wales, some Indigenous Australians became translators and go-betweens; the best-known was Bennelong, who eventually adopted European dress and customs and travelled to England where he was reportedly presented to King George III. Others, such as Pemulwuy, Yagan, and Windradyne, became famous for armed resistance to the European settlers.
During the twentieth century, as social attitudes shifted and interest in Indigenous culture increased, there were more opportunities for Indigenous Australians to gain recognition. Albert Namatjira became a painter, and actors such as David Gulpilil, Ernie Dingo, and Deborah Mailman became well known. Bands such as Yothu Yindi, and singers Christine Anu, Jessica Mauboy and Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, have combined Indigenous musical styles and instruments with pop/rock, gaining appreciation amongst non-Indigenous audiences. Polymath David Unaipon is commemorated on the Australian $50 note.
While relatively few Indigenous Australians have been elected to political office (Neville Bonner, Aden Ridgeway, Ken Wyatt, Nova Peris, Jacqui Lambie and Linda Burney remain the only Indigenous Australians to have been elected to the Australian Federal Parliament), Aboriginal rights campaigner Sir Douglas Nicholls was appointed Governor of the State of South Australia in 1976, and many others have become famous through political activism – for instance, Charles Perkins' involvement in the Freedom Ride of 1965 and subsequent work; or Torres Strait Islander Eddie Mabo's part in the landmark native title decision that bears his name. The voices of Cape York activists Noel Pearson and Jean Little, and academics Marcia Langton and Mick Dodson, today loom large in national debates. Some Indigenous people who initially became famous in other spheres – for instance, poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal – have used their celebrity to draw attention to Indigenous issues.
In health services, Kelvin Kong became the first Indigenous surgeon in 2006 and is an advocate of Indigenous health issues."
Indigenous Australians,"See also
Notes
Citations
Sources
Further reading
External links"
Indigenous Australians,"""Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice"". Australian Human Rights Commission. 31 October 2023.
""Australian Database of Indigenous Violence"". Archived from the original on 15 July 2010. Retrieved 14 November 2009.
""Home page"". Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. Retrieved 26 March 2022.
""Home page"". Indigenous.gov.au. Australian Government. Retrieved 26 March 2022.
""Home page"". National Indigenous Times.
""Home page"". Australian Indigenous HealthInfoNet. 15 January 2018.
""Indigenous Law Resources"". Australasian Legal Information Institute (austlii). 20 July 2017.
""Map of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health/medical services"". Australian Indigenous HealthInfoNet. Retrieved 26 March 2022."
Electorates of the Australian House of Representatives,Electorates (also known as electoral divisions or seats) of the Australian House of Representatives are single member electoral districts for the lower house of the Parliament of the Commonwealth. There are currently 151 electorates.
Electorates of the Australian House of Representatives,"Constitutional and legal requirements
Section 24 of the Constitution of Australia specifies that the total number of members of the Australian House of Representatives shall be ""as nearly as practicable"" twice as many as the number of members of the Australian Senate. The section also requires that electorates be apportioned among the states in proportion to their respective populations; provided that each original state has at least 5 members in the House of Representatives, a provision that has given Tasmania higher representation than its population would otherwise justify. There are three electorates in the Australian Capital Territory and even though the Northern Territory should have only one electorate based on their population, parliament have legislated that they receive two (by setting the quota for seat allocation using the harmonic mean for territories, meaning only around 1.3 quotas rather than 1.5 quotas are needed to have two seats).
In addition, Section 29 forbids electorate boundaries from crossing state lines, forcing populated areas along state and territory borders to be placed in different electorates, such as Albury in New South Wales being part of the electorate of Farrer, while nearby Wodonga in Victoria is part of the electorate of Indi. The same restriction does not apply to territories, and several current electoral divisions incorporate electors from multiple territories. This is currently the case for the Division of Bean (covering part of the ACT and the whole of Norfolk Island), the Division of Fenner (covering part of the ACT and the whole of Jervis Bay Territory), and the Division of Lingiari (covering part of the Northern Territory and the whole of Christmas Island and Cocos (Keeling) Islands).
The Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 sets out further provisions."
Electorates of the Australian House of Representatives,"Apportionment and redistribution
The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) determines the number of members of the House of Representatives to which each state and territory is entitled (called apportionment) and the boundaries of each electorate, in a process known as redistribution. Such apportionment and redistributions apply to the next federal election, but not to any by-elections. The last apportionment determination was made in July 2020.  The resulting redistribution took place during 2021 and was used in the 2022 federal election, which was held on 21 May 2022.
Within each state and territory, electoral boundaries are redrawn from time to time. This takes place at least once every 7 years, or when the state's entitlement to the number of members of the House of Representatives changes. Boundaries are drawn by a Redistribution Committee, and redistributions within a state are on the basis of the number of enrolled voters, rather than total residents or ""population"". The number of enrolled voters in each division cannot vary by more than 10% from the average across a state or territory, nor can the number of voters vary by more than 3.5% from the average projected enrolment 3.5 years into the future. However, due to various reasons, larger seats like Cowper in New South Wales contain 80% more electors than that of smaller seats like Solomon in the Northern Territory. In 2018, seats in Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia were also abolished, in order to make way for seats in similar locations but with different names.
At the 2022 Australian federal election, based on the 2021 apportionment, there were 151 divisions: 47 in New South Wales, 39 in Victoria, 30 in Queensland, 15 in Western Australia, 10 in South Australia, 5 in Tasmania, 3 in the ACT and 2 in Northern Territory."
Electorates of the Australian House of Representatives,"Naming
The divisions of the House of Representatives are unusual in that many of them are not named after geographical features or numbered, as is the case in most other legislatures around the world. Most divisions are named in honour of prominent historical people, such as former politicians (often Prime Ministers), explorers, artists and engineers. There is also a preference for retaining names used since Federation.
In some cases where a division is named after a geographical locality, the connection to that locality is sometimes tenuous. For instance, the Division of Werriwa, created in 1901, was named after the Aboriginal word for Lake George in the Canberra region. However, Werriwa has not contained Lake George for many decades, and has steadily moved some 200 km north to the south-western suburbs of Sydney over the past century."
Electorates of the Australian House of Representatives,"List of current electoral divisions
The divisions that existed at the 2022 Australian federal election appear in the table below."
Electorates of the Australian House of Representatives,"Abolished divisions
These divisions no longer exist:"
Electorates of the Australian House of Representatives,"See also
List of members of the Australian House of Representatives
Australian electoral system"
Electorates of the Australian House of Representatives,"External links
Adam Carr's Electoral Archive: Index of House of Representatives Divisions 1901–2001"
Electorates of the Australian House of Representatives,"
== References =="
Aged care in Australia,"Aged care in Australia (also known as elderly care), is the provision of services to meet the unique needs of older people in Australia. It includes both residential aged care (nursing homes) as well as services provided in the home such as personal care, domestic assistance, home nursing, nutrition and meal preparation, respite services, continence management, mobility & dexterity assistance, transport, social support and the provision of equipment and aids.
In Australia, many aged care services are subsidised by the Department of Health to help keep costs manageable and affordable.  Australians who are eligible for government subsidies to help fund the costs of aged care services will still be expected to contribute to the cost of services if they can afford to."
Aged care in Australia,"Ageing population in Australia
Australia's population is getting older, due to longer life expectancy and low fertility rates. Results of the 2016 national census show that one in six Australians is now aged over 65. By 2056, it is projected there will be 8.7 million older Australians (22% of the population); by 2096, 12.8 million people (25%) will be aged 65 years and over.
The impact of our ageing population is an increase in the number of Australians needing help in aged care. In 2016, almost a quarter of a million people (249,000) were using residential care, home care or transition care services—a 31% increase over the last decade.
The public aged-care system is already under strain, with fewer places than there is demand. By 2060, aged care demands are expected to put additional pressure on Australian governments equivalent to about 6 per cent of national GDP.
Since 2012, the government has been introducing reforms that move towards consumer-directed aged care - a more market-driven environment where the consumer (or their carer) can choose their service provider.
In response, more private business providers are entering the market, in competition with the government-funded and not-for-profit providers that have historically dominated. However, there is no official government channel that regulates private aged-care providers and reports on their quality of services such as staffing levels and skills and quality of care.   The government announced a public inquiry into misconduct in the sector in September 2018. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation produced two-part documentary focusing on alleged neglect and abuse of older people. Service providers, including Estia Health, Regis Healthcare and Japara Healthcare lost about a sixth of their value."
Aged care in Australia,"Aged care options
The three main options available to older people are:"
Aged care in Australia,"Stay in their own home and access in-home care and services to help them remain independent.
Move into an aged care home (a residential aged care facility) where meals, accommodation, care services and nursing services (if required) are available.
Move into a retirement village where some services are available for a fee."
Aged care in Australia,"In-home aged care
Most older Australians prefer to remain in their own home as they get older. 83% of people over 60 surveyed in the Housing Decisions of Older Australians research paper by the Australian Government's Productivity Commission in 2015, preferred to continue living in their own home (compared to 6% who preferred living in a retirement villages and 1% in a residential aged care facility.) If a person is generally able to manage but needs extra assistance with day to day tasks, they can access a number of services to support their independence while remaining in their own home.
Types of services that people can access in their home include:"
Aged care in Australia,"Personal care
Domestic assistance
Nutrition and meal preparation
Continence management
Mobility and dexterity assistance
Nursing, allied health and other clinical services
Transport and assistance getting around in their community
Equipment and aids.
Social Support
Flexible Respite
Allied Health Services / Physiotherapy / Occupational Therapy / Dietetics / Podiatry"
Aged care in Australia,"Funding
There are two types of funding provided by the Australian Government available to help subsidise the costs of in-home aged care services for eligible people."
Aged care in Australia,"Home Care Package
A Home Care Package provides long-term help to allow people to stay independent in their own home as long as possible and offer four levels of care packages to support people with basic, low, intermediate, and high care needs.
Depending on the level of support needed, an aged care services provider can work with an individual to create a care plan tailored to their needs. A Home Care Package can deliver a mix of services including:"
Aged care in Australia,"Personal care
Domestic assistance
Nutrition and meal preparation
Continence management
Mobility and dexterity assistance
Nursing, allied health and other clinical services
Transport and assistance getting around in their community
Provision of equipment and aids
Assistive technology
It is possible to change services or move to a different level of package based on changing needs.
Older Australians or their carer can contact the My Aged Care service provided by the Australian Government to find out if they can access government funding to help cover the cost of Aged Care Services. My Aged Care can arrange for the person to be assessed by the Aged Care Assessment Team (ACAT) or ACAS (Victoria only).
The funding a person receive varies depending on the level of their Home Care Package and is paid direct to the service provider. If personal circumstances allow, the Government expects people receiving funding to contribute to the cost of their care.
The amount they will need to contribute is based on their income and is determined by the Department of Human Services."
Aged care in Australia,"Commonwealth Home Support Programme
If a person only requires short-term help or some assistance with daily activities around the home, the Commonwealth Home Support Programme allows them to access the specific services they need, when they need them. The Commonwealth Home Support Programme lets the older person choose the services they need as required.
Services available under the Commonwealth Home Support Programme include:"
Aged care in Australia,"Personal care
Domestic assistance
Meal preparation
Social support
Flexible respite
Allied Health / Physiotherapy
The person can choose from a set menu of services based on when they need them and can enter and leave the programme as their needs change.
To access services provided by the Commonwealth Home Support Programme, the person will need to be assessed by a team member from the Regional Assessment Service either in their home or on the phone.
The subsidy programme does not necessarily fund the full cost of the service, so each person may pay a small contribution. Special consideration is available to people experiencing financial difficulty."
Aged care in Australia,"Costs
The Australian Government pays for the bulk of aged care in Australia. However, to receive help at home through the government's home care packages, one needs to contribute towards one or both of the following:"
Aged care in Australia,"A basic daily fee, which is a percentage of one's aged pension
A means-tested fee, payable if one's income is over a certain amount
Once an individual has had an ACAT assessment, this will be sent to Centrelink, which will determine how much needs to be paid.
An ACAT assessment is a comprehensive assessment with an Aged Care Assessment Team. ACATs are teams of medical, nursing and allied health professionals who assess the physical, psychological, medical, restorative, cultural and social needs of frail older people and help them and their carers to access appropriate levels of support.
The cost will vary depending on whether the funding is provided under the Commonwealth Home Support Programme or the Home Care Packages Program. If a person is not eligible for a subsidy from the Australian Government, they can still access aged care services privately but will be required to cover the associated costs."
Aged care in Australia,"2017 Government changes to in-home care
In February 2017, the Australian Government introduced Increasing Choice in Home Care reforms. These reforms are designed to give older people more choice and control over their home care. Recipients of government funding to cover the cost of aged care services are now able to choose their preferred provider of in home aged care services. They can also choose to change their provider at any time.
Once a person's application for funding is successful, they will be allocated their funding based on how long they have been waiting and also on their individual care needs and personal circumstances.
A person can accrue unspent funds that are left over from their package after any expenses and fees have been deducted. If they change home care provider these unspent funds will be transferred to the new provider.
After 27 February 2017, aged care providers are able to charge customers an exit fee to cover administrative costs which will be deducted from any unspent funds. Providers are legally required to publish their maximum exit fees on the My Aged Care website. Not all providers require exit fees."
Aged care in Australia,"Aged care homes
As people grow older, they may need more help with day-to-day tasks or health care. In some cases the best way to receive help and support can be by living in an aged care home (also known as nursing homes) either on a permanent basis or for a short stay (called ""residential respite"").
Aged care homes offer accommodation services (also known as “hotel services”) and personal care assistance (e.g. bathing & personal hygiene, continence management, dressing). Aged care homes may also provide complex care and services such as specialized bedding materials, non-customized mobility goods, incontinence aids, nursing services and allied health services.
Most aged care homes in Australia receive funding from the Australian Government. The aged care system in Australia aims to make sure that all older people can receive support and quality care when they need it.
If a person's care needs are less than those supplied by an aged care home, independent living units or retirement villages are an alternative. These residential communities offer a variety of services for older people to help them live independently, and are regulated by state and territory governments.
A younger person with disabilities can also live in residential aged care settings.  As of 2015, over 7,000 young disabled people lived in aged care homes.  A goal of the National Disability Insurance Scheme is to get younger people with disabilities out of residential age care settings."
Aged care in Australia,"Funding for residential aged care
The Australian Government funds the majority of aged care in Australia but people are expected to contribute to the cost of their care if they can afford to.
There are also specific programmes and information available to Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people; people from culturally or linguistically diverse backgrounds; people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or intersex; or Care-Leavers.
Older veterans, those who are financially disadvantaged, people living with disability and those living away from large towns can also access tailored support.
To determine eligibility to receive funding, a member of an Aged Care Assessment Team (ACAT, or ACAS in Victoria) will carry out an assessment with the person to identify their needs and circumstances and work out what options are available to them."
Aged care in Australia,"Aged care assessment
Whether an older person requires help with basic tasks at home or more intensive aged care services, they will need to arrange an assessment with the My Aged Care service.
My Aged Care will register the person's details and ask them a series of questions to help identify their needs and circumstances such as:"
Aged care in Australia,"any support they are currently receiving
if they have any health concerns
how they are managing with activities around the home
some questions relating to their safety in the home
From there they may be referred for a home support assessment, a comprehensive assessment, or direct referral to services."
Aged care in Australia,"Home support assessment
If a person has entry level aged care needs, My Aged Care may arrange a home support assessment to identify their care needs. The assessment will be undertaken by a local assessor from the My Aged Care Regional Assessment Service."
Aged care in Australia,"Comprehensive assessment
If the older person has more complex aged care needs, a comprehensive assessment by a member of an Aged Care Assessment Team (ACAT, or ACAS in Victoria) may be organized for them if they want to access government funded services or if they are considering moving into an aged care home. A person may also need to have a comprehensive assessment if they are ready to leave hospital, or if they need a short break in an aged care home (also called 'respite care')."
Aged care in Australia,"See also
Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety
Dementia and Alzheimer's disease in Australia"
Aged care in Australia,"References
External links"
Aged care in Australia,"""My Aged Care"". Australian Government."
Arts in Australia,"The Arts in Australia refers to the visual arts, literature, performing arts and music in the area of, on the subject of, or by the people of the Commonwealth of Australia and its preceding Indigenous and colonial societies. Indigenous Australian art, music and story telling attaches to a 40–60,000-year heritage and continues to affect the broader arts and culture of Australia. During its early western history, Australia was a collection of British colonies, therefore, its literary, visual and theatrical traditions began with strong links to the broader traditions of English and Irish literature, British art and English and Celtic music. However, the works of Australian artists – including Indigenous as well as Anglo-Celtic and multicultural migrant Australians – has, since 1788, introduced the character of a new continent to the global arts scene – exploring such themes as Aboriginality, Australian landscape, migrant and national identity, distance from other Western nations and proximity to Asia, the complexities of urban living and the ""beauty and the terror"" of life in the Australian bush.
Notable Australian writers have included the Nobel laureate Patrick White, the novelists Colleen McCullough and Henry Handel Richardson and the bush poets Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson. Leading Australian performing artists have included Robert Helpmann of the Australian Ballet, Joan Sutherland of Opera Australia and the humourist Barry Humphries. Prominent Australian musical artists have included the Australian country music singer Slim Dusty, rising star Cody Simpson, folk-rocker Paul Kelly, ""pop princess"" Kylie Minogue and rock n roll bands the Bee Gees, AC/DC, INXS and Powderfinger. Quintessentially Australian art styles include the Heidelberg School the Hermannsburg School and the Western Desert Art Movement. 
Australian cinema has a long tradition with a body of work producing popular classics such as Crocodile Dundee and The Man From Snowy River, and arthouse successes such as Picnic at Hanging Rock and Ten Canoes. Prominent Australian trained filmed artists include Errol Flynn, Mel Gibson, Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett.
Notable institutions for the arts include the UNESCO listed Sydney Opera House, the National Gallery of Victoria, the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra and the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney."
Arts in Australia,"Overview
The arts in Australia, including the fields of cinema, music, visual arts, theatre, dance and crafts often reflect general trends in Western arts. However, the arts as practiced by indigenous Australians represent a unique Australian cultural tradition, and Australia's landscape and history have contributed to some unique variations in the styles inherited by Australia's various migrant communities.
At the close of the 19th century, the painters of the Heidelberg School began to capture the unique colours of the Australian bush, famed writers Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson presented conflicting views of the harshness and romance of life in Australia, and performing artists like opera singer Dame Nellie Melba made a mark internationally in classical European culture. During the 20th century, writers and performers like C J Dennis, Barry Humphries and Paul Hogan both mocked and celebrated Australian cultural stereotypes, while shifting demographics saw a diversification of artistic output, with writers like feminist Germaine Greer challenging traditional cultural norms.
Australia's capital cities each support traditional  ""high culture"" institutions in the form of major art galleries, ballet troupes, theatres, symphony orchestras, opera houses and dance companies. Leading Australian performers in these fields have included the opera Dames Nellie Melba and Joan Sutherland, dancers Edouard Borovansky and Sir Robert Helpmann, and choreographer/dancers such as Graeme Murphy and Meryl Tankard. Opera Australia is based in Sydney at the world-renowned Sydney Opera House. The Australian Ballet, Melbourne and Sydney symphony orchestras are also well regarded cultural institutions.
Organisations such as the Sydney Theatre Company and National Institute of Dramatic Art have fostered students of theatre, film, and television several of whom have continued to international success, with actors like Cate Blanchett and Geoffrey Rush having been associated with both institutions.
Independent culture thrives in all capital cities and exists in most large regional towns. The independent arts of music, film, art and street art are the most extensive. Melbourne's independent music scene, is one of the largest in the world, whilst another can be found in the multitude of international street artists visiting Melbourne and, to a lesser extent, other major cities, to work for a period of time. As of February 2015, Arts and recreation services was the strongest industry in Australia by total number of employed persons growing by 20.59% since the same time in 2013."
Arts in Australia,"Visual arts
Painting, drawing and sculpture
The visual arts have a long history in Australia, dating back around 30,000 years, and examples of ancient Aboriginal rock art can be found throughout the continent, notably in national parks such as the UNESCO-listed sites at Uluru and Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory, and also within protected parks in urban areas such as Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park in Sydney. In the mid-twentieth century, the landscape paintings of Albert Namatjira were popular and received national and international acclaim. Since the 1970s, contemporary Indigenous Australian artists have used acrylic paints in styles such as that of the Western Desert Art Movement, which leading critic Robert Hughes saw as ""the last great art movement of the 20th century"". Art is important both culturally and economically to Indigenous society; art critic Sasha Grishin concluded that central Australian Indigenous communities have ""the highest per capita concentrations of artists anywhere in the world"". Contemporary artists whose work has been exhibited internationally such as at the Venice Biennale, include Rover Thomas and Emily Kngwarreye, while designs were commissioned from several nationally recognised artists in 2006 for the new Musée du quai Branly buildings. The artists included Paddy Bedford, John Mawurndjul, Ningura Napurrula, Lena Nyadbi, Michael Riley, Judy Watson, Tommy Watson and Gulumbu Yunupingu.
Following the arrival of permanent European settlement in Australia in 1788, the story of early Australian painting has been described as requiring of artists a shift from a ""European sense of light"" to an ""Australian sense of light"". The origins of distinctly Australian painting is often associated with the Heidelberg School of the 1880s–1890s. Artists such as Arthur Streeton, Frederick McCubbin and Tom Roberts applied themselves to recreating in their art a truer sense of light and colour as seen in the Australian landscape. Like the European Impressionists, they painted in the open air. These artists found inspiration in the unique light and colour which characterises the Australian bush.
Among the first Australian artists to gain a reputation overseas was the impressionist John Russell during the 1880s. Another notable expatriate artist of the era was Rupert Bunny, a painter of landscape, allegory and sensual and intimate portraits. Ernst William Christmas also made a name internationally.
Among the principal Australian artists of the 20th century are the surrealists Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd and Russell Drysdale, the avant-garde Brett Whiteley, the painter/sculptors William Dobell and Norman Lindsay, the landscapists Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Albert Namatjira and Lloyd Rees, and modernist photographer Max Dupain. Each has helped to define the unique character of the visual arts in Australia.
Modernism arrived in Australia early in the 20th century. Among the earliest exponents were Grace Cossington Smith and Margaret Preston. Humorist Barry Humphries has been a provocative exponent of dadaism in Australia.
Popular with the general community have been Ken Done, best known for his design work, Pro Hart and Rolf Harris, a British/Australian living in the UK who is popular as a musician, composer, painter and television host. Ricky Swallow, Patricia Piccinini, Susan Norrie, Callum Morton, Rover Thomas and Emily Kame Kngwarreye have all represented Australians at the Venice Biennale using the traditional mediums of sculpture, photography and painting while instilling them with a renewed vigour. A new generation of Aboriginal artists, while not rejecting the culture of the past, endeavour to move the artistic dialogue forward, including Gordon Bennett, Rosella Namok, Richard Bell and Julie Dowling.
In recent years the art market has been democratised and art is judged on its merits rather than snobbery. A cohort of male artists aged under fifty (Dane Lovett, Adam Cullen, Ben Quilty, Anthony Bennett, Simon Cuthbert, Rhys Lee, Ben Frost and Alasdair McIntyre) have an expressive style and use humour in their work.
In addition street art is also a prominent feature in major cities such as Melbourne and Sydney. Though there is some debate over the legality, some councils have expressed greater recognition of the urban art movement.
Australia has a number of notable museums and galleries, including the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, the National Gallery of Australia, National Portrait Gallery of Australia and National Museum of Australia in Canberra, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney."
Arts in Australia,"Cinema, TV and video games
Australia has a long history of film production. Australia's first dedicated film studio, the Limelight Department, was created by The Salvation Army in Melbourne in 1898, and is believed to have been the world's first. The world's first feature-length film was the Australian production The Story of the Kelly Gang of 1906. After such early successes, Australian cinema suffered from the rise of Hollywood."
Arts in Australia,"In 1933, In the Wake of the Bounty was directed by Charles Chauvel, who cast Tasmanian-born Errol Flynn as the leading actor. Flynn went on to a celebrated career in Hollywood. Chauvel directed a number of successful Australian films, the last being 1955's Jedda, which was notable for being the first Australian film to be shot in colour, and the first to feature Aboriginal actors in lead roles and to be entered at the Cannes Film Festival. It was not until 2006 and Rolf de Heer's Ten Canoes that a major feature-length drama was shot in an indigenous language.
The first Australian Oscar was won by 1942's Kokoda Front Line!, directed by Ken G. Hall.
Television broadcasting began in Australia in 1956. The majority of locally produced content was broadcast live-to-air, with very little local programming from these first few years of Australian TV broadcasting recorded. Notable early arts programs were Bandstand, hosted by Brian Henderson; Six O'Clock Rock, hosted by Johnny O'Keefe and the first Australian serial drama, Autumn Affair. A TV series The Adventures of Long John Silver was made in Sydney for the American and British market; it was shown on the ABC in 1958.
During the late 1960s and 1970s an influx of government funding saw the development of a new generation of filmmakers telling distinctively Australian stories, including directors Peter Weir, George Miller and Bruce Beresford. Films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Sunday Too Far Away (1975) had an immediate international impact. The 1980s is often regarded as a golden age of Australian cinema, with many successful films, from the historical drama of Gallipoli (1981) to the dark science fiction of the Mad Max sequels (1981–85), the romantic adventure of The Man From Snowy River (1982) or the comedy of Crocodile Dundee (1986).
In 1982, the first Australian game development studios to achieve global success, Melbourne House (now Krome Studios Melbourne) publisherd a text adventure adaption of The Hobbit for the ZX Spectrum. Other early game development studios in Australia include Strategic Studies Group, who developed Reach for the Stars in 1983, and Micro Forté, founded in 1985.
A major theme of Australian cinema has been survival in the harsh Australian landscape. A number of thrillers and horror films dubbed ""outback gothic"" have been created, including Wake in Fright, Walkabout (1971), The Cars That Ate Paris (1974) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), Razorback (1984) and Shame (1988) in the 1980s, and Japanese Story (2003), The Proposition (2005) and the world-renowned Wolf Creek (2006) in the 21st century. These films depict the Australian outback and its wilderness and creatures as deadly, and its people as outcasts and psychopaths disconnected to modern urban Australia. These are combined with futuristic post-apocalyptic themes in the Mad Max series.
The 1990s saw a run of successful comedies such as Strictly Ballroom (1992), Muriel's Wedding (1994) and The Castle (1996), which helped launch the careers of Toni Collette, P. J. Hogan, Eric Bana and Baz Luhrmann. This group was joined in Hollywood by actors including Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett and Heath Ledger who also rose to international prominence.
The domestic film industry continues to produce a reasonable number of films each year. The industry is also supported by US producers who produce in Australia following the decision by Fox head Rupert Murdoch to utilise new studios in Melbourne and Sydney where filming could be completed well below US costs. Notable productions include The Matrix, Star Wars episodes II and III, and Australia starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman."
Arts in Australia,"The Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne is Australia's national museum of film, video games, digital culture and art. During the 2015–16 financial year, 1.45 million people visited ACMI, making it the most visited moving image museum in the world."
Arts in Australia,"Literature
Australian writers who have obtained international renown include the Nobel winning author Patrick White, as well as authors Peter Carey, Thomas Keneally, Colleen McCullough, Nevil Shute and Morris West. Notable contemporary expatriate authors include the feminist Germaine Greer, art historian Robert Hughes and humorists Barry Humphries and Clive James."
Arts in Australia,"Among the important authors of classic Australian works are the poets Henry Lawson, Banjo Paterson, C J Dennis and Dorothea McKellar. Dennis wrote in the Australian vernacular, while McKellar wrote the iconic patriotic poem My Country. At one point, Lawson and Paterson contributed a series of verses to The Bulletin magazine in which they engaged in a literary debate about the nature of life in Australia. Lawson said Paterson was a romantic and Paterson said Lawson was full of doom and gloom. Lawson is widely regarded as one of Australia's greatest writers of short stories, while Paterson's poems The Man From Snowy River and Clancy of the Overflow remain amongst the most popular Australian bush poems. Significant political poets of the 20th century included Dame Mary Gilmore and Judith Wright. Among the best known contemporary poets are Les Murray and Bruce Dawe.
Novelists of classic Australian works include Marcus Clarke (For the Term of His Natural Life), Henry Handel Richardson (The Fortunes of Richard Mahony), Joseph Furphy (Such Is Life), Miles Franklin (My Brilliant Career) and Ruth Park (The Harp in the South). In terms of children's literature, Norman Lindsay (The Magic Pudding) and May Gibbs (Snugglepot and Cuddlepie) are among the Australian classics, while eminent Australian playwrights have included Steele Rudd, David Williamson, Alan Seymour and Nick Enright.
Although historically only a small proportion of Australia's population have lived outside the major cities, many of Australia's most distinctive stories and legends originate in the outback, in the drovers and squatters and people of the barren, dusty plains.
Contemporary works dealing with the migrant experience include Melina Marchetta's Looking for Alibrandi and Anh Do's memoir The Happiest Refugee, which won the Indie Book of the Year Award for 2011 and tells the story of his experience as a Vietnamese refugee travelling to and growing up in Australia.
David Unaipon is known as the first indigenous author. Oodgeroo Noonuccal was the first Aboriginal Australian to publish a book of verse. A significant contemporary account of the experiences of Indigenous Australia can be found in Sally Morgan's My Place.
Charles Bean (The Story of Anzac: From the Outbreak of War to the End of the First Phase of the Gallipoli Campaign 4 May 1915, 1921) Geoffrey Blainey (The Tyranny of Distance, 1966), Robert Hughes (The Fatal Shore, 1987), Manning Clark (A History of Australia, 1962–87), and Marcia Langton (First Australians, 2008) are authors of important Australian histories."
Arts in Australia,"Performing arts
Dance
Indigenous dance
Traditional Aboriginal Australian dance is closely associated with song and designed to make present the reality of the Dreamtime. In some instances, the dances imitate the actions of a particular animal in the process of telling a story. Traditional ritual performances define roles, responsibilities and country, giving an understanding of people's relationship with social, geographical and environmental forces. Performances may be associated with specific sacred places. Body decoration and specific gestures related to kin and other relationships (such as to Dreamtime beings with which individuals and groups). For a number of Aboriginal Australian groups, their dances are secret and or sacred, gender could also be an important factor in some ceremonies with men and women having separate ceremonial traditions.
A corroboree, a generic word for a meeting of Australian Aboriginal peoples often including dance as well as elements of  sacred ceremony and/or celebration, has been incorporated into the English language and used to explain a practice that is different from ceremony and more widely inclusive than theatre or opera.
In the latter part of the 20th century the influence of Indigenous Australian dance traditions has been seen with the development of concert dance, particularly in contemporary dance with the National Aboriginal Islander Skills Development Association providing training to Indigenous Australians in dance, and the Bangarra Dance Theatre."
Arts in Australia,"Ballet
The Australian Ballet is the foremost classical ballet company in Australia.  It was founded by the English ballerina Dame Peggy van Praagh in 1962 and is today recognised as one of the world's major international ballet companies. It is based in Melbourne and performs works from the classical repertoire as well as contemporary works by major Australian and international choreographers. As of 2010, it was presenting approximately 200 performances in cities and regional areas around Australia each year as well as international tours. Regular venues include: the Arts Centre Melbourne, Sydney Opera House, Sydney Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre and Queensland Performing Arts Centre. Robert Helpmann is among Australia's best known ballet dancers."
Arts in Australia,"Other forms of dance
Bush dance has developed in Australia as a form of traditional dance, drawing from English, Irish, Scottish and other European dance. Favourite dances in the community include such as the Irish Céilidh ""Pride of Erin"" and the quadrille ""The Lancers"". Locally originated dances include the ""Waves of Bondi"", the Melbourne Shuffle and New Vogue.
Many immigrant communities continue their own dance traditions on a professional or amateur basis. Traditional dances from a large number of ethnic backgrounds are danced in Australia, helped by the presence of enthusiastic immigrants and their Australian-born families. It is quite common to see dances from the Baltic region, as well as Scottish, Irish, Indian, Indonesian or African dance being taught at community centres and dance schools in Australia.
Baz Luhrmann's popular 1992 film Strictly Ballroom, starring Paul Mercurio contributed to an increased interest in dance competition in Australia, and a number of popular dance shows including So You Think You Can Dance have featured on television in recent years."
Arts in Australia,"Music
Indigenous music
Aboriginal song is an integral part of Aboriginal culture. The most famous feature of their music is the didgeridoo. This wooden instrument, used amongst the Aboriginal tribes of northern Australia, makes a distinctive droning sound and its use has been adopted by a wide variety of non-Aboriginal performers.
Aboriginal musicians have turned their hand to Western popular musical forms, often to considerable commercial success. Pioneers included Lionel Rose, and Jimmy Little, while notable contemporary examples include Archie Roach, the Warumpi Band, NoKTuRNL and Yothu Yindi. Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu (formerly of Yothu Yindi) has attained international success singing contemporary music in English and in the language of the Yolngu. Christine Anu is a successful Torres Strait Islander singer.
Australian country music has been popular among indigenous communities, with performers including Troy Cassar-Daley rising to national prominence.
Amongst young Australian aborigines, African-American and Aboriginal hip hop music and clothing is popular. Aboriginal boxing champion and former professional rugby league footballer Anthony Mundine identified US rapper Tupac Shakur as a personal inspiration, after Mundine's release of his 2007 single, Platinum Ryder.
The Deadlys are an annual celebration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander achievement in music, sport, entertainment and community."
Arts in Australia,"Folk music and national songs
The early Anglo-Celtic immigrants of the 18th and 19th centuries introduced folk ballad traditions which were adapted to Australian themes: ""Bound for Botany Bay"" tells of the voyage of British convicts to Sydney, ""The Wild Colonial Boy"" evokes the spirit of the bushrangers, and ""Click Go the Shears"" speaks of the life of Australian shearers. The lyrics of Australia's best-known folk song, ""Waltzing Matilda"", were written by the bush poet Banjo Paterson in 1895. Adopted by Australian soldiers during World War I, this song remains popular and is often sung at sporting events, including the closure of the Sydney Olympics in 2000, by Australian country music singer Slim Dusty.
Other well-known singers of Australian folk music include Rolf Harris (who wrote ""Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport""), John Williamson, and Eric Bogle whose 1972 song ""And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda"" is a sorrowful lament to the Gallipoli Campaign. Bush dance is a traditional style of dance from Australia with strong Celtic roots, and influenced country music. It is generally accompanied by such instruments as the fiddle, accordion, concertina and percussion instruments. A well-known Bush band is The Bushwackers.
The national anthem of Australia is ""Advance Australia Fair"":"
Arts in Australia,"Unofficial pop music anthems of Australia include Peter Allen's ""I Still Call Australia Home"" and Men at Work's ""Down Under""."
Arts in Australia,"Classical music
The earliest Western musical influences in Australia can be traced back to two distinct sources: the first free settlers who brought with them the European classical music tradition, and the large body of convicts and sailors, who brought the traditional folk music of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.  The practicalities of building a colony mean that there is very little music extant from this early period although there are samples of music originating from Hobart and Sydney that date back to the early 19th century."
Arts in Australia,"Nellie Melba (1861–1931) travelled to Europe in 1886 to commence her international career as an opera singer. She became among the best known Australians of the period and participated in early gramophone recording and radio broadcasting.
The establishment of choral societies (c. 1850) and symphony orchestras (c. 1890) led to increased compositional activity, although many Australian classical composers attempted to work entirely within European models. A lot of works leading up to the first part of the 20th century were heavily influenced by the folk music of other countries (Percy Grainger's Country Gardens of 1918 being a good example of this) and a very conservative British orchestral tradition.
In the war and post-war eras, as pressure built to assert a national identity in the face of the looming superpower of the United States and the ""motherland"" Britain, composers looked to their surroundings for inspiration. John Antill and Peter Sculthorpe began to incorporate elements of Aboriginal music, and Richard Meale drew influence from south-east Asia (notably using the harmonic properties of the Balinese Gamelan, as had Percy Grainger in an earlier generation).
By the beginning of the 1960s, Australian classical music erupted with influences, with composers incorporating disparate elements into their work, ranging from Aboriginal and south-east Asian music and instruments, to American jazz and blues, to the belated discovery of European atonality and the avant-garde. Composers like Don Banks, Don Kay, Malcolm Williamson and Colin Brumby epitomise this period. In recent times composers including Liza Lim, Carl Vine, Georges Lentz, Matthew Hindson, Yitzhak Yedid, Nigel Westlake, Ross Edwards, Graeme Koehne, Elena Kats-Chernin, Richard Mills,  Stuart Greenbaum and Brett Dean have embodied the pinnacle of established Australian composers.
Well-known Australian classical performers include: sopranos Dame Joan Sutherland, Dame Joan Hammond, Joan Carden, Yvonne Kenny, Sara Macliver and Emma Matthews; pianists Roger Woodward, Eileen Joyce, Michael Kieran Harvey, Geoffrey Tozer, Geoffrey Douglas Madge, Leslie Howard and Ian Munro; guitarists John Williams and Slava Grigoryan; horn player Barry Tuckwell; oboist Diana Doherty; violinists Richard Tognetti and Elizabeth Wallfisch; cellists John Addison and David Pereira; organist Christopher Wrench; orchestras like the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, the Australian Chamber Orchestra and the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra; and conductors Sir Bernard Heinze, Sir Charles Mackerras, Richard Bonynge, Simone Young and Geoffrey Simon. Indigenous performers like didgeridoo player William Barton and immigrant musicians like Egyptian-born oud virtuoso Joseph Tawadros have stimulated interest in their own music traditions and have also collaborated with other musicians and ensembles both in Australia and internationally."
Arts in Australia,"Pop and rock
Australia has produced a large variety of popular music from the internationally renowned work of the Bee Gees, AC/DC, INXS, Nick Cave, Cody Simpson or Kylie Minogue to the popular local content of John Farnham or Paul Kelly.
Among the brightest stars of early Australian rock and roll was Johnny O'Keefe, who formed a band in 1956; his hit Wild One made him the first Australian rock'n'roller to reach the national charts. While US and British content dominated airwaves and record sales into the 1960s, local successes began to emerge – notably The Easybeats and the folk-pop group The Seekers had significant local success and some international recognition, while the bands the Bee Gees and AC/DC had their first hits in Australia before going on to international success.
The arrival of the 1961 underground movement into the mainstream in the early 1970s changed Australian music permanently. Skyhooks were far from the first people to write songs in Australia by Australians about Australia, but they were the first ones to make good money doing it. The two best-selling Australian albums made up to that time put Australian music on the map. Within a few years, the novelty had worn off and it became commonplace to hear distinctively Australian lyrics and sounds side-by-side with imports.
During the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s Australian performers continued to do well on the local and international music scenes, for example Cold Chisel, INXS, Men at Work and Kylie Minogue, Natalie Imbruglia, Savage Garden and Silverchair. In the early 21st century, bands such as Jet, Wolfmother, Eskimo Joe, Grinspoon, The Vines, The Living End, Pendulum, Delta Goodrem and others were enjoying success internationally.
Domestically, John Farnham has remained one of Australia's best-known performers, with a career spanning over 40 years. Singer-songwriter Paul Kelly whose music style straddles folk, rock, and country has been described as the poet laureate of Australian music.
The national expansion of ABC youth radio station Triple J during the 1990s has increased the profile and availability of home-grown talent to listeners nationwide. Since the mid-1990s a string of successful alternative Australian acts have emerged; artists to achieve both underground (critical) and mainstream (commercial) success include You Am I, Grinspoon, Powderfinger and Jet."
Arts in Australia,"Country music
Australia has a long tradition of country music, which has developed a style quite distinct from its US counterpart, influenced by Celtic folk ballads and the traditions of Australian bush balladeers like Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson. Pioneers of popular country music in Australia included Tex Morton in the 1930s and Smoky Dawson from the 1940s onward."
Arts in Australia,"Slim Dusty (1927–2003) was known as the King of Australian Country Music. His successful career spanned almost six decades and his 1957 hit ""A Pub With No Beer"" was the biggest-selling record by an Australian to that time, the first Australian single to go gold, and the first and only 78 rpm record to be awarded a gold disc. Dusty recorded and released his one-hundredth album in the year 2000 and was given the honour of singing Waltzing Matilda in the closing ceremony of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. Dusty's wife Joy McKean penned several of his most popular songs.
Other popular performers of Australian country music include: John Williamson (who wrote the iconic song ""True Blue""), Lee Kernaghan, Kasey Chambers and Sara Storer. In the United States, Australian country music stars including Olivia Newton-John and Keith Urban have attained great success.
Country music has also been a particularly popular form of musical expression among the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Troy Cassar-Daley is among Australia's successful indigenous performers.
The Tamworth Country Music Festival is an annual country music festival held in Tamworth, New South Wales. It celebrates the culture and heritage of Australian country music. During the festival the Country Music Association of Australia holds the Country Music Awards of Australia ceremony awarding the Golden Guitar trophies."
Arts in Australia,"Theatre
The ceremonial dances of indigenous Australians which recount the stories of the Dreamtime, comprise theatrical aspects and have been performed since time immemorial during the 40–60,000-year Aboriginal occupation of Australia. European traditions came to Australia with the First Fleet in 1788, with the first production being performed in 1789 by convicts. Two centuries later, the extraordinary circumstances of the foundations of Australian theatre were recounted in Our Country's Good by Timberlake Wertenbaker: the participants were prisoners watched by sadistic guards and the leading lady was under threat of the death penalty."
Arts in Australia,"The Theatre Royal, Hobart, opened in 1837 and it remains the oldest theatre in Australia. The Australian gold rushes beginning in the 1850s provided funds for the construction of grand theatres in the Victorian style. A theatre was built on the present site of Melbourne's Princess Theatre in 1854. The present building now hosts major international productions as well as live performance events such as the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.
The Melbourne Athenaeum was built during this period and later became Australia's first cinema, screening The Story of the Kelly Gang, the world's first feature film in 1906. Mark Twain, Nellie Melba, Laurence Olivier and Barry Humphries have all performed on this historic stage. The Queen's Theatre, Adelaide opened with Shakespeare in 1841 and is today the oldest theatre on the mainland.
After Federation in 1901, theatre productions evidenced the new sense of national identity. On Our Selection (1912) by Steele Rudd, told of the adventures of a pioneer farming family and became immensely popular. Sydney's grand Capitol Theatre opened in 1928 and after restoration remains one of the nation's finest auditoriums.
In 1955, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll by Ray Lawler portrayed resolutely Australian characters and went on to international acclaim. That same year, young Melbourne artist Barry Humphries performed as Edna Everage for the first time at Melbourne University's Union Theatre. Humphries left for London in his early 20s and enjoyed success on stage, including in Lionel Bart's musical, Oliver!. His satirical stage creations – notably Dame Edna and later Les Patterson –– became Australian cultural icons. Humphries also achieved success in the US with tours on Broadway and television appearances and has been honoured in Australia and Britain.
The National Institute of Dramatic Art was created in Sydney in 1958. This institute has since produced a list of famous alumni including Cate Blanchett, Mel Gibson and Baz Luhrmann.
Construction of the Adelaide Festival Centre began in 1970 and South Australia's Sir Robert Helpmann became director of the Adelaide Festival of Arts. The new wave of Australian theatre debuted in the 1970s. The Belvoir St Theatre presented works by Nick Enright and David Williamson. In 1973, the Sydney Opera House, which had been based on a design by Jørn Utzon, was officially opened. Opera Australia made its home in the building and its reputation was enhanced by the presence of the diva Joan Sutherland.
The Sydney Theatre Company was founded 1978 becoming one of Australia's foremost theatre companies. The Bell Shakespeare Company was created in 1990.  A period of success for Australian musical theatre came in the 1990s with the debut of musical biographies of Australian music singers Peter Allen (The Boy From Oz in 1998) and Johnny O'Keefe (Shout! The Legend of The Wild One).
In The One Day of the Year, Alan Seymour studied the paradoxical nature of the ANZAC Day commemoration by Australians of the defeat of the Battle of Gallipoli. Ngapartji Ngapartji, by Scott Rankin and Trevor Jamieson, recounts the story of the effects on the Pitjantjatjara people of nuclear testing in the Western Desert during the Cold War. It is an example of the contemporary fusion of traditions of drama in Australia with Pitjantjatjara actors being supported by a multicultural cast of Greek, Afghan, Japanese and New Zealand heritage."
Arts in Australia,"Professional wrestling
See also
Architecture of Australia
Arts South Australia
Australian feminist art timeline
Create NSW
Performing arts education in Australia
Performing arts of Australia
South Australian Living Artists Festival"
Arts in Australia,"References
External links
ARTS.org.au – The Australian Arts Community – ""An online resource for artists and arts organisations Australia wide.""
Australian Aboriginal Art Museum ""La grange"", Môtiers/NE, Switzerland
Australia Council for the Arts
Culture and Recreation Portal Archived 19 August 2006 at the Wayback Machine
Australian Art
ArtsHub – Australian Arts Networking and Jobs Directory"
Geology of Australia,"The geology of Australia includes virtually all known rock types, spanning a geological time period of over 3.8 billion years, including some of the oldest rocks on earth. Australia is a continent situated on the Indo-Australian Plate."
Geology of Australia,"Components
Australia's geology can be divided into several main sections: the Archaean cratonic shields, Proterozoic fold belts and sedimentary basins, Phanerozoic sedimentary basins, and Phanerozoic metamorphic and igneous rocks.
Australia as a separate continent began to form after the breakup of Gondwana in the Permian, with the separation of the continental landmass from the African continent and Indian subcontinent. Australia rifted from Antarctica in the Cretaceous.
The current Australian continental mass is composed of a thick subcontinental lithosphere, over 200 kilometres (120 mi) thick in the western two-thirds and 100 kilometres (62 mi) thick in the younger eastern third. The Australian continental crust, excluding the thinned margins, has an average thickness of 38 kilometres (24 mi), with a range in thickness from 24 to 59 kilometres (15 to 37 mi).
The continental crust is composed primarily of Archaean, Proterozoic and some Palaeozoic granites and gneisses. A thin veneer of mainly Phanerozoic sedimentary basins cover much of the Australian landmass (these are up to 7 kilometres or 4.3 miles thick).
These in turn are currently undergoing erosion by a combination of aeolian and fluvial processes, forming extensive sand dune systems, deep and prolonged development of laterite and saprolite profiles, and development of playa lakes, salt lakes and ephemeral drainage."
Geology of Australia,"Blocks
The main continental blocks of the Australian continent are;"
Geology of Australia,"The Yilgarn Craton, of Archaean age
The Pilbara Craton of Archaean to Proterozoic age
The Gawler Craton and Willyama Block, of Archaean to Proterozoic age.
These are in turn flanked by several Proterozoic orogenic belts and sedimentary basins, notably the"
Geology of Australia,"Musgrave Block of granulite gneiss and igneous rocks
The Arunta Block of amphibolite grade metamorphic rocks and granites
The Gascoyne Complex, Glengarry Basin, and Bangemall Basin sandwiched between the Yilgarn and Arunta Blocks"
Geology of Australia,"Geologic history
The geologic history of the Australian continental mass is extremely prolonged and involved, continuing from the Archaean to the recent. In a gross pattern, continental Australia grew from west to east, with Archean rocks mostly in the west, Proterozoic rocks in the centre, and Phanerozoic rocks in the east. Recent geologic events are confined to intraplate earthquakes, as the continent of Australia sits distant from the plate boundary.
The Australian continent evolved in five broad but distinct time periods, namely: 3800–2100 Ma, 2100–1300 Ma, 1300–600 Ma, 600–160 Ma and 160 Ma to the present. The first period saw the growth of nuclei about which cratonic elements grew, whereas the latter four periods involved the amalgamation and dispersal of Nuna, Rodinia and Pangea, respectively."
Geology of Australia,"Tectonic setting
The Australian landmass has been part of all major supercontinents, but its association with Gondwana is especially notable as important correlations have been made geologically with the African continental mass and Antarctica.
Australia separated from Antarctica over a prolonged period beginning in the Permian and continuing through to the Cretaceous (84 Ma). "
Geology of Australia,"Continental Australia is unique among the continents in that the measured stress field is not parallel to the present-day north-northeast directed plate motion. Most of the stress state in continental Australia is controlled by compression originating from the three main collision boundaries located in New Zealand, Indonesia and New Guinea, and the Himalaya (transmitted through the Indian and Capricorn plates). South of latitude −30°, the stress trajectories are oriented east–west to northwest–southeast. North of this latitude, the stress trajectories are closer to the present day plate motion, being oriented east-northeast–west-southwest to northeast–southwest. Notably, the main stress trajectories diverge most markedly from one another in north–central New South Wales (east-southeast to north-northeast), although the area is not known historically for earthquake activity. Young mountain building (< 5 Ma) in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia is driven from plate convergence at the boundary in New Zealand.
Australia is currently moving toward Eurasia at the rate of 6–7 centimetres a year."
Geology of Australia,"Archaean
There are three main cratonic shields of recognised Archaean age within the Australian landmass: The Yilgarn, the Pilbara and the Gawler cratons. Several other Archaean-Proterozoic orogenic belts exist, usually sandwiched around the edges of these major cratonic shields.
The history of the Archaean cratons is extremely complex and protracted. The cratons appear to have been assembled to form the greater Australian landmass in the late Archaean to Mesoproterozoic, ~2400 Ma to 1,600 Ma.
Chiefly the Glenburgh Orogeny is partly responsible for the assembly of the West Australian landmass by joining the Yilgarn and Pilbara cratons. The Glenburgh Orogeny is exposed in the rocks of the Glenburgh Terrane, the Yarlarweelor Gneiss Complex, and possibly the Glengarry, Yerrida and Padbury basins. Unknown Proterozoic orogenic belts, possibly similar to the Albany Complex in southern Western Australia and the Musgrave Block, represent the Proterozoic link between the Yilgarn and Gawler cratons, covered by the Proterozoic-Palaeozoic Officer and Amadeus basins.
See also: "
Geology of Australia,Narryer Gneiss Terrane
Geology of Australia,"Palaeoproterozoic
Western Australian Events
The assembly of the Archaean Yilgarn and Pilbara cratons of Australia was initiated at ~2200 Ma during the first phases of the Glenburgh orogen.
The last stages of the 2770–2300 Ma Hamersley Basin on the southern margin of the Pilbara Craton are Palaeoproterozoic and record the last stable submarine-fluviatile environments between the two cratons prior to the rifting, contraction and assembly of the intracratonic ~1800 Ma Ashburton and Blair basins, the 1600–1070 Ma Edmund and Collier basins, the 1840–1620 Ma northern Gascoyne Complex, the 2000–1780 Ma Glenburgh Terrane in the southern Gascoyne Complex and the Errabiddy Shear Zone at the northwestern margin of the Yilgarn Craton.
Between approximately 2000–1800 Ma, on the northern margin of the Yilgarn Craton, the c. 2000 Ma Narracoota Volcanics of the Bryah Basin formed in a transverse back-arc rift sag basin during collision. Culmination of the cratonic collision resulted in the foreland sedimentary Padbury Basin. To the east the Yerrida and Eerarheedy Basins were passive margins along the Yilgarn's northern margin.
The c. 1830 Ma Capricorn Orogeny in this section of the Pilbara-Yilgarn boundary resulted in deformation of the Bryah-Padbury Basin and the western fringe of the Yerrida Basin, along with flood basalts. The Yapungku Orogeny (~1790 Ma) formed the Stanley Fold Belt on the northern margin of the Eerarheedy Basin, via assembly of the Archaean-Proterozoic fold belts of Northern Australia."
Geology of Australia,"East Australian Events
The Palaeoproterozoic in southeastern Australia is represented by the polydeformed high-grade gneiss terranes of the Willyama Supergroup, Olary Block and Broken Hill Block, in South Australia and New South Wales. The Palaeoproterozoic in the north of Australia is represented mostly by the Mount Isa Block and complex fold-thrust belts.
These rocks, aside from suffering intense deformation, record a period of widespread platform cover sedimentation, ensialic rift-sag sedimentation including widespread dolomite platform cover, and extensive phosphorite deposition in the deeper sea beds."
Geology of Australia,"Mesoproterozoic
The oldest rocks in Tasmania formed in the Mesoproterozoic on King Island and in the Tyennan Block.
Late Mesoproterozoic igneous events include: "
Geology of Australia,"the Giles Complex mafic-ultramafic intrusions in the Musgrave Block at ~1080 Ma
widespread sills in the Bangemall Basin and the Glenayle area at ~1080 Ma
The Warukurna Large Igneous Province of ~1080 Ma"
Geology of Australia,"Neoproterozoic
Widespread deposition occurred in the Centralian Superbasin and Adelaide Geosyncline (Adelaide Rift Complex) during the Neoproterozoic. The Petermann Orogeny caused extensive uplift, mountain building and basin fragmentation in central Australia at the close of the Neoproterozoic."
Geology of Australia,"Paleozoic
Cambrian
The Stavely Zone in Victoria is a boninite to MORB basalt terrane considered to have been connected with the boninites the Mount Read Volcanics of Northern Tasmania. In New South Wales, extensive deepwater sedimentation formed the Adaminaby Beds in Victoria and New South Wales. The Lachlan Fold Belt ophiolite sequences are considered to be of Cambrian age, and are obducted during the Lachlan Orogen.
The Petermann Orogeny in Central Australia, which started at the end of the Neoproterozoic, continued into the Cambrian, shedding a thick intracontinental sequence of fluvial sediments into the central Australian landmass. Marginal platforms and passive margin basins existed in South Australia –  – formed in the foreland of the Delamerian Orogeny. Western Australian passive margin basins and platform cover begin at this stage.
The extensive Antrim Plateau flood basalts, covering in excess of 12,000 square kilometres, erupt in the Cambrian of Western Australia, providing a useful chronostratigraphic marker. "
Geology of Australia,"Stansbury basin
Gascoyne Sub-basin – begins Cambrian, through to Tertiary
Bonaparte Gulf Basin"
Geology of Australia,"Ordovician
Ordovician geological events in Australia involved Alpinotype orogeny in the Lachlan Fold Belt, resulting in the great serpentinite belts of western New South Wales, and accretion of deepwater molasse and flysch exemplified by the slate belts of Victoria and eastern New South Wales.
Victoria – 490–440 Ma
The late Cambrian to early Ordovician saw deepwater sedimentation of the St Arnaud and Castlemaine Group turbidites, which are now emplaced in the Stawell and Bendigo Zones. The middle Ordovician saw the deposition of the Sunbury Group in the Melbourne Zone, Bendoc Group and formation of the Molong Arc, a calc-alkaline volcanic arc which is related to the Kiandra Group turbidites.
Ordovician orogenies include the Lachlan Orogeny."
Geology of Australia,"Silurian
During the Silurian Period most of the Australian continent in the west and centre was dry land.  However, from Geraldton north to Exmouth Gulf along the far Western Australian coast a fluvial sediment basin existed.  Near Kalbarri on the Murchison River the footprints of a giant water scorpion were found on land, the first animal to walk on the Australian continent.  A gulf linked to the sea existed under what is now the Great Sandy Desert.  Meanwhile, in the east there were volcanic arcs in New England, also west of Townsville and Cairns, and in NSW and Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory.  Deep water sediments formed in the Cowra, Tumut and Hillend Troughs.  The Yass Molong rise was a row of volcanoes.  Granite intrusions formed in New South Wales and Victoria from 435 to 425 Mya, with the Bega batholith as young as 400 Mya.  In NSW granites the distinction between I-type and S-type granites was discovered."
Geology of Australia,"Devonian
During the Devonian Period conditions were warm in Australia.  There was a large bay in the Great Sandy Desert with reefs.  The Calliope Arc went from the north of Rockhampton south to Grafton.  Most of the centre and west of Australia was land mass.  There were volcanic mountains off the current east coast supplying sediment into a basin on parts of the east.  The basin contained limestone and river deposited sand.  Andesite and Rhyolite volcanoes were found in central NSW, the Snowy Mountains, Eden, New England and near Clermont, Queensland.  Baragwanathia longifolia was the first Australian land plant appearing at this time.
The Tabberabberan Orogeny compressed the eastern seaboard in an east–west direction, with Tasmania, Victoria and southern New South Wales folded 385 – 380 Mya.  Northern NSW and Queensland was compressed 377 to 352 Mya.  A major river drained the continental interior and passed eastwards at Parkes.  The Bungle Bungle Range sandstone was formed in Western Australia from river sands.  More Granite was intruded in the Devonian.
The Connors Arc and Baldwin arc formed behind Mackay and Western New England."
Geology of Australia,"Carboniferous
The Carboniferous Period saw the Eastern Highlands of Australia form as a result of its collision with what are now parts of South America (e.g. the Sierra de Cordoba) and New Zealand.
At the time they were formed they are believed to have been as high as any mountains on the planet today, but they have been almost completely eroded in the 280 million years since.
Another notable feature of Carboniferous Australia was a major ice age which left over half of the continent glaciated. Evidence for the cold conditions can be seen not only in glacial features dating from this period but also in fossil Gelisols from as far north as the Hunter River basin."
Geology of Australia,"Mesozoic
Permo-Triassic
The Permian to Triassic in Australia is dominated by subduction zones on the eastern margin of the landmass, part of the Hunter-Bowen Orogeny. This was a major arc-accretion, subduction and back-arc sedimentary basin forming event which persisted episodically from approximately late Carboniferous in its initial stages, through the Permian and terminated in the Middle Triassic at around 229Ma to 225Ma.
In Western and Central Australia the then-extensive central Australian mountain ranges such as the Petermann Ranges were eroded by the Permian glacial event, resulting in thick marine to fluvial glacial tillite and fossiliferous limestone deposits and extensive platform cover. Rifting of Australia from India and Africa began in the Permian, resulting in the production of a rift basin and half-grabens of the basal portions of the long-lived Perth Basin. Petroleum was formed in the Swan Coastal Plain and Pilbara during this rifting, presumably in a rift valley lake where the bottom was deoxygenated (akin to Africa's Lake Tanganyika today)
See also:"
Geology of Australia,"Perth Basin
Bowen Basin
Gunnedah basin
Sydney basin and Geography of Sydney
Ipswich basin/Clarence Moreton Basin"
Geology of Australia,"Jurassic
In the west of Australia the Jurassic was a tropical savannah to jungle environment, shown by advanced tropical weathering preserved in the regolith of the Yilgarn craton which is still preserved today.
Australia began rifting away from Antarctica in the Jurassic, which formed the Gippsland, Bass and Otway Basins in Victoria and the offshore shelf basins of South Australia and Western Australia, all of which host significant oil and gas deposits. The Prospect dolerite intrusion in the Sydney Basin was a result of tense continental crust breaking all the way down to the upper mantle during development of the rift divergence zone that occurred before the breakup of the Australian and Antarctic continents in the Eocene epoch. 
Jurassic coal-bearing basins were formed in north central Queensland, with significant marine platform cover extending across most of central Australia.
Continued passive-margin subsidence and marine transgressions in the Perth Basin of Western Australia continued, with the Jurassic Cattamarra Coal Measures a notable fluvial terrigenous formation of the Jurassic.
See also"
Geology of Australia,"Surat Basin
Perth Basin"
Geology of Australia,"Cretaceous
The initial rifting of Australia and Antarctica in the Jurassic continued through the Cretaceous, with offshore development of a mid ocean ridge seafloor spreading centre. Tasmania was rifted off during this stage.
Cretaceous volcanism in the offshore of Queensland was related to a minor episode of arc formation, typified by the Whitsunday Islands, followed by development of offshore coral platforms, passive margin basins and far-field volcanism throughout the quiet Hunter-Bowen orogenic belt.
Cretaceous sedimentation continued in the Surat Basin. Some small Cretaceous volcanism was present at the edges of basement highs in the Great Artesian Basin, resulting in some sparse volcanic plugs today.
Cretaceous sedimentation continued in the Perth Basin."
Geology of Australia,"Palaeocene to Recent
Tertiary
The Tertiary saw the majority of Australian tectonism cease. Sparse examples of intraplate volcanism exist, for instance the Glasshouse Mountains in Queensland, which are Tertiary examples of a chain of small volcanic plugs which decrease in age to the south, where they result in ~10,000-year-old maar volcanoes and basalts of the Newer Volcanics in South Australia and Victoria."
Geology of Australia,"See also
See also – by state and territory
Geology of the Australian Capital Territory
Geology of New South Wales
Geology of Tasmania
Geology of South Australia
Geology of Victoria
Geology of Queensland
Category:Geology of Western Australia"
Geology of Australia,"See also – by feature
Adelaide Geosyncline
Dry Lake"
Geology of Australia,"See also – by industry
Mining in Australia"
Geology of Australia,"Notes
References
Pirajno, F., Occhipinti, S. A. and Swager, C. P., 1998. Geology and tectonic evolution of the Palaeoproterozoic Bryah, Padbury and Yerrida basins, Western Australia: implications for the history of the south-central Capricorn orogen. Precambrian Research, 90: 119–140.
AUSTRALIA’S PLATE SETTING"
Geology of Australia,"Braun J Dooley J Goleby B van der Hilst R. & Klootwijk C (Eds). 1998. Structure and Evolution of the Australian Plate. American Geophysical Union, Geodynamics Series 26:
DeMetts et al. 2010. Geologically current plate motions. Geophysical Journal International 181: 1–80.
Graham I. (Ed), 2008. A Continent on the Move: New Zealand Geoscience into the 21st Century. 388 p.
Quigley MC. et al. 2010. Late Cenozoic tectonic geomorphology of Australia. Geological Society of London Special Publication 346: 243–265.
Royer J-Y & Gordon RG. 1997. The motion and boundary between the Capricorn and Australian Plates. Science 277: 1268–1274.
Tregoning P. 2003. Is the Australian Plate deforming? A space geodetic perspective. Geological Society of Australia Special Publication 22: 41–48.
GEOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK OF AUSTRALIA"
Geology of Australia,"Johnson DP. 2009. The Geology of Australia. Second edition. Cambridge University Press. 360p
Geoscience Australia. 2001. Palaeogeographic atlas of Australia. https://web.archive.org/web/20110602133645/http://www.ga.gov.au/meta/ANZCW0703003727.html
Shaw RD et al. 1995. Australian crustal elements (1:5,000,000 scale map) based on the distribution of geophysical domains (v 1.0), Australian Geological Survey Organisation, Canberra.
MAPPING AUSTRALIA	"
Geology of Australia,"Aitken ARA. 2010. Moho geometry gravity inversion experiment (MoGGIE): A refined model of the Australian Moho, and its tectonic and isostatic implications. Earth and Planetary Science Letters 297: 71–83.
Birch WD. 2003. Geology of Victoria. Geological Society of Australia Special Publication 23.
Burrett CF & Martin EL. 1989. Geology and mineral resources of Tasmania. Geological Society of Australia Special Publication 15.
Day RW et al. 1983. Queensland geology: a companion volume to the 1:2,500,000 scale geological map (1975). Geological Survey of Queensland Publication 383.
Drexel JF et al. 1993–1995. The geology of South Australia. Geological Survey of South Australia, Bulletin 54 (2 v.)
Earth Science History Group. 2010. Thematic Issue: Snapshots of the geological program covering the whole of Australia. Geological Society of Australia ESHG Newsletter 41: 43 p.
Finlayson DM. 2008. A geological guide to Canberra Region and Namadgi National Park. Geological Society of Australia (ACT Division), 139 p.
Geological Survey of Western Australia, 1990. Geology and Mineral Resources of Western Australia. Memoir 3.
McKenzie et al. (ed) 2004. Australian Soils and Landscapes: an illustrated compendium. CSIRO Publishing: 395 p.
National Library of Australia. 2007. Australia in Maps: great maps in Australia's history from the National Library's collection: 148 p.
Scheibner E. 1996–1998. Geology of New South Wales – synthesis. Geological Survey of New South Wales Memoir geology: 13 (2 v.)
AUSTRALIAN LITHOSPHERE	"
Geology of Australia,"Clitheroe G. et al. 2000. The crustal thickness of Australia, Journal Geophysical Research 105: 13,697–13,713.
Hillis RR & Muller RD. (eds) 2003. Evolution and dynamics of the Australian Plate. Geological Society of Australia Special Publication 22: 432 p.
AUSTRALIA THROUGH TIME: TECTONIC EVOLUTION	"
Geology of Australia,"Betts PG & Giles D. 2006. The 1800–1100 Ma tectonic evolution of Australia. Precambrian Research 144: 92–125.
Bishop P & Pillans B. (eds) 2010. Australian Landscapes. Geological Society of London Special Publication 346.
Cawood PA. 2005. Terra Australis Orogen: Rodinia breakup and development of the Pacific and Iapetus margins of Gondwana during the Neoproterozoic and Paleozoic. Earth-Science Reviews 69: 249–279.
Cawood PA & Korsch RJ. (eds) 2008. Assembling Australia: Proterozoic building of a continent. Precambrian Research 166: 1–396.
Champion DC et al. 2009. Geodynamic synthesis of the Phanerozoic of eastern Australia and implications for metallogeny. Geoscience Australia Record 2009/18.
Gray DR & Foster DA. 2004. Tectonic review of the Lachlan Orogen: historical review, data synthesis and modern perspectives. Australian Journal of Earth Sciences 51: 773–817.
Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. 2007. Great Barrier Reef Climate Change Action Plan 2007–2011. http://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/corp_site/key_issues/climate_change/management_responses
Hawkesworth CJ et al. 2010. The generation and evolution of the continental crust. Journal of the Geological Society 167: 229–248.
Korsch RJ. et al. 2011. Australian island arcs through time: Geodynamic implications for the Archean and Proterozoic. Gondwana Research 19: 716–734.
Moss PT & Kershaw AP. 2000. The last glacial cycle from the humid tropics of northeastern Australia: comparison of a terrestrial and a marine record. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 155: 155–176.
Myers JS. et al. 1996. Tectonic evolution of Proterozoic Australia. Tectonics 15: 1431–1446.
Neumann NL & Fraser GL. 2007. Geochronological synthesis and time-space plots for Proterozoic Australia. Geoscience Australia Record 2007/06: 216 p.
van Ufford AQ & Cloos M. 2005. Cenozoic tectonics of New Guinea. AAPG Bulletin 89: 119–140.
Veevers JJ. (ed) 2000. Billion-Year Earth History of Australia and Neighbours in Gondwanaland. GEMOC Press, Sydney: 388 p.
Veevers JJ. 2006. Updated Gondwana (Permian–Cretaceous) earth history of Australia. Gondwana Research 9: 231–260
DEEP TIME"
Geology of Australia,"Australian Journal of Earth Sciences. 2008. Thematic Issue – Geochronology of Australia. Volume 55(6/7).
Laurie J. (ed) 2009. Geological Timewalk, Geoscience Australia, Canberra: 53 p."
Geology of Australia,"Further reading
Joseph Jukes (1850), A sketch of the physical structure of Australia: so far as it is at present known (1st ed.), Joseph Jukes, Wikidata Q19025678"
Geology of Australia,"External links
Geoscience Australia
Australian Stratigraphic Units Database
Map of Australian Mines and Mineral Deposits 1.3Mb PDF
Geology of Victoria, Vicmines
Neoproterozoic to Ordovician
Silurian
Devonian
Early Carboniferous
Late Carboniferous to Triassic
Late Jurassic to Recent
Geology of New South Wales, NSW DTI
Clarence-Moreton Basin – Geological Overview"
Australian Greens,"The Australian Greens (AG), commonly referred to simply as the Greens, are a confederation of green state and territory political parties in Australia. As of the 2022 federal election, the Greens are the third largest political party in Australia by vote and the fourth-largest by elected representation. The leader of the party is Adam Bandt, with Mehreen Faruqi serving as deputy leader. Larissa Waters currently holds the role of Senate leader.
The ACT Greens are currently in a coalition government with ACT Labor in the Australian Capital Territory, and have been consecutively since 2008. This represents the only jurisdiction in Australia where the Greens have a power-sharing agreement.
The party was formed in 1992 as a confederation of eight state and territorial parties. In their early years, the party was largely built around the personality of well-known Tasmanian politician Bob Brown, before expanding its representation substantially in the early part of the 21st century. The party cites four core values as its ideology, namely ecological sustainability, social justice, grassroots democracy, and peace and non-violence. The party's origins can be traced to early environmental movement in Australia, the Franklin Dam controversy, the Green bans, and the nuclear disarmament movement. The party began with the United Tasmania Group, one of the first green parties in the world.
Following the 2022 Australian federal election, the Australian Greens had twelve senators and four members in the Australian House of Representatives, and as of 2020 had over 15,000 party members."
Australian Greens,"History
Formation
The origins of the Australian Greens can be traced to the early environmental movement in Australia and the formation of the United Tasmania Group, one of the first green parties in the world, but also the nuclear disarmament movement in Western Australia and sections of the industrial left in New South Wales who were inspired by the Builders Labourers Federation Green bans in Sydney. Co-ordination between environmentalist groups occurred in the 1980s with various significant protests. Key people involved in these campaigns included Bob Brown and Christine Milne, who went on to contest and win seats in the Parliament of Tasmania and eventually form the Tasmanian Greens. Both Brown and Milne subsequently became leaders of the federal party.
The formation of the federal party in 1992 brought together over a dozen green groups, from state and local organisations, some of which had existed for 20 years. Following the formation of the national party in 1992, regional emphasis variations remained within the Greens, with members of the ""industrial left"" remaining a presence in the New South Wales branch. Brown resigned from the Tasmanian Parliament in 1993, and in 1996 he was elected as a senator for Tasmania, the first elected as an Australian Greens candidate.
Initially, the most successful Greens group during this period was The Greens (WA), which was still a separate organisation from the Australian Greens at the time. Vallentine was succeeded by Christabel Chamarette in 1992, and she was joined by Dee Margetts in 1993. However, Chamarette was defeated in the 1996 federal election. Margetts lost her seat in the 1998 federal election, leaving Brown as the sole Australian Greens senator."
Australian Greens,"Bob Brown era 2001–2012
2001–2004
In the 2001 federal election, Brown was re-elected as a senator for Tasmania, and a second Greens senator, Kerry Nettle, was elected in New South Wales. The Greens opposed the Howard government's Pacific Solution of offshore processing for asylum seekers, and opposed the bipartisan offers of support to ANZUS and the Afghanistan War by the government and Beazley Opposition in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. The party described the Afghanistan commitment in particular as ""warmongering"". Brown and Nettle's performance in the Senate increased voter support for the party, as it showcased that the Greens were not deep ecologists nor a single-issue environmentalist organisation, thus granting approval from disaffected Labor voters."
Australian Greens,"2002 Cunningham by-election
On 19 October 2002, the Greens won a House of Representatives seat for the first time when Michael Organ won the Cunningham by-election. In the 2004 federal election, the Australian Greens fielded candidates in every House of Representatives seat in Australia. The Greens' primary vote rose by 2.3% to 7.2%. This won them two additional Senate seats, taken by Christine Milne in Tasmania and Rachel Siewert in Western Australia, bringing the total to four."
Australian Greens,"2004–2007
At the 2004 Federal Election, the Greens ran John Kaye as their lead Senate candidate but were unsuccessful due to unfavourable preference flows."
Australian Greens,"2007–2010
The Greens increased their national vote by 1.38 points to 9.04% at the 2007 federal election, with the election of South Australian senator Sarah Hanson-Young taking the number of Greens senators to five. Senators Bob Brown (Tas) and Kerry Nettle (NSW) were up for re-election, Brown was re-elected, but Nettle was unsuccessful, becoming the only Australian Greens senator to lose their seat despite increasing her vote from 2001.
In November 2008, Senator Christine Milne was elected deputy leader in a ballot contested against Senator Rachel Siewert.
In 2009, the Greens and the Liberal Party voted to defeat Labor's emission trading scheme legislation after failed negotiations for an emissions cut target."
Australian Greens,"2010–2012
The 2010 federal election marked a high point for the Greens electorally, with the party receiving its largest vote to date and sharing the balance of power. The Greens received a four percent swing to finish with 13 percent of the vote in the Senate. The Greens won a seat in each of the six states at the election, bringing the party to a total of nine senators from July 2011, holding the balance of power in the Senate. The new senators were Lee Rhiannon in New South Wales, Richard Di Natale in Victoria, Larissa Waters in Queensland, Rachel Siewert in Western Australia, Penny Wright in South Australia and Christine Milne in Tasmania. Incumbents Scott Ludlam in Western Australia, Sarah Hanson-Young in South Australia and Bob Brown in Tasmania were not due for re-election. The Greens also won their first House of Representatives seat at a general election, the seat of Melbourne with candidate Adam Bandt, who was a crossbencher in the first hung parliament since the 1940 federal election. Almost two weeks after the election, the Greens agreed to support a Gillard Labor minority government on confidence and supply votes. Labor was returned to government with the additional support of three independent crossbenchers.
Prior to the 2010 Federal Election, the Electrical Trades Union's Victorian branch donated $325,000 to the Greens' Victorian campaign – the largest political donation ever directed to the Party up to that time.
The Greens signed a formal agreement with the Australian Labor Party involving consultation in relation to policy and support in the House of Representatives in relation to confidence and supply and three of the independents declared their support for Labor on confidence and supply, allowing Gillard and Labor to remain in power with a 76–74 minority government.
On 24 February 2011, in a joint press conference of the ""Climate Change Committee"" – comprising the Government, Greens and two independent MPs – Prime Minister Gillard announced a plan to legislate for the introduction of a fixed price to be imposed on ""carbon pollution"" from 1 July 2012 The carbon price would be placed for three to five years before a full emissions trading scheme is implemented, under a blueprint agreed by a multi-party parliamentary committee. Key issues remained to be negotiated between the Government and the cross-benches, including compensation arrangements for households and businesses, the carbon price level, the emissions reduction target and whether or not to include fuel in the price.
In April 2012, Bob stepped down as leader of the Australian Greens, and retired from the Senate in June 2012."
Australian Greens,"Christine Milne era 2012–2015
Christine Milne led the Australian Greens through the remainder of the minority parliament, after being elected unopposed."
Australian Greens,"2013 Federal Election
At the 2013 federal election, the House of Representatives (lower house) primary vote was 8.7 percent (−3.1) with the Senate (upper house) primary vote at 8.7 percent (−4.5). Despite receiving a decline in votes, the Greens representation in the parliament increased. Adam Bandt retained his Melbourne seat with a primary vote of 42.6 percent (+7.0) and a two-candidate preferred vote of 55.3 percent (−0.6). The Greens won four Senate positions, increasing their Senate representation from nine to ten senators."
Australian Greens,"2014 Australian Senate Special Election in Western Australia
At the 2014 Australian Senate special election in Western Australia, the Greens won in excess of a quota with the primary vote increasing from 9.5 to 15.6 percent, re-electing Scott Ludlam."
Australian Greens,"2015
In December 2015, the Greens struck a deal with the Coalition government, passing a law requiring multinational private companies with a turnover over $200 million to disclose their tax arrangements. This law also made it mandatory for multinational companies with a global turnover of $1 billion or more to have to prepare ""general purpose"" financial statements, which disclose greater tax details than previously occurred in Australia. The following year the Coalition government and the Greens agreed on a permanent 15% tax rate for backpackers, in exchange for a $100 million funding boost to environmental stewardship not-for-profit Landcare.
Christine Milne stepped down from the leadership of the Australian Greens on 6 May 2015."
Australian Greens,"Richard Di Natale era 2015–2020
Di Natale was elected unopposed as parliamentary leader of the Greens party room on 6 May 2015 following the resignation of Christine Milne from the position.
At the 2016 federal election, the House of Representatives (lower house) primary vote increased to 10.23 percent (+1.58) but decreased in the Senate (upper house), with primary vote at 8.65 percent (−0.58). Adam Bandt was elected to a third term in his Melbourne seat with a primary vote of 43.75 percent (+1.13) and a two-candidate preferred vote of 68.48 percent (+13.21). Despite a campaign focus on winning additional seats in the lower house, The Greens failed to win any lower house contests.
The Greens also lost one Senate position in South Australia, decreasing their Senate representation from ten to nine senators, to a total of ten Green members in the Parliament of Australia. The result was seen as disappointing, and caused internal divisions to flare up, with former Federal Leader Bob Brown calling upon Senator Lee Rhiannon to resign, citing the ""need for renewal""."
Australian Greens,"2017–18 Australian parliamentary eligibility crisis
In 2017, Senators Scott Ludlam and Larissa Waters were forced to resign during 2017–18 Australian parliamentary eligibility crisis after it was found that Ludlam had dual Australian–New Zealand citizenship and Waters had dual citizenship with Canada. Subsequently, Adam Bandt and Rachel Siewert were named as temporary co-deputy leaders until the arrival of Ludlam and Waters' replacements in Canberra."
Australian Greens,"2019 election
At the 2019 federal election, the Australian Greens received a primary vote of 10.4% in the House of Representatives, with a federal swing of +0.2%. The party's highest vote was captured in the Australian Capital Territory (16.8%), followed by Victoria (11.9%), Western Australia (11.6%), Queensland (10.3%), Northern Territory (10.2%), Tasmania (10.1%), South Australia (9.6%) and New South Wales (8.7%). The party retained the federal electorate of Melbourne with Adam Bandt sitting at a 71.8% two-party preferred vote.
In the Senate, the Greens received favourable swings in South Australia (+5.03%), Queensland (+3.12%), the Australian Capital Territory (+1.61%), Western Australia (+1.48%), Tasmania (+1.41%) and New South Wales (+1.32%). Small swings against the Greens in the Senate were observed in only Victoria (-0.25%) and the Northern Territory (−0.54%). All six Greens senators up for re-election retained their seats, including Senators Mehreen Faruqi, Janet Rice, Larissa Waters, Sarah Hanson-Young, Jordon Steele-John and Nick McKim.
Three key seats were targeted by the Greens in Victoria, including Kooyong, Higgins and Macnamara. Prominent barrister Julian Burnside, who stood for Kooyong, came close to unseating treasurer and deputy Liberal leader Josh Frydenberg, falling short by 5.7% in the two-party preferred vote. Greens candidate Jason Ball, for the Division of Higgins, failed to enter the two-party preferred vote, despite optimism within the Greens and a diminishing Liberal vote. In Macnamara (formerly Melbourne Ports), a three-way contest emerged between the Liberals, Labor and Greens. Greens candidate Steph Hodgins-May had come within a few hundred votes in 2016 of taking the seat, however, redistributions in the electorate for the 2019 election were unfavourable for the Greens' vote, and the party's final vote sat at 24.2%.
On 3 February 2020, Di Natale resigned as leader of the Greens and announced his intention to resign from the Senate."
Australian Greens,"Adam Bandt era 2020–present
On 4 February, Adam Bandt was elected unopposed as parliamentary leader of the Australia Greens party room."
Australian Greens,"2022 election
The Greens' strategy for the 2022 federal election involved targeting nine key seats, including the previously Labor-held seats of Macnamara, Griffith, Richmond, Wills, and Canberra, and four previously Liberal-held seats of Kooyong, Brisbane, Ryan and Higgins. Bandt claimed that polling suggested a hung parliament was a likely outcome and the Greens would work with Labor to ""kick the Liberals out and make the next government go further and faster on climate action, and make billionaires and mining corporations pay their fair share."" Antony Green suggested that a redistribution in Victoria by the Australian Electoral Commission would likely increase the Greens' odds of winning the seat of Macnamara.
The party had its best ever result at the election, picking up three seats in inner Brisbane, Elizabeth Watson-Brown in the seat of Ryan, Stephen Bates in the seat of Brisbane, and Max Chandler-Mather in the seat of Griffith, to boost their representation in the House to four MPs, and won a Senate seat in every state to increase to 12 senators with new Senators Barbara Pocock, David Shoebridge and Penny Allman-Payne. This gave them the balance of power. Analysis of vote trends suggested the party succeeded in picking up former votes of both Labor and the Liberal Party. The party were unsuccessful in picking up the seat of Richmond with their high-profile candidate Mandy Nolan.
On 6 February 2023, Victorian Greens senator Lidia Thorpe announced that she would resign from the Greens to become an independent senator, over disagreements concerning the proposed Indigenous Voice to Parliament.
In mid-March 2024, the Greens announced they would introduce legislation seeking to break the dominance of the two supermarket giants Woolworths Group and Coles Group by forcing them to sell some of their operations. While the Albanese government did not support the bill, it found support from the centre-right National Party."
Australian Greens,"Ideology
The Australian Greens are part of the global ""green politics"" movement. Party Leader Adam Bandt describes The Greens as a social democratic party. The charter of the Australian Greens identifies four main pillars as the party's policy: ""social justice"", ""sustainability"", ""grassroots democracy"" and ""peace and non-violence""."
Australian Greens,"Policy positions
Environment and climate change
The party favours environmentalism, including expansion of recycling facilities; phasing out single-use plastics; conservation efforts; and addressing species extinction, habitat loss and deforestation in Australia.
The Greens support the achieving of 100% renewable energy by 2030 through the establishment of a Green New Deal, which entails investment in renewable energy technology and a revitalisation of Australian manufacturing. Manufacturing would be required to produce solar panels, wind turbines and green steel produced from hydrogen. The party supports the creation of a publicly owned renewable energy provider to boost renewable energy and lower household electricity prices. To support the transition to clean energy, the party calls for growth in lithium mining. The Greens have also proposed plans to boost jobs and apprenticeships in the construction of public housing units as further economic stimulus as well as to address rising homelessness in Australia."
Australian Greens,"Finance
The Greens oppose tax cuts that solely benefit the top bracket of income earners and lead to economic inequality. The Greens believe that all essential services need to be adequately funded to suit community needs; and argue for the re-establishment of a publicly owned bank. The party argues for a Corporate Super-Profits Tax on major corporations, the establishment of a wealth tax on billionaires, and an end to multi-national corporation's tax avoidance.
The party advocates a significant improvement of welfare policies. They propose solving housing shortages and homelessness through the creation of affordable social housing. The party also wants to introduce rent caps to limit growth of rental prices. Greens also propose increase in all income support payments to $88 a day, that would make them $1,232 per fortnight. To help students, the party wants to forgive all student debt. The Greens also advocate for free childcare as well as free public transport. Finally Greens propose to increase the minimum wage. 
Green politicians have campaigned on free university and technical and further education. The party opposes fee hikes for degrees and funding cuts for universities, and have called for increased funding for public schools. The party also supports the abolition of all student debt."
Australian Greens,"Health
The party supports universal health care through extending Medicare coverage into dental health care and mental health care. Furthermore, the party supports reproductive health rights and voluntary euthanasia. The Greens support drug law reform, including the legalisation of cannabis; treating drug use as a health issue rather than a criminal issue; and the provision of free drug checking stations at community events and relevant venues. Further information on the Greens cannabis legalisation proposed law can be found at Legalising Cannabis Bill 2023."
Australian Greens,"Social issues
The Greens are often known for their outspoken advocacy on numerous social issues, such as the legalisation of marriage equality, the right to seek asylum, and gender equality. The Greens also advocate for policies that they believe will strengthen Australian democracy and ""clean up politics"", including capping political donations and instituting a federal anti-corruption watchdog."
Australian Greens,"Agriculture
In terms of agricultural policy, the party strongly favours policies to promote animal welfare and climate resilience with farmers. The Greens strongly support reducing soil and water degradation through community-driven decision-making processeses, and supporting farmers experiencing effects of climate change."
Australian Greens,"Animal welfare
The Greens are in favour of phasing out live animal exports, instead favouring investment in the domestic chilled meat industry. The Greens have also campaigned on banning greyhound racing, whaling and animal-tested cosmetics. The party believes in phasing out caged egg production and sow stalls, instead favouring ethical farming practices. The party advocates for the reduction of methane emissions from livestock through research, animal health and nutrition, selection and genetics."
Australian Greens,"Foreign affairs
On foreign policy, the party says that it wants ""Independent, transparent and accountable foreign and defence policies based on mutual respect."""
Australian Greens,"Voting system
The party supports proportional representation in the House of Representatives and local government."
Australian Greens,"Structure
Parliament
Federal leaders
On Saturday 12 November 2005 at the national conference in Hobart, the Australian Greens abandoned their long-standing tradition of having no official leader and approved a process whereby a parliamentary leader could be elected by the Greens Parliamentary Party Room. On Monday 28 November 2005, Bob Brown – who had long been regarded as de facto leader by many inside the party, and most people outside the party – was elected unopposed as the Parliamentary Party Leader. Each leader has been described to represent a faction within the party, with the political journalist Paddy Manning describing that Christine Milne came from the right wing of the party, while Bandt is the first Greens leader from the left wing of the party."
Australian Greens,"Parliamentary portfolios
Greens MPs are each assigned their own portfolios, or specific areas of responsibility. All portfolios are decided by the party and may differ in title from the government's portfolio priorities The Greens have formed a Gun Control portfolio, of which there is no equivalent in the government.
Portfolios are divided into five major categories according to the Greens: ""an equal society"", ""world-class essential services"", ""climate and the environment"", ""the green economy"", and ""a confident Australia""."
Australian Greens,"National Council
The Australian Greens is federally organised with separately registered state parties signing up to a national constitution, yet retaining considerable policy-making and organisational autonomy from the centre. The national decision-making body of the Australian Greens is the National Council, consisting of delegates from each member body (a state or territory Greens party), two members of the federal party room, a representative of the Australian Greens First Nations Network (AGFNN, or Blak Greens), and the national office bearers including the National Convenor, Secretary and Treasurer. As at May 2020, all seven of the party's office bearer positions are held by women. There is also a Public Officer, a Party Agent and a Registered Officer. The National Council arrives at decisions by consensus. All policies originating from this structure are subject to ratification by the members of the Australian Greens at National Conference."
Australian Greens,"State and territory parties
The Australian Greens are a federation consisting of eight parties from each state and territory. The various Australian states and territories have different electoral systems, all of which allow the Greens to gain representation. In New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia and South Australia, the Greens hold seats in the Legislative Councils (upper houses), which are elected by proportional representation. The Greens also hold seats in the unicameral Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly and Legislative Assembly of Queensland. As of 2020, no members have been elected from the Northern Territory.
Five Greens have become ministers at the state/territory level: Nick McKim and Cassy O'Connor in Tasmania, 2010–2014; and in the ACT, Shane Rattenbury since 2012 and Emma Davidson and Rebecca Vassarotti since 2020.
Most of the state-based Green parties which have joined the Australian Greens do not have a formal leader, and instead they have a shared leadership structure. However, Tasmania, Victoria, and the ACT have adopted singular leadership structures into their party.
The current Australian Green member parties are the following:"
Australian Greens,"Working groups
A variety of working groups have been established by the National Council, which are directly accessible to all Greens members. Working groups perform an advisory function by developing policy, reviewing or developing the party structure, or by performing other tasks assigned by the National Council.
The Australian Young Greens are a federation of Young Greens groups from each Australian state and territory. Together they form the youth wing of the Australian Greens
A national Sexuality and Gender Identity Working Group exists at a federal level, and there are LGBTIQ working groups in some state and territory parties, including: Queer Greens Victoria, Queensland Rainbow Greens, SA Greens Queer Members Action Group, NSW Greens Sex, Sexuality and Gender Identity Working Group."
Australian Greens,"Support
The Greens generally draw support from younger voters with higher than average educational attainment. The Greens absorbed much of the Australian Democrats' support base following its downfall as the third party in Australia and many of the social and environmental policies and issues that the Democrats advocated for have been taken up by the Greens. Much like the Democrats, the Greens have a higher proportion of supporters who are university educated, under 40, identify as professionals in their field, are small business owners, and earn above the national average wage. Notably, there has also been a steady increase in working-class support for the Greens since the creation of the party.
In 2019, Ian McAllister in an analysis of class voting patterns found that Greens voters are distinguished as being high in cultural capital, such as a university education, but tend to be in asset poverty due to not owning their own home. Political scientist Todd Farrell in an analysis in 2020 found that, unlike other minor parties in the past (such as the Australian Democrats), Greens supporters hold high levels of party identification and consistent durable vote, indicating a political realignment in Australian politics away from the major Labor and Liberal parties."
Australian Greens,"Federal electoral results
House of Representatives
Senate
Maps
Current federal parliamentarians
House of Representatives
Senate
Former
Senator Jo Vallentine, 1990–1992, Greens WA (originally elected in 1984 for the Nuclear Disarmament Party)
Senator Christabel Chamarette, 1992–1996, Greens WA
Senator Dee Margetts, 1993–1999, Greens WA
Michael Organ MP (Cunningham, NSW), 2002–2004
Senator Kerry Nettle (NSW), 2002–2008
Senator Bob Brown (Tas), 1996–2012
Senator Christine Milne (Tas), 2005–2015
Senator Penny Wright (SA), 2011–2015
Senator Robert Simms (SA), 2015–2016
Senator Scott Ludlam (WA), 2008–2017
Senator Lee Rhiannon (NSW), 2011–2018
Senator Andrew Bartlett (Qld), 2017–2018
Senator Richard Di Natale (Vic), 2011–2020
Senator Rachel Siewert (WA), 2005–2021
Senator Lidia Thorpe (Vic), 2020–2023
Senator Janet Rice (Vic), 2014–2024
Senators Vallentine, Chamarette and Margetts were all elected as Greens (WA) senators and served their terms before the Greens WA affiliated to the Australian Greens, meaning that they were not considered to be Australian Greens senators at the time.
For current and former state parliamentarians, see the List of Australian Greens parliamentarians."
Australian Greens,"Other notable members
Clive Hamilton, Greens candidate for the 2009 Higgins by-election
Chris Harris, former Greens Councillor for the City of Sydney
Jean Jenkins, former Democrats Senator for Western Australia
Jack Mundey, trade union leader involved in the green bans
Janet Powell, former Democrats leader
Peter Singer, moral philosopher and Greens candidate for the 1994 Kooyong by-election
Brian Walters SC, prominent Human Rights lawyer and candidate for the state seat of Melbourne at the 2010 Victorian election
Andrew Wilkie, former Greens candidate and independent federal member for Denison (2010–19) and Clark (2019–present)
Julian Burnside AO QC, prominent barrister, human rights and refugee advocate, and candidate for the federal seat of Kooyong in the 2019 federal election
Jason Ball, former Australian rules football player and mental health advocate, and candidate for Higgins in the 2019 federal election"
Australian Greens,"Donors
For the 2015–2016 financial year, the top ten disclosed donors to the Greens were: Graeme Wood ($500,000), Duncan Turpie ($500,000), Electrical Trades Union of Australia ($320,000), Louise Crossley ($138,000), Anna Hackett ($100,000), Pater Investments ($100,000), Ruth Greble ($35,000), Minax Uriel Ptd Ltd ($39,800) and Chilla Bulbeck ($30,000).
Since 2017, the Australian Greens have implemented real-time disclosure of donations to them of over $1,000, in an effort to ""clean up politics""."
Australian Greens,"See also
List of Australian Greens parliamentarians"
Australian Greens,"Footnotes
References
Further reading
Lohrey, Amanda (November 2002). Groundswell: The rise of the Greens. Quarterly Essay.
Bennett, Scott (September 2008). ""The rise of the Australian Greens"". Australia: Department of Parliamentary Services.
Manning, Paddy (2019). Inside the Greens : the Origins and Future of the Party, the People and the Politics. Schwartz Publishing Pty, Limited. ISBN 978-1743821190.
Jackson, Stewart (2018). The Australian Greens : from activism to Australia's third party. Melbourne University Publishing. ISBN 978-0522869521."
Australian Greens,External links
Australian Greens,Official website
Chinese Australians,"Chinese Australians (simplified Chinese: 华裔澳大利亚人 or 华裔澳洲人; traditional Chinese: 華裔澳大利亞人 or 華裔澳洲人; pinyin: Huáyì àodàlìyà rén or Huáyì àozhōu rén) are Australians of Chinese origin. Chinese Australians are one of the largest groups within the global Chinese diaspora, and are the largest Asian Australian community. Per capita, Australia has more people of Chinese ancestry than any country outside Asia. As a whole, Australian residents identifying themselves as having Chinese ancestry made up 5.5% of Australia's population at the 2021 census.
The very early history of Chinese Australians involved significant immigration from villages of the Pearl River Delta in South China, with most such immigrants speaking dialects within the Yue dialect group. The Gold rushes lured many Chinese to the Australian colonies in the 19th century. As with many overseas Chinese groups the world over, early Chinese immigrants to Australia established several Chinatowns in major cities, such as Sydney (Chinatown, Sydney), Melbourne (Chinatown, Melbourne), Brisbane (Chinatown, Brisbane) and Perth (Chinatown, Perth). In the Australian external territory of Christmas Island, Australians of full or partial Chinese origin form the plurality of the population.
The recent turbulence of Australia–China relations had a negative impact to the Chinese Australian community, being increasingly targeted by xenophobic attitudes."
Chinese Australians,"History
Chinese peoples have a long and continuing role in Australian history. There were early links between China and Australia when Macau and Canton were used as an important trading ports with the fledgling colony. Mak Sai Ying (also known as John Shying) was the first officially recorded Chinese migrant in 1818. After his arrival he spent some time farming before, in 1829, he became prominent as the publican of The Lion in Parramatta. Early 19th Century migration was in limited numbers and sporadic, primarily those who came in this period were free merchants or adventurers and, the more common, indentured labourers."
Chinese Australians,"The Australian Gold Rushes are what first lured thousands of Chinese to the country. In 1855 in Melbourne there were 11,493 Chinese arrivals. This was startling considering that barely five years previous, Melbourne's entire population had only been around 25,000 people. By 1858, 42,000 Chinese immigrants had arrived in Victoria, with many of them living in boarding houses in Little Bourke Street. Due to the widespread racist sentiments in parliament and on the goldfields, the first of many immigration restrictions and Chinese targeting laws was passed in late 1855. However, due to the long, poorly regulated borders between the colonies of Australia the numbers of Chinese on the goldfields continued to swell. Upon the goldfields Chinese peoples faced many hardships. There were violent anti-Chinese riots; the Buckland Riot, the Lambing Flats Riots, as well as general discrimination and prejudice. However, there were many establishments in this period that would have a lasting effect on the history of Australia and the history of Chinese in Australia. One of these establishments were the Chinese camps, which most often, later, became Chinatowns in Australia. There was also the establishment and the consolidation of power for Chinese societies, many of these are still active in Australia today. These societies provided support and community for the Chinese in the colonies.
After the gold rushes the numbers of Chinese living in the cities swelled and their businesses and industries contributed much to growth of Melbourne and Sydney in the late 19th century. Mei Quong Tart and Lowe Kong Meng were prominent business figures in Sydney and Melbourne respectively. However, there were very few Chinese women migrating to Australia. At one point in the 1860s the numbers of Chinese in Australia was around 40,000. Of these, it is believed only 12, were women. This gender imbalance meant that Chinese men married women of European descent but many had it in their hearts to return to China."
Chinese Australians,"Anti-Chinese racism among white Australians also strongly contributed to the push for the federation of Australia. Some of the first Acts of the new federation would establish the White Australia Policy. This policy made it almost impossible for anyone new to migrate from China to Australia. After federation the population of Chinese in Australia steadily declined. Despite the declining numbers people with Chinese heritage still played their part in Australian history. There were over 200 people with Chinese heritage who fought for Australia in World War I, including the decorated sniper Billy Sing. A similar number fought for Australia in World War II.
The final end of the White Australia Policy from the 1960s saw new arrivals from the Chinese diaspora and for the first time significant numbers from non-Cantonese speaking parts of China. The first wave of arrivals were ethnic Chinese refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia during the 1970s. This was followed by economic immigrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan in the 1980s and 1990s, whose families often settled in the capital cities. New institutions were established for these arrivals and old ones such as the Chinese Chamber of Commerce revived, while numerous Chinese language newspapers were once again published in the capital cities. Ethnic Chinese settlers from Peru immigrated to Australia following the Peruvian dictatorship of Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces of Peru in 1968."
Chinese Australians,"After the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, then-Australian Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, allowed students from China to settle in Australia permanently. The aftermath of May 1998 riots of Indonesia saw sizeable influx of Chinese Indonesians fleeing persecution in their home country for Australia. Since the 2000s, with the rapid development of China's economy, there has been an explosion in the number of immigrants from China, which have frequently been Australia's largest source of new immigrants since 2000. In 2015–16, China (excluding Hong Kong and Macau) was the second largest source of immigrants to Australia behind India. China (excluding Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan) is now the third largest foreign birthplace for Australian residents, after England and New Zealand."
Chinese Australians,"Demographics
At the 2021 census, 1,390,637 Australian residents identified themselves as having Chinese ancestry, accounting for 5.5% of the total population.
In 2019, the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated that there were 677,240 Australian residents born in Mainland China, 101,290 born in Hong Kong, 59,250 born in Taiwan and 3,130 born in Macau. There are also a large number of persons of Chinese ancestry among those born in Southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines and Vietnam.
Before the end of the 20th century, Chinese Australians were predominately of Cantonese and Hakka descent from Mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau, and Cantonese was the dominant language. Due to more recent immigration from other regions of China, Mandarin has surpassed Cantonese by number of speakers.
In a 2004 study on the intermarriage pattern in Australia, the proportion of second-generation Chinese Australians with spouses of Anglo-Celtic ancestry was approximately 21% and for third generation it was 68%.
According to Australian Bureau of Statistics, in 2012 Chinese immigrant mothers had a total fertility of 1.59 children per woman, lower compared to the Australian average of 1.94. This declined to 1.19 and 1.73 respectively in 2019."
Chinese Australians,"Language
At the 2021 census, 685,274 persons declared that they spoke Mandarin at home (the most common language spoken at home in Australia after English at 2.8%), followed by Cantonese at 295,281 (the fourth most common after English at 1.2%). Many Chinese Australians speak other varieties of Chinese such as Shanghainese, Hokkien and Hakka at home. Many Chinese Australians from other areas speak Tagalog (Philippines), Malay (Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei), Vietnamese, Thai, and Portuguese (Macau) as additional languages. Second or higher generation Chinese Australians are often either monolingual in English or bilingual to varying degrees with their heritage language, with their relationship to language often being a key component in the maintenance of a bicultural identity.
Chinese Australians have adopted many slang terms in Chinese. An example is the term 土澳, which is a slang term for Australia (as opposed to the standard term, 澳大利亚)."
Chinese Australians,"Religion
According to the census data collected in the last twenty years, among Australians with full or partial Chinese ancestry there has been a general decline of institutional religions (between 2006 and 2016, Buddhism fell from 24.1% to 15.7% and Christianity fell from 29.8% to 23.4%). In 2016, 55.4% of the Chinese Australians fit within the census category of ""not religious, secular beliefs or other spiritual beliefs"", rising significantly from 37.8% in 2006. These shiftings in religious demography may be due to the incoming of new immigrants from China who generally do not have a formal religious affiliation, and many of whom are involved in the native Chinese religion (including Chinese ancestral worship) which has been experiencing a revival in China over the last decades.
There are also several notable Chinese temples that exist and still active in Australia, like Sarm Sung Goon Temple, Albion (built in 1886), Sze Yup Temple (built in 1898), Yiu Ming Temple (built in 1908) and Heavenly Queen Temple (Melbourne). Nan Tien Temple in New South Wales and Chung Tian Temple in Queensland are the oversea branch temples of Fo Guang Shan."
Chinese Australians,"Politics
Historically, Chinese Australians have voted for the Coalition over Labor, due to a perception that Liberal Party was more business-oriented and more focused on economic development than Labor. However, support for the Coalition from Chinese Australians has declined in recent years. In the 2022 Australian federal election, electorates with a higher concentration of Chinese-Australian voters experienced larger swings against the Coalition compared to other electorates; in the top 15 seats by Chinese ancestry, the swing against the Coalition on a two-party-preferred basis was 6.6 per cent, compared to 3.7 per cent in other seats. This resulted in the Liberal Party losing many federal seats with large Chinese communities in 2022 to Labor (losing Bennelong and Reid in Sydney and Chisholm in Melbourne to Labor and Kooyong in Melbourne to a teal independent), as well as losing Aston in 2023, which was the first time in over a century in which the government won a seat off the opposition in a by-election. In the 2023 New South Wales state election, the top 10 electorates in terms of Chinese ancestry all saw big swings to Labor. The marked swings from the Coalition to Labor from 2022 onwards has been attributed to Australia's fraught relationship with China under the Morrison government, which was marked with aggressive and hostile rhetoric against China from senior politicians such as Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton.
The federal electorate with the highest number of Chinese Australians is the Division of Chisholm in Melbourne, which has been held by the Labor Party since 2022."
Chinese Australians,"Socioeconomics
Education
In 2006, 55.0 percent for Chinese-born Australians aged 15 years and over had some form of higher non-school qualifications compared to 52.5 percent of the Australian population. Among Chinese-born Australians, 42.2 percent had Diploma level or higher* qualifications and 4.8 percent had Certificate level qualifications. For Chinese-born Australians, 88,440 had no higher non-school qualification, of which 35.3 percent were still attending an educational institution. In 2006, 57.3 per cent of the Hong Kong-born Australians aged 15 years and over had some form of higher non-school qualifications compared to 52.5 percent of the Australian population. Among the Hong Kong-born Australians, 45.7 per cent had Diploma level or higher qualifications and 6.1 percent had Certificate level qualifications. From the Hong Kong-born Australians, 28,720 had no higher non-school qualification, of which 44.7 per cent were still attending an educational institution.
In 2006, 31.9% of Chinese Australians attained a bachelor's degree compared to just 14.8% for the general Australian population. 36.1% of Hong Kong Australians attained a bachelor's degree or higher. Chinese Australians born overseas reported high educational attainment with over 50% of them holding at least bachelor's degree. When all these rates are melded, approximately 42 percent of (first and second generation) Chinese Australians have achieved a bachelor's degree, making it roughly three times the national average of 14 percent.
The pathways Chinese-Australian families choose to motivate their children is partly based on their cultural values which emphasise scholastic excellence, and partly on their own experiences in their native as well as in the host country. Customarily, activities taking place in Chinese-Australian homes were related to the education of their children. Regular family discussions on educational matters and career paths had a modelling effect. The key feature of these families was that parental involvement in their children's school-related activities remained high throughout the high school time of their children. Chinese-Australian families indicated that diligence, a deep cultural respect for education and motivation to become educated was quite strong among first generation immigrants. Chinese-Australians have a significant influence and place considerable pressure on their children academically. In addition, mathematics achievement and participation of high school students have a strong correlation towards the success or achievement goals and sense of competence. In addition, Chinese students from migrant backgrounds, in comparison to those from refugee backgrounds, are more academically successful."
Chinese Australians,"Employment
Among Hong Kong-born Australians aged 15 years and over, the participation rate in the labour force was 63.3 percent and the unemployment rate was 6.6 percent. The corresponding rates in the total Australian population were 64.6 and 5.2 percent respectively. Of the 39,870 Hong Kong-born Australians who were employed, 42.2 percent were employed in a Skill Level 1 occupation, 12.3 percent in Skill Level 2 and 8.5 percent in Skill Level 3. The corresponding rates in the total Australian population were 28.7, 10.7 and 15.1 percent respectively.
Many Chinese Australians work in white collar middle class jobs. But Chinese Australians are under-represented in occupations such
as journalism, law and other professions that require language skills and face to face contact. First-generation Chinese Australians
also experience problems in getting white collar jobs commensurate with their qualifications and work experience. Instead, they go
into business and operate convenience stores, car dealerships, grocery stores, coffee shops, news agencies and restaurants while
making sacrifices to pay for their children's education. Perceiving education as the only available channel of social mobility, substantial
investment in children's education at a disproportionate sacrifice to family finance and social well-being is an indication of
parental concerns and expectations.
33.8% of Chinese Australians and 46.6% Hong Kong Australians work as white collar professionals compared to 32% for the total Australian population. 63.3% of Hong Kong Australians and 56.3% of Chinese Australians participate in the Australian workforce which was below the national average of 67.1%. Chinese Australians and Hong Kong Australians also have an unemployment rate of 11.2% and 6.6% respectively. Both figures were higher than the national average of 4.9%."
Chinese Australians,"Economics
In 2006, the median individual weekly income for Chinese-born Australians aged 15 years and over was $242, compared with $431 for all overseas-born and $488 for all Australia-born. The total Australian population had a median individual weekly income of $466. In 2006, the median individual weekly income for Hong Kong-born Australians aged 15 years and over was $425, compared with $431 for all overseas-born and $488 for all Australia-born. The total Australian population had a median individual weekly income of $466. Therefore, median weekly earnings for Chinese Australians are relatively lower than the population average."
Chinese Australians,"Notable Chinese Australians
There have been numerous notable Chinese Australians in various fields throughout Australia's history."
Chinese Australians,"Chinese place names in Australia
Due to the long history of the Chinese in Australia, many places have Chinese names."
Chinese Australians,"See also
History of Chinese Australians
Chinatowns in Australia
Chinatowns in Oceania
Asian Australians
White Australia policy
Buckland riot (1857)
Lambing Flat riots (1860–1861)
Australia–China relations
Australia–Taiwan relations"
Chinese Australians,"References
Further reading
Brawley, Sean, The White Peril – Foreign Relations and Asian Immigration to Australasia and North America 1919–1978, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1995. 9780868402789
Cushman, J.W., ""A 'Colonial Casualty': The Chinese community in Australian Historiography"", Asian Studies Association of Australia, vol.7, no 3, April 1984.
Fitzgerald, Shirley, Red Tape, Gold Scissors, State Library of NSW Press, Sydney, 1997.
Macgregor, Paul (ed.), Histories of the Chinese in Australasia and the South Pacific, Museum of Chinese Australian History, Melbourne,1995.
May, Cathie, Topsawyers: the Chinese in Cairns 1870 to 1920, James Cook University, Townsville, 1984.
Williams, Michael, 2018, Returning home with glory: Chinese villagers around the Pacific, 1849 to 1949 (榮歸故里：太平洋地區的中國僑鄉 1849–1949), Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong.
Taylor, Antony. ""Chinese Emigration to Australia around 1900: A Re-examination of Australia’s 'Great White Walls'"" History Compass (February 2013) 11#2 pp 104–116, DOI:10.1111/hic3.12032
Williams, Michael, Chinese Settlement in NSW – A thematic history (Sydney: Heritage Office of NSW, 1999) www.heritage.nsw.gov.au"
Chinese Australians,"External links
Chinese Museum Chinese Immigration to Australia
Chinese-Australian Historical Images in Australia
Chinese Australian Historical Society
From Quong Tarts to Victor Changs: Being Chinese in Australia in the Twentieth Century Archived 4 December 2010 at the Wayback Machine
[http The Poison of Polygamy - the first Chinese Australian novel://chineseaustralianhistory.org Chinese Australian history website]
Tracking The Dragon – A history of the Chinese in the Riverina  online exhibition
Tracking the Dragon A guide for finding and assessing Chinese Australian heritage places
The Harvest of Endurance scroll – an interactive representing two centuries of Chinese contact with, and emigration to, Australia Archived 2 July 2014 at the Wayback Machine at the National Museum of Australia
Culture Victoria – Dreams of Jade and Gold – Chinese Australian families
Chinese Language Records at Public Record Office Victoria Archived 2 August 2014 at the Wayback Machine
The tiger’s mouth – Thoughts on the history and heritage of Chinese Australia
Shirley Fitzgerald - City of Sydney History Unit (2008). ""Chinese"". Dictionary of Sydney. Retrieved 4 October 2015. (Chinese in Sydney) [CC-By-SA]
Chinese Australian History in 88 Objects"
Protected areas of Australia,"Protected areas of Australia include Commonwealth and off-shore protected areas managed by the Australian government, as well as protected areas within each of the six states of Australia and two self-governing territories, the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory, which are managed by the eight state and territory governments.
Commonwealth and off-shore protected areas in the Australian Capital Territory, the Northern Territory, the Christmas Island Territory, the Cocos (Keeling) Islands Territory, the Norfolk Island Territory and the Australian Antarctic Territory are managed by Director of National Parks, an agency within the Department of the Environment and Energy, with the exception of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, which is managed by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, a separate body within the department.
As of February 2022 protected areas cover 1,518,814.69 km2 (586,417.63 sq mi) of Australia's land area, or about 19.75% of the total land area. The Australian Capital Territory has the highest level of protection at nearly 56% of its territory, followed by Tasmania with 42% and South Australia with 30%. The lowest level of protection is in Queensland and New South Wales with 8.71% and 9.61% respectively. Of all protected areas, two-thirds are considered strictly protected (IUCN categories I to IV), and the rest is mostly managed resources protected area (IUCN category VI). Over 43% of the protected area in Australia is publicly owned and managed by the Australian government or state and territory governments. The second-largest component of protected areas are the Indigenous Protected Areas, at over 44% and growing as of February 2022."
Protected areas of Australia,"Protected areas managed by the Australian government
The following list shows only the Commonwealth and off-shore protected areas that are managed by the Australian government which represents a small portion of all protected areas located in Australia. Each state and territory is responsible for the management of the protected areas under its jurisdiction with exception to protected areas such as the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park in the Northern Territory.  The majority of Australian protected areas are managed by the state and territory governments."
Protected areas of Australia,"National Parks
The following protected areas which are designated as national parks are managed by the Australian government and in some instances in conjunction with indigenous land owners:"
Protected areas of Australia,"Booderee (owned by the Wreck Bay Aboriginal Community and co-managed)
Christmas Island
Kakadu
Norfolk Island
Pulu Keeling
Uluru-Kata Tjuta
Australia's first national park - and the second in the world - is Royal National Park in New South Wales, established in 1879."
Protected areas of Australia,"National Heritage List
The National Heritage List is a heritage register, a list of national heritage places deemed to be of outstanding heritage significance to Australia, established in 2003. The list includes natural and historic places, including those of cultural significance to Indigenous Australians. Once on the National Heritage List the provisions of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 apply. Some of these also form part of the World Heritage Sites listed in a separate section below."
Protected areas of Australia,"Botanical Gardens
Australian National
Booderee (owned by the Wreck Bay Aboriginal Community and co-managed)
Norfolk Island"
Protected areas of Australia,"Antarctic Specially Protected Areas
As of 2014 there are 12 Antarctic Specially Protected Areas"
Protected areas of Australia,"Amanda Bay
Ardery Island and Odbert Island
Clark Peninsula
Frazier Islands
Hawker Island
Marine Plain
Mawson's Huts
North-eastern Bailey Peninsula
Rookery Islands
Scullin and Murray Monoliths
Stornes
Taylor Rookery"
Protected areas of Australia,"Antarctic Specially Managed Areas
As of 2014 there is 1 Antarctic Specially Managed Area"
Protected areas of Australia,Larsemann Hills
Protected areas of Australia,"Commonwealth Marine reserves
The Australian Government manages an estate of marine protected areas  known as Commonwealth marine reserves (CMR) which was established under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act). These marine reserves are in Australian waters, but not state or territory waters. A majority of the reserves are not in effect until new managements plans are released following a review of reserves established in 2012.
In addition to the Coral Sea CMR and the Heard Island and McDonald Islands CMR, there are a further 57 Commonwealth marine reserves grouped into 5 geographical regions called Commonwealth marine reserve networks:"
Protected areas of Australia,"North network (8 reserves)
North-west network (13 reserves)
Temperate East network (8 reserves)
South-east network (14 reserves)
South-west network (14 reserves)"
Protected areas of Australia,"Calperum and Taylorville Stations
Calperum and Taylorville Stations are pastoral leases located next to each other near Renmark in South Australia and which were purchased for conservation purposes using both private and Australian government funds.  Calperum Station was purchased by the Chicago Zoological Society in 1993 while Taylorville Station was purchased by the Australian Landscape Trust in 2000 with the ownership of both leases being deeded to the Director of National Parks.  Both properties are managed by the Australian Landscape Trust."
Protected areas of Australia,"Protection arising from Australian government policy and international obligations
World Heritage listed areas
As of April 2020, the following sites are listed by UNESCO as World Heritage Sites:"
Protected areas of Australia,"Australian Fossil Mammal Sites (Riversleigh, Qld and Naracoorte, SA)
Australian Convict Sites, consisting of 11 remnant sites
Budj Bim Cultural Landscape, Vic
Fraser Island, Qld
Gondwana Rainforests of Australia, formerly Central Eastern Rainforest Reserves
Great Barrier Reef, Qld
Greater Blue Mountains Area, NSW
Heard and McDonald Islands, Antarctica
Kakadu National Park, NT
Lord Howe Island
Macquarie Island
Ningaloo Coast, WA
Purnululu National Park, WA
Royal Exhibition Building and Carlton Gardens
Shark Bay, WA
Sydney Opera House
Tasmanian Wilderness
Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, NT
Wet Tropics of Queensland
Willandra Lakes Region, NSW"
Protected areas of Australia,"Indigenous protected areas
An Indigenous Protected Area (IPA) is a class of protected area formed by agreement with Indigenous Australians and formally recognised by the Australian government as being part of the National Reserve System.  As of April 2020 there are 75 IPAs occupying about 67,000,000 hectares (170,000,000 acres) and comprising more than 44% of the National Reserve System."
Protected areas of Australia,"Biosphere reserves
The following biosphere reserves belonging to the UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve program are located within Australia:"
Protected areas of Australia,"Croajingolong, Victoria (1977)
Riverland, South Australia (1977)
Kosciuszko, New South Wales (1977)
Prince Regent River, Western Australia (1977)
Mamungari (formerly Unnamed), South Australia (1977)
Uluru (Ayers Rock-Mount Olga), Northern Territory (1977)
Yathong (1977)
Fitzgerald River, Western Australia (1978)
Hattah-Kulkyne and Murray-Kulkyne, Victoria (1981)
Wilsons Promontory, Victoria (1981)
Mornington Peninsula and Western Port, Victoria (2002)
Barkindji, New South Wales (2005)
Noosa, Queensland (2007)
Great Sandy, Queensland (2009)"
Protected areas of Australia,"Ramsar sites
As a contracting party to the Convention on Wetlands of International Importance (known as the Ramsar Convention), Australia is encouraged ""to nominate sites containing representative, rare or unique wetlands, or that are important for conserving biological diversity, to the List of Wetlands of International Importance"".  As of March 2014, the Australian Government has nominated 65 Ramsar sites."
Protected areas of Australia,"Management by Australian states and territories
Protected areas of the Australian Capital Territory
Protected areas of New South Wales
Protected areas of the Northern Territory
Protected areas of Queensland
Protected areas of South Australia
Protected areas of Tasmania
Protected areas of Victoria
Protected areas of Western Australia"
Protected areas of Australia,"Other conservation organisations
There is a number of private and government organisations involved in conservation in Australia."
Protected areas of Australia,"See also
Australia's National Reserve System
Australian Whale Sanctuary
Conservation park (Australia)
List of national parks of Australia
Wild Rivers"
Protected areas of Australia,"References
External links
Department of the Environment,Australia
The Director of National Parks
Parks Australia
Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority"
Constitutional history of Australia,"The Constitutional history of Australia is the history of Australia's foundational legal principles. Australia's legal origins as a nation state began in the colonial era, with the reception of English law and the lack of any regard to existing Indigenous legal structures. As the colonies expanded, Australia gradually began to achieve de facto independence. Over the years as a result the foundations of the Australian legal system gradually began to shift. This culminated in the Australia Act, an act formally ending legal ties with the UK."
Constitutional history of Australia,"Settlement
Prior to European settlement of Australia, Europeans had been to the land merely as explorers. The only exception was James Cook who in 1770 sailed up most of the east coast of Australia and then claimed the entire coastline he had just explored as British territory. No formal legal justification was made of the claim at the time, but in any event no regard was given to any potential Indigenous legal rights.
Orders-in-Council were issued in London on 6 December 1785 for the establishment of a colony in Botany Bay. Arthur Phillip was appointed Governor-designate of the new colony in October 1786. In Phillip's commission, the boundary was defined as the 135th meridian east longitude (135° east), (26 January 1788 – Map) taking the line from Melchisédech Thévenot's chart, Hollandia Nova‒‒Terre Australe, published in Relations de Divers Voyages Curieux (Paris, 1663).
Soon after Lord Sydney appointed him governor, Phillip drew up a detailed memorandum of his plans for the proposed new colony. In one paragraph he wrote: ""The laws of this country [England] will of course, be introduced in [New] South Wales, and there is one that I would wish to take place from the moment his Majesty's forces take possession of the country: That there can be no slavery in a free land, and consequently no slaves."" European settlement commenced with the arrival of the First Fleet, comprising 11 ships which arrived at Botany Bay, New South Wales between 18 and 20 January 1788. The Fleet brought a total of 1044 people to the new settlement, of whom 696 were convicts. The actual settlement was located at Sydney Cove. The colony was formally proclaimed by Governor Phillip on 7 February 1788 at Sydney. Though the settlement was a military prison, and Phillip had full power as governor, the colony also had a civil administration and courts of law.
The application of English law to the Indigenous population remained unsettled however. In R v Tommy an Aboriginal man was found liable under law for the murder of a colonist. Later, in the case of R v Ballard the court held it did not have the jurisdiction to convict an Aborignal man of murdering another Aboriginal man as English law did not apply to them. However, this judgment was implicitly overturned in the case of R v Murrel, where the court held that Aborigianl people had no law and could be convicted for the murder of each other.
In 1835, Governor Bourke proclaimed that Indigenous Australians could not sell or assign land, nor could an individual person or group acquire land, other than through distribution by the Crown. The proclamation was approved by the Colonial Office on 10 October 1835. The proclamation was issued in response to the attempt by graziers from Van Diemen's Land to enter into an agreement with indigenous tribes in Port Philip, known as Batman's Treaty.
During the 19th century, separate British colonies were formed in Australia. In 1825, Tasmania, named Van Diemen's Land, was proclaimed a separate colony from the colony of New South Wales. The Swan River Colony of Western Australia was established in 1832, separately from that of New South Wales, effectively taking over by Britain of the remainder of the Australian continent. Following the Treaty of Waitangi, William Hobson declared British sovereignty over New Zealand in 1840 and was part of the colony of New South Wales. In 1841, it was separated from the colony of New South Wales to form the new Colony of New Zealand. South Australia was formed in 1836 separately of the colony of New South Wales, and Victoria in 1851 and Queensland in 1859 both from the colony of New South Wales. By Letters Patent on 6 June 1859, Queen Victoria gave her approval to the separation of the colony of Queensland from New South Wales. On the same day an Order-in-Council gave Queensland its own Constitution. Queensland became a self-governing colony with its own Governor, a nominated Legislative Council and an elected Legislative Assembly. South Australia was founded as a ""free province""—it was never a penal colony. Victoria and Western Australia were also founded ""free"", but later accepted transported convicts. A campaign by the settlers of New South Wales led to the end of convict transportation to that colony; the last convict ship arrived in 1848."
Constitutional history of Australia,"Responsible government
Between 1855 and 1890, the six colonies individually gained responsible government, managing most of their own affairs while remaining part of the British Empire. The Colonial Office in London retained control of some matters, notably foreign affairs, defence, and international shipping. New Zealand achieved responsible government in 1853, New South Wales and Victoria in 1855, Tasmania in 1856, Queensland in 1859 (separated from New South Wales in that year with self-government from the beginning) and Western Australia in 1890. These arrangements were confirmed by the Colonial Laws Validity Act 1865.
The Colonial Laws Validity Act 1865 was a British Act of Parliament to define the relationship between local (""colonial"") and British (""imperial"") legislation. It confirmed that colonial legislation was to have full effect within the colony, limited only to the extent that it was not in contradiction with (""repugnant to"") any Imperial Act which extended to that colony. The Act had the effect of clarifying and strengthening the position of colonial legislatures, while at the same time restating their ultimate subordination to the British Parliament.
Until the passage of the Act, a number of colonial statutes had been struck down by local judges on the grounds of repugnancy to English laws (whether or not those English laws had been intended by Parliament to be effective in the colony). This had been a particular problem for the government in South Australia, where Justice Benjamin Boothby had struck down local statutes on numerous occasions in the colony's Supreme Court."
Constitutional history of Australia,"Towards federation
The first formal steps to federation of the colonies was in the form of the Federal Council of Australasia in 1885. However, the council was a weak non-executive, non-legislative federation of Western Australia, Fiji, Queensland, Tasmania and Victoria. The movement for full federation developed in the late 19th century, culminating in the six Australian colonies forming a federation of States. It was envisaged that New Zealand might also join.
In the 1890s, two constitutional conventions were called, which ultimately adopted a constitution based on a combination of British, American and other models (monarchy and parliamentary government from Britain, federalism from Canada and the United States, the use of the referendum from Switzerland). This constitution was then approved by the voters in each of the six colonies. (At the time women had the vote in only one of them: South Australia, and Aboriginal Australians in South Australia and Queensland only).
It was then passed (with an amendment allowing for some appeals to the Privy Council in London) as an Act of the British Parliament: the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900. The Act entered into force on 1 January 1901, at which point the Commonwealth of Australia came into being.
The Australian Constitution, besides other matters, dealt with the allocation of powers between the colonies, which became states, and the federal parliament. Most of the powers, including those of foreign affairs and defence, were concurrent powers, with the proviso that if there was a conflict between the federal and a state law, then the federal law ""will prevail"". But the United Kingdom still had the power to engage in foreign affairs on behalf of Australia, and to make laws for it. In the early years Australia continued to be represented by the United Kingdom as part of the British Empire at international conferences. In 1919, following Canadian lead, Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes insisted that Australia have separate representatives at the Versailles Peace Conference and not as part of the British delegation.
The Constitution provided that the British monarch be represented in Australia by a Governor-General. Originally, appointments were made on the advice of the British, not the Australian, government, and was generally a British aristocrat. In 1930, the Australian government insisted that Australian-born Isaac Isaacs be appointed. The British government very reluctantly accepted the Australian position that such appointments be made on the advice of the Australian government.
Finally, the Constitution provided that any law of the Australian Parliament could be disallowed within a year by the British monarch (acting on the advice of British ministers), though this power was never in fact exercised. In summary, the constitutional position of the Commonwealth as a whole in relation to the United Kingdom was, originally, the same as that of the individual colonies before federation."
Constitutional history of Australia,"From a united imperial Crown to a shared monarch
A fundamental change in the constitutional structures of the British Commonwealth (formerly the British Empire, and not to be confused with the Commonwealth of Australia) did occur, however, in the late 1920s. Under the British Royal and Parliamentary Titles Act 1927, which implemented a decision of an earlier Commonwealth conference, the unified Crown that had heretofore been the centre point of the Empire was replaced by multiple crowns worn by a shared monarch.
Before 1927, King George V reigned as king in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the Irish Free State, South Africa, etc., each of these states, in effect, as dominions, amounting to a subset of the United Kingdom. After 1927, he reigned as King of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, South Africa, etc.
The form of use in the royal title as issued by King George V did not mention the dominions by name, except 'Ireland', which changed from being referred to as Great Britain and Ireland to Great Britain, Ireland, indicating that it was no longer part of the United Kingdom, but a separate state of which the monarch was now directly the head, rather than through linkage with Great Britain. Though unnamed, except through reference to the 'British Dominions beyond the Seas', the ground-breaking move shattered the previous concept of the shared monarch to one of multiple monarchies, all held by the one monarch.
Though this principle was implicit in the Act and in the King's new titles, and came out of a Commonwealth Conference, neither the British government nor the dominion governments seemed initially to grasp its significance. So while the Irish immediately put the principle into effect by assuming the right to select their own governor-general and to demand a direct right of audience with the King (excluding British ministers), other dominions were much slower to go down this path, and when they did so, they were faced with determined, though ultimately futile, attempts to block such evolution in London.
Whereas before 1927, it was correct in law to talk about the British monarch reigning in the dominions, after 1927, there was technically a King of Australia, etc., even if that title was never used formally, with the only link being that that monarch was also monarch of the UK and resident outside the Commonwealth of Australia. Curiously, while the Irish asserted the title King of Ireland by having King George V sign an international treaty on behalf of his Irish realm as early as 1931 (where he was formally advised by the Irish Minister for External Affairs who formally attended His Majesty, with no British minister present), the formal title Queen of Australia was only adopted through the Royal Style and Titles Act 1973."
Constitutional history of Australia,"Statute of Westminster 1931
By the mid-1920s, it was accepted by the British government that dominions would have full legislative autonomy. This was given legislative effect in 1931 by the Statute of Westminster 1931. The Statute took effect in Australia in 1942 with the passing of the Statute of Westminster Adoption Act 1942, with retroactive effect to 3 September 1939, the start of World War II. The adoption of the Statute repealed the application of the Colonial Laws Validity Act 1865 in relation to federal legislation. However, the Colonial Laws Validity Act 1865 continued to have application in individual Australian states until the Australia Act 1986 came into effect in 1986."
Constitutional history of Australia,"Crisis in 1975
The elections of the Australian Labor Party in 1972 and 1974 under its leader Gough Whitlam forced several constitutional issues to be tested. For two weeks in 1972, the Government had only two ministers, Whitlam and Lance Barnard. Although it had a majority in the lower House, the ALP faced a hostile Senate, and the defeat of Government bills led to a double dissolution and a consequent joint sitting and the passing of the bills into law as allowed under section 57. The political situation however was not improved much by the 1974 election, and the Senate later failed to provide ""supply"" (i.e. to pass tax and expenditure acts). The resulting Australian constitutional crisis of 1975 raised a series of issues: "
Constitutional history of Australia,"Must a State Governor appoint a party's nomination as a replacement in the Senate?
Should the Senate refuse supply or refuse to discuss supply?
Should the Prime Minister resign in such a situation?
If he does not, should the Governor-General dismiss him?
How can the Governor-General and Prime Minister have a sensible discussion when each is able to have the other dismissed immediately provided that the other has not already acted?
Of these, only the first has been partly resolved; an amendment in 1977 changed the procedure for casual appointment. While the State Parliaments can still require a state Governor to appoint somebody who is not the party's nominee, by stripping that nominee of their party membership the party can deny them appointment to the Senate. Under Section 11 of the Constitution a State parliament can still refuse to appoint the party's nominee; in this case, a stand-off can develop where the vacancy goes unfilled. This occurred in 1987, when the Tasmanian state parliament refused to appoint the Labor Party's nominee for a casual vacancy.
Two time-honoured constitutional principles were in conflict during the crisis. The first is that a ministry drawn from the majority of the lower house may continue to govern until it has lost the confidence of the House. The second is that a ministry may not continue to govern once supply has been exhausted. The potential of conflict has been resolved in the United Kingdom, where the House of Lords no longer has the power to block money bills. To date it has not been resolved in Australia. The crisis of 1975 may be repeated in the future, though it is unlikely."
Constitutional history of Australia,"The Australia Act
The power under the Statute of Westminster to request the British Parliament to make laws for Australia was used on several occasions, primarily to enable Australia to acquire new territories. But its most significant use was also its last. This was when the procedure was used to pass the Australia Act 1986. The Australia Act effectively terminated the ability of the British Parliament or Government to make laws for Australia or its States, even at their request; and provided that any law which was previously required to be passed by the British Parliament on behalf of Australia could now be passed by Australia and its States by themselves.
Since the Australia Act, the only remaining constitutional link with the United Kingdom (if it is one) is in the person of the monarch (see Queen of Australia). But even that connection may not be automatic. In an important constitutional case (Sue v Hill (1999) 163 ALR 648), three justices of the High Court of Australia (the ultimate court of appeal) expressed the view that if the British Parliament were to alter the law of succession to the throne, such a change could not have any effect on the monarchy in Australia, because of the Australia Act: succession to the throne would continue in Australia according to the existing rule, unless and until that was altered in Australia. None of the other four justices in that case disagreed with this reasoning. (Because it was not strictly necessary to decide the case at hand, this is not strictly a binding judicial determination; but it is almost certainly correct given the precedent of the Abdication Crisis of 1936.)
The same case decided (and on this point the decision is binding) that the United Kingdom is a ""foreign power"" within the meaning of the Constitution, and therefore that holders of British citizenship are ineligible for election to the Federal Parliament (though a special ""grandfathering"" arrangement merely phases out the right of British citizens to vote)."
Constitutional history of Australia,"See also
Australian constitutional law
Constitutional law
Constitutional convention"
Constitutional history of Australia,"Notes
References
Bibliography
External links
Australian Parliamentary Library – Australia's Constitutional Milestones Archived 17 February 2012 at the Wayback Machine
Documentation on Australian Constitutional History"
China–Australia Free Trade Agreement,"The China–Australia Free Trade Agreement (ChAFTA) is a bilateral free trade agreement (FTA) between the governments of Australia and China. Since negotiations began, 21 negotiating rounds have been completed. The deal was completed on 17 November 2014 and details released two days later, nearly 10 years after its first round of negotiations that began on 23 May 2005 after a joint feasibility study. The free trade agreement was signed between the two countries on 17 June 2015. Following the usual treaty making process the agreement came into force on 20 December 2015, after the Chinese Government completed its domestic legal and legislative processes and the Australian Parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Treaties and the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee finished a review."
China–Australia Free Trade Agreement,"Background
According to the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, in 2014, China was Australia's largest export market for both goods and services, accounting for nearly a third of total exports, and a growing source of foreign investment.
Australia's Prime Minister Tony Abbott and China's paramount leader Xi Jinping announced the conclusion of negotiations for the China–Australia Free Trade Agreement (ChAFTA) on 17 November 2014. A Declaration of Intent to work towards signature of the Agreement was signed by Australia's Trade and Investment Minister Andrew Robb and China's Commerce Minister Gao Hucheng."
China–Australia Free Trade Agreement,"Provisions
Upon full implementation of the agreement, 95 percent of Australian exports to China will be tariff free. These will include many agricultural products, including beef and dairy. In addition, there will be liberalization of market access for Australia's services sector, and investments by private companies from China under 1,078 million AUD will not be subject to FIRB approval. In addition there will be an Investor State Dispute Settlement mechanism under the treaty.
There will be a Work and Holiday Agreement in which Australia will grant up to 5,000 visas to Chinese nationals for work and holiday makers. The free trade agreement was signed in Canberra, Australia between the two countries on 17 June 2015. The agreement will follow the usual treaty making process whereby it will come into force when China will complete its domestic legal and legislative processes and in Australia, review by the Australian Parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Treaties, and the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee."
China–Australia Free Trade Agreement,"See also
New Zealand–China Free Trade Agreement
Japan–Australia Economic Partnership Agreement
Australia–Korea Free Trade Agreement
Abbott government"
China–Australia Free Trade Agreement,"References
External links
China-Australia FTA on the China FTA network
China-Australia FTA on Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade"
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), is the national broadcaster of Australia. It is principally funded by direct grants from the Australian government and is administered by a government-appointed board. The ABC is a publicly owned body that is politically independent and accountable such as through its production of annual reports and is bound by provisions contained within the Public Interest Disclosure Act 2013 and the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act 2013, with its charter enshrined in legislation, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Act 1983. ABC Commercial, a profit-making division of the corporation, also helps to generate funding for content provision.
The ABC was established as the Australian Broadcasting Commission on 1 July 1932 by an act of federal parliament. It effectively replaced the Australian Broadcasting Company, a private company established in 1924 to provide programming for A-class radio stations. The ABC was given statutory powers that reinforced its independence from the government and enhanced its news-gathering role. Modelled after the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), which is funded by a television licence, the ABC was originally financed by consumer licence fees on broadcast receivers.  However, the licence fees soon proved to be insufficient due to Australia's small population compared with the vast area to be serviced and the need for individual divisions in each state such that by 1949 the Chifley government decided that the ABC would be directly funded by the government. Licence fees however continued to be collected until 1947, however they were subsumed into the government's general revenue. Later funding was supplemented with commercial activities related to its core broadcasting mission. The ABC adopted its current name in 1983.
The ABC provides radio, television, online, and mobile services throughout metropolitan and regional Australia. ABC Radio operates four national networks, a large number of ABC Local Radio stations, several digital stations, and the international service Radio Australia. ABC Television operates five free-to-air channels, as well as the ABC iview streaming service and the ABC Australia satellite channel. News and current affairs content across all platforms is produced by the news division.
The postal address of the ABC in every Australian capital city is PO Box 9994, as a tribute to the record-breaking batting average of Australian cricketer Sir Donald Bradman."
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"History
Origins
After public radio stations were established independently in the state capitals from 1924, a licensing scheme administered by the Postmaster-General's Department was established, allowing certain stations (with ""Class A"" licences"") government funding, albeit with restrictions placed on their advertising content. In 1928, the government established the National Broadcasting Service to take over the 12 A-Class licences as they came up for renewal, and contracted the Australian Broadcasting Company, a private company established in 1924, to supply programs to the new national broadcaster.
After it became politically unpopular to continue to allow the Postmaster-General to run the National Broadcasting Service, the government established the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) on 1 July 1932, under the Australian Broadcasting Commission Act 1932. to take over the Australian Broadcasting Company and run the National Broadcasting Service.
The ABC became informally referred to as ""Aunty"", originally in imitation of the British Broadcasting Corporation's nickname. The structure and programming was broadly modelled on the British Broadcasting Corporation, and programs not created in Australia were mostly bought in from the BBC.
In 1940 one of the ABC Board's most prominent members, Dick Boyer, was appointed to the ABC, becoming chairman on 1 April 1945. Today known for the continuing series of Boyer Lectures initiated by him in 1959, he had a good but not too close working relationship with Sir Charles Moses (general manager 1935–1965), and remained chair until his retirement in 1961. He was determined to maintain the autonomy of the ABC."
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"War years
In 1942 The Australian Broadcasting Act was passed, giving the ABC the power to decide when, and in what circumstances, political speeches should be broadcast. Directions from the minister about whether or not to broadcast any matter now had to be made in writing, and any exercise of the power had to be mentioned in the commission's annual report."
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"1950–2000
The ABC commenced television broadcasting in 1956. ABN-2 in Sydney was inaugurated by prime minister Robert Menzies on 5 November 1956, with the first broadcast presented by Michael Charlton, and James Dibble reading the first television news bulletin. Television relay facilities were not in place until the early 1960s, so news bulletins had to be sent to each capital city by teleprinter, to be prepared and presented separately in each city. In 1975, colour television was permanently introduced into Australia, and within a decade, the ABC had moved into satellite broadcasting, greatly enhancing its ability to distribute content nationally.
Also in 1975 the ABC introduced a 24-hour-a-day AM rock station in Sydney, 2JJ (Double Jay), which was eventually expanded into the national Triple J FM network. A year later, a national classical music network was established on the FM band, broadcasting from Adelaide. It was initially known as ABC-FM (later ABC Classic FM) – referring both to its ""fine music programming and radio frequency"".
ABC budget cuts began in 1976 and continued until 1998, the largest cuts (calculated by the ABC as 25% in real terms) coming between 1985 and 1996.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation Act 1983 changed the name of the organisation to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, effective 1 July 1983. Although funded and owned by the government, the ABC remains editorially independent as ensured by the 1983 Act. At the same time, the newly formed corporation underwent significant restructuring, including a split into separate television and radio divisions, and ABC Radio was restructured significantly again in 1985. Geoffrey Whitehead was managing director of the ABC at this time. Following his resignation in 1986, David Hill (at the time chair of the ABC Board) took over his position and local production trebled from 1986 to 1991."
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"Live television broadcasts of selected parliamentary sessions started in 1990, and by the early 1990s, all major ABC broadcasting outlets moved to 24-hour-a-day operation.
In 1991 the ABC helped launch Australian children's music band The Wiggles, under the ABC music label.
In 1991 the corporation's Sydney radio and orchestral operations moved to a new building, the ABC Ultimo Centre, in the inner-city suburb of Ultimo. In Melbourne, the ABC Southbank Centre was completed in 1994.
In 1992 Australian children's television series Bananas in Pyjamas first aired.
International television service ABC Australia was established in 1993, while at the same time Radio Australia increased its international reach. Reduced funding in 1997 for Radio Australia resulted in staff and programming cuts.
The ABC Multimedia Unit was established in July 1995 to manage the new ABC website, which was launched in August.
The ABC was registered on the Australian Business Register as a Commonwealth Government Entity on 1 November 1999."
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"2000s–2010s
In 2001 digital television commenced (see Online, below). At the same time the ABC's multimedia division was renamed ""ABC New Media"", becoming an output division of the ABC alongside television and radio.
In 2002 the ABC launched ABC Asia Pacific, the replacement for the defunct Australia Television International operated previously by the Seven Network. A digital radio service, ABC DiG, was also launched in November that year.
On 8 February 2008 ABC TV was rebranded as ABC1, and a new channel for children, ABC3, was funded and announced by the Rudd government in June. A new online video-on-demand service launched in July of the same year, titled ABC iview.
ABC News 24, now known as ABC News, a channel dedicated to news, launched on 22 July 2010. On 20 July 2014, ABC1 reverted to its original name of ABC TV.
In November 2014 a cut of $254 million (4.6%) to funding over the following five years together with the additional unfunded cost of the news channel meant that the ABC would have to shed about 10% of its staff, around 400 people. There were several programming changes, with regional and local programming losing out to national programs, and the Adelaide TV production studio had to close.
In November 2016 the ABC announced that ABC News 24, ABC NewsRadio, as well as its online and digital news brands, would be rebranded under a unified ABC News brand, which was launched on 10 April 2017.
Michelle Guthrie took over from managing director Mark Scott, whose second five-year contract finished in April 2016. Between July 2017 and June 2018, the whole of the ABC underwent an organisational restructure, after which the Radio and Television Divisions were no longer separate entities each under a director, instead being split across several functional divisions, with different teams producing different genres of content for television, radio and digital platforms. The Entertainment & Specialist (E&S) team focussed on comedy, kids' programs, drama, Indigenous-related programs, music, other entertainment and factual content; the new ABC Specialist team created content across the arts, science, religion & ethics, education and society & culture; while the Regional & Local team focussed on regional and local content.
Around 23 September 2018 Guthrie was fired. A leadership crisis ensued after allegations arose that ABC Chair, Justin Milne, had, according to the MEAA, engaged in ""overt political interference in the running of the ABC that is in clear breach of the ABC charter and the role of the chairperson"" by interfering in editorial and staffing matters. After pressure for an independent inquiry or statement from Milne, or his resignation, following meetings by ABC staff in various locations, on 27 September Milne resigned.
In February 2019, after the roles of ABC chair and managing director had been vacant for more than four months, Ita Buttrose was named chair. Buttrose named David Anderson as managing director in May 2019.
On 5 June 2019 Australian Federal Police (AFP) raided the headquarters of the ABC looking for articles written in 2017 about alleged misconduct by Australian special forces in Afghanistan, later dubbed the Afghan Files. The raid was countered by lawyers for the ABC in litigation against the AFP, challenging the examination of over 9,200 documents, including internal emails. In February 2020 the case was dismissed by the federal court. In June 2020, the AFP sent a brief of evidence to the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions (CDPP), the federal public prosecutor, recommending charges be laid against journalist Dan Oakes for breaking the Afghan Files story, but in October 2020, the CDPP dropped the case."
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"2020s
In June 2020 the ABC announced it needed to cut 229 jobs, a number of programs, and reduce its travel and production budgets after the Turnbull government's announcement of a freeze to indexation of its budget in 2018 this was estimated at the time to cost the ABC A$84 million over three years, however the actual appropriation did not decrease and the ABC chair was quoted as saying it would actually increase ""but by a reduced amount"".
In all, over a five-year period, there were 737 redundancies, a further 866 resignations, and 203 retirements; but the total number of staff only fell by 313 due to the ABC hiring 650 staff over that period.
In June 2021 the ABC announced its plan to move around 300 staff to offices in Parramatta, in a plan which would see 75% of journalists and producers moving out of the Ultimo building by 2025 to reduce costs. Rental from some of the vacant space in the city centre would earn additional income to offset the ongoing effects of the significant funding cuts since 2014 and the recent indexation freeze.
In December 2021 the ABC announced that, in addition to the 83 additional positions already established, it was to create an additional ""50-plus"" new jobs in regional Australia as a result of commercial agreements with digital platforms flowing from the Morrison government's News Media Bargaining Code.
In May 2024 the ABC started moving from its Ultimo office to a new Parramatta office. The first program to be broadcast from the new studio in Parramatta was ABC Radio Sydney Mornings."
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"Lissajous curve logo
The ABC logo is one of the most recognisable logos in Australia. In the early years of television, the ABC had been using Lissajous curves as fillers between programmes. In July 1963, the ABC conducted a staff competition to create a new logo for use on television, stationery, publications, microphone badges and ABC vehicles. In 1965, ABC graphics designer Bill Kennard submitted a design representing a Lissajous display, as generated when a sine wave signal is applied to the ""X"" input of an oscilloscope and another at three times the frequency at the ""Y"" input. The letters ""ABC"" were added to the design and it was adopted as the ABC's official logo. Kennard was presented with £25 (about AU$715 in 2021) for his design.
On 19 October 1974 the Lissajous curve design experienced its first facelift with the line thickened to allow for colour to be used. It would also be treated to the 'over and under' effect, showing the crossover of the line in the design. To celebrate its 70th anniversary on 1 July 2002, the ABC adopted a new logo, which was created by (Annette) Harcus Design in 2001. This logo used a silver 3D texture but the crossover design was left intact and was then used across the ABC's media outlets. After the on-air revival of the 1974 logo since 2014, the ABC gradually reinstated the classic symbol. The most recent change happened in February 2018, with a new logotype and brand positioning under its tagline, Yours. The 2002 silver logo is no longer in use by the corporation."
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"Governance and structure
The operations of the ABC are governed by a board of directors, consisting of a managing director, five to seven directors, and until 2006, a staff-elected director. The managing director is appointed by the board for a period of up to five years, but is eligible for renewal. The authority and guidelines for the appointment of directors is provided for in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Act 1983.
Appointments to the ABC Board made by successive governments have often resulted in criticism of the appointees' political affiliation, background, and relative merit. Past appointments have associated directly with political parties – five of fourteen appointed chairmen have been accused of political affiliation or friendship, include Richard Downing and Ken Myer (both of whom publicly endorsed the Australian Labor Party at the 1972 election), as well as Sir Henry Bland. David Hill was close to Neville Wran, while Donald McDonald was considered to be a close friend of John Howard.
From 2003 the Howard government made several controversial appointments to the ABC Board, including prominent ABC critic Janet Albrechtsen, Ron Brunton, and Keith Windschuttle.
During their 2007 federal election campaign Labor announced plans to introduce a new system, similar to that of the BBC, for appointing members to the board. Under the new system, candidates for the ABC Board would be considered by an independent panel established ""at arm's length"" from the Communications Minister. If the minister chose someone not on the panel's shortlist, they would be required to justify this to parliament. The ABC chairman would be nominated by the prime minister and endorsed by the leader of the opposition.
A new merit-based appointment system was announced on 16 October 2008, in advance of the new triennial funding period starting in 2009.
In 2013 the Coalition government introduced a merit-based system for appointing the board based on the recommendations of a nominations panel. However, the panel was ultimately only advisory, with almost all of the board members in 2018 directly appointed by the Communications minister, despite some being rejected by the panel or not being considered at all.
As of March 2024 board members are:"
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"As of July 2020 there were 3,730 employees, down from 4,649 in 2019."
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"Funding
The ABC is primarily funded by the Australian government, in addition to some revenue received from commercial offerings and its retail outlets. The ABC's funding system is set and reviewed every three years.
Until 1948 the ABC was funded directly by radio licence fees; amendments were also made to the Australian Broadcasting Act that meant the ABC would receive its funding directly from the federal government. Licence fees remained until 1973, when they were abolished by the Whitlam Labor government, on the basis that the near-universality of television and radio services meant that public funding was a fairer method of providing revenue for government-owned radio and television broadcasters.
In 2014 the ABC absorbed $254 million in federal budget deficits.
In the 2018–19 budget handed down by then-Treasurer Scott Morrison, the ABC was subject to a pause of indexation of operation funding, saving the federal government a total of $83.7 million over 3 years. In fiscal year 2016–17, the ABC received $861 million in federal funding, which increased to $865 million per year from 2017 to 2018 to 2018–19, representing a cut in funding of $43 million over three years when accounting for inflation. In the 2019–20 federal budget funding was around $3.2 billion over three years ($1.06 billion per year) for the ABC. The Enhanced Newsgathering Fund, a specialised fund for regional and outer-suburban news gathering set up in 2013 by the Gillard government, was $44 million over three years as of the 2019–20 budget, a reduction of $28 million per year since the 2016 Australian federal election. This came after speculation that the fund would be removed, to which ABC Acting managing director David Anderson wrote to Communications Minister Mitch Fifield expressing concerns.
Butdespite the cuts made by Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull and the freeze introduced by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Communications Minister Mitch Fifield, the ABC itself has published financial data that shows an increase in the taxpayer appropriation to the ABC of 10% in real terms (i.e. above inflation) between 1998 and 2021.
In 2023, fulfilling one of Labor's election pledges, the ABC moved into a five instead of three-year funding term.
The term ""where your 8 cents a day goes"", coined in the late 1980s during funding negotiations, is often used in reference to the services provided by the ABC. It was estimated that the cost of the ABC per head of population per day was 7.1 cents a day, based on the corporation's 2007–08 ""base funding"" of A$543 million."
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"Services
Radio
The ABC operates 54 local radio stations, in addition to four national networks and international service Radio Australia. In addition, DiG Radio (rebranded as Double J in 2014) launched on digital platforms in 2002, and later spinning off ABC Country and ABC Jazz.
ABC Local Radio is the corporation's flagship radio station in each broadcast area. There are 54 individual stations, each with a similar format consisting of locally presented light entertainment, news, talk back, music, sport and interviews, in addition to some national programming such as AM, PM, The World Today, sporting events and Nightlife.
As of June 2021 the ABC operates 15 radio networks, variously available on AM and FM as well as on digital platforms and the internet."
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"Radio National – A generalist station, also known as RN, broadcasting more than 60 special interest programmes per week covering a range of topics including music, comedy, book readings, radio dramas, poetry, science, health, the arts, religion, social history and current affairs.
ABC NewsRadio – A news based service, also known as ABC News on Radio, broadcasting federal parliamentary sittings and news on a 24/7 format with updates on the quarter-hour. Broadcast's news content produced by the ABC itself, as well as programmes relayed from ABC Radio Australia, the BBC World Service, NPR, Deutsche Welle, Radio Netherlands and CNN Radio.
ABC Classic – A classical music based station, formerly known as ABC Classic FM. It also plays some jazz and world music. ABC Classic was the ABC's first FM radio service. It was originally known simply as ""ABC FM"", and for a short time ""ABC Fine Music"".
Triple J – A youth-oriented radio network, with a strong focus on alternative and independent music (especially Australian artists); it is targeted at people aged 18–35.
The ABC also operates several stations only available online and on digital platforms:"
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"ABC Classic 2 – a sister station to ABC Classic, focussing on performances by Australian artists. Only available on streaming platforms.
Double J – a Triple J sister station, focussed on an older audience to Triple J.
Triple J Unearthed – a Triple J sister station, playing unsigned and independent Australian talent.
Triple j Hottest – a Triple J sister station, playing tracks from the past 30 years of Triple J Hottest 100 countdowns.
ABC Jazz – A station exclusively dedicated to Jazz from Australia and the world.
ABC Country – An exclusively country music station, mainly focussing on Australian country music.
ABC Grandstand – Since November 2020 merged to ABC Sport.
ABC Extra – A temporary special events station.
ABC Kids – Children's based programming, and a sister station to the ABC Kids television channel.
There is also ABC Radio Australia, the international radio station of the ABC (see below)."
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"ABC Listen app
The ABC Radio app was launched in 2012. This was replaced by the ABC Listen app in September 2017, which included 45 ABC radio stations and audio networks."
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"Television
The ABC operates five national television channels:"
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"ABC TV (formerly ABC1 from 2008 to 2014), the corporation's original television service, receives the bulk of funding for television and shows first-run comedy, drama, documentaries, and news and current affairs. In each state and territory a local news bulletin is shown at 7 pm nightly.
ABC Family (formerly ABC2 and ABC Comedy and ABC TV Plus), launched in 2005, shows comedic content in addition to some repeats from ABC TV of which the amount has decreased gradually since ABC TV Plus's inception. It is not a 24-hour channel, but is broadcast daily from 7:30 pm to around 3 am the following night. The channel shares airspace with the ABC Kids programming block from 5 am to 7:30 pm.
ABC Entertains (originally ABC3 and ABC Me) became a fully fledged channel on 4 December 2009, but has been part of the electronic guide line-up since 2008, broadcasting an ABC1 simulcast until 4 December 2009, then an ABC Radio simulcast and teaser graphic until its official launch. It is broadcast from 6 am to around 10 pm on weekdays and 6 am to 2 am the next day on weekends, and consists of a broad range programmes aimed at a young audience aged 6–15, with a core demographic of 8–12.
ABC Kids (formerly ABC For Kids on 2 and ABC 4 Kids) is a preschool children's block featuring children's programming aimed at the 0 to 5 age groups. ABC Kids broadcasts during ABC Family downtime, from 4 am to 7:30 pm daily.
ABC News (originally ABC News 24), a 24-hour news channel, featuring the programming from ABC News and Current Affairs, selected programs from the BBC World News channel, coverage of the Federal Parliament's Question Time, documentaries and factual, arts programming and state or national election coverage.
Although the ABC's headquarters in Sydney serve as a base for program distribution nationally, ABC Television network is composed of eight state and territory based stations, each based in their respective state capital and augmented by repeaters:"
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"The eight ABC stations carry opt outs for local programming. In addition to the nightly 7 pm news, the stations also broadcast weekly state editions of 7.30 on Friday evenings (until 5 December 2014), state election coverage and in most areas, live sport on Saturday afternoons.
There is also ABC Australia, the international TV service of the ABC (see below)."
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"Online and digital
ABC Online is the name given to the online services of the ABC, which have evolved to cover a large network of websites including those for ABC News, its various television channels, ABC radio; podcasts; SMS, mobile apps and other mobile phone services; vodcasts and video-on-demand through ABC iView.
The official launch of ABC Online, then part of the ABC's Multimedia Unit, was on 14 August 1995, charged with developing policy for the ABC's work in web publishing. At first it relied upon funding allocation to the corporation's TV and radio operations, but later began to receive its own. The ABC provided live, online election coverage for the first time in 1996, and limited news content began to be provided in 1997. This unit continued until 2000, when the New Media division was formed, bringing together the ABC's online output as a division similar to television or radio. In 2001 the New Media division became New Media and Digital Services, reflecting the broader remit to develop content for digital platforms such as digital television, becoming an ""output division"" similar to Television or Radio. In addition to ABC Online, the division also had responsibility over the ABC's two digital television services, Fly TV and the ABC Kids channel, until their closure in 2003.
ABC TV Plus, a digital-only free-to-air television channel, launched on 7 March 2005, as ABC2. Unlike its predecessors the new service was not dependent on government funding, instead running on a budget of A$3 million per year. Minister for Communications Helen Coonan inaugurated the channel at Parliament House three days later. Genre restrictions limiting the types of programming the channel could carry were lifted in October 2006 – ABC TV Plus (then ABC2) was henceforth able to carry programming classified as comedy, drama, national news, sport, and entertainment.
In conjunction with the ABC's radio division, New Media and Digital Services implemented the ABC's first podcasts in December 2004. By mid-2006 the ABC had become an international leader in podcasting with over fifty podcast programmes delivering hundreds of thousands of downloads per week, including trial video podcasts of The Chaser's War on Everything and jtv.
In February 2007 the New Media & Digital Services division was dissolved and divided up among other areas of the ABC. It was replaced by a new Innovation division, to manage ABC Online and investigate new technologies for the ABC.
In 2008 Crikey reported that certain ABC Online mobile sites in development were planned to carry commercial advertising. Screenshots, developed in-house, of an ABC Radio Grandstand sport page include advertising for two private companies. Media Watch later revealed that the websites were to be operated by ABC Commercial and distinguished from the main, advertising-free, mobile website by a distinct logo.
In 2015 the Innovation Division was replaced with the Digital Network Division. Angela Clark was head from 2012 until at least the end of financial year 2015/6, but by 2017 she was gone, and the Digital Network fell into the Technology division under the Chief Technology Officer.
In May 2017 Helen Clifton was appointed to the new role of Chief Digital and Information Officer. She retired from this role in 2022
In December 2019 a refreshed ABC homepage was launched. ABC News is one of Australia's largest and most-visited web sites; from its position as 11th most popular in the country in 2008, in recent years up to 2021 it has maintained its top position in the rankings.
In June 2023 the broadcaster released its five-year plan, outlining that it would move its resources away from radio and television, and instead dedicate these resources to improving and promoting its digital platforms."
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"International
ABC International is responsible for its international operations, which include the internationally broadcast Radio Australia, the Asia-Pacific TV channel ABC Australia, and its ABC International Development (ABCID) branch.
In June 2012 Lynley Marshall, former head of ABC Commercial, was appointed CEO of ABC International, filling a role left empty by the retirement of Murray Green. At the time, it was intended that Radio Australia, ABC Australia and ABC News would work together more closely ABC International was at this time a division of the ABC, but it has not been represented as a separate division in the organisational structure of the ABC since 2016, after Marshall's departure in February 2017.
There were fears of job losses in the division after the huge budget cuts in 2014, as well as an earlier termination of a A$220 million contract with the Department of Foreign Affairs, one year into the 10-year contract.
On 24 May 2021 Claire Gorman was appointed to an expanded role to manage both the International Strategy and the International Development teams.
ABC Australia is an international satellite television service operated by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, funded by advertising and grants from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Aimed at the Asia-Pacific region, the service broadcasts a mixture of English language programming, including general entertainment, sport, and current affairs.
Radio Australia is an international satellite and internet radio service with transmissions aimed at South-East Asia and the Pacific Islands, although its signals are also audible in many other parts of the world. It features programmes in various languages spoken in these regions, including Mandarin, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Khmer and Tok Pisin. Before 31 January 2017 Radio Australia broadcast short-wave radio signals. Radio Australia bulletins are also carried on WRN Broadcast, available via satellite in Europe and North America.
ABC International Development, or ABCID, is a media development unit that promotes public interest journalism and connects with local media in the region. ABCID employs local people in Papua New Guinea and many Pacific countries. The team ""provides expertise, training, technical and program support to partner organisations"", by working with a variety of organisations, including international development donors, for example through the Pacific Media Assistance Scheme (PACMAS)."
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"Independence and impartiality
Under the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Act 1983, the ABC Board is bound to ""maintain the independence and integrity of the Corporation"" and to ensure that ""the gathering and presentation by the Corporation of news and information is accurate and impartial according to the recognized standards of objective journalism"".
The ABC's editorial policy on impartiality requires it to take ""no editorial stance other than its commitment to fundamental democratic principles including the rule of law, freedom of speech and religion, parliamentary democracy and non-discrimination"". The ABC follows the following ""hallmarks of impartiality"": ""a balance that follows the weight of evidence, fair treatment, open-mindedness and opportunities over time for principal relevant perspectives on matters of contention to be expressed"".
The editorial policy on diversity also requires the broadcaster ""to present, over time, content that addresses a broad range of subjects from a diversity of perspectives reflecting a diversity of experiences, presented in a diversity of ways from a diversity of sources"". However, it also notes that this ""does not require that every perspective receives equal time, nor that every facet of every argument is presented""."
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"ABC Commercial
The commercial arm of the ABC was established in 1974 under the name Enterprises as a self-funding unit, marketing products relating to the ABC's activities. It was renamed in 2007 to ABC Commercial, The aim of ABC Commercial was ""to create, market and retail high quality consumer products which reflect and extend the scope of the ABC's activities"". At this time it comprised the ABC Shop, ABC Consumer Publishing and Content Sales, ABC Resource Hire, and ABC Content Services (Archives).
ABC Commercial was registered as a business name under Australian Broadcasting Corporation in April 2007 and continues to exist as of June 2021. It includes ABC Music, a leading independent record label; ABC Events, which stages concerts and other events; and publishing and licensing activities by ABC Books, ABC Audio, ABC Magazines and ABC Licensing.
ABC Shop Online was wound up at the end of 2018, along with the in-store ABC Centres. In early 2019, ABC Commercial split from the Finance division and became an independent business unit of the ABC.
In the financial year 2018–2019, ABC Commercial turned a profit of A$4.4 million, which was invested in content production.
The ABC Studios and Media Production hires out some of the ABC studios and sound stages, operating as part of ABC Commercial. The studios for hire are in Sydney (Studios 21, 22, 16), Melbourne (31), Adelaide (51B) and Perth (61)."
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"Orchestras
Up until the installation of disc recording equipment in 1935, all content broadcast on the ABC was produced live, including music. For this purpose the ABC established broadcasting orchestras in each state, and in some centres also employed choruses and dance bands. This became known as the ABC Concert Music Division, which was controlled by the Federal Director of Music – the first of whom was W. G. James.
In 1997 the ABC divested all ABC orchestras from the Concerts Department of the ABC into separate subsidiary companies, allied to a service company known as Symphony Australia, and on 1 January 2007 the orchestras were divested into independent companies. The six state orchestras are:"
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"Adelaide Symphony Orchestra
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
Queensland Symphony Orchestra
Sydney Symphony Orchestra
Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra
West Australian Symphony Orchestra"
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"ABC Friends
ABC Friends, formerly Friends of the ABC (FABC), consists of independent organisations in each state and territory, under an umbrella organisation established in December 2016, ABC Friends National Inc. In 1976 three independent groups were formed: Aunty's Nieces and Nephews in Melbourne, Friends of the ABC (NSW) Inc. (now ABC Friends NSW & ACT) and Friends of the ABC (SA) (since 2007/2008, ABC Friends SA/NT). The groups were formed by citizens who were concerned about government threats to make deep cuts to the ABC's budget. Historian Ken Inglis wrote that ""The Friends were in the line of those people who had affirmed over the years that the ABC was essential to the nation"". Over the years, independent state organisations were established, run by committees, and in January 2014 the name of each was changed to ABC Friends."
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"The objectives of ABC Friends National are stated as follows:To represent community interest in defending and promoting the vital role of Australia's independent national public broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) to ensure:
that the ABC be properly funded to maintain and advance its role as the national public broadcaster in all media, promoting and reflecting Australian culture and diversity
that it remain editorially independent of government and commercial interests."
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"Controversies
Defamation
In 2023 the ABC lost a defamation case against Heston Russell, where the corporation withdrew a truth defence and opted for the case to be heard under a public interest defence.
In the landmark ruling Justice Lee awarded Russell $390,000 in addition to interest and damages. Estimates of legal expenses ranged between $1.2 million and $3 million. The broadcaster did not take up an earlier settlement offer of $99,000 and removal of the published articles. The ABC managing director, David Anderson, who took home a six-figure pay rise shortly after the defamation case loss, outlined in senate estimates that he would not apologise to Russell for the false reporting.
Recordings of Mark Willacy's interviews that formed part of the defamation case were garnished as part of the legal discovery process. They were made available to Ben Fordham's 2GB radio program.
In December 2023 Antoinette Lattouf was hired for five days to fill in for Sarah Macdonald on ABC Radio Sydney and then sacked three days later due to her outspoken activism on the Israel-Gaza conflict by reposting a Human Rights Watch story covering alleged actions taken by Israeli soldiers in Gaza. Two days later Lattouf initiated law action with the Fair Work Commission against the ABC for alleged racial discrimination. ABC members of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance voted no confidence in Anderson partly due to WhatsApp messages that had come to light from a pro-Israel lobby group known as ""Lawyers for Israel"". The next day the ABC Board voted unanimous confidence in Anderson."
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"Perceived bias
External critics have complained in particular of left-wing political bias at the broadcaster, citing a prominence of Labor Party-connected journalists hosting masthead political programs or a tendency to favour ""progressive"" over ""conservative"" political views on issues such as immigration, asylum seekers, the republic, multiculturalism, Indigenous reconciliation, feminism, environmentalism, and same-sex marriage.
In December 2013 former judge and ABC chair James Spigelman announced that four independent audits would be conducted each year in response to the allegations of bias in the reporting of news and current affairs. ABC Friends have observed that: ""Most of the complaints about bias in the ABC have come from the government of the day – Labor or Liberal. Significantly both parties have been far less hostile to the ABC when in opposition""."
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"Reviews and investigations
Reviews of the ABC are regularly commissioned and sometimes not released.
Both internal and external research has been conducted on the question of bias at the ABC. These include the following:"
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"A 2004 Roy Morgan media credibility survey found that journalists regarded ABC Radio as the most accurate news source in the country and the ABC as the second ""most politically biased media organisation in Australia"".
A 2013 University of the Sunshine Coast study of the voting intentions of journalists found that 73.6% of ABC journalists supported Labor or the Greens – with 41% supporting the Greens (whereas only around 10% of people in the general population voted Green).
At the 2016 federal election, a study commissioned by the ABC and conducted by Isentia compiled share-of-voice data and found that the ABC devoted 42.6% of election coverage to the Coalition government (this compares to the 42.04% vote received by the Coalition in the House of Representatives (HOR)), 35.9% to the Labor opposition (34.73% HOR), 8% to the Greens(10.23% HOR), 3.1% to independents (1.85% HOR), 2.2% to the Nick Xenophon Team (1.85% HOR) and 8.1% to the rest. However, the ABC itself notes the ""significant limitations around the value of share of voice data"" as ""duration says nothing about tone or context"".
In December 2020, the Board commissioned its 19th editorial review by an independent reviewer, which found that the ABC's news coverage of lead-up to the 2019 Australian election was ""overwhelmingly positive and unbiased"", although it also found that specific episodes of The Drum and Insiders reflected too narrow a range of viewpoints. The government forced the publication of the report after Coalition senator James McGrath raised a motion in the Senate, which led to ABC Chair Ita Buttrose and managing director David Anderson writing to the president of the Senate, Scott Ryan, to express their concerns about the use of the such powers, which went against the public interest."
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"Relationships with government
Labor prime minister Bob Hawke considered the ABC's coverage of the 1991 Gulf War to be biased. In 1996, conservative opposition leader John Howard refused to have Kerry O'Brien of the ABC moderate the television debates with Labor prime minister Paul Keating because Howard saw O'Brien as biased against the Coalition.
Liberal Prime Minister Tony Abbott perceived the ABC to be left wing and hostile to his government, while Malcolm Turnbull enjoyed better relations with the national broadcaster. Turnbull's successor, Scott Morrison, once again presided over ""strained"" relations between the government and the ABC. Under Morrison's leadership, an investigation was launched into the ABC and its complaints-handling process—a decision which was criticised by Ita Buttrose as ""political interference"". The inquiry was abandoned the following June."
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"Specific topics
The Catholic Church and George Pell
The ABC's coverage of the issue of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church received praise and criticism. The Melbourne Press Club presented the 2016 Quill for Coverage of an Issue or Event for the report George Pell and Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church, and the 2016 Golden Quill award to Louise Milligan and Andy Burns for their extensive coverage of Cardinal George Pell's evidence given at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
The ABC Media Watch program of 20 April 2020 noted that the ABC had been accused of leading a ""witch hunt"" against Cardinal Pell. Media Watch reported that, following his acquittal, Pell said the ABC gave an ""overwhelming presentation of one view and only one view"". Media Watch also canvassed other criticisms including from The Australian newspaper's editor-at-large Paul Kelly, who charged the ABC with having run a ""sustained campaign against Pell"". Media Watch also offered criticism of its own, noting Louise Milligan and the Four Corners program had failed to canvass any of Pell's defence from the trial and ""lined up witnesses condemning Pell"", while social media commentary by Barrie Cassidy and Quentin Dempster had undermined the presumption of innocence. Margaret Simons similarly noted in The Guardian that ""there has been some social media activity by ABC journalists that looks very much like lobbying against Pell..."""
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"Environmentalism
Planet Slayer was an ABC website run by scientist Bernie Hobbs to teach children about the environment in around 2008/9. It included a ""Greenhouse Calculator"" which aimed to help children to work out their carbon footprint by providing an estimate of the age a person needs to die if they are not to use more than their fair share of the Earth's resources. Victorian Liberal senator Mitch Fifield criticised a cartoon series on the site for portraying those who eat meat, loggers, and workers in the nuclear industry as ""evil"". ABC managing director Mark Scott said the site was not designed to offend anyone, but instead have children think about environmental issues."
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"See also
History of broadcasting in Australia
Timeline of Australian radio"
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"Notes
References
Further reading
Cater, Nick The Lucky Culture and the Rise of an Australian Ruling Class  (2013) pp 199–228
Curgenven, Geoffrey. Dick Boyer, an Australian humanist (Bolton, 1967) (Dick Boyer was chair of the ABC Board from 1940 until his death in 1961.)
Inglis, K. S. This is the ABC – the Australian Broadcasting Commission 1932 – 1983 (2006)
Inglis, K. S. Whose ABC? The Australian Broadcasting Corporation 1983–2006 (2006)
Moran, Albert, and Chris Keating. The A to Z of Australian Radio and Television (Scarecrow Press, 2009)
Semmler, Clement. The ABC: Aunt Sally and Sacred Cow (1981)"
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,External links
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,"Official website
Australian Broadcasting Corporation Act 1983"
Reserve Bank of Australia,"The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) is Australia's central bank and banknote issuing authority. It has had this role since 14 January 1960, when the Reserve Bank Act 1959 removed the central banking functions from the Commonwealth Bank.
The bank's main policy role is to control inflation levels within a target range of 2–3%, by controlling the unemployment rate according to the 'non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment' (NAIRU) by controlling the official cash rate. The NAIRU was implemented in most western nations after 1975, and has been maintained at a target of 5–6% unemployment. The average unemployment rate in Australia between the end of the Second World War and the implementation of the NAIRU was consistently between 1 and 2%. Since the implementation of the NAIRU, the average unemployment rate in Australia has been close to 6%.
The RBA also provides services to the Government of Australia and services to other central banks and official institutions. The RBA currently comprises the Payments System Board, which sets the payment system policy of the bank, and the Reserve Bank Board, which sets all other monetary and banking policies of the bank.
Both boards consist of members of the bank, the Treasury, other Australian government agencies, and leaders of other institutions that are part of the Australian economy. The structure of the Reserve Bank Board has remained consistent ever since 1951, with the exception of the change in the number of members of the board. The governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia is appointed by the Treasurer and chairs both the Payment Systems and Reserve Bank Boards and when there are disagreements between both boards, the governor resolves them."
Reserve Bank of Australia,"Roles and responsibilities
The Reserve Bank is currently governed by the Reserve Bank Act 1959. The Reserve Bank Board's duty set out in the Act, within its outlined boundaries, is to ensure that the bank's monetary and banking policy is used to help the Australian population. This should be accomplished through both consultation with the government and the Reserve Bank Board's opinion that its powers are used to help with:"
Reserve Bank of Australia,"In practice the Reserve Bank concentrates on the first objective, that is to control inflation through monetary policy. The current objective is a policy of inflation targeting aimed at maintaining the annual inflation rate at between ""2–3 per cent, on average, over the cycle"". This target was first set in 1993 by the then Reserve Bank Governor Bernie Fraser and was then formalised in 1996 by the then Treasurer Peter Costello and incoming Reserve Bank Governor Ian Mcfarlane.
The Reserve Bank gives banking and registry services to agencies of the government, to other central banks, and other official institutions. The assets of the bank include the gold and foreign exchange reserves of Australia, which is estimated to have a net worth of A$101 billion.
Nearly 94% of the RBA's employees work at its headquarters and at the Business Resumption Site, both in Sydney. The remainder of the total of 926 staff work in Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, Perth, London and New York City. A wholly owned subsidiary of the bank is Note Printing Australia, which employs 257 other workers, and which manufactures the Australian dollar and other securities, for markets both in and outside of Australia.
The Payments System Board fills the role of deciding on the bank's payments system policy and the Reserve Bank Board is responsible for all other monetary and banking policies of the bank. Conflicts between the two boards do not occur often, and when they do, they are resolved by the governor."
Reserve Bank of Australia,"Governors and their roles
The Reserve Bank governor is the most senior position in the RBA. The governor is appointed for a term of up to seven years by the Treasurer and is eligible to be reappointed at the end of their term. The governor is the chairman of both the Payment Systems Board and the Reserve Bank Board and resolves any disputes that occur between the two boards.
The governor of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia was both an ex officio member of the Notes Board from 1920 to 1924 and of the eight directors of the Commonwealth Bank from 1924 to 1945. The Commonwealth Bank and Bank Acts in 1945 stated the governor's responsibilities of managing the CBA. In 1951, legislation established a 10-member board of which the CBA governor was a member. The CBA has maintained a similar structure since 1951.
The RBA governor is required by the Reserve Bank Act 1959 to keep in contact with the Treasury Secretary on matters concerning both the Treasury and Reserve Bank and vice versa. It also mandates that the RBA board inform the government of the bank's monetary and banking policy, which is often accomplished through the governor's meetings with the Treasurer. Since 1996, the governor and other senior members of the RBA have appeared twice annually before the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics to explain the conduct of the bank."
Reserve Bank of Australia,"List of Governors of the CBA and RBA
The longest-serving governor, if his service to both the Commonwealth Bank and the Reserve Bank of Australia are included, is H.C. Coombs, who served nineteen years and six months combined. He is regarded by some as one of the most committed anti-inflationists in government throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The longest-serving Commonwealth Bank governor is Sir Ernest Riddle, who served eleven years and four months, while the longest-serving Reserve Bank governor is Ian Macfarlane, who served ten years. The shortest-serving governor by many years is James Kell, who served 2 years for the Commonwealth Bank.
In July 2023, the RBA announced the appointment of Michele Bullock as its new Governor, taking up the role in September 2023. This made Bullock the RBA's first female Governor."
Reserve Bank of Australia,"Reserve Bank Board
The Reserve Bank Board consists of nine members, including three ex officio members: the Governor of the Reserve Bank, who is Chair of the Board; the Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank, who is the Deputy Chair of the Board; and the Secretary to the Treasury.
The board also has six external members who are appointed by the Treasurer for five years. According to section 17(1) of the Reserve Bank Act, members of the board are not allowed to be a director, officer, or employee of an institution that is authorised to take in deposits. Excluding changes in the number of members, the structure of the board has remained unchanged since 1951.
The current members of the board are:"
Reserve Bank of Australia,"The board normally meets eleven times each year, on the first Tuesday of each month except January. Board meetings are usually held at the Reserve Bank's Head Office in Sydney. Meetings are held in two other Australian cities each year. Five members of the board must meet in order to constitute a quorum, and the meeting must be chaired by the governor, or the deputy governor in his absence.
The board usually forms a consensus without a need for structured voting on the issues at hand. Meetings of the board are held in the boardroom of the Reserve Bank's Head Office in Sydney or a similar facility in one of the bank's State Offices when meetings are held interstate (a secure location is used in Australian cities where the bank does not have its own premises). The meetings begin at 9:00 am and continue for three-and-a-half hours, with minutes published two weeks after the meeting is held."
Reserve Bank of Australia,"Payments System Board and Australian Competition & Consumer Commission
The Reserve Bank Act 1959 authorises the Payments System Board to decide the Reserve Bank's payments system policy. This is done so it can control risk, promote efficiency and to aid in competitiveness and balance in the financial system. The bank's power through the Payment Systems Act 1998 allows it to regulate any payment system and can create binding rules for security and performance in the system. If members of a payment system are at odds over issues of market risk, admission, safety and rivalry, the RBA can additionally administer arbitration with the consent of those involved. The RBA is also permitted to gather information from a payment system or participants thereof. The bank can also regulate the competition of transactions since August 2001.
The Payment Systems and Netting Act 1998 gives the board power in areas of the law that were previously uncertain. It removed the zero-hour rule that allowed a bankruptcy to date a bankruptcy the previous midnight and the Act made it so payments the same day could not be undone. Before the removal of the zero-hour rule, the real-time gross settlement system had been violated because payments in the system should inherently not be reversed. Some payments systems had previously agreed to pay and receive obligations to the whole system, rather than merely maintaining their own. But in the event of a bankruptcy, the bankrupt institution did not pay what it owed back to the solvent parties, while they had to pay their dues to the failed bank. This was later changed, when cheques were deemed void if the bankrupt institution does not have the funds to back them up, after the Cheques Act 1986 was amended in 1998. The Trade Practices Act 1974 generally does not allow competitors to make cooperative agreements, but the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) is permitted to make exceptions for competitors making agreements among themselves. The ACCC and the Payments Systems Board are encouraged to work together regarding access and rivalry through the Payment Systems (Regulation) Act 1998.
Members of the Payments System Board are defined by Section 25A of the Reserve Bank Act 1959, with three of the members being ex officio or representatives of another organisation. The governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia is the Chairman of the Payments System Board, there is one representative of the RBA, and there is one representative of the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA). In addition, there are up to five other members of the board who are appointed by the Treasurer for a term of up to five years. The board meet once per quarter, usually in Sydney with five members forming a quorum, which must be chaired by the Governor or, in his or her absence, the Deputy Chair. The Chairman meets with the Chairman of the ACCC at least once annually on issues of interest to both parties in the payments system, in addition to members of both organisations consulting over issues that are mutually important.
The current members of the Payments System Board are:"
Reserve Bank of Australia,"History
From the middle of the 19th century into the 1890s, the prospects for the forming of a central bank grew. In 1911, the Commonwealth Bank was established, but did not have the authority to print notes, which function was still that of the Treasury. A movement toward re-establishing the gold standard occurred after World War I (1914–1918) with John Garvan leading various boards in contracting the money supply on the route to doing so, and the gold standard was instituted for both the British pound sterling and the Australian pound in 1925.
During the Great Depression, the Australian pound became devalued, no longer worth the same as the pound sterling, and formally departed from the gold standard with the Commonwealth Bank Act of 1932. Legislation in 1945 led to regulation of private banks which Herbert Coombs was opposed to, and when he became governor in 1949, he gave them more overall control over their institutions. When the monetary authorities implemented the advice of Coombs to have a flexible interest rate, it allowed the bank to rely more on open market operations. In 1980 the issue of short-term government bonds—Treasury notes of 13 and 26 weeks' duration—changed from a tap system, in which the price was set, to a tender system in which the volume of stock was set and the price determined by the market. Soon afterwards the tender system was extended to the issue of longer-term government bonds.
The float of the Australian dollar happened in 1983, around the same period of time that the financial system in Australia was deregulated. Administration of the banks was transferred in 1998 from the bank to the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority and the Payments System Board was created, while the bank was given power within the board in the same year. The current governor of the Reserve Bank is Michele Bullock, who succeeded Philip Lowe as governor on 18 September 2023.
In May 2022, the bank increased the nation's interest rates for the first time in more than a decade. This move was designed to combat high rates of inflation. The move generated considerable discussion, as it was taken during a federal election campaign that was heavily focused on increased costs of living."
Reserve Bank of Australia,"Mid-19th century–1924
Proposals for a national bank in Australia were first raised in the mid-19th century, and got a significant boost in the 1890s as a result of the Australian banking crisis of 1893 during which many commercial banks and building societies collapsed, leading to a general economic depression. The Australian Labor Party, formed during this period, proposed a bank which would be a protected and cheap way of providing financial services. The party's platform for the 1908 election was for a ""Commonwealth Bank"", which would have both commercial and central bank functions.
Regardless, Fisher's Labor government established the Commonwealth Bank by the Commonwealth Bank Act 1911, which came into effect on 22 December 1911. The new bank was a government-owned commercial bank, without any central bank functions. He stated that ""Time and experience will show how its functions for usefulness may be extended [towards central banking]."" The only function at the time that made the bank characteristic of a central one was that it was the banker to the Australian government, in addition to it being the same for the states. At the time, the Treasury of Australia maintained the role of issuing bank notes through the Australian Notes Act 1910. The bank was also the first bank in Australia to receive a federal government guarantee. 
The Commonwealth Bank gradually acquired central bank functions. In response to the disruption of trade during World War I it was given responsibility to manage the Australian government debt. Nevertheless, at the end of the war, the bank's primary role was as a savings and trading bank. In the war, to fund the great increase in government spending, the currency of Australia went off the gold standard, as did those of the United Kingdom and other parts of the British Empire.
The Australian pound remained tied to the pound sterling. Inflation in Australia thus increased, less than in Britain, but more than in the United States. The case for a central bank was increased by the need for the government to cut spending after the war to reduce its debt. Commonwealth Bank Governor Denison Miller had been arguing for the issue of Australian currency to be switched from the treasury to the bank, as it had more staff and more monetary knowledge.
The Australian Notes Board (ANB) was created in 1920 and partially acceded to Miller's request, in having four directors, with the governor of the bank being an ex officio member. The ANB began to follow a policy of board member John Garvan, in contracting the money supply, with the goal of reducing prices so that free convertibility of the Australian pound to gold could be re-established at pre-war rates, that is return to the former gold standard.
This was accomplished by refusing the exchange of notes for gold and it was hoped that this would lower domestic prices and raise the exchange rate for the Australian pound. When gold arrived from New York the government sold securities to diminish the effect of monetary expansion, therefore executing the first open market operations in the history of Australia and thus the first attempt of central banking."
Reserve Bank of Australia,"1924–present
The Australian Notes Board (ANB) was created in 1920, within the Department of Treasury, which issued notes until 1924, when this function was transferred to the Commonwealth Bank. The ANB was abolished by the Commonwealth Bank Act 1924. 
The Treasurer and Country Party Leader Earle Page wanted to end the monetary contraction which particularly hurt his farming constituents, who were as a result receiving reduced export prices. The new board of directors replacing it, which was composed of various areas of the industry, soon appointed Garvan chairman, and thus he continued his policies. In 1925, both the pound sterling and Australian pound returned to the pre-war gold standard. The primary role of the Commonwealth Bank continued to be a savings and trading bank, even though the government attempted to make the bank into a central bank through its actions in 1924.
Legislation was introduced to the Parliament at the height of the Great Depression, in May 1930, by Treasurer E.G. Theodore, to transfer central banking powers from the Commonwealth Bank to a new central bank, but this failed. The Australian pound was devalued in 1931 and it ceased to be tied to the pound sterling. The Reserve Bank departed from the gold standard with the Commonwealth Bank Act 1932, which made the notes no longer exchangeable into gold and allowed the bank not to keep any gold reserves. The monetary policy of the bank from 1931 until the early 1970s had been to maintain a stable exchange rate with the pound sterling.
Through the new Commonwealth Bank Act and the Banking Act 1945, the board was replaced by a six-member council, consisting of bank and treasury officials. It additionally formalised the bank's administrative powers of monetary and banking policy and exchange control and also stated the governor was responsible for managing the bank. Highly debated legislation in 1945 caused high amounts of regulation on private banks, which later-Governor H.C. Coombs was opposed to, along with his opposition to bank nationalisation in 1947. When he became governor in 1949, he allowed private banks to have more control over their liquidity and attempted to introduce market-based monetary policy. He also warned of the possibility of stagflation in 1959.
Legislation in 1951, substituted the council by a 10-member board which included the governor, deputy governor and the secretary to the treasury. The board took over the management of the bank from the governor. The Reserve Bank Act 1959 (23 April 1959) took out the part of the Commonwealth Bank that executed central bank functions and placed it into the Reserve Bank, while the commercial and savings bank functions stayed with the Commonwealth Bank. This finally created a separate central bank for Australia in 1959, which took effect 14 January 1960, many years after several other nations already had one and similar to the early proposal by Treasurer Theodore.
In the mid-1960s, monetary authorities accepted Coombs' conclusions and allowed a flexible interest rate, making it easier for the bank to rely on open market operations. The Exchange Control was abolished after the float of the Australian dollar occurred in 1983. In the five years after the Campbell Committee probe, 1979–1984, the financial system in Australia became deregulated. Another probe was the Wallis Committee in 1996, which took effect in 1998. The effects were the transfer of overseeing the banks from the RBA to the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) and the creation of the Payments System Board (PSB), which would attempt to maintain the safety and performance of the payments system. The bank was given powers within the PSB through additional legislation in 1998.
In August 1996, then bank Governor-designate Ian Macfarlane and the Treasurer issued a Statement on the Conduct of Monetary Policy which restated the roles of the Reserve Bank and the Government of Australia. It affirmed government endorsement of the Reserve Bank's inflation objective, which was introduced in 1993. A change of government in December 2007 led to another Statement, which was issued by both former Treasurer Wayne Swan and Reserve Bank Governor Glenn Stevens. This amends previous statements by giving the bank independence and encourages transparency and communication."
Reserve Bank of Australia,"Securency scandal
Since 2007, the RBA's reputation has been affected by the 'Securency' or Note Printing Australia scandal. These RBA subsidiaries were involved in bribing overseas officials so that Australia might win lucrative polymer note-printing contracts. Australian press coverage, which continued into late 2011, reflects concerns with the apparent laxity and tardiness of corrective actions undertaken by relevant RBA board members and officials. The matters were not reported to the Federal Police in 2007, although they have been since, while in 2011 it was revealed that the RBA had to correct inaccurate evidence previously given to parliamentary committees.
In July 2014, WikiLeaks released a copy of a court order prohibiting publication throughout Australia of information that ""reveals, implies, suggests or alleges"" corruption involving specifically named past and present high-ranking Malaysian, Indonesian and Vietnamese officials in relation to the Note Printing Australia bribery allegations."
Reserve Bank of Australia,"Heritage listings
A number of buildings associated with the Reserve Bank are heritage-listed, including:"
Reserve Bank of Australia,"20-22 London Circuit, Canberra: Reserve Bank of Australia Building, Canberra
65 Martin Place, Sydney: Reserve Bank of Australia Building, Sydney"
Reserve Bank of Australia,"See also
Australian dollar
Australian Prudential Regulation Authority
Bank Notes Tax Act 1910
Banking in Australia
Central bank
Note Printing Australia
Official cash rate
Royal Australian Mint
List of central banks"
Reserve Bank of Australia,"Notes
^A  Members are eligible to be appointed to another term."
Reserve Bank of Australia,"References
External links"
Reserve Bank of Australia,"Reserve Bank of Australia
Museum of Australian Currency Notes"
2021 Australian census,"The 2021 Australian census, simply called the 2021 Census, was the eighteenth national Census of Population and Housing in Australia. The 2021 Census took place on 10 August 2021, and was conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).  It had a response rate of 96.1% up from the 95.1% at the 2016 census.  The total population of the Commonwealth of Australia was counted as 25,422,788 – an increase of 8.6 per cent or 2,020,896 people over the previous 2016 census.
Results from the 2021 census were released to the public on 28 June 2022 from the Australian Bureau of Statistics website. A small amount of additional 2021 census data was released in October 2022 and in 2023.
Australia's next census is scheduled to take place in 2026.
The census was undertaken during the COVID-19 pandemic.  It therefore provided a clear snapshot of how the pandemic impacted Australian society."
2021 Australian census,"Overview
In Australia, completing the census is compulsory for all people in Australia on census night, only excluding foreign diplomats and their families. Census data is used to ""help governments, businesses, not for profit and community organisations across the country make informed decisions"", including helping governments to plan the provision of services. An independent report from Lateral Economics found that for every $1 of investment on the census, $6 of benefits are created in the Australian economy.
Since the 2001 Census, all households have the option of allowing their census data, including personal information such as names and addresses, to be stored by the National Archives of Australia (NAA) for 99 years. 99 years after Census Night, the NAA will release that data to the public in a Census Time Capsule. Censuses stored by the NAA cannot by accessed, amended, or retrieved by anyone, including courts and tribunal, until their release, the first of which will occur in 2100.
The 2020 Census Test occurred on 27 October 2020 with around 100,000 households from Sydney, Adelaide, Darwin, and Canberra, as well as communities in Karratha, Warrnambool, and Alice Springs Town Camps."
2021 Australian census,"Topics
Every census, the ABS makes a recommendation to the Australian Government on the topics to be included, based on the benefit that data would provide to Australia. Through the Census and Statistics Amendment (Statistical Information) Regulations 2020, the federal parliament approves topics that may be included. For the 2021 census, the ABS had been authorised to include questions relating to long-term health conditions and service in the Australian Defence Force, and would not continue asking questions about home internet access considering the rise of mobile devices. This represented the first significant change to census topics since 2006.
Alongside these two new topics, the 2021 Census continued to ask questions related to:"
2021 Australian census,"Consultations
Through late 2017, the ABS began discussions with major census data users on what was needed. From 3 April to 30 June 2018, a formal consultation process occurred on the online ""ABS Consultation Hub"", with the ABS receiving 450 submissions, 315 of which were published with consent."
2021 Australian census,"Collection
Since 2006, the ABS has allowed the census to be completed online, moving in 2016 to be digital-first. Like 2016, the 2021 Census was primarily collected online, with paper census forms being available on request for any household. In 2016, around a third of all households requested and completed their census using the paper form. It was planned that in late October 2019, the ABS would publish a market opportunity to seek a commercial partner to build the 2021 Census Digital Service."
2021 Australian census,"Population and dwellings
The population counts for Australian states and territories were that New South Wales remains the most populous state, with 8,072,163 people counted, ahead of Victoria (6,503,491) and Queensland (5,156,138).
The total population of Australian as counted in the 2021 census by state and external territories are:"
2021 Australian census,"Country of birth
Of all residents over two-thirds (72.4% or 18,235,690) were born in Australia. Over a quarter of the population (27.6% or 7,502,450 persons) said they were born overseas. After Australia, England is the most common birthplace with 927,490 people.  India became the third-largest country of birth, surpassing China and New Zealand."
2021 Australian census,"Notes
References
External links
Sample copies of the 2021 Census paper forms"
Australian Labor Party,"The Australian Labor Party (ALP), also known simply as Labor or the Labor Party, is the major centre-left political party in Australia and one of two major parties in Australian politics, along with the centre-right Liberal Party of Australia. The party has been in government since being elected at the 2022 federal election, and with political branches in each state and territory, they currently form government in New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Victoria, Western Australia, the Australian Capital Territory, and the Northern Territory. As of 2023, Tasmania is the only state or territory where Labor forms the opposition. It is the oldest continuous political party in Australian history, being established on 8 May 1901 at Parliament House, Melbourne, the meeting place of the first federal Parliament.
The ALP was not founded as a federal party until after the first sitting of the Australian parliament in 1901. It is regarded as descended from labour parties founded in the various Australian colonies by the emerging labour movement in Australia, formally beginning in 1891. Colonial labour parties contested seats from 1891, and federal seats following Federation at the 1901 federal election. The ALP formed the world's first labour party government and the world's first democratic socialist or social-democratic government at a national level. At the 1910 federal election, Labor was the first party in Australia to win a majority in either house of the Australian parliament. In every election since 1910 Labor has either served as the governing party or the opposition. There have been 13 Labor prime ministers and 10 periods of federal Labor governments. Of the major parties, it is the older one among them, since the Liberal Party was formed in 1944.
The Labor party is often called the party of unions due to its close ties to the labour movement in Australia, with the majority of trade unions being affiliated with the Labor party. The party is equally controlled by unions and rank-and-file party members through affiliated unions being granted 50% of delegates at each state and national conference.
At the federal and state/colony level, the Australian Labor Party predates both the British Labour Party and the New Zealand Labour Party in party formation, government, and policy implementation. Internationally, the ALP is a member of the Progressive Alliance, a network of progressive and social-democratic parties, having previously been a member of the Socialist International."
Australian Labor Party,"Name and spelling
In standard Australian English, the word labour is spelt with a u. However, the political party uses the spelling Labor, without a u. There was originally no standardised spelling of the party's name, with Labor and Labour both in common usage. According to Ross McMullin, who wrote an official history of the Labor Party, the title page of the proceedings of the Federal Conference used the spelling ""Labor in 1902, ""Labour"" in 1905 and 1908, and then ""Labor"" from 1912 onwards. In 1908, James Catts put forward a motion at the Federal Conference that ""the name of the party be the Australian Labour Party"", which was carried by 22 votes to 2. A separate motion recommending state branches adopt the name was defeated. There was no uniformity of party names until 1918 when the Federal party resolved that state branches should adopt the name ""Australian Labor Party"", now spelt without a u. Each state branch had previously used a different name, due to their different origins.
Although the ALP officially adopted the spelling without a u, it took decades for the official spelling to achieve widespread acceptance. According to McMullin, ""the way the spelling of 'Labor Party' was consolidated had more to do with the chap who ended up being in charge of printing the federal conference report than any other reason"". Some sources have attributed the official choice of Labor to influence from King O'Malley, who was born in the United States and was reputedly an advocate of spelling reform; the spelling without a u is the standard form in American English. It has been suggested that the adoption of the spelling without a u ""signified one of the ALP's earliest attempts at modernisation"", and served the purpose of differentiating the party from the Australian labour movement as a whole and distinguishing it from other British Empire labour parties. The decision to include the word ""Australian"" in the party's name, rather than just ""Labour Party"" as in the United Kingdom, has been attributed to ""the greater importance of nationalism for the founders of the colonial parties""."
Australian Labor Party,"History
The Australian Labor Party has its origins in the Labour parties founded in the 1890s in the Australian colonies prior to federation. Labor tradition ascribes the founding of Queensland Labour to a meeting of striking pastoral workers under a ghost gum tree (the Tree of Knowledge) in Barcaldine, Queensland in 1891. The 1891 shearers' strike is credited as being one of the factors for the formation of the Australian Labor Party. On 9 September 1892 the Manifesto of the Queensland Labour Party was read out under the well known Tree of Knowledge at Barcaldine following the Great Shearers' Strike.  The State Library of Queensland now holds the manifesto; in 2008 the historic document was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Australian Register and, in 2009, the document was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World International Register. The Balmain, New South Wales branch of the party claims to be the oldest in Australia. However, the Scone Branch has a receipt for membership fees for the Labour Electoral League dated April 1891. This predates the Balmain claim. This can be attested in the Centenary of the ALP book. Labour as a parliamentary party dates from 1891 in New South Wales and South Australia, 1893 in Queensland, and later in the other colonies.
The first election contested by Labour candidates was the 1891 New South Wales election, when Labour candidates (then called the Labor Electoral League of New South Wales) won 35 of 141 seats. The major parties were the Protectionist and Free Trade parties and Labour held the balance of power. It offered parliamentary support in exchange for policy concessions. The United Labor Party (ULP) of South Australia was founded in 1891, and three candidates were that year elected to the South Australian Legislative Council. The first successful South Australian House of Assembly candidate was John McPherson at the 1892 East Adelaide by-election. Richard Hooper however was elected as an Independent Labor candidate at the 1891 Wallaroo by-election, while he was the first labor member of the House of Assembly he was not a member of the newly formed ULP.
At the 1893 South Australian elections, the ULP was immediately elevated to balance of power status with 10 of 54 lower house seats. The liberal government of Charles Kingston was formed with the support of the ULP, ousting the conservative government of John Downer. So successful, less than a decade later at the 1905 state election, Thomas Price formed the world's first stable Labor government. John Verran led Labor to form the state's first of many majority governments at the 1910 state election.
In 1899, Anderson Dawson formed a minority Labour government in Queensland, the first in the world, which lasted one week while the conservatives regrouped after a split.
The colonial Labour parties and the trade unions were mixed in their support for the Federation of Australia. Some Labour representatives argued against the proposed constitution, claiming that the Senate as proposed was too powerful, similar to the anti-reformist colonial upper houses and the British House of Lords. They feared that federation would further entrench the power of the conservative forces. However, the first Labour leader and Prime Minister Chris Watson was a supporter of federation.
Historian Celia Hamilton, examining New South Wales, argues for the central role of Irish Catholics. Before 1890, they opposed Henry Parkes, the main Liberal leader, and of free trade, seeing them both as the ideals of Protestant Englishmen who represented landholding and large business interests. In the strike of 1890 the leading Catholic, Sydney's Archbishop Patrick Francis Moran was sympathetic toward unions, but Catholic newspapers were negative.  After 1900, says Hamilton, Irish Catholics were drawn to the Labour Party because its stress on equality and social welfare fitted with their status as manual labourers and small farmers. In the 1910 elections Labour gained in the more Catholic areas and the representation of Catholics increased in Labour's parliamentary ranks."
Australian Labor Party,"Early decades at the federal level
The federal parliament in 1901 was contested by each state Labour Party. In total, they won 15 of the 75 seats in the House of Representatives, collectively holding the balance of power, and the Labour members now met as the Federal Parliamentary Labour Party (informally known as the caucus) on 8 May 1901 at Parliament House, Melbourne, the meeting place of the first federal Parliament. The caucus decided to support the incumbent Protectionist Party in minority government, while the Free Trade Party formed the opposition. It was some years before there was any significant structure or organisation at a national level. Labour under Chris Watson doubled its vote at the 1903 federal election and continued to hold the balance of power. In April 1904, however, Watson and Alfred Deakin fell out over the issue of extending the scope of industrial relations laws concerning the Conciliation and Arbitration bill to cover state public servants, the fallout causing Deakin to resign. Free Trade leader George Reid declined to take office, which saw Watson become the first Labour Prime Minister of Australia, and the world's first Labour head of government at a national level (Anderson Dawson had led a short-lived Labour government in Queensland in December 1899), though his was a minority government that lasted only four months. He was aged only 37, and is still the youngest prime minister in Australia's history.
George Reid of the Free Trade Party adopted a strategy of trying to reorient the party system along Labour vs. non-Labour lines prior to the 1906 federal election and renamed his Free Trade Party to the Anti-Socialist Party. Reid envisaged a spectrum running from socialist to anti-socialist, with the Protectionist Party in the middle. This attempt struck a chord with politicians who were steeped in the Westminster tradition and regarded a two-party system as very much the norm.
Although Watson further strengthened Labour's position in 1906, he stepped down from the leadership the following year, to be succeeded by Andrew Fisher who formed a minority government lasting seven months from late 1908 to mid 1909. At the 1910 federal election, Fisher led Labor to victory, forming Australia's first elected federal majority government, Australia's first elected Senate majority, the world's first Labour Party majority government at a national level, and after the 1904 Chris Watson minority government the world's second Labour Party government at a national level. It was the first time a Labour Party had controlled any house of a legislature, and the first time the party controlled both houses of a bicameral legislature. The state branches were also successful, except in Victoria, where the strength of Deakinite liberalism inhibited the party's growth. The state branches formed their first majority governments in New South Wales and South Australia in 1910, Western Australia in 1911, Queensland in 1915 and Tasmania in 1925. Such success eluded equivalent labour parties in other countries for many years.
Analysis of the early NSW Labor caucus reveals ""a band of unhappy amateurs"", made up of blue collar workers, a squatter, a doctor, and even a mine owner, indicating that the idea that only the socialist working class formed Labor is untrue. In addition, many members from the working class supported the liberal notion of free trade between the colonies; in the first grouping of state MPs, 17 of the 35 were free-traders.
In the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution of 1917, support for socialism grew in trade union ranks, and at the 1921 All-Australian Trades Union Congress a resolution was passed calling for ""the socialisation of industry, production, distribution and exchange"". The 1922 Labor Party National Conference adopted a similarly worded socialist objective which remained official policy for many years. The resolution was immediately qualified, however, by the Blackburn amendment, which said that ""socialisation"" was desirable only when was necessary to ""eliminate exploitation and other anti-social features"". In practice the socialist objective was a dead letter. Only once has a federal Labor government attempted to nationalise any industry (Ben Chifley's bank nationalisation of 1947), and that was held by the High Court to be unconstitutional. The commitment to nationalisation was dropped by Gough Whitlam, and Bob Hawke's government carried out many free market reforms including the floating of the dollar and privatisation of state enterprises such as Qantas airways and the Commonwealth Bank.
The Labor Party is commonly described as a social democratic party, and its constitution stipulates that it is a democratic socialist party. The party was created by, and has always been influenced by, the trade unions, and in practice its policy at any given time has usually been the policy of the broader labour movement. Thus at the first federal election 1901 Labor's platform called for a White Australia policy, a citizen army and compulsory arbitration of industrial disputes. Labor has at various times supported high tariffs and low tariffs, conscription and pacifism, White Australia and multiculturalism, nationalisation and privatisation, isolationism and internationalism.
From 1900 to 1940, Labor and its affiliated unions were strong defenders of the White Australia policy, which banned all non-European migration to Australia. This policy was motivated by fears of economic competition from low-wage overseas workers which was shared by the vast majority of Australians and all major political parties. In practice the Labor party opposed all migration, on the grounds that immigrants competed with Australian workers and drove down wages, until after World War II, when the Chifley government launched a major immigration program. The party's opposition to non-European immigration did not change until after the retirement of Arthur Calwell as leader in 1967. Subsequently, Labor has become an advocate of multiculturalism."
Australian Labor Party,"World War II and beyond
The Curtin and Chifley governments governed Australia through the latter half of the Second World War and initial stages of transition to peace. Labor leader John Curtin became prime minister in October 1941 when two independents crossed the floor of Parliament. Labor, led by Curtin, then led Australia through the years of the Pacific War. In December 1941, Curtin announced that ""Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom"", thus helping to establish the Australian-American alliance (later formalised as ANZUS by the Menzies Government). Remembered as a strong war time leader and for a landslide win at the 1943 federal election, Curtin died in office just prior to the end of the war and was succeeded by Ben Chifley. Chifley Labor won the 1946 federal election and oversaw Australia's initial transition to a peacetime economy.
Labor was defeated at the 1949 federal election. At the conference of the New South Wales Labor Party in June 1949, Chifley sought to define the labour movement as follows: ""We have a great objective – the light on the hill – which we aim to reach by working for the betterment of mankind. ... [Labor would] bring something better to the people, better standards of living, greater happiness to the mass of the people.""
To a large extent, Chifley saw centralisation of the economy as the means to achieve such ambitions. With an increasingly uncertain economic outlook, after his attempt to nationalise the banks and a strike by the Communist-dominated Miners' Federation, Chifley lost office in 1949 to Robert Menzies' Liberal-National Coalition. Labor commenced a 23-year period in opposition. The party was primarily led during this time by H. V. Evatt and Arthur Calwell."
Australian Labor Party,"Various ideological beliefs were factionalised under reforms to the ALP under Gough Whitlam, resulting in what is now known as the Socialist Left who tend to favour a more interventionist economic policy and more socially progressive ideals, and Labor Right, the now dominant faction that tends to be more economically liberal and focus to a lesser extent on social issues. The Whitlam Labor government, marking a break with Labor's socialist tradition, pursued social-democratic policies rather than democratic socialist policies. In contrast to earlier Labor leaders, Whitlam also cut tariffs by 25 percent. Whitlam led the Federal Labor Party back to office at the 1972 and 1974 federal elections, and passed a large amount of legislation. The Whitlam government lost office following the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis and dismissal by Governor-General John Kerr after the Coalition blocked supply in the Senate after a series of political scandals, and was defeated at the 1975 federal election in the largest landslide of Australian federal history. Whitlam remains the only Prime Minister to have his commission terminated in that manner. Whitlam also lost the 1977 federal election and subsequently resigned as leader.
Bill Hayden succeeded Whitlam as leader. At the 1980 federal election, the party achieved a big swing, though the unevenness of the swing around the nation prevented an ALP victory. In 1983, Bob Hawke became leader of the party after Hayden resigned to avoid a leadership spill.
Bob Hawke led Labor back to office at the 1983 federal election and the party won four consecutive elections under Hawke. In December 1991 Paul Keating defeated Bob Hawke in a leadership spill. The ALP then won the 1993 federal election. It was in power for five terms over 13 years, until severely defeated by John Howard at the 1996 federal election. This was the longest period the party has ever been in government at the national level.
Kim Beazley led the party to the 1998 federal election, winning 51 percent of the two-party-preferred vote but falling short on seats, and the ALP lost ground at the 2001 federal election. After a brief period when Simon Crean served as ALP leader, Mark Latham led Labor to the 2004 federal election but lost further ground. Beazley replaced Latham in 2005; not long afterwards he in turn was forced out of the leadership by Kevin Rudd.
Rudd went on to defeat John Howard at the 2007 federal election with 52.7 percent of the two-party vote (Howard became the first prime minister since Stanley Melbourne Bruce to lose not just the election but his own parliamentary seat). The Rudd government ended prior to the 2010 federal election with the overthrow of Rudd as leader of the party by deputy leader Julia Gillard. Gillard, who was also the first woman to serve as prime minister of Australia, remained prime minister in a hung parliament following the election. Her government lasted until 2013, when Gillard lost a leadership spill, with Rudd becoming leader once again. Later that year the ALP lost the 2013 election."
Australian Labor Party,"After this defeat, Bill Shorten became leader of the party. The party narrowly lost the 2016 election, yet gained 14 seats. It remained in opposition after the 2019 election, despite having been ahead in opinion polls for the preceding two years. The party lost in 2019 some of the seats which it had won back in 2016. After the 2019 defeat, Shorten resigned from the leadership, though he remained in parliament. Anthony Albanese was elected as leader unopposed and led the party to victory in the 2022 election, and became the new prime minister.
Between the 2007 federal election and the 2008 Western Australian state election, Labor was in government nationally and in all eight state and territory parliaments. This was the first time any single party or any coalition had achieved this since the ACT and the NT gained self-government. Labor narrowly lost government in Western Australia at the 2008 state election and Victoria at the 2010 state election. These losses were further compounded by landslide defeats in New South Wales in 2011, Queensland in 2012, the Northern Territory in 2012, Federally in 2013 and Tasmania in 2014. Labor secured a good result in the Australian Capital Territory in 2012 and, despite losing its majority, the party retained government in South Australia in 2014.
However, most of these reversals proved only temporary with Labor returning to government in Victoria in 2014 and in Queensland in 2015 after spending only one term in opposition in both states. Furthermore, after winning the 2014 Fisher by-election by nine votes from a 7.3 percent swing, the Labor government in South Australia went from minority to majority government. Labor won landslide victories in the 2016 Northern Territory election, the 2017 Western Australian election and the 2018 Victorian state election. However, Labor lost the 2018 South Australian state election after 16 years in government. In 2022, Labor returned to government after defeating the Liberal Party in the 2022 South Australian state election. Despite favourable polling, the party also did not return to government in the 2019 New South Wales state election or the 2019 federal election. The latter has been considered a historic upset due to Labor's consistent and significant polling lead; the result has been likened to the Coalition's loss in the 1993 federal election, with 2019 retrospectively referred to in the media as the ""unloseable election"". Anthony Albanese later led the party into the 2022 Australian federal election, in which the party once again won a majority government. In 2023, Labor won the 2023 New South Wales state election returning to government for the first time since 2011. This victory marked the first time in 15 years that Labor were in government in all mainland states."
Australian Labor Party,"National platform
The policy of the Australian Labor Party is contained in its National Platform, which is approved by delegates to Labor's National Conference, held every three years. According to the Labor Party's website, ""The Platform is the result of a rigorous and constructive process of consultation, spanning the nation and including the cooperation and input of state and territory policy committees, local branches, unions, state and territory governments, and individual Party members. The Platform provides the policy foundation from which we can continue to work towards the election of a federal Labor government.""
The platform gives a general indication of the policy direction which a future Labor government would follow, but does not commit the party to specific policies. It maintains that ""Labor's traditional values will remain a constant on which all Australians can rely."" While making it clear that Labor is fully committed to a market economy, it says that: ""Labor believes in a strong role for national government – the one institution all Australians truly own and control through our right to vote."" Labor ""will not allow the benefits of change to be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, or located only in privileged communities. The benefits must be shared by all Australians and all our regions."" The platform and Labor ""believe that all people are created equal in their entitlement to dignity and respect, and should have an equal chance to achieve their potential."" For Labor, ""government has a critical role in ensuring fairness by: ensuring equal opportunity; removing unjustifiable discrimination; and achieving a more equitable distribution of wealth, income and status."" Further sections of the platform stress Labor's support for equality and human rights, labour rights and democracy.
In practice, the platform provides only general policy guidelines to Labor's federal, state and territory parliamentary leaderships. The policy Labor takes into an election campaign is determined by the Cabinet (if the party is in office) or the Shadow Cabinet (if it is in opposition), in consultation with key interest groups within the party, and is contained in the parliamentary Leader's policy speech delivered during the election campaign. When Labor is in office, the policies it implements are determined by the Cabinet, subject to the platform. Generally, it is accepted that while the platform binds Labor governments, how and when it is implemented remains the prerogative of the parliamentary caucus. It is now rare for the platform to conflict with government policy, as the content of the platform is usually developed in close collaboration with the party's parliamentary leadership as well as the factions. However, where there is a direct contradiction with the platform, Labor governments have sought to change the platform as a prerequisite for a change in policy. For example, privatisation legislation under the Hawke government occurred only after holding a special national conference to debate changing the platform."
Australian Labor Party,"Party structure
National executive and secretariat
The Australian Labor Party National Executive is the party's chief administrative authority, subject only to Labor's national conference. The executive is responsible for organising the triennial national conference; carrying out the decisions of the conference; interpreting the national constitution, the national platform and decisions of the national conference; and directing federal members.
The party holds a national conference every three years, which consists of delegates representing the state and territory branches (many coming from affiliated trade unions, although there is no formal requirement for unions to be represented at the national conference). The national conference decides the party's platform, elects the national executive and appoints office-bearers such as the national secretary, who also serves as national campaign director during elections. The current national secretary is Paul Erickson. The most recent national conference was the 48th conference held in December 2018.
The head office of the ALP, the national secretariat, is managed by the national secretary. It plays a dual role of administration and a national campaign strategy. It acts as a permanent secretariat to the national executive by managing and assisting in all administrative affairs of the party. As the national secretary also serves as national campaign director during elections, it is also responsible for the national campaign strategy and organisation."
Australian Labor Party,"Federal Parliamentary Labor Party
The elected members of the Labor party in both houses of the national Parliament meet as the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party, also known as the Caucus (see also caucus). Besides discussing parliamentary business and tactics, the Caucus also is involved in the election of the federal parliamentary leaders."
Australian Labor Party,"Federal parliamentary leaders
Until 2013, the parliamentary leaders were elected by the Caucus from among its members. The leader has historically been a member of the House of Representatives. Since October 2013, a ballot of both the Caucus and by the Labor Party's rank-and-file members determined the party leader and the deputy leader. When the Labor Party is in government, the party leader is the prime minister and the deputy leader is the deputy prime minister. If a Labor prime minister resigns or dies in office, the deputy leader acts as prime minister and party leader until a successor is elected. The deputy prime minister also acts as prime minister when the prime minister is on leave or out of the country. Members of the Ministry are also chosen by Caucus, though the leader may allocate portfolios to the ministers.
Anthony Albanese is the leader of the federal Labor party, serving since 30 May 2019. The deputy leader is Richard Marles, also serving since 30 May 2019."
Australian Labor Party,"State and territory branches
The Australian Labor Party is a federal party, consisting of eight branches from each state and territory. While the National Executive is responsible for national campaign strategy, each state and territory are an autonomous branch and are responsible for campaigning in their own jurisdictions for federal, state and local elections. State and territory branches consist of both individual members and affiliated trade unions, who between them decide the party's policies, elect its governing bodies and choose its candidates for public office.
Members join a state branch and pay a membership fee, which is graduated according to income. The majority of trade unions in Australia are affiliated to the party at a state level. Union affiliation is direct and not through the Australian Council of Trade Unions. Affiliated unions pay an affiliation fee based on the size of their membership. Union affiliation fees make up a large part of the party's income. Other sources of funds for the party include political donations and public funding.
Members are generally expected to attend at least one meeting of their local branch each year, although there are differences in the rules from state to state. In practice, only a dedicated minority regularly attend meetings. Many members are only active during election campaigns.
The members and unions elect delegates to state and territory conferences (usually held annually, although more frequent conferences are often held). These conferences decide policy, and elect state or territory executives, a state or territory president (an honorary position usually held for a one-year term), and a state or territory secretary (a full-time professional position). However, ACT Labor directly elects its president. The larger branches also have full-time assistant secretaries and organisers. In the past the ratio of conference delegates coming from the branches and affiliated unions has varied from state to state, however under recent national reforms at least 50% of delegates at all state and territory conferences must be elected by branches.
In some states, the party also contests local government elections or endorses local candidates. In others it does not, preferring to allow its members to run as non-endorsed candidates. The process of choosing candidates is called preselection. Candidates are preselected by different methods in the various states and territories. In some they are chosen by ballots of all party members, in others by panels or committees elected by the state conference, in still others by a combination of these two.
The state and territory Labor branches are the following:"
Australian Labor Party,"Country Labor
The Country Labor Party, commonly known as Country Labor, was an affiliated organisation of the Labor Party. Although not expressly defined, Country Labor operated mainly within rural New South Wales, and was mainly seen as an extension of the New South Wales branch that operates in rural electorates.
Country Labor was used as a designation by candidates contesting elections in rural areas. The Country Labor Party was registered as a separate party in New South Wales, and was also registered with the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) for federal elections. It did not have the same status in other states and, consequently, that designation could not be used on the ballot paper.
The creation of a separation designation for rural candidates was first suggested at the June 1999 ALP state conference in New South Wales. In May 2000, following Labor's success at the 2000 Benalla by-election in Victoria, Kim Beazley announced that the ALP intended to register a separate ""Country Labor Party"" with the AEC; this occurred in October 2000. The Country Labor designation was most frequently used in New South Wales. According to the ALP's financial statements for the 2015–16 financial year, NSW Country Labor had around 2,600 members (around 17 percent of the party total), but almost no assets. It recorded a severe funding shortfall at the 2015 New South Wales election, and had to rely on a $1.68-million loan from the party proper to remain solvent. It had been initially assumed that the party proper could provide the money from its own resources, but the NSW Electoral Commission ruled that this was impermissible because the parties were registered separately. Instead the party proper had to loan Country Labor the required funds at a commercial interest rate.
The Country Labor Party was de-registered by the New South Wales Electoral Commission in 2021."
Australian Labor Party,"Australian Young Labor
Australian Young Labor is the youth wing of the Australian Labor Party, where all members under age 26 are automatically members. It is the peak youth body within the ALP. Former presidents of AYL have included former NSW Premier Bob Carr, Federal Leader of the House Tony Burke, former Special Minister of State Senator John Faulkner, former Australian Workers Union National Secretary, current Member for Maribyrnong and former Federal Labor Leader Bill Shorten as well as dozens of State Ministers and MPs. The current National President is Manu Risoldi."
Australian Labor Party,"Networks
The Australian Labor Party is beginning to formally recognise single interest groups within the party. The national platform currently encourages state branches to formally establish these groups known as policy action caucuses. Examples of such groups include the Labor Environment Action Network, Rainbow Labor, Labor For Choice, Labor Women's Network, Labor for Drug Law Reform Labor for Refugees, Labor for Housing, Labor Teachers Network, Aboriginal Labor Network, and recently, Labor Enabled – the action group for Disability Advocacy The Tasmanian Branch of the Australian Labor Party recently gave these groups voting and speaking rights at their state conference."
Australian Labor Party,"Ideology and factions
Labor's constitution has long stated: ""The Australian Labor Party is a democratic socialist party and has the objective of the democratic socialisation of industry, production, distribution and exchange, to the extent necessary to eliminate exploitation and other anti-social features in these fields"". This ""socialist objective"" was introduced in 1921, but was later qualified by two further objectives: ""maintenance of and support for a competitive non-monopolistic private sector"" and ""the right to own private property"". Labor governments have not attempted the ""democratic socialisation"" of any industry since the 1940s, when the Chifley government failed to nationalise the private banks, and in fact have privatised several industries such as aviation and banking."
Australian Labor Party,"Factions
The Labor Party has always had a left wing and a right wing; however, since 1989, it has been organised into formal factions.
The two largest factional groupings are the Labor Left, who are supportive of democratic socialist ideals, and the Labor Right who generally support social-democratic traditions. The national factional groupings are themselves divided into formal factions, primarily state-based such as Centre Unity in New South Wales and Labor Forum in Queensland. 
Some trade unions are affiliated with the Labor Party and are also factionally aligned. Important unions supporting the right faction are the Australian Workers' Union (AWU), the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association (SDA) and the Transport Workers Union of Australia (TWU). Important unions supporting the left include the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU), United Workers Union, the Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union (CFMEU) and the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU)."
Australian Labor Party,"Federal election results
House of Representatives
Donors
For the 2015–2016 financial year, the top ten disclosed donors to the ALP were the Health Services Union NSW ($389,000), Village Roadshow ($257,000), Electrical Trades Union of Australia ($171,000), National Automotive Leasing and Salary Packaging Association ($153,000), Westfield Corporation ($150,000), Randazzo C&G Developments ($120,000), Macquarie Telecom ($113,000), Woodside Energy ($110,000), ANZ Bank ($100,000) and Ying Zhou ($100,000), all significantly lower than the 2014 donations by a Chinese donor Zi Chun Wang, which at $850,000 was the largest donation to any political party in the 2013–2014 financial year. At least one newspaper report queried the identity of this donor stating ""news archive searches do not produce results for this name, suggesting Wang operates under another name"". Another report mentions that in addition to a hotel and a travel agency, the donor's listed address at the Old Communist Cadres Activity Centre in Shijiazhuang  houses several Chinese government entities, stating also that another publisher ""tried many times without success"" to contact the donor on the phone number listed in the donation return form.
The Labor Party also receives undisclosed funding through several methods, such as ""associated entities"". John Curtin House, Industry 2020, IR21 and the Happy Wanderers Club are entities which have been used to funnel donations to the Labor Party without disclosing the source.
A 2019 report found that the Labor Party received $33,000 from pro-gun groups during the 2011–2018 periods compared to $82,000 received by the Coalition."
Australian Labor Party,"See also
Australian labour movement
Labor Against War
Socialism in Australia
Third Way"
Australian Labor Party,"Further reading
Ormonde, Paul (1982). A Foolish Passionate Man: a biography of Jim Cairns. Ringwood, Vic, Australia: Penguin Books. ISBN 014005975X.
Ormonde, Paul (1972). The Movement. Sydney: Thomas Nelson. ISBN 0170019683
Charlesworth, M. J. (2000) Ormonde, Paul (Ed). Santamaria : the politics of fear : critical reflections. Richmond, Vic.: Spectrum Publications. ISBN 0867862947"
Australian Labor Party,"Notes
References
Bibliography
External links"
Australian Labor Party,"Australian Labor Party Victorian Branch Rules, April 2013 Archived 11 April 2019 at the Wayback Machine
Manifesto of the Queensland Labour Party, 1892 – UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Register
125th anniversary of the Manifesto of the Queensland Labour Party – John Oxley Library Blog, State Library of Queensland.
OM69-18 Charles Seymour Papers 1880–1924 – Collection record, State Library of Queensland
Charles Seymour Papers 1880–1924: Treasure collection of the John Oxley Library – John Oxley Library Blog, State Library of Queensland."
List of earthquakes in Australia,This is a list of significant earthquakes recorded in Australia and its territories. The currency used is the Australian dollar (A$) unless noted otherwise.
List of earthquakes in Australia,"List of earthquakes
Other earthquakes
Broome, 16 August 1929, magnitude 6.6, offshore earthquake to the north-west of Broome, Western Australia.
Simpson Desert, 21 December 1937, magnitude 6.0, in a remote location of the Simpson Desert in the Northern Territory, south-east of Alice Springs.
Simpson Desert, 27 June 1941, magnitude 6.5, in a remote location of the Simpson Desert in the Northern Territory, south-east of Alice Springs.
Broome, 14 July 2019, magnitude 6.6, offshore earthquake 200 km north-west of Broome, Western Australia, which caused minor damage in the town itself"
List of earthquakes in Australia,"See also
Earthquakes in Western Australia
Geology of Australia"
List of earthquakes in Australia,"References
Sources"
List of earthquakes in Australia,"External links
Seismicity in Australia
The 2012 Australian Earthquake Hazard Map – Geoscience Australia"
Makassan contact with Australia,"Makassar people from the region of Sulawesi in  Indonesia began visiting the coast of Northern Australia sometime around the middle of the 18th century, first in the Kimberley region, and some decades later in Arnhem Land. They were men who collected and processed trepang (also known as sea cucumber), a marine invertebrate prized for its culinary value generally and for its supposed medicinal properties in Chinese markets. The term Makassan (or Macassan) is generally used to apply to all the trepangers who came to Australia."
Makassan contact with Australia,"Fishing and processing of trepang
The creature and the food product are commonly known in English as sea cucumber, bêche-de-mer in French, gamat in Malay, while Makassarese has 12 terms covering 16 different species. One of the Makassar terms, for trepang, taripaŋ, entered the Aboriginal languages of the Cobourg Peninsula, as tharriba in Marrku, as jarripang in Mawng or otherwise as darriba.
Trepang live on the sea floor and are exposed at low tide. Fishing was traditionally done by hand, spearing, diving or dredging. The catch was placed in boiling water before being dried and smoked, to preserve the trepang for the journey back to Makassar and other South East Asian markets. Trepang is still valued by Chinese communities for its jelly-like texture, its flavour-enhancing properties, and as a stimulant and aphrodisiac. Matthew Flinders made a contemporary record of how trepang was processed when he met Pobasso, a chief of a Makassan fleet in February 1803."
Makassan contact with Australia,"Voyage to Marege' and Kayu Jawa
Trepanging fleets began to visit the northern coasts of Australia from Makassar in southern Sulawesi, Indonesia, from at least 1720 and possibly earlier. Campbell Macknight's classic study of the Makassan trepang industry accepts the start of the industry as about 1720, with the earliest recorded trepang voyage made in 1751. But Regina Ganter of Griffith University notes that a Sulawesi historian suggests a commencement date for the industry of about 1640. Ganter also notes that for some anthropologists, the extensive influence of the trepang industry on the Yolngu people suggests a longer period of contact. Arnhem Land Aboriginal rock art, recorded by archaeologists in 2008, appears to provide further evidence of Makassan contact in the mid-1600s. Based on radiocarbon dating for apparent prau (boat) designs in Aboriginal rock art, some scholars have proposed contact from as early as the 1500s."
Makassan contact with Australia,"At the height of the trepang industry, the Makassan ranged thousands of kilometres along Australia's northern coasts, arriving with the north-west monsoon each December. Makassan perahu or praus could carry a crew of thirty members, and Macknight estimated the total number of trepangers arriving each year as about one thousand. The Makassan crews established themselves at various semi-permanent locations on the coast, to boil and dry the trepang before the return voyage home, four months later, to sell their cargo to Chinese merchants. Marege' was the Makassan name for Arnhem land (meaning ""Wild Country""), from the Cobourg Peninsula to Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Kayu Jawa was the name for the fishing grounds in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, from Napier Broome Bay to Cape Leveque. Other important fishing areas included West Papua, Sumbawa, Timor, and Selayar.
Matthew Flinders, in his circumnavigation of Australia in 1803, met a Makassan trepang fleet near present-day Nhulunbuy. He communicated at length with a Makassan captain, Pobasso, through his cook, who was also a Malay, and learned of the extent of the trade from this encounter. Ganter writes that there were at most ""1,000 Macassans"" compared to the almost ""7,000 British nestled into Sydney Cove and Newcastle"". French explorer Nicholas Baudin also encountered twenty-six large perahu off the northern coast of Western Australia in the same year.
The British settlements of Fort Dundas and Fort Wellington were established as a result of Phillip Parker King's contact with Makassan trepangers in 1821.
Using Daeng Rangka, the last Makassan trepanger to visit Australia, lived well into the twentieth century, and the history of his voyages are well documented. He first made the voyage to northern Australia as a young man. He suffered dismasting and several shipwrecks, and had generally positive but occasionally conflicting relationships with Indigenous Australians. He was the first trepanger to pay the South Australian government (at the time the jurisdiction that administered the Northern Territory) for a trepanging licence in 1883, an impost that made the trade less viable. The trade continued to dwindle toward the end of the 19th century, due to the imposition of customs duties and licence fees and probably compounded by overfishing. Rangka commanded the last Makassar perahu, which left Arnhem Land in 1907."
Makassan contact with Australia,"Physical evidence of Makassan contact
There is significant evidence of contact with Makassan fishers in examples of Indigenous Australian rock art and bark painting of northern Australia, with the Makassan perahu a prominent feature."
Makassan contact with Australia,"Northern Territory
Archaeological remains of Makassar processing plants from the 18th and 19th centuries are still at Port Essington, Anuru Bay, and Groote Eylandt, along with stands of the tamarind trees introduced by the Makassan. Macknight and others note that excavations and development in these areas have revealed pieces of metal, broken pottery and glass, coins, fish-hooks and broken clay pipes related to this trade. Macknight notes that much of the ceramic material found suggests a nineteenth-century date.
In January 2012, a swivel gun found two years before at Dundee Beach near Darwin was widely reported by web news sources and the Australian press to be of Portuguese origin. However initial analysis by the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory in 2012 indicated that it is of Southeast Asian origin, likely from Makassar. There is nothing in its chemical composition, style, or form that matches Portuguese breech-loading swivel guns. The museum holds seven guns of South East Asian manufacture in its collections. Another swivel gun of South East Asian manufacture, found in Darwin in 1908, is held by the South Australian Museum, and is also possibly of Makassan origin.
The Wurrwurrwuy stone arrangements at Yirrkala, which are listed as heritage monuments, depict aspects of Makassan trepanging, including details of the vessels' internal structures."
Makassan contact with Australia,"Western Australia
In 1916, two bronze cannons were found on a small island in Napier Broome Bay, on the northern coast of Western Australia. Scientists at the Western Australian Museum in Fremantle have made a detailed analysis and have determined that these weapons are swivel guns and almost certainly of late 18th century Makassan, rather than European, origin. Flinders' account confirms that the Makassans he met were personally armed and their perahus carried small cannons.
In 2021 archaeological excavations are taking place on the island of Niiwalarra (Sir Graham Moore Island), off the Kimberley coast, for the first time since Ian Crawford did his research in the 1960s. The archaeologists are being assisted by some of the traditional owners of the island, the Kwini people.  Evidence of pottery and other artefacts from the new excavations are being complemented by the oral histories of the Kwini people, yielding evidence of Makassan fishers and traders on the island. A number of hearths are a record of where the trepang was cooked on the beach in large iron pots, with activity especially picking up around 1800."
Makassan contact with Australia,"Indonesia
There are written and oral accounts of Aboriginal people moving to the island with Asian fishermen, some dating back as far as the 1600s. In early 2023, photographs featuring Aboriginal Australian people which had been taken in Makassar in the 1870s were discovered. Yolngu  elders identified the subjects of the photos as Yolngu people from the Arnhem Land area. The discovery sparked an international search for descendants of these people, in the hope of being able to do DNA testing to shed more light on migration from northern Australia to South East Asia."
Makassan contact with Australia,"Effect on Indigenous people of Australia
The Makassar contact with Aboriginal people had a significant effect on the latter's culture, and likely there were also cross-cultural influences. Ganter writes ""the cultural imprint on the Yolngu people of this contact is everywhere: in their language, in their art, in their stories, in their cuisine"". According to anthropologist John Bradley from Monash University, the contact between the two groups was a success: ""They traded together. It was fair – there was no racial judgement, no race policy"". Even into the early 21st century, the shared history between the two peoples is still celebrated by Aboriginal communities in northern Australia as a period of mutual trust and respect.
However, anthropologist Ian McIntosh has speculated that the initial effects of contact with the Makassan fishermen resulted in ""turmoil"" with the extent of Islamic influence being noteworthy. In another paper McIntosh says, ""strife, poverty and domination ... is a previously unrecorded legacy of contact between Aborigines and Indonesians"". He also claims that the Makassan appear to have been welcomed initially; however, relations deteriorated when, ""aborigines began to feel they were being exploited ... leading to violence on both sides""."
Makassan contact with Australia,"Trade
Studies by anthropologists have found traditions that indicate the Makassans negotiated with local people on the Australian continent for the right to fish certain waters. The exchange also involved the trade of cloth, tobacco, metal axes and knives, rice, and gin. The Yolngu of Arnhem Land also traded turtle-shell, pearls and cypress pine, and some were employed as trepangers. While there is ample evidence of peaceful contact, some contact was hostile. Using Daeng Rangka described at least one violent confrontation with Aborigines, while Flinders recorded being advised by the Makassan to ""beware of the natives"".
Some of the rock art and bark paintings appear to confirm that some Aboriginal workers willingly accompanied the Makassans back to their homeland of South Sulawesi across the Arafura Sea. Women were also occasional items of exchange according to Denise Russell, but their views and experiences have not been recorded. After visiting Groote Eylandt in the early 1930s, anthropologist Donald Thomson speculated that the traditional seclusion of women from strange men and their use of portable bark screens in this region ""may have been a result of contact with Macassans""."
Makassan contact with Australia,"Health
Smallpox may have been introduced to northern Australia in the 1820s via Makassan contact. This remains unproven as First Fleet smallpox was already recorded as spreading across Australia from Sydney Cove. The prevalence of the hereditary Machado–Joseph disease in the Groote Eylandt community has been attributed to outside contact. Recent genetic studies showed that the Groote Eylandt families with MJD shared a Y-DNA haplogroup with some families of Taiwanese, Indian, and Japanese ancestry."
Makassan contact with Australia,"Economic
Some Yolngu communities of Arnhem Land appear to have transitioned their economies from being largely land-based to largely sea-based, following the introduction of Makassar technologies such as dug-out canoes, which were highly prized. These seaworthy boats, unlike the traditional Yolngu bark canoes, allowed the people to fish the ocean for dugongs and sea turtles. Macknight notes that both the dug-out canoe and shovel-nosed spear found in Arnhem Land were based on Macassarese prototypes."
Makassan contact with Australia,"Language
A Makassan pidgin became a lingua franca along the north coast, not just between Makassan and Aboriginal people, but also as a language of trade among different Aboriginal groups, who were brought into greater contact with each other by the seafaring Makassar culture. Words from the Makassarese language (related to Javanese and Malay) can still be found in Aboriginal language varieties of the north coast. Examples include rupiah (money), jama (work), and balanda (white person). The latter was adopted into the Makassar language via the Malay term orang belanda (referring to Dutch person).
In 2012, a huge painting by Gulumbu Yunupingu titled Garrurru (Sail) was installed at the Australian National University's Hedley Bull Centre for World Politics.  The word garrurru is the Yolngu word for ""sail"", and derives from the Makassan word for sailcloth."
Makassan contact with Australia,"Religion
Drawing on the work of Ian Mcintosh (2000), Regina Ganter and Peta Stephenson suggest that aspects of Islam were creatively adapted by the Yolngu. Muslim references still survive in certain ceremonies and Dreaming stories in the early 21st century. Stephenson speculates that the Makassans may have been the first visitors to bring Islam to Australia.
According to anthropologist John Bradley from Monash University, ""If you go to north-east Arnhem Land there is [a trace of Islam] in song, it is there in painting, it is there in dance, it is there in funeral rituals. It is patently obvious that there are borrowed items. With linguistic analysis as well, you're hearing hymns to Allah, or at least certain prayers to Allah""."
Makassan contact with Australia,"Current situation
Though prevented from fishing across Arnhem Land, other Indonesian fishermen have continued to fish up and down the west coast, in what are now Australian waters. This continues a practice of several hundred years, before such territories were declared – and some use traditional boats their grandparents owned. The current Australian government considers such fishing illegal by its rules. Since the 1970s, if the fishermen are caught by authorities, their boats are burned and the fishermen are deported to Indonesia. Most Indonesian fishing in Australian waters now occurs around what Australia termed ""Ashmore Reef"" (known in Indonesia as Pulau Pasir) and the nearby islands."
Makassan contact with Australia,"See also
Patorani and padewakang, two types of perahu used for trepanging by Makassan
History of Australia before 1901
Theory of Portuguese discovery of Australia
Baijini, a legendary people interpreted by some researchers as pre-Makassan visitors to Arnhem Land.
Marchinbar Island, location of a deposit of early coins in Australia
Javanese contact with Australia"
Makassan contact with Australia,"Notes
References
Citations"
Makassan contact with Australia,"
=== Sources ==="
Theatre of Australia,"Theatre of Australia refers to the history of the live performing arts in Australia: performed, written or produced by Australians. 
There are theatrical and dramatic aspects to Indigenous Australian ceremonies such as the Corroboree, which go back more than 30,000 years. After British settlement in 1788, Australian theatrical arts became linked to the traditions of English literature and to British and Irish theatre. Australian literature and theatrical artists (including Aboriginal as well as multicultural immigrant Australians) have more recently introduced the culture of Australia and the character of a new continent to the world stage.
Like many other spheres of activity, the performing arts have been organised differently in different States. Notable theatrical complexes include the Sydney Opera House in Sydney and the Melbourne Arts Centre in Melbourne. The major teaching institutions for the dramatic arts are the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney and the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts in Perth."
Theatre of Australia,"Contributing individuals
Very many Individuals have contributed to theatre in Australia. Some of the best-known include:"
Theatre of Australia,"J. C. Williamson, Betty Burstall, John Sumner, Richard Wherrett, Robin Lovejoy, Jim Sharman, John Bell, John Derum, Carillo Gantner, Aarne Neeme, Aubrey Mellor and Simon Phillips for live theatre management and direction
Dame Judith Anderson, Frank Thring, John McCallum, Ruth Cracknell, Gordon Chater, Ron Haddrick, Robyn Nevin and Arthur Dignam as live stage actors
Betty Roland, Mona Brand, Ray Lawler, Patrick White, David Williamson, Dorothy Hewett, Alex Buzo, John Romeril, Jack Hibberd and Nick Enwright as playwrights for theatre
Roy Rene, George Wallace, Barry Humphries, Reg Livermore and Tim Minchin for live comedy
Dame Nellie Melba, Dame Joan Sutherland, June Bronhill, Sir Robert Helpmann and Graeme Murphy for opera and ballet
Gladys Moncrieff, Julie Anthony, Anthony Warlow, Nancye Hayes, Robyn Archer, Peter Allen, Colleen Hewett, Marina Prior and Tina Arena in musical theatre
Australia has contributed a high number of international movie actors. Many of these made a beginning in live theatre, and have continued to act on stage throughout their careers."
Theatre of Australia,"Funding
In general, larger performing arts companies cannot exist without regular, guaranteed government funding, and this has been particularly true for Australia with its small population, remote from Europe and America.  
The Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust was established with the visit of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 to bring high culture - opera and ballet - to Australia, providing a theatre ""of Australians by Australians for Australians"". It formed by public subscription with a matching Commonwealth government contribution, and nurtured Opera Australia and the Australian Ballet Foundation, with associated orchestras in Sydney and Melbourne. 
The Australia Council for the Arts was announced in 1967, modelled on similar bodies in the major English-speaking countries. The early Australia Council grants in the 1960s were distributed through the Theatre Trust and went mostly to the largest companies. In 1973, the reformist government of Gough Whitlam doubled Arts funding and reconstituted the Council as a statutory authority consisting of seven autonomous boards, which used a peer-reviewing process to select organisations or individuals for support. The most significant Boards for the performing arts were the Theatre Arts Board and the Literature Board.
In 2014-15, a large proportion of arts funding was removed (totalling $101.8 million), throwing the sector into chaos and leading to the loss of many small to medium companies. The lost funds were returned in 2016 after intensive sector lobbying.
The Covid-19 Pandemic in 2020-21 was very damaging to live performance in Australia, as everywhere in the world, but Australian theatre did somewhat better than most."
Theatre of Australia,"Early history
The traditional ceremonial dances of indigenous Australians performed at corroborees comprise theatrical aspects. At a corroboree Aborigines interact with the Dreamtime through dance, music and costume and many ceremonies act out events from the Dreamtime. Corroboree in many areas have developed and adapted, integrating new themes and stories since European occupation of Australia began. Academic Maryrose Casey writes that ‘Australian Aboriginal cultures are probably the most performance-based in the world – in the sense that explicit, choreographed performances were used for a vast range of social purposes from education, through to spiritual practices, arranging marriage alliances, to judicial and diplomatic functions’. Casey suggests that 'corroboree' could also be called 'aboriginal theatre'.
European theatrical traditions came to Australia with European settlement commencing in 1788 with the First Fleet. The first production, The Recruiting Officer written by George Farquhar in 1706, was performed in 1789 by convicts. The extraordinary circumstances of the foundation of Australian theatre were recounted in Thomas Keneally's novel The Playmaker - the participants were prisoners watched by sadistic guards and the leading lady was under threat of the death penalty.
The first European play to refer to Australia was Les Emigres aux Terres Australes, a French play. The earliest British play was Michael Howe, The Terror of Van Diemen's Land.
The earliest theatres copied the burlesque or vaudeville style of minor theatres in Britain, with many different independent acts including comedy, opera and circus. The burlesque form has always been popular and continues to the present day in theatre restaurants. 
A theatre was opened in Sydney in 1796 by Robert Sidaway, until closed as a 'corrupting influence' - partly due to the presence of pickpockets in the audience. In major variety theatres, liquor was well-supplied, and prostitutes openly solicited customers in the auditorium of major variety theatres until the 1870's. 
The first Australian play professionally produced in Sydney was The Hibernian Father.
From 1876, the American actor J. C. Williamson acted in shows in Australia. He became Australia's leading impresario when he won the right to stage Gilbert and Sullivan musicals in Australia. He brought many famous Victorian stage performers to Australia, becoming known for spectacular, large-scale productions of all kinds, mostly working in the Theatre Royal in Sydney and in Adelaide, but owning or leasing many other theatres. His theatrical empire became the largest in the world, continuing after his death in 1913 until the company closed in 1976. After 1945 the firm was best known for producing long-running American and British musicals in Australia.    
After Federation in 1901, theatre productions embodied the sense of national identity that had been present in Australian literature since the 1890s. Playwrights active early in Australia include Arthur Adams, Musette Morrell, Malcolm Afford, Walter J Turner and Charles Haddon Chambers. Louis Esson, with Vance Palmer, founded the Pioneer Players, dedicated to the performance of Australian plays and the development of a national theatre. They produced 18 new Australian plays in their four years of existence. 
Musicals were written by Alfred Wheeler, Arlene Sauer, and Edmund Duggan. Other examples include The Bunyip, F.F.F. and a 1918 pantomime version of Robinson Crusoe on Rainbow Island with music by six Australian composers. Operas were composed by Moritz Heuzenroeder and Arthur Chanter."
Theatre of Australia,"Theatre buildings
Theatres are usually among the most prominent city buildings, being necessary for the performance of indoor drama, song and dance and for larger events and ceremonies. Their construction usually presents prevailing prosperity and the architectural styles of the time. The Australian gold rushes beginning in the 1850s provided funds for the construction of grand theatres in the Victorian style, along with many other civic buildings. The Western Australian goldrushes in the 1890s led to a similar construction boom in Perth.
Some of the oldest grand heritage theatrical buildings include: "
Theatre of Australia,"The term Theatre Royal was initially synonymous with the major theatre in each city. The first Theatre Royal was opened in Sydney in 1833. The building suffered destruction and underwent renovation several times, and the existing Theatre Royal was built on the site in 1976.
The Theatre Royal, Hobart opened in 1837 and is the oldest still-operating theatre in Australia. Noël Coward called it a Dream Theatre and Laurence Olivier came to its defence when it was threatened with demolition in the 1940s.
The Queen's Theatre, Adelaide opened with Shakespeare in 1841 and is today the oldest theatre on the mainland.
The Melbourne Athenaeum was founded in 1839 as the Melbourne Mechanics' Institute, and the theatre in its present form was created in 1924.
A theatre was built on the present site of Melbourne's Princess Theatre in 1854, with the present building constructed in 1886.
The Victoria Theatre in Newcastle was built in 1876 and is the oldest theatre still standing in New South Wales. It was decommissioned in 1964, but in 2015 it was acquired, with plans to renovate in motion.
His Majesty's Theatre, Perth opened in 1904. The building remains a rare example of Edwardian baroque theatrical architecture in Australia.
In the period between the Wars, elaborate cinemas were constructed, often in the Art Deco style. When cinemas were no longer popular, these buildings were sometimes repurposed as general theatres for performances and community events. The Capitol Theatre in Sydney had a long history as a covered market, a circus and a cinema before becoming a theatre for major musicals in 1972. The State Theatre (renamed the Forum in 1963) and the Regent Theatre both opened in Melbourne in 1929, originally as cinemas, while the Astor Theatre opened in 1939. The Palais Theatre, St Kilda is still the largest seated theatre in Australia,. Several art deco picture palaces, now theatres, opened in Perth in the inter-war years - the Regal in Subiaco in 1937 and the Astor in Mount Lawley.
From the 1960s, major cities across Australia developed new government-owned performing arts centres, often housing not-for-profit theatre, opera and dance companies. Examples include the Sydney Opera House, the Arts Centre Melbourne, the Adelaide Festival Centre, the Canberra Theatre Centre and the Queensland Performing Arts Centre in Brisbane. 
The Arts Centre Melbourne in the Melbourne Arts Precinct was designed by architect Sir Roy Grounds. The masterplan for the complex was approved in 1960, and construction of the Arts Centre began in 1973. The complex opened in stages, with Hamer Hall opening in 1982, and the Theatres Building opening in 1984. The centre now hosts regular performances by Opera Australia, The Australian Ballet, the Melbourne Theatre Company and Melbourne Symphony Orchestra as well as a large number of Australian and international performances and production companies.  
In 1973, the Sydney Opera House opened in Sydney – becoming among the most famous performance venues in the world and a World Heritage site. It is the home of the Australian Ballet, Opera Australia and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and has a drama theatre and other facilities. With its spectacular Sydney Harbour site and expressionist design, it is Australia's most visited tourist attraction.
Also opening in 1973, the Adelaide Festival Centre was Australia's first multi-purpose art centre, and it includes three theatres. It hosts the Adelaide Festival and several other festivals, and it is home to the major State performing arts groups.     
Most major regional centres and many outer metropolitan areas have a professional-standard performing arts centre typically run by the local council, either newly built such as the Riverside Theatres Parramatta, the Wagga Wagga Civic Theatre or the Frankston Arts Centre, or refurbishment of heritage theatres or cinemas such as the Newcastle Civic Theatre, the Theatre Royal in Hobart or the Empire Theatre in Toowoomba.
Non-establishment theatres like the New Theatre in Newtown, Sydney have catered to a more radical clientele. The New Theatre was originally established in 1932 as part of the international New Theatre movement affiliated with Communist parties, and is the oldest theatre company in continuous production. Its most famous production was Reedy River in 1953 based on the 1891 Australian Shearer's Strike, which helped to launch the 1950s Folk Music Revival. Melbourne also had a New Theatre, founded by radical playwright Betty Roland in 1936. It ran the first play supporting Indigenous Australians, White Justice, about the Pilbara strike, and it was the first theatre to stage Brecht.
For a long time, innovative theatre was only staged by student companies in theatres associated with university precincts. Some of the better-known university performing arts theatres are: "
Theatre of Australia,"Union House Theatre at the University of Melbourne
The Seymour Centre at the University of Sydney
The Ian Potter Centre, the George Jenkins Theatre and the Robert Blackwood Hall at Monash University
The Dolphin, Octagon and New Fortune theatres at the University of Western Australia,
There are many smaller theatres associated with particular theatre companies. A full list of existing major theatres in each city is given below,"
Theatre of Australia,"Drama
Theatre companies
Theatre companies produce most of the drama in Australia. If successful, they operate under various sustainable business models. Most companies have been associated with a single theatre, but others perform in multiple venues. Resident professional theatre companies produce main-stage seasons of Australian and international plays and, occasionally, musicals.    
No theatre company operates out of more than one city. Some of the major companies include:"
Theatre of Australia,"Sydney
The Old Tote Theatre Company was originally established in 1963 as the theatre company for NIDA. It separated from NIDA in 1967, and after a grant from the Australian Council for the Arts, aimed to become a State theatre company. In that capacity it employed most of the best-loved actors and directors of New South Wales. In 1978 it overstretched its capacity and went into liquidation.
Its role was taken by the Sydney Theatre Company under Richard Wherrett, now one of Australia's foremost theatre companies. It operates from The Wharf Theatre near The Rocks, as well as from the Sydney Theatre and the Sydney Opera House Drama Theatre.
The tiny Jane Street Theatre was a joint venture of NIDA, the Old Tote and others in 1966. It was an early attempt to foster original Australian work, with a resident company of young professionals. It showcased many new playwrights, directors and actors. 
The Nimrod Theatre was established in Kings Cross by John Bell and Richard Wherrett in 1970 as a venue for new Australian theatre. Until it dissolved in 1988, it was said to have shown more good new Australian drama than any other company, and virtually all significant Australian actors of the period were alumni. It moved to the Belvoir St Theatre in Surry Hills in 1974. The Belvoir company took over this theatre in 1985.
The Bell Shakespeare Company was created in 1990 by John Bell. The company specialises in the works of William Shakespeare. It is Australia's only national touring theatre company, touring each Australian state in each year.
The Ensemble Theatre is Australia's longest continuously running theatre company, founded by the American director and method actor Hayes Gordon in 1958 on Sydney's North Shore. The very popular actress Lorraine Bayly was a founder, and performed here until 2003.
The Griffin Theatre Company was founded in Sydney in 1979 and is based at the Stables Theatre in Kings Cross. It is exclusively devoted to the development and staging of new Australian writing. Cate Blanchett began her professional career here.
The Genesian Theatre is an amateur company formed in 1944 by members of the Sydney Catholic Youth Organisation, and is one of Australia's oldest theatrical groups. It has since evolved into a community theatre."
Theatre of Australia,"Melbourne
The Melbourne Theatre Company, originally the Union Theatre Repertory Company, was formed in 1953 by John Sumner, It is a department of the University of Melbourne. It is Australia's oldest fully professional theatre company, and one of the largest in the world. It operates from a conservative middle-class subscriber base and mostly produces stage classics. However it occasionally stages more risky works, introducing newer authors to mainstream Melbourne audiences.
The La Mama Theatre near the University of Melbourne was created by director Betty Burstall in 1967 to recreate the vibrancy and immediacy of the small on-off Broadway ventures in New York. The production of Australian plays was almost non-existent at the time, and La Mama became the venue for the performance of new experimental Australian theatre. In the first two years, twenty-five new Australian plays premiered there. It went on to become the Australian Performing Group, established by Graeme Blundell. This group was based at the closely associated Pram Factory.which nurtured New Left politics, comedy, popular theatre, new Australian writing, puppetry and circus.The not-for-profit La Mama model of giving artists upfront funding to present work in a rent-free venue with 80% box-office return is unique. La Mama also uses the nearby Carlton Courthouse Theatre.
The Playbox Theatre Company was founded by Carillo Gantner of the Myer Dynasty in 1976. It has always been dedicated to supporting Australian playwrights and producing new Australian plays. After its original theatre burned down in 1984, it moved to the Malthouse Theatre in the Melbourne Arts Precinct. As well as drama, it shows music theatre, contemporary dance and comedy."
Theatre of Australia,"Brisbane
La Boite Theatre Company was originally an amateur repertory company. It was established in 1925 and is Australia's longest running theatrical company. By 1980 it had Australia Council funding and became ""pro-am"", with productions every night of the theatrical year. It is home to the Roundhouse Theatre, Australia's only purpose-built theatre-in-the round.
The Queensland Theatre Company in South Brisbane runs largely on philanthropic donations."
Theatre of Australia,"Canberra
The Canberra Repertory Society is an amateur company founded in 1932, with more than 460 productions to its credit."
Theatre of Australia,"Perth
The Black Swan State Theatre Company is resident in the State Theatre Centre of WA. It was founded in 1991, and runs on subscription. It supports an emerging writers' group and resident artists. Prior to the construction of the Theatre Centre, the main theatre was the Playhouse, now demolished, with its resident National Theatre Company (until 1984), managed by the Perth Theatre Trust. In the late 1980s, this company was producing up to 14 plays by Western Australians per year.
At the University of Western Australia, the Graduate Dramatic Society is a not-for-profit established in 1952, The University Dramatic Society is student-run and was established in 1923.  The Perth playwright Dorothy Hewett's plays were first performed by these groups."
Theatre of Australia,"Adelaide
The State Theatre Company of South Australia is the leading professional company
Adelaide Theatre is the oldest surviving repertory theatre in the Southern Hemisphere, established in 1908.
Some professional companies focus on particular genres like classical theatre (Bell Shakespeare), theatre for young people (Windmill, Barking Gecko, Patch, Arena, Monkey Baa), music theatre (The Production Company, Harvest Rain) or circus and physical theatre (Circa, Circus Oz). Other companies specialise in areas such as artists with disability (Back to Back), Indigenous artists (see below) or specific communities (Urban Theatre Projects, Big hART)."
Theatre of Australia,"Theatrical training
The major training centre for young actors in Australia is the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) at the University of New South Wales, established in 1958. The list of famous alumni include Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette, Mel Gibson and Baz Luhrmann.
The other dedicated university training centre is the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) at Edith Cowan University, established in 1980. As an elite course it accepts only 18 students per year. Famous alumni include Hugh Jackman and Tim Minchin. 
As well, almost all Australian universities offer degree and diploma courses in theatre and drama studies. 
All States have a range of community-based organisations and colleges for training in theatre. Youth-based companies include the PACT Centre for Emerging Artists in Sydney, St Martins Youth Arts Centre in Melbourne, and the Windmill Theatre Company in Adelaide. The Eora Centre in Redfern, Sydney has been a centre for contemporary visual and performing arts and Aboriginal studies since it was established in July 1984."
Theatre of Australia,"Playwrights and plays
Betty Roland has been called the first ""real dramatist"" in Australia. Her early plays such as Touch of Silk in 1928, were mostly romantic drama or comedy, but her later work with New Theatre was agitprop and highly political. She also wrote novels, autobiography and film, radio and TV scrips, including the book for Australia's first talking movie Spur of the Moment. Another feminist playwright of the Left around the same time was Dymphna Cusack, who built an international reputation across Europe in leftist communities. 
Mona Brand was also associated with the New Theatre and her 28 plays mostly had political messages. From 1950 to 1980 she had more plays put on abroad than any other Australian, although she never had a professional production in Australia. 
Up until the 1950s and beyond, Australian actors were trained in Britain and took on typical British upper-class accents. Many had difficulty using the Australian accent and vernacular, even into the 1970s. The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll by Ray Lawler was a watershed for Australian theatre, openly and authentically portraying distinctly Australian life and characters who had Australian accents. It was first performed at the Union Theatre in Melbourne in 1955. It was taken up by the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust and presented in all Australian States as well as London and New York. It has become a beloved Australian play, and has been adapted for film, TV and opera.    
Some plays tackled Australia's myths critically. In The One Day of the Year, Alan Seymour studied the paradoxical nature of the ANZAC Day commemoration by Australians of the defeat of the Battle of Gallipoli. The first production was by the Adelaide Theatre group in 1960, and many of those involved received death threats. 
A considerable expansion of Australian theatre began in the 1970s (sometimes called a 'New Wave') with the works of writers including David Williamson, Dorothy Hewett, John Romeril, Alex Buzo, Barry Oakley, Jack Hibberd, and Alma de Groen. Many of these playwrights debuted at La Mama in Melbourne or the Nimrod in Sydney, and went on to present works in mainstream venues.    
David Williamson has been the most successful playwright in Australia's history. He has written over 60 plays, of which The Club has been staged over 130 times while The Removalists and Don's Party have been staged over 50 times, making these the most popular Australian plays of all time. These three plays, and The Coming of Stork, Travelling North and The Perfectionist, were adapted as movies. Williamson also collaborated on high-profile film scripts including Eliza Frazer, Gallipoli, The Year of Living Dangerously and Phar Lap. He was declared the Senior Australian of the Year in 2012.  
Unlike in Europe, most original theatre in Australia has been naturalistic, though Patrick White, Dymphna Cusack and Douglas Stewart included non-naturalistic and poetic elements in their plays. From 1969, a series of plays by the Western Australian poet, playwright and novelist Dorothy Hewett introduced home-grown Expressionist or Epic theatre to Australia, with its whirl of disparate theatrical elements. Hewett wrote a number of plays specifically for the open-air New Fortune Theatre at the University of Western Australia, including Australia's first ""Second Wave Feminist"" play The Chapel Perilous in 1971. Music has featured extensively in Hewett's plays: seven of her 22 plays were musicals and employed theatre composers such as Jim Cotter.
Nick Enright began as an actor and director, but won the Major AWGIE Award from the Australian Writers Guild four times for plays and adaptations. He was happy to take his plays on tour; the play Daylight Saving played in 45 theatres in a round-Australia odyssey during 2000-01. His adaptation of Tim Winton's Cloudstreet received box office and critical acclaim, and went on tour in Australia, at the Festival of Dublin, and in London. He wrote the lyrics and book for a number of musicals, including The Boy from Oz about Peter Allen. Enright died of melanoma at age 52."
Theatre of Australia,"Actors
Several Australian drama actors were famous at home or played major roles abroad.  "
Theatre of Australia,"Dame Judith Anderson took many leading roles on Broadway and the Old Vic from the 1920s , She is considered one of the 20th century's greatest classical stage actors, even playing Hamlet in her seventies during a national tour of the USA.
Sir Robert Helpmann the ballet dancer took leading roles in British theatre in the 1940s.
Frank Thring played long-running character roles in major productions in Australia and Britain from 1945, and gained fame in the movie Ben Hur and in Hollywood epics of the 1950s and 1960s.
John McCallum did seasons in Britain from 1939, acted in movies after 1947, and became joint Director of J.C. Williamsons in Australia in 1958. He was married to the British entertainer and film star Googie Withers, who played many stage leads in Australia. He received the JC Williamson Award for lifetime achievement.
From the 1950s, actors could made a career in Australia. Some of the most famous and respected have been:"
Theatre of Australia,"Ruth Cracknell, a character actor and comedian, acted for most of the major theatre companies and on television and films.
Gordon Chater arrived in Australia after World War II, and was a stage, radio and TV personality. He toured successfully with the play The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin in the 1970s.
Ron Haddrick played five seasons in Stratford-on-Avon with Britain's top actors, then played in over forty productions at the Old Tote.
Robyn Nevin has directed more than 30 productions and acted in more than 80 plays.
John Bell spent five years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, co-founded the Nimrod Theatre Company in 1970, and founded Bell Shakespeare in 1990. He has been voted a National Living Treasure for the National Trust by public nomination
From the 1980s, Australian actors began to garner leads and action hero roles in Hollywood. Probably the best known internationally as A-list celebrities and Oscar winners are Cate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman, Mel Gibson, Russell Crowe and Heath Ledger."
Theatre of Australia,"Cross-fertilization with cinema and TV
Film and television have been more lucratively funded than live stage, and have provided a career vehicle for aspiring actors and scriptwriters. Conversely, movie stars with an interest in live theatre have headlined important stage productions as a drawcard. Australian movie or TV stars that have made significant contributions to live theatre in Australia and abroad include Peter Finch, Michael Caton, Jacki Weaver, Helen Morse, Wendy Hughes, Bryan Brown, Garry McDonald, Geoffrey Rush, Judy Davis, Mel Gibson, Sigrid Thornton, Hugo Weaving, Greta Scacchi, Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, Cate Blanchett and Toni Collette. As an example of cross-fertilisation between the genres, in 1979, two impoverished young Sydney actors, Mel Gibson and Geoffrey Rush, shared a flat and co-starred in a local production of Waiting for Godot. Gibson had studied at NIDA and made his stage debut alongside classmate Judy Davis in a 1976 production of Romeo and Juliet, before becoming internationally known in the Mad Max and Gallipoli films. Rush joined Jim Sharman's Lighthouse Theatre troupe in the 1980s and built a reputation as one of Australia's leading stage actors before becoming known internationally in film.  
Conversely, some of the bigger theatre companies have consistently employed film actors. Players associated with the Sydney Theatre Company include Mel Gibson, Judy Davis, Hugo Weaving, Geoffrey Rush and Toni Collette."
Theatre of Australia,"Festivals and conferences
Festivals may be the oldest form of drama, where the larger gathering of people encourages display in costume and rehearsed performance. In Australia they are important showcases to a wider range of people than usual. The major cultural festivals have been the Perth International Arts Festival (Australia's longest running cultural festival, first held in 1953) the Adelaide Festival of the Arts (from 1960) , the Melbourne International Arts Festival (from 1973) the Sydney Festival (from 1977), the Darwin Festival (from 1978) and the Brisbane Festival (from 1996). These larger festivals usually feature a mix of overseas and Australian acts of all kinds. There are many smaller specialist festivals and regional festivals in Australia. 
Arts conferences have been an important way to showcase new work and to meet others and share ideas. The National Playwrights Conference, associated with the Australian National Playwrights Centre, which ran from 1972 to 2006, became a cornerstone of the industry. A national Play Festival began ran from 2012 to 2019 under the aegis of the short-lived Playwriting Australia.  A new Playwrights Conference began in 2022, presented by Currency Press.  
From the 1960s to the 1980s, Australian Universities Drama Festivals provided an opportunity for tertiary students to present plays to each other, learning playcrafting and direction. One of the more famous gatherings was in 1963, when Germaine Greer acted in Brecht's Mother Courage and the radical playwright Fernando Arribal was brought from Paris."
Theatre of Australia,"Musical theatre
Musical theatre has always been very popular in Australia, though most often this has meant large-scale productions of British or American musicals headlined by international stars. J C Williamsons brought Gilbert and Sullivan productions from 1879 to 1963. Broadway musicals from Rodgers and Hammerstein began long runs from 1949, and then Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals from the 1970s. Rock opera productions such as Hair, Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar and the Rocky Horror Show gave a major boost to popular music talent, and performers such as Marcia Hines, Reg Livermore, and Colleen Hewett became national names through their involvement. Musical biographies of Australian music singers Peter Allen (The Boy From Oz in 1998) and Johnny O'Keefe (Shout! The Legend of The Wild One) attracted big audiences in the 1990s.                             
Australian theatrical musicals where authorship was granted to the scriptwriter rather than the composer or a duo, such as The Legend of King O'Malley by Bob Ellis, the Man from Mukinupin by Dorothy Hewett, the Sapphires by Tony Briggs, Bran Nue Day by Jimmy Chi and Miracle City and Summer Rain, by Nick Enright, signalled a more radical political role for musical theatre."
Theatre of Australia,"Performers
Gladys Moncrieff ""the Australian Wonder Child"" was a child star. As an adult, ""Our Glad"" performed in light opera in the 1920s and was known as ""Australia's Queen of Song"". She was very active raising funds for charities in World War II.
Nancye Hayes, also ""Australia's queen of song and dance"", performed many leading roles in musicals, including Australian-written musicals, and won many awards. She was also very active in television.
Julie Anthony performed in musicals and light opera, and won the Mo Awards 13 times as Best Vocal Performance or Entertainer of the Year.
Anthony Warlow had lead roles in many musicals, received 11 Mo Awards between 1990 and 2008, and was declared a National Living Treasure.
Reg Livermore first worked with Philip Street regulars, and on TV, including the Mavis Bramston Show. He starred in the long-running musical Hair in 1970, followed by the cult Rocky Horror Show. He then toured with three of his own one-man shows, especially the high camp Betty Blokkbuster Follies. Unlike Humphries, he was not popular in the USA or Britain, where he was booed off the stage.
Robyn Archer began as a folk music performer, but in 1974 she became involved with the musical theatre of Brecht and German-style cabaret. From the late 1970s she toured with a series of one woman shows such as A Star is Torn (1979) which moved to London's West End. Archer has devised many works for the stage, and in 2022-23 she has toured with An Australian Songbook. She also acted as a director of many festivals, including the National Festival of Australian Theatre from 1993-5, the Adelaide and Melbourne Arts Festivals between 1998 and 2004, and in Liverpool, England with the European Capital of Culture 2008."
Theatre of Australia,"Comedy, circus and puppetry
Comedy
For much of Australia's early history, touring theatre companies brought variety theatre and vaudeville to regional audiences. Vaudeville consisted of a series of separate acts, including light theatre, comedy and song. Travelling circuits like Brennan-Fullers, which featured illusionists, jugglers, singers and acrobats, or the Tivoli circuit, operating around the Tivoli theatres in four states, were extremely popular.
The Tivoli Theatre or Adelphi Theatre in Sydney presented vaudeville between 1912 and 1966 until television made them no longer profitable. Stars of the Tivoli included Roy Rene. who had created the comic character Mo McCackie from 1916, in white and black makeup. Lecherous, leering and ribald, Mo epitomised the Australian ""lair"", always trying to ""make a quid"" or to ""knock off a sheila"". He played to packed houses right through the war years, and gained a nationwide audience through radio. 
George Wallace also began his career in a duo act, creating a ""wharfie"" character, but he became popular as a solo act in the Depression years. Although uneducated, he wrote all his own material, and could sing and dance. After headlining in five movies, he was known as Australia's biggest film star. "
Theatre of Australia,"Barry Humphries has been Australia's most famous comic As a follower of the absurdist art movement Dada. his many experiments in anarchy and visual satire have been legendary. Amongst many stage characters, he created Edna Everage from Moonee Ponds, who became a household name with her outrageous Australian expressions, audience-shaming and gladioli-waving. Another character, Barry McKenzie, began as a popular comic strip, and actually poked fun at the British while featuring a boorish innocent epitomising the British view of Australians. Humphries was just as popular in England as Australia, and Edna Everage was created a Dame by the Queen. Humphries also achieved success in the US with tours on Broadway and television appearances. He was a stalwart of British and Australian theatre and was honoured in both nations.  
The Philip Street Theatre in Sydney, operating from 1954 to 1971, featured intimate satirical revue productions. Humphries and most other significant Australian comedy actors were alumni. The Mavis Bramston Show, Australia's first satirical sketch comedy topical satire TV series, sprang from Philip Street actors.
The Last Laugh, in Collingwood and then at the Athenaeum Theatre, became Australia's prime location for alternative and stand-up comedy, often featuring genuine cabaret acts in the European style. Some of Australia's best comedians made their start in this venue. Melbourne also had a tradition for experimenting with unusual comedy venues, such as mobile trams and trains. John Pinder, owner of the Last Laugh, launched the Melbourne International Comedy Festival,one of the three largest comedy festivals in the world."
Theatre of Australia,"Circus
Vaudeville often contained circus performers, but dedicated travelling circuses were also a regular annual feature in the suburbs and seaside resorts, with Big Top tents, ringmasters, acrobatic, animal and clown acts. Wirth's Circus was billed for eighty years as Australia's own ""Greatest Show on Earth"" from 1882 to 1963. It took over the present Melbourne Arts Centre site as Olympia Circus from 1902, and occupied a permanent location in Sydney's Haymarket. The circus also toured through the Pacific. Other important circuses were Ashtons Circus, which was founded in Tasmania in 1847 and is one of the longest lasting in the world, run by the sixth generation of Ashtons. Bullen's Circus ran from 1920 to 1969, and featured a large elephant herd.   
Television spelled the demise of the original travelling shows, but theatre-based circuses began to appear from the 1970s, doubling as circus schools. The Flying Fruit Fly Circus formed from the Victorian College of the Arts Drama School in 1979. Circus Oz emerged from the Australian Performing Group in 1978 and played long seasons at the Last Laugh; the troupe is currently threatened with closure.   
Traditional travelling circuses include the Stardust Circus, which up till 2021 was the last circus to feature wild animal acts, and a number of other small single-family operations."
Theatre of Australia,"Puppetry
The first Australian marionette company was Webb's Royal Marionettes, which formed out of a visiting British company and toured from 1876 to 1887. Puppetry guilds were founded in Sydney and Melbourne in the 1940s. The first major Australian company was the Tintookies, which was founded by Peter Scriven in 1956 under the auspices of the Elizabethan Theatre Trust. It toured Australia and South-east Asia with large scale-shows having an overtly Australian content. 
The Australia Council offered funding for puppetry from its inception, and other companies including the Queensland Marionette Theatre, the Tasmanian Puppet Theatre (1976), Polyglot Puppet Company, Terrapin Puppet Theatre and Spare Parts puppet theatre. The Dead Puppet Society, from Queensland but with an international reach, uses computer-designed and laser cut puppets and features multi-genre productions in design-led theatre.  
Small one and two person puppet shows operate without subsidy and tour to schools."
Theatre of Australia,"Indigenous theatre
During the 1940s, John Antill composed the music for his Corroboree ballet based on the Aboriginal corroboree. The production was first performed in 1946 and toured Australia during the 1950s and featured on the schedule of Queen Elizabeth II's first Royal Tour of Australia in 1954. It represents an early example of the fusion of Western and Aboriginal theatrical forms in Australia – now regularly expressed in the work of the Bangarra Dance Theatre and other indigenous troupes.In the late 1960s and early 1970s, street theatre, guerrilla theatre and other performances put on by the Aboriginal community were used as a form of political protest. Brian Syron, actor, director and teacher, was a pioneer of Aboriginal theatre from the 1960s onwards. Melbourne's Nindethana Theatre was Australia's first Aboriginal theatre company, co-founded by Bob Maza and Uncle Jack Charles in 1971. Maza also helped set up National Black Theatre in Redfern, Sydney, in 1972. Playwrights such as Kevin Gilbert, Jack Davis, Bobby Merritt and Kath Oodgeroo Noonuccal Walker wrote works which were by, about and for Aboriginal people, and Harry and Bindi Williams, Gary Foley and Paul Coe added to the content and drive which helped ""Blak"" theatre production. Rhoda Roberts and Justine Saunders were two other driving forces, as in the creation of the Aboriginal National Theatre Trust, which emerged from the first National Black Playwright's Conference in 1987.
As of 2020 there are several Indigenous theatre companies in existence, including the Yirra Yaakin in Perth, Ilbijerri in Melbourne (led by Maza's daughter, Rachael), and Moogahlin Performing Arts, based in Sydney's Carriageworks. The Bangarra Dance Theatre is known worldwide, BlakDance is another pathway for Indigenous dancers, and Marrugeku, ""Australia's Leading Indigenous Intercultural Dance Theatre"", has bases on both Sydney Carriageworks and in Broome, Western Australia. The Aboriginal Centre for the Performing Arts in Brisbane provides a pathway for young Indigenous performers. Writer/performers such as Nakkiah Lui, Leah Purcell and others continue to produce work for stage.
Ngapartji Ngapartji, by Scott Rankin and Trevor Jamieson, recounts the story of the effects on the Pitjantjatjara people of nuclear testing in the Western Desert during the Cold War. It is an example of the contemporary fusion of traditions of drama in Australia with Pitjantjatjara actors being supported by a multicultural cast of Greek, Afghan, Japanese and New Zealand heritage."
Theatre of Australia,"Opera, ballet and dance
Opera
Opera was not initially regarded as ""high culture"" and was performed with other musical and comedy material as part of variety entertainment. In the 1820s several operas were staged by convicts at the Emu Plains Prison Farm. The Theatre Royal and the Royal Victoria Theatre presented operas from 1832.
Tours by international opera companies began after the Gold Rushes. The first resident opera company was brought to Australia in 1861 by William Saurin Lyster, and the company toured around Australia and New Zealand. In the 1860s, it performed 42 full-length operas in nearly 1500 performances. The company dispersed after Lyster died in 1880. Australia did not have had another permanent opera company until 1966.
Until then, most opera singers moved abroad to train and find fame. Dame Nellie Melba, a lyric coloratura soprano, was one of the most famous singers of the late 19th century. She travelled to Europe and became a great success in Paris, Brussels and from 1888, in Covent Garden in London. She returned to Australia frequently and raised large sums for Great War charities. 
Dame Joan Sutherland was considered the leading coloratura soprano of the 20th century. She began singing leading roles in London in 1952. She sang in Italian, German and English, but was most famous for her lead role in Lucia di Lammermoor, where she became known as La Stupenda. 
Other famous Australian opera singers include the sopranos June Bronhill and Yvonne Kenny, and baritones John Shaw, John Cameron, Anthony Warlow and Dennis Olsen. 
The assistance of large national funding bodies made Australian opera companies possible. The Elizabethan Trust Opera Company became permanent in 1966, and, as Opera Australia, had its first performance in the Sydney Opera House in 1973. It is not just Australia's principal opera company, but the biggest performing arts company in Australia. Companies such as the West Australian Opera, Opera Queensland, State Opera of South Australia and Victorian Opera are based in individual states. Sydney's Pinchgut Opera performs baroque and early classical works, and Sydney Chamber Opera produces twentieth century and contemporary works.
The Sydney Conservatorium of Music opened an opera school in 1935. Voice is offered as an instrument in other Conservatoria of Music around Australia."
Theatre of Australia,"Ballet and dance
As in opera, early Australian ballet dancers went to England to perform. Sir Robert Helpmann became principal dancer after 1932 for the Vic-Wells Ballet. From the beginning he was also a major director for opera and theatre, an actor with principal roles in plays in major venues, and he appeared in 15 films. He became co-director of the Australian Ballet in 1965, though he frequently clashed with a penny-pinching management. As Australia's greatest theatrical figure of his era, he was given a State Funeral in 1986.The Australian Ballet was founded by the English ballerina Dame Peggy van Praagh in 1962 in Melbourne. It is Australia's foremost classical ballet company and is today recognised as one of the world's major international ballet companies. It performs works from the classical repertoire as well as contemporary works by major Australian and international choreographers. As of 2010, it was presenting approximately 200 performances in cities and regional areas around Australia each year as well as conducting international tours. Regular venues include: the Arts Centre Melbourne, the Sydney Opera House, Sydney Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre and Queensland Performing Arts Centre.
The Australian Ballet School is the primary training body for the Australian Ballet. It was founded in 1964 and operates out of the Melbourne Arts Precinct.
Most other forms of dance are participatory rather than theatrical performances, with several important exceptions. Indigenous corroboree has commonly been conducted as a presentation or form of theatre, showing the relations of people to Country, to their tribe or to ancestors. 
Contemporary dance is also conducted as rehearsed public performance, The Sydney Dance Company was originally a dance-in-education contemporary dance group, which prospered under the leadership of Graeme Murphy from 1976. Murphy is the only choreographer to receive the JC Williamson Award for lifetime achievements in the Arts."
Theatre of Australia,"Theatre today
Theatre in Australia today includes a diverse range of performances of different scale and contexts. Performing arts centres across the country like the Sydney Opera House, Arts Centre Melbourne, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Adelaide Festival Centre produce, present or host Australian and international theatre productions of various kinds. Venues in smaller cities like the Theatre Royal Hobart, The Arts Centre Gold Coast, Darwin Entertainment Centre or Geelong Performing Arts Centre, or outside the CBD of major cities like Frankston Arts Centre, Riverside Theatre Parramatta or Sunnybank Performing Arts Centre, also present seasons of touring productions. Non-traditional spaces Carriageworks in Sydney and Arts House in Melbourne have a focus on contemporary and experimental works. Independent and fringe theatre is fostered by venues such as La Mama and Theatre Works in Melbourne and the Old Fitz in Sydney.
The national Helpmann Awards are the major live performance awards in Australia. Major cities also have their own theatre awards, such as the Sydney Theatre Awards, Melbourne's Green Room Awards and Brisbane's Matilda Awards.
Publishers of Australian playscripts include the non-profit Australian Script Centre, Currency Press, Yackandandah playscripts, Playlab Press and Full Dress Publishing."
Theatre of Australia,"List of current major theatre companies
Plays and theatre
Back to Back Theatre
Bell Shakespeare Company
Black Swan Theatre Company
Brink Productions
Belvoir, Sydney
Griffin Theatre Company
La Boite Theatre
La Mama Theatre, Melbourne
Malthouse Theatre
Melbourne Theatre Company
Queensland Theatre
State Theatre Company of South Australia
Sydney Theatre Company
Twelfth Night Theatre
Windmill Performing Arts"
Theatre of Australia,"Musical theatre
Chamber Made
Hayes Theatre Co
Harvest Rain Theatre Company"
Theatre of Australia,"Circus and physical theatre
Circa, Brisbane
Circus Oz
Kage Physical Theatre
Legs On The Wall
Gravity and Other Myths"
Theatre of Australia,"Opera companies
Opera Australia
Opera Queensland
State Opera of South Australia
Victorian Opera
West Australian Opera"
Theatre of Australia,"Performing arts festivals
Major performing arts festivals
Adelaide Festival of Arts
Brisbane Festival
Melbourne Festival
Perth International Arts Festival
Sydney Festival
Ten Days on the Island (Tasmania)"
Theatre of Australia,"Single genre
Adelaide Cabaret Festival
Melbourne International Comedy Festival"
Theatre of Australia,"Fringe festivals
Adelaide Fringe
Melbourne Fringe Festival
Fringe World (Perth)"
Theatre of Australia,"Theatre education
Aboriginal Centre for the Performing Arts
Australian Institute of Music - Dramatic Arts
National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA)
Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA)
Victorian College of the Arts (VCA)
National Institute of Circus Arts (NICA)
Adelaide College of the Arts
Australian Institute of Music
CQUniversity's Central Queensland Conservatorium of Music, Mackay"
Theatre of Australia,"Awards and competitions
Green Room Awards - for Melbourne theatre, opera and dance
Helpmann Award - national awards for plays, musicals, opera, dance, comedy, cabaret, contemporary music and classical music
Mo Awards - national entertainment industry awards live entertainment. Last awarded in 2016
Matilda Awards - for Brisbane theatre
Performing Arts WA Awards - for Perth theatre, musicals, opera and dance
Sydney Theatre Awards - for Sydney theatre"
Theatre of Australia,"Performing arts publishers
Australian Script Centre
Currency Press
Yackandandah Playscripts"
Theatre of Australia,"See also
Australia Council for the Arts
AusStage - Gateway to Performing Arts
Australian comedy
Culture of Australia
Dance in Australia
Architecture of Australia
Performing Arts in Australia
Performing arts education in Australia
List of concert halls in Australia and New Zealand
List of festivals in Australia"
Theatre of Australia,"References
Further reading
Kirby-Smith, Virginia (1969). The development of Australian theatre and drama, 1788-1964 (PhD thesis). Ann Arbor, Michigan: Duke University.
Fitzpatrick, Peter (1979). After the Doll: Australian Drama since 1955. Melbourne: Edwin Arnold. ISBN 0726720402.
Vella, Maeve (1989). Theatre of the Impossible: Puppet Theatre in Australia. Craftsman House. ISBN 9780947131210.
Milne, Geoffrey (2004). Theatre (un)limited: Australian Theatre Since the 1950s. Rodopi. ISBN 9042009306.
Meyrick, Julian (2017). Australian Theatre after the New Wave: Policy, Subsidy and the Alternative Artist. Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-33988-0.
Thurow, Suzanne (2019). Performing Indigenous Identities on the Contemporary Australian Stage. London: Routledge. ISBN 9780429281488.
Pinne, Peter; Johnson, Peter Wyllie (2019). The Australian Musical: From the Beginning. Allen and Unwin. ISBN 9781760529666."
Theatre of Australia,"External links
AustralianPlays.org - source of Australian playscripts
The History of Theatre in Australia
AussieTheatre.com - Australia theatre news site
Highlights in Australian theatre history at the Australian Culture and Recreation Portal
RealTime - Australian contemporary arts magazine covering dance, performance, sound/music, visual arts, film and media art
AusStage, Australian Performing Arts Database, Flinders University, SA
AusStage, theatre productions, Australian National Identity 1829 - 2012. -database, Flinders University, SA"
Military history of Australia during the Vietnam War,"Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War began with a small commitment of 30 military advisors in 1962, and increased over the following decade to a peak of 7,672 Australian personnel following the Menzies Government's April 1965 decision to upgrade its military commitment to South Vietnam's security. By the time the last Australian personnel were withdrawn in 1972, the Vietnam War had become Australia's longest war, eventually being surpassed by Australia's long-term commitment to the War in Afghanistan. It remains Australia's largest force contribution to a foreign conflict since the Second World War, and was also the most controversial military action in Australia since the conscription controversy during World War I. Although initially enjoying broad support due to concerns about the spread of communism in Southeast Asia, an increasingly influential anti-war movement developed, particularly in response to the government's imposition of conscription.
The withdrawal of Australia's forces from South Vietnam began in November 1970, under the Gorton Government, when 8 RAR completed its tour of duty and was not replaced. A phased withdrawal followed and, by 11 January 1973, Australian involvement in hostilities in Vietnam had ceased. Nevertheless, Australian troops from the Australian Embassy Platoon remained deployed in the country until 1 July 1973, and Australian forces were deployed briefly in April 1975, during the fall of Saigon, to evacuate personnel from the Australian embassy. Approximately 60,000 Australians served in the war: 521 were killed and more than 3,000 were wounded."
Military history of Australia during the Vietnam War,"History
Background
Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War was driven largely by the rise of communism in Southeast Asia after World War II, and the fear of its spread, which developed in Australia during the 1950s and early 1960s. Following the end of the World War II, the French had tried to reassert control over French Indochina, which had been occupied by Japan. In 1950, the communist-backed Việt Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh, began to gain the ascendency in the First Indochina War. In 1954, after the defeat of the French at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the Geneva Accords of 1954 led to the splitting of the country geographically, along the 17th parallel north of latitude: the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) (recognised by the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China) ruling the north, and the State of Vietnam (SoV), an associated state in the French Union (recognised by the non-communist world) ruling the south.
The Geneva Accords imposed a deadline of July 1956 for the governments of the two Vietnams to hold elections, with a view to uniting the country under one government. In 1955, Ngô Đình Diệm, the prime minister of the State of Vietnam, deposed the head of state Bảo Đại in a fraudulent referendum and declared himself President of the newly proclaimed Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam). He then refused to take part in the elections, claiming that the communist North Vietnam would engage in election fraud and that as a result they would win because they had more people. After the election deadline passed, the military commanders in the North began preparing an invasion of the South. Over the course of the late 1950s and early 1960s this invasion took root in a campaign of insurgency, subversion and sabotage in the South employing guerrilla warfare tactics. In September 1957, Diem visited Australia and was given strong support by both the ruling Liberal Party of Australia of Prime Minister Robert Menzies and the opposition Australian Labor Party (ALP). Diem was particularly feted by the Catholic community, as he pursued policies that discriminated in favour of the Catholic minority in his country and gave special powers to the Catholic Church.
By 1962, the situation in South Vietnam had become so unstable that Diem submitted a request for assistance to the United States and its allies to counter the growing insurgency and the threat that it posed to South Vietnam's security. Following that, the US began to send advisors to provide tactical and logistical advice to the South Vietnamese. At the same time, the US sought to increase the legitimacy of the South Vietnamese government by instituting the Many Flags program, hoping to counter the communist propaganda that South Vietnam was merely a US puppet state, and to involve as many other nations as possible. Thus Australia, as an ally of the United States, with obligations under the ANZUS Pact, and in the hope of consolidating its alliance with the US, became involved in the Vietnam War. Between 1962 and 1972, Australia committed almost 60,000 personnel to Vietnam, including ground troops, naval forces and air assets, and contributed significant amounts of materiel to the war effort."
Military history of Australia during the Vietnam War,"Australia's military involvement
Australian advisors, 1962–1965
While assisting the British during the Malayan Emergency, Australian and New Zealand military forces had gained considerable experience in jungle warfare and counter-insurgency. According to historian Paul Ham, the US Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, ""freely admitted to the ANZUS meeting in Canberra in May 1962, that the US armed forces knew little about jungle warfare"". Given the experience that Australian forces had gained in Malaya, it was felt that Australia could contribute in Vietnam by providing advisors who were experts in the tactics of jungle warfare. The Australian government's initial response was to send 30 military advisers, dispatched as the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam (AATTV), also known as ""the Team"". The Australian military assistance was to be in jungle warfare training, and the Team comprised highly qualified and experienced officers and NCOs, led by Colonel Ted Serong, many with previous experience from the Malayan Emergency. Their arrival in South Vietnam, during July and August 1962, was the beginning of Australia's involvement in the war in Vietnam.
Relationships between the AATTV and US advisors were generally very cordial, but there were sometimes significant differences of opinion on training and tactics. For example, when Serong expressed doubt about the value of the Strategic Hamlet Program at a US Counter Insurgency Group meeting in Washington on 23 May 1963, he drew a ""violent challenge"" from US Marine General Victor ""Brute"" Krulak. Captain Barry Petersen's work with raising an anti-communist Montagnard force in the Central Highlands between 1963 and 1965 highlighted another problem. South Vietnamese officials sometimes found sustained success by a foreigner difficult to accept. Warrant Officer Class Two Kevin Conway, of the AATTV, was killed on 6 July 1964, side by side with Master Sergeant Gabriel Alamo of the USSF, during a sustained Vietcong (VC) attack on Nam Dong Special Forces Camp, becoming Australia's first battle casualty."
Military history of Australia during the Vietnam War,"Increased Australian commitment, 1965–1970
In August 1964 the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) sent a flight of Caribou transports to the port town of Vũng Tàu. By the end of 1964, there were almost 200 Australian military personnel in the South Vietnam, including an engineer and surgical team as well as a larger AATTV team. To boost the size of the Army by providing a greater pool for infantrymen, the Australian Government had introduced conscription for compulsory military service for 20-year-olds, in November 1964, despite opposition from within the Army and many sections of the broader community. Thereafter, battalions serving with in South Vietnam all contained National Servicemen. With the war escalating the AATTV increased to approximately 100 men by December.
On 29 April 1965, Menzies announced that the government had received a request for further military assistance from South Vietnam. ""We have decided...in close consultation with the Government of the United States—to provide an infantry battalion for service in Vietnam."" He argued that a communist victory in South Vietnam would be a direct military threat to Australia. ""It must be seen as part of a thrust by Communist China between the Indian and Pacific Oceans"" he added.
The question of whether a formal request was made by the South Vietnamese government at that time has been disputed. Although the South Vietnamese Prime Minister, Trần Văn Hương, made a request in December 1964, Hương's replacement, Phan Huy Quát, had to be ""coerced into accepting an Australian battalion"", and stopped short of formally requesting the commitment in writing, simply sending an acceptance of the offer to Canberra, the day before Menzies announced it to the Australian parliament. In that regard, it has been argued that the decision was made by the Australian government, against advice of the Department of Defence, to coincide with the commitment of US combat troops earlier in the year, and that the decision would have been made regardless of the wishes of the South Vietnamese government."
Military history of Australia during the Vietnam War,"As a result of the announcement, the 1st Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (1 RAR) was deployed. Advanced elements of the battalion departed Australia on 27 May 1965. Accompanied by a troop of armoured personnel carriers from the 4th/19th Prince of Wales's Light Horse, as well as logistics personnel, they embarked upon HMAS Sydney and, following their arrival in Vietnam in June, they were attached to the US 173rd Airborne Brigade, along with a Royal New Zealand Army artillery battery at Bien Hoa Base Camp. Throughout 1965, they undertook several operations in Biên Hòa Province and subsequently fought significant actions, including Gang Toi, Operation Crimp and Suoi Bong Trang. Meanwhile, 1 RAR's attachment to US forces had highlighted the differences between Australian and American operational methods, and Australian and US military leaders subsequently agreed that Australian combat forces should be deployed in a discrete province. That would allow the Australian Army to ""fight their own tactical war"", independently of the US.
In April 1966, 1st Australian Task Force (1 ATF) was established in Phước Tuy Province, based at Nui Dat. 1 ATF consisted of two (and, after 1967, three) infantry battalions, a troop, and later a squadron, of armoured personnel carriers from the 1st Armoured Personnel Carrier Squadron, and a detachment of the Special Air Service Regiment (SASR), as well as support services under the command of the 1st Australian Logistic Support Group (1 ALSG), based in Vũng Tàu. A squadron of Centurion tanks was added in December 1967. The New Zealand battery and a battery from the U.S 35th Field Artillery Regiment were integrated into the task force. New Zealand infantry units were deployed in 1967 and, after March 1968, were integrated into Australian battalions serving with 1 ATF. The combined infantry forces were thereafter designated ""ANZAC Battalions"". Special forces from the New Zealand Special Air Service were also attached to each Australian SASR squadron from late 1968. 1 ATF's responsibility was the security of Phước Tuy Province, excluding larger towns.
The RAAF contingent was also expanded, growing to include three squadrons — No. 35 Squadron, flying Caribous, No. 9 Squadron flying UH-1 Iroquois battlefield helicopters and No. 2 Squadron flying Canberra bombers. Based at Phan Rang Air Base in Ninh Thuận Province, the Canberras flew many bombing sorties, and two were lost, while the Caribou transport aircraft supported anti-communist ground forces, and the Iroquois helicopters were used in troop-lifts and medical evacuation and, from Vũng Tàu Air Base, as gunships  in support of 1 ATF. At its peak it included over 750 personnel.
During the war, RAAF CAC-27 Sabre fighters from No. 79 Squadron were deployed to Ubon Air Base in Thailand as part of Australia's SEATO commitments. The Sabres took no part in direct hostilities against North Vietnam, and were withdrawn in 1968. The Royal Australian Navy (RAN) also made a significant contribution, which involved the deployment of one destroyer, on six-month rotations, deployed on the gun-line in a shore bombardment role. The RAN Helicopter Flight Vietnam and a RAN Clearance Diving Team were also deployed. The ageing aircraft carrier, HMAS Sydney, after being converted to a troop-ship, was used to convey the bulk of Australian ground forces to South Vietnam. Female members of the Army and RAAF nursing services were present in Vietnam from the outset and, as the force grew, the medical capability was expanded by the establishment of the 1st Australian Field Hospital at Vũng Tàu on 1 April 1968."
Military history of Australia during the Vietnam War,"From an Australian perspective, the most famous engagement in the war was the Battle of Long Tan, which took place on 18 and 19 August 1966. During the battle, a company from 6 RAR, despite being heavily outnumbered, fought off an assault by a force of regimental strength. 18 Australians were killed and 24 wounded, while at least 245 VC were killed. It was a decisive Australian victory and is often cited as an example of the importance of combining and coordinating infantry, artillery, armour and military aviation. The battle had considerable tactical implications as well, being significant in allowing the Australians to gain dominance over Phước Tuy Province and, although there were other large-scale encounters in later years, 1 ATF was not fundamentally challenged again. Regardless, during February 1967, 1 ATF sustained its heaviest casualties in the war to that point, losing 16 men killed and 55 wounded in a single week, the bulk of them during Operation Bribie. 1 ATF appeared to have lost the initiative and, for the first time in nine months of operations, the number of Australians killed in battle, or from friendly fire, mines or booby traps, had reversed the task force's kill ratio.
Such losses underscored the need for a third battalion, and the requirement for tanks to support the infantry, a realisation which challenged the conventional wisdom of Australian counter-revolutionary warfare doctrine, which had previously allotted only a minor role to armour. Yet, it was nearly a year before more Australian forces finally arrived. To Brigadier Stuart Graham, the 1 ATF commander, Operation Bribie confirmed the need to establish a physical barrier, to deny the VC freedom of movement and thereby regain the initiative. The subsequent decision to establish an 11-kilometre (6.8 mi) barrier minefield from Đất Đỏ to the coast increasingly came to dominate task force planning. Ultimately, that would prove both controversial and costly for the Australians. Despite initial success, the minefield became a source of munitions for the VC to use against 1 ATF and, in 1969, the decision was made to remove it.
As the war continued to escalate following further American troop increases, 1 ATF was heavily reinforced in late 1967. A third infantry battalion arrived in December 1967, and a squadron of Centurion tanks, and more Iroquois helicopters, were added in early 1968. In all, a further 1,200 men were deployed, taking the total Australian troop strength to over 8,000 men, its highest level during the war. This increase effectively doubled the combat power available to the task force commander.
Although primarily operating out of Phước Tuy, the 1 ATF was also available for deployment elsewhere in the III Corps Tactical Zone. As Phước Tuy progressively came under Australian control, 1968 saw the Australians spending a significant period of time conducting operations further afield. The communist Tet Offensive began on 30 January 1968 with the aim of inciting a general uprising, simultaneously engulfing population centres across South Vietnam. In response, 1 ATF was deployed along likely infiltration routes to defend the vital Biên Hòa–Long Binh complex northeast of Saigon, as part of Operation Coburg between January and March. Heavy fighting resulted in 17 Australians being killed and 61 wounded, while communist casualties included at least 145 killed, 110 wounded and 5 captured, with many more removed from the battlefield. Tet also affected Phước Tuy Province and, although stretched thin, the remaining Australian forces there successfully repelled an attack on Ba Ria, as well as spoiling a harassing attack on Long Dien. A sweep of Hỏa Lòng was conducted, killing 50 VC and wounding 25, for the loss of five Australians killed and 24 wounded. In late February, the communist offensive collapsed, suffering more than 45,000 killed, compared with allied losses of 6,000 men. Regardless, Tet proved to be a turning point in the war and, although it was a tactical disaster for the communists, it proved a strategic victory for them. Confidence in the American military and political leadership collapsed, as did public support for the war in the United States."
Military history of Australia during the Vietnam War,"Tet had a similar effect on Australian public opinion, and caused growing uncertainty in the government about the determination of the United States to remain militarily involved in Southeast Asia. Amid the initial shock, Prime Minister John Gorton unexpectedly declared that Australia would not increase its military commitment in Vietnam. The war continued without respite and, between May and June 1968, 1 ATF was again deployed away from Phước Tuy in response to intelligence reports of another impending offensive. In May 1968, 1 RAR and 3 RAR, with armour and artillery, support fought off large-scale attacks during the Battle of Coral–Balmoral. 25 Australians were killed and nearly 100 wounded, while the North Vietnamese People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) lost in excess of 300 killed.
Later, from December 1968 to February 1969, two battalions from 1 ATF again deployed away from their base in Phước Tuy province, operating against suspected PAVN/VC bases in the Hat Dich area, in western Phước Tuy, south-eastern Biên Hòa, and south-western Long Khan provinces, during Operation Goodwood. The fighting lasted 78 days and was one of the longest out-of-province operations mounted by the Australians during the war.
From May 1969, the main effort of the task force refocussed on Phước Tuy Province. Later in June 1969, 5 RAR fought one of the last large-scale actions of the Australian involvement in the war, during the Battle of Binh Ba, 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) north of Nui Dat in Phước Tuy Province. The battle differed from the unusual Australian experience, because it involved infantry and armour in close-quarter house-to-house fighting against a combined PAVN/VC force, through the village of Binh Ba. For the loss of one Australian killed, the PAVN/VC lost 107 killed, six wounded and eight captured, in a hard-fought but one-sided engagement."
Military history of Australia during the Vietnam War,"Due to the losses suffered at Binh Ba, the PAVN was forced to move out of Phước Tuy into adjoining provinces and, although the Australians did encounter main force units in the years to come, the Battle of Binh Ba marked the end of such clashes. Yet, while the VC had largely been forced to withdraw to the borders of the province by 1968–69, control of Phước Tuy was challenged on several occasions in the following years, including during the 1968 Tet Offensive, as well as in mid-1969, following the incursion of the PAVN 33rd Regiment, and again in mid-1971, with further incursions by the 33rd Regiment and several VC main force units and, finally, during the Easter Offensive in 1972. Attacks on South Vietnamese Regional Force outposts, and incursions into the villages, had also continued.
Large-scale battles were not the norm in Phước Tuy Province. More typical was company-level patrolling and cordon and search operations, which were designed to put pressure on enemy units and disrupt their access to the local population. To the end of Australian operations in Phước Tuy, that remained the focus of Australian efforts, and that approach arguably achieved the restoration of South Vietnamese government control in the province. Australia's peak commitment at any one time was 7,672 combat troops and New Zealand's, 552, in 1969.
During that time, the AATTV had continued to operate in support of the South Vietnamese forces, with an area of operations stretching from the far south to the Vietnamese Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) which formed the border between North Vietnam and South Vietnam. Members of the team were involved in many combat operations, often commanding formations of Vietnamese soldiers. Some advisors worked with regular Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) units and formations, while others worked with the Montagnard hill tribes, in conjunction with US Special Forces. A few were involved in the controversial Phoenix Program, run by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which was designed to target the VC infrastructure through infiltration, arrest and assassination. The AATTV became Australia's most decorated unit of the war, winning all four Victoria Crosses awarded during the conflict.
Australia also sent some civilian medical staff to help during the war."
Military history of Australia during the Vietnam War,"Australian counter-insurgency tactics and civic action
Historian Albert Palazzo comments that when the Australians entered the Vietnam War, it was with their own ""well considered ...concept of war"", and this was often contradictory or in conflict with US concepts. The 1 ATF light infantry tactics such as patrolling, searching villages without destroying them (with a view to eventually converting them), and ambush and counter ambush drew criticism from some US commanders. General William Westmoreland is reported to have complained to Major General Tim Vincent that 1 ATF was ""not being aggressive enough"". By comparison, US forces sought to flush out the enemy and achieve rapid and decisive victory through ""brazen scrub bashing"" and the use of  ""massive firepower."" Australians acknowledged they had much to learn from the US forces about heliborne assault and joint armour and infantry assaults. Yet the US measure of success—the body count—was apparently held in contempt by many 1 ATF battalion commanders.
In 1966, journalist Gerald Stone described tactics then being used by Australian soldiers newly arrived in Vietnam:"
Military history of Australia during the Vietnam War,"The Australian battalion has been described ...as the safest combat force in Vietnam... It is widely felt that the Australians have shown themselves able to give chase to the guerrillas without exposing themselves to the lethal ambushes that have claimed so many American dead...
Australian patrols shun jungle tracks and clearings... picking their way carefully and quietly through bamboo thickets and tangled foliage... .It is a frustrating experience to trek through the jungle with Australians. Patrols have taken as much as nine hours to sweep a mile of terrain. They move forward a few steps at a time, stop, listen, then proceed again.
Looking back on ten years of reporting the war in Vietnam and Cambodia, journalist Neil Davis said in 1983: ""I was very proud of the Australian troops. They were very professional, very well trained and they fought the people they were sent to fight—the Viet Cong. They tried not to involve civilians and generally there were fewer casualties inflicted by the Australians."" Another perspective on Australian operations was provided by David Hackworth: ""The Aussies used squads to make contact... and brought in reinforcements to do the killing; they planned in the belief that a platoon on the battlefield could do anything.""
For some VC leaders there was no doubt the Australian jungle warfare approach was effective. One former VC leader is quoted as saying: ""worse than the Americans were the Australians. The Americans style was to hit us, then call for planes and artillery. Our response was to break contact and disappear if we could...The Australians were more patient than the Americans, better guerrilla fighters, better at ambushes. They liked to stay with us instead of calling in the planes. We were more afraid of their style."" According to Albert Palazzo, as a junior partner, the Australians had little opportunity to influence US strategy in the war: ""the American concept [of how the war should be fought] remained unchallenged and it prevailed almost by default.""
Overall, the operational strategy used by the Australian Army in Vietnam was not successful. Palazzo believes that like the Americans, Australian strategy was focused on seeking to engage the PAVN/VC forces in battle and ultimately failed as the PAVN/VC were generally able to evade Australian forces when conditions were not favourable. Moreover, the Australians did not devote sufficient resources to disrupting the logistical infrastructure which supported the PAVN/VC forces in Phước Tuy Province and popular support for them remained strong. After 1 ATF was withdrawn in 1971 the insurgency in Phước Tuy rapidly expanded.
Historians Andrew Ross, Robert Hall, and Amy Griffin, on the other hand make the point that Australian forces more often than not defeated the PAVN/VC whenever they met them, nine times out of ten. When the Australians were able to set ambushes, or openly engage the enemy, they defeated them and killed or destroyed the units that opposed them."
Military history of Australia during the Vietnam War,"Meanwhile, although the bulk of Australian military resources in Vietnam were devoted to operations against the PAVN/VC forces, a civic action program was also undertaken to assist the local population and government authorities in Phước Tuy. This included projects aimed at winning the support of the people and was seen as an essential element of Australian counter-revolutionary doctrine. Australian forces had first undertaken some civic action projects in 1965 while 1 RAR was operating in Biên Hòa, and similar work was started in Phước Tuy following the deployment of 1 ATF in 1966. In June 1967 the 40-man 1st Australian Civil Affairs Unit (1 ACAU) was established to undertake the program. By 1970 this unit had grown to 55 men, with detachments specialising in engineering, medical, education and agriculture.
During the first three years of the Australian presence civic action was mainly an adjunct to military operations, the unit taking part in the cordon and search of villages and resettlement programs, as well as occasionally in directly aiding and reconstructing villages that had been damaged in major actions. In the final years of the Australian presence it became more involved in assistance to villages and to the provincial administration. While 1 ACAU was the main agency involved in such tasks, at times other task force units were also involved in civic action programs. Activities included construction and public works, medical and dental treatment, education, agriculture development and youth and sports programs.
Although extensive, these programs were often undertaken without reference to the local population and it was not until 1969 that villagers were involved in determining what projects would be undertaken and in their construction. Equally, ongoing staff and material support was usually not provided, while maintenance and sustainment was the responsibility of the provincial government which often lacked the capacity or the will to provide it, limiting the benefit provided to the local population. The program continued until 1 ATF's withdrawal in 1971, and although it may have succeeded in generating goodwill towards Australian forces, it largely failed to increase support for the South Vietnamese government in the province. Equally, while the program made some useful contributions to the civil facilities and infrastructure in Phước Tuy which remained following the Australian departure, it had little impact on the course of the conflict."
Military history of Australia during the Vietnam War,"Withdrawal of Australian forces, 1970–1973
The Australian withdrawal effectively commenced in November 1970. As a consequence of the overall US strategy of Vietnamization and with the Australian government keen to reduce its own commitment to the war, 8 RAR was not replaced at the end of its tour of duty. 1 ATF was again reduced to just two infantry battalions, albeit with significant armour, artillery and aviation support remaining. The Australian area of operations remained the same, the reduction in forces only adding further to the burden on the remaining battalions. Regardless, following a sustained effort by 1 ATF in Phước Tuy Province between September 1969 and April 1970, the bulk of PAVN/VC forces had become inactive and had left the province to recuperate. By 1971 the province had been largely cleared of local VC forces, who were now increasingly reliant on reinforcements from North Vietnam. As a measure of some success, Highway 15, the main route running through Phước Tuy between Saigon and Vũng Tàu, was open to unescorted traffic. Regardless, the VC maintained the ability to conduct local operations. Meanwhile, the AATTV had been further expanded, and a Jungle Warfare Training Centre was established in Phước Tuy Province first at Nui Dat then relocated to Van Kiep. In November 1970, the unit's strength peaked at 227 advisors.
Australian combat forces were further reduced during 1971. The Battle of Long Khánh on 6–7 June 1971 took place during one of the last major joint US-Australian operations, and resulted in three Australians killed and six wounded during heavy fighting in which an RAAF UH-1H Iroqouis was shot down. On 18 August 1971, Australia and New Zealand decided to withdraw their troops from Vietnam; the Australian prime minister, William McMahon, announced that 1 ATF would cease operations in October, commencing a phased withdrawal. The Battle of Nui Le on 21 September proved to be the last major battle fought by Australian forces in the war, and resulted in five Australians killed and 30 wounded. Finally, on 16 October Australian forces handed over control of the base at Nui Dat to South Vietnamese forces, while the main body from 4 RAR—the last Australian infantry battalion in South Vietnam—sailed for Australia on board HMAS Sydney on 9 December 1971. Meanwhile, D Company, 4 RAR with an assault pioneer and mortar section and a detachment of APCs remained in Vũng Tàu to protect the task force headquarters and 1 ALSG until the final withdrawal of stores and equipment could be completed, finally returning to Australia on 12 March 1972.
Australian advisors continued to train Vietnamese troops until the announcement by the newly elected Australian Labor government of Gough Whitlam that the remaining advisors would be withdrawn by 18 December 1972. It was only on 11 January 1973 that the Governor-General of Australia, Paul Hasluck, announced the cessation of combat operations. Whitlam recognised North Vietnam, which welcomed his electoral success. Australian troops remained in Saigon guarding the Australian embassy until 1 July 1973. The withdrawal from South Vietnam meant that 1973 was the first time since the beginning of World War II in 1939 that Australia's armed forces were not involved in a conflict somewhere in the world. In total approximately 60,000 Australians—ground troops, air-force and naval personnel—served in South Vietnam between 1962 and 1972. 521 died as a result of the war and over 3,000 were wounded. 15,381 conscripted national servicemen served from 1965 to 1972, sustaining 202 killed and 1,279 wounded. Six Australians were listed as missing in action, although these men are included in the list of Australians killed in action and the last of their remains were finally located and returned to Australia in 2009. Between 1962 and March 1972 the estimated cost of Australia's involvement in the war was $218.4 million.
In March 1975 the Australian Government dispatched RAAF transport aircraft to South Vietnam to provide humanitarian assistance to refugees fleeing the North Vietnamese Ho Chi Minh Campaign. The first Australian C-130 Hercules arrived at Tan Son Nhat Airport on 30 March and the force, which was designated 'Detachment S', reached a strength of eight Hercules by the second week of April. The aircraft of detachment S transported refugees from cities near the front line and evacuated Australians and several hundred Vietnamese orphans from Saigon to Malaysia. They also regularly flew supplies to a large refugee camp at An Thoi on the island of Phú Quốc. The deteriorating security situation forced the Australian aircraft to be withdrawn to Bangkok in mid-April, from where they flew into South Vietnam each day. The last three RAAF flights into Saigon took place on 25 April, when the Australian embassy was evacuated. While all Australians were evacuated, 130 South Vietnamese who had worked at the embassy and had been promised evacuation were left behind. Whitlam later refused to accept South Vietnamese refugees following the fall of Saigon in April 1975, including Australian embassy staff who were later sent to re-education camps by the communists. The Liberals—led by Malcolm Fraser—condemned Whitlam, and after defeating Labor in the 1975 federal election, allowed South Vietnamese refugees to settle in Australia in large numbers."
Military history of Australia during the Vietnam War,"Protests against the war
In Australia, resistance to the war was at first very limited. Initially public opinion was strongly in support of government policy in Vietnam and when the leader of the ALP (in opposition for most of the period), Arthur Calwell announced that the 1966 federal election would be fought specifically on the issue of Vietnam the party suffered its biggest political defeat in decades. Anti-war sentiment escalated rapidly from 1967, although it never gained support from the majority of the Australian community. The centre-left ALP became more sympathetic to the communists and Calwell stridently denounced South Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyễn Cao Kỳ as a ""fascist dictator"" and a ""butcher"" ahead of his 1967 visit—at the time Ky was the chief of the Republic of Vietnam Air Force and headed a military junta. Despite the controversy leading up to the visit, Ky's trip was a success. He dealt with the media effectively, despite hostile sentiment from some sections of the press and public. After hostile questioning from Tribune journalist Harry Stein, Ky personally offered Stein space on his own flight to visit South Vietnam for himself.
The introduction of conscription by the Australian government in response to a worsening regional strategic outlook during the war was consistently opposed by the ALP and by many sections of society, and some groups resisted the call to military service by burning the letters notifying them of their conscription, which was punishable by a monetary fine, or incited young men to refrain from registering for the draft, which was punishable by imprisonment. Growing public uneasiness about the death toll was fuelled by a series of highly publicised arrests of conscientious objectors, and exacerbated by revelations of atrocities committed against Vietnamese civilians, leading to a rapid increase in domestic opposition to the war between 1967 and 1970. Following the 1969 federal election, which Labor lost again but with a much reduced margin, public debate about Vietnam was increasingly dominated by those opposed to government policy. On 8 May 1970, moratorium marches were held in major Australian cities to coincide with the marches in the US. The demonstration in Melbourne, led by future deputy prime minister Jim Cairns, was supported by an estimated 100,000 people. Across Australia, it was estimated that 200,000 people were involved.
Nevertheless, opinion polls taken at the time demonstrated that the moratorium failed to achieve its goals and had only a very limited impact upon public opinion, over half the respondents saying that they still supported national service and slightly less stating that they did not want Australia to pull out of the war. The numbers that resisted the draft remained low. Indeed, by 1970 it was estimated that 99.8 per cent of those issued with call up papers complied with them.
Further moratoria were undertaken on 18 September 1970 and again on 30 June 1971. Arguably, the peace movement had lost its original spirit, as the political debate degenerated, according to author Paul Ham, towards ""menace and violence"". Dominated by elements Ham describes as ""left-wing extremists"", the organisers of the events extended invitations to members of the North Vietnamese government to attend, although this was prevented by the Australian government's refusing to grant them visas. Attendance at the subsequent marches was lower than that of May 1970, and as a result of several factors including confusion over the rules regarding what the protesters were allowed to do, aggressive police tactics, and agitation from protesters, the second march became violent. In Sydney, 173 people were arrested, while in Melbourne the police attempted to control the crowd with a baton-charge."
Military history of Australia during the Vietnam War,"Social attitudes and treatment of veterans
Initially there was considerable support for Australia's involvement in Vietnam, and all Australian battalions returning from Vietnam participated in well attended welcome home parades through either Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane or Townsville, even during the early 1970s. Regardless, as opposition to the war increased service in Vietnam came to be seen by sections of the Australian community in less than sympathetic terms and opposition to it generated negative views of veterans in some quarters. In the years following the war, some Vietnam veterans experienced social exclusion and problems readjusting to society. Nevertheless, as the tour of duty of each soldier during the Vietnam War was limited to one year (although some soldiers chose to sign up for a second or even a third tour of duty), the number of soldiers suffering from combat stress was probably more limited than it might otherwise have been.
As well as the negative sentiments towards returned soldiers from some sections of the anti-war movement, some Second World War veterans also held negative views of the Vietnam War veterans. As a result, many Australian Vietnam veterans were excluded from joining the Returned Servicemen's League (RSL) during the 1960s and 1970s on the grounds that the Vietnam War veterans did not fight a ""real war"". The response of the RSL varied across the country, and while some rejected Vietnam veterans, other branches, particularly those in rural areas, were said to be very supportive. Many Vietnam veterans were excluded from marching in Anzac Day parades during the 1970s because some soldiers of earlier wars saw the Vietnam veterans as unworthy heirs to the ANZAC title and tradition, a view that hurt many Vietnam veterans and resulted in continued resentment towards the RSL. In 1972 the RSL decided that Vietnam veterans should lead the march, which attracted large crowds throughout the country.
Australian Vietnam veterans were honoured at a ""Welcome Home"" parade in Sydney on 3 October 1987, and it was then that a campaign for the construction of the Vietnam War Memorial began. This memorial, known as the Vietnam Forces National Memorial, was established on Anzac Parade in Canberra, and was dedicated on 3 October 1992."
Military history of Australia during the Vietnam War,"Effect on Australian foreign and defence policy
In the aftermath of the Vietnam War the withdrawal of the US from South-East Asia forced Australia to adopt a more independent foreign policy, moving away from forward defence and reliance on powerful allies to a greater emphasis on the defence of continental Australia and military self-reliance, albeit in the context of a continued alliance with the United States. This later had important implications for the military's force structure in the 1980s and 1990s. The experience in Vietnam also caused an intolerance for casualties which resulted in successive Australian governments becoming more cautious towards the deployment of military forces overseas. Regardless, the ""imperative to deploy forces overseas"" remained a feature of Australian strategic behaviour in the post-Vietnam era, while the US alliance has continued to be a fundamental aspect of its foreign policy into the early 21st century."
Military history of Australia during the Vietnam War,"Timeline
See also
Australian Army battle honours of the Vietnam War
Canada and the Vietnam War
History of the Australian Army
Military History of Australia
New Zealand in the Vietnam War
Order of battle of Australian forces during the Vietnam War
Role of United States in the Vietnam War
South Korea in the Vietnam War"
Military history of Australia during the Vietnam War,"Notes
References
External links"
Military history of Australia during the Vietnam War,"Vietnam War Bibliography: Australia and New Zealand
""Australia's Vietnam War: Exploring the Combat Actions of the 1st Australian Task Force"". Australian Defence Force Academy.
""Australia and the Vietnam War"". Department of Veterans' Affairs. Archived from the original on 17 February 2019. Retrieved 17 February 2019."
Republicanism in Australia,"Republicanism in Australia is a movement to change Australia's system of government from a constitutional monarchy to a republic; presumably, a form of parliamentary republic that would replace the monarch of Australia (currently King Charles III) with a non-royal Australian head of state. It is opposed to monarchism in Australia. Republicanism was first espoused in Australia before Federation in 1901. After a period of decline following Federation, the movement again became prominent at the end of the 20th century after successive legal and socio-cultural changes loosened Australia's ties with the United Kingdom.
Republicanism is officially supported by the Labor Party and the Greens, and is also supported by some Liberal Party members of the Australian Parliament. There was an assistant minister for the republic from 1 June 2022 until its abolishment on 28 July 2024. In a referendum held in 1999, Australian voters rejected a proposal to establish a republic with a parliamentary appointed head of state. This was despite polls showing a majority of Australians supported a republic in principle for some years before the vote."
Republicanism in Australia,"History
Before federation
In his journal The Currency Lad, first published in Sydney in 1832, pastoralist and politician Horatio Wills was the first person to openly espouse Australian republicanism. Born to a convict father, Wills was devoted to the emancipist cause and promoted the interests of ""currency lads and lasses"" (Australian-born Europeans).
Some leaders and participants of the revolt at the Eureka Stockade in 1854 held republican views and the incident has been used to encourage republicanism in subsequent years, with the Eureka Flag appearing in connection with some republican groups. The Australian Republican Association (ARA) was founded in response to the Eureka Stockade, advocating the abolition of governors and their titles, the revision of the penal code, payment of members of parliament, the nationalisation of land and an independent federal Australian republic outside of the British Empire. David Flint, the national convener of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy, notes that a movement emerged in favour of a White Australia policy; however British authorities in Whitehall were opposed to segregational laws. He suggests that to circumvent Westminster, those in favour of the discriminatory policies backed the proposed secession from the Empire as a republic. One attendee of the ARA meetings was the Australian-born poet Henry Lawson, who wrote his first poem, entitled A Song of the Republic, in The Republican journal."
Republicanism in Australia,Banish from under your bonny skiesThose old-world errors and wrongs and lies
Republicanism in Australia,"Federation and decline
At the Australian Federation Convention, which produced the first draft that was to become the Australian constitution 1891, a former Premier of New South Wales, George Dibbs, stated the ""inevitable destiny of the people of this great country"" would be the establishment of ""the Republic of Australia"". The fervour of republicanism tailed off in the 1890s as the labour movement became concerned with the Federation of Australia. The republican movement dwindled further during and after World War I as emotional and patriotic support for the war effort went hand in hand with a renewed sense of loyalty to the monarchy. The Bulletin abandoned republicanism and became a conservative, Empire loyalist paper. The Returned and Services League formed in 1916 and became an important bastion of monarchist sentiment.
The conservative parties were fervently monarchist and although the Labor Party campaigned for greater Australian independence within the Empire and generally supported the appointment of Australians as governor-general, it did not question the monarchy itself. Under the Labor government of John Curtin, a member of the Royal Family, Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, was appointed governor-general during World War II. The royal tour of Queen Elizabeth II in 1954 saw a reported 7 million Australians (out of a total population of 9 million) out to see her."
Republicanism in Australia,"Whitlam era
The constitutional crisis of 1975, which began when the opposition controlled Senate refused to pass the budget of the government, culminated in the dismissal of the Whitlam government by governor-general Sir John Kerr  and the appointment of opposition leader Malcolm Fraser as prime minister to hold a new election. The incident raised questions about the value of maintaining a supposedly symbolic office that still possessed many key constitutional powers and what an Australian president with the same reserve powers would do in a similar situation. Correspondence between Kerr and Martin Charteris, the Queen's private secretary, were declassified by the Australian National Archives in 2020 and show that Kerr did not inform the palace ahead of time of his decision to dismiss the prime minister. They do reveal however, that Kerr sought advice from the palace about his constitutional obligations and concerns about a ""race to the palace"" should Whitlam attempt to advise the queen to dismiss the governor general before the governor general dismissed Whitlam."
Republicanism in Australia,"Australia Act and other changes
References to the monarchy were removed from various institutions through the late 1980s and 1990s. For example, in 1993, the Oath of Citizenship, which included an assertion of allegiance to the Australian monarch, was replaced by a pledge to be loyal to ""Australia and its people"". Earlier, in 1990, the formula of enactment for the Parliament of Australia was changed from ""Be it enacted by the Queen, and the Senate, and the House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Australia as follows"" to ""The Parliament of Australia enacts"".
Barristers in New South Wales (from 1993), Queensland (from 1994), ACT (from 1995), Victoria (from 2000), Western Australia (from 2001), Tasmania (from 2005), Northern Territory (from 2007), Commonwealth (from March 2007) and South Australia (from 2008) were no longer appointed Queen's Counsel (QC), but as Senior Counsel (SC). These changes were criticised by Justice Michael Kirby and other monarchists as moves to a ""republic by stealth"". However beginning with Queensland in 2013, Victoria and the Commonwealth in 2014 and followed by South Australia in 2020 the title of Queen's Counsel (QC) and now King's Counsel (KC) has again been conferred, in part due to the title's greater regard and recognition, internationally and domestically. There remains interest in New South Wales for a reintroduction of the title. In 2024, South Australia reverted back to only appointing SCs.
All Australian federal parliamentarians are required to take an oath or affirmation of allegiance by pledging to ""be faithful and bear true allegiance to [His Majesty King Charles III], [His] heirs and successors according to law. So help me God!"" before taking their seats, as required by s 42 of the constitution. Any changes to this, or any other part of the constitution, require the passage of a referendum."
Republicanism in Australia,"Keating government proposals
The Australian Labor Party (ALP) first made republicanism its official policy in 1991, with then Prime Minister Bob Hawke describing a republic as ""inevitable"". Following the ALP decision, the Australian Republican Movement, the leading republican advocacy group, was born. Hawke's successor, Paul Keating, pursued the republican agenda much more actively than Hawke and established the Republic Advisory Committee to produce an options paper on issues relating to the possible transition to a republic to take effect on the centenary of Federation: 1 January 2001. The committee produced its report in April 1993 and in it argued that ""a republic is achievable without threatening Australia's cherished democratic institutions"".
In response to the report, Keating promised a referendum on the establishment of a republic, replacing the governor-general with a president, and removing references to the Australian sovereign. The president was to be nominated by the prime minister and appointed by a two-thirds majority in a joint sitting of the Senate and House of Representatives. The referendum was to be held either in 1998 or 1999. However, Keating's party lost the 1996 federal election in a landslide and he was replaced by John Howard, a monarchist, as prime minister."
Republicanism in Australia,"1998 Constitutional Convention
With the change in government in 1996, Prime Minister John Howard proceeded with an alternative policy of holding a constitutional convention. This was held over two weeks in February 1998 at Old Parliament House. Half of the 152 delegates were elected and half were appointed by the federal and state governments. Convention delegates were asked whether or not Australia should become a republic and which model for a republic is preferred. At the opening of the convention, Howard stated that if the convention could not decide on a model to be put to a referendum, then plebiscites would be held on the model preferred by the Australian public.
At the convention, a republic gained majority support (89 votes to 52 with 11 abstentions), but the question of what model for a republic should be put to the people at a referendum produced deep divisions among republicans. Four republican models were debated: two involving direct election of the head of state; one involving appointment on the advice of the prime minister (the McGarvie Model); and one involving appointment by a two-thirds majority of parliament (the bi-partisan appointment model).
The latter was eventually successful at the convention, even though it only obtained a majority because of 22 abstentions in the final vote (57 against delegates voted against the model and 73 voted for, three votes short of an actual majority of delegates). A number of those who abstained were republicans who supported direct election (such as Ted Mack, Phil Cleary, Clem Jones, and Andrew Gunter), thereby allowing the bi-partisan model to succeed. They reasoned that the model would be defeated at a referendum and a second referendum called with direct election as the model.
The convention also made recommendations about a preamble to the constitution and a proposed preamble was also put to referendum.
According to critics, the two-week timeline and quasi-democratic composition of the convention is evidence of an attempt by John Howard to frustrate the republican cause, a claim John Howard adamantly rejects."
Republicanism in Australia,"1999 Republican referendum
The republic referendum was held on 6 November 1999, after a national advertising campaign and the distribution of 12.9 million 'Yes/No' case pamphlets. It comprised two questions: The first asked whether Australia should become a republic in which the governor-general and monarch would be replaced by one office, the President of the Commonwealth of Australia, the occupant elected by a two-thirds vote of the Australian parliament for a fixed term. The second question, generally deemed to be far less important politically, asked whether Australia should alter the constitution to insert a preamble. Neither of the amendments passed, with 55% of all electors and all states voting 'no' to the proposed amendment; it was not carried in any state. The preamble referendum question was also defeated, with a Yes vote of only 39 per cent.
Many opinions were put forward for the defeat, some relating to perceived difficulties with the parliamentary appointment model, others relating to the lack of public engagement or that most Australians were simply happy to keep the status quo. Some republicans voted no because they did not agree with provisions such as the president being instantly dismissible by the prime minister."
Republicanism in Australia,"2000s: Following the referendum
On 26 June 2003, the Senate referred an inquiry into an Australian republic to the Senate Legal and Constitutional References Committee. During 2004, the committee reviewed 730 submissions and conducted hearings in all state capitals. The committee tabled its report, called Road to a Republic, on 31 August 2004. The report examined the contest between minimalist and direct-election models and gave attention to hybrid models such as the electoral college model, the constitutional council model, and models having both an elected president and a governor-general.
The bi-partisan recommendations of committee supported educational initiatives and holding a series of plebiscites to allow the public to choose which model they preferred, prior to a final draft and referendum, along the lines of plebiscites proposed by John Howard at the 1998 constitutional convention.
Issues related to republicanism were raised by the March 2006 tour of Australia by Queen Elizabeth II. John Howard, still serving as prime minister, was then questioned by British journalists about the future of the Australian monarchy and there was debate about playing Australia's royal anthem, ""God Save the Queen"", during the opening of that year's Commonwealth Games, at which the monarch was present.
In July 2007, Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd pledged to hold a new referendum on a republic if called on to form a government. However, he stated there was no fixed time frame for such a move and that the result of the 1999 referendum must be respected. After his party won the 2007 federal election and Rudd was appointed prime minister, he stated in April 2008 that a move to a republic was ""not a top-order priority"".
In the lead-up to the 2010 federal election, Prime Minister Julia Gillard stated: ""I believe that this nation should be a republic. I also believe that this nation has got a deep affection for Queen Elizabeth."" She stated her belief that it would be appropriate for Australia to become a republic only once Queen Elizabeth II's reign ends."
Republicanism in Australia,"2010s
In November 2013, Governor-General Quentin Bryce proclaimed her support for an Australian republic, stating in a speech ""perhaps, my friends, one day, one young girl or boy may even grow up to be our nation's first head of state"". She had previously emphasised the importance of debate about the future of the Australian head of state and the evolution of the constitution.
In January 2015, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten called for a new push for a republic, stating: ""Let us declare that our head of state should be one of us. Let us rally behind an Australian republic - a model that truly speaks for who we are, our modern identity, our place in our region and our world.""
In September 2015, former Australian Republican Movement chair Malcolm Turnbull became leader of the Liberal Party and was appointed prime minister. He stated he would not pursue ""his dream"" of Australia becoming a republic until after the end of the Queen's reign, instead focusing his efforts toward the economy. Upon meeting Elizabeth II in July 2017, Turnbull declared himself an ""Elizabethan"" and stated he did not believe a majority of Australians would support a republic before the end of her reign.
In December 2016, News.com.au found that a slim majority of members of both houses of parliament supported Australia becoming a republic (54% in the House and 53% in the Senate).
In July 2017, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten revealed that, should the Labor Party be elected to a plurality in the 2019 federal election, they would legislate for a compulsory plebiscite on the issue. Should that plebiscite be supported by a majority of Australians, a second vote would be held, this time a referendum, asking the public for their support for a specific model of government. Labor lost the election."
Republicanism in Australia,"2020s
Following Labor's victory in the 2022 federal election, the new Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, appointed Matt Thistlethwaite as the Assistant Minister for the Republic, signalling a commitment to prepare Australia for a transition to republic following the next election. After the death of Elizabeth II, former prime minister Julia Gillard opined that Australia would inevitably choose to be a republic, but agreed with Albanese's timing on debate about the matter. When asked if he supported another referendum following the Queen's death, Albanese stated it was ""not the time"" to discuss a republic. Instead the government had focused on the referendum to enshrine an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, which has been described by the assistant minister as a ""critical first step"" before a vote possibly some time in 2026. The Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had stated: ""I couldn't envisage a circumstance where we changed our head of state to an Australian head of state but still didn't recognise First Nations people in our constitution."" However, this referendum failed, leading to warnings within the government that it could not politically afford to lose a second referendum on constitutional reform and should focus instead on economic policy and leaving many senior republican leaders to fear there will be no chance for a successful referendum for at least a generation.
In January 2024, the government stated that the issue was ""not a priority"" and that there was no timeline for a new referendum, abandoning an earlier commitment to seek a referendum on the monarchy in its second term, but maintained that a republic was still Labor party policy in the long term. On 28 July 2024, the position of assistant minister for the republic, which was first established on 1 June 2022, was abolished in a ministerial reshuffle."
Republicanism in Australia,"Arguments for change
Independence and head of state
A central argument made by Australian republicans is that, as Australia is an independent country, it is inappropriate and anomalous for Australia to share the person of its monarch with the United Kingdom. Republicans argue that the Australian monarch is not Australian and, as a national and resident of another country, cannot adequately represent Australia or Australian national aspirations, either to itself or to the rest of the world. Former Chief Justice Gerard Brennan stated that ""so long as we retain the existing system our head of state is determined for us essentially by the parliament at Westminster"". As Australian Republican Movement member Frank Cassidy put it in a speech on the issue: ""In short, we want a resident for President."""
Republicanism in Australia,"Multiculturalism and sectarianism
Some republicans associate the monarchy with British identity and argue that Australia has changed demographically and culturally, from being ""British to our bootstraps"", as prime minister Sir Robert Menzies once put it, to being less British in nature (albeit maintaining an ""English Core""). Many Australian republicans are of non-British ancestry, and feel no connection to the ""mother country"" to speak of. According to an Australian government inquiry, arguments put forth by these republicans include the claim that the idea of one person being both monarch of Australia and of the United Kingdom is an anomaly.
However, monarchists argue that immigrants who left unstable republics and have arrived in Australia since 1945 welcomed the social and political stability that they found in Australia under a constitutional monarchy. Further, some Aboriginal Australians, such as former Senator Neville Bonner, said a republican president would not ""care one jot more for my people"".
It has also been claimed monarchism and republicanism in Australia delineate historical and persistent sectarian tensions with, broadly speaking, Catholics more likely to be republicans and Protestants more likely to be monarchists. This developed out of a historical cleavage in 19th- and 20th-century Australia, in which republicans were predominantly of Irish Catholic background and loyalists were predominantly of British Protestant background. Whilst mass immigration since the Second World War has diluted this conflict, the Catholic–Protestant divide has been cited as a dynamic in the republic debate, particularly in relation to the referendum campaign in 1999. Nonetheless, others have stated that Catholic–Protestant tensions—at least in the sense of an Irish–British conflict—are at least forty years dead.
It has also been claimed, however, that the Catholic–Protestant divide is intermingled with class issues. Republicanism in Australia has traditionally been supported most strongly by members of the urban working class with Irish Catholic backgrounds, whereas monarchism is a core value associated with urban and rural inhabitants of British Protestant heritage and the middle class, to the extent that there were calls in 1999 for 300,000 exceptionally enfranchised British subjects who were not Australian citizens to be barred from voting on the grounds that they would vote as a loyalist bloc in a tight referendum."
Republicanism in Australia,"Social values and contemporary Australia
From some perspectives, it has been argued that several characteristics of the monarchy are in conflict with modern Australian values. The hereditary nature of the monarchy is said to conflict with egalitarianism and dislike of inherited privilege. The laws of succession were, before amendment to them in 2015, held by some to be sexist and the links between the monarchy and the Church of England inconsistent with Australia's secular character. Under the Act of Settlement, the monarch is prohibited from being a Catholic."
Republicanism in Australia,"Proposals for change
A typical proposal for an Australian republic provides for the King and governor-general to be replaced by a president or an executive federal council. There is much debate on the appointment or election process that would be used and what role such an office would have."
Republicanism in Australia,"Methods for deciding a head of state
Election
by a popular vote of all Australian citizens;
by the federal parliament alone;
by federal and state parliaments;
by a hybrid process of popular and parliamentary votes.
Selection
by the prime minister;
by consensus among the government and opposition;
by a constitutional council.
An alternative minimalist approach to change provides for removing the sovereign and retaining the governor-general. The most notable model of this type is the McGarvie model, while Copernican models replace the monarch with a directly elected figurehead. These Copernican models allow for regular and periodic elections for the office of head of state while limiting the reserve powers to the appointed governor-general only. A popularly elected head of state would have the same powers as the monarch, but he or she could not dismiss the prime minister. If this were to happen, it would be a first, as all other former Commonwealth realms have created presidencies upon becoming republics. Alternatively it has been proposed to abolish the roles of the governor-general and the monarchy and have their functions exercised by other constitutional officers such as the speaker.
Another such model is the 50-50 model, created by government consultant and Labor member Anthony Cianflone. Under this model, an Australian president would be the head of state and elected by a combination of a joint sitting of Parliament and the public, with each have 50% of the vote. While having a similar role as the current governor-general, under this model the president would also act as the nation's ""social conscience and moral compass"" by advocating for social issues. Additionally, a ""Social and Moral Conscience Charter"" is suggested, which the president could be empowered to require Parliament to consider regarding certain bills. Finally, an annual address to Parliament would also allow the president to lobby the Parliament on certain issues and help ensure consistency in policy making between governments.
Australians for Constitutional Monarchy and the Australian Monarchist League argue that no model is better than the present system and argue that the risk and difficulty of changing the constitution is best demonstrated by inability of republicans to back a definitive design."
Republicanism in Australia,"Process models
From its foundation until the 1999 referendum, the Australian Republican Movement (ARM) supported the bi-partisan appointment model, which would result in a President elected by the Parliament of Australia, with the powers currently held by the Governor-General. It is argued that the requirement of a two-thirds majority in a vote of both houses of parliament would result in a bi-partisan appointment, preventing a party politician from becoming president.
In 2010, the ARM briefly proposed a non-binding plebiscite to decide the model, followed by a binding referendum to amend the Constitution, reflecting the model chosen. Opponents of holding non-binding plebiscites include monarchist David Flint, who described this process as ""inviting a vote of no confidence in one of the most successful constitutions in the world,"" and minimalist republican Greg Craven, who states ""a multi-option plebiscite inevitably will produce a direct election model, precisely for the reason that such a process favours models with shallow surface appeal and multiple flaws. Equally inevitably, such a model would be doomed at referendum."" Since 2022, the ARM has supported the Australian Choice Model, which was developed after consultation with more than 10,000 Australians and drafted into detailed constitutional amendments with the support of ten constitutional law scholars. The model proposes that state, territory and Federal parliaments nominate a shortlist of candidates which are then put to a national vote. ARM research showed that this approach has significantly higher levels of support in the Australian community than direct election or parliamentary appointment models and would have the best prospects of success at a referendum."
Republicanism in Australia,"Public opinion
Polls and surveys generate different responses depending on the wording of the questions, mostly in regards the type of republic, and often appear contradictory.
In 2009, the Australian Electoral Survey that is conducted following all elections by the Australian National University has found that support for a republic has remained reasonably static since 1987 at around 60%, if the type of republic is not part of the question. The survey also shows that support or opposition is relatively weak: 31% strongly support a republic while only 10% strongly oppose. Roy Morgan research has indicated that support for the monarchy has been supported by a majority of Australians since 2010, with support for a republic being in the majority between 1999 and 2004.
An opinion poll held in November 2008 that separated the questions found support for a republic at 50% with 28% opposed. Asked how the president should be chosen if there were to be a republic, 80 percent said elected by the people, against 12 percent who favoured appointment by parliament. In October 2009, another poll by UMR found 59% support for a republic and 33% opposition. 73% supported direct election, versus 18% support for parliamentary appointment.
On 29 August 2010, The Sydney Morning Herald published a poll produced by Neilson, asking multiple questions on the future of the monarchy:"
Republicanism in Australia,"48% of the 1400 respondents were opposed to constitutional change (a rise of 8 per cent since 2008)
44% supported change (a drop of 8 per cent since 2008).
But when asked which of the following statements best described their view:"
Republicanism in Australia,"31% said Australia should never become a republic.
29% said Australia should become a republic as soon as possible.
34% said Australia should become a republic only after Queen Elizabeth II's reign ends.
A survey of 1,000 readers of The Sun-Herald and The Sydney Morning Herald, published in The Sydney Morning Herald on 21 November 2010, found 68% of respondents were in favour of Australia becoming a republic, while 25% said it should not. More than half the respondents, 56%, said Australia should become a republic as soon as possible while 31% said it should happen after the Queen dies.
However, an opinion poll conducted in 2011 saw a sharp decline in the support for an Australian republic. The polling conducted by the Morgan Poll in May 2011 showed the support for the monarchy was now 55% (up 17% since 1999), whereas the support for a republic was at 34% (down 20%). The turnaround in support for a republic has been called the ""strange death of Australian republicanism"".
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Vote Compass during the 2013 Australian federal election found that 40.4% of respondents disagreed with the statement ""Australia should end the monarchy and become a republic"", whilst 38.1% agreed (23.1% strongly agreed) and 21.5% were neutral. Support for a republic was highest among those with a left-leaning political ideology. Younger people had the highest rate for those neutral towards the statement (27.8%) with their support for strongly agreed the lowest of all age groups at 17.1%. Support for a republic was highest in the Australian Capital Territory and Victoria and lowest in Queensland and Western Australia. More men than women said they support a republic.
In early 2014, a ReachTEL poll of 2,146 Australian conducted just after Australia Day showed only 39.4% supported a republic with 41.6% opposed. Lowest support was in the 65+ year cohort followed by the 18–34-year cohort. Geoff Gallop, the then chairman of the Australian Republican Movement, said higher support for a republic among Generation X and baby boomer voters could be explained by them having participated in the 1999 referendum and remembering the 1975 constitutional crisis.
In April 2014, a poll found that ""support for an Australian republic has slumped to its lowest level in more than three decades""; namely, on the eve of the visit to Australia by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, and Prince George, 42% of those polled agreed with the statement that ""Australia should become a republic"", whereas 51% opposed.
ARM commissioned a poll to be conducted by Essential Research from 5 to 8 November in 2015, asking ""When Prince Charles becomes King of Australia, will you support or oppose replacing the British monarch with an Australian citizen as Australia's head of state?"" Of the 1008 participants, 51% said they would prefer an Australian head of state to ""King Charles"", 27% opposed and 22% were undecided.
The Australian has polled the same question ""Are you personally in favour or against Australia becoming a republic?"" multiple times since 1999. After Australia Day 2016 they found 51% support. This level of support was similar to levels found between 1999 and 2003 by the same newspaper. Total against was 37% which was an increase over the rates polled in all previous polls other than 2011. Uncommitted at 12% was the lowest ever polled. However support for a republic was again lowest in the 18–34-year cohort.
In November 2018, Newspoll found support for a republic had collapsed to 40%. It was also the first time in their polling since the 1999 referendum that support for the monarchy was higher than a republic. A July 2020 YouGov poll found 62% of Australians believed Australia's head of state should be an Australian, not Queen Elizabeth II. An Ipsos poll in January 2021 found support for a republic was 34%, the lowest since 1979. However, one conducted by Ipsos in December 2022 (after the death of the Queen) showed support for the republic had risen to 54% (see above reference.)"
Republicanism in Australia,"Party political positions
Summary
Below is a table summarising the positions of political parties on the establishment of a republic."
Republicanism in Australia,"Liberal-National Coalition
The Liberal Party espouses both conservative and classically liberal positions. It has no official position on the issue of monarchy, but both republicans and monarchists have held prominent positions within the party.
Proponents of republicanism in the Liberal Party include Malcolm Turnbull (a former prime minister, and Australian Republican Movement leader), former prime minister Malcolm Fraser, former opposition leader John Hewson, former premiers Gladys Berejiklian (of NSW), Mike Baird (of NSW) and Jeff Kennett (of Victoria), former deputy leader Julie Bishop, and former federal treasurers Joe Hockey and Peter Costello.
Supporters of the status quo include former prime ministers Scott Morrison, Tony Abbott (who led Australians for Constitutional Monarchy from 1992 to 1994), John Howard (whose government oversaw the 1999 referendum), current opposition leader Peter Dutton, and former opposition leaders Alexander Downer and Brendan Nelson.
The National Party officially supports the status quo, but there have been some republicans within the party, such as former leader Tim Fischer. The Country Liberal Party also supports the status quo, but some republicans have been members of the party, including former leader Gary Higgins.
Under then prime minister John Howard, a monarchist, the government initiated a process to settle the republican debate, involving a constitutional convention and a referendum. Howard says the matter was resolved by the failure of the referendum."
Republicanism in Australia,"Australian Labor Party
The Labor Party has supported constitutional change to become a republic since 1991 and has incorporated republicanism into its platform. Labor has proposed a series of plebiscites to restart the republican process. Along with this, Labor spokesperson (and former federal attorney general) Nicola Roxon has previously said that reform will ""always fail if we seek to inflict a certain option on the public without their involvement. This time round, the people must shape the debate"". In the 2019 federal election, Labor's platform included a two-stage referendum on a republic to be held during the next parliamentary term; however, Labor was defeated in the election."
Republicanism in Australia,"Australian Greens
The Australian Greens are a strong proponent for an Australian republic, and this is reflected in the Greens ""Constitutional Reform & Democracy"" policy. In 2009, the Greens proposed legislation to hold a plebiscite on a republic at the 2010 federal election. The bill was subject to a Senate inquiry, which made no recommendation on the subject, and the proposal was subsequently dropped."
Republicanism in Australia,"Democrats
The Australian Democrats, Australia's third party from the 1970s until the 2000s, strongly supported a move towards a republic through a system of an elected head of state through popular voting."
Republicanism in Australia,"See also
Australian Republic Movement
Australians for Constitutional Monarchy
Australian Monarchist League
Process model (Australia)
Australian flag debate
Australian head of state dispute
Quebec sovereignty movement
Monarchism in Australia
Republicanism in Antigua and Barbuda
Republicanism in the Bahamas
Republicanism in Canada
Republicanism in Jamaica
Republicanism in New Zealand
Republicanism in the United Kingdom"
Republicanism in Australia,"References
Bibliography
External links
Australian Republican Movement (official website)
Australians for Constitutional Monarchy (official website)
Australian Monarchist League (official website)"
Anarchism in Australia,"Anarchism in Australia arrived within a few years of anarchism developing as a distinct tendency in the wake of the 1871 Paris Commune. Although a minor school of thought and politics, composed primarily of campaigners and intellectuals, Australian anarchism has formed a significant current throughout the history and literature of the colonies and nation. Anarchism's influence has been industrial and cultural, though its influence has waned from its high point in the early 20th century where anarchist techniques and ideas deeply influenced the official Australian union movement. In the mid 20th century anarchism's influence was primarily restricted to urban bohemian cultural movements. In the late 20th century and early 21st century Australian anarchism has been an element in Australia's social justice and protest movements."
Anarchism in Australia,"History
Anarchism has found both proponents and critics during the short history since the British colonised Australia. International movements, émigrés or home-grown anarchists have all contributed to radical politics during the nation's formation."
Anarchism in Australia,"Beginnings
The Melbourne Anarchist Club was officially founded on 1 May 1886 by David Andrade and others breaking away from the Australasian Secular Association of Joseph Symes, the journal Honesty being the anarchist club's official organ; and anarchism became a significant minor current on the Australian left. The current included a diversity of views on economics, ranging from an individualism influenced by Benjamin Tucker to the anarchist communism of JA Andrews. All regarded themselves as broadly ""socialist"" however. The Anarchists mixed with the seminal literary figures Henry Lawson and Mary Gilmore and the labour journalist and utopian socialist William Lane. The most dramatic event associated with this early Australian anarchism was perhaps the bombing of the ""non-union"" ship SS Aramac on 27 July 1893 by Australian anarchist and union organiser Larrie Petrie. This incident occurred in the highly charged atmosphere following the defeat of the 1890 Australian maritime dispute and the 1891 Australian shearers' strike, an atmosphere which also produced the Sydney-based direct action group the ""Active Service Brigade"" Petrie was arrested for attempted murder but charges were dropped after a few months. He later joined Lane's ""New Australia"" utopian experiment in Paraguay.
A major challenge to the principles of these early Australian anarchists was the virulent anti-Chinese racism of the time, of which racism William Lane himself was a leading exponent. On a political level the anarchists opposed the anti-Chinese agitation. ""The Chinese, like ourselves, are the victims of monopoly and exploitation"" editorialised Honesty ""We had far better set to and make our own position better instead of, like a parcel of blind babies, trying to make theirs worse."" The anarchists were sometimes more ambivalent on the subject than this statement of principle might suggest; anti-Chinese racism was entrenched in the labour movement of which they were a part, and challenged by few others."
Anarchism in Australia,"World War I
Monty Miller, a veteran of the Eureka uprising, belonged to the Melbourne Anarchist Club. He would later become a well-known militant of the Australian branch of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and was arrested and imprisoned in 1916. His friend the social activist and literary figure Willem Siebenhaar was among those who campaigned for his release.
The anarchist tradition was kept alive in Australia by, among others, the prominent agitator and street speaker Chummy Fleming who died in Melbourne in 1950 and by Italian Anarchists active in Melbourne's Matteotti Club and the North Queensland canefields. William Andrade (1863–1939), David Andrade's brother and fellow anarchist, became a successful bookseller in Sydney and Melbourne and while he retired from active politics in about 1920 he continued to influence events by allowing various radical groups to use his premises throughout the 1920s and 1930s."
Anarchism in Australia,"Post-World War II
After World War Two the Sydney Libertarians developed a distinct brand of ""pessimistic"" or ""permanent protest"" anarchism, deeply sceptical of revolution and of any grand scheme of human betterment, yet friendly to the revolutionary unionism of the IWW. Poet Harry Hooton associated with this group, and his friend Germaine Greer belonged to it in her youth. By 1972 she was calling herself an ""anarchist communist"" and was still identifying herself as ""basically"" an anarchist in 1999. The Sydney Libertarians were the political tendency around which the ""Sydney Push"" social milieu developed, a milieu which included many anarchists.
The Sydney Libertarians, along with the remnant of the Australian IWW and of Italian and Spanish migrant anarchism fed into the Anarchist revival of the sixties and seventies which Australia shared with much of the developed world. Another post-war influence that fed into modern Australian anarchism was the arrival of anarchist refugees from Bulgaria.
The last years of Australian involvement in the Vietnam war was an active period for Australian anarchists, the high-profile draft resister Michael Matteson in particular became something of a folk hero. The prolific anarchist poet Pi O began to write. The Brisbane Self-Management Group was formed in 1971, heavily influenced by the councillist writings of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group and its offshoots. The Anarchist Bookshop in Adelaide began publishing the monthly Black Growth. Anarchists active in inner-city Melbourne played a major part in creating the Fitzroy Legal Service (FLS) in 1972.
In 1974 after successfully campaigning against the 1971 South Africa rugby union tour of Australia Anti-apartheid movement activist Peter McGregor was one of several people who involved themselves in resurrecting the Sydney Anarchist Group to organise an Australian Anarchist conference in Sydney in January 1975. At the time anarchist theory was being intensely debated. A diverse Federation of Australian Anarchists (FAA) was formed at a conference in Sydney in 1975. A walkout from the second conference in Melbourne in 1976 led to the founding of the Libertarian Socialist Federation (LSF), which in turn led to the founding of Jura Books in 1977.
The end of the 1970s saw the development of a Christian anarchist Catholic Worker tendency in Brisbane, the most prominent person in the group being Ciaron O'Reilly. This tendency exploded into prominence in 1982 because of its part along with other anarchists and assorted radicals in the Brisbane free speech fights during the Queensland premiership of Joh Bjelke-Petersen. In Melbourne in 1977 the Libertarian Workers for a Self-Managed Society (LW) were formed on a theoretical platform similar to the Brisbane Self-Management Group. This Libertarian Workers group engaged very actively in propaganda, which played a major part on making possible the Australian Anarchist Centenary Celebrations of 1986. Apart from generally respectful publicity the lasting consequences of the Celebrations were the founding of the Anarchist Media Institute, its most visible member being Joseph Toscano; and the founding of an Australian section of the International Workers' Association (IWA) called the Anarcho-Syndicalist Federation (ASF). A major part of the activity of the ASF was its agitation among Melbourne's public transport workers culminating in a significant influence on the Melbourne Tram Dispute of 1990.
In 1982 the paper Rebel Worker began to be published in Sydney as the paper of the Australian IWW. It has since then been published, with varying periodicity but commonly bimonthly, as an independent anarcho-syndicalist paper, as the paper of the Anarcho-Syndicalist Federation and currently in 2019 as the paper of the Anarcho-Syndicalist Network. The main figure associated with producing it throughout this time has been Sydney anarcho-syndicalist Mark Maguire. This history has been accompanied by a good deal of controversy."
Anarchism in Australia,"Timeline
1886: Melbourne Anarchist Club founded.
1892: Andrade's Bookery is established in Melbourne, serving as an early infoshop that provides a library, coffee shop and vegetarian restaurant.
1893: SS Aramac bombed by anarchist Larrie Petri in Brisbane.
1901: Chummy Fleming disrupts the opening of Federal Parliament in Melbourne in protest of restrictions around free speech and the state of poverty in Australia.
1907: First IWW clubs form in Australia.
1900s: IWW and AMIEU organises workers' councils in the meat industry in Queensland, Victoria and South Australia.
1916: Two IWW members are executed after being framed for the murder of a police officer in Tottenham.
1917: The IWW is declared an unlawful organisation by the government and more than 100 of its members are arrested.
1934: Anarchists lead a strike among Italian immigrant sugarcane workers in north Queenslands.
1942: Anarchist immigrant from Italy Francesco Fantin is murdered in an internment camp in South Australia by fascist Giovanni ‘Bruno’ Casotti.
1948: The Southern Advocate for Workers Councils is published in Melbourne, advocating for libertarian socialist and council communist perspectives until 1949.
1940s: The left-libertarian Sydney Push is formed, a collection of people who meet in pubs and discuss political theory and philosophy, with some anarchist.
1966: The Australian New Zealand Anarchist Conference (ANZAC) is held in Sydney.
1971: Anarchists begin to aid the green bans in Sydney.
1971: Anarchist Julian Ripley is allegedly framed by police for bombing the Labour and National Service building.
1977: Libertarian Workers for a Self-Managed Society founded in Melbourne.
1977: Jura Books founded in Sydney.
1982: A split occurs in Jura Books, with some members forming a new bookshop dubbed ""Black Rose"".
1982: The Melbourne Anarchist Centre is created in Collingwood, Melbourne.
1982: Anarchists break into Pine Gap and spraypaint ""No To This Madness"" and the circle-A as the base of a radar dome.
1985: An anarchist, two communists and a social democrat break into Pine Gap and prevent a Galaxy C-5 plane from landing on schedule. They are then chased and subdued by local police, base security and CIA officers.
1986: The Australian Anarchist Centenary Celebrations are held in Melbourne.
1986: The Anarcho-Syndicalist Federation is founded.
1990: Anarcho-syndicalists lead a strike among Melbourne tramworkers that results in trams blocking traffic in the city and workers taking over tram depots with community support. However, the strike fails.
1996: A new anarchist bookshop opened in Brunswick, Melbourne suffers several attacks from neo-nazis.
1997: Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin completed a speaking tour of Australia organised by local anarchists, despite government opposition.
1998: Anarchists are active in the movement to stop uranium mining on aboriginal land at the Jabiluka Blockade.
1999: An anarcho-syndicalist conference is held in Carlton, Melbourne with international attendance from the UK, New Zealand, Japan and Korea.
2003: Mutiny Collective formed in Sydney over anger at the Iraq War and an interest in anti-war direct action.
2008: Mutiny Collective was one of several antiwar groups planning to protest a military arms fair in Adelaide. The fair was canceled as a result. Labor premier Kevin Foley accused all the intending protestors of being ""these feral anarchists"" and that ""These are feral, low-life people who want society to be in a state of near anarchy for their perverse pleasure,""
2019: The Melbourne Anarchist Club clubhouse is shut down after factional fighting."
Anarchism in Australia,"See also
Socialism in Australia
Angry Penguins
How to Make Trouble and Influence People
Mutiny Collective"
Anarchism in Australia,"References
External links
Bibliography of Anarchism & Syndicalism in Australia & Aotearoa / New Zealand
Sydney Libertarians and Anarchism Index
Anarcho-Syndicalism in Melbourne and Sydney
anarchist bulletin
Melbourne Anarchist Club
Jura Books
Rebel Worker
Black Rose Anarchist Library and Bookshop
Mutiny Zine: A Paper of Anarchistic Ideas and Action
Brisbane Solidarity Network
Black Swan Adelaide"
Dance in Australia,"Ceremonial dancing has a very important place in the Indigenous cultures of Australia. They vary from place to place, but most ceremonies combine dance, song, rituals and often elaborate body decorations and costumes. The different body paintings indicate the type of ceremony being performed. They play an important role in marriage ceremonies, in the education of Indigenous children, as well as storytelling and oral history. The term corroboree is commonly used to refer to Australian Aboriginal dances, although this term has its origins among the people of the Sydney region. In some places, Aboriginal people perform corroborees for tourists. In the latter part of the 20th century the influence of Indigenous Australian dance traditions has been seen with the development of concert dance, with the Aboriginal Centre for the Performing Arts (ACPA) providing training in contemporary dance.
The Australian bush dance, which draws on traditions from English, Irish, Scottish and other European dance styles, is also a common community activity. Favourite dances include the Irish Céilidh ""Pride of Erin"" and the quadrille ""The Lancers"". Locally originated dances include the ""Waves of Bondi"", the Melbourne Shuffle and New Vogue.
The Australian Ballet is the foremost classical ballet company in Australia. It began in 1962 and is today recognised as one of the world's major international ballet companies. It is based in Melbourne and performs works from the classical repertoire as well as contemporary works by major Australian and international choreographers."
Dance in Australia,"Indigenous Australian dance
Traditional Aboriginal Australian dance was closely associated with song and was understood and experienced as making present the reality of the Dreamtime. In some instances, they would imitate the actions of a particular animal in the process of telling a story. For the people in their own country it defined to roles, responsibilities and the place itself. These ritual performances gave them an understanding of themselves in the interplay of social, geographical and environmental forces. The performances were associated with specific places and dance grounds were often sacred places. The body decoration and specific gestures related to kin and other relationships, such as to Dreamtime beings. Some groups hold their dances secret or sacred. Gender is an important factor in some ceremonies with men and women having separate ceremonial traditions, such as the Crane Dance.
The term ""corroboree"" is commonly used by non-Indigenous Australians to refer to any Aboriginal dance, although this term has its origins among the people of the Sydney region. In some places, Australian Aboriginal people perform corroborees for tourists.
For Torres Strait Islander people, singing and dancing is their ""literature"" – ""the most important aspect of Torres Strait lifestyle. The Torres Strait Islanders preserve and present their oral history through songs and dances;...the dances act as illustrative material and, of course, the dancer himself [sic] is the storyteller"" (Ephraim Bani, 1979). There are many songs about the weather; others about the myths and legends; life in the sea and totemic gods; and about important events. ""The dancing and its movements express the songs and acts as the illustrative material""."
Dance in Australia,"20th–21st centuries
In the latter part of the 20th century, the influence of Indigenous Australian dance traditions was seen with the development of concert dance, particularly in contemporary dance with the National Aboriginal and Islander Skills Development Association (established 1975) and the Aboriginal Centre for the Performing Arts (ACPA, founded 1997) providing training to Indigenous Australians in dance, and the Bangarra Dance Theatre (founded 1989). With a new sense of pride emerging in a number of Aboriginal organisations in Redfern, Sydney, the Aboriginal Dance Theatre Redfern (ADTR) was established in 1979.
The establishment of National Aboriginal Dance Council Australia (NADCA, also referred to as National Aboriginal Dance Council of Australia) was instigated by Christine Donnelly and ADTR in 1995. It was supported by Ausdance in their presentation of the presentation of three major Indigenous dance conferences. The second one was held in Adelaide in 1997, where cultural and intellectual property rights and copyright issues for Australian Indigenous dancers were discussed, and included a free outdoor performance in Rymill Park / Murlawirrapurka. The third conference took place in Sydney in 1999, funded by the Australia Council. Both the 2nd and 3rd conferences were attended by David Gulpilil's dance troupe,
NADCA  was still in existence in 2007, when it was in the process of developing a document on ""Cultural Protocols on Aboriginal Dance""."
Dance in Australia,"Other varieties of dance
Bush dance has developed in Australia as a form of traditional dance, it draws on traditions from English, Irish, Scottish and other European dance. Favourite dances in the community include dances of European descent, such as the Irish Céilidh ""Pride of Erin"" and the quadrille ""The Lancers"". Locally originated dances include the ""Waves of Bondi"", the Melbourne Shuffle and New Vogue.
Many immigrant communities continue their own dance traditions on a professional or amateur basis. Traditional dances from a large number of ethnic backgrounds are danced in Australia, helped by the presence of enthusiastic immigrants and their Australian-born families. It is quite common to see dances from the Baltic region, as well as Scottish, Irish, Indian, Indonesian or African dance being taught at community centres and dance schools in Australia.
Still more dance groups in Australia employ dances from a variety of backgrounds, including reconstructed European Court dances and Medieval Dance, as well as fusions of traditional steps with modern music and style.
The Australian Ballet is the foremost classical ballet company in Australia. Its inaugural artistic director was the English-born dancer, teacher and repetiteur Dame Peggy van Praagh in 1962 and is today recognised as one of the world's major international ballet companies. It is based in Melbourne and performs works from the classical repertoire as well as contemporary works by major Australian and international choreographers. As of 2010, it was presenting approximately 200 performances in cities and regional areas around Australia each year as well as international tours. Regular venues include: the Arts Centre Melbourne, Sydney Opera House, Sydney Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre and Queensland Performing Arts Centre. Robert Helpmann is among Australia's best-known ballerinos.
Baz Luhrmann's popular 1992 film Strictly Ballroom, starring Paul Mercurio, contributed to an increased interest in dance competition in Australia, and popular dance shows such as So You Think You Can Dance have featured on television in recent years."
Dance in Australia,"The Nutbush
The Nutbush is a classic Australian line dance—typically performed to the American song ""Nutbush City Limits"" by Ike & Tina Turner—was created in the 1970s disco era; it took off in Australia during the 1980s, and it has seen sustained success to this day, including gaining viral popularity internationally through TikTok. A common way of first hearing the song is when schools typically make students dance to it as part of a physical education."
Dance in Australia,"Major dance companies
Those dance companies funded by the Major Performing Arts Board of the Australia Council and from state arts agencies are:"
Dance in Australia,"Ballet companies
The Australian Ballet
The Queensland Ballet
The West Australian Ballet
Contemporary dance companies
Australian Dance Theatre (Garry Stewart)
Phillip Adams BalletLab
Bangarra Dance Theatre (Stephen Page)
Chunky Move
Company In Space
Dance Hub SA (previously Leigh Warren & Dancers)
Dancenorth
Descendance
Australasian Dance Collective, previously Expressions Dance Company
Force Majeure (Kate Champion)
Lucy Guerin Inc
Mirramu Dance Company
Phunktional
Sydney Dance Company
TasDance
Youth dance companies
QL2 Centre for Youth Dance
Extensions Youth Dance Company
Urban Ignition Youth Dance Company
Dance competitions
(Showcase) Australian Dance Championships, established in 1994"
Dance in Australia,"Post-secondary dance education
NSW"
Dance in Australia,"Australian College of Physical Education
Australian Dance Institute(ADi)
Excelsia College formerly Wesley Institute
Macquarie University (North Ryde)
National Aboriginal Islander Skills Development Association (NAISDA)
University of NSW (Kensington Campus)
Victoria
Australian Ballet School
Box Hill Institute (Centre for Performing Arts)
Deakin University (Melbourne Campus, Burwood)
Victorian College of the Arts (University of Melbourne)
Victoria University (Footscray Campus)
The Space Dance and Arts Centre
Queensland
Aboriginal Centre for the Performing Arts
Queensland University of Technology (Kelvin Grove Campus)
South Australia
Adelaide College of the Arts (TAFE SA), a member of the Helpmann Academy
Western Australia
Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (Edith Cowan University)
Youth Ballet Centre of Western Australia"
Dance in Australia,"List of operating dance companies
A-C
Ambition School Of Dance
Anything Is Valid Dance Theatre
The Australian Ballet
The Australian Choreographic Centre
Australian Dance Theatre
BalletLab (Contemporary dance company – Artistic Director, Phillip Adams)
Bangarra Dance Theatre
Blink Dance Theatre
Buzz Dance Theatre
Canberra Dance Theatre
Chunky Move
D-M
Dance Exchange
Dance Hub SA (previously Leigh Warren & Dancers)
Dance Works
Dancehouse
Dancenorth
Descendance
Expressions Dance Company
Force Majeure (dance company) led by Kate Champion
Igneous
Kage Physical Theatre
Mirramu Dance Company
Move Through Life Dance Company
Nunukul Yuggera Aboriginal Dancers
O-Z
One Extra Dance
Passada School of Afro Latin Dance
The Queensland Ballet
Raw Metal Dance Company
Restless Dance Company
Strange Fruit
Sydney Dance Company
TasDance
Tracks Dance Theatre
The Dance Collective
Visible Dance
West Australian Ballet
Wu Lin Dance Theatre
youMove Dance Company"
Dance in Australia,"Defunct companies
Aboriginal Islander Dance Theatre (1976–1998)
The Australian Choreographic Centre (1996–2007)
Australian Choreographic Ensemble (ACE) (1992–1998) founded by Paul Mercurio
Australian Theatre Ballet (1955–1955)
Ballet Australia (1960–1976)
Ballet Guild (1946–1967)
Ballet Victoria (1967–1976)
Bodenwieser Ballet (1939–1959) founded by Gertrud Bodenwieser"
Dance in Australia,"See also
Helpmann Award for Best Ballet or Dance Work
Australian Dance Awards"
Dance in Australia,"References
Sources
Dance in Australia – a profile by David Throsby, Professor of Economics at Macquarie University"
Dance in Australia,"External links
The Dance Collection, Performing Arts Collection, at Arts Centre Melbourne
Ausdance : the Australian Dance Council
Australia Dancing[usurped], a directory of dance resources in the National Library of Australia and National Film and Sound Archive
Australian Performing and Media Arts magazine
List of Australian dance schools by state"
Fauna of Australia,"The fauna of Australia consists of a large variety of animals; some 46% of birds, 69% of mammals, 94% of amphibians, and 93% of reptiles that inhabit the continent are endemic to it.: 4  This high level of endemism can be attributed to the continent's long geographic isolation, tectonic stability, and the effects of a unique pattern of climate change on the soil and flora over geological time. A unique feature of Australia's fauna is the relative scarcity of native placental mammals. Consequently, the marsupials – a group of mammals that raise their young in a pouch, including the macropods, possums and dasyuromorphs – occupy many of the ecological niches placental animals occupy elsewhere in the world. Australia is home to two of the five known extant species of monotremes and has numerous venomous species, which include the platypus, spiders, scorpions, octopus, jellyfish, molluscs, stonefish, and stingrays. Uniquely, Australia has more venomous than non-venomous species of snakes.
The settlement of Australia by Indigenous Australians between 48,000 and 70,000 years ago and by Europeans from 1788, has significantly affected the fauna. Hunting, the introduction of non-native species, and land-management practices involving the modification or destruction of habitats have led to numerous extinctions.: 8–9   Based on the list of Australian animals extinct in the Holocene, about 33 mammals (27 from the mainland, including the thylacine), 24 birds (three from the mainland), one reptile, and three frog species or subspecies are strongly believed to have become extinct in Australia during the Holocene epoch. These figures exclude dubious taxa like the Roper River scrub robin (Drymodes superciliaris colcloughi) and possibly extinct taxa like the Christmas Island shrew (Crocidura trichura). Unsustainable land use still threatens the survival of many species.: 8–9   To target threats to the survival of its fauna, Australia has passed wide-ranging federal and state legislation and established numerous protected areas.: v"
Fauna of Australia,"Origins and history
Both geologic and climatic events helped to make Australia's fauna unique. Australia was once part of the southern supercontinent Gondwana, which also included South America, Africa, India and Antarctica. Gondwana began to break up 140 million years ago (MYA); 50 MYA Australia separated from Antarctica and was relatively isolated until the collision of the Indo-Australian Plate with Asia in the Miocene era 5.3 MYA. The establishment and evolution of the present-day fauna was apparently shaped by the unique climate and the geology of the continent. As Australia drifted, it was, to some extent, isolated from the effects of global climate change. The unique fauna that originated in Gondwana, such as the marsupials, survived and adapted in Australia.
After the Miocene, fauna of Asian origin were able to establish themselves in Australia. The Wallace Line — the hypothetical line separating the zoogeographical regions of Asia and Australasia — marks the tectonic boundary between the Eurasian and Indo-Australian plates. This continental boundary prevented the formation of land bridges and resulted in a distinct zoological distribution, with limited overlap, of most Asian and Australian fauna, with the exception of birds. Following the emergence of the circumpolar current in the mid-Oligocene era (some 15 MYA), the Australian climate became increasingly arid, giving rise to a diverse group of arid-specialised organisms, just as the wet tropical and seasonally wet areas gave rise to their own uniquely adapted species."
Fauna of Australia,"Mammals
Australia has a rich mammalian fossil history, as well as a variety of extant mammalian species, dominated by the marsupials, currently however there is limited taxonomic research into Australia's mammals. The fossil record shows that monotremes have been present in Australia since the Early Cretaceous 145–99 MYA, and that marsupials and placental mammals date from the Eocene 56–34 MYA, when modern mammals first appeared in the fossil record. Although terrestrial marsupials and placental mammals did coexist in Australia in the Eocene, only the marsupials have survived to the present. Non-volant placental mammals made their reappearance in Australia in the Miocene, when Australia moved closer to Indonesia, and rodents started to appear reliably in the Late Miocene fossil record. The marsupials evolved to fill specific ecological niches, and in many cases they are physically similar to the placental mammals in Eurasia and North America that occupy similar niches, a phenomenon known as convergent evolution. For example, the top predator in Australia, the Tasmanian wolf, bore a striking resemblance to canids. Gliding possums and flying squirrels have similar adaptations enabling their arboreal lifestyle; and the numbat and anteaters are both digging insectivores. For the most part, mammals are not a highly visible part of the faunal landscape, as most species are nocturnal and many arboreal."
Fauna of Australia,"Monotremes and marsupials
Two of the five living species of monotreme occur in Australia: the platypus and the short-beaked echidna, the other three being echidnas that only occur in New Guinea. Monotremes differ from other mammals in their methods of reproduction; in particular, they lay eggs instead of giving birth to live young. The platypus — a venomous, egg-laying, duck-billed amphibious mammal — is considered to be one of the strangest creatures in the animal kingdom. When it was first presented by Joseph Banks to English naturalists it was thought to be a hoax. The short-beaked echidna is covered in hairy spikes with a tubular snout in the place of a mouth, and a tongue that can move in and out of the snout at a rate of 100 times a minute to capture termites."
Fauna of Australia,"Australia has the world's largest and most diverse range of marsupials. Marsupials are characterised by the presence of a pouch in which they rear their young after birth. The carnivorous marsupials — Dasyuromorphia — are represented by two surviving families: the Dasyuridae with 51 members, and the Myrmecobiidae with the numbat as its sole extant species. The Tasmanian tiger was the largest Dasyuromorphia and the last living specimen of the family Thylacinidae died in captivity in 1936. The world's largest surviving carnivorous marsupial is the Tasmanian devil; it is the size of a small dog and can hunt, although it is mainly a scavenger. It became extinct on the mainland some 600 years ago, and is now found only in Tasmania. There are four species of quoll, or ""native cat"", all of which are threatened species. The eastern quoll for example is believed to have been extinct on the mainland since the 1960s, though there are efforts to reintroduce it. The remainder of the Dasyuridae are referred to as ""marsupial mice""; most weigh less than 100 g. There are two species of marsupial mole — order Notoryctemorphia — that inhabit the deserts of Western Australia. These rare, blind and earless carnivorous creatures spend most of their time underground; little is known about them."
Fauna of Australia,"The bandicoots and bilbies — order Peramelemorphia — are marsupial omnivores. There are seven extant species in Australia, most of which are endangered. These small creatures share several characteristic physical features: a plump, arch-backed body with a long, delicately tapering snout, large upright ears, long, thin legs, and a thin tail. The evolutionary origin of this group is unclear, because they share characteristics from both carnivorous and herbivorous marsupials."
Fauna of Australia,"Marsupials with two front teeth (diprotodont) on the lower jaw and syndactyly are classified in the order Diprotodontia, and further into the suborders Vombatiformes, Macropodiformes and Phalangerida. The Vombatiformes include the koala and the three species of wombat. One of Australia's best-known marsupials, the koala is an arboreal species that feeds on the leaves of various species of eucalyptus. Wombats, on the other hand, live on the ground and feed on grasses, sedges and roots. Wombats use their diprotodont teeth and powerful claws to dig extensive burrow systems; they are mainly crepuscular and nocturnal.
The Phalangerida includes six families and 26 species of possum and three families with 53 species of macropod. The possums are a diverse group of arboreal marsupials and vary in size from the little pygmy possum, weighing just 7 g, to the cat-sized common ringtail and brushtail possums. The sugar and squirrel gliders are common species of gliding possum, found in the eucalypt forests of eastern Australia, while the feathertail glider is the smallest glider species. The gliding possums have membranes called ""patagia"" that extend from the fifth finger of their forelimb back to the first toe of their hind foot. These membranes, when outstretched, allow them to glide between trees.
The macropods are divided into three families: the Hypsiprymnodontidae, with the musky rat-kangaroo as its only member; the Potoroidae, with 11 species; and the Macropodidae, with 45 species. Macropods are found in all Australian environments except alpine areas. The Potoroidae include the bettongs, potaroos and rat-kangaroos, small species that make nests and carry plant material with their tails. The Macropodiae include kangaroos, wallabies and associated species; size varies widely within this family. Most macropods have large hind legs and long, narrow hind feet, with a distinctive arrangement of four toes, and powerfully muscled tails, which they use to hop around. The musky rat-kangaroo is the smallest macropod and the only species that is quadrupedal not bipedal, while the male red kangaroo is the largest, reaching a height of about 2 m and weighing up to 85 kg."
Fauna of Australia,"Placental mammals
Australia has indigenous placental mammals from two orders: the bats — order Chiroptera — represented by six families; and the mice and rats — order Rodentia, family Muridae. There are only two endemic genera of bats, although 7% of the world's bat species live in Australia. Rodents first arrived in Australia 5–10 MYA, undergoing a wide radiation to produce the species collectively known as the ""old endemic"" rodents. The old endemics are represented by 14 extant genera. A million years ago, the rat entered Australia from New Guinea and evolved into seven species of Rattus, collectively called the ""new endemics"".
Since human settlement many additional placental mammals have been introduced to Australia and are now feral. The first placental mammal introduced to Australia was the dingo. Fossil evidence suggests that people from the north brought the dingo to Australia about 5000 years ago. When Europeans settled Australia they intentionally released many species into the wild including the red fox, European hare, and the European rabbit. Other domestic species have escaped and over time have produced wild populations including the banteng, cat, fallow deer, red deer, sambar deer, rusa deer, chital, hog deer, horse, donkey, pig, goat, water buffalo, and the camel. Only three species of non-native placental mammal were not deliberately introduced to Australia: the house mouse, black rat and the brown rat."
Fauna of Australia,"Forty-six marine mammals from the order Cetacea are found in Australian coastal waters. Since the majority of these species have global distribution, some authors do not consider them to be Australian species. There are eleven species of baleen whale present; humpback whales, southern right whales, dwarf minke whales and pygmy blue whales are more commonly observed. There are 37 species of toothed whale, which include all six genera of the family Ziphiidae, and 21 species of oceanic dolphin, including the Australian snubfin dolphin, a species first described in 2005. Some oceanic dolphins, such as the orca, can be found in all waters around the continent; others, such as the Irrawaddy dolphin, are confined to the warm northern waters. The dugong is an endangered marine species that inhabits the waters of north-eastern and north-western Australia, particularly the Torres Strait. It can grow up to 3 m long and weigh as much as 400 kg. The dugong is the only herbivorous marine mammal in Australia, feeding on sea grass in coastal areas. The destruction of sea grass beds is a threat to the survival of this species. Eleven species of seal — family Pinnipedia — live off the southern coast."
Fauna of Australia,"Birds
Australia and its territories are home to around 800 species of bird; 45% of these are endemic to Australia. The fossil record of birds in Australia is patchy; however, there are records of the ancestors of contemporary species as early as the Late Oligocene. Birds with a Gondwanan history include the flightless ratites (the emu and southern cassowary), megapodes (the malleefowl and Australian brush-turkey), and a huge group of endemic parrots, order Psittaciformes. Australian parrots comprise a sixth of the world's parrots, including many cockatoos and galahs. The kookaburra is the largest species of the kingfisher family, known for its call, which sounds uncannily like loud, echoing human laughter. The Brolga is the only crane exclusive to Australia, and it shares habitat with the more widely distributed Sarus Cranes.The passerines of Australia, also known as songbirds or perching birds, include wrens, robins, the magpie group, thornbills, pardalotes, the huge honeyeater family, treecreepers, lyrebirds, birds of paradise and bowerbirds. The satin bowerbird has attracted the interest of evolutionary psychologists; it has a complex courtship ritual in which the male creates a bower filled with blue, shiny items to woo mates.
Relatively recent colonists from Eurasia are swallows, larks, thrushes, cisticolas, sunbirds, and some raptors, including the large wedge-tailed eagle. A number of bird species have been introduced by humans; some, like the European goldfinch and greenfinch, coexist happily with Australian species, while others, such as the common starling, common blackbird, house sparrow and Indian mynah, are destructive of some native bird species and thus destabilise the native ecosystem.
About 200 species of seabird live on the Australian coast, including many species of migratory seabird. Australia is at the southern end of the East Asian-Australasian Flyway for migratory water birds, which extends from Far-East Russia and Alaska through Southeast Asia to Australia and New Zealand. About two million birds travel this route to and from Australia each year. One very common large seabird is the Australian pelican, which can be found in most waterways in Australia. The Australian little penguin is the only species of penguin that breeds on mainland Australia."
Fauna of Australia,"Amphibians and reptiles
Australia has four families of native frogs and one introduced toad, the cane toad. In 1935 the cane toad was introduced to Australia in a failed attempt to control pests in sugarcane crops. It has since become a devastating pest, spreading across northern Australia. As well as competing with native insectivores for food, the cane toad produces a venom that is toxic to native fauna, as well as to humans. The Myobatrachidae, or southern frogs, are Australia's largest group of frogs, with 112 species classified into anywhere from 17 to 22 genera. A notable member of this group is the colourful and endangered Corroboree frog. The tree frogs, from family Hylidae, are common in high rainfall areas on the north and east coasts; there are 77 Australian species from three genera. The 18 species from two genera of the Microhylidae frogs are restricted to the rainforests of northern Australia and nearby habitats; the smallest species, the scanty frog, is from this family. There is a single species from the world's dominant frog group, family Ranidae – the Australian wood frog – which only occurs in the Queensland rainforests. As elsewhere, there has been a precipitous decline in Australia's frog populations in recent years. Although the full reasons for the decline are uncertain, it can be at least partly attributed to the fatal amphibian fungal disease chytridiomycosis. Another theory for the decline might be, as research shows, that species from the Southern Hemisphere are on average 4.6 million years old, compared to an average 2.9 million years old for the Northern Hemisphere: Researchers believe this age difference is because of the history of severe ice ages in the Northern Hemisphere, which may drive older species to extinction."
Fauna of Australia,"Australia has two species of crocodile. The saltwater crocodile, known colloquially as the ""salty"", is the largest living crocodile species; reaching over 7 m, and weighing over 1,000 kg, they can and do kill people. They live on the coast and in the freshwater rivers and wetlands of northern Australia, and they are farmed for their meat and leather. Freshwater crocodiles, found only in northern Australia, are not considered dangerous to humans.
The Australian coast is visited by six species of sea turtle: the flatback, green sea, hawksbill, olive ridley, loggerhead and the leatherback sea turtles; all are protected in Australian waters. There are 35 species of Australian freshwater turtles from eight genera of the family Chelidae. The pig-nosed turtle is the only Australian turtle not of that family. Australia is the only continent without any living species of land tortoises of the Testudinoidea superfamily besides Antarctica."
Fauna of Australia,"Australia is the only continent where venomous snakes outnumber their non-venomous cousins. Australian snakes belong to seven families. Of these, the most venomous species, including the fierce snake, eastern brown snake, taipan and eastern tiger snake are from the family Elapidae. Of the 200 species of elapid, 106 are found in Australia and 86 are found only in Australia. Thirty-three sea snakes from family Hydrophiidae inhabit Australia's northern waters; many are extremely venomous. Two species of sea snake from the Acrochordidae also occur in Australian waters. Australia has only 11 species from the world's most significant snake family Colubridae; none are endemic, and they are considered to be relatively recent arrivals from Asia. There are 15 python species and 45 species of insectivorous blind snake.
There are more species of snake in Darwin than any other Australian state capital, with 34 non-marine snake species found in the region, of which 23 have been recorded by professional snake catchers in Darwin itself. Fortunately for the citizens of Darwin, a far smaller proportion of these snakes are highly venomous than is typically found in other cities, due to the low numbers of front-fanged elapid species and dominance of relatively harmless pythons and colubrid species."
Fauna of Australia,"There are more than 700 species of lizards in Australia with representatives of five families. There are over 130 species in 20 genera of gecko found throughout the Australian continent. The Pygopodidae is a family of limbless lizards endemic to the Australian region; all 39 species from seven genera occur in Australia. The Agamidae or dragon lizards are represented by 70 species in 14 genera, including the thorny devil, bearded dragon and frill-necked lizard. There are 30 species of monitor lizard, family Varanidae, in Australia, where they are commonly known as goannas. The largest Australian monitor is the perentie, which can reach up to 2 m in length. There are about 450 species of skink from more than 40 genera, comprising more than 50% of the total Australian lizard fauna; this group includes the blue-tongued lizards."
Fauna of Australia,"Fish
More than 5000 species of fish inhabit Australia's waterways; of these, 24% are endemic. However, because of the relative scarcity of freshwater waterways, Australia has only about 300 species of freshwater fish. Two families of freshwater fish have ancient origins: the arowana or bonytongues, and the Queensland lungfish. The Queensland lungfish is the most primitive of the lungfish, having evolved before Australia separated from Gondwana. One of the smallest freshwater fish, peculiar to the southwest of Western Australia, is the salamanderfish, which can survive desiccation in the dry season by burrowing into mud. Other families with a potentially Gondwanan origin include the Retropinnidae, Galaxiidae, Aplochitonidae and Percichthyidae. Apart from the ancient freshwater species, 70% of Australia's freshwater fish have affinities with tropical Indo-Pacific marine species that have adapted to freshwater. These species include freshwater lampreys, Herrings, catfish, rainbowfish, and some 50 species of gudgeon, including the sleepy cod. Native freshwater game fish include the barramundi, Murray cod, and golden perch. Two species of endangered freshwater shark are found in the Northern Territory."
Fauna of Australia,"Several exotic freshwater fish species, including brown, brook and rainbow trout, Atlantic and Chinook salmon, redfin perch, common carp, and mosquitofish, have been introduced to Australian waterways. The mosquitofish is a particularly aggressive species known for harassing and nipping the fins of other fish. It has been linked to declines and localised extirpations of several small native fish species. The introduced trout species have had serious negative impacts on a number of upland native fish species including trout cod, Macquarie perch and mountain galaxias species as well as other upland fauna such as the spotted tree frog. The common carp is strongly implicated in the dramatic loss in waterweed, decline of small native fish species and permanently elevated levels of turbidity in the Murray-Darling Basin of south west Australia.
Most of Australia's fish species are marine, and 75% live in tropical marine environments. This is partly due to Australia's huge marine territory, covering 9 million km2. Groups of interest include the moray eels and squirrelfish, as well as the pipefish and seahorses, whose males incubate their partner's eggs in a specialised pouch. There are 80 species of grouper in Australian waters, including one of the world's biggest bony fish, the giant grouper, which can grow as large as 2.7 m and weigh up to 400 kg. The trevally, a group of 50 species of silver schooling fish, and the snappers are popular species for commercial fishing. The Great Barrier Reef supports a huge variety of small- and medium-sized reef fish, including the damselfish, butterflyfish, angelfish, gobies, cardinalfish, wrassees, triggerfish and surgeonfish. There are several venomous fish, among them several species of stonefish and pufferfish and the red lionfish, all of which have toxins that can kill humans. There are 11 venomous species of stingray, the largest of which is the smooth stingray. The barracudas are one of the reef's largest species. However, large reef fish should not be eaten for fear of ciguatera poisoning."
Fauna of Australia,"Sharks inhabit all the coastal waters and estuarine habitats of Australia's coast. There are 166 species, including 30 species of requiem shark, 32 of catshark, six of wobbegong shark, and 40 of dogfish shark. There are three species from the family Heterodontidae: the Port Jackson shark, the zebra bullhead shark and the crested bullhead shark. In 2004, there were 12 unprovoked shark attacks in Australia, of which two were fatal. Only 3 species of shark pose a significant threat to humans: the bull shark, the tiger shark and the great white shark. Some popular beaches in Queensland and New South Wales are protected by shark netting, a method that has reduced the population of both dangerous and harmless shark species through accidental entanglement. The overfishing of sharks has also significantly reduced shark numbers in Australian waters, and several species are now endangered. A megamouth shark was found on a Perth beach in 1988; very little is known about this species, but this discovery may indicate the presence of the species in Australian coastal waters."
Fauna of Australia,"Invertebrates
Of the estimated 200,000 animal species in Australia, about 96% are invertebrates. While the full extent of invertebrate diversity is uncertain, 90% of insects and molluscs are considered endemic. Invertebrates occupy many ecological niches and are important in all ecosystems as decomposers, pollinators, and food sources. The largest group of invertebrates is the insects, comprising 75% of Australia's known species of animals. The most diverse insect orders are the Coleoptera, with 28,200 species of beetles and weevils, the Lepidoptera with 20,816 species including butterflies and moths, and around 14,800 species of Hymenoptera, including the ants, bees and wasps. Order Diptera, which includes the flies and mosquitoes, comprises 7,786 species. Order Hemiptera, including bugs, aphids and hoppers, comprises 5,650 species; and there are 2,827 species of order Orthoptera, including grasshoppers, crickets and katydids. Introduced species that pose a significant threat to native species include the European wasp, the red fire ant, the yellow crazy ant and feral honeybees which compete with native bees."
Fauna of Australia,"Australia has a wide variety of arachnids, including 78 spider families with 79 species of spider familiar enough to have common names. There are numerous highly venomous species, including the notorious Sydney funnel-web and allied mygalomorphs, whose bites can be deadly. The redback spider was thought to be deadly but redback bites are no longer thought to be life-threatening, as the lack of deaths since 1956 was thought to be due to the development of an anti-venom which has since been shown to be no better than placebo. There are thousands of species of mites and ticks from the subclass Acari. Australia also has at least 150 species of pseudoscorpion with an estimated 550 more waiting to be described, and at least 17 scorpion genera with 120 species.
In the Annelida (sub)class Oligochaeta there are many families of aquatic worms, and for native terrestrial worms: the Enchytraeidae (pot worms) and the ""true"" earthworms in families Acanthodrilidae, Octochaetidae and Megascolecidae. The latter includes the world's largest earthworm, the giant Gippsland earthworm, found only in Gippsland, Victoria. On average they reach 80 cm in length, but specimens up to 3.7 m in length have been found."
Fauna of Australia,"The large family Parastacidae includes 124 species of Australian freshwater crayfish. These include the world's smallest crayfish, the swamp crayfish, which does not exceed 30 mm in length, and the world's largest crayfish, the Tasmanian giant freshwater crayfish, measuring up to 76 cm long and weighing 4.5 kg. The crayfish genus Cherax includes the common yabby, in addition to the farmed species marron and Queensland red claw. Species from the genus Engaeus, commonly known as the land crayfish, are also found in Australia. Engaeus species are not entirely aquatic, because they spend most of their lives living in burrows. Australia has seven species of freshwater crab from the genus Austrothelphusa. These crabs live burrowed into the banks of waterways and can plug their burrows, surviving through several years of drought. The extremely primitive freshwater mountain shrimp, found only in Tasmania, are a unique group, resembling species found in the fossil record from 200 MYA."
Fauna of Australia,"A huge variety of marine invertebrates are found in Australian waters, with the Great Barrier Reef an important source of this diversity. Families include the Porifera or sea sponges, the Cnidaria (includes the jellyfish, corals and sea anemones, comb jellies), the Echinodermata (includes the sea urchins, sea stars, brittle stars, sea cucumbers, the lamp shells) and the Mollusca (includes snails, slugs, limpets, squid, octopus, cockles, oysters, clams, and chitons). Venomous invertebrates include the box jellyfish, the blue-ringed octopus, and ten species of cone snail, which can cause respiratory failure and death in humans. The crown-of-thorns starfish usually inhabits the reef at low densities. However, under conditions that are not yet well understood, they can reproduce to reach an unsustainable population density when coral is devoured at a rate faster than it can regenerate. This presents a serious reef management issue. Other problematic marine invertebrates include the native species purple sea urchin and the white urchin, which have been able to take over marine habitats and form urchin barrens due to the over harvesting of their natural predators which include abalone and rock lobster. Introduced invertebrate pests include the Asian mussel, New Zealand green-lipped mussel, black-striped mussel and the northern Pacific seastar, all of which displace native shellfish.
There are many unique marine crustaceans in Australian waters. The best-known class, to which all the edible species of crustacean belong, is Malacostraca. The warm waters of northern Australia are home to many species of decapod crustaceans, including crabs, false crabs, hermit crabs, lobsters, shrimps, and prawns. The peracarids, including the amphipods and isopods, are more diverse in the colder waters of southern Australia. Less-well-known marine groups include the classes Remipedia, Cephalocarida, Branchiopoda, Maxillopoda (which includes the barnacles, copepods and fish lice), and the Ostracoda. Notable species include the Tasmanian giant crab, the second largest crab species in the world, found in deep water, and weighing up to 13 kg, and the Australian spiny lobsters, such as the western rock lobster, which are distinct from other lobster species as they do not have claws."
Fauna of Australia,"Invasive species
Introduction of exotic fauna in Australia by design, accident and natural processes has led to a considerable number of invasive, feral and pest species which have flourished and now impact the environment adversely. Introduced organisms affect the environment in a number of ways. Rabbits render land economically useless by eating everything. Red foxes affect local endemic fauna by predation while the cane toad poisons the predators by being eaten. Some water fleas may have been introduced to Australia by humans or birds. Other invasive species include birds (Indian mynah), fish (common carp), insects (red imported fire ant), molluscs (Asian mussel). The problem is compounded by invasive exotic flora as well as introduced diseases, fungi and parasites. An example of this is Blue Green Algae, which is spreading through many bodies of water in rural Victoria, such as the Gippsland Lakes.
Costly, laborious and time-consuming efforts at control of these species has met with little success and this continues to be a major problem area in the conservation of Australia's biodiversity.
Many of the introduced species are not regulated through wildlife services and can be regularly hunted year round. Some states even fund hunting initiatives though the efficacy of these programs are disputed.
According to a 2023 report co-authored by biologist Tim Low, invasive species are the leading cause of native Australian animal extinctions since the 1960s."
Fauna of Australia,"Human impact and conservation
For at least 40,000 years, Australia's fauna played an integral role in the traditional lifestyles of Indigenous Australians, who relied upon many species as a source of food and skins. Vertebrates commonly harvested included macropods, possums, seals, fish and the short-tailed shearwater, most commonly known as the muttonbird. Invertebrates used as food included insects such as the bogong moth and larvae collectively called witchetty grubs and molluscs. The use of fire-stick farming, in which large swathes of bushland were burnt to facilitate hunting, modified both flora and fauna – and are thought to have contributed to the extinction of large herbivores with a specialised diet, such as the flightless birds from the genus Genyornis. The role of hunting and landscape modification by aboriginal people in the extinction of the Australian megafauna is debated, but increasingly favours the idea humans were responsible for megafaunal extinction."
Fauna of Australia,"Despite the major impact of Aboriginals on native species populations, this is considered to be less significant than that of the European settlers, whose impact on the landscape has been on a relatively large scale. Since European settlement, direct exploitation of native fauna, habitat destruction and the introduction of exotic predators and competitive herbivores has led to the extinction of some 27 mammal, 23 bird and 4 frog species. Much of Australia's fauna is protected by legislation. The federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 was created to meet Australia's obligations as a signatory to the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity. This act protects all native fauna and provides for the identification and protection of threatened species. In each state and territory, there is statutory listing of threatened species. At present, 380 animal species are classified as either endangered or threatened under the EPBC Act, and other species are protected under state and territory legislation. More broadly, a complete cataloguing of all the species within Australia has been undertaken, a key step in the conservation of Australian fauna and biodiversity. In 1973, the federal government established the Australian Biological Resources Study (ABRS), which coordinates research in the taxonomy, identification, classification and distribution of flora and fauna. The ABRS maintains free online databases cataloguing much of the described Australian flora and fauna. Impacts such as the illegal setting of traps in rivers affect animals such as the Australian platypus, along with lack of awareness each year an average of 2–5 Australians lose their lives to what is presumed a safe creature. The key is understanding of Australia's diverse wildlife and fauna; what seems safe is often deadly.
The Australian Wildlife Conservancy is the largest private owner of land for conservation in the country which is dedicated to protecting endangered species across 4.8 million hectares of land in the most popular regions such as the Kimberley, Cape York, Lake Eyre and the Top End. This not-for-profit organisation is working hard to avoid extinction of the endangered native species in various wildlife sanctuaries.
Australia is a member of the International Whaling Commission and is strongly opposed to commercial whaling — all cetacean species are protected in Australian waters. Australia is also a signatory to the CITES agreement and prohibits the export of endangered species. Protected areas have been created in every state and territory to protect and preserve the country's unique ecosystems. These protected areas include national parks and other reserves, as well as 64 wetlands registered under the Ramsar Convention and 16 World Heritage Sites. As of 2002, 10.8% (774,619.51 km2) of the total land area of Australia is within protected areas. Protected marine zones have been created in many areas to preserve marine biodiversity; as of 2002, these areas cover about 7% (646,000 km2) of Australia's marine jurisdiction. The Great Barrier Reef is managed by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority under specific federal and state legislation. Some of Australia's fisheries are already overexploited, and quotas have been set for the sustainable harvest of many marine species.
The State of the Environment Report, 2001, prepared by independent researchers for the federal government, concluded that the condition of the environment and environmental management in Australia had worsened since the previous report in 1996. Of particular relevance to wildlife conservation, the report indicated that many processes — such as salinity, changing hydrological conditions, land clearing, fragmentation of ecosystems, poor management of the coastal environment, and invasive species — pose major problems for protecting Australia's biodiversity."
Fauna of Australia,"See also
List of mammals of Australia
List of Australian monotremes and marsupials
List of Australian bats
List of Australian rodents
List of placental mammals introduced to Australia
List of Australian marine mammals
List of Australian birds
List of Australian, New Zealand and Antarctic birds
List of birds of Tasmania
List of ants of Australia
List of butterflies of Australia
List of moths of Australia
List of Australian stick insects and mantids
List of Dermapterans of Australia
List of common Australian spiders
List of extinct animals of Australia
List of introduced fish in Australia
Threatened fauna of Australia
List of Australian animals extinct in the Holocene
List of marine animals of Australia (temperate waters)
Environmental issues in Australia"
Fauna of Australia,"Notes
References
External links"
Fauna of Australia,"Australian Biological Resources Study Archived 8 January 2009 at the Wayback Machine
Australian Insect Common names
Australian Museum, Australia's natural history museum
Crustacean Gallery- Marine crustacean from southeastern Australia
The Reptile Database
University of Melbourne Australian Venom Research Unit, descriptions and images of venomous species
Fauna of Australia, full contents of Mammalia and some of Amphibia & Reptilia available in .pdf format
30+ Native Australian Animals - Facts, Pics & Where To Find Them"
Category:Use Australian English from May 2011,"This category combines all ""Use Australian English""-tagged articles from May 2011 to enable us to work through the backlog more systematically. It is a member of Category:Use Australian English."
Australian Chinese cuisine,"Australian Chinese cuisine is a style of cooking developed by Australians of Chinese descent, who adapted dishes to satisfy local Anglo-Celtic tastes. Its roots can be traced to indentured Chinese who were brought to work as cooks in country pubs and sheep stations.
Migrant numbers exploded with the gold rushes of the 19th century. By 1890, a third of all cooks were Chinese. Historians believe exemptions for Chinese chefs under the White Australia policy led to the eventual spread of Chinese restaurants across suburbs and country towns.
Most early Chinese migrants were from Guangdong province, and so Cantonese cuisine became the chief influence, using locally available vegetables and more meat than was usual in traditional recipes. Later Chinese immigration, as well as increasingly adventurous domestic palates, have led to restaurants with more authentic dishes from a wider selection of provinces."
Australian Chinese cuisine,"History
Not until the Australian Gold Rushes did many Chinese immigrants move to the country. The gold rushes drew thousands of Chinese people, mostly from villages in Southern China - especially the Pearl River delta. In 1855, there were 11,493 Chinese arrivals in Melbourne, Victoria.
As gold was rare, and mining always a dangerous job, Chinese people started to do different jobs to earn a living. Many chose to open small grocery stores or fruit and vegetable-hawking businesses, enter the fishing and fish curing industry, or become market gardeners. Other Chinese immigrants decided to open restaurants that served traditional dishes.
Perhaps because the White Australia policy had an exemption for chefs, many Chinese immigrants and their families became chefs in Australia. By 1890, it was said that 33% of all the cooks in Australia were Chinese. Over time, these Chinese communities grew and established Chinatowns in several major cities around Australia, including Sydney (Chinatown, Sydney), Melbourne (Chinatown, Melbourne) and Brisbane (Chinatown, Brisbane) and as well as regional towns associated with the goldfields such as Cairns Chinatown."
Australian Chinese cuisine,"Chinese cuisine in Australia
Australian Chinese cuisine cooking styles were derived from the cooking styles of provinces such as Sichuan and Guangdong. Therefore, Chinese cuisine in Australia from the beginning were usually hot, spicy and numbing (Sichuan cuisine); and/or sweet and sour (Guangdong cuisine). During the first Gold Rush period, Chinese labourers were found working their second job at small food stores which were referred to as ""cookhouses"" to serve their own people. However, at this time, there was little accessibility towards traditional ingredients, especially vegetables such as bok choy and choy sum. As a result, after the White Australia policy was revoked, many Chinese migrants brought seeds from China and started to grow their own vegetables at home to increase the variety in Australia. 
Chinese food has been named as Australia's favourite cuisine according to Roy Morgan Research. However, despite its popularity, Australian Chinese cuisine still slightly differs to the authentic Chinese cuisine. One of the reason for this is due to the conflicts between Australian and Chinese people. In order for these Chinese restaurants to survive, Chinese chefs were expected to provide food that would not directly compete with that of white establishments, but would still suit Western tastes. As a result, many Australian Chinese restaurants have adjusted their food to better adapt to the Australians' appetites. For instance, traditional cuisines of China considers vegetables as a main dish, while Westerners only treat vegetables as side dishes. To better suit the local diners, Chinese restaurants offer more meat options on the menus."
Australian Chinese cuisine,"Moreover, as Guangdong's cooking styles focus on producing a fresh and tender taste, their cooking methods usually favor steaming and braising the most. However, to better adapt to the Australian palates, deep-fried and saucy Asian dishes have also been included in the new menus. These include sweet and sour pork, sticky lemon chicken and dim sim. Inspired by the authentic Chinese style of dishes, dim sum, the dim sim or ""dimmy"" was developed by Chinese chef William Wing Young around 1945 in Melbourne. Dim sim is a dumpling with thick (crispy) skin filled with meat and is usually fried. It is normally mistaken for dim sum - small bite-sized portions of food served in small baskets which are usually cooked by the steaming method.
Another example showing the adaptation of the Chinese cuisine can be seen through how Matthew Chan has developed Peacock Gardens Restaurant into the symbol of Modern Australian Chinese cuisine. In an interview with News.com.au, Chan said that back in the 70's, Australian customers are not yet familiar with dishes such as ""chicken chop suey, san choy bow and beef and black bean"". It was Matthew Chan who has introduced these dishes into Australia with a few Western twists. For example, with 'san choy bow', understanding that Australian people were not familiar with pigeon meat, Chan decided to change the main protein to pork and beef mince. Furthermore, many vegetables were also substituted: cabbage to celery; bamboo shoots to water chestnuts; and most notably how Western broccoli have been used more frequently instead of Chinese broccoli .
Furthermore, as the popularity of Chinese cuisine has been increasing steadily in Australia for the past century, unheard Chinese ingredients are now appearing in Australian kitchens more regularly. For instance, tofu - a dish that was not accepted in Australia has now been the main ingredient in many dishes served in the country. Tofu was discovered over 2000 years ago by the action of curdling soymilk and pressing those curds into blocks with different textures such as soft, firm and extra-firm. A well-known tofu dish that are normally served in Chinese restaurants around the country is Mapo Tofu.
However, on the other hand, some Australian Chinese dishes are actually inspired by Western cuisine, this includes the Wasabi Prawn. This dish was developed by Matthew Chan during a business trip to America ""I got the idea from the Hilton's San Francisco Grill where they had mustard on roast beef. I tried to do mustard steak but it didn't work, so I tried it with prawns."" In this dish, the prawns are coated with the tangy and creamy English mustard and are served with a side of deep-fried spinach leaves sprinkled with sugar to balance the mustard's sharp and strong flavours.
In short, most Chinese restaurants in Australia are designed to be able to cater both Chinese and non-Chinese customers. That being said, there are many items on the menu such as chicken liver, ox tongue, pig uteri and other dishes that can 'frighten' the Western customers. Furthermore, due to the growing population of Chinese people in Australia, there are more and more Australian Chinese restaurants that serve highly authentic tastes, and there is a wider variety of types of Chinese Restaurants. This has included a significant boom in Hong Kong(/Macau) Style Cafes, often serving mixed Cantonese-western dishes with HK-style coffee or tea. Taiwanese restaurants have also significantly increased, especially in the major cities."
Australian Chinese cuisine,"Restaurants
Due to such large popularity, Chinese restaurants can be found in most suburbs and cities of Australia. However, the most concentrated locations of Chinese restaurants in Australia are identified as Chinatowns. Here, the dishes are normally prepared to cater for recent Asian immigrants and tourists, as well as Western people with a larger variety of cuisine; including Anhui, Cantonese, Fujian, Shandong, Sichuan and others.
Chinese restaurants can also serve food at different price points, as well as serving both traditional and modern Chinese food. For instance, Chinese restaurants which are found in food-courts normally provide food for customers with shoestring budgets. For instance, in Haymarket, Sydney, inside Dixon House, there are many Chinese food stalls that serve affordable Chinese meals. Dixon House, opened in 1982, is one of the most well-known Chinatown food courts. According to Thang Ngo ""[Dixon House] is still the most Chinese of the Chinatown food courts"" The place now boasts restaurants such as Oriental Dumpling King and Sizzling and Hot Pot Kitchen, where customers can find meals that range from AU$10 - AU$20.
On the other hand, Chinese restaurants can also be very expensive. The Golden Century Seafood Restaurant, located in Sydney Chinatown, has become the symbol for Chinese luxurious dining. The restaurant was established in 1989 and is known for their 'from tank to plate' serving style. This serving style, according to presenter Gus Worland, has provided an assurance for the freshness of the ingredients. Signature dishes such as Braised Lobster with Ginger and Shallot as well as Braised Whole Abalone with Oyster Sauce can cost the customers around AU$300. Moreover, the reason why The Golden Century Seafood Restaurant has become very well-known is that the place has been hosting royalty, politicians and celebrities. For instance, former United States president, George W. Bush has been spotted eating Peking Duck; or well-known celebrities such as Rihanna and Lady Gaga have also been seen enjoying seafood at the restaurant.
Australia also contains authentic restaurants which serves traditional styles as well as restaurants that serves contemporary Chinese cuisine. Authentic Chinese cuisine can be found in Supper Inn Chinese Restaurant. Supper Inn was established in the 1980s; the restaurant is located in the central business district of Melbourne.  The food served by Super Inn is described as classic Chinese/Cantonese food: ""It is such a simple comfort to eat here, [the restaurant] serves quality consistent Cantonese food."" Super Inn's signature dishes include chicken congee and BBQ Suckling Pig. These dishes have been around in China for thousands of years. Moreover, the restaurant is also famous for its late night food; the restaurant only decided to close at 2:30 am – every day.
On the contrary, there are also restaurants that decided to combine the authentic tastes Chinese cuisine with other cuisines around the world to create its own version of contemporary Chinese food. Mr Wong is an example of this. The restaurant was co-created by Dan Hong and Michael Lou. Mr Wong, described by Sydney Morning Herald as a ""self-contained Chinatown in the middle of Sydney"". The restaurant offers a customised menu with the utilisation of many foreign ingredients has changed Australian people's perspective on Chinese cuisine. Indeed, xiaolongbao, a type of Chinese steamed bun which usually has a minced pork filling has now been swapped with lobster and scallop. Furthermore, Mr Wong also offers a modern drinks menu with cocktails and house-made ginger beer clearly suggests its effort to change the customers' views on Chinese cuisine."
Australian Chinese cuisine,"Dishes
Chinese dishes that have been adapted to Australian tastes include:"
Australian Chinese cuisine,"Lemon chicken: consists of pieces of chicken meat that are normally deep-fried and coated with a sticky, sweet and sour lemon-flavoured sauce. Despite its lack of resemblance to authentic Chinese cuisine found in China, lemon chicken is very popular in Australian Chinese restaurants.
Lettuce Wraps: also known as San Choy Bow is a well known Chinese dish where originally pigeon minces were wrapped inside a lettuce leaf. However, in Australia, the pigeon mince has been substituted with mainly pork minces.
Chow Sam See: is a dish invented by Matthew Chan. This dish includes shredded chicken, barbecued pork and Chinese mushroom being stir fried and later being served in a thin pancake. Matthew Chan said that this was his effort to recreate Peking Duck with less expensive ingredients.
Mustard Prawns: is a dish inspired by Western cuisine. The main ingredients include prawns, cooking wine, mustard and sweet and sour sauce.
Dim Sim: was developed by Chinese chef William Wing Young around 1945 in Melbourne. Dim Sim is a dumpling with thick (crispy) skin filled with meat and is usually fried.
Broad beans, Bean curd and Chinese chutney (BBC): A vegetarian dish popularised by the Adelaide Chinese restaurant Ying Chow. It is popular in South Australia and consists of stir fried edamame and marinated firm bean curd in a sauce consisting of pickled cabbage, garlic, chilli and soy sauce.
Billy Kee Chicken: A dish that hails from Sydney's Chinatown in the 1950s. Named after local identity, Billy Kee, it consists of fried chicken or pork in a sauce made with red wine, worcestershire sauce, five spice, garlic and tomato sauce. 
Ham and Chicken Roll: A appetiser dish made with chicken wrapped around ham and then coated and deep fried. Often accompanied by sweet and sour sauce on the side.
Mango Pancakes: A staple dish of Yum Cha restaurants in Sydney since the 1980s. It consists of a thin Mango crepe filled with whipped cream and chunks of mango. 
Honey King Prawns and Honey Chicken: A main dish of either battered prawns or chicken pieces coated in a Honey sauce and covered in sesame seeds. Often served over crispy fried rice noodles.
Mongolian Lamb: A staple dish consisting of stir fried lamb pieces and spring onions cooked in a soy and hoisin based sauce. It is often served on a hot sizzling iron dish.
Honey Chilli Chicken: Popularised from the Australian Women's Weekly Chinese Cooking Class cookbook originally published in 1978.
Satay Combination: A dish served on a plate with a mix of beef, chicken and seafood. Often served with a bowl of lemon essence that is set alight in the middle of the dish.
XO pipis: A dish common throughout seafood Cantonese restaurants that combines the native Pipi (also known as Goolwa cockles) stir fried with the Hong Kong style XO sauce."
Australian Chinese cuisine,"See also
Yum cha
Fusion cuisine
American Chinese cuisine
Canadian Chinese cuisine
New Zealand Chinese cuisine
British Chinese cuisine
Australian cuisine"
Australian Chinese cuisine,"
== References =="
History of Indigenous Australians,"The history of Indigenous Australians began 50,000 to 65,000 years ago when humans first populated the Australian continental landmasses. This article covers the history of Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander peoples, two broadly defined groups which each include other sub-groups defined by language and culture. Human habitation of the Australian continent began with the migration of the ancestors of today's Aboriginal Australians by land bridges and short sea crossings from what is now Southeast Asia. The Aboriginal people spread throughout the continent, adapting to diverse environments and climate change to develop one of the oldest continuous cultures on Earth.
At the time of first European contact, estimates of the Aboriginal population range from 300,000 to one million. They were complex hunter-gatherers with diverse economies and societies. There were about 600 tribes or nations and 250 languages with various dialects. Certain groups engaged in fire-stick farmingand fish farming, while they built semi-permanent shelters. The extent to which some groups engaged in agriculture is controversial.
The Torres Strait Islander people first settled their islands around 4,000 years ago. Culturally and linguistically distinct from mainland Aboriginal peoples, they were seafarers and obtained their livelihood from seasonal horticulture and the resources of their reefs and seas. Agriculture also developed on some islands. Villages had appeared in their areas by the 14th century.
The British Empire established a penal colony at Botany Bay in 1788. In the 150 years that followed, the number of Indigenous Australians fell sharply due to introduced diseases and violent conflict with the colonists. From the 1930s, the Indigenous population began to recover and Indigenous communities founded organisations to advocate for their rights. From the 1960s, Indigenous people won the right to vote in federal and state elections, and some won the return of parts of their traditional lands. In 1992, the High Court of Australia, in the Mabo Case, found that Indigenous native title rights existed in common law. By 2021, Indigenous Australians had exclusive or shared title to about 54% of the Australian land mass.
From 1971 to 2006, Indigenous employment, median incomes, home ownership, education and life expectancy all improved, although they remained well below the level for those who were not indigenous. Since 2008, successive Australian governments have launched policies aimed at reducing Indigenous disadvantage in education, employment, literacy and child mortality. However, by 2023 Indigenous people still experienced entrenched inequality. In October 2023, the Australian people, in a referendum, voted against a constitutional amendment to establish an Indigenous advisory body to government."
History of Indigenous Australians,"Migration
Human habitation of continent
It is believed that early human migration to Australia was achieved when it formed part of the Sahul continent, connected to the island of New Guinea via a land bridge. This would have nevertheless required crossing the sea at the so-called Wallace Line. It is also possible that people came by island-hopping via an island chain between Sulawesi and New Guinea, reaching North Western Australia via Timor.
A 2021 study which mapped likely migration routes suggests that the populating of the Sahul took 5,000–6,000 years to reach Tasmania (then part of the continent), with a rate of one kilometre per year, after making landfall in the Kimberley region of Western Australia around 60,000 years ago. The total human population could have been as high as 6.4 million, with 3 million in the area of modern Australia.  The modelling suggests that the path of population movement may have followed two main routes down from contemporary New Guinea, with the so-called ""southern route"" going  into Kimberley, Pilbara and Arnhem Land, and then to the Great Sandy Desert before moving towards the centre in Lake Eyre and further on to the southeast of the continent. It also leads through another path to the southwestern parts, such as Margaret River and the Nullarbor Plain. The ""northern route"" meanwhile crosses over the current location of the Torres Strait and then divides into one path connecting to Arnhem Land and another leading down the East Coast.
Madjedbebe, in the north of the continent, is possibly the oldest known site showing the presence of humans in Australia, with one study dating it to 65,000 ± 6,000 years ago and at least by 50,000 years ago. The rock shelters at Madjedbebe (about 50 kilometres (31 mi) inland from the present coast) and at Nauwalabila I (70 kilometres (43 mi) further south) show possible evidence of ochre used by artists 60,000 years ago.  However, a 2020 study found that first human occupation at these sites might have been more recent.
From the north, the population spread into a range of very different environments. Devil's Lair in the extreme south-west of the continent was occupied around 47,000 BP and Tasmania by 39,000 BP.
Near Penrith, stone tools have been found in Cranebrook Terraces gravel sediments having dates of 45,000 to 50,000 years BP.  A 2018 study using archaeobotany dated evidence of human habitation at Karnatukul (Serpent's Glen) in the Carnarvon Range in the Little Sandy Desert in WA at around 50,000 years, which was 20,000 earlier than previously believed. The integration of human genomic evidence from various parts of the world also supports a date of about 50,000 years ago for the arrival of Aboriginal people in the continent.
The oldest human remains found are at Lake Mungo in New South Wales, which have been dated to around 41,000 years ago. The site suggests one of the world's oldest known cremations, indicating early evidence for religious ritual among humans.
Humans reached Tasmania approximately 40,000 years ago by migrating across a land bridge from the mainland that existed during the last glacial maximum. After the seas rose about 12,000 years ago and covered the land bridge, the inhabitants there were isolated from the mainland until the arrival of European settlers.
Short-statured Aboriginal people inhabited the rainforests of North Queensland, of which the best known group is probably the Tjapukai of the Cairns area."
History of Indigenous Australians,"Indian migration theory
A number of changes in Indigenous culture about 4,000 years ago have led some scholars to theorise that a second wave of immigration was responsible. These changes include the introduction of the dingo, the spread of the Pama-Nyungan language family over most of the mainland, and new stone tool technology using smaller tools. A 2013 study based on large-scale genotyping, indicated that Aboriginal Australians, the indigenous peoples of New Guinea and the Mamanwa of the Philippines were closely related, having diverged from a common origin approximately 36,000 years ago. The same study suggested that Aboriginal genomes consist of up to 11% Indian DNA , indicating a substantial gene flow between Indian populations and northern Australia occurred around 4,000 years ago. However, a 2016 study using advanced gene sequencing technology showed no Indian DNA and that Aboriginal people diverged from other Sahul peoples 47,000 to 53,000 years ago. The authors concluded that Aboriginal Australians were probably the source for the technological and linguistic changes 4,000 years ago. The consensus of scholars is that before the arrival of the British there was probably only one wave of immigration to Australia at least 50,000 years ago."
History of Indigenous Australians,"History to British colonisation
Geography and cultural adaptation
When the north-west of Australia was first occupied, the region consisted of open tropical forests and woodlands. After around 10,000 years of stable climatic conditions, by which time the Aboriginal people had settled the entire continent, temperatures began cooling leading to an ice age. By the glacial maximum, 25,000 to 15,000 years ago, the sea level had dropped to around 140 metres below its present level. Australia was connected to New Guinea and the Kimberley region of Western Australia was separated from Southeast Asia (Wallacea) by a strait only approximately 90 km wide. Rainfall was 40% to 50% lower than modern levels, depending on region. The Kimberley, including the adjacent exposed continental Sahul Shelf, was covered by vast grasslands dominated by flowering plants of the family Poaceae, with woodlands and semi-arid scrub covering the shelf joining New Guinea to Australia. 
Tasmania was covered primarily by cold steppe and alpine grasslands, with snow pines at lower altitudes. There may have been a significant reduction in Australian Aboriginal populations during this time, with scattered ""refugia"" where vegetation and Aboriginal populations were able to survive. Corridors between these refugia seem to be routes by which people kept in contact. With the end of the ice age, strong rains returned, until around 5,500 years ago, when the wet season cycle in the north ended, bringing with it a megadrought that lasted 1,500 years. The return of reliable rains around 4,000 years BP gave Australia its current climate.
Following the Ice Age, Aboriginal people around the coast, from Arnhem Land, the Kimberley and the southwest of Western Australia, all tell stories of former territories that were drowned beneath the sea with the rising coastlines. It was this event that isolated the Tasmanian Aboriginal people on their island, and probably led to the extinction of Aboriginal cultures on the Bass Strait Islands and Kangaroo Island in South Australia. In the interior, the end of the Ice Age may have led to the recolonisation of the desert and semi-desert areas by Aboriginal people of the Northern Territory. This in part may have been responsible for the spread of languages of the Pama–Nyungan language family and secondarily responsible for the spread of male initiation rites involving circumcision. There has been a long history of contact between Papuan peoples of the Western Province, Torres Strait Islanders and the Aboriginal people in Cape York.
Aboriginal people developed technologies to better exploit diverse environments. Fibre and nets for use in watercraft and fishing developed before 40,000 BP. More complex tools, such as edge-ground axes hafted to wooden handles, appeared by 35,000 BP.  Elaborate trade networks also developed. Ochre was transported 250 kilometres from the Barrier Range to Lake Mungo 40,000 years ago.  Shells (for decorative beads) were transported 500 kilometres by 30,000 BP. More extensive trade networks developed in later times.
The warming climate was associated with new technologies. Small back-bladed stone tools appeared 15–19 thousand years ago. Wooden javelins and boomerangs have been found dating from 10,000 years ago. Stone points for spears have been found dating from 5–7 thousand years ago. Spear throwers were probably developed more recently than 6,500 years ago.
Sea levels stabilised at around their current level about 6,500 years ago. Warmer weather, wetter conditions and the new coastlines led to significant changes in Aboriginal social and economic organisation. New coastal societies emerged around tidal reefs, estuaries and flooded river valleys, and coastal islands were incorporated into local economies.  There was a proliferation of stone tool, plant processing and landscape modification technologies. Elaborate fish and eel traps involving channels up to three kilometres long were in use in western Victoria from about 6,500 years ago. Semi-permanent collections of wooden huts on mounds also appeared in western Victoria, associated with a more systematic exploitation of new food sources in the wetlands.
Aboriginal Tasmanians were isolated from the mainland from about 14,000 years ago. As a result, they only possessed one quarter of the tools and equipment of the adjacent mainland and were without hafted axes, grinding technology, stone tipped weapons, spear throwers and the boomerang. By 3,700 BP they had ceased to eat fish and use bone tools. Coastal Tasmanians switched from fish to abalone and crayfish and more Tasmanians moved to the interior. The Tasmanians built watercraft from reeds and bark and journeyed up to 10 kilometres offshore to visit islands and hunt for seals and muttonbirds.
Oral history demonstrates ""the continuity of culture of Indigenous Australians"" for at least 10,000 years. This is shown by correlation of oral history stories with verifiable incidents including known changes in sea levels and their associated large changes in location of ocean shorelines; oral records of megafauna; and comets.
Around 4,000 years ago the first phase of occupation of the Torres Strait Islands began. By 2,500 years ago more of the islands were occupied and a distinctive Torres Strait Island maritime culture emerged. Agriculture also developed on some islands and by 700 years ago villages appeared."
History of Indigenous Australians,"Ecology
The introduction of the dingo, possibly as early as 3500 BCE, showed that contact with South East Asian peoples continued, as the closest genetic connection to the dingo seems to be the wild dogs of Thailand.  This contact was not just one-way, as the presence of kangaroo ticks on these dogs demonstrates. Dingoes began and evolved in Asia. The earliest known dingo-like fossils are from Ban Chiang in north-east Thailand (dated at 5500 years BP) and from north Vietnam (5000 years BP). According to skull morphology, these fossils occupy a place between Asian wolves (prime candidates were the pale footed (or Indian) wolf Canis lupus pallipes and the Arabian wolf Canis lupus arabs) and modern dingoes in Australia and Thailand.
The spread of the population also altered the environment. There is evidence of the deliberate use of fire to shape the Australian environment 46,000 years ago. In many parts of Australia, firestick farming was used to clear vegetation to make travel easier, drive animals into ambushes, and create open grasslands rich in animal and vegetable food sources. More than 60 species of animals, including Australian megafauna, became extinct by 10,000 BP. Researchers have variously attributed these extinctions to human hunting and firing practices, climate change or a combination of these factors."
History of Indigenous Australians,"Food
Aboriginal Australians were limited to the range of foods occurring naturally in their area, but they knew exactly when, where and how to find everything edible. Anthropologists and nutrition experts who have studied the tribal diet in Arnhem Land found it to be well-balanced, with most of the nutrients modern dietitians recommend. But food was not obtained without effort. In some areas both men and women had to spend from half to two-thirds of each day hunting or foraging for food. Each day, the women of the group went into successive parts of one countryside with wooden digging sticks and plaited dilly bags or wooden coolamons. Larger animals and birds, such as kangaroos and emus, were speared or disabled with a thrown club, boomerang, or stone. Many Indigenous hunting devices were used to get within striking distance of prey. The men were excellent trackers and stalkers, approaching their prey running where there was cover, or ""freezing"" and crawling when in the open. They were careful to stay downwind and sometimes covered themselves with mud to disguise their smell.
Fish were sometimes taken by hand by stirring up the muddy bottom of a pool until they rose to the surface, or by placing the crushed leaves of poisonous plants in the water to stupefy them. Fish spears, nets, wicker or stone traps were also used in different areas. Lines with hooks made from bone, shell, wood or spines were used along the north and east coasts. Dugong, turtle and large fish were harpooned, the harpooner launching himself bodily from the canoe to give added weight to the thrust. Both Torres Strait Island populations and mainland Aboriginal peoples were predominantly hunter & gatherers, who relied on wild foods. However, banana cultivation is now thought to have been practiced amongst Torres Strait Islanders. Aboriginal Australians along the coast and rivers were also expert fishermen. Some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people relied on the dingo as a companion animal, using it to assist with hunting and for warmth on cold nights."
History of Indigenous Australians,"In present-day Victoria, there were two separate communities who farmed eels in complex and extensive irrigated pond systems; one on the Murray River in the state's north, the other in the south-west near Hamilton in the territory of the Djab Wurrung, which traded with other groups from as far away as the Melbourne area (see Gunditjmara). A primary tool used in hunting is the spear, launched by a woomera or spear-thrower in some locales. Boomerangs were also used by some mainland Indigenous Australians. The non-returnable boomerang (known more correctly as a Throwing Stick), more powerful than the returning kind, could be used to injure or even kill a kangaroo.
In mainland Australia no animal other than the dingo was domesticated, however domestic pigs and cassowaries were utilised by Torres Strait Islanders. The typical Aboriginal diet included a wide variety of foods, including introduced pigs, kangaroo, emu, wombats, goanna, snakes, birds, and many insects such as honey ants, Bogong moths and witchetty grubs. Many varieties of plant foods such as taro, coconuts, nuts, fruits and berries were also eaten."
History of Indigenous Australians,"Culture
Torres Strait Islanders were culturally and linguistically distinct from mainland Aboriginal peoples. They were seafarers and obtained their livelihood from seasonal horticulture and the resources of their reefs and seas. Villages and agriculture also developed on some islands."
History of Indigenous Australians,"Aboriginal cultures were diverse. The earliest Aboriginal rock art consists of hand-prints, hand-stencils, and engravings of circles, tracks, lines and cupules, and has been dated to 35,000 years ago. Around 20,000 year ago Aboriginal artists were depicting humans and animals. However, the dating is contentious and some researchers believe that known examples of Aboriginal rock art are possibly more recent.Some innovations were imported to the mainland from neighbouring cultures. The dingo was introduced about 4,000 years ago. Shell fish hooks appeared in Australia about 1,200 years ago and were probably introduced from the Torres Strait or by Polynesian seafarers. From the mid-1660s fishing vessels from Indonesia regularly visited the north coast of Australia in search of trepang (sea cucumber). Trade and social relationships developed which were reflected in Aboriginal art, ceremonies and oral traditions. Aboriginal people adopted dugout canoes and metal harpoon heads from the Indonesians which allowed them to better hunt dugong and turtle off the coast and nearby islands.
Despite these interactions with neighbouring cultures, the basic structure of Aboriginal society was unchanged. Family groups were joined in bands and clans averaging about 25 people, each with a defined territory for foraging.  Clans were attached to tribes or nations, associated with particular languages and country. At the time of European contact there were about 600 tribes or nations and 250 distinct languages with various dialects.
Aboriginal society was egalitarian with no formal government or chiefs. Authority rested with elders who held extensive ritual knowledge gained over many years. Group decisions were generally made through the consensus of elders. The traditional economy was cooperative, with males generally hunting large game while females gathered local staples such as small animals, shellfish, vegetables, fruits, seeds and nuts. Food was shared within groups and exchanged across groups.
Aboriginal groups were semi-nomadic, generally ranging over a specific territory defined by natural features. Members of a group would enter the territory of another group through rights established by marriage and kinship or by invitation for specific purposes such as ceremonies and sharing abundant seasonal foods. As all natural features of the land were created by ancestral beings, a group's particular country provided physical and spiritual nourishment.
According to Australian Aboriginal mythology and the animist framework developed in Aboriginal Australia, the Dreaming is a sacred era in which ancestral totemic spirit beings formed The Creation. The Dreaming established the laws and structures of society and the ceremonies performed to ensure continuity of life and land.
The extent to which some Aboriginal societies were agricultural is controversial. In the Lake Condah region of western Victoria the inhabitants built elaborate eel and fish traps and hundreds gathered in semi-permanent stone and bark huts during the eel season. However, these groups still moved across their territory several times a year to exploit other seasonal food sources. In semi-arid areas, millet was harvested, stacked and threshed and the seeds stored for later use. In tropical areas the tops of yams were replanted. Flood argues that such practices are better classified as resource management than agriculture and that Aboriginal societies did not develop the systematic cultivation of crops or permanent villages such as existed in the Torres Strait Islands. Elizabeth Williams has called the inhabitants of the more settled regions of the Murray valley ""complex hunter gatherers"".
In many Aboriginal communities a complex kinship structure developed and most groups were divided into two inter-marrying halves called moieties. Polygamy was common, although many marriages were monogamous. To enable men and women to find suitable partners, many groups would come together for annual gatherings (commonly known as corroborees) at which goods were traded, news exchanged, and marriages arranged amid appropriate ceremonies. This practice both reinforced clan relationships and prevented inbreeding in a society based on small semi-nomadic groups.
Male initiation usually occurred at puberty and the rites often included penile subincision, depilation or tooth avulsion. Female initiation often involved purification through smoke or bathing, and sometimes scarification or the removal of finger joints.
Abortion and infanticide were widely practised as a means of birth control or dealing with deformities, injuries or illness which might impair the functioning of the group.
Some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups also practised ritual cannibalism in rare circumstances."
History of Indigenous Australians,"1770–1850s: impact of British colonisation
The first contact between British explorers and Indigenous Australians came in 1770, when Lieutenant James Cook  interacted with the Guugu Yimithirr people around contemporary Cooktown. Cook wrote that he had claimed the east coast of Australia for what was then the Kingdom of Great Britain and named it New South Wales, while on Possession Island off the west coast of Cape York Peninsula. However, it seems that no such claim was made when Cook was in Australia. Cook's orders were to look for ""a Continent or Land of great extent"" and ""with the Consent of the Natives to take possession of Convenient situations in the Country in the name of the King"". The British government did not view Aboriginal Australians as the owners of the land as they did not practise farming. British colonisation of Australia began at Port Jackson in 1788 with the arrival of Governor Arthur Phillip and the First Fleet. The Governor was instructed to ""by every possible means to open an intercourse with the natives, and to conciliate their affections, enjoining all our subjects to live in amity and kindness with them"" and to punish those aiming to ""wantonly destroy them"".
The immediate reaction of the Eora, who were first to witness it, to colonisation was at first surprise and then aggression. Following this the Eora generally avoided the British for the next two years. They were offended by the British entering their lands and taking advantage of their resources without asking permission, as was customary in Aboriginal society. Some contacts did however occur, with both the Eora and the Tharawal at Botany Bay, including exchanges of gifts. Out of the 17 encounters during the first month, only two involved the Eora entering British settlements. After a year, Phillip decided to capture Indigenous people to teach them English and make them intermediaries, resulting in the kidnappings of Arabanoo and Bennelong, with Phillip getting speared by the latter's companion. Bennelong would eventually travel to England with Phillip and Yemmerrawanne in 1793. A Kuringgai man Bungaree also made voyages with Europeans. Following the lethal spearing of a huntsman, possibly by Pemulwuy, Phillip ordered 10 men (but not women or children) in Botany Bay to be captured and beheaded. None were however found."
History of Indigenous Australians,"The first apparent consequence of British settlement appeared in April 1789 when a disease, which was probably smallpox, struck the Aboriginal peoples about Port Jackson. Before the epidemic, the First Fleet had equalled the population of the Eora; after it the settler population was equal to all Indigenous people on the Cumberland Plain; and by 1820, their population of 30,000 was as much of the entire Indigenous populace of New South Wales. A generation after colonisation, the Eora, Dharug and Kuringgai had been greatly reduced and were mainly living in the outskirts of European society, though some Indigenous people did continue to live in the coastal regions around Sydney further on, as well as around Georges River and Botany Bay. Further inland, Indigenous peoples were warned of the British invasion after the Cumberland Plain had been taken by 1815, and  this information preceded them by hundreds of kilometres. However, by the second generation of contact, many groups in south-eastern Australia were gone. The greatest cause of death was disease, followed by settler and inter-Indigenous killings. This population loss was further exacerbated by an extremely low birth rate. An estimated decline of 80 percent in the population meant that traditional kinship systems and ceremonial obligations became hard to maintain and family and social relations were torn. The survivors came to live on the fringes of European society, living in tents and shacks around towns and riverbanks in poor health.
Aboriginal Tasmanians first came to contact with Europeans when the Baudin expedition to Australia arrived at Adventure Bay in 1802. The French explorers were more friendly to the Indigenous than the British further north. Already earlier, in 1800, European whalers had been to the Bass Strait islands, where they had used kidnapped aboriginal women. The local Indigenous also sold women to the sailors. Later the descendants of these women would be the last survivors of Tasmanian Indigenous people."
History of Indigenous Australians,"Assimilation
The assimilation policy was first started by Governor Macquarie, who established in 1814 the Native Institution in Blacktown ""to effect the Civilization of the Aborigines of New South Wales, and to render their Habits more domesticated and industrious"" by enrolling children in a residential school. By 1817, 17 were enrolled, one of whom, a girl called Maria, won the first prize in a school exam ahead of European children in 1819. The institution was however closed soon after following Macquarie's replacement for spending. Macquerie also had attempted to settle 16 Kuringgai at George's Head with land, pre-fabricated huts and other supplies, but the families had soon sold the farms and left."
History of Indigenous Australians,"Christian missions were also started at Lake Macquarie in 1827, at Wellington Valley in 1832, and in Port Phillip and Moreton Bay around 1840. These involved learning Indigenous languages, with the Gospel of Luke translated into Awabakal in 1831 by a missionary and Biraban, as well as offering food and sanctuary on the frontier. However, when supplies ran out, the Indigenous would often leave for pastoral stations in search of work. Some missionaries would take children without consent to be taught in dormitories. The government had started blanket distribution in the 1830s, but ended this in 1844 as a cost-saving measure. It also created Indigenous paramilitary units, called the Australian native police, with these being establish in Port Phillip in 1842, New South Wales in 1848, and in Queensland 1859. Exceptional among these, the Port Phillip force had police powers over white people as well. The forces killed hundreds of (or in the case of Queensland, up to a thousand) Indigenous people.
In 1833, a committee of the British House of Commons, led by Fowell Buxton, demanded better treatment of the Indigenous, referring to them as 'original owners', leading the British government in 1838 to create the office of the Protector of Aborigines. However, this effort ended by 1857. Nevertheless, the humanitarian effort did produce the Waste Land Act of 1848, which gave indigenous people certain rights and reserves on the land.
There was also some assimilation of Europeans into Indigenous cultures. Living with Indigenous people was William Buckley, an escaped convict, who was with the Wautharong people near Melbourne for thirty-two years, before being found in 1835. James Morrill was an English sailor aboard the vessel Peruvian which became shipwrecked off the coast of north-eastern Australia in 1846, was taken in by a local clan of Aboriginal Australians. He adopted their language and customs and lived as a member of their society for 17 years. Indigenous peoples also adopted the European dog widely."
History of Indigenous Australians,"Conflict
The British settlement was initially planned to be a self-sufficient penal colony based on agriculture. Karskens argues that conflict broke out between the settlers and the traditional owners of the land because of the settlers' assumptions about the superiority of British civilisation and their entitlement to land which they had ""improved"" through building and cultivation.
Broome argues that the British claims of exclusive possession to land and other property was irreconcilable with Aboriginal concepts of communal ownership of land and its food resources. Flood points out that conflict between British law and Aboriginal customary law was also a source of conflict; for example, Aboriginal groups considered they had a right to hunt all animals on their traditional land whereas British settlers considered the killing of their livestock as poaching. Conflict also arose from cross-cultural misunderstandings and from reprisals for previous actions such as the kidnapping of Aboriginal men, women and children. Reprisal attacks and collective punishments were perpetrated by colonists and Aboriginal groups alike. Sustained Aboriginal attacks on settlers, the burning of crops and the mass killing of livestock were more obviously acts of resistance to the loss of traditional land and food resources.
On the mainland, prolonged conflict followed the frontier of European settlement. Broome estimates the total death toll from settler-Aboriginal conflict between 1788 and 1928 as 1,700 settlers and 17–20,000 Aboriginal people. Reynolds has suggested a higher ""guesstimate"" of 3,000 settlers and up to 30,000 Aboriginals killed. A project team at the University of Newcastle, Australia, has reached a preliminary estimate of 8,270 Aboriginal deaths in frontier massacres from 1788 to 1930.
Some Indigenous people also allied with the colonists against other Indigenous people. colonisation accelerated fighting between Indigenous groups by causing them to leave their traditional lands as well as by causing deaths by disease which were attributed to enemy sorcery. Indigenous gun ownership was banned in New South Wales in 1840, but this was overturned by the British government as inequality before the law.
In 1790, an Aboriginal leader Pemulwuy in Sydney resisted the Europeans, waging a guerrilla-style warfare on the settlers in a series of wars known as the Hawkesbury and Nepean Wars, which spanned 26 years, from 1790 to 1816. After his death in 1802, his son Tedbury continued the campaign until 1810. The campaign led to the banning of Aboriginal groups of more than six and forbid them from carrying weapons closer to two kilometers from settlements. Beyond the Cumberland Plain, violence erupted first at Bathurst against the Wiradjuri, with martial law declared in 1822 and the 40th Regiment responding. This became known as the Bathurst War.
In Van Diemen's Land, conflict arrived in 1824 after major expansion of settler and sheep numbers, with Indigenous warriors responding by killing 24 Europeans by 1826. In 1828, martial law was declared and bounty parties of settlers took vengeance. On the Indigenous side,  Musquito led the Oyster Bay tribe against the settlers. Tarenorerer was another leader. The Black War, fought largely as a guerrilla war by both sides, claimed the lives of 600 to 900 Aboriginal people and more than 200 European colonists, nearly annihilating the island's indigenous population. The near-destruction of the Aboriginal Tasmanians, and the frequent incidence of mass killings, has sparked debate among historians over whether the Black War should be defined as an act of genocide.
In Swan River Colony, conflict occurred near Perth, with the government offering the use of the armoury for the settlers. A punitive party was led against the Pindjarup in 1834."
History of Indigenous Australians,"Diseases
Deadly infectious diseases like smallpox, influenza and tuberculosis were always major causes of Aboriginal deaths. 
Smallpox alone killed more than 50% of the Aboriginal population. Other diseases included dysentery, scarlet fever, typhus, measles, whooping cough and influenza. Sexually transmitted infections were also introduced by colonialism. Health decline was also caused by increasing use of flour and sugar instead of more diverse traditional diets, resulting in malnutrition. Alcohol was also first introduced by colonialism, leading to alcoholism.
In April 1789, a major outbreak of smallpox killed large numbers of Indigenous Australians between Hawkesbury River, Broken Bay, and Port Hacking. Based on information recorded in the journals of some members of the First Fleet, it has been surmised that the Aboriginal peoples of the Sydney region had never encountered the disease before and lacked immunity to it. Unable to understand or counter the sickness, they often fled, leaving the sick with some food and water to fend for themselves. As the clans fled, the epidemic spread further along the coast and into the hinterland. This had a disastrous effect on Aboriginal society; with many of the productive hunters and gatherers dead, those who survived the initial outbreak began to starve.
Some have suggested that Makasar fishermen accidentally brought smallpox to Australia's north and the virus travelled south. However, given that the spread of the disease depends on high population densities, and the fact that those who succumbed were soon incapable of walking, such an outbreak was unlikely to have spread across the desert trade routes. A more likely source of the disease was the ""variolas matter"" Surgeon John White brought with him on the First Fleet, although it is unknown how this may have been spread. It has also been speculated that the vials were either accidentally or intentionally released as a ""biological weapon"". In 2014, writing in Journal of Australian Studies, Christopher Warren concluded that British marines were most likely to have spread smallpox, possibly without informing Governor Phillip, but conceded in his conclusion that ""today's evidence only provides for a balancing of probabilities and this is all that can be attempted."": 79, 68–86"
History of Indigenous Australians,"Economy and environment
In 1822, the British government reduced duties on Australian wool, leading to an expansion of sheep numbers, followed by increased immigration. The sheep flourished in the arid western plains. The settlers created an ecological revolution, as their cattle ate away local grasses and trampled waterholes, with precious food staples like murnong diminished, and with new weeds spreading. Meat sources like kangaroo and the Australian brushturkey were replaced by cattle. In response, Indigenous peoples would appropriate settler resources, such as taking sheep and raising their own flocks. New economic products also disrupted traditional lifestyles, as for example in the case of the steel axe, which replaced the traditional stone one, resulting in a loss of authority to the older men who traditionally had access to them. The new axes would be given to younger people by settlers and missionaries in exchange for work, also diminishing old trading networks.
Following the loss of lands, Indigenous people 'came in' to pastoral station, missions and towns, often forced by lack of food. Tobacco, tea and sugar were also important in attracting Indigenous people to settlers. After some handouts, work was demanded by the settlers in return for rations, leading to Indigenous employment in cutting timber, herding and shearing sheep, and in stock work. They were also working as fishermen, water carriers, domestic servants, boatmen and whalers. However, European work ethic was not part of their culture, as working beyond the amount necessary for future benefits was seen as not important. Their pay was also unequal to that of settlers, being mostly rations or less than half the wage. Women had previously been the main providers in Indigenous families, but their roles were diminished as men became the main recipients of wages and rations, while women could at most find European-style domestic work or prostitution, leading some to live with European men who had access to resources."
History of Indigenous Australians,"1850s–1940s: northern expansion
By 1850, southern Australia had been settled by the new immigrants and their descendants, except for the Great Victoria Desert, Nullarbor Plain, Simpson Desert, and Channel Country. European explorers had started to venture into these areas, as well as the Top End and Cape York Peninsula. By 1862 they had crossed the continent and entered Kimberley and Pilbara, while consolidating colonial claims in the process. Indigenous reaction to them ranged from assistance to hostility. Any new lands were claimed, mapped and opened to pastoralists, with North Queensland settled in the 1860s, Central Australia and the Northern Territory in the 1870s, Kimberley in the 1880s, and the Wunaamin Miliwundi Ranges after 1900. This again led to violent confrontation with the Indigenous peoples. However, because of the dryness and remoteness of the new frontier, settlement and economic development were slower. The European population therefore remained small and consequently more fearful, with few police protecting the Indigenous population. It is estimated that in North Queensland 15 percent of the first wave of pastoralists were killed in Indigenous attacks, while 10 times more of the other side met the same fate. In the Gulf Country, over 400 violent Indigenous deaths were recorded 1872 to 1903.
In the earlier settled southern parts of Australia, an estimated 20,000 Indigenous individuals (10 percent of the total at the beginning of colonisation), remained by the 1920s, with half being of mixed ancestry. There about 7000 in New South Wales, 5000 in southern Queensland, 2500 in south-west Western Australia, 1000 in southern South Australia, 500 in Victoria, and under 200 in Tasmania (mostly on Cape Barren Island). One fifth lived in reserves, while most of the rest were in camps around country towns, with small numbers owning farms or living in towns or capital cities. In the country as a whole, there were about 60,000 Indigenous people in 1930.
Foreign pearlers moved into the Torres Strait Islands from 1868 bringing exotic diseases which halved the Indigenous population. In 1871, the London Missionary Society began operating in the islands and most Torres Strait Islanders converted to Christianity which they considered compatible with their beliefs. Queensland annexed the islands in 1879.
The Defence Act of 1903 only allowed those of ""European origin or descent"" to enlist in military service. However, in 1914 around 800 Aboriginal people answered the call to arms to fight in World War I. As the war continued, these restrictions were relaxed as more recruits were needed. Many enlisted by claiming they were Māori or Indian. During World War II, after the threat of Japanese invasion of Australia, Indigenous enlistment was accepted. Up to 3000 individuals of mixed descent served in the military, including Reg Saunders, the first indigenous officer. The Torres Strait Light Infantry Battalion, Northern Territory Special Reconnaissance Unit, and the Snake Bay Patrol were also established. Another 3000 civilians worked in labour corps."
History of Indigenous Australians,"Employment, wagelessness and resistance
Nevertheless, Indigenous workers in the north were able to find jobs better than in south since there was no cheap convict labour available, though they were not paid in wages and were abused.    There was a widely held belief that white people could not work in Northern Australia. Pearl hunting employed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers, though many were coerced into it. By the 1880s, the introduction of diving suits had reduced Indigenous workers to deckhands. Otherwise Indigenous people congregated at settlements such as Broome (servicing luggers) or Darwin (where 20 percent of the Northern Territory's Indigenous workers were employed). However, in Darwin the Indigenous workers were kept locked up at night. Most of the Indigenous workers in North Queensland, the Northern Territory, and the Kimberley were employed by the cattle industry. Wage payment varied by state. In Queensland, wages were paid from 1901 onwards, being set at a third of white wages in 1911, two-thirds in 1918, and equal in 1930. However, some of the wages were deposited on trust accounts, from which they could be stolen. In the Northern Territory, there was no requirement to pay a wage. Overall, up to the Second World War about half of the Indigenous stockmen received wages, and if so, they were well below the white level. There was also physical abuse of the workers, sometimes including by the police.
On 4 February 1939, Jack Patten led a strike at Cummeragunja Station in New South Wales. The people of Cummeragunja were protesting their harsh treatment under what was a draconian system. A once successful farming enterprise was taken from their control, and residents were forced to subsist on meagre rations. Approximately 200 people left their homes, taking part in the Cummeragunja walk-off, and the majority crossed the border into Victoria, never to return home. Following the rising threat from the Empire of Japan, the Australian Army came to the north in the early 1940s, bringing new people and ideas while employing Indigenous workers in defence projects. They were paid a wage and mixed with the regular troops. This led the Northern Territory administration to investigate and recommend paying wages, though it was never enforced. Following meetings held by the Don McLeod in 1942, Indigenous groups in Pilbara decided to go on strike, which they did after the end of the war in the 1946 Pilbara strike. In 1949, they won a wage double the size of their original demand, and were encouraged to start their own co-operative based on the mining they had been doing while on strike. Along with the war, this event also helped reduce the abuse of Indigenous workers."
History of Indigenous Australians,"Racism and the early civil rights movement
As scientific racism developed from Darwinism (with Charles Darwin himself having claimed after visiting New South Wales that the death of ""the Aboriginal"" was a consequence of natural selection), the popular view of Indigenous Australians started to see them as inferior. Indigenous Australians were considered in the global scientific community as the world's most primitive humans, leading to trade of human remains and relics. This was especially true of Indigenous Tasmanians, with 120 books and articles written by scholars around the world by the late 19th century. Some Indigenous people were also toured and exhibited around the world as spectacles. However, in the 1930s, physical anthropology was taken over by cultural anthropology, which focused cultural difference over inferiority. Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, the father of modern social anthropology, published his Social Organization of Australian Tribes in 1931.
By 1900 most white Australians held racist views of the Indigenous peoples, and the Constitution of Australia of that year did not count them alongside other Australians in the census. Racist treatment was also encoded in special Acts governing Indigenous peoples separately from the rest of society. Racism also manifested itself in everyday discrimination, which was termed the ""colour bar or the caste barrier"". This affected life in most settled parts of Australia, though not that much in the capital cities. For example, from the 1890s to 1949, the New South Wales government removed Indigenous children from state schools if non-Indigenous parents objected to their presence, placing them instead to reserve schools with worse education. The same policy was in place in Western Australia, as well, where only one percent of Indigenous children attended state schools. Indigenous residents of New South Wales were also not permitted to buy or drink alcohol. These kinds of restrictions did not apply in Victoria, with a smaller Indigenous population and an assimilationist policy. Furthermore, Indigenous people were often excluded from organisations, businesses, and sports or recreational facilities, such as pools. Employment and housing was difficult to find for them.
Women's groups, such as the Australian Federation of Women Voters and the National Council of Women of Australia, became advocates for Indigenous issues in the 1920s. The first Indigenous political organisation was the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association, established in 1924, with 11 branches and more than 500 Indigenous members in a year. It had been partly inspired by Marcus Garvey. In 1926, the Native Union in Western Australia was founded. White advocate groups emerged in the 1930s. Other Indigenous organisations included the Euralian Association set up in 1934, the Australian Aborigines' League in 1934, and the Aborigines Progressive Association in 1937. The latter marked Invasion Day on the 150th anniversary of the First Fleet's landing."
History of Indigenous Australians,"Reserves and protection boards
The only known treaty between Indigenous and European Australians was Batman's Treaty, signed by Billibellary. His son, Simon Wonga, and other Kulin nation leaders requested land in 1859 for cultivation, and were granted 1820 hectares in the Acheron River by the Victorian government. In 1860, the same government established Aboriginal reserves in Coranderrk, Framlingham, Lake Condah, Ebenezer, Ramahyuck, as well as Lake Tyers. Corranderrk was notably successful, becoming practically self-sufficient and winning the first prize for their hops at the Melbourne International Exhibition. Nevertheless, the inhabitants were refused to be given individual land titles or be paid wages. In South Australia, Raukkan and Poonindie were also set up as communities for Indigenous peoples. In New South Wales, such communities included Maloga, Brungle, Warangesda, and Cummeragunja.
However, the reserve system also gave authorities power over Indigenous people, with the Aboriginal Protection Board exercising control over work and wages, adult movement, and child removal in Victoria from 1869 onwards. With the Half-Caste Act of 1886, the Victorian government started removing those with partial European ancestry from the reserves, with the claimed aim to ""merge the half-caste population into the general community"", which was also followed in New South Wales with the Aborigines Protection Act 1909. This had deleterious consequences for the viability of the communities, leading to their decline. The Queensland Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act of 1897 became a model for Indigenous legislation in Western Australia (1905), South Australia (1911), and the Northern Territory (1911), which gave the authorities power over anyone deemed ""Aboriginal"" in regards to placing them or their children in reserves, denying voting rights or the ability to buy alcohol, as well as prohibiting interracial sexual relations (requiring a ministerial permission for interracial marriage).
The reserves were subsequently mostly reduced, closed and sold off by the 1920s. Meanwhile, the Protection Boards became more powerful in 1915 in New South Wales after new legislation gave them the power to remove children of mixed ancestry without parental or court approval. Later research shows that the authorities aimed to reunite white families without doing so for Indigenous ones. Overall Indigenous communities in south-eastern Australia became increasingly under government control, with a dependence on weekly rations instead of agricultural work. The 1897 Queensland Act and its subsequent amendments gave reserve superintendents the right to search people and their dwellings or belongings, to confiscate their property and read their mail, as well as to expel them to other reserves, among other powers. The inhabitants had to work 32 hours a week without pay, and were subject to verbal abuse, while their traditions were prohibited."
History of Indigenous Australians,"1940s–present: political activism and equality
World War II led to improvements and new opportunities in Indigenous lives through employment in the services and war time industries. After the war, full employment continued, with 96 percent of New South Wales' Indigenous population being employed in 1948. The Commonwealth Child Endowment, as well as the Invalid and Old Age Pensions, were expanded to Indigenous people outside of reserves during the war, though full inclusiveness only followed by 1966. The 1940s also saw individuals given the ability to apply for freedom from Aboriginal Acts, though onerous conditions kept the numbers relatively low. The Nationality and Citizenship Act of 1948 also gave citizenship to any Indigenous people born in Australia. In 1949, the right to vote in federal elections was extended to Indigenous Australians who had served in the armed forces, or were enrolled to vote in state elections.
The postwar era also saw the increased removal of children under assimilationist policies, with between 10 and 33 percent of Aboriginal children being removed from their families between 1910 and 1970. The number may have been more than 70,000 across 70 years. By 1961, the Aboriginal population had risen to 106,000. This went hand-in-hand with urbanization, with the population in capital cities increasing by the 1960s with 12,000 in Sydney, 5000 in Brisbane and 2000 in Melbourne.
In 1962, the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders started advocating for wage equality,  successfully pressuring the Australian Council of Trade Unions to join the cause. As a result, in 1965 the Australian Industrial Relations Commission declared that there should be no discrimination in Australian industrial relations law. However, after this pastoralists began to mechanise their operations with fencing and helicopters, as well as stating to employ white Australians. By 1971, Indigenous labour had reduced by 30 percent in some places. Unemployment rose massively during the rest of the decade, with Indigenous people being pushed off pastoral properties and gathering in northern towns such as Katherine, Tennant Creek, Halls Creek, Fitzroy Crossing, Broome and Derby.
Indigenous people generally had very poor economic opportunities, with 81 percent of workers being unskilled, 18 percent semi-skilled, and just 1 percent skilled in New South Wales in the mid-'60s. Health differences to the general population were massive, with many times worse infant mortality rates and child health, especially in the Northern Territory. Issues of malnutrition, poverty and poor sanitation led to health effects on children potentially affecting school success. The lack of skills in New South Wales was accompanied with only 4 percent having finished secondary or apprentice training. Heavy drinking was also widespread.
Notable Indigenous individuals during the post-war era included activist Douglas Nicholls, artist Albert Namatjira, opera singer Harold Blair, and actor Robert Tudawali.  Many Indigenous people were also successful in sports, with 30 national  and 5 commonwealth boxing champions by 1980. In 1968, boxer Lionel Rose, the first Aboriginal Australian athlete to win a world championship was proclaimed Australian of the Year and thronged by 250,000 adoring fans on the streets of Melbourne. That same year, artist Albert Namatjira (1902–1959) was honoured with a postage stamp. Namatjira's Hermannsburg School art movement had emerged in the 1940s and 50s to great acclaim, foreshadowing a growing respect and fascination with Aboriginal art in the later 20th century, however his exemption from Northern Territory race laws in the 1950s had only served to highlight ongoing discrimination. In the 1970s Rose became a recording artist and had two hits, following from the success of singer-songwriter Jimmy Little, whose 1963 Gospel song ""Royal Telephone"" had been the first No.1 hit by an Aboriginal artist. Women's Tennis  World No. 1 Evonne Goolagong Cawley won 11 grand slams in the 1970s and was Australian of the Year in 1971.
In 1984, a group of Pintupi people who were living a traditional hunter-gatherer desert-dwelling life were tracked down in the Gibson Desert in Western Australia and brought into a settlement. They are believed to have been the last uncontacted tribe in Australia."
History of Indigenous Australians,"Activism
In the 1950s, new political activism for Indigenous rights emerged with 'advancement leagues', which were biracial coalitions. These included the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship in Sydney and the Victorian Aborigines Advancement League. Similar leagues existed in Perth and Brisbane. A national federation for them was established in 1958 in the form of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. Conflict over white and Indigenous power within the organisations led to their decline by the 1970s.
Following the Sharpeville massacre, racial issues became a bigger part of student politics, with an educational assistance program called ABSCHOL established by the National Union of Students. In 1965, Charles Perkins organised the Freedom Ride with University of Sydney students, inspired by the American Freedom Riders. The reaction by locals was often violent."
History of Indigenous Australians,"Parliamentary representation and equality before the law
In 1961, at the Native Welfare Conference, a meeting of federal and state ministers responsible for Aboriginal welfare, agreed on a policy of assimilation. The measures included the removal of discriminatory legislation and restrictive practices, welfare measures, education and training to assist the involvement of Aboriginal people in the economy, and the education of non-Indigenous Australians about Aboriginal culture and history.
The Menzies Government's 1962 Commonwealth Electoral Act confirmed the right to vote in Commonwealth elections in Australia. Previously, the law had allowed state governments to determine federal voting rights, and thus Aboriginal people in QLD and WA were still being deprived of the right to vote. The first federal election in which all Aboriginal Australians could vote was held in November 1963. The right to vote in state elections was granted in Western Australia in 1962 and Queensland was the last state to do so in 1965.
Aboriginal people had served in Australian parliaments since colonial times without publicly identifying as such, but from the 1970s, a new generation of Aboriginal representation in Parliament began to assert its presence. Neville Bonner was appointed Liberal Senator for QLD in 1971, becoming the first federal Parliamentarian to identify as Aboriginal. Eric Deeral (QLD) and Hyacinth Tungutalum (NT) followed at a state and territory level in 1974.  In 1976, Sir Doug Nicholls was appointed Governor of South Australia, the first indigenous Australian to hold vice-regal office. From these beginnings, by the 2020s, Aboriginal representation in the Federal Parliament had exceeded the proportion of Aboriginal people in the general population, and Australia had its first Aboriginal leader of a state or territory in 2016, when the Country Liberal Party's Adam Giles became Chief Minister of the Northern Territory.
The Holt Government's landmark 1967 Referendum received overwhelming public support for the transfer of responsibility for Aboriginal Affairs to the Federal Government, and the removal of discriminatory provisions regarding the national census from the Australian Constitution. The vote passed with a 90% majority, the largest affirmative vote in the history of Australia's referendums. Following the transfer to federal responsibility, the Office of Aboriginal Affairs was established by the Holt government in 1967. In 1972, the OAA was transformed into a separate government department by the Whitlam government, replacing the preceding Department of the Environment, Aborigines and the Arts created by the McMahon government."
History of Indigenous Australians,"Land rights
The modern land rights movement started with the 1963 Yolngu Bark Petition, when Yolngu people from the remote settlement of Yirrkala, in north-east Arnhem Land, petitioned the federal government to have their land and rights given back. The 1966 Wave Hill Walk-Off, or Gurundji Strike, started with a protest about working conditions, but grew into a lands right issue, with the people claiming rights to the land which was then a cattle station owned by a large British company, Vesteys. The strike lasted for eight years.
The Aboriginal Lands Trust Act 1966 (SA) established the South Australian Aboriginal Lands Trust (ALT). This was the first major recognition of Aboriginal land rights by any Australian government. It allowed for parcels of Aboriginal land previously held by the SA Government, to be handed to the Aboriginal Lands Trust of SA under the Act. The Trust was governed by a Board composed solely of Aboriginal people.
In 1971, Justice Richard Blackburn of the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory ruled against the Yolngu in Milirrpum v Nabalco Pty Ltd (the ""Gove land rights case"") under the principle of terra nullius, when they sought native title rights over the Gove Peninsula. However, Justice Blackburn did acknowledge the claimants' ritual and economic use of the land and that they had an established system of law ""a subtle and highly elaborate"" system of laws (Madayin). In this way, this was the first significant legal case for Aboriginal land rights in Australia.
In the wake of Milirrpum, the Aboriginal Land Rights Commission (also known as the ""Woodward Royal Commission"") was established in the Northern Territory in 1973. This Royal Commission, chaired by Justice Woodward, made a number of recommendations in favour of recognising Aboriginal Land Rights. Taking up many of these recommendations, the Whitlam government introduced an Aboriginal Land Rights Bill to Parliament; however, this lapsed upon the dismissal of the government in 1975. The succeeding conservative government, led by Malcolm Fraser, reintroduced a Bill, though not of the same content, and it was signed by the Governor-General of Australia on 16 December 1976.
The Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976 established the basis upon which Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory could claim rights to land based on traditional occupation. The statute, the first of the Aboriginal land rights acts, was significant in that it allowed a claim of title if claimants could provide evidence of their traditional association with land. Four Land Councils were established in the Northern Territory under this law.
The Land Rights Act only applied to the Northern Territory, but Aboriginal communities could also acquire land through various state land rights acts or other legislation. By the early 1980s Aboriginal communities had gained title to about 30 per cent of Northern Territory land and 20 per cent of South Australian land. In 1982, the Queensland government granted Aboriginal reserve land to its occupiers but the grants gave limited rights and was revocable at any time. Only a small proportion of land in other states had been transferred to traditional owners. In 1985, the Hawke government handed over Uluru (Ayers Rock) to traditional owners with a lease back to the Commonwealth. In 1987, the West Australian government granted Aboriginal reserve land (amounting to 7 per cent of the state's land) to traditional owners on 50 year and 99 year leases. Key issues for Indigenous communities with recognised land rights included security of title, the protection of culturally significant sites, and the right to veto, or to be adequately compensated for, mining and development on their land. Compensation for previous dispossession of land was an unresolved issue.
In 1992, the High Court of Australia handed down its decision in the Mabo Case, holding that Indigenous native title survived reception of English law and continued to exist unless extinguished by conflicting law or interests in land. The Keating government passed a Native Title Act in 1993 to regulate native title claims and established a Native Title Tribunal to hear those claims. In the subsequent Wik decision of 1996, the High Court found that a pastoral lease did not necessarily extinguish native title. In response, the Howard government amended the Native Title Act to provide better protection for pastoralists and others with an interest in land.  By March 2019 the Native Titles Tribunal had determined that 375 Indigenous communities had established native title over 39 per cent of the Australian continent, with one third under exclusive title."
History of Indigenous Australians,"Self-determination
The Australian Aboriginal flag was designed in 1971 by Harold Thomas, an Aboriginal artist who is descended from the Luritja people of Central Australia. In 1972, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy was established on the steps of Old Parliament House in Canberra, the Australian capital, to demand sovereignty for the Aboriginal Australian peoples.  Demands of the Tent Embassy have included land rights and mineral rights to Aboriginal lands, legal and political control of the Northern Territory, and compensation for land stolen.
The National Aboriginal Consultative Committee (NACC) was the first elected body representing Indigenous Australians on the national level, having been established by the Whitlam government in 1972. It was composed of 36 representatives elected by Aboriginal people in 36 regions of Australia. In 1983, the elections reached a turnout of approximately 78 percent. Following a review in 1976, the NACC was abolished by the new Fraser government in 1977. To replace it, the National Aboriginal Conference (NAC) was founded.
Following the election of the Hawke government in 1983, two reports were commissioned into a replacement of the NAC. The O'Donoghue report argued that the NAC did not effectively represent its constituents or advocate specific policies. The Coombs report made the case for an organisation with representation of regions and existing indigenous organisations. To respond to these recommendations, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission was founded in 1989.
The Outstation movement emerged in the 1970s and continued through the 1980s which saw the creation of very small, remote settlements of Aboriginal people who relocated themselves from the towns and settlements where they had been settled by the government's policy of assimilation. It was ""a move towards reclaiming autonomy and self-sufficiency"". Outstations were created by Aboriginal people who sought autonomy and could be seen as a sign of remote Aboriginal Australians' attempt at self-determination."
History of Indigenous Australians,"1990 to present
In 1992, the Australian High Court handed down its decision in the Mabo Case, declaring the previous legal concept of terra nullius to be invalid and recognising the pre-colonial land interests of First Nations people within Australia's common law. The Prime Minister Paul Keating praised the decision, saying it ""establishes a fundamental truth, and lays the basis for justice"". Native title doctrine was eventually codified in statute by the Keating government in the Native Title Act 1993. This recognition enabled further litigation for Indigenous land rights in Australia. By 2021, Indigenous Australians had exclusive or shared title to about 54% of the Australian land mass.
In 1998, as the result of the 1997 Bringing Them Home report on the forced removal of Indigenous children from their families, a National Sorry Day was instituted, to acknowledge the wrong that had been done to Indigenous families. Many politicians, from both sides of the house, participated, with the notable exception of the Prime Minister, John Howard, stating that he ""did not subscribe to the black armband view of history"". In 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made a formal apology for the Stolen Generations.
In 1999 a referendum was held to change the Australian Constitution to include a preamble that, amongst other topics, recognised the occupation of Australia by Indigenous Australians prior to British settlement. This referendum was defeated, though the recognition of Indigenous Australians in the preamble was not a major issue in the referendum discussion, and the preamble question attracted minor attention compared to the question of becoming a republic.
In 2004, the Australian Government abolished The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), which had been Australia's top Indigenous organisation. The Commonwealth cited corruption and, in particular, made allegations concerning the misuse of public funds by ATSIC's chairman, Geoff Clark, as the principal reason. Indigenous specific programmes have been mainstreamed, that is, reintegrated and transferred to departments and agencies serving the general population. The Office of Indigenous Policy Coordination was established within the then Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, and now with the Department of Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs to co-ordinate a ""whole of government"" effort. Funding was withdrawn from remote homelands (outstations).
From 1971 to 2006, Indigenous employment, median incomes, home ownership, education and life expectancy all improved, although they remained well below the level for those who were not indigenous.  In 2008, the Council of Australian Governments created targets for ""closing the gap"" in inequality in a number of key areas of education, employment, literacy and child mortality. By 2020, the outcomes for Indigenous Australians improved in most of these areas. However, the gap widened for child mortality and school attendance, and targets for closing the inequality gap were not met for employment and child literacy and numeracy. Targets for closing the gap in early childhood education and Year 12 school attainment were on track.
In 2020, all Australian governments committed to a new ""National Agreement on Closing the Gap"" between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in their life outcomes. However, by 2023 Indigenous people still experienced entrenched inequality.
In October 2023, the Australian population voted ""no"" to  alter the Australian Constitution that would recognise Indigenous Australians in the document through prescribing a body called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice that ""may make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples""."
History of Indigenous Australians,"See also
References
This article incorporates text by Anders Bergström et al. available under the CC BY 4.0 license."
History of Indigenous Australians,"Sources
Further reading
Australian Institute of Aboriginal, and Torres Strait Islander Studies. The Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history, society and culture Ed. David Horton. (2 Vol.  Aboriginal Studies Press, 1994).
Craven, Rhonda. Teaching Aboriginal Studies: A practical resource for primary and secondary teaching (Allen & Unwin, 2011).
Gammage, Bill. The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (2011).
Gerritsen, Rupert. Australia and the Origins of Agriculture (2008).
Hannah, Mark; Macfarlane, Ingereth, eds. (December 2007). Transgressions: Critical Australian Indigenous histories. Aboriginal History Monographs 16. ANU Press. doi:10.22459/T.12.2007. ISBN 9781921313431.
Isaacs, Jennifer. Australian dreaming: 40,000 years of Aboriginal history (New Holland Publishing Australia Pty Ltd, 2006).
Lourandos, H. Continent of Hunter-Gatherers: New Perspectives in Australian Prehistory (1997)
Reynolds, Henry. The other side of the frontier: Aboriginal resistance to the European invasion of Australia (UNSW Press, 2006).
Stone, Sharman N., ed. Aborigines in white Australia: a documentary history of the attitudes affecting official policy and the Australian Aborigine, 1697–1973 (Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1974).
Williams, E. Complex Hunter-Gatherers: A Late Holocene Example from Temperate Australia (1988)."
History of Indigenous Australians,External links
History of Indigenous Australians,"Jamison, T. The Australian Aboriginal People: Dating the Colonization of Australia
Articles, Research, and Historical Documentation of Explorer & Pioneer Encounters with Native Communities of South East Queensland"
Territorial evolution of Australia,"The first colonies of the British Empire on the continent of Australia were the penal colony of New South Wales, founded in 1788, and the Swan River Colony (later renamed Western Australia), founded in 1829. Over the next few decades, the colonies of New Zealand, Queensland, South Australia, Van Diemen's Land (later renamed Tasmania), and Victoria were created from New South Wales, as well as an aborted Colony of North Australia. On 1 January 1901, these colonies, excepting New Zealand, became states in the Commonwealth of Australia. Since federation, the internal borders have remained mostly stable, except for the creation of some territories with limited self-government: the Northern Territory from South Australia, to govern the vast, sparsely populated centre of the country; the split of the Northern Territory into Central Australia and North Australia, and then the quick merger of those back into the Northern Territory; and the Australian Capital Territory, a federal district ceded from New South Wales.
Outside of the continent, Queensland attempted an expansion into New Guinea, but British authorities rejected this; the claim would later be made a British protectorate and ceded to Australia. The League of Nations mandated northeast New Guinea to Australia after World War I, as well as Nauru, which was placed under joint Australian-British-New Zealand jurisdiction. These mandates (and, later, United Nations trust territories) became the independent nations of Nauru and Papua New Guinea in the mid-20th century. Australia has also obtained several small island territories, mainly from earlier British colonies, and has a large claim on Antarctica."
Territorial evolution of Australia,"Table of changes
Key to map colours"
Territorial evolution of Australia,"Colonial period
Federation
Proposed boundary change to the Australian Capital Territory
In September 2022, it was announced the border between the Australian Capital Territory and New South Wales would change for the first time since it was created in 1911. ACT chief minister Andrew Barr said NSW premier Dominic Perrottet had agreed to a proposed border change for 330 hectares of land."
Territorial evolution of Australia,"See also
Northern Territory borders
Proposals for new Australian states
Queensland borders
South Australian borders
States and territories of Australia
Western Australian borders"
Territorial evolution of Australia,"References
External links
States of Australia – Statoids.com
The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies provides a map of estimated territorial boundaries of the various First Nations of Australia"
White Australia policy,"The White Australia policy was a set of racial policies that aimed to forbid people of non-European ethnic origins – especially Asians (primarily Chinese) and Pacific Islanders – from immigrating to Australia in order to create a ""white/British"" ideal focused on but not exclusively Anglo-Celtic peoples. Pre-Federation, the Australian colonies passed many anti-Chinese immigration laws mainly using Poll Taxes, with Federation in 1901 came discrimination based on the Dictation Test, which effectively gave power to immigration officials to racially discriminate without mentioning race. The policy also affected immigrants from Germany, Italy, and other European countries, especially in wartime. Governments progressively dismantled such policies between 1949 and 1973, when the Whitlam government removed the last racial elements of Australia's immigration laws.
Competition in the gold fields between European and Chinese miners, and labour union opposition to the importation of Pacific Islanders (primarily South Sea Islanders) into the sugar plantations of Queensland, reinforced demands to eliminate or minimize low-wage immigration from Asia and the Pacific Islands. From the 1850s colonial governments imposed restrictions on Chinese arrivals, including poll taxes and tonnage restrictions. The colonial authorities levied a special tax on Chinese immigrants which other immigrants did not have to pay. Towards the end of the 19th century, labour unions pushed to stop Chinese immigrants from working in the furniture and market garden industries. Some laws were passed regarding the labelling of Chinese made furniture in Victoria and Western Australia but not in New South Wales. Chinese people dominated market gardening until their numbers declined as departures were not replaced.
Soon after Australia became a federation in January 1901, the federal government of Edmund Barton passed the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901; this was drafted by Alfred Deakin, who eventually became Australia's second prime minister. The passage of this bill marked the commencement of the White Australia Policy as Australian federal government policy. The key feature of this legislation was the dictation test, which was used to bar non-white immigrants from entry. Subsequent acts further strengthened the policy. These policies effectively gave British migrants preference over all others through the first half of the 20th century. During World War II, Prime Minister John Curtin reinforced the policy, saying ""This country shall remain forever the home of the descendants of those people who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race.""
Successive governments dismantled the policy in stages after the conclusion of World War II, with the Chifley and Menzies governments encouraging non-British Europeans to immigrate to Australia. The Migration Act 1958 abolished the dictation test, while the Holt government removed discrimination against non-white applicants for citizenship in 1966. The Whitlam government passed laws to ensure that race would be totally disregarded as a component for immigration to Australia in 1973. In 1975, the Whitlam government passed the Racial Discrimination Act, which made racially-based selection criteria unlawful. In the decades since, Australia has maintained large-scale multi-ethnic immigration. As of 2018, Australia's migration program allows people from any country to apply to immigrate to Australia, regardless of their nationality, ethnicity, culture, religion, or language, provided that they meet the criteria set out in law. Prior to 2011, the United Kingdom was the largest source country for immigration to Australia but, since then, China and India have provided the highest number of permanent migrants. The National Museum of Australia describes the White Australia Policy as openly racist, stating that it ""existed because many white Australians feared that non-white immigrants would threaten Australian society""."
White Australia policy,"Immigration policies before federation
Gold rush era
The discovery of gold in Australia in 1851 led to an influx of immigrants from all around the world. The colony of Victoria had a population of only 77,000 in 1851 and New South Wales just 200,000, but the huge influx of settlers spurred by the Australian gold rushes transformed the Australian colonies economically, politically and demographically. Over the next 20 years, 40,000 Chinese men but very few women, nearly all from the province of Guangdong (then known as Canton) but divided by language and dialect nevertheless, immigrated to the goldfields seeking prosperity.
Gold brought great wealth but also new social tensions. Multi-ethnic migrants came to Victoria and New South Wales in large numbers for the first time. Competition on the goldfields, particularly resentment among white miners towards the successes of Chinese miners, led to tensions between groups and eventually a series of significant racist protests and riots, including the Buckland riot in 1857 and the Lambing Flat riots between 1860 and 1861. Governor Hotham, on 16 November 1854, appointed a Royal Commission on Victorian goldfields problems and grievances. This led to restrictions being placed on Chinese immigration and residency taxes levied from Chinese residents in Victoria from 1855. New South Wales following suit with poll taxes and tonnage restrictions only in 1861. These restrictions remained in force only until 1867."
White Australia policy,"Support from the Australian Labour Movement
Melbourne Trades Hall was opened in 1859 with trades and labour councils and trades halls opening in all cities and most regional towns in the following forty years. During the 1880s, trade unions developed among shearers, miners, and stevedores (wharf workers), but soon spread to cover almost all blue-collar jobs. Shortages of labour led to high wages for a prosperous skilled working class, whose unions demanded and got an eight-hour day and other benefits unheard of in Europe.
Australia gained a reputation as ""the working man's paradise"". Some employers hired Chinese labourers, who were cheaper and more hard working. This produced a reaction which led eventually to all the colonies restricting Chinese immigration by 1888 and subsequently other Asian immigration. This was the genesis of the White Australia Policy. The ""Australian compact"", based around centralised industrial arbitration, a degree of government assistance particularly for primary industries, and White Australia, was to continue for many years before gradually dissolving in the second half of the 20th century."
White Australia policy,"The growth of the sugar industry in Queensland in the 1870s led to searching for labourers prepared to work in a tropical environment. During this time, thousands of ""Kanakas"" (Pacific Islanders) were brought into Australia as indentured workers. This and related practices of bringing in non-white labour to be cheaply employed was commonly termed ""blackbirding"" and refers to the recruitment of people, often through trickery and kidnappings, to work on plantations, particularly the sugar cane plantations of Queensland (Australia) and Fiji. In the 1870s and 1880s, the trade union movement began a series of protests against foreign labour. Their arguments were that Asians and Chinese took jobs away from white men, worked for ""substandard"" wages, lowered working conditions, were harder workers and refused unionisation.
Objections to these arguments came largely from wealthy land owners in rural areas. It was argued that without Asiatics to work in the tropical areas of the Northern Territory and Queensland, the area would have to be abandoned. Despite these objections to restricting immigration, between 1875 and 1888 all Australian colonies enacted legislation which excluded all further Chinese immigration. Asian immigrants already residing in the Australian colonies were not expelled and retained the same rights as their Anglo and southern compatriots, although they faced significant discrimination.
Agreements were made to further increase these restrictions in 1895 following an inter-colonial premiers' conference where all colonies agreed to extend entry restrictions to all non-white races. However, in attempting to enact this legislation, the governors of New South Wales, South Australia and Tasmania reserved the bills, due to a treaty with Japan, and they did not become law. Instead, the Natal Act of 1897 was introduced, restricting ""undesirable persons"" who could not fill in a set form rather than by naming any specific race."
White Australia policy,"The British government in London was not pleased with legislation that discriminated against certain subjects of its empire, but decided not to disallow the laws that were passed. Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain explained in 1897:We quite sympathize with the determination...of these colonies...that there should not be an influx of people alien in civilisation, alien in religion, alien in customs, whose influx, moreover, would seriously interfere with the legitimate rights of the existing labouring population."
White Australia policy,"From the Federation to World War II
In writing about the preoccupations of the Australian population in early Federation Australia before World War I in ANZAC to Amiens, the official historian of the war, Charles Bean, considered the White Australia Policy and defined it as follows:""White Australia Policy"" – a vehement effort to maintain a high Western standard of economy, society and culture (necessitating at that stage, however it might be camouflaged, the rigid exclusion of Oriental peoples)."
White Australia policy,"Federation Convention and Australia's first government
Immigration was a prominent topic of discussion in the lead up to the establishment of the Australian Federation. At the third session of the Australasian Federation Convention of 1898, Western Australian premier and future federal cabinet member John Forrest summarised the feeling of the Anglo-Saxon people in Australia:"
White Australia policy,"It is of no use to shut our eyes to the fact that there is a great feeling all over Australia against the introduction of coloured persons. It goes without saying that we do not like to talk about it, but it is so.
The Barton government which came to power following the first elections of the Commonwealth parliament in 1901 was formed by the Protectionist Party with the support of the Australian Labor Party. The support of the Labor Party was contingent upon restricting non-white immigration, reflecting the attitudes of the Australian Workers Union and other labour organisations at the time, upon whose support the Labor Party was founded. The Australian historian James Jupp wrote that it was not true that the White Australia policy was exclusively a right-wing cause as the strongest support for the White Australia policy was on the left-side of Australian politics with both the trade unions and the Labour Party being the most militant opponents of Asian immigration well into the 1960s. Many Australians in the early 20th century tended to define being white as being the same as Australian with a majority of Australian states passing laws banning marriage and/or sex between whites and Aboriginals as part of an effort to maintain Australia's white character.    
The first Parliament of Australia quickly moved to restrict immigration to maintain Australia's ""British character"", and the Pacific Island Labourers Bill and the Immigration Restriction Bill were passed shortly before parliament rose for its first Christmas recess. The colonial secretary in Britain had, however, made it clear that a race-based immigration policy would run ""contrary to the general conceptions of equality which have ever been the guiding principle of British rule throughout the Empire"". The Barton government therefore conceived of the ""Education test"", later called the ""Dictation Test"", which would allow the government, at the discretion of Customs Officers, to block unwanted migrants by forcing them to sit a test in ""any European language"". At the time, Anglo-Japanese relations were improving, and in 1902 Britain and Japan were to sign a defensive alliance directed implicitly against Russia. The White Australia policy led to vigorous protests from the Japanese government, and led to complaints from London that Australia was gratuitously straining relations with Japan, which Britain viewed as a prospective ally against Russia.    
For the Labor Party this was a compromise of principles, so the main question for the debate on the Immigration Restriction Act just how openly racist to be, with the Labor Party preferring to openly bar ""aboriginal natives of Asia, Africa, or the islands thereof"". However in the end the preferred option of the British, the Education Test was passed. There was also opposition from Queensland and its sugar industry to the proposals of the Pacific Islanders Bill to exclude ""Kanaka"" labourers, however Barton argued that the practice was ""veiled slavery"" that could lead to a ""negro problem"" similar to that in the United States, and the bill was passed."
White Australia policy,"Immigration Restriction Act 1901
The new Federal Parliament, as one of its first pieces of legislation, passed the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 (1 Edward VII 17 1901) to ""place certain restrictions on immigration and... for the removal... of prohibited immigrants"". The act drew on similar legislation in the South African colony of Natal. Edmund Barton, the prime minister, argued in support of the bill with the following statement: ""The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman."""
White Australia policy,"The attorney general tasked with drafting the legislation was Alfred Deakin. Deakin supported Barton's position over that of the Labor Party in drafting the bill (the ALP wanted more direct methods of exclusion than the dictation test) and redacted the more vicious racism proposed for the text in his second reading of the Bill. In seeking to justify the policy, Deakin said he believed that the Japanese and Chinese might be a threat to the newly formed federation and it was this belief that led to legislation to ensure they would be kept out:It is not the bad qualities, but the good qualities of these alien races that make them so dangerous to us. It is their inexhaustible energy, their power of applying themselves to new tasks, their endurance and low standard of living that make them such competitors.Early drafts of the act explicitly banned non-Europeans from migrating to Australia but objections from the British government, which feared that such a measure would offend British subjects in India and Britain's allies in Japan, caused the Barton government to remove this wording. Instead, a ""dictation test"" was introduced as a device for excluding unwanted immigrants. Immigration officials were given the power to exclude any person who failed to pass a 50-word dictation test. At first this was to be in any European language, but was later changed to include any language.  The tests were given in such a way as to make them impossible to pass. If a person seemed likely to pass in English then a test in another language could be given. Attlee Hunt, the first administrator of the Immigration Restriction Act expressed it clearly in a 1903 memo to all Customs Officers: ""It is not desirable that persons should be allowed to past the test, and before putting it to anyone the Officer should be satisfied that he will fail. If he is considered likely to pass the test if put in English, it should be applied in some other language of which he is ignorant."" 
The legislation found strong support in the new Australian Parliament, with arguments ranging from economic protection to outright racism. The Labor Party wanted to protect ""white"" jobs and pushed for more explicit restrictions. A few politicians spoke of the need to avoid hysterical treatment of the question. Member of Parliament Bruce Smith said he had ""no desire to see low-class Indians, Chinamen or Japanese...swarming into this country... But there is obligation...not (to) unnecessarily offend the educated classes of those nations"" Norman Cameron, a Free Trade Party member from Tasmania, expressed a rare note of dissension:"
White Australia policy,"[N]o race on... this earth has been treated in a more shameful manner than have the Chinese.... They were forced at the point of a bayonet to admit Englishmen... into China. Now if we compel them to admit our people... why in the name of justice should we refuse to admit them here?
Outside parliament, Australia's first Catholic cardinal, Patrick Francis Moran was politically active and denounced anti-Chinese legislation as ""un-Christian"". The popular press mocked the Cardinal's position and the small European population of Australia generally supported the legislation and remained fearful of being overwhelmed by an influx of non-British migrants from the vastly different cultures of the highly populated nations to Australia's north.
The Immigration Restriction Act 1901 imposed a dictation test, in any European language, for any non-European migrant to Australia. The immigration officer (Customs until 1949) could choose any language, which effectively meant that the officer had the power to restrict the immigration of any individual. Further discriminatory legislation was the Postal and Telegraph Services Act 1901 (1 Edward VII 12 1901), which required any ship carrying mail to and from Australia to only have a white crew."
White Australia policy,"Pacific Island Labourers Act 1901
In 1901, there were approximately 9,800 Pacific Islander labourers in Queensland. In 1901, the Australian parliament passed the Pacific Island Labourers Act 1901 (1 Edward VII 16 1901). The result of these statutes was that 7,500 Pacific Islanders (called ""Kanakas"") working mostly on plantations in Queensland were deported, and entry into Australia by Pacific Islanders was prohibited after 1904. Those exempted from repatriation, along with a number of others who escaped deportation, remained in Australia to form the basis of what is today Australia's largest non-indigenous black ethnic group. Today, the descendants of those who remained are officially referred to as South Sea Islanders."
White Australia policy,"Exemption for Māori
Māori generally benefited from the same immigration and voting rights as European New Zealanders in Australia, making them a notable exception to the White Australia Policy. In 1902, with the Commonwealth Franchise Act, Māori residents in Australia were granted the right to vote, a right denied to Indigenous Australians. During that same period, their right to settle in Australia was facilitated by their shared status as British subjects. The Australian government granted equal rights to Māori only reluctantly. In 1905, the New Zealand government made a formal complaint about the exclusion of two Māori shearers, after which the Australian government changed its customs regulations to allow Māori to freely enter the country. Other Pacific Islanders were still subject to the White Australia Policy."
White Australia policy,"Paris Peace Conference
At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference following the First World War, Japan sought to include a racial equality clause in the Covenant of the League of Nations. Japanese policy reflected their desire to remove or to ease the immigration restrictions against Japanese (especially in the United States and Canada), which Japan regarded as a humiliation and affront to its prestige.
Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes was already concerned by the prospect of Japanese expansion in the Pacific. Australia, Japan and New Zealand had seized the German colonial empire's territories in the Pacific in the early stages of the war and Hughes was concerned to retain German New Guinea as vital to the defence of Australia. The treaty ultimately granted Australia a League of Nations Mandate over German New Guinea and Japan to the South Seas Mandate immediately to its north – thus bringing Australian and Japanese territory to a shared border – a situation altered only by Japan's Second World War invasion of New Guinea."
White Australia policy,"Hughes vehemently opposed Japan's racial equality proposition. Hughes recognised that such a clause would be a threat to White Australia and made it clear to British prime minister David Lloyd George that he would leave the conference if the clause was adopted. Hughes wrote in 1919: ""No Govt. could live for a day in Australia if it tempered with a White Australia"". Hughes wrote a note to Colonel Edward M. House of the American delegation: ""It may be all right. But sooner than agree to it I would walk into the Seine-or the Folies Bergeres-with my clothes off"". Hughes did offer the compromise that he would support the Racial Equality Clause provided that it did not affect immigration, an offer the Japanese rejected. When the proposal failed, Hughes reported in the Australian parliament:The White Australia is yours. You may do with it what you please, but at any rate, the soldiers have achieved the victory and my colleagues and I have brought that great principle back to you from the conference, as safe as it was on the day when it was first adopted."
White Australia policy,"Abolition of the policy
World War II
Australian anxiety at the prospect of Japanese expansionism and war in the Pacific continued through the 1930s. Hughes, by then a minister in the United Australia Party's Lyons government, made a notable contribution to Australia's attitude towards immigration in a 1935 speech in which he argued that ""Australia must... populate or perish.""
Between the Great Depression starting in 1929 and the end of World War II in 1945, global conditions kept immigration to very low levels. At the start of the war, Prime Minister John Curtin (ALP) reinforced the message of the White Australia Policy by saying: ""This country shall remain forever the home of the descendants of those people who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race.""
Following the 1942 Fall of Singapore, Australians feared invasion by Imperial Japan. Australian cities were bombed by the Japanese airforce and Navy and Axis naval forces menaced Australian shipping, while the Royal Navy remained pre-occupied with the battles of the Atlantic and Mediterranean in the face of Nazi aggression in Europe. A Japanese invasion fleet headed for the Australian Territory of New Guinea was only halted by the intervention of the United States Navy in the Battle of the Coral Sea. Australia received thousands of refugees from territories falling to advancing Japanese forces – notably thousands of Chinese men and women as well as many Chinese  seamen. There were also Dutch who fled the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Aboriginal Australians, Torres Strait Islanders, Papua New Guineans and Timorese served in the frontline of the defence of Australia, bringing Australia's racially discriminatory immigration and political rights policies into focus and wartime service gave many Indigenous Australians confidence in demanding their rights upon return to civilian life."
White Australia policy,"During the war, talk arose about the possibility of abolishing the policy. Hostility to this idea was one reason Australia never signed a treaty with China as it was feared the Chinese government would request the abolition of the White Australian policy as an ally. Spokesman for the Labor Party demanded that it be continued:The policy of White Australia is now, perhaps, the most outstanding political characteristic of this country, and it has been accepted not only by those closely associated with it, but also by those who watched and studied ""this interesting experiment"" from afar. Only those who favor the exploitation of a servile coloured race for greed of gain, and a few professional economists and benighted theologians, are now heard in serious criticism of a White Australia; but...they are encouraged by the ill-timed and inappropriate pronouncements of what are, after all, irresponsible officials."
White Australia policy,"Post-war immigration
Following the trauma of the Second World War, Australia's vulnerability during the Pacific War and its relatively small population compared to other nations led to policies summarised by the slogan, ""populate or perish."" According to author Lachlan Strahan, this was an ethnocentric slogan that in effect was an admonition to fill Australia with Europeans or else risk having it overrun by Asians. Immigration Minister Arthur Calwell stated in 1947 to critics of the government's mass immigration programme: ""We have 25 years at most to populate this country before the yellow races are down on us.""
During the war, many non-white refugees, Chinese but also including Malays, Indonesians and Filipinos, arrived in Australia, but Calwell controversially sought to have them all deported. Between 1945 and 1952, an Australian brigade served as part of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force in Japan. Until 1952, Australia did not permit Japanese women who had married Australian soldiers to enter Australia. 
The Chifley government introduced the Aliens Deportation Act 1948, which had its weaknesses exposed by the High Court case O'Keefe v Calwell, and then passed the War-time Refugees Removal Act 1949 which gave the immigration minister sweeping powers of deportation. In 1948, Iranian Bahá'ís seeking to immigrate to Australia were classified as ""Asiatic"" by the policy and were denied entry. In 1949, Calwell's successor, Harold Holt, allowed the remaining 800 non-white refugees to apply for residency, and also allowed Japanese ""war brides"" to settle in Australia. In the meantime, Holt continued Calwell's policy of encouraging mass immigration from Europe, and Australia admitted large numbers of immigrants from mostly Italy, Poland, Greece and Yugoslavia, as well as its traditional source of immigration, the British Isles. The Australian Government promoted the assimilation of migrants to Australia from continental Europe, who were expected to become mainstream Australians. In 1947, Australian immigration law, which had until had been based on encouraging British immigration, was amended to take in more European immigration. The way that Australia took in a large number of European immigrants from countries that were previously considered undesirable weakened the case for Australia as a primarily ""British"" country and led to demands for the end of the White Australia policy. Given that the purpose of the White Australia policy was to preserve Australia as a British country, in an ironic twist, some of the strongest critics of the White Australia policy in the 1950s were liberal British professors serving at Australian universities. In 1959, the Immigration Reform Group was founded at Melbourne University to champion for the abolition of the policy."
White Australia policy,"Relaxation of restrictions
Australian policy began to shift towards significantly increasing immigration. Legislative changes over the next few decades continuously opened up immigration in Australia.
Labor Party Chifley government:"
White Australia policy,"1947: The Chifley Labor government relaxed the Immigration Restriction Act allowing non-Europeans the right to settle permanently in Australia for business reasons.
Liberal-Country Party Menzies government (1949–1966):"
White Australia policy,"1949: Immigration Minister Holt permitted 800 non-European refugees to stay, and Japanese war brides to be admitted.
1950: External Affairs Minister Percy Spender instigated the Colombo Plan, under which students from Asian countries were admitted to study at Australian universities, though many more came as privately sponsored students.
1957: Non-Europeans with 15 years' residence in Australia were allowed to become citizens.
1958: Migration Act 1958 abolished the dictation test and introduced a simpler system for entry. Immigration Minister Sir Alick Downer announced that ""distinguished and highly qualified Asians"" might immigrate.
1959: Australians were permitted to sponsor Asian spouses for citizenship.
1964: Conditions of entry for people of non-European origin were relaxed.
This was despite comments Menzies made in a discussion with radio 2UE's Stewart Lamb in 1955, where he appeared to be a defender of the White Australia Policy. Menzies: ""I don't want to see reproduced in Australia the kind of problem they have in South Africa or in America or increasingly in Great Britain. I think it's been a very good policy and it's been of great value to us and most of the criticism of it that I've ever heard doesn't come from these oriental countries it comes from wandering Australians.""
Lamb: ""For these years of course in the past Sir Robert you have been described as a racist.""
Menzies: ""Have I?""
Lamb: ""I have read this, yes."""
White Australia policy,"Menzies: ""Well if I were not described as a racist I'd be the only public man who hasn't been.""
In 1963, a paper, ""Immigration: Control or Colour Bar?"", was published by a group of students and academics at Melbourne University. It proposed eliminating the White Australia policy and was influential towards this end."
White Australia policy,"End of the White Australia Policy
In July 1966, Prime Minister Harold Holt stated that Australia no longer had a White Australia policy, but instead had a ""restricted immigration policy"". Earlier in the year he and immigration minister Hubert Opperman had announced a significant liberalisation of immigration laws for non-whites. These included reducing the waiting time for non-whites to obtain citizenship from fifteen years to five years and allowed for family reunification. Non-white immigrants would be admitted on the basis that they were ""well-qualified"", rather than ""highly qualified and distinguished"" as had been the case since 1956. According to The Canberra Times the changes would allow around 5,000 non-whites to obtain citizenship.
In January 1971, Prime Minister John Gorton stated that his government aimed to establish a multi-racial society in Australia and committed to abolishing racial discrimination. However he stated that there was still a need to restrict non-white immigration. He had earlier stated that the White Australia policy was not morally justifiable, but that ""the unlimited influx of colored people would lead to stresses in Australia"".
Labor Party members Don Dunstan and Gough Whitlam set about removing the White Australia Policy from the Labor platform. Attempts in 1959 and 1961 failed, with Labor leader Arthur Calwell stating, ""It would ruin the Party if we altered the immigration policy ... it was only cranks, long hairs, academics and do-gooders who wanted the change."" However, Dunstan persisted in his efforts, and in 1965, the White Australia Policy was removed from the Labor platform at their national conference; Dunstan personally took credit for the change. 
In 1966, the Holt Liberal government modified the White Australia policy in an effort to reduce the strong perception of Australia's anti-Asian racism. After a review of immigration policy in March 1966, Immigration Minister Hubert Opperman announced applications for migration would be accepted from well-qualified people ""on the basis of their suitability as settlers, their ability to integrate readily and their possession of qualifications positively useful to Australia"". At the same time, Holt's government decided to allow foreign non-whites to become permanent residents and citizens after five years (the same as for Europeans), and also removed discriminatory provisions in family reunification policies.
After the removal of official discrimination, preference was still given to Asian migrants of European or racially mixed appearance. A report on the Filipino community of Sydney in 1966 observed that its members – numbering approximately 100 – were all ""white"" looking, or in Filipino terms, ""mestizos"" of presumably Spanish descent. ""The Filipino Consul General stated that he was the only 'colored Filipino' in Sydney."" 
Nevertheless, the annual non-European settler arrivals rose from 746 in 1966 to 2,696 in 1971, while annual part-European settler arrivals rose from 1,498 to 6,054.
Leader of the Labor Party from 1960 to 1967 Arthur Calwell supported the White Australia policy. This is reflected by Calwell's comments in his 1972 memoirs, Be Just and Fear Not, in which he made it clear that he maintained his view that non-European people should not be allowed to settle in Australia. He wrote:"
White Australia policy,"I am proud of my white skin, just as a Chinese is proud of his yellow skin, a Japanese of his brown skin, and the Indians of their various hues from black to coffee-coloured. Anybody who is not proud of his race is not a man at all. And any man who tries to stigmatise the Australian community as racist because they want to preserve this country for the white race is doing our nation great harm... I reject, in conscience, the idea that Australia should or ever can become a multi-racial society and survive.
The Whitlam Labor government brought about the comprehensive legal end of the White Australia policy in 1973 as prime minister. The Whitlam Labor government implemented a series of amendments preventing the enforcement of racial aspects of the immigration law. These amendments:"
White Australia policy,"Legislated that all migrants, regardless of origin, be eligible to obtain citizenship after three years of permanent residence.
Ratified all international agreements relating to immigration and race.
Issued policy to totally disregard race as a factor in selecting migrants.
The Racial Discrimination Act 1975 made the use of racial criteria for any official purpose illegal.
It was not until the Fraser Liberal government's review of immigration law in 1978 that all selection of prospective migrants based on country of origin was entirely removed from official policy.
In 1981, the minister for immigration announced a special humanitarian assistance programme (SHP) for Iranians to seek refuge in Australia and by 1988 some 2,500 Bahá'ís and many more others had arrived in Australia through either SHP or refugee programmes. The last selective immigration policy, offering relocation assistance to British nationals, was finally removed in 1982."
White Australia policy,"Aftermath
Australia's contemporary immigration programme has two components: a programme for skilled and family migrants and a humanitarian programme for refugees and asylum seekers. By 2010, the post-war immigration programme had received more than 6.5 million migrants from every continent. The population tripled in the six decades to around 21 million in 2010, comprising people originating from 200 countries."
White Australia policy,"Legacy
Non-European and non-Christian immigration has increased substantially since the dismantling of the White Australia Policy."
White Australia policy,"Religious legacy
The policy had the effect of creating a population of overwhelmingly European, and largely Anglo-Celtic, descent. By not allowing immigration by people who had other ethnic origins, it effectively limited the immigration of practitioners of non-Christian faiths. Consequently, the White Australia Policy ensured that Christianity remained the religion which was adhered to by the majority of Australians. However, the percentage of Australians who are religious is dropping significantly each year."
White Australia policy,"Contemporary demographics
In 2019, Australia has the world's eighth-largest immigrant population, with immigrants accounting for 34% of the population, a higher proportion than in any other nation with a population of over 10 million. 162,417 permanent immigrants were admitted to Australia in 2017–18. Most immigrants are skilled, but the immigration quota includes categories for family members and refugees. In 2018 the five largest immigrant groups were those born in England (4%), Mainland China (2.6%), India (2.4%), New Zealand (2.3%) and the Philippines (1.1%).
In the 2016 Australian census, the most commonly nominated ancestries were:  "
White Australia policy,"English (36.1%)
Australian (33.5%)
Irish (11.0%)
Scottish (9.3%)
Chinese (5.6%)
Italian (4.6%)
German (4.5%)
Indian (2.8%)
Indigenous (2.8%)
Greek (1.8%)
Dutch (1.6%)
Filipino (1.4%)
Vietnamese (1.4%)
Lebanese (1%)"
White Australia policy,"Political and social legacy
The story of Australia since the Second World War – and particularly since the final relegation of the White Australia Policy – has been one of ever-increasing ethnic and cultural diversity. Successive governments have sustained a large program of multi-ethnic immigration from all continents."
White Australia policy,"Discrimination on the basis of race or ethnicity was legally permitted until 1975. Australia's new official policy on racial diversity is: ""to build on our success as a culturally diverse, accepting and open society, united through a shared future"". The White Australia policy continues to be mentioned in modern contexts, although it is generally only mentioned by politicians when denouncing their opposition. As Leader of the Opposition, John Howard argued for restricting Asian immigration in 1988 as part of his One Australia policy; in August 1988, he said: I do believe that if it is – in the eyes of some in the community – that it's too great, it would be in our immediate-term interest and supporting of social cohesion if it [Asian immigration] were slowed down a little, so the capacity of the community to absorb it was greater.Howard later retracted and apologised for the remarks, and was returned to the leadership of the Liberal Party in 1995. The Howard government (1996–2007) in turn ran a large programme of non-discriminatory immigration and, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Asian countries became an increasingly important source of immigration over the decade from 1996 to 2006, with the proportion of migrants from Southern and Central Asian countries doubling from 7% to 14%. The proportion of immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa also increased. By 2005–06, China and India were the third and fourth largest sources of all migration (after New Zealand and the United Kingdom). In 2005–06, there were 180,000 permanent additions of migrants to Australia (72% more than the number in 1996–97). This figure included around 17,000 through the humanitarian programme, of whom Iraqis and Sudanese accounted for the largest portions. China became Australia's biggest source of migrants for the first time in 2009, surpassing New Zealand and Britain.
The Australian historian John Fitzgerald wrote that the White Australia policy, with its definition that to be Australian was to be white, had a powerful impact on forging the identity of the Chinese-Australian community as a marginalised community. Fitzgerald noted that even in the early 21st century, many Chinese-Australians who had been born and grew up in Australia automatically referred to white Australians as ""the Australians"" and to themselves as ""the Chinese"".
Historian Geoffrey Blainey achieved mainstream recognition for the anti-multiculturalist cause when he wrote that multiculturalism threatened to transform Australia into a ""cluster of tribes"". In his 1984 book All for Australia, Blainey criticised multiculturalism for tending to ""emphasise the rights of ethnic minorities at the expense of the majority of Australians"" and also for tending to be ""anti-British"", even though ""people from the United Kingdom and Ireland form the dominant class of pre-war immigrants and the largest single group of post-war immigrants.""
According to Blainey, such a policy, with its ""emphasis on what is different and on the rights of the new minority rather than the old majority,"" was unnecessarily creating division and threatened national cohesion. He argued that ""the evidence is clear that many multicultural societies have failed and that the human cost of the failure has been high"" and warned that ""we should think very carefully about the perils of converting Australia into a giant multicultural laboratory for the assumed benefit of the peoples of the world.""
In one of his numerous criticisms of multiculturalism, Blainey wrote:"
White Australia policy,"For the millions of Australians who have no other nation to fall back upon, multiculturalism is almost an insult. It is divisive. It threatens social cohesion. It could, in the long-term, also endanger Australia's military security because it sets up enclaves which in a crisis could appeal to their own homelands for help.
Blainey remained a persistent critic of multiculturalism into the 1990s, denouncing multiculturalism as ""morally, intellectually and economically ... a sham"". The British historian Andrew Roberts, in his 2006 book A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900 praised the White Australia policy as being necessary to ""protect Australia as an English-speaking nation"". Roberts wrote the White Australia policy was the ""right"" immigration policy to pursue as he accused Asian immigrants of spreading infectious diseases and stated ""Australia had the right (and duty) to protect herself"" from Asian immigration. Views such as those expressed by Roberts have been in the minority. In 2009, the Australian historian Erin Ihde described the White Australia policy as ""discredited"" both within the historians' community and with the general public. Ihde wrote that the White Australia policy remains a difficult subject within the Australian popular memory of the past as it was the fear of the so-called ""Yellow Peril"" in the form of Asian immigration and the possibility of Asian nations such as China and Japan posing a military threat to Australia that played a major role in the formation of the Australian federation in 1901. Ihde argued the White Australia policy was not an aberration in Australian history, nor was it marginal, making it problematic to integrate into a positive view of Australian history.
Despite the overall success and generally bipartisan support for Australia's multi-ethnic immigration programme, there remain voices of opposition to immigration within the Australian electorate. At its peak, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party received 9% of the national vote at the 1998 Federal Election."
White Australia policy,"Hanson was widely accused of trying to take Australia back to the days of the White Australia policy, particularly through reference to Arthur Calwell, one of the policy's strongest supporters. In her maiden address to the Australian Parliament following the 1996 election, Hanson said:I and most Australians want our immigration policy radically reviewed and that of multiculturalism abolished. I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians. Between 1984 and 1995, 40 per cent of all migrants coming into this country were of Asian origin. They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate.Hanson's remarks generated wide interest in the media both nationally and internationally, but she herself did not retain her seat in Parliament at the 1998 election or subsequent 2001 and 2004 federal elections. Hanson also failed to win election in the 2003 and 2011 New South Wales state elections. In May 2007, Hanson, with her new Pauline's United Australia Party, continued her call for a freeze on immigration, arguing that African migrants carried disease into Australia. Hanson returned to politics in 2014 and ran in the Queensland election. She won a Queensland senate seat in the 2016 election, and retained it again in 2022.
Topics related to racism and immigration in Australia are still regularly connected by the media to the White Australia policy. Some examples of issues and events where this connection has been made include:
reconciliation with Indigenous Australians; mandatory detention and the ""Pacific Solution""; the 2005 Cronulla riots, and the 2009 attacks on Indians in Australia. Former opposition Labor party leader Mark Latham, in his book The Latham Diaries, described the ANZUS alliance as a legacy of the White Australia policy.
In 2007, the Howard government proposed an Australian Citizenship Test intended ""to get that balance between diversity and integration correct in future, particularly as we now draw people from so many different countries and so many different cultures"". The draft proposal contained a pamphlet introducing Australian history, Culture and Democracy. Migrants were to be required to correctly answer at least 12 out of 20 questions on such topics in a citizenship quiz. Migrants would also be required to demonstrate an adequate level of understanding of the English language. The Rudd government reviewed and then implemented the proposal in 2009.
On 14 August 2018, Senator Fraser Anning delivered his maiden speech to the Senate. In it, he called for a plebiscite to reintroduce the White Australia Policy, especially with regard to excluding Muslims. He was criticised by politicians from the left and the right, in particular for his choice of words (""final solution""). He was again criticised by politicians across the board after blaming Muslim immigration to New Zealand for the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks.
Surveys from 2018 and 2023 have found that over 15% polled have shown support for discrimination when it comes to immigration intake. Support for discrimination was higher on basis of religion then race or ethnicity."
White Australia policy,"See also
Anti-Chinese legislation in the United States
Apartheid
Australian nationalism
Europeans in Oceania
Head tax (Canada) and Chinese Immigration Act, 1923
Head tax (New Zealand)
Racism in Australia
Settler colonialism
Blackbirding"
White Australia policy,"References
Informational notes
Citations
Further reading
Affeldt, Stefanie (2010) ""A Paroxysm of Whiteness. 'White' Labour, 'White' Nation and 'White' Sugar in Australia"" in Hund, Wulf D.; Krikler, Jeremy; and Roediger, David (eds.) Wages of Whiteness & Racist Symbolic Capital. Berlin. ISBN 978-3-643-10949-1
Affeldt, Stefanie (2014). Consuming Whiteness. Australian Racism and the 'White Sugar' Campaign. Berlin. LIT. ISBN 978-3-643-90569-7.
Bailey, John (2001). The White Divers of Broome. Sydney, MacMillan. ISBN 0-7329-1078-1.
Dixon, Chris. ""Confronting the 'Bulwark of White Supremacy': The African American Challenge to White Australia, 1941–1945."" Journal of African American History 106.1 (2021): 78-102.
Doulman, Jane; Lee, David (2008). Every Assistance & Protection: a History of the Australian Passport. Australian Government, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade / Federation Press.
Duffield, Ian (1993). Skilled Workers or Marginalised Poor? The African Population of the United Kingdom, 1812–1852. Immigrants and Minorities Vol. 12, No. 3; Frank Cass.
Eldershaw, Philip S. ""The Exclusion of Asiatic Immigrants in Australia."" The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 34 (September 1909): 190–203. Online
Fitzgerald, John (2007). Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia. Sydney. ISBN 978-0-86840-870-5.
Hund, Wulf D. (2006) ""White Australia oder der Krieg der Historiker."" In: Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, 3+.
Ishii, Yuka. (2021) ""Transformation of the 'Mutual' Recognition between Australia and Asia in the Era of the White Australia Policy Geopolitics, Human Exchange, and Images in the Asia-Pacific Region."" Journal of Australian Studies 34#1 (2021): 30–38. online
Jordan, Matthew (2017). ""'Not on Your Life': Cabinet and Liberalisation of the White Australia Policy, 1964–67"". The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. 46 (1): 169–201. doi:10.1080/03086534.2017.1391485. S2CID 158117024.
Jupp, James (Spring 1995). ""From 'White Australia' to 'Part of Asia': Recent Shifts in Australian Immigration Policy towards the Region"". The International Migration Review. 29 (1): 207–228.
Laksiri Jayasuriya; Walker, David; and Gothard, Jan (eds.) (2003) Legacies of White Australia. Crawley, University of Western Australia Press.
Lee, Tim (29 March 2020). ""Immigrant who fought White Australia policy for right to vote leaves lasting legacy"". ABC News. – Story of Sikh hawker Siva Singh
Jupp, James; Kabala, Maria (1993). The Politics of Australian Immigration. Australian Government Publishing Service.
MacMiillan, Margaret (2001). Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World. New York: Random House.
McDonald, Peter. (2019) ""Migration to Australia: From Asian exclusion to Asian predominance."" Revue européenne des migrations internationales 35.1 et 2 (2019): 87–105. [3]
Stratton, Jon. ""The Colour of Jews: Jews, Race and the White Australia Policy."" Journal of Australian Studies 20.50-51 (1996): 51-65.
Tavan, Gwenda (2005). The Long, Slow Death of White Australia. Scribe. ISBN 1-920769-46-3.
Walker, David. (2019) Stranded Nation: White Australia in an Asian Region (UWA Press, 2019)
Willard, Myra (1923). History of the White Australia Policy to 1920. Melbourne University Press. ISBN 0-522-83830-8.
Williams, Michael (2021). Australia's Dictation Test: The Test it was a Crime to Fail. Brill. p. 168. ISBN 978-90-04-47110-8."
White Australia policy,"External links
""Immigration Restriction Act 1901"". National Archives of Australia: Documenting a Democracy. Archived from the original on 1 June 2011. Retrieved 14 February 2006. (scan of the Act and information)
Robertson, Kel; et al. (2005). ""Dictating to One of 'Us': the Migration of Mrs Freer"" (PDF). Macquarie Law Journal. 5: 241–275. Archived from the original (PDF) on 4 June 2007.
Educational Resources about the White Australia Policy
Newton Barton Diary, 1894–1895– A shipboard diary kept by able seaman Newton Barton on one of his voyages to recruit South Sea Islanders for the Queensland cane fields. Digitised and held by the State Library of Queensland.
Fact Sheet 8 – Abolition of the 'White Australia' Policy"
Constitutional convention (Australia),"Constitutional conventions in Australia are significant meetings that have debated the Australian Constitution. The first two gatherings debated Federation and what form of Constitution to adopt, while the following conventions debated amendments to the document. 
The draft Constitution that was the final product of the first two conventions was approved at referendum in 1899 and 1900 by a 72% ""Yes"" vote on a 58% turnout. There have been four of the latter conventions post Federation, but no constitutional proposal from these has been approved by referendum, and those put to referendum (proposals from the 1942 and 1998 conventions) were soundly defeated, reaching no more than 46% approval on 90% to 96% turnout."
Constitutional convention (Australia),"1891 convention
The 1891 Constitutional Convention was held in Sydney in March 1891 to consider a draft Frame of Government for the proposed federation of the British colonies in Australia and New Zealand. There were 46 delegates at the Convention, chosen by the seven colonial parliaments. Among the delegates was Sir Henry Parkes, known as the ""Father of Federation"". The Convention approved a draft largely written by Andrew Inglis Clark from Tasmania and Samuel Griffith from Queensland, but the colonial parliaments failed to act to give effect to it."
Constitutional convention (Australia),"1897–1898 convention
The next constitutional convention – the Australasian Federal Convention – was held in stages in 1897–98. Unlike the first convention, the delegates from New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania were elected by popular vote. The delegates of Western Australia were chosen by its parliament. It met first in Adelaide in March 1897, then in Sydney in August, before, finally, it met again in Melbourne in January 1898. The intervals between the sessions were used for intense debate in the colonial parliaments and for public discussion of the draft constitution.
Since 1891, New Zealand had lost interest in federating with the Australian colonies, and was not represented. In Queensland, the parliament had not passed the necessary legislation, so the northern colony was also unrepresented. In the other five colonies ten delegates from each colony were elected by the people, although Western Australian attendance was sporadic. At Melbourne the convention finally produced a draft constitution which was eventually approved by the people at referendums in the colonies."
Constitutional convention (Australia),"1942 convention
In November 1942, the Curtin government convened a constitutional convention for the sole purpose of discussing Attorney-General's H. V. Evatt proposed addition to the constitution of section 60A. This would have made the powers of federal parliament virtually unlimited, declaring ""the power of the Parliament shall extend to all measures which in the declared opinion of the Parliament will tend to achieve economic security and social justice ... notwithstanding anything contained elsewhere in this Constitution"". The convention was held in Canberra and consisted of 24 members – six nominated by the federal government, six by the federal opposition, the six state premiers, and the six state leaders of the opposition. After an opening speech by Prime Minister John Curtin, Evatt announced that he was withdrawing his original draft due to public criticism and would substitute a watered-down series of proposals. The convention was immediately adjourned for 24 hours. It eventually appointed a drafting committee which produced the ""14 powers"" amendment that was put to a referendum in 1944.
That proposal was lost at the referendum, only gaining 46% of the vote and only passing in two out of the four states required."
Constitutional convention (Australia),"1973 convention
The 1973 Constitutional Convention was established by the Whitlam government in 1973 to consider possible amendments to the Constitution which could be put to the people for approval at a referendum. The Convention, which was not elected but consisted of delegates chosen by the federal and state Parliaments, met through 1973–75 but achieved nothing as a result of non-support by the conservative parties."
Constitutional convention (Australia),"1998 convention
The 1998 Constitutional Convention met in Canberra in February 1998. The Convention was convened by Prime Minister John Howard to fulfill a promise made by his predecessor as Liberal leader, Alexander Downer.  During the Convention, Prime Minister John Howard dedicated an area of parkland to the south-east of Old Parliament House as Constitution Place, Canberra.
The Convention consisted of 152 delegates, of whom half were elected by the people and half were appointed by the federal government. This latter group included senior federal, state and territory politicians appointed by virtue of their positions.
The Convention was divided into four philosophical groups: those wanting to retain Australia's existing constitutional monarchy, those wanting Australia to become a republic with a president chosen by the Parliament (""indirect electionists""), those wanting Australia to become a republic with a president elected by the people (""direct electionists""), and those having no fixed position or seeking a compromise between the other groups. In the fourth group, Republicans dominated both subgroups, but proved far from united in their views.
At the opening of the Convention, Prime Minister John Howard stated:"
Constitutional convention (Australia),"If this Convention does not express a clear view on a preferred republican alternative, then the people will be asked – after the next election – to vote in a preliminary plebiscite which presents them with all the reasonable alternatives.
Then a formal constitutional referendum offering a choice between the present system and the republican alternative receiving most support in the preliminary plebiscite would follow.
73 delegates voted in favour of the Bi-partisan appointment model, 57 against and 22 abstained. Not one constitutional monarchist delegate voted in favour. The policy of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy (ACM) and other monarchist groups was to oppose all republican models, including the minimalist McGarvie model. In response, John Howard stated to the Convention:"
Constitutional convention (Australia),"The only commonsense interpretation of this Convention is, firstly, that a majority of people have voted generically in favour of a republic... Secondly, amongst the republican models, the one that has just got 73 votes is clearly preferred. When you bind those two together, it would be a travesty in commonsense terms of Australian democracy for that proposition not to be put to the Australian people. Moreover, it would represent a cynical dishonouring of my word as Prime Minister and the promises that my coalition made to the Australian people before the last election.
A number of republicans who supported direct election abstained from the vote (such as Ted Mack, Phil Cleary, and Clem Jones), thereby allowing the bi-partisan model to succeed. They reasoned that the model would be defeated at a referendum, and a second referendum called with direct election as the model."
Constitutional convention (Australia),"See also
History of Australia
Australian Constitutional history
Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act
Monarchy in Australia
Republicanism in Australia
Republic Advisory Committee
McGarvie Model
Constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians"
Constitutional convention (Australia),"References
Bibliography
Referendum Council (30 June 2017). Final Report of the Referendum Council (PDF) (Report). Australia: Referendum Council. ISBN 9781925362565."
Constitutional convention (Australia),"Further reading
J. A. La Nauze, The Making of the Australian Constitution, Melbourne University Press 1972
Vizard, Steve, Two Weeks in Lilliput: Bear Baiting and Backbiting At the Constitutional Convention (Penguin, 1998, ISBN 0-14-027983-0)"
Constitutional convention (Australia),"External links
Records of the Australasian Federal Conventions of the 1890s
The Australian Broadcasting Commission's 1998 Convention website"
Southeast Australia temperate savanna,"The Southeast Australia temperate savanna ecoregion is a large area of grassland dotted with eucalyptus trees running north–south across central New South Wales, Australia.
In Australia, the region is known as, or corresponds to, the Grey Box Grassy Woodlands and Derived Native Grasslands of South-Eastern Australia, which are described as ""temperate eucalypt woodlands with a grassy understorey""."
Southeast Australia temperate savanna,"Location and description
It is a dry area of low hills and valleys of which the southern section is the wheat-growing plain known as the Riverina and the northern section is low hills and plains mostly used for grazing sheep running north to the plains of the Darling River basin and the New South Wales–Queensland border. Rivers of the savanna include the Murray River and the Murrumbidgee in the south and the Darling River in the north. Rainfall is low and irregular, from 300 to 500 mm per year becoming less further westward, and that is where the vegetation grades to Shrub–steppe.
Most of the region features a semi-arid climate, though small areas in the east of the zone have a humid subtropical climate. The ecoregion as defined by WWF includes the Darling Riverine Plains, Cobar Peneplain, and Riverina IBRA regions, along with the southern portion of the Brigalow Belt South in New South Wales."
Southeast Australia temperate savanna,"Flora
The dry climate sustains hardy shrubs and grasses scattered with small patches of the bimble box, grey box and coolibah eucalyptus trees that once covered most of this part of Australia. The Riverina area nearer the coast contains red river gum (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) and black box (Eucalyptus largiflorens).
The effect of massive numbers of sheep on the grassland was dramatic and was noted by settlers in the grassland regions. The original soil of the grasslands was soft and absorbed rain readily, but heavy continuous stock grazing drove a degradation sequence that shifted the botanical composition of native grasslands from an ecosystem regulated by large, perennial tussock grasses such as Themeda triandra (Kangaroo Grass) to one containing abundant disturbance tolerant native grasses such as Rytidosperma spp."
Southeast Australia temperate savanna,"Fauna
These grasslands are the western limit for much of the wildlife that lives here as further west is desert. Wildlife of the savanna includes mammals such as the mouse-like kultarr marsupial (Antechinomys laniger), tiger quoll (Dasyurus maculatus), and brush-tailed rock-wallaby (Petrogale penicillata). The western barred bandicoot (Perameles bougainville fasciata) and bridled nail-tail wallaby that once lived here are now presumed extinct in New South Wales.
Birds include the endangered bush stone-curlew (Burhinus grallarius), superb parrot (Polytelis swainsonii), red goshawk (Erythrotriorchis radiatus), malleefowl (Leipoa ocellata) and plains-wanderer (Pedionomus torquatus), and reptiles include an endangered skink Anomalopus mackayi. The Riverina grasslands are home to birds such as the freckled duck, and wintering populations of swift parrot (Lathamus discolor)."
Southeast Australia temperate savanna,"Threats and preservation
Active preservation of habitats is required because much of the savanna has been converted to pasture or wheatland. This is particularly so in the Riverina where most has been cleared for wheat planting, a process that is ongoing, while the grasslands are vulnerable to overgrazing, and rivers including the Murray and Murrumbidgee are depleted by being water sources for large irrigation projects. As land is cleared it becomes habitat for invasive species such as noisy miner bird (Manorina melanophrys) and Australian raven (Corvus coronoides)."
Southeast Australia temperate savanna,"Protected areas
A 2017 assessment identified 15,778 km2 of protected areas, excluding the Brigalow Belt south portion of the ecoregion. Protected areas in the Brigalow Belt portion of the ecoregion include the parks and reserves in the Pilliga forest and the steep volcanic outcrops of Warrumbungle National Park. Other protected areas include Barmah National Park, Gundabooka National Park, Murrumbidgee Valley National Park, Oolambeyan National Park, Willandra National Park and Urrbrae Wetland. There are small areas of parkland elsewhere and plans to create more, but there are no large areas of original savanna under protection."
Southeast Australia temperate savanna,"External links
""Southeast Australia temperate savanna"". Terrestrial Ecoregions. World Wildlife Fund.
 Media related to Southeast Australia temperate savanna at Wikimedia Commons"
Southeast Australia temperate savanna,"
== References =="
Proposed Japanese invasion of Australia during World War II,"In early 1942, elements of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) proposed an invasion of mainland Australia. This proposal was opposed by the Imperial Japanese Army and Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, who regarded it as being unfeasible, given Australia's geography and the strength of the Allied defences. Instead, the Japanese military adopted a strategy of isolating mainland Australia from the United States by advancing through the South Pacific. This offensive was abandoned following the Battle of the Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway in May and June 1942, and all subsequent Japanese operations in the vicinity of Australia were undertaken to slow the advance of Allied forces.
This is all despite key battles, including the Battle of Milne Bay, where the Japanese suffered from the first defeat of a land battle at the hands of an Australian Brigade, and the Kokoda Campaign, where the Australians prevented the Japanese reaching Port Moresby, the capital of the Australian Territory of Papua, in late 1942.  The Australian townships of Darwin and Broome were attacked by air a number of times, and the fact that Sydney Harbor was also attacked by two midget submarines certainly would have given the Australians and Americans the impression that the Japanese were considering invasion as a strong possibility.  This also supported the strategic planning of the Brisbane Line.
Former Australian War Memorial principal historian Dr Peter Stanley states that the Japanese ""army dismissed the idea as 'gibberish', knowing that troops sent further south would weaken Japan in China and in Manchuria against a Soviet threat. Not only did the Japanese army condemn the plan, but the Navy General Staff also deprecated it, unable to spare the million tonnes of shipping the invasion would have consumed.""
After the fall of Singapore in February 1942, the Australian government, the military and the people were deeply alarmed by the possibility of a Japanese invasion. Widespread fear led to an expansion of Australia's military and war economy, as well as closer links with the United States."
Proposed Japanese invasion of Australia during World War II,"Japanese proposals
Debate between the Army and Navy
Japan's success in the early months of the Pacific War led elements of the Imperial Japanese Navy to propose invading Australia. In December 1941 the Navy proposed including an invasion of Northern Australia as one of Japan's ""stage two"" war objectives after South-East Asia was conquered. This proposal was most strongly pushed by Captain Sadatoshi Tomioka, the head of the Navy General Staff's Planning section, on the grounds that the United States was likely to use Australia as a base to launch a counter-offensive in the South-West Pacific. The Navy headquarters argued that this invasion could be carried out by a small landing force as this area of Australia was lightly defended and isolated from Australia's main population centres. There was not universal support for this proposal within the Navy, however, and Isoroku Yamamoto, the commander of the Combined Fleet, consistently opposed it.
The Japanese Army opposed the Navy's proposal as being impractical. The Army's focus was on defending the perimeter of Japan's conquests, and it believed that invading Australia would over-extend these defence lines. Moreover, the Army was not willing to release the large number of troops it calculated was needed for such an operation from the Kwantung Army in Manchuria as it both feared that the Soviet Union would enter the Pacific War and wanted to preserve an option for Japan to invade Siberia.
Prime Minister Hideki Tojo also consistently opposed invading Australia. Instead, Tojo favoured a policy of forcing Australia to submit by cutting its lines of communication with the US. In his last interview before being executed for war crimes Tojo stated,"
Proposed Japanese invasion of Australia during World War II,"We never had enough troops to [invade Australia]. We had already far out-stretched our lines of communication. We did not have the armed strength or the supply facilities to mount such a terrific extension of our already over-strained and too thinly spread forces. We expected to occupy all New Guinea, to maintain Rabaul as a holding base, and to raid Northern Australia by air. But actual physical invasion—no, at no time.
In speeches before the Diet of Japan on 12 January and 16 February 1942, Tojo claimed Japanese policy was to ""eradicate the British colonies at Hong Kong and in the Malay Peninsula as these were 'evil bases used against East Asia', and turn these places into strongholds for the defence of Greater East Asia. Burma and the Philippines would get independence if they co-operated with Japan; the Netherlands East Indies and Australia would be crushed if they resisted; but if they recognised Japan's true intentions would receive help in promoting their welfare and development."""
Proposed Japanese invasion of Australia during World War II,"The Army's and the Navy's calculations of the number of troops needed to invade Australia differed greatly and formed a central area of discussion. In December 1941 the Navy calculated that a force of three divisions (between 45,000 and 60,000 men) would be sufficient to secure Australia's north-eastern and north-western coastal areas. In contrast, the Army calculated that a force of at least ten divisions (between 150,000 and 250,000 men) would be needed. The Army's planners estimated that transporting this force to Australia would require 1.5 to 2 million tons of shipping, which would have required delaying the return of requisitioned merchant shipping. This invasion force would have been larger than the entire force used to conquer South-East Asia. The Army also rejected the Navy's proposal of limiting an invasion of Australia to securing enclaves in the north of the country as being unrealistic given the likely Allied counter-offensives against these positions. Due to its experience in China the Army believed that any invasion of Australia would have to involve an attempt to conquer the entire Australian continent, something which was beyond Japan's abilities.
The possibility of invading Australia was discussed by the Japanese Army and Navy on several occasions in February 1942. On 6 February the Navy Ministry formally proposed a plan in which eastern Australia would be invaded at the same time other Japanese forces captured Fiji, Samoa, and New Caledonia, and this was again rejected by the Army. On 14 February, the day before Singapore was captured, the Army and Navy sections of the Imperial General Headquarters again discussed invading Australia and during this discussion Captain Tomioka argued that it would be possible to take Australia with a ""token force"". This statement was labelled ""so much gibberish"" in the Imperial General Headquarters' secret diary. General Tomoyuki Yamashita:"
Proposed Japanese invasion of Australia during World War II,"He said that after he had taken Singapore, he wanted to discuss with Tojo a plan for the invasion of Australia... Tojo turned down the plan, making the excuse of lengthened supply lines, which would be precarious and open to enemy attack...
The dispute between the Army and Navy was settled in late February with a decision to isolate rather than invade Australia. The Army continued to maintain its view that invading Australia was impractical, but agreed to extend Japan's strategic perimeter and cut Australia off from the US by invading Fiji, Samoa, and New Caledonia in the so-called Operation FS. The question of whether to invade Australia was discussed by Imperial Headquarters for the last time on 27 February and in this meeting the Army stated that it believed that Australia was defended by a 600,000-strong military force. During a further meeting held on 4 March the Imperial Headquarters formally agreed to a ""Fundamental Outline of Recommendations for Future War Leadership"" which relegated the option of invading Australia as a ""future option"" only if all other plans went well. This plan was presented to the Emperor by Prime Minister Hideki Tōjō and in effect ended discussion of invading Australia. The FS Operation was not implemented, however, due to Japan's defeats in the Battle of the Coral Sea and Battle of Midway and was cancelled on 11 July 1942."
Proposed Japanese invasion of Australia during World War II,"Subsequent Japanese operations in the South-West Pacific
As the option of invading Australia was rejected in February 1942 and was not revisited, the Japanese attacks on Australia during the war were not precursors to invasion, as is sometimes claimed. The large air raid on Darwin on 19 February 1942 and the Attack on Broome on 3 March were conducted to prevent the Allies from using these towns as bases to contest the invasion of the Dutch East Indies and was not related to an invasion. According to Frei:"
Proposed Japanese invasion of Australia during World War II,"The generals of the Army General Staff, and the Prime Minister of Japan, General Hideki Tojo, did not see a need to commit massive troop resources to the conquest of Australia, with the massive logistical problems that would produce. The generals were confident that Australia could be bullied into surrender to Japan by isolating it completely from the United States and by applying intense psychological pressure.
The dozens of subsequent air raids on Northern Australia in 1942 and 1943 were mainly small and aimed to prevent the Allied air units based there from attacking Japanese positions. The Attack on Sydney Harbour in May 1942 had the goal of diverting Allied forces away from Midway Island prior to the Japanese attempt to capture it and the subsequent Japanese submarine campaigns off the Australian east coast in 1942 and 1943 were attempts to break the supply line between Australia and New Guinea during the New Guinea Campaign. Moreover, the Japanese attempt to capture Port Moresby in New Guinea by advancing along the Kokoda Track and landing at Milne Bay between July and September 1942 aimed to capture the town to complete Japan's defensive perimeter in the region. Once secured, Port Moresby was to have been used as a base from which Japanese aircraft could dominate the Torres Strait and Coral Sea, and not to support an invasion of Australia.
A small Japanese reconnaissance unit carried out a brief landing on the Australian mainland during January 1944. Matsu Kikan (""Pine Tree""), a joint army-navy intelligence unit, landed to assess reports that the Allies had begun to build major new bases on the northernmost coast of the Kimberley region of Western Australia, facing the Timor Sea. After leaving their base at Kupang, West Timor, the unit – comprising 10 Japanese personnel in a commandeered fishing vessel crewed by West Timorese civilians – made brief visits to the uninhabited Ashmore Reef and Browse Island. On 19 January, Matsu Kikan entered York Sound on the mainland. While smoke was seen in hills to the east, the Japanese vessel was anchored and camouflaged with tree branches. Landing parties went ashore near the mouth of the Roe River. They reconnoitred the surrounding area for about two hours and filmed it with an 8 mm camera. The following day, Matsu Kikan personnel again reconnoitred the area, before returning to Kupang. Matsu Kikan did not see any signs of recent human activity, and little of military significance was learnt from the mission. An officer involved with the mission reportedly returned to Japan shortly afterward, where he suggested landing 200 Japanese convicts in Australia, to launch a guerrilla campaign. This suggestion was not, however, adopted. According to historian Peter Stanley, ""No historian of standing believes the Japanese had a plan to invade Australia, there is not a skerrick of evidence."""
Proposed Japanese invasion of Australia during World War II,"Australian fear of invasion
After the fall of Singapore, Prime Minister of Australia John Curtin compared its loss to the Battle of Dunkirk. The Battle of Britain occurred after Dunkirk; ""the fall of Singapore opens the Battle for Australia"", Curtin said, which threatened the Commonwealth, the United States, and the entire English-speaking world. Not knowing that Japan did not plan to invade Australia and in February 1942 could not successfully do so, the Australian government and people expected an invasion soon. The fear was greatest until June 1942. Curtin said on 16 February:"
Proposed Japanese invasion of Australia during World War II,"The protection of this country is no longer that of a contribution to a world at war but the resistance to an enemy threatening to invade our own shore ... It is now work or fight as we have never worked or fought before ... On what we do now depends everything we may like to do when this bloody test has been survived.
Former Head of the Centre for Historical Research at the National Museum of Australia Dr Peter Stanley has been critical of the oft-repeated, widespread myth that Japan intended to invade Australia, commenting ""the invasion myth helps justify the parochial view Australians took of their war effort."""
Proposed Japanese invasion of Australia during World War II,"In fiction
The 1984 alternate history novel The Bush Soldiers by John Hooker depicts a successful Japanese invasion of Australia and the last-ditch resistance effort made by a handful of Australian and British troops.
In John Birmingham's 2004 alternative history novel Designated Targets, Imperial Japan launches an invasion of northern Australia.
The 2001 alternate history essay collection Rising Sun Victorious edited by Peter G. Tsouras has a chapter Samurai Down Under by John H. Gill that posits a briefly-successful Japanese invasion of the Queensland coast at Cape York, Cairns and Townsville."
Proposed Japanese invasion of Australia during World War II,"See also
Axis victory in World War II
Battle for Australia
Brisbane Line
Battle of Christmas Island
Cocos Islands during World War II
Kantokuen
Operation Mo"
Proposed Japanese invasion of Australia during World War II,"Notes
References"
Proposed Japanese invasion of Australia during World War II,"
== Further reading =="
Immigration history of Australia,"The immigration history of Australia began with the initial human migration to the continent around 80,000 years ago when the ancestors of Aboriginal Australians arrived on the continent via the islands of Maritime Southeast Asia and New Guinea. From the early 17th century onwards, the continent experienced the first coastal landings and exploration by European explorers. Permanent European settlement began in 1788 with the establishment of a British penal colony in New South Wales. From early federation in 1901, Australia maintained the White Australia Policy, which was abolished after World War II, heralding the modern era of multiculturalism in Australia. From the late 1970s there was a significant increase in immigration from Asian and other non-European countries.
Australia is also a signatory to the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and recognises the right of asylum."
Immigration history of Australia,"Original inhabitants
The first inhabitants in Australia were the ancestors of the present Indigenous people. Whether these first migrations involved one or several successive waves and distinct peoples is still subject to academic debate, as is its timing. The minimum widely accepted time frame places presence of humans in Australia at 40,000 to 43,000 years Before Present (BP), while the upper range supported by others is 60,000 to 70,000 years BP.
In any event, this migration was achieved during the closing stages of the Pleistocene epoch, when sea levels were typically much lower than they are today. Repeated episodes of extended glaciation resulted in decreases of sea levels by some 100–150 m. The continental coastline therefore extended much further out into the Timor Sea than it does today, and Australia and New Guinea formed a single landmass (known as Sahul), connected by an extensive land bridge across the Arafura Sea, Gulf of Carpentaria and Torres Strait.
It is theorised that these original peoples first navigated the shorter distances from and between the Sunda Islands to reach Sahul; then via the land bridge to spread out through the continent. Archaeological evidence indicates human habitation at the upper Swan River, Western Australia by about 40,000 years ago; Tasmania (also at that time connected via a land bridge) was reached at least 30,000 years ago.
The ancestral Australian Aboriginal peoples were thus long established and continued to develop, diversify and settle through much of the continent. As the sea levels again rose at the terminus of the most recent glacial period some 10,000 years ago the Australian continent once more became a separated landmass. However, the newly formed 150 km wide Torres Strait with its chain of islands still provided the means for cultural contact and trade between New Guinea and the northern Cape York Peninsula.
Several thousand years ago the Melanesian Torres Strait Islander peoples were established in the Torres Strait Islands, and commerce and contact was continued via this route although there is little evidence to suggest immediate influences extended much further south. A more sporadic contact along the northern Australian coast was maintained by seafarers across the Timor and Arafat Seas, with substantial evidence of Macassan contact with Australia in the centuries prior to European arrival, and also evidence of earlier contacts and exchanges by other groups. However, these exchanges do not appear to have involved any extended settlement or migrations of non-Aboriginal peoples to the region.
According to a 2013 German study by a team of researchers on Indigenous Australian DNA genes reveal that a wave of migrants from India arrived in Australia about 4,230 years ago. It shows that the Indian migrants settled in Australia before Captain James Cook's first recorded contact with the Australian coastline. The study also suggests that up to 11 per cent of Aboriginal Australians DNA derives from Indians. During the migration period, dingos first appeared in the fossil suggests that the Indians took their dingos with them and they may also have brought stone tools called microliths. This study overturns the view that Australian continent was isolated from the time it was first colonised about 45,000–50,000 years ago until Europeans discovered Australia in the eighteenth century. Doctor Mark Stoneking, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology had explained that the DNA link could have been by people actually moving, physically travelling from India directly to Australia, or their genetic material could have moved in terms of contact between India and neighbouring populations who then had contact with other neighbour populations and eventually, there would have been contact with Australia. Professor Alan Cooper, from the University of Adelaide's Centre for Ancient DNA, says that the Indian influence may well have played a role in the development of the Australian Aboriginal culture. It has taken a while for the Indian influence to be discovered because Indigenous Australians have been hesitant to participate in these kinds of genetic studies."
Immigration history of Australia,"British colonisation and settlement: 1787–1850s
After the loss of the United States, Britain experienced overcrowding of its prisons and sought to ease the problems by transportation of its prisoners. In 1787 the First Fleet of 11 ships and about 1350 people under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip sailed for Australia. On 26 January 1788 a landing was made at Sydney Cove. The new colony was formally proclaimed as the Colony of New South Wales on 7 February. Other transport fleets bringing further convicts as well as free settlers to the colony followed. As a result of agitation by the free settlers in Sydney, transportation of convicts to Sydney ended in 1840. It continued to the colonies of Van Diemen's Land (where settlement began in 1803) and Moreton Bay (founded 1824, and later renamed Queensland) for some years longer. The small settlement of Perth, founded in 1829 on the Swan River in Western Australia by free settlers, failed to prosper and asked for convicts. In contrast, South Australia, with its capital Adelaide founded in 1836, and Victoria, with its capital Melbourne founded in 1839, were settled only by free settlers. South Australia not only received British migrants, but also a significant influx of Prussian farmers and tradesmen, initially seeking freedom from religious persecution. By the end of the penal transportation in 1868, approximately 165,000 people had entered Australia as convicts.
From about 1815 Sydney began to grow rapidly as free settlers arrived from Britain and Ireland and new lands were opened up for farming. Despite the long and arduous sea voyage, settlers were attracted by the prospect of making a new life on virtually free land. Many settlers occupied land without authority; they were known as squatters and became the basis of a powerful landowning class."
Immigration history of Australia,"Gold rushes
The discovery of gold, beginning in 1851 first near Bathurst in New South Wales and then in the newly formed colony of Victoria, transformed Australia economically, politically and demographically. The gold rushes occurred hard on the heels of a major worldwide economic depression. As a result, about two per cent of the population of the British Isles emigrated to New South Wales and Victoria during the 1850s. There were also a significant number of continental Europeans, North Americans and Chinese.
In 1851 the Australian population was 437,655, of which 77,345, or just under 18%, were Victorians. A decade later the Australian population had grown to 1,151,947 and the Victorian population had increased to 538,628; just under 47% of the Australian total and a sevenfold increase. The rapid growth was predominantly a result of the gold rushes.
During the later half of the 19th century, several colonies funded the immigration of skilled immigrants from Europe, starting with the assistance of German vintners to South Australia. The government found that if it wanted immigrants it had to subsidise migration; the great distance from Europe made Australia a more expensive and less practical destination than Canada, the United States, Brazil or Argentina.
The number of immigrants needed during different stages of the economic cycle could be controlled by varying the subsidy. Before federation in 1901, assisted migrants received passage assistance from colonial government funds; the British government paid for the passage of convicts, paupers, the military and civil servants. Few immigrants received colonial government assistance before 1831. In Queensland many immigrants passed through the Yungaba Immigration Centre in Brisbane. The facility was built shortly after a period when immigration had been at an all-time high."
Immigration history of Australia,"Early federation: 1901–1945
One of the motives for creating a federated Australia was the need for a common immigration policy. There was much resistance to Chinese immigration and the use of indentured workers from New Caledonia to work in the Queensland sugar industry.
The White Australia policy involved the exclusion of all non-European people from immigrating into Australia, and was the official policy of all governments and all mainstream political parties in Australia from the 1890s to the 1950s, and elements of the policy survived until the 1970s. Although the expression 'White Australia policy' was never in official use, it was common in political and public debate throughout the period.
By 1938, many Jews were seeking to leave Germany and Austria due to the Nazi policy of Judenrein, the forced removal of Jews. In June 1938 at the Evian Conference was held in France to discuss the Jewish refugee crisis by which time there were hundreds of thousands of Jewish seeking to immigrate. Although many nations attended the conference and expressed their concerns for the refugees, No progress was made towards re-settlement of the refugees. Australia agreed to accept 15,000 Jewish refugees over three years with Australia's delegate, Tomas W. White saying ""As we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one.""
A predominantly European nation on the periphery of Asia, historically many white citizens of Australia feared being demographically overwhelmed by the heavily populated Asian countries to the north. Following the attacks on Darwin and the associated fear of Imperial Japanese invasion in WWII, Minister of Immigration Arthur Calwell stated in 1947: ""We have 25 years at most to populate this country before the yellow races are down on us."" This concern about Australia's demographic vulnerability was a driving force behind the country's massive post-war program of European immigration."
Immigration history of Australia,"Post-war immigration
After World War II, Australia believed that it must increase its population to avoid the threat of another invasion and launched an immigration program whose goal was to increase Australia's population with the slogan ""populate or perish"". Hundreds of thousands of displaced Europeans immigrated to Australia with more than three million people immigrating from Europe during the late 1940s until the 1960s. The Immigration Minister, Arthur Calwell, introduced the Assisted Passage Migration Scheme in 1945. The government was still trying to increase Australia's population, especially with people who have skills in the secondary industry sector. As the world was transforming into a more industrial and technological world, Australia needed to keep up.
Australia looked first to Britain for migrants. In the beginning the assisted immigration scheme was popular among young married couples and single people. It was inexpensive, an adventure and an opportunity. After only a year, however, there was a shortage of ships and numbers dropped. The immigration targets were not being met. For the first time, in a revolutionary step for both Australian society and international relations, Australia looked outside Britain for migrants. In 1947, Calwell agreed to bring 12,000 people every year from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. Many of these people were refugees who were being cared for by the International Refugee Organisation (IRO). They were accepted on humanitarian grounds with the condition that they would remain in Australia for two years and work in government selected jobs. 182,159 people were sponsored by the IRO from the end of World War II up to the end of 1954 to resettle in Australia from Europe.
Over the next twenty years, patterns of immigration continued to change. The government encouraged more people to come to Australia and many more assisted agreements were made with countries. In the late 1950s, more immigrants began to be accepted from the Middle East. In 1958, under the Migration Act 1958, the dictation test was removed and a new universal visa scheme or entry permits introduced. This allowed non-Europeans to immigrate. Their entry was now based on what they could contribute to Australia and if it could be shown that they could integrate into Australian society. This attracted many professionals and highly qualified people who added to Australia's relatively small tertiary industry.
The Australian government assisted many of the refugees, such as helping them find work (due to an expanding economy and major infrastructure projects, the Snowy Mountains Scheme being the most famous). This growth of immigration greatly changed the national image regarding the Australian way of life which, before the war, had been dominated by Anglo-Saxons. Immigration was still strict in allowing non-Europeans to immigrate into the country due to the White Australia Policy.
The White Australia Policy began to be abandoned in 1966, under Prime Minister Harold Holt. The last reside of the policy was finally abolished in 1973 under the Government of Gough Whitlam."
Immigration history of Australia,"Modern era
During the 1970s and 1980s, around 120,000 southern Asian refugees migrated to Australia. During that twenty years, Australia first began to adopt a policy of what Minister of Immigration Al Grassby termed ""multiculturalism"". The development of Australia's multicultural policy was heavily influenced by the Galbally Report of 1978, which addressed issues with living in and planning for a multicultural Australian society.
Migration to Australia in the late twentieth century was influenced by a number of world events, including:"
Immigration history of Australia,"The fall of Saigon in 1975, the start of migration waves from Indo-China to Western countries and Australia.
The fall of East Timor to Indonesian's troops in 1975, which led many East-Timorese to seek refuge in Australia.
Dictatorships in South America, which led political dissidents from Chile, Argentina and Uruguay to flee military regimes during the 1970s and seek refuge in Australia.
The Lebanese Civil War of 1975–1990, which saw many Lebanese refugees come to Australia.
Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989, as a result of which many Chinese students in Australia were granted permanent residency.
The Yugoslav Wars in the Balkans from 1991 to 2001, which drove many Albanians, Bosnians, Croats, Serbs, to settle in Australia.
The Jakarta riots of May 1998, which led migrants from Jakarta to trickle into major cities in Australia.
In 1994–95, Australia accepted 87,000 immigrants, the last financial year before the Howard government was elected. Planned immigrant intake was reduced to 68,000 following the election of John Howard in 1996.
In 2004–05, Australia accepted 123,000 new settlers, a 40% increase over the past 10 years. The largest number of immigrants (40,000 in 2004/05) moved to Sydney. The majority of immigrants came from Asia, led by China and India. There was also significant growth in student numbers from Asia, and continued high numbers of tourists from Asia. Planned immigrant intake in 2005-06 had more than doubled compared with the intake of 1996.
As at 2007 immigration accounted just over half the overall growth in Australia's population. In N.S.W. and South Australia about three-quarters of the population growth could be attributed to immigration. The planned intake for 2007-08 was almost 153,000, plus 13,000 under the humanitarian program and in addition 24,000 New Zealanders were expected to migrate under specific trans-Tasman agreement.
Since the 1988 Fitzgerald Inquiry, the quota for skilled and business migrants has risen compared with the quota for family reunions. Refugees that are granted a protection visa are eligible for standard social security benefits such as New start and Rent Assistance."
Immigration history of Australia,"Asylum seekers
In the early 1990s Australian immigration legislation was changed dramatically, introducing the concept of mandatory detention of unauthorised arrivals, who were popularly referred to as boat people. With a sharp rise in unauthorised boat arrivals in the late 1990s, mostly from war-torn countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan, the Howard government enforced the mandatory detention policy created by the previous Paul Keating government. This came to international attention during the Tampa affair of 2001.
During the 2001 election campaign, immigration and border protection became the hot issue, as a result of incidents such as the Tampa affair, the Children overboard affair, and the sinking of the SIEV-X. This was a major factor contributing to the victory of the Coalition, deemed impossible only a few months earlier, and also marked the beginning of the controversial Pacific Solution.
After the election, the government continued with its hard line on unauthorised arrivals of asylum seekers. Legislation was developed to excise certain islands from Australia's migration zone meaning that if asylum seekers landed on an excised island, Australia was not required to provide access to the Australian courts or permanent settlement. Australia still adheres to its international obligations by considering such refugee applications offshore and providing temporary protection visas to those in genuine need of protection.
By 2004, the number of unauthorised boat arrivals had been reduced dramatically. The government argued that this was the result of its strong policy towards asylum seekers. Others argued that the decrease was the result of global factors, such as changing circumstances in the primary source nations of Afghanistan and Iraq."
Immigration history of Australia,"Opposition to immigration
In March 1984, Professor Geoffrey Blainey, an Australian historian, made a speech criticizing what he saw as disproportionately high levels of Asian immigration to Australia. Blainey's remarks touched off a flood of debate and controversy about immigration and multiculturalism, known as the 'Blainey debate'. In 1984, he wrote a book outlining his ideas on immigration and multiculturalism titled All for Australia. Blainey remained a persistent critic of multiculturalism throughout the 1980s, claiming multiculturalism was a ""sham"", ""anti-British"" and threatened to transform Australia into a ""cluster of tribes"".
Blainey's views were echoed by some politicians. In August 1988, John Howard, then opposition leader, launched the One Australia policy, stating that he believed the rate of Asian immigration into Australia should be slowed for the sake of social cohesion. He stated: ""I do believe that if it is – in the eyes of some in the community – that it's too great, it would be in our immediate-term interest and supporting of social cohesion if it were slowed down a little, so the capacity of the community to absorb it was greater.""
In her maiden speech to the House of Representatives after her election in 1996, Pauline Hanson expressed her concern that Australia ""was in danger of being swamped by Asians"". This message exposed a population deeply divided on the issue of immigration. Hanson went on to form the One Nation Party, which subsequently won nearly one quarter of the vote in Queensland state elections. Hanson claimed government policies were favoring migrants (multiculturalism) and indigenous Australians. The issue of immigration remains highly sensitive in Australia.
A 2018, Lowy Institute Poll found that a majority of Australians oppose the current rate of immigration to Australia. In 2018, 54% of Australians say that ‘the total number of migrants coming to Australia each year is too high’. A minority say its ‘too low’ (14%). These results represent a significant rise in opposition to the existing migration rate – up 14 points since last year, and up 17 points since we first asked this question in 2014. Immigration to Australia came to a halt during the COVID-19 pandemic, which in turn saw a shrinkage of the Australian population for the first time since World War I."
Immigration history of Australia,"See also
Demographics of Australia
Europeans in Oceania
History of Australia
Immigration to Australia"
Immigration history of Australia,"References
Further reading
Betts, Katharine. Ideology and Immigration: Australia 1976 to 1987 (1997)
Burnley, I.H. The Impact of Immigration in Australia: A Demographic Approach (2001)
Foster, William, et al. Immigration and Australia: Myths and Realities (1998)
Jupp, James. From White Australia to Woomera: The Story of Australian Immigration (2007) excerpt and text search
Jupp, James. The English in Australia (2004) excerpt and text search
Jupp, James. The Australian People: An Encyclopedia of the Nation, its People and their Origins (2002)
Lack, John and Templeton, Jacqueline – editors – (1988) Sources of Australian immigration history Parkville, Vic: History Dept., University of Melbourne, Melbourne University history monographs ; 0002. ISBN 0-86839-679-6 (set)
Markus, Andrew, James Jupp and Peter McDonald, eds. Australia's Immigration Revolution (2010) excerpt and text search
O'Farrell, Patrick. The Irish in Australia: 1798 to the Present Day (3rd ed. Cork University Press, 2001)
Pascoe, Robert. Buongiorno Australia:Our Italian Heritage. (Greenhouse Publications in association with Vaccari Italian Historical Trust, 1987)
Wells, Andrew, and Theresa Martinez, eds. Australia's Diverse Peoples: A Reference Sourcebook (ABC-CLIO, 2004)"
1951 Australian Communist Party ban referendum,"On 22 September 1951, a referendum was held in Australia which sought approval to alter the Australian Constitution to give Parliament the power to make laws regarding communism and communists, so that the Parliament would be empowered to instate a law similar to the Communist Party Dissolution Act of 1950. It was not carried."
1951 Australian Communist Party ban referendum,"General background
After World War II, membership of the Communist Party of Australia had peaked at around 20,000 and Fred Paterson had won the seat of Bowen in the 1944 Queensland state election. Communists became prominent in trade unions as well as cultural and literary circles. Following the attempted nationalisation of the Australian Banks in 1948, Opposition Leader Robert Menzies became concerned that communist ideas were infiltrating the Labor Party. A Queensland rail strike in that same year cemented that idea. Menzies vowed that if elected he would outlaw communism."
1951 Australian Communist Party ban referendum,"1949 federal election campaign
In the 1949 general election, the newly formed Liberal Party campaigned on a strongly anti-communist, anti-interventionist platform, which targeted the Labor government's attempt to nationalise banking in Australia, as well as what Menzies considered to be a growing communist threat in the wake of World War II.
On 27 June 1949, coal miners went out on strike, supported by the Communist Party and various unions. Bargaining quickly broke down between the unions and government and on 1 August, Prime Minister Chifley sent in troops from the Australian Armed Forces to run the mines until the dispute was resolved. By its fourth day, the Sydney docks were congested with coal ships unable to leave the port, the loading of ships being severely delayed by restricted transport. By 1 July the government was examining the possibility of importing coal from Britain. The strike lasted over 6 weeks, until 15 August. Later that year, PM Chifley also brought in legislation to begin the rationing of petrol. Both of these events became key issues in the 1949 federal election campaign.
During the campaign, Menzies asserted that socialism was the ""outstanding issue"" of the day. He accused the Labor Party of having communist leanings, citing as proof its banking legislation and regulation in other areas of the economy. ""A vote for Labor,"" he suggested, ""is a vote for the socialist objective"". Socialism was, according to Menzies, detrimental to the freedom and prosperity of the nation, and to be considered a real and prominent threat to the Australian way of life.
In December 1949, the Liberal Party with Robert Menzies as Prime Minister won a majority in the House of Representatives with 74 of 121 seats."
1951 Australian Communist Party ban referendum,"The Communist Party Dissolution Act
On 23 June 1950, the Communist Party Dissolution Bill 1950 (Cth) was introduced. In his speech introducing the Bill, PM Menzies read out the names of 53 members of the Communist Party of Australia, referring to them as a ""traitorous minority"" which threatened the security of the nation. The Bill passed the House of Representatives, but struggled to pass the Senate, which had a Labor party majority. Labor senators agreed that the Communist Party should be dissolved, but held reservations about allowing the Governor-General to 'declare' people communists. These reservations were especially strong after Menzies admitted that the names of Communist Party members which had been read out on the House floor contained errors. Amendments were proposed that removed this power, but the Labor Party later withdrew its opposition and the Bill passed the Senate without amendments on 19 October 1950. It was brought into effect as the Communist Party Dissolution Act 1950 (Cth) on 20 October 1950.
The Act authorised the Governor-General to declare any person a communist, where they are satisfied that person is ""engaged, or is likely to engage, in activities prejudicial to the security and defence of the Commonwealth or to the execution or maintenance of the Constitution or of the laws of the Commonwealth"". Such persons were not allowed to be employed by the Commonwealth in public service, or in industries considered vital to the defence of Australia. They were not permitted to run for office and were prohibited from joining a union. The Communist Party of Australia was declared an unlawful organisation and was dissolved, its property forfeited to the Commonwealth without compensation. Affiliated organisations were also liable to be declared unlawful, at the discretion of the Governor-General."
1951 Australian Communist Party ban referendum,"Australian Communist Party v Commonwealth (1951)
Immediately following the passage of the Act, a challenge was filed in the High Court. The case was heard beginning on 14 November 1950 by all seven judges of the High Court. The question was whether the federal government had the power to pass this law under the Section 51(vi) of the Constitution of Australia (also known as the defence power). Section 51(vi) of the Constitution gives the Parliament power to make laws in regard to ""the naval and military defence of the Commonwealth and of the several States, and the control of the forces to execute and maintain the laws of the Commonwealth"". The Commonwealth claimed that the Act was valid under this power because communists presented a real threat to Australian security, as revolution was a central theme of marxism.
On 19 March 1951, the Court ruled 6:1 (Latham CJ dissenting) that the Act was invalid. In his opinion, Fullagar J summarised the position of the majority writing,"
1951 Australian Communist Party ban referendum,"The validity of a law or of an administrative act done under a law cannot be made to depend on the opinion of the law-maker, or the person who is to do the act, that the law or the consequence of the act is within the constitutional power upon which the law in question itself depends for its validity. A power to make laws with respect to lighthouses does not authorize the making of a law with respect to anything which is, in the opinion of the law-maker, a lighthouse. A power to make a proclamation carrying legal consequences with respect to a lighthouse is one thing: a power to make a similar proclamation with respect to anything which in the opinion of the Governor-General is a lighthouse is another thing."
1951 Australian Communist Party ban referendum,"Referendum
A referendum was called on 23 August 1951, which sought to insert a clause into the constitution that empowered the Federal Parliament make laws in reference to communism and communists. Newspaper editorials were overwhelmingly in favour of the ban with 12 editorials in support, two papers not taking a stance (Daily Mirror and Daily News), and just one newspaper against it (The Argus). The Labor party had decided to campaign for a No vote despite supporting the Bill through the senate the previous year. Opposition Leader HV Evatt held more speeches than Menzies and started campaigning earlier, campaigning vigorously against what he perceived as Menzies' attempt to establish a police state in Australia. Menzies' speeches were often interrupted by the No campaign's hecklers, although Menzies claimed to have been happy with the uproar because it demonstrated the communists' ""disrespect for liberal norms"".
Some Liberal party members and non-affiliated conservatives also supported the No campaign, which undermined Menzies efforts to convince the public that this was a necessary measure. Despite this, seven weeks before the ballot, the ban was supported by 73.3% percent of respondents in a Gallup Poll. The reason behind the Gallup support plummeting for Yes has been estimated to have been especially middle class Liberal voters slipping away from the Coalition position, whereas Labor kept their ranks better. Bi-partisan support was usually required for constitutional amendments to pass in Australia.
The referendum was held on 22 September 1951. The question which appeared on the ballot was:
Do you approve of the proposed law for the alteration of the Constitution entitled 'Constitution Alteration (Powers to deal with Communists and Communism) 1951'?
The referendum was not carried. Reflecting on the outcome, Menzies remarked ""to get an affirmative vote from the Australian people on a referendum proposal is one of the labours of Hercules""."
1951 Australian Communist Party ban referendum,"Constitution Alteration (Power to deal with Communists and Communism) 1951
The 'Constitutional Alteration (Power to deal with Communists and Communism) 1951' proposed to insert into the constitution after section 51 the following text.51A.--(1.) The Parliament shall have power to make such laws for the peace, order and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to communists or communism as the Parliament considers to be necessary or expedient for the defence or security of the Commonwealth or for the execution or maintenance of this Constitution or of the laws of the Commonwealth.
(2.) In addition to all other powers conferred on the Parliament by this Constitution and without limiting any such power, the Parliament shall have power---
(a) to make a law in the terms of the Communist Party Dissolution Act 1950--
(i) without alteration; or
(ii) with alterations, being alterations with respect to a matter dealt with by that Act or with respect to some other matter with respect to which the Parliament has power to make laws;
(b) to make laws amending the law made under the last preceding paragraph, but so that any such amendment is with respect to a matter dealt with by that law or with respect to some other matter with respect to which the Parliament has power to make laws; and
(c) to repeal a law made under either of the last two preceding paragraphs."
1951 Australian Communist Party ban referendum,"(3.) In this section, 'the Communist Party Dissolution Act 1950' means the proposed law passed by the Senate and the House of Representatives, and assented to by the Governor-General on the twentieth day of October, One thousand nine hundred and fifty, being the proposed law entitled 'An Act to provide for the Dissolution of the Australian Communist Party and of other Communist Organizations, to disqualify Communists from holding certain Offices, and for purposes connected therewith'."
1951 Australian Communist Party ban referendum,Results
1951 Australian Communist Party ban referendum,"
== References =="
Native title in Australia,"Native title is the set of rights, recognised by Australian law, held by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups or individuals to land that derive from their maintenance of their traditional laws and customs. These Aboriginal title rights were first recognised as a part of Australian common law with the decision of Mabo v Queensland (No 2) in 1992. The doctrine was subsequently implemented and modified via statute with the Native Title Act 1993.
The concept recognises that in certain cases there was and is a continued beneficial legal interest in land held by Indigenous peoples which survived the acquisition of radical title and sovereignty to the land by the Crown. Native title can co-exist with non-Aboriginal proprietary rights and in some cases different Aboriginal groups can exercise their native title rights over the same land.
The Federal Court of Australia arranges mediation in relation to claims made by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and hears applications for, and makes, native title determinations. Appeals against these determinations can be made to a full sitting of the Federal Court and then to the High Court of Australia. The National Native Title Tribunal (NNTT), established under the Native Title Act 1993, is a body that applies the ""registration test"" to all new native title claimant applications, and undertakes future act mediation and arbitral functions. The Attorney-General's Department advises the Australian Government on legal and legal-policy regarding on native title, and assists the Attorney-General to administer the Native Title Act 1993."
Native title in Australia,"Definitions: Native title/land rights
According to the Attorney-General's Department:There are fundamental differences between land rights and native title. Land rights are rights created by the Australian, state or territory governments. Land rights usually consist of a grant of freehold or perpetual lease title to Indigenous Australians. By contrast, native title arises as a result of the recognition, under Australian common law, of pre-existing Indigenous rights and interests according to traditional laws and customs. Native title is not a grant or right created by governments.
The Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976 (see below) covers the granting of land to Aboriginal Land Trusts; setting up Aboriginal land councils; mineral rights; decision-making processes for dealing with land; dealing with income from land use agreements; and negotiations about leases for development on Aboriginal land. The Native Title Act 1993 (NTA) gives recognition that ""Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have rights to land, water and sea, including exclusive possession in some cases, but does not provide ownership"". It allows for negotiations over land, but does not provide for a veto over development, and nor does it grant land, as the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (ALRA) does."
Native title in Australia,"Native title definitions
National Native Title Tribunal definition:[Native title is] the communal, group or individual rights and interests of Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islander people in relation to land and waters, possessed under traditional law and custom, by which those people have a connection with an area which is recognised under Australian law (s 223 NTA).
Commonwealth Government's indigenous.gov.au website:Native title is the recognition in Australian law, under common law and the Native Title Act 1993 (Cth), of Indigenous Australians' rights and interests in land and waters according to their own traditional laws and customs.
Native title has also been described as a ""bundle of rights"" in land, which may include such rights as camping, performing ceremony, etc. If native title is granted, specific rights are decided on a case-by-case basis, and may only sometimes includes freehold title."
Native title in Australia,"History
Pre-Mabo
1971 – Milirrpum
Australia did not experience litigation involving Aboriginal native title until the 1970s, though several earlier cases tangentially involved issues of native title. In 1835, John Batman purported to sign Batman's Treaty with Aboriginal elders in the Port Phillip District. Governor Bourke declared Batman's Treaty was ""void and of no effect as against the rights of the Crown"" and declared any person on ""vacant land of the Crown"" without authorization from the Crown to be trespassing. The proclamation was approved by the Colonial Office. The official objection to the Treaty was that Batman had attempted to negotiate directly with the Aboriginal people, whom the British did not recognise as having any claim to any lands in Australia.
In 1971, in Milirrpum v Nabalco Pty Ltd (the ""Gove land rights case"") in the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory, Justice Richard Blackburn explicitly rejected the concept of native title, ruling against the claimants on a number of issues of law and fact."
Native title in Australia,"1972–1976: Aboriginal Land Rights Act
In the wake of Milirrpum and the election of the Whitlam government in 1972, the Aboriginal Land Rights Commission (also known as the Woodward Royal Commission) was established in 1973 to inquire into appropriate ways to recognise Aboriginal land rights in the Northern Territory. Prime Minister Gough Whitlam introduced a new policy of Aboriginal self-determination, and initiatives such as the Aboriginal Land Fund and the National Aboriginal Consultative Committee was set up. The latter consisted of elected Aboriginal representatives, who would advise the Minister of Aboriginal Affairs. The Whitlam government introduced legislation later passed by the Fraser government as the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976, which established a procedure to transfer almost 50 per cent of land in the Northern Territory (around 600,000 km2) to collective Aboriginal ownership. The Fraser government continued to implement many of the previous government's initiatives, under the description ""self-management"" rather than self-determination."
Native title in Australia,"1979 – Coe v Commonwealth
In 1979, Paul Coe, a Wiradjuri man from Cowra, New South Wales, commenced an action in the High Court of Australia arguing that Aboriginal people retained rights to land as an Aboriginal nation or nations existed pre-settlement and continues to exist, and that their land had been taken by conquest rather than by settlement. The court held in Coe v Commonwealth (1979) that no Aboriginal nation holds any kind of sovereignty, distinguishing the US case of Cherokee Nation v Georgia (1831). However, the substantive issue of continuing land rights was not heard due to the lack of precision, vagueness and other serious deficiencies with the statement of claim presented to the court. Justice Gibbs said, at paragraph 21, 'The question what rights the aboriginal people of this country have, or ought to have, in the lands of Australia is one which has become a matter of heated controversy. If there are serious legal questions to be decided as to the existence or nature of such rights, no doubt the sooner they are decided the better, but the resolution of such questions by the courts will not be assisted by imprecise, emotional or intemperate claims. In this, as in any other litigation, the claimants will be best served if their claims are put before the court dispassionately, lucidly and in proper form'."
Native title in Australia,"1981 – Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Land Rights Act
The South Australian Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Land Rights Act 1981 was introduced by Premier Don Dunstan in November 1978, several months prior to his resignation from Parliament. An amended bill, following extensive consultation, was passed by the Tonkin Liberal government in March 1981. This legislation gave significant rights well in advance of any other to date in Australia. In 1981, SA Premier Tonkin returned 102,650 square kilometres (39,630 sq mi) of land (10.2% of the state's land area) to the Pitjantjara and Yankunytjatjara people. However, it did not give the people the power of veto over mining activities; any disputes would need to be resolved by an independent arbitrator.
In 1984 Premier John Bannon's Labor government passed legislation to return lands to the Maralinga Tjarutja people. The legislation was proclaimed in January 1985 and was followed by a ceremony in the desert attended by Maralinga Tjarutja leader Archie Barton, John Bannon and Aboriginal Affairs Minister Greg Crafter. This granted rights over 75,000 square kilometres (29,000 sq mi) of land in the Great Victoria Desert, including the land contaminated by the British nuclear weapons testing at Maralinga."
Native title in Australia,"Mabo and the Native Title Act
1988–1992 – Mabo
Mabo v Queensland (No 2) (1992) was the foundational case for native title in Australia. In 1992 the rejection of native title in Milirrpum v Nabalco was overruled by the High Court in Mabo v Queensland (No 2), which recognised the Meriam people of Murray Island (Mer) in the Torres Strait as native title holders over part of their traditional lands. The Court rejected the notion that all Indigenous rights to land were abolished upon acquisition of sovereignty over Australia. The Court held that native title rights continued to exist, and that these rights existed by virtue of the continuing connection of Indigenous People to land, independent from a grant from the Crown. Native title would continue to exist as long as traditional laws and customs continue to be observed, unless the rights were otherwise extinguished by an incompatible grant by the Crown. Justice Gerard Brennan in this landmark decision stated:"
Native title in Australia,"However, when the tide of history has washed away any real acknowledgment of traditional law and any real observance of traditional customs, the foundation of native title has disappeared. Thus although over some parts of Australia native title has been lost, in large areas of the nation's interior, native title could be recognised.
As Justice Brennan stated in Mabo (No. 2), ""native title has its origin and is given its content by the traditional laws acknowledged by and the customs observed by the Aboriginal inhabitants of a territory""."
Native title in Australia,"1993 – Native Title Act 1993
One year after the recognition of the legal concept of native title in Mabo, the Keating government formalised the recognition by legislation with the enactment by the Australian Parliament of the Native Title Act 1993. The Act attempted to clarify the legal position of landholders and the processes to be followed for native title to be claimed, protected and recognised through the courts. The Act also established the National Native Title Tribunal."
Native title in Australia,"Wik and 1998 amendment
1996 – Wik
After the Mabo decision it was uncertain as to whether the granting of pastoral leases would extinguish native title. The Wik Decision in 1996 clarified the uncertainty. The court found that the statutory pastoral leases (which cover some 40% of the Australian land mass) under consideration by the court did not bestow rights of exclusive possession on the leaseholder. As a result, native title rights could co-exist, depending on the terms and nature of the particular pastoral lease. Where there was a conflict of rights, the rights under the pastoral lease would prevail over native title rights."
Native title in Australia,"1998 – Native Title Amendment Act 1998
The Wik decision led to amendments to the Native Title Act 1993 by the Native Title Amendment Act 1998. This Act, also known as the ""10 Point Plan"", was introduced by the Howard government. The amendments substantially restricted Native Title by narrowing the right to negotiate and extinguishing Native Title on most pastoral and mining leases granted before 1994."
Native title in Australia,"Cases after the 1998 amendment
1998–2002 – Yorta Yorta
Yorta Yorta v Victoria, addressed a native title claim by the Yorta Yorta Aboriginal people of north central Victoria, which was dismissed by Justice Olney of the Federal Court in 1998. Appeals to the Full Bench of the Federal Court in 2001, and the High Court in 2002 were also dismissed.
The determination by Justice Olney in 1998 ruled that the 'tide of history' had 'washed away' any real acknowledgement of traditional laws and any real observance of traditional customs by the applicants. The 2002 High Court decision adopted strict requirements of continuity of traditional laws and customs for native title claims to succeed."
Native title in Australia,"1998–2003 – Miriuwung Gajerrong
Ward v Western Australia (1998) addressed an application made on behalf of the Miriuwung and Gajerrong people of the east Kimberly, over land in Western Australia and the Northern Territory. Justice Malcolm Lee of the Federal Court ruled in their favour in recognition of the native title. Western Australia appealed the decision to the Full Court of the Federal Court, then to the High Court.
The High Court held in Western Australia v Ward that native title is a bundle of rights, which may be extinguished one by one, for example, by a mining lease. In this case, the lease did not confer 'exclusive possession', because the claimants could pass over the land and do various things. But some parts of native title rights were extinguished, including the rights to control access and make use of the land.
The claim was remitted to the Full Court of the Federal Court to determine in accordance with the decision of the High Court. The claimants reached an agreement about the claim area and a determination was made in 2003. ""Exclusive possession native title was recognised over Lacrosse Island, Kanggurru Island, Aboriginal reserves within the Kununurra townsite, Glen Hill pastoral lease and Hagan Island. Non-exclusive rights were recognised over a number of areas including islands in Lake Argyle."""
Native title in Australia,"2001 – Yarmirr
Yarmirr v Northern Territory (2001), addressed an application made on behalf of a number of clan groups of Aboriginal people to an area of seas and sea-beds surrounding Croker Island in the Northern Territory. It was the first judgment by the High Court of native title over waters. The judge, Olney J, determined that members of the Croker Island community have a native title right to have free access to the sea and sea-bed of the claimed area for a number of purposes. The case established that traditional owners do have native title of the sea and sea-bed; however common law rights of fishing and navigation mean that only non-exclusive native title can exist over the sea. The decision paved the way for other native title applications involving waters to proceed."
Native title in Australia,"2002 & 2004 – Nangkiriny
Nangkiriny v State of Western Australia (2002 & 2004), in which John Dudu Nangkiriny and others were plaintiffs, were cases addressing the claims of the Karajarri people in the Kimberley region, south of Broome. Land rights were recognised over 31,000 square kilometres (12,000 sq mi) of land (half the size of Tasmania) via an ILUA on 5 July 2011."
Native title in Australia,"2004 – Maralinga
In May 2004, following the passage of special legislation, South Australian Premier Mike Rann handed back title to 21,000 square kilometres of land to the Maralinga Tjarutja and Pila Nguru people. The land, 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) north-west of Adelaide and abutting the Western Australia border, was then called the Unnamed Conservation Park. It is now known as Mamungari Conservation Park. It includes the Serpentine Lakes, and was the largest land return since 1984. At the 2004 ceremony Rann said the return of the land fulfilled a promise he made to Archie Barton in 1991 when he was Aboriginal Affairs Minister, after he passed legislation to return lands including the sacred Ooldea area (which also included the site of Daisy Bates' mission camp) to the Maralinga Tjarutja people. The Maralinga Tjarutja lands now total 102,863 square kilometres."
Native title in Australia,"2005 – Wotjobaluk, Jaadwa, Jadawadjali, Wergaia and Jupagalk
The Aboriginal peoples of the Wimmera region of Western Victoria won recognition of their native title on 13 December 2005 after a ten-year legal process commenced in 1995 when they filed an application for a determination of native title in respect of certain land and waters in Western Victoria. It was the first successful native title claim in south-eastern Australia and in Victoria, determined by Justice Ron Merkel involving Wotjobaluk, Jaadwa, Jadawadjali, Wergaia and Jupagalk people. In his reasons for judgment Justice Merkel explained the significance of his orders:"
Native title in Australia,"""The orders I propose to make are of special significance as they constitute the first recognition and protection of native title resulting in the ongoing enjoyment of native title in the State of Victoria and, it would appear, on the South-Eastern seaboard of Australia. These are areas in which the Aboriginal peoples suffered severe and extensive dispossession, degradation and devastation as a consequence of the establishment of British sovereignty over their lands and waters during the 19th century."""
Native title in Australia,"2005 – Noongar
In 2005 the Federal Court brought down a judgment recognising the native title of the Noongar people over the Perth metropolitan area. Justice Wilcox found that native title continues to exist within an area in and around Perth. It was the first judgment recognising native title over a capital city and its surroundings. The claim area itself is part of a much larger area included in the ""Single Noongar Claim"", covering the south-western corner of Western Australia. An appeal was subsequently lodged and in 2008 the Full Court of the Federal Court upheld parts of the appeal by the Western Australian and Commonwealth governments against Justice Wilcox's judgment."
Native title in Australia,"2008 – Blue Mud Bay sea rights
The 2008 decision by the High Court decided the Blue Mud Bay sea rights case, establishing a precedent for sea rights over an intertidal zone for the first time. The Yolngu people of Baniyala were involved in this case, which involved Blue Mud Bay in East Arnhem Land."
Native title in Australia,"2007 & 2009 amendments
In 2007 the Howard government passed the Native Title Amendment Act 2007, and the Native Title Amendment (Technical Amendments) Act 2007, a package of coordinated measures and technical amendments to improve the performance of the native title system. These are aimed at making the native title process more efficient and to speed up the determination of whether native title exists on the 580 claims that had been registered but not yet determined.
The Native Title Act 1993 was further amended by the Rudd government by the Native Title Amendment Act 2009. It allows the Federal Court to determine who may mediate a claim, whether that be the court itself, the Native Title Tribunal, or otherwise."
Native title in Australia,"Further significant determinations
2008–2019 – Timber Creek
Northern Territory v Mr Griffiths and Lorraine Jones was a 2018 High Court of Australia case, ruled in 2019, regarding land around Timber Creek, Northern Territory, involving a compensation claim by Ngaliwurru and Nungali lands surrounding Timber Creek. It related to various earlier cases since 1997. Described as ""the most significant [case]… since Mabo"", the High Court ruled for the first time on compensation for the extinguishment of native title in Australia. It is considered a ""landmark"" native title case, because the clauses contained within the Native Title Act 1993 pertaining to the determination of compensation payable due to the extinguishment of native title had never been heard before in the High Court."
Native title in Australia,"2020 – Yamatji
Yamatji Marlpa Aboriginal Corporation was involved in a large native title claim from 1996, based on the Native Title Act 1993, resulting in an historic determination in February 2020, involving both native title and an ILUA, covering an area of 48,000 square kilometres (19,000 sq mi) in Western Australia."
Native title in Australia,"2020 – Gurindji, Wave Hill Station
A claim was lodged in 2016 by the Central Land Council on behalf of the Gurindji peoples in the area, as there were mining interests in area covered by Wave Hill Station's pastoral lease. On 8 September 2020, the Federal Court of Australia recognised the native title rights of the Gurindji people to 5,000 square kilometres (1,900 sq mi) of the Wave Hill Station, allowing them to receive royalties as compensation from resource companies who explore the area. Justice Richard White said that the determination recognised Indigenous involvement (Jamangku, Japuwuny, Parlakuna-Parkinykarni and Yilyilyimawu peoples) with the land ""at least since European settlement and probably for millennia"". The court sitting took place nearly 800 kilometres (500 mi) south of Darwin, and descendants of Vincent Lingiari and others involved in the Wave Hill walk-off celebrated the determination. The owners will participate in the mining negotiations and exploration work, from which royalties may flow in the future, but just as important is the right to hunt, gather, teach and perform cultural activities and ceremonies, and allow the young people to connect with their land."
Native title in Australia,"2023 – Eastern Maar
In March 2023, 8578.35 kilometres along the coast of the Grey River in Victoria. The case was the first Native Title case heard in the state of Victoria for 10 years. At the Federal Court at Warnambool designated the land as native title rights."
Native title in Australia,"Native title rights and interests
Native title concerns the interaction of two systems of law:"
Native title in Australia,"The traditional laws and customs that regulated the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders prior to the colonisation of Australia by the British (""Aboriginal customary law"").
The English-derived legal system, which was brought to Australia with colonisation, which includes the common law and enacted laws (""Australian law""). As Australia was (and remains) designated as a ""settled"" colony, the laws of England were imported with any local laws not recognised (as they would be in ""conquered"" or ""ceded"" colonies).
Native title is the term adopted in Australian law to describe the rights to land and waters possessed by Indigenous Australians under their customary laws that are recognised by the Australian legal system. Native title is able to be possessed by a community or individual depending on the content of the traditional laws and customs; it is inalienable other than by surrender to the Crown; and rights over the land may range from access and usage rights to rights of exclusive possession. Native title rights and interests are based on laws and customs that pre-date the British acquisition of sovereignty; they are distinct from the rights granted by government such as statutory land rights of the kind found in the Land Rights Act. Native title rights and interests may exist over land and waters to the extent that they are consistent with other rights established over the land by law or executive action.
According to the National Native Title Tribunal (2013): ""The native title rights and interests held by particular Aboriginal people will depend on both their traditional laws and customs and what interests are held by others in the area concerned. Generally speaking, native title must give way to the rights held by others. The capacity of Australian law to recognise the rights and interests held under traditional law and custom will also be a factor... The source of native title is the system of traditional laws and customs of the native title holders themselves."" Native title rights and interests may include the right to live in an area or to access it for traditional purposes; to visit and protect sacred sites; to hunt, fish or gather resources; or to teach law and custom. Exclusive possession can only be recognised over certain parts of Australia, such as vacant Crown land, or areas already held by Indigenous Australians.
A 2015 review of the Native Title Act by the Australian Law Reform Commission reported that ""Courts have indicated that native title is not to be understood in terms equivalent to common law property interests, but they often still tend to draw on these concepts... The prevailing view of the nature and content of native title is hybrid, drawing on traditional laws and customs for content, but also at times idiosyncratically adopting common law terms to describe the nature or character of the rights"". It is a complex area of law. The Act continues to be reviewed and amended."
Native title in Australia,"Native title determinations
The National Native Title Register (NNTR), maintained by the NNTT, is a register of approved native title determinations. A determination can be that native title does or does not exist. As part of the determination of native title, native title groups are required to nominate a Native Title Prescribed Body Corporate to hold (as trustee) or manage (as agent) their native title. Following a determination, Prescribed Bodies Corporate are entered onto the NNTR. At this point, the corporation becomes a Registered Native Title Body Corporate (RNTBC).
On 1 July 2011, the 160 registered determinations of native title covered some 1,228,373 km2 (474,277 sq mi) (approximately 16 per cent) of the land mass of Australia; and registered Indigenous land use agreements (ILUAs) covered about 1,234,129 km2 (476,500 sq mi) (about 16 per cent) of the land mass, as well as about 5,435 km2 (2,098 sq mi) of sea."
Native title in Australia,"Mediation
Native title in Australia frequently involves mediation between native title parties and other groups with an interest in native title, such as the Australian Government, state and territory governments, miners and pastoralists. Amendments to the NTA made in 2012 meant that the NNTT would henceforth only conduct native title claim mediation by referral from the Federal Court, which may also order mediation by other agencies or persons. The purpose of mediation is to assist parties to clarify the issues in dispute, to explore options for settlement and to reach agreement. Mediation is a structured process, with the intention of a mutually agreed outcome rather than having a decision imposed by a judge."
Native title in Australia,"Alternative agreements
Alternative settlements (also termed ""broader settlements"") may be negotiated out of court, often being resolved more quickly and efficiently than via the court process under the Native Title Act. They can give traditional owner group recognition in areas where native title rights have been extinguished, or where it is difficult for a group to prove that it persists. Such agreements are resolved through negotiation, and recognition of traditional ownership and various other land rights in land may be achieved without an actual native title determination. Examples of such arrangements are the Indigenous land use agreement or, in Victoria, a settlement under the Traditional Owner Settlement Act 2010 (TOSA).
Alternative settlements agreements can be made alongside the Native Title Act, but usually the traditional owners are required to withdraw any existing native title claims. Such settlements can include any matters agreed to by all parties, which may included recognition of traditional owner rights, grants of freehold for specified purposes, or the right to be consulted and participate in natural resource management."
Native title in Australia,"Types
ILUAs
An Indigenous land use agreement (ILUA) is a voluntary agreement between a native title group and others about the use of land and waters, provided for under the Act. They must be about native title matters, but can include other matters. They enable people to negotiate flexible and pragmatic agreements to suit their particular circumstances.
An ILUA may exist over areas where native title has, or has not yet, been determined; may be entered into regardless of whether there is a native title claim over the area or not; and may be part of a native title determination, or settled separately from a native title claim. An ILUA is binding between a native title group or Registered Native Title Body Corporate/s (RNTBC) and other parties, and bind all persons holding native title in the area of the ILUA, regardless of whether they are parties or not.
ILUAs are an alternative to making an application for native title determination, generally processed within less than six months, and may deal with a wide range of issues, including such topics as:"
Native title in Australia,"native title holders agreeing to a future development;
how native title rights coexist with the rights of other people;
access to an area;
protection of sacred sites
extinguishment of native title;
compensation;
employment and economic opportunities for native title groups;
cultural heritage; and
mining.
There are three types of ILUAs: Body Corporate Agreements, Area Agreements and Alternative Procedure Agreements."
Native title in Australia,"TOSA settlements (Vic.)
The Traditional Owner Settlement Act 2010 (TOSA) ""provides for an out-of-court settlement of native title. The Act allows the Victorian Government to recognise traditional owners and certain rights in Crown land. In return for entering into a settlement, traditional owners must agree to withdraw any native title claim, pursuant to the Native Title Act 1993 (Cth) and not to make any future native title claims""."
Native title in Australia,"Traditional owner
Alternative agreements require that the claimants demonstrate that they are the ""traditional owners"" (or ""traditional custodians"") of the country in question. However, this term has sometimes proved problematic in law: it is not mentioned in the NTA, but Indigenous Land Use Agreements (see below), which are provided for under the Act, require that the Indigenous group or groups party to the agreement assert ""traditional ownership"" of the area.
The definition of the term ""traditional owner"" varies among jurisdictions. According to the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976, the term refers to ""a local descent group of Aboriginals who: (a) have common spiritual affiliations to a site on the land, being affiliations that place the group under a primary spiritual responsibility for that site and for the land; and (b) are entitled by Aboriginal tradition to forage as of right over that land"". A similar definition was incorporated in the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC), but legislation differed in various states, such as the South Australian legislation referring to an ""Aboriginal person who has, in accordance with Aboriginal tradition, social, economic and spiritual affiliations with, and responsibilities for, the lands or any part of them"".
A further complexity is introduced in a form of ranking of rights, for example in New South Wales, a traditional owner must be both born in the country and have a cultural association with the land. Peter Sutton distinguishes between ""core"" and ""contingent"" rights, which he says are recognised among most Aboriginal peoples. So there are sometimes challenges in finding ""the right people for the right country"", complicated by the fact that there are cases where both primary and secondary rights holders are described by the term. Distinguishing between ""historical people"" and others who have been custodians of the land for many generations add to the complexity. In the case of some agreements, historical people may be recognised as parties even when they don't have ""traditional"" associations with the land.
The term Traditional Owner Corporation (TOC) is used to refer to various types of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander corporations. Such a corporation is usually the negotiating body when determining native title outcomes. (A TOC is distinct from the Registered Native Title Body Corporate (RNTBC), which manages the land after a native title determination has been made.)
In Victoria, a ""traditional owner group"" is defined in the Traditional Owner Settlement Act 2010 to include those people recognised by the Attorney-General as traditional owners, based on their traditional and cultural associations with the land, and there are government guidelines detailing what these terms mean. They state that traditional ""Denotes linkages with the past that are actively kept alive by the traditional owner group members. It is not restricted to features or activities understood to be fully continuous with, and identical to, such activities or features in pre-contact Aboriginal society"".
Apart from the legal definitions, the terms traditional owners or traditional custodians of the land are included in Acknowledgment of Country wording which is used to pay respects to the people of that Country."
Native title in Australia,"Examples of alternative settlements
South West Native Title Settlement for Noongar people in Western Australia aims to resolve native title claims in exchange for statutory recognition of the Noongar people as the traditional owners of south-Western Australia. As of 2020 it is the largest native title settlement in Australian history, affecting about 30,000 Noongar people and encompassing around 200,000 km2 (77,000 sq mi) in south-western Western Australia. It has been described as ""Australia's first treaty"".
An Indigenous Land Use Agreement (ILUA) was agreed with the Kaurna Yerta Aboriginal Corporation (KYAC) in Adelaide, South Australia and effected on 19 November 2018."
Native title in Australia,"By state and territory
ACT
No native title claim has ever been granted in the ACT, because of the lack of historical records enabling such a determination to be made."
Native title in Australia,"South Australia
An Indigenous Land Use Agreement (ILUA) was agreed with the Kaurna Yerta Aboriginal Corporation (KYAC) and effected on 19 November 2018. The agreement was among the South Australian government, the federal government and the Kaurna people, with formal recognition coming after the Federal Court judgment, 18 years after lodgement. This was the first claim for a first land use agreement to be agreed to in any Australian capital city. The rights cover Adelaide's whole metropolitan area and includes ""17 parcels of undeveloped land not under freehold"". Some of the land is Crown land, some belongs to the state government and some is private land owned by corporations. Justice Debra Mortimer said it would be ""the first time in Australia that there [had] been a positive outcome within the area of (native title) determination""."
Native title in Australia,"Victoria
As of 2020, four native title claims have been determined in Victoria; three of them resulted in the recognition of native title by agreement via a consent determination in the Federal Court. In Yorta Yorta v Victoria (see above) in 2003, native title was determined not to exist by the Federal Court. The native title determinations are:"
Native title in Australia,"Wotjobaluk, Jaadwa, Jadawadjali, Wergaia and Yupagalk Peoples (known as the ""Wimmera claim - see above) (2005)
Gunditjmara People (2007)
Gunaikurnai People (October 2010)
Although the Yorta Yorta people's claim did not meet the legal standard for native title under the Act, in 2004 the Victorian Government entered into a Cooperative Management Agreement with the Yorta Yorta Nation Aboriginal Corporation, which was the first Victorian agreement reached outside the native title process, and applies to designated areas of Crown land in north central Victoria, with direct engagement between Yorta Yorta, Parks Victoria and the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning (DELWP). In October 2010, the State entered into a Traditional Owner Land Management Agreement with the Yorta Yorta, which established the Yorta Yorta Traditional Owner Land Management Board to jointly manage Barmah National Park (a TOSA settlement, under the Traditional Owner Settlement Act 2010)."
Native title in Australia,"Western Australia
An alternative settlement, the South West Native Title Settlement for Noongar people in Western Australia, aims to resolve native title claims in exchange for statutory recognition of the Noongar people as the traditional owners of south-Western Australia. As of 2020 it is the largest native title settlement in Australian history, affecting about 30,000 Noongar people and encompassing around 200,000 km2 (77,000 sq mi) in south-western Western Australia. It has been described as ""Australia's first treaty"".
The Noongar (Koorah, Nitja, Boordahwan) (Past, Present, Future) Recognition Act 2016 recognises Noongar ownership, and the settlement includes six individual Indigenous Land Use Agreements (ILUAs). On 19 December 2019, the Federal Court upheld the Native Title Registrar’s decision to register the six ILUAs, and settlement is expected to begin in the second half of 2020."
Native title in Australia,"National Native Title Council
The National Native Title Council (NNTC) is a not-for-profit organisation whose website states that it is the ""peak body for the native title sector"". Its members include regional Native Title Representative Bodies (NTRBs), Native Title Service Providers (NTSPs), local Prescribed Body Corporates (PBCs) and Traditional Owner Corporations (TOCs)."
Native title in Australia,"Human rights reports
Under the Native Title Act 1993, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner was required to prepare an annual report to the Attorney-General on the operation of the NTA and its effect on the exercise and enjoyment of human rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and to report on other matters as and when requested by the Attorney-General.
The objectives of the Commissioner were to provide and promote a human rights perspective on native title; to assist in developing more efficient native title processes; and to advocate for the co-existence between Indigenous and non-Indigenous interests in land based on compatible land use. All of the reports from 1994 to 2016 have been published online. Changes brought about by the Human Rights Legislation Amendment Act 2017 removed the statutory obligation for an annual Social Justice and Native Title Report such as those produced up to and including 2016."
Native title in Australia,"See also
Aboriginal land rights in Australia
Australian Aboriginal sovereignty
Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation
List of Australian native title court cases
List of native title claims in South Australia
Native title legislation in Australia
Outstation movement"
Native title in Australia,"References
Further reading
""AATL: Historical land right legislations Flashcards"". Quizlet. 11 October 2012. – Summary of points in the land rights movement and native title for a Yr 11 course.
Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. Native Title Research Unit (June 2000). A guide to Australian legislation relevant to native title: Volume One (NSW, VIC, QLD, SA). Aboriginal Studies Press. ISBN 0-85575-361-7. PDF
Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. Native Title Research Unit (June 2000). A guide to Australian legislation relevant to native title: Volume Two (WA, Tas., ACT, NT and Commonwealth). Aboriginal Studies Press. ISBN 0-85575-361-7. PDF
Berg, Shaun, ed. (2010). Coming to terms : Aboriginal title in South Australia. Wakefield Press. ISBN 9781862548671.
Ganesharajah, Cynthia (April 2009). Indigenous Health and Wellbeing: The Importance of Country (PDF). Native Title Research Report: Report No. 1/2009. AIATSIS. Native Title Research Unit. ISBN 9780855756697. AIATSIS summary
Gardiner-Garden, John (12 October 1993). ""The Mabo debate: a chronology"". ParlInfo.
Glaskin, Katie (2007). ""Chapter Ten: Outstation Incorporation as Precursor to a Prescribed Body Corporate 1"". In Weiner, James F.; Glaskin, Katie (eds.). Customary Land Tenure and Registration in Australia and Papua New Guinea: Anthropological Perspectives. Asia-Pacific Environment Monographs. ANU E Press. p. 199. ISBN 978-1-921313-27-1. Text
""Mabo and Native Title"". Australians Together.
""Native title and the claim process: an overview"" (PDF). National Native Title Tribunal.
""Native Title Infobase"". Federal Court of Australia. 28 October 2012. The Native Title Infobase includes selected material commencing from 1839 to the present day - online catalogue only
""Native Title Reports"". Australian Human Rights Commission. 29 November 2015. (1994– )
Native title research and resources at Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS)
""Native Title National Practice Area (NPA)"". Federal Court of Australia. 17 May 2019. – includes all applications relating to native title and Indigenous Land Use Agreements.
Van Krieken, Robert (1 July 2000), From Milirrpum to Mabo: The High Court, Terra Nullius and Moral Entrepreneurship (2000) 23 UNSW Law Journal 63.
Walker v State of South Australia (No 2) [2013] FCA 93 (17 January 2019) His Honour quotes Kirby in Fejo, who dismissed an argument that the Letters Patent Proviso provides any protection for the rights of Aboriginal people to the occupation or enjoyment of their lands.  – refers to Fejo v Northern Territory (1998) 195 CLR 96. (This case is based on s 61 Native Title Act 1993 (Cth).)"
Native title in Australia,"External links
""Native Title Act 1993"". Federal Register of Legislation. 18 January 2019. (Latest version as of July 2020)
""Search Register of Native Title Claims"". National Native Title Tribunal.
""Native title"". Government of Australia. Attorney-General's Department. 8 March 2020."
Australian Army,"The Australian Army is the principal land warfare force of Australia, a part of the Australian Defence Force (ADF) along with the Royal Australian Navy and the Royal Australian Air Force. The Army is commanded by the Chief of Army (CA), who is subordinate to the Chief of the Defence Force (CDF) who commands the ADF. The CA is also directly responsible to the Minister for Defence, with the Department of Defence administering the ADF and the Army.
Formed in 1901, as the Commonwealth Military Forces, through the amalgamation of the colonial forces of Australia following the Federation of Australia. Although Australian soldiers have been involved in a number of minor and major conflicts throughout Australia's history, only during the Second World War has Australian territory come under direct attack.
The Australian Army was initially composed almost completely of part-time soldiers, where the vast majority were in units of the Citizens Military Force (CMF or Militia) (1901–1980) during peacetime, with limits set on the regular Army. Since all reservists were barred from forcibly serving overseas, volunteer expeditionary forces (1st AIF, ANMEF, 2nd AIF) were formed to enable the Army to send large numbers of soldiers to serve overseas during periods of war. This period lasted from federation until post-1947, when a standing peacetime regular army was formed and the Australian Army Reserve (1980–present) began to decline in importance.
During its history, the Australian Army has fought in a number of major wars, including the Second Boer War, the First and Second World Wars, Korean War, Malayan Emergency, Indonesia-Malaysia Confrontation, Vietnam War, the War in Afghanistan (2001–2021) and the Iraq War. Since 1947, the Australian Army has also been involved in many peacekeeping operations, usually under the auspices of the United Nations. Today, it participates in multilateral and unilateral military exercises and provides emergency disaster relief and humanitarian aid in response to domestic and international crises."
Australian Army,"History
Formation
Formed in March 1901, following federation, the Australian Army initially consisted of the six, disbanded and separate, colonial military forces' land components. Due to the Army being continuation of the colonial armies, it became immediately embroiled in conflict as contingents had been committed to fight for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in the Second Boer War. The Army gained command of these contingents and even supplied federal units to reinforce their commitment at the request of the British government.
The Defence Act 1903, established the operation and command structure of the Australian Army. In 1911, the Universal Service Scheme was implemented, introducing conscription for the first time in Australia, with males aged 14–26 assigned into cadet and CMF units; though the scheme did not prescribe or allow overseas service outside the states and territories of Australia. This restriction would be primarily, and continually, bypassed through the process of raising separate volunteer forces until the mid-20th century; this solution was not without its drawbacks, as it caused logistical dilemmas."
Australian Army,"World War I
After the declaration of war on the Central Powers, the Australian Army raised the all volunteer First Australian Imperial Force (AIF) which had an initial recruitment of 52,561 out of a promised 20,000 men. A smaller expeditionary force, the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force (ANMEF), dealt with the issue of the German Pacific holdings. ANMEF recruitment began on 10 August 1914, and operations started 10 days later. On 11 September, the ANMEF landed at Rabaul to secure German New Guinea, with no German outposts in the Pacific left by November 1914. During the AIF's preparations to depart Australia, the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers; thereby receiving declarations of war from the Allies of World War I in early November 1914.
After initial recruitment and training, the AIF departed for Egypt where they underwent further preparations, and where the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) was formed. Their presence in Egypt was due to the planned Gallipoli campaign, an invasion of the Ottoman Empire via Gallipoli. On 25 April, the AIF landed at ANZAC Cove, which signaled the start of Australia's contribution to the campaign. Following little initial success, fighting quickly devolved into trench warfare, which precipitated a stalemate. On 15 December 1915, after eight months of fighting, the evacuation of Gallipoli commenced; it was completed 5 days later with no casualties recorded. After regrouping in Egypt, the AIF was split into two groups and further expanded with reinforcements. This division would see a majority of the Australian Light Horse fight the Ottomans in Arabia and the Levant, whereas
the rest of the AIF would go to the Western Front."
Australian Army,"Western Front
The AIF arrived in France with the 1st, 2nd, 4th and 5th Divisions; which comprised, in part, I ANZAC Corps and, in full, II ANZAC Corps. The 3rd Division would not arrive until November 1916, as it underwent training in England after its transfer from Australia. In July 1916, the AIF commenced operations with the Battle of the Somme, and more specifically with the Attack at Fromelles. Soon after, the 1st, 2nd and 4th Divisions became tied down in actions at the Battle of Pozières and Mouquet Farm. In around six weeks, the operations caused 28,000 Australian casualties. Due to these losses and pressure from the United Kingdom to maintain the AIF's manpower, Prime Minister Billy Hughes introduced the first conscription plebiscite. It was defeated by a narrow margin and created a bitter divide on the issue of conscription throughout the 20th century.
Following the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line in March 1917, which was better defended and eased manpower restraints, the first Australian assault on the Hindenburg Line occurred on 11 April 1917 with the First Battle of Bullecourt. On 20 September, the Australian contingent joined the Third Battle of Ypres with the Battle of Menin Road, and continued on to fight in the Battle of Polygon Wood, which lasted until 3 October; in total, these tow operations cost roughly 11,000 in Australian casualties. Until 15 November 1917, multiple attacks at the Battle of Broodseinde Ridge and the Battle of Passchendaele occurred, but, failed to take their objectives following the start of the rain and subsequent muddying of the fields.
On 21 March 1918, the Germans attempted a breakout through the Michael Offensive, which was part of the much larger German spring offensive; the AIF suffered 15,000 casualties due to this effort. During this operation, Australian troops conducted a series of local defences and offensives to hold and retake Villers–Brettoneux over the period 4 to 25 April 1918. After the cessation of offensives by the German Army, the Australian Corps began participating in ""Peaceful penetration"" operations, which were localised raids designed to harass and gain small tracts of territory; these proved so effective that several major operational objectives were captured.
On 4 July 1918, the Battle of Hamel saw the first successful use of tanks alongside Australians, with the battleplan of John Monash completed three minutes over the planned 90 minute operation. Following this success, the Battle of Amiens was launched on 8 August 1918, in conjunction with the Canadian Corps and the British III Corps, and concluded on 12 August 1918; General Erich Ludendorff described it as ""the black day of the German Army"". On 29 August 1918, following territorial advances and pursuits, the AIF attacked Pèronne and subsequently initiated the Battle of Mont St Quentin. Another operation around Épehy was planned for 18 September 1918, which aimed to retake the British trenches and, potentially, capture their most ambitious objective of the Hindenburg's outpost line – which they achieved.
Following news of a three-month furlough for certain soldiers, seven AIF battalions were disbanded; consequently, members of these battalions mutinied. Soon after the penetration of the Hindenburg Line, plans for the breakthrough of the main trench, with the Australian Corps as the vanguard, were completed. However, due to manpower issues, only the 3rd and 5th Divisions participated, with the American Expeditionary Forces' 27th and 30th Divisions given as reinforcements. On 29 September, following a three day long bombardment, the Battle of the Hindenburg Line commenced, wherein the corps attacked and captured more of the line. On 5 October 1918, after furious fighting, the Australian Corps was withdrawn from the front, as the entire corps had been operating continuously since 8 August 1918. They would not return to the battlefield, as Germany signed the Armistice of 11 November 1918 that ultimately ended the war on the Western Front."
Australian Army,"Middle East
The Australian mounted units, composed of the ANZAC Mounted Division and eventually the Australian Mounted Division, participated in the Sinai and Palestine campaign. They were originally stationed there to protect the Suez Canal from the Turks, and following the threat of its capture passing, they started offensive operations and helped in the re-conquest of the Sinai Desert. This was followed by the Battles of Gaza, wherein on the 31 October 1917 the 4th and 12th Light Horse took Beersheba through the last charge of the Light Horse. They continued on to capture Jerusalem on 10 December 1917 and then eventually Damascus on 1 October 1918 whereby, a few days later on 10 October 1918, the Ottoman Empire surrendered."
Australian Army,"Interbellum
Repatriation efforts were implemented between the armistice and the end of 1919, which occurred after the disbandment of the Australian Imperial Force. In 1921, CMF units were renumbered to that of the AIF, to perpetuate the honours and numerical identities of the units involved in WW1. During this period there was a complacency towards matters of defence, due to the devastating effects of the previous war on the Australian psyche. Following the election of Prime Minister James Scullin in 1929, two events occurred that substantially affected the armed forces: conscription was abolished and the economic effects of the Great Depression started to be felt in Australia. The economic ramifications of the depression led to decisions that decreased defence expenditure and manpower for the army. Since conscription was repealed, to reflect the new volunteer nature of the Citizens Forces, the CMF was renamed to the Militia."
Australian Army,"World War II
Following the declaration of war on Nazi Germany and her allies by the United Kingdom, and the subsequent confirmation by Prime Minister Robert Menzies on 3 September 1939, the Australian Army raised the Second Australian Imperial Force, a 20,000-strong volunteer expeditionary force, which initially consisted of the 6th Division; later increased to include the 7th and 9th Divisions, alongside the 8th Division which was sent to Singapore. In October 1939, compulsory military training recommenced for unmarried men aged 21, who had to complete three months of training.
The 2nd AIF commenced its first operations in North Africa with Operation Compass, that began with the Battle of Bardia. This was followed by supplying Australian units to defend against the Axis in the Battle of Greece. After the evacuation of Greece, Australian troops took part in the Battle of Crete which, though more successful, still failed and another withdrawal was ordered. During the Greek Campaign, the Allies were pushed back to Egypt and the Siege of Tobruk began. Tobruk's primary defence personnel were Australians of the 9th Division; the so-called 'Rats of Tobruk'. Additionally, the AIF participated in the Syria–Lebanon campaign. The 9th Division fought in the First and Second Battle of El Alamein before also being shipped home to fight the Japanese."
Australian Army,"Pacific
In December 1941, following the Bombing of Pearl Harbour, Australia declared war on Japan. Consequently, the AIF was requested to return home, as the subsequent rapid conquest of Southeast Asia extremely concerned Australian policymakers, and the militia was mobilised. After the Fall of Singapore, and the consequent capture of the entire 8th Division as POWs, this concern only grew. These events hastened the relief of the Rats of Tobruk, while the other divisions were immediately recalled to reinforce New Guinea. General conscription was reintroduced, though service was again limited to Australian possessions, which caused tension between the AIF and Militia. This was in addition to the CMF's perceived inferior fighting ability, with these grievances earning the Militia their nicknames of ""koalas"" and ""chocos"" or ""chocolate soldiers"".
The Imperial Japanese Navy's failure in the Battle of the Coral Sea, was the impetus for the Imperial Japanese Army to try to capture Port Moresby via the Owen Stanley Range. On 21 July 1942, the Japanese began the Kokoda Campaign after landing at Gona; attempts to defeat them by Australian battalions were met with eventual success. Resultant offensive operations concluded with the Japanese being driven out of New Guinea entirely. In parallel with these defences, the Battle of Milne Bay was waged, and when the Japanese were repulsed, it was considered their first significant reversal for the war. In November 1942, the campaign ended after the Japanese withdrawal, with Australian advances leading to the Battle of Buna–Gona."
Australian Army,"In early 1943, the Salamaua–Lae campaign began, with operations against the entrenched Japanese aimed towards recapturing the eponymous towns. This culminated in the capture of Lae, held by the 7th Division in early September 1943, from a successful combined amphibious landing at Lae and an airborne landing at Nadzab. The seaborne assault was notable as it was the first large–scale amphibious operation since Gallipoli. Subsequently, Salamaua was taken days later on 11 September 1943, by a separate joint Australia–US attack. The Battle of Lae was additionally part of the wider Huon Peninsula campaign. Following Lae's capture, the Battle of Finschhafen commenced with a relatively swift control of objectives, with subsequent Japanese counterattacks beaten off. On 17 November 1943, a major offensive that began with the Battle of Sattelberg, continued with the Battle of Wareo, and concluded with the Battle of Sio on 15 January 1944, was unleashed. The momentum of this advance was continued by the 8th Brigade, as they pursued the enemy in retreat, which culminated with the Battle of Madang.
In mid-1944, Australian forces took over the garrisoning of Torokina from the US with this changeover giving Australian command responsibility over the Bougainville campaign. Soon after arriving in November of the same year, the commander of II Corps, Lieutenant-General Stanley Savige, began an offensive to retake the island with the 3rd Division alongside the 11th and 23rd Brigades. The campaign lasted until the Japanese surrender, with controversy surrounding its little apparent significance to the war's conclusion, and the number of casualties incurred; this was one of Australia's most costliest campaigns in the Second World War.
In October 1944, Australian participation in the Aitape–Wewak campaign began with the replacement of US forces at Aitape with the Australian 6th Division. US forces had previously captured the position, and had held it passively, though Australian command found this unsuitable. On 2 November 1944, the 2/6th Cavalry Commando Regiment was tasked with patrolling the area, wherein minor engagements were reported. In early December, the commandos were sent inland to establish access to the Torricelli Range, while the 19th Brigade handled patrolling, consequently, the amount of fierce fighting and territory secured increased. Following this success, thought was given for the capture of Maprik and Wewak, though supply became a major issue in this period. On 10 February 1945, the campaign's major offensive was underway, which resulted in both falling in quick succession on 22 April 1945. Smaller operations to secure the area continued, and all significant actions ceased by July."
Australian Army,"The Borneo campaign was a series of three distinct amphibious operations that were undertaken by the 7th and 9th Divisions. The campaign began with the Battle of Tarakan on 1 May 1945, followed six weeks later by the Battle of Labuan, and concluded with the Battle of Balikpapan. The purpose of capturing Tarakan was to establish airfields, and the island was taken seven weeks following the initial amphibious landing. On 10 June 1945, the operation at Labuan commenced, and was tasked to secure resources and a naval base, and would continue until Japan's surrender. On 1 July 1945, the Balikpapan engagement commenced, with all its major objectives being acquired by war's end; this operation remains the largest amphibious operation undertaken by Australian forces, with 33,000 Australian servicemen participating. On 15 August 1945, Japan surrendered, ending the Second World War."
Australian Army,"Cold War
Korean War
After the surrender of Japan, Australia provided a contingent to the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF) which included the 34th Brigade. The units that composed the brigade would eventually become the nucleus of the regular army, with the battalions and brigade being renumbered to reflect this change. Following the start of the Korean War, the Australian Army committed troops to fight against the North Korean forces; the units came from the Australian contribution to BCOF. The 3rd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (3RAR) arrived in Pusan on 28 September 1950. Australian troop numbers would increase and continue to be deployed up until the armistice, with 3RAR being eventually joined by the 1st Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (1RAR). For a brief period, between 1951 and 1959, the Menzies Government reinstituted conscription and compulsory military training with the National Service Scheme, which required all males of eighteen years of age to serve for specified period in either the Australian Regular Army (ARA) or CMF."
Australian Army,"Malayan Emergency
The Australian military entered the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960) in October 1955, committing the 2nd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (2RAR) to fight alongside Commonwealth forces. The 2RAR fought against the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA), a communist led guerrilla army whose goal was to turn Malaya into a socialist republic, and whose leaders had previously been trained and funded by Britain to resist the Japanese occupation of Malaya. Australian military operations in Malaya consisted of patrolling actions and guarding infrastructure, though they rarely saw combat as the emergency was nearly over by the time of their deployment. All three original Royal Australian Regiment battalions would complete at least one tour before the end of operations. In August 1963, Australia ended deployments to Malaya, three years after the emergency's official end."
Australian Army,"Indonesia–Malaysia confrontation
In 1962, the Borneo Confrontation began, due to Indonesia's opposition to the formation of Malaysia. It was an undeclared war that entailed a series of border conflicts between Indonesian-backed forces and British–Malaysian allies. Initial Australian support in the conflict began, and continued throughout, with the training and supply of Malaysian troops; Australian soldiers only saw combat during defensive operations. In January 1965, permission was granted for the deployment of 3RAR, with extensive operations conducted in Sarawak from March until their withdrawal in July 1965. The subsequent deployment of 4th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (4RAR), in April 1966, was less intensive, with the battalion withdrawn in August. This is not to mention the efforts of several other corps and units in the conflict."
Australian Army,"Vietnam War
The Australian Army commenced its involvement in the Vietnam War by sending military advisors in 1962, which was then increased by sending in combat troops, specifically 1RAR, on 27 May 1965. Just before the official start of hostilities, the Australian Army was augmented with the reintroduction of conscription, which was based on a 'birthday ballot' selection process for all registered 20-year-old males. These men were required to register, unless they gave a legitimate reason for their exemption, else they faced penalties. This scheme would prove to be one of the most controversial implementations of conscription in Australia, with large protests against its adoption.
In March 1966, the Australian Army increased its commitment again with the replacement of 1RAR with the 1st Australian Task Force, a force in which all nine battalions of the Royal Australian Regiment would serve. One of the heaviest actions of the war occurred in August 1966, with the Battle of Long Tan, wherein D Company, 6th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (6RAR) successfully fended off an enemy force, estimated at 2,000 men, for four hours. In 1968, Australian forces defended against the Tet Offensive, a Viet Cong military operation, and repulsed them with few casualties. The contribution of personnel to the war was gradually wound down, starting in late-1970 and ending in 1972; the official declaration of the end of Australia's involvement in the war was made on 11 January 1973."
Australian Army,"Activities in Africa
Following the Vietnam War, there was a significant hiatus of operational activity by the Australian Army. In late 1979, in the largest deployment of the decade, the Army committed 151 troops to the Commonwealth Monitoring Force, which monitored the transition of Rhodesia to universal suffrage. A decade later in 1989, Australia deployed 300 army engineer personnel as the Australian contribution to the United Nations Transition Assistance Group in Namibia. The mission helped transition the country to independence from South African control."
Australian Army,"Recent history (1990–present)
Peacekeeping
Following the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq in August 1990, a coalition of countries sponsored by the United Nations Security Council, of which Australia was a part, gave a deadline for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait of the 15 January 1991. Iraq refused to retreat and thus full conflict and the Gulf War began two days later on 17 January 1991. In January 1993, the Australian Army deployed 26 personnel on an ongoing rotational basis to the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO), as part of a non-United Nations peacekeeping organisation that observes and enforces the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt.
Australia's largest peacekeeping deployment began in 1999 with the International Force for East Timor, while other ongoing operations include peacekeeping in the Sinai (as part of MFO), and the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (as part of Operation Paladin since 1956). Humanitarian relief after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake in Aceh Province, Indonesia, Operation Sumatra Assist, ended on 24 March 2005."
Australian Army,"Afghanistan and Iraq
Following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, Australia promised troops to any military operations that the US commenced in response to the attacks. Subsequently, the Australian Army committed combat troops to Afghanistan in Operation Slipper. This combat role continued until the end of 2013 when it was replaced by a training contingent operating under Operation Highroad until 2021.
After the Gulf War the UN imposed heavy restrictions on Iraq to stop them producing any Weapon of mass destruction. In the early 21st century, the US accused Iraq of possessing these weapons, and requested that the UN invade the country in response, a motion which Australia supported. The UN denied this motion, however, it did not stop a coalition, that Australia joined, invading the country; thus starting the Iraq War on 19 March 2003.
Between April 2015 and June 2020, the Army deployed a 300-strong element to Iraq, designated as Task Group Taji, as part of Operation Okra. In support of a capacity building mission, Task Group Taji's main role was to provide training to Iraqi forces, during which Australian troops have served alongside counterparts from New Zealand.
In 2020 an investigation of allegations of war crimes committed during Australian military operations in Afghanistan was concluded with the release of the Brereton Report. The report identified 25 ADF personnel that were involved directly or indirectly in the murder of 39 civilians and prisoners, with 19 referred to the Australian Federal Police to be criminally investigated. A 'warrior culture' in the SAS was specifically criticised with investigators 'frustrated by outright deceit by those who knew the truth and, not infrequently, misguided resistance to inquiries and investigations by their superiors'."
Australian Army,"Organisation
1st (Australian) Division
Beginning 1 July 2023, the division was renamed the 1st Australian Division. The 1st, 3rd and 7th Brigades were placed under the direct control of the division's headquarters. This reform aimed to improve the connections between the divisional headquarters and the brigades it commands during deployments."
Australian Army,"1 Brigade – Light Combat Brigade based in Darwin.
3 Brigade – Armoured Combat Brigade based in Townsville.
7 Brigade – Motorised Combat Brigade based in Brisbane."
Australian Army,"Forces Command
Forces Command controls for administrative purposes all non-combat assets of the Australian Army. Its focus is on unifying all training establishments to create a base for scaling and mobilisation:
2 Brigade – Health Brigade based across Australia.
6 Brigade (CS&ISTAR) – Mixed brigade based in Sydney.
8 Brigade – training brigade with units around Australia.
17 Sustainment Brigade – Logistic brigade based in Sydney.
Additionally, Forces Command includes the following training and support establishments:"
Australian Army,"Army Recruit Training Centre at Kapooka, NSW;
Royal Military College, Duntroon in the ACT;
Combined Arms Training Centre at Puckapunyal, Victoria;
Army Logistic Training Centre at Bonegilla and Bandiana, Victoria;
Defence Command Support Training Centre at Macleod, Victoria;
Combat Training Centre at  Townsville, Queensland.
39th Operational Support Battalion at Sydney, NSW."
Australian Army,"2nd (Australian) Division
Administers the reserve forces from its headquarters located in Sydney."
Australian Army,"4 Brigade – based in Victoria and Tasmania.
5 Brigade – based in New South Wales.
9 Brigade – Integrated Combat Brigade based in South Australia.
11 Brigade – based in Queensland.
13 Brigade – based in Western Australia."
Australian Army,"Aviation
Army Aviation Command is responsible for the Australian Army's helicopters and training, aviation safety and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). Army Aviation Command comprises:"
Australian Army,"16 Aviation Brigade – brigade based in Gallipoli Barracks at  Enoggera, Brisbane.
Army Aviation Training Centre at Oakey, Queensland"
Australian Army,"Special Forces
Special Operations Command is a command formation of equal status to the other commands in the ADF and includes all of Army's special forces units. Special Operations Command comprises:"
Australian Army,Special Forces Group - a brigade-level headquarters.
Australian Army,"Colours, standards and guidons
Infantry, and some other combat units of the Australian Army carry flags called the King's Colour and the Regimental Colour, known as ""the Colours"". Armoured units carry Standards and Guidons – flags smaller than Colours and traditionally carried by Cavalry, Lancer, Light Horse and Mounted Infantry units. The 1st Armoured Regiment is the only unit in the Australian Army to carry a Standard, in the tradition of heavy armoured units. Artillery units' guns are considered to be their Colours, and on parade are provided with the same respect. Non-combat units (combat service support corps) do not have Colours, as Colours are battle flags and so are only available to combat units. As a substitute, many have Standards or Banners. Units awarded battle honours have them emblazoned on their Colours, Standards and Guidons. They are a link to the unit's past and a memorial to the fallen. Artillery do not have Battle Honours – their single Honour is ""Ubique"" which means ""Everywhere"" – although they can receive Honour Titles.
The Army is the guardian of the National Flag and as such, unlike the Royal Australian Air Force, does not have a flag or Colours. The Army, instead, has a banner, known as the Army Banner. To commemorate the centenary of the Army, the Governor General Sir William Deane, presented the Army with a new Banner at a parade in front of the Australian War Memorial on 10 March 2001. The banner was presented to the Regimental Sergeant Major of the Army (RSM-A), Warrant Officer Peter Rosemond.
The Army Banner bears the Australian Coat of Arms on the obverse, with the dates ""1901–2001"" in gold in the upper hoist. The reverse bears the Rising Sun badge of the Australian Army, flanked by seven campaign honours on small gold-edged scrolls: South Africa, World War I, World War II, Korea, Malaya-Borneo, South Vietnam, and Peacekeeping. The banner is trimmed with gold fringe, has gold and crimson cords and tassels, and is mounted on a pike with the usual British royal crest finial."
Australian Army,"Personnel
Strength
As of June 2022 the Army had 28,387 permanent (regular) members and 20,742 reservists (part-time); all of whom are volunteers. As of June 2022, women made up 15.11% of the Army, with a target set for 18% 2025. Gender based restrictions for frontline combat or training roles were lifted in January 2013. Also as of June 2022, Indigenous Australians made up 3.7% of the Army."
Australian Army,"Rank and insignia
The ranks of the Australian Army are based on the ranks of the British Army, and carry mostly the same actual insignia. For officers the ranks are identical except for the shoulder title ""Australia"". The Non-Commissioned Officer insignia are the same up until Warrant Officer, where they are stylised for Australia (for example, using the Australian, rather than the British coat of arms).
The ranks of the Australian Army are as follows:"
Australian Army,"Uniforms and Dress
The Australian Army uniforms are detailed in the Australian Army Dress Manual and are grouped into nine general categories, each ranging from ceremonial dress, to general duties dress, to battle dress (in addition there are a number of special categories specific to uniforms that are only worn when posted to specific locations, like ADFA or RMC-D), these are further divided into individual 'Dress Orders' denoted by alphabetical suffixes that detail the specific items of clothing, embellishment and accoutrements, i.e. Dress Order No. 1A - 'Ceremonial Parade Service Dress', Dress Order No. 2G - 'General Duty Office Dress', Dress Order No 4C 'Combat Dress (AMCU)' . The slouch hat or beret are the regular service and general duties hat, while the field hat, or combat helmet is for use in the field while training, on exercise, or on operations. In December 2013 the Chief of Army reversed a previous ban on berets as general duties headwear for all personnel except Special Forces personnel (SASR, CDO Regiments). Australian Multi-cam Camouflage Uniform is the camouflage pattern for Australian Army camouflage uniforms, and was introduced in 2014, replacing the Disruptive Pattern Camouflage Uniform (DPCU), and Disruptive Pattern Desert Uniform (DPDU) for all Australian Army orders of dress."
Australian Army,"Equipment
Firearms and artillery
Vehicles
Support
Aircraft
Bases
The Army's operational headquarters, Forces Command, is located at Victoria Barracks in Sydney. The Australian Army's three regular brigades are based at Robertson Barracks near Darwin, Lavarack Barracks in Townsville, and Gallipoli Barracks in Brisbane. The Deployable Joint Force Headquarters is also located at Gallipoli Barracks.
Other important Army bases include the Army Aviation Centre near Oakey, Queensland, Holsworthy Barracks near Sydney, Lone Pine Barracks in Singleton, New South Wales and Woodside Barracks near Adelaide, South Australia. The SASR is based at Campbell Barracks Swanbourne, a suburb of Perth, Western Australia.
Puckapunyal, north of Melbourne, houses the Australian Army's Combined Arms Training Centre, Land Warfare Development Centre, and three of the five principal Combat Arms schools. Further barracks include Steele Barracks in Sydney, Keswick Barracks in Adelaide, and Irwin Barracks at Karrakatta in Perth. Dozens of Australian Army Reserve depots are located across Australia."
Australian Army,"Australian Army Journal
Since June 1948, the Australian Army has published its own journal titled the Australian Army Journal. The journal's first editor was Colonel Eustace Keogh, and initially, it was intended to assume the role that the Army Training Memoranda had filled during the Second World War, although its focus, purpose, and format has shifted over time. Covering a broad range of topics including essays, book reviews and editorials, with submissions from serving members as well as professional authors, the journal's stated goal is to provide ""...the primary forum for Army's professional discourse... [and]... debate within the Australian Army... [and improve the]... intellectual rigor of that debate by adhering to a strict and demanding standard of quality"". In 1976, the journal was placed on hiatus as the Defence Force Journal began publication; however, publishing of the Australian Army Journal began again in 1999 and since then the journal has been published largely on a quarterly basis, with only minimal interruptions."
Australian Army,"See also
Australian Defence Force ranks and insignia
Australian military slang
Battle and theatre honours of the Australian Army
Conscription in Australia
List of Australian Army units
List of Australian military memorials
List of military weapons of Australia
Army (newspaper)"
Australian Army,"References
Department of Defence (2022). Defence Annual Report 2021–22 (PDF) (Report). Commonwealth of Australia. ISBN 978-1-925890-48-8. Retrieved 29 July 2023."
Australian Army,"Citations
Notes
Bibliography
Further reading
External links"
Australian Army,"Official website 
Australian Army Dress Manual – AL5 (2013)"
Flag of Australia,"The national flag of Australia is based on the British Blue Ensign—a blue field with the Union Jack in the upper hoist quarter—augmented with a large white seven-pointed star (the Commonwealth Star) and a representation of the Southern Cross constellation, made up of five white stars (one small five-pointed star and four, larger, seven-pointed stars). Australia also has a number of other official flags representing its people and government bodies.
The original version of the flag first flew as the Commonwealth blue ensign on 3 September 1901, after being selected alongside a red version (the Red Ensign) in a competition held following Federation. A slightly simplified version as approved by King Edward VII was officially adopted in 1903. It was later modified to the current design on 8 December 1908, with the change from a six to a seven point Commonwealth Star. In 1954, the flag was recognised in legislation with the passage of the Flags Act 1953. This act also ended the confusion since 1901 as to whether the red ensign or the blue ensign was to be used, with the blue ensign designated as the Australian National Flag and given priority for the first time over the Union Flag."
Flag of Australia,"Design
Devices
The Australian flag uses three prominent symbols: the Southern Cross, the Union Jack and the Commonwealth Star.
In its original usage as the flag of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, the Union Flag combined three heraldic crosses which represent the countries of the United Kingdom (as constituted in 1801):"
Flag of Australia,"The red St George's Cross of England
The white diagonal St Andrew's Cross of Scotland
The red diagonal St Patrick's Cross of Ireland
The Union Jack acknowledges the history of British settlement in Australia. Historically, it was included in the design as a demonstration of loyalty to the British Empire.
The Commonwealth Star, also known as the Federation Star, originally had six points, representing the six federating colonies. In 1908, a seventh point was added to symbolise the Territory of Papua, and any future territories. Another rationale for the change was to match the star used on the coat of arms, which was created in the same year. The Commonwealth Star does not have any official relation to Beta Centauri, despite the latter's brightness and location in the sky; however, the 1870 version of the flag of South Australia featured the pointer stars, Alpha and Beta Centauri.
The Southern Cross is one of the most distinctive constellations visible in the Southern Hemisphere, and has been used to represent Australia since the early days of British settlement. Ivor Evans, one of the flag's designers, intended the Southern Cross to also refer to the four moral virtues ascribed to the four main stars by Dante: justice, prudence, temperance and fortitude. The number of points on the stars of the Southern Cross on the modern Australian flag differs from the original competition-winning design, in which they ranged between five and nine points each, representing their relative brightness in the night sky. The stars are named after the first five letters of the Greek alphabet, in decreasing order of brightness in the sky. Alpha was originally larger than Beta and Gamma whilst Delta was originally smaller than Beta and Gamma. In order to simplify manufacture, the British Admiralty standardised the size and shape of the four larger outer stars at seven points and each of the same size, leaving the smaller, more central star with five points. This change was officially gazetted on 23 February 1903.
A complete specification for the official design was published in the Commonwealth Gazette in 1934."
Flag of Australia,"Colours
The colours of the flag, although not specified by the Flags Act, have been given Pantone specifications by the Parliamentary and Government Branch of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. The Australian Government's Style Manual for Authors, Editors and Printers also gives CMYK and RGB specifications for depicting the flag in print and on screen respectively."
Flag of Australia,"The shade of the red colour in the canton of the Australian flag (Pantone 185C, Hex: #FF0000) is actually generally lighter than the shade used (no specific shade is specified) in the British flag (Pantone 186C, Hex: #C8102E) from which it originated. The blue colour has a different hex code for RGB scheme, but when printed -the Pantone number- it is the same: Australia (Pantone 280C, Hex: 00008B) vs. United Kingdom (Pantone 280C, Hex: 012169)."
Flag of Australia,"Construction
Constituent parts of the flag of Australia
		
			
			
		
		
			
			
		
		
			
			
		"
Flag of Australia,"Under the Flags Act, the Australian National Flag must meet the following specifications:"
Flag of Australia,"the Union Jack occupying the upper quarter (canton) next to the staff;
a large seven-pointed white star (six representing the six states of Australia and one representing the territories) in the centre of the lower quarter next to the staff and pointing direct to the centre of St George's Cross in the Union Jack;
five white stars (representing the Southern Cross) in the half of the flag further from the staff.
The location of the stars is as follows:"
Flag of Australia,"Commonwealth Star – 7-pointed star, centred in lower hoist.
Alpha Crucis – 7-pointed star, straight below centre fly 1⁄6 up from bottom edge.
Beta Crucis – 7-pointed star, 1⁄4 of the way left and 1⁄16 up from the centre fly.
Gamma Crucis – 7-pointed star, straight above centre fly 1⁄6 down from top edge.
Delta Crucis – 7-pointed star, 2⁄9 of the way right and 31⁄240 up from the centre fly.
Epsilon Crucis – 5-pointed star, 1⁄10 of the way right and 1⁄24 down from the centre fly.
The outer diameter of the Commonwealth Star is 3⁄20 of the flag's width, while that of the stars in the Southern Cross is 1⁄14 of the flag's width, except for Epsilon, for which the fraction is 1⁄24. Each star's inner diameter is 4⁄9 of the outer diameter. The flag's width is the measurement of the hoist edge of the flag (the distance from top to bottom)."
Flag of Australia,"Protocol
Guidelines for flying the flag are laid out in the pamphlet ""Australian Flags"", which is infrequently published by the Australian Government. The guidelines say that the Australian National Flag is allowed to be flown on every day of the year, and that it ""should be treated with the respect and dignity it deserves as the nation's most important national symbol"".
The National Flag must always be flown in a position superior to that of any other flag or ensign when flown in Australia or on Australian territory, and it should always be flown aloft and free. The flag must be flown in all government buildings and (where possible) displayed in or near polling stations when there is a national election or referendum. Government ships, fishing vessels, pleasure craft, small craft and commercial vessels under 24 metres in tonnage length, can fly either the Red Ensign or the Australian National Flag, but not both. The British Blue Ensign can be flown on an Australian owned ship instead of the Australian flag if the owner has a warrant valid under British law.
The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet also advises that the flag should only be flown during daylight hours, unless it is illuminated. Two flags should not be flown from the same flagpole. The flag should not be displayed upside down under any circumstances, not even to express a situation of distress. The flag is not to be placed or dropped on the ground, nor should it be used to cover an object in the lead-up to an unveiling ceremony, or to hide other material. Flags that have decayed or faded should not be displayed. Old or decayed flags should be disposed of in private ""in a dignified way""; a method given as an example is to cut the flag into small pieces before being placed in the waste."
Flag of Australia,"When the flag is flown at half-mast, it should be recognisably at half-mast—for example, a third of the way down from the top of the pole. The Australian flag should never be flown half mast at night, unless directed to half-mast for an extended period. Days on which flags are flown at half-mast on government buildings include,"
Flag of Australia,"On the death of the sovereign – from the time of announcement of the death up to and including the funeral. On the day the accession of the new sovereign is proclaimed, it is customary to raise the flag to the top of the mast from 11 am.
On the death of a member of the royal family by special command of the Sovereign and/or by direction of the Australian Government.
On the death of the governor-general or a former governor-general.
On the death of a distinguished Australian citizen in accordance with protocol. Flags in any locality may be flown at half-mast on the death of a notable local citizen or on the day, or part of the day, of their funeral.
On the death of the head of state of another country with which Australia has diplomatic relations – the flag would be flown at half-mast on the day of the funeral.
On ANZAC Day the flag is flown at half-mast until noon.
On Remembrance Day flags are flown at peak until 10:30 am, at half-mast from 10:30 am to 11:02 am, then at peak for the remainder of the day.
The department provides an email service called the Commonwealth Flag Network, which gives information on national occasions to fly the flag at half-mast as well as national days of commemoration and celebration of the flag.
The Australian National Flag may be used for commercial or advertising purposes without formal permission as long as the flag is used in a dignified manner and reproduced completely and accurately; it should not be defaced by overprinting with words or illustrations, it should not be covered by other objects in displays, and all symbolic parts of the flag should be identifiable. It also must sit first (typically, left) where more than one flag is used. For this reason the Collingwood Football Club had to reverse its logo, which previously featured the flag until a logo refresh at the end of 2017.
There have been several attempts to make desecration of the Australian flag a crime. In 1953, during the second reading debate on the Flags Bill, the leader of the Opposition, Arthur Calwell, unsuccessfully called for provisions to be added to the bill to criminalise desecration. Michael Cobb introduced private member's bills in 1989, 1990, 1991 and 1992 to ban desecration, but on each occasion the bill lapsed. In 2002, the leader of the National Party, John Anderson, proposed to introduce laws banning desecration of the Australian flag, a call that attracted support from some parliamentarians both in his own party and the senior Coalition partner, the Liberal Party. The Prime Minister, John Howard, rejected the calls, stating that ""in the end I guess it's part of the sort of free speech code that we have in this country"". In 2003, the Australian flags (Desecration of the Flag) Bill was tabled in Parliament by Trish Draper without support from Howard and subsequently lapsed. In 2006, following a flag-burning incident during the 2005 Cronulla riots and a burnt flag display by a Melbourne artist, Liberal MP Bronwyn Bishop introduced the Protection of the Australian National Flag (Desecration of the Flag) Bill 2006. This bill sought to make it an offence to desecrate the flag by ""wilfully destroying or otherwise mutilating the Australian National Flag in circumstances where a reasonable person would infer that the destruction or mutilation is intended publicly to express contempt or disrespect for the Flag or the Australian Nation"". The bill received a second reading but subsequently lapsed and did not proceed to be voted in the House of Representatives."
Flag of Australia,"History
The Union Flag, as the flag of the British Empire, was first used on Australian soil on 29 April 1770 when Lieutenant James Cook landed at Botany Bay. Following the arrival of the First Fleet, Captain Arthur Phillip established a convict settlement at Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788. He first raised the Union Flag on 7 February 1788 when he proclaimed the Colony of New South Wales.
The Union Flag at that stage was the one introduced in 1606, which did not include the Saint Patrick's Saltire; it was included from 1801 after the Acts of Union 1801. The second version post-1801 is depicted on the Australian flag. Each colony also had its own flag based on the British Blue Ensign, defaced with a state badge. As an Australian national consciousness began to emerge, several flag movements were formed and unofficial new flags came into common usage. Two attempts were made throughout the nineteenth century to design a national flag. The first such attempt was the National Colonial Flag created in 1823–1824 by Captains John Nicholson and John Bingle. This flag consisted of a red cross on a white background, with an eight-point star on each of the four limbs of the cross, while incorporating a Union Jack in the canton. The most popular national flag of the period was the 1831 Federation Flag, also designed by Nicholson. This flag was the same at the National Colonial Flag, except that the cross was blue instead of resembling that of St. George. Although the flag was designed by Nicholson in 1831, it did not become widely popular until the latter part of the century, when calls for federation began to grow louder. These flags, and many others such as the Eureka Flag (which came into use at the Eureka Stockade in 1854), featured the Southern Cross. The oldest known flag to show the stars arranged as they are seen in the sky is the Anti-Transportation League Flag, which is similar in design to the present National Flag. The differences were that there was no Commonwealth Star, while the components of the Southern Cross are depicted with eight points and in gold. This flag was only briefly in usage, as two years after the formation of the Anti-Transportation League in 1851, the colonial authorities decided to stop the intake of convicts, so the ATL ceased its activities. The Eureka Flag has become an enduring symbol in Australian culture and has been used by various groups and movements. The Murray River Flag, popular since the 1850s, is still widely used by boats that traverse Australia's main waterway. It is the same as the National Colonial Flag, except that the white background in the three quadrants other the canton were replaced with four alternating blue and white stripes, representing the four major rivers that run into the Murray River."
Flag of Australia,"1901 Federal Flag Design Competition
As Federation approached, thoughts turned to an official federal flag. In 1900, the Melbourne Herald conducted a design competition with a prize of 25 Australian pounds (A$4,400 in 2021 terms). The competition conducted by the Review of Reviews for Australasia—a Melbourne-based publication— suggested that entries incorporate a design based on the British ensigns and around the Southern Cross, noting that designs without these emblems were unlikely to be successful. After Federation on 1 January 1901, and following receipt of a request from the British government to design a new flag, the new Commonwealth Government held an official competition for a new federal flag in April. The competition attracted 32,823 entries, including those originally sent to the Review of Reviews. One of these was submitted by an unnamed governor of a colony.  The two contests were merged after the Review of Reviews agreed to being integrated into the government initiative.  The £75 prize money of each competition were combined and augmented by a further £50 donated by Havelock Tobacco Company.  Each competitor was required to submit two coloured sketches, a red ensign for the merchant service and public use, and a blue ensign for naval and official use. The judging criteria for the designs included historical relevance, compliance with the conventions of heraldry, originality, utility, and the cost of manufacture. The majority of designs incorporated the Union Flag and the Southern Cross, but native animals were also popular, including one that depicted a variety of indigenous animals playing cricket, a six-tailed kangaroo representing the six Australian states, and a kangaroo aiming a gun at the Southern Cross. The entries were put on display at the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne and the judges took six days to deliberate before reaching their conclusion. Five almost identical entries were chosen as the winning design, and the designers shared the £200 (2021: $35,200) prize money, with £40 each. They were Ivor Evans, a fourteen-year-old schoolboy from Melbourne; Leslie John Hawkins, a teenager apprenticed to an optician from Sydney; Egbert John Nuttall, an architect from Melbourne; Annie Dorrington, an artist from Perth; and William Stevens, a ship's officer from Auckland, New Zealand. The differences to the current flag were the six-pointed Commonwealth Star, while the components stars in the Southern Cross had different numbers of points, with more if the real star was brighter. This led to five stars of nine, eight, seven, six and five points respectively. The Inner Diameter of the six-pointed Federal Star in the lower Hoist was larger than that of the later seven-pointed version of the Federal Star in the lower Hoist. Alpha Crucis and Delta Crucis were of different sizes than they are today—with Alpha being larger than at present and Delta being smaller than at present.
The flag's initial reception was mixed. Readers of The Age newspaper were told that,"
Flag of Australia,"a huge ""Blue Ensign,"" with the prize design of the Southern Cross and a six pointed star thereon, was run up to the top of the flagstaff on the dome, and breaking, streamed out on the heavy south-westerly breeze a brave and inspiriting picture.
The report carried by the Argus newspaper was also celebratory in nature, stating,"
Flag of Australia,"In years to come the flag which floated yesterday in the Exhibition building over Her Excellency the Countess of Hopetoun, who stood for Great Britain, and the Prime Minister (Mr Barton), who stood for Australia, will, in all human probability, become the emblem upon which the millions of the free people of the Commonwealth will gaze with a thrill of national pride.
Alternatively, the then republican magazine The Bulletin labelled it,"
Flag of Australia,"a staled réchauffé of the British flag, with no artistic virtue, no national significance ... Minds move slowly: and Australia is still Britain's little boy. What more natural than that he should accept his father's cut-down garments, – lacking the power to protest, and only dimly realising his will. That bastard flag is a true symbol of the bastard state of Australian opinion.
As the design was basically the Victorian flag with a star added, many critics in both the Federal Government and the New South Wales government objected to the chosen flag for being ""too Victorian"". They wanted the Australian Federation Flag, and Prime Minister Barton, who had been promoting the Federation Flag, submitted this flag along with that chosen by the judges to the Admiralty for final approval. The Admiralty chose the Red for private vessels and Blue Ensigns for government ships. The Barton government regarded both the Blue and Red Ensigns as colonial maritime flags and ""grudgingly"" agreed to fly it only on naval ships. Later governments, that of Chris Watson in 1904 and Andrew Fisher in 1910, were also unhappy with the design, wanting something ""more distinctive"" and more ""indicative of Australian unity"". "
Flag of Australia,"On 3 September 1901, the new Australian flag flew for the first time from the dome of the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne. The names of the joint winners of the design competition were announced by Hersey, Countess of Hopetoun (the wife of the Governor-General, the 7th Earl of Hopetoun) and she unfurled the flag for the first time. Since 1996 this date has been officially known as Australian National Flag Day.
The competition-winning designs were submitted to the British Colonial Secretary in 1902.  Prime Minister Edmund Barton announced in the Commonwealth Gazette that King Edward VII had officially approved the design as the flag of Australia on 11 February 1903. The published version made all the stars in the Southern Cross seven-pointed and of equal size apart from the smallest—and is the same as the current design except for the six-pointed Commonwealth Star."
Flag of Australia,"Blue versus red ensign
In the decades following federation the red ensign was also the pre-eminent flag in use by private citizens on land. This was largely due to the Commonwealth government, assisted by flag suppliers, discouraging the use of the blue ensign by the general public. Both the blue and red versions were used by armed forces during the First and Second World Wars (see: Flags of the Australian Defence Force). A colourised version of a photograph held by the Australian War Memorial of the Armistice Day celebrations in Sydney's Martin Place, 11 November 1918, reveals both ensigns being displayed by the assembled crowd. Illustrations and photos of the opening of Australia's provisional Parliament House in 1927 show Australian Ensigns flown alongside Union Flags. However, sources disagree on the colours of the Australian flags, leaving open the possibility that either ensign or both were used.
A 1934 issue of National Geographic covering the flags of the world and containing coloured illustrations describes the red ensign as ""Australia – Merchant"" and omits the blue ensign altogether. A memo from the Prime Minister's Department dated 6 March 1939 states that ""the Red Ensign is the flag to be flown by the public generally"" and the federal government policy was ""The flying of the Commonwealth Blue Ensign is reserved for Commonwealth Government use but there is no reservation in the case of the Commonwealth Merchant Flag, or Red Ensign""."
Flag of Australia,"In the 1940s, the federal government began to encourage public use of the blue ensign. Despite this, there remained confusion until the Flags Act 1953 declared the Blue Ensign to be the national flag and the Red Ensign the flag of the Australian mercantile marine. It has been claimed that this choice was made on the basis that the predominately red version carried too many communist overtones for the government of the day to be legislated for as the chief national symbol, although no cabinet documents yet released to the public including the more detailed minutes have ever been adduced in support of this theory. This theory is unlikely, as since 1904 the Australian Government had given precedence to the blue ensign, for example by giving the right to fly it in schools in 1940. Blue suited the anti-communist policy of the Menzies government (and other organisations such as the Catholic Church), however it was also suitable to the Labor party as it was the same colour as the Eureka Flag. The Red Ensign continues to be paraded on Anzac Day in recognition of its historical significance.
Technically, private non-commercial vessels were liable to a substantial fine if they did not fly the British Red Ensign. However, an Admiralty Warrant was issued on 5 December 1938, authorising these vessels to fly the Australian Red Ensign. The Shipping Registration Act 1981 reaffirmed that the Australian Red Ensign was the proper colours for commercial ships over 24 metres (79 ft) in tonnage length.
As a result of the declaration of 3 September as Merchant Navy Day in 2008, the Red Ensign can be flown on land alongside the Australian national flag on this occasion as a matter of protocol."
Flag of Australia,"Status of the Union Jack
The Blue Ensign replaced the Union Jack at the Olympic Games at St Louis in 1904. In the same year, due to lobbying by Richard Crouch MP, it had the same status as the Union Flag in the UK, when the Australian House of Representatives proclaimed that the Blue Ensign ""should be flown upon all forts, vessels, saluting places and public buildings of the Commonwealth upon all occasions when flags are used"". The government agreed to fly the Blue Ensign on special flag days, but not if it meant additional expense, which undermined the motion. The Blue Ensign could only be flown on a state government building if a state flag was not available.
On 2 June 1904 a resolution was passed by parliament to replace the Union Jack with the ""Australian flag"" on forts. Initially the Department of Defence resisted using the Flag, considering it to be a marine ensign and favouring King's Regulations that specified the use of the Union Jack. After being approached by the Department of Defence, Prime Minister Chris Watson stated in parliament that he was not satisfied with the design of the Australian flag and that implementation of the 1904 resolution could wait until consideration was given to ""adopt another [flag] which in our opinion is more appropriate"". In 1908, Australian Army Military Order, No 58/08 ordered the ""Australian Ensign"" replace the Union Flag at all military establishments. From 1911 it was the saluting flag of the Australian army at all reviews and ceremonial parades.
The Royal Australian Navy (RAN) was promulgated on 5 October 1911 and was directed to fly the British White Ensign on the stern and the flag of Australia on the jackstaff. Despite the government wanting to use the Blue Ensign on Australian warships, officers continued to fly the Union Flag, and it was not until 1913, following public protest in Fremantle after its use for the review of HMAS Melbourne, that the government reminded them of the 1911 legislation. The British White Ensign was finally replaced by a distinctively Australian White Ensign on 1 March 1967 (see Flags of the Australian Defence Force). Despite the new Australian flags official use, from 1901 until the 1920s the Federation Flag remained the most popular Australian flag for public and even some official events. It was flown at the 1907 State Premiers conference in Melbourne and during the 1927 visit to Australia of the Duke and Duchess of York, the future King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.
In the 1920s there was debate over whether the Blue Ensign was reserved for Commonwealth buildings only, culminating in a 1924 agreement that the Union Flag should take precedence as the National Flag with state and local governments henceforth able to use the blue ensign. As the Union Flag was recognised as the National flag, it was considered disloyal to fly either ensign without the Union flag alongside, and it was the Union Flag that covered the coffins of Australia's war dead.
In 1940 the Victorian government passed legislation allowing schools to purchase Blue Ensigns, which in turn allowed its use by private citizens. Prime Minister Robert Menzies then recommended schools, government building and private citizens to use the Blue Ensign, issuing a statement the following year allowing Australians to use either ensign providing it was done so respectfully.
Prime Minister Ben Chifley issued a similar statement in 1947.
On 4 December 1950, the Prime Minister Robert Menzies affirmed the Blue ensign as the National flag and in 1951 King George VI approved the Government's recommendation."
Flag of Australia,"When the Flags Bill was introduced into parliament on 20 November 1953, Menzies said,This bill is very largely a formal measure which puts into legislative form what has become almost the established practice in Australia ... The design adopted was submitted to His Majesty King Edward VII, and he was pleased to approve of it as the Australian flag in 1902. However, no legislative action has ever been taken to determine the precise form of the flag or the circumstances of its use, and this bill has been brought down to produce that result.
This status was formalised on 14 February 1954, when Queen Elizabeth II gave royal assent to the Flags Act 1953, which had been passed two months earlier. The monarch's assent was timed to coincide with the Queen's visit to the country and came after she had opened the new session of Parliament. The act confers statutory powers on the governor-general to appoint ""flags and ensigns of Australia"" and authorise warrants and make rules as to use of flags. Section 8 ensures that the ""right or privilege"" of a person to fly the Union Flag is not affected by the act.
South Australia chose to continue with the Union Flag as National flag until 1956, when schools were given the option of using either the Union or Australian flags. The Union Flag was still regarded as the National flag by many Australians well into the 1970s, which inspired Arthur Smout's campaign from 1968 to 1982 to encourage Australians to give the Australian flag precedence.
By the mid-1980s, the Commonwealth Government no longer reminded Australians they had the right to fly the Union Flag alongside the National Flag or provided illustrations of how to correctly display them together.
In 1977, the Australian flag was first displayed in the House of Representatives in Old Parliament House. It continued to be displayed in the chamber on the opening New Parliament House in 1988. Subsequently, the flag was displayed in the Senate for the first time in 1992."
Flag of Australia,"Flag Day
In 1996, 3 September was proclaimed as Australian National Flag Day. Flag Day celebrations had been occurring in Sydney since 1985. The inaugural event was held under the auspices of the New South Wales branch of the Australian National Flag Association to commemorate the anniversary of the flag being first flown in 1901. On Flag Day, ceremonies are held in schools, major centres, and the Governor-General, Governors and some politicians attend or release statements to the media. Australian National Flag Day is not a public holiday."
Flag of Australia,"Centenary flags
Centenary flag of state
On the centenary of the first flying of the flag, 3 September 2001, the Australian National Flag Association presented the then prime minister John Howard with a flag at the Royal Exhibition Building intended to replace the missing original flag. This flag was not a replica of the original flag, on which the Commonwealth Star had only six points, but was a current Australian National Flag with a seven pointed Commonwealth Star. The flag has a special headband, including a cardinal red stripe and an inscription. The red stripe represents the ""crimson thread of kinship of all peoples of Australia""; an idea sourced from a Henry Parkes speech that urged Federation, due to the ""crimson thread of kinship"" of a common British origin that connected the colonists together. 
A warrant authorising the use of the Centenary Flag under section 6 of the Flags Act was issued by the Governor-General and the flag is now used as the official flag of state on important occasions. These included the opening of new parliamentary terms and when visiting heads of state arrive. The flag has been transported across the country for flying in every state and territory. It was later used on Remembrance Day in 2003 for the opening of the Australian War Memorial in Hyde Park in London."
Flag of Australia,"Parliament house centenary flag
On 18 September 2001 during the centenary of federation the federal member for Hinkler, Paul Neville, requested to the speaker that,"
Flag of Australia,"before [the flag] becomes too faded or too tattered, [it] be taken down and perhaps offered to a museum or an art gallery as the seminal flag that flew over this building 100 years from the time the first flag was flown?""
The parliament house centenary flag was subsequently entrusted to the Australian flag Society and has been paraded at schools to mark Australian National Flag Day on a tour of the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales and Queensland."
Flag of Australia,"Other Australian flags
Under Section 5 of the Flags Act 1953, the Governor-General may proclaim flags other than the National Flag and the Red Ensign as flags or ensigns of Australia. Five flags have been appointed in this manner. The first two were the Royal Australian Navy Ensign and the Royal Australian Air Force Ensign, the flags used by the Royal Australian Navy and the Royal Australian Air Force. The Australian Army has no ensign of its own, but they are given the ceremonial task to be the defender of the National Flag. The Air Force and the Navy flew the appropriate British ensigns (the White Ensign and the Royal Air Force Ensign) until the adoption of similar ensigns based on the Australian National Flag in 1948 and 1967 respectively. The current Navy and Air Force Ensigns were officially appointed in 1967 and 1982 respectively.
The Queen's Personal Australian flag was approved by Queen Elizabeth II on 20 September 1962 and was only flown when she visited Australia. It was used in a similar way as the Royal Standard of the United Kingdom.
In 1995, the Aboriginal flag and the Torres Strait Islander flag were also appointed flags of Australia. While mainly seen as a gesture of reconciliation, this recognition caused a small amount of controversy at the time, with then opposition leader John Howard describing it as divisive. Some Indigenous people, such as the flag's designer Harold Thomas, felt that the government was appropriating their flag, saying it ""doesn't need any more recognition"". However, Thomas later transferred the flag's copyright to the Commonwealth Government, expressing hope that doing so would ""provide comfort to all Aboriginal people and Australians to use the flag"".
The Australian Defence Force Ensign was proclaimed in 2000. This flag is used to represent the Defence Force when more than one branch of the military is involved, such as at the Australian Defence Force Academy, and by the Minister for Defence.
The Legislative Instruments Act 2003 required the proclamations of these flags to be lodged in a Federal Register. Due to an administrative oversight they were not, and the proclamations were automatically repealed. The Governor-General of Australia issued new proclamations dated 25 January 2008, with effect from 1 January 2008 (or 1 October 2006 in the case of the Defence Force Ensign).
In addition to the seven flags declared under the Flags Act, there are three additional Australian Government flags, the Australian Civil Aviation Ensign, Australian Border Force Flag and the Australian Federal Police Flag, eight Vice-Regal flags and nine state and territory flags that are recognised as official flags through other means."
Flag of Australia,"Flag debate
There have been mild but persistent debates over whether or not the Union Flag should be removed from the canton of the Australian flag. This debate has culminated on several occasions, such as the period preceding the Australian Bicentenary in 1988, and during the Prime Ministership of Paul Keating, who publicly supported a change in the flag, saying ""I do not believe that the symbols and the expression of the full sovereignty of Australian nationhood can ever be complete while we have a flag with the flag of another country on the corner of it.""
There are two lobby groups involved in the flag debate: Ausflag (established 1981), which supports changing the flag, and the Australian National Flag Association (ANFA) (established 1983), which wants to keep the existing flag. The primary arguments for keeping the flag cite historic precedence, while those for changing the flag are based around the idea that the status quo does not accurately depict Australia's status as an independent and multicultural nation, nor is its design unique enough to easily distinguish it from similar flags, such as the flags of New Zealand, Cook Islands and Tuvalu (despite the counter argument that this is not uncommon, as seen with Romania and Chad sharing near identical flags). The similarity between the flag of Australia and those of other countries is often derived from a common colonial history.
The Coalition government under John Howard in 1996 established Australian National Flag Day and in 1998 sponsored an amendment to the Flags Act to require any changes to the national flag design to be passed at a plebiscite along the same lines of the 1977 national song poll. In 2002 it also supplied ANFA's promotional video free to all primary schools and in 2004 required all schools receiving federal funds to fly the Australian flag.
Ausflag periodically campaigns for flag change in association with national events such as the 2000 Summer Olympics, and holds flag design competitions, while ANFA's activities include promotion of the existing flag through events such as National Flag Day. On Australia Day in 2018, Ausflag released an alternative design of the flag without the Union Jack, featuring a Commonwealth Star and Southern Cross. The date of the release was met with some backlash, which Harold Scruby, Ausflag's executive director called ""the lowest form of censorship"". Following the release, Malcolm Turnbull, then-prime minister and a former Ausflag director, told the group that the flag would never change, viewing it as an important symbol of Australian history.
A 2004 Newspoll that asked: ""Are you personally in favour or against changing the Australian flag so as to remove the Union Jack emblem?"" was supported by 32% of respondents and opposed by 57%, with 11% uncommitted. A 2010 Morgan Poll that asked: ""Do you think Australia should have a new design for our National Flag?"" was supported by 29% of respondents and opposed by 66%, with 5% uncommitted. A 2013 survey found that 95 per cent of surveyed adults stated that they took pride in the national flag, which was enjoying increasing popularity; half (50%) said they were extremely proud. Conversely, a 2016 self-selected non-weighted online survey from Western Sydney University found that 64% of the responders wanted the flag to change, with 36% wanting it to remain the same."
Flag of Australia,"See also
Historical flags of the British Empire and the overseas territories
Flag of Fiji
List of Australian flags"
Flag of Australia,"Notes
References
Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (2022). Australian flags (PDF) (3rd ed.). Australian Government. ISBN 978-0642471345. Archived (PDF) from the original on 17 May 2023."
Flag of Australia,External links
Flag of Australia,"Australian National Flag  (Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet)
Australia at Flags of the World
Review of Reviews for Australasia, 20 September 1901 – includes the Federal Flag Competition"
Crime in Australia,"Crime in Australia is managed by various law enforcement bodies (federal and state-based police forces and local councils), the federal and state-based criminal justice systems and state-based correctional services.
The Department of Home Affairs oversees federal law enforcement, national security (including cyber security, transport security, criminal justice, emergency management, multicultural affairs, immigration and border-related functions).  It comprises the Australian Federal Police, Australian Border Force, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre and the Australian Institute of Criminology as of February 2019. Each state and territory runs its own police service.
The national justice system is overseen by the Attorney-General's Department, with each state and territory having its own equivalent.
Prison services are run independently by correctional services department in each state and territory.
Crime statistics are collected on a state basis and then collated and further analysed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Between 2008–09 and 2017–18 the national victimisation rate decreased for personal crime in all categories except sexual assault, and also all household crimes selected in the national statistics. Approximately 5.0% (966,600) of Australians aged 15 years and over experienced personal crime."
Crime in Australia,"Law enforcement
Law enforcement in Australia is served by law enforcement officers under the control of federal government, states and territories  and local agencies. A number of state, territory and federal agencies also administer a wide variety of legislation related to white-collar crime. Police are responsible for the administration of criminal law. Sheriffs and bailiffs in each state and territory are responsible for the enforcement of the judgments of the courts exercising civil law (common law) jurisdictions. The various state police forces are responsible for enforcing state law within their own states, while the Australian Federal Police (AFP) are responsible for the enforcement of and investigation of crimes against Commonwealth law which applies across the whole country."
Crime in Australia,"Justice
Prison services
Immigration detention centres
In addition to the standard prisons run by the states (and not included in prisoner statistics), the Department of Home Affairs also operates a separate system of Australian immigration detention facilities to detain non-citizens who have breached the terms of or lack a visa. Some of these immigration detention centres are used to indefinitely detain asylum seekers and refugees, often without trial and in many cases for several years."
Crime in Australia,"Crime and crime prevention since colonisation
Convicts
During the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, large numbers of convicts were transported to the various Australian penal colonies by the UK Government. One of the primary reasons for the British settlement of Australia was the establishment of a penal colony to alleviate pressure on their overburdened correctional facilities. Over a period of eighty years, more than 165,000 British convicts were transported to Australia.
Discipline was poor among the early convicts, with high rates of theft, physical and sexual assault. Law enforcement was initially the preserve of the New South Wales Marine Corps, which accompanied the First Fleet. Australia's first civilian crime prevention force was established in August 1789, comprising a twelve-man nightwatch authorised to patrol the settlement at Sydney Cove and with powers ""for the apprehending and securing for examination"" anyone suspected of ""felony, trespass or misdemeanour."""
Crime in Australia,"Aboriginal massacres
From the earliest days of settlement at Sydney Cove, settlers clashed with the indigenous peoples. Governor Arthur Phillip himself gave ex-convicts muskets which were utilised to shoot at Aboriginal people in the area, and also deployed soldiers to their allotted areas, who ""dispersed"" about 50 Aboriginal people. Hidden or sanctioned massacres continued through to the 20th century, the last recorded being in 1928 at Coniston massacre in Western Australia."
Crime in Australia,"Bushrangers (1788–1880s)
Bushrangers were originally escaped convicts in the early years of the British settlement of Australia who used the Australian bush as a refuge to hide from the authorities. By the 1820s, the term ""bushranger"" had evolved to refer to those who took up ""robbery under arms"" as a way of life, using the bush as their base. Bushranging thrived during the gold rush years of the 1850s and 1860s when the likes of Ben Hall, Frank Gardiner and John Gilbert led notorious gangs in the country districts of New South Wales."
Crime in Australia,"Riots
Civil disturbances and prison riots, have occurred throughout the history of European settlement in Australia, a selection of which follows:"
Crime in Australia,"Riots at Fremantle Prison, WA (many, between 1854 and 1988)
Goldfields riots in NSW (1860-1861)
Bathurst prison riots, NSW (1970 and 1974)
2004 Palm Island riots, Qld
2004 Redfern riots, Sydney
2005 Macquarie Fields riots, Sydney
2005 Cronulla riots, Sydney"
Crime in Australia,"21st century statistics
The Australian Institute of Criminology hosts an interactive gateway to statistics and information on Australian crime and justice issues, called Crime Statistics Australia. This provides the easiest public access to statistics showing all aspects of crime in Australia, including death in custody, offender and victim statistics, types of crime, drug use, prisons and criminal courts."
Crime in Australia,"Crime rates
In comparison to other English-speaking countries, such as New Zealand, United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States, Australia in 2020 had an overall crime rate of 0.87 per 100,000 people, while the overall crime rate in North America was higher, with 2.1 per 100,000 in Canada and 6.5 per 100,000 in the United States. The homicide rate in Australia in 2021 was 0.86 per 100,000, which was lower than New Zealand's 1.0 per 100,000 and 1.3 per 100,000 in the United Kingdom. In comparison to North America in 2021, the United States and Canada had homicide rates of 3.8 and 2.2 per 100,000, respectively."
Crime in Australia,"2016–2017
The number of offenders proceeded against by police during 2016–2017 increased by 1% from the previous year to approximately 414,000.
In 2016–2017, the offender rate, which is the number of offenders in the population of Australia, increased slightly from 1.98% to 2%. The youth offender rate decreased for the seventh consecutive year in 2016–17; between 2009–10 and 2016–17, the rate fell from 3,339 to 2,330 offenders per 100,000 persons aged 10 to 17.
The most common type of offence in 2016-17 was illicit drug offences (20%), with sexual assault and related offences increasing by 3%, being the sixth successive annual increase and a total increase of 40%."
Crime in Australia,"2009–2010
Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) shows that during the 2009/10 year police took action against 375,259 people, up by 4.8 percent from 2008/09 figures. Young offenders aged 10 to 19 comprised about 29 percent of the total offender population across Australia.
In the 2009/10 financial year, 84,100 women had police action taken against them across Australia, up by six percent compared with the previous year. 290,400 men had police action taken against them in 2009/10, an annual increase of 4 percent. About 30 percent of the women were accused of theft, whereas the most common principal offence for men was intention to cause injury and matters related to public order."
Crime in Australia,"Declining homicide rate
Between 2016 and 2017, the number of homicide and attempted victims across Australia decreased from 453 victims to 414 victims (down 39 victims or 9%). Since 2017 the homicide rate has stabilised around 0.87 per 100,000 as of 2020. 
Between the 1989-1990 and 2013-2014 statistical years, the national homicide rate decreased from 1.8 per 100,000 people to 1 per 100,000. There were 238 homicide incidents in Australia in 2013-14 compared with 307 in 1989–90. From the National Australian Homicide Monitoring program report 2012: ""The homicide rate has continued to decrease each year, since 1989-90. The periods 2010–2011 and 2011–2012 are the lowest homicide rate since data collection began in 1989”."
Crime in Australia,"Prison statistics
Prisoner statistics 2000–present can be found on the Australian Bureau of Statistics page for 4517.0 - Prisoners in Australia."
Crime in Australia,"2018
Between 2017 and 2018 the national imprisonment rate increased by 3% from 216 to 221 prisoners per 100,000 adult population.
In 2018, adult prisoner numbers were up by 4% on the previous year, with female prisoner numbers increasing at a faster rate than male prisoners and with drug offences responsible for the highest rise by category. There were rises in all states except for South Australia. The breakdown was: acts intended to cause injury (9,659 prisoners or 22%); illicit drug offences (6,779 prisoners or 16%); and sexual assault and related offences (5,283 prisoners or 12%). Males accounted for 92% of all prisoners. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners accounted for over a quarter of the total Australian prisoner population."
Crime in Australia,"Deaths in custody
Research from the Australian Institute of Criminology showed that from 1990 until the middle of 2011, 40 percent of people who were fatally shot by police were suffering from a mental illness. In NSW, the fatalities included Adam Salter (shot dead in Sydney in 2009); Elijah Holcombe (shot dead in Armidale in 2009); and Roni Levi (shot dead on Bondi Beach in 1997). In Victoria, the fatalities included the 2008 shooting death of Tyler Cassidy. At age 15, Cassidy is believed to be the youngest person ever shot dead by police in Australia."
Crime in Australia,"Indigenous Australians and crime
Indigenous Australians are both convicted of crimes and imprisoned at a disproportionately high rate in Australia. The issue is a complex one, to which federal and state governments as well as Indigenous groups have responded with various analyses and numerous programs and measures. Many sources report over-representation of Indigenous offenders at all stages of the criminal justice system."
Crime in Australia,"Gun control laws
The gun buy-back program which was implemented in 1996, purchased and destroyed mostly semi-automatic and pump action firearms. Relatively frequent mass murders committed in the United States serve to re-ignite the debate on gun control laws from time to time, and Australia's gun control laws have been held up as an example of a workable solution for the safer management of guns and gun licensing by citizens of the United States and some members of Congress.
Crime statistics before and after the implementation of gun laws have shown a decrease of the use of guns in crime. According to the national homicide monitoring program, the number of homicide incidents involving a firearm decreased by 57% between 1989–90 and 2013–14, from 75 to 32. Firearms were used in 13% of homicide incidents in 2013–14, compared with 24% in 1989–90."
Crime in Australia,"Civic organisations
Neighbourhood Watch
Crime Victims Support Association"
Crime in Australia,"See also
Punishment in Australia
Christmas Island
Crime in New South Wales
Crime in Queensland
Crime in South Australia
Crime in Tasmania
Crime in the Australian Capital Territory
Crime in the Northern Territory
Crime in Victoria
Crime in Western Australia
Judiciary of Australia
Organised crime in Australia
Norfolk Island#Government and politics
Timeline of major crimes in Australia"
Crime in Australia,"References
Further reading
William Westgarth (December 1864). ""The Statistics of Crime in Australia"". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. 27 (4): 505–519. ISSN 0964-1998. Wikidata Q108489539."
Crime in Australia,"External links
Crime Statistics Australia (Australian Institute of Criminology) Archived 17 March 2021 at the Wayback Machine"
Australia,"Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands. It is the largest country by area in Oceania and the world's sixth-largest country. Australia is the oldest, flattest, and driest inhabited continent, with the least fertile soils. It is a megadiverse country, and its size gives it a wide variety of landscapes and climates including deserts and tropical rainforests.
The ancestors of Aboriginal Australians began arriving from south-east Asia 50,000 to 65,000 years ago, during the last glacial period. They settled on the continent and formed approximately 250 distinct language groups by the time of European settlement, maintaining some of the longest known continuing artistic and religious traditions in the world. Australia's written history commenced with Dutch exploration of most of the coastline in the 17th-century. British colonisation began in 1788 with the establishment of the penal colony of New South Wales. By the mid-19th century, most of the continent had been explored by European settlers and five additional self-governing British colonies were established, each gaining responsible government by 1890. The colonies federated in 1901, forming the Commonwealth of Australia. This continued a process of increasing autonomy from the United Kingdom, highlighted by the Statute of Westminster Adoption Act 1942, and culminating in the Australia Acts of 1986.
Australia is a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy comprising six states and ten territories. Its population of over 27 million is highly urbanised and heavily concentrated on the eastern seaboard. Canberra is the nation's capital, while its most populous cities are Sydney and Melbourne, both with a population of over 5 million. Australia is culturally diverse and has one of the highest foreign-born populations in the world. It has a highly developed market economy and one of the highest per capita incomes globally. Its abundant natural resources and well-developed international trade relations are crucial to the country's economy.  It ranks highly for quality of life, health, education, economic freedom, civil liberties and political rights.
Australia is a middle power, and has the world's thirteenth-highest military expenditure. It is a member of international groups including the United Nations; the G20; the OECD; the World Trade Organization; Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation; the Pacific Islands Forum; the Pacific Community; the Commonwealth of Nations; and the defence and security organisations ANZUS, AUKUS, and the Five Eyes. It is also a major non-NATO ally of the United States."
Australia,"Etymology
The name Australia (pronounced  in Australian English) is derived from the Latin Terra Australis (""southern land""), a name used for a hypothetical continent in the Southern Hemisphere since ancient times. Several 16th-century cartographers used the word Australia on maps, but not to identify modern Australia. When Europeans began visiting and mapping Australia in the 17th century, the name Terra Australis was applied to the new territories.
Until the early 19th century, Australia was best known as New Holland, a name first applied by the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman in 1644 (as Nieuw-Holland) and subsequently anglicised. Terra Australis still saw occasional usage, such as in scientific texts. The name Australia was popularised by the explorer Matthew Flinders, who said it was ""more agreeable to the ear, and an assimilation to the names of the other great portions of the Earth"". The first time that Australia appears to have been officially used was in April 1817, when Governor Lachlan Macquarie acknowledged the receipt of Flinders' charts of Australia from Lord Bathurst. In December 1817, Macquarie recommended to the Colonial Office that it be formally adopted. In 1824, the Admiralty agreed that the continent should be known officially by that name. The first official published use of the new name came with the publication in 1830 of The Australia Directory by the Hydrographic Office.
Colloquial names for Australia include ""Oz"", ""Straya"" and ""Down Under"". Other epithets include ""the Great Southern Land"", ""the Lucky Country"", ""the Sunburnt Country"", and ""the Wide Brown Land"". The latter two both derive from Dorothea Mackellar's 1908 poem ""My Country""."
Australia,"History
Indigenous prehistory
Indigenous Australians comprise two broad groups: the Aboriginal peoples of the Australian mainland (and surrounding islands including Tasmania), and the Torres Strait Islanders, who are a distinct Melanesian people. Human habitation of the Australian continent is estimated to have begun 50,000 to 65,000 years ago, with the migration of people by land bridges and short sea crossings from what is now Southeast Asia. It is uncertain how many waves of immigration may have contributed to these ancestors of modern Aboriginal Australians. The Madjedbebe rock shelter in Arnhem Land is possibly the oldest site showing the presence of humans in Australia. The oldest human remains found are the Lake Mungo remains, which have been dated to around 41,000 years ago.
Aboriginal Australian culture is one of the oldest continuous cultures on Earth. At the time of first European contact, Aboriginal Australians were complex hunter-gatherers with diverse economies and societies, and spread across at least 250 different language groups. Estimates of the Aboriginal population before British settlement range from 300,000 to one million. Aboriginal Australians have an oral culture with spiritual values based on reverence for the land and a belief in the Dreamtime. Certain groups engaged in fire-stick farming, fish farming, and built semi-permanent shelters. The extent to which some groups engaged in agriculture is controversial.
The Torres Strait Islander people first settled their islands around 4,000 years ago. Culturally and linguistically distinct from mainland Aboriginal peoples, they were seafarers and obtained their livelihood from seasonal horticulture and the resources of their reefs and seas. Agriculture also developed on some islands and villages appeared by the 1300s.
By the mid-18th century in northern Australia, contact, trade and cross-cultural engagement had been established between local Aboriginal groups and Makassan trepangers, visiting from present-day Indonesia."
Australia,"European exploration and colonisation
The Dutch are the first Europeans that recorded sighting and making landfall on the Australian mainland. The first ship and crew to chart the Australian coast and meet with Aboriginal people was the Duyfken, captained by Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon. He sighted the coast of Cape York Peninsula in early 1606, and made landfall on 26 February 1606 at the Pennefather River near the modern town of Weipa on Cape York. Later that year, Spanish explorer Luís Vaz de Torres sailed through and navigated the Torres Strait Islands. The Dutch charted the whole of the western and northern coastlines and named the island continent ""New Holland"" during the 17th century, and although no attempt at settlement was made, a number of shipwrecks left men either stranded or, as in the case of the Batavia in 1629, marooned for mutiny and murder, thus becoming the first Europeans to permanently inhabit the continent. In 1770, Captain James Cook sailed along and mapped the east coast, which he named ""New South Wales"" and claimed for Great Britain.
Following the loss of its American colonies in 1783, the British Government sent a fleet of ships, the First Fleet, under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip, to establish a new penal colony in New South Wales. A camp was set up and the Union Flag raised at Sydney Cove, Port Jackson, on 26 January 1788, a date which later became Australia's national day.
Most early settlers were convicts, transported for petty crimes and assigned as labourers or servants to ""free settlers"" (willing immigrants). Once emancipated, convicts tended to integrate into colonial society. Martial law was declared to suppress convict rebellions and uprisings, and lasted for two years following the 1808 Rum Rebellion, the only successful armed takeover of government in Australia. Over the next two decades, social and economic reforms, together with the establishment of a Legislative Council and Supreme Court, saw New South Wales transition from a penal colony to a civil society.
The indigenous population declined for 150 years following European settlement, mainly due to infectious disease. British colonial authorities did not sign any treaties with Aboriginal groups. As settlement expanded, thousands of Indigenous people died in frontier conflicts while others were dispossessed of their traditional lands."
Australia,"Colonial expansion
In 1803, a settlement was established in Van Diemen's Land (present-day Tasmania), and in 1813, Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and William Wentworth crossed the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, opening the interior to European settlement. The British claim extended to the whole Australian continent in 1827 when Major Edmund Lockyer established a settlement on King George Sound (modern-day Albany). The Swan River Colony (present-day Perth) was established in 1829, evolving into the largest Australian colony by area, Western Australia. In accordance with population growth, separate colonies were carved from New South Wales: Tasmania in 1825, South Australia in 1836, New Zealand in 1841, Victoria in 1851, and Queensland in 1859. South Australia was founded as a free colony—it never accepted transported convicts. Growing opposition to the convict system culminated in its abolition in the eastern colonies by the 1850s. Initially a free colony, Western Australia practised penal transportation from 1850 to 1868.
The six colonies individually gained responsible government between 1855 and 1890, thus becoming elective democracies managing most of their own affairs while remaining part of the British Empire. The Colonial Office in London retained control of some matters, notably foreign affairs.
In the mid-19th century, explorers such as Burke and Wills charted Australia's interior. A series of gold rushes beginning in the early 1850s led to an influx of new migrants from China, North America and continental Europe, as well as outbreaks of bushranging and civil unrest; the latter peaked in 1854 when Ballarat miners launched the Eureka Rebellion against gold license fees. The 1860s saw a surge in blackbirding, where Pacific Islanders were forced into indentured labour, mainly in Queensland.
From 1886, Australian colonial governments began introducing policies resulting in the removal of many Aboriginal children from their families and communities. The Second Boer War (1899–1902) marked the largest overseas deployment of Australia's colonial forces."
Australia,"Federation to the World Wars
On 1 January 1901, federation of the colonies was achieved after a decade of planning, constitutional conventions and referendums, resulting in the establishment of the Commonwealth of Australia as a nation under the new Australian Constitution.
After the 1907 Imperial Conference, Australia and several other self-governing British settler colonies were given the status of self-governing dominions within the British Empire. Australia was one of the founding members of the League of Nations in 1920, and subsequently of the United Nations in 1945. The Statute of Westminster 1931 formally ended the ability of the UK to pass laws with effect at the Commonwealth level in Australia without the country's consent. Australia adopted it in 1942, but it was backdated to 1939 to confirm the validity of legislation passed by the Australian Parliament during World War II.
The Australian Capital Territory was formed in 1911 as the location for the future federal capital of Canberra. While it was being constructed, Melbourne served as the temporary capital from 1901 to 1927. The Northern Territory was transferred from the control of the South Australian government to the federal parliament in 1911. Australia became the colonial ruler of the Territory of Papua (which had initially been annexed by Queensland in 1883) in 1902 and of the Territory of New Guinea (formerly German New Guinea) in 1920. The two were unified as the Territory of Papua and New Guinea in 1949 and gained independence from Australia in 1975."
Australia,"In 1914, Australia joined the Allies in fighting the First World War, and took part in many of the major battles fought on the Western Front. Of about 416,000 who served, about 60,000 were killed and another 152,000 were wounded. Many Australians regard the defeat of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) at Gallipoli in 1915 as the ""baptism of fire"" that forged the new nation's identity. The beginning of the campaign is commemorated annually on Anzac Day, a date which rivals Australia Day as the nation's most important.
From 1939 to 1945, Australia joined the Allies in fighting the Second World War. Australia's armed forces fought in the Pacific, European and Mediterranean and Middle East theatres. The shock of Britain's defeat in Singapore in 1942, followed soon after by the bombing of Darwin and other Japanese attacks on Australian soil, led to a widespread belief in Australia that a Japanese invasion was imminent, and a shift from the United Kingdom to the United States as Australia's principal ally and security partner. Since 1951, Australia has been allied with the United States under the ANZUS treaty."
Australia,"Post-war and contemporary eras
In the decades following World War II, Australia enjoyed significant increases in living standards, leisure time and suburban development. Using the slogan ""populate or perish"", the nation encouraged a large wave of immigration from across Europe, with such immigrants referred to as ""New Australians"".
A member of the Western Bloc during the Cold War, Australia participated in the Korean War and the Malayan Emergency during the 1950s and the Vietnam War from 1962 to 1972. During this time, tensions over communist influence in society led to unsuccessful attempts by the Menzies Government to ban the Communist Party of Australia, and a bitter split in the Labor Party in 1955.
As a result of a 1967 referendum, the federal government gained the power to legislate with regard to Indigenous Australians, and Indigenous Australians were fully included in the census. Pre-colonial land interests (referred to as native title in Australia) was recognised in law for the first time when the High Court of Australia held in Mabo v Queensland (No 2) that Australia was neither terra nullius (""land belonging to no one"") or ""desert and uncultivated land"" at the time of European settlement.
Following the abolition of the last vestiges of the White Australia policy in 1973, Australia's demography and culture transformed as a result of a large and ongoing wave of non-European immigration, mostly from Asia. The late 20th century also saw an increasing focus on foreign policy ties with other Pacific Rim nations. The Australia Acts severed the remaining constitutional ties between Australia and the United Kingdom while maintaining the monarch in her independent capacity as Queen of Australia. In a 1999 constitutional referendum, 55% of voters rejected abolishing the monarchy and becoming a republic.
Following the September 11 attacks on the United States, Australia joined the United States in fighting the Afghanistan War from 2001 to 2021 and the Iraq War from 2003 to 2009. The nation's trade relations also became increasingly oriented towards East Asia in the 21st century, with China becoming the nation's largest trading partner by a large margin.
In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, several of Australia's largest cities were locked down for extended periods and free movement across the national and state borders was restricted in an attempt to slow the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus."
Australia,"Geography
General characteristics
Surrounded by the Indian and Pacific oceans, Australia is separated from Asia by the Arafura and Timor seas, with the Coral Sea lying off the Queensland coast, and the Tasman Sea lying between Australia and New Zealand. The world's smallest continent and sixth-largest country by total area, Australia—owing to its size and isolation—is often dubbed the ""island continent"" and is sometimes considered the world's largest island. Australia has 34,218 km (21,262 mi) of coastline (excluding all offshore islands), and claims an extensive exclusive economic zone of 8,148,250 square kilometres (3,146,060 sq mi). This exclusive economic zone does not include the Australian Antarctic Territory. 
Mainland Australia lies between latitudes 9° and 44° South, and longitudes 112° and 154° East. Australia's size gives it a wide variety of landscapes, with tropical rainforests in the north-east, mountain ranges in the south-east, south-west and east, and desert in the centre. The desert or semi-arid land commonly known as the outback makes up by far the largest portion of land. Australia is the driest inhabited continent; its annual rainfall averaged over continental area is less than 500 mm. The population density is 3.4 inhabitants per square kilometre, although the large majority of the population lives along the temperate south-eastern coastline. The population density exceeds 19,500 inhabitants per square kilometre in central Melbourne. In 2021 Australia had 10% of the global permanent meadows and pastureland."
Australia,"The Great Barrier Reef, the world's largest coral reef, lies a short distance off the north-east coast and extends for over 2,000 km (1,200 mi). Mount Augustus, claimed to be the world's largest monolith, is located in Western Australia. At 2,228 m (7,310 ft), Mount Kosciuszko is the highest mountain on the Australian mainland. Even taller are Mawson Peak (at 2,745 m (9,006 ft)), on the remote Australian external territory of Heard Island, and, in the Australian Antarctic Territory, Mount McClintock and Mount Menzies, at 3,492 m (11,457 ft) and 3,355 m (11,007 ft) respectively.
Eastern Australia is marked by the Great Dividing Range, which runs parallel to the coast of Queensland, New South Wales and much of Victoria. The name is not strictly accurate, because parts of the range consist of low hills, and the highlands are typically no more than 1,600 m (5,200 ft) in height. The coastal uplands and a belt of Brigalow grasslands lie between the coast and the mountains, while inland of the dividing range are large areas of grassland and shrubland. These include the western plains of New South Wales, and the Mitchell Grass Downs and Mulga Lands of inland Queensland. The northernmost point of the mainland is the tropical Cape York Peninsula."
Australia,"The landscapes of the Top End and the Gulf Country—with their tropical climate—include forest, woodland, wetland, grassland, rainforest and desert. At the north-west corner of the continent are the sandstone cliffs and gorges of The Kimberley, and below that the Pilbara. The Victoria Plains tropical savanna lies south of the Kimberley and Arnhem Land savannas, forming a transition between the coastal savannas and the interior deserts. At the heart of the country are the uplands of central Australia. Prominent features of the centre and south include Uluru (also known as Ayers Rock), the famous sandstone monolith, and the inland Simpson, Tirari and Sturt Stony, Gibson, Great Sandy, Tanami, and Great Victoria deserts, with the famous Nullarbor Plain on the southern coast. The Western Australian mulga shrublands lie between the interior deserts and Mediterranean-climate Southwest Australia."
Australia,"Geology
Lying on the Indo-Australian Plate, the mainland of Australia is the lowest and most primordial landmass on Earth with a relatively stable geological history. The landmass includes virtually all known rock types and from all geological time periods spanning over 3.8 billion years of the Earth's history. The Pilbara Craton is one of only two pristine Archaean 3.6–2.7 Ga (billion years ago) crusts identified on the Earth.
Having been part of all major supercontinents, the Australian continent began to form after the breakup of Gondwana in the Permian, with the separation of the continental landmass from the African continent and Indian subcontinent. It separated from Antarctica over a prolonged period beginning in the Permian and continuing through to the Cretaceous. When the last glacial period ended in about 10,000 BC, rising sea levels formed Bass Strait, separating Tasmania from the mainland. Then between about 8,000 and 6,500 BC, the lowlands in the north were flooded by the sea, separating New Guinea, the Aru Islands, and the mainland of Australia. The Australian continent is moving toward Eurasia at the rate of 6 to 7 centimetres a year.
The Australian mainland's continental crust, excluding the thinned margins, has an average thickness of 38 km, with a range in thickness from 24 km to 59 km. Australia's geology can be divided into several main sections, showcasing that the continent grew from west to east: the Archaean cratonic shields found mostly in the west, Proterozoic fold belts in the centre and Phanerozoic sedimentary basins, metamorphic and igneous rocks in the east.
The Australian mainland and Tasmania are situated in the middle of the tectonic plate and have no active volcanoes, but due to passing over the East Australia hotspot, recent volcanism has occurred during the Holocene, in the Newer Volcanics Province of western Victoria and south-eastern South Australia. Volcanism also occurs in the island of New Guinea (considered geologically as part of the Australian continent), and in the Australian external territory of Heard Island and McDonald Islands. Seismic activity in the Australian mainland and Tasmania is also low, with the greatest number of fatalities having occurred in the 1989 Newcastle earthquake."
Australia,"Climate
The climate of Australia is significantly influenced by ocean currents, including the Indian Ocean Dipole and the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, which is correlated with periodic drought, and the seasonal tropical low-pressure system that produces cyclones in northern Australia. These factors cause rainfall to vary markedly from year to year. Much of the northern part of the country has a tropical, predominantly summer-rainfall (monsoon). The south-west corner of the country has a Mediterranean climate. The south-east ranges from oceanic (Tasmania and coastal Victoria) to humid subtropical (upper half of New South Wales), with the highlands featuring alpine and subpolar oceanic climates. The interior is arid to semi-arid.
Driven by climate change, average temperatures have risen more than 1°C since 1960. Associated changes in rainfall patterns and climate extremes exacerbate existing issues such as drought and bushfires. 2019 was Australia's warmest recorded year, and the 2019–2020 bushfire season was the country's worst on record. Australia's greenhouse gas emissions per capita are among the highest in the world.
Water restrictions are frequently in place in many regions and cities of Australia in response to chronic shortages due to urban population increases and localised drought. Throughout much of the continent, major flooding regularly follows extended periods of drought, flushing out inland river systems, overflowing dams and inundating large inland flood plains, as occurred throughout Eastern Australia in the early 2010s after the 2000s Australian drought."
Australia,"Biodiversity
Although most of Australia is semi-arid or desert, the continent includes a diverse range of habitats from alpine heaths to tropical rainforests. Fungi typify that diversity—an estimated 250,000 species—of which only 5% have been described—occur in Australia. Because of the continent's great age, extremely variable weather patterns, and long-term geographic isolation, much of Australia's biota is unique. About 85% of flowering plants, 84% of mammals, more than 45% of birds, and 89% of in-shore, temperate-zone fish are endemic. Australia has at least 755 species of reptile, more than any other country in the world. Besides Antarctica, Australia is the only continent that developed without feline species. Feral cats may have been introduced in the 17th century by Dutch shipwrecks, and later in the 18th century by European settlers. They are now considered a major factor in the decline and extinction of many vulnerable and endangered native species. Seafaring immigrants from Asia are believed to have brought the dingo to Australia sometime after the end of the last ice age—perhaps 4000 years ago—and Aboriginal people helped disperse them across the continent as pets, contributing to the demise of thylacines on the mainland. Australia is also one of 17 megadiverse countries.
Australian forests are mostly made up of evergreen species, particularly eucalyptus trees in the less arid regions; wattles replace them as the dominant species in drier regions and deserts. Among well-known Australian animals are the monotremes (the platypus and echidna); a host of marsupials, including the kangaroo, koala, and wombat, and birds such as the emu and the kookaburra. Australia is home to many dangerous animals including some of the most venomous snakes in the world. The dingo was introduced by Austronesian people who traded with Indigenous Australians around 3000 BCE. Many animal and plant species became extinct soon after first human settlement, including the Australian megafauna; others have disappeared since European settlement, among them the thylacine.
Many of Australia's ecoregions, and the species within those regions, are threatened by human activities and introduced animal, chromistan, fungal and plant species. All these factors have led to Australia's having the highest mammal extinction rate of any country in the world. The federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 is the legal framework for the protection of threatened species. Numerous protected areas have been created under the National Strategy for the Conservation of Australia's Biological Diversity to protect and preserve unique ecosystems; 65 wetlands are listed under the Ramsar Convention, and 16 natural World Heritage Sites have been established. Australia was ranked 21st out of 178 countries in the world on the 2018 Environmental Performance Index. There are more than 1,800 animals and plants on Australia's threatened species list, including more than 500 animals. Paleontologists discovered a fossil site of a prehistoric rainforest in McGraths Flat, in South Australia, that presents evidence that this now arid desert and dry shrubland/grassland was once home to an abundance of life."
Australia,"Government and politics
Australia is a constitutional monarchy, a parliamentary democracy and a federation. The country has maintained its mostly unchanged constitution alongside a stable liberal democratic political system since Federation in 1901. It is one of the world's oldest federations, in which power is divided between the federal and state and territory governments. The Australian system of government combines elements derived from the political systems of the United Kingdom (a fused executive, constitutional monarchy and strong party discipline) and the United States (federalism, a written constitution and strong bicameralism with an elected upper house), resulting in a distinct hybrid.
Government power is partially separated between three branches:"
Australia,"Legislature: the bicameral Parliament, comprising the monarch, the Senate, and the House of Representatives
Executive: the Cabinet, led by the prime minister (the leader of the party or Coalition with a majority in the House of Representatives) and other ministers they have chosen; formally appointed by the governor-general
Judiciary: the High Court and other federal courts
Charles III reigns as King of Australia and is represented in Australia by the governor-general at the federal level and by the governors at the state level, who by section 63 of the Constitution and convention act on the advice of their ministers. Thus, in practice the governor-general acts as a legal figurehead for the actions of the prime minister and the Cabinet. The governor-general may in some situations exercise powers in the absence or contrary to ministerial advice using reserve powers. When these powers may be exercised is governed by convention and their precise scope is unclear. The most notable exercise of these powers was the dismissal of the Whitlam government in the constitutional crisis of 1975."
Australia,"In the Senate (the upper house), there are 76 senators: twelve each from the states and two each from the mainland territories (the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory). The House of Representatives (the lower house) has 151 members elected from single-member electoral divisions, commonly known as ""electorates"" or ""seats"", allocated to states on the basis of population, with each of the current states guaranteed a minimum of five seats. The lower house has a maximum term of three years, but this is not fixed and governments usually dissolve the house early for an election at some point in the 6 months before the maximum. Elections for both chambers are generally held simultaneously with senators having overlapping six-year terms except for those from the territories, whose terms are not fixed but are tied to the electoral cycle for the lower house. Thus only 40 of the 76 places in the Senate are put to each election unless the cycle is interrupted by a double dissolution.
Australia's electoral system uses preferential voting for the House of Representatives and all state and territory lower house elections (with the exception of Tasmania and the ACT which use the Hare-Clark system). The Senate and most state upper houses use the ""proportional system"" which combines preferential voting with proportional representation for each state. Voting and enrolment is compulsory for all enrolled citizens 18 years and over in every jurisdiction. The party with majority support in the House of Representatives forms the government and its leader becomes Prime Minister. In cases where no party has majority support, the governor-general has the constitutional power to appoint the prime minister and, if necessary, dismiss one that has lost the confidence of Parliament. Due to the relatively unique position of Australia operating as a Westminster parliamentary democracy with a powerful and elected upper house, the system has sometimes been referred to as having a ""Washminster mutation"", or as a semi-parliamentary system.
There are two major political groups that usually form government, federally and in the states: the Australian Labor Party and the Coalition, which is a formal grouping of the Liberal Party and its minor partner, the National Party. The Liberal National Party and the Country Liberal Party are merged state branches in Queensland and the Northern Territory that function as separate parties at a federal level. Within Australian political culture, the Coalition is considered centre-right and the Labor Party is considered centre-left. Independent members and several minor parties have achieved representation in Australian parliaments, mostly in upper houses. The Australian Greens are often considered the ""third force"" in politics, being the third largest party by both vote and membership. The most recent federal election was held on 21 May 2022 and resulted in the Australian Labor Party, led by Anthony Albanese, being elected to government."
Australia,"States and territories
Australia has six states—New South Wales (NSW), Victoria (Vic), Queensland (Qld), Western Australia (WA), South Australia (SA) and Tasmania (Tas)—and two mainland self-governing territories—the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and the Northern Territory (NT). 
The states have the general power to make laws except in the few areas where the constitution grants the Commonwealth exclusive powers. The Commonwealth can only make laws on topics listed in the constitution but its laws prevail over those of the states to the extent of any inconsistency. Since Federation, the Commonwealth's power relative to the states has significantly increased due to the increasingly wide interpretation given to listed Commonwealth powers and because of the states' heavy financial reliance on Commonwealth grants.
Each state and major mainland territory has its own parliament—unicameral in the Northern Territory, the ACT and Queensland, and bicameral in the other states. The lower houses are known as the Legislative Assembly (the House of Assembly in South Australia and Tasmania); the upper houses are known as the Legislative Council. The head of the government in each state is the Premier and in each territory the Chief Minister. The King is represented in each state by a governor. At the Commonwealth level, the King's representative is the governor-general.
The Commonwealth government directly administers the internal Jervis Bay Territory and the other external territories: the Ashmore and Cartier Islands, the Coral Sea Islands, the Heard Island and McDonald Islands, the Indian Ocean territories (Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands), Norfolk Island, and the Australian Antarctic Territory. The remote Macquarie Island and Lord Howe Island are part of Tasmania and New South Wales respectively."
Australia,"Foreign relations
Australia is a middle power, whose foreign relations has three core bi-partisan pillars: commitment to the US alliance, engagement with the Indo-Pacific and support for international institutions, rules and co-operation. Through the ANZUS pact and its status as a major non-NATO ally, Australia maintains a close relationship with the US, which encompasses strong defence, security and trade ties. In the Indo-Pacific, the country seeks to increase its trade ties through the open flow of trade and capital, whilst managing the rise of Chinese power by supporting the existing rules based order. Regionally, the country is a member of the Pacific Islands Forum, the Pacific Community, the ASEAN+6 mechanism and the East Asia Summit. Internationally, the country is a member of the United Nations (of which it was a founding member), the Commonwealth of Nations, the OECD and the G20. This reflects the country's generally strong commitment to multilateralism."
Australia,"Australia is a member of several defence, intelligence and security groupings including the Five Eyes intelligence alliance with the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand; the ANZUS alliance with the United States and New Zealand; the AUKUS security treaty with the United States and United Kingdom; the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue with the United States, India and Japan; the Five Power Defence Arrangements with New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Malaysia and Singapore; and the Reciprocal Access defence and security agreement with Japan.
Australia has pursued the cause of international trade liberalisation. It led the formation of the Cairns Group and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, and is a member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Beginning in the 2000s, Australia has entered into the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership multilateral free trade agreements as well as bilateral free trade agreements with the United States, China, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, the United Kingdom and New Zealand, with the most recent deal with UK signed in 2023.
Australia maintains a deeply integrated relationship with neighbouring New Zealand, with free mobility of citizens between the two countries under the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement and free trade under the Closer Economic Relations agreement. The most favourably viewed countries by the Australian people in 2021 include New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, Taiwan, Thailand, the United States and South Korea. It also maintains an international aid program under which some 75 countries receive assistance. Australia ranked fourth in the Center for Global Development's 2021 Commitment to Development Index.
The power over foreign policy is highly concentrated in the prime minister and the national security committee, with major decision such as joining the 2003 invasion of Iraq made with without prior Cabinet approval. Similarly, the Parliament does not play a formal role in foreign policy and the power to declare war lies solely with the executive government. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade supports the executive in its policy decisions."
Australia,"Military
The two main institutions involved in the management of Australia's armed forces are the Australian Defence Force (ADF) and the Department of Defence, together known as ""Defence"". The Australian Defence Force is the military wing, headed by the chief of the defence force, and contains three branches: the Royal Australian Navy, the Australian Army and the Royal Australian Air Force. In 2021, it had 84,865 currently serving personnel (including 60,286 regulars and 24,581 reservists). The Department of Defence is the civilian wing and is headed by the secretary of defence. These two leaders collective manage Defence as a diarchy, with shared and joint responsibilities. The titular role of commander-in-chief is held by the governor-general, however actual command is vested in the chief of the Defence Force.  The executive branch of the Commonwealth government has overall control of the military through the minister of defence, who is subject to the decisions of Cabinet and its National Security Committee. Major Australian intelligence agencies include the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (foreign intelligence), the Australian Signals Directorate (signals intelligence) and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (domestic security).
In 2022, defence spending was 1.9% of GDP, representing the world's 13th largest defence budget. In 2024, the ADF had active operations in the Middle-East and the Indo-Pacific (including security and aid provisions), was contributing to UN forces in relation to South Sudan, Syria-Israel and North Korea, and domestically was assisting to prevent asylum-seekers enter the country and with natural disaster relief."
Australia,"Human rights
Legal and social rights in Australia are regarded as among the most developed in the world. Attitudes towards LGBT people are generally positive within Australia, and same-sex marriage has been legal in the nation since 2017. Australia has had anti-discrimination laws regarding disability since 1992. However, international organisations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have expressed concerns in areas including asylum-seeker policy, indigenous deaths in custody, the lack of entrenched rights protection and laws restricting protesting."
Australia,"Economy
Australia's high-income mixed-market economy is rich in natural resources. It is the world's fourteenth-largest by nominal terms, and the 18th-largest by PPP. As of 2021, it has the second-highest amount of wealth per adult, after Luxembourg, and has the thirteenth-highest financial assets per capita. Australia has a labour force of some 13.5 million, with an unemployment rate of 3.5% as of June 2022. According to the Australian Council of Social Service, the poverty rate of Australia exceeds 13.6% of the population, encompassing 3.2 million. It also estimated that there were 774,000 (17.7%) children under the age of 15 living in relative poverty. The Australian dollar is the national currency, which is also used by three island states in the Pacific: Kiribati, Nauru, and Tuvalu.
Australian government debt, about $963 billion in June 2022, exceeds 45.1% of the country's total GDP, and is the world's eighth-highest. Australia had the second-highest level of household debt in the world in 2020, after Switzerland. Its house prices are among the highest in the world, especially in the large urban areas. The large service sector accounts for about 71.2% of total GDP, followed by the industrial sector (25.3%), while its agriculture sector is by far the smallest, making up only 3.6% of total GDP. Australia is the world's 21st-largest exporter and 24th-largest importer. China is Australia's largest trading partner by a wide margin, accounting for roughly 40% of the country's exports and 17.6% of its imports. Other major export markets include Japan, the United States, and South Korea.
Australia has high levels of competitiveness and economic freedom, and was ranked fifth in the Human Development Index in 2021. As of 2022, it is ranked twelfth in the Index of Economic Freedom and nineteenth in the Global Competitiveness Report. It attracted 9.5 million international tourists in 2019, and was ranked thirteenth among the countries of Asia-Pacific in 2019 for inbound tourism. The 2021 Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report ranked Australia seventh-highest in the world out of 117 countries. Its international tourism receipts in 2019 amounted to $45.7 billion."
Australia,"Energy
In 2021–22, Australia's generation of electricity was sourced from black coal (37.2%), brown coal (12%), natural gas (18.8%), hydro (6.5%), wind (11.1%), solar (13.3%), bio-energy (1.2%) and others (1.7%). Total consumption of energy in this period was sourced from coal (28.4%), oil (37.3%), gas (27.4%) and renewables (7%). From 2012 to 2022, the energy sourced from renewables has increased 5.7%, whilst energy sourced from coal has decreased 2.6%. The use of gas also increased by 1.5% and the use of oil stayed relatively stable with a reduction of only 0.2%.
In 2020, Australia produced 27.7% of its electricity from renewable sources, exceeding the target set by the Commonwealth government in 2009 of 20% renewable energy by 2020. A new target of 82% percent renewable energy by 2030 was set in 2022 and a target for net zero emissions by 2050 was set in 2021."
Australia,"Science and technology
In 2019, Australia spent $35.6 billion on research and development, allocating about 1.79% of GDP. A recent study by Accenture for the Tech Council shows that the Australian tech sector combined contributes $167 billion a year to the economy and employs 861,000 people.  In addition, recent startup ecosystems in Sydney and Melbourne are already valued at $34 billion combined. Australia ranked 24th in the Global Innovation Index 2023.
With only 0.3% of the world's population, Australia contributed 4.1% of the world's published research in 2020, making it one of the top 10 research contributors in the world. CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, contributes 10% of all research in the country, while the rest is carried out by universities. Its most notable contributions include the invention of atomic absorption spectroscopy, the essential components of Wi-Fi technology, and the development of the first commercially successful polymer banknote.
Australia is a key player in supporting space exploration. Facilities such as the Square Kilometre Array and Australia Telescope Compact Array radio telescopes, telescopes such as the Siding Spring Observatory, and ground stations such as the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex are of great assistance in deep space exploration missions, primarily by NASA."
Australia,"Demographics
Australia has an average population density of 3.4 persons per square kilometre of total land area, which makes it one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world. The population is heavily concentrated on the east coast, and in particular in the south-eastern region between South East Queensland to the north-east and Adelaide to the south-west.
Australia is also highly urbanised, with 67% of the population living in the Greater Capital City Statistical Areas (metropolitan areas of the state and mainland territorial capital cities) in 2018. Metropolitan areas with more than one million inhabitants are Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide.
In common with many other developed countries, Australia is experiencing a demographic shift towards an older population, with more retirees and fewer people of working age. In 2021 the average age of the population was 39 years. In 2015, 2.15% of the Australian population lived overseas, one of the lowest proportions worldwide."
Australia,"Ancestry and immigration
Between 1788 and the Second World War, the vast majority of settlers and immigrants came from the British Isles (principally England, Ireland and Scotland), although there was significant immigration from China and Germany during the 19th century. Following Federation in 1901, a strengthening of the white Australia policy restricted further migration from these areas. However, in the decades immediately following the Second World War, Australia received a large wave of immigration from across Europe, with many more immigrants arriving from Southern and Eastern Europe than in previous decades. All overt racial discrimination ended in 1973, with multiculturalism becoming official policy. Subsequently, there has been a large and continuing wave of immigration from across the world, with Asia being the largest source of immigrants in the 21st century.
Today, Australia has the world's eighth-largest immigrant population, with immigrants accounting for 30% of the population, the highest proportion among major Western nations. In 2022–23, 212,789 permanent migrants were admitted to Australia, with a net migration population gain of 518,000 people inclusive of non-permanent residents. Most entered on skilled visas, however the immigration program also offers visas for family members and refugees.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics asks each Australian resident to nominate up to two ancestries each census and the responses are classified into broad ancestry groups. At the 2021 census, the most commonly nominated ancestry groups as a proportion of the total population were: 57.2% European (including 46% North-West European and 11.2% Southern and Eastern European), 33.8% Oceanian, 17.4% Asian (including 6.5% Southern and Central Asian, 6.4% North-East Asian, and 4.5% South-East Asian), 3.2% North African and Middle Eastern, 1.4% Peoples of the Americas, and 1.3% Sub-Saharan African. At the 2021 census, the most commonly nominated individual ancestries as a proportion of the total population were: "
Australia,"At the 2021 census, 3.8% of the Australian population identified as being Indigenous—Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders."
Australia,"Language
Although English is not the official language of Australia in law, it is the de facto official and national language. Australian English is a major variety of the language with a distinctive accent and lexicon, and differs slightly from other varieties of English in grammar and spelling. General Australian serves as the standard dialect. The Australian sign language known as Auslan was used at home by 16,242 people at the time of the 2021 census.
At the 2021 census, English was the only language spoken in the home for 72% of the population. The next most common languages spoken at home were Mandarin (2.7%), Arabic (1.4%), Vietnamese (1.3%), Cantonese (1.2%) and Punjabi (0.9%).
Over 250 Australian Aboriginal languages are thought to have existed at the time of first European contact. The National Indigenous Languages Survey (NILS) for 2018–19 found that more than 120 Indigenous language varieties were in use or being revived, although 70 of those in use were endangered. The 2021 census found that 167 Indigenous languages were spoken at home by 76,978 Indigenous Australians — Yumplatok (Torres Strait Creole), Djambarrpuyngu (a Yolŋu language) and Pitjantjatjara (a Western Desert language) were among the most widely spoken. NILS and the Australian Bureau of Statistics use different classifications for Indigenous Australian languages."
Australia,"Religion
Australia has no state religion; section 116 of the Australian Constitution prohibits the Australian government from making any law to establish any religion, impose any religious observance, or prohibit the free exercise of any religion. However, the states still retain the power to pass religiously discriminatory laws.
At the 2021 census, 38.9% of the population identified as having ""no religion"", up from 15.5% in 2001. The largest religion is Christianity (43.9% of the population). The largest Christian denominations are the Roman Catholic Church (20% of the population) and the Anglican Church of Australia (9.8%). Non-British immigration since the Second World War has led to the growth of non-Christian religions, the largest of which are Islam (3.2%), Hinduism (2.7%), Buddhism (2.4%), Sikhism (0.8%), and Judaism (0.4%).
In 2021, just under 8,000 people declared an affiliation with traditional Aboriginal religions. In Australian Aboriginal mythology and the animist framework developed in Aboriginal Australia, the Dreaming is a sacred era in which ancestral totemic spirit beings formed The Creation. The Dreaming established the laws and structures of society and the ceremonies performed to ensure continuity of life and land."
Australia,"Health
Australia's life expectancy of 83 years (81 years for males and 85 years for females), is the fifth-highest in the world. It has the highest rate of skin cancer in the world, while cigarette smoking is the largest preventable cause of death and disease, responsible for 7.8% of the total mortality and disease. Ranked second in preventable causes is hypertension at 7.6%, with obesity third at 7.5%. Australia ranked 35th in the world in 2012 for its proportion of obese women and near the top of developed nations for its proportion of obese adults; 63% of its adult population is either overweight or obese.
Australia spent around 9.91% of its total GDP to health care in 2021. It introduced a national insurance scheme in 1975. Following a period in which access to the scheme was restricted, the scheme became universal once more in 1981 under the name of Medicare. The program is nominally funded by an income tax surcharge known as the Medicare levy, currently at 2%. The states manage hospitals and attached outpatient services, while the Commonwealth funds the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (subsidising the costs of medicines) and general practice."
Australia,"Education
School attendance, or registration for home schooling, is compulsory throughout Australia. Education is primarily the responsibility of the individual states and territories, however the Commonwealth has significant influence through funding agreements. Since 2014, a national curriculum developed by the Commonwealth has been implemented by the states and territories. Attendance rules vary between states, but in general children are required to attend school from the age of about 5 until about 16. In some states (Western Australia, Northern Territory and New South Wales), children aged 16–17 are required to either attend school or participate in vocational training, such as an apprenticeship. According to the 2022 PISA evaluations, Australian 15-year-olds ranked ninth in the OECD for reading and science and tenth for maths. However, less than 60% of Australian students achieved the National Proficiency Standard – 51% in maths, 58% in science and 57% in reading.
Australia has an adult literacy rate that was estimated to be 99% in 2003. However, a 2011–2012 report for the Australian Bureau of Statistics found that 44% of the population does not have high literary and numeracy competence levels, interpreted by others as suggesting that they do not have the ""skills needed for everyday life"".
Australia has 37 government-funded universities and three private universities, as well as a number of other specialist institutions that provide approved courses at the higher education level. The OECD places Australia among the most expensive nations to attend university. There is a state-based system of vocational training, known as TAFE, and many trades conduct apprenticeships for training new tradespeople. About 58% of Australians aged from 25 to 64 have vocational or tertiary qualifications and the tertiary graduation rate of 49% is the highest among OECD countries. 30.9% of Australia's population has attained a higher education qualification, which is among the highest percentages in the world.
Australia has the highest ratio of international students per head of population in the world by a large margin, with 812,000 international students enrolled in the nation's universities and vocational institutions in 2019. Accordingly, in 2019, international students represented on average 26.7% of the student bodies of Australian universities. International education therefore represents one of the country's largest exports and has a pronounced influence on the country's demographics, with a significant proportion of international students remaining in Australia after graduation on various skill and employment visas. Education is Australia's third-largest export, after iron ore and coal, and contributed over $28 billion to the economy in 2016–17."
Australia,"Culture
Contemporary Australian culture reflects the country's Indigenous traditions, Anglo-Celtic heritage, and post-1945 history of multicultural immigration. The culture of the United States has also been influential. The evolution of Australian culture since British colonisation has given rise to distinctive cultural traits.
Many Australians identify egalitarianism, mateship, irreverence and a lack of formality as part of their national identity. These find expression in Australian slang, as well as Australian humour, which is often characterised as dry, irreverent and ironic. New citizens and visa holders are required to commit to ""Australian values"", which are identified by the Department of Home Affairs as including: a respect for the freedom of the individual; recognition of the rule of law; opposition to racial, gender and religious discrimination; and an understanding of the ""fair go"", which is said to encompass the equality of opportunity for all and compassion for those in need. What these values mean, and whether or not Australians uphold them, has been debated since before Federation."
Australia,"Arts
Australia has over 100,000 Aboriginal rock art sites, and traditional designs, patterns and stories infuse contemporary Indigenous Australian art, ""the last great art movement of the 20th century"" according to critic Robert Hughes; its exponents include Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Early colonial artists showed a fascination with the unfamiliar land. The impressionistic works of Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts and other members of the 19th-century Heidelberg School—the first ""distinctively Australian"" movement in Western art—gave expression to nationalist sentiments in the lead-up to Federation. While the school remained influential into the 1900s, modernists such as Margaret Preston and Clarice Beckett, and, later, Sidney Nolan, explored new artistic trends. The landscape remained central to the work of Aboriginal watercolourist Albert Namatjira, as well as Fred Williams, Brett Whiteley and other post-war artists whose works, eclectic in style yet uniquely Australian, moved between the figurative and the abstract.
Australian literature grew slowly in the decades following European settlement though Indigenous oral traditions, many of which have since been recorded in writing, are much older. In the 19th century, Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson captured the experience of the bush using a distinctive Australian vocabulary. Their works are still popular; Paterson's bush poem ""Waltzing Matilda"" (1895) is regarded as Australia's unofficial national anthem. Miles Franklin is the namesake of Australia's most prestigious literary prize, awarded annually to the best novel about Australian life. Its first recipient, Patrick White, went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973. Australian Booker Prize winners include Peter Carey, Thomas Keneally and Richard Flanagan. Australian public intellectuals have also written seminal works in their respective fields, including feminist Germaine Greer and philosopher Peter Singer."
Australia,"In the performing arts, Aboriginal peoples have traditions of religious and secular song, dance and rhythmic music often performed in corroborees. At the beginning of the 20th century, Nellie Melba was one of the world's leading opera singers, and later popular music acts such as the Bee Gees, AC/DC, INXS and Kylie Minogue achieved international recognition. Many of Australia's performing arts companies receive funding through the Australian government's Australia Council. There is a symphony orchestra in each state, and a national opera company, Opera Australia, well known for its famous soprano Joan Sutherland. Ballet and dance are represented by The Australian Ballet and various state companies. Each state has a publicly funded theatre company."
Australia,"Media
The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), the world's first feature-length narrative film, spurred a boom in Australian cinema during the silent film era. After World War I, Hollywood monopolised the industry, and by the 1960s Australian film production had effectively ceased. With the benefit of government support, the Australian New Wave of the 1970s brought provocative and successful films, many exploring themes of national identity, such as Picnic at Hanging Rock, Wake in Fright and Gallipoli, while Crocodile Dundee and the Ozploitation movement's Mad Max series became international blockbusters. In a film market flooded with foreign content, Australian films delivered a 7.7% share of the local box office in 2015. The AACTAs are Australia's premier film and television awards, and notable Academy Award winners from Australia include Geoffrey Rush, Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett and Heath Ledger.
Australia has two public broadcasters (the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the multicultural Special Broadcasting Service), three commercial television networks, several pay-TV services, and numerous public, non-profit television and radio stations. Each major city has at least one daily newspaper, and there are two national daily newspapers, The Australian and The Australian Financial Review. In 2020, Reporters Without Borders placed Australia 25th on a list of 180 countries ranked by press freedom, behind New Zealand (8th) but ahead of the United Kingdom (33rd) and United States (44th). This relatively low ranking is primarily because of the limited diversity of commercial media ownership in Australia; most print media are under the control of News Corporation (59%) and Nine Entertainment Co (23%)."
Australia,"Cuisine
Most Indigenous Australian groups subsisted on a hunter-gatherer diet of native fauna and flora, otherwise called bush tucker. It has increased in popularity among non-Indigenous Australians since the 1970s, with examples such as lemon myrtle, the macadamia nut and kangaroo meat now widely available.
The first colonists introduced British and Irish cuisine to the continent. This influence is seen in dishes such as fish and chips, and in the Australian meat pie, which is related to the British steak pie. Also during the colonial period, Chinese migrants paved the way for a distinctive Australian Chinese cuisine.
Post-war migrants transformed Australian cuisine, bringing with them their culinary traditions and contributing to new fusion dishes. Italians introduced espresso coffee and, along with Greeks, helped develop Australia's café culture, of which the flat white and ""smashed avo"" on toast are now considered Australian staples. Pavlovas, lamingtons, Vegemite and Anzac biscuits are also often called iconic Australian foods.
Australia is a leading exporter and consumer of wine. Australian wine is produced mainly in the southern, cooler parts of the country. The nation also ranks highly in beer consumption, with each state and territory hosting numerous breweries."
Australia,"Sport and recreation
The most popular sports in Australia by adult participation are: swimming, athletics, cycling, soccer, golf, tennis, basketball, surfing, netball and cricket.
Australia is one of five nations to have participated in every Summer Olympics of the modern era, and has hosted the Games twice: 1956 in Melbourne and 2000 in Sydney. It is also set to host the 2032 Games in Brisbane. Australia has also participated in every Commonwealth Games, hosting the event in 1938, 1962, 1982, 2006 and 2018.
Cricket is a major national sport. The Australian national cricket team competed against England in the first Test match (1877) and the first One Day International (1971), and against New Zealand in the first Twenty20 International (2004), winning all three games. It has also won the men's Cricket World Cup a record six times.
Australia has professional leagues for four football codes, whose relative popularity is divided geographically. Originating in Melbourne in the 1850s, Australian rules football attracts the most television viewers in all states except New South Wales and Queensland, where rugby league holds sway, followed by rugby union. Soccer, while ranked fourth in television viewers and resources, has the highest overall participation rates.
The surf lifesaving movement originated in Australia, and the volunteer lifesaver is one of the country's icons."
Australia,"See also
Outline of Australia
Index of Australia-related articles
International rankings of Australia"
Australia,"Notes
References
Sources
This article incorporates text from a free content work.  Licensed under CC BY-SA IGO 3.0 (license statement/permission). Text taken from World Food and Agriculture – Statistical Yearbook 2023​,  FAO, FAO."
Australia,"Bibliography
Further reading
External links"
Australia,"Australia profile on The World Factbook
Australia profile from BBC News
Australia profile from the OECD
Australia at Curlie
 Wikimedia Atlas of Australia
 Geographic data related to Australia at OpenStreetMap
Government"
Australia,"Parliament of Australia
Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
National Archives of Australia
Australian Bureau of Statistics
Travel"
Australia,Official website of Tourism Australia
Prime Minister of Australia,"The prime minister of Australia is the head of government of the Commonwealth of Australia. The prime minister is the chair of the Cabinet of Australia and thus the head of the federal executive government. Under the principles of responsible government, the prime minister is both responsible to and a member of the Commonwealth Parliament. The current prime minister is Anthony Albanese of the Australian Labor Party, who assumed the office on 23 May 2022.
The role and duties of the prime minister are not described by the Australian constitution but rather defined by constitutional convention deriving from the Westminster system and responsible government. The prime minister is formally appointed by the by the governor-general, who is ordinarily constrained by convention to choose the parliamentarian able to command the confidence of the House of Representatives (the lower house). Since Federation, this has almost always been the leader of the majority party or coalition. In practice, this means the prime minister most often changes after an election results in a different party gaining control of the lower house or as a result of the majority party changing its leader internally between elections.
The office of prime minister comes with various privileges, including the use of two official residences: The Lodge in Canberra and Kirribilli House in Sydney, as well as an office at Parliament House.
Thirty-one people (thirty men and one woman) have served as prime minister, the first of whom was Edmund Barton taking office on 1 January 1901 following federation of the British colonies in Australia. The longest-serving prime minister was Robert Menzies, who served over 18 years, and the shortest-serving was Frank Forde, who served one week."
Prime Minister of Australia,"Powers and responsibilities
In common with other political systems based on the Westminster system, the prime minister both leads the executive government and wields significant power in Parliament."
Prime Minister of Australia,"Executive role
Cabinet, the primary decision making body of the executive government, is chaired by the prime minister. While the prime minister has been described as the ""first among equals"" of the other ministers that make up cabinet, they nevertheless wield primary influence in the body. They set the agenda and processes of cabinet meetings and has the final word where a collective decision cannot be reached. Ministers making up the cabinet are chosen by the prime minister and may be removed at any time. Additionally, the prime minister chooses the portfolio of each minister and a prime minister's resignation or dismissal leads by convention to the resignation of all other ministers. The precise authority of each individual prime minister within cabinet is uncertain, as their deliberations are secret, however in recent decades their power has increased substantially. The authority of the prime minister to make independent policy decisions apart from Cabinet is also present, which such decisions also colloquially called ""captain's calls"". The prime minister also has significant influence in the setting of foreign policy, through their role as chair of the National Security Committee, a sub-committee of cabinet whose decisions do not need to be endorsed by the cabinet as a whole.
The prime minister is also the responsible minister for the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, whose tasks include general policy development across the government, inter-governmental communications, honours and symbols policy and Indigenous government programmes."
Prime Minister of Australia,"Legislative role
Since the emergence of the strong party system in Australia in the 1920s, prime ministers have almost always been the head of the party (or coalition of parties) that has a majority in the House of Representatives (which has been either the Labor Party or the Liberal Party since the 1940s). Responsible government has always required the prime minister and government to have the confidence of a majority of the lower house in order to govern, however the emergence of strong parties with members strongly punished for voting against party policy (also known as crossing the floor) has meant that most prime ministers and governments have significant control over the passage of bills in this house. However, bills must also be passed by the Senate (the upper house) in order to become law and the government rarely has a majority in this house, leading to some checks on the legislative powers of the government. The prime minister also controls the date of elections, through formal advice to the governor-general, with such elections usually occurring within a 6 month period prior to the maximum 3 year term of the House of Representatives expiring."
Prime Minister of Australia,"Other responsibilities
National Cabinet, the primary inter-governmental decision making forum between the federal government and the states, is also chaired by the prime minister. While called a cabinet, the body is merely a discussion forum and the principles of secrecy and collective decision making do not apply. 
Since the 1940s, the prime minister has asserted their authority to select the governor-general alone, instead of this being a cabinet decision. The power is exercised through advice to the King of Australia, who holds the de jure power to make the appointment and is by convention bound to accept such advice. The prime minister can also advise the monarch to dismiss the governor-general, though it remains unclear how quickly the monarch would act on such advice in a constitutional crisis. This uncertainty, and the possibility of a race between the governor-general and prime minister to dismiss the other, was a key question in the 1975 constitutional crisis."
Prime Minister of Australia,"Selection and constitutional basis
In ordinary circumstances, the leader of the party or coalition that has the confidence of the House of Representatives is entitled to become prime minister and form a government. Generally, a party or coalition will have a majority in the lower house in order to provide confidence, however in periods of minority government, the larger party will rely on confidence and supply from minor parties or independents. By convention, the prime minister must be a member of the lower house. The only case where a member of the Senate was appointed prime minister was John Gorton, who subsequently resigned his Senate position and was elected as the member for Higgins in the House of Representatives. The prime minister is formally appointed to the role by the governor-general under section 64 of the Australian Constitution, however their choice is limited in normal circumstances to the individual with the confidence of the lower house. However, the prime minister (and all other ministers) must be a parliamentarians or become one within three months to be a minister. 
There are no term limits for the prime minister, and they are generally entitled to continue in their role whilst they retain the confidence of the lower house. Individuals most commonly cease to become prime minister after losing an election by not obtaining a majority in the lower house (at which point they generally become leader of the opposition or resign) or through replacement by their parliamentary party colleagues. This later method has become increasingly common, with the office changing hands four times due to parliamentary spill and only twice due to an election in the period following the election defeat of John Howard in 2007 to the election of Anthony Albanese in 2022. 
A prime minister may also lose their position following a vote of no confidence in the government or due to a failure to pass supply through the lower house. In either event, the prime minister is required by convention to either resign or call an election. Whether a prime minister is required to resign or call an election following an inability to pass supply through the Senate was the animating issue of the 1975 constitutional crisis. In that event, governor-general Sir John Kerr dismissed the Whitlam government following the Senate's deferral of the government's budget and demand that they would not pass supply until the government called an election. The constitutional propriety of the governor-general's action during that period remains subject to vigorous debate."
Prime Minister of Australia,"Despite the importance of the office of prime minister, the Constitution does not mention the office by name. The conventions of the Westminster system were thought to be sufficiently entrenched in Australia by the authors of the Constitution that it was deemed unnecessary to detail these. Indeed, prior to Federation in 1901 the terms ""premier"" and ""prime minister"" were used interchangeably for the head of government in a colony.Following a resignation in other circumstances or the death of a prime minister, the governor-general generally appoints the deputy prime minister as the new prime minister, until or if such time as the governing party or senior coalition party elects an alternative party leader. This has resulted in the party leaders from the Country Party (now named National Party) being appointed as prime minister, despite being the smaller party of their coalition. This occurred when Earle Page became caretaker prime minister following the death of Joseph Lyons in 1939, and when John McEwen became caretaker prime minister following the disappearance of Harold Holt in 1967. However, in 1941, Arthur Fadden became the leader of the Coalition and subsequently prime minister by the agreement of both coalition parties, despite being the leader of the smaller party in coalition, following the resignation of UAP leader Robert Menzies.
Excluding the brief transition periods during changes of government or leadership elections, there have only been a handful of cases where someone other than the leader of the majority party or coalition in the House of Representatives was prime minister:"
Prime Minister of Australia,"Federation occurred on 1 January 1901, but elections for the first parliament were not scheduled until late March. In the interim, an unelected caretaker government was necessary. In what is now known as the Hopetoun Blunder, the governor-general, Lord Hopetoun, invited Sir William Lyne, the premier of the most populous state, New South Wales, to form a government. However, no politician would agree to be a member of his Cabinet and Lyne returned his commission before Federation actually took place. The governor-general instead then commissioned the much more popular Edmund Barton, who became the first prime minister on Federation and led the inaugural government into and beyond the election.
During the second parliament, three parties (Free Trade, Protectionist and Labor) had roughly equal representation in the House of Representatives. The leaders of the three parties, Alfred Deakin, George Reid and Chris Watson each served as prime minister before losing a vote of confidence.
As a result of the Labor Party's split over conscription, Billy Hughes and his supporters were expelled from the Labor Party in November 1916. He subsequently continued on as prime minister at the head of the new National Labor Party, which had only 14 members out of a total of 75 in the House of Representatives. The Commonwealth Liberal Party – despite still forming the official Opposition – provided confidence and supply until February 1917, when the two parties agreed to merge and formed the Nationalist Party.
During the 1975 constitutional crisis, on 11 November 1975, the governor-general, Sir John Kerr, dismissed the Labor Party's Gough Whitlam as prime minister. Despite Labor holding a majority in the House of Representatives, Kerr appointed the Leader of the Opposition, Liberal leader Malcolm Fraser as caretaker prime minister, conditional on the passage of the Whitlam government's Supply bills through the Senate and the calling of an election for both houses of parliament. Fraser accepted these terms and immediately advised a double dissolution. An election was called for 13 December, which the Liberal Party won in its own right (although the Liberals governed in a coalition with the Country Party).
Compared to other Westminster systems such as those of Canada's federal and provincial governments, the transition from an outgoing prime minister to an incoming prime minister has been brief in Australia since the 1970s. Prior to that, in accordance with longstanding Australian constitutional practice, convention held that an outgoing prime minister would stay on as a caretaker until the full election results were tallied. Starting with the 1972 Australian federal election on 2 December 1972, Gough Whitlam and his deputy were sworn in on 5 December 1972 to form an interim government for two weeks, as the vote was being finalised and the full ministry makeup was being determined. On 23 May 2022 Anthony Albanese became prime minister with an interim four person ministry, two days after his victory in the election. This rapid shift was done in order for the new PM to attend a Quad meeting scheduled shortly after the election. When the results of the election were more clearly known the entire ministry was sworn in on 1 June 2022."
Prime Minister of Australia,"Amenities of office
Salary
As of 27 August 2023, Australia's prime minister is paid a total salary of A$586,950. This is made up of the 'base salary' received by all members of parliament (A$225,750) plus a 160 percent 'additional salary' for the role of prime minister. Increases in the base salary of MPs and senators are determined annually by the independent Remuneration Tribunal."
Prime Minister of Australia,"Residences and transport
The prime minister has two official residences. The primary official residence is the Lodge in Canberra. Most prime ministers have chosen the Lodge as their primary residence because of its security facilities and close proximity to Parliament House. There have been some exceptions, however. James Scullin preferred to live at the Hotel Canberra (now the Hyatt Hotel) and Ben Chifley lived in the Hotel Kurrajong. More recently, John Howard used the Sydney prime ministerial residence, Kirribilli House, as his primary accommodation. On her appointment on 24 June 2010, Julia Gillard said she would not be living in the Lodge until such time as she was returned to office by popular vote at the next general election, as she became prime minister by replacing an incumbent during a parliamentary term. Tony Abbott was never able to occupy the Lodge during his term (2013–15) because it was undergoing extensive renovations, which continued into the early part of his successor Malcolm Turnbull's term. Instead, Abbott resided in dedicated rooms at the Australian Federal Police College when in Canberra.
During his first term, Rudd had a staff at the Lodge consisting of a senior chef and an assistant chef, a child carer, one senior house attendant, and two junior house attendants. At Kirribilli House in Sydney, there are a full-time chef and a full-time house attendant. The official residences are fully staffed and catered for both the prime minister and their family. In addition, both have extensive security facilities. These residences are regularly used for official entertaining, such as receptions for Australian of the Year finalists.
The prime minister receives a number of transport amenities for official business. A Royal Australian Air Force operated Airbus KC-30A, transports the prime minister overseas, with two Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes available for shorter flights. For ground travel, the prime minister is transported in an armoured BMW 7 Series model. It is referred to as ""C-1"", or Commonwealth One, because of its number plate. It is escorted by police vehicles from state and federal authorities."
Prime Minister of Australia,	Privileges of office
Prime Minister of Australia,"After office
Politicians, including prime ministers, are usually granted certain privileges after leaving office, such as office accommodation, staff assistance, and a Life Gold Pass which entitles the holder to travel within Australia for non-commercial purposes at government expense. In 2017, then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull said the pass should be available only to former prime ministers, though he would not use it when he was no longer PM.
Only one prime minister who had left the Federal Parliament ever returned. Stanley Bruce was defeated in his own seat in 1929 while prime minister but was re-elected to parliament in 1931. Other prime ministers were elected to parliaments other than the Australian federal parliament: Sir George Reid was elected to the UK House of Commons (after his term as High Commissioner to the UK), and Frank Forde was re-elected to the Queensland Parliament (after his term as High Commissioner to Canada, and a failed attempt to re-enter the Federal Parliament).
As well as Reid and Forde, five other prime ministers went on to hold diplomatic posts.
Andrew Fisher, Joseph Cook and Stanley Bruce also served as High Commissioners to the United Kingdom, Gough Whitlam had served as Ambassador to UNESCO and Kevin Rudd is currently the Ambassador to the United States."
Prime Minister of Australia,"Acting prime ministers and succession
The deputy prime minister becomes acting prime minister if the prime minister is unable to undertake the role for a short time, for example if they are ill, overseas or on leave (and if both are unavailable, then another senior minister takes on this role). The Acts Interpretation Act 1901 confers upon acting ministers ""the same power and authority with respect to the absent Minister's statutory responsibilities"".
If the prime minister were to die, then the deputy prime minister would be appointed prime minister by the governor-general until the government votes for another member to be its leader. This happened when Harold Holt disappeared in 1967, when John McEwen was appointed prime minister. On the other two occasions that the prime minister has died in office, in 1939 and 1945, Earle Page and Frank Forde, respectively, were appointed prime minister.
In the early 20th century, overseas travel generally required long journeys by ship. As a result, some held the position of acting prime minister for significant periods of time, including William Watt (16 months, 1918–1919), George Pearce (7 months, 1916), Alfred Deakin (6 months, 1902), Joseph Cook (5 months, 1921), James Fenton (19 weeks, 1930–1931), John Forrest (4 months, 1907), and Arthur Fadden (4 months, 1941). Fadden was acting prime minister for a cumulative total of 676 days (over 22 months) between 1941 and 1958."
Prime Minister of Australia,"Honours
Prime ministers have been granted numerous honours, typically after their period as prime minister has concluded, with a few exceptions.
Nine former prime ministers were awarded knighthoods: Barton (GCMG, 1902), Reid (GCMG, 1911), Cook (GCMG, 1918), Page (GCMG, 1938), Menzies (KT, 1963), Fadden (KCMG, 1951), McEwen (GCMG, 1971), Gorton (GCMG, 1977), and McMahon (GCMG, 1977). Of those awarded, Barton and Menzies were knighted while still serving as prime minister, with Page awarded his before becoming prime minister, and the remainder awarded after leaving office. Reid (GCB, 1916), Menzies (AK, 1976) and Fadden (GCMG, 1958) were awarded a second knighthood after leaving office.
Non-titular honours were also bestowed on former prime ministers, usually the Order of the Companions of Honour. This honour was awarded to Bruce (1927), Lyons (1936), Hughes (1941), Page (1942), Menzies (1951), Holt (1967), McEwen (1969), Gorton (1971), McMahon (1972), and Fraser (1977), mostly during office as prime minister.
In almost all occasions these honours were only accepted by non-Labor/conservative prime ministers. However, appointment to the Privy Council of the United Kingdom was accepted by all prime ministers until 1983 (with the exception of Alfred Deakin, Chris Watson and Gough Whitlam), with Malcolm Fraser being the last prime ministerial appointee.
Since its introduction in 1975, former prime ministers of Australia have been appointed to the Order of Australia and to its highest level – Companion: Whitlam (1978), Fraser (1988), Gorton (1988), Howard (2008), Gillard (2017), Rudd (2019), Abbott (2020), and Turnbull (2021). Keating refused appointment in the 1997 Australia Day Honours, saying that he had long believed honours should be reserved for those whose work in the community went unrecognised and that having been Prime Minister was sufficient public recognition. Bob Hawke was appointed a Companion in 1979, for service to trade unionism and industrial relations, before becoming prime minister in 1983. Menzies was appointed to the higher grade of Knight of the Order, which is no longer awarded, in 1976.
John Howard was also appointed to the Order of Merit in 2012, whose appointments are within the personal gift of the monarch. Menzies' Knight of the Order of the Thistle awarding was also in the personal gift of Queen Elizabeth II in 1963.
Although not strictly an honour, one former prime minister was raised to the peerage; Stanley Bruce was created 1st Viscount Bruce of Melbourne in the 1947 New Year Honours.
In addition to these honours, all deceased former prime ministers of Australia currently have federal electorates named after them, with the exception of Sir Joseph Cook (a Division of Cook does exist, but it is named after explorer James Cook). The most newly created of these electorates is the Division of Hawke, named in honour of the recently deceased Bob Hawke in 2021."
Prime Minister of Australia,"Lists relating to the prime ministers of Australia
The longest-serving prime minister was Robert Menzies, who served in office twice: from 26 April 1939 to 28 August 1941, and again from 19 December 1949 to 26 January 1966. In total Robert Menzies spent 18 years, 5 months and 12 days in office. He served under the United Australia Party and the Liberal Party respectively.
The shortest-serving prime minister was Frank Forde, who was appointed to the position on 6 July 1945 after the death of John Curtin, and served until 13 July 1945 when Ben Chifley was elected leader of the Australian Labor Party.
The most recent prime minister to serve out a full government term in the office was Scott Morrison, who won the 2019 election and led his party to the 2022 election, but was defeated and lost his title as prime minister.
Lists of the 31 people who have so far held the premiership:"
Prime Minister of Australia,"List of prime ministers of Australia
List of prime ministers of Australia by birthplace
List of prime ministers of Australia by time in office"
Prime Minister of Australia,"See also
Historical rankings of prime ministers of Australia
List of Commonwealth heads of government
List of prime ministers of Australia by time in office
List of prime ministers of Elizabeth II
List of prime ministers of Charles III
Prime Ministers Avenue in Horse Chestnut Avenue in the Ballarat Botanical Gardens contains a collection of bronze busts of former Australian prime ministers.
Prime Ministers' Corridor of Oaks in Faulconbridge, New South Wales contains a corridor of oaks of former Australian prime ministers.
Prime Minister's XI
Spouse of the prime minister of Australia
Leader of the Opposition (Australia)"
Prime Minister of Australia,"References
Specific references
General references
Further reading
Abjorensen, Norman (2015). The Manner of Their Going: Prime Ministerial Exits from Lyne to Abbott. Australian Scholarly. ISBN 9781925333213.
Grattan, Michelle (2016). Australian Prime Ministers. New Holland. ISBN 9781742579337.
Hughes, Colin (1976). Mr Prime Minister: Australian Prime Ministers 1901–1972. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195504712.
Strangio, Paul (2013). ""Evaluating Prime-Ministerial Performance: The Australian Experience"". In Strangio, Paul; 't Hart, Paul; Walter, James (eds.). Understanding Prime-Ministerial Performance: Comparative Perspectives. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199666423.
Strangio, Paul; 't Hart, Paul; Walter, James (2016). Settling the Office: The Australian Prime Ministership from Federation to Reconstruction. Melbourne University Press. ISBN 9780522868722.
Strangio, Paul; 't Hart, Paul; Walter, James (2017). The Pivot of Power: Australian Prime Ministers and Political Leadership, 1949-2016. Melbourne University Press. ISBN 9780522868746.
Whitington, Don (1972). Twelfth Man?. Jacaranda Press. ISBN 0701605855."
Prime Minister of Australia,External links
Prime Minister of Australia,"Official website of the prime minister of Australia
Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet
Australia's Prime Ministers – National Archives of Australia reference site and research portal
Biographies of Australia's Prime Ministers / National Museum of Australia
Classroom resources on Australian Prime Ministers
Museum of Australian Democracy website about Australian prime ministers"
Drought in Australia,"Drought in Australia is defined by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology as rainfall over period greater than three-months being in the lowest decile of what has been recorded for that region in the past. This definition takes into account that drought is a relative term and rainfall deficiencies need to be compared to typical rainfall patterns including seasonal variations. Specifically, drought in Australia is defined in relation to a rainfall deficiency of pastoral leases and is determined by decile analysis applied to a certain area. Note that this definition uses rainfall only because long-term records are widely available across most of Australia. However, it does not take into account other variables that might be important for establishing surface water balance, such as evaporation and condensation.
Historical climatic records are now sufficiently reliable to profile climate variability taking into account expectations for regions. Bureau of Meteorology records since the 1860s show that a 'severe' drought has occurred in Australia, on average, once every 18 years. State Governments are responsible for declaring a region drought affected and the declaration will take into account factors other than rainfall.
Australia has experienced a marked decrease in precipitation levels since 1994. Deficiencies in northern Australia increased in 2013–14, leading to an extended drought period in certain parts of Queensland. Between 2017 and 2019, severe drought developed once more across much of eastern and inland Australia including Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, also extending into parts of South and Western Australia."
Drought in Australia,"Droughts in the 19th century
1803 Drought in New South Wales (NSW) that produced several crop failures.
1809 Beginning of an unusually severe drought in NSW that continued until 1811.
1813–1815 Severe drought in NSW that prompted searches for new pastures.
1826–1829 Severe drought in NSW that caused Lake George to dry up and the Darling River to cease flowing.
Since 1860, when adequate meteorological recording commenced, the most severe droughts have occurred commonly at intervals of 11 to 14 years. Major droughts that were recorded later in the 19th century include:"
Drought in Australia,"1829 Major drought in Western Australia with very little water available.
1835 and 1838 Sydney and NSW receive 25% less rain than usual. Severe drought in Northam and York areas of Western Australia.
1838–39 Droughts in South Australia and Western Australia
1839 Severe drought in the west and north of Spencer Gulf, South Australia.
1846 Severe drought converted the interior and far north of South Australia into an arid desert.
1849 Sydney received about 27 inches less rain than normal.
1850 Severe drought, with big losses of livestock across inland New South Wales and around the western rivers region.
1864–1866 (and 1868). The little data available indicates that this drought period was rather severe in Victoria, South Australia, New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia. This drought also helped fires in the Australia outback at the time.
1877 All states affected by severe drought, with disastrous losses in Queensland. In Western Australia many native trees died, swamps dried up and crops failed.
1880 to 1886 Drought in Victoria (northern areas and Gippsland); New South Wales (mainly northern wheat belt, Northern Tablelands and south coast); Queensland (1881–1886, in south-east with breaks – otherwise mainly in coastal areas, the central highlands and central interior in 1883–1886); and South Australia (1884–1886, mainly in agricultural areas).
1888 Extremely dry in Victoria (northern areas and Gippsland); Tasmania (1887–1889 in the south); New South Wales had the driest year since records began; Queensland (1888–89) had a very severe drought, with much native scrub dying and native animals perishing; South Australia had one of its most severe droughts; and Western Australia (central agricultural areas) lost many sheep.
1897 Drought in much of Queensland, compared to 1883–84 droughts."
Drought in Australia,"Drought in the 20th century
Federation drought
At the time of Federation, Australia suffered a major drought. There had been a number of years of below average rainfall across most of Australia before the drought. During the drought, the wheat crop was ""all but lost"", and the Darling River was dry at Bourke, New South Wales, for over a year, from April 1902 to May 1903. There was concern about Sydney's water supply. By 1902, Australia's sheep population dropped from its 1891 level of 106 million to fewer than 54 million. Cattle numbers fell by more than 40 per cent. Sheep numbers did not return to 100 million until 1925.
In the 1911–1915 period, Australia suffered a major drought, which failed the 1914 wheat crop. From 1918 to 1920, a severe drought was experienced by Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia, Northern Territory (Darwin-Daly Waters area and central Australia), Western Australia (Fortescue area), Victoria, and Tasmania."
Drought in Australia,"Other 20th century droughts
The World War II drought: 1937 to 1945
During World War II frequent dry spells from 1937 to 1945 extended over New South Wales, Victoria, much of Queensland and parts of Western Australia, with more breaks than the Federation and Millennium droughts, but more periods of intense dryness. Parts of New South Wales, notably the central west, had record-low rainfall and in 1938 severe dry conditions intensified there and in Victoria, eastern South Australia and in southwest Australian grain-growing areas. An extremely dry six-month spell in Victorian forests contributed to the disastrous Black Friday bushfires of January 1939, before heavy rain came in late February 1939 over Victoria, South Australia and New South Wales. 
The rains were only a brief respite, and 1940 was one of the driest years of the century over most of southern Australia, emptying the Nepean Dam in New South Wales and imposing water restrictions in Brisbane. Perth had its driest year of the 20th century. Heavy rain in the southeastern States in November 1940 and January 1941 slightly eased the situation and 1942 was a year of good general rain, but an even worse 1944 resulted when dearth of winter–spring rains led to failure of the wheat crop and required populations in northern Victoria to cart water. Into 1945, large rivers virtually dried up, with most of the Hunter River ceasing flow and the Hawkesbury drying up at North Richmond. There was no flow in the Murray above Echuca. Adelaide faced water shortages while main Victorian water storages were empty in April 1945 and water restrictions were imposed as far north as Townsville. Dust storms blanketed South Australia, northern Victoria and southern New South Wales through the summer of 1944–45. 
Artist Russell Drysdale undertook 3-week 5000km tour, at the height of WW2, of wind-eroded drought-stricken areas on commission from The Sydney Morning Herald. The articles written by Keith Newman and variously headed ""The country in which there are no Bushfires. There is nothing to burn;"" ""Worst Drought in Australia's History;"" and ""An Artist's Journey Into Australia's Lost World,"" were generously illustrated with stark line drawings by Drysdale and appeared on subsequent days 16-19 December 1944.
The drought broke in the southern States in winter 1945, with a good wheat harvest that year, but in some regions of southern Queensland and northern New South Wales 1946 was the worst year of all, and only in 1947 did significant general rains end the long drought."
Drought in Australia,"Post World War II
In 1952 large regions across the North were affected by a failed wet season declared to be the ""driest season for 50 years."" Its effect on agriculture was profound, with millions of cattle dying, many because the stock routes south were too dry to sustain their journey. Artist Sidney Nolan, on commission from the Brisbane Courier-Mail, produced a series of photographs of their dried carcasses, but the results were judged by editors to be too confronting and the article carried his drawings from the pictures instead."
Drought in Australia,"The 1965 to 1968 drought
From 1965–1968, eastern Australia was again greatly affected by drought. Conditions had been dry over the centre of the continent since 1957 but spread elsewhere during the summer of 1964/1965. This drought contributed to the 1967 Tasmanian fires in which 62 people died in one day and 1,400 homes were lost."
Drought in Australia,"1980s
The drought in 1982–83 is regarded as the worst of the twentieth century for short-term rainfall deficiencies of up to one year and their over-all impact. There were severe dust storms in north-western Victoria and severe bushfires in south-east Australia in February 1983 with 75 people killed. This El Niño-related drought ended in March, when a monsoon depression became an extratropical low and swept across Australia's interior and on to the south-east in mid- to late March."
Drought in Australia,"1990s Queensland drought
An extremely severe drought occurred in the later year of 1991, which intensified in 1994 and 1995 to become the worst on record in Queensland. This drought was influenced by a strong El Niño weather pattern and associated with high temperatures in July and August 1995, the fifth continuous year of drought in parts of Queensland. According to Primary Industries Minister, Ed Casey, ""the drought affected region stretched in a 200 km to 300 km wide strip from Stanthorpe to Charters Towers"". So few wheat and barley crops survived, about half the usual for that year, that grains had to be imported from other states.
In June 1994, more than ten towns had lost irrigation systems; and some areas had gone five years without decent rainfall.
A part of the upper Darling River system collapsed during this drought. By October 1994, the Condamine River was exhausted, reverting to a series of ponds. Across the state, in more than 13,000 properties, totaling 40% of Queensland, was drought declared. The flow past Goondiwindi was the lowest since 1940. Cotton farms near Moree and Narrabri had been allocated no water for irrigation, which resulted in a major loss of production. The town of Warwick was particularly affected."
Drought in Australia,"Drought in the 21st century
2000s or 'Millennium' drought in south-eastern Australia
From 1996 to 2010, south-eastern Australia experienced prolonged dry conditions with rainfall persistently well below average, particularly during the cooler months from April to October. The most acute period of the so-called 'Millennium drought' was between 2001 and 2009. The drought finished with the arrival of wet La Niña conditions during 2010 and 2011, with particularly heavy summer rainfall."
Drought in Australia,"1996 to 2000: patchy rainfall in the south-east
Dry conditions began to emerge in south-eastern Australia during late 1996 and intensified during the strong 1997 El Niño event. Rainfall in 1998, 1999 and 2000 was closer to average, with isolated areas affected by rainfall well below average."
Drought in Australia,"2001 to 2009: the peak of the drought
According to the Bureau of Meteorology, much of eastern Australia experienced a dry 2001. 2002 was one of Australia's driest and warmest years on record, with 'remarkably widespread' dry conditions, particularly in the eastern half of the country, which was again affected by El Niño conditions. It was, at the time, Australia's fourth driest year since 1900."
Drought in Australia,"The El Niño weather pattern broke down during 2003, but occasional strong rainfall in 2003 and 2004 failed to alleviate the cumulative effect of persistently low rainfall in south-eastern Australia, with some measurement stations having recorded below average rainfall for eight consecutive years. Rainfall in early 2005 remained below average, and better rainfall in the second half of the year again failed to break continuing drought conditions in the south-east. South-east Australia experienced its second driest year on record in 2006, particularly affecting the major agricultural region of the Murray–Darling basin. 2007 saw record temperatures across the south of Australia, and only patchy rain; promising early year rains contrasted with a very dry July–October period, meaning that drought conditions persisted across much of the south-east. At this point, the Bureau of Meteorology estimated that south-eastern Australia had missed the equivalent of a full year's rain in the previous 11 years.
2008 and 2009 saw continuing hot and dry conditions in south-eastern Australia, with occasional heavy rainfall failing to break the continuing drought. The effects of the drought were exacerbated by Australia's (then) second hottest year on record in 2009, with record-breaking heatwaves in January, February and the second half of the year."
Drought in Australia,"2010 and 2011: La Niña finally breaks the drought
Australia's weather pattern transitioned rapidly to a wet La Niña pattern during autumn, resulting in record-breaking rains in the Murray-Darling Basin and well above average rainfall across the south-east. For many locations this was the first year of above-average rainfall since 1996. The rainfall dramatically increased surface water storage and soil moisture, effectively ending the drought in the south-east. Very wet conditions continued through 2011, resulting in floods in Queensland and northern Victoria."
Drought in Australia,"Effects on agricultural production
Dairy producers were hit particularly hard by the drought. 2004 was a particularly bleak year in the sector, with revenue in the industry falling by 5.6%.
Agricultural production was affected. Water use by the industry fell by 37% between 2000/01 and 2004/05, due mainly to drought. Around 20 cotton communities and 10,000 people directly employed by the cotton industry were impacted by the drought. The main areas affected were in New South Wales: Menindee, where the area under production was reduced by 100%, Bourke, area reduced by 99%, Walgett by 95%, the Macquarie River by 74% and Gwydir River by 60%. In Queensland, the worst-affected areas were Biloela, which reduced the area under production by 100%, Dirranbandi, by 91%, Central Highlandsby 82% and Darling Downs by 78%. Bourke has only had adequate water for one cotton crop in the last five years.
Dry conditions again began to develop and be sustained in mid-2013 through much of western Queensland. Although these began easing for western Queensland in early 2014, drought began to develop further east, along the coastal fringe and into the ranges of southeast Queensland and northeast New South Wales.
Dry conditions continued into 2015 in the east, particularly in Queensland where the monsoon rains were delayed. Queensland had experienced poor wet season rains for three consecutive seasons. Wetter conditions in 2016 eased the effects of drought in eastern Australia, but pockets of south-east Queensland and north-east New South Wales remained drier than average.
Stock feed becomes scarce and farmers find it difficult to feed cattle and sheep."
Drought in Australia,"Early 2017 to late 2019
Meteorological conditions
2017 was a drier than average year for much of inland Queensland, most of New South Wales, eastern and central Victoria, and all of Tasmania. In 2018, rainfall for the year was very low over the southeastern quarter of the Australian mainland, with much of the region experiencing totals in the lowest 10% of historical observations, and was particularly low over the mainland southeast from April onwards. The state of New South Wales was declared to be 100% in drought by August 2018, remaining at 98.6% 
into May 2019; by May 2019 65.2% of Queensland was also declared to be in drought. Two southern parts of Western Australia were declared ""water deficient"" by May 2019 after months of drought, with other drought affected areas including central and east Gippsland in Victoria, and parts of eastern South Australia. On one-to-two-year timeframes to the end of March 2019, rainfall deficiencies in the Murray–Darling Basin, Australia's most extensive river system, were the third lowest on record, behind similar length timeframes between 1901 and 1903, and between 1918 and 1920. In July 2019, climatologist David Jones from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology stated that the present drought was now officially the worst on record in the Murray–Darling Basin, and ""had now exceeded the Federation Drought, the WWII drought and the Millennium drought in terms of its severity through the MDB"". In October 2019, Australia's Bureau of Meteorology stated that drier and warmer and drier than average conditions were expected to persist at least until the end of the year with no relief in sight for most of the drought affected areas, influenced at least in part by a positive Indian Ocean Dipole and a prolonged period of negative SAM (Southern Annular Mode) during October and November. Exacerbating the effects of diminished rainfall in this drought has been a record breaking run of above average monthly temperatures, lasting 36 months to October 2019.
As of December 2019 the drought was continuing – including the driest November across Australia on record – but the Bureau of Meteorology reported that the positive Indian Ocean Dipole had weakened to around 50% of its peak seen in mid October, possibly indicating a future improvement in conditions later in the Australian summer.
From 7-10 February 2020, many areas on the east coast of New South Wales received heavy and continuous rain, the heaviest falls for thirty years. 391.6 millimetres (15.42 in) of rain fell over the four days in Sydney, more than three times the February average. Flooding was extensive, including areas such as Lake Conjola, that had been devastated by bushfires about 6 weeks earlier. About 28500 people were affected by this drought.
In March 2021, above average rainfall led to serious and destructive flooding in the Hawkesbury-Nepean catchment and on the Mid North Coast of New South Wales."
Drought in Australia,"Australian Government response
In November 2013 the Australian Government released a $500 million drought stimulus package, including an additional $2 million in loans under the Regional Investment Corporation under a reconfigured payment schedule, an extension to the existing Drought Communities Program which provides money to regional Councils, and supplementary payments under the Roads to Recovery program to assist with job creation in drought-affected areas. The plan also provided $100 million for South Australia to turn on its Adelaide Desalination Plant to significantly ramp up production of water to supply the Adelaide metropolitan area, to allow farmers affected by drought to access more water from the Murray River upstream. This followed the release of a $170 million Drought Stimulus Package by the New South Wales State Government in June."
Drought in Australia,"2019 bushfires
Dry conditions in September 2019 contributed to several small to mid-range fires in north eastern New South Wales. By November of that year, continuing heat and lack of rain had desiccated the forests and agricultural land along the Great Dividing range in New South Wales and Queensland. Sydney received less than 2 millimetres (0.079 in) of rain in December 2019, with temperatures reaching 40°C (104°F). Numerous intense bushfires occurred, some of which burnt Gondwanan rainforest remnants that had not experienced fires for millennia. This included Mount Nothofagus National Park and Nightcap National Park."
Drought in Australia,"Future projections
Australia's national science research agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), states that on account of projected future climate change, hot days will become more frequent and hotter (very high confidence), extreme rainfall events will become more intense (high confidence), and the time in drought is projected to increase over southern Australia (high confidence). Seasonal-average rainfall changes will vary across Australia: in southern mainland Australia, winter and spring rainfall is projected to decrease (high confidence), but increases are projected for Tasmania in winter (medium confidence), while in eastern and northern Australia in the near future (to 2030), natural variability is anticipated to predominate over trends due to greenhouse gas emissions. However even if climate change does not result in decreased rainfall in eastern and northern Australia over the period to 2030, the perceived severity of drought (in terms of low soil moisture) would increase on account of the higher evaporative demand resulting from the projected overall rise in average temperatures."
Drought in Australia,"See also
Climate change in Australia
Deserts of Australia
Extreme weather
Federation Drought
List of reservoirs and dams in Australia
Peak water
Send her down Hughie
Water restrictions in Australia
Effects of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation in Australia"
Drought in Australia,"References
External links
 Media related to Drought in Australia at Wikimedia Commons
Drought
Drought in Australia on Australian Bureau of Statistics
Drought in Australia on Bureau of Meteorology
Government Drought Support (PDF) (Technical report). Australian Government Productivity Commission. 2009. ISBN 978-1-74037-275-6. 46."
Islam in Australia,"Islam is the second-largest religion in Australia. According to the 2021 Census in Australia, the combined number of people who self-identified as Australian Muslims, from all forms of Islam, constituted 813,392 people, or 3.2% of the total Australian population. That total Muslim population makes Islam, in all its denominations and sects, the second largest religious grouping in Australia, after all denominations of Christianity (43.9%, also including non-practicing cultural Christians).
Demographers attribute Muslim community growth trends during the most recent census period to relatively high birth rates, and recent immigration patterns. Adherents of Islam represent the majority of the population in Cocos (Keeling) Islands, an external territory of Australia.
The vast majority of Muslims in Australia are Sunni, with significant minorities belonging to the Shia denomination. The followers of each of these are further split along different Madhhab (schools of thought within Islamic jurisprudence for the interpretation and practice of Islamic law) and Sub-Sect. There are also practitioners of other smaller denominations of Islam such as Ibadi Muslim Australians of Omani descent, and approximately 20,000 Druze Australians whose religion emerged as an offshoot of Islam which arrived in Australia with the immigration of Druze mainly from Lebanon and Syria. There are also Sufi (Islamic mysticism) minorities among Muslim practitioners in Australia.
While the overall Australian Muslim community is defined largely by a common religious identity, Australia's Muslims are not a monolithic community. The Australian Muslim community has traditional sectarian divisions and is also extremely diverse racially, ethnically, culturally and linguistically. Different Muslim groups within the Australian Muslim community thus also espouse parallel non-religious ethnic identities with related non-Muslim counterparts, either within Australia or abroad."
Islam in Australia,"History
Prior to 1860
Islam has been in Australia since the 1700s when Makassar traders were long-term visitors to Arnhem land (now Northern Territory). A dance among the Warramiri people refers to a dreamtime creational being is given the name, Walitha Walitha, which is an adaptation of the Arabic phrase Allah ta'ala (God, the exalted). The  'Dreaming' creation figure, Walitha' walitha, is also known as Allah. In the Warramiri tradition, Walitha' walitha descends from heaven to re-establish order from infighting and violence between different groups in Arnhem land. Indigenous Australians share this ceremony, known as the Wurramu, with the people of Macassar Indonesia, but the Aboriginal version is a mortuary ritual. Aboriginal elders explain on  an  'outside' level' the dance performance is about the new  world introduced to Aborigines in pre-colonial times as a result of this first contact experience, but on an 'inside' level, they focus on the Aboriginal deaths that occurred as a consequence of contact with these fishing peoples from the north of Australia. The 'inside' meaning of the ritual relates to the passage of  the soul of the deceased to a  heavenly paradise above, the abode of Allah."
Islam in Australia,"Indonesian Muslims trepangers from the southwest corner of Sulawesi visited the coast of northern Australia, ""from at least the eighteenth century"" to collect and process trepang, a marine invertebrate prized for its culinary and medicinal values in Chinese markets. Remnants of their influence can be seen in the culture of some of the northern Aboriginal peoples. Regina Ganter, an associate professor at Griffith University, says, ""Staying on the safe grounds of historical method ... the beginning of the trepang industry in Australia [can be dated] to between the 1720s and 1750s, although this does not preclude earlier, less organised contact."" Ganter also writes ""the cultural imprint on the Yolngu people of this contact is everywhere: in their language, in their art, in their stories, in their cuisine.""  According to anthropologist John Bradley from Monash University, the contact between the two groups was a success: ""They traded together. It was fair - there was no racial judgement, no race policy."" Even into the early 21st century, the shared history between the two peoples is still celebrated by Aboriginal communities in Northern Australia as a period of mutual trust and respect.
Others who have studied this period have come to a different conclusion regarding the relationship between the Aboriginal people and the visiting trepangers. Anthropologist Ian McIntosh has said that the initial effects of the Macassan fishermen were ""terrible"", which resulted in ""turmoil"": 65–67  with the extent of Islamic influence being ""indeterminate"".: 76  In another paper McIntosh concludes, ""strife, poverty and domination . . is a previously unrecorded legacy of contact between Aborigines and Indonesians."": 138   A report prepared by the History Department of the Australian National University says that the Macassans appear to have been welcomed initially, however relations deteriorated when, ""aborigines began to feel they were being exploited . . leading to violence on both sides"".: 81–82 
A number of ""Mohammedans"" were listed in the musters of 1802, 1811, 1822, and the 1828 census, and a small number of Muslims arrived during the convict period. Beyond this, Muslims generally are not thought to have settled in large numbers in other regions of Australia until 1860.: 10 
Muslims were among the earliest settlers of Norfolk Island while the island was used as a British penal colony in the early 19th century. They arrived from 1796, having been employed on British ships. They left following the closure of the penal colony and moved to Tasmania. The community left no remnants; only seven permanent residents of the island identified themselves as ""non-Christian"" in a 2006 census."
Islam in Australia,"1860 onward: cameleers and pearlers
Among the early Muslims were the ""Afghan"" camel drivers who migrated to and settled in Australia during the mid to late 19th century. Between 1860 and the 1890s a number of Central Asians came to Australia to work as camel drivers. Camels were first imported into Australia in 1840, initially for exploring the arid interior (see Australian camel), and later for the camel trains that were uniquely suited to the demands of Australia's vast deserts. The first camel drivers arrived in Melbourne, Victoria, in June 1860, when eight Muslims and Hindus arrived with the camels for the Burke and Wills expedition. The next arrival of camel drivers was in 1866 when 31 men from Rajasthan and Baluchistan arrived in South Australia with camels for Thomas Elder. Although they came from several countries, they were usually known in Australia as 'Afghans' and they brought with them the first formal establishment of Islam in Australia."
Islam in Australia,"Cameleers settled in the areas near Alice Springs and other areas of the Northern Territory and inter-married with the Indigenous population. The Adelaide, South Australia to Darwin, Northern Territory, railway is named The Ghan (short for The Afghan) in their memory.
The first mosque in Australia was built in 1861 at Marree, South Australia. The Great Mosque of Adelaide was built in 1888 by the descendants of the Afghan cameleers. The Broken Hill Mosque at North camel camp was built by the cameleers between 1887 and 1891.
During the 1870s, Muslim Malay divers were recruited through an agreement with the Dutch to work on Western Australian and Northern Territory pearling grounds. By 1875, there were 1800 Malay divers working in Western Australia. Most returned to their home countries.
One of the earliest recorded Islamic festivals celebrated in Australia occurred on 23 July 1884 when 70 Muslims assembled for Eid prayers at Albert Park, Melbourne. The Auckland Star noted the ceremony's calm demeanor, stating: ""During the whole service the worshippers wore a remarkably reverential aspect."""
Islam in Australia,"20th century
Most of the cameleers returned to their countries after their work had dried up, but a few had brought wives and settled in Australia with their families, and others settled either on their own (some living at the Adelaide Mosque), or married Aboriginal or European women. Halimah Schwerdt, secretary to Mahomet Allum, a former cameleer who established himself as herbalist, healer and philanthropist in Adelaide, became first European woman in Australia to publicly embrace Islam. She was engaged to Allum in 1935-37, but there is no record of a wedding. He married Jean Emsley in 1940, who converted to Islam later. Allam also published pamphlets and articles about Islam.
From 1901, under the provisions of the White Australia policy, immigration to Australia was restricted to persons of white European descent (including white Europeans of the Muslim faith). Meanwhile, persons not of white European heritage (including most Muslims) were denied entry to Australia during this period, and those already settled were not granted Australian citizenship.
Notable events involving Australian Muslims during this early period include what has been described either as an act of war by the Ottoman Empire, or the earliest terrorist attack planned against Australian civilians. The attack was carried out at Broken Hill, New South Wales, in 1915, in what was described as the Battle of Broken Hill. Two Afghans who pledged allegiance to the Ottoman Empire shot and killed four Australians and wounded seven others before being killed by the police."
Islam in Australia,"In the 1920s and 1930s Albanian Muslims, whose European heritage made them compatible with the White Australia Policy, immigrated to the country. The Albanian arrival revived the Australian Muslim community whose ageing demographics were until that time in decline and Albanians became some of the earliest post-colonial Muslim groups to establish themselves in Australia. Some of the earliest communities with a sizable Albanian Muslim population were Mareeba, Queensland and Shepparton in Victoria."
Islam in Australia,"Post-war migration
The perceived need for population growth and economic development in Australia led to the broadening of Australia's immigration policy in the post-World War II period. This allowed for the acceptance of a number of displaced white European Muslims who began to arrive from other parts of Europe, mainly from the Balkans, especially from Bosnia and Herzegovina. As with the Albanian Muslim immigrants before them, the European heritage of these displaced Muslims also made them compatible with the White Australia Policy.
Albanians partook in the revival of Islamic life within Australia, in particular toward creating networks and institutions for the community. Albanian Muslims built the first mosque in Shepparton, Victoria (1960), first mosque in Melbourne (1969) and another in 1985, and a mosque in Mareeba, Far North Queensland (1970).
With the increase in immigration of Muslims after the war from countries such as Bosnia, Albania and Kosovo, the Islam in Australia developed its characteristic plurality. The move proved enriching for Muslim migrants, who ""met Muslim fellows from many different ethnic, racial, cultural, sectarian and linguistic backgrounds"" and ""found Islam more pluralistic and more sophisticated"" than their countries of origin.
Later, between 1967 and 1971, during the final years of the step-by-step dismantling of the White Australia policy, approximately 10,000 Turkish citizens settled in Australia under an agreement between Australia and Turkey. From the 1970s onwards, there was a significant shift in the government's attitude towards immigration, and with the White Australia policy now totally dismantled from 1973 onwards, instead of trying to make newer foreign nationals assimilate and forgo their heritage, the government became more accommodating and tolerant of differences by adopting a policy of multiculturalism."
Islam in Australia,"Larger-scale Muslim migration of non-White non-European Muslims began in 1975 with the migration of Lebanese Muslims, which rapidly increased during the Lebanese Civil War from 22,311 or 0.17% of the Australian population in 1971, to 45,200 or 0.33% in 1976. Lebanese Muslims are still the largest and highest-profile Muslim group in Australia, although Lebanese Christians form a majority of Lebanese Australians, outnumbering their Muslim counterparts at a 6-to-4 ratio."
Islam in Australia,"1990s
Trade and educational links have been developed between Australia and several Muslim countries. Muslim students from countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, are among the thousands of international students studying in Australian universities.
A number of Australian Arabs experienced anti-Arab backlash during the First Gulf War (1990–91). Newspapers received numerous letters calling for Arab Australians to ""prove their loyalty"" or ""go home"", and some Arab Australian Muslim women wearing hijab head coverings were reportedly harassed in public. The Australian government's Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission included accounts of racial harassment experienced by some Australian Arabs in their 1991 report on racism in Australia.: 11–13"
Islam in Australia,"21st century
By the beginning of the 21st-century, Muslims from more than sixty countries had settled in Australia. While a very large number of them come from Bosnia, Turkey, and Lebanon, there are Muslims from Indonesia, Malaysia, Iran, Fiji, Albania, Sudan, Somalia, Egypt, the Palestinian territories, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh, among others. At the time of the 2011 census, 476,000 Australians (representing 2.2 percent of the population) reported Islam as their religion.
On a few occasions in the 2000s and 2010s, tensions have flared between Australian Muslims and the general population. The Sydney gang rapes formed a much-reported set of incidents in 2000; a group of Lebanese men sexually assaulted non-Muslim women. In 2005, tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims in the Cronulla area of Sydney led to violent rioting; the incident resulted in mass arrests and criminal prosecution. In 2012, Muslims protesting in central Sydney against Innocence of Muslims, an anti-Islam film trailer, resulted in rioting. There was an increase in anti-Muslim sentiment in the aftermath of the Sydney hostage crisis on 15–16 December 2014, including a threat made against a mosque in Sydney. However, the Muslim community also received support from the Australian public through a social media campaign."
Islam in Australia,"The founding president of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils has said that with moderate Muslims being sidelined by those promoting more fundamentalist views, there is a need to be more careful in regard to potential Australian immigrants. Keysar Trad has said moderate Muslims need to take back control.
An article in The Australian in May 2015 opined, ""Most Muslims want the peace and prosperity that comes from an Islam that coexists with modernity; it is a fanatical fringe that seeks to impose a fabricated medieval Islam"". It describes Dr Jamal Rifi as a brave insider who is working to assist ""the cause of good Muslims who are struggling for the soul of Islam""."
Islam in Australia,"Islamic denominations in Australia
Most Australian Muslims are Sunni, with Shia, Sufi and Ahmadiyya as minorities."
Islam in Australia,"Sunni
In Sydney, adherents of the Sunni denomination of Islam are concentrated in the suburb of Lakemba and surrounding areas such as Punchbowl, Wiley Park, Bankstown and Auburn.
In Australia there are also groups associated with the ""hardline"" Salafi branch of Sunni Islam, including the Islamic Information and Services Network of Australasia and Ahlus Sunnah Wal Jamaah Association (Australia) (ASWJA). While their numbers are small, the ASWJA is said to ""punch above its weight"".
There are communities of NSW Muslims who adhere to Tablighi Jamaat form of Islam and worship at the Granville, Al Noor Masjid, which is led by Sheik Omar El-Banna. Similarly many Bangladeshi Tablighi Jamaat, Muslims worship at mosques in Seaton, NSW and in Huntingdale Victoria.
Dawateislami, which is a ""non-political Islamic organisation based in Pakistan"", has adherents in Australia.
In 2015, Wikileaks cables released information that Saudi Arabia closely monitors the situation of Islam and Arab community in Australia, whilst at the same time spending considerately to promote its fundamentalist version of Sunni Islam within the country."
Islam in Australia,"Shia
In 1977 Sheikh Fahd Mehdi the first Shia cleric arrived in Australia and established the first Shia place of worship in Sydney, Al Zahra Mosque with funding from overseas and the help of Sayed Mohamed Kadhim Al Qazwini. He went on to establish the first Shia Islamic centre in Sydney AL-Jaafaria Society in Rockdale NSW. "
Islam in Australia,"The Shi'a denomination of Islam is centred in the St George, Campbelltown, Fairfield, Auburn and Liverpool regions of Sydney, with the al-Zahra Mosque, built in Arncliffe in 1983, and the Al-Rasool Al-A'dham Mosque serves the region in Bankstown.  In 2008, the mainstream Shia community numbered 30,000 followers nationally.
In October 2004 Sheikh Mansour Leghaei  established the Imam Hasan Centre in Annangrove, NSW.
In November 2014, up to 3,000 Shi'a Muslims marched in Sydney on the annual Ashura Procession to mark the death of the prophet's grandson. In November 2015 there was Ashura march in Sydney and a Victorian school observed Muharram."
Islam in Australia,"Others
There are also others from smaller non-mainstream sects of Islam, including approximately 20,000 Alawites from Turkish, Syrian and Lebanese backgrounds. They have at least one school called Al Sadiq College, with campuses in the Sydney suburbs of Yagoona and Greenacre. There is also a population of the related, though distinct, Alevis.
There is also an Ismaili population of unspecified size. While Dawoodi Bohra, a small Ismaili Shia sect has its Sydney Jamaat located in Auburn NSW.
Additionally, the Druze, who practice Druzism, a religion that began as an offshoot of 11th-century Ismaili Islam, are reported to have around 20,000 followers living in Australia."
Islam in Australia,"Sufi
The study of the history of Sufism in Australia is a fledgling discipline. Initial examination indicates that the Sufis have played an important part in Muslim engagement with Australia and its peoples. There are many reported instances of Sufism amongst the cameleers, though the best available evidence of this to date exists within a hand written manuscript at the historic Broken Hill mosque, providing at least one instance of Qadiri Sufis amongst the cameleers.
Baron Friedrich von Frankenberg, who was inspired by the man who first brought to the West, Inayat Khan, moved to Australia from Germany with his family in 1927. The baron and his Australian wife were well-liked, and students would study Sufism under von Frankenberg at their home in Camden, New South Wales. In 1939 he organised the visit of a renowned Sufi leader, or Murshida, and devotee of Khan, known as Murshida Rabia Martin. Born Ada Ginsberg, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants to the US, Martin's visit was of great significance because of her link to Khan. After the baron's death in 1950, the poet and artist Francis Brabazon, student of Meher Baba, another early spiritual teacher took up a leadership role. However, there is some contention regarding the extent to which this group adhered to Islamic practice, limiting the extent to which this group can be considered a representation of Islam in Australia.
Currently there are communities representing most of the major Sufi Orders within Australia, including, but not limited to the Mevlevi, Rifaii, Naqshbandiyya, and Burhaniyya. Amongst these Sufi communities, it is estimated there are at least 5,000 adherents."
Islam in Australia,"Sectarian tensions
Conflict between religious groups in the Middle East are reflecting as tensions within the Australian community and in the schools."
Islam in Australia,"Religious life
The Australian Muslim community has built a number of mosques and Islamic schools, and a number of imams and clerics act as the community's spiritual and religious leaders. In 1988, the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils (AFIC) appointed Sheikh Taj El-Din Hilaly as the first Grand Mufti of Australia and New Zealand. In 2007, Hilaly was succeeded by Fehmi Naji in June 2007 who was succeeded by the current Grand Mufti, Ibrahim Abu Mohamed in September 2011."
Islam in Australia,"Fatwas, edicts based on Islamic jurisprudence which aim to provide ""guidance to Muslim Australians in the personal, individual and private spheres of life"", are issued by various Australian Islamic authorities."
Islam in Australia,"Organisations
A number of organisations and associations are run by the Australian Islamic community including mosques, private schools and charities and other community groups and associations. Broad community associations which represent large segments of the Australian Muslim public are usually termed ""Islamic councils"". Some organisations are focused on providing assistance and support for specific sectors within the community, such as women.
Two organisations with strong political emphasis are Hizb ut-Tahrir which describes itself as a, ""political party whose ideology is Islam"" and Ahlus Sunnah Wal Jamaah Association (ASWJA)."
Islam in Australia,"A number of financial institutions have developed Sharia-compliant finance products, with university courses leading to Islamic financial qualifications also being established. Other Australian Islamic organisations have been set up to manage sharia-compliant investments, superannuation,  Islamic wills and zakat management."
Islam in Australia,"Halal certification
There are close to two dozen Halal certification authorities in Australia. Halal meat and meat product exports to the Middle East and Southeast Asia have greatly increased from the 1970s onwards; this expansion was due in part to efforts of the AFIC.: 151  Halal certification has been criticised by anti-Halal campaigners who argue that the practice funds the growth of Islam, results in added costs, a requirement to officially certify intrinsically-halal foods and with consumers required to subsidise a particular religious belief.
An inquiry by an Australian Senate committee, which concluded in December 2015, found the current system is ""lacklustre"" and made recommendations for improvement.   It found there was no evidence to support claims that the profits of halal certification are used to fund terrorism. The report recognised that halal certification has economic benefits for Australia because of increased export opportunities.  It recommended that the federal government increase its oversight of halal certifiers to address fraudulent conduct, with halal products to be clearly labelled and  for meat products sourced from animals subject to religious slaughter, to be specifically labelled.
It said that it had heard, ""credible reports suggesting that the lack of regulation has been unscrupulously exploited"". In tabling the report, committee chairman Sam Dastyari said, ""Some certifiers are nothing more than scammers.""
The committee recommended a single halal certification authority. The committee in recommending clearer labelling, specifically referred to the need for meat processors to label products sourced from animals subject to religious slaughter."
Islam in Australia,"Demography
Historical population
During the 1980s the Australian Muslim population increased from 76,792 or 0.53% of the Australian population in 1981, to 109,523 or 0.70% in 1986.  In the 2011 Census, the Muslim population was 479,300 or 2.25%, an increase of 438% on the 1981 number.
The general increase of the Muslim population in this decade was from 147,487 or 0.88% of the Australian population in 1991, to 200,885 or 1.12% in 1996.
In 2005 the overall Muslim population in Australia had grown from 281,600 or 1.50% of the general Australian population in 2001, to 340,400 or 1.71% in 2006. The growth of Muslim population at this time was recorded as 3.88% compared to 1.13% for the general Australian population.. From 2011-2016, Muslim population grew by 27% from 476,291 to 604,200 with majority residing in New South Wales.
The following is a breakdown of the country of birth of Muslims in Australia from 2001:
There were 281,578 Muslims recorded in this survey; in the 2006 census the population had grown to 340,392. 48% of Australian-born Muslims claimed Lebanese or Turkish ancestry.
The distribution by state of the nation's Islamic followers has New South Wales with 50% of the total number of Muslims, followed by Victoria (33%), Western Australia (7%), Queensland (5%), South Australia (3%), ACT (1%) and both Northern Territory and Tasmania sharing 0.3%.
The majority of people who reported Islam as their religion in the 2006 Census were born overseas: 58% (198,400).  Of all persons affiliating with Islam in 2006 almost 9% were born in Lebanon and 7% were born in Turkey."
Islam in Australia,"Areas
According to the 2016 census, the Muslim population numbered 604,235 individuals, of whom 42% live in Greater Sydney, 31% in Greater Melbourne, and 8% in Greater Perth. The states and territories with the highest proportion of Muslims are New South Wales (3.58%) and Victoria (3.32%), whereas those with the lowest are Queensland (0.95%) and Tasmania (0.49%).
4.2% of people in Greater Melbourne are Muslim. Many Muslims living there are Bosnian and Turkish. Melbourne's Australian Muslims live primarily in the northern suburbs surrounding Broadmeadows, (mostly Turkish), Coburg, Brunswick, Epping (mostly Lebanese) and Truganina, Tarneit (mostly Indian). They also form communities in outer south-eastern suburbs such as Dandenong and Hallam (mostly Afghan and Pakistani).
Very few Muslims live in rural areas with the exceptions of the sizeable Albanian and Turkish communities in Shepparton, which has Victoria's oldest mosque, and Malays in Katanning, Western Australia. A community of Iraqis have settled in Cobram on the Murray River in Victoria. An Albanian Muslim community resides in Mareeba who established Queensland's second oldest mosque.
Perth also has a Muslim community focussed in and around the suburb of Thornlie, where there is a mosque. Perth's Australian Islamic School has around 2,000 students on three campuses.
Mirrabooka and Beechboro contain predominantly Bosnian communities. The oldest mosque in Perth is the Perth Mosque on William Street in Northbridge. It has undergone many renovations although the original section still remains. Other mosques in Perth are located in Rivervale, Mirrabooka, Beechboro and Hepburn.
There are also communities of Muslims from Turkey, the Indian subcontinent (Pakistan, India and Bangladesh) and South-East Asia, in Sydney and Melbourne, the Turkish communities around Auburn, New South Wales and Meadow Heights and Roxburgh Park and the South Asian communities around Parramatta. Indonesian Muslims, are more widely distributed in Darwin."
Islam in Australia,"Communities
It is estimated that Australian Muslims come from 63 different backgrounds, with ""loose associations"" between them."
Islam in Australia,"Aboriginal Muslims
According to Australia's 2011 census, 1,140 people identify as Aboriginal Muslims, almost double the number of Aboriginal Muslims recorded in the 2001 census. Many are converts and some are descendants of Afghan cameleers or, as in the Arnhem Land people, have Macassan ancestry as a result of the historical Makassan contact with Australia.  In north east Arnhem Land, there is some Islamic influence on the songs, paintings, dances, prayers with certain hymns to Allah and funeral rituals like facing west during prayers, roughly the direction of Mecca, and ritual prostration reminiscent of the Muslim sujud. As a result of Malay indentured laborers, plenty of families in Northern Australia have names like Doolah, Hassan and Khan. Notable Aboriginal Muslims include the boxer Anthony Mundine and Rugby League footballer Aidan Sezer. Many indigenous converts are attracted to Islam because they see a compatibility between Aboriginal and Islamic beliefs, while others see it as a fresh start and an aid against common social ills afflicting indigenous Australians, such as alcohol and drug abuse.
Some academics who have studied these issues have come to less positive conclusions regarding the relationship between the Aboriginal people and the visiting trepangers.: 65–67  : 76  : 138  : 81–82"
Islam in Australia,"Albanian Muslims
In the late twentieth century, 80% of Albanian speakers in Australia followed Islam. In the twenty first century, the largest Albanian communities in Australia, Shepparton and Melbourne's suburb of Dandenong in Victoria are mostly Muslims. Muslim Albanian communities exist in Western Australia, South Australia, Queensland, New South Wales and the Northern Territory.
As Islam is the dominant religion among Albanian Australians, it has given the community a sense of unity and the capacity and resources to construct their own mosques. They have symbolised the Albanian community's permanent settlement in Australia. Mosques serve as important centres for community activities and are pivotal toward retaining the religious identity of Albanian Australians. Albanian representatives serve in most federal Islamic organisations, with some in senior positions. In the few areas of concentrated Albanian settlement, their small numbers shaped local areas through the construction of their first mosques or becoming a sizable proportion of the school Muslim population. The foundations created by Albanian Australians have attracted future Muslim migrants to areas which have an existing mosque or services assisting with settlement.
Albanians perform certain Muslim practices. Muslim head coverings are worn mainly by a few older women, Ramadan fasts are adhered to by some people and in Shepparton, Islam is influenced by Sufi Bektashism from Albania."
Islam in Australia,"Bangladeshi Muslims
According to the 2016 Australian Census, Bangladeshi origin population were around 55,000; among them about 33,000 were living in NSW. Bangladeshi Muslims are located primarily in Rockdale, Lakemba, Bankstown and many suburbs in Western Sydney region with a mosque in Sefton and in the south-east of Melbourne, with a mosque at Huntingdale.  The Sefton Mosque has been linked to the Tablighi Jamaat School of Islam and has hosted Hizb ut-Tahrir.  For Bangladeshi Muslims attending the Huntingdale Mosque, all Islamic lunar months, such as Ramadan are observed using local moon-sightings, rather than being based on Middle-Eastern, or other, timings. According to the 2016 Australian census, 81.2% of the Bangladesh-born population in Australia was Muslim by faith."
Islam in Australia,"Bosnian Muslims
Bosnian Muslims have predominantly arrived in Australia after 1992, with most of the community living in the south east of Melbourne and in the south west of Sydney. There are Bosnian run mosques in Deer Park, Noble Park, Penshurst and Smithfield. According to the 2016 Australian census, 23.2% of the Bosnia and Herzegovina-born population in Australia was Muslim by faith."
Islam in Australia,"Egyptian Muslims
Egyptian Muslims in Sydney are represented by The Islamic Egyptian Society.  The Society has managed the Arkana College in Kingsgrove since 1986.  It is reported that enrolments for its 203 co-educational places are booked out until 2020. According to the 2016 Australian census, 15.6% of the Egypt-born population in Australia was Muslim by faith."
Islam in Australia,"Indonesian Australians
Though Islam is the majority religion in Indonesia, Muslims are the minority among Indonesians in Australia. In the 2006 Australian Census, only 8,656 out of 50,975 Indonesians in Australia, or 17%, identified as Muslim. However, in the 2011 census, that figure rose to 12,241 or 19.4%, 18.9% in 2016, and 19.3% in 2021."
Islam in Australia,"Iraqi Australians
Iraqi Muslims mainly came to the country as a refugees after the Iran–Iraq War, failed 1991 uprisings in Iraq, and then post-2003. They predominately settled in the western suburbs of Sydney, such as Fairfield and Auburn. According to the 2016 Australian census, 31.4% of the Iraqi-born population in Australia was Muslim by faith."
Islam in Australia,"Kurdish Muslims
Kurdish Muslims have predominantly arrived in Australia since the second half of the 1980s, with most of the community settling in Melbourne and Sydney.  Although the large majority of the Kurdish Australians are Muslims, there are no registered Kurdish run mosques in Australia."
Islam in Australia,"Lebanese Muslims
Lebanese Muslims form the core of Australia's Muslim Arab population, particularly in Sydney where most Arabs in Australia live. Approximately 3.4% of Sydney's population are Muslim. Approximately 4.2% of residents in Greater Melbourne are Muslim, and Sydney Road in Brunswick and Coburg is sometimes called 'Little Lebanon'.
In November 2016, Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton said that it was a mistake of a previous administration to have brought out Lebanese Muslim immigrants. Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop said Dutton was making a specific point about those charged with terrorism offences. ""He made it quite clear that he respects and appreciates the contribution that the Lebanese community make in Australia"".
According to the 2016 Australian census, 43.5% of the Lebanon-born population in Australia was Muslim by faith."
Islam in Australia,"Somali Muslims
Although the first Somali community in Victoria was established in 1988, most Somalis began to settle in the country in the early 1990s following the civil war in Somalia. Somalis are active in the wider Australian Muslim community, and have also contributed significantly to local business. According to the 2016 Australian census, 93.4% of the Somalia-born population in Australia was Muslim by faith."
Islam in Australia,"Turkish Muslims
Turkish Muslims are a significant segment of the Australian Muslim community. Melbourne has the largest Turkish community in Australia, with the majority of Turkish Muslims living around Broadmeadows and other northern suburbs. The majority of Turkish Muslims in Sydney are from Auburn, Eastlakes and Prestons. Despite still having a large Turkish population in Auburn and Eastlakes, According to the 2016 Australian census, 64.0% of the Turkey-born population in Australia was Muslim by faith."
Islam in Australia,"Malay Muslims
According to the 2016 Australian census, only 5.2% of the Malaysia-born population in Australia was Muslim by faith."
Islam in Australia,"Discrimination
According to some scholars, a particular trend of anti-Muslim prejudice has developed in Australia since the late 1980s. Since the 2001 World Trade Center attacks in New York, and the 2005 Bali bombings, Islam and its place in Australian society has been the subject of much public debate.
A report published in 2004 by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission pointed to many Muslim Australians who felt the Australian media was unfairly critical of, and often vilified their community due to generalisations of terrorism and the emphasis on crime. The use of ethnic or religious labels in news reports about crime was thought to stir up racial tensions.
After the White Australia immigration laws were replaced with multicultural policies the social disadvantage of Muslims was thought to have been alleviated. Some sources, however, note that Muslims now face some disadvantages on account of their religion.: 15–16  At times there has been opposition to the construction of new mosques in Australia. A 2014 report from the Islamic Sciences and Research Academy, University of Western Sydney, on mosques in New South Wales found that 44 percent of mosques in the state had ""experienced resistance from the local community when the mosque was initially proposed"". In around 20 percent of these cases opposition was from a small number of people.
According to Michael Humphrey, a professor of sociology at the University of Sydney, much of Islamic culture and organisation in Australia has been borne of the social marginalisation experiences of Muslim working class migrants. This ""immigrant Islam"" is often viewed by the host society as a force of ""cultural resistance"" toward the multicultural and secular nature of the general Australian culture. Muslim practices of praying, fasting and veiling appear as challenging the conformity within public spaces and the values of gender equality in social relationships and individual rights. The immigrant Muslims are often required to ""negotiate their Muslimness"" in the course of their encounters with Australian society, the governmental and other social institutions and bureaucracies.
A poll of nearly 600 Muslim residents of Sydney released in November 2015 found that the respondents were three to five times more likely to have experienced racism than the general Australian population. However, approximately 97 per cent of the Muslim respondents reported that they had friendly relations with non-Muslims and felt welcome in Australia.
In an Australia-wide survey published in November 2015, which was based on 1,573 interviews, which asked, ""Are Muslims that live in Australia doing enough to integrate into the Australian community, or should they be doing more?"", only 20% of respondents thought Muslims are currently ""doing enough"".
A poll conducted by the University of South Australia's International Centre for Muslim and non-Muslim Understanding which was released in 2016 found that 10 per cent of Australians have hostile attitudes towards Muslims. The accompanying report concluded that ""the great majority of Australians in all states and regions are comfortable to live alongside Australian Muslims"".
A Council for the Prevention of Islamophobia Inc has been established. An Australian speaking tour by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, was proposed for April 2017. Because of her alleged Islamophobia, the Council for the Prevention of Islamophobia told organisers that there would be 5,000 protesters outside the Festival Hall in Melbourne if she was to speak at that venue.  Her Australian tour was cancelled. It is likely that Australian Muslims are facing up to six times exclusion from the society."
Islam in Australia,"Views on homosexuality
In line with the views of most Islamic scholars worldwide, Islamic leaders in Australia generally believe that homosexuality is not permitted by their faith.
In June 2016, the president of the Australian National Imams Council (ANIC), Sheikh Shady Alsuleiman participated in an Iftar dinner at Kirribilli House hosted by the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister said he would not have invited Alsuleiman had he known of his position regarding homosexuals. The sheikh had previously spoken about the ""evil actions"" of homosexuality. Australia's Grand Mufti, Ibrahim Abu Mohamed has defended Alsuleiman, saying Islam has a, ""longstanding"" position on homosexuality"" which ""no person can ever change"".  He said that any attempt to call out its teachings could lead to radicalisation.  ANIC treasurer Imam Mohamed Imraan Husain said, ""Islam prevents lesbianism and being gay."" Uthman Badar spokesman for Hizb ut-Tahrir (Australia), said that Mr Turnbull was condemning the ""normative Islamic position on homosexuality"".
Yusuf Peer, president of the Council of Imams Queensland, in referring to the sharia law death penalty for homosexuality said, ""that is what Islam teaches and that will never change.""  The Imam of Australia's largest mosque, located in Lakemba, NSW, Shaykh Yahya Safi has said, ""In Islam we believe it's a major sin to have such relations between men and men, a sexual relation. We don't discuss this because it's obvious.""
In August 2017 the National Imams Council issued a statement opposing the proposed introduction of same-sex marriage in Australia, and several individual religious leaders have also argued against same-sex marriage. However, some Australian Muslims support same-sex marriage, and the Muslims for Progressive Values and Muslims for Marriage Equality groups have campaigned in favour of such a reform. As of September 2017, there was no polling data on the Australian Islamic community's views on this issue."
Islam in Australia,"Employment, education and crime
As of 2007, average wages of Muslims were much lower than those of the national average, with just 5% of Muslims earning over $1000 per week compared to the average of 11%. Unemployment rates amongst Muslims born overseas were higher than Muslims born in Australia. Muslims are over-represented in jails in New South Wales, at 9% to 10% of the prison population, compared to less than 3% within the NSW population."
Islam in Australia,"In literature and film
There are a number of notable works in Australian literature that discuss the Muslims during the ""Afghan period"" (1860-1900).: 10 "
Islam in Australia,"The Camel in Australia, by Tom L. McKnight
Fear and Hatred, by Andrew Markus
Afghans in Australia, by Michael Cigler
Tin Mosques and Ghantowns, by Christine Stevens
Ali Abdul v The King, by Hanifa Deen
Australia's Muslim Cameleers: Pioneers of the inland, 1860s–1930s, by Dr Anna Kenny
Veiled Ambition is a documentary created by Rebel Films for the SBS independent network following a Lebanese-Australian woman named Frida as she opens a shop selling fashionable clothing for Muslim women on Melbourne's Sydney Road. The documentary follows Frida as she develops her business in Melbourne while juggling a husband and home in Sydney and a pregnancy. Veiled Ambition won the Palace Films Award for Short Film Promoting Human Rights at the 2006 Melbourne International Film Festival.
Ali's Wedding is an Australian film based on a true story of an Iraqi Shia immigrant family. It depicts some of the religious and social practices of the Shia community in Australia."
Islam in Australia,"Notable Australian Muslim figures
See also
Q Society of Australia
Ahmadiyya in Australia
Islam by country
Islamic organisations in Australia
Religion in Australia
Shia–Sunni relations
Islam in Bangladesh
Islam in China
Islam in Indonesia
Islam in Iran
Islam in Nigeria
Islam in Pakistan
Islam in the Philippines
Islam in Russia"
Islam in Australia,"References
CIA Factbook
US State Department's International Religious Freedom Report 2006"
Islam in Australia,"Further reading
Ali, Jan A. Islam and Muslims in Australia: Settlement, Integration, Shariah, Education and Terrorism. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2020.
Aslan, Alice. ""Islamophobia In Australia""
Al-Momani, Kais; Dados, Nour; Maddox, Marion; Wise, Amanda (2010). ""Political Participation of Muslims in Australia"" (PDF). Department of Social Security. Archived from the original (PDF) on 21 September 2015. Retrieved 1 October 2017.
Boundless Plains: The Australian Muslim Connection, By Islamic Museum of Australia. Author: Moustafa Fahour
Cook, Abu Bakr Sirajuddin; Yucel, Salih (2016). ""Australia's Indigenous Peoples and Islam: Philosophical and Spiritual Convergences between Belief Structures"". Comparative Islamic Studies. 12 (1–2): 165–185. doi:10.1558/cis.37033. ISSN 1743-1638.
Cleland, Bilal. The Muslims in Australia: A Brief History. Melbourne: Islamic Council of Victoria, 2002.
Deen, Hanifa. Muslim Journeys. Online: National Archives of Australia, 2007.
Drew, Abdul Shaheed. Muslims in Australia since the 1600s
Kabir, Nahid. Muslims in Australia: Immigration, Race Relations and Cultural History. London: Kegan Paul, 2004.
Kabir, Nahid (July 2006). ""Muslims in a 'White Australia': Colour or Religion?"". Immigrants and Minorities. 24 (2): 193–223. doi:10.1080/02619280600863671. S2CID 144587003.
Saeed, Abdullah. Islam in Australia. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2003.
Saeed, Abdullah and Shahram Akbarzadeh, eds. Muslim Communities in Australia. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2001.
Stephenson, Peta. Islam Dreaming: Indigenous Muslims in Australia. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2010.
Stevens, Christine. Tin Mosques and Ghantowns.
Woodlock, Rachel and John Arnold (eds). Isolation, Integration and Identity: The Muslim Experience in Australia. Special Issue of The La Trobe Journal. Melbourne, Victoria: State Library of Victoria Foundation, 2012.
B Amin, Umar. Muslim Employemnet in Commonwealth Department and Agencies in context of Access and Equity. Tarbiya; Journal of Education in Muslim Society, Jun 2016."
Islam in Australia,"External links
Islam in Australia - at Oxford Bibliographies Online (2013; subscription only for full content)
Islamic Museum of Australia
Muslim Journeys – historical community biography produced by the National Archives of Australia
Wotherspoon, Garry (2015). ""Muslims in Sydney"". Dictionary of Sydney. [CC-By-SA]"
Parliaments of the Australian states and territories,"The parliaments of the Australian states and territories are legislative bodies within the federal framework of the Commonwealth of Australia.
All the parliaments are based on the Westminster system, and each is regulated by its own constitution. Queensland and the two territories have unicameral parliaments, with the single house being called the Legislative Assembly. The other states have a bicameral parliament, with a lower house called the Legislative Assembly (New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia) or House of Assembly (South Australia and Tasmania), and an upper house called the Legislative Council.
Section 44 of the Constitution of Australia prevents persons with dual citizenship from being members of the Federal Parliament, but there are no laws preventing holders of dual citizenship being members of State Parliaments."
Parliaments of the Australian states and territories,"Background
Before the formation of the Commonwealth in 1901, the six Australian colonies were self-governing colonies, with parliaments which had come into existence at various times between 1825, when the New South Wales Legislative Council was created, to 1891, when Western Australia became the last of the colonies to gain full self-government.
The colonies ratified the Constitution of Australia, becoming States of the Commonwealth in the new federation, and ceding certain of their legislative powers to the Commonwealth Parliament, but otherwise retaining their self-governing status with their own constitutions and parliaments. The state parliaments were all created by legislation of the British Imperial Parliament, and their original constitutions were contained in Acts of that Parliament; however now the power to amend state constitutions resides with the respective state parliaments, in accordance with its constitution. The Commonwealth Parliament cannot amend a state's constitution.
The Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory, by contrast, are territories of the Commonwealth, and their parliaments were created by way of legislation of the Commonwealth Parliament. Although the Commonwealth treats the territories as though they were states for many purposes, they are not states, and the legislative powers of their parliaments can be altered or even abolished by the Commonwealth Parliament. The Commonwealth can also overturn legislation passed by the territory parliaments."
Parliaments of the Australian states and territories,"Overview
States and territories
New South Wales
The Parliament of New South Wales is a bicameral legislature comprising the New South Wales Legislative Council, the Legislative Assembly and the King, represented by the Governor of New South Wales. The Legislative Council has 42 members elected for eight-year terms with half the members facing re-election every four years. The Legislative Council cannot block appropriation bills. They are elected by proportional voting with the whole state being one electorate. The Legislative Assembly has 93 members elected for four-year terms from single-member constituencies, using optional preferential voting."
Parliaments of the Australian states and territories,"Victoria
The Parliament of Victoria is a bicameral legislature comprising the Victorian Legislative Council, the Legislative Assembly and the King, represented by the Governor of Victoria. The Legislative Council has 40 members, elected for four-year terms, elected from eight multi-member constituencies, each with five members, using proportional voting. The Legislative Assembly has 88 members elected for fixed four-year terms from single-member constituencies, using preferential voting. Voting is compulsory, and elections take place on the last Saturday of November every four years."
Parliaments of the Australian states and territories,"Queensland
The Parliament of Queensland is a unicameral legislature comprising the Legislative Assembly and the King, represented by the Governor of Queensland. The Legislative Assembly has 93 members elected for fixed four-year terms in single-member constituencies using preferential voting. Voting is compulsory, and elections take place on the last Saturday of October every four years."
Parliaments of the Australian states and territories,"South Australia
The Parliament of South Australia is a bicameral legislature comprising the South Australian Legislative Council and the House of Assembly. According to the South Australian Constitution, unlike the Federal Parliament, and the parliaments of the other states and territories of Australia, neither the Sovereign nor the Governor is considered to be a part of the South Australian Parliament. The Legislative Council has 22 members, elected for eight-year terms by proportional voting with half the members facing re-election every four years, and the House of Assembly which has 47 members, elected for four-year terms from single-member constituencies, using preferential voting. Voting is compulsory."
Parliaments of the Australian states and territories,"Western Australia
The Parliament of Western Australia is a bicameral legislature comprising the Western Australian Legislative Council, the Legislative Assembly and the King, represented by the Governor of Western Australia. The Legislative Council has 36 members, elected for fixed four-year terms from six multi-member electoral regions by ""community of interest"" —3 metropolitan and 3 rural—each electing 6 members by proportional voting. There is a significant malapportionment in the Legislative Council in favour of rural regions. The Legislative Assembly has 59 members, elected for fixed four-year terms from single-member constituencies, using preferential voting. Voting is compulsory, with elections being held every four years on the second Saturday in March, though the term of the Legislative Council does not expire until May after the election."
Parliaments of the Australian states and territories,"Tasmania
The Parliament of Tasmania is a bicameral legislature comprising the Tasmanian Legislative Council, the House of Assembly and the Governor of Tasmania. The Legislative Council has 15 members, elected for six-year terms, elected from single-member constituencies on a rotational basis with either two or three being elected each year, using full preferential voting. The House of Assembly has 35 members elected for four-year terms from multi-member constituencies, using the Hare-Clark system of proportional representation. Voting is compulsory."
Parliaments of the Australian states and territories,"Australian Capital Territory
The Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly has 25 members, elected for four-year terms from multi-member constituencies, using the Hare-Clark system of proportional voting."
Parliaments of the Australian states and territories,"Northern Territory
The Northern Territory Legislative Assembly is a unicameral legislature. The Legislative Assembly has 25 members, elected for four-year terms from single-member constituencies, using preferential voting. The head of government is called the Chief Minister, while the Administrator of the Northern Territory (appointed by the federal government) forms a similar role to state governors in providing assent to legislation."
Parliaments of the Australian states and territories,"Norfolk Island
In the external territory of Norfolk Island located in the South Pacific Ocean, the local legislative body is the Norfolk Island Regional Council, established in 2016. The island was previously governed by a Norfolk Island Legislative Assembly. Formed after the Norfolk Island Act 1979 was passed in the Australian parliament, its first members were elected on the tenth of August 1979. The assembly consisted of 9 members elected every three years by popular vote. It was abolished in June 2015 as part of a reorganisation of the territory's government by the Parliament of Australia."
Parliaments of the Australian states and territories,"Christmas Island
In the external territory of Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, the Shire Council provides local governance. The nine-member Shire Council was established in 1993. Councilors serve four-year terms, with four or five being chosen every second year."
Parliaments of the Australian states and territories,"Cocos (Keeling) Islands
In the external territory of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands in the Indian Ocean, the Shire of Cocos is the local legislative body. Established in 1993, the Shire Council consists of 7 members serving terms of four years. Elections for half the seats are held every two years."
Parliaments of the Australian states and territories,"Current compositions
Shading indicates party or coalition in government. Greyed out cells indicate that party is not active within that state."
Parliaments of the Australian states and territories,"See also
Electoral systems of the Australian states and territories
Members of multiple Australian legislatures"
Parliaments of the Australian states and territories,"References
External links
The New South Wales Parliament
The Queensland Parliament
The South Australian Parliament
The Tasmanian Parliament
The Victorian Parliament
The Western Australian Parliament
The Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly
The Northern Territory Legislative Assembly"
Australian Curriculum,"The Australian Curriculum is a national curriculum for all primary and secondary schools in Australia under progressive development, review, and implementation. The curriculum is developed and reviewed by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, an independent statutory body. Since 2014 all states and territories in Australia have begun implementing aspects of the Foundation to Year 10 part of the curriculum.
Credentialing, and related assessment requirements and processes, remain the responsibility of states and territories.
The full Australian Curriculum can be accessed at its own website."
Australian Curriculum,"Learning areas
The learning areas in the Australian Curriculum are as follows:"
Australian Curriculum,"History
A nationwide curriculum has been on the political agenda in Australia for several decades. In the late 1980s a significant push for a national curriculum in Australia was mounted by the Hawke federal government. Draft documentation was produced but failure to achieve agreement from the predominately coalition state governments led to the abandonment of this initiative in 1991.
In 2006, then-Prime Minister John Howard called for a ""root and branch renewal"" of Australian history teaching at school level, ostensibly in response to building criticism of Australian students' (and Australians more widely) perceived lack of awareness of historical events.  The Howard government convened the Australian History Summit in August 2006 to commence the process of drafting a national History curriculum.  The Summit recommended that Australian History be a compulsory part of the curriculum in all Australian schools in years 9 and 10.  The Australian History External Reference Group was then commissioned by the government to develop a Guide to Teaching Australian History in Years 9 and 10.  The Reference Group comprised Geoffrey Blainey, Gerard Henderson, Nicholas Brown and Elizabeth Ward, and was presented with a draft proposal prepared earlier by the historian Tony Taylor.  The Guide was released to the public on 11 October 2007, but little was achieved toward its implementation following the Howard government's defeat at the federal election in November 2007.
In April 2008, the Rudd government established the independent National Curriculum Board. Taylor, who had written the original draft for the Howard government-appointed Australian History External Reference Group, told The Age that he expected that the Reference Group's Guide to Teaching Australian History would be discarded by the new Board. Taylor had expressed public disapproval of the changes made to his original draft, both by the Reference Group and, Taylor suspected, by Howard himself. Taylor was of the opinion that the Guide had sought to establish a curriculum that was ""too close to a nationalist view of Australia's past"", and hoped that the new Board would produce a curriculum that was more in line with what Taylor saw as Rudd's ""regional and global world view"". In September 2008, the Board appointed four academics to draft ""framing documents"" which would establish a broad direction for the National Curriculum in each of four subject areas: history (Stuart Macintyre), english (Peter Freebody), science (Denis Goodrum) and mathematics (Peter Sullivan). In May 2009 the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), a statutory authority, was established to oversee the implementation of the planned nationwide curriculum initiative. In March 2010 a draft national curriculum was released."
Australian Curriculum,"Implementation issues and criticism
The Australian Curriculum has experienced implementation issues due to reluctance or slowness by some States in changing state curricula. New South Wales in particular has delayed its roll out of the new curriculum.
In May 2010, Anna Patty, an education editor for the Sydney Morning Herald, criticised the Australian Curriculum on the basis that it ""threatens to water down the content"" for senior students, compared with the existing Higher School Certificate. Under the new curriculum, students would have to learn statistics in mathematics, while the Extension 1 and 2 topics would be replaced with an easier specialist maths course. Patty said that the English courses would focus more on language and literacy, and less on literature, and that the curriculum would disadvantage gifted students.
In September 2010, the NSW Board of Studies criticised the then-draft Australian Curriculum, saying that it was inferior to the NSW curriculum.  Among other criticisms, the Board said that the draft K-10 curriculum lacked an overarching framework, was overcrowded with content, diminished the teaching of literature, and that the maths curriculum failed to cater to the full range of students.
In October 2010, Peter Brown, a mathematics lecturer of the University of New South Wales, criticised the Australian Curriculum for lack of flexibility within the Year 9-10 and the Year 11-12 syllabuses by the removal of extension maths courses. Brown also said that the National Curriculum would ""dumb down"" the year 12 curriculum then offered in NSW.
In October 2013, conservative economist Judith Sloan criticised the business and economics components of the Australian Curriculum in particular, and offered the general criticism that ""[t]he real rationale for a national school curriculum relates to the pursuit of centralised control by the federal government and the scope to impose fashionable values dressed up as the pursuit of educational excellence"".
In June 2021, following media reports that the proposed national curriculum was ""preoccupied with the oppression, discrimination and struggles of Indigenous Australians"", the Australian Senate approved a motion tabled by right-wing senator Pauline Hanson calling on the federal government to reject Critical race theory CRT, despite it not being included in the curriculum."
Australian Curriculum,"See also
Education in Australia
Australian Certificate of Education
Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority"
Australian Curriculum,"References
External links
Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority official website
The Australian Curriculum official website
New NSW Syllabuses"
Energy policy of Australia,"The energy policy of Australia is subject to the regulatory and fiscal influence of all three levels of government in Australia, although only the State and Federal levels determine policy for primary industries such as coal. Federal policies for energy in Australia continue to support the coal mining and natural gas industries through subsidies for fossil fuel use and production. Australia is the 10th most coal-dependent country in the world. Coal and natural gas, along with oil-based products, are currently the primary sources of Australian energy usage and the coal industry produces over 30% of Australia's total greenhouse gas emissions. In 2018 Australia was the 8th highest emitter of greenhouse gases per capita in the world.
Australia's energy policy features a combination of coal power stations and hydro electricity plants. The Australian government has decided not to build nuclear power plants, although it is one of the world's largest producers of uranium.
Australia has one of the fastest deployment rates of renewable energy worldwide. The country has deployed 5.2 GW of solar and wind power in 2018 alone and at this rate, is on track to reach 50% renewable electricity in 2024 and 100% in 2032. However, Australia may be one of the leading major economies in terms of renewable deployments, but it is one of the least prepared at a network level to make this transition, being ranked 28th out of the list of 32 advanced economies on the World Economic Forum's 2019 Energy Transition Index."
Energy policy of Australia,"Electricity generation
History and governance
After World War II, New South Wales and Victoria started connecting the formerly small and self-contained local and regional power grids into statewide grids run centrally by public statutory authorities.  Similar developments occurred in other states. Both of the industrially large states cooperated with the Commonwealth in the development and interconnection of the Snowy Mountains Scheme.
Rapid economic growth led to large and expanding construction programs of coal-fired power stations such as black coal in New South Wales and brown coal in Victoria. By the 1980s complex policy questions had emerged involving the massive requirements for investment, land and water.
Between 1981 and 1983 a cascade of blackouts and disruptions was triggered in both states, resulting from generator design failures in New South Wales, industrial disputes in Victoria, and drought in the storages of the Snowy system (which provided essential peak power to the State systems). Wide political controversy arose from this and from proposals to the New South Wales Government from the Electricity Commission of New South Wales for urgent approval to build large new stations at Mardi and Olney on the Central Coast, and at other sites later.
The Commission of Enquiry into Electricity Generation Planning in New South Wales was established, reporting in mid-1985. This was the first independent enquiry directed from outside the industry into the Australian electricity system. It found, among other matters, that existing power stations were very inefficient, that plans for four new stations, worth then about $12 billion, should be abandoned, and that if the sector were restructured there should be sufficient capacity for normal purposes until the early years of the 21st century. This forecast was achieved. The Commission also recommended enhanced operational coordination of the adjoining State systems and the interconnection in eastern Australia of regional power markets.
The New South Wales Enquiry marked the beginning of the end of the centralised power utility monopolies and established the direction of a new trajectory in Australian energy policy, towards decentralisation, interconnection of States and the use of markets for coordination. Similar enquiries were subsequently established in Victoria (by the Parliament) and elsewhere, and during the 1990s the industry was comprehensively restructured in southeastern Australia and subsequently corporatised.
Following the report by the Industry Commission on the sector moves towards a national market developed. The impetus towards system-wide competition was encouraged by the Hilmer recommendations. The establishment of the National Electricity Market in 1997 was the first major accomplishment of the new Federal/State cooperative arrangements under the Council of Australian Governments. The governance provisions included a National Electricity Code, the establishment in 1996 of a central market manager, the National Electricity Market Management Company (NEMMCO), and a regulator, National Electricity Code Administrator (NECA).
Following several years experience with the new system and several controversies an energy market reform process was conducted by the Ministerial Council on Energy. As a result, beginning in 2004, a broader national arrangement, including electricity and gas and other forms of energy, was established. These arrangements are administered by a national regulator, the Australian Energy Regulator (AER), and a market rule-making body, the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC), and a market operator, the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO).
Over the 10 years from 1998–99 to 2008–09, Australia's electricity use increased at an average rate of 2.5% a year. In 2008–09, a total of 261 terawatt-hours (940 PJ) of electricity (including off-grid electricity) was generated in Australia. Between 2009 and 2013 NEM energy usage had decreased by 4.3% or almost 8 terawatt-hours (29 PJ)."
Energy policy of Australia,"Coal-fired power
The main source of Australia's electricity generation is coal. In 2003, coal-fired plants produced 58.4% of the total capacity, followed by hydropower (19.1%, of which 17% is pumped storage), natural gas (13.5%), liquid/gas fossil fuel-switching plants (5.4%), oil products (2.9%), wind power (0.4%), biomass (0.2%) and solar (0.1%). In 2003, coal-fired power plants generated 77.2% of the country's total electricity production, followed by natural gas (13.8%), hydropower (7.0%), oil (1.0%), biomass (0.6%) and solar and wind combined (0.3%).
The total generating capacity from all sources in 2008-9 was approximately 51 gigawatts (68,000,000 hp) with average capacity utilisation of 52%. Coal-fired plants constituted a majority of generating capacity which in 2008-9 was 29.4 gigawatts (39,400,000 hp). In 2008–9, a total of 143.2 terawatt-hours (516 PJ) of electricity was produced from black coal and 56.9 terawatt-hours (205 PJ) from brown coal.  Depending on the cost of coal at the power station, the long-run marginal cost of coal-based electricity at power stations in eastern Australia is between 7 and 8 cents per kWh, which is around $79 per MWh."
Energy policy of Australia,"Hydroelectric power
Hydroelectricity accounts for 6.5–7% of NEM electricity generation. The massive Snowy Mountains Scheme is the largest producer of hydro-electricity in eastern Victoria and southern New South Wales."
Energy policy of Australia,"Wind power
By 2015, there were 4,187 MW of installed wind power capacity, with another 15,284 MW either being planned or under construction. In the year to October 2015, wind power accounted for 4.9% of Australia's total electricity demand and 33.7% of total renewable energy supply. As at October 2015, there were 76 wind farms in Australia, most of which had turbines from 1.5 to 3 MW."
Energy policy of Australia,"Solar power
Solar energy is used to heat water, in addition to its role in producing electricity through photovoltaics (PV).
In 2014/15, PV accounted for 2.4% of Australia's electrical energy production. The installed PV capacity in Australia has increased 10-fold between 2009 and 2011, and quadrupled between 2011 and 2016."
Energy policy of Australia,"Wave power
The Australian government says new technology harnessing wave energy could be important for supplying electricity to most of the country's major capital cities. The Perth Wave Energy Project near Fremantle in Western Australia operates through several submerged buoys, creating energy as they move with passing waves. The Australian government has provided more than $US600,000 in research funding for the technology developed by Carnegie, a Perth company."
Energy policy of Australia,"Nuclear power
Jervis Bay Nuclear Power Plant was a proposed nuclear power reactor in the Jervis Bay Territory on the south coast of New South Wales. It would have been Australia's first nuclear power plant, and was the only proposal to have received serious consideration as of 2005. Some environmental studies and site works were completed, and two rounds of tenders were called and evaluated, but the Australian government decided not to proceed with the project.
Queensland introduced legislation to ban nuclear power development on 20 February 2007. Tasmania has also banned nuclear power development. Both laws were enacted in response to a pro-nuclear position, by John Howard in 2006.
John Howard went to the November 2007 election with a pro-nuclear power platform but his government was soundly defeated by Labor, which is opposed to nuclear power for Australia."
Energy policy of Australia,"Geothermal
There are vast deep-seated granite systems, mainly in central Australia, that have high temperatures at depth and these are being drilled by 19 companies across Australia in 141 areas. They are spending A$654 million on exploration programs.  South Australia has been described as ""Australia's hot rock haven"" and this emissions-free and renewable energy form could provide an estimated 6.8% of Australia's baseload power needs by 2030. According to an estimate by the Centre for International Economics, Australia has enough geothermal energy to contribute electricity for 450 years.
The 2008 federal budget allocated $50 million through the Renewable Energy Fund to assist with 'proof-of-concept' projects in known geothermal areas."
Energy policy of Australia,"Biomass
Biomass power plants use crops and other vegetative by-products to produce power similar to the way coal-fired power plants work. Another product of biomass is extracting ethanol from sugar mill by-products. The GGAP subsidies for biomass include ethanol extraction with funds of $7.4M and petrol/ethanol fuel with funds of $8.8 million. The total $16.2M subsidy is considered a renewable energy source subsidy."
Energy policy of Australia,"Biodiesel
Biodiesel is an alternative to fossil fuel diesel that can be used in cars and other internal combustion engine vehicles. It is produced from vegetable or animal fats and is the only other type of fuel that can run in current unmodified vehicle engines.
Subsidies given to ethanol oils totaled $15 million in 2003–2004, $44 million in 2004–2005, $76 million in 2005–2006 and $99 million in 2006–2007. The cost for establishing these subsidies were $1 million in 2005–2006 and $41 million in 2006–2007.
However, with the introduction of the Fuel Tax Bill, grants and subsidies for using biodiesel have been cut leaving the public to continue using diesel instead. The grants were cut by up to 50% by 2010–2014. Previously the grants given to users of ethanol-based biofuels were $0.38 per litre, which were reduced to $0.19 in 2010–2014."
Energy policy of Australia,"Fossil fuels
In 2003, Australian total primary energy supply (TPES) was 112.6 million tonnes of oil equivalent (Mtoe) and total final consumption (TFC) of energy was 72.3 Mtoe."
Energy policy of Australia,"Coal
Australia had a fixed carbon price of A$23 ($23.78) a tonne on the top 500 polluters from July 2012 to July 2014."
Energy policy of Australia,"Australia is the fourth-largest coal producing country in the world. Newcastle is the largest coal export port in the world. In 2005, Australia mined 301 million tonnes of hard coal (which converted to at least 692.3 million tonnes of co2 emitted) and 71 million tonnes of brown coal (which converted to at least 78.1 million tonnes of co2).) Coal is mined in every state of Australia. It provides about 85% of Australia's electricity production and is Australia's largest export commodity. 75% of the coal mined in Australia is exported, mostly to eastern Asia. In 2005, Australia was the largest coal exporter in the world with 231 million tonnes of hard coal. Australian black coal exports are expected by some to increase by 2.6% per year to reach 438 million tonnes by 2029–30, but the possible introduction of emissions trading schemes in customer countries as provided for under the Kyoto protocol may affect these expectations in the medium term.
Coal mining in Australia has become more controversial because of the strong link between the effects of global warming on Australia and burning coal, including exported coal, and climate change, global warming and sea level rise. Coal mining in Australia will as a result have direct impacts on agriculture in Australia, health and natural environment including the Great Barrier Reef.
The IPCC AR4 Working Group III Report ""Mitigation of Climate Change"" states that under Scenario A (stabilisation at 450ppm) Annex 1 countries (including Australia) will need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25% to 40% by 2020 and 80% to 95% by 2050. Many environmental groups around the world, including those represented in Australia, are taking direct action for the dramatic reduction in the use of coal as carbon capture and storage is not expected to be ready before 2020 if ever commercially viable."
Energy policy of Australia,"Natural gas
In 2002, the Howard government announced the finalisation of negotiations for a $25 billion contract with China for LNG. The contract was to supply 3 million tonnes of LNG a year from the North West Shelf Venture off Western Australia, and was worth between $700 million and $1 billion a year for 25 years. The members of the consortium which operates the North West Shelf Venture are Woodside Petroleum, BHP, BP, Chevron, Shell and Japan Australia LNG. The price was guaranteed not to increase until 2031, and by 2015 China was paying ""one-third the price for Australian gas that Australian consumers themselves had to pay.""
In 2007, there was another LNG deal with China worth $35 billion. The agreement was for the potential sale of 2 to 3 million tonnes of LNG a year for 15 to 20 years from the Browse LNG project, off Western Australia, of which Woodside is the operator. The agreement was expected to bring in total revenues of $35 billion to $45 billion.
Succeeding governments oversaw other contracts with China, Japan and South Korea, but none have required exporters to set aside supplies to meet Australia's needs. The price of LNG has historically been linked to oil prices, but the true price, costs and supply levels are presently too difficult to determine.
Santos GLNG Operations, Shell and Origin Energy are major gas producers in Australia. Australia Pacific LNG (APLNG), led by Origin Energy, is the largest producer of natural gas in eastern Australia and a major exporter of liquefied natural gas to Asia. Santos is Australia's second-largest independent oil and gas producer. According to the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC), the demand for gas in the domestic east coast market is about 700 petajoules a year. Australia is expected to become the world's biggest LNG exporter by 2019, hurting supplies in the domestic market and driving up gas and power prices.
In 2017 the Australian government received a report from the Australian Energy Market Operator and one from the ACCC showing expected gas shortages in the east coast domestic market over the next two years. The expected gas shortfall is 54 petajoules in 2018 and 48 petajoules in 2019. The federal government considered imposing export controls on gas to ensure adequate domestic supplies. The companies agreed to make sufficient supplies available to the domestic market until the end of 2019. On 7 September Santos pledged to divert 30 petajoules of gas from its Queensland-based Gladstone LNG plant slated for export into Australia's east coast market in 2018 and 2019. On 26 October 2017, APLNG agreed to increase gas to Origin Energy by 41 petajoules over 14 months, increasing APLNG's total commitment to 186 PJ for 2018, representing almost 30% of Australian east coast domestic gas market.
The price at which these additional supplies are to be made available has not been disclosed. On 24 August 2017, Orica chief executive Alberto Calderon described gas prices in Australia as ridiculous, saying that prices in Australia were more than double of what was being paid in China or Japan, adding that Australian producers could buy gas overseas (at much lower world prices) to free up domestic gas to sell at the same profit margin."
Energy policy of Australia,"Transport subsidies
Petrol
In the transport sector, fuel subsidies reduce petrol prices by $0.38/L. This is very significant, given current petrol prices in Australia of around $1.30/L. The acceptable petrol prices hence result in Australia's petroleum consumption at 28.9 GL every year.
According to Greenpeace, removal of this subsidy would make petrol prices rise to around $1.70/L and thus could make certain alternative fuels competitive with petroleum on cost. The 32% price increase associated with subsidy removal would be expected to correspond to an 18% reduction in petrol demand and a Greenhouse Gases emission reduction of 12.5 Mt CO2-e. The Petroleum Resource Rent Tax keeps oil prices low and encourages investment in the 'finite' supplies of oil, at the same time considering alternatives."
Energy policy of Australia,"Diesel
The subsidies for the Oil-Diesel fuel rebate program are worth about $2 billion, which are much more than the grants devoted to renewable energy. Whilst renewable energy is out of scope at this stage, an alternative diesel–renewable hybrid system is highly recommended. If the subsidies for diesel were bounded with the renewable subsidies, remote communities could adapt hybrid electric generation systems. The Energy Grants Credit Scheme (EGCS), an off-road component is a rebate program for diesel and diesel-like fuels."
Energy policy of Australia,"Federal Government
Australia introduced a national energy rating label in 1992. The system allows consumers to compare the energy efficiency between similar appliances."
Energy policy of Australia,"Institutions
The responsible governmental agencies for energy policy are the Council of Australian Governments (COAG), the Ministerial Council on Energy (MCE), the Ministerial Council on Mineral and Petroleum Resources (MCMPR), the Commonwealth Department of Resources; Energy and Tourism (DRET), the Department of Environment and Heritage (DEH), the Australian Greenhouse Office (AGO), the Department of Transport and Regional Services, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), the Australian Energy Market Commission, the Australian Energy Regulator and the Australian Energy Market Operator."
Energy policy of Australia,"Energy strategy
In the 2004 White Paper Securing Australia's Energy Future, several initiatives were announced to achieve the Australian Government's energy objectives. These include:"
Energy policy of Australia,"a complete overhaul of the fuel excise system to remove A$1.5 billion in excise liability from businesses and households in the period to 2012–13
the establishment of a A$500 million fund to leverage more than A$1 billion in private investment to develop and demonstrate low-emission technologies
a strong emphasis on the urgency and importance of continued energy market reform
the provision of A$75 million for Solar Cities trials in urban areas to demonstrate a new energy scenario, bringing together the benefits of solar energy, energy efficiency and vibrant energy markets
the provision of A$134 million to remove impediments to the commercial development of renewable technologies
incentives for petroleum exploration in frontier offshore areas as announced in the 2004–05 budget
New requirements for a business to manage their emissions wisely
a requirement that larger energy users undertake, and report publicly on, regular assessments to identify energy efficiency opportunities.
Criticisms"
Energy policy of Australia,"On a net basis this is a tax on the top 40% of income earners which will then be used largely to subsidise the coal industry in attempts to develop carbon capture and storage in Australia, clean coal.
Deforestation is not included in the scheme where there will be reforestation despite the significant timing differences, the uncertainty of reforestation and the effect of leaving old-growth forests vulnerable.
It is unclear what level of a carbon price will be sufficient to reduce demand for coal-fired power and increase demand for low emissions electricity like wind or solar.
No commitment to maintain Mandatory Renewable Energy Target.
The scheme fails to address climate change caused by burning of coal exported from Australia."
Energy policy of Australia,"Energy market reform
On 11 December 2003, the Ministerial Council on Energy released a document entitled ""Reform of Energy Markets"". The overall purpose of this initiative was the creation of national electricity and natural gas markets rather than the state-based provision of both. As a result, two federal-level institutions, the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) and the Australian Energy Regulator (AER), were created."
Energy policy of Australia,"State policies
Queensland
Victoria
In 2006, Victoria became the first state to have a renewable energy target of 10% by 2016. In 2010 the target was increased to 25% by 2020."
Energy policy of Australia,"New South Wales
As of 2008 New South Wales had a renewable energy target of 20% by 2020."
Energy policy of Australia,"Western Australia
In some remote areas of Western Australia, the use of fossil fuels is expensive, thus making renewable energy supplies commercially competitive."
Energy policy of Australia,"Australian Capital Territory
The ACT Government's Sustainable Energy Policy establishes the key objective of achieving a more sustainable energy supply as the territory moves to carbon neutrality by 2060."
Energy policy of Australia,"Tasmania
Tasmania's electricity grid is largely powered by hydroelectric generation."
Energy policy of Australia,"Renewable energy targets
In 2001, the federal government introduced a Mandatory Renewable Energy Target (MRET) of 9,500 GWh of new generation, with the scheme running until at least 2020. This represents an increase of new renewable electricity generation of about 4% of Australia's total electricity generation and a doubling of renewable generation from 1997 levels. Australia's renewable energy target does not cover heating or transport energy like Europe's or China's, Australia's target is therefore equivalent to approximately 5% of all energy from renewable sources.
The Commonwealth and the states agreed in December 2007, at a Council of Australian Governments (COAG) meeting, to work together from 2008, to combine the Commonwealth scheme with the disparate state schemes, into a single national scheme. The initial report on progress and an implementation plan was considered at a March 2008 COAG meeting. In May 2008, the Productivity Commission, the government's independent research and advisory body on a range of economic, social and environmental issues, claimed the MRET would drive up energy prices and would do nothing to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The Productivity Commission submission to the climate change review, stated that energy generators have warned that big coal-fired power stations are at risk of ""crashing out of the system"", and leaving huge supply gaps and price spikes if the transition is not carefully managed. This forecast has been described as a joke because up to A$20 billion compensation is proposed to be paid under the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. In addition, in Victoria where the highest emitting power stations are located, the state government has emergency powers enabling it to take over and run the generating assets. The final design was presented for consideration at the September 2008 COAG meeting.
On 20 August 2009, the Expanded Renewable Energy Target increased the 2020 MRET from 9,500 to 45,000 gigawatt-hours, and continued until 2030. This will ensure that renewable energy reaches a 20% share of the electricity supply in Australia by 2020. After 2020, the proposed Emissions Trading Scheme and improved efficiencies from innovation and manufacturing were expected to allow the MRET to be phased out by 2030. The target was criticised as unambitious and ineffective in reducing Australia's fossil fuel dependency, as it only applied to generated electricity, but not to the 77% of energy production exported, nor to energy sources which are not used for electricity generation, such as the oil used in transportation. Thus 20% renewable energy in electricity generation would represent less than 2% of total energy production in Australia.
Computer modelling by the National Generators Forum has signalled the price on greenhouse emissions will need to rise from $20 a tonne in 2010 to $150 a tonne by 2050 if the federal government is to deliver its promised cuts. Generators of Australia's electricity warned of blackouts and power price spikes if the federal government moved too aggressively to put a price on greenhouse emissions.
South Australia achieved its target of 20% of renewable supply by 2014 three years ahead of schedule (i.e. in 2011). In 2008 it set a new target of 33% by 2020. New South Wales and Victoria have renewable energy targets of 20% and 25% respectively by 2020. Tasmania has had 100% renewable energy for a long time.
In 2011 the 'expanded MRET' was split into two schemes: a 41,000 GWh Large-scale Renewable Energy Target (LRET) for utility-scale renewable generators, and an uncapped Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme for small household and commercial-scale generators.
The MRET requires wholesale purchasers of electricity (such as electricity retailers or industrial operations) to purchase renewable energy certificates (RECs), created through the generation of electricity from renewable sources, including wind, hydro, landfill gas and geothermal, as well as solar PV and solar thermal. The objective is to provide a stimulus and additional revenue for these technologies. Since 1 January 2011, RECs were split into small-scale technology certificates (STCs) and large-scale generation certificates (LGCs). RECs are still used as a general term covering both STCs and LGCs.
In 2014, the Abbott government initiated the Warburton Review and subsequently held negotiations with the Labor Opposition. In June 2015, the 2020 LRET was reduced to 33,000 GWh. This will result in more than 23.5% of Australia's electricity being derived from renewable sources by 2020. The required gigawatt-hours of renewable source electricity from 2017 to 2019 were also adjusted to reflect the new target."
Energy policy of Australia,"Greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets
Coal is the most carbon-intensive energy source releasing the highest levels of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere."
Energy policy of Australia,"South Australia, legislated cuts of 60% in greenhouse pollution by 2050 and stabilisation by 2020 were announced.
Victoria announced legislated cuts in greenhouse pollution of 60% by 2050 based on 2000 levels.
New South Wales announced legislated cuts in greenhouse pollution of 60% by 2050 and a stabilisation target by 2025."
Energy policy of Australia,"Low Emissions Technology Demonstration Fund (LETDF)
$500 million – competitive grants
$1 billion – private sector funds
Currently has funded six projects to help reduce GHG emissions, which are summarised below"
Energy policy of Australia,"82% of subsidies are concentrated in the Australian Government's 'Clean Coal Technology', with the remaining 18% of funds allocated to the renewable energy 'Project Solar Systems Australia' $75 million.
The LETDF is a new subsidy scheme aimed at fossil fuel energy production started in 2007."
Energy policy of Australia,"Feed-in tariffs
Between 2008 and 2012 most states and territories in Australia implemented various feed-in tariff arrangements to promote uptake of renewable electricity, primarily in the form of rooftop solar PV systems. As system costs fell uptake accelerated rapidly (in conjunction with the assistance provided through the national-level Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme (SRES)) and these schemes were progressively wound back."
Energy policy of Australia,"Public opinion
The Australian results from the 1st Annual World Environment Review, published on 5 June 2007 revealed that:"
Energy policy of Australia,"86.4% are concerned about climate change.
88.5% think their Government should do more to tackle global warming.
79.9% think that Australia is too dependent on fossil fuels.
80.2% think that Australia is too reliant on foreign oil.
89.2% think that a minimum of 25% of electricity should be generated from renewable energy sources.
25.3% think that the Government should do more to expand nuclear power.
61.3% are concerned about nuclear power.
80.3% are concerned about carbon dioxide emissions from developing countries.
68.6% think it appropriate for developed countries to demand restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions from developing countries."
Energy policy of Australia,"See also
Asia-Pacific Emissions Trading Forum
Australian Renewable Energy Agency
Carbon capture and storage in Australia
Effects of global warming on Australia
Energy diplomacy
Energy policy
Energy in Victoria"
Energy policy of Australia,"References
Further reading
Australian Government (2007). Australian Government Renewable Energy Policies and Programs 2 pages.
New South Wales Government (2006). NSW Renewable Energy Target: Explanatory Paper 17 pages.
The Natural Edge Project, Griffith University, ANU, CSIRO and NFEE (2008). Energy Transformed: Sustainable Energy Solutions for Climate Change Mitigation Archived 28 June 2010 at the Wayback Machine 600+ pages.
Greenpeace Australia Pacific Energy [R]evolution Scenario: Australia, 2008 [1] Archived 14 April 2011 at the Wayback Machine) 47 pages.
Beyond Zero Emissions Zero Carbon Australia 2020, 2010 [2]"
Climate of Australia,"Australia's climate is governed mostly by its size and by the hot, sinking air of the subtropical high pressure belt (subtropical ridge or Australian High). This moves north-west and north-east with the seasons. The climate is variable, with frequent droughts lasting several seasons, thought to be caused in part by the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. Australia has a wide variety of climates due to its large geographical size. The largest part of Australia is desert or semi-arid. Only the south-east and south-west corners have a temperate climate and moderately fertile soil. The northern part of the country has a tropical climate, varying between grasslands and desert. Australia holds many heat-related records: the continent has the hottest extended region year-round, the areas with the hottest summer climate, and the highest sunshine duration.
Because Australia is a medium-sized continent, separated from polar regions by the Southern Ocean, it is not subject to movements of frigid polar air during winter, of the type that sweep over the continents in the northern hemisphere during their winter. Consequently, Australia's winter is relatively mild, with less contrast between summer and winter temperatures than in the northern continents–though the transition is more dramatically marked in alpine regions of Australia and places of substantial elevation. Seasonal highs and lows can still be considerable. Temperatures have ranged from above 50 °C (122 °F) to as low as −23.0 °C (−9.4 °F). Minimum temperatures are moderated.
The El Niño–Southern Oscillation is associated with seasonal abnormality in many areas in the world. Australia is one of the continents most affected and experiences extensive droughts alongside considerable wet periods. Occasionally a dust storm will blanket a region and there are reports of the occasional tornado. Tropical cyclones, heat waves, bushfires and frosts in the country are also associated with the Southern Oscillation. Rising levels of salinity and desertification in some areas is ravaging the landscape.
Climate change in Australia is a highly contentious political issue. Temperatures in the country rose by approximately 0.7 °C between 1910 and 2004, following an increasing trend of global warming. Overnight minimum temperatures have warmed more rapidly than daytime maximum temperatures in recent years. The late-20th century warming has been largely attributed to the increased greenhouse effect. According to the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM), 80% of the land receives less than 600 mm (24 in) of rainfall annually and 50% has even less than 300 mm (12 in). As a whole, Australia has a very low annual average rainfall of 419 mm (16 in)."
Climate of Australia,"States and territories
Australian Capital Territory
Because of its higher general elevation of over 650 m (2,130 ft), southern latitude and entirely landlocked location, winters are exclusively cool to cold in the Australian Capital Territory. Canberra has warm to hot, dry summers with some thunderstorms. Heavy frosts are commonplace and radiation fog often occurs. Many of the higher mountains to the territory's west are snow-covered for a large part of the winter and early spring. Thunderstorms can occur between October and March, and annual rainfall is 623 mm (25 in), with rainfall highest in spring and summer and lowest in winter. The region is dry throughout its entirety due to its position on the leeward side of the Brindabella Ranges.
The highest temperature recorded in the ACT was 44.0 °C (111.2 °F) at Canberra Airport on 4 January 2020. The lowest temperature was −14.6 °C (5.7 °F) at Gudgenby on 11 July 1971."
Climate of Australia,"New South Wales
Over half of New South Wales has an arid or semi-arid climate. The eastern portion has a temperate climate, ranging from humid subtropical from its northern border to the Central Coast and most of Sydney, and oceanic to the south coast. The Snowy Mountains region in the south-east falls in the alpine climate or subpolar oceanic climate zone, with cool to cold weather all year around and regular heavy snowfalls in the winter and spring. Further inland, the climate is semi-arid and a desert climate towards the western part of the state.
The weather in the southern half of the state is generally warm to hot in summer and cool in the winter. The seasons are more defined in the southern half of the state, especially in the South West Slopes, Central West and the Riverina regions. On the coast and anywhere east of the dividing range, a summer rainfall peak is observed throughout its entire latitudinal span. On the ranges and farther inland, rainfall usually peaks in spring in most parts of the state; though the South West Slopes region, in the south-central part of the state (bordering Victoria), has a distinct winter rainfall peak; whereas the New England and North West Slopes regions have a summer rainfall peak. On a hot summer day, a southerly buster may at times moderate the extreme heat experienced in the coastal New South Wales region, from Port Macquarie southwards to Nowra.
The warmest region by annual maxima is the north-west, where summers are extremely hot, but winters relatively cooler and dry. The weather in the northeast region of the state, or the North Coast, bordering Queensland, is moderately hot, humid and rainy in the summer, and mild in winter with more sunshine; and little seasonal temperature difference. The Northern Tablelands have relatively milder summers and colder winters, due to their high elevation and inland location on the Great Dividing Range. The southeast coastal plain, which lies on the leeward side of the Great Dividing Range, experiences foehn winds, particularly between winter and spring, which can elevate fire danger.
The coldest region is the Snowy Mountains where the snow and ice continues for a long period during the winter months. The Blue Mountains, Southern Tablelands and Central Tablelands, which are situated on the Great Dividing Range, have mild to warm summers and cold winters, although not as severe as those in the Snowy Mountains. The areas situated in the valleys of the range, such as Bathurst, Goulburn and Bowral, among other places, have recorded freezing and/or near-freezing lows even in the summer months, unlike other places of similar latitude and altitude in the northern hemisphere.
The highest maximum temperature recorded was 49.7 °C (121.5 °F) at Menindee in the state's west on 10 January 1939. The lowest minimum temperature was −23.0 °C (−9.4 °F) at Charlotte Pass on 29 June 1994 in the Snowy Mountains. This is also the lowest temperature recorded in the whole of Australia excluding Australian Antarctic Territory.
Rainfall varies throughout the state. The far northwest receives the least, less than 180 mm (7 in) annually, while the east receives between 600 and 1,200 mm (24 and 47 in) of rain."
Climate of Australia,"Northern Territory
The Northern Territory has two distinctive climate zones. The northern end, including Darwin, has a tropical savannah climate (Köppen Aw) with high humidity and two seasons, the wet (October to April) and dry season (May to September). During the dry season nearly every day is warm and sunny, and afternoon humidity averages around 30%. There is very little rainfall between May and September. In the coolest months of June and July, the daily minimum temperature may dip as low as 14 °C (57 °F), but very rarely lower, and frost has never been recorded.
The wet season is associated with tropical cyclones and monsoon rains. The majority of rainfall occurs between December and March (the Southern Hemisphere summer), when thunderstorms are common and afternoon relative humidity averages over 70% during the wettest months. On average more than 1,570 mm (62 in) of rain falls in the north. Thunderstorms can produce spectacular lightning displays."
Climate of Australia,"The rest of the territory lies in the desert centre of the country; it includes Alice Springs and Uluru, and is arid or semi-arid with little rain usually falling during the hottest months from October to March. Its seasons are more defined than the northern parts, with summers being very hot, with average temperatures often exceeding 35 °C (95 °F), and winters relatively cool with average minimum temperatures dipping as low as 5 °C (41 °F), with a few frosty nights. Central Australia receives less than 250 mm (10 in) of annual rainfall.
The highest maximum temperature recorded in the territory was 48.3 °C (118.9 °F) at Finke on 1 and 2 January 1960. The lowest minimum temperature was −7.5 °C (18.5 °F) at Alice Springs on 12 July 1976."
Climate of Australia,"Queensland
Because of its size, there is significant variation in climate across the state. Low rainfall and hot summers are typical for the inland west, a monsoonal 'wet' season in the far north, and warm subtropical conditions along the coastal strip. Inland and in southern ranges cooler temperatures are experienced, especially at nights. The climate of the coastal strip is influenced by warm ocean waters, keeping the region free from extremes of temperature and providing moisture for rainfall.
There are five predominant climatic zones in Queensland, based on temperature and humidity:"
Climate of Australia,"hot humid summer (far north and coastal)
warm humid summer (coastal elevated hinterlands and coastal south-east)
hot dry summer, mild winter (central west)
hot dry summer, cold winter (southern west)
temperate – warm summer, cold winter (inland south-east, e.g. Granite Belt)"
Climate of Australia,"However, most of the Queensland populace experience two weather seasons: a winter period of rather warm temperatures with minimal rainfall, and a sultry summer period of hot, sticky temperatures and more rain.
The highest maximum temperature observed in the state is 49.5 °C (121.1 °F) at Birdsville on 24 December 1972. The temperature of 53.1 °C (127.6 °F) at Cloncurry on 16 January 1889 is not considered official; the figure quoted from Birdsville is the next highest, so that record is considered as being official.
The lowest minimum temperature is −10.6 °C (12.9 °F) at Stanthorpe on 23 June 1961 and at The Hermitage on 12 July 1965."
Climate of Australia,"South Australia
The majority of the state has the arid and semi-arid climates. The southern coastal parts of the state have a Mediterranean climate with mild wet winters and hot dry summers. The highest rainfall occurs along the southern coasts and the Mount Lofty Ranges (with an average annual rainfall of 1,200 millimetres (47 in) in the vicinity of Mount Lofty); the lowest rainfall occurs in the Lake Eyre basin where the average annual totals are less than 150 millimetres (6 in) and possibly even 100 millimetres (4 in). Most of the rain in the southern districts of the State fall during the winter months when the sub-tropical high-pressure belt is displaced to the north over the Australian continent."
Climate of Australia,"South Australia's mean temperature range is 29 °C (84 °F) in January and 15 °C (59 °F) in July. Daily temperatures in parts of the state in January and February can be up to 50 °C (122 °F). The highest maximum temperature was recorded as 50.7 °C (123.3 °F) at Oodnadatta on 2 January 1960, which is the highest official temperature recorded in Australia. The lowest minimum temperature was −8.0 °C (17.6 °F) at Yongala on 20 July 1976."
Climate of Australia,"Tasmania
Tasmania has a cool temperate climate, with most areas under an oceanic climate (Cfb), with four distinct seasons. Summer lasts from December to February when the average maximum sea temperature is 21 °C (70 °F) and inland areas around Launceston reach 24 °C (75 °F). Other inland areas are much cooler; Liawenee, located on the Central Plateau, is one of the coldest places in Australia with February temperatures ranging between 4 and 17 °C (39 and 63 °F). Autumn lasts between March and May and experiences changeable weather, where summer weather patterns gradually take on the shape of winter patterns.
The highest recorded maximum temperature in Tasmania was 42.2 °C (108.0 °F) at Scamander on 30 January 2009, during the 2009 south-eastern Australia heat wave. Tasmania's lowest recorded minimum temperature was −14.2 °C (6.4 °F) on 7 August 2020, at Liawenee."
Climate of Australia,"Victoria
Victoria has a varied climate despite its small size. It ranges from semi-arid and hot in the north-west, to temperate and cool along the coast. Victoria's main land feature, the Great Dividing Range, produces a cooler, mountain climate in the centre and east of the state.
The coastal plain south of the Great Dividing Range has Victoria's mildest climate. Regular frontal systems off the Southern Ocean significantly mitigate the heat of summer. Melbourne and other large cities are located in this temperate region.
The Mallee and upper Wimmera are Victoria's warmest regions with hot winds blowing from nearby deserts. Average temperatures top 32 °C (90 °F) during summer and 15 °C (59 °F) in winter. Victoria's highest maximum temperature of 48.8 °C (119.8 °F) was recorded in Hopetoun on 7 February 2009, during the 2009 south-eastern Australia heat wave. A screen temperature of 50.7 °C (123.3 °F) was recorded on 7 January 1906 in Mildura.
The Victorian Alps in the eastern and central regions constitute the coldest climate of Victoria. The Alps are part of the Great Dividing Range extending longitudinally through the centre of Victoria. Average maximum temperatures are less than 9 °C (48 °F) in winter; below 0 °C (32 °F) in the highest parts of the ranges. The state's lowest minimum temperature of −11.7 °C (10.9 °F) was recorded at Omeo on 13 June 1965, and again at Falls Creek on 3 July 1970.
Victoria is the wettest Australian state after Tasmania. Rainfall in Victoria increases from north to south, with higher averages in areas of high altitude. Median annual rainfall exceeds 1,800 mm (71 in) in some parts of the Northeast but is less than 250 mm (10 in) in the Mallee.
Rain is heaviest in the Otway Ranges on the southwest coast and West Gippsland in South-Central Victoria, and in the mountainous Northeast. Snow often falls on the low-lying hilly country in the centre of the state, and on rare occasions may also fall to sea level. Rain falls most frequently in winter, but summer precipitation is heavier. Rainfall is most reliable in Gippsland and the Western District, making them both leading farming areas. Victoria's highest recorded daily rainfall was 375 millimetres (14.8 in) at Tanybryn in the Otway Ranges on 22 March 1983."
Climate of Australia,"Western Australia
Most of Western Australia has a hot arid and semi-arid climate. However, the south-west corner of the state has a Mediterranean climate. The area was originally heavily forested, including large stands of the karri, one of the world's tallest trees. This agricultural region of Western Australia is in the top nine terrestrial habitats for terrestrial biodiversity, with a higher proportion of endemic species than most other equivalent regions. Due to the offshore Leeuwin Current, the area numbers in the top six regions for marine biodiversity, containing the most southerly coral reefs in the world.
Average annual rainfall varies from 300 mm (12 in) at the edge of the Wheatbelt region to 1,400 mm (55 in) in the wettest areas near Northcliffe, the southwesternmost tip of Australia, but in the months of November to March, although rain still falls, evaporation exceeds rainfall and it is generally very dry. Plants must be adapted to this as well as the extreme poverty of all soils. A major reduction in rainfall has been observed, with a greater number of rainfall events in the summer months. The central four-fifths of the state is semi-arid or desert and is lightly inhabited with the only significant activity being mining. Annual rainfall averages about 200 to 250 mm (8 to 10 in), most of which occurs in sporadic torrential falls related to cyclone events in summer months.
An exception to this is the northern tropical regions. The Kimberley has an extremely hot monsoonal climate with average annual rainfall ranging from 500 to 1,500 mm (20 to 59 in), but there is a very long dry season of 7 months from April to November. Eighty-five per cent of the state's runoff occurs in the Kimberley, but because it occurs in violent floods and because of the insurmountable poverty of the generally shallow soils, development has only taken place along the Ord River."
Climate of Australia,"Australia's tropical/subtropical location and cold waters off the western coast make most of Western Australia a hot desert with aridity a marked feature of a greater part of the continent. These cold waters produce precious little moisture needed on the mainland. A 2005 study by Australian and American researchers investigated the desertification of the interior, and suggested that one explanation was related to human settlers who arrived about 50,000 years ago.
Snowfall in the state is rare, and typically only in the Stirling Range near Albany, the southwesternmost point in WA, the only mountain range far enough south and with sufficient elevation. More rarely, snow can fall on the nearby Porongurup Range. Snow outside these areas is a major event; it usually occurs in hilly areas of south-western Australia. The most widespread low-level snow occurred on 26 June 1956 when snow was reported in the Perth Hills, as far north as Wongan Hills and as far east as Salmon Gums. However, even in the Stirling Range, snowfalls rarely exceed 5 cm (2 in) and rarely settle for more than one day.
The highest observed maximum temperature of 50.7 °C (123.3 °F) was recorded at Onslow on 13 January 2022. The lowest minimum temperature recorded was −7.2 °C (19.0 °F) at Eyre Bird Observatory on 17 August 2008."
Climate of Australia,"Distant Australian islands
Precipitation
Rain
More than 80% of Australia has an annual rainfall of less than 600 mm (24 in); among the continents, only Antarctica receives less rainfall. A place inland near Lake Eyre (in South Australia) would only receive 81 mm (3 in) of rain annually. Another place, Troudaninna Bore (29°11′44″S 138°59′28″E, altitude : 46 m) in South Australia, from 1893 to 1936, received, in average, 104.9 mm (4.13 inches) of precipitation. From one extreme to another, parts of the far North Queensland coast annually average over 4,000 mm (157 in), with the Australian annual record being 12,461 mm (491 in), set at the summit of Mount Bellenden Ker in 2000. Four factors contribute to the dryness of the Australian landmass:"
Climate of Australia,"Cold ocean currents off the west coast
Low elevation of landforms
Dominance of high-pressure systems
Shape of the landmass
The average annual rainfall in the Australian desert is low, ranging from 81 to 250 mm (3 to 10 in). Thunderstorms are relatively common in the region, with an annual average of 15 to 20 thunderstorms. Summer daytime temperatures range from 32 to 40 °C (90 to 104 °F); winter temperatures run 18 to 23 °C (64 to 73 °F).
The southern parts of Australia get the usual westerly winds and rain-bearing cold fronts that come when high–pressure systems move towards northern Australia during winter. Cold snaps may bring frosts inland, though temperatures near the coast are mild or near mild all year round. The Australian northwest cloudbands provides up to 80% of the annual rainfall for northwestern Australia and up to 40% of the annual rainfall for southwestern Australia, including most of the winter rainfall over northwest Western Australia and Central Australia.  Summers in southern Australia are generally dry and hot with coastal sea breezes. During a lengthy dry spell, hot and dry winds from the interior can cause bushfires in some southern and eastern states, though most commonly Victoria and New South Wales.
The tropical areas of northern Australia have a wet summer because of the monsoon. During ""the wet"", typically October to April, humid north-westerly winds bring showers and thunderstorms. Occasionally, tropical cyclones can bring heavy rainfall to tropical coastal regions, which is also likely to reach further inland. After the monsoonal season, the dry season comes (""winter""), which brings mostly clear skies and milder conditions.
Rainfall records tend to be concentrated along the east coast of Australia, particularly in tropical north Queensland. The highest 24‑hour rainfall on record in Australia was 907.0 millimetres (35.7 in) in Crohamhurst on 3 February 1893. The highest monthly rainfall on record was 5,387.0 millimetres (212.1 in) recorded at Mount Bellenden Ker, Queensland in January 1979. The highest annual rainfall was 12,461.0 millimetres (490.6 in) recorded also at Mount Bellenden Ker in 2000. Additionally, the location which receives the highest average annual rainfall in Australia is Babinda in Queensland with an annual average of 4,279.4 millimetres (168.5 in).
Cold ocean currents off the coast of Western Australia result in little evaporation occurring. Hence, rain clouds are sparsely formed and rarely do they form long enough for a continuous period of rain to be recorded. Australia's arid/semi-arid zone extends to this region. The absence of any significant mountain range or area of substantial height above sea level, results in very little rainfall caused by orographic uplift. In the east the Great Dividing Range limits rain moving into inland Australia.
Australia has a compact shape, and no significant bodies of water penetrate very far inland. This is important in as much as moist winds are prevented from penetrating inland, so keeping rainfall low."
Climate of Australia,"Snow
In Australia, snow falls frequently on the highlands of the southeast, in the states of Victoria, New South Wales and Tasmania and in the Australian Capital Territory. There is a regular snow season in several areas which have seasonal ski tourism industries, such as Thredbo, Cabramurra, Mount Buller and Perisher Ski Resort, among others. Snow falls with some regularity above 900 metres (3,000 ft) on the Great Dividing Range, seldom as far north as Stanthorpe in southernmost Queensland and in isolated parts of South Australia and Western Australia, but outside these areas, snow is an extremely rare occurrence.
Snow at sea level is occasionally recorded on mainland Australia (namely in southwestern and south-central Victoria), but is more frequent in western Tasmania where snowfalls at sea level can occur nigh to annually during the winter months Light snow generally falls once every few winters in Canberra."
Climate of Australia,"Temperatures
The tropical savannah zone of Northern Australia is warm to hot all year. Summers are hot in most of the country with average January maximum temperatures exceeding 30 °C over most of the mainland, except for high elevations. Winters are warm in the north and cool in the south, with nightly frosts common in inland areas south of the Tropic of Capricorn. Only at the highly elevated areas do wintertime temperatures approach those found in much of Europe or North America, especially the southern parts.
Temperatures in Australia have followed an increasing trend between the years of 1910 and 2004 by approximately 0.7 °C. Overnight minimum temperatures have warmed more rapidly than daytime maximum temperatures. The observed warming has hastened in recent years. The late-20th-century warming has been largely attributed to the increased greenhouse effect. Temperature differences between winter and summer are minor in the tropical region of Australia. However, they are greatest in the southern inland, with seasonal differences along the coast being moderated by the ocean's proximity. In July, a more common latitudinal distribution of average maximums is apparent, ranging from 30 °C near the north coast to below 3 °C in the mountainous areas of the south-east.
Average minimum temperatures in all seasons are highest in northern Australia and near the coastal areas, and are lowest in the elevated areas of the south-east. The highest average January minimum temperatures (near 27 °C) are found near the north-west coast, while in winter they exceed 20 °C at some coastal locations in northern Australia and on the Torres Strait and Tiwi Islands. In the mountains of New South Wales, it is not unusual to have average low minimum temperatures dipping below 5 °C in January and −5 °C in July. Comparatively, most inland (non-mountainous) areas south of the tropics have average July minimum between 0 and 6 °C.
In the desert, the dry air and clear skies give rather large ranges in temperature between day and night. Ranges of 15 °C being typical and 20 °C not quite unusual. Light nighttime frosts in winter occur over much of the southern half of the arid zone, where mean July minimum temperatures are mostly in the 3 to 6 °C range. Moving north, frosts become increasingly rare, with mean July minimum being around 10 °C on the northern boundary.
The highest maximums in Australia are recorded in two regions, the Pilbara and Gascoyne regions of north-western Western Australia and the area extending from south-western Queensland across South Australia into south-eastern Western Australia. Many locations in this region have recorded temperatures exceeding 48 °C. In January, average maximum temperatures exceed 35 °C over a large area of the interior and exceed 40 °C over areas in the north-west. The highest summer maximums in the Pilbara and Gascoyne average at around 41 °C (in some years daily maximums consecutively exceed 40 °C for several weeks at a time)."
Climate of Australia,"Extremes
The most powerful heatwave in the history of south-eastern Australia occurred in January 1939. Adelaide (46.1 °C on the 12th), Melbourne (45.6 °C on the 13th) and Sydney (45.3 °C on the 14th) all had record-high temperatures during this period, as did many other central district areas in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. The record number of consecutive days in Melbourne over 40 °C is five, with Brisbane having two and Sydney having four. Heatwaves usually bring by oppressively warm nights, with Oodnadatta, SA recording an Australian record of nine nights above 30 °C in February 2004. Another extreme event was a prolonged period of extensive heatwaves known as the Angry Summer in early 2013.
Marble Bar achieved 160 consecutive days above 37.8 °C (100.0 °F) in 1923–24. Nyang had an average maximum of 44.8 °C for the months of February 1998 and January 2005, an Australian record. At the other extreme, average January maximums are near 15 °C on the highest peaks of the south-east ranges and near 20 °C in much of Tasmania. In most of the desert region during summer, cool days are rare and usually associated with major rain events—a rather exceptional example occurred in February 1949, when many areas failed to reach 20 °C on one or more days, and the maximum at Boulia, western Queensland was at 14.4 °C, which was 23 °C below normal.
Many other locations in Australia, except those above 500 metres, have extreme maximums between 43 and 48 °C. Most Tasmanian sites away from the north coast have had extreme maximums between 35 and 40 °C. The lowest extreme maximums are found along the north coast of Tasmania (e.g. 29.5 °C at Low Head) and at high elevations (27.0 °C at Thredbo). While extreme high temperatures are more common inland than they are near the coast, notable extreme maxima have been observed near the coast; 50.7 °C at Onslow, 50.5 °C at Mardie, 49.9 °C at Nullarbor, South Australia, 49.8 °C at Eucla, South Australia and 49.5 °C at Port Augusta, South Australia.
At lower elevations, most inland places south of the tropics have extreme minimum between −3 and −7 °C, and these low temperatures have also occurred in locations within a few kilometres of southern and eastern coasts, such as Sale, Victoria (−5.6 °C), Bega, New South Wales (−8.1 °C), Grove, Tasmania (−7.5 °C) and Taree, New South Wales (−5.0 °C). Many locations in this region have recorded −10 °C or lower, including Gudgenby in the Australian Capital Territory (−14.6 °C) and Woolbrook, New South Wales (−14.5 °C). In the desert, the lowest extreme minimum occur at high elevations, especially around Alice Springs, where the temperature has fallen as low as −7.5 °C.
In the tropics, extreme minimum near or below 0 °C have occurred at many places distant from the coast, as far north as Herberton, Queensland (−5.0 °C). Some locations near tropical coasts, such as Mackay (−0.8 °C), Townsville (0.1 °C) and Kalumburu, Western Australia (0.3 °C) have also recorded temperatures near 0 °C. In contrast, some coastal locations, such as Darwin, have never fallen below 10 °C, and Thursday Island, in the Torres Strait, has an extreme minimum of 16.1 °C. The lowest maximum temperature on record in Australia was −6.9 °C (19.6 °F), recorded on 9 July 1978 at Thredbo Ski Resort in New South Wales. The highest minimum temperature on record was 36.6 °C (97.9 °F) on 26 January 2019 at Borrona Downs Station near Wanaaring, New South Wales. Before this heatwave, the previous record was 35.5 °C (95.9 °F), recorded on 24 January 1982 in Arkaroola, South Australia and again on 21 January 2003 in Wittenoom, Western Australia.
A list of extremes can be found in the tables below:"
Climate of Australia,"Natural hazards and disasters
Bushfires
Climatic factors contribute to Australia's high incidence of bushfires, particularly during the summer months. Low relative humidity, wind and lack of rain can cause a small fire, either man-made or caused by lightning strikes, to spread rapidly. Low humidity, the heat of the sun and lack of water cause vegetation to dry out becoming a perfect fuel for the fire. High winds fan the flames, increasing their intensity and the speed and distance at which they can travel.
Many of the worst bushfires in eastern Australia, such as the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires, accompany El Niño–Southern Oscillation events which tend to cause a warm, dry and windy climate.
The worst bushfires in Australian history occurred during the 2019–2020 Australian bushfire season, also known as the ""Black Summer"", which lasted for 6 months and burnt 140,000 km2 (55,000 mi2) of land primarily in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and the Australian Capital Territory. By the end of the season there had been 14-34 direct human deaths, hundreds of indirect human deaths, 1-3 billion animal deaths and 3,500 homes destroyed.
Prior to this, the worst had been the Black Saturday fires in February to March 2009, causing 173 deaths and destroying over 2000 homes in Victoria."
Climate of Australia,"Dust storms
A dust storm or sandstorm, a meteorological phenomenon common in arid and semi-arid regions, arises when a gust front passes or when the wind force exceeds the threshold value where loose sand and dust are removed from the dry surface. Particles are transported by saltation and suspension, causing soil erosion from one place and deposition in another.
Sandstorm usually refers to dust storms in desert areas when, in addition to fine particles obscuring visibility, a considerable amount of larger sand particles moves closer to the surface. The term dust storm is more likely to be used when finer particles are blown long distances, especially when the dust storm affects urban areas."
Climate of Australia,"Drought
Drought in Australia is defined by rainfall over a three-month period being in the lowest ten per cent of amounts having been recorded for that region in the past. This definition takes into account that low rainfall is a relative term and rainfall deficiencies need to be compared to typical rainfall patterns including seasonal variations. Specifically drought in Australia is defined in relation to a rainfall deficiency of pastoral leases and is determined by decile analysis applied to a certain area.
Historical climatic records are now sufficiently reliable to profile climate variability taking into account expectations for regions. State Governments are responsible for declaring a region drought affected and the declaration will take into account factors other than rainfall."
Climate of Australia,"Flooding
Though most of Australia is arid or semi-arid, some regions have very significant rainfall. The Wet Tropics in northeast Queensland as well as the western half of Tasmania both average over 1400mm (55 in) of rainfall annually, sometimes much higher. As a result, the former has some of Australia's only tropical rainforest, while the latter features extensive temperate rainforests where floods can occur at any time.
Through La Niña years the eastern seaboard of Australia (east of the Great Dividing Range) records above-average rainfall, usually creating damaging floods. The 2010–2011 La Niña system broke many rainfall records in Australia, particularly in the states of Queensland and New South Wales, with extensive flooding and major damage to infrastructure and crops. The central east area of Queensland, an area the size of Germany and France combined, was under water in 2010–11. La Nina related flooding has affected major eastern cities such as Sydney, and especially Brisbane. The 2022 eastern Australia floods were also one of the worst recorded flood events.
West of the Great Dividing Range, higher than average rainfall may be related to a negative Indian Ocean Dipole, which sometimes leads to inland flooding, particularly in the Murray-Darling Basin river system and its flood plains and especially during winter.
The Top End, Kimberley and much of North and Far North Queensland are affected by the Australian monsoon (wet season) which brings heavy rain, thunderstorms, tropical cyclones (see below) and frequent flooding from November to April, making many unsealed roads impassable for part of the year. As a result, these regions are feature extensive tropical savannah."
Climate of Australia,"Snowfall
Blizzards are not common in mainland Australia, but occur frequently in the Snowy Mountains in New South Wales and Victoria. When blizzards do occur, they can affect the Tasmanian Highlands and, particularly, Mount Wellington, which towers over the Tasmanian capital Hobart. Blizzards do not affect any major towns or cities, because there are no populated areas located in the mountains except for the ski resort towns of New South Wales and Victoria."
Climate of Australia,"Tornadoes
In Australia, a tornado is also known as a twister or willy-willy. The earliest recorded tornado in Australia was in 1795. The country experiences about 60 tornadoes per year."
Climate of Australia,"Tropical cyclones
Australia is affected by tropical cyclones which primarily occur between December and April but have occasionally developed in November and May. Cyclones over mainland Australia occur on average five to six times each year. The regions between Broome and Exmouth are most prone to cyclones. Tropical cyclones are known to bring destructive winds, heavy rain with flooding creating storm surges along the coast, causing inundation to low-lying areas. The strongest Australian region cyclone was 2006's Cyclone Monica, with gusts topping 350 km/h (220 mph). Cyclones can also move inland, decaying to rain depressions, dumping heavy rain and causing flooding.
The worst cyclones of Australia have caused billions of dollars of damage and many deaths. Cyclone Tracy crossed directly over Darwin in 1974, killing 71 persons. It was Australia's most damaging cyclone. Cyclone Mahina in 1899 brought a storm surge to Far North Queensland reaching 13 metres (43 ft) high, causing 400 deaths and making it the worst natural disaster to befall Australia. Cyclone Larry struck North Queensland and passed over Innisfail in 2006 causing damages estimated at A$1.5 billion. However, there were no deaths in that storm. Cyclone Yasi caused severe flooding and had a total estimated cost of A$3.5 billion making it the second-most costliest cyclone to strike Australia."
Climate of Australia,"Climate change
See also
Indigenous Australian seasons
List of wettest known tropical cyclones in Australia
Weather extremes in Australia, an index of extreme Australian weather articles
Effects of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation in Australia
Australian monsoon"
Climate of Australia,"References
External links"
Climate of Australia,"Australian Bureau of Meteorology – Climate Information
Interactive: 100 years of temperatures in Australia – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
Interactive: 100 years of rainfall in Australia"
Hinduism in Australia,"Hinduism is the third largest religion in Australia consisting of more than 684,002 followers, making up 2.7% of the population as of the 2021 census. Hinduism is the fastest growing religion in Australia mostly through immigration. Hinduism is also one of the most youthful religions in Australia, with 34% and 66% of Hindus being under the age of 14 and 34 respectively.
In the nineteenth century, the British first brought Hindus from India to Australia to work on cotton and sugar plantations.  Many remained as small businessmen, working as camel drivers, merchants and hawkers, selling goods between small rural communities. Today, many Hindus are well educated professionals in fields such as medicine, engineering, commerce and information technology, constituting a model minority.  The Hindus in Australia are mostly of Indian origin; other origins include those from Sri Lanka, Fiji, Malaysia, Bali, Cham, Singapore, Mauritius, and Nepal."
Hinduism in Australia,"History
The following dates briefly outline the arrival of Hinduism."
Hinduism in Australia,"As early as 300AD – Indonesian Hindu merchants make contact with Australian Aborigines. 
1844 – P. Friell who had previously lived in India, brought 25 domestic workers from India to Sydney and these included a few women and children.
1850s – A Hindu Sindhi merchant, Shri Pammull, built a family opal trade in Melbourne that has prosperously continued with his third-to fourth-generation descendants.
1836 – The census showed a mere 277 Hindus in Victoria. The gold rush years attracted many Indians to Australia and across the borders to the gold mines in Victoria.
1890 – The census showed that 521 Hindus were living in New South Wales.
1907 – Just about 800 Indians lived in Australia, the majority of them lived in northern NSW and Queensland.
1911 – The census counted 3698 Hindus in the entire country.
1921 – Less than 2200 Indians lived in Australia.
1971 – Swami Prabhupada arrives in Australia and founded first Hare Krishna centre in Sydney.
1977 – The first Hindu temple in Australia, the Sri Mandir Temple, was built. Established by three devotees; Dr Prem Shankar (from Ujhani, UP), Dr Padmanabn Shrindhar Prabhu and Dr Anand, who bought an old house in Auburn NSW and paid $12000.00 to convert it into a temple.
1981 – The census recorded 12,466 Hindus in Victoria and 12,256 in NSW from a total of 41,730 in the entire country.
1985 – A Hindu society, the Saiva Manram, was formed to build a temple for Lord Murukan. Since its inception, Lord Murukan has been called 'Sydney Murukan'. The Saiva Manram has worked hard for nearly ten years to build a temple for Lord Murukan.
1986 – According to the 1986 census, the number of Hindus in Australia surpasses 21,000.
1991 – According to the 1991 census, the number of Hindus in Australia surpasses 43,000.
1995 - Completion of the Brisbane Selva Vinayakar Kovil the consecration ceremony was held on 5 February 1995. 
1996 – Hindus with their birthplace in India made up 31 per cent of all Hindus in Australia. But the census also showed there were 67,270 Hindus living in Australia.
2001 – According to the 2001 census, the number of Hindus in Australia surpasses 95,000.
2003 – Sri Karphaga Vinayakar Temple was formed to build a temple for Lord Ganesha/Ganapathi/Vinayakar. Since its inception, Lord Ganesh has been called 'Sydney Ganesh Temple'. ""www.vinayakar.org.au""
2006 – According to the 2006 census, the number of Hindus in Australia surpasses 145,000.
2011 – According to the 2011 census, the number of Hindus in Australia surpasses 275,000.
2015 – Daniel Mookhey becomes the first Australian MP to be sworn into office by swearing his/her oath on the Bhagavad Gita.
2016 – 2016 Census data states that Hindus comprise almost 2% of the Australian population.
2018 – Kaushaliya Vaghela becomes the first Indian-born Hindu Member of Parliament in any Australian Parliament."
Hinduism in Australia,"Demographics
Hindu population by year
Hindus by state or territory
Data from the 2011 Census showed that all states (and A.C.T and the Northern Territory) apart from New South Wales had their Hindu population double from the 2006 census. New South Wales has had the largest number of Hindus since at least 2001."
Hinduism in Australia,"The majority of Australian Hindus live along the Eastern Coast of Australia, mainly in the cities of Melbourne and Sydney. About 39% of Hindus lived in Greater Sydney, 29% in Greater Melbourne, and 8% each in Greater Brisbane and Greater Perth. The states and territories with the highest proportion of Hindus are the Australian Capital Territory (2.57%) and New South Wales (2.43%), whereas those with the lowest are Queensland (0.98%) and Tasmania (0.50%).
According to the 2006 Census, 44.16% of all Australians who were born in India were Hindu, so were 47.20% of those born in Fiji, 1.84% born in Indonesia, 3.42% from Malaysia, and 18.61% from Sri Lanka.
In Tasmania, Hinduism is practised mainly by the ethnic Lhotshampa from Bhutan."
Hinduism in Australia,"Hindu converts
Hinduism is also more popular among the Anglo-Australians. Many Caucasians in Australia also visit the Hindu temple at Carrum Downs (Shri Shiva Vishnu Temple) and learn Vedic Hindu scriptures in Tamil. The ISKCON Hindu community in Australia has 60,000 members - 70% of whom are Hindus from overseas, with the other 30% being Anglo Australians. The 2016 Census noted 415 Hindus belonging to the indigenous community of Australia (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people)."
Hinduism in Australia,"Languages
As per the Census of 2021, 13.0% of the Australian Hindus use English at home. English (88,832 or 13.0%) is the third most common language spoken by Australian Hindus, behind Hindi (155,242 or 22.7%) and Nepali (111,353 or 16.3%). The number of Australian Hindus speaking various languages in their home according to the 2006 census:"
Hinduism in Australia,"Indian migrants speak Hindi, Tamil, Gujarati, Telugu, Punjabi, Malayalam, Marathi, Kannada etc.
Tamil by immigrants from India, Sri lanka, Singapore, Malaysia, Mauritius
Nepali by immigrants from Nepal, Bhutan and India.
Bengali by immigrants from India and Bangladesh.
Fijian Hindi and Fijian by migrants from Fiji
Mauritian Creole by migrants from Mauritius
Balinese and Indonesian by Indonesian migrants
Other languages such as French, Malay, Sinhalese, Italian, Vietnamese, etc."
Hinduism in Australia,"Hindu temples in Australia
There are currently over forty Hindu temples in Australia."
Hinduism in Australia,"Sri Karphaga Vinayakar Temple, Sydney
Sydney Murugan Temple, Westmead
Sai Mandir, Regents Park, Sydney
Minto Shiva Temple, Sydney
Raghavendra swamy mutt, Toongabie, NSW
Sydney Durga Temple, Sydney
Perth Shiva Temple, Perth
Bala Murugan Temple, Perth
Shree Swaminarayan Temple, Perth
BAPS Temple, Melbourne
Sri Venkata Krishna Brundavana, Melbourne
Sri Venkata Krishna Vrundavana, Sydney
Shiva Vishnu Temple, Melbourne
Durga Temple, Melbourne
Shirdi Sai Sansthan, Melbourne
Sankatamochan Hanuman Mandir, Melbourne
Melbourne Murugan Temple, Melbourne
Sri Vakrathunda Vinayagar Temple, Melbourne
Perth Ram Temple, Perth (biggest temple in the country)"
Hinduism in Australia,"Contemporary society
According to a national survey reported in 2019, Hindu Australians continues to experience the highest rates of discrimination even after being the model minority. The survey showed that a three quarters of respondents (75%) had experienced discrimination on public transport or on the street. The total fertility rate (TFR) among Hindus is also the second least (least being Buddhists) in Australia with 1.81, which is lower than Christians (2.11) and Muslims (3.03)."
Hinduism in Australia,"Overseas territories
Hinduism is practised by the small number of Malaysian Indians in Christmas Island."
Hinduism in Australia,"Attacks on Hindu Community
In January 2023, three Hindu temples were vandalized across Australia namely the BAPS Swaminarayan Temple of Melbourne, Shiva Vishnu Temple of Carrum Downs, Victoria and ISKCON Temple of Melbourne with anti-Hindu graffiti by Khalistani extremists. High Commission of India to Australia condemned the repeated hate-crimes and the Australian High Commission to India assured support and solidarity with the Hindu community of Australia. Several top Australian lawmakers condemned the attacks on Hindu community's places of worship and stressed importance of respect in a multicultural society.
In February 2023, Khalistani extremists made threatening phone calls to a prominent Hindu temple in Brisbane. The perpetrators demanded the temple raise Khalistan slogans if they wished to celebrate Mahashivratri peacefully. The calls came after three Hindu temples in Australia were defaced with anti-India graffiti, allegedly by Khalistani extremists.
In March 2023, the Shree Laxmi Narayan Temple in Brisbane was vandalized by Khalistani extremists with anti-Hindu graffiti on the walls of temple. Sarah L Gates, the Director of Hindu Human Rights suspects that the hate crime is an attempt to terrorize Hindu community by members of Sikhs For Justice (SFJ) headed by Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, an individual designated as terrorist by the government of India. However the Australian Police claims they have no suspects or leads behind the vandalism.The investigators proposed a theory that alleges the vandalism had a ""Hindu hand"" in order to blame pro Khalistan elements as well as the Sikhs for Justice organization.
In May 2023, the BAPS Swaminarayan Temple of Sydney was vandalized with anti-Hindu graffiti allegedly by Khalistano extremists. Andrew Charlton, Member of Parliament from Parramatta expressed regret and visited the temple for helping the temple volunteers in cleaning the graffiti. Michelle Rowland, Minister of Communications condemned the vandalism. The Hindu Council of Australia called it not only an attack on sanctity of temple but also an insult to Australian Hindus and demanded investigation and justice."
Hinduism in Australia,"Image gallery
See also
Hinduism in New Zealand
Hinduism in Fiji
Hinduism in Vietnam
Hinduism by country
List of Hindu temples in Australia
Religion in Australia
List of Hindu empires and dynasties"
Hinduism in Australia,"References
Sources
Byrnes, J 2007,' Hinduism', Religion and Ethics, abc.net.au
""Indian Magazine Australia Indian Newspaper Australia Indian Events Australia"". web.archive.org. 12 August 2014. Retrieved 9 November 2022."
Hinduism in Australia,"External links
Chinmaya Mission Australia
Hindu Council of Australia an umbrella organisation
Vishva Hindu Parishad of Australia
Hinduism Summit Melbourne
Hindu Community Council of Victoria (HCCV) Archived 11 March 2018 at the Wayback Machine
The Hindu Temple and Cultural Centre ACT
Purohit Services Archived 26 June 2010 at the Wayback Machine
Religious Services
Hindu Temples in Australia
Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh"
History of Australia (1788–1850),"The history of Australia from 1788 to 1850 covers the early British colonial period of Australia's history. This started with the arrival in 1788 of the First Fleet of British ships at Port Jackson on the lands of the Eora, and the establishment of the penal colony of New South Wales as part of the British Empire. It further covers the European scientific exploration of the continent and the establishment of the other Australian colonies that make up the modern states of Australia.  
After several years of privation, the penal colony gradually expanded and developed an economy based on farming, fishing, whaling, trade with incoming ships, and construction using convict labour. By 1820, however, British settlement was largely confined to a 100-kilometre (62 mi) radius around Sydney and to the central plain of Van Diemen's land. From 1816, penal transportation to Australia increased rapidly and the number of free settlers grew steadily. Van Diemen's Land became a separate colony in 1825, and free settlements were established at the Swan River Colony in Western Australia (1829), the Province of South Australia (1836), and in the Port Philip District (1836). The grazing of cattle and sheep expanded inland, leading to increasing conflict with Aboriginal people on their traditional lands.
The growing population of free settlers, former convicts and Australian-born currency lads and lasses led to public demands for representative government. Penal transportation to New South Wales ended in 1840 and a semi-elected Legislative Council was established in 1842. In 1850, Britain granted Van Diemen's Land, South Australia and the newly created colony of Victoria semi-representative Legislative Councils.
British settlement led to a decline in the Aboriginal population and the disruption of their cultures due to introduced diseases, violent conflict and dispossession of their traditional lands. Aboriginal resistance to British encroachment on their land often led to reprisals from settlers including massacres of Aboriginal people. Many Aboriginal people, however, sought an accommodation with the settlers and established viable communities, often on small areas of their traditional lands, where many aspects of their cultures were maintained."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"Colonisation
Decision to colonise New South Wales
The decision to establish a colony in Australia was made by Thomas Townshend, 1st Viscount Sydney. This was taken for two reasons: the ending of transportation of criminals to North America following the American Revolution, as well as the need for a base in the Pacific to counter French expansion. Approximately 50,000 convicts are estimated to have been transported to the colonies over 150 years. The First Fleet, which established the first colony, was an unprecedented project for the Royal Navy, as well as the first forced migration of settlers to a newly established colony.
The American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) saw Britain lose most of its North American colonies and consider establishing replacement territories. Britain had transported about 50,000 convicts to the New World from 1718 to 1775 and was now searching for an alternative. The temporary solution of floating prison hulks had reached capacity and was a public health hazard, while the option of building more jails and workhouses was deemed too expensive."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"Sir Joseph Banks, the eminent scientist who had accompanied Lieutenant James Cook on his 1770 voyage, recommended Botany Bay, then known to the local Gweagal people as Kamay, as a suitable site. Banks accepted an offer of assistance from the American Loyalist James Matra in July 1783. Matra had visited Botany Bay with Banks in 1770 as a junior officer on the Endeavour commanded by James Cook. Under Banks's guidance, he rapidly produced ""A Proposal for Establishing a Settlement in New South Wales"" (24 August 1783), with a fully developed set of reasons for a colony composed of American Loyalists, Chinese and South Sea Islanders (but not convicts)."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"Following an interview with Secretary of State Lord Sydney in March 1784, Matra amended his proposal to include convicts as settlers. Matra's plan can be seen to have “provided the original blueprint for settlement in New South Wales”. A cabinet memorandum December 1784 shows the Government had Matra's plan in mind when considering the creation of a settlement in New South Wales.
The major alternative to Botany Bay was sending convicts to Africa. From 1775 convicts had been sent to garrison British forts in west Africa, but the experiment had proved unsuccessful. In 1783, the Pitt government considered exiling convicts to a small river island in Gambia where they could form a self-governing community, a ""colony of thieves"", at no expense to the government.
In 1785, a parliamentary select committee chaired by Lord Beauchamp recommended against the Gambia plan, but failed to endorse the alternative of Botany Bay. In a second report, Beauchamp recommended a penal settlement at Das Voltas Bay in modern Namibia. The plan was dropped, however, when an investigation of the site in 1786 found it to be unsuitable. Two weeks later, in August 1786, the Pitt government announced its intention to send convicts to Botany Bay. The Government incorporated the settlement of Norfolk Island into their plan, with its attractions of timber and flax, proposed by Banks's Royal Society colleagues, Sir John Call and Sir George Young.
There has been a longstanding debate over whether the key consideration in the decision to establish a penal colony at Botany Bay was the pressing need to find a solution to the penal management problem, or whether broader imperial goals — such as trade, securing new supplies of timber and flax for the navy, and the desirability of strategic ports in the region — were paramount. Leading historians in the debate have included Sir Ernest Scott, Geoffrey Blainey, and Alan Frost.
The decision to settle was taken when it seemed the outbreak of civil war in the Netherlands might precipitate a war in which Britain would be again confronted with the alliance of the three naval Powers, France, Holland and Spain, which had brought her to defeat in 1783. Under these circumstances a naval base in New South Wales which could facilitate attacks on Dutch and Spanish interests in the region would be attractive. Specific plans for using the colony as a strategic base against Spanish interests were occasionally made after 1788, but never implemented.
Macintyre argues that the evidence for a military-strategic motive in establishing the colony is largely circumstantial and hard to reconcile with the strict ban on establishing a shipyard in the colony.  Karskens points out that the instructions provided to the first five governors of New South Wales show that the initial plans for the colony were limited. The settlement was to be a self-sufficient penal colony based on subsistence agriculture. Trade, shipping and ship building were banned in order to keep the convicts isolated and so as not to interfere with the trade monopoly of the British East India Company. There was no plan for economic development apart from investigating the possibility of producing raw materials for Britain. Christopher and Maxwell-Stewart argue that whatever the government's original motives were in establishing the colony, by the 1790s it had at least achieved the imperial objective of providing a harbour where vessels could be careened and resupplied."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"Establishment of colony
On 13 May 1787, the First Fleet of 11 ships and about 1,530 people (736 convicts, 17 convicts' children, 211 marines, 27 marines' wives, 14 marines' children and about 300 officers and others) under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip set sail for Botany Bay. A few days after arrival at Botany Bay the fleet moved to the more suitable Port Jackson where a settlement was established at Sydney Cove, known by the Indigenous name Warrane, on 26 January 1788. This date later became Australia's national day, Australia Day. The colony was formally proclaimed by Governor Phillip on 7 February 1788 at Sydney. Sydney Cove offered a fresh water supply and a safe harbour, which Philip famously described as:"
History of Australia (1788–1850),being with out exception the finest Harbour in the World [...] Here a Thousand Sail of the Line may ride in the most perfect Security.
History of Australia (1788–1850),"Phillip named the settlement after the Home Secretary, Lord Sydney. The only people at the flag raising ceremony and the formal taking of possession of the land in the name of King George III were Phillip and a few dozen marines and officers from the Supply, the rest of the ship's company and the convicts witnessing it from on board ship. The remaining ships of the Fleet were unable to leave Botany Bay until later on 26 January because of a tremendous gale. The new colony was formally proclaimed as the Colony of New South Wales on 7 February.
The colony included all of Australia eastward of the meridian of 135° East. This included more than half of mainland Australia and reflected the line of division between the claims of Spain and Portugal established in the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. Watkin Tench subsequently commented in A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay, ""By this partition, it may be fairly presumed, that every source of future litigation between the Dutch and us, will be for ever cut off, as the discoveries of English navigators only are comprized in this territory""."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"The claim also included ""all the Islands adjacent in the Pacific"" between the latitudes of Cape York and the southern tip of Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania). King argues that an unofficial British map published in 1786 (A General Chart of New Holland) showed the possible extent of this claim. In 1817, the British government withdrew the extensive territorial claim over the South Pacific, passing an act specifying that Tahiti, New Zealand and other islands of the South Pacific were not within His Majesty's dominions. However, it is unclear whether the claim ever extended to the current islands of New Zealand.
On 24 January 1788 a French expedition of two ships led by Admiral Jean-François de La Pérouse had arrived off Botany Bay, on the latest leg of a three-year voyage. Though amicably received, the French expedition was a troublesome matter for the British, as it showed the interest of France in the new land.
Nevertheless, on 2 February Lieutenant King, at Phillip's request, paid a courtesy call on the French and offered them any assistance they may need. The French made the same offer to the British, as they were much better provisioned than the British and had enough supplies to last three years. Neither of these offers was accepted. On 10 March the French expedition, having taken on water and wood, left Botany Bay, never to be seen again."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"Governor Phillip was vested with complete authority over the inhabitants of the colony. His intention was to establish harmonious relations with local Aboriginal people and try to reform as well as discipline the convicts of the colony. Early efforts at agriculture were fraught and supplies from overseas were scarce. Between 1788 and 1792 about 3546 male and 766 female convicts were landed at Sydney. Many new arrivals were sick or unfit for work and the condition of healthy convicts also deteriorated due to the hard labour and poor food. The food situation reached crisis point in 1790 and the Second Fleet which finally arrived in June 1790 had lost a quarter of its passengers through sickness, while the condition of the convicts of the Third Fleet appalled Phillip. From 1791, however, the more regular arrival of ships and the beginnings of trade lessened the feeling of isolation and improved supplies.
In 1788, Phillip established a subsidiary settlement on Norfolk Island in the South Pacific where he hoped to obtain timber and flax for the navy. The island, however, had no safe harbour, which led the settlement to be abandoned and the settlers evacuated to Tasmania in 1807. The island was subsequently re-established as a site for secondary transportation in 1825.
Phillip sent exploratory missions in search of better soils, fixed on the Parramatta region as a promising area for expansion, and moved many of the convicts from late 1788 to establish a small township, which became the main centre of the colony's economic life. This left Sydney Cove only as an important port and focus of social life. Poor equipment and unfamiliar soils and climate continued to hamper the expansion of farming from Farm Cove to Parramatta and Toongabbie, but a building program, assisted by convict labour, advanced steadily. Between 1788 and 1792, convicts and their gaolers made up the majority of the population; however, a free population soon began to grow, consisting of emancipated convicts, locally born children, soldiers whose military service had expired and, finally, free settlers from Britain. Governor Phillip departed the colony for England on 11 December 1792, with the new settlement having survived near starvation and immense isolation for four years.
A number of foreign commentators pointed to the strategic importance of the new colony. Spanish naval commander Alessandro Malaspina, who visited Sydney in March–April 1793 reported to his government that imperialism and trade were the real objects of the colony.  Frenchman François Péron, of the Baudin expedition visited Sydney in 1802 and reported to the French Government his surprise that the Spanish had not protested at a colony strategically place to challenge Spanish interests in the region.
King points out that supporters of the penal colony frequently compared the venture to the foundation of Rome, and that the first Great Seal of New South Wales alluded to this. Phillip, however, wrote, ""I would not wish Convicts to lay the foundations of an Empire...[.]"""
History of Australia (1788–1850),"Consolidation of colony
After the departure of Phillip, trade developed with visiting ships and farming spread to more fertile lands on the fringes of Sydney.The New South Wales Corps was formed in England in 1789 as a permanent regiment of the British Army to relieve the marines who had accompanied the First Fleet. Officers of the Corps soon became involved in the corrupt and lucrative rum trade in the colony. Governor William Bligh (1806 – 1808) tried to suppress the rum trade and the illegal use of Crown Land, resulting in the Rum Rebellion of 1808. The Corps, working closely with the newly established wool trader John Macarthur, staged the only successful armed takeover of government in Australian history, deposing Bligh and instigating a brief period of military rule prior to the arrival from Britain of Governor Lachlan Macquarie in 1810.
Macquarie served as the last autocratic Governor of New South Wales, from 1810 to 1821, and had a leading role in the social and economic development of New South Wales, which saw it transition from a penal colony to a budding civil society. He established a bank, a currency and a hospital, and commissioned extensive public works.
Central to Macquarie's policy was his treatment of the emancipists, whom he considered should be treated as social equals to free-settlers in the colony. He appointed emancipists to key government positions including Francis Greenway as colonial architect and William Redfern as a magistrate. His policy on emancipists was opposed by many influential free settlers, officers and officials, and London became concerned at the cost of his public works. In 1819, London appointed J. T. Bigge to conduct an inquiry into the colony, and Macquarie resigned shortly before the report of the inquiry was published."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"Expansion (1821—1850)
In 1820, British settlement was largely confined to a 100 kilometre radius around Sydney and to the central plain of Van Diemen's Land. The settler population was 26,000 on the mainland and 6,000 in Van Diemen's Land. Following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 the transportation of convicts increased rapidly and the number of free settlers grew steadily. From 1821 to 1840, 55,000 convicts arrived in New South Wales and 60,000 in Van Diemen's Land. However, by 1830, free settlers and the locally born exceeded the convict population of New South Wales.
From the 1820s, grazing of sheep and cattle expanded rapidly, and the colony spread beyond the official bounds of settlement. In 1825, the western boundary of New South Wales was extended to longitude 129° East, which is the current boundary of Western Australia. As a result, the territory of New South Wales reached its greatest extent, covering the area of the modern state as well as modern Queensland, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and the Northern Territory.
The Proclamation of Governor Bourke, (10 October 1835) reinforced the doctrine that Australia had been terra nullius when settled by the British in 1788, and that the Crown had obtained beneficial ownership of all the land of New South Wales from that date. The proclamation stated that British subjects could not obtain title over vacant Crown land directly from Aboriginal Australians, effectively quashing the treaty between John Batman and the Aboriginal people of the Port Phillip area.
By 1850 the settler population of New South Wales had grown to 180,000, not including the 70–75 thousand living in the area which became the separate colony of Victoria in 1851."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"Establishment of further colonies
Van Diemen's Land
After hosting Nicholas Baudin's French naval expedition in Sydney in 1802,  Governor Phillip Gidley King decided to establish a settlement in Van Diemen's Land (modern Tasmania) in 1803, partly to forestall a possible French settlement. The British settlement of the island soon centred on Launceston in the north and Hobart in the south. For the first two decades the settlement relied heavily on convict labour, small-scale farming and sheep grazing, sealing, whaling and the ""dog and kangaroo"" economy where emancipists and escaped convicts hunted native game with guns and dogs.
From the 1820s free settlers were encouraged by the offer of land grants in proportion to the capital the settlers would bring. Almost 2 million acres of land was granted to free settlers in the decade, and the number of sheep in the island increased from 170,000 to a million. The land grants created a social division between large landowners and a majority of landless convicts and emancipists.
Van Diemen's Land became a separate colony from New South Wales in December 1825 and continued to expand through the 1830s, supported by farming, sheep grazing and whaling. Following the suspension of convict transportation to New South Wales in 1840, Van Diemen's land became the main destination for convicts. Transportation to Van Diemen's Land ended in 1853 and in 1856 the colony officially changed its name to Tasmania."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"Victoria
Pastoralists from Van Diemen's land began squatting in the Port Phillip hinterland on the mainland in 1834, attracted by its rich grasslands. In 1835, John Batman and others negotiated the transfer of 100,000 acres of land from the Kulin people. However, the treaty was annulled the same year when the British Colonial Office issued the Proclamation of Governor Bourke stating that all unalienated land in the colony was vacant Crown Land, irrespective of whether it was occupied by traditional landowners. Its publication meant that from then, all people found occupying land without the authority of the government would be considered illegal trespassers.
In 1836, Port Phillip was officially recognised as a district of New South Wales and opened for settlement. The main settlement of Melbourne was established in 1837 as a planned town on the instructions of Governor Bourke. Squatters and settlers from Van Diemen's Land and New South Wales soon arrived in large numbers, and by 1850 the district had a population of 75,000 Europeans, 2,000 Indigenous inhabitants and 5 million sheep. In 1851, the Port Phillip District separated from New South Wales as the colony of Victoria."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"Western Australia
In 1826, the governor of New South Wales, Ralph Darling, sent a military garrison to King George Sound (the basis of the later town of Albany), to deter the French from establishing a settlement in Western Australia. In 1827, the head of the expedition, Major Edmund Lockyer, formally annexed the western third of the continent as a British colony.
In 1829, the Swan River colony was established at the sites of modern Fremantle and Perth, becoming the first convict-free and privatised colony in Australia. However, much of the arable land was allocated to absentee owners and the development of the colony was hampered by poor soil, the dry climate, and a lack of capital and labour. By 1850 there were a little more than 5,000 settlers, half of them children. The colony accepted convicts from that year because of the acute shortage of labour."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"South Australia
The Province of South Australia was established in 1836 as a privately financed settlement based on the theory of ""systematic colonisation"" developed by Edward Gibbon Wakefield. The intention was to found a free colony based on private investment at little cost to the British government. Power was divided between the Crown and a Board of Commissioners of Colonisation, responsible to about 300 shareholders. Settlement was to be controlled to promote a balance between land, capital and labour. Convict labour was banned in the hope of making the colony more attractive to ""respectable"" families and promote an even balance between male and female settlers. The city of Adelaide was to be planned with a generous provision of churches, parks and schools. Land was to be sold at a uniform price and the proceeds used to secure an adequate supply of labour through selective assisted migration. Various religious, personal and commercial freedoms were guaranteed, and the Letters Patent enabling the South Australia Act 1834 included a guarantee of the rights of ""any Aboriginal Natives"" and their descendants to lands they ""now actually occupied or enjoyed"".
The colony was badly hit by the depression of 1841–44, and overproduction of wheat and overinvestment in infrastructure almost bankrupted it. Conflict with Indigenous traditional landowners also reduced the protections they had been promised. In 1842, the settlement became a Crown colony administered by the governor and an appointed Legislative Council. The economy recovered from 1845, supported by wheat farming, sheep grazing and a boom in copper mining. By 1850 the settler population had grown to 60,000 and the following year the colony achieved limited self-government with a partially elected Legislative Council."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"Queensland
In 1824, the Moreton Bay penal settlement was established on the site of present-day Brisbane as a place of secondary punishment. In 1842, the penal colony was closed and the area was opened for free settlement. By 1850 the population of Brisbane had reached 8,000 and increasing numbers of pastoralists were grazing cattle and sheep in the Darling Downs west of the town. However, several attempts to establish settlements north of the Tropic of Capricorn had failed, and the settler population in the north remained small. Frontier violence between settlers and the Indigenous population became severe as pastoralism expanded north of the Tweed River. A series of disputes between northern pastoralists and the government in Sydney led to increasing demands from the northern settlers for separation from New South Wales. In 1857, the British government agreed to the separation and in 1859 the colony of Queensland was proclaimed. The settler population of the new colony was 25,000 and the vast majority of its territory was still occupied by its traditional owners."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"Convict society
Between 1788 and 1868, approximately 161,700 convicts (of whom 25,000 were women) were transported to the Australian colonies of New South Wales, Van Diemen's Land and Western Australia. Historian Lloyd Robson has estimated that perhaps two-thirds were thieves from working class towns, particularly from the Midlands and north of England. The majority were repeat offenders. The literacy rate of convicts was above average and they brought a range of useful skills to the new colony including building, farming, sailing, fishing and hunting. The small number of free settlers meant that early governors also had to rely on convicts and emancipists for professions such as lawyers, architects, surveyors and teachers."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"The first governors saw New South Wales as a place of punishment and reform of convicts. Convicts worked on government farms and public works such as land clearing and building. After 1792 the majority were assigned to work for private employers including emancipists (as transported convicts who had completed their sentence or had been pardoned called themselves). Emancipists were granted small plots of land for farming and a year of government rations. Later they were assigned convict labour to help them work their farms. Some convicts were assigned to military officers to run their businesses because the officers did not want to be directly associated with trade. These convicts learnt commercial skills which could help them work for themselves when their sentence ended or they were granted a ""ticket of leave"" (a form of parole). Female convicts were usually assigned as domestic servants to the free settlers, many being forced into prostitution.
Convicts soon established a system of piece work which allowed them to work for wages once their allocated tasks were completed. Due to the shortage of labour, wage rates before 1815 were high for male workers although much lower for females engaged in domestic work. In 1814, Governor Macquarie ordered that convicts had to work until 3pm, after which private employers had to pay them wages for any additional work.
By 1821 convicts, emancipists and their children owned two-thirds of the land under cultivation, half the cattle and one-third of the sheep. They also worked in trades and small business. Emancipists employed about half of the convicts assigned to private masters.
After 1815 wages and employment opportunities for convicts and emancipists deteriorated as a sharp increase in the number of convicts transported led to an oversupply of labour. A series of reforms recommended by J. T. Bigge in 1822 and 1823 also sought to change the nature of the colony and make transportation ""an object of real terror"". The food ration for convicts was cut and their opportunities to work for wages restricted. More convicts were assigned to rural work gangs, bureaucratic control and surveillance of convicts was made more systematic, isolated penal settlements were established as places of secondary punishment, the rules for tickets of leave were tightened, and land grants were skewed to favour free settlers with large capital.  As a result, convicts who arrived after 1820 were far less likely to become property owners, to marry, and to establish families."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"Growth of free settlement
The Bigge reforms also aimed to encourage affluent free settlers by offering them land grants for farming and grazing in proportion to their capital. From 1831 the colonies replaced land grants with land sales by auction at a fixed minimum price per acre, the proceeds being used to fund the assisted migration of workers. From 1821 to 1850 Australia attracted 200,000 immigrants from the United Kingdom. Although most immigrants settled in towns, many were attracted to the high wages and business opportunities available in rural areas. However, the system of land grants, and later land sales, led to the concentration of land in the hands of a small number of affluent settlers.
Two-thirds of the migrants to Australia during this period received assistance from the British or colonial governments. Healthy young workers without dependants were favoured for assisted migration, especially those with experience as agricultural labourers or domestic workers. Families of convicts were also offered free passage and about 3,500 migrants were selected under the English Poor Laws. Various special-purpose and charitable schemes, such as those of Caroline Chisholm and John Dunmore Lang, also provided migration assistance."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"Women
Colonial Australia was characterised by an imbalance of the sexes as women comprised only about 15 per cent of convicts transported. The first female convicts brought a range of skills including experience as domestic workers, dairy women and farm workers. Due to the shortage of women in the colony they were more likely to marry than men and tended to choose older, skilled men with property as husbands. The early colonial courts enforced the property rights of women independently of their husbands, and the ration system also gave women and their children some protection from abandonment. Women were active in business and agriculture from the early years of the colony, among the most successful being the former convict turned entrepreneur Mary Reibey and the agriculturalist Elizabeth Macarthur. One-third of the shareholders of the first colonial bank (founded in 1817) were women.
One of the goals of the assisted migration programs from the 1830s was to promote migration of women and families to provide a more even gender balance in the colonies. The philanthropist Caroline Chisholm established a shelter and labour exchange for migrant women in New South Wales in the 1840s and promoted the settlement of single and married women in rural areas where she hoped they would have a civilising influence on rough colonial manners and act as ""God's police"".
Between 1830 and 1850 the female proportion of the Australian settler population increased from 24 per cent to 41 per cent."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"European exploration
By the middle of the 17th century, the discoveries of Dutch explorers allowed the almost complete mapping of Australia's northern and western coasts and much of its southern and south-eastern Tasmanian coasts. In 1770, James Cook had charted most of the east coast of the continent.
In 1798–99 George Bass and Matthew Flinders set out from Sydney in a sloop and circumnavigated Tasmania, thus proving it to be an island. In 1801–02 Flinders, in HMS Investigator, led the first circumnavigation of Australia. Aboard ship was the Aboriginal explorer Bungaree, who became the first person born on the Australian continent to circumnavigate it.
In 1798, the former convict John Wilson and two companions crossed the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, in an expedition ordered by Governor Hunter. Hunter suppressed news of the feat for fear that it would encourage convicts to abscond from the settlement. In 1813, Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and William Wentworth crossed the mountains by a different route and a road was soon built to the Central Tablelands.
In 1824 the Governor Sir Thomas Brisbane, commissioned Hamilton Hume and former Royal Navy Captain William Hovell to lead an expedition to find new grazing land in the south of the colony, and also to find an answer to the mystery of where New South Wales's western rivers flowed. Over 16 weeks in 1824–25, Hume and Hovell journeyed to the bay Naarm on the land of the Kulin nation, later named Port Phillip, and back. They found many important sites including the Murray River (which they named the Hume), many of its tributaries, and good agricultural and grazing lands between Gunning, New South Wales and Corio Bay, Victoria.
Charles Sturt led an expedition along the Macquarie River in 1828 and found the Darling River. A theory had developed that the inland rivers of New South Wales were draining into an inland sea. Leading a second expedition in 1829, Sturt followed the Murrumbidgee River into a 'broad and noble river', the Murray River, which he named after Sir George Murray, secretary of state for the colonies. His party then followed this river to its junction with the Darling River, facing two threatening encounters with local Aboriginal people along the way. Sturt continued downriver on to Lake Alexandrina, where the Murray meets the sea in South Australia. Suffering greatly, the party had to then row back upstream hundreds of kilometres for the return journey.
Surveyor General Sir Thomas Mitchell conducted a series of expeditions from the 1830s to ""fill in the gaps"" left by these previous expeditions. He was meticulous in seeking to record the original Aboriginal place names around the colony, for which reason the majority of place names to this day retain their Aboriginal titles.
The Polish scientist and explorer Count Paul Edmund Strzelecki conducted surveying work in the Australian Alps in 1839 and became the first European to ascend Australia's highest peak which he named Mount Kosciuszko in honour of the Polish patriot Tadeusz Kosciuszko.
European explorers penetrated deeper into the interior in the 1840s in a quest to discover new lands for agriculture or answer scientific enquiries. The German scientist Ludwig Leichhardt led three expeditions in northern Australia in this decade, sometimes with the help of Aboriginal guides, identifying the grazing potential of the region and making important discoveries in the fields of botany and geology. He and his party disappeared in 1848 while attempting to cross the continent from east to west. Edmund Kennedy led an expedition into what is now far-western Queensland in 1847 before being speared by Aborigines in the Cape York Peninsula in 1848."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"Aboriginal resistance and accommodation
Impact of introduced diseases
The relative isolation of the Indigenous population for some 60,000 years meant that they had little resistance to many introduced diseases. An outbreak of smallpox in April 1789 killed about half the Aboriginal population of the Sydney region while only one death was recorded among the settlers. The source of the outbreak is controversial; some researchers contend that it originated from contact with Indonesian fisherman in the far north and spread along Aboriginal trade routes while others argue that it is more likely to have been inadvertently or deliberately spread by settlers.
There were further smallpox outbreaks devastating Aboriginal populations from the late 1820s (affecting south-eastern Australia), in the early 1860s (travelling inland from the Coburg Peninsula in the north to the Great Australian Bight in the south), and in the late 1860s (from the Kimberley to Geraldton). According to Josphine Flood, the estimated Aboriginal mortality rate from smallpox was 60 per cent on first exposure, 50 per cent in the tropics, and 25 per cent in the arid interior.
Other introduced diseases such as measles, influenza, typhoid and tuberculosis also resulted in high death rates in Aboriginal communities. Butlin estimates that the Aboriginal population in the area of modern Victoria was around 50,000 in 1788 before two smallpox outbreaks reduced it to about 12,500 in 1830. Between 1835 (the settlement of Port Phillip) and 1853, the Aboriginal population of Victoria fell from 10,000 to around 2,000. It is estimated that about 60 per cent of these deaths were from introduced diseases, 18 per cent from natural causes and 15 per cent from settler violence.
Venereal diseases were also a factor in Indigenous depopulation, reducing Aboriginal fertility rates in south-eastern Australia by an estimated 40 per cent by 1855. By 1890 up to 50 per cent of the Aboriginal population in some regions of Queensland were affected."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"Frontier violence
Aboriginal reactions to the arrival of British settlers were varied, but often hostile when the presence of the colonists led to competition over resources, and to the occupation of Aboriginal lands. By contrast with New Zealand, no valid treaty was signed with any of Aboriginal peoples in Australia. Flood, however, points out that unlike New Zealand, Australia's Indigenous population was divided into hundreds of tribes and language groups, which did not have ""chiefs"" with whom treaties could be negotiated. Moreover, Aboriginal Australians had no concept of alienating their traditional land in return for political or economic benefits.
The British settlement was initially planned to be a self-sufficient penal colony based on agriculture. Karskens argues that conflict broke out between the settlers and the traditional owners of the land because of the settlers' assumptions about the superiority of British civilisation and their entitlement to land which they had ""improved"" through building and cultivation."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"Conflict also arose from cross-cultural misunderstandings and from reprisals for previous actions such as the kidnapping of Aboriginal men, women and children. Reprisal attacks and collective punishments were perpetrated by colonists and Aboriginal groups alike. Sustained Aboriginal attacks on settlers, the burning of crops and the mass killing of livestock were more obviously acts of resistance to the loss of traditional land and food resources.As the colony spread to the more fertile lands around the Hawkesbury river, north-west of Sydney, conflict between the settlers and the Darug people intensified, reaching a peak from 1794 to 1810. Bands of Darug people, led by Pemulwuy and later by his son Tedbury, burned crops, killed livestock and raided settler huts and stores in a pattern of resistance that was to be repeated as the colonial frontier expanded. A military garrison was established on the Hawkesbury in 1795. The death toll from 1794 to 1800 was 26 settlers and up to 200 Darug.
Conflict again erupted from 1814 to 1816 with the expansion of the colony into Dharawal country in the Nepean region south-west of Sydney. Following the deaths of several settlers, Governor Macquarie despatched three military detachments into Dharawal lands, culminating in the Appin massacre (April 1816) in which at least 14 Aboriginal people were killed.
In the 1820s the colony spread to the lightly wooded pastures west of the Great Dividing Range, opening the way for large scale farming and grazing in Wiradjuri country. From 1822 to 1824 Windradyne led a group of 50-100 Aboriginal men in raids on livestock and stockmen's huts resulting in the death of 15-20 colonists. Martial law was declared in August 1824 and ended five months later when Windradyne and 260 of his followers ended their armed resistance. Estimates of Aboriginal deaths in the conflict range from 15 to 100.
After two decades of sporadic violence between settlers and Aboriginal Tasmanians in Van Diemen's land, the Black War broke out in 1824, following a rapid expansion of settler numbers and sheep grazing in the island's interior. When Eumarrah, leader of the North Midlands people, was captured in 1828 he said his patriotic duty was to kill as many white people as possible because they had driven his people off their kangaroo hunting grounds. Martial law was declared in the settled districts of Van Diemen's Land in November 1828 and was extended to the entire island in October 1830. A ""Black Line"" of around 2,200 troops and settlers then swept the island with the intention of driving the Aboriginal population from the settled districts. From 1830 to 1834 George Augustus Robinson and Aboriginal ambassadors including Truganini led a series of ""Friendly Missions"" to the Aboriginal tribes which effectively ended the Black War.  Flood states that around 200 settler and 330 Aboriginal Tasmanian deaths in frontier violence were recorded during the period 1803 to 1834, but adds that it will never be known how many Aboriginal deaths went unreported. Clements estimates that colonists killed 600 Aboriginal people in eastern Van Diemen's Land during the Black War. Around 220 Aboriginal Tasmanians were eventually relocated to Flinders Island.
As settlers and pastoralists spread into the region of modern Victoria in the 1830s, competition for land and natural resources again sparked conflict with traditional landowners. Aboriginal resistance was so intense that it was not unusual for sheep runs to be abandoned after repeated attacks. Broome estimates that 80 settlers and 1,000–1,500 Aboriginal people died in frontier conflict in Victoria from 1835 to 1853.
The growth of the Swan River Colony (centred on Fremantle and Perth) in the 1830s led to conflict with a number of clans of the Noongar people. Governor Sterling established a mounted police force in 1834 and in October that year he led a mixed force of soldiers, mounted police and civilians in a punitive expedition against the Pindjarup. The expedition culminated in the Pinjarra massacre in which some 15 to 30 Aboriginal people were killed. According to Neville Green, 30 settlers and 121 Aboriginal people died in violent conflict in Western Australia between 1826 and 1852.
Aboriginal casualty rates in conflicts increased as the colonists made greater use of mounted police, Native Police units, and newly developed revolvers and breech-loaded guns. Civilian colonists often launched punitive raids against Aboriginal groups without the knowledge of colonial authorities. Conflict was particularly intense in NSW in the 1840s.
The spread of British settlement also led to an increase in inter-tribal Aboriginal conflict as more people were forced off their traditional lands into the territory of other, often hostile, tribes. Butlin estimated that of the 8,000 Aboriginal deaths in Victoria from 1835 to 1855, 200 were from inter-tribal violence."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"Accommodation and protection
In the first two years of settlement the Aboriginal people of Sydney, after initial curiosity, mostly avoided the newcomers. Governor Phillip had a number of Aboriginal people kidnapped in an attempt to learn their language and customs. In November 1790, 18 months after the smallpox epidemic that had devastated the Aboriginal population, Bennelong led the survivors of several clans into Sydney. Later, he and a companion became the first Aboriginal people to sail for Europe, when, in 1792 they accompanied Governor Phillip to England and were presented to King George III. Bungaree, a Kuringgai man, joined Matthew Flinders in his circumnavigation of Australia from 1801 to 1803, playing an important role as emissary to the various Indigenous peoples they encountered.
Governor Macquarie hoped to ""effect the civilization of the Aborigines"" and reclaim them ""from their barbarous practices"".  In 1815, he established a Native Institution to provide elementary education to Aboriginal children, settled 15 Aboriginal families on farms in Sydney and made the first freehold land grant to Aboriginal people at Black Town, west of Sydney. In 1816, he initiated an annual Native Feast at Parramatta which attracted Aboriginal people from as far as the Bathurst plains. However, by the 1820s the Native Institution and Aboriginal farms had failed. Aboriginal people continued to live on vacant waterfront land and on the fringes of the Sydney settlement, adapting traditional practices to the new semi-urban environment.
Escalating frontier conflict in the 1820s and 1830s saw colonial governments develop a number of policies aimed at protecting Aboriginal people. Protectors of Aborigines were appointed in South Australia and the Port Phillip District in 1839, and in Western Australia in 1840. While the aim was to extend the protection of British law to Aboriginal people, more often the result was an increase in their criminalisation. Protectors were also responsible for the distribution of rations, delivering elementary education to Aboriginal children, instruction in Christianity and training in occupations useful to the colonists. However, by 1857 the protection offices had been closed due to their cost and failure to meets their goals.
Colonial governments established a small number of reserves and encouraged Christian missions which afforded some protection from frontier violence. In 1825, the NSW governor granted 10,000 acres for an Aboriginal mission at Lake Macquarie. In the 1830s and early 1840s there were also missions in the Wellington Valley, Port Phillip and Moreton Bay. The settlement for Aboriginal Tasmanians on Flinders Island operated effectively as a mission under George Robinson from 1835 to 1838.
In more densely settled areas, most Aboriginal people who had lost control of their land lived on reserves and missions, or on the fringes of cities and towns. In pastoral districts the British Waste Land Act of 1848 gave traditional landowners limited rights to live, hunt and gather food on Crown land under pastoral leases. Many Aboriginal groups camped on pastoral stations where Aboriginal men were often employed as shepherds and stockmen. These groups were able to retain a connection with their lands and maintain aspects of their traditional culture."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"Politics and government
Traditional Aboriginal society had been governed by councils of elders and a collective decision-making process, but the first European-style governments established after 1788 were autocratic and run by appointed governors—although English law was transplanted into the Australian colonies by virtue of the doctrine of reception, thus notions of the rights and processes established by the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights 1689 were brought from Britain by the colonists. Agitation for representative government began soon after the settlement of the colonies."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"From 1788 until the 1850s, the governance of the colonies, including most policy decision-making, was largely in the hands of the governors, who were directly responsible to the government in London (Home Office until 1794; War Office until 1801; and War and Colonial Office until 1854). The first governor of New South Wales, Arthur Phillip, was given executive and legislative powers to establish courts, military forces, fight enemies, give out land grants, and regulate the economy.
The early colonists adopted the British political culture of the time, which allowed the use of public office for furthering private interests, which led to officers of the New South Wales Corps, which had replaced the original marines in 1791, trying to use their position in order to create monopolies on trade. Such private enterprise was encouraged by the second governor Francis Grose, who had replaced Phillip in 1792, and he started giving out land and convict labourers to the officers. The Corps established a monopoly on the rum trade, and became very powerful within the small colony. After Governor William Bligh tried to break the military monopoly and questioned some of their leases, officers led by George Johnston launched a coup d'état in the Rum Rebellion. After a year, he agreed to leave his position, and returned to Britain alongside Johnston, who was found guilty by a court-martial. In response to the events, the British government dispanded the Corps, and replaced them with the 73rd Regiment, which led to ""deprivatising"" of the officials of the colony. Many of the officers retired, and were later known as the ""faction of 1808"" and as an influential and conservative element in the politics of the colony."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"The New South Wales Act 1823 by the Parliament of the United Kingdom established the first legislative body in Australia, the New South Wales Legislative Council, as an appointed body of five to seven members to advise the Governor of New South Wales. However, the new body had limited powers of oversight. The act also established the Supreme Court of New South Wales, which had power over the executive. Before a Governor could propose a law before the council, the Chief Justice had to certify that it was not against English law, creating a form of judicial review. However, there was no separation of powers, with Chief Justice Francis Forbes also serving in the Legislative Council as well as the Governor's Executive Council. The Executive Council had been founded in 1825, and was composed of leading officials in the colony.
The Australian began publishing in 1824, as did The Monitor in 1826, and The Sydney Morning Herald in 1831. Ralph Darling tried to control the press first by proposing to license newspapers and impose a stamp duty on them, and after this was refused by Forbes, by prosecuting their owners for seditious libel.
Van Diemen's Land was established in 1825, but remained under the jurisdiction of the New South Wales Governor, being represented there by a lieutenant-governor. Western Australia was declared to the British Empire by James Stirling, and the Swan River Colony was established there in 1829, with Stirling made governor in 1831. The South Australian Company was established in 1834 as a private venture to establish a new colony in the south coast, being motivated by the social reformist ideas of Jeremy Bentham."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"Political divisions
The divide between liberals and conservatives in British politics was replicated in Australia. This division was also affected by that between ""emancipists"" (former convicts) and ""exclusivists"" (land-owning free settlers). The conservatives generally saw representative government as a threat, since they were worried about former convicts voting against their masters. The leader of the conservatives was John Macarthur, a wool producer and a leader of the Rum Rebellion. The conservatives believed themselves to be leading and protecting the economic development of the colony.
The reformist attorney general, John Plunkett, sought to apply Enlightenment principles to governance in the colony, pursuing the establishment of equality before the law, first by extending jury rights to emancipists, then by extending legal protections to convicts, assigned servants and Aboriginal peoples. Plunkett twice charged the colonist perpetrators of the Myall Creek massacre of Aboriginal people with murder, resulting in a conviction and his landmark Church Act of 1836 disestablished the Church of England and established legal equality between Anglicans, Catholics, Presbyterians and later Methodists."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"Representative government
The Legislative Council and Supreme Court provided additional limits to the power of governors, but a number of prominent colonial figures, including William Wentworth campaigned for a greater degree of self-government. However, there were divisions about the extent to which a future legislative body should be popularly elected. Other major issues in the public debate about colonial self-government were traditional British political rights, land policy, transportation and whether colonies with a large population of convicts and former convicts could be trusted with self-government. The Australian Patriotic Association was formed in 1835 by Wentworth and William Bland to promote representative government for New South Wales."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"In 1840, the Adelaide City Council and the Sydney City Council were established. Men who possessed 1,000 pounds' worth of property were able to stand for election and wealthy landowners were permitted up to four votes each in elections.
The British government abolished transportation to New South Wales in 1840, and in 1842 granted limited representative government to the colony by establishing a reformed Legislative Council with one-third of its members appointed by the governor and two-thirds elected by male voters who met a property qualification. The property qualification meant that only 20 per cent of males were eligible to vote in the first Legislative Council elections in 1843.
The increasing immigration of free settlers, the declining number of convicts, and the growing middle class and working class population led to further agitation for liberal and democratic reforms. Public meetings in Adelaide in 1844 called for more representative government for South Australia. The Constitutional Association, formed in Sydney in 1848, called for manhood suffrage. The Anti-Transportation League, founded in Van Diemen's Land in 1849, also demanded more representative government. In the Port Phillip District, agitation for representative government was closely linked to demands for independence from New South Wales.
In 1850, the imperial parliament passed the Australian Colonies Government Act, granting Van Diemen's Land, South Australia and the newly created colony of Victoria semi-elected Legislative Councils on the New South Wales model. The Act also reduced the property requirement for voting. Government officials were to be responsible to the governor rather than the Legislative Council, so the imperial legislation provided for limited representative government rather than responsible government."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"Economy and trade
The instructions provided to the first five governors of New South Wales show that the initial plans for the colony were limited. The settlement was to be a self-sufficient penal colony based on subsistence agriculture. Trade, shipping and ship building were banned in order to keep the convicts isolated and so as not to interfere with the trade monopoly of the British East India Company. There was no plan for economic development apart from investigating the possibility of producing raw materials for Britain.
After the departure of Phillip, the colony's military officers began acquiring land and importing consumer goods obtained from visiting ships. Former convicts also farmed land granted to them and engaged in trade. Farms spread to the more fertile lands surrounding Paramatta, Windsor and Camden, and by 1803 the colony was self-sufficient in grain. Boat building developed in order to make travel easier and exploit the marine resources of the coastal settlements. Sealing and whaling became important industries.
Because of its nature as a forced settlement, the early colony's economy was heavily dependent on the state. For example, some of the earliest agricultural production was directly run by the government. The Commissariat also played a major role in the economy. In 1800, 72% of the population relied on government rations, but this was reduced to 32% by 1806. While some convicts were assigned to settlers as labourers, they were usually free to find part-time work for supplemental income, and were allowed to own property (in contravention to British law at the time). Some convicts had their skills taken to use by the colonial government, as with for example the architect Francis Greenway, who designed many early public buildings. Approximately 10–15% of the convicts worked on public projects building infrastructure, while most of the rest were assigned to private employers. Land grants were abandoned in 1831 in favour of selling crown lands, which covered all land deemed ""unsettled"".
The colonies relied heavily on imports from England for survival. The official currency of the colonies was the British pound, but the unofficial currency and most readily accepted trade good was rum. The early economy relied on barter for exchange, an issue which Macquarie (Governor from 1810 to 1821) tried to fix first by introducing Spanish dollars, and then by establishing the Bank of New South Wales with the authority to issue financial instruments. Barter continued, however, until shipments of sterling in the late 1820s enabled a move to a monetary economy.
Macquarie also played a leading role in the economic development of New South Wales by employing a planner to design the street layout of Sydney and commissioning the construction of roads, wharves, churches, and public buildings. He sent explorers out from Sydney and, in 1815, a road across the Blue Mountains was completed, opening the way for large scale farming and grazing in the lightly-wooded pastures west of the Great Dividing Range.
The colonists spent a large part of the early nineteenth century building infrastructure such as railways, bridges and schools, which facilitated economic development. During this period Australian businesspeople began to prosper. For example, the partnership of Berry and Wollstonecraft made enormous profits by means of land grants, convict labour, and exporting native cedar back to England. John Macarthur, after retiring from the New South Wales Corps, went on to start the wool industry in Australia.
From the 1820s squatters increasingly established unauthorised cattle and sheep runs beyond the official limits of the settled colony. In 1836, a system of annual licences authorising grazing on Crown Land was introduced in an attempt to control the pastoral industry, but booming wool prices and the high cost of land in the settled areas encouraged further squatting. By 1844 wool accounted for half of the colony's exports and by 1850 most of the eastern third of New South Wales was controlled by fewer than 2,000 pastoralists."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"Religion, education, and culture
Religion
According to Australian Aboriginal mythology and the animist framework, the Dreaming is a sacred era in which ancestral totemic spirit beings formed The Creation. The Dreaming established the laws and structures of society and the ceremonies performed to ensure continuity of life and land.
The early chaplains of the colony were also civil magistrates with the power to discipline convicts and grant tickets of leave. The Church of England was the only recognised church before 1820 and its clergy worked closely with the governors. Richard Johnson, (chief chaplain 1788–1802) was charged by Governor Arthur Phillip, with improving ""public morality"" in the colony and was also heavily involved in health and education. Samuel Marsden (various ministries 1795–1838) became known for his missionary work, the severity of his punishments as a magistrate, and the vehemence of his public denunciations of Catholicism and Irish convicts."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"About a quarter of convicts were Catholics and they frequently requested a Catholic priest to perform their rites. The lack of official recognition of Catholicism was combined with suspicion of Irish convicts which only increased after the Irish-led Castle Hill Rebellion of 1804. Only two Catholic priests operated temporarily in the colony before Governor Macquarie appointed official Catholic chaplains in New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land in 1820.
The Bigge reports recommended that the status of the Anglican Church be enhanced as a source of stability and moral authority in the colony. An Anglican archdeacon was appointed in 1824 and allocated a seat in the first advisory Legislative Council. The Anglican clergy and schools also received state support. This policy was changed under Governor Burke by the Church Acts of 1836 and 1837. The government now provided state support for the clergy and church buildings of the four largest denominations: Anglican, Catholic, Presbyterian and, later, Methodist.
The Church Acts did not alleviate sectarianism as many Anglicans saw state support of the Catholic Church as a threat. The prominent Presbyterian minister John Dunmore Lang also promoted sectarian divisions in the 1840s. State support, however, led to a growth in church activities. Charitable associations such as the Catholic Sisters of Charity, founded in 1838, provided hospitals, orphanages and asylums for the old and disabled. Religious organisations were also the main providers of school education in the first half of the nineteenth century."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"Education
The first school in the colony was opened in 1789. By 1792, the government had established two public schools for the children of convicts and emancipists. The teachers themselves were female convicts or emancipists. The military also established a school for soldiers and their children.
By the early 1800s, public schools were established in the main settlements and some teachers were opening private academies with tuition fees. Public schools were run by the Church of England and taught reading, writing, arithmetic and scripture. They were funded by the government, the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and community donations. Clergy and professional teachers were sometimes recruited from Britain but most teachers were from the colony. The London Missionary Society also established several chapel-schools outside the main settlements. Nevertheless, school was not compulsory and many parents preferred to have their children work or help in the home rather than send them to the nearest public school. Affluent colonists sent their children to Britain or local private academies for schooling, or engaged a tutor or governess.
An orphan school for girls opened in Sydney in 1801, and one for boys in 1819. Governor Macquarie (1810-1821) established charity schools and, in 1815, a Native Institution for Aboriginal children which provided basic education and training in work skills. In 1826, the Church of England attempted to establish a system of schools through a Church and Schools Corporation but with limited success.
In the 1830s, most colonial governments offered support for schools in the recognised Anglican, Catholic, Presbyterian and Methodist denominations. In South Australia, Lutherans established schools without government support. In Western Australia, the Catholic church established the first schools. Church-run schools spread to most major towns in the colonies and were the largest provider of school education.
Education intended for the working classes was also provided by mechanics' institutes and schools of arts. These institutions were opened in Hobart (1827), Sydney (1833), Melbourne (1839), Geelong (1846), Brisbane (1849) and Perth (1851). They were intended to provide adult education in literacy, numeracy, the liberal arts and technical subjects.
Private schools based on British models of grammar schools and public schools also appeared from the 1830s. These included Sydney College (1830), the  Australian College (Sydney, 1831) and The King's School (Sydney and Parramatta,1831)."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"Science and technology
The new colony was of particular scientific and technological interest in Britain. Up to 1820, Joseph Banks was the chief promoter of the colony's importance to botany and agricultural technology and he corresponded frequently with the early governors on these subjects. William Hooker also promoted the study of Australia's plant life, Roderick Murchison its geology, and Richard Owen its zoology and palaeontology.
Banks organised Matthew Flinders' 1801-03 circumnavigation of the continent, and ensured the crew included an astronomer, a mineralogist and a botanist. The early explorations of surveyor John Oxley involved the mapping of rivers and his parties also included botanists and a mineralogist. The explorations of Sturt and Mitchell were intended to facilitate the economic and scientific development of the colony. In agricultural technology, there were Australian advances in sheep breeding, particularly the development of merino wool. In 1843, John Miller invented the horse-drawn wheat stripper.
An astronomical observatory was set up in Sydney in 1788, and governor Brisbane established a permanent one at Parramatta in 1824. In 1835 the observatory published the Catalogue of 7385 Stars. The Parramatta observatory was closed in 1847 before the Sydney Observatory was opened in 1855. The Admiralty established a Magnetical and Meteorological Observatory at Hobart in 1840.
The Royal Botanic Garden was established in Sydney in 1816, and Charles Frazer was appointed Colonial Botanist in 1821. The Australian Museum was founded in Sydney in 1827. The Tasmanian Society, founded in 1837, was Australia's leading scientific society at the time. The Royal Society of Van Diemen's Land for Botany, Horticulture and the Advancement of Science was established in 1844. The University of Sydney, founded in 1850, included chairs in mathematics, chemistry and physics.
Colonial medical science was based on existing European knowledge and practice. Over a hundred men who practised medicine were transported to Australia as convicts between 1788 and 1868. Medical qualifications were not standardised at the time, and many would have been unqualified. D'Arcy Wentworth was a free settler and assistant surgeon on a convict ship. In 1809 he was appointed Principal Surgeon of the colony. He was instrumental in the opening of the new Sydney hospital in 1816.  William Redfern was a convict and surgeon who passed an examination before three colonial doctors, becoming Australia's first locally qualified doctor. William Bland was a convict and qualified surgeon. He was pardoned in 1815 and set up a private medical practice. He later worked with the Benevolent Society and the Sydney Dispensary before embarking on a political career. He was a skilled surgeon who made important contributions to surgical techniques."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"Culture
Aboriginal groups continued the artistic traditions they had practised for thousands of years. They made art works on bark, stone and their bodies, and in the sand and earth of their land. They told stories of ancestral beings and the Dreaming. They performed their culture and its stories in song, music and dance. Songmen and women were skilled in correctly singing the songlines of the ancestral beings who created the landscape, and in passing on new songs sent to them in dreams. Aboriginal history, law and creation stories were transmitted orally through generations.
The colonists also transmitted their cultures orally and through song, music, art and performance, but also through writing. Governor Macquarie commissioned emancipist Michael Massey Robinson to write verse to celebrate the birthdays of George III and Queen Charlotte. Alongside such official verse, satirical verse written by convicts such as Frank the Poet flourished.Barron Field, the supreme court judge, published First Fruits of Australian Poetry (1819 and 1823). His poem ""The Kangaroo"" is notable. Early poems with patriotic Australian themes include William Wentworth's ""Australasia"" (1823) and Charles Thompson's Wild Notes From the Lyre of a Native Minstrel (1826). In 1845, the radical republican Charles Harpur published Thoughts: a Series of Sonnets and went on to become an influential Australian poet.
Before the 1850s, there was no Australian book publishing industry and few professional authors. Stories and poetry were published in newspapers and magazines, and books were mostly published in Britain or self-published in Australia. In prose, colonial officers Watkin Tench and David Collins published popular early accounts of the colony. Most published prose consisted of works of non-fiction, tales or sketches of colonial life, travel stories and popular fiction. Biographies and novels of convicts were popular. Henry Savery's novel of convict life Quintus Servinton (1830-31) and James Tucker's Ralph Rashleigh (1844-45) were typical. Novels of emigration to Australia, such as Thomas McCombie's Adventures of a Colonist (1845), became popular in the 1840s. Mary Theresa Vidal's Tales for the Bush (1845) was popular in England and Australia and went through many editions.
In art, the Port Jackson Painters recorded the growth of the settlement, the local Aboriginal people and the flora and fauna of the colony. Convict artists such as Thomas Watling, Joseph Lycett and Thomas Bock painted landscapes, portraits of affluent settlers, scenes of colonial life and official commissions. Augustus Earle, John Glover and Conrad Martens were English artists who visited or migrated to Australia in the 1820s and 1830s and painted influential Australian landscapes.
Australia's first colonial music was the popular ballads, sea shanties and folk songs brought by convicts and settlers. Military music was also commonly performed in the early years of the colony. Military musicians often performed at church services, balls and other official and private functions. The first known local composition was a set of quadrilles written by the bandmaster Reichenberg in 1825. English musician John Phillip Deane (who arrived in Australia in 1822), Irish composer William Vincent Wallace (who arrived in 1835) and English composer Isaac Nathan (who arrived in 1841) all helped develop a musical culture in the Australian colonies.
The first play performed in Australia was a 1789 convict production of Farquar's The Recruiting Officer. Theatrical performances after this were sporadic, as religious authorities considered the theatre promoted immorality. But by the 1830s, popular demand for comedies, melodramas and pantomime led to regular commercial theatrical and musical performances in Sydney and Hobart. Edward Geoghegan's The Currency Lass (1844) was a popular example of colonial musical comedy."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"Representations in literature and film
Marcus Clarke's 1874 novel, For the Term of his Natural Life, and the 1983 television adaptation of the novel.
Eleanor Dark's 1947 Timeless Land trilogy, which spans the colonisation from 1788 to 1811. The 1980s television drama, The Timeless Land, was based on this trilogy.
Kate Grenville's 2005 novel The Secret River, about a convict transported to Australia for theft and his family, and their confrontations with Aboriginal people."
History of Australia (1788–1850),"See also
Notes
References
Bibliography
Further reading
Clark, C. M. H. (1955), Select Documents in Australian History 1788–1850 (Angus and Robertson). Available at the Internet Archive.[3]
Duyker, Edward & Maryse. 2001. Voyage to Australia and the Pacific 1791–1793. Melbourne University Press. ISBN 0-522-84932-6.
Duyker, Edward & Maryse. 2003. Citizen Labillardière – A Naturalist's Life in Revolution and Exploration. The Miegunyah Press. ISBN 0-522-85010-3.
Horner, Frank. 1995. Looking for La Pérouse. Melbourne University Press. ISBN 0-522-84451-0.
Lepailleur, François-Maurice. 1980. Land of a Thousand Sorrows. The Australian Prison Journal 1840–1842, of the Exiled Canadien Patriote, François-Maurice Lepailleur. Trans. and edited by F. Murray Greenwood. University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver. ISBN 0-7748-0123-9.
Rose, J. Holland; Newton, A. P.; Benians, E. A. (1968), The Cambridge History of the British Empire, Volume II—The Growth of the New Empire 1783–1870. Available at the Internet Archive.[4]
The Australian History page at Project Gutenberg of Australia – digitised versions of many old books"
Royal Australian Navy,"The Royal Australian Navy (RAN) is the naval force of the Australian Defence Force (ADF). The professional head of the RAN is Chief of Navy (CN) Vice Admiral Mark Hammond AM, RAN. CN is also jointly responsible to the Minister of Defence (MINDEF) and the Chief of Defence Force (CDF). The Department of Defence as part of the Australian Public Service administers the ADF. In 2023, the Surface Fleet Review was introduced to outline the future of the Navy.
The navy was formed in 1901 as the Commonwealth Naval Forces (CNF) through the amalgamation of the colonial navies of Australia following the federation of Australia. Although it was originally intended for local defence, it became increasingly responsible for regional defence as the British Empire started to diminish its influence in the South Pacific.
The Royal Australian Navy was initially a green-water navy, as the Royal Navy provided a blue-water force to the Australian Squadron, which the Australian and New Zealand governments helped to fund; the squadron was assigned to the Australia Station. This period lasted until 1913, when naval ships purchased from Britain arrived, although the British Admiralty continued to provide blue-water defence capability in the Pacific and Indian Oceans up to the early years of the Second World War.
During its history, the Royal Australian Navy has participated in a number of major wars, including the First and Second World Wars, Korean War, Malayan Emergency, Indonesia-Malaysia Confrontation and the Vietnam War. Today, the RAN consists of 30 commissioned vessels, 11 non-commissioned vessels and over 16,000 personnel. The navy is one of the largest and most sophisticated naval forces in the South Pacific region, with a significant presence in the Indian Ocean and worldwide operations in support of military campaigns and peacekeeping missions."
Royal Australian Navy,"History
Formation
The Commonwealth Naval Forces were established on 1 March 1901, with the amalgamation of the six separate colonial naval forces, following the Federation of Australia. The Royal Australian Navy initially consisted of the former New South Wales, Victorian, Queensland, Western Australian, South Australian and Tasmanian ships and resources of their disbanded navies.
The Defence Act 1903 established the operation and command structure of the Royal Australian Navy. When policymakers sought to determine the newly established force's requirements and purpose, there were arguments about whether Australia's naval force would be structured mainly for local defence or designed to serve as a fleet unit within a larger imperial force, controlled centrally by the British Admiralty. In 1908–09, a compromise solution was pursued, with the Australian government agreeing to establish a force for local defence but that would be capable of forming a fleet unit within the Royal Navy, albeit without central control. As a result, the navy's force structure was set at ""one battlecruiser, three light cruisers, six destroyers and three submarines"". The first of the RAN's new vessels, the destroyer HMAS Yarra, was completed in September 1910, and by the outbreak of the First World War the majority of the planned fleet had been realised. On 10 July 1911, the CNF was granted ""Royal"" status by King George V."
Royal Australian Navy,"World War I
Pacific
Following the British Empire's declaration of war on Germany, the British War Office tasked the capture of German New Guinea to the Australian Government. This was to deprive the Imperial German Navy's East Asia Squadron of regional intelligence by removing their access to wireless stations. On 11 August, three destroyers and HMAS Sydney prepared to engage the squadron at German Anchorages in New Guinea, which did not eventuate as the vessels were not present. Landing parties were placed on Rabaul and Herbertshohe to destroy its German wireless station; however, the objective was found to be further inland and an expeditionary force was required. Meanwhile, HMAS Australia was tasked with scouring the Pacific Ocean for the German squadron.
The Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force (ANMEF) began recruiting on the same day that the taskforce arrived in New Britain, and consisted of two battalions: one of 1,000 men, and the other with 500 serving and former seamen. On 19 August, the ANMEF departed Sydney for training in Townsville before the rendezvous with other RAN vessels in Port Moresby. On 29 August, four cruisers and HMAS Australia assisted New Zealand's Samoa Expeditionary Force in landing at Apia, and committing a bloodless takeover of German Samoa. Additionally, the RAN captured German merchant vessels, disrupting German merchant shipping in the Pacific. On 7 September, the ANMEF, now including HMAS Australia, three destroyers, and two each of cruisers and submarines, departed for Rabaul.
A few days later, on 9 September, HMAS Melbourne landed a party to destroy the island's wireless station, though the German administration promptly surrendered. Between 11 and 12 September, landings were put ashore at Kabakaul, Rabaul and Herbertshohe; it was during this period that the first Australian casualties and deaths of the war occurred. On 14 September, HMAS Encounter barraged an enemy position at Toma with shells; it was the first time the RAN had fired upon an enemy and had shelled an inland location. On 17 September, German New Guinea surrendered to the encroaching ANMEF, with the overall campaign a success and exceeded the objectives set by the War Office. However, the RAN submarine HMAS AE1 became the first ever vessel of the new navy to be sunk. The Australian Squadron was placed under control of the British Admiralty, and was moreover tasked with protecting Australian shipping.
On 1 November, the RAN escorted the First Australian Imperial Force convoy from Albany, WA and set for the Khedivate of Egypt, which was soon to become the Sultanate of Egypt. On 9 November, HMAS Sydney began hunting for SMS Emden, a troublesome German coastal raider. The SMS Emden and HMAS Sydney met in the Battle of Cocos, the Emden was destroyed in Australia's first naval victory. Following the almost complete destruction of the East Asia Squadron in the Battle of the Falklands by the Royal Navy, the RAN became able to be reassigned to other naval theatres of the war."
Royal Australian Navy,"Atlantic and Mediterranean
On 28 February 1915, the Royal Australian Naval Bridging Train (RANBT) was formed with members of the Royal Australian Naval Reserve who could not find billets in the RAN. Following the entrance of the Ottoman Empire in alliance with the Central Powers, HMAS AE2 was committed to the initial naval operation of the Gallipoli campaign. After the failure of the naval strategy, an amphibious assault was planned to enable the Allies' warships to pass through the Dardanelles and capture Constantinople. The RANBT was sent ashore, along with the invasion, for engineering duties.
Later in the war, most of the RAN's major ships operated as part of Royal Navy forces in the Mediterranean and North Seas, and then later in the Adriatic, and then the Black Sea following the surrender of the Ottoman Empire."
Royal Australian Navy,"Interwar years
In 1919, the RAN received a force of six destroyers, three sloops and six submarines from the Royal Navy, but throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, the RAN was drastically reduced in size due to a variety of factors including political apathy and economic hardship as a result of the Great Depression. In this time the focus of Australia's naval policy shifted from defence against invasion to trade protection, and several fleet units were sunk as targets or scrapped. By 1923, the size of the navy had fallen to eight vessels, and by the end of the decade it had fallen further to five, with just 3,500 personnel. In the late 1930s, as international tensions increased, the RAN was modernised and expanded, with the service receiving primacy of funding over the Army and Air Force during this time as Australia began to prepare for war."
Royal Australian Navy,"World War II
Early in the Second World War, RAN ships again operated as part of Royal Navy formations, many serving with distinction in the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean, and off the West African coast. Following the outbreak of the Pacific War and the virtual destruction of Allied naval forces in Southeast Asia, the RAN operated more independently, defending against Axis naval activity in Australian waters, or participating in United States Navy offensives. As the navy took on an even greater role, it was expanded significantly and at its height the RAN was the fourth-largest navy in the world, with 39,650 personnel operating 337 warships, but no active submarines. A total of 34 vessels were lost during the war, including three cruisers and four destroyers."
Royal Australian Navy,"Post war to present
After the Second World War, the size of the RAN was again reduced, but it gained new capabilities with the acquisition of two aircraft carriers, Sydney and Melbourne. The RAN saw action in many Cold War–era conflicts in the Asia-Pacific region and operated alongside the Royal Navy and United States Navy off Korea, Malaysia, and Vietnam. Since the end of the Cold War, the RAN has been part of Coalition forces in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean, operating in support of Operation Slipper and undertaking counter piracy operations. It was also deployed in support of Australian peacekeeping operations in East Timor and the Solomon Islands.
The high demand for personnel in the Second World War led to the establishment of the Women's Royal Australian Naval Service (WRANS) branch in 1942, where over 3,000 women served in shore-based positions. The WRANS was disbanded in 1947, but then re-established in 1951 during the Cold War. It was given permanent status in 1959, and the RAN was the final branch to integrate women in the Australian military in 1985."
Royal Australian Navy,"Structure
Command structure
The strategic command structure of the RAN was overhauled during the New Generation Navy changes. The RAN is commanded through Naval Headquarters (NHQ) in Canberra.  NHQ is responsible for implementing policy decisions handed down from the Department of Defence and for overseeing tactical and operational issues that are the purview of the subordinate commands.
Beneath NHQ are two subordinate commands:"
Royal Australian Navy,"Fleet Command: fleet command is led by Commander Australian Fleet (COMAUSFLT). COMAUSFLT holds the rank of rear admiral; previously, this post was Flag Officer Commanding HM's Australian Fleet (FOCAF), created in 1911, but the title was changed in 1988 to the Maritime Commander Australia. On 1 February 2007, the title changed again, becoming Commander Australian Fleet. The nominated at-sea commander is Commodore Warfare (COMWAR), a one-star deployable task group commander. Fleet command has responsibility to CN for the full command of assigned assets, and to Joint Operations command for the provision of operationally ready forces.
Navy Strategic Command: the administrative element overseeing the RAN's training, engineering and logistical support needs. Instituted in 2000, the Systems Commander was appointed at the rank of commodore; in June 2008, the position was upgraded to the rank of rear admiral.
Fleet Command was previously made up of seven Force Element Groups, but after the New Generation Navy changes, this was restructured into four Force Commands:"
Royal Australian Navy,"Fleet Air Arm (previously known as the Australian Navy Aviation Group), responsible for the navy's aviation assets and capability. As of 2018, the FAA consists of two front line helicopter squadrons (one focused on anti-submarine and anti-shipping warfare and the other a transport unit), two training squadrons and a trials squadron.
Mine Warfare, Clearance Diving, Hydrographic, Meteorological and Patrol Forces, an amalgamation of the previous Patrol Boat, Hydrographic, and Mine Warfare and Clearance Diving Forces, operating what are collectively termed the RAN's ""minor war vessels""
Submarine Force, (Royal Australian Navy Submarine Service) operating the Collins-class submarines
Surface Force, covering the RAN's surface combatants (generally ships of frigate size or larger)"
Royal Australian Navy,"Fleet
The Royal Australian Navy consists of nearly 50 commissioned vessels and over 16,000 personnel. Ships commissioned into the RAN are given the prefix HMAS (His/Her Majesty's Australian Ship).
The RAN has two primary bases for its fleet: the first, Fleet Base East, is located at HMAS Kuttabul, Sydney and the second, Fleet Base West, is located at HMAS Stirling, near Perth. In addition, three other bases are home to the majority of the RAN's minor war vessels: HMAS Cairns, in Cairns, HMAS Coonawarra, in Darwin, and HMAS Waterhen, in Sydney."
Royal Australian Navy,"Clearance Diving Branch
The Clearance Diving Branch is composed of two Clearance Diving Teams (CDT) that serve as parent units for naval clearance divers:"
Royal Australian Navy,"Clearance Diving Team 1 (AUSCDT ONE), based at HMAS Waterhen in New South Wales; and
Clearance Diving Team 4 (AUSCDT FOUR), based at HMAS Stirling in Western Australia.
When clearance divers are sent into combat, Clearance Diving Team Three (AUSCDT THREE) is formed.
The CDTs have two primary roles:"
Royal Australian Navy,"Mine counter-measures (MCM) and explosive ordnance disposal (EOD); and
Maritime tactical operations."
Royal Australian Navy,"Personnel
As of June 2023, the RAN has 14,745 permanent full-time personnel, 172 gap-year personnel, and 4,607 reserve personnel. The permanent full-time trained force consists of 3,070 commissioned officers, and 9,695 enlisted personnel. While male personnel made up 75.9% of the permanent full-time force, while female personnel made up 24%. The RAN has the second-highest percentage of women in the permanent forces, compared to the RAAF's 26.6% and the Army's 15.3%. Throughout the 2022-23 financial year 1,141 enlisted in the RAN on a permanent basis while 1,354 left, representing a net loss of 213 personnel.                 
The following are some of the current senior Royal Australian Navy officers:"
Royal Australian Navy,"Vice Admiral David Johnston – Vice Chief of the Defence Force
Vice Admiral Mark Hammond – Chief of Navy
Vice Admiral Jonathan Mead – Chief Nuclear-Powered Submarine Taskforce
Rear Admiral Jonathan Earley – Deputy Chief of Navy
Rear Admiral Christopher Smith – Commander Australian Fleet
Rear Admiral Matthew Buckley – Head Nuclear-Powered Submarine Capability
Rear Admiral Stephen Hughes – Head Navy Capability
Rear Admiral Rachel Durbin – Head Navy Engineering
Rear Admiral David Greaves – Director-General Australian Navy Cadets
Warrant Officer Andrew Bertoncin – Warrant Officer of the Navy"
Royal Australian Navy,"Ranks and uniforms
Commissioned Officers
Commissioned officers of the Australian Navy have pay grades ranging from S-1 to O-11. The only O-11 position in the navy is honorary and has only ever been held by royalty, most recently being held by the Late  Prince Philip, The Duke of Edinburgh as the Lord High Admiral of the United Kingdom. The highest rank achievable in the current Royal Australian Navy structure is O-10, an admiral who serves as the Chief of the Defence Force (CDF) when the position is held by a Naval Officer.
O-8 (rear admiral) to O-11 (admiral of the fleet) are referred to as flag officers, O-5 (commander) and above are referred to as senior officers, while S-1 (midshipman) to O-4 (lieutenant commander) are referred to as junior officers. All RAN Officers are issued a commission by the Governor General of Australia as Commander-in-Chief on behalf of His Majesty King Charles III, King of Australia.
Naval officers are trained at the Royal Australian Naval College (HMAS Creswell) in Jervis Bay as well as the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra."
Royal Australian Navy,"Sailors
Rate Insignia
Royal Australian Navy Other Ranks wear ""right arm rates"" insignia, called ""Category Insignia"" to indicate specialty training qualifications. This is a holdover from the Royal Navy."
Royal Australian Navy,"Special insignia
The Warrant Officer of the Navy (WO-N) is an appointment held by the most senior sailor in the RAN and holds the rank of warrant officer (WO). However, the WO-N does not wear the WO rank insignia; instead, they wear the special insignia of the appointment. The WO-N appointment has similar equivalent appointments in the other services, each holding the rank of warrant officer, each being the most senior sailor/soldier/airman in that service, and each wearing their own special insignia rather than their rank insignia. The Australian Army equivalent is the Regimental Sergeant Major of the Army (RSM-A) and the Royal Australian Air Force equivalent is the Warrant Officer of the Air Force (WOFF-AF)."
Royal Australian Navy,"Chaplains and Maritime Spiritual Wellbeing Officers
Chaplains in the Royal Australian Navy are commissioned officers who complete the same training as other officers in the RAN at the Royal Australian Naval College, HMAS Creswell. From July 2020, Maritime Spiritual Wellbeing Officers (MSWOs) were introduced to the Navy Chaplaincy Branch, designed to give Navy people and their families with professional, non-religious pastoral care and spiritual support.
In the Royal Australian Navy, Chaplains and MSWOs are commissioned officers without rank. For reasons of protocol, ceremonial occasions and for saluting purposes, they are, where appropriate, normally grouped with Commanders (O-5).. The more senior Division 4 Senior Chaplains are grouped with Captains (O-6) and Division 5 Principal Chaplains are grouped with Commodores (O-7), but their rank slide remains the same. Principal Chaplains and MSWOs, however, have gold braid on the peak of their white service cap.
From January 2021, MSWOs and all chaplains wear the branch's new non-faith-specific rank insignia of a fouled anchor overlaying a compass rose, which represents a united team front, encompassing all faiths and purpose. Chaplains and MSWOs have insignia that reflect their religion on collar mounted patches (Cross for Christian, Crescent for Muslim etc, Compass rose for MSWOs.)"
Royal Australian Navy,"Ships and equipment
Current ships
The RAN currently operates 30 commissioned vessels, made up of nine ship classes and three individual ships, plus 11 non-commissioned vessels. In addition, DMS Maritime operates a large number of civilian-crewed vessels under contract to the Australian Defence Force."
Royal Australian Navy,"Fleet Air Arm
Small arms
RAN personnel utilise the following small arms:"
Royal Australian Navy,"EF88 Austeyr
F89A1 Minimi
Browning Hi-Power
870P Shotgun
M2HB-QCB
M4A1 carbine
MAG 58"
Royal Australian Navy,"Future
There are currently several major projects underway that will see upgrades to RAN capabilities."
Royal Australian Navy,"Project SEA 1180 Phase 1 is building six Arafura-class offshore patrol vessels based on the Lürssen OPV80 design, to replace Armidale-class patrol boats. Construction started in November 2018, with the first vessel, HMAS Arafura to enter service in 2022.
Project SEA 1905 is the acquisition of a further two Arafura-class offshore patrol vessels in a mine counter-measures configuration.
Project SEA 1654 Phase 3 acquired two Supply-class replenishment ships based on the Spanish Cantabria-class oiler. HMAS Supply was launched in November 2018 and replaced HMAS Success, while the second, HMAS Stalwart replaced HMAS Sirius.
Project SEA 1445 Phase 1 is the acquisition of ten Evolved Cape class patrol boats to be built by Austal in Henderson. The RAN decided to acquire the Evolved Cape class boats instead of extending the life of six Armidale class patrol boats as it transitions to the new Arafura class offshore patrol vessel.
Project SEA 3000 is the General Purpose Frigate program aimed to replace the Anzac-class frigates in the Tier 2 role.
Project SEA 4000 Phase 6 will upgrade the existing three Hobart-class destroyers with Aegis Baseline 9 combat system.
Project SEA 5000 Phase 1 is acquiring six Hunter-class frigates based on the British Type 26 Global Combat Ship, to replace the Anzac-class frigates in the Tier 1 ASW role from 2034. The vessels will be built in Adelaide by BAE Systems, with the first three to be named HMA Ships Hunter, Flinders and Tasman.
Surface Fleet Review announced the acquisition of six Large Optionally Crewed Surface Vessels (LOSVs) which will be constructed in partnership with the United States Navy."
Royal Australian Navy,"Submarines
Project SEA 1429 Phase 2 is upgrading the Collins-class submarines with the Mk48 Mod 7 CBASS torpedo. Initial Operational Capability (IOC) was achieved in May 2008 with Final Operational Capability (FOC) due in December 2018, 60 months late.
Project SEA 1439 Phase 3 is upgrading the Collins-class submarine platform systems to improve 'reliability, sustainability, safety and capability'. IOC was achieved in October 2007, FOC is due in September 2022.
Project SEA 1439 Phase 4A is replacing the Collins-class submarines' combat system with the AN/BYG-1(V)8 developed in conjunction with the US Navy IOC Expected to achieve Final Operating Capability in December 2018. IOC was in May 2008 with FOC planned for December 2018.
Project SEA 1450: In September 2021, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced that the Collins-class submarines will receive a Life of Type Extension (LOTE) from 2026 that will cost up to A$6.4 billion.
SSN-AUKUS: In March 2023, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced that Australia will build nuclear-powered SSN-AUKUS class submarines. The UK Submersible Ship Nuclear Replacement (SSNR) design was renamed SSN-AUKUS in March 2023, under the AUKUS trilateral security partnership, when Australia joined the project and additional US technology was incorporated into the design. The construction of the first boat is to begin by the end of the 2030s with the boat delivered in the early 2040s. Five boats are planned to be built.
Virginia class: In March 2023, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced that Australia intends to purchase three nuclear-powered Virginia class submarines from the US, subject to congressional approval, to ensure there is no capability gap as the RAN transitions to the SSN-AUKUS. The first boat is planned to be delivered in 2033. If there are delays with the SSN-AUKUS class program, Australia has the option of purchasing up to two additional Virginia class boats.
East coast base: In March 2022, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced that a ""new submarine base will be built on the east coast of Australia"" and ""three preferred locations on the east coast have been identified, being Brisbane, Newcastle, and Port Kembla""."
Royal Australian Navy,"Current operations
The RAN currently has forces deployed on seven major operations:"
Royal Australian Navy,"Operation Resolute: border protection and fisheries patrol.
Operation Manitou: counter-piracy, counterterrorism and maritime stability in the Middle East and
Operation Accordion: support operation to provide sustainment to forces deployed on Operation Manitou.
Operation Solania: contribute to maritime surveillance in the Pacific.
Operation Gateway: operate maritime patrols in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, alongside Malaysia.
Operation Render Safe: safely dispose of remnant explosives of World War II on Pacific nations.
Operation Dyurra: integrate space capabilities into other operations."
Royal Australian Navy,"See also
Australian Navy Cadets
Australian White Ensign
Battle and theatre honours of the Royal Australian Navy
Royal Australian Navy Band
Royal Australian Navy School of Underwater Medicine
List of ships of the Royal Australian Navy
Navy News (Australia)"
Royal Australian Navy,"References
Notes
Bibliography
Bogart, Charles H. (2006). ""The Royal Australian Navy: A Pictorial Look at the 1980s"". Warship International. XLIII (2): 195–221. ISSN 0043-0374.
Dennis, Peter; Grey, Jeffrey; Morris, Ewan; Prior, Robin (1995). The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-553227-9.
Frame, Tom (2004). No Pleasure Cruise: The Story of the Royal Australian Navy. Crows Nest, New South Wales: Allen & Unwin. ISBN 1-74114-233-4.
Gillett, Ross; Graham, Colin (1977). Warships of Australia. Adelaide, South Australia: Rigby. ISBN 0-7270-0472-7.
Whitley, M. J. (2000) [1988]. Destroyers of World War Two: An International Encyclopedia. London: Cassell. ISBN 1-85409-521-8.
Department of Defence, (Australia) (2021). Defence Annual Report 2020-2021 (PDF). Defence Publishing Service. p. 117."
Royal Australian Navy,External links
Royal Australian Navy,"Official website 
Historical listing of RAN ships
Maritimequest Royal Australian Navy photo gallery
Biographies of senior RAN officers
Royal and Dominion Navies in World War II, Campaigns, Battles, Warship losses
ADF Pay & Conditions Manual – Equivalent ranks and classifications"
Australian Government,"The Australian Government, also known as the Commonwealth Government or the Federal Government, is the national executive government of the Commonwealth of Australia, a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy. The executive government consists of the prime minister and other ministers that currently have the support of a majority of members of the House of Representatives (the lower house) and in some contexts also includes the departments and other executive bodies that ministers oversee. The current executive government consists of Anthony Albanese and other Australian Labor Party ministers, in place since the 2022 federal election.
The prime minister is the head of the government and is appointed to the role by the governor-general (the King's representative). The governor-general normally appoints the parliamentary leader who has the support of a majority of members in the House of Representatives. By convention, the prime minister is a member of the lower house.
The prime minister and cabinet ministers form the cabinet, the key decision-making organ of the government that forms policy and decides the agenda of the government. Members of the government can exercise both legislative power (through their control of the parliament) and executive power (as ministers on behalf of the governor-general and the King). However, in accordance with responsible government, this also requires the actions of the government in its executive capacity to be subject to scrutiny from parliament.
The government is headquartered in the executive wing of Parliament House, located in the nation's capital, Canberra, in the Australian Capital Territory. The head offices of all sixteen federal departments lie in Canberra, along with Parliament House and the High Court."
Australian Government,"Name
The name of the government in the Constitution of Australia is the ""Government of the Commonwealth"". This was the name used in many early federal government publications. 
However, in 1965 Robert Menzies indicated his preference for the name ""Australian Government"" in order to prevent confusion with the new Commonwealth of Nations. The Whitlam government legislated the use of ""Government of Australia"" in 1973 in line with its policy of promoting national goals and aspirations. However, academic Anne Twomey argues that the government was also motivated by a desire to blur the differences between the Commonwealth and the states in an attempt to increase federal power. The Parliament of Australia website also notes that the name ""Australian Government"" is preferable in order to avoid confusion with the Commonwealth of Nations and the US federal government by those not familiar with Australia's system of government. This terminology remains preferred by the government. However, the terms Commonwealth Government and federal government are also common.
In some contexts, the term ""government"" refers to all public agencies that exercise the power of the State, whether legislative, executive or judicial."
Australian Government,"Executive power
The government's primary role, in its executive capacity, is to implement the laws passed by the Parliament. However, laws are frequently drafted according to the interests of the executive branch as the government often also controls the legislative branch.
Unlike the other two branches of government, however, membership of the executive is not clearly defined. One definition describes the executive as a pyramid, consisting of three layers. At the top stands The King, as the symbolic apex and formal repository of executive power. Below him lies a second layer made up of the prime minister, cabinet and other ministers who in practice lead the executive. Finally, the bottom layer includes public servants, police, government departments and independent statutory bodies who directly implement policy and laws.
Executive power is also difficult to clearly define. In the British context, it was defined by John Locke as all government power not legislative or judicial in nature. The key distinction is that while legislative power involves setting down rules of general application, executive power involves applying those rules to specific situations. In practice, however, this definition is difficult to apply as many actions by executive agencies are wide-ranging, binding and conducted independently of Parliament. The executive can also be delegated legislative power through provisions allowing for statutory instruments and Henry VIII clauses. Ultimately whether power is executive or legislative is determined on a case-by-case basis, and involves the weighing up of various factors, rather than the application of a strict test.
As most executive power is granted by statute, the executive power of the government is similarly limited to those areas in which the Commonwealth is granted the power to legislate under the Constitution (primarily under section 51). They also retain certain powers traditionally part of the royal prerogative, such as the power to declare war and enter into treaties. Finally, there exists certain ""nationhood powers"", implied from section 61 of the Constitution. These were defined by High Court Justice Anthony Mason, as powers ""peculiarly adapted to the government of a nation and which cannot otherwise be carried on for the benefit of the nation"". They have been found to include the power to provide financial stimulus payments to households during a financial crisis and the power to prevent ""unlawful non-citizens"" from entering the country."
Australian Government,"Ministers
Ministers drawn from the Australian Parliament form the core of the Australian Government. A subset of these ministers form the Cabinet, the de facto highest executive body of the government. Ministers not part of Cabinet belong to the outer ministry. Additionally, there are also assistant ministers (formally parliamentary secretaries), responsible for a specific policy area, reporting directly to a cabinet minister."
Australian Government,"Cabinet
The cabinet consists of the prime minister and senior ministers and makes most of the important policy decisions of the government. Members of the cabinet are selected by the prime minister and may be added or removed at any time, usually through a cabinet reshuffle. Cabinet meetings are strictly private and occur once a week where vital issues are discussed and policy formulated.  The Cabinet is not a legal entity; it exists solely by convention. Its decisions do not in and of themselves have legal force. However, it serves as the practical expression of the Federal Executive Council, which is Australia's highest formal governmental body. In practice, the Federal Executive Council meets solely to endorse and give legal force to decisions already made by the cabinet. All members of the cabinet are members of the Executive Council. A senior member of the cabinet holds the office of vice-president of the Executive Council and acts as presiding officer of the Executive Council in the absence of the governor-general.
The cabinet meets not only in Canberra but also in state capitals, most frequently Sydney and Melbourne. Kevin Rudd was in favour of the Cabinet meeting in other places, such as major regional cities. There are Commonwealth Parliament Offices in each state capital, with those in Sydney located in 1 Bligh Street.
Until 1956 all members of the ministry were members of the cabinet. The growth of the ministry in the 1940s and 1950s made this increasingly impractical, and in 1956 Robert Menzies created a two-tier ministry, with only senior ministers holding cabinet rank, also known within parliament as the front bench. This practice has been continued by all governments except the Whitlam government."
Australian Government,"Ministerial selection
The prime minister's power to select the ministry differs depending on their party. When the Liberal Party and its predecessors (the Nationalist Party and the United Australia Party) have been in coalition with the National Party or its predecessor the Country Party, the leader of the junior Coalition party has had the right to nominate their party's members of the Coalition ministry, and to be consulted by the prime minister on the allocation of their portfolios.
When Labor first held office under Chris Watson, Watson assumed the right to choose members of his cabinet. In 1907, however, the party decided that future Labor cabinets would be elected by the members of the Parliamentary Labor Party, the Caucus, and the prime minister would retain the right to allocate portfolios. This practice was followed until 2007. Between 1907 and 2007, Labor prime ministers exercised a predominant influence over who was elected to Labor ministries, although the leaders of the party factions also exercised considerable influence. However, in 2007 Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, assumed the power to choose the ministry alone. Later, the caucus regained this power in 2013. According to reporting by the Sydney Morning Herald, ministerial positions are allocated by the Left and Right factions proportionally according to their representation in the Parliament."
Australian Government,"The role of the King and the governor-general
The King is not involved with the day-to-day operations of the government, belonging (according to the Bagehot formulation) to the ""dignified"" rather than the ""efficient"" part of government. While the executive power of the Commonwealth is formally vested in the monarch, the Constitution requires those powers to be exercisable by a governor-general, appointed by the monarch as their representative (but since the appointing of Sir Isaac Isaacs in 1931, always appointed according to the advice of federal ministers, rather than British ministers). Members of the government do not exercise executive power of their own accord but are instead appointed by the governor-general as ministers, formally as the ""Queen's [or King's] Ministers of State"". As such, while government ministers make most major decisions in cabinet, if those decisions require the formal endorsement of the governor-general in council, those decisions do not have legal force until approved by the Federal Executive Council, which is presided over by the governor-general.
Similarly, laws passed by both houses of parliament require royal assent before being enacted, as the monarch is a constituent part of the Parliament.
However, in all these cases, except for certain reserve powers, the King and the governor-general must follow the advice of the prime minister or other ministers in the exercise of his powers. Powers subject to the governor-general’s discretion are known as reserve powers. While certain reserve powers, such as the ability to choose the prime minister most likely to command the confidence of the lower house, are uncontroversial, others are subject to much greater debate. The most notable example of their use occurring in the Dismissal of 1975. In that case, the Governor-General Sir John Kerr dismissed the prime minister and government due to his conclusion that the government had failed to secure supply. The propriety of the use of the powers during that event remain highly contested."
Australian Government,"Federal Executive Council
The Federal Executive Council is the body that formally advises the governor-general in the exercise of executive power. Decisions of the body give legal effect to decisions already deliberated at cabinet. All current and formers ministers are members of the council, although only current ministers are summoned to meetings. The governor-general usually presides at council meetings, but in his or her absence another minister nominated as the vice-president of the Executive Council presides at the meeting of the council. Since 1 June 2022, the vice-president has been senator Katy Gallagher."
Australian Government,"Departments
As of 17 August 2024, there are 16 departments of the Australian Government."
Australian Government,"Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry
Attorney-General's Department
Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water
Department of Defence
Department of Education
Department of Employment and Workplace Relations
Department of Finance
Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
Department of Health and Aged Care
Department of Home Affairs
Department of Industry, Science and Resources
Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts
Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet
Department of Social Services
Department of the Treasury
Department of Veterans' Affairs
Additionally, there are four departments which support the Parliament of Australia:"
Australian Government,"Department of Parliamentary Services
Department of the House of Representatives
Department of the Senate
Parliamentary Budget Office"
Australian Government,"Publicly owned entities
Corporations prescribed by acts of parliament
The following corporations are prescribed by Acts of Parliament:"
Australian Government,"Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Clean Energy Finance Corporation
Special Broadcasting Service"
Australian Government,"Government Business Enterprises
As of March 2024, the following Corporate Commonwealth entities are prescribed as Government Business Enterprises (GBEs):"
Australian Government,"Australia Post
Defence Housing Australia
The following Commonwealth companies are prescribed as GBEs:"
Australian Government,"Australian Submarine Corporation
Australian Naval Infrastructure
Australian Rail Track Corporation
National Intermodal Corporation
NBN Co
Snowy Hydro
Western Sydney Airport"
Australian Government,"Other public non-financial corporations
Airservices Australia"
Australian Government,"See also
Australian Public Service
Referendums in Australia
States and territories of Australia
Timeline of the expansion of federal powers in Australia"
Australian Government,"Notes
References
External links"
Australian Government,"Australian government directory
Parliament of Australia website"
Australian Securities Exchange,"Australian Securities Exchange Ltd (ASX) is an Australian public company that operates Australia's primary securities exchange, the Australian Securities Exchange (sometimes referred to outside of Australia as, or confused within Australia as, the Sydney Stock Exchange, a separate entity). The ASX was formed on 1 April 1987, through incorporation under legislation of the Australian Parliament as an amalgamation of the six state securities exchanges, and merged with the Sydney Futures Exchange in 2006.
Today, ASX has an average daily turnover of A$4.685 billion and a market capitalisation of around A$1.6 trillion, making it one of the world's top 20 listed exchange groups, and the largest in the southern hemisphere.
ASX Clear is the clearing house for all shares, structured products, warrants and ASX Equity Derivatives."
Australian Securities Exchange,"Overview
ASX Group is a market operator, clearing house and payments system facilitator. It also oversees compliance with its operating rules, promotes standards of corporate governance among Australia's listed companies and helps to educate retail investors."
Australian Securities Exchange,"Australia's capital markets
Financial development – Australia was ranked 5th out of 57 of the world's leading financial systems and capital markets by the World Economic Forum;
Equity market – the 8th largest in the world (based on free-float market capitalisation) and the 2nd largest in Asia-Pacific, with A$1.2 trillion market capitalisation and average daily secondary trading of over A$5 billion a day;
Bond market – 3rd largest debt market in the Asia Pacific;
Derivatives market – largest fixed income derivatives in the Asia-Pacific region;
Foreign exchange market – the Australian foreign exchange market is the 7th largest in the world in terms of global turnover, while the Australian dollar is the 5th most traded currency and the AUD/USD the 4th most traded currency pair;
Funds management – Due in large part to its compulsory superannuation system, Australia has the largest pool of funds under management in the Asia-Pacific region, and the 4th largest in the world. Its primary markets are the AQUA Markets.
Regulation
The Australian Securities & Investments Commission (ASIC) has responsibility for the supervision of real-time trading on Australia's domestic licensed financial markets and the supervision of the conduct by participants (including the relationship between participants and their clients) on those markets. ASIC also supervises ASX's own compliance as a public company with ASX Listing Rules.
ASX Compliance is an ASX subsidiary company that is responsible for monitoring and enforcing ASX-listed companies' compliance with the ASX operating rules.
The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has oversight of the ASX's clearing and settlement facilities for financial system stability."
Australian Securities Exchange,"Products
Products and services available for trading on ASX include shares, futures, exchange traded options, warrants, contracts for difference, exchange-traded funds, real estate investment trusts, listed investment companies and interest rate securities.
The biggest stocks traded on the ASX, in terms of market capitalisation, include BHP, Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, Telstra, Rio Tinto, National Australia Bank and Australia & New Zealand Banking Group.
The major market index is the S&P/ASX 200, an index made up of the top 200 shares in the ASX. This supplanted the previously significant All Ordinaries index, which still runs parallel to the S&P ASX 200. Both are commonly quoted together. Other indices for the bigger stocks are the S&P/ASX 100 and S&P/ASX 50."
Australian Securities Exchange,"History
The origins of the ASX date back to the mid-1800s when six separate exchanges were established in Australia's state capital cities of Melbourne, Victoria, (1861), Sydney, New South Wales (1871), Hobart, Tasmania (1882), Brisbane, Queensland (1884), Adelaide, South Australia (1887) and Perth, Western Australia (1889). A further exchange in Launceston, Tasmania, merged into the Hobart exchange.
In November 1903 the first interstate conference was held to coincide with the Melbourne Cup.  The exchanges then met on an informal basis until 1937 when the Australian Associated Stock Exchanges (AASE) was established, with representatives from each exchange.  Over time the AASE established uniform listing rules, broker rules, and commission rates.
Trading was conducted by a call system, where an exchange employee called the names of each company and brokers bid or offered on each.  In the 1960s this changed to a post system.  Exchange employees called ""chalkies"" wrote bids and offers in chalk on blackboards continuously, and recorded transactions made.
The ASX (Australian Stock Exchange Limited) was formed in 1987 by legislation of the Australian Parliament which enabled the amalgamation of six independent stock exchanges that formerly operated in the state capital cities. After demutualisation, the ASX was the first exchange in the world to have its shares quoted on its own market. The ASX was listed on 14 October 1998. On 7 July 2006 the Australian Stock Exchange merged with SFE Corporation, holding company for the Sydney Futures Exchange."
Australian Securities Exchange,"Timeline of significant events
1861: Ten years after the official advent of the Gold Rush, Australia's first stock exchange was formed in Melbourne. In the 1850s Victoria was Australia's gold mining centre, its population increasing from 80,000 in 1851 to 540,000 in 1861.
1871: Thirty years after it lit the first gas street light in Sydney, the Australian Gas Light Company took its place in history again, becoming the second company to list on the Sydney Stock Exchange.
1885: Two years after the Broken Hill Mining Company (private company) was established by a syndicate of seven men from the Mount Gipps Station, the company was incorporated to become the Broken Hill Proprietary Company Limited (BHP). In 1885, BHP listed on the Melbourne Stock Exchange.
1937: The Australian Associated Stock Exchanges (AASE) was established in 1937. Since 1903 the state stock exchanges had met on an informal basis, but in 1936 Sydney took the lead in formalising the association. Initially this involved the exchanges in Adelaide, Brisbane, Hobart and Sydney. Melbourne and Perth joined soon after. Through the AASE the exchanges gradually brought in common listing requirements for companies and uniform brokerage and other rules for stockbroking firms. They also set the ground rules for commissions and the flotation of government and semi-government loan raisings.
1938: Publication of the first share price index.
1939: Sydney Stock Exchange closed for the first time due to the declaration of World War II.
1960: Sydney Futures Exchange began trading as Sydney Greasy Wool Futures Exchange (SGWFE). Its original goal was to provide Australian wool traders with hedging facilities in their own country. SGWFE offered a single contract of greasy wool that by the end of the year had traded 19,042 lots.
1969–1970: The Poseidon bubble (a mining boom triggered by a nickel discovery in Western Australia) caused Australian mining shares to soar and then crash, prompting regulatory recommendations that ultimately led to Australia's national companies and securities legislation.
1976: The Australian Options Market was established, trading call options.
1980: The separate Melbourne and Sydney stock exchange indices were replaced by Australian Stock Exchange indices.
1984: Brokers' commission rates were deregulated. Commissions have gradually fallen ever since, with rates today as low as 0.12% or 0.05% from discount internet-based brokers.
1984: Sydney Stock Exchange closed due to heavy rain and flooding on 9 November 1984 with 70 millimetres of rain falling in one half-hour. All trading on the floor of the Sydney Exchange was suspended throughout Friday. Damage totaled $2 million and repairs took more than six months, with new carpet laid and cables and computers replaced.
Stockbrokers who had taken advantage of joint access were able to trade on the Melbourne Stock Exchange. And, with the Sydney trading floor closed by floodwaters, the Melbourne Exchange enjoyed its busiest trading day for the year. After that episode a back-up site was established outside the Sydney CBD.
1987: The Australian Stock Exchange Limited (ASX) was formed on 1 April 1987, through incorporation under legislation of the Australian Parliament. The formation of the national stock exchange involved the amalgamation of the six independent stock exchanges that had operated in the states' capital cities.
Launch of the Stock Exchange Automated Trading System (SEATS). It was a far cry from the original system which dated back over 100 years. During that time there had been three different forms of trading on the Australian stock exchanges. The earliest was the auction-based call system, which saw a stock exchange employee (the caller) call the name of each listed security in turn while members bid, offered, sold or bought the stock at each call. This system proved inadequate to handle the increased volume of trading during the mining booms. It was replaced by the 'post' system in the early 1960s, which involved stocks being quoted on 'posts' or 'boards'. 'Chalkies' were employed by the Stock Exchange and it was their function to record in chalk the bids and offers of the operators (employees of stockbrokers) and the sales made. This system stayed in place until 1987.
1990: A warrants market was established.
1993: Fixed-interest securities were added (see Interest rate market below). Also in 1993, the FAST system of accelerated settlement was established, and the following year the CHESS system (see Settlement below) was introduced, superseding FAST.
1994: The Sydney Futures Exchange announced trading in futures over individual ASX stocks. The ASX responded with the Low Exercise Price Option or LEPO (see below). The SFE went to court, claiming that LEPOs were futures and therefore that the ASX could not offer them. The court held they were options and so LEPOs were introduced in 1995.
1995: Stamp duty on share transactions was halved from 0.3% to 0.15%. The ASX had agreed with the Queensland State Government to locate staff in Brisbane in exchange for the stamp duty reduction there, and the other states followed suit so as not to lose brokerage business to Queensland. In 2000 stamp duty was abolished in all states as part of the introduction of the GST.
1996: The exchange members (brokers etc.) voted to demutualise. The exchange was incorporated as ASX Limited and in 1998 the company was listed on the ASX itself, with the Australian Securities & Investments Commission enforcing the listing rules for ASX Limited.
1997: Electronic trading commences as the option market moves from floor to screen. A phased transition to the electronic CLICK system for derivatives began.
1998: ASX demutualised to become a listed company. It was the first exchange in the world to demutualise and list on its own market, a trend that has been imitated by several other exchanges over the years. The Australian Mutual Provident Society began in 1849 as an organisation offering life insurance. Now known as AMP it became a publicly listed company on the ASX in 1998.
2000: In October, ASX acquires a 15% stake in the trading and order management software company IRESS (formerly BridgeDFS Ltd).
2001: Stamp duty on marketable securities abolished.
2006: The ASX announced a merger with the Sydney Futures Exchange, the primary derivatives exchange in Australia."
Australian Securities Exchange,"Trading systems
ASX Group has two trading platforms – ASX Trade, which facilitates the trading of ASX equity securities and ASX Trade24 for derivative securities trading.
All ASX equity securities are traded on screen on ASX Trade. ASX Trade is a NASDAQ OMX ultra-low latency trading platform based on NASDAQ OMX's Genium INET system, which is used by many exchanges around the world.  It is one of the fastest and most functional multi-asset trading platforms in the world, delivering latency down to ~250 microseconds.
ASX Trade24 is ASX global trading platform for derivatives. It is globally distributed with network access points (gateways) located in Chicago, New York, London, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney and Melbourne. It also allows for true 24-hour trading, and simultaneously maintains two active trading days which enables products to be opened for trading in the new trading day in one time zone while products are still trading under the previous day."
Australian Securities Exchange,"Opening times
The normal trading or business days of the ASX are week-days, Monday to Friday. ASX does not trade on national public holidays: New Year's Day (1 January), Australia Day (26 January, and observed on this day or the first business day after this date), Good Friday (that varies each year), Easter Monday, Anzac day (25 April), King's Birthday (June), Christmas Day (25 December) and Boxing Day (26 December).
On each trading day there is a pre-market session from 7:00 am to 10:00 am Sydney time and a normal trading session from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm Sydney time. The market opens alphabetically in Single-price auctions, phased over the first ten minutes, with a small random time built in to prevent exact prediction of the first trades. There is also a single-price auction between 4:10 pm and 4:12 pm to set the daily closing prices."
Australian Securities Exchange,"Settlement
Security holders hold shares in one of two forms, both of which operate as uncertificated holdings, rather than through the issue of physical share certificates:"
Australian Securities Exchange,"Clearing House Electronic Sub-register System (CHESS). The investor's controlling participant (normally a broker) sponsors the client into CHESS. The security holder is given a ""holder identification number"" (HIN) and monthly statements are sent to the security holder from the CHESS system when there is a movement in their holding that month.
Issuer-sponsored. The company's share register administers the security holder's holding and issues the investor with a security-holder reference number (SRN) which may be quoted when selling.
Holdings may be moved from issuer-sponsored to CHESS or between different brokers by electronic message initiated by the controlling participant."
Australian Securities Exchange,"Short selling
Short selling of shares is permitted on the ASX, but only among designated stocks and with certain conditions:"
Australian Securities Exchange,"ASX trading participants (brokers) must report all daily gross short sales to ASX. The report will aggregate the gross short sales as reported by each trading participant at an individual stock level.
ASX publishes aggregate gross short sales to ASX participants and the general public.
Many brokers do not offer short selling to small private investors. LEPOs can serve as an equivalent, while contracts for difference (CFDs) offered by third-party providers are another alternative.
In September 2008, ASIC suspended nearly all forms of short selling due to concerns about market stability during the 2007–2008 financial crisis. The ban on covered short selling was lifted in May 2009.
Also, in the biggest change for ASX in 15 years, ASTC Settlement Rule 10.11.12 was introduced, which requires the broker to provide stocks when settlement is due, otherwise the broker must buy the stock on the market to cover the shortfall. The rule requires that if a Failed Settlement Shortfall exists on the second business day after the day on which the Rescheduled Batch Instruction was originally scheduled for settlement (that is, generally on T+5), the delivering settlement participant must either:"
Australian Securities Exchange,"close out the Failed Settlement Shortfall on the next business day by purchasing the number of Financial Products of the relevant class equal to the shortfall; or
acquire under a securities lending arrangement the number of Financial Products of the relevant class equal to the shortfall and deliver those Financial Products in Batch Settlement no more than two business days later."
Australian Securities Exchange,"Options
Options on leading shares are traded on the ASX, with standardised sets of strike prices and expiry dates. Liquidity is provided by market makers who are required to provide quotes. Each market maker is assigned two or more stocks. A stock can have more than one market maker, and they compete with one another. A market maker may choose one or both of:"
Australian Securities Exchange,"Make a market continuously, on a set of 18 options.
Make a market in response to a quote request, in any option up to 9 months out.
In both cases there is a minimum quantity (5 or 10 contracts depending on the shares) and a maximum spread permitted.
Due to the higher risks in options, brokers must check clients' suitability before allowing them to trade options. Clients may both take (i.e. buy) and write (i.e. sell) options. For written positions, the client must put up margin."
Australian Securities Exchange,"Interest rate market
The ASX interest rate market is the set of corporate bonds, floating rate notes, and bond-like preference shares listed on the exchange. These securities are traded and settled in the same way as ordinary shares, but the ASX provides information such as their maturity, effective interest rate, etc., to aid comparison."
Australian Securities Exchange,"Futures
The Sydney Futures Exchange (SFE) was the 10th largest derivatives exchange in the world, providing derivatives in interest rates, equities, currencies and commodities. The SFE is now part of ASX and its most active products are: "
Australian Securities Exchange,"SPI 200 Futures – Futures contracts on an index representing the largest 200 stocks on the Australian Stock Exchange by market capitalisation.
AU 90-day Bank Accepted Bill Futures – Australia's equivalent of T-Bill futures.
3-Year Bond Futures – Futures contracts on Australian 3-year bonds.
10-Year Bond Futures – Futures contracts on Australian 10-year bonds.
The ASX trades futures over the ASX 50, ASX 200 and ASX property indexes, and over grain, electricity and wool. Options over grain futures are also traded."
Australian Securities Exchange,"Market indices
The ASX maintains stock indexes concerning stocks traded on the exchange in conjunction with Standard & Poor's. There is a hierarchy of index groups called the S&P/ASX 20, S&P/ASX 50, S&P/ASX 100, S&P/ASX 200 and S&P/ASX 300, notionally containing the 20, 50, 100, 200 and 300 largest companies listed on the exchange, subject to some qualifications."
Australian Securities Exchange,"Sharemarket Game
The ASX Sharemarket Game gives members of the public and secondary school students the chance to learn about investing in the sharemarket using real market prices. Participants receive a hypothetical $50,000 to buy and sell shares in 150 companies and track the progress of their investments over the duration of the game."
Australian Securities Exchange,"Merger talks with SGX
ASX was (25 October 2010) in merger talks with Singapore Exchange (SGX). While there was an initial expectation that the merger would have created a bourse with a market value of US$14 billion, this was a misconception; the final proposal intended that the ASX and SGX bourses would have continued functioning separately. The merger was blocked by Treasurer of Australia Wayne Swan on 8 April 2011, on advice from the Foreign Investment Review Board that the proposed merger was not in the best interests of Australia."
Australian Securities Exchange,"Company performance (financial year)
2015 – Information Services and Technical Services revenues grew by 8% and 10% respectively, while Austraclear chipped in with 9%. Another bright spot was the dividend from IRESS, which rose 47% from the prior period, to $4.9m. This financial software company has risen by 27% over the past couple of years and ASX's 19.3% stake is now worth $334m, more than 4% of its own market value."
Australian Securities Exchange,"See also
Economy of Australia
Australian Securities and Investments Commission
All Ordinaries
Charles Challice, the fifth chief executive of the Sydney Stock Exchange"
Australian Securities Exchange,"Lists
List of stock exchanges
List of futures exchanges
List of Australian exchange-traded funds"
Australian Securities Exchange,"References
External links"
Australian Securities Exchange,"Official website
ASX Annual Report 2012. Archived 24 April 2013 at the Wayback Machine.
Australian Stock Exchange and National Guarantee Fund Act 1987"
Australian art,"Australian art is a broad spectrum of art created in or about Australia, or by Australians overseas, spanning from prehistoric times to the present day. The art forms include, but are not limited to, Aboriginal, Colonial, Landscape, Atelier, and Contemporary art. 
The visual arts in Australia have a rich and extensive history, with Aboriginal art dating back at least 30,000 years. The country has been the birthplace of many notable artists from both Western and Indigenous Australian schools. These include the late-19th-century Heidelberg School plein air painters, the Antipodeans, the Central Australian Hermannsburg School watercolorists, and the Western Desert Art Movement. The Australian art scene also features significant examples of High modernism and Postmodern art."
Australian art,"History
Indigenous Australia
The ancestors of Aboriginal Australians are believed to have arrived in Australia as early as 60,000 years ago, and evidence of Indigenous Australian art in Australia can be traced back at least 30,000 years. Examples of ancient Aboriginal rock artworks can be found throughout the continent. Notable examples can be found in national parks, such as those of the UNESCO listed sites at Uluru and Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory, and the Gwion Gwion rock paintings in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. Rock art can also be found within protected parks in urban areas such as Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park in Sydney. The Sydney rock engravings are approximately 5000 to 200 years old. Murujuga in Western Australia has the Friends of Australian Rock Art advocating its preservation, and the numerous engravings there were heritage listed in 2007.
In terms of age and abundance, cave art in Australia is comparable to that of Lascaux and Altamira in Europe, and Aboriginal art is believed to be the oldest continuing tradition of art in the world. There are three major regional styles: the geometric style found in Central Australia, Tasmania, the Kimberley and Victoria known for its concentric circles, arcs and dots; the simple figurative style found in Queensland; the complex figurative style found in Arnhem Land which includes X-Ray art. These designs generally carry significance linked to the spirituality of the Dreamtime."
Australian art,"William Barak (c. 1824–1903) was one of the last traditionally educated of the Wurundjeri-Willam people who come from the district now incorporating the city of Melbourne. He remains notable for his artworks which recorded traditional Aboriginal ways for the education of Westerners (which remain on permanent exhibition at the Ian Potter Centre of the National Gallery of Victoria and the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery). Margaret Preston (1875–1963) was among the early non-indigenous painters to incorporate Aboriginal influences in her works. Albert Namatjira (1902–1959) is a famous Australian artist and an Arrernte man. His landscapes inspired the Hermannsburg School of art. Elizabeth Durack's works, which notably fuse Western and indigenous influences, are significant. Since the 1970s, indigenous artists have employed the use of acrylic paints – with styles such as the Western Desert Art Movement becoming globally renowned 20th-century art movements.
The National Gallery of Australia exhibits a great many indigenous art works, including those of the Torres Strait Islands who are known for their traditional sculpture and headgear. The Art Gallery of New South Wales has an extensive collection of indigenous Australian art. [3] In May 2011, the Director of the Place, Evolution, and Rock Art Heritage Unit (PERAHU) at Griffith University, Paul Taçon, called for the creation of a national database for rock art. Paul Taçon launched the ""Protect Australia's Spirit"" campaign in May 2011 with the Australian actor Jack Thompson. This campaign aims to create the very first fully resourced national archive to bring together information about rock art sites, as well as planning for future rock art management and conservation. The National Rock Art Institute would bring together existing rock art expertise from Griffith University, Australian National University, and the University of Western Australia if they were funded by philanthropists, big business and government. Rock Art Research is published twice a year and also covers international scholarship of rock art."
Australian art,"Early European depictions
The first artistic representations of the Australia scene by European artists were mainly natural history illustrations, depicting the distinctive flora and fauna of the land for scientific purposes, and the topography of the coast. Sydney Parkinson, the botanical illustrator on James Cook's 1770 voyage that first charted the eastern coastline of Australia, made a large number of such drawings under the direction of naturalist Joseph Banks. Many of these drawings were met with scepticism when taken back to Europe, for example claims that the platypus was a hoax. In the form of copies and reproductions, George Stubbs' 1772 paintings Portrait of a Large Dog and The Kongouro from New Holland—depicting a dingo and kangaroo respectively—were the first images of Australian fauna to be widely disseminated in Britain."
Australian art,"British colonization (1788–1850)
Early Western art in Australia, from British colonisation in 1788 onwards, is often narrated as the gradual shift from a European sense of light to an Australian one. The lighting in Australia is notably different from that of Europe, and early attempts at landscapes attempted to reflect this. It has also been one of transformation, where artistic ideas originating from beyond (primarily Europe) gained new meaning and purpose when transplanted into the new continent and the emerging society.
Despite Banks' suggestions, no professional natural-history artist sailed on the First Fleet in 1788. Until the turn of the century all drawings made in the colony were crafted by soldiers, including British naval officers George Raper and John Hunter, and convict artists, including Thomas Watling. However, many of these drawings are by unknown artists, most notably the Port Jackson Painter. Most are in the style of naval draughtsmanship, and cover natural history topics, specifically birds, and a few depict the infant colony itself."
Australian art,"Several professional natural-history illustrators accompanied expeditions in the early 19th century, including Ferdinand Bauer, who travelled with Matthew Flinders, and Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, who travelled with a French expedition led by Nicolas Baudin. The first resident professional artist was John Lewin, who arrived in 1800 and published two volumes of natural history art. Ornithologist John Gould was renowned for his illustrations of the country's birds. In the late 19th century Harriet and Helena Scott were highly respected natural history illustrators
Lewin's Platypus (1808) represents the fine detail and scientific observation displayed by many of these early painters.
As well as inspiration in natural history, there were some ethnographic portraiture of Aboriginal Australians, particularly in the 1830s. Artists included Augustus Earle in New South Wales and Benjamin Duterrau, Robert Dowling and the sculptor Benjamin Law, recording images of Aboriginal Tasmanians.
The most significant landscape artist of this era was John Glover. Heavily influenced by 18th-century European landscape painters, such as Claude Lorraine and Salvator Rosa, his works captured the distinctive Australian features of open country, fallen logs, and blue hills.
Conrad Martens (1801–1878) worked from 1835 to 1878 as a professional artist, painting many landscapes and was commercially successful. His work has been regarded as softening the landscape to fit European sensibilities. His watercolour studies of Sydney Harbour are well regarded, and seen as introducing Romantic ideals to his paintings. Martens is also remembered for accompanying scientist Charles Darwin on HMS Beagle (as had Augustus Earle)."
Australian art,"Gold rushes and expansion (1851–1885)
From 1851, the Victorian gold rush resulted in a huge influx of settlers and new wealth. S. T. Gill (1818–1880) documented life on the Australian gold fields, however the colonial art market primarily desired landscape paintings, which were commissioned by wealthy landowners or merchants wanting to record their material success.
William Piguenit's (1836–1914) ""Flood in the Darling"" was acquired by the National Gallery of New South Wales in 1895.
Some of the artists of note included Eugene von Guerard, Nicholas Chevalier, William Strutt, John Skinner Prout and Knud Bull."
Australian art,"Louis Buvelot was a key figure in landscape painting in the later period. He was influenced by the Barbizon school painters, and so using a plein air technique, and a more domesticated and settled view of the land, in contrast to the emphasis on strangeness or danger prevalent in earlier painters. This approach, together with his extensive teaching influence, have led his to dubbed the ""Father of Landscape Painting in Australia"".
A few attempts at art exhibitions were made in the 1840s, which attracted a number of artists but were commercial failures. By the 1850s, however, regular exhibitions became popular, with a variety of art types represented. The first of these exhibitions was in 1854 in Melbourne. An art museum, which eventually became the National Gallery of Victoria, was founded in 1861, and it began to collect Australian works as well as gathering a collection of European masters. Crucially, it also opened an art school, important for the following generations of Australian-born and raised artists.
Henry James Johnstone (also known as H. J. Johnstone), a professional photographer and student of Buvelot, painted the large-scale bush scene Evening Shadows (1880), the first acquisition of the Art Gallery of South Australia and possibly Australia's most reproduced painting."
Australian art,"Australian impressionists (1885–1900)
The origins of a distinctly Australian painting tradition is often associated with the Heidelberg School of the late 19th century. Named after a camp Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton established in Heidelberg (then a rural suburb on the outskirts of Melbourne), these painters, together with Frederick McCubbin, Charles Conder and others, began an impressionistic plein air approach to the Australian landscape that remains embedded in Australia's popular consciousness, both in and outside the art world."
Australian art,"Many of their most famous works depict scenes of pastoral and outback Australia. Central themes of their art include manual labour, conquering the land, and an idealisation of the rural pioneer. By the 1890s most Australians were city-dwellers, as were the artists themselves, and a romantic view of pioneer life gave great power and popularity to images such as Shearing the Rams. In this work Roberts uses formal composition and strong realism to dignify the shearers whilst the relative anonymity of the men and their subdued expressions, elevate their work as the real subject, rather that the specific individuals portrayed.
In their portrayal of the nobility of rural life, the Heidelberg artists reveal their debt to Millet, Bastien-Lepage and Courbet, but the techniques and aims of the French Impressionists provide more direct inspiration and influenced their actual practise. In their early and extremely influential Exhibition of 9 by 5 Impressions of small sketches, their impressionistic programme was clear, as evidenced from their catalogue: ""An effect is only momentary: so an impressionist tries to find his place... it has been the object of artists to render faithfully, and thus obtain first records of effects widely differing, and often of very fleeting character.""
Other significant painters associated with the Heidelberg painters were Walter Withers, who won the inaugural Wynne Prize in 1896, and Jane Sutherland, a student of McCubbin. Born and raised in Sydney, impressionist John Russell spent much of his career in Europe, where he befriended the likes of Vincent van Gogh and Claude Monet. He also wrote letters home to his friend, Tom Roberts, updating him on developments in French impressionism."
Australian art,"Federation era and World War I (1901–1918)
In 1901, the six self-governing Australian colonies federated to form a unified nation. Artists such as Hans Heysen and Elioth Gruner built on the Australian landscape tradition of the Heidelberg painters, creating grand, nationalist pastoral landscapes. Others moved on to successful careers in London and Paris, such as Rupert Bunny and Hugh Ramsay."
Australian art,"1920s onwards
Among the public, through the 1920s, modified forms of Impressionism were popular, with Elioth Gruner being considered the last of the Australian Impressionists. The Australian Tonalist movement, originating in the writings and teaching of Max Meldrum, followed a 'scientific' transcription of tonal relations, making 'impressionism' a system, and opposed Modernist art then emerging pre-WW2 in the Angry Penguins and the Heide Circle influenced by refugees from Europe, and Australian-born artists' visits to England and France. Conservatives' attitudes to 'modern art' prevailed until the 1960s, institutionalised in the Australian Academy of Art (1937–1947), opposed by such groups as the Contemporary Art Society (established 1938 and continuing).
The 1950s restored an interest in the Outback as subject matter in Australian art. Russell Drysdale and Sidney Nolan toured the interior, sponsored by newspapers to document drought.  They and Albert Tucker, in his Explorer series, sought to capture the ancient strangeness and a cruel infinity of the central Australian landscape.
Splatt and Burton (1977) consider the 1960s a period in which public attention was being drawn to urban bushland and that landscape paintings of the 1970s carried through on the themes of environmental preservation and threats of destruction."
Australian art,"List of artists
Art museums and galleries in Australia
Institutions
Australia has major art museums and galleries subsidised by the national and state governments, as well as private art museums and small university and municipal galleries. The National Gallery of Australia, the Gallery of Modern Art and the Art Gallery of New South Wales have major strengths in collecting the art of the Asia Pacific Region. Others include the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, which has a significant Australian collection of Western art. Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, and the privately owned Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania and White Rabbit Gallery in Sydney are widely regarded as autonomously discerning collections of international contemporary art.
Other institutions include the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide, Newcastle Art Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery of Australia, the National Museum of Australia, the Canberra Museum and Gallery, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart, the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory in Darwin, and the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth. A network of regional public galleries have existed since the mid-1800s and one, Castlemaine Art Museum, is unique in specialising in Australian art. The State Library of New South Wales holds a significant collection comprising more than a quarter of a million artworks, many from the colonial period. More material is held by other national and state libraries."
Australian art,"Art market
The boom and bust cycle in contemporary art is evident in the 1980s colonial art boom ending at the time of the 1987 stock market crash and the exit of many artists and dealers, followed by the 2000s boom in Aboriginal dot painting and Australian late modernist painting, which ended at the time of the global financial crisis and growing collector and public interest in the international contemporary art circuit.
A 5% resale royalty scheme commenced in 2010 under which artists receive 5% of the sale price when eligible artworks are resold commercially for $1000 or more. Between 10 June 2010 and 15 May 2013, the scheme generated over $1.5 million in royalties for 610 artists. Some buyers object to paying any resale royalty while others do not mind a royalty going directly to the artists. However, they worry about further red tape and bureaucratic interference.
In 2014/15 there was a rediscovery of colonial art at auction. Affordable 20th-century rural scene painting is buoyant. While the inflated northern hemisphere art markets had anticipating a massive correction in the Australian art market which transitioned to the middle market.
Socially oriented art events such as art fairs and biennials have continued to grow in size and popularity in the contemporary art scene.
The smaller commercial galleries have struggled to remain in business in the 2010s in spite of a functioning economy, although there is little consensus on the reasons for this.
A new market has arisen in China, where Australian artists are selling works in a traditionally local market: ""While the Chinese have always had a passion for traditional Chinese art, according to global auction house Sotheby's, the surging interest in contemporary international art is a recent trend.""
The market for Aboriginal art is still very strong, on the national and international stage, since becoming a solid financial investment in the 1980s. Not only do all the regional and State Galleries acquire significant collections of Aboriginal art, but private galleries are showing featured artists abroad. Aboriginal artists are also represented in all the major landscape prizes Australia. In 2019, ""the Wynne prize, worth $50,000, was won by Sylvia Ken for her painting Seven Sisters – marking the fourth year in a row that the landscape prize has been won by Indigenous artists."""
Australian art,"Australian visual arts in other countries
The museum for Australian Aboriginal art 'La grange' in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, was one of the few museums in Europe that dedicated itself entirely to Aboriginal art."
Australian art,"See also
Arts in Australia
Australian artist groups and collectives
Australiana
Australian Cartoonists' Association
Australian feminist art timeline
Photography in Australia"
Australian art,"References
External links
National Association for the Visual Arts
Australian Commercial Galleries Association
Craft Australia's website
Australian Video Art Archive
Design and Art Australia Online
Art Collector Magazine's Indigenous Art Centres Guide
The Australian Arts Community – A free community website for the arts in Australia (archived)
Art Prizes Australia, a free listing of Australian Art Prizes (archived)"
Intersex rights in Australia,"Intersex rights in Australia are protections and rights afforded to intersex people through statutes, regulations, and international human rights treaties, including through the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth) which makes it unlawful to discriminate against a person based upon that person's intersex status in contexts such as work, education, provision of services, and accommodation.
Australia was the first country to conduct a parliamentary inquiry into involuntary or coerced medical interventions on intersex people. A 2016 Family Court case authorising a gonadectomy and consequential surgery on a young child has attracted public commentary for disclosing those medical interventions, their rationales, and a prior clitorectomy and labiaplasty.
In March 2017, Australian and New Zealand community organizations issued a joint call for legal reform, including the criminalization of deferrable intersex medical interventions on children, an end to legal classification of sex, and improved access to peer support."
Intersex rights in Australia,"History
Early common law, like canon law, held that hermaphrodites were to be treated as male or female depending on the prevailing sex. However, in 1979 the Family Court of Australia annulled the marriage of an intersex man who had been ""born a male and had been reared as a male"" on the basis that he was an hermaphrodite.
Intersex Peer Support Australia (formerly the Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome Support Group Australia) is thought to be world's oldest intersex civil society organization, founded in 1985. Intersex Human Rights Australia (formerly OII Australia) was established in 2009. The two organizations have campaigned for political recognition and bodily autonomy, with some success.
Alex MacFarlane is believed to be amongst the first people worldwide to legally secure a birth certificate and passport recording sex as indeterminate, reported in January 2003. Phoebe Hart directed the award-winning autobiographical road trip movie Orchids, My Intersex Adventure with her sister, Bonnie Hart, in 2010, promoting awareness of intersex issues. Tony Briffa became the world's first openly intersex mayor, and ""the first known intersex public office-bearer in the Western world"", serving as Deputy Mayor of the City of Hobsons Bay, Victoria, between 2009 and 2011, and Mayor between 2011 and 2012.
In 2013, Australia became the first country to pass a standalone attribute protecting intersex people in anti-discrimination law, and the first to conduct a parliamentary inquiry into intersex medical interventions. In 2014, Morgan Carpenter took part in the ""first United Nations Human Rights Council side event on intersex issues"" in March 2014, alongside Mauro Cabral and representatives of Intersex UK and Zwischengeschlecht.
However, while Australian terminology has expanded from ""LGBT"" to ""LGBTI"" to include intersex people, the experience of intersex people remains poorly understood. In June 2016, Intersex Human Rights Australia made a submission to the UN Committee Against Torture which stated that the dignity and rights of LGBT and intersex people are recognized while what it and the UN Committee state to be harmful practices on intersex children continue."
Intersex rights in Australia,"Darlington Statement
In March 2017, representatives of Intersex Peer Support Australia, Intersex Trust Aotearoa New Zealand, and Intersex Human Rights Australia participated in an Australian and Aotearoa/New Zealand consensus ""Darlington Statement"" by intersex community organizations and others. The statement calls for legal reform, including the criminalization of deferrable intersex medical interventions on children, an end to legal classification of sex, and improved access to peer support."
Intersex rights in Australia,"Physical integrity and bodily autonomy
Intersex infants are often subjected to medical operations to their genitalia and other sex characteristics to make them conform to a male or female appearance or nature. These practices have been criticised by human rights institutions and practitioners, and intersex advocates, as human rights abuses, violating rights to live free from violence and harmful practices, and rights to bodily autonomy, integrity and dignity, drawing parallels to female genital mutilation."
Intersex rights in Australia,"Decision-making principles
Decision-making principles were published in 2010 by Gillam, Hewitt and Warne, three clinicians associated with the Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne and Murdoch Childrens Research Institute. The principles include minimizing ""psychosocial risks"" to children through medical intervention, including risks of ""impaired bonding"" with parents and ""reduced opportunities for marriage"". The guidelines were criticized by Alice Dreger and two colleagues for being focused on infant genital surgeries. Gillam, Hewitt and Warne stated in 2011 that the principles were then being extended nationally, that is, they were now ""being extended to other centres in Australia"".
The government of Victoria produced a ""derivative"" version in 2013. This later version was criticised by one academic and Intersex Human Rights Australia for being irrelevant to clinical practice. Victoria later removed a ""psychosocial"" rationale for intersex medical interventions focused on ""marriageability""."
Intersex rights in Australia,"Senate report on involuntary or coerced sterilization
In October 2013, the Australian Senate Community Affairs References Committee published a report entitled Involuntary or coerced sterilisation of intersex people in Australia. The Senate found that ""normalising"" surgeries are taking place in Australia, often on infants and young children. The Report stated:"
Intersex rights in Australia,"normalisation surgery is more than physical reconstruction. The surgery is intended to deconstruct an intersex physiology and, in turn, construct an identity that conforms with stereotypical male and female gender categories...
The evidence suggests that a human rights consistent framework ... must necessarily operate from a presumption in favour of maintaining the status quo for as long as possible..."
Intersex rights in Australia,"Enormous effort has gone into assigning and 'normalising' sex: none has gone into asking whether this is necessary or beneficial. Given the extremely complex and risky medical treatments that are sometimes involved, this appears extremely unfortunate.
The committee made 15 recommendations, including that: "
Intersex rights in Australia,"medical treatment of intersex people take place under guidelines that ensure treatment is managed within a human rights framework, and which ""favour deferral of normalising treatment until the person can give fully informed consent, and seek to minimise surgical intervention on infants undertaken for primarily psychosocial reasons""; and
proposed intersex medical interventions on children and adults without the capacity to consent should require legal authorisation by an administrative tribunal or the Family Court of Australia.
The recommendations have not been adopted."
Intersex rights in Australia,"Re: Carla (Medical procedure)
In December 2016, The Australian and SBS reported on a Family Court of Australia case published in January 2016, Re Carla (Medical procedure), where the parents were able to authorize the sterilization of their 5-year child with 17-beta-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase III deficiency. The child had previously been subjected to intersex medical interventions including a clitorectomy and labiaplasty, without requiring Court oversight. These were described by the judge as having ""enhanced the appearance of her female genitalia"".
Intersex Human Rights Australia found this ""disturbing"", and stated that the case was reliant on gender stereotyping and failed to take account of data on cancer risks, and demonstrating a lack of scrutiny and transparency in the treatment of intersex infants and children. A commentary by the Human Rights Law Centre described the case as a ""particularly disturbing misapplication of the principles in Re Marion"".
Numerous academics have commented on the issues raised by the case. Bernadette Richards wrote that it stretched the bounds of parental authority by removing ""external review of invasive treatment"". Melinda Jones has compared the interventions in this and other cases to female genital mutilation. Fiona Kelly and Malcolm Smith have written that the evidence put to the Court was incomplete, and its reasoning lacked rigor. Morgan Carpenter has written that the case demonstrated a ""failed narrative of continuous"" clinical ""technical improvement""."
Intersex rights in Australia,"Responses to developments
On 11 November 2014, the New South Wales Legislative Council passed a motion recognising stigma and human rights abuses, and calling on that State government to ""work with the Australian Government to implement the recommendations"" of the 2013 Senate committee report.
The Asia Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions states that Australian regulations that prohibit female genital mutilation give ""explicit permission for genital surgeries to 'normalise' the bodies of intersex infants and children"". In the same month, the United Nations Committee Against Torture asked the Australian government to confirm whether or not such medical interventions persist, and asking about implementation of the 2013 Senate report.
In December 2016, the United Nations Committee Against Torture asked the Australian government to confirm the availability of civil and criminal remedies for irreversible medical interventions as children, including the applicability of statutes of limitations. In March 2017, an Australian and Aotearoa/New Zealand community statement called for acknowledgement, an apology, and compensation for intersex people who have been subjected to ""involuntary or coercive medical interventions"".
In March 2017, an Australian and Aotearoa/New Zealand community statement called for the criminalization of deferrable intersex medical interventions.
In June 2017, and in response to a joint submission by almost 50 non-governmental organizations, the UN Committee on Economic Social and Cultural Rights stated concern that ""children born with intersex variations are subject to early surgeries and medical interventions before they are able to provide full and informed consent"", calling for implementation of the 2013 Senate report. The United Nations Human Rights Committee recommended in December 2017 that Australia ""move to end irreversible medical treatment, especially surgery, of intersex infants and children, who are not yet able to provide fully informed and free consent, unless such procedures constitute an absolute medical necessity"". In July 2018, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women issued concluding observations on harmful practices, recommending that Australia adopt ""Adopt clear legislative provisions explicitly prohibiting the performance of unnecessary surgical or other medical treatment on intersex children before they reach the legal age of consent"". The committee also called for implementation of the 2013 Senate committee report, the provision of redress, counselling and support to families.
In mid 2018, the Australian Human Rights Commission commenced a project on protecting the rights of Australians born with variations in sex characteristics in the context of medical interventions.
In 2023, the Australian Capital Territory became the first place in Australia to outlaw surgeries that are deferrable from being performed on intersex children without their consent."
Intersex rights in Australia,"Protection from discrimination
At the federal level, ""intersex status"" became a protected attribute in the federal Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth), making it unlawful to discriminate against a person based upon that person's intersex status in contexts such as work, education, provision of services, and accommodation. The Act defines intersex status as:"
Intersex rights in Australia,"the status of having physical, hormonal or genetic features that are: (a) neither wholly female nor wholly male; or (b) a combination of female and male; or (c) neither female nor male.
The Act contains exemptions in religion and sport. A religious exemption applies solely to the internal appointment, training or practices within religious bodies. Exemptions apply to competitive sport in certain instances, but this is not applicable to sporting activities involving children aged less than 12 years old, or persons participating in coaching, refereeing, or administering sporting activities.
Tasmania has also passed legislation precluding discrimination on the basis of intersex status, and similar legislative amendments passed in the Australian Capital Territory and South Australia, went into full effect in 2017. Furthermore, in 2019, Tasmania replaced the attribute of intersex status with the more internationally accepted attribute of sex characteristics, becoming the first Australian jurisdiction to do so. Intersex Human Rights Australia has expressed concern about a lack of public awareness of these protections.
Research on intersex Australians published in 2016 shows that, while 2% of Australians fail to complete secondary school, 18% of Australians born with intersex variations fail to do so due to issues around bullying, discrimination and pubertal medical interventions.
In 2014, Intersex Human Rights Australia and Pride in Diversity partnered to publish a guide on intersex employees for employers."
Intersex rights in Australia,"Identification documents
Australian research has shown that 19% of people born with atypical sex characteristics selected an ""X"" or ""other"" classification, while 52% are women and 23% men and 6% unsure.
Alex MacFarlane received the first Australian passport with an 'X' sex descriptor, reported in January 2003. Australian government policy between 2003 and 2011 was to issue passports with an 'X' marker only to people who could ""present a birth certificate that notes their sex as indeterminate"" In 2011, the Australian Passport Office introduced new guidelines for issuing of passports with a new gender, and broadened the availability of the X descriptor to all individuals with documented ""indeterminate"" sex. From 2013, federal guidelines enable all people to identify gender as male, female or X on federal documents, including passports. Documentary evidence must be witnessed by a doctor or psychologist, but medical intervention is not required.
In Australia, birth certificates are issued by States and Territories. Intersex Human Rights Australia states that identification changes are managed as an administrative correction.
Alex MacFarlane is also believed to be the first person in Australia to obtain a birth certificate recording sex as indeterminate, reported in January 2003.
In March 2017, an Australian and Aotearoa/New Zealand community statement called for an end to legal classification of sex, stating that legal third classifications, like binary classifications, were based on structural violence and failed to respect diversity and a ""right to self-determination""."
Intersex rights in Australia,"Marriage
Marriage regardless of sex, gender or intersex status has been legally recognised in Australia since 9 December 2017. The Marriage Amendment (Definition and Religious Freedoms) Act 2017 permits any ""2 people"" to marry.
Prior to that date, marriage was only permitted between a ""man and a woman"", meaning that intersex people who had other sex classifications, or sex classifications that matched their partner, could not legally marry each other.
Historically, two legal cases are known to involve the marriages of intersex people. In the early twentieth century, the marriage of missionary Florrie Cox was annulled due to ""malformation frigidity"". In 1979, the Family Court of Australia, annulled the marriage of an intersex man, who had been ""born a male and had been reared as a male"" on the basis that he was an hermaphrodite."
Intersex rights in Australia,"Right to life
Intersex Peer Support Australia and Intersex Human Rights Australia have expressed concerns about the use of genetic selection via preimplantation genetic diagnosis, including in submissions to the National Health and Medical Research Council recommending that deselection of embryos and foetuses on grounds of intersex status should not be permitted. The organisations have also expressed concern about pregnancy termination rates of up to 88% in 47,XXY in circumstances where the World Health Organization describes the intersex trait as ""compatible with normal life expectancy"", and ""often undiagnosed"".
In 2016, Intersex Human Rights Australia wrote about the sponsorship of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) events by IVF clinics in Australia, stating that, in addition to ethical issues raised by the elimination of intersex traits, ""sponsorship of ""LGBTI"" events by such businesses raises more ethical issues still, including the nature of community and comprehension of issues relating to intersex bodily diversity."""
Intersex rights in Australia,"Rights advocacy
Notable intersex rights organizations in Australia include Intersex Human Rights Australia (formerly OII Australia) and Intersex Peer Support Australia (formerly Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome Support Group Australia). Notable advocates include Tony Briffa, Morgan Carpenter, Bonnie Hart, Phoebe Hart, Alex MacFarlane and Gina Wilson."
Intersex rights in Australia,"See also
Intersex human rights
LGBT rights in Australia
Transgender rights in Australia
Human rights in Australia"
Intersex rights in Australia,"References
Bibliography
Australian Senate Community Affairs Committee (October 2013). Involuntary or coerced sterilisation of intersex people in Australia. ISBN 978-1-74229-917-4.
Australian Human Rights Commission. Resilient Individuals: Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity & Intersex Rights National Consultation Report 2015 (PDF). Retrieved 24 September 2016.
Asia Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions (June 2016). Promoting and Protecting Human Rights in relation to Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Sex Characteristics. ISBN 978-0-9942513-7-4.
Briffa, Tony (15 April 2004). ""Intersex surgery disregards children's human rights"". Nature. 428 (6984): 695. Bibcode:2004Natur.428Q.695B. doi:10.1038/428695a. PMID 15085107.
Carpenter, Morgan (May 2016). ""The human rights of intersex people: addressing harmful practices and rhetoric of change"". Reproductive Health Matters. 24 (47): 74–84. doi:10.1016/j.rhm.2016.06.003. ISSN 0968-8080. PMID 27578341.
Jones, Tiffany (11 March 2016). ""The needs of students with intersex variations"". Sex Education. 16 (6): 602–618. doi:10.1080/14681811.2016.1149808. ISSN 1468-1811. S2CID 74173324.
Jones, Tiffany; Hart, Bonnie; Carpenter, Morgan; Ansara, Gavi; Leonard, William; Lucke, Jayne (February 2016). Intersex: Stories and Statistics from Australia (PDF). Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers. ISBN 978-1-78374-208-0. Archived from the original (PDF) on 14 September 2016. Retrieved 2 February 2016.
Wilson, Gina (2013). ""Equal Rights for Intersex People: Testimony of an Intersex Person"". Equal Rights Review. 10: 133–139. Archived from the original on 11 June 2013. Retrieved 5 February 2017."
Television in Australia,"Television in Australia began experimentally as early as 1929 in Melbourne with radio stations 3DB and 3UZ, and 2UE in Sydney, using the Radiovision system by Gilbert Miles and Donald McDonald, and later from other locations, such as Brisbane in 1934.
Mainstream television was launched on 16 September 1956 in Willoughby, New South Wales, with Nine Network station TCN-9 Sydney. The new medium was introduced by advertising executive Bruce Gyngell with the words ""Good evening, and welcome to television"", and has since seen the transition to colour and  digital television."
Television in Australia,"Local programs, over the years, have included a broad range of comedy, sport, and in particular drama series, in addition to news and current affairs. The industry is regulated by the Australian Communications and Media Authority, through various legislation, regulations, standards and codes of practice, which also regulates radio and in recent years has attempted to regulate the Internet."
Television in Australia,"History
Origins: Early transmission trials
In 1885, Henry Sutton developed a Telephane for closed circuit transmission of pictures via telegraph wires, based on the Nipkow spinning disk system, so that the Melbourne Cup could be seen in Ballarat. Reports differ on whether the Telephane was successfully implemented.
The first television broadcast in Australia took place on 30 September 1929 at the Menzies Hotel in Melbourne, using the electro-mechanical Radiovision system. Other transmissions took place in the city over the next few weeks. Also in 1929, the Baird system was used on 3DB, 3UZ and 2UE.
After 18 months of test transmissions, regular broadcasts began in Brisbane on 6 May 1934 using a 30-line system, to an estimated 18 receivers around Brisbane. The test transmissions, which were of 1-hour duration each day, were made by Thomas M. B. Elliott and Dr Val McDowall from the Wickham Terrace Observatory Tower. The programs included news headlines, still pictures and silent movies such as the temperance film Horrors of Drink. The Commonwealth Government granted a special licence and permission to conduct experimental television by VK4CM, in July 1934. By 1935, it expanded to 180 lines. Other experimental transmissions followed in other cities."
Television in Australia,"Early demonstrations
Television commenced in the United States and in the United Kingdom before World War II. The two countries developed radically different industry models, which were based on the models each used for radio broadcasting.  British broadcasting was entirely controlled by the government-created broadcasting corporation, the BBC, which derived its revenue from compulsory viewer licence fees. The United States adopted a commercial model, based on privately owned stations and networks that earned revenue by charging for advertising time, with public broadcasting forming only a minor component of the larger system.
In June 1948, the Australian Labor Government under Ben Chifley, opted to follow the British model, on the advice from the Postmaster-General's Department. It decided to establish a government-controlled TV station in each capital city and called for tenders for the building of the six TV transmitters. The Broadcasting Act 1948 specifically prohibited the granting of commercial TV licences, a decision that the Liberal-Country Party opposition criticised as ""authoritarian and socialistic"". This policy was never put into practice, however, because the Labor government did not have the opportunity to establish the TV network before it was defeated in December 1949. The incoming Robert Menzies-led Liberal-Country Party coalition, which was to hold power for the next 23 years, changed the industry structure by also permitting the establishment of  American-style commercial stations.
The economic situation at the time that TV was established in Australia exerted a pivotal influence on the foundation and subsequent history of the industry. When the decision was made to go ahead with granting the first licences for broadcast TV in the early 1950s, Australia was in a recession, with severe shortages of labour and materials and an underdeveloped heavy industrial base, and in this context TV was seen as a drain away from more fundamental projects.
The Menzies government was concerned about the long-term viability of the new industry and worried that it might be called on to bail out struggling stations and networks if the economy deteriorated. Consequently, it decided to grant the initial commercial TV licences to established print media proprietors, with the expectation that these companies would, if necessary, be able to subsidize the new TV stations from their existing (and highly profitable) press operations.
Meanwhile, in 1949, the first large-scale public demonstrations of the medium took place when the Shell company sponsored a series of closed-circuit broadcasts in capital cities produced by Frank Cave. These broadcasts were elaborate, usually opened by a local politician, and featured many people appearing on camera – singing, playing instruments, and giving demonstrations of cooking, sport, and magic tricks.
Buoyed by the success of these tests, in March 1950, the Astor Radio Corporation embarked upon a tour of 200 regional towns with a mobile broadcast unit, giving a series of 45-minute demonstration programs, allowing local performers and members of the public to appear on camera.
In January 1953, in response to increasing pressure from the commercial lobby, the Menzies government amended the Broadcasting Act 1948 to allow for the granting of commercial licences, thus providing the legislative framework for a dual system of TV ownership. This structure was directly modeled on the long-established two-tiered structure of Australian broadcast radio—one tier being the stations in a new national, government-funded TV network run by the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), and the other tier being privately owned commercial stations that drew their income from advertising revenue.
Commercial TV licences were nominally overseen by the Australian Broadcasting Control Board (ABCB), a government agency responsible for the regulation of broadcasting standards and practices, while technical standards (such as broadcast frequencies) were administered by the Postmaster-General's Department. The ABC, as an independent government authority, was not subject to the regulation of the ABCB and instead answered directly to the Postmaster-General and ultimately to the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs (a situation that provoked bitter complaints from commercial radio in the mid-1970s when the ABC established its controversial youth station Double Jay).
In 1954, the Menzies Government formally announced the introduction of the new two-tiered TV system—a government-funded service run by the ABC, and two commercial services in Sydney and Melbourne, with the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne being a major driving force behind the introduction of television to Australia.
TCN-9 Sydney began test transmissions on 16 September 1956 and officially commenced broadcasting on 27 October. HSV7 Melbourne became the first television station to broadcast to viewers in Melbourne on 4 November, soon followed by ABV-2 then GTV9 on 19 January 1957.  Sydney station ABN-2 also started broadcasting in November. All of these stations were operational in time for the 1956 Melbourne Summer Olympics opening ceremony, on 22 November 1956. ATN-7 started in December.
An interview with Mrs Edna Everage (a comic creation of performing artist Barry Humphries) was one of the programmes screened on HSV-7's first day of programming in 1956. The character went on to great success in the United Kingdom and later, the United States.
Videotape technology was still in its infancy when Australian television was launched in 1956 and video recorders did not become widely available to Australian TV stations until the 1960s. For the first few years, the only available method for capturing TV programs was the kinescope process, in which a fixed movie camera filmed broadcasts screened on a specially adjusted TV monitor. Similarly, the playback of pre-recorded programs to air was only possible at this stage through the telecine process, in which films or kinescoped TV recordings were played back on a movie screen which was monitored by a TV camera.
Because of these limitations, it was relatively difficult and expensive to record and distribute local programming, so the majority of locally produced content was broadcast live-to-air. Very little local programming from these first few years of Australian TV broadcasting was recorded and in the intervening years, the majority of that material has since been lost or destroyed. Even the footage of the 'first' Australian TV broadcast with Bruce Gyngell on Channel 9, Sydney (see image above) is a fabrication—according to Gerald Stone the kinescope film of the actual September 1956 broadcast was lost and the footage that exists today is a considerably more polished re-enactment, made a year later.
Most programs in this early period were based on popular radio formats—musical variety and quiz formats were the most popular.
In the first decade after the first TV licences were granted, the federal government and the ABCB did not act to enforce local content quotas, and such measures were resisted by the commercial sector. As a result, Australian TV was soon dominated by material imported from the United States and (to a far smaller extent) Great Britain. In this period nearly every TV drama screened in Australia came from the US and the few programs that were made locally were almost all produced by the ABC. In other formats, the few locally produced programs made by or for commercial stations were typically low-cost copies of proven American talk/variety or quiz show formats. By the early 1960s, at least 80% of all Australian TV content was sourced from the US and not surprisingly American programs consistently topped the ratings.
These changes led to a significant concentration of cross-media ownership. By 1960, the Packer family's Consolidated Press group controlled Channels 9 in Melbourne and Sydney (the flagship stations that formed the basis of the Nine Network), Melbourne's Herald and Weekly Times group owned HSV-7, and the Fairfax newspaper group controlled ATN-7 in Sydney. In the view of some media historians, these arrangements established a pattern of ""high-level political allegiances between commercial broadcasters and Liberal-National Party governments"" and that, as a result, the  ABCB ""was left very weak and uncertain in its capacity to control broadcaster conduct and exhibited strong symptoms of regulatory capture, or over-identification with the industry it regulated"".
In 1963, the Senate Select Committee on the Encouragement of Australian Productions for Television, chaired by Senator Seddon Vincent (known as the Vincent Committee) presented its report to federal parliament and its findings painted a bleak picture for local producers—the Committee found that 97% percent of all television drama shown on Australian TV between 1956 and 1963 was imported from the United States, and it criticised the ABCB for failing to use its powers to enforce local content standards on television broadcasters, particularly the commercial stations. The Vincent Report recommended a sweeping program of reforms but none were implemented by the Menzies Government at that time.
The advent of TV effectively destroyed Australia's once thriving radio production industry within a few years, and the absence of local production quotas for TV in this formative period compounded the problem. Faced with almost unbeatable competition from American-made programming, local technical and creative professionals in radio were unable to make the transition to the new medium, as many of their American and British counterparts had done when TV was introduced there.
Those Australian producers who did try to break into TV faced almost insurmountable challenges. Imported American and British programs benefited from high budgets, an international talent pool, and huge economies of scale, thanks to their very large domestic markets (relative to Australia), established worldwide distribution networks; additionally, since most American production houses and networks were based in Los Angeles, they had access to resources and expertise built up over decades by the Hollywood movie studios. These disadvantages were further exacerbated by the fact that American producers and networks offered Australian channels significant discount rates on bundled programming. Taken as a whole, these factors meant that local producers were faced with a relative production-cost ratio on the order of 10:1 or more in favour of the imported product.
Some sense of the scale of this ""resource gap"" can be gained by comparing the budgets of contemporary American and Australian TV programs. The pilot of the 1967 satirical sketch comedy series Laugh-In reportedly cost about US$200,000.At the top end of the scale, in 1966 Desilu Studios spent almost US$1 million on the two pilot episodes for the renowned science fiction series Star Trek – the first pilot ""The Cage"" (which was rejected by NBC) cost more than US$600,000 and the set for the bridge of the Enterprise alone reportedly cost US$60,000; the second pilot, ""Where No Man Has Gone Before"" cost around US$300,000.
By comparison, the budget for the pilot episode of the 1964 Australian topical revue series The Mavis Bramston Show was just AU£1500. Adjusted for inflation, this was around A$3500 in 1967 figures; given that US–Australian dollar exchange rate in 1967 was A$1.00 = US$1.12, this still would have only equated to around US$4,000—50 times less than Laugh-In.
Although by the end of the 1950s television had expanded to also include Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth, it was estimated that in 1956 less than 5% of the residents in Melbourne, and fewer than 1% in Sydney, owned a television set, which at the time cost, on average, six to ten weeks' wages. During these early years, broadcast days were very short—all stations including the ABC-only broadcast programs for a few hours each day and broadcast the test pattern for the rest of the time they were on air. Broadcast times were gradually increased over succeeding decades, although ABC did not commence 24-hour broadcasting until 1993."
Television in Australia,"Early programmes
The TV series The Adventures of Long John Silver was made in the Pagewood Studios, Sydney, for the American and British market; it was shown on the ABC in 1958. Local content was limited to talk shows, variety shows, and news & current affairs. Notable programs of the 1950s included TCN-9's long-running music variety program Bandstand, (based on the US version of the same name) hosted by radio presenter and future newsreader Brian Henderson; HSV-7's weekly sport program, (that would broadcast for the next 28 years) World of Sport; and the shorter-lived programs, including the ABC's Six O'Clock Rock, hosted by Johnny O'Keefe. The first Australian serial drama, Autumn Affair, ran for a 10-month run on ATN-7. Programming also covered religion; for example, Discovering the Bible. Several programs in the 1950s were simply adaptations of already established radio programs such as Pick a Box."
Television in Australia,"Television and programming in the 1960s
The 1960s saw the continued growth of television in Australia, particularly into regional areas. The first regional TV services began in Victoria in 1961 with the first being Gippsland's GLV-10 followed by Shepparton's GMV-6 and Bendigo's BCV-8. NBN-3 in Newcastle was the first regional service in New South Wales commencing broadcast in 1962.
While the first television services were being established in regional areas, larger cities including Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth began to receive their second and, in the mid-1960s, third stations. In order to reduce costs, networks began to merge – originally in 1957 between HSV-7 and TCN-9, but later between almost all the metropolitan stations of a certain frequency. This led to the formation of the National Television Network (forerunner to the Nine Network) and Australian Television Network (later known as the Seven Network) in 1962. Not all stations became a part of their respective networks – TVW-7 in Perth remained independent for a number of years as the sole commercial station in the city. Throughout the decade the ABC expanded transmissions to several major centres including Adelaide, Perth, Hobart, and Canberra.
Beginning in 1964, the federal government tried to address concerns about competition and local production by licensing a third station in major cities, beginning with Channel 0 in Melbourne and Channel 10 in Sydney. More third-licence stations were established in other capitals and regional cities over the next few years and by the late Sixties these stations joined forces to create Australia's third commercial network, originally known as the Independent Television System (ITS), then later changed to the 0–10 Network, and now called Network 10.
Channel 0 in Melbourne took an early lead in catering to teenage viewers and quickly became the preeminent network in pop music programming, commissioning a sequence of popular and influential local pop shows including The Go!! Show and Kommotion (1964–1967), Uptight (1968–70) and Happening '70 and its successors (1970–1972)."
Television in Australia,"The establishment of the Sydney–Melbourne co-axial cable link between Sydney and Melbourne in 1962 marked the first step in the establishment of effective national networking for Australian TV stations. The cable-supported the simultaneous live broadcast of the 5th test of the 1962–63 Ashes series to Sydney, Canberra, and Melbourne – a major milestone in Australian television history.
The introduction of satellite broadcasting in the late 1960s allowed news stories and programs to be accessed from around the world. The first live satellite transmission occurred between Australia and the United Kingdom in 1966. The first direct telecast across the Pacific from North America to Australia took place on 6 June 1967 when ""Australia Day"" at Expo 67 in Montreal was broadcast live to Australia via a US satellite link. Prime Minister Harold Holt officially opened the Australian pavilion and visitors watched events including boomerang throwing, sheep-dog trials, wood chopping contests and tennis matches with members of the Australian Davis Cup team.
In the afternoon a variety concert, 'Pop goes Australia', featured musicians Normie Rowe, Bobby Limb, Rolf Harris and The Seekers. The entire 10-hour program was televised live and several hundred thousand people across Australia sat up through the night to watch it. One newspaper reported that the picture was so clear that hundreds of viewers rang a Sydney television station to seek assurance that the pictures really were being broadcast live from Canada.
Two weeks later, on 25 June 1967, Australia participated in the historic ""Our World"" broadcast, the first live global satellite television hookup involving fourteen countries. The event is now chiefly remembered for the participation of The Beatles, who performed their new song ""All You Need Is Love"" live from the Abbey Road Studios in London. Australia's contribution showed a Melbourne tram leaving the depot for its early morning run, which caused some controversy as people felt that it was not a very exciting image of Australia. By 1970 as many as thirty-one programs were received via this manner. GTV-9 in Melbourne broke records in 1969 for the world's longest scheduled live telecast with its coverage of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, running for 163 hours, a record which has since been beaten.
Even though the dominance of imported American and British programming continued, local production gradually increased in the 1960s and several important new Australian programs were launched.  Crawford Productions' Melbourne-based police drama Homicide premiered on 20 October 1964 on HSV-7, soon followed on 11 November by the ATN-7 satirical sketch comedy series The Mavis Bramston Show (which at its peak drew an unprecedented 59% of the audience), the rural soap opera Bellbird on the ABC (1967), and for interstate viewers Graham Kennedy's In Melbourne Tonight or the Graham Kennedy Channel Nine Show. In addition to these, many programs still seen today were launched at this time including the ABC's acclaimed current affairs program Four Corners (1961) and Play School – now the country's longest-running children's show—as well as the Nine Network's Here's Humphrey, which both premiered in 1966.
Veteran actor-producer John McCallum and filmmaker Lee Robinson created the children's adventure series Skippy the Bush Kangaroo which premiered in 1968 on the Nine Network. At a reported cost of A$6000 per episode it was said to have been the most expensive Australian TV series yet produced up to that time (by comparison, the first series of Star Trek reportedly cost around US$200,000 per episode). Although Australian TV was still in black-and-white at the time, Skippy was filmed in colour with a view to overseas sales and it was the first Australian-made series to achieve significant international success, with sales to more than 80 countries worldwide, and it became the first Australian TV show to be widely screened in the USA.
Winners of the first nationally shown TV Week Logie Awards included In Melbourne Tonight host Graham Kennedy – twice, Pick-a-box host Bob Dyer, Lorrae Desmond from ABC's The Lorrae Desmond Show, Four Corners reporter Michael Charlton, Bobby Limb, Jimmy Hannan, Gordon Chater, Brian Henderson and Hazel Phillips.
Numerous television stations were launched, mainly concentrated around the southern and eastern parts of the country. By the turn of the decade, the takeup of television had increased dramatically – by 1960 up to 70% of homes in Sydney and Melbourne had a television set. Following its introduction to regional centres and other capital cities through the late 1950s and 1960s over 90% of Australian homes in established markets had a television set. The new medium had also become highly lucrative to advertisers.
In 1967 the NSWRFL grand final became the first football grand final of any code to be televised live in Australia. The Nine Network had paid $5,000 for the broadcasting rights. That same year, ATV-0 telecast the Pakenham races in colour under the supervision of the Broadcasting Control Board.
The first fully equipped – permanent – colour studios and post-production facilities were set up in 1969 at Video Tape Corporation in Sydney (VTC), by executives that decamped from TEN.  Although the output was hobbled to monochrome until 1974, many original long and short-form productions were completed over the years until its closure and eventual absorption into other companies in the late 1980s.
Test broadcasting of colour began in the late 1960s. The full changeover to colour transmission did not occur until 1975."
Television in Australia,"Television and programming in the 1970s
Following the new medium's establishment in most major metropolitan and regional centres, television continued to expand to remote areas, most notably those in the northern and western parts of Australia – Darwin, for example, did not receive television until ABD-6 and NTD-8 launched in 1971. Similarly, VEW-8 launched in Kalgoorlie on 18 June 1971, and ITQ-8 launched in Mount Isa on 11 September 1971. The youngest network, the 0/10 Network, as it was then known, launched the controversial sex-melodrama serial Number 96 in March 1972. The success of this program led to this third network becoming commercially viable.
In 1969, a group of ex-network executives pooled together to create Video-Tape Corporation (VTC) in East Roseville. This was to be the first end-to-end 'fully electronic' (no film) colour video facility in the region, intended to be up and running with studios, audio, OB and post-production facilities to feed the emerging colour broadcast industry. To accommodate producers and film aesthetics, VTC also installed comprehensive 'film-to-tape' (telecine) capabilities as they grew. However the networks and government were locked in their own battles, and despite being ready for full-colour operation from around 1971, VTC was hobbled until 1973–74 before the content would ever reach ""the masses"". Around that same time, Royce Smeale/ECV arrived to offer a complementary service with more emphasis on production and OB services.
In 1972 it was announced that all stations would move to colour on 1 March 1975, using the European PAL standard mandated in 1968. The slogan used to sell colour television to the Australian public was 'March first into colour'. Australia was to have one of the fastest change-overs to colour television in the world – by 1978 over 64% of households in Sydney and Melbourne had colour television sets.
Government subsidies provided for the production of local series led to a boom in Australian-produced content. Some of the most popular series included Crawford Productions police dramas Homicide, Division 4 which started during the 1960s and Matlock Police which began in 1971; variety series Young Talent Time; comedy/variety series Hey Hey It's Saturday, which ran for 28 years until 1999, music show Countdown; soap operas Bellbird which had started in late 1967, Number 96 and The Box, and the World War II-themed The Sullivans. Against the Wind, the first major mini-series produced for commercial television, was shown on the Seven Network. Later hospital drama The Young Doctors ran for 1396 episodes between 1976 and 1983, becoming at the time it ended Australia's longest-running drama series.
Graham Kennedy returned to the Nine Network after his departure from In Melbourne Tonight with The Graham Kennedy Show in 1973, but was banned from appearing on television in 1975 after an infamous 'crow-call' incident. Kennedy subsequently returned in 1977 as the host of Blankety Blanks. In 1979, commercial stations were mandated to provide 'C'-classified programming targeted at children between 4-5pm, and a minimum of 30 minutes of pre-school programming prior to that. These regulations saw the establishment of a number of children's series including Simon Townsend's Wonder World and Shirl's Neighbourhood.
News and current affairs, particularly on commercial television, grew significantly – the Nine Network's A Current Affair, hosted by Mike Willesee began in November 1971, while 60 Minutes, on the same network, began in 1979. In March 1972, Brisbane station BTQ-7 claimed the first one-hour newscast in Australia. The one-hour newscast format was also later adopted by regional station NBN, Newcastle, and capital city television stations TEN-10 Sydney and ATV-0 Melbourne.
A special Gold Logie Award was awarded to the Apollo 11 crew in 1970, alongside actors Barry Crocker and Maggie Tabberer. Other Gold Logie winners included Gerard Kennedy, Tony Barber, Graham Kennedy, Pat McDonald, Ernie Sigley and Denise Drysdale in the first awards presentation shown in colour, Don Lane, Jeanne Little, and Bert Newton.
Sports broadcasting became increasingly sophisticated through the 1970s. ABC, the Seven Network and the Nine Network joined to broadcast the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal, with the opening and closing ceremonies telecast live, and highlights packages shown each night. During November of the same year, RTS-5a commenced transmissions in Riverland, with GTW-11 launching in Geraldton on 21 January 1977.
In 1977 the Victorian Football League Grand Final was shown live to Melbourne viewers for the first time. As with the Olympics, the 1978 Commonwealth Games in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada were shown in the form of highlights packages on ABC TV.
The Special Broadcasting Service, originally a group of radio stations broadcasting government information to ethnic minorities in Sydney and Melbourne, began test transmissions on ABC in the two cities – mainly showing foreign-language programming on Sunday mornings."
Television in Australia,"Television and programming in the 1980s
The country's second national public broadcaster, the Special Broadcasting Service, launched Channel 0/28 in Sydney and Melbourne in October 1980. The new station, aimed at Australia's growing multicultural population, placed a much heavier emphasis on subtitled or foreign-language content. The network expanded to cover Canberra and Goulburn in 1983, followed by Brisbane, Adelaide, Newcastle, Wollongong and the Gold Coast in June 1985. It is now available in most areas.
Although Australia had seen the introduction of the satellite in the 1960s, 1986 saw the introduction of a new, domestic satellite called AUSSAT. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation and other commercial broadcasters were able to broadcast to the more remote areas of Australia without needing to set up a new station, and by the end of 1986 the Australian Broadcasting Corporation were broadcasting both television and radio to remote areas of Australia. By 1980, commercial television in Australia accounted for 33% of all mainstream advertising; this was a significant rise from the introduction of television in 1960 when it was accountable for only 15% of advertising revenue.
The newly relaunched Network 10, with Rupert Murdoch controlling the flagship stations TEN-10 and ATV-10, aggressively challenged the long-held dominance of the Seven and Nine networks with the commissioning of several large-budget mini-series, many produced by the Kennedy-Miller  partnership; the expansion of news and current affairs coverage; securing the exclusive Australian television rights to the 1984 and 1988 Summer Olympic Games; and a strong line-up of Hollywood blockbuster movies and mini-series. The 1980s were a huge step up for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, sealing the contracts for both Live Aid and the 1986 Commonwealth Games, live from Edinburgh.
In 1983 a two-hour experiment was conducted, in which the Seven Network televised a series of 3D films.
The Australian soap opera Neighbours was first broadcast on the Seven Network on 18 March 1985. The show's storylines concern the domestic and professional lives of the people who live and work in the fictional suburb of Erinsborough, Melbourne. Seven decided to commission the show following the success of Watson's other soap opera, Sons and Daughters. Neighbours underperformed in the Sydney market and it struggled for four months before Seven cancelled it. The show was immediately bought by rival network, Ten. Ten began screening Neighbours on 20 January 1986. Neighbours has since become the longest-running series in Australian television and attained great success in the United Kingdom and launched the careers of several international stars, including Kylie Minogue, Guy Pearce, Russell Crowe, Natalie Imbruglia and Margot Robbie to name a few.
The soap opera Home and Away has been produced in Sydney by the Seven Network since July 1987. It premiered in January 1988 and is the second longest-running drama on Australian television, winning more than 30 Logie Awards. The show initially focused on the characters of Pippa and Tom Fletcher who ran the Summer Bay Caravan Park and lived there with a succession of foster children, most notably their adopted daughter Sally, played by Kate Ritchie. Other notable actors who have starred in the series include Heath Ledger, Julian McMahon and Naomi Watts.
The late 1980s saw the ownership changeover for many commercial and regional stations. Six main ownership groups emerged, three for commercial broadcasters and three for regional broadcasters This was the beginning of aggregation for Australian television."
Television in Australia,"Television and programming in the 1990s
The 1990s saw a boom in Australian-made drama, which included Halifax f.p., Stingers, Water Rats, SeaChange, All Saints, and the long running police drama Blue Heelers which ran from 1993 to 2006, one of the longest running Australian programs, equaling Homicide's record of 510 episodes; a record set two decades earlier. A number of successful comedy programs also aired during the 1990s, including Fast Forward, Full Frontal, The Late Show and Good News Week. Hey Hey It's Saturday ended its 28-year run in November 1999. One of the most significant developments in terms of high-quality Australian programming was the establishment by the Federal Government of the Commercial Television Production Fund.
One of the most significant changes for regional television in Australia began in the 1990s with the introduction of aggregation. Instead of being covered by a single commercial channel, regional license areas would combine to provide two or three stations in line with metropolitan areas. As a result, most regional areas went from one to three channels, although some, particularly outside eastern states New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland, remained with two or even only one commercial station.
The first license area to aggregate was that of southern New South Wales, on 31 March 1989, followed by Queensland on 31 December 1990, northern New South Wales on 31 December 1991, Victoria on 1 January 1992, and Tasmania in 1994 (two stations only). Some areas too small to be properly aggregated, such as Darwin, Mildura or rural South Australia, however, either applied for a second license or introduced a supplementary second service run by the existing local station. Following aggregation in 1995, Sunshine Television was purchased by Seven Network Limited.
Community television was introduced to Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth in 1994. The stations, which all broadcast on channel 31, were allocated long-term temporary licences until new legislation introduced in 1997 permitted permanent licences to be granted. Briz 31 was the first community television station to launch in Australia, on 31 July 1994. C31 Melbourne and Access 31 in Perth followed in 1994 and 1999 respectively, along with a number of other stations in some capital and regional cities. The most recent to launch was Sydney's TVS. Throughout the early 1990s, SBS TV coverage continued to expand to include the Latrobe Valley, Spencer Gulf, Darwin, northeast Tasmania, Cairns and Townsville.
During the 1990s the first subscription television services were introduced to Australia. The first license was issued to Galaxy Television, which started in 1993, providing services to most metropolitan areas by 1995.  Other major providers include Foxtel, Optus Television, and AUSTAR, all of which were introduced in 1995.
Subscription television allowed customers to have access to more channels. For example, PSN (later Fox Sports) was launched in 1995 and ESPN in 1996, featuring Super 12 (rugby union), NFL (American football) and NBA (basketball).
The advent of pay television in Australia resulted in the Super League war which was fought in and out of court during the mid-1990s by the News Ltd-backed Super League and Kerry Packer-backed Australian Rugby League organisations over broadcasting rights, and ultimately control of the top-level professional rugby league football competition of Australasia. This resulted in the greatest and most costly set-piece confrontation to shake the corporate landscape of Australia.
Galaxy folded in 1998 and was subsequently absorbed by Foxtel. Despite recent growth, subscription television in Australia still has relatively few subscribers."
Television in Australia,"Television and programming in the 2000s
The 2000 Summer Olympics resulted in huge ratings for its broadcaster (the event was hosted in Sydney) for the Seven Network – over 6.5 million Australians watched the telecast of opening and closing ceremonies, which were amongst the most-watched programs in television history and helped Seven defeat the Nine Network in ratings terms for the first time in more than two decades. The broadcast also ran on the short-lived C7 Sport subscription channel. The Dream with Roy and HG was a sports/comedy talk show, broadcast every night during the Sydney 2000 (and subsequent Salt Lake 2002 and Athens 2004 Olympics) presented by Australian comedy duo Roy and HG which achieved great popularity during the Games.
The turn of the millennium introduced digital television to Australia, as well as the transition to widescreen standard-definition and high-definition television production. Community stations also began to receive permanent transmitter licences, replacing temporary licences that were renewed yearly. At this time it was thought that allowing Commercial Multicasting would be detrimental so the publicly owned networks (ABC and SBS) were the only networks that were allowed to create new digital SD Channels. This was only revised after Digital Television Uptake was not as high as expected in many areas, and from 1 January 2009, Network 10, Nine and Seven were allowed to create alternative SD channels.
Many successful Australian shows were created during the 2000s, including ABC comedies like Kath & Kim, CNNNN, Summer Heights High, Spicks and Specks and The Chaser's War on Everything, Network 10's Skithouse, Russell Coight's All Aussie Adventures, Thank God You're Here, H2O: Just Add Water & The Secret Life of Us, which led to the creation of many local versions throughout the world, and the growth of reality television, especially Big Brother Australia and Australian Idol. Australian content on subscription television also grew, with shows such as the Logie Award winning Love My Way. Enough Rope with Andrew Denton, a television interview show broadcast on ABC, aired from 2003 to 2008.
Amongst the new digital 'multichannels', one of the earliest was the SBS World News Channel in 2002, providing news bulletins in languages other than English. In 2003 Tasmanian Digital Television launched, providing Tasmanian viewers a third commercial station, and nationally available stations Fly TV and the ABC Kids launched, later to be eventually shut down due to funding issues and replaced in 2005 by ABC TV Plus. Mildura Digital Television, similar to TDT, launched at the start of 2006. Sydney also began testing datacasting transmissions with Digital 44 in 2003. While digital television boomed in areas that received a third channel and with the subscription television services, growth in other areas has been slow, with analogue shut-down dates pushed back several times. A number of new community stations were also opened, including C31 Adelaide in April 2004 and Television Sydney in February 2006.
In October 2005, Network 10 announced that the morning show entitled Good Morning Australia would be cancelled at the end of the year, after a 14-year run. Although Bert Newton was offered ongoing employment at Network 10, he joined the Nine Network to host the short-lived game show Bert's Family Feud, until 23 May 2007 when the program was axed.
The Nine Network, the traditional ratings leader, suffered ratings losses by the mid-2000s, losing out to the Seven Network, which became the most popular Australian network by early 2007, thanks to its ""Seven in '07"" campaign. This was not the only loss by the network: the death of its CEO Kerry Packer in late 2005 led to network personality Eddie McGuire becoming the head of the network, and the network lost AFL broadcast rights to the Seven and Ten networks in the largest Australian television rights deal in history, worth A$780 million. In mid-2007, National Indigenous Television launched as Australia's 'third public broadcaster', after the ABC and SBS, replacing Indigenous Community Television on the Optus Aurora remote satellite service."
Television in Australia,"High-definition TV
The move to high-definition television broadcasting came to the forefront when Network 10 announced its intentions to create the first dedicated HD multichannel 10 HD on 14 September 2007 with a December 2007 Launch date.
Although 10 HD was initially expected to be the first new commercial television channel in metropolitan areas of Australia since 1988, it was instead beaten to the punch by 7HD. Following the announcement by the Ten Network, Network Seven also announced its previously hidden plans to launch a dedicated HD channel on 15 September 2007 and pushed the launch date forward to 10 October. 7HD was the first dedicated HD multichannel launched, 2 months earlier than the Channel 10 equivalent. The Nine Network's move to a HD channel was considered sluggish by industry insiders, taking until March 2008. The Network was more excited by its plans to introduce a new SD channel in 2009 called 9Go!, which is when digital multicasting restrictions were scheduled to be lifted from the commercial stations. 9Go! was released to the public on 9 August, spelling the end of 9HD which was replaced by the previous HD version of Nine.
2009 also saw the launch of four other channels, 7two, a general entertainment channel, SBS Viceland available in SD, ABC Me, a dedicated children's television channel available in SD, and 10 Bold, a dedicated 24-hour sport channel and a subsidiary of Network 10 available in both HD and SD, replacing Ten HD. ABC Me, unlike commercial channels, is not constrained by local content quotas."
Television in Australia,"Television and programming in the 2010s
In the early stages of the 2010s, several governmental analysts observed that commercial networks were having trouble making the transition to digital television and subsequently, a $250m rebate was implemented on their licensing fees. The government-funded stations, ABC and SBS, received increased funding in the closing stages of the 2000s to enable them to make the transition to digital TV. Meanwhile, the community station C31 received no government assistance or funding to make the transition; this still remains a source of controversy.
Other issues were noted such as the increased cost of producing local content on commercial networks. For example: it costs roughly $800,000 to produce one hour of local content such as Underbelly and Packed to the Rafters, in comparison to a mere $100,000 to purchase one hour of the US produced Two and a Half Men, the former example screening very often during the off ratings period 2009–10. The cost disparity has led many to question the viability of commercial networks in the future of delivering and investing in locally produced content and has also brought their financial arrangements with business and industry groups into question. Meanwhile, ABC and SBS quickly began producing very successful local content with shows such as Review, Lawrence Leung's Choose Your Own Adventure, Hungry Beast and many more publicly funded local programs, produced in Australia, with Australian cast and crews, adding to the increasing health of Australian film and television industries.
During January 2010, the ABC announced its long-awaited 24-hour news channel, ABC News to launch in July 2010. It will broadcast on the current ABC HD channel and according to the ABC, ""Australia's first free-to-air 24-hour television news channel"". Following technical issues at ABC's new playout facility MediaHub, the ABC News launch date was pushed to 22 July 2010.  ABC News began to broadcast a three-minute loop promo on Channel 24 on 6 July 2010.
On 19 August 2010, the Seven Network announced their third digital channel, 7mate, which replaced 7HD. 7mate is aimed at males between 16 and 49, and launched with the AFL Grand Final on 25 September.  The Nine Network has also launched a third digital channel called 9Gem, broadcasting only in HD and replacing 9HD. 9Gem is targeted at middle-aged women. On 26 August, Network 10 announced their plans for a channel to replace One SD. The new channel, 10 Peach, is aimed at a youth audience and carries flagship TEN programming including Neighbours. Eleven launched on 11 January 2011.
In 2011, the Seven Network created history by winning all 40 weeks of a television ratings season for the first time since OzTAM was established in 2001.
On 12 December 2012, NITV started its free-to-air broadcasts under new ownership of SBS.
On 10 December 2013, the analogue TV shutdown completed all around Australia.
On 19 August 2015, then Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull introduced a bill retracting the legal obligation for broadcasters to broadcast their primary channel in standard definition.
On 29 August 2015, Racing.com was launched owned by Racing Victoria and Seven West Media.
In October 2015, the Nine Network announced their fourth digital channel, 9Life. Launching on 26 November, 9Life is a dedicated lifestyle and reality channel on Channel 94. Around the same time, 9HD was relaunched on Channel 90.
On 28 February 2016, the Seven Network launched a fifth digital channel, 7flix, which is a dedicated movie and entertainment channel on Channel 76.
On 2 March 2016, Network 10 relaunched 10 HD on Channel 13.
On 10 May 2016, the Seven Network relaunched 7HD in Melbourne and Adelaide on Channel 70. On 16 December of the same year, it was relaunched on the same channel in Sydney, Brisbane and Perth."
Television in Australia,"Television and programming in the 2020s
With the rapid spread of COVID-19 in the early months of 2020, television production in Australia (as it did worldwide) suffered greatly due to health requirements; many programs such as Neighbours and Home and Away were forced to suspend filming in an effort to keep their respective cast and crews safe from infection. From the first (of many) 'health lockdowns' until the later months of 2021, many studios were closed or reorganised to suit the legal requirements for spread prevention. As vaccination rates against the virus increased, many of the studios began to reopen and production rates have increased, with Neighbours and Home and Away restarting production in October/November 2021."
Television in Australia,"Broadcasting
Television broadcasting in Australia is currently available as digital, colour television, via a range of means including terrestrial, satellite, and cable television services. Both free-to-air and subscription channels/networks are available. Analogue television has been phased out, with the last service being switched off in December 2013.
In most areas, there is a choice of three free-to-air commercial broadcasters as well as two national public broadcasters, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the Special Broadcasting Service. A third, recently established, National Indigenous Television service is available in many remote areas.
Commercial television is dominated by three major metropolitan-based networks, the Seven Network, Network 10, which own stations in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, and the Nine Network which owns stations in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Darwin, Adelaide and Perth. In addition to its metropolitan assets, Seven owns regional stations in New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia, the ACT and Queensland and Nine owns and operates its regional station NBN in Northern NSW and the Gold Coast.
Regional television in Australia consists of independently owned networks 'affiliated' to metropolitan stations. WIN Television is the country's largest regional broadcaster in terms of population reach, followed by Southern Cross Austereo and Imparja Television. Some regional centres have three commercial broadcasters, while others — such as regional Western Australia and remote central & eastern Australia — have two, and others — such as Mount Gambier and Broken Hill — have only one commercial broadcaster. In two-broadcaster markets, the two incumbent commercial broadcasters applied for and were granted a third, digital-only license. In single-broadcaster markets, each incumbent commercial broadcaster was granted a second, and later a third license, to provide additional programming.  This has resulted in the establishment of a number of channels including Tasmanian Digital Television, Mildura Digital Television, Darwin Digital Television and West Digital Television.
Subscription television in Australia is provided in most areas by Foxtel with Optus Television also serving Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. A number of smaller operators including SelecTV, TransACT, UBI World TV, and Neighbourhood Cable provide niche or local services.  Most operators provide the same or similar channels. There are few genuine local channels and few independent channels.  One exception is the World Movies channel owned by a consortium including SBS Television and companies owned by Kerry Stokes and the Australian Radio Network.
Community television progressively launched between the 1980s to the 2000s. The sector is represented nationally by the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia. Community stations include TVS, C31 Melbourne, 31 Brisbane, C31 Adelaide and Access 31; many recognisable mainstream personalities originated from community television, including Rove McManus and Wil Anderson and Kayne Tremills"
Television in Australia,"Cable television
Cable television has been available in Australia since the early 1990s, with Galaxy TV being the first. It became insolvent in 1997, due to decreasing popularity after the launch of Foxtel and Austar in May 1995, two cable services that offered more variety than Galaxy TV.  Foxtel commenced by supplying programs to Galaxy's subscribers on an interim basis. In 1999 Foxtel was able to significantly boost its customer base by acquiring Galaxy TV's subscribers from the Australis Media liquidator and commenced offering its services on a satellite television platform. There is currently one major subscription television provider in Australia, Foxtel. Foxtel bought Austar in 2012 and has now completed the merger of its operations. Other minor providers include TransACT, Neighbourhood Cable, and SelecTV.
In the capital cities, cable is the more predominant form of pay television distribution. In regional areas or in new or outskirted areas of cities, satellite is far more common.
Due to its history, financial backing, and market dominance, most local versions of channels are either owned directly by Foxtel or through related companies.
In terms of coverage, Foxtel's cable network covers parts of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth. Optus's network covers small parts of Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane, though its restrictive subscription rules mean that many people living in apartments or confined living areas may be unable to connect.
Austar (now Foxtel) is available by satellite in most of regional and rural Australia, but does have a small cable network in the city of Darwin. TransACT is only available in Canberra, where a custom cable network was developed. A similar situation used to exist in Perth where a small area was covered by Bright Telecommunications (though they closed down after lack of funding) as well in parts of Geelong, Ballarat and Mildura that are reached by Neighbourhood Cable."
Television in Australia,"Satellite television
Satellite television in Australia has proven to be a far more feasible option than cable television, perhaps due to the vast distances between population centres, (although Canada, which also has large distances between population centres, has a relatively high cable television penetration rate). The first service to come online in Australia was Galaxy, which was later taken over by cable television giant Foxtel, which now operates both cable and satellite services to all state capital cities (except Darwin and Hobart) and the whole of Western Australia. Its main metropolitan rival was Optus Vision, while rural areas are served by Austar, both of which just rebroadcast Foxtel as of 2005. In 2006 SelecTV began operating, aiming at providing comparatively low-cost packages and catering to specialised market segments."
Television in Australia,"Internet television
Internet television in Australia is the digital distribution of movies and television content via the Internet. In Australia, internet television is provided by a number of generalist, subscription-based streaming service providers, in addition to several niche providers that focus on specific genres. Australia's five major free-to-air television networks also all offer catch up TV of previously broadcast content to watch via their webpages and apps, and a number of ISPs and other companies offer IPTV – the live streaming of television channels sourced from Australia and elsewhere."
Television in Australia,"Broadcasting programming synopsis
Australia has produced numerous notable television series and miniseries, with the most prominent programs coming from the comedy, police, and medical drama genres."
Television in Australia,"Serials and dramas
One of the earliest Australian police drama series was Homicide, produced in Melbourne by Crawford Productions, widely viewed as having revolutionised Australian television drama production. It was followed by Division 4 and Matlock Police, which also enjoyed great popularity and long runs both locally and overseas. Other successful police drama series have included Cop Shop, Police Rescue, Blue Heelers, Water Rats and Stingers. Medical dramas have also proved popular with audiences, including series such as A Country Practice, The Flying Doctors, GP and All Saints."
Television in Australia,"Mini-serials
Notable miniseries have included Against the Wind, All the Rivers Run, Bodyline, Brides of Christ, The Dismissal and The Timeless Land, and in more recent times Curtin, Bastard Boys and The Slap."
Television in Australia,"Soap opera
Australian soap opera success began with Bellbird in 1967 which was a moderate but consistent success. Following this the huge success of Number 96 in 1972 prompted creation of the similar The Box in 1974. These serials were all cancelled in 1977. Following this successful serials included The Young Doctors, The Sullivans, Prisoner, Sons and Daughters, Neighbours and Home and Away. This later group were also screened internationally, finding particular success in the United Kingdom."
Television in Australia,"Comedy
Comedy series have included The Aunty Jack Show, The Paul Hogan Show, The Norman Gunston Show, and more recently The D-Generation, Frontline, The Glass House, Bogan Hunters, Summer Heights High, Please Like Me and popular series Thank God You're Here, which has since been adapted to a number of countries around the world, and already several of them have brought in creators and stars of shows like Kath & Kim to help produce, direct, star, or serve as consultants on their versions."
Television in Australia,"Scheduling
The scheduling for each network is quite diverse: while the Seven Network, Nine Network, and affiliates have an hour of news and current affairs at 6:00 pm, Network 10 has news at 5:00 pm while ABC has news at 7:00 pm and SBS has world news at 6:30 pm. The primetime slot in Australia runs from 6:00 pm to midnight, with the most popular programming shown from around 7:30 pm to 10:30 pm.
Many programs shown in these times on commercial networks are taken from American television, while ABC has a mixture of Australian and British productions. SBS, as a multicultural broadcaster, shows a range of programs produced locally and overseas in a number of languages. Imported programming has typically been shown months after its debut in the United States or the United Kingdom, however, in recent times networks have begun to air programs within hours or days of their overseas counterparts.
Seven and Nine have rival breakfast shows that run from 5:30–9:00 am while 10 airs repeated shows from the previous day at 6:00 am–8:30 am, followed by morning shows on all three networks until midday. ABC now broadcasts a breakfast news show (ABC News Breakfast) while on ABC TV Plus and ABC Me there are children's programming, also on 9Go! and Nickelodeon, Australian children's programming currently airs on 7flix, 9Go! and Nickelodeon, meanwhile on SBS foreign-language bulletins are shown for most of the morning, followed by foreign-language films and documentaries.
Most scheduling is consistent across Australia's three time zones – this means that South Australia and the Northern Territory sees programming half an hour behind Australian Eastern Time, while in Western Australia programs are seen two hours behind. When daylight saving is in effect, because it is only partially observed, Queensland gets programming one hour later, Northern Territory sees it 90 minutes behind and Western Australia receives its shows three hours behind. Consequently, many national news bulletins shown live to eastern states are seen on considerable delay in Western Australia (with the notable exception of The Midday Report, of which a second edition is produced for WA). The time delay can often deny viewers in central and western areas the opportunity to participate in interactive shows such as The Voice.
One exception to this rule are subscription channels, which always run on Australian Eastern Time regardless of the local service or time zone. The recent introduction of timeshift channels delayed two hours for all viewers, particularly on Foxtel, allowed WA viewers to see programs in sync with other states during standard time (although due to WA's non-observance of daylight saving, programs air one hour ahead during this time). However, ABC News is live across the nation with no delay, the only free-to-air television channel to do this."
Television in Australia,"News and current affairs
News
Both national public broadcasters, the ABC and SBS, produce news services. The ABC provides both local and national news bulletins in the form of ABC News at 5:30pm, 7pm and The Midday Report, presented from Sydney and state capitals. SBS broadcasts a nightly hour-long World News Australia bulletin at 6.30pm, followed by a later, half-hour edition at 10.30pm.
Higher ratings for earlier bulletins from commercial broadcasters including the Seven Network and Nine Network have prompted fierce ratings competition. For most years up until the mid-1990's Nine News was traditionally the highest-rating news service in Australia, but in 2005 it was overtaken by Seven News before it regained the lead on a national basis in 2013.
Seven News produces Seven Early News, Seven Morning News, Seven News at 4 and Seven News local bulletins in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Cairns, Townsville and Mackay. The network's news bulletins and breakfast program Sunrise compete directly with the Nine Network's offerings, which include Today and Nine Morning News, Nine Afternoon News and Nine News local bulletins. 10 News First currently produces a local hour-long weeknight bulletin of 10 News First  and on weekends it airs a national hour-long bulletin.
In Australia, there are two local 24-hour news channels. The ABC News channel is Australia's only free-to-air news channel. ABC News launched on 22 July 2010 as ABC News 24 and it features all of ABCs news and current affairs programs. ABC News is available on digital channel 24. Sky News Australia is Australia's second news channel that is only available on Foxtel, Austar, and Optus TV. The subscription based television channel draws on the resources of its shareholders news services, using content from Seven News, Nine News and Sky News from the United Kingdom, as well as reporters based in Sydney, Canberra, and Melbourne.
A number of regional television networks produce news services. WIN Television produces 20 bulletins in parts of New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, and Western Australia. NBN is the only regional broadcaster to produce a bulletin on both weeknights and weekends, in an hour-long format presented from Newcastle and seen across northern New South Wales. Seven produces news updates throughout regional New South Wales and Victoria, with its sister station producing Seven News for Western Australia. In the Northern Territory, Imparja Television shows Imparja National News. Southern Cross Seven produces a bulletin for Tasmania and regional South Australia. In addition Sky News Australia has a regional free-to-air news channel called Sky News Regional on digital channels 53 and 56 in partnership with Southern Cross Austereo and WIN Television on their TV stations."
Television in Australia,"Current affairs
Current affairs programming is shown in a broad range of formats, ranging between tabloid-style current affairs shows to investigative programs such as Four Corners.
ABC has had a long history of producing current affairs programs, including the award-winning This Day Tonight, the first regular current affairs program to be shown on Australian television and a training ground for many of Australia's best-known journalists. This Day Tonight was axed in 1978, however in the mid-1980s The 7.30 Report was launched in state-based editions (these were combined into a national program hosted by Kerry O'Brien in 1995). Four Corners, first seen in 1961, an investigative documentary series modelled on the BBC's Panorama, has also won many awards and broken stories previously not covered by other media outlets.
Other current affairs programs include news and analysis program Lateline, 7.30, Foreign Correspondent, Insiders, Offsiders and Australia Wide.
SBS also shows a number of current affairs programs, such as Dateline, the country's longest-running international current affairs program, launched in 1984. Insight, originally conceived in 1999 as a domestic current affairs program, is a discussion forum focussing on a single issue. SBS's Indigenous Media Unit produces another program titled Living Black, which covers issues relevant to Australia's indigenous community.
There are a number of commercial current affairs programs. The Seven Network, in addition to Sunrise, broadcasts Today Tonight, a tabloid current affairs program, every weeknight after its 6pm news bulletin. On the Nine Network, A Current Affair, first shown in 1971, competes directly with Today Tonight and has, since Ray Martin began presenting in 1994, provided a similar mix of content. On Sundays, 60 Minutes features a number of stories produced both locally and from its US counterpart. In the morning Sunday covers local and overseas news, politics, and current affairs, in addition to film reviews, politics, arts, and music.
Political and interview program The Bolt Report is also shown on Sunday mornings, on Network 10.
On subscription television, Sky News Australia airs a number of news commentary and analysis shows such as Agenda, Sportsline, Sky Business Report, and Sky News Eco Report. A local version of Sky News Weather Channel was launched in 1999, joined in 2006 by Fox Sports News, a 24-hour sports news channel. Squawk Australia, a business news program shown from 6.00am, is seen on CNBC Asia."
Television in Australia,"Indigenous television
In the 21st century, and especially the 2010s, programmes and series by and about Indigenous Australians proliferated. The Circuit (2007) was an early example; Redfern Now, 8MMM Aboriginal Radio, The Gods of Wheat Street (2014), Ready for This, Cleverman, Black Comedy, The Warriors, Kiki & Kitty, Total Control, KGB, Little J & Big Cuz, Mystery Road were all well received. Shari Sebbens commented that a ""golden age"" of Indigenous television is here.
The last episode of the second series of Get Krack!n, featuring Miranda Tapsell and Nakkiah Lui and co-written by Lui, trended on Twitter, outraged right wing commentator Andrew Bolt, and was widely lauded as hilarious, ground-breaking, hard-hitting satire.
National Indigenous Television (NITV) is (since 2012) a national, free-to-air channel dedicated to Indigenous stories, news, films and issues, with programming produced largely by Indigenous people, funded through SBS. In early 2016, it refreshed its brand and revamped its schedule, with an increased focus on its central charter, Indigenous news and current affairs."
Television in Australia,"Ratings
Television ratings in Australia are collected by three main organisations: OzTAM in metropolitan areas, Regional TAM in regional areas serviced by three commercial television networks, and in areas with two commercial networks, Nielsen Media Research Australia.
Ratings are collected for 40 weeks during the year, excluding a two-week break during Easter and ten weeks over summer. The majority of locally produced comedy and drama on commercial networks is shown during the ratings period.
For many years up until the mid-nineties, the Nine Network had been the ratings leader in Australia, typically followed by the Seven Network and Network 10. Subscription television and the two national broadcasters, ABC and in particular SBS, due to its special-interest nature, typically attract fewer viewers than the three commercial networks. Network 10, due to its programming line-up, has traditionally been the market leader for younger viewers.
In 2007, the Seven Network overtook its rival Nine Network in terms of average viewers, and in 2011, it became the first television network since OzTam's launch in 2001 to win all 40 weeks in a ratings season. As of 2016, it has won the last ten ratings seasons consecutively. ABC has also, since the early 2000s, seen ratings (as well as audience reach) as a major performance indicator. The Nine Network has, in the past, aggressively marketed its long-time ratings dominance through its promotional campaign ""Still the One"", which they no longer use."
Television in Australia,"Regulation
Content on Australian television is regulated by the Australian Communications and Media Authority. All codes of practice submitted to the Australian Communications and Media Authority are reviewed by the public prior to acceptance. There are different regulations for different types of content, and the main categories are divided up into Australian content, children's content, commercial broadcasting, community broadcasting, public broadcasting, and subscription television.
The regulations in place define what a broadcaster may put on-air, the time(s) of day they are allowed to broadcast specific material, and what advertisements are shown in relation to these criteria. In essence, the Australian Communications and Media Authority controls what content is shown, what time(s) of day it is shown, and who controls what is shown (i.e.: international media as opposed to Australian media).
Genre restrictions imposed by the Australian government on digital multi-channeling were lifted along with the media ownership laws passed through the Parliament of Australia on 18 October 2006. Digital-only multichannels in Australia were previously limited in the subjects they could cover, with programming identified as comedy, drama, national news, sport or entertainment, prohibited from broadcast."
Television in Australia,"See also
Digital television in Australia
High-definition television in Australia
Internet television in Australia
Subscription television in Australia
History of television
List of digital television channels in Australia"
Television in Australia,"References
External links
Free TV Australia
National Film and Sound Archive homepage
TVAus Forum
History of West Australian Television
Culture Victoria – images and text about the 50th Anniversary of Television in Australia"
Timeline of Australian history,"This is a timeline of Australian history, comprising important legal and territorial changes and political events in Australia and its predecessor states. To read about the background to these events, see history of Australia."
Timeline of Australian history,"Pre-written history
16th century
17th century
18th century
19th century
20th century
21st century
See also
List of monarchs of Australia
List of prime ministers of Australia
History of Western Australia
Timeline of Adelaide
Timeline of Brisbane
Timeline of Darwin
Timeline of Gold Coast, Queensland
Timeline of Melbourne
Timeline of Sydney
Timeline of Tasmania"
Timeline of Australian history,"
== References =="
List of governors-general of Australia,"The governor-general of Australia is the head of the executive branch of the federal government, serving as the representative of the Australian monarch (currently Charles III). The position came into being on 29 October 1900, just prior to the adoption of the new national constitution and has been held by 28 people since then. Governors-general have no fixed term, but have usually served for around five years."
List of governors-general of Australia,"Background
For the first two decades after federation, governors-general were selected solely by the British government. The monarch was consulted on the decision into the 1930s. The first four governors-general were peers; Sir Ronald Munro Ferguson (appointed 1914) was the first commoner to hold the position, although he was also later elevated to the peerage. In 1920, Billy Hughes became the first prime minister to be consulted over the governor-generalship. Stanley Bruce (1925) and Joseph Lyons (1935) either asked for or were given a list of suitable candidates to choose from.
James Scullin (1930) became the first prime minister of Australia to exercise complete discretion in the appointment; his nomination of Sir Isaac Isaacs made Australia the first Dominion to have a native-born governor-general. In 1945, John Curtin nominated Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, to the post – the first and only royal officeholder to take up the post; however, in October 1938 Prince George, Duke of Kent had been announced as the successor to Lord Gowrie with effect from November 1939, but on 11 September 1939, owing to the outbreak of the Second World War, the Duke's appointment was postponed. It never eventuated, instead Lord Gowrie continued his incumbency until 1945, creating a still-unsurpassed record term of over 9 years. A second Australian (William McKell) was appointed in 1947; he was followed by three more Britons, each chosen by Sir Robert Menzies. Menzies's fourth nomination was Richard Casey, who took office in 1965; he and all subsequent governors-general have been Australian citizens. All states except South Australia and Tasmania have provided at least one appointee. The first female governor-general, Quentin Bryce, took office in 2008.
On 16 December 2018, prime minister Scott Morrison announced that the next governor-general would be General David Hurley, then-governor of New South Wales. To provide continuity through general elections both federally and in New South Wales, Hurley succeeded General Sir Peter Cosgrove, who had planned to retire in March 2019, on 1 July 2019.
On 3 April 2024, prime minister Anthony Albanese announced that General Hurley would be succeeded on 1 July 2024 by businesswoman Sam Mostyn, the second woman to be governor-general."
List of governors-general of Australia,"List of officeholders
See also
History of Australia
Constitutional history of Australia
Governors of the Australian states
British Empire
Governor-general (links to other countries which have governors-general)"
List of governors-general of Australia,"Notes
Further reading
Christopher Cunneen (1983). Kings' Men: Australia's Governors-General from Hopetoun to Isaacs. Allen and Unwin. ISBN 0-86861-238-3.
Bill Hayden (1996). Hayden: An Autobiography. Angus & Robertson. ISBN 0-207-18769-X. (pp 515, 519, 548)"
List of governors-general of Australia,"External links
The Office of the Governor-General
The use of the reserve powers
A Mirror to the People a 58-minute documentary film on the Office of Governor-General of Australia 1999. Dir: Daryl Dellora. Features Sir William Deane, Sir Zelman Cowen, Sir Ninian Stephen. Special Commendation ATOM Awards."
Western Australian mulga shrublands,"The Western Australian Mulga shrublands is a deserts and xeric shrublands ecoregion of inland Western Australia. It is one of Australia's two mulga ecoregions, characterized by dry woodlands of mulga trees (Acacia aneura and related species) interspersed with areas of grassland and scrub."
Western Australian mulga shrublands,"Location and description
This is a hot, dry area with little rainfall.
The region consists of the Gascoyne and Murchison bioregions of the Interim Biogeographic Regionalisation for Australia (IBRA)."
Western Australian mulga shrublands,"Flora and fauna
The predominant vegetation is mulga trees, a type of acacia adapted to the hot, dry climate by means of long tap roots. In some areas the mulga trees are surrounded by Eriachne grassland.
Wildlife of the region includes birds such as red kangaroos, emus, Australian bustards and honeyeaters.
Most of the area is uninhabited but there is some mining activity and some sheep grazing, both of which cause damage to native habitats."
Western Australian mulga shrublands,"Protected areas
4.53% of the ecoregion is in protected areas. Protected areas in the ecoregion include:"
Western Australian mulga shrublands,"Barlee Range Nature Reserve
Birriliburu Indigenous Protected Area
Bullock Holes Timber Reserve
Collier Range National Park
De La Poer Range Nature Reserve
Goongarrie National Park
Matuwa and Kurrara-Kurrara Indigenous Protected Area
Mount Augustus National Park
Queen Victoria Spring Nature Reserve
Toolonga Nature Reserve
Unnamed WA46847 Nature Reserve
Wanjarri Nature Reserve"
Western Australian mulga shrublands,"References
External links
 Media related to Western Australian mulga shrublands at Wikimedia Commons
""Western Australian Mulga shrublands"". Terrestrial Ecoregions. World Wildlife Fund."
Squatting in Australia,"Squatting in Australia usually refers to a person who is not the owner, taking possession of land or an empty house. In 19th century Australian history, a squatter was a settler who occupied a large tract of Aboriginal land in order to graze livestock. At first this was done illegally, later under licence from the Crown.
In more recent times, there have been squats in the major cities such as Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney. It would be possible in theory for squatters to be charged with criminal trespass under the Inclosed Lands Protection Act, but squatters are simply evicted when they are discovered. As in England and Wales and also the United States, adverse possession exists in Australian law, although it is rarely used by squatters. This means that if a squatter lives uninterruptedly in a property for over 12 years (15 in South Australia and Victoria) and against the wishes of the owner, the ownership of the property can be claimed by the squatter."
Squatting in Australia,"Squattocracy
In the 19th century, the British government claimed to own all of Australia and tried to control land ownership, ignoring Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Farmers of livestock (some of them ex-convicts) claimed land for themselves and thus were known as squatters – the phenomenon is referred to in the song Waltzing Matilda. Maps of pastoral lands were also known as squatting maps. The successful farmers became wealthy and powerful, setting up empires which extend into the present in some cases."
Squatting in Australia,"Squatting runs
The Atlas Maps of N. South Wales, Queensland, New Zealand, Victoria and South Australia by William Owen was published in Melbourne in 1869. It provides the earliest preserved record of squatting runs in the colonies of eastern Australia and New Zealand. These maps also provide placenames for small 19th century settlements that had vanished. The New South Wales map includes the Riverine District with Squatting Runs. The colonial administration rejected squatting in 1833 but only with regards to trespass on Crown land. The Imperial Waste Lands Act 1846, known as Earl Grey's Act, established additional countries that had the status of intermediate districts and 15 squatting districts in which squatting runs could be taken up. The Waste Lands Repeal Act 1855 transferred the administration of land policy from the British Government to the colonies. In the 1840s squatters traveled along the Murrumbidgee route, which had been documented by the explorers Thomas Mitchell and Charles Sturt, in search for suitable lands."
Squatting in Australia,"1946
Following World War II, various individuals and families squatted for housing in Hobart, Melbourne, Port Kembla and Sydney in 1946. The actions were supported by the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and often resulted in more long term arrangements."
Squatting in Australia,"Canberra
The Aboriginal Tent Embassy was set up in 1972 on the lawn in front of Parliament House (now Old Parliament House) in Canberra as a protest over Aboriginal land rights. It became a squat later that year in the eyes of the law when the Australian government criminalised the occupation by amending the Trespass on Commonwealth Lands Ordinance. It was then evicted and briefly resquatted several times, before being set up again in 1973. The embassy played a part in the formation of the Aboriginal Land Rights Act of 1976. The embassy then moved to different sites but returned to its original site in 1992. It remains as an ongoing protest occupation.
The Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Squatters' Union was formed in the early 1980s. It had links to the Franklin Dam campaign and was supported by the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF). The South Vietnamese embassy at 39 National Circuit and 14 Hobart Avenue had been empty since 1975 and was occupied after a demonstration in March 1984. The empty Cambodian embassy building on Melbourne Avenue was occupied in 1985 and quickly housed 200 people. The squatters said that they would be careful with their electricity use since at the South Vietnamese embassy they had left behind an unpaid bill of over $1000."
Squatting in Australia,"Melbourne
The Squatters Union of Victoria was founded in 1981 and over the next three years coordinated over 170 squats.
Melbourne squats are usually located in the inner suburbs, like Footscray, St. Kilda and Coburg. They tend to be houses that are waiting for demolition. A well-known squat in Carlton was organised by international students in 2008. A Squatter's Handbook was produced by activists in 1993, 2001 and 2010.
The Bendigo Street housing dispute occurred in 2016. When the Government of Victoria wanted to build the East West Link road, squatters occupied a series of buildings in protest. Eventually, the road-building plans were scrapped and the government announced plans for a new package of measures to deal with homelessness."
Squatting in Australia,"Sydney
In Sydney, streets of terraced houses in areas such as the Rocks and Potts Point were squatted to prevent their demolition in the 1970s. In the inner city suburb of Pyrmont, the Old Pyrmont Cottages were squatted from the late 1970s until 1994.
Much of the Glebe estate in Glebe was scheduled for demolition as part of road-building plans in the 1970s. A Green Ban was imposed in 1972 and the first house was squatted in 1973. Glebe Point Road had an extensive influx of squatters in the 1980s before its eventual gentrification. The squatters stayed until 1987, when the Department of Main Roads (DMR) shelved the road plans. Karl Kruszelnicki squatted in Glebe. Women's Liberation Movement activists including Anne Summers and Bessie Guthrie occupied a house to use as a women's refuge on Westmoreland Street in 1974. They called it the Elsie Refuge. It was legalised and eventually received funding. A women's refuge was also squatted by the Women's Liberation Movement in Adelaide in 1974.
Also during the 1970s and 1980s, extensive parts of Woolloomooloo and Darlinghurst were also squatted, along corridors of houses bought to make way for new road works. Examples of these include ""The Compound"" in Darlinghurst and along Palmer Street in Woolloomooloo. Punks, political activists, musicians and artists also started squatting in ""The Gunnery"", a former Navy warehouse and training facility, in Woolloomooloo, during the early-to-mid-1980s. This squat, a large warehouse with several unusual spaces able to be used as theatres or other venues (thanks to its former use by the Navy) became a critical site for the development of arts and music in Sydney in the mid to late 1980s, with independent musical and art events being held there regularly. It is now an arts centre.
The activists squatting empty buildings on Broadway which were owned by South Sydney City Council were evicted in 2001, a few months after the 2000 Olympics. They had organised art exhibitions, parties, political film nights and a free café.
The Midnight Star on Parramatta Road was built in the 1920s and opened as the Homebush Theatre cinema in 1925, operating until 1959. After being used amongst other things as an ice rink and a restaurant, it became derelict in the 1990s. When squatted in 2002, it was used as an autonomous social centre, hosting music events, a cafe, a library, a free internet space and a Food Not Bombs kitchen. It was evicted in December 2002 following its use as a convergence centre for protests against the November World Trade Organization talks.
In 2003, a legal squat was organised for ten people who moved onto the site of an old incinerator at Green Square.
A five-year-old squat was peacefully evicted in March 2008, when an office block in Balmain was demolished to make way for a park. The council voted to allow the squatters to stay in the building, which they called Iceland, until the plans for demolition were in place. One of the squatters said, ""About 20 people have lived here over the years and it's been a place for band rehearsals, art projects, people practising dance routines, bike workshops. Squatting gives you a chance to think about things other than how you are going to pay the rent and ways to contribute to the world.""
The ""People's Castle"" in Redfern had a free shop and a free café before being evicted in 2010. The Redfern Aboriginal Tent Embassy was established on National Sorry Day on 26 May 2014, by Aboriginal elders protesting against the gentrification of the area. The protesters demanded affordable housing and in 2017 agreed to leave when a deal was made to build 62 homes for Aboriginal people for the sum of $70 million.
There were estimated to be more than 120,000 unoccupied houses in Sydney in 2011."
Squatting in Australia,"See also
Adverse possession in Australia"
Squatting in Australia,"References
External links
Australian Museum of Squatting"
List of the largest trading partners of Australia,"This is a list of the largest two-way trading partners of Australia, based on data released by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade for the 2022 calendar year."
List of the largest trading partners of Australia,"The largest trading partners
The 10 largest trading partners of Australia with their total trade (sum of imports and exports) in millions of Australian dollars and the total trade for all countries for the 2022 calendar year were as follows:"
List of the largest trading partners of Australia,"Top export markets
The 15 largest export markets of Australia in millions of Australian dollars for the 2022 calendar year were as follows:"
List of the largest trading partners of Australia,"Top import sources
The 15 largest import sources to Australia in millions of Australian dollars for the 2022 calendar year were as follows:"
List of the largest trading partners of Australia,"See also
List of the largest trading partners of the ASEAN
List of the largest trading partners of Canada
List of the largest trading partners of China
List of the largest trading partners of the European Union
List of the largest trading partners of Germany
List of the largest trading partners of Italy
List of the largest trading partners of the Netherlands
List of the largest trading partners of India
List of the largest trading partners of Russia
List of the largest trading partners of United Kingdom
List of the largest trading partners of the United States
List of the largest trading partners of South Korea"
List of the largest trading partners of Australia,"
== References =="
Asylum in Australia,"Asylum in Australia has been granted to many refugees since 1945, when half a million Europeans displaced by World War II were given asylum. Since then, there have been periodic waves of asylum seekers from South East Asia and the Middle East, with government policy and public opinion changing over the years.
Refugees are governed by statutes and government policies which seek to implement Australia's obligations under the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, to which Australia is a party. Thousands of refugees have sought asylum in Australia over the past decade, with the main forces driving movement being war, civil unrest and persecution. The annual refugee quota in 2012 was 20,000 people. From 1945 to the early 1990s, more than half a million refugees and other displaced persons were accepted into Australia.
Historically, most asylum seekers arrived by plane. However, there was an increasing number of asylum seekers arriving by boat in the late 2000s and early 2010s, which was met with some public disapproval. In 2011–2012, asylum seekers arriving by boat outnumbered those arriving by plane for the first time. Three waves of asylum seekers arriving by boat have been identified: Vietnamese between 1976 and 1981; Indochinese asylum seekers from 1989 to 1998; and people of Middle East origin from 1999.
The visa policy of the current government is to detain persons entering or being in Australia without a valid visa until those persons can be returned to their home country. Australia is the only country in the world with a policy of mandatory detention and offshore processing of asylum seekers who arrive without a valid visa.
Asylum policy is a contentious wedge issue in Australian politics, with the two major political parties in Australia arguing that the issue is a border control problem and one concerning the safety of those attempting to come to Australia by boat."
Asylum in Australia,"Laws governing the status of asylum seekers
Historically, Australia was generally viewed as a world leader in resettling refugees, with more than 870,000 refugees resettled in Australia since World War II. Yet Australia is also one of the world's poorest in providing durable solutions to people who come here to claim protection – people seeking asylum – especially if they come by boat. This dichotomy has persisted into the present.
The processing of people seeking asylum that have arrived in Australia for status determination has undergone significant change over the past decade. The process for refugee status determination is dynamic, with the government's humanitarian program mainly diverging in process between on-shore and off-shore arrivals. While the Migration Act 1958 (Cth) had previously drafted to give effect to Australia's obligations under international law, mainly the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its First Optional Protocol, recent legislative amendments by successive governments have uncoupled the Act from giving effect to the Convention. This has resulted in a softening on the impact of the Convention in interpreting the Act, leading to the government resiling from the protocol set out in the international agreement.
The Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals) Bill 2006 introduced by the Howard government was withdrawn after an enquiry by a Senate Committee which reported on the Bill recommended that it should not proceed in light of the evidence presented to it, and it also became clear that it would be defeated in the Senate, with a number of Liberal Senators threatening to vote against it or abstain. Six years later, another bill, designated the Migration Amendment (Unauthorised Maritime Arrivals and Other Measures) Bill 2012, also gave rise to a Senate Committee Inquiry, with one submission showing that it was almost identical to the 2006 Bill, except without a reporting requirement obliging the Minister to table in Parliament an annual report which detailed the arrangements for assessing refugee claims processed offshore as well as information about their accommodation, health care and education. This added to concerns expressed below about the lack of transparency and public scrutiny. However the bill was passed into law, becoming the Migration Amendment (Unauthorised Maritime Arrivals and Other Measures) Act 2013.
A new ""fast track"" assessment scheme was introduced in 2014 via the Migration and Maritime Powers Legislation Amendment (Resolving the Asylum Legacy Caseload) Bill 2014 Migration and Maritime Powers Legislation Amendment (Resolving the Asylum Legacy Caseload) Bill 2014. The definition of a fast track applicant was narrowed further by Immigration Minister Peter Dutton in an amendment to the definition under the ""Migration Act 1958"", which changed the date of arrival requirement from January 2012 to August 2012 for parents whose children wished to be put classified as fast track applicants."
Asylum in Australia,"Offshore processing
Australia's humanitarian program is complex, but the basic structure is one of bifurcation between onshore and offshore processing of claims for people seeking asylum. While the onshore humanitarian program is common across most signatories to the 1951 Refugee Convention, it is Australia's offshore detention policy that is the most controversial and widely criticised by civil society members.
Australia is one of two nation-states that currently employ a policy of shifting potential people seeking asylum by boat to other nation-states for processing of asylum claims. This policy receives support from both major political parties."
Asylum in Australia,"Legacy caseload
In July 2019 it was estimated that there were about 30,000 people living in Australia who are ineligible for permanent residency, because they came to the country by boat before 2014. Recommendations to the government by the Australian Human Rights Commission to help improve the lives of these non-residents, some of whom live in poverty and suffer from mental health issues because of restrictions of their access to financial support and other welfare, and their uncertain futures, was rejected."
Asylum in Australia,"Claims processing
A compliance interview, often done with the assistance of an interpreter, is one of the first steps taken by immigration officers to determine if a person is making a valid claim of asylum. If a valid fear of persecution is expressed a formal application for refugee status is undertaken. If permission to stay in Australia is not granted they must be removed as soon as possible. However, under the notion of complementary protection, an applicant who is not deemed to be a refugee may still be permitted to remain in Australia. Complementary protection applies when an applicant/s would face a real risk of; arbitrary deprivation of life; the death penalty; torture; cruel or inhuman treatment or punishment; degrading treatment or punishment. It does not apply when there is no real risk of significant harm, namely when an applicant can safely relocate to another part of the country, or an authority within the country can provide protection.
People who arrived by boat on or after 13 August 2012 are not able to propose that their immediate family members also gain entry to Australia.
A new ""fast track"" assessment scheme was introduced in 2014 via the Migration and Maritime Powers Legislation Amendment (Resolving the Asylum Legacy Caseload) Bill 2014 [1]. The definition of a fast track applicant was narrowed further by Immigration Minister Peter Dutton in an amendment to the definition under the ""Migration Act 1958"", which changed the date of arrival requirement from January 2012 to August 2012 for parents whose children wished to be put classified as fast track applicants."
Asylum in Australia,"Statistics
The pic measurement of historical migration flows are not accurate, as methods of counting and categorisations have changed over the years. Post-war refugee immigrants, from 1947 to 1975, totalled about 297,000 refugees, the majority assisted by the government. Since then, the annual refugee quota has varied from year to year.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, between 2005 and 2009 Australia was ranked 47th out of 198 countries in the world in terms of the number of refugees hosted, out of those countries who host refugees. In 2012, the Refugee Council of Australia ranked Australia 22nd on a per capita basis in a list of countries that accept refugees. The Council found that in terms of resettlement (as opposed to ""receiving"") asylum seekers, Australia ranks 2nd in the world overall, 3rd per capita and 3rd as a proportion of GDP. The Council provides a wide range of statistics on its website.
Australia's total refugee and humanitarian intake remained relatively constant between the mid-1980s and 2016, but peaked in 2017:"
Asylum in Australia,"In 2016-2017 financial year Australia accepted more refugees than it ever had since it started a dedicated humanitarian migration program, with 24,162 migrants settled on humanitarian grounds. The number includes a special intake of Syrian and Iraqi refugees owing to particular circumstances in ongoing conflicts. (This was part of a far broader migration program for the year; the total number of migrants was 225,941.)
The rate of arrivals by boat, the most controversial aspect of Australia's refugee policy, has been exceptionally volatile. It reached a peak of 20,587 people in 2013 (excluding crew), before falling again to zero two years later:"
Asylum in Australia,"A ""fact check"" produced by Australian Broadcasting Corporation News and RMIT concluded that then Attorney-General George Brandis' claim in November 2017 that Australia runs the most generous refugee program per capita in the world was misleading. Various complexities of the data are examined in the article, which says that Australia's level of refugee recognition is small compared to other wealthy nations (as well as poorer ones)."
Asylum in Australia,"Timeline
""White Australia policy"": Pre-federation-1973
The White Australia policy is a term used for the historical policies responsible for the exclusion of non-European origin, especially Asians (primarily Chinese) and Pacific Islanders (primarily Melanesians) from immigrating to Australia."
Asylum in Australia,"World War II refugees: 1930s
In the 1930s more than 7,000 refugees from Nazi Germany were accepted into Australia. In the eight years after the end of World War II almost 200,000 European refugees settled in Australia. Australia was reluctant to recognise a general ""right of asylum"" for refugees when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was being drafted."
Asylum in Australia,"West Papuan refugees on Manus Island: 1960s
University of Sydney immigration law specialist Professor Mary Crock says that Australia's history of offshore processing goes back to the 1960s, when Manus Island was set up to take refugees from West Papua. Known as  ""Salasia Camp"", it consisted of a few corrugated iron houses on a bare concrete slab, not far from a beach near the main town Lorengau. Indonesia was preparing a military takeover of the former Dutch New Guinea colony in the 1960s, causing thousands of refugees to flee into the then Australian colony of Papua New Guinea; the first were sent to Manus in 1968 by the Australian government. The camp was built by Australia in order to avoid a diplomatic confrontation with Indonesia, and for this reason they were not granted refugee status. It was not a detention centre; the refugees were free to come and go, but remained stateless until granted citizenship by PNG in 2017."
Asylum in Australia,"Vietnamese boat people: 1970s
The first recorded instance of asylum seekers arriving in Australia via unauthorised boat occurred in April 1976. Fleeing South Vietnam after the Communist Party victory of 1975, an estimated 2,000 ""Vietnamese boat people"" followed between 1976 and 1982. The sporadic arrival of unauthorised boats was a cause of concern for the Australian people. The initial controversy regarding asylum seekers in Australia was mostly because of family reunions. Employment and security concerns were also raised with the Waterside Workers Federation calling for strikes on the matter. This led to the first detention of boat people. In response, the government of Malcolm Fraser authorised the immigration of more than 50,000 Vietnamese from Indian Ocean refugee camps. At the time, the ""open door"" immigration policy enjoyed bipartisan support.
Professor Crock says that a type of offshore processing was used after the Vietnam War. The regional processing regime established right across Southeast Asia was designed to stop asylum seekers where they were, process them in situ, and then to distribute them in an orderly way."
Asylum in Australia,"Mandatory detention: the 1990s
During the early 1990s, asylum seekers from Cambodia began to arrive in Australia. In response, the Keating government instituted a mandatory detention policy aimed at deterring refugees. Under mandatory detention, anyone who enters the Australian migration zone without a visa is placed in a holding facility while security and health checks are performed. Additionally, the validity of the person's claim to asylum is assessed by the Department of Immigration and Citizenship.
In 1990, a number of asylum seekers arrived from Somalia without documentation. They were detained at Villawood Immigration Detention Centre for 18 months without any progress on their status. Some began a hunger strike in response to the prolonged detention. Eventually, all were determined to be genuine refugees.
In the mid-1990s, numerous boats carrying Chinese and Sino-Vietnamese refugees were returned to their place of origin after asylum claims were denied. The rapid repatriations meant that many citizens were unaware of the refugees. During this period a refugee from Indonesia was detained for 707 days before being granted refugee status.
During the Kosovo War (1999), the Australian government conducted Operation Safe Haven and gave temporary asylum to 4000 Kosovo Albanians by housing them in military facilities. The event shaped a pivotal change in Australian government policy toward refugees by offering temporary asylum instead of permanent settlement.
In 1999, Middle Eastern immigrants fleeing from oppressive regimes in Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq began to arrive in large numbers. The Howard government extended the time they spent in mandatory detention and introduced temporary protection visas for boat arrivals. The deterrents did little to stop immigrants; roughly 12,000 asylum seekers reached Australia from 1999 to 2001."
Asylum in Australia,"Pacific Solution: 2001–2007
In August 2001, a Norwegian freight ship, the Tampa, picked up 438 people whose vessel was sinking off the coast of Indonesia. Captain Rinnan first tried to slowly turn the boat towards Indonesia, after being threatened with prosecution by the Australian government. However, after a while the mainly Afghan asylum seekers noticed, so, concerned that if the ship continued to sail to Indonesia they might jump overboard or riot and harm the crew, decided to head back towards Christmas Island. The Howard government refused to allow the boat to land, saying it was a matter for Norway and Indonesia to work out between themselves. Neither made a move, creating a three way diplomatic standoff which became known as the Tampa Affair. Australia seized control of the ship, drawing international criticism but strong support in Australia. After ten days, Australia struck a deal with New Zealand and Nauru to have those nations temporarily host the refugees while Australia processed their asylum claims.
Following the September 11 attacks in the US in 2001, anti-Muslim rhetoric increased in Australia, as Muslims were the primary asylum seekers at the time.
Following the Tampa Affair, the Commonwealth Migration Act (1958) was amended by the Howard government in September 2001. The amendments, which became known as the Pacific Solution, excised Christmas Island and Ashmore Reef from the Australian migration zone. The Christmas Island Detention Centre, designed as a temporary holding centre, was set up, and asylum seekers were directed from there to nearby island nations Papua New Guinea, to be housed in the Manus Island Regional Processing Centre and Nauru, to the Nauru Regional Processing Centre. There, asylum seekers had to undergo a lengthy process before they could immigrate to Australia. The Pacific Solution was intended to remove the incentive for refugees to come to Australia. While detained offshore, asylum-seekers under the Pacific Solution were denied access to Australian lawyers and to protection under Australian law. The combination of the boat arrivals and the September 11 were said to have turned the November 2001 election in John Howard's favour.
At the time, the minority Labor Party opposed the policy. In 2003, Julia Gillard, then shadow minister for Population and Immigration, promised that Labor would end the Pacific Solution ""because it is costly, unsustainable and wrong as a matter of principle"". The policy was also highly criticised by human rights groups and refugees, including those imprisoned on Nauru who undertook hunger strikes from 2003 to 2008. The primary concern was that abuse of the process could potentially develop in remote locations, and that immigration control would dominate over child protection issues, children being without an effective guardian. In July 2005, Australia ceased the practice of mandatory detention of children.
In 2002, the arrivals dropped from 5,516 the previous year to 1. From 2001 to 2007, fewer than 300 asylum seekers arrived. The program cost Australia more than AU$1 billion during that period."
Asylum in Australia,"End of offshore processing: 2007–2012
After winning the 2007 election, the Labor Party under Prime Minister Kevin Rudd abandoned the Pacific Solution, installing a more liberal asylum policy. The Rudd government pledged to settle all asylum claims within three months and closed the Nauru detention facility. It abolished temporary protection visas in 2008. Only 45 of the 1,637 asylum seekers detained in Nauru were found not to be refugees.
Over the next few years the number of asylum seekers arriving in the country increased substantially. According to parliamentary records, only 25 asylum seekers travelled by boat to Australia in the 2007–08 financial year. In 2008, there were 161 immigrants under asylum laws; in 2009, claims jumped to 2,800; in 2009–10, more than 5,000 people came. The issue quickly became a political problem for Rudd. He claimed it was a change in the international political environment that caused the increase, not the abandonment of the Pacific Solution. When that idea failed to be accepted, he proposed what became known as the Indonesian Solution. Under the plan, Indonesia would receive financial aid and intelligence in exchange for cracking down on the people smugglers that transported the asylum seekers."
Asylum in Australia,"In October 2009, the Australian customs boat Oceanic Viking was involved in an operation to apprehend 78 Sri Lankan asylum seekers and move them to an Australia-funded immigration detention centre on the Indonesian island of Bintan for processing. The asylum seekers were taken to Indonesia but refused to disembark until 17 November, after a deal was agreed upon. The asylum seekers were transferred to Indonesian detention, and after a month were determined to be refugees and resettled in several countries.
In December 2010, a boat carrying around 90 asylum seekers sank off the coast of Christmas Island, killing 48 people.
Ahead of the 2010 election, Tony Abbott campaigned on the asylum issue, and with Rudd refusing to engage with him in ""a race to the bottom"", polls showed the public strongly favouring Abbott's anti-asylum views. By this time, Rudd was struggling in the polls for a number of reasons and had lost the confidence of the Labor Party Caucus, which, fearing defeat in the upcoming election, installed Julia Gillard in his place. Gillard argued it was wrong to give special privileges to asylum seekers. She was against a return to the Pacific Solution, instead arguing for the establishment of a regional offshore processing centre. Gillard's new position was welcomed in the polls, and in the August 2010 election, Labor retained power in a minority government supported by a number of independents.
In May 2011, the Gillard government announced plans to address the issue by swapping 800 new asylum seekers for 4,000 long-standing assessed refugees in Malaysia. The so-called Malaysian Solution was eventually ruled unconstitutional by the high court, partly because Malaysia was not a signatory to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention.
In 2011, Australia received 2.5% of the world's total number of claims for asylum. During 2012, more than 17,000 asylum seekers arrived via boat. The majority of the refugees came from Afghanistan, Iran, and Sri Lanka.
In June 2012, a boatload of asylum seekers capsized in the Indian Ocean between Indonesia and Christmas Island, leading to 17 confirmed deaths, with 70 other people missing."
Asylum in Australia,"Offshore processing resumed, PNG solution: 2012–2013
In June 2012, Gillard appointed an expert panel to make recommendations on the asylum issue by August 2012. The report included 22 recommendations. Following their recommendations, her government effectively reinstated the Pacific Solution, and re-introduced offshore processing for asylum seekers. Some Labor members complained that Gillard had abandoned her principle for the sake of politics. Greens' Senator Sarah Hanson-Young called offshore processing ""a completely unworkable, inhumane, unthinkable proposition"". The Nauru processing facility was reopened in September, and the Manus Island facility in Papua New Guinea reopened in November. However, the centres could not keep up with demand, creating a large backlog. The first 6 months of the policy did not see a reduction in immigration attempts – in the first half of 2013, there were more than 15,000 asylum seekers. For the 6 months to June 2014 however, the number has appeared to sharply reduce, with the immigration minister Scott Morrison claiming that there ""had (not been) a successful people smuggling venture"" in the period."
Asylum in Australia,"In July 2013, Rudd, who had recently returned to power as Prime Minister, announced that anyone who arrived in Australia by boat without a visa would not be eligible for asylum. In co-operation with Papua New Guinean Prime Minister Peter O'Neill, the Regional Settlement Agreement was drafted. Under the agreement, new asylum seekers would be sent to Papua New Guinea where legitimate cases would be granted asylum in that, but would lose any right to seek asylum in Australia. To accommodate the refugees, the Manus Regional Processing Centre would be enlarged significantly. In exchange for taking the asylum seekers, Papua New Guinea would receive financial aid from Australia. Like Australia, Papua New Guinea is a signatory to United Nations Refugees Convention. Rudd said the policy was not intended to be permanent and would be reviewed annually.
Announcing the new policy, Rudd remarked ""Australians have had enough of seeing people drowning in the waters to our north. Our country has had enough of people smugglers exploiting asylum seekers and seeing them drown on the high seas."" Liberal Party leader Tony Abbott praised the substance of plan, but said Rudd's government was incapable of making it work. Greens leader Christine Milne, however, called the plan ""absolutely immoral"". Human rights groups criticised the decision. ""Mark this day in history as the day Australia decided to turn its back on the world's most vulnerable people, closed the door and threw away the key,"" said Graeme McGregor of Amnesty International Australia. Human rights lawyer David Mann called it a ""fundamental abrogation of Australia's responsibilities"" and doubted the legality of the policy. He has also questioned the record of human rights in Papua New Guinea.
The New York Times described Rudd's decision as likely ""part of a concerted effort"" to nullify opposition attacks ahead of the 2013 federal election. He had been under fire for the unpopular programs of Gillard that led to his return to power, and immigration had become a major issue in the election campaign. Concurrent with Rudd's announcement, Indonesia announced it would toughen requirement for Iranians seeking visas, a change that had been requested by Australia. An Indonesia spokesperson denied that the change in policy was because of an Australian request.
The New York Times reported that more than 600 asylum seekers had died en route to Australian territory between 2009 and 2013. According to the Morrison government in 2019, more than 50,000 people had arrived by boat and at least 1,200 people drowned at sea during the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years."
Asylum in Australia,"Operation Sovereign Borders: Sept 2013
At the federal election on 7 September 2013, Abbott led the Liberal/National coalition to victory, to a large degree on the popularity of his ""Stop the boats"" slogan, after nearly 19,000 refugees had arrived by boat in the previous year (despite the number being relatively low by world standards). The Abbott government clamped down further on boat arrivals, naming their strategy Operation Sovereign Borders. This was implemented by then immigration minister Scott Morrison and continued by successor Peter Dutton from December 2014 and under prime ministers Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison, as of November 2019.  Their ""zero tolerance"" policies included the use of boat turn-backs, offshore detention and processing and tight control of information about any arrivals by the government.
In 2015, the government rejected suggestions that it would accept Rohingyas (a persecuted Muslim minority in Myanmar) during the Rohingya refugee crisis, with the Prime Minister Tony Abbott responding ""Nope, nope, nope. We have a very clear refugee and humanitarian program"". However, later in the year the government unexpectedly increased its intake of refugees to accommodate persecuted minorities, such as Maronites, Yazidis and Druze, from the conflicts of the Syrian Civil War and Iraq War. (It was these refugees who swelled the figures for 2016–2017.)"
Asylum in Australia,"US refugee swap deal: 2016
In 2016 Turnbull announced a new resettlement deal with the then US president Barack Obama, who agreed to take 1,250 of the refugees held on Manus Island and Nauru in exchange for Central American refugees coming to Australia. Upon taking office not long afterwards, Donald Trump was not pleased with the deal, but went on to honour it, and as of February 2019 more than 500 refugees had moved to the US."
Asylum in Australia,"Closure of Manus detention centre: 2017
The centre was formally closed on 31 October 2017, but as of February 2019, there were 600 asylum seekers still housed on the island in several transit centres near the main town of Lorengau.
The Australian government ruled out bringing people held on Manus Island to Australia. New Zealand's offer to resettle 150 refugees within its existing quota was refused by the Australian Government several times. United States officials began assessing applications for asylum for refugees to be resettled in the United States as part of a deal struck with the Australian government."
Asylum in Australia,"Statistics and assessment: end 2018
Over the period from the Abbott government through to the Morrison government, arrivals dropped to around 1,200. However, the conditions of those left on the islands has continued to garner national and worldwide attention. Immigration law specialist Professor Mary Crock said there was no statistical evidence that offshore processing itself deterred asylum seekers; it was rather boat push-backs that were more successful. People had become aware of the human cost as well as the monetary cost. ""We've spent more on this than [the US$5 billion] Trump is asking for his wall,"" she said.
Public opinion seemed to be reflected in the polls at the October 2018 Wentworth by-election, after successful candidate Kerryn Phelps had urged voters to protest 'inhumane' refugee policies by voting for her."
Asylum in Australia,"Medevac Bill & re-opening of Christmas Island: Feb to Dec 2019
On 13 February 2019, a bill which became known as the ""Medevac bill"" was narrowly passed by the Australian parliament allowing doctors to have more say in the process by which asylum seekers on Manus and Nauru may be brought to the mainland for treatment. The approval of two doctors is required, but approval may still be overridden by the home affairs minister in one of three areas. The fast-tracked medical transfers will only apply to the existing cohort of refugees and asylum seekers on Manus Island and Nauru, a point that Mr Morrison refuses to concede. Human rights advocates hailed the decision, with one calling it a ""tipping point as a country"", with the weight of public opinion believing that sick people need treatment.
A few days later, after warning about an influx of asylum seeker boats by both Dutton and Morrison, the prime minister announced the re-opening of the Christmas Island detention facilities, implying that this change in the law would provide the signal for people smugglers to begin operating again. The government later announced a plan to send sick refugees there, rather than hospitals on mainland Australia as was the intention of the Medevac bill. In the days following, Dutton said that because of this change in the law, Australians on waiting lists for hospital treatment and those already in public housing were going to be adversely affected.
This was seen by Robert Manne as a turning point in Labor Party policy, after having had almost identical asylum seeker policies as the Coalition for the past five years. He also points out the numerous obstacles any potential people smuggler or asylum seeker would have to face, because the deterrent aspects of the policy are still firmly in place, and the new legislation applies only to the approximately 1000 people still on Nauru and Manus (of whom only a relatively small number will be allowed to access the urgent medical attention they need).
In December 2019, the Medevac bill was repealed, after 37 votes to 35 in the senate supported the government's move to repeal the law."
Asylum in Australia,"""Biloela family"" asylum seekers
In a long-running case in which a couple of Tamil asylum seekers, Kokilapathmapriya Nadesalingam (Priya) and Nadesalingam Murugappan (Nades), were refused refugee status after settling and starting a family in Biloela in central Queensland, the community rallied to support the family, who became known as ""the Biloela family"" in the press. The family was removed in a dawn raid on their home and taken to Melbourne in March 2018, pending deportation. Various legal avenues were pursued, with the family taken to Christmas Island Detention Centre in late August 2018. In April 2020 they were awarded costs of more than $200,000 against the federal government, for lack of procedural fairness in assessing their youngest daughter's claim.
After election of a Labor government under prime minister Anthony Albanese, on 25 May 2022 interim home affairs minister Jim Chalmers granted the family a bridging visa which would allow the family to live and work in Biloela while they work towards the resolution of their immigration status."
Asylum in Australia,"March to May 2020
In March 2020, Home Affairs told the Senate estimates committee that ""211 refugees and asylum seekers remained on Nauru, 228 in Papua New Guinea, and about 1,220, including their dependents, were in Australia to receive medical treatment"". Transfer and resettlement of approved refugees in the US was proceeding during the COVID-19 pandemic. 35 refugees left Port Moresby on 28 May 2020, and others would be flown from their places of detention within Australia, to be resettled in 18 US cities."
Asylum in Australia,"July to October 2021
On 31 July 2021, there were 124 adults remaining in PNG and 107 on Nauru.
In September 2021, the Minister for Home Affairs signed a new deal with Nauru to keep an ongoing form of asylum seeker processing centre on the island.
In October 2021,  the Australian Government cut off all support to the remaining men in PNG, leaving the PNG Government to take over responsibility for them. The remaining men were told that their options are transferring to the Nauru processing centre or resettling in PNG."
Asylum in Australia,"December 2021 – July 2022
As of December 2021, there were 2,352 ""Irregular Maritime Arrivals"" (IMAs) who had applied for a protection visa and whose bridging visa had expired; there are no statistics for non-IMAs under the same conditions. This group has no access to services like Medicare, no Centrelink (social security) payments or other social services, and are not allowed to work. They rely on free food from charities, A$400 given to them in cash by the Australian Red Cross each month, and live in overcrowded, rundown properties together.
It was estimated in July 2022 that there were around 100,000 asylum seekers in Australia, with around 30,000 of those whose applications for refugee status have been rejected, and the rest status as yet undetermined, or on temporary visas."
Asylum in Australia,"Changes in 2016
A number of changes were implemented in July 2016 in relation to mandatory detention, both broadening opportunities for community integration by offering community alternatives and narrowing release through the creation of new immigration status designations. These included:"
Asylum in Australia,"Community placements
Those granted bridging visas are able to access basic government services, including Centrelink and Medicare. They are able to move freely within their community, but are unable to choose the community that they live in, required to live an address designated by the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection."
Asylum in Australia,"Work rights
For the designated refugees that are eligible for work, many are prevented from entering the work force owing to issues of cultural competency and language. The overall effect is that the great majority of refugees in Australia are eager to workout without any pathways into the Australian work force."
Asylum in Australia,"Refugees with adverse security assessment
Introduction of a new category of designated immigration status: adverse security assessments."
Asylum in Australia,"Visa cancellations and the Border Force Act
The Australian Border Force Act 2015 (Cth) makes it a crime punishment of two years imprisonment for an entrusted person to make record of or disclose ""protected information"". This raises issues relating to judicial power: by denying the court's access to information by which to evaluate a matter, it constitutes an impermissible interference on the functions of a court, following the decision in Graham v Minister for Immigration and Border Control. The matter was not fully resolved as of 2016."
Asylum in Australia,"Arrival and processing in mainland Australia
After arriving in Australia, the experience for any individual persons seeking asylum is largely impacted by the location they are placed, socioeconomic status, country of origin, age, sex and knowledge of the area, including family or friends that were in Australia prior to their arrival. Nonetheless, there are recurrent difficulties that surface continuously in asylum seeker communities across Australia, in the interim between arrival and refugee status determination."
Asylum in Australia,"Housing
For asylum seekers that arrive in Australia and receive a temporary protection visa (subclass 785), they are given the right to live in the community and are largely given autonomy to choose housing. The Australian government does not provide services to link asylum seekers with potential housing. Their ephemeral status in the country, entirely dependent on status determination by the government, leads to apprehension amongst housing providers arising from concern that they may not remain in Australia for the duration of the lease. The lack of clarity and certainty owing to their undefined legal status therefore deters housing providers from offering leases to asylum seekers.
Compounding this factor is the exceptionally low income for most asylum seekers, arising from their inability to work legally in Australia (an issue that will be comprehensively discussed below). These low wages limit housing options for asylum seekers and leaves them susceptible to a higher risk of exploitation. Substandard housing conditions clearly follows from this difficulty. One instance in Adelaide found 20 temporary protection visa holders living in a single address, while a service provider in Sydney reported instances where people seeking asylum had been convinced by real estate agents to rent non-residential properties such as warehouses with dividers between the beds.
General issues prevalent across most major cities in Australia in relation to housing are compounded in severity for asylum seekers. Housing affordability for most areas in proximity to city centres has become out of reach for both buyers and renters. In the two largest cities of Sydney and Melbourne, housing availability is an additional strain for renters, with a competitive market leading to some perpetually searching for housing. The impact these general issues have on asylum seekers searching for housing open arrival into Australia is therefore significant and, at times, debilitating, leading to substantial possibility of homelessness throughout these communities."
Asylum in Australia,"Income and work rights
Asylum seekers in Australia are precluded from the ability to work until a determination is made on their refugee status. The timeline for status determination varies considerably on a case-by-case basis. Until the passage of the Migration and Maritime Powers (Resolving the Asylum Legacy Caseload) Act 2015 (Cth), the Commonwealth was required to report the percentage of decisions made within 90 days of lodging their application. From 2013 to 2014, the Department of Immigration and Border Protection made just seven percent of initial decisions within the given timeframe. While more current data is unavailable, it is unlikely that the change of Liberal leadership (and therefore government) from Abbott to Turnbull has raised these rates. This means that it is likely that the overwhelming majority of asylum seekers in Australia are unable to work for well over three months while they wait for status determination.
The lack of ability to work forces asylum seekers in Australia to rely heavily on Centrelink payments. Their capacity to earn is then greatly reduced and there is an identifiable gap in the interstice between application for refugee status and refugee status determination where asylum seekers in Australia are placed into a tenuous financial position.
The bleak outlook on income are working rights so described leads to a direct impact on the mental health of the asylum seeker community. For those asylum seekers that go on to be recognised as legally defined refugees, the labour opportunities are largely seen as a window dressing exercise. The support given is unspecialised, with Jobactive largely ignoring the unique difficulties newly recognised refugees possess when searching for and obtaining work."
Asylum in Australia,"Procedural challenges
The Status Resolution Support Services (SSRS) is the Department of Immigration and Border Protection's replacement for the previous Community Assistance Program that is meant to connect migrants and non-citizens with social services. The services are delivered under six different bands that vary dependent upon identity and timeline of asylum. There are issues latent within the SSRS arising from a strict adherence to the band taxonomy that leads to a stringent, and at times problematic, application of the band criteria. There is the additional strain of a high caseworker to client ratio of 1:120, which has largely been viewed as a compromise on quality.
The Code of Behaviour is an agreement asylum seekers sign when arriving in Australia that largely binds them to certain standards of behaviour while awaiting refugee status determination. This has been received by the community as casting a dark shadow for asylum seekers' experience in Australia, with many of the signees feeling that the agreement creates uncertainty and confusion as to which actions may jeopardise their applications. The effect of the Code of Behaviour has deterred refugees from community events out of fear that their participation could contribute to a denial of their applications."
Asylum in Australia,"Public debate and politics
Opinion polls show that boat arrivals have always been an issue of concern to the Australian public, but opposition has increased steadily over the previous four decades, according to a 2013 research paper by the Parliamentary Library.
In 2005, the wrongful incarceration of Cornelia Rau was made public through the Palmer Inquiry, which stimulated concern in the Australian public about the detention of children in remote locations and the potential for resultant long-term psychological harm.
Between 1998 and 2008, the UN Human Rights Committee made adverse findings against Australia in a number of immigration detention cases, concluding that Australia had violated the prohibition on arbitrary detention in Article 9(1) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The longest-held detainee within the Australian immigration detention system was Peter Qasim, who was detained for six years and ten months.
In March 2012, former Prime Minister Paul Keating said there were ""racial undertones"" to the debate and that Australia's reputation in Asia was being damaged. In 2013, former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser described the positions of the major political parties as a ""race to the bottom"".
In 2003, economist Ross Gittins, a columnist at Fairfax Media, said former Prime Minister John Howard had been ""a tricky chap "" on immigration, by appearing ""tough"" on illegal immigration to win support from the working class, while simultaneously winning support from employers with high legal immigration.
In one of many protests that had taken place around Australia over asylum seeker policy activists disrupted the Australian Open men's tennis final in 2015. Demonstrators in the crowd and on court raised banners and wore t-shirts that read “Australia open for refugees"".
In 2016, the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, François Crépeau, criticised Australia's policies of mandatory and off-shore immigration detention. Crépeau claimed that Australia had adopted a ""punitive approach"" towards migrants who arrived by boat which had served to ""erode their human rights"".
The attempted deportation of the Sri Lankan Tamil Murugappan family was the subject of significant media attention in 2019, which continued until they were allowed back to Biloela in 2022."
Asylum in Australia,See also
Asylum in Australia,"Asylum Seeker Resource Centre
Children Overboard affair
Craig Foster, advocate
Human rights in Australia
Immigration detention in Australia
List of Australian immigration detention facilities
Stateless (TV series)"
Asylum in Australia,"
== References =="
Religion in Australia,"Religion in Australia  is diverse. In the 2021 national census, 43.9% of Australians identified with Christianity and 38.9% declared ""no religion"".
Australia has no official religion. Section 116 of the Constitution of Australia states: ""The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.""
The Christian festivals of Easter and Christmas are public holidays."
Religion in Australia,"History
The Aboriginal peoples of Australia traditionally followed a set of beliefs known as  The Dreaming; some of the earliest evidence on earth for religious practices among humans has been found in the archaeological record of their ancestors.  Torres Strait Islander religion bore similarities to broader Melanesian spirituality.
Christianity came to Australia in 1788 with British colonial settlement. Of the convicts and free settlers, most were members of the established Church of England with lesser numbers of Nonconformist Protestants, Catholics and other faiths. The first religious census in 1828 divided the early colony into four groups: Protestants, Catholics, Jews and Pagans.
Other smaller groups also arrived and established their churches. Jews started arriving in the early 19th century. The Australian gold rushes brought in workers from China and the Pacific islands, as well as specialised workers from British India, such as the mainly Muslim ""Afghan Cameleers""."
Religion in Australia,"Indigenous Australian religion
Dreaming (spirituality) has been practised for tens of thousands of years. It is at once a collection of stories of an ancient view of creation and present day spirituality. It places significant emphasis on belonging to the land. It shaped and continues to shape Aboriginal law and customs; and Aboriginal art, story and dance continue to draw on these spiritual traditions.
There is evidence of contact between indigenous Australians with colonisers, fishermen, and survivors of numerous shipwrecks from peoples of various non-Indigenous cultures and faiths prior to British colonisation. Indigenous Australians of (Arnhem Land) (in Northern Australia) retain stories, songs and paintings of trade and cultural interaction with sea-faring peoples from the north, generally regarded as being from the east Indonesian archipelago. There is some evidence of Islamic terms and concepts entering northern Aboriginal cultures via these interactions. (See: Macassan contact with Australia.)"
Religion in Australia,"Christianity
While the Church of England originally held a position of privilege in early colonial Australia, a legal framework guaranteeing religious equality evolved within a few decades, especially when the Church of England was disestablished in the colony of New South Wales by the Church Act of 1836. Drafted by the reformist attorney-general John Plunkett, the act established legal equality for Anglicans, Catholics and Presbyterians, and was later extended to Methodists. British Nonconformist Methodist, Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Baptists set up their own churches in the 19th century, as did Lutherans from Germany. 
Large numbers of Irish Catholics were transported to Australia through the British criminal justice system. Religious tensions, largely fuelled by historical grievances between Catholics and other Christians, continued into the 20th century."
Religion in Australia,"The gold rush of the 1850s led to significantly increased immigration and diversity of religious traditions, such as Irish Catholicism, Scottish Presbyterianism, and more English Anglicanism, among other religious traditions.
Australian Aboriginal peoples suffered a decline during this period as they were dispossessed of their lands; and diseases spread among their populations. Christian churches organised missions during this period, intended to ""civilise"" Aboriginal communities and spread Christianity. The overall consequences of this activity contributed to the decline of indigenous languages and beliefs, the extent to which are still being determined and recorded.
By 1901, apart from the indigenous population and descendants of gold rush migrants, Australian society was predominantly Anglo-Celtic, with 40% of the population being Anglican, 23% Catholic, 34% other Christian and about 1% professing non-Christian religions. There was a Lutheran population of German descent in South Australia.
Freedom of Religion was enshrined in Section 116 of the Constitution of Australia of 1901."
Religion in Australia,"Other religions
There were at least 15 Jews in the First Fleet, 14 convicts and one ""free"" child. 
The Tolpuddle Martyrs were sentenced to penal transportation to Australia because friendly societies had strong elements of what are now considered to be the predominant role of trade unions.
As noted above, the Australian gold rushes brought in workers from China and the Pacific islands, as well as specialised workers from British India such as, from the 1860s onwards, the mainly Muslim ""Afghan Cameleers"". From the 1870s Malay divers were recruited (with most subsequently repatriated). Before 1901, some Muslim sailors and prisoners came to Australia on convict ships. 
In 1901, the government passed an act limiting immigration to those of European descent in what came to be known as the White Australia Policy. By effectively limiting the immigration of practitioners of different faiths, this policy ensured that Christianity remained the religion of the overwhelming majority of Australians for the foreseeable future and, indeed, to the present day. The first census in 1911 showed 96% identified themselves as Christian. Sectarian tensions continued into the 1960s; e.g. job vacancy advertisements sometimes stated ""Protestant preferred"" or that ""Catholics need not apply"". Nevertheless, Australia elected its first Catholic prime minister, James Scullin, in 1929, and in 1930 Sir Isaac Isaacs, an Australian-born Jew, was appointed Governor-General."
Religion in Australia,"Demographics
A question on religion has been asked in every census taken in Australia, with the voluntary nature of this question having been specifically stated since 1933. In 1971, the instruction ""if no religion, write none"" was introduced. This saw a sevenfold increase from the previous census year in the percentage of Australians stating they had no religion. Since 1971, this percentage has progressively increased to 38.9% in 2021.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) 2006 Census Dictionary statement on religious affiliation states the purpose for gathering such information:"
Religion in Australia,"Data on religious affiliation are used for such purposes as planning educational facilities, aged persons' care and other social services provided by religion-based organisations; the location of church buildings; the assigning of chaplains to hospitals, prisons, armed services and universities; the allocation of time on public radio and other media; and sociological research.
The census question about religion is optional, and asks ""What is the person's religion?"", giving respondents a choice of nine religions, ""Other"" and ""No religion"". At the 2016 census 9.6% of people declined to answer, or they did not give a response adequate for interpretation. This figure dropped to 7.2% in 2021.
The 2021 Australian census data showed that 43.9% of Australians classify themselves Christian, 8.2% less in real terms than five years prior, The second-largest classification was the 38.9% who identified as ""no religion"".
As in many Western countries, the level of active participation in church worship is much lower than this; weekly attendance at church services is likely to be under 1 million, about 4% of the population.
The fastest growing religious classifications over the fifteen years between 2006 and 2021 were:"
Religion in Australia,"No religion – up from 18.7% to 38.9%
Islam – up from 1.7% to 3.2%
Hinduism – up from 0.7% to 2.7%
Sikhism – up from 0.1% to 0.8%
Buddhism - from 2.1% to 2.4%
Meanwhile, all Christian denominations combined decreased from 63.9% to 43.9%."
Religion in Australia,"Census data
1: Includes relatively small numbers declaring ""secular beliefs"", such as atheism, agnosticism, humanism and rationalism, and spiritual beliefs such as New Age, ""own spiritual beliefs"", theism(!), etc. See 7
2: Includes ""inadequately described""
3: Due to rounding, figures may not add up to the totals shown."
Religion in Australia,"Line and bar charts
""Over the past 50 years, there has been a steady decline in the proportion of Australians who reported an affiliation with Christianity. The same period has seen a consistent rise in Other religions and No religion, particularly in the last 20 years""."
Religion in Australia,"Total fertility rates
As of 2016, Buddhists (1.68), Hindus (1.81) and the non-religious (1.84) had the lowest fertility rates. Christians (2.11) and Jews (2.17) had moderate fertility rates, and Muslims had the highest rate at 3.03."
Religion in Australia,"Indigenous Australian traditions
Dreaming (spirituality)—the Dreaming or Dreaming—places significant emphasis on belonging to the land. It is at once a collection of stories of an ancient view of creation and present day Dreaming (spirituality). It shaped and continues to shape Aboriginal law and customs; and Aboriginal art, story and dance continue to draw on these spiritual traditions. 
There were a great many different nations, each with their own individual culture, belief structure, and language. The Rainbow Serpent is a major dream spirit for Aboriginal people across Australia. The Yowie and Bunyip are other well known dream spirits. At the time of the British settlement, traditional religions were animist and tended to have elements of ancestor worship.
Aboriginal beliefs and spirituality, even among those Aboriginal peoples who identify themselves as members of a traditional organised religion, are intrinsically linked to the land generally and to certain sites of significance in particular. As Mircea Eliade put it, ""There is a general belief among the [indigenous] Australians that the world, man, and the various animals and plants were created by certain Supernatural beings who afterwards disappeared, either ascending to the sky or entering the earth."" There were and still are ritual systems, with an emphasis on life transitions such as adulthood and death.
The spirituality and customs of Torres Strait Islanders, who inhabit the islands between Australia and New Guinea, reflected their Melanesian origins and dependence on the sea."
Religion in Australia,"Since British settlement
European culture and Christianity have had a significant impact on Indigenous Australians. As in many colonial situations the churches both facilitated the loss of Indigenous Australian culture and religion and also facilitated its maintenance. The involvement of Christians in Aboriginal affairs has evolved significantly since 1788. Around the year 2000, many churches and church organisations officially apologised for past failures to adequately respect indigenous cultures and address the injustices of the dispossession of indigenous people.
In the Torres Strait Islands, the Coming of the Light Festival marks the day the Christian missionaries first arrived on the islands on 1 July 1871 and introduced Christianity to the region. This is a significant festival for Torres Strait Islanders, who are predominantly Christian. Religious and cultural ceremonies are held across Torres Strait and mainland Australia.
Prominent Aboriginal activist Noel Pearson, himself raised at a Lutheran mission in Cape York, has written that missions throughout Australia's colonial history ""provided a haven from the hell of life on the Australian frontier while at the same time facilitating colonisation"". Prominent Aboriginal Christians have included Pastor David Unaipon, the first Aboriginal author; Pastor Sir Douglas Nicholls, athlete, activist and former Governor of South Australia; Mum (Shirl) Smith, a celebrated Redfern community worker who, assisted by the Sisters of Charity, work to assist Aboriginal peoples.; and former Senator Aden Ridgeway, the first Chairman of the Aboriginal Catholic Ministry. In recent times, Christians such as Fr Ted Kennedy of Redfern, Jesuit human rights lawyer Fr Frank Brennan and the Josephite Sisters have been prominent in working for Aboriginal rights and improvements to standards of living."
Religion in Australia,"Abrahamic religions
Christianity
After the arrival of the first Christian settlers on the First Fleet of British ships in 1788, Christianity quickly became the major religion in Australia. Consequently, the Christian festivals of Christmas and Easter are public holidays, the skylines of Australian cities and towns are marked by church and cathedral spires. Christian churches played a significant role in the development of early education, health and welfare services in Australia.
The churches with the largest number of members are the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church of Australia and the Uniting Church in Australia. The National Council of Churches in Australia has been the main Christian ecumenical body."
Religion in Australia,"The Christian churches played an integral role in the development and provision of welfare services in Australia. The first chaplain, Richard Johnson, a Church of England cleric, was charged by Governor Arthur Phillip with improving ""public morality"" in the colony, and he was also heavily involved in health and education.
For much of Australian history, the Church of England in Australia, now known as the Anglican Church of Australia, was the largest religious affiliation. However its relative position has declined, with the Catholic Church, benefiting from post-war Australia multicultural immigration, among other factors, to become the largest single religious group. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia and other congregations associated with non-British cultures have also expanded.
Today, the Catholic education system is the second biggest sector after government schools, with more than 750,000 students in 2018 (and around 21 per cent of all secondary school enrolments). The Anglican Church educates around 105,000 students and the Uniting Church has around 48 schools. Smaller denominations, including the Lutheran Church also have a number of schools in Australia. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia also has 8 schools across the country. There are two Catholic universities in Australia: the Australian Catholic University which opened in 1991 following the amalgamation of four Catholic tertiary institutions in eastern Australia, and the University of Notre Dame Australia based in Perth.
Catholic Social Services Australia's 63 member organisations help more than a million Australians every year. Anglican organisations work in health, missionary work, social welfare and communications; and the Uniting Church does extensive community work, in aged care, hospitals, nursing, family support services, youth services and with the homeless, and especially throughout inland Australia. Christian charities such as the Saint Vincent de Paul Society, the Salvation Army, Anglicare, and Youth Off the Streets receive considerable national support. Religious orders founded many of Australia's hospitals, such as St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney, which was opened as a free hospital in 1857 by the Sisters of Charity and is now Australia's largest not-for-profit health provider and has trained prominent Australian surgeons such as Victor Chang."
Religion in Australia,"Notable Australian Christians have included: Mary MacKillop – educator, founder of the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart and the first Australian to be recognised as a saint by the Catholic Church; David Unaipon – an Aboriginal writer, inventor and Christian preacher currently featured on the Australian $50 note; Archbishop Daniel Mannix of Melbourne – a controversial voice against Conscription during World War I and against British policy in Ireland; the Reverend John Flynn – founder of the Royal Flying Doctor Service, currently featured on the Australian $20 note; Sir Douglas Nicholls – Aboriginal rights activist, athlete, pastor and former Governor of South Australia; Archbishop Stylianos Harkianakis – Archbishop and primate of the Greek Orthodox church in Australia from 1975 to 2019
Sectarianism in Australia tended to reflect the political inheritance of Britain and Ireland. Until 1945, the vast majority of Catholics in Australia were of Irish descent, causing the British majority to question their loyalty to the British Empire. The first Catholic priests arrived in Australia as convicts in 1800, but the Castle Hill Rebellion of 1804 alarmed the British authorities and no further priests were allowed in the colony until 1820, when London sent John Joseph Therry and Philip Connolly. In 1901, the Australian Constitution guaranteed Separation of Church and State. A notable period of sectarianism re-emerged during the First World War and the 1916 Easter Uprising in Ireland, but sectarian division declined after World War II. There was a diversification of Christian churches (especially with the growth of Greek, Macedonian, Serbian and Russian Orthodox churches), together with an increase in ecumenism among Christians through organisations such as the National Council of Churches in Australia, as well as an increase in non-religious adherence."
Religion in Australia,"One of the most visible signs of the historical importance of Christianity to Australia is the prominence of churches in most Australian towns and cities. Among Australia's oldest are Ebenezer Chapel and the Anglican St Matthew's, Windsor, St Luke's, Liverpool, St Peter's, Campbelltown and St James Church, Sydney, built between 1819 and 1824 by Governor Macquarie's architect, Francis Greenway. St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney, was built to a design by William Wardell from a foundation stone laid in 1868; the spires of the cathedral were not finally added until the year 2000. Wardell also worked on the design of St Patrick's Cathedral, Melbourne – among the finest examples of ecclesiastical architecture in Australia. The Anglican St Paul's Cathedral, Melbourne, in the iconic hub of the city opposite Flinders Street station. Adelaide is known as the ""City of Churches"", but churches extend far into the Australian Outback, as at the historic Lutheran Mission Chapel at Hermannsburg, Northern Territory. Along with community attitudes to religion, church architecture changed significantly during the 20th century. Urban churches, such as the Wayside Chapel (1964) in Sydney, differed markedly from traditional ecclesiastical designs. In the later 20th century, distinctly Australian approaches were applied at places such as Jambaroo Benedictine Abbey, where natural materials were chosen to ""harmonise with the local environment"" and the chapel sanctuary is of glass overlooking rainforest. Similar design principles were applied at Thredbo Ecumenical Chapel built in the Snowy Mountains in 1996.
The Christian festivals of Christmas and Easter are national public holidays in Australia. Christmas, which recalls the birth of Jesus Christ, is celebrated on 25 December during the Australian summer (although on 7 January by some Eastern Orthodox) and is an important cultural festival even for many non-religious Australians. The European traditions of Christmas trees, roast dinners, carols and gift giving are all continued in Australia, but they might be conducted between visits to the beach.
Here are some Christian denominations with Australian articles:"
Religion in Australia,"Anglican Church of Australia (formerly the Church of England in Australia)
Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia
Australian Christian Churches (formerly the Assemblies of God in Australia)
Australian Union Conference of Seventh-day Adventists
Baptist Union of Australia
Christian City Churches, started in Australia
Churches of Christ in Australia
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Australia
Fellowship of Congregational Churches, Australian only
Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia
CRC Churches International
Lutheran Church of Australia
Presbyterian Church of Australia
Presbyterian Church of Eastern Australia
Presbyterian Reformed Church (Australia)
Catholic Church in Australia
Uniting Church in Australia
Two by Twos
A 2023 IPSOS survey found that 22% of the population was Protestant or Evangelical while 18% was Catholic."
Religion in Australia,"Islam
The first contacts that Islam had with Australia was when Muslim fishermen native to Makassar, which is today a part of Indonesia, visited North-Western Australia long before British settlement in 1788. This contact of South East Asian ethnic groups of Islamic faith can be identified from the graves they dug for their comrades who died on the journey, being that they face Mecca (in Arabia), in accordance with Islamic regulations concerning burial, as well as evidence from Aboriginal cave paintings and religious ceremonies which depict and incorporate the adoption of Makassan canoe designs and words.
In later history, throughout the 19th century following British settlement, other Muslims came to Australia including the Muslim 'Afghan' cameleers, who used their camels to transport goods and people through the otherwise unnavigable desert and pioneered a network of camel tracks that later became roads across the Outback. Australia's first mosque was built for them at Marree, South Australia in 1861. Between the 1860s and 1920s around 2000 cameleers were brought from Afghanistan and the north west of British India (now Pakistan) and perhaps 100 families remained in Australia. Other outback mosques were established at places like Coolgardie, Cloncurry, and Broken Hill – and more permanent mosques in Adelaide, Perth and later Brisbane. A legacy of this pioneer era is the presence of wild camels in Outback and the oldest Islamic structure in the southern hemisphere, at Central Adelaide Mosque. Nonetheless, despite their significant role in Australia prior to the establishment of rail and road networks, the formulation of the White Australia policy at the time of Federation made immigration difficult for the 'Afghans' and their memory slowly faded during the 20th century, until a revival of interest began in the 1980s.
Successive Australian governments dismantled the White Australia Policy in the Post-WW2 period. From the 1970s onwards, under the leadership of Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, Australia began to pursue multiculturalism. Australia in the later 20th century became a refuge for many Muslims fleeing conflicts including those in Lebanon, Bosnia, Iraq, Iran, Sudan and Afghanistan. General immigration, combined with religious conversion to Islam by Christians and other Australians, as well as Australia's participation in UN refugee efforts has increased the overall Muslim population. Around 36% of Muslims are Australian born. Overseas born Muslims come from a great variety of nations and ethnic groups – with large Lebanese and Turkish communities.
Following the 11 September attacks in the USA, attempts to associate the ideology/ies of Osama bin Laden and the religion of Islam stirred some debate in some quarters in Australia about Islam's relationship with the wider community. The deaths of Australians in bombings by militant Islamic fundamentalists in New York in 2001, Bali in 2002–5 and London in 2005; as well as the sending of Australian troops to East Timor in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003; the arrest of bomb plotters in Australia; and concerns about certain cultural practices such as the wearing of the Burkha all contributed to a degree of tension. A series of comments by a senior Sydney cleric, Sheikh Taj El-Din Hilaly also stirred controversy, particularly his remarks regarding ""female modesty"" following an incident of gang rape in Sydney. Australians were among the targets of Islamic Fundamentalists in the Bali bombings in Indonesia and an attack on the Australian Embassy in Jakarta; and the South East Asian militant group Jemaah Islamiyah has been of particular concern to Australians.
The Australian government's mandatory detention processing system for asylum seekers became increasingly controversial after the 11 September attacks. A significant proportion of recent Asylum seekers arriving by boat have been Muslims fleeing the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere. Some Islamic leaders and social commentators claim that Islam has suffered from unfair stereotyping Violence and intimidation was directed against Muslims and people of Middle Eastern appearance during southern Sydney's Cronulla riots in 2005. In 2005, the Howard government established the Muslim Community Reference Group to advise on Muslim community issues for one year, chaired by Ameer Ali. Inter-faith dialogues were also established by Christian and Muslim groups such as The Australian Federation of Islamic Councils and the National Council of Churches in Australia. Australia and Indonesia co-operated closely following the Bali-bombings, not only in law-enforcement but in improving education and cross-cultural understanding, leading to a marked improvement in relations. After a series of controversies, Sheikh Taj El-Din Hilaly retired as Grand mufti of Australia in 2007 and was replaced by Fehmi Naji El-Imam AM.
Today, over 604,000 people in Australia identify as Muslim, with diverse communities concentrated mainly in Sydney and Melbourne. More than half are non-practising cultural Muslims. Since the 1970s Islamic schools have been established as well as more than 100 mosques and prayer centres. Many notable Muslim places of worship are to be found in large Australian cities, including the Central Adelaide Mosque, which was constructed during the 1880s; and Sydney's Classical Ottoman style Auburn Gallipoli Mosque, which was largely funded by the Turkish community and the name of which recalls the shared heritage of the foundation of modern Turkey and the story of the ANZACs. 1,140 people identified as Aboriginal Muslims in the 2011 census, almost double the number recorded in the 2001 census. Notable Australian Muslims include boxer Anthony Mundine; community worker and rugby league star Hazem El Masri; cricketer Usman Khawaja and academic Waleed Aly. In 2013, Labor MP Ed Husic became Australia's first Muslim member of Cabinet, briefly serving as Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister and for Broadband in the short lived Second Rudd government."
Religion in Australia,"Judaism
At least eight Jewish convicts are believed to have been transported to Sydney aboard the First Fleet in 1788, when the first British settlement was established on the continent. An estimated 110,000 Jews currently live in Australia, the majority being Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern European descent, with many being refugees and Holocaust survivors who arrived during and after World War II.
The Jewish population has increased slightly in recent times due to immigration from South Africa and the former Soviet Union. The largest Jewish community in Australia is in Melbourne, with about 60,000, followed by Sydney with about 45,000 members. Smaller communities are dispersed among the other state capitals.
Following the conclusion of the British colonial period, Jews have enjoyed formal equality before the law in Australia and have not been subject to civil disabilities or other forms of state-sponsored anti-Semitism which exclude them from full participation in public life.
Sydney's gothic design Great Synagogue, consecrated in 1878, is a notable place of Jewish worship in Australia. Notable Australian Jews have included the Sir John Monash, the notable World War I general who opened the Maccabean Hall in Sydney in 1923 to commemorate Jews who fought and died in the First World War and who is currently featured on the Australian $100 note; and Sir Isaac Isaacs who became the first Australian born governor general in 1930. Sir Zelman Cowen also served as Governor-General, between 1977 and 1982. The Sydney Jewish Museum opened in 1992 to commemorate The Holocaust ""challenge visitors' perceptions of democracy, morality, social justice and human rights"".
Until the 1930s, all synagogues in Australia were nominally Orthodox, with most acknowledging leadership of the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom. To this day the vast majority of synagogues in Australia are Orthodox. However, there is a wide range of Orthodox congregations, including Mizrachi, Chabad and Adass Israel congregations. There are also Sephardi congregations.
There had been short-lived efforts to establish Reform congregations as early as the 1890s. However, under the leadership of Ada Phillips, a sustained liberal congregation, Temple Beth Israel, was established in Melbourne. Subsequently, another synagogue linked to the United States Reform Movement, Temple Emanuel, was established in Sydney. Following these two congregations, a number of other Liberal synagogues have been founded in other cities.
Since 1992 Conservative (Masorti) services have been held as an alternative service usually in the Neuweg, the smaller second synagogue within Temple Emanuel, Woollahra, Sydney. In 1999, Kehilat Nitzan, Melbourne's first Conservative (Masorti) congregation was established, with foundation president John Rosenberg. The congregation appointed its first rabbi, Ehud Bandel in 2006. In 2010 Beit Knesset Shalom became Brisbane's first Conservative (Masorti) synagogue.
In 2012, the first humanistic Jewish congregation, known as Kehilat Kolenu, was established in Melbourne with links to the cultural Jewish youth movement Habonim Dror. Later in 2012, a similar congregation was established in Sydney, known as Ayelet HaShachar. The services are loosely based on the Humanistic Jewish movement in the United States and the musical-prayer group Nava Tehila in Israel."
Religion in Australia,"Baháʼí Faith
The Baháʼí Faith first arrived in Australia in 1922, and at less than 0.1% of the total population, is one of the smaller religious minorities. The Sydney Baháʼí Temple is situated in Ingleside, a northern suburb of Sydney. According to Jennifer Taylor, a historian at Sydney University, it is among Sydney's four most significant religious buildings constructed in the twentieth century. Dedicated in 1961, it was also the world's fourth Baháʼí House of Worship to be completed.
The 1996 Australian Census lists Baháʼí membership at just under 9,000. In 2001, the second edition of A Practical Reference to Religious Diversity for Operational Police and Emergency Services added the Baháʼí Faith to its coverage of religions in Australia and noted that the community had grown to over 11,000. The Association of Religion Data Archives (relying on World Christian Encyclopedia) estimated some 17,700 Baháʼís in 2005, and over 19,300 in 2010. However, census data from 2016 reported a much lower population of only 13,988."
Religion in Australia,"Indian/Dharmic religions
Hinduism
Hindus numbered 684,000 in the 2021 census, making Hinduism the fourth largest religious or non-religious affiliation. It is one of the fastest growing religions in Australia (12.0% per year since 2011). In the 19th century, Hindus first came to Australia to work on cotton and sugar plantations. Many who remained worked in small business, as camel drivers, merchants and hawkers, selling goods between small rural communities. Their population increased dramatically from the 1960s and 1970s and more than doubled between the 1996 and 2006 census to around 148,000 people. Most were migrants from countries such as Fiji, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore and South Africa. At present many Hindus are well-educated professionals in fields such as medicine, engineering, commerce and information technology. Among Australia's best-known Hindus is the singer Kamahl. There are around forty-three Hindu temples in Australia, the Sri Mandir Temple in Auburn, Sydney being the first established in 1977."
Religion in Australia,"Buddhism
Buddhists began arriving in Australia in significant numbers during the goldrush of the 1850s with an influx of Chinese miners. However, the population remained low until the 1960s. Buddhism is now one of the fastest growing religions in Australia. Immigration from Asia has contributed to this, but some people of non-Asian origin have also converted. The three main traditions of Buddhism—Theravada, East Asian and Tibetan—are now represented in Australia. According to the 2021 census, Buddhism has 615,800 adherents: 2.4% of the total population.
Buddhist temples can be very active. Quang Minh Temple in Braybrook, Melbourne, Victoria gets about 2,000 people through every Sunday and gives a free vegetarian meal to about 600 people. For important events, more than 20,000 people come. Even more come to the Nan Tien Temple, or ""Southern Paradise Temple"", in Wollongong, New South Wales, began construction in the early 1990s, adopting the Chinese palace building style and is now the largest Buddhist temple in the Southern Hemisphere. This temple follows the Venerable Master Hsing Yun of the Fo Guang Shan Buddhist order. Bodhinyana Monastery is a Theravadin Buddhist monastery in the Thai Forest Tradition located in Serpentine, Western Australia."
Religion in Australia,"Sikhism
Sikhism has been one of the fastest growing religions in Australia in recent years. According to census data, Australia's Sikh population grew from 72,000 to 210,400 between 2011 and 2021, an average growth rate of 14.8% per year. Around 42% of Australia's Sikhs live in the state of Victoria."
Religion in Australia,"Jainism
Jainism is currently the fourth fastest growing religion in Australia, recording 4,050 adherents in 2016 and growing an average of 7.7% per year. The overwhelming majority (94.7%) of Jains live inside the state capitals, primarily Sydney, Melbourne and Perth."
Religion in Australia,"Irreligion
Non-religious
Australia is one of the least religious nations in the developed world, with religion not described as a central part in many people's lives. This view is prominent among Australia's youth, who were ranked as the least religious worldwide in a 2008 survey conducted by The Christian Science Monitor. In the 2021 census, the ABS categorised ~9,887,000 Australians (38.9%) as having no religion, up 16.6% in real terms from 4,796,800 (22.3%) in 2011. This category includes agnosticism, atheism, humanism, rationalism, and people who are unaffiliated with any particular religion."
Religion in Australia,"Atheism
While people with no religion are more than 30% of the Australian population, the Australian Bureau of Statistics does not provide information in the annual ""1301.0 – Year Book Australia"" on religious affiliation as to how many people fall into each sub-category. Data on religious affiliation is only collected by the ABS at the five yearly population census. Atheist interests in Australia are represented nationally by the Atheist Foundation of Australia. Humanist interests in Australia are represented nationally by the Council of Australian Humanist Societies. Rationalist interests in Australia are represented nationally by the Rationalist Society of Australia. The Global Atheist Convention, a prominent atheist event, has been held in Melbourne."
Religion in Australia,"Other religions
The 2006 census shows 53 listed groups down to 5000 members, most of them Christian denominations, many of them national versions such as Greek, Serbian Orthodox and Assyrian Orthodox. Of the smaller religions, Pagan religions 29,328, the Baháʼí Faith at 12,000, Humanism about 7000. Between 1000 and 5000 are: Taoism, Druse, Satanism, Zoroastrian, Rationalism, Creativity, Theosophy, Jainism. There are also adherents of Tenrikyo, Shinto, Unitarian Universalism, Eckankar, Cao Dai, Rastafari, Pantheism, Scientology and Raelianism.
In general, non-Christian religions and those with no religion have been growing in proportion to the overall population. With fewer classifications, data from 1996 and 2001 showed Aboriginal religion decreasing from 7000 to 5000 while Baháʼí grew from just under 9,000 to over 11,000 and the rest of the ""Other"" category growing from about 69,000 to about 92,000."
Religion in Australia,"Paganism
The early history of Australian Paganism is obscure. Theosophists and spiritualists arrived in Australia in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) had a lodge in Sydney from 1912 until the late 1920s, which was revived in 1982. In late 1960s and 1970s both Melbourne and Sydney saw various occult orders influenced by Western magical traditions, British occultism, and figures like Aleister Crowley however these groups were mostly small and secretive.
When exactly Witchcraft arrived in Australia is a matter of debate however it’s commonly accepted that Alexandrian Wiccans and Gardnerian Wiccans arrived in Australia from England and the United States around the late 1960s.
In the 2001 Australian census, 24,157 people identified with a Pagan religion, representing 0.12% of the population. This included 10,632 Pagans, 8,755 Wiccans, 2,225 nature religion adherents, 1,085 Pantheists, 763 Animists, and 697 Druids.
Comparatively, there are slightly more Pagans in Australia than Brethren, ten times more than Scientologists, and half the number of Seventh Day Adventists or Mormons, making Paganism a significant minority religion. Professor Douglas Ezzy suspects that 2001 census underestimates the number of Pagans, especially among teenagers whose parents may not have reported their Pagan beliefs due to the stigma associated with terms like “Witch”; many any who identified as “Pagan” on the census might identify as “Witch” in private.
The 2001 census (and following censuses) also showed that women dominate Australian Paganism, with 63% being female. The religion in Australia with the highest proportion of females to males is Wicca, with only 26 males for every 100 females, compared to the national ratio of 97 males for every 100 females.
In the 2011 census, 32,083 Australians identified their religion as a pagan religion including 8,413 people who identified their religion as Wicca or Neopagan witchcraft.
In the 2016 census, 27,194 Australians identified as pagan or other affiliated ""nature religions"" including 6,616 people who identified their religion as Wicca or Neopagan witchcraft.
In the 2021 census, 33,142 Australians identified their religion as nature religion including 18,630 people who identified their religion as pagan religion and 7,785 people who identified their religion as Wicca or Neopagan witchcraft.
In 2021, The Adelaide University Occult Club, a student club at the University of Adelaide, faced challenges in securing funding and access to campus facilities from student union, YouX due to a delay in reregistering the club. The pagan club with multiple other clubs signed an open letter to the clubs committee. In 2022, controversy the club was reregistration was denied during an in camera decision; rejection of registration was complaint over the club might summon satan.
In 2024, Sacred Grove Society (SGSFU), student club for pagans at Flinders University was formed; Flinders University used to have the pagan club from 1998 to 2008, Flinders University Pagan Association (FUPA); FUPA used to produce a club newsletter called The Grimoire and host a radio show called The Elements on student radio.
Other university pagan clubs of the 2000s in Australia include Pagans and Gnostics of the University of Sydney (PAGUS), Monash University’s Alternative Spiritualities Club, and University of Western Australia’s Pagan Network.
Australia inherited its witchcraft laws from British colonial rule, specifically the Witchcraft Act of 1735, was repealed in 1951. Australian witchcraft laws were gradually phased out in Australia, with New South Wales being the first state to repeal them in 1969. South Australia followed in 1991, Queensland in 2000, and Victoria in 2005."
Religion in Australia,"Religion and the law
Constitutional status
Section 116 of the Constitution of Australia provides that:"
Religion in Australia,"The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.
Technically, this does not affect the states' authority to legislate on religion. Nor would it block federal legislation on religion, aside from that establishing an official religion of Australia. In practice, though, federal governments have respected Section 116 and generally allowed the free practice of religions. Australia does not have explicit ""separation of church and state""—the essence of a ""secular state""—in the sense that countries like the USA do. In view of Section 116 of Australia's constitution (""The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance ...""), it is commonly believed that Australia is already a ""secular state"". This is a misconception: in 1981, the High Court determined that there is in fact no constitutional separation of church and state in Australia. However, there is no general ""mood"" to legislate establishment of religions."
Religion in Australia,"Other interactions
In 1983, the High Court of Australia defined religion as ""a complex of beliefs and practices which point to a set of values and an understanding of the meaning of existence"". The Australian Bureau of Statistics 2001 Census Dictionary defines ""no religion"" as a category of religion which includes subcategories such as agnosticism, atheism, Humanism and rationalism (but the ABS also categorises these as ""secular beliefs"").
The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) is able to inquire into allegations of discrimination on religious grounds.
In 1998 the HREOC addressed the right to freedom of religion and belief in Australia against article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, stating that ""despite the legal protections that apply in different jurisdictions, many Australians suffer discrimination on the basis of religious belief or non-belief, including members of both mainstream and non-mainstream religions, and those of no religious persuasion."" An example of an HREOC response to such views is the IsmaU project, which examines possible prejudice against Muslims in Australia since the 11 September 2001 attacks in the US and the Bali bombings."
Religion in Australia,"Interfaith efforts
Interfaith efforts between various religious institutions occur. Since the early 2000s, the Abraham Conference convenes as an annual interfaith event between Christians, Muslims, and Jews."
Religion in Australia,"See also
A Practical Reference to Religious Diversity for Operational Police and Emergency Services
Australian Association for Jewish Studies
Broken Rites & Catholic Church sexual abuse cases in Australia
Freedom of religion in Australia
National Church Life Survey
Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse
Separation of church and state in Australia
Stolen Generations"
Religion in Australia,"References
Further reading
External links
Australian Standard Classification of Religious Groups (ASCRG), 1266.0, 1996
1996 Census Dictionary – Religion category
2001 Census Dictionary – Religion category
Year Book Australia, 2006. Religious Affiliation section
Australia in USA Department of State International Religious Freedom Report
Carey, Hilary M. (2008). ""Religion"". Dictionary of Sydney. Retrieved 4 October 2015. (History of Religion in Sydney) [CC-By-SA]"
Contemporary Indigenous Australian art,"Contemporary Indigenous Australian art (also known as contemporary Aboriginal Australian art) is the modern art work produced by Indigenous Australians, that is, Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islander people. It is generally regarded as beginning in 1971 with a painting movement that started at Papunya, northwest of Alice Springs, Northern Territory, involving Aboriginal artists such as Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, and facilitated by white Australian teacher and art worker Geoffrey Bardon. The movement spawned widespread interest across rural and remote Aboriginal Australia in creating art, while contemporary Indigenous art of a different nature also emerged in urban centres; together they have become central to Australian art. Indigenous art centres have fostered the emergence of the contemporary art movement, and as of 2010 were estimated to represent over 5000 artists, mostly in Australia's north and west.
Contemporary Indigenous artists have won many of Australia's most prominent art prizes. The Wynne Prize has been won by Indigenous artists on at least three occasions, the Blake Prize for Religious Art was in 2007 won by Shirley Purdie with Linda Syddick Napaltjarri a finalist on three separate occasions, while the Clemenger Contemporary Art Award was won by John Mawurndjul in 2003 and Judy Watson in 2006. There is a national art prize for Indigenous artists, the National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award, which in 2013 was won by Jenni Kemarre Martiniello from Canberra.
Indigenous artists, including Rover Thomas, have represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in 1990 and 1997. In 2007, a painting by Emily Kngwarreye, Earth's Creation, was the first Indigenous Australian art work to sell for more than A$1 million. Leading Indigenous artists have had solo exhibitions at Australian and international galleries, while their work has been included in major collaborations such as the design of the Musée du quai Branly. Works by contemporary Indigenous artists are held by all of Australia's major public galleries, including the National Gallery of Australia, which in 2010 opened a new wing dedicated to its Indigenous collection.
The figurative ""dot painting"" produced by Western Desert artists is among the most well-known styles of contemporary Aboriginal art."
Contemporary Indigenous Australian art,"Origins and evolution
Indigenous Australian art can claim to be ""the world’s longest continuing art tradition"". Prior to European settlement of Australia, Indigenous people used many art forms, including sculpture, wood carving, rock carving, body painting, bark painting and weaving. Many of these continue to be used both for traditional purposes and in the creation of art works for exhibition and sale. Some other techniques have declined or disappeared since European settlement, including body decoration by scarring and the making of possum-skin cloaks. However, Indigenous Australians also adopted and expanded the use of new techniques including painting on paper and canvas. Early examples include the late nineteenth century drawings by William Barak."
Contemporary Indigenous Australian art,"Early initiatives
In the 1930s, artists Rex Battarbee and John Gardner introduced watercolour painting to Albert Namatjira, an Indigenous man at Hermannsberg Mission, south-west of Alice Springs. His landscape paintings, first created in 1936 and exhibited in Australian cities in 1938, were immediately successful, and he became the first Indigenous Australian watercolourist as well as the first to successfully exhibit and sell his works to the non-Indigenous community. Namatjira's style of work was adopted by other Indigenous artists in the region beginning with his close male relatives, and they became known as the Hermannsburg School or as the Arrernte Watercolourists.
Namatjira died in 1959, and by then a second initiative had also begun. At Ernabella, now Pukatja, South Australia, the use of bright acrylic paints to produce designs for posters and postcards was introduced. This led later to fabric design and batik work, which is still produced at Australia's oldest Indigenous art centre."
Contemporary Indigenous Australian art,"Origin
While the initiatives at Hermannsburg and Ernabella were important antecedents, most sources trace the origins of contemporary Indigenous art, particularly acrylic painting, to Papunya, Northern Territory, in 1971. An Australian school teacher, Geoffrey Bardon arrived at Papunya and started an art program with children at the school and then with the men of the community. The men began with painting a mural on the school walls, and moved on to painting on boards and canvas. At the same time, Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, a member of the community who worked with Bardon, won a regional art award at Alice Springs with his painting Gulgardi. Soon over 20 men at Papunya were painting, and they established their own company, Papunya Tula Artists Limited, to support the creation and marketing of works. Although painting took hold quickly at Papunya, it remained a ""small-scale regional phenomenon"" throughout the 1970s, and for a decade none of the state galleries or the national gallery collected the works, with the notable exception of the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, that acquired 220 of the early Papunya boards."
Contemporary Indigenous Australian art,"Evolution
After being largely confined to Papunya in the 1970s, the painting movement developed rapidly in the 1980s, spreading to Yuendumu, Lajamanu, Utopia and Haasts Bluff in the Northern Territory, and Balgo, Western Australia. By the 1990s artistic activity had spread to many communities throughout northern Australia, including those established as part of the Outstation movement, such as Kintore, Northern Territory and Kiwirrkurra Community, Western Australia. As the movement evolved, not all artists were satisfied with its trajectory. What began as a contemporary expression of ritual knowledge and identity was increasingly becoming commodified, as the economic success of painting created its own pressures within communities. Some artists were critical of the art centre workers, and moved away from painting, returning their attention to ritual. Other artists were producing works less connected to social networks that had been traditionally responsible for designs. While the movement was evolving, however, its growth did not slow: at least another 10 painting communities developed in central Australia between the late 1990s and 2006.
Indigenous art cooperatives have been central to the emergence of contemporary Indigenous art. Whereas many western artists pursue formal training and work as individuals, most contemporary Indigenous art is created in community groups and art centres. The number of people involved, and the small sizes of the places in which they work, mean that sometimes a quarter to a half of community members are artists, with critic Sasha Grishin concluding in 2007 that the communities include ""the highest per capita concentrations of artists anywhere in the world"".
In 2010, the peak body representing Central Desert Australian Indigenous art centres, Desart (incorporated in 1993), had 44 member centres, As of January 2024 it has 30 member centres. It mounts the Desert Mob exhibition and event at the Araluen Arts Centre in Mparntwe (Alice Springs) each year. 
The Association of Northern, Kimberley and Arnhem Aboriginal Artists (ANKAAA; now Arnhem, Northern and Kimberley Artists, or ANKA), the peak body for northern Australian communities, had 43 member centres in 2010. The centres represent large numbers of artists – ANKAAA estimated that in 2010 its member organisations included up to 5000. 
The Aboriginal Art Association of Australia (AAAA), incorporated in January 1999, advocates for all industry participants, including artists, galleries, and dealers. It lobbies and informs governments on behalf of its members on a range of matters."
Contemporary Indigenous Australian art,"Styles and themes
Indigenous art frequently reflects the spiritual traditions, cultural practices and socio-political circumstances of Indigenous people, and these have varied across the country. The works of art accordingly differ greatly from place to place. Major reference works on Australian Indigenous art often discuss works by geographical region. The usual groupings are of art from the Central Australian desert; the Kimberley in Western Australia; the northern regions of the Northern Territory, particularly Arnhem Land, often referred to as the Top End; and northern Queensland, including the Torres Strait Islands. Urban art is also generally treated as a distinct style of Indigenous art, though it is not clearly geographically defined."
Contemporary Indigenous Australian art,"Desert art
Indigenous artists from remote central Australia, particularly the central and western desert area, frequently paint particular 'dreamings', or stories, for which they have personal responsibility or rights. Best known amongst these are the works of the Papunya Tula painters and of Utopia artist Emily Kngwarreye. The patterns portrayed by central Australian artists, such as those from Papunya, originated as translations of traditional motifs marked out in sand, boards or incised into rock. The symbols used in designs may represent place, movement, or people and animals, while dot fields may indicate a range of phenomena such as sparks, clouds or rain.
There are some figurative approaches in the art of those of central Australia, such as among some of the painters from Balgo, Western Australia. Some central Australian artists whose people were displaced from their lands in the mid-twentieth century by nuclear weapon tests have painted works that use traditional painting techniques but also portray the effects of the blasts on their country."
Contemporary Indigenous Australian art,"APY lands
Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara, in remote north-western South Australia, is renowned for its artists, who are always well-represented in any exhibitions and awards for Indigenous Australian artists. In 2017, APY artists earned 25 nominations in the prestigious Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Awards; two were named as finalists in the Archibald Prize; 14 APY artists' work made the shortlist for the 2019 A$50,000 Wynne Prize for landscape painting; and in 2019, APY artists also won or were shortlisted for the Ramsay Art Prize, the Sir John Sulman Prize, the John Fries Award, and others. Nici Cumpston, artistic director of Tarnanthi Festival at Art Gallery of South Australia, regularly visits the APY art centres.
The APY Art Centre Collective is  as of 2020 a group of ten Indigenous-owned and -governed enterprises which supports artists from across the Lands and helps to market their work. The collective supports collaborative regional projects, such as the renowned Kulata Tjuta project, and the APY Photography initiative. Seven art centres across the Lands support the work of more than 500 Anangu artists, from the oldest one, Ernabella Arts, to Iwantja Arts at Indulkana, whose residents include award-winning Vincent Namatjira. Other APY centres are Tjala Arts (at Amata), Kaltjiti Arts, Mimili Maku Arts and Tjungu Palya (Nyapari). As well as the APY centres, Maruku Arts from Uluru, Tjanpi Desert Weavers based in Alice Springs, and Ara Iritja Aboriginal Corporation bring the number up to ten.
The Collective has galleries in Darlinghurst, Sydney and, since May 2019, a gallery and studio space on Light Square (Wauwi)  in Adelaide."
Contemporary Indigenous Australian art,"The Top End
In Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, men have painted their traditional clan designs. The iconography however is quite separate and distinct from that of central Australia. In north Queensland and the Torres Strait many communities continue to practice cultural artistic traditions along with voicing strong political and social messages in their work."
Contemporary Indigenous Australian art,"Urban art
In Indigenous communities across northern Australia most artists have no formal training, their work being based instead on traditional knowledge and skills. In southeast Australia other Indigenous artists, often living in the cities, have trained in art schools and universities. These artists are frequently referred to as ""urban"" Indigenous artists, although the term is sometimes controversial, and does not accurately describe the origins of some of these individuals, such as Bronwyn Bancroft who grew up in the town of Tenterfield, New South Wales, Michael Riley who came from rural New South Wales near Dubbo and Moree, or Lin Onus who spent time on his father's traditional country on the Murray River near Victoria's Barmah forest. Some, like Onus, were self-taught while others, such as artist Danie Mellor or artist and curator Brenda Croft, completed university studies in fine arts."
Contemporary Indigenous Australian art,"Media
Anthropologist Nicholas Thomas observed that contemporary Indigenous art practice was perhaps unique in how ""wholly new media were adapted so rapidly to produce work of such palpable strength"". Much contemporary Indigenous art is produced using acrylic paint on canvas. However other materials and techniques are in use, often in particular regions. Bark painting predominates amongst artists from Arnhem Land, who also undertake carving and weaving. In central Australian communities associated with the Pitjantjatjara people, pokerwork carving is significant. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander printmaking was in 2011 described by the National Gallery's senior curator of prints and drawings as ""the most significant development in recent printmaking history"".
Textile production including batik has been important in the northwestern desert regions of South Australia, in the Northern Territory's Utopia community, and in other areas of central Australia. For a decade before commencing the painting career that would make her famous, Emily Kngwarreye was creating batik designs that revealed her ""prodigious original talent"" and the modernity of her artistic vision. A wide range of textile art techniques, including dyeing and weaving, is particularly associated with Pukatja, South Australia (formerly known as Ernabella), but in the mid-2000s the community also developed a reputation for fine sgraffito ceramics. Hermannsburg, originally home to Albert Namatjira and the Arrente Watercolourists, is now renowned for its pottery.
Amongst urban Indigenous artists, more diverse techniques are in use such as silkscreen printing, poster making, photography, television and film. One of the most important contemporary Indigenous artists of his generation, Michael Riley worked in film, video, still photography and digital media. Likewise, Bronwyn Bancroft has worked in fabric, textiles, ""jewellery design, painting, collage, illustration, sculpture and interior decoration"". Nevertheless, painting remains a medium used by many 'urban' artists, such as Gordon Bennett, Fiona Foley, Trevor Nickolls, Lin Onus, Judy Watson, and Harry Wedge."
Contemporary Indigenous Australian art,"Exhibitions
The public recognition and exhibition of contemporary Indigenous art was initially very limited: for example, it was only a minor part of the collection of the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) when its building was opened in 1982. Early exhibitions of major works were held as part of the Sydney Biennales of 1979 and 1982, while a large-scale sand painting was a feature of the 1981 Sydney Festival. Early private gallery showings of contemporary Indigenous art included a solo exhibition of bark paintings by Johnny Bulunbulun at Hogarth Gallery in Sydney in 1981, and an exhibition of western desert artists at Gallery A in Sydney, which formed part of the 1982 Sydney Festival.
There are a number of regular exhibitions devoted to contemporary Indigenous art. Since 1984, the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award exhibition has been held in the Northern Territory, under the auspices of the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. In 2007, the NGA held the first National Indigenous Art Triennial (NIAT), which included works by thirty contemporary Indigenous artists such as Richard Bell, Danie Mellor, Doreen Reid Nakamarra and Shane Pickett. Despite its name, the second triennial was not held until 2012, and was titled unDisclosed. The third Triennial, Defying Empire, was held in 2017, with the title referencing the 50th anniversary of the 1967 referendum.
The Araluen Centre for Arts and Entertainment, a public art gallery in Alice Springs, hosts the annual Desert Mob exhibition, representing current painting activities across Australia's Aboriginal art centres.
Several individual artists have been the subject of retrospective exhibitions at public galleries. These have included Rover Thomas at the National Gallery of Australia in 1994, Emily Kngwarreye, at the Queensland Art Gallery in 1998, John Mawurndjul at the Tinguely Museum in Basel, Switzerland in 2005, and Paddy Bedford at several galleries including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney in 2006–07.
Internationally, Indigenous artists have represented Australia in the Venice Biennale, including Rover Thomas and Trevor Nickolls in 1990, and Emily Kngwarreye, Judy Watson and Yvonne Koolmatrie in 1997. In 2000, a number of individual artists and artistic collaborations were shown in the prestigious Nicholas Hall at the Hermitage Museum in Russia. In 2003, eight Indigenous artists – Paddy Bedford, John Mawurndjul, Ningura Napurrula, Lena Nyadbi, Michael Riley, Judy Watson, Tommy Watson and Gulumbu Yunupingu – collaborated on a commission to provide works that decorate one of the Musée du quai Branly's four buildings completed in 2006.
In 2005, the Australian Research Council and Land & Water Australia supported an artistic and archaeological collaboration through the project Strata: Deserts Past, Present and Future, which involved Indigenous artists Daisy Jugadai Napaltjarri and Molly Jugadai Napaltjarri.
In London, Tate Modern's exhibition, A Year in Art: Australia 1992, which opened in June 2021, was extended until September 2022 owing to its popularity. In mid-2022, the National Gallery Singapore opened a major exhibition, Ever Present: First Peoples Art of Australia, which is the most extensive show of its type to tour Asia."
Contemporary Indigenous Australian art,"Collections
Contemporary Indigenous art works are collected by all of Australia's major public galleries. The National Gallery of Australia has a significant collection, and a new wing was (pictured) opened in 2010 for its permanent exhibition. Some state galleries, such as the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Victoria, and the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, have gallery space permanently dedicated to the exhibition of contemporary Indigenous art. The National Gallery of Victoria's collection includes the country's main collection of Indigenous batik. The Araluen Centre for Arts and Entertainment hosts the country's largest collection of works by Albert Namatjira.
Galleries outside Australia acquiring contemporary Indigenous art include the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Permanent displays of Indigenous art outside Australia are found at Seattle Art Museum, Glasgow's Gallery of Modern Art and the Kluge–Ruhe Museum at the University of Virginia."
Contemporary Indigenous Australian art,"Prizes
Contemporary Indigenous art works have won a number of Australia's principal national art prizes, including the Wynne Prize, the Clemenger Contemporary Art Award and the Blake Prize for Religious Art. Indigenous awardees have included Shirley Purdie, 2007 winner of the Blake Prize with her work Stations of the Cross; 2003 Clemenger Award winner John Mawurndjul, and 2006 Clemenger winner Judy Watson. The Wynne Prize has been won by contemporary Indigenous artists on several occasions, including in 1999 by Gloria Petyarre with Leaves; in 2004 by George Tjungurrayi; and in 2008 by Joanne Currie Nalingu, with her painting The river is calm.
As well as winning major prizes, Indigenous artists have been well represented among the finalists in these competitions. The Blake Prize has included numerous Indigenous finalists, such as Bronwyn Bancroft (2008), Angelina Ngal and Irene (Mbitjana) Entata (2009), Genevieve Kemarr Loy, Cowboy Loy Pwerl, Dinni Kunoth Kemarre, Elizabeth Kunoth Kngwarray (2010), and Linda Syddick Napaltjarri (on three separate occasions).
Australia's major Indigenous art prize is the National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award. Established by the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory in 1984, the award includes a major winner that receives A$40,000, and five category awards each worth $4000: one for bark painting, one for works on paper, one for three-dimensional works and, introduced for the first time in 2010, one for new media. Winners of the major prize have included Makinti Napanangka in 2008, and Danie Mellor in 2009. In 2008, the Art Gallery of Western Australia established the Western Australian Indigenous Art Awards, which include the country's most valuable Indigenous art cash prize of A$50,000, as well as a A$10,000 prize for the top Western Australian artist, and a A$5000 People's Choice Award, all selected from the field of finalists, which includes 15 individuals and one collaborative group. The 2009 winner of the main prize was Ricardo Idagi, while the People's Choice award was won by Shane Pickett. Wayne Quilliam was awarded the 2009 NAIDOC Artist of the Year for his many years of work on the local and international scene working with Indigenous groups throughout the world."
Contemporary Indigenous Australian art,"Benefits and costs
The flowering of Indigenous art has delivered economic, social and cultural benefits to Indigenous Australians, who are socially and economically disadvantaged compared to the Australian community as a whole. The sale of art works is a significant economic activity for individual artists and for their communities. Estimates of the size of the sector vary, but placed its value in the early 2000s at A$100 to 300 million, and by 2007 at half a billion dollars and growing. The sector is particularly important to many Indigenous communities because, as well being a source of cash for an economically disadvantaged group, it reinforces Indigenous identity and tradition, and has aided the maintenance of social cohesion. For example, early works painted at Papunya were created by senior Aboriginal men to help educate younger generations about their culture and their cultural responsibilities."
Contemporary Indigenous Australian art,"Fraud and exploitation are significant issues affecting contemporary Indigenous Australian art. Indigenous art works have regularly been reproduced without artists' permission, including by the Reserve Bank of Australia when it used a David Malangi painting on the one dollar note in 1966. Similar appropriation of material has taken place with fabric designs, T-shirts and carpets. There have been claims of artists being kidnapped, or relocated against the wishes of their families, by people keen to acquire the artists' paintings.
Artists, particularly in the remoter parts of Australia, sometimes paint for outlets other than the Indigenous art centres or their own companies. They do this for economic reasons, however the resulting paintings can be of uneven quality, and of precarious economic value. Doubts about the provenance of Indigenous paintings, and about the prices paid for them, have spawned media scrutiny, an Australian parliamentary inquiry, and have been a factor limiting the growth in value of works. Questions regarding the authenticity of works have arisen in relation to particular artists, including Emily Kngwarreye, Rover Thomas, Kathleen Petyarre, Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula, Ginger Riley Munduwalawala, and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri; in 2001 an art dealer was jailed for fraud in relation to Clifford Possum's work. These pressures led in 2009 to the introduction of a commercial code of conduct, intended to establish ""minimum standards of practice and fair dealing in the Indigenous visual arts industry"". However, persistent problems in the industry in September 2012 led the chair of the code's administering body Indigenous Art Code, Ron Merkel, to call for the code to be made mandatory for art dealers.
Prices fetched in the secondary market for Indigenous art works vary widely. Until 2007, the record at auction for an Indigenous art work was $778,750 paid in 2003 for a Rover Thomas painting, All That Big Rain Coming from the Top Side. In 2007, a major work by Emily Kngwarreye, Earth's Creation, sold for $1.056 million, a new record that was however eclipsed only a few months later, when Clifford Possum's epic work Warlugulong was bought for $2.4 million by the National Gallery of Australia. At the same time, however, works by prominent artists but of doubtful provenance were being passed in at auctions. In 2003 there were 97 Indigenous Australian artists whose works were being sold at auction in Australia for prices above $5000, with the total auction market worth around $9.5 million. In that year Sotheby's estimated that half of sales were to bidders outside Australia. By 2012, the market had changed, with older works fetching higher prices than contemporary paintings.
A 2011 change in Australian superannuation investment rules resulted in a sharp decline in sales of new Indigenous art. The change prohibits assets acquired for a self-managed superannuation fund from being ""used"" before retirement; in particular, an artwork must be kept in storage rather than displayed."
Contemporary Indigenous Australian art,"Influence on non-Indigenous artists
Initially a source of ethnographic interest, and later an artistic movement with roots outside Western art traditions, Indigenous art was influenced by, and had influence upon, few European Australian artists. The early works of Margaret Preston sometimes expressed motifs from traditional Indigenous art; her later works show a deeper influence, ""in the use of colours, in the interplay of figuration and abstraction in the formal structure"". In contrast, Hans Heysen, though he admired fellow landscapist Albert Namatjira and collected his paintings, was not influenced by his Indigenous counterpart. The contemporary Indigenous art movement has influenced some non-Indigenous Australian artists through collaborative projects. Indigenous artists Gordon Bennett and Michael Nelson Jagamarra have engaged in both collaborative artworks and exhibitions with gallerist Michael Eather, and painter Imants Tillers, the Australian-born son of Latvian refugees."
Contemporary Indigenous Australian art,"Assessment
Professor of art history Ian McLean described the birth of the contemporary Indigenous art movement in 1971 as ""the most fabulous moment in Australian art history"", and considered that it was becoming one of Australia's founding myths, like the ANZAC spirit. Art historian Wally Caruana called Indigenous art ""the last great tradition of art to be appreciated by the world at large"", and contemporary Indigenous art is the only art movement of international significance to emerge from Australia. Leading critic Robert Hughes saw it as ""the last great art movement of the 20th century"", while poet Les Murray thought of it as ""Australia's equivalent of jazz"". Paintings by the artists of the western desert in particular have quickly achieved ""an extraordinarily widespread reputation"", with collectors competing to obtain them. Some Indigenous artists are regarded as amongst Australia's foremost creative talent; Emily Kngwarreye has been described as ""one of the greatest modern Australian painters"", and ""among the best Australian artists, arguably amongst the best of her time."" Critics reviewing the Hermitage Museum exhibition in 2000 were fulsome in their praise, one remarking: ""This is an exhibition of contemporary art, not in the sense that it was done recently, but in that it is cased in the mentality, technology and philosophy of radical art of the most recent times. No one, other than the Aborigines of Australia, has succeeded in exhibiting such art at the Hermitage"".
The assessments have not been universally favourable. When an exhibition was held in the United Kingdom in 1993, a reviewer in The Independent described the works as ""perhaps the most boring art in the world"". Museum curator Philip Batty, who had been involved in assisting the creation and sale of art in central Australia, expressed concern at the effect of the non-Indigenous art market on the artists – particularly Emily Kngwarreye – and their work. He wrote ""there was always a danger that the European component of this cross-cultural partnership would become overly dominant. By the end of her brief career, I think that Emily had all but evacuated this intercultural domain, and her work simply became a mirror image of European desires"". Outstanding art works are mixed with poor ones, with the passage of time yet to filter the good from the bad."
Contemporary Indigenous Australian art,"2020s resurgence
There was evidence of a resurgence of interest in contemporary Australian Indigenous art in the early 2020s, both at home and abroad. Works at the Fremantle Arts Centre's 2022 Revealed exhibition, featuring early-career artists, sold three-quarters of the works on the first night. In London, England, Tate Modern's exhibition, A Year in Art: Australia 1992, which opened in June 2021, was extended until September 2022 owing to its popularity. In 2022, Sotheby's in New York moved its annual Australian Indigenous art sale from the winter off-season to the May ""marquee month"", with the highest-selling work going for just over one million Australian dollars. In mid-2022, the National Gallery Singapore opened a major exhibition, Ever Present: First Peoples Art of Australia, which is the most extensive show of its type to tour Asia."
Contemporary Indigenous Australian art,"See also
APY Art Centre Collective
Indigenous Australian art
List of Indigenous Australian art movements and cooperatives
Torres Strait Islander art"
Contemporary Indigenous Australian art,"References
Bibliography
Bedford, Paddy and Russell Storer (2006). Paddy Bedford. Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art. ISBN 1-921034-16-5.
Butler, Roger (2011). ""Print – Matters"". In Jaynie Anderson (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Australian Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 97–108. ISBN 978-1-107-60158-1.
Carty, John; French, Alison (2011). ""Art of Central Australia: Refigured Ground"". In Jaynie Anderson (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Australian Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 122–142. ISBN 978-1-107-60158-1.
Caruana, Wally (2003). Aboriginal Art (2nd ed.). London: Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978-0-500-20366-8.
Croft, Brenda (2006). Michael Riley: Sights Unseen. Canberra: National Gallery of Australia. ISBN 0-642-54162-0.
Croft, Brenda, ed (2007). Culture Warriors: National Indigenous Art Triennial 2007. Canberra: National Gallery of Australia. ISBN 978-0-642-54133-8.
Cubillo, Franchesca; Wally Caruana, eds. (2010). Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art: Collection Highlights. Canberra: National Gallery of Australia. ISBN 978-0-642-33414-5.
Dussart, Francoise (2006). ""Canvassing identities: reflecting on the acrylic art movement in an Australian Aboriginal settlement"". Aboriginal History. 30: 156–168.
(no editor) (1996). Emily Kngwarreye – Paintings. North Ryde New South Wales: Craftsman House / G + B Arts International. ISBN 90-5703-681-9.
Genocchio, Benjamin (2008). Dollar Dreaming. Prahran, VIC: Hardie Grant Books. ISBN 978-1-74066-609-1.
Greer, Germaine, ed (2004). Whitefella Jump Up: The Shortest Way to Nationhood. London: Profile Books. ISBN 1-86197-739-5.
Horton, David, ed (1994). Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia. Volume 1. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. ISBN 978-0-85575-234-7.
Jenkins, Susan (2004). No Ordinary Place: the Art of David Malangi. Canberra: National Gallery of Australia. ISBN 0-642-54179-5.
Johnson, Vivien (1994). Aboriginal Artists of the Western Desert: A Biographical Dictionary. Roseville East, NSW: Craftsman House. ISBN 976-8097-81-7.
Johnson, Vivien, ed (2007). Papunya Painting: Out of the Desert Archived 21 July 2018 at the Wayback Machine. Canberra: National Museum of Australia. ISBN 978-1-876944-58-2.
Johnson, Vivien (2010). Once Upon a Time in Papunya. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. ISBN 978-1-74223-007-8.
Kleinert, Sylvia and Margot Neale, eds (2000). The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-550649-9.
McCulloch, Alan; Susan McCulloch and Emily McCulloch Childs (2006). The New McCulloch's Encyclopedia of Australian Art. Fitzroy, Victoria: Aus Art Editions in association with The Miegunyah Press. ISBN 0-522-85317-X.
McCulloch, Susan and Emily McCulloch Childs (2008). McCulloch's Contemporary Aboriginal Art: The Complete Guide. 3rd edition. Balnarring, Victoria: McCulloch & McCulloch. ISBN 978-0-9804494-2-6.
McLean, Ian (2011). ""The Gift that Time Gave: Myth and History in the Western Desert Painting Movement"". In Jaynie Anderson (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Australian Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 180–192. ISBN 978-1-107-60158-1.
Morphy, Howard (2011). ""Coming to Terms with Aboriginal Art in the 1960s"". In Jaynie Anderson (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Australian Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 153–167. ISBN 978-1-107-60158-1.
Morphy, Howard (1999). Aboriginal Art. London: Phaidon. ISBN 0-7148-3752-0.
Murphy, John, ed (2009). Gallery A Sydney 1964–1983. Campbelltown NSW: Campbelltown Arts Centre, and Newcastle NSW: Newcastle Region Art Gallery. ISBN 978-1-875199-67-9.
Rothwell, Nicholas (2007). Another Country. Melbourne: Black Inc. ISBN 978-1-86395-382-5.
Ryan, Judith (2008). Across the Desert: Aboriginal Batik from Central Australia. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria. ISBN 978-0-7241-0299-0.
Ryan, Judith; Carol Cooper and Joy Murphy-Wandin (2003). Remembering Barak. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria. ISBN 0-7241-0222-1.
Senate Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts Committee (2007). Indigenous Art – Securing the Future. Australia's Indigenous Visual Arts and Craft Sector. Canberra: The Senate. ISBN 978-0-642-71788-7.
Thomas, Nicholas (1999). Possessions. Indigenous Art / Colonial Culture. London: Thames and Hudson. ISBN 0-500-28097-5"
Contemporary Indigenous Australian art,External links
Contemporary Indigenous Australian art,"APY Gallery Adelaide website
Australian Art Collector magazine's Guide to Indigenous Art Centres
Papunya Collection, National Museum of Australia Archived 7 October 2012 at the Wayback Machine
Ernabella Arts Collection, National Museum of Australia
Papunya Painting: Out of the Desert, National Museum of Australia online exhibition Archived 25 May 2012 at the Wayback Machine"
European Australians,"European Australians are citizens or residents of Australia whose ancestry originates from the peoples of Europe. They form the largest panethnic group in the country. At the 2021 census, the number of ancestry responses categorised within European ancestral groups as a proportion of the total population amounted to more than 57.2% (46% North-West European and 11.2% Southern and Eastern European). It is impossible to quantify the precise proportion of the population with European ancestry. For instance, many census recipients nominated two European ancestries, tending towards an overcount. Conversely, 29.9% of census recipients nominated ""Australian"" ancestry (categorised within the Oceanian ancestry group, although most of them are likely to be of Anglo-Celtic or European ancestry), tending towards an undercount.
Since the early 19th century, people of European descent have formed the majority of the population in Australia. Historically, European immigrants had great influence over Australian culture and society, which results in the perception of Australia as a European-derived country.
The majority of European Australians are of British Isles – English, Irish, Scottish, or Welsh – ancestral origin. While not an official ancestral classification, they are often referred to as Anglo-Celtic Australians. Other significant ancestries include Italian, German, Greek, Dutch, European New Zealanders, Polish, Maltese, and Scandinavian."
European Australians,"Classification
The Australian Bureau of Statistics and Australian Census does not collect data based on race. Instead, it collects information on distinct ancestries, of which census respondents can select up to two. For the purposes of aggregating data, the Australian Bureau of Statistics in its Australian Standard Classification of Cultural and Ethnic Groups (ASCCEG) has grouped certain ancestries into certain categories, including the following two broad European groupings:"
European Australians,"North-West European Australians, including Austrian Australians, Belgian Australians, Danish Australians, Dutch Australians, English Australians, Finnish Australians, French Australians, German Australians, Icelandic Australians, Irish Australians, Norwegian Australians, Scottish Australians, Swedish Australians and Welsh Australians
Southern and Eastern European Australians, including Albanian Australians, Belarusian Australians, Bosnian Australians, Bulgarian Australians, Croatian Australians, Cypriot Australians, Czech Australians, Estonian Australians, Greek Australians, Hungarian Australians, Italian Australians, Latvian Australians, Lithuanian Australians, Macedonian Australians, Maltese Australians, Montenegrin Australians, Polish Australians, Portuguese Australians, Romanian Australians, Russian Australians, Serbian Australians, Slovak Australians, Slovene Australians, Spanish Australians and Ukrainian Australians
While officially part of the North-West European classification, Australians of English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh or Cornish ancestral origins are often informally referred to as Anglo-Celtic Australians.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has stated that most people nominating ""Australian"" ancestry have at least partial Anglo-Celtic European ancestry, although they are officially categorised as part of the Oceanian group."
European Australians,"History
Early sightings by Europeans
The first records of European mariners sailing into 'Australian' waters occurs around 1606, and includes their observations of the land known as Terra Australis Incognita (unknown southern land). The first ship and crew to chart the Australian coast and meet with Aboriginal people was the Duyfken captained by Dutchman, Willem Janszoon.
Between 1606 and 1770, an estimated 54 European ships from a range of nations made contact. Many of these were merchant ships from the Dutch East Indies Company and included the ships of Abel Tasman. Tasman charted parts of the north, west and south coasts of Australia which was then known as New Holland.
Seebaer van Nieuwelant (born 27 July 1623), son of Willemtgen and Willem Janszoon, was born south of Dirk Hartog Island, in present-day Western Australia. Nieuwelant was the First white child born in Australia. 
In 1770, Englishman Lieutenant James Cook charted the Australian east coast in his ship HM Barque Endeavour. Cook wrote that he claimed the east coast for King George III of Great Britain on 22 August 1770 when standing on Possession Island off the west coast of Cape York Peninsula, naming eastern Australia ""New South Wales'. The coast of Australia, featuring Tasmania as a separate island, was mapped in detail by the English mariners and navigators Bass and Flinders, and the French mariner, Baudin. A nearly completed map of the coastline was published by Flinders in 1814.
This period of European exploration is reflected in the names of landmarks such as the Torres Strait, Arnhem Land, Dampier Sound, Tasmania, the Furneaux Islands, Cape Frecinyet and La Perouse. French expeditions between 1790 and the 1830s, led by D'Entrecasteaux, Baudin, and Furneaux, were recorded by the naturalists Labillardière and Péron.
Luis Vaez de Torres from Spain was also one of the first Europeans to explore Australia."
European Australians,"First settlement by Europeans
The British Crown Colony of New South Wales started with the establishment of a settlement at Sydney Cove by Captain Arthur Phillip on 26 January 1788. This date later became Australia's national day, Australia Day. These land masses included the current islands of New Zealand, which was administered as part of New South Wales until it became a separate colony in 1841. Van Diemen's Land, now known as Tasmania, was first settled in 1803."
European Australians,"British and Irish settlers
The first European Australians came from United Kingdom and Ireland.
The First white child born in New South Wales was Rebecca Small (22 September 1789 – 30 January 1883), was born in Port Jackson, the eldest daughter of John Small a boatswain in the First Fleet which arrived at Botany Bay in January 1788.
The First white child born in Victoria was William James Hobart Thorne (25 November 1803 – 2 July 1872) was born at Port Phillip, in what was still part of New South Wales but became Victoria
Other British settlements followed, at various points around the continent, most of them unsuccessful. In 1824, a penal colony was established near the mouth of the Brisbane River (the basis of the later colony of Queensland). In 1826, a British military camp was established in Western Australia at King George Sound, to discourage French colonisation. (The camp formed the basis of the later town of Albany.) In 1829, the Swan River Colony and its capital of Perth were founded on the west coast proper and also assumed control of King George Sound. Initially a free colony, Western Australia later accepted British convicts, because of an acute labour shortage.
The British Colonial Office in 1835 issued the Proclamation of Governor Bourke, implementing the legal doctrine of terra nullius upon which British settlement was based, reinforcing the notion that the land belonged to no one prior to the British Crown taking possession of it and quashing earlier treaties with Aboriginal peoples, such as that signed by John Batman. Its publication meant that from then, all people found occupying land without the authority of the government would be considered illegal trespassers.
Separate colonies were created from parts of New South Wales: South Australia in 1836, New Zealand in 1840, Victoria in 1851, and Queensland in 1859. The Northern Territory was founded in 1863 as part of South Australia. The transportation of convicts to Australia was phased out between 1840 and 1868.
The European population grew from 0.3 percent of the population of the continent at 1800 to 58.6 percent at 1850.
In 1868, the population of European Australians was 1,539,552.
Massive areas of land were cleared for agriculture and various other purposes, in addition to the obvious impacts this early clearing of land had on the ecology of particular regions, it severely affected indigenous Australians, by reducing the resources they relied on for food, shelter and other essentials. This progressively forced them into smaller areas and reduced their numbers as the majority died of newly introduced diseases and lack of resources. Indigenous resistance against the settlers was widespread, and prolonged fighting between 1788 and the 1930s led to the deaths of at least 20,000 Indigenous people and between 2,000 and 2,500 Europeans.
Irish formed about 25 per cent of the European Australian population in the nineteenth century. Germans formed the largest non-British community for most of the 19th century.
In 1971, nine out of the top ten birthplace groups were from European countries and accounted for 77.2% of all people born overseas. 
People from the United Kingdom still form the largest group. However, their number as a proportion of the total overseas-born population has declined, falling from 40.6% (1,046,356) in 1971 to 17.7% (1,078,064) in 2016."
European Australians,"After World War II
Following World War II, the Australian government instigated a massive program of European immigration. After narrowly preventing a Japanese invasion  and suffering attacks on Australian soil for the first time, it was seen that the country must ""populate or perish"".  Prior to WWII, Australia had viewed itself as largely of British and Irish ancestry but after WWII the success of the United States and the reason for its success, that is largely the creation of a European diaspora, could not be ignored by Australia.  Immigration brought traditional migrants from the United Kingdom along with, for the first time, large numbers of southern and central Europeans, as well as Eastern European Australians. A booming Australian economy stood in sharp contrast to war-ravaged Europe, and newly arrived migrants found employment in government-assisted programs such as the Snowy Mountains Scheme. Two million immigrants arrived between 1948 and 1975, many from Robert Menzies' newly founded Liberal Party of Australia dominated much of the immediate post-war era, defeating the Australian Labor Party government of Ben Chifley in 1949. Menzies oversaw the post-war expansion and became the country's longest-serving leader. Manufacturing industry, previously playing a minor part in an economy dominated by primary production, greatly expanded. Since the 1970s and the abolition of the White Australia policy from Asia and other parts of the world, Australia's demography, culture and image of itself has been radically transformed.
In 1987, the vast majority of European Australians were descendants either of Anglo-Irish-Scots who arrived after 1850, or of Greeks, Italians, Hungarians, South Slavs, Poles and Germans who emigrated after 1945."
European Australians,"Demographics
Notably, Australia does not collect statistics on the racial origins of its residents, instead collecting data at each five-yearly census on distinct ancestries, of which each census respondent may choose up to two. At the 2021 census, the number of ancestry responses categorised within European ancestral groups as a proportion of the total population amounted to 57.2% (including 46% North-West European and 11.2% Southern and Eastern European). It is impossible to quantify the precise proportion of the population with European ancestry. For instance, many census recipients nominated two European ancestries, tending towards an overcount. Conversely, 29.9% of census recipients nominated ""Australian"" ancestry (categorised within the Oceanian ancestry group although the Australian Bureau of Statistics has stated that most of them are likely to have at least partial Anglo-Celtic European ancestry), tending towards an undercount.
At the 2021 census, the most commonly nominated European ancestries were as set out in the following table."
European Australians,"Historical demographics
Australia enumerated its population by race between 1911 and 1966, by racial-origin in 1971 and 1976, and by self-declared ancestry since 1986. From 1986 onwards, only estimates can be obtained from ancestry. The 1991 and 1996 census did not include a question on ancestry.
The following table shows the proportion of Australian residents nominating European race or ancestry at various points in history."
European Australians,"Ancestral origins
The following table shows the numbers of Australians claiming various European ancestries at selected national census historical intervals."
European Australians,"European born population
The following table shows the proportions of European-born and British Isles-born residents at various points in history."
European Australians,"Political involvement
Colonial period
As the earliest colonists of Australia, settlers from England and their descendants often held positions of power and made or helped make laws often because many had been involved in government back in England. In the original six separate British self-governing colonies of Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia, and Western Australia agreed to unite and form the Commonwealth of Australia, establishing a system of federalism in Australia."
European Australians,"National founders
The lineage of most of the national founders was British (especially English) such as:"
European Australians,"Sir Henry Parkes is often regarded as the ""Father of Federation"" in Australia. During the late 19th century, he was the strongest proponent for a federation of Australian territories. Parkes died before Australia federated, and was never able to see his plan come to fruition.
Various other founders of Australia have also been unofficially recognised: "
European Australians,"Captain James Cook, the Englishman who claimed Australia
Captain Arthur Phillip (Englishman), was the first governor of New South Wales and founder of the first colony
Sir Edmund Barton (English parents), the first Australian Prime Minister.
Scotsman Lachlan Macquarie is considered by historians to have had a crucial influence on the transition of New South Wales from a penal colony to a free settlement and therefore to have played a major role in the shaping of Australian society in the early nineteenth century. An inscription on his tomb on the Isle of Mull, Scotland describes him as ""The Father of Australia""."
European Australians,"Culture
European-Australian culture is integral to the culture of Australia. The culture of Australia is essentially a Western culture influenced by the unique geography of the Australian continent, the diverse input of Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and other Oceanian people, the British colonisation of Australia that began in 1788, and the various waves of multi-ethnic migration that followed. As the English were always the largest element among the settlers, their cultural influence was naturally greater than that of the Irish, Welsh or Scots. Evidence of a significant Anglo-Celtic heritage includes the predominance of the English language, the common law, the Westminster system of government, Christianity (Anglicanism) as the once dominant religion, and the popularity of sports such as cricket and rugby; all of which are part of the heritage that has shaped modern Australia. Australian culture has diverged significantly since British settlement.
Several states and territories had their origins as penal colonies, with the first British convicts arriving at Sydney Cove in 1788. Stories of outlaws like the bushranger Ned Kelly have endured in Australian music, cinema and literature. The Australian gold rushes from the 1850s brought wealth as well as new social tensions to Australia, including the miners' Eureka Stockade rebellion. The colonies established elected parliaments and rights for workers and women before most other Western nations."
European Australians,"Language
Australian English is a major variety of the English language and is used throughout Australia. Although English has no official status in the Constitution, Australian English is the country's de facto official language and is the first language of the majority of the population.
Australian English began to diverge from British English after the founding of the colony of New South Wales in 1788 and was recognised as being different from British English by 1820. It arose from the intermingling of early settlers from a great variety of mutually intelligible dialectal regions of the British Isles and quickly developed into a distinct variety of English.
Australian English differs from other varieties of English in vocabulary, accent, pronunciation, register, grammar and spelling.
The earliest form of Australian English was first spoken by the children of the colonists born into the colony of New South Wales. This first generation of children created a new dialect that was to become the language of the nation. The Australian-born children in the new colony were exposed to a wide range of dialects from all over the British Isles, in particular from Ireland and South East England.
The native-born children of the colony created the new dialect from the speech they heard around them, and with it expressed mateship. Even when new settlers arrived, this new dialect was strong enough to blunt other patterns of speech.
A quarter of the convicts were Irish. Many had been arrested in Ireland, and some in Great Britain. Many, if not most, of the Irish convicts spoke either no English at all, or spoke it poorly and rarely. There were other significant populations of convicts from non-English speaking part of Britain, such as the Scottish Highlands and Wales.
The most commonly spoken European languages other than English in Australia are Italian, Greek and German."
European Australians,"Music
Another area of cultural influence are Australian Patriotic songs:"
European Australians,"""Advance Australia Fair"" is the national anthem of Australia - Created by the Scottish-born composer Peter Dodds McCormick, the song was first performed in 1878, and was sung in Australia as a patriotic song. It replaced ""God Save the Queen"". It did not gain its status as the official anthem until 1984, following a plebiscite to choose the national song in 1977.
""Waltzing Matilda""  - Australia's most widely known bush ballad, and has been described as the country's ""unofficial national anthem"". Scottish-Australian poet Banjo Paterson wrote the words to ""Waltzing Matilda"" in January 1895 while staying at Dagworth Station, a sheep and cattle station near Winton in western Queensland owned by the Macpherson family. The words were written to a tune played on a zither or autoharp by 31‑year‑old Christina Macpherson, one of the family members at the station.
""The Song of Australia"" - An English-born poet Caroline Carleton wrote the lyrics in 1859 for a competition sponsored by the Gawler Institute.  The music for the song was composed by the German-born Carl Linger (1810-1862)."
European Australians,"Architecture
The Sydney Opera House was formally opened on 20 October 1973, by Queen Elizabeth II. After a gestation beginning with Utzon's 1957 selection as winner of an international design competition. The government of New South Wales, led by the premier, Joseph Cahill, authorised work to begin in 1958 with Utzon directing construction. The government's decision to build Utzon's design is often overshadowed by circumstances that followed, including cost and scheduling overruns as well as the architect's ultimate resignation.
Australia has three architectural listings on UNESCO's World Heritage list: Australian Convict Sites (comprising a collection of separate sites around Australia, including Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney, Port Arthur in Tasmania, and Fremantle Prison in Western Australia); the Sydney Opera House; and the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne. Contemporary Australian architecture includes a number of other iconic structures, including the Harbour Bridge in Sydney and Parliament House, Canberra. Significant architects who have worked in Australia include Governor Lachlan Macquarie's colonial architect, Francis Greenway; the ecclesiastical architect William Wardell; the designer of Canberra's layout, Walter Burley Griffin; the modernist Harry Seidler; and Jørn Utzon, designer of the Sydney Opera House. The National Trust of Australia is a non-governmental organisation charged with protecting Australia's built heritage."
European Australians,"Prime Ministers
As of 2022, there have been 31 Prime Ministers of Australia. The ancestors of all these Prime Ministers have all been European and Anglo-Celtic (English, Scottish, Northern Irish, Welsh, or Irish). Some ancestors of four Prime Minister's did not emigrate from Britain or Ireland: some of the ancestors of Chris Watson were German (his father was German Chilean), some of the ancestors of Malcolm Fraser were European Jews, some of Tony Abbott's ancestors were Dutch migrants (one of his grandparents), and Anthony Albanese's ancestors on his father's side were Italians."
European Australians,"Breakdown
The following is a breakdown of the ethnic origins of Australians based on a 2018 study that used data from the 2016 census."
European Australians,"See also
Demographics of Australia
African Australians
American Australians
Arab Australians
Asian Australians
Black Australians
Caribbean and West Indian Australians
Indigenous Australians
Latin American Australians
North African and Middle Eastern Australians
Europeans in Oceania
First white child in Australia
European Americans
European Canadians
European New Zealanders
European diaspora
Immigration to Australia
White Australia policy
White demographic decline
Australians
White people
European emigration
Argentines of European descent
Venezuelans of European descent
European Moroccans
Peruvians of European descent
European Pakistanis
European Tunisians"
European Australians,Notes
European Australians,"
== References =="
Pub rock (Australia),"Pub rock is a style of Australian rock and roll that peaked in popularity throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and that continues to influence Australian music into the 21st century. It is named after the live music circuit in which most associated bands developed their sound: inner-city and suburban pubs. These often noisy, hot, small and crowded venues favoured loud, riff-based heavy rock.
Australian pub rock incorporates hard rock and blues rock, and occasionally elements of progressive rock and psychedelic rock. It emerged in the early 1970s, with bands such as Buffalo, Blackfeather, and Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs pioneering the sound. Later acts such as Rose Tattoo, AC/DC and Hunters & Collectors expanded the genre further and achieved mainstream success.
In a few Australian cities, particularly Melbourne, pub rock was associated with the Sharpies youth subculture."
Pub rock (Australia),"History
Background
The emergence of the Australian version of the pub rock genre and the related pub circuit was the result of several interconnected factors. From the 1950s to the 1970s, mainly because of restrictive state liquor licensing laws, only a small proportion of live pop and rock music in Australia was performed on licensed premises (mostly private clubs or discotheques); the majority of concerts were held in non-licensed venues like community, church or municipal halls. These concerts and dances were 'all-ages' events—often with adult supervision—and alcohol was not served.
During the 1960s, however, Australian states began liberalising their licensing laws. Sunday Observance Acts were repealed, pub opening hours were extended, discriminatory regulations — such as the long-standing ban on women entering or drinking in public bars — were removed, and in the 1970s the age of legal majority was lowered from 21 to 18. Concurrently, the members of the so-called ""Baby Boomer"" generation  — who were the main audience for pop and rock music — were reaching their late teens and early twenties, and were thus able to enter such licensed premises. Pub owners soon realised that providing live music (which was often free) would draw young people to pubs in large numbers, and regular rock performances soon became a fixture at many pubs."
Pub rock (Australia),"First bands emerge
In the early 1970s Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs, Blackfeather and Buffalo pioneered Australia's pub-rock movement. In March 1970 Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs consisted of Thorpe on lead vocals and guitar, Jimmy Thompson on drums, Paul Wheeler on bass guitar and Lobby Loyde (ex-Purple Hearts, Wild Cherries) on lead guitar. They released a cover version of Willie Dixon's ""Good Morning, School Girl"". They had developed a heavier sound and in July that year, Warren 'Pig' Morgan (piano, backing vocals) had joined and the band recorded The Hoax Is Over, which was released in January 1971. Thorpe described their sound ""[It was] like we were standing on a pair of Boeing 747 engines. It cracked the foundations and broke windows in neighbouring buildings"".
By early 1971, Blackfeather consisted of Neale Johns on lead vocals, John Robinson on lead guitar (ex-Lonely Ones, Monday's Children, Dave Miller Set), Robert Fortesque on bass guitar, and Alexander Kash on drums. Their debut album, At the Mountains of Madness, appeared in April 1971. In May they had a hit with ""Seasons of Change"", which peaked at No. 15 on the Go-Set National Top 40 Singles Chart. Buffalo formed in August 1971 by Dave Tice on co-lead vocals (ex-Head) with Paul Balbi on drums, John Baxter on guitar and Peter Wells on bass guitar. Their debut album, Dead Forever..., appeared in June the following year. According to Australian rock music journalist, Ed Nimmervoll, ""The seeds for Australian heavy rock can be traced back to two important sources, Billy Thorpe's Seventies Aztecs and Sydney band Buffalo"". In 1972, Aztecs member Lobby Lloyd formed Coloured Balls, which became the favoured band of the sharpies youth subculture.
Notable pub-rock venues include the Largs Pier Hotel and the Governor Hindmarsh Hotel in Adelaide; the Royal Antler Hotel in Narrabeen, Sydney; the Civic Hotel in Sydney's city centre; the Star Hotel in Newcastle, New South Wales; and the Station Hotel in Prahran, Melbourne, which was one of the premier pub-rock venues in Australia for more than two decades. Additionally, Poyntons Carlton Club Hotel in Carlton was Melbourne's first Sunday night live pub-rock venue; Charles Hotel in Perth is the only remaining pub-rock venue in Perth."
Pub rock (Australia),"Expansion of the sound
Many city and suburban pubs gained renown for their support of live music, and many prominent Australian bands — including AC/DC, Cold Chisel, The Angels and The Dingoes — developed their style at these venues in the early days of their careers. Australian musicologist Ian McFarlane described how AC/DC took ""the raw energy of Aussie pub rock, extend its basic guidelines, serve it up to a teenybop Countdown audience and still reap the benefits of the live circuit by packing out the pubs"". He found that Cold Chisel ""fused a combination of rockabilly, hard rock and rough-house soul'n'blues that was defiantly Australian in outlook"". He noted The Angels had ""a profound effect on the Australian live music scene of the late 1970s/early 1980s. [They] helped redefine the Australian pub rock tradition ... [their] brand of no-frills, hard-driving boogie rock attracted pub goers in unprecedented numbers"". The Dingoes provided a ""spirited combination of R&B, country and red-hot rock'n'roll was imbued with a delightful sense of time and place"" according to McFarlane.
As the pub-rock phenomenon expanded, hundreds of hotels in capital cities and major towns began providing regular live music, and a thriving circuit evolved, enabling bands to tour up and down the eastern and southern coast of Australia from North Queensland to South Australia.
A band like Hunters & Collectors, for example, saw their sound harden from their arty origins (which included a brass section, experimental percussion, and complex arrangements) to a more straightforward rock sound with emphasis on drums, bass, and simple guitar riffs; it was a sound that more suited the beer barns they were to play in over their extensive touring career.
Though Australia has a relatively small population, the proportionally high number of venues that bands could play in, mainly along the Eastern coast, meant that a band could tour extensively, often playing every night for long periods. This would allow bands such as AC/DC, Cold Chisel, INXS, Midnight Oil, Rose Tattoo and others to build their reputation and take their live skills into large venues in the US and Europe with ease."
Pub rock (Australia),See also
Pub rock (Australia),"Music of Australia
List of public house topics
Roots rock
Grunge"
Pub rock (Australia),"
== References =="
Christian politics in Australia,"Christian democracy of the type found in Europe never gained a strong presence in Australia.  While sectarianism was an important factor in Australian politics in the early 20th century it was only a single element in political divisions at the time, with Roman Catholics along with the Irish tending to be drawn towards the left-wing Australian Labor Party, while Protestants were grouped alongside the British in the various anti-Labor conservative parties of the time.
Even as Australians' levels of church attendance declined, religious influence, particularly the influence of socially conservative Christians, within political parties has remained strong.  In 2017 the Parliamentary Christian Fellowship meet fortnightly, with about 60 members from all sides of politics in attendance. This is more than a quarter of total parliamentary members. 
  The Australian National Prayer Breakfast started in 1985 and is based on the National Prayer Breakfast.  Conservative religious community groups such as the Australian Family Association have been vocal in their opposition to developments such as gay rights and same sex marriage.
Christian organisations, especially the Catholic Church in Australia are influential on many social and political issues. It operates through a number of front organisations ostensibly on particular public issues, such as the  Australian Family Association, the Australian Family Coalition, the Australian Christian Lobby and the Marriage Alliance, all of which oppose legalisation of same-sex marriage in Australia, and Freedom for Faith, which promotes itself as ""a Christian legal think tank that exists to see religious freedom protected and promoted in Australia,"" but which proposed to the Ruddock Inquiry Into Religious Freedom in Australia to make further exceptions to the Discrimination Act ostensibly on the basis of religious freedom."
Christian politics in Australia,"Parties
United Christian Party (1972–1983)
Australian Family Movement (1974–1990)
Christian Democratic Party (1977–2022)
One Australia Movement (1986–1992)
Family First Party (2002–2017)
Australian Christians (party) (2011–present)
Family First Party (2021–)"
Christian politics in Australia,"See also
Australian Christian Lobby
Marriage Alliance
Religion in Australia
Politics of Australia"
Christian politics in Australia,"
== References =="
List of cities in Australia,The definition of a city in Australia varies between the states. State capital cities may include multiple local government areas (LGAs) within their boundaries and these LGAs may be cities in their own right. Cities listed below are those as defined by the states in which they are located. Also included are former cities that have lost city status due to LGA amalgamations or other factors.
List of cities in Australia,"Australian Capital Territory
Canberra (national and territory capital city)"
List of cities in Australia,"New South Wales
Since 1993, only local government areas in New South Wales can be declared as ""cities"" by the Government, under the Local Government Act 1993. Although the present version of the Act specifies no criteria for city status, a previous version of the Act specified that to be a city, a Council area must:"
List of cities in Australia,"New South Wales, therefore, has two types of ""city"": cities that are acknowledged on the register of the Geographical Names Board of New South Wales, and local government areas that have been proclaimed as cities but are not acknowledged on the Geographical Names Register."
List of cities in Australia,"Cities acknowledged on the NSW Geographical Names Register
Cities not acknowledged on the NSW Geographical Names Register
This list includes local government areas inside the Sydney metropolitan area but excludes cities also acknowledged on the Geographical Names Register:"
List of cities in Australia,Former local government areas that were accorded city status (however since amalgamated) include:
List of cities in Australia,"Northern Territory
Darwin (territory capital)
Palmerston"
List of cities in Australia,"Queensland
Other towns or suburban areas whose local government was accorded city status (including those since amalgamated) include:"
List of cities in Australia,"Charters Towers
Redcliffe City
Redland City
Thuringowa
Warwick"
List of cities in Australia,"South Australia
Tasmania
Hobart (state capital), the metropolitan area of which consists of the City of Clarence, City of Hobart, and the City of Glenorchy
Burnie
Devonport
Launceston"
List of cities in Australia,"Victoria
Western Australia
Local government areas with city status not listed above, all of which lie within Perth's metropolitan area, include:"
List of cities in Australia,"See also
List of cities in Australia by population
Lists of cities by country
Lists of cities in Oceania
List of cities in Oceania by population"
List of cities in Australia,"Notes
References
External links
Map of cities of Australia at archive.today (archived 2012-12-10)
A Gazetteer of Australian Cities, Towns and Suburbs  (Monash University)
Detailed map of cities of Australia"
Floods in Australia,"Australia has had over 160,708 floods in the last 10 years, many of which have taken out homes, wildlife and many habitats.
Floods that have occurred in the country of Australia:"
Floods in Australia,"References
Further reading
Devin, L.B. and D.L. Purcell (1983) Flooding in Australia Canberra : Australian Government Publishing Service ISBN 0-644-02627-8 : (Water 2000 : consultants report no. 11)(Department of Resources and Energy)."
Floods in Australia,"External links
 Media related to Floods in Australia at Wikimedia Commons"
Floods in Australia,"Flood and natural hazard research from Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC
Geosciences Australia overview fact sheets.
South Australian flood history Archived 2007-07-02 at the Wayback Machine."
International students in Australia,"Australia ranked third in top study abroad destinations with a total market value of over 5 billion AUD (3.47 billion USD) generated by international students in 2018. In 2018, 869,709 international students were enrolled in educational programs in Australia, which was about 8.8% higher than the amount in 2017 (799,371). They come to gain a high-quality education, possibly immigrate, or to experience a different life. Each year, many new international students will enrol in Australian courses and add to the already significant international student body around the country."
International students in Australia,"Australia has the highest ratio of international students per capita in the world by a large margin. In 2019, international students represented an average 26.7% of the student body population in Australian universities. International education therefore represents one of the country's largest exports and has a pronounced influence on the country's demographics, with a significant proportion of international students remaining in Australia after graduation on various skill and employment visas.
According to data released by the Departure of Education and Training of the Australian Government in 2023, China is the most significant source of international students to Australia. India had the second largest proportion of the enrollments, followed by Nepal, Colombia and Philippines.
All international students are required to obtain a valid student visa before they arrive in Australia. When students apply for their student visa through the Department of Home Affairs of the Australian Government, they need to submit the electronic Confirmation of Enrolment (CoE) and a compulsory English language proficiency test score to lodge their visa application. Also, each student visa applicant must prove that they have enough financial ability to pay for their tuition fees, books and daily living expenses while they study in Australia.
After the Australian government published the new immigration policy, international students are encouraged to study, work and stay in regional areas in Australia, such as Adelaide, Tasmania and the Northern Territory. In order to protect the local workforce, the Australian government intends to reduce the number of accepted migrants, and in the long-term, the government aims to set the cap of skilled immigration to about 160,000.
In 2023, according to the Department of Education of the Australian Government, New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland are the states attracting the major population of international student in Australia."
International students in Australia,"Definitions
In Australia, a student is considered an international student if they are not an Australian citizen, Australian permanent resident, New Zealand citizen, or a holder of an Australian permanent resident humanitarian visa."
International students in Australia,"Classification
By destinations
Popular destinations
The top 3 states in Australia for foreign enrolment in 2018 are listed below."
International students in Australia,"Distribution of International Students in major cities and regional areas
In 2018, 3% of international students enrolled in Australia stayed in regional locations of Australia, while 97% of international students chose to settle down in major cities. All enrolments in Tasmania and the Northern Territory are considered as enrolled in regional areas.
New South Wales had the largest number of international students, up to 333,913. Queensland had the largest regional area proportion (5%), followed by New South Wales (1%) and Victoria (1%)."
International students in Australia,"China was the main source country for enrolments, which contributed 24% of regional area enrolments. Nepal (7%) had the second large proportion of the regional area enrolments, followed by Malaysia, South Korea and the US, all of which are contributed three per cent to total regional enrolments. "
International students in Australia,Top 10 regional centers for international student enrolments in 2018 are listed below.
International students in Australia,"By sending countries and regions
Top 20 countries and regions sending students to Australia in 2023 are listed below."
International students in Australia,"Requirements
Student visa
Generally, international students as citizens of other countries are required to obtain a valid student visa, which ascertains their legal status for staying in Australia. Students who have obtained the Student Visa (subclass 500) can stay in Australia for up to 5 years, depending on their enrolment. Approximately, 400,000 overseas students are granted this visa each year. In Australia, when students apply for their visa, they need to get the Confirmation of Enrolment (CoE) for each course and submit it to the Department of Home Affairs of the Australian Government. Overseas Student Health Cover (OSHC) is compulsory for all overseas students. Each student visa applicant must prove that they have enough financial ability to pay for their tuition, books and daily living expenses while they study in Australia. Overseas students enrolled in an English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students (ELICOS, offered by secondary schools) with a student visa are required to study full time (tourist and visitors to Australia can also participate in ELICOS study during their stay)."
International students in Australia,"On 1 July 2016, after a new Simplified Student Visa Framework (SSVF) was implemented in Australia, the Department of Home Affairs of Australian Government introduced a new immigration risk framework to determine the amount of documents a student needs to submit with their application form, based on their country of citizenship and intended education provider.
According to the new released Simplified Student Visa Framework (SSVF), foreign students are able to provide a Confirmation of Enrolment (CoE) to meet the English language requirements for their student visa application. The Confirmation of Enrolment (CoE) is a piece of evidence to prove that the English language requirements for their course are equal to or higher than the requirements for a student visa. However, those foreign students who assessed at a higher immigration risk level will still need to attend an English language test and to provide evidence of their English language proficiency through one of the English tests accepted by Australia with an approved test score."
International students in Australia,"English language proficiency requirements
International students who apply to study in Australia will need to meet English language proficiency requirements to obtain a valid student visa. Students must have taken the English language test in the last two years before they apply for a students visa, or the validity will expire."
International students in Australia,"English language proficiency evidence exemptions
All international students will need to meet the English language proficiency requirements to gain entry into their course and receive a student visa.
Some international students are exempt from providing evidence of English language proficiency with their visa application if they satisfy one or more of the following requirements:"
International students in Australia,"Students who are a citizen and passport holder of UK, USA, Canada, New Zealand or Ireland.
An applicant who is a Foreign Affairs or, Defence sponsored student or a Secondary Exchange Student (AASES).
Students who have completed at least five years of study in one or more of the following countries: Australia, UK, USA, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, or Ireland.
In last two years of applying for a student visa, students who have completed either the Senior Secondary Certificate of Education or a course leading to a qualification from the Australian Qualifications Framework at the Certificate IV or higher level in Australia.
Students enrolled full time in school studies as a principal course (including secondary exchange programs), a registered postgraduate research or a standalone English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students (ELICOS) program
All other students are required to provide evidence of English language proficiency (with a Confirmation of Enrolment(CoE) or a minimum ielts score for australia student visa)."
International students in Australia,"Types of English Language Proficiency tests accepted in Australia
There are five types of English language proficiency (ELP) tests accepted for student visa applications in Australia:"
International students in Australia,"International English Language Testing System (IELTS)
Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) *internet-based test (paper-based test is also accepted)
Cambridge English: Advanced (CAE)
Pearson Test of English Academic (PTE Academic)
Occupational English Test (OET)"
International students in Australia,"Minimum English language proficiency test score required
The requirements for English language proficiency tests scores will vary depending on the institution they choose, their country of citizenship and whether they are preparing to enrol in an English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students (ELICOS) course.
For student visa applicants, the minimum scores accepted for each test are listed in the table below.
for the international students who do not meet the English language test requirement, they are suggested to complete an English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students (ELICOS) to improve their English language skills."
International students in Australia,"However, even though the government have provided the minimum English language proficiency tests scores required for student visa application, foreign students may still need to get a higher score to get enrolled into their desire institution and courses. Some specific courses, such as law, education, medical programs, are likely to have a higher requirement, while the requirements for an English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students (ELICOS) and Vocational Education and Training (VET) courses are usually lower."
International students in Australia,"Impact on Australia's economy
According to the survey prepared by Deloitte Access Economics and the Australian government, international education was predicted to contribute about seventeen billion to Australia's GDP in a 2014-15 financial year. This value is the sum of:"
International students in Australia,"Twelve billion of direct value which is the paid tuition fee to the education providers and the learning materials and services which sold to the students
Five billion of indirect value, which is the payment of the education providers to their suppliers, for example, printing and information technology support services.
Apart from that, international students make a substantial contribution to the development of many regional areas as there is at least five per cent of students living and studying in those communities. In 2014–15, the international student spent about 3 billion of expenditure (for purchasing goods and services) to Melbourne while 900 million indirect value flowed to regional communities and massively supported the agricultural products and other linkages. Finally, the consequence of student consumption supported approximately 12,746 jobs in regional Victoria.
Furthermore, in 2014–2015, The stocks of international students were estimated to deliver about 130,000 skilled migrants after the graduation year. This number of skilled migrants had increased 3% of Australia's current workforce with tertiary education. In the financial year of 2018, international students inject $31.9 billion into the Australian economy, directly boosting Australian jobs and wages, generating jobs, supporting wages, and lifting the living standards of Australia.
International students inject almost $32 billion into Australia's economy each year and support 130,000 Australian jobs. They also bring Australia and the world closer together, and built important diplomatic and personal ties.
According to the warning by NSW auditors, Australian universities is now suffering from a ""market concentration risk"" since their finance and budget rely too much on foreign student fees. As the report shows, in the New South Wales, the international students tuition fees injects $2.8 billion AUD into universities, which accounts for 28% of the total revenue. The University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales, two universities in NSW, accounted for more than 50% of their total revenue from international students' tuition fees."
International students in Australia,"Controversies
In recent years, the increasing number of international students in Australia has raised several concerns. One major issue pertains to changes in Australia's international student intake policy and the discrimination based on the economic status of their home countries. Critics argue that Australia discriminates against citizens from certain countries, alleging that these citizens come from nations with lower economic opportunities compared to Australia.
Another significant concern is the rising safety issues faced by international students. Despite Australia's status as a developed country, reports indicate that many international students experience mental health challenges, and the country lacks adequate preventive and support systems to address these issues. A 2019 report revealed that rising educational and financial pressures, isolation, homesickness, and difficulties in accessing mental health support have led to an increase in suicides among international students. Scholars also express apprehension about the ability of international students to actively engage in English-based systems within Australia. For many international students, English is not their first language, and they may struggle with it. Factors such as social isolation due to language barriers, racial and cultural differences, and other challenges increasingly hinder their ability to improve their English language skills."
International students in Australia,"Extension of 2019–20 Hong Kong protests into universities campus
Since March 2019, there has been a number of protests owing to the 2019 Hong Kong extradition bill. Some students from Hong Kong would like to support the protest in Hong Kong, but some of them said that they felt being monitored by the mainland students, and were provoked by the students from mainland China even if the Hong Kong students were solely expressing their opinion peacefully. 
On 24 July 2019, there was a supporting protest at the Great Court of Queensland University (UQ) initiated by Drew Pavlou, a student representative to UQ's senate. The protest was echoed by some students from Hong Kong. They urged for the acceptance of the five requests in Hong Kong (Complete withdrawal of the bill, Withdrawal determining the protests as ""riots"", cancellation of Political prosecution on the protesters, independent investigation on the violence of the police and the implementation of real universal suffrage), urging for the closure of the Confucius Institute at the Queensland University, shutting down the Xinjiang re-education camps. Nevertheless, the protest was developed into a conflict. Some students from mainland China (The Consulate-General of PRC in Brisbane claimed that also included students from Hong Kong, but it was not proven by other media) initiated anti-separation and anti Hong Kong independence protests. Some mainland destroyed the Lennon Wall and poster established by the Hong Kong students, and openly sang the Chinese National Song. Pavlou was attacked by the Chinese student and was injured.
PRC Consul-General in Brisbane responded by confirming the patriotic act of the mainland students and condemning the ""anti-Chinese"" activities initiated by the Hong Kong students. In October 2019, Pavlou has sought a court order similar to a restraining order against the Chinese Consul-General in Brisbane, Xu Jie."
International students in Australia,"Australian University Intakes
Australia offers three primary intakes periods for international students: February (Semester 1), July (Semester 2), and November (Semester 3). Here's a quick overview of each:"
International students in Australia,"Immigration policy for international students
Most international students who come to study in Australia wish to reside here permanently. The student-migration nexus in Australia is pretty complex and is constantly evolving.
The current immigration policy published by Australian government encourages foreign students to work and stay in regional areas, such as Adelaide and Tasmania, by reducing the quota of skilled independent visa entrants (change from subclass 175 and subclass 885 to subclass 189), and in the meantime increasing the number of skilled regional (provisional) visa (change from subclass 457 to 489)."
International students in Australia,"In 2017, the government accepted about 162,000 migrants, which was about 10% lower than the accepted amount in 2016. The long-term forecast of the Australian Government aims to set the cap of skilled immigrants to about 160,000. The primary reason behind such decisions is to protect the local workforce and also to diminish the tension between locals and the recent immigrants. For instance, locals believe that the investment and settlement of the immigrants has led to the recent rapid increase in accommodation market price and the decreasing quality of health and welfare in Australia.
One of the primary reasons for some international students to study in Australia is to settle down after their graduation. Hence, the change in the policy will hugely affect the graduation pathway of international students. Since the new policy is published recently, further research will need to be conducted later for obtaining more relevant information to understand its effects on the students. For instance, a survey can be conducted for the selected group."
International students in Australia,"
== References =="
Chief of the Defence Force (Australia),"The Chief of the Defence Force (CDF) is the highest-ranking and most senior military officer in the Australian Defence Force (ADF) and is the principal military advisor to the National Security Committee and the Minister for Defence. The current Chief of the Defence Force is Admiral David Johnston, who took office on 10 July 2024."
Chief of the Defence Force (Australia),"Responsibilities
The CDF commands the ADF under the direction of the Minister for Defence and provides advice on matters that relate to military activity, including military operations.  In a diarchy, the CDF serves as co-chairman of the Defence Committee, conjointly with the Secretary of Defence, in the command and control of the Australian Defence Organisation.
The CDF is the Australian equivalent position of what in NATO and the European Union is known as the Chief of Defence, in the United Kingdom is known as the Chief of the Defence Staff, and in the United States is known as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, although with the latter prohibited by law from having operational command authority over the US Armed Forces.
Constitutionally, the Governor-General of Australia, is the de jure Commander-in-Chief of the Australian Defence Force. However, in practice, the Australian Government de facto exercises executive power via the Federal Executive Council. The CDF is appointed by the Governor-General on the advice of his/her ministers. The appointment is politically neutral, as are all military positions, and not affected by a change of government.
Since 4 July 2014, the CDF is appointed for a fixed four-year term under the Defence Act (1903). Prior to this date, the appointment was for three years. The position of CDF is notionally rotated between the Royal Australian Navy, the Australian Army and the Royal Australian Air Force. However, in practice this has not been the case; of twenty appointees, twelve have been from the Army, six from the Navy and four from the Air Force.
During peacetime, the Chief of the Defence Force is the only four-star officer in the ADF (admiral, general, or air chief marshal). The CDF is assisted by the Vice Chief of the Defence Force (VCDF) and serves as the Chairman of the Chiefs of Service Committee, composed of the service chiefs: the Chief of Navy (CN), Chief of Army (CA), and Chief of Air Force (CAF), all of whom are three-star officers (vice admiral, lieutenant general, and air marshal), as is the VCDF."
Chief of the Defence Force (Australia),"History
Prior to 1958 there was no CDF or equivalent; a Chiefs of Staff Committee (COSC) existed but no separate position was established as its senior officer. Instead, the senior service chief served as Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee. In March 1958, Lieutenant General Sir Henry Wells was appointed Chairman, Chiefs of Staff Committee, a role independent of and notionally senior to the Army, Navy and Air Force chiefs. However, Wells and his successors did not command the Australian armed forces in any legal sense; the chairman had only an advisory role in the running of the separate services. In February 1976, COSC was dissolved and the new position of Chief of Defence Force Staff (CDFS) was created with command authority over the ADF. In October 1984 the position was renamed Chief of the Defence Force to more clearly reflect the role and its authority."
Chief of the Defence Force (Australia),"Appointments
The following list chronologically records those who have held the post of Chief of the Defence Force or its preceding positions. The official title of the position at that period of time is listed immediately before the officers who held the role. The honours are as at the completion of the individual's term."
Chief of the Defence Force (Australia),"Timeline
References
External links
Australian Government. ""Department of Defence"". Commonwealth of Australia.
""Defence Organisational Structure Chart"" (PDF). Department of Defence. Commonwealth of Australia. 21 September 2015."
Australia Telescope Compact Array,"The Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) is a radio telescope operated by CSIRO at the Paul Wild Observatory, twenty five kilometres (16 mi) west of the town of Narrabri in New South Wales, Australia. Its opening ceremony took place on September 2, 1988."
Australia Telescope Compact Array,"Overview
The telescope is an array of six identical 22-metre (72 ft) diameter dishes, which commonly operate in aperture synthesis mode to produce radio images. Five of the dishes can be moved along a three-kilometre (2 mi) railway track oriented east-west. The sixth antenna is situated three kilometres west of the end of the main track. Each dish weighs about 270 tonnes (270 long tons; 300 short tons).
The Compact Array is a part of the Australia Telescope National Facility network of radio telescopes. The array is frequently operated together with other CSIRO telescopes, the 64-metre (210 ft) dish at the Parkes Observatory and a single 22-metre (72 ft) dish at Mopra (near Coonabarabran), to form a very long baseline interferometry array.
The Array welcomes visitors from the general public. The facility includes a Visitor's Centre where the operations of the array can be observed in comfort and shade, and it has a range of informational displays and audiovisual presentations, while the surrounding grounds have displays and activities for visitors.  Open Days are run regularly, and to mark special events such as the anniversary of the first Moon landing, or major anniversaries of the telescope itself.
The children's/teen's television adventure series Sky Trackers was filmed in this facility in 1993, with the radio telescopes being prominently featured."
Australia Telescope Compact Array,"Space tracking
Whilst remaining a telescope predominantly dedicated to radio-astronomy, in 2007, the Compact Array was outfitted with receivers enabling it to receive radio waves 7 mm long, allowing it to be used from time to time to help NASA track spacecraft."
Australia Telescope Compact Array,"Key results
Highlights of the scientific work done by the ATCA include:"
Australia Telescope Compact Array,"1991 the first image of a radio supernova remnant as it formed (SNR 1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud)
1992 observe the longest galactic radio jets to date (galaxy 0319-453).
1995 create the first 3-D models of Jupiter’s radiation belts, showing properties of its magnetic field closer to the planet than spacecraft could measure.
1996 create the most detailed maps of hydrogen in the Magellanic Clouds, by a factor of 20.
1998 first evidence that gamma-ray bursts are linked to supernovae.
2000 observations suggest that radio beams from the giant radio galaxy B0114-476 may have turned off, then restarted.
2001 observations suggest that Abell 3667, a cluster of about 500 galaxies, was produced by two smaller clusters merging. This is the first observational evidence for this process.
2001 (with Parkes telescope) the first three-dimensional structure of a face-on galaxy (the Large Magellanic Cloud).
2002 (with Chandra X-ray space telescope) for the first time capture the entire life-cycle of jets from a microquasar, XTE J1550-564, seeing jets erupt at relativistic speeds, slow down and fade away.
2003 show that gamma ray bursts release similar total energy, and so probably have a common origin.
2004 first observations of a neutron star emit a jet at relativistic speed.  This challenged the idea that only black holes can create the conditions needed to accelerate jets to such extreme speeds."
Australia Telescope Compact Array,"See also
John Paul Wild, founder of the observatory
List of radio telescopes
Radio Galaxy Zoo"
Australia Telescope Compact Array,"References
External links"
Australia Telescope Compact Array,"Australia Telescope Compact Array Home Page contains links for the general public and for professional astronomers
Australia Telescope Compact Array at CSIROpedia
ATCA Live! website shows current observations
ATCA sky camera shows the sky above the ATCA"
Template talk:Largest cities of Australia,"== Topic ==
Can I just note that AussieLegend's adjustment to this template is a vast improvement on its accuracy. Cheers to all.--VS talk 02:29, 2 June 2008 (UTC)
Tanks, I do my best. :) --AussieLegend (talk) 23:01, 2 June 2008 (UTC)"
Template talk:Largest cities of Australia,"Recent changes
This template has undergone a number of changes over the past two days. VirtualSteve took exception to Albury-Wodonga being listed as Albury in New South Wales.[1] He was quite justified in doing so because Albury is not the ""core city"" of Albury-Wodonga. Albury and Wodonga are two independent cities in two different states that just happen to be close to each other. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) refers to them as ""Albury-Wodonga"" for statistical purposes only. It also refers to them independently[2][3] because they are independent as Local Government Areas of Australia (LGAs), as cities in their own right[4][5], and because they are governed under, and subject to, the laws of different states.
VirtualSteve's changes were reverted without explanation by NuclearVacuum.[6] After a discussion with VirtualSteve on his talk page[7] I edited the table to include the correct information. Finding identical issues with Canberra-Queanbeyan and Gold Coast-Tweed, I changed those too. I also changed ""Core City"" to ""City Name"" because it's an imprecise term. As I've explained, these places have no ""core cities"" per se. The fact that Albury, Canberra and the Gold Coast are mentioned first in the name is not an authority that they're the core cities. They're mentioned first only because they're the larger of each pair which has nothing to do with being a core city.
After these edits, João Felipe C.S changed the template to place the images in the middle of the table,[8] which had the unfortunate effect of making the table look lopsided so I reverted the changes. In an attempt to get the images back into the middle of the table he has edited the table to replace the accurate information with the imprecise terms[9] so I've again found it necessary to revert the changes. He made similar changes at Australia,[10]. Those had the effect of unlinking from this template, making it an orphan and therefore of little value. This has been corrected and Australia once again uses this template.
While a side issue, placing the images in the middle of the table also makes this template inconsistent with the other country specific templates listed at Category:Templates of city populations. Even Template:United Kingdom cities, which uses 4 images rather than 2, places its images at the sides as per every other template listed.
In summary:"
Template talk:Largest cities of Australia,"The cities listed have no core cities and should be listed by name as per the citation;
Defining a core city is WP:OR because there is no authoritative reference that defines the core city;
""City Name"" is more accurate than ""Core City"" in this template; and
Placing images in the middle results in the table being lopsided and inconsistent with other templates.
In line with the template as it stands now,[11] I've changed the link for Newcastle. Newcastle, New South Wales is about the Urban Centre/Locality that covers most of the Newcastle and Lake Macquarie LGAs. The Newcastle referred to by this template includes both of those LGAs, as well as the Cessnock, Maitland and Port Stephens LGAs.
(Talk:Australia#Cities by population table should also be referred to for other comments that may be relevant) --AussieLegend (talk) 00:52, 3 June 2008 (UTC)"
Template talk:Largest cities of Australia,"Could you explain why the same rule was not applied to Brisbane? This ABS page says the population of the city of Brisbane is 1 007 901, not 1.8 million which I'm assuming is different because it includes a nearby city Logan and others.  I mean don't the 253,861 people living in Queensland's third largest city (according to the ABS ref on the Logan City Council page) deserve their own entry in the table too? The city of Ipswich isn't on the list. Sunshine Coast isn't a city - its a region and LGA. The city of Caloundra isn't on the list either. We shouldn't sacrifice accuracy for convenience. - Shiftchange (talk) 20:06, 2 December 2008 (UTC)
The same rule was applied. The cities referred to in the template are, as I posted at Talk:Australia#Template:Largest cities of Australia, based on List of cities in Australia by population#Capital city Statistical Divisions and Statistical Districts by population. I don't see Caloundra or Ipswich in the citation used for that article. --AussieLegend (talk) 05:07, 3 December 2008 (UTC)"
Template talk:Largest cities of Australia,"Three images
As I've indicated in my edit summary, there's no need for three images in this template. It's only used in one article, Australia, and there is an image of Brisbane just above the template in that article. It isn't needed here. It just makes the template unnecessarily bulky and places too many images of Brisbane in close proximity. And, as a reference, other similar templates generally use only two images. The layout of this template was the result of consensus and a TfD discussion. Changes to the template shouldn't be discussed on user talk pages.  Changes should be discussed here, with a note at Talk:Australia since that's the only other place it's used. --AussieLegend (talk) 04:22, 25 November 2008 (UTC)"
Template talk:Largest cities of Australia,"The edit summaries contain full details of the multiple edits that you reverted.  Please see your talk page, and do not edit-war. You have not provided any reason yet for wiping the main changes that you lost in your reversions. --Zigger «º» 04:37, 25 November 2008 (UTC)
Looking at the edit history of the article I suggest you take your own advice regarding edit-warring. As I was the one who fixed the issues (as you can see at the very top of this page) that were the original cause of the problems several months ago, and as I set the template up specifically for 1024x768 resolution I'm well aware of the issues. Looking at the template now, as it has been for months, I see no problems at 1024x768 in either IE or Firefox. If you had issues you should have raised them here where the issues can be addressed by a reasonable audience instead of on individual user pages where any discussion tends to be limited in scope and audience. --AussieLegend (talk) 04:54, 25 November 2008 (UTC)"
Template talk:Largest cities of Australia,"Ref tag causing problems
This template includes a ref tag, which is causing problems on the Perth, Western Australia page. I think the problem is that:"
Template talk:Largest cities of Australia,"This template is after the reflist in the article, in accordance with WP:LAY.
This template includes ref tags, which thus appear after the reflist in the article
Wikipedia seems to have a problem with ref tags appearing after the reflist - at least in some circumstances, although I'm not sure exactly which. (I do recall seeing a similar problem elsewhere, but can't remember where.)
I'm not sure what the solution is. Mitch Ames (talk) 10:57, 3 May 2011 (UTC)"
Template talk:Largest cities of Australia,"RFC notice
Image change"
Template talk:Largest cities of Australia,"The current thumbnail of Sydney is almost a decade old. Sure, the skyline hasn't changed dramatically, but the image itself is pretty average. A night shot, particularly from Kirribilli, such as the one I have tried to replace it with, would be far better suited. One person complained that it wasn't bright enough, but I had no trouble with the image in thumbnail size and my monitors brightness is less than half way. The cityscape is clearly defined, because of the lights and it's a neat view. A lot better than the current one which is really just the skyline obscured by the Opera House. If you're going to argue that it's not bright enough, then the Brisbane thumbnail could also be criticised. Perth's image is a daytime shot and you can barely make out detail, so why is the Sydney one targeted, User:AussieLegend? Rigidity at its finest. Oppose or support, otherwise its replaced. Ashton 29 (talk) 02:54, 17 February 2014 (UTC)"
Template talk:Largest cities of Australia,"I've adjusted the image sizes at right to show the size they actually appear in the template. At higher resolutions more detail begins to appear so it's important to view them as they appear in the template, since that is how they appear to all readers. All of the images in the template are daytime shots so a nighttime shot looks out of place. At only 120px, there's virtually nothing identifiable in the night image. The opera house is impossible to identify and the bridge is barely recognisable. The cityscape is not clearly defined at all, unlike the daytime shot. There is far too much black in the image to delineate between the buildings and the sky, especially just to the left of the centre of the image. While the buildings may be partially obscured in the daytime shot, these buildings are not notable and it can be seen in the image that there is actually a gap between the tall buildings here, so what is obscured is minimal. The Brisbane image is a lot brighter than File:Sydney from Kirribilli.jpg and nothing of note is obscured. Perth lacks any structures that are instantly recognisable by most readers, so it is at a disadvantage compared to Sydney which has the opera house and bridge, which are arguably two of the most well known structures in Australia. Images don't have to be a skyline view. Instead the Perth photo shows the extent of the city. There is actually plenty of detail in all of the daytime images but the nighttime image is just too dark. --AussieLegend (✉) 07:15, 17 February 2014 (UTC)"
List of Australian ministries,This is a list of ministries of the Government of Australia since Federation in 1901.
List of Australian ministries,"Ministries
Notes
1..^ Date of swearing in of Interium ministry. Full ministry to be sworn in 1st July 2022.
2..^ Election to occur in mid 2025"
List of Australian ministries,"
== References =="
ABC News (Australia),"ABC News, also known as ABC News and Current Affairs and overseas as ABC Australia, is a public news service produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Broadcasting within Australia and the rest of the world, the service covers both local and world affairs. 
The division of the organisation ABC News, Analysis and Investigations is responsible for all news-gathering and coverage across the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's various television, radio, and online platforms. Some of the services included under the auspices of the division are its 24-hour news channel ABC News (formerly ABC News 24), the long-running radio news programs, AM, The World Today, and PM; ABC NewsRadio, a 24-hour continuous news radio channel; and radio news bulletins and programs on ABC Local Radio, ABC Radio National, ABC Classic FM, and Triple J.
ABC News Online has an extensive online presence which includes many written news reports and videos available via ABC Online, an ABC News mobile app (ABC Listen), podcasts, and in addition, all of the ABC news television programs available via the video-on-demand platform, ABC iview. As of 2021, the ABC News website includes ABC Sport, ABC Health, ABC Science, ABC Arts & Culture, ABC Fact Check, ABC Environment, and news in other languages.
Justin Stevens was appointed director of the division on 31 March 2022."
ABC News (Australia),"History
ABC News, from its inception in 1932, with ABC radio sourced its news from multiple sources, including cable news from London, its own bureaus in Europe, the Middle East, Greece and the Asia-Pacific, and in a fashion similar to commercial radio stations from local newspapers around Australia. 
Censorship was rife during the war, particularly after the U.S. entered the conflict on 7 December 1941. After General Douglas MacArthur set up his headquarters in Australia, he wielded enormous power, including on matters of censorship. Inter alia, he declared that every Australian radio station would only broadcast three news bulletins per day and that these would be simultaneous on all stations (ABC and commercial) at 7.45 a.m., midday, and 7.00 p.m. Weather forecasts were banned because it was felt that these may assist the enemy.
The 7:45 a.m. bulletin was the only one that did not commence on the hour or the half-hour. Incredibly, this 7.45 bulletin continued to be heard on ABC Local Radio stations until as late as 19 September 2020. Therefore, it would not be unreasonable to suggest that the effects of war-time censorship were still felt in Australia until 2020.
Notices were issued banning radio stations from broadcasting some major wartime events, but as the federal government did not have the same power over the printed press as it did over the radio, newspapers usually reported events that radio was not permitted to mention.
The ABC launched its first independent news bulletin on 1 June 1947 after years of negotiations with the Australian Government.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation Act 1983 mandates that the ABC ""shall develop and maintain an independent service for the broadcasting of news and information"" both within Australia on a daily basis, and also to countries outside Australia.
The name of the division and director responsible has changed over the years. In 2004 it was the News and Current Affairs Division when John Cameron took over as Director from Max Uechtritz as Director.  The financial year 2008–2009 saw a lot of changes, both in the way that television content was produced as well as an ""expansion of international news programming and continuous news across platforms, new programs and a range of appointments to senior positions"". Kate Torney became director of the News Division in April 2009.
In November 2014, a cut of A$254 million to funding over the following five years meant that the ABC would have to shed about 10% of its total staff, around 400 people. There were several programming changes, with regional and local programming losing out to national programs, and the Adelaide TV production studio had to close apart from the news and current affairs section.
In late 2015 Gaven Morris was appointed Director of the News Division.
The ABC announced in November 2016 that their 24-hour television news channel ABC News 24 and ABC NewsRadio would be rebranded under the ABC News division with an updated logo, commencing on 10 April 2017. The ABC announced on that day that ABC News 24 and ABC NewsRadio were both called ABC NEWS, with a new logo and visual branding. They would be distinguished by context or by descriptors, such as ""the ABC News channel"" for TV and ""ABC News on radio"" for radio. Social media accounts would be merged.
The Director's role changed its name to Director, News, Analysis & Investigations in 2017–2018, and as of June 2021 Morris was still in the role. During the 2017 to 2018 financial year, the ABC launched ""Regional Connecting Communities"" program, which provided funding for increased jobs in the regions, as well as more resources for local news, weather and live reporting.
Justin Stevens was appointed director of the division of ABC News, Analysis and Investigations on 31 March 2022."
ABC News (Australia),"Functions
The division is responsible for all news-gathering and production of news output for ABC television, the ABC network of radio stations, and for its online services. In 2018 it was estimated that online ABC news and current affairs reached about 4.8 million users in Australia each month. As of 2021, the ABC News website includes ABC Sport, ABC Health, ABC Science, ABC Arts & Culture, ABC Fact Check, ABC Environment and news in other languages."
ABC News (Australia),"Theme music
The news theme used from the first days of ABC television from November 1956 to 1985 was ""Majestic Fanfare"", composed by Charles Williams. From 1956 until the early 1980s the version used was the abridged version performed by the Queen's Hall Light Orchestra, from a recording made in 1943. Each bulletin opened with a clip from the top story of the day, with the title ""ABC News"" superimposed over the footage. Later, this on-screen approach was replaced by a generic graphic title sequence. In 1982, to celebrate the ABC's 50th anniversary, a new version of the theme was commissioned, which incorporated both orchestral and new electronic elements.
With the exception of a period in the mid-1980s, during which a synthesised theme (""Best Endeavours"", written by Alan Hawkshaw, which was  the theme for Channel 4 News in the UK) was used for around a year, this was used on radio until August 1988, and on television until early 1985. A reworking of ""Majestic Fanfare"" (essentially the original orchestration up one tone) was arranged by Richard Mills and recorded in 1988 by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
From 1985, a theme composed by Tony Ansell and Peter Wall was used for 20 years, even after the 1998 brand refresh. In 2010, it was sampled and remixed by the group Pendulum and this revised work went on to be placed #11 on the Triple J Hottest 100 chart on Australia Day 2011.
The theme for ABC News changed on Australia Day (26 January) 2005, to a piece written by Martin Armiger and John Gray, and for a couple of years it bore a resemblance to the original Peter Wall / Tony Ansell work in the opening signature notes. Wall challenged the ABC and was successful in reaching an agreement. The opening notes were removed and the work was re-arranged in 2010. The theme music from the 2005–2010 era was remixed by Armiger, giving it a more upbeat, synthesised feel.
On 1 July 2022, ABC News used the 1985–2005 theme during the ABC's 90th Anniversary.
That theme, by Wall and Ansell, was remixed from the original multi-track studio recording and re-introduced to news bulletins in August 2024."
ABC News (Australia),"Television
History
In March 1985, the ABC refreshed its structure and look, when the 7 o'clock news and the following current affairs program (at that time, Nationwide) were combined to form The National, and moved to 6:30 pm. After The National was deemed unsuccessful, that same year the news was refreshed again with a new set, graphics, and theme.
In 1998, the set was updated, a new opener featuring a light blue globe and the ABC logo was introduced, and the theme remained the same but was tweaked. The graphics also changed to match the new look."
ABC News (Australia),"In 2005, a new look (along with theme music) was introduced. The new look made use of an orange and blue globe motif. At the same time the set and graphics received a major overhaul to fit in with this look. This package was used until 21 July 2010, a day before the launch of ABC News.
In January 2010, the ABC announced that a dedicated 24-hour digital television news channel, named ABC News would be launched during the year. The new channel commenced preliminary broadcasting with a promo loop in early July 2010, with the ABC re-numbering ABC HD channel 20 to logical channel number 24. The channel was officially launched as ABC News 24 at 7:30 pm Australian Eastern Standard Time on 22 July 2010, and simulcast its first hour of transmission on ABC TV.
With the launch of ABC News on 22 July 2010, all 7 pm bulletins across Australia had a graphics overhaul to match the look of the new channel. The blue/orange globe style opener was replaced with a series of sliding panels, featuring images specific to each state. New sets were built in each capital city studio to match the ABC News 24 set and graphics were changed to match."
ABC News (Australia),"ABC News channel
The news bulletins such as ABC News Mornings, ABC News Afternoons, The World, and Weekend Breakfast are aired on ABC News along with its own 30- and 15-minute hourly bulletins."
ABC News (Australia),"National bulletins and programs
National news updates are presented on ABC TV throughout the day, with evening updates at 7 pm presented live in most states by the respective state news presenters. Bulletins focus strongly on issues of state relevance, with a greater inclusion of national and international news items than are found in the news bulletins of commercial broadcasters. A national financial bulletin is presented on weeknights by Alan Kohler in Melbourne.  The ABC's Ultimo studios produces the 8:30 pm weeknight update presented by Joe O'Brien.
News Breakfast is broadcast on weekdays from 6 am – 9 am on ABC TV and the ABC News channel from ABC's Melbourne studio and is presented by Michael Rowland and Lisa Millar, news presenter Bridget Brennan, sport presenter Tony Armstrong and weather presenter Nate Byrne. The program is also shown online and on ABC Australia in the Asia Pacific region.
Weekend Breakfast is broadcast on weekends from 7 am – 11 am on ABC TV and the ABC News channel from ABC's main national news studio in Sydney at Ultimo and is presented by Johanna Nicholson and Fauziah Ibrahim.
ABC News Mornings is presented by Gemma Veness and Dan Bourchier (from the ABC's main national news studio in Sydney at Ultimo, and airs weekdays at 9 am on ABC TV and on the ABC News channel. Sport is presented by Tony Armstrong and weather is presented by Nate Byrne, both from the Melbourne studios.
ABC News at Noon (launched in February 2005 to replace the less successful Midday News and Business, preceded in turn by the long-running World at Noon) is presented by Ros Childs (weekdays) and Dan Bourchier (weekends) from the ABC's main national news studio in the Sydney suburb of Ultimo, and airs on ABC TV and ABC News channel in each Australian state and territory at midday Australian Eastern Standard/Daylight Time. A separate edition of the bulletin is produced for Western Australia two to three hours after the original broadcast, as the time delay was deemed too long to remain up-to-date.
7.30 is presented by Sarah Ferguson from the ABC's main national news studio in Ultimo, Sydney on ABC TV at 7:30 pm, weeknights. However, when a big state political event happens, the national program can be pre-empted by the local edition.
ABC Late News is presented by Jade Barker (Sunday–Thursday) and Craig Smart (Friday–Saturday), which is broadcast on ABC TV at 10:20 pm (eastern time). A separate edition is presented from Perth for Western Australia also by Jade Barker on ABC at 10:30 pm (western time) and then ABC News channel at 11pm (eastern time) and 12:30 am. Later, they also host 15-minute News Overnight bulletins.
Other news and current affairs programs broadcast nationally include Afternoon Briefing, ABC News at Five, 7.30, Insiders, Four Corners, Behind the News, Q&A, Landline, Offsiders, One Plus One, The Business, The World, Australian Story, Foreign Correspondent, Media Watch and Australia Wide."
ABC News (Australia),"State bulletins
ABC News Canberra is presented from the ABC's Dickson studio by Adrienne Francis on Monday and Tuesday and James Glenday from Wednesday to Sunday.
ABC News New South Wales is presented from the ABC's Ultimo, New South Wales studio (ABN) by Jeremy Fernandez from Sunday to Thursday and Lydia Feng on Friday and Saturday. Weather is presented by Tom Saunders on weeknights.
ABC News Northern Territory is presented from the ABC's Darwin studio (ABD) by Jessica Randell from Sunday to Thursday and Melissa Mackay on Friday and Saturday.
ABC News Queensland is presented from the ABC's Queensland headquarters (ABQ) on Brisbane's South Bank by Jessica van Vonderen from Monday to Thursday and Ellen Fanning from Friday to Sunday. Weather is presented by Jenny Woodward from Sunday to Thursday.
ABC News South Australia is presented from the ABC's Collinswood studio (ABS) by Jessica Harmsen from Monday to Thursday and Richard Davies or Candice Prosser from Friday to Sunday.
ABC News Tasmania is presented from the ABC's Hobart studio (ABT) by Guy Stayner on weeknights and Alexandra Alvaro on weekends.
ABC News Victoria is presented from ABC Victoria's Southbank studio (ABV) by Tamara Oudyn from Sunday to Thursday and Iskhandar Razak on Friday and Saturday.
ABC News Western Australia is presented from ABC WA's East Perth studio by Pamela Medlen from Monday to Thursday and Charlotte Hamlyn from Friday to Sunday."
ABC News (Australia),"ABC Australia
News and current affairs programs are also broadcast on ABC Australia, a channel broadcast to the region outside Australia. These include Four Corners, 7:30 and Q+A."
ABC News (Australia),"Online
ABC news television programs are available via the video-on-demand platform, ABC iview."
ABC News (Australia),"Radio
ABC NewsRadio is a radio station dedicated to news and current affairs.
ABC Radio Australia, which covers the Asia-Pacific region, broadcasts regular bulletins produced in Melbourne, featuring reports from foreign correspondents in the region."
ABC News (Australia),"National bulletins
ABC Classic FM broadcasts state bulletins every hour from 6 am until noon and then every 2 hours on the hour.
Non-local streams of ABC Radio National broadcast national bulletins every hour, 24 hours a day.
National youth radio station triple j broadcasts its own bulletins between 6:00 am and 6:00 pm on weekdays, and between 7:00 am and noon on weekends."
ABC News (Australia),"State bulletins
State bulletins are produced by the ABC Local Radio station from the capital city of each state and mainland territory. They are broadcast to all ABC Local Radio and ABC Radio National stations in each state, and focus strongly on issues of state relevance, but also feature national and international stories. National bulletins air when state bulletins are not produced.
ABC Local Radio stations broadcast a flagship 15-minute state bulletin at 7:45 am, the only bulletin still introduced by the 18-second version of Majestic Fanfare. All other bulletins are introduced by a 9-second version of Majestic Fanfare. ABC Radio National and ABC Classic FM stations do not broadcast the 7:45 am bulletin, instead broadcasting an ordinary 8:00 am state bulletin and a 10-minute 7 am bulletin respectively, and continue to broadcast bulletins every hour when Local Radio stations broadcast bulletins every 30 minutes in the early morning."
ABC News (Australia),"ABC News ACT is broadcast at 5:30 am and on the hour between 6 am and 10 pm each day from the studios of ABC Radio Canberra.
ABC News New South Wales is broadcast at 5:30 am and on the hour between 6 am and 10 pm each day from the studios of ABC Radio Sydney.
ABC News Northern Territory is broadcast at 5:30 am and on the hour between 6 am and 10 pm each day from the studios of ABC Radio Darwin.
ABC News Queensland is broadcast at 5:30 am and on the hour between 6 am and 7 pm on weekdays from the studios of ABC Radio Brisbane. Weekend bulletins are broadcast on the hour between 6 am and midday.
ABC News South Australia is broadcast at 5:30 am and on the hour between 6 am and 10 pm on weekdays from the studios of ABC Radio Adelaide. Weekend bulletins are broadcast on the hour between 6 am and midday.
ABC News Tasmania is broadcast at 5:30 am and on the hour between 6 am and 9 pm on weekdays from the studios of ABC Radio Hobart. Weekend bulletins are broadcast on the hour between 6 am and midday.
ABC News Victoria is broadcast at 5:30 am and on the hour between 6 am and 10 pm on weekdays from the studios of ABC Radio Melbourne. Weekend bulletins are broadcast on the hour between 6 am and midday.
ABC News Western Australia is produced by ABC Radio Perth. Weekday bulletins are broadcast every 30 minutes between 5:00 am and 7:00 am, then at 7:45 am, then at 9:00 am, then every hour until 10:00 pm. Weekend bulletins are broadcast every 30 minutes between 6:00 am and 7:00 am, then at 7:45 am, then at 9:00 am, then every hour until 1:00 pm."
ABC News (Australia),"Current affairs
ABC News produces several current affairs programs for radio. All share a quasi-magazine format, and investigate stories in greater depth compared to news bulletins."
ABC News (Australia),"AM is broadcast in three editions – a 10-minute edition at 6:05 am on ABC Local Radio, a 20-minute edition at 7:10 am on ABC Radio National, and a flagship 30 minute edition at 8:00 am on ABC Local Radio.
The World Today is broadcast in one edition – a 30-minute edition at 12:10 pm on ABC Local Radio and ABC Radio National.
PM is broadcast in two editions – a 30-minute edition at 5:00 pm on ABC Radio National, and a flagship 30 minute edition at 6:30 pm on ABC Local Radio."
ABC News (Australia),"Programs
Other news-related, factual and current affairs programs broadcast by the various radio stations of the ABC Radio network include:"
ABC News (Australia),"Sunday Extra, incorporating Background Briefing and Ockham's Razor, hosted by Julian Morrow (replacing Correspondents Report),
RN Breakfast
Late Night Live
Hack
Nightlife
Awaye!
Country Breakfast"
ABC News (Australia),"Online
All ABC radio stations are available via an ABC News mobile app, ABC Listen, from which podcasts are also available."
ABC News (Australia),"Presenters
National"
ABC News (Australia),ACT
ABC News (Australia),New South Wales
ABC News (Australia),Northern Territory
ABC News (Australia),Queensland
ABC News (Australia),South Australia
ABC News (Australia),Tasmania
ABC News (Australia),Victoria
ABC News (Australia),Western Australia
ABC News (Australia),Other
ABC News (Australia),Past
ABC News (Australia),"Notes
References
Further reading
ABC Bureaux and Foreign Correspondents
50 Years of ABC TV News and Current Affairs"
ABC News (Australia),"External links
Official website
News on iview"
Australian Capital Territory,"The Australian Capital Territory (ACT), known as the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) until 1938, is a federal territory of Australia. Canberra, the capital city of Australia, is situated within the territory, and serves as the territory's primate city. It is located in southeastern Australian mainland as an enclave completely within the state of New South Wales. Founded after Federation as the seat of government for the new nation, the territory hosts the headquarters of all important institutions of the Australian Government.
On 1 January 1901, federation of the colonies of Australia was achieved. Section 125 of the new Australian Constitution provided that land, situated in New South Wales and at least 100 mi (160 km) from Sydney, would be ceded to the new federal government. Following discussion and exploration of various areas within New South Wales, the Seat of Government Act 1908 was passed in 1908 which specified a capital in the Yass-Canberra region. The territory was transferred to the federal government by New South Wales in 1911, two years prior to the capital city being founded and formally named as Canberra in 1913.
While the overwhelming majority of the population resides in the city of Canberra in the ACT's north-east, the territory also includes some towns such as Williamsdale, Oaks Estate, Uriarra, Tharwa and Hall. The ACT also includes the Namadgi National Park, which comprises the majority of land area of the territory. Despite a common misconception, the Jervis Bay Territory is not part of the ACT, although the laws of the Australian Capital Territory apply as if Jervis Bay did form part of the ACT. The territory has a relatively dry, continental climate, experiencing warm to hot summers and cool to cold winters.
The Australian Capital Territory is home to many important institutions of the federal government, national monuments and museums. These include the Parliament of Australia, the High Court of Australia, the Australian Defence Force Academy and the Australian War Memorial. It also hosts the majority of foreign embassies in Australia, as well as regional headquarters of many international organisations, not-for-profit groups, lobbying groups and professional associations. Several major universities also have campuses in the ACT, including the Australian National University, the University of Canberra, the University of New South Wales, Charles Sturt University and the Australian Catholic University.
A locally elected legislative assembly has governed the territory since 1988. However, the Commonwealth maintains authority over the territory and may overturn local laws. It still maintains control over the area known as the Parliamentary Triangle through the National Capital Authority. Residents of the territory elect three members of the House of Representatives and two senators.
With 453,324 residents, the Australian Capital Territory is the second smallest mainland state or territory by population. At the 2016 census, the median weekly income for people in the territory aged over 15 was $998, significantly higher than the national median of $662. The average level of degree qualification in the ACT is also higher than the national average. Within the ACT, 37.1% of the population hold a bachelor's degree level or above education compared to the national figure of 20%. The Australian Capital Territory had the second highest Human Development Index score (0.980) out of over 1,700 subnational regions in 2021, coming close to a perfect score of 1."
Australian Capital Territory,"History
Indigenous inhabitants
Aboriginal Australian peoples have long inhabited the area. Evidence indicates habitation dating back at least 25,000 years, and it is possible that the area was inhabited for considerably longer, with evidence of an Aboriginal presence at Lake Mungo dating back around 40,000–62,000 years.  The principal group occupying the region were the Ngunnawal people, with the Ngarigo and Walgalu living immediately to the south, the Wandadian to the east, the Gandangara to the north and the Wiradjuri to the north-west."
Australian Capital Territory,"European colonisation
Following European settlement, the growth of the new colony of New South Wales led to an increasing demand for arable land. Governor Lachlan Macquarie supported expeditions to open up new lands to the south of Sydney. The 1820s saw further exploration in the Canberra area associated with the construction of a road from Sydney to the Goulburn plains. While working on the project, Charles Throsby learned of a nearby lake and river from the local Indigenous peoples and he accordingly sent Wild to lead a small party to investigate the site. The search was unsuccessful, but they did discover the Yass River, and it is surmised that they would have set foot on part of the future territory.
A second expedition was mounted shortly thereafter, and they became the first Europeans to camp at the Molonglo (Ngambri) and Queanbeyan (Jullergung) Rivers. However, they failed to find the Murrumbidgee River. The issue of the Murrumbidgee was solved in 1821 when Throsby mounted a third expedition and successfully reached the watercourse, on the way providing the first detailed account of the land where the Australian Capital Territory now resides. The last expedition in the region before settlement was undertaken by Allan Cunningham in 1824. He reported that the region was suitable for grazing and the settlement of the Limestone Plains followed immediately thereafter."
Australian Capital Territory,"Early settlement
The first land grant in the region was made to Joshua John Moore in 1823, and European settlement in the area began in 1824 with the construction of a homestead by his stockmen on what is now the Acton Peninsula. Moore formally purchased the site in 1826 and named the property Canberry or Canberra.
A significant influx of population and economic activity occurred around the 1850s goldrushes. The goldrushes prompted the establishment of communication between Sydney and the region by way of the Cobb & Co coaches, which transported mail and passengers. The first post offices opened in Ginninderra in 1859 and at Lanyon in 1860.
During colonial times, the European communities of Ginninderra, Molonglo and Tuggeranong settled and farmed the surrounding land. The region was also called the Queanbeyan-Yass district, after the two largest towns in the area. The villages of Ginninderra and Tharwa developed to service the local agrarian communities.
During the first 20 years of settlement, there was only limited contact between the settlers and Aboriginal people. Over the succeeding years, the Ngunnawal and other local indigenous people effectively ceased to exist as cohesive and independent communities adhering to their traditional ways of life. Those who had not succumbed to disease and other predations either dispersed to the local settlements or were relocated to more distant Aboriginal reserves set up by the New South Wales government in the latter part of the 19th century."
Australian Capital Territory,"Creation of the territory
In 1898, a referendum on a proposed Constitution was held in four of the colonies – New South Wales, South Australia, Tasmania, and Victoria. Although the referendum achieved a majority in all four colonies, the New South Wales referendum failed to gain the minimum number of votes needed for the bill to pass. Following this result, a meeting of the four Premiers in 1898 heard from George Reid, the Premier of New South Wales, who argued that locating the future capital in New South Wales would be sufficient to ensure the passage of the Bill. The 1899 referendum on this revised bill was successful and passed with sufficient numbers. Section 125 of the Australian Constitution thus provided that, following Federation in 1901, land would be ceded freely to the new federal government."
Australian Capital Territory,"This, however, left open the question of where to locate the capital. In 1906 and after significant deliberations, New South Wales agreed to cede sufficient land on the condition that it was in the Yass-Canberra region, this site being closer to Sydney. Initially, Dalgety, New South Wales remained at the forefront, but Yass-Canberra prevailed after voting by federal representatives. The Seat of Government Act 1908 was passed in 1908, which repealed the 1904 Act and specified a capital in the Yass-Canberra region. Government surveyor Charles Scrivener was deployed to the region in the same year to map out a specific site and, after an extensive search, settled upon the present location, basing the borders primarily on the need to secure a stable water supply for the planned capital."
Australian Capital Territory,"The Australian Capital Territory was transferred to the Commonwealth by New South Wales on 1 January 1911, two years before the naming of Canberra as the national capital on 20 March 1913.
The Commonwealth gained control of all land within the borders of the new territory but ownership only of NSW Crown land, with significant parcels of extant freehold remaining in the hands of their pre-existing owners. Much of this was acquired during World War One, though a few titles were not transferred until the late 20th Century.
Land within the territory is granted under a leasehold system, with 99-year residential leases sold to buyers as new suburbs are planned, surveyed, and developed. The current policy is for these leases to be extended for another 99-year period on expiry, subject to payment of an administrative fee. In an arrangement inspired by Georgism, the ideas of 19th-century American economist Henry George, leaseholders had to pay 5% of the unimproved value of the underlying land in rent until the Gorton government abolished it in 1970."
Australian Capital Territory,"Development throughout 20th century
In 1911, an international competition to design the future capital was held; it was won by the Chicago architect Walter Burley Griffin in 1912. The official naming of Canberra occurred on 12 March 1913 and construction began immediately.
After Griffin's departure following difficulty in implementing his project, the Federal Capital Advisory Committee was established in 1920 to advise the government of the construction efforts. The committee had limited success meeting its goals. However, the chairman, John Sulman, was instrumental in applying the ideas of the garden city movement to Griffin's plan. The committee was replaced in 1925 by the Federal Capital Commission.
In 1930, the ACT Advisory Council was established to advise the minister for territories on the community's concerns. In 1934, the Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory was established.
From 1938 to 1957, the National Capital Planning and Development Committee continued to plan the further expansion of Canberra. However, it did not have executive power, and decisions were made on the development of Canberra without consulting the committee. During this time, Prime Minister Robert Menzies regarded the state of the national capital as an embarrassment.
After World War II, there was a shortage of housing and office space in Canberra. A Senate Select Committee hearing was held in 1954 to address its development requirements. This Committee recommended the creation of a single planning body with executive power. Consequently, the National Capital Planning and Development Committee was replaced by the National Capital Development Commission in 1957. The National Capital Development Commission ended four decades of disputes over the shape and design of Lake Burley Griffin and construction was completed in 1964 after four years of work. The completion of the centrepiece of Griffin's design finally laid the platform for the development of Griffin's Parliamentary Triangle."
Australian Capital Territory,"Self-government
In 1978, an advisory referendum was held to determine the views of ACT citizens about whether there should be self-government. Just under 64 percent of voters rejected devolved government options, in favour of the status quo. Nevertheless, in 1988, the new minister for the Australian Capital Territory Gary Punch received a report recommending the abolition of the National Capital Development Commission and the formation of a locally elected government. Punch recommended that the Hawke government accept the report's recommendations and subsequently Clyde Holding introduced legislation to grant self-government to the territory in October 1988.
The enactment on 6 December 1988 of the Australian Capital Territory (Self-Government) Act 1988 established the framework for self-government. The first election for the 17-member Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly was held on 4 March 1989.
The initial years of self-government were difficult and unstable. A majority of ACT residents had opposed self-government and had it imposed upon them by the federal parliament. At the first election, 4 of the 17 seats were won by anti-self-government single-issue parties due to a protest vote by disgruntled Canberrans and a total of 8 were won by minor parties and independents.
In 1992, Labor won eight seats and the minor parties and independents won only three. Stability increased, and in 1995, Kate Carnell became the first elected Liberal chief minister. In 1998, Carnell became the first chief minister to be re-elected."
Australian Capital Territory,"Geography
The Australian Capital Territory is the smallest mainland territory (aside from the Jervis Bay Territory) and covers a total land area of 2,280 km2 (880 sq mi), slightly smaller than Luxembourg.
It is bounded by the Bombala railway line in the east, the watershed of Naas Creek in the south, the watershed of the Cotter River in the west and the watershed of the Molonglo River in the north-east. These boundaries were set to give the ACT an adequate water supply. The ACT extends about 88.5 km (55.0 mi) north-south between 35.124°S and 35.921°S, and 57.75 km (35.88 mi) west-east between 148.763°E and 149.399°E. The city area of Canberra occupies the north-eastern corner of this area.
The Australian Capital Territory includes the city of Canberra and some towns such as Williamsdale, Oaks Estate, Uriarra Village, Tharwa and Hall. The Australian Capital Territory also contains agricultural land (sheep, dairy cattle, vineyards and small amounts of crops) and a large area of national park (Namadgi National Park), much of it mountainous and forested."
Australian Capital Territory,"Tidbinbilla is a locality to the south-west of Canberra that features the Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve and the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex, operated by the United States' NASA as part of its Deep Space Network. The Southern Tablelands Temperate Grassland straddles the state.
The territory includes a large range of mountains, rivers and creeks, largely contained within the Namadgi National Park. These include the Naas and Murrumbidgee Rivers.
In September 2022, it was announced that the border between NSW and the ACT would change for the first time since it was created in 1911. ACT chief minister Andrew Barr said NSW premier Dominic Perrottet had agreed to a proposed border change of 330 ha (1.3 sq mi) in the Ginninderra watershed."
Australian Capital Territory,"Climate
The territory has a relatively dry, continental climate, experiencing warm to hot summers and cool to cold winters. Under the Köppen-Geiger classification, the territory has an oceanic climate (Cfb).
January is the hottest month with an average high of 27.7 °C. July is the coldest month when the average high drops to 11.2 °C (52.2 °F). The highest maximum temperature recorded in the territory was 44.0 °C on 4 January 2020. The lowest minimum temperature was −10.0 °C on 11 July 1971.
Rainfall varies significantly across the territory. Much higher rainfall occurs in the mountains to the west of Canberra compared to the east. The mountains act as a barrier during winter with the city receiving less rainfall. Average annual rainfall in the territory is 629mm and there is an average of 108 rain days annually. The wettest month is October, with an average rainfall of 65.3mm, and the driest month is June, with an average of 39.6mm.
Frost is common in the winter months. Snow is rare in Canberra's city centre, but the surrounding areas get annual snowfall through winter and often the snow-capped mountains can be seen from the city. The last significant snowfall in the city centre was in 1968.
Smoke haze became synonymous with the 2019/2020 Australian summer. On 1 January 2020 Canberra had the worst air quality of any major city in the world, with an AQI of 7700 (USAQI 949)."
Australian Capital Territory,"Geology
Notable geological formations in the Australian Capital Territory include the Canberra Formation, the Pittman Formation, Black Mountain Sandstone and State Circle Shale.
In the 1840s fossils of brachiopods and trilobites from the Silurian period were discovered at Woolshed Creek near Duntroon. At the time, these were the oldest fossils discovered in Australia, though this record has now been far surpassed. Other specific geological places of interest include the State Circle cutting and the Deakin anticline.
The oldest rocks in the ACT date from the Ordovician around 480 million years ago. During this period the region along with most of Eastern Australia was part of the ocean floor; formations from this period include the Black Mountain Sandstone formation and the Pittman Formation consisting largely of quartz-rich sandstone, siltstone and shale. These formations became exposed when the ocean floor was raised by a major volcanic activity in the Devonian forming much of the east coast of Australia."
Australian Capital Territory,"Flora and fauna
The environments range from alpine area on the higher mountains, to sclerophyll forest and to woodland. Much of the ACT has been cleared for grazing and is also burnt off by bushfires several times per century. The kinds of plants can be grouped into vascular plants, that include gymnosperms, flowering plants, and ferns, as well as bryophytes, lichens, fungi and freshwater algae. Four flowering plants are endemic to the ACT. Several lichens are unique to the territory. Most plants in the ACT are characteristic of the Flora of Australia and include well known plants such as Grevillea, Eucalyptus trees and kangaroo grass.
The native forest in the Australian Capital Territory was almost wholly eucalypt species and provided a resource for fuel and domestic purposes. By the early 1960s, logging had depleted the eucalypt, and concern about water quality led to the forests being closed. Interest in forestry began in 1915 with trials of a number of species including Pinus radiata on the slopes of Mount Stromlo. Since then, plantations have been expanded, with the benefit of reducing erosion in the Cotter catchment, and the forests are also popular recreation areas.
The fauna of the territory includes representatives from most major Australian animal groups. This includes kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, platypus, echidna, emu, kookaburras and dragon lizards."
Australian Capital Territory,"Government and politics
Territory government
Unlike the States of Australia which have their own constitutions, territories like the ACT are governed under a Commonwealth statute—for the ACT, the Australian Capital Territory (Self-Government) Act 1988. The Self-Government Act constitutes a democratic government for the Territory consisting of a popularly elected Legislative Assembly which elects a Chief Minister from among its membership who, in turn, appoints an Executive consisting of a number of Ministers.
The executive power of the Territory rests with the ACT Government, led by the Executive. The Executive is chaired by the Chief Minister (currently the Labor Party's Andrew Barr) and consists of Ministers appointed by them. The Executive are supported by the ACT Public Service, which is arranged into directorates, and a number of public authorities. The Chief Minister is the equivalent of a State Premier and sits on the National Cabinet. Unlike the States and the Northern Territory, there is no vice-regal representative who chairs the Executive. The Chief Minister performs many of the roles that a state governor normally holds in the context of a state; however, the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly gazettes the laws and summons meetings of the Assembly.
The legislative power of the Territory is vested in the unicameral Legislative Assembly. The Assembly consists of 25 members who are elected from five electorates using the Hare-Clark single transferable voting system. The Assembly is presided over by the Speaker (currently the Labor Party's Joy Burch). The Assembly has almost all of the same powers as the state parliaments, the power to ""make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Territory"", with limited exceptions relating to the Territory's unique relationship with the Commonwealth. The Hare-Clark voting system was adopted after a referendum in 1992 and was entrenched by another referendum in 1995. The electoral system cannot be changed except by a two-thirds majority in the Assembly or a majority vote of support at a public referendum.
There is no level of local government below the Territory government as in the States and the functions associated with local government are carried out principally by the Transport Canberra and City Services Directorate. There is an indigenous voice to the ACT Government, called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elected Body.
Despite the wide powers of the Territory government, the federal government continues to have power over the Territory. This includes an unused power to dissolve the Assembly and appoint a caretaker government in extraordinary circumstances. The federal and territory governments share some officers, such as the Ombudsman. The federal parliament also retains the power to make any law for the Territory under section 122 of the Constitution and an exclusive power to legislate for the ""seat of government"". Territory laws which conflict with federal law are inoperable to the extent of the inconsistency. Land in the Territory that is designated to be ""National Land"" under federal law remains under the control of the federal government, usually represented by the National Capital Authority. The federal parliament can disallow laws enacted by the Assembly by a joint resolution of both houses of Parliament, a power which replaced a federal executive veto in 2011."
Australian Capital Territory,"Judiciary and policing
The judicial power of the Territory is exercised by the territory courts. These courts are the Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory, the Magistrates Court of the Australian Capital Territory and the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal. It is unique in that the territory does not have an intermediary court like other mainland states and territories; there is only the superior court and a court of summary jurisdiction. From 2001, appeals from the Supreme Court are heard by a panel of Supreme Court judges sitting as the Court of Appeal. The current Chief Justice is Lucy McCallum and the current Chief Magistrate is Lorraine Walker.
The Federal Court has concurrent jurisdiction over civil matters arising under Territory law, a fact which has become increasingly important to the practice of defamation law across Australia.
Policing services are provided by the ACT Policing unit of the Australian Federal Police under agreements between the territory government, the federal government, and the police force. Canberra had the lowest rate of crime of any capital city in Australia as of February 2019."
Australian Capital Territory,"Federal representation
In Australia's Federal Parliament, the ACT is represented by five federal members: three members of the House of Representatives represent the Division of Bean, the Division of Canberra and the Division of Fenner, and it is one of only two territories to be represented in the Senate, with two Senators (the other being the Northern Territory). The Member for Bean and the ACT Senators also represent the constituents of Norfolk Island. The Member for Fenner and the ACT Senators also represent the constituents of the Jervis Bay Territory."
Australian Capital Territory,"Jervis Bay Territory
In 1915, the Jervis Bay Territory Acceptance Act 1915 created the Jervis Bay Territory as an annex to the Federal Capital Territory. While the Act's use of the language of ""annexed"" is sometimes interpreted as implying that the Jervis Bay Territory was to form part of the Federal Capital Territory, the accepted legal position is that it has been a legally distinct territory from its creation despite being subject to ACT law and, prior to ACT self-government in 1988, being administratively treated as part of the ACT.
In 1988, when the ACT gained self-government, Jervis Bay was formally pronounced as a separate territory administered by the Commonwealth known as the Jervis Bay Territory. However, the laws of the ACT continue to apply to the Jervis Bay Territory. Magistrates from the ACT regularly travel to the Jervis Bay Territory to conduct court.
Another occasional misconception is that the ACT retains a small area of territory on the coast on the Beecroft Peninsula, consisting of a strip of coastline around the northern headland of Jervis Bay. While the land is owned by the Commonwealth Government, that area itself is still considered to be under the jurisdiction of New South Wales government, not a separate territory nor a part of the ACT."
Australian Capital Territory,"Demographics
The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates that the population of the territory was 453,324 on 31 December 2021, with an annual growth in 2021 of 0.4%. A 2019 projection estimated the population would reach to approximately 700,000 by 2058.
The overwhelming majority of the population reside in the city of Canberra.
At the 2016 census, the median weekly income for people in the territory aged over 15 was $998 while the national average was $662.
The average level of degree qualification in the ACT is higher than the national average. Within the ACT, 37.1% of the population hold a bachelor's degree level or above education compared to the national figure of 20%."
Australian Capital Territory,"City and towns
The Australian Capital Territory consists of the city of Canberra and some towns including Williamsdale, Oaks Estate, Uriarra, Tharwa and Hall.
The urban areas of the Australian Capital Territory are organised into a hierarchy of districts, town centres, group centres, local suburbs as well as other industrial areas and villages. There are seven districts (with an eighth currently under construction), each of which is divided into smaller suburbs, and most of which have a town centre which is the focus of commercial and social activities. The districts were settled in the following chronological order:"
Australian Capital Territory,"North Canberra: mostly settled in the 1920s and '30s, with expansion up to the 1960s, now 14 suburbs;
South Canberra: settled from the 1920s to '60s, 13 suburbs;
Woden Valley: first settled in 1963, 12 suburbs;
Belconnen: first settled in 1967, 25 suburbs;
Weston Creek: settled in 1969, 8 suburbs;
Tuggeranong: settled in 1974, 19 suburbs;
Gungahlin: settled in the early 1990s, 18 suburbs although only 15 are developed or under development;
Molonglo Valley: first suburbs currently under construction.
The North and South Canberra districts are substantially based on Walter Burley Griffin's designs. In 1967, the then National Capital Development Commission adopted the ""Y Plan"" which laid out future urban development in the Australian Capital Territory a series of central shopping and commercial area known as the 'town centres' linked by freeways, the layout of which roughly resembled the shape of the letter Y, with Tuggeranong at the base of the Y and Belconnen and Gungahlin located at the ends of the arms of the Y."
Australian Capital Territory,"Ancestry and immigration
At the 2021 census, the most commonly nominated ancestries were:"
Australian Capital Territory,"The 2021 census showed that 32.5% of the ACT's inhabitants were born overseas. Of inhabitants born outside of Australia, the most prevalent countries of birth were India, England, China, Nepal and New Zealand.
2.0% of the population, or 8,949 people, identified as Indigenous Australians (Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders) in 2021."
Australian Capital Territory,"Language
At the 2021 census, 71.3% of people spoke only English at home. The other languages most commonly spoken at home were Mandarin (3.2%), Nepali (1.3%), Vietnamese (1.1%), Punjabi (1.1%), Hindi (1.0%)."
Australian Capital Territory,"Religion
The most common responses in the 2021 census for religion in the territory were No Religion (43.5%), Catholic (19.3%), Anglican (8.2%), Not stated (5.2%) and Hinduism (4.5%)."
Australian Capital Territory,"Culture
Education
Almost all educational institutions in the Australian Capital Territory are located within Canberra. The ACT public education system schooling is normally split up into Pre-School, Primary School (K-6), High School (7–10) and College (11–12) followed by studies at University or Institute of Technology. Many private high schools include years 11 and 12 and are referred to as colleges. Children are required to attend school until they turn 17 under the ACT Government's ""Learn or Earn"" policy.
In February 2004 there were 140 public and non-governmental schools in ACT; 96 were operated by the Government and 44 are non-Government. In 2005, there were 60,275 students in the ACT school system. 59.3% of the students were enrolled in government schools with the remaining 40.7% in non-government schools. There were 30,995 students in primary school, 19,211 in high school, 9,429 in college and a further 340 in special schools.
As of May 2004, 30% of people in the ACT aged 15–64 had a level of educational attainment equal to at least a bachelor's degree, significantly higher than the national average of 19%. The two main tertiary institutions are the Australian National University (ANU) in Acton and the University of Canberra (UC) in Bruce. There are also two religious university campuses in Canberra: Signadou is a campus of the Australian Catholic University and St Mark's Theological College is a campus of Charles Sturt University. Tertiary level vocational education is also available through the multi-campus Canberra Institute of Technology (CIT).
The Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) and the Royal Military College, Duntroon (RMC) are in the suburb of Campbell in Canberra's inner northeast. ADFA teaches military undergraduates and postgraduates and is officially a campus of the University of New South Wales while Duntroon provides Australian Army Officer training.
The Academy of Interactive Entertainment (AIE) offers courses in computer game development and 3D animation."
Australian Capital Territory,"Sport
The Australian Capital Territory is home to a number of major professional sports league franchise teams including the ACT Brumbies (Rugby Union), Canberra United (Soccer), Canberra Raiders (Rugby League) and the Canberra Capitals (Basketball).
The Prime Minister's XI (Cricket), started by Robert Menzies in the 1950s and revived by Bob Hawke in 1984, has been played every year at Manuka Oval against an overseas touring team.
The Greater Western Sydney Giants (Football) play three regular season matches a year and one pre-season match in Canberra at Manuka Oval."
Australian Capital Territory,"Arts and entertainment
The territory is home to many national monuments and institutions such as the Australian War Memorial, the National Gallery of Australia, the National Portrait Gallery, the National Library, the National Archives, the Australian Academy of Science, the National Film and Sound Archive and the National Museum. Many Commonwealth government buildings in the Australian Capital Territory are open to the public, including Parliament House, the High Court and the Royal Australian Mint.
Lake Burley Griffin is the site of the Captain James Cook Memorial and the National Carillon. Other sites of interest include the Telstra Tower, the Australian National Botanic Gardens, the National Zoo and Aquarium, the National Dinosaur Museum and Questacon – the National Science and Technology Centre."
Australian Capital Territory,"The Canberra Museum and Gallery in the city is a repository of local history and art, housing a permanent collection and visiting exhibitions. Several historic homes are open to the public: Lanyon and Tuggeranong Homesteads in the Tuggeranong Valley, Mugga-Mugga in Symonston, and Blundells' Cottage in Parkes all display the lifestyle of the early European settlers. Calthorpes' House in Red Hill is a well-preserved example of a 1920s house from Canberra's very early days.
The Australian Capital Territory has many venues for live music and theatre: the Canberra Theatre and Playhouse which hosts many major concerts and productions; and Llewellyn Hall (within the ANU School of Music), a world-class concert hall are two of the most notable. The Albert Hall was Canberra's first performing arts venue, opened in 1928. It was the original performance venue for theatre groups such as the Canberra Repertory Society.
There are numerous bars and nightclubs which also offer live entertainment, particularly concentrated in the areas of Dickson, Kingston and the city. Most town centres have facilities for a community theatre and a cinema, and they all have a library. Popular cultural events include the National Folk Festival, the Royal Canberra Show, the Summernats car festival, Enlighten festival and the National Multicultural Festival in February."
Australian Capital Territory,"Media
The Australian Capital Territory have a daily newspaper, The Canberra Times, which was established in 1926. There are also several free weekly publications, including news magazines City News and Canberra Weekly.
Major daily newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph and Sydney Morning Herald from Sydney, The Age and Herald Sun from Melbourne as well as national publications The Australian and the Australian Financial Review are also available for purchase via retail outlets or via home delivery in the Australian Capital Territory.
There are a number of AM and FM stations broadcasting throughout the ACT (AM/FM Listing). The main commercial operators are the Capital Radio Network (2CA and 2CC), and Southern Cross Austereo/ARN Media (Hit 104.7 and Mix 106.3). There are also several community operated stations as well as the local and national stations of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
A DAB+ digital radio trial is also in operation, it simulcasts some of the AM/FM stations, and also provides several digital only stations (DAB+ Trial Listing).
Five free-to-air television stations service the territory:"
Australian Capital Territory,"ABC Canberra (ABC)
SBS New South Wales/Australian Capital Territory (SBS)
WIN Television Southern NSW & ACT (WIN) – Nine Network affiliate
Prime7 Southern NSW & ACT (CBN) – A Seven Network owned & operated station, Seven Network affiliate
Southern Cross 10 Southern NSW & ACT (CTC) – Network 10 affiliate
Each station broadcasts a primary channel and several multichannels.
Pay television services are available from Foxtel (via satellite) and telecommunications company TransACT (via cable)."
Australian Capital Territory,"Infrastructure
Health
The Australian Capital Territory has two large public hospitals both located in Canberra: the approximately 600-bed Canberra Hospital in Garran and the 174-bed Calvary Public Hospital in Bruce. Both are teaching institutions. The largest private hospital is the Calvary John James Hospital in Deakin. Calvary Private Hospital in Bruce and Healthscope's National Capital Private Hospital in Garran are also major healthcare providers.
The Australian Capital Territory has 10 aged care facilities. ACT's hospitals receive emergency cases from throughout southern New South Wales, and ACT Ambulance Service is one of four operational agencies of the ACT Emergency Services Authority. NETS provides a dedicated ambulance service for inter-hospital transport of sick newborns within the ACT and into surrounding New South Wales."
Australian Capital Territory,"Transport
The automobile is by far the dominant form of transport in the Australian Capital Territory. The city is laid out so that arterial roads connecting inhabited clusters run through undeveloped areas of open land or forest, which results in a low population density; this also means that idle land is available for the development of future transport corridors if necessary without the need to build tunnels or acquire developed residential land. In contrast, other capital cities in Australia have substantially less green space.
Australian Capital Territory's localities are generally connected by parkways—limited access dual carriageway roads with speed limits generally set at a maximum of 100 km/h (62 mph). An example is the Tuggeranong Parkway which links Canberra's CBD and Tuggeranong, and bypasses Weston Creek. In most districts, discrete residential suburbs are bounded by main arterial roads with only a few residential linking in, to deter non-local traffic from cutting through areas of housing.
ACTION, the government-operated bus service, provides public transport throughout the Australian Capital Territory. CDC Canberra provides bus services between the Australian Capital Territory and nearby areas of New South Wales (Murrumbateman and Yass) and as Qcity Transit (Queanbeyan). A light rail line that opened in April 2019 links the CBD with the northern district of Gungahlin. At the 2016 census, 7.1% of the journeys to work involved public transport while 4.5% were on foot.
There are two local taxi companies. Aerial Capital Group enjoyed monopoly status until the arrival of Cabxpress in 2007. In October 2015, the ACT Government passed legislation to regulate ride sharing, allowing ride share services including Uber to operate legally in the Australian Capital Territory. The ACT Government was the first jurisdiction in Australia to enact legislation to regulate the service.
An interstate NSW TrainLink railway service connects Canberra to Sydney. Canberra's railway station is in the inner south suburb of Kingston. Train services to Melbourne are provided by way of a NSW TrainLink bus service which connects with a rail service between Sydney and Melbourne in Yass, about a one-hour drive from Canberra.
Canberra is about three hours by road from Sydney on the Federal Highway (National Highway 23), which connects with the Hume Highway (National Highway 31) near Goulburn, and seven hours by road from Melbourne on the Barton Highway (National Highway 25), which joins the Hume Highway at Yass. It is a two-hour drive on the Monaro Highway (National Highway 23) to the ski fields of the Snowy Mountains and the Kosciuszko National Park. Batemans Bay, a popular holiday spot on the New South Wales coast, is also two hours away via the Kings Highway.
Canberra Airport provides direct domestic services to Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Gold Coast, Hobart and Perth, with connections to other domestic centres. There are also direct flights to regional cities: Dubbo and Newcastle in New South Wales. Regular direct international flights operate to Singapore and Doha from the airport daily, but both with a stopover in Sydney before Canberra. Canberra Airport is, as of September 2013, designated by the Australian Government Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development as a restricted use designated international airport. Until 2003, the civilian airport shared runways with RAAF Base Fairbairn. In June of that year, the Air Force base was decommissioned and from that time the airport was fully under civilian control."
Australian Capital Territory,"Utilities
The government-owned Icon Water, formerly ACTEW, manages the territory's water and sewerage infrastructure. ActewAGL is a joint venture between Icon and AGL, and is the retail provider of Australian Capital Territory's utility services including water, natural gas, electricity, and also some telecommunications services via a subsidiary TransACT.
Australian Capital Territory's water is stored in four reservoirs, the Corin, Bendora and Cotter dams on the Cotter River and the Googong Dam on the Queanbeyan River. Although the Googong Dam is located in New South Wales, it is managed by the ACT government. Icon Water owns Australian Capital Territory's two wastewater treatment plants, located at Fyshwick and on the lower reaches of the Molonglo River.
Electricity for the Australian Capital Territory mainly comes from the national power grid through substations at Holt and Fyshwick (via Queanbeyan). Power was first supplied from a thermal plant built in 1913, near the Molonglo River, but this was finally closed in 1957. The ACT has four solar farms, which were opened between 2014 and 2017: Royalla (rated output of 20 megawatts, 2014), Mount Majura (2.3 MW, 2016), Mugga Lane (13 MW, 2017) and Williamsdale (11 MW, 2017). In addition numerous houses in Canberra have photovoltaic panels or solar hot water systems. In 2015 and 2016, rooftop solar systems supported by the ACT government's feed-in tariff had a capacity of 26.3 megawatts, producing 34,910 MWh. In the same year, retailer-supported schemes had a capacity of 25.2 megawatts and exported 28,815 MWh to the grid (power consumed locally was not recorded).
The ACT has the highest rate with internet access at home (94 per cent of households in 2014–15)."
Australian Capital Territory,"Economy
The economic activity of the Australian Capital Territory is heavily concentrated around the city of Canberra.
A stable housing market, steady employment and rapid population growth in the 21st century have led to economic prosperity and, in 2011, Commsec ranked the ACT as the second best performing economic region in the country. This trend continued into 2016, when the territory was ranked the third best performing out of all of Australia's states and territories.
In 2017–18, the ACT had the fastest rate of growth in the nation due to a rapid growth in population, a strongly performing higher education sector as well as a significant housing and infrastructure investment.
Higher education is the territory's largest export industry. The ACT is home to a significant number of universities and higher education providers. The other major services exports of the ACT in 2017–18 were government services and personal travel. The major goods exports of the territory in 2017–18 were gold coin, legal tender coin, metal structures and fish, though these represent a small proportion of the economy compared to services exports.
The economy of the ACT is largely dependent on the public sector with 30% of the jobs in the territory being in the public sector. Decisions by the federal government regarding the public service can have a significant impact on the territory's economy.
The ACT's gross state product in 2017–18 was $39.8 billion which represented 2.2% of the overall gross domestic product of Australia. In 2017–18 the ACT economy grew by 4.0 per cent, the highest growth rate of any jurisdiction in Australia. This brought real economic growth over the three years to June 2018 to 12 per cent."
Australian Capital Territory,"See also
Community Based Corrections
Human Rights Act 2004
Index of Australia-related articles
Jervis Bay Territory
Revenue stamps of the Australian Capital Territory"
Australian Capital Territory,"Notes
References
Bibliography
The Penguin Australia Road Atlas. Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books Australia. 2000. ISBN 0-670-88980-6.
UBD Canberra. North Ryde, New South Wales: Universal Publishers. 2007. ISBN 978-0-7319-1882-9.
Vaisutis, Justine (2009). Australia. Footscray, Victoria: Lonely Planet. ISBN 978-1-74179-160-0."
Australian Capital Territory,External links
Australian Capital Territory,"Government of the Australian Capital Territory
Legislative Assembly of the Australian Capital Territory
Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory
Statistical Subdivisions of the Australian Capital Territory
List of public art in Australian Capital Territory
 Geographic data related to Australian Capital Territory at OpenStreetMap"
List of political parties in Australia,"The politics of Australia has a mild two-party system, with two dominant political groupings in the Australian political system, the Australian Labor Party and the Liberal/National Coalition. Federally, 17 of the 151 members of the lower house (Members of Parliament, or MPs) are not members of major parties, as are 17 of the 76 members of the upper house (senators).
The Parliament of Australia has a number of distinctive features including compulsory voting, with full-preference instant-runoff voting in single-member seats to elect the lower house, the Australian House of Representatives, and the use of the single transferable vote to elect the upper house, the Australian Senate.
Other parties tend to perform better in the upper houses of the various federal and state parliaments since these typically use a form of proportional representation, except for in Tasmania where the lower house is proportionally elected and the upper house is made up of single member districts."
List of political parties in Australia,"History
Two political groups dominate the Australian political spectrum, forming a de facto two-party system. One is the Australian Labor Party (ALP), a centre-left party which is formally linked to the Australian labour movement. Formed in 1893, it has been a major party federally since 1901, and has been one of the two major parties since the 1910 federal election. The ALP is in government in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia, the Northern Territory, the Australian Capital Territory and the Federal Government of Australia.
The other group is a conservative grouping of parties that are in coalition at the federal level, as well as in New South Wales, but compete in Western Australia and South Australia. It is in government in Tasmania.  The main party in this group is the centre-right Liberal Party. The Liberal Party is the modern form of a conservative group that has existed since the combination  of the Protectionist Party and Free Trade Party into the Commonwealth Liberal Party in 1909. Although this group has changed its nomenclature, there has been a general continuity of MPs and structure between different forms of the party. Its modern form was founded by Robert Menzies in 1944. The party's philosophy is generally liberal conservatism.
Every elected prime minister of Australia since 1910 has been a member of either the Labor Party, the Liberal Party, or one of the Liberal Party's previous incarnations (the Commonwealth Liberal Party, the Nationalist Party of Australia, and the United Australia Party).
The Liberal Party is joined by the National Party, a party that represents rural and agricultural interests. The Nationals contest a limited number of seats and do not generally directly compete with the Liberal Party. Its ideology is generally more socially conservative than that of the Liberal Party. In 1987, the National Party made an abortive run for the office of prime minister in its own right, in the Joh for Canberra campaign. However, it has generally not aspired to become the majority party in the coalition, and it is generally understood that the prime minister of Australia will be a member of either the Labor or Liberal parties. On two occasions (involving Earle Page in 1939, and John McEwen from December 1967 to January 1968), the deputy prime minister, the leader of the National Party (then known as the Country Party), became the prime minister temporarily, upon the death of the incumbent prime minister. Arthur Fadden was the only other Country Party, prime minister. He assumed office in August 1941 after the resignation of Robert Menzies and served as prime minister until October of that year.
The Liberal and National parties have merged in Queensland and the Northern Territory/South Australia, although the resultant parties are different. The Liberal National Party of Queensland, formed in 2008, is a branch of the Liberal Party, but it is affiliated with the Nationals and members elected to federal parliament may sit as either Liberals or Nationals. The Country Liberal Party was formed in 1978 when the Northern Territory gained responsible government. It is a separate member of the federal coalition, but it is affiliated with the two major members and its president has voting rights in the National Party. The name refers to the older name of the National Party.
Federally, these parties are collectively known as the Coalition. The Coalition has existed continually (between the Nationals and their predecessors, and the Liberals and their predecessors) since 1923, with minor breaks in 1940, 1973, and 1987.
Historically, support for either the Coalition or the Labor Party was often viewed as being based on social class, with the upper and middle classes supporting the Coalition and the working class supporting Labor. This has been a less important factor since the 1970s and 1980s when the Labor Party gained a significant bloc of middle-class support and the Coalition gained a significant bloc of working-class support.
The two-party duopoly has been relatively stable, with the two groupings (Labor and Coalition) gaining at least 70% of the primary vote in every election since 1910 (including the votes of autonomous state parties). Third parties have only rarely received more than 10% of the vote for the Australian House of Representatives in a federal election, such as the Australian Democrats in the 1990 election and the Australian Greens in 2010, 2016, 2019 and 2022. Additionally, support for Independent politicians in Australia has resulted in major parties having to come to agreements to form government at times, including the 2010 Australian Federal Election."
List of political parties in Australia,"Membership requirement
To maintain registration, parties must demonstrate that they have a certain number of members.
Federally, since 2022, unless a party has current parliamentary representation, they must demonstrate they have 1,500 members. For the state and territory elections, parties require 100 members in Tasmania and the ACT, 200 in South Australia and Northern Territory, 500 in Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia, and 750 in New South Wales."
List of political parties in Australia,"Federal parties
Federal parliamentary parties
Federal non-parliamentary parties
Parties listed in alphabetical order as of May 2024:"
List of political parties in Australia,"State and territory parties
New South Wales
As of the New South Wales Electoral Commission:"
List of political parties in Australia,"Parliamentary parties
Non-parliamentary parties
Victoria
As of the Victorian Electoral Commission:"
List of political parties in Australia,"Parliamentary parties
Non-parliamentary parties
Queensland
As of the Queensland Electoral Commission:"
List of political parties in Australia,"Parliamentary parties
Non-parliamentary parties
Western Australia
As of the Western Australian Electoral Commission:"
List of political parties in Australia,"Parliamentary parties
Non-parliamentary parties
South Australia
As of the Electoral Commission of South Australia:"
List of political parties in Australia,"Parliamentary parties
Non-parliamentary parties
Tasmania
As of the Tasmanian Electoral Commission:"
List of political parties in Australia,"Parliamentary parties
Non-parliamentary parties
Australian Capital Territory
As listed with the ACT Electoral Commission:"
List of political parties in Australia,"Parliamentary parties
Non-parliamentary parties
Northern Territory
As of the Northern Territory Electoral Commission:"
List of political parties in Australia,"Parliamentary parties
Non-parliamentary parties
See also"
List of political parties in Australia,"List of historical political parties in Australia
List of local government political parties in Australia
List of political parties by country
Politics of Australia"
List of political parties in Australia,"
== References =="
List of cities in Australia by population,"These lists of Australian cities by population provide rankings of Australian cities and towns according to various systems defined by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
The eight Greater Capital City Statistical Areas are listed for the state and territory capital cities. All Significant Urban Areas (SUA), representing urban agglomerations of over 10,000 population, are listed next. The fifty largest Urban Centres (built-up area) are then ranked and, lastly, the fifty largest Local Government Areas (the units of local government below the states and territories) are also ranked."
List of cities in Australia by population,"Greater capital city statistical areas by population
Each capital city forms its own Greater Capital City Statistical Area (GCCSA), which according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) represents a broad functional definition of each of the eight state and territory capital cities. In Australia, the population of the GCCSA is the most-often quoted figure for the population of capital cities. These units correspond broadly to the international concept of metropolitan areas."
List of cities in Australia by population,Notes
List of cities in Australia by population,"Significant urban areas by population
The following table ranks the SUAs, including those of the capital cities (which are smaller than their respective GCCSAs, except for Canberra's, which includes adjacent Queanbeyan, in New South Wales). Capitals are in bold. Significant Urban Areas are defined to represent significant towns and cities, or agglomerations of smaller towns, that have at least 10,000 total population. Significant Urban Areas may contain more than one distinct Urban Centre. There are urban areas of greater than 10,000 people that the ABS does not currently classify as Significant Urban Areas.
70% of the Australian population live in the top eight most populous cities."
List of cities in Australia by population,"50 largest urban centres by population
Urban centres are defined by the Australian Bureau of Statistics as being a population cluster of 1,000 or more people. For statistical purposes, people living in urban centres are classified as urban. The figures below represent the populations of the contiguous built-up areas of each city; with state and territory capitals in bold. These figures are only updated every census, as the ABS does not render population projections for Urban Centres, and as such can only be as up-to-date as the most recent census year."
List of cities in Australia by population,"Urban areas
Main urban areas in Australia, according to the Demographia:"
List of cities in Australia by population,"List of local government areas by population
Local government areas (LGAs) are the main units of local government in Australia. They may be termed cities, councils, regions, shires, towns, or other names, and all function similarly. Local government areas cover around 90 per cent of the nation. Significant sections of South Australia and New South Wales are unincorporated, that is, have no defined local government, along with the ACT and smaller sections of Northern Territory and Victoria. Brisbane is the only state capital city with its respective LGA (City of Brisbane) covering a significant portion of its urban area. In other capital cities, the central LGA covers a much smaller proportion of the total urban area.
The populations of the central local government areas in other capitals are relatively small. As of June 2020, Darwin had a population of 82,030, Hobart 55,250, Perth 30,971, and Adelaide 26,177. Most Australian capital cities have suburban local government areas significantly larger in population than the central local government area."
List of cities in Australia by population,"Definitions
Illustrated are the various statistical areas defined by the Australian Bureau of Statistics for Sydney and its surrounds. The extent of the Greater Sydney greater capital city statistical area is designated by thick grey line and black text. The greater capital city statistical areas are the eight unique statistical divisions delineating the broadest possible concept of each state or territory capital city, constructed from one or more whole labour market areas (designated SA4 in the Australian Statistical Geography Standard). The rest of NSW area includes the entire remainder of the state, as each state or territory has only one GCCSA.
The significant urban areas are designated by solid orange lines with stippled fill and red text. Significant urban areas are statistical divisions designed to represent significant towns and cities or associated collections of smaller towns, with total populations of 10,000 people or more. They consist of single, or clusters of, urban centres/localities (see below), and are constructed from one or more SA2 units, which are collations of suburbs and localities designed for consistent statistical output between censuses.
The Urban Centres/Localities are designated by dashed red lines with pink fill. Urban centres/localities are statistical divisions delineating the contiguous built up, or urban areas of cities, towns and most small settlements. They are constructed from the smallest statistical output areas (SA1).
Also represented are 31 outlined coloured areas. These are the 31 local government areas that are commonly understood as comprising Sydney, albeit unofficially."
List of cities in Australia by population,"See also
Demography of Australia
List of cities in Australia
List of cities in Oceania by population
List of largest cities in the world
List of places in New South Wales by population
List of places in the Northern Territory by population
List of places in Queensland by population
List of places in South Australia by population
List of places in Tasmania by population
List of places in Victoria by population
List of places in Western Australia by population
List of towns and cities in Australia by year of settlement"
List of cities in Australia by population,"References
External links
""Table 1: Population growth and turnover in Local Government Areas (LGAs), 2006 to 2011"". Australian Bureau of Statistics. 25 November 2009. Retrieved 10 August 2015. — Spreadsheet of population data for local government areas in the 2006 and 2011 Australian census"
Far-right politics in Australia,"Far-right politics in Australia describes authoritarian ideologies, including fascism and White supremacy as they manifest in Australia.
In Australia the far-right first came to public attention with the formation in 1931 of the New Guard in Sydney and its offshoot, the Centre Party in 1933. These proto-fascist groups were monarchist, anti-communist and authoritarian in outlook. These early far-right groups were followed by the explicitly fascist Australia First Movement (1941). Far-right groups and individuals in Australia went on to adopt more explicitly racial positions during the 1960s and 1970s, morphing into self-proclaimed Nazi, fascist and anti-Semitic movements, organisations that opposed non-white and non-Christian immigration, such as the neo-Nazi National Socialist Party of Australia (1967) and the militant white supremacist group National Action (1982).
Since the 1980s, the term has mainly been used to describe those who advocate for preservation of what they perceive to be Christian Anglo-Australian culture, and those who campaign against Aboriginal land rights, multiculturalism, immigration and asylum seekers. Since 2001, Australia has seen the formation of several neo-Nazi, neo-Fascist or alt-right groups such as the True Blue Crew, the United Patriots Front, Fraser Anning's Conservative National Party and the Antipodean Resistance, and others.
Australian nationalism was a 19th-century movement, mostly concerned with establishing an Australian national identity, but more recently, some far-right groups have also dubbed themselves Australian nationalists."
Far-right politics in Australia,"20th century
An early exponent of fascist ideology in Australia was the writer and poet William Baylebridge, who was later associated with P. R. Stephensen and the Australia First Movement in the 1930s and early 1940s."
Far-right politics in Australia,"1930s to 1960s
The New Guard (1930s)
The Australian far right rose out of the monarchist and anti-communist movements. Formed in Sydney on 16 February 1931, the New Guard was the first and largest fascist organisation in Australia. It was formed by World War I veteran, Australian monarchist and anti-communist, Eric Campbell. The group comprised mostly returned servicemen and claimed a membership of 50,000 at its peak, including prominent members of society such as aviator Sir Charles Kingsford Smith and former Mayor of North Sydney Hubert Primrose.
The New Guard was a paramilitary organisation with its members being well armed and receiving military training. The New Guard under Campbell orchestrated a number of operations, including strike breaking, attacking Labor Party members and ""Communist"" meetings; they also demanded the deportation of Communists. During the initial growth of the movement, Campbell was able to attract many ex-soldiers and ex-commanders to the movement.
The New Guard saw the Premier of New South Wales Jack Lang as an immediate threat. The organisation attracted attention when member Francis de Groot, on horseback and at Campbell's direction, upstaged Lang in cutting the ribbon at the opening ceremony of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in protest at Lang's anti-monarchist sentiments.
After Lang's dismissal in May 1932 the New Guard's membership declined rapidly."
Far-right politics in Australia,"White Army
The White Army (so named after the Russian White Army),  also known as the League of National Security (LNS), was formed in Victoria around 1931, headed by the Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police, Thomas Blamey and  described as a fascist paramilitary group. The group, which existed for about eight years from 1931, comprised several senior army officers, including Col. Francis Derham, a Melbourne lawyer, and Lt. Col. Edmund Herring, later Chief Justice of Victoria. Some members had been members of the New Guard, and both groups were involved in street fights with leftist groups. This was reportedly a response to the rise of communism in Australia. Its members stood ready to take up arms to stop a Catholic or communist revolution."
Far-right politics in Australia,"The Centre Party (1933-1935)
The Centre Party was a fascist political party formed in December 1933, following Lang's dismissal and the demise of the New Guard. Eric Campbell established the party after he had met with European fascists and National Socialists such as Sir Oswald Mosley and Joachim von Ribbentrop. Campbell repositioned the remnants of the New Guard away from paramilitary activities and into electoral politics.
The Centre Party contested the May 1935 New South Wales state election, polling 0.60% of the total vote. Following the party's poor showing at the election Campbell withdrew from public life and the party disbanded."
Far-right politics in Australia,"Australia First Movement
The Australia First Movement was a short-lived Australian fascist movement founded in October 1941. The group was anti-Semitic and national socialist, advocating the corporate state and a political alliance with the Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Japan.
The group was disbanded in March 1942, when a number of its members were secretly interned by the Australian government on suspicion that they might attempt to provide help to Japanese invaders. Two members were convicted of treason. Australia First Movement member and former member of the Centre Party Adela Pankhurst, of the famous suffragette family, was arrested and interned in 1942 for her advocacy of peace with Japan."
Far-right politics in Australia,"Australian League of Rights
The Australian League of Rights is a fascist and anti-Semitic political organisation. It was founded in Adelaide, South Australia by Eric Butler in 1946, and organised nationally in 1960. The party's ideology was based on the economic theory of Social Credit expounded by C. H. Douglas. The League describes itself as upholding the values of ""loyalty to God, Queen and Country"".
The group inspired groups like the British League of Rights, Canadian League of Rights and the New Zealand League of Rights. In 1972 Butler created an umbrella group, the Crown Commonwealth League of Rights, to represent the four groups; it also served as a chapter of the World League for Freedom and Democracy."
Far-right politics in Australia,"1960s to 2000s
Australian National Socialist Party (1962-1968)
The Australian National Socialist Party (ANSP) was a minor Australian neo-Nazi party. The party was founded in 1962 by University of Adelaide physics student Ted Cawthron and Sydney council worker Don Lindsay. The group was anti-communist, and supported the White Australia policy and the total annexation of New Guinea.
On 26 June 1964, the party's headquarters were raided by police. Smith and four other party members were arrested and convicted of possessing unlicensed firearms and explosives and possession of stolen goods. By 1967 the remnants of the party had joined the newly formed National Socialist Party of Australia."
Far-right politics in Australia,"National Socialist Party of Australia (1967-1970s)
The National Socialist Party of Australia (NSPA) was a minor Australian neo-Nazi party formed in 1967 by former ANSP leader Ted Cawthron. In May 1968, the ANSP merged into the NSPA, and Cawthron and Frank Molnar attempted to distance themselves and the party from the ""jackbooted 'Nazi' image"" associated with the ANSP.
In early 1970, Cawthron contested the May 1970 ACT by-election, making him the first National Socialist in Australia to run for public office. The party also made a number of unsuccessful runs for the Senate.
Jim Saleam was made deputy leader of the party between 1972 and 1975. Saleam became a prominent figure in far-right politics, going on to found National Action in 1982 and the Australia First Party 1996."
Far-right politics in Australia,"National Action (1982-1991)
National Action was a militant white supremacist group founded on Anzac Day 1982 by the former deputy leader of the National Socialist Party of Australia, Jim Saleam and former neo-Nazi David Greason.
In 1989, Saleam was convicted of being an accessory before the fact in regard to organising the attempted assassination of African National Congress representative Eddie Funde. Saleam claimed to have been set up by police.
In 1991, the group was disbanded following the murder of a member, Wayne ""Bovver"" Smith, in the group's headquarters in the Sydney suburb of Tempe. Following the murder of Smith, Saleam became NSW chairman of Australia First Party."
Far-right politics in Australia,"Australian National Alliance (1978-1981)
Progressive Conservative Party (Australia) (1980)
Australian Nationalist Movement (1985-2007)
The Australian Nationalist Movement (ANM), also known as the Australian Nationalist Worker's Union (ANWU), was a Western Australian neo-Nazi, extreme right-wing group founded and led by Peter Joseph ""Jack"" van Tongeren.
In 1987, Van Tongeren distributed 400,000 racist posters around Perth. The posters bore phrases such as ""No Asians"", ""White Revolution The Only Solution"", ""Coloured Immigration: Trickle Is Now A Flood"" and ""Asians Out Or Racial War"". Van Tongeren is a holocaust denier.
In 1989, Van Tongeren staged a series of racially motivated arson attacks, targeting businesses owned by Asian Australians. Van Tongeren served thirteen years in prison for his crimes. In the late 1980s it was revealed that his father was Javanese, making him of Indonesian ancestry. He resumed anti-Asian activities upon his release in 2002 leading to further convictions in 2006.
In 1989, two ANM members murdered police informant David Locke. The murder trial of the two men eventually led to Van Tongeren being found guilty of 53 crimes and sentenced to 18 years. The two men who murdered David Locke received life sentences.
On being released from jail in 2002, Van Tongeren expressed no remorse. In February 2004 three Chinese restaurants, synagogues and Asian-owned businesses were firebombed, plastered with posters and daubed with swastikas. Western Australian police launched ""Operation Atlantic"" in response to the attacks, leading to the arrest of five men involved in the attacks. The police also identified a plot to harm WA Attorney-General Jim McGinty and his family, among others.
In August 2004, Van Tongeren and his co-accused Matthew Billing were found and arrested in the Boddington area south-east of Perth. Both men once again faced the courts over the 2004 arson plots. During a hearing on 2 November, Van Tongeren collapsed, was taken to hospital, and later used a wheelchair. Van Tongeren was released from jail on the condition that he leave Western Australia. In 2007 the ANM/ANWU was reported to have been disbanded.
Van Tongeren has been a member of a number of far-right extremist groups including National Action (Australia) and the Australia First Movement."
Far-right politics in Australia,"Australian Citizens Party
Founded in 1988, The Australian Citizens Party (formerly known as ""Citizens Electoral Council of Australia"" or CEC) is a minor political party in Australia affiliated with the international LaRouche Movement which was led by American political activist Lyndon LaRouche. The group has been accused, by B'nai B'rith, of being anti-Semitic, anti-gay, anti-Aboriginal and racist. The document cites CEC publications and quotes former CEC members.
The group has been accused of ""brainwashing"" members and engaging in campaigns involving ""dirty tricks""."
Far-right politics in Australia,"Australians Against Further Immigration (1989-2008)
Australians Against Further Immigration (AAFI) was an Australian far-right anti-immigration political party which described itself as ""eco-nationalist"" and was against positive net immigration. The party was founded in 1989 and dissolved in 2008. The party was deregistered by the Australian Electoral Commission in December 2005, because it was lacking the minimum 500 members required to be registered as a political party."
Far-right politics in Australia,"Confederate Action Party of Australia (1992-1993)
Reclaim Australia: Reduce Immigration (1996-1999)
21st-century groups
Antipodean Resistance
Antipodean Resistance (AR) is an Australian neo-Nazi group. Formed in October 2016, the group's flag features a swastika. The group's logo features the black sun and Totenkopf (skull head) with an Akubra hat, a laurel wreath and a swastika. Antipodean Resistance promotes and incites hatred and violence, as illustrated in its anti-Jewish and anti-homosexual posters, with graphic images of shooting Jews and homosexuals in the head. One poster called to ""Legalise the execution of Jews.""
In 2017, it was reported that ASIO, the Australian national security organisation, was monitoring the group, who were ""willing to use violence to further their own interests"".
Members of the Antipodean Resistance and Lads Society organised the creation of a new group, the National Socialist Network, in 2020."
Far-right politics in Australia,"Australian Defence League
The Australian Defence League (ADL) is a neo-Nazi street gang. The gang is anti-Islam, and has been involved in making terrorist threats, abusing, stalking and doxxing Muslim Australians. The gang was founded in Sydney in 2009 by recidivist criminal Ralph Cerminara. Cerminara has a significant criminal record, including convictions for assault, high-range drink-driving and breaching apprehended violence orders."
Far-right politics in Australia,"Australian Protectionist Party
The Australian Protectionist Party (also known as the Party For Freedom) is a minor far-right anti-immigration party, focused on economic protectionism and white nationalism. The Australian Protectionist Party has been active in protesting against the presence of asylum seekers and Muslims, and has also organised several protests against Sharia law being implemented in Australia. The party has unsuccessfully contested a number of elections, failing to secure more than 1% of the vote in any election it has contested."
Far-right politics in Australia,"Australia First Party
The Australia First Party (AFP) is a militant white supremacist political party founded in 1996 by Graeme Campbell and currently led by Jim Saleam. The party stands on a nationalist, anti-multicultural and economic protectionist platform. The Party's current platform includes the reintroduction of the White Australia policy and opposition to Chinese immigration.
Campbell was Australia First's leader until June 2001, when he left the party to stand as a One Nation Senate candidate in Western Australia. After serving time in jail for organising the failed attempted assassination of Eddie Funde, Saleam took control of the party and ran as an its candidate for a seat on Marrickville council, New South Wales, claiming ""to oppose Marrickville being a Refugee Welcome Zone"". Later that year the party formed its youth wing, the Patriotic Youth League. The party contested the 2010 federal election, the 2013 federal election, the 2016 federal election, the 2017 Cootamundra state by-election, the 2018 Longman by-election, and the 2019 New South Wales state election, but failed to poll at more than 2% on any occasion. Saleam's platform included the reintroduction of the White Australia policy and opposition to Chinese immigration.
On 20 March 2019, Australia First member Nathan Sykes was charged with at least eight offences relating to threats he made to a number of journalists."
Far-right politics in Australia,"Australian Liberty Alliance (2015-2020)
The Australian Liberty Alliance (ALA), created in 2015, was rebranded as Yellow Vest Australia in 2019. It was a minor political party in Australia, with Debbie Robinson as party president. The party was the political wing of the Q Society. Founded in 2015, the party was anti-Islamic, with policies focusing on Muslim immigration such as enforcing ""integration over separation"", replacing multiculturalism with an integrated multi-ethnic society and stopping public funding for ""associations formed around foreign nationalities"". They vowed to ""stop the Islamisation of Australia"". The party was deregistered in 2020."
Far-right politics in Australia,"Creativity Movement/Alliance
The Creativity Movement, self-described as a ""church"" but in reality an anti-Christian, white supremacist, neo-Nazi organisation, was founded in the United States in 1997 as an offshoot of the 1973 Church of the Creator, and had adherents in Australia until 2010. The group ceased to exist elsewhere in the world by 2020, and the police seized the Creativity Movement website in 2021. The domain name creativitymovement.org is now held by the Creativity Alliance. Founded in 2003 after the arrest of the American Creativity Movement leader, Matt Hale, the Creativity Alliance is an Adelaide-based offshoot of the Church of the Creator, run by Cailen Cambeul.
The Creativity Alliance includes numerous Church of Creativity groups, such as the ""Church of Creativity – Victoria"", with its now-defunct website stating that it is ""A Creativity Alliance website"", was operational from at least 2004 until 2017 and has since been blended into the main Creativity Alliance website along with all other regional Church of Creativity websites. The Victorian website stated that it ""objects to... Christianity, multiculturalism and Marxism"". A 2010 version of the website listed its five core beliefs, including ""our Race is our Religion;... the White Race is Nature's Finest; ... Racial Loyalty is the greatest of all honors, and racial treason is the worst of all crimes; ...what is good for the White Race is the highest virtue, and what is bad for the White Race is the ultimate sin; ...[and] that the one and only, true and revolutionary White Racial Religion -Creativity- is the only salvation for the White Race"".
A Liberal Party campaigner who had been a leading member of the Young Liberals in Geelong, Scott Harrison, was revealed to have been a member of this organisation for six years prior to 2010, but had turned his back on those beliefs. He resigned from the Liberal Party after anti-Semitic articles written by him emerged, including airing a theory that the Port Arthur massacre was master-minded by Jews, as well as a photo of him gesturing with a Nazi salute in front of a swastika.
Some activity by members were reported in Melbourne and the Surf Coast in 2015. In 2011, after stickers advocating ""White Power"" were found in Victoria, the group was investigated by the state's Multicultural Affairs Minister. The group says it is committed to achieving its aims by non-violent means."
Far-right politics in Australia,"The Dingoes
In 2016 the Dingoes were described in a 2016 news report as ""young, educated and alternative right"", comparing the group to the Identitarian movement in Europe. The group self-described themselves as ""politically incorrect larrikins"", and one member praised Donald Trump for embodying ""white values"". Members do not reveal their identity.
The Dingoes were mentioned as one of the groups involved in the 2018 infiltration to the NSW Young Nationals (see below). National Party MP George Christensen and One Nation candidate Mark Latham were both was interviewed on the Dingoes podcast, called The Convict Report, but Christensen later said that he would not have done it if he had known about their extremist views. The podcast also featured a New Zealand man who ran the Dominion Movement, who was later arrested for sharing information that threatened NZ security. The group planned a 2018 conference in Sydney, dubbed DingoCon, at which US alt-right figure Mike Enoch of The Right Stuff was invited to speak.
The group posts anti-Semitic and other racist commentary on Twitter, and have used the same meme character as the perpetrator of the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings. The podcast was shut down after the attack."
Far-right politics in Australia,"Fraser Anning's Conservative National Party (2019-2020)
Fraser Anning's Conservative National Party was a populist, far-right, white nationalist party founded by Fraser Anning in April 2019, when he was a senator for Queensland. Anning had previously been a senator for Pauline Hanson's One Nation and Katter's Australian Party, and sat as an independent before founding the new party. The party contested the 2019 federal election, but failed to win a seat. The party was deregistered on 23 September 2020."
Far-right politics in Australia,"Lads Society
The Lads Society is a far-right white nationalist extremist group founded by several former members of the United Patriots Front in late 2017, with club houses in Sydney and Melbourne. The Lads Society came to national prominence after it staged a rally in St Kilda, Victoria, targeting the local African Australian community. Attendees were seen making the Nazi salute and one was photographed brandishing an SS helmet. In 2017, the group's leader Thomas Sewell approached the perpetrator of the Christchurch mosque shootings, Brenton Harrison Tarrant, asking him to join the Lads Society, but Tarrant refused. The group's members and allies attempted to infiltrate the Young Nationals in NSW, and engaged in branch stacking at the May 2018 conference. Lads Society members attained leadership positions in the Young Nationals, but were later forced out of the party. Canadian alt-right activist Lauren Southern and white nationalist Stefan Molyneux met with Lads Society members during their visit to Australia.
Undated videos leaked to the press in November 2019 revealed Lads Society leader Sewell's aim to attract and recruit members from mainstream society under the guise of a men's fitness club. His white supremacist agenda was clearly shown as he outlined plans which included the creation of ""Anglo-European"" enclaves in Australian cities, encouraging the ""speed and ferocity of the decay"" of society to help foment a ""race war"" by such tactics as exploiting the ""African gangs"" trope used by Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton and other mainstream politicians.
Members of the Lads Society and Antipodean Resistance organised the creation of a new group, the National Socialist Network, in late 2020, and Sewell was one of the organisers of a 2021 group trip to the Grampians in January 2021 (see below)."
Far-right politics in Australia,"Love Australia or Leave
Love Australia or Leave is a far-right, nationalist political party based in Queensland. It has been registered for federal elections since October 2016, after being founded by Kim Vuga, who is still the head. The party platform includes opposition to mass immigration and Islam in Australia, and support of Australia leaving the United Nations. The party ran candidates at the 2019 Australian federal election in Queensland, New South Wales and Tasmania, but failed to win any seats."
Far-right politics in Australia,"National Socialist Network
The National Socialist Network (NSN) was formed by members of the Lads Society and Antipodean Resistance in late 2020. It is a Melbourne-based neo-Nazi group that claims to be active in Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra, Perth and several regional cities, but which would not reveal how many members or associates the group has. It has vowed to bring about a ""white revolution"" and has openly described Indigenous Australians as ""subhuman and monkeys"". They also engage in anti-Semitic and other racist behaviour. Its leader is Thomas Sewell, an ex-Australian army soldier turned neo-Nazi, who is also leader of the Lads Society.
The group helped to organise a group of about 38 young white men who paraded Nazi symbolism and shouted offensive slogans in the Grampians region over the Australia Day weekend in January 2021 (see below).
In March 2021, Victoria Police's counter-terrorism command charged Sewell with affray, recklessly causing injury, and unlawful assault after he allegedly punched a security guard working for the Nine Network in Melbourne's Docklands. The alleged assault took place prior to the broadcast of an A Current Affair report about Sewell's organisation."
Far-right politics in Australia,"New Guard (2015–2018)
The New Guard (not to be confused with the 1930s New Guard mentioned above) was a group with a presence on Facebook between 2015 and 2018. Self-described as fascists, the group's aim was to influence mainstream politics. Their tactics included spreading propaganda about protecting Australia's European identity as well as opening businesses and buying property to create wealth, using this to try to influence the election of state and federal parliamentarians. Part of the group's plans was to create a kind of ""pioneer Europa"", where people subscribing to such views would live, governed by a sympathetic mayor. The men-only group was revealed to have infiltrated the Young Nationals in New South Wales in late 2018, leading to its demise."
Far-right politics in Australia,"Patriotic Youth League/Eureka Youth League
The Patriotic Youth League (PLY) was a neo-Nazi micro group and the youth wing of the Australia First Party, founded in 2002 by former One Nation activist Stuart McBeth. The Patriotic Youth League was mainly active in the northern suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne, and played a large role in the 2005 Cronulla riots. It disbanded in 2006, but was reincarnated as the Eureka Youth League in 2010."
Far-right politics in Australia,"Q Society of Australia (2010-2020)
The Q Society of Australia was a far-right, homophobic and Islamophobic organisation that opposed Muslim immigration and the presence of Muslims in Australian society. Founded in 2010, Q Society referred to itself as ""Australia's leading Islam-critical organisation"" and stated that its purpose was to fight against the ""Islamisation of Australia"". The group's events featured extreme homophobia and Islamophobia. Its president was Debbie Robinson, who was also president of the Australian Liberty Alliance (later Yellow Vest Australia).
On 13 February 2020, the Q Society stated that it would deregister itself due to lack of financial support, effective from 30 June 2020."
Far-right politics in Australia,"Reclaim Australia (2015-2017?)
Formed in 2015, Reclaim Australia is a loosely associated far-right Australian nationalist protest group which draws support from nationalists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other far-right groups, which is primarily focused on opposing Islam. The group held street rallies between 2015 and 2017, and often faced counter-protests from trade unions, human rights and anti-racism activists. After observing many Reclaim Australia rallies and interviewing participants, author John Safran described it as a loose collective of different groups such as the United Patriots Front and Danny Nalliah's Catch the Fire Ministries.
The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), says that it monitors the group because of its potential for violence."
Far-right politics in Australia,"Rise Up Australia Party (2011-2019)
The Rise Up Australia Party was a far-right, Christian political party launched in June 2011. The party's policy platform was focused on nationalist and fundamentalist Christian values. It was opposed to Islam in Australia and opposes same-sex marriage. Its slogan was ""Keep Australia Australian"". The party was founded and was led by Pentecostal minister Danny Nalliah, who is also the president of Catch the Fire Ministries. Dr. Daniel Nalliah is originally from Sri Lanka, and has worked and lived in Saudi Arabia with his family.  The Rise up Australia party opposed multiculturalism, wanted to preserve Australia's ""Judeo-Christian heritage"", called for cuts to Muslim immigration, and advocated freedom of speech and freedom of religion. In the 2013 federal election the party contested seats in most territories and states, and lobbied for changing the name of the immigration department under the Abbott government from immigration and cultural affairs to immigration and border protection.  
After the 2019 Australian federal election, on 26 June 2019, the party was voluntarily deregistered by the Australian Electoral Commission."
Far-right politics in Australia,"Soldiers of Odin Australia
Soldiers of Odin (SOO) is an anti-immigrant group founded in Kemi, Finland, in October 2015, in the midst of the European migrant crisis. The 
Soldiers of Odin Australia arose out of the Reclaim Australia group, and was registered as a non-profit association with the Victorian government in June 2016.  That same year the group ran racially-driven vigilante ""safety patrols"" around Federation Square, Birrarung Marr and Bourke Street Mall and outside city train stations at night to counteract what it claims was the inability of police to protect the public from rising street crime and gangs such as the so-called Apex gang. They also distributed food to homeless people in the city.
Their recruitment rhetoric included exaggerating illegal entry to the country, crime perpetrated by immigrants and the threat of Islamic terrorism, targeting mainly Anglo-Australian men; they also used the ""exotic Norse mythology"" to attract far-right sympathisers who were willing to take public action.
While they attracted significant press coverage in the second half of 2016,
 their presence seemed to have faded fairly quickly, and by 2020 they were no longer deemed a significant far-right group."
Far-right politics in Australia,"True Blue Crew
The True Blue Crew (TBC) is an Australian militant white supremacist group. Members and supporters have been linked to right-wing terrorism and vigilantism, and members have been arrested with weapons and on terrorism-related charges. Experts who have studied the group say it appears to be ""committed to violence"". The True Blue Crew was formed in 2015 as a splinter group from the anti-Islamic Reclaim Australia group, along with a number of small far-right nationalist groups such as the United Patriots Front.
In December 2019 a member of True Blue Crew, Phillip Galea, was convicted of terrorism charges relating to planned bombings of the Victorian Trades Hall and other left wing organisations in Melbourne."
Far-right politics in Australia,"United Patriots Front (2015-2017)
The United Patriots Front (UPF) was a far-right extremist group whose membership was composed of neo-Nazis and fundamentalist Christians. Based in the state of Victoria, UPF was a nationalist anti-Islam organisation that stood in opposition to immigration, opposition to multiculturalism and Islam by demonstrations. It was a splinter group from Reclaim Australia group, formed after a dispute between Shermon Burgess and Reclaim Australia organisers. The group has been described by a number of media outlets and journalists as a hate group, and has claimed solidarity with Golden Dawn. The group was disbanded in 2017. The UPF's leaders went on to form a new, more explicitly White nationalist group, the Lads Society, later that same year."
Far-right politics in Australia,"Others
Another extremist group mentioned in connection with infiltration to the NSW Young Nationals in 2018 (see below) is Squadron 88.
There was a small group called Identity Australia that was formed around March 2019, which described itself as ""a youth-focused identitiarian organisation dedicated to giving European Australians a voice and restoring Australia's European character"", and published a manifesto detailing its beliefs, but its website is as of April 2021 non-operational.
Other potentially violent groups active in Australia include the Southern Cross Hammerskins and the Crazy Whiteboys. The latter is a violent anti-Asian, anti-Semitic and anti-African Australian group (also described as skinhead) founded in 2009 in Melbourne. Two of their members were given jail sentences after a particularly vicious and brutal attack on an Asian student in 2012.
Other far-right groups whose profiles have varied include the Nationalist Australian Alternative, Australian Traditionalism, and the New National Action.
There is some cross-over between the two groups which call themselves Freemen on the Land (FOTL) and Sovereign Citizens (and some others), but both have their roots in the American farm crisis and the US/Canadian financial crisis of the 1980s, and their core beliefs may be broadly defined as ""see[ing] the state as a corporation with no authority over free citizens"". In 2011, Malcolm Roberts wrote a letter to then Prime Minister Julia Gillard filled with characteristic sovereign citizen ideas, but denied that he was a ""sovereign citizen"". There have been several court cases testing this concept, none successful for the ""freemen"". In 2015, the New South Wales Police Force identified ""sovereign citizens"" as a potential terrorist threat, estimating that there were about 300 sovereign citizens in the state at the time. There have been a few minor cases where parties have invoked arguments surrounding the ""sovereign man"", but the arguments have failed. Sovereign Citizens from the US have undertaken speaking tours to New Zealand and Australia, with some support among farmers struggling with drought and other hardships. A group called United Rights Australia (U R Australia) has a Facebook presence, and there are other websites promulgating Freemen/Sovereign Citizen ideas. From the 2010s, there has been a growing number of Freemen targeting Indigenous Australians, with groups with names like Tribal Sovereign Parliament of Gondwana Land, the Original Sovereign Tribal Federation (OSTF) and the Original Sovereign Confederation. Some proponents have conflated sovereign state beliefs with the land rights movement."
Far-right politics in Australia,"Incidents
Bendigo mosque protests (2014–5)
In 2014 the City of Greater Bendigo announced the construction of a A$3m mosque and Islamic community centre in Bendigo, Victoria. Some residents created a ""Stop the Mosque in Bendigo"" group, and certain far-right organisations, in particular the Q Society, mobilised residents and brought in outsiders to oppose the construction by conducting extensive protests. In October 2015, around 1,000 people turned up for a protest organised by the United Patriots Front. Members of the extremist group Right Wing Resistance Australia travelled from interstate, and the Rise Up Australia Party was also represented."
Far-right politics in Australia,"Infiltration of the Young Nationals (2018)
In 2018, it was revealed that the NSW Young Nationals had been infiltrated by a significant  number of neo-Nazis and other far-right extremists. Party leader Michael McCormack denounced these attempts, and the leader of the NSW Nationals, John Barilaro, also denounced racism and fascism within the party. The suspected neo-Nazis were expelled from the party and its youth wing. Several of the men who infiltrated the organisation were from the New Guard (see above). The 19 members expelled from the party also included members of the Lads Society, Antipodean Resistance, Squadron 88, and the Dingoes."
Far-right politics in Australia,"Christchurch mosque shootings (2019)
Australian far-right terrorist Brenton Harrison Tarrant committed the March 2019 mosque shootings at Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 51 people and injuring 50 more. Tarrant had expressed support for two Australian far-right organizations, the United Patriots Front and the True Blue Crew online, and repeatedly praised Blair Cottrell, a neo-Nazi and former leader of the UPF, affectionately calling him ""Emperor Blair Cottrell"" during a celebration of Donald Trump being elected as President of the United States in 2016; he also donated money to the UPF."
Far-right politics in Australia,"Grampians neo-Nazi trip (2021)
On the Australia Day weekend in January 2021, the National Socialist Network, a new group created by members of the Antipodean Resistance and the Lads Society under Lads leader Thomas Sewell, were observed parading Nazi paraphernalia and harassing bystanders at several locations around the Grampians in Victoria. One Halls Gap resident said: ""There were 40 white males, many with skinheads, some chanting 'white power'"". They were reported to have chanted ""sieg heil"" and ""white power"", burnt a cross, and posted stickers saying ""Australia For The White Man"".
Concerned citizens reported them to police, who confronted the group and later collected video evidence from security videos. Victoria Police's Counter Terrorism Command and ASIO were notified, and the incident was widely covered in the media. One anti-Semitism expert called for the group to be branded a terrorist group, saying ""We know that there is a direct link between incitement, between vilification ... and shooting rampages that we saw not just in Christchurch, but in other places""."
Far-right politics in Australia,"Australian far-right figures
Fraser Anning, former Queensland Senator (2017-2019) and One Nation member, founder of Fraser Anning's Conservative National Party
William Baylebridge, writer and poet, later associated with Stephensen's Australia First Movement
Eric Butler, founder of the Australian League of Rights
Cailen Cambeul, co-founder of the Creativity Alliance related to the Creativity Movement
Eric Campbell (political activist) Chief Commander of the New Guard, Leader of the Centre Party
Graeme Campbell, MP (1980-1998) former Labor and One Nation member, founder of Australia First Party
Ralph Cerminara, founder of Australian Defence League
Blair Cottrell, founding member of United Patriots Front, Lads Society
Neil Erikson, founding member of United Patriots Front, Lads Society
Phillip Galea, former member of the True Blue Crew, convicted of planning a terrorist attack in 2019
Pauline Hanson, founder of One Nation, Senator for Queensland (2016–present).
Jacob Hersant, co-founder of the National Socialist Network.
George Hodges Knox, former Nationalist Party, United Australia Party and Liberal Party member, Deputy Chief Commander of the New Guard
Danny Nalliah, founder and leader of Rise Up Australia
Adela Pankhurst, former communist and suffragette turned fascist, co-founder of the fascist Australia First Movement
Debbie Robinson, founder and leader of Yellow Vest Australia and director of Q Society
Jim Saleam, founder of National Action, former National Socialist Party of Australia and One Nation member, leader of Australia First Party
Thomas Sewell, leader of the National Socialist Network
P. R. Stephensen, co-founder of the fascist Australia First Movement
Brenton Harrison Tarrant, white nationalist neo-fascist far-right terrorist responsible for the Christchurch mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand
Jack van Tongeren, founder of the Australian Nationalist Movement
Bernard Gaynor, anti-gay activist and Iraq war veteran."
Far-right politics in Australia,"Election results
See also
References
Further reading
Amos, Keith (1976). The New Guard Movement 1931–1935. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. ISBN 978-0-522-84092-6.
Campbell, Andrew (1978). The Australian League of Rights: a study in political extremism and subversion. Collingwood: Outback Press. ISBN 978-0-868-88222-2.
Cathcart, Michael (1988). Defending the National Tuckshop: Australia's Secret Army Intrigue of 1931. Melbourne: McPhee Gribble Publishers. ISBN 978-0869140772.
Cathcart, Michael (16 March 2017). ""The White Army: Fascism in Australia in the 1930s"" (Audio). ABC Radio (Interview). Nightlife. Interviewed by Clark, Philip.
Clune, David (2009). The Governors of New South Wales 1788-2010. Annandale, NSW: Federation Press. ISBN 978-1-86287-743-6.
Dean, Geoff; Bell, Peter; Vakhitova, Zarina (October 2016). ""Right-wing extremism in Australia: the rise of the new radical right"". Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism. 11 (2): 121–142. doi:10.1080/18335330.2016.1231414. S2CID 151616050.
Fleming, Andy; Mondon, Aurelien (2018). ""The Radical Right in Australia"". In Rydgren, Jens (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right. Oxford University Press.
Greason, David (1994). I was a teenage fascist. McPhee Gribble. ISBN 978-0-869-14285-1.
Hagan, Jim (1991). A History of the Labor Party in New South Wales, 1891-1991. Melbourne: Longman Cheshire. ISBN 978-0-582-86969-1.
Moore, Andrew (1989). The Secret Army and the Premier: Conservative Paramilitary Organisations in New South Wales 1930-32. Kensington, NSW: New South Wales University Press. ISBN 978-0-86840-283-3.
Moore, Andrew (1995). The Right Road: A history of Right-wing Politics in Australia. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-195-53512-9.
Muirden, Bruce (1968). The Puzzled Patriots: The Story of the Australia First Movement. Melbourne University Press. ISBN 9780522839074.
Nairn, Bede (1986). The ""Big Fella"": Jack Lang and the Australian Labor Party 1891–1949. Carlton, VIC: Melbourne University Press. ISBN 978-0-522-84406-1.
Nilan, Pam (2019). ""Far-Right Contestation in Australia: Soldiers of Odin and True Blue Crew"". In Peucker, Mario; Smith, Debra (eds.). The Far-Right in Contemporary Australia. Springer Singapore. pp. 101–125. doi:10.1007/978-981-13-8351-9_5. ISBN 978-981-13-8350-2. S2CID 199297174 – via ResearchGate (by request).
Peucker, Mario; Smith, Debra, eds. (2019). The Far-Right in Contemporary Australia. Springer Singapore. doi:10.1007/978-981-13-8351-9. ISBN 978-981-13-8350-2. S2CID 211346468.
Strømmen, Øyvind (20 October 2015). ""Fear, loathing and factions"". Hate Speech International.
Winter, Barbara (January 2005). The Australia First Movement. Interactive Publications. ISBN 978-1-876819-91-0."
1999 Australian republic referendum,"The Australian republic referendum held on 6 November 1999 was a two-question referendum to amend the Constitution of Australia. The first question asked whether Australia should become a republic, under a bi-partisan appointment model where the president would be appointed by Parliament with a two-thirds majority. This was the model that was endorsed by the Constitutional Convention, held in Canberra in February 1998. The second question, generally deemed to be far less important politically, asked whether Australia should alter the Constitution to insert a preamble. 
Since the early 1990s opinion polls had suggested that a majority of the electorate favoured a republic in principle. Nonetheless, the republic referendum was defeated."
1999 Australian republic referendum,"Background
Australia is a constitutional monarchy under the Constitution of Australia adopted in 1901, with the duties of the monarch performed by a governor-general selected by the Australian Government (although formally appointed by the monarch). Australian republicanism has existed since colonial times, though through much of the 20th century the monarchy remained popular. In the early 1990s, republicanism became an important political issue. Australian Labor Party (ALP) Prime Minister Paul Keating indicated a desire to instigate a republic in time for the centenary of the Federation of Australia in 2001. The opposition Liberal-National Coalition, led by Alexander Downer, though less supportive of the republic plan, promised to convene a constitutional convention to discuss the issue. Under John Howard, the Coalition won the 1996 Federal Election and set the Convention date for February 1998.
The 1998 Australian Constitutional Convention debated the need for a change to the Constitution of Australia which would abolish the Australian monarchy. The convention considered three categories of model for the selection of the head of state in an Australian republic: direct election, parliamentary election by a special majority, and appointment by a special council following prime ministerial nomination.
""In principle"" agreement was reached by a majority of delegates for an Australian Republic (though a minority bloc of monarchists dissented). Additionally, delegates endorsed a republic under a bipartisan appointment model  as preferable to the existing constitutional arrangements (monarchists and some radical-change republicans abstained from the vote). The Convention also recommended to the prime minister and Parliament of Australia that a referendum to implement the constitutional changes required for this model be held in 1999."
1999 Australian republic referendum,"Division of electorate
The majority of analysis has advanced two main reasons for the referendum defeat:
First, Australians have traditionally been cautious about proposed constitutional change. Beginning in 1906, only eight of 45 proposals put to a referendum, have been approved by the constitutionally required double majority – that is, (1) a majority in each of a majority of the six states and (2) a majority nationally. As Sir Robert Menzies explained following his failure to pass a referendum to ban the communist party, ""to get an affirmative vote from the Australian people on a referendum proposal is one of the labours of Hercules"".
Second, public opinion varied widely on the issue, and was not a simple positive or negative reaction. The major opinion groups were:"
1999 Australian republic referendum,"Traditional monarchists who held their beliefs largely on principled and/or sentimental attachment to the monarchy, in part based on traditional associations with the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth of Nations and a personal identification with Queen Elizabeth II and her family. Many were older or from rural rather than urban areas.
Pragmatic monarchists who maintained that, whatever the alleged or actual weaknesses of the current system, it also had many alleged or actual strengths. The view of this group was that constitutional monarchy provides the basis for stable democratic government, with the Governor-General (the monarch's nominal representative) acting as an impartial, non-political umpire of the political process. Many distrusted the Australian political classes and believed the provision of executive powers to a local politician would result in an undesirably partisan head of state, instability, dictatorship, or a possible repeat of the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis.
Minimal change republicans who aimed to remove the monarchy, but otherwise maintain the current system as unchanged as possible, thus creating a parliamentary republic. Within this group, there were a small group of supporters of the ultra-minimalist McGarvie Model, but generally the favoured model of these groups was appointment by a two-thirds majority of a joint sitting of Parliament.
Progressive republicans who wanted a popularly elected head of state.
Radical republicans who saw the minimal change option as purely cosmetic, and desired comprehensive revision to the current Westminster-based system and possibly the implementation of a presidential or semi-presidential system. This was easily the smallest major group, but prominent in the debate.
Tactical voters who took a long-term view and voted against their inclinations to avoid more radical changes in the future. Some traditional and pragmatic monarchists perceived a weight of inevitability and voted ""Yes"" to the minimalist republic to avoid a more radical republic. Some sentimental republicans voted ""no"" in the hope of a more radical or populist proposal winning a future referendum.
The uncommitted. As in all elections, a proportion of the electorate remained unattached to either side. Uncommitted swinging voters can be a decisive force in shaping election and referendum results, especially in countries where voting is compulsory."
1999 Australian republic referendum,"Alternative methods for selecting a president
The process for change is seen as an important factor for the eventual outcome in a referendum. There were several other proposals for selecting a president:"
1999 Australian republic referendum,"Election
by the federal Parliament alone
by federal and state Parliaments (as in India)
by a popular vote (as in Ireland)
Selection
by the Prime Minister
by consensus among the Government and Opposition
by a constitutional council (known as the McGarvie Model)
Different groups within the republican cause expressed views as to which model was preferable. Some were committed to one option exclusively."
1999 Australian republic referendum,"The two sides
The ""Yes"" side
The ""Yes"" campaign was headed by Malcolm Turnbull. It was divided in detail but nevertheless managed to present a fairly united and coherent message and was notable for unlikely alliances between traditional opponents—for example, former Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser gave joint statements. Many other prominent Australians also endorsed the ""Yes"" vote, which led to claims that the movement was ""elitist"" in sentiment and supported by politicians rather than the public at large. Viewing the case for a republic as fairly self-evident and broadly supported by the Australian populace, their advertising concentrated mainly on the positive symbolism of the republican case. The ""Yes"" campaign was also viewed as having the support of the popular Australian media by British politician and journalist Bill Deedes who said in The Daily Telegraph in 1999: ""I have rarely attended elections in any country, certainly not a democratic one, in which the newspapers have displayed more shameless bias. One and all, they determined that Australians should have a republic and they used every device towards that end."""
1999 Australian republic referendum,"The ""No"" side
The organised ""No"" campaign was a mixture of monarchist groups. Additionally it included some republican groups who did not feel that the proposed model was satisfactory; in particular, they thought that the people should elect the president. Headed by Kerry Jones, the ""No"" campaign concentrated on the perceived flaws of the model on offer, claiming that those who supported the ""Yes"" push were ""elites"" (although many leading figures on the monarchist side also had ""elite"" backgrounds), and skillfully managing to appeal both to those apprehensive about the change and to those feeling that the model did not go far enough. Their advertising emphasised voting ""No"" to ""this republic"", implying to direct-election supporters that a model more to their preferences was likely to be put in the future.
The common elements within the ""No"" campaign were the view that the model proposed was undemocratic and would lead to a ""politician's republic"", playing to a general distrust of politicians. ""No"" campaigners called for further consultation, while remaining non-specific on what steps were needed to ensure this."
1999 Australian republic referendum,"Constitutional Convention
The model with an appointed head of state was the one endorsed by the Constitutional Convention and put forward at the referendum. It was broadly supported by both minimalist and establishment republicans, including almost all Labor and some conservative politicians. Progressive republicans in the general community opposed the indirect elected model urging people to vote against the referendum. It was opposed by monarchists of both kinds.
Voting at the convention was open and was recorded in Hansard. Hansard shows that 73 delegates voted in favour, 57 against and 22 abstained. Not one constitutional monarchist delegate voted in favour. The policy of ACM and other monarchist groups was to oppose all republican models, including the minimalist McGarvie model. Some conservatives argued that this would be the easiest model to defeat in a referendum and therefore should be supported at the convention. Had the monarchists followed this advice, the McGarvie model would have prevailed at the convention. A number of republicans who supported direct election abstained from the vote (such as Ted Mack, Phil Cleary, Clem Jones and Andrew Gunter), thereby allowing the bi-partisan model to succeed. They reasoned that the model would be defeated at a referendum, and then a second referendum called with direct election as the model.
Although the motion was passed by ignoring those who abstained, the referendum model did not enjoy the support of the majority of delegates, a condition which the Prime Minister had indicated for a referendum. Because the model was overwhelmingly supported by the republican delegates, the Prime Minister decided to put that model to the referendum, a decision acclaimed by the ARM delegates and the media."
1999 Australian republic referendum,"The questions and results
Republic question
Electors were asked whether they approved of:"
1999 Australian republic referendum,A proposed law: To alter the Constitution to establish the Commonwealth of Australia as a republic with the Queen and Governor-General being replaced by a President appointed by a two-thirds majority of the members of the Commonwealth Parliament.
1999 Australian republic referendum,"Preamble question
Electors were also asked to vote on a second question at the 1999 referendum which asked whether they approved of:"
1999 Australian republic referendum,"A proposed law: To alter the Constitution to insert a preamble
The preamble would have been:"
1999 Australian republic referendum,"With hope in God, the Commonwealth of Australia is constituted as a democracy with a federal system of government to serve the common good.
We the Australian people commit ourselves to this Constitution: "
1999 Australian republic referendum,"proud that our national unity has been forged by Australians from many ancestries;
never forgetting the sacrifices of all who defended our country and our liberty in time of war;
upholding freedom, tolerance, individual dignity and the rule of law;
honouring Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, the nation’s first people, for their deep kinship with their lands and for their ancient and continuing cultures which enrich the life of our country;
recognising the nation-building contribution of generations of immigrants;
mindful of our responsibility to protect our unique natural environment;
supportive of achievement as well as equality of opportunity for all;
and valuing independence as dearly as the national spirit which binds us together in both adversity and success."
1999 Australian republic referendum,"Results
Section 128 of the Constitution requires a ""double majority"" in a referendum to approve a constitutional amendment—a majority of votes in each of a majority of the states (i.e. at least four of the six), and a majority of all the electors voting. Voters in the territories count only towards the second of those majorities.
11,785,000 votes were cast, representing a voter turnout of 95.10%. Of these, approximately 100,000 (0.9%) were informal."
1999 Australian republic referendum,"The republic
The preamble
Analysis of results
Both propositions failed on both of the voting requirements. There was no majority for ""Yes"" in any state, where the ""Yes"" vote for the republic ranged from 37.44% in Queensland to 49.84% in Victoria, and for the preamble ranged from 32.81% in Queensland to 42.46% in Victoria. Overall, 54.87% voted ""No"" to the republic, and 60.66% to the preamble.
The highest ""Yes"" votes for the republic came from inner metropolitan areas. Of Australia's 148 divisions, 42 voted ""Yes"", with Melbourne (70.92%), Sydney (67.85%), Melbourne Ports (65.90%), Grayndler (64.77%) and Fraser (64.46%) registering the highest ""Yes"" votes at division level. Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart voted in favour of the proposition for Australia to become a republic, in contrast to ""No"" votes in Adelaide, Brisbane, Gold Coast, Perth, Newcastle and Townsville. Votes in opposition to the proposal came predominantly from rural and remote divisions, as well as many outer suburban areas. The four divisions recording the highest ""No"" vote were in Queensland: Maranoa 77.16%, Blair 74.64%, Wide Bay 74.33% and Groom 72.58%. Gwydir in rural New South Wales recorded the fifth-highest vote against the republic, with 72.21%."
1999 Australian republic referendum,"Aftermath
As I said at the time, I respect and accept the outcome of the referendum. In the light of the result last November, I shall continue faithfully to serve as Queen of Australia under the Constitution to the very best of my ability, as I have tried to do for these past forty-eight years. It is my duty to seek to remain true to the interests of Australia and all Australians as we enter the twenty-first century.
With republican models of one form or another winning a majority in opinion polls prior to the referendum, it was expected that the republican referendum would pass. However, the question put was for a particular model of republic with a head of state appointed by Parliament. This was opposed by some supporters of a republic, who preferred a directly elected head of state. Some of these, such as Phil Cleary, advocated that republic supporters vote ""No"" in order that a future referendum could be put on the directly elected model. Some commentators—including the president of the Australian Republican Movement, Malcolm Turnbull—identified this split within the republican camp as a key reason for the referendum's failure.
After the referendum, Malcolm Turnbull blamed Prime Minister Howard in particular for the defeat and claimed: ""Whatever else he achieves, history will remember him for only one thing. He was the Prime Minister who broke a nation's heart."" Meanwhile, the leader of Australians for a Constitutional Monarchy, Kerry Jones, called for citizens to accept the result and go forward ""as a united nation"". Later in 2006, Turnbull stated that the ARM had ultimately made the right choices, but that the referendum failed because Australians did not support indirect election and it would have been irresponsible for the ARM to have supported a direct election model. Despite the hopes of more radical republicans such as Phil Cleary, the referendum defeat was generally viewed as a setback for the republican cause and calls for another referendum were ignored by the Howard government.
High Court Justice Michael Kirby, a constitutional monarchist, ascribed the failure of the republic referendum to ten factors: lack of bi-partisanship; undue haste; a perception that the republic was supported by big city elites; a ""denigration"" of monarchists as ""unpatriotic"" by republicans; the adoption of an inflexible republican model by the convention; concerns about the specific model proposed (chiefly the ease with which a prime minister could dismiss a president); a republican strategy of using big ""names"" attached to the Whitlam era to promote their cause; strong opposition to the proposal in the smaller states; a counter-productive pro-republican bias in the media; and an instinctive caution among the Australian electorate regarding Constitutional change.
The Gillard Labor government, which took power in a hung parliament following the August 2010 election, indicated an intention not to revisit the issue of a vote for an Australian republic during the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. The Liberal-National Coalition government in power following the September 2013 federal election was led by Tony Abbott, a supporter of constitutional monarchy. During Abbott's term as prime minister, Labor Opposition Leader Bill Shorten stated he believed it was time to ""breathe new life into the dream of an Australian republic"".
On 15 September 2015, Malcolm Turnbull, who had been chairman of the Australian Republican Movement from 1993 until 2000, succeeded Tony Abbott as leader of the Liberal Party, to become the prime minister of Australia. For the first time, the prime minister and the federal Opposition Leader, as well as the eight state and territory premiers and chief ministers, were all self-declared republicans. Turnbull has stated that he believes Australia should become a republic after the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. Turnbull was later succeeded, on 24 August 2018, by Scott Morrison, who subsequently declared himself a constitutional monarchist, and re-hung a portrait of the Queen in the Prime Minister's office, which Turnbull had removed. Anthony Albanese, who was sworn in as prime minister in May 2022, is a convinced republican, going as far to appoint an Assistant Minister for the Republic. However, with the death of Queen Elizabeth II in September 2022, Albanese announced that he would not organise a referendum during his first term in office, out of respect for the late Queen."
1999 Australian republic referendum,"See also
Republicanism in Australia
Monarchy of Australia
1980 Quebec referendum
1995 Quebec referendum
1995 Bermudian independence referendum
2002 Gibraltar sovereignty referendum
2008 Tuvaluan constitutional referendum
2009 Saint Vincent and the Grenadines constitutional referendum
2013 Falkland Islands sovereignty referendum
2014 Scottish independence referendum
2015–2016 New Zealand flag referendums
2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum
2023 Australian Indigenous Voice referendum"
1999 Australian republic referendum,"References
External links
Official Yes/No referendum pamphlet
Australian Electoral Commission (AEC)
Referendums
1999 Referendum Report and Statistics (ISBN 0-642-51870-X)
Key results
Summary of Results – Republic
Summary of Results – Preamble
Electoral Newsfile No. 87: Referendum 1999 – Results Guide (1999-December)"
Australian Labor Party split of 1955,"The Australian Labor Party split of 1955 was a split within the Australian Labor Party along ethnocultural lines and about the position towards communism. 
Key players in the split were the federal opposition leader H. V. ""Doc"" Evatt and B. A. Santamaria, the dominant force behind the ""Catholic Social Studies Movement"" or ""the Movement""."
Australian Labor Party split of 1955,"Evatt denounced the influence of Santamaria's Movement on 5 October 1954, about 4 months after the 1954 federal election. The Victorian ALP state executive was officially dissolved, but both factions sent delegates to the 1955 Labor Party conference in Hobart. Movement delegates were excluded from the conference. They withdrew from the Labor party, going on to form the Australian Labor Party (Anti-Communist) which in 1957 became the Democratic Labor Party. The split then moved from federal level to states, predominantly Victoria and Queensland.
Historians, journalists, and political scientists have observed that the split was not a single event but a process that occurred over the early 1950s in state and federal Labor parties. The conservative Catholic and staunchly anti-ALP Democratic Labor Party used Australia's full-preference instant-runoff voting system to direct its preferences to benefit the Coalition two-party-preferred vote and was successful until 1972 in preventing the election of an Australian Labor Party federal government."
Australian Labor Party split of 1955,"Terminology
The Australian Labor Party split of 1955 is also referred to as the ""Labor split of 1955"", the ""Labor split of 1954–55"" or within the context of the Australian Labor Party and Roman Catholicism in Australia simply ""the Split""."
Australian Labor Party split of 1955,"Background
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, there was an effort by the Communist Party of Australia to infiltrate trade unions in Australia. In response, the Labor party instituted ""industrial groups"" within trade unions to counter the perceived Communist threat.
In Melbourne in the 1930s, a group of the city's Catholics, predominantly lawyers, formed ""The Campion Society"" and published ""The Catholic Worker"". B. A. Santamaria, then a recent graduate of Melbourne Law School, became its editor. Australian Catholic bishops in 1937 established a National Secretariat for Catholic Action, and in 1939, Santamaria set up the National Catholic Rural Movement to promote conservative Catholic values among Catholic farmers. The NCRM claimed by the mid-1940s branches in all states except Tasmania, and a membership of over 5000. The NCRM promoted its objectives through and within other rural organisations and also politically. By 1941 Santamaria had also set up the ""Catholic Social Studies Movement"", commonly known as the ""Movement"". Besides promoting conservative Catholic values, Santamaria and the Movement were strongly anti-communist."
Australian Labor Party split of 1955,"Showdown
At the 1954 federal election, held in May, Labor received over 50% of the popular vote and won 57 seats (up 5) to the Coalition's 64. In September 1954, journalist Alan Reid published an exposé in The Sydney Sun about Santamaria. He wrote of him that: 
""In the tense melodrama of politics there are mysterious figures who stand virtually unnoticed in the wings, invisible to all but a few of the audience, as they cue, Svengali-like, among the actors out on the stage."""
Australian Labor Party split of 1955,"On 5 October 1954 in a Press release, Dr H. V. Evatt blamed Labor's loss of seats and defeat in the 1954 federal election on ""a small minority of members, located particularly in the State of Victoria"", which were in conspiracy to undermine him. Evatt blamed Santamaria and his supporters in the Victorian Labor Party, called ""the Groupers"" . Santamaria exercised strong influence in the Cain government through ""Movement"" linked ministers such as Bill Barry, Frank Scully and Les Coleman. Protestant and left-wing ministers strongly opposed the Movement faction.
On 31 October 1954, the Sydney Sun-Herald reported on a letter sent by the Victorian Minister for Lands, Robert Holt, to the federal secretary of the Australian Labor Party, J. Schmella, which the paper described as 'probably as explosive, politically, as any document in Australia'. Holt stated -"
Australian Labor Party split of 1955,"""My charge is that the Victorian branch is controlled and directed in the main by one group or section through Mr. B. Santamaria ... My criticism is not personal. It is leveled against those ideas which are contrary to what I believe Labor policy to be. Moreover, I have been requested by my numerous and trusted friends, who happen to be Catholic, to fight against the influence of Mr. Santamaria and those he represents, when he seeks to implement his ideas through an abuse of a political movement, designed to serve a truly political purpose.""
Holt spoke of events the previous year and describes attending a meeting of Santamaria's National Catholic Rural Movement Convention, following which he was, as Minister of Lands, approached by Santamaria and Frank Scully, where he was asked to use his position to make Crown land available to ""Italians with foreign capital"". When he refused, ""Santamaria stated that I might not be in the next parliament"", and Scully agreed. Holt considered this 'a direct threat' which was confirmed when another M.L.A. confided that there was 'pressure' to oppose him for party selection for his seat. He added that ""subsequent events which happened during the selection ballot' had convinced him that the ALP's 'Victorian branch is not free to implement Labor policy and connives with this method."" He concluded by stating his belief in:'a party machine which permits the true expression of opinion of its members, regardless of who or what they may be. The only requirement is loyalty to Labor ideals and principles. This is not possible in the present circumstances...'
Holt introduced the Land Bill without Santamaria's desired advantage and it was at first amended by another ALP member, then defeated, amended again and passed – with what Santamaria wanted – after two Liberal party members ""switched sides"". In December 1954, Santamaria launched a suit against Holt for libel, citing the letter published in-full by the Sun-Herald. The libel action was withdrawn, without explanation, in April 1955.
In Victoria, Dr Mannix strongly supported Santamaria, but in New South Wales, Norman Cardinal Gilroy, the first Australian-born Roman Catholic cardinal, opposed him, favouring the traditional alliance between the Church and Labor. Gilroy's influence in Rome helped to end official Church support for the Groupers. In January 1955, Santamaria used Dr Mannix as his witness to the statement, ""There is no Catholic organisation seeking to dominate the Labor Party or any other political party ... So that there will be no equivocation, Catholics are not associated with any other secular body seeking to dominate the Labor Party or any other political party.""
Santamaria made this statement when he denied charges from the general secretary of the Australian Workers' Union (Mr T Dougherty) that the ""No. 2 man in the Victorian ALP"" (Frank McManus), the ""No. 2 man in the NSW Labor Party"" (J. Kane) and the ""secretary of the Australian Rules Football Association of Queensland"" (Mr Polgrain) were Santamaria's ""top lieutenants in The Movement"". For his part, McManus suggested that Dougherty ""appeared to have contracted an ailment from one of his political colleagues ... the chief symptom of this ailment was that the sufferer believed he was always detecting conspiracy theories"".
In early 1955 the Labor Party's Federal executive dissolved the Victorian state executive and appointed a new executive in its place. Both executives sent delegates to the 1955 National Conference in Hobart, where the delegates from the old executive were excluded from the conference. The Victorian branch then split between pro-Evatt and pro-Santamaria factions, and in March the pro-Evatt state executive suspended 24 members of state Parliament suspected of being Santamaria supporters. (Santamaria was not a party member.) Four ministers were forced to resign from John Cain's Labor government. Four unions were also disaffiliated from the ALP after the split. The unions were the 'right-wing' Federated Clerks Union, the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association, the Federated Ironworkers' Association of Australia and the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners.
On the night of 19 April 1955, Henry Bolte raised a motion of no-confidence against Cain's government in the Legislative Assembly. After twelve hours of debate on the motion, in the early hours of 20 April, 11 of the expelled Labor members  crossed the floor to support Bolte's motion. With his government defeated, Cain sought and received a dissolution of parliament later that day."
Australian Labor Party split of 1955,"Electoral repercussions
At the ensuing May 1955 Victorian state election, the expelled members and others stood as the Australian Labor Party (Anti-Communist). It drew 12.6% of the vote, mainly from the ALP, but because its vote was widely spread only one of its candidates, the expelled Labor member Frank Scully, was re-elected. The party directed its 12.6% vote to the Coalition, and most of its supporters followed the party's preferences. Labor won 37.6% of the vote and 20 seats to the Liberals' 34 and the Country Party's ten.
The Australian Labor Party (Anti-Communist) went on in 1957 to be the nucleus of the Democratic Labor Party.
At the 1958 Victorian state election, similar tactics were used. The DLP won 14.4% of the vote but even Scully lost his seat, and most of the preferences went to the Coalition. The ALP received 37.7% of the vote.
In New South Wales, Labor leader and premier Joseph Cahill decisively won the 1953 NSW election. He was desperate to keep the New South Wales branch united during the split. He achieved this by controlling the anti-DLP faction in his party. The DLP did not contest the 1956 NSW election and Cahill was returned in the 1959 NSW election, but died in office later that year. He was succeeded as leader and premier by Robert Heffron. Heffron continued the Labor reign in New South Wales winning the 1962 NSW election. Heffron resigned the leadership and premiership in 1964, and was succeeded by Jack Renshaw, who lost the premiership at the 1965 NSW election ending 24 years of Labor power in the state.
In Queensland, Labor leader and premier Vince Gair since 1952 was expelled from the Labor party in 1957 because of his support of the Groupers. Gair had previously attempted to mobilise the Industrial Groups to counteract a perceived communist influence of the Australian Workers' Union in the Queensland Trades and Labor Council.  With other Queensland caucus members, Gair went on to form the Queensland Labor Party.  As happened two years earlier in Victoria, the split destroyed the Labor government; Gair was defeated on a no-confidence motion, and in the resulting election the two wings of Labor were reduced to only 31 seats between them.  Labor would remain in opposition until 1989.  Gair's QLP was absorbed into the DLP in 1962."
Australian Labor Party split of 1955,"Long-term consequences
Directing preferences to the Liberals
From the 1955 election until the demise of the party, the DLP directed its supporters to give their electoral preferences to the Liberals, ahead of the ALP. Santamaria intended to keep Labor from winning government until it accepted his terms for reunification. On two occasions—1961 and 1969—Labor actually won a majority of the two-party vote, but DLP preferences resulted in Labor coming up just short of ending the Coalition's hold on government."
Australian Labor Party split of 1955,"Re-affiliation of unions
The first of four unions disaffiliated after the split of 1955, attempted to return at the ALP Victorian State Conference in 1983. The Federated Clerks and three other similarly aligned 'right-wing' unions – the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association, the Federated Ironworkers' Association of Australia and the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners – had their re-affiliation cases considered by a special Victorian ALP committee of ten which split on the decision 5 for and against 5 and had submitted separate reports to the State Conference. The Federated Clerks' case, 'after a bitter and at times acrimonious 3 and a 1/2 hour debate', which was 'centered on alleged links' with Santamaria, the National Civic Council, and the Industrial Action Fund, was defeated at the State Conference by 289 votes to 189. It was noted in a news report of the time that all four were likely to appeal to the federal ALP executive and that they had the support of then Prime Minister Bob Hawke. The ALP federal executive supported the re-affiliation before the 1985 Victorian State Conference while two of the unions were refused re-affiliation in the Northern Territory later that year. Ultimately, all four returned as ALP affiliated unions in some form; the Federated Clerks' Union amalgamated into the affiliated Australian Services Union in 1993, the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association is a current ALP affiliated union, while the Federated Ironworkers' Association of Australia and the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners amalgamated with the affiliated Australian Workers' Union."
Australian Labor Party split of 1955,"See also
History of the Australian Labor Party
Australian Labor Party split of 1916
Australian Labor Party split of 1931"
Australian Labor Party split of 1955,"References
Further reading
External links
AUSTRALIA: Explosion – article about ""The Split"" in Time magazine, Monday, 25 Oct 1954
Australian Communist Party v Commonwealth [1951] HCA 5, (1951) 83 CLR 1 (9 March 1951), High Court."
Mainland Australia,"Mainland Australia is the main landmass of the Australian continent, excluding the Aru Islands, New Guinea, Tasmania, and other Australian offshore islands. The landmass also constitutes the mainland of the territory governed by the Commonwealth of Australia, and the term, along with continental Australia, can be used in a geographic sense to exclude surrounding continental islands and external territories. Generally, the term is applied to the states of New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Victoria, and Western Australia, as well as the Australian Capital Territory, Jervis Bay Territory, and Northern Territory.
The term is typically used when referring to the relationship between Tasmania and the other Australian states, in that people not from Tasmania are referred to as mainlanders. Tasmania has been omitted on a number of occasions from maps of Australia, reinforcing the divide between Tasmania and the mainland. The 1982 Commonwealth Games in Brisbane left Tasmania off the map of Australia during the opening ceremony, as did the designs of the Australian Swim Team uniform for the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.
The land mass covers 7,591,608 km2 (2,931,136 sq mi), about 98.7% of the area of the country of Australia and 1.5% of Earth's surface.  It is sometimes described as an island, in which case it would be the largest island by area–more than three times the size of Greenland. Its population is about 25.9 million, 98% of Australia's total population. Mainland Australia has a variety of climatic regions, ranging from tropical rainforests and deserts to cool temperature rainforests to snow-covered mountains. It is in these mainland regions that much of Australia's native flora and fauna can be found."
Mainland Australia,"History
Early in the Cretaceous period, 130 million years ago, Australia (and Antarctica) separated from a supercontinent known as Gondwana. Antarctica's separation from Australia began roughly 85 million years ago, at a rate of a few millimetres per year.
It took over 30 million years (53 million years ago), toward the end of the Palaeocene epoch, for Australia to fully separate from Antarctica and set course for where we see the two continents today.
During the last ice-age around 35,000 years ago, sea levels (around Australia) dropped by 120 metres (390 ft), developing a continuous stretch of land between what is now Papua New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania. Over the next 6,000 years the ice gradually melted, increasing sea-levels, cutting off Papua New Guinea and Tasmania from mainland Australia."
Mainland Australia,"Prehistory
It has been estimated that Australian Aborigines occupied mainland Australia up to 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, well before the last ice-age. Although an exact figure has not been decided on, numerous DNA studies all confirm that Aboriginal Australians are one of the oldest living populations in the world outside of Africa. 
Prior to the arrival of Europeans on the Australian mainland in the late 18th century, over 500 different clan groups (nations) each with unique cultures, beliefs and languages inhabited territories on the mainland. Currently, Indigenous people living on the mainland make up 2.4% of the total Australian population, encompassing over 250 language groups."
Mainland Australia,"European colonization
The first documented encounter of the Australian mainland was by Willem Janszoon in 1606, as he sailed around Australia's north coast arriving in present-day Cape York, Queensland. These explorations led way to the term 'Terra Australis', Latin for South Land, which was hypothesised on the notion there must be land in the Southern Hemisphere to balance the land mass in the Northern Hemisphere. This encounter led several other Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and British journeyings to Terra Australis throughout the 17th and 18th century, progressively mapping what we now know to be as (mainland) Australia. 
The most famous and well documented expedition of Australia occurred 164 years after Janszoon's journey, through British navigator and explorer James Cook. He documented the first interaction of the Eastern Australian coastline, and on 23 April 1770, Cook made the first recorded observation of Indigenous Australians at nowadays Brush Island. This journey, coupled with numerous other reports, ultimately led the British to establish a penal colony in Australia, firstly at Botany Bay."
Mainland Australia,"Geography
The Australian mainland's geology and climate is one of its defining features. Despite being surrounded by ocean, approximately 20% of the Australian mainland is classified as desert. This is due to the extremely variable rain patterns across the mainland. Toward the barren centre of the mainland, the rainfall pattern is concentric and sparse, whereas there is higher intensity rainfall toward the mainland's tropics and coastal areas.
Australia lies on the middle of the Indo-Australian tectonic plate and as a result is not influenced by any severe tectonic activity. Over millions of years, the shifting of these tectonic plates has seen the Australian mainland undergo many physical changes. Mountain ranges and seas have come and gone, and the forces of weathering and erosion have formed much of the mainlands current topography. 
These physical changes developed four primary landform divisions spread throughout the mainland states and territories; the Coastal Plains, the Eastern and Southern highlands, the Central Lowlands (and Deserts) and the Western and Northern Plateaus (and Basins)."
Mainland Australia,"Coastal Plains
Along the Eastern seaboard of the mainland are the Coastal Plains; a narrow strip of land along the East coast of Australia from Queensland to Victoria. This division is host to some of the mainland's major cities, namely, Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, due to its hospitable conditions. Some sources refer to the Coastal Plains as the entire coastline of the mainland, outspreading beyond the East Coast."
Mainland Australia,"Eastern Highlands
Approximately 100 km (62 mi) inland, the Eastern Highlands (including the Great Dividing Range) cover almost 10% of the mainland. Incorporating several mountain ranges which extend 3,700 km (2,300 mi) the Highlands run parallel to the east coast of the mainland; covering Queensland, New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory and Victoria. The highlands were formed around 80 million years ago, and are some of the oldest and most prominent in the world. This area is very rugged and primarily consists of a series of tablelands and plateaus. The highlands are much more prominent toward the south east of the mainland and form the Southern Highlands, which are located across (south) New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory and Victoria. These Southern highlands experience snowfall for more than half the year during the winter due to their higher altitude."
Mainland Australia,"Central Lowlands
Occupying approximately 25% of the Australian mainland, the Central Lowlands (and Deserts) are low-lying with an average height of under 200 metres (660 ft) above sea level. It is home to the Sturt and Simpson deserts and closer to Central Australia lie some desert mountain ranges (MacDonnell and Musgrave). The Central Lowlands incorporates three primary drainage basins: in the North, the Carpentaria Lowlands, Lake Eyre toward the centre and the Murray-Darling Basin down South. The lowest point on the mainland is found in this division at Lake Eyre, at 50m below sea level."
Mainland Australia,"Western Plateau
Approximately 144 to 65 million years ago (Cretaceous period), there lay a great inland sea, stretching over one quarter of the mainland. The evaporation of this ocean left behind what we now know as the Western Plateau. The Western and Northern Plateaus incorporate nearly all Western Australia and the Northern Territory and parts of South Australia. 
Over one-third of the mainland, the Plateaus are made of one stable block of igneous and metamorphic rock which is up to 3.6 billion years old. Despite this, the Plateau is a huge area of tablelands, averaging 500m above sea level in some parts. It is home to Uluru, Kata Tjuta, the Finke River, the Victorian Desert, the Great Sandy Desert and the Gibson Desert.
Much of the Western Plateau receives minimal rainfall and thus appears red in colour. Conversely, the Northern Plateau experiences heavy rainfall throughout the wet season (November to April), due to its more tropical location compared to the Western Plateau."
Mainland Australia,"Natural resources
Australia's separation from the other continents resulted in a long period of uplift, erosion and thick terrigenous deposition in rift valleys.  It was these processes which over millions of years has led to the accumulation of Australia's main known mineral, oil and gas resources. Most of Australia's oil and gas exploration occurs off the mainland. However, on the mainland, the abundance of minerals (and thus metals) has formed the basis of Australia's dependence on mining; exporting much of these natural occurring resources overseas."
Mainland Australia,"Mining
The Australian mainland is host to some of the world's largest open-cut and underground mines. Across the mainland states (besides the ACT), there are over 350 operating mines, producing 19 useful rocks and minerals. These mines allow Australia to be one of the world's largest producers of iron ore, coal, bauxite (aluminium ore), manganese, nickel, copper, gold, silver, cobalt, lead, copper, uranium, opal and diamond. Some of the largest mines on the Australian mainland are listed below:"
Mainland Australia,"Renewables
The Australian mainland's various geology and climate, has led to the increased utilisation of renewable energy (solar, wind and hydro) over recent decades. In 2021, approximately 28.9% of the mainland's total electricity generation was from renewable energy sources with South Australia at 66.5% renewable energy generation, Victoria at 33.4%, Western Australia at 31.5%, New South Wales at 26.0% and Queensland at 19.6%. The majority of this renewable energy was generated through wind and solar, proportionally contributing 35.9% and 38.3% respectively."
Mainland Australia,"Politics
Australian political decisions are typically deliberated and enacted within the limits of homeland (mainland Australia) soil. Despite Tasmania being one of Australia's six British establishment colonies, Tasmania has often been looked over due to the state's small size and general isolation. This is observed through the states and territories of mainland Australia representing 146 of the 151 members in Parliament."
Mainland Australia,"State formation
From 1788 to 1859, Britain established five colonies on the Australian mainland, and one in Tasmania. All six colonies were constitutionally connected to Britain, each with their own parliament and courts, with their respective laws subject to the laws of British Parliament.
These colonies formed the six states of Australia; New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia, South Australia (included the Northern Territory at this time), Queensland and Tasmania. In 1901, the six states were united as the Commonwealth of Australia, under a new federal constitution. In 1911, the Northern Territory was transferred from South Australia to the Commonwealth and formed a territory."
Mainland Australia,"Capital selection
After Federation in 1901, it was always assumed the Australian capital would be on the mainland. However, the location of the capital sparked years of negotiating between politicians in New South Wales and Victoria, the two most prominent states, who each wanted their capital, Sydney and Melbourne respectively, to become the new country's capital.
After years of debate to no avail, the two states decided on a compromise that met the requirements of the Australian Constitution. A separate territory (the Australian Capital Territory) was to be established on land given by New South Wales, however it must be at least 100 miles (160 km) from Sydney. This territory would contain the official capital of Australia, and Parliament would sit in Melbourne until the city (now Canberra) was built. In 1909, this compromise was agreed upon and was finally legislated in 1911.
On 12 March 1913, Canberra was officially named as the capital of Australia. In 1915, Jervis Bay territory was added to the Australian Capital Territory to ensure the Commonwealth had a seaport."
Mainland Australia,"See also
Fauna of Australia
Flora of Australia
Natural history of Australia
Geography of Australia
List of islands of Australia
States and territories of Australia
European exploration of Australia"
Mainland Australia,Notes
Mainland Australia,"
== References =="
"Air raids on Australia, 1942–1943","During the Pacific War the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Force and Imperial Japanese Army Air Force conducted air raids on the Australian mainland, domestic airspace, offshore islands, and coastal shipping, attacking at least 111 times between February 1942 and November 1943. These attacks came in various forms; from large-scale raids by medium bombers, to torpedo attacks on ships, and to strafing runs by fighters.
In the first and deadliest set of attacks, 242 aircraft hit Darwin on the morning of 19 February 1942. Killing at least 235 people and causing immense damage, the attacks made hundreds of people homeless and resulted in the abandonment of Darwin as a major naval base.
These attacks were opposed by, and often aimed at, units and personnel from the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF), Australian Army, Royal Australian Navy, United States Army Air Forces, United States Navy, British Royal Air Force and Royal Netherlands East Indies Air Force. Japanese aircrews also targeted civil infrastructure, including harbours, civil airfields, railways, and fuel tanks. Some civilians were also killed.
Although the main defence was provided by RAAF and Allied fighters, a number of Australian Army anti-aircraft batteries in northern Australia also defended against Japanese air raids."
"Air raids on Australia, 1942–1943","Early Japanese air raids
The Japanese conducted a series of air raids on Australia during February and March 1942. These raids sought to prevent the Allies from using bases in northern Australia to contest the conquest of the Netherlands East Indies."
"Air raids on Australia, 1942–1943","The first air raid on Darwin
The bombing of Darwin on 19 February 1942 was both the first and the largest attack mounted by Japan against mainland Australia, when four Japanese aircraft carriers (Akagi, Kaga, Hiryū and Sōryū) launched a total of 188 aircraft from a position in the Timor Sea. These 188 naval aircraft inflicted heavy damage on Darwin and sank eight ships. A raid conducted by 54 land-based army bombers later the same day inflicted further damage on the town and RAAF Base Darwin and resulted in the destruction of 20 military aircraft. Allied casualties were 235 killed and between 300 and 400 wounded, the majority of whom were non-Australian Allied sailors. Only four Japanese aircraft (all navy carrier-borne) were confirmed to have been destroyed by Darwin's defenders."
"Air raids on Australia, 1942–1943","The attack on Broome
On 3 March 1942, nine Japanese A6M2 Zero fighters attacked the town of Broome, in northern Western Australia. Although Broome was a small town, it had become a significant air base and route of escape for refugees and retreating military personnel, following the Japanese invasion of Java. During the attack, which consisted of strafing runs only by the Zeros, at least 88 Allied civilians and military personnel were killed and 24 aircraft were lost. As Broome was almost undefended, Japanese losses were light, with only a single Zero being shot down over Broome and another one failing to reach its base."
"Air raids on Australia, 1942–1943","Attacks on North Queensland, July 1942
Japanese naval flying boats conducted four small air raids on the north Queensland city of Townsville and the town of Mossman in late July 1942. Townsville, which was an important military base, was raided by Japanese Kawanishi H8K1 ""Emily"" flying boats operating from Rabaul on three nights in late July 1942. On the night of 25/26 July, the city was attacked by two flying boats but did not suffer any damage as the six bombs dropped by these aircraft fell into the sea. Townsville was attacked for the second time in the early hours of 28 July when a single flying boat dropped eight bombs which landed in bushland outside the city. Six P-39 Airacobras unsuccessfully attempted to intercept the Japanese aircraft. The third raid on Townsville occurred in the early hours of 29 July when a single flying boat again attacked the city, dropping seven bombs into the sea and an eighth which fell on an agricultural research station at Oonoonba, damaging a coconut plantation. This aircraft was intercepted by four Airacobras and was damaged. The fourth raid on north Queensland occurred on the night of 31 July when a single flying boat dropped a bomb which exploded near a house outside of Mossman, injuring a child."
"Air raids on Australia, 1942–1943","List of attacks by date
1942
February
19
Bombing of Darwin
(10:00) Attack by 188 carrier-based aircraft at Darwin, Northern Territory (NT)
(11:55) Attack by 54 land-based high-level bombers at Darwin, NT
Bathurst Island, NT
20
(11:30) Off Cape Londonderry, Western Australia (WA). MV Koolama damaged by a Kawanishi H6K5 flying boat. Attacked again at 13:30 and severely damaged, with injuries to three passengers.
21
Rulhieres Bay, WA (later known as Koolama Bay) Koolama attacked again, no damage or injuries."
"Air raids on Australia, 1942–1943","March
3
(09:20) Broome, WA. Attack on Broome: a strafing raid by nine A6M2 Zeros. At least 88 people were killed and 24 Allied aircraft were destroyed. A Sikh pilot of the Royal Indian Air Force Flying Officer Manmohan Singh, in one of the RAF Catalina flying boats died. He was the first Indian casualty on Australian soil.
(~10:30) Carnot Bay, WA. PK-AFV (Pelikaan)—a Douglas DC-3 airliner owned by KLM—was shot down by Zeros returning from the attack on Broome. It crash-landed 50 mi (80 km) north of Broome. Four passengers were killed. Diamonds worth £150,000–300,000 were lost or stolen following the crash.
Wyndham, WA. Strafing attack by Zeroes. No casualties. Koolama, which is in port by this time (see above), sinks as an indirect result of the attack.
Wyndham Airfield, WA
4
Wreckage and passengers from PK-AFV attacked again by a Kawanishi H6K5 flying boat, no damage or casualties.
(14:00) Darwin RAAF Airfield, NT
14
Horn Island, Queensland (Qld)
15
Darwin, NT. Sgt. Albert Cooper, 28, (RAF, 54 Squadron) from Wolverhampton, Staffordshire, England, shot down, and killed, in his Spitfire over Darwin harbour
16
(13:30) Darwin RAAF Airfield and Bagot, NT
17
Darwin, NT
18
Horn Island, Qld
19
(11:40) Darwin (Myilly Point and Larrakeyah), NT
20
Broome Airfield, WA. Attack by Mitsubishi G4M2 ""Betty"" medium bombers. One civilian killed. Minor damage to airfield.
Derby, WA
22
(00:51) Darwin, NT
22
Katherine, NT. One civilian killed. (Furthest air raid into the Australian interior – over 200 kilometres (120 mi) from the coast).
23
Darwin, NT
Wyndham, WA (two raids)
28
(12:30) Darwin RAAF Airfield, NT
30
(05:40?) Darwin RAAF Airfield, NT
30
Darwin RAAF Airfield, NT
31
(13:20) Darwin RAAF Airfield, NT
(22:19) Darwin RAAF Airfield, NT"
"Air raids on Australia, 1942–1943","April
2
(15:30) Darwin (Harvey St, McMinn St, Shell Oil Tanks), NT
Sattler Airfield, NT
4
(13:48) Darwin Civil Airfield and Parap Hotel, NT
5
(12:29) Darwin RAAF Airfield, NT
25
(14:00) Darwin RAAF Airfield, NT
27
(12:07) Darwin RAAF Airfield, NT
30
Horn Island, QLD"
"Air raids on Australia, 1942–1943","June
13
(11:52) Darwin RAAF Airfield, NT
14
(13:14) Darwin (town area), NT
15
(12:20) Darwin (Larrakeyah to Stokes Hill), NT
16
(12:01) Darwin (town area), NT
26
(20:50) Darwin, NT"
"Air raids on Australia, 1942–1943","July
7
Horn Island, Qld
25
(20:50) Darwin (town area), NT
26
Townsville, Qld
(21:39–22:54) Darwin (Vesteys Meatworks), NT
27
(22:27) Knuckey's Lagoon, Darwin RAAF Airfield, NT
28
(00:45) Darwin RAAF airfield, NT
Townsville, Qld
29
(00:59) Darwin (town area) and Knuckey's Lagoon, NT.
Townsville, Qld
30
(03:58) Darwin (town area) and Darwin RAAF Airfield, NT
Horn Island, Qld
Port Hedland, WA.
31
Mossman, Qld
(13:33) Darwin RAAF Airfield, NT"
"Air raids on Australia, 1942–1943","August
1
Horn Island, Qld
21
Wyndham, WA
23
(12:12) Hughes Airfield, NT
24
(21:24) Darwin RAAF Airfield, NT
(22:14) Noonamah, NT
25
(00:05) Darwin and Parap, NT
27
(03:45–05:37) Darwin (Botanical Gardens) and Cox Peninsula, NT
28
(03:35) Darwin (Railway Yards and Port Patterson), NT
30
(02:39) Darwin (town area), NT
31
(05:14) Darwin (town area) and Cox Peninsula), NT"
"Air raids on Australia, 1942–1943","September
25
(03:41) Darwin (town area) and Knuckey's Lagoon, NT
25
(05:48) Darwin (town area and Daly Street Bridge), NT
26
(05:22) Livingstone Airfield, NT
27
(04:56) Bynoe Harbour, NT
(05:44) Darwin (town area) (Frances Bay)"
"Air raids on Australia, 1942–1943","October
10
Horn Island, Qld
24
(04:42) Batchelor Airfield
(04:52) Pell Airfield
(04:57) Cox Peninsula
(05:12) Darwin RAAF Airfield, NT
25
(05:30) Darwin (town area) and Darwin RAAF Airfield, NT
26
(04:54) Darwin (town area) and Darwin RAAF Airfield, NT
27
(02:20) Darwin (town area) and Darwin RAAF Airfield, NT"
"Air raids on Australia, 1942–1943","November
23
(03:00–04:39) Darwin (town area) and Darwin RAAF Airfield, NT
Coomalie Creek Airfield, NT
26
(03:20) Darwin (town area), Strauss Airfield and Hughes Airfield, NT
27
(03:56–04:46) Coomalie Creek, Hughes Airfield and Strauss Airfield, NT"
"Air raids on Australia, 1942–1943","1943
January
20
(22:44–00:15) Searchlight station, AWC Camp, Ironstone, NT
21
(21:54) Darwin (Frances Bay), NT
22
(13:30) HMAS Patricia Cam sunk, near Wessel Islands, NT."
"Air raids on Australia, 1942–1943","March
2
(14:34) Coomalie Creek Airfield, NT
15
(11:20) Darwin (oil tanks), NT"
"Air raids on Australia, 1942–1943","May
2
(10:15) Darwin RAAF Airfield and Darwin Floating Dock, NT
9
Millingimbi, NT
10
Millingimbi, NT. The cutter HMAS Maroubra was sunk.
20
Exmouth Gulf, WA
21
Exmouth Gulf, WA
28
Millingimbi, NT"
"Air raids on Australia, 1942–1943","June
18
Horn Island, Qld
20
(10:43) Winnellie and Darwin RAAF Airfield, NT
28
(11:07) Vesteys, NT
30
(12:30) Fenton Airfield, NT"
"Air raids on Australia, 1942–1943","July
6
(12:02) Fenton Airfield, NT"
"Air raids on Australia, 1942–1943","August
13
(21:45) Fenton Airfield, NT
(23:12) Fenton Airfield and Coomalie Creek Airfield, NT
(23:42) Coomalie Creek Airfield, NT
14
Long Airfield, NT
17
Port Hedland, WA
21
(00:37) Fenton Airfield and Coomalie Creek Airfield, NT
(03:30) Pell Airfield, NT"
"Air raids on Australia, 1942–1943","September
15
(00:25) Fenton Airfield and Long Airfield, NT
15
Onslow, WA.
16
Exmouth Gulf, WA (The southernmost air raid in Australia.)
18
(03:50) Fenton Airfield and Long Airfield, NT
27
Drysdale River Mission (Kalumburu) airfield, WA. Six fatalities; Father Thomas Gil, the superior of the mission, and five Aboriginal Australians."
"Air raids on Australia, 1942–1943","November
10
Coomalie Creek Airfield, NT
12
(03:53–05:30) Parap, Adelaide River and Batchelor Airfield, NT"
"Air raids on Australia, 1942–1943","See also
3rd Air Group
Takao Air Group
No. 1 Wing RAAF
Military history of Australia during World War II
Battle for Australia"
"Air raids on Australia, 1942–1943","Notes
References
External links
ozatwar.com, ""Japanese Air Raids in Australia During WW2""
diggerhistory.info ""Attacks on the Australian mainland in WW2""
Australian War Memorial, ""Air raids on Australian mainland – Second World War""
Darwin Defenders 1942–45 Inc, veterans association's list of 43 air raids (excluding reconnaissance flights)
Kalumburu Community-ABC Open, ""The secret bombing of Australia"""
Australian involvement in the Iraq War,"Australia joined a U.S.-led coalition in the Iraq War. Declassified documents reveal that the decision to go to war was taken primarily with a view to enhancing its alliance with the United States.
The Howard government supported the disarmament of Iraq during the Iraq disarmament crisis. Australia later provided one of the four most substantial combat force contingents during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, under the operational codename Operation Falconer. Part of its contingent were among the first forces to enter Iraq after the official ""execute"" order. The initial Australian force consisted of three Royal Australian Navy ships, a 500-strong special forces task group, two AP-3C Orion maritime patrol aircraft, two B707 Air-to-Air refuelling aircraft, C-130 Hercules transport aircraft and No. 75 Squadron RAAF (which included 14 F/A-18 Hornet fighters). Combat forces committed to Operation Falconer for the 2003 Invasion were withdrawn during 2003. Under the name Operation Catalyst, Australian combat troops were redeployed to Iraq in 2005, however, and assumed responsibility for supporting Iraqi security forces in one of Iraq's southern provinces. These troops began withdrawing from Iraq on 1 June 2008 and were completely withdrawn by 28 July 2009."
Australian involvement in the Iraq War,"Forces committed
A headquarters staff of about 60 personnel under the command of Brigadier Maurie McNarn."
Australian involvement in the Iraq War,"Royal Australian Navy
The frigates HMAS Anzac and HMAS Darwin, which were already on-station as part of the Multinational Interception Force enforcing economic sanctions against Iraq before the invasion plan was entered into. Each ship carried a single Seahawk helicopter from 816 Squadron RAN.
The transport ship HMAS Kanimbla carrying 350 crew and soldiers, including embarked Australian Army LCM-8 landing craft and an anti-aircraft contingent, a Sea King helicopter from 817 Squadron RAN, and a bomb disposal team. A detachment from the Army's 16th Air Defence Regiment provided point defence to the Kanimbla.
Clearance Diving Team Three, which worked alongside divers from several nations to clear Iraqi ports of mines.
Royal Australian Air Force
No. 75 Squadron, operating 14 F/A-18 Hornet fighter jets together with 250 command, coordination, support and aircrew personnel.
Three C-130H Hercules transport aircraft from No. 36 Squadron RAAF and 150 support personnel.
Two AP-3C Orion maritime patrol aircraft and 150 support personnel (these aircraft may have operated in the electronic intelligence gathering role).
Australian Army
A 500-strong special forces task group consisting of:
Forward Command Element
Special Forces Task Group attached to Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-West (CJSOTF-W)
1st Squadron Group, Australian Special Air Service Regiment
Platoon (+), 4th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (Commando)
D Troop, Incident Response Regiment
Combat Service Support Group
Troop, C Squadron, 5th Aviation Regiment (3 CH-47 Chinook)
2 LCM-8 Landing Craft, 70/71 Troop Water Transport Squadron"
Australian involvement in the Iraq War,"Operations by Australian Forces
Planning for the deployment of ADF units to the Middle East began in mid-2002 when Australian officers were attached to United States planning teams. This was before the Government's announcement that Australia would join the United States and British buildup, but was conducted as contingency planning which did not imply a commitment to war.
In keeping with its relatively small size, the Australian force made an important though limited contribution to Coalition operations during the invasion of Iraq. The Australian contribution was also geographically dispersed, with the Australian forces forming part of larger US and British units rather than a concentrated Australian unit. No Australian personnel were killed or taken prisoner during the war.
Brigadier Maurie McNarn on 21 March 2003, was the first Coalition commander to hold an official press conference with the international media in Qatar. Australian contributions at the time were widely quoted owing to the lack of official operational news from other participants."
Australian involvement in the Iraq War,"Maritime operations
Before the outbreak of war the Australian naval force in the Persian Gulf continued to enforce the sanctions against Iraq. These operations were conducted by boarding parties from the RAN warships and the AP-3 Orion patrol aircraft.
Upon the outbreak of war the RAN's focus shifted to supporting the coalition land forces and clearing the approaches to Iraqi ports. HMAS Anzac provided gunfire support to Royal Marines during fighting on the Al-Faw Peninsula and the Clearance Diving Team took part in clearing the approaches to Umm Qasr. Boarding operations continued during the war, and on 20 March boarding parties from HMAS Kanimbla seized an Iraqi ship carrying 86 naval mines. Army LCM-8 Landing Craft were used as forward deployment and support platforms for the Navy boarding parties and were the first regular Maritime assets to the port of Umm Qasr, moving as far north as Basara on the inland waterways collecting intelligence for allied forces. LCM-8 Assets were utilised by British and American forces for various cargo transportation duties during the course of the war."
Australian involvement in the Iraq War,"Special forces operations
The primary role of the Special Forces Task Group was to secure an area of western Iraq from which it was feared that SCUD missiles could be launched. The SAS successfully entered Iraq by vehicle and United States helicopters and secured their area of responsibility after a week of fighting. Following this the SAS patrolled the highways in the area in order to block the escape of members of the Iraqi government and to prevent enemy foreign fighters from entering the country.
On 11 April the SAS Squadron was concentrated to capture the Al Asad Airbase. While this base proved to be almost undefended, the Australian troops captured over 50 MiG jets and more than 7.9 million kilograms of explosives. After securing the air base the SAS were reinforced by 4 RAR and the IRR elements. The Special Forces Task Group remained at Al Asad until the end of the war, when most of the SAS Squadron and IRR Troop returned home and the 4 RAR platoon (reinforced by elements of the SAS) was deployed to Baghdad to protect Australian diplomats."
Australian involvement in the Iraq War,"Air operations
No. 75 Squadron's initial role was to escort high-value Coalition aircraft such as tankers and AWACS aircraft. As it became clear that the Iraqi Air Force posed no threat, the role of No. 75 Squadron shifted to providing close air support to Coalition ground forces and air interdiction against Iraqi forces. These missions were initially flown in support of the US Army but the Squadron later switched to supporting the US Marines. As organized Baathist resistance crumbled, the F/A-18s were increasingly tasked to provide 'shows of force' to encourage Iraqi forces to surrender. During the war No. 75 Squadron flew a total of 350 sorties and dropped 122 laser-guided bombs.
Reports indicate that the No. 75 Squadron's activities were somewhat restricted in their military role compared to similarly equipped US forces. Australian aircraft were not permitted to operate in the ""Baghdad SuperMEZ"" (Missile Exclusion Zone) because of fears that the Hornet's electronic warfare systems were inadequate, though the report indicates that they were identical to American Hornets operating in this area. Furthermore, they were not permitted to conduct close air support missions in urban areas because of fears of collateral damage. These restrictions were in line with the rules of engagement set by the Australian Government, which were reportedly more restrictive than the rules governing the conduct of British and American forces.
The Australian C-130 transports and CH-47 helicopters provided airlift to Coalition forces, including the Australian Special Forces Task Group."
Australian involvement in the Iraq War,"Post-invasion operations – Operation Catalyst
Following the capture of Baghdad Australian C-130 aircraft flew humanitarian supplies into the city. Almost all the forces deployed for the war returned to Australia shortly after the end of major fighting.
Unlike the three other countries which contributed combat forces to the war, Australia did not immediately contribute military forces to the post-war reconstruction of Iraq. Following victory, the Australian force in Iraq was limited to specialists attached to the Coalition headquarters in Baghdad and the search for Iraq's suspected weapons of mass destruction, a frigate in the Persian Gulf, a party of air traffic controllers at Baghdad International Airport, two C-130 Hercules transport aircraft, two AP-3C Orion aircraft and small Security Detachment (SECDET) consisting of infantry, Armoured and support elements with the Military Police Close Protection Team protecting the Australian military units and diplomats based in Baghdad. This force was later expanded to include an Army training detachment and a small medical detachment attached to a US Air Force hospital. The Royal Australian Navy has also assumed command of coalition forces in the Persian Gulf on two occasions; Combined Task Force 58 in 2005 and Combined Task Force 158 in 2006.
The Australian Government refused requests made during 2003 and 2004 by the United States and United Nations to increase Australia's contribution to the Multinational force in Iraq. In 2004 the government argued that assistance it had provided to prepare a Fijian force for Iraq met its obligation to contribute to security arrangements for the January 2005 Iraqi parliamentary election. In February 2005, however, the Australian government announced that the Australian Army would deploy a battlegroup to Al Muthanna Province to provide security for the Japanese engineers deployed to the province as well as to help train Iraqi security forces. This force — approximately 500 strong and equipped with armoured vehicles including ASLAVs and Bushmasters – named the Al Muthanna Task Group, commenced operations in April 2005. Following the withdrawal of the Japanese force and the transition of Al Muthanna to Iraqi control the Australian battlegroup relocated to Tallil Air Base in neighbouring Dhi Qar province in July 2006. The name AMTG was subsequently abandoned in favour of the title Overwatch Battle Group (West), reflecting the unit's new role. Al Muthana and Dhi Qar are the westernmost of the four southern provinces and OBG(W) became the prime coalition intervention force in the western sector of the British Multi-National Division (South-East) (Iraq) (MND-SE) Area of Operations, with MND-SE based in the southern port city of Basrah. Responsibility for overwatch in Dhi Qar was subsequently assumed from the withdrawing Italian contingent in late October 2006, whilst OBG(W) continued to train Iraqi security forces. By late 2006 overall personnel numbers committed to Operation Catalyst (Iraq) had risen to 1400.
After the Labor Party achieved a landslide victory in the 2007 election, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's government withdrew Australian combat forces began from Iraq on 1 June 2008 and the Overwatch Battle Group (West) and Australian Army Training Team formally ceased combat operations on 2 June 2008, having helped train 33,000 Iraqi soldiers. Approximately 200 Australian personnel will remain in Iraq on logistical and air surveillance duties. All personnel other than those in SECDET and two officers attached to the United Nations will be withdrawn in July 2009."
Australian involvement in the Iraq War,"Casualties
No Australian military personnel were killed in direct combat action during Operation Falconer or Operation Catalyst. One Australian soldier died in 2015 as a direct result of injuries sustained in an IED blast in 2004, three died in accidents or during service with British forces; many more have been wounded. Additionally as many as six Australians have been killed whilst working as private security contractors.
Matthew Millhouse, 36, was a trooper serving in the 2nd Cavalry Regiment, when the ASLAV he was driving was struck by a VBIED on the 25th of October 2004. He was knocked unconscious, but awoke and ran to the aid of LT Garth Callender who was severely injured. LT Callander later recovered from his physical wounds, but as a result of the blast TPR Millhouse was diagnosed with younger-onset dementia which claimed his life on 28 August 2015. He has since been listed on the Australian War Memorial Honour Roll as a casualty of the Iraq War.
Paul Pardoel, 35, was a flight lieutenant serving as a navigator in the RAF. He died when his C-130 Hercules from No 47 Squadron crashed in Iraq on 30 January 2005 killing all ten crew aboard. He was an Australian citizen serving in the British Armed Forces, having transferred from the RAAF in 2002. He was originally from Victoria.
David Nary, 42, was a warrant officer with the Australian Special Air Service Regiment. He was killed on 5 November 2005 after being struck by a vehicle during a training exercise in Kuwait prior to deployment to Iraq.
Jake Kovco, 25, was a private serving in the 3rd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (3 RAR). He was part of the security detachment (SECDET) in Baghdad when he was killed on 21 April 2006 from a gunshot wound to the head that was believed to have been accidentally self-inflicted."
Australian involvement in the Iraq War,"Australian contribution in context
Scale of the Australian force commitment
The Australian military contribution was relatively small in proportional terms, around 2,000 personnel in total, or 2.42% of its military compared to the United States 4.85% and the United Kingdom's 12%.
With one obvious exception, the particular forces committed by the Australian Government can be seen by some as modest and to follow past practice closely. Australia committed special forces to the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in roughly similar numbers to those above. The two RAN frigates were already on-station for the Afghanistan campaign; Kanimbla was a relatively small addition to the naval force. RAN clearance divers also took part in the Gulf War.
Australia sent Hercules and Orion aircraft to assist in the Afghanistan campaign—but also Boeing 707 tankers, which had not been committed to the Gulf War, despite a marked Coalition shortage of probe/drogue capable tanker aircraft. The absence of the 707s was likely caused by technical rather than policy reasons: the RAAF has only four second-hand 707 tankers; all are at the end of their service lives, very difficult to maintain and soon to be replaced.
The commitment of No. 75 Squadron and its supporting personnel, however, was a major change from past practice. Australia did not commit combat aircraft to the 1991 Gulf War, and although a small detachment of Hornets was deployed to Diego Garcia during the Afghanistan campaign to provide airfield defence for the joint United States-United Kingdom military facility present there, this was not a true combat role, however, but simply a precaution against possible suicide attacks by hijacked civil aircraft. The commitment of No. 75 Squadron was the first combat deployment of Australian aircraft since the Vietnam War.
No official statement has been made on the reasons behind the choice of F/A-18 fighters as Australia's primary combat commitment, but it is commonly assumed that the obvious alternative of sending a substantial land force instead was considered to involve an unacceptably high risk of casualties, particularly given the possibility of house-to-house fighting in Iraqi cities. Iraq is largely landlocked, and Australia no longer has a fixed-wing naval aviation component; thus, a larger naval commitment could not be considered particularly helpful. The choice of the F/A-18 deployment rather than of the F-111 tactical bomber may have been due to the higher cost of operation of the F-111, and its use being limited to more politically contentious ground attack missions rather than more uncontentious tasks like combat air patrols."
Australian involvement in the Iraq War,"Financial costs
The cost of the Iraq war to Australian taxpayers is estimated to have exceeded A$5 billion. The cost of Australia's involvement in Iraq has risen since the initial invasion gave way to a protracted insurgency. Excluding debt relief, the annual cost has risen from just over $400 million in 2003–04 to $576.6 million in the 2007 financial year. Ancillary costs included:"
Australian involvement in the Iraq War,"$494.5 million in the base wage and personnel costs for Australian Defence Force troops deployed in Iraq not included in the net additional spending figures;
$211.5 million spent by Foreign Affairs and other departments on aid, reconstruction, Australia's diplomatic presence in Baghdad and tax concessions for soldiers; and
$668 million in Iraqi debts waived by Australia."
Australian involvement in the Iraq War,"References
Further reading
External links"
Australian involvement in the Iraq War,"Operation Catalyst: Department of Defence – official.
""The War in Iraq: ADF Operations in the Middle East in 2003"" (PDF). Official History. Department of Defence. February 2004. Retrieved 14 December 2012.
Bassingthwaighte, MAJ Michael B. (2010). ""Adaptive Campaigning Applied: Australian Army Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan"". www.dtic.mil. United States Army Command and General Staff College. Archived from the original on 8 April 2013.
Iraq: Australian War Memorial"
Australian Aboriginal culture,"Australian Aboriginal culture includes a number of practices and ceremonies centered on a belief in the Dreamtime and other mythology. Reverence and respect for the land and oral traditions are emphasised. The words ""law"" and ""lore"", the latter relating to the customs and stories passed down through the generations,  are commonly used interchangeably.  Learned from childhood, lore dictates the rules on how to interact with the land, kinship and community. 
Over 300 languages and other groupings have developed a wide range of individual cultures.  Aboriginal art has existed for thousands of years and ranges from ancient rock art to modern watercolour landscapes. Traditional Aboriginal music developed a number of unique instruments, and contemporary Aboriginal music spans many genres. Aboriginal peoples did not develop a system of writing before colonisation, but there was a huge variety of languages, including sign languages."
Australian Aboriginal culture,"Oral tradition
Cultural traditions and beliefs as well as historical tellings of actual events are passed down in Aboriginal oral tradition, also known loosely as oral history (although the latter has a more specific definition). Some of the stories are many thousands of years old.
In a study published in February 2020, new evidence produced using radiometric dating showed that both Budj Bim and Tower Hill volcanoes erupted at least 34,000 years ago. Significantly, this is a ""minimum age constraint for human presence in Victoria"", and also could be interpreted as evidence for the Gunditjmara oral histories which tell of volcanic eruptions being some of the oldest oral traditions in existence. An axe found underneath volcanic ash in 1947 was also proof that humans inhabited the region before the eruption of Tower Hill."
Australian Aboriginal culture,"Art and crafts
Australian Aboriginal art has a history spanning thousands of years. Aboriginal artists continue these traditions using both modern and traditional materials in their artworks. Aboriginal art is the most internationally recognizable form of Australian art. Several styles of Aboriginal art have developed in modern times including the watercolour paintings of Albert Namatjira, the Hermannsburg School, and the acrylic Papunya Tula ""dot art"" movement. Painting is a large source of income for some Central Australian communities such as at Yuendumu.
Basket weaving has been traditionally practised by the women of many Aboriginal peoples across the continent for centuries."
Australian Aboriginal culture,"Astronomy
For many Aboriginal cultures, the night sky is a repository of stories and law. Songlines can be traced through the sky and the land. Stories and songs associated with the sky under many cultural tents."
Australian Aboriginal culture,"Beliefs
Aboriginal Australians' oral tradition and spiritual values build on reverence for the land and on a belief in the Dreamtime, or Dreaming. The Dreaming is considered to be both the ancient time of creation and the present-day reality of Dreaming. It describes the Aboriginal cosmology, and includes the ancestral stories about the supernatural creator-beings and how they created places. Each story can be called a ""Dreaming"", with the whole continent criss-crossed by Dreamings or ancestral tracks, also represented by songlines.
There are many different groups, each with their own individual culture, belief structure and language."
Australian Aboriginal culture,"The Rainbow Serpent is a major ancestral being for many Aboriginal people across Australia.
Baiame or Bunjil are regarded as the primary creator-spirits in South-East Australia.
Dingo Dreaming is a significant ancestor in the interior regions of Bandiyan, as Dingo formed the songlines that cross the continent from north to south and east to west.
The Yowie and Bunyip have their roots in Aboriginal mythology."
Australian Aboriginal culture,"Sacred sites
To Aboriginal people, some places are sacred, owing to their central place in the mythology of the local people."
Australian Aboriginal culture,"Customary law
The words ""law"" and ""lore"" are commonly used interchangeably: ""law"" was introduced by the British, whereas ""lore"" relates to the customs and stories from the Dreamtime, which has been passed on through countless generations through songlines, stories and dance. Learned from childhood, lore dictates the rules on how to interact with the land, kinship and community."
Australian Aboriginal culture,"Kurdaitcha
Kurdaitcha (or kurdaitcha man, and also spelled kurdaitcha, gadaidja, cadiche, kadaitcha, or karadji) is a type of shaman amongst the Arrernte people, an Aboriginal group in Central Australia. The kurdaitcha may be brought in to punish a guilty party by death. The word may also relate to the ritual in which the death is willed by the kurdaitcha man, known also as bone-pointing.
The expectation that death would result from having a bone pointed at a victim is not without foundation. Other similar rituals that cause death have been recorded around the world. Victims become listless and apathetic, usually refusing food or water with death often occurring within days of being ""cursed"". When victims survive, it is assumed that the ritual was faulty in its execution. The phenomenon is recognized as psychosomatic in that death is caused by an emotional response—often fear—to some suggested outside force and is known as ""voodoo death"". As this term refers to a specific religion, the medical establishment has suggested that ""self-willed death"", or ""bone-pointing syndrome"" is more appropriate. In Australia, the practice is still common enough that hospitals and nursing staff are trained to manage illness caused by ""bad spirits"" and bone pointing."
Australian Aboriginal culture,"Arnhem Land
The complete system of Yolngu customary law is the ""Madayin"", which embodies the rights and responsibilities of the owners of the law, or citizens (rom watangu walal, or simply rom).  Madayin includes the rom, as well as the objects that symbolise the law, oral rules, names and song cycles, and the sacred places that are used to maintain, develop and provide education in the law. Rom can be roughly translated as ""law"" or ""culture"", but it embodies more than either of these words. Galarrwuy Yunupingu has described Rom watangu as the overarching law of the land, which is ""lasting and alive... my backbone"".
It covers ownership of land and waters and the resources within this region; it controls production trade; and includes social, religious and ethical laws. These include laws for conservation and farming of flora and fauna. Observance of Madayin creates a state of balance, peace and true justice, known as Magaya.
Rom includes bush crafts such as basket-weaving and mat-making, and stories which teach history, hunting, spear-making, gathering food, building shelters and rafts, various rituals, and taking care of others.
""Rom"" is a word and concept shared by at least one of the nearby peoples, the Anbarra, who also perform a Rom ceremony."
Australian Aboriginal culture,"Ceremonies and sacred objects
Aboriginal ceremonies have been a part of Aboriginal culture since the beginning, and still play a vital part in society. They are held often, for many different reasons, all of which are based on the spiritual beliefs and cultural practices of the community. They include Dreaming stories, secret events at sacred sites, homecomings, births and deaths. They still play a very important part in the lives and culture of Aboriginal people. They are performed in Arnhem Land and Central Australia with the aim of ensuring a plentiful supply of foods; in many regions they play an important part in educating children, passing on the lore of their people, spiritual beliefs and survival skills; some ceremonies are a rite of passage for adolescents; other ceremonies are around marriage, death or burial. Most include dance, song, rituals and elaborate body decoration and/or costume. Ancient Aboriginal rock art shows ceremonies and traditions are still continued today.
Ceremonies provide a time and place for everyone in the group and community to work together to ensure the ongoing survival of spiritual and cultural beliefs. Certain stories are individually ""owned"" by a group, and in some cases dances, body decoration and symbols in a ceremony pass on these stories only within the group, so it is vital that these ceremonies are remembered and performed correctly. Men and women have different roles, and are sometimes appointed as guardians of a sacred site, whose role it is to care for the site and the spiritual beings who live there, achieved partly by performing ceremonies. The terms “men’s business” and “women’s business” are sometimes used; neither have greater spiritual needs or responsibilities than the other, but jointly ensure that sacred practices are passed on. Men often conduct ceremonies, but women are also guardians of special knowledge, hold great spiritual power within a group, and conduct ceremonies. Participation in ceremonies can also be restricted by age, family group, language group, but are sometimes open to all, depending on the purpose of the ceremony.
Right of access to songs and dances pertaining to a specific ceremony belong to a certain defined group (known as manikay by the Yolngu peoples of north-east Arnhem Land, or clan songs); some may be shared with people outside the community, but some are never shared. There is a wide range of songs, dances, music, body ornamentation, costume, and symbolism, designed to connect the body with the spiritual world of the ancestors. Ceremonies help to sustain Aboriginal identity as well as the group's connection to country and family."
Australian Aboriginal culture,"Examples of ceremonies
A bora is an initiation ceremony in which young boys (Kippas) become men.
Bunggul is a traditional ceremonial dance of the Yolngu people of East Arnhem Land.
The bunya feast held in the hinterland of the Sunshine Coast of Queensland is well-known. Representatives from many different groups from across southern Queensland and northern New South Wales would meet to discuss important issues relating to the environment, social relationships, politics and Dreaming lore, feasting and sharing dance ceremonies. Many conflicts would be settled at this event, and consequences for breaches of laws were discussed.
Burial practices differ from group to group. In parts of Northern Australia, there are two stages of burial. After the body has been on an elevated platform, covered with leaves and branches, long enough for the flesh to rot away from the bones, the bones are collected, painted with ochre, and dispersed in various ways.
A corroboree is a ceremonial meeting for Australian Aboriginal people, interacting with the Dreaming and accompanied by song and dance. They differ from group to group, and may be sacred and private.
An ilma is both a public ceremony or performance of the Bardi people, and the hand-held objects used in these ceremonies.
The inma is a cultural ceremony of Aṉangu women of Central Australia, involving song and dance and embodying the stories and designs of the tjukurrpa (Ancestral Law, or Dreamtime). The ceremony carries camaraderie, joy, playfulness and seriousness, and may last for hours. There are many different inma, all profoundly significant to the culture.
The Mamurrng is a ceremony of West Arnhem Land in which two different language communities come together for trade and diplomacy.
The Morning Star Ceremony is a mortuary ceremony of the Dhuwa moiety.
The ngarra is one of the major regional rituals performed in north-east Arnhem Land, begun by the Rirratjingu clan of the Yolŋu people of East Arnhem. The first ngarra was performed by creation ancestors called Djang'kawu at the sacred site of Balma, in Yalangbara, after giving birth to the first of the Rirratjingu clan.
A Pukamani, or Pukumani, is a burial ceremony of the Tiwi Islands, which lasts for several days around the grave of the deceased about six months after their death. Elaborate funerary posts known as tutini are erected around the grave before the ceremony, and dancers dance and sing around the posts.
The ROM (or Rom - see previous section) ceremony, involving songs, dances, and artefacts, which involve presenting other neighbouring communities with decorated totem poles, with the intent of establishing or re-establishing friendly terms with them; a form of diplomacy. The process of making and decorating the poles can extend over weeks, and involves successive sessions of song and dance, culminating in the ceremony where gifts are exchanged. In April 2017, a four-day festival to mark the Rom ceremony was attended by about 500 people at Gapuwiyak School, in north-eastern Arnhem Land. It was planned to hold the event each term. Historian and writer Billy Griffiths wrote in his award-winning book Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia (2018), of the Rom ceremony as an ""extension of friendship"" and ""ritual of diplomacy"", of which the ""full significance ... has yet to be appreciated by the Australian public. At the heart of this symbolic act is a gift – of song and dance and cultural knowledge, but it comes with obligations. The acceptance of such a gift enmeshes the recipients into a continual process of reciprocity"".
A smoking ceremony is a cleansing ritual performed on special occasions.
Tjurunga (or churinga) are objects of religious significance by Central Australian Arrernte groups.
Walkabout is a rite of passage journey during adolescence, often mis-applied.
A welcome to country is a ritual now performed at many events held in Australia, intended to highlight the cultural significance of the surrounding area to a particular Aboriginal group. The welcome must be performed by a recognised elder of the group. The welcome ceremony is sometimes accompanied by a smoking ceremony, music or dance."
Australian Aboriginal culture,"Musical instruments and other objects
The didgeridoo originated in northern Australia, but is now used throughout the continent. Clapsticks, seed rattles and objects such as rocks or pieces of wood are used; in a few areas, women play a drum made from goanna, snake, kangaroo or emu skin."
Australian Aboriginal culture,"Cuisine
Animal native foods include kangaroo, emu, witchetty grubs and crocodile, and plant foods include fruits such as quandong, kutjera, spices such as lemon myrtle and vegetables such as warrigal greens and various native yams. Since the 1970s, there has been recognition of the nutritional and gourmet value of native foods by non-Indigenous Australians, and the bushfood industry has grown enormously."
Australian Aboriginal culture,"Medicine
Pituri is a mixture of leaves and wood ash traditionally chewed as a stimulant (or, after extended use, a depressant) by Aboriginal Australians widely across the continent. Leaves are gathered from any of several species of native tobacco (Nicotiana) or from at least one distinct population of the species Duboisia hopwoodii. Various species of Acacia, Grevillea and Eucalyptus are burned to produce the ash.  Traditional healers (known as Ngangkari in the Western jester areas of Central Australia) are highly respected men and women who not only acted as healers or doctors, but also generally served as custodians of important Dreaming stories."
Australian Aboriginal culture,"Fire practices
Cultural burning, identified by Australian archaeologist Rhys Jones in 1969, is the practice of regularly and systematically burning patches of vegetation used in Central to Northern Australia to facilitate hunting, to reduce the frequency of major bush-fires, and to change the composition of plant and animal species in an area. This ""fire-stick farming"", or ""burning off"", reduces the fuel-load for a potential major bush fire, while fertilising the ground and increasing the number of young plants, providing additional food for kangaroos and other fauna hunted for meat. It is regarded as good husbandry and ""looking after the land"" by Aboriginal people of the Northern Territory."
Australian Aboriginal culture,"Language
The Australian Aboriginal languages consist of around 290–363 languages belonging to an estimated 28 language families and isolates, spoken by Aboriginal Australians of mainland Australia and a few nearby islands. The relationships between these languages are not clear at present. Many Australian Aboriginal cultures have or traditionally had a manually coded language, a signed counterpart of their oral language. This appears to be connected with various speech taboos between certain kin or at particular times, such as during a mourning period for women or during initiation ceremonies for men.
Avoidance speech in Australian Aboriginal languages is closely tied to elaborate tribal kinship systems in which certain relatives are considered taboo. Avoidance relations differ from tribe to tribe in terms of strictness and to whom they apply. Typically, there is an avoidance relationship between a man and his mother-in-law, usually between a woman and her father-in-law, and sometimes between any person and their same-sex parent-in-law. For some tribes, avoidance relationships are extended to other family members, such as the mother-in-law's brother in Warlpiri or cross-cousins in Dyirbal. All relations are classificatory – more people may fall into the ""mother-in-law"" category than just a man's wife's mother.
Australian Aboriginal English (AAE) is a dialect of Australian English used by a large section of the Indigenous Australian (Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander) population. Australian Kriol is an English-based creole language that developed from a pidgin used in the early days of European colonisation.  The pidgin died out in most parts of the country, except in the Northern Territory, which has maintained a vibrant use of the language, spoken by about 30,000 people. It is distinct from Torres Strait Creole."
Australian Aboriginal culture,"Literature
At the point of the first colonisation, Indigenous Australians had not developed a system of writing, so the first literary accounts of Aboriginal people come from the journals of early European explorers, which contain descriptions of first contact.
A letter to Governor Arthur Phillip written by Bennelong in 1796 is the first known work written in English by an Aboriginal person.
While his father, James Unaipon (c. 1835–1907), contributed to accounts of Ngarrindjeri mythology written by the missionary George Taplin in South Australia, David Unaipon (1872–1967) provided the first accounts of Aboriginal mythology written by an Aboriginal person, Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines (1924–25), and was the first Aboriginal author to be published.
The Yirrkala bark petitions of 1963 are the first traditional Aboriginal document recognised by the Australian Parliament.
Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920–1993) was a famous Aboriginal poet, writer and rights activist credited with publishing the first Aboriginal book of verse: We Are Going (1964).
Sally Morgan's 1987 memoir My Place brought Indigenous stories to wider notice.
Leading Aboriginal activists Marcia Langton (First Australians documentary TV series, 2008) and Noel Pearson (Up from the Mission, 2009) are contemporary contributors to Australian non-fiction. Other voices of Indigenous Australians include the playwright Jack Davis and Kevin Gilbert.
Writers coming to prominence in the 21st century include Kim Scott, Alexis Wright, Kate Howarth, Tara June Winch, Yvette Holt and Anita Heiss. Indigenous authors who have won Australia's Miles Franklin Award include Kim Scott, who was joint winner (with Thea Astley) in 2000 for Benang and again in 2011 for That Deadman Dance. Alexis Wright won the award in 2007 for her novel Carpentaria. Melissa Lucashenko won the Miles Franklin Award in 2019 for her novel Too Much Lip."
Australian Aboriginal culture,"Music
Aboriginal people have developed unique musical instruments and folk styles. The didgeridoo is often considered the national instrument of Aboriginal Australians; however, it was traditionally played by peoples of Northern Australia, and only by the men. It has possibly been used by the people of the Kakadu region for 1500 years.
Clapping sticks are probably the more ubiquitous musical instrument, especially because they help maintain rhythm. More recently, Aboriginal musicians have branched into rock and roll, hip hop and reggae. Bands such as No Fixed Address and Yothu Yindi were two of the earliest Aboriginal bands to gain a popular following among Australians of all cultures.
In 1997 the State and Federal Governments set up the Aboriginal Centre for the Performing Arts (ACPA) to preserve and nurture Aboriginal music and talent across all styles and genres from traditional to contemporary."
Australian Aboriginal culture,"Sport and games
Woggabaliri is a traditional Indigenous Australian ""co-operative kicking volley game"". The Indigenous in areas of and near New South Wales played a ball game called Woggabaliri. The ball was usually made of possum fur, and was played in a group of four to six players in circle. It was a co-operative kicking game to see for how long the ball can be kept in the air before it touches the ground.
The Djab Wurrung and Jardwadjali people of western Victoria once participated in the traditional game of Marn Grook, a type of football played with possum hide. The game is believed by some commentators, including Martin Flanagan, Jim Poulter and Col Hutchinson, to have inspired Tom Wills, inventor of the code of Australian rules football.
Similarity between Marn Grook and Australian football include jumping to catch the ball or high ""marking"", which results in a free kick. Use of the word ""mark"" in the game may be influenced by the Marn Grook word mumarki, meaning ""catch"". However, this is likely a false etymology; the term ""mark"" is traditionally used in Rugby and other games that predate AFL to describe a free kick resulting from a catch, in reference to the player making a mark on the ground from which to take a free kick, rather than continuing to play on.
There are many Indigenous AFL players at professional level, with approximately one in ten players being of Indigenous origin as of 2007. The contribution of the Aboriginal people to the game is recognized by the annual AFL ""Dreamtime at the 'G"" match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground between Essendon and Richmond football clubs (the colors of the two clubs combine to form the colours of the Aboriginal flag). 
Testifying to this abundance of Indigenous talent, the Aboriginal All-Stars, an AFL-level all-Aboriginal football side competes against any one of the Australian Football League's current football teams in pre-season tests. The Clontarf Foundation and football academy is just one organisation aimed at further developing aboriginal football talent. The Tiwi Bombers began playing in the Northern Territory Football League and became the first all-Aboriginal side to compete in a major Australian competition.
Coreeda is a style of folk wrestling practiced in Australia and is based on Aboriginal combat sports that existed in the pre-colonial period before the 19th century. Combining the movements of the traditional kangaroo dance as a warm up ritual, with a style of wrestling that utilizes a yellow 4.5 meter diameter circle that has black and red borders (similar to the Aboriginal flag), Coreeda is often compared to sports as diverse as capoeira and sumo.
A popular children's game in some parts of Australia is weet weet, or throwing the play stick. The winner throws the weet weet furthest or the most accurately."
Australian Aboriginal culture,"See also
Australian Aboriginal artefacts
Black Theatre (Sydney)
Contemporary Indigenous Australian art
Country (Indigenous Australians)
Garma Festival of Traditional Cultures
Indigenous Australian art
Indigenous Australian literature
Indigenous Australian traditional custodianship
Jindyworobak Movement, a white Australian literary movement inspired by Aboriginal culture
Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages, a digital archive of literature in endangered languages of the Northern Territory
Lizard Island#Mangrove Beach, a 2024 pottery finding
Stone tool#Aboriginal Australian use
Yaama Ngunna Baaka, 2019 festival consisting of a series of corroborees"
Australian Aboriginal culture,"References
Bibliography
Bowern, Claire (23 December 2011). ""How many languages were spoken in Australia?"". Anggarrgoon. Archived from the original on 3 February 2019. Retrieved 30 March 2018.
Bowern, Claire; Atkinson, Quentin (2012). ""Computational Phylogenetics and the Internal Structure of Pama-Nyungan"". Language. 84 (4): 817–845. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.691.3903. doi:10.1353/lan.2012.0081. S2CID 4375648.
Dixon, R. M. W. (1980). The Languages of Australia. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-29450-8. Archived from the original on 22 December 2019. Retrieved 30 August 2017."
Australian Aboriginal culture,Further reading
Australian Aboriginal culture," Indigenous Australian culture travel guide from Wikivoyage
ENGAGING - A Guide to Interacting Respectfully and Reciprocally with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People, and their Arts Practices and Intellectual Property (Australian Government: Indigenous Culture Support)"
Transport in Australia,There are many forms of transport in Australia. Australia is highly dependent on road transport. There are more than 300 airports with paved runways. Passenger rail transport includes widespread commuter networks in the major capital cities with more limited intercity and interstate networks. The Australian mining sector is reliant upon rail to transport its product to Australia's ports for export.
Transport in Australia,"Road transport
Road transport is an essential element of the Australian transport network, and an enabler of the Australian economy. There is a heavy reliance on road transport due to Australia's large area and low population density in considerable parts of the country. Australia's road network experiences excessive demand during peak periods and very weak demand overnight.
Another reason for the reliance upon roads is that the Australian rail network has not been sufficiently developed for a lot of the freight and passenger requirements in most areas of Australia. This has meant that goods that would otherwise be transported by rail are moved across Australia via road trains. Almost every household owns at least one car, and uses it most days.
There are three different categories of Australian roads. They are federal highways, state highways and local roads. The road network comprises a total of 913,000 km broken down into:"
Transport in Australia,"paved: 353,331 km (including 3,132 km of expressways)
unpaved: 559,669 km (1996 estimate)
Victoria has the largest network, with thousands of arterial (major, primary and secondary) roads to add.
The majority of road tunnels in Australia have been constructed since the 1990s to relieve traffic congestion in metropolitan areas, or to cross significant watercourses."
Transport in Australia,"Cars
Australia has the thirteenth-highest level of car ownership in the world. It has three to four times more road per capita than Europe and seven to nine times more than Asia. Australia also has the third-highest per capita rate of fuel consumption in the world. Melbourne is the most car-dependent city in Australia, according to a data survey in the 2010s, having over 110,000 more cars driving to and from the city each day than Sydney. Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane are rated as being close behind. All these capital cities are rated among the highest in this category in the world (car dependency). The distance travelled by car (or similar vehicle) in Australia is among the highest in the world."
Transport in Australia,"Electric vehicles
The adoption of plug-in electric vehicles in Australia is driven mostly by state-based electric vehicle targets and monetary incentives to support the adoption and deployment of low- or zero-emission vehicles. The monetary incentives include electric vehicle subsidies, interest-free loans, registration exemptions, stamp duty exemptions, the luxury car tax exemption and discounted parking for both private and commercial purchases. The Victorian and New South Wales governments target between 50% and 53% of new car sales to be electric vehicles by 2030."
Transport in Australia,"Public transport in Australia
Suburban rail
Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide have extensive suburban rail networks which have grown and expanded over time. Australian suburban rail typically operates with bidirectional all-day services with Sydney, Melbourne, and to a lesser extent Perth and Brisbane's systems operating with much higher frequencies, particularly in their underground cores. Sydney Trains operates the busiest system in the country with approximately 1 million trips per day. Metro Trains Melbourne operates a larger system albeit with a lower number of trips."
Transport in Australia,"Trams and light rail
Trams have historically operated in many Australian towns and cities, with the majority of these being shut down before the 1970s in the belief that more widespread car ownership would render them unnecessary. Melbourne is a major exception and today has the largest tram network of any city in the world. Adelaide retained one tram service — the Glenelg tram line, since 2008 extended to Hindmarsh and the East End. Trams once operated in Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, and Hobart, and a number of major regional cities including Ballarat, Bendigo, Broken Hill, Fremantle, Geelong, Kalgoorlie, Launceston, Maitland, Newcastle, Rockhampton, and Sorrento.
The Inner West Light Rail opened in Sydney in 1997 with the conversion of a disused section of the Metropolitan Goods line. The CBD and South East Light Rail opened to Randwick in December 2019 and Kingsford in April 2020. A light rail system opened on the Gold Coast in 2014. A line opened in Newcastle in February 2019 and one in Canberra opened in April 2019."
Transport in Australia,"Rapid transit
Sydney is the only city in Australia with a rapid transit system. The Sydney Metro network currently consists of one 36 km driverless line, connecting Tallawong and Chatswood. The line will eventually connect with the Sydney Metro City & Southwest to form a 66 km network with 31 metro stations. The Sydney Metro West is also currently in the planning stages.
Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth's commuter systems are all partially underground and reflect some aspects of typical rapid transit systems, particularly in the city centres."
Transport in Australia,"Intra-city public transport networks
The following table presents an overview of multi-modal intra-city public transport networks in Australia's larger cities. The only Australian capital cities without multi-modal networks is Darwin, which relies entirely on buses, and Hobart, which has sections of derelict railway. The table does not include tourist or heritage transport modes (such as the private monorail at Sea World or the tourist Victor Harbor Horse Drawn Tram)."
Transport in Australia,"Intercity rail transport
The railway network is large, comprising a total of 33,819 km (2,540 km electrified) of track: 3,719 km broad gauge, 15,422 km standard gauge, 14,506 km narrow gauge and 172 km dual gauge. Rail transport started in the various colonies on different dates. Privately owned railways started the first lines, and struggled to succeed on a remote, huge, and sparsely populated continent, and government railways dominated. Although the various colonies had been advised by London to choose a common gauge, the colonies ended up with different gauges."
Transport in Australia,"Inter-state rail services
Journey Beyond operates four trains: the Indian Pacific (Sydney-Adelaide-Perth), The Ghan (Adelaide-Alice Springs-Darwin), The Overland (Melbourne-Adelaide), and the Great Southern (Brisbane-Melbourne-Adelaide). NSW Government owned NSW TrainLink services link Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, Dubbo, Broken Hill, Armidale, Moree and Griffith to Sydney. Since the extension of the Ghan from Alice Springs to Darwin was completed in 2004, all mainland Australian capital cities are linked by standard gauge rail, for the first time."
Transport in Australia,"Intra-state and city rail services
There are various state and city rail services operated by a combination of government and private entities, the most prominent of these include V/Line (regional trains and coaches in Victoria); Metro Trains Melbourne (suburban services in Melbourne); NSW TrainLink (regional trains and coaches in New South Wales); Sydney Trains (suburban services in Sydney); Queensland Rail (QR) operating long-distance Traveltrain services and the City network in South-East Queensland, and Transwa operating train and bus services in Western Australia.
In Tasmania, TasRail operates a short-haul narrow gauge freight system, that carries inter-modal and bulk mining goods. TasRail is government-owned (by the State of Tasmania) and is going through significant below and above rail upgrades with new locomotives and wagons entering service. Significant bridge and sleeper renewal have also occurred. The Tasmanian Government also operates the West Coast Wilderness Railway as a tourist venture over an isolated length of track on Tasmania's West Coast."
Transport in Australia,"Mining railways
Six heavy-duty mining railways carry iron ore to ports in the northwest of Western Australia. These railways carry no other traffic and are isolated by deserts from all other railways. The lines are standard gauge and are built to the heaviest US standards. Each line is operated by one of either BHP, Rio Tinto, Fortescue Metals Group and Hancock Prospecting.
A common carrier railway was proposed to serve the port of Oakajee just north of Geraldton, but this was later cancelled after a collapse in the iron ore price."
Transport in Australia,"Cane railways
In Queensland, 19 sugar mills are serviced by ~3,000 km of narrow gauge (2 ft / 610 mm gauge) cane tramways that deliver sugar cane to the mills."
Transport in Australia,"Pipelines
There are several pipeline systems including:"
Transport in Australia,"Crude oil: 2,500 km
Petroleum products: 500 km
Natural gas: 5,600 km
Water
Perth to Kalgoorlie - Goldfields Water Supply Scheme
Morgan on the Murray River to Whyalla, Port Lincoln - Morgan–Whyalla pipeline
Mannum on the Murray River to Adelaide - Mannum–Adelaide pipeline
Waranga Western Channel, near Colbinabbin to Bendigo and Ballarat - Goldfields Superpipe
Projects under construction or planned:
Victoria"
Transport in Australia,"Goulburn River to Sugarloaf Reservoir, Melbourne (North South Pipeline, alternatively called the Sugarloaf Pipeline) - was connected to Melbourne in February 2010.
Wimmera-Mallee Pipeline - construction commenced in November 2006 and was completed in April 2010.
Melbourne to Geelong Pipeline - construction was completed in March 2012.
Rocklands Reservoir to Grampian Headworks Pipeline (Hamilton - Grampians Pipeline) - construction commenced December 2008, expected completion in 2010."
Transport in Australia,"Waterways
Between 1850 and 1940, paddle steamers were used extensively on the Murray-Darling Basin to transport produce, especially wool and wheat, to river ports such as Echuca, Mannum and Goolwa. However, the water levels of the inland waterways are highly unreliable, making the rivers impassable for large parts of the year. A system of locks was created largely to overcome this variability, but the steamers were unable to compete with rail, and later, road transport. Traffic on inland waterways is now largely restricted to private recreational craft."
Transport in Australia,"Ports and harbours
Mainland
General
Adelaide, Brisbane, Cairns, Darwin, Fremantle, Geelong, Gladstone, Port Lincoln, Mackay, Melbourne, Newcastle, Portland, Sydney, Townsville, Wollongong"
Transport in Australia,"Iron ore
Dampier
Port Hedland
Geraldton
Oakajee - proposed 2006
Esperance
Port Lincoln - possible 2007"
Transport in Australia,"Tasmania
Burnie
Devonport
Launceston
Hobart"
Transport in Australia,"Merchant marine vessels
In 2006, the Australian fleet consisted of 53 ships of 1,000 gross tonnage or over. The use of foreign registered ships to carry Australian cargoes between Australian ports is permitted under a permit scheme, with either Single Voyage Permit (SVP) or a Continuous Voyage Permit (CVP) being issued to ships. Between 1996 and 2002 the number of permits issued has increased by about 350 per cent.
Over recent years the number of Australian registered and flagged ships has greatly declined, from 75 ships in 1996 to less than 40 in 2007, by 2009 the number is
now approaching 30. Marine unions blame the decline on the shipping policy of the Howard government which permitted foreign ships to carry coastal traffic.
There have also been cases where locally operated ships have an Australian flag from the vessel, registering it overseas under a flag of convenience, then hiring foreign crews who earn up to about half the monthly rate of Australian sailors. Such moves were supported by the Howard government but opposed by maritime unions and the Australian Council of Trade Unions. The registration of the ships overseas also meant the earnings of the ships are not subject to Australian corporate taxation laws."
Transport in Australia,"Aviation
Qantas is the flag carrier of Australia. Australian National Airways was the predominant domestic carrier from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s. After World War II, Qantas was nationalised and its domestic operations were transferred to Trans Australia Airlines in 1946. The Two Airlines Policy was formally established in 1952 to ensure the viability of both airlines. However, ANA's leadership was quickly eroded by TAA, and it was acquired by Ansett Airways in 1957. The duopoly continued for the next four decades. In the mid-1990s TAA was merged with Qantas and later privatised. Ansett collapsed in September 2001. In the following years, Virgin Australia became a challenger to Qantas. Both companies launched low-cost subsidiaries Jetstar and Tigerair Australia respectively.
Overseas flights from Australia to the United Kingdom via the Eastern Hemisphere are known as the Kangaroo Route, whereas flights via the Western Hemisphere are known as the Southern Cross Route. In 1948, the first commercial flight from Australia to Africa was flown by Qantas, launching what is known as the Wallaby Route. In 1954, the first flight from Australia to North America was completed, as a 60-passenger Qantas aircraft connected Sydney with San Francisco and Vancouver, having fuel stops at Fiji, Canton Island and Hawaii. In November 1982, a Pan Am 747SP flew the first non-stop commercial flight from Los Angeles to Sydney. Airport transfer provides a seamless and efficient transportation solution for travelers. A non-stop flight between Australia and Europe was first completed in March 2018 from Perth to London.
There are many airports around Australia paved or unpaved. A 2004 estimate put the number of airports at 448. The busiest airports in Australia are:"
Transport in Australia,"Sydney Airport Sydney, New South Wales SYD
Melbourne Airport Melbourne, Victoria MEL
Brisbane Airport Brisbane, Queensland BNE
Perth Airport Perth, Western Australia PER
Adelaide Airport Adelaide, South Australia ADL
Gold Coast Airport Gold Coast, Queensland OOL
Cairns Airport Cairns, Queensland CNS
Canberra Airport Canberra, Australian Capital Territory CBR
Hobart International Airport Hobart, Tasmania HBA
Darwin International Airport, Northern Territory DRW
Townsville Airport Townsville, Queensland TSV"
Transport in Australia,"Airports with paved runways
There are 305 airports with paved runways:"
Transport in Australia,"Over 3,047 m (9,997 ft): 10
2,438 to 3,047 m (7,999 to 9,997 ft): 12
1,524 to 2,437 m (5,000 to 7,995 ft): 131
914 to 1,523 m (2,999 to 4,997 ft): 139
Under 914 m (2,999 ft): 13 (2004 estimate)"
Transport in Australia,"Airports with unpaved runways
There are 143 airports with unpaved runways:"
Transport in Australia,"1,524 to 2,437 m (5,000 to 7,995 ft): 17
914 to 1,523 m (2,999 to 4,997 ft): 112
Under 914 m (2,999 ft): 14 (2004 estimate)"
Transport in Australia,"Environmental impact
The environmental impact of transport in Australia is considerable. In 2009, transport emissions made up 15.3% of Australia's total greenhouse gas emissions. Between 1990 and 2009, transport emissions grew by 34.6%, the second-highest growth rate in emissions after stationary energy.
The Australian Energy Regulator and state agencies such as the New South Wales Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal set and regulate electricity prices, thereby lowering production and consumer cost."
Transport in Australia,"See also
Economic history of Australia
Inland Railway
Lonie Report"
Transport in Australia,"References
Sources
This article incorporates public domain material from The World Factbook (2024 ed.). CIA. (Archived 2000 edition.)"
Transport in Australia,"Further reading
Unstead, R. J. ""From Bullock Dray to Tin Lizzie."" History Today (June 1968), Vol. 18 Issue 6, pp 406–414 online. Covers 1788 to 1920, regarding ships, bullock drays, concord coaches, camels, railways, buggies, horse bucks, trams, and automobiles."
Transport in Australia,External links
Transport in Australia,"Australia Transport Statistics
Railway maps
Driving time calculator for NSW Archived 10 August 2013 at the Wayback Machine
Road map of Australia Archived 28 September 2015 at the Wayback Machine"
Australian Intelligence Community,"The Australian Intelligence Community (AIC) and the National Intelligence Community (NIC) or National Security Community of the Australian Government are the collectives of statutory intelligence agencies, policy departments, and other government agencies concerned with protecting and advancing the national security and national interests of the Commonwealth of Australia. The intelligence and security agencies of the Australian Government have evolved since the Second World War and the Cold War and saw transformation and expansion during the Global War on Terrorism with military deployments in Afghanistan, Iraq and against ISIS in Syria. Key international and national security issues for the Australian Intelligence Community include terrorism and violent extremism, cybersecurity, transnational crime, the rise of China, and Pacific regional security.
The National Security Committee of Cabinet (NSC) is a Cabinet committee and the peak Australian Government decision-making body for national security, intelligence, foreign policy, and defence matters. It is chaired by the Prime Minister and is composed of the Deputy Prime Minister, Attorney-General, Treasurer, Minister for Foreign Affairs, Minister for Defence, and Minister for Home Affairs."
Australian Intelligence Community,"History
During World War I, in January 1916, the UK Government established an Australian branch of the Imperial Counter Espionage Bureau, known as the Australian Special Intelligence Bureau (SIB). In 1919 the Commonwealth Police Force and the Special Intelligence Bureau merged to form the Investigation Branch (IB).
During World War II Commonwealth Security Service was established.
In 1946 Commonwealth Investigation Service (CIS) took over security intelligence functions. In 1949 Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) was established.
In the late 1940s the Australian Government established a foreign intelligence organisation in the Department of Defence. In 1952 it became the Australian Secret Service, renamed as the Australian Secret Intelligence Service in 1954.
In 1947 a permanent signals intelligence agency in the Department of Defence was established, called the Defence Signals Bureau. It changed its name to the Defence Signals Branch in 1949, the Defence Signals Division in 1964, the Defence Signals Directorate in 1978, and the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) in 2013.
In 1947 the Department of Defence established the Joint Intelligence Bureau (JIB) which was renamed the Joint Intelligence Organisation (JIO) in 1969 and then the Defence Intelligence Organisation (DIO) in 1989.
In 1977 an additional intelligence analysis agency, the Office of National Assessments (ONA), was created in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. It was renamed the Office of National Intelligence (ONI) in 2018."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Overview
The Australian government's National Security Strategy includes six core intelligence agencies in the Australian Intelligence Community (AIC), and defines the National Intelligence Community (NIC) as comprising policy departments and other government agencies. The Office of National Intelligence further classifies the six AIC agencies as collection or assessment agencies, and plays a unique all-source intelligence assessment and intergovernmental co-ordination role."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Australian Intelligence Community
National Intelligence Community
Roles and threats
The Australian Government 2008 National Security Strategy defined the Australian Intelligence Community (AIC) as the six core intelligence agencies (Office of National Assessments (ONA), Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), Defence Intelligence Organisation (DIO), Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation (AGO)) and the National Intelligence Community (NIC) as policy departments and other government agencies such as the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and the Australian Federal Police. The Office of National Assessments further classifies the six agencies of the Australian Intelligence Community as collection (ASIO, ASIS, ASD, AGO) or assessment agencies (ONA, DIO). The Office of National Assessments itself plays a unique all-source intelligence assessment and intergovernmental co-ordination role.
As a middle power and G20 economy in the international community and a regional power in the Asia-Pacific and Indo-Pacific, Australia has played a major role in international security. The Australian Government is a member of the Five Eyes intelligence community, the Australia, New Zealand, United States Security Treaty, the Five Power Defence Arrangements, and the Commonwealth of Nations. The foreign policy of Australia is guided by its commitment to multilateralism and the United Nations and regionalism with the Pacific Islands Forum and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations alongside strong bilateral relations particularly in Oceania, Southeast Asia, the alliance with the United States, and Australia–China relations.
The Australian Defence Force has also deployed around the world for United Nations peacekeeping, regional peacekeeping operations including with the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands and the International Force for East Timor, humanitarian relief, counterterrorism and special operations, border security in Operation Resolute, airborne surveillance operations and maritime monitoring operations in the South China Sea and South West Pacific, counterinsurgency and security assistance such as with the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan with Operation Slipper and Operation Highroad, and the fight against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant with Operation Okra.
Domestically, the rise of violent extremism and threats of both Islamic and right-wing terrorism are key concerns of the Australian Government. Crime in Australia, including cybercrime and transnational crime such as human trafficking, arms trafficking, and the illegal drug trade, are ongoing risks to the security and safety of Australia."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Governance and Coordination
National Security Committee of Cabinet
The National Security Committee of Cabinet (NSC) is a Cabinet committee and the peak ministerial decision-making body on national security, intelligence and defence matters. Decisions of the Committee do not require the endorsement of the Cabinet. It is chaired by the Prime Minister and the membership includes the Deputy Prime Minister, Attorney-General, Treasurer, Minister for Foreign Affairs, Minister for Defence, Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, and the ministerial Cabinet Secretary. Attendance also includes the Secretaries for each respective public service department, as well as the Chief of the Defence Force, the Director-General of Security and the Directors-General of the Office of National Assessments and the Australian Secret Intelligence Service."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Secretaries Committee on National Security
The Secretaries Committee on National Security (SCNS) (formerly the Secretaries Committee on Intelligence and Security) is the peak interdepartmental officials-level committee considering national security matters in support of the National Security Committee. It considers all major matters to be put before the NSC and has a strong role in ensuring that Australia maintains a coordinated policy approach on all national security issues. Membership of the SCNS includes the Secretaries of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Attorney-General's Department, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Department of Defence, the Department of the Treasury, the Chief of the Australian Defence Force, and the Director-General of the Office of National Assessments. Other senior officials including the Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police, the Commissioner of the Australian Border Force, and the chief executive officerof the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, the Director-General of Security (Australian Security Intelligence Organisation), the Director-General of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, and the Directors of the Defence Intelligence Organisation, the Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation, and the Australian Signals Directorate."
Australian Intelligence Community,"National Intelligence Coordination Committee
The National Intelligence Coordination Committee (NICC) was formed in 2008 to provide strategic co-ordination for the effectiveness and integration of the national intelligence efforts. It is chaired by the Deputy Secretary of National Security and International Policy of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. The National Intelligence Coordination Committee comprises the chiefs of the ONA, ASIS, ASIO, DIO, ASD, AGO, AFP, ACIC, ABF, as well as the Deputy Secretary for Strategic Policy and Intelligence of the Department of Defence, the Deputy Secretary for National Security and Emergency Management of the Attorney-General's Department, and the Deputy Secretary responsible for international security of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
The National Intelligence Collection Management Committee (NICMC) is a subcommittee of the National Intelligence Coordination Committee and is responsible for setting specific requirements and evaluating collection effort against each of the National Intelligence Priorities (NIPs). It is chaired by the Director General of the Office of National Assessments.
The National Intelligence Open Source Committee (NIOSC) is a subcommittee of the National Intelligence Coordination Committee and is responsible for enhancing the co-ordination and capabilities of the national intelligence community's open source efforts. It is chaired by the Director General of the Office of National Assessments."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Australia-New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee
The Australia-New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee (ANZCTC) is a bilateral and intergovernmental high level body to co-ordinate counterterrorism capabilities, crisis management, command and control, intelligence and investigation functions composed of representatives from the Australian Government, Australian state and territory governments and the New Zealand Government. Formerly the National Counter-Terrorism Committee (NCTC), in October 2012, the New Zealand Government became members to encourage closer dialogue on matters of bilateral interest relevant to counter-terrorism. It was established by the Inter-Governmental Agreement in October 2002 to contribute to the security of the Australian community through co-ordination of a nationwide cooperative framework, known as the National Counter-Terrorism Plan. The Commonwealth Counter-Terrorism Coordinator is the Co-Chair of the Australia-New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Australian Counter-Terrorism Centre
The Australian Counter-Terrorism Centre (ACTC) is an intergovernmental multi-agency body that coordinates counterterrorism in Australia, overseen by the Joint Counter Terrorism Board (JCTB) consisting of senior government officials. The ACTC provides strategic direction to set strategic counter-terrorism priorities, co-ordinate counter-terrorism policy, inform operational counter-terrorism priorities, evaluate performance on priorities, and identify and fix impediments to effective co-ordination of counterterrorism. Membership of the ACTC includes senior officials from the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, the Australian Signals Directorate, the Australian Border Force, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre. The Commonwealth Counter-Terrorism Coordinator is the Co-Chair of the Joint Counter Terrorism Board."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Australian Government Crisis Committee
The Australian Government Crisis Committee (AGCC) is the national co-ordination body composed of Ministers and senior officials from Australian Government agencies convened by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and supported by the Crisis Coordination Centre of Emergency Management Australia. AGCC may convene in response to any crisis, including a terrorist act, where the scope and resourcing of Commonwealth Government support to States and Territories requires senior officials' level co-ordination. The purpose of the AGCC is to ensure effective co-ordination of information, intelligence and response options to support the NSC. The AGCC does not extend to managing the deployment of resources or other activities of operational agencies.
The National Crisis Committee (NCC) is a national intergovernmental body for crisis co-ordination composed of senior officials from Commonwealth, State and Territory governments. It would be convened in the event of a terrorist act to co-ordinate information exchange regarding response and recovery within the Commonwealth Government and with the States and Territories. It is chaired by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and supported by the Crisis Coordination Centre of Emergency Management Australia."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Cyber Security Operations Board
The Cyber Security Operations Board (CSOB) is a secretary and agency head-level body responsible for strategic oversight of the government's operational cyber security capabilities and co-ordination of cyber security measures. It specifically oversees the work of the Australian Cyber Security Centre, the intergovernmental and interagency cybersecurity hub hosted by the Australian Signals Directorate. The Board is chaired by the Secretary of the Attorney-General's Department."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Policy
Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet
The National Security and International Policy Group of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, led by the Deputy Secretary for National Security and International Policy, provides advice on Australia's foreign, trade and treaty matters, defence, intelligence, non-proliferation, counter-terrorism, law enforcement, border security and emergency management matters, coordinates security-related science and technology research matters, and plays a co-ordinating leadership role in the development of integrated, whole-of-government national security policy. The National Security and International Policy Group comprises three divisions each led by a First Assistant Secretary as well as the Office of the Counter-Terrorism Coordinator with the rank of Deputy Secretary."
Australian Intelligence Community,"The International Division provides advice, co-ordination and leadership on Australia's foreign, trade, aid and treaty matters and priorities, including bilateral relations, relationships with regional and international organisations, free trade negotiations and whole-of-government priorities for the overseas aid program. It also includes the South, South-East Asia, Americas and the Middle East Branch and the North Asia, Europe, Pacific, Africa and Trade Branch.
The National Security Division provides advice, co-ordination and leadership on integrated, whole-of-government policy matters, priorities and strategy in the areas of military operations, defence strategy, domestic security and critical infrastructure protection. This Division is divided into the Defence Branch and the Domestic Security Unit."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Department of Home Affairs
The Department of Home Affairs was established on the 20 December 2017 through Administrative Arrangements Order bringing together the national security, law enforcement and emergency management functions of the Attorney-General's Department portfolio (including the AFP, and the ACIC), the entire Department of Immigration and Border Protection portfolio and the Australian Border Force, the transport security functions of the Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development, the counter-terrorism and cybersecurity functions of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, and the multicultural affairs functions of the Department of Social Services. ASIO will be transfer to Home Affairs once enabling legislations is pass by Parliament.
The Department of Home Affairs includes the following departmental units with responsibilities for national security and intelligence policy and coordination: "
Australian Intelligence Community,"Intelligence Division
National Security and Law Enforcement Policy Division
Transnational Serious and Organised Crime Division
Countering Violent Extremism Centre"
Australian Intelligence Community,"Commonwealth Counter-Terrorism Coordinator
The Commonwealth Counter-Terrorism Coordinator and the Centre for Counter-Terrorism Coordination within the Department of Home Affairs (formerly within the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet) provides strategic advice and support to the Minister for Home Affairs and the Prime Minister on all aspects of counterterrorism and countering violent extremism policy and co-ordination across government. The Office was created after recommendations from the Review of Australia's Counter-Terrorism Machinery in 2015 in response to the 2014 Sydney hostage crisis. The Commonwealth Counter-Terrorism Coordinator also serves as the Co-Chair and or Chair of the Australian and New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee and the Joint Counter-Terrorism Board, with the Centre for Counter-Terrorism Coordination providing secretariat support to the Australian Counter-Terrorism Centre and the Australian and New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee. Along with the Deputy Counter-Terrorism Coordinator, the Centre for Counter-Terrorism Coordination is also composed of the Counter-Terrorism Strategic Coordination Branch, the Domestic Operations and Engagement Branch, the Counter-Terrorism Capability Branch, and the Home Affairs Counter-Terrorism Policy Branch."
Australian Intelligence Community,"National Cyber Coordinator
The National Cyber Coordinator and the Cyber Security Policy Division within the Department of Home Affairs (formerly within the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet) is responsible for cyber security policy and the implementation of the Australian Government Cyber Security Strategy. The National Cyber Coordinator also ensures effective partnerships between Commonwealth, state and territory governments, the private sector, non-governmental organisations, the research community and the international partners. The National Cyber Coordinator also works closely with the Australian Cyber Security Centre and the Australian Ambassador for Cyber Issues.
CERT Australia is the national computer emergency response team responsible for cybersecurity responses and providing cyber security advice and support to critical infrastructure and other systems of national interest. CERT Australia works closely with other Australian Government agencies, international CERTs, and the private sector. It is also a key element in the Australian Cyber Security Centre, sharing information and working closely with ASIO, the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Signals Directorate, the Defence Intelligence Organisation and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Critical Infrastructure Centre
The Australian Government Critical Infrastructure Centre (CIC) is responsible for whole-of-government co-ordination of critical infrastructure protection and national security risk assessments and advice. It was established on 23 January 2017 and brings together expertise and capability from across the Australian Government and functions in close consultation states and territory governments, regulators, and the private sector. The Centre also supports the Foreign Investment Review Board."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Crisis Coordination Centre
The Australian Government Crisis Coordination Centre (CCC) is an all-hazards co-ordination facility, which operates on a 24/7 basis, and supports the Australian Government Crisis Committee (AGCC) and the National Crisis Committee (NCC). The CCC provides whole-of-government all-hazards monitoring and situational awareness for domestic and international events and coordinates Australian Government responses to major domestic incidents. The Crisis Coordination Centre is managed by the Crisis Coordination Branch of Emergency Management Australia."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
The International Security Division is the international security and foreign intelligence policy and governance co-ordination entity of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. It is divided into three branches each led by an Assistant Secretary:"
Australian Intelligence Community,"The Counter-Terrorism Branch coordinates international counter-terrorism policy and activities. The branch also supports the Australian Ambassador for Counter-Terrorism.
The Australian Ambassador for Cyber Affairs with the rank of Assistant Secretary is responsible for leading the Australian Government's international efforts in cybersecurity and cybercrime, supporting cyber capacity building in the Asia-Pacific region, and advocating for internet freedoms. The Ambassador will work with the Special Adviser to the Prime Minister on Cyber Security to implement the Cyber Security Strategy and will encourage collaboration between Australian Government, business, academia and communities to improve cyber security.
The Arms Control and Counter-Proliferation Branch coordinates international arms control, disarmament, and non-proliferation policy.
The Strategic Issues and Intelligence Branch provides analysis, research and advice on strategic issues, foreign intelligence and other international security affairs. The Branch includes the Intelligence Policy and Liaison Section."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Department of Defence
The Defence Strategic Policy and Intelligence Group was established on 8 February 2016 as a key recommendation of the First Principles Review of the Australian Defence Organisation. The Group integrates the policy, strategy and intelligence functions of the Australian Defence Organisation to deliver high-quality advice to the Australian Government, the Secretary of the Department of Defence and the Chief of the Defence Force. The Group is led by a Deputy Secretary and comprises four divisions and three intelligence agencies."
Australian Intelligence Community,"The Strategic Policy Division develops policy, military strategy and strategic planning and advice for the Australian Government, senior Defence leaders and other government agencies on the strategic implications of defence and national security matters. The Division comprises the Military Strategy Branch, the Strategic Policy Branch, the Arms Control Branch, and the Intelligence Policy Integration Branch.
The International Policy Division provides strategic-level policy advice to the Australian Government on the central issues of Australia's defence policy, including international defence relations and ADF operations. The Division comprises the South East Asia Branch, the Global Interests Branch, the Major Powers Branch, the Pacific and Timor-Leste Branch, and numerous overseas military attaché postings.
The Contestability Division provides arms-length internal contestability functions across the capability life-cycles as to ensure the capability needs and requirements of the Australian Defence Organisation are aligned with strategy and resources.
The Defence Industry Policy Division has responsibility for the implementation of defence industry policy, engagement and innovation as well as Australian export controls."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Attorney-General's Department
The Attorney-General's Department is the chief law office of Australia. On the 20 December 2017 by Administrative Arrangements Order, law enforcement and emergency management functions of the department moved to the newly established Department of Home Affairs. ASIO will remain part of the Attorney-General's Department until legislations is pass for transition to Home Affairs. However, the Attorney-General's Department will have responsibilities for the oversight and integrity of the Australian Intelligence Community through the transfer of the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor, and the Commonwealth Ombudsman from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. The Attorney-General of Australia also retains the responsibility for the authorisation of ASIO operations, the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions, and various other criminal law policy matters.
The Attorney-General's Department includes the Security and Criminal Law Division which is responsible for providing policy and legislative advice with regards to intelligence, criminal, electronic surveillance and counter-terrorism law, anti-corruption, fraud, and protective security policy. The Division is also responsible for international arrangements for anti-corruption, intelligence management within the department, and whole-of-government advice for criminal offences. The Division includes the National Security Coordination Unit, the Communications Security and Intelligence Branch."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Primary Entities
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation
The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) is Australia's national security service with the main role is to gather information and produce intelligence that will enable it to warn the government about activities or situations that might endanger Australia's national security. The ASIO Act defines ""security"" as the protection of Australia's territorial and border integrity from serious threats, and the protection of Australia and its people from espionage, sabotage, politically motivated violence, the promotion of communal violence, attacks on Australia's defence system, and acts of foreign interference. ASIO also includes the Counter-Terrorism Control Centre which is responsible for setting and managing counter-terrorism priorities, identifying intelligence requirements, and ensuring the processes of collecting and distributing counter terrorism information are fully harmonised and effective. The National Threat Assessment Centre is also part of ASIO and is responsible for analysis of terrorist threats to Australian interests overseas and terrorist threats and threats from violent protests in Australia.
The Business Liaison Unit (BLU) of ASIO provides a conduit between the private sector and the Australian Intelligence Community. It seeks to provide industry security and risk managers with credible, intelligence-backed reporting that enables them to brief executive management and staff authoritatively, and to use this knowledge for their risk management and continuity planning."
Australian Intelligence Community,"National Threat Assessment Centre
The National Threat Assessment Centre (NTAC) of ASIO prepares assessments of the likelihood and probable nature of terrorism and protest violence, including against Australia, Australians and Australian interests here and abroad, special events and international interests in Australia. Threat Assessments support jurisdictions and agencies to make risk management decisions to determine how best to respond to the threat and mitigate risk."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Counter Terrorism Control Centre
The Counter Terrorism Control Centre (CTCC) is a multi-agency located within ASIO which sets and manages counter-terrorism priorities, identifies intelligence requirements, and ensures that the processes of collecting and distributing counter-terrorism information are fully harmonised and effective across the spectrum of Australia's counter-terrorism activity. The CTCC has senior level representation from ASIS, AFP, ASD, and AGO."
Australian Intelligence Community,"National Interception Technical Assistance Centre
The National Interception Technical Assistance Centre (NiTAC) of ASIO is an inter-agency central point of reference for technical assistance, advice, and support particularly regarding telecommunications interception and signals intelligence."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Australian Secret Intelligence Service
The Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) is Australia's overseas secret HUMINT collection agency with the mission to protect and promote Australia's vital interests through the provision of unique foreign intelligence services as directed by Government. ASIS's primary goal is to obtain and distribute secret intelligence about the capabilities, intentions and activities of individuals or organisations outside Australia, which may impact on Australia's interests and the well-being of its citizens."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation
The Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation (AGO) was established by amalgamating the Australian Imagery Organisation, the Directorate of Strategic Military Geographic Information, and the Defence Topographic Agency to provide geospatial intelligence, from imagery and other sources, in support of the Australian Defence Force and national security interests."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Geospatial Analysis Centre
The AGO hosts the Geospatial Analysis Centre (GAC) outside of Bendigo, Victoria which provides geospatial intelligence support to the Australian Defence Organisation and the Australian Intelligence Community across geospatial information and mapping services including targeting foundation data, and three-dimensional modelling and visualisation products."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Australian Signals Directorate
The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) is responsible for collection, analysis and distribution of foreign signals intelligence and is the national authority on communications, information, cyber and computer security. The ASD also includes the Cyber Security Operations Centre which coordinates and assists with operational responses to cyber events of national importance and provides government with a consolidated understanding of the cyber threat through its intrusion detection, analytic and threat assessment capabilities."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap
The Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap is a joint Australia-United States military signals intelligence and satellite ground station outside of Alice Springs, Northern Territory. The Chief of the Facility is a senior official of the United States Intelligence Community (usually the Central Intelligence Agency) and the Deputy Chief serves concurrently as the Assistant Secretary for Technical Intelligence of the Australian Signals Directorate. Personnel from the Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation, the Defence Science and Technology Group, the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency, its National Security Agency, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, the United States Naval Network Warfare Command, the United States Air Force Twenty-Fifth Air Force (including the 566th Intelligence Squadron of the 544th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Group), the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command, and the Marine Cryptologic Support Battalion are also present."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Australian Cyber Security Centre
The Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) works across cybersecurity including analysing, investigating and reporting cyber threats and co-ordinating national security capabilities and operations for incidents of cybercrime, cyberterrorism, and cyberwarfare. The ACSC is joint responsibility of the Minister for Defence and the Attorney-General. The Deputy Director of the Australian Signals Directorate serves as the Coordinator of the Australian Cyber Security Centre which integrates the national security cyber capabilities across Defence Intelligence Organisation strategic intelligence analysts, the Computer Emergency Response Team of the Attorney-General's Department, Australian Security Intelligence Organisation cyber investigations and telecommunication security specialists, Australian Federal Police cyber crime investigators, and Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission cyber crime threat intelligence specialists."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Defence Intelligence Organisation
The Defence Intelligence Organisation (DIO) is the national military intelligence and intelligence assessment agency that provides services and advice at the national security level with the mandate to support the Australian Defence Force, Department of Defence and the Australian Government and national security decision-making and to assist with the planning and conduct of Australian Defence Force operations."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Office of National Intelligence
The Office of National Intelligence (ONI) produces all-source assessments on international political, strategic and economic developments as an independent body directly accountable to the Prime Minister and provides advice and assessments to other Senior Ministers in the National Security Committee of Cabinet, and Senior Officials of Government Departments. ONI operates under its own legislation and has responsibility for co-ordinating/analysing and verifying/evaluating Australia's foreign intelligence priorities & activities. It draws its information from other intelligence agencies, as well as diplomatic reporting, information and reporting from other government agencies, and open source material."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Open Source Centre
The Open Source Centre (OSC) of ONI collects, researches, and analyses open source information in support of Australia's national security. In line with ONI's mandate under the ONI Act, the OSC focuses on international developments that affect Australia's national interests. Its principal consumers are the departments and agencies that make up Australia's national intelligence community."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Secondary Entities
Australian Federal Police
The Australian Federal Police (AFP) is the federal law enforcement agency under the Department of Home Affairs. It provides criminal intelligence and other intelligence capabilities across all operational functions and crime types. Divided into operational intelligence teams, the division collects, collates, analyses and disseminates intelligence on nationally significant criminal issues of interest to the AFP. Areas of intelligence operations extend to crime related to people smuggling, illicit drugs, human trafficking and sexual servitude, financial crime, counter-terrorism, high-tech crime, and child sex tourism.
The Intelligence Division is the criminal intelligence and national security intelligence division of the AFP. The Intelligence Division is project-driven and multi-jurisdictional in its functions, using capabilities from the AFP National Headquarters and the relevant field offices."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Joint Counter Terrorism Teams
The Joint Counter Terrorism Teams (JCTT) of the Australian Federal Police operate in each state and territory jurisdiction consisting of AFP, state and territory police, and ASIO officers. JCTTs conduct investigations to prevent, respond to and investigate terrorist threats and attacks in Australia."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Australian Bomb Data Centre
The Australian Bomb Data Centre (ABDC) of the AFP is Australia's primary source of information and intelligence relating to the unlawful use of explosives. The ABDC officially began operations on 1 July 1978, and it is therefore one of the oldest bomb data centres in the world. The ABDC provides statistical reporting on all explosive incidents reported to the Centre by Australian policing and military agencies. This includes any minor incidents or acts of vandalism reported by the relevant agency. The ABDC is concerned both with criminals who use explosives for their own benefit and with those who use explosives and bombs for terrorism. It maintains records of all bomb-related incidents reported to it, regardless of design, target or motive. The ABDC is staffed by members of the AFP as well as members of the Australian Defence Force."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Australian High Tech Crime Centre
The Australian High Tech Crime Centre (AHTCC) is a national cybercrime and cybersecurity initiative located within the AFP with staff also from the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and Australian Signals Directorate. The primary role of the AHTCC is to co-ordinate the efforts of Australian law enforcement in combating serious, complex and multi-jurisdictional high tech crimes, especially those beyond the capability of single policing jurisdictions in Australia. Secondary roles include protecting the information infrastructure of Australia, and providing information to other law enforcement to help combat online crime."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission
The Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC) is Australia's national criminal intelligence agency with investigative, research and information delivery functions under the Attorney-General's Department. It has a range of statutory functions centred on intelligence collection, dissemination and investigations regarding nationally significant, complex, serious and or major crimes. The ACIC recommends national criminal intelligence priorities (NCIPs), works collaboratively with international partners and federal, state and territory agencies, and maintains ongoing powers similar to a Royal Commission. The ACIC shapes the national agenda on fighting serious crime, provides solutions for national serious crime priorities and maintains a leading capability in national criminal intelligence.
The ACIC is responsible for delivering national policing information services, developing and maintaining national information-sharing services between state, territory and federal law enforcement agencies, consolidating criminal intelligence, and providing national criminal history record checks for accredited agencies. The ACIC maintains and provides the National Automated Fingerprint Identification System (NAFIS), the National Criminal Investigation DNA Database (NCIDD), the National Child Offender System (NCOS), the Child Exploitation Tracking System (CETS), the National Police Reference System (NPRS), the National Firearms Licensing and Registration System (NFLRS), the National Vehicles of Interest Register, the National Police Checking Service, National Missing Persons and Victim System (NMPVS) and is developing the National DNA Investigative Capability (NDIC)."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre
The Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC) is the national financial intelligence agency under the Department of Home Affairs. It is responsible for gathering intelligence on and regulating money laundering, terrorism financing and major financial crimes."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Australian Border Force
The Australian Border Force (ABF) of the Department of Home Affairs manages the security and integrity of Australia's borders. It works closely with other government and international agencies to detect and deter unlawful movement of goods and people across the border."
Australian Intelligence Community,"The Counter Terrorism Unit (CTU) of the ABF are teams of officers based at major international airports who provide a front-line response capability to act when persons of national security interest attempt to cross the border. The CTU randomly assesses individuals and also relies upon intelligence to target individuals.
The Intelligence Division of the ABF is responsible for the assessment of new and emerging threats to the border and customs and the provision of intelligence and targeting that informs and underpins risk mitigation. The division consists of the Intelligence Analysis and Assessments Branch and the Operational Intelligence Branch.
The National Border Targeting Centre (NBTC) of the ABF is a border security intelligence organisation established to target high-risk international passengers and cargo, particularly illicit substances and potential terrorists. The NBTC includes staff from the AFP, ASIO, ACC, DFAT, Department of Agriculture, and the Office of Transport Security.
The Strategic Border Command (SBC) of the ABF is the formal command and control entity for border security, distinct from the Border Protection Command. The SBC comprises the Investigations, Compliance and Enforcement Branch and the Special Investigations and Programmes Branch along with regional commands in NSW/ACT, VIC/TAS, QLD, WA, and Central.
The Maritime Border Command is a Royal Australian Navy and Australian Border Force joint command which provides security for Australia's offshore maritime areas. Combining the resources and expertise of the ABF and the RAN, and working with the Australian Fisheries Management Authority and other government agencies, it delivers a coordinated national approach to Australia's offshore maritime security."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Oversight
Executive Oversight
The Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security (IGIS) is the independent statutory office in the Commonwealth of Australia responsible for reviewing the activities of the six intelligence agencies which collectively comprise the Australian Intelligence Community (AIC). With own motion powers in addition to considering complaints or requests from ministers, IGIS is a key element of the accountability regime for Australia's intelligence and security agencies.
The Independent National Security Legislation Monitor (INSLM) is the independent review body of the Australian Government responsible for reviewing the operation, effectiveness and implications of Australia's counter‑terrorism and national security legislation on an ongoing basis. The INSLM also considers whether legislation contains appropriate safeguards for protecting the rights of individuals, remains proportionate to any threat of terrorism or threat to national security or both, and remains necessary. Australian security and intelligence agencies provide the INSLM with information (both classified and unclassified), relevant to the above functions. This is under compulsion in some circumstances. The INSLM makes recommendations on these matters in reports, which are then tabled in Parliament.
The Independent Reviewer of Adverse Security Assessments is an independent official of the Attorney-General's Department with the responsibilities to review Australian Security Intelligence Organisation adverse security assessments given to the Department of Immigration and Border Protection in relation to people who remain in immigration detention and have been found to engage Australia's protection obligations under international law, and not be eligible for a permanent protection visa, or who have had their permanent protection visa cancelled. The Independent Reviewer of Adverse Security Assessments examines all material relied upon by ASIO in making the security assessment, as well as other relevant material, and forms an opinion on whether the assessment is an appropriate outcome. The applicant may also submit material for the Independent Reviewer's consideration. The Independent Reviewer provides their recommendations to the Director-General of Security. The Director-General must respond to the reviewer and may determine whether to take action if he agrees with the reviewer's opinion. The applicant will be told the outcome of the review, including the Director-General's response. The Attorney-General of Australia, Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, and the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security are also provided with copies of the Independent Reviewer's recommendations.
The Australian Human Rights Commission is the Australian national human rights institution and the independent statutory body with the responsibility for investigating alleged infringements under Australia's anti-discrimination legislation in relation to Commonwealth agencies.
The Commonwealth Ombudsman is the national ombudsman of Australian which has responsibilities to investigate complaints about the actions and decisions of Australian Government agencies and services delivered by most private contractors for the Australian Government, to and oversee complaint investigations conducted by the Australian Federal Police. The Ombudsman can also investigate complaints about delays in processing Freedom of Information requests (FOI) and complaints about FOI charges. The Commonwealth Ombudsman is also the Australian Defence Force Ombudsman, Immigration Ombudsman, Postal Industry Ombudsman, Taxation Ombudsman, and Law Enforcement Ombudsman. In addition, the Ombudsman has a number of statutory oversight functions in relation to law enforcement agency use of special powers, including those under the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979, Surveillance Devices Act 2004 and Part 1AB of the Crimes Act 1914.
The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner is an independent Australian Government agency, functioning as the national data protection authority for Australia, and reports to the Parliament of Australia.
The Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) is the national auditor for the Parliament of Australia and Government of Australia. The ANAO supports the Auditor-General of Australia with the main functions and powers under the Auditor-General Act 1997 (Cth) including auditing financial statements of Commonwealth agencies and authorities in accordance with the Financial Management and Accountability Act 1997 (Cth) and conducting performance audits which are tabled in Parliament.
The Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity (ACLEI) is an Australian government statutory agency, created under the Law Enforcement Integrity Commissioner Act 2006. Its role is to support the Law Enforcement Integrity Commissioner, detecting and preventing corruption in the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, Australian Border Force, the Australian Federal Police, and Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre. Priority is given to investigations of serious and systemic political corruption.  ACLEI supports the Integrity Commissioner by collecting intelligence regarding corruption. The Integrity Commissioner is required to make recommendation to the federal government regarding improvements to legislation that will prevent corrupt practices or their early detection.
The Inspector of Transport Security is the national oversight entity for transport security and the Office of Transport Security. Under the Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development, the Inspector of Transport Security inquires into major transport or offshore security incidents or a pattern or series of incidents that point to a systemic failure or possible weakness of aviation or maritime transport security regulatory systems."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Parliamentary Oversight
The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS) is the parliamentary body responsible for oversight for the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, the Australian Signals Directorate, the Defence Intelligence Organisation, the Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation, and the Office of National Intelligence. The PJCIS's main function is the administrative and expenditure review and oversight of the primary agencies of the Australian Intelligence Community. The Committee does not review intelligence gathering or operational procedures or priorities, nor does it conduct inquiries into individual complaints about the activities of the intelligence agencies. The Committee comprises eleven members: five from the Senate and six from the House of Representatives. Six members are from the Government and five from the Opposition. Serving ministers are not allowed to be members.
The Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee is a standing committee of the Australian Senate with the responsibilities for the parliamentary oversight of the portfolios of the Department of Defence (Australia) and its agencies (including the Defence Intelligence Organisation, the Australian Signals Directorate, and the Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation) and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and its agencies (including the Australian Secret Intelligence Service). The Committee's purpose is to deal with legislative bills referred by the Senate and to oversee the budget estimates process and performance reporting of the portfolio entities.
The Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee is a standing committee of the Australian Senate with the responsibilities for the parliamentary oversight of the portfolios of the Attorney-General's Department and its agencies (including the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre, and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission) and the Department of Home Affairs and its agencies (including the Australian Federal Police and Australian Border Force). The Committee's purpose is to deal with legislative bills referred by the Senate and to oversee the budget estimates process and performance reporting of the portfolio entities.
The Senate Finance and Public Administration Committee is a standing committee of the Australian Senate with the responsibilities for the parliamentary oversight of the portfolios of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and its agencies (including the Office of National Assessments and the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security) and the Department of Finance and its agencies. The Committee's purpose is to deal with legislative bills referred by the Senate and to oversee the budget estimates process and performance reporting of the portfolio entities.
The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Law Enforcement is the parliamentary body responsible for oversight for the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission and the Australian Federal Police. It is tasked with monitoring, reviewing and reporting on the performance of the ACIC and AFP and to examine trends and changes in criminal activities in Australia.
The Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade is a joint parliamentary committee, administered through the House of Representatives, with responsibilities to consider and report on such matters relating to the portfolios of the Australian Defence Organisation and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade as may be referred to it by either the Parliament or a Minister. The Committee may also inquire into matters raised in annual reports of the portfolio departments and agencies or in reports of the Australian National Audit Office."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Judicial Review
The Federal Court of Australia is an Australian superior court of record which has jurisdiction to deal with most civil disputes governed by federal law (with the exception of family law matters), along with some summary (less serious) criminal matters. Cases are heard at first instance by single Judges. The Court includes an appeal division referred to as the Full Court comprising three Judges, the only avenue of appeal from which lies to the High Court of Australia. In the Australian court hierarchy, the Federal Court occupies a position equivalent to the Supreme Courts of each of the states and territories. In relation to the other Courts in the federal stream, it is equal to the Family Court of Australia, and superior to the Federal Circuit Court. It was established in 1976 by the Federal Court of Australia Act.
The Administrative Appeals Tribunal includes the Security Division, for appeals of applications regarding national security assessments under the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act 1979."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Related Entities
The Defence Science and Technology Group (DST Group) of the Department of Defence provides science and technology support for Australia's defence and national security needs. It is Australia's second largest government-funded science organisation after the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. The DST Group provides scientific and technical support to current defence operations, investigates future technologies for defence and national security applications, advises on the purchase and use of defence equipment, develops new defence capabilities, and enhances existing systems by improving performance and safety and reducing the cost of owning defence assets. The DST Group National Security and Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Division undertakes advanced scientific research and development into technologies across national security, military, and intelligence capabilities of the Australian Government. Research areas include cybersecurity, border security, forensic science, geospatial intelligence, measurement and signature intelligence, human intelligence analytics, and surveillance and reconnaissance systems.
The Office of Transport Security (OTS) is the protective security regulator for the aviation and maritime sectors and the principal transport security advisory entity of Australia. An entity of the Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development, the OTS works with the states and territories, other government agencies, international bodies, and the aviation and maritime industry to improve security and prevent transport security incidents. The OTS develops and provides transport security intelligence, transport security policy and planning, and transport security regulation and compliance.
The Australian Safeguards and Non-proliferation Office (ASNO) of Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is responsible for safeguarding and ensuring the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. ASNO consists of the Australian Safeguards Office (ASO), the Chemical Weapons Convention Office (CWCO), and the Australian Comprehensive Test Ban Office (ACTBO). ASNO ensures that Australia's international obligations are met under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Australia's NPT safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material (CPPNM) and Australia's various bilateral safeguards agreements. ASNO has four main areas of responsibility in the nuclear area which are application of safeguards in Australia, the physical protection and security of nuclear items in Australia, the operation of Australia's bilateral safeguards agreements, and the contribution to the operation and development of IAEA safeguards and the strengthening of the international nuclear non-proliferation regime. ASNO also ensures that Australia's international obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) are met whilst promoting their international implementation particularly in the Asia-Pacific. ASNO also contributes to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) and the CTBTO Preparatory Commission.
The Australian Army Intelligence Corps (AUSTINT) is a corps of the Australian Army for strategic, operational and tactical military intelligence. The Corps also provides staff to the Defence Intelligence Organisation, Australian Signals Directorate and Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation as well as major Australian Defence Force command headquarters.
The Australian Special Operations Command is a command within the Australian Defence Force uniting all Australian Army special forces including the Special Air Service Regiment and the Special Operations Engineer Regiment.
The Defence Security and Vetting Service (DSVS) (formerly the Defence Security Authority) supports the Department of Defence and the Australian Defence Force with protective security matters. The DSVS has responsibilities for developing and promulgating security policy that complies with Australian Government protective security policy, monitoring and reporting on security compliance, performance and risks, investigating serious and complex security incidents, granting security clearances for Defence and Defence Industry Security Program members, and conducting clearance revalidations and re-evaluations, assisting Groups and the Services with security policy implementation, and managing the Defence Industry Security Program. The DSVS also oversees the Australian Government Security Vetting Agency.
The Australian Defence Force Investigative Service (ADFIS) is the agency responsible for complex and major investigations involving the Australian Defence Force."
Australian Intelligence Community,"Legislation
Intelligence Services Act 2001
Intelligence Services Amendment Act 2004
Independent National Security Legislation Monitor Act 2010
Charter of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act 1979"
Australian Intelligence Community,"International Partnerships
UKUSA Agreement
ANZUS
Combined Communications Electronics Board"
Australian Intelligence Community,"Former Entities
The National Security Advisor (NSA) was a position that existed under the Rudd government and Gillard government from 2007 to 2013 which was the chief advisor for national security and international security policy and co-ordination, with the rank of Associate Secretary of the National Security and International Policy Group of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. The National Security Advisor served as the Chair and or Co-Chair of the Australian and New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee and the Joint Counter-Terrorism Board.
The Heads of Intelligence Agencies Meeting (HIAM) and Foreign Intelligence Coordination Committee (FCIC) were senior deliberative and co-ordination bodies of the Australian Intelligence Community for the consideration of issues relating specifically to Australia's foreign intelligence activities. It was chaired by the Director General of the Office of National Assessments.
The Defence Intelligence Board (DIB) is a former governance entity with responsibility for the oversight and strategic co-ordination of military intelligence and the Defence Intelligence and Security Group. Chaired by the Deputy Secretary for Intelligence and Security, the DIB included representation from ONA, the Defence Science and Technology Organisation, and Australian Army, the Royal Australian Navy, and the Royal Australian Air Force.
The Joint Intelligence Organisation is the predecessor to the Defence Intelligence Organisation and the Office of National Assessments with former responsibilities for the analysis of defence and foreign intelligence.
The Allied Intelligence Bureau was a joint United States-Australian-Dutch-British human intelligence and covert action agency in the Pacific Ocean theatre of World War II."
Australian Intelligence Community,"The Central Bureau was a joint Allied military intelligence signals intelligence organisation attached to the South West Pacific Command. Central Bureau's role was to research and decrypt intercepted Imperial Japanese Army land and air traffic and work in close co-operation with other signals intelligence units in the US, United Kingdom and India. 
The Fleet Radio Unit was a joint Royal Australian Navy-United States Navy signals intelligence unit in Melbourne (FRUMEL), attached to the United States Seventh Fleet.
The Combined Field Intelligence Service also known as the Coastwatchers was an Allied military intelligence initiative. The Australian Commonwealth Naval Board first established the coastwatching organisation, operated through the Naval Intelligence Division, in 1922. Originally confined to Australia, it expanded after the outbreak of war in 1939 to New Guinea and to the Solomon Islands. Coastwatchers were stationed on remote Pacific islands during the Pacific Ocean theatre of World War II to observe enemy movements and rescue stranded Allied personnel particularly in the South West Pacific theatre and as an early warning network during the Guadalcanal campaign.
The Services Reconnaissance Department also known as Special Operations Australia (SOA) and the Inter-Allied Services Department was an Australian Defence Force military intelligence and special reconnaissance unit during World War II. It was modelled initially on the British Special Operations Executive (SOE). The Allied Intelligence Bureau acted as its controlling body from 1942, with the Services Reconnaissance Department becoming Section A within the Allied Intelligence Bureau. The Services Reconnaissance Department oversaw intelligence-gathering, reconnaissance and raiding missions in Japanese-occupied areas of New Guinea, the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), Portuguese Timor (East Timor), the Malayan Peninsula, British Borneo and Singapore."
Australian Intelligence Community,"See also
List of intelligence agencies
Intelligence cycle
List of intelligence gathering disciplines
Australia"
Australian Intelligence Community,"Australian Defence Force
Australian Special Forces
Australian Police Tactical Groups
Australian Law Enforcement
Five Eyes"
Australian Intelligence Community,"ECHELON and Five Eyes
United States Intelligence Community
United Kingdom Intelligence Community
New Zealand Intelligence Community
Canadian Intelligence Community
Overseas"
Australian Intelligence Community,"Russian Intelligence Community
Chinese National Security
Japanese Security Police, National Public Safety Commission and Public Security Intelligence Agency
Indonesian National Police and Indonesian National Armed Forces"
Australian Intelligence Community,"References
External links
IGIS – Australian Intelligence Community Overview
ONA – Australian Intelligence Community Agencies, Functions, Accountability and Oversight (2006)
Security Challenges Vol. 3 No. 4 (11/2007) The Australian Intelligence Community in 2020
ONA History of the Australian Intelligence Community
DPMC 2004 Report of the Inquiry into Australian Intelligence Agencies
Australian Human Rights Commission Independent Review of the Intelligence Community April 2011
Office of National Assessments Timeline of the Australian Intelligence Community"
Economic history of Australia,The economic history of Australia traces the economic history of Australia since European settlement in 1788.
Economic history of Australia,"1788–1821
The European settlement of Australia began on 26 January 1788 at Port Jackson (modern Sydney, New South Wales), when the First Fleet arrived with more than 1,000 convicts, marines and a few free settlers, plus a vast quantity of stores to establish a penal colony in New South Wales. The United Kingdom claimed all of eastern Australia as its territory on the basis of terra nullius, though the actual landing and consequent settlement was initially confined to the Port Jackson area. According to the first census of 1788, as reported by Governor Phillip to Lord Sydney, the Home Secretary, the white population in the colony was 1,030, of which 753 were convicts and their children; the colony also had 7 horses, 2903 sheep, 749 swine, 6 rabbits, and 754 cattle. The Indigenous population was not counted or estimated, nor reported at that point. More settlers came with the arrival of the Second Fleet in 1789, and the Third Fleet in 1791, with other convict transports in the years that followed.
Governors of New South Wales had authority to make land grants to free settlers, emancipists (former convicts) and non-commissioned officers. Land grants were often subject to conditions, such as a quit rent (one shilling per 50 acres (200,000 m2) to be paid after five years) and a requirement for the grantee to reside on and cultivate the land. Whaling in Australia commenced in 1791, when Captain Thomas Melvill, commanding Britannia, one of 11 ships of the Third Fleet, and Captain Eber Bunker of William and Ann, after landing their passengers and cargo then went whaling and sealing in Australasian waters. Seal skins, Whale oil and baleen (whalebone) were valuable commodities and provided Australia with its first major export industries. Sealing and whaling contributed more to the colonial economy than land produce until the 1830s. When Governor Phillip left the colony in December 1792, the European population was 4,221, of whom 3,099 were convicts.
Hobart in what was then called Van Diemen's Land (modern Tasmania) was established in 1804 as a penal settlement. It was founded more to forestall a possible French claim to that part of Australia than for any immediate economic benefit to the Sydney settlement.
The colony of New South Wales barely survived its first years and was largely neglected for much of the following quarter-century while the British government was preoccupied until 1815 with the Napoleonic Wars. One very important British oversight was the provision of adequate coinage for the new colony and, because of the shortage of any sort of money, the real means of exchange during the first 25 years of settlement was rum. Though it did not solve the problem arising from the lack of coins, but in an attempt to put some order into the economy, in 1800, Governor Philip Gidley King set the value of a variety of foreign coins circulating in New South Wales. During this period the New South Wales Corps, whose officers had benefited most from access to land and imported goods (thus hopelessly entangling public and private interests), defied the authority of the governors. The New South Wales Corps was recalled in 1808.
Governor Macquarie was appointed in the following year. There was a change of policy under his administration towards the promotion of a private economy to support the penal regime, separate from the activities and interests of the colonial government. There was a significant increase in transportation after 1810, which provided cheap and skilled labour for the colony. As laborers, craftsmen, clerks and tradesmen, many convicts possessed the skills required in the new settlements. As their terms expired, they also added permanently to the free population.
The Blue Mountains were a barrier to the expansion of the colony. The crossing of the Blue Mountains in 1813 enabled the settlers to access and use the wealthy land west of the mountains for farming. Bathurst was established as Australia's first inland settlement. The first bank in Sydney, the Bank of New South Wales, was established in 1817. The Bank, and each private bank established afterwards, could issue its own paper money. During the 19th and early 20th century, the Bank of New South Wales opened branches, first throughout Australia and Oceania, including branches at Moreton Bay (Brisbane) in 1850, then in Victoria (1851), New Zealand (1861), South Australia (1877), Western Australia (1883), Fiji (1901), Papua (now part of Papua New Guinea) (1910) and Tasmania (1910).
In line with the British government's policy of concentrated land settlement for the colony, Governors of New South Wales tended to be conservative in making land grants. By the end of Macquarie's tenure in 1821, less than 1,000 square miles (3,000 km2) of land had been granted in the colony. Above all, agriculture was established on the basis of land grants to senior officials and emancipated convicts, and limited freedoms were allowed to convicts to supply a range of goods and services. Although economic life depended heavily on the government Commissariat as a supplier of goods, money and foreign exchange, individual rights in property and labour were recognised, and private markets for both started to function."
Economic history of Australia,"1821–1840s
According to a 2018 study in the Economic History Review, ""Australian GDP per worker grew exceptionally quickly from the 1820s to the 1870s, at a rate about twice that of the US and three times that of Britain."" This rapid growth in GDP per worker did not however lead to rising inequality (as has been the case in similar scenarios in other countries) but rather a ""revolutionary levelling in incomes up to the 1870s"".
During Governor Brisbane's 4-year term (1821–1825) land grants were more readily made. In addition, regulations introduced during Brisbane's term enabled settlers to purchase (with his permission) up to 4,000 acres (16 km2) at 5s an acre (with superior quality land priced at 7s 6d). During his term, the total amount of land in private hands virtually doubled.
Those known as 'free settlers' were only permitted to take up land within the approved areas, which from 1826 was confined to the Nineteen Counties of the Sydney settlement. From 1831 the granting of free land ceased and the only land that was to be available for sale was to be within the Nineteen Counties. Despite the uncertainty of land tenure, squatters ran large numbers of sheep and cattle beyond the boundaries. From 1836 they could legally do so, paying ten pounds per year for the right.
From the 1820s economic growth was based increasingly upon the production of fine wool and other rural commodities for markets in Britain and the industrializing economies of Northwestern Europe. To finance this trade a number of banks set up in London in the 1830s, including the Bank of Australasia in 1835 and the Union Bank of Australia established in 1837. This growth was interrupted by two major depressions during the 1840s and 1890s and stimulated in complex ways by the rich gold discoveries in Victoria in 1851, but the underlying dynamics were essentially unchanged.
At different times, the extraction of natural resources, whether maritime before the 1840s or later gold and other minerals, was also important. Agriculture, local manufacturing and construction industries expanded to meet the immediate needs of growing populations, which concentrated increasingly in the main urban centres.
The opportunities for large profits in pastoralism and mining attracted considerable amounts of British capital, while expansion generally was supported by enormous government outlays for transport, communication and urban infrastructures, which also depended heavily on British finance. As the economy expanded, large-scale immigration became necessary to satisfy the growing demand for workers, especially after the end of convict transportation to the eastern mainland in 1840.
The costs of immigration were subsidized by colonial governments, with settlers coming predominantly from the United Kingdom and bringing skills that contributed enormously to the economy's growth. All this provided the foundation for the establishment of free colonial societies. In turn, the institutions associated with these – including the rule of law, secure property rights, and stable and democratic political systems – created conditions that, on balance, fostered growth.
In addition to New South Wales, four other British colonies were established on the mainland: Western Australia (1829), South Australia (1836), Victoria (1851) and Queensland (1859). Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania after 1856) became a separate colony in 1825. From the 1850s, these colonies acquired responsible government. In 1901, they federated, creating the Commonwealth of Australia.
The process of colonial growth began with two related developments. First, in 1820, Macquarie responded to land pressure in the districts immediately surrounding Sydney by relaxing restrictions on settlement. Soon the outward movement of herdsmen seeking new pastures became uncontrollable. From the 1820s, the British authorities also encouraged private enterprise by the wholesale assignment of convicts to private employers and easy access to land.
In 1831, the principles of systematic colonization popularized by Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796–1862) were put into practice in New South Wales with the substitution of land sales for grants in order to finance immigration. This, however, did not affect the continued outward movement of pastoralists who simply occupied land where they could find it beyond the official limits of settlement, usually in disregard for any rights of indigenous peoples.
By 1840, they had claimed a vast swathe of territory two hundred miles in depth running from Moreton Bay in the north (the site of modern Brisbane) to the Port Phillip District (the future colony of Victoria, whose capital Melbourne was marked out in 1837) to Adelaide in South Australia. The absence of any legal title meant that these intruders became known as 'squatters' and the terms of their tenure were not finally settled until 1846 after a prolonged political struggle with the Governor of New South Wales, Sir George Gipps.
The impact of the original penal settlements on the indigenous population had been enormous. The consequences of squatting after 1820 were equally devastating as the land and natural resources upon which indigenous hunter-gathering activities and environmental management depended were appropriated on a massive scale. Aboriginal populations collapsed in the face of disease, violence and forced removal until they survived only on the margins of the new pastoral economy, on government reserves, or in the arid parts of the continent least touched by white settlement. The process would be repeated in northern Australia during the second half of the century.
Colonial governments and settlers did not recognise any Aboriginal land rights or sovereignty (arguable under the doctrine of terra nullius) and therefore felt free to expand into their territory with impunity. The encouragement of private enterprise, the reception of Wakefieldian ideas, and the wholesale spread of white settlement were all part of a profound transformation in official and private perceptions of Australia's prospects and economic value as a British colony. Millennia of fire-stick management to assist hunter-gathering had created inland grasslands in the southeast that were ideally suited to the production of fine wool.
Both the physical environment and the official incentives just described raised expectations of considerable profits to be made in pastoral enterprise and attracted a growing stream of British capital in the form of organizations like the Australian Agricultural Company (1824), which was granted the right to select 1,000,000 acres (4,047 km2) in New South Wales for agricultural development; and new corporate settlements were established in Western Australia (1829) and South Australia (1836). By the 1830s, wool had overtaken whale oil as the colony's most important export, and by 1850 New South Wales had displaced Germany as the main overseas supplier to British industry.
Allowing for the colonial economy's growing complexity, the cycle of growth based upon land settlement, exports and British capital would be repeated twice. The first pastoral boom ended in a depression which was at its worst during 1842–43. Although output continued to grow during the 1840s, the best land had been occupied in the absence of substantial investment in fencing and water supplies. Without further geographical expansion, opportunities for high profits were reduced and the flow of British capital dried up, contributing to a wider downturn caused by drought and mercantile failure.
A number of London-based banks and mortgage companies were established during this period to operate in the colonies, including the Bank of Australasia (1835), the Union Bank of Australia (1837), and the English, Scottish and Australian Bank (1852)."
Economic history of Australia,"1850–60
The discovery of gold in 1851 led to gold rushes in many parts of Australia and changed the direction of the Australian economy. The discovery led to many workers leaving their employment and heading for the goldfields. The gold rushes caused a huge influx of people from overseas, including from many non-British sources. In the 1850s Victoria was Australia's gold mining centre, its population increasing from 76,000 in 1851 to 540,000 in 1861. Australia's total population more than tripled from 430,000 in 1851 to 1.7 million in 1871. There was a resumption of wool as the principal provider of economic growth by 1860.
The colonial governments started a ""development strategy"" by issuing bonds to the London market, selling public land and using this to fund infrastructure.
As the easy gold ran out in Victoria many people flooded into Melbourne or became a pool of unemployed in cities around Ballarat and Bendigo. The accelerated population growth and the enormous wealth of the goldfields fuelled a boom which lasted for forty years. Melbourne spread eastwards and northwards over the surrounding flat grasslands, and southwards down the eastern shore of Port Phillip. Wealthy new suburbs grew up, while the working classes settled in the inner suburbs.
The influx of educated gold seekers from England led to rapid growth of schools, churches, learned societies, libraries and art galleries. On the back of the wealth derived from gold, there was a burst in building activity especially in Melbourne. Australia's first telegraph line was erected between Melbourne and Williamstown in 1853. The first railway in Australia was built in Melbourne in 1854. Following incorporation in 1853, the University of Melbourne was built in 1855, and the State Library of Victoria in 1856. There were many other building works."
Economic history of Australia,"1860–75
Due to the increases in income attributable to the gold rush, manufacturing and construction sectors of the economy fared very well. The boom fuelled by gold and wool lasted through the 1860s and the 1870s. Victoria suffered from an acute labour shortage despite its steady influx of migrants, and this pushed up wages until they were the highest in the world. Victoria was known as ""the working man's paradise"" in these years. The Stonemasons Union won the eight-hour day in 1856 and celebrated by building the enormous Melbourne Trades Hall in Carlton.
Australia's first stock exchange was opened in Melbourne in 1861.
In 1861, the Crown Lands Acts 1861 (NSW) reformed land holdings in New South Wales in an attempt to break the squatters' domination of land tenure. The Acts allowed unlimited selection of agricultural crown land in designated areas and made redundant the limits of location, which had limited sale of land to the Nineteen Counties which had applied since 1826."
Economic history of Australia,"1875–80
As fertile land became less available to settlers, pastoral industries continued to increase their land holdings for the use of wool production. This caused a retraction in returns on investment by pastoral companies. Even when poorer land was utilized for the purpose of wool production there was continued investment both from private backers, and governments (in the form of transportation infrastructure).
Melbourne Trades Hall was opened in 1859 with Trades and Labour Councils and Trades Halls opening in all cities and most regional towns in the following forty years. During the 1880s Trade unions developed among shearers, miners, and stevedores (wharf workers), but soon spread to cover almost all blue-collar jobs. Shortages of labour led to high wages for a prosperous skilled working class, whose unions demanded and got an eight-hour day and other benefits unheard of in Europe."
Economic history of Australia,"Australia gained a reputation as ""the working man's paradise."" Some employers tried to undercut the unions by importing Chinese labour. This produced a reaction which led to all the colonies restricting Chinese and other Asian immigration. This was the foundation of the White Australia Policy. The ""Australian compact"", based around centralised industrial arbitration, a degree of government assistance particularly for primary industries, and White Australia, was to continue for many years before gradually dissolving in the second half of the 20th century."
Economic history of Australia,"1880–1890
An investment boom in Australia in the 1880s saw increased economic expansion although the investments were providing less of a return. That can be attributed to foreign funds' becoming more available to Australia. The influx of capital led to Australians' experiencing the highest per capita incomes in the world during the late 19th century.
However, by the end of the 1880s, overseas investors became more concerned with the difference between expected returns and actual returns on Australian investment. The Barings Crisis of 1890, although focused on Argentina, led to a reassessment of the exposure of investors to regions of declining return, and consequently British investors began to withdraw from providing further funding to the Australian market. This caused a banking crisis in Victoria, South Australia, New South Wales and Tasmania. In 1891, The Bank of Van Diemen's Land was the first major bank to fail, with 13 more to follow. By the end of the year it is estimated that half of Australian bank customers had been debarred from their bank. Consequently, the eastern Australian colonies saw the start of a severe depression in 1890–91. Australian economic historian Noel Butlin would later argue that the history of Australian settlement has been one of growth financed by foreign capital, punctuated by depression caused by balance of payment crises after a collapse in property prices and exacerbated by the imprudent use of capital.
The impact of the end of the long boom and the collapse of the property market in Melbourne did not impact as greatly the economy of the colony of Western Australia, where substantial reserves of gold were discovered at Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie in a region of Western Australia that subsequently became known as the 'Goldfields'. This prompted a 'Gold Rush' in Western Australia characterized by a sustained, rapid expansion of the colony that would continue up to the First World War. This expansion allowed the development of the port of Fremantle, the opening up of the south-west corner of the colony for agricultural development and the rapid expansion of the colonial rail network.
In the 1880s, the long boom culminated in a frenzy of speculation and rapid inflation of land prices known as the Land Boom and centred on the city of Melbourne. Governments shared in the wealth and ploughed money into urban infrastructure, particularly railways. Huge fortunes were built on speculation, and Victorian business and politics became notorious for corruption. English banks lent freely to colonial speculators, adding to the mountain of debt on which the boom was built. Following the collapse of the Land Boom, property values in central Melbourne would not return to the level of the 1880s until the late 1950s (in real terms)."
Economic history of Australia,"1890–1900
1890: the Great maritime strike
1891: the Australian shearers' strike
1891: 16 small banks and building societies collapsed in Melbourne
1892: the Broken Hill miners' strike
1892: 133 limited companies went into liquidation in Victoria alone
1893: a major international depression and the speculative property boom of the 1880s, led to the Australian banking crisis of 1893 and a serious economic depression. 11 commercial banks failed or temporarily closed to avoid a run, including the National Bank of Australasia and the Commercial Bank of Australia. On 1 May, the Victoria government implemented a five-day bank holiday to ameliorate the panic.
1894: recovery from the crisis began. Some reforms to regulations and laws were made to try to prevent future financial abuses."
Economic history of Australia,"1900–1939
In 1901, the first federal government formed by the Protectionist Party.
In 1904, the Australian Labor Party forms the Commonwealth government, the first labour movement in the world to attain government."
Economic history of Australia,"In 1907, the Harvester case ruling that established the right to a basic wage, a 'fair and reasonable' minimum wage for unskilled workers of 7 shillings.
In 1910, the federal government introduced a national currency, the Australian pound. Monetary policy ensured that the Australian pound was fixed in value to the pound sterling, and as long as Britain was on the gold standard, so was Australia. In 1914, the pound sterling was removed from the gold standard, but when it was returned to the gold standard in 1925, the sudden increase in its value, imposed by the nominal gold price, unleashed crushing deflation. Both the initial 1914 inflation and the subsequent 1926 deflation had far-reaching economic effects throughout the British Empire, including Australia, and the rest of the world. In 1929, as an emergency measure during the Great Depression, Australia left the gold standard, resulting in a devaluation relative to sterling. A variety of pegs to sterling applied until December 1931, when the government set a rate of £1 Australian = 16 shillings sterling (£1·5s Australian = £1 sterling; A£1.25 = £1 sterling).
While wool-growing remained at the centre of economic activity, a variety of new goods, such as wheat, dairy and other agriculturally-based produce, became part of Australian exports. It was in then that the latter started contributing more to economic growth than wool production. Part of that emergence of other sources of economic expansion came from technological progress, such as disease-resistant wheat and refrigerated shipping. The development of these technologies also renewed large-scale foreign investment.
That injection of foreign investment led to increases in construction, particularly in the private residential sector. That injection of foreign cash was the main contributor to economic expansion, which was again troublesome for Australia's economy. Returns on investments, as before, were immensely different from the expected returns.
By the 1920s, agricultural producers were experiencing profit troubles and governments, which invested heavily on transportation infrastructure, were not getting the returns that they had expected. Cutbacks in borrowing, government and private expenditure in the late 1920s led to a recession. The recession itself became worse as other nations fell into depressions. They not only cut back on foreign investments to Australia but also led to a lower demand for Australian exports. That culminated into the biggest recession in Australia's history, which peaked in 1931–1932.
The worldwide depression of the 1930s was not felt as badly in Australia than in to international counterparts because of increases in productivity from the manufacturing sector. (In William Sinclair [1]'s terms [2], that is when Australia moved from the old model to the new model.) Trade protection, particularly from tariffs implemented by governments at the time, were instrumental to the prosperity of the manufacturing sector.
A major labour strike took place at the State Coalfields in Wonthaggi, Victoria in 1934. Conditions were hard on the strikers over a five-month episode. Their resilience, cohesion, and significant community support accounted for their persistence. Winning the strike revitalized the Victorian labour movement and enhanced its political power."
Economic history of Australia,"1939–1945
World War II had a profound impact on the Australian economy and permanently changed how the economy was run. Prior to 1939, the Commonwealth Government had little role in the management of the Australian economy. The state governments levied most of the income tax, and Australia's international trade was dictated by its relationship with the British Empire. The Japanese attack on Australia in 1942 led the Australian Government to adopt an ""All In"" war policy, which dictated the full mobilisation of the Australian economy and workforce. To that end, a range of economic and industrial controls were adopted: rationing, production controls, military and industrial conscription. The new powers were generally administered by the Commonwealth Government assisted by government appointed boards of control. The best and the most successful example was the Commonwealth Munitions Board (CMB) which directed the expansion of the Australian munitions industry. Chaired by Essington Lewis, the General Manager of BHP, the CMB was by the end of the war indirectly managing some of the largest manufacturing concerns in the country.
The economic policies of the Labor government of John Curtin greatly stimulated the economy by increasing production and ending unemployment.  Labor relations were good and strikes were avoided. A wide range of industries, including motor vehicles, metal processing, TCF (textiles, clothing and footwear) and chemicals, all benefitted from government contracts and regulations, but by 1943, a severe manpower shortage limited further industrial expansion. High profits, and the strict rationing of consumables led to a rapid increase in national savings and profits, which generated a surplus of domestic capital. To fund the war effort, in 1942, the Australian Government instituted the Uniform Taxation Act and removed the ability of the state governments to levy income tax. Higher taxation and successive bond drives meant that by 1945, the Australian Government had largely funded the war effort from domestic sources. In the immediate postwar period, Australia was able even to extend economic assistance to Britain, and the Curtin government could start planning for a comprehensive plan of postwar reconstruction."
Economic history of Australia,"1945-1972
Wartime measures and the expanded wartime economy provided the basis for rapid economic growth in the period after 1945.  Postwar economic reconstruction was also aided by a policy of national development pursued by the Australian Labor Party (ALP), which formed the government from 1941 to 1949. That policy was in line with the general socialist ideals that the ALP held and were then widely supported within the broader labour movement.
International conditions also favoured the policy as after the war Australia enjoyed favourable terms of trade and an increase in the amount of foreign (largely US) investment into the economy. However, it was assumed that the agricultural and mining sectors would be geared towards international markets, and manufacturing would serve the domestic ""consumer"" market. This continued into the 1950s and 1960s, and led government policy makers to implement import replacement strategies.
During the war, Australia's international trade and investment position began to change. In 1944, Australia became a part of the Bretton Woods system, with major world currencies maintaining fixed exchange rates relative to each other and with the US dollar being pegged to gold. Australia maintained a fixed exchange rate which was effectively pegged to sterling until 1967. The exchange rate between the Australian and British pounds was set at 0.8 GBP (16 shillings sterling; A£1 5s = £1 sterling). However, those new developments did not entirely supplant the traditional relationship with Britain, and Australia remained a part of the ""Sterling Zone"" until 1967. That reflected Australia's historical ties as well as a view about the stability in value of the British pound. After a brief period of disruption caused by the Second World War, the United Kingdom returned to its position as Australia's main trading partner.
In 1949, the United Kingdom devalued the pound sterling against the US dollar by 30%, and Australia followed suit so that the Australian pound would not become overvalued in sterling zone countries with which Australia did most of its external trade. As the pound sterling went from US$4.03 to US$2.80, the Australian pound went from US$3.224 to US$2.24. Relative to the pound sterling, the Australian pound remained the same at A£1 5s = £1 sterling.
With the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, Australia converted the traditional peg to a fluctuating rate against the US dollar. In September 1974, Australia valued the dollar against a basket of currencies called the trade weighted index (TWI) in an effort to reduce the fluctuations associated with its tie to the US dollar. The daily TWI valuation was changed in November 1976 to a periodically adjusted valuation. On 12 December 1983, Australia floated the Australian dollar, with the exchange rate reflecting the balance of payments and other market drivers.
Immediately after 1945 Australia continued to be governed by the ALP, which adopted a policy of reconstruction based on the principles of ""nationalisation and rationalisation"".  This dictated that the government maintain control over the ""commanding heights"" of the economy in order to continue economic growth, restrain inflation and institute full employment. A number of Australian companies such as QANTAS were nationalised in this period, while a range of government run enterprises such as TAA and the ANL were set up to expand the government sector. In 1948 the Snowy Mountain River Project was commenced. This policy achieved high economic growth, but led to growing political opposition, especially after the failure of the government to nationalise the banking sector in 1948. Political opponents also capitalized on the retention of rationing of food and petrol. As a result, in 1949 the government was replaced at national elections with a more conservative government committed to supporting a ""mixed economy.""
The new Australian Government, led by Liberal leader Robert Menzies, continued to regulate economic activity, but preferred to manage the economy ""indirectly"" where possible. More encouragement was given to private industry, but where public enterprise was deemed ""necessary"" it was retained, and in some cases expanded. The pragmatic approach of the conservative Menzies Government was underlined with the establishment of the Reserve Bank of Australia, the continuance of the mass immigration policy began in 1946, and the signing of a range of new trade agreements with nations outside the British Empire, including West Germany (1955), Japan (1957) and the USSR (1965). In 1955 Australia began exporting coal to Japan, and by 1967 Japan had surpassed Britain as Australia's main market. In 1966 Australia abandoned the pound and adopted the Australian Dollar.
Economic growth, high employment levels, growing foreign investment and the development of new markets led Australia to enjoy a high level of economic prosperity in the post-war period. Rationing was abolished in 1950. High population growth, high government spending, the introduction of television (1956) and the gradual relaxation of government controls over ""hire purchase"" helped Australia to develop into an affluent society in the 1950s and 1960s. Rising income from taxation receipts eventually allowing the Australian Government to fund a large expansion in higher education, the development of Canberra, the national capital, and the host the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. By the time of Sir Robert Menzies's retirement in 1966, the Australian economy seemed stronger and wealthier than ever before. The Australian governments of this period, dominated by the conservative Liberal Party of Australia, were broadly successful in maintaining economic growth and unemployment, but were criticised by opponents for failing to effectively control inflation, instituting periodic ""credit squeezes"" (1952 and 1961), and rejecting national economic planning. During the 1960s an increase in tariff protection for new industries protected jobs and profits, but lowered the need for productivity and innovation, and by 1966 foreign investment was shifting to the less heavily regulated mining and pastoral sectors.
After 1967 the favourable conditions that Australia had enjoyed in the international economy began to change. From 1962 Britain progressively abandoned the system of Imperial Preference adopted in 1932 and moved towards membership of the European Economic Community. Australia's privileged access to the British market was drawing to a close. In the era of the Vietnam War the U.S. Economy began to enter into a difficult period, and the rate of U.S. investment into Australia began to decline. Even more ominously, Australia began to face greater economic competition and a steady decline in her terms of trade. In this context the governments that followed the Menzies government in the period 1966–1972 increasingly found it hard to manage the rising expectations of consumers and industry. In the period 1972–1973 Australia began to experience the beginnings of ""stagflation"" as unemployment and inflation began to rise simultaneously for the first time."
Economic history of Australia,"1972–1982
The post-war economic boom ended with ""stagflation"" in the early 1970s. This was primarily caused by developments in the international economy; the Oil Crisis, Britain's entry into the E.E.C., and growing economic competition in Australia's traditional export markets. However, the economic policies of the ALP Whitlam government did not prove effective at dealing with stagflation. Gough Whitlam had been elected on a platform that included the rapid expansion of government funded health and education programs. At the same time the labour movement, of which the Labor Party was a part, were opposed to both wage restraint and economic restructuring. Higher government spending coupled with higher wages, but not linked to higher productivity, created strong inflationary pressure. Whitlam's lack of a majority in the Australian Senate, and the hostility of the conservative state governments made it difficult to effectively manage the economy.
In 1973, with Australia experiencing sharply rising inflation, Fred Gruen, special consultant to the Whitlam government, proposed a 25% across the board tariff cut, which was adopted by the government. The 1973 oil crisis had caused prices to spike and, according to government figures, inflation topped 13% for the year 1973–1974. By mid-1974, Australia was in an economic recession. The rapid change in economic conditions was not countered by a change in government policy. In particular Whitlam's desire to increase the wages and conditions of the federal public service was not checked. This fed into a 30% increase in imports and a $1.5 billion increase in the trade deficit by the end of 1974. Primary producers of commodities such as beef were caught in a credit squeeze as short-term interest rates rose to extremely high levels. Unemployment also rose significantly despite continuing government spending.
The failure of the Whitlam government to effectively manage the Australian economy was a factor in the crisis that ended that government's term in office at the end of 1975.  The government of Malcolm Fraser that succeeded Whitlam promised greater control of government spending, and an end to inflationary pay increases in the public sector. However, its close links with industry and commerce made it reluctant to institute economic reform. While a growing number of economists and business leaders began to call for economic deregulation the Fraser government preferred to promote policies similar to those adopted in the earlier post-war period; chiefly wage and credit restraint, and tighter government economic regulation of the economy. This was symbolised in 1982 when Fraser dismissed the findings of the Campbell Commission into Banking (which his government had put in place) that had recommended deregulation of the banking industry."
Economic history of Australia,"1983–2020; 2020–present
Despite similarities in history, law and culture, Australia and Canada followed quite different macroeconomic histories. Australia's GDP per capita was well above those of Britain and the United States in 1870, and more than twice the Canadian level. By the 1980s, however, Canada's GDP per capita almost matched the United States, and was well above that of Australia and Britain.
Economic liberalisation and deregulation of the Australian economy began in the early 1980s under the Hawke Labor government, which commenced the process of economic reform by concluding a wages accord with the trade union movement. In exchange for wage restraint and an increase in the ""social wage"" the trade union movement agreed to support economic reform and oppose industrial conflict (i.e. strikes). The success of the ""Accord"" allowed a Labor government to implement economic reforms that in other nations had been implemented by conservative political parties; tariffs were progressively cut, the Australian dollar was floated (1983), and the financial system deregulated. Hawke was also able to privatise several large government enterprises. Sector wide 'Industry Plans' for economic reform were introduced in telecommunications and manufacturing. The Commonwealth Bank was sold in three parcels between 1991 and 1996. Qantas was sold in two parcels, one in 1993 and the other in 1995, and the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories was floated in 1994. Telstra was sold off in three parcels in 1997, 1999 and 2006. One result of these reforms was a marked increase labour productivity, and a reduction in government spending as a proportion of GDP. The Australian Stock Exchange Limited (ASX) was formed in 1987 through the amalgamation of six independent stock exchanges that formerly operated in the state capitals. Each of those exchanges had a history of share trading dating back to the 19th century.
The global early 1990s recession came swiftly after the Black Monday of October 1987, resulting from a stock collapse of unprecedented size which saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average fall by 22.6%. This collapse, larger than the stock market crash of 1929, was handled effectively by the global economy, and the stock market began to quickly recover. However, in North America, the lumbering savings and loans industry was facing decline which eventually led to a savings and loan crisis which compromised the wellbeing of millions of Americans. The following recession thus impacted the many countries closely linked to the United States, including Australia. Paul Keating, who was Treasurer at the time, famously referred to it as ""the recession that Australia had to have."" During the recession, GDP fell by 1.7%, employment by 3.4% and the unemployment rate rose to 10.8%. However, as is typical during recessions, there was a beneficial reduction in inflation.
This process of economic reform and restructuring continued under the Coalition government led by John Howard which took power in 1996. The Howard government established a goods and services tax from 2000, established a national Productivity Commission and further deregulated labour markets under WorkChoices in 2006.
WorkChoices, in effect, took away an employee's right to sue for unfair dismissal if their former employer employed less than 100 people, making its implementation extremely unpopular, greatly contributing to the Howard government's loss at the 2007 election. The newly elected Labor government, under Kevin Rudd, completely repealed WorkChoices in 2008, passing the Fair Work Act 2009.
These economic reforms have resulted in Australia now being considered one of the most open economies in the world, notwithstanding polarising opinions regarding the long-term success of free and open trade, and its inevitable effect on domestic workers. Australia has enjoyed over two decades of economic growth, coupled with low inflation and relatively low unemployment - until 2020 when the country entered into a brief recession where unemployment skyrocketed amid the global COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the outbreak of COVID-19, trade disputes with China, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there has been a significant political shift in focus toward National Security and renewed interest in Australia's manufacturing industry. Although free trade continues to take place, the importance of a thriving local industry has regained traction as an important consensus. The economic reforms implemented since the 1980s have led to a large contraction of the Australian manufacturing sector, along with trade union membership; with the percentage of workforce unionisation dropping from over 50% in the 1970s, to only 14% presently.
The 1980s economic reforms, intended to diversify the national economy and make it more resilient, were introduced after the mid-1980s decline in the terms of trade. The trend of Australia's gross domestic product at market prices estimated by the International Monetary Fund is as follows:"
Economic history of Australia,"For purchasing power parity comparisons, the US$ is exchanged at A$0.98. In recent times Australia has received financial growth in the mining industry. This has been a major contributing factor of a high Australian dollar. The reform of the Australian economy in this period was not without cost. Improvements in the efficiency of the services sector, agriculture and mining were achieved while manufacturing industries struggled, especially those industries that had been established behind a wall of high tariffs created in the post-war period."
Economic history of Australia,"Automobiles
On 2008, four companies mass-produced cars in Australia. Mitsubishi ceased production in March 2008, followed by Ford in 2016, and Holden and Toyota in 2017.
Holden announced on 11 December 2013 that Holden cars would no longer be manufactured in Australia from the end of 2017.
Ford had two main factories, both in Victoria: located in the Geelong suburb of Norlane and the northern Melbourne suburb of Broadmeadows. Both plants were closed down in October 2016.
Until 2006, Toyota had factories in Port Melbourne and Altona, Victoria. Since then, all manufacturing has been at Altona. In 2008, Toyota exported 101,668 vehicles worth $1,900 million. In 2011 the figures were ""59,949 units worth $1,004 million"". On 10 February 2014 it was announced that by the end of 2017 Toyota would cease manufacturing vehicles and engines in Australia.
Whilst we've seen the closure of Holden, Ford and Toyota there has been an increase in Australia's Electric Vehicle potential with the introduction of ACE EV and Australian electric vehicle company."
Economic history of Australia,"Textiles
Until trade liberalisation in the mid-1980s, Australia had a large textile industry.  This decline continued through the first decade of the 21st century. Since the 1980s, tariffs have steadily been reduced; in early 2010, the tariffs were reduced from 17.5 to 10 percent on clothing, and 7.5–10% to 5% for footwear and other textiles.
As of 2010, most textile manufacturing, even by Australian companies, is performed in Asia."
Economic history of Australia,"Mining
The economic rise of China has produced a major demand for mining products, especially iron ore and coal."
Economic history of Australia,"Iron
Geoscience Australia calculates that the country's ""economic demonstrated resources"" of iron currently amount to 24 gigatonnes, or 24 billion tonnes. The current production rate from the Pilbara region of Western Australia is approximately 430 million tonnes a year and rising. Gavin Mudd (Monash University) and Jonathon Law (CSIRO) expect it to be gone within 30–50 years and 56 years, respectively. These 2010 estimates require on-going review to take into account shifting demand for lower-grade iron ore and improving mining and recovery techniques (allowing deeper mining below the groundwater table).
Tensions remain high between management and labour unions."
Economic history of Australia,"Coal
In 1984 Australia surpassed the US as the world's largest coal exporter.  One-third of Australia's coal exports were shipped from the Hunter Valley region of New South Wales, where coal mining and transport had begun nearly two centuries earlier. Coal River was the first name given by British settlers to the Hunter River after coal was found there in 1795. In 1804 the Sydney-based administration established a permanent convict settlement near the mouth of the Hunter River to mine and load the coal, predetermining the town's future as a coal port by naming it Newcastle. Today, Newcastle, NSW, is the largest coal port in the world. Now the state of Queensland is Australia's top coal producer, with its Bowen Basin the main source of black coal, and plans by miners such as Gina Rinehart to open up the Galilee and Surat Basins to coal mining.  China became the main customer."
Economic history of Australia,"2020 recession
The COVID-19 pandemic reached Australia in January 2020. On 20 March, Australian borders were closed to all non-residents, impacting especially tourism and the entry of overseas students. Social distancing rules were imposed on 21 March, and “non-essential” services were closed, which included social gathering venues such as pubs and clubs but, unlike many other countries, did not include most business operations such as construction, manufacturing and many retail categories. A second wave of infections in Victoria emerged during May to June, and Victoria imposed a strict lockdown, which continued into September. State governments also imposed bans on cross state border movements.
On 2 September 2020, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, Australia officially went into recession (defined as two quarters of negative growth) with GDP falling 7% in the June 2020 quarter, the largest drop on record. GDP fell 0.3% in the March quarter."
Economic history of Australia,"Trade unions
The Australian labour movement generally sought to end child labour practices, improve worker safety, increase wages for both union workers and non-union workers, raise the entire society's standard of living, reduce the hours in a work week, provide public education for children, and bring other benefits to working class families.
Melbourne Trades Hall was opened in 1859 with Trades and Labour Councils and Trades Halls opening in all cities and most regional towns in the next forty years. During the 1880s Trade unions developed among shearers, miners, and stevedores (wharf workers), but soon spread to cover almost all blue-collar jobs. Shortages of labour led to high wages for a prosperous skilled working class, whose unions demanded and got an eight-hour day and other benefits unheard of in Europe."
Economic history of Australia,"Australia gained a reputation as ""the working man's paradise"". Some employers tried to undercut the unions by importing Chinese labour. This produced a reaction which led to all the colonies restricting Chinese and other Asian immigration. This was the foundation of the White Australia Policy. The ""Australian compact"", based around centralised industrial arbitration, a degree of government assistance particularly for primary industries, and White Australia, was to continue for many years before gradually dissolving in the second half of the 20th century.
In the 1870s and 1880s, the growing trade union movement began a series of protests against foreign labour. Their arguments were that Asians and Chinese took jobs away from white men, worked for ""substandard"" wages, lowered working conditions and refused unionisation.
Objections to these arguments came largely from wealthy land owners in rural areas. It was argued that without Asiatics to work in the tropical areas of the Northern Territory and Queensland, the area would have to be abandoned. Despite these objections to restricting immigration, between 1875 and 1888 all Australian colonies enacted legislation which excluded all further Chinese immigration. Asian immigrants already residing in the Australian colonies were not expelled and retained the same rights as their Anglo and Southern compatriots.
The Barton government which came to power after the first elections to the Commonwealth parliament in 1901 was formed by the Protectionist Party with the support of the Australian Labor Party. The support of the Labor Party was contingent upon restricting non-white immigration, reflecting the attitudes of the Australian Workers Union and other labour organisations at the time, upon whose support the Labor Party was founded."
Economic history of Australia,"See also
Agriculture in Australia
Economy of Australia
Banking in Australia
History of tariffs in Australia
Transport in Australia"
Economic history of Australia,"References
Sources and further reading
Butlin, N. G. (1964). Investment in Australian Economic Development. Cambridge University Press.
Butlin, N.G. Forming a Colonial Economy: Australia 1810-1850 (1995)
Butlin, N.G. War Economy 1939-1942 (1961)
Coghlan, T A (1918). Labour and Industry in Australia, Cambridge Books, Cambridge.
Fitzpatrick, B (1939). British Imperialism and Australia: 1783–1833, Sydney University Press, Sydney.
Fitzpatrick, B (1941). The British Empire in Australia: An Economic History 1834–1939, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.
Greasley, David, and Les Oxley. ""A tale of two dominions: comparing the macroeconomic records of Australia and Canada since 1870."" Economic History Review 51.2 (1998): 294–318. online
Gregory, R.G., and N. G. Butlin. Recovery from the Depression: Australia and the World Economy in the 1930s (1989)
McLean, Ian W (2016). Why Australia Prospered: The Shifting Sources of Economic Growth, Princeton U.P.
McLean, Ian W. ""Australian economic growth in historical perspective."" Economic Record 80.250 (2004): 330–345. online
Millmow, Alex. A History of Australasian Economic Thought (Routledge, 2017), 250 pp. online review
Oxley, Les. ""Australasia."" in An Economist’s Guide to Economic History in Matthias Blum and Christopher L. Colvin, eds. (Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2018) pp. 309–317. online
Reid, Alan (1976), The Whitlam Venture, Hill of Content, ISBN 978-0-85572-079-7
Shann, Edward [1930] (2016). An Economic History of Australia. Cambridge University Press.
Sinclair, W. A. (1976). The Process of Economic Development in Australia. Melbourne: Cheshire.
Snooks, G.D. (1994). Portrait of the Family within the Total Economy, Australia Since 1788. Cambridge University Press.
Unstead, R. J. ""From Bullock Dray to Tin Lizzie."" History Today (June 1968), Vol. 18 Issue 6, pp 406–414 online. Covers transportation 1788 to 1920, regarding ships, bullock drays, concord coaches, camels, railways, buggies, horse bucks, trams, and automobiles.
Ville, Simon and Glenn Withers, eds. The Cambridge Economic History of Australia  (Cambridge University Press, 2015)."
List of birds of Australia,"This is a list of the wild birds found in Australia including its outlying islands and territories, but excluding the Australian Antarctic Territory. The outlying islands covered include: Christmas, Cocos (Keeling), Ashmore, Torres Strait, Coral Sea, Lord Howe, Norfolk, Macquarie and Heard/McDonald. The list includes introduced species, common vagrants and recently extinct species. It excludes species only present in captivity. 975 extant and extinct species are listed.
There have been three comprehensive accounts: the first was John Gould's Birds of Australia, the second Gregory Mathews, and the third was the Handbook of Australian, New Zealand and Antarctic Birds (1990-2006).
The taxonomy originally followed is from Christidis and Boles, 2008. Their system has been developed over nearly two decades and has strong local support, but deviates in important ways from more generally accepted schemes. Supplemental updates follow The Clements Checklist of Birds of the World, 2022 edition."
List of birds of Australia,This list uses British English throughout. Bird names and other wording follows that convention.
List of birds of Australia,"Ostriches
Order: Struthioniformes   Family: Struthionidae"
List of birds of Australia,"1 species recorded [1 introduced]
This order is not native to Australia, but feral populations of one species have become established in South Australia and possibly on the New South Wales/Victoria border."
List of birds of Australia,"Cassowaries and emu
Order: Casuariiformes   Family: Casuariidae"
List of birds of Australia,"2 species recorded [2 extant native]
This family of flightless ratite birds is represented by two living species in Australia. Another two species are found in New Guinea. The extinct, geographically isolated King and Kangaroo Island emus were historically considered to be separate species to mainland emus. However, genetic evidence from 2011 suggests that all three are conspecific."
List of birds of Australia,"Magpie goose
Order: Anseriformes   Family: Anseranatidae"
List of birds of Australia,"1 species recorded [1 extant native]
The family contains a single species, the magpie goose. It was an early and distinctive offshoot of the anseriform family tree, diverging after the screamers and before all other ducks, geese and swans, sometime in the late Cretaceous. The single species is found across Australia."
List of birds of Australia,"Ducks, geese, and waterfowl
Order: Anseriformes   Family: Anatidae"
List of birds of Australia,"30 species recorded [20 extant native, 3 introduced, 7 vagrant]
The family Anatidae includes the ducks and most duck-like waterfowl, such as geese and swans. These are adapted for an aquatic existence, with webbed feet, bills that are flattened to a greater or lesser extent, and feathers that are excellent at shedding water due to special oils. In Australia, 30 species have been recorded, of which three have been introduced, and seven are vagrants."
List of birds of Australia,"Megapodes
Order: Galliformes   Family: Megapodiidae"
List of birds of Australia,"3 species recorded [3 extant native]
Megapodiidae are represented by various species in the Australasian region, although only three species are found in Australia. They are commonly referred to as ""mound-builders"" due to their habit of constructing large mounds to incubate their eggs."
List of birds of Australia,"Guineafowl
Order: Galliformes   Family: Numididae
1 species recorded [1 introduced]
Numididae are not native to Australia, but feral populations of one species exist in Queensland."
List of birds of Australia,"New World quail
Order: Galliformes   Family: Odontophoridae
1 species recorded [1 introduced]
Odontophoridae are not native to Australia, but feral populations of one species survive in external territories and possibly the mainland."
List of birds of Australia,"Pheasants, grouse, and allies
Order: Galliformes   Family: Phasianidae"
List of birds of Australia,"8 species recorded [3 extant native, 5 introduced]
Phasianidae consists of the pheasants and their allies. These are terrestrial species, variable in size but generally plump, with broad, relatively short wings. Many species are gamebirds or have been domesticated as a food source for humans. Three species are native to Australia, and five commonly domesticated species are feral, with most established populations persisting on offshore islands."
List of birds of Australia,"Flamingos
Order: Phoenicopteriformes   Family: Phoenicopteridae
1 species recorded [1 vagrant]
Australia has only a single record of any flamingo species, from the North Keeling Island. Several prehistoric species are also known to have existed."
List of birds of Australia,"Grebes
Order: Podicipediformes   Family: Podicipedidae"
List of birds of Australia,"4 species recorded [3 extant native, 1 vagrant]
Grebes are small to medium-large freshwater diving birds. They have lobed toes and are excellent swimmers and divers. However, they have their feet placed far back on the body, making them quite ungainly on land. Three species have been regularly recorded in Australia, and a fourth is a vagrant."
List of birds of Australia,"Pigeons and doves
Order: Columbiformes   Family: Columbidae"
List of birds of Australia,"41 species recorded [27 extant native, 4 introduced, 7 vagrant, 2 extirpated native, 1 extinct native]
Pigeons and doves are stout-bodied birds with short necks and short slender bills with a fleshy cere. In Australian territory 41 species have been recorded, four of which have been introduced, and another six are vagrants. One has become extinct since European colonisation."
List of birds of Australia,"Bustards
Order: Otidiformes   Family: Otididae
1 species recorded [1 extant native]
Bustards are large terrestrial birds mainly associated with dry open country and steppes in the Old World. They are omnivorous and nest on the ground. They walk steadily on strong legs and big toes, pecking for food as they go. They have long broad wings with ""fingered"" wingtips and striking patterns in flight. Many have interesting mating displays."
List of birds of Australia,"Cuckoos
Order: Cuculiformes   Family: Cuculidae"
List of birds of Australia,"21 species recorded [14 extant native, 7 vagrant]
The family Cuculidae includes cuckoos, roadrunners and anis. These birds are of variable size with slender bodies, long tails and strong legs. The Old World cuckoos are brood parasites."
List of birds of Australia,"Frogmouths
Order: Caprimulgiformes   Family: Podargidae
3 species recorded [3 extant native]
The frogmouths are a distinctive group of small nocturnal birds related to swifts found from India across southern Asia to Australia. Three species are found in Australia."
List of birds of Australia,"Nightjars and allies
Order: Caprimulgiformes   Family: Caprimulgidae
5 species recorded [3 extant native, 2 vagrant]
Nightjars are medium-sized nocturnal birds that usually nest on the ground. They have long wings, short legs and very short bills. Most have small feet, of little use for walking, and long pointed wings. Their soft plumage is camouflaged to resemble bark or leaves."
List of birds of Australia,"Owlet-nightjars
Order: Caprimulgiformes   Family: Aegothelidae
1 species recorded [1 extant native]
The owlet-nightjars are a distinctive group of small nocturnal birds related to swifts found from the Maluku Islands and New Guinea to Australia and New Caledonia. One species is found in Australia."
List of birds of Australia,"Swifts
Order: Caprimulgiformes   Family: Apodidae
9 species recorded [4 extant native, 5 vagrant]
Swifts are small birds which spend the majority of their lives flying. These birds have very short legs and never settle voluntarily on the ground, perching instead only on vertical surfaces. Many swifts have long swept-back wings which resemble a crescent or boomerang. Nine species recorded in Australian territory, five of which are vagrants."
List of birds of Australia,"Rails, gallinules, and coots
Order: Gruiformes   Family: Rallidae"
List of birds of Australia,"24 species recorded [15 extant native, 7 vagrant, 1 extirpated, 1 extinct native]
Rallidae is a large family of small to medium-sized birds which includes the rails, crakes, coots and gallinules. Typically they inhabit dense vegetation in damp environments near lakes, swamps or rivers. In general they are shy and secretive birds, making them difficult to observe. Most species have strong legs and long toes which are well adapted to soft uneven surfaces. They tend to have short, rounded wings and to be weak fliers."
List of birds of Australia,"Cranes
Order: Gruiformes   Family: Gruidae
2 species recorded [2 extant native]
Cranes are large, long-legged and long-necked birds. Unlike the similar-looking but unrelated herons, cranes fly with necks outstretched, not pulled back. Most have elaborate and noisy courting displays or ""dances""."
List of birds of Australia,"Sheathbills
Order: Charadriiformes   Family: Chionidae
1 species recorded [1 extant native]
The sheathbills are scavengers of the Antarctic regions. They have white plumage and look plump and dove-like but are believed to be similar to the ancestors of the modern gulls and terns."
List of birds of Australia,"Thick-knees
Order: Charadriiformes   Family: Burhinidae"
List of birds of Australia,"2 species recorded [2 extant native]
The thick-knees are a group of largely tropical waders in the family Burhinidae. They are found worldwide within the tropical zone, with some species also breeding in temperate Europe and Australia. They are medium to large waders with strong black or yellow-black bills, large yellow eyes and cryptic plumage. Despite being classed as waders, most species have a preference for arid or semi-arid habitats."
List of birds of Australia,"Stilts and avocets
Order: Charadriiformes   Family: Recurvirostridae"
List of birds of Australia,"3 species recorded [3 extant native]
Recurvirostridae is a family of large wading birds, which includes the avocets and stilts. The avocets have long legs and long up-curved bills. The stilts have extremely long legs and long, thin straight bills."
List of birds of Australia,"Oystercatchers
Order: Charadriiformes   Family: Haematopodidae
3 species recorded [2 extant native, 1 vagrant]
The oystercatchers are large and noisy plover-like birds, with strong bills used for smashing or prising open molluscs."
List of birds of Australia,"Plovers and lapwings
Order: Charadriiformes   Family: Charadriidae"
List of birds of Australia,"21 species recorded [15 extant native, 6 vagrant]
The family Charadriidae includes the plovers, dotterels and lapwings. They are small to medium-sized birds with compact bodies, short, thick necks and long, usually pointed, wings. They are found in open country worldwide, mostly in habitats near water."
List of birds of Australia,"Plains-wanderer
Order: Charadriiformes   Family: Pedionomidae
1 species recorded [1 extant native]
The plains-wanderer is a quail-like ground bird. They are excellent camouflagers, and will first hide at any disturbance. If they're approached too close, they will run as opposed to flying, which they are very poor at."
List of birds of Australia,"Painted-snipe
Order: Charadriiformes   Family: Rostratulidae"
List of birds of Australia,"1 species recorded [1 extant native]
Painted-snipe are short-legged, long-billed birds similar in shape to the true snipes, but more brightly coloured."
List of birds of Australia,"Jacanas
Order: Charadriiformes   Family: Jacanidae
2 species recorded [1 extant native, 1 vagrant]
The jacanas are a group of waders found throughout the tropics. They are identifiable by their huge feet and claws which enable them to walk on floating vegetation in the shallow lakes that are their preferred habitat."
List of birds of Australia,"Sandpipers and allies
Order: Charadriiformes   Family: Scolopacidae
47 species recorded [29 extant native, 18 vagrant]
Scolopacidae is a large diverse family of small to medium-sized shorebirds including the sandpipers, curlews, godwits, shanks, tattlers, woodcocks, snipes, dowitchers, and phalaropes. The majority of these species eat small invertebrates picked out of the mud or soil. Variation in length of legs and bills enables multiple species to feed in the same habitat, particularly on the coast, without direct competition for food."
List of birds of Australia,"Buttonquail
Order: Charadriiformes   Family: Turnicidae"
List of birds of Australia,"7 species recorded [7 extant native]
The buttonquails are small, drab, running birds which resemble the true quails. The female is the brighter of the sexes and initiates courtship. The male incubates the eggs and tends the young."
List of birds of Australia,"Pratincoles and coursers
Order: Charadriiformes   Family: Glareolidae
3 species recorded [2 extant native, 1 vagrant]
Glareolidae is a family of wading birds comprising the pratincoles, which have short legs, long pointed wings, and long forked tails, and the coursers, which have long legs, short wings, and long, pointed bills which curve downwards."
List of birds of Australia,"Skuas and jaegers
Order: Charadriiformes   Family: Stercorariidae
5 species recorded [5 extant native]
The family Stercorariidae are, in general, medium to large birds, typically with grey or brown plumage, often with white markings on the wings. They nest on the ground in temperate and arctic regions and are long-distance migrants."
List of birds of Australia,"Gulls, terns, and skimmers
Order: Charadriiformes   Family: Laridae"
List of birds of Australia,"37 species recorded [25 extant native, 12 vagrant]
Laridae is a family of medium to large seabirds, the gulls, terns, and skimmers. Gulls are typically grey or white, often with black markings on the head or wings. They have stout, longish bills and webbed feet. Terns are a group of generally medium to large seabirds typically with grey or white plumage, often with black markings on the head. Most terns hunt fish by diving but some pick insects off the surface of fresh water. Terns are generally long-lived birds, with several species known to live in excess of 30 years. Skimmers are a small family of tropical tern-like birds. They have an elongated lower mandible which they use to feed by flying low over the water surface and skimming the water for small fish."
List of birds of Australia,"Tropicbirds
Order: Phaethontiformes   Family: Phaethontidae"
List of birds of Australia,"3 species recorded [2 extant native, 1 vagrant]
Tropicbirds are slender white birds of tropical oceans, with exceptionally long central tail feathers. Their long wings have black markings, as does the head. Three species have been recorded from Australian waters."
List of birds of Australia,"Penguins
Order: Sphenisciformes   Family: Spheniscidae"
List of birds of Australia,"15 species recorded [7 extant native, 8 vagrant]
Penguins are a group of aquatic, flightless birds living almost exclusively in the Southern Hemisphere, especially in Antarctica. Only one species, the Australian little penguin, breeds on the Australian coast."
List of birds of Australia,"Albatrosses
Order: Procellariiformes   Family: Diomedeidae
13 species recorded [11 extant native, 2 vagrant]
The albatrosses are a family of large seabird found across the Southern and North Pacific Oceans. The largest are among the largest flying birds in the world. Thirteen species are seen to varying degrees in Australian waters, with two recorded as vagrants."
List of birds of Australia,"Southern storm-petrels
Order: Procellariiformes   Family: Oceanitidae
7 species recorded [5 extant native, 2 vagrant]
The southern storm-petrels are the smallest seabirds, relatives of the petrels, feeding on planktonic crustaceans and small fish picked from the surface, typically while hovering. Their flight is fluttering and sometimes bat-like."
List of birds of Australia,"Northern storm-petrels
Order: Procellariiformes   Family: Hydrobatidae
5 species recorded [2 extant native, 3 vagrant]
Though the members of this family are similar in many respects to the southern storm-petrels, including their general appearance and habits, there are enough genetic differences to warrant their placement in a separate family."
List of birds of Australia,"Shearwaters and petrels
Order: Procellariiformes   Family: Procellariidae"
List of birds of Australia,"61 species recorded [41 native extant, 19 vagrant, 1 extirpated]
The procellariids are the main group of medium-sized ""true petrels"", characterised by united nostrils with medium nasal septum, and a long outer functional primary flight feather."
List of birds of Australia,"Storks
Order: Ciconiiformes   Family: Ciconiidae
1 species recorded [1 extant native]
Storks are large, long-legged, long-necked, wading birds with long, stout bills. Storks are mute, but bill-clattering is an important mode of communication at the nest. Their nests can be large and may be reused for many years."
List of birds of Australia,"Frigatebirds
Order: Suliformes   Family: Fregatidae"
List of birds of Australia,"3 species recorded [3 extant native]
Frigatebirds are large seabirds usually found over tropical oceans. They are large, black, or black-and-white, with long wings and deeply forked tails. The males have coloured inflatable throat pouches. They do not swim or walk and cannot take off from a flat surface. Having the largest wingspan-to-body-weight ratio of any bird, they are essentially aerial, able to stay aloft for more than a week."
List of birds of Australia,"Boobies and gannets
Order: Suliformes   Family: Sulidae"
List of birds of Australia,"6 species recorded [5 extant native, 1 vagrant]
The sulids comprise the gannets and boobies. Both groups are medium-large coastal seabirds that plunge-dive for fish. Six species have been recorded from Australian territory."
List of birds of Australia,"Anhingas
Order: Suliformes   Family: Anhingidae
2 species recorded [1 extant native, 1 vagrant]
Anhingas or darters are cormorant-like water birds with long necks and long, straight bills. They are fish eaters which often swim with only their neck above the water. One species is found in Australia."
List of birds of Australia,"Cormorants and shags
Order: Suliformes   Family: Phalacrocoracidae
10 species recorded [7 extant native, 2 vagrant]
Cormorants are medium-to-large aquatic birds, usually with mainly dark plumage and areas of coloured skin on the face. The bill is long, thin and sharply hooked. Their feet are four-toed and webbed, a distinguishing feature among the order Pelecaniformes. Nine species occur in Australian territory, with two as vagrants."
List of birds of Australia,"Pelicans
Order: Pelecaniformes   Family: Pelecanidae
1 species recorded [1 extant native]
Pelicans are large water birds with distinctive pouches under their bills. Like other birds in the order Pelecaniformes, they have four webbed toes. One species has been recorded in Australia."
List of birds of Australia,"Herons, egrets, and bitterns
Order: Pelecaniformes   Family: Ardeidae"
List of birds of Australia,"25 species recorded [15 extant native, 10 vagrant]
The family Ardeidae contains the bitterns, herons, and egrets. Herons and egrets are medium to large wading birds with long necks and legs. Bitterns tend to be shorter necked and more wary. Members of Ardeidae fly with their necks retracted, unlike other long-necked birds such as storks, ibises, and spoonbills."
List of birds of Australia,"Ibises and spoonbills
Order: Pelecaniformes   Family: Threskiornithidae"
List of birds of Australia,"5 species recorded [5 extant native]
Threskiornithidae is a family of large terrestrial and wading birds which includes the ibises and spoonbills. They have long, broad wings with 11 primary and about 20 secondary feathers. They are strong fliers and despite their size and weight, very capable soarers."
List of birds of Australia,"Osprey
Order: Accipitriformes   Family: Pandionidae
1 species recorded [1 extant native]
The family Pandionidae contains only one species, the osprey. The osprey is a medium-large raptor which is a specialist fish-eater with a worldwide distribution."
List of birds of Australia,"Hawks, eagles, and kites
Order: Accipitriformes   Family: Accipitridae"
List of birds of Australia,"22 species recorded [17 extant native, 5 vagrant]
Accipitridae is a family of birds of prey, which includes hawks, eagles, kites, harriers, and Old World vultures. These birds have powerful hooked beaks for tearing flesh from their prey, strong legs, powerful talons, and keen eyesight."
List of birds of Australia,"Barn-owls
Order: Strigiformes   Family: Tytonidae"
List of birds of Australia,"5 species recorded [5 extant native]
Barn-owls are medium to large owls with large heads and characteristic heart-shaped faces. They have long strong legs with powerful talons."
List of birds of Australia,"Owls
Order: Strigiformes   Family: Strigidae
10 species recorded [6 extant native, 4 vagrant]
The typical owls are small to large solitary nocturnal birds of prey. They have large forward-facing eyes and ears, a hawk-like beak, and a conspicuous circle of feathers around each eye called a facial disk."
List of birds of Australia,"Hoopoes
Order: Bucerotiformes   Family: Upupidae
1 species recorded [1 vagrant]
Hoopoes have black, white, and orangey-pink colouring with a large erectile crest on their head."
List of birds of Australia,"Kingfishers
Order: Coraciiformes   Family: Alcedinidae"
List of birds of Australia,"15 species recorded [11 extant native, 4 vagrant]
Kingfishers are medium-sized birds with large heads, long pointed bills, short legs, and stubby tails."
List of birds of Australia,"Bee-eaters
Order: Coraciiformes   Family: Meropidae
1 species recorded [1 extant native]
The bee-eaters are a group of near passerine birds in the family Meropidae. Most species are found in Africa but others occur in southern Europe, Madagascar, Australia, and New Guinea. They are characterised by richly coloured plumage, slender bodies, and usually elongated central tail feathers. All are colourful and have long downturned bills and pointed wings, which give them a swallow-like appearance when seen from afar."
List of birds of Australia,"Rollers
Order: Coraciiformes   Family: Coraciidae
2 species recorded [1 extant native, 1 vagrant]
Rollers resemble crows in size and build, but are more closely related to the kingfishers and bee-eaters. They share the colourful appearance of those groups with blues and browns predominating. The two inner front toes are connected, but the outer toe is not."
List of birds of Australia,"Falcons and caracaras
Order: Falconiformes   Family: Falconidae
7 species recorded [6 extant native, 1 vagrant]
Falconidae is a family of diurnal birds of prey. They differ from hawks, eagles, and kites in that they kill with their beaks instead of their talons."
List of birds of Australia,"New Zealand parrots
Order: Psittaciformes   Family: Nestoridae
1 species recorded [1 extinct native]
The family diverged from the other parrots around 82 million years ago when New Zealand broke off from Gondwana, while the ancestors of the genera Nestor and Strigops diverged from each other between 60 and 80 million years ago."
List of birds of Australia,"Cockatoos
Order: Psittaciformes   Family: Cacatuidae
14 species recorded [14 extant native]
The cockatoos share many features with other parrots including the characteristic curved beak shape and a zygodactyl foot, with two forward toes and two backwards toes. They differ, however in a number of characteristics, including the often spectacular movable headcrest."
List of birds of Australia,"Old World parrots
Order: Psittaciformes   Family: Psittaculidae"
List of birds of Australia,"44 species recorded [42 extant native, 1 extirpated native, 1 extinct native]
Characteristic features of parrots include a strong curved bill, an upright stance, strong legs, and clawed zygodactyl feet. Many parrots are vividly coloured, and some are multi-coloured. In size they range from 8 cm (3.1 in) to 1 m (3.3 ft) in length. Old World parrots are found from Africa east across south and southeast Asia and Oceania to Australia and New Zealand."
List of birds of Australia,"Pittas
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Pittidae
6 species recorded [3 extant native, 3 vagrant]
Pittas are medium-sized by passerine standards and are stocky, with fairly long, strong legs, short tails, and stout bills. Many are brightly coloured. They spend the majority of their time on wet forest floors, eating snails, insects, and similar invertebrates."
List of birds of Australia,"Lyrebirds
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Menuridae"
List of birds of Australia,"2 species [2 extant native]
Lyrebirds are most notable for their superb ability to mimic natural and artificial sounds from their environment, and the striking beauty of the male bird's huge tail when it is fanned out in courtship display."
List of birds of Australia,"Scrub-birds
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Atrichornithidae
2 species recorded [2 extant native]
The scrub-bird family is ancient and is understood to be most closely related to the lyrebirds, and probably also the bowerbirds and treecreepers."
List of birds of Australia,"Bowerbirds
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Ptilonorhynchidae"
List of birds of Australia,"11 species recorded [11 extant native]
The bowerbirds are small to medium-sized passerine birds. The males notably build a bower to attract a mate. Depending on the species, the bower ranges from a circle of cleared earth with a small pile of twigs in the centre to a complex and highly decorated structure of sticks and leaves."
List of birds of Australia,"Australasian treecreepers
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Climacteridae
6 species recorded [6 extant native]
The Climacteridae are medium-small, mostly brown-coloured birds with patterning on their underparts."
List of birds of Australia,"Fairywrens
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Maluridae
27 species recorded [27 extant native]
Maluridae is a family of small, insectivorous passerine birds endemic to Australia and New Guinea. They are socially monogamous and sexually promiscuous, meaning that although they form pairs between one male and one female, each partner will mate with other individuals and even assist in raising the young from such pairings."
List of birds of Australia,"Honeyeaters
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Meliphagidae"
List of birds of Australia,"76 species recorded [76 extant native]
The honeyeaters are a large and diverse family of small to medium-sized birds most common in Australia and New Guinea. They are nectar feeders and closely resemble other nectar-feeding passerines."
List of birds of Australia,"Bristlebirds
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Dasyornithidae
3 species recorded [3 extant native]
Bristlebirds are long-tailed, sedentary, ground-frequenting birds. The common name of the family is derived from the presence of prominent rictal bristles - three stiff, hair-like feathers curving downwards on either side of the gape."
List of birds of Australia,"Pardalotes
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Pardalotidae"
List of birds of Australia,"4 species recorded [4 extant native]
Pardalotes spend most of their time high in the outer foliage of trees, feeding on insects, spiders, and above all lerps (a type of sap-sucking insect)."
List of birds of Australia,"Thornbills and allies
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Acanthizidae"
List of birds of Australia,"45 species recorded [44 extant native, 1 extinct native]
Thornbills are small passerine birds, similar in habits to the tits."
List of birds of Australia,"Pseudo-babblers
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Pomatostomidae
4 species recorded [4 extant native]
The pseudo-babblers are small to medium-sized birds endemic to Australia and New Guinea. They are ground-feeding omnivores and highly social"
List of birds of Australia,"Logrunners
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Orthonychidae
2 species recorded [2 extant native]
The Orthonychidae is a family of birds with a single genus, Orthonyx, which comprises two types of passerine birds endemic to Australia and New Guinea, the logrunners and the chowchilla. Both use stiffened tails to brace themselves when feeding."
List of birds of Australia,"Quail-thrushes and jewel-babblers
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Cinclosomatidae
7 species recorded [7 extant native]
The Cinclosomatidae is a family containing jewel-babblers and quail-thrushes."
List of birds of Australia,"Cuckooshrikes
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Campephagidae
8 species recorded [7 extant native, 1 extirpated native]
The cuckooshrikes are small to medium-sized passerine birds. They are predominantly greyish with white and black, although some species are brightly coloured."
List of birds of Australia,"Sittellas
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Neosittidae"
List of birds of Australia,"2 species recorded [2 extant native]
The sittellas are a family of small passerine birds found only in Australasia. They resemble treecreepers, but have soft tails."
List of birds of Australia,"Whipbirds and wedgebills
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Psophodidae
5 species recorded [5 extant native]
The Psophodidae is a family containing whipbirds and wedgebills."
List of birds of Australia,"Australo-Papuan bellbirds
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Oreoicidae
1 species recorded [1 extant native]
The three species contained in the family have been moved around between different families for fifty years. A series of studies of the DNA of Australian birds between 2006 and 2001 found strong support for treating the three genera as a new family, which was formally named in 2016."
List of birds of Australia,"Shrike-tits
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Falcunculidae
3 species recorded [3 extant native]
The shrike-tits have a parrot-like bill, used for distinctive bark-stripping behaviour, which gains it access to invertebrates."
List of birds of Australia,"Whistlers and allies
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Pachycephalidae"
List of birds of Australia,"14 species recorded [14 extant native]
The family Pachycephalidae includes the whistlers, shrikethrushes, and some of the pitohuis."
List of birds of Australia,"Old World orioles
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Oriolidae
3 species recorded [3 extant native]
The Old World orioles are colourful passerine birds. They are not related to the New World orioles."
List of birds of Australia,"Boatbills
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Machaerirhynchidae
1 species recorded [1 extant native]
The boatbills have affinities to woodswallows and butcherbirds, and are distributed across New Guinea and northern Queensland."
List of birds of Australia,"Woodswallows, bellmagpies, and allies
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Artamidae
15 species recorded [15 extant native]
The woodswallows are soft-plumaged, somber-coloured passerine birds. They are smooth, agile flyers with moderately large, semi-triangular wings. The cracticids: currawongs, bellmagpies and butcherbirds, are similar to the other corvids. They have large, straight bills and mostly black, white or grey plumage. All are omnivorous to some degree."
List of birds of Australia,"Fantails
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Rhipiduridae
7 species recorded [6 extant native, 1 extirpated]
The fantails are small insectivorous birds which are specialist aerial feeders."
List of birds of Australia,"Drongos
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Dicruridae"
List of birds of Australia,"2 species recorded [1 extant native, 1 vagrant]
The drongos are mostly black or dark grey in colour, sometimes with metallic tints. They have long forked tails, and some Asian species have elaborate tail decorations. They have short legs and sit very upright when perched, like a shrike. They flycatch or take prey from the ground."
List of birds of Australia,"Birds-of-paradise
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Paradisaeidae
4 species recorded [4 extant native]
The birds-of-paradise are best known for the striking plumage possessed by the males of most species, in particular highly elongated and elaborate feathers extending from the tail, wings or head. These plumes are used in courtship displays to attract females."
List of birds of Australia,"Monarch flycatchers
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Monarchidae"
List of birds of Australia,"15 species recorded [13 extant native, 2 vagrant]
The monarch flycatchers are small to medium-sized insectivorous passerines which hunt by flycatching."
List of birds of Australia,"White-winged chough and apostlebird
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Corcoracidae
2 species recorded [2 extant native]
They are found in open habitat in eastern Australia, mostly open eucalypt woodlands and some forest that lacks a closed canopy. They are highly social, spend much of their time foraging through leaf litter with a very distinctive gait, calling to one another almost constantly"
List of birds of Australia,"Shrikes
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Laniidae
2 species recorded [2 vagrant]
Shrikes are passerine birds known for their habit of catching other birds and small animals and impaling the uneaten portions of their bodies on thorns. A typical shrike's beak is hooked, like a bird of prey."
List of birds of Australia,"Crows, jays, and magpies
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Corvidae
6 species recorded [5 extant native, 1 vagrant]
The family Corvidae includes crows, ravens, jays, choughs, magpies, treepies, nutcrackers and ground jays. Corvids are above average in size among the Passeriformes, and some of the larger species show high levels of intelligence."
List of birds of Australia,"Australasian robins
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Petroicidae"
List of birds of Australia,"23 species recorded [23 extant native]
Most species of Petroicidae have a stocky build with a large rounded head, a short straight bill and rounded wingtips. They occupy a wide range of wooded habitats, from subalpine to tropical rainforest, and mangrove swamp to semi-arid scrubland. All are primarily insectivores, although a few supplement their diet with seeds."
List of birds of Australia,"Larks
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Alaudidae
2 species recorded [1 extant native, 1 introduced]
Larks are small terrestrial birds with often extravagant songs and display flights. Most larks are fairly dull in appearance. Their food is insects and seeds."
List of birds of Australia,"Cisticolas and allies
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Cisticolidae
2 species recorded [2 extant native]
The Cisticolidae are warblers found mainly in warmer southern regions of the Old World. They are generally very small birds of drab brown or grey appearance found in open country such as grassland or scrub."
List of birds of Australia,"Reed warblers and allies
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Acrocephalidae"
List of birds of Australia,"2 species recorded [1 extant native, 1 vagrant]
The members of this family are usually rather large for ""warblers"". Most are rather plain olivaceous brown above with much yellow to beige below. They are usually found in open woodland, reedbeds, or tall grass. The family occurs mostly in southern to western Eurasia and surroundings, but it also ranges far into the Pacific, with some species in Africa."
List of birds of Australia,"Grassbirds and allies
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Locustellidae"
List of birds of Australia,"8 species recorded [5 extant native, 3 vagrant]
Locustellidae are a family of small insectivorous songbirds found mainly in Eurasia, Africa, and the Australian region. They are smallish birds with tails that are usually long and pointed, and tend to be drab brownish or buffy all over."
List of birds of Australia,"Swallows
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Hirundinidae"
List of birds of Australia,"7 species recorded [6 extant native, 1 vagrant]
The family Hirundinidae is adapted to aerial feeding. They have a slender streamlined body, long pointed wings, and a short bill with a wide gape. The feet are adapted to perching rather than walking, and the front toes are partially joined at the base."
List of birds of Australia,"Bulbuls
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Pycnonotidae
2 species recorded [1 introduced, 1 extirpated]
Bulbuls are medium-sized songbirds. Some are colourful with yellow, red or orange vents, cheeks, throats or supercilia, but most are drab, with uniform olive-brown to black plumage. Some species have distinct crests."
List of birds of Australia,"Leaf warblers
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Phylloscopidae
6 species recorded [6 vagrant]
Leaf warblers are a family of small insectivorous birds found mostly in Eurasia and ranging into Wallacea and Africa. The species are of various sizes, often green-plumaged above and yellow below, or more subdued with greyish-green to greyish-brown colours."
List of birds of Australia,"Bush warblers and allies
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Scotocercidae
1 species recorded [1 vagrant]
The members of this family are found throughout Africa, Asia, and Polynesia. Their taxonomy is in flux, and some authorities place some genera in other families."
List of birds of Australia,"White-eyes, yuhinas, and allies
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Zosteropidae
8 species recorded [6 extant native, 1 possibly extinct native, 1 extinct native]
The white-eyes are small birds of rather drab appearance, the plumage above being typically greenish-olive, but some species have a white or bright yellow throat, breast, or lower parts, and several have buff flanks. As the name suggests, many species have a white ring around each eye."
List of birds of Australia,"Starlings
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Sturnidae
8 species recorded [2 extant native, 2 introduced, 3 vagrant, 1 extinct native]
Starlings are small to medium-sized passerine birds. Their flight is strong and direct and they are very gregarious. Their preferred habitat is fairly open country. They eat insects and fruit. Plumage is typically dark with a metallic sheen."
List of birds of Australia,"Thrushes and allies
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Turdidae"
List of birds of Australia,"7 species recorded [3 extant native, 2 introduced, 2 vagrant]
The thrushes are a group of passerine birds that occur mainly in the Old World. They are plump, soft plumaged, small to medium-sized insectivores or sometimes omnivores, often feeding on the ground. Many have attractive songs."
List of birds of Australia,"Old World flycatchers
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Muscicapidae"
List of birds of Australia,"9 species recorded [9 vagrant]
Old World flycatchers are a large group of small arboreal insectivores. The appearance of these birds is highly varied, but they mostly have weak songs and harsh calls."
List of birds of Australia,"Flowerpeckers
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Dicaeidae
2 species recorded [2 extant native]
The flowerpeckers are very small, stout, often brightly coloured birds, with short tails, short thick curved bills, and tubular tongues."
List of birds of Australia,"Sunbirds and spiderhunters
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Nectariniidae
1 species recorded [1 extant native]
The sunbirds and spiderhunters are very small passerine birds which feed largely on nectar, although they will also take insects, especially when feeding young. Their flight is fast and direct on short wings. Most species can take nectar by hovering like a hummingbird, but usually perch to feed."
List of birds of Australia,"Waxbills and allies
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Estrildidae"
List of birds of Australia,"22 species recorded [18 extant native, 3 introduced, 1 vagrant]
The estrildid finches are small passerine birds of the Old World tropics and Australasia. They are gregarious and often colonial seed eaters with short thick but pointed bills. They are all similar in structure and habits, but have wide variation in plumage colours and patterns."
List of birds of Australia,"Old World sparrows
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Passeridae
2 species recorded [2 introduced]
Old World sparrows are small passerine birds, typically small, plump, brown or grey with short tails and short powerful beaks. They are seed-eaters, but also consume small insects."
List of birds of Australia,"Wagtails and pipits
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Motacillidae"
List of birds of Australia,"10 species recorded [4 extant native, 6 vagrant]
Motacillidae is a family of small passerine birds with medium to long tails and comprises the wagtails, longclaws, and pipits. These are slender ground-feeding insectivores of open country."
List of birds of Australia,"Finches, euphonias, and allies
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Fringillidae
5 species recorded [4 introduced, 1 introduced vagrant]
Finches are small to moderately large seed-eating passerine birds with a strong beak, usually conical and in some species very large. All have 12 tail feathers and nine primary flight feathers. Finches have a bouncing flight, alternating bouts of flapping with gliding on closed wings, and most sing well."
List of birds of Australia,"Old World buntings
Order: Passeriformes   Family: Emberizidae
2 species recorded [1 introduced vagrant, 1 vagrant]
The emberizids are a large family of seed-eating birds with distinctively shaped bills. Many emberizid species have distinctive head patterns."
List of birds of Australia,"See also
Birds of Australia, including links to state and local lists
Lists of birds by region, including Oceania and Asia
Fauna of Australia
List of endemic birds of Australia"
List of birds of Australia,"
== References =="
Environment of Australia,"The Australian environment ranges from virtually pristine Antarctic territory and rainforests to degraded industrial areas of major cities. Forty distinct ecoregions have been identified across the Australian mainland and islands. Central Australia has a very dry climate. The interior has a number of deserts while most of the coastal areas are populated. Northern Australia experiences tropical cyclones while much of the country is prone to periodic drought. This dry and warm environment and exposure to cyclones, makes Australia particularly vulnerable to climate change -- with some areas already experiencing increases in wildfires and fragile ecosystems.
The island ecology of Australia has led to a number of unique endemic plant and animal species, notably marsupials like the kangaroo and koala. Agriculture and mining are  predominant land uses which cause negative impacts on many different ecosystems.  The management of the impact on the environment from the mining industry, the protection of the Great Barrier Reef, forests and native animals are recurring issues of conservation. "
Environment of Australia,"The protected areas in Australia are important sources of ecotourism, with sites like the Great Barrier Reef and World Heritage sites like Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area or the Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park draw both national and international tourism. Clean Up Australia Day was an initiative developed in 1989 to collaboratively clean up local areas and is held on the first Sunday of autumn (in March)."
Environment of Australia,"Protected areas
Protected areas cover 895,288 km2 of Australia's land area, or about 11.5% of the total land area. Of these, two-thirds are considered strictly protected (IUCN categories I to IV), and the rest is mostly managed resources protected area (IUCN category VI).  There are also 200 marine protected areas, which cover a further 64.8 million hectares. Indigenous Protected Area have been established since the 1990s, the largest of which covers part of the Tanami Desert in the Northern Territory.
The protected natural areas include world heritage listed properties, such as the Australian Fossil Mammal Sites (Riversleigh/Naracoorte), Central Eastern Rainforest Reserves, Fraser Island, Great Barrier Reef, Greater Blue Mountains Area, Heard and McDonald Islands, Lord Howe Island, Macquarie Island, Purnululu National Park, Shark Bay, and the Wet Tropics of Queensland.
Protected mixed World Heritage listed areas include Tasmanian Wilderness, Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park, Willandra Lakes Region and Kakadu National Park.  Ningaloo Reef and Cape Range peninsula are submitted and on the Tentative List for World Heritage listing and are Australian National Parks."
Environment of Australia,"Conservation
Although most of Australia is semi-arid or desert, it covers a diverse range of habitats, from alpine heaths to tropical rainforests, and is recognised as a megadiverse country. Because of the great age and consequent low levels of fertility of the continent, its extremely variable weather patterns, and its long-term geographic isolation, much of Australia's biota is unique and diverse. About 85% of flowering plants, 84% of mammals, more than 45% of birds, and 89% of in-shore, temperate-zone fish are endemic. Many of Australia's ecoregions, and the species within those regions, are threatened by human activities and introduced plant and animal species. The federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 is a legal framework for the protection of threatened species. Numerous protected areas have been created under the national Biodiversity Action Plan to protect and preserve unique ecosystems; 65 wetlands are listed under the Ramsar Convention, and 16 World Heritage Sites have been established. Australia was ranked 13th in the world on the 2005 Environmental Sustainability Index.
Most Australian woody plant species are evergreen and many are adapted to fire and drought, including many eucalyptus and acacias. Australia has a rich variety of endemic legume species that thrive in nutrient-poor soils because of their symbiosis with Rhizobia bacteria and mycorrhizal fungi. Well-known Australian fauna include monotremes (the platypus and echidna); a host of marsupials, including the kangaroo, koala, wombat; and birds such as the emu and kookaburra. The dingo was introduced by Austronesian people who traded with Indigenous Australians around 3000 BCE. Many plant and animal species became extinct soon after first human settlement, including the Australian megafauna; others have become extinct since European settlement, among them the thylacine."
Environment of Australia,"Water
Australia is the second driest continent (after Antarctica), and frequent droughts have led to the introduction of water restrictions in all parts of Australia. This has led to concern about water security in Australia by environmentalists, irrigators and state and federal governments. Diversion and capture of natural water flows for irrigation in Australia has been responsible for dramatic changes in environmental water flows, particularly in the Murray–Darling basin. The major part of Snowy River flows was diverted by the Snowy Mountains Scheme.
Australia's urban areas use wastewater treatment plants.  Both stormwater and treated sewerage flow into rivers, estuaries, nearshore waters and beaches."
Environment of Australia,"Water supply
Issues
The environmental of Australia is in a ""poor state and it is deteriorating in the face of amplifying threats"". Major environmental issues in Australia include whaling, logging of old growth forest, irrigation and its impact on the Murray River, Darling River and Macquarie Marshes, acid sulfate soils, soil salinity, land clearing, soil erosion, uranium mining, nuclear waste, the creation of marine reserves, air quality in major cities and around polluting industries and infrastructure, pesticide and herbicide impacts and growing of genetically modified food.
There is also a large savana called the great Australian savana.
Increased coal mining in Australia is contentious because of the effects of global warming on Australia, emissions to air from coal burning power stations, dust, subsidence, impact on rivers like the Hunter River and other water users, failure to adequately restore mined areas, and lack of sustainability. As an example, in 1999 Australia's energy consumption of coal and coal products was 47,364 thousand metric tons oil equivalent, compared to that of the world's energy consumption of coal and coal products which totalled 2,278,524 (also measured in thousand metric tons oil equivalent).
Climate change and global warming are of particular concern because of the likely effects of global warming on agriculture, the Great Barrier Reef and tourism industry, human health through mosquito-borne crydiologicyticlogy. Sea level rise could also have a profound impact on low-levelled and poorer communities and waterfront suburbs. The range of rises forecast by the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report would be sufficient to have impacts in many areas, and if the Greenland ice cap melts faster than forecast, it could have a disastrous impact.
In urban areas, noise and odour are major sources of complaints to environmental protection authorities."
Environment of Australia,"Climate change
State of the Environment reports
Commonwealth of Australia
The State of the Environment (SoE) section has responsibility for environmental reporting and implements two key interrelated initiatives: the State of the Environment report and the Essential Environmental Measures for Australia program.
State of the Environment report
The SoE section leads the development and production of the Australia: State of the Environment. The report is a comprehensive national assessment of the state of our environment produced every five years based on the best available evidence. It is tabled in accordance with section 516B of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conversation Act 1999, by the Minister for the Environment and Energy. The SoE report provides a vital resource for policy makers, industry and NGOs, educational institutions, the science community and the general public.
Essential Environmental Measures for Australia
The section also leads the development of the Essential Environmental Measures (EEM) program to strengthen environmental reporting. The EEM program aims to improve our capacity to track trends in the State of Australia's environment and engages with environmental experts to:"
Environment of Australia,"identify measures that are essential for tracking change in the state of the environment and
make measure-related data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR).
Over time, it is anticipated that information provided through the program will become a core component of the evidence used to inform national state of the environment reporting and environmental-economic accounting.
Sydney"
Environment of Australia,"2003
2006
2009"
Environment of Australia,"Victoria
South Australia
Western Australia
The southwest coastal area has a Mediterranean climate and was originally heavily forested, including large stands of the karri, one of the tallest trees in the world. This agricultural region of Western Australia is in the top nine terrestrial habitats for terrestrial biodiversity, with a higher proportion of endemic species than most other equivalent regions. Thanks to the offshore Leeuwin Current the area numbers in the top six regions for marine biodiversity, containing the most southerly coral reefs in the world.
Average annual rainfall varies from 300 millimetres (12 in) at the edge of the Wheatbelt region to 1,400 millimetres (55 in) in the wettest areas near Northcliffe, but in the months of November to March evaporation exceeds rainfall, and it is generally very dry. Plants must be adapted to this as well as the extreme poverty of all soils. A major reduction in winter rainfall has been observed since the mid-1970s, with a greater number of extreme rainfall events in the summer months.
The central four-fifths of the state is semiarid or desert and is lightly inhabited with the only significant activity being mining. Annual rainfall averages 200–250 millimetres (8–10 in), most of which occurs in sporadic torrential falls related to cyclone events in summer months.
An exception to this is the northern tropical regions. The Kimberley has an extremely hot monsoonal climate with average annual rainfall ranging from 500 to 1,500 millimetres (20–60 in), but there is a very long almost rainless season from April to November. Eighty-five percent of the state's runoff occurs in the Kimberley, but because it occurs in violent floods and because of the insurmountable poverty of the generally shallow soils, the only development has taken place along the Ord River.
The black swan is the state bird of Western Australia.
The red-and-green kangaroo paw is the floral emblem of Western Australia.
Occurrence of snow in the state is rare, and typically only in the Stirling Range near Albany, as it is the only mountain range far enough south and with sufficient elevation. More rarely, snow can fall on the nearby Porongurup Range. Snow outside these areas is a major event; it usually occurs in hilly areas of southwestern Australia. The most widespread low-level snow occurred on 26 June 1956 when snow was reported in the Perth Hills, as far north as Wongan Hills and as far east as Salmon Gums. However, even in the Stirling Range, snowfalls rarely exceed 5 cm (2 in) and rarely settle for more than one day.
The highest observed maximum temperature of 50.5 °C (122.9 °F) was recorded at Mardie Station on 19 February 1998. The lowest minimum temperature recorded was −7.2 °C (19.0 °F) at Eyre Bird Observatory on 17 August 2008."
Environment of Australia,"Tasmania
Mild climate"
Environment of Australia,"Australian Capital Territory
Northern Territory
Low relative humidity, wind and lack of rain from hot and dry in the interior to the milder, wetter climates of the south."
Environment of Australia,"Environment organizations
Australian Conservation Foundation
Australian Network of Environmental Defenders Offices (ANEDO)
Greenpeace Australia Pacific
Sustainable Population Australia
Trees for Life (Brooklyn Park)"
Environment of Australia,"See also
Climate change in Australia
List of wettest known tropical cyclones in Australia
List of Australian environmental books
Ecology of Sydney
Waste management in Australia"
Environment of Australia,"References
Further reading"
Environment of Australia,"Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Penguin Books, 2005 and 2011 (ISBN 9780241958681). See chapter 13 entitled « ""Mining"" Australia » (pp. 378–416)."
Liberalism in Australia,"In Australia, liberalism has a vast interpretation and a broad definition. It dates back to the earliest Australian pioneers and has maintained a strong foothold to the present day. Modern-day Australian liberalism is the successor to colonial liberalism, and has been compared to British liberalism for its similarity. The primary representation (and political entity) of Australian liberalism is the centre-right Liberal Party of Australia. Unlike in the United States, liberalism in Australia, and the term ""liberal"", is often associated with conservatism."
Liberalism in Australia,"Introduction
Some of the earliest pioneers of the federation movement, men such as Alfred Deakin, came under the influence of David Syme of The Age. Other influencers  of federalism included Samuel Griffith who, while initially seen as a supporter of the labour movement, became partisan against the Labour movement with his legal intervention in the 1891 Australian Shearers' strike. While all of these men were generally self-described ""liberals"", their understanding of liberalism differed substantially. At the time, Deakin was sometimes described as a ""radical"", and was disliked by both urban conservatives, and the squatting class of Australia. (However, Deakin was also consistently opposed to Labor, instrumental in the fusion of the centre-right parties, a strong supporter of the White Australia policy, and a prominent proponent of stronger trade and defence ties to the British Empire – a position that gained him admirers amongst tories in the UK.) The degree of progressive sentiments also varied from colony to colony: social liberals such as David Syme were prominent in Victoria while others were prominent in South Australia, for instance. At any rate, Australia's parliamentary institutions, especially at a national level, were brand-new, so it was difficult for anyone to be labelled ""conservative"" in a traditional sense.  The two largest political parties, the Free Trade Party and the Protectionist Party, could both loosely be described as ""liberal"" in the terms of the time. They were moderates with a strong belief in parliamentary institutions, financially orthodox and attached to the British Empire, with a distaste for radicalism. The third major political force was the trade union movement represented by the Australian Labor Party. The rise in popularity of the Labor Party became the major preoccupation of these two other parties.
In the early stages of the parliament, the Labor Party engaged in a partnership with the more radical Protectionists, but Labor's wide-ranging policies for social reform met with only lukewarm support from most Protectionists. Fear of socialism became widespread among the ranks  of the establishment, and as the question of tariffs was settled, there was increasing pressure on the non-Labor parliamentary forces to unite in opposition to Labor.
The result was the Fusion in 1909, composed of Joseph Cook's Anti-Socialist Party (formerly Free Trade Party), and conservative Protectionists. The Fusion soon began calling itself the Liberal Party, proclaiming its adherence to classical liberalism.  After Deakin's departure, the fervent anti-socialist Joseph Cook became leader of the party and it became the dominant right-wing force in Australian politics."
Liberalism in Australia,"The pattern of a non-Labor party defining itself as liberal rather than conservative and deriving support from a middle-class base continued to the formation of the present-day Liberal Party, founded in 1945 and led initially by Sir Robert Menzies. Malcolm Fraser, quoting from Menzies' memoir, Afternoon Light, described the decision to call the party ""Liberal"" in these terms, 
We chose the word 'Liberal' because we want to be a progressive party, in no way conservative, in no way reactionary."
Liberalism in Australia,"However, previous Liberal Prime Minister, John Howard, is reported to have described himself the most conservative leader the Liberal Party had ever had.
The ""wet"" (moderate) and ""dry"" (conservative) wings of the Liberal party co-operated fairly harmoniously, but in the early 1970s as conservatives started to dominate in South Australia liberals led by Steele Hall broke off to form the Liberal Movement.  In 1977, other dissident 'small-l liberal' forces led by Don Chipp created the Australian Democrats."
Liberalism in Australia,"Contemporary Australian liberalism
From the early 1990s, social conservatism has characterised the Liberal Party's actions in Government and policy development. Former Prime Minister John Howard in a 2005 speech described the modern position:"
Liberalism in Australia,"The Liberal Party is a broad church. You sometimes have to get the builders in to put in the extra pew on both sides of the aisle to make sure that everybody is accommodated. But it is a broad church and we should never as members of the Liberal Party of Australia lose sight of the fact that we are the trustees of two great political traditions. We are, of course, the custodian of the classical liberal tradition within our society, Australian Liberals should revere the contribution of John Stuart Mill to political thought. We are also the custodians of the conservative tradition in our community. And if you look at the history of the Liberal Party it is at its best when it balances and blends those two traditions. Mill and Burke are interwoven into the history and the practice and the experience of our political party.
Federal ""small-l liberals"", such as Joe Hockey  and Malcolm Turnbull were Cabinet ministers in the Howard government. Christopher Pyne , George Brandis  and Bruce Billson served in the outer ministry. In 2018, members of this grouping made up the substantial majority of senior cabinet and ministry positions in the government of small-l liberal Turnbull. At the state level, ""small-l liberals"" have substantial influence particularly in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania.
The Democrats, fractured under the leadership of Cheryl Kernot and Natasha Stott Despoja, moved to the left. Party leader Meg Lees formed the more avowedly centrist Australian Progressive Alliance in 2003.  In 2002, Tasmanian Liberal candidate Greg Barns was disendorsed following comments opposing Government action taken over the Tampa affair. Barns joined the Australian Democrats, with the view of returning a strong liberal platform to the party."
Liberalism in Australia,"Liberal leaders
Protectionist, Fusion: Alfred Deakin
Fusion/Liberal Party: Joseph Cook
Liberal Party of Australia: Robert Menzies – Harold Holt – John Gorton – William McMahon – Billy Snedden – Malcolm Fraser – Andrew Peacock – John Hewson – Alexander Downer – John Howard – Brendan Nelson – Malcolm Turnbull – Tony Abbott – Malcolm Turnbull – Scott Morrison – Peter Dutton
Australian Democrats: Don Chipp – Janine Haines – Cheryl Kernot – Meg Lees – Natasha Stott Despoja – Andrew Bartlett – Lyn Allison"
Liberalism in Australia,"See also
Christian politics in Australia
Conservatism in Australia
History of Australia
List of political parties in Australia
Moderates (Liberal Party of Australia)
Politics of Australia
Reason Party
Socialism in Australia"
Liberalism in Australia,"References
External links
Libertarian Society of Australia Archived 2008-06-11 at the Wayback Machine
ABC Radio National's Hindsight - An attitude of mind and faith: liberalism in Australian political history
ABC Radio National's Lingua Franca - George Megalogenis on the words 'liberal' and 'conservative'"
Australian Aboriginal languages,"The Indigenous languages of Australia number in the hundreds, the precise number being quite uncertain, although there is a range of estimates from a minimum of around 250 (using the technical definition of 'language' as non-mutually intelligible varieties) up to possibly 363. The Indigenous languages of Australia comprise numerous language families and isolates, perhaps as many as 13, spoken by the Indigenous peoples of mainland Australia and a few nearby islands. The relationships between the language families are not clear at present although there are proposals to link some into larger groupings. Despite this uncertainty, the Indigenous Australian languages are collectively covered by the technical term ""Australian languages"", or the ""Australian family"".
The term can include both Tasmanian languages and the Western Torres Strait language, but the genetic relationship to the mainland Australian languages of the former is unknown, while the latter is Pama–Nyungan, though it shares features with the neighbouring Papuan, Eastern Trans-Fly languages, in particular Meriam Mir of the Torres Strait Islands, as well as the Papuan Tip Austronesian languages. Most Australian languages belong to the widespread Pama–Nyungan family, while the remainder are classified as ""non-Pama–Nyungan"", which is a term of convenience that does not imply a genealogical relationship.
In the late 18th century there were more than 250 distinct First Nations Peoples social groupings and a similar number of languages or varieties. The status and knowledge of Aboriginal languages today varies greatly. Many languages became extinct with settlement as the encroachment of colonial society broke up Indigenous cultures. For some of these languages, few records exist for vocabulary and grammar. At the start of the 21st century, fewer than 150 Aboriginal languages remained in daily use, with the majority being highly endangered. In 2020, 90 per cent of the barely more than 100 languages still spoken are considered endangered. Thirteen languages are still being transmitted to children. The surviving languages are located in the most isolated areas. Of the five least endangered Western Australian Aboriginal languages, four belong to the Western Desert grouping of the Central and Great Victoria Desert.
Yolŋu languages from north-east Arnhem Land are also currently learned by children. Bilingual education is being used successfully in some communities. Seven of the most widely spoken Australian languages, such as Warlpiri, Murrinh-patha and Tiwi, retain between 1,000 and 3,000 speakers. Some Indigenous communities and linguists show support for learning programmes either for language revival proper or for only ""post-vernacular maintenance"" (Indigenous communities having the opportunity to learn some words and concepts related to the lost language)."
Australian Aboriginal languages,"Living Aboriginal languages
The National Indigenous Languages Survey is a regular Australia-wide survey of the status of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages conducted in 2005, 2014 and 2019.
Languages with more than 100 speakers:"
Australian Aboriginal languages,"New South Wales:
3 languages (~ 600):
Yugambeh-Bundjalung
Bundjalung (~ 100)
Yugambeh (~ 20; shared with Queensland)
Githabul (~ 10; shared with Queensland)
Wiradjuri (~ 500)
Gamilaraay (~ 100)
South Australia:
4 languages (~ 3,900):
Ngarrindjeri (~ 300)
Adyamathanha (~ 100)
Yankunytjatjara (~ 400)
Pitjantjatjara (~ 3,100; shared with Northern Territory and Western Australia)
Queensland:
5 languages (~ 1,800):
Kuku Yalanji (~ 300)
Guugu Yimidhirr (~ 800)
Kuuk Thaayore (~ 300)
Wik Mungkan (~ 400)
Western Australia:
17 languages (~ 8,000):
Noongar (~ 500)
Wangkatha (~ 300)
Ngaanyatjarra (~ 1,000)
Manytjilyitjarra (~ 100)
Martu Wangka (~ 700)
Panyjima (~ 100)
Yinjibarndi (~ 400)
Nyangumarta (~ 200)
Bardi (~ 400)
Wajarri (~ 100)
Pintupi (~ 100; shared with Northern Territory)
Pitjantjatjara (~3,100; shared with Northern Territory and South Australia)
Kukatja (~ 100)
Walmatjarri (~ 300)
Gooniyandi (~ 100)
Djaru (~ 200)
Kija (~ 200)
Miriwoong (~ 200)
Northern Territory:
19 languages (~ 28,100):
Luritja (~ 1,000)
Upper Arrernte (~ 4,500)
Warlpiri (~ 2,300)
Kaytetye (~ 100)
Warumungu (~ 300)
Gurindji (~ 400)
Murrinh Patha (~ 2,000)
Tiwi (~ 2,000)
Pintupi (~ 100; shared with Western Australia)
Pitjantjatjara (~3,100; shared with Western Australia and South Australia)
Iwaidja (~ 100)
Maung (~ 400)
Kunwinjku (~ 1,800)
Burarra (~ 1,000)
Dhuwal (~4,200)
Djinang (~ 100)
Nunggubuyu (~ 300)
Anindilyakwa (~ 1,500)
Total 46 languages, 42,300 speakers, with 11 having only approximately 100. 11 languages have over 1,000 speakers."
Australian Aboriginal languages,"Creoles:
Kriol (~ 20,000)"
Australian Aboriginal languages,"Classification
Internal
Most Australian languages are commonly held to belong to the Pama–Nyungan family, a family accepted by most linguists, with Robert M. W. Dixon as a notable exception. For convenience, the rest of the languages, all spoken in the far north, are commonly lumped together as ""Non-Pama–Nyungan"", although this does not necessarily imply that they constitute a valid clade. Dixon argues that after perhaps 40,000 years of mutual influence, it is no longer possible to distinguish deep genealogical relationships from areal features in Australia, and that not even Pama–Nyungan is a valid language family.
However, few other linguists accept Dixon's thesis. For example, Kenneth L. Hale describes Dixon's scepticism as an erroneous phylogenetic assessment which is ""such an insult to the eminently successful practitioners of Comparative Method Linguistics in Australia, that it positively demands a decisive riposte"". Hale provides pronominal and grammatical evidence (with suppletion) as well as more than fifty basic-vocabulary cognates (showing regular sound correspondences) between the proto-Northern-and-Middle Pamic (pNMP) family of the Cape York Peninsula on the Australian northeast coast and proto-Ngayarta of the Australian west coast, some 3,000 kilometres (1,900 mi) apart, to support the Pama–Nyungan grouping, whose age he compares to that of Proto-Indo-European.
Johanna Nichols suggests that the northern families may be relatively recent arrivals from Maritime Southeast Asia, perhaps later replaced there by the spread of Austronesian. That could explain the typological difference between Pama–Nyungan and non-Pama–Nyungan languages, but not how a single family came to be so widespread. Nicholas Evans suggests that the Pama–Nyungan family spread along with the now-dominant Aboriginal culture that includes the Australian Aboriginal kinship system.
In late 2017, Mark Harvey and Robert Mailhammer published a study in Diachronica that hypothesised, by analysing noun class prefix paradigms across both Pama-Nyungan and the minority non-Pama-Nyungan languages, that a Proto-Australian could be reconstructed from which all known Australian languages descend. This Proto-Australian language, they concluded, would have been spoken about 12,000 years ago in northern Australia."
Australian Aboriginal languages,"External
For a long time unsuccessful attempts were made to detect a link between Australian and Papuan languages, the latter being represented by those spoken on the coastal areas of New Guinea facing the Torres Strait and the Arafura Sea. In 1986 William A. Foley noted lexical similarities between Robert M. W. Dixon's 1980 reconstruction of proto-Australian and the East New Guinea Highlands languages. He believed that it was naïve to expect to find a single Papuan or Australian language family when New Guinea and Australia had been a single landmass (called the Sahul continent) for most of their human history, having been separated by the Torres Strait only 8000 years ago, and that a deep reconstruction would likely include languages from both. Dixon, in the meantime, later abandoned his proto-Australian proposal."
Australian Aboriginal languages,"Families
Glottolog 4.1 (2019)
Glottolog 4.1 (2019) recognises 23 independent families and 9 isolates in Australia, comprising a total of 32 independent language groups."
Australian Aboriginal languages,"Bowern (2011)
According to Claire Bowern's Australian Languages (2011), Australian languages divide into approximately 30 primary sub-groups and 5 isolates."
Australian Aboriginal languages,"Presumptive isolates:
Tiwi
Giimbiyu (extinct)
Marrgu (extinct)
Wagiman (moribund)
Wardaman
Previously established families:
Bunuban (2)
Daly (four to five families, with 11–19 languages)
Iwaidjan (3–7)
Jarrakan (3–5)
Nyulnyulan (8)
Worrorran (7–12)
Newly proposed families:
Mirndi (5–7)
Darwin Region (4)
Macro-Gunwinyguan languages (22)
Greater Pama–Nyungan:
Tangkic (5)
Garawan (3)
Pama–Nyungan proper (approximately 270 languages)
Western and Northern Tasmanian (extinct)
Northeastern Tasmanian (extinct)
Eastern Tasmanian (extinct)"
Australian Aboriginal languages,"Survival
It has been inferred from the probable number of languages and the estimate of pre-contact population levels that there may have been from 3,000 to 4,000 speakers on average for each of the 250 languages. A number of these languages were almost immediately wiped out within decades of colonisation, the case of the Aboriginal Tasmanians being one notorious example of precipitous linguistic ethnocide. Tasmania had been separated from the mainland at the end of the Quaternary glaciation, and Indigenous Tasmanians remained isolated from the outside world for around 12,000 years. Claire Bowern has concluded in a recent study that there were twelve Tasmanian languages, and that those languages are unrelated (that is, not demonstrably related) to those on the Australian mainland.
In 1990 it was estimated that 90 languages still survived of the approximately 250 once spoken, but with a high rate of attrition as elders died out. Of the 90, 70% by 2001 were judged as 'severely endangered' with only 17 spoken by all age groups, a definition of a 'strong' language. On these grounds it is anticipated that despite efforts at linguistic preservation, many of the remaining languages will disappear within the next generation. The overall trend suggests that in the not too distant future all of the Indigenous languages will be lost, perhaps by 2050, and with them the cultural knowledge they convey.
During the period of the Stolen Generations, Aboriginal children were removed from their families and placed in institutions where they were punished for speaking their Indigenous language. Different, mutually unintelligible language groups were often mixed together, with Australian Aboriginal English or Australian Kriol language as the only lingua franca. The result was a disruption to the inter-generational transmission of these languages that severely impacted their future use. Today, that same transmission of language between parents and grandparents to their children is a key mechanism for reversing language shift. For children, proficiency in the language of their cultural heritage has a positive influence on their ethnic identity formation, and it is thought to be of particular benefit to the emotional well-being of Indigenous children. There is some evidence to suggest that the reversal of the Indigenous language shift may lead to decreased self-harm and suicide rates among Indigenous youth.
The first Aboriginal people to use Australian Aboriginal languages in the Australian parliament were Aden Ridgeway on 25 August 1999 in the Senate when he said ""On this special occasion, I make my presence known as an Aborigine and to this chamber I say, perhaps for the first time: Nyandi baaliga Jaingatti. Nyandi mimiga Gumbayynggir. Nya jawgar yaam Gumbyynggir."" (Translation: My father is Dhunghutti. My mother is Gumbayynggir. And, therefore, I am Gumbayynggir.) In the House of Representatives on 31 August 2016 Linda Burney gave an acknowledgment of country in Wiradjuri in her first speech and was sung in by Lynette Riley in Wiradjuri from the public gallery."
Australian Aboriginal languages,"Preservation measures
2019 was the International Year of Indigenous Languages (IYIL2019), as declared by the United Nations General Assembly. The commemoration was used to raise awareness of and support for the preservation of Aboriginal languages within Australia, including spreading knowledge about the importance of each language to the identity and knowledge of Indigenous groups. Warrgamay/Girramay man Troy Wyles-Whelan joined the North Queensland Regional Aboriginal Corporation Language Centre (NQRACLC) in 2008, and has been contributing oral histories and the results of his own research to their database. As part of the efforts to raise awareness of Wiradjuri language a Grammar of Wiradjuri language was published in 2014 and A new Wiradjuri dictionary in 2010.
The New South Wales Aboriginal Languages Act 2017 became law on 24 October 2017. It was the first legislation in Australia to acknowledge the significance of first languages.
In 2019 the Royal Australian Mint issued a 50-cent coin to celebrate the International Year of Indigenous Languages which features 14 different words for ""money"" from Australian Indigenous languages. The coin was designed by Aleksandra Stokic in consultation with Indigenous language custodian groups.
The work of digitising and transcribing many word lists created by ethnographer Daisy Bates in the 1900s at Daisy Bates Online provides a valuable resource for those researching especially Western Australian languages, and some languages of the Northern Territory and South Australia. The project is co-ordinated by Nick Thieberger, who works in collaboration with the National Library of Australia ""to have all the microfilmed images from Section XII of the Bates papers digitised"". The project is succeeded by the Nyingarn Project
, which digitises manuscripts and crowdsources transcriptions through DigiVol."
Australian Aboriginal languages,"Language revival
In recent decades, there have been attempts to revive indigenous languages. Significant challenges exist, however, for the revival of languages in the dominant English language culture of Australia.
The Kaurna language, spoken by the Kaurna people of the Adelaide plains, has been the subject of a concerted revival movement since the 1980s, coordinated by Kaurna Warra Pintyanthi, a unit working out of the University of Adelaide. The language had rapidly disappeared after the settlement of South Australia and the breaking up of local indigenous people. Ivaritji, the last known speaker of the language, died in 1931. However, a substantial number of primary source records existed for the language, from which the language was reconstructed."
Australian Aboriginal languages,"Common features
""Some Aboriginal people distinguish between usership and ownership. There are even those who claim that they own a language although they only know one single word of it: its name."": 212 
Whether it is due to genetic unity or some other factor such as occasional contact, typologically the Australian languages form a language area or Sprachbund, sharing much of their vocabulary and many distinctive phonological features across the entire continent.
A common feature of many Australian languages is that they display so-called avoidance speech, special speech registers used only in the presence of certain close relatives. These registers share the phonology and grammar of the standard language, but the lexicon is different and usually very restricted. There are also commonly speech taboos during extended periods of mourning or initiation that have led to numerous Aboriginal sign languages.
For morphosyntactic alignment, many Australian languages have ergative–absolutive case systems. These are typically split systems; a widespread pattern is for pronouns (or first and second persons) to have nominative–accusative case marking and for third person to be ergative–absolutive, though splits between animate and inanimate are also found. In some languages the persons in between the accusative and ergative inflections (such as second person, or third-person human) may be tripartite: that is, marked overtly as either ergative or accusative in transitive clauses, but not marked as either in intransitive clauses. There are also a few languages which employ only nominative–accusative case marking."
Australian Aboriginal languages,"Phonetics and phonology
The following represents a canonical 6-place Australian Aboriginal consonant system. It does not represent any single language, but is instead a simplified form of the consonant inventory of what would be found in many Australian languages, including most Arandic and Yolŋu languages."
Australian Aboriginal languages,"Segmental inventory
A typical Australian phonological inventory includes just three vowels, usually /i, u, a/, which may occur in both long and short variants. In a few cases the [u] has been unrounded to give [i, ɯ, a].
There is almost never a voicing contrast; that is, a consonant may sound like a [p] at the beginning of a word, but like a [b] between vowels, and either letter could be (and often is) chosen to represent it. Australia also stands out as being almost entirely free of fricative consonants, even of [h]. In the few cases where fricatives do occur, they developed recently through the lenition (weakening) of stops, and are therefore non-sibilants like [ð] rather than the sibilants like [s] that are common elsewhere in the world. Some languages also have three rhotics, typically a flap, a trill, and an approximant (that is, like the combined rhotics of English and Spanish) and many have four laterals.
Besides the lack of fricatives, the most striking feature of Australian speech sounds is the large number of places of articulation. Some 10-15% of Australian languages have four places of articulation, with two coronal places of articulation, 40-50% have five places, and 40-45% have six places of articulation, including four coronals. The four-way distinction in the coronal region is commonly accomplished through two variables: the position of the tongue (front, alveolar or dental, or retroflex), and its shape (apical or laminal).
There are also bilabial, velar and often palatal consonants, but a complete absence of uvular consonants and only a few languages with a glottal stop. Both stops and nasals occur at all six places, and in many languages laterals occur at all four coronal places.
Andrew Butcher speculates that the unusual segmental inventories of Australian languages may be due to the very high presence of otitis media ear infections and resulting hearing loss in their populations. People with hearing loss often have trouble distinguishing different vowels and hearing fricatives and voicing contrasts. Australian Aboriginal languages thus seem to show similarities to the speech of people with hearing loss, and avoid those sounds and distinctions which are difficult for people with early childhood hearing loss to perceive. At the same time, Australian languages make full use of those distinctions, namely place of articulation distinctions, which people with otitis media-caused hearing loss can perceive more easily. This hypothesis has been challenged on historical, comparative, statistical, and medical grounds.
A language which displays the full range of stops, nasals and laterals is Kalkatungu, which has labial p, m; ""dental"" th, nh, lh; ""alveolar"" t, n, l; ""retroflex"" rt, rn, rl; ""palatal"" ty, ny, ly; and velar k, ng. Wangganguru has all this, as well as three rhotics. Yanyuwa has even more contrasts, with an additional true dorso-palatal series, plus prenasalised consonants at all seven places of articulation, in addition to all four laterals.
A notable exception to the above generalisations is Kalaw Lagaw Ya, spoken in the Torres Strait Islands, which has an inventory more like its Papuan neighbours than the languages of the Australian mainland, including full voice contrasts: /p b/, dental /t̪ d̪/, alveolar /t d/, the sibilants /s z/ (which have allophonic variation with [tʃ] and [dʒ] respectively) and velar /k ɡ/, as well as only one rhotic, one lateral and three nasals (labial, dental and velar) in contrast to the 5 places of articulation of stops/sibilants. Where vowels are concerned, it has 8 vowels with some morpho-syntactic as well as phonemic length contrasts (i iː, e eː, a aː, ə əː, ɔ ɔː, o oː, ʊ ʊː, u uː), and glides that distinguish between those that are in origin vowels, and those that in origin are consonants. Kunjen and other neighbouring languages have also developed contrasting aspirated consonants ([pʰ], [t̪ʰ], [tʰ], [cʰ], [kʰ]) not found further south."
Australian Aboriginal languages,"Coronal consonants
Descriptions of the coronal articulations can be inconsistent.
The alveolar series t, n, l (or d, n, l) is straightforward: across the continent, these sounds are alveolar (that is, pronounced by touching the tongue to the ridge just behind the gum line of the upper teeth) and apical (that is, touching that ridge with the tip of the tongue). This is very similar to English t, d, n, l, though the Australian t is not aspirated, even in Kalaw Lagaw Ya, despite its other stops being aspirated.
The other apical series is the retroflex, rt, rn, rl (or rd, rn, rl). Here the place is further back in the mouth, in the postalveolar or prepalatal region. The articulation is actually most commonly subapical; that is, the tongue curls back so that the underside of the tip makes contact. That is, they are true retroflex consonants. It has been suggested that subapical pronunciation is characteristic of more careful speech, while these sounds tend to be apical in rapid speech. Kalaw Lagaw Ya and many other languages in North Queensland differ from most other Australian languages in not having a retroflexive series.
The dental series th, nh, lh are always laminal (that is, pronounced by touching with the surface of the tongue just above the tip, called the blade of the tongue), but may be formed in one of three different ways, depending on the language, on the speaker, and on how carefully the speaker pronounces the sound. These are interdental with the tip of the tongue visible between the teeth, as in th in English; dental with the tip of the tongue down behind the lower teeth, so that the blade is visible between the teeth; and denti-alveolar, that is, with both the tip and the blade making contact with the back of the upper teeth and alveolar ridge, as in French t, d, n, l. The first tends to be used in careful enunciation, and the last in more rapid speech, while the tongue-down articulation is less common.
Finally, the palatal series ty, ny, ly. (The stop is often spelled dj, tj, or j.) Here the contact is also laminal, but further back, spanning the alveolar to postalveolar, or the postalveolar to prepalatal regions. The tip of the tongue is typically down behind the lower teeth. This is similar to the ""closed"" articulation of Circassian fricatives (see Postalveolar consonant). The body of the tongue is raised towards the palate. This is similar to the ""domed"" English postalveolar fricative sh. Because the tongue is ""peeled"" from the roof of the mouth from back to front during the release of these stops, there is a fair amount of frication, giving the ty something of the impression of the English palato-alveolar affricate ch or the Polish alveolo-palatal affricate ć. That is, these consonants are not palatal in the IPA sense of the term, and indeed they contrast with true palatals in Yanyuwa. In Kalaw Lagaw Ya, the palatal consonants are sub-phonemes of the alveolar sibilants /s/ and /z/.
These descriptions do not apply exactly to all Australian languages, as the notes regarding Kalaw Lagaw Ya demonstrate. However, they do describe most of them, and are the expected norm against which languages are compared."
Australian Aboriginal languages,"Phonotactics
Some have suggested that the most appropriate unit to describe the phonotactics of Australian languages is the phonological word. The most common word length is two syllables, and a typical phonological word would have the form:"
Australian Aboriginal languages,"(CINIT)V1C1(C2)V2(CFIN)
with the first syllable being stressed. The optionality of CFIN is cross-linguistically normal, since coda consonants are weak or nonexistent in many languages, as well as in the early stages of language acquisition. The weakening of CINIT, on the other hand, is very unusual. No Australian language has consonant clusters in this position, and those languages with fortis and lenis distinctions do not make such distinctions in this position. Place of articulation distinctions are also less common in this position, and lenitions and deletions are historically common here. While in most languages the word-initial position is prominent, maintaining all a language's contrasts, that is not the case in Australia. Here the prominent position is C1(C2), in the middle of the word. C1 is typically the only position allowing all of a language's place of articulation contrasts. Fortis/lenis contrasts can only occur at C1, or at C2 when C1 is a sonorant. Consonant clusters are often restricted to the C1(C2) position, and are most commonly sonorant + obstruent sequences. In languages with pre-stopped nasals or laterals, those sounds only occur at C1.
Australian languages typically resist certain connected speech processes which might blur the place of articulation of consonants at C1(C2), such as anticipatory assimilation of place of articulation, which is common around the world. In Australia, this type of assimilation seems only to have affected consonants within the apical and laminal categories. There's little evidence of assimilation between the labial, apical, laminal, and dorsal categories. Many proto-Pama–Nyungan /-np-/ and /-nk-/ clusters have been preserved across Australia. Heterorganic nasal + stop sequences remain stable even in modern connected speech, which is highly unusual.
The anticipatory assimilation of nasality is quite common in various languages around the world. Typically, a vowel will become nasalized before a following nasal consonant. However, this process is resisted in Australian languages.
There was a historical process in many languages where nasal + stop C1C2 clusters lost the nasal element if CINIT was a nasal. Also, many languages have morphophonemic alterations whereby initial nasals in suffixes are denasalized if the preceding stem contains a nasal consonant.
While the existence of phonemic pre-stopped nasals and laterals, contrasting with plain nasals and laterals, has been documented in some Australian languages, nasals and laterals are pre-stopped on a phonetic level in most languages of the continent. These phenomena are the result of a general resistance to the anticipatory assimilation of nasality and laterality. The lack of assimilation makes coda nasals and laterals more acoustically distinct.
Most speakers of Australian languages speak with a 'pressed' voice quality, with the glottal opening narrower than in modal voice, a relatively high frequency of creaky voice, and low airflow. This may be due to an avoidance of breathy voice. This pressed quality could therefore serve to enhance the clarity of speech and ensure the perception of place of articulation distinctions."
Australian Aboriginal languages,"Orthography
Probably every Australian language with speakers remaining has had an orthography developed for it, in each case in the Latin script. Sounds not found in English are usually represented by digraphs, or more rarely by diacritics, such as underlines, or extra symbols, sometimes borrowed from the International Phonetic Alphabet. Some examples are shown in the following table."
Australian Aboriginal languages,"Demographics (2016)
In the Northern Territory, 62.5% of Aboriginal Australians spoke an indigenous language at home in 2016. In Queensland, almost 95% of Torres Strait Islanders spoke an indigenous language at home in 2016."
Australian Aboriginal languages,"Notable linguists
A number of linguists and ethnographers have contributed greatly to the sum of knowledge about Australian languages. Of particular note are:"
Australian Aboriginal languages,"See also
Aboriginal Australians
Australian Aboriginal sign languages
List of Aboriginal Australian group names
List of Australian Aboriginal languages
List of Aboriginal languages of New South Wales
List of Australian place names of Aboriginal origin
List of endangered languages with mobile apps
List of reduplicated Australian place names
Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages
Macro-Gunwinyguan languages
Macro-Pama–Nyungan languages"
Australian Aboriginal languages,"Notes
Citations
Sources
Further reading
Simpson, Jane (21 January 2019). ""The state of Australia's Indigenous languages – and how we can help people speak them more often"". The Conversation.
AUSTLANG Australian Indigenous Languages Database at AIATSIS
Aboriginal Australia map, a guide to Aboriginal language, tribal and nation groups published by AIATSIS
Aboriginal Languages of Australia
The AIATSIS map of Aboriginal Australia (recorded ranges; full view here
Languages of Australia, as listed by Ethnologue
Report of the Second National Indigenous Languages Survey 2014
Finding the meaning of an Aboriginal word
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, Social Justice Report 2009 for more information about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages and policy.
Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages Archived 14 March 2018 at the Wayback Machine (Northern Territory languages only)
Bowern, Claire. 2016. ""Chirila: Contemporary and Historical Resources for the Indigenous Languages of Australia"". Language Documentation and Conservation 10 (2016): 1–44. http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc/?p=1002."
Australian Aboriginal languages,"External links
Cultures and languages are strong, supported and flourishing Data relating to the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Languages spoken in Australia and its States and Territories.
50 Words Project (audio recordings of 50 words in Australian Indigenous languages)
CHIRILA: A database of the languages of Australia Archived 23 October 2020 at the Wayback Machine (Contemporary and Historical Reconstruction in the Indigenous Languages of Australia)
CHIRILA, Yale Pama-Nyungan Lab
Gambay - First Languages Map, an interactive map of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander word lists, State Library of Queensland.
Spoken: celebrating Queensland languages digital stories, State Library of Queensland"
Climate change in Australia,"Climate change has been a critical issue in Australia since the beginning of the 21st century. Australia is becoming hotter and more prone to extreme heat, bushfires, droughts, floods, and longer fire seasons because of climate change. Climate issues include wildfires, heatwaves, cyclones, rising sea levels, and erosion.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, Australia has experienced an increase of over 1.4 °C in average annual temperatures, with warming occurring at twice the rate over the past 50 years compared with the previous 50 years. Recent climate events such as extremely high temperatures and widespread drought have focused government and public attention on the effects of climate change in Australia. Rainfall in southwestern Australia has decreased by 10–20% since the 1970s, while southeastern Australia has also experienced a moderate decline since the 1990s. Rainfall is expected to become heavier and more infrequent, as well as more common in summer rather than in winter. Australia's annual average temperatures are projected to increase 0.4–2.0 °C above 1990 levels by the year 2030, and 1–6 °C by 2070. Average precipitation in the southwest and southeast Australia is projected to decline during this time, while regions such as the northwest may experience increases in rainfall.
Climate change is affecting the continent's environment and ecosystems. Australia is vulnerable to the effects of global warming projected for the next 50 to 100 years because of its extensive arid and semi-arid areas, and already warm climate, high annual rainfall variability. The continent's high fire risk increases this susceptibility to changes in temperature and climate. Meanwhile, Australia's coastlines will experience erosion and inundation from an estimated 8–88 cm increase in global sea level. Australia's unique ecosystems such as the Great Barrier Reef and many animal species are also at risk.
Climate change also has diverse implications for Australia's economy, agriculture and public health. Projected impacts include more severe floods, droughts, and cyclones. Furthermore, Australia's population is highly concentrated in coastal areas at risk from rising sea levels, and existing pressures on water supply will be exacerbated. The exposure of Indigenous Australians to climate change impacts is exacerbated by existing socio-economic disadvantages which are linked to colonial and post-colonial marginalisation. The communities most affected by climate changes are those in the North where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people make up 30% of the population. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities located in the coastal north are the most disadvantaged due to social and economic issues and their reliance on traditional land for food, culture, and health. This has raised the question for many community members in these areas, ""Should we stay or move away?""
Australia is also a contributor to climate change, with its greenhouse gas emissions per capita above the world average. The country is highly reliant on coal and other fossil fuels, although renewable energy coverage is increasing. National mitigation efforts include a commitment to achieving net zero emissions by 2050 under the Paris Agreement, although Australia has repeatedly ranked poorly in the Climate Change Performance Index and other international rankings for its climate targets and implementation. Adaptation can be performed at national and local levels and was identified as a priority for Australia in the 2007 Garnaut Review.
Climate change has been a divisive or politicised issue in Australian politics since the 2000s, contributing to successive governments implementing and repealing mitigation policies such as carbon pricing. Some Australian media outlets have promoted climate misinformation. The issue has sparked protests in support of climate change policies, including some of the largest demonstrations in Australia's history."
Climate change in Australia,"Greenhouse gas emissions
Impacts on the natural environment
Temperature and weather changes
Australia's instrumental record from 1885 to the present shows the following broad picture:
Conditions from 1885 to 1898 were generally fairly wet, though less so than in the period since 1968. The only noticeably dry years in this era were 1888 and 1897. Although some coral core data suggest that 1887 and 1890 were, with 1974, the wettest years across the continent since settlement, rainfall data for Alice Springs, then the only major station covering the interior of the Northern Territory and Western Australia, strongly suggest that 1887 and 1890 were overall not as wet as 1974 or even 2000. In New South Wales and Queensland, however, the years 1886–1887 and 1889–1894 were indeed exceptionally wet. The heavy rainfall over this period has been linked with a major expansion of the sheep population and February 1893 saw the disastrous 1893 Brisbane flood.
A drying of the climate took place from 1899 to 1921, though with some interruptions from wet El Niño years, especially between 1915 and early 1918 and in 1920–1921, when the wheat belt of the southern interior was drenched by its heaviest winter rains on record. Two major El Niño events in 1902 and 1905 produced the two driest years across the whole continent, whilst 1919 was similarly dry in the eastern States apart from the Gippsland.
The period from 1922 to 1938 was exceptionally dry, with only 1930 having Australia-wide rainfall above the long-term mean and the Australia-wide average rainfall for these seventeen years being 15 to 20 per cent below that for other periods since 1885. This dry period is attributed in some sources to a weakening of the Southern Oscillation and in others to reduced sea surface temperatures. Temperatures in these three periods were generally cooler than they are currently, with 1925 having the coolest minima of any year since 1910. However, the dry years of the 1920s and 1930s were also often quite warm, with 1928 and 1938 having particularly high maxima.
The period from 1939 to 1967 began with an increase in rainfall: 1939, 1941 and 1942 were the first close-together group of relatively wet years since 1921. From 1943 to 1946, generally dry conditions returned, and the two decades from 1947 saw fluctuating rainfall. 1950, 1955 and 1956 were exceptionally wet except 1950 and 1956 over arid and wheatbelt regions of Western Australia. 1950 saw extraordinary rains in central New South Wales and most of Queensland: Dubbo's 1950 rainfall of 1,329 mm (52.3 in) can be estimated to have a return period of between 350 and 400 years, whilst Lake Eyre filled for the first time in thirty years. In contrast, 1951, 1961 and 1965 were very dry, with complete monsoon failure in 1951/1952 and extreme drought in the interior during 1961 and 1965. Temperatures over this period initially fell to their lowest levels of the 20th century, with 1949 and 1956 being particularly cool, but then began a rising trend that has continued with few interruptions to the present.
Since 1968, Australia's rainfall has been 15 per cent higher than between 1885 and 1967. The wettest periods have been from 1973 to 1975 and 1998 to 2001, which comprise seven of the thirteen wettest years over the continent since 1885. Overnight minimum temperatures, especially in winter, have been markedly higher than before the 1960s, with 1973, 1980, 1988, 1991, 1998 and 2005 outstanding in this respect. There has been a marked decrease in the frequency of frost across Australia.
According to the Bureau of Meteorology, Australia's annual mean temperature for 2009 was 0.9 °C above the 1961–90 average, making it the nation's second-warmest year since high-quality records began in 1910.
According to the Bureau of Meteorology's 2011 Australian Climate Statement, Australia had lower than average temperatures in 2011 as a consequence of a La Niña weather pattern; however, ""the country's 10-year average continues to demonstrate the rising trend in temperatures, with 2002–2011 likely to rank in the top two warmest 10-year periods on record for Australia, at 0.52 °C (0.94 °F) above the long-term average"". Furthermore, 2014 was Australia's third warmest year since national temperature observations commenced in 1910."
Climate change in Australia,"Sea level rise
The Australian Government released a report saying that up to 247,600 houses are at risk from flooding from a sea level rise of 1.1 metres. There were 39,000 buildings located within 110 metres of 'soft' erodible shorelines, at risk from a faster erosion due to sea level rise. Adaptive responses to this specific climate change threat are often incorporated in the coastal planning policies and recommendations at the state level. For instance, the Western Australia State Coastal Planning Policy established a sea level rise benchmark for initiatives that address the problem over a 100-year period. Lower projections indicate that sea levels will rise by 40 to 90 cm upon the end of the century"
Climate change in Australia,"Water (droughts and floods)
Bureau of Meteorology records since the 1860s show that a 'severe' drought has occurred in Australia, on average, once every 18 years. Australia is already the driest populated continent in the world.
Rainfall in southwestern Australia has decreased by 10–20% since the 1970s, while southeastern Australia has also experienced a moderate decline since the 1990s. Rainfall is expected to become heavier and more infrequent, as well as more common in summer rather than in winter.
In June 2008 it became known that an expert panel had warned of long-term, maybe irreversible, severe ecological damage for the whole Murray-Darling basin if it did not receive sufficient water by October of that year. Water restrictions were in place in many regions and cities of Australia in response to chronic shortages resulting from the 2008 drought. In 2004 paleontologist Tim Flannery predicted that unless it made drastic changes the city of Perth, Western Australia, could become the world's first ghost metropolis—an abandoned city with no more water to sustain its population.
In 2019 the drought and water resources minister of Australia David Littleproud, said, that he ""totally accepts"" the link between climate change and drought in Australia because he ""live it"". He says that the drought in Australia is already eight years long. He called for a reduction in greenhouse gas emission and massive installation of renewable energy. Former leader of the nationalists Barnaby Joyce said that if the drought became more fierce and dams will not be built, the coalition risk ""political annihilation"".
According to the 2022 IPCC report, there has been an increase in flooding episodes and other catastrophic weather events because of global warming. These unusual weather changes in include rainfall in the north and severe droughts in the south. Less rainfall means less streamflow of water for major cities. The IPCC recommends a step up to our adaptation and finance policies in our systems to keep up with the drastic impacts of climate change for a sustainable development."
Climate change in Australia,"Water resources
Healthy and diverse vegetation is essential to river health and quality, and many of Australia's most important catchments are covered by native forest, maintaining a healthy ecosystem. Climate change will affect growth, species composition and pest incursion of native species and in turn, will profoundly affect water supply from these catchments. Increased re-afforestation in cleared catchments also has the prospect for water losses.
The CSIRO predicts that the additional results in Australia of a temperature rise of between only 1 and 2 °C will be:"
Climate change in Australia,"12–25% reduction inflow in the Murray River and Darling River basin.
7–35% reduction in Melbourne's water supply."
Climate change in Australia,"Bushfires
There is an increase in fire activity in Australia in the latest decades. The causes include ""more dangerous fire weather conditions, increased risk factors associated with pyroconvection, including fire-generated thunderstorms, and increased ignitions from dry lightning, all associated to varying degrees with anthropogenic climate change"".
Firefighting officials are concerned that the effects of climate change will increase the frequency and intensity of bushfires under even a ""low global warming"" scenario. A 2006 report, prepared by CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, Bushfire CRC, and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, identified South Eastern Australia as one of the three most fire-prone areas in the world, and concluded that an increase in fire-weather risk is likely at most sites over the next several decades, including the average number of days when the McArthur Forest Fire Danger Index rating is very high or extreme. It also found that the combined frequencies of days with very high and extreme FFDI ratings are likely to increase 4–25% by 2020 and 15–70% by 2050, and that the increase in fire-weather risk is generally largest inland.
Australian Greens leader Bob Brown said that the fires were ""a sobering reminder of the need for this nation and the whole world to act and put at a priority the need to tackle climate change"". The Black Saturday Royal Commission recommended that ""the amount of fuel-reduction burning done on public land each year should be more than doubled"".
In 2018, the fire season in Australia began in the winter. August 2018 was hotter and windier than the average. Those meteorological conditions led to a drought in New South Wales. The Government of the state already gave more than $1 billion to help the farmers. The hotter and drier climate led to more fires. The fire seasons in Australia are lengthening and fire events became more frequent in the latest 30 years. These trends are probably linked to climate change.
The 2019–20 Australian bushfire season was by some measures Australia's ""worst bushfire season on record"". In New South Wales, the fires burnt through more land than any other blazes in the past 25 years, in addition to being the state's worst bushfire season on record. NSW also experienced the longest continuously burning bushfire complex in Australia's history, having burnt more than 4 million hectares (9,900,000 acres), with 70-metre-high (230 ft) flames being reported. Approximately 3 billion animals were killed or displaced by the bushfires and this made them one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history. The chance of reaching the climatic conditions that fuels the fires became more than four times bigger since the year 1900 and will become eight times more likely to occur if the temperature will rise by 2 degrees from the preindustrial level. In December 2019 the New South Wales Government declared a state of emergency after record-breaking temperatures and prolonged drought exacerbated the bushfires.
In 2019 bushfires linked to climate change created air pollution 11 times higher that the hazardous level in many areas of New South Wales. Many medical groups called to protect people from ""public health emergency"" and moving on from fossil fuels.
According to the United Nations Environment Programme the megafires in Australia in 2019–2020 are probably linked to climate change that created the unusually dry and hot weather conditions. This is part of a global trend. Brazil, the United States, the Russian Federation, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo all face similar problems. By the second week of January the fires burned a territory of approximately 100,000 square kilometres close to the territory of England, killed one billion animals and caused large economic damage.
Researchers claim that the exceptionally strong wildfires in 2019–2020 were impossible without the effects of climate change. More than one-fifth of Australian forests were burned in one season, which was completely unprecedented. They say that: ""In the case of recent events in Australia, there is no doubt that the record temperatures of the past year would not be possible without anthropogenic influence, and that under a scenario where emissions continue to grow, such a year would be average by 2040 and exceptionally cool by 2060."" Climate change probably also caused drier weather conditions in Australia by impacting Indian Ocean Dipole, which also increase fires. In average, below 2% of Australian forests burn annually. Climate change has increased the likelihood of the wildfires in 2019–2020 by at least 30%, but researchers said the result is probably conservative."
Climate change in Australia,"Extreme weather events
Rainfall patterns and the degree of droughts and storms brought about by extreme weather conditions are likely to be affected. The CSIRO predicts that a temperature rise of between 2 and 3 °C on the Australian continent could incur some of the following extreme weather occurrences, in addition to standard patterns:"
Climate change in Australia,"Wind speeds of tropical cyclones could intensify by 5 to 10%.
In 100 years, strong tides would increase by 12–16% along eastern Victoria's coast.
The forest fire danger indices in New South Wales and Western Australia would grow by 10% and the forest fire danger indices in south, central and north-east Australia would increase by more than 10%."
Climate change in Australia,"Heatwaves
A report in 2014 revealed that, due to the change in climatic patterns, heat waves were found to be increasingly more frequent and severe, with an earlier start to the season and longer duration.
Since temperatures began to be recorded in 1910, they have increased by an average of 1 °C, with most of this change occurring from 1950 onwards. This period has seen the frequency and intensity of extreme heat events increase.
Summer 2013–14 was warmer than average for the entirety of Australia. Both Victoria and South Australia saw record-breaking temperatures. Adelaide recorded a total of 13 days reaching 40 °C or more, 11 of which reached 42 °C or more, as well as its fifth-hottest day on record—45.1 °C on 14 January. The number of days over 40 °C beat the previous record of summer 1897–1898, when 11 days above 40 °C were recorded. Melbourne recorded six days over 40 °C, while nighttime temperatures were much warmer than usual, with some nights failing to drop below 30 °C. Overall, the summer of 2013–2014 was the third-hottest on record for Victoria, fifth-warmest on record for New South Wales, and sixth-warmest on record for South Australia. This heatwave has been directly linked to climate change, which is unusual for specific weather events.
Following the 2014 event, it was predicted that temperatures might increase by up to 1.5 °C by 2030.
2015 was Australia's fifth-hottest year on record, continuing the trend of record-breaking high temperatures across the country. According to Australian Climate Council in 2017 Australia had its warmest winter on record, in terms of average maximum temperatures, reaching nearly 2 °C above average. January 2019 was the hottest month ever in Australia with average temperatures exceeding 30 °C (86 °F)."
Climate change in Australia,"Ecosystems and biodiversity
Sustained climate change could have drastic effects on the ecosystems of Australia. For example, rising ocean temperatures and continual erosion of the coasts from higher water levels will cause further bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef. Beyond that, Australia's climate will become even harsher, with more powerful tropical cyclones and longer droughts.
The Department of Climate Change said in its Climate Change Impacts and Costs fact sheet: ""...ecologically rich sites, such as the Great Barrier Reef, Queensland Wet Tropics, Kakadu Wetlands, Australian Alpine areas, south-western Australia and sub- Antarctic islands are all at risk, with significant loss of biodiversity projected to occur by 2020"". It also said: ""Very conservatively, 90 Australian animal species have so far been identified at risk from climate change, including mammals, insects, birds, reptiles, fish, and amphibians from all parts of Australia.""
Australia has some of the world's most diverse ecosystems and natural habitats, and it may be this variety that makes them the Earth's most fragile and at-risk when exposed to climate change. The Great Barrier Reef is a prime example. Over the past 20 years it has experienced unparalleled rates of bleaching. Additional warming of 1 °C is expected to cause substantial losses of species and of associated coral communities.
The CSIRO predicts that the additional results in Australia of a temperature rise of between 2 and 3 °C will be:"
Climate change in Australia,"97% of the Great Barrier Reef bleached annually.
10–40% loss of principal habitat for Victoria and montane tropical vertebrate species.
92% decrease in butterfly species' primary habitats.
98% reduction in Bowerbird habitat in Northern Australia.
80% loss of freshwater wetlands in Kakadu (30 cm sea level rise).
A study conducted in 2024, suggests that worsening climate scenarios may have significant impacts on the habitat area for vertebrates and vascular plant species in Australia. This data suggests that in 2030, the habitat area among species appears consistent across climate scenarios, however, by 2090, a significant change is predicted, as deteriorating climate conditions are associated with reductions in habitat area for biodiversity."
Climate change in Australia,"Great Barrier Reef
The Great Barrier Reef could be killed as a result of the rise in water temperature forecast by the IPCC. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, the reef has experienced unprecedented rates of bleaching over the past two decades, and additional warming of only 1 °C is anticipated to cause considerable losses or contractions of species associated with coral communities."
Climate change in Australia,"Lord Howe Island
The coral reefs of the World Heritage-listed Lord Howe Island could be killed as a result of the rise in water temperature forecast by the IPCC.
As of April 2019, approximately 5% of the coral is dead."
Climate change in Australia,"Impacts on people
Economic impacts
According to the Climate Commission (now the Climate Council) report in 2013, the extreme heatwaves, flooding and bushfires striking Australia have been intensified by climate change and will get worse in future in terms of their impacts on people, property, communities and the environment. The summer of 2012/2013 included the hottest summer, hottest month and hottest day on record. The cost of the 2009 bushfires in Victoria was estimated at A$4.4bn (£3bn) and the Queensland floods of 2010/2011 cost over A$5bn.
In 2008 the Treasurer and the Minister for Climate Change and Water released a report that concluded the economy will grow with an emissions trading scheme in place.
A report released in October 2009 by the Standing Committee on Climate Change, Water, Environment and the Arts, studying the effects of a 1-metre sea level rise, quite possible within the next 30–60 years, concluded that around 700,000 properties around Australia, including 80,000 buildings, would be inundated, the collective value of these properties is estimated at $155 billion.
In 2019 the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences published a report about the impact of climate change on the profitability of the Australian agriculture, saying that the profit of the Australian farms was cut by 22% due to climate change in the years 2000–2019.
According to the 2022 IPCC report Australia will lose billions of dollars due to loss of life, and physical damages. These natural disasters are caused by climate change and increasing global warming will worsen these events. The report estimates that under 2 degrees of warming Australia will lose $115 billion in the next decade, and $350 billion in the next twenty years. If warming goes up to under 3 degrees of warming Australia's economy will lose $200 billion and $600 billion by 2042."
Climate change in Australia,"Agriculture forestry and livestock
Small changes caused by global warming, such as a longer growing season, a more temperate climate and increased CO2 concentrations, may benefit Australian crop agriculture and forestry in the short term. However, such benefits are unlikely to be sustained with increasingly severe effects of global warming. Changes in precipitation and consequent water management problems will further exacerbate Australia's current water availability and quality challenges, both for commercial and residential use.
The CSIRO predicts that the additional results in Australia of a temperature rise of between 3 and 4 °C will be:"
Climate change in Australia,"32% possibility of diminished wheat production (without adaptation).
45% probability of wheat crop value being beneath present levels (without adaptation).
55% of primary habitat lost for Eucalyptus.
25–50% rise in common timber yield in cool and wet parts of South Australia.
25–50% reduction in common timber yield in North Queensland and the Top End.
6% decrease in Australian net primary production (for 20% precipitation decrease)
128% increase in tick-associated losses in net cattle production weight."
Climate change in Australia,"Electricity demand
Use of domestic air conditioners during severe heatwaves can double electricity demand, placing great stress on electricity generation and transmission networks, and lead to load shedding. In addition, bushfires can damage electricity lines, while repairing power poles and power line damages is often restricted during hot and dry weather because of high fire risks."
Climate change in Australia,"Impacts on housing
Settlements and infrastructure
Global warming could lead to substantial alterations in climate extremes, such as tropical cyclones, heat waves and severe precipitation events. This would degrade infrastructure and raise costs through intensified energy demands, maintenance for damaged transportation infrastructure, and disasters, such as coastal flooding.: 5  In the coastal zone, sea level rise and storm surge may be more critical drivers of these changes than either temperature or precipitation.: 20 
The CSIRO describes the additional impact on settlements and infrastructure for rises in temperature of only 1 to 2 °C: A 22% rise in 100-year storm surge height around Cairns; as a result, the area flooded doubles."
Climate change in Australia,"Human settlements
Climate change will have a higher impact on Australia's coastal communities, due to the concentration of population, commerce and industry. Climate modelling suggests that a temperature rise of 1–2 °C will result in more intense storm winds, including those from tropical cyclones. Combine this with sea level rise, and the result is greater flooding, due to higher levels of storm surge and wind speed. The impact of climate change on insurance against catastrophes. Proceedings of Living with Climate Change Conference. Canberra, 19 December.) Tourism of coastal areas may also be affected by coastal inundation and beach erosion, as a result of sea level rise and storm events. At higher levels of warming, coastal impacts become more severe with higher storm winds and sea levels."
Climate change in Australia,"Property
A report released in October 2009 by the Standing Committee on Climate Change, Water, Environment and the arts, studying the effects of a 1-metre sea level rise, possible within the next 30–60 years, concluded that around 700,000 properties around Australia, including 80,000 buildings, would be inundated. The collective value of these properties is estimated at $150 billion.
A 1-metre sea level rise would have massive impacts, not just on property and associated economic systems, but in displacement of human populations throughout the continent. Queensland is the state most at risk due to the presence of valuable beachfront housing."
Climate change in Australia,"Impacts on foreign policy and national security
Several prominent reports and decision makers are concerned that climate change affects Australia’s national security. A 2023 assessment of the Australian Office of National Intelligence on the security implications of climate change (commissioned by Anthony Albanese)  remains classified. These concerns are tied to broader debates about climate security.
Climate change is unlikely to trigger large-scale migration movements to Australia. Research shows that people adversely affected by climate change often lack the resources to migrate over large distances (they are adapt in-situ or move to nearby places). This is particularly the case for Australia, which is an island nation with tough border controls and immigration policies.
Climate change can cause major challenges to Australia’s foreign policies. Pacific Island countries, which are highly vulnerable to climate change, have repeatedly blamed Australia for not being active enough in mitigating climate change. With geopolitical tensions between Australia and China on the rise, these countries are of high relevance for the Australian government. In addition, existing data suggest that several countries in Australia’s neighbourhood (e.g., Indonesia, the Philippines, large parts of South Asia) and some key partner governments (e.g., India, Papua New Guinea) are very vulnerable to climate-related unrest and conflict.
Several reports also warn that climate change poses significant challenges to the capacities of the Australian Defence Force. Many military bases are located close to the coastline, which is threatened by sea-level rise and more intense storms. Civilian infrastructure relevant to military operations (like transports networks and power lines) is also adversely affected by climate change, for instance when floods wash away key supply roads. More extreme heat days complicate military training and put a heavier toll on equipment, particularly in northern Australia. Finally, the Australian Defence Force will be called upon more often to provide disaster relief within the country and internationally, further straining its resources."
Climate change in Australia,"Health impacts
The CSIRO predicts that the additional results in Australia of a temperature rise of between only 1 and 2 °C will be:"
Climate change in Australia,"Southward spread of malaria receptive zones.
Risk of dengue fever among Australians increases from 170,000 people to 0.75–1.6 million.
10% increase in diarrhoeal diseases among Aboriginal children in central Australia.
100% increase in a number of people exposed to flooding in Australia.
Increased influx of refugees from the Pacific Islands.
Based on some predictions for 2070, data suggests that people who are not accustomed to the warmer climate may experience as much as 45 days per year where they are unable to tolerate being outside, compared to the current 4–6 days per year."
Climate change in Australia,"Impacts on indigenous Australians
Indigenous Australians have a millennia long history of responding and adapting to social and environmental changes. Indigenous Australians have a high level of situated traditional knowledge and historical knowledge about climate change. However, the exposure of Indigenous Australians to climate change impacts is exacerbated by existing socio-economic disadvantages which are linked to colonial and post-colonial marginalisation.
Some of these changes include a rise in sea levels, getting hotter and for a longer period of time, and more severe cyclones during the cyclone season.  Climate issues include wild fires, heatwaves, floods, cyclones, rising sea levels, rising temperatures, and erosion. The communities most affected by climate changes are those in the North where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people make up 30% of the population. Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islander communities located in the coastal north are the most disadvantaged due to social and economic issues and their reliance on traditional land for food, culture, and health. This has begged the question for many community members in these regions, should they move away from this area or remain present.
Many Aboriginal people live in rural and remote agricultural areas across Australia, especially in the Northern and Southern areas of the continent. There are a variety of different climate impacts on different Aboriginal communities which includes cyclones in the Northern region and flooding in Central Australia which negatively impacts cultural sites and therefore the relationship between indigenous people and the places that hold their traditional knowledge. Other effects include sea level rise, loss of land and hunting ground, changes in fire regimes, increased severity and duration of wet and dry seasons as well as reduced numbers of animals in the sea, rivers and creeks."
Climate change in Australia,"Vulnerability
The vulnerability comes from remote location where indigenous groups live, lower socio-economic status, and reliance of natural systems for economic needs. Disadvantages which are compounding Indigenous peoples vulnerability to climate change include inadequate health and educational services, limited employment opportunities as well as insufficient infrastructure. Top down institutions have also restricted Indigenous Australians ability to contribute to climate policy frameworks and have their culture and practices recognised.
Many of the economic, political, and social-ecological issues present in indigenous communities are long term effects from colonialism and the continued marginalization of these communities. These issues are aggravated by climate change and environmental changes in their respective regions. Indigenous people are seen as particularly vulnerable to climate change because they already live in poverty, poor housing and have poor educational and health services, other socio-political factors place them at risk for climate change impacts. Indigenous people have been portrayed as victims and as vulnerable populations for many years by the media. Aboriginal Australians believe that they have always been able to adapt to climate changes in their geographic areas.
Many communities have argued for more community input into strategies and ways to adapt to climate issues instead of top down approaches to combating issues surrounding environmental change. This includes self-determination and agency when deciding how to respond to climate change including proactive actions. Indigenous people have also commented on the need to maintain their physical and mental well-being in order to adapt to climate change which can be helped through the kinship relationships between community members and the land they occupy.
In Australia, Aboriginal people have argued that in order for the government to combat climate change, their voices must be included in policy making and governance over traditional land. Much of the government and institutional policies related to climate change and environmental issues in Australia has been done so through a top down approach. Indigenous communities have stated that this limits and ignores Aboriginal Australian voices and approaches. Due to traditional knowledge held by these communities and elders within those communities, traditional ecological knowledge and frameworks are necessary to combat these and a variety of different environmental issues."
Climate change in Australia,"Heat and drought
Fires and droughts in Australia, including the Northern regions, occur mostly in savannas because of current environmental changes in the region. The majority of the fire prone areas in the savanna region are owned by Aboriginal Australian communities, the traditional stewards of the land. Aboriginal Australians have traditional landscape management methods including burning and clearing the savanna areas which are the most susceptible to fires. Traditional landscape management declined in the 19th century as Western landscape management took over. Today, traditional landscape management has been revitalized by Aboriginal Australians, including elders. This traditional landscape practices include the use of clearing and burning to get rid of old growth. Though the way in which indigenous communities in this region manage the landscape has been banned, Aboriginal Australian communities who use these traditional methods actually help in reducing greenhouse gas emissions."
Climate change in Australia,"Impact of climate change on health
Increased temperatures, wildfires, and drought are major issues in regard to the health of Aboriginal Australian communities. Heat poses a major risk to elderly members of communities in the North. This includes issues such as heat stroke and heat exhaustion. Many of the rural indigenous communities have faced thermal stress and increased issues surrounding access to water resources and ecological landscapes. This impacts the relationship between Aboriginal Australians and biodiversity, as well as impacts social and cultural aspects of society.
Aboriginal Australians who live in isolated and remote traditional territories are more sensitive than non-indigenous Australians to changes that effect the ecosystems they are a part of. This is in large part due to the connection that exists between their health (including physical and mental), the health of their land, and the continued practice of traditional cultural customs. Aboriginal Australians have a unique and important relationship with the traditional land of their ancestors. Because of this connection, the dangerous consequences of climate change in Australia has resulted in a decline in health including mental health among an already vulnerable population. In order to combat health disparities among these populations, community based projects and culturally relevant mental and physical health programs are necessary and should include community members when running these programs."
Climate change in Australia,"Traditional knowledge
Indigenous people have always responded and adapted to climate change, including indigenous people of Australia.  Aboriginal Australian people have existed in Australia for tens of thousands of years. Due to this continual habitation, Aboriginal Australians have observed and adapted to climatic and environmental changes for millennia which uniquely positions them to be able to respond to current climate changes. Though these communities have shifted and changed their practices overtime, traditional ecological knowledge exists that can benefit local and indigenous communities today. This knowledge is part of traditional cultural and spiritual practices within these indigenous communities. The practices are directly tied to the unique relationship between Aboriginal Australians and their ecological landscapes. This relationship results in a socio-ecological system of balance between humans and nature Indigenous communities in Australia have specific generational traditional knowledge about weather patterns, environmental changes and climatic changes. These communities have adapted to climate change in the past and have knowledge that non-Indigenous people may be able to utilize to adapt to climate change currently and in the future.
Indigenous people have not been offered many opportunities or provided with sufficient platforms to influence and contribute their traditional knowledge to the creation of current international and local policies associated to climate change adaptation. Although, Indigenous people have pushed back on this reality, by creating their own platforms and trying to be active members in the conversation surrounding climate change including at international meetings. Specifically, Indigenous people of Australia have traditional knowledge to adapt to increased pressures of global environmental change.
Though some of this traditional knowledge was not utilised and conceivably lost with the introduction of white settlers in the 18th century, recently communities have begun to revitalize these traditional practices. Australian Aboriginal traditional knowledge includes language, cultural, spiritual practices, mythology and land management."
Climate change in Australia,"Responses to climate change
Indigenous knowledge has been passed down through the generations with the practice of oral tradition. Given the historical relationship between the land and the people and the larger ecosystem Aboriginal Australians choose to stay and adapt in similar ways to their ancestors before them. Aboriginal Australians have observed short and long term environmental changes and are highly aware of weather and climate changes. Recently, elders have begun to be utilised by indigenous and non-indigenous communities to understand traditional knowledge related to land management.  This includes seasonal knowledge means indigenous knowledge pertaining to weather, seasonal cycles of plants and animals, and land and landscape management. The seasonal knowledge allows indigenous communities to combat environmental changes and may result in healthier social-ecological systems. Much of traditional landscape and land management includes keeping the diversity of flora and fauna as traditional foodways. Ecological calendars is one traditional framework used by Aboriginal Australian communities. These ecological calendars are way for indigenous communities to organize and communicate traditional ecological knowledge. The ecological calendars includes seasonal weather cycles related to biological, cultural, and spiritual ways of life."
Climate change in Australia,"Mitigation
Climate change mitigation focuses on steps taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It is the set of preventative measures taken to curb global warming and climate change. Examples would be investing in clean fuel and using renewable energy such as wind and solar power.
According to the CSIRO and Garnaut Climate Change Review, climate change is expected to have numerous adverse effects on many species, regions, activities and much infrastructure and areas of the economy and public health in Australia. The Stern Report and Garnaut Review on balance expect these to outweigh the costs of mitigation.
The World Resources Institute identifies policy uncertainty and over-reliance on international markets as the top threats to Australia's GHG mitigation."
Climate change in Australia,"Emissions reductions
Internationally, Australia pledged as part of Paris Agreement to reduce emissions by 43% by 2030  and achieve net zero emissions by 2050. Domestically, the Clean Energy Act 2011 addresses GHG with an emissions cap, carbon price, and subsidies. Emissions by the electric sector are addressed by Renewable Energy targets at multiple scales, Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC), carbon capture and storage flagships, and feed-in tariffs on solar panels. Emissions by the industrial sector are addressed by the Energy Efficiency Opportunities (EEO) program.
Emissions by the building sector are addressed by building codes, minimum energy performance standards, Commercial Building Disclosure program, state energy-saving obligations, and the National Energy Saving Initiative. Emissions by the transportation sector are addressed by reduced fuel tax credits and vehicle emissions performance standards. Emissions by the agricultural sector are addressed by the Carbon Farming Initiative and state land-clearing laws. Emissions by the land use sector are addressed by the Clean Energy Future Package, which consists of the Carbon Farming Futures program, Diversity Fund, Regional Natural Resources Management Planning for Climate Change Fund, Indigenous Carbon Farming Fund, and Carbon Farming Skills program."
Climate change in Australia,"Forestry and forest-related options for carbon sinks
In Australia, forestry and forest-related options are the most significant and most easily achieved carbon sink making up 105 Mt per year CO2-e or about 75 per cent of the total figure attainable for the Australian state of Queensland from 2010 to 2050. Among the forestry options, forestry with the primary aim of carbon storage (called carbon forestry) has the highest attainable carbon storage capacity (77 Mt CO2-e/yr) while strategy balanced with biodiversity plantings can return 7–12 times more native vegetation for a 10%–30% reduction of carbon storage performance.
Legal strategies to encourage this form of biosequestration include permanent protection of forests in National Parks or on the World Heritage List, properly funded management and bans on use of rainforest timbers and inefficient uses such as woodchipping old growth forest."
Climate change in Australia,"Policies and legislation to achieve mitigation
Paris Agreement
The Paris agreement is a legally international agreement adopted at the COP 21, its main goal is to limit global warming to below 1.5 °C, compared to pre-industrial levels. The Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) are the plans to fight climate change adapted for each country. Every party in the agreement has different goals based on its own historical climate records and country's circumstances.  All the goals for each country are stated in their NDC.
Australia's target regarding reductions from 2005 year levels:"
Climate change in Australia,"26–28% reduction of greenhouse gases (GHG) until 2030 from 2005 levels. In 2022 the new Australian government officially declared the update of the targets to 43% reduction by 2030 and net zero emissions by 2050.
Gases covered in reductions: Carbon dioxide (CO2), Methane (CH4), Nitrous oxide (N2O), Hydrofluorocarbon (HFCs), Perfluorinated compound (PFCs), Sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) and Nitrogen trifluoride (NF3).
Countries have different ways to achieve the established goals depending on resources. Australia's developed approach to support the NDC climate change plan is the following:"
Climate change in Australia,"Enabling new technologies with low emissions and promoting economic growth.
Establish regional hydrogen exports to strengthen the country's industry and fund research in the field and enable distribution.
Improve charging and refueling infrastructure to enable companies and fleets to integrate new more sustainable vehicle technology.
The country has created a development fund whose purpose is for projects concerning carbon dioxide capture. The fund is for storage, use and carbon capture.
Investments in technological development that reduces emissions in the sectors of agriculture, industry, transport and manufacturing.
Climate solution package to increase investment in projects to generate clean energy. The package also includes extra funds to support development in the hard-to-reach sectors.
Australia has a legalised obligation for the major emitting sectors in the country where the emissions are to be kept below their baseline.
Australia has through funds such as Australia emission reduction fund contributed with 60 million tonnes reduction of greenhouse gases. The fund enables businesses to earn carbon credits. This is done by storing or preventing emissions through new sustainable techniques."
Climate change in Australia,"State legislation
Victoria
The Climate Change Act was adopted in 2017 and is part of a broader Victorian environmental legislation taking climate change into account. It establishes a net-zero emission target by 2050 and interim targets set every five years to adapt and keep Victoria on track with the 2050 goal."
Climate change in Australia,"Adaptation
According to the IPCC's 2001 Assessment Report, no matter how much effort is put into mitigating climate change, some amount of climate change cannot be avoided. The report shared that climate change adaptation should complement mitigation efforts. Adaptation is the approach that focuses on alleviating current problems brought about by global warming and climate change. It is the attempt to live with the changes in the environment and the economy that global warming has generated and will continue to generate. In short, it involves taking action to deal with the problems brought about by global warming and climate change. Examples include building better flood defences and avoiding the building of residential areas near low-lying, flood-prone areas. In cities with a proven vulnerability to climate change, investment is likely to require the strengthening of urban infrastructure, including storm drain systems, water supply and treatment plants, and protection or relocation of solid waste management and power generation facilities."
Climate change in Australia,"Coastal regions are likely to need large investment in physical infrastructure projects, specifically projects related to the effects of rising sea levels. Projects such as the construction of protective barriers against rising sea levels, the building of dams to retain and manage water, the redesign and development of port facilities and the improvement of the defence systems at coastal areas should be carried out.
Federal, state and territory policy makers have supported a National Biodiversity and Climate Change Action Plan that works to adapt to the impacts of climatic change and manage the effects on wildlife."
Climate change in Australia,"National government programs
Regional natural resource management (NRM) organisations
Federal natural resource goals, government agencies and non-government organizations established 56 regional natural resource management (NRM) organisations beginning in the mid-1990s. NRM organisations fall under the federal government Natural Heritage Trust. NRM operate according to individual constitutions, usually by the state government and others by community associations. Their boards are appointed by either the local government or community stakeholders. NRM Planning for Climate Fund, put $13.6 million toward helping NRMs plan land use in light of climate change by building a base of detailed climatic information."
Climate change in Australia,"National Climate Change Adaptation Programme
The Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction has come up with the National Climate Change Adaptation Programme which aims to work with industries, scientific organisations, residents and other governments to create workable solutions. Some A$14 million over a period of four years (2008–2012) is to be spent on this initiative. The programme has forged strong research links in at-risk areas such as the Great Barrier Reef. Research conducted in the Great Barrier Reef is focused on developing methods to deal with climate change to protect the reef. It is hoped that this work will create a universal model for sustainable, cost-effective reef development. According to the programme's brochure: ""National greenhouse mitigation policies and programmes are projected to reduce emissions by 94 million tonnes by 2010 – the equivalent of removing every motor vehicle in Australia from the road! However, the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere and the growing emissions from around the world will affect our climate. Adaptation to climate change will complement action to reduce greenhouse gases""."
Climate change in Australia,"Climate Adaptation Flagship
The Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) started the Climate Adaptation Flagship. Its aim is ""enabling Australia to adapt more effectively to the impacts of climate change and variability and informing national planning, regulation and investment decisions"". This is part of the National Research Flagships Program. It is designed to bring various stakeholders, i.e. research companies, industries, international connections, eminent scientists and CSIRO, together in hope of delivering practical solutions that address the pressing issues of Australia.
The Climate Adaptation Flagship project concerns both climate variability (or non-human causes, as defined by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) and climate change. The research budget for this Flagship for the year 2008–09 is close to A$30 million. There are four research prongs to this project: Pathways to adaptation; Sustainable cities and costs; Managing species and natural ecosystems; Adaptive primary industries, enterprises and communities."
Climate change in Australia,"National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility
The National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility (NCCARF) is hosted by Griffith University in Queensland and ""leads the research community in a national interdisciplinary effort to generate the information needed by decision-makers in government and in vulnerable sectors and communities to manage the risks of climate change impacts"".
The key roles of NCCARF include:"
Climate change in Australia,"developing National Adaptation Research Plans to identify critical gaps in the information available to decision-makers
synthesising existing and emerging national and international research on climate change impacts and adaptation and developing targeted communication products
undertaking a program of Integrative Research to address national priorities, and
establishing and maintaining Adaptation Research Networks to link together key researchers and assist them in focusing on national research priorities.
The facility is a partnership between the Australian government's Department of Climate Change and Griffith University, with a consortium of funding partners and universities drawn from across the country."
Climate change in Australia,"The Local Adaptations Pathway Program
The Australian government is of the view that local government is critical in managing the impacts of climate change and seeks to assist local councils in studying and applying adaptation options. The programme is the Australian government's initiative to enable councils to go through climate change risk assessments and come up with action plans to prepare for the impacts the phenomenon may have on local society. Up to A$50,000 will be released. A list of councils successful in procuring the funding is provided on the programme's website."
Climate change in Australia,"Policies and legislation
In November 1981, the Office of National Assessments (intelligence agency) presented prime minister Malcolm Fraser with a classified-confidential assessment noting scientific acceptance of the greenhouse effect and resultant ""measurably warmer"" temperatures and ""related climatic changes"", and also projecting effects of possible doubling and quadrupling of atmospheric CO2 levels by the middle and end of the 21st century. The assessment focused on the implications for the country's fossil fuel industry.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was clear Australian consensus about the need for action on climate change between the two major political parties. However, following the 1991 recession, incoming right wing governments began framing science of climate change as a continuing debate. In 1997, Australia joined the United States as the only countries to not ratify the Kyoto Protocol.
With voters influenced by events like the Millennium drought and 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth, both parties went to the 2007 election promising action on climate change, with the then opposition calling climate change the ""greatest moral, economic and social challenge of our time"". The incumbent Howard government lost, and the incoming Labor government immediately ratified the Kyoto Protocol. In 2009, before a bill could be passed, with the support of opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull, the opposition changed leaders to Tony Abbott, and supported by The Greens but for the opposite reason that Rudd's scheme was too weak and potentially locked in failure, blocked Rudd's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.
In 2010, the Rudd government decided to delay the implementation of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) until the end of the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol (ending in 2012). They cited the lack of bipartisan support for the CPRS and slow international progress on climate action as the reasons for the decision. In turn, the delay was strongly criticised by the Federal Opposition as well as community and grassroots action groups such as GetUp.
Following the unsuccessful Copenhagen Summit, the Rudd was replaced by Gillard as Prime Minister, who stated that ""there will be no 'carbon tax' under the government I lead""."
Climate change in Australia,The Gillard Labor government established several government entities to manage Australia's response to climate change:
Climate change in Australia,"The Climate Change Authority, an independent statutory body that provides advice and performs research for the federal government on climate change.
The Clean Energy Regulator, an independent statutory body that administers federal government schemes to measure and reduce Australia's greenhouse gas emissions.
The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), a corporate body that manages renewable energy programs.
The Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC), a government-owned corporation that invests in clean energy technologies.
In 2011, Parliament passed the Clean Energy Act 2011, which introduced carbon pricing in Australia, colloquially known as a 'carbon tax'. It required large businesses, defined as those emitting over 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent annually, to purchase emissions permits. The strong backlash led by opposition leader Abbott led to her being replaced as leader by Rudd, then Abbott at the next election. Under his leadership, Australia became the first country to repeal a carbon pricing program.
In 2015, Abbott was replaced as Prime Minister by Minister for Communications Malcolm Turnbull under the condition that his climate policy would not change. Australia attended the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference and adopted the Paris Agreement. In limiting further action on climate change, Australia joined Russia, Turkey and Brazil in citing US President Trump's promise to withdraw from the Paris Agreement.
In 2018, Turnbull was replaced by Scott Morrison as leader of the Liberal Party and Prime Minister. Morrison won the 2019 election with an unchanged climate policy.
In June 2021, the Sustainable Development Report 2021 scored Australia last out of 193 United Nations member countries for action taken to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, scoring 10 out of 100 in an assessment of fossil fuel emissions, emissions associated with imports and exports, and policies for pricing carbon.
In May 2022, the Coalition lost the federal election to the Labor Party, led by Anthony Albanese. In a machinery of government change, a new Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water will be established. The new government committed to a 43% reduction in Australia's emissions by 2030 (compared to 2005 levels), and net zero emissions by 2050."
Climate change in Australia,"History of climate change policy in Australia
Domestic action to address climate change in Australia began in 1989, when Senator Graham Richardson proposed the first greenhouse gas emission reduction target of 20% by 2005. The Australian Government rejected this target. In 1990, Ros Kelly and Jon Kerin announced that the Australian Government would adhere to the goals initially proposed by Richardson but not to any economic detriment.
Australia signed the UNFCCC in 1992. This was followed by the release of the National Greenhouse Response Strategy (NGRS), which provided states and territories with the mechanisms to adhere to UNFCCC emission guidelines. Australia attended the first session of the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC in Berlin in March 1995. Throughout the 1990s, Australia regularly failed to meet its own emission targets and those set by the UNFCCC.
In 1997, Prime Minister John Howard announced that by 2010, an additional 2% of electricity would be sustainably sourced. The following year, the Australian Greenhouse Office (AGO) was established to monitor greenhouse gas reductions. The AGO later combined with the Department of Environment and Heritage. In April 1998, Australia became a party to the Kyoto Declaration. The Declaration was ratified in 2007 under Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
In the Renewable Energy (Electricity) Act 2000, the Federal Government introduced the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target program, which aimed to sustainably source 10% of electrical energy by 2010. In 2011, the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target program was divided into the Large-Scale Renewable Energy Target and the Small-Scale Renewable Energy Scheme. In January 2003, the New South Wales State Government implemented the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Scheme (GGRS), which allowed carbon emissions to be traded."
Climate change in Australia,"Under Rudd, the Labor Government proposed the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, which was intended to take effect in 2010. This scheme was rejected by the Greens for being too permissive and by Tony Abbott's Coalition for being economically detrimental. Under Prime Minister Julia Gillard, the Labor Party passed the Clean Energy Act 2011 to establish a carbon tax and put a price on greenhouse gas emissions. This carbon tax was a divisive partisan issue.
In 2012, the Coalition ran a campaign to repeal the carbon tax. Upon election victory in September 2013, Prime Minister Tony Abbott passed the Clean Energy Legislation (Carbon Tax Repeal) Bill. In replacement of the carbon tax, Abbott introduced the Direct Action Scheme to financially reward businesses for voluntarily reducing their carbon emissions. This was followed by a decision not to participate in the 19th session of the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC (COP-19).
Australia became a party to the Paris Agreement in 2015. In the agreement, Australia committed to reducing its emissions by 26% by 2030.
In 2019, Prime Minister Scott Morrison was criticised for a lack of commitment to addressing climate change while taking a vacation during the 2019 bushfires."
Climate change in Australia,"International cooperation
Internationally, Australia contributed to the creation of the Asia Pacific Rain Forest Partnership, International Coral Reef Initiative, International Partnership for Blue Carbon, Mission Innovation, Clean Energy Ministerial Forum, International Solar Alliance, and the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol. The government has also provided $1 billion to assist developing countries in reducing GHG emissions, partly through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Green Climate Fund. Australia's scientists also provide data on climate, emissions, impacts, and mitigation options for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessments.
Under the Paris Agreement, Australia has committed to reducing emission by 26-28% below 2005 levels. This would mean reducing emissions by half per capita and by two-thirds across the economy. The Department of Environment and Energy noted in a 2017 review that no one policy could achieve what multiple, sector-specific ones have. This approach has manifested in Australia meeting its first Kyoto Protocol target. Australia is now bound to reducing emissions to at least 5% by 2020 under the Copenhagen Accord and Cancun Agreements and 0.5% less than 1990 levels by 2020 under their second target for the Kyoto Protocol.
While Australia opposed a 1.5 °C target at the 2015 negotiations for the Paris Agreement, in 2019, they supported the Kainaki II Declaration of the Pacific Islands Forum, which included this target. In 2022, Australia discussed hosting COP29 with its Pacific island neighbours in 2024 at the Pacific Islands Forum.
In November 2023 it was announced that Australia will offer 280 Tuvalu citizens displaced by climate change permanent residency in Australia per year, as part of a broad bilateral deal."
Climate change in Australia,"Society and culture
Politics
Despite the support of a clear scientific consensus, climate change has been a divisive or controversial issue in Australian politics since the 2000s. It has sometimes been referred to as a ""culture war"" in the country. Conservatives have generally opposed climate mitigation policies and renewable energy, instead favouring or supporting the country's coal and fossil fuels industries, which make up a large part of the economy. Proposed carbon pricing during the premiership of Julia Gillard proved highly divisive, and was later repealed under Tony Abbott. Climate change was a key issue in the 2022 federal election, where the Australian Labor Party and teal independents made gains in part due to promoting environmental policies.
Australian conservatives, with the support of strongly climate-skeptical media, have long opposed climate change mitigation and changes to energy policy. This is partly a strategy to foster the support of the country's coal and the fossil fuel industry, which are highly influential and a large employer in the country."
Climate change in Australia,"Activism
Climate change protests have taken place in Australia during the 21st century.In 2005, with support from Uniting Church and Catholic Earthcare, the Australian Conservation Foundation and the National Council of Churches Australia produced a brochure, Changing Climate, Changing Creation, which was distributed to churches across the country to call for action on climate change.
Rising Tide held environmental direct action protests in February 2007, where more than 100 small and medium-sized craft, including swimmers and people on surfboards, gathered in Newcastle harbour. Young people from the Real Action On Climate Change shut down two coal-fired power stations in September 2007. A 2009 ""Walk Against Warming"" drew 40,000 participants in Melbourne."
Climate change in Australia,"The Say Yes demonstrations took place on 5 June 2011, in which 45,000 people demonstrated in every major city nationwide in support of carbon pricing policies. Thousands of Australian children took part in school strikes for climate in 2018 and 2019. The September 2019 climate strikes attracted an estimated 180,000 to 300,000 participants across eight Australian capital cities and 140 urban centres, making it one of the largest protests in the country's history and one of the largest climate protests globally. Approximately 2,500 businesses also took part.
The response to the 2019–20 Australian bushfire season sparked protests in Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, Victoria, Brisbane, Hobart, and outside the Australian High Commission in London. Prime Minister Scott Morrison was criticised for climate denial in the wake of the bushfires. Extinction Rebellion held rallies in London, Berlin, Madrid, Copenhagen and Stockholm calling for stronger climate action. Direct action group Blockade Australia began disruptive activism in 2021 and 2022.  In 2023 another Rising Tide water blockade was held in Newcastle during which 3000 people took part and 109 were arrested. Despite the introduction of tougher penalties in New South Wales for such activity the majority of those facing court received dismissals with no conviction with magistrates acknowledging the protesters as “valuable contributors to society"" and commending their “muscular good character."
Climate change in Australia,"Litigation
Groups including Rising Tide and Queensland Conservation have initiated legal challenges to coal mines under the Commonwealth EPBC legislation. In late 2006, Queensland Conservation lodged an objection to the greenhouse gas emissions from a large coal mine expansion proposed by Xstrata Coal Queensland Pty Ltd. QC's action aimed to have the true costs of the greenhouse gas emissions from coal mining recognised. The Newlands Coal Mine Expansion will produce 28.5 million tonnes of coal over its fifteen years of operation. The mining, transport and use of this coal will emit 84 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. Queensland Conservation aims to have reasonable and practical measures imposed on new mines to avoid, reduce or offset the emissions from the mining, transport and use of their coal. The Land and Resources Tribunal ruled against the case."
Climate change in Australia,"Media coverage
Projected impacts by location
The impacts of climate change will vary significantly across Australia. The Australian Government appointed Climate Commission have prepared summary reports on the likely impacts of climate change for regions across Australia, including: Queensland, NSW, Victoria and Tasmania."
Climate change in Australia,"Capital cities
Adelaide
Adelaide will get hotter and drier with rainfall predicted to decline 8% to 29% by 2090 and average temperature to increase between 4 and 0.9 degrees. The number of days above 35 degrees will increase by 50% in 2090 and the number of days above 40 degrees will double. Bringing it close to Northampton, Western Australia, for temperature and Kadina, South Australia, for rainfall.
Sea levels will rise with predictions between 39 and 61 cm by 2090. And extreme seas are predicted to rise as well, with the CSIRO predicting buildings in Port Adelaide would need to be raised by 50 to 81 cm to keep the amount of flooding incidents the same as recorded between 1986 and 2005."
Climate change in Australia,"Brisbane
In a RCP 4.5 scenario Brisbane's temperature will be similar to that of Rockhampton today while rainfall will be closest to Gympie. The CSIRO predicts rainfall in Brisbane will fall between -23% (235 mm) and -4% (45.3 mm) annually by 2090 while temperature will rise between 4.2° and 0.9°. The number of hot days and hot nights will double by 2050, with many people needing to avoid outdoor activity in summer. Further urban growth increases the number of hot nights even further. Hot nights increase deaths amongst the elderly. Rainfall will be deposited in less frequent more intense rain events, fire days will also get more frequent while frost days will decrease. Sea levels are predicted to rise by 80 cm by 2100 and there will be more frequent sea level extremes."
Climate change in Australia,"Darwin
In a RCP 4.5 scenario Darwin's temperature will be similar to that of Daly River now, with its rainfall most like that of Milikapiti. In a RCP 8.5 scenario, indicating higher greenhouse gas emissions, Darwin's temperature loses any close comparison in Australia being significantly hotter than every town in Australia is today (with the exclusion of Halls Creek in Autumn)."
Climate change in Australia,"Sydney
Suburbs of Sydney like Manly, Botany, Narrabeen, Port Botany, and Rockdale, which lie on rivers like the Parramatta, face risks of flooding in low-lying areas such as parks (like Timbrell Park and Majors Bay Reserve), or massive expenses in rebuilding seawalls to higher levels. Sea levels are predicted to rise between 38 and 66 cm by 2090.
Temperature in Sydney will increase between 0.9° and 4.2°, while rainfall will decrease between -23% and -4% by 2090. Bringing Sydney's climate close to that of Beaudesert today (under a RCP 8.5 scenario). Different parts of Sydney will warm differently with the greatest impact expected in Western Sydney and Hawkesbury, these areas can expect 5 to 10 additional hot days by 2030. Similarly future rainfall patterns will be different to those today, with more rain expected to fall in summer and autumn and less expected in Winter and Spring. Fire danger days will increase in number by 2070."
Climate change in Australia,"Melbourne
Sea levels are projected to rise between 0.37 cm and 0.59 cm at Williamstown (the closest covered point) by 2090. At the higher end of this scale areas in and around Melbourne would be impacted. With some of the most vulnerable areas being the Docklands development and several marinas and berths in Port Phillip. Melbourne's climate will become similar in terms of total rainfall and average temperature to that of Dubbo today, with temperatures warming between 0.9° and 3.8° and total annual rainfall falling between -10% and -4% by 2090. Rainfall patterns will also change with 20% less rainfall predicted during spring in 2050, which may impact the severity of summer bushfires.
The increases in temperature and decrease in rainfall will have a series of follow on effects on the city, including a possible 35% reduction in trees in Melbourne by 2040. And more frequent ambulance callouts and more deaths due to heatwaves. Climate change will cost Melbourne City $12.6bn by 2050 and be closer to Wangaratta's climate."
Climate change in Australia,"Perth
In 2090 Perth is predicted to have the rainfall of Yanchep today and the temperature of Geraldton using the RCP 4.5 scenario. Rainfall is predicted to fall between -29% (-226 mm) and -8% (-66 mm) and temperature predicted to rise between 0.9° and 4°. Perth may see the number of days above 35° increase from 28 per year on average to 36 in 2030, and to between 40 and 63 in 2090. While frost days will decrease. Rainfall will increase in intensity while decreasing on average. Drought days in the south west as a whole may increase by as much as 80% versus 20% for Australia. The danger from fire will increase with more fire days for all of Western Australia."
Climate change in Australia,"Hobart
By 2090 Hobart's climate will warm between 3.8° and 0.9°, rainfall will decline between 4% and 10%. The temperature pattern will be similar to Port Lincoln while rainfall will be closer to Condoblin's today in a RCP 8.5 scenario. Warm spells are likely to last longer and rainfall will trend to more intense rain events dumping less rain annually, increasing the risk of erosion and flooding. Flooding on the Derwent river will become more regular and extreme with a current 1-in-100-year event being possibly a 2-to-6-year event in 2090. Hobart's fire season will get longer."
Climate change in Australia,"States
Victoria
By 2050, Victoria's annual temperature will increase up to 2.4 °C, with twice the number of very hot days compared to1986-2005, longer fire seasons, less rainfall and snowfall in cool season and a rise in sea levels about 24 cm."
Climate change in Australia,"Historical aspects
Pre-instrumental climate change
Paleoclimatic records indicate that during glacial maxima Australia was extremely arid, with plant pollen fossils showing deserts as far as northern Tasmania and a vast area of less than 12% vegetation cover over all of South Australia and adjacent regions of other states. Forest cover was largely limited to sheltered areas of the east coast and the extreme southwest of Western Australia.
During these glacial maxima the climate was also much colder and windier than today. Minimum temperatures in winter in the centre of the continent were as much as 9 °C (48 °F) lower than they are today. Hydrological evidence for dryness during glacial maxima can also be seen at major lakes in Victoria's Western District, which dried up between around 20,000 and 15,000 years ago and re-filled from around 12,000 years ago.
During the early Holocene, there is evidence from Lake Frome in South Australia and Lake Woods near Tennant Creek that the climate between 8,000 and 9,500 years ago and again from 7,000 to 4,200 years ago was considerably wetter than over the period of instrumental recording since about 1885. The research that gave these records also suggested that the rainfall flooding Frome was certainly summer-dominant rainfall because of pollen counts from grass species. Other sources suggest that the Southern Oscillation may have been weaker during the early Holocene and rainfall over northern Australia less variable as well as higher. The onset of modern conditions with periodic wet season failure is dated at around 4,000 years before the present.
In southern Victoria, there is evidence for generally wet conditions except for a much drier spell between about 3,000 and 2,100 years before the present, when it is believed Lake Corangamite fell to levels well below those observed between European settlement and the 1990s. After this dry period, Western District lakes returned to their previous levels fairly quickly and by 1800 they were at their highest levels in the forty thousand years of record available.
Elsewhere, data for most of the Holocene are deficient, largely because methods used elsewhere to determine past climates (like tree-ring data) cannot be used in Australia owing to the character of its soils and climate. Recently, however, coral cores have been used to examine rainfall over those areas of Queensland draining into the Great Barrier Reef. The results do not provide conclusive evidence of man-made climate change, but do suggest the following:"
Climate change in Australia,"There has been a marked increase in the frequency of very wet years in Queensland since the end of the Little Ice Age, a theory supported by there being no evidence for any large Lake Eyre filling during the LIA.
The dry era of the 1920s and 1930s may well have been the driest period in Australia over the past four centuries.
A similar study, not yet published, is planned for coral reefs in Western Australia.
Records exist of floods in a number of rivers, such as the Hawkesbury, from the time of first settlement. These suggest that, for the period beginning with the first European settlement, the first thirty-five years or so were wet and were followed by a much drier period up to the mid-1860s, when usable instrumental records started."
Climate change in Australia,"Development of an instrumental network for climate records
Although rain gauges were installed privately by some of the earliest settlers, the first instrumental climate records in Australia were not compiled until 1840 at Port Macquarie. Rain gauges were gradually installed at other major centres across the continent, with the present gauges in Melbourne and Sydney dating from 1858 and 1859, respectively.
In eastern Australia, where the continent's first large-scale agriculture began, a large number of rain gauges were installed during the 1860s and by 1875 a comprehensive network had been developed in the ""settled"" areas of that state. With the spread of the pastoral industry to the north of the continent during this period, rain gauges were established extensively in newly settled areas, reaching Darwin by 1869, Alice Springs by 1874, and the Kimberley, Channel Country and Gulf Savannah by 1880.
By 1885, most of Australia had a network of rainfall reporting stations adequate to give a good picture of climatic variability over the continent. The exceptions were remote areas of western Tasmania, the extreme southwest of Western Australia, Cape York Peninsula, the northern Kimberley and the deserts of northwestern South Australia and southeastern Western Australia. In these areas good-quality climatic data were not available for quite some time after that.
Temperature measurements, although made at major population centres from days of the earliest rain gauges, were generally not established when rain gauges spread to more remote locations during the 1870s and 1880s. Although they gradually caught up in number with rain gauges, many places which have had rainfall data for over 125 years have only a few decades of temperature records."
Climate change in Australia,"See also
References
External links
Climate Action Network Australia – the Australian branch of a worldwide network of NGOs
Range Extension Database and Mapping Project, Australia – ecological monitoring project in the marine environment
National Climate Change Adaptation Programme brochure
Climate Change projections"
Greek Australians,"Greek Australians (Greek: Ελληνοαυστραλοί, romanized: Ellinoafstralí) are Australians of Greek ancestry. Greek Australians are one of the largest groups within the global Greek diaspora. As per the 2021 Australian census, 424,750 people stated that they had Greek ancestry (whether alone or in combination with another ancestry), comprising 1.7% of the Australian population. At the 2021 census, 92,314 Australian residents were born in Greece.
Greek immigration to Australia has been one of the largest migratory flows in the history of Australia, especially after World War II and the Greek Civil War. The flow of migrants from Greece increased slightly in 2015 due to the economic crisis in Greece, with Australia as one of the main destinations for departing Greeks, mainly to Melbourne, where the Greek Australian community is most deeply established.
88% of Greek Australians speak Greek and 91% are Christians and members of the Greek Orthodox Church.
Australia and Greece have a close bilateral relationship based on historical ties and the rich contribution of Greek Australians to Australian society. In 2019, the export of Australian services to Greece was valued at $92 million, while services imports from Greece totalled $750 million. Australia's stock of investment in Greece in 2019 totalled $481 million, while investment in Australia from Greece was $192 million."
Greek Australians,"History
Early Greek immigration
Greek immigration to Australia began in the early colonial period in the 19th century. The first known Greeks arrived in 1829. These Greeks were seven sailors, convicted of piracy by a British naval court, and were sentenced to transportation to New South Wales. Though they were eventually pardoned, two of those seven Greeks stayed and settled in the country. One settled on the Monaro Plains in Southern New South Wales and one at Picton near Sydney. Their names were Ghikas Bulgaris known as Jigger Bulgari, and Andonis Manolis. Jigger Bulgari married an Irish woman, and they had many children. Jigger was buried at Nimmitabel Pioneer Cemetery. The Hellenic Club of Canberra laid a commemorative marble plaque over his resting place around 2000. Andonis Manolis' grave is in the old cemetery at Mittagong. The first known free Greek migrant to Australia was Katerina Georgia Plessos (1809–1907), who arrived in Sydney with her husband Major James Crummer in 1835. They married in 1827 on the island of Kalamos where Crummer, the island's commandant, met the young refugee from the Greek independence wars. In her youth, she must have been one of the last living people to speak to Lord Byron. They lived in Sydney, Newcastle and Port Macquarie. They had 11 children. The first wave of free Hellenic migrants commenced in the 1850s, and continued through the end of the 19th century, prompted in part by the recent discovery of gold in the country."
Greek Australians,"20th-century Greek immigration
From the last decade of the 19th century until World War I, the number of Greeks immigrating to Australia increased steadily and Hellenic communities were reasonably well established in Melbourne and Sydney at this time. The Greek language press began in Australia and in 1913, Australia had the first Greek weekly newspaper called Afstralia that was published in Melbourne.
Anna Perivolaris was a leading organiser of Greek culture in Sydney in the 1920s until she was head hunted to organise a Greek after school club in Perth.
There was a significant population of Greeks in Australia during World War I, especially from the Greek islands, which led to the community being heavily monitored and counted in a 'secret census' in 1916, due to questions of Greek loyalty as Greece was initially neutral during the war. Later the Greeks were raising money for the Greek Government in exile. 
After the changes in Greece from the mid 1970s, including the fall of the Papadopoulos regime in 1974 and the formal inclusion of Greece into the European Union, Greek immigration to Australia has slowed since the 1971 peak of 160,200 arrivals. Within Australia, the Greek immigrants have been ""extremely well organised socially and politically"", with approximately 600 Greek organisations in the country by 1973, and immigrants have strived to maintain their faith and cultural identity.
By comparison, the Greek Cypriot community in Australia doubled following the Invasion of Cyprus by Turkey following a campaign of ethnic cleansing in 1974."
Greek Australians,"21st-century Greek immigration
Since the year 2000, Greek immigration to Australia has slowed down. As the economic crisis in Greece grew, the opportunities for temporary resident Greek Australians abroad were limited.
In the early 2010s, there has been an increase of Greek immigration flows to Australia due to unemployment, among other issues, because of the economic crisis in Greece. This has led to the return of many Greek Australians which had gone to Greece before the crisis and also the arrival of newcomers from Greece, who have been received by the large Greek Australian community, mainly in Melbourne."
Greek Australians,"Demographics
At the 2021 census, 424,750 people stated that they had Greek ancestry (whether alone or in combination with another ancestry), comprising 1.7% of the Australian population. At the 2021 census, 92,314 Australian residents were born in Greece.
The largest concentration of Greek Australians is in the state of Victoria, which is often regarded as the heartland of the Greek Australian community. Victoria's capital Melbourne has the largest Greek Australian community in Australia.
The 2021 census showed that the following states had the largest numbers of people nominating Greek ancestry: Victoria (181,184), New South Wales (141,627), South Australia (40,704), Queensland (32,702), Western Australia (16,117).
One study investigating the 54 most common ethnic groups in Australia found that Greek Australians had the lowest rate of intermarriage (marrying outside their ethnicity) than every other ethnicity in the first, second and third generations."
Greek Australians,"Culture
Religion
According to the 2016 Australian census, 91.4% of Australians with Greek ancestry are Christian, mainly Eastern Orthodox; however, minorities who belong to different Christian denominations like Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses and Pentecostals also exist. Together, these other denominations make up 0.4% of the Greek Australian population. 5.6% identified as spiritual, secular or irreligious, and 2.6% did not answer the census question on religion. Greek Australians are predominantly Greek Orthodox. The largest religious body of Greek Orthodox Australians is the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia, with its headquarters at the Cathedral of The Annunciation of Our Lady in the inner Sydney suburb of Redfern."
Greek Australians,"Greek language
In 2016, the Greek language was spoken at home by 237,588 Australian residents, a 5.8% decrease from the 2011 census data. Greek is the seventh most commonly spoken language in Australia after English, Mandarin, Arabic, Cantonese, Vietnamese and Italian. The remainder of the ethnic Greek population in Australia mainly use English as their first language. Most Greek Australians speak the Greco-Australian dialect. Greco-Australian is an Australian-based dialect of Greek that is spoken by the local disapora, including by both Greek immigrants and Australians of Greek descent."
Greek Australians,"Media
The Greek language press began in Australia in 1913 when the first Greek weekly newspaper was published in Melbourne. In South Australia, the local Greek community published a short-lived newspaper called Okeanis (Oceania), around 1914 before it moved to Sydney. On 16 November 1926, George Marsellos and John Stilson published a broadsheet under the name Panellenios Keryx (Panhellenic Herald or The Greek Herald), becoming the second national Greek newspaper in Australia. In 1935 and 1936 a third newspaper, Pharos (Lighthouse), was published, and a number of short-lived titles were issued in the late 1960s, with the longest of these being Tachydromos (Mailman), founded in September 1968. In 1957, Hellenic/Greek language newspaper Neos Kosmos was founded by Dimitri Gogos, Bill Stefanou and Alekos Doukas, the latter also being an exceptionally well known author. Since 1994, a publication called Paroikiako Vema (Steps in the adopted Country) and printed in Renmark, has served the Greek community in rural South Australia.
Multicultural broadcaster SBS (Special Broadcasting Service) airs a Greek-language radio program every afternoon from 4 PM to 6 PM. The program features news, current affairs, music, interviews, and a talkback segment, where listeners can dial into the program from 5:30 PM onwards and express their opinion on a topic being focused on. Additionally, SBS also airs Greek public broadcaster ERT's Eidiseis news program every morning as part of their WorldWatch programming block."
Greek Australians,"Notable individuals
Academic
Nikos Athanasou – Professor of Musculoskeletal Pathology at Oxford University and a novelist.
Nick (Νικήτας) Birbilis – Professor of Engineering / Executive Dean, Faculty of Science, Engineering and Built Environment Deakin University
Adrian David Cheok – Professor of Pervasive Computing at City University London & Director of the Mixed Reality Lab
Nicholas Doumanis – Assoc. Professor of History, at the University of New South Wales
Nikolas Kompridis – Professorial Fellow at the University of Western Sydney in the School of Humanities & Communication Arts
Michael Kyrios - Emeritus Professor at Flinders University;  previous Vice President and Executive Dean, College of Education, Psychology and Social Work
Christos Pantelis – Professor of Psychiatry, University of Melbourne
Maria Skyllas-Kazacos – Emeritus Professor at the University of New South Wales, chemical engineer best known for her pioneering work of the vanadium redox battery
John Tasioulas – Director of Institute for Ethics in AI and Professor of Ethics and Legal Philosophy at University of Oxford and first Greek-Australian Rhodes Scholar"
Greek Australians,"Art and design
Con Chrisoulis – comic book creator
Nonda Katsalidis – architect
Marc Newson – industrial designer
Polixeni Papapetrou – artist
Paul Pholeros – architect
Tony Rafty – caricaturist
Stelarc (Stelios Arkadiou) – artist
Christos Tsiolkas – writer
Michael Zavros – artist/painter"
Greek Australians,"Business
Mark Bouris – managing director of Wizard
George Calombaris – chef, former judge MasterChef Australia
Con Constantine – former chairman, Newcastle United Jets
Andrew Demetriou – chief executive, Australian Football League
Tim Efkarpidis — businessman, property developer, Molongo Group
Harry Katsiabanis – founder of TaxiLink and StorageX
Antony J. J. Lucas – businessman noted for his philanthropic activities
Marinos Lucas – businessman, theatre company operator
Andrew N. Liveris – CEO of Dow Chemical Company
Kostas Makris – the richest Greek in Australia (in the top 30 of the richest residents in Australia)
Nick Pappas – chairman, South Sydney Rabbitohs
Nicholas Paspaley Senior and Paspaley family (Paspalis) – Paspaley dominate the pearling industry; large property holdings in Darwin CBD and properties in Sydney
George Peponis – chairman, Canterbury Bulldogs
Geoff Polites – chief executive officer of Australian Jaguar Land RoverFPV President / Tickford managing director
Nick Politis – car retailer and chairman of the Sydney Roosters rugby league club
James Samios – Hon. MBE Museum of Contemporary Art, Circular Quay, Sydney
Peter V'landys – chairman of the Australian Rugby League Commission"
Greek Australians,"Fashion
Christopher Chronis – fashion designer
Napoleon Perdis – make-up artist
Alex Perry – fashion designer"
Greek Australians,"Film, theatre, and television
Peter Andrikidis – director and producer, Underbelly, G.P.
Alex Andreas – actor, Fat Tony & Co.
Alex Blias – actor, Home and Away
Elena Carapetis – actress, Heartbreak High
Gia Carides – actress, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Brilliant Lies, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Strictly Ballroom
Zoe Carides – actress, Death in Brunswick, G.P.
Wayne Coles-Janess – director and producer
Chantal Contouri – actress, Number 96
Mary Coustas – comedian and actress
Alex Dimitriades – actor, The Heartbreak Kid, Heartbreak High, Head On, The Slap
Rebekah Elmaloglou – actress, Home and Away and Neighbours
Sebastian Elmaloglou – actor, Home and Away, brother of Rebekah
Damien Fotiou – actor, Kangaroo Jack, Head On
Nick Giannopoulos – actor, The Wog Boy, Acropolis Now and director
Diana Glenn – actress
George Houvardas – actor, Packed to the Rafters
Hugh Jackman – actor, Paperback Hero, Australia, Logan, The Greatest Showman
George Kapiniaris – actor, Acropolis Now and comedian
Peter Kelamis – comedian
Costas Kilias – actor
Ana Kokkinos – director, The Secret Life of Us, Head On
Katerina Kotsonis - actress, Neighbours
Nico Lathouris – actor
Costas Mandylor – actor, Saw, Picket Fences
Louis Mandylor – actor, My Big Fat Greek Wedding
Lex Marinos – actor, Kingswood Country, director, writer and broadcaster
Harry Michaels – actor, Number 96, producer, Aerobics Oz Style, and director, Sports TV
Bill Miller – director and producer
George Miller – Academy Award-winning director and producer, Babe, Happy Feet, Mad Max: Fury Road"
Greek Australians,"Ada Nicodemou – actress, Home and Away, Heartbreak High, Police Rescue
Tony Nikolakopoulos – actor and director
Socratis Otto – actor, known for television series Young Lions, and Wentworth
Alex Papps – actor, Home and Away, The Henderson Kids and presenter, Play School
Thaao Penghlis – actor, Days of Our Lives, General Hospital, Santa Barbara (TV series)
Alex Proyas – director, I, Robot, Dark City, The Crow, Knowing"
Greek Australians,"Jordan Raskopoulos – comedian and singer
Steen Raskopoulos – actor and comedian
Gina Riley – actress, Kath & Kim, comedian, entertainer and singer
Nathan Saidden – comedian
George Spartels – actor
Nadia Tass – director, Malcolm, The Big Steal
John Tatoulis – director and producer
Maria Theodorakis – actress
Alkinos Tsilimidos – director
Olympia Valance – actress, Neighbours, Playing for Keeps and model
Zoe Ventoura – actress, Packed to the Rafters
Helen Zerefos – actress and cabaret singer"
Greek Australians,"Journalism
Nick Adams - also known as Nick Adamopoulos, US-based political commentator
Dimitri Gogos – late editor, Neos Kosmos
George Donikian – news presenter, Ten Network
Peter Frilingos – sports journalist with the Daily Telegraph in Sydney, and broadcaster and commentator with the Continuous Call Team
Helen Kapalos – journalist, reporter Sunday Night, Seven Network
Patricia Karvelas – journalist, ABC
Mary Kostakidis – journalist, SBS
John Mangos – news presenter and journalist, Sky News Australia
George Megalogenis – author and formerThe Australian newspaper journalist
Harry Nicolaides – novelist
Peter Peters – sports broadcaster and commentator"
Greek Australians,"Justice
Chris Kourakis – Chief Justice of South Australia
Emilios Kyrou – Justice of the Supreme Court of Victoria
John Morris – Chief Justice of Tasmania (surname originally Moros)"
Greek Australians,"Music
Peter Andre – singer, entertainer
Alex Carapetis – drummer
Kaz James – singer and DJ
James Kannis – singer (Australian Idol)
Chris Karan – jazz drummer (Dudley Moore Trio) and studio percussionist (Bob Marley & the Wailers)
Vasilliki Karagiorgos (Vassy) – singer and songwriter
John Lemmone – flute player and composer
Orianthi Panagaris – guitarist/musician
Sally Polihronas – singer (Bardot)
Nick Skitz – deejay-producer
Costas Tsicaderis – singer-songwriter"
Greek Australians,"Politics
Nick Bolkus – federal politician
Michael Costa – former Finance Minister, New South Wales
Steve Dimopoulos – politician, Victoria
Nicholas Dondas - former politician Northern Territory
Jim Fouras – politician, Queensland
Steve Georganas – federal politician
Petro Georgiou – federal politician
John Hatzistergos – Attorney General, New South Wales
Peter Katsambanis – former politician, Victoria
Steve Kons – Deputy Premier, Tasmania
Nicholas Kotsiras – Minister, Victoria
Tom Koutsantonis – Minister for Trade, South Australia
Fiona Martin - former federal politician
Michael McCormack - former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia
Ken Michael – politician
Jenny Mikakos – former Health Minister, Victoria
John Pandazopoulos – politician, Victoria
Drew Pavlou – student activist at the University of Queensland
Eleni Petinos – politician, New South Wales
Nick Staikos – politician, Victoria
Andrew Theophanous – federal politician, Victoria (born Cyprus)
Theo Theophanous – politician, Victoria (born Cyprus)
Kat Theophanous – politician, Victoria
Arthur Sinodinos – former senator and Chief of Staff, PM John Howard
Maria Vamvakinou – federal politician, Victoria
Kon Vatskalis – politician, Northern Territory
Nick Xenophon – politician, South Australia
George Georgas – former politician Queensland"
Greek Australians,"Religion
Archbishop Stylianos Harkianakis – former Primate of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia
Archbishop Makarios Griniezakis – current Primate of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia"
Greek Australians,"Science and technology
Manuel Aroney – organic chemist
Gerasimos Danilatos – physicist, inventor of environmental scanning electron microscope
George North (Tramountanas) – pastoralist, sheep farmer and first Greek to settle in South Australia in 1842
Christos Pantelis – psychiatrist
George Paxinos – Professor of Psychology at the University of New South Wales
Michael Kyrios – clinical psychologist"
Greek Australians,"Sport
Australian rules football
Luke Beveridge – Melbourne, Footscray & St Kilda player
Ang Christou – Carlton player
Andrew Demetriou – North Melbourne & Hawthorn player (later League CEO)
Ange Postecoglou – Soccer Manager
Josh Francou – Port Adelaide player
Gary Frangalas – Sydney & Richmond player
John Georgiades – Footscray player
John Georgiou – St.Kilda player
Con Gorozidis – St.Kilda & Footscray player
Athas Hrysoulakis – Collingwood player
Peter Kanis – Hawthorn player
Arthur Karanicolas – North Melbourne player
Patrick Karnezis – Brisbane & Collingwood player
Paul Koulouriotis – Port Adelaide & Geelong player
Spiro Kourkoumelis – Carlton & St Kilda player
Anthony Koutoufides – Carlton player
Angelo Lekkas – Hawthorn player
Spiro Malakellis – Geelong player
Tony Malakellis – Geelong & Sydney player
Steve Malaxos – Hawthorn & West Coast player
Daniel Metropolis – West Coast & Fremantle player
Russell Morris – Hawthorn & St Kilda player
Chris Pavlou – Carlton player
Phillip Poursanidis – Carlton player
Lou Richards – Collingwood player
Ron Richards – Collingwood player
John Rombotis – Fitzroy, Port Adelaide & Richmond player
Tony Spassopoulos – Fitzroy player
Jimmy Toumpas – Melbourne & Port Adelaide player
Jason Traianidis – St Kilda player
Zeno Tzatzaris – Footscray player
David Zaharakis – Essendon player"
Greek Australians,"Boxing and kickboxing
Evangelos Goussis – Kickboxer and Boxer, convicted murderer
George Kambosos Jr. – Professional boxer
Michael Katsidis – Professional Boxer, former WBA and WBO lightweight champion
Stan Longinidis – Kickboxer, former World Kickboxing Champion
Tosca Petridis – Kickboxer, former World Kickboxing Champion"
Greek Australians,"Cricket
Jason Gillespie – cricket coach and retired Australia international cricketer
Peter Hatzoglou – Melbourne Renegades cricketer
Sam Konstas - Sydney thunder cricketer
Blake Nikitaras - Sydney thunder cricketer
Steve Nikitaras - Former WA cricketer
Marcus Stoinis – Australia international cricketer"
Greek Australians,"Flying disc
Maxwell Gratton – CEO, Flying Disc Australia"
Greek Australians,"Soccer
John Anastasiadis – former player of Heidelberg United, PAOK, South Melbourne and Yarraville Glory. Represented the Socceroos at U21 level. Coached Yarraville Glory, South Melbourne, Oakleigh Cannons and is current coach of Bentleigh Greens.
Panos Armenakas – player, Udinese Calcio
Con Blatsis – former player of South Melbourne, Derby County, Sheffield Wednesday (on loan), Colchester United, Kocaelispor and St Patrick's Athletic. Represented the Socceroos at U20, U23 and senior level.
Con Boutsianis – former player of South Melbourne, Heidelberg United, Collingwood Warriors, Bentleigh Greens, Perth Glory, Bolton Wanderers, Bulleen Zebras, Oakleigh Cannons, Essendon United and Malvern City. He represented the Socceroos at senior level.
Dean Bouzanis – player Reading, Melbourne City and former Liverpool FC
Jason Davidson – player Eupen, Melbourne Victory and former Socceroos
Chris Kalantzis – player
Evan Kostopoulos – player, Adelaide United
Stan Lazaridis – player, Perth Glory and Socceroos
Apostolos Stamatelopoulos – player, Adelaide United and Western United
Michalis 'Mike' Mandalis - player, one of Australia's all-time greats South Melbourne and Melbourne Hakoah
Lucas Pantelis – former player
Jim Patikas – former player, first Australian participant in UEFA Champions League, former Socceroos
Ange Postecoglou – coach Socceroos, Celtic and Spurs, former player
Peter Raskopoulos - player, Sydney Olympic FC
Nick Theodorakopoulos – coach
Michael Theoklitos – former player of Brisbane Roar, Melbourne Victory, South Melbourne
Michael Valkanis – coach, Melbourne City and Greece national football team assistant
Helen Caceres – player
Andy Vlahos – player
Charlie Yankos – former Socceroos captain
Terry Antonis – player, Western Sydney Wanderers
Apostolos Giannou – player, Kerala Blasters
Avraam Papadopoulos – player, Australian born Greece national football team member
Jesse Makarounas – player, Melbourne Victory
Dimitri Petratos – player, Mohun Bagan Super Giant
Kosta Petratos – player, St George City
Maki Petratos – player, St George City
Chris Ikonomidis – player, Melbourne Victory
Anthony Lesiotis – player, Melbourne City"
Greek Australians,"Mixed martial arts
George Sotiropoulos – former UFC mixed martial artist
Alexander Volkanovski – UFC mixed martial artist"
Greek Australians,"Rugby league
Braith Anasta – player, Sydney Roosters
Jason Demetriou - player/coach
George Gatis – player, New Zealand Warriors
Steve Georgallis – player/coach
Michael Korkidas – player, Salford City Reds
Nick Kouparitsas – player, Canterbury Bulldogs
Glenn Lazarus – player Canberra Raiders, Brisbane Broncos and Melbourne Storm
Billy Magoulias — player, Cronulla Sharks
George Peponis – former Australian captain
Peter Peters - player, Manly-Warringah
Willie Peters – player, South Sydney Rabbitohs
Jim Serdaris – player, South Sydney, Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs
John Skandalis – player, Huddersfield Giants
Jason Stevens – player, St-George Illawarra Dragons, Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks
Justin Tsoulos – player, Parramatta Eels
Arthur Kitinas – player/coach, South Sydney Sydney Roosters"
Greek Australians,"Sailing
Edward Psaltis – sailor"
Greek Australians,"Shooting
Michael Diamond – shooter – Olympic gold medallist, Sydney 2000"
Greek Australians,"Skateboarding
Tas Pappas – former World No.1
Ben Pappas"
Greek Australians,"Skiing
Lydia Lassila – skier"
Greek Australians,"Tennis
Mark Philippoussis – player
Nick Kyrgios – player
Thanasi Kokkinakis – player"
Greek Australians,"Weightlifting
Robert Kabbas - athlete
Bill Stellios - athlete"
Greek Australians,"Wrestling
Tony Kontellis – professional wrestler
Spiros Manousakis (Spiros Arion) – wrestler"
Greek Australians,"See also
Australia–Greece relations
Australians in Greece
Cypriot Australians
European Australians
Europeans in Oceania
Greek Cypriots
Greek New Zealanders
Greek Orthodox churches in New South Wales
Greeks
Immigration to Australia
Neos Kosmos"
Greek Australians,"References
Bibliography
Tamis, Anastasios (2005). The Greeks in Australia. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-54743-1
Gilchrist, Hugh (1992), Australians and Greeks Volume I: The Early Years, Brown, Prior, Anderson Pty. Ltd., ISBN 978-1-875684-01-4
Alexakis, Effy and Janiszewski, Leonard (1998). In Their Own Image: Greek-Australians. Hale & Iremonger Pty Limited. ISBN 0-86806-655-9
Alexakis, Effy and Janiszewski, Leonard (1995). Images of Home: Mavri Xenitia. Hale & Iremonger Pty Limited. ISBN 0-86806-560-9
Alexakis, Effy and Janiszewski, Leonard (2013). Selling an American Dream: Australia's Greek Cafe. Macquarie University. ISBN 9781741383959
Alexakis, Effy and Janiszewski, Leonard (2016). Greek Cafes & Milk Bars of Australia. Halstead Press. ISBN 9781925043181"
Greek Australians,"External links
Diamadis, Panayiotis – University of Technology, Sydney (2011). ""Greeks"". Dictionary of Sydney. Retrieved 4 October 2015.{{cite web}}:  CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) (Greeks in Sydney) [CC-By-SA]
A video of Peter Yiannoudes, who established Greek Cinema in Victoria in the 1950s on Culture Victoria
Meet me at the Paragon digital stories, State Library of Queensland. Digital stories relating to Greek Australian owned café and milk bars in Queensland"
Health care in Australia,"Health care in Australia operates under a shared public-private model underpinned by the Medicare system, the national single-payer funding model. State and territory governments operate public health facilities where eligible patients receive care free of charge. Primary health services, such as GP clinics, are privately owned in most situations, but attract Medicare rebates. Australian citizens, permanent residents, and some visitors and visa holders are eligible for health services under the Medicare system. Individuals are encouraged through tax surcharges to purchase health insurance to cover services offered in the private sector, and further fund health care.
In 1999, the Howard government introduced the private health insurance rebate scheme, under which the government contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people covered by Medicare. Including these rebates, Medicare is the major component of the total Commonwealth health budget, taking up about 43% of the total. The program was estimated to cost $18.3 billion in 2007–08. In 2009 before means testing was introduced, the private health insurance rebate was estimated to cost $4 billion, around 20% of the total budget. The overall figure was projected to rise by almost 4% annually in real terms in 2007. In 2013–14 Medicare expenditure was $19 billion and expected to reach $23.6 billion in 2016/7. In 2017–18, total health spending was $185.4 billion, equating to $7,485 per person, an increase of 1.2%, which was lower than the decade average of 3.9%. The majority of health spending went on hospitals (40%) and primary health care (34%). Health spending accounted for 10% of overall economic activity.
State and territory governments (through agencies such as Queensland Health) regulate and administer the major elements of healthcare such as doctors, public hospitals and ambulance services. The federal Minister for Health sets national health policy and may attach conditions to funding provided to state and territory governments. The funding model for healthcare in Australia has seen political polarisation, with governments being crucial in shaping national healthcare policy.
In 2013, the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) was commenced. This provides a national platform to individuals with disability to gain access to funding. The NDIS aims to provide resources to support individuals with disabilities in terms of medical management as well as social support to assist them in pursuing their dreams, careers, and hobbies. The NDIS also has supports for family members to aid them in taking care of their loved ones and avoid issues like carer burnout. Unfortunately, the National Disability Insurance Scheme is not without its limitations but overall the system is standardised across Australia and has helped many people with disabilities improve their quality of life."
Health care in Australia,"Statistics
In 2005/2006 Australia had (on average) 1 doctor per 322 people and 1 hospital bed per 244 people. At the 2011 Australian Census 70,200 medical practitioners (including doctors and specialist medical practitioners) and 257,200 nurses were recorded as currently working. In 2012, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare recorded data showing a rate of 374 medical practitioners per 100,000 population. The same study reported a rate of 1,124 nurses and midwives per 100,000 population.
Along with many countries around the world, there is a shortage of health professionals in Australia despite growth in the health workforce in previous years. From the years 2006–2011 the health workforce employment rate increased by 22.1%, which is reflected in the increase from 956,150 to 1,167,633.
In a sample of 13 developed countries, Australia was eighth in its population weighted usage of medication in 14 classes in 2009 and also in 2013. The drugs studied were selected on the basis that the conditions treated had high incidence, prevalence and/or mortality, caused significant long-term morbidity and incurred high levels of expenditure and significant developments in prevention or treatment had been made in the last 10 years. The study noted considerable difficulties in cross-border comparison of medication use.
Australia's health-expenditure–to–GDP ratio (~9.5%) in 2011–12 was slightly above average compared with other OECD countries."
Health care in Australia,"Medicare and the universal health care system
Medicare is the main funding source for health services in Australia and the universal health care system. ""Medicare"" can be broken down into four distinct programs, each run by Services Australia:"
Health care in Australia,"the Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS), which is the namesake program that subsidises a portion of each 'episode' of a health service
the National Health Reform Agreement (NHRA), which covers the cost of treatment in state and territory facilities, such as hospitals, by sharing the cost between the Australian Government and state and territory government
the Pharmaceutical Benefits Schedule (PBS) which assists with the costs of some medicines and therapies
and My Aged Care (MAC), which provides contributions towards the cost of aged care services.
Medicare contributions to health services are only made for Australian citizens and permanent residents. Some visitors and visa holders are also entitled to Medicare coverage, although  cover for international visitors under Reciprocal Health Care Agreements is limited to immediately necessary care only.
To be eligible for on-the-spot Medicare coverage, patients generally have to present their Medicare card at the time. Funding for Medicare is raised by a 2% Medicare levy, as well as a Medicare levy surcharge for people over 35 that don't have private health insurance. Exemptions and reductions are available for low-income earners. Both the MBS and PBS also have ""safety nets"" which further cover the cost of health care and medicines for people that pay a lot out-of-pocket each year.
Medicare does not cover the cost of ambulance services, most dental care, glasses, contact lenses or hearing aides, and cosmetic surgery. Most of these are covered under private health insurance, or by state and territory governments."
Health care in Australia,"Medicare Benefits Schedule
The Medicare Benefits Schedule lists all services that they will contribute towards, how much a standard cost for that service is (called the schedule Fee), and what percentage of that fee that Medicare will cover. Around 90% of general practitioners ""bulk bill"" consultations, which means they will only charge how much Medicare will cover for eligible patients. The MBS also contributes partially towards hospital admissions, with the rest being covered by either a NHRA payment (for public hospitals) or private health insurance (for either public or private hospitals).
Health care providers may individually decide how much to charge, and may charge more than the scheduled fee. Families or individuals are also subject to the safety net threshold: after a certain amount of out-of-pocket expenses in a calendar year, Medicare will increase the contribution percentage for specialist services. Certain concession holders, such as veterans, those with disabilities, and low-income earners receiving payments from Centrelink, often can claim a higher percentage of the scheduled fee than what the general population can.
Other universal health services like the cancer screening programs and the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) are covered under separate agreements between the different levels of government. There are also other programs within the broad Medicare system that support access to mental health services (Better Access Scheme), care for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, and rural and remote people."
Health care in Australia,"National Health Reform Agreement
Public hospitals and community health services are owned and operated by state and territory health departments, and jointly funded by the Australian Government and the state and territory government. These include local public health units, but exclude Primary Health Networks (which are funded directly by the federal government). Additional costs to public health services relating to the COVID-19 pandemic receive additional contributions under the National Partnership Agreement on COVID-19 Response (NPA).
NHRA funding is a mix of two systems: block funding and activity-based funding. Block funding is specific to each hospital, and is used to cover the cost of teaching and research, and for most rural and remote health facilities. Activity-based funding (ABF) is used for larger hospitals, where they receive a certain amount of money for 'episode of care' they provide, depending on what care is provided.
The National Health Funding Pool Administrator (the Administrator), through the National Health Funding Body (NHFB), oversees the National Health Funding Pool (NHFP) which is a lump-sum account of all government spending on health care. The Administrator uses information from the Independent Health and Aged Care Pricing Authority (IHACPA) to distribute those funds to the local health networks that operate public hospitals."
Health care in Australia,"Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme
Under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, some prescription medications are subsidised by the Australian Government. The PBS does not cover the full cost of medications, and doesn't cover all medications either. People with certain concession cards, or that spend a lot on medicine, can also receive further rebates."
Health care in Australia,"Health insurance
Funding of the health system in Australia is a combination of government funding and private health insurance. Government funding is through the Medicare scheme, which subsidises out-of-hospital medical treatment and funds free treatment in a public hospital.
In Australia, health insurance is provided by a number of health insurance organisations, called health funds. Such insurance is optional, and covers the cost of treatment as a private patient in a hospital, and may provide ""extras"" cover."
Health care in Australia,"Hospital cover. Medicare covers the cost of treatment as a public patient at a public hospital for elective treatments as well as emergency or medically necessary treatments. A public patient is a person whose treatment is covered by Medicare, while a private patient is one whose hospital accommodation is covered entirely by either a health fund or by the patient themselves (self-funding). While Medicare does not make any contribution towards hospital accommodation fees, theatres fees or prostheses for privately admitted patients, it does pay a portion of all medical fees (fees charged by doctors) associated with a private admission. There are a number of community objections to being a public patient in a public hospital, including the lack of choice of doctors or carers, long waiting lists, etc., and many people who take out health insurance do so to be treated as a private patient in either a public hospital or a private hospital. A private patient in a public hospital is entitled to a doctor of their choice, and cover for accommodation in a ward, and theatre fees for surgery. A person without insurance cover must resort to being a public patient at a public hospital or else carry the cost alone.
Extras cover. Some non-medical or allied health services are not covered by Medicare or by standard health insurance, such as dentistry, medical devices and alternative medicine. A person may in addition or as an alternative take out ""extras"" cover for such treatments. What services are covered and how much is reimbursed and caps that apply vary between funds.
Health insurance in Australia is community rated; health funds cannot take age, gender, pre-existing conditions or other underlying risk factors into account in the calculation of premiums.
The largest health fund with a 26.9% market share is Medibank. Medibank was set up to provide competition to private ""for-profit"" health funds. Although formerly government-owned, the fund operated as a government business enterprise from 2009 until it was privatised in 2014, operating as a fully commercialized business paying tax and dividends under the same regulatory regime as do all other registered private health funds. Medibank was privatised in 2014 and became for-profit. Australian health funds can be either 'for profit' including Bupa and nib; 'mutual' including Australian Unity; or 'non-profit' including GMHBA, HCF Health Insurance and CBHS Health Fund. Some have membership restricted to particular groups, some focus on specific regions – like HBF Health Fund which centres on Western Australia, but the majority have open membership. Almost all health funds that are not-for-profit or part of a member-owned group, regional or community based (26 insurers covering a combined +5 million lives) are part the Members Health Fund Alliance Membership to most of these funds is also accessible using a comparison websites or the decision assistance sites. These sites operate on a commission-basis agreement with their participating health funds and allow consumers to compare policies before joining online.
Most aspects of health insurance in Australia are regulated by the Private Health Insurance Act 2007. Complaints and reporting of the health industry is carried out by an independent government agency, the Private Health Insurance Ombudsman. The ombudsman publishes an annual report that outlines the number and nature of complaints per health fund compared to their market share.
The private health system in Australia operates on a ""community rating"" basis, whereby premiums do not vary solely because of a person's previous medical history, current state of health, or (generally speaking) their age (but see Lifetime Health Cover loading below). Balancing this are waiting periods, in particular for pre-existing conditions (usually referred to within the industry as PEA, which stands for ""pre-existing ailment""). Funds are entitled to impose a waiting period of up to 12 months on benefits for any medical condition the signs and symptoms of which existed during the six months ending on the day the person first took out insurance.  They are also entitled to impose a 12-month waiting period for benefits for treatment relating to an obstetric condition, and a 2-month waiting period for all other benefits when a person first takes out private insurance.
Funds have the discretion to reduce or remove such waiting periods in individual cases. They are also free not to impose them, to begin with, but this would place such a fund at risk of ""adverse selection"", attracting a disproportionate number of members from other funds, or from the pool of intending members who might otherwise have joined other funds. It would also attract people with existing medical conditions, who might not otherwise have taken out insurance at all because of the denial of benefits for 12 months due to the PEA Rule.  The benefits paid out for these conditions would create pressure on premiums for all the fund's members, causing some to drop their membership, which would lead to further rises, and a vicious cycle would ensue.
Health funds are not permitted to discriminate between members in terms of premiums, benefits or membership on the basis of racial origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, nature of employment, and leisure activities. Premiums for a fund's product that is sold in more than one state can vary from state to state, but not within the same state."
Health care in Australia,"Incentives
A number of incentives encourage people to take out and maintain private hospital insurance, including:"
Health care in Australia,"Lifetime Health Cover loading: If a person has not taken out private hospital cover by 1 July after their 31st birthday, then when (and if) they do so after this time, their premiums must include a loading of 2% per annum. Thus, a person taking out private cover for the first time at age 40 will pay a 20% loading. The loading continues for 10 years. The loading applies only to premiums for hospital cover, not to ancillary (extras) cover.
Medicare levy surcharge (MLS): People whose income for MLS purposes is greater than a specified amount and who do not have an 'appropriate level of cover' (being a complying health insurance policy that provides hospital cover with a payable excess not more than $750 for a policy covering a single insured, or $1500 for a policy covering more than one insured) pay the MLS in addition to the standard Medicare levy.
Private health insurance rebate:  The government subsidises the premiums for all health insurance cover, including hospital and ancillary (extras), by a different percentage depending on income tier (with individuals on higher incomes entitled to a smaller rebate), and age (with those 70+ receiving the highest percentage rebate)."
Health care in Australia,"Medicare levy surcharge
The government encourages individuals with income above a set level to privately insure. This is done by charging these (higher income) individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out health insurance, and a means-tested rebate. This is to encourage individuals who are perceived as able to afford private insurance not to resort to the public health system, even though people with valid private health insurance may still elect to use the public system if they wish.
The Howard Coalition government introduced a Medicare levy surcharge (MLS) with effect from 1 July 1997, as an incentive for people on higher incomes to take out and maintain an appropriate level of private health insurance, as part of an effort to reduce demand pressure on public hospitals by encouraging people to have insurance cover for them to use private hospitals. Individuals can take out health insurance to cover out-of-pocket costs, with either a plan that covers just selected services, to a full coverage plan. In practice, a person with health insurance may still be left with out-of-pocket payments, as services in private hospitals often cost more than the insurance payment.
Initially, MLS of 1% applied to individuals and families who did not have an ""appropriate level of cover"" and whose taxable income was above a prescribed threshold. In 1997, the MLS threshold was $90,000 for individuals or $180,000 for families. The threshold increased by $1,500 for each dependent child after the first in the family group.
Since 1 July 2012, the basis of the threshold has been ""income for MLS purposes"", which includes the individual's or family group's taxable income, fringe benefits, superannuation contributions and net investment losses.
In 2014, the surcharge rate was increased from 1% to 1.25% for those with MLS income over $105,000, from $97,000, and 1.5% for those on incomes over $140,000, from $130,000; and the threshold amounts are doubled for families.
The MLS is calculated at the surcharge rate on the whole of an individual's MLS income, and not just the amount above the MLS threshold. The minimum MLS amount is $900.
The requirement that a higher-income earner have an ""appropriate level of private hospital cover"" is satisfied under the government's new four-tier hospital insurance structure introduced in 2019 by a basic hospital insurance cover. Extras or add-on insurance alone does not qualify."
Health care in Australia,"Private health insurance rebate
In 1999, the Howard government introduced the private health insurance rebate scheme, under which the government contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people covered by Medicare. The program was estimated to cost $18.3 billion in 2007–08. In 2009, before means testing was introduced, the private health insurance rebate was estimated to cost $4 billion, around 20% of the total budget. The overall figure was projected to rise by almost 4% annually in real terms in 2007.
Since 2009, the rebate has been income- and age-tested. For a single person whose ""income for MLS purposes"" is less than $90,000 a year, or $180,000 for a family, and under 65 years old, the rebate is 24.608% (1 April 2022 to 31 March 2023), covering both hospital and extras cover. The rebate phases down over those amounts and cuts out at $140,000 for a single person, and double for a family. The rebate can be claimed as a premium reduction or as a refundable tax offset.
Debates regarding Medicare focus on the two-tier system and the role of private health insurance. Controversial issues include:"
Health care in Australia,"whether people with means should take up private health insurance
whether rebates/incentives should be given in terms of private health insurance
people with health insurance still accessing the tax-payer funded public system rather than relying on their insurance
people with private health insurance are not required to pay the Medicare Levy Surcharge.
Critics argue that the rebate is an unfair subsidy to those who can afford health insurance, claiming the money would be better spent on public hospitals where it would benefit everyone. Supporters argue that people must be encouraged into the private health care system, claiming the public system is not universally sustainable for the future. Similarly, even after the introduction of the rebate, some private health insurance companies have raised their premiums most years, to an extent negating the benefit of the rebate.
In 2013/14 Medicare expenditure was $19 billion and expected to reach $23.6 billion in 2016/17. During FY2014, approximately 47.2% of Australians had private health insurance with some form of hospital cover."
Health care in Australia,"Lifetime Health Cover loading
To arrest the decline in the number of Australians maintaining private health insurance, the government introduced the Lifetime Health Cover loading, under which people who take out private hospital insurance later in life pay higher premiums, called a ""loading"", compared to those who have held coverage since they were younger, and may also be subject to the Medicare levy surcharge."
Health care in Australia,"Four tier system
From 1 April 2019, the federal government introduced a four tiered system of private hospital insurance, under which health funds will classify hospital policies into four tiers – basic, bronze, silver and gold. Minimum coverage requirements will apply to each tier, and insurers can also offer add-ons (called ""plus options"") for the basic, bronze and silver tiers. The system will be rolled out by 1 April 2020. Research conducted by consumer advocacy group Choice found silver plus options offered by some health funds cost more than rival funds' gold options, while providing less coverage."
Health care in Australia,"Government agencies
Federal government agencies
Services Australia, formerly the Department of Human Services, is responsible for administering Australia's universal health insurance scheme, such as making payments to health providers or patients. The Department of Health and Aged Care is responsible for national regulation of medicines and therapeutic devices, with the Australian Border Force responsible for screening imports into Australia to make sure that only approved medicines are allowed across the border.
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) is Australia's national agency for health and welfare statistics and information. Its biennial publication Australia's Health is a key national information resource in the area of health care. The Institute publishes over 140 reports each year on various aspects of Australia's health and welfare. Food Standards Australia New Zealand and the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency also play a role in protecting and improving the health of Australians.
The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (Ahpra) are responsible for regulating the registration of most health practitioners. Unless a person is registered on the National Register as a certain health practitioner, it is illegal to call themselves as such or provide health care. National Boards set the professional practice standards for each profession, and can apply to state and territory tribunals to suspend or remove health practitioner's registration.
The national My Health Record is a digital health platform maintained by the Australian Digital Health Agency. The platform stores and allows access to medical records by registered health practitioners such as doctors and nurses."
Health care in Australia,"State and territory agencies
Each state and territory is responsible for their own public hospitals, as well as the state or territory's health department (such as Queensland Health). For some internal territories (such as the Jervis Bay Territory) and all external territories (such as Norfolk Island), health services are provided by another state or territory government. Under the NHRA, public health care services are provided by local health districts (such as Metro North Hospital and Health Service in Queensland)."
Health care in Australia,"Ambulance services
Queensland and Tasmanian state governments cover the cost of ambulance services for their citizens, both in the state and while interstate. Outside of Queensland and Tasmania, the cost of ambulance services varies state-by-state, but is either a call out fee plus a per-kilometre charge, or a membership to that state's ambulance provider. Each state and territory has their own ambulance service, such as NSW Ambulance, Ambulance Victoria or the Queensland Ambulance Service."
Health care in Australia,"Non-government organisations
Australian Red Cross Lifeblood collects blood, plasma and other essential tissue and organ donations and provides them to healthcare providers. The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) funds competitive health and medical research, and develops statements on policy issues. The Royal Flying Doctor Service provides both emergency and primary health care in rural and regional Australia using aircraft. Heart of Australia provides specialist cardiac and respiratory investigation and treatment services in rural and regional Queensland, particularly mining towns, using specially-equipped large trucks."
Health care in Australia,"Challenges
Workforce
In a report published by HealthWorkforce Australia in March 2012, a shortage of nearly 3,000 doctors, over 100,000 nurses and more than 80,000 registered nurses was predicted in the year 2025. In the conclusion of the report, the HWA explains: ""For nurses, given the size of the projected workforce shortages presented in this report, HWA will conduct an economic analysis to quantify the cost to allow an assessment of the relative affordability of the modelled scenarios to close the projected gap."" Governments, Higher Education and Training, Professions and Employers are also identified as key players in the process of addressing future challenges. The mental health of health professionals in Australia is a growing concern, so much so that an organisation called Crazysocks4docs Trust Foundation was established by Melbourne cardiologist Geoff Toogood. The organisation aims to break down the stigma of health professionals experiencing mental health issues through such initiatives as its annual flagship event, Crazy Socks 4 Docs Day. However, some of those within the medical field have been both complimentary and critical of the crazy socks initiative."
Health care in Australia,"Quality of care
An international comparative study, 'Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: An International Update on the Comparative Performance of American Health Care' was published by The Commonwealth Fund in May 2007 and compared the health care systems in six countries (Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States). It found that in the healthy lives category, ""Australia ranks highest, scoring first or second on all three indicators"", although its overall ranking in the study was below the UK and Germany systems, tied with New Zealand's and above those of Canada and far above the U.S. A new study published in July 2017 as part of the same 'Mirror, Mirror' series by The Commonwealth Fund compared the health care systems in 11 countries (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and found that Australia was now one of the top ranked countries overall, alongside the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.
A global study of end of life care, conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit, part of the group which publishes The Economist magazine, published the compared end of life care, gave the highest ratings to Australia and the UK out of the 40 countries studied, the two country's systems receiving a rating of 7.9 out of 10 in an analysis of access to services, quality of care and public awareness."
Health care in Australia,"Aging population
Australia's life expectancy is approximately 83 years, however 10 of these years are expected to include an increase in disability from a chronic disease. The increase in chronic diseases are a contributor of higher healthcare costs overall. Additionally the older generation shows an increased need for health services, and utilizes services frequently. From the years 1973 to 2013 the total number of people 65 or older tripled, increasing from 1.1 million to 3.3. As for the population of 85 and older there was an increase from 73,100 to 439,600. In order for the Australian health care system to handle the gradual population aging, government and administration must develop new policies and programs to accommodate the needs of changing demographics."
Health care in Australia,"Rural and remote health care
Health care services, their availability and the health outcomes of those who live in rural and remote parts of Australia can differ greatly from metropolitan areas. In recent reports, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare noted that ""compared with those in Major Cities, people in regional and remote areas were less likely to report very good or excellent health"", with life expectancy decreasing with increasing remoteness: ""[c]ompared with Major Cities, the life expectancy in regional areas is 1–2 years lower and in remote areas is up to 7 years lower."" It was also noted that Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander peoples experienced worse health than non-Indigenous Australians."
Health care in Australia,"Affordability
Government subsidies have not kept up with increasing fees charged by medical professionals or the increasing cost of medicines.  Data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare shows that out-of-pocket payments increased four-and-a-half times faster than government funding in 2014–15.  This has led to large numbers of patients skipping treatment or medicine.  Australian out-of-pocket health expenses are the third highest in the developed world."
Health care in Australia,"Adoption of US-style preferred provider contracts
Since around 2010 Private Health Insurance (PHI) companies have introduced Preferred Provider contracts with healthcare providers. Whilst seemingly a win win scenario at the start the PHI companies now have a great deal of control over these providers. The introduction of 1- Differential rebating 2- HICAPS and access to members data 3- Patient steering 
have led to a high level of discontent amongst healthcare providers.
The Senate enquiry into the value and affordability of private health insurance conducted 2017–18 led to a host of recommendations to Parliament to end these practices however as of the time of writing the Minister for Health has not taken any action. 
The ACCC have also looked at this matter without recommending any action be taken.
The impact of these PHI policies has been overwhelmingly to place financial pressure on healthcare providers and reduce the choice of healthcare provider to the patient as rebate amounts differ depending on which provider the patient attends. This has led to a number of bankruptcies in the Dental field."
Health care in Australia,"Corporatisation of the dental industry
The Australian Dental Association (ADA) set quality and care standards for the industry, but provide no standardised pricing schedule for services and treatment. Large corporate dental practices, which have a wide footprint, often have check-up and service KPIs. As there is no standard pricing schedule, this can quite often leave patients with large expenses, and on occasion unnecessary treatment. It also leads to cases where identical treatment plans can have drastically different pricing."
Health care in Australia,"Other health care programs
National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) – Australia's national disability-related health care program, managed by the National Disability Insurance Agency
Healthdirect Australia – Healthdirect provides access to quality health information and is funded by the Australian Government.
DoctorConnect – To encourage overseas doctors to work in Australia."
Health care in Australia,"Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme
The Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) subsidises certain prescribed pharmaceuticals.  The PBS pre-dates Medicare, being established in 1948.  It is generally considered a separate health policy to 'Medicare'. The PBS is now administered by the Department of Human Services Insurance, with input from a range of other bodies such as the Pharmaceutical Benefits Pricing Authority."
Health care in Australia,"State/territory programs
State and Territory Governments also sometimes administer peripheral health programmes, such as free dentistry for school students and community sexual health programmes."
Health care in Australia,"Dental care services
With some exceptions, such as the Teen Dental Plan, dental care is generally not covered by Medicare for all Australians, although the various States and Territories provide free or subsidised dental services to certain categories of the population, such as Health Care Card and Pensioner Concession Card holders.: 19 
For example, Victoria provides subsidized dental care to concession card holders through a network of community clinics and the Royal Dental Hospital. There is also a voucher system available for general and emergency dental care where these can not be met by the public system. Vouchers allow patients to receive $799 worth of necessary general and/or emergency dental treatment at a time. The patient co-payment in these situations is generally $27 a visit up to a maximum of 4 visits at $108."
Health care in Australia,"National Diabetes Services Scheme
The National Diabetes Services Scheme is funded by the Australian government to deliver diabetes-related products at affordable prices."
Health care in Australia,"Sick leave
Sick leave has its origins in trade union campaigns for its inclusion in industrial agreements. In Australia, it was introduced into industrial awards in 1922.
Under the Federal Government's industrial relations legislation, known as Fair Work, eligible employees are entitled to 10 days of paid personal leave (sick/carer's leave) per year, which also carries over to subsequent years if not used.
In addition, Australian workers may be entitled to two days of compassionate leave for each permissible occasion where a member of their family or household contracts or develops a personal illness or sustains a personal injury that poses a threat to his or her life, or dies."
Health care in Australia,"Peak bodies
Australian Medical Association
Royal Australian College of General Practitioners"
Health care in Australia,See also
Health care in Australia,"Aged care in Australia
Australian paradox
Biosecurity in Australia
Dental care in adolescent Australians
Emergency medical services in Australia
Euthanasia in Australia
Health of prisoners in Australia
Home medicines review
Medical education in Australia
Nursing in Australia
Paramedics in Australia
Private Health Insurance Ombudsman
Rural health care in Australia
International
Health care compared
Health care systems"
Health care in Australia,"
== References =="
Prehistory of Australia,"The prehistory of Australia is the period between the first human habitation of the Australian continent and the colonisation of Australia in 1788, which marks the start of consistent written documentation of Australia. This period has been variously estimated, with most evidence suggesting that it goes back between 50,000 and 65,000 years. This era is referred as prehistory rather than history because knowledge of this time period does not derive from written documentation. However, some argue that Indigenous oral tradition should be accorded an equal status.  
Human habitation of the Australian continent began with the migration of the ancestors of today's Aboriginal Australians by land bridges and short sea crossings from what is now Southeast Asia. It is uncertain how many waves of immigration may have contributed to these ancestors of modern Aboriginal Australians. The Madjedbebe rock shelter in Arnhem Land is perhaps the oldest site showing the presence of humans in Australia. The oldest human remains found are at Lake Mungo in New South Wales, which have been dated to around 41,000 years ago.
At the time of first European contact, estimates of the Aboriginal population range from 300,000 to one million. They were complex hunter-gatherers with diverse economies and societies. There were about 600 tribes or nations and 250 languages with various dialects. Certain groups engaged in fire-stick farming, fish farming, and built semi-permanent shelters. The extent to which some groups engaged in agriculture is controversial. 
The Torres Strait Islander people first settled their islands around 4,000 years ago. Culturally and linguistically distinct from mainland Aboriginal peoples, they were seafarers and obtained their livelihood from seasonal horticulture and the resources of their reefs and seas. Agriculture also developed on some islands and villages appeared by the 1300s."
Prehistory of Australia,"Arrival
The earliest evidence of humans in Australia has been variously estimated, with most scholars, as at 2023, dating it between 50,000 and 65,000 years BP.
There is considerable discussion among archaeologists as to the route taken by the first migrants to Australia, widely taken to be ancestors of the modern Aboriginal peoples. Migration took place during the closing stages of the Pleistocene, when sea levels were much lower than they are today. Repeated episodes of extended glaciation during the Pleistocene epoch resulted in decreases of sea levels by more than 100 metres in Australasia. People appear to have arrived by sea during a period of glaciation, when New Guinea and Tasmania were joined to the continent of Australia. The continental coastline extended much further out into the Timor Sea, and Australia and New Guinea formed a single landmass (known as Sahul), connected by an extensive land bridge across the Arafura Sea, Gulf of Carpentaria and Torres Strait. Nevertheless, the sea still presented a major obstacle so it is theorised that these ancestral people reached Australia by island hopping. Two routes have been proposed. One follows an island chain between Sulawesi and New Guinea and the other reaches North Western Australia via Timor. Rupert Gerritsen has suggested an alternative theory, involving accidental colonisation as a result of tsunamis. The journey still required sea travel, however, making them some of the world's earliest mariners.
In the 2013 book First Footprints: The Epic Story of the First Australians, Scott Cane writes that the first wave may have been prompted by the eruption of Toba, and if they arrived around 70,000 years ago, they could have crossed the water from Timor, when the sea level was low – but if they came later, around 50,000 years ago, a more likely route would be through the Moluccas to New Guinea. Given that the likely landfall regions have been under around 50 metres of water for the last 15,000 years, it is unlikely that the timing will ever be established with certainty."
Prehistory of Australia,"Dating of sites
The minimum widely accepted time-frame for the arrival of humans in Australia is placed at least 48,000 years ago. Many sites dating from this time period have been excavated. In Arnhem Land Madjedbebe (formerly known as Malakunanja II) fossils and a rock shelter have been dated to around 65,000 years old, although a study in 2020 suggests that human habitation at the site was more recent. According to mitochondrial DNA research, Aboriginal people reached Eyre Peninsula (South Australia) 49,000-45,000 years ago from both the east (clockwise, along the coast, from northern Australia) and the west (anti-clockwise).: 189  
Radiocarbon dating suggests that they lived in and around Sydney for at least 30,000 years. In Parramatta, Western Sydney, it was found that some Aboriginal peoples used charcoal, stone tools and possible ancient campfires. Near Penrith, a far western suburb of Sydney, numerous Aboriginal stone tools were found in Cranebrook Terraces gravel sediments having dates of 45,000 to 50,000 years BP. This would mean that there was human settlement in Sydney earlier than thought.
Archaeological evidence indicates human habitation at the upper Swan River, Western Australia by about 40,000 years ago. A 2018 study using archaeobotany dated evidence of human habitation at Karnatukul (Serpent's Glen) in the Carnarvon Range in the Little Sandy Desert in WA at around 50,000 years (20,000 years earlier than previously thought), and it was shown that human habitation had been continuous at the site since then. 
Tasmania, which was connected to the continent by a land bridge, was inhabited at least 40,000 years ago. The oldest known site is Wareen Cave, dated to this time."
Prehistory of Australia,"Migration routes and waves
A 2021 study by researchers at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage has mapped the likely migration routes of the peoples as they moved across the Australian continent to its southern reaches of what is now Tasmania, but back then part of the mainland. The modelling is based on data from archaeologists, anthropologists, ecologists, geneticists, climatologists, geomorphologists, and hydrologists, and it is intended to compare the modelling with the oral histories of Aboriginal peoples, including Dreaming stories, as well as Australian rock art and linguistic features of  the many Aboriginal languages. The routes, dubbed ""superhighways"" by the authors, are similar to current highways and stock routes in Australia. Lynette Russell of Monash University sees the new model as a starting point for collaboration with Aboriginal people to help uncover their history. The new models suggest that the first people may have first landed in the Kimberley region in what is now Western Australia about 60,000 years ago, and had settled across the continent within 6,000 years."
Prehistory of Australia,"Phylogenetic data suggests that an early Eastern Eurasian lineage trifurcated somewhere in eastern South Asia, and gave rise to Aboriginal Australians, Papuans, the Andamanese, the AASI, as well as East/Southeast Asians, although Papuans may have also received some gene flow from an earlier group (xOoA), around 2%, next to additional archaic admixture in the Sahul region. 
According to one study, Papuans could have either formed from a mixture between an East Eurasian lineage and lineage basal to West and East Asians, or as a sister lineage of East Asians with or without a minor basal OoA or xOoA contribution.
A Holocene hunter-gatherer sample (Leang_Panninge) from South Sulawesi was found to be genetically in between Basal-East-Asian and Australo-Papuans. The sample could be modeled as ~50% Papuan-related and ~50% Basal-East Asian-related (Andamanese Onge or Tianyuan). The authors concluded that Basal-East Asian ancestry was far more widespread and the peopling of Insular Southeast Asia and Oceania was more complex than previously anticipated.
It is unknown how many populations settled in Australia prior to European colonisation. Both ""trihybrid"" and single-origin hypotheses have received extensive discussion. Keith Windschuttle, known for his belief that Aboriginal pre-history has become politicised, argues that the assumption of a single origin is tied into ethnic solidarity, and multiple entry was suppressed because it could be used to justify white seizure of Aboriginal lands, but this hypothesis is not supported by scientific studies."
Prehistory of Australia,"Changes c. 4000 years ago
Human genomic differences are being studied to find possible answers, but there is still insufficient evidence to distinguish a ""wave invasion model"" from a ""single settlement"" one.
A 2012 paper by Alan J. Redd et al. on the topic of migration from India around 4,000 years ago notes that the indicated influx period corresponds to the timing of various other changes, specifically mentioning ""The divergence times reported here correspond with a series of changes in the Australian anthropological record between 5,000 years ago and 3,000 years ago, including the introduction of the dingo; the spread of the Australian Small Tool tradition; the appearance of plant-processing technologies, especially complex detoxification of cycads; and the expansion of the Pama-Nyungan language over seven-eighths of Australia"". Although previously linked to the pariah dogs of India, recent testing of the mitochondrial DNA of dingoes shows a closer connection to the dogs of Eastern Asia and North America, suggesting an introduction as a result of the Austronesian expansion from Southern China to Timor over the last 5,000 years. A 2007 finding of kangaroo ticks on the pariah dogs of Thailand suggested that this genetic expansion may have been a two-way process.
The dingo reached Australia about 4,000 years ago, and around the same time there were changes in language, with the Pama-Nyungan language family spreading over most of the mainland, and stone tool technology, with the use of smaller tools. Human contact has thus been inferred, and genetic data of two kinds have been proposed to support a gene flow from India to Australia: firstly, signs of South Asian components in Aboriginal Australian genomes, reported on the basis of genome-wide SNP data; and secondly, the existence of a Y chromosome (male) lineage, designated haplogroup C∗, with the most recent common ancestor around 5,000 years ago. The first type of evidence comes from a 2013 study by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology using large-scale genotyping data from a pool of Aboriginal Australians, New Guineans, island Southeast Asians and Indians. It found that the New Guinea and Mamanwa (Philippines area) groups diverged from the Aboriginal about 36,000 years ago (and supporting evidence that these populations are descended from migrants taking an early ""southern route"" out of Africa, before other groups in the area), and also that the Indian and Australian populations mixed well before European contact, with this gene flow occurring during the Holocene (c.4,230 years ago). The researchers had two theories for this: either some Indians had contact with people in Indonesia who eventually transferred those genes from India to Aboriginal Australians, or that a group of Indians migrated all the way from India to Australia and intermingled with the locals directly.
However, a 2016 study in Current Biology by Anders Bergström et al. excluded the Y chromosome as providing evidence for recent gene flow from India into Australia. The study authors sequenced 13 Aboriginal Australian Y chromosomes using recent advances in gene sequencing technology, investigating their divergence times from Y chromosomes in other continents, including comparing the haplogroup C chromosomes. The authors concluded that, although this does not disprove the presence of any Holocene gene flow or non-genetic influences from South Asia at that time, and the appearance of the dingo does provide strong evidence for external contacts, the evidence overall is consistent with a complete lack of gene flow, and points to indigenous origins for the technological and linguistic changes. Gene flow across the island-dotted 150-kilometre (93 mi)-wide Torres Strait, is both geographically plausible and demonstrated by the data, although at this point it could not be determined from this study when within the last 10,000 years it may have occurred - newer analytical techniques have the potential to address such questions."
Prehistory of Australia,"Advent of fire farming and megafauna extinctions
Archaeological evidence from ash deposits in the Coral Sea indicates that fire was already a significant part of the Australian landscape over 100,000 years BP. There is evidence of the deliberate use of fire to shape the Australian environment 46,000 years ago. One explanation being the use by hunter-gatherers as a tool to drive game, to produce a green flush of new growth to attract animals, and to open up impenetrable forest. In The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines made Australia, Bill Gammage claims that dense forest became more open sclerophyll forest, open forest became grassland and fire-tolerant species became more predominant: in particular, eucalyptus, acacia, banksia, casuarina and grasses."
Prehistory of Australia,"The changes to the fauna were even more dramatic: the megafauna, species significantly larger than humans, disappeared, and many of the smaller species disappeared too. All told, about 60 different vertebrates became extinct, including the genus Diprotodon (very large marsupial herbivores that looked rather like hippos), several large flightless birds, carnivorous kangaroos, Wonambi naracoortensis, a five-metre snake, a five-metre lizard and Meiolania.
The direct cause of the mass extinctions is uncertain: it may have been fire, hunting, climate change or a combination of all or any of these factors. The degree of human agency in these extinctions is still a matter of discussion. With no large herbivores to keep the understorey vegetation down and rapidly recycle soil nutrients with their dung, fuel build-up became more rapid and fires burned hotter, further changing the landscape. Against this theory is the evidence that in fact careful seasonal fires from Aboriginal land management practices reduced fuel loads, and prevented wildfires like those seen since European colonisation.
The Aboriginal population was confronted with significant changes to climate and environment. About 30,000 years ago, sea levels began to fall, temperatures in the south-east of the continent dropped by as much as 9 degrees Celsius, and the interior of Australia became more arid. About 20,000 years ago, New Guinea and Tasmania were connected to the Australian continent, which was more than a quarter larger than today.
About 19,000 years ago temperatures and sea levels began to rise. Tasmania became separated from the mainland some 14,000 years ago, and between 8,000 and 6,000 years ago thousands of islands in the Torres Strait and around the coast of Australia were formed. Josephine Flood writes that the flooding and loss of land as coastlines receded might have led to greater emphasis on territorial boundaries separating groups, stronger clan identity, and the development of the Rainbow Serpent and other mythologies.
The warmer climate was associated with new technologies. Small back-bladed stone tools appeared 15–19 thousand years ago. Wooden javelins and boomerangs have been found dating from 10,000 years ago. Stone points for spears have been found dating from 5–7 thousand years ago. Spear throwers were probably developed more recently than 6,500 years ago.
Sea levels stabilised at around their current level about 6,500 years ago. Warmer weather, wetter conditions and the new coastlines led to significant changes in Aboriginal social and economic organisation. New coastal societies emerged around tidal reefs, estuaries and flooded river valleys, and coastal islands were incorporated into local economies.  There was a proliferation of stone tool, plant processing and landscape modification technologies. Elaborate fish and eel traps involving channels up to three kilometres long were in use in western Victoria from about 6,500 years ago. Semi-permanent collections of wooden huts on mounds also appeared in western Victoria, associated with a more systematic exploitation of new food sources in the wetlands.
Aboriginal Tasmanians were isolated from the mainland from about 14,000 years ago. As a result, they only possessed one quarter of the tools and equipment of the adjacent mainland and were without hafted axes, grinding technology, stone tipped weapons, spear throwers and the boomerang. By 3,700 BP they had ceased to eat fish and use bone tools. Coastal Tasmanians switched from fish to abalone and crayfish and more Tasmanians moved to the interior. The Tasmanians built watercraft from reeds and bark and journeyed up to 10 kilometres offshore to visit islands and hunt for seals and muttonbirds."
Prehistory of Australia,"Culture and technology
Around 4,000 years ago the first phase of occupation of the Torres Strait Islands began. By 2,500 years ago more of the islands were occupied and a distinctive Torres Strait Island maritime culture emerged. Agriculture also developed on some islands and by 700 years ago villages appeared.
On the Australian mainland, some innovations were imported from neighbouring cultures. The dingo was introduced about 4,000 years ago. Shell fish hooks appeared in Australia about 1,200 years ago and were probably introduced from the Torres Strait or by Polynesian seafarers. From the mid-1660s fishing vessels from Indonesia regularly visited the north coast of Australia in search of trepang (sea cucumber). Trade and social relationships developed which were reflected in Aboriginal art, ceremonies and oral traditions. Aboriginal people adopted dugout canoes and metal harpoon heads from the Indonesians which allowed them to better hunt dugong and turtle off the coast and nearby islands.
Despite these interactions with neighbouring cultures, the basic structure of Aboriginal society was unchanged. Family groups were joined in bands and clans averaging about 25 people, each with a defined territory for foraging.  Clans were attached to tribes or nations, associated with particular languages and country. At the time of European contact there were about 600 tribes or nations and 250 distinct languages with various dialects.
Aboriginal society was egalitarian with no formal government or chiefs. Authority rested with elders who held extensive ritual knowledge gained over many years. Group decisions were generally made through the consensus of elders. The traditional economy was cooperative, with males generally hunting large game while females gathered local staples such as small animals, shellfish, vegetables, fruits, seeds and nuts. Food was shared within groups and exchanged across groups.
Aboriginal groups were semi-nomadic, generally ranging over a specific territory defined by natural features. Members of a group would enter the territory of another group through rights established by marriage and kinship or by invitation for specific purposes such as ceremonies and sharing abundant seasonal foods. As all natural features of the land were created by ancestral beings, a group's particular country provided physical and spiritual nourishment.
According to Australian Aboriginal mythology and the animist framework developed in Aboriginal Australia, the Dreaming is a sacred era in which ancestral totemic spirit beings formed The Creation. The Dreaming established the laws and structures of society and the ceremonies performed to ensure continuity of life and land.
The extent to which some Aboriginal societies were agricultural is controversial. In the Lake Condah region of western Victoria the inhabitants built elaborate eel and fish traps and hundreds gathered in semi-permanent stone and bark huts during the eel season. However, these groups still moved across their territory several times a year to exploit other seasonal food sources. In semi-arid areas, millet was harvested, stacked and threshed and the seeds stored for later use. In tropical areas the tops of yams were replanted. Flood argues that such practices are better classified as resource management than agriculture and that Aboriginal societies did not develop the systematic cultivation of crops or permanent villages such as existed in the Torres Strait Islands. Elizabeth Williams has called the inhabitants of the more settled regions of the Murray valley ""complex hunter gatherers"".
Behaviour was governed by strict rules regarding responsibilities to and from uncles, aunts, brothers and sisters as well as in-laws. The kinship systems observed by many communities included a division into moieties, with restrictions on intermarrying dictated by the moiety an individual belonged to.
Male initiation usually occurred at puberty and the rites often included penile subincision, depilation or tooth avulsion. Female initiation often involved purification through smoke or bathing, and sometimes scarification or the removal of finger joints.
Abortion and infanticide were widely practised as a means of birth control or dealing with deformities, injuries or illness which might impair the functioning of the group.
Some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups also practised ritual cannibalism in rare circumstances.
Describing prehistoric Aboriginal culture and society during her 1999 Boyer Lecture, Australian historian and anthropologist Inga Clendinnen explained:"
Prehistory of Australia,"""They [...] developed steepling thought-structures – intellectual edifices so comprehensive that every creature and plant had its place within it. They travelled light, but they were walking atlases, and walking encyclopedias of natural history. [...] Detailed observations of nature were elevated into drama by the development of multiple and multi-level narratives: narratives which made the intricate relationships between these observed phenomena memorable.
These dramatic narratives identified the recurrent and therefore the timeless and the significant within the fleeting and the idiosyncratic. They were also very human, charged with moral significance but with pathos, and with humour, too – after all, the Dreamtime creatures were not austere divinities, but fallible beings who happened to make the world and everything in it while going about their creaturely business. Traditional Aboriginal culture effortlessly fuses areas of understanding which Europeans 'naturally' keep separate: ecology, cosmology, theology, social morality, art, comedy, tragedy – the observed and the richly imagined fused into a seamless whole."""
Prehistory of Australia,"Contact outside Australia
Aboriginal people have no cultural memory of living anywhere outside Australia. Nevertheless, the people living along the northern coastline of Australia, in the Kimberley, Arnhem Land, Gulf of Carpentaria and Cape York had encounters with various visitors for many thousands of years. People and traded goods moved freely between Australia and New Guinea up to and even after the eventual flooding of the land bridge by rising sea levels, which was completed about 6,000 years ago.
However, trade and intercourse between the separated lands continued across the newly formed Torres Strait, whose 150 km-wide channel remained readily navigable with the chain of Torres Strait Islands and reefs affording intermediary stopping points. The islands were settled by different seafaring Melanesian cultures such as the Torres Strait Islanders over 2500 years ago, and cultural interactions continued via this route with the Aboriginal people of northeast Australia.
Indonesian ""Bajau"" fishermen from the Spice Islands (e.g. Banda) have fished off the coast of Australia for hundreds of years. Macassan traders from Sulawesi regularly visited the coast of northern Australia to fish for trepang, an edible sea cucumber to trade with the Chinese since at least the early 18th century.
There was a high degree of cultural exchange, evidenced in Aboriginal rock and bark paintings, the introduction of technologies such as dug-out canoes and items such as tobacco and tobacco pipes, Macassan words in Aboriginal languages (e.g. Balanda for white person), and descendants of Malay people in Australian Aboriginal communities and vice versa, as a result of intermarriage and migration.
The myths of the people of Arnhem Land have preserved accounts of the trepang-catching, rice-growing Baijini people, who, according to the myths, were in Australia in the earliest times, before the Macassans. The Baijini have been variously interpreted by modern researchers as a different group of presumably South East Asian people, such as Bajau visitors to Australia who may have visited Arnhem Land before the Macassans, as a mythological reflection of the experiences of some Yolŋu people who have travelled to Sulawesi with the Macassans and came back, or, in more fringe views, even as visitors from China."
Prehistory of Australia,"Possible link to east Africa
In 1944, a small number of copper coins with Arabic inscriptions were discovered on a beach in Jensen Bay on Marchinbar Island, part of the Wessel Islands of the Northern Territory. These coins were later identified as from the Kilwa Sultanate of east Africa. Only one such coin had ever previously been found outside east Africa (unearthed during an excavation in Oman). The inscriptions on the Jensen Bay coins identify a ruling Sultan of Kilwa, but it is unclear whether the ruler was from the 10th century or the 14th century. This discovery has been of interest to those historians who believe it likely that people made landfall in Australia or its offshore islands before the first generally accepted such discovery, by the Dutch sailor Willem Janszoon in 1606."
Prehistory of Australia,"See also
Australian Aboriginal sacred site
Australian archaeology
Dreamtime, Aboriginal mythology about Australian prehistory
European maritime exploration of Australia
Juukan Gorge caves, destroyed in May 2020
Lake Mungo remains
Ten Canoes, a 2006 film about Australian prehistory"
Prehistory of Australia,"References
Bibliography
This article incorporates text by Anders Bergström et al. available under the CC BY 4.0 license."
Prehistory of Australia,"External links
Timeline of pre-contact Australia Australian Museum"
Transgender rights in Australia,"Transgender rights in Australia have legal protection under federal and state/territory laws, but the requirements for gender recognition vary depending on the jurisdiction. For example, birth certificates, recognised details certificates, and driver licences are regulated by the states and territories, while Medicare and passports are matters for the Commonwealth.
Changing legal gender assignment for federal purposes such as Medicare and passports requires only a letter from a treating medical practitioner. By contrast, most states and territories impose additional requirements for gender recognition that have been criticised by the Australian Human Rights Commission and LGBT advocates. This includes requiring the person to undergo sexual reassignment surgery and, in most jurisdictions until 2018, to divorce if married. Advocates argue that marital status and surgery requirements are irrelevant to the recognition of a person's sex or gender identity, and instead should rely on their self-identification. The legalisation of same-sex marriage in 2017 had the effect of removing the requirement to divorce if one was already married. This took effect on 9 December 2018 unless the state or territory government has already removed this requirement beforehand.
Gender reassignment surgery is available in Australia with the costs of some, but not all, treatments for transgender people covered by the national Medicare public health scheme. Between 2004 and 2017 transgender children required approval from the Family Court of Australia before being prescribed hormone treatment, although a series of rulings in 2013 and 2017 removed the need for court approval of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormone therapy where there is no dispute between a child, their parents and their treating doctors."
Transgender rights in Australia,"History
19th century
Edward de Lacy Evans (1830-1901) was a servant, blacksmith, and coal miner who publicly identified as male for the majority of his life, was registered as the father of his son, and referred to as ""Dadds"" and ""Uncle"" by his family members. He was inducted into various mental health asylums, such as Kew Lunatic Asylum, in attempts to ""cure"" his male identity. Evans made international news in 1879 when it was discovered he was assigned female at birth. The following year, he made his identity publicly known, such as by performing in the Melbourne Waxworks under the tagline ‘The Wonderful Male Impersonator', or in Sydney as 'The Man-Woman Mystery'."
Transgender rights in Australia,"20th century
Following the widespread newspaper reports of the successful sex change operations of Christine Jorgensen in December 1952 and Roberta Cowell in March 1954, the first reported case of an Australian undertaking a sex change operation was an ex-RAAF Staff Sergeant Robert James Brooks in February 1956.
In 1975, the Gender Dysphoria Clinic at Queen Victoria Hospital, Melbourne was established by Trudy Kennedy and Herbert Bower. The clinic later moved in the Monash Medical Centre in 1989 and closed surgeries in 2009; however, it continues to provide mental health assessments and referrals as the Monash Health Gender Clinic.
In 1979 Australia's first transgender rights and advocacy organisations were established, the Melbourne-based Victorian Transsexual Coalition and the Victorian Transsexual Association; these were followed in 1981 by the Sydney-based Australian Transsexual Association, which included prominent activist, academic and author Roberta Perkins.
In 1987, Estelle Asmodelle became possibly Australia's first legally recognized post operative transgender person with the Births, Deaths and Marriages Department of New South Wales, and her transition helped gain recognition for transgender people in Australia. This was the first time in Australian legal history that a transgender Australian was permitted to change their birth certificate to a different sex. Soon afterwards the passport laws also changed to allow the sex on passports to be changed."
Transgender rights in Australia,"Identification documents
Issues
Forced divorce
Traditionally, all states and territories required a person to be single before changing the sex recorded on their birth certificate, which meant divorcing their spouse if the person was married. This was to prevent a same-sex marriage arising after the person's transition to the same sex as their spouse, given the federal ban on same-sex marriage in Australia before 2017.
To prevent married transgender people challenging the ""forced divorce"" requirement on the basis that it discriminated against their marital status in breach of the Sex Discrimination Act, in 2011 the Gillard government introduced an exemption in section 40(5) of that Act allowing a State or Territory ""to refuse to make, issue or alter an official record of a person’s sex if a law of a State or Territory requires the refusal because the person is married"".
Despite the exemption, both Australian Capital Territory and South Australia changed birth certificate sex markers for married transgender people before the introduction of same-sex marriage, with the latter repealing its ""forced divorce"" law in 2016. Legislation abolishing forced transgender divorce in Tasmania was first introduced in 2014 but did not pass until 2019. In 2017 the United Nations Human Rights Committee upheld a New South Wales woman's objection to her state's forced divorce law, finding it violated articles 17 and 26 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. New South Wales ended its forced divorce requirement in 2018.
The section 40(5) exemption was repealed by the law legalising same-sex marriage in Australia, the Marriage Amendment (Definition and Religious Freedoms) Act 2017, making it unlawful discrimination for Australian states and territories to require a transgender person to divorce before changing the sex on their birth certificate. However, the repeal did not take effect until 9 December 2018, giving states and territories 12 months to repeal any divorce requirement in their gender recognition laws."
Transgender rights in Australia,"Medical requirements
In 2014 the Australian Capital Territory abolished the sex reassignment surgery requirement for a change of sex on birth certificates, after a 2013 Law Reform Advisory Council report called it ""inhumane"".
In 2014 trans man Paige Phoenix challenged the Victorian requirement for surgery on the basis that it would be potentially life-threatening, making a complaint to the Human Rights Commission and United Nations.
South Australia abolished the surgery requirement in December 2016, while a similar proposal in Victoria failed in the Legislative Council by one vote.
Western Australia formerly required sterilisation prior to approving a change in sex classification. This requirement was overturned when the High Court ruled, in the 2012 case of AB v Western Australia, that two transgender men who had undergone mastectomies and hormone treatment did not need to undergo sterilisation to obtain a WA gender recognition certificate."
Transgender rights in Australia,"Non-binary gender recognition
Norrie May-Welby is a Scottish-Australian who became the first transgender person in Australia to publicly pursue a legal status of neither a man nor a woman. That status was subject to appeals by the State of New South Wales.
In April 2014, the High Court of Australia unanimously ruled in the Norrie Case that, having undergone sex affirmation surgery, androgynous person Norrie was to be registered as neither a man nor a woman with the NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages. The decision follows previous regulations and legislation that recognises a third gender classification, and establishes that Australia's legal system recognises and permits the gender registration of 'non-specific', as the judges found in the Norrie case.
The Australian Capital Territory's 2014 birth certificate law amendments also allowed people to register as male, female or ""X"" regardless of whether they had undertaken any surgery. Victoria's failed 2014 proposal had a similar approach.
In April 2019, Tasmania amended the Birth, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act to allow the registration of genders on the basis of self-identification, with gender defined by the applicant through a statutory declaration. This allows a diversity of genders. Any gender-related description should be allowable, through the Registrar may refuse vexatious or obscene applications. The law within Tasmania goes into effect on 5 September 2019, after royal assent was granted on 8 May 2019 by the Governor of Tasmania."
Transgender rights in Australia,"Australian residents born overseas
Australian residents born overseas are eligible to record a change of gender with their state/territory's RBDM in the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales, South Australia, Victoria, and Western Australia. After a change is recorded, they are issued a recognised details certificate (identity acknowledgment certificate in South Australia)."
Transgender rights in Australia,"Protections by state
Birth certificates and recognised details certificates are issued by states and territories. In many states, sterilisation is (or has been) required for transgender people to obtain recognition of their preferred gender in cardinal identification documents."
Transgender rights in Australia,"Australian Capital Territory
In 2014, the Australian Capital Territory passed legislation that removed the surgery requirement for changing the sex marker on birth certificates. In 2016 the ACT introduced a recognised details certificate for transgender people who were born outside the Territory to use as their proof of gender instead of a birth certificate. The ACT, since 2020, has also allowed youths to change their given names and sex to better reflect their gender identity. This can be done without parental permission if they are 16 or 17, or if they are given permission by ACT Civil & Administrative Tribunal."
Transgender rights in Australia,"New South Wales
The New South Wales Registry of Births Deaths & Marriages requires that transgender people must have ""undergone a sex affirmation procedure"".
In October 2020, the NSW Parliament lower house passed a ""non-binding bipartisan motion"" unanimously - calling for the human rights, dignity and respect for transgender individuals within NSW.
In January 2021, it was reported by the news media that transgender individuals who had not undergone sex reassignment surgery were banned from entering a ladies-only pool within Coogee."
Transgender rights in Australia,"South Australia
In December 2016, South Australia became the first state to remove the surgery requirement for a change of sex on birth certificates and identity acknowledgment certificates."
Transgender rights in Australia,"Tasmania
On 10 April 2019 the Tasmanian Parliament passed amendments to the Birth, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act. These amendment make Tasmania the first state to allow change of gender on Birth Certificates by a simple statutory declaration. There are a number of other landmark provisions. People 16 or over can apply independently. Parents can apply for change of the gender of children of any age. Gender can be self-described, and is not limited to certain categories. Parents can ask that birth certificates do not include a gender marker (at all: not a marker of ""undetermined"", ""unstated"", etc.). Persons can ask that their own certificates do not include gender markers. This is in line with the Yogyakarta +10 recommendation 31, Royal assent was granted on 8 May 2019 by the Governor of Tasmania and went into effect after 120 days (i.e. from 5 September 2019)."
Transgender rights in Australia,"Passports
The Australian Government Guidelines on the Recognition of Sex and Gender, which took effect from 1 July 2013, enable any adult to choose to identify as male, female or X. Documentary evidence must be provided from a doctor or psychologist, but no medical intervention is required.
Alex MacFarlane was reported as receiving a passport with an 'X' sex descriptor in early 2003. MacFarlane achieved this after using an indeterminate birth certificate that was issued by the State of Victoria. Australian government policy between 2003 and 2011 was to issue passports with an 'X' marker only to people who could ""present a birth certificate that notes their sex as indeterminate""
In 2011, the Australian Passport Office introduced new guidelines for issuing of passports with a new gender, and broadened the availability of the X descriptor to all individuals with documented ""indeterminate"" sex. The revised policy stated that ""sex reassignment surgery is not a prerequisite to issue a passport in a new gender. Birth or citizenship certificates do not need to be amended."""
Transgender rights in Australia,"Gender dysphoria treatment
Access by children
Medical treatment is available to a child who has been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. A diagnosis requires that the child feels and verbalises a strong desire to have a different gender for at least six months.
Medical treatment for minors with gender dysphoria experiencing puberty is generally divided into two stages:"
Transgender rights in Australia,"Stage 1 treatment involves the use of puberty blockers, which are reversible and can be accessed by children who have reached stages 2 or 3 of pubertal development on the Tanner Scale – this may occur as early as 10 years old;
Stage 2 treatment involves administering transgender hormone therapy such as testosterone or oestrogen. This has irreversible effects (such as a deepened voice following masculinizing hormone therapy or breast growth after feminizing hormone therapy). It is usually available once a person has reached 16 years of age.
Transgender Australians are generally not eligible for sexual reassignment surgery until they turn 18 years old.
A number of requirements must be satisfied in order for a transgender child to receive treatment. Stage 1 treatment in Australia is provided in accordance with the Endocrine Society's Clinical Practice Guideline ""Endocrine Treatment of Transsexual Persons"" and involves:"
Transgender rights in Australia,"a standardised assessment of psychological development by two independent child and adolescent psychiatrists
a formal assessment of the child's gender identification and capacity to understand the proposed treatment
an assessment by a paediatric endocrinologist to establish the child's pubertal stage and exclude disorders of sex development
discussions between the paediatric endocrinologist, the child and their parents about the effects and risks of blocking puberty
(if there is any disagreement between the child, a parent or the medical practitioner about the treatment) legal authorisation from the Family Court of Australia
Access to Stage 2 treatment requires the following:"
Transgender rights in Australia,"consensus among a team of medical practitioners (a paediatrician, a fertility expert and two mental health professionals of whom at least one must be a psychiatrist) that the treatment is in the best interests of the child
(if there is any disagreement between the child, a parent or the medical practitioner about the treatment) legal authorisation from the Family Court of Australia"
Transgender rights in Australia,"Court involvement
In the 2004 case Re Alex : Hormonal Treatment for Gender Identity Dysphoria the Family Court of Australia held that both Stage 1 and Stage 2 treatments for gender dysphoria were non-therapeutic ""special medical procedures"" for the purposes of the Family Law Act 1975, which meant that even if a child's parents consented, the Family Court's approval was necessary to ensure the child's welfare was protected. This was based on the principles of Marion's Case, in which the High Court of Australia ruled that parental consent was insufficient for ""special medical procedures"", and instead court approval was necessary to ensure they were in the best interests of the child. After that case, the Family Court heard an increasing number of applications for child gender dysphoria treatment.
In its judgments, the Family Court assessed the child's Gillick competence; in other words, whether the child was in a position to consent to the treatment by fully understanding its nature, effects and risks. If the Court found the child to be Gillick-competent, the child's wishes had to be respected. If not, the Court would then decide whether the proposed treatment was in the child's best interests.
The need for court involvement was relaxed in several 2013 judgments, which were approved by the Full Court of the Family Court in Re Jamie. In these cases, the judges accepted that the medical treatments were therapeutic in nature and that parents could consent to Stage 1 treatment for their child without court oversight. Following these cases, court approval for Stage 1 treatment is only necessary if there was a disagreement between the child, their parents or their treating doctors about the treatment.
Australia was the only country in the world to require court involvement in the process. Several families with transgender children called for the Family Court's role to be abolished in all non-disputed cases, given that the legal process merely ""rubber stamped"" the expert opinions of medical practitioners and imposed significant financial and emotional costs on applicants. The legal process cost about $30,000 in 2016. Opponents of court involvement also indicated that some transgender teenagers were risking their lives sourcing cross-sex hormones on the black market due to the cost and delays caused by the legal process.
In 2016, Family Court Chief Justice Diana Bryant acknowledged the difficulties of the existing process and promised it would be simplified. Bryant had earlier suggested in 2014 that the High Court of Australia should reconsider the case law requiring court supervision for the medical treatment of transgender children. In late 2016 a spokesperson for Attorney-General George Brandis said the government was ""actively considering options"" for reform.
On 30 November 2017, the Full Court of the Family Court issued a ruling which removed the requirement for court approval of Stage 2 where the child, the family and medical staff all agreed. The case, known as Re Kelvin, was brought by a father of a 16-year old transgender child, who asked the court to consider whether previous case law requiring the court process for unopposed applications should be overturned. The case had several interveners, most of whom agreed that the court should be only be involved in the process if there was a disagreement."
Transgender rights in Australia,"Access by adults
Gender reassignment surgery is available in Australia, but only at a few private hospitals at a relatively high cost. The costs of some, but not all treatments for trans people are covered by the national Medicare public health scheme. Trans advocates have campaigned for full Medicare funding for various treatments that may be unaffordable for transgender people, such as top surgery, facial surgery and hormone therapy, among others. Some Australian medical staff lack expertise in trans issues, particularly in rural areas, and many transgender Australians travel overseas for surgery to countries such as Thailand. Australia's compulsory superannuation scheme for retirement savings can be accessed early to cover the cost of surgery locally and overseas. Members of the transgender community have also called for greater access to mental health services given the increased demand. Private psychologists and psychiatrists can be expensive, with delays of 12 to 18 months recorded in Victoria for access via the public system. A few doctors require psychological or psychiatric evaluation before prescribing hormone therapy, but the informed consent approach has made the process easier in recent years."
Transgender rights in Australia,"Discrimination protections
Federal law protections
Prior to 1 August 2013 Australia did not comprehensively outlaw discrimination based on gender identity at the federal level. In late 2010, the Gillard Labor government announced a review of federal anti-discrimination laws, with the aim of introducing a single equality law that would also cover sexual orientation and gender identity. This approach was abandoned and instead on 25 June 2013, the Federal Parliament added marital or relationship status, sexual orientation, gender identity and intersex status as protected attributes to the existing Sex Discrimination Act by passing the Sex Discrimination Amendment (Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Intersex Status) Act 2013.
From 1 August 2013, discrimination against transgender and gender diverse people, and all LGBTI people, became illegal for the first time under national law. Aged care providers who are owned by religious groups will no longer be able to exclude people from aged care services based on their LGBTI or same-sex relationship status. However, religious owned private schools and religious owned hospitals are exempt from gender identity and sexual orientation provisions in the Sex Discrimination Amendment (Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Intersex Status) Bill 2013."
Transgender rights in Australia,"State and territory law protections
Aside from Commonwealth (i.e. federal) anti-discrimination laws, each of the states and territories have their own laws which protect LGBTI people from discrimination."
Transgender rights in Australia,"School anti-bullying programs
The Safe Schools Coalition Australia has sought to combat anti-LGBTI abuse or bullying, which research suggested was prevalent across Australian schools. Initially established in Victorian schools in 2010, the program was launched nationwide in 2014 under the Abbott government. The program received support from a majority of state governments, LGBTI support groups and other religious and non-governmental organisations such as beyondblue, headspace and the Australian Secondary Principals Association.
However, the program faced criticism in 2015 and 2016 from social conservatives including the Australian Christian Lobby, LNP politicians such as Cory Bernardi, George Christensen, Eric Abetz, Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott, Kevin Andrews, and former Labor Senator Joe Bullock for indoctrinating children with ""Marxist cultural relativism"" and age-inappropriate sexuality and gender concepts in schools, while others criticised the Marxist political views of Roz Ward, a key figure in the program. Petitions were also delivered against the program by members of Australia's Chinese and Indian communities.
The concerns led to a review under the Turnbull government, which implemented a number of changes such as restricting the program to high schools, removing role playing activities and requiring parental consent before students take part. The federal changes were rejected by the governments of Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory, who persisted with the original program and announced they would fund it independently of the federal government. Funding for the federal program has since been allowed to lapse."
Transgender rights in Australia,"Marriage
In the 2001 case of Re Kevin – validity of marriage of transsexual, the Family Court of Australia held that a post-operative transgender person could be recognised as their new gender for the purposes of marriage."
Transgender rights in Australia,"Opposition
Sports
In Queensland April 2022, Katter's Australian Party Robbie Katter said he will move a bill to ban transgender athletes from women's sport in the state. In May 2022, he proposed a motion which was voted down 49 votes to 33. The opposition Liberal National Party of Queensland voted with him.
In 2021, a poll conducted by Binary Australia, an organisation that opposes trans women competing in women's sports, found that 67.3% of Australians opposed allowing trans women to compete against cis women. The poll found that only a majority of Greens voters (52.1%) were in favour, while the majority of people who vote for Labor (62.9%), the Liberals (78.3%), the Nationals (79.4%) and One Nation (81.1%) were against."
Transgender rights in Australia,"Surgery
In 2023, Liberal senator for South Australia Alex Antic proposed a bill to ban gender reassignment surgery and treatment for teenagers."
Transgender rights in Australia,"See also
Re Alex
Re Kevin – validity of marriage of transsexual
LGBT rights in Australia
Intersex rights in Australia
Transgender rights
Name change"
Transgender rights in Australia,"References
Bibliography
Australian Human Rights Commission (March 2009). Sex Files: the legal recognition of sex in documents and government records. Concluding paper of the sex and gender diversity project. Archived from the original on 17 September 2016. Retrieved 8 September 2016.
Australian Human Rights Commission (2015). Resilient Individuals: Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity & Intersex Rights National Consultation Report (PDF). Retrieved 24 September 2016.
Asia Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions (June 2016). Promoting and Protecting Human Rights in relation to Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Sex Characteristics. ISBN 978-0-9942513-7-4."
Creative Australia,"Creative Australia, formerly known as the Australia Council for the Arts and the Australia Council, is the country's official arts council, serving as an arts funding and advisory body for the Government of Australia. 
The council was announced in 1967 as the Australian Council for the Arts, with the first members appointed the following year. It was made a statutory corporation by the passage of the Australia Council Act 1975. It became the Australia Council in 2013, and then Creative Australia, with a new organisational structure, from 24 August 2023. 
The organisation has included several boards within its structure over the years, including more than one incarnation of a Visual Arts Board (VAB), in the 1970s–80s and in the early 2000s."
Creative Australia,"History
Prime Minister Harold Holt announced the establishment of a national arts council in November 1967, modelled on similar bodies in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. It was one of his last major policy announcements prior to his death the following month. In June 1968, Holt's successor John Gorton announced the first ten members of the council, which was initially known as the Australian Council for the Arts. Economist H. C. Coombs became the first chairman of the body, while the other members included radio quizmaster Barry Jones, school principal Betty Archdale, magazine editor and state Liberal MP Peter Coleman, socialite Virginia Erwin (wife of federal Liberal MP Dudley Erwin), architect Karl Langer, author Geoffrey Dutton, theatre producer Jeana Bradley, arts patron Mary Houghton, and retired academic Kay Masterman.
The council issued its first grants in December 1968, which were distributed via the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust as the council did not yet have its own financial apparatus. Gorton stated that the council ""had adopted a principle widely accepted [...] that high standards can best be achieved by a concentration of available funds, rather than by a thin spread over a wide area"". The council subsequently received criticism from smaller professional and semi-professional companies, leading to the establishment of an Arts Special Projects Fund to assist smaller organisations. In December 1969, Coombs announced a new formula for grants whereby organisations could only receive a maximum of two-thirds of their budget from the council.
In February 1973, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam announced a new structure for the council whereby funding recommendations would be made by seven autonomous boards for different areas of the arts. Later that year, the council produced a report recommending that it be established as a statutory corporation."
Creative Australia,"Aboriginal Arts Board (1973)
The Aboriginal Arts Board (AAB) was created in 1973. Comprising Aboriginal Australian artists, writers and performers, its purpose was ""to stimulate Indigenous Australian arts and lead to the preservation of many art forms almost lost since the settlement of Australia by Europeans"". Dick Roughsey was the inaugural head of the board, followed by Yolngu artist and activist Wandjuk Marika. One of its earliest activities was the hosting of a seminar called Aboriginal Arts in Australia at the Australian National University, with around 800 attendees, with the intention of working out how government could best support Aboriginal culture and art in the future.
When created, AAB had similar aims as the Aboriginal Publications Foundation (APF), leading to some duplication of work by the two bodies. From mid-1975, promotional work carried out by the APF was put under the control of the AAB, while the APF became a referral body for the AAB. The APF was wound down, with its main responsibility the publication of the quarterly journal Identity until its closure in 1982.
The Australia Council became the biggest consumer of Aboriginal art, as there was not much interest in it during those years. Works were bought directly from artists, and often sent to galleries in the US and Canada.
The Board was later renamed the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board or ATSIA Board, and is as of July 2021 the ATSIA Panel."
Creative Australia,"Change of name (1975)
After being given statutory authority in March 1975 by the Australia Council Act under the Whitlam government, it was renamed to Australia Council. The Council then incorporated other government projects, such as the Commonwealth Literary Fund and the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board.
The Visual Arts Board (VAB) existed during the 1970s and mid-1980s."
Creative Australia,"21st century
The Visual Arts/Craft Board was renamed the Visual Arts Board around 2007–8.
The Council's operations were independently reviewed in 2012, and the Australia Council Act 2013 (the Act) commenced on 1 July 2013.
In early 2014 federal Arts Minister George Brandis and Minister for Communications Malcolm Turnbull told artists at the Sydney Biennale that they were ungrateful and selfish to protest about the role of Transfield in the Nauru immigration detention centre. In December 2014, Brandis withdrew a large portion of literature funding from Australia Council.
In May 2015, Brandis cut $26 million a year for four years from Australia Council arts funding, a third of its arts funding, receiving significant criticism from the arts community. The money was reallocated to a new program, the National Program for Excellence in the Arts (NPEA). NPEA in turn was criticised by many artists and arts organisations for lacking the ""arms-length"" funding principles that had applied to the relationship between the government and Australia Council since its inception in the 1970s. These principles have traditionally had bipartisan support. Brandis was criticised previously for giving Melbourne classical music record label Melba Recordings a $275,000 grant outside of the usual funding and peer-assessment processes. Brandis's changes to funding arrangements, including the quarantining of the amount received by Australia's 28 major performing arts companies, were widely seen to disadvantage the small-to-medium arts sector and independent artists.
Following Malcolm Turnbull's successful spill of the leadership of the Liberal party in September 2015, Brandis was replaced as arts minister by Mitch Fifield. In November Fifield gave back $8 million a year for four years to Australia Council, changed the NPEA to the Catalyst Fund, and stressed it would have a focus on smaller arts projects. The arts community was not impressed by the changes.
As a result of the reduced funding, Australia Council cancelled project funding rounds for small groups and individuals in 2015 and then cut funding to over 60 arts organisations across the country in May 2016. Small arts organisations such as the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia (CACSA), Leigh Warren & Dancers and many others were affected, forcing them to contract, merge or make drastic changes to their programs."
Creative Australia,"Rebranding (2023)
The Australia Council Act 2013 was amended by the Australia Council Amendment (Creative Australia) Act 2023, by which instrument the new name and organisational structure was created on 24 August 2023, described as ""an expanded and modernised Australia Council"". The number of board members was doubled from 12 to 24, but it continues to be known as the Australia Council Board. Councils for Music Australia and Creative Workplaces (for the Centre for Art and Entertainment Workplaces, as mentioned in the National Cultural Policy – Revive: a place for every story, a story for every place, created 30 January 2023) were created.
The Music Australia Council was appointed by Arts Minister Tony Burke in August 2023, consisting of eight members:"
Creative Australia,"Gordi, the folktronica singer-songwriter
Mama Kin, aka Danielle Caruana, a solo artist, co-founder of The Seed Fund
Fred Leone, the Butchulla songman
Michael Chugg, music promoter
Petrina Convey, owner of UNITY Mgmt. Group
Nathan McLay, founder and CEO of independent label and management company Future Classic
Fred Alale , co-founder and chair of African Music and Cultural Festival Inc.
Lisa Baker, arts and culture manager at City of Playford
Adrian Collette, CEO of Creative Australia
Still to follow (not included in the 2023 legislation) are the First Nations-led Board and Writers Australia, as outlined in the National Cultural Policy and the ""Corporate Plan 2023–27""."
Creative Australia,"Function and governance
Creative Australia is the Australian Government's principal arts funding and advisory body. Its purpose is to promote and invest in Australian arts. It is ""accountable to the Australian Parliament, and to the Government through the Minister for the Arts""."
Creative Australia,"People
Adrian Collette  became CEO of the Australia Council in January 2019 and remains in the position as CEO of Creative Australia as of October 2023. He was formerly chief executive of Opera Australia. 
Sam Walsh  was appointed chair of the Australia Council in 2016. In July 2021, Robert Morgan was appointed chair. Morgan has a degree in economics, and had been head of Australia's largest advertising and marketing business, Clemenger Group, but is also passionate about the arts, and was a member of the board of Opera Australia for over 10 years. 
Since 24 August 2023 and as of October 2023, Robert Morgan is the chair and Wesley Enoch  deputy chair of Creative Australia."
Creative Australia,"Programs
ACCELERATE
ACCELERATE was a leadership program for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the creative arts, run jointly by the British Council and Australia Council, in partnership with state arts agencies,  between 2009 and 2016. During that time, 35 people participated in the program, with many alumni going on to excel in their fields."
Creative Australia,"Visual Arts and Crafts Strategy
The Visual Arts and Crafts Strategy (VACS), a partnership between the federal and all state and territory governments in Australia, was established in 2003, with the aim of ""providing stability to Australia's visual arts and craft sector"". VACS delivers funding across all jurisdictions, with half provided by the Commonwealth and half by the states and territories. Its current policy framework runs from 2021 to 2024, continuing under the rebranded Creative Australia."
Creative Australia,"Awards
Australia Council Awards
The Australia Council Awards  were established in or before 1981, with the numbers of awards awarded each year growing over time. As of 2021 there were eight categories for achievement in various types of arts, called:"
Creative Australia,"Australia Council Don Banks Music Award
Australia Council Lifetime Achievement in Literature
Australia Council Award for Dance
Australia Council Award for Visual Arts
Australia Council Award for Emerging and Experimental Arts
Australia Council Kirk Robson Award for Community Arts and Cultural Development
Australia Council Ros Bower Award for Community Arts and Cultural Development
Australia Council Award for Theatre"
Creative Australia,"Fellowships
Australia Council Fellowships, worth A$80,000, ""support creative activity and career development for mid-career and established artists"". Past fellowship holders include: Hetti Perkins (2018), Lisa Maza (2017), Vicki Couzens (2016), Brenda L Croft (2015) and Reko Rennie (2015). They are awarded in the areas of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts; community arts and cultural development; dance; emerging and experimental arts; literature; music; theatre; and visual arts."
Creative Australia,"First Nations Arts Awards
The annual National Indigenous Arts Awards (NIAA) were established by the Australia Council in 2007. Renamed as the First Nations Arts Awards in 2020,  as of 2022 they include four categories, all restricted to Australian First Nations artists:"
Creative Australia,"The Dreaming Award, established in 2012, ""to support an inspirational young artist aged 18-26 years to create a major body of work through mentoring and partnerships"", with Nakkiah Lui winning the inaugural award
The Red Ochre Award, established in 1993, a lifetime award for outstanding lifetime achievement in the arts, is awarded annually to both a male and female recipient
The First Nations Arts Fellowship, to support the creation of a major work
The First Nations Emerging Career Development Award, which supports two artists or arts workers to pursue their professional development
The awards ceremony is held event is held on 27 May each year, on the anniversary of the 1967 referendum. At the event, Indigenous Australians who have been awarded Fellowships (in 2018–2019, Vernon Ah Kee for visual art, and Ali Cobby Eckermann, for literature), and First Nations artists who received Australia Council Awards earlier in the year are also celebrated."
Creative Australia,"Controversy
In May 2020 the Australia Council awarded a A$25,000 grant to performance artist Casey Jenkins for a piece titled Immaculate, incorporating a live stream of Jenkins  self-inseminating. Following adverse media coverage, the council suspended the funding hours before the first performance on 19 August, and formally rescinded the grant on 21 September 2020. The council stated that the withdrawal of the grant was not due to negative media coverage, but followed legal advice about the organisation's liabilities if pregnancy resulted. Jenkins said that the council had ""grossly and insultingly mischaracterised my artwork"". Writer and social commentator Ben Eltham wrote that the council's actions might have a chilling effect on performance art in Australia."
Creative Australia,"References
External links
Official website
Creative Australia at AusStage"
Scottish Australians,"Scottish Australians (Scots: Scots Australiens; Scottish Gaelic: Astràilianaich Albannach) are ‌‍‍‍‍residents of Australia who are fully or partially of Scottish descent.
According to the 2021 Australian census, 130,060 Australian residents were born in Scotland, while 2,176,777 claimed Scottish ancestry, either alone or in combination with another ancestry."
Scottish Australians,"History
The links between Scotland and Australia stretch back to the first British expedition of the Endeavour under command of Lieutenant James Cook who was himself the son of a Scottish ploughman. Cook navigated and charted the east coast of Australia, making first landfall at Botany Bay on 29 April 1770. His reports in Cook's expedition would lead to British settlement of the continent, and during the voyage Cook also named two groups of Pacific islands in honour of Scotland: New Caledonia and the New Hebrides. The first European to die on Australian soil was a Scot; Forbey Sutherland from Orkney, an able seaman died on 30 April 1770 of consumption and was the first to be buried on the colony by Captain Cook, who named Sutherland Point at Botany Bay in his honour."
Scottish Australians,"Colonial period
The first Scottish settlers arrived in Australia with the First Fleet in 1788, including three of the first six Governors of New South Wales John Hunter, Lachlan Macquarie (often referred to as the father of Australia) and Thomas Brisbane. The majority of Scots arriving in the early colonial period were convicts: 8,207 Scottish convicts, of the total 150,000 transported to Australia, made up about 5% of the convict population. The Scottish courts were unwilling to punish crimes deemed to be lesser offences in Scots Law by deportation to Australia. Scottish law was considered more humane for lesser offences than the English and Irish legal systems. Although Scottish convicts had a poor reputation, most were convicted of minor property offences and represented a broad cross-section of Scotland's working classes. As such, they brought a range of useful skills to the colonies.
From 1793 to 1795, a group of political prisoners later called the 'Scottish Martyrs', were transported to the colonies. They were not all Scots, but had been tried in Scotland. Their plight as victims of oppression was widely reported and the subsequent escape of one of them, Thomas Muir, in 1796 caused a sensation and inspired the poetry of Robert Burns. The majority of immigrants, 'free settlers', in the late 18th century were Lowlanders from prominent wealthy families. Engineers like Andrew McDougall and John Bowman arrived with experience in building corn mills, while others were drawn to Australia by the prospects of trade. William Douglas Campbell, Robert Campbell, Charles Hook, Alexander Berry Laird of the Shoalhaven, were some of the first merchants drawn to the colonies.
At this time, several Scottish regiments were recorded in the colonies: Macquarie's unit or the 73rd Regiment, the Royal North British Fusiliers, and the King's Own Scottish Borderers. Three of the Deputy Commissaries-General (the highest rank in the colony) from 1813 to 1835 were Scots: David Allan, William Lithgow, Stewart.
By 1830, 15.11% of the colonies' total population were Scots, which increased by the middle of the century to 25,000, or 20-25% of the total population. The Australian Gold Rush of the 1850s provided a further impetus for Scottish migration: in the 1850s 90,000 Scots immigrated, far higher than other British or Irish populations at the time. Literacy rates of the Scottish immigrants ran at 90-95%. By the 1830s a growing number of Scots from the poorer working classes joined the diaspora. Immigrants included skilled builders, tradesmen, engineers, tool-makers and printers. They settled in commercial and industrial cities, Sydney, Adelaide, Hobart and Melbourne. The migration of skilled workers increased, including bricklayers, carpenters, joiners, and stonemasons. They settled in the colonies of Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia and Tasmania.
In the 1840s, Scots-born immigrants constituted 12 percent of the Australian population. Out of the 1.3 million migrants from Britain to Australia in the period from 1861 to 1914, 13.5 percent were Scots. Much settlement followed the Highland Potato Famine, Highland Clearances and the Lowland Clearances of the mid-19th century. By 1860 Scots made up 50% of the ethnic composition of Western Victoria, Adelaide, Penola and Naracoorte. Other settlements in New south Wales included New England, the Hunter Valley and the Illawarra."
Scottish Australians,"Their preponderance in pastoral industries on the Australian frontier and in various colonial administrative roles, meant that some Scottish migrants were involved in the injustices against Indigenous Australians throughout the colonial period, including: the dispossession of the indigenous from their lands, the creation of discriminatory administration regimes, and in killings and massacres.
Throughout the 19th century, Scots invested heavily in the industries of the Australian colonies. In the 1820s, the Australian Company of Edinburgh & Leith exported a variety of goods to Australia, but a lack of return cargo led to the company's termination in 1831. The Scottish Australian Investment Company was formed in Aberdeen in 1840, and soon became one of the chief businesses in the colonies, making substantial investments in the pastoral and mining industries. Smaller companies, such as George Russel's Clyde Company and Niel & Company, also had a significant presence in the colonies. Before the 1893 Australian financial crisis, Scotland was the main source of private British loans to Australia."
Scottish Australians,"20th century
A steady rate of Scottish immigration continued into the 20th century, with substantial numbers of Scots continuing to arrive after 1945. Between 1910 and 1914, around 9000 Scots arrived each year, and in 1921 the Scottish population of Australia was 109,000. Due to economic decline in Scotland after the First World War, there was an over-representation of Scots among British migrants to Australia during the interwar period, and by 1933 there were 132,000 Scottish migrants living in Australia.
By the 1920s and 1930s, a majority of Scottish migrants in Australia were living in Victoria and New South Wales. The urban working-class background of many British migrants to Australia in the early 20th century meant that Scots were most likely to settle in industrial portside suburbs, especially in Melbourne and Sydney, where they made notable contributions to the shipbuilding industry. In the late-19th and early-20th century, Scottish-born workers had a significant influence in the labour movement, and played key roles in trade unions and the Australian Labor Party, as well as becoming leaders in the Communist Party of Australia. In 1928, a significant delegation of Scottish Australians to Scotland was influential in the opening of a direct trade route between Australia and Glasgow, and by 1932 traders on the Clyde had reported a three-fold increase in imports from Australia and New Zealand.
Today, a strong cultural Scottish presence is evident in the Highland games, dance, Tartan day celebrations, Clan and Gaelic-speaking societies found throughout modern Australia. In the early 2000s, the number of Australians claiming to have Scottish ancestry increased almost three-fold; the majority of those who claim Scottish ancestry are third or later generation Australians."
Scottish Australians,"Demographics
2011 Census
According to the 2011 Australian census 133,432 Australian residents were born in Scotland, which was 0.6% of the Australian population. This is the fourth most commonly nominated ancestry and represents over 8.3% of the total population of Australia."
Scottish Australians,"2006 Census
At the 2006 Census 130,205 Australian residents stated that they were born in Scotland.  Of these 80,604 had Australian citizenship. The majority of residents, 83,503, had arrived in Australia in 1979 or earlier."
Scottish Australians,"Culture
Some aspects of Scottish culture can be found in Australia:"
Scottish Australians,"Bagpiping and pipe bands.
Burns Supper
Ceilidhs
Hogmanay, the Scottish New Year
Presbyterianism - the majority of Scottish settlers were Presbyterian, some were Roman Catholic or Episcopalian.
Tartan, some regions of Australia have their own tartan.
Tartan Day, in Australia, falls on 1 July, the date of the repeal proclamation in 1792 of the Act of Proscription that banned the wearing of Scottish national dress."
Scottish Australians,"Highland gatherings
Highland gatherings are popular in Australia.  Notable gatherings include:"
Scottish Australians,"Bundanoon, New South Wales established in 1976, claimed to be one of the largest Highland Gatherings in the Southern Hemisphere, and the biggest in Australia.
Maclean, New South Wales first held in 1904. A gathering that attracts pipe bands from all over Australia and includes massed bands, dancing and a street parade.
Maryborough, Victoria held since 1857 on New Year's Day"
Scottish Australians,"Scottish schools
The Scots in Australia started a number of schools, some of which are state run, and some of which are private:"
Scottish Australians,"The Scots College, in Bellevue Hill, Sydney, New South Wales.
Presbyterian Ladies' College PLC In Croydon, New South Wales.
The Scots PGC College, in Warwick, Queensland, formed by the merger of The Scots College, Warwick and The Presbyterian Girls' College.
The Scots School Albury, in Albury, New South Wales.
The Scots School, Bathurst, in Bathurst, New South Wales.
Presbyterian Ladies' College, Armidale PLCA in Armidale, New South Wales.
Scotch College, Adelaide, in Torrens Park and Mitcham, South Australia.
Scotch College, Melbourne, in Hawthorn, Victoria.
Scotch College, Perth, in Swanbourne, Western Australia.
Presbyterian Ladies' College, Perth, in Peppermint Grove, Western Australia
Scotch College, Launceston, in Tasmania; amalgamated with Oakburn College in 1979 to form Scotch Oakburn College.
Seymour College, Adelaide, South Australia.
Bagpipe Uni, Melbourne (George), in Victoria Australia"
Scottish Australians,"Scottish placenames
In Australia, Scottish names make up 17 per cent of all non-Indigenous placenames. Many are of Lowland origins, but Highland names are also common in areas of concentrated Highland settlement. There are also many other landscape features, properties, and streets in Australia with Scottish origins.
Notable Scottish placenames in Australia include:"
Scottish Australians,"Western Australia
Perth
Albany
Marvel Loch, Western Australia
Stirling Range
New South Wales
Maclean
Ben Lomond
Glen Innes
Northern Territory
MacDonnell Ranges
Queensland
Brisbane (Thomas Brisbane)
South Australia
St Kilda
Stirling
Glenelg
Tasmania
Ben Lomond
Lake Mackintosh
Suburbs of Hobart-Glenorchy-
Glenorchy & City of Glenorchy
Victoria
St. Kilda"
Scottish Australians,"Places named after Lachlan Macquarie
Many places in Australia have been named in Macquarie's honour (some of these were named by Macquarie himself).  They include:
At the time of his governorship or shortly thereafter:"
Scottish Australians,"Macquarie Island between Tasmania and Antarctica.
Lake Macquarie on the coast of New South Wales between Sydney and Newcastle renamed after Macquarie in 1826.
Macquarie River  a significant inland river in New South Wales which passes Bathurst, Wellington, Dubbo and Warren before entering the Macquarie Marshes and the Barwon River.
Lachlan River, another significant river in New South Wales
Port Macquarie, a city at the mouth of the Hastings River on the North Coast, New South Wales.
Macquarie Pass, a route traversing the escarpment between the Illawarra district and the Southern Highlands district of New South Wales.
Macquarie Rivulet, a river 23 kilometers long which rises near Robertson, New South Wales and drains into Lake Illawarra.
In Tasmania:
Macquarie Harbour on the west coast of Tasmania.
Lachlan a small town named by Sir John Franklin in 1837.
Macquarie River.
Macquarie Hill, formerly known as Mount Macquarie, in Wingecarribee Shire, Southern Highlands, New South Wales.
Macquarie Pass, north-east of Robertson, New South Wales.
Lachlan Swamps, in Centennial Parklands.
Many years after his governorship:"
Scottish Australians,"Macquarie Park and Macquarie Links, suburbs of Sydney.
Macquarie, a suburb of Canberra, Australia.
Division of Macquarie, one of the first 75 Divisions of the Australian House of Representatives created for the Australian Parliament in 1901."
Scottish Australians,"Notable Australians of Scottish descent
See also
Scottish diaspora
Anglo-Celtic Australians
Scottish placenames in Australia"
Scottish Australians,"References
Further reading
Prentis, Malcolm D.  (2008), The Scots in Australia, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, ISBN 9780424001005
Wilkie, Benjamin (2017), The Scots in Australia 1788-1938, Boydell & Brewer, Woodbridge, ISBN 9781783272563
Richards, Eric. Britannia's children: emigration from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland since 1600 (A&C Black, 2004) online."
Scottish Australians,"External links
The Scottish Australian (Scottish Australian history blog)
Scottish Australian Heritage Council
Scotland's Links with Australia and New Zealand Archived 2009-02-19 at the Wayback Machine
Scottish Emigration Database
Malcolm Prentis - Australian Catholic University (2008). ""Scots"". Dictionary of Sydney. Dictionary of Sydney Trust. Retrieved 4 October 2015. (History of Scots in Sydney)"
Australia (disambiguation),"Australia is a country in the Southern Hemisphere.
Australia may also refer to:"
Australia (disambiguation),"Places
Name of Australia relates the history of the term, as applied to various places."
Australia (disambiguation),"Oceania
Australia (continent),  or Sahul, the landmasses which sit on Australia's continental plate
Mainland Australia, the current continental landmass of Australia"
Australia (disambiguation),"Variant spelling
La Austrialia  [sic] del Espíritu Santo, an early Spanish name for the group of islands now known as Vanuatu"
Australia (disambiguation),"Elsewhere
Australia, Cuba, a village in Cuba
Australia, Mississippi, a ghost town in the United States
Australia, Markham, a former community in Markham, Ontario, Canada"
Australia (disambiguation),"Film and television
Australia (1989 film), directed by Jean-Jacques Andrien
Australia (2008 film), directed by Baz Luhrmann
""Australia"" (Modern Family), an episode of the TV series Modern Family
""Australia"" (ChuckleVision), an episode of the ChuckleVision children's television show
Australia: The Story of Us, a 2015 television documentary drama series"
Australia (disambiguation),"Music
Albums
Australia (Cusco album), 1993
Australia (Mango album), 1985
Australia (Howie Day album), 2000
Australia (EP), by Ace Enders, 2009"
Australia (disambiguation),"Songs
""Australia"" (Gyroscope song), 2008
""Australia"" (The Kinks song), 1969
""Australia"" (Manic Street Preachers song), 1996
""Australia"" (The Shins song), 2007
""Australia (Whore of the World)"", by John Gordon, 2010
""Australia"", by Guttermouth from Chicken & Champagne, 2000
""Australia"", by the Bicycles from The Good, the Bad and the Cuddly, 2006
""Australia"", by the Jonas Brothers from Jonas Brothers, 2007
""Australia"", by Amanda Palmer from Amanda Palmer Goes Down Under, 2010"
Australia (disambiguation),"Ships
Australia (schooner), a schooner used as a blockade runner in the American Civil War
Australia (yacht), competed in the 1977 and 1980 America's Cups
Australia II, a 12-metre yacht, Australia's first successful America's Cup challenger
HMAS Australia, three ships in the Royal Australian Navy
HMS Australia (1886), a ship in the Royal Navy"
Australia (disambiguation),"Other
45563 Australia, a British LMS Jubilee Class locomotive
Australia (LB&SCR no. 48), a London, Brighton and South Coast Railway B4 class 4-4-0 tender locomotive
Australia, the Geographic Beanie Baby bear produced in honour of Australia
Australia (board game), a board game by Ravensburger
Australia (horse), a racehorse foaled in 2011
Australia Girault, 1925, a junior synonym of the wasp genus Parachalcerinys
Australia: National Journal (1939–1946), art and lifestyle magazine"
Australia (disambiguation),See also
Australia (disambiguation),"Austral (disambiguation)
Austrasia
Australasia
Australian (disambiguation)
Austria
The Australian (disambiguation)
Oceania (disambiguation)
Outline of Australia
Terra Australis
All pages with titles beginning with Australia
All pages with titles containing Australia
Austria (disambiguation)"
Southwest Australia,"Southwest Australia is a biogeographic region in Western Australia. It includes the Mediterranean-climate area of southwestern Australia, which is home to a diverse and distinctive flora and fauna.
The region is also known as the Southwest Australia Global Diversity Hotspot."
Southwest Australia,"Geography
The region includes the Mediterranean forests, woodlands, and scrub ecoregions of Western Australia. The region covers 356,717 km2, consisting of a broad coastal plain 20-120 kilometres wide, transitioning to gently undulating uplands made up of weathered granite, gneiss and laterite. Bluff Knoll in the Stirling Range is the highest peak in the region, at 1,099 metres (3,606 ft) elevation.
Desert and xeric shrublands lie to the north and east across the centre of Australia, separating Southwest Australia from the other Mediterranean and humid-climate regions of the continent."
Southwest Australia,"Climate
The region has a wet-winter, dry-summer Mediterranean climate, one of five such regions in the world. During the winter months, westerly winds bring cool weather, clouds, and rainfall to Southwest Australia. In the summer months, the lower-latitude anticyclonic belt, with generally dry easterly winds, moves southwards, increasing temperatures and decreasing rainfall. Tropical cyclones, off the shore of northern Western Australia during the December-to-March northern wet season, occasionally reach as far south as Perth before moving inland, bringing floods and damaging winds to the west coast and rain to the dry interior.
Rainfall generally decreases from south to north, and with distance from the coast. The highest rainfall is typically in the Karri Forest Region between Pemberton and Walpole, up to 1,400 mm (55 inches) annually.
The region has been experiencing the effects of human induced climate change. Average annual rainfall has declined as much as 20% since the 1970s, declining by 10-20 millimetres each decade. Summertime maximum temperatures have increased by 0.1º to 0.3º C per decade, and the average number of days per year over 40º C in Perth has doubled over the last century. Lower rainfall and higher temperatures have reduced stream flow and inflow into drinking water and irrigation catchments since the 1960s. The summer of 2021/22 was the hottest on record."
Southwest Australia,"Flora
Southwest Australia is recognised as a floristic province.
Vegetation in the region is mainly woody, including forests, woodlands, shrublands, and heathlands, but no grasslands. Predominant vegetation types are Eucalyptus woodlands, eucalyptus-dominated mallee shrublands, and kwongan shrublands and heathlands, which correspond to the chaparral, matorral, maquis, and fynbos shrublands found in other Mediterranean-type regions. The region has generally nutrient-poor sandy or lateritic soils, which has encouraged rich speciation of plants adapted to specific ecological niches. The region hosts a great diversity of endemic species, notably among the protea family (Proteaceae).
Southwest Australia is home to many endemic carnivorous plants, including more than half the world's species of sundews (Drosera), the bladderwort subgenus Polypompholyx, the Byblis gigantea complex of rainbow plants (composed of two species, Byblis lamellata and B. gigantea), and the pitcher plant Cephalotus follicularis, sole species in the plant family Cephalotaceae."
Southwest Australia,"Fauna
The honey possum (Tarsipes rostratus) is a tiny marsupial endemic to Southwest Australia that feeds on nectar and pollen, and is an important pollinator for several southwestern plants including Banksia attenuata, Banksia coccinea, and Adenanthos cuneatus. Other mammals endemic to Southwest Australia are the western brush wallaby (Macropus irma) and the quokka (Setonix brachyurus).
Southwest Australia is an Endemic Bird Area, with several endemic species of birds including the long-billed black cockatoo (Zanda baudinii), western corella (Cacatua pastinator), noisy scrubbird (Atrichornis clamosus), red-winged fairywren (Malurus elegans), western bristlebird (Dasyornis longirostris),  black-throated whipbird (Psophodes nigrogularis), white-breasted robin (Eopsaltria georgianus), and red-eared firetail (Stagonopleura oculata). The western rufous bristlebird (Dasyornis broadbenti litoralis), an endemic subspecies of rufous bristlebird, is now extinct."
Southwest Australia,"Ecoregions
The World Wide Fund for Nature and Interim Biogeographic Regionalisation for Australia (IBRA) divide the region into six ecoregions and ten biogeographic regions:"
Southwest Australia,"Coolgardie woodlands (IBRA Coolgardie and Hampton)
Esperance mallee (IBRA Esperance Plains and Mallee)
Jarrah-Karri forest and shrublands (IBRA Warren)
Southwest Australia savanna (IBRA Geraldton Sandplains, Avon Wheatbelt, and Yalgoo)
Southwest Australia woodlands (IBRA Jarrah Forest)
Swan Coastal Plain scrub and woodlands (IBRA Swan Coastal Plain)
The transitional Coolgardie, Hampton, and Yalgoo bioregions are generally drier than the rest of the Southwest. They considered part of Southwest Australia by the WWF, but are considered part of the Central Australian or Eremaean Region by the Western Australian Herbarium."
Southwest Australia,"Freshwater
Southwest Australia has several permanent rivers and streams, including the Swan–Avon system, the Blackwood River, and other short rivers. The perennial rivers drain from the interior plateau and Darling Range across the coastal plain. Their flow is strongly seasonal, corresponding to the Southwest's wet winter–dry summer weather pattern. The perennial streams extend from east of Esperance on the south coast to the Arrowsmith River north of Perth, most often in areas with 700 mm or more of annual rainfall.
Arid regions separate Southwest Australia's freshwater habitats from Australia's other year-round rivers. As with its terrestrial flora, Southwest Australia's Mediterranean climate and biogeographic isolation has given rise to a distinct freshwater ecoregion with many endemic species.
There are fifteen freshwater fish species, including nine exclusively freshwater species, three estuarine species adapted to brackish water, and three diadromous species that spend part of their life-cycle in the sea. The exclusively freshwater species are endemic to Southwest Australia, as are two estuarine species. The salamanderfish (Lepidogalaxias salamandroides) is the sole species in the endemic family Lepidogalaxiidae. Salamanderfish can aestivate during the summer months, an adaptation to the region's dry summers. Other endemic species are the nightfish (Bostockia porosa), western mud minnow (Galaxiella munda), black-stripe minnow (Galaxiella nigrostriata), Balston’s pygmy perch (Nannatherina balstoni), western pygmy perch (Nannoperca vittata), and western galaxias (Galaxias occidentalis).
Southwest Australian varieties of the diadromous common galaxias (Galaxias maculatus) and spotted galaxias (Galaxias truttaceus) have adapted so they can live their life-cycle and reproduce in fresh water.
The southwestern snake-necked turtle (Chelodina colliei) and western swamp turtle (Pseudemydura umbrina) are aquatic species endemic to Southwest Australia."
Southwest Australia,"History
The first evidence of human habitation of the region was 50,000 years ago at Devil's Lair by ancestors of today's Aboriginal people.
Aboriginal populations were generally denser on the coastal plain and along the coastal forest edge, and in the interior woodlands and shrublands, particularly near permanent streams and river estuaries. Population was sparse in the forested areas of the south. Offshore islands were likely uninhabited.
The Aboriginal inhabitants deliberately set fires to manage the land and vegetation. Evidence from lake and estuarine sediments and firsthand accounts suggest that fire intervals in well-settled areas were frequent – from one to ten years – compared to unoccupied forests and offshore islands, where fire intervals were 30 to 100 or more years. Frequent burning reduced tree cover and encouraged the growth of grasses, herbs, and low shrubs, fostering open woodlands and savannas and limiting areas of dense forest and thicket.
Noongar peoples inhabited the western and southern portions of the region. The Noongar comprised 14 groups, which spoke distinct but mutually-intelligible languages.
The Nyoongar seasonal calendar includes six different seasons in a yearly cycle. These are Birak, Bunuru, Djeran, Makuru, Djilba and Kambarang. Each of the six seasons represents and explains the seasonal changes seen annually. The flowering of many different plants, the hibernation of reptiles and the moulting of swans are all helpful indicators that the seasons are changing.
The first permanent European settlement in the region was in 1826 near present-day Albany. European settlers mostly dispossessed the Aboriginal inhabitants, and established extensive agriculture, including wheat, barley, canola, lupins, and oats. They also introduced sheep and cattle to the region. European settlement also changed the fire regime established by the Aboriginal inhabitants of the land."
Southwest Australia,"Protected areas
109,445 km2, or 22.13%, of Southwest Australia's land area is in protected areas."
Southwest Australia,"See also
South West, Western Australia
South West Seismic Zone"
Southwest Australia,"References
Further reading
Thackway, R and I D Cresswell (1995) An interim biogeographic regionalisation for Australia : a framework for setting priorities in the National Reserves System Cooperative Program Version 4.0 Canberra : Australian Nature Conservation Agency, Reserve Systems Unit, 1995. ISBN 0-642-21371-2"
Southwest Australia,External links
Southwest Australia,Biodiversityhotspots.org: Conservation International − Southwest Australia)
Minister for Defence (Australia),"The minister for Defence, also known as the Defence minister, is the minister of state of the Commonwealth of Australia charged with overseeing the organisation, implementation, and formulation of strategic policy in defence and military matters as the head of the Department of Defence. The Defence minister directs the government’s approach to the Australian Defence Organisation and the Australian Defence Force. The current Defence minister is Richard Marles, who is concurrently serving as deputy prime minister of Australia, he was selected by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in May 2022 following the 2022 Australian federal election.
As the Minister for Defence is responsible for the executive management of Australia's defence and military forces and the portfolio's accountability to the Parliament, the Secretary of Defence is required under section 63(1) of the Public Service Act 1999 and the Requirements for Annual Reports from the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Public Accounts and Audit to submit a report to the responsible ministers on the activities of the Department of Defence after the end of each financial year for presentation to the Parliament.
It is one of only four ministerial positions (along with Prime Minister, Attorney-General and Treasurer) that have existed since Federation."
Minister for Defence (Australia),"Defence policy
The primary function of the Minister for Defence is to direct the formulation of the government's defence policy relating to the universal conduct of any entity of the Australian Government, or working on behalf of the Australian Government, and the agencies and personnel of the Australian Defence Organisation as a whole. The Australian Government operates three principal entities responsible for creating and maintaining defence policy within the 'Defence' superstructure: the Air Power Development Centre, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, and Sea Power Centre - Australia. Additionally, the Australian Government, often at the direct request of the Prime Minister, will expend extensive introspective resources for the publication of Defence white papers so as to assess the current extent of Australia's defence capabilities and infrastructure and investigate the best manner of improving Defence in such a way that will positively inform the government's policy.
The most recent white paper publication is the 2016 Defence White Paper that includes three elements: the 2016 Defence White Paper itself, 2016 Integrated Investment Program, and 2016 Defence Industry Policy Statement. Presented on 24 February 2016 and published the same day, it is the eighth defence whitepaper since 1976 and defined three key strategic objectives that the defence portfolios and governments of both parties have had little debate over. Recent Ministers for Defence for both political parties have typically formed their policy around the strict and professional advice of Australia's leading policy experts and senior military personnel and has generally caused little controversy."
Minister for Defence (Australia),"Composition of the defence portfolio
Over the years there have been a number of ministers with a variety of functions involved in the defence portfolio; in the period November 1939 to April 1942, there was no position named ""Minister of Defence"". Instead, several ministers were responsible for the various tasks and duties that are presently under the purview of the Minister for Defence.
Previous governments have included ministers with titles using one or more of the following terms:"
Minister for Defence (Australia),"List of ministers for defence
There was a Minister for Defence from 1 January 1901 until 13 November 1939, with the exception of two small breaks. Robert Menzies, the Prime Minister, abolished the position on the outbreak of World War II and created separate Ministers for the Navy, the Army and the Air, with himself as Minister for Defence Coordination in his first ministry. He retained this position until the fall of his government, and then held the post in the brief government of Arthur Fadden. John Curtin initially followed the same arrangement as Menzies in his ministry until 14 April 1942, when he took the title of Minister for Defence. The separate titles of Ministers for the Navy, the Army and the Air were abolished in the second Whitlam Ministry on 30 November 1973, when the separate departments of Navy, Army and Air were also abolished. There had also been a separate Navy portfolio between 1915 and 1921.
The following have served as Minister for Defence:"
Minister for Defence (Australia),"List of assistant ministers for defence
The following individuals have been appointed as Assistant Minister for Defence, or any of its precedent titles:"
Minister for Defence (Australia),"Individual service branch ministers
Ministers for the Navy
The following served as Minister for the Navy:"
Minister for Defence (Australia),"Ministers for the Army
The following served as Minister for the Army:"
Minister for Defence (Australia),"Ministers for Air
The following served as Minister for Air:"
Minister for Defence (Australia),"See also
Department of Defence (Australia)
Department of Munitions (11 June 1940 — April 1948)
Minister for Defence Industry
Minister for Defence Personnel
Minister for Veterans' Affairs (Australia)
Defence Estate and Infrastructure Group"
Minister for Defence (Australia),"Notes
References
External links"
Minister for Defence (Australia),Official website
Renewable energy in Australia,"Renewable energy in Australia is mainly based on biomass, solar, wind, and hydro generation. Over a third of electricity is generated from renewables, and is increasing, with a target to phase out coal power before 2040. Wind energy and rooftop solar have particularly grown since 2010. The growth has been stimulated by government energy policy in order to limit the rate of climate change in Australia that has been brought about by the use of fossil fuels. Pros and cons of various types of renewable energy are being investigated, and more recently there have been trials of green hydrogen and wave power.
Australia ratified the Kyoto protocol in 2007, and in 2016 became a party to the Paris Agreement, an international agreement which binds member countries to address climate change. However, the level of fossil fuel subsidies in Australia is still disputed. The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) was established as an independent government agency in 2012 to improve the competitiveness of renewable energy technologies and to encourage innovation in the industry. As of 2024 renewable energy is seen as a good investment, and many companies operate in Australia, including BP Solar, Eurosolar, Hydro Tasmania, Origin Energy, and Pacific Blue."
Renewable energy in Australia,"Government policy
As in many other countries, renewable energy in Australia has been encouraged by government energy policy to limit climate change, reduce oil import dependency, and stimulate the economy.
A 2019 article raised concerns about environmental sustainability for future generations, as it seemed that the then federal government had no renewable energy policy beyond the year 2020. The Liberal Party's energy minister, Angus Taylor, stated that the government would not be replacing the Renewable Energy Target (RET) after 2020."
Renewable energy in Australia,"International agreements
Australia ratified the Kyoto Protocol in December 2007 under the then newly elected Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. Evidence suggests Australia will meet its targets required under this protocol. Australia had not ratified the Kyoto Protocol until then, due to concerns over a loss of competitiveness with the US, which also rejects the treaty.
In December 2016, Australia became a party to the Paris Agreement, an international agreement which binds member countries to address climate change, and started submitting  emissions reduction commitments (NDCs)."
Renewable energy in Australia,"Renewable energy targets
A key policy encouraging the development of renewable energy in Australia are the mandatory renewable energy targets (MRET) set by both Commonwealth and state governments. 
An Expanded Renewable Energy Target was passed with broad support by the Australian Parliament on 20 August 2009, to ensure that renewable energy achieves a 20% share of electricity supply in Australia by 2020. To ensure this the Federal Government committed to increasing the 2020 MRET from 9,500 gigawatt-hours to 45,000 gigawatt-hours. The scheme was scheduled to continue until 2030. This target has since been revised with the Gillard government introducing in January 2011 an expanded target of 45,000 GWh of additional renewable energy between 2001 and 2020.
The MRET was split in 2012 into a small-scale renewable energy scheme (SRES) and large-scale renewable energy target (LRET) components to ensure that adequate incentive exists for large scale grid connected renewable energy. A number of states have also implemented their own renewable energy targets independent of the Commonwealth. For example, the Victorian Renewable Energy Target Scheme (VRET) mandated an additional 5% of Victoria's ""load for renewable generation"", although this has since been replaced by the new Australian Government LRET and SRES targets. South Australia achieved its target of 20% of renewable supply by 2014 three years ahead of schedule (i.e. in 2011) and has subsequently established a new target of 33% to be achieved by 2020.
Australia's climate goal includes reducing emissions by 43% by 2030, aiming for 82% of its electricity to come from renewable sources, aligning with the Australian Energy Market Operator's (AEMO) forecast of 83% renewables in the National Electricity Market by the same year. This effort is supported by individual targets and initiatives from states and territories, and the National Energy Transformation Partnership, established in August 2022."
Renewable energy in Australia,"Government bodies and mechanisms
Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA)
ARENA was established by the Australian Government on 1 July 2012. The purpose of ARENA is to improve the competitiveness of renewable energy technologies and increase the supply of renewable energy through innovation that benefits Australian consumers and businesses. Between 2012 and January 2021, ARENA supported 566 projects with $1.63 billion in grant funding."
Renewable energy in Australia,"Carbon pricing
In 2012, the Gillard government implemented a carbon price of A$23 per tonne to be paid by 300 liable entities representing the highest business emitters in Australia. The carbon price will increase to $25.40 per tonne by 2014–15, and then will be set by the market from 1 July 2015 onwards. It was expected that in addition to encouraging efficient use of electricity, pricing carbon will encourage investment in cleaner renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power. Treasury modelling has projected that with a carbon price, energy from the renewables sector is likely to reach 40 per cent of supply by 2050. Analysis of the first 6 months of operation of the carbon tax showed that there had been a drop in carbon emissions by the electricity sector. There had been a change in the mix of energy over this period, with less electricity being sourced from coal and more being produced by renewables such as hydro and wind power. The government at the time presented this analysis as an indicator that their policies to promote cleaner energy were working. 
The carbon pricing legislation was repealed by the Tony Abbott-led Australian Government on 17 July 2014. Since then, carbon emissions from the electricity sector have increased."
Renewable energy in Australia,"Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC)
The new 10 billion dollar Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) was created by the government in 2012, with the goal of overcoming barriers to the mobilisation of capital by the renewable energy sector. It was intended to make available two billion dollars a year for five years for the financing of renewable energy, energy efficiency, and low emissions technologies projects in the latter stages of development. The fund was expected to be financially self-sufficient.
By the end of 2022, the  CEFC had investments totalling around A$11 billion, and had financed 42 wind and solar projects, which added 2.1 GW of solar and 1.5 GW of wind capacity. In 2022, as part of the ""Rewiring the Nation"" initiative, the Australian Government approved a capital increase of A$11 billion for the CEFC, its first since the corporation's inception. As of 2022, the CEFC had facilitated over A$38.65 billion in clean energy investments."
Renewable energy in Australia,"Renewable Energy Certificates Registry
The Renewable Energy Certificates Registry (REC-registry) is an internet-based registry system that is required by the Australian Renewable Energy (Electricity) Act 2000. The REC-registry is dedicated to: maintaining various registers (as set in the act); and facilitating the creation, registration, transfer and surrender of renewable energy certificates (RECs)."
Renewable energy in Australia,"Feed-in tariffs
Feed-in tariffs have been enacted on a state-by-state basis in Australia to encourage investment in renewable energy by providing above commercial rates for electricity generated from sources such as rooftop photovoltaic panels or wind turbines. The schemes in place focus on residential scale infrastructure by having limits that effectively exclude larger-scale developments such as wind farms. Feed-in tariffs schemes in Australia started at a premium, but have mechanisms by which the price paid for electricity decreases over time to be equivalent or below the commercial rate. As of 2011, all the schemes in place in Australia were ""net"" schemes, whereby the householder is only paid for surplus electricity over and above what is actually used. In the past, New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory enacted ""gross"" schemes whereby householders were entitled to be paid for 100% of renewable electricity generated on the premises, however these programs have now expired. In 2008 the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) agreed to harmonise the various state schemes and developed a set of national principles to apply to new schemes. Leader of the Australian Greens, Christine Milne, advocated a uniform national ""gross"" feed-in tariff scheme. Each state and territory of Australia offers a different policy with regards to feed-in tariffs."
Renewable energy in Australia,"Solar Sunshot program
The Solar Sunshot program, announced by prime minister Anthony Albanese in March 2024, is a A$1 billion fund that delivers grants and production credits to manufacturers of solar panels, to increase the number made in Australia. (As of March 2024, 99% are imported.) The scheme will be run by ARENA. Provision will also be made to manufacturers of other components needed to create renewable energy, and the scheme is part of a plan to provide jobs for those workers currently employed in the coal industry. The new industries will be created in Portland and the Latrobe Valley in Victoria, and Wollongong and the Hunter Region in NSW."
Renewable energy in Australia,"Subsidies to fossil fuel industry
There is dispute about the level of subsidies paid to the fossil fuel industry in Australia. The Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) argues that according to the definitions of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), fossil fuel production and use is subsidised in Australia by means of direct payments, favourable tax treatment, and other actions. It has been suggested these measures act as impediments to investment in renewable energy resources. Analysis by the ACF in 2010 indicated that these provisions added up to a total annual subsidy of A$7.7 billion, with the most significant component being the Fuel Tax Credits program that rebates diesel fuel excise to many business users. This analysis is disputed by the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) who argue that the ACF's definition of a subsidy differs from that of the OECD and that the fuel tax rebate schemes are in place to ensure that all producers are treated equally from a tax point of view. However, the IPA acknowledges that regardless of perceived issues with the ACF analysis, some level of fossil fuel subsidy is likely in existence."
Renewable energy in Australia,"State and territory policies
State governments have varied in their policies."
Renewable energy in Australia,"In Victoria, the renewable energy targets were set to achieve 25% by 2020, 40% by 2025, and 50% by 2030. A subsequent announcement in 2022 outlined ambitious goals of 65% by 2030 and 95% by 2035. These targets are part of the state's Climate Change Strategy, which employs reverse auctions to finance more than 900 MW of renewable energy projects.
The Australian Capital Territory (ACT) made significant strides in renewable energy, achieving 100% renewables in 2020—a target set in 2016 under its Climate Change Strategy 2019-2025. This achievement was facilitated by reverse auctions that funded renewable energy generation projects, cumulatively amounting to 650 MW.
Queensland has set renewable energy targets of 70% by 2032 and 80% by 2035, announced in September 2022. These objectives are embedded within Queensland's Climate Action Plan 2020-2030, which also foresees the conversion of coal-fired power plants into renewable energy hubs by 2035. To facilitate this transition, an AUD 62 billion clean energy plan has been put in place, utilising reverse auctions.
South Australia is committed to achieving 100% net renewables by 2030 and aspires to be a net exporter of renewable energy, setting a bold target of 500% by 2050. These ambitions are detailed in the Climate Change Action Plan 2021-2025, which focuses on government funding for renewable energy and storage solutions, rather than market mechanisms.
Tasmania is on track to achieve its target of 100% renewable energy by 2022, a goal it achieved ahead of schedule in 2020. The state now targets the production of 200% renewable energy by 2040. This goal is advanced by the Climate Change Action Plan 2017-2021, focusing on enhancing government investment in existing hydropower assets, avoiding reliance on market mechanisms.
The Northern Territory has committed to a target of 50% renewable energy by 2030. The state is also set to have 10% renewable energy by 2020.
New South Wales aims to have zero emissions across the state economy by 2050.
As of 2018, Western Australia was the only state or territory yet to commit to a renewable energy target. In May 2019, 21 Western Australian councils have called on the state's Labor government to adopt targets for a 50% renewable electricity supply by 2030, and net-zero emissions by 2050."
Renewable energy in Australia,"Timeline of developments
2001–2010
In 2001, a mandatory renewable energy target is introduced to encourage large-scale renewable energy development.
In 2007, several reports have discussed the possibility of Australia setting a renewable energy target of 25% by 2020. Combined with some basic energy efficiency measures, such a target could deliver 15,000 MW new renewable power capacity, $33 billion in new investment, 16,600 new jobs, and 69 million tonnes reduction in electricity sector greenhouse gas emissions.
In 2008, Greenpeace released a report called ""Energy [r]evolution: A Sustainable Energy Australia Outlook"", detailing how Australia could produce 40% of its energy through renewable energy by 2020 and completely phase out coal-fired power by 2030 without any job losses. David Spratt and Phillip Sutton argue in their book Climate Code Red that Australia needs to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions down to zero as quickly as possible so that carbon dioxide can be drawn down from the atmosphere and greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced to less than 325 ppm CO2-e, which they argue is the upper ""safe climate"" level at which we can continue developing infinitely. They outline a plan of action which would accomplish this.
In 2010 the mandatory renewable energy target was increased to 41,000 gigawatt-hours of renewable generation from power stations. This was subsequently reduced to 33,000 gigawatt-hours by the Abbott government, in a compromise agreed to by the Labor opposition. Alongside this there is the Small-Scale Renewable Energy Scheme, an uncapped scheme to support rooftop solar power and solar hot water and several State schemes providing feed-in tariffs to encourage photovoltaics.
Also in 2010, ZCA launch their ""Stationary Energy Plan"" showing Australia could entirely transition to renewable energy within a decade by building 12 very large scale solar power plants (3500 MW each), which would provide 60% of electricity used, and 6500 7.5 MW wind turbines, which would supply most of the remaining 40%, along with other changes. The transition would cost A$370 billion or about $8/household/week over a decade to create a renewable energy infrastructure that would last a minimum of 30 to 40 years."
Renewable energy in Australia,"2011–2020
In 2012, these policies were supplemented by a carbon price and a 10 billion-dollar fund to finance renewable energy projects, although these initiatives were later withdrawn by the Abbott government.
Of all renewable electrical sources in 2012, hydroelectricity represented 57.8%, wind 26%, bioenergy 8.1%, solar PV 8%, large-scale solar 0.147%, geothermal 0.002% and marine 0.001%; additionally, solar hot water heating was estimated to replace a further 2,422 GWh of electrical generation.
In 2015, the Abbott government ordered the $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation to refrain from any new investment in wind power projects, saying that the government prefers the corporation to invest in researching new technologies rather than the ""mature"" wind turbine sector.
In December 2016, Australia became a party to the Paris Agreement, an international agreement which binds member countries to address climate change. It is an obligation for each to submit  emissions reduction commitments, called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), under Article 4 of the agreement. Australia submitted an NDC in 2022.
By 2017, an unprecedented 39 projects, both solar and wind, with a combined capacity of 3,895 MW, were either under construction, already constructed, or would start construction in 2017. Capacity addition based on renewable energy sources was expected to increase substantially in 2017, with over 49 projects either under construction, constructed or with funding secured for construction. As of August 2017, it was estimated that Australia generated enough to power 70% of the country's households, and once additional wind and solar projects were complete at the end of the year, enough energy would be generated to power 90%  of the country's homes.
In 2019, Australia met its 2020 renewable energy target of 23.5% and 33 terawatt-hours (TWh)."
Renewable energy in Australia,"With the 2020 targets being achieved, many of the Australian states and territories committed to a greater 40% target for renewable energy sources by 2030, including Queensland, Victoria and the Northern Territory."
Renewable energy in Australia,"2021–present
Between 2000 and 2021, the proportion of energy from renewables grew from 8% to 11.5%, mainly due to growth of wind energy and rooftop solar since 2010.: 79 
In July 2022, a report published by the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering estimated that Australia would be generating around 50 per cent its electricity needs from renewable sources by 2025, rising to 69 per cent by 2030. By 2050, power networks would be able to use 100 per cent green energy for periods. However the report said that investment was also needed, not only in new renewable sources, but in services needed during the transition period – hydroelectric power, batteries and probably gas for a while.
In 2022, 35.9% of electricity in Australia was generated from renewable sources, up from 32.5 in 2021."
Renewable energy in Australia,"By type
Despite the increase in renewables most energy is still from fossil fuels."
Renewable energy in Australia,"Biofuels
Biomass can be used directly for electricity generation, for example by burning sugarcane waste (bagasse) as a fuel for thermal power generation in sugar mills. It can also be used to produce steam for industrial uses, cooking, and heating. It can also be converted into a liquid or gaseous biofuel. In 2015 Bagasse accounted for 26.1% (90.2PJ) of Australia's renewable energy consumption, while wood and wood waste for another 26.9% (92.9PJ). Biomass for energy production was the subject of a federal government report in 2004.
Biofuels produced from food crops have become controversial as food prices increased significantly in mid-2008, leading to increased concerns about food vs fuel. Ethanol fuel in Australia can be produced from sugarcane or grains and there are currently three commercial producers of fuel ethanol in Australia, all on the east coast. Legislation imposes a 10% cap on the concentration of fuel ethanol blends. Blends of 90% unleaded petrol and 10% fuel ethanol are commonly referred to as E10, which is mainly available through service stations operating under the BP, Caltex, Shell, and United brands. In partnership with the Queensland Government, the Canegrowers organisation launched a regional billboard campaign in March 2007 to promote the renewable fuels industry. Over 100 million litres of the new BP Unleaded with renewable ethanol has now been sold to Queensland motorists. Biodiesel produced from oilseed crops or recycled cooking oil may be a better prospect than ethanol, given the nation's heavy reliance on road transport, and the growing popularity of fuel-efficient diesel cars. Australian cities are some of the most car-dependent cities in the world, and legislations involving vehicle pollution within the country are considered relatively lax."
Renewable energy in Australia,"Geothermal energy
In Australia, geothermal energy is a natural resource which is not widely used as a form of energy. However, there are known and potential locations near the centre of the country in which geothermal activity is detectable. Exploratory geothermal wells have been drilled to test for the presence of high temperature geothermal activity and such high levels were detected. As a result, projects will eventuate in the coming years and more exploration is expected at potential locations.
South Australia has been described as ""Australia's hot rock haven"" and this emissions free and renewable energy form could provide an estimated 6.8% of Australia's base load power needs by 2030. According to an estimate by the Centre for International Economics, Australia has enough geothermal energy to contribute electricity for 450 years.
There are currently 19 companies Australia-wide spending A$654 million in exploration programmes in 141 areas. In South Australia, which is expected to dominate the sector's growth, 12 companies have already applied for 116 areas and can be expected to invest A$524 million (US$435 M) in their projects by the next six years. Ten projects are expected to achieve successful exploration and heat flows, by 2010, with at least three power generation demonstration projects coming on stream by 2012. A geothermal power plant is generating 80 kW of electricity at Birdsville, in southwest Queensland."
Renewable energy in Australia,"Green hydrogen
Investigations into green hydrogen production has been funded by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), an independent federal government agency, mostly in Western Australia. In 2018, it funded Australia's first green hydrogen project at Jandakot, called the ATCO Hydrogen Microgrid. Solar energy is used to separate hydrogen molecules from water to create renewable hydrogen. This project involved a trial to produce, store, and use green hydrogen to power a microgrid, and to assess the feasibility of a similar process on a larger scale. The total project cost was A$3.53m, with A$1.79m coming from ARENA, and the project was completed on 30 November 2019. 
In South Australia, the Whyalla Hydrogen Facility  is a proposed 250MWe hydrogen electrolyser, a 200MW combined cycle gas turbine generator, and 3600-tonne hydrogen storage facility. A South Australian Government company called Hydrogen Power South Australia was established to own and operate the plant, which is expected to be completed in 2025 and begin operations in 2026. Once it is up and running, it will supply power to the Whyalla Steelworks, which will then produce green steel.
In March 2024 funding was provided by ARENA for a feasibility study into the East Kimberley Clean Energy Project, in which a 900-megawatt solar farm at Lake Argyle, Western Australia, would create green hydrogen gas. This would be piped north to Wyndham, where it would be converted into ammonia and exported to Asia. Total output is estimated at 250,000 tonnes per annum."
Renewable energy in Australia,"Hydro power
In 2022, hydro power supplied 19.7% of Australia's renewable electricity generation or 7.1% of Australia's total electricity generation.
The largest hydro power system in Australia is the Snowy Mountains Scheme constructed between 1949 and 1974, which consists of 16 major dams and 7 major power stations, and has a total generating capacity of 3,800 MW. The scheme generates on average 4,500 GWh electricity per year. A major extension of the scheme is ongoing as of 2020. Dubbed Snowy 2.0, it consists in adding a 2,000 MW pumped hydro storage capacity by connecting two existing reservoirs with tunnels and an underground power station. It is due to complete by 2026.
Hydro Tasmania operates 30 power stations and 15 dams, with a total generating capacity of 2,600 MW, and generates an average of 9,000 GWh of electricity per year. There are also plans to upgrade Tasmania's hydro power system to give it the capability to function as pumped hydro storage under the 'Battery of the Nation' initiative."
Renewable energy in Australia,"Solar photovoltaics
In 2022, solar power supplied around 41.0% of Australia's renewable electricity and around 14.7% of Australia's total electricity. Twelve new large-scale (>5 MW) solar farms were commissioned in 2021 with a combined capacity of 840 MW, bringing the total installed large-scale capacity to almost 6.5 GW. As of the end of 2022, 48 large-scale solar farms were either under construction or financial committed nationally.
Small-scale solar power (<100 kW) is the dominant contributor to Australia's overall solar electricity production as of 2022, producing 63% of solar's total electricity output (21,726 GWh of 34,446 GWh total). In 2022, 2.7 GW of new small-scale capacity was installed across 310,352 installations, bringing total small-scale capacity to 19.39 GW.
As of December 2022, Australia's over 3.36 million solar PV installations had a combined capacity of 29,683 MW of which 3,922 MW were installed in the preceding 12 months."
Renewable energy in Australia,"Solar thermal energy
Solar water heating
Australia has developed world leading solar thermal technologies, but with only very low levels of actual use. Domestic solar water heating is the most common solar thermal technology. During the 1950s, Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) carried out world leading research into flat plate solar water heaters. A solar water heater manufacturing industry was subsequently established in Australia and a large proportion of the manufactured product was exported. Four of the original companies are still in business and the manufacturing base has now expanded to 24 companies. Despite an excellent solar resource, the penetration of solar water heaters in the Australian domestic market was only about 5% in 2006, with new dwellings accounting for most sales. By 2014, around 14% of Australian households had solar hot water installed It is estimated that by installing a solar hot water system, it could reduce a family's CO2 emissions up to 3 tonnes per year while saving up to 80% of the energy costs for water heating.
While solar water heating saves a significant amount of energy, they are generally omitted from measures of renewable energy production as they do not actually produce electricity. Based on the installed base in Australia as of October 2010, it was calculated that solar hot water units would account for about 7.4% of clean energy production if they were included in the overall figures."
Renewable energy in Australia,"Solar thermal power
The CSIRO's National Solar Energy Centre in Newcastle, New South Wales houses a 500 kW (thermal) and a 1.5 MW (thermal) solar central receiver system, which are used as research and development facilities.
The Australian National University (ANU) has worked on dish concentrator systems since the early 1970s, and early work lead to the construction of the White Cliffs Solar Power Station. In 1994, the first 'Big Dish' 400 m2 solar concentrator was completed on the ANU campus. In 2005, the dish technology developed by ANU was exclusively licensed to solar technology company Wizard Power. In collaboration with ANU, the company built and demonstrated the 500m2 commercial Big Dish design in Canberra, with this having been completed in 2009. The company  had planned to construct the Solar Oasis demonstration site in Whyalla, South Australia as the first commercial implementation of the technology, using 300 Wizard Power Big Dish solar thermal concentrators to deliver a 40MWe solar thermal power plant. Construction was expected to commence in mid-late 2013, but following the withdrawal of Commonwealth funding in June 2013, the project was halted with Wizard Power ceasing operations in September 2013.
Research activities at the University of Sydney and University of New South Wales have spun off into Solar Heat and Power (now Areva Solar), which was building a major project at Liddell Power Station in the Hunter Valley. The CSIRO Division of Energy Technology has opened a major solar energy centre in Newcastle that has a tower system purchased from Solar Heat and Power and a prototype trough concentrator array developed in collaboration with the ANU."
Renewable energy in Australia,"Wave power
Several projects for harvesting the power of the ocean were attempted:"
Renewable energy in Australia,"Oceanlinx trialled a wave energy system at Port Kembla, but went bankrupt.
Carnegie Corp of Western Australia tried a method of using energy captured from passing waves, CETO.
BioPower Systems is developing its bioWAVE system anchored to the seabed that would generate electricity through the movement of buoyant blades as waves pass, in a swaying motion similar to the way sea plants, such as kelp, move. It expects to complete pilot wave and tidal projects off northern Tasmania this year."
Renewable energy in Australia,"Wind power
In 2022, wind power supplied around 35.6% of Australia's renewable electricity and around 12.8% of Australia's total electricity. Eight new wind farms were commissioned in 2022 with a combined capacity of 1,410 MW, bringing the total installed capacity to more than 10.5 GW. As of the end of 2022, 19 wind farms with a combined capacity of 4.7 GW were either under construction or financial committed nationally.
Wind power in Victoria is the most developed with 8,655 GWh generated in 2021, followed by South Australia with 5,408 GWh, New South Wales with 5,384 GWh, Western Australia with 3,407 GWh, Tasmania with 1,859 GWh, and Queensland with 1,772 GWh.
The largest wind farm in Australia is the Stockyard Hill Wind Farm, which opened in 2022 with a capacity of 530 MW. This overtook the 453 MW Coopers Gap Wind Farm."
Renewable energy in Australia,"Academic literature
Australia has a very high potential for renewable energy. Therefore, the transition to a renewable energy system is gaining momentum in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Among them several studies have examined the feasibility of a transition to a 100% renewable electricity systems, which was found both practicable as well as economically and environmentally beneficial to combat global warming."
Renewable energy in Australia,"Major renewable energy companies
BP Solar
BP has been involved in solar power since 1973 and its subsidiary, BP Solar, is now one of the world's largest solar power companies with production facilities in the United States, Spain, India and Australia. BP Solar is involved in the commercialisation of a long life deep cycle lead acid battery, jointly developed by the CSIRO and Battery Energy, which is ideally suited to the storage of electricity for renewable remote area power systems (RAPS)."
Renewable energy in Australia,"Edwards
Edwards first began manufacturing water heaters in Australia in 1963. Edwards is now an international organisation which is a leader in producing hot water systems for both domestic and commercial purposes using solar technology. Edwards exports to Asia, the Pacific, the Americas, Europe, Africa and the Middle East."
Renewable energy in Australia,"Eurosolar
Eurosolar was first formed in 1993, with an aim of providing photovoltaic systems to the masses. It focuses on solar power in multiple Australian capitals.  They continue to install panels all around Australia."
Renewable energy in Australia,"Hydro Tasmania
Hydro Tasmania was set up by the State Government in 1914 (originally named the Hydro-Electric Department, changed to the Hydro-Electric Commission in 1929, and Hydro Tasmania in 1998). Today Hydro Tasmania is Australia's largest generator of renewable energy. They operate thirty hydro-electric stations and one gas power station, and are a joint owner in three wind farms."
Renewable energy in Australia,"Meridian Energy Australia
Meridian Energy Australia runs a number of renewable energy assets (4 wind farms and 4 hydro plants) and only produces renewable energy – it claims to be Australasia's largest 100% renewable energy generator."
Renewable energy in Australia,"Nectr
Nectr is an Australian-based electricity retailer that focuses on offering renewable energy plans and services. Launched in 2019, it currently operates in New South Wales, South East Queensland and South Australia, planning to expand to Victoria, Tasmania and the ACT in 2022. Nectr is owned by Hanwha Energy, an affiliate of South Korea's Hanwha Group, one of the global leaders in renewable energy technology, including solar power (Hanwha Q Cells) and battery storage technologies. The company offers 100% carbon offset plans, GreenPower plans and also launched solar and battery installation bundles in Ausgrid and Endeavour within NSW. Its parent company Hanwha Energy Australia is an investor in Australian utility-scale solar power assets, including the 20 MWAC Barcaldine solar farm in Queensland and the 88 MWAC Bannerton solar farm in Victoria. It is currently developing two new solar farms in southern NSW with capacity to produce enough energy to supply 50,000 homes."
Renewable energy in Australia,"Origin Energy
Origin Energy is active in the renewable energy arena, and has spent a number of years developing several wind farms in South Australia, a solar cell business using technology invented by a team led by Professor Andrew Blakers at the Australian National University, and geothermal power via a minority shareholding stake in Geodynamics."
Renewable energy in Australia,"Pacific Blue
Pacific Blue is an Australian company that specialises in 100% renewable energy generation. Its focus is on hydroelectricity and wind power. Power stations owned by Pacific Blue include wind farms: Codrington Wind Farm, Challicum Hills Wind Farm, Portland Wind Project and Hydro power: Eildon Pondage Power Station, Ord River Hydro Power Station and The Drop Hydro."
Renewable energy in Australia,"Snowy Hydro Limited
Snowy Hydro Limited, previously known as the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Authority, manages the Snowy Mountains Scheme which generates on average around 4500 gigawatt hours of renewable energy each year, which represented around 37% of all renewable energy in the National Electricity Market in 2010. The scheme also diverts water for irrigation from the Snowy River Catchment west to the Murray and Murrumbidgee River systems."
Renewable energy in Australia,"Solahart
Solahart manufactured its first solar water heater in 1953, and products currently manufactured by Solahart include thermosiphon and split system solar and heat pump water heaters. These are marketed in 90 countries around the world and overseas sales represent 40% of total business. Solahart has a market share of 50% in Australia."
Renewable energy in Australia,"Solar Systems
Solar Systems was a leader in high concentration solar photovoltaic applications, and the company built a photovoltaic Mildura Solar concentrator power station, Australia. This project will use innovative concentrator dish technology to power 45,000 homes, providing 270,000 MWh/year for A$420 million. Solar Systems has already completed construction of three concentrator dish power stations in the Northern Territory, at Hermannsburg, Yuendumu, and Lajamanu, which together generate 1,555 MWh/year (260 homes, going by the energy/home ratio above). This represents a saving of 420,000 litres of diesel fuel and 1550 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year. The total cost of the solar power station was ""A$7M, offset by a grant from the Australian and Northern Territory Governments under their Renewable Remote Power Generation Program"". The price of diesel in remote areas is high due to added transportation costs: in 2017, retail diesel prices in remote areas of the Northern Territory averaged $1.90 per litre. The 420,000 litres of diesel per year saved by these power stations in the first decade of operation would thus have cost approximately $8,000,000."
Renewable energy in Australia,"Wind Prospect
Wind Prospect is a company based in Bristol, UK, founded in 1992. An Adelaide-born employee, Michael Vawser, established a separate company of the same name in Adelaide, South Australia, in 2000. The company first created the 46MW Canunda Wind Farm in the south-east of the state (commissioned in March 2005), followed by the 70MW Mount Millar Wind Farm on the Eyre Peninsula. It built many wind farms in SA, and then expanded interstate. As of March 2024 the Australian company is based in Melbourne, Victoria, and has obtained planning approval for 22 wind farms and 2 solar farms in total. The Wind Prospect Group, apart from the UK and Australia, also operates in Ireland, Canada, France (as WPO), and China."
Renewable energy in Australia,"See also
References
Further reading
Australian Conservation Foundation (2007). A Bright Future: 25% Renewable Energy for Australia by 2020 27 pages.
Australian Government (2007). Australian Government Renewable Energy Policies and Programs 2 pages.
CSIRO (2007). Climate Change in Australia: Technical Report 148 pages.
CSIRO (2007). Rural Australia Providing Climate Solutions 54 pages.
Diesendorf, Mark (2007). Paths to a Low Carbon Future 33 pages.
ICLEI Oceania (2007). Biodiesel in Australia: Benefits, Issues and Opportunities for Local Government Uptake 95 pages.
New South Wales Government (2006). NSW Renewable Energy Target: Explanatory Paper 17 pages.
Office of the Renewable Energy Regulator (2006). Mandatory Renewable Energy Target Overview 5 pages.
Renewable Energy Generators Australia (2006). Renewable Energy – A Contribution to Australia's Environmental and Economic Sustainability 116 pages.
The Natural Edge Project, Griffith University, ANU, CSIRO and NFEE (2008). Energy Transformed: Sustainable Energy Solutions for Climate Change Mitigation 600+ pages.
Greenpeace Australia Pacific Energy [R]evolution Scenario: Australia, 2008 [2]) 47 pages.
Beyond Zero Emissions Zero Carbon Australia 2020, 2010 [3])
Ison, Nicky (2018). A plan to repower Australia (PDF). Repower Australia 2018."
Renewable energy in Australia,External links
Renewable energy in Australia,"Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA)
Office of the Renewable Energy Regulator
The Australian Centre for Renewable Energy (ACRE)
""Climate change"", Australian Government – Department of the Environment
Map of operating renewable energy generators in Australia
Renewable energy farms and Energy Georeference World map
Desert Knowledge Australia Solar Centre
Renew Economy
Articles
Australia no shining star of renewable energy
MRET policy 'stills wind farm plans'
Green energy market unviable: Vestas
Cool wind blows for investors
Riches in energy harvesting, farmers told
Renewable energy revolution for NSW cane growers
Australian breakthrough snapped up – by eager Americans
Renewable Energy projects in Australia – By State
Renewable Energy projects in Australia – By Type
At its current rate, Australia is on track for 50% renewable electricity in 2025"
Social security in Australia,"Social security, in Australia, refers to a system of social welfare payments provided by Australian Government to eligible Australian citizens, permanent residents, and limited international visitors. These payments are almost always administered by Centrelink, a program of Services Australia. In Australia, most payments are means tested.
The system includes payments to retirees, job seekers, parents (especially new and single parents), people with disabilities and their caregivers, guardians of orphans, students and apprentices, and people who have no way of supporting themselves."
Social security in Australia,"History
Prior to 1900 in Australia, charitable assistance from benevolent societies, sometimes with financial contributions from the authorities, was the primary means of relief for people not able to support themselves. The 1890s economic depression and the rise of the trade unions and the Labor parties during this period led to a movement for welfare reform.
In 1900, New South Wales and Victoria enacted legislation introducing non-contributory pensions for those aged 65 and over. Queensland legislated a similar system in 1907 before the Deakin government introduced a national aged pension under the Invalid and Old-Aged Pensions Act 1908. A national invalid disability pension was started in 1910, and a national maternity allowance was introduced in 1912. The old age pension and invalid pension were restricted to those of ""good character"", and the maternity allowance was not given to Aboriginals, Asians, or Pacific Islanders. Also in 1907, the Harvester case created a living wage with the assumptions of a man with three children and a dependent wife, closer to subsistence than a comfortable existence.
In 1923, the Bruce-Page government announced plans to develop a comprehensive national social security scheme, which was typically referred to as National Insurance in line with the terminology used in Britain. The government established a royal commission on national insurance in 1923 and introduced a bill in 1928, which failed to pass before the government was defeated. The Lyons government later passed the National Health and Pensions Insurance Act 1938, which would have enacted the scheme but was ultimately abandoned in the lead-up to World War II.  Lacking a national scheme forms of government welfare were administered by local and state governments. The introduction of various schemes, and improvements in them, were often secured after protest campaigns by unemployed community members.
During the Second World War, the federal government significantly accelerated the development of Australia's welfare state, led by Prime Minister John Curtin and Treasurer Ben Chifley. The Menzies government enacted a child endowment scheme in 1941 (superseding the 1927 New South Wales scheme), while the Curtin government enacted a widows' pension in 1942 (superseding the New South Wales 1926 scheme); a wife's allowance in 1943; additional allowances for the children of pensioners in 1943; and unemployment, sickness, and special benefits in 1945 (superseding the Queensland 1923 scheme). The success of the 1946 Social Services referendum modified the Australian Constitution explicitly granting the Commonwealth power to legislate for maternity allowances, widows pensions, child endowment, unemployment, pharmaceutical, sickness and hospital benefits, medical and dental services, and student and family allowances, allowing further welfare initiatives by Prime Minister Ben Chifley's post-war government. From the end of the Second World War until 1975, Australian governments had a policy of full employment – from 1946 the Commonwealth Employment Service assisted a quarter of the workforce in finding paid employment that was suited to them, helping to keep the unemployment rate very low.
In 2001, Amanda Vanstone and Tony Abbott made a joint cabinet submission arguing that particular groups of welfare recipients, particularly single parents, needed to be ""guided towards work"" through compulsion, including literacy programs, regular reporting by recipients, and a Work for the Dole scheme.
The Social Services Legislation Amendment (Welfare Reform) Bill 2017 has changed several aspects of social security in Australia, and has been given assent to as of 11 April 2018. It includes a demerit-point system for not meeting welfare obligations. As of June 2018, former social security recipients who owe a debt to Centrelink will not be allowed to travel outside Australia until they have repaid their debt, with interest."
Social security in Australia,"Contemporary welfare attitudes
Bert Kelly and Clyde Cameron popularised the term ""dole bludger"" in the 1970s, causing welfare recipients to be viewed as parasites upon ""ordinary Australian"" taxpayers.  Prior to this, high unemployment was seen as a failure of the economy and government, not individual welfare recipients.  Negative characterisations were challenged during the 1970s and 1980s by unemployed organisations. These organised numerous protests and marches, which typically demanded that governments do more to create work, that welfare payments match the cost of living, and that social security recipients not be subject to invasive and patronising treatment.  Economists argue that Australia needs more unemployed people to control demand and therefore inflation.  Current attitudes toward welfare in Australia can be separated into support for the welfare system and support for welfare recipients. A 2015 multivariate analysis using canonical correlation analysis identified five distinct profiles of welfare attitudes and socio-demographic characteristics.
The main attitude cluster was one toward support for the welfare system and welfare recipients. Having received government welfare in the past strongly predicted a person supporting the welfare system and its beneficiaries. The next most prominent attitude profile was summarised as 'the welfare system is good but the people on it are lazy and dependent'. This attitude profile was found among people receiving welfare payments that were either normative (e.g., the age pension) or where there is little expectation that a person will return to work (e.g. disability support pension). A 2017 study showed that overall, Australians held more negative attitudes toward welfare recipients than they did the welfare system. People with a history of receiving unemployment benefits had more negative welfare attitudes if they lived in areas where other community members had more negative attitudes."
Social security in Australia,"Eligibility and exclusions
Australian citizens are eligible for various payments that they may be entitled to. New Zealand citizens have to pass a range of criteria to access different levels of payments, Permanent residents have to pass various waiting periods of between one and four years to become eligible for various levels of benefits.
Asylum seekers in Australia who have applied for a protection visa and whose bridging visa has expired have no access to Centrelink payments or other social services, nor Medicare benefits, and are not allowed to work. It was estimated in July 2022 that there were around 2000 people in this situation."
Social security in Australia,"Legal framework
Social security payments and other benefits are currently made available under the following acts of parliament:"
Social security in Australia,"Social Security Act 1991
A New Tax System (Family Assistance) Act 1999
Student Assistance Act 1973
Paid Parental Leave Act 2010"
Social security in Australia,"Payments under the Social Security Act and the Student Assistance Act
These are available only to the ""domestic students"", i.e. Australian citizens and permanent residents, etc. These benefits are not available to the ""international students""."
Social security in Australia,"ABSTUDY – offers a range of allowances to assist Indigenous students and New Apprentices.
Age Pension – for people planning for retirement or who are already retired aged 67 years and over.
Assistance for Isolated Children – for families with a child who cannot attend school locally because of distance or special needs.
Austudy Payment – for full-time students and New Apprentices aged 25 years or over.
Carer Allowance – for people who care for individuals over 16 years with a disability or age-related special need.
Carer Allowance (Child) – for people who care for a child under 16 years with a disability.
Carer Payment – for people who provide full-time care for someone with a disability
Disability Support Pension – for people unable to work for at least 2 years due to illness, injury or disability.
Double Orphan Pension – for people who are raising children who have lost both parents.
Maternity Payment – for help with those extra costs after the birth of a new baby.
JobSeeker Payment – for people who are looking for employment, also often given to those in the application process for Disability Support Pension.
Parenting Payment – for parents or guardians to help with the cost of raising children under 6 for partnered parents and under 8 for sole parents.
Pensioner Education Supplement – for people on pensions with education expenses.
Special Benefit – for people who are in financial hardship, have no way of supporting themselves and are not entitled to another payment (normally due to residency requirements)
Youth Allowance – for full-time students or New Apprentices aged 15 (under some circumstances) 16 to 24 and people aged under 21 who are undertaking job search or a combination of approved activities."
Social security in Australia,"Income support
All Centrelink income support payments are payable fortnightly, usually by direct deposit into the recipient's bank account. They are also subject to a means test which calculates the recipient (and their partner's) fortnightly income and assets and affects the rate of their payment accordingly. As such, people on lower incomes may be entitled to part-payment of their allowance (subject to other qualification requirements). The assessment of income and assets varies greatly between different social security payments and the effect that income and assets have on each payment differs in that they have different income thresholds (i.e. how much income one can earn before it affects their payment) and different taper rates (the amount the payment drops by per dollar above these thresholds).
An individual may be precluded from claiming any of income support payments listed below for a certain number of weeks following receipt of a lump sum compensation payment, made wholly or partly in respect of lost earnings or lost capacity to earn resulting from personal injury (often received in settlement of a Workers' Compensation claim). The number of weeks for which the preclusion period applies to an individual is proportional the size of the lump sum payment they received. Centrelink has a discretion to reduce the duration of the preclusion period if it is satisfied that there exist special circumstances that make an individual's case out of the ordinary: for example, extreme financial hardship."
Social security in Australia,"Age Pension
The age pension was the first payment made by the Australian Government, dating back to 1909. There is no automatic entitlement to an age pension in Australia, unlike in countries such as the UK or New Zealand. Taxpayer-funded pensions are means tested (similar to the UK's Pension Credit), effectively making them another type of benefit. Except for the mandatory superannuation scheme, workers do not contribute to a pension or insurance scheme in Australia, unlike pension schemes in many other countries.
The age pension is subject to a number of requirements:"
Social security in Australia,"the age pension is available to persons over what is referred to as the Age Pension age. The pension age has been increasing since 2017 by six-month periods every two years from the previous pension age of 65 years. On 1 July 2021, the pension age became 66 years and 6 months, and from 1 July 2023, the pension age will increase to 67, the proposed cap.
a residency requirement requires an applicant to have been a resident in Australia for the last 10 years, with no break in residency for 5 of those years, and be in Australia on the day the application is lodged. If the applicant is a resident in one of the 31 country with which Australia has an International Social Security Agreement, residence in that country may count towards the minimum 10-year residence requirement. The applicant may be entitled to other residency exemptions such as lodging the claim in an agreement country.
income and assets tests apply and determine whether a pension is payable and the rate of payment. Deeming rules are used to assess income from financial assets. Since 1 January 2015, the deeming rules also apply to account-based income streams."
Social security in Australia,"JobSeeker Payment
JobSeeker Payment is the main unemployment benefit paid to eligible Australians and permanent residents aged 22 to 64. To be eligible, a person must apply for the benefit and be actively seeking work, undertaking approved training or performing approved volunteer work. On 1 July 1991, the ""Newstart Allowance"" replaced the Unemployment Benefit (UB) which had been unchanged since 1945. It was part of a government reform called Newstart – the Active Employment Strategy.
The Newstart Allowance was formally renamed to the JobSeeker Payment on 20 March 2020.
A job seeker receiving this payment is paid on the basis of a 'mutual agreement' between the customer and Centrelink, where Centrelink will continue to pay fortnightly payments to the customer for so long as the customer attempts to find employment and fulfills their mutual obligation requirements. These mutual agreements are negotiated between Centrelink and the job seeker, and often includes participation in the jobactive program. These agreements are then recorded in a ""Job Plan"", a written document which outlines the personal process for an individual to no longer need the JobSeeker Payment. Activities to which a job seeker may have to agree, in order to continue receiving the Newstart Allowance, include applying for a specific number of jobs (usually ten) per fortnight and recording these applications in a Centrelink issued diary, undertaking vocational education or training, paid work experience, participation in a labour market program or Work for the Dole project, and other activities, such as voluntary work if considered appropriate by Centrelink. For example, more elderly customers who have been made redundant and are approaching the age pension age, and who may face considerable difficulties re-entering the labour market, are often permitted to fulfil their plan by engaging in voluntary activities alone. A job seeker has to nominate and engage in one activity (for example, either a vocational education activity or Work for the Dole activity) in any one mutual obligation period (lasting six months at a time).
Clients are not expected to engage in the more intensive of these activities as soon as their receipt of the allowance commences. The amount of activity required on behalf of the client in order to continue receiving his/her benefit is usually staggered as follows:"
Social security in Australia,"Ordinarily, during the first three months of unemployment, a job seeker has no other obligations but to submit a fortnightly Application For Payment form at the local office. The form asks the applicant a number of questions about his /her circumstances and for the basic details of four positions for which the job seeker applied in the last fortnight. Customers may also be required to make up to 10 'Job Search Contacts' per fortnight (dependent on the local labour market and their personal circumstances) and record the details of these jobs within a specifically issued Job Seeker Diary for a given period of time. The job seeker then takes the Application For Payment form personally to the local Centrelink Office. They will then attend a short one-on-one interview with a Centrelink officer. The interview is usually for the purposes of checking that the application form is in order and that the applicant is aware of any appointments that may need to be attended, and obligations that may need to be met. The client at this stage also has the opportunity to talk to a Centrelink officer about any problems the client may be encountering without having to make a prior appointment first.
If after an initial three months of unemployment, during which the job seeker has only to hand in the fortnightly application form and record the Job Seeker Diary, the client remains unemployed; the client will be required to attend appointments with a Job Services Australia provider whose responsibility it is to assist the client to re-enter the workforce. The job seeker also has to attend a two-week training course which focuses on job-searching skills such as writing resumes and attending interviews.
If the customer remains unemployed for twelve months, they are then subject to the Work Experience Phase of their Employment Pathway Plan, which consists of more intensive assistance involving the activities listed above such as Work for the Dole, accredited study, part-time work, volunteer work or a combination of these. A Job Services Australia provider may require a JobSeeker recipient to do voluntary work (up to 15 hours a week), for which clients receive a supplement to their benefit of $20.80 per fortnight. The supplement is also paid to Work for the Dole participants. They must also continue to apply for 4 or more positions at the same time to meet their mutual obligations.
If the client becomes long-term unemployed (24 months or longer), the client's activity requirements will usually consist of another Work Experience Phase style activity for six months in any twelve-month period. (Australia's unemployment benefits do not have a time limit: it is, in theory, possible to remain on unemployment benefits for the whole of one's adult life).
The JobSeeker rates are adjusted on 20 March and 20 September each year. As of September 2013, the basic JobSeeker rate for a single unemployed person without children was A$501 per fortnight. However, this basic rate does not include supplemental payments—including include Rent Assistance of up to A$121.00 per fortnight—and other supplements such as Pharmaceutical Allowance, Telephone Allowance, Remote Area Allowance, Training Supplement, and the Work for the Dole Supplement; which are paid depending on personal circumstances and activity. Rates differ for married couples, registered relationships or de facto couples (including same-sex or opposite-sex couples) and persons with children. Despite significant increases in the cost of living, the increases to Newstart/JobSeeker have not kept pace with inflation. The initial income threshold has only risen from 1987's $60 to $62 in 2000.
On 1 March 2010, the Australian Government introduced changes to Disability Employment Services (DES). Multiple existing programs were streamlined into two clearly distinct programs, making assessment and referral processes less complex. 
All eligible job seekers with disability have access to individually tailored services which meet their needs including capacity building, training, work experience and other 'interventions' to help participants obtain and maintain suitable employment . DES providers support and manage a participant's condition in the workplace, along with providing ongoing support in the workplace for as long as it is required. 
New compliance rules were introduced on 1 July 2011, dealing with client meetings with a DES provider and payment suspension. Data released in mid-November 2013 showed that the number of welfare recipients had grown by 55%. In 2007 228,621 Newstart Allowance recipients were registered, a total that increased to 646,414 in March 2013.
In January 2014, Patrick McClure was appointed by the Abbott government to a review targeting benefits on people in receipt of Newstart Allowance and the Disability Support Pension, due to report in February 2014.
In the 2016 Australian federal budget, the Turnbull government planned to cease the clean-energy supplement of $4.40 for people beginning Newstart after 20 September.
In October 2017, the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) stated that the Newstart Allowance was $160 below the poverty line. In May 2018, the Business Council of Australia also advocated for increasing the Newstart Allowance, saying that it is impossible to live on. In March 2018, Newstart was raised by 50 cents per day, which was criticised as inadequate. After handing down the 2018 Australian federal budget, Treasurer Scott Morrison rejected calls to increase the rate of the Newstart Allowance, saying ""my priority is to give tax relief to people who are working and paying taxes"". Newstart had not been increased since 1994, when it was increased by $2.95 per week.
In 2018, the Anti-Poverty Network of South Australia, with the Newstart Choir, recorded a revised version of the 'It's Time' song used by the Australian Labor Party in 1972 to win the election after 23 years of Conservative Government. The song is a campaign to the Australian Labor Party to commit, if elected at the next federal election, to raising Newstart.
In September 2018, the base Newstart rate was raised by $2.20 per week.
On 22 February 2021, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced that the JobSeeker base rate would be increased by A$50 a fortnight from April 2021. The JobSeeker Payment will rise to A$614 a fortnight, with an estimated cost over forward estimates of A$9 billion. It is also intended to increase the threshold amount recipients can earn before their payment starts to be reduced. The mutual obligations that a recipient must follow also became more demanding.
The Albanese government announced that existing mutual obligation penalties would be wiped clean from people's records as the government transitioned to the Workforce Australia system. Under Workforce Australia, JobSeekers will have to earn 100 points per month and report them online, including 4 job searches per month, with a list of approved activities each given different points values. In addition to activities that can earn points, jobseekers must attend meetings with job agencies to keep their payments, which can be up to 90 minutes away. A jobseeker in a remote area has had to spend over 7 hours away from home in order to attend job agency meetings. Furthermore, a jobseeker has been forced to choose between attending work and attending required job agency meetings. Job agencies can claim 'outcome payments' when they find work for a jobseeker, and also when the jobseeker finds work for themselves."
Social security in Australia,"Coronavirus assistance
In 2020, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and to assist people in isolation and encourage Australia's economic recovery, supplementary payments were added to the basic welfare payments. An additional A$550 per fortnight 'Coronavirus Supplement' was paid, originally only for six months, starting on 27 April and finishing on 24 September 2020.
On 20 July, it was announced that the Supplement would be extended, but in altered form, beyond 24 September. After 24 September, the rate was reduced to $250 per fortnight. On 1 December, it reduced to $150 per fortnight. The Supplement ceased on schedule after 31 March 2021.
The Coronavirus Supplement was paid to recipients of:"
Social security in Australia,"JobSeeker Payment, Partner Allowance, Widow Allowance, Sickness Allowance and Wife Pension
Youth Allowance for job seekers
Youth Allowance for students and apprentices
Austudy for students and apprentices
ABSTUDY for students getting Living Allowance
Parenting Payment partnered and single
Farm Household Allowance
Special Benefit
In addition, there was also a once-off $750 Economic Support Payment (ESP) paid from late March to eligible JobSeeker Payment and other recipients. A second ESP was only available to those who did not receive the Coronavirus Supplement."
Social security in Australia,"Temporary COVID Disaster Payment
On 3 June 2021, after Victoria's fourth COVID lockdown was extended by a week, the Federal Government announced the 'Temporary COVID Disaster Payment' for people who lose work as a result of lockdowns, of at least 7 days length. These people may be eligible to receive A$325 or A$500 per week, depending on hours of work lost."
Social security in Australia,"Youth Allowance
Youth Allowance is an income support payment available to unemployed young people aged 16 to 21 (aged 18 to 24 if a full-time student and Australian Apprentices). Youth Allowance recipients are considered to either be dependent on a caregiver(s), or independent. The underlying philosophy of Youth Allowance is that legal guardians are responsible for supporting their children where they have the means if that young person has not lived independently from them.
Dependent recipients are subject to the Parental Income Test and Family Assets Test, unless a parent is in receipt of a specified income support payment themselves. A dependent Youth Allowance recipients may be exempt from the Parental Income Test if their parent is in receipt of an income support payment themselves. A dependent recipient's rate of payment will be reduced as a result of parental income above the parental income free area, although the parental income free area can be increased by sibling concessions.
Dependent Youth Allowance recipients may also be subject to the Family Actual Means Test (FAMT) which applies where the parent is self-employed, involved in a trust or company or several other categories. The rationale behind the FAMT is that the taxable income on which Youth Allowance is normally based may not accurately reflect the true financial means of parents in these categories. It asks for details of the family's spending on living expenses during the relevant tax year and extrapolates an equivalent notional taxable income from this. Sole traders involved in primary production and parents receiving drought assistance such as Exceptional Circumstances Relief Payment are exempt.
All Youth Allowance recipients are subject to the Personal Income Test, which takes into account any income they may earn through part-time or casual work. If an independent Youth Allowance customer has a partner, then their income will be included under the Partner Income Test.
Youth Allowance has lower payment rates for recipients who live with a parent or guardian compared to those who live away from home. Recipients living 'away from home' may also be eligible for Rent Assistance.
15-year-olds can also receive Youth Allowance if they are defined as independent and are over the school leaving age in the state of residence. The school leaving age is 17 in all states and territories of Australia.
Youth Allowance was introduced from July 1998 and replaced Youth Training Allowance and Newstart Allowance for job seekers under 21 and AUSTUDY for students under 25.
In 2009 a number of significant changes to Youth Allowance were announced in that year's Federal Budget. Some of the proposed changes included introducing new scholarships for university students, and changes to the independence criteria and Parental Income Test. These changes were passed by Parliament on 17 March 2010. The changes will be implemented over a number of years, beginning with the introduction of new scholarships from 1 April 2010.
In the 2011–12 Budget, the Australian Government announced that from 1 July 2012, Youth Allowance (other) was to be extended to 21-year-olds (21-year-olds were eligible for Newstart Allowance). 21-year-olds who were on Newstart Allowance, or who had applied for it, by 1 July 2012 were not affected by the change."
Social security in Australia,"Austudy Payment
The Austudy Payment was originally known as the AUSTUDY Scheme (January 1987–June 1998), an all-ages study allowance, but since the introduction of Youth Allowance (see above) it has been reserved for the over-25s. To qualify, one must be an Australian resident, over 25, and studying full-time at an approved education institution. However, students who were receiving a Youth Allowance prior to turning 25 and are still pursuing the same course of study continue to receive a Youth Allowance until they finish (or otherwise terminate) their course.
Unlike Youth Allowance, Austudy recipients are considered to be independent and are not subject to the Parental Income Test, Family Assets Test and the Family Actual Means Test. As part of the 2007 Australian federal budget, Austudy Payment recipients were eligible for Rent Assistance from 1 January 2008. Prior to 1 January 2008, Rent Assistance was not payable with Austudy. Like most Centrelink payments, Austudy Payments are subject to a personal and/or partner income and assets test."
Social security in Australia,"ABSTUDY
ABSTUDY (The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Study Assistance Scheme) is a welfare payment for Indigenous Australians undergoing some form of study. All Indigenous students at secondary or tertiary institutions, as well as those studying by correspondence, and primary students who turned 14 prior to 1 January of their current year of study. To qualify as Indigenous, a student must be of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent by Centrelink standards and be a current Australian citizen. ABSTUDY is tailored according to income tests, and the status of partners, guardians, and dependent children.
Whilst this payment is administered through Centrelink, the payment is made under ABSTUDY Policy. The responsibility for ABSTUDY Policy rests with the Minister of Education and the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, and is not contained within the Social Security Act 1991."
Social security in Australia,"Disability Support Pension
The Disability Support Pension (DSP) provides income support for people who suffer a long-term disability, which in the opinion of an assessor they will not recover from in the next two years, and which will render them unable to work or participate in a training activity enabling them to work. The basic rate for a single person is A$782.20 (as at March 2015); different rates apply to persons under 18 with no children, and to couples, married, de facto or in a same-sex relationship. The payment is income and assets-tested. However, if an applicant is permanently blind, they can receive DSP without income and assets tests, and without needing to prove any inability to work, etc. DSP can take a while to process, so as a temporary measure claimants are placed on another payment (e.g. Newstart with a medical certificate to cover the activity tests) while the payment is being assessed; once granted it is backdated to the claim date at the higher DSP rate.
In the 2011 Australian federal budget, there were changes introduced to the Disability Support Pension, including that people under the age of 35 would be placed onto the Newstart Allowance for the first 18 months.  Furthermore, the eligibility criteria for the DSP became more strict under the Gillard government.
Patrick McClure was in January 2014 appointed by the Abbott government to a review targeting benefits on people in receipt of Newstart Allowance and the Disability Support Pension, reporting in February 2014. Eligibility criteria for the DSP has been made more strict, and unsuccessful claimants can only receive the Newstart Allowance, which pays $170 less per week.  According to the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS), between 2010 and 2016 there was a large drop in successful claims to the DSP. To be eligible for the DSP, a person's condition must be ""fully diagnosed, fully treated and fully stabilised"", which has had the unintended consequence of making it harder for cancer patients to access the DSP – unless their condition is terminal."
Social security in Australia,"Sickness Allowance
A Sickness Allowance was paid for those currently suffering an illness, injury, or disability (short-term i.e. less than two years), are employed, and have no access to leave or have used all their leave. It was paid under the Newstart system without an Activity Test. Sickness Allowance was equal to the Newstart Allowance but only one of these payments can be claimed (you don't get both). In order to be granted a Sickness Allowance you had to be registered with Centrelink, which includes reporting your earned income each fortnight through your myGov account. You automatically ceased being eligible for either payment if your earned income exceeds the allowance-rate over three consecutive fortnightly reporting periods. Once ineligible you become subject to a waiting period before being paid any applicable welfare payment (whether it be Newstart or Sickness, or any other payment). This waiting period, known as the exclusion period was generally six weeks however can be up to ten weeks in which you will have to survive on your own, without any government benefits. This waiting/exclusion period was not backdated, so any payment approved by Centrelink will start only once the exclusion period is exhausted."
Social security in Australia,"Carer Payment
A Carer Payment is made to those providing a level of care to someone who is ill, injured or has a disability. A medical certificate and other supporting documentation is required. Centrelink does not offer any related services for Carers, nor does it provide any other support or welfare follow-up, nor does it carry out any process to ensure, or validate, actual service delivery. Carers are wholly responsible for their caring duties which is negotiated between the Carer and Caree' on an individual and personal-needs basis."
Social security in Australia,"Parenting Payment
A payment for those who are principal carers of dependent children under the age of 6 for partnered customers and children under the age of 8 for single customers.  Parenting Payment Partnered is classified as an allowance and Parenting Payment Single is classified as a pension.
A controversial decision by the Labor party in 2006 and 2013, to transfer sole parents to the lower Newstart payment, has placed sole parents well below the poverty line.  Welfare groups have reported these parents, 82.3% of which are women (ABS 2011), are turning to prostitution (because of the cash in hand options), have given up their education and are sleeping in their cars. This decision was made as an incentive for parents to seek work, as 57% of primary residential mothers work and 70% of primary residential fathers work (ABS 2011). With one quarter of single parent households headed by a single parent being 896,542 families (17.7% male & 82.3% female, ABS 2011)
Parenting Payment Partnered uses an individual and a partner income test to determine the rate of payment with benefit withdrawal rates of 60 cents in the dollar (as of 1 July 2007) on income over the legislated limits. A partner's gross earnings are assessed as shared, regardless of individual tax already paid. If, for example, the breadwinner is currently paying 30 per cent personal tax, the effective marginal tax rate (EMTR) after benefit withdrawal is 90 percent of earnings above the legislated limit (the EMTR prior to 1 July 2007 is 100% as the benefit withdrawal rate is 70% of the partner's earnings above the legislated income limit)."
Social security in Australia,"Additional and supplementary payments
Rent Assistance
Income support recipients who are classed as non-homeowners and pay more than a required amount of board or rent for accommodation are eligible for Rent Assistance payments. This payment is paid as part of the income support payment. Verification of the rent details is required, either a lease or by completing a Rent Certificate every six months. The amount of rent assistance a recipient is eligible for depends on the amount of rent one is paying. The basic rate for a single person with no children and not sharing accommodation is as follows. As at 28 January 2010, Rent Assistance begins to be paid when a renter's fortnightly rent is in excess of A$99.40. For every dollar in excess of this amount, Rent Assistance pays A$0.75, up to a maximum of A$111.80 per fortnight. The maximum amount payable is lower for those sharing accommodation, in which case it is A$74.53. Different rates apply to couples, couples separated by illness, couples temporarily separated and singles and couples with dependent children. An example of an income support payment is the Newstart Allowance which comprises a base rate plus rent assistance. An ""income support payment"" is an umbrella term (or classification of payment) which is sometimes used instead of detailing the name of the particular payment. It does not represent a payment of its own but could mean any one of Centrelink's welfare payments, e.g. the Newstart Allowance is an income support payment."
Social security in Australia,"Pharmaceutical Allowance
A payment of A$6.00 per fortnight for those receiving certain Centrelink payments, to help cover the cost of prescription medicines. The amount covers the cost of one prescription per fortnight for a concession card holder eligible for the concessional rate of medicines (A$5.90 per script from 1 January 2013). This payment is only given if you are able to prove to Centrelink that you require prescribed medication. A Centrelink Medical Certificate can be obtained online from my.gov.au or from a branch, which will need to be filled out by a registered medical professional and then submitted to Centrelink for consideration. This allowance can drop-off on its own so recipients must call Centrelink to notify them of this, when or if this occurs. Undercalculated payments can take one business day to correct however an underpayment is more likely to be paid in your next fortnightly pay with your regular entitlement. which are covered under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, which covers most prescription medicines available."
Social security in Australia,"Telephone Allowance
A payment issued quarterly to eligible customers receiving pension payments, to help cover the cost of telephone bills. Eligible customers must have a telephone service subscribed in their name to be eligible for Telephone Allowance. There are two rates payable: a basic rate of A$23.40 and a higher rate of A$35.20. JobSeeker Recipients are not eligible."
Social security in Australia,"A New Tax System (Family Assistance) Act 1999
Payments made under the A New Tax System (Family Assistance) Act 1999 include:"
Social security in Australia,"Family Tax Benefit Part A – for parents or carers to help with the cost of raising children.
Family Tax Benefit Part B – for single income families or sole parents.
Maternity Immunisation Allowance – for fully immunised children or those exempt from immunisation
Child Care Benefit – for families to help with the cost of child care.
Schoolkids Bonus – for families for the cost of education for children in primary and secondary school."
Social security in Australia,"Family Tax Benefit
Family Tax Benefit is a per-child payment made through Services Australia to the people with at least 35 per cent of care for a child. Family Tax Benefit is income-tested on a family's adjusted taxable income in the given financial year. Income support recipients are exempt from the income test and are entitled to the maximum rate of payment.
Payments can be paid in fortnightly instalments or as a lump sum payment at the end of the year. For Family Tax Benefit paid in instalments, the income test is based on an estimate of adjusted taxable income that is reconciled after the recipient has lodged their tax return. The reconciliation process compares the estimated income with their actual income. "
Social security in Australia,"Centrelink debt is accrued for overpayments, when customers underestimate their income.
A top-up payment is granted at the end of the year, when customers overestimate their income which can be used to repay outstanding Centrelink debt.
Childless persons, or non-parents, are not entitled to the Family Tax Benefit payments.
Family Tax Benefit Part B is paid based on the lower of the recipient and their partner's income, or, for a single parent at the maximum rate."
Social security in Australia,"Maternity Immunisation Allowance
Maternity Immunisation Allowance is paid to parents whose children who have received all immunisations specified by the national immunisation schedule by the time they are 2 years old. Alternatively, if the parents object to immunisation on any grounds and inform Centrelink of this, they may also receive this allowance. The allowance ceased on 1 July 2012."
Social security in Australia,"Child Care Benefit
Child Care Benefit assists Australian parents with the cost of approved and registered child care. It is a means tested payment and is based on the recipient's taxable income; low income families receive the highest rate of Child Care Benefit.
The Australian Government spent approximately $2.1 billion on Child Care Benefit to assist families with the cost of child care in the financial year ending 30 June 2011."
Social security in Australia,"Schoolkids Bonus
In May 2012, the Australian Government abolished the Education Tax Refund (ETR) that allowed families to claim a refund for education expenses through the Australian Taxation Office (ATO). The Schoolkids Bonus replaced the ETR from 1 January 2013. The Schoolkids Bonus aimed to assist families and students with the costs of education for children in primary and secondary school. The School Kids Bonus is paid in 2 equal instalments each year in January and July."
Social security in Australia,"Paid Parental Leave Scheme
The Paid Parental Leave Scheme provides financial support to eligible working parents of newborn or recently adopted children. Under the scheme, the government funds employers to provide Parental Leave Pay or Dad and Partner Pay to their eligible employees.
Parental Leave Pay is paid to the child's primary carer and eligible parents for up to 18 weeks of pay based on the rate of National Minimum Wage. Dad and Partner Pay is for eligible working dads or partners (including adopting parents and same-sex couples) for up to two weeks of pay based on the rate of National Minimum Wage.
This scheme does not apply to casual employees who do not have paid leave entitlements. Women who are engaged in casual rate employment who are ineligible for paid maternity leave and who are unable to continue employment due to pregnancy are not entitled to the Paid Parental Leave Scheme. Unemployed pregnant women may be eligible to apply for an income support payment however normal eligibility criteria applies."
Social security in Australia,"Concession cards
The following concession cards are issued by Centrelink:"
Social security in Australia,"Health Care Card – primarily entitles holder to PBS medications at the concession rate. This green paper card is the basic and most common Health Care Card which is sent to a recipient of a payment by post shortly after receiving their first payment and then each year before expiry, if still eligible. This card is given to those not eligible for a Commonwealth Seniors Concession, or Pensioner Concession Card. This card has secondary benefits, including cheaper public transport in some states, upon application. In order to gain a transport concession a separate application for concession needs to be made to the Department of Planning, Transport and Infrastructure and if successful, a transport concession card will be mailed to you. Heavy fines apply for using public transport on a concession-priced ticket without holding a valid transport concession card. A general Health Care Card does not entitle the bearer to transport concessions. Only Pensioner and Commonwealth Seniors Concession Card holders can apply for a transport concession card.
Commonwealth Seniors Health Card – a HCC issued to senior citizens
Pensioner Concession Card – this offers additional benefits to the Pensioner, including pensioner transportation fares (in some areas), and a certain number of free country rail journeys within the holder's state. Pensioners can enjoy discounted postal services including discounted stamps, and a whole range of discounted services including discounted cinema tickets, discounted meals when dining out, discounted hair cuts and discounts on all utility and home service costs."
Social security in Australia,"Prisons and psychiatric hospitals
Persons imprisoned or admitted to a psychiatric institution are generally not eligible to receive benefits for the duration of imprisonment or admission. (However, it may be payable if a psychiatric stay is classed as rehabilitation.) The benefits resume upon release or discharge. However, upon release or discharge from imprisonment or psychiatric hospitalisation of more than two weeks, the claimant is entitled to an additional payment equal to seven days of their regular payment, to help with adjustment."
Social security in Australia,"Review of social security decisions
Every decision made under social security law is to be in writing and given sufficient notice, usually in a letter. Applications for review of such decisions may be lodged at any time, but depending on the decision remedial action may only be taken if the review is received within 13 weeks of receiving notice, for decisions made under the Social Security act, or 52 weeks for decisions made under Family assistance law. At the bottom of each letter informing customers of a Centrelink decision, a ""your rights"" box informs individuals of potential avenues for review."
Social security in Australia,"Internal review
Legislation ultimately governs the decision-making process, and Centrelink policy guidelines provide the lens through which legislation is interpreted by Centrelink Customer Service Advisers (CSAs). However, notwithstanding legislation and policy, there are still many areas in which significant discretion is afforded to the decision maker, which may be subject to internal and external review."
Social security in Australia,"Original decision maker (ODM) review
Centrelink possesses a prescribed two-tiered system of internal review. The initial stage is the ODM Review, where the matter is brought back to the CSA for reconsideration. This is a wholly intra-office process and functions as an initial check on the decision, and the appeal progresses further from the ODM only if necessary. Many reviews are due to legislative changes, administrative errors, provision of new customer documentation, or customer disagreement with the decision. There is also the opportunity for the customer to make a formal written complaint. However, many individuals may not wish to have the same CSA make another decision, which may even lead to confusion as to whether internal review has actually taken place.
Once the ODM review has been completed it should contain the relevant legislative provisions, any new information considered, and a determination stating whether the original decision has been set aside, affirmed or varied."
Social security in Australia,"Authorised review officer (ARO) review
If the individual is not satisfied, an Authorised Review Officer (ARO), an officer delegated review powers from the Secretary for the purposes of social security law, may affirm, vary, or set aside the original decision. Although an employee of the Centrelink, an ARO is not to defend ODM decisions as it is a strong principle that the ARO is independent of the situation and has no previous involvement in the case. Nevertheless, AROs also look at legislation with the same policy guidelines as CSAs."
Social security in Australia,"External review
The Social Security Appeals Tribunal – SSAT
A customer dissatisfied with an internal review of a decision may apply to the Social Security Appeals Tribunal (SSAT) to review a decision affirmed, varied or set aside by internal review,  subject to some exceptions. The SSAT generally has the same powers as the Secretary, and may affirm, vary, set aside and substitute a decision or return the matter to Centrelink with recommendations. SSAT hearings are generally informal, confidential and not bound by  the Laws of Evidence.
Experience has indicated that at the SSAT more weighting goes towards the legislation as opposed to policy guidelines. Welfare advocacy groups such as the Welfare Rights Centre are often involved in providing legal help to individuals affected by Centrelink decisions. There is no Welfare Rights Centre in South Australia so complaints are to be raised with Centrelink directly.
As of 1 July 2015, the SSAT is no longer is a separate tribunal. Alongside the Migration Review Tribunal and the Refugee Review Tribunal, the SSAT has instead merged with the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT). Decisions deemed reviewable by the ARO are now heard in the Social Services and Child Support Division of the AAT. The primary functions of the SSAT as the first tier of the review process have been converted and are now known as the 'AAT first review'. Therefore, the traditional two-tier review process has morphed in light of the amalgamation but it has nevertheless been preserved within the AAT.
2019, SACAT South Australian Civil Administrative Tribunal deals with rental properties and issues between renters and landlords and agents, as well as deals with various licensing matters and handles reviews of mental health treatment orders including investigating and revoking involuntary psychiatric confinement orders, commonly enforced by the authoritarian Government."
Social security in Australia,"The AAT and the courts
A decision may be reviewed by the AAT on AAT ""first review"", after which it can be reviewed again on AAT ""second review"" if an applicant is unhappy after the first review. Further appeals (on questions of law only) are available to the Federal Court and High Court."
Social security in Australia,"The Ombudsman
The Commonwealth Ombudsman does not conduct a merits review (as would the ARO, SSAT or AAT), but considers the administrative decision-making process employed by Centrelink to reach the decision or carry out the action complained of.
Where the Ombudsman concludes that there has been a deficiency in Centrelink's action (for examples) the Ombudsman may make recommendations to Centrelink for remedial action. This may result in Centrelink changing their decision, or providing a better explanation of their decision.
Investigations by the Ombudsman are usually result from a complaint about a decision or action of Centrelink, and in the process of an investigation the Ombudsman is entitled to view Centrelink records and ask questions of Centrelink staff. While the Ombudsman does not have coercive powers to make Centrelink change a decision or act in a certain way, recommendations made by the Ombudsman are rarely rejected."
Social security in Australia,"See also
Economic history
Cashless Welfare Card
Welfare
Social safety net
Welfare reform
Unemployment benefits"
Social security in Australia,"References
External links
Services Australia
Commonwealth Ombudsman
Administrative Appeals Tribunal"
Prostitution in Australia,"Prostitution in Australia is governed by state and territory laws, which vary considerably, although none ban the selling of sex itself."
Prostitution in Australia,"Tasmania, Western Australia and South Australia operate under an abolitionism framework, where the selling of sex itself is not illegal, but activities such as keeping brothels and pimping are illegal.
The Australian Capital Territory operates under a legalisation framework, where sex work is legal, but brothels must be licensed and can face criminal penalties for operating without a license. Private sex work is legal if the sex worker is working alone.
The Northern Territory, New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria operate under a decriminalisation framework, where most criminal penalties associated with sex work have been removed and brothels or prostitutes are not required to be licensed, however all jurisdictions still have some remaining regulations in regards to where prostitutes or brothels can operate, or on other activities such as advertising.
There is no evidence of pre-colonial prostitution amongst Indigenous Australians, however sexual practices more consistent with the modern understanding of polygamy were common, such as the exchange of women to demonstrate friendship. Colonial-era prostitution was controlled via legislation such as the colonial versions of the Contagious Diseases Acts, passed in Victoria and Queensland. Although colonies such as South Australia chose not to pass any CD Act, seeing it as ""infringement on the rights of women and official condoning of immorality"". After Federation, criminal law was left in the hands of the states, which by and large did not make selling of sex itself illegal, although many acts associated with it such as solicitation, brothel keeping, and leasing accommodations were made illegal.
From the 1970s onwards, prostitution restrictions have generally eased. A 1990 Australian Institute of Criminology report recommended decriminalization of prostitution. New South Wales decriminalized street-based sex work in 1979, using a model subsequently adopted by jurisdictions such as New Zealand, and made brothels legal in 1995.
The United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS (UNAIDS), which issues regular statistics on sex work,  estimated there were around 20,500 sex workers in Australia in 2016. Scarlet Alliance, a national peer sex worker NGO, provides advocacy for sex workers in Australia."
Prostitution in Australia,"Queensland since August 2, 2024 is the most recent state to decriminalise sex work, removing most criminal penalties associated with sex work and abolishing the brothel licensing systems. Victoria decriminalised sex work in 2023. The Northern Territory decriminalised sex work in 2019."
Prostitution in Australia,"History
Sex work in Australia has operated differently depending on the period of time evaluated. For this reason discussion is divided into three distinct periods: convict, late colonial, and post-federation. Pre-colonial ""prostitution"" among Aboriginal peoples is not considered here, since it bore little resemblance to contemporary understanding of the term. The arrival of the Europeans changed this ""wife exchange"" system, once they started exchanging their European goods for sexual services from Aboriginal women. During the convict period, English common law applied, and dealt with brothel keeping, disorderly houses, and public nuisance. The late colonial period viewed prostitution as a public health issue, through the Contagious Diseases Acts, versions of which passed in Victoria and Queensland, with compulsory examination of prostitutes and detention in ""lock hospitals"" if found to be carrying a ""venereal disease"". South Australia chose not to pass any CD Act, seeing it as ""infringement on the rights of women and official condoning of immorality"". Since Federation in 1901, the emphasis has been on criminalising activities associated with prostitution. Although not explicitly prohibiting paid sex, the criminal law effectively produced a de facto prohibition."
Prostitution in Australia,"Convict period 1788–1840
Prostitution probably first appeared in Australia at the time of the First Fleet in 1788. Some of the women transported to Australia had previously worked in prostitution, while others chose the profession due to economic circumstances, and a severe imbalance of the sexes. While the 1822 Bigge Inquiry  refers to brothels, these were mainly women working from their own homes."
Prostitution in Australia,"Colonial period 1840–1901
In the colonial period, prior to federation, Australia adopted the Contagious Diseases Acts of the United Kingdom between 1868 and 1879 in an attempt to control venereal disease in the military, requiring compulsory inspection of women suspected of prostitution, and could include incarceration in a lock hospital.
Japan exported prostitutes called Karayuki-san during the Meiji and Taisho periods to China, Canada, the United States, Australia, French Indochina, British Malaya, British Borneo, British India and British East Africa where they served western soldiers and Chinese coolies. Japanese prostitutes were also in other European colonies in Southeast Asia like Singapore as well as Australia and the US."
Prostitution in Australia,"Federal period 1901–1970s
After federation, criminal law was left in the hands of the states. But criminal law relating to prostitution only dates from around 1910. These laws did not make the act of prostitution illegal but did criminalise many activities related to prostitution. These laws were based on English laws passed between 1860 and 1885, and related to soliciting, age restrictions, brothel keeping, and leasing accommodation."
Prostitution in Australia,"Post 1970s
Since the 1970s there has been a change toward liberalisation of prostitution laws, but although attitudes to prostitution are largely homogenous, the actual approaches have varied. A May 1990 Australian Institute of Criminology report recommended that prostitution not be a criminal offence, since the laws were ineffective and endangered sex workers. The NSW Wood Royal Commission into Police Corruption in 1995 recommended sex work be decriminalised to curb corruption and abuse of power..
Following South Korea passing its Anti-prostitution Law and subsequent crackdowns on brothels and prostitution, many Korean sex workers moved abroad, including to Australia. In 2011 Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs estimated there to be 1,000 Korean sex workers in Australia. A 2022 investigation by the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission and other agencies alleged that 14 Australian-based overseas student education providers worked with crime syndicates to obtain student visa for Korean sex workers.
The United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS UNAIDS has estimated the number of sex workers in Australia in 2012–2014 as between 20,000 and 25,000. Scarlet Alliance, a national peer sex worker NGO, provides advocacy for sex workers in Australia."
Prostitution in Australia,"Health
Despite discriminatory STI, BBV and HIV laws targeted at sex workers, peer education has been effective at keeping STIs in the sex worker population at a low level, similar to the general population, and comparable among the states. Although there had been claims that sex workers were responsible for STI levels in mining communities, subsequent research has shown this not to be true."
Prostitution in Australia,"Human trafficking in Australia
The number of people trafficked into or within Australia is unknown. Estimates given to a 2004 parliamentary inquiry into sexual servitude in Australia ranged from 300 to 1,000 trafficked women annually.
In 2006, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Trafficking in persons: global patterns lists Australia as one of 21 trafficking destination countries in the high category.
Australia did not become a party to the Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others when it was implemented in 1949. It has implemented in 1999 the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children, supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, to which it is a party. Australia has also ratified on 8 January 2007 the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography, which requires it to prohibit, besides other things, child prostitution. For the purpose of the Protocol, a child is any human being under the age of 18, unless an earlier age of majority is recognised by a country's law. In all Australian jurisdictions, the minimum age at which a person can engage in prostitution is 18 years, although it is argued against the age of consent, and it is always illegal to engage another in prostitution.
A 2020 research on migration, sex work and trafficking showed that, due to the decriminalisation of sex work in some of its states and to a recent increase in work visa opportunities for sections of migrant sex workers, the numbers of human trafficking victims into the sex industry in Australia had dramatically decreased."
Prostitution in Australia,"Australian Capital Territory
Sex work in the Australian Capital Territory is governed by the Sex Work Act 1992, following partial decriminalisation in 1992; that Act was originally known as the Prostitution Act 1992, being changed to its current name by the Prostitution Act (Amendment) Act 2018. Brothels are legal, but sex workers were required to register with the Office of Regulatory Services (ORS), subsequently Access Canberra. The ORS also registered and regulated brothels and escort agencies. Sex workers may work privately but must work alone. Soliciting remains illegal (Section 19).
Subsequent amending acts include the Prostitution Amendment Act 2002 and the Justice and Community Safety Legislation Amendment Act 2011
(Part 1.7), a minor administrative amendment."
Prostitution in Australia,"History
Prior to passage of the  Prostitution Act 1992, prostitution policy in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) consisted of ""containment and control"" under the Police Offences Act 1930
This prohibited keeping a brothel, persistently soliciting in a public place, or living on the earnings of prostitution. This law was not enforced. In 1991 a report entitled Prostitution in the ACT: Interim Report (Australian Capital Territory) was produced by the Select Committee on HIV, Illegal Drugs and Prostitution describing the then state of the industry, the shortcomings of the law, and the possible reforms available. Having considered the example of other Australian States that had adopted various other models, the committee recommended decriminalisation, which occurred in the 1992 Prostitution Act. Sex workers and brothel owners were required to register with the Office of Regulatory Services (ORS), subsequently Access Canberra, as were escort agencies, including sole operators."
Prostitution in Australia,"Legislative review 2011
The legal situation was reviewed again with a Standing Committee on Justice and Community Safety's inquiry into the ACT Prostitution Act 1992, following the death of a 16-year-old woman, Janine Cameron, from a heroin overdose in a brothel in 2008.
The inquiry was established on 28 October 2010. The committee, chaired by ACT Liberal MLA Vicki Dunne, devised terms of reference that were as follows:"
Prostitution in Australia,"the form and operation of the Act
identifying regulatory options, including the desirability of requiring commercially operated brothels to maintain records of workers and relevant proof of age, to ensure that all sex workers are over the age of 18 years
the adequacy of, and compliance with, occupational health and safety requirements for sex workers
any links with criminal activity
the extent to which unlicensed operators exist within the ACT
other relevant matter
Written submissions were required by 26 February 2011 at which time 58 submissions had been received.
Submissions to the committee included Scarlet Alliance. The Alliance requested changes that would allow sex workers to work together, the removal of registration (which is rarely complied with), and the repeal of sections 24 and 25 dealing with sexually transmitted diseases. The Eros Association, which represents the industry also called for removal of registration and for an expansion into residential areas. As in other States and Territories, conservative Christian groups such as the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) called for criminalising clients.
 Groups supporting this position included the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women Australia, and the Catholic Church. Sex workers argued against it. 
Ms Dunne stated that the committee would consider exit schemes; however Attorney-General Simon Corbell stated that it was unlikely there will be any substantive changes to the status quo. The committee completed its hearings on evidence on 13 July 2011, and issued its report in February 2012. The Government issued a formal response in June, stating it would follow most of the recommendations and that the inquiry had affirmed that sex work was a legitimate occupation.
In the October 2012 elections the opposition Liberals campaigned on a platform to oppose allowing more than one sex worker to use a premise in suburban areas but were not successful in preventing a further term of the ALP Green alliance."
Prostitution in Australia,"Advocacy
Advocacy for sex workers in the ACT is undertaken by SWOP ACT (Sex Work Outreach Project)."
Prostitution in Australia,"New South Wales
New South Wales (NSW) has almost complete decriminalisation, and has been a model for other jurisdictions such as New Zealand. Brothels are legal in NSW under the Summary Offences Act 1988. The main activities that are illegal are:"
Prostitution in Australia,"living on the earnings of a prostitute, although persons who own or manage a brothel are exempt
causing or inducing prostitution (procuring: Crimes Act s.91A,B)
using premises, or allowing premises to be used, for prostitution that are held out as being available for massage, sauna baths, steam baths, facilities for exercise, or photographic studios
advertising that a premise is used for prostitution, or advertising for prostitutes
soliciting for prostitution near or within view of a dwelling, school, church or hospital
engaging in child prostitution (Crimes Act s.91C-F)
According to a 2009 report in the Daily Telegraph, illegal brothels in Sydney outnumbered licensed operations by four to one."
Prostitution in Australia,"History
Early era
NSW was founded in 1788 and was responsible for Tasmania until 1825, Victoria until 1851 and Queensland until 1859. It inherited much of the problems of port cities, penal colonies, and the gender imbalance of colonial life. Initially there was little specific legislation aimed at prostitution, but prostitutes could be charged under vagrancy provisions if their behaviour drew undue attention. In 1822 Commissioner Bigge reported stated there were 20 brothels in Sydney, and many women at the Parramatta Female Factory were involved in prostitution. The Prevention of Vagrancy Act 1835 was designed to deal with 'undesirables'. In 1848 the Sydney Female Refuge Society was set up in Pitt Street to care for prostitutes; its buildings were demolished in 1901 to make way for the new Central Railway Station.
The 1859 Select Committee into the Condition of the Working Classes of the Metropolis described widespread prostitution. Nineteenth-century legislation included the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1883 and Police Offences Act 1901. Attempts to pass contagious diseases legislation were resisted, and unlike other States, legislative control was minimal till the general attack on 'vice' of the first decade of the twentieth century which resulted in the Police Offences Amendment Act 1908, and the Prisoners Detention Act. Street prostitution was controlled by the Vagrancy Act 1902 (sec. 4[1] [c]) enabling a woman to be arrested as a 'common prostitute'. This was strengthened by an amendment of the Police Offences (Amendment) Act 1908, which also prohibited living on the earnings."
Prostitution in Australia,"Modern era
Strengthening the laws
The Vagrancy Act was further strengthened in 1968, making it an offence to 'loiter for the purpose of prostitution' (sec. 4 [1] [k]). These provisions were then incorporated into the Summary Offences Act 1970, s.28."
Prostitution in Australia,"Decriminalisation
In the 1970s an active debate about the need for liberalisation appeared, spearheaded by feminists and libertarians, culminating under the Wran ALP government in the Prostitution Act 1979. Eventually NSW became a model for debates on liberalising prostitution laws. But almost immediately, community pressure started to build for additional safeguards, particularly in Darlinghurst , although police still utilised other legislation such as the Offences in Public Places Act 1979 for unruly behaviour. Eventually, this led to a subsequent partial recriminalisation of street work with the Prostitution (Amendment) Act 1983, of which s.8A stipulates that;
(1) A person in a public street shall not, near a dwelling, school, church or hospital, solicit another person for the purpose of prostitution ... 
(2) A person shall not, in a school, church or hospital, solicit another person for the purpose of prostitution.
This resulted in Darlinghurst street workers relocating.
Further decriminalisation of premises followed with the implementation of recommendations from the Select Committee of the Legislative Assembly Upon Prostitution (1983–86). Although the committee had recommended relaxing the soliciting laws, the new Greiner Liberal government tightened these provisions further in 1988 through the Summary Offences Act in response to community pressure.
The current regulatory framework is based on the Crimes Act 1900, Disorderly Houses Act 1943 (renamed Restricted Premises Act in 2002), Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979, and Summary Offences Act 1988. The suburbs of King's Cross in Sydney and Islington in Newcastle have been traditional centres of prostitution. New South Wales legalises street prostitution, but community groups in those locations have occasionally lobbied for re-criminalisation.
As promised in its 2011 election campaign, the Liberal Party sought review of the regulation of brothels. In September 2012, it issues a discussion paper on review of the regulations. It stated that the purpose was three-fold, the protection of residential amenity; protection of sex workers and safeguarding public health. Nevertheless, there is no evidence of a negative effect of brothels on the community."
Prostitution in Australia,"Politics
Generally prostitution policy in NSW has been bipartisan. But in 2010 the Liberal (centre-right) opposition announced that it would make prostitution reform part of its campaign for the March 2011 State election. The plan would involve a new licensing authority, following revelations that the sex industry had been expanding and operating illegally as well as in legal premises. The Liberals claimed that organised crime and coercion were part of the NSW brothel scene. The last reform was in 2007, with the Brothels Legislation Act. The Liberals were duly elected as the new government in that election.
Advocacy for sex workers in NSW is undertaken by SWOP NSW (Sex Workers Outreach Project)."
Prostitution in Australia,"Northern Territory
Sex work including the operation of brothels and street work became legal, subject to regulation, in the Northern Territory in 2019 with the passage of the Sex Industry Act which repealed earlier legislation."
Prostitution in Australia,"History
Unlike other parts of Australia, the Northern Territory remained largely Aboriginal for much longer, and Europeans were predominantly male. Inevitably this brought European males into close proximity with Aboriginal women. There has been much debate as to whether the hiring of Aboriginal women (Black Velvet) as domestic labour but also as sexual partners constituted prostitution or not. Certainly these inter-racial liaisons attracted much criticism. Once the Commonwealth took over the territory from South Australia in 1911, it saw its role as protecting the indigenous population, and there was considerable debate about employment standards and the practice of 'consorting'.
Pressure from reform came from women's groups such as Women Against Discrimination and Exploitation (WADE). (Bonney 1997) In 1992 the Prostitution Regulation Act reformed and consolidated the common law and statute law relating to prostitution. The first report of the Escort Agency Licensing Board in 1993 recommended further reform, but the Government did not accept this, feeling there would be widespread opposition to legalising brothels. The Attorney-General's Department conducted a review in 1996. A further review was subsequently conducted in 1998. In 2004 The Suppression of Brothels Act 1907 (SA) in its application to the Territory was repealed by the Prostitution Regulation Act 2004 (NT). Under this legislation brothels and street work were illegal, but The Northern Territory Licensing Commission could license Northern Territory residents for a licence to operate an escort agency business. Sole operators were legal and unregulated. Sex workers protested against the fact that the NT was the only part of Australia where workers had to register with the police."
Prostitution in Australia,"Sex Industry Act 2019
In June 2010, the NT Government rejected calls from the NT Sex Workers Outreach Programme for legalisation of brothels. As elsewhere in Australia, legalisation was opposed by the Australian Christian Lobby.
The ALP government, elected in 2016, issued a discussion paper in March 2019. Following the consultation period in May, legislation was prepared, and introduced in September as the Sex Industry Bill. It was referred to committee on 18 September, inviting public submissions. The Economic Policy Scrutiny Committee reported on 20 November, with the Government response on the 26th. The Bill was considered and passed by the Legislative Assembly that day, effectively decriminalising prostitution in the Territory, and coming into force on 16 December 2019. The move was welcomed by the United Nations HIV/AIDS Programme (UNAIDS)."
Prostitution in Australia,"Anti-Discrimination Amendment 2022
In November 2022, the NT Government passed the Anti-Discrimination Amendment Bill giving full protection of sex workers making it the first region in the world to do so."
Prostitution in Australia,"Queensland
Since full implementation on August 2, 2024 under proclamation sex work within Queensland has been formally decriminalized and brothels are allowed and permitted. There is still official restrictions on sex work that are “near or close proximity to schools, hospitals and churches” within legislation."
Prostitution in Australia,"History
Much emphasis was placed in colonial Queensland on the role of immigration and the indigenous population in introducing and sustaining prostitution, while organisations such as the Social Purity Society described what they interpreted as widespread female depravity. Concerns led to the Act for the Suppression of Contagious Diseases 1868 (31 Vict. No. 40), part of a widespread legislative attempt to control prostitution throughout the British Empire through incarceration in lock hospitals. Brothels were defined in section 231 of the Queensland Criminal Code in 1897, which explicitly defined 'bawdy houses' in 1901. A further act relating to venereal disease control was the Health Act Amendment Act 1911 (2 Geo. V. No. 26). Solicitation was an offence under Clause 132E, and could lead to a fine or imprisonment. Other measures included the long-standing vagrancy laws and local by-laws.
The Fitzgerald Report (Commission of Inquiry into ""Possible Illegal Activities and Associated Police Misconduct"") of 1989 led to widespread concern regarding the operation of the laws, and consequently a more specific inquiry (Criminal Justice Commission. Regulating morality? An inquiry into prostitution in Queensland) in 1991. This in turn resulted in two pieces of legislation, the Prostitution Laws Amendment Act 1992 and the Prostitution Act 1999.
The Crime and Misconduct Commission reported on the regulation of prostitution in 2004, and on outcall work in 2006. Five amendments were introduced between 1999 and 2010. In August 2009 the Prostitution and Other Acts Amendment Bill 2009 was introduced and assented to in September, becoming the Prostitution and Other Acts Amendment Act 2010 proclaimed in March 2011."
Prostitution in Australia,"South Australia
Brothels are illegal in South Australia, under the Criminal Law Consolidation Act 1935 and the Summary Offences Act 1953. Soliciting in public places (maximum penalty of $750), receiving money from the prostitution of another, and procuring are illegal ($2,500 or jail for six months), but the act of prostitution itself is not."
Prostitution in Australia,"History
Early era
Despite the intentions of the founders, prostitution became identified early in the history of the colony, known as the 'social evil', and various government reports during the nineteenth century refer to estimates of the number of people working in prostitution. In 1842, within six years of the founding of the colony, it was reported that there were now ""large numbers of females who are living by a life of prostitution in the city of Adelaide, out of all proportion to the respectable population"".
The Police Act 1844 set penalties for prostitutes found in public houses or public places This was consistent with the vagrancy laws then operating throughout the British Empire and remained the effective legislation for most of the remainder of the century, although it had little effect despite harsher penalties enacted in 1863 and 1869."
Prostitution in Australia,"Following the scandal described by WT Stead in the UK, there was much discussion of the white slave trade in Adelaide, and with the formation of the Social Purity Society of South Australia in 1882 along similar lines to that in other countries, similar legislation to the UK Criminal Law Consolidation Amendment Act 1885 was enacted, making it an offence to procure the defilement of a female by fraud or threat (the 1885 Protection of Young Persons Act). Opinions were divided as to whether to address the issue of prostitution by social reform and 'prevention', or by legislation, and many debates were held concerning the need for licensing and regulation.
The twentieth century saw the Suppression of Brothels Bill 1907, the Venereal Diseases Act of 1920, the Police Act 1936 and Police Offences Act 1953."
Prostitution in Australia,"Modern era
While current legislation is based on acts of parliament from the 1930s and 1950s, at least six unsuccessful attempts have been made to reform the laws, starting in 1980. In 1978 one of many inquires was launched. Parliament voted a select committee of inquiry in August, renewed following the 1979 election. The Evidence Act 1978 was amended to allow witness immunity."
Prostitution in Australia,"Millhouse (1980)
The committee report (1980) recommended decriminalisation. Robin Millhouse's (former Liberal Attorney-General, but then a new LM and finally Democrat MLA) introduced (27 February 1980) a bill entitled ""A Bill for an Act to give effect to the recommendations of the Select Committee of Inquiry into prostitution."" It generated considerable opposition in the community and failed on a tied vote in the Assembly on 11 February 1981."
Prostitution in Australia,"Pickles (1986)
A further bill was introduced in 1986 (Carolyn Pickles ALP MLC 1985–2002) but dropped on 18 March 1987 due to Liberal opposition and community pressure, with a 13–2 vote."
Prostitution in Australia,"Gilfillan (1991)
A number of issues kept sex work in the public eye during 1990 and 1991. The next development occurred on 8 February 1991 when Ian Gilfillan (Australian Democrat MLC 1982–3) stated he would introduce a decriminalisation private members bill. He did so on 10 April 1991 but it met opposition from groups such as the Uniting Church and it lapsed when parliament recessed for the winter. Although he introduced a similar bill on 21 August 1991 but on 29 April 1992 a motion passed that resulted in the bill being withdrawn in favour of a reference to the Social Development Committee, although little was achieved by the latter during this time."
Prostitution in Australia,"Brindal (1993)
Another bill came in 1993 and then Mark Brindal, a Liberal backbencher, produced a discussion paper on decriminalisation in November 1994, and on 9 February 1995 he introduced a private member's bill (Prostitution (Decriminalisation) Bill) to decriminalise prostitution and the Prostitution Regulation Bill on 23 February. He had been considered to have a better chance of success than the previous initiatives due to a ""sunrise clause"" which would set a time frame for a parliamentary debate prior to it coming into effect. He twice attempted to get decriminalisation bills passed, although his party opposed this. The Decriminalisation Bill was discharged on 6 July, and the Regulation Bill was defeated on 17 July."
Prostitution in Australia,"Cameron (1998)
Meanwhile, the Committee released its final report on 21 August 1996, but it was not till 25 March 1998 that Terry Cameron MLC (ALP 1995–2006) introduced a bill based on it. It had little support and lapsed when parliament recessed."
Prostitution in Australia,"Brokenshire (1999)
The Liberal Police Minister, Robert Brokenshire, introduced four Bills in 1999, the Prostitution (Licensing) Bill 1999, the Prostitution (Registration) Bill 1999, the Prostitution (Regulation) Bill 1999 and the Summary Offences (Prostitution) Bill 1999, to revise the laws and decriminalise prostitution. The Prostitution (Regulation) Bill was passed by the House of Assembly and received by the Legislative Council on 13 July 2000, but defeated on 17 July 2001, 12:7. The Bill was also supported by the Australian Democrats. The then Minister for the status of Women, Diana Laidlaw is said to have been moved to tears, and called her colleagues ""gutless"". Another MLC, Sandra Kanck (Australian Democrat 1993–2009) angrily stated that sex workers had been ""thrown to the wolves by Parliament""."
Prostitution in Australia,"Key–Gago (2012–2013)
No further attempts to reform the law were made for some time, however in 2010 a governing Labor backbencher and former minister, Stephanie Key, announced she would introduce a private members decriminalisation bill. Religious groups immediately organised opposition, although the opposition Liberals promised to consider it. Consultations with the blackmarket industry continued and in June 2011 she outlined her intended legislation to amend the Criminal Law Consolidation Act 1935 and the Summary Offences Act 1953 to ensure sex workers had the same industrial rights and responsibilities as other workers, that minors under the age of 18 years were not involved in or associated with sex work, preventing sex services premises from being established within 200 metres of schools, centres for children or places of worship, allowing local government to regulate public amenity, noise, signage and location in relation to sex services premises with more than three workers, promote safe sex education and practice by clients and sex workers, and enable sex workers to report criminal matters to the police like in a similar matter to other citizens, but not where workers could report victims of abuse for intervention assistance or men who sought out such young women as potential rapists or pedophiles.
She presented her proposals to the Caucus in September 2011, and tabled a motion on 24 November 2011 ""That she have leave to introduce a Bill for an Act to decriminalise prostitution and regulate the sex work industry; to amend the Criminal Law Consolidation Act 1935, the Equal Opportunity Act 1984, the Fair Work Act 1994, the Summary Offences Act 1953 and the Workers Rehabilitation and Compensation Act 1986; and for other purpose"".
The proposal was opposed by the Family First Party that had ten per cent of the votes in the Legislative Council, where Robert Brokenshire now opposed decriminalisation. However Police Commissioner, Mal Hyde, stated that the laws need to change. After considerable discussion and some compromises the Sex Work Reform Bill was introduced in May 2012, but was defeated by one vote, 20 to 19 in a conscience vote on second reading in November 2012.
Status of Women Minister Gail Gago introduced a similar bill in the Legislative Council, but withdrew it following the defeat of Stephanie Key's Bill. Key introduced another Bill in May 2013."
Prostitution in Australia,"Lensink–Key–Chapman–Franks (2015–2019)
On 1 July 2015 Michelle Lensink Liberal MLC introduced an updated version of the Key-Gago legislation as a Private Member's Bill to the South Australian Legislative Council (53rd Parliament), the Statutes Amendment (Decriminalisation of Sex Work) Bill (LC44). Key and Lensink collaborated across party lines to develop the legislation, sexual exploitation being the obvious potential in an industry like this, and its introduction to the Legislative Council was intended to test key elements of the legislation with important opponents in the upper house. The Bill passed the upper house on 6 July 2017 but did not proceed past a second reading on 19 October 2017 in the Assembly, due to prorogation prior to the election the following March, which led to a change of government.
The Bill sought to decriminalise sex work by a number of legislative amendments. It would delete the term ""common prostitute"" from the Criminal Law Consolidation Act (1935) and Summary Offences Act (1953). In addition it would remove common law offences relating to sex work and add ""sex work"" to the Equal Opportunity Act making discrimination against a person for being a sex worker an offence. Criminal records relating to sex work, including brothels, would be deleted by amending the Spent Convictions Act. The Return to Work Act would be amended to recognise commercial sexual services as in any other business. Sex workers would also be covered under the Work Health and Safety Act
A further attempt to introduce the same Bill (Decriminalisation of Sex Work Bill LC2) was made on 9 May 2018 (54th Parliament), also as a private member's bill sponsored by the  Attorney-General Vickie Chapman and Tammy Franks MLC (Greens), and with the support of Liberal Premier Steven Marshall. Statistics published at the time showed that only four people had been fined for offering prostitution services in public between 1 October 2016 and 30 September 2019. In that period, 57 fines for other sex work offences, mainly for managing a brothel or receiving money in a brothel. The bill was again passed in the Legislative Council on 20 June 2019, but this time was defeated in the Assembly 24 to 19 on 13 November 2019 on a conscience vote on second reading. This was the thirteenth bill to fail over a 20-year time period."
Prostitution in Australia,"Tasmania
Prostitution is legal, but it is illegal for a person to employ or otherwise control or profit from the work of individual sex workers. The Sex Industry Offences Act 2005 states that a person must not be a commercial operator of a sexual services business – that is, ""someone who is not a self-employed sex worker and who, whether alone or with another person, operates, owns, manages or is in day-to-day control of a sexual services business"". Street prostitution is illegal.
This law explicitly outlines that it is illegal to assault a sex worker, to receive commercial sexual services, or provide or receive sexual services unless a prophylactic is used."
Prostitution in Australia,"History
Prostitution has existed in Tasmania (known as Van Diemen's Land prior to 1856) since its early days as a penal colony, when large numbers of convict women started arriving in the 1820s. Some of the women who were transported there already had criminal records related to prostitution, but most were labelled as such, despite it not being either illegal or grounds for deportation. Prostitution was not so much a profession as a way of life for some women to make ends meet, particularly in a society in which there was a marked imbalance of gender, and convict women had no other means of income. Certainly brothels were established by the end of the 1820s, and records show girls as young as 12 were involved, while prostitution was associated with the female factory at Cascades. Nevertheless, the concept of 'fallen women' and division of women into 'good' and 'bad' was well established. In an attempt to produce some law and order the Vagrancy Act 1824 was introduced.
The Van Diemen's Land Asylum for the Protection of Destitute and Unfortunate Females (1848) was the first establishment for women so designated. Other attempts were the Penitent's Homes and Magdalen Asylums as rescue missions. In 1879 like other British colonies, Tasmania passed a Contagious Diseases Act (based on similar UK legislation of the 1860s), and established Lock Hospitals in an attempt to prevent venereal diseases amongst the armed forces, at the instigation of the Royal Navy. The Act ceased to operate in 1903 in the face of repeal movements. However, there was little attempt to suppress prostitution itself. What action there was against prostitution was mainly to keep it out of the public eye, using vagrancy laws. Otherwise the police ignored or colluded with prostitution."
Prostitution in Australia,"Twentieth century
More specific legislation dates from the early twentieth century, such as the Criminal Code Act 1924 (Crimes against Morality), and the Police Offences Act 1935. Efforts to reform legislation that was clearly ineffective began in the 1990s. Prior to the 2005 Act, soliciting by a prostitute, living on the earnings of a prostitute, keeping a disorderly house and letting a house to a tenant to use as a disorderly house were criminal offences. Sole workers and escort work, which was the main form of prostitution in the stat, were legal in Tasmania.
Reform was suggested by a government committee in 1999. In December 2002 Cabinet agreed to the drafting of legislation and in September 2003, approved the release of the draft Sex Industry Regulation Bill for consultation. The Bill proposed registration for operators of sexual services businesses.
Consultation with agencies, local government, interested persons and organisations occurred during 2004, resulting in the Sex Industry Regulation Bill 2004 being tabled in Parliament in June 2005.
The Bill was supported by sex workers,
The Bill included offence provisions to ensure that Tasmania met its international obligations under the United Nations Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography (signed by Australia in 2001.) It passed the House of Assembly and was tabled in the Legislative Council, where it was soon clear that it would not be passed, and was subsequently lost. It was replaced by the Sex Industry Offences Act 2005. Essentially, in response to protests the Government moved from a position of liberalising to one of further criminalising. The Act that was passed consolidated and clarified the existing law in relation to sex work by providing that it was legal to be a sex worker and provide sexual services but that it was illegal for a person to employ or otherwise control or profit from the work of individual sex workers. A review clause was included because of the uncertainty as to what the right way to proceed was. The Act commenced 1 January 2006."
Prostitution in Australia,"2008 review
In 2008, the Justice Department conducted a review of the 2005 Act and received a number of submissions, in accordance with the provisions of the Act."
Prostitution in Australia,"The report was tabled in June 2009 and expressed concerns about the effectiveness of the legislation, and suggested considering alternatives.
In June 2010, the Attorney-General Lara Giddings announced the Government was going to proceed with reform, using former Attorney-General Judy Jackson's 2003 draft legislation as a starting point. Giddings became the Premier in a minority ALP government in January 2011. However, her Attorney-general, former premier David Bartlett, did not favour this position but resigned shortly afterwards, being succeeded by Brian Wightman."
Prostitution in Australia,"2012 review
Wightman released a discussion paper in January 2012. This was opposed by religious conservative groups, some feminist groups as well as community organisations with concerns about the potential a legalised sex industry to bring organised crime to the state, and included presentations from other States such as Sheila Jeffreys. The government invited submissions on the discussion paper until the end of March, and received responses from a wide range of individuals and groups. Wightman declined to refer the matter to the Law Reform Institute. After the review Wightman stated that there were no plans to make prostitution illegal ""Legal issues around the sex industry can be emotive and personal for many people... The Government's top priority is the health and safety of sex workers and the Tasmanian community."""
Prostitution in Australia,"Victoria
Victoria decriminalised sex work on 1 December 2023, by repealing the Sex Work Act 1994. This means that brothels no longer need to be licensed, and offenses such as a sex worker working with a sexually transmitted infection were repealed. The only offense remaining for street-based sex work is loitering or soliciting for sex work ""at or near"" a school, education or care service, children's service, or place of worship between the hours of 6am and 7pm, or at any time on prescribed ""days of religious significance"" at or near a specific religion's places of worship, being:"
Prostitution in Australia,"For Christian churches:
Good Friday,
Saturday before Easter Sunday,
Easter Sunday,
Christmas Eve,
Christmas Day.
(Note: the prescribed days of Easter are different for Eastern Orthodox churches, whose Easter date is determined by the Julian calendar instead of the Gregorian calendar, on which the Victorian Easter public holidays and most other Christian churchs' Easter dates rely on.)"
Prostitution in Australia,"For Muslim mosques:
Ramadan (a period of 30 days)
Eid al-Fitr (day after the end of Ramadan).
For Jewish synagogues:
Yom Kippur (a period of 2 days)
Hanukkah (a period of 8 days).
No other ""days of religious significance"" have been prescribed. Other offenses exist such as a business owner or manager allowing a person aged between 18 months and 18 years of age to enter or remain in a sexual services business except if that premises is primarily used as a residence.
Additionally, it is against the law to discriminate against someone, for example in rental applications or in employment, on the basis of ""lawful sexual activity"" under the Equal Opportunity Act 2010, and this includes sex work."
Prostitution in Australia,"History
Victoria has a long history of debating prostitution, and was the first State to advocate regulation (as opposed to decriminalisation in New South Wales) rather than suppression of prostitution. Legislative approaches and public opinion in Victoria have gradually moved from advocating prohibition to control through regulation. While much of the activities surrounding prostitution were initially criminalised de jure, de facto the situation was one of toleration and containment of 'a necessary evil'."
Prostitution in Australia,"19th century
Laws against prostitution existed from the founding of the State in 1851. The Vagrant Act 1852 included prostitution as riotous and indecent behaviour carrying a penalty of imprisonment for up to 12 months with the possibility of hard labour (Part II, s 3). The Conservation of Public Health Act 1878 required detention and medical examination of women suspected of being prostitutes,
 corresponding to the Contagious Diseases Acts in other parts of the British Empire. This Act was not repealed till 1916, but was relatively ineffective either in controlling venereal diseases or prostitution.
The Crimes Act 1891 included specific prohibitions under PART II.—Suppression of Prostitution Procurement (ss 14–17) or detention (ss 18–21) of women either through inducements or violence to work as prostitutes was prohibited, with particular reference to underage girls. The Police Offences Act 1891 separated riotous and indecent behaviour from prostitution, making it a specific offence for a prostitute to 'importune' a person in public (s 7(2)).
Despite the laws, prostitution flourished, the block of Melbourne bounded by La Trobe Street, Spring Street, Lonsdale Street and Exhibition Street being the main red light district, and their madams were well known. An attempt at suppression in 1898 was ineffectual."
Prostitution in Australia,"Early 20th century
The Police Offences Act 1907 prohibited 'brothel keeping', leasing a premise for the purpose of a brothel, and living off prostitution (ss 5, 6). Despite a number of additional legislative responses in the early years of the century, enforcement was patchy at best. Eventually amongst drug use scandals, brothels were shut down in the 1930s. All of these laws were explicitly directed against women, other than living on the avails.
In the 1970s brothels evaded prohibition by operating as 'massage parlours', leading to pressure to regulate them, since public attitudes were moving more towards regulation rather than prohibition. Initial attempts involved planning laws, when in 1975 the Melbourne Metropolitan Planning Scheme allowed for the operation of these parlours, even though they were known to be brothels, indeed the approval process required assurances that they would not be operated as such but this was not enforced. Community concerns were loudest in the traditional Melbourne stroll area of St. Kilda."
Prostitution in Australia,"Late 20th century: From prohibition to regulation
A Working Party was assembled in 1984 and led to the Planning (Brothel) Act 1984, as a new approach. Part of the political bargaining involved in passing the act was the promise to set up a wider inquiry. The inquiry was chaired by Marcia Neave, and reported in 1985. The recommendations to allow brothels to operate legally under regulation tried to avoid some of the issues that arose in New South Wales in 1979. It was hoped that regulation would allow better control of prostitution and at the same time reduce street work. The Government attempted to implement these in the Prostitution Regulation Act 1986. However, as in other States, the bill ran into considerable opposition in the upper house, was extensively amended, and consequently many parts were not proclaimed. This created an incoherent patchwork approach."
Prostitution in Australia,"21st century
In February 2022, Victoria passed legislation to decriminalise sex work. The Sex Work Decriminalisation Act 2021 will partially abolish street-based sex work offences and associated public health offences, remove the licensing system and move to regulate the industry through existing agencies."" From 1 December 2023, a sex services business will be able to operate exactly the same way as any other business in Victoria."
Prostitution in Australia,"Regulatory framework
In 1992 a working group was set up by the Attorney-General, which resulted in the Prostitution Control Act 1994 (PCA)
 (now known as the Sex Work Act 1994) This Act legalises and regulates the operations of brothels and escort agencies in Victoria. The difference between the two is that in the case of a brothel clients come to the place of business, which is subject to local council planning controls. In the case of an escort agency, clients phone the agency and arrange for a sex worker to come to their homes or motels. A brothel must obtain a permit from the local council (Section 21A). A brothel or escort agency must not advertise its services. (Section 18) Also, a brothel operator must not allow alcohol to be consumed at the brothel, (Section 21) nor apply for a liquor licence for the premises; nor may they allow a person under the age of 18 years to enter a brothel nor employ as a sex worker a person under 18 years of age, (Section 11A) though the age of consent in Victoria is 16 years.
Owner-operated brothels and private escort workers are not required to obtain a licence, but must be registered, and escorts from brothels are permitted. If only one or two sex workers run a brothel or escort agency, which does not employ other sex workers, they also do not need a licence, but are required to be registered. However, in all other cases, the operator of a brothel or escort agency must be licensed. The licensing process enables the licensing authority to check on any criminal history of an applicant. All new brothels are limited to having no more than six rooms. However, larger brothels which existed before the Act was passed were automatically given licences and continue to operate, though cannot increase the number of rooms. Sex workers employed by licensed brothels are not required to be licensed or registered. A person under 18 years is not permitted to be a sex worker (sections 5–7), and sex work must not be forced (section 8)
Amending Acts were passed in 1997 and 1999, and a report on the state of sex work in Victoria issued in 2002. More substantial amendments followed in 2008. The Consumer Affairs Legislation Amendment Act 2010 came into effect in November 2010. 'Prostitution' was replaced by 'Sex Work' throughout. The Act is now referred to as the Sex Work Act 1994. In 2011 further amendments were introduced, and assented to in December 2011. In addition to the Sex Work Act 1994, it amends the Confiscation Act 1997 and the Confiscation Amendment Act 2010. The stated purposes of the Act is to assign and clarify responsibility for the monitoring, investigation and enforcement of provisions of the Sex Work Act; to continue the ban on street  prostitution.
As part of the Sex Work Decriminalisation Act 2021, the Sex Work Act 1994 was completely repealed, effective from 1 December 2023. The only remaining consensual adult prostitution related offenses are loitering or soliciting for sex work at or near a place of worship or school at specific times, which are contained in the Summary Offenses Act 1966. Other offenses relating to children and non consensual prostitution were also transferred to other Acts. All regulatory and planning functions for brothels and other sex businesses now operate the same as any other business, with workplaces subject to WorkSafe Victoria requirements and subject to the Victorian Planning Provisions."
Prostitution in Australia,"2000s perspectives and reviews
Premises-based sex work
In November 2005, 95 licensed brothels existed in Victoria and a total of 2007 small owner-operators were registered in the state (Of these, 2003 were escort agents, two were brothels, and two were combined brothels and escort agents.) Of the 95 licensed brothels, 505 rooms existed and four rooms were located in small exempt brothels. Of 157 licensed prostitution service providers (i.e. operators), 47 were brothels, 23 were escort agencies and 87 were combined brothel-escort agencies. In March 2011, government data showed the existence of 98 licensed brothels in Victoria.
Based on the statements of William Albon, a representative of the Australian Adult Entertainment Industry (AAEI) (formerly the Australian Adult Entertainment Association (AAEA)), the number of illegal brothels in Victoria was estimated as 400 in 2008, with this estimation rising to 7,000 in 2011. In 2011 News.com.au published an estimate of 400 illegal brothels in the Melbourne metropolitan area—the article cited the news outlet's engagement with the Victorian State Government's Business Licensing Authority (BLA), the body responsible for registering owner-operated sex work businesses, but does not clarify from where or whom it obtained the estimate.
However, a 2006 study conducted by the University of Melbourne, Melbourne Sexual Health Centre and Victoria's Alfred Hospital, concluded that ""The number of unlicensed brothels in Melbourne is much smaller than is generally believed."" The study's results presented an estimate of between 13 and 70 unlicensed brothels in Melbourne, and the method used by the researchers involved a systematically analysis of the language used in advertisements from Melbourne newspapers published in July 2006 to identify sex industry venues that were indicated a likelihood of being unlicensed. A total of 438 advertisements, representing 174 separate establishments, were analysed."
Prostitution in Australia,"Street sex work
An advisory group was founded in March 2001 by the Attorney-General at the time, Rob Hulls, which solely examined the issues pertaining to the City of Port Phillip, as the suburb of St. Kilda is a metropolitan location in which a significant level of street prostitution occurred. The Advisory Group consisted of residents, traders, street-based sex workers, welfare agencies, the City of Port Phillip, the State Government and Victoria Police, and released the final report after a 12-month period.
The Executive Summary of the report states:"
Prostitution in Australia,"The Advisory Group seeks to use law enforcement strategies to manage and, where possible, reduce street sex work in the City of Port Phillip to the greatest extent possible, while providing support and protection for residents, traders and workers. It proposes a harm minimisation approach to create opportunities for street sex workers to leave the industry and establish arrangements under which street sex work can be conducted without workers and residents suffering violence and abuse ... A two-year trial of tolerance areas and the establishment of street worker centres represents the foundation of the package proposed by the Advisory Group. Tolerance areas would provide defined geographic zones in which clients could pick-up street sex workers. The areas would be selected following rigorous scrutiny of appropriate locations by the City of Port Phillip, and a comprehensive process of community consultation. Tolerance areas would be created as a Local Priority Policing initiative and enshrined in an accord. Ongoing monitoring would be undertaken by the City of Port Phillip Local Safety Committee.
The concluding chapter of the report is entitled ""The Way Forward"" and lists four recommendations that were devised in light of the publication of the report. The four recommendations are listed as: a transparent process; an implementation plan; a community consultation; and the completion of an evaluation.
The June 2010 Victorian Recommendations of the Drug and Crime Prevention Committee were released nearly a decade later and, according to SA:"
Prostitution in Australia,"... if implemented, will criminalise, marginalise and further hurt migrant and non- migrant sex workers in Victoria; a group who already face the most overbearing regulatory structures and health policies pertaining to sex workers in Australia, and enjoy occupational health and safety worse than that of their criminalised colleagues (Western Australia) and far behind those in a decriminalised setting (New South Wales).
Alongside numerous other organisations and individuals, SA released its response to the recommendations of the Committee that were divided into two sections: 1. Opposition to all of the recommendations of the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry 2. Recommendations from the Victorian Parliamentary Committee to the Commonwealth Government. The list of organisations in support of SA's response included Empower Foundation, Thailand; COSWAS, Collective of Sex Workers and Supporters, Taiwan; TAMPEP (European Network for HIV/STI Prevention and Health Promotion among Migrant Sex Workers); Sex Workers Outreach Project USA; Maria McMahon, Former Manager Sex Workers Outreach Project NSW and Sex Services Planning Advisory Panel, NSW Government; and Christine Harcourt, Researcher, Law & Sex Worker Health Project (LASH) for the University of NSW National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research and Faculty of Law and University of Melbourne Sexual Health Unit School of Population Health."
Prostitution in Australia,"HIV
In terms of HIV, a 2010 journal article by the Scarlet Alliance (SA) organisation—based on research conducted in 2008—explained that it is illegal for a HIV-positive sex worker to engage in sex work in Victoria; although, it is not illegal for a HIV-positive client to hire the services of sex workers. Additionally, according to the exact wording of the SA document, ""It is not a legal requirement to disclose HIV status prior to sexual intercourse; however, it is an offence to intentionally or recklessly infect someone with HIV."""
Prostitution in Australia,"Economics
Between 1995 and 1998, the Prostitution Control Board, a state government body, collected $991,000 Australian in prostitution licensing fees. In addition, hoteliers, casinos, taxi drivers, clothing manufacturers and retailers, newspapers, advertising agencies, and other logically related businesses profit from prostitution in the state. One prostitution business in Australia is publicly traded on the Australian stock exchange."
Prostitution in Australia,"Criticism
Coalition Against Trafficking in Women Australia (CATWA) members Sheila Jeffreys and Mary Sullivan in a 2001 article criticised the 1984 Labor government decision to legalise prostitution in Victoria. They explained the legislative shift as follows: ""The prohibition of prostitution was seen to be ineffective against a highly visible massage parlour trade (a euphemism for brothels), increasing street prostitution, criminal involvement and drug use."" The authors used the term ""harm minimization"" to describe the objective of the Labor government at the time, and the oppositional Coalition government elected in 1992 decided to continue this policy. Sullivan and Jeffreys defined sex work as ""commercial sexual violence"", and argued that the aim to eliminate organised crime from the sex industry had failed.
In a 2005 study Mary Sullivan of CATWA stated that prostitution businesses made revenues of A$1,780 million in 2004/5 and that the sex industry was growing at a rate of 4.6% annually (a rate higher than GDP). In the state of Victoria, there were 3.1 million instances of buying sex per year as compared with a total male population of 1.3 million men.: 6 
She stated that women made up 90% of the labour force in the industry in Victoria and earned, on average, A$400–$500 per week, did not receive holiday or sick pay, and worked on average four 10-hour shifts per week. According to her report, there had been an overall growth in the industry since legalisation in the mid-1980s and that with increased competition between prostitution businesses, earnings had decreased. She estimated the total number of women working in the sex trade to be 3,000 to 4,000 in the mid-1980s, opposed to 4500 women in the legal trade alone in 2005, estimating the illegal trade to be 4 to 5 times larger.: 5–6 
Sullivan's study stated that the sex industry was run by six large companies, which tended to control a wide array of prostitution operations, making self-employment very difficult.: 8–9  She claimed brothels took 50% to 60% of the money paid by clients, and that one agency threatened a worker with a fine if she refused a customer.: 7  Sullivan also alleged that legal businesses were commonly used by criminal elements as a front to launder money from human trafficking, underage prostitution, and other illicit enterprises.: 14 
Sullivan's claims have been widely disputed."
Prostitution in Australia,"Western Australia
Like other Australian states, Western Australia has had a long history of debates and attempts to reform prostitution laws. In the absence of reform, varying degrees of toleration have existed. The current legislation is the Prostitution Act 2000, with some offences under the Criminal Code, Health Act 1911 (addressing venereal diseases) and the Liquor Control Act 1988 (prohibiting a prostitute from being on licensed premises). Prostitution itself is legal, but many activities associated with it, such as pimping and running brothels, are illegal. Despite the fact that brothels are illegal, the state has a long history of tolerating and unofficially regulating them. Street offences are addressed in Ss. 5 and 6 of the Prostitution Act, while brothels are prohibited (including living on the earnings) under S. 190 of the Criminal Code (2004). Procuring is covered under both acts.
Asian workers form a significant section of the workforce and experience a disproportionate amount of social and health problems."
Prostitution in Australia,"History
Early period
Legislation addressing prostitution in Western Australia dates from the introduction of English law in 1829, specifically prohibiting bawdy houses (Interpretation Act). Prostitution in Western Australia has been intimately tied to the history of gold mining. In these areas a quasi-official arrangement existed between premise owners and the authorities. This was frequently justified as a harm reduction measure. Like other Australian colonies, legislation tended to be influenced by developments in Britain. The Police Act 1892 was no different, establishing penalties for soliciting or vagrancy, while the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1892 dealt with procurement. Brothel keepers were prosecuted under the Municipal Institutions Act 1895, by which all municipalities had passed brothel suppression by-laws by 1905."
Prostitution in Australia,"Twentieth century
Laws were further strengthened by the Police Act Amendment Act 1902, and Criminal Code 1902. Despite this the brothels of Kalgoorlie were legendary. Prostitution was much debated in the media and parliament, but despite much lobbying, venereal diseases were not included in the Health Act 1911. Prostitution was also dealt with by the Criminal Code 1913. The war years and the large number of military personnel in Perth and Fremantle concentrated attention on the issue, however during much of Western Australian history, control of prostitution was largely a police affair rather than a parliamentary one, as a process of ""containment"", in which brothels were tolerated in exchange for a level of cooperation. Consequently, the names and addresses of prostitutes remain recorded in the official records. This policy originated in Kalgoorlie, and later appeared in Perth. The informal containment policy, dating from 1900, was replaced by a more formal one in 1975. Containment was ended by the police in 2000, leaving brothels largely unregulated. Approaches reflected the ideology of the particular ruling party, as an attempt was made to replace ""containment"" and make control a specific parliamentary responsibility.
There was further legislative activity in the 1980s and 1990s with the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1988 Pt. 2, Law Reform (Decriminalization Of Sodomy) Act 1989, Acts Amendment (Evidence) Act 1991, and the Criminal Law Amendment Act (No 2) 1992. The  Criminal  Code  (s.190,  s.191) made managing premises  for  the  purpose  of  prostitution,  living off the earnings of prostitution, or procuring a person for prostitution an offence. Reform was suggested in 1997, with the formation of a working group, and a Prostitution  Control  Bill was drafted in 1999 but not enacted till the Prostitution Act 2000. The latter dealt principally with street  soliciting,  offences  involving  children  in  relation  to  prostitution,  advertising  and  sponsorship."
Prostitution in Australia,"Gallop Government (2001–2006)
Under the new Australian Labor Party (ALP) Government of Geoff Gallop, elected in 2001, several prostitution Bills were introduced. In November 2002, Police Minister Michelle Roberts introduced the Prostitution Control Bill 2002 as a Green Bill (for public discussion). Following submissions, a Bill (Prostitution Control Bill 2003) was introduced in April 2003. The latter was a bill to decriminalise  prostitution, regulate brothels, introduce a licensing  system and establish a Prostitution Control Board. The bill was described as a ""social control model"" and widely criticised. It lacked sufficient support in the upper house, and eventually lapsed on 23  January 2005 on prorogation for the February election, at which the Government was returned. During this time, offences under the Police Act 1892 were repealed by passage of the Criminal Law Amendment (Simple Offences) Act 2004 and the Criminal Investigation (Consequential Provisions) Act 2006, transferring these offences to the Criminal Code."
Prostitution in Australia,"Carpenter Government (2006–2008)
Much of the debate on the subject under this government centred on the Prostitution Amendment Act 2008, introduced in 2007 by Alan Carpenter's ALP Government. As a background, a working party was formed in 2006, reporting the following year. Although the resulting legislation passed the upper house narrowly and received Royal Assent on 14 April 2008, it was not proclaimed before the 2008 state election, in which Carpenter and the ALP narrowly lost power in September, and therefore remained inactive, the incoming Coalition Government having vowed to repeal it in its Plan for the First 100 Days of Government. The Act was based partly on the approach taken in 2003 in New Zealand (and which in turn was based on the approach in NSW). It would have decriminalised brothels and would have required certification (certification would not have applied to independent operators).
Therefore, the 2000 Act continued to be in force. Brothels existed in a legal grey area, although 'containment' had officially been disbanded, in Perth in 1958 and subsequently in Kalgoorlie."
Prostitution in Australia,"Barnett Government (2008–2017)
In opposition the ALP criticised the lack of action on prostitution by the coalition government. The debate had been reopened when the Liberal-National Barnett Government announced plans to regulate brothels in December 2009. More information was announced by Attorney-General Christian Porter in June 2010. Religious groups continued to oppose any liberalisation, as did elements within the government party although Porter denied this.
His critics stated that Porter ""would accommodate the market demand for prostitution by setting up a system of licensed brothels in certain non-residential areas"" and that people ""should accept that prostitution will occur and legalise the trade, because we can never suppress it entirely"" and that it is ""like alcohol or gambling – saying it should be regulated rather than banned.""
Porter challenged his critics to come up with a better model and rejected the Swedish example of only criminalising clients. These represent a change in thinking since an interview he gave in March 2009. However he followed through on a promise he made in early 2009 to clear the suburbs of sex work.
Porter released a ministerial statement and made a speech in the legislature on 25 November 2010, inviting public submissions. The plan was immediately rejected by religious groups.
By the time the consultation closed on 11 February 2011, 164 submissions were received, many repeating many of the arguments of the preceding years. One major submission was a comprehensive review of prostitution in Western Australia by a team from the University of NSW. This time Porter found himself criticised by both sides of the 2007 debate, for instance churches that supported the Coalition position in opposition, now criticised them, while sex worker groups that supported the Carpenter proposals continued to oppose coalition policies, as did health groups."
Prostitution in Australia,"Prostitution Bill 2011
On 14 June 2011 the Minister made a ""Green Bill"" (draft legislation) available for public comment over a six-week period. Porter explained the purpose of the legislation thus: ""The Prostitution Bill 2011 will not only ban brothels from residential areas but also ensure appropriate regulatory and licensing schemes are in place for those very limited non-residential areas where prostitution will be permitted and heavily regulated."" A FAQ sheet was also developed. Publication of the Bill did not shift the debate—which remained deeply polarised, with any legalisation bitterly opposed by conservative religious groups—despite Porter's assurances that his government did not condone sex work. Sex Workers and health organisations remained just as committed to opposing the proposals.
Following consultation, the government announced a series of changes to the bill that represented compromises with its critics,
and the changes were then introduced into parliament on 3 November 2011, where it received a first and second reading.
Sex workers continued to stand in opposition. Significantly, the opposition Labor Party opposed the bill, both political parties agreeing on the need to decriminalise the indoor market, but differing in approach. Since the government was in a minority, it required the support of several independent members to ensure passage through the Legislative Assembly. In practice, it proved difficult to muster sufficient public support, and the Bill did not attract sufficient support in parliament either. Porter left State politics in June 2012, being succeeded by Michael Mischin. Mischin admitted it would be unlikely that the bill would pass in that session. This proved to be true, as the legislature was prorogued on 30 January 2013, pending the general election on 9 March, and thus all bills lapsed.
The Barnett government was returned in that election with a clear majority, but stated it would not reintroduce the previous bill and that the subject was a low priority. Meanwhile, sex workers continued to push for decriminalisation. A division exists within the government party, with some members such as Nick Goiran threatening 'civil war'."
Prostitution in Australia,"McGowan Government (2017–)
In the election campaign of 2017, prostitution law reform was among the topics debated, and the Barnett government defeated with a return to power of the ALP. Public discussion of reform has continued since, with lobbying on both sides of the question, while a further review of the industry, following up on the 2010 (LASH) report, continued to recommend decriminalisation (The Law and Sex worker Health, LASH reports)."
Prostitution in Australia,"Other minor territories of Australia
Christmas Island
Christmas Island is a former British colony, which was administered as part of the Colony of Singapore.  The laws of Singapore, including prostitution law, were based on British law. In 1958, the sovereignty of the island was transferred to Australia. The ‘laws of the Colony of Singapore’ continued to be the law of the territory. The Territories Law Reform Act 1992 decreed that Australian federal law and the state laws of Western Australia be applicable to the Indian Ocean Territories, of which Christmas Island is a part.
For the current situation see Western Australia."
Prostitution in Australia,"Cocos (Keeling) Islands
Cocos (Keeling) Islands were, like Christmas Island, a British colony and part of the Colony of Singapore. After transfer of sovereignty to Australia in 1955, Singapore's colonial law was still in force on the islands until 1992.  The Territories Law Reform Act 1992 made Australian federal law and the state laws of Western Australia applicable to the islands.
For the current situation see Western Australia."
Prostitution in Australia,"Norfolk Island
Previously a self-governing Australian territory, the Norfolk Island Applied Laws Ordinance 2016 applied Australian federal law and the state laws of New South Wales to Norfolk Island.
For the current situation see New South Wales."
Prostitution in Australia,"See also
History of Australia
Daily Planet brothel
Scarlet Alliance
Convict women in Australia
R v McLean & Trinh, trial for the murder of two prostitutes in the Northern Territory"
Prostitution in Australia,References
Prostitution in Australia,"
== Bibliography =="
Australian Indian Ocean Territories,"The Australian Indian Ocean Territories is the name since 1995 of an administrative unit under the Australian Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts, consisting of two island groups in the Indian Ocean under Australian sovereignty:"
Australian Indian Ocean Territories,"Christmas Island (10.485°S 105.636°E / -10.485; 105.636 (Christmas Island)), where the administrator resides
Cocos (Keeling) Islands (12.158°S 96.870°E / -12.158; 96.870 (Cocos (Keeling) Islands)), where the same officer also has jurisdiction as administrator but does not reside
Each of these island components has its own shire council: the Shire of Christmas Island and the Shire of Cocos.
The administrative unit does not have jurisdiction over the uninhabited Ashmore and Cartier Islands and Heard Island and McDonald Islands, despite these territories lying within the Indian Ocean."
Australian Indian Ocean Territories,"Administration
Reviews
In 2004 a review of the territories was made.
In 2012 the administration was reviewed by Australian parliamentary visits and enquiry.
Farzian Zainal is a community representative for, and the Treasurer of, the Indian Ocean Territories Regional Development Organisation, which is administered by the Australian government."
Australian Indian Ocean Territories,"Administrators
References
External links
  
WorldStatesmen: Australia – Christmas Island
WorldStatesmen: Australia – Cocos (Keeling) Islands"
South Australian wine,"The South Australian wine industry is responsible for more than half the production of all Australian wine. South Australia has a vast diversity in geography and climate which allows the state to be able to produce a range of grape varieties–from the cool climate Riesling variety in the Clare Valley wine region to the big, full bodied Shiraz wines of the Barossa Valley.
Some of Australia's best-known wines like Penfolds Grange, Jacob's Creek, Yalumba and Henschke Hill of Grace are produced there, as well as many of Australia's mass-produced box wines.
As with most agriculture in Australia, irrigation is vital to the success of the South Australian wine industry."
South Australian wine,"History
The earliest recorded evidence of vine planting was in 1836 by a settler named John Barton Hack in Chichester Gardens, North Adelaide.
In 1838 George Stevenson planted a vineyard in Adelaide and may have been producing wine as early as 1841, while John Reynell planted a vineyard with 500 cuttings from Tasmania in 1841, and made wine in 1843. Following the spread of urban development, Hack's vines were pulled up and replanted in a new vineyard at Echunga Springs near Mount Barker. In 1843, he sent a case of wine made from the vineyard to Queen Victoria, being the first Australian wine to reach the Queen.
Dr Christopher Rawson Penfold established his medical practice at ""The Grange"" in Magill in 1844, planting the vine cuttings from southern France that he had brought with him when emigrating to Australia."
South Australian wine,"Climate and geography
Located in south central Australia, South Australia is bordered by the four other mainland states, (Western Australia to the west, Queensland to the north east, New South Wales to the east, Victoria to the south east), the Northern Territory to the north, and the Great Australian Bight forms the state's southern coastline.
The climate of the state varies greatly, with the more interior regions like the Riverland being intensely hot, and growing cooler closer to the coastal regions like Adelaide Hills. Across the region there is low annual rainfall which necessitates irrigation to counter droughts.
Vines are grown at altitudes from the low valley regions of the Barossa and the Riverland up to 600 metres (1,970 ft) high in the vineyards at Pewsey Vale in the Eden Valley. The soil types are also varied, and include the terra rosa of the Coonawarra region, the limestone-marl based soils of the Adelaide and Riverland areas, and the sandy, clay loam based soils of the Barossa."
South Australian wine,"Wine zones and regions
Since the 1960s, Australia's labeling laws have used an appellation system known as the Australian Geographical Indication (AGI or geographical indication) which distinguishes the geographic origins of the grape. Under these laws, at least 85% of the grapes must be from the region that is designated on the label. In the late 1990s more definitive boundaries were established that divided Australia up into Geographic Indications known as zones, regions and subregions."
South Australian wine,"Adelaide super zone
In South Australia, a fourth geographical indication known as a super zone is used which consists of a group of adjoining zones. As of 2014, only one 'super zone' exists: this is the Adelaide region which consists of the Barossa, Fleurieu and Mount Lofty Ranges zones.  The Adelaide super zone  was registered as an AGI on 27 December 1996."
South Australian wine,"Barossa zone
The Barossa zone is located just outside the north-east of the Adelaide metropolitan area."
South Australian wine,"The Barossa Valley wine region is one of Australia's oldest and most prestigious premium wine-producing regions, known for its Shiraz production. The area's climate is very hot and dry (for a wine-producing area). Most of the area's white wine plantings (Chardonnay, Riesling and Semillon) are located on the higher altitude hill sides around the valley where they can be cooled by the ocean breeze. In recent times the area has found some success with plantings of Rhône varietals including Grenache and Mourvèdre. Due to the hot climate, the grapes can become overripe, which requires the winemakers to limit the maceration time to prevent the wines from being overly tannic.
The Eden Valley wine region includes the High Eden sub-region, and is known for its rockier, more acidic soil than the neighbouring Barossa Valley. The area has a higher elevation (in the 400–610 metres (1,300–2,000 ft) range), and thus has a colder, wetter climate. The Eden Valley is home to the Hill of Grace vineyard with its 140+ year old Shiraz vines that are behind the Henschke Hill of Grace wine. The Eden Valley has also gained international attention for its limestone noted Rieslings."
South Australian wine,"Fleurieu zone
The Fleurieu zone is located south of the Adelaide metropolitan area, between the mouth of the River Murray and the Gulf St Vincent and includes Kangaroo Island."
South Australian wine,"The Currency Creek wine region is located on the west side of Lake Alexandrina between Milang, the Murray Mouth, Port Elliot and just south of Ashbourne including the town of Currency Creek.  Chardonnay, Riesling, Sauvignon blanc and Semillon grow here, though the area also produces some notable red wines.
The Kangaroo Island wine region is located just off the coast of South Australia and is known for its Bordeaux style wines. Most of the vineyards are found on the ironstone and sandy loam soils near Kingscote.
The Langhorne Creek wine region is located southeast of Adelaide along the Bremer River. Orlando Wines sources many of the grapes for its Jacob's Creek brand from this area which has also developed a reputation of its dessert wines.
The McLaren Vale wine region is located south of Adelaide and extends to the south of Morphett Vale. With the area's 56 centimetres (22 in) of rain, and diversity of soil types including sand, clay and limestone, this area produces a wide range of wines with Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Chardonnay, Semillon and Sauvignon blanc being the most widely planted.
The Southern Fleurieu region is located on the southern end of the Fleurieu Peninsula. The area's sandy loam and gravel based ironstone soil supports Cabernet Sauvignon, Malbec, Riesling and Viognier plantings. Shiraz, Sauvignon blanc, Merlot and Primitivo are also planted at Nangkita in the centre of the Peninsula."
South Australian wine,"Mount Lofty Ranges zone
The Mount Lofty Ranges zone is located immediately to the east of Adelaide, north of the Fleurieu zone and south and north of the Barossa zone."
South Australian wine,"The Adelaide Hills  is located 14 kilometres (9 mi) from the Gulf St Vincent coast; winds from which have a tempering effect on the mediterranean climate of this region, making it one of the coolest in South Australia.  The region contains two sub-regions, Lenswood and Piccadilly Valley.
The Adelaide Plains is one of the hottest and flattest wine regions in South Australia. The area's Magill vineyards located on the edge of the foothills: ""The Grange"", pioneered by Christopher Rawson Penfold, and ""Auldana"", pioneered by W. P. Auld, once provided the grapes for the production of Penfolds' Grange. There were once a number of vineyards on the Plains to the south of the Adelaide city centre, but these areas are now covered with Adelaide's suburban sprawl.
The Clare Valley is South Australia's most northerly major wine district. The region contains two areas considered to be sub-regions - Polish Hill River and Watervale.  Despite its hot and dry climate, many of the vineyards in this area are not irrigated. This helps to reduce crop yields and to concentrate the flavours in the grape. The region is known for its ability to produce Chardonnays, Semillons, and Rieslings that range from full body and luscious to light and delicate."
South Australian wine,"Far North zone
The Far North zone is located north of the Clare Valley wine region."
South Australian wine,"The Southern Flinders Ranges has been planted with vineyards since the 1890s, but has only recently started to gain the attention of the international wine community. Located along the Goyder's Line, the area receives an ample amount of rainfall and tends to harvest earlier than the more southerly Clare and Barossa valleys. The area is best suited for Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Shiraz."
South Australian wine,"Limestone Coast zone
The Limestone Coast zone is located in the south-east of the state, bounded by the continental coastline to the south, the border with the neighbouring state of Victoria to the east and the Lower Murray wine zone to the north."
South Australian wine,"The Coonawarra  covers an area centred on the strip of land adjoining both sides of the Riddoch Highway mainly north of the town of Penola and is bordered by the Wrattonbilly region in the north, by the Mount Gambier region in the south and by the Victorian border in the east. It is known for the Cabernet Sauvignon grown in its terra rossa soil. For years there were disputes within the Coonawarra region about which vineyards could rightfully be considered ""Coonawarra"", and which were outside the boundaries. The soil itself became the deciding factor, with the lands with red terra rossa soil being visually distinguishable from the black soil found interspersed throughout the region. In addition to Cabernet, the region has also found some success with its Chardonnay, Malbec, Merlot, Petit Verdot, Pinot noir, Riesling, Sauvignon blanc, Semillon and Shiraz.
The Mount Benson wine region is located in the southeastern part of the state near the Robe wine region,  west of Coonawarra. In the late 20th century, the area saw an influx of foreign investment, including the Rhône wine estate M. Chapoutier and the Belgium Kreglinger winery. The wines made here tend to be fruitier and less tannic than Coonawarra.
The Mount Gambier wine region is located around the regional city of Mount Gambier.  The first planting of vines occurred in 1982.  The region received appellation as an Australian Geographical Indication in 2010 and as of 2014, is represented by 20 vineyards and eight wineries.
The Padthaway wine region is a little north of, and slightly warmer than, Coonawarra, but it is better known for its white wine production, particularly Chardonnay. The wines here are known for the balance of their natural acidity and fruit.
The Robe wine region is located near Mount Benson in the southeast part of the state, west of Coonawarra.
The Wrattonbully wine region is located between Coonawarra and Padthaway and had its first commercial vineyards established in the area in 1968. The climate of the region is similar to Coonawarra, but vineyards in the Wrattonbully region tend to be higher elevated and on better drained soils. The soil of the area includes clay, sand and loam on top of limestone, with some patches of terra rossa. Cabernet Sauvignon and Shiraz are the most popular plantings."
South Australian wine,"Lower Murray zone
The Lower Murray zone which is located to the east of the Adelaide superzone, is bounded by the Limestone Coast zone to the south, the Far North zone to the north and by the border with Victoria to the east."
South Australian wine,"The Riverland wine region is the highly irrigated land where a large percentage of Australia's bulk and box wines are produced, similar to the Riverina region in New South Wales. Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Malbec and Riesling are some of the largest plantings in the area. The Riverland region also has one of the larger single plantings of Petit Verdot in the world, with Kingston Estate planting 100 hectares (250 acres) of this variety."
South Australian wine,"The Peninsulas zone
The Peninsulas zone covers the entire Yorke Peninsula, an adjoining portion of the Mid North of South Australia, the portion of Eyre Peninsula south of a line of latitude approximately in line with Crystal Brook and the islands located off the adjoining coastline.  It is bounded by the Far North zone to its north by the Mount Lofty Ranges zone to its east."
South Australian wine,"South Eastern Australia wine region
The South Eastern Australia wine region covers the area south of a line running from Ceduna in western South Australia to the junction of the borders of New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia (known as Cameron Corner) and then to the intersection of the Tropic of Capricorn with the eastern continental coastline.  This region was registered as an AGI on 1 May 1996."
South Australian wine,"See also
Australian wine
List of wineries in South Australia"
South Australian wine,"References
Citations
Sources
External links"
South Australian wine,"South Australian Wine Industry Association – SA peak industry body official site
Phylloxera and Grape Industry Board of South Australia
Vine Guide - search over 300 South Australian wineries"
Name of Australia,"The name Australia (pronounced  in Australian English) is derived from the Latin australis, meaning ""southern"", and specifically from the hypothetical Terra Australis postulated in pre-modern geography. The name was popularised by the explorer Matthew Flinders from 1804, and it has been in official use since 1817, replacing ""New Holland"",  an English translation of the Dutch name, first given by Abel Tasman in 1643 as the name for the continent."
Name of Australia,"History
The name Australia has been applied to two continents. Originally, it was applied to the south polar continent, or sixth continent, now known as Antarctica. The name is a shortened form of Terra Australis which was one of the names given to the imagined (but undiscovered) land mass that was thought to surround the south pole. The earliest known use of the name Australia in Latin was in 1545, when the word appears in a woodcut illustration of the globe titled ""Sphere of the Winds"" contained in an astrological textbook published in Frankfurt.  In the nineteenth century, the name Australia was re-assigned to New Holland, the fifth continent. Thereafter, the south polar continent remained nameless for some eighty years until the new name of Antarctica was invented.
A Terra Australis ""land of the south"" appeared on world maps from the 15th century, although it was not based on any actual surveying of such a landmass but rather on the hypothesis that continents in the Northern Hemisphere should be balanced by land in the south. This theory of balancing land is on record as early as the 5th century on maps by Macrobius.
The earliest recorded use of the word Australia in English was in 1625 in ""A note of Australia del Espíritu Santo, written by Sir Richard Hakluyt"", published by Samuel Purchas in Hakluytus Posthumus, a variation of the original Spanish name ""Austrialia del Espiritu Santo"" (Southern-Austrian Land of the Holy Spirit) coined by navigator Pedro Fernandes de Queirós in 1606 for the largest island of Vanuatu, believing his expedition had reached Terra Australis. This is a rare combination of terms ""Austral"" and ""Austria"", the latter in honour of the Habsburg dynasty that ruled Spain at the time. The Dutch adjectival form Australische was used in a Dutch book in Batavia (Jakarta) in 1638, to refer to the newly discovered lands to the south. Australia was later used in a 1693 translation of Les Aventures de Jacques Sadeur dans la Découverte et le Voyage de la Terre Australe, a 1676 French novel by Gabriel de Foigny, under the pen-name Jacques Sadeur.  Referring to the entire South Pacific region, Alexander Dalrymple used it in An Historical Collection of Voyages and Discoveries in the South Pacific Ocean in 1771.
The name Australia was specifically applied to the continent for the first time in 1794, with the botanists George Shaw and Sir James Smith writing of ""the vast island, or rather continent, of 
Australia, Australasia or New Holland"" in their 1793 Zoology and Botany of New Holland, and James Wilson including it on a 1799 chart.
The name Australia was popularised by the explorer Matthew Flinders, who pushed for it to be formally adopted as early as 1804. When preparing his manuscript and charts for his 1814 A Voyage to Terra Australis, he was persuaded by his patron, Sir Joseph Banks, to use the term Terra Australis as this was the name most familiar to the public. Flinders did so, and published the following rationale:"
Name of Australia,"There is no probability, that any other detached body of land, of nearly equal extent, will ever be found in a more southern latitude; the name Terra Australis will, therefore, remain descriptive of the geographical importance of this country, and of its situation on the globe: it has antiquity to recommend it; and, having no reference to either of the two claiming nations, appears to be less objectionable than any other which could have been selected.
In the footnote to this Flinders wrote:"
Name of Australia,"Had I permitted myself any innovation on the original term, it would have been to convert it to AUSTRALIA; as being more agreeable to the ear, and an assimilation to the names of the other great portions of the earth. This is the only occurrence of the word Australia in that text; but in Appendix III, Robert Brown's General remarks, geographical and systematical, on the botany of Terra Australis, Brown makes use of the adjectival form Australian throughout—the first known use of that form. Despite popular conception, the book was not instrumental in the adoption of the name: the name came gradually to be accepted over the following ten years.
The first time that the name Australia appears to have been officially used was in a despatch to Lord Bathurst of 4 April 1817 in which Governor Lachlan Macquarie acknowledges the receipt of Capt. Flinders' charts of Australia. On 12 December 1817, Macquarie recommended to the Colonial Office that it be formally adopted. In 1824, the Admiralty agreed that the continent should be known officially as Australia."
Name of Australia,"Ulimaroa was a name given to Australia by the Swedish geographer and cartographer Daniel Djurberg in 1776. Djurberg adapted the name from Olhemaroa, a Māori word found in Hawkesworth's edition of Captain James Cook and Sir Joseph Banks' journals which is thought to have been a misunderstood translation — the Māori were actually referring to Grand Terre, the largest island of New Caledonia. Djurberg believed the name meant something like ""big red land"", whereas modern linguists believe it meant ""long arm"" (or hand) — echoing the geography of Grand Terre. The spurious name continued to be reproduced on certain European maps, particularly some Austrian, Czech, German and Swedish maps, until around 1820, including in Carl Almqvist's 1817 novel Parjumouf Saga ifrån Nya Holland (Stockholm, 1817). Nowadays, in Māori the term for Australia is Ahitereiria."
Name of Australia,"The Commonwealth of Australia
The sovereign country Australia, formed in 1901 by the Federation of the six British colonies, is officially known as The Commonwealth of Australia, abbreviated within the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act and the Constitution of Australia to ""the Commonwealth""."
Name of Australia,"Oz
The country has been referred to colloquially as Oz by people outside the country since the early 20th century; and by Australians in more recent times.
The Oxford English Dictionary records a first occurrence in 1908, in the form Oss. Oz is often taken as an oblique reference to the fictional Land of Oz in the film The Wizard of Oz (1939), based on L. Frank Baum's novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). In 1988, an American opinion was that Australians' ""image of Australia as a 'Land of Oz' is not new, and dedication to it runs deep"" but evidence for this view within Australia itself is lacking. The spelling Oz is likely to have been influenced by the 1939 film, though the pronunciation was probably always with a /z/, as it is also for Aussie, sometimes spelt Ozzie. The Baz Luhrmann film Australia (2008) makes repeated reference to The Wizard of Oz, which appeared just before the wartime action of Australia. Some critics have even speculated that Baum was inspired by Australia, in naming the Land of Oz: ""In Ozma of Oz (1907), Dorothy gets back to Oz as the result of a storm at sea while she and Uncle Henry are travelling by ship to Australia. So, like Australia, Oz is somewhere to the west of California. Like Australia, Oz is an island continent. Like Australia, Oz has inhabited regions bordering on a great desert. One might almost imagine that Baum intended Oz to be Australia, or perhaps a magical land in the centre of the great Australian desert.""
Australia's initial ccTLD was oz, with such domains moved to .oz.au, as discussed in Historical ccTLDs."
Name of Australia,"Ahitereiria
The Māori name ""Ahitereiria"" appears in the Māori name for Food Standards Australia New Zealand, ""Te Mana Kounga Kai – Ahitereiria me Aotearoa""."
Name of Australia,"Other epithets and nicknames
Australia is colloquially known as ""the Land Down Under"" (or just ""Down Under""), which derives from the country's position in the Southern Hemisphere, near the antipodes of the United Kingdom. The term was first recorded in print in 1886, and was popularised internationally by the 1980 song of the same name by Men at Work. Other less common nicknames include ""Straya"" (""Australia"" pronounced in an exaggerated Strine manner), and ""Aussie"", which is usually used as a demonym, but occasionally extended to the country as a whole (especially in New Zealand). More poetic epithets used within Australia include ""the Great Southern Land"" (re-popularised by a 1980s rock song, and not to be confused with the Great Southern region of Western Australia), ""the Lucky Country"" (deriving from Donald Horne's 1964 book of the same name), and two phrases deriving from Dorothea Mackellar's 1908 poem ""My Country"" – ""the sunburnt country"" and ""the wide brown land""."
Name of Australia,"
== References =="
History of Australia (1851–1900),"The History of Australia (1851–1900) refers to the history of the people of the Australian continent during the 50-year period which preceded the foundation of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901.
The gold rushes of the 1850s led to high immigration and a booming economy. Increasing prosperity and the growing number of free settlers and locally born people led to popular demands for the end of penal transportation and the introduction of colonial self-government. Transportation of convicts to the colonies was phased out from 1840 to 1868. In 1855 and 1856, Britain granted self-government to New South Wales, the new colony of Victoria, Van Diemen's Land (renamed Tasmania) and South Australia. Queensland became a separate self-governing colony in 1859 and Western Australia was granted self-government in 1890. The colonies introduced universal male suffrage from 1856 to 1900. Women won the vote in South Australia in 1895 and in Western Australia in 1899. Some colonies, however, denied voting rights to most Aboriginal people, Asians and Africans.
European exploration of the interior of the continent, and settlement of the northern coastal regions, progressed rapidly from the 1850s, resulting in further violent conflict with Aboriginal people, disruption of their societies and dispossession of their traditional lands. The living standards of the settlers and their descendants, however, rose to become one of the highest in the world until a severe depression and drought in the 1890s caused widespread social distress.
Growing nationalist sentiment mixed with demands for a ""white Australia"" led to a series of inter-colonial conferences and referendums in the 1890s which culminated in a new constitution—endorsed by a majority of the population—providing for the federation of the colonies. The constitution gained royal assent in 1900 and the Commonwealth of Australia was proclaimed on 1 January 1901."
History of Australia (1851–1900),"Gold rushes and self-government
Although gold had been found in Australia as early as 1823 by surveyor James McBrien, a gold rush began when Edward Hargraves widely publicised his discovery of gold near Bathurst, New South Wales, in February 1851. Further discoveries were made later that year in Victoria, where the richest gold fields were found. By British law all minerals belonged to the Crown, and the governors of New South Wales and Victoria quickly introduced laws aimed at avoiding the disorder associated with the California gold rush of 1848. Both colonies introduced a gold mining licence with a monthly fee, the revenue being used to offset the cost of providing infrastructure, administration and policing of the gold fields. As the size of allowable claims was small (6.1 metres square), and much of the gold was near the surface, the licensing system favoured small prospectors over large enterprises.
The gold rush initially caused some economic disruption including wage and price inflation and labour shortages as male workers moved to the goldfields. In 1852, the male population of South Australia fell by three per cent and that of Tasmania by 17 per cent. Immigrants from the United Kingdom, continental Europe, the United States and China also poured into Victoria and New South Wales. The Australian population increased from 430,000 in 1851 to 1,170,000 in 1861. Victoria became the most populous colony and Melbourne the largest city.
Chinese migration was a particular concern for colonial officials. There were 20,000 Chinese miners on the Victorian goldfields by 1855 and 13,000 on the New South Wales diggings. There was a widespread belief that they represented a danger to white Australian living standards and morality, and colonial governments responded by imposing a range of taxes, charges and restrictions on Chinese migrants and residents. Anti-Chinese riots erupted on the Victorian goldfields in 1856 and in New South Wales in 1860. According to Stuart Macintyre, ""The goldfields were the migrant reception centres of the nineteenth century, the crucibles of nationalism and xenophobia[.]"""
History of Australia (1851–1900),"The Eureka stockade
As more men moved to the goldfields and the quantity of easily-accessible gold diminished, the average income of miners fell. Victorian miners increasingly saw the flat monthly licence fee as a regressive tax and complained of official corruption, heavy-handed administration and the lack of voting rights for itinerant miners. Protests intensified in October 1854 when three miners were arrested following a riot at Ballarat. Protesters formed the Ballarat Reform League to support the arrested men and demanded manhood suffrage, reform of the mining licence and administration, and land reform to promote small farms. Further protests followed and protesters built a stockade on the Eureka Field at Ballarat. On 3 December troops overran the stockade, killing about 20 protesters. Five troops were killed and 12 seriously wounded.
Following a Royal Commission, the monthly licence was replaced with an annual miner's right at a lower cost which also gave holders the right to vote and build a dwelling on the goldfields. The administration of the Victorian goldfields was also reformed. Stuart Macintyre states, ""The Eureka rebellion was a formative event in the national mythology, the Southern Cross [on the Eureka flag] a symbol of freedom and independence."" However, according to A. G. L. Shaw, the Eureka affair ""is often painted as a great fight for Australian liberty and the rights of the working man, but it was not that. Its leaders were themselves small capitalists...and even after universal suffrage was introduced...only about a fifth of the miners bothered to vote."""
History of Australia (1851–1900),"Colonial self-government
Elections for the semi-representative Legislative Councils, held in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Van Diemen's Land in 1851, produced a greater number of liberal members. That year, the New South Wales Legislative Council petitioned the British Government requesting self-government for the colony. The Anti-Transportation League also saw the convict system as a barrier to the achievement of self-government. In 1852, the British Government announced that convict transportation to Van Diemen's Land would cease and invited the eastern colonies to draft constitutions enabling responsible self-government. The Secretary of State cited the social and economic transformation of the colonies following the discoveries of gold as one of the factors making self-government feasible.
The constitutions for New South Wales, Victoria and Van Diemen's Land (renamed Tasmania in 1856) gained Royal Assent in 1855, that for South Australia in 1856. The constitutions varied, but each created a lower house elected on a broad male franchise and an upper house which was either appointed for life (New South Wales) or elected on a more restricted property franchise. Britain retained its right of veto over legislation regarding matters of imperial interest. When Queensland became a separate colony in 1859 it immediately became self-governing, adopting the constitution of New South Wales. Transportation of convicts to Western Australia ended in 1868 and the colony was granted self-government in 1890."
History of Australia (1851–1900),"Exploration of the interior
In 1860, Burke and Wills led the first south–north crossing of the continent from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria. Lacking bushcraft and unwilling to learn from the local Aboriginal people, Burke and Wills died in 1861, having returned from the Gulf to their rendezvous point at Coopers Creek only to discover the rest of their party had departed the location only a matter of hours previously. They became tragic heroes to the European settlers, their funeral attracting a crowd of more than 50,000 and their story inspiring numerous books, artworks, films and representations in popular culture.
In 1862, John McDouall Stuart succeeded in traversing central Australia from south to north. His expedition mapped out the route which was later followed by the Australian Overland Telegraph Line.
The completion of this telegraph line in 1872 was associated with further exploration of the Gibson Desert and the Nullarbor Plain. While exploring central Australia in 1872, Ernest Giles sighted Kata Tjuta from a location near Kings Canyon and called it Mount Olga. The following year Willian Gosse observed Uluru and named it Ayers Rock, in honour of the Chief Secretary of South Australia, Sir Henry Ayers. In 1879, Alexander Forrest trekked from the north coast of Western Australia to the overland telegraph, discovering land suitable for grazing in the Kimberley region."
History of Australia (1851–1900),"Impact on indigenous population
The spread of sheep and cattle grazing after 1850 brought further conflict with Aboriginal tribes more distant from the closely settled areas. Aboriginal casualty rates in conflicts increased as the colonists made greater use of mounted police, Native Police units, and newly developed revolvers and breech-loaded guns. Conflict was particularly intense in NSW in the 1840s and in Queensland from 1860 to 1880. In central Australia, it is estimated that 650 to 850 Aboriginal people, out of a population of 4,500, were killed by colonists from 1860 to 1895. In the Gulf Country of northern Australia five settlers and 300 Aboriginal people were killed before 1886. The last recorded massacre of Aboriginal people by settlers was at Coniston in the Northern Territory in 1928 where at least 31 Aboriginal people were killed.
Broome estimates the total death toll from settler-Aboriginal conflict between 1788 and 1928 as 1,700 settlers and 17–20,000 Aboriginal people. Reynolds has suggested a higher ""guesstimate"" of 3,000 settlers and up to 30,000 Aboriginals killed. A project team at the University of Newcastle, Australia, has reached a preliminary estimate of 8,270 Aboriginal deaths in frontier massacres from 1788 to 1930.
In New South Wales, 116 Aboriginal reserves were established between 1860 and 1894. Most reserves allowed Aboriginal people a degree of autonomy and freedom to enter and leave. In contrast, the Victorian Board for the Protection of Aborigines (created in 1869) had extensive power to regulate the employment, education and place of residence of Aboriginal Victorians, and closely managed the five reserves and missions established since self government in 1858. In 1886, the protection board gained the power to exclude ""half caste"" Aboriginal people from missions and stations. The Victorian legislation was the forerunner of the racial segregation policies of other Australian governments from the 1890s. The Queensland Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act of 1897 allowed the government to place any Aboriginal person on a reserve against their will. They were also denied the right to vote or drink alcohol.
In more densely settled areas, most Aboriginal people who had lost control of their land lived on reserves and missions, or on the fringes of cities and towns. In pastoral districts the British Waste Land Act of 1848 gave traditional landowners limited rights to live, hunt and gather food on Crown land under pastoral leases. Many Aboriginal groups camped on pastoral stations where Aboriginal men were often employed as shepherds and stockmen. These groups were able to retain a connection with their lands and maintain aspects of their traditional culture.
Foreign pearlers moved into the Torres Strait Islands from 1868 bringing exotic diseases which halved the Indigenous population. In 1871, the London Missionary Society began operating in the islands and most Torres Strait Islanders converted to Christianity which they considered compatible with their beliefs. Queensland annexed the islands in 1879."
History of Australia (1851–1900),"Boom, depression and race
Land reform
In the 1860s New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia introduced Selection Acts intended to promote family farms and mixed farming and grazing. Legislation typically allowed individual ""selectors"" to select small parcels of unused crown land or leased pastoral land for purchase on credit. The reforms initially had little impact on the concentration of land ownership as large landowners used loopholes in the laws to buy more land. However, refinements to the legislation, improvements in farming technology and the introduction of crops adapted to Australian conditions eventually led to the diversification of rural land use. The expansion of the railways from the 1860s allowed wheat to be cheaply transported in bulk, stimulating the development of a wheat belt from South Australia to Queensland. Land under cultivation increased from 200,000 hectares to 2 million hectares from 1850 to 1890."
History of Australia (1851–1900),"Bushrangers
The period 1850 to 1880 saw a revival in bushranging. The first bushrangers had been escaped convicts or former convicts in the early years of British settlement who lived independently in the bush, often supporting themselves by criminal activity. The early association of the bush with freedom was the beginning of an enduring myth. The resurgence of bushranging from the 1850s drew on the grievances of the rural poor (several members of the Kelly gang, the most famous bushrangers, were the sons of impoverished small farmers). The exploits of Ned Kelly and his gang garnered considerable local community support and extensive national press coverage at the time. After Kelly's capture and execution for murder in 1880 his story inspired numerous works of art, literature and popular culture and continuing debate about the extent to which he was a rebel fighting social injustice and oppressive police, or a murderous criminal."
History of Australia (1851–1900),"Economic growth and race
From the 1850s to 1871 gold was Australia's largest export and allowed the colony to import a range of consumer and capital goods. More importantly, the increase in population in the decades following the gold rush stimulated demand for housing, consumer goods, services and urban infrastructure. By the 1880s half the Australian population lived in towns, making Australia more urbanised than the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada. Between 1870 and 1890 average income per person in Australia was more than 50 per cent higher than that of the United States, giving Australia one of the highest living standards in the world.
The size of the government sector almost doubled from 10 per cent of national expenditure in 1850 to 19 per cent in 1890. Colonial governments spent heavily on infrastructure such as railways, ports, telegraph, schools and urban services. Much of the money for this infrastructure was borrowed on the London financial markets, but land-rich governments also sold land to finance expenditure and keep taxes low."
History of Australia (1851–1900),"In 1856, building workers in Sydney and Melbourne were the first in the world to win the eight hour working day. The 1880s saw trade unions grow and spread to lower skilled workers and also across colonial boundaries. By 1890 about 20 per cent of male workers belonged to a union, one of the highest rates in the world.
Economic growth was accompanied by expansion into northern Australia. Gold was discovered in northern Queensland in the 1860s and 1870s, and in the Kimberley and Pilbara regions of Western Australia in the 1880s. Sheep and cattle runs spread to northern Queensland and on to the Gulf Country of the Northern Territory and the Kimberley region of Western Australia in the 1870s and 1880s. Sugar plantations also expanded in northern Queensland during the same period.
The gold discoveries in northern Australia attracted a new wave of Chinese immigrants. The Queensland sugar cane industry also relied heavily on indentured South Sea Island workers, whose low wages and poor working conditions became a national controversy and led to government regulation of the industry. Additionally, a significant population of Japanese, Filipinos and Malays were working in pearling and fishing.  In 1890, the population of northern Australia is estimated at 70,000 Europeans and 20,000 Asians and Pacific Islanders. Indigenous people probably outnumbered these groups, leaving white people a minority north of the Tropic of Capricorn.
From the late 1870s trade unions, Anti-Chinese Leagues and other community groups campaigned against Chinese immigration and low-wage Chinese labour. Following intercolonial conferences on the issue in 1880–81 and 1888, colonial governments responded with a series of laws which progressively restricted Chinese immigration and citizenship rights."
History of Australia (1851–1900),"1890s depression
Falling wool prices and the collapse of a speculative property bubble in Melbourne heralded the end of the long boom. When British banks cut back lending to Australia, the heavily indebted Australian economy fell into economic depression. A number of major banks suspended business and the economy contracted by 20 per cent from 1891 to 1895. Unemployment rose to almost a third of the workforce. The depression was followed by the ""Federation Drought"" from 1895 to 1903.In 1890, a strike in the shipping industry spread to wharves, railways, mines and shearing sheds. Employers responded by locking out workers and employing non-union labour, and colonial governments intervened with police and troops. The strike failed, as did subsequent strikes of shearers in 1891 and 1894, and miners in 1892 and 1896. By 1896, the depression and employer resistance to trade unions saw union membership fall to only about five per cent of the workforce.
The defeat of the 1890 Maritime Strike led trade unions to form political parties. In New South Wales, the Labor Electoral League won a quarter of seats in the elections of 1891 and held the balance of power between the Free Trade Party and the Protectionist Party. Labor parties also won seats in the South Australian and Queensland elections of 1893. The world's first Labor government was formed in Queensland in 1899, but it lasted only a week.
From the mid-1890s colonial governments, often with Labor support, passed acts regulating wages, working conditions and ""coloured"" labour in a number of industries.
At an Intercolonial Conference in 1896, the colonies agreed to extend restrictions on Chinese immigration to ""all coloured races"". Labor supported the Reid government of New South Wales in passing the Coloured Races Restriction and Regulation Act, a forerunner of the White Australia Policy. However, after Britain and Japan voiced objections to the legislation, New South Wales, Tasmania and Western Australia instead introduced European language tests to restrict ""undesirable"" immigrants."
History of Australia (1851–1900),"Democratic rights and restrictions
The secret ballot was adopted in Tasmania, Victoria and South Australia in 1856, followed by New South Wales (1858), Queensland (1859) and Western Australia (1877). South Australia introduced universal male suffrage for its lower house in 1856, followed by Victoria in 1857, New South Wales (1858), Queensland (1872), Western Australia (1893) and Tasmania (1900). Queensland excluded Aboriginal males from voting in 1885 (all women were also excluded).  In Western Australia, a property qualification for voting existed for male Aboriginals, Asians, Africans and people of mixed descent.
Propertied women in the colony of South Australia were granted the vote in local elections (but not parliamentary elections) in 1861. Henrietta Dugdale formed the first Australian women's suffrage society in Melbourne, Victoria in 1884. Societies to promote women's suffrage were also formed in South Australia in 1888 and New South Wales in 1891. The Women's Christian Temperance Union established branches in most Australian colonies in the 1880s, promoting votes for women and a range of social causes.
Women became eligible to vote for the Parliament of South Australia in 1895. This was the first legislation in the world permitting women also to stand for election to political office and, in 1897, Catherine Helen Spence became the first female political candidate for political office, unsuccessfully standing for election as a delegate to the Federal Convention on Australian Federation. Women won the vote in Western Australia in 1899, with some restrictions based on race. Women in the remainder of Australia only won full rights to vote and to stand for elected office in the decade after Federation, although there were some racial restrictions.
Indigenous Australian males gained the right to vote when Victoria, New South Wales, Tasmania and South Australia gave voting rights to all male British subjects over 21. However, they were not encouraged to vote and few did. Only Queensland legally barred Aboriginal people from voting, although Western Australia had a property qualification which effectively denied them the vote."
History of Australia (1851–1900),"Nationalism and federation
Growth of nationalism
By the late 1880s, a majority of people living in the Australian colonies were native born, although more than 90 per cent were of British and Irish heritage. The Australian Natives Association, a friendly society open to Australian-born males, flourished in the 1880s. It campaigned for an Australian federation within the British Empire, promoted Australian literature and history, and successfully lobbied for the 26 January to be Australia's national day."
History of Australia (1851–1900),"Australian nationalists often claimed that unification of the colonies was Australia's destiny. Australians lived on a single continent, and the vast majority shared a British heritage and spoke English. Many nationalists spoke of Australians sharing common blood as members of the British ""race"". Henry Parkes stated in 1890, ""The crimson thread of kinship runs through us all...we must unite as one great Australian people.""
A minority of nationalists saw a distinctive Australian identity rather than shared ""Britishness"" as the basis for a unified Australia. Some, such as the radical magazine The Bulletin and the Tasmanian Attorney-General Andrew Inglis Clark, were republicans, while others were prepared to accept a fully independent country of Australia with only a ceremonial role for the British monarch. In 1887, poet Henry Lawson wrote of a choice between ""The Old Dead Tree and the Young Tree Green/ The Land that belongs to the lord and the Queen,/And the land that belongs to you.""
A unified Australia was usually associated with a white Australia. In 1887, The Bulletin declared that all white men who left the religious and class divisions of the old world behind were Australians. The 1880s and 1890s saw a proliferation of books and articles depicting Australia as a sparsely populated white nation threatened by populous Asian neighbours.  A white Australia also meant the exclusion of cheap Asian labour, an idea strongly promoted by the labour movement. According to historian John Hirst, ""Federation was not needed to make the White Australia policy, but that policy was the most popular expression of the national ideal that inspired federation."""
History of Australia (1851–1900),"Federation movement
Growing nationalist sentiment coincided with business concerns about the economic inefficiency of customs barriers between the colonies, the duplication of services by colonial governments and the lack of a single national market for goods and services. Colonial concerns about German and French ambitions in the region also led to British pressure for a federated Australian defence force and a unified, single-gauge railway network for defence purposes.
A Federal Council of Australasia was formed in 1885 but it had few powers and New South Wales and South Australia declined to join."
History of Australia (1851–1900),"An obstacle to federation was the fear of the smaller colonies that they would be dominated by New South Wales and Victoria. Queensland, in particular, although generally favouring a white Australia policy, wished to maintain an exception for South Sea Islander workers in the sugar cane industry.
Another major barrier was the free trade policies of New South Wales which conflicted with the protectionist policies dominant in Victoria and most of the other colonies. Nevertheless, the NSW premier Henry Parkes was a strong advocate of federation and his Tenterfield Oration in 1889 was pivotal in gathering support for the cause. Parkes also struck a deal with Edmund Barton, leader of the NSW Protectionist Party, whereby they would work together for federation and leave the question of a protective tariff for a future Australian government to decide.
In 1890, representatives of the six colonies and New Zealand met in Melbourne and agreed in principle to a federation of the colonies and for the colonial legislatures to nominate representatives to attend a constitutional convention. The following year, the National Australasian Convention was held in Sydney, with all the future states and New Zealand represented. A draft constitutional Bill was adopted and transmitted to the colonial parliaments for approval by the people. The worsening economic depression and parliamentary opposition, however, delayed progress.
In early 1893 the first citizens' Federation League was established in the Riverina region of New South Wales and many other leagues were soon formed in the colonies. The leagues organised a conference in Corowa in July 1893 which developed a new plan for federation involving a constitutional convention with directly elected delegates and a referendum in each colony to endorse the proposed constitution. The new NSW premier, George Reid, endorsed the ""Corowa plan"" and in 1895 convinced the majority of other premiers to adopt it.
Most of the colonies sent directly elected representatives to the constitutional convention, although those of Western Australia were chosen by its parliament. Queensland did not send delegates. The convention held sessions in 1897 and 1898 which resulted in a proposed constitution for a Commonwealth of federated states under the British Crown.
Referendums held in 1898 resulted in solid majorities for the constitution in Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania. However, the referendum failed to gain the required majority in New South Wales after that colony's Labor Party campaigned against it and premier Reid gave it such qualified support that he earned the nickname ""yes-no Reid"".
The premiers of the other colonies agreed to a number of concessions to New South Wales (particularly that the future Commonwealth capital would be located in that state), and in 1899 further referendums were held in all the colonies except Western Australia. All resulted in yes votes.
In March 1900, delegates were dispatched to London, including Barton and the Victorian parliamentarian Alfred Deakin, who had been a leading advocate for federation. Following intense negotiations with the British government, the federation Bill was passed by the imperial parliament on 5 July 1900 and gained Royal Assent on 9 July. Western Australia subsequently voted to join the new federation."
History of Australia (1851–1900),"Religion, education and culture
Religion
There was no established church in the colonies and the major churches were largely divided along ethnic lines, the Church of England's adherents being mostly of English heritage, Presbyterians mostly Scottish and Catholics mostly Irish. The decades from the gold rushes brought an increase in population and religion. Church attendance among Anglicans and Presbyterians doubled in the 1860s, but growth of Catholicism and Methodism was even higher. Chinese religions and Christian sects also gained a foothold. Nevertheless, some 30 to 40% of the population did not regularly attend church by 1871. Missionary organisations such as the Bush Missionary Society and the Bible Christian Bush Mission attempted to combat this. City missions were also established.Missionary work also extended to Aboriginal people. Six missions in Victoria were established by 1860. A Methodist school and a Benedictine mission had been opened in Western Australia by 1846. The Anglican Pooninde Mission opened in South Australia in 1850 and the Maloga Mission was opened in New South Wales in 1874. The Mapoon mission (established 1891) and Yarrabah mission (established 1893) were two of the most enduring in Queensland.
Religious groups were prominent in health, education and welfare. The Sisters of Charity opened St Vincent's Hospital in Sydney in 1857. In 1867 Mary McKillop founded the Sisters of St Joseph to teach children in rural areas. Irish immigration to Australia increased in the 1860s, and sectarian differences between Protestants and Catholics increased. Between 1872 and 1896 all colonial governments withdrew state funding of religious schools, and the Catholic church responded by expanding its school system as an alternative to secular education. In the later part of the century, the Catholic church also became closely associated with Australian nationalism.
Christian revivalism became prominent in the 1870s. The Salvation Army commenced in 1880 and Catholic parish missions such as the Redemptorists, Vincentians and Passionists were established. Christian women's groups such as The Protestant Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the Anglican Mother's Union were also formed. Nevertheless, there was steady growth in secular views and although 96% of the Australian population identified as Christian in 1901, less than half attended church regularly."
History of Australia (1851–1900),"Education
In the 1850s, most schooling was conducted by religious organisations. The Catholic church ran colleges and convent schools in the major settlements and country areas which catered for both Catholics and Protestants. Protestant schools mainly catered for pupils from affluent backgrounds and emphasised preparation for the professions. In 1861, however, only half of school age children were literate and colonial governments became more committed to universal secular education.
In 1866, New South Wales created a council to oversee public and religious schools in the colony, and public schools were progressively established in localities with 25 or more pupils. In 1872, Victoria was the first colony to legislate for the progressive introduction of free, compulsory and secular schools. As similar acts were passed in other colonies, state funding was withdrawn from religious schools. In response, the Catholic church expanded its own network of schools, leading to a division between state and Catholic schools.
Although most children attended primary education, secondary education was sporadic. New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia established secondary schools called ""superior,"" ""high,"" or ""grammar"" schools, whereas Victoria and Tasmania offered scholarships to private schools and colleges.
The first Australian universities were The University of Sydney (1850), the University of Melbourne (1853), the University of Adelaide (1874) and the University of Tasmania (1890). These were secular and selected students on academic merit based on examinations. Adelaide accepted female students from 1876, Melbourne from 1880, Sydney from 1882 and Tasmania from 1893.
Technical education in mining, agriculture and other vocational areas was provided in several colonies by the 1870s and 1880s. prominent institutions included the Ballarat School of Mines in Victoria (founded 1870) and the Roseworthy Agricultural College in South Australia (founded 1883). Adult education in literacy, numeracy, the liberal arts and technical subjects was also provided by mechanics' institutes and schools of arts which were established in most cities and large towns."
History of Australia (1851–1900),"Culture
Magazines and newspapers continued to be the major means of publication of Australian novels and poetry. Marcus Clarke's For the Term of His Natural Life was serialised in 1870-72 before being published as a book in Melbourne and London a few years later. Rolf Boldrewood's Robbery Under Arms was serialised in 1882-83 before book publication in 1888. Charles Harpur, Henry Kendall and Adam Lindsay Gordon were prominent in attempts to establish a ""national poetry"" from the 1860s."
History of Australia (1851–1900),"The growing nationalist sentiment in the 1880s and 1890s was associated with the development of a distinctively Australian art and literature. Artists of the Heidelberg School such as Arthur Streeton, Frederick McCubbin and Tom Roberts followed the example of the European Impressionists by painting in the open air. They applied themselves to capturing the light and colour of the Australian landscape and exploring the distinctive and the universal in the ""mixed life of the city and the characteristic life of the station and the bush"".In the 1890s Henry Lawson, Banjo Paterson and other writers associated with The Bulletin produced poetry and prose exploring the nature of bush life and themes of independence, stoicism, masculine labour, egalitarianism, anti-authoritarianism and mateship. Protagonists were often shearers, boundary riders and itinerant bush workers. In the following decade Lawson, Paterson and other writers such as Steele Rudd, Miles Franklin, and Joseph Furphy helped forge a distinctive national literature. Paterson's ballad ""The Man from Snowy River"" (1890) achieved popularity, and his lyrics to the song ""Waltzing Matilda"" (c. 1895) helped make it the unofficial national anthem for many Australians.
Commercial theatre was the leading form of popular entertainment but was dominated by English and American plays. From the 1870s, however, Australian plays became more frequent. Walter Cooper's spectacular melodrama Sun and Shadow (1870), and adaptations of For the Term of His Natural Life and Robbery Under Arms were successful.
Popular songs and ballads with Australian themes were common in the period and can mostly be traced back to English and Irish traditional music. American popular and traditional music was also disseminated between the Californian and Australian gold fields of the 1850s. Bush ballads and songs about bushrangers such as The Dying Stockman, The Old Bark Hut and The Wild Colonial Boy were popular.
The gold rushes and subsequent strong population growth led to the development of a middle class which fostered a musical culture. Formal training in European music and audiences for operas, concerts and recitals grew.  Opera singer Nellie Melba (1861–1931) travelled to Europe in 1886 to commence her international career. She became an international success in her profession from the late 1880s."
History of Australia (1851–1900),"Sport
Spectator sports flourished over this period. Intercolonial cricket in Australia started in 1851 and the first cricket ""Test Match"" between Australia and England took place in Melbourne in 1877. Australian Rules Football began in 1858 and quickly became popular in Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania. The 1890 Victorian Football Association final drew a crowd of 33,000. The first metropolitan Rugby Union competition was organised in Sydney in 1874 and the sport became popular in New South Wales and Queensland. By 1900, matches in Sydney drew crowds of up to 15,000. Boxing and horse racing were also popular. By the 1880s, the Melbourne Cup drew crowds of around 100,000. However, the first modern Olympics at Athens in 1896 attracted only one Australian competitor."
History of Australia (1851–1900),"See also
Australia and the American Civil War
History of Australia (1901–1945)
List of massacres of Indigenous Australians"
History of Australia (1851–1900),"References
Sources
Further reading
Clark, Victor S. ""Australian Economic Problems. I. The Railways,"" Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 22, No. 3 (May, 1908), pp. 399–451 in JSTOR, history to 1907
Arthur Patchett Martin (1889). ""Australian Democracy"". Australia and the Empire: 77–114. Wikidata Q107340686.
Arthur Patchett Martin (1889). ""Native Australians and Imperial Federation"". Australia and the Empire: 189–231. Wikidata Q107340730."
Homeschooling and distance education in Australia,"In Australia, homeschooling is becoming increasingly popular. It is legal in all Australian states and territories, with each having its own regulations around the practice. Distance education (commonly known as external studies in Australia) is also prevalent for Australians who live in remote, rural areas. There are more than a dozen universities in Australia that support distance education for tertiary studies. Some Australians switch between distance education and classroom teaching. The number of homeschooled children and students who take distance education in Australia is approximately 30,000. The number of registered homeschoolers alone was 21,437 in 2019; this corresponds to 0.5 per cent of the total school population of Australia. In the 2010s, the average growth rate of the practice amounted to 9.4 per cent per year. The largest Christian school of distance education in Australia is the Australian Christian College, which has over 1,700 families with 4,000 students enrolled. Homeschooling generally enjoys a very good reputation in the Australian media and is widely seen as a flexible alternative form of education with good socialisation opportunities in the community."
Homeschooling and distance education in Australia,"History
Homeschooling
In 1995, Roland Meighan of Nottingham School of Education estimated some 20,000 families homeschooling in Australia. Homeschooling since 2006 requires government registration, with different requirements from state to state. Some home educators prefer to be regulated, but others question whether the government has any legitimate authority to oversee the choices parents make to raise and educate their children. Curricular help is offered by the Australian Government. In 2006, Victoria passed legislation, requiring the registration of children up to the age of 16 and increasing the school leaving age to 16 from the previous 15, undertaking home education (registration is optional for those age of 16–17 but highly recommended). The Victorian Registration and Qualifications Authority (VRQA) is the registering body. Philip Strange of Home Education Association, Inc. very roughly estimated the number of homeschoolers to be 26,500 in 2011."
Homeschooling and distance education in Australia,"Distance education
Compulsory school attendance was established in Victoria in 1872. However, children and parents in rural and remote areas of the state were facing major problems of accessing schools and therefore, regular school attendance could not be guaranteed. As an answer to this, correspondence schooling was introduced, whereby young teachers were employed in remote areas of Victoria. Victoria was the first state in Australia to do so, others came after in the following years. Today, distance learning is virtually only carried out via the Internet."
Homeschooling and distance education in Australia,"Motivations for homeschooling
Reasons for Australian people to choose homeschooling are often lifestyle choices; some people choose to home educate so that they can travel and spend better time with their children. Some children learn differently to the general crowd and can get bored or can struggle at school, where the teachers are unable to cater for the individuality of each child. Other often cited reasons for choosing homeschooling in Australia include religious or philosophical conviction and bullying in or dissatisfaction with school, as well as special needs. School closures and subsequent distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic were motivating factors for parents to homeschool as well."
Homeschooling and distance education in Australia,"Organisations
In Australia, many organisations exist to help parents and teachers with home education. Every Australian state has at least one support group for home education. The Home Education Association, Inc (HEA) is Australia's national advocacy organisation. It is a not-for-profit, member-funded charity which began in 2001 to support home educators across Australia. The association is run by volunteers from the home education community and offers a free phone helpline and registration support in each state or territory.  The HEA does not produce educational material but offers substantial discounts to its members to third-party educational curriculum. The HEA advocates in the interest of home educators in all states and territories, with each state regulated by different Education Acts.
One of the most popular schools for distance learning in Western Australia is the School of Isolated and Distance Education (SIDE)."
Homeschooling and distance education in Australia,"See also
Education in Australia
School of the Air"
Homeschooling and distance education in Australia,"References
Further reading
Reiach, Stephen; Cassidy, Virginie; Averbeck, Clemens (22 December 2012). ""The evolution of distance education in Australia: past, present, future"". Quarterly Review of Distance Education. 13 (4): 247–253. OCLC 7129021965. ERIC EJ1005855 Gale A379316157 ProQuest 1356976073."
List of female heads of government in Australia,"A total of fourteen women have served, or are serving, as the head of an Australian government. Of these, one has served as the prime minister of Australia, eight as the premier of a state and five as the chief minister of a territory. Twenty women have also served, or are serving, as the deputy head of government in Australian states and territories; one has served as the deputy prime minister of the country, thirteen as the deputy premier of a state, and six as the deputy chief minister of a territory.
The first female head of government in Australia, was Rosemary Follett in 1989, who was the 1st Chief Minister of the Australian Capital Territory. Carmen Lawrence became the first female premier of a state in 1990, by serving as the 25th Premier of Western Australia. In 2010, Julia Gillard became the first, and to date, only female Prime Minister of Australia.
Today, every Australian state and territory has had at least one female head of government, except for South Australia; the Australian Capital Territory has had the most, with three serving throughout its 35-year history; Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, and the Northern Territory have each had a second female head of government serving in their respective jurisdiction. The most female heads to serve concurrently was four, during the 315 days between 16 May 2011 and 26 March 2012. Annastacia Palaszczuk, who served as the 39th Premier of Queensland from 2015 to 2023, had the longest tenure of any female head of government in Australia. The shortest tenure belongs to Kristina Keneally, who served as the 42nd Premier of New South Wales for a little over a year from 2009 to 2011.
There are currently two serving female heads of government in Australia: Jacinta Allan (49th Premier of Victoria) who was appointed on 27 September 2023, and Eva Lawler (13th Chief Minister of the Northern Territory) who was appointed on 21 December 2023. In addition, four women currently serve as deputy heads of government in Australia; Yvette Berry (Deputy Chief Minister of the Australian Capital Territory) since 31 October 2016; Susan Close (Deputy Premier of South Australia) since 21 March 2022; Prue Car (Deputy Premier of New South Wales) since 28 March 2023; and Rita Saffioti (Deputy Premier of Western Australia) since 8 June 2023."
List of female heads of government in Australia,"Female heads of government
Heads
Deputy heads
Female opposition leaders
Timeline
Heads
Red represents members of the Australian Labor Party, blue represents members of the Liberal Party of Australia."
List of female heads of government in Australia,"Deputy heads
Red represents members of the Australian Labor Party, blue represents members of the Liberal Party of Australia and orange represents the Country Liberal Party."
List of female heads of government in Australia,"See also
Women and government in Australia
List of elected and appointed female heads of state and government
List of female first ministers in Canada
List of female governors in the United States"
List of female heads of government in Australia,"Notes
References
External links
Australian Electoral Commission: Electoral Milestones for Women"
The Australian,"The Australian, with its Saturday edition The Weekend Australian, is a daily newspaper in broadsheet format published by News Corp Australia since 14 July 1964. As the only Australian daily newspaper distributed nationally, its readership as of September 2019 of both print and online editions was 2,394,000. Its editorial line has been self-described over time as centre-right."
The Australian,"Parent companies
The Australian is published by News Corp Australia, an asset of News Corp, which also owns the sole daily newspapers in Brisbane, Adelaide, Hobart, and Darwin, and the most circulated metropolitan daily newspapers in Sydney and Melbourne. News Corp's chairman and founder is Rupert Murdoch.
The Australian integrates content from overseas newspapers owned by News Corp Australia's international parent News Corp, including The Wall Street Journal and The Times of London."
The Australian,"History
The first edition of The Australian was published by Rupert Murdoch on 15 July 1964, becoming the third national newspaper in Australia following shipping newspaper Daily Commercial News (1891) and Australian Financial Review (1951). Unlike other original Murdoch newspapers, it is not a tabloid publication. At the time, a national paper was considered commercially unfeasible, as newspapers mostly relied on local advertising for their revenue. The Australian was printed in Canberra, then plates flown to other cities for copying. From its inception, the paper struggled for financial viability, and ran at a loss for several decades.
A Sunday edition, The Sunday Australian, was established in 1971. It was discontinued in 1972, though, because press capacity was insufficient to print The Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Mirror, and it.
The Australian's first editor was Maxwell Newton, before leaving the newspaper within a year, and was succeeded by Walter Kommer, and then by Adrian Deamer. Under Deamer's editorship, The Australian encouraged female journalists, and was the first mainstream daily newspaper to hire an Aboriginal reporter, John Newfong.
During the 1975 election, campaigning against the Whitlam government by its owner led to the newspaper's journalists striking over editorial direction.
Editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell was appointed in 2002 and retired on 11 December 2015; he was replaced by Paul Whittaker, formerly the editor-in-chief of Sydney's Daily Telegraph.
In May 2010, the newspaper launched the first Australian newspaper iPad application.
In October 2011, The Australian announced that it was planning to become the first general newspaper in Australia to introduce a paywall, with the introduction of a $2.95/week charge for readers to view premium content on its website, mobile phone, and tablet apps. The paywall was officially launched on 24 October, with a free 3-month trial.
In September 2017, The Australian launched a Chinese website.
In October 2018, Chris Dore, former editor of The Daily Telegraph, The Courier-Mail, and The Sunday Times (Western Australia) was announced as taking over as editor-in-chief. After Dore resigned in November 2022, the newspaper appointed its first female editor-in-chief, Michelle Gunn, in January 2023.
The editorial board began investigating a senior editor after allegations of misconduct were raised following events of the papers' Christmas drinks. The senior editor was accused of inappropriate conduct at the event by multiple female employees.
Since 2019, The Australian has published an annual study, called Australia's Richest 250, which ranks the country's wealthiest people from one to 250, in order of their net worth."
The Australian,"Coverage
Daily sections include national news (""The Nation""), world news (""Worldwide""), sport news, and business news (""Business""). Contained within each issue is a prominent opinion/editorial (op/ed) section, including regular columnists and occasional contributors. Other regular sections include technology (""Australian IT""), media (edited by Darren Davidson since 2015), features, legal affairs, aviation, defence, horse-racing (""Thoroughbreds""), the arts, health, wealth, and higher education. A traveland indulgence section is included on Saturdays, along with ""The Inquirer"", an in-depth analysis of major stories of the week, alongside much political commentary. Saturday lift-outs include ""Review"", focusing on books, arts, film, and television, and The Weekend Australian Magazine, the only national weekly glossy insert magazine. A glossy magazine, Wish, is published on the first Friday of the month.
""The Australian has long maintained a focus on issues relating to Aboriginal disadvantage."" It also devotes attention to the information technology, defence and mining industries, as well as the science, economics, and politics of climate change. It has also published numerous special reports into Australia's energy policy, legal affairs, and research sector.
The Australian Literary Review was a monthly supplement from September 2006 to October 2011.
The tone and nature of The Australian's coverage has changed over time, but since the late 20th century under the ownership of Rupert Murdoch and with Chris Mitchell as editor-in-chief, it has taken a markedly conservative direction. It was outspoken in supporting the conservative government of Prime Minister John Howard."
The Australian,"Editorial and opinion pages
Former editor Paul Kelly stated in 1991, ""The Australian has established itself in the marketplace as a newspaper that supports economic libertarianism"". Laurie Clancy asserted in 2004 that the newspaper ""is generally conservative in tone and heavily oriented toward business; it has a range of columnists of varying political persuasions, but mostly to the right."" Former editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell has said that the editorial and op-ed pages of the newspaper are centre-right but ""claims it is down the middle in its news coverage"".
In 2007, Crikey described the newspaper as generally in support of the Liberal Party of Australia and the then-Coalition government, but has pragmatically supported Labor governments in the past as well. In 2007, The Australian announced their support for Kevin Rudd of the Australian Labor Party in the Federal election. As of 2021, the last time the paper endorsed the Labor Party at any level, state or federal, was the 2010 Victorian election. Along with other Australian papers owned by News Ltd, The Australian has been highly and repeatedly critical of the Labor Party.
The Australian presents varying views on climate change, including articles by those who disagree with the scientific consensus, such as Ian Plimer, and those who agree, such as Tim Flannery and Bjørn Lomborg. A 2011 study of the previous seven years of articles claimed that four out of every five articles were opposed to taking action on climate change.
In 2010, ABC's Media Watch presenter Paul Barry accused The Australian of waging a campaign against the Australian Greens, and the Greens' federal leader Bob Brown wrote that The Australian has ""stepped out of the fourth estate by seeing itself as a determinant of democracy in Australia"". In response, The Australian opined that ""Greens leader Bob Brown has accused The Australian of trying to wreck the alliance between the Greens and Labor. We wear Senator Brown's criticism with pride. We believe he and his Green colleagues are hypocrites; that they are bad for the nation; and that they should be destroyed at the ballot box"".
The Australian has been described by some media commentators and scholars as working to promote a right-wing agenda, and as a result, encouraging political polarisation in Australia. In 2019, former The Australian journalist Rick Morton reported in The Saturday Paper that an unpublished study by Victoria University, Melbourne, found that The Australian ""fuels far-right recruitment"" through dog whistle coded language. Victoria University issued a statement that ""At no point does the research report claim that News Ltd publication fuelled far-right sentiment.""
In late 2022, editor-in-chief Chris Dore resigned from The Australian citing health issues. After acting as editor-in-chief following the departure of Dore, Michelle Gunn become the first female editor-in-chief at the newspaper in January 2023. Gunn was replaced as editor by Kelvin Healey."
The Australian,"Notable stories
AWB kickback scandal
Caroline Overington, a senior journalist writing for The Australian, reported in 2005 about the Australian Wheat Board funneling hundreds of millions of dollars to Iraq and the government of Saddam Hussein before the start of the Iraq War. This story became known as the AWB oil-for-wheat scandal, and resulted in a commission of inquiry into the matter. Overington received a Walkley Award for her coverage."
The Australian,"Stimulus Watch
In 2009, The Australian ran a large number of articles about the Rudd government's Building the Education Revolution policy, which uncovered purported evidence of overpricing, financial waste, and mismanagement of the building of improvements to schools such as halls, gymnasia, and libraries. On the newspaper's website, a section named ""Stimulus Watch"", subtitled ""How your Billions Are Being Spent"", contained a large collection of such articles.
The following year, other media outlets also reported these issues and the policy turned into a political embarrassment for the government, which until then had been able to ignore The Australian's reports. Along with the government's insulation stimulus policy, it contributed to criticisms, perceptions of incompetence, and general dissatisfaction with the government's performance.
On 16 July 2010, Julia Gillard was reported to have admitted that the school-building program was flawed and that errors had been made because the program was designed in haste to protect jobs during the Great Recession."
The Australian,"AWU Affair
In 2011, Glenn Milne reported on the allegations against Prime Minister Julia Gillard concerning the AWU affair, including a claim regarding Gillard's living arrangements with Australian Workers' Union official Bruce Wilson. Gillard contacted the chief executive of The Australian, resulting in the story being removed and an apology and retraction posted in its place.
On 18 August 2012, Hedley Thomas reported that Gillard had left her job as a partner with law firm Slater & Gordon as a direct result of a secret internal investigation in 1995 into corrupt conduct on behalf of her then-boyfriend Ralph Blewett. The story was ignored for a long time by other media outlets until after Gillard held a press conference to respond to the allegations against her. In 2013, the Fair Work Commission commenced initial inquiries into allegations of improper union financial conduct, and the government initiated a judicial inquiry into the AWU affair in December of that year as part of a royal commission into trade unions."
The Australian,"The Teacher's Pet
The Teachers Pet, an investigation into the disappearance of Lynette Dawson, is a podcast written by Hedley Thomas and Slade Gibson that ran in 2018. It was credited with generating new leads that led to the subsequent arrest of Chris Dawson for the murder of his wife, and the setting up of police enquiry Strike Force Southwood to explore claims of sexual assaults and student-teacher relationships at several Sydney high schools brought up on the podcast. The series has had 28 million downloads, was the number-one Australian podcast and reached number one in the UK, Canada, and New Zealand. Both Hedley and Gibson received Gold Walkleys for their work on the series."
The Australian,"Columnists and contributors
Former columnists include Mike Steketee, David Burchell, Michael Stutchbury, Simon Adamek, Emma Jane, George Megalogenis, Glenn Milne, Cordelia Fine, Alan Wood, Michael Costa, P. P. McGuinness, Michael Costello, Frank Devine, Matt Price, Christopher Pearson, Niki Savva. Political cartoonist Bill Leak worked for the paper until his death.
Stuart Rintoul (active from around 1989) was a senior writer with The Australian, with some expertise in Indigenous languages and history. His 2020 book Lowitja: The Authorised Biography of Lowitja O'Donoghue, a biography of Indigenous Australian trailblazer Lowitja O'Donoghue, was shortlisted for a Walkley Award for Best Non-Fiction Book, and was highly commended in the National Biography Awards in 2021.
Columnists include Janet Albrechtsen, Troy Bramston, Henry Ergas, Ticky Fullerton, Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Adam Creighton, Robert Gottliebsen, Gideon Haigh, Paul Kelly, Chris Kenny, Brendan O'Neill, Nicolas Rothwell, Angela Shanahan, Dennis Shanahan, Greg Sheridan, Judith Sloan, Cameron Stewart, Peter van Onselen, Graham Richardson, Peta Credlin, and Claire Lehmann. It also features daily cartoons from Johannes Leak.
Occasional contributors include Gregory Melleuish, Kevin Donnelly, Caroline Overington, Tom Switzer, James Allan, Hal G.P. Colebatch, Luke Slattery, Noel Pearson, Bettina Arndt, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott, and Lucian Boz.
Contributors to The Weekend Australian Magazine and ""Review"" in The Weekend Australian include Phillip Adams, national art critic Christopher Allen, actor and writer Graeme Blundell, Jeremy Clarkson, Antonella Gambotto-Burke, author Trent Dalton, author Nikki Gemmell, poet Sarah Holland-Batt, and demographer Bernard Salt. Film critic David Stratton retired in December 2023."
The Australian,"Australian of the Year Award
In 1971, The Australian instituted its own ""Australian of the Year award"" separate and often different from the Australian of the Year chosen by the government's National Australia Day Council. Starting in 1968, the official award had long had links to the Victorian Australia Day Council, and at the time a public perception arose that it was state-based. As a national newspaper, The Australian felt it was better situated to create an award that more truly represented all of Australia. Nominees are suggested by readers, decided upon by an editorial board, and awarded in January of every year."
The Australian,"Circulation
In the June quarter of 2013, the average print circulation for The Australian on weekdays was 116,655, and 254,891 for The Weekend Australian. Both were down (9.8 and 10.8%, respectively) compared to the June quarter the previous year.
As of March 2015, the weekday edition circulation was 104,165 and the weekend edition was 230,182, falling 6.5% and 3.3%, respectively, compared to the same period in 2014. The Australian had 67,561 paid digital subscribers in the same period.
As of August 2015, according to third-party web analytics providers Alexa and Similarweb, The Australian's website was the 72nd- and 223rd-most visited websites in Australia, respectively. SimilarWeb rates the site as the 23rd-most visited news website in Australia, attracting almost 3 million visitors per month.
In September 2018, according to Roy Morgan Research, The Australian had a readership of 303,000.
In September 2019, Roy Morgan reported figures of 843,000 (September 2018 – 810,000) for the print version (total, weekend, and weekday editions); digital versions 1,903,000 (September 2018 – 1,812,000); total cross-platform 2,394,000 (September 2018 – 2,503,000); down 4.4%. (By way of comparison, The Sydney Morning Herald total figure was 4,209,000; The Age (Melbourne) 2,852,000, Herald Sun (Melbourne) 2,801,000. The only other nationally distributed daily newspaper, the business-focused Australian Financial Review, had 1,599,000 cross-platform readers (up 17.7%).)"
The Australian,"Awards
The paper has won Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers' Association awards on several occasions:"
The Australian,"2007 Online Newspaper of the Year award
2017 Daily Newspaper of the Year, Weekend Newspaper of the Year and Best Mobile site categories
Several journalists writing for The Australian have received Walkley Awards for their investigative reporting."
The Australian,"See also
Journalism in Australia
List of newspapers in Australia
List of newspapers in New South Wales
List of Walkley awards won by The Australian"
The Australian,"References
External links
Official website"
Opera Australia,"Opera Australia is the principal opera company in Australia. Based in Sydney, New South Wales, its performance season at the Sydney Opera House accompanied by the Opera Australia Orchestra runs for approximately eight months of the year, with the remainder of its time spent at the Arts Centre Melbourne, where it is accompanied by Orchestra Victoria. In 2004, the company gave 226 performances in its subscription seasons in Sydney and Melbourne, Victoria, attended by more than 294,000 people.
It is funded by government grants, corporate sponsorship, private philanthropy, and ticket sales. The proportion of its revenue from ticket sales is considerably higher than that of most companies, approximately 75 per cent. The company is perhaps best known internationally for its association with Dame Joan Sutherland, for Baz Luhrmann's production of Puccini's La bohème in the early 1990s and more recently, for, apart from performances inside the opera house, large scale outdoor performances on Sydney Harbour.
Many thousands of Australians also experience the company's work through television, radio, video, compact disc, DVD, and the annual free performance of opera in the Domain in Sydney. The company also performs in an annual outdoor event at Mrs Macquarie's Chair, Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour, where since 2012 operas such as La traviata, Madama Butterfly, Turandot, Aida and Carmen have played."
Opera Australia,"History
Australian Opera Company, 1956–57
In 1956, the Australian Opera Company was formed in Sydney under the auspices of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust. It commemorated the Mozart bicentenary by presenting four Mozart operas in all capital cities, travelling more than 10,000 kilometres, and giving 169 performances."
Opera Australia,"Elizabethan Theatre Trust Opera Company, 1957–70
By 1957, it changed its name to the Elizabethan Theatre Trust Opera Company.
In 1959 the company's laid-off singers gave the first of many regional tours (presented by state Arts Councils) with Rossini's The Barber of Seville using reduced scenery and conducted from the piano by Georg Tintner (Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland). Subsequent Arts Council tours included Rigoletto (1960; Victoria, Queensland, New South Wales), Così fan tutte (1961; New South Wales, Queensland) and La traviata (1962; New South Wales, Queensland), all conducted by Tintner. However, by 1963 a permanent nucleus of singers and staff was retained throughout the year and the company had made appearances at regional festivals, including the Adelaide Festival. It was also able to establish the first Elizabethan Trust Orchestra for the company by 1967 with additional government aid. During this time, Stefan Haag played an important role in the development of the company.
A major milestone for the company was a television recording of Puccini's Tosca filmed in 1968 at the Adelaide Festival. This starred Tito Gobbi as Scarpia alongside two Australian singers, soprano Marie Collier in the title role, and tenor Donald Smith as Cavaradossi, with the Argentinian born, Italian conductor Carlo Felice Cillario conducting. This was the commencement of a long and fruitful association between the Australian Opera and Cillario until his retirement in 2003. Some of his first rehearsals in the country involved conducting the Elizabethan Sydney Orchestra and the Australian Opera Chorus, both newly formed and on permanent contracts.
While not yet appearing with this company, Joan Sutherland, then an internationally known Australian soprano, and her husband, the conductor Richard Bonynge, helped the cause of opera in general in Australia during the 1960s. Sutherland's name was also linked to the progress of the Sydney Opera House, begun in 1957 and still undergoing a lengthy and controversial construction. By the time ""La Stupenda"" appeared there in 1974, one year after the opening of the theatre, the company was a leading repertory company with a large chorus and a roster of experienced Australian principals supplemented by guest singers and conductors."
Opera Australia,"The Australian Opera, 1970–96
In 1970, the company became known as The Australian Opera. The 1970s saw considerable changes both in administration and location. In 1972, Edward Downes, formerly associated with London's Royal Opera House, became musical director, and his first new production was the Australian premiere of Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier at the Princess Theatre, Melbourne, followed closely by Prokofiev's War and Peace as the opening night performance of the Sydney Opera House, a short time before the building's official opening.
The Sydney Opera House, as well as quickly becoming a distinctive cultural landmark in that city, gave the company a permanent performance home and thus helped to expand its repertoire and develop local audiences. Audiences were boosted by Joan Sutherland's performances with The Australian Opera in Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann. In the 1974 season, three Australian works were performed: The Affair by Felix Werder, Lenz by Larry Sitsky, and Rites of Passage by Peter Sculthorpe. (Rites of Passage was to have been the inaugural opera presentation at the Sydney Opera House, but was not ready in time.)
By 1976, Richard Bonynge had become musical director and he led the company on its first overseas tour to New Zealand with Verdi's Rigoletto and Janáček's Jenůfa, the latter conducted by Georg Tintner. This was followed in 1978 by the first Australian Opera country tour with orchestra to north-eastern New South Wales (Don Pasquale with the Queensland Theatre Orchestra, conducted by Tintner). The principal tenor for this tour was Robin Donald. From 1977 to 1990, the resident director was Elke Neidhardt.
In 1977, the New South Wales Friends of the Australian Opera and the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust established the Armstrong-Martin Scholarship to further the musical education of professional opera singers.
During the 1980s, after many years of recording performances by the Australian Opera for television, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and The Australian Opera presented their first live simulcast, Johann Strauss's Die Fledermaus, and it was seen by more than two million people. Over the following years a series of simulcasts reached millions of Australian homes.
Luciano Pavarotti and Joan Sutherland appeared at the Concert Hall of the Sydney Opera House in 1983, with the Elizabethan Sydney Orchestra conducted by Richard Bonynge (the sister orchestra in Melbourne was known as the Elizabethan Melbourne Orchestra. Now they are known respectively as the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra, Sydney and Orchestra Victoria, Melbourne). Another successful concert with Sutherland and Marilyn Horne was held in the Concert Hall.
Several innovative features characterised this period of the 1980s. The first, Esso Opera in the Park in the Sydney Domain, quickly became an annual event, and it is now called ""Opera in the Domain"". Typically, it attracts almost 100,000 people each year. A similar annual outdoor event, which attracts more than 25,000 people, is held in Melbourne. The second was the establishment of The Esso Young Artists' Development Program for the Australian Opera while the third was the Australian Compositions Program launched with a new production of Brian Howard's Metamorphosis.
Another innovative program, The National Opera Workshop, was established to enable selected Australian composers to present works in workshop form with artists from the Australian Opera. Lastly, OperaAction, the Youth Education Program, established a program of events, including three youth performances of Puccini's Madama Butterfly and, in 1986, Winds of the Solstice, an original youth opera created by 70 students working on libretto, music, choreography and orchestration and presented at the Sydney Opera House.
The company re-organised its administration gradually throughout the decade, appointing Moffatt Oxenbould as artistic director in 1984, and announcing that Bonynge would become Musical Director Emeritus and principal guest conductor from 1987, after his decade long contract as musical director expired.
In 1988, in association with the Australian Bicentennial Authority, the company toured Brisbane, Darwin, Hobart, Melbourne, Perth and the National Opera Workshop in Melbourne with The Ra Project, a music-theatre work composed with the direct participation from the earliest stages by the singers who performed it and marking director Baz Luhrmann's first association with the Australian Opera.
Sutherland gave her farewell performances for the Australian Opera in 1990 in a production of Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots. Two years later, the company named its major rehearsal studio after Dame Joan.
Also in 1990, Baz Luhrmann's La bohème premiered in Sydney, establishing Cheryl Barker and David Hobson as important principals in the company. Such was its impact that the production went on to play at the Broadway Theatre in New York in 2002 for 228 performances.
The early 1990s were to see two important changes in the way that the company worked: firstly, in 1991, with the formation of the Artistic Associates of The Australian Opera, a body of people was created which comprised some of the most important figures in the Australian musical and performing arts world. Secondly, the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra was integrated with the Australian Opera to produce a permanent opera and ballet orchestra for the company.
In its first performances outside Australasia in 1994, the company performed Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Edinburgh International Festival. In addition, the Baz Luhrmann production of La bohème was screened over more than 300 North American television stations, followed by worldwide video release and a later Broadway version."
Opera Australia,"Opera Australia, since 1996
Opera Australia (OA) was formed by the merger of the Australian Opera and the Victoria State Opera (VSO) companies in 1996, following the financial collapse of the Melbourne-based VSO. Adrian Collette was appointed general manager of the new company, and developed a three-year plan to restructure the company involving twice yearly seasons in both Sydney and Melbourne, integrating the OA and VSO staff and planning a viable financial structure so as to manage the inherited debt.
The first few years of the present century saw the retirement of Moffatt Oxenbould, Opera Australia's artistic director for 15 years, and the appointment of Simone Young as musical director. Immediately on taking up her position in 2001, Simone Young appointed the Australian director Stuart Maunder to the position of artistic director. Young proceeded to develop the company's core repertoire, including more German operas in the repertoire and diversifying the types of productions mounted and the standards of international and local artists employed. By late 2002 however, the OA board, faced with mounting deficits, announced that Young's future visions for the company were ""unsustainable"" and decided not to renew her contract after the end of 2003.
At the end of 2003, Richard Hickox was named music director-designate of Opera Australia, and took up the post full-time from January 2005. During his tenure, Hickox diversified the repertoire with the addition of more 20th-century works such as The Love for Three Oranges, Rusalka and Arabella, recording live performances of many of these works for Chandos Records. The company's 50th anniversary was celebrated in 2006 with a gala concert in which tributes were paid to Joan Sutherland and Richard Bonynge, the principal artists, the chorus, production staff and the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra (the AOBO) for their ""artistry and talent"" and the ""ensemble nature"" of the company. In mid-2008, Hickox and Opera Australia were criticised by a singer for what she perceived as a decline in artistic standards since the start of Hickox's tenure. The board expressed complete confidence in Hickox. On returning to the UK in November 2008 following the Sydney winter season, Hickox died suddenly from a heart attack after conducting a rehearsal in Swansea. On 30 June 2009, Lyndon Terracini was announced as the new artistic director."
Opera Australia,"""Change for survival""
In 2011, Terracini gave a controversial speech as part of the annual Peggy Glanville-Hicks Address, in which he announced that Opera Australia had to change in order to survive. ""Opera companies and orchestras of significance world wide are closing at an alarming rate ... We can blithely ignore the fact ... or we can change ... brave programming is having the courage to programme what critics will criticise you for, but will make a genuine connection to a real audience."""
Opera Australia,"Terracini pursued a program designed to bring opera to wider audiences. In 2012 through the sponsorship of Haruhisa Handa and Destination NSW, Opera Australia staged the first Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour, a three-week season of a fully produced and staged opera, designed to be an opera ""event"". The production of La traviata was directed by Francesca Zambello and attracted an audience of 40,000 people. In 2013, Opera Australia staged an open-air production of Carmen on Sydney Harbour, directed by Gale Edwards. It reached similar audience numbers. The harbour has since received annual stagings, followed by Madama Butterfly (2014), Aida (2015), and Turandot (2016), a new production of Carmen in 2017, La bohème (2018), West Side Story (2019), La Traviata (1920, 2021), The Phantom of the Opera (2022), Madama Butterfly (2023), West Side Story (2024)
In 2012, Opera Australia replaced the regular Gilbert and Sullivan productions that had formed part of the company's repertoire for some years with a series of Broadway musicals. A Lincoln Center Theatre production of South Pacific played at the Sydney Opera House and Melbourne's Princess Theatre in 2012, kicking off a national tour which continued in 2013.
An extensive philanthropic drive enabled the company to program its first full-length Ring Cycle, which was performed in Melbourne over four weeks at the end of 2013. After tickets to the event sold out in just one day, ABC Classic FM and Opera Australia announced the radio station would live broadcast the Ring Cycle to audiences across the country.
In April 2013, Opera Australia announced a 44 per cent growth in total revenue based on an increase in box office sales of more than 55 per cent. For the second year in a row, the company reported an operating profit following two successive deficits.
In January 2013, the board of Opera Australia announced they would extend Lyndon Terracini's contract as artistic director for five more years. Later that year, Terracini announced that singers on 12-month contracts will be ""rested"" without pay for a period of six to twelve weeks in 2014.
Terracini resigned in October 2022 and in December Opera Australia announced Welsh-born Jo Davies as his replacement. She is the first woman to be appointed artistic director of the company."
Opera Australia,"Educational outreach
Oz Opera was established after the merger of the AO with the VSO in 1996 with Lindy Hume as its director. Its aim is to present opera to audiences throughout metropolitan and regional Australia. It presents performances in primary schools across New South Wales and Victoria, adapting large-scale scores to suit young audiences.
Oz Opera, now called Opera Australia Touring and Outreach (Opera Australia's education, access and development arm), presented the La bohème production in Victoria, the Northern Territory and Western Australia, attended by 13,350 people, while OzOpera's Schools Company performed to over 63,500 primary age children in more than 360 performances in urban and regional New South Wales and Victoria. Since then the touring and outreach arm of the company has performed to a great many more people around Australia and toured other states, including South Australia, Queensland and Tasmania."
Opera Australia,"Modern Australian opera
Opera Australia is committed to the long-term development and performance of modern Australian operas. Since 1974, OA has fully staged 12 new Australian operas and workshopped over 20 new works in various stages of development. The main new works staged by the company have been The Little Mermaid by Anne Boyd (1985); Metamorphosis by Brian Howard (1985); Voss by Richard Meale (1986); Whitsunday by Howard (1988); Mer de glace by Richard Meale (1992); The Golem by Larry Sitsky (1993); The Eighth Wonder by Alan John (1995); Summer of the Seventeenth Doll by Richard Mills (1999); Batavia by Richard Mills (2001); Love in the Age of Therapy by Paul Grabowsky (OzOpera 2002); Lindy by Moya Henderson (2003); Madeline Lee by John Haddock (2004); Bliss (2010) by Brett Dean; and The Rabbits by Kate Miller Heidke (2015). In 2015, OA produced the television opera The Divorce by Elena Kats-Chernin and Joanna Murray-Smith based on an original idea by Terracini for ABC Television."
Opera Australia,"Digital strategy
In 2011, Opera Australia launched a digital strategy in order to bring high-definition recordings of its operas to cinemas (in collaboration with CinemaLive), as well as launching DVD, Blu-ray and CD releases on its own label and broadcasting these recordings on ABC Television."
Opera Australia,"Awards and nominations
ARIA Music Awards
The ARIA Music Awards is an annual awards ceremony that recognises excellence, innovation, and achievement across all genres of Australian music. They commenced in 1987."
Opera Australia,"Home media
Opera Australia has released numerous video recordings, on VHS, DVD and BluRay, of whole productions and of thematic selections, including:"
Opera Australia,"Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour — The Collection: boxed set of five complete operas: Carmen, La Traviata, Aida, Madama Butterfly, and Turandot.
Opera Australia Favorites: two-DVD set of highlights, including performances by Cheryl Barker, Monique Brynnel, Joan Carden, Christine Douglas, Lauris Elms, Glenys Fowles, Robert Gard, Richard Greager, David Hobson, Marilyn Horne, Rosamund Illing, Fiona Janes, Suzanne Johnston, Yvonne Kenny, Eva Marton, Leona Mitchell, Luciano Pavarotti, John Pringle, Neil Rosenshein, Ghillian Sullivan, Joan Sutherland, Huguette Tourangeau, Victoria Vergara, and John Wegner.
Stars of Opera Australia (2014): popular arias and duets from various OA productions, including the 2013 Handa opera La traviata"
Opera Australia,"References
Sources"
Opera Australia,"Adams, Brian (1980). La Stupenda. Hutchinson. ISBN 0-09-137410-3.
Oxenbould, Moffatt (2005). Timing Is Everything. ABC Books."
Opera Australia,"External links
Official website
Opera Australia's channel on YouTube
The Australian Opera, operas performed during 1970–1996"
Australian megafauna,"The term Australian megafauna refers to the megafauna in Australia during the Pleistocene Epoch. Most of these species became extinct during the latter half of the Pleistocene, and the roles of human and climatic factors in their extinction are contested.
There are similarities between the prehistoric Australian megafauna and some mythical creatures from the Aboriginal Dreamtime."
Australian megafauna,"Causes of extinction
Many modern researchers, including Tim Flannery, think that with the arrival of early Aboriginal Australians (around 70,000~65,000 years ago), hunting and the use of fire to manage their environment may have contributed to the extinction of the megafauna. Increased aridity during peak glaciation (about 18,000 years ago) may have also contributed, but most of the megafauna were already extinct by this time. Others, including Steve Wroe, note that records in the Australian Pleistocene are rare, and there is not enough data to definitively determine the time of extinction of many of the species, with many of the species having no confirmed record within the last 100,000 years. They suggest that many of the extinctions had been staggered over the course of the late Middle Pleistocene and early Late Pleistocene, prior to human arrival, due to climatic stress."
Australian megafauna,"New evidence based on accurate optically stimulated luminescence and uranium-thorium dating of megafaunal remains suggests that humans were the ultimate cause of the extinction for some of the megafauna in Australia. The dates derived show that all forms of megafauna on the Australian mainland became extinct in the same rapid timeframe—approximately 46,000 years ago—the period when the earliest humans first arrived in Australia (around 70,000~65,000 years ago long chronology and 50,000 years ago short chronology). However, these results were subsequently disputed, with another study showing that 50 of 88 megafaunal species have no dates postdating the penultimate glacial maximum around 130,000 years ago, and there was only firm evidence for overlap of 8-14 megafaunal species with people. Analysis of oxygen and carbon isotopes from teeth of megafauna indicate the regional climates at the time of extinction were similar to arid regional climates of today and that the megafauna were well adapted to arid climates. The dates derived have been interpreted as suggesting that the main mechanism for extinction was human burning of a landscape that was then much less fire-adapted; oxygen and carbon isotopes of teeth indicate sudden, drastic, non-climate-related changes in vegetation and in the diet of surviving marsupial species. However, early Aboriginal peoples appear to have rapidly eliminated the megafauna of Tasmania about 41,000 years ago (following formation of a land bridge to Australia about 43,000 years ago as Ice Age sea levels declined) without using fire to modify the environment there, implying that at least in this case hunting was the most important factor. It has also been suggested that the vegetational changes that occurred on the mainland were a consequence, rather than a cause, of the elimination of the megafauna. This idea is supported by sediment cores from Lynch's Crater in Queensland, which suggest that fire increased in the local ecosystem about a century after the disappearance of Sporormiella (a fungus found in herbivorous animal dung used as a megafaunal proxy), leading to a subsequent transition to fire-tolerant sclerophyll vegetation. However, the use of Sporormiella as a megafaunal proxy has been criticised, noting that Sporormiella is found sporadically in the dung of various herbivorous species, including extant emus and kangaroos, not just megafauna, that its presence depends on a variety of factors, often unrelated to megafaunal abundance, and that in Cuddie Springs, a well known megafaunal site, the densities of Sporormiella were consistently low. A study of extinct megafauna at the Walker Creek site in Queensland, found that their disappearance from the site after 40 kya came after an extended period of environmental deterioration.
Chemical analysis of fragments of eggshells of Genyornis newtoni, a flightless bird that became extinct in Australia, from over 200 sites, revealed scorch marks consistent with cooking in human-made fires, presumably the first direct evidence of human contribution to the extinction of a species of the Australian megafauna. This was later contested by another study that noted the too small dimensions (126 x 97 mm, roughly like the emu eggs, while the moa eggs were about 240 mm) for the Genyornis supposed eggs, and rather, attributed them to another extinct, but much smaller bird, the megapode Progura. The real time that saw Genyornis vanish is still an open question, but this was believed as one of the best documented megafauna extinctions in Australia.
""Imperceptive overkill"", a scenario where anthropogenic pressures take place, slowly and gradually wiping the megafauna out, has been suggested.
On the other hand, there is also evidence to suggest that (contrary to other conclusions) the megafauna lived alongside humans for several thousand years. The question of if (and how) the megafauna died before the arrival of humans is still debated; with some authors maintaining that only a minority of such fauna remained by the time the first humans settled on the mainland. One of the most important advocates of human role, Tim Flannery, author of the book Future Eaters, was also heavily criticised for his conclusions. A surprisingly late date of 33-37 kya is known for a Zygomaturus specimen from the Willandra Lakes Region in New South Wales, the latest known date for any Australian Megafauna. This is well after aboriginal arrival in Australia around 50 kya.
A 2021 study found that the rate of extinction of Australia's megafauna is rather unusual, with some more generalistic species having gone extinct earlier while highly specialised ones having become extinct later or even still surviving today. A mosaic cause of extinction with different anthropogenic and environmental pressures was proposed."
Australian megafauna,"Living Australian megafauna
The term ""megafauna"" is usually applied to large animals (over 100 kg (220 lb)). In Australia, however, megafauna were never as large as those found on other continents, and so a more lenient criterion of over 40 kg (88 lb) is often applied."
Australian megafauna,"Marsupials
The red kangaroo (Osphranter rufus) grows up to 1.8 m (6 ft) tall and weighs up to 85 kg (187 lb). Females grow up to 1.1 m (3 ft 7 in) tall and weigh up to 35 kg (77 lb). Tails on both males and females can be up to 1 m (3 ft 3 in) long.
The eastern grey kangaroos (Macropus giganteus). Although a male typically weighs around 66 kg (145 lb) and stand almost 2 m (6 ft 7 in) tall, the scientific name Macropus giganteus (gigantic large-foot) is misleading, as the red kangaroo living in the semi-arid inland is larger.
The antilopine kangaroo (Osphranter antilopinus), sometimes called the antilopine wallaroo or the antilopine wallaby, is a species of macropod found in northern Australia at Cape York Peninsula in Queensland, the Top End of the Northern Territory, and the Kimberley region of Western Australia. They can weigh as much as 47 kg (104 lb) and grow over 1 m (3 ft 3 in) long.
Common wombats (Vombatus ursinus) can reach 40 kg (88 lb). They thrive in Eastern Australia and Tasmania, preferring temperate forests and highland regions."
Australian megafauna,"Birds
The emu (Dromaius novaehollandiae)
The southern cassowary (Casuarius casuarius)"
Australian megafauna,"Reptiles
Goannas, being predatory lizards, are often quite large or bulky, with sharp teeth and claws. The largest extant goanna is the perentie (Varanus giganteus), which can grow over 2 m (6 ft 7 in) in length. However, not all goannas are gargantuan: pygmy goannas may be smaller than a man's arm.
A healthy adult male saltwater crocodile (Crocodylus porosus) is typically 4.8–7 m (15 ft 9 in – 23 ft 0 in) long and weighs around 1,000 kg (2,200 lb)), with many being much larger than that. The female is much smaller, with typical body lengths of 2.5–3 m (8 ft 2 in – 9 ft 10 in). An 8.5 m (28 ft) saltwater crocodile was reportedly shot on the Norman River of Queensland in 1957; a cast was made of it and is on display as a popular tourist attraction. However, due to the lack of solid evidence (other than the plaster replica), and the length of time since the crocodile was caught, it is not considered ""official"".
The freshwater crocodile (Crocodylus johnstoni) is a relatively small crocodilian. Males can grow to 2.3–3 m (7 ft 7 in – 9 ft 10 in) in length, while females reach a maximum length of 2.1 m (6 ft 11 in). Males commonly weigh around 60 kg (130 lb), with large specimens up to 85 kg (187 lb) or more, as against the average female weight of 20 kg (44 lb). In places such as Lake Argyle and Nitmiluk National Park (Katherine Gorge), there exist a handful of confirmed 4-metre (13 ft) individuals."
Australian megafauna,"Extinct Australian megafauna
The following is an incomplete list of extinct Australian megafauna (monotremes, marsupials, birds and reptiles) in the format:"
Australian megafauna,"Latin name, (common name, period alive), and a brief description."
Australian megafauna,"Monotremes
Monotremes are arranged by size with the largest at the top."
Australian megafauna,"Murrayglossus hacketti was a sheep-sized echidna uncovered in Mammoth Cave in Western Australia, and is the largest monotreme so far uncovered.
Obdurodon dicksoni was a platypus up to 60 cm (2 ft) in total length, fossils of which were found at Riversleigh.
Megalibgwilia ramsayi was a large, long-beaked echidna with powerful forelimbs for digging."
Australian megafauna,"Marsupials
Marsupials are arranged by size, with the largest at the top."
Australian megafauna,"1,000–3,000 kilograms (2,200–6,610 lb)
Diprotodon optatum is not only the largest known species of diprotodontid, but also the largest known marsupial to ever exist. Approximately 3 m (10 ft) long and 2 m (7 ft) high at the shoulder and weighing up to 2,780 kg (6,130 lb), it resembled a giant wombat. It is the only marsupial known, living or extinct, to have conducted seasonal migrations.
Palorchestes azael was a diprotodontoid similar in size to Zygomaturus. It had long claws to grasp branches with. It lived during the Pleistocene."
Australian megafauna,"100–1,000 kilograms (220–2,200 lb)
Euowenia grata
Euryzygoma dunense
Zygomaturus trilobus was a smaller (bullock-sized, about 2 m (7 ft) long by 1 m (3 ft) high) diprotodontid that may have had a short trunk. It appears to have lived in wetlands, using two fork-like incisors to shovel up reeds and sedges for food.
Macropus pearsoni and M. ferragus
Mukupirna nambensis, in its own family Mukupirnidae within the Vombatiformes suborder of the large marsupial order Diprotodontia
Nototherium was a diprotodontoid relative of the larger Diprotodon.
Phascolonus gigas
Procoptodon goliah (the giant short-faced kangaroo) is the largest-known kangaroo to have ever lived. It grew 2–3 metres (7–10 feet) tall, and weighed up to 230 kg (510 lb).
Procoptodon rapha, P. pusio and P. texasensis
Protemnodon, a genus of wallaby with four known giant species out of 11 known species
Palorchestes parvus
Ramsayia magna
Sthenurus tindalei and S. atlas
Thylacoleo carnifex (the marsupial lion) is the largest known carnivorous mammal to have ever lived in prehistoric Australia, and was of comparable size to female placental mammal lions and tigers, It had a catlike skull with large slicing pre-molars, a retractable thumb-claw and massive forelimbs. It was almost certainly carnivorous and a tree-dweller."
Australian megafauna,"10–100 kilograms (22–220 lb)
Simosthenurus pales
Phascolarctos stirtoni (the giant koala) was similar in structure to the modern koala (P. cinereus), but one-third larger.
Phascolomys medius
Lasiorhinus angustidens
Thylacinus cynocephalus (the thylacine, Tasmanian wolf or Tasmanian tiger), which notably survived into recent history (the last known individual died in 1936).
Congruus congruus, a wallaby from Naracoorte
Troposodon minor
Sthenurus oreas
Simosthenurus occidentalis (another sthenurine) was about as tall as a modern eastern grey kangaroo, but much more robust. It is one of the nine known species of leaf-eating kangaroos identified in fossils found in Naracoorte Caves National Park.
Simothenurus brownei
Propleopus oscillans (the giant rat-kangaroo) was a large (about 70 kg (150 lb) rat-kangaroo with large shearing and stout grinding teeth that indicate it may have been an opportunistic omnivore able to eat invertebrates, vertebrates (possibly carrion), fruits, and soft leaves. Grew to about 1.5–3 m (5–10 ft) in height.
Simothenurus maddocki
Sthenurus andersoni
Vombatus hacketti
Macropus thor
Macropus piltonensis
Macropus rama
Simothenurus gilli
Warrendja wakefieldi, a wombat from Naracoorte
Sarcophilus harrisii laniarius, a large subspecies of the Tasmanian devil.
Thylacinus megiriani"
Australian megafauna,"Birds
Family Dromornithidae: this group of birds was more closely related to modern fowl than to modern ratites.
Dromornis stirtoni, (Stirton's thunder bird) was a flightless bird 3 m (10 ft) tall that weighed about 500 kg (1,100 lb). It is one of the largest birds so far discovered. It inhabited subtropical open woodlands and was probably herbivorous with some omnivory. It was heavier than the moa and taller than the elephant birds.
Dromornis (formerly Bullockornis) planei (the ""demon duck of doom"") was another huge member of the Dromornithidae. It was up to 2.5 m (8 ft) tall and weighed up to 250 kg (550 lb); it was probably herbivorous with some omnivory.
Genyornis newtoni (the mihirung) was related to Dromornis, and was about the height of an ostrich. It was the last survivor of the Dromornithidae. It had a large lower jaw and was probably herbivorous with some omnivory.
Progura gallinacea (the giant malleefowl) was a larger relative of the extant malleefowl (Leipoa ocellata).
Cryptogyps lacertosus
Dynatoaetus gaffae, largest bird of prey of Australia, second only to the Haast's eagle of New Zealand"
Australian megafauna,"Reptiles
Varanus priscus (formerly Megalania prisca) (the megalania) was a giant carnivorous goanna that might have grown to as long as 7 m (23 ft), and weighed up to 1,940 kg (4,280 lb) (Molnar, 2004). Giant goannas and humans overlapped in time in Pleistocene Australia, but there is no evidence that they directly encountered each other.
Wonambi naracoortensis was a non-venomous snake of 5–6 m (16–20 ft) in length. It was an ambush predator living at waterholes located in natural sun traps and killed its prey by constriction.
Quinkana was a semi-terrestrial crocodile that normally grew around 3 m (9.8 ft) in length. Its blade-like teeth for cutting suggests its terrestrial ecology. It belonged to the mekosuchine subfamily (all now extinct). It was discovered at the Bluff Downs in Queensland.
Liasis dubudingala, lived during the Pliocene epoch, grew up to 10 m (33 ft) long, and is the largest Australian snake known. It hunted mammals, birds and reptiles in riparian woodlands. It is most similar to the extant olive python (Liasis olivacea).
Meiolania was a genus of huge terrestrial cryptodire turtles measuring 2.5 m (8 ft) in length, with horned heads and spiked tails."
Australian megafauna,"Extinct megafauna contemporaneous with Aboriginal Australians
Monsters and large animals in Dreamtime stories have been associated with extinct megafauna."
Australian megafauna,"The association was made at least as early as 1845, with colonists writing that Aboriginal people identified Diprotodon bones as belonging to bunyips, and Thomas Worsnop concluding that the fear of bunyip attacks at watering holes remembered a time when Diprotodon lived in marshes.
In the early 1900s, John Walter Gregory outlined the Kadimakara (or Kuddimurka or Kadimerkera) story of the Diyari (similar stories being told by nearby peoples), which describes the deserts of Central Australia as having once been ""fertile, well-watered plains"" with giant gum trees, and almost solid cloud cover overhead. The trees created a roof of vegetation in which lived the strange monsters called Kadimakara—which sometimes came to the ground to eat. One time, the gum trees were destroyed, forcing the Kadimakara to remain on the ground, particularly Lake Eyre and Kalamurina, until they died.
In times of drought and flood, the Diyari performed corroborees (including dances and blood sacrifices) at the bones of the Kadimakara to appease them and request that they intercede with the spirits of rain and clouds. Sites of Kadimakara bones identified by Aboriginal people corresponded with megafauna fossil sites, and an Aboriginal guide identified a Diprotodon jaw as belonging to the Kadimakara.
Gregory speculated that the story could be a remnant from when the Diyari lived elsewhere, or when the geographical conditions of Central Australia were different. The latter possibility would indicate Aboriginal coexistence with megafauna, with Gregory saying:"
Australian megafauna,"If, therefore, the geologist can determine whether the bones of the extinct monsters of Lake Eyre correspond to those described in the aboriginal traditions, he can throw light on several interesting problems.
If the legends attribute to the extinct animals characters which they possessed, but which the natives could not have inferred from the bones, then the legends are of local origin. They would prove that man inhabited Central Australia, at the same time as the mighty diprotodon and the extinct, giant kangaroos. If, on the other hand, there is no such correspondence between the legends and the fossils, then we must regard the traditions as due to the habit of migratory peoples, of localising in new homes the incidents recorded in their folklore.
After examining fossils, Gregory concluded that the story was a combination of the two factors, but that the environment of Lake Eyre had probably not changed much since Aboriginal habitation. He concluded that while some references to Kadimakara were probably memories of the crocodiles once found in Lake Eyre, others that describe a ""big, heavy land animal, with a single horn on its forehead"" were probably references to Diprotodon."
Australian megafauna,"Geologist Michael Welland describes from across Australia Dreamtime ""tales of giant creatures that roamed the lush landscape until aridity came and they finally perished in the desiccated marshes of Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre"", giving as examples the Kadimakara of Lake Eye, as well as continent-wide stories of the Rainbow Serpent, which he says corresponds with Wonambi naracoortensis.
Journalist Peter Hancock speculates in The Crocodile That Wasn't that a Dreamtime story from the Perth area could be a memory of Varanus priscus. However, the story in question details dingoes attacking or frightening off the alleged V. priscus, when the giant lizard died out nearly 46,000 years before the accepted arrival date of dingoes.
Rock art in the Kimberley region appears to depict a marsupial lion and a marsupial tapir, as does Arnhem land art. Arnhem art also appears to depict Genyornis, a bird that is believed to have gone extinct 40,000 years ago.
An Early Triassic archosauromorph found in Queensland, Kadimakara australiensis, is named after the Kadimakara."
Australian megafauna,"See also
List of Australian animals extinct in the Holocene
Cuddie Springs – Archaeological site in Australia
Hulitherium and Maokopia (Diprotodontoids inhabited New Guinea during the Pleistocene)
Komodo dragon – Largest living species of lizard (Believed to have evolved in Australia)
Quaternary extinction event – Extinctions of large mammals in the Late PleistocenePages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets
Pleistocene rewilding (there exist discussions about validity of invasive species in Australia to compensate for ecological niches of extinct Australian megafauna)"
Australian megafauna,"References
Field, J. H.; Dodson, J. (1999). ""Late Pleistocene megafauna and archaeology from Cuddie Springs, south-eastern Australia"". Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society. 65: 1–27. doi:10.1017/S0079497X00002024. S2CID 131617908.
Field, J. H.; Boles, W. E. (1998). ""Genyornis newtoni and Dromaius novaehollandiae at 30,000 b.p. in central northern New South Wales"". Alcheringa. 22 (#2): 177–188. Bibcode:1998Alch...22..177F. doi:10.1080/03115519808619199.
Long, J.A., Archer, M. Flannery, T.F. & Hand, S. (2003). Prehistoric Mammals of Australia and New Guinea −100 Million Years of Evolution. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. 242 pp.
Molnar, R. (2004). Dragons in the Dust: The Paleobiology of the Giant Lizard Megalania. Indiana University Press. p. 127.
Murray, P. F.; Megirian, D. (1998). ""The skull of dromornithid birds: anatomical evidence for their relationship to Anseriformes (Dromornithidae, Anseriformes)"". Records of the South Australian Museum. 31: 51–97.
Wroe, S.; Field, J.; Fullagar, R. (2002). ""Lost giants"". Nature Australia. 27 (#5): 54–61.
Prideaux, Gavin J; Roberts, Richard G.; Megirian, Dirk; Westaway, Kira E.; Hellstrom, John C.; Olley, John M. (2007). ""Mammalian responses to Pleistocene climate change in southeastern Australia"" (PDF). Geology. 35 (#1): 33–36. Bibcode:2007Geo....35...33P. doi:10.1130/G23070A.1."
Australian megafauna,"External links
Cuddie Springs
Interview with Dr John Long, curator at the Museum of Victoria
Naracoorte caves in South Australia
Humans, not climate change, wiped out Australian megafauna. Phys.org, January 20, 2017."
Women and government in Australia,"Government in Australia is elected by universal suffrage and Australian women participate in all levels of the government of the nation. In 1902, the newly formed Commonwealth of Australia became the first nation on earth to enact equal suffrage, enabling women to both vote and stand for election alongside men Women have been represented in Australian state parliaments since 1921, and in the Federal Parliament since 1943. The first female leader of an Australian State or Territory was elected in 1989, and the first female Prime Minister took office in 2010. In 2019 for the first time, a majority of members of the  Australian Senate were women. At the time of its foundation in 1901, and again from 1952 to 2022, Australia has had a female monarch as ceremonial Head of State, while the first female Governor of an Australian State was appointed in 1991, and the first female Governor-General of Australia took office in 2008.
Prior to the 1901 Federation of Australia, some of the self-governing British colonies of Australia had already enacted the right of women to vote or stand in elections. South Australian women achieved the right to stand for office in 1895 following the Constitutional Amendment (Adult Suffrage) Act 1894, which was the first legislation in the world to permit women to stand for election for political office. In 1897, Catherine Helen Spence became the first female political candidate for political office, unsuccessfully standing as a delegate to the Federal Convention on Australian Federation. Women won the vote in Western Australia in 1900, with some restrictions based on race. Indigenous Australian women could vote in some jurisdictions and circumstances from the outset, but did not achieve unqualified suffrage in all states and territories until 1962. Following Federation in 1901, the newly formed Parliament of Australia passed the Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902 allowing most women to both vote and stand at the 1903 Federal election. The states of New South Wales, Tasmania, Queensland and Victoria passed legislation allowing women to participate in government at the state and local levels soon after Federation. The first woman to be elected to any Australian parliament was Edith Cowan in 1921 (WA), but it was not until the 1943 election that Enid Lyons and Senator Dorothy Tangney became the first women to be elected to the Federal Parliament.
The first female to lead a state or territory government was Rosemary Follett serving in 1989 and again between 1991 and 1995 as chief minister of the ACT. The first female premier was Carmen Lawrence, leading Western Australia for three years until 1993. Joan Kirner was the first female premier of Victoria, serving from 1990 to 1992. In the Northern Territory, Clare Martin became the first female chief minister in 2001 winning from opposition and was reelected in 2005 with an increased majority.  In 2007, Anna Bligh became the first female premier in Queensland after the retirement of Peter Beattie, and in 2009, Bligh became the first popularly elected woman premier. In NSW, Kristina Keneally became the first female premier of the state in 2009 and was defeated at the 2011 state election. Lara Giddings was the first female Premier of the state of Tasmania between January 2011 and March 2014. In Queensland, in 2015, Annastacia Palaszczuk became the first woman to be elected premier from opposition and was the first female premier to be elected for a second term after winning the 2017 Queensland state election. Despite being the earliest state to grant voting rights and allow women to stand in parliament since 1895, South Australia has never had a female premier. Julia Gillard was prime minister of Australia from 24 June 2010 to 27 June 2013, the first and only woman to have held the position.
Woman were allowed to vote and be stand for election in 1902 but many people thought that this was a bad idea so until 41 years later there were no women in parliament. The first 2 people were Edith Lyon in the house of representatives in Darwin (wife of prime minister Joseph lyon) and Dorothy tagney in the senate in Western Australia. Dorothy held the record for longest woman working in parliament until 2001 at 25 years.in 2014 research has showed that 28.2% of the house of representatives were woman while in the Senate was 32%. In 2022 we found out 39% of parliament was women."
Women and government in Australia,"The Crown
Australia has been governed as a Federated Constitutional Monarchy since 1901. There have been two female heads of state in the history of the Monarchy of Australia. Queen Victoria, who reigned from 1837 to 1901, and was the reigning monarch when the Constitution of Australia came into force, on 1 January 1901, after she gave it Royal Assent. Queen Elizabeth II reigned from 1952 to 2022, and from 1973 she was styled ""Queen of Australia"", to emphasise the separate constitutional status of the Australian Monarchy from the United Kingdom institution. Queen Elizabeth celebrated her 70th jubilee in 2022 – the longest serving monarch in Australian history."
Women and government in Australia,"The Monarch is represented in Australia by Governors at a state level, and by the Governor-General at a Federal government level. There have been fifteen female state governors, since 1991 when Dame Roma Mitchell became the 31st Governor of South Australia. Dame Quentin Bryce became the first female Governor–General in 2008 and served until 2014."
Women and government in Australia,"Women's suffrage
During the 19th century, Britain's Australasian colonies were at the vanguard of achieving both male and female suffrage. Australia's first council elections were held with male suffrage in 1840, while parliamentary elections were first conducted for the New South Wales Legislative Council in 1843, with voting rights (for males only) tied to property ownership or financial capacity. The Australian Colonies Government Act, passed in 1850, granted representative constitutions to New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, and Tasmania and the colonies enthusiastically set about writing constitutions which produced democratically progressive parliaments – through the constitutions generally maintained the role of the colonial upper houses as representative of social and economic ""interests"" and all established Constitutional Monarchies with the British monarch as the symbolic head of state. 1855 also saw the granting of the right to vote to all male British subjects 21 years or over in South Australia. This right was extended to Victoria in 1857 and New South Wales the following year. The other colonies followed until, in 1896, Tasmania became the last colony to grant universal male suffrage.
While the female descendants of the Bounty mutineers who lived on Pitcairn Islands could vote from 1838, and this right transferred with their resettlement to Norfolk Island (now an Australian external territory) in 1856, women in mainland Australia and New Zealand were next in the world to achieve such historic gains. Following the successful establishment of voter rights for males, women's suffrage groups began to organise in Australia from the 1880s. The first was the Victorian Women's Suffrage Society, was formed by Henrietta Dugdale in 1884. The organisations involved in the suffrage movement varied across the colonies. A national body, the Australian Women's Suffrage Society, was formed in 1889, whose aims were to educate women and men about a woman's right to vote and stand for parliament. Key figures in the Australian suffrage movement included South Australians Mary Lee and Catherine Helen Spence, Western Australian Edith Cowan, New South Welsh Maybanke Anderson, Louisa Lawson, Dora Montefiore and Rose Scott, Tasmanians Alicia O'Shea Petersen and Jessie Rooke, Queenslander Emma Miller, and Victorians Annette Bear-Crawford, Henrietta Dugdale, Vida Goldstein, Alice Henry and Annie Lowe.
In 1861 land-owning South Australian women had a vote in local elections. In 1894, the Constitutional Amendment (Adult Suffrage) Act 1894 in South Australia followed New Zealand in extending the franchise to women voters – but went further than New Zealand and allowed women to stand for the colonial Parliament. South Australian women voted for the first time at the 1896 South Australian election. In 1897 Catherine Helen Spence became the first woman political candidate when she ran for election to the National Australasian Convention as one of ten delegates, but came 22nd out of 33 candidates. In 1899 Western Australian women achieved voting rights for colonial elections but not the right to stand for the colonial Parliament. Women from both South Australia and Western Australia voted at the 1901 election.
On 12 June 1902 the Commonwealth Franchise Act came into effect, granting most Australian women the right to vote and stand in Commonwealth elections. Franchise of Indigenous Australians at the federal level was not universal until 1962, and voting by Indigenous Australians was not compulsory until 1984. The first election at which women used both the right to vote and stand for election was the 1903 election, held on 16 December.
Following the inclusion of non-indigenous women in the 1903 election, many Australian women and the Australian government, led by Prime Minister Alfred Deakin, used their experience to promote women's suffrage in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. 'Trust the Women Mother, As I Have Done', banner painted by Dora Meeson was carried at the head of the Australian and New Zealand Women Voters' Committee contingent in the Women's Suffrage Coronation March in London on 17 June 1911.
New South Wales, Tasmania, Queensland and Victoria followed the lead of the other states in allowing women to vote, and later to stand for election. Victoria, the last state to grant women's suffrage, had briefly allowed women to vote when the Electoral Act 1863 enfranchised all ratepayers listed on local municipal rolls. Women in Victoria voted in the 1864 general election. The legislative mistake was quickly repaired in 1865, and it took 19 private members' bills from 1889 until Victorian women gained the vote in 1908, and were able to exercise the vote in 1911. Women in the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory were, as federal subjects, eligible to vote at the federal level from their establishment.  By the time the territories achieved self-government in 1978 and 1989 respectively, they did not need to enact specific legislation to enable the women's vote.
The right to vote in local government elections was granted later in most jurisdictions than it was at the state and federal levels. The right to vote in local elections was also not automatic, as property ownership qualifications limited the eligibility to vote and stand for local elections.
Significantly from 2010 to 2011 the city of Sydney was operating totally under female governance: from the Lord Mayor and State Member for Sydney Clover Moore, to State Premier Kristina Keneally, to State Governor Marie Bashir, to Federal Member for Sydney Tanya Plibersek, to Prime Minister of Australia Julia Gillard, to Governor–General of Australia Quentin Bryce, and of course, to the Australian Head of State, Queen Elizabeth II.
The first women elected to Australian parliaments have generally been members of the non-Labor (i.e., conservative) parties. This was the case in every state except for Tasmania, where an independent, Margaret McIntyre, was the first woman elected to parliament. The Labor Party first began to regularly nominate female candidates to parliament in the 1950s, generally only to the upper houses at first.
Since 2015, 12 Indigenous women have been elected to state, territory or commonwealth parliaments, with 5 of whom having been ministers in a government starting with Marion Scrymgour in 2007."
Women and government in Australia,"Women in politics
Commonwealth government
Early Parliamentary Candidates
In 1902, Australia became the first nation in the world to introduce equal federal suffrage with the enactment of the Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902, which enabled women to both vote and stand in federal elections. However, it would be four decades before female candidates were elected to serve in the Federal Parliament of Australia. Nevertheless, four women stood for election at the 1903 federal election. They were Mary Moore-Bentley and Nellie Martel from New South Wales, and Vida Goldstein from Victoria, all of whom stood for the Senate, and Selina Anderson who contested the Sydney House of Representatives seat of Dalley. All failed to get major party endorsement and stood as independents, and all were unsuccessful. Goldstein stood for the Senate again in 1910, 1913, 1914 and 1917, all without success. Eva Seery contested Labor Party preselection for the Senate in 1916 but was unsuccessful. She and Henrietta Greville were endorsed Labor candidates at the 1917 federal election, though for safe conservative seats. Though unsuccessful they were the first women to stand for the Australian Parliament with major party endorsement."
Women and government in Australia,"First Members, Senators & Ministers
At the 1943 federal election, two women were elected to Parliament - Dame Enid Lyons and Dorothy Tangney. With Australian Labor Party endorsement, Tangney was elected to the Senate representing Western Australia, an office she held until 1968. With the backing of the United Australia Party, Lyons was elected to the House of Representatives as the member for the Division of Darwin, which was located in Tasmania. In 1949 she became the first female member of cabinet, when Liberal Prime Minister Robert Menzies appointed her  Minister without Portfolio to enable her appointment to the honorary office of Vice-President of the Executive Council, an office she held until her retirement from parliament in 1951.
Dame Annabelle Rankin won election for the Liberal Party representing Queensland at the 1946 Election and became Australia's second female Senator. She served as Government Whip from 1951 to 1966 in the Menzies government, and was appointed Minister for Housing in the Holt government in 1966, the first woman to head a government department. In 1975, Liberal Senator Dame Margaret Guilfoyle became the first female cabinet minister with a portfolio, following her appointment as Minister for Education in the Fraser government. Agnes Robertson was elected as the fourth female Senator in 1949, and was elected as the first Country Party (now National Party) Senator at the 1955 election, after losing endorsement for the Liberals and switching allegiance. She went on to be appointed as the first female member of the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs in 1956."
Women and government in Australia,"Further milestones
In 1983 Labor MP Ros Kelly became the first woman to give birth while an MP. Florence Bjelke-Petersen became Deputy Leader of the National Party in the Senate in 1985 and remained in the role until 1990. In 1986 there were two firsts, Joan Child became the first female Speaker of the House of Representatives and Janine Haines became the first woman to lead a parliamentary party when she became head of the Australian Democrats. Margaret Reid became the first female President of the Senate in 1996. Nova Peris and Jacqui Lambie were the first two indigenous women to enter federal politics in 2014.
Kathy Sullivan was the first woman to have served in both the Senate and the House of Representatives."
Women and government in Australia,First Woman Prime Minister
Women and government in Australia,"On 24 June 2010, Julia Gillard became the first woman to lead one of the major political parties at the federal level as Leader of the Australian Labor Party, as well as the first female Prime Minister of Australia. However, as it became clear that her government was headed for a heavy defeat, she was deposed by her own party in June 2013 in favour of former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, whom she had replaced in a similar coup."
Women and government in Australia,"Ongoing developments
Julie Bishop had become the first female Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party in 2007, and with the election of the Abbott government in 2013, became Australia's first female Minister for Foreign Affairs. The National Party also had its first female Deputy Leader over the period in Fiona Nash, who held the position from 2008 to 2017.
In December 2014, Liberal MP Bronwyn Bishop eclipsed Kathy Sullivan's earlier record of 27 years to become the longest-serving female Member of the Australian Federal Parliament. She was nominated Speaker of the House of Representatives by Prime Minister Tony Abbott, and served in the role from 2013 to 2015.
Following the 2016 Australian federal election there were 73 women members of both Houses of the Australian Parliament, representing 32% of all seats in the Senate and House of Representatives.
At the 2019 federal election, of the 68 members of the Labor Party in the House of Representatives 28 were women (41.2%). In the Liberal Party, of the 61 members, 13 were women (21.3%). For the Nationals, it had 2 women among 16 members (12.5%). Of the Independents there were 3 women among 6 members (50.0%). Overall, there were 45 women among 151 members (29.8%).
The Liberal–National government's Second Morrison Ministry reached an historic high of seven women in Cabinet, including Foreign Minister Marise Payne, who previously served as Australia's first female Defence Minister, and became the longest-serving female senator in Australian history, as well as the longest current serving female member of federal parliament in 2022. Following the 2022 Australian federal election, the Albanese Government surpassed the record set by the Morrison government with the appointment of ten women parliamentarians to cabinet. This election also saw a number of female ""teal independents"" elected to parliament."
Women and government in Australia,"Commonwealth Public Service
The Commonwealth Public Service Act 1902 provided that every female officer was ""deemed to have retired from the Commonwealth service upon her marriage"", with the exception of women working in agencies transferred from a state to the Commonwealth. The very great majority of women were effectively blocked from non-secretarial positions in the Commonwealth Public Service. In 1949 women were allowed into the clerical division of the service but they remained restricted by the marriage bar. In November 1966, Australia became the last democratic country to lift the legislated marriage bar which had prevented married women from holding permanent positions in the public service."
Women and government in Australia,"State and territory governments
The first woman elected to a state parliament was Edith Cowan, when she was elected to the Western Australian Legislative Assembly in 1921. Millicent Preston-Stanley was elected to the New South Wales Legislative Assembly in 1925, Irene Longman was elected to the Legislative Assembly of Queensland in 1929 and Millie Peacock was elected to the Victorian Legislative Assembly in 1933. Ironically, South Australia as the first state to allow women to sit in state parliament, was also the last to have a female sitting member when Joyce Steele and Jessie Cooper were elected on the same day in 1959. Both the Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly and Northern Territory Legislative Assembly had women in their inaugural Parliaments. Women were not elected to the upper house of state parliaments until after World War II; no woman was elected to the Victorian upper house until 1979, when Gracia Baylor (Liberal) and Joan Coxsedge (ALP) were elected.
In 1989 Rosemary Follett became the first female head of government in Australia, as Chief Minister of the Australian Capital Territory. Carmen Lawrence was the first female premier of an Australian state when she took the office of Premier of Western Australia in February 1990.  She was followed by the appointment of Joan Kirner as Premier of Victoria, in which position she served from 1990 to 1992, when her party was swept from office by Jeff Kennett's conservatives. Clare Martin was Chief Minister of the Northern Territory from 2001 to 2007. Anna Bligh became Premier of Queensland in 2007 when Peter Beattie retired.  In 2009, she became the first woman in Australia to be elected Premier, though she subsequently suffered a landslide loss to Campbell Newman's LNP in 2012. On 4 December 2009, Kristina Keneally replaced Nathan Rees to become the first female Premier of New South Wales. As Carmel Tebbutt retained the role of Deputy Premier, Keneally also led the first executive in Australia to be led by two women. However, Keneally would also go on to suffer a crushing defeat at the hands of Barry O'Farrell in 2011. In 2011 Lara Giddings became the first female Premier of Tasmania, serving until 2014 when she likewise suffered a crushing loss to conservative leader Will Hodgman.  This again leaves South Australia as the only state or territory not to have had a female head of government.
Marion Scrymgour is to date the highest ranked Indigenous woman in a government in Australia when she was Deputy Chief Minister of the Northern Territory from 2007 until 2009.
Prior to Labor's massive loss in 2012 the Legislative Assembly of Queensland had the highest female parliamentary representation in Australia and the third highest in the world, with 30 out of 89 Members having been women. However, the next state election resulted in Annastacia Palaszczuk becoming the first woman to become Premier from opposition. The subsequent government would become the second in Australia to be headed by two women and the first ministry in Australia to have a female majority.
On 3 March 2018, Australia passed another milestone when, at the 2018 Tasmanian election, Tasmanians elected a majority of women to the Tasmanian House of Assembly, with 13 women and 12 men. Seven of the ten Labor members are women, four of the 13 Liberals and both of the Greens.
As at 27 November 2018, following the 2018 Victorian state election, 50% of Ministers in the second Victorian Andrews Government were female, and following cabinet changes on 23 March 2020, a majority of the cabinet was female.
Dame Roma Mitchell was made the first female Justice of the Supreme Court of South Australia in 1965, at the recommendation of Don Dunstan, South Australia's 38th Attorney-General. She was still the only female judge in South Australia when she retired 18 years later in 1983 although Justices Elizabeth Evatt and Mary Gaudron had been appointed to federal courts by the Whitlam Government. It was not until 1993 that the second woman was appointed to the court, Mitchell's former student, Margaret Nyland."
Women and government in Australia,"Local government
The first woman elected to a local government authority in Australia was Grace Benny, who was elected to the Brighton Council in South Australia in 1919. In 1920 Mary Rogers was elected to Richmond City Council, Victoria and Elizabeth Clapham was elected to Western Australia's Cottesloe Municipal Council. Queensland's first female councillor was Dr Ellen Kent-Hughes, elected to Kingaroy Shire Council in 1923. New South Wales' first female alderman was Lilian Fowler, elected in 1928 to Newtown Municipal Council; she was later to become Australia's first woman mayor. Dorothy Edwards, Tasmania's first female alderman, was elected to Launceston City Council in 1950 and became the first female mayor of an Australian city in 1955.
Australia's first female lord mayor, Joy Cummings, was elected to Newcastle City Council in 1974.
In 1951 the Australian Local Government Women's Association (ALGWA) was formed.  The ALGWA is an association of local government women helping other women to join them.
In 1975 Western Australia and the Northern Territory elected their first women mayors, Councillor Evelyn H. Parker of the City of Subiaco and Dr Ella Stack of the City of Darwin respectively.
In the 1980s women began to hold the position of Lord Mayor in the capital cities for the first time, including:"
Women and government in Australia,"Adelaide –  Wendy Chapman (1983–1985)
Brisbane – Sallyanne Atkinson (1985–1991)
Hobart – Doone Kennedy (1986–1996), Sue Hickey (2014–2018) and Anna Reynolds (2018–present)
Melbourne – Lecki Ord (1987–1988), Winsome McCaughey (1988–1989) and Sally Capp (2018–present)
Sydney – Lucy Turnbull (2003–2004) and Clover Moore (2004–present)
Perth – Lisa Scaffidi (2007–2018)"
Women and government in Australia,"Other milestones
In 2010, Australia had female leaders occupying every major political office, with Clover Moore as Lord Mayor, Kristina Keneally as Premier of New South Wales, Marie Bashir as Governor of New South Wales, Julia Gillard as prime minister, Quentin Bryce as Governor-General of Australia, and Elizabeth II as Queen of Australia.
As of April 2023: The Governor of New South Wales Margaret Beazley, Governor of Queensland Jeannette Young, Governor of South Australia  Frances Adamson, Governor of Tasmania Barbara Baker and Governor of Victoria Linda Dessau are women. Meaning that out of 6 Governors, 5 are women."
Women and government in Australia,"See also
Women in Australia
Women in the Australian House of Representatives
Women in the Australian Senate
2021 Australian Parliament rape allegations
2021 March 4 Justice"
Women and government in Australia,"References
Commonwealth Office of the Status of Women. 2002. Our Centenary of Women's Suffrage
Haines, J. 1993. Suffrage to Sufferance. Allen and Unwin. ISBN 1-86373-365-5
Parliament of New South Wales. Women in Parliament
Sawer, M. 2001. Women and government in Australia, In Year Book of Australia, 2001, Australia Bureau of Statistics, Catalogue #1301.01
Sawer, M. and Simms, M. 1993. A woman's place. Allen and Unwin. ISBN 1-86373-169-5
Scott, M. 2003. How Australia led the way: Dora Meeson Coates and British Suffrage. Commonwealth Office of the Status of Women ISBN 1-877042-40-4
Walsh, K. Ed. 2004. One Hundred Years of Women's Suffrage in Australia, Papers on Parliament No. 41.  Department of the Senate"
Women and government in Australia,"External links
Why politics is toxic for Australia’s women by Frances Mao, BBC News, May, 16, 2019"
Public holidays in Australia,"Public holidays in Australia refer to the holidays recognised in law in Australia. Although they are declared on a state and territory basis, they comprise a mixture of nationally celebrated days and holidays exclusive to the individual jurisdictions.
Public holidays function as non-working days, with workers generally receiving full paid leave independently of annual leave. Those working on public holidays receive additional penalty rates of pay. Where they fall on a weekend, public holidays are generally declared in lieu for the following Monday.
Statutory holidays in Australia are based on varying religious, cultural and civic observations. Christian celebrations, namely Christmas and Easter, are some of the most significant ones observed. A Labour Day is observed in each state and territory, although it is varied in date. There are two significant national days, Australia Day (26 January) and Anzac Day (25 April), which are nationwide public holidays.
When a public holiday occurs on a Friday or Monday, the three-day period is colloquially known as a ""long weekend""."
Public holidays in Australia,"Nature of public holidays
Traditionally, Australians in employment (whether in the public or private sector) have had the right to take a public holiday off work with regular pay. In recent years this tradition has changed somewhat. For example, businesses that normally open on a public holiday may request employees to work on that day. Employers can deny employees a holiday only on reasonable business grounds.
From 2006, WorkChoices eliminated the entitlement to penalty rates in many workplaces; however since the implementation of the Fair Work Act 2009 and the modern awards in 2010, most public-holiday penalty rates have increased dramatically. As of 2018 employees generally receive pay at a penalty rate—usually 2.5 times (known as ""double time and a half"") the base rate of pay—when they work on a public holiday.
Besides designating days as public holidays, Australian authorities also designate some of these days as restricted trading days.
Public holidays are determined by a combination of:"
Public holidays in Australia,"statutes, with specific gazetting of public holidays
industrial awards and agreements
If a standard public holiday falls on a weekend, a substitute public holiday will sometimes be observed on the first non-weekend day (usually Monday) after the weekend, whether by virtue of the public holiday legislation or by ad hoc proclamation. Workers required to work on a public holiday or substituted public holiday will usually be entitled to remuneration at a holiday penalty rate.
All states have their own public holidays in addition to national public holidays, and in some states certain public holidays, such as Melbourne Cup Day, are in force in only part of a state.
Alcohol licences in several states prevent sale of alcohol on certain public holidays, such as Good Friday."
Public holidays in Australia,"Public holidays
Legend:
B City of Brisbane only. The Royal National Agricultural (RNA) Show Day (Brisbane only) is held on the Wednesday during the RNA Show period. The RNA Show commences on the first Friday in August, unless the first Friday is prior to 5 August, then it commences on the second Friday of August. Other Queensland show holidays: Show holiday dates | Public, school and show holidays
C = Conditional: Public Service employees or where defined in Employment Agreement/Award
H = Hobart area only
NH = Not Hobart area
P Part day, from 7 pm to midnight (6 pm to midnight for QLD)
† Often substituted with the Geelong Cup for Geelong residents. For regional Victoria other local cup days are sometimes substituted.
* Depends on occupation, generally from 6 pm to midnight"
Public holidays in Australia,"Substitute holidays for holidays falling on a weekend
When a public holiday falls on a weekend, the following work day may be considered a public holiday depending on the state/territory and the holiday in question."
Public holidays in Australia,"Holidays that always fall on a particular day of the week are not listed in this table. Prior to 2008, Victorian law only specified substitute holidays for New Year and Boxing Day, and only if they fell on a Sunday. From 2008, Victorian law specifies the substitute holidays in the table above.
Since Easter Monday can occur as late as 26 April it is possible for the Easter Monday holiday to coincide with Anzac Day, as occurred in 2011.  State Acts do not give a provision to separate the days when this occurs, so no additional public holiday is given by law. However an extra day is usually proclaimed by the minister, so as to have a steady number of public holidays each year. In the year 2038, Anzac Day will coincide with Easter Sunday."
Public holidays in Australia,"Australia Day
Nationally, Australia Day was originally celebrated on 30 July 1915.
Recorded celebrations of the 26 January date back to 1808 in Australia, and in 1818, Governor Lachlan Macquarie held the first official celebration of Australia Day.  26 January was chosen because it is the day of the establishment of the first British settlement at Port Jackson by Captain Arthur Phillip in 1788.  It was made a public holiday in New South Wales in 1836, and Victoria adopted the day as a public holiday in 1931. The 26 January commenced to be recognised by all states and territories as Australia Day in 1935 (pre 150th Anniversary) and all States except SA  observed it from the 1888 centenary.
Australia Day has been celebrated as a national public holiday on 26 January since 1994.
Since 1960, the winner of the Australian of the Year award is announced by the Prime Minister on the eve of Australia Day (25 Jan)."
Public holidays in Australia,"Labour Day
Labour Day commemorates the achievements of the Australian labour movement. The celebration of Labour Day has its origins in the eight-hour day movement, which advocated eight hours for work, eight hours for recreation, and eight hours for rest. On 21 April 1856 Stonemasons and building workers on building sites around Melbourne, Australia, stopped work and marched from the University of Melbourne to Parliament House to achieve an eight-hour day. Their direct action protest was a success, and they are noted as the first organised workers in the world to achieve an eight-hour day with no loss of pay, which subsequently inspired the celebration of Labour Day and May Day. In Tasmania the public holiday is called Eight Hours Day and in the Northern Territory it is called May Day.
The Labour Day public holiday varies considerably between the various states and territories. It is the first Monday in October in the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales and South Australia. In Western Australia, it is the first Monday in March. In both Victoria and Tasmania, it is the second Monday in March. In the Northern Territory, and in Queensland it is the first Monday in May. More than 80 countries celebrate Labor Day. Labor Day is a long weekend."
Public holidays in Australia,"Easter
The days of Easter vary each year depending on the day determined by the Western Christian calendar. Until 1994 Easter Tuesday was a Bank Holiday in Victoria (it retains this status partially in Tasmania). The day after Good Friday and before Easter Sunday is traditionally known as Holy Saturday. However, the states where that day is a public holiday use different terminology – it is officially gazetted as ""Easter Saturday"" in the ACT, New South Wales, the Northern Territory and South Australia, as ""the day after Good Friday"" in Queensland, and as ""Saturday before Easter Sunday"" in Victoria."
Public holidays in Australia,"ANZAC Day
ANZAC Day is a day on which the country remembers those citizens who fell fighting or who served the country in wars. ANZAC Day is commemorated on 25 April every year. The tradition began to remember the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) soldiers who landed at Gallipoli in Turkey during World War I.
ANZAC Day commemoration features marches by veterans and by solemn ""Dawn Services"", a tradition started in Albany, Western Australia on 25 April 1923 and now held at war memorials around the country, accompanied by thoughts of those lost at war to the ceremonial sounds of The Last Post on the bugle. The fourth stanza of Laurence Binyon's poem For the Fallen (known as the ""Ode of Remembrance"") is often recited."
Public holidays in Australia,"King's Birthday
In all states and territories except Queensland and Western Australia, the King's Birthday is observed on the second Monday in June. Because Western Australia celebrates Western Australia Day (formerly Foundation Day) on the first Monday in June, the Governor of Western Australia proclaims the day on which the state will observe the King's Birthday, based on school terms and the Perth Royal Show. There is no firm rule to determine this date before it is proclaimed, though it is typically the last Monday of September or the first Monday of October: in 2011 the King's Birthday holiday in Western Australia was moved from Monday, 3 October 2011 to Friday, 28 October 2011 to coincide with the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), which was held in Perth. In parts of the Pilbara, it is celebrated on a different date from the rest of Western Australia, and it may even be celebrated on different dates in different parts of the Pilbara. In Queensland, it is celebrated on the 1st Monday in October.
The day has been celebrated since 1788, when Governor Arthur Phillip declared a holiday to mark the birthday of King George III. Until 1936 it was held on the actual birthday of the Monarch, but after the death of King George V, it was decided to keep the date at mid-year.
On that day the ""King's Birthday honours list"" is released naming new members of the Order of Australia and other Australian honours. This occurs on the date observed in the Eastern States, not the date observed in Western Australia.
The King's Birthday weekend and Empire Day, 24 May, were long the traditional times for public fireworks displays in Australia. Although they still occur, the tradition has recently been overshadowed by larger New Year's Eve fireworks, as the sale of fireworks to the public was banned by the states in the 1980s, and in the ACT as of 24 August 2009. In the Northern Territory fireworks remain available to the public on 1 July for the celebration of Territory Day."
Public holidays in Australia,"Christmas Day
Christmas is observed on 25 December each year to commemorate the birth of Jesus. In Australia, it was introduced with British settlement in 1788 as the cultural norms were transferred to the new colonies."
Public holidays in Australia,"Boxing Day
Boxing Day is on the day after Christmas, i.e. 26 December each year, except in South Australia where it is replaced by Proclamation Day.
Boxing Day is noted for the start of the post-Christmas sale season. The day has also become a significant sporting day. Melbourne hosts the Boxing Day Test match; the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race also starts on this day."
Public holidays in Australia,"Other holidays
Every public holiday and Sunday is a bank holiday in South Australia.
Proclamation Day is in December in South Australia only.
Canberra Day is held on the 2nd Monday in March in the ACT. Prior to 2008, this holiday was celebrated on the 3rd Monday of March.
Melbourne Cup Day is held on the first Tuesday of November—the day of the Melbourne Cup. It was originally observed only in the Melbourne metropolitan area. From 2007 to 2009 in ACT, Melbourne Cup day was also a holiday called ""Family and Community Day"". The holiday continued from 2010 to 2017 but no longer coincided with Melbourne Cup day. In Victoria, the Public Holidays Act 1993 (Vic) was amended from 24 September 2008 and made the Melbourne Cup Day holiday applicable in all parts of the state (unless another day is observed in substitute). It also made the holiday applicable to employees covered by federal awards.
Recreation Day is the first Monday of November, and celebrated in Northern Tasmania where Regatta Day is not a holiday.
Regatta Day is the second Monday in February, and is celebrated in Southern Tasmania. Previously it was held on the second Tuesday in February.
Geelong Cup Day is held on the fourth Wednesday of October in the city of Geelong, Victoria
Queensland Day is celebrated on 6 June each year, but not with a public holiday.
Adelaide Cup Day is held on the second Monday in March in South Australia (held in May before 2006)
Western Australia Day in Western Australia on the first Monday in June.
Picnic Day in the Northern Territory in August, and also May Day
Tasmania has Easter Tuesday as a bank holiday (for bank and government employees only).
New South Wales has the first Monday in August as a bank holiday (for bank employees only).
Many cities and towns observe local public holidays for their local Agricultural Show.  For example:
Darwin Show Day in Darwin area in late July
Royal Queensland Show Day in Brisbane area in August
Gold Coast Show in Gold Coast area in October
Territory Day celebrated in the Northern Territory on 1 July while not a designated public holiday, it remains the only Australian public celebration where the public may purchase fireworks for home detonation
""National Day of Mourning for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II"" was a ""one off"" national public holiday declared by the Prime Minister for 22 September 2022 to allow people to pay their respects for the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the longest-reigning Australian monarch."
Public holidays in Australia,"Public holidays by state
Queensland
The days are set in the Holidays Act 1983.  Most public holidays include a second public holiday on a week-day if they happen to fall on Saturday or Sunday. In which case, both days are public holidays."
Public holidays in Australia,"New Year's Day: 1 January, or if 1 January is a Saturday or Sunday, the following Monday.
Australia Day: 26 January, or if 26 January is a Saturday or Sunday, the following Monday.
Good Friday: on the date it is publicly observed, always a Friday.
The day after Good Friday: Always a Saturday, one day after Good Friday.
Easter Monday: The next Monday after Good Friday.
Anzac Day: 25 April, or if 25 April is a Sunday, 26 April.
Labour Day (""May Day""): 1st Monday in May.
King's/Queen's Birthday: 1st Monday in October. (legislated as the ""Birthday of the Sovereign"")
Christmas Day: 25 December.
Boxing Day: 26 December.
If Christmas Day (25 December) is a Saturday or Sunday, then 27 December is also a public holiday.
If Boxing day (26 December) is a Saturday or Sunday, then 28 December is also a public holiday.
Because of the variable days of Easter, Anzac day could fall on an Easter holiday. When Anzac day falls on a Saturday, there is no week day public holiday. In such situations it is generally expected that the minister will proclaim extra public holidays on week-days to ensure every year has the same number of public holidays on week-days.
The minister of the state may proclaim and adjustments or additions, such as the date of the Brisbane Ekka Show day holiday. This day has historically always been proclaimed for the second Wednesday in August, except if there are five Wednesdays in August, in which case it is the third Wednesday in August."
Public holidays in Australia,"New South Wales
Public holidays generally follow the national pattern, but special cases are resolved by the State Government and advised by proclamation. Details of future holidays can be found on the NSW Industrial Relations website. Public holidays are regulated by the New South Wales Public Holidays Act 2010 No 115, which supersedes the Banks and Bank Holidays Act 1912 No 43.
The first Monday in August is a Bank Holiday, during which banks and financial institutions are closed."
Public holidays in Australia,"Australian Capital Territory and Jervis Bay Territory
Most New South Wales public holidays are public holidays in the Australian Capital Territory, with the addition of Canberra Day and Reconciliation Day, which holiday falls on the Monday closest to 27 May."
Public holidays in Australia,"South Australia
Public holidays in South Australia are set out in the Public Holidays Act 2023, while additional holidays may be proclaimed in all or part of the state by the Governor."
Public holidays in Australia,"Victoria
Public holidays in Victoria are regulated by the Victorian Public Holidays Act 1993.
Victorian employees fall under the Workchoices system either as coming within the Commonwealth constitutional power (called ""constitutional corporation employees"") or because of Victoria's referral of its legislative powers to the Commonwealth for particular workplace relations matters.
Employee entitlements to public holidays and additional pay depend on whether they are covered by a federal award or agreement.
Employees not covered by a federal award or agreement are entitled to public holidays under the Victorian Public Holidays Act 1993. Also, all permanent employees not covered by a federal award or agreement who would normally work on a public holiday (or a substitute public holiday) are entitled to the holiday without loss of pay. Their employers are not required to provide additional payment if they work on a public holiday, but this does not exclude the possibility of employees and employers negotiating for additional pay.
Employees who are covered by a federal award or agreement are entitled to public holidays as provided by the relevant federal award or agreement and the Public Holidays Act 1993. Many federal awards and agreements also provide for additional penalty rates for work performed on a public holiday.
Restricted shop trading laws apply to Good Friday, Christmas Day and before 1 pm on Anzac Day. On these days only exempted businesses are permitted to open for trading. All public holidays and substitute public holidays are bank holidays.
In August 2015, the day before the AFL Grand Final, as well as Easter Sunday, were gazetted as Public Holidays within Victoria.  This date of the holiday is as gazetted by the Victorian Government and cannot be accurately predicted. In 2019, the Victorian Parliament legislated the AFL Grand Final public holiday by amending the Public Holidays Act 1993 (Vic).
The Victorian public holidays are as follows:"
Public holidays in Australia,"* Melbourne Cup Day is observed in most of the state, but various cup days and show days in the state's west are locally substituted. See the list at Non-Metropolitan Public Holiday Dates (Victoria Online).
Melbourne Show Day used to be observed on the Thursday in the last full week of September as a half-day public holiday—later changing to full day—until 1994 (abolished by the state government). Easter Tuesday was observed as a Bank Holiday in Victoria until 1994 (also abolished by the state government)."
Public holidays in Australia,"Western Australia
*If a Public Holiday falls on a Saturday or Sunday, the following Monday is also observed as a Public Holiday
#The King's Birthday may be held on a different date in regional communities"
Public holidays in Australia,"Penalty rates
Penalty rates are the rates of pay which an employee is paid higher than their standard base rate for working at times or on days, such as public holidays, which are outside the normal working week. They were introduced in 1947 for workers working on the Sabbath, as most workers were Christian, while today, these rates of pay are set by the Fair Work Commission."
Public holidays in Australia,"See also
Australian labour law
Australian Pay and Classification Scales"
Public holidays in Australia,"References
External links
Public holidays - Fair Work Ombudsman
Australian public holidays - Tourism Australia"
Western Australian Museum,"The Western Australian Museum is a statutory authority within the Culture and the Arts Portfolio, established under the Museum Act 1969.
The museum has six main sites. The state museum, WA Museum Boola Bardip, is located in the Perth Cultural Centre. The other sites are: the WA Maritime Museum and WA Shipwrecks Museum in Fremantle, the Museum of the Great Southern in Albany, the Museum of Geraldton in Geraldton, and the Museum of the Goldfields in Kalgoorlie-Boulder."
Western Australian Museum,"History
Established in 1891 in the Old Perth Gaol, it was known as the Geological Museum and consisted of geological collections. In 1892, ethnological and biological exhibits were added, and in 1897, the museum officially became the Western Australian Museum and Art Gallery.
The museum employed collectors to obtain series of specimens; J. T. Tunney ventured across the state from 1895 to 1909 obtaining animals and, later, the tools and artefacts of the indigenous inhabitants."
Western Australian Museum,"During 1959, the botanical collection was transferred to the new Western Australian Herbarium and the museum and the art gallery became separate institutions. The museum focussed its collecting and research interests in the areas of natural sciences, anthropology, archaeology, and Western Australia's history. Over the 1960s and 1970s, it also began to work in the then-emerging areas of historic shipwrecks and Aboriginal site management.
In February 2008, the Government of Western Australia announced that it would build a new A$500-million museum at the East Perth Power Station site. However, following the election of a new State Liberal party government under Colin Barnett, the redevelopment plans were scrapped in early February 2009."
Western Australian Museum,"On Museums day in 2012, the Barnett State Government pledged to build a new museum at the Perth Cultural Centre at a cost of $428 million, for completion by 2019–20. The Western Australian Museum – Perth site closed temporarily from 18 June 2016 until 2020 to construct the New Museum for WA, designed by OMA and Hassell.
In late 2014, critical improvements to the museum's Collection and Research Centre (CRC) in Welshpool commenced. This site continues to house the museum's research laboratories and working collections throughout the construction phase. The upgrades to the CRC include new collection storage, laboratories, and workshops to support ongoing research and to ensure that collections can be adequately prepared and conserved."
Western Australian Museum,"Locations
The Western Australian Museum has six museum branches and four collection facilities. The museum also offers outreach services to all areas of Western Australia."
Western Australian Museum,"Perth
Old museum
On 9 September 1891, the Geological Museum was opened at the site of the Old Gaol and housed the state's first collection of geological samples. The Old Gaol still forms a significant part of the Western Australian Museum – Perth and is one of the oldest standing buildings in Western Australia.
Shortly after the Geological Museum was opened, collections were expanded to include geological, ethnological and biological specimens and in 1897, the Western Australian Museum and Art Gallery was declared. From 1971 to 2003, a greater part of the research and display collections were housed in a large building on Francis Street. This site was closed due to concerns with asbestos, and demolition concluded in late 2011."
Western Australian Museum,"Throughout the Western Australian Museum's history, the prominent James Street location remained central to the museum's identity and the location of many large permanent and touring exhibits. Exhibitions on fashion, natural history, cultural heritage and history have attracted large numbers of visitors, including A Day in Pompeii (25 May – 12 September 2010) which attracted more than 100,000 people.
Permanent exhibitions which were on display at the Western Australian Museum in Perth included:"
Western Australian Museum,"WA Land and People: This exhibition tells the story of Western Australia from prehistoric times of dinosaurs, to indigenous beginnings, and through to environmental issues of the present day.
Diamonds to Dinosaurs: An exhibition exploring 12 billion years of WA's history, featuring specimens such as rocks from the Moon and Mars, pre-solar diamonds and dinosaur skeleton casts.
Katta Djinoong: This exhibition depicts the history and culture of the Aboriginal peoples of Western Australia from past to present.
Dampier Marine Gallery: This exhibit explores the biodiversity of the waters around the Dampier Archipelago.
Mammal, Bird and Butterfly Galleries: These galleries contain extensive collections of various animals.
The museum closed for major redevelopment in June 2016.
The Perth site also included the Discovery Centre, designed to help children and adults interact and learn about the museum's collections and research. After the closure of the main museum for redevelopment, the Discovery Centre relocated to a Discovery Zone in the State Library of Western Australia in September 2016, but this closed permanently from 8 December 2019."
Western Australian Museum,"New museum
After four years of construction, the Perth museum re-opened on Saturday, 21 November 2020. The new museum is named ""WA Museum Boola Bardip"", and features new exhibitions and topics such as the formation of the Universe, WA's latest inventions, dinosaurs, newly discovered species and local communities.
Inside the new complex are five heritage buildings, including the Old Perth Gaol, which dates back to 1855. It is also built around what is believed to be Australia's oldest grapevine, estimated to date from the 1850s or 1860s, and encompasses Hackett Hall, once home to the State Library of Western Australia, now displays the skeleton of a blue whale (nicknamed Otto), which was in storage since 2003. The Jubilee Building has been refurbished, with the terrace and grand entrance reopened."
Western Australian Museum,"Maritime and Shipwrecks Museums
The Western Australian Museum has two branches in Fremantle: the WA Maritime Museum and WA Shipwrecks Museum (formerly known as Maritime Gallery and Shipwreck Gallery).
The WA Maritime Museum is located on Victoria Quay, and contains galleries with themes such as the Indian Ocean, the Swan River, fishing, maritime trade and naval defence. One of the museum's highlights is the yacht Australia II, which won the America's Cup in 1983. The museum is located in the historically significant Maritime Heritage Precinct, which includes the entrance to Fremantle Inner Harbour and associated installations; Forrest Landing, the remnant of the original limestone bar used by Aboriginal men as a crossing point at the mouth of the Swan River; the migrant Welcome Walls memorial; and the World War II submarine slipway area."
Western Australian Museum,"Immediately adjacent to the WA Maritime Museum on the WWII slipway is HMAS Ovens, an Oberon-class submarine that is open for guided tours and commemorates the World War II Fremantle allied submarine base, which was the largest submarine base in the southern hemisphere, with 170 submarines of the British, Dutch and US navies conducting patrols from there."
Western Australian Museum,"Nearby in Cliff Street, the WA Shipwrecks Museum, housed in the 1850s-era Commissariat Buildings, is recognised as the foremost maritime archaeology and shipwreck conservation museum in the southern hemisphere. The museum contains a reconstructed hull of Dutch East India Company vessel Batavia, which was wrecked off the coast of Western Australia in 1629, and several other relics and artefacts from ships wrecked along the WA coast. It also houses the horizontal trunk engine recovered from the iron steamer SS Xantho, which sank in 1872. This unit, the only known example of the first mass-produced, high-speed and high-pressure marine engine, can now be turned over by hand. The museum's CEO is also responsible for the historic wrecks off the coast of Western Australia, and many shipwrecks appear in the exhibits. In 1980, the museum also commenced the development of a ""Museum-Without-Walls"" program via its ""wreck trail"" or ""wreck access"" programs at Rottnest Island. These ""trails"" now appear at many places along the coast.
The Maritime Archaeology department primarily researches shipwreck archaeology from the Western Australian coast, including the famous Batavia shipwreck. Its staff members are involved in developing artefact management and cataloguing strategies, outreach and wreck-access programs, site-inspection techniques, and studies of diverse maritime sites, such as iron ship archaeology, characterised by its SS Xantho program and underwater aviation archaeology. The department also conducts master's level programs in maritime archaeology in collaboration with University of Western Australia."
Western Australian Museum,"Museum of the Great Southern
Refurbished in July 2010, the Museum of the Great Southern is situated at the site of the first European settlement in Western Australia, in Albany. This museum explores the region's biodiversity, the stories of the indigenous Noongar people and ancient natural environment.
The museum was the original residence of Major Edmund Lockyer, the commanding officer of the settlement group that landed in Princess Royal Harbour on 26 December 1826, and formally proclaimed sovereignty on 21 January 1827 for King George IV of Great Britain, naming the place King George's Sound settlement (later renamed Frederickstown and then renamed again Albany). Together with the Old Gaol, and the buildings of the Amity heritage precinct (Breaksea Museum) and the non-navigable replica of the brig Amity, they were the subject of investigation by the Commonwealth of Australia and UNESCO as a convict colonial settlement (not included in the formal nomination)."
Western Australian Museum,"Museum of Geraldton
The Museum of Geraldton is situated in Western Australia's rapidly growing mid-west region. This museum explores the region's biodiversity, mining and agricultural history, the stories of the indigenous Yamaji people and the Dutch shipwrecks. The famous 17th-century Dutch vessel Batavia sank in the nearby Abrolhos Islands. This museum features the portico recovered from this wreck, which has been reconstructed to form the centre of the museum's shipwreck gallery."
Western Australian Museum,"Museum of the Goldfields
The Museum of the Goldfields in Kalgoorlie explores the history of the Eastern Goldfields, the city's mining heritage and the hardships faced by the early mining and pioneer families."
Western Australian Museum,"Research departments
The Western Australian Museum has an extensive research program, with museum scientists and curators specialising in the fields of aquatic zoology, archaeology and anthropology, conservation, earth and planetary sciences, history, and terrestrial zoology. The museum also has a specialist materials conservation team.
The WA Museum Collections and Research Centre (CRC) at 49 Kew Street, Welshpool, houses most of the museum's collections and research facilities. It houses the following departments (staff and collections):"
Western Australian Museum,"The Terrestrial Zoology department maintains large collections of a wide variety of terrestrial animals, including both terrestrial invertebrates and vertebrates, as well as marine mammals. The department includes sections that study: subterranean biology, ornithology, mammalogy, entomology, vertebrate biogeography, arachnids and myriapods and herpetology.
The Aquatic Zoology department is responsible for documenting and researching the marine, estuarine and freshwater fauna of Western Australia. The department includes sections that study malacology, ichthyology, crustacea, marine invertebrates and worms.
The Earth and Planetary Sciences Department studies and collects in the areas of fossils (invertebrate, vertebrate, plant and trace fossils), minerals, rocks, gems, meteorites and tektites. The department's collection holds taxonomic and stratigraphic (rock layers and layering) material that is representative of Western Australia's palaeobiological (the biology of fossil animals and plants) evolution and geological history from 3.8 billion years ago to a few thousand years ago. There are over 1.5 million items in the department collections.
The History Department specialises in developing collections reflecting the material life of Western Australians, and researching the story of the people and places in Western Australia in all its diversity. The department also holds the Edith Cowan University Museum of Childhood Collection (ECU Museum of Childhood Collection), a nationally significant collection of 24,000 items is reflective of Western Australian childhood, donated to the WA Museum in 2009 by Edith Cowan University.
The Anthropology and Archaeology Department specialises in cultural anthropology and archaeology. The department's research, collections and public programs focus on understanding what it is to be human, cultural diversity, exploring complex relationships between society, culture, language, sociality and economy. The department specialises in the study of Ancient Egypt, Aboriginal cultures (particularly the South West, Pilbara, Desert and Kimberley regions) and indigenous cultures of the Ancient World.
There are also some of the collection items from the Maritime Archaeology and Maritime History departments housed at the CRC; however staff from Maritime Archaeology and Maritime History are located at WA Shipwrecks Museum.
The Materials Conservation department is responsible for ensuring the millions of items in the museum's collections are permanently preserved for reference, research and exhibition through the use of preventive and remedial conservation techniques in accordance with international and national standards of best practice. The Materials Conservation department also possesses a research division in its overall structure which develop conservation techniques and methodologies."
Western Australian Museum,"Publications
The museum has produced its own publications of books over time, as well as Records of the Western Australian Museum since 1910 and for a short time between 1998 and 2005 produced Tracks. The Records of the Museum is the museum's peer-reviewed journal which publishes the results of research into all branches of natural sciences and social and cultural history. Between 1910 and 2012, over 800 articles were published in this journal, the vast majority written after 1975. All individual articles published through the records are available for free download on the WA Museum website."
Western Australian Museum,"Controversy
In December 2020 the Western Australian Museum removed what it said were two factual errors on labels in a multimedia display after complaints about their veracity, including from the consul general of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in Perth. One pertained to COVID-19, which the museum initially labelled as originating from China. The other pertained to Taiwan, which the museum initially depicted on a map as a country, specifically the Republic of China (ROC), that is distinct from China rather than including ""Taiwan as a Chinese territory"". This is controversial because ""China regards Taiwan as a breakaway province which it has vowed to retake, by force if necessary. It says the ROC's lack of diplomatic recognition proves that the world agrees there is only one China.""
The museum altered the visuals in response to the complaints, saying that the World Health Organization is still investigating the origin of COVID-19, and that the map ""did not include Taiwan ... as part of China, which is not in line with Australian government policy"". However, Mark McGowan, the premier of Western Australia, stated that ""the decision to change the exhibits was the museum's."" Additionally, Mark Harrison, a senior lecturer in Chinese studies at the University of Tasmania, pointed out that contrary to the museum's claims, including Taiwan as part of China is ""not actually reflective of 'Australian government policy'"". Rather, the Australian government ""uses a deliberate ambiguity on the status of Taiwan"" and ""is very careful to not use maps of national boundaries that show Taiwan as part of the PRC"".
The changes drew a critical reaction from Human Rights Watch researcher Sophie McNeill, who said that it is ""very important that our cultural institutions rely on accuracy and facts and don't bow to pressure from the Chinese Communist Party who are often trying to censor and rewrite history"". In a statement, the museum rejected any claims of bowing to bullying, saying the errors ""were literally factual errors that we were very happy to correct"", and that the errors were corrected in line with the museum's policy on accuracy."
Western Australian Museum,"Gallery
See also
List of museums in Western Australia"
Western Australian Museum,"Notes
References
External links"
Western Australian Museum,"Official website 
Atlas of Living Australia – WA Museum taxonomic collections
Department of Culture and Arts"
Meat pie (Australia and New Zealand),"In Australia and New Zealand, a meat pie is a hand-sized pie containing diced or minced meat and gravy, sometimes with onion, mushrooms or cheese and is often consumed as a takeaway food snack.
This variant of the standard meat pie is considered iconic. It was described by New South Wales Premier Bob Carr in 2003 as Australia's ""national dish"". New Zealanders regard the meat pie as a part of New Zealand cuisine, and it forms part of the New Zealand national identity."
Meat pie (Australia and New Zealand),"Commercial production
Meat pies are made in numerous neighbourhood bakery shops in Australia and New Zealand.
According to a 2003 study, the average Australian eats more than 12 meat pies each year. According to a 2004 study, the average New Zealander eats 15 meat pies a year."
Meat pie (Australia and New Zealand),"Australia
Manufacturers of pies in Australia tend to be state-based, reflecting the long distances involved with interstate transport and lack of refrigeration capabilities in the early years of pie production. Many pies are sold ready-to-eat at smaller outlets and are sold unbranded although some may be locally produced by a brand-name vendor, or even imported. Frozen pies are heated prior to serving.
An Australian meat pie, first produced in 1947, by L. T. McClure in a small bakery in Bendigo, became the well-known Four'n Twenty pie. Due to its association with Australian rules football, Four'n Twenty has iconic status in Victoria. Other manufacturers well predate this brand.
Sargents—once the dominant meat pie brand of New South Wales, but not made since 2022—could trace its pie making back to 1891.
In South Australia, Balfours have been making pies for over a century, but Vili's began in the post-war era. Both of these pie makers supply pies to various venues hosting Australian rules football games.
Produced in Western Australia, Mrs Mac's Pies are sold nationwide, found mostly in service stations and corner stores, competing with other brands in the contested takeaway hotbox market on the basis of quality and fillings other than the normal fare.
In Victoria, some of the well known and famous pie makers include the makers of two of Australia's most famous pies—Four'n Twenty and Patties—both manufactured by Patties Foods in Bairnsdale.
In Tasmania, the main manufacturer of pies is National Pies. National Pies make typical beef mince pies, as well as ""Cottage Pies"", which are topped with mashed potato. National Pies' mince pies are rectangular in shape, as opposed to most other brands, which are round.
'Railway pies', once served on country trains and at refreshment rooms of the NSWGR, achieved a reputation for their high meat content and flavour. In 1942, it was reported that 2.3 million of these pies were consumed over a 12-month period. All the pies were baked in a facility under Central Station, until around 1980. The long trip from Sydney and absence of refrigeration were possibly why there were reports of pies that were past their prime condition, when served to customers in railway refreshment rooms in the regions. 
Australian meat pies were introduced into the United States in 1994 by Mark Allen, of Boort, Victoria, when he and his wife, Wendy, began operation of Pacific Products, Inc. in Marietta, Georgia. Pacific Products was a wholesale only business, selling their pies to chain retailers throughout the United States. Although Pacific Products is no longer in business, Allen and his partner Neville Steele opened the Australian Bakery Cafe in Marietta, a retail bakery which also ships its products throughout the US."
Meat pie (Australia and New Zealand),"New Zealand
Big Ben Pies have been making pies since 1969 in Auckland, New Zealand and sells 13 million pies per year.
In 1977, during the time that American fast food restaurants moved into New Zealand, Progressive Enterprises created Georgie Pie, a fast food restaurant with a menu based on meat pies. The pies were batch made and frozen at Progressive's Māngere plant.  The first Georgie Pie restaurant opened in Kelston, Auckland, and at its peak in the mid-1990s had become a chain of 32 restaurants across New Zealand.  However, after a major expansion, Georgie Pie became uneconomic to run and was eventually sold to McDonald's New Zealand in 1996. The last restaurant at Mission Bay, Auckland, closed in 1998. In June 2013, McDonald's started a trial relaunch of Georgie Pie, selling one flavour of pie (Steak Mince 'n' Cheese) through eleven of its restaurants in Auckland and Hamilton."
Meat pie (Australia and New Zealand),"Nutritional value
The meats allowed by FSANZ to make up at least 25% of a meat pie are beef, buffalo, camel, deer, goat, hare, pig, poultry, rabbit and sheep. Kangaroo meat, a leaner alternative, is also sometimes used. However, most pie manufacturers specify 'beef' in their ingredients list; typically, those using other types of meat will simply put 'meat' in the list instead. FSANZ requires that a meat pie must contain a minimum of 25% ""meat flesh"". Meat flesh includes the skeletal muscle of any slaughtered animal as well as any attached animal rind, fat, connective tissue, nerve, blood and blood vessels. Offal (such as brain, heart, kidney, liver, tongue, tripe) must be specified on the label."
Meat pie (Australia and New Zealand),"Awards
The Great Aussie Meat Pie Contest
The annual Great Aussie Pie Contest began in 1990 to find commercially produced meat pie produced in Australia, to promote higher quality pie production, and to attempt to increase media attention upon the foodstuff, with the meat pie often dwarfed by the omnipresent advertising of fast food chains.
The contest attracts various pie-makers from all over Australia; the pies for the contest are judged anonymously to avoid bias towards or against specific bakeries or states. Run in parallel to the main contest is one for gourmet pies, with categories for such fillings as chicken, seafood and even vegetarian pies. As well as the main prize, certificates of excellence are awarded for entries that reach set quality standards. The main award is coveted due to the increased sales it generates, with many people travelling interstate to sample the winning pie."
Meat pie (Australia and New Zealand),"Bakels New Zealand Supreme Pie Awards
In New Zealand an annual pie competition has been held since 1997. The Bakels New Zealand Supreme Pie Awards to recognises quality pie manufacturers in New Zealand, assisting them in producing award-winning pies and continuing to help foster and encourage developments within this category of baking.
They were entered in 11 categories– mince and gravy; chicken and vegetables; gourmet meat; bacon and egg; gourmet fruit; steak, vegetable and gravy; steak and cheese; vegetarian; mince and cheese; seafood and commercial wholesale pies.  The pies were judged on presentation, the pastry on the top and bottom, the filling and the profile."
Meat pie (Australia and New Zealand),"Other cultural references
In the 1970s, meat pies were mentioned in a jingle for General Motors Holden Australia, adapted from General Motors’ Chevrolet jingles in the United States.
Fair-Go Dibbler, citizen of Fourecks (The Last Continent) in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, is famous for selling the archetypal pie floaters to his unsuspecting customers."
Meat pie (Australia and New Zealand),"See also
References
External links
The Great Aussie Meat Pie Contest
Choice Magazine – Meat Pies
Bye-bye American Pie, The Age, 21 July 2003"
Census in Australia,"The Census in Australia, officially the Census of Population and Housing, is the national census in Australia that occurs every five years. The census collects key demographic, social and economic data from all people in Australia on census night, including overseas visitors and residents of Australian external territories, only excluding foreign diplomats. The census is the largest and most significant statistical event in Australia and is run by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). Every person must complete the census, although some personal questions are not compulsory. The penalty for failing to complete the census after being directed to by the Australian Statistician is one federal penalty unit, or A$220. The Australian Bureau of Statistics Act 1975 and Census and Statistics Act 1905 authorise the ABS to collect, store, and share anonymised data.
The first Australian census was held on 2 April 1911, but census data had been previously collected by individual states.
The most recent census was held on 10 August 2021, with the data planned to be released starting from mid-2022. The next census will be held in early August 2026."
Census in Australia,"Geographical divisions
The census, like all ABS data, is collected and published in geographical divisions as defined by the Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS). The ASGS was released in 2011, replacing the former Australian Standard Geographical Classification. The Standard is reviewed and updated every five years to align with the census. The ABS also releases data divided into areas not managed by the Bureau, such as postcodes (managed by Australia Post) and Local Government Areas (managed by state and territory governments)."
Census in Australia,"Privacy
The Census and Statistics Act 1905 and Privacy Act 1988 prohibit the ABS from releasing any personally identifiable census data to any government, private or individual entity.
In 1979, the Australian Law Reform Commission released Privacy and the Census, a report detailing legislative privacy measures related to the census. One of the key elements under question was the inclusion of names and addresses in census data. It was found that excluding names reduced the accuracy of the data; individuals were more likely to leave questions blank. Not collecting this data would also impair the ability of the ABS to ensure that all participants have responded.
The ABS protects personal information primarily through anonymisation of data. Personal information is stored separately from other census data, and separately from each other. Names are mutated into anonymised codes, which are then used to link data."
Census in Australia,"Destruction of personal information
Historically, the ABS has destroyed census forms or other census-related personal information after the census data processing period, roughly 18 months after the census.
Following a public consultation process before the 2016 census, it was found that Australians expected the ABS to hold their information for as long as there is a benefit to the community, and should be destroyed as soon as that need no longer exists. Following this process, the ABS has revised the retention period to four years after census, instead of 18 months. Concurrently, the ABS also improved their anonymisation techniques and limits access to addresses and anonymised names to when only necessary."
Census in Australia,"Census Time Capsule
Since 2001, the ABS and National Archives of Australia have given respondents the option to have their complete census data, including name and address, stored in the Census Time Capsule. The capsule is stored securely at the National Archives for 99 years after each census and is released publicly at the end of that period. The first capsule opening will be on 7 August 2100."
Census in Australia,"Counting of Indigenous Australians
Indigenous Australians in contact with the colonists were enumerated at many of the colonial censuses. When the Federation of Australia occurred in 1901, the new Constitution contained a provision (section 127), which said: ""In reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, Aboriginal [persons ...] shall not be counted."" In 1967, a referendum was held which approved two amendments to the Australian constitution relating to Indigenous Australians. The second of the two amendments deleted section 127 from the Constitution. It was widely believed at the time of the referendum, and is still often said, that section 127 meant that Aboriginal persons were not counted in Commonwealth censuses before 1967. In fact section 127 related to calculating the population of the states and territories for the purpose of allocating seats in Parliament and per capita Commonwealth grants. Its purpose was to prevent Queensland and Western Australia using their large Aboriginal populations to gain extra seats or extra funds. Thus the Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics interpreted section 127 as meaning that they may enumerate Aboriginal persons but that they must be excluded from published tabulations of population. Aboriginal persons living in settled areas were counted to a greater or lesser extent in all censuses before 1967.
George Handley Knibbs, the first Commonwealth Statistician, obtained a legal opinion at the time that persons of 50 percent or more non-Aboriginal descent were not Aboriginal persons for the purposes of the Constitution. At the first Australian census in 1911 only those Aboriginal persons living near white settlements were enumerated, and the main population tables included only those of 50 percent or more non-Aboriginal descent. Details of Aboriginal persons of 50 percent or more non-Aboriginal descent were included in separate tables to Aboriginal persons of more than 50 percent Aboriginal descent. This practice was followed in all subsequent censuses up to 1966.
Since 1967, the ABS has considered Torres Strait Islanders a separate Indigenous people. Prior to 1947, Torres Strait Islanders were regarded as Aboriginal and excluded when not of 50 percent or more non-Aboriginal descent. In 1947, Torres Strait Islanders were considered to be Polynesian and in 1954 and 1961 were considered to be Pacific Islanders. In 1966, Torres Strait Islanders were again regarded as Aboriginal and excluded when not of 50 percent or more non-Aboriginal descent."
Census in Australia,"Australian Standard Classification of Cultural and Ethnic Groups
Ancestry data was included in the 1986 census. It was found when the data was evaluated that people who filled in the census were not sure what the question meant and there were inconsistent results, particularly for those people whose families had been in Australia for many generations. There were no ancestry related questions in 1991 or 1996. For 2001 it was decided that development of Government policies did need information about people who were either born overseas, or whose parents were born overseas. The questions were to mark the ancestries most closely identified with and to consider ancestry back as far as three generations. Respondents had the option of reporting more than one ancestry but only the first two ancestries they reported were coded for the census.
The results for 2001 were coded using the Australian Standard Classification of Cultural and Ethnic Groups (ASCCEG). This classification of cultural and ethnic groups is based on the geographic area in which a group originated or developed; and the similarity of cultural and ethnic groups in terms of social and cultural characteristics. The classification is specific to Australian needs and was developed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The classification is based on the self-perceived group identification approach, using a self assessed response to a direct question. This approach measures the extent to which individuals associate with particular cultural or ethnic groups."
Census in Australia,"History
1828
Australia's first census was held in November 1828 in New South Wales, a British colony at the time. Previous government statistical reports had been taken from ""musters"" where white immigrants were brought together for counting. In 1828, the white population was 36,598: 20,870 settlers and 15,728 convicts. 23.8% of the population were born in the colony and 24.5% were women. There were 25,248 Protestants and 11,236 Catholics. Indigenous Australians were not counted.
Of the 36,598 people, 638 were living in what is now Queensland. There were also 18,128 people in Tasmania."
Census in Australia,"1881
In the mid-19th century the colonial statisticians encouraged compatibility between the colonies in their respective censuses, and in 1881 a census was held simultaneously in each of the colonies. This was part of a census of the British Empire. The questions posed in the colonies were not uniform and Henry Heylyn Hayter, who conducted the Victorian census, found that this caused difficulties in dealing with Australia-wide data.
The population of Australia counted in the census was 2,231,531. "
Census in Australia,"At the time, the Northern Territory was part of South Australia and had 3,451 white people plus 6,346 Aboriginals in settled districts. Including the Northern Territory, South Australia had a total counted population of 286,211 people. The reported population of Western Australia did not include Aboriginal persons of more than 50 percent Aboriginal descent. The population of greater Melbourne was 282,947 and of Sydney was 224,939."
Census in Australia,"1891
1901
In 1901, there were 3,773,801 people (1,977,928 males and 1,795,873 females) counted in Australia.
Prior to federation, each colony had been responsible for its own census collection. The census held during the first year of Federation, 1901, was again collected by each state separately. When planning for the 1901 census it was clear that federation was soon to occur, and a uniform census schedule was adopted."
Census in Australia,"1911
The first national census was developed by the Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics. The census occurred at midnight between 2 and 3 April 1911. Tabulation was carried out almost entirely by hand; over 4 million cards were sorted and physically counted for each tabulation. Results from the 1911 census took a long time to be released, with delays increased by World War I. The Australian population was counted in the census as 4,455,005, exclusive of Aboriginal persons of more than 50 percent Aboriginal descent.
In the 1911 census, many collectors used horses. A drought in Western Australia meant that some collectors were unable to find feed for their horses. Flooding and bogs stranded some collectors in Queensland."
Census in Australia,"Rubella research
In 1911 the census asked about deaf-mutism. This question was also asked in the next two censuses of 1921 and 1933. Deaf-mutism was found to be very high among 10- to 14-year-olds, with the same pattern existing in the 1921 census among 20- to 24-year-olds. The statisticians report on the 1921 census noted that it was ""a reasonable assumption therefore that the abnormal number of deaf-mutes . . . was the result of the extensive epidemic of infectious diseases which occurred soon after many in those age groups were born"".  Rubella was not known to be a possible contributor. During World War II, the ophthalmologist Norman McAllister Gregg began to investigate the connection between birth defects and the infection of mothers early in their pregnancy. In 1951, prompted by Gregg's work, Australian statistician Oliver Lancaster examined the census figures of 1911, 1921 and 1933. He found a peak in the level of deaf-mutism in the age cohort born in 1898 and 1899 and that this matched with a known outbreak of rubella in those years. ""This was the first time in the world that the link between rubella and congenital problems with unborn children was firmly established."""
Census in Australia,"1921–1966
Australia's population counted in April 1921 was 5,435,700, exclusive of Aboriginal persons of more than 50 percent Aboriginal descent. The Statistician independently estimated the number of Aboriginal persons, both those of more than 50 percent Aboriginal descent and those of 50 percent or more non-Aboriginal descent, by obtaining figures from police and protectors of Aboriginal persons throughout the country.
One of the significant findings of the 1921 census was the low rate of males to females in the 20–30 age group, showing the impact of World War I on the population.
The 1921 census introduced automatic machine tabulation equipment, hired from England for the census. Three punched cards were used to store individual, dwelling, and family information. The cards were processed using an electric sorting machine prior to final totalling with an electric tabulator machine, devised by Herman Hollerith.
The census was subsequently conducted in 1933, 1947, 1954, and every five years from 1961 onwards."
Census in Australia,"1971
Following the 1967 referendum removing section 127 from the Constitution, the ""race"" question was re-designed for the 1971 census and methods for remote area collection examined to improve identification of Indigenous Australian groups.
There were 12,755,638 people counted."
Census in Australia,"1976
The 1976 census was the largest undertaken to date, with 53 questions. Due to budgetary restraints, the ABS was not able to complete normal processing of the data and a 50% sample was processed. There were 13,548,450 people counted."
Census in Australia,"1981
Scanned data of the 1981 Census is available on the ABS website."
Census in Australia,"1986
The 1986 Census was held on 30 June 1986. Scanned data of the 1986 Census is available on the ABS website."
Census in Australia,"1991
The 1991 census was held on 6 August 1991."
Census in Australia,"1996
The 1996 census was held on 6 August. There were 16,892,423 people counted in Australia. Of these, 342,864 people identified themselves as Indigenous Australians. There were 139,594 overseas visitors."
Census in Australia,"2001
The 2001 census was held on 7 August. There were 18,769,420 people counted in Australia. Of these, 410,003 people identified as Indigenous Australians. There were 203,101 overseas visitors."
Census in Australia,"2006
The 2006 census was conducted on the night of 8 August. There were 19,855,288 people counted in Australia. Of those, 455,031 people identified as Indigenous Australians. There were 206,358 overseas visitors. For the first time, the territories of Cocos (Keeling) Islands were included in the 2006 census, following the enactment of the Territories Law Reform Act 1992.
The 2006 census contained 60 questions, all of which were compulsory except those relating to religion and household census data retention. The census cost around A$300 million to conduct."
Census in Australia,"eCensus
For the first time, respondents were given the option of completing an online ""eCensus"" as opposed to the traditional paper-based version. By 17 August, more than 720,000 households had completed the census online.
Across Australia, 8.4% of estimated dwellings lodged online. The highest percentage of internet lodgements was in the Australian Capital Territory with 14.8% of households using eCensus. This was a markedly different proportion of households than elsewhere in Australia, with the other states and territory ranging from 5.9% in the Northern Territory to 8.9% in Western Australia.
The peak lodgement was between 8pm and 9pm on census night, when more than 72,000 online forms were received. The eCensus remained available throughout the entire census period. During the 24-hour period of 8 August (census night), eCensus delivered more than 12.5 million page views and at 8:47 pm, more than 55,000 households were logged on simultaneously. IBM assisted with the development of the eCensus, having provided similar infrastructure and technology for the Canadian census earlier that year."
Census in Australia,"2011
The 2011 census was held on the night of 9 August, using both paper and electronic ""eCensus"" forms. Minimal changes were made from the 2006 census due to financial constraints on the ABS during development. The 2011 census was the largest logistical peacetime operation ever undertaken in Australia, employing over 43,000 field staff to ensure approximately 14.2 million forms were delivered to 9.8 million households.
The first results of the census were released in June 2012 on the Australian Bureau of Statistics website.
The cost of the 2011 census was A$440 million."
Census in Australia,"2016
The census occurred on 9 August 2016. For the first time, the ABS the census was by default filled out online, claiming it expected more than 65% of Australians would be completing the census online. Reflecting this new preference, the tagline of the ad campaign for the census was the rhyming slogan ""Get online on August 9"". Across many regions, paper forms were no longer delivered by default to homes, and households that wished to complete a paper census had to order such forms via an automated hotline. Letters were sent to each dwelling with unique code numbers that people would need to either login to the census website or order a paper form if they preferred. By census night, many households had still not received such a letter. Contrary to previous years where censuses were both delivered and retrieved from households by dedicated census employees, in 2016 most of the paperwork relating to the census was delivered from and to the ABS by Australia Post.
The 2016 census was met by two controversies. The first was that the retention of names and addresses increased to up to 4 years, from 18 months in the 2006 and 2011 censuses, leading to concerns about privacy and data security. As such, some Australian Senate crossbenchers (from the Greens, Nick Xenophon Team and Jacqui Lambie Network) said they would not complete those specific sections of the census, despite the fines associated with incorrect completion of the census. The second was that many Australians could not complete the census online on the designated day. While a paper census form was also available on request, for 2016 the ABS was aiming for two-thirds online. However, the online census website shut down at about 7:30 pm AEST on the night it was to be completed.
According to the ABS, throughout 9 August the census website received four denial-of-service attacks. At 7:30 pm, when the site was being heavily used, a software failure meant that the ABS was unable to keep blocking the denial-of-service attacks, leading to the failure of a router. As a result, the ABS decided to close down the system as a precaution. The ABS reported that no census data were compromised. The Australian Signals Directorate was assisting the ABS to bring the infrastructure back online more than 24 hours after the closure.
The census website was restored at 2:30 pm on 11 August. On the same day, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull stated his displeasure over the event, which had ""been a failure of the ABS"", with his expectation that ""heads will roll"" once a review was complete. Leader of the opposition Bill Shorten said that the 2016 census had been the ""worst-run ... in the history of Australia"". The ABS blamed service provider IBM for the failure in the online census, saying that IBM had advised on the preparedness and resilience to DDoS attacks and had not offered any further protections that could be employed. On 31 August, the Parliament of Australia initiated an inquiry into the 2016 census. It released its findings on 24 November: no individual party was found to be responsible but it was shared between the government, IBM, and other sub-contractors.
The census forms were able to be submitted online until 23 September. Once collection was complete, the ABS issued an announcement which confirmed that in spite of the initial online problems, there was a preliminary response rate of more than 96%. This consisted of 4.9 million (over 58%) online submissions and 3.5 million paper forms. The preliminary response rate was similar to the previous two census response rates of 95.8% in 2006 and 96.5% in 2011.
According to the ABS, the preliminary release of census data became available to the public on the ABS website on 11 April 2017, two months earlier than for any previous census. The main release of data occurred on 27 June 2017 and a final data release on 17 October 2017."
Census in Australia,"2021
The 2021 Census occurred on 10 August 2021, and was run by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). It was Australia's 18th Census. 
The 2021 Census achieved a response rate above the Australian Bureau of Statistics target obtaining data from 10 million (10,852,208) dwellings. The dwelling response rate was 96.1 per cent, up from 95.1 per cent in 2016.
The Statistical Independent Assurance Panel, established by the Australian Statistician to provide assurance of Census data quality, concluded that the 2021 Census data is fit-for-purpose, is of comparable quality to the 2011 and 2016 Censuses and can be used with confidence.
The first release of the Census data was published on 28 June 2022. Census data can be accessed using a number of Census data tools."
Census in Australia,"See also
Census and Statistics Act 1905
Demography of Australia
List of cities in Australia by population"
Census in Australia,"Notes
References
Further reading
Wright, Beth (1 March 2011). ""One hundred years of working on the census"". Australian Bureau of Statistics. Australian Government."
Census in Australia,"External links
Official website
2016 Census form (sample)"
Foreign relations of Australia,"Foreign relations of Australia are influenced by its position as a leading trading nation and as a significant donor of humanitarian aid. Australia's foreign policy is guided by a commitment to multilateralism and regionalism, as well as to build strong bilateral relations with its allies. Key concerns include free trade, terrorism, refugees, economic co-operation with Asia and stability in the Indo-Pacific. Australia is active in the United Nations and the Commonwealth of Nations. Given its history of starting and supporting important regional and global initiatives, it has been described as a regional middle power par excellence.
It maintains significant ties with ASEAN and has become steadfastly allied with New Zealand, through long-standing ties dating back to the 1800s. The country also has a longstanding alliance with the United States of America. Over recent decades Australia has sought to strengthen its relationship with Asian countries, with this becoming the focus of the country's network of diplomatic missions. In 2021, Australia signed a significant security partnership with the United Kingdom and the United States of America (AUKUS) aimed at upholding security in the Indo-Pacific region."
Foreign relations of Australia,"History
Before the Second World War, Australia saw its economic and military security assured by being a loyal dominion of the British Empire and generally sought to align its diplomatic policies with those of the British Government. Although Australia, like other British Dominions, was a signatory to the Treaty of Versailles and a member of the League of Nations, the British Government handled most of Australia's diplomatic exchanges outside the Empire. The approach of the Second World War saw the first steps by Australia in establishing its own diplomatic network, particularly with economically and politically important countries of the Pacific Rim. The first accredited diplomat sent to a foreign country was Richard Casey, appointed as the first Minister to the United States in January 1940. This was followed shortly after by the arrival of the first Australian high commissioner to Canada, and by appointments of Ministers to Japan in 1940 and China in 1941.  With the entry of Japan into the war in December 1941 and the consequent heightened vulnerability of Australia to attack, a critical decision was made by the Curtin Government to more closely seek the military protection of the United States. Since that time, United States has been the most important security ally. The close security relationship with the United States was formalized in 1951 by the Australia, New Zealand, United States Security (ANZUS) Treaty which remains the cornerstone of Australian security arrangements.
During and after the Second World War, and in parallel with the evolution of the British Empire to the Commonwealth of Nations, Australia progressively took responsibility for fully managing its foreign relations with other states.  Australia concluded an agreement in 1944 with New Zealand dealing with the security, welfare, and advancement of the people of the dependent territories of the Pacific (the ANZAC pact).  Australia was one of the founders of the United Nations (1945) and the South Pacific Commission (1947), and in 1950, it proposed the Colombo Plan to assist developing countries in Asia.  After the war, Australia played a role in the Far Eastern Commission in Japan and supported Indonesian independence during that country's revolt against the Dutch (1945–49).
As the Cold War deepened, Australia aligned itself fully with the Western Powers.  In addition to contributing to UN forces in the Korean War – it was the first country to announce it would do so after the United States – Australia sent troops to assist in putting down the communist revolt in Malaya in 1948–60 and later to combat the Indonesian-supported invasion of Sarawak in 1963–65.  Australia sent troops to repel communism and assist South Vietnamese and American forces in the Vietnam War, in a move that stirred up antiwar activism at home.  Australia has been active in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, and in the Australia – New Zealand – United Kingdom agreement and the Five Power Defence Arrangement—successive arrangements with Britain and New Zealand to ensure the security of Singapore and Malaysia.
After the end of the Cold War, Australia remained an important contributor to UN peacekeeping missions and to other multilateral security missions, often in alliance with the United States.  Notably, it joined coalition forces in the Persian Gulf War in 1991, the War in Afghanistan (2001-2021), the Iraq War of 2003-2011 and the War in Iraq (2013-2017).  In 1999 Australian peace keeping forces intervened in East Timor following its referendum to secede from Indonesia. In 2006 Australia sent a contingent of Australian troops to the state to assist in the 2006 East Timor crisis.  Australia has also most recently led security assistance, peacekeeping and policing missions elsewhere in its neighbourhood, including in the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and Tonga.
In the late 20th Century and early 21st Century, a new element in Australia's foreign relations was the growing relationship with the People's Republic of China.  After the establishment of diplomatic relations in December 1972, Sino-Australian relations grew rapidly, to a point where China became Australia's main trading partner and extensive official and people-to-people links were well established.  In the first 15 years of the 21st Century, Australia maintained privileged relations with both the United States and China.  Since 2017, Sino-Australian relations have deteriorated dramatically, as a result of Australian criticism of policies and actions taken under General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping.  This has strongly influenced recent Australian bilateral and multi-lateral engagements such as the Pacific Step-Up with Pacific Island states, the development of comprehensive strategic partnerships with a number of regional states, and the pursuit of alliances directed at countering Chinese predominance in the Indo-Pacific region.  Since 2017, existing security arrangements have been augmented by a revived Quadrilateral Security Dialogue involving India, Japan and United States, the 2021 AUKUS security partnership with the United States and United Kingdom and the 2022 Australia-Japan Reciprocal Access Agreement, which provides for closer Australian-Japanese cooperation on defence and humanitarian operations."
Foreign relations of Australia,"International agencies, treaties, and agreements
Membership of international organizations and groupings
One of the drafters of the UN Charter, Australia has given firm support to the United Nations system. Australia held the first Presidency of the Security Council in 1946 and provided the first military observers under UN auspices a year later, to Indonesia. It has been a member of the Security Council a further four times, in 1956–57, 1973–74, 1986–87 and 2013–14.  It has been regularly elected a member of the Economic and Social Council most recently for 2020–22, a member of the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2018-20 and its predecessor the UN Commission on Human Rights in the 1990s. Australia takes a prominent part in many other UN activities, including peacekeeping, disarmament negotiations, and narcotics control.  In September 1999, acting under a UN Security Council mandate, Australia led an international coalition to restore order in East Timor upon Indonesia's withdrawal from that territory.  Australia has also been closely engaged in international development cooperation and humanitarian assistance through the Specialized agencies, Funds and Programmes and Regional Commissions of the United Nations and major International Financial Institutions, in particular the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Asian Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Australia is a member of the G20, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the APEC forum.  It is active in meetings of the Commonwealth Heads of Government, the Pacific Islands Forum and other Pacific Islands regional organizations and the Indian Ocean Rim Association.  It has been a leader in the Cairns Group – countries pressing for agricultural trade reform in the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) negotiations. Australia is also a member of MIKTA,  an informal and diverse middle power partnership between Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea, Turkey and Australia, led by its foreign ministers, which seeks to promote an effective, rules-based global order.
Australia has devoted particular attention in the early 21st century to promoting regional architecture centred around the countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), to support dialogue on political, security and economic challenges in the Indo-Pacific region. Australia is an active participant in the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), and the ASEAN sponsored East Asia Summit. Australia's place at the 2005 inaugural summit was only secured after it agreed to reverse its policy and accede to ASEAN's Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia. Australia had been reluctant to sign the treaty out of concerns regarding how it would affect Australia's obligation under other treaty arrangements including ANZUS."
Foreign relations of Australia,"Security treaties
Special strategic partnership
Japan (as of 2014).  Under this partnership, Australia and Japan have established a strong and broad-ranging security relationship under the renewed 2022 Australia-Japan Joint Declaration on Security Cooperation."
Foreign relations of Australia,"Comprehensive strategic partnerships
Comprehensive strategic partnerships are broad, high level relationships which have increasingly been formalized in the Asia-Pacific region under this description since the early 21st century.  They are arrangements which, in general, convey a sense of mutual value, strategic alignment and positive intent to further strengthen ties.  They establish the framework for an intensified level of engagement across governments and indicate particularly close bilateral relations. Australia has a formal comprehensive strategic partnership with the following countries and multi-national organizations:"
Foreign relations of Australia,"Singapore (as of 2016)
Indonesia (as of 2018)
India (as of 2020)
Papua New Guinea (as of 2020)
Malaysia (as of 2021)
South Korea (as of 2021)
ASEAN (as of 2021)
Vietnam (as of 2024)
In 2014, the Australian Prime Minister and Chinese President agreed to describe the relationship as a ""comprehensive strategic partnership"", and this helped facilitate an extensive program of engagement. This partnership has been dormant since relations deteriorated, particularly since 2020."
Foreign relations of Australia,"Trade
Overall Australia's largest trading partners are the United States, South Korea, Japan, China, and the United Kingdom. Australia currently has bilateral Free Trade Agreements with New Zealand, the United States, Thailand and Singapore as of 2007 and the United Kingdom as of 2021. As well as this, Australia is in the process undertaking studies on Free Trade Agreements with ASEAN, China, Chile, India, Indonesia, and Malaysia."
Foreign relations of Australia,"Australia–Chile Free Trade Agreement
Australia–China Free Trade Agreement
Australia–Korea Free Trade Agreement
Australia–New Zealand Closer Economic Relations Trade Agreement
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement
Australia–United Kingdom Free Trade Agreement
Australia–Fiji Free Trade Agreement"
Foreign relations of Australia,"Armaments
To bolster its foreign policy, Australia maintains a very well-equipped military,
According to SIPRI, Australia is the fourth largest importer of major weapons in the world. The US supplied 60 per cent of Australia's imports and Spain 29 per cent. All armed services have received new major arms in 2014–18, but mainly aircraft and ships. The F-35 combat aircraft and antisubmarine warfare aircraft from the USA made up 53 per cent of Australian arms imports in 2014–18, while ships from Spain accounted for 29 per cent. Large deliveries for additional aircraft and ships are outstanding.
Australia is modernising its armed forces but also acquiring weapons that significantly increase its long-range capabilities. Among the weapons imported in 2010–14 were 5 tanker aircraft and the first of 2 amphibious assault ships from Spain, along with 2 large transport aircraft and 4 airborne early warning (AEW) aircraft from the USA. Australia also received 26 combat aircraft from the US, with 82 more on order (see box 3), as well as 8 anti-submarine warfare aircraft from the US and 3 Hobart destroyers from Spain.  Australia's imports of major weapons increased 37 percent between 2010 and 2014 and 2014–18, making it the fourth largest importer in the world according to SIPRI.
In 2021, after Australia ended its 20-year military mission in Afghanistan, the defence officials held formal talks on strengthening military ties with the United Arab Emirates. However, the human rights groups said that it was ""very concerning"" to witness, as the Emirates was accused of carrying out ""unlawful attacks"" in war-torn nations like Libya and Yemen.
In December 2021, Australia signed a defence procurement deal with South Korea worth $1billion AUD (US$720 million) for modern artillery, supply trucks and radars supplied by South Korean defense company Hanwha. The South Korean President Moon Jae-in and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison met for the signing of the agreement and additionally announced they were formally upgrading the Australian-South Korean relationship to a ""comprehensive strategic partnership."""
Foreign relations of Australia,"International aid
According to the Australian think tank Lowy Institute, Australia is the Pacific region's largest development partner, disbursing A$17 billion worth of international aid between 2008 and 2021, accounting for 40% of the region's overseas development finance (ODF). Australian international aid in the Pacific exceeded other regional partners including the Asian Development Bank, China, New Zealand and Japan. Between 2019 and 2021, Australian's overseas development finance in the Pacific rose from A$1.34 billion in 2019 to A$1.89 billion in 2021.
In May 2024, RNZ reported that the Albanese Government had slightly increased Australia's foreign aid budget by four percent, bringing its total 2024-2025 aid o A$4.961 billion budget. In August 2023, the Government had released its new international development strategy, which promised new country, gender, disability and humanitarian aid strategies."
Foreign relations of Australia,"Diplomatic relations
As of 2011, Australia had established formal diplomatic relations with all members of the United Nations as well as the Holy See, Kosovo, Cook Islands and (in 2014) Niue. In many cases, diplomatic relations are maintained on a non-resident basis, with the Australian ambassador or high commissioner based in another country. Since 2012, diplomatic relations have been effectively suspended with the Syrian Arab Republic, with no diplomatic accreditation by either country maintained, but consular relations continue. In the case of Afghanistan, following the Taliban takeover in 2021, diplomatic relations are in an ambiguous status with Australia ""temporarily"" closing its embassy in Kabul and not recognizing the Islamic Emirate government but maintaining the credentials of the embassy of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan in Canberra. A number of Canadian missions provide consular assistance to Australians in countries in Africa where Australia does not maintain an office (and Australia reciprocates this arrangement for Canada in some other countries) through the Canada-Australia Consular Services Sharing Agreement.
Due to the One China Policy of the People's Republic of China, the Australian Office in Taiwan (formerly the Australian Commerce and Industry Office) unofficially represents Australia's interest in Taiwan, serving a function similar to other Australian Consulates."
Foreign relations of Australia,"List
List of countries which Australia maintains diplomatic relations with:"
Foreign relations of Australia,"Bilateral relations
Africa
Americas
Asia
Europe
Oceania
Australia is a member of the Pacific Islands Forum and other regional organisations. As part of its Pacific Step-Up initiative announced in 2016 Australia has uniquely established resident High Commissions and embassies in all independent and self governing members of the Pacific Islands Forum as well as consulates-general in New Caledonia and French Polynesia. Australia provides aid to many of its developing Pacific Islands neighbours, and to Papua New Guinea. For decades, it has been the largest donor of aid to the Oceania region. China and New Zealand, the next biggest donors, donated only one sixth of Australia's aid during the 2010s.
Since the end of the Cold War, the understanding from the United States has been that Australia and New Zealand would assume responsibility for the security of much of the Oceania region, whom they already share pre-existing cultural and economic ties to.
Australia's approach to the Pacific has included frequent references to what it has perceived as an ""Arc of Instability"" among its island neighbours. In August 2006 Australian Defence Minister Brendan Nelson stated to the Australian Parliament:"
Foreign relations of Australia,"We cannot afford to have failing states in our region. The so-called 'arc of instability', which basically goes from East Timor through to the south-west Pacific states, means that not only does Australia have a responsibility in preventing and indeed assisting with humanitarian and disaster relief, but also that we cannot allow any of these countries to become havens for transnational crime, nor indeed havens for terrorism.
As from early 2008, the Australian government led by Kevin Rudd began what it called a ""new approach"" to relations between Australia and the Pacific, appointing a Parliamentary Secretary for Pacific Island Affairs, Duncan Kerr. In February, Kerr and fellow Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Bob McMullan visited Samoa, Tonga and Kiribati in February, and stated:"
Foreign relations of Australia,"Broadly, the approach is one of much more partnership and engagement on the basis of mutual respect. We're not going to be lecturing or hectoring, we're going to try and work together with them and I think we set a pretty good standard with the way we started. The relationships we've established with ministers and leaders in those countries [Kiribati, Tonga and Samoa] is very positive.
Richard Marles, the deputy leader of the Australian Labor Party, has strongly advocated for Australia to prioritize its role in the Pacific. In 2021, he wrote a book titled Tides that bind: Australia in the Pacific, and claimed in an interview that, ""By any measure, we are huge part of the Pacific. We're the largest donor into the Pacific, we've got the biggest diplomatic footprint in the Pacific, we've got the most development resources in the Pacific of any country. For most of the Pacific, we're the most important bilateral relationship they have, more important than the United States, more important than China."""
Foreign relations of Australia,"See also
ANZUS
AUKUS
Australia and the United Nations
Australia House (Ottawa)
Australian contribution to the 2003 Gulf War
CANZUK International and CANZUK
Defence of Australia Policy
Five Eyes
Free-trade area
List of Australians imprisoned or executed abroad
List of diplomatic missions in Australia
List of diplomatic missions of Australia
Market access
Quadrilateral Security Dialogue
Rules of Origin
Tariffs
UKUSA Agreement
Visa requirements for Australian citizens"
Foreign relations of Australia,"References
Further reading
Abbondanza, Gabriele. The Geopolitics of Australia in the New Millennium: the Asia-Pacific Context (Aracne, 2013)
Beeson, Mark. ""Issues in Australian Foreign Policy"". The Australian Journal of Politics and History (2002) 48#2 online Archived 11 December 2018 at the Wayback Machine
Bisley, Nick. ""Issues in Australian Foreign Policy: July to December 2011"". Australian Journal of Politics & History  (2012) 58#2 pp 268–82 doi:10.1111/j.1467-8497.2012.01636.x
Chai, Tommy Sheng Hao. ""How China attempts to drive a wedge in the U.S.-Australia alliance"". Australian Journal of International Affairs 74.5 (2020): 511–531.
Chieocharnpraphan, Thosaphon. Australian Foreign Policy under the Howard Government: Australia as a Middle Power? (2011)
Curley, Melissa, and Dane Moores. ""Issues in Australian Foreign Policy, January to June 2011"". Australian Journal of Politics & History  (2011) 57#4 pp 597–613 doi:10.1111/j.1467-8497.2011.01617.x
Dalrymple, Rawdon. Continental Drift: Australia's Search for a Regional Identity (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2003). ISBN 0754634469.
Fels, Enrico. Shifting Power in Asia-Pacific? The Rise of China, Sino-US Competition and Regional Middle Power Allegiance. (Springer, 2017), pp. 365–436.
Firth, Stewart. Australia in International Politics: An Introduction to Australian Foreign Policy (3rd ed., 2011) online 2005 edition Archived 15 December 2018 at the Wayback Machine
Gyngell; Allan, and Michael Wesley.  Making Australian Foreign Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2003) online Archived 15 December 2018 at the Wayback Machine
Hundt, David. ""Issues in Australian Foreign Policy: July to December 2010"". Australian Journal of Politics & History (2011) doi:10.1111/j.1467-8497.2011.01597.x
Lockyer, Adam, Australia's Defence Strategy: Evaluating Alternatives for a Contested Asia, (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2017)
McDonald, Scott D., and Andrew T. H. Tan, eds. The Future of the United States-Australia Alliance: Evolving Security Strategy in the Indo-Pacific (2020) excerpt
Millar, T. B. Australia in peace and war: external relations 1788-1977 (1978) online, 612pp
Patience, Allan. Australian Foreign Policy in Asia: Middle Power or Awkward Partner? (2019) Book excerpt Amazon 
Suri, Navdeep. ""Australia-China Relations: The Great Unravelling"". ORF Issue Brief No. 366, June 2020, Observer Research Foundation. online
Tow, William T., and Chen-shen Yen. ""Australia–Taiwan relations: the evolving geopolitical setting"". Australian Journal of International Affairs 61.3 (2007): 330–350.
Ungerer, Carl. ""The 'middle power' concept in Australian foreign policy"". Australian Journal of Politics & History 53.4 (2007): 538–551.
Watt, Alan. The Evolution of Australian Foreign Policy 1938–1965. (Cambridge UP, 1967)"
Foreign relations of Australia,"External links
Australian Department of Foreign Affairs
Australian Customs Service
Australian Embassies, high commissions, consulates, multilateral missions and representative offices
Index of Foreign Embassies in Australia"
Australia (continent),"The continent of Australia, sometimes known in technical contexts by the names Sahul (), Australia-New Guinea, Australinea, Oceania, or Meganesia to distinguish it from the country of Australia, is located within the Southern and Eastern hemispheres. The continent includes mainland Australia, Tasmania, the island of New Guinea (Papua New Guinea and Western New Guinea), the Aru Islands, the Ashmore and Cartier Islands, most of the Coral Sea Islands, and some other nearby islands. Situated in the geographical region of Oceania, Australia is the smallest of the seven traditional continents.
The continent includes a continental shelf overlain by shallow seas which divide it into several landmasses—the Arafura Sea and Torres Strait between mainland Australia and New Guinea, and Bass Strait between mainland Australia and Tasmania. When sea levels were lower during the Pleistocene ice age, including the Last Glacial Maximum about 18,000 BC, they were connected by dry land into the combined landmass of Sahul. The name ""Sahul"" derives from the Sahul Shelf, which is a part of the continental shelf of the Australian continent. During the past 18,000 to 10,000 years, rising sea levels overflowed the lowlands and separated the continent into today's low-lying arid to semi-arid mainland and the two mountainous islands of New Guinea and Tasmania.
With a total land area of 8.56 million square kilometres (3,310,000 sq mi), the Australian continent is the smallest, lowest, flattest, and second-driest continent (after Antarctica) on Earth. As the country of Australia is mostly on a single landmass, and comprises most of the continent, it is sometimes informally referred to as an island continent, surrounded by oceans.
Papua New Guinea, a country within the continent, is one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse countries in the world. It is also one of the most rural, as only 18 percent of its people live in urban centres. West Papua, a region in Indonesia, is home to an estimated 44 uncontacted tribal groups. Australia, the largest landmass in the continent, is highly urbanised, and has the world's 14th-largest economy with the second-highest human development index globally. Australia also has the world's 9th largest immigrant population."
Australia (continent),"Terminology
The continent of Australia is sometimes known by the names Sahul, Australinea, or Meganesia to differentiate it from the country of Australia, and consists of the landmasses which sit on Australia's continental plate. This includes mainland Australia, Tasmania, and the island of New Guinea, which comprises Papua New Guinea and  Western New Guinea (Papua and West Papua, provinces of Indonesia). The name ""Sahul"" takes its name from the Sahul Shelf, which is part of the continental shelf of the Australian continent.
The term Oceania, originally a ""great division"" of the world in the 1810s, was replaced in English language countries by the concept of Australia as one of the world's continents in the 1950s. Prior to the 1950s, before the popularization of the theory of plate tectonics, Antarctica, Australia and Greenland were sometimes described as island continents, but none were usually taught as one of the world's continents in English-speaking countries. Scottish cartographer John Bartholomew wrote in 1873 that, ""the New World consists of North America, and the peninsula of South America attached to it. These divisions [are] generally themselves spoken as continents, and to them has been added another, embracing the large island of Australia and numerous others in the [Pacific] Ocean, under the name of Oceania. There are thus six great divisions of the earth — Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America and Oceania.""
The American author Samuel Griswold Goodrich  wrote in his 1854 book History of All Nations that, ""geographers have agreed to consider the island world of the Pacific Ocean as a third continent, under the name Oceania."" In this book the other two continents were categorized as being the New World (consisting of North America and South America) and the Old World (consisting of Africa, Asia and Europe). In his 1879 book Australasia, British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace commented that, ""Oceania is the word often used by continental geographers to describe the great world of islands we are now entering upon"" and that ""Australia forms its central and most important feature."" He did not explicitly label Oceania a continent in the book, but did note that it was one of the six major divisions of the world. He considered it to encompass the insular Pacific area between Asia and the Americas, and claimed it extended up to the Aleutian Islands, which are among the northernmost islands in the Pacific Ocean. However, definitions of Oceania varied during the 19th century. In the 19th century, many geographers divided up Oceania into mostly racially-based subdivisions; Australasia, Malaysia (encompassing Malay Archipelago), Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia.
Today, the Malay Archipelago is typically considered part of Southeast Asia, and the term Oceania is often used to denote the region encompassing the Australian continent, Zealandia, and various islands in the Pacific Ocean that are not included in the seven-continent model. It has been recognized by the United Nations as one of the world's five major continental divisions since its foundation in 1947, along with Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. The UN's definition of Oceania utilizes four of the five subregions from the 19th century; Australasia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. They include American Samoa, Australia and their external territories, the Cook Islands, Easter Island (Chile), the Federated States of Micronesia, French Polynesia, Fiji, Galapagos Islands (Ecuador), Guam, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Niue, the Northern Mariana Islands, Ogasawara (Japan), Palau, Papua New Guinea, Pitcairn Islands, Samoa, the Solomon Islands, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, Wallis and Futuna, Western New Guinea, and the United States Minor Outlying Islands (Baker Island, Howland Island, Jarvis Island, Midway Atoll, Palmyra Atoll, and Wake Island) as well as Hawaii, one of 50 states of United States. The original UN definition of Oceania from 1947 included these same countries and semi-independent territories, which were mostly still colonies at that point.
The island states of Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore and Taiwan, all located within the bounds of the Pacific or associated marginal seas, are excluded from the UN definition. The states of Hong Kong and Malaysia, located in both mainland Asia and marginal seas of the Pacific, are also excluded, as is the nation of Brunei, which shares the island of Borneo with Indonesia and Malaysia. Further excluded are East Timor and Indonesian (or Western) New Guinea, areas which are biogeographically or geologically associated with the Australian landmass. This definition of Oceania is used in statistical reports, by the International Olympic Committee, and by many atlases. The CIA World Factbook also categorize Oceania or the Pacific area as one of the world's major continental divisions, but use the term ""Australia and Oceania"" to refer to the area. Their definition does not include Australia's subantarctic external territory Heard Island and McDonald Islands, but is otherwise the same as the UN definition, and it is also used for statistical purposes.
In countries such as Argentina, Brazil, China, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, France, Greece, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Peru, Spain, Switzerland or Venezuela, Oceania is treated as a continent in the sense that it is ""one of the parts of the world"", and Australia is only seen as an island nation. In other countries, including Kazakhstan, Poland and Russia, Australia and Eurasia are thought of as continents, while Asia, Europe and Oceania are regarded as ""parts of the world"". In the Pacific Ocean Handbook (1945), author Eliot Grinnell Mears wrote that he categorized Australia, New Zealand and Pacific islands under the label of Oceania for ""scientific reasons; Australia's fauna is largely continental in character, New Zealand's are clearly insular; and neither Commonwealth realm has close ties with Asia."" He further added that, ""the term Australasia is not relished by New Zealanders and this name is too often confused with Australia."" Some 19th century definitions of Oceania grouped Australia, New Zealand and the islands of Melanesia together under the label of Australasia, in other 19th century definitions of Oceania, the term was only used to refer to Australia itself, with New Zealand being categorized with the islands of Polynesia in such definitions.
Archaeological terminology for this region has changed repeatedly. Before the 1970s, the single Pleistocene landmass was called Australasia, derived from the Latin australis, meaning ""southern"", although this word is most often used for a wider region that includes lands like New Zealand that are not on the same continental shelf. In the early 1970s, the term Greater Australia was introduced for the Pleistocene continent. Then at a 1975 conference and consequent publication, the name Sahul was extended from its previous use for just the Sahul Shelf to cover the continent.
In 1984 W. Filewood suggested the name Meganesia, meaning ""great island"" or ""great island-group"", for both the Pleistocene continent and the present-day lands, and this name has been widely accepted by biologists. Others have used Meganesia with different meanings: travel writer Paul Theroux included New Zealand in his definition and others have used it for Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii. Another biologist, Richard Dawkins, coined the name Australinea in 2004. Australia–New Guinea has also been used."
Australia (continent),"Geology and geography
The Australian continent, being a part of the Indo-Australian Plate (more specifically, the Australian Plate), is the lowest, flattest, and oldest landmass on Earth and it has had a relatively stable geological history. New Zealand is not part of the continent of Australia, but of the separate, submerged continent of Zealandia. New Zealand and Australia are both part of the Oceanian sub-region known as Australasia, with New Guinea being in Melanesia.
The continent includes a continental shelf overlain by shallow seas which divide it into several landmasses—the Arafura Sea and Torres Strait between mainland Australia and New Guinea, and Bass Strait between mainland Australia and Tasmania. When sea levels were lower during the Pleistocene ice age, including the Last Glacial Maximum about 18,000 BC, they were connected by dry land. 
During the past 18,000 to 10,000 years, rising sea levels overflowed the lowlands and separated the continent into today's low-lying arid to semi-arid mainland and the two mountainous islands of New Guinea and Tasmania. The continental shelf connecting the islands, half of which is less than 50 metres (160 ft) deep, covers some 2.5 million square kilometres (970,000 sq mi), including the Sahul Shelf and Bass Strait.
Geological forces such as tectonic uplift of mountain ranges or clashes between tectonic plates occurred mainly in Australia's early history, when it was still a part of Gondwana. Australia is situated in the middle of the tectonic plate, and therefore currently has no active volcanism."
Australia (continent),"The continent primarily sits on the Indo-Australian Plate. Because of its central location on its tectonic plate, Australia does not have any active volcanic regions, the only continent with this distinction. The lands were joined with Antarctica as part of the southern supercontinent Gondwana until the plate began to drift north about 96 million years ago.
For most of the time since then, Australia–New Guinea remained a continuous landmass. When the last glacial period ended in about 10,000 BC, rising sea levels formed Bass Strait, separating Tasmania from the mainland. Then between about 8,000 and 6,500 BC, the lowlands in the north were flooded by the sea, separating the Aru Islands, mainland Australia, New Guinea, and Tasmania.
A northern arc consisting of the New Guinea Highlands, the Raja Ampat Islands, and Halmahera was uplifted by the northward migration of Australia and subduction of the Pacific Plate. The Outer Banda Arc was accreted along the northwestern edge the continent; it includes the islands of Timor, Tanimbar, and Seram. Papua New Guinea has several volcanoes, as it is situated along the Pacific Ring of Fire. Volcanic eruptions are not rare, and the area is prone to earthquakes and tsunamis because of this. Mount Wilhelm in Papua New Guinea is the second highest mountain in the continent, and at 4,884 metres (16,024 ft) above sea level, Puncak Jaya is the highest mountain."
Australia (continent),"Human history
The Australian continent and Sunda were points of early human migrations after leaving Africa.
Recent research points to a planned migration of hundreds of people using bamboo rafts, which eventually landed on Sahul."
Australia (continent),"Indigenous peoples
Indigenous Australians, that is Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders people, are the original inhabitants of the Australian continent and nearby islands. They migrated from Africa to Asia around 70,000 years ago and arrived in Australia at least 50,000 years ago, based on archaeological evidence. More recent research points to earlier arrival, possibly 65,000 years ago.
They are believed to be among the earliest human migrations out of Africa. There is evidence of genetic and linguistic interchange between Australians in the far north and the Austronesian peoples of modern-day New Guinea and the islands, but this may be the result of recent trade and intermarriage. The earliest known human remains were found at Lake Mungo, a dry lake in the southwest of New South Wales. Remains found at Mungo suggest one of the world's oldest known cremations, thus indicating early evidence for religious ritual among humans. Dreamtime remains a prominent feature of Australian Aboriginal art, the oldest continuing tradition of art in the world.
Papuan habitation is estimated to have begun between 42,000 and 48,000 years ago in New Guinea. Trade between New Guinea and neighboring Indonesian islands was documented as early as the seventh century, and archipelagic rule of New Guinea by the 13th. At the beginning of the seventh century, the Sumatra-based empire of Srivijaya (7th century–13th century) engaged in trade relations with western New Guinea, initially taking items like sandalwood and birds-of-paradise in tribute to China, but later making slaves out of the natives. The rule of the Java-based empire of Majapahit (1293–1527) extended to the western fringes of New Guinea. Recent archaeological research suggests that 50,000 years ago people may have occupied sites in the highlands at New Guinean altitudes of up to 2,000 m (6,600 ft), rather than being restricted to warmer coastal areas."
Australia (continent),"Pre-colonial history
Legends of Terra Australis Incognita—an ""unknown land of the South""—date back to Roman times and before, and were commonplace in medieval geography, although not based on any documented knowledge of the continent. Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle speculated of a large landmass in the southern hemisphere, saying, ""Now since there must be a region bearing the same relation to the southern pole as the place we live in bears to our pole..."". His ideas were later expanded by Ptolemy (2nd century AD), who believed that the lands of the Northern Hemisphere should be balanced by land in the south. The theory of balancing land has been documented as early as the 5th century on maps by Macrobius, who uses the term Australis on his maps.
Terra Australis, a hypothetical continent first posited in antiquity, appeared on maps between the 15th and 18th centuries. Scientists, such as Gerardus Mercator (1569) and Alexander Dalrymple as late as 1767 argued for its existence, with such arguments as that there should be a large landmass in the south as a counterweight to the known landmasses in the Northern Hemisphere. The cartographic depictions of the southern continent in the 16th and early 17th centuries, as might be expected for a concept based on such abundant conjecture and minimal data, varied wildly from map to map; in general, the continent shrank as potential locations were reinterpreted.  At its largest, the continent included Tierra del Fuego, separated from South America by a small strait; New Guinea; and what would come to be called Australia."
Australia (continent),"European exploration
In 1606 Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon made the first documented European sight and landing on the continent of Australia in Cape York Peninsula. Dutch explorer Abel Janszoon Tasman circumnavigated and landed on parts of the Australian continental coast and discovered Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania), New Zealand in 1642, and Fiji islands. He was the first known European explorer to reach these islands.
In the quest for Terra Australis, Spanish explorations in the 17th century, such as the expedition led by the Portuguese navigator Pedro Fernandes de Queirós, discovered the Pitcairn and Vanuatu archipelagos, and sailed the Torres Strait between Australia and New Guinea, named after navigator Luís Vaz de Torres, who was the first European to explore the Strait. When Europeans first arrived, inhabitants of New Guinea and nearby islands, whose technologies included bone, wood, and stone tools, had a productive agricultural system. In 1660, the Dutch recognised the Sultan of Tidore's sovereignty over New Guinea. The first known Europeans to sight New Guinea were probably the Portuguese and Spanish navigators sailing in the South Pacific in the early part of the 16th century.
On 23 April 1770 British explorer James Cook made his first recorded direct observation of indigenous Australians at Brush Island near Bawley Point. On 29 April, Cook and crew made their first landfall on the mainland of the continent at a place now known as the Kurnell Peninsula. It is here that James Cook made first contact with an Aboriginal tribe known as the Gweagal, who he fired upon, injuring one. His expedition became the first recorded Europeans to have encountered the eastern coastline of Australia. Captain Arthur Phillip led the First Fleet of 11 ships and about 850 convicts into Sydney on 26 January 1788. This was to be the location for the new colony. Phillip described Sydney Cove as being ""without exception the finest harbour in the world""."
Australia (continent),"Modern history
In 1883, the Colony of Queensland tried to annex the southern half of eastern New Guinea, but the British government did not approve. The Commonwealth of Australia came into being when the Federal Constitution was proclaimed by the Governor-General, Lord Hopetoun, on 1 January 1901. From that point a system of federalism in Australia came into operation, entailing the establishment of an entirely new national government (the Commonwealth government) and an ongoing division of powers between that government and the States. With the encouragement of Queensland, in 1884, a British protectorate had been proclaimed over the southern coast of New Guinea and its adjacent islands. British New Guinea was annexed outright in 1888. The possession was placed under the authority of the newly federated Commonwealth of Australia in 1902 and with passage of the Papua Act of 1905, British New Guinea became the Australian Territory of Papua, with formal Australian administration beginning in 1906."
Australia (continent),"The Bombing of Darwin on 19 February 1942 was the largest single attack ever mounted by a foreign power on Australia. In an effort to isolate Australia, the Japanese planned a seaborne invasion of Port Moresby, in the Australian Territory of New Guinea. Between July and November 1942, Australian forces repulsed Japanese attempts on the city by way of the Kokoda Track, in the highlands of New Guinea. The Battle of Buna–Gona, between November 1942 and January 1943, set the tone for the bitter final stages of the New Guinea campaign, which persisted into 1945. The offensives in Papua and New Guinea of 1943–44 were the single largest series of connected operations ever mounted by the Australian armed forces.
Following the 1998 commencement of reforms across Indonesia, Papua and other Indonesian provinces received greater regional autonomy. In 2001, ""Special Autonomy"" status was granted to Papua province, although to date, implementation has been partial and often criticised. The region was administered as a single province until 2003, when it was split into the provinces of Papua and West Papua. Elections in 1972 resulted in the formation of a ministry headed by Chief Minister Michael Somare, who pledged to lead the country to self-government and then to independence. Papua New Guinea became self-governing on 1 December 1973 and achieved independence on 16 September 1975. The country joined the United Nations (UN) on 10 October 1975.
Migration brought large numbers of southern and central Europeans to Australia for the first time. A 1958 government leaflet assured readers that unskilled non-British migrants were needed for ""labour on rugged projects ...work which is not generally acceptable to Australians or British workers"". Australia fought on the side of Britain in the two world wars and became a long-standing ally of the United States when threatened by Imperial Japan during World War II. Trade with Asia increased and a post-war immigration program received more than 6.5 million migrants from every continent. Supported by immigration of people from more than 200 countries since the end of World War II, the population increased to more than 23 million by 2014."
Australia (continent),"Ecology
Flora
For about 40 million years Australia–New Guinea was almost completely isolated. During this time, the continent experienced numerous changes in climate, but the overall trend was towards greater aridity. When South America eventually separated from Antarctica, the development of the cold Antarctic Circumpolar Current changed weather patterns across the world. For Australia–New Guinea, it brought a marked intensification of the drying trend. The great inland seas and lakes dried out. Much of the long-established broad-leaf deciduous forest began to give way to the distinctive hard-leaved sclerophyllous plants that characterise the modern Australian landscape.
Typical Southern Hemisphere flora include the conifers Podocarpus (eastern Australia and New Guinea), the rainforest emergents Araucaria (eastern Australia and New Guinea), Nothofagus (New Guinea and Tasmania) and Agathis (northern Queensland and New Guinea), as well as tree ferns and several species of Eucalyptus. Prominent features of the Australian flora are adaptations to aridity and fire which include scleromorphy and serotiny. These adaptations are common in species from the large and well-known families Proteaceae (Banksias and Grevilleas), Myrtaceae (Eucalyptus or gum trees, Melaleucas and Callistemons), Fabaceae (Acacias or wattles), and Casuarinaceae (Casuarinas or she-oaks), which are typically found in the Australian mainland. The flora of New Guinea is a mixture of many tropical rainforest species with origins in Asia, such as Castanopsis acuminatissima, Lithocarpus spp., elaeocarps, and laurels, together with typically Australasian flora. In the New Guinean highlands, conifers such as Dacrycarpus, Dacrydium, Papuacedrus and Libocedrus are present.
For many species, the primary refuge was the relatively cool and well-watered Great Dividing Range. Even today, pockets of remnant vegetation remain in the cool uplands, some species not much changed from the Gondwanan forms of 60 or 90 million years ago. Eventually, the Australia–New Guinea tectonic plate collided with the Eurasian plate to the north. The collision caused the northern part of the continent to buckle upwards, forming the high and rugged mountains of New Guinea and, by reverse (downwards) buckling, the Torres Strait that now separates the two main landmasses. The collision also pushed up the islands of Wallacea, which served as island 'stepping-stones' that allowed plants from Southeast Asia's rainforests to colonise New Guinea, and some plants from Australia–New Guinea to move into Southeast Asia. The ocean straits between the islands were narrow enough to allow plant dispersal, but served as an effective barrier to exchange of land mammals between Australia–New Guinea and Asia.
Among the fungi, the remarkable association between Cyttaria gunnii (one of the ""golf-ball"" fungi) and its associated trees in the genus Nothofagus is evidence of that drift: the only other places where this association is known are New Zealand and southern Argentina and Chile."
Australia (continent),"Fauna
Due to the spread of animals, fungi and plants across the single Pleistocene landmass the separate lands have a related biota. There are over 300 bird species in West Papua, of which at least 20 are unique to the ecoregion, and some live only in very restricted areas. These include the grey-banded munia, Vogelkop bowerbird, and the king bird-of-paradise.
Australia has a huge variety of animals; some 83% of mammals, 89% of reptiles, 24% of fish and insects and 93% of amphibians that inhabit the continent are endemic to Australia. This high level of endemism can be attributed to the continent's long geographic isolation, tectonic stability, and the effects of an unusual pattern of climate change on the soil and flora over geological time. Australia and its territories are home to around 800 species of bird; 45% of these are endemic to Australia. Predominant bird species in Australia include the Australian magpie, Australian raven, the pied currawong, crested pigeons and the laughing kookaburra. The koala, emu, platypus and kangaroo are national animals of Australia, and the Tasmanian devil is also one of the well-known animals in the country. The goanna is a predatory lizard native to the Australian mainland."
Australia (continent),"As the continent drifted north from Antarctica, a unique fauna, flora and mycobiota developed. Marsupials and monotremes also existed on other continents, but only in Australia–New Guinea did they out-compete the placental mammals and come to dominate. New Guinea has 284 species and six orders of mammals: monotremes, three orders of marsupials, rodents and bats; 195 of the mammal species (69%) are endemic. New Guinea has a rich diversity of coral life and 1,200 species of fish have been found. Also about 600 species of reef-building coral—the latter equal to 75 percent of the world's known total. New Guinea has 578 species of breeding birds, of which 324 species are endemic. Bird life also flourished—in particular, the songbirds (order Passeriformes, suborder Passeri) are thought to have evolved 50 million years ago in the part of Gondwana that later became Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, and Antarctica, before radiating into a great number of different forms and then spreading around the globe.
Animal groups such as macropods, monotremes, and cassowaries are endemic to Australia. There were three main reasons for the enormous diversity that developed in animal, fungal and plant life."
Australia (continent),"While much of the rest of the world underwent significant cooling and thus loss of species diversity, Australia–New Guinea was drifting north at such a pace that the overall global cooling effect was roughly equalled by its gradual movement toward the equator. Temperatures in Australia–New Guinea, in other words, remained reasonably constant for a very long time, and a vast number of different animal, fungal and plant species were able to evolve to fit particular ecological niches.
Because the continent was more isolated than any other, very few outside species arrived to colonise, and unique native forms developed unimpeded.
Finally, despite the fact that the continent was already very old and thus relatively infertile, there are dispersed areas of high fertility. Where other continents had volcanic activity and/or massive glaciation events to turn over fresh, unleached rocks rich in minerals, the rocks and soils of Australia–New Guinea were left largely untouched except by gradual erosion and deep weathering. In general, fertile soils produce a profusion of life, and a relatively large number of species/level of biodiversity. This is because where nutrients are plentiful, competition is largely a matter of outcompeting rival species, leaving great scope for innovative co-evolution as is witnessed in tropical, fertile ecosystems. In contrast, infertile soils tend to induce competition on an abiotic basis meaning individuals all face constant environmental pressures, leaving less scope for divergent evolution, a process instrumental in creating new species.
Although New Guinea is the most northerly part of the continent, and could be expected to be the most tropical in climate, the altitude of the New Guinea highlands is such that a great many animals and plants that were once common across Australia–New Guinea now survive only in the tropical highlands where they are severely threatened by population growth."
Australia (continent),"Climate
In New Guinea, the climate is mostly monsoonal (December to March), southeast monsoon (May to October), and tropical rainforest with slight seasonal temperature variation. In lower altitudes, the temperature is around 27 °C (81 °F) year round. But the higher altitudes, such as Mendi, are constantly around 21 °C (70 °F) with cool lows nearing 11 °C (52 °F), with abundant rainfall and high humidity. The New Guinea Highlands are one of the few regions close to the equator that experience snowfall, which occurs in the most elevated parts of the mainland. Some areas in the island experience an extraordinary amount of precipitation, averaging roughly 4,500 millimetres (180 in) of rainfall annually.
The Australian landmass's climate is mostly desert or semi-arid, with the southern coastal corners having a temperate climate, such as oceanic and humid subtropical climate in the east coast and Mediterranean climate in the west. The northern parts of the country have a tropical climate. Snow falls frequently on the highlands near the east coast, in the states of Victoria, New South Wales, Tasmania and in the Australian Capital Territory. Temperatures in Australia have ranged from above 50 °C (122 °F) to well below 0 °C (32 °F). Nonetheless, minimum temperatures are moderated. The El Niño-Southern Oscillation is associated with seasonal abnormality in many areas in the world. Australia is one of the continents most affected and experiences extensive droughts alongside considerable wet periods."
Australia (continent),"Demography
Religion
Christianity is the predominant religion in the continent, although large proportions of Australians belong to no religion. Other religions in the region include Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism, which are prominent minority religions in Australia. Traditional religions are often animist, found in New Guinea. Islam is widespread in the Indonesian New Guinea. Many Papuans combine their Christian faith with traditional indigenous beliefs and practices."
Australia (continent),"Languages
""Aboriginal Australian languages"", including the large Pama–Nyungan family, ""Papuan languages"" of New Guinea and neighbouring islands, including the large Trans–New Guinea family, and ""Tasmanian languages"" are generic terms for the native languages of the continent other than those of Austronesian family. Predominant languages include English in Australia, Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea, and Indonesian (Malay) in Indonesian New Guinea. Immigration to Australia have brought overseas languages such as Italian, Greek, Arabic, Filipino, Mandarin, Vietnamese and Spanish, among others. Contact between Austronesian and Papuan resulted in several instances in mixed languages such as Maisin. Tok Pisin is an English creole language spoken in Papua New Guinea. Papua New Guinea has more languages than any other country, with over 820 indigenous languages, representing 12% of the world's total, but most have fewer than 1,000 speakers."
Australia (continent),"Immigration
Since 1945, more than 7 million people have settled in Australia. From the late 1970s, there was a significant increase in immigration from Asian and other non-European countries, making Australia a multicultural country. Sydney is the most multicultural city in Oceania, having more than 250 different languages spoken, with about 40 percent of residents speaking a language other than English at home. Furthermore, 36 percent of the population reported having been born overseas, with top countries being Italy, Lebanon, Vietnam and Iraq, among others. Melbourne is also fairly multicultural, having the largest Greek-speaking population outside of Europe, and the second largest Asian population in Australia after Sydney."
Australia (continent),"Economy
Australia is the only First World country on the Australia-New Guinea continent, although the economy of Australia is by far the largest and most dominant economy in the region and one of the largest in the world. Australia's per-capita GDP is higher than that of the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and France in terms of purchasing power parity. The Australian Securities Exchange in Sydney is the largest stock exchange in Australia and in the South Pacific. In 2012, Australia was the 12th largest national economy by nominal GDP and the 19th-largest measured by PPP-adjusted GDP. Tourism in Australia is an important component of the Australian economy. In the financial year 2014/15, tourism represented 3.0% of Australia's GDP contributing A$47.5 billion to the national economy. In 2015, there were 7.4 million visitor arrivals. Mercer Quality of Living Survey ranks Sydney tenth in the world in terms of quality of living, making it one of the most livable cities. It is classified as an Alpha+ World City by GaWC. Melbourne also ranked highly in the world's most liveable city list, and is a leading financial centre in the Asia-Pacific region.
Papua New Guinea is rich in natural resources, which account for two-thirds of their export earnings. Though PNG is filled with resources, the lack of country's development led foreign countries to take over few sites and continued foreign demand for PNG's resources and as a result, the United States constructed an oil company and began to export in 2004 and this was the largest project in PNG's history. Papua New Guinea is classified as a developing economy by the International Monetary Fund. Strong growth in Papua New Guinea's mining and resource sector led to the country becoming the sixth fastest-growing economy in the world in 2011."
Australia (continent),"Politics
Australia is a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy with Charles III at its apex as the King of Australia, a role that is distinct from his position as monarch of the other Commonwealth realms. The King is represented in Australia by the Governor-General at the federal level and by the Governors at the state level, who by convention act on the advice of his ministers. There are two major political groups that usually form government, federally and in the states: the Australian Labor Party and the Coalition which is a formal grouping of the Liberal Party and its minor partner, the National Party. Within Australian political culture, the Coalition is considered centre-right and the Labor Party is considered centre-left."
Australia (continent),"Papua New Guinea is a Commonwealth realm. As such, King Charles III is its sovereign and head of state. The constitutional convention, which prepared the draft constitution, and Australia, the outgoing metropolitan power, had thought that Papua New Guinea would not remain a monarchy. The founders, however, considered that imperial honours had a cachet. The monarch is represented by the Governor-General of Papua New Guinea, currently Bob Dadae. Papua New Guinea (along with Solomon Islands) is unusual among Commonwealth realms in that governors-general are elected by the legislature, rather than chosen by the executive branch."
Australia (continent),"Culture
Since 1788, the primary influence behind Australian culture has been Anglo-Celtic Western culture, with some Indigenous influences. The divergence and evolution that has occurred in the ensuing centuries has resulted in a distinctive Australian culture. Since the mid-20th century, American popular culture has strongly influenced Australia, particularly through television and cinema. Other cultural influences come from neighbouring Asian countries, and through large-scale immigration from non-English-speaking nations. The Australian Museum in Sydney and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne are the oldest and largest museums in the continent, as well as in Oceania. Sydney's New Year's Eve celebrations are the largest in the continent.
It is estimated that more than 7000 different cultural groups exist in Papua New Guinea, and most groups have their own language. Because of this diversity, in which they take pride, many different styles of cultural expression have emerged; each group has created its own expressive forms in art, performance art, weaponry, costumes and architecture. Papua New Guinea is one of the few cultures in Oceania to practice the tradition of bride price. In particular, Papua New Guinea is world-famous for carved wooden sculpture: masks, canoes, story-boards.
Australia has a tradition of Aboriginal art which is thousands of years old, the best known forms being rock art and bark painting. Evidence of Aboriginal art in Australia can be traced back at least 30,000 years. Examples of ancient Aboriginal rock artworks can be found throughout the continent – notably in national parks such as those of the UNESCO listed sites at Uluru and Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory, but also within protected parks in urban areas such as at Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park in Sydney. Aboriginal culture includes a number of practices and ceremonies centered on a belief in the Dreamtime. Reverence for the land and oral traditions are emphasised."
Australia (continent),"Sport
Popular sports in Papua New Guinea include various codes of football (rugby league, rugby union, soccer, and Australian rules football), cricket, volleyball, softball, netball, and basketball. Other Olympic sports are also gaining popularity, such as boxing and weightlifting. Rugby league is the most popular sport in Papua New Guinea (especially in the highlands), which also unofficially holds the title as the national sport. The most popular sport in Australia is cricket, the most popular sport among Australian women is netball, while Australian rules football is the most popular sport in terms of spectatorship and television ratings. Australia has hosted two Summer Olympic Games: Melbourne 1956 and Sydney 2000. Australia has also hosted five editions of the Commonwealth Games (Sydney 1938, Perth 1962, Brisbane 1982, Melbourne 2006, and Gold Coast 2018). In 2006 Australia joined the Asian Football Confederation and qualified for the 2010 and 2014 World Cups as an Asian entrant."
Australia (continent),"See also
Australian Plate
List of islands in the Pacific Ocean
Outline of Australia
Paleoclimatology"
Australia (continent),"Notes
References
Bibliography
Davison, Graeme; Hirst, John; Macintyre, Stuart (1998). The Oxford Companion to Australian History. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-553597-6.
Lewis, Martin W.; Wigen, Kären E. (1997). The Myth of Continents: a Critique of Metageography. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-20743-1.
Ebach, Malte C., ed. (2021). Handbook of Australasian Biogeography (1st ed.). CRC Press. ISBN 9780367658168."
Australia (continent),"External links
 Media related to Australia (continent) at Wikimedia Commons"
Monarchy of Australia,"The monarchy of Australia is a key component of Australia's form of government,  by which a hereditary monarch serves as the country’s sovereign and head of state. The Australian monarchy is a constitutional one, modelled on the Westminster system of parliamentary government, while incorporating features unique to the constitution of Australia.
The present monarch is King Charles III, who has reigned since 8 September 2022. The monarch is represented at the federal level by the governor-general (currently Samantha Mostyn), in accordance with the Australian constitution and letters patent from his mother and predecessor, Queen Elizabeth II. Similarly, in each of the Australian states the monarch is represented by a governor (assisted by a lieutenant-governor), according to the Australia Act and respective letters-patent and state constitutions. The monarch appoints the governor-general on the advice of the prime minister and the state governors on the advice of the respective premiers. These are the only mandatory constitutional functions of the monarch of Australia.
Australian constitutional law provides that the person who is monarch of the United Kingdom will also be the monarch of Australia. Since the 1940s at the latest, the Australian monarchy has been a distinct office and in that capacity, they act exclusively upon the advice of Australian state and federal ministers. Australia is one of the Commonwealth realms, 15 independent countries that share the same person as monarch and head of state."
Monarchy of Australia,"International and domestic aspects
The monarch of Australia is the same person as the monarch of the 14 other Commonwealth realms within the 56-member Commonwealth of Nations. However, each realm is independent of the others, the monarchy in each being distinct from the rest. Effective with the Australia Act 1986, no foreign government can advise the monarch on any matters pertinent to Australia; on all matters of the Australian Commonwealth, the monarch is advised solely by Australian federal ministers of state. Likewise, on all matters relating to any Australian state, the monarch is advised by the ministers of that state, tendered via the premier."
Monarchy of Australia,"Emergence of a separate Crown
Courts and academics have proposed several dates on which the Crown of Australia separated from the Crown of the United Kingdom. These include 1926, when at an Imperial Conference it was announced that governors-general would no longer represent the government of the United Kingdom or 1930, when at another Imperial Conference it was clarified that the monarch would be advised directly by dominion ministers. Anne Twomey argues for this later date at the latest. Others have suggested the Crowns separated once Australia became fully independent, with dates suggested including 1931 (when the UK Statute of Westminster was passed), 1939 or 1942 (due to Statute of Westminster Adoption Act, passed in 1942 with retrospective effect to 1939) or 1986 (when the Australia Acts severed the last possibilities of UK institutions changing Australian laws). However, members of the High Court have indicated that the separation of the Crowns was complete by at least 1948, as seen by the creation of Australian citizenship laws.
It is unclear however whether for each state there is also a distinct Crown, separate from the Crown of Australia. In other words, the monarch may also be King of Victoria, etc. for each of the states. Prior to the passage of the Australia Act, the monarch acted as sovereign of the United Kingdom at the state level. With that Act's passage, either independent Crowns emerged for each of the states or the Crown of Australia transformed into a federal Crown in which the monarch receives advice from both state and commonwealth ministers in exercising their respective powers. Such a distinction may be relevant if either Australia or an individual state wished to become a republic, as with separate crowns, a federal republic would not necessarily abolish the Crown at a state level."
Monarchy of Australia,"Title
The title of the monarch is Charles the Third, by the Grace of God King of Australia and His other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth. Prior to 1953, the title had simply been the same as that in the United Kingdom. A change in the title resulted from occasional discussion among Commonwealth prime ministers and an eventual meeting in London in December 1952, at which Australia's officials stated their preference for a format for Queen Elizabeth II's title that would name all the realms. However, they stated they would also accept Elizabeth II (by the Grace of God) of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, [name of realm], and all of her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth (Defender of the Faith). The latter composition was adopted, despite some objections from the South African and Canadian governments. The sovereign's title in all her realms thus kept mention of the United Kingdom, but, for the first time, also separately mentioned Australia and the other Commonwealth realms. The passage of the Royal Style and Titles Act 1954 by the Parliament of Australia put these recommendations into law.
In 1973 the Whitlam government replaced the 1953 royal styles Act, with Whitlam arguing that the inclusion and position of the Queen's title in the UK made the title not ""sufficiently distinctively Australian"" and that the phrase ""Defender of the Faith"" had ""no historical or constitutional relevance in Australia"". A new Royal Titles and Styles Bill that removed these references was passed by the federal Parliament. The governor-general, Sir Paul Hasluck, reserved royal assent for the Queen, as governor-general Sir William McKell had done with the 1953 Royal Titles and Styles Bill to allow Queen Elizabeth II to give her assent in person, which she did at Government House in Canberra on 19 October 1973.
At the state level, Western Australia and South Australia have independently legislated the monarch's title to be the same as the Commonwealth title. There is limited reference to the monarch's title in the other states, however parliamentarians have used expressions include ""Queen of [state]"" and ""Queen in right of [state]"" during parliamentary debates. In 1973, Queensland sought to pass legislation to include Queensland specifically in the monarch's title. The Queensland parliament passed legislation seeking an advisory opinion from the Privy Council as to whether they had the legislative power to do, however this legislation was declared unconstitutional by the High Court. In seeking this title, the Queensland government's motivation was to dissuade the British from accepting the Whitlam's government advice that all of the British government's then authority over the states should be transferred to the federal government. The dismissal of the Whitlam government in 1975 removed the impetus for the title change and no further steps were taken in the matter."
Monarchy of Australia,"Succession
Royal succession is according to British laws that have been incorporated into Australian law, both federal and state: namely, the Bill of Rights 1689 and the Act of Settlement 1701. These acts limit the succession to the natural (i.e. non-adopted), legitimate descendants of Sophia, Electress of Hanover, and stipulate that the monarch must be in communion with the Church of England upon ascending the throne. With the passage of the Statute of Westminster Adoption Act 1942, Australia agreed to change its rules of succession only in agreement with the United Kingdom and the other then-Dominions.
In that spirit, the Commonwealth realms reached the Perth Agreement in 2011, committed all to amend the laws governing line of succession to follow absolute primogeniture for those in the royal family born in and after 2011. As part of the agreement, Australia, along with the other realms, repealed the Royal Marriages Act 1772, which gave precedence to male heirs and excluded from succession a person married to a Roman Catholic. In Australia, federal legislation to do this required a request and concurrence from all the states, meaning the federal legislation was not assented to until 24 March 2015 and took effect on 26 March 2015 (BST). The Northern Territory also added its request and concurrence, although this was not constitutionally required.
Upon a demise of the Crown (the death or abdication of a sovereign), it is customary for the accession of the new monarch to be publicly proclaimed by the governor-general on behalf of the Federal Executive Council, which meets at Government House after the accession. Parallel proclamations are made by the governors in each state. Regardless of any proclamations, the late sovereign's heir immediately and automatically succeeds, without any need for confirmation or further ceremony. Following an appropriate period of mourning, the monarch is also crowned at a coronation ceremony in the United Kingdom; though, this is not necessary for a sovereign to reign, being primarliy a symbolic event. For example, Edward VIII was never crowned, yet was undoubtedly king during his short time on the throne. After an individual ascends the throne, he or she typically continues to reign until death. The monarch legally cannot unilaterally abdicate; the only Australian monarch to do so, Edward VIII, did so after Australia (and the other dominions) assented to the British Parliament legislating on their behalf in accordance with the Statute of Westminster to ratify the abdication with the passage of the abdication Act. While the UK has passed regency acts from 1936 onwards to prepare for a situation when the monarch is incapacitated, the dominions did not agree for these acts to be extended into domestic law as it was felt that governors-general could exercise all the powers a regent would need to exercise."
Monarchy of Australia,"Finances
In 2018, a trip by King Charles III, then the Prince of Wales, to the Commonwealth country of Vanuatu, escorted by Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Julie Bishop in between a tour of Queensland and the Northern Territory, was paid for by the Australian government."
Monarchy of Australia,"Residences
The governor-general has two official residences: Government House in Canberra (commonly known as Yarralumla) and Admiralty House in Sydney. The Australian monarch stays at Government House when in Canberra, as do visiting heads of state.
When HMY Britannia was in Australian waters and in use by the monarch of Australia, it was not available to British officials for meetings or promotions."
Monarchy of Australia,"Personification of the state
The monarch is the locus of many oaths of allegiance. Various employees of the Crown are required by law to recite this oath before taking their posts, such as all members of the Commonwealth Parliament and of the state and territory parliaments, as well as most magistrates, judges, police officers, and justices of the peace. This is in reciprocation to the sovereign's coronation oath, taken most recently by King Charles III who promised ""to govern the Peoples of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland [and] your other Realms ... according to their respective laws and customs"". "
Monarchy of Australia,"The prime minister, ministers and parliamentary secretaries also make an oath or affirmation of office on their appointment to a particular ministry, which traditionally included a promise of allegiance to the monarch. However, the wording of this oath or affirmation is not written into law and beginning with swearing in of Paul Keating, all Labor prime ministers have dropped the reference to the sovereign.
The oath of citizenship similarly contained a statement of allegiance to the reigning monarch until 1994, when a pledge of allegiance to Australia and its values was introduced. However, the importance of allegiance to the monarch has been stressed by several justices in the context of determining whether a person is an ""alien"" for the purposes of section 51 the Constitution. For example, Justice Callinan held in Re Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs; Ex parte Te (2002) that ""judged from a constitutional — rather than a statutory — perspective, the fundamental criterion of membership [of the Australian body-politic] is allegiance to the Queen of Australia"". However, the precise relationship and relative importance of constitutional and statutory definitions of ""the people"" is the subject of evolving interpretations of the court."
Monarchy of Australia,"Head of state
Key features of Australia's system of government include its basis on a combination of written and unwritten rules, comprising the sovereign, governors, and governor-general. The Constitution does not mention the term head of state. According to the Parliament of Australia website, Australia's head of state is the monarch and its head of government is the prime minister, with powers limited by both law and convention for government to be carried on democratically. However, the governor-general's website states that the office holder is in practice Australia's head of state. A leading textbook on Australian constitutional law formulates the position thus: ""The Queen, as represented in Australia by the governor-general, is Australia's head of state.""
Additionally, Queensland and South Australia describe the monarch as the head of state for their particular state. New South Wales and Western Australia on the other hand describe their governors as their respective heads of state, whilst Tasmania and Victoria state that the governor ""exercises the constitutional power"" of the head of state.
While current official sources use the description head of state for the monarch, in the lead up to the referendum on Australia becoming a republic in 1999, Sir David Smith proposed an alternative explanation that the governor-general is head of state. This view has some support within the group Australians for Constitutional Monarchy."
Monarchy of Australia,"Constitutional role and royal prerogative
Australia has a written constitution based on the Westminster model of government, implementing a federal system and a distinct separation of powers. It gives Australia a parliamentary system of government, wherein the role of the sovereign and governor-general is both legal and practical. The sovereign of Australia is represented in the federal sphere by the governor-general—appointed by the monarch on the advice of the prime minister of Australia—and in each state by a governor—appointed by the monarch upon the advice of the relevant state premier."
Monarchy of Australia,"Executive
One of the main duties of the governor-general is to appoint the prime minister. This is, in accordance with convention, the individual most likely to maintain the support of the House of Representatives; usually the leader of the political party with a majority in that house; but, also when no party or coalition holds a majority (referred to as a minority government situation) or other scenarios in which the governor‑general's judgement about the most suitable candidate for prime minister has to be brought into play. The governor-general also, on the advice of the prime minister, appoints the other ministers of state, a subset of which form the Cabinet. In accordance with the principles of responsible government, these ministers are, in turn, accountable to the Parliament and, through it, to the people. The monarch is informed by the governor-general of the acceptance of the resignation of a prime minister and the swearing-in of a new prime minister and other members of the ministry and the monarch holds audience with Australian ministers where possible."
Monarchy of Australia,"The prime minister and Cabinet advises the governor-general on how to execute his or her executive powers over all aspects of government operations and foreign affairs. This means ministers direct the use of the royal prerogative that resides in the monarch, which includes the privilege to declare war, maintain peace, direct the actions of the Australian Defence Force, and negotiate and ratify treaties, alliances, and international agreements. The governor-general is empowered by the constitution to summon and prorogue parliament and call elections. Use of the royal prerogative does not require parliamentary approval.
As such, the monarch's and the governor-general's roles are primarily symbolic and cultural, acting as a symbol of the legal authority under which all governments and agencies operate. Still, the royal prerogative belongs to the Crown, not to any of the ministers, and the governor-general may unilaterally use these powers in exceptional situations, such as when, during the constitutional crisis in 1975, Sir John Kerr dismissed prime minister Gough Whitlam, on the occasion of a stalemate over government funding between the House of Representatives and the Senate.
The only role the monarch must perform personally is appoint the governor-general. Additionally, assent for a bill may be reserved for the pleasure of the monarch, allowing them to exercise their judgement on whether to give assent. The monarch has also been personally involved in issuing letters-patent for the creation of Australian honours.
Members of various executive agencies and other officials are appointed by the governor-general, including High Court judges. Ministers and parliamentary secretaries are also appointed to the Federal Executive Council. Royal commissions, a powerful type of public inquiry, are also commissioned by the Crown through a royal warrant."
Monarchy of Australia,"Parliament
Parliament consists of the sovereign, the Senate and the House of Representatives. Their authority in the House of Representatives is represented by the Mace of the House (which also represents the authority of the house itself and its Speaker). However, neither the sovereign nor the governor-general participate in the legislative process save for the granting of royal assent. Further, the constitution outlines that the governor-general alone is responsible for summoning, proroguing, and dissolving the federal parliament.
All laws in Australia, except those in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), are enacted only with the granting of royal assent, done by the governor-general, relevant state governor, or administrator in the case of the Northern Territory (NT). This is done in the federal context by the governor-general signing two copies of the bill. If the law is one in which takes effect on proclamation, the governor-general will also make this proclamation to which the Great Seal of Australia is then affixed in authentication of the corresponding letters patent. Laws passed by the ACT and NT legislatures, unlike their state counterparts, are subject to the oversight of the government of Australia and can be disallowed by the Australian Parliament. The governor-general may reserve a bill for the King's (or Queen's) pleasure; that is withhold his consent to the bill and present it to the sovereign for their personal decision. Under the constitution, the sovereign also has the power to disallow a bill within one year of the governor-general having granted royal assent. The purpose of this section was originally to allow the UK parliament to supervise the workings of the Commonwealth parliament, as this power would only be exercised by the monarch as advised by their British ministers. However, the power was never actually used and it is very unlikely that it will be used in the future."
Monarchy of Australia,"Courts
Traditionally, the monarch is known as the fount of justice. However, he does not personally rule in judicial cases, meaning that judicial functions are normally performed only in the monarch's name. In most jurisdictions, criminal offences are legally deemed to be offences against the sovereign and proceedings for indictable offences are brought in the sovereign's name in the form of The King [or Queen] against [Name] (typically shortened to R v [Name] standing for Rex for King or Regina for Queen). However, offences in Western Australia and Tasmania are brought in the name of the particular state. Civil lawsuits against the Crown in its public capacity (that is, lawsuits against the government) are permitted due to statute. In international cases, as a sovereign and under established principles of international law, the monarch of Australia is not subject to suit in foreign courts without his express consent. The prerogative of mercy lies with the monarch, and is exercised in the state jurisdictions by the governors."
Monarchy of Australia,"States and territories
In accordance with the Australia Act 1986, the sovereign has the power to appoint, on advice tendered by the relevant state premier, a governor in each of the Australian states, who themselves appoint executive bodies, as well as people to fill casual Senate vacancies, if the relevant state parliament is not in session. The state governors continue to serve as the direct representatives of the monarch, in no way subordinate to the governor-general, and they carry out on his behalf all of the monarch's constitutional and ceremonial duties in respect of their respective state. The Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory resemble states in many respects, but are administered directly by the Commonwealth of Australia; an administrator, appointed by the governor-general upon the advice of the Commonwealth government, takes the place of a state governor in the Northern Territory. The Australian Capital Territory has no equivalent position."
Monarchy of Australia,"Cultural role
Royal presence and duties
Official duties involve the sovereign representing the state at home or abroad, or other royal family members participating in a government-organised ceremony either in Australia or elsewhere. The sovereign and their family have participated in events such as various centennials and bicentennials; Australia Day; the openings of Olympic and other games; award ceremonies; D-Day commemorations; anniversaries of the monarch's accession; and the like.
Other royals have participated in Australian ceremonies or undertaken duties abroad, such as Prince Charles at the Anzac Day ceremonies at Gallipoli, or when the Queen, Prince Charles, and Princess Anne participated in Australian ceremonies for the anniversary of D-Day in France in 2004. Members of the royal family will sometimes make private donations to Australian charities or causes, such as when Queen Elizabeth II made a private donation to the Australian Red Cross Appeal after the Blue Mountains bushfires in 2009."
Monarchy of Australia,"The Crown and the Australian Defence Force
Section 68 of the Australian Constitution says: ""The command in chief of the naval and military forces of the Commonwealth is vested in the governor-general as the Queen's [monarch's] representative."" In practice, however, the governor-general does not play any part in the Australian Defence Force's command structure other than following the advice of the Minister for Defence in the normal form of executive government.
Australian naval vessels bear the prefix His Majesty's Australian Ship (HMAS) and many organisational groupings of the defence force (such as the Royal Australian Infantry Corps, Royal Australian Air Force and the Royal Australian Engineers) carry the ""royal"" prefix.
Members of the royal family have presided over military ceremonies, including Trooping the Colour ceremonies, inspections of the troops, and anniversaries of key battles. When the Queen was in Canberra, she laid wreaths at the Australian War Memorial. In 2003, the Queen acted in her capacity as Australian monarch when she dedicated the Australian War Memorial in Hyde Park, London.[1]"
Monarchy of Australia,"Some members of the royal family are Colonels-in-Chief of Australian regiments, including: the Royal Regiment of Australian Artillery; Royal Australian Army Medical Corps; the Royal Australian Armoured Corps and the Royal Australian Corps of Signals, amongst many others. The Queen's late husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, was an Admiral of the Fleet."
Monarchy of Australia,"Australian royal symbols
Royal symbols are the visual and auditory identifiers of the Australian monarchy. The main symbol of the monarchy is the sovereign, and their image is used to signify Australian sovereignty. Queen Elizabeth II's portrait, for instance, currently appears on all Australian coins minted during her reign, the five-dollar banknote, and postage stamps such as the Queen's Birthday stamp, issued by Australia Post every year since 1980. Some coins bearing King Charles III's portrait have begun to enter circulation, however the new five-dollar banknote is expected to depict Indigenous Australian culture and history instead of the new monarch.
A crown is depicted on the Queensland and Victorian state badges (which are included on the Australian coat of arms,) and on various medals and awards. The latter reflects the monarch's place as the fount of honour—the sovereign head of the Australian honours and awards system."
Monarchy of Australia,"The sovereign is further both mentioned in and the subject of songs and loyal toasts. Australia inherited the royal anthem ""God Save the King"" (alternatively, ""God Save the Queen"" in the reign of a female monarch) from the United Kingdom. It was the national anthem of Australia until 1984, and has since been retained as the country's royal anthem, its use generally restricted to official occasions where the monarch or a member of the royal family is present."
Monarchy of Australia,"The Queen's Personal Australian Flag, adopted in 1962, was used to signify Queen Elizabeth II's presence when she visited Australia. It features the coat of arms of Australia in banner form, defaced with a gold seven-pointed federation star with a blue disc containing the crowned letter E, surrounded by a garland of golden roses. Each of the six sections of the flag represents the heraldic badge of the Australian states, and the whole is surrounded by an ermine border representing the federation of the states. The current monarch, King Charles III, has not adopted a personal flag for Australia.
As in other Commonwealth realms, the King's Official Birthday is a public holiday and, in Australia, is observed on the second Monday in June in all states and territories, except Queensland and Western Australia. In Queensland, it is celebrated on the first Monday in October, and in Western Australia it is usually the last Monday of September or the first Monday of October. Celebrations are mainly official, including the Australian Birthday Honours list and military ceremonies."
Monarchy of Australia,"Religious role
Until its new constitution went into force in 1962, the Anglican Church of Australia was part of the Church of England. Its titular head was consequently the monarch, in his or her capacity as Supreme Governor of the Church of England. However, unlike in England, Anglicanism was never established as a state religion in Australia."
Monarchy of Australia,"History
The development of the Australian monarchy into the independent entity it is today began in 1770, when Captain James Cook, in the name of, and under instruction from, King George III, claimed the east coast of Australia. Colonies were eventually founded across the continent, all of them ruled by the monarch of the United Kingdom, upon the advice of his or her British ministers, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, in particular. In 1901 the six colonies united to form the Commonwealth of Australia, following the assent of Queen Victoria to the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act. However, this did not change the relationship of the monarch to the new nation, with her powers (such as the appoint of governors, governors-general and others set out in the Constitution) exercised in accordance with the advice of British ministers."
Monarchy of Australia,"This situation continued until after the First World War, where in response to calls from some Dominions for a re-evaluation of their status under the Crown after their sacrifice and performance in the conflict,: 110  the Balfour Declaration of 1926 was issued following a series of Imperial conferences. The statement provided that the United Kingdom and the Dominions were to be ""autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate to one another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown"". The Royal and Parliamentary Titles Act 1927, an Act of the Westminster Parliament, was the first indication of a shift in the law,  which ensured the independence of the office. Another move to independence occurred in 1930, when the British government agreed that the Australian Cabinet would advise the sovereign directly on the choice of governor-general. The Crown was further separated by the Statute of Westminster 1931, adopted by Australia in 1942 (retroactive to 3 September 1939)."
Monarchy of Australia,"The Curtin Labor government appointed Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, as governor-general during the Second World War. Curtin hoped the appointment might influence the British to despatch men and equipment to the Pacific War, and the selection of the brother of King George VI reaffirmed the important role of the Crown to the Australian nation at that time. Queen Elizabeth II became the first reigning monarch to visit Australia in 1954, greeted by huge crowds across the nation. In 1967, Elizabeth's son, Charles III (then Prince Charles), attended school in Geelong Grammar School in Corio, Victoria. Her grandson Prince Harry undertook a portion of his gap-year living and working in Australia in 2003."
Monarchy of Australia,"The sovereign did not possess a title unique to Australia until the Australian Parliament enacted the Royal Styles and Titles Act in 1953, after the accession of Elizabeth to the throne, and giving her the title of Queen of the United Kingdom, Australia and Her other Realms and Territories. Still, Elizabeth remained both as a queen who reigned in Australia both as Queen of Australia (in the federal jurisdiction) and Queen of the United Kingdom (in each of the states), as a result of the states not wishing to have the Statute of Westminster apply to them, believing that the status quo better protected their sovereign interests against an expansionist federal government, which left the Colonial Laws Validity Act in effect. Thus, the British government could still – at least in theory, if not with some difficulty in practice – legislate for the Australian states, and the viceroys in the states were appointed by and represented the sovereign of the United Kingdom, not that of Australia. As late as 1976, the British ministry advised the Queen to refuse Colin Hannah another term as Queensland's governor, after seriously considering unilaterally dismissing him due his breach of political impartiality, despite the recommendation of the then state Bjelke-Petersen government for his nomination. Additionally, court cases from state supreme courts could be appealed directly to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, thereby bypassing the Australian High Court which otherwise could not be appealed in the privy council for federal matters since 1968 and for state matters since 1975. In 1973 reference to the United Kingdom was removed by the Royal Style and Titles Act. Henceforth, the monarch would be styled uniquely as Queen of Australia. The Queen signed her assent to the Act at Government House, Canberra that year, leading Senior Vice President of the Labor Party, Jack Egerton, to remark to her, ""They tell me, love, you've been naturalised."" It was with the passage of the Australia Act 1986, which repealed the Colonial Laws Validity Act and abolished appeals of state cases to London, that the final vestiges of the British monarchy in Australia were removed, leaving a distinct Australian monarchy for the nation. The view in the Republic Advisory Committee's report in 1993 was that if, in 1901, Victoria, as Queen-Empress, symbolised the British Empire of which all Australians were subjects, all of the powers vested in the monarch under Australia's Constitution were now exercised on the advice of the Australian government."
Monarchy of Australia,"The 1999 Australian republic referendum was defeated by 54.4 per cent of the populace, despite polls showing that the majority supported becoming a republic. Many commentators have argued that disagreement between republicans as to the preferred model for a republic (most notably over whether the president should be appointed or directly elected) was a key factor in the ""no"" result. The referendum followed the recommendation of a 1998 Constitutional Convention called to discuss the issue of Australia becoming a republic."
Monarchy of Australia,"Elizabeth II died on 8 September 2022. She was the longest serving monarch and was succeeded by her son, Charles III. The coronation of Charles III and Camilla took place on 6 May 2023."
Monarchy of Australia,"Debate
Public polling
A poll taken by Morgan in October 2011 found that support for constitutional change was at its lowest for 20 years. Of those surveyed, 34 per cent were for a republic, as opposed to 55 per cent preferring to maintain the current constitutional arrangements. A peer-reviewed study published in the Australian Journal of Political Science in 2016 found that there had been a significant increase to support for monarchy in Australia after a 20-year rapid decline following the 1992 annus horribilis.
A Newspoll in November 2018 found support for the monarchy had climbed to its highest point in 25 years. A YouGov poll in July 2020 found that 62 per cent of respondents supported replacing the monarch with ""an Australian head of state"". A 2021 Ipsos poll found 40 per cent of respondents were opposed to Australia becoming a republic, 34 per cent were in favour, and 26 per cent didn't know. This was the lowest support recorded for republicanism since 1979."
Monarchy of Australia,"Political debate
Whereas prime minister Julia Gillard stated that she would like to see Australia become a republic, she, on 21 October 2011, at a reception in the presence of the Queen at Parliament House, asserted that the monarch is ""a vital constitutional part of Australian democracy and would only ever be welcomed as a beloved and respected friend"".  After Kevin Rudd was appointed as prime minister, he affirmed that a republic was still a part of his party's platform and stated his belief that the debate on constitutional change should continue.
Gillard had, during her time as prime minister, propounded that an appropriate time for Australia to become a republic would be after the end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. Following Elizabeth's death, the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, said in an interview he wanted to Australia to have an appointed head of state, but he did not have a timetable for a referendum, did not commit to advising one take place during his time as prime minister, and postulated that no vote should happen until demand rose from the grassroots. Albanese had earlier stated he would, out of respect for the Queen, merely refrain from having the governor-general call a referendum before the next election for the House of Representatives.
Republicans have dismissed the large public turnouts during royal tours as ""the cult of celebrity"". However, following Prince William's and Catherine's visit to the Blue Mountains after devastating bush fires in 2014, historian Jane Connors opined that ""there is still a sense that having the royal family come to see you is more healing and significant than just having anyone come to see you"", citing comments made by some who had come to the area while the royal couple were present. Ex-governor-general Michael Jeffery has also argued that the constitutional monarchy has been key to Australia's political stability and lack of civil wars.
The idea of a uniquely Australian monarch, resident in Australia, has been voiced occasionally. The proposition was first published in 1867. It was later reiterated by Alan Atkinson in his 1993 book The Muddle Headed Republic, by Harry Meklonian in 2009, and by Richard Hughes in 2017. In a similar vein, Waleed Aly suggested in 2022 replacing the monarch with a life appointed Indigenous ""First Elder"". Another possibility would be to crown someone in the line of succession to the Australian throne, but who is not expected to become monarch by the present rules of succession.
Frank C. Green, the Clerk of the House of Representatives, noted in 1955 that, while the Australian parliament did not then have a provision for foreign dignitaries to address the legislative body, Prince Edward and Prince Albert had been allowed to make speeches to parliamentarians in 1920 and 1927, respectively, as ""the British royal family is also the Australian royal family"". Australian legislators later spoke in parliament of the Australian royal family and John Mason, who acted as the British high commissioner to Australia between 1980 and 1984, referred to Queen Elizabeth II and her relations as the Australian royal family. However, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese stated in 2023 that ""we [Australians] don't have an Australian royal family""."
Monarchy of Australia,"List of monarchs of Australia
Colonial period (1770–1901)
Federation (1901–present)
British crown (1901–1939)
The Australian Crown (1939–present)
The date of separation of the Australian Crown from the UK Crown is a matter of debate (see emergence of a separate Crown above), however the process most likely occurred in the 1930s to 1940s, and was complete by at least 1948."
Monarchy of Australia,"Timeline of monarchs since Federation
See also
Australian State Coach
List of Australian organisations with royal patronage
Royal tours of Australia
List of Commonwealth visits made by Elizabeth II
List of prime ministers of Elizabeth II
List of sovereign states headed by Elizabeth II
Australian peers and baronets
Wattle Queen
King-in-Parliament"
Monarchy of Australia,"Notes
References
Specific references
General references
External links"
Monarchy of Australia,"Governor-General of Australia (Official website)
Australians for Constitutional Monarchy (Official website)
Australian Republican Movement (Official website)
Australian Monarchist League (Official website)
Official Australian portraits of The King and Queen"
List of Ramsar sites in Australia,"This is a list of wetlands in Australia that are designated by the Ramsar Convention as sites of international importance. Under the convention, the wetlands are considered as being of significant value not only for the Australian community, but for humanity as a whole.
The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands came into force for Australia on 21 December 1975 (1975-12-21). As of 28 February 2018, Australia has 66 sites designated as Wetlands of International Importance, with a total area of 8,342,175 hectares (20,613,960 acres)."
List of Ramsar sites in Australia,"Management of Ramsar wetlands in the Australian jurisdiction
The management of Ramsar sites listed within Australia is controlled at national level by the Australian government via the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 and its accompanying regulations, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Regulations 2000.
The act, as of 2015, lists the principles required for meeting treaty obligations in respect to ""wetlands of international importance"" including ""environmental approvals"" (i.e. sections 16-17B), the prerequisites for the making of both ""declarations"" and ""bilateral agreements"" (i.e. sections 34C and 37F, and 52 respectively), the approval process (i.e. section 138), ""strategic assessments"" (i.e. section 134J), and the management approach (i.e. sections 325 to 336 inclusive).
The applicable regulation (i.e. regulation 10.02) lists three requirements as of 2015. Firstly, a set of general principles for management is described including the need for ""public consultation,"" the involvement of parties with an interest and/or who may be affected by the management of wetland, as well as allowing for ""continuing community and technical input."" Secondly, the requirements for the management plan to be prepared for each listed wetland are described. Thirdly, the requirements for the ""environmental impact assessment and approval"" are described for parties wishing to undertake activities that are likely to have ""a significant impact on the ecological character of a Ramsar wetland."""
List of Ramsar sites in Australia,"Australian Capital Territory
The following wetlands are located in the Australian Capital Territory:"
List of Ramsar sites in Australia,"New South Wales
The following wetlands are located in New South Wales:"
List of Ramsar sites in Australia,"Northern Territory
The following wetlands are located in the Northern Territory:"
List of Ramsar sites in Australia,"Queensland
The following wetlands are located in Queensland:"
List of Ramsar sites in Australia,"South Australia
The following wetlands are located in South Australia:"
List of Ramsar sites in Australia,"Tasmania
The following wetlands are located in Tasmania:"
List of Ramsar sites in Australia,"Victoria
The following wetlands are located in Victoria:"
List of Ramsar sites in Australia,"Western Australia
The following wetlands are located in Western Australia:"
List of Ramsar sites in Australia,"External territories
The following wetlands are located in the External territories:"
List of Ramsar sites in Australia,"See also
List of Ramsar sites worldwide
A Directory of Important Wetlands in Australia"
List of Ramsar sites in Australia,"References
External links
Official Australian Government webpage
List of Ramsar Sites
Australia's National Report to the 11th Conference of the Parties, 2011"
Military history of Australia during World War I,"In Australia, the outbreak of World War I was greeted with considerable enthusiasm. Even before Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, the nation pledged its support alongside other states of the British Empire and almost immediately began preparations to send forces overseas to engage in the conflict. The first campaign that Australians were involved in was in German New Guinea after a hastily raised force known as the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force was dispatched in September 1914 from Australia and seized and held German possessions in the Pacific. At the same time another expeditionary force, initially consisting of 20,000 men and known as the Australian Imperial Force (AIF), was raised for service overseas.
The AIF departed Australia in November 1914 and, after several delays due to the presence of German naval vessels in the Indian Ocean, arrived in Egypt, where they were initially used to defend the Suez Canal. In early 1915, it was decided to carry out an amphibious landing on the Gallipoli peninsula with the goal of opening up a second front and securing the passage of the Dardanelles. The Australians and New Zealanders, grouped together as the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC), went ashore on 25 April 1915 and for the next eight months the Anzacs, alongside their British, French and other allies, fought a costly and ultimately unsuccessful campaign against the Turks.
The force was evacuated from the peninsula in December 1915 and returned to Egypt, where the AIF was expanded. In early 1916 it was decided that the infantry divisions would be sent to France, where they took part in many of the major battles fought on the Western Front. Most of the light horse units remained in the Middle East until the end of the war, carrying out further operations against the Turks in Egypt and Palestine. Small numbers of Australians served in other theatres of war. Although the main focus of the Australian military's effort was the ground war, air and naval forces were also committed. Squadrons of the Australian Flying Corps served in the Middle East and on the Western Front, and elements of the Royal Australian Navy carried out operations in the Atlantic, North Sea, Adriatic and Black Sea, as well as the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
By the end of the war, Australians were far more circumspect. The nation's involvement cost more than 60,000 Australian lives and many more were left unable to work as a result of their injuries. The impact of the war was felt in many other areas as well. Financially it was very costly. The effect on the social and political landscape was considerable and threatened to cause serious divides in the nation's social fabric. Conscription was possibly the most contentious issue and ultimately, despite having conscription for home service, Australia was one of only three combatants not to use conscripts in the fighting. For many Australians the nation's involvement in World War I and the Gallipoli campaign was seen as a symbol of its emergence as an international actor; many of the notions of the Australian character and nationhood that exist today have their origins in the war, and Anzac Day is commemorated as a national holiday."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Outbreak of the war
On 30 July 1914, the British government informed the Australian government via an encoded telegram that a declaration of war was likely. The message came during the lead-up to the 1914 federal election, meaning parliament was not in session and key political figures were spread around the country campaigning. Prime Minister Joseph Cook spoke at Horsham, Victoria, on 31 July, telling an election meeting to ""remember that when the Empire is at war, so is Australia at war [...] all our resources in Australia are in the Empire and for the Empire and for the preservation and security of the Empire"". On the same day, Opposition Leader Andrew Fisher was speaking at Colac, Victoria, and promised that ""Australians will stand beside our own to help and defend her to our last man and our last shilling"". An emergency cabinet meeting – at which only five out of ten ministers were present – was convened in Melbourne on 3 August, the government deciding that it would offer to send an expeditionary force of 20,000 men. The United Kingdom declared war on 4 August at 11 p.m. (5 August at 9 a.m. Melbourne time), and Australia and the other Dominions were considered to be ""automatically"" at war as well. At 12:45 p.m. on 5 August, Cook announced to the press in his office that ""I have received the following despatch from the Imperial government: 'war has broken out in Germany'"". Given the predominantly British heritage of most Australians at the time, there was considerable support from all corners of the country and large numbers of young Australian men reported to recruiting centres around the country to enlist in the following months.
Within days, plans for an Australian expeditionary force were completed by Brigadier General William Throsby Bridges and his staff officer, Major Cyril Brudenell Bingham White. White proposed a force of 18,000 men (12,000 Australians and 6,000 New Zealanders). This proposal was approved by Prime Minister Cook but he increased the offer to the British of 20,000 men to serve in any destination desired by the Home Government. On 6 August 1914, London cabled its acceptance of the force and asked that it be sent as soon as possible. Recruiting offices opened on 10 August 1914 and by the end of 1914, 52,561 volunteers had been accepted, although strict physical fitness guidelines were put in place."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"German New Guinea
In 1884, Germany had colonised the north eastern part of New Guinea and several nearby island groups. By the outbreak of the war, the Germans had been using the colony as a wireless radio base, and supporting the German East Asia Squadron which threatened merchant shipping in the region. As a consequence, Britain required the wireless installations to be destroyed. Shortly after the outbreak of war—following a request by the British government on 6 August 1914—the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force (AN&MEF) began forming. The objectives of the force were the German stations at Yap in the Caroline Islands, Nauru and at Rabaul, New Britain. The AN&MEF comprised one battalion of infantry (1,023 men) enlisted in Sydney, 500 naval reservists and ex-sailors organised into six companies who would serve as infantry and a further 500 men from the Kennedy Regiment, a Queensland militia battalion that had volunteered for overseas service and had been sent to garrison Thursday Island. Together, these forces were placed under the command of Colonel William Holmes, an officer in the militia who was at the time commander of the 6th Brigade and secretary of the Sydney Water and Sewerage Board.
The task force sailed from Sydney on 19 August 1914, and hove to off Port Moresby where they waited for their escorts to arrive. While they were at Port Moresby, Holmes decided to disembark the Queensland militia soldiers due to concerns about their preparedness for action. Escorted by the cruiser Sydney and the battlecruiser Australia, the task force reached Rabaul on 11 September 1914 and found that the port was free of German forces. Sydney and the destroyer HMAS Warrego landed small parties of naval reservists at the settlements of Kabakaul and the German gubernatorial capital Herbertshöhe on Neu-Pommern, south-east of Rabaul. These parties were reinforced first by sailors from HMAS Warrego and HMAS Yarra and later by infantry from the transport HMAS Berrima."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"A small 25-man force of naval reservists was subsequently landed at Kabakaul Bay and continued inland to capture the radio station believed to be in operation at Bita Paka, 4 miles (7 km) to the south. The Australians were resisted by a mixed force of German reservists and Melanesian native police, who forced them to fight their way to the radio station. By nightfall, the radio station was reached and it was found to have been abandoned, the mast dropped but its instruments and machinery intact. During the Battle of Bita Paka six Australians were killed and five wounded; the defenders lost one German non-commissioned officer (NCO) and about 30 Melanesians killed, and one German and ten Melanesians wounded. Later it was alleged that the heavy losses among the Melanesian troops was the result of the Australians bayoneting all those they had captured during the fighting. As a result of this engagement, Able Seaman W.G.V. Williams became the first Australian fatality of the war. The first Army fatality was a medical officer, Captain B. C. A. Pockley, who died the same day.
At nightfall on 12 September, the Berrima landed the AN&MEF infantry battalion at Rabaul. The following afternoon, although the governor had not yet surrendered the territory, a ceremony was carried out to signal the British occupation of New Britain. The German administration had withdrawn inland to Toma at dawn on 14 September, and HMAS Encounter subsequently bombarded a ridge near the town while half a battalion advanced towards the town supported by a field gun. The show of firepower was sufficient to start negotiations, ending the siege of Toma following the surrender of the remaining garrison of 40 Germans and 110 native police. The German territory surrendered on 17 September 1914.
Although successful the operation was arguably not well managed, and the Australians had been effectively delayed by a half-trained native force. The Australians had prevailed not least of all because of their unexpected ability to fight in close terrain, and outflanking the German positions had unnerved their opponents. The losses of the AN&MEF were light in the context of later operations but were sufficiently heavy given the relatively modest gain. These losses were further compounded by the unexplained disappearance of the Australian submarine HMAS AE1 during a patrol off Rabaul on 14 September, with 35 men aboard.
Following the capture of German possessions in the region, the AN&MEF provided occupation forces for the duration of the war. On 9 January 1915, Holmes handed over command of the AN&MEF to Brigadier General Sir Samuel Pethebridge, the former Secretary of the Department of Defence. Holmes returned to Australia and re-enlisted in the AIF, as did most of his men. They were replaced by the 3rd Battalion, known as the ""Tropical Force"" because it had been specially enlisted for service in the tropics. Pethebridge established the administrative structures that remained through the period of military occupation. Although required by international law to follow the German forms of government, the territory gradually acquired the appearance of a British colony."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"First Australian Imperial Force
At the start of the war, Australia's military forces were focused upon the militia and what Regular forces existed were mostly serving in the artillery or engineers and were assigned in most part to the task of coastal defence. Due to the provisions of the Defence Act 1903, which precluded sending conscripts overseas, upon the outbreak of war it was realised that a totally separate, all volunteer force would need to be raised. This force was known as the Australian Imperial Force (AIF).
The AIF began forming shortly after the outbreak of war and was the brain child of Bridges and White. Upon formation, the AIF consisted of only one infantry division, the 1st Division, and the 1st Light Horse Brigade. The 1st Division was made up of the 1st Infantry Brigade under Colonel Henry MacLaurin; the 2nd, under Colonel James Whiteside McCay, an Australian politician and former Minister for Defence; and the 3rd, under Colonel Ewen Sinclair-Maclagan, a British regular officer seconded to the Australian Army before the war. The 1st Light Horse Brigade was commanded by Colonel Harry Chauvel, an Australian regular, and the divisional artillery was commanded by Colonel Talbot Hobbs.
In the early stages of mobilisation the men of the AIF were selected under some of the toughest criteria of any army in World War I and roughly 30 per cent of men that applied were rejected on medical grounds. Applicants had to be aged between 18 and 35 years of age (although it is believed that men as old as 70 and as young as 14 managed to enlist) and they had to be at least five-foot six inches tall (168 centimetres), with a chest measurement of at least 34 inches (86 centimetres). Many of these strict requirements were lifted later in the war, as the need for replacements grew. Indeed, casualties among the initial volunteers were so high, that of the 32,000 original soldiers of the AIF only 7,000 would survive to the end of the war.
The initial response was so good that in September 1914 the decision was made to raise the 4th Infantry Brigade and 2nd and 3rd Light Horse Brigades. The 4th Infantry Brigade was commanded by Colonel John Monash, a prominent Melbourne civil engineer and businessman. The AIF continued to grow through the war, eventually numbering five infantry divisions, two mounted divisions and a mixture of other units. A sixth infantry division, the 6th Division, was partially formed in the United Kingdom February 1917. Casualties from the First Battle of Bullecourt and the Battle of Messines caused the disbandment of the partially formed unit to allow the other five divisions to be brought back up to strength."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Gallipoli
Background
The 1st Division departed Australia from Albany, Western Australia on 1 November 1914 in convoy of 10 transports escorted by several British, Australian and Japanese warships. Initially bound for British-controlled Egypt, with a stopover in Ceylon, the convoy had been delayed several times due to fears of interception by German warships in the area. These fears later proved valid when the German cruiser Emden was sighted off Cocos Island. As the convoy steered to avoid the threat, the Australian cruiser HMAS Sydney, engaged the Emden with her heavier guns and after an engagement that lasted only twenty-five minutes, the Sydney emerged victorious.
The threat of the German Squadron neutralised, the convoy was able to continue its voyage unmolested. Upon their arrival in Egypt in November, the 1st Division moved to Camp Mena, near Cairo, where they were used to defend the Suez Canal against Turkey, which had declared war on 29 October; the Australians commenced a period of training to prepare them for combat on the Western Front as it was still expected that they would be sent to England for deployment in the European theatre. As they waited, the Australian and New Zealand forces in Egypt at the time were formed into the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) under the command of British Army Lieutenant General William Birdwood, and consisting of the Australian 1st Division and the composite New Zealand and Australian Division (NZ&A).
Overcrowding and shortages of equipment in England meant that it was decided to keep the Anzacs in Egypt during the European winter, during which time they would undertake further training to prepare them for their eventual use in the trenches in France. Despite this, the training that the Australians and New Zealanders received in this time could be considered only very rudimentary in nature, and despite popular opinion at the time, it did little to prepare them for what was to come."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"In the background, though, moves were being made to commit the Australians and New Zealanders elsewhere. Later in November, Winston Churchill, in his capacity as First Lord of the Admiralty, put forward his first plans for a naval attack on the Dardanelles. A plan for an attack and invasion of the Gallipoli peninsula was eventually approved by the British cabinet in January 1915. It was decided that the Australian and New Zealand troops would take part in the operation, although they were outnumbered by the British, Indian and French contingents, a fact which is often overlooked today by many Australians and New Zealanders. The objective of the invasion was to open up another front against the Central Powers and to open the Black Sea's only entrance to the Mediterranean, via the Dardanelles and Bosphorus, to allow shipping to Russia all year round.
After the failure of naval attacks, it was decided that ground forces were necessary to eliminate the Turkish mobile artillery and allow minesweepers to clear the waters for larger vessels. The British Secretary of State for War, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, appointed General Sir Ian Hamilton to command the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force (MEF) that was to carry out the mission. The MEF consisted of Birdwood's ANZAC, British 29th Division, British Royal Naval Division and the French Corps expéditionnaire d'Orient. Some 40,000 Russian troops would participate in the capture or occupation of Constantinople."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Landing at Anzac Cove
The invasion plan was for the 29th Division to land at Cape Helles on the tip of the peninsula and then advance upon the forts at Kilitbahir. The Anzacs were to land north of Gaba Tepe on the Aegean coast from where they could advance across the peninsula and prevent retreat from or reinforcement of Kilitbahir. The Anzac assault force, the 3rd Brigade of the Australian 1st Division, began to go ashore shortly before dawn at 4:30 am on 25 April 1915. The intended landing zone was a broad front centred about a mile north of Gaba Tepe, possibly due to navigational error or an unexpected current, the landing went awry and the boats concentrated about a mile and a half further north than intended in a shallow, nameless cove between Ari Burnu to the north and Hell Spit to the south. Since 1985, the cove has been officially known as Anzac Koyu (Anzac Cove).
The Anzacs were confronted by a treacherous, confusing tangle of ravines and spurs that descended from the heights of the Sarı Baır range to the sea. The landing was only lightly opposed by scattered Turkish units until Mustafa Kemal, commanding the 19th Division and perceiving the threat posed by the landings, rushed reinforcements to the area in what became a race for the high ground. The contest for the heights was decided on the second ridge line where the Anzacs and Turks fought over a knoll called Baby 700. The position changed hands several times on the first day before the Turks, having the advantage of the higher ground on Battleship Hill, took final possession of it. Once the Anzac advance was checked, the Turks counter-attacked, trying to force the invaders back to the shore, but failed to dislodge them from the foothold they had gained. A trench perimeter quickly developed and a bloody stalemate ensued until August."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Krithia
In May 1915, Hamilton decided to concentrate his resources in the Helles sector. Birdwood withdrew Colonel McCay's 2nd Infantry Brigade and the New Zealand Infantry Brigade and they moved by sea to Cape Helles on 6 May. During the subsequent Second Battle of Krithia the two brigades suffered 1,827 casualties, including McCay, in an ill-advised daylight advance over open ground that could have been occupied after dark without loss. During May Turkish snipers were particularly active in Monash Valley. On 15 May, one shot and fatally wounded Major General Bridges. His body was returned to Australia and buried on the hill overlooking Royal Military College, Duntroon in Canberra. The Australian government sent Major General James Gordon Legge from Australia to replace him."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Turkish counter-attack
On 19 May 1915, the Turkish launched an assault against the Anzac perimeter. Forewarned by naval reconnaissance aircraft, the troops were on alert and the position was reinforced by the return of the 2nd and New Zealand Infantry Brigades from Cape Helles and the arrival of the 1st Light Horse Brigade and New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade from Egypt. Along most of the line, the attack met with immediate disaster, the Turkish attackers being swept away by the rifle and machine gun fire of the Anzac defenders. At Courtney's Post, one of the most exposed parts of the perimeter, the Turks managed to enter the trenches but there they encountered Lance Corporal Albert Jacka and others, who drove them out again. For his action, Jacka became the first Australian to win the Victoria Cross in the war."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"August offensive
The repeated failure of the Allies to capture Krithia or make any progress on the Helles front led Hamilton to pursue an imaginative new plan for the campaign. On the night of 6 August a fresh landing of two infantry divisions was to be made at Suvla, 5 miles (8 km) north of Anzac. Meanwhile, at Anzac a strong assault would be made on the Sari Bair range by breaking out through thinly defended sector at the north of the Anzac perimeter. The offensive was preceded on the evening of 6 August by diversionary assaults at Helles and Anzac. At Helles, the diversion at Krithia Vineyard became another futile battle with no gains and heavy casualties for both sides. At Anzac, an attack on the Turkish trenches at Lone Pine by the infantry brigades of the Australian 1st Division was a rare victory for the ANZACs. At a cost of over 2,000 men, the Australians inflicted 7,000 casualties on the Turks. Because it was an effective attack on a vital position, it was the most effective diversionary attack carried out by the Australians of the war, drawing in the Turkish reserves.
The main assault aimed at the peaks of Chunuk Bair and Hill 971 was less successful. The force striking for the nearer peak of Chunuk Bair comprised the New Zealand Infantry Brigade. It came within 500 metres (1,600 ft) of the peak by dawn on 7 August but was not able to seize the summit until the following morning. This delay had fatal consequences for another supporting attack on the morning of 7 August, that of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade at the Nek which was to coincide with the New Zealanders attacking back down from Chunuk Bair against the rear of the Turkish defences. The New Zealanders held out on Chunuk Bair for two days before relief was provided by two New Army battalions from the Wiltshire and Loyal North Lancashire Regiments. A massive Turkish counter-attack, led in person by Mustafa Kemal, swept these two battalions from the heights. Meanwhile, the landing at Suvla Bay was only lightly opposed but the British commander, Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Stopford, had so diluted his early objectives that little more than the beach was seized. Again the Turks were able to win the race for the high ground of the Anafarta Hills thereby rendering the Suvla front another case of static trench warfare.
The Suvla landing was reinforced by the arrival of the British 53rd and 54th Divisions along with the British 10th Division from Kitchener's New Army divisions plus the dismounted yeomanry of the 2nd Mounted Division. The unfortunate 29th Division was also shifted from Helles to Suvla for one more push. The final British attempt to resuscitate the offensive came on 21 August with attacks at Scimitar Hill and Hill 60. Control of these hills would have united the Anzac and Suvla fronts, but neither battle was successful. When fighting at Hill 60 ceased on 29 August, the battle for the Sari Bair heights, and indeed the battle for the peninsula, was effectively over."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Evacuation
After eight months of bloody fighting it was decided to evacuate the entire force on the Gallipoli peninsula. Troop numbers were progressively reduced from 7 December and cunning ruses were performed to fool the Turks and to prevent them from discovering the Allies that were departing. At Anzac, the troops would maintain utter silence for an hour or more until the curious Turks would venture out to inspect the trenches, whereupon the Anzacs would open fire. As the numbers in the trenches were thinned, rifles were rigged to fire by water dripped into a pan attached to the trigger. In what was ironically the best planned operation of the campaign, the evacuation was completed by dawn on 20 December 1915, without a single casualty.
Ultimately the Gallipoli campaign was a disastrous failure. It did not achieve any of the objectives that had been given as a justification for it, and due to the inexperience of high commanders and mismanagement there were an unacceptably high casualties among the participating troops, not only from as a result of combat, but also due to widespread disease that resulted from poor sanitation and hygiene in the front lines and a breakdown in the casualty clearance and resupply and logistics systems. It has been estimated that over the course of the campaign there were 26,111 Australian casualties with 8,141 killed. Other Allied casualties—killed and wounded—included: 7,571 New Zealanders, 120,000 British and 27,000 French.
After the war, the bad conditions and high casualties among the Anzac troops resulted in a reasonably prevalent view in Australia that these had been due to the incompetence of British officers commanding the Australian troops and their disregard for the casualties that resulted from poorly planned or ill-conceived attacks. Whether these claims are valid or not, there can be little doubt that the entire campaign was poorly conducted, and as a result there were many military lessons learnt that were to be applied in later campaigns. Despite this, for Australians and New Zealanders the Gallipoli campaign has come to symbolise an important milestone in the emergence of both nations as independent actors on the world stage and the development of a sense of national identity. Today, the date of the initial landings, 25 April, is a public holiday known as Anzac Day in Australia and New Zealand and every year thousands of people gather at memorials in both nations, and indeed in Turkey, to honour the bravery and sacrifice of the original Anzacs, and of all those who have subsequently lost their lives in war."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Egypt and Palestine
Reorganisation in Egypt
After the Gallipoli campaign, Australian troops returned to Egypt and the AIF underwent a major expansion, which involved the raising of another three infantry divisions—the 3rd, 4th and 5th—and the establishment of the Anzac Mounted Division. In March 1916, the infantry began to move to France while the cavalry units stayed in the area and fought Turkish troops and the Senussi Arab tribes that were threatening British control of Egypt. Mounted troops were particularly important in the defence of Egypt and Australian troops of the Anzac Mounted Division saw action in all the major battles of the campaign, first seeing combat in the Battle of Romani. Apart from the horsemen, the mounted troops included the 1st Imperial Camel Corps Brigade. This was organised as a mounted infantry brigade. Of its four battalions, the 1st and 3rd were composed of Australians, the 2nd was British, and the 4th was half Australian and half New Zealand. The cameliers participated in most of the fighting in Egypt and Palestine until the brigade was disbanded in July 1918. The Australian and New Zealand components then traded their camels for horses and became the 5th Light Horse Brigade."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Fighting the Senussi Arabs
In response to the growing threat from a pro-Turkish Islamic Arab sect known as the Senussi, a composite British force—the ""Western Frontier Force""—under the command of the British Indian Army officer Major General Alexander Wallace, was sent into the Libyan Desert to Mersa Matruh in late-November 1915. This force included a composite regiment of Australian light horse and the horse transport of the 1st Division. A series of sharp battles against the Arabs ensued at Um Rakhum, Gebel Medwa and Halazin during December and January. British casualties were comparatively light, although many were killed or wounded, including Australians. Arab losses were much higher, hundreds being killed during the fighting. Meanwhile, several Australian Light Horse units returning from Gallipoli were sent further south to guard the edge of the Nile Valley against the Senussi. The 1st Armoured Car Section was also involved in guarding the Western Desert until it was sent to Palestine as the 1st Light Car Patrol at the end of 1916."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Battle of Romani
The Battle of Romani took place near the Egyptian town of Romani, 23 miles (37 km) east of the Suez Canal, on 3–5 August 1916. The goal of the Turkish and German army was to control or destroy the Suez Canal, thereby denying the use of the waterway to the Allies and in doing so aiding the Central Powers. Both the Anzac Mounted Division, under Major General Harry Chauvel, and the 52nd (Lowland) Infantry Division saw action against the German and Turkish force.
Since first making contact with the advancing German and Turkish force on 20 July they had been harassed alternately by the Australian 1st and 2nd Light Horse Brigades. During the night of 3–4 August, the day before the battle commenced, both brigades were involved in fighting. By about midday on 4 August, the Turkish and German force had pushed the two Australian brigades back to a point where the 52nd (Lowland) Infantry Division, in their trenches, were able to attack the Turkish right flank, and the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade and British 5th Mounted Brigade arrived from their deployment protecting the Suez Canal, to extend the Australians' line on the left flank. The Turkish and German advance was stopped by the fire brought to bear on them by the combined British infantry and Australian, British and New Zealand mounted forces and by the deep sand, the midday summer heat, and thirst.
In these extremely tough conditions, the British infantry were unable to move effectively against the retreating German and Turkish force in the following days. Alone, the Anzac Mounted Division was unable to stop the retreating force withdrawing to Katia and eventually back to their base at Bir el Abd. This base was abandoned the day after it was attacked by the Anzac Mounted Division, on 12 August 1916, ending any threat to the Suez Canal for the remainder of the war. The battle cost the Allies 1,202 casualties of which 222 were killed, 71 died of wounds and 909 were wounded; half of these were Australians."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Battle of Magdhaba
Following the victory at Romani the Anzac Mounted Division pushed the German and Turkish Army back across the Sinai Peninsula. The German and Turkish forces had been put on the defensive and retreated from Bir el Abd on 12 August 1916 towards the Egyptian–Turkish frontier, the day after being attacked by the Anzac Mounted Division. A Turkish rearguard action was fought at Bir el Mazar before the German and Turkish force retired to El Arish in September. In the Maghara Hills in October 1916 a strongly defended position was attacked by an Allied force based on the Suez Canal. Both Bir el Mazar and Maghara Hills positions were subsequently abandoned. During November, an aerial bombing raid by 5 B.E.s and a Martinsyde, the largest air attack yet organised in the East was carried out on Beersheba. By the beginning of December the railway had reached Bir el Mazar and with the development of lines of communications, garrisons, support and services, it became possible to plan for an advance to El Arish."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"On 21 December, after a night march of 30 miles (48 km) the Anzac Mounted Division, commanded by Chauvel, entered El Arish, which had been abandoned by the German and Turkish force who had retreated to Madghaba where the mounted force won a fierce daylong engagement against strong well constructed defences manned by determined defenders. Situated on the British right flank, the Egyptian outpost of Magdhaba was some 23 miles (37 km) to the south-south-east into the Sinai desert, from El Arish on the Mediterranean coast. With Turkish forces on the defensive, Madghaba, along with another position at Rafa, were the last main obstacles standing in the way of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force's advance into Palestine. Chauvel, with the agreement of Lieutenant General Philip Chetwode commanding the Desert Column who had arrived earlier that day, set out to attack the Turkish forces at Magdhaba with the Anzac Mounted Division. Leaving at about midnight on 22 December, the Anzac Mounted Division was in a position by 03.50 am on 23 December to see enemy fires still some miles away at Magdhaba.
With the 1st Light Horse Brigade in reserve, Chauvel sent the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade and the 3rd Light Horse Brigade to move on Magdhaba by the north and north-east to cut off the possibility of retreat while the Imperial Camel Corps Brigade followed the telegraph line straight to Magdhaba. The 1st Light Horse Brigade advanced mounted to the attack but fierce shrapnel fire forced them to advance up the wadi bed. By midday all three brigades and the Camel Brigade, despite support from machine-guns and artillery, were hotly engaged. Aerial reconnaissance from Australian and British aircraft, which scouted out the Turkish positions, greatly assisted the attack, although the Turkish positions were obscured by the effect of a mirage and dust clouds.
When the fighting began the going was tough and by 1.00 pm, after hearing that the Turkish defenders still had possession of most of the water in the area, Chauvel decided to call off the attack. The message reached the commander of the 1st Light Horse Brigade just as the Australians were preparing to assault the main redoubt, and the message was deliberately misplaced until the attack had commenced. Both the 1st Light Horse and the New Zealand Mounted Rifle Brigades made progress capturing about 100 prisoners and by 3.30 pm the Turkish defenders began to surrender. By 4.30 pm, the entire Turkish garrison had surrendered, having suffered heavy casualties, and the town was captured. The victory cost the Australians 22 dead and 121 wounded."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Battle of Rafa
Two and a half weeks later, on the evening of 8 January 1917 the mounted units of the Desert Column commanded by Chetwode rode out of El Arish towards Rafa where a 2,000-strong Turkish garrison was based. The attacking force comprised the Australian 1st Light Horse Brigade, 3rd Light Horse Brigade and the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade of the Anzac Mounted Division under the command of Chauvel, the 5th Mounted Brigade and three battalions of the Imperial Camel Corps Brigade. After a long night march, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force attacked the strongly entrenched position at El Magruntein. A fierce day-long battle resulted in the mounted troops (fighting dismounted) capturing the town around nightfall with the loss of 71 killed and 415 wounded. The Turkish garrison suffered heavily, with 200 killed and another 1,600 taken prisoner."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Fighting around Gaza, 1917
In early 1917, the Imperial Mounted Division was formed from the 3rd and 4th Light Horse Brigades and two British mounted brigades. The division first saw service during the First Battle of Gaza, which occurred in southern Gaza on 26 March 1917. At around noon two mounted brigades of the Anzac Mounted Division attacked Gaza from the north and east. At 6.00 pm the Turkish position had become perilous with the ring closing tightly around Gaza. In a decision that dismayed most of their soldiers, the British commanders decided to call off the attack and retreat, delivering victory to the Turks. A second attempt was made to capture Gaza on 19 April by which time the Turkish defences were even more formidable and the task confronting the British even more difficult. This battle became known as the Second Battle of Gaza. The Anzac Mounted Division played only a minor role in this battle suffering only 105 casualties out of the 5,917 suffered. The second battle of Gaza was a disastrous defeat for the Allied forces.
In June 1917, the Imperial Mounted Division was renamed as the Australian Mounted Division. In August 1917 Chauvel was placed in command of the Desert Mounted Corps, which included the two Australian mounted divisions, as well as the British Yeomanry Division and the Imperial Camel Corps Brigade. Chauvel became the first Australian to command a corps, as well as the first to achieve the rank of lieutenant general.
With the failure of the Second Battle of Gaza a third assault was launched on Gaza between 31 October and 7 November 1917. Units from the Anzac Mounted Division and the Australian Mounted Division took part in the battle. The battle was a complete success for the Allies. The Gaza–Beersheba line was completely overrun and 12,000 Turkish soldiers were captured or surrendered. The critical moment of the battle was the capture of the town of Beersheba on the first day by Australian light horsemen. The Australian 4th Light Horse Brigade, under Brigadier General William Grant, charged more than 4 miles (6.4 km) at the Turkish trenches, overran them and captured the wells at Beersheba. In the capture of Beersheba, the Australians lost 31 men killed. A further 32 were wounded, and 80 horses were lost. On the Turkish side, more than 500 men were killed and 1,500 captured as well as nine artillery pieces, several machine guns, and other pieces of equipment."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Fighting advance
From 1 to 7 November, strong Turkish rearguards at Tel el Khuweilfe in the southern Judean Hills, at Hareira and Sheria on the maritime plain and at Sausage Ridge and Gaza close to the Mediterranean coast, held the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in heavy fighting. During this time the Turkish Army was able to withdraw in good order. The rearguard garrisons themselves were also able to retire under cover of darkness, during the night of 6/7 or 7/8 November. On 7 and 8 November, the surviving units of the 7th and 8th Turkish armies further delayed the advance of Desert Mounted Corps commanded by Chauvel and the XXI Corps's 52nd (Lowland) Division and the 75th Yeomanry Division.
All other units of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force had come to the end of their lines of communication. These units were the XXI Corps' 54th (East Anglian) Division resting at Gaza and the Imperial Service Cavalry Brigade at Beit Hanun. Also in the rear was the whole of Chetwode's XX Corps which had transferred its transport to XXI Corps. Its 53rd (Welsh) Division and corps cavalry, together with the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade, were deployed in the front line near Tel el Khuweilfe, in the Judean Hills north of Beersheba. While its 60th (London) Infantry Division was resting at Huj, its 10th (Irish) Division and 74th Infantry Division were both resting back at Karm.
The Desert Mounted Corps and the two infantry divisions of XX Corps became involved in a series of engagements during the days leading up to the battle and on the day after. These began on 10 November when one brigade of the 52nd (Lowland) Division and two brigades of the Anzac Mounted Division commanded by Major General Edward Chaytor successfully pushed across the Nahr Sukereir to establish a bridgehead on the Turkish right flank. Three brigades of the Australian Mounted Division under the command of Major General Henry West Hodgson ran into the Turkish rearguard's left flank around the village of Summeil. The mounted troops occupied the village on 11 November but were unable to advance further due to intense Turkish artillery fire which continued throughout the day.
On 12 November Allenby made preparations for battle the following day. He ordered an attack by the 52nd (Lowland) Division to extend their position across the Nahr Sukereir on the Turkish Army's right flank. Reinforced with two more brigades, he ordered the Australian Mounted Division to advance towards Tel es Safi where they encountered a determined and substantial Turkish counterattack. This counterattack forced the mounted division to concede the territory gained during the day, before fighting the Turkish Army to a standstill in front of Summeil. On the morning after the battle at Mughar Ridge, Junction Station was occupied and during the following days other villages in the area were found to have been abandoned. Later in the morning of 14 November New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade ran into a determined and well entrenched Turkish rearguard near Ayun Kara, which they attacked. Fierce close quarter fighting against the Turkish 3rd Infantry Division continued during the afternoon. Although severely threatened, the New Zealand Mounted Rifle Brigade eventually prevailed and went on to occupy Jaffa two days later.
The Battle of Mughar Ridge was fought on 13 November by the 52nd (Lowland) Division and the 75th Division in the centre, with the Australian Mounted Division on their right flank and the Anzac Mounted Division and Yeomanry Mounted Divisions on the infantry's left flank. The battle was divided into two stages with a pause for artillery to be brought forward. Following the Yeomanry's successful charge up onto El Mughar ridge, two crucial fortified villages were captured by elements of the 52nd (Lowland) Division. This victory resulted in the subsequent occupation of Junction Station, a vital railway station on the Turk's lines of communication between Jaffa and Jerusalem."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Jerusalem
The Australian mounted troops took part the Capture of Jerusalem in late 1917. These operations included two battles fought in the Judean Hills; the Battle of Nebi Samwil from 17 to 24 November and the Defence of Jerusalem from 26 to 30 December and another fought on the maritime plain; the subsidiary Battle of Jaffa on 21–22 December 1917. This series of battles involved the British Empire's XX Corps, XXI Corps and the Desert Mounted Corps fighting the Turkish 7th Army in the Judean Hills and the 8th Army north of Jaffa on the Mediterranean coast.
After the failure of widespread and determined Turkish counterattacks fought from 27 November to 1 December by the 7th Turkish Army they evacuated Jerusalem. Troops from the Australian Mounted Division were the first mounted troops to enter Jerusalem in December 1917. Towards the end of December the British Empire forces at the Battle of Jaffa and the Defence of Jerusalem succeeded in pushing the Turkish armies north. A strong British defensive line was established which remained in place until mid September 1918. The line stretched across from well north of the Nahr el Auja on the Mediterranean coast in the west to north and east of Jerusalem. It was extended during the middle of February 1918 when Jericho in the Jordan Valley was captured and the eastern end of the line was secured on the Dead Sea."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Transjordan operations
In March and April 1918, Australian and New Zealand mounted troops and British infantry took part in two raids east across the Jordan River to Amman and Es Salt, a village in Palestine 23 kilometres (14 mi) west of Amman. Although these raids were unsuccessful, they encouraged Turkish commanders to believe that the main British effort would be launched across the Jordan when it would be launched along the coastal plain. Before these operations could commence it was necessary to capture the country east of Jerusalem and into the Jordan Valley to Jericho. The attack on the Turkish 26th and 53rd Infantry Divisions was made by the 60th (London) and the Anzac Mounted Divisions on 19 February. Talat ed Dumm, on the road from Jerusalem, was captured the next day and in the evening the Wady Fara and Nebi Musa were also captured. On 21 February Jericho was occupied by the two divisions of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Final offensive
During the final offensive in September 1918, the two divisions of Australian mounted troops, as well as the 1st Light Car Patrol and No. 1 Squadron AFC, took part in Battle of Megiddo on 28 September 1918, a decisive British victory in which 70,000 Turkish soldiers were taken prisoner. The Desert Mounted Corps attacked across the Golan Heights, cutting off the north and north-west exits to Damascus on 29 September. On 30 September, the head of a column of 20,000 Turkish and German troops was annihilated by the Australian light horsemen as it attempted to withdraw west through the Barada Gorge. Australian troops were the first to enter Damascus, which fell on 1 October. Following an advance of 300 kilometres (190 mi), Aleppo was captured on 25 October. The Turkish government signed an armistice on 28 October 1918 and surrendered outright two days later.
Following the armistice, the Australian Mounted Division went into camp at Tripoli while the Anzac Mounted Division, having borne the brunt of the entire campaign, suffered heavily from malaria and influenza in the Jordan Valley. Australia's role in the Sinai and Palestine campaign was later acknowledged by Field Marshal Edmund Allenby, who had been commander-in-chief of the Allied forces in the Middle East, as having been considerable. Total Australian battle casualties in the campaign were 4,851, including 1,374 dead."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Western Front
Transfer to Europe
In March 1916, the infantry units of the AIF were transferred from Egypt to Europe for service on the Western Front. Initially they were organised into I Anzac Corps and II Anzac Corps alongside the New Zealand Division. The 2nd Division was the first to arrive in France, followed by the 1st Division; the 4th and 5th left Egypt later in June 1916. The 3rd Division was the last to arrive, having been formed in Australia in March 1916, and moving to England for training in July 1916, before being sent to France in December 1916. For the next two and a half years the constant rotations in and out of the line were punctuated by several major battles, during which the Australians earned for themselves a formidable reputation. On 1 November 1917 the Australian divisions were re-grouped together to form the Australian Corps.
When the 1st Division arrived, it was reunited with its mechanical transport. In September 1914, the Army had decided to supply mechanical transport for the 1st Division and formed a company in New South Wales and one in Victoria. These were the first ever mechanical transport units in the Australian Army. Nearly 200 vehicles were purchased and the two units departed Melbourne for Egypt on 22 December 1914. Unfortunately, vehicles over 5 long tons (5.1 t) were prohibited in Cairo as most bridges could not hold their weight, whereas they possessed vehicles weighing up to 7 long tons (7.1 t). It was therefore arranged for them to continue to England where they arrived on 15 February 1915. There they lived in tents on Salisbury Plain and hauled gravel for roads before being sent to France in July 1915."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"They were not the first Australians to serve on the Western Front. An Australian Voluntary Hospital had been formed in England in August 1914 from Australian expatriates. All medical practitioners in the unit were Australians and although women were not allowed to serve as doctors, Australian nurses were accepted. The unit left for France in August 1914 and from October was based at Wimereux, where the 2nd General Hospital joined it in June 1916. In July 1916, the Australian Voluntary Hospital was absorbed into the British Army. Another group of Australians had also arrived in France before I Anzac Corps. In June 1915, the 1st Siege Artillery Brigade was formed under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Walter Adams Coxen, the Australian Army's Director of Artillery, for service on the Western Front. About half the men in the unit were permanent gunners of the Garrison Artillery. The brigade departed Melbourne for England on 17 July 1915 and landed in France on 27 February 1916. Its 54th Siege Battery was equipped with 8-inch howitzers and its 55th Siege Battery with 9.2-inch howitzers.
With the move of the majority of the AIF to France, the base organisation was transferred to the United Kingdom. Most of the training units moved to the Salisbury Plain, establishing depots at Perham Down, Rollestone, Larkhill and Tidworth. When it arrived, the 3rd Division also moved into camps in this area. Command Depots, where men returning from hospitals were sent before being returned to their units, were established at Perham Down, Weymouth, Wool, Dorset and Worgret. Depots for men moving from the United Kingdom to France were established at Étaples. In June 1917, these were swapped with the Canadians for depots around Le Havre, thereby reducing travelling time from the Salisbury Plain. AIF Headquarters was established at Horseferry Road in London and Colonel R. M. McC. Anderson, a businessman, was appointed as its commandant. Anderson negotiated a new method of payment for services provided by the British Army as a per capita per diem payment."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Battle of the Somme, 1916
On 7 April 1916, I Anzac Corps took up positions in a quiet sector south of Armentières, known as the ""Nursery"". The Australians were spared from participating in the disastrous first day on the Somme, but within three weeks of the beginning of the Allied offensive, four divisions of the AIF had been committed to the battle. Only the 3rd Division did not take part, having only just recently arrived in England from Australia. The 5th Division, positioned on the left flank of the salient, was the first to see action during the Battle of Fromelles on 19 July 1916, suffering a staggering 5,533 casualties in a single day.
The 1st Division entered the line on 23 July 1916, taking part in the assault on Pozières. Initially they succeeded in carrying the German positions with relatively small losses, but once the Germans had recovered they directed an intense artillery barrage upon the town which resulted in heavy losses. By the time that they were relieved by the 2nd Division on 27 July, they had suffered 5,286 casualties. Two days after taking over the line, the 2nd Division was thrown into a hastily planned attack that resulted in further casualties when the Germans spotted the Australians forming up and once again subjected them to the weight of their artillery and machine guns. Another attack was launched on 4 August which, although it met with success, resulted again in such heavy casualties—almost 7,000—that the division was relieved the next day.
Following the attack on Pozières the Australians were called upon to attack Mouquet Farm in August. All three divisions of I Anzac Corps were committed in an effort to force a breach in the German lines behind Thiepval, to the north of Pozières. The task of the initial advance fell to the 4th Division on 10 August, which had already suffered 1,000 casualties resisting the final German counter-attack, but in the ensuing battle it would lose a further three times that number as the Australians once again suffered at the hands of the German artillery, finding themselves squeezed into a frontage of less than 1.5 kilometres (0.93 mi) against which the Germans were able to concentrate the weight of their defence. Three more attacks were made over the course of the next three weeks as the Australians fought their way across the shell-pocked countryside to the farm, only to be forced out again shortly after by the concentration of German artillery. The other two divisions of I Anzac fared only slightly better in these attacks and at the end of the engagement, Australian casualties at Mouquet Farm totalled 6,300 men.
As that battle on the Somme dragged on, the Canadian Corps was brought up and the AIF was withdrawn from the line to re-organise and reform, having suffered almost 23,000 casualties over the course of the 45 days that they had been involved. The 5th Division had been so badly mauled, having been incapacitated by the losses they had suffered at Fromelles, that it was not until October that the 5th Division finally returned to the line and joined the 1st, 2nd and 4th Divisions on the Somme near Flers."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Battle of Bullecourt
In March 1917 two 'flying columns' from the 2nd and 5th Divisions pursued the German back to the Hindenburg Line, capturing the town of Bapaume. On 11 April, the 4th Division, consisting of the 4th and 12th Brigades, assaulted the Hindenburg Line in the First Battle of Bullecourt. The battle was a disaster, with over 3,000 casualties and 1,170 taken prisoner by the Germans. On 15 April the 1st and 2nd Divisions were struck by a German counterattack at dawn near the town of Lagnicourt, by a force of up to 23 battalions as the Germans attempted to take advantage of the weakness that had developed in the Allied line following the British offensive at Arras. The Australians were initially forced to abandon the town to the Germans and in the process several artillery batteries were lost. At 7:00 am a successful counterattack was launched by four Australian battalions, resulting in the town being recaptured and the guns reclaimed. Later, on 3 May two brigades of the 2nd Division—the 5th and the 6th—took part in the Second Battle of Bullecourt, where they succeeded in taking sections of the Hindenburg Line and eventually managed to hold most these gains until they were relieved by the 1st Division. On 7 May the 5th Division was committed to relieve the 1st, remaining in the line until the battle ended in mid May. The battle resulted in a victory for the Allies, but the effort cost the AIF some 7,482 casualties and ultimately ended plans to expand the AIF to a sixth division."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Battle of Messines
On 7 June 1917, along with two British corps, the II Anzac Corps, consisting of the Australian 3rd Division, the British 25th Division and the New Zealand Division, with the Australian 4th Division attached, launched an operation in the Flanders region of southern Belgium, near Messines The objective was to eliminate a salient that had developed in the line south of Ypres, enclosing the Wytschaete–Messines ridge and thus providing the Germans with good observation and fields of fire that could threaten the major offensive that the British planned to launch around Ypres later in the year. The attack commenced with the detonation of 1,000,000 pounds (450,000 kg) of explosives that had been placed underneath the Messines ridge in 19 separate tunnels, completely destroying the German trenches.
Following the explosions, the Allied advance was virtually unopposed as the Germans were too stunned and demoralised to put up much resistance. Not everything went the Australians' way; the 3rd Division, under Major General John Monash, suffered heavy casualties when they were shelled by phosgene gas and shrapnel shells while moving towards the line of departure, but the division still managed to get into position for the start of the attack. Strong German counterattacks were launched the next day, once again supported by concentrated artillery fire, but the advance was able to continue on through the mess of concrete blockhouses the Germans had erected and continued on until all the objectives had been taken. Australian casualties amounted to nearly 6,800 men. On 2 July 1917, Major General Holmes was mortally wounded by a German shellburst while surveying the Messines battlefield with the Premier of New South Wales, William Holman."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Third Battle of Ypres
Between September and November 1917, I Anzac Corps took part in actions around Ypres in Belgium as the Allies launched a campaign to capture the Gheluvelt Plateau in Belgium. Collectively these actions have come to be known as the Third Battle of Ypres, of which they were a part, although to Australians they are more commonly known by the names of the places where the individual actions took place—Menin Road, Polygon Wood, Broodseinde, Poelcappelle and Passchendaele.
I Anzac Corps was committed six weeks after the start of the battle and on 16 September, having marched through Ypres the night before, the 1st and 2nd Divisions took up a position in the trenches on the main ridge at Glencorse Wood. The first attack came on 20 September at Menin Road, where the Australians experienced success making considerable gains against the enemy for the loss of about 5,000 casualties. On 26 September, the 4th and 5th Divisions attacked and captured Polygon Wood, and on 4 October another successful attack was made on the main ridge at Broodseinde, where the four Australian divisions involved fought side by side, as they clashed head on with a German counterattack that had been launched at the same time the Australians had risen to carry out their assault. The result was a rout by the Australians, as the German line broke and following further attacks against German pillboxes, the ridge was captured.
The first two attacks had been successful and as Allied commanders began to believe that a breakthrough was possible further attacks were made at Poelcappelle on 9 October and at Passchendaele on 12 October despite heavy rain that turned the ground into a muddy quagmire. Both attacks were ultimately doomed to failure, with heavy casualties, as the attacks foundered in the mud and as the battle petered out, it was decided that it was time for the Australians to be withdrawn from the line. This was completed by 14 November 1917. Over the course of the eight weeks they had been involved in the fighting around Ypres, they had suffered 38,000 casualties."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"German Spring Offensive, 1918
On 21 March 1918, having been buoyed by the capitulation of Bolshevik Russia, the German Army launched their Spring Offensive against the Allies with a staggering 63 divisions over a front of 70 miles (110 km). As the Allies began to fall back against the tremendous weight of this offensive, on 25 March the Australian 3rd and 4th Divisions were rushed south to Amiens from where they had been holding the line at Messines. The German offensive lasted with varying intensity for the next five months and during this time, all five divisions of the AIF in France were involved in the fighting as they attempted to stem the tide of the German advance, which achieved large territorial gains and at one stage looked like it might ultimately secure a remarkable victory for the Germans as they pushed to within 50 miles (80 km) from Paris late in May. During this time, the Australians were involved in actions at Dernancourt, Morlancourt, Villers-Bretonneux, Hangard Wood, Hazebrouck, and Hamel.
Of these actions, the last one, at Hamel on 4 July 1918, is perhaps the most notable. Even though the action was relatively minor in terms of the scale of previous operations mounted on the Western Front, it is notable because it was the first 'set-piece' operation planned and carried out by the newly appointed commander of the Australian Corps, Lieutenant General John Monash and it has since been used as the model of a successful combined arms attack. Using aircraft, artillery and armour in effective combination with infantry, the attack was over in the space of 93 minutes; although Monash had planned for a 90-minute operation. It achieved its objectives of straightening the Allied line and taking the town of Hamel. The Australians had advanced the line almost 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) across a front of 6.5 kilometres (4.0 mi) and in the process taken roughly 1,600 German prisoners as well as over 200 machine guns, trench mortars and anti-tank weapons. Against this the Australians suffered 1,062 casualties."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Hundred Days Offensive
The last-ditched effort by the Germans to win the war came to a grinding halt in mid-July and after that there followed a brief period of lull, during which time the Australians undertook a series of small unit actions aimed at capturing parts of the German line with limited support. These actions became known as Peaceful Penetrations and were essentially a cross between trench raids and patrolling. Their success relied heavily upon the leadership and initiative of junior commanders and the ability of soldiers to employ principles of fire and manoeuvre. This lull did not last long, as the Allies were soon ready to launch their own offensive, known as the Hundred Days Offensive, which would bring about an end to the war.
The offensive began on 8 August 1918 when 20 Allied divisions, including four Australian, struck at Amiens on the Somme. Using the combined arms techniques developed earlier at Hamel, the Allies achieved territorial gains that had been unheard of since the start of the war. In the Australian sector, the 4th and 5th Divisions had initially spearheaded the advance, before the 2nd and 3rd Divisions had advanced another three kilometres to secure the secondary objectives. The attack had been so successful that it was later described by German General Erich Ludendorff as a ""black day"" for the German Army.
Following that the Allied offensive continued for the next four months, right up until the end of the war. During the Second Battle of the Somme the Australian Corps fought actions at Lihons, Etinehem, Proyart, Chuignes, and Mont St Quentin, before taking part in their final engagement of the war on 5 October 1918 at Montbrehain. Australian casualties during these battles were very high and coupled with the drying up of reinforcements from Australia, the rejection of the proposal to introduce conscription and the granting of home leave to men who been serving since 1914 meant that by the end of the war the AIF was stretched to the limit. Consequently, during the height of the offensive it was decided to disband three battalions—the 36th, 47th and 52nd—to reinforce other units.
The engagement at Montbrehain was the Australian Corps' last contribution to the war and they were out of the line training when the Armistice was declared on 11 November 1918. Total Australian casualties on the Western Front numbered 181,000, including 46,000 of whom died. Another 114,000 men were wounded, 16,000 gassed, and approximately 3,850 were taken prisoners of war."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Other theatres
When the war ended, there were 92,000 Australian soldiers in France, 60,000 in England and 17,000 in Egypt, Palestine and Syria. Small numbers were serving in other theatres. Australian troops from the 1st Australian Wireless Signal Squadron provided communications for British forces during the Mesopotamian campaign. They participated in several battles, including the Battle of Baghdad in March 1917 and the Battle of Ramadi in September that year. Meanwhile, following the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Caucasus Front collapsed, leaving Central Asia open to the Turkish Army. A special force, known as Dunsterforce after its commander, Major General Lionel Dunsterville, was formed from hand-picked British officers and NCOs to organise any remaining Russian forces or civilians who were ready to fight the Turkish forces. Some 20 Australian officers served with Dunsterforce in the Caucasus Campaign and one party under Captain Stanley Savige was instrumental in protecting thousands of Assyrian refugees. Australian nurses also staffed four British hospitals in Salonika, and another 10 in India."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Australian Flying Corps
Formation
The Australian Flying Corps (AFC) was formed in March 1914 and was soon deployed to German New Guinea, with one BE2c aircraft and crew dispatched with the AN&MEF, although the colonies surrendered before the plane was even unpacked. The first operational flights did not occur until 27 May 1915, when the Mesopotamian Half Flight was called upon to assist the Indian Army in protecting British oil interests in what is now Iraq. The Corps later saw action in Egypt, Palestine and on the Western Front throughout the remainder of the war. Organised into four operational squadrons in France and the Middle East and another four training squadrons in England, the AFC remained part of the AIF."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Mesopotamian Half Flight
The Mesopotamian Half-Flight—also known as the Australian Half-Flight—was the first AFC unit to see active service. On 8 February 1915, the Australian Government had received a request from the Viceroy of India for air assistance in fighting the Turks. The AFC was still forming and could provide enough aircrew and ground staff for only half a flight: the unit therefore became known as the Mesopotamian Half-Flight and Captain Henry Petre was appointed commander. The AFC contingent sailed for Bombay, and on 20 April 1915 it left for Basra, arriving at the end of May. Flying underpowered and unreliable aircraft such as the Caudron, Maurice Farman Longhorn and Martinsyde, the Half-Flight suffered a high attrition rate, losing two killed and six captured out of its strength of just nine pilots. The arrival of reinforcements allowed the formation of a squadron, (No. 30 Squadron RFC), but by November 1915 only one of the original pilots remained. The squadron was mainly involved in unarmed reconnaissance, although later small 9 pounds (4.1 kg) bombs were added to the aircraft. In October, three Australian aircraft bombed an Arab tribe known to be hostile in an unsuccessful attempt to bring them to surrender. During the siege of Kut, the last Australian pilot in Mesopotamia, Captain Petre, dropped supplies to the garrison. When Kut surrendered, the AFC ground crewmen located in the city were captured, seven of them later dying in captivity. Petre flew the only remaining Shorthorn to Egypt on 7 December 1915, where he rendezvoused with No.1 Squadron AFC, effectively marking the end of the Half-Flight's service."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Operations in the Middle East
By late 1915 the AFC began forming complete squadrons. At British request No. 1 Squadron was dispatched to Egypt with 28 officers and 195 other ranks, where they were equipped with British aircraft including BE2c and Martinsyde G100. The squadron operated from Heliopolis, Palestine and Syria over the next two years, supporting ground forces in all the major battles of the Palestine campaign against the Turks. Missions included aerial reconnaissance, bombing enemy positions, communications and artillery spotting. They were also involved in many air-to-air battles with German aircraft. It was in this theatre that the Australians first encountered anti-aircraft fire. The squadron was re-equipped in 1917 with BE2a, RE8 and Martinsyde G102 aircraft; by 1918 these types were replaced with Bristol F.2 Fighters. Notably during this time Lieutenant Frank McNamara was awarded the Victoria Cross for rescuing another Australian pilot who had been shot down by ground fire and forced to land close to Turkish positions on 20 March 1917. No. 1 Squadron also took part in the actions at Wadi Fara on 21 September 1918 as part of the Battle of Megiddo, which witnessed the destruction of the bulk of the Turkish Seventh Army by British airpower."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Fighting on the Western Front
Other AFC squadrons began forming in Australia for service on the Western Front, Nos. 2, 3 and 4 Squadrons arriving in France between August and December 1917. No. 2 Squadron, equipped with DH5s, was subsequently involved in the Battle of Cambrai on 20 November 1917, conducting patrol duties, ground strafing and bombing enemy troops and positions. Casualties were high with 7 of the squadrons 18 aircraft shot down, and 2 pilots lost. No. 3 Squadron, equipped with RE8s, was supporting the final phase of the Battle of Passchendaele in Flanders, conducting mainly artillery spotting duties. No. 4 Squadron, equipped with Sopwith Camels, was the last to arrive in France, and was assigned to the First Army around Lens. Notably during March 1918 the squadron was engaged in aerial combat with aircraft commanded by Manfred von Richthofen—known as the 'Red Baron'—shooting down two German aircraft for the loss of one of their own. The Lens sector had been relatively quiet until 21 March 1918 when the Germans launched a major offensive, No. 4 Squadron being heavily engaged in low-level bombing to support the 4th Australian Division.
The Australian squadrons played a limited role in the allied advance from Amiens on 8 August 1918, No. 3 Squadron being engaged in reconnaissance and contact patrols to help identify the locations of forward troops. They also undertook extensive aerial photography to aid in remapping and the locating of German artillery positions. During this period Nos. 2 and 4 Squadrons were in the Ypres–Arras area and were involved in patrols and raids on the railways in the vicinity of Lille. With the Germans in retreat during September 1918, the squadrons felt considerable pressure just keeping up. Regardless, No. 4 Squadron took part in, perhaps its most spectacular action, in the very last weeks of the war. On 29 October, 15 Australian Sopwith Snipes encountered more than 60 German Fokkers, in an action which became one of the largest air battles of the war. The Australians gained the upper hand and 10 Fokkers were shot down for the loss of one Snipe, and the damage of several others.
During their time on the Western Front, No. 2 and No 4. Squadrons had been used mainly in the fighter role, and No. 3 Squadron was primarily used for reconnaissance. No. 4 Squadron became the most successful fighter squadron in France, accounting for 199 enemy aircraft; No. 2 Squadron was credited with the destruction of 185. The total AFC casualties on the Western Front included 78 killed, 68 wounded and 33 taken prisoner. Following the end of the war on 11 November 1918, No. 4 Squadron was the only Australian unit assigned to the British Army of Occupation, arriving in Germany in December and being based in Cologne. The three AFC squadrons subsequently handed over their equipment to the RAF in February 1919 and returned to Australia where they disbanded."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Legacy
Despite Australian military aviation being in its infancy, the AFC's identity as a separate national force was considered important, not to mention unusual. Thousands of aircrew from the other Dominions—such as New Zealand and Canada—flew with the Royal Flying Corps and Royal Naval Air Service, and their unified successor force after 1 April 1918, the Royal Air Force during the war, without gaining the benefits of command and the administrative experience which came with an independent air service. By the end of the war, four squadrons had seen active service, 460 officers and 2,234 other ranks had served in the AFC, and another 200 men had served as aircrew in the British flying services. Casualties included 175 dead, 111 wounded, 6 gassed and 40 captured. The AFC was disbanded after the war, being replaced in 1920 by the Australian Air Corps, which became the Royal Australian Air Force in 1921."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Royal Australian Navy operations
At the outbreak of war the Royal Australian Navy consisted of the battlecruiser HMAS Australia, the light cruisers Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane (under construction), the destroyers Parramatta, Yarra and Warrego, and the submarines AE1 and AE2. Three more destroyers were also under construction. The Squadron was under the command of Rear Admiral Sir George E. Patey, a British admiral who was knighted on the deck of the Australia before it departed England in 1913.
The first naval operation of the war was in support of the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force during the occupation of German New Guinea. The naval portion of the force included the Australia, Melbourne, Sydney, Warrego, Encounter, and submarine AE1. The only loss during the New Guinea Campaign occurred when the AE1 disappeared on 14 September 1914, taking three officers and 32 men with it.
The first major RAN victory of the war occurred when the cruiser, HMAS Sydney sank the German light cruiser, SMS Emden off the Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean on 9 November 1914. Four Australians were killed in the engagement and another 12 were wounded. Ships of the RAN helped provide naval cover for the ambitious landings at Gallipoli, and the submarine AE2 broke the blockade of the Dardanelles to harass Turkish shipping but was later sunk and her crew captured in the Sea of Marmara."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"In 1915 the light cruisers Melbourne and Sydney were deployed to the Atlantic where they worked alongside the Royal Navy's North American and West Indies Squadrons, which were engaged in surveillance operations on the many German ships that had taken refuge in neutral American ports when the war had broken out. This continued until September 1916 when both cruisers were moved to the North Sea where they joined Australia, which had been assisting the Royal Navy in its blockade of the German High Seas Fleet.
During this time the RAN also continued to carry out operations in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. By 1915 there were up to 74 German ships which had taken refuge in ports in the Netherlands East Indies. The presence of these ships close to Australia and the sea lanes that connected the nation to the United Kingdom and the Middle East was a cause of concern to the Navy and so in the middle of 1915 the cruiser HMAS Psyche and the sloop Fantome were sent to the Bay of Bengal to conduct patrol operations. Later in the year, in October, a force of three destroyers, a yacht and the cruiser Encounter were sent into the Macassar Strait to search for a German munitions base that had been reported in the area. Nothing was found, although the patrol served to interrupt German efforts to carry out subversive activities in several British possessions.
In May 1917 the British government requested assistance from the Australian government in dealing with the increasing threat posed by German U-boats. Six destroyers—the Warrego, Parramatta, Yarra, Swan, Torrens and Huon—were sent in response to this request, and undertook anti-submarine operations in the Adriatic, working out of Brindisi, Italy as part of the Otranto Barrage.
The most decorated RAN unit of the war was the Bridging Train. A reserve unit commanded by Lieutenant Commander Leighton Bracegirdle, it supported the British at Suvla Bay during the Gallipoli Campaign by constructing piers and harbours in the bay. Afterwards it served in Egypt and Palestine, taking part in an amphibious assault in El Arish and the First Battle of Gaza before it was disbanded in 1917. Some members later went on to serve with the AIF and RAN. During the war the RAN lost 171 men killed, including 15 officers and 156 sailors, of which six officers and 57 sailors had been on loan from the Royal Navy."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Home front
Australian Military Forces on home service
Although the main focus of Australia's military during World War I was overseas in Europe and the Middle East, there was still a necessity to maintain troops in Australia on home service to carry out essential tasks. As the AIF was otherwise engaged these duties out of necessity fell to the soldiers of the militia and a few regular soldiers. In the early stages of mobilisation several militia infantry battalions were called out to carry out guard duties upon infrastructure that was considered important to the war effort, such as munitions factories, communications facilities, ammunition dumps and transportation centres. 500 men from the Kennedy Regiment were sent to Thursday Island from Townsville to garrison the island in response to a possible threat from German forces in the Pacific. Militia troops were also used to establish and guard internment camps and garrison artillery and engineer units from the militia were also mobilised to assist the regular units that were manning coastal defences."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"By the end of 1914 the naval situation in the Pacific had eased to a large extent due to the sinking of the Emden, and it was decided that there was no longer a need to maintain guards on many of the less important facilities, and instead it was decided to concentrate the home defence network upon maintaining the coastal defences and on guarding ships while they were in port. In the larger seaports these precautions required the commitment of considerable resources, requiring several hundred men to provide security. The requirement for the militia to undertake these duties was eased when a special corps was raised from men that had been rejected for service with the AIF, to which a corps of garrison military police that had served in the AIF was added later.
The militia garrison artillery and engineers were required throughout the war to man the coastal defences. Despite the fact that after 1915 it was decided that only small garrisons were required on active service, the militia was ordered to maintain their readiness in case they were required to be called out and such was the importance placed upon their role that to a large extent they were barred from joining the AIF for overseas service. In February 1916 a large-scale effort by militia artillerymen to enlist in the artillery units that were being raised for the 3rd Division was prevented when they were called out to man the coastal defences due to the threat posed by a German commerce raider that was believed to be in the Pacific. This mobilisation lasted until April 1916, when the garrisons were again reduced and the ban on men serving in militia artillery and engineer units volunteering for overseas service was lifted.
In April 1918 the militia artillery was again mobilised, although this time only for a month, when news that the German commerce raiders Wolf and Seeadler had entered Australian waters the previous year. In June 1918 the number of troops actively employed on home service was 9,215, of which 2,476 were regulars. At this time the Navy took over the task of providing guards for ships in harbour and communications facilities, thus allowing for many of the militia troops to be released for further training, and as such it was decided to increase the period of camp training for the militia from eight days to 24."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Conscription
Throughout World War I the Australian forces deployed overseas were all volunteers, but on the home front there was considerable debate about the issue of conscription. Conscription had been a contentious issue ever since Federation and when the AIF was initially raised in 1914 it had been decided that it would be an all-volunteer force due to the provisions of the Defence Act that precluded sending conscripts overseas. As the war progressed, casualties among the deployed forces began to reach alarming rates and as the flow of reinforcements and recruits for the AIF began to drop in 1916, the issue of conscription rose once more.
In Australia, public opinion regarding the matter was divided; many Australians opposed to the issue on moral grounds, feeling that the situation was not desperate enough to require such a drastic measure, but others felt it necessary to achieve final victory. The Hughes Labor government decided to hold a plebiscite on the matter and on 28 October 1916 the matter was decided by a narrow margin of 51 per cent to 49 per cent, the no vote prevailing. Despite the result, the issue split the Labor Party and the pro-conscription prime minister, Billy Hughes, ultimately left the party and joined with members of the opposition that supported conscription to form a new party, known as the Nationalist Party.
As manpower shortages on the Western Front began to become acute, a second plebiscite was held on 20 December 1917. This time it was defeated by an even greater margin of 94,152 votes. This effectively put an end to plans to expand the AIF in France and ultimately led to severe manpower shortages that the AIF in France experienced in 1917 and 1918. As a result, plans to expand the force to a 6th Division were shelved and its manpower distributed among the other five divisions; the five divisions were amalgamated together under the banner of the Australian Corps, thus effectively allowing the 4th Division, which was struggling to maintain its numbers to act as a depot formation within the Corps with the other three divisions providing most of the combat power.
As the war continued, the manpower shortages continued. Wounded men were being pressed back into service, and there were cases of ""combat refusal"" by the 1st and 59th Battalions. On 23 September 1918, Monash ordered the breakup of some under-strength battalions to reinforce others. In the AIF the battalion was the source of pride and identification for the men, rather than the regiment as in the British Army, so in some cases this order was defied – some men, who were not eligible to draw rations as their unit no longer officially existed, lived by stealing food or sharing with other units. Monash rescinded the order for a while but eventually ""the Heads"" (as Australians called their senior officers) enforced the change by marching off companies by night into different battalions. The change ultimately proved unnecessary as the war ended shortly after."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Internment, censorship and other special measures
The global nature of the war meant that many functions that were previously vested in the individual Australian state governments had to be placed under the control of the Commonwealth government. The exigencies of the war meant also that the government required the power to enact certain laws that under the Constitution it would not normally be able to do. To enable this, the War Precautions Act 1914 was introduced in October 1914, providing the Commonwealth government with wide-ranging powers for a period of up to six months after the duration of the war.
The main provisions of the Act were focused upon allowing the Commonwealth to enact legislation that was required for the smooth prosecution of the war. The main areas in which legislation was enacted under the War Precautions Act were: the prevention of trade with hostile nations, the creation of loans to raise money for the war effort, the introduction of a national taxation scheme, the fixing of the prices of certain goods, the internment of people considered a danger to the war effort, the compulsory purchase of strategic goods, and the censorship of the media.
At the outbreak of the war there were about 35,000 people who had been born in either Germany or Austria-Hungary living in Australia. Due to large-scale German migration in the late 19th century, there were also an inestimable number of people of German origin, many of whom maintained an affinity for their ancestral roots. Many of these were naturalised Australians, and it is believed that many men of German origin enlisted in the AIF. Owing to concerns about the loyalties of some members of the German and Austrian communities, internment camps were set up where those suspected of unpatriotic acts were sent. In total it is believed that 4,500 people were interned under the provisions of the War Precautions Act, of which 700 were naturalised Australians and 70 Australian-born. Following the end of the war, 6,150 were deported.
There was a considerable public backlash to the way in which some of the provisions of the War Precautions Act were applied, particularly in relation to certain sections of the community such as trade unions and other sections of the community that were not as sympathetic to the British cause as the wider community. Indeed, in 1917, following the suppression of a prominent trade union and the jailing of 12 of its members on charges of sedition and sabotage, it seemed as if Australia's war effort might have been in danger of breaking down.
After the war, the continued operation of the War Precautions Act led to considerable social and political unrest in late 1918 and into 1919 and several violent incidents broke out. The most notable of these was the so-called Red Flag Riots in Brisbane, in 1919."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Economy
At the outset of the war, Australia's economy had been quite small and dependent largely upon agriculture and the resources industries for export earnings, and most manufactured products were imported from overseas. Almost immediately uncertainty over the continuation of foreign trade led to a rise in unemployment, indeed it was estimated that after only a couple of days of Britain having declared war, that up to 15,000 men had been retrenched in New South Wales alone due to concerns about the continued availability of foreign markets for Australian produce.
These initial concerns were short lived, at least in the beginning as the British government provided assurances that it would underwrite a large amount of the war risk insurance for shipping to allow trade among the Commonwealth to continue. Shortly thereafter the wartime direction of trade began when the British asked the Australian government to place certain restrictions upon overseas trade to secure resources vital to the war effort and to limit the ability of the Central Powers from obtaining these goods from Commonwealth nations via neutral third parties. To an extent these restrictions served to reduce the ability of Australian producers to find buyers for their products, at least initially, but in many cases the British stepped in to buy these goods, thus alleviating Australian concerns about a significant reduction in the standard of living. This understanding proved particularly beneficial for the wool and wheat industries; the British government undertook to buy Australian products even though the shortage of shipping meant that there was no chance that they would ever receive them.
On the whole Australian commerce was expanded due to the war, although the cost of the war was quite considerable and the Australian government had to borrow considerably from overseas to fund the war effort. In terms of value, Australian exports rose almost 45 per cent; the number of Australians employed in the manufacturing industry increased over 11 per cent. This was due in the most part to the reduced ability of traditional sources to continue supplying Australia with manufactured products, which out of necessity stimulated the development of the Australian manufacturing industry.
In terms of goods produced indigenously, it was estimated that due to the inability of traditional suppliers to deliver manufactured goods because of trade embargoes and shipping shortages up to 400 new articles were produced in Australian factories as a result of the war. This was not an insignificant number, although the transformation of the Australian economy as a result of World War I was by no means as significant as that which occurred during World War II. The expansion of the steel industry that occurred during this time laid the foundation for future industrialisation.
Despite this increase in the domestic manufacturing industry there was still a significant shortfall in many items. In part this was due to the priority that military consumption and production necessarily had over civilian, but there was also a considerable scarcity of raw materials and other components required for manufacturing. This was due both to the lack of shipping available from the United Kingdom, as well as the limitations placed upon the flow of such goods from Britain due to their own increased requirements. The result of this was inflationary. Domestic prices went up, but the cost of exports was deliberately kept lower than market value in an effort to prevent further inflationary pressures worldwide. As a result, the cost of living for many average Australians was increased considerably.
An increase in the trade union movement was an inevitable corollary of this and during the war years there was a considerable increase in the membership. Despite the considerable rises in the costs of many basic items, the government sought to maintain wages largely as they were. Although the average weekly wage during the war was increased by between 8–12 per cent, it was not enough to keep up with inflation and as a result there was considerable discontent among workers, to the extent that industrial action followed. Not all of these disputes were due to economic factors, and indeed in some part they were the result of violent opposition to the issue of conscription, which many trade unionists were opposed to. The result was very disruptive and it has been estimated that between 1914 and 1918 there were 1,945 industrial disputes, resulting in 8,533,061 working days lost and £4,785,607 in lost wages.
Overall, the war had a significantly negative impact on the Australia economy. Real aggregate Gross Domestic Product (GDP) declined by 9.5 per cent over the period 1914 to 1920, and the mobilization of personnel resulted in a 6 per cent decline in civilian employment. Meanwhile, although population growth continued during the war years, it was only half that of the prewar rate. Per capita incomes also declined sharply, falling by 16 per cent."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"After the war
Repatriation and demobilisation
Following the end of hostilities in Europe the Australian government decided against contributing Australian forces to the occupation forces that were sent to Germany as part of the post war settlement so that it could begin the repatriation of the AIF early. Lieutenant General Sir John Monash was appointed Director-General of Repatriation and Demobilisation and oversaw the process in Britain, and Lieutenant General Henry Chauvel took charge of the efforts in the Middle East.
Rather than employing a system that returned men by units, or by employment categories, it was decided to use an egalitarian system that saw men who had been away for the longest period of time being returned first. Due to the size of the forces deployed overseas—roughly 167,000 personnel in France, Britain and Egypt—and the logistical requirements of bringing them home the process was a lengthy one and as such it became important to occupy the troops while they waited. To achieve this and to prepare the men for a return to civilian employment, a vocational education scheme was set up by George Long and troops in Britain were offered educational courses and civilian work placement opportunities and although these programs were not as successful as hoped, several thousand soldiers took advantage of them.
Some Australians decided to delay their departure and instead joined the British Army and went on to serve in Northern Russia during the Russian Civil War, although officially the Australian government refused to contribute forces to the campaign. HMAS Yarra, Torrens, Swan and Parramatta served in the Black Sea during the same conflict. Elsewhere, in Egypt in early 1919, several Australian light horse units were used to quell a nationalist uprising while they were waiting for passage back to Australia. Despite shortages in shipping, the process of returning the soldiers to Australia was completed faster than expected and by September 1919 there were 10,000 men still left in Britain waiting for repatriation. The last of the main transports conveying Australian troops left England on 23 December 1919, arriving in Australia in early 1920. A year later, on 1 April 1921, the AIF was officially disbanded.
The process of repatriation did not end there, though. Upon their return to Australia the effort shifted towards placing the returned soldiers into employment, or education and taking care of those that were too badly injured to work. To meet these needs the Commonwealth established the Repatriation Department, tasked with managing the placement of returned soldiers into employment, training, education, housing. Eventually this also included the colossal task of managing the provision of war pensions, managing repatriation hospitals and convalescent homes and administering the Soldier Settlement Scheme. The total cost of these provisions was considerable, and in June 1935 it was estimated to have cost approximately £238,000,000 which was more than the total amount spent on defence during the war.
To advocate for the many thousands of returned servicemen and women many ex-services organisations sprang up. The most prominent of these was probably the Returned Sailors and Soldiers Imperial League of Australia which had been established in 1916 by representatives from many state-based organisations already in existence. Following the war this organisation grew in its political influence as its numbers grew and was very active in the repatriation process, advocating for financial entitlements for veterans and securing concessions for soldiers returning to civilian employment. By 1919 it was estimated to have 150,000 members although this fell dramatically in the mid-1920s."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Legacy
The war affected Australia in many ways, although arguably not as greatly as it did the many European nations that were more directly involved. Economically the war had significant impacts, although the Great Depression would later prove far more significant and Australian industry was not as greatly transformed as it would be following World War II. The political landscape was also transformed due to the rifts that resulted from the issue of conscription, and to a smaller extent the role of women in society also evolved as more women entered the workforce. Between 1914 and 1918 there had been a 13 per cent increase in the employment of women; this was mainly in areas where women were traditionally employed. Although around 2,000 women were employed as nurses in the AIF, there was no great involvement of women in the military during the war.
Another legacy was the manner in which it led to the emergence—albeit only fleetingly—of an independence in Australian foreign affairs. Although previously Australian foreign interests had been largely handled by Britain, as a combatant Australia sent its own delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, and it also began to take a more assertive role in regional affairs in the Pacific. At the peace conference Prime Minister Hughes pushed aggressively for reparations and an Australian mandate over German New Guinea; a stance which conflicted with the liberal internationalist inspired Fourteen Points put forward by American President Woodrow Wilson. Regardless, following the war there was little real change in Imperial relations and Dominion affairs, and as a result the war arguably did not lead to any significant change in Australia's perception of its role in the world. Indeed, profound change would only occur following the Japanese crisis of 1942, which ultimately saw Australia pursue a foreign policy more independent of Britain, and an alliance with the United States.
Perhaps the greatest effect of the war was a psychological one. The heavy losses deeply affected many directly, and war memorials were built all over the country as people sought to remember those that had been killed. Despite the size of Australia's contribution to the fighting, there were many Australians who had had no actual experience of it. Realising this, and having witnessed the impact of the war first hand, Charles Bean, who was instrumental in editing and writing the official history of Australia's involvement in the war, advocated the need for a national memorial and was one of the main architects in establishing the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. The experience of the war also perpetuated many notions about the Australian character and national identity that endure to this day. For many Australians the performance of their soldiers—particularly during the failed Gallipoli campaign—served to highlight the nation's emergence as a member of the international community, while bringing to the fore a belief in Australians' natural ability as soldiers. A number of veterans of Gallipoli were interviewed about their experiences of the battle in the 1920s-1930s, during which they remembered the battle in a fashion that was consistent with the popular ""digger"" stereotype of Australian soldiers with the emphasis being on the bravery, toughness, stubbornness, and ""mateship"" of the Australians at Gallipoli. Some of the same veterans were interviewed again in the 1970s-1980s during which they remembered the Battle of Gallipoli in a completely different manner with the emphasis being on the squalor and horror of the battle with many of the veterans recalling that they were terrified. The British historian John Tosh argued that the stories told by Australian veterans of Gallipoli reflected what the Australian public wanted to hear at different times, namely tales of the brave ""diggers""  battling it out in the face of overwhelming odds in the interwar era and tales of a horrific battle in the post-Vietnam era.         
The attitudes of many Australians towards war itself were also greatly affected. There was a widespread revulsion at the large-scale destruction and loss of life that had occurred and a desire that it should never occur again. In many regards this led to a general complacency towards defence and military matters after the war and arguably led to the nation's lack of preparedness for the next major conflict; it may still be evident in Australian strategic behaviour to this day."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Statistics
During World War I over 421,809 Australians served in the military with 331,781 serving overseas. Over 60,000 Australians lost their lives and 137,000 were wounded. As a percentage of forces committed, this equalled a casualty rate of almost 65 per cent, one of the highest casualty rates among the British Empire forces. The financial cost of the war to the Australian government was £188,480,000."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"See also
Australian Army battle honours of World War I
List of Australian diarists of World War I"
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Notes
References
Citations
Sources
Historiography
Parsons, George. ""Historians and the First World War."" AQ - Australian Quarterly 82#1, 2010, p. 37+. online
Tosh, John (2002). The Pursuit of History Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of Modern History. London: Longman. ISBN 9780582772540."
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Further reading
External links"
Military history of Australia during World War I,"Australian War Memorial
Australian War Memorial: Deaths as a result of service with Australian units
Australian Light Horse Studies Centre
Beaumont, Joan: Australia, in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
Seal, Graham: Anzac (Australia), in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
Westerman, William: Warfare 1914–1918 (Australia), in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
Stanley, Peter: Between Acceptance and Refusal – Soldiers' Attitudes Towards War (Australia), in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
Connor, John: Civilian and Military Power (Australia), in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
Connor, John: Governments, Parliaments and Parties (Australia), in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
Wilcox, Craig: Pre-war Military Planning (Australia), in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
Robertson, Emily: Propaganda at Home (Australia), in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
Beaumont, Joan: War Aims and War Aims Discussions (Australia), in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
Noonan, David C.: War Losses (Australia), in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
Frances, Rae: Women’s Mobilisation for War (Australia), in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War."
List of islands of Australia,"This is a list of selected Australian islands grouped by state or territory. Australia has 8,222 islands within its maritime borders."
List of islands of Australia,"Largest islands
The islands larger than 1,000 square kilometres (390 sq mi) are:"
List of islands of Australia,"Tasmania (Tas) 64,519 square kilometres (24,911 sq mi);
Melville Island, Northern Territory (NT), 5,786 square kilometres (2,234 sq mi);
Kangaroo Island, South Australia (SA), 4,416 square kilometres (1,705 sq mi);
Groote Eylandt (NT), 2,285 square kilometres (882 sq mi);
Bathurst Island (NT), 1,693 square kilometres (654 sq mi);
K'gari, Queensland (Qld), 1,653 square kilometres (638 sq mi);
Flinders Island (Tas), 1,359 square kilometres (525 sq mi);
King Island (Tas), 1,091 square kilometres (421 sq mi); and
Mornington Island (Qld), 1,002 square kilometres (387 sq mi).
Apart from the state of Tasmania (with a population of 570,000), the largest islands by population are those connected to major urban areas on the mainland by bridge, including Bribie Island near Brisbane with a population of 18,000, and Phillip Island near Melbourne with a population of 14,000."
List of islands of Australia,"New South Wales
Northern Territory
Queensland
Woody Island"
List of islands of Australia,"South Australia
Ocean islands
Murray River islands
Hindmarsh Island
Mundoo Island
Pomanda Island
Rabbit Island, Coorong"
List of islands of Australia,"Tasmania
Tasmania is a large island state off the south-east coast of mainland Australia.  The main island of Tasmania (which includes 94% of the state's land area) does not have a defined name but can be referred to as the ""Tasmanian mainland"". There are 334 islands (or islets) within the state of Tasmania; with the main islands listed below, each having a land area greater than 100 hectares (250 acres). A full list of all 334 islands is located at the list of islands of Tasmania."
List of islands of Australia,"Victoria
River islands
Beveridge Island
Coode Island
Gunbower Island
Herring Island
Jordan's Island
Pental Island"
List of islands of Australia,"Western Australia
Over 1,000 islands have been gazetted – only the island groups and major islands are listed."
List of islands of Australia,"Australian territories
Jervis Bay Territory
Bowen Island"
List of islands of Australia,"Australian Capital Territory
Kingston Island
Pine Island
Queen Elizabeth II Island
Spinnaker Island
Springbank Island"
List of islands of Australia,"External territories
See also"
List of islands of Australia,"List of islands
List of islands in the Pacific Ocean
List of islands in the Indian Ocean
List of islands of Asia
List of Torres Strait Islands"
List of islands of Australia,"
== References =="
Fungi of Australia,"The Fungi of Australia form an enormous and phenomenally diverse group, a huge range of freshwater, marine and terrestrial habitats with many ecological roles, for example as saprobes, parasites and mutualistic symbionts of algae, animals and plants, and as agents of biodeterioration. Where plants produce, and animals consume, the fungi recycle, and as such they ensure the sustainability of ecosystems.
Knowledge about the fungi of Australia is meagre. Little is known about aboriginal cultural traditions involving fungi, or about aboriginal use of fungi apart from a few species such as Blackfellow's bread (Laccocephalum mylittae). Humans who came to Australia over the past couple of centuries brought no strong fungal cultural traditions of their own. Fungi have also been largely overlooked in the scientific exploration of Australia. Since 1788, research on Australian fungi, initially by botanists and later by mycologists, has been spasmodic and intermittent. At governmental level, scientific neglect of Australian fungi continues: in the country's National Biodiversity Conservation Strategy for 2010–2030, fungi are mentioned only once, in the caption of one illustration, and some states currently lack mycologists in their respective fungal reference collections.
The exact number of fungal species recorded from Australia is not known, but is likely to be about 13,000. The CSIRO has published three volumes providing a bibliography of all Australian fungal species described. Volume 2A was published in 1997, and Volume 2B was published in 2003. Unlike the Flora of Australia series they are bibliographic lists and do not contain species descriptions.
The total number of fungi which actually occur in Australia, including those not yet discovered, has been estimated at around 250,000 fungal species, including about 5,000 mushrooms, of which roughly 5% have been described. Knowledge of distribution, substrata and habitats is poor for most species, with the exception of common plant pathogens. One result of this poor knowledge is that it is often difficult or even impossible to determine whether a given fungus is a native species or an introduction."
Fungi of Australia,"History
Early collections in Western Australia were made by James Drummond and Ludwig Preiss in the early to mid-19th Century. They sent their specimens to W.J. Hooker at Kew and Elias Magnus Fries respectively.
John Burton Cleland conducted the first systematic review of Australian fungi in a landmark monograph of fungal specimens at the South Australian Herbarium. Comprising some 16,000 specimens, this included fungi from elsewhere in the country as well as South Australia. He was assisted by such people as Edwin Cheel, keeper of the Herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney, Leonard Rodway of Tasmania and Phyllis Clarke (later North), who provided some watercolour paintings. These three were honoured with at least one specific epithet of new species described by Cleland. This resulted in two comprehensive volumes (1934–35) on the larger fungi of South Australia, and was reprinted in 1976. These were reworked and published in 1997 as Larger Fungi of Southern Australia by contemporary mycologist Cheryl Grgurinovic, though funding only allowed the publication of a volume on larger fungi.
Bruce Fuhrer and Tony Young, whose book was first published in 1982 and has been revised several times since, have been instrumental in promoting Australian fungi to the general public with popular books on fungi in Australia. Published knowledge is augmented by locally produced guides in Western Australia, Queensland and Tasmania."
Fungi of Australia,"Diversity
Ascomycota
Commonly called ascomycetes, this group, the Ascomycota, is likely to be the largest fungal phylum in Australia in terms of species numbers. Australia's ascomycetes include some large and conspicuous fungi, but the fruiting bodies produced by most species are less than about 1 cm in their largest dimension. The range of habitats they occupy is the same as for the fungi as a whole. Most of Australia's lichen-forming fungi belong in this group. With a few exceptions, the ascomycetes of Australia are very poorly known, and many remain undiscovered. Partly because of their importance in forestry, species associated with Eucalyptus trees have received considerable attention and, with hundreds known to be associated with some of the more studied tree species, it is clear that these fungi form a huge, complex and important component of Australia's forests. Charismatic species include the ""golf-ball fungi"" (species of the genus Cyttaria) which occur only on living branches of Nothofagus trees. Australia's native truffles (subterranean ascomycetes) form another distinct and interesting group which remains poorly known."
Fungi of Australia,"Basidiomycota
Representatives of all three subdivisions of the Basidiomycota are found in Australia. These are the Agaricomycotina (bracket fungi, jelly fungi, mushrooms and toadstools, puffballs etc., i.e. most of the species commonly understood to be fungi), the Pucciniomycotina (rust fungi), and the Ustilaginomycotina (smut fungi)."
Fungi of Australia,"Agaricomycotina
Native species are very poorly known, with most taxa undescribed. For those that have been, there are huge gaps in knowledge, especially with respect to distribution and, for the larger species, edibility. Reasons for this include the brief and unpredictable appearance of fruiting bodies, often the only evidence of most species, and the fact that there has been comparatively little scientific attention focused upon fungi in Australia.
There are several exceptions; one is the family Hygrophoraceae, which has been written about by mycologist A. M. (Tony) Young in 2005. Another is a treatment of the genus Mycena in Southeastern Australia. The genus Amanita has been the subject of two reviews but a microscope is still needed to distinguish many species and coverage has concentrated in Australia's eastern regions. Alec Wood has also published a study of the genus Galerina, describing 29 species, 21 of them new, primarily in New South Wales. A more usual state of affairs is that reported by Roy Watling with regard to boletes, that in Australia, it appears to be rich in species yet only a minority are described."
Fungi of Australia,"With the notable exception of the gigantic Phlebopus marginatus, possibly Australia's largest mushroom, many of the most conspicuous fungi have been introduced in association with exotic soil and trees; Lactarius deliciosus, Chalciporus piperatus, Suillus luteus and Suillus granulatus are European fungi found in pine plantations in Eastern Australia. The deadly Amanita phalloides is found under Oak in urban Canberra and Melbourne and has caused deaths. There are concerns at least one of them, Amanita muscaria is spreading into (and forming new mycorrhizal associations with) native Nothofagus woodland and possibly displacing local species. Lawns, farms and parklands see exotic fungi such as the shaggy ink cap (Coprinus comatus), the poisonous Chlorophyllum molybdites and several species of Agaricus, including the edible A. bisporus and A. campestris as well as mildly poisonous A. xanthodermus.
Mycorrhiza of Rhizopogon luteolus was deliberately introduced to improve the performance of pines in pine plantations in Western Australia in the early part of the 20th century.
The stinkhorn-like species Aseroë rubra is significant in that it is the first fungus species known to have been introduced in the other direction, namely to Europe, from Australia. It was recorded growing on soil transported from Australia in a glasshouse in Kew Gardens in 1829."
Fungi of Australia,"Pucciniomycotina
Rust fungi are a large group of plant parasites. Many of them are highly host-specific. Some cause significant losses to economic crops, and where the crop itself is an introduction to Australia, the rusts on that crop may also be non-native. Rusts on native species are likely to form an important component of the natural checks and balances of native ecosystems, and may have their own distinctive conservation needs. There seems to have been no compilation of information about the rust fungi of Australia since the detailed monograph by McAlpine (2006)."
Fungi of Australia,"Ustilaginomycotina
These fungi are parasites, mainly of flowering plants. Unlike the Agaricomycotina, they are usually small and easily missed by the untrained eye. These fungi are most easily noticed when they produce their fruiting structures, called sori, which are most often confined to the host flower, but may also sometimes be seen on fruits and leaves. In Australia, 296 smut species from 43 genera have been recorded."
Fungi of Australia,"Non-Dikarya
Apart from fungi of the subkingdom Dikarya, such as those described above (Ascomycota and Basidiomycota), some non-Dikarya fungi are known to have relatively high diversity in Australia; e.g. Backusella."
Fungi of Australia,"Mycologists
Selected mycologists that have made significant contributions to Australian mycology:"
Fungi of Australia,"Alec Wood (born 1933), abbreviated as A.E.Wood
Anthony M. Young, abbreviated as A.M.Young
Bruce Fuhrer (1930–2023), abbreviated as Fuhrer
Joan Cribb (1920–2007)
John Burton Cleland (1878–1971), abbreviated as Cleland
Sally E. Smith
Tom May, abbreviated as T.W.May"
Fungi of Australia,"Literature
Many of the books on Australian fungi are listed below:"
Fungi of Australia,"General
Young & Smith (1982). Common Australian Fungi. University of New South Wales Press. ISBN 0868403849.
Various authors (1996). Fungi of Australia Volume 1A. CSIRO Publishing/ABRS. ISBN 9780643058026.
Various authors (1996). Fungi of Australia Volume 1B. CSIRO Publishing/ABRS. ISBN 9780643059351.
May & Wood (1997). Fungi of Australia Volume 2A. CSIRO Publishing/ABRS. ISBN 9780643059290.
Jones, May, Milne & Shingles (2003). Fungi of Australia Volume 2B. CSIRO Publishing/ABRS. ISBN 9780643069077.
McCann (2003). Australian fungi illustrated. Macdown Productions. ISBN 9780975078006.
Grey, Pat & Ed (2005). Fungi Down Under. Fungimap. ISBN 9780646446745.
Fuhrer (2005). A Field Guide to Australian Fungi. Bloomings Books. ISBN 9781876473518.
Young & Smith (2005). A Field Guide to the Fungi of Australia. UNSW Press. ISBN 9780868407425.
Negus & Scott (2006). The Magical World of Fungi. Cape to Cape Publishing. ISBN 9780957772991."
Fungi of Australia,"Region or taxon specific
Willis (1963). Victorian Toadstools and Mushrooms. Field Naturalists Club of Victoria.
Aberdeen (1979). Introduction to the Mushrooms, Toadstools and Larger Fungi of Queensland. Queensland Naturalists Club.
Macdonald & Westerman (1979). Fungi of South-Eastern Australia. Thomas Nelson. ISBN 9780170052900.
Cole, Fuhrer & Holland (1984). A Field Guide to the Common Genera of Gilled Fungi of Australia. Inkata Press. ISBN 9780909605117.
Griffiths (1985). A Field Guide to the Larger Fungi of the Darling Scarp & South West of Western Australia Privately published. ISBN 0958970505.
Shepherd & Totterdell (1988). Mushrooms and Toadstools of Australia. Inkata Press. ISBN 0909605513.
Wood (1990). Australian Mushrooms and Toadstools New South Wales University Press. ISBN 0868400440.
Fuhrer & Robinson (1992). Rainforest fungi of Tasmania and south-east Australia. CSIRO publishing. ISBN 9780643052413.
Grgurinovic (1997). Larger Fungi of South Australia. Flora and Fauna of South Australia Handbooks Committee. ISBN 0730807371.
Bougher & Syme (1998). Fungi of Southern Australia. University of Western Australia Press. ISBN 1875560807.
Grgurinovic (2003). The Genus Mycena in South-Eastern Australia. Fungal Diversity Press/ABRS. ISBN 9789628676521.
Robinson (2003). Fungi of the South-West Forests. Department of Environment and Conservation. ISBN 9780730755289.
Hood (2003). An Introduction to Fungi on Wood in Queensland. University of New England. ISBN 1863898190.
Young (2005). Fungi of Australia Hygrophoraceae. CSIRO Publishing/ABRS. ISBN 9780643091955.
Bell (2005). An Illustrated Guide to the Coprophilous Ascomycetes of Australia. APS Press. ISBN 9789070351588.
Priest (2006). Fungi of Australia Septoria. CSIRO Publishing/ABRS. ISBN 9780643 093768.
Bougher (2007). Perth Urban Bushland Fungi Field Book. PUBF.
Tait (2007) Fungi out west. Chinchilla Field Naturalist's Club. ISBN 9780980382402.
Vánky & Shivas (2008). Fungi of Australia The Smut Fungi. CSIRO Publishing/ABRS. ISBN 9780643095366.
(2013) Fungi of the Wombat Forest and Macedon Ranges. Wombat Forestcare.
McMullan-Fisher, Leonard Guard (2014). Australian Subtropical Fungi. Fungimap ISBN 9780646915524.
Guard McMullan-Fisher (2016). Fungi of the Sunshine Coast. Queensland Mycological Society, Brisbane.
Guard McMullan-Fisher (2016). Mushrooms of the Sunshine Coast. Queensland Mycological Society, Brisbane."
Fungi of Australia,"See also
Fungimap"
Fungi of Australia,"References
External links"
Fungi of Australia,"Interactive Catalogue of Australian Fungi — Australian Biological Resources Study, Canberra/Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne
D.A. Ratkowsky and G.M. Gates. (December 2005) An inventory of macrofungi observed in Tasmanian forests over a six-year period Archived 2012-10-08 at the Wayback Machine. Tasforests, Vol. 16, pp. 153–168.
Fungimap, a resource on Australian fungi and citizen science project
Queensland Mycological Society, A community science and education network for the identification and research of Queensland fungi"
Demographics of Australia,"The population of Australia is estimated to be 27,358,000 as of 18 August 2024. Australia is the 56th most populous country in the world and the most populous Oceanian country. Its population is concentrated mainly in urban areas, particularly on the Eastern, South Eastern and Southern seaboards, and is expected to exceed 30 million by 2029.
Australia's population has grown from an estimated population of between 300,000 and 2,400,000 Indigenous Australians at the time of British colonisation in 1788 due to numerous waves of immigration during the period since. Also due to immigration, the European component's share of the population rose sharply in the late 18th and 19th centuries, but is now declining as a percentage.
Australia has an average population density of 3.6 persons per square kilometre of total land area, which makes it one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world. This is generally attributed to the semi-arid and desert geography of much of the interior of the country. Another factor is urbanisation, with 89% of its population living in a handful of urban areas, Australia is one of the world's most urbanised countries. The life expectancy of Australia in 2015–2017 was 83.2 years, among the highest in the world."
Demographics of Australia,"Cities
Australia contains five cities (including their suburbs) that consist of over one million people. Most of Australia's population live close to coastlines."
Demographics of Australia,"Ancestry
The earliest accepted timeline for the first arrivals of humans to the continent of Australia places this human migration to at least 65,000 years ago, most probably from the islands of Indonesia and New Guinea.
Captain James Cook claimed the east coast for Great Britain in 1770; the west coast was later settled by Britain also. At that time, the indigenous population was estimated to have been between 315,000 and 750,000, divided into as many as 500 tribes speaking many different languages.
Between 1788 and the Second World War, the vast majority of settlers and immigrants came from the British Isles (principally England, Ireland and Scotland), although there was significant immigration from China and Germany during the 19th century. In the decades immediately following the Second World War, Australia received a large wave of immigration from across Europe, with many more immigrants arriving from Southern and Eastern Europe than in previous decades. Since the end of the White Australia policy in 1973, Australia has pursued an official policy of multiculturalism, and there has been a large and continuing wave of immigration from across the world, with Asia being the largest source of immigrants in the 21st century.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics no longer collects data on race, but does ask each Australian resident to nominate up to two ancestries each census. These ancestry responses are classified into broad standardised ancestry groups. In the 2021 census, the most commonly nominated individual ancestries as a proportion of the total population were: "
Demographics of Australia,"At the 2021 census, 3.2% of the Australian population identified as being Indigenous — Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders. In 2020, 7.5% of births were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander persons up from 5.7% in 2010; Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander fertility rates have stayed above replacement levels even as the nation's has declined rapidly.
Although the ABS does not collect data on race and ethnic background, various studies have put together results of the census to determine the ethnic composition of Australia, the Australian Human Rights Commission has estimated the European population at 76% of the Australian population, while a media diversity study put it at 72%, the non-European proportion was 21% and 23% respectively, and the Aboriginal Australian population at 3% in both.
Immigration minister Andrew Giles had pledged to incorporate a question on ethnicity into the 2026 Australian census. However in 2024 the ABS decided against collecting data on ethnicity."
Demographics of Australia,"Immigration and country of birth
In 2019, 30% of the Australian resident population, or 7,529,570 people, were born overseas.
Australia's population has quadrupled since the end of World War I, much of this increase from immigration. Australia has the world's eighth-largest immigrant population, with immigrants accounting for 30% of the population, a higher proportion than in any other nation with a population of over 10 million. Most immigrants are skilled, but the immigration quota includes categories for family members and refugees.
The following table shows Australia's population by country of birth as estimated by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2023. It shows only countries or regions or birth with a population of over 100,000 residing in Australia."
Demographics of Australia,"As of 2020, 29.8% of Australia's population was born overseas and 76% as of 2016 had European ancestry. The percentage of Australians with European backgrounds has been declining since the 1960s and 1970s, which is around the time the White Australia policy was abolished."
Demographics of Australia,"Australia migration data, 2013-present
Religion
At the 2021 Census, 38.9% of the population identified as having ""no religion"", up from 15.5% in 2001. The largest religion is Christianity (43.9% of the population). The largest Christian denominations are the Roman Catholic Church (20% of the population) and the Anglican Church of Australia (9.8%). Multicultural immigration since the Second World War has led to the growth of non-Christian religions, the largest of which are Islam (3.2%), Hinduism (2.7%), Buddhism (2.4%), Sikhism (0.8%), and Judaism (0.4%).
The Australian Bureau of Statistics 2001 Census Dictionary statement on religious affiliation states the purpose for gathering such information:"
Demographics of Australia,"Data on religious affiliation are used for such purposes as planning educational facilities, aged persons' care and other social services provided by religion-based organisations; the location of church buildings; the assigning of chaplains to hospitals, prisons, armed services and universities; the allocation of time on public radio and other media; and sociological research.
Historically, Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology was the prevalent belief system in Australia until around 1840, when European Australians first outnumbered indigenous Australians. For a period, in the 19th and 20th centuries, Australia was majority Protestant with a large Catholic minority. Catholics first outnumbered Anglicans in the 1986 census. As a result of this history, while Australia has no official religion and ""no religion"" constitutes the largest group by religious identification, the various governments of Australia refer to the Christian God in their ceremonies, as do the various Australian Courts.
As in many Western countries, the level of active participation in religious services is lower than would be indicated by the proportion of the population identifying themselves as affiliated with a religion; weekly attendance at Christian church services is about 1.5 million, or about 7.5% of the population. Christian charitable organisations, hospitals and schools play a prominent role in welfare and education services. The Catholic education system is the second biggest sector after government schools, with more than 795,000 students (and around 20 per cent of all secondary school enrolments)."
Demographics of Australia,"Language
The vast majority of Australians speak English at home, with the exception of some Aboriginal Australians and first-generation immigrants.
Although Australia has no official language, English has always been the de facto national language and the only common tongue. Australian English is a major variety of the language, with a distinctive accent and lexicon, and differs slightly from other varieties of English in grammar and spelling. General Australian serves as the standard variety.
At the 2021 census English was the only language spoken in the homes of 72% of the population. The next most common languages spoken at home are Mandarin Chinese (2.7%), Arabic (1.4%), Vietnamese (1.3%), Cantonese (1.2%), and Punjabi (0.9%). Considerable proportions of first- and second-generation immigrants are bilingual.
Over 250 Indigenous Australian languages are thought to have existed at the time of first European contact; fewer than 20 are still in daily use by all age groups. About 110 others are spoken exclusively by older people. At the time of the 2006 census, 52,000 Indigenous Australians, representing 12% of the Indigenous population, reported that they spoke an Indigenous language at home.
Australia has its own sign language, Auslan. It is the main language of about 5,500 deaf people."
Demographics of Australia,"Indigenous population
The earliest accepted timeline for the first arrivals of indigenous Australians to the continent of Australia places this human migration to at least 40,000 years ago.
Dutch navigators landed on the coasts of modern Western Australia and Queensland several times during the 17th century. Captain James Cook wrote that he claimed the east coast for Great Britain in 1770 while standing on Possession Island off the west coast of Cape York Peninsula. The west coast was later settled by Britain also. At that time, the indigenous population was estimated to have numbered between as few as 315,000 and as many as 1,100,000, divided into many tribes speaking many different languages. In the 2011 census, 495,757 respondents declared they were Aboriginal, 31,407 declared they were Torres Strait Islander, and a further 21,206 declared they were both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.
Today, most of Australia's Indigenous population live on the east coast of Australia, where almost 60% of Indigenous Australians live in New South Wales (208,476) and Queensland (188,954) which roughly represents 2–5% of those state's populations. The Northern Territory has an Indigenous population of 61,115, which represents 26.3% of the total Northern Territory population."
Demographics of Australia,"States and territories
Historical population
Population estimates in the table below do not include the Aboriginal population before 1961. Estimates of Aboriginal population before European settlement range from 300,000 to one million, with archaeological finds indicating a sustainable maximum population of around 750,000. Where available, actual population figures from census years are included."
Demographics of Australia,"Total fertility rate from 1850 to 1899
The total fertility rate is the number of children born per woman. It is based on fairly good data for the entire period. Sources: Our World In Data and Gapminder Foundation.
The following figures show the total fertility rates since the first years of British colonisation."
Demographics of Australia,"Crude birth rates from 1860 to 1899
The crude birth rate is the total number of live births per 1,000 population in a year. Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics."
Demographics of Australia,"Historical distribution of the total population by age
Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics."
Demographics of Australia,"Historical median age of the population
Median age of the Australia population through history. Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics."
Demographics of Australia,"Vital statistics since 1900
Source:"
Demographics of Australia,"Current vital statistics
[1]
In 2012, the total fertility rate of Australian-born women was 1.94, while for overseas-born women, it was 1.81, while in 2013, it was 1.91 and 1.79 respectively.
In 2017, TFR was 1.68 for overseas women (overseas father 1.73) and 1.78 for native women (native father 1.69)."
Demographics of Australia,"Structure of the population
Life expectancy at birth from 1921 to 2015
Sources: Our World In Data and the United Nations."
Demographics of Australia,Source: Our World in Data
Demographics of Australia,Source: UN World Population Prospects
Demographics of Australia,"Other general demographic statistics
As of the year to 30 June 2023, the population growth rate was 2.4%. This rate was based on estimates of (June 2023):"
Demographics of Australia,"one birth every 1 minute and 42 seconds,
one death every 2 minutes and 52 seconds,
one migrant person arriving to live in Australia every 45 seconds,
one Australian resident leaving Australia to live overseas every 2 minutes and 43 seconds, leading to
an overall total population increase of one person every 50 seconds.
Much of the data that follows has been derived from the CIA World Factbook and the Australian Bureau of Statistics, through censuses."
Demographics of Australia,"Population
The following figures are ABS estimates for the resident population of Australia, based on the 2001 and 2006 Censuses and other data."
Demographics of Australia,"27,358,000 (as of 18 August 2024)
23,470,145 (July 2018 est.)
23,232,413 (July 2017 est.)
21,262,641 (July 2009 – CIA World Factbook)"
Demographics of Australia,"Age structure
0–14 years: 17.75% (male 2,138,080 /female 2,027,583)
15–24 years: 12.62% (male 1,520,528 /female 1,442,461)
25–54 years: 41.35% (male 4,944,587 /female 4,760,752)
55–64 years: 11.84% (male 1,379,681 /female 1,398,177)
65 years and over: 16.44% (male 1,786,595 /female 2,071,701) (2018 est.)
0–14 years: 17.8% (male 2,122,139/female 2,012,670)
15–24 years: 12.79% (male 1,524,368/female 1,446,663)
25–54 years: 41.45% (male 4,903,130/female 4,725,976)
55–64 years: 11.83% (male 1,363,331/female 1,384,036)
65 years and over: 16.14% (male 1,736,951/female 2,013,149) (2017 est.)"
Demographics of Australia,"Median age
total: 38.8 years. Country comparison to the world: 58th
male: 38.1 years
female: 39.7 years (2018 est.)
Total: 36.9 years
Male: 36.6 years
Female: 38.1 years (2009 est.)"
Demographics of Australia,"Birth rate
12 births/1,000 population (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 165th
12.1 births/1,000 population (2017 est.)
12.47 births/1,000 population (2009 est.) (Rank 164)"
Demographics of Australia,"Death rate
7.3 deaths/1,000 population (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 118th
6.68 deaths/1,000 population (2009 est.) (Rank 146)"
Demographics of Australia,"Total fertility rate
1.77 children born/woman (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 155th"
Demographics of Australia,"Net migration rate
5.4 migrant(s)/1,000 population (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 22nd
5.5 migrant(s)/1,000 population (2017 est.) (Rank 21)
6.23 migrant(s)/1,000 population. (2009 est.) (Rank 15)"
Demographics of Australia,"Population growth rate
1.6% (2023 est.)"
Demographics of Australia,"Mother's mean age at first birth
28.7 years (2014 est.)"
Demographics of Australia,"Life expectancy at birth
total population: 82.4 years (2018 estimate)
male: 79.9 years (2018 estimate)
female: 85 years (2018 estimate)
At the time of Australian Federation in 1901, the rate of natural increase was 14.9 persons per 1,000 population. The rate increased to a peak of 17.4 per thousand population in the years 1912, 1913 and 1914. During the Great Depression, the rate declined to a low of 7.1 per thousand population in 1934 and 1935. Immediately after World War II, the rate increased sharply as a result of the start of the post–World War II baby boom and the immigration of many young people who then had children in Australia. A rate plateau of over 13.0 persons per 1,000 population occurred for every year from 1946 to 1962.
There has been a fall in the rate of natural increase since 1962 due to falling fertility. In 1971, the rate of natural increase was 12.7 persons per 1,000 population; a decade later it had fallen to 8.5. In 1996 the rate of natural increase fell below seven for the first time, with the downward trend continuing in the late 1990s.  Population projections by the Australian Bureau of Statistics indicate that continued low fertility, combined with the increase in deaths from an ageing population, will result in natural increase falling below zero sometime in the mid-2030s. However, in 2006 the fertility rate rose to 1.81, one of the highest rates in the OECD.
Since 1901, the crude death rate has fallen from about 12.2 deaths per 1,000 population, to 6.4 deaths per 1,000 population in 2006."
Demographics of Australia,"Urbanisation
urban population: 86% of total population (2018)
rate of urbanisation: 1.43% annual rate of change (2015–20 est.)
Urbanisation population: 89% of total population (2008)
Rate of urbanisation: 1.2% annual rate of change (2005–2010)"
Demographics of Australia,"Sex ratio
Birth: 1.06 males/female
Under 15 years: 1.05 males/female
15–64 years: 1.03 males/female
65 years and over: 0.84 male/female
Total population: 1 male/female (2009)"
Demographics of Australia,"Dependency ratios
total dependency ratio: 51.1
youth dependency ratio: 28.5
elderly dependency ratio: 22.6
potential support ratio: 4.4 (2015 est.)"
Demographics of Australia,"HIV/AIDS
Adult prevalence rate: 0.1% (2017 est.)
People living with HIV/AIDS: 26,000 (2017 est.)
Deaths: fewer than 200 (2017 est.)"
Demographics of Australia,"School life expectancy (primary to tertiary education)
total: 23 years
male: 23 years
female: 23 years (2016)"
Demographics of Australia,"Unemployment, youth ages 15–24
total: 12.6%. Country comparison to the world: 105th
male: 13.7%
female: 11.5% (2017 est.)"
Demographics of Australia,"Incarceration and punishment
In March 2019, 43,320 adults were imprisoned in Australia – an incarceration rate of 221 prisoners per 100,000 adult population or 169 per 100,000 total population. Additionally, 75,544 people were in community corrections (various non-custodial punishments such as parole, bail, probation and community service).
In June 2018, about 980 minors were imprisoned in Australia on an average night."
Demographics of Australia,"Literacy
Definition: aged 15 years and over can read and write
Total population: 99%
Male: 99%
Female: 99% (2003 est.)"
Demographics of Australia,"Education expenditure
4.9% of GDP (2013)
country comparison to the world: 55"
Demographics of Australia,"Population density
As of June 2022, the population density of Australia was reported as 3.4/km2 (8.8/sq mi). This makes Australia the 3rd least densely populated country in the world, after Namibia and Mongolia."
Demographics of Australia,"See also
Notes
References
Citations
Sources
General references"
Demographics of Australia,"Further reading
Jupp, James. The Australian People: An Encyclopedia of the Nation, its People and their Origins (2002)
O'Farrell, Patrick. The Irish in Australia: 1798 to the Present Day (3rd ed. Cork University Press, 2001)
Wells, Andrew, and Theresa Martinez, eds. Australia's Diverse Peoples: A Reference Sourcebook (ABC-CLIO, 2004)"
Demographics of Australia,External links
Demographics of Australia,"Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Year Book Australia, 2009–10
Australian population: ethnic origins (DOC)
Build Australian population graph 1960 – 2013 (World Bank data)
Build Australian population projection graph till 2100 (United Nation data)
Build Australian life expectancy at birth graph 1950 – 2013 (United Nation data)
Australia's population clock"
Conservatism in Australia,"Conservatism in Australia refers to the political philosophy of conservatism as it has developed in Australia. Politics in Australia has, since at least the 1910s, been most predominantly a contest between the Australian labour movement (primarily the Australian Labor Party) and the combined forces of anti-Labour groups (primarily the Liberal-National Coalition). The anti-Labour groups have at times identified themselves as ""free trade"", ""nationalist"", ""anti-communist"", ""liberal"", and ""right of centre"", among other labels; until the 1990s, the label ""conservative"" had rarely been used in Australia, and when used it tended to be used by pro-Labour forces as a term of disparagement against their opponents. Electorally, conservatism has been the most successful political brand in Australian history.
Like other countries with a Westminster system of government (but unlike the United States), the mainstream form of conservatism in Australia is liberal conservatism. On economic issues, conservatives typically support lower taxes and less government spending. Unlike in the United States, mainstream Australian conservatives often support some liberal reforms, such as same-sex marriage (which was legalised by the Coalition government of Malcolm Turnbull), whilst typically remaining conservative on other issues such as legalising recreational cannabis. Mainstream Australian conservatives also typically support Australia remaining a constitutional monarchy."
Conservatism in Australia,"Terminology
In the early 20th century, ""Conservatism"" was used as a disparaging epithet by detractors of right wing politics and politicians within Australia, often by supporters and members of left leaning movements and parties such as the Australian Labor Party and later the Australian Greens. People on the right often called themselves ""liberals"". That only changed in the late 20th century; John Hirst says that as a significant political movement, conservatism is ""a very recent arrival in Australia"". John Howard, who became prime minister in 1996, was the first holder of the office to describe himself as a conservative.""
In the 21st century the term covers similar political issues as found in other Western democracies. In the early 20th century the liberals had connections with reform movements. However, as Howard has argued, the Liberal Party became the trustee of both the classical liberal and conservative traditions.  That is, it combines liberal (market-based, pro-business, anti-union) economic policies with conservative social policies.
Although used much less than the term conservative, former Prime Minister Scott Morrison (Liberal) described himself as a traditionalist upon his ascent to party leader and appointment as Prime Minister (2018–2022). Similarly, former Liberal MP for Moreton (1955–1983) and Minister for Defence (1975–1982) and the Navy (1969–1971), James Killen, was considered to be a Tory, or a ""Tory Liberal"", especially in his younger years."
Conservatism in Australia,"History
Unlike the various forms of conservatism across the world, especially in the United Kingdom and the United States, Australian conservatism has a short history. 
In the late 19th century, the Free Trade Party and the Protectionist Party were the two major parties in Australia. The Free Trade Party was generally more conservative while the Protectionist Party was generally more liberal (though both parties contained liberal and conservative factions). When the Australian labour movement emerged, both parties began attempting to form a united alliance against it. George Reid, the leader of the Free Trade Party between 1901 and 1905, and Prime Minister of Australia from 1904 to 1905, imagined an Australian political spectrum that ran from socialist to anti-socialist, and attempted to reframe the party system this way. This was welcomed by politicians who were influenced by the Westminster tradition and who regarded a two-party system as the norm. In 1909, the two parties merged to form the Commonwealth Liberal Party in order to more effectively oppose the new Labor Party.
In 1920, the Country Party (now known as the National Party) was formed as an agrarian conservative party representing the interests of farmers. After the 1922 federal election, which produced a hung parliament, the Country Party and the Nationalist Party (the successor to the Commonwealth Liberal Party) formed a conservative coalition. The Nationalist Party later became the United Australia Party in 1931. After the United Australia Party collapsed in 1945, conservative forces within Australia were in disarray and were seen as irrelevant. This is when the Liberal Party emerged, establishing itself as a big tent party of the right, taking influence from classical conservative thinker Edmund Burke."
Conservatism in Australia,"Political parties
Mainstream political conservatism is primarily represented by the Liberal Party of Australia, and its coalition partner, the National Party, which historically was the party of the conservative small farmers and espoused agrarianism. The Liberal Party was formed in 1944 as a successor of the United Australia Party, which had been formed in 1931 as a successor of the Nationalist Party and ideologically similar parties that preceded it. The Liberal Party's ideology has been described as conservative, liberal-conservative, conservative-liberal, and classical liberal. The Liberal Party tends to promote economic liberalism (which in the Australian usage refers to free markets and small government).
Moser and Catley state, ""In America, 'liberal' means left-of-center, and it is a pejorative term when used by conservatives in adversarial political debate. In Australia, of course, the conservatives are in the Liberal Party."" Jupp points out that, ""[the] decline in English influences on Australian reformism and radicalism, and appropriation of the symbols of Empire by conservatives continued under the Liberal Party leadership of Sir Robert Menzies, which lasted until 1966."" Beecher comments that, ""across the economic and cultural landscape, Howard proved that the centre of politics in Australia is inherently conservative.""
There are also other minor parties which may be perceived to be conservative in orientation on account of some of their policies - and even some are regarded as right wing or extreme right, such as the Democratic Labor Party, One Nation Party, Liberal Democratic Party, Family First Party, Australian Christians, Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party, and Katter's Australian Party, although some would not champion the classical liberal approach to economics adopted by the Liberal Party. In the 45th Australian Senate, the Liberal Democratic Party's David Leyonhjelm, the Independent Cory Bernardi, Independent Fraser Anning and the United Australia Party's Brian Burston formerly formed a ""conservative bloc"".
Since the 2010s, an increasing number of prominent conservative members of the Liberal/National coalition have left the party, such as in 2017 with Senator Cory Bernardi and in 2022 with MP George Christensen."
Conservatism in Australia,"Think tanks and other entities
Some think tanks in Australia have a conservative focus. The Centre for Independent Studies, for example, focuses on classical liberal issues such as free markets and limited government, while the Institute of Public Affairs advocates free market economic policies such as privatisation and deregulation of state-owned enterprises, trade liberalisation and deregulated workplaces, climate change scepticism, the abolition of the minimum wage, and the repeal of parts of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975. The H. R. Nicholls Society focuses on industrial relations, and advocates full workplace deregulation, contains some Liberal MPs as members and is seen to be of the New Right. The Menzies Research Centre is an associated entity of the Liberal Party. The Samuel Griffith Society is a legal think tank that advocates constitutional conservatism, federalism and black letter law jurisprudence, and has reportedly been influential in recent Coalition appointments to administrative tribunals and the Judiciary.
Apart from political parties, conservative grass-roots movements have also arisen in Australia in recent years. Q Society of Australia is a far-right anti-Muslim association that works closely with the Australian Liberty Alliance. Some of these may have connections to existing political leaders, such as Senator Cory Bernardi's Conservative Leadership Foundation (which is dedicated to fostering community based conservative leadership) or explicitly reject party politics in favour of cultural restoration, such as the Sydney Traditionalist Forum and Edmund Burke's Club   (which are described as ""an association of 'old school' conservative, traditionalist and paleoconservative individuals"").
In Australia however there are some differences in the political landscape in which conservatism exists, compared to what is found in other countries, especially in economics. Australia undertook in the mid-1980s significant economic reforms – faith in markets, deregulation, a reduced role for government, low protection and the creation of a new cooperative enterprise culture - under the centre-left Australian Labor Party and especially under social liberal Paul Keating."""
Conservatism in Australia,"Media
Two national newspapers in Australia, The Australian and The Australian Financial Review, take a conservative stance. Since the 1970s, the Financial Review has advocated economic liberalism in Australia, driving a consistent editorial line favouring small government, deregulation, privatisation, lower taxes and trade liberalisation.
Major conservative regional newspapers include The Daily Telegraph, The West Australian, The Mercury, The Canberra Times, The Advertiser and The Courier-Mail.
The primary conservative magazines in Australia are News Weekly, Quadrant and The Spectator Australia.
On television, a conservative outlook is represented by Sky News Australia.
Newspapers and other publications owned by News Corp have been accused of adopting anti-Labor political positions. The publications owned by News Corp include The Australian, The Daily Telegraph, The Mercury, The Advertiser and The Courier-Mail. Sky News is also owned by News Corp."
Conservatism in Australia,"Monarchism
Whether Australia should remain a monarchy or become a republic was a contentious issue in the 1990s. It has since not been a priority for the government as of 2019. In 1998 when debate peaked, Howard took the monarchist position favoured by most conservatives. Howard argued that the monarchy had provided a long period of stability and whilst he said there was no question that Australia was a fully independent nation, he believed that the ""separation of the ceremonial and executive functions of government"" and the presence of a neutral ""defender of constitutional integrity"" was an advantage in government and that no republican model would be as effective in providing such an outcome as the Australian constitutional monarchy. Despite opinion polls suggesting Australians favoured a republic, the 1999 republic referendum rejected the model proposed by the 1998 convention involving appointment of the head of state by Parliament. Conservatives generally support keeping the current flag (with its British insignia) and are proud of the nation's British heritage."
Conservatism in Australia,"Aboriginal conservatism in Australia
Traditionally, Aboriginal Australians in cities have been known to predominantly vote for parties of the political left, such as the Australian Labor Party or the Australian Greens. Despite this, there are numerous Aboriginal activists, politicians and individuals affiliated with the political right. The most prominent Aboriginal Conservative was Neville Bonner who was the first Aboriginal Australian elected to federal Parliament. In the Northern Territory, the Country Liberal Party has had a fluctuating relationship with the state's Indigenous communities (even providing Australia's first Indigenous head of government, Adam Giles) and holds several of the territory's electorates with large Aboriginal populations.
Jacinta Price is a well-known conservative activist of Warlpiri descent who was elected to the Senate for the Country Liberal Party representing Northern Territory in 2022. Price has argued against claims of systemic racism against Aboriginals in the criminal justice system, instead arguing that ""black-on-black violence"" is most pressing in Aboriginal communities. Unlike many Aboriginal activists, Price opposes changing the date of Australia Day, describing the proposal as ""virtue-signaling"".
Kerrynne Liddle is a former journalist and Arrernte woman originally from Alice Springs. At the 2022 she was elected as a Liberal Senator for South Australia. 
Originally a member of Labor, former Indigenous Advisory Council (IAC) member Warren Mundine has since shifted toward the political right. Mundine has criticised what he describes as efforts to introduce ""critical race theory"" in Australian schools, arguing it promotes a victim mentality among Aboriginals.
Former Aboriginal conservative politicians include:"
Conservatism in Australia,"Adam Giles – Served as the Chief Minister of the Northern Territory (2013–2016).
Joanna Lindgren – A former Liberal National Senator for Queensland (2015–2016).
Hyacinth Tungutalum – The first  Aboriginal Australian elected to a State or Territorial parliament; member of the Country Liberal Party (1974–1977).
Bess Price – A former Northern Territory Minister for Community Services; member of the Country Liberal Party (2012–2016)
Eric Deeral – Queensland MP representing the Country Party (1974–1977)"
Conservatism in Australia,"See also
Christian politics in Australia
History wars
Liberalism in Australia
Socialism in Australia"
Conservatism in Australia,"References
Bibliography
Brett, Judith (2003). Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class: From Alfred Deakin to John Howard. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 1-139-43720-8.
Dutton, David (2002). One of Us? A Century of Australian Citizenship. UNSW Press. ISBN 0-868-40556-6.
Jupp, James (2004). The English in Australia. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-54295-2.
Mosler, David; Catley, Robert (1998). America and Americans in Australia. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 0-275-96252-0.
Reekie, Gail (1998). Measuring Immorality: Social Inquiry and the Problem of Illegitimacy. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-62974-4."
Conservatism in Australia,"Further reading
Hirst, John, ""Conservatism,"" in Graeme Davison et al. eds., The Oxford Companion to Australian History  (2nd ed. 2001) pp 148–50"
Indonesia–Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement,"The Indonesia–Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (IA-CEPA; Indonesian: Perjanjian Kemitraan Ekonomi Komprehensif Indonesia–Australia) is a bilateral agreement signed between Australia and Indonesia in March 2019, ratified by Australia in November 2019 and Indonesia in February 2020. The agreement contains a free trade agreement removing tariffs from nearly all products traded between both countries, in addition to loosening investment regulations in Indonesia for Australian firms and increasing the quota for Indonesians seeking vocational training in Australia."
Indonesia–Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement,"Agreements
IA-CEPA contains clauses on bilateral free trade, investments, skills training visas, investor arbitration, e-commerce, and intellectual property protection. Indonesia, under the agreement, will remove tariffs from nearly all Australian products exported to Indonesia while all Indonesian products exported to Australia will be free of tariffs. Australian firms would be permitted to hold a majority stake in Indonesian telecommunications, transport, health and energy firms. Additionally, the number of work holiday visas issued to Indonesians annually would be increased from 1,000 to 4,100 (later to 5,000 by 2026), and Australian universities would be permitted to open Indonesian campuses.
The deal also includes protections against discrimination and expropriations, and prevents software developers from being forced to hand over their source code to sell their products. Additionally, Australian businesses were granted exceptions to an Indonesian regulation requiring online marketplaces in Indonesia to store data locally."
Indonesia–Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement,"History
Bilateral trade negotiations began between the two countries in November 2010, with the IA-CEPA itself being announced in a joint statement, during the presidency of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and the prime ministership of Julia Gillard. After several conferences and meetings throughout 2011, another joint communiqué was released following a meeting in Darwin on 3 July 2012 calling for the launch of the deal's negotiations before the end of that year. Afterwards, however, relations between the two countries soured (due to 2013 Australian spying scandal and the 2015 Indonesian execution of Australian citizens), and in 2015 Indonesia implemented tariffs on Australian cattle imports. Eventually Indonesian Trade Minister Thomas Lembong and his Australian counterpart Steven Ciobo announced a resumption of negotiations in March 2016. Prior to the resumption of talks, four rounds of negotiations had been held.
By February 2017, six rounds of negotiations had been held between the two countries, and both Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull and Indonesian President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) committed to wrapping up the discussions by the end of that year in March 2017. Continued negotiations throughout the year failed to complete the deal by the end of 2017, which by November had totalled ten rounds. In March 2018, Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi admitted that negotiators were still attempting to resolve some issues and moved the deadline to the end of 2018. Indonesian Trade Minister Enggartiasto Lukita further aimed to sign the agreement by November 2018 in April."
Indonesia–Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement,"During new Australian prime minister Scott Morrison's first foreign visit in his tenure to Jakarta, he and Jokowi announced an agreement regarding IA-CEPA on 31 August 2018. The signing was however delayed due to a bilateral spat over Australia's recognition of West Jerusalem as Israel's capital, which drew diplomatic protests from Indonesia. The agreement was finally signed by Lukita and Australian Trade Minister Simon Birmingham in March 2019, subject to ratification by the Parliament of Australia and Indonesia's People's Representative Council.
Australia's parliament ratified the agreement as part of the Customs Amendment Bill 2019 (alongside CEPAs with Peru, Hong Kong and China) on 26 November 2019 and the bill received royal assent on 3 December 2019. The People's Representative Council ratified the agreement on 6 February 2020 during a plenary session. It  came into force on 5 July 2020."
Indonesia–Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement,"Reactions
Shortly after Indonesia's ratification of the agreement, Australia's Monash University revealed plans to open a campus in Indonesia, becoming the first foreign university to do so in Indonesia. Indonesian economic observers remarked that the free trade agreement may lead to increased imports of agricultural products, primarily Australian beef, which may displace the local cattle industry. The Australian Labor Party has also questioned the treaty's clauses on investor-state disputes and on temporary Indonesian work in Australia."
Indonesia–Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement,"References
External links
IA-CEPA text and associated documents"
Languages of Australia,"The languages of Australia are the major historic and current languages used in Australia and its offshore islands. Over 250 Australian Aboriginal languages are thought to have existed at the time of first European contact. English is the majority language of Australia today. Although English has no official legal status, it is the de facto official and national language.  Australian English is a major variety of the language with a distinctive accent and lexicon, and differs slightly from other varieties of English in grammar and spelling.
Around 120 to 170 Indigenous languages and dialects are spoken today, but many of these are endangered. Creole languages such Kriol and Yumplatok (Torres Strait Creole) are the most widely-spoken Indigenous languages. Other distinctively Australian languages include the Australian sign language Auslan, Indigenous sign languages, and Norf'k-Pitcairn, spoken mostly on Norfolk Island.
Major waves of immigration following the Second World War and in the 21st century considerably increased the number of community languages spoken in Australia. In 2021, 5.8 million people used a language other than English at home. The most common of these languages were Mandarin, Arabic, Vietnamese, Cantonese, Punjabi, Greek, Italian and Hindi."
Languages of Australia,"English
English was introduced into Australia on British settlement in 1788 and in the following decades gradually overtook Indigenous languages to become the majority language of Australia. Although English is not the official language of Australia in law, it is the de facto official and national language. It is the most widely spoken language in the country, and is used as the only language in the home by 72% of the population. The increase in the migrant population over the past decade has seen a decline in the number of people speaking only English at home."
Languages of Australia,"Australian English is a major variety of the language with a distinctive accent and lexicon, and differs slightly from other varieties of English in grammar and spelling. General Australian serves as the standard dialect."
Languages of Australia,"Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island languages
Humans arrived in Australia 50,000 to 65,000 years ago but it is possible that the ancestor language of existing Indigenous languages is as recent as 12,000 years old. Over 250 Australian Aboriginal languages are thought to have existed at the time of first European contact. The National Indigenous Languages Survey (NILS) for 2018-19 found that more than 120 Indigenous language varieties were in use or being revived, although 70 of those in use are endangered. The 2021 census found that 167 Indigenous languages were spoken at home by 76,978 Indigenous Australians. NILS and the Australian Bureau of Statistics use different classifications for Indigenous Australian languages.
According to the 2021 census, the classifiable Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island languages with the most speakers are Yumplatok (Torres Strait Creole) (7,596 speakers), Kriol (7,403), Djambarrpuyngu (3,839), Pitjantjatjara (3,399), Warlpiri (2,592), Murrinh Patha (2,063) and Tiwi (2,053). There were also over 10,000 people who spoke an Indigenous language which could not be further defined or classified."
Languages of Australia,"Torres Strait Island languages
Three languages are spoken on the islands of the Torres Strait, within Australian territory, by the Melanesian inhabitants of the area: Yumplatok (Torres Strait Creole) (7,596 speakers used the language at home in 2021), Kalaw Lagaw Ya (875 speakers) and Meriam Mir (256 speakers). Meriam Mir is a Papuan language, while Kalaw Lagaw Ya is an Australian language."
Languages of Australia,"Creoles
A number of English-based creoles have arisen in Australia after European contact, of which Kriol and Yumplatok (Torres Strait Creole) are among the strongest and fastest-growing Indigenous languages. Kriol is spoken in the Northern Territory and Western Australia, and Torres Strait Creole in Queensland and south-west Papua. It is estimated that there are 20,000 to 30,000 speakers of Indigenous creole languages."
Languages of Australia,"Tasmanian languages
Before British colonisation, there were perhaps five to sixteen languages on Tasmania, possibly related to one another in four language families. The last speaker of a traditional Tasmanian language died in 1905. Palawa kani is an in-progress constructed language, built from a composite of surviving words from various Tasmanian Aboriginal languages."
Languages of Australia,"Indigenous sign languages
Traditional Indigenous languages often incorporated sign systems to aid communication with the hearing impaired, to complement verbal communication, and to replace verbal communication when the spoken language was forbidden for cultural reasons. Many of these sign systems are still in use."
Languages of Australia,"Other languages
Sign languages
The Australian sign language Auslan was used at home by 16,242 people at the time of the 2021 census. Over 2,000 people used other sign languages at home in 2021. There is a small community of people who use Australian Irish Sign Language."
Languages of Australia,"Norf'k-Pitcairn
Norf'k-Pitcairn, a creole of 18th century English and Tahitian, was introduced to Norfolk Island by Pitcairn settlers after 1856. In 2021, it was used at home by 907 people, mostly on Norfolk Island."
Languages of Australia,"Other spoken languages
The proportion of Australians speaking a language other than English increased after the Second World War due to the immigration of refugees and displaced persons from European countries. In the 21st century, there was another sharp increase in immigration, especially from Asia. In 2021, 5.8 million people (22.8% of the population) reported using a language other than English at home. The ten most common of these were: Mandarin (2.7% of census respondents), Arabic (1.4%), Vietnamese (1.3%), Cantonese (1.2%), Punjabi (0.9%), Greek (0.9%), Italian (0.9%), Hindi (0.8%), Spanish (0.7%) and Nepali (0.5%)."
Languages of Australia,"Language education
English is the language of school education in Australia and is a key learning area in the Australian curriculum up to Year 10. Languages are also a key learning area up to Year 10 and include Arabic, Auslan, Chinese, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Modern Greek, Spanish, Turkish and Vietnamese, as well as the Framework for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Languages, and Framework for Classical Languages including Classical Greek and Latin. Year 12 enrolments in Languages Other than English declined over the 10 years to 2021 and are the lowest of all subject areas.
There are a number of Indigenous language programs inside and outside the school system. The Australian Government has committed $14.1 million over the four years to 2025-2026 to teach First Nations languages in primary schools across Australia. There are also 20 Indigenous Language Centres across Australia which receive funding from the Australian Government and other sources.
Australia is a significant destination for overseas students studying English. Over 79,000 overseas students enrolled in intensive English courses in Australia in 2022. This was below the pre-Covid peak of 156,478 enrolments in 2019."
Languages of Australia,"Languages in Parliament
Although English is the primary language used for addressing any legislature in Australia, due to Australia's multiculturalism, many politicians have used other languages in parliamentary speeches."
Languages of Australia,"Federal
In 2016, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull spoke Ngunnawal in a parliamentary speech, becoming the first ever Prime Minister to use an Indigenous language in Parliament.
In 1988, Trish Crossin became the first Senator to give a maiden speech in an Indigenous language, speaking in Gumatj, a Yolŋu dialect.
In 1999, Aden Ridgeway introduced himself to the Senate in Gumbaynggirr.
In 2008, Rob Oakeshott became the first politician to use an Indigenous language in the House of Representatives, after he used three Dhanggati words in his speech. In June 2013, he became the first politician to give a speech to any Australian parliament entirely in an Indigenous language, after giving a speech in Dhanggati with help from a linguist.
In August 2016, Linda Burney gave an Acknowledgement of Country in Wiradjuri.
In 2016, Senator Pat Dodson spoke Yawuru in the Senate, with the Senate President even responding in Yawuru.
In 2016, Senator Malarndirri McCarthy gave an Acknowledgement of Country in Yanyuwa.
In 2022, two MPs spoke both English and French in their maiden speeches: Jerome Laxale and Zoe McKenzie, both of whom are of French background. In the same year, Sam Lim used three languages in his maiden speech: Malay, Mandarin and English (in that order)."
Languages of Australia,"New South Wales
The first politician to use an Indigenous language in the Parliament of New South Wales was Troy Grant in 2014, who used Wiradjuri in the closing sentence of the Acknowledgement of Country.
In 2019, Sarah Mitchell gave an Acknowledgment of Country in English, which was translated into Dhanggati."
Languages of Australia,"Northern Territory
In 1981, Neil Bell became the first politician to use an Indigenous language in a maiden speech to the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly, speaking in Pitjantjatjara.
In 2008, Alison Anderson spoke in the Western Desert language during her first speech as Minister for Natural Resources, Environment and Heritage.
In 2012, Bess Price spoke Warlpiri in her maiden speech. In the same sitting of parliament, Yingiya Mark Guyula spoke Yolŋu in his maiden speech."
Languages of Australia,"Queensland
In 2018, Cynthia Lui became the first politician to address an Australian parliament in a Torres Strait Islander language, addressing the Queensland Legislative Assembly in Kala Lagaw Ya."
Languages of Australia,"Western Australia
Josie Farrer was the first politician to use an Indigenous language in the Parliament of Western Australia, speaking in both Kija and Kriol."
Languages of Australia,"See also
Diminutives in Australian English"
Languages of Australia,"References
Citations
Sources
External links"
Languages of Australia,"Ethnologue report for Australia
Census Data (Australian government)"
List of World Heritage Sites in Australia,"The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Sites are places of importance to cultural or natural heritage as described in the UNESCO World Heritage Convention, established in 1972. Cultural heritage consists of monuments (such as architectural works, monumental sculptures, or inscriptions), groups of buildings, and sites (including archaeological sites). Natural features (consisting of physical and biological formations), geological and physiographical formations (including habitats of threatened species of animals and plants), and natural sites which are important from the point of view of science, conservation, or natural beauty, are defined as natural heritage. Australia accepted the convention on 22 August 1974. There are 20 World Heritage Sites in Australia, with a further seven on the tentative list.
The first sites in Australia added to the list were the Great Barrier Reef, Kakadu National Park, and Willandra Lakes Region, at the fifth session of the World Heritage Committee, held in Sydney, in 1981. The most recent site listed was the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape, in 2019. Of these 20 sites, four are cultural, 12 are natural, and four are mixed, listed for both cultural and natural properties. Australia has served as a member of the World Heritage Committee five times, in 1976–1983, 1983–1989, 1995–2001, 2007–2011, and 2017–2021."
List of World Heritage Sites in Australia,"World Heritage Sites
UNESCO lists sites under ten criteria; each entry must meet at least one of the criteria. Criteria i through vi are cultural, and vii through x are natural."
List of World Heritage Sites in Australia,"Tentative list
In addition to sites inscribed on the World Heritage List, member states can maintain a list of tentative sites that they may consider for nomination. Nominations for the World Heritage List are only accepted if the site was previously listed on the tentative list. Australia maintains six properties on its tentative list."
List of World Heritage Sites in Australia,See also
List of World Heritage Sites in Australia,Tourism in Australia
List of World Heritage Sites in Australia,"
== References =="
1967 Australian referendum (Aboriginals),"The second question of the 1967 Australian referendum of 27 May 1967, called by the Holt government, related to Indigenous Australians. Voters were asked whether to give the Commonwealth Parliament the power to make special laws for Indigenous Australians in states, and whether Indigenous Australians should be included in official population counts for constitutional purposes. The term ""the Aboriginal Race"" was used in the question.
Technically the referendum question was a vote on the Constitution Alteration (Aboriginals) 1967 that would amend section 51(xxvi) and repeal section 127.
The amendments to the Constitution were overwhelmingly endorsed, winning 90.77% of votes cast and having majority support in all six states. The amendment became law on 10 August 1967."
1967 Australian referendum (Aboriginals),"Background
In 1901, the attorney-general, Alfred Deakin, provided a legal opinion on the meaning of section 127 of the Constitution of Australia. Section 127 excluded ""aboriginal natives"" from being counted when reckoning the numbers of the people of the commonwealth or a state. His legal advice was that ""half-castes"" were not ""aboriginal natives"".
Prior to 1967, censuses asked a question about Aboriginal race to establish numbers of ""half-castes"" and ""full-bloods"". ""Full-bloods"" were then subtracted from the official population figure in accordance with the legal advice from the attorney-general.
Strong activism by individuals and both Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups greatly aided the success of the 1967 referendum in the years leading up to the vote. Calls for Aboriginal issues to be dealt with at the federal level began as early as 1910. Despite a failed attempt in the 1944 referendum, minimal changes were instigated for Aboriginal rights until the 1960s, where the Bark Petition in 1963 and the ensuing Milirrpum v Nabalco Pty Ltd and Commonwealth of Australia (Gove Land Rights Case), and Gurindji Strike highlighted the negative treatment of Indigenous workers in the Northern Territory. From here, the overall plight of Aboriginal Australians became a fundamental political issue."
1967 Australian referendum (Aboriginals),"On 7 April 1965, the Menzies Cabinet decided that it would seek to repeal section 127 of the Constitution at the same time as it sought to amend the nexus provision, but made no firm plans or timetable for such action. In August 1965, attorney-general Billy Snedden proposed to Cabinet that abolition of section 127 was inappropriate unless section 51(xxvi) was simultaneously amended to remove the words ""other than the aboriginal race in any state"". He was rebuffed, but gained agreement when he made a similar submission to the Holt Cabinet in 1966. In the meantime, his Liberal colleague Billy Wentworth had introduced a private member's bill proposing inter alia to amend section 51(xxvi).
In 1964, the Leader of the Opposition, Arthur Calwell, had proposed such a change and pledged that his party, the Australian Labor Party, would back any referendum to that effect.
In 1967, the Australian Parliament was unanimous in voting for the alteration bill.
The Australian Board of Missions, the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, the Australian Aborigines League, the Australian Council of Churches, the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI) and spokespeople such as Ruby Hammond, Bill Onus and Faith Bandler were some of the many groups and individuals who effectively utilised the media and their influential platforms to generate the momentum needed to achieve a landslide Yes vote."
1967 Australian referendum (Aboriginals),"Amendments to the Constitution
Voters were asked to approve, together, changes to two provisions in the Constitution section 51(xxvi) and section 127.
Section 51 begins:"
1967 Australian referendum (Aboriginals),"The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to:And the extraordinary clauses that follow (ordinarily referred to as heads of power) list most of the legislative powers of the federal parliament. The amendment deleted the text in bold from subsection xxvi (known as the ""race"" or ""races"" power):
The people of any race, other than the aboriginal race in any State, for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws;
The amendment gave the Commonwealth parliament power to make ""special laws"" with respect to Aboriginal People living in a state; the parliament already had unfettered power in regard to territories under section 122 of the Constitution. It was the intention of the government and many voters that this new power was to be only used beneficially. However in the case of Kartinyeri v Commonwealth, the High Court did not find that such a restriction on the power existed, with the court being split 2:2 (2 judges not deciding) as to whether or not the power could be used to the detriment of an identified race. The Hindmarsh Island bridge controversy, and the Northern Territory Intervention are two circumstances where the post-1967 race power has arguably been used in this way.
Section 127 was wholly removed. Headed ""Aborigines not to be counted in reckoning population"", it had read:"
1967 Australian referendum (Aboriginals),"In reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted.
The Constitution required the calculation of ""the people"" for several purposes in sections 24, 89, 93 and 105. Section 89 related to the imposition of uniform customs duties and operated until 1901. Section 93 related to uniform custom duties after being imposed by section 89 and operated until 1908. Section 105 related to taking over state debts and was superseded by section 105A inserted in the Constitution in 1929 following the 1928 referendum. Accordingly, in 1967, only section 24 in relation to the House of Representatives had any operational importance to section 127. 
Section 24 ""requires the membership of the House of Representatives to be distributed among the States in proportion to the respective numbers of their people"". The number of people in section 24 is calculated using the latest statistics of the Commonwealth which are derived from the census. Section 51(xi) of the Constitution enabled the Parliament to make laws for ""census and statistics"" and it exercised that power to pass the Census and Statistics Act 1905."
1967 Australian referendum (Aboriginals),"What the referendum did not do
Give voting rights
It is frequently stated that the 1967 referendum gave Aboriginal people Australian citizenship and that it gave them the right to vote in federal elections; however, this was not the case. 
From 1944, Aboriginal people in Western Australia could apply to become citizens of the state, which gave them various rights, including the right to vote. This citizenship was conditional on adopting ""the manner and habits of civilised life"" and not associating with Aboriginal people other than their parents, siblings, children, or grandchildren, and could be taken away at any time. This situation continued until 1971. Most Indigenous Australians continued to be denied the right to vote in elections for the Australian Parliament even after 1949. The Commonwealth Electoral Act 1949 gave Aboriginal people the right to vote in federal elections only if they were able to vote in their state elections (they were disqualified from voting altogether in Queensland, while in Western Australia and in the Northern Territory the right was conditional), or if they had served in the defence force. 
The Commonwealth Electoral Act 1962 gave all Aboriginal people the option of enrolling to vote in federal elections. It was not until the Commonwealth Electoral Amendment Act 1983 that voting became compulsory for Aboriginal people, as it was for other Australians.
Aboriginal people (and all other people) living in the Northern Territory were not allowed to vote in the referendum, which remained the case for both the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory until the Constitutional amendment to section 128 after a referendum in 1977."
1967 Australian referendum (Aboriginals),"Supersede a ""Flora and Fauna Act""
It is also sometimes mistakenly stated that the 1967 referendum overturned a Flora and Fauna Act. This is believed to have come from the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Act 1974, which controlled Aboriginal heritage, land and culture. The other states had equivalent acts which were managed by various departments, including those relating to agriculture and fishing."
1967 Australian referendum (Aboriginals),"Right to be included in the census
Section 127 prevented the inclusion of the Indigenous Australians in the official population for constitutional purposes, i.e. their population would not be included in the calculation of the number of seats to assign for each state or in the determination of tax revenue. The section did not prevent the Bureau of Statistics from counting or collecting other information about Indigenous Australians. From 1911 to 1966 the Bureau had collected information about Indigenous Australians, however this was published separately to the general population. As such, while the inclusion in the general population was important symbolically, the change did not directly improve the information available to government."
1967 Australian referendum (Aboriginals),"Question
DO YOU APPROVE the proposed law for the alteration of the Constitution entitled— ""An Act to alter the Constitution so as to omit certain words relating to the People of the Aboriginal Race in any State and so that Aboriginals are to be counted in reckoning the Population""?"
1967 Australian referendum (Aboriginals),"Results
At this time, territorians, while able and required to vote in elections, were not permitted to vote in referendums. That was not established until 1977."
1967 Australian referendum (Aboriginals),"Legacy
Ninety percent of voters voted yes, and the overwhelming support gave the Federal Government a clear mandate to implement policies to benefit Aboriginal people. Many misconceptions have arisen as to the outcomes of the referendum, some as a result of it taking on a symbolic meaning during a period of increasing Aboriginal self-confidence. It was some five years before any real change occurred as a result of the referendum, but federal legislation has since been enacted covering land rights, discriminatory practices, financial assistance, and preservation of cultural heritage.
The referendum result had two main outcomes:"
1967 Australian referendum (Aboriginals),"The first was to alter the legal boundaries within which the Federal Government could act. The Federal Parliament was given a constitutional head-of-power under which it could make special laws ""for"" Aboriginal people (for their benefit or, as the High Court has made clear, their detriment) in addition to other ""races"". The Australian Constitution states that federal law prevails over state law, where they are inconsistent, so that the Federal Parliament could, if it so chose, enact legislation that would end discrimination against Aboriginal people by state governments. However, during the first five years following the referendum the Federal Government did not use this new power.
The other key outcome of the referendum was to provide Aboriginal people with a symbol of their political and moral rights. The referendum occurred at a time when Aboriginal activism was accelerating, and it was used as a kind of historical shorthand for all the relevant political events of the time, such as the demands for land rights by the Gurindji people, the equal-pay case for pastoral workers, and the Freedom Rides to end segregation in New South Wales. This use as a symbol for a period of activism and change has contributed to the misconceptions about the effects of the constitutional changes themselves."
1967 Australian referendum (Aboriginals),"Symbolic effect
The 1967 referendum has acquired a symbolic meaning in relation to a period of rapid social change during the 1960s. As a result, it has been credited with initiating political and social change that was the result of other factors. The real legislative and political impact of the 1967 referendum has been to enable, and thereby compel, the federal government to take action in the area of Aboriginal Affairs. Federal governments with a broader national and international agenda have attempted to end the discriminatory practices of state governments such as Queensland and to introduce policies that encourage self-determination and financial security for Aboriginal people. However, the effectiveness of these policies has been tempered by an unwillingness of most federal governments to deal with the difficult issues involved in tackling recalcitrant state governments. It has been argued that Holt, who died not long after the referendum, was setting up a more extensive government response than Gorton enacted."
1967 Australian referendum (Aboriginals),"Land rights
The benefits of the referendum began to flow to Aboriginal people in 1972. On 26 January 1972, Aboriginal peoples erected the Aboriginal Tent Embassy on the lawns of the Federal Parliament building in Canberra to express their frustration at the lack of progress on land rights and racial discrimination issues. This became a major confrontation that raised Aboriginal affairs high on the political agenda in the federal election later that year. One week after gaining office, the Whitlam government (1972–1975) established a Royal Commission into land rights for Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory under Justice Woodward. Its principal recommendations, delivered in May 1974, were: that Aboriginal people should have inalienable title to reserve lands; that regional land councils should be established; to establish a fund to purchase land with which Aboriginal people had a traditional connection, or that would provide economic or other benefits; prospecting and mineral exploration on Aboriginal land should only occur with their consent (or that of the Federal Government if the national interest required it); entry onto Aboriginal land should require a permit issued by the regional land council. The recommendations were framed in terms to enable application outside the Northern Territory. The Federal Government agreed to implement the principal recommendations, and in 1975, the House of Representatives passed the Aboriginal Councils and Associations Bill and the Aboriginal Land (Northern Territory) Bill, but the Senate had not considered them by the time parliament was dissolved in 1975.
The following year, the Fraser government (1975–1983) amended the Aboriginal Land (Northern Territory) Bill by introducing the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Bill. The new bill made a number of significant changes such as limitation on the operations and boundaries of land councils; giving Northern Territory law effect on Aboriginal land, thereby enabling land rights to be eroded; removing the power of land councils to issue permits to non-Aboriginal people; and allowing public roads to be built on Aboriginal land without consent. This bill was passed as the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976. It is significant however that this legislation was implemented at all, given the political allegiances of the Fraser government, and shows the level of community support for social justice for Aboriginal people at the time."
1967 Australian referendum (Aboriginals),"Use of ""race power"" in legislation
The Whitlam government used its constitutional powers to overrule racially discriminatory state legislation. On reserves in Queensland, Aboriginal people were forbidden to gamble, use foul language, undertake traditional cultural practices, indulge in adultery, or drink alcohol. They were also required to work without payment. In the Aboriginal Courts in Queensland the same official acted as judge as well as the prosecuting counsel. Defendants almost invariably pleaded guilty as pleas of not guilty were more than likely to lead to a longer sentence. The Whitlam government, using the race power, enacted the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (Queensland Discriminatory Laws) Act 1975 to override the state laws and eliminate racial discrimination against Aboriginal people. However, no federal government ever enforced this Act.
The race power was also used by the Whitlam government to positively discriminate in favour of Aboriginal people. It established schemes whereby Aboriginal people could obtain housing, loans, emergency accommodation and tertiary education allowances. It also increased funding for the Aboriginal Legal Service enabling twenty-five offices to be established throughout Australia.
The race power gained in the 1967 referendum has been used in several other pieces of significant Federal legislation. One of the pieces of legislation enacted to protect the Gordon River catchment used the race power but applied it to all people in Australia. The law prohibited anyone from damaging sites, relics and artefacts of Aboriginal settlement in the Gordon River catchment. In the Tasmanian Dam Case, the High Court held that even though this law applied to all people and not only to Aboriginal people, it still constituted a special law.
In the 1992 Mabo judgment, the High Court of Australia established the existence of Native Title in Australian Common Law. Using the race power, the Keating Government enacted the Native Title Act 1993 and successfully defended a High Court challenge from the Queensland Government."
1967 Australian referendum (Aboriginals),"Blame Shifting
In granting the Commonwealth a broad power to legislate in regards to Indigenous Australians, responsibilities for areas traditionally the purview of the states (such as housing, education and healthcare) was shared between both branches of government. As a result, both levels have sought to blame the other for the continuing disadvantage of Indigenous Australians, while seeking to place the cost and responsibility to manage these issues on the other. Additionally, the disillusion in the face of continuing discrimination despite the overwhelming success of the vote led to a new generation of Indigenous activists, who placed a greater emphasis on their rights as First Peoples as seen through the establishment of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, the focus on sovereignty and land rights."
1967 Australian referendum (Aboriginals),"Negative application of ""race power""
When John Howard's Coalition government came to power in 1996, it intervened in the Hindmarsh Island bridge controversy in South Australia with legislation that introduced an exception to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984, to allow the bridge to proceed. The Ngarrindjeri challenged the new legislation in the High Court on the basis that it was discriminatory to declare that the Heritage Protection Act applied to sites everywhere but Hindmarsh Island, and that such discrimination – essentially on the basis of race – had been disallowed since the Commonwealth was granted the power to make laws with respect to the ""Aboriginal race"" as a result of the 1967 Referendum. The High Court decided, by a majority, that the amended s.51(xxvi) of the Constitution still did not restrict the Commonwealth parliament to making laws solely for the benefit of any particular race, but still empowered the parliament to make laws that were to the detriment of any race. This decision effectively meant that those people who had believed that they were casting a vote against negative discrimination towards Indigenous people in 1967 had, in fact, allowed the Commonwealth to participate in the discrimination against Indigenous people which had been practised by the States."
1967 Australian referendum (Aboriginals),"See also
2023 Australian Indigenous Voice referendum
Council for Aboriginal Rights
History of Australia
Politics of Australia
Referendums in Australia
Voting rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples"
1967 Australian referendum (Aboriginals),"Notes
References
Sources
Further reading
External links
Commonwealth of Australia (6 April 1967). ""Referendums to be held on Saturday, 27 May, 1967, on the proposed laws for the alteration of the Constitution entitled Constitution alteration (Parliament) 1967 and Constitution alteration (Aboriginals) 1967"". Commonwealth Government Printer. Archived from the original on 20 April 2019 – via Museums Victoria. (Scan of first two pages of information booklet, including the two questions)
""Constitution Alteration (Aboriginals) 1967"". Federal Legislation. Australian Government.
""1967 referendum: 50 years + counting"", digitised recording of an event held at State Library of Queensland reflecting on the 50 year anniversary of the referendum
""Don't Just Count Us, Let Us Count!"", State Library of Queensland. Exhibition relating to the 1967 Australian Referendum, made in conjunction with the Aboriginal Centre for Performing Arts (ACPA)."
Western Australia,"Western Australia (WA) is a state of Australia occupying the western third of the land area of the Australian continent. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean to the north and west, the Southern Ocean to the south, the Northern Territory to the north-east, and South Australia to the south-east. With a total land area of 2,527,013 square kilometres (975,685 sq mi), Western Australia is Australia's largest state as well as the second-largest subdivision of any country on Earth, surpassed only by the Sakha Republic in eastern Russia.
Western Australia has a diverse range of climates, including tropical conditions in the Kimberley, deserts in the interior (including the Great Sandy Desert, Little Sandy Desert, Gibson Desert, and Great Victoria Desert) and a Mediterranean climate on the south-west and southern coastal areas. As of 2021, the state has 2.91 million inhabitants—11 percent of the national total. Over 90 percent of the state's population live in the south-west corner and around 80 percent live in the state capital Perth, leaving the remainder of the state sparsely populated. The Trans-Australian Railway and the Eyre Highway traverse the Nullarbor Plain in the state's south-east, providing the principal connection between Western Australia and the population centres in the eastern states.
Western Australia's Indigenous peoples have been present for tens of thousands of years. Dutch explorers visited Western Australia from the 17th century, with Dirk Hartog's 1616 expedition the first Europeans to make landfall. The British claimed Western Australia in 1827 and established the Swan River Colony with Perth as its capital in 1829. The Western Australian gold rushes of the late 19th century resulted in a significant population influx. The colony was granted responsible government in 1890, the last of the Australian colonies to become self-governing, and federated with the other colonies in 1901.
Western Australia's mining sector is a key driver of the state economy. The late 20th century saw the development of the state's significant iron ore mining industry – the world's largest – as well as primarily offshore petroleum and natural gas resources. Gold mining retains a significant presence and many other mineral commodities are mined, with Perth being a major centre for associated services. Outside of mining, primary industry is the other significant contributor to the state's economy, including agriculture in the Wheatbelt and temperate southern coastal regions, pastoralism in marginal grassland areas, forestry in the south-west and fishing (including pearling and, historically, whaling)."
Western Australia,"History
Western Australia has a geological history dating back to 4.4 billion years ago when Hadean zircons were formed. The earliest direct known life on land, known as stromatolites, started to be created by microbes at around 3.48 billion years ago.
The first human inhabitants of Australia arrived from the north ""over 50,000 years ago and possibly as much as 70,000 years ago"".: 5  Over thousands of years they eventually spread across the whole landmass. These Indigenous Australians were long established throughout Western Australia by the time European explorers began to arrive in the early 17th century."
Western Australia,"The first Europeans to visit Western Australia were those of the Dutch Dirk Hartog expedition, who on 25 October 1616 landed at what is now known as Cape Inscription, Dirk Hartog Island. For the rest of the 17th century, other Dutch and British navigators encountered the coast of what Abel Tasman named New Holland in 1644, usually unintentionally as demonstrated by the many shipwrecks along the coast of ships that deviated from the Brouwer Route (because of poor navigation and storms). By the late 18th century, British and French sailors had begun to explore the Western Australian coast. The Baudin expedition of 1800–03 included the coast of Western Australia and resulted in the Freycinet Map of 1811, the first published map featuring the full outline of Australia. The name New Holland remained in popular and semi-official use until at least the mid-1850s; that is, it was in use for about 206 years in comparison to the name Australia which to date has been in use for about 195 years.: 11 "
Western Australia,"The origins of the present state began with the establishment by Lockyer of a convict-supported settlement from New South Wales at King George III Sound. The settlement was formally annexed on 21 January 1827 by Lockyer when he commanded the Union Jack be raised and a feu de joie fired by the troops. The settlement was founded in response to British concerns about the possibility of a French colony being established on the coast of Western Australia. On 7 March 1831 it was transferred to the control of the Swan River Colony, and named Albany in 1832.
In 1829 the Swan River Colony was established on the Swan River by Captain James Stirling. By 1832, the British settler population of the colony had reached around 1,500, and the official name of the colony was changed to Western Australia on 6 February that year. The two separate townsites of the colony developed slowly into the port city of Fremantle and the state's capital, Perth. York was the first inland settlement in Western Australia, situated 97 kilometres (60 mi) east of Perth and settled on 16 September 1831. York was the staging point for early explorers who discovered the rich gold reserves of Kalgoorlie.
Population growth was very slow until significant discoveries of gold were made in the 1890s around Kalgoorlie."
Western Australia,"In 1887, a new constitution was drafted, providing for the right of self-governance of European Australians, and in 1890, the act granting self-government to the colony was passed by the British Parliament. John Forrest became the first Premier of Western Australia.
In 1896, after discoveries of gold at Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie, the Western Australian Parliament authorised the raising of a loan to construct a pipeline to transport 23 megalitres (5 million imperial gallons) of water per day to the burgeoning population on the goldfields. The pipeline, known as the Goldfields Water Supply Scheme, was completed in 1903.  C. Y.  O'Connor, Western Australia's first engineer-in-chief, designed and oversaw the construction of the pipeline. It carries water 530 km (330 mi) from Perth to Kalgoorlie, and is attributed by historians as an important factor driving the state's population and economic growth.
Following a campaign led by Forrest, electors of the colony of Western Australia voted in favour of federation with the five other Australian colonies, resulting in Western Australia officially becoming a state on 1 January 1901."
Western Australia,"Geography
Western Australia is bounded to the east by longitude 129°E, the meridian 129 degrees east of Greenwich, which defines the border with South Australia and the Northern Territory, and bounded by the Indian Ocean to the west and north. The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) designates the body of water south of the continent as part of the Indian Ocean; in Australia it is officially gazetted as the Southern Ocean.[b]
The total length of the state's eastern border is 1,862 km (1,157 mi). There are 20,781 km (12,913 mi) of coastline, including 7,892 km (4,904 mi) of island coastline. The total land area occupied by the state is 2.5 million km2 (970 thousand sq mi)."
Western Australia,"Geology
The bulk of Western Australia consists of the extremely old Yilgarn craton and Pilbara craton which merged with the Deccan Plateau of India, Madagascar and the Kaapvaal and Zimbabwe cratons of Southern Africa, in the Archean Eon to form Ur, one of the oldest supercontinents on Earth (3 – 3.2  billion years ago). In May 2017, evidence of the earliest known life on land may have been found in 3.48-billion-year-old geyserite and other related mineral deposits (often found around hot springs and geysers) uncovered in the Pilbara craton.
Because the only mountain-building since then has been of the Stirling Range with the rifting from Antarctica, the land is extremely eroded and ancient, with no part of the state above 1,249 metres (4,098 ft) AHD (at Mount Meharry in the Hamersley Range of the Pilbara region). Most of the state is a low plateau with an average elevation of about 400 metres (1,200 ft), very low relief, and no surface runoff. This descends relatively sharply to the coastal plains, in some cases forming a sharp escarpment (as with the Darling Range/Darling Scarp near Perth)."
Western Australia,"The extreme age of the landscape has meant that the soils are remarkably infertile and frequently laterised. Even soils derived from granitic bedrock contain an order of magnitude less available phosphorus and only half as much nitrogen as soils in comparable climates in other continents. Soils derived from extensive sandplains or ironstone are even less fertile, nearly devoid of soluble phosphate and deficient in zinc, copper, molybdenum and sometimes potassium and calcium.
The infertility of most of the soils has required heavy application by farmers of fertilisers. These have resulted in damage to invertebrate and bacterial populations. The grazing and use of hoofed mammals and, later, heavy machinery through the years have resulted in compaction of soils and great damage to the fragile soils.
Large-scale land clearing for agriculture has damaged habitats for native flora and fauna. As a result, the South West region of the state has a higher concentration of rare, threatened or endangered flora and fauna than many areas of Australia, making it one of the world's biodiversity ""hot spots"". Large areas of the state's wheatbelt region have problems with dryland salinity and the loss of fresh water."
Western Australia,"Climate
The southwest coastal area has a Mediterranean climate. It was originally heavily forested, including large stands of karri, one of the tallest trees in the world. This agricultural region is one of the nine most bio-diverse terrestrial habitats, with a higher proportion of endemic species than most other equivalent regions. Thanks to the offshore Leeuwin Current, the area is one of the top six regions for marine biodiversity and contains the most southerly coral reefs in the world.
Average annual rainfall varies from 300 millimetres (12 in) at the edge of the Wheatbelt region to 1,400 millimetres (55 in) in the wettest areas near Northcliffe, but from November to March, evaporation exceeds rainfall, and it is generally very dry. Plants are adapted to this as well as the extreme poverty of all soils.
The central two-thirds of the state is arid and sparsely inhabited. The only significant economic activity is mining. Annual rainfall averages less than 300 millimetres (8–10 in), most of which occurs in sporadic torrential falls related to cyclone events in summer.
An exception to this is the northern tropical regions. The Kimberley has an extremely hot monsoonal climate with average annual rainfall ranging from 500 to 1,500 millimetres (20–60 in), but there is a very long almost rainless season from April to November. Eighty-five percent of the state's runoff occurs in the Kimberley, but because it occurs in violent floods and because of the insurmountable poverty of the generally shallow soils, the only development has taken place along the Ord River.
Snow is rare in the state and typically occurs only in the Stirling Range near Albany, as it is the only mountain range far enough south and sufficiently elevated. More rarely, snow can fall on the nearby Porongurup Range. Snow outside these areas is a major event; it usually occurs in hilly areas of southwestern Australia. The most widespread low-level snow occurred on 26 June 1956 when snow was reported in the Perth Hills, as far north as Wongan Hills and as far east as Salmon Gums. However, even in the Stirling Range, snowfalls rarely exceed 5 cm (2 in) and rarely settle for more than one day.
The highest observed temperature of 50.7 °C (123.3 °F) was recorded in Onslow on 13 January 2022. The lowest temperature recorded was −7.2 °C (19.0 °F) at Eyre Bird Observatory on 17 August 2008.
The south geomagnetic pole is currently tilted 10 degrees away from the South Pole towards Western Australia, allowing for aurora australis displays as far north as Geraldton."
Western Australia,"Flora and fauna
Western Australia is home to around 630 species of birds (depending on the taxonomy used). Of these around 15 are endemic to the state. The best areas for birds are the southwestern corner of the state and the area around Broome and the Kimberley.
The Flora of Western Australia comprises 10,162 published native vascular plant species, along with a further 1,196 species currently recognised but unpublished. They occur within 1,543 genera from 211 families; there are also 1,276 naturalised alien or invasive plant species, more commonly known as weeds. In the southwest region are some of the largest numbers of plant species for its area in the world. 
Western Australia's ecoregions include the sandstone gorges of the Kimberley on the northern coast, and below that the drier Victoria Plains tropical savanna inland, and the semi-desert Pilbara shrublands, Carnarvon xeric shrublands, and Western Australian mulga shrublands to the southwest. Southwards along the coast are the Southwest Australia savanna and the Swan Coastal Plain around Perth, with the jarrah-karri forest and shrublands on the southwest corner of the coast around the Margaret River wine-growing area. Going east along the Southern Ocean coast is the Goldfields-Esperance region, including the Esperance mallee and the Coolgardie woodlands inland around town of Coolgardie. Deserts occupy the interior, including the Great Sandy-Tanami desert, Gibson Desert, Great Victoria Desert, and Nullarbor Plain.
In 1831 Scottish botanist Robert Brown produced a scientific paper, General view of the botany of the vicinity of Swan River. It discusses the vegetation of the Swan River Colony."
Western Australia,"Demographics
Europeans began to settle permanently in 1826 when Albany was claimed by Britain to forestall French claims to the western third of the continent. Perth was founded as the Swan River Colony in 1829 by British and Irish settlers, though the outpost languished. Its officials eventually requested convict labour to augment its population. In the 1890s, interstate immigration, resulting from a mining boom in the Goldfields region, resulted in a sharp population increase.
Western Australia did not receive significant flows of immigrants from Britain, Ireland or elsewhere in the British Empire until the early 20th century. At that time, its local projects—such as the Group Settlement Scheme of the 1920s, which encouraged farmers to settle the southwest—increased awareness of Australia's western third as a destination for colonists.
Led by immigrants from the British Isles, Western Australia's population developed at a faster rate during the twentieth century than it had previously. After World War II, both the eastern states and Western Australia received large numbers of Italians, Croatians and Macedonians. Despite this, Britain has contributed the greatest number of immigrants to this day. Western Australia—particularly Perth—has the highest proportion of British-born of any state: 10.3% in 2011, compared to a national average of 5.1%. This group is heavily concentrated in certain parts, where they account for a quarter of the population."
Western Australia,"Perth's metropolitan area (including Mandurah) had an estimated population of 2,043,138 in June 2017 (79% of the state). Other significant population centres include Bunbury (73,989), Geraldton (37,961), Kalgoorlie-Boulder (30,420), Albany (33,998), Karratha (16,446), Broome (14,501) and Port Hedland (14,285)."
Western Australia,"Ancestry and immigration
At the 2016 census, the most commonly nominated ancestries were: "
Western Australia,"3.1% of the population, or 75,978 people, identified as Indigenous Australians (Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders) in 2016."
Western Australia,"Language
At the 2016 census, 75.2% of inhabitants spoke only English at home, with the next most common languages being Mandarin (1.9%), Italian (1.2%), Vietnamese (0.8%), Cantonese (0.8%) and Tagalog (0.6%)."
Western Australia,"Religion
According to the 2021 census, Christianity is the major religious affiliation in WA, followed by 41.1% of its population. In 1971, Christianity was followed by 85.5% of the population and it has been declining since, while the percentage of people who identified as having no religious affiliation has increased from 8.7% in 1971 to 42.9% in 2021.
A small minority of the population are Muslims (2.5%), Buddhists (2.2%) and Hindus (2.0%)."
Western Australia,"Economy
Western Australia's economy is largely driven by extraction and processing of a diverse range of mineral and petroleum commodities. The structure of the economy is closely linked to these natural resources, providing a comparative advantage in resource extraction and processing. As a consequence:"
Western Australia,"Western Australia contributes an estimated 58% of Australia's Mineral and Energy Exports, potentially earning up to 4.64% of Australia's total GDP.
Gross state product per person ($97,940 in 2017–18) is higher than any other state and well above the national average ($73,267).
Diversification (i.e. a greater range of commodities) over the past 15 years has provided a more balanced production base and less reliance on just a few major export markets, insulating the economy from fluctuations in world prices to some extent.
Finance, insurance and property services and construction have grown steadily and have increased their share of economic output.
Recent growth in global demand for minerals and petroleum, especially in China (iron-ore) and Japan (for LNG), has ensured economic growth above the national average.
In 2019 Western Australia's overseas exports accounted for 46% of the nation's total. The state's major export commodities included iron-ore, petroleum, gold, alumina, nickel, wheat, copper, lithium, chemicals and mineral sands.
Western Australia is the world's largest iron-ore producer (34% of the world's total), and extracts 66% (6.9% of world production) of Australia's 306 tonnes (9.8 million troy ounces) of gold in 2022. It is a major world producer of bauxite, which is processed into alumina at four refineries providing 11% of total world production. Until 2020 diamonds were extracted from the world's largest diamond mine in the far north Kimberley region. Coal mined at Collie is the main fuel for baseload electricity generation in the state's south-west.
Agricultural production in WA is a major contributor to the state and national economy. In the period 2010–2019 wheat production in WA has averaged nearly 10 million tonnes (22 billion pounds), valued at $2.816 billion in 2019, accounting for half the nation's total and providing $2–3 billion in export income.
Other significant farm output includes wool, beef, lamb, barley, canola, lupins, oats and pulses. There is a high level of overseas demand for live animals from WA, driven mainly by southeast Asia's feedlots and Middle Eastern countries, where Islamic dietary laws and a lack of storage and refrigeration facilities favour live animals over imports of processed meat. About half of Australia's live cattle exports come from Western Australia.
Resource sector growth in recent years has resulted in significant labour and skills shortages, leading to recent efforts by the state government to encourage interstate and overseas immigration. According to the 2006 census, the median individual income was A$500 per week in Western Australia (compared to A$466 in Australia as a whole). The median family income was A$1246 per week (compared to A$1171 for Australia). Recent growth has also contributed to significant rises in average property values in 2006, although values plateaued in 2007.
Located south of Perth, the heavy industrial area of Kwinana had the nation's largest oil refinery with a capacity of 23,200 cubic metres per day (146,000 barrels per day) until its closure in 2021, producing most of the state's petrol and diesel. Kwinana also hosts alumina and nickel processing plants, port facilities for grain and other bulk exports, and support industries for mining and petroleum such as heavy and light engineering, and metal fabrication. Shipbuilding (e.g. Austal) and associated support industries are found at nearby Henderson, just north of Kwinana. Significant secondary industries include cement and building product manufacturing, flour milling, food processing, animal feed production, automotive body building and printing.
Western Australia has a significant fishing industry. Products for local consumption and export include western rock lobsters, prawns, crabs, shark and tuna, as well as pearl fishing in the Kimberley region of the state. Processing is conducted along the west coast. Whaling was a key marine industry but ceased at Albany in 1978.
Western Australia has the world's biggest plantations of both Indian sandalwood (northern WA) and Australian sandalwood (semi-arid regions), which are used to produce sandalwood oil and incense. The WA sandalwood industry provides about 40% of the international sandalwood oil market."
Western Australia,"Tourism
In recent years, tourism has grown in importance, with significant numbers of visitors to the state coming from the UK and Ireland (28%), other European countries (14%) Singapore (16%), Japan (10%) and Malaysia (8%). Revenue from tourism is a strong economic driver in many of the smaller population centres outside of Perth, especially in coastal locations.
Tourism forms a major part of the Western Australian economy with 833,100 international visitors making up 12.8% of the total international tourism to Australia in the year ending March 2015. The top three source markets include the United Kingdom (17%), Singapore (10%), and New Zealand (10%) with the majority of purpose for visitation being holiday/vacation reasons. The tourism industry contributes $9.3 billion to the Western Australian economy and supports 94,000 jobs within the state. Both directly and indirectly, the industry makes up 3.2% of the state's economy whilst comparatively, WA's largest revenue source, the mining sector, brings in 31%.
Tourism WA is the government agency responsible for promoting Western Australia as a holiday destination."
Western Australia,"Government
Western Australia was granted self-government in 1890 with a bicameral Parliament located in Perth, consisting of the Legislative Assembly (or lower house), which has 59 members; and the Legislative Council (or upper house), which has 36 members. Suffrage is universal and compulsory for citizens over 18 years of age.
With the federation of the Australian colonies in 1901, Western Australia became a state within Australia's federal structure; this involved ceding certain powers to the Commonwealth (or Federal) government in accordance with the Constitution; all powers not specifically granted to the Commonwealth remained solely with the State. However over time the Commonwealth has effectively expanded its powers through broad interpretation of its enumerated powers and increasing control of taxation and financial distribution (see Federalism in Australia).
Whilst the sovereign of Western Australia is the monarch of Australia (currently Charles III) and executive power is nominally vested in his or her state representative, the Governor (currently Chris Dawson), executive power rests with the premier and ministers drawn from the party or coalition of parties holding a majority of seats in the Legislative Assembly. Roger Cook is the premier, having succeeded Mark McGowan after his resignation in June 2023."
Western Australia,"Secession
Secessionism has been a recurring feature of Western Australia's political landscape since shortly after European settlement in 1826. Western Australia was the most reluctant participant in the Commonwealth of Australia. Western Australia did not participate in the earliest federation conference. Longer-term residents of Western Australia were generally opposed to federation; however, the discovery of gold brought many immigrants from other parts of Australia. It was these residents, primarily in Kalgoorlie but also in Albany who voted to join the Commonwealth, and the proposal of these areas being admitted separately under the name Auralia was considered.
In a referendum in April 1933, 68% of voters voted for the state to leave the Commonwealth of Australia with the aim of returning to the British Empire as an autonomous territory. The State Government sent a delegation to Westminster, but the British Government ruled that after the Statute of Westminster 1931, it no longer had the authority to amend the constitution of Australia without the consent of its federal government; the British Government took no action."
Western Australia,"Local government
Western Australia is divided into 139 Local Government Areas, including Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. Their mandate and operations are governed by the Local Government Act 1995."
Western Australia,"Education
Education in Western Australia consists of one year of pre-school at age 4 or 5, followed by six years of primary education for all students as of 2015. At age 12 or 13, students begin six years of secondary education. Students are required to attend school up until they are 16 years old. Sixteen and 17 year olds are required to be enrolled in school or a training organisation, be employed or be in a combination of school/training/employment. Students have the option to study at a TAFE college after Year 10, or continue through to Year 12 with vocational courses or a university entrance courses.
There are five universities in Western Australia. They consist of four Perth-based public universities, being the University of Western Australia, Curtin University, Edith Cowan University and Murdoch University; and one Fremantle-based private Roman Catholic university, the University of Notre Dame Australia. The University of Notre Dame is also one of only two private universities in Australia, along with Bond University, a not-for-profit private education provider based in Gold Coast, Queensland."
Western Australia,"Media
Print
Western Australia has two daily newspapers: the Seven West Media-owned tabloid The West Australian and the Kalgoorlie Miner. Also published is one weekend paper, The Weekend West, and one Sunday tabloid newspaper, which is also owned by Seven West Media after purchase from News Corporation's The Sunday Times. There are also 17 weekly community newspapers with distribution from Yanchep in the north to Mandurah in the south. There are two major weekly rural papers in the state, Countryman and the Australian Community Media-owned Farm Weekly. The national broadsheet publication The Australian is also available, although with sales per capita lagging far behind those in other states. WAtoday is an online newspaper owned by Nine Entertainment, focusing its coverage on Perth and Western Australia."
Western Australia,"Television
Metropolitan Perth has five broadcast television stations;"
Western Australia,"ABC TV WA. (Callsign: ABW – Channel 12 Digital)
SBS WA. (Callsign: SBS – was on Channel 29 Digital – now Channel 7 Digital since the 2013 retune)
Seven Network Perth. (Callsign: TVW – Channel 6 Digital)
Nine Network Perth. (Callsign: STW – Channel 8 Digital)
Network Ten Perth. (Callsign: NEW – Channel 11 Digital)
Perth formerly had West TV, a free-to-air community television channel that began broadcasting in April 2010 and ceased broadcasting in February 2020. It replaced Access 31, which ceased broadcasting in August 2008.
Regional WA has a similar availability of stations as Perth. Geographically, it is one of the largest television markets in the world, including almost one-third of the continent."
Western Australia,"Golden West Network (GWN7). Owned by Seven West Media. (Callsigns: SSW South West, VEW Goldfields/Esperance, GTW Central West, WAW remote areas)
WIN Television WA. Affiliated with Nine (Callsign: WOW)
West Digital Television. Affiliated with Ten (Callsigns: SDW South West, VDW Goldfields/Esperance, GDW Central West, WDW remote areas)
Regional WA used to have Westlink. An open-narrowcast community-based television channel that was only on satellite until Westlink's discontinuation in 2018. (Satellite only)"
Western Australia,"In addition, broadcasters operate digital multichannels:"
Western Australia,"ABC HD (Carried by ABW)
ABC TV Plus (Carried by ABW)
ABC Me (Carried by ABW)
ABC News (Carried by ABW)
SBS HD (Carried by SBS)
SBS Viceland (Carried by SBS)
SBS World Movies (Carried by SBS)
SBS Food (Carried by SBS)
NITV (Carried by SBS)
SBS WorldWatch (Carried by SBS)
7HD (Carried by TVW)
7TWO (Carried by TVW and affiliates)
7mate (Carried by TVW and affiliates)
7flix (Carried by TVW)
Racing.com (Carried by TVW and affiliates)
9HD (Carried by STW and affiliates)
9Gem (Carried by STW and affiliates)
9Go! (Carried by STW and affiliates)
9Life (Carried by STW and affiliates)
9Rush (Carried by STW)
Extra (Carried by STW)
10 Bold (Carried by NEW and affiliate)
10 Peach (Carried by NEW and affiliate)
10 Shake (Carried by NEW)
10 HD (Carried by NEW and affiliate)
TVSN (Carried by NEW and affiliate)
Gecko TV (Carried by NEW)
Pay TV services are provided by Foxtel, which acquired many of the assets and all the remaining subscribers of the insolvent Galaxy Television satellite service in 1998. Some metropolitan suburbs are serviced by Pay TV via cable; however, most of the metropolitan and rural areas can only access Pay TV via satellite."
Western Australia,"Radio
Perth has many radio stations on both AM and FM frequencies. ABC stations include ABC NewsRadio (6PB 585 AM), ABC Radio Perth (6WF 720 AM), Radio National (6RN 810 AM), ABC Classic FM (6ABC 97.7FM) and Triple J (6JJJ 99.3FM). The six commercial stations are: Triple M (6PPM), Nova 93.7 (6PER), Mix 94.5 (6MIX), 96FM (6NOW) and AM 882 (6PR), AM 1080 (6iX) and AM 1116 (6MM)
The leading community radio stations are Curtin FM 100.1, 6RTR FM 92.1, Sonshine FM 98.5 (6SON) and 91.3 SportFM (6WSM)."
Western Australia,"Culture
Arts and entertainment
Western Australia is home to one of the country's leading performance training institutions, the acclaimed Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA), as well as a burgeoning theatrical and musical scene. Notable musicians and bands to have been born in or lived in Western Australia include Adam Brand, Ammonia, Karnivool, Birds of Tokyo, Bon Scott, Eskimo Joe, Johnny Young, Gyroscope, the John Butler Trio, Tame Impala, Kevin Mitchell, Tim Minchin, Troye Sivan, the Kill Devil Hills, Pendulum, the Pigram Brothers, Rolf Harris, Stella Donnelly and the Triffids. The West Australian Music Industry Awards (WAMis) have been awarded every year to the leading musicians and performers in WA since 2001.
Notable actors and television personalities from Western Australia include Heath Ledger, Sam Worthington, Ernie Dingo, Jessica Marais, Megan Gale, Rove McManus, Isla Fisher, and Melissa George. Films and television series filmed or partly filmed in Western Australia include Rabbit-Proof Fence, The Heights, Mystery Road, These Final Hours, Cloudstreet, Jasper Jones, Australia, Bran Nu Dae, Red Dog, ABBA: the Movie and Last Train to Freo."
Western Australia,"Noted Western Australian Indigenous painters and artisans include Jack Dale Mengenen, Paddy Bedford, Queenie McKenzie, and siblings Nyuju Stumpy Brown and Rover Thomas.
The West Australian Symphony Orchestra (WASO) is based at the Perth Concert Hall. Other concert, performance and indoor sporting venues in Western Australia include His Majesty's Theatre, the State Theatre Centre of Western Australia, the Crown Theatre and Perth Arena, which opened in 2012. Performing arts companies based in Perth include the West Australian Ballet, the West Australian Opera, the Black Swan State Theatre Company and the Perth Theatre Company.
Western Australia has served as the setting for a number of works of Australian literature. Prominent authors include Katharine Susannah Prichard, Randolph Stow, Tim Winton, Kim Scott, Sally Morgan, Joan London, Mary Durack and Craig Silvey.
The public Art Gallery of Western Australia is part of the Perth Cultural Centre. Founded in 1895, it houses the State Art Collection, comprising works from local and international artists, dating back to the 1800s. The Perth Cultural Centre is also home to the Western Australian Museum, State Library of Western Australia, State Records Office, and Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA). Western Australia has a public library system, with libraries in every local government area (although some public libraries are shared school libraries)."
Western Australia,"Sport
A number of national or international sporting teams and events are based in the state, including:"
Western Australia,"Australian rules football: The West Coast Eagles and the Fremantle Dockers compete in the Australian Football League (AFL). They also have women's teams playing in the AFL Women's league. The West Australian Football League (WAFL) is the main local football competition, but other local and amateur football leagues exist across the state.
Baseball: The Perth Heat compete in the Australian Baseball League.
Basketball: The Perth Wildcats (men) and Perth Lynx (women) compete in the National Basketball League and Women's National Basketball League, respectively.
Cricket: Western Australia represent the state in first-class and List A domestic cricket, with the Perth Scorchers competing in the Twenty20 Big Bash League.
Field hockey: The Thundersticks (men) and Diamonds (women) compete in the Australian Hockey League.
Netball: The West Coast Fever compete in the ANZ Championship.
Rugby league: The West Coast Pirates compete in the S. G. Ball Cup.
Rugby union: The Western Force competes in Super Rugby Pacific.
Soccer: Perth Glory field men's and women's teams in the A-League Men and A-League Women, respectively.
Tennis: The ITF Hopman Cup, an annual international team indoor hardcourt tennis tournament.
Water Polo: The UWA Torpedoes water polo club competes in the National Water Polo League (NWPL).
International sporting events hosted in the past in Western Australia include the Tom Hoad Cup (water polo), the Perth International (golf), the 2006 Gravity Games (extreme sports), the 2002 Women's Hockey World Cup, the 1991 FINA World Aquatics Championships, the World Rally Championships and the 1962 British Empire and Commonwealth Games.
Western Australia's largest sports stadium is Perth Stadium, also known by naming rights sponsorship as Optus Stadium. It has a capacity of over 60,000 people and is primarily used for Australian rules football and cricket."
Western Australia,"Wine
Winemaking regions are concentrated in the cooler climate of the south-western portion of the state. Western Australia produces less than 5% of the country's wine output, but in quality terms is considered to be very much near the top. Major wine producing regions include: Margaret River, The Great Southern, Swan Valley as well as smaller districts including Blackwood Valley, Manjimup, Pemberton, Peel, Chittering Valley, Perth Hills, and Geographe."
Western Australia,"Sister states
Western Australia has five sister states:"
Western Australia,"East Java, Indonesia
Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan
Andhra Pradesh State, India
Tuscany Region, Italy
Zhejiang Province, China
In 1981, a sister state agreement was drawn up between Western Australia and Hyōgo Prefecture in Japan that was aimed at improving cultural ties between the two states. To commemorate the 10th anniversary of this agreement, the Hyōgo Prefectural Government Cultural Centre was established in Perth in 1992. Prior to that, the Western Australian government opened an office in Kobe, the largest city in Hyōgo, to facilitate maintenance of the relationship in 1989.
Following the Great Hanshin earthquake that devastated southern Hyōgo in January 1995, Western Australian groups and businesses raised funds and provided materials, whilst individuals travelled to Hyōgo to help with emergency relief and the subsequent reconstruction process. The two governments signed a memorandum of understanding on the 20th anniversary in 2001 that aimed to improve the economic relationship between the two states.
Further to the sister state relationship, the City of Rockingham in Western Australia and the City of Akō in Hyōgo signed a sister city agreement in 1997. It is one of nine sister city relationships between Western Australian and Japanese cities."
Western Australia,"See also
Outline of Australia
Index of Australia-related articles"
Western Australia,"Government of Western Australia
Mining in Western Australia
Petroleum in Western Australia"
Western Australia,"Lists
List of Western Australian towns
List of statues in Western Australia
Local Government Areas of Western Australia
Category:Lists of people from Western Australia"
Western Australia,"Notes
a  ""West Australia"" and its related demonym ""West Australian"" are occasionally used, including in the names of the main daily newspaper, The West Australian, and the state-based West Australian Football League, but are rarely used in an official sense. The terms ""Westralia"" and ""Westralian"" were regularly used in the 19th and 20th century.  The terms are still found in the names of certain companies and buildings, e.g. Westralia House in Perth, the skyscraper Westralia Square on St Georges Terrace, and Westralia Airports Corporation, which operates Perth Airport, as well as in the names of several ships. 
b  In Australia, the body of water south of the continent is officially gazetted as the Southern Ocean, whereas the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) designates it as part of the Indian Ocean."
Western Australia,"References
Further reading
Zuckermann, Ghil'ad (2020). Revivalistics: From the Genesis of Israeli to Language Reclamation in Australia and Beyond. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199812790."
Western Australia,External links
Western Australia," Geographic data related to Western Australia at OpenStreetMap
Welcome to Western Australia, a tourist website run by Tourism Western Australia, the statutory authority responsible for promoting Western Australia as a tourist destination
Western Australia government's website
Watch historical footage of Western Australia from the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia's collection.
Watch audiovisual material relating to Western Australia on the National Film and Sound Archive's australianscreen online."
Archaeology of Australia,"Australian archaeology is a large sub-field in the discipline of archaeology. Archaeology in Australia takes four main forms: Aboriginal archaeology (the archaeology of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia before and after European settlement), historical archaeology (the archaeology of Australia after European settlement), maritime archaeology and the archaeology of the contemporary past (after the Second World War). Bridging these sub-disciplines is the important concept of cultural heritage management,  which encompasses Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sites, historical sites, and maritime sites."
Archaeology of Australia,"Research and investigations
Archaeological studies or investigations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and culture in Australia have had many different agendas through time. Initial archaeological investigation was often focused on finding the oldest sites. By the 1970s, archaeological research was also concerned with the environment and the way it impacted on humans. In the late 1970s cultural heritage management gained prominence, with the increasing demands by Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups for representation in archaeological research. At a research level, the focus shifted to cultural change of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people through time.
Currently, archaeological research places great importance on Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people's viewpoints on the land and history of Australia. Consideration is given to Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people's belief that archaeological sites are not just capsules of the past but a continuation from the past to the present. Therefore, at a research level, significance is placed not only the past but also on the importance of the present."
Archaeology of Australia,"The first settlement of Australia is a popular research topic both in archaeology and in the public arena. There is consensus that no human or closely related species evolved independently in Australia. This is because there have been no species of primate found in Australia, either in the present or in the fossil record. It is therefore assumed that the first settlers of Australia came from outside. At present, the fossil record suggests that the first settlers were Homo sapiens, or fully anatomically modern humans.
There is controversy over where the first Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people originated. Both of the two main theories postulate that the first settlers were fully anatomically modern humans. Asian genetic studies have demonstrated that there are similarities between Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, Melanesians and Indians. However, the suggested date of 60,000 years ago for initial settlement is quite early when compared to other areas of the world. This may suggest that the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations derive from an early African population which migrated along the south coast of Asia, at a much faster rate than other populations migrating across the continents of the Holocene.
The first settlement of Australia most likely occurred during the last glacial maximum. During this time Australia, New Guinea, the Aru Islands, and Tasmania were joined as a single land mass called Sahul. The south-east Asian continent and islands were also joined as a single land mass called Sunda. It is theorized that the first Australians crossed the sea between Sahul and Sunda about 60,000 to 40,000 years ago. Other dates have been suggested, and this timeframe is not seen as conclusive. Sunda and Sahul had a permanent water-crossing, meaning that the first Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people had to make a crossing on the open sea (see Wallace Line).
Sahul is important in that in the past Australia (including Tasmania) was not an isolated continent, but was joined with New Guinea and the Aru Islands. New Guinea and the Aru Islands have also been the focus of archaeological investigations by Australian researchers.
The most important early sites in Australia are:"
Archaeology of Australia,"Nauwalabila I (55,000 – 60,000 years old)
Madjedbebe (65,000 years ago)
Devil's Lair (45,000 years old)
Lake Mungo (61,000 or 40,000 years old) – controversy exists over precise dating (see below)
Warratyi (49,000 years old)
The change in sea levels means that the first settlements located on the coast would have been submerged.
With the settlement of Australia, it is most probable that Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people first settled on the northern coast, as this is the area closest to Asia. However, the actual spread of people and the settlement of the continent is debated, with three major models put forward:"
Archaeology of Australia,"Concentric dispersal through the entire continent through one single ""entry"" point.
Coastal dispersal by spreading along the coastline and later entering inland areas, mainly via the major waterways.
Fluctuating colonization in and out of different environmental zones. For example, in plentiful years the population would occupy semi-arid regions, but in drought would move to areas with better resources."
Archaeology of Australia,"Controversies in Aboriginal archaeology
Date of arrival
There is significant debate over the date of arrival of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people into the Australian continent. Until the 1950s, it was often believed that arrival of the first Aboriginal people was within the last 10,000 years. In the 1950s, the dates were extended to the last Ice Age, based upon falling sea-levels at that period and the existence of landbridges linking the islands of the Sunda Shelf and the Sahul Continental Shelf with Australia, New Guinea, the Aru Islands, and Tasmania. The discovery and use of carbon-14 dating extended the dating to 40,000 years at Lake Mungo, and this was the date most frequently given. However, more recently, the analysis of sea levels has shown that coastlines 40,000 years ago were not as exposed as they were 60,000 to 70,000 years ago. The submergence of the earliest sites of occupation due to rising sea levels has meant that the earliest archaeological signature may in fact represent occupation much later than the initial time of arrival. The difficulty in establishing a date of arrival earlier than 50,000 years has been compounded by the widespread use of radiocarbon dating and the supposed ""radiocarbon barrier"" which establishes 40,000 years as a limit to which carbon-14 dates can be easily and reliably extracted. This limitation has prompted many archaeologists, including Rhys Jones and Alan Thorne, to include thermoluminescence dating methods in their studies of early occupation sites. It is argued that 60,000 to 70,000 years best fits the evidence from the Human genome diversity project and a number of other new dating technologies. Some have proposed dates extending back 100,000 to 120,000 years, but these dates are criticised on technical grounds and are not accepted by most scientists. A recent study by Eske Willesev of the University of Copenhagen, of the genome of an Aboriginal man from the Western Australian Goldfields confirms that the Aboriginal population separated from the early human stock 70,000 years ago, in Africa or from Oman, and travelled fairly rapidly across south and south eastern Asia to arrive in Australia at least 50,000 years ago, before a second wave travelled into Europe and Asia, receiving some input from the Aboriginal people who had already made that journey."
Archaeology of Australia,"Multiple arrivals
Earlier anthropologists believed that there were ""three waves"" of arrival of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to Australia, the first being the ""negrito"" Tasmanian people, who were displaced by ""Murrayans"", who in turn were considered to be displaced by ""Carpentarians"". These theories were sometimes advocated to disprove the Aboriginal claim to being the indigenous ""first peoples"", and are no longer accepted by archaeologists.  The finding of a robust skeleton with surprisingly so-called ""primitive"" features at Kow Swamp was also advocated as proof of an earlier wave of settlers to the continent. Dating of the Kow Swamp material, however, showed that rather than being earlier, it was in fact a lot more recent than the nearby Mungo gracile skeletons that more closely resembled modern Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Today it is thought that Aboriginal people throughout the continent are descendants of an original founder population, although this does not completely exclude some contribution from later arrivals.
For example, on the basis of genomic analysis, it has been found that 400–500 years ago a small band from the Indian sub-continent traveled to northern Australia and contributed to the genome of people living in the north.  At that time the appearance of the backed blade tradition, the dingo and other cultural features have been attributed to the arrivals.  Nevertheless, it now appears that rather than a connection with the Indian pariah dogs, as previously thought, the dingo shows a greater connection to the dogs of East Asia, and the genetic bottleneck through which they passed may have been due to a single pregnant female, introduced through Austronesian connections 5,000 years ago."
Archaeology of Australia,"Megafauna extinction
Some researchers, such as Tim Flannery, have put forward the idea that human settlement was responsible for the large climatic and environmental changes that occurred in Australia.
The extent and causes of the Australian megafaunal extinction—generally placed in the Late Pleistocene—continues as an active debate and is a preoccupation among archaeologists and paleontologists working in the Australian scene. Besides ongoing attempts to refine the dating and extent of the extinction event(s), much research is actively directed towards establishing whether, or to what extent, anthropogenic effects played a part in the disappearance of dozens of species of large-bodied animals formerly inhabiting the continent. Central to this question is a determination of how long humans and the megafauna species coexisted. Many factors have been considered as possible causes of the extinction, ranging from environmental variables to entirely human-based activity.
The most extreme theory is that Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were completely responsible for the extinction of these animals through extensive hunting. This theory is largely based on the overkill hypothesis of the Americas, where hunters travelled through the land exterminating megafauna. The overkill hypothesis is largely discredited  (and not just in Australia), as there have been no confirmed discoveries of kill sites, sites that are found in other contexts around the world and associated with megafauna hunting. The sites of Cuddie Springs in New South Wales, and Keilor in Victoria, display some evidence of associations between Aboriginal stone tools and megafauna remains, but do not prove conclusively the overkill theory. Furthermore, the coexistence of Aboriginal populations with the megafauna tends to contradict the overkill hypothesis.  These writers suggest ""threshold (for megafauna dieoff) was crossed between 26,000 and 15,000 yr B.P. when the arid area expanded further than usual and water resources in the woodland areas were severely reduced"", although this finding is disputed by Roberts et al. It is clear from paleobotanical and palaeontological evidence that the extinction coincided with great environmental change. The high-resolution chronology of the changes supports the hypothesis that human hunting alone eliminated the megafauna, and that the subsequent change in flora was most likely a consequence of the elimination of browsers and an increase in fire.
Approximately 18,000 to 7,000 years ago, many societies around the world underwent significant change; in particular, this time marks the rise of agriculture in many Neolithic societies. In the Australian context environmental change did not give rise to the development of agriculture but it may have contributed to the disappearance of populations of animals made even more vulnerable to depletion through hunting and marginalised grazing."
Archaeology of Australia,"Lake Mungo dating
Arguably the oldest human remains in Australia, the Lake Mungo 3 skull was given the age of 60,000 years by Gregory Adcock and his researchers. However, this claim has been criticised, largely due to the process used to analyse the skull and the claims regarding the dating and the mtDNA found. Most people suggest that the age of the specimen is approximately 40,000 years. Sensitivities to handling Aboriginal remains means that specimens are not available for further research, so reassessment of the date awaits the development of appropriate ethical protocols."
Archaeology of Australia,"The intensification debate
The idea of intensification was put forward by a number of archaeologists, but the most prominent in developing the idea was Harry Lourandos. Intensification is an idea that posits that change in economic systems of peoples is controlled by social changes. This means that change can occur without an external force such as environmental change. The idea is derived from a 1990s debate about the Tasmanian Aboriginal people and whether large social/economic change was caused by environmental factors (see Environmental determinism), or from factors within the society. The predominant view at the time held that in the case of the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people any social change was largely influenced by external, largely environmental, factors.
The evidence that supports this idea is that sites at approximately the same time (around 4,000 years ago) experienced increased usage. This is supported by increased site numbers, increased artefact density and an expansion into new environments. This evidence better explained as an artefact of archaeological research and conflation of independent events, by environmental factors, large population growth, technological change, or post-depositional factors."
Archaeology of Australia,"The cultivation question
Kent Flannery's model of the broad spectrum revolution in which foragers diversified the types of food sources harvested, broadening their subsistence base outward to include more fish, small game, water fowl, invertebrates likes snails and shellfish, as well as previously ignored or marginal plant sources, would seem to apply to Australian hunters and gatherers. These changes were linked to climatic changes, including sea level rises during the Flandrian transgression in which:"
Archaeology of Australia,"Conditions became more inviting to marine life offshore in shallow, warm waters.
Quantity and variety of marine life increased drastically as did the number of edible species.
Because the rivers' power weakened with rising waters, and the creation of many estuaries, the currents flowing into the ocean were slow enough to allow fish to ascend upstream to spawn.
Birds found refuge next to riverbeds in marsh grasses and then proceeded to migrate to different habitats.
Aboriginal people had a good understanding of local ecologies, and harvested many varieties of plants and animals in season. W.E.Roth talks about driving kangaroos into a 3 sided enclosure of nets ""with the assistance of numerous beaters"". Wallabies and emus were also caught in a similar way. Wallaroos were hunted with fire and beaten towards a creek, where they were killed with spears and sticks. Animals were also driven towards set nets and fish traps were common.
The degree to which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people on the Australian continent practised agriculture has long been debated by archaeologists. Earlier it was believed that Australian Aboriginal people were ignorant of the principles of agriculture, but this has since been disproven. For instance, Australian Aboriginal women in traditional societies often transplanted immature ""bush tucker"" plants found growing in unfavourable locations to more favourable spots. There were also a number of plants (particularly seeds and roots) that could have lent themselves to cultivation, and were used in making such foods as bush bread. Charles Sturt in his 1844 expedition to northwest New South Wales and central Australia reports seeing large haystacks built by Aboriginal people of seed crops. This was located east of Depot Glen Milparinka about 600 km from the Murray River. Firestick farming has also always been a technique used by Aboriginal people to open the canopy of closed canopy forests, introducing sunlight to the ground, and prompting germination of a number of foodstuffs known to attract kangaroo and other marsupials. This would encourage a more intensive land use than otherwise. But the main reason for the lack of agriculture in Australia is the extreme variability of the climate. Australia is the only continent on Earth, which, as a result of the El Nino Southern Oscillation, experiences greater variability between years than it does between the seasons. Such climatic variability makes farming very difficult, especially for incipient farmers who cannot be supported from outside their community. Australian Aboriginal people found that maintaining stable populations below the effective carrying capacity of the environment would enable an adequate supply of food, even in drought years, so maintaining a stable culture. This made hunting and gathering a more sustainable activity on the Australian continent than neolithic farming. Evidence of cultivation at Kuk in Papua New Guinea, from about 10–12,000 years BP (at a time when that island was joined to Australia, suggests crop raising was possible in the Sahul supercontinent when conditions were favourable."
Archaeology of Australia,"Historical archaeology in Australia
Historical archaeology is the study of the past through material remains such as artefacts (i.e. objects), structures (e.g. standing and ruined buildings, fences, roads), features (e.g. ditches, mounds, canals, landfill), and even whole landscapes modified by human activity and their spatial and stratigraphic contexts.
The origins of historical archaeology in Australia are generally held to lie in archaeological investigations by the late William (Bill) Culican at Fossil Beach in Victoria, in Jim Allen's PhD research at Port Essington in the Northern Territory and in Judy Birmingham's work at Irrawang Pottery in the Hunter Valley of NSW. An increasingly important area of Australian historical archaeology studies the interaction between European and other settlers, and Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people."
Archaeology of Australia,"Underwater and maritime archaeology in Australia
Underwater archaeology is archaeology practised in a submerged environment. It encompasses the pre-historic and historic eras, including post-World War II. Maritime archaeology (the study of humans and their activities in, on, around and under the seas, rivers and estuaries) and nautical archaeology (the specialised study of boat and ship construction) are allied sub-disciplines of archaeology as a whole. Often the sites or relics are not inundated, however.
In mirroring their terrestrial roots, underwater, maritime and nautical archaeology can now include the examination of a wide range of sites ranging from the Indigenous through to industrial archaeology, including historic submerged aircraft. Better known as a sub-discipline of aviation archaeology, underwater aviation archaeology is arguably the most recent offshoot of underwater archaeology, having developed its theoretical underpinnings and a substantial corpus of fieldwork, research and publication work in the late 1990s.
Maritime archaeology, the first of these sub-disciplines to emerge in Australia, commenced under the aegis of Jeremy Green in the 1970s after concerns were expressed by academics and politicians over the rampant destruction of Dutch and British East Indian ships lost on the west coast. After Commonwealth legislation was enacted and enforced after 1976 and the states enacted their own legislation, the sub-discipline spread throughout Australia, as a result of on-going funding by both the states and the Commonwealth. While also encompassing the study of port-related structures (e.g. jetties, anchorages), lighthouses, moorings, defences etc., initially the focus in maritime archaeology was solely on shipwrecks.
Now far broader in its scope, in some states maritime and underwater archaeology is managed by museums and in others by cultural heritage management units. There are also numerous practitioners in private practice, or acting as consultants. All practitioners operate under the aegis of the Australasian Institute for Maritime Archaeology (AIMA)."
Archaeology of Australia,"Cultural heritage management
Commercial or consulting archaeology (also termed cultural heritage management) only developed in earnest in Australia from the 1970s, with the advent of various state legislation requiring approvals for damage or disturbance to archaeological relics, such as the Aboriginal and Archaeological Relics Preservation Act 1972, in Victoria. The Victoria Archaeological Survey was established from the Relics Office in 1975. Historical Archaeology is generally protected by separate legislation, such as the New South Wales Heritage Act 1977, and the various other state counterparts.
Cultural Heritage Management for archaeological sites is seen in the context of wider heritage issues, and follows the principles set out in the Burra Charter or the Australia ICOMOS charter for the conservation of places of cultural significance.
From a handful of practitioners in the 1970s, there are now more than 250 commercially based archaeologists in Australia. Again in Victoria, one of the first to establish was du Cros and associates (later absorbed by Biosis Research, renamed Biosis Pty Ltd in 2012). The Australian Association of Consulting Archaeologist Inc. (AACAI) is the professional body established in 1979 with presently about 50 full members. In New South Wales, companies such as Casey and Lowe and GML have specialised in large scale historical archaeological salvage.
Consultancy archaeology is primarily driven by development, and so is often at the centre of controversy over ownership of heritage and in particular the conflicting objectives of conservation and development. Aboriginal communities often ascribe a special significance to the places where archaeological remains have been found."
Archaeology of Australia,"Legal obligations in Australia
Protection and management of archaeology in Australia is controlled by Federal and State Government legislation including the Commonwealth Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984, The Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act and the various state archaeological legislation such as Victoria's Heritage Act 1995 (covering historical archaeology) and the Aboriginal Heritage Act 2006. Several states maintain archaeological site inventories as the main management tool. The principle of most forms of archaeological legislation in Australia is to provide blanket protection for all archaeological remains and sites, whether or not they have been recorded, and use a system of permits and consents to control change to those sites. for Aboriginal archaeological sites, there is often a requirement for consultation with traditional owners, and they sometimes have a role in approving works that impact on archaeological sites."
Archaeology of Australia,"Native title and land rights
Native title is formalised under The Commonwealth Native Title Act 1993 which establishes a framework for the protection and recognition of native title. The Australian legal system recognises native title where:"
Archaeology of Australia,"the rights and interests are possessed under traditional laws and customs that continue to be acknowledged and observed by the relevant Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people;
by virtue of those laws and customs, the Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people have a connection with the land or waters; and
the native title rights and interests are recognised by the common law of Australia."
Archaeology of Australia,"Notable Australian archaeologists
This is an abbreviated list of Australian archaeologists who have made a notable contribution to the development of the subject of Australian archaeology."
Archaeology of Australia,"Professional societies in Australian archaeology
The Australian Archaeological Association is one of the largest and oldest organisations devoted to furthering archaeology of all types within Australia.
The Australasian Society for Historical Archaeology (ASHA) founded as the Australian Society for Historical Archaeology in 1970. Its aims were, and still are, to promote the study of historical archaeology in Australia.
The Australian Association of Consulting Archaeologists Inc. was founded in 1979 and aims to promote and represent professional archaeologists.
The Archaeological and Anthropological Society of Victoria (AASV) is predominantly a non-professional organisation, which was formed in 1976 in through the amalgamation of two earlier societies, the Anthropological Society of Victoria formed in 1934, and the Archaeological Society of Victoria formed in 1964."
Archaeology of Australia,"Notable sites
Publications
General books
Flood, Josephine, 2010. Archaeology of the dreamtime: the story of prehistoric Australia and its people. Revised edition. Marleston: Gecko Books.
Frankel, David, 1991. Remains to be seen: archaeological insights into Australian prehistory. Melbourne: Longman Cheshire.
Frankel, David, 2017. Between the Murray and the sea: Aboriginal archaeology in south-eastern Australia. Sydney: Sydney University Press.
Griffiths, Billy (2018). Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia. Black Inc. ISBN 9781760640446.
Hiscock, Peter, 2008. Archaeology of ancient Australia. Abingdon: Routledge.
Holdaway, Simon and Nicola Stern, 2004. A record in stone: the study of Australia’s flaked stone artefacts. Melbourne: Museum Victoria and Aboriginal Studies Press.
Mulvaney, John and Johan Kamminga, 1999. Prehistory of Australia. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Mulvaney, John and J. Peter White, (eds), 1987. Australians to 1788. Sydney: Fairfax, Syme & Weldon.
Lourandos, Harry, 1997. A continent of hunter-gatherers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press."
Archaeology of Australia,"Journals
The principal academic journals publishing on Australian archaeology in Australia, are:"
Archaeology of Australia,"Australian Archaeology
Archaeology in Oceania
Queensland Archaeological Research
The Artefact
Bulletin of the Australasian Institute for Maritime Archaeology
Australasian Historical Archaeology
Some history-focused journals such as History Australia and Aboriginal History also feature Australian archaeology related topics. Several international journals such as Nature, Journal of Archaeological Science, Science, Antiquity and the International Journal of Historical Archaeology, often publish articles on Australian archaeology."
Archaeology of Australia,"See also
Australian Aboriginal sacred site
History of Indigenous Australians"
Archaeology of Australia,"References
External links
Australian Archaeological Association
Australian Association of Consulting Archaeologists
Australasian Society for Historical Archaeology"
Human rights in Australia,"Human rights in Australia have largely been developed by the democratically elected Australian Parliament through laws in specific contexts (rather than a stand-alone, abstract bill of rights) and safeguarded by such institutions as the independent judiciary and the High Court, which implement common law, the Australian Constitution, and various other laws of Australia and its states and territories.  Australia also has an independent statutory human rights body, the Australian Human Rights Commission, which investigates and conciliates complaints, and more generally promotes human rights through education, discussion and reporting.
Universal voting rights and rights to freedom of association, freedom of, and from, religion and freedom from discrimination are protected in Australia. The Australian colonies were among the first political entities in the world to grant universal manhood suffrage (1850s) and female suffrage (1890s). Ever since the gradual dismantling of the White Australia policy throughout the late 20th century, contemporary Australia is a liberal democracy and heir to a large post-World War II multicultural program of immigration in which forms of racial discrimination have been prohibited since 1975.
As a founding member of the United Nations, Australia has assisted in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and it is signatory to various other international treaties on the subject of human rights. However, Australia is the only democratic country in the world without a national bill of rights of some kind. Racism in Australia traces both historical and contemporary racist community attitudes, as well as political non-compliance and alleged governmental negligence on United Nations human rights standard and incidents in Australia.
Ongoing human rights issues in Australia largely stems from the legacy of mistreatment of Indigenous Australians, who are disproportionately of disadvantaged socioeconomic standing, have shorter life spans, and make up a disproportionately high number of imprisoned persons, thus receiving disproportionately high levels of social welfare payment as well as preferential employment and tertiary educational placement in state sectors. De jure, these rights are protected by the Australian Constitution and the constitutions of the states and territories bodies created to advance the promotion and protection of Human Rights Commission, in addition to a number of federal laws that exist to protect people from discrimination and nature breaches to human rights. The usage of immigration detention facilities remains a contentious issue especially among critics and human rights groups. In 2017, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has cited these facilities as a ""damning indictment of a policy meant to avoid Australia's international human rights obligations""."
Human rights in Australia,"Sources of rights
Most human rights are not constitutionally protected at the federal level. However, certain rights are protected via statute both federally and in the states (often called charters of rights). For example, in Queensland, in Victoria, and in the ACT. As such, other sources of rights exist to protect rights in Australia (the Constitution, through statutes, common law, and through implementation of international treaties)."
Human rights in Australia,"Australian Constitution
Human rights are protected under the Australian Constitution in several ways:"
Human rights in Australia,"Self-determination is protected by the creation of a system of responsible government chosen by the people in the form of the Australian Parliament;
Section 41 provides a right to vote;
Section 51(xxiii) prohibits civil conscription in relation to medical and dental services;
section 51(xxxi) empowers the Commonwealth to acquire property only ""on just terms"";
Section 80 provides a right to a jury trial for indictable offences;
Section 92 protects freedom of interstate trade, commerce and communication among the States;
Section 116 prohibits the Commonwealth from passing laws establishing religion, imposing religious observance, or requiring a religious test for qualification for public office;
Section 117 prohibits discrimination on the basis of State residence.
In addition, as a result of certain structural implications and principles, the Constitution protects human rights indirectly through several means, including:"
Human rights in Australia,"An implied freedom of political communication on government and political matters;
A requirement that punishment (and, with some exceptions, imprisonment) only occur pursuant a court order, arising from the separation of powers;
A requirement that courts be independent and impartial from the executive and legislature;
The right to challenge the legality of government action for jurisdictional error, even where legislation purports to preclude judicial review."
Human rights in Australia,"Statutes
Human rights are protected through various statutory enactments in a broad variety of specific contexts. For example, there are statutes which prescribe and regulate police powers, use of personal information, secret recording of conversations, equal treatment when buying goods and services, consumer rights, and many other statutes."
Human rights in Australia,"Common law
The common law of Australia protects rights indirectly through various causes of action (such as in contract, tort, and property rights).  The common law also protects human rights through principles of statutory interpretation. One example is found in Gleeson CJ's statement that it is presumed that it is not Parliament's intention to remove a fundamental human right(s) or freedom(s) unless such an intention is outlined and manifested by clear language. This is known as the principle of legality which acts as an extra layer of protection for human rights against vague or ambiguous legislation.  Furthermore, Former Chief Justice of New South Wales, James Spigelman, has compiled a list of a number of rights-depriving acts which the common law presumes the legislature does not intend without clear wording, including retrospectively changing rights and obligations, infringing personal liberty, interfering with freedom of movement or speech, restricting access to the courts, interfering with vested property rights, and denying procedural fairness.
In addition, there are various common law principles which afford certain protections, such as legal professional privilege, and the privilege against self-incrimination."
Human rights in Australia,"International Human Rights Laws in Australia
Australia has signed various international treaties and conventions regarding human rights. Australia has agreed to be bound by the following treaties:"
Human rights in Australia,"Universal Declaration on Human Rights
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
Convention on the Political Rights of Women
International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination
Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women
Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment
Convention on the Rights of the Child
Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness
Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons
Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees
1926 Slavery Convention
Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery
Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
Although Australia is a signatory to these, the rights given in the treaties are only applicable in Australia if domestic legislation is established. For example, the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth), implements the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth), provides some of the rights outlined in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.
However, another way the rights provided in a treaty can be seen in Australian law is where provisions of a treaty are already a part of domestic legislation (for example, the Convention of the Rights of People of Disabilities can be seen as incorporated into domestic law through similar provisions in the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (Cth))."
Human rights in Australia,"Australian Human Rights Commission
The Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) (previously known as the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission) is a national independent statutory body of the Australian government. Established under the Australian Human Rights Commission Act 1986 (Cth), it has responsibility for the investigation of alleged infringements under Australia's anti-discrimination legislation.
Matters that can be investigated by the Commission include discrimination on the grounds of age, race, colour or ethnic origin, racial vilification, sex, sexual harassment, sexual orientation, gender identity, intersex status, marital or relationship status, actual or potential pregnancy, breastfeeding or disability.
However, the protection of human rights has several significant limitations. For instance, human rights will often trump other public goods as it enjoys a prima facie; human rights may be violated in some circumstances or reasons like national emergency or security; human rights are protected in various States (ACT and Victoria) through legislation. However, it cannot be implemented nor enforceable at the Federal level."
Human rights in Australia,"Civil and political rights
Freedom of expression
Under the Australian Constitution, there is an implied freedom of political communication on government and political matters.
Some restrictions on political expression exist in Australia, including laws on defamation, racial vilification, and contempt of Parliament.
In 2015, Tasmania's Anti Discrimination Commissioner found that the Catholic Church and the Archbishop of Hobart had a ""case to answer"" under Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination legislation for promoting the Catholic view of marriage. Australian Greens candidate Martine Delaney brought the matter to the commission. The ABC reported that case has ""raised concerns about freedom of speech ahead of a national debate on same-sex marriage.""
In 2007, Parliamentarian Lee Rhiannon of the Australian Greens referred remarks made by an Australian Catholic Cardinal opposing embryonic stem cell research to the New South Wales parliamentary privileges committee for allegedly being in ""contempt of parliament"". The Cardinal was cleared of the charge and described the move as a ""clumsy attempt to curb religious freedom and freedom of speech"".
In 2022, Reporters Without Borders raised concerns over eroding press freedom in Australia, citing the 'ultra-concentration of media ownership' and 'growing official pressure.'"
Human rights in Australia,"Voting rights
Australians achieved voting rights decades before most other Western nations. The Australian colonies granted universal manhood suffrage from the 1850s and in 1895 the women of South Australia achieved the right to both vote and stand for Parliament, enabling Catherine Helen Spence to be the first to stand as a political candidate in 1897. After federation of the colonies in 1901, the Franchise Act 1902 was passed, granting the right to vote to men and women. However, the Act also restricted votes for 'natives' unless they were already enrolled. These restrictions were unevenly applied and were relaxed after World War II, with full rights restored by the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1962.
In 1856, an innovative secret ballot was introduced in Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia, in which the government supplied voting paper containing the names of candidates and voters could select in private. This system was adopted around the world, becoming known as the ""Australian Ballot"". The use of proportional representation via Single Transferable Vote (STV) and majoritarian Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) in many state/territory upper and lower houses as well as the federal Senate and House of Representatives respectively. These democratic features are upheld by rankings in V-Dem Democracy indices, Democracy Index (The Economist) and Polity IV as well as processes, proceedings and conduct being regulated by federal and state Electoral Commissions.
In South Australia, Premier Don Dunstan progressively introduced the Age of Majority (Reduction) Bill in October 1970, the voting age in South Australia was lowered to 18 years old in 1973."
Human rights in Australia,"Women's rights
As mentioned above Women's suffrage was granted in 1902 and property rights in 1897. The first woman elected to any Australian Parliament was Edith Cowan, to the West Australian Legislative Assembly in 1921. Dame Enid Lyons, in the Australian House of Representatives and Senator Dorothy Tangney became the first women in the Federal Parliament in 1943. In 1971, Senator Neville Bonner became the first Aboriginal Australian to sit in the federal Parliament. Rosemary Follett was elected Chief Minister of the Australian Capital Territory in 1989, becoming the first woman elected to lead a state or territory. In 2010, Julia Gillard became the first female Prime Minister of Australia."
Human rights in Australia,"By 2010, the people of Australia's oldest city, Sydney, had female leaders occupying every major political office above them, with Clover Moore as Lord Mayor, Kristina Keneally as Premier of New South Wales, Marie Bashir as Governor of New South Wales, Julia Gillard as Prime Minister, Quentin Bryce as Governor General of Australia and Elizabeth II as Queen of Australia.
Australia has laws banning gender, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, breastfeeding and pregnancy discrimination, providing for equal access to services (such as parental leave, education and child care), advancing reproductive rights (through universal healthcare and laws surrounding reproductive rights), outlawing of sexual harassment, marital rape, female genital mutilation, child marriage and legalisation of no-fault divorce.
The first Australian state to deal with marital rape was South Australia, under the progressive initiatives of Premier Don Dunstan, which in 1976 partially removed the exemption. Section 73 of the Criminal Law Consolidation Act Amendment Act 1976 (SA) read: ""No person shall, by reason only of the fact that he is married to some other person, be presumed to have consented to sexual intercourse with that other person"".
The role of women in the Australian military began to change in the 1970s. In 1975, which was the International Year of Women, the service chiefs established a committee to explore opportunities for increased female participation in the military. This led to reforms which allowed women to deploy on active service in support roles, pregnancy no longer being grounds for automatic termination of employment and changes to leave provisions.
Despite being integrated into the military, there were still restrictions on female service. The ADF was granted an exemption from the Sexual Discrimination Act when it was introduced in 1984 so that it could maintain gender-based restrictions against women serving in combat or combat-related positions, which limited women to 40 percent of positions in the ADF. As a result of personnel shortages in the late 1980s the restriction against women in combat-related positions was dropped in 1990, and women were for the first time allowed to serve in warships, RAAF combat squadrons and many positions in the Army. Women were banned from positions involving physical combat, however, and were unable to serve in infantry, armoured, artillery and engineering units in the Army and clearance diving and ground defence positions in the RAN and RAAF respectively.
On 27 September 2011, Defence Minister Stephen Smith announced that women will be allowed to serve in frontline combat roles by 2016. Women became able to apply for all positions other than special forces roles in the Army on 1 January 2013; it is planned that this remaining restriction will be removed in 2014 once the physical standards required for service in these units are determined. Women will be directly recruited into all frontline combat positions from late 2016."
Human rights in Australia,"Capital punishment
The last use of the death penalty in Australia was in Victoria in 1967. Ronald Joseph Ryan was hanged at Pentridge Prison on 3 February 1967 for the murder of a prison guard, George Hodson. However, Australian criminologist, Gordon Hawkins, director of Sydney University's Institute of Criminology, doubts that Ryan was guilty.
Capital punishment was officially abolished for federal offences by the Death Penalty Abolition Act 1973. The various states abolished capital punishment at various times, starting with Queensland in 1922 and ending with New South Wales in 1985.
In South Australia,  under the premiership of then-Premier Don Dunstan, the Criminal Law Consolidation Act 1935 (SA) was modified so that the death sentence was changed to life imprisonment in 1976."
Human rights in Australia,"People with a disability
Discrimination against persons with disabilities in various contexts is prohibited under the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (Cth) (DDA). The Act makes it unlawful to treat a disabled person less favorably, or to fail to make reasonable adjustments for the person, in the contexts of employment, education, publicly available premises, provision of goods and services, accommodation, clubs and associations, and other contexts.  Complaints made under the DDA are made to the Australian Human Rights Commission.
The Australian Government requested the Productivity Commission to evaluate the effectiveness of the DDA, and the Commission published its findings in 2004. The Commission found that while there is still room for improvement, particularly in reducing discrimination in employment, overall the DDA has been reasonably effective. The Commission found that people with a disability were less likely to finish school, to have a TAFE or university qualification and to be employed. They are more likely to have a below average income, be on a pension, live in public housing and in prison. The average personal income for people with a disability is 44 per cent of the income of other Australians.
The National Disability Insurance Scheme, is a healthcare program initiated by the Australian government. The bill was introduced into parliament in November 2012. In July 2013 the first stage of National Disability Insurance Scheme (which was at the time called DisabilityCare Australia) commenced in South Australia, Tasmania, the Hunter Region in New South Wales and the Barwon area of Victoria, while the Australian Capital Territory commenced in July 2014.
On 15 September 2020, the Human Rights Watch released a report examining the serious risk of self-harm and death for prisoners with mental health conditions. Media reports between 2010 and 2020 found that about 60 per cent of adults, who died in prisons in Western Australia, had disabilities, including mental health conditions. Of the 60 per cent, 58 per cent died due to lack of support, suicide, or after becoming a target of violence, where half of these deaths were of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners."
Human rights in Australia,"Child detention
The age for criminal responsibility in Australia is currently 10 years, well below the international standard of 14 years, leading the United Nations to call upon the Australian government to raise its age threshold.
The state of Queensland routinely detains young minors in youth detention centers, and in September 2023, the government of Queensland suspended its Human Rights Act for the second time in the year in order to detain children as young as 10 due in police holding cells due to a lack of space in its youth detention centers. The issue of child detention in Queensland disproportionately affects indigenous children, who make up nearly 63% of those in detention, despite being only 4.6% of the state's population.
The lack of an upper house in Queensland's parliament has allowed the ruling party to pass laws suspending the state's human rights legislation without adequate scrutiny. The suspension in September coincided with federal campaigning for an Indigenous rights referendum, leading to accusations of hypocrisy."
Human rights in Australia,"Treatment of particular groups and minorities
Indigenous Australians
The wellbeing of Indigenous Australians is an ongoing issue in Australia."
Human rights in Australia,"There is significant disparity in health between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. In 2010–2012, the estimated life expectancy at birth for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander males was 69.1 years, and for females 73.7 years. This was 10.6 years lower than the life expectancy of non-Indigenous males, and 9.5 years lower than that of non-Indigenous females.  A 2006 study by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare showed that 70% of the Aboriginal population die before the age of 65, compared with 20% of non-Indigenous Australians.  Additionally, the suicide rate among Aboriginal Australians is almost three times higher (at 4.2%) than the national average (1.5%).
The roots of the present condition can be traced to the historical treatment of Aboriginal people and the dispossession of land that occurred following European colonisation of Australia, where a combination of disease, loss of land (and thus food resources) and violence decimated the Aboriginal population. Later, from the 1830s, colonial governments established the now controversial offices of the Protector of Aborigines in an effort to avoid mistreatment of Indigenous peoples and conduct government policy towards them. Christian churches in Australia sought to convert Aboriginal people, and were often used by government to carry out welfare and assimilation policies.
The Caledon Bay crisis of 1932–4 saw one of the last incidents of frontier violence, which began when the spearing of Japanese poachers who had been molesting Yolngu women was followed by the killing of a policeman. As the crisis unfolded, national opinion swung behind the Aboriginal people involved, and the first appeal on behalf of an Indigenous Australian to the High Court of Australia was launched. Elsewhere around this time, activists like Sir Douglas Nicholls were commencing their campaigns for Aboriginal rights within the established Australian political system and the age of frontier conflict closed.
In 1962, the Menzies government's Commonwealth Electoral Act provided that all Indigenous Australians should have the right to enrol and vote at federal elections (prior to this, Indigenous people in Queensland, Western Australia and some in the Northern Territory had been excluded from voting unless they were ex-servicemen). The successor Holt government called the 1967 Referendum which removed the discriminatory clause in the Australian Constitution which excluded Aboriginal Australians from being counted in the census – the referendum was one of the few to be overwhelmingly endorsed by the Australian electorate (over 90% voted ""yes"")."
Human rights in Australia,"From the 1960s, Australian writers began to re-assess European assumptions about Aboriginal Australia – with works including Geoffrey Blainey's landmark history Triumph of the Nomads (1975) and the books of historian Henry Reynolds.From the late 1960s a movement for Aboriginal land rights developed, especially in South Australia under the Premiership of Don Dunstan. This era saw vast reformation in regards to land rights, anti-discrimination and personal rights.
In the mid-1960s, one of the earliest Aboriginal graduates from the University of Sydney, Charles Perkins, helped organise freedom rides into parts of Australia to expose discrimination and inequality. In 1966, the Gurindji people of Wave Hill station (owned by the Vestey Group) commenced strike action led by Vincent Lingiari in a quest for equal pay and recognition of land rights.
The Whitlam Labor and Fraser Liberal governments instigated the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976, which, while limited to the Northern Territory, affirmed ""inalienable"" native title to some traditional lands. In 1985, the Hawke government returned ownership of Uluru (formerly known as Ayers Rock) to the local Pitjantjatjara Aboriginal people."
Human rights in Australia,"Indigenous Australians began to take up representation in Australian parliaments during the 1970s. In 1971 Neville Bonner of the Liberal Party was appointed by the Queensland Parliament to replace a retiring senator, becoming the first Aboriginal in Federal Parliament. Bonner was returned as a Senator at the 1972 election and remained until 1983. Hyacinth Tungutalum of the Country Liberal Party in the Northern Territory and Eric Deeral of the National Party of Queensland, became the first Indigenous people elected to territory and state legislatures in 1974. In 1976, under the recommendation of Premier Don Dunstan, Sir Douglas Nicholls was appointed Governor of South Australia, becoming the first Aboriginal to hold vice-regal office in Australia. Aden Ridgeway of the Australian Democrats served as a senator during the 1990s, but no Indigenous person was elected to the House of Representatives, until West Australian Liberal Ken Wyatt, in August 2010.In 1992, the High Court of Australia handed down its decision in the Mabo Case, recognising native title. That same year, Prime Minister Paul Keating said in his Redfern Park Speech that European settlers were responsible for the difficulties Australian Aboriginal communities continued to face. In 1999 Parliament passed a Motion of Reconciliation drafted by Prime Minister John Howard and Aboriginal Senator Aden Ridgeway naming mistreatment of Indigenous Australians as the most ""blemished chapter in our national history"".
Prior to the calling of a 2007 federal election, the then Prime Minister, John Howard, revisited the idea of bringing a referendum to seek recognition of Indigenous Australians in the Constitution (his government first sought to include recognition of Aboriginal peoples in the Preamble to the Constitution in a 1999 referendum). The Labor opposition initially supported the idea; however, Kevin Rudd withdrew this support just prior to the election.
In 2007, Prime Minister John Howard and Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough launched the Northern Territory National Emergency Response. In response to the Little Children are Sacred Report into allegations of child abuse among Indigenous communities in the Territory, the government banned alcohol in prescribed communities in the Northern Territory; quarantined a percentage of welfare payments for essential goods purchasing; despatched additional police and medical personnel to the region; and suspended the permit system for access to Indigenous communities. The policy was largely maintained under the Rudd and Gillard governments.
Notable contemporary Indigenous rights campaigners have included: federal politicians Ridgeway and Wyatt, lawyer Noel Pearson; academic Marcia Langton; and Australians of the Year Lowitja O'Donoghue (1984), Mandawuy Yunupingu (1992), Cathy Freeman (1998) and Mick Dodson (2009). As of 2016, there were five Indigenous people serving in the Federal Parliament of Australia.
In 2016–17, the estimated direct expenditure per person was $44,886 for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, which was around twice the rate for non-Indigenous Australians ($22,356).
An annual report called ""Closing the Gap"" is presented to the parliament by the office of Prime Minister and Cabinet and it details the gap in multiple facets of life disproportionately affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people compared to non-Indigenous including education, life expectancy, infant mortality, employment, housing and criminal justice. Despite a decade of action though, the life expectancy gap continues to widen with only marginal if any improvements in other sectors of Indigenous affairs and according to Oxfam ""they are still denied the same access to these services that non-Indigenous people take for granted"".
On 30 October 2019, Ken Wyatt, Minister for Indigenous Australians in the Morrison government, announced the commencement of a ""co-design process"" aimed at providing an Indigenous voice to government. The Senior Advisory Group (SAG) is co-chaired by Professor Tom Calma , Chancellor of the University of Canberra,  and Professor Dr Marcia Langton, Associate Provost at the University of Melbourne, and comprises a total of 20 leaders and experts from across the country. There was some skepticism about the process from the beginning, with the criticism that it did not honour  the Uluru Statement from the Heart's plea to ""walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future"". According to Michelle Grattan, ""...it is notable that it is calling it a 'voice to government' rather than a 'voice to parliament' "". Prime Minister Scott Morrison rejected the  proposal in the Uluru Statement for a voice to parliament to be put into the Australian constitution; instead, the voice will be enshrined in legislation. The government also said it would run a referendum during its present term about recognising Indigenous people in the constitution ""should a consensus be reached and should it be likely to succeed”."
Human rights in Australia,"Immigrants and asylum seekers
Australia is an immigrant nation with a large and longstanding multi-ethnic migration program."
Human rights in Australia,"Historically, from the 1890s to the 1950s the country adhered to the White Australia Policy, which effectively barred or impeded people of non-European descent from immigrating to Australia. The policy was dismantled by successive governments after World War II, and from the 1970s successive governments officially supported multiculturalism. Australia is a signatory to the Refugee Convention and a component of the Australian immigration program is devoted to providing protection for refugees. The majority of refugees received by Australia are identified and referred by the UNHCR. The Special Humanitarian Program further offers refuge to people subject to ""substantial discrimination amounting to gross violation of human rights in their home country"" and who are supported by a proposer within Australia. In 2009–10 a total of 13,770 visas were granted under these categories. The annual figure remained roughly stable for the years between 2004–2010 and accepted applicants from such nations as Myanmar, Iraq, Bhutan, Afghanistan and six African countries.
To varying degrees of success, recent Australian governments have sought to discourage unauthorised arrivals by people seeking refugee status in Australia by maintaining a system of mandatory detention for processing of people who arrive without a visa.  In 1992, Australia adopted a policy of under which the Australian government could detain any person in the country without a valid visa. In 1994 the detention of 'unlawful non-citizens' was made mandatory. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, these unauthorised arrivals, popularly referred to as ""boat people"", were transferred to one of the Australian immigration detention facilities on the Australian mainland, or to Manus Island or Nauru as part of the Pacific Solution. These offshore processing and mandatory detention policies have attracted criticism. In 2014, the Australian Human Rights Commission published a report, which found that many basic rights outlined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child were denied to children living in immigration detention.
Australia's immigration regime has attracted the ire of the United Nations Human Rights Council for ""massive abuse [...] of irregular migrants"", by suspending habeas corpus, separating families, indefinite detention of irregular migrants and inadequate reception/medical centres. and whilst Australia ""remains in active discussions"" with the Refugees and Safe, Orderly & Regular Migration components of the Global Compacts on Migration, Prime Minister Morrison stated that the compact will ""fundamentally weaken Australia's strong border protection"" and will not sign it.Medical evacuation (Medevac) laws have since been passed by parliament. However, Medevac laws have become a point of contention as the local Medevac centre in Kangaroo Point, Brisbane has sparked mass protests after becoming a detention centre that has detained refugees in Brisbane for more than seven years.
Human Rights Watch’s annual human rights report outlined issues in Australia spanning refugee policy, the treatment of Indigenous people and climate change action. The federal government's failure to address the cruel treatment of asylum seekers despite international pressure tarnishes the country's global standing."
Human rights in Australia,"LGBTI people
Historical persecution
Prior to European contact, there were no known legal or social punishments for engaging in homosexual activity. Sex seems to have been a very open topic among the Indigenous people. Among the Arrernte people, sex plays were particularly ubiquitous, even among young children who would play ""mothers and fathers"" in a very literal sense. They would typically mimic the sex acts they saw their parents and other adults perform. These acts seem to have been performed regardless of sex. Traditions of ""boy-wives"" also existed where young boys, typically 14 years of age, would serve as intimate servants of older men until they reached the age of initiation, at which point the young man would have his penis subincised. The Indigenous people did not have the typical Western view of heterosexuality and homosexuality.
As part of the British Empire, Australian colonies inherited anti-homosexuality laws such as the Buggery Act 1533. These provisions were maintained in criminal sodomy laws passed by 19th century colonial parliaments, and subsequently by state parliaments after Federation. Same-sex sexual activity between men was considered a capital crime, resulting in the execution of people convicted of sodomy until 1890.
Different jurisdictions gradually began to reduce the death penalty for sodomy to life imprisonment, with Victoria the last state to reduce the penalty in 1949. Community debate about decriminalising homosexual activity began in the 1960s, with the first lobby groups Daughters of Bilitis, Homosexual Law Reform Society and the Campaign Against Moral Persecution formed in 1969 and 1970."
Human rights in Australia,"Decriminalisation
In October 1973, former Prime Minister John Gorton put forward a motion in the federal House of Representatives that ""in the opinion of this House homosexual acts between consenting adults in private should not be subject to the criminal law"". All three major parties were given a conscience vote, and the motion was passed by 64 votes to 40:
However, Gorton's motion had no legal effect as the legality of homosexuality was a matter for state and territory governments. Over a 22-year span between 1975 and 1997, the states and territories gradually repealed their sodomy laws as support for gay law reform grew."
Human rights in Australia,"Nonetheless, under the premiership of Premier Don Dunstan, LGBT rights in South Australia expanded, and South Australia became the first jurisdiction to decriminalise male homosexual activity on 17 September 1975, with the Australian Capital Territory's decriminalisation, first proposed in 1973, approved by the Fraser Federal Government with effect from 4 November 1976. Victoria followed on 23 December 1980, although a ""soliciting for immoral purposes"" provision added by conservatives saw police harassment continue in that state for some years.
Other jurisdictions to decriminalise male homosexuality were the Northern Territory (effective 4 October 1983), New South Wales (22 May 1984) and (after four failed attempts) Western Australia (7 December 1989). In exchange for decriminalisation, Western Australian conservatives required a higher age of consent and an anti-proselytising provision similar to the United Kingdom's section 28, both since repealed.
Queensland legalised male same-sex activity with effect from 19 January 1991 after the long-standing Nationals government had lost power.
The Tasmanian Government refused to repeal its sodomy law, which led to the case of Toonen v Australia, in which the United Nations Human Rights Committee ruled that sodomy laws violated the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Tasmania's continued refusal to repeal the offending law led the Keating government to pass the Human Rights (Sexual Conduct) Act 1994, which legalised sexual activity between consenting adults throughout Australia and prohibited laws that arbitrarily interfered with the sexual conduct of adults in private.
In the 1997 case of Croome v Tasmania, Rodney Croome applied to the High Court of Australia to strike down the Tasmanian anti-gay law as inconsistent with federal law; after having failed to have the matter thrown out, the Tasmanian Government decriminalised homosexuality on 1 May 1997, becoming the final Australian jurisdiction to do so.
In late 2010, the Gillard Labor government announced that it was undertaking a review of federal anti-discrimination laws, with the aim of introducing a single equality act that would include sexual orientation and gender identity. In 2011, the government introduced new guidelines which would enable sex- and gender-diverse people to record their preferred gender in their passports.
In March 2013, Mark Dreyfus introduced the Sex Discrimination Amendment (Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Intersex Status) Bill, and on 25 June 2013, the Australian Federal Parliament passed it with overwhelming support in both houses. The Sex Discrimination Amendment (Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Intersex Status) Act 2013 became law from Royal Assent three days later by the Governor-General. It became effective from 1 August 2013, making discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and for the first time in the world, intersex people, illegal at a national level. Aged care providers who are owned by religious groups would no longer be able to exclude people from aged care services based on their LGBTI or same-sex relationship status. However, religion-based private schools and hospitals are exempt from gender identity and sexual orientation provisions. No religious exemptions exist on the basis of intersex status.
The content of laws relating to the equality of LGBT people is summarised in the following table:"
Human rights in Australia,"Intersex people
Australia was the first country to conduct a parliamentary inquiry into involuntary or coerced medical interventions on intersex people in October 2013, but the report has not been implemented.
A 2016 Family Court case authorising a gonadectomy and consequential surgery on a young child attracted public commentary for disclosing those medical interventions, their rationales, and a prior clitorectomy and labiaplasty.
In March 2017, Australian and New Zealand community organisations issued a joint call for legal reform, including the criminalisation of deferrable intersex medical interventions on children, an end to legal classification of sex, and improved access to peer support."
Human rights in Australia,"See also
Human rights in Asia"
Human rights in Australia,"References
External links
The Australian Human Rights Commission website
NSW Council for Civil Liberties
National Human Rights Consultation
The Equality Campaign (Same-sex marriage advocacy group)
Privacy in Australian law"
List of Australian bushfire seasons,"This is a list of specific seasons of bushfires in Australia including some significant bushfire events from each season. Events are listed if they cause fatalities, destroy houses, or burn more than 100,000 hectares (250,000 acres) of land. Across Australia, seasonality of bushfires varies significantly; however, is generally aligned with the weather patterns in the south of the continent so that each season begins in June (the beginning of the Australian winter) and runs through the following May (the end of the Australian autumn). The worst season recorded is 1974-75, with 117 million hectares (290 million acres) burned, equivalent to 15 percent of Australia's physical land mass  that equates to the entire area of France, Spain, and Portugal combined."
List of Australian bushfire seasons,"1800s
1897-98 Australian bushfire season:
Red Tuesday: 12 fatalities, 2000 buildings were destroyed, and 260,000 hectares (640,000 acres) were burnt in Victoria (DSE 2003b).
1850-51 Australian bushfire season:
Black Thursday bushfires: 12 fatalities, one million sheep and thousands of cattle were killed, and the fire burnt the second largest area (approximately 5,000,000 hectares (12,000,000 acres)) in history (CFA 2003a; DSE 2003b)."
List of Australian bushfire seasons,"1920s
1925-26 Australian bushfire season"
List of Australian bushfire seasons,"1930s
1938-1939 Black Friday bushfires"
List of Australian bushfire seasons,"1940s
1943-44 Australian bushfire season"
List of Australian bushfire seasons,"1960s
1965 New South Wales bushfires. The Chatsbury-Bungonia bushfires destroyed much of the villages of Towrang, Tallong, Wingello, and Penrose, orchards, and livestock, affecting 250,000 hectares (620,000 acres). It broke out in the Southern Highlands and spread toward Nowra. Three people died.
1968-69 Australian bushfire season: NSW in 1968-69 over 1,000,000 hectares (2,500,000 acres) were burnt and three people were killed (Linacre & Hobbs 1977; RFS 2003a).
1966-67 Australian bushfire season: 62 fatalities, 900 injured, 7,000 left homeless, 4,286 buildings lost
The 1967 Tasmanian fires: 110 separate fire fronts burnt through 264,000 hectares (650,000 acres) of land in southern Tasmania. The destruction included 1,293 homes, around 62,000 farm animals, over 1,700 other buildings, 80 bridges, 4,800 sections of power lines, 1,500 motor vehicles and over 100 other structures.
1961 Western Australian bushfires The towns of Dwellingup and Karridale were basically destroyed, along with many small settlements that were not rebuilt. The Dwellingup fire migrated to the town of Pinjarra where it burned a significant number of buildings. From January to March of that year, about 1,800,000 hectares (4,400,000 acres) was burnt throughout the south-west, with a large loss of livestock."
List of Australian bushfire seasons,"1970s
1974-75 Australian bushfire season: approximately 117 million hectares (290 million acres) burned. The area burnt, 117 million hectares (290 million acres), is equivalent to 15 percent of Australia's physical land mass  that equates to the entire area of France, Spain, and Portugal combined."
List of Australian bushfire seasons,"1980s
1984-85 Australian bushfire season: NSW in 1984-85, 3,500,000 hectares (8,600,000 acres) were burnt, four lives were lost, 40,000 livestock were killed and $40m damage to property was caused (RFS 2003a).
1982-1983 Australian bushfire season: The Ash Wednesday fires of 16 February 1983 caused severe damage in Victoria and South Australia. In Victoria, 210,000 hectares (520,000 acres) were burnt, 2,080 houses destroyed, more than 27,000 stock lost and 47 people lost their lives (CFA 2003a; DSE 2003b, 2003d). Property-related damage was estimated at over $200m and more than 16,000 fire fighters, 1,000 police and 500 defence personnel fought the fires in Victoria. In South Australia, 208,000 hectares (510,000 acres) were burnt, 383 houses were destroyed, 28 people were killed and property-related damage was estimated to be more than $200m (DSE 2003d)."
List of Australian bushfire seasons,"1990s
1998–99 Australian bushfire season: 5 fatalities
Linton bushfire: 5 firefighters killed on 2 December near Linton in Victoria
1997–98 Australian bushfire season: 4 fatalities and 10 houses lost
4 fatalities and 10 houses lost on 20 November at Menai in New South Wales
1996–97 Australian bushfire season: 3 fatalities and 44 houses lost
1 house destroyed in October near Ravensbourne in Queensland.
3 fatalities and 43 houses lost on 19 January in the Dandenong Ranges and Mornington Peninsula.
1994–95 Australian bushfire season: 23 houses lost
23 houses lost from September to November in southeast Queensland.
1993–94 Australian bushfire season:  4 fatalities, 206 houses lost, 800,000 hectares (2,000,000 acres) burnt in NSW
1994 Eastern seaboard fires: 4 fatalities and 206 houses lost on the east coast of New South Wales
1992–93 Australian bushfire season: 4 houses lost
4 houses lost at Coominya in Queensland
1991–92 Australian bushfire season: 3 fatalities, 17 houses lost
2 fatalities and 14 houses lost on 16 October in western Sydney and the Central Coast in New South Wales
1 fatality and 3 houses lost at Mount Tamborine in Queensland
1990-91 Australian bushfire season: 4 fatalities, 25 houses lost
3 fatalities in Queensland
8 houses lost on 23 December across New South Wales
1 fatality and 17 houses lost on 27 December at Strathbogie"
List of Australian bushfire seasons,"2000s
2009–10 Australian bushfire season: 2 fatalities, at least 57 houses lost
5 houses lost during November near Swansea and St Helens in Tasmania
A park ranger died in a helicopter crash on 9 December in the Dorrigo National Park in New South Wales
9 houses lost on 17 December at Gerogery, Tooma and Michelago in New South Wales
6 houses lost on 23 December at Port Lincoln in South Australia
37 houses lost on 29 December near Toodyay in Western Australia
A firefighter killed in a vehicle accident on 10 January near Tatong on the way to a fire near Mansfield in Victoria.
2008–09 Australian bushfire season: 173 fatalities, 2,060 houses lost
2 houses lost on 13 January at Port Lincoln in South Australia
31 houses lost from 30 January to 1 February at Yinnar, Boolarra and Mirboo North in Victoria
Black Saturday bushfires: 173 fatalities, 2,056 houses lost and 239,637 hectares (592,160 acres) burned on 7 February at numerous locations in Victoria
2007–08 Australian bushfire season: 5 fatalities, 1 house lost
3 truck drivers killed on 30 December at Boorabbin National Park in Western Australia
One house lost on 10 January in the Kangarilla and Echunga area of South Australia
2006–07 Australian bushfire season: 5 fatalities, 63 houses lost
7 houses lost on 24 September at Picton, Thirlmere and Oakdale in New South Wales
1 fatality, 33 houses lost, and 1,154,828 hectares (2,853,640 acres) burnt in the Great Divide fire complex from 1 December 2006 to 7 February 2007 across alpine Victoria
22 houses lost on 11–14 December at Scamander and Four Mile Creek in Tasmania
1 house lost on 12 December at Kalamunda in Western Australia
2005–06 Australian bushfire season: 3+ fatalities, 54 houses lost
Jail Break Inn Fire: 10 houses lost on 1 January near Junee in New South Wales
3 houses lost on 1 January near Gosford in New South Wales
Mount Lubra bushfire: 2 fatalities, 41 houses lost and 116,380 hectares (287,600 acres) burned from 19 January around the Grampians National Park in Victoria
2 fatalities and 16 houses lost from other fires during January in Victoria
2004–05 Australian bushfire season: 9 fatalities, 3 houses lost
Eyre Peninsula bushfire: 9 fatalities and 93 houses lost on 11 January on the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia
2002–03 Australian bushfire season: 7 fatalities and at least 549 houses lost
1 fatality and 10 houses lost from 16–29 October near Toowoomba in Queensland
10 houses lost on 9 October at Engadine in New South Wales
2002 Sydney: 41 homes were lost on 4 December 2002 at Glenorie, a suburb north of Sydney.
2003 Eastern Victorian alpine bushfires: 41 houses lost and 1,200,000 hectares (3,000,000 acres) burned from 8 January to 19 March in northeastern Victoria.
2003 Canberra bushfires: 4 fatalities and 488 houses lost on 18 January in western Canberra and nearby townships.
2001–02 Australian bushfire season: 110 houses lost
Black Christmas bushfires: 109 houses lost and 733,342 hectares (1,812,130 acres) burned from 24 December to 16 January at numerous locations in New South Wales.
1 house lost in March at Glenaroua in Victoria
2000–01 Australian bushfire season: 11 houses lost
11 houses lost from 1–9 February at Tulka in South Australia."
List of Australian bushfire seasons,"2010s
2018–19 Australian bushfire season: 35 houses lost, 1 fatality
2017–18 Australian bushfire season: 94 buildings lost
2016–17 Australian bushfire season: 46 houses lost
2015–16 Australian bushfire season: 9 fatalities, 408 houses lost
The most destructive bushfire season in terms of human life and property loss since the 2008–09 Australian bushfire season prior to the 2019-2020 bushfires. Insurance losses of around A$353 million
At least 317,000 hectares (780,000 acres) burned
Loss of 408 houses and at least 500 non-residential buildings
8 deaths as a direct result of fire: 6 people died in Western Australia, 2 in South Australia. In New South Wales a volunteer firefighter died due to unrelated health complications while on duty.
2015 Esperance bushfires: 4 fatalities; 19 buildings destroyed
2015 Pinery bushfire: 2 fatalities; 470+ buildings destroyed
2016 Tasmanian bushfires: catastrophic impact on Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area lands
2014–15 Australian bushfire season: 1 fatality, 48 houses lost
75,000 hectares (190,000 acres) burned over twelve days in September and threatened the town of Tom Price and the western portion of Karijini National Park in Western Australia
1 farmer killed and two firefighters injured on 1 November while fighting a fire about 100 kilometres (62 mi) north of Adelaide at Nantawarra, South Australia. The fire burnt out about 1,800 hectares (4,448 acres) of grassland
2015 Sampson Flat bushfires, South Australia: 32 houses lost, 125 outbuildings
2013–14 Australian bushfire season: 3 fatalities, 335 buildings lost"
List of Australian bushfire seasons,"2013 New South Wales bushfires: 2 fatalities, 208 houses lost 86,000 hectares (210,000 acres) bushland burnt including parts of the World Heritage–listed Greater Blue Mountains
1 fatality and 52 houses lost on 12–13 January in the Perth Hills around Parkerville, Stoneville and Mount Helena.
32 houses lost on 15–20 January around the northern Grampians in western Victoria
15 houses lost on 17–19 January in the Barossa Valley and Flinders Ranges in South Australia.
The Snowy River bushfire in Eastern Victoria in February 2014. The bushfire which lasted for 70 days grew to 165,800 hectares (410,000 acres) and was roughly the same size as Melbourne. Also burning were fires at Hazelwood coal mine and Kilmore
2012–13 Australian bushfire season: 4 fatalities, 314 buildings lost
7 houses lost on 11 November at Tulka near Port Lincoln, South Australia
Several properties lost from 8–10 December at Myora Springs, Stradbroke Island, Queensland
2013 Tasmanian bushfires:  1 fatality and 203 houses lost from 3–5 January in Dunally, Boomer Bay, Bicheno, Sommers Bay, and Copping
1 house lost on 9 January at Jugiong in New South Wales
9 houses lost on 8 January at Snake Valley, Chepstowe and Carngham in Victoria
51 houses lost from 13–17 January from a fire in the Warrumbungle National Park west of Coonabarabran, New South Wales
1 fatality and 22 houses lost from 17–18 January in bushfires affecting Coongulla, Glenmaggie, Heyfield, Newry and Seaton in Victoria
2 firefighters killed by a falling tree on 13 February fighting a fire near Harrietville
1 fatality and 4 houses lost during February in fires affecting Esperance, Boddington and Bridgetown in Western Australia
16 houses lost on 27 March at Dereel in Victoria
1 house lost on 9 May near Cherryville in South Australia
2011–12 Australian bushfire season: 32 houses lost
32 houses lost on 23–26 November near Margaret River in Western Australia
2018-19 Australian Bushfire Season:
2010–11 Australian bushfire season: 83 houses lost
10 houses lost on 10–12 January at Lake Clifton in Western Australia
2 houses lost on 1–3 February in Gippsland, Victoria
71 houses lost on 5–7 February near Roleystone and Kelmscott in Western Australia"
List of Australian bushfire seasons,"2020s
2019–20 Australian bushfire season
At least 2,680 homes lost
33 deaths (including four firefighters and three US firefighters operating a Lockheed Martin C-130 Large Air Tanker that crashed in the Snowy Monaro Region of southern NSW)
WWF-Australia estimated at least 1.25 billion wild animals killed
At least 18.626 million hectares (46.03 million acres) burned
2020–21 Australian bushfire season
2021–22 Australian bushfire season
2022–23 Australian bushfire season
2023–24 Australian bushfire season"
List of Australian bushfire seasons,"See also
Bushfires in Australia
List of major bushfires in Australia
List of natural disasters in Australia"
List of Australian bushfire seasons,"Notes
References
External links
Australian Emergency Management Knowledge Hub
NSW Rural Fire Service: Brief History of Bush Fires in NSW
Victorian Country Fire Authority: Major Fires
South Australia Country Fire Service: Bushfire History"
Time in Australia,"Australia uses three main time zones: Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST; UTC+10:00), Australian Central Standard Time (ACST; UTC+09:30) and Australian Western Standard Time (AWST; UTC+08:00).
Time is regulated by the individual state governments, some of which observe daylight saving time (DST). Daylight saving time (+1 hour) is used between the first Sunday in October and the first Sunday in April in jurisdictions in the south and south-east:"
Time in Australia,"New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, Jervis Bay Territory and the Australian Capital Territory switches to the Australian Eastern Daylight Saving Time (AEDT; UTC+11:00), and
South Australia switches to the Australian Central Daylight Saving Time (ACDT; UTC+10:30).
Standard time was introduced in the 1890s when all of the Australian colonies adopted it. Before the switch to standard time zones, each local city or town was free to determine its local time, called local mean time. Now, Western Australia uses Western Standard Time; South Australia and the Northern Territory use Central Standard Time; while New South Wales, Queensland, Tasmania, Victoria, Jervis Bay Territory, and the Australian Capital Territory use Eastern Standard Time. Daylight saving time is not currently used in Western Australia, the Northern Territory, or Queensland.
The Cocos (Keeling) Islands uses UTC+06:30 year round, Christmas Island uses UTC+07:00 year round, while Norfolk Island uses UTC+11:00 as standard time and UTC+12:00 as daylight saving time."
Time in Australia,"History
The standardisation of time in Australia began in 1892, when surveyors from the six colonies in Australia met in Melbourne for the Intercolonial Conference of Surveyors. The delegates accepted the recommendation of the 1884 International Meridian Conference to adopt Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) as the basis for standard time.
The colonies enacted time zone legislation, which took effect in February 1895. The clocks were set ahead of GMT by 8 hours in Western Australia; by 9 hours in South Australia (and the Northern Territory, which it governed); and by 10 hours in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, and Tasmania. The three time zones became known as Western Standard Time, Central Standard Time, and Eastern Standard Time. Broken Hill in the far west of New South Wales (strictly speaking, the county of Yancowinna) also adopted Central Standard Time due to it being connected at the time by rail to Adelaide but not Sydney.
In May 1899, in a break with the common international practice of setting one-hour intervals between adjacent time zones, South Australia advanced Central Standard Time by thirty minutes after lobbying by businesses who wanted to be closer to Melbourne time and cricketers and footballers who wanted more daylight to practice in the evenings. It also meant that South Australia became one of only a few places in the world which uses a time-zone meridian located outside of its geographical boundaries. Attempts to undo this change in 1986 and 1994 failed.
In 1911, when the Northern Territory was separated from South Australia and placed under the jurisdiction of the Federal Government, the Territory kept Central Standard Time. Likewise, when the ACT and Jervis Bay Territory were broken off from New South Wales, they retained Eastern Standard Time.
Since 1899, the only major changes in Australian time zones have been setting of clocks half an hour later than Eastern time (GMT plus 10:30) on the territory of Lord Howe Island, and Norfolk Island changing from UTC+11:30 to UTC+11:00 on 4 October 2015.
When abbreviating ""Australian Central Time"" and ""Australian Eastern Time"", in domestic contexts the leading ""Australian"" may be omitted; however, the prefix ""A"" is often used to avoid ambiguity with the time zone abbreviations ""CST"" and ""EST"" referring to the Central and Eastern Time Zones in North America."
Time in Australia,"Civil time and legislation
Though the governments of the states and territories have the power to legislate variations in time, the standard time within each of these is set related to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) as determined by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures and set by section 8AA of the National Measurement Act of 1960 of the Commonwealth.
Australia has kept a version of the UTC atomic time scale since the 1990s, but Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) remained the formal basis for the standard times of all of the states until 2005. In November 2004, the state and territory attorneys-general endorsed a proposal from the Australian National Measurement Institute to adopt UTC as the standard of all Australian standard times, thereby eliminating the effects of slight variations in the rate of rotation of the Earth that are inherent in mean solar time. All jurisdictions have adopted the UTC standard, starting on 1 September 2005.
In Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT, the starting and ending dates of daylight saving times are officially determined by proclamations, declarations, or regulation made by the State Governor or by the responsible minister. Such instruments may be valid for only the current year, and so this section generally only refers to the legislation. In New South Wales and Western Australia, the starting and ending dates, if any, are to be set by legislation."
Time in Australia,"Australian Western Standard Time (AWST) – UTC+08:00
Western Australia – Standard Time Act 2005"
Time in Australia,"Australian Central Standard Time (ACST) – UTC+09:30
South Australia – Standard Time Act 2009 and the Daylight Saving Act 1971
Northern Territory – Standard Time Act 2005
Australian Western Central Standard Time (AWCST) UTC+8:45"
Time in Australia,"Small portion of south eastern corner of Western Australia as well as Border Village in South Australia
Used in following towns: Border Village, Eucla, Mundrabilla, Madura, Cocklebiddy"
Time in Australia,"Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST) – UTC+10:00
Queensland – Standard Time Act 1894
New South Wales – Standard Time Act 1987 No 149
Australian Capital Territory and Jervis Bay Territory – Standard Time and Summer Time Act 1972
Victoria – Summer Time Act 1972
Tasmania – Standard Time Act 1895 and the Daylight Saving Act 2007"
Time in Australia,"Daylight saving time (DST)
The choice of whether to use DST is a matter for the governments of the individual states and territories. However, during World War I and World War II all states and territories used daylight saving time (DST). In 1968 Tasmania became the first state to use DST in peacetime, followed in 1971 by New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, and the Australian Capital Territory.  Queensland abandoned DST in 1972.  Western Australia and the Northern Territory did not adopt it. Queensland and Western Australia have occasionally used DST since then during trial periods.
The main DST zones are the following:"
Time in Australia,"(Australian) Central Daylight Saving Time (ACDT or CDST) – UTC+10:30, in South Australia and Broken Hill, New South Wales
(Australian) Eastern Daylight Saving Time (AEDT or EDST) – UTC+11:00, in New South Wales, the ACT, Victoria, and Tasmania
During the usual periods of DST, the three standard time zones in Australia become five zones. This includes the areas that do not observe DST: Western Australia (UTC+08:00), the Northern Territory (UTC+09:30), and Queensland (UTC+10:00).
The change to and from DST takes place at 02:00 local standard time the appropriate Sunday. Until 2008, DST usually began on the last Sunday in October, and ended on the last Sunday in March. However, Tasmania, given its latitude further south, began DST earlier, on the first Sunday in October, and ended it later, on the first Sunday of April.
On 12 April 2007, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, and the ACT agreed to common beginning and ending dates for DST from 2008. DST in these states and South Australia began on the first Sunday in October and ended on the first Sunday in April. Western Australia was then the only state to use DST from the last Sunday in October to the last Sunday in March, but it abolished DST in 2009."
Time in Australia,"Anomalies
Unlike the rest of New South Wales, Broken Hill and the surrounding region (specified as Yancowinna County) observes Australian Central Standard Time (UTC+09:30), a time zone it shares with nearby South Australia and the Northern Territory.
Heron Island, 72 km (45 mi) off the coast off Gladstone in Queensland, has two time zones: the island resort follows DST all year round, whereas the Marine Research Centre and the Parks and Wildlife office on the island remain on Eastern Standard Time. Resort manager Alistair Cooray says no-one is sure how the time zone came about. 'I believe it started in the late '50s early '60s as a way to give the guests a bit more daylight time on the island and no-one knows for sure though.'""
Lord Howe Island, part of the state of New South Wales but 600 kilometres (370 miles) east of the Australian mainland in the Pacific Ocean, uses UTC+10:30 during the winter months (30 minutes ahead of the eastern states), but advances to UTC+11:00 in summer (the same time as the rest of New South Wales).
A compromise between Western and Central time (UTC+08:45, without DST), unofficially known as Central Western Standard Time, is used in one area in the southeastern corner of Western Australia and one roadhouse in South Australia. Towns east of Caiguna on the Eyre Highway (including Eucla, Cocklebiddy, Madura, Mundrabilla and Border Village, just over the border into South Australia), follow ""CWT"" instead of Western Australian time. The total population of that area is estimated at 200 people. This area did not change when South Australia introduced DST. During the Western Australian trial of DST from 2006 to 2009, this area also sets its clocks ahead one hour during summer. This time zone is not officially recognised, but is marked by official road signs. It is tracked in the tz database, the record of time zones for computers, as ""Australia/Eucla"".
A number of small towns in Outback Western Australia also follow UTC+09:30 rather than UTC+08. These towns include Blackstone, Irrunytju, Warakurna, Wanarn, Kiwirrkurra, and Tjukurla.
The Indian Pacific train has its own time zone—a so-called ""train time"" when travelling between Kalgoorlie, Western Australia and Port Augusta, South Australia—which was at UTC+09:00 hours during November 2005 when DST was observed in the eastern and southern states."
Time in Australia,"External territories
Australia's external territories follow different time zones."
Time in Australia,"Special events
In 2000, all of the eastern jurisdictions that normally observe DST—New South Wales, Victoria, the ACT, and Tasmania—began DST early because of the Summer Olympic Games held in Sydney. These jurisdictions moved to DST on 27 August 2000. South Australians did not change their clocks until the usual date, which was 29 October 2000.
In 2006, all of the states that followed DST (the above states and South Australia) delayed their return to Standard Times by one week, because of the 2006 Commonwealth Games held in Melbourne in March. DST ended on 2 April 2006."
Time in Australia,"National times
There are situations in which a nationwide time is in effect. In the case of business activities, a national time can be used. For example, a prospectus for the issue of stock in a company would usually set the closing time for offers at some location (e.g. Sydney) as the time when offers must be received, regardless of the source of the offer. Similarly, tenders for their sale of stock usually set out the time at a given location by which they must be received to be considered. Another example is the Australian Securities Exchange which operates on Sydney time.
On the other hand, Federal legislation yields to state-regulated standard times in many diverse situations. For example, it yields in setting the normal working times of Federal employees, the recognition of public holidays, etc. The Federal government also relies on local times for Federal elections, so that the polls in Western Australia close two or three hours after those in the eastern states. Also, documents to be filed in a Federal Court may be filed based on the local time. The effect of this is that if there had been a failure to file a legal document on time in an eastern State, that document can sometimes still be filed (within two hours) in Western Australia."
Time in Australia,"IANA time zone database
The 18 zones for Australia as given by zone.tab of the IANA time zone database. Columns marked * are from the zone.tab."
Time in Australia,"Debate, trials and referendums
Queensland
Queensland has had a particularly involved debate over daylight saving time, with public opinion geographically divided. The state's first trial of DST lasted one year, from 31 October 1971 to 27 February 1972. In 1973 the Committee on Daylight Saving analysed this trial and the effects of daylight saving on different demographics, and ultimately concluded not to adopt daylight saving time. The committee's reasons include Queensland's unsuitable geography and a lack of broad support from denizens.
Later, another introduction of DST was trialled from 29 October 1989 to 4 March 1990, overseen by the daylight saving task force. At the task force's recommendation, the trial was extended from one to three years. The Legislative Assembly voted to hold a referendum on DST at the trial's conclusion in 1992, which was defeated with a 54.5 per cent negative vote. The referendum result displayed a distinct trend—that public opinion on DST in Queensland is geographically divided, with the negative vote being strongest in northern and western districts, while the positive vote being strongest in the southeastern region (e.g. in Brisbane). The holiday islands in the Whitsundays (Hayman, Lindeman and Hamilton) continued to observe DST in defiance of the Standard Time Act (The ""Australia/Lindeman"" Timezone in the tz database is based on this). However the practice was abandoned two years later in 1995. Heron Island, 72 km off the coast off Gladstone, has two time zones: the resort follows DST all year round, whereas ""the Marine Research Centre and the Parks and Wildlife office on the island remain on Eastern Standard Time"".
Since the late 1900s, there have been a number of petitions submitted to the Legislative Assembly of Queensland, lobbying for the introduction of daylight saving time or for another referendum to be held. A petition in 2006 was signed by 62,232 people. In response to these petitions, then Queensland Premier Peter Beattie commissioned research to find out if it should be re-introduced into Queensland. Around this time, Beattie predicted that daylight saving in Queensland would increase the rate of skin cancer in the state, an assertion for which there is no evidence, according to the Queensland Cancer Fund.
In October 2007, the government-commissioned research was presented to Anna Bligh, who had replaced Peter Beattie as the Premier of Queensland; she ruled out holding a new referendum, despite the report indicating that 59 per cent of the residents of Queensland and 69 per cent of those in southeastern Queensland to be in favour of adopting daylight saving.
In December 2008, the Daylight Saving for South East Queensland (DS4SEQ) political party was officially registered, to advocate for the use of a two-time-zone system for DST in Queensland, with most of the state (in land area) using standard time. This party contested the March 2009 Queensland State election with 32 candidates, and it received about one per cent of the statewide primary vote.
In early 2010, the DS4SEQ political party approached the independent member, Peter Wellington, to introduce a private member's bill for DST.
Since Wellington agreed with the principles of the DS4SEQ proposal, specifically the dual-time-zone system, he drafted the Daylight Saving for South East Queensland Referendum Bill 2010 and he submitted this bill to Queensland Parliament on 14 April 2010. Wellington called for a referendum to be held at the next state election on the introduction of DST into southeastern Queensland under the dual-time-zone system.
In response to this bill, Premier Anna Bligh announced a community consultation process, which resulted in over 74,000 respondents participating, 64 per cent of whom voted in favour of a trial, and 63 per cent of whom were in favour of holding a referendum. The decision announced by the Premier on 7 June 2010 was that her Government would not support the bill because rural Queenslanders were overwhelmingly opposed to DST. The Bill was defeated in Queensland Parliament on 15 June 2011."
Time in Australia,"Western Australia
Western Australia has also had a particularly involved debate over DST, with the issue being put to a referendum four times: in 1975, 1984, 1992, and 2009. All of these proposals to adopt DST were defeated. Voters registered a negative vote of 54.6 per cent in the 2009 referendum, the highest percentage for all four of these referendums. Each referendum followed a trial period during which the state observed DST. The first three followed a one-year trial, while the 2006 Western Australian Daylight Saving Bill (No. 2) 2006 instituted a trial of DST beginning on 3 December 2006, and lasting for three years."
Time in Australia,"Deviances
Some towns located near the border of another state or territory use a different time zone to the rest of their own state or territory and may follow the bordering state or territory's time zone instead. The most well-known example of this is Broken Hill and the surrounding area, which, despite being located in New South Wales, use the same time zone as South Australia year-round."
Time in Australia,"Additionally, Gold Coast Airport, which straddles the border between New South Wales and Queensland (with the majority of the airport on the Gold Coast and a small portion of it in Tweed Heads), uses Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST) throughout the airport all year round, despite New South Wales observing daylight savings (which Queensland does not observe)."
Time in Australia,"See also
List of time zones
List of military time zones
UTC+10:00"
Time in Australia,"Notes
References
The Australian National Time System National Standards Commission Leaflet No. 8, January 2003, linked via Wayback Machine
NSW Legislative Council Hansard, 2 March 2005
Daylight Saving Petitions
Daylight Saving Time – history of daylight saving time implementation dates at the Bureau of Meteorology website"
Time in Australia,"External links
Information on time zones from official Government web site
Daylight Saving for South East Queensland political party Official DS4SEQ website"
Italian Australians,"Italian Australians (Italian: italo-australiani) are Australian-born citizens who are fully or partially of Italian descent, whose ancestors were Italians who emigrated to Australia during the Italian diaspora, or Italian-born people in Australia. 
Italian Australians constitute the sixth largest ancestry group in Australia, and one of the largest groups in the global Italian diaspora. At the 2021 census, 1,108,364 Australian residents nominated Italian ancestry (whether alone or in combination with another ancestry), representing 4.4% of the Australian population. The 2021 census found that 171,520 were born in Italy.
In 2021, there were 228,042 Australian residents who spoke Italian at home. The Italo-Australian dialect is prominent among Italian Australians who use the Italian language."
Italian Australians,"History
Early history
Italians have been arriving in Australia in a limited number since before the first fleet. Two individuals of Italian descent served on board the Endeavour when Captain James Cook arrived in Australia in 1770. Giuseppe Tuzi was among the convicts transported to Australia by the British in the First Fleet. Another early notable arrival, for his participation in Australian politics, was Raffaello Carboni who in 1853 participated with other miners in the uprising of Eureka Stockade and wrote the only complete eye-witness account of the uprising. This migration of northern Italian middle class professionals to Australia was spurred by the persecution from Austrian authorities – who controlled most of the northern regions of Italy until 1860 – especially after the failure of the revolts in many European cities in the 1840s and 1850s. As stated by D'Aprano in his work on the first Italian migrants in Victoria: We find some Italian artisans in Melbourne and other colonies already in the 1840s, and 1841s, many of whom had participated in the defeated revolts against the despotic rulers of Modena, Naples, Venice, Milan, Bologna, Rome and other cities. They came to Australia to seek a better and more efficient life.
Through the 1840s and 1850s, the number of Italian migrants of peasant background who came for economic reasons increased. Nevertheless, they did not come from the landless, poverty-stricken agricultural working class but from rural families with at least sufficient means to pay their fare to Australia. Furthermore, in the late 1850s, some 2,000 Swiss Italians of Australia from Northern Italy migrated to the Victorian goldfields.
The number of Italians who arrived in Australia remained small during the whole of the nineteenth century. The voyage was costly and complex, as no direct shipping link existed between the two countries until the late 1890s. The length of the voyage was over two months before the opening of the Suez Canal. Italian migrants who intended to leave for Australia had to use German shipping lines that called at the ports of Genoa and Naples no more than once a month. Therefore, other overseas destinations such as the United States and the Latin American countries proved much more attractive, thus allowing the establishment of migration patterns more quickly and drawing far greater numbers.
Nevertheless, the Victorian gold rush of the 1850s attracted thousands of Italians and Swiss Italians to Australia. The drain on the labour supply occasioned by the gold rush caused Australia to also seek workmen from Europe for land use and the development of cultivation, both in New South Wales and Queensland. Unfortunately, the number of Italians who joined the Victorian gold mines is obscure, and until 1871 Italians did not receive a special place in any Australian census figures. By 1881, the first year of census figures on Italian migrants in all States, there were 521 Italians (representing 0.066% of the total population) in New South Wales, and 947 (0.10%) in Victoria, of whom one-third were in Melbourne and the rest were in the goldfields. Queensland had 250 Italians, South Australia 141, Tasmania 11 and Western Australia just 10. Such figures, from Australian sources, correspond to similar figures from Italian sources.
While Italians in Australia were less than 2,000, they tended to increase, because they were attracted by the easy possibility to settle in areas capable of intense agricultural exploitation. In this regard, it must be borne in mind again that in the early 1880s Italy was facing a strong economic crisis, which was going to push a hundred thousand Italians to seek a better life abroad.
In addition, even Australian travellers, like Randolph Bedford, who visited Italy in the 1870s and 1880s, admitted the convenience of having a larger intake of Italian workers into Australia. Bedford stated that Italians would adjust to the Australian climate better than the ""pale"" English migrant. As the job opportunities attracted so many British people to the colonies to be employed in agriculture, certainly the Italian peasant, accustomed to be a hard-worker, ""frugal and sober"", would be a very good immigrant for the Australia soil. Many Italian immigrants had extensive knowledge of Mediterranean-style farming techniques, which were better suited to cultivating Australia's harsh interior than the Northern-European methods in use previous to their arrival.
Since the early 1880s, due to the socioeconomic situation in Italy and the abundant opportunities to settle in Australia as farmers, skilled or semi-skilled artisans and labourers, the number of Italians who left for Australia increased."
Italian Australians,"In 1881, over 200 foreign immigrants, of whom a considerable number were Italians from Northern Italy, arrived in Sydney. They were the survivors from Marquis de Ray's ill-fated attempt at founding a colony, Nouvelle France, in New Ireland, which later became part of Germany's New Guinea Protectorate. Many of them took up a conditional purchase farm of 16 hectares (40 acres) near Woodburn in the Northern Rivers District at what was subsequently known as New Italy. By the mid-1880s, about 50 holdings of an aggregate area of more than 1,200 hectares (3,000 acres) were under occupation, and the Italian population of New Italy has increased to 250. In this respect, Lyng reported: ""The land was very poor and heavily timbered and had been passed over by local settlers. However, the Italians set to work and by great industry and thrift succeeded in clearing some of the land and making it productive. ... Besides, working on their own properties the settlers were engaged in the sugar industry, in timber squaring, grass seed gathering, and other miscellaneous work"".
In 1883, a commercial Treaty between the United Kingdom and Italy was signed, allowing Italian subjects freedom of entry, travel and residence, and the rights to acquire and own property and to carry on business activities. This Agreement certainly favoured the arrival in Australia of many more Italians."
Italian Australians,"In working society, 1890–1920
1891 was the year in Queensland in which over 300 peasants from northern Italy were scheduled to arrive, as the first contingent to replace over 60,000 Kanakas brought to north Queensland since the mid-nineteenth century as exploitable labour for the sugarcane plantations. Until the early 1890s, Italians had been practically an unknown—although very modest—quantity in Queensland. As a result of the new White Australia policy, the Kanakas were now being deported. While employment was guaranteed, wages were low and fixed. The deciding factor in the whole matter was the plight of the sugar industry: docile gang labour was essential, and the ""frugal"" Italian peasants were perfectly suited for such employment.
The Australian Workers' Union claimed that Italians would work harder than the Kanakas for lower pay and take away work from Australians, and over 8,000 Queenslanders signed a petition requesting the project to be cancelled. Nonetheless, more Italian migrants arrived and soon nominated friends and relatives still in Italy. They slowly acquired a large number of sugar-cane plantations and gradually set up thriving Italian communities in north Queensland around the towns of Ayr and Innisfail."
Italian Australians,"A few years later, Italians were again the subject of public discussion in Western Australia. The gold rush of the early 1890s in Western Australia and the subsequent labour disputes at the mines had belatedly attracted Italians in large number, both from Victoria and Italy itself. Most of them were unskilled and therefore usually employed on the surface of the mines, or cutting, loading and carting wood nearby. Pyke so described the situation: Popular agitation was prompted mainly by growing unemployment; even Italians had begun to write home about it. Italians, however, could still be readily employed, often in preference to other workmen, because of the contract system of employment. They had the virtue of comparative docility and temperance and the ability to work in the hottest of weather; consequently, they were sought after by contractors, a few of whom were Italians themselves.
As previously stated with respect to the temporary migration of Tuscan migrants, Italians worked hard, and most saved steadily, by a simple a primitive mode of life, to buy land either in hospitable Australian urban areas or in the Italian community of origin. They were clearly ""the better men for the worse job""."
Italian Australians,"The early 1890s is a turning point in the Australian attitude toward Italian immigration. Pyke stated: The Labour Movement was against Italian immigration to all areas, and particularly to these industries, inasmuch as it swelled the labour market and increased competition, thereby putting employers in the enviable position of being able to pick and choose and giving employees who wanted to labour and needed work, the opportunity of paying for employment and accepting low wages.
Sugarcane activities in Queensland and mining in Western Australia—where most of the Italians were employed—became the targets of the Labour movement. As O'Connor reports in his work on the first Italian settlements, when Italians began to compete with Britons for work on the Kalgoorlie goldfields, the Parliament was warned that they, along with Greeks and Hungarians, ""had become a greater pest in the United States than the coloured races"". In other words, during the 1890s, a political and social alliance was formed between the Australian Labour Party and the Anglo-Celtic Australian working class to react to Italian immigrants, with particular reference to northern and central Italian workers who lowered the level of wages."
Italian Australians,"Even in the Italian literature of the 1890s and early 1900s on travel reports and descriptions of Australia, there are notes about these frictions. The Italian Geographical Society (Societa' Geografica Italiana) reported as follows about the few Italian settlements in Australia: Nella maggior parte dei casi l'operaio (italiano) vive sotto la tenda, così chiunque non sia dedito all'ubriachezza (cosa troppo comune in questi paesi, ma non fra i nostri connazionali) può facilmente risparmiare la metà del suo salario. I nostri italiani, economi per eccellenza, risparmiano talvolta anche di più. (In the great majority of cases, Italian labourers live in tents, so, whoever does not get drunk (which is such a common habit in this country, except amongst Italians) can easily save up to half his wage. Our Italians, extremely thrifty, save even more than that).
Among the many observations about his journey to Australia, the Italian priest and writer, Giuseppe Capra, notes in 1909: In questi ultimi cinquantacinque anni, in cui l'Italiano emigrò più numeroso in Australia, la sua condotta morale è superiore a quella delle altre nazionalità che qui sono rappresentate, l'inglese compreso. Amante del lavoro, del risparmio, intelligente, sobrio, è sempre ricercatissimo: l'unico contrasto che talvolta incontra è quello dell'operaio inglese, che, forte della sua origine, si fa preferire e guarda al suo concorrente con viso arcigno, temendo, senza alcun fondamento, che l'Italiano si presti a lavori per salari inferiori ai proprii.
(During these recent 55 years, when Italians migrated more to Australia, their moral conduct had been superior to that of the many other nationals here represented, British included. Italians are work and savings-oriented, intelligent, sober and very much sought after. The only hostility comes from the British labourers who, confident of their origin, look at their Italian competitors with a surly mood, because they are afraid—without any evidence—that Italians could work for lower wages than theirs)."
Italian Australians,"Frictions between the established Australian working class and the newcomers suggest that, during periods of economic crisis and unemployment, immigration acted as a ""tool of division and attack"" by international capitalism to working class organisations. There were Italians in occupations other than in the sugarcane industry and mining. In Western Australia, fishing was next in popularity, followed by the usual urban pursuits now associated with Italians of peasant origin, such as market gardening, the keeping of restaurants and wine shops and the sale of fruit and vegetables.
As Cresciani has explained in his comprehensive study of Italian settlements in the early decades of the twentieth century, it was the small size and the type of the Italian settlement that also worked against a wider involvement of Italian migrants with organised labour.
""Most Italians were scattered in the countryside, on the goldfields, in the mines. As agricultural workers, fruit pickers, farmers, tobacco growers, canecutters. The distance and the lack of communication prevented them from organising themselves. Those in the cities, mainly greengrocers, market gardeners and labourers, because of the sheer lack of interest and capacity to understand the advantages that a political organisation would bring, kept themselves aloof from any active role in politics and from the people who were advocating it. Also, many migrants were seasonal workers, never stopping for long at any one place, thus making it difficult for them to take part in social or political activities"". By the early 1900s, there were over 5,000 Italians in Australia in a remarkable variety of occupations. According to the 1911 Census, there were 6,719 residents who had been born in Italy. Of these, 5,543 were males, while 2,683 had become naturalised. No less than 2,600 were in Western Australia.
One of the most significant policy matters that the new Parliament of Australia had to consider after it opened in 1901 was immigration. Later that year, the Attorney-General, Alfred Deakin, introduced and passed into legislation the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 and the allied Pacific Island Labourers Act. The goal was to ensure the White Australia policy by controlling entry into Australia and—by the latter—repatriating coloured labour from the Pacific Islands. The concept was meant to safeguard the social ""white"" purity and protect wage standards against cheap coloured labour.
As the Restriction Act passed into legislation, there was some confusion as to whether Italians should be let into the country or kept out by means of the ""Dictation test"" provisions, as stated into the Act. The Act did not specify a translation but rather a dictation in a European language, the purpose of the test being to keep non-Europeans out of Australia, as a deterrent to unwanted immigrants. Although the test was initially to be administered in English, it was then changed to any European language, ""mainly through Labour insistence"". Such a firmly sustained system to select entries into Australia that it remained on the statute books until 1958, when it was replaced by a system of entry permits.
Nevertheless, in the early 1900s, some Italians calling at Fremantle and other Australian ports were refused admission under the provisions of the Act. These latter cases might be indicative of the fact that Western Australia shared the xenophobia of the rest of the world. The reaction was certainly associated with the so-called ""Awakening of Asia"" and 'Yellow Peril', which were not exclusively Australian terms. As reported: ""Such concepts combined to produce in Europe a suspicion that the traditional European supremacy around the globe was coming to an end. In Australia that eventually was seen as, or made to appear, a more immediate threatening"".
Fuelled both by the British-European feeling of loss of supremacy and the fears of the Australian Labor Party in working sectors where labourers were not exclusively Anglo-Celtic, anti-Italian sentiments gathered momentum in the United States in the early 1900s, in the wake of Italian mass migration. Such attitudes also flourished in Australia, as it has been reported with respect to the Queensland sugar-cane industry and Western Australian mines.
Nevertheless, a new attempt to found an Italian colony in Western Australia took place in 1906, when the western state offered to host about 100 Italian peasant families to settle in the south-western rural corner of Western Australia. A delegation of a few northern Italian farmers led by Leopoldo Zunini, an Italian career diplomat, visited most of these rural areas. Although his report on soil fertility, quality of cattle to graze, transport and accommodation for the Italian farmers was extremely positive and enthusiastic, the settlement scheme was not carried out. Again, Western Australia public opinion opposed the creation of an exclusively Italian settlement, possibly caused by a mounting anti-Italian sentiment fuelled by the outlined episodes of confrontation between the Labour movement and the cheap labour cost offered by Italian migrants."
Italian Australians,"Growth of the community, 1921–1945
Italian migration to Australia increased markedly only after heavy restrictions were placed on Italians' entry to the United States. More than two million Italian migrants entered the United States from the start of the 20th century to the outbreak of the First World War, whereas only about twelve thousand Italians had entered Australia in the same period. In 1917, while war was still on, the United States introduced a Literacy Act to curtail its immigration flow—which had reached a high number in the years immediately before the war—and Canada enacted similar legislation two years later. In 1921, United States policy became even stricter, with the establishment of a quota system that limited the total intake of Italian immigrants in any one year to about 41,000 (calculated as 3% of the number of Italians residing in the United States in 1910). Furthermore, in 1924, the figures related to the entry of Italians were cut almost to zero, as they were meant to represent the 2% of the Italian component in the United States in 1890.
Such severe restrictions meant that part of the great post-war stream of migrants from Italy was progressively diverted to Australia. Nevertheless, the way Italian migrants were conceived by Australian society was not going to change after its perception had formed in the early 1900s. With respect to this attitude, MacDonald wrote:
""Italian immigration became the largest non-British movement after the entry of Melanesians and Asians was stopped by the new federal government in 1902. This put Italians at the bottom of the Australian ""racial totem pole"", just above other Southern Europeans and Aborigines. The volume of arrivals, the proportion of settlers in the total population of Australia, and the size of Italian agglomerated settlements were trivial by international standards. Yet the establishment of fifty Italian households within a radius of five miles (8.0 km) or the employment of twenty Italians on a job were cause for alarm in Australian eyes, The ""inferiority"" of Italians was generally seen in racist terms as well as specifically in terms of their threatening to compete with labour of British stock because of their ""primitive"" way of life"".
This attitude was also present in other English speaking countries, as Porter reported for Canada. In his classical study of Italians in North Queensland, Douglass suggests other factors affecting such racist attitudes, and reports a summary of the Commonwealth Parliamentary debate of 1927: ""The image of the Italian was nourished by the stereotype of the southerner, and particularly the Sicilian. Regardless of its veracity, it could be applied to only a minority of the new arrivals since, by Italian Government estimates, fully two-fifths of its emigrants to Australia were from the Veneto and another two-fifths were drawn from the Piedmont, Lombardy and Tuscany regions. Only one-fifth were from Sicily and Calabria"".
Although the Australian attitude towards Italians was not friendly, since the early 1920s Italian migrants began to arrive in Australia in notable numbers. While the Australian Census of 1921 recorded 8,135 Italians residing in the country, during the years 1922–1925 another 15,000 arrived and, again, a similar number of Italians reached Australia during the period 1926–1930.
Together with the entry restrictions adopted by the United States, another factor that increased Italian emigration in the early 1920s was the rise of Fascism in Italy in 1922. Gradually, the arrays of migrants became formed also by a minor component of political opponents to Fascism, generally peasants of the northern Italian regions, who chose Australia as their destination. In his study on Italian migration to South Australia, O'Connor even reports on the presence, in 1926, in Adelaide of a dangerous anarchist ""subversive"" from the village of Capoliveri, in the Tuscan Island of Elba, one Giacomo Argenti.
The concern of Benito Mussolini about the high emigration figures of the mid-1920s pushed the Fascist government's decision in 1927 to stop all migration to overseas countries, with rarely permitted exceptions, apart from female and minor close relatives (under-age sons, unmarried daughters of any age, parents and unmarried sisters without family in Italy) dependent on residents abroad. In the early 1920s Italians had found that it was not difficult to enter Australia, as there were no visa requirements. The Amending Immigration Act of 1924 prohibited the entry of migrants unless they had a written guarantee completed by a sponsor, an Atto di richiamo ('Call notice'). In this case, any migrant could come to Australia free of charge. Without a sponsor, the required landing money was ten pounds until 1924 and forty since 1925. O'Connor stated: ""In 1928, as the number of arrivals increased, a 'gentleman's agreement' between Italy and Australia limited the entry of Italians to no more than 2% of British arrivals, amounting to a maximum of 3,000 Italians per year"".
Italian nationalism acted as an element of reaction and defence to the Australian environment. By the early 1930s, even Italian diplomatic activity in Australia—as a direct expression of the Fascist government—became more incisive and oriented to make more and more Fascist proselytes among Italians. Migrants were invited to become members of the fascist political organisations of Australia, to come to fascist meetings and eventually to return to Italy, to consent to serve in the Italian armed forces, both in view of the Italian war campaign of Ethiopia (1936) and, later, at the outbreak of World War II.
Italians had arrived in Australia in consistent numbers all through the 1920s and 1930s, regardless of the internal and external factors affecting either their departure or their stay in Australia. Entry conditions of Italian migrants became stricter in countries of more popular destinations as the United States, and Italian Fascist authorities tightened the departure of migrants. At the same time, in Australia, the attitude towards Italians had been hostile to their settlements and work patterns. In addition, Australia, like the United States and most western countries, was hit by the economic Depression of 1929, which caused a serious recession during the following years."
Italian Australians,"Even Australian legislation was changed consequently. Amendments to the Immigration Restriction Act in 1932 were more drastic and aimed at more effectively controlling the entry of ""white aliens"" into Australia. The amendment extended the landing permit system to all categories of immigrants, while before was applicable only to immigrants with a maintenance guarantee. The goal was to limit immigrants from competing in the local labour market to the detriment of the local unemployed. At the same time, the power to apply the dictation test was still available for up to five years to restrict the landing of an immigrant whose admission was not desired.
The economic depression ignited another social tension which fanned into racial hatred again in 1934. In the gold-mining city of Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, an Australian who had expressed defamatory remarks about Italians in an Italian-owned hotel was knocked dead by the barman. This accident sparked the resentment of many Australian miners against Italians residing in Kalgoorlie, which culminated in two days of riots. A raging crowd of miners devastated and burnt many shops and private abodes of Italians and other Southern Europeans in Boulder and Kalgoorlie and pushed hundreds of Italian migrants to shelter in the surrounding countryside. Notwithstanding the condemnation of the fact on media, the riots did not modify the attitude of public opinion toward Italians in general.
In the 1930s, the Australian community maintained a perception of cultural inferiority of Italians that owed much to longer-term racial conceptions and which were confirmed by the lifestyle of the migrants. As observed by Bertola in his study of the riots, racism towards Italians lay in ""their apparent willingness to be used in efforts to drive down wages and conditions, and their inability to transcend the boundaries that separated them from the host culture"". "
Italian Australians,"This was the umpteenth episode that without doubt pushed the notable number of Italians now working and residing in Australia to sympathise with Fascism and devote to the narrow circle of the Italian associations and the close relations of the family. In the late 1930s, a Fascist traveller to Australia so describes the life and work of Italians in the Western Australian mines: È la dura quotidiana fatica del lavoro e la resistenza alle lotte degli Australiani che essi debbono sostenere per il prestigio di essere Italiani di Mussolini. [...] Gli Italiani formarono quel fronte unico di resistenza che va considerato una delle più belle vittorie del fascismo in terra straniera. Altra cosa è fare gl'Italiani in Italia altra è all'estero, dove chi ti dà da mangiare dimentica che tu lavori per lui, e solo per questo crede di essere padrone delle tue braccia e del tuo spirito. 
(Italians have to sustain the daily hard work and the resistance to the claims of Australians, to bear the prestige to be Italians of Mussolini. [...] Italians formed that strong front of resistance, which can be considered one of the best victories of fascism in foreign land. One thing is to form Italians in Italy and another is abroad, where those who feed you forget that you all work for them, and just for this reason they think to be the owners of your arms and spirits).
Nevertheless, the Australia Census of 1933 claimed that 26,756 (against the 8,000 of 1921) were born in Italy. Since that year, Italy-born residents in Australia began to represent the first non-English speaking ethnic group of the country, replacing Germans and Chinese. Notwithstanding, a very high proportion of them (20,064) were male. Many Italian male migrants, who had in fact left Italy for Australia during the late 1920s and early 1930s, were joined by wives, working-age sons, daughters, brothers and sisters in the late 1930s. This pattern can be interpreted as a ""defence"" from both the perceived hostile Australia environment and the political turmoil of pre-war Italy.
Until the outbreak of World War II, there was a considerable degree of segregation between Italians and Australians. As an additional reaction, a large proportion of Italians in Australia tended to defer naturalisation (which could be granted after a period of five years of residence) until they had finally established their homes in Australia. Consequently, it is not surprising that, with the outbreak of World War II, the Australian opinion of Italian migrants naturally hardened.
The entry of Italy into the war was followed by the large-scale internment of Italians, especially in Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia. The concern in Queensland was that Italians would somehow join forces with an invading Japanese force and constitute a fifth column. Between 1940 and 1945, most of those who had not been naturalised before the war's outbreak were considered ""enemy aliens"", and therefore either interned or subjected to close watch, with respect to personal movements and area of employment. There were many cases of Italian-Australians who had taken out Australian citizenship also being interned. This was particularly the case in northern Queensland."
Italian Australians,"Post-war mass migration to Australia, 1946–1970s
During WWII, more than 18,000 Italian prisoners-of-war were sent to internment camps throughout Australia. Together with the interned ""enemy aliens"", after 1942 a large number of them were employed in inland farms without much surveillance. Many prisoners of war and Italian-Australian interned worked hard in farms and cattle stations, thus gaining a favourable opinion as hard and committed workers by their Australian employers. This circumstance contributed to generate an environment more agreeable – than that before the war – for the Italian post-war migration to Australia.
After World War II, the attitude of Australians towards Italians gradually began to change, with the increasing appreciation of the value of Italians in the economic development of Australia. At the same time, the Italian war experience helped to destroy many of the political and sentimental attachments that Italians had previously felt towards their country. As a consequence, the end of the war encouraged the naturalisation of many Italian migrants, who had been caught up as enemy aliens at the outbreak of the world conflict."
Italian Australians,"At the end of 1947, only 21% of the Italians residing in Australia were not yet naturalised. Many of those becoming naturalised in the late 1940s did so to allay the suspicion caused by the war. Borrie wrote in his fundamental work on the assimilation of Italians in Australia:""Naturalisation was the obvious first step towards their rehabilitation. The war had also broken many of the links with Italy, and in addition it was still difficult to secure a shipping passage to return there. But while the act of naturalization may have been an irrevocable step which in turn provided an incentive to become socially and culturally assimilated, field investigations show clearly that Italians retained many traits, particularly within the circle of the home, which were not ""Australian"". And naturalized or not, they were still not fully accepted by Australians""."
Italian Australians,"Conversely, after the war experience, the Australian government embarked on the 'Populate or Perish' program, aimed to increase the population of the country for strategically important economic and military reasons. The immigration debate in postwar Australia assumed new dimensions as official policy sought a significant increase in the number and the diversity of immigrants, and to find a place for those coming from a tired and torn Europe. The war had occasioned a shift in migration patterns, pressing the need to place a large number of people who could not return to their own countries for a wide range of reasons. This was the case of over ten million people from Central and North-eastern Europe, such as Poles, Germans, Greeks, Czechs, Yugoslavs and Slovaks. An important stage in this immigration program began with the Displaced Persons Scheme in 1947, which attracted over 170,000 displaced persons to Australia. 
Italy's postwar migration certainly grew out of the country's policy of industrial development. Although there had been a significant industrial growth in Italy before the war, the devastation wrought by the conflict left the structure in ruins. This factor and the return of Italian soldiers from the war fronts generated a surplus of population which turned to emigration as an alternative to poverty.
By the early 1950s, Australian authorities negotiated formal migration agreements with the Netherlands (1951), Germany and Austria (1952). They also introduced a system of personal nominations and guarantees, opened to Italians, to permit families separated by the war to come together again. In addition, the Australian and Italian governments negotiated a scheme of recruitment and assisted passages, which became fully effective in 1952. As extensively outlined by MacDonald, the chain migration process, eased by the personal nomination scheme, seemed to be more flexible than the administrative machinery of the bilateral program. Personal nominees had a guarantee of assistance and contacts at their arrival in Australia, to help migrants to evaluate all employment possibilities.
Since the mid-1950s, the Italian flow of migrants to Australia assumed a sort of mass migration. Either nominated by relatives in Australia as a major component, or as assisted migrants, a notable number of migrants left Italy for Australia. Unlike the pre-war movement, most of the migrants of the 1950s and 1960s had planned to settle permanently in Australia. Within these two decades, the number of Italians who came to Australia was so high that their number increased tenfold. Between June 1949 and July 2000, Italy was the second most common birthplace for immigrant arrivals to Australia after United Kingdom and Ireland."
Italian Australians,"21st century
In recent years, Australia has been witnessing a new wave of migration from Italy in numbers not seen in half a century, as thousands flee the economic hardship in Italy.
The explosion of numbers saw more than 20,000 Italians arrive in Australia in 2012–13 on temporary visas, exceeding the number of Italians that arrived in 1950–51 during the previous migration boom following World War Two.
At the 2022 federal election, Anthony Albanese was elected, becoming Australia's first Prime Minister of Italian descent.
As of 2020 David Crisafulli is the Queensland state Opposition Leader (LNP) and Lia Finocchiaro is the Northern Territory Opposition Leader (CLP). Both are of Italian descent."
Italian Australians,"Demographics
At the 2021 census, 1,108,364 people nominated Italian ancestry (whether alone or in combination with another ancestry), representing 4.4% of the Australian population. The 2021 census found that 163,326 were born in Italy. In 2021, there were 228,042 Australian residents who spoke Italian at home.
According to 2006 census data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 95% of Italian born Australians recorded their religion as Christian. 
As of the 2006 census, 162,107 (81.4%) speak Italian at home. Proficiency in English was self-described by census respondents as very well by 28%, well by 32%, 21% not well (18% didn't state or said not applicable).
As the level of immigration from Italy dropped significantly after the 1970s, the Australian population born in Italy is ageing and in decline. Most Italian Australians are the Australian-born descendants of Italian immigrants.
As of 2016, there were 120,791 registered Italian citizens (including those with dual citizenship) living in Australia according to the Italian constitutional referendum, 2016."
Italian Australians,"Geographical distribution
Italians are well represented in every Australian state, territory, town and region. At the 2021 census, states with the largest numbers of persons nominating Italian ancestry were Victoria (384,688), New South Wales (301,829), Queensland (152,571), Western Australia (137,255) and South Australia (103,914).
Most Australian residents born in Italy are now concentrated in Melbourne (73,799), Sydney (44,562), Adelaide (20,877) and Perth (18,815). Unlike other groups, the number of Italians residing in Brisbane is relatively few, with the exception of a notable distribution of Italians in Northern Queensland, as Hempel has described in her research on post-war settlement of Italian immigrants in this state. This circumstance is a consequence of the migration patterns followed by Italians in the earlier stage of their settlement in Queensland, during the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s, when the sugarcane industry and its related possibility of quick earnings attracted more ""temporary"" migrants in the countryside.
Conversely, in Australian cities, the Italian village or the region of origin have been significant in the formation of separate settlements or neighbourhood groupings of Italians. The way in which a population ""subgroup"" is distributed across an area is of importance because not only can it tell us a great deal about the pattern of life of that group, but it is also crucial in any planning of service delivering to such a community. The Italian community has very distinctive patterns of distribution that differentiate it from the total population.
As Burnley reports in his study on Italian absorption in urban Australia, some Italian concentrations in the inner suburbs of Carlton, the traditional 'Little Italy' of Melbourne, and Leichhardt, its equivalent in Sydney, were made up of several groups from geographically very circumscribed areas of Italy. Migrants from the Lipari Islands of Sicily, and from a few communities of the Province of Vicenza have formed the main Italian community core of Leichhardt, as well as Sicilians from the Province of Ragusa and the Commune of Vizzini have formed a large contingent in Brunswick, a local government authority of Melbourne now containing over 10,000 Italians.
On a smaller scale, but through similar patterns, other large communities of Italians were formed, since the first notable arrival of Italians of the 1920s and 1930s, in Adelaide, Perth and in minor cities of Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. Most first-generation Italian migrants came to Australia by the nomination of a close relative or a friend, as forms of chain migration.
With particular reference to Western Australia, as previously stated, Italians began to arrive in more notable number after the discovery of gold in the Eastern Goldfields, in the early 1890s. The Australian Census of 1911 records the presence of over 2,000 Italians in Western Australia. Only two years before, the Italian writer Capra had visited the state and reported:
""L'attuale emigrazione italiana in Australia e' poca cosa, e consta quasi esclusivamente di operai per le miniere e pel taglio della legna nella parte occidentale, e di lavoratori della canna da zucchero nel Queensland"". (Present Italian migration to Australia is negligible, almost exclusively limited to miners and woodcutters in the western state, and sugarcane cutters in Queensland).
Capra details the professional distribution of Italians. Over two-thirds all Italians were employed either in mines or in the mine-related woodcutting industry (respectively about 400 and 800), both in the gold districts of Gwalia, Day Down, Coolgardie and Cue, and the forests of Karrawong and Lakeside. The remaining Italian workers were mainly involved in farming (250) and fishing (150). This work pattern of Italians in Western Australia did not change much with the more consistent migration flow of the late 1920s and early 1930s. During these two decades, Italian migrants to Australia continued to come from the north and central mountain areas of Italy, thus following a pattern of ""temporary"" migration that pushed them to look for jobs with potential quick remuneration, as mining and woodcutting could offer. Changes in such patterns, together with the Italian mass-migration program of the 1950s and 1960s, have already been examined. Hence, the different component of regional origin of Italians in Western Australia and, subsequently, since the late 1950s, a more composite geographical distribution of Italian migrants in both urban and rural areas of the state."
Italian Australians,"Origins
Between the period of 1947 to 1971, Australia's Italy-born numbered 289,476 and most Italian migrants came from Sicily, Calabria and Veneto and settled in metropolitan areas."
Italian Australians,"Return migration
Italian Australians have a low rate of return migration to Italy. In December 2001, the Department of Foreign Affairs estimated that there were 30,000 Australian citizens resident in Italy. These are likely to be largely returned Italian emigrants with Australian citizenship, and their Italian-Australian children."
Italian Australians,"Film on Italian emigration to Australia
A Girl in Australia (1971), directed by Luigi Zampa
Love's Brother by Jan Sardi (2004)
Underbelly (series 1) (2008)"
Italian Australians,"See also
European Australians
Italian diaspora
Italo-Australian Dialect
List of Italian Australians
List of Italian association football clubs in Australia
List of Italian-Australian communities
Swiss Italians of Australia
Immigration to Australia"
Italian Australians,"Notes
External links
Spunti e ricerche; rivista d'italianistica Academic Scholarly Journal
Gianfranco Cresciani (2008). ""Italians"". Dictionary of Sydney. Retrieved 4 October 2015. (Italians in Sydney)
Pierpaolo Gandini (1996). ""Antipodi"". L'emigrazione italiana in Australia"
List of mountains in Australia,This is a list of mountains in Australia.
List of mountains in Australia,"Highest points by state and territory
List of mountains in Australia by topographic prominence
This is a list of the top 50 mountains in Australia ranked by topographic prominence. Most of these peaks are the highest point in their areas."
List of mountains in Australia,"Australian Capital Territory
The following is a list of mountains and prominent hills in the Australian Capital Territory in order, from the highest peak to the lowest peak, for those mountains and hills with an elevation above 750 metres (2,460 ft) AHD:"
List of mountains in Australia,"New South Wales
Queensland
South Australia
Tasmania
Victoria
Western Australia
Carnarvon Range
Mount Augustus (1105m)
Mount Beadell
Darling Range
Mount Dale
Mount Cooke
Hamersley Range
Mount Meharry (at 1,249 metres above sea level, the highest peak in Western Australia)
Mount Bruce (1,221 m; the second highest peak in WA)
Mount Nameless/Jarndunmunha 1,115 m
Wunaamin Miliwundi Ranges, formerly King Leopold Ranges
Mount Lesueur
Porongurup Range
Stirling Range
Bluff Knoll (1,099m)
Toolbrunup (998m)
Mount Magog
Mount Trio
Mount Hassell
Talyuberlup Peak
Peak Charles National Park
Peak Charles
Peak Eleanora
West Mount Barren
East Mount Barren
Mount Wells (983m)
Mount Ord (947m)
Mount Teague
Mount Manypeaks"
List of mountains in Australia,Northern Territory
List of mountains in Australia,"
== References =="
Australian Defence Organisation,"The Australian Defence Organisation (ADO) is an Australian Government organisation that consists of the Australian Defence Force (ADF), the Department of Defence (DoD, also branded as Defence Australia), and other related organisations. In present use, the ADO is referred to as Defence. Defence's mission and purpose is ""to defend Australia and its national interests in order to advance Australia’s security and prosperity""."
Australian Defence Organisation,"Organisation
Defence consists of several smaller interrelated military and corporate organisations. The two most significant organisations are the ADF, led by the Chief of the Defence Force who is Australia's senior military leader, and the DoD, managed by the Secretary of the Department of Defence who is a senior public servant accountable under the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act 2013.
In addition to the two primary organisations, a number of other entities are considered part of Defence:"
Australian Defence Organisation,"The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) is an independent statutory agency under the  Intelligence Services Act 2001.
The Australian Submarine Agency is a non-corporate Commonwealth entity under the DoD.
Both the Inspector-General of the ADF and the Defence Honours and Awards Appeals Tribunal are independent statutory offices created by the Defence Act 1903 which operate within the DoD.
Defence additionally contains a number of independent statutory offices created by the Defence Force Discipline Act 1982.
Various other trusts and companies support the mission of defence, including the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Defence Housing Australia and funds and trusts associated with branches of the ADF.
Entities within Defence report to the Minister for Defence, but the defence minster's portfolio and ADO are not identical, for example the Department of Veterans' Affairs reports to the defence minister but is not part of Defence.
For the 2024-25 financial year, as estimated in the Defence Portfolio Budget Statement prepared as part of the 2024 Australian federal budget, Defence's    total workforce was 82,724 people (16,331 Navy personnel, 31,339 Army personnel, 15,927 Air Force personnel and 19,127 public servants), and Defence received A$53.58 billion in government funding.
The ADO is understood to be a diarchy, a rare organisational structure intended to take advantage of ""the responsibilities and complementary abilities of public servants and military officials"". The 2014 First Principles Review, taken up in the 2016 Defence White Paper, recommended moving to operate as a more integrated organisation, amid public criticism of the diarchy structure."
Australian Defence Organisation,"While Defence is more commonly used, use of 'Australian Defence Organisation'  to refer to the entities collectively is longstanding practice. For example, 'Australian Defence Organisation' can still be seen on the number plates of vehicles managed by the Australian Defence Organisation Commercial Vehicles Fleet, operated by the Australian Army."
Australian Defence Organisation,"Australian Defence Force
The armed forces of Australia are the Australian Defence Force, consisting of three branches: the Royal Australian Navy, Australian Army and Royal Australian Air Force. Command of the Australian Defence Force, under the direction of Defence Minister, is the primary responsibility of the Chief of the Defence Force, currently Admiral David Johnston.
Reporting to the Chief of Defence Force are the Chief of Navy, Chief of Army, and Chief of Air Force. Each Chief manages the day-to-day executive operations of their branch with both discretionary decision making authority and direction from the Chief of the Defence Force and the various Ministers of the defence portfolio and often cooperate with their counterparts from the other services as well as the Department of Defence.
The Vice Chief of the Defence Force, currently Vice Air Marshal Robert Chipman, is responsible for joint force integration, preparedness and military strategy, interoperability, and designing the future force. The Joint Operations Command oversees all joint deployments of the Australian Defence Force and is commanded by the Chief of Joint Operations. The Joint Capabilities Group, commanded by the Chief of Joint Capabilities, provides joint military professional education and training, logistics support, health support and oversees the Joint Logistics Command, Joint Health Command, Australian Defence College, and the Information Warfare Division."
Australian Defence Organisation,Department of Defence
Australian Defence Organisation,"The Department of Defence is one of the three original Australian Government departments created at Federation of Australia in 1901, alongside the Attorney-General's Department and the Treasury. It is the Australian Public Service entity that provides advice, coordination, and program delivery for defence and military policy.
The Department of Defence also manages and oversees a range of public service and defence force agencies and organisations that deliver and develop the capabilities and services that support the Australian Defence Force. Such agencies include the Army and Air Force Canteen Service, the Defence Community Organisation, and Defence Housing Australia.
The Department also includes key groups including the Capability Acquisition and Sustainment Group, the Defence Science and Technology Group, and the Defence Strategic Policy and Intelligence Group (which oversees the Australian Signals Directorate, Defence Intelligence Organisation, and Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation)."
Australian Defence Organisation,"
== References =="
Australian comedy,"Australian comedy (or Australian humour) refers to the comedy and humour performed in or about Australia or by the people of Australia. Australian humour can be traced to various origins, and today is manifested in a diversity of cultural practices and pursuits.  Writers like Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson helped to establish a tradition of laconic, ironic and irreverent wit in Australian literature, while Australian politicians and cultural stereotypes have each proved rich sources of comedy for artists from poet C. J. Dennis to satirist Barry Humphries to iconic film maker Paul Hogan, each of whom have given wide circulation to Australian slang.
Vaudeville larrikinism in the style of Graham Kennedy and parochial satire and self-mockery has been a popular strain in Australian comedy, notably in the work of such as Norman Gunston (Garry McDonald), The D-Generation, Roy & HG and Kath & Kim. Acclaimed Australian comic character actors have included John Meillon, Leo McKern, Ruth Cracknell, Geoffrey Rush and Toni Collette. Sardonic political satire like that of The Chaser and social and cultural commentary provided by broadcasters like Clive James and Andrew Denton has been another hallmark. Multiculturalism has also contributed to a diversity in Australian comedy, from the work of migrant comedians like Mary Coustas and Anh Do to Aboriginal performers like Ernie Dingo. Australian stand-up comedy has a wide following and the Melbourne Comedy Festival is a major international comedy event."
Australian comedy,"Australian sense of humour
The ""Australian sense of humour"" is often characterised as dry, irreverent and ironic, exemplified by some of the works of performing artists like Barry Humphries and Paul Hogan and by character creations such as mock-talk-show hosts Norman Gunston (Garry McDonald) and Roy and HG (John Doyle and Greig Pickhaver). Australian humour was influenced by the convict origins of European Australian history. It is today expressed in Australian slang as well as throughout Australian film, literature, and other media. While outback and ""bronzed Aussie"" stereotypes are a rich source of Australian comedy, so are the urban rituals and exuberant cosmopolitanism of much of contemporary Australia, as expressed by auteurs like Baz Luhrmann in the 1993 film Strictly Ballroom. The quirks of Australian multiculturalism have also provided fodder for comedy: from They're a Weird Mob (1957) about an Italian immigrant adapting to Sydney life; to the works of Vietnamese refugee Anh Do and Egyptian born Akmal Saleh; the Guido Hatzis parody and Nick Giannopoulos' Wog Boy 2: Kings of Mykonos (2010) about second-generation Australian Greeks returning to their ancestral home. Actor Ernie Dingo is perhaps the best known Aboriginal Australian comedic performing artist. In recent years, comedy duo Hamish & Andy have dominated radio ratings  with cross-medium programming showcasing larrikin ideals and spirited curiosity."
Australian comedy,"Formative years: early Australian comedy
While the convicts of the early colonial period helped establish anti-authoritarianism as a hallmark of Australian comedy, Watkin Tench, an officer of the marines on the First Fleet, reflected on the irreverent humour of his friends among the Aboriginal Australians of Sydney.
Influential in the establishment of stoic, dry wit as a characteristic of Australian humour were the bush balladeers of the 19th century, including Henry Lawson, author of The Loaded Dog. His contemporary Banjo Paterson contributed such classic comic poems as ""Mulga Bill's Bicycle"", ""The Geebung Polo Club"" and ""A Bush Christening"".
Early novelist Joseph Furphy wrote in the Australian vernacular and the poet C. J. Dennis reflected a sense of Australian identity and humour in the Australian vernacular – notably in ""The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke"", which chronicles the courtship and marriage of a larrikin called Bill and his girl, Doreen: including a trip to the theatre: ""This Romeo 'e's lurkin' wiv a crew – A dead tough crowd o' crooks – called Montague"". The Dad and Dave series about a pioneer farming family was an enduring hit of the early 20th century.
Australia's ANZAC troops of World War I were said to often display a streak of irreverence in their relations with superior officers and dark humour in the face of battle. Books like Norman Lindsay's The Magic Pudding use humorous anthropomorphism to transform the animals of the Australian bush into a classic work of Australian children's literature.
Vaudeville stars like Roy Rene 'Mo' toured with the Tivoli Circuit prior to the arrival of radio. Mo, in baggy trousers and battered top hat and using Australian English catchphrases like ""Strike me lucky"" and ""Don't come the raw prawn with me"" became Australia's most successful variety star and began performing on radio in 1946. The arrival of television in 1956 assisted in the demise of the large vaudeville theatres and a switch to small venue ""comedy revues"" – notably the Melbourne University Revues."
Australian comedy,"Modern Australian comedy
Character creations
The satirical character creations of Barry Humphries include housewife and ""gigastar"" Dame Edna Everage; and ""Australian cultural attaché to the Court of St James's"" Sir Les Patterson, whose interests include boozing, chasing women and flatulence. Edna made her first appearance in a Melbourne University's UTRC revue at the end of 1955, as the city prepared for the 1956 Olympic Games. Humphries says his creations ""encourage people to look at Australia critically and with affection and humour"". Humphries first performed the Edna character to a London audience in 1969 and after initial bewilderment, British audiences came to adore the antipodean house-wife parody. Humphries honed the character to satirise vices from snobbery to celebrity-worship and later succeeded in the United States. For his delivery of dadaist and absurdist humour to millions, biographer Anne Pender described Humphries in 2010 as not only ""the most significant theatrical figure of our time … [but] the most significant comedian to emerge since Charlie Chaplin"".
Impersonators of the famous with wide followings have included Gerry Connolly, Max Gillies and Billy Birmingham (The Twelfth Man). Conolly's best known impersonation is of the Queen, while Gillies has made a career out of political impersonations on programs such as The Gillies Report and Birmingham has had success sending up well-known Australian sports commentators, notably Richie Benaud and the Channel Nine cricket commentary team.  The flamboyant ""Bob Downe"" character is a cheesy, safari-suit-wearing lounge singer and exponent of camp humour. Elliot Goblet delivers quirky deadpan stand up. Representatives of the ""bawdy"" strain of Australian comedy include Rodney Rude and Austen Tayshus. Tayshus' first single ""Australiana""  became the biggest selling single in Australian recording history. A spoken word piece, it is filled with Australian puns:"
Australian comedy,"Song
Chad Morgan (The Sheik of Scrubby Creek) has been a popular exponent of vaudeville Australian country music for several decades. His songs are peppered with Australian slang: sheilas, drongos, dills and geezers. The breakthrough hits of leading Australian country music stars Slim Dusty and John Williamson might both be considered comic novelty songs: Dusty's ""Pub With No Beer"" (1957) and Williamson's ""Old Man Emu"" (1970). Dusty's hit was the first Australian single to reach the international pop charts. It begins with mock profundity:"
Australian comedy,"Williamson was influenced by Australian folk-singer, artist and broadcaster Rolf Harris and his novelty hit ""Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport"". Harris built an extraordinarily successful career in Britain as a broadcaster and entertainer. ""Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport"" is one of his many Australian themed comic hits and tells the sorry tale of a dying stockmen instructing his comrades on what to do upon his passing:"
Australian comedy,"Popular novelty hits of recent decades have included The Twelfth Man (Billy Birmingham)'s sports commentary parody ""Marvellous""; the Pauline Hanson send up ""I Don't Like It"" by Pauline Pantsdown; and the ""bogan anthem"" ""Bloke"" by tattooed, mulleted stand-up comic Chris Franklin."
Australian comedy,"Cinema
The cinema of Australia has a long history and Australia was a pioneer in the production of feature films. Among early hits of Australian cinema were silent classics like Raymond Longford's The Sentimental Bloke (1919) and the Cinesound series of films based on Steele Rudd's Dad and Dave characters of the 1930s. A century of Australian film was marked in 1995 with an homage remake of Steele Rudd's On Our Selection featuring Joan Sutherland and some of Australia's most acclaimed character actors: Leo McKern, Geoffrey Rush and Noah Taylor.
Australians have a strong tradition of self-mockery in their comedy, from the outlandish Barry McKenzie expat-in-Europe movies of the 1970s, to the quirky outback characters of the Crocodile Dundee films of the 1980s and the Working Dog Productions' 1997 homage to suburbia The Castle.
Paul Hogan's Aussie bushman-in-New York/fish-out-of-water comedy romance Crocodile Dundee was a huge international hit – becoming the most successful foreign film ever released in the United States. Other than Hogan in the lead role, the film series features such veteran Australian comedic actors as John Meillon, David Gulpilil and Ernie Dingo.  Australian cinema's all-time top-ten box-office hits include several other comedies: the barn yard animation Babe (1995), directed by Chris Noonan; George Miller's animation Happy Feet (2006); Baz Luhrmann's musical Moulin Rouge! (2001); Crocodile Dundee II (1988); Strictly Ballroom (1992); Rob Sitch's The Dish (2000); and Stephan Elliott's dragqueens-in-the-outback comedy drama The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994).
Other successes at the Australian box office include: 1966's They're a Weird Mob; the Alvin Purple and the Barry Humphries–Bruce Beresford Barry McKenzie movies of the 1970s (of the ""Ozploitation"" genre); 1987's Young Einstein; 1990's The Big Steal, 1992's Spotswood 1994's Muriel's Wedding; 1994's The Sum of Us; 1999's The Craic and Nick Giannopoulos' Wog Boy comedies. Clayton Jacobson's successful 2006 comedy debut Kenny, starring Shane Jacobson followed the life of a Melbourne plumber working for a corporate bathroom rental company called Splashdown. Crackerjack is a 2002 film starring Mick Molloy and Bill Hunter in which a wisecracking layabout (Molloy) joins a seniors lawn bowls club to be allowed to use a free parking space and discovers a villainous plot against the club. The 2009 clay-animation black comedy Mary and Max brought together the voices of Australian comic character actors Barry Humphries, Eric Bana and Toni Collette.
The 2006 comedy-drama Ten Canoes, directed by Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigirr, is notable for its setting in pre-European Australia."
Australian comedy,"Television
The vaudeville talents of Graham Kennedy, Don Lane and Bert Newton earned popular success during the early years of Australian television. Kennedy hosted the groundbreaking In Melbourne Tonight (IMT) from 1957 to 1970, becoming known as ""The King of Australian Comedy"". He also hosted the popular innuendo-laden 1970s game show Blankety Blanks. His quick witted IMT offsider Bert Newton remains one of the most enduring comic talents of Australian television, presenting a string of programs and hosting the Logie Awards more often than any other presenter. The variety show Hey Hey It's Saturday, hosted by Daryl Somers screened for three decades and featured the ever-popular amateur comedian segment: ""Red Faces"" in which often bizarre and occasionally skilled acts would perform before celebrity judges.
My Name's McGooley, What's Yours? was a popular sitcom of the 1960s. Among the best loved Australian sitcoms was Mother & Son, about a divorcee (played by Garry McDonald) who had moved back into the suburban home of his mother (Ruth Cracknell).  Sitcom Kingswood Country depicted the shifting face of Australia in the 1980s with bigoted patriarch ""Ted"" Bullpitt (Ross Higgins) having to come to terms with his migrant son-in-law.  Acropolis Now further reflected the ongoing demographic changes, set amongst the inner working of a Greek Cafe with a cast of exaggerated ""Aussie-Greeks"": Nick Giannopoulos as ""Jim"" and Mary Coustas as the memorable ""Effie"". Ethnic humour also formed a central plank of the comedy in SBS television's offbeat Pizza TV series, which included regular Arab and Asian characters and presented pizza delivery in the suburbs of Sydney as ""one of the most dangerous jobs in the world"".
Nevertheless, sketch comedy rather than the sitcom formula has been a popular stalwart of Australian television.  The Mavis Bramston Show and later The Naked Vicar Show and The Paul Hogan Show achieved great popularity in the 1970s.  Notable programs of recent decades have included The Comedy Company in the 1980s, which featured the comic talents of Mary-Anne Fahey, Ian McFadyen, Mark Mitchell, Glenn Robbins, Kym Gyngell and others. The show focussed on suburban life with regular characters: the Greek fruit shop owner Con, the inarticulate and unemployed Col'n Carpenter, school girl Kylie Mole and elderly Uncle Arthur became household names. The shows catchphrases such as Con's ""coupla days"" and ""bewdiful"" entered the Australian vernacular. In August 1989, then Prime Minister Bob Hawke appeared in a The Comedy Company sketch with Mitchell on the premise of presenting Con with Australian citizenship. In reply to Con's question as to when Hawke was going to fix up the country, Hawke took delight in responding ""a coupla days"".
Growing out of Melbourne University and The D-Generation came  The Late Show (1992–1993), starring the influential talents Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner, Jane Kennedy, Tony Martin, Mick Molloy and Rob Sitch; and during the 1980s and 1990s Fast forward (Steve Vizard, Magda Szubanski, Marg Downey, Michael Veitch, Peter Moon and others) and successor Full Frontal – which launched the career of Eric Bana and featured Shaun Micallef.  The D-Gen team formed Working Dog Productions who have produced a string of hit films and television series, including the talk show The Panel, the mockumentary series Russell Coight's All Aussie Adventures and the improvisation comedy show Thank God You're Here.
Rove McManus is a three-time winner of the Gold Logie award as comedic host of his self-titled chat-variety show. The cerebral wit of such as Clive James, Clive Robertson and Andrew Denton has been employed to great acclaim in the talk-show interview style.
The Australian tradition of self-mockery runs thick in television comedy. The dysfunctional suburban mother–daughter sitcom Kath & Kim pokes fun at the accents and attitudes of Australian suburbia. Roy and HG provide an affectionate but irreverent parody of Australia's obsession with sport. The Dream with Roy and HG has been a regular feature of Olympic television coverage in Australia since the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Actor/writer Chris Lilley has produced a series of award-winning ""mockumentary"" style television series about ordinary Australian characters since 2005.
Cynical satire has had enduring popularity in Australian comedy. Rubbery Figures was a satirical rubber puppet series that screened in Australia in various forms from 1984 to 1990 and featured puppet caricatures of leading politicians and businesspeople. The Doug Anthony All Stars musical comedy group featured Paul McDermott, who later hosted the satirical news-based quiz show Good News Week.  The television series Frontline lampooned the inner workings of Australia's ""news and current affairs"" TV journalism; The Hollowmen (2008) was set in the office of the Prime Minister's political advisory (spin) department. The Chaser's War on Everything cynically examines domestic and international politics. Satirists John Clarke and Bryan Dawe performed together in a long running mock-interview segment on ABC Television's current affairs flagship The 7:30 Report.
Australian tastes can be eclectic when it comes to imported comedy from other English-speaking countries, with long-running American series like M*A*S*H, Seinfeld, Friends and The Simpsons achieving devoted followings in Australia – but so too such quintessentially British comedies as  Fawlty Towers, Dad's Army, The Goodies, Blackadder and The Office."
Australian comedy,"Australian stand-up
Australian stand-up comedy is an important aspect of contemporary Australian comedy. Show-piecing the art is the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, which began in 1987 with Barry Humphries as patron and British comic Peter Cook as guest of honour and has grown to attract over 350,000 visitors annually. Stand-up is performed at live venues of all sizes across the nation – from small Pubs to major auditoria. Various television programs such as Hey Hey It's Saturday and Rove Live have provided additional exposure to stand-up comics.
Among the best known of contemporary comedy performers in Australia are Wil Anderson, Carl Barron, Jimeoin, Dave Hughes, Wendy Harmer, Peter Helliar, Russell Gilbert, Tony Martin, Jim Jefferies, Anh Do, Judith Lucy, Mick Molloy and Adam Hills."
Australian comedy,"Radio
Australian radio has long provided a popular outlet for Australian comedy, since the days of the vaudevillians like Roy Rene in the 1940s.  In recent years, popular comedy DJ duos have included Roy & HG and Merrick and Rosso beginning on JJJ Radio and Martin/Molloy, Akmal and Kate Ritchie and the radio show Hamish & Andy on the commercial networks."
Australian comedy,"Cartoons
Australian cartoons have a long history dating back to colonial times. Political cartoons began appearing in Australian newspapers in the 1830s and The Bulletin magazine used political cartoons to great effect from the 1880s. Will Dyson took the Australian style of satirical cartooning to London before the First World War. Later internationally influential Australian cartoonists included Pat Oliphant and Paul Rigby. Ginger Meggs, a popular long-run Australian comic strip, was created in the early 1920s by Jimmy Bancks. The strip follows the escapades of a red-haired prepubescent mischief-maker who lives in an inner suburban working-class household. Stan Cross is famous for his iconic 1933 ""For gorsake, stop laughing: this is serious!"" cartoon.
Cartoons are today an integral part of political commentary and analysis in Australia. The lyrical cartoons of Michael Leunig provide a quirky take on social issues. Patrick Cook, Alan Moir, Warren Brown and Cathy Wilcox are prominent contemporary political cartoonists."
Australian comedy,"Awards and festivals
The annual Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF) is one of the largest comedy festivals in the world, and a popular fixture on the city's cultural calendar. More recently The Sydney Comedy Festival and Brisbane Comedy Festival were launched.
Raw Comedy Award, supported primarily by the MICF and Triple J, is Australia's longest running and well-known national competition for emerging comedians. Heats are held annually around the country and the grand final is held in Melbourne during the festival and recorded for broadcast nationally on Australian Broadcasting Corporation television later in the year.
World's Funniest Island began as an Australian comedy event held on the third weekend in October on Cockatoo Island, on Sydney Harbour in 2009. The Bald Archy art prize (a parody of the Archibald Prize) includes cartoons or humorous works making fun of celebrities and current affairs and is allegedly ""judged by a cockatoo"".
The annual TV Week Logie Awards recognise television comedy in the category of ""Most Popular Light Entertainment/Comedy"" and the Australian Film Institute offers the annual Australian Film Institute Award for Best Television Comedy Series."
Australian comedy,"Australian comedies and comedians
Notable comedians
List of Australian comedians
List of Australian stand-up comedians"
Australian comedy,"Notable television comedies
See Australian Film Institute Award for Best Television Comedy Series"
Australian comedy,"Notable film comedies
The Adventures of Barry McKenzie
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
Alvin Purple
Babe
Babe: Pig in the City
Bad Boy Bubby
Bad Eggs
Barry McKenzie Holds His Own
The Big Steal
Bran Nue Dae
The Cars That Ate Paris
The Castle
Crackerjack
The Craic
Crocodile Dundee
Crocodile Dundee II
The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course
On Our Selection
Dirty Deeds
The Dish
Don's Party
Gettin' Square
He Died with a Felafel in His Hand
Hercules Returns
Kenny
Malcolm
Muriel's Wedding
The Odd Angry Shot
Spotswood
Strictly Ballroom
They're a Weird Mob
Wog Boy 2: Kings of Mykonos"
Australian comedy,"See also
List of Australian comedians
Australian English
Australian cinema
Television in Australia
Australian literature
Australian culture
Australian history
Theatre in Australia
Henry Hoke, the central character in a comedic look at invention in Australia"
Australian comedy,"
== References =="
Opposition (Australia),"In Australian parliamentary practice, the Opposition or the Official Opposition consists of the second largest party or coalition of parties in the Australian House of Representatives, with its leader being given the title Leader of the Opposition. The Opposition serves the same function as the official opposition in other Commonwealth of Nations monarchies that follow the Westminster conventions and practices. It is seen as the alternative government and the existing administration's main opponent in the Australian Parliament and at a general election. By convention, the Opposition Leader in the federal Parliament comes from the House of Representatives, as does the deputy, although the Government and Opposition may also both have leaders in the Senate. The Opposition is sometimes styled as His Majesty's Loyal Opposition to show that, although the group may be against the sitting government, it remains loyal to the Crown (the embodiment of the Australian state), and thus to Australia.
The current Opposition at a federal level is the centre-right Liberal Party/National Party Coalition, led by Peter Dutton."
Opposition (Australia),"State and territory opposition
The Opposition parties and leaders of Australian States and Territories are:"
Opposition (Australia),"See also
List of federal Opposition Leaders
Shadow Ministry of Australia"
Opposition (Australia),"
== References =="
International rankings of Australia,"This is a list of Australia's international rankings on a range of social, economic and other criteria."
International rankings of Australia,"International rankings
Note: Below each survey uses a limited number of countries/region's for its assessments, see ""Measurement(s)"" for number variables."
International rankings of Australia,"Freedom assessments
The freedom indices produced by several non-governmental organizations publishes assessments of political rights and civil liberties for countries around the world."
International rankings of Australia,"Maps of indices
References
External links
Statistics and rankings - Global Australia
Global Benchmarking Database - University of Warwick
Australia international rankings - Rankedex
Country rankings - TheGlobalEconomy.com
Australia profile -  OECD
Catalogue of Indices 2016 - Global Observatory"
Australian diaspora,"The Australian diaspora are those Australians living outside of Australia. It includes approximately 598,765 Australian-born people living outside of Australia, people who are Australian citizens and live outside Australia, and people with Australian ancestry who live outside of Australia.
In 2020, 2.34% of the Australian population lived overseas, which is lower than most OECD countries, except the USA (0.89%) and Japan (0.64%)."
Australian diaspora,"History
The diaspora was reported on in a 2003 Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) research report, ""Australia's Diaspora: Its Size, Nature and Policy Implications"". The report argued for an Australian government policy of maintaining active contact with the diaspora.
In 2005, Senate Legal and Constitutional References Committee (a standing committee) reported into the issue of Expatriate Australians and made recommendations that the ""Australian Government needs to make greater efforts to connect
with and engage our expatriate community"".
In contrast to many countries which experience a ""brain drain"" due to emigration, the 2003 CEDA report argued that emigration was a net positive for Australia, with the country seeing ""brain circulation"" as Australians added to their skills and expertise, and a ""brain gain"", as these skilled expatriates tended to return to Australia and new skilled immigrants arrive. Between 1999 and 2003, there were seven highly educated migrants to Australia for every one highly educated Australian who was living elsewhere in countries within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Levels of skilled immigration to Australia reflect Government policies to ""practise a selective immigration policy based on human capital criteria""."
Australian diaspora,"Countries by Australian diaspora
United Kingdom
In 2021, 165,000 Australian-born people lived in the United Kingdom. The 2011 UK Census recorded 113,592 residents born in Australia in England, 2,695 in Wales, 8,279 in Scotland, and 1,750 in Northern Ireland."
Australian diaspora,"United States
In 2019, there were 98,619 Australian-born people living in the United States. In 2001, the major places of residence were: 25,000 living in Los Angeles; 17,000 in San Francisco; 17,000 in Washington, D.C.; and 15,000 in New York."
Australian diaspora,"New Zealand
In 2018, there were 75,696 Australian-born people living in New Zealand. The Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement enables Australians and New Zealanders to migrate between Australia and New Zealand without complying with usual immigration requirements."
Australian diaspora,"Hong Kong
In 2016, there were 14,669 Australian-born people living in Hong Kong."
Australian diaspora,"China
In 2010, there were 13,286 Australian-born people living in Mainland China."
Australian diaspora,"Germany
In 2021 there were 26,000 Australian-born people living in Germany. In recent years, the number of Australians living abroad in Germany has increased."
Australian diaspora,"Comparison with the expatriate populations of other countries
In 2020, 2.34% of the Australian population lived overseas, which is lower than most OECD countries, except the USA (0.89%) and Japan (0.64%). 
Education levels of Australian expatriates were high: 44% of Australian expatriates in other OECD countries had a high level of education. Japanese expatriates had the highest proportion, with 50% having a high level of education. 49% of expatriates from the USA had a high education as did 45% of expatriates from New Zealand."
Australian diaspora,"See also
Australian rules football around the world
Little Australia"
Australian diaspora,"References and notes
Further reading
Graeme Hugo (13 February 2006). ""An Australian Diaspora?"". International Migration. 44 (1). International Organization for Migration: 105–133. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2435.2006.00357.x.
Graeme Hugo (2006). ""Australian experience in skilled migration"". In Christiane Kuptsch; Pang Eng Fong; Eng Fong Pang (eds.). Competing for Global Talent. International Labour Organization. pp. 143–145. ISBN 978-92-9014-776-3."
Australian diaspora,"External links
""Senate Inquiry into Australian Expatriates: Overview. Final Inquiry Report Tabled on 8 March 2005"". Southern Cross Group. 2005. Archived from the original on 27 December 2005. Retrieved 8 January 2006.
Harry Heidelberg (13 January 2003). ""What to make of the Australian diaspora"". Sydney Morning Herald. Archived from the original on 15 January 2006. Retrieved 8 January 2006.
""The Extent and Diversity of the Australian Diaspora"". Southern Cross Group. 2003. Archived from the original on 29 August 2005. Retrieved 8 January 2006."
Australian rules football,"Australian rules football, also called Australian football or Aussie rules, or more simply football or footy, is a contact sport played between two teams of 18 players on an oval field, often a modified cricket ground. Points are scored by kicking the oval ball between the central goal posts (worth six points), or between a central and outer post (worth one point, otherwise known as a ""behind"").
During general play, players may position themselves anywhere on the field and use any part of their bodies to move the ball. The primary methods are kicking, handballing and running with the ball. There are rules on how the ball can be handled; for example, players running with the ball must intermittently bounce or touch it on the ground. Throwing the ball is not allowed, and players must not get caught holding the ball. A distinctive feature of the game is the mark, where players anywhere on the field who catch the ball from a kick (with specific conditions) are awarded unimpeded possession. Possession of the ball is in dispute at all times except when a free kick or mark is paid. Players can tackle using their hands or use their whole body to obstruct opponents. Dangerous physical contact (such as pushing an opponent in the back), interference when marking, and deliberately slowing the play are discouraged with free kicks, distance penalties, or suspension for a certain number of matches depending on the severity of the infringement. The game features frequent physical contests, spectacular marking, fast movement of both players and the ball, and high scoring.
The sport's origins can be traced to football matches played in Melbourne, in 1858, inspired by English public school football games. Seeking to develop a game more suited to adults and Australian conditions, the Melbourne Football Club published the first laws of Australian football in May 1859.
Australian football has the highest spectator attendance and television viewership of all sports in Australia, while the Australian Football League (AFL), the sport's only fully professional competition, is the nation's wealthiest sporting body. The AFL Grand Final, held annually at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, is the second-highest-attended club championship event in the world. The sport is also played at amateur level in many countries and in several variations. Its rules are governed by the AFL Commission with the advice of the AFL's Laws of the Game Committee."
Australian rules football,"Name
Australian rules football is known by several nicknames, including Aussie rules, football and footy. In some regions, where other codes of football are more popular, the sport is usually called AFL after the Australian Football League, while the league itself also uses this name for local competitions in some areas."
Australian rules football,"History
Origins
Primitive forms of football were played sporadically in the Australian colonies in the first half of the 19th century. Compared to cricket and horse racing, football was considered a mere ""amusement"" by colonists at the time, and while little is known about these early one-off games, evidence does not support a causal link with Australian football. In Melbourne, in 1858, in a move that would help to shape Australian football in its formative years, private schools (then termed ""public schools"" in accordance with nomenclature in England) began organising football games inspired by precedents at English public schools. The earliest match, held on 15 June, was between Melbourne Grammar and St Kilda Grammar.
On 10 July 1858, the Melbourne-based Bell's Life in Victoria and Sporting Chronicle published a letter by Tom Wills, captain of the Victoria cricket team, calling for the formation of a ""foot-ball club"" with a ""code of laws"" to keep cricketers fit during winter. Born in Australia, Wills played a nascent form of rugby football while a pupil at Rugby School in England, and returned to his homeland a star athlete and cricketer. Two weeks later, Wills' friend, cricketer Jerry Bryant, posted an advertisement for a scratch match at the Richmond Paddock adjoining the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG). This was the first of several ""kickabouts"" held that year involving members of the Melbourne Cricket Club, including Wills, Bryant, W. J. Hammersley and J. B. Thompson. Trees were used as goalposts and play typically lasted an entire afternoon. Without an agreed-upon code of laws, some players were guided by rules they had learned in the British Isles, ""others by no rules at all"". Another milestone in 1858 was a 40-a-side match played under experimental rules between Melbourne Grammar and Scotch College, held at the Richmond Paddock. Umpired by Wills and teacher John Macadam, it began on 7 August and continued over two subsequent Saturdays, ending in a draw with each side kicking one goal. It is commemorated with a statue outside the MCG, and the two schools have since competed annually in the Cordner–Eggleston Cup, the world's oldest continuous football competition.
Since the 1920s, it has been suggested that Australian football may have been derived from the Irish sport of Gaelic football. However, there is no archival evidence in favour of a Gaelic influence, and the style of play shared between the two modern codes appeared in Australia long before the Irish game evolved in a similar direction. Another theory, first proposed in 1983, posits that Wills, having grown up among Aboriginals in Victoria, may have seen or played the Aboriginal ball game of Marn Grook, and incorporated some of its features into early Australian football. There is only circumstantial evidence that he knew of the game, and according to biographer Greg de Moore's research, Wills was ""almost solely influenced by his experience at Rugby School""."
Australian rules football,"First rules
A loosely organised Melbourne side, captained by Wills, played against other football enthusiasts in the winter and spring of 1858. The following year, on 14 May, the Melbourne Football Club was officially established, making it one of the world's oldest football clubs. Three days later, Wills, Hammersley, Thompson and teacher Thomas H. Smith met near the MCG at the Parade Hotel, owned by Bryant, and drafted ten rules: ""The Rules of the Melbourne Football Club"". These are the laws from which Australian football evolved. The club aimed to create a simple code suited to the hard playing surfaces around Melbourne, and to eliminate the roughest aspects of English school games—such as ""hacking"" (shin-kicking) in Rugby School football—to reduce the risk of injuries to working men. In another significant departure from English public school football, the Melbourne rules omitted any offside law. ""The new code was as much a reaction against the school games as influenced by them"", writes Mark Pennings. The rules were distributed throughout the colony; Thompson in particular did much to promote the new code in his capacity as a journalist."
Australian rules football,"Early competition in Victoria
Following Melbourne's lead, Geelong and Melbourne University also formed football clubs in 1859. While many early Victorian teams participated in one-off matches, most had not yet formed clubs for regular competition. A South Yarra club devised its own rules. To ensure the supremacy of the Melbourne rules, the first-club level competition in Australia, the Caledonian Society's Challenge Cup (1861–64), stipulated that only the Melbourne rules were to be used. This law was reinforced by the Athletic Sports Committee (ASC), which ran a variation of the Challenge Cup in 1865–66. With input from other clubs, the rules underwent several minor revisions, establishing a uniform code known as ""Victorian rules"". In 1866, the ""first distinctively Victorian rule"", the running bounce, was formalised at a meeting of club delegates chaired by H. C. A. Harrison, an influential pioneer who took up football in 1859 at the invitation of Wills, his cousin.
The game around this time was defensive and low-scoring, played low to the ground in congested rugby-style scrimmages. The typical match was a 20-per-side affair, played with a ball that was roughly spherical, and lasted until a team scored two goals. The shape of the playing field was not standardised; matches often took place in rough, tree-spotted public parks, most notably the Richmond Paddock (Yarra Park), known colloquially as the Melbourne Football Ground. Wills argued that the turf of cricket fields would benefit from being trampled upon by footballers in winter, and, as early as 1859, football was allowed on the MCG. However, cricket authorities frequently prohibited football on their grounds until the 1870s, when they saw an opportunity to capitalise on the sport's growing popularity. Football gradually adapted to an oval-shaped field, and most grounds in Victoria expanded to accommodate the dual purpose—a situation that continues to this day."
Australian rules football,"Spread to other colonies
Football became organised in South Australia in 1860 with the formation of the Adelaide Football Club, the oldest football club in Australia outside Victoria. It devised its own rules, and, along with other Adelaide-based clubs, played a variety of codes until 1876, when they uniformly adopted most of the Victorian rules, with South Australian football pioneer Charles Kingston noting their similarity to ""the old Adelaide rules"". Similarly, Tasmanian clubs quarrelled over different rules until they adopted a slightly modified version of the Victorian game in 1879. The South Australian Football Association (SAFA), the sport's first governing body, formed on 30 April 1877, firmly establishing Victorian rules as the preferred code in that colony. The Victorian Football Association (VFA) formed the following month."
Australian rules football,"Clubs began touring the colonies in the late 1870s, and in 1879 the first intercolonial match took place in Melbourne between Victoria and South Australia. To standardise the sport across Australia, delegates representing the football associations of South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria and Queensland met in 1883 and updated the code. New rules such as holding the ball led to a ""golden era"" of fast, long-kicking and high-marking football in the 1880s, a time which also saw players such as George Coulthard achieve superstardom, as well as the rise of professionalism, particularly in Victoria and Western Australia, where the code took hold during a series of gold rushes. Likewise, when New Zealand experienced a gold rush, the sport arrived with a rapid influx of Australian miners. Now known as Australian rules or Australasian rules, the sport became the first football code to develop mass spectator appeal, attracting world record attendances for sports viewing and gaining a reputation as ""the people's game"".
Australian rules football reached Queensland and New South Wales as early as 1866; the sport experienced a period of dominance in the former, and in the latter, several regions remain strongholds of Australian rules, such as the Riverina. However, by the late 1880s, rugby football had become the dominant code in both colonies, as well as in New Zealand. This shift was largely due to rugby's spread with British migration, regional rivalries and the lack of strong local governing bodies. In the case of Sydney, denial of access to grounds, the influence of university headmasters from Britain who favoured rugby, and the loss of players to other codes inhibited the game's growth."
Australian rules football,"Emergence of the VFL
In 1896, delegates from six of the wealthiest VFA clubs—Carlton, Essendon, Fitzroy, Geelong, Melbourne and South Melbourne—met to discuss the formation of a breakaway professional competition. Later joined by Collingwood and St Kilda, the clubs formed the Victorian Football League (VFL), which held its inaugural season in 1897. The VFL's popularity grew rapidly as it made several innovations, such as instituting a finals system, reducing teams from 20 to 18 players, and introducing the behind as a score. Richmond and University joined the VFL in 1908, and by 1925, with the addition of Hawthorn, Footscray and North Melbourne, it had become the preeminent league in the country and would take a leading role in many aspects of the sport."
Australian rules football,"Interstate football and the World Wars
The time around the federation of the Australian colonies in 1901 saw Australian rules undergo a revival in New South Wales, New Zealand and Queensland. In 1903, both the Queensland Australian Football League and the NSW Australian Football Association were established, and in New Zealand, as it moved towards becoming a dominion, leagues were also established in the major cities. This renewed popularity helped encourage the formation of the Australasian Football Council, which in 1908 in Melbourne staged the first national interstate competition, the Jubilee Australasian Football Carnival, with teams representing each state and New Zealand.
The game was also established early on in the new territories. In the new national capital Canberra both soccer and rugby had a head start, but following the first matches in 1911, Australian rules football in the Australian Capital Territory became a major participation sport. By 1981 it had become much neglected and quickly lagged behind the other football codes. Australian rules football in the Northern Territory began shortly after the outbreak of the war in 1916 with the first match in Darwin. The game went on to become the most popular sport in the Territory and build the highest participation rate for the sport nationally."
Australian rules football,"Both World War I and World War II had a devastating effect on Australian football and on Australian sport in general. While scratch matches were played by Australian ""diggers"" in remote locations around the world, the game lost many of its great players to wartime service. Some clubs and competitions never fully recovered. Between 1914 and 1915, a proposed hybrid code of Australian football and rugby league, the predominant code of football in New South Wales and Queensland, was trialled without success. In Queensland, the state league went into recess for the duration of the war. VFL club University left the league and went into recess due to severe casualties. The WAFL lost two clubs and the SANFL was suspended for one year in 1916 due to heavy club losses. The Anzac Day match, the annual game between Essendon and Collingwood on Anzac Day, is one example of how the war continues to be remembered in the football community.
The role of the Australian National Football Council (ANFC) was primarily to govern the game at a national level and to facilitate interstate representative and club competition. In 1968, the ANFC revived the Championship of Australia, a competition first held in 1888 between the premiers of the VFA and SAFA. Although clubs from other states were at times invited, the final was almost always between the premiers from the two strongest state competitions of the time—South Australia and Victoria—with Adelaide hosting most of the matches at the request of the SAFA/SANFL. The last match took place in 1976, with North Adelaide being the last non-Victorian winner in 1972. Between 1976 and 1987, the ANFC, and later the Australian Football Championships (AFC) ran a night series, which invited clubs and representative sides from around the country to participate in a knock-out tournament parallel to the premiership seasons, which Victorian sides still dominated.
With the lack of international competition, state representative matches were regarded with great importance. Due in part to the VFL poaching talent from other states, Victoria dominated interstate matches for three-quarters of a century. State of Origin rules, introduced in 1977, stipulated that rather than representing the state of their adopted club, players would return to play for the state they were first recruited in. This instantly broke Victoria's stranglehold over state titles and Western Australia and South Australia began to win more of their games against Victoria. Both New South Wales and Tasmania scored surprise victories at home against Victoria in 1990."
Australian rules football,"Towards a national league
The term ""Barassi Line"", named after VFL star Ron Barassi, was coined by scholar Ian Turner in 1978 to describe the ""fictitious geographical barrier"" separating the rugby-following parts of New South Wales and Queensland from the rest of the country, where Australian football reigned. It became a reference point for the expansion of Australian football and for establishing a national league.
The way the game was played had changed dramatically due to innovative coaching tactics, with the phasing out of many of the game's kicking styles and the increasing use of handball; while presentation was influenced by television."
Australian rules football,"In 1982, in a move that heralded big changes within the sport, one of the original VFL clubs, South Melbourne, relocated to Sydney and became known as the Sydney Swans. In the late 1980s, due to the poor financial standing of many of the Victorian clubs, and a similar situation existing in Western Australia in the sport, the VFL pursued a more national competition. Two more non-Victorian clubs, West Coast and Brisbane, joined the league in 1987 generating more than $8 million in license revenue for the Victorian clubs and increasing broadcast revenues which helped the Victorian clubs survive. In their early years, the Sydney and Brisbane clubs struggled both on and off-field because the substantial TV revenues they generated by playing on a Sunday went to the VFL. To protect these revenues the VFL granted significant draft concessions and financial aid to keep the expansion clubs competitive.
The VFL changed its name to the Australian Football League (AFL) for the 1990 season, and over the next decade, three non-Victorian clubs gained entry: Adelaide (1991), Fremantle (1995) and the SANFL's Port Adelaide (1997), the only pre-existing club outside Victoria to join the league. In 2011 and 2012, respectively, two new non-Victorian clubs were added to the competition: Gold Coast and Greater Western Sydney. The AFL, currently with 18 member clubs, is the sport's elite competition and most powerful body. Following the emergence of the AFL, state leagues were quickly relegated to a second-tier status. The VFA merged with the former VFL reserves competition in 1998, adopting the VFL name. State of Origin also declined in importance, especially after an increasing number of player withdrawals. The AFL turned its focus to the annual International Rules Series against Ireland in 1998 before abolishing State of Origin the following year. State and territorial leagues still contest interstate matches, as do AFL Women players.
In the 2010s, the AFL signalled further attempts at expanding into markets outside Australian football's traditional heartlands by hosting home-and-away matches in New Zealand, followed by China. After several failed bids since the early 1990s for a Tasmania-based AFL team, the Tasmania Football Club secured the 19th AFL license in 2023, and is set to compete by 2028."
Australian rules football,"Laws of the game
Players and equipment
In a standard match, a team may consist of anywhere between 14 and 18 players who may be permitted on the playing surface at any given time. Each team may have up to four interchange (reserve) players who may be swapped for those on the field at any time during the game. Although some leagues in less populated areas may use as few as 12 players.  In addition, some leagues notably including the AFL, have each team designate one additional player as a substitute who can be used to make a single permanent exchange of players during a game for either medical or tactical reasons.
Players on the playing surface can be swapped with those on the interchange bench at any time. They must though pass through a designated ""Interchange Area"". In the event a player fails to pass through this area correctly, or if too many players from one team are found to be on the ground at a time, a free kick will be awarded to the opposing side.
While there is no set uniform, the basic equipment for Australian football consists of a guernsey, shorts, socks and boots, with additional pieces of apparel such as headbands and gloves additionally being permitted. Players may wear certain pieces of protective equipment, such as helmets or arm guards, if approved by the relevant controlling body. Mouthguards are strongly recommended for all players.
Players are not permitted to wear jewellery, or other materials which the field umpire has deemed to be either potentially dangerous or increase the risk of injury to other players."
Australian rules football,"Ball
Australian rules football is played with an ellipsoid ball, between 72 and 73 cm (28 and 29 in) in long circumference, and 54.5 and 55.5 cm (21.5 and 21.9 in) in short circumference. For women's competitions, a smaller ball size of 69 and 53 cm (27 and 21 in) is used. The ball must be inflated to a pressure of 69 kilopascals (10.0 pounds per square inch). There are no defined laws regarding what material a ball must be made from, but standard AFL match-used balls are produced by Sherrin using cowhide leather.
While there is no standard colour of the ball, red and yellow are most common and the only colours used at AFL level. Yellow is used for games beginning after 3 pm or in an enclosed stadium, due to its greater visibility, and to assist score reviews."
Australian rules football,"Field
Unlike other forms of football which are played on rectangular fields, Australian rules football playing fields are oval-shaped, and are between 135 and 185 metres (148 and 202 yd) long and 110 and 155 metres (120 and 170 yd) wide.
At either end of the field, two sets of posts are erected in a straight line to indicate the scoring areas on the field, each with two kinds of posts, named the goal posts and the behind posts respectively. The goal posts are placed first, located 6.4 metres (7.0 yd) apart from each other, with a behind post being placed a further 6.4 metres to the side of each goal post. The name for the field line between two goal posts is known as the Goal Line.
Around the perimeter of the field, two white lines are drawn between the set of behind posts in an arc-shape, marking the field of play.
Other field markings include:"
Australian rules football,"An arc drawn 50 metres (55 yd) from either end of the playing surface, known as the fifty metre arc.
A 50 by 50 metres (55 yd × 55 yd) square located in the centre of the playing surface, known as the centre square.
A 10 by 10 metres (11 yd × 11 yd) circle located in the centre of the playing surface, known as the centre circle
A rectangle drawn at either end of the ground, measuring 9 metres (9.8 yd) out from each pair of goal posts. This is known as the goal square.
The 50m arcs, centre square, centre circle and goal square are used at the beginning of each quarter or after each goal. With each team  permitted a maximum of six players in each 50m arc, with one in the goal square and four players in the centre square with one in the centre circle. If this is breached, a free kick is awarded."
Australian rules football,"Match duration
A game lasts for 80 minutes, split into four-quarters consisting of 20 minutes playing time, with the clock being stopped for stoppages in play such as scores,  or at the umpire's discretion, e.g. for serious injury. Leagues may choose to employ shorter quarters of play at their discretion, such as the AFLW using 17 minutes per quarter.
For any given match, two timekeepers are appointed to officiate the duration. The timekeepers record all relevant statistics for the match, such as total quarter duration and score by each team. Additionally timekeepers are required to sound a siren prior to and at the conclusion of each quarter until such time they are acknowledged by the field umpires. To stop and recommence the clock, the field umpires are required to signal to the timekeepers to indicate when the clock should be stopped or restarted.
Between each quarter, a break is observed to allow players a rest period. Two six-minute breaks are observed between the first and second quarters, and the third and fourth quarters. A longer 20-minute break is observed between the second and third quarter, commonly known as half-time."
Australian rules football,"Officiation
Each game is officiated by at least five match officials, known as an umpire. These match officials are placed into three categories based upon their roles and responsibilities, with varying minimum numbers of Umpires required depending on position:"
Australian rules football,"Field umpire: Field umpires are positioned within the playing area contained within the Boundary Lines, and are the primary match officials. A minimum of one field umpire is required to officiate the match, though it is common practice to employ more to reduce physical demand on individual umpires, and improve officiation quality.
Boundary umpires: Boundary umpires are positioned along the two boundary lines upon either side of the field. Their primary duties include determining when the football is deemed to be outside of the field of play, and to throw the football back into play when directed. A minimum of two boundary umpires are required for a match.
Goal umpires: Goal umpires are positioned at either end of the ground, with one stationed at either set of goal posts on the field. Their primary duties include judging what scores made by players, signalling scores, and recording scores made by each team during a match. A minimum of two goal umpires are required for a match.
At AFL level, a video score review system is utilised. Only umpires are permitted to request a review, and only scoring shots and potential scoring shots are permitted to be reviewed."
Australian rules football,"Game skills
Ball movement
An Australian rules football may only be propelled forward in a select few ways as defined by the Laws of Australian Football, published by the AFL. The ball can be propelled in any direction by way of a kick or a clenched fist (called a handball)—deemed a correct disposal. Failure to dispose of the ball in one of these two methods will result in a free kick to the opposing team. If the ball is not currently in a player's possession, it can be moved legally through the usage of other means, such as punching. While in possession of the ball, players may run with the ball, but are required to either bounce or touch the ball on the ground at least once every 15 metres (16 yd)."
Australian rules football,"Tackling
Tackling is a technique employed by players used to force opposition players to dispose of the ball when they are in possession. Failure to dispose of the ball when legally tackled may see the player penalised for 'holding the ball', except if the umpire deems there was a lack of prior opportunity to do so.
The ball carrier may only be tackled between the shoulders and knees from the front or side. If the player forcefully contacts the opposing in the back while performing a tackle, the opposition player will be penalised for a push in the back. If the opposition tackles the player with possession below the knees (a low tackle or a trip) or above the shoulders (a high tackle), the team with possession of the football gets a free kick. Furthermore, tackles deemed to be dangerous by the umpire and those conducted from front-on while an opposition player has their head over the football are deemed to be prohibited contact, and will incur a free kick against the offending player.
Additionally, players may perform a technique known shepherding when the ball is within 5 metres (5.5 yd) of an opposition player. Shepherding involves the use of a player's body to push, bump or otherwise block an opposition player, providing they do not have possession of the ball."
Australian rules football,"Marking
If a player takes possession of the ball  that has travelled more than 15 metres (16 yd) from another player's kick, by way of a catch within the field of play, it is deemed as a mark. Upon a mark being taken, one opposition player may choose to stand on the point on the field where the mark was taken, known as ""the mark"". When a mark is taken, a small protected zone is established on the field, extending 10 metres (11 yd) either side of ""the mark"" and the player who marked the ball, with a small protected corridor between ""the mark"" and the player. The opposition player is permitted to jump, but is not allowed to move from their position on ""the mark"". Any other movements result in a 50-metre penalty. The player who was awarded the mark may then choose to either dispose of the ball over ""the mark"" or may choose to attempt disposal via a different method, in which case the field umpire will call ""play on""—a verbal instruction to continue play. ""Play on"" may also be called if the umpire deems the player awarded the mark to be taking an unreasonable amount of time to dispose of the football.
Once the player has disposed of the ball, or ""play on"" is called, normal play resumes."
Australian rules football,"Misconduct
In the event a player breaks a rule, a free kick is awarded to the opposing team, from the location that the misconduct occurred, or the ball's current location—whichever is closer to the team's scoring zone. As when a mark is taken, this location is called ""the mark"", and the same protections regarding the space apply.
In the event a player engages in unsportsmanlike conduct after a free kick has been awarded or a mark has been paid to the opposing team, the umpire may instead award a 50-metre penalty. When imposed, the field umpire will advance ""the mark"" an additional 50 metres (55 yd) down the field or to the goal line, whichever is closer. Additional 50-metre penalties may be awarded if the behaviour continues after the initial penalty.
The laws of the game allow umpires to send off players for egregious foul play, although this law does not apply to the AFL and is largely only used at the local level."
Australian rules football,"Scoring
There are two types of scoring shots in Australian football: goals and behinds. A goal is worth six points, and is scored when the football is propelled between the goal posts and across the goal line at any height by way of a kick from the attacking team. It may touch the ground, but must not have been touched by any player from either team or a goalpost prior to crossing the goal line.
A behind is worth one point and is scored when:"
Australian rules football,"The ball passes between a goal post and a behind post at any height.
If the ball hits a goal post.
If any player sends the ball across the goal or behind line by touching it with any part of the body other than a foot or lower leg.
A behind is also awarded to the team if the ball touches any part of an opposition player, including a foot, before passing across their goal or behind line. A free kick is awarded against any player who is deemed to have deliberately rushed a behind.
The team that has scored the most points at the end of play wins the game. If the scores are level on points at the end of play, then the game is a draw; extra time applies only during finals matches in some competitions.
As an example of a score report, consider a match between Sydney and Geelong with the former as the home team. Sydney's score of 17 goals and 5 behinds equates to 107 points. Geelong's score of 10 goals and 17 behinds equates to a 77-point tally. Sydney wins the match by a margin of 30 points. Such a result would be written as:"
Australian rules football,"""Sydney 17.5 (107) defeated Geelong 10.17 (77).
And spoken as:"
Australian rules football,"""Sydney, seventeen-five, one hundred and seven, defeated Geelong, ten-seventeen, seventy-seven"".
Additionally, it can be said that:"
Australian rules football,"""Sydney defeated Geelong by 30 points"".
The home team is typically listed first and the visiting side is listed second.
A draw would be written as:"
Australian rules football,"""Greater Western Sydney 10.8 (68) drew with Geelong 10.8 (68)""."
Australian rules football,"Structure and competitions
The football season proper is from March to August (early autumn to late winter in Australia) with finals being held in September and October. In the tropics, the game is sometimes played in the wet season (October to March).
The AFL is recognised by the Australian Sports Commission as being the National Sporting Organisation for Australian football. There are also seven state/territory-based organisations in Australia, all of which are affiliated with the AFL. These state leagues hold annual semi-professional club competitions, with some also overseeing more than one league. Local semi-professional or amateur organisations and competitions are often affiliated to their state organisations.
In 2002, the AFL became the de facto world governing body for Australian football when it pushed for the closure of the International Australian Football Council. There are also a number of affiliated organisations governing amateur clubs and competitions around the world.
For almost all Australian football club competitions, the aim is to win the Premiership. The premiership is typically decided by a finals series. The teams that occupy the highest positions on the ladder after the home-and-away season play-off in a ""semi-knockout"" finals series, culminating in a single Grand Final match to determine the premiers. Between four and eight teams contest a finals series, typically using the AFL final eight system or a variation of the McIntyre system. The team which finishes first on the ladder after the home-and-away season is referred to as a ""minor premier"", but this usually holds little stand-alone significance, other than receiving a better draw in the finals.
Some metropolitan leagues have several tiered divisions, with promotion of the lower division premiers and relegation of the upper division's last placed team at the end of each year."
Australian rules football,"Women and Australian football
The high level of interest shown by women in Australian football is considered unique among the world's football codes. It was the case in the 19th century, as it is in modern times, that women made up approximately half of total attendances at Australian football matches—a far greater proportion than, for example, the estimated 10 per cent of women that comprise British soccer crowds. This has been attributed in part to the egalitarian character of Australian football's early years in public parks where women could mingle freely and support the game in various ways.
In terms of participation, there are occasional 19th-century references to women playing the sport, but it was not until the 1910s that the first organised women's teams and competitions appeared. Women's state leagues emerged in the 1980s, and in 2013, the AFL announced plans to establish a nationally televised women's competition. Amidst a surge in viewing interest and participation in women's football, the AFL pushed the founding date of the competition, named AFL Women's, to 2017. Eight AFL clubs won licences to field sides in its inaugural season. By the seventh season, which began in August 2022, all 18 clubs fielded a women's side."
Australian rules football,"Variations and related sports
Many related games have emerged from Australian football, mainly with variations of contact to encourage greater participation. These include Auskick (played by children aged between 5 and 12), kick-to-kick (and its variants end-to-end footy and marks up), rec footy, 9-a-side footy, masters Australian football, handball and longest-kick competitions. Players outside Australia sometimes engage in related games adapted to available fields, like metro footy (played on gridiron fields) and Samoa rules (played on rugby fields). One such prominent example in use since 2018 is AFLX, a shortened variation of the game with seven players a side, played on a soccer-sized pitch."
Australian rules football,"International rules football
The similarities between Australian football and the Irish sport of Gaelic football have allowed for the creation of a hybrid code known as international rules football. The first international rules matches were contested in Ireland during the 1967 Australian Football World Tour. Since then, various sets of compromise rules have been trialed, and in 1984 the International Rules Series commenced with national representative sides selected by Australia's state leagues (later by the AFL) and the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). The competition became an annual event in 1998, but was postponed indefinitely in 2007 when the GAA pulled out due to Australia's severe and aggressive style of play. It resumed in Australia in 2008 under new rules to protect the player with the ball."
Australian rules football,"Global reach
During the colonial period, Australian rules was sometimes referred to as Australasian rules, reflecting its popularity in New Zealand. The game was played outside Australasia as early as 1888 when Australians studying at Edinburgh University and London University formed teams and competed in London. By the early 20th century, it had spread with the Australian diaspora to South Africa, the United States and other parts of the Anglosphere; however this growth went into rapid decline during and after World War I, leading also to a decades long hiatus in New Zealand. After World War II, it experienced growth in the Pacific region, particularly in Papua New Guinea and Nauru, where Australian football is now the national sport.
Today, the sport is played at an amateur level in various countries throughout the world. Twenty-three countries have participated in the International Cup, the highest level of international competition, held triennially in Australia since 2002. Nine countries have also participated in the AFL Europe Championship with both competitions prohibiting Australian players. A fan of the sport since attending school in Victoria, King Charles is the Patron of AFL Europe. In 2013, participation across AFL Europe's 21 member nations was more than 5,000 players, the majority of which are European nationals rather than Australian expats. The sport also has a growing presence in India. Over 20 countries have either affiliation or working agreements with the AFL.
Most present-day international amateur clubs and leagues are based in North America, Europe and Asia, with the oldest typically having originated in the 1980s. That decade, the sport developed a cult following in the United States when matches were broadcast on the fledgling ESPN network. Growing international interest has been assisted by exhibition matches, players switching between football codes, and Australia's multicultural makeup. Many VFL/AFL players were born overseas, with a growing number recruited through various initiatives. One notable example is the Irish experiment, which, since the 1980s, has seen many Gaelic footballers leave the amateur GAA to play Australian rules professionally.
Although Australian rules football is not an Olympic sport, it was showcased at the MCG as part of the 1956 Summer Olympics, held in Melbourne. In addition, when Brisbane hosted the 1982 Commonwealth Games, an exhibition match was held at the Gabba."
Australian rules football,"Cultural impact and popularity
Australian football has attracted more overall interest among Australians than any other football code, and, when compared with all sports throughout the nation, has consistently ranked first in the winter reports, and third behind cricket and swimming in summer. Over 1,057,572 fans were paying members of AFL clubs in 2019.  The 2021 AFL Grand Final was the year's most-watched television broadcast in Australia, with an in-home audience of up to 4.11 million.
In 2019, there were 1,716,276 registered participants in Australia including 586,422 females (34 per cent of the overall total) and more than 177,000 registered outside Australia including 79,000 females (45 per cent of the overall total)."
Australian rules football,"In the arts and popular culture
Australian football has inspired many literary works, from poems by C. J. Dennis and Peter Goldsworthy, to the fiction of Frank Hardy and Kerry Greenwood. Historians Manning Clarke and Geoffrey Blainey have also written extensively on the sport. Slang within Australian football has impacted Australian English more broadly, with a number of expressions taking on new meanings in non-sporting contexts, e.g., to ""get a guernsey"" is to gain recognition or approval, while ""shirt-fronting"" someone is to accost them.
In 1889, Australian impressionist painter Arthur Streeton captured football games en plein air for the 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition, titling one work The National Game. Paintings by Sidney Nolan (Footballer, 1946) and John Brack (Three of the Players, 1953) helped to establish Australian football as a serious subject for modernists, and many Aboriginal artists have explored the game, often fusing it with the mythology of their region. In cartooning, WEG's VFL/AFL premiership posters—inaugurated in 1954—have achieved iconic status among Australian football fans. Australian football statues can be found throughout the country, some based on famous photographs, among them Haydn Bunton Sr.'s leap, Jack Dyer's charge and Nicky Winmar lifting his jumper. In the 1980s, a group of postmodern architects based in Melbourne began incorporating references to Australian football into their buildings, an example being Building 8 by Edmond and Corrigan.
Dance sequences based on Australian football feature heavily in Robert Helpmann's 1964 ballet The Display, his first and most famous work for the Australian Ballet. The game has also inspired well-known plays such as And the Big Men Fly (1963) by Alan Hopgood and David Williamson's The Club (1977), which was adapted into a 1980 film, directed by Bruce Beresford. Mike Brady's 1979 hit ""Up There Cazaly"" is considered an Australian football anthem, and references to the sport can be found in works by popular musicians, from singer-songwriter Paul Kelly to the alternative rock band TISM. Many Australian football video games have been released, most notably the AFL series."
Australian rules football,"Australian Football Hall of Fame
For the centenary of the VFL/AFL in 1996, the Australian Football Hall of Fame was established. That year, 136 significant figures across the various competitions were inducted into the Hall of Fame. Each years since the creation of the Hall of Fame, a panel selects a small group of players they deem worthy for this prestigious honour, resulting in a total number of more than 300 inductees as of 2024.
In addition to the Hall of Fame, select members are chosen to receive the elite Legend status. Due to restrictions limiting the number of Legend status players to 10% of the total number of Hall of Fame inductees, there are currently only 32 players with the status in the Hall of Fame as of 2024."
Australian rules football,"See also
Australian rules football attendance records
Australian rules football positions
List of Australian rules football clubs
List of Australian rules football rivalries
List of Australian rules football terms"
Australian rules football,"References
Citations
Sources
Books
Journal and conference articles
External links"
Australian rules football,"Australian Football League (AFL) official website
Australian Football: Celebrating The History of the Great Australian Game
2020 Laws of Australian Football
Australian Football explained in 31 languages – a publication from AFL.com.au
Reading Australian Rules Football – The Definitive Guide to the Game
State Library of Victoria Research Guide to Australian Football"
List of Australian states by life expectancy,This is a list of Australian states and territories by estimated life expectancy at birth.
List of Australian states by life expectancy,Data source: Australian Bureau of Statistics. The next release is expected 8 November 2024.
List of Australian states by life expectancy,"Charts
See also"
List of Australian states by life expectancy,"List of countries by life expectancy
List of Oceanian countries by life expectancy
States and territories of Australia
Demographics of Australia"
List of Australian states by life expectancy,"
== References =="
Mining in Australia,"Mining in Australia has long been a significant primary sector industry and contributor to the Australian economy by providing export income, royalty payments and employment. Historically, mining booms have also encouraged population growth via  immigration to Australia, particularly the gold rushes of the 1850s. Many different ores, gems and minerals have been mined in the past and a wide variety are still mined throughout the country.
In 2019, Australia was the world's largest producer of iron ore and bauxite; the second largest of gold, manganese, and lead; the third largest of zinc, cobalt, and uranium; the fifth largest of salt; the sixth largest of copper and nickel; the eighth largest producer of silver and tin; the fourteenth largest of phosphate; and the fifteenth largest of sulfur. The country is also a major producer of precious stones. Australia is the world's largest producer of opal and is one of the largest producers of diamond, ruby, sapphire and jade.
In non-renewable energies, in 2020, the country was the 30th largest producer of oil in the world, extracting 351.1 thousand barrels/day. In 2019, the country consumed 1 million barrels/day (the 20th largest consumer in the world). The country was the 20th largest oil importer in the world in 2018 (461.9 thousand barrels/day). In 2015, Australia was the 12th largest world producer of natural gas, 67.2 billion m3 per year. In 2019, the country was the 22nd largest gas consumer (41.9 billion m3 per year) and was the 10th largest gas exporter in the world in 2015: 34.0 billion m3 per year. In the production of coal, the country was the 4th largest in the world in 2018: 481.3 million tons. Australia is the 2nd largest coal exporter in the world (387 million tons in 2018)"
Mining in Australia,"History
Mining was an important early source of export income in Australian colonies and helped to pay for the imports needed for the growing colonial economies. Silver and later copper were discovered in South Australia in the 1840s, leading to the export of ore and the immigration of skilled miners and smelters. Coal was first exported to India in 1799. By 1901 Australia was exporting several million tonnes of coal each year. After World War II the Bowen Basin was opened up fueling exports to Japan for their growing steel industry.
An iron ore export ban was in place from 1938 to 24 November 1960.  In 1965, the first iron ore mine was operated at Goldsworthy in Western Australia.  Exports of iron ore began in the 1960s. Iron ore production reached 100 million tonnes by the mid-1970s.  This figure doubled to 200 million tonnes in 2003, and tripled by 2013. Western Australia became the largest iron ore producer in the world in 2014.  Iron ore reached $100 billion in annual export value in 2020, the first commodity to do so.
The first economic minerals in Australia were silver and lead in February 1841 at Glen Osmond, now a suburb of Adelaide in South Australia. Mines including Wheal Gawler and Wheal Watkins opened soon after. The value of these mines was soon overshadowed by the discovery of copper at Kapunda (1842), Burra (1845) and in the Copper Triangle (Moonta, Kadina and Wallaroo) area at the top of Yorke Peninsula (1861).
A small amount of uranium ore was mined in 1906 from Radium Hill. Uranium deposits at Rum Jungle were developed in the 1950s.  The Ranger Uranium Mine was opened in June 1979 and the Olympic Dam mine opened in 1988.  The Ranger Uranium Mine was controversial, leading to the Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry. Indigenous people of the region were opposed to the mine."
Mining in Australia,"Gold rushes
In 1851, gold was found near Ophir, New South Wales. Weeks later, gold was found in the newly established colony of Victoria. Australian gold rushes, in particular the Victorian gold rush, had a major lasting impact on Victoria, and on Australia as a whole. The influx of wealth that gold brought soon made Victoria Australia's richest colony by far, and Melbourne the continent's largest city. By the middle of the 1850s, 40% of the world's gold was produced in Australia.
Australia's population changed dramatically as a result of the gold rushes: in 1851 the population was 437,655 and a decade later it was 1,151,957; the rapid growth was predominantly a result of the ""new chums"" (recent immigrants from the United Kingdom and other colonies of the Empire) who contributed the 'rush'. Although most Victorian goldfields were exhausted by the end of the 19th century, and although much of the profit was sent back to the UK, sufficient wealth remained to fund substantial development of industry and infrastructure."
Mining in Australia,"Location
Australia has mining activity in all of its states and territories. The Minerals Council of Australia estimates that 0.02% of Australia's land surface is directly impacted by mining.
Particularly significant areas today include the Goldfields, Peel and Pilbara regions of Western Australia, the Hunter Valley in New South Wales, the Bowen Basin in Queensland and Latrobe Valley in Victoria and various parts of the outback. Places such as Kalgoorlie, Mount Isa, Mount Morgan, Broken Hill and Coober Pedy are known as mining towns.
Major active mines in Australia include:"
Mining in Australia,"Olympic Dam in South Australia, a copper, silver and uranium mine believed to have the world's largest uranium reserve, and in 2018 representing 6% of world production
Super Pit gold mine, which has replaced a number of underground mines at Boulder, Western Australia
Mount Whaleback mine in Western Australia is the largest open-pit iron ore mine in the world."
Mining in Australia,"Minerals and resources
Large quantities of minerals and resources :
Iron ore – Australia was the world's largest producer in 2019, supplying 580 million tonnes, 37% of the world's output (39% of the world's contained metal production).
Nickel – Australia was the world's fifth largest producer in 2019, producing 6.7% of world output.
Aluminium – Australia was the world's largest producer of bauxite in 2019 (27% of world production), and the second largest producer of alumina (15%), after China.
Copper – Australia was the world's 6th largest producer in 2019 (5% of world's production).
Gold – Australia was the second largest producer after China in 2019, producing 330 tonnes (11,000,000 ozt), 10% of the world's output.
Silver –  In 2019 Australia was the sixth largest producer, producing 1,400 tonnes (45,000,000 ozt), 5% of the world's output.
Uranium – Australia is responsible for 12% of the world's production and was the world's third largest producer in 2018, after Kazakhstan and Canada.
Diamond – Australia has the third largest commercially viable deposits after Russia and Botswana. Australia also boasts the richest diamantiferous pipe with production reaching peak levels of 42 metric tons (41 LT/46 ST) per year in the 1990s.
Opal – Australia is the world's largest producer of opal, being responsible for 95% of production.
Zinc – Australia was third to China and Peru in zinc production in 2019, producing 1.3 million tonnes, 10% of world production.
Coal – Australia is the world's largest exporter of coal and fourth largest producer of coal behind China, USA and India.
Oil shale – Australia has the sixth largest defined oil shale resources.
Petroleum – In 2019 Australia was the thirty-third largest producer of petroleum.
Natural gas – Australia is world's largest exporter of LNG with 77.5 million tonnes in 2019.
Rare earth elements – In 2019 Australia was the third largest producer after China and USA, with 10% of the world's output.
Much of the raw material mined in Australia is exported overseas to countries such as China for processing into refined products. Energy and minerals constitute two-thirds of Australia's total exports to China, and more than half of Australia's iron ore exports are to China."
Mining in Australia,"Statistical chart of Australia's major mineral resources
Australia ranks among the top 4 in economic resources for 21 primary industrial minerals, more than any other nation. Statistics are for December 2016.
Units of measurement:  t = tonne; kt = kilotonne (1,000 t); Mt = million tonne (1,000,000 t); Mc = million carat (1,000,000 c)"
Mining in Australia,"Coal mining
Coal is mined in every state of Australia except South Australia. Australia is one of the world's major coal producers and exporters, ranking fourth in production (after China, India and the United States) and second in exports (after Indonesia). While most Australian coal is exported, coal was also used to generate 28.7% of Australia's total primary energy supply in 2021."
Mining in Australia,"Uranium mining
Uranium mining in Australia began in the early 20th century in South Australia. At 2016 Australia contained 29% of the world's defined uranium resources. The three largest uranium mines in the country are Olympic Dam, Ranger Uranium Mine and Beverley Uranium Mine. Future production is expected from Honeymoon Uranium Mine and the planned Four Mile Uranium Mine."
Mining in Australia,"Natural gas
Based on 2008 CSIRO report, Australia estimated to have stranded gas reserves with about 140 trillion cubic feet or enough to fulfil the needs of a city with one million people for 2,800 years."
Mining in Australia,"Lithium
Australia is the biggest producer of lithium by weight and has the world's largest hard-rock lithium mine, the Greenbushes mine in Western Australia. Lithium mined at Greenbushes accounted for more than 20% of global production in 2021."
Mining in Australia,"Entrepreneurs and magnates
At various stages in the history of the mining industry in Australia, individual mining managers, directors and investors have gained significant wealth and the subsequent publicity. In most cases the individuals are designated Mining Magnates or Australian mining entrepreneurs."
Mining in Australia,"Economics
A number of large multinational mining companies including BHP, Newcrest, Rio Tinto, Alcoa, Chalco, Shenhua, Alcan and Xstrata operate in Australia. There are also many small mining and mineral exploration companies listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX). Overall, the resources sector represents almost 20% of the ASX market by capitalisation, and almost one third of the companies listed.
Mining is Australia's largest sector by share of national Gross Domestic Product, 10.4% in 2020. This is up from only 2.6% in 1950, and from 10% at the time of federation in 1901. In 2020 mineral exports contributed 62% of Australia's total export revenue, valued at $270 billion. Australia is the world's largest exporter of coal (35% of international trade), iron ore, lead, diamonds, rutile, zinc and zirconium, second largest of gold and uranium, and third largest of aluminium. Japan was the major purchaser of Australian mineral exports in the mid-1990s.
Of the developed countries, perhaps only Canada and Norway have mining as such a significant part of the economy; for comparison, in Canada mining represents about 3.6% of the Canadian economy and 32% of exports, and in Norway mining, dominated by petroleum, represents about 19% of GDP and 46% of exports. By comparison, in the United States mining represents only about 1.6% of GDP.
The mining sector employed in 2021 about 270,000 people, about 2.0% of the total labour force.
Australia's mining industry is 86% foreign owned; BHP is 76% foreign owned, and Rio Tinto is 83%. Between them they constitute 70% of listed mining company resources."
Mining in Australia,"Technology and services
Australia's mining services, equipment, and technology exports are over $2 billion annually. Due to the predominance of mining activities in Australia, many technological innovations have been developed or proven in Australian mine sites. These innovations include contributions to autonomous underground vehicles, 3D scanning and printing and underground communications."
Mining in Australia,"Environment and politics
Australia is the world's third largest exporter of fossil fuel carbon dioxide-emissions potential. “Australia mines about 57 tonnes of CO2 potential per person each year, about 10 times the global average”.
Mining has had a substantial environmental impact in some areas of Australia. Historically, the Victorian gold rush was the start of the economic growth of the country, leading to major increases in population. However, it also resulted in deforestation, consequent erosion, and pollution in the areas that were mined. The effects on the landscape near Bendigo and Ballarat can still be seen today. Queenstown, Tasmania's mountains were also completely denuded through a combination of logging and pollution from a mine smelter, and remain bare today. It is estimated that 10 million hectares of land have been affected throughout the history of mining in Australia. Because Australia's mines are distributed across varying climates the knowledge gained from one mine's restoration does not easily extrapolate to other sites.
Uranium mining has been controversial, partly for its alleged environmental impact but more so because of its end uses in nuclear power and nuclear weapons. The Australian Labor Party, one of Australia's two major parties, maintains a policy of ""no new uranium mines"". As of 2006, the increased world demand for uranium has seen some pressure, both internally and externally on the ALP, for a policy change. Australia is a participant in international anti-proliferation efforts designed to ensure that no exported uranium is used in nuclear weapons.
During the period of 2010 and 2013, Australia saw a debate about the Minerals Resource Rent Tax (MRRT). The tax, levied on 30% of the ""super profits"" from the mining of iron ore and coal in Australia. A company was to pay the tax when its annual profits reach $75 million. The controversy regarding the MRRT was such that an ""ad war"" between the government and mining interests began in May 2010 and continued until the downfall of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in June 2010. The Australian Electoral Commission released figures indicating mining interests had spent $22 m in campaigning and advertisements in the six weeks prior to the end of the Rudd prime ministership. Mining interests re-introduced the advertisements arguing against the proposed revised changes during the 2010 federal election campaign.
The Coalition, led by Tony Abbott, went to the 2010 and 2013 elections promising to repeal the tax. The Coalition won the 2013 election, and after one failed attempt to pass the bill, the Mining Tax Repeal Bill finally passed both houses of Parliament on 2 September 2014 and the tax was subsequently repealed.
A January 2014 poll conducted by UMR Research, however, found that a majority of Australians still think that multinational mining companies do not pay enough tax.
In the 2017 Western Australian state election The Western Australian National Party led by Brendon Grylls, who retook the leadership in August 2016, ran on a policy to tax BHP and Rio Tinto $5 for every tonne of iron ore mined (as opposed to $0.25 currently). While a poll conducted found that 39.4% of voters surveyed supported the policy, 37.1% opposed and 23.5% were undecided.
The big mining companies ran an advertising campaign against the policy.
Grylls was defeated in that election by the Labor candidate."
Mining in Australia,"Mining disasters
New Australasian Gold Mine
Creswick in the Victorian goldfields is the site of the New Australasian No.2 Gold Mine. On 12 December 1882, 29 miners became trapped underground by water that broke through from the adjacent flooded No.1 Gold Mine workings. Only five survived. Despite two days of frantic pumping, water filled the mine workings. The trapped men scrawled last notes to their loved ones on billy cans before they drowned. Some of these have been kept and still bear the messages. The men that perished left 17 widows and 75 dependent children."
Mining in Australia,"Mount Kembla Colliery
In 1902 a gas explosion in the Mount Kembla Colliery in the Illawarra region of New South Wales resulted in the deaths of 96 men and boys, either while at work or in the course of trying to rescue others. Every family in the village lost a relative. A service of commemoration is held annually on 31 July at the Mount Kembla Soldiers' and Miners' Memorial Church. This was Australia's worst mining disaster."
Mining in Australia,"North Mount Lyell
On 12 October 1912 at Queenstown, Tasmania the North Mount Lyell Fire caused the death of 42 miners, and required breathing apparatus to be transported from Victoria to rescue trapped miners. The subsequent royal commission was inconclusive as to the cause."
Mining in Australia,"Mount Mulligan
The 1921 Mount Mulligan mine disaster occurred in Far North Queensland. A coal dust explosion killed 75 men."
Mining in Australia,"Moura
Four serious accidents have occurred at mines in the Central Queensland town of Moura. The first accident took the lives of 13 men in September 1975. In July 1986 there was an explosion at Moura Number 4 Mine. 12 coal miners lost their lives in this disaster that sparked controversy after experts claimed the accident was avoidable. Another explosion killed two men in January 1994 and just eight months later another explosion deep underground took the lives of 11 men."
Mining in Australia,"Bulli Colliery
On 23 March 1887 an explosion at the mine in Bulli in New South Wales killed 81 people. A royal commission was set up to investigate the explosion and concluded:"
Mining in Australia,"..that the explosion was caused by marsh gas or carburetted hydrogen gas [methane] that had accumulated at the face ... That the immediate cause was probably the flame from an overcharged shot that had apparently been fired fired by [a miner] in the coal in No. 2 heading. The gas explosion propagated a coal dust explosion and travelled towards the fresh air at the surface.
The commission was of the opinion that carelessness, want of skill, and the loose and perfunctory manner in which the principal operations in the mine were performed by the majority of the men, and countenanced by at least the overman and deputies, were immediately connected with, and led up to, the occurrence of the final catastrophe, when, by the direct negligence of probably one man, eighty other men lost their lives, and   that the mine deputy, the mine overman (foreman) and the mine manager were guilty of contributory negligence."
Mining in Australia,"Box Flat Mine
At the Box Flat Mine in Swanbank, South East Queensland, 17 miners were lost after an underground gas explosion occurred on 31 July 1972. Another man died later from injuries sustained in the explosion. The mine tunnel mouths were sealed and the mine closed shortly after."
Mining in Australia,"Australian mining in literature, art and film
Henry Lawson, His Father's Mate from While The Billy Boils, 1896 (short story)
Nickel Queen, based on the Western Australian nickel boom of the late 1960s
Colin Thiele, The Fire in the Stone (book which became a film)
Wendy Richardson, Windy Gully 1989 Currency Press (play)
Conal Fitzpatrick, Kembla- The Book of Voices 2002 Kemblawarra Press (poetry) ISBN 0-9581287-0-7
Henry Handel Richardson, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony: Australia Felix Takes place in the chaos of the early Ballarat goldrush.
Richard Lowenstein, Strikebound (1984 film).
Tim Burstall, The Last of the Knucklemen (1979 film, based on the play by John Power, who also wrote a novelisation of the film).
Kriv Stenders, Red Dog (2011 film, based on the true story)
Franklin White. Miner with a Heart of Gold: biography of a mineral science and engineering educator. 2020. Friesen Press. ISBN 978-1-5255-7765-9 (Hardcover) 978-1-5255-7766-6 (Paperback) 978-1-5255-7767-3 (eBook)"
Mining in Australia,"See also
Mining in the Northern Territory
Mining in Western Australia
NSW Minerals Council
Uranium mining controversy in Kakadu National Park"
Mining in Australia,"References
External links
Australian Mines Atlas 
Atlas of Australian Mine Waste 
""Australian Atlas of Mineral Resources, Mines & Processing Centres"". Geoscience Australia. Retrieved 6 June 2006.
Minerals Council of Australia"
Premiers and chief ministers of the Australian states and territories,"The premiers and chief ministers of the Australian states and territories are the heads of the executive governments in the six states and two self-governing territories of Australia. They perform the same function at the state and territory level as the Prime Minister of Australia performs at the national level. The King of Australia and the state governors are the formal repositories of executive power; however, in practice they act only on the advice of state premiers and ministers except in extreme circumstances, such as a constitutional crisis."
Premiers and chief ministers of the Australian states and territories,"Background
Each of the Australian states is governed under the Westminster system of parliamentary government. Each state has an elected legislature. Following a general election, the state governor appoints as premier the member of the lower house of the state legislature who can command a simple majority of votes on the floor of the house. The governor is the head of state, and acts only on the advice of the head of government - the premier. The premier must resign the commission to the governor for losing the confidence of the legislative assembly, either because their party is defeated at a general election or losing a vote of confidence in the house. (Premiers may also resign for other reasons, such as losing the confidence of their own party).
The Australian states were founded as British colonies, and executive power was held by a governor (or sometimes a lieutenant-governor) appointed by the British government (see Governors of the Australian states). From the 1820s the power of the governors was gradually transferred to legislative bodies, at first appointed, later partly elected, and finally fully elected. Victoria gained full responsible parliamentary government in 1855, New South Wales, South Australia and Tasmania in 1856, Queensland in 1859 and Western Australia (owing to its much smaller population) in 1890.
Until the rise of the Australian Labor Party in the 1890s, the Australian colonies did not have formal party systems, although many colonial politicians called themselves Liberals or Conservatives. Ministries were usually formed on the basis of personal or factional loyalties, and rose and fell with great frequency as loyalties changed. Colonial politics were commonly regarded as parochial, corrupt and cynical, and in many cases they were. Victorian Premier James Munro, for example, fled the colony to escape his creditors in 1890, and Queensland Premier Sir Thomas McIlwraith was notoriously corrupt.
The rise of Labor forced the colonies to move towards a two-party system of Labor versus non-Labor, although state politics remained more personalised and less ideological than national politics for many years. The first minority Labor government was formed by Anderson Dawson in Queensland in 1899, and the first majority Labor government was led by James McGowen in New South Wales in 1910. Since about 1910 state politics have followed much the same party pattern as Australian national politics (see Politics of Australia).
Since 1952, every premier of every state has been a member of the Australian Labor Party, the Liberal Party of Australia, or the National Party of Australia (until 1973, the Liberal Party was known as the Liberal and Country League in South Australia; the Country Liberal Party is the Northern Territory branch of the Liberal and National Parties; and the Liberal National Party has been the Queensland branch of the same two parties since 2008).
Although the legislative powers of the states are defined in the Constitution, the real power of the Australian premiers has been declining steadily ever since Federation in 1901, as the power and responsibility of the national government has expanded at the expense of the states. The most important transfer of power came in 1943, when in the interests of national unity during World War II the states gave up their power to levy their own income taxes to the Commonwealth. Since then the states' finances have essentially been controlled by the Commonwealth."
Premiers and chief ministers of the Australian states and territories,"Relations between the premiers and other levels of government
For many decades, the premiers met with each other and the prime minister at Premiers' Conferences. From 1992 to 2020, such meetings occurred through the Council of Australian Governments (COAG), which also includes the chief ministers of the territories and a representative of local government. Since 2020, the National Cabinet allows meetings between the prime minister, state premiers and chief ministers of the territories, however local government representation has been removed.
On 21 July 2006, South Australian premier Mike Rann was appointed chairman of a new Council for the Australian Federation, a council which aims to improve state-federal ties."
Premiers and chief ministers of the Australian states and territories,"Timeline
Between 6 March 2002 (when Mike Rann (Labor) succeeded Rob Kerin (Liberal) as Premier of South Australia) and 23 September 2008, when Colin Barnett succeeded Alan Carpenter as Premier of Western Australia, there were Labor Premiers in all six of the Australian states (and Chief Ministers in both territories); this was only the second time a party or coalition has ever achieved this.  A comparable feat was achieved by the Coalition between 26 May 1969 (when the Liberals' Angus Bethune succeeded Labor's Eric Reece as Premier of Tasmania) and 2 June 1970 (when the Liberals' Steele Hall was succeeded by Labor's Don Dunstan as Premier of South Australia)."
Premiers and chief ministers of the Australian states and territories,"Current premiers of the states
Current chief ministers of the territories
Female heads of government
With the exception of South Australia, every state and territory of Australia has had a female head of government, all but two of whom have represented the Australian Labor Party. They are:"
Premiers and chief ministers of the Australian states and territories,"Australian Capital Territory:
Rosemary Follett 1989, 1991–1995 (first territory and first jurisdiction)
Kate Carnell 1995–2000
Katy Gallagher 2011–2014
Western Australia:
Carmen Lawrence 1990–1993 (first state)
Victoria:
Joan Kirner 1990–1992
Jacinta Allan 2023–present
Northern Territory:
Clare Martin 2001–2007
Natasha Fyles 2022–2023
Eva Lawler 2023–present
Queensland:
Anna Bligh 2007–2012
Annastacia Palaszczuk 2015–2023
New South Wales:
Kristina Keneally 2009–2011
Gladys Berejiklian 2017–2021
Tasmania:
Lara Giddings 2011–2014
Of the state leaders, all but Palaszczuk succeeded male premiers of their own party who had resigned mid-term; in three cases (Lawrence, Kirner and Keneally), their predecessors' resignations occurred after losing the support of their parliamentary colleagues; in Allan's case, her predecessor, Daniel Andrews, resigned only ten months after being re-elected in November 2022. The governments led by Lawrence, Kirner, Keneally and Giddings were defeated at the subsequent elections.
Anna Bligh, Annastacia Palaszczuk and Gladys Berejiklian are the only women who have received a popular mandate as premier of an Australian state (21 March 2009, 31 January 2015 and 23 March 2019). Palaszczuk is also the only woman to have led a party from Opposition to Government.
Women have also been elected to the almost-equivalent posts of chief ministers of the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and the Northern Territory (NT). Rosemary Follett (Labor) was elected as the inaugural Chief Minister of the ACT in 1989, nine months before any woman became premier of a state.  Kate Carnell (Liberal), and Clare Martin (Labor) also received popular mandates as chief ministers of the ACT and the NT respectively. Clare Martin was the only one of these three women to lead a majority government.
Of all female premiers and chief ministers, only Clare Martin and Annastacia Palaszczuk have gained re-election after successfully completing a term from election to election. Rosemary Follett did win two consecutive elections, but had an interrupted term of service from 5 December 1989 (when a successful motion of no confidence passed by establishing a new government led by Trevor Kaine) to 6 June 1991 (when another motion of no confidence was passed, this time against Trevor Kaine, re-establishing Follett as chief minister)."
Premiers and chief ministers of the Australian states and territories,"See also
List of Australian heads of government by time in office"
Premiers and chief ministers of the Australian states and territories,"
== References =="
Abortion in Australia,"Abortion in Australia is legal. There are no federal abortion laws, and full decriminalisation of the procedure has been enacted in all jurisdictions. Access to abortion varies between the states and territories: Surgical abortions are readily available on request within the first 22 to 24 weeks of pregnancy in most jurisdictions, and up to 16 weeks in Tasmania. Later-term abortions can be obtained with the approval of two doctors, although the Australian Capital Territory only requires a single physician's approval.
Since at least the 1980s, opinion polls have shown a majority of Australians support abortion rights, and that support for abortion rights is increasing. While anti-abortion violence is rare in Australia, anti-abortion activists have used tactics including ""verbal abuse, threats, and impeding entry"" outside abortion clinics. In response, all jurisdictions have enacted laws prohibiting protesters from harassing visitors and staff within a certain radius of abortion clinics, starting with Tasmania in 2013 and lastly with Western Australia in 2021.
A woman's sexual partner is not required to be notified of an abortion, and Australian courts will not grant injunctions to prevent the procedure, even if the applicant is the putative father of the foetus. No waiting periods are imposed on having an abortion. A minor does not need to notify a parent of a proposed abortion, nor is parental consent required. While abortions are regulated by the states and territories, the procedure is partially funded under the Federal Government public health scheme, Medicare, or by private healthcare insurers."
Abortion in Australia,"History
Since colonisation, abortion in Australia has always been regulated by state (previously colonial) law. Before the end of the 19th century, each colony had adopted the Imperial Offences Against the Person Act 1861, which, in turn, was derived from English laws from 1837, 1828, and 1803, which made abortion illegal under any circumstance. Since then, abortion law has continued to evolve in each state by case law and changes in legislation.
A legal precedent concerning the legality of abortion was set in Australia in 1969, by the Menhennitt ruling in the Victorian Supreme Court case R v Davidson, which held that abortion was lawfully justified if ""necessary to preserve the physical or mental health of the woman concerned, provided that the danger involved in the abortion did not outweigh the danger which the abortion was designed to prevent"". Since then, court rulings and legislative reform have helped deliver a medical framework for abortion in Australia; the Menhennitt ruling was later largely adopted by courts in New South Wales and Queensland, and was influential in some other states. Over time, this has come to be broadly defined so as to include the mental health of the woman, to which unwanted pregnancy is interpreted as clinically injurious.
Abortion rights received more attention over the 1970s across Australia, due, in part, to the efforts of many organisations and individuals such as the Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA), Control Abortion Referral Service, and government initiatives such as the Royal Commission on Human Relationships, and activist medical practitioners such as Bertram Wainer.
In the mid-1990s, the conservative Howard government was in power in Australia, with conservative independent Tasmanian Senator Brian Harradine holding the balance of power in the Senate. Howard brokered a deal with Harradine to ensure his support for proposed bills, including the privatisation of national telecommunications provider Telecom. In return, Harradine received support for introducing restrictions on abortion. As a result, unlike other medications, abortifacient drugs were made to require approval from the Minister for Health before they could be assessed by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA). As TGA assessment is a requirement for drugs to be sold in Australia, this created a ministerial veto. Accordingly, the abortifacient RU-486, which was widely used overseas, was banned in Australia. The continued refusal by Tony Abbott, then Minister for Health, to allow abortifacients into Australia led to a private member's bill being introduced in late 2005 to transfer the approval back to the TGA. The bill was made law in 2006. From 2006 to 2012, the drug was still not registered by the TGA, and medical practitioners needed special status from the TGA in order to prescribe it; even after registration its use still has special conditions and restrictions. There is opinion among medical experts in Australia that abortifacients are over-regulated.
In 2006, after losing his veto power over abortifacients, Tony Abbott lobbied for funding of alternative counseling to pregnant women through church-affiliated groups to lower the national abortion rate, without success. In 2010, however, while he was seeking election as Liberal Party leader, Abbott pledged not to make any changes to abortion laws.
In 2017, Senator Cory Bernardi moved a motion to ban sex-selective abortion. The motion was voted down (10–36). There is no evidence that sex-selective abortions are common in Australia, though according to the Human Rights Law Centre, attempting to create bans on the procedure is a ""well-known tactic of opponents of abortion to limit women's access to abortion"".
The National Women's Health Strategy 2020–2030, published by the Department of Health in 2019, listed ""equitable access to pregnancy termination services"" as a key measure of success for maternal, sexual and reproductive health.
Before the 2019 federal election, the Australian Labor Party unveiled a national abortion policy for the 2019 Australian federal election. The party's policy included requiring public hospitals to offer abortion procedures consistently under new Commonwealth funding agreements, encouraging New South Wales to remove abortion from its criminal laws and building an abortion clinic in Tasmania. In response Liberal Party leader Scott Morrison stated the issue was controversial and sensitive and decisions should be left to the states. His Coalition colleagues were largely quiet on the matter, while anti-abortion groups including the Australian Christian Lobby and Cherish Life campaigned against Labor on the issue. Cherish Life incorrectly claimed that Labor had an ""extreme late-term abortion agenda"", and that ""more babies would die"" if they were elected. Labor MP Ed Husic, who retained his seat at the election, said the misrepresentation of the party's abortion policy was a factor in his decrease in votes."
Abortion in Australia,"Anti-abortion violence and protests
Abortion-related violence is rare in Australia. The first serious attack and murder by an anti-abortion activist occurred in 2001, carried out by Peter Knight. Knight forced his way into a Melbourne clinic carrying a rifle, kerosene, and equipment to lock the doors of the clinic. He was intending to murder all patients and staff in the building, though he was overpowered after shooting and killing a security guard. Anti-abortion activists had been protesting outside the clinic, though left 15 minutes before Knight's attack. Knight, described by the prosecution as a ""hermit obsessed with killing abortion doctors"", was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. In January 2009, a firebombing using Molotov cocktails was attempted at a medical clinic in Mosman Park, Western Australia. Damage was minimal, and only resulted in smashed windows and blackened external walls. Police believed graffiti saying ""baby killers"" on the building was related to the attack; however, the medical clinic did not actually offer abortion services.
Since at least the 1990s, tactics used by anti-abortion campaigners outside abortion clinics included ""verbal abuse, threats, impeding entry to clinics, displaying violent imagery, and acts of 'disturbing theater' such as pushing a blood-splattered doll in a pram"". In response, states and territories began creating ""safe access zones"", which prevent protesting about abortion within a proscribed area surrounding a clinic. Tasmania was the first state to do so in 2013. In April 2019, the High Court of Australia upheld these laws after they were challenged by two people arrested for violating them. The petitioners claimed their right to freedom of political communication had been denied as a result of the laws, though the court dismissed the appeals, saying the laws served a legitimate purpose. In August 2021, Western Australia became the last state to introduce safe access zones. In the months prior, patients at abortion clinics in that state were continuing to be approached and intimidated by protesters; footage was also obtained of anti-abortion campaigners protesting outside a Western Australian clinic at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, despite social distancing guidelines at the time. All jurisdictions have their exclusion zone at 150m around abortion clinics at all times, except for the Australian Capital Territory which may set a zone of 50m with approval from a health minister."
Abortion in Australia,"Abortion laws
Federal involvement
Abortions are partially funded under Medicare, the federal government-funded public health scheme. As of 2015, Medicare effectively halved the cost of surgical abortion, and those provided by private healthcare insurers, which are also regulated by the federal government. The federal government also provides funding to public hospitals, and can thereby influence abortion policy and practice. Abortions and abortion advice are regarded as health services, and are exempt from the Goods and Services Tax (GST)."
Abortion in Australia,"Summary of state laws
Australian Capital Territory
In the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), references to abortion as a criminal offence were repealed by the Crimes (Abolition of Offence of Abortion) Act 2002. Before then, abortion law was for many years governed by case law under sections 82–84 of the Crimes Act 1900 of New South Wales. Abortion care is now regulated under the framework of health law, standards, policies, and professional ethics that apply to all healthcare. There is no gestational limit preventing an abortion in the ACT.
Since March 2016, it has been an offence to protest within 50 m of an abortion clinic within the Australian Capital Territory (otherwise called ""protest free zones"").
Since April 2023, abortion is free or at no cost for official Australian Capital Territory residents, a legal first for an Australian jurisdiction.
In June 2024, a bill passed in the ACT Assembly increasing abortion services by allowing nurses and midwives to prescribe abortion medication for the first time, in addition to doctors. The bill also introduced a requirement for health practitioners who refuse to provide abortion services to either refer patients to a practitioner that provides those services, or information on how to find one, bringing the ACT ""into line with other states and territories"" which had already required this."
Abortion in Australia,"New South Wales
Abortion was decriminalised in New South Wales on 2 October 2019 with the royal assent of the Abortion Law Reform Act 2019, passed a week earlier by both houses of the New South Wales parliament. The legislation took abortion out of the 119-year-old criminal code, and regulates it as a medical procedure.
Under the new law, abortions are made available on request during the first 22 weeks of gestation. After that time, two doctors must agree that it is appropriate, based on the woman's current and future physical, psychological, and social circumstances. This is similar to laws in other states and territories. The medical practitioner performing the abortion has an obligation to give appropriate medical care if the abortion results in a live baby being born.
Prior to the new law, abortion had been explicitly listed in New South Wales as a crime under sections 82–84 of the Crimes Act 1900 (NSW) since 1900, but the interpretation of the law is subject to the Levine ruling, from R v Wald of 1971, itself derived from the Victorian Menhennitt ruling, which held an abortion to be legal if a doctor had an honest and reasonable belief that, due to ""any economic, social, or medical ground or reason"", the abortion was necessary to ""preserve the woman involved from serious danger to her life or physical or mental health which the continuance of the pregnancy would entail"".
This was expanded by CES v Superclinics Australia Pty Ltd (1995), which extended the period during which health concerns might be considered from the duration of pregnancy to include the woman's future health and well-being. In 2006, Dr. Suman Sood was convicted of two counts of performing an illegal abortion where she failed to enquire as to whether a lawful reason for performing the abortion did exist.
In June 2016, Greens upper house MP Mehreen Faruqi was to introduce a bill decriminalising abortion in NSW. However, on the eve of the introduction of the bill on 23 June 2016, it was removed from the order of business for the following day, despite being first in the order of precedence for months, scheduled and publicly announced.
In August 2016, Mehreen Faruqi released an exposure draft of the Abortion Law Reform (Miscellaneous Acts Amendment) Bill 2016 to ""Repeal sections 82–84 of the Crimes Act, relating to abortion offences; Provide for a 150 metre safe access zone around abortion clinics and service providers to ensure a patient's right to medical privacy; and Require doctors to disclose conscientious objection at the start of the consultation and refer patients to another doctor who does not have such an objection or to the local Women's Health NSW centre"". The bill was introduced to the upper house on 11 August 2016. It was defeated in the second reading 25–14 on 11 May 2017.
Since 1 July 2018, it has been illegal to protest within 150 metres of an abortion clinic."
Abortion in Australia,"Northern Territory
In the Northern Territory, abortion requires the approval of two doctors after 24 weeks' gestation. Surgical and medical abortion are available in the public health system. This is unusual in Australia where abortion services are frequently outsourced to private providers.
The Termination of Pregnancy Law Reform Act was enacted on 1 July 2017 and removed the need for two doctors to examine a woman before 14 weeks gestation, implemented a 150-metre ""safe access zone"" around clinics, removed the requirement of parental approval for the procedure and provided the ability for the prescription of medical abortion tablets. The Interpretive Report 2018 recorded 742 abortions in the previous 12 months with 73% being medical abortion with tablets before 9 weeks gestation, the remaining 27% were conducted in hospital. Since the legislative change, 99.33% of terminations of pregnancy were conducted under 14 weeks of gestation. This has also meant that the waiting time in a public hospital for a surgical termination has reduced which has policy and public health economic implications.
In December 2021, the Northern Territory eased restrictions on abortions, allowing access between 14 and 24 weeks with the approval of one doctor instead of the previous two required. They also legalised terminations after 24 weeks with the approval of two doctors, removing the previous provision which stated abortions were only legal after 24 weeks to save a woman's life."
Abortion in Australia,"Queensland
Since 3 December 2018, abortion in Queensland has been available on request during the first 22 weeks of gestation. After that period, two doctors must sign off on the procedure before a woman can access an abortion unless there is a danger to the life of the woman or, in a multiple pregnancy, another unborn child.
Prior to December 2018, abortion access in Queensland was determined by the 1986 McGuire ruling, which declared abortion to be legal if necessary to preserve the woman from a serious danger to her life or health—beyond the normal dangers of pregnancy and childbirth—that would result if the pregnancy continued, and is not disproportionate to the danger being averted. Until 2008, abortion law in Queensland closely mirrored the law in Victoria. The McGuire ruling was affirmed in the 1994 case Veivers v. Connolly, by a single judge of the Supreme Court of Queensland."
Abortion in Australia,"South Australia
In South Australia, South Australian residents up to 23 weeks pregnant can have an early medication or surgical abortion. Safe access zones of 150 metres are provided around abortion clinics, effective since 1 January 2021.
Legislation in 1969 legalised abortion when necessary to protect the life or physical or mental health of the woman — taking into account the current and reasonably foreseeable future — or in cases when the child was likely to be born with serious handicaps. Abortions must be performed before a time limit of 28 weeks of pregnancy. Abortions must be performed in a hospital, and be approved by two physicians, and are also subject to a residency requirement (patient must be a resident of South Australia for at least two months). The hospital, dual approval, and residency requirement may be waived in an emergency. Abortions in South Australia are available for free or low cost at some of the public health facilities, including The Pregnancy Advisory Centre. This Pregnancy Advisory Centre is a registered hospital, with doctors available for approval. Both medical and surgical abortions are performed.
A bill decriminalising abortion was introduced into the state parliament in October 2020. Under the legislation, abortion can be performed upon request up to 22 weeks and six days gestation. After that period, a medical practitioner can only perform an abortion if they consult with another practitioner, and if both are of the view that the procedure is medically appropriate. The reform removed abortion entirely from the criminal code. The Legislative Council passed the bill on 3 December 2020, as did the House of Assembly on 19 February 2021, by 29 votes to 15. As an amendment banning so-called ""gender-selective abortion"" was passed by the Assembly, the amendments were agreed to by the Legislative Council on 2 March 2021, and received royal assent on 11 March 2021. The legislation required further regulations to be issued by the government, in order to come into effect. The government published the regulations on 23 June 2022; they came into effect on 7 July 2022. Health Minister Chris Picton criticised the former Liberal government, which was defeated by Labor at the March 2022 state election, for ""delay[ing] and bury[ing] these regulations, and failed to explain to the community why they did not progress them""."
Abortion in Australia,"Tasmania
In Tasmania, since 21 November 2013, abortions are allowed on request up to 16 weeks of pregnancy. After 16 weeks abortion requires the consent of two doctors on medical or psychological grounds. The law also prohibits filming, the holding of protests, harassment, or intimidation of patients or staff within 150 metres of abortion clinics.
From 1925 until 2001, Tasmania's Criminal Code prohibited ""unlawful abortion"", without actually stating what was lawful or not. While it had never actually been prosecuted, it had been held that Victoria's Menhennitt ruling of 1969 and New South Wales' Levine ruling applied in Tasmanian law. In late 2001, the Criminal Code was clarified to state that an abortion must be carried out under a set of criteria resembling those of the South Australian requirements.
The availability of abortion facilities in the state is limited. The state's public health system provides abortion services in only extraordinary circumstances (e. g., in cases of foetal abnormality); so, most women access pregnancy terminations through the private sector. In 2017, the state's only dedicated low-cost surgical abortion clinic closed. Some women chose to fly interstate for pregnancy terminations."
Abortion in Australia,"Victoria
In Victoria, since 2008, abortions are allowed on request up to 24 weeks of pregnancy, with abortions after that time requiring two doctors to agree that it is appropriate, based on the woman's current and future physical, psychological, and social circumstances.
Before 2008, abortion law was based on the Victorian Crimes Act, as interpreted by the Menhennitt ruling in 1969, in the case of R v Davidson. Under the ruling, abortions were only legal if necessary to preserve the woman from a serious danger to her life or health — beyond the normal dangers of pregnancy and childbirth — that would result if the pregnancy continued, and is not disproportionate to the danger being averted. Menhennitt's ruling remained the basis for abortion law in Victoria until the Abortion Law Reform Act 2008 (Vic) decriminalised abortions up to a gestational limit of 24 weeks."
Abortion in Australia,"Western Australia
In Western Australia, from May 1998, abortions became legal on request (with a referral from a doctor) up to 20 weeks of pregnancy, though subject to counselling by a medical practitioner other than the one performing the abortion. After 20 weeks of pregnancy, abortions were only able to be performed if the foetus was likely to be born with severe medical problems, which needed to be confirmed by two independently appointed doctors. For girls under 16 years of age, one parent needed to be notified, except where permission has been granted by the Children's Court or when the child did not live with her parents.
In September 2023, progressive abortion reforms were made, which included fully removing abortion from the criminal code, removing the need for parental notification for minors, and reducing the number of doctors needed to approve most abortions from two to one. The need for mandatory counselling was also removed, and the time at which additional requirements for abortion apply was increased from 20 weeks gestation to 23 weeks. The changes came into effect on 27 March 2024.
Western Australia was the last jurisdiction in Australia not to have safe access zones. A bill to create safe zones within 150 metres of abortion clinics was formally passed in August 2021, and went into legal effect from 1 September on assent. A 2020 report by the Western Australian Department of Health found that 70% of people approved of safe access zones."
Abortion in Australia,"Telehealth Services for Abortion in Australia
With advancements in technology and the need for accessible healthcare services, telehealth has become a pivotal mode for providing abortion services across Australia. This approach allows women in remote, rural, and urban areas to access safe and legal abortion services, without the need for physical attendance in a healthcare facility.
Telehealth services for abortion typically involve consultations via video calls, phone calls, or other digital communication platforms, where healthcare providers can prescribe medication for medical abortions. This method significantly increases access to abortion services, especially for those women facing geographical barriers or those who prefer privacy.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Australian states and territories have adapted their healthcare policies to include telehealth services for abortion, recognizing the importance of maintaining access to essential health services during lockdowns and travel restrictions. This adjustment reflects a broader trend towards integrating digital healthcare solutions into reproductive health services.
The effectiveness and safety of telehealth abortions have been supported by various studies, indicating similar outcomes to in-person services. These findings underscore the potential of telehealth to revolutionize access to abortion services, making it an essential component of reproductive health care in Australia."
Abortion in Australia,"""Child destruction"" laws
Each state and territory has its own criminal code relating to child destruction. The offence is called ""killing unborn child"", and can be committed only around the time of childbirth in Queensland, Western Australia, and the Northern Territory. It is called ""causing death of child before birth"" in Tasmania. As of 2008, in South Australia, ""child destruction"" came under the heading of ""abortion"". The definition is somewhat broader in the Australian Capital Territory, and comparably broad to English law in Tasmania and South Australia. The offence was abolished in Victoria by the Abortion Law Reform Act 2008 (Victoria).
New South Wales does not have a ""child destruction"" enactment, but the Crimes Amendment (Grievous Bodily Harm) Act 2005 (NSW) amended the Crimes Act 1900 (NSW), so that s 4(1)(a) now defines ""grievous bodily harm"" as including ""the destruction (other than in the course of a medical procedure) of the foetus of a pregnant woman, whether or not the woman suffers any other harm"". This was further amended by the Abortion Law Reform Act 2019 to ""the destruction (other than in the course of a medical procedure or a termination of a pregnancy in accordance with the Abortion Law Reform Act 2019) of the foetus of a pregnant woman, whether or not the woman suffers any other harm""."
Abortion in Australia,"Statistics
There is a lack of consistent data collection standards across states due to differences in definitions, making it difficult or impossible to accurately quantify the number of abortions performed in Australia each year. There were an average of 75,700 Medicare-funded procedures that could result in an ""abortive outcome"" performed each year from 1995 to 2004, but this figure includes miscarriages as well as terminations. On the other hand, many women who have medical abortions performed at private hospitals may not claim the Medicare rebate.
South Australia is the only state which collects and publishes data on abortions. In 2002 there were 5147 medical abortions performed in South Australia, or 17.2 per 1000 women aged 15–44. Projected nationally, this would suggest that about 73,300 abortions were performed nationwide. This does not take into account differences between states. For example, unpublished data from Western Australia estimates a rate of 19.4 terminations per 1000 women in the same age bracket, which would indicate about 82,700 abortions projected nationally. The South Australian data also indicates that the vast majority of abortions performed between 1994 and 2002 occurred before 14 weeks gestation. Less than 2% took place at or after 20 weeks."
Abortion in Australia,"Public opinion
Traditional Christian beliefs played a large factor influencing Australia's initial policies opposing abortion. Changing attitudes to abortion and reproductive rights have correlated with fewer Australians perceiving their country to be a ""Christian nation"", which, in turn, has decreased the influence of right-wing Christian politicians. Stigma surrounding the issue of abortion, however, still remains, and can severely impact women's sense of identity and mental health, and also influence whether an abortion is obtained. Women may choose to state they suffered a miscarriage, rather than telling people they had an abortion, to avoid negative reactions.
Since at least the 1980s, opinion polls have shown a majority of Australians support abortion rights, and that support for abortion rights is increasing."
Abortion in Australia,"In 1973, the Women's Electoral Lobby polled 5,267 men and women in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Canberra. The survey found 80% of people believed a woman should have a right to have an abortion.
In 1987, a Saulwick poll found only about 7% of Australians would not approve of abortions under any circumstances.
In 2003, a poll by The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes (AuSSA) found that 81% of Australians believe a woman should have the right to choose an abortion, and only 9% believe they should not; 7% were ""neutral"", and 2% could not decide.
In 2005, a Nielsen Corporation poll found that 56% of Australians thought the abortion laws in place, which generally allow abortion for the sake of life, health, or economic factors, were ""about right"", 16% want changes in law, to make abortion ""more accessible"", and 17% want changes to make it ""less accessible"".
In 2006, a poll by Roy Morgan Research found that 65% of Australians approved of surgical abortion, and 22% disapproved; and that 62% believed RU-486 should be available to women, while 31% believed it should not.
In 2006, interviews found that 80% of Australians disapproved the use of sex-selective abortion.
In 2007, a poll by AuSSA found that 4% of Australians are opposed to abortion in all circumstances, 33% believe abortion should be allowed in certain circumstances, and 57% believed it should be readily available whenever a woman wants one; 7% were undecided, or did not respond.
In 2009, a study of polls conducted during Australia's 2007 federal elections found that a clear majority of both Labor Party and Liberal Party voters support abortion rights. The study also showed that 77 per cent of winning candidates in the 2007 election favoured an unrestricted approach to abortion.
In 2010, a study published in The Medical Journal of Australia found that 61% of Australians said abortion should be lawful without question in the first trimester of pregnancy, while 26% said it should be lawful depending on the reason. In the second trimester and third trimesters, support for outright lawful abortion was 12% and 6%, respectively, while 57% and 42%, respectively, said it depended on the circumstances."
Abortion in Australia,"Indigenous perceptions
When abortion began to be legislated in 1969, some Indigenous Australians were among those opposing it, on the belief it would lead to ""coerced abortion and sterilization"". This attitude is believed to have been influenced by previous government interference in Indigenous autonomy, including the Stolen Generations. As of the mid-2010s, more Indigenous women were choosing to have abortions, though stigmatisation around the issue is still prominent within many Indigenous communities."
Abortion in Australia,"See also
Abortion in New Zealand
Abortion law"
Abortion in Australia,"References
External links
Abortion law: a national perspective – briefing paper prepared for the New South Wales Parliament concerning laws regarding abortion in Australia (2017)
Marie Stopes Australia | Leading national abortion provider
Children by choice | Abortion by state Archived 31 March 2021 at the Wayback Machine"
List of rivers of Australia,"Rivers are ordered alphabetically, by state. The same river may be found in more than one state as many rivers cross state borders."
List of rivers of Australia,"Longest rivers nationally
Longest river by state or territory
Although the Murray River forms much of the border separating New South Wales and Victoria, it is not Victoria's longest river because the New South Wales border is delineated by the river's southern bank rather than by the middle of the river. The only section of the river formally within Victoria is a stretch of approximately 11 kilometres (7 mi) where it separates Victoria and South Australia. At this point, the middle of the river forms the border."
List of rivers of Australia,"Rivers by state or territory
The following is a list of rivers located within Australian states and territories. Where a river crosses a state or territory boundary, it is listed in both states and territories. Where a river has a name that includes the word creek, it has been officially designated as a river."
List of rivers of Australia,"Australian Capital Territory
New South Wales
The Geographical Names Board of New South Wales lists 439 rivers in the Geographical Names Register. In the following list, where there are duplicated names, the source local government area (LGA) is identified. In the event of there being two rivers of the same name within the same local government area, additional referencing is provided. Rivers of New South Wales lists all rivers below, grouped according to whether the river flows towards the coast or flow inland, and grouped according to their respective catchment and sub-catchment. Where shown in italics, the watercourse is a creek, rivulet, brook, or similar."
List of rivers of Australia,"Northern Territory
Queensland
South Australia
Tasmania
Victoria
Western Australia
List of major rivers by basin
Australia's largest primary rivers"
List of rivers of Australia,"  
*Daly–Katherine (682 km), Roper–Waterhouse (599 km), Cooper Creek–Barcoo (1,420 km), Warburton–Georgina (1,400 km); De Grey–Oakover (569 km);"
List of rivers of Australia,"See also
List of rivers
List of drainage basins of Australia
List of valleys of Australia"
List of rivers of Australia,"References
External links
 Media related to Rivers of Australia at Wikimedia Commons"
Political funding in Australia,"Political funding in Australia deals with political donations, public funding and other forms of funding received by politician or political party in Australia to pay for an election campaign. Political parties in Australia are publicly funded, to reduce the influence of private money upon elections, and subsequently, the influence of private money upon the shaping of public policy. After each election, the Australian Electoral Commission distributes a set amount of money to each political party, per vote received. For example, after the 2013 election, political parties and candidates received $58.1 million in election funding. The Liberal Party received $23.9 million in public funds, as part of the Coalition total of $27.2 million, while the Labor Party received $20.8 million.
In Australia, the majority of private political donations come in the form of donations from corporations, which go towards the funding of the parties' election advertising campaigns. Donations and affiliation fees from trade unions also play a big role, and to a lesser extent donations from individuals. Donations occasionally take the form of non-cash donations, referred to as gifts-in-kind.
The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) monitors donations to political parties, and publishes a yearly list of political donors. In practice, it is not difficult for donors to make undisclosed donations to political parties in Australia; for example, donors can sometimes hide their identities behind associated entities."
Political funding in Australia,"Corporate political donations
Between the years 1995–1998, corporations donated $29 million to Australian political parties. The largest corporate donor during this period was Westpac. By the year 2002–2003, the amount of corporate funding to Australian political parties had risen to $69.4 million. In 2004–2005, the Labor Party raised $64.8 million from both the corporate sector and public funding, while the Liberal Party raised over $66 million. Most of the large corporate donors conduct business in an area greatly affected by government policy, or are likely to benefit from government contracts."
Political funding in Australia,"Corporate fundraising
In Australia, there is a growing trend for MPs to become directly involved in the corporate fundraising efforts of their parties. Ministers and staff are enlisted to engage with donors and business supporters, with the aim of raising funds for their political parties. It is known for business leaders to pay $1,400 to get near a federal minister.
When political parties lodge their return to the AEC, they are not required to identify the corporations which attended party fundraising events. This allows companies to deny they are political donors."
Political funding in Australia,"Other corporate funding
Corporations may contribute to political funding in a variety of ways. For example, they may pay a corporate fee to attend party conferences."
Political funding in Australia,"Individual donations
The UK's Michael Ashcroft become a significant figure in Australian politics, having been identified as the single largest individual donor to any Australian political party during the 2004–05 financial year. The Australian Electoral Commission reported in February 2006 that Ashcroft (who gave his address as ""House of Lords, Westminster, London"") had donated $1 million to the Liberal Party in September 2004, shortly before the 2004 federal election. It was, at the time, the biggest single private donation in Australian political history.
In 2010, Graeme Wood gave a political donation of A$1.6 million to the Greens."
Political funding in Australia,"Trade union political funding
The Australian Labor Party is the main beneficiary of trade union affiliation fees, special levies and donations. The Labor Party received $49.68 million from trade unions in 2004/05. Critics have accused the unions of buying seats at ALP state conferences. In 2001/02, money from trade unions amounted to 11.85% of the Labor Party's income.
In the 2013 Election, the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union CFMEU donated $50,000 to the Greens party in the ACT.
In the leadup to the 2018 Victorian Election the Electrical Trades Union of Australia donated $50,000 towards the Victorian Socialists.
In November 2019, the ETU ceased donations to the federal Labor party over Anthony Albanese's government supporting free trade agreements."
Political funding in Australia,"Gun lobby political donations
A 2019 report revealed that Katter's Australian Party has taken more than $808,760 from pro-gun groups during the 2011-2018 period. The party received the most disclosed pro-gun donations of all Australian political parties.
The same report found that the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party had received approximately $700,000 in political donations from pro-gun groups, and that the Liberal Democratic Party (Australia) had received political donations of $37,311 from pro-gun groups between July 2011 and March 2019."
Political funding in Australia,"Public funding for political parties
In 1984, the Hawke Labor Government introduced public funding for political parties, with the intention that it would reduce the parties' reliance on corporate donations. To be eligible for public funding a political party needs to be registered with the Australian Electoral Commission under the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918. A candidate or Senate group is eligible for election funding if they obtain at least 4% of the first preference vote in the division or the state or territory they contested.
The amount payable is calculated by multiplying the number of first preference (i.e., primary) votes received by the rate of payment applicable at the time. The rate is indexed every six months in line with increases in the Consumer Price Index. At the time of the 1984 election the rate was 61.2 cents for the House of Representatives and 30.6 cents for the Senate. That amount was based on the cost of a standard 30¢ postage stamp per elector per year. By the 1996 election, the rate was set at $1.58 per vote for both Houses. By the 2013 election the rate was $2.49. At 1 January 2014 the rate was $2.52 per vote. By the 2016 election, the election funding rate from 1 July 2016 to 31 December 2016 was $2.62784 per eligible vote.
As a result of the 2013 election, political parties and candidates received $58.1 million in election funding. The Liberal Party received $23.9 million in public funds, as part of the Coalition total of $27.2 million, while the Labor Party received $20.8 million. When public funding was introduced in 1984, the amount paid was $12 million. For the 1996 election, the total public funding had increased to $32.2 million, and was $41.9 million for the 2004 election. In 2016, $62.7 million was distributed.  New rules for the 2019 election include that parties need to provide evidence of electoral spending to the AEC, and their potential public funding is capped in relation to their electoral spending: they cannot receive more public funding than they spent."
Political funding in Australia,"Disclosure of political donations
At the time of introducing public funding for political parties in 1984, the Hawke government also introduced a requirement for public disclosure of political donations. The threshold amount was set at $1,500. The disclosure scheme was introduced to increase overall transparency and inform the public about the financial dealings of political parties, candidates and others involved in the electoral process.
In May 2006, the Howard government increased the disclosure threshold to $10,000, which is then increased six-monthly by the consumer price index. Critics of the change claimed the new law would increase the chances of corruption, by making political donations harder to track, and by making conflicts of interest harder to detect. The change allowed corporations to secretly donate up to $90,000 spread across the national and the eight state/territory branches of political parties without public disclosure of that funding. In 2007, the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library estimated this disclosure change will increase the number of non-disclosed political donations from 25% to 36%.
Since 2006, the donations limit has increased by $200 or $300 each year so that by 2014 the threshold was $12,400, and $13,200 for 2016/17 (and applicable to the 2016 federal election). This meant that in 2014 up to $111,600 could be donated to a political party from a donor without disclosure, if donations are spread across the national and the eight state/territory branches.
In February 2017, then-Prime Minister Turnbull confirmed he had personally donated $1.75 million to the Liberal Party's election campaign for the 2016 federal election.
Another way of getting around the donation disclosure limits is for donations to be channelled through more than one entity or individuals."
Political funding in Australia,"Tax deductibility
Until 2006, $100 of political donations could be claimed as a tax deduction for income tax purposes. In 2006, the Howard government increased the deductible amount to $1,500. The disclosure rules for political parties require them to characterise receipts as either ""donations"" or ""other receipts"". Most receipts are in fact marked as ""other receipts"", indicating that they have been structured in such a way as not to be treated as a political donation, which is subject to the tax deductibility limit. Such a device may, for example, be an exorbitantly priced lunch or dinner, or structured as a business meeting with a minister, or it may be an expensive advertisement in an association's magazine. The profits of the entity providing such ""services"" then flow to the associated political party."
Political funding in Australia,"Associated entities
Despite the AEC publishing a yearly list of political donors, it is often difficult to ascertain who made the donation, as political parties sometimes use associated entities as front organisations to hide the source of donations.
Front organisations provide individuals and corporations a means of passing funds to the major parties anonymously or to avoid the tax deductibility limits of political donations. The Cormack Foundation is one such an organisation which raises funds for the Liberal Party, while John Curtin House Limited does the same for the Labor Party. Under the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918, these organisations are not required to disclose where its funds come from. Associated entities have become major conduits for political donations in Australia, in 2003–2004 donating $72.6 million to political parties.
Some candidates have their own fundraising entities. Malcolm Turnbull has the Wentworth Forum run by the Wentworth Federal Electoral Conference (or FEC), which Turnbull claims ceased operations in 2009. The North Sydney Forum is a campaign fundraising body run by the North Sydney Federal Electoral Conference (FEC). While Joe Hockey was Treasurer of Australia, a member of the Forum was rewarded with private meetings with Hockey in return for annual fees of up to $22,000. Such entities do not make funding disclosures to the AEC as an associated entity of a political party, instead being structured as a funding entity for a particular candidate. Payments made by ""members"" are not treated as donations, instead being treated as membership fees or fees for services provided. There are many such fundraising entities not disclosed to the AEC or the public, including Enterprise Victoria, Free Enterprise Foundation and Greenfields Foundation. The Fadden Forum is a fundraising entity of the Queensland Liberal National Party controlled by MP Stuart Robert. Another similar entity said to occupy a ""grey area"" is the Conservative Leadership Foundation, set up in 2009 by Senator Cory Bernardi in Adelaide, South Australia.
An associated entity called Millennium Forum raised political donations for the NSW branch of the Liberal Party. In public hearings at the NSW corruption inquiry, ICAC, it was alleged that senior Liberal Party officials used the Millennium Forum and another Liberal-linked entity, the Free Enterprise Foundation, to funnel prohibited donations, including from property developers, into the 2011 NSW election campaign. It was alleged that donations prohibited under NSW law were instead made to the Free Enterprise Foundation, a federal body. The Free Enterprise Foundation would then donate to the NSW Liberals' state campaign. Now discredited, the Millennium Forum was replaced by the new Federal Forum for the same purpose. It has also been alleged that Mafia figures donated tens of thousands of dollars to the Millennium Forum, as part of an ultimately successful campaign to allow a known criminal to stay in Australia.
Another type of associated entities are so-called think tanks, such as the Menzies Research Centre, the H.R. Nicholls Society and Institute of Public Affairs which contribute to policy development."
Political funding in Australia,"Service companies
It was revealed before the 2016 federal election that each Liberal MP pays a company called Parakeelia $2,500 a year from their taxpayer-funded office allowances to use software that collates constituent information. In fact, Parakeelia is a Liberal Party-controlled entity all of whose profit flows to the party. The structure, described by some commentators as a rort, made the entity the party's second-largest single source of revenue in 2014-15. Parakeelia paid $500,000 to the Liberal Party in 2015.
Unlike the Liberals, Labor has contracted an external private provider, Magenta Linas, to perform the same function, but there is no flow back to the party."
Political funding in Australia,"Criticism of political donations
The Australian Shareholders Association has called for political donating to end, arguing that the donations are a gift and a form of bribery.
Former Qantas chief, John Menadue, said:"
Political funding in Australia,"Corporate donations are a major threat to our political and democratic system, whether it be state governments fawning before property developers, the Prime Minister providing ethanol subsidies to a party donor, or the immigration minister using his visa clientele to tap into ethnic money.
Political researchers Sally Young and Joo-Cheong Tham from the Australian National University concluded:"
Political funding in Australia,"There is inadequate transparency of funding. Moreover, there is a grave risk of corruption as undue influence due to corporate contributions and the sale of political access.
Some critics say Australia should follow the example of the United Kingdom, where corporate donors must disclose their political donations in the company's annual report to shareholders.
Other critics have called for limits to cap the amount that corporations and unions can donate to political parties, similar to the $5000 personal donation limit in Canada, with a virtual ban on union and corporate donations. Some point to the success New Zealand has had, limiting the amount of money that political parties can spend on their election campaigns.
In January 2008, New South Wales Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell demanded political donations be limited to $30,000 per candidate, and a cap of $250,000 on what a corporation or union can donate to a political party. Describing the NSW government of Morris Iemma, O'Farrell said: ""This is a Government where many people are of the view donations buy influence and decisions. That's why we need to take action to clean up the system.""
Under a proposal launched by Shadow Federal Treasurer Malcolm Turnbull in January 2008, only individuals who are Australian citizens or on the Electoral Roll would be eligible to donate to political parties, and must declare the money came from their own funds. Turnbull said that the democratic system was not working properly when there is such a disparity between the amount of political donations a government can raise compared to the opposition.
In June 2017, a joint Fairfax-Four Corners investigation into Chinese attempts to influence Australian political parties exposed that the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation briefed both major parties about receiving campaign contributions from Chinese billionaires. These briefings were ignored and both political parties continued to accept donations from people in question. The Director-General of ASIO, Duncan Lewis, stated that Chinese political donors could be channels to advance Beijing's interests. In response to the allegations, Malcolm Turnbull ordered an inquiry into espionage and foreign interference laws. In December 2017, opposition MP Sam Dastyari resigned under pressure from a political scandal where he was accused of going against the Australian government's policy on the South China Sea as well as accusations of accepting financial favors from Chinese companies. Shortly afterwards, the Coalition government announced plans to ban foreign donations to Australian political parties and activist groups. This was a remarkable turn of events as Australia historically had no restrictions on political donations from outside of the country."
Political funding in Australia,"State political donations
New South Wales
The New South Wales government is the seventh biggest advertiser in Australia, ahead of McDonald's and Coca-Cola.
On 30 October 2006, former Prime Minister Paul Keating called for an end to political donations from property developers. He said that in NSW, property developers were sending a ""wall of money"" towards the planning minister.
In September 2007, the Independent Commission Against Corruption cited political donations as a risk for corruption. The ICAC recommended that the state premier make changes to the Election Funding Act to force property developers to publicly disclose any donations made to the minister for planning, or the minister's political party. The ICAC also recommended that local government councillors step aside from any development applications involving political donors.
On 27 June 2007, the New South Wales Legislative Council established a committee to investigate electoral and political party funding.
Critics have said the inquiry will be a toothless tiger, due to it being stacked with government-friendly members.
On 14 September 2011, a radical bill was tabled by Premier Barry O'Farrell which would ban any donations from corporations, unions or other organisations; only individuals would be permitted to donate, up to a cap of one thousand dollars. The bill was passed on 16 February 2012. This act was later repealed by, and replaced by, the Electoral Funding Act 2018, which reinstated the ability of Australian business entities to make donations, and increased the donations caps imposed on individuals and entities."
Political funding in Australia,"Victoria
In Victoria during the year 2001–2002, the Victorian Labor Party received $7.2 million in political donations, with trade unions, gaming companies and property developers on the list of donors. In the same year, the Victorian Liberals received $11.3 million in political funding, including $3.8 million in public funding."
Political funding in Australia,"Former Victorian premier, John Cain, presented a speech on political donors: 
All of them want access and, some would say, favours. We seem to have accepted this situation provided that the donation, the giver and receiver are known; that is, that disclosure is the key.
But the driver is hunger for money by the parties. Despite public funding in the Commonwealth and some states, this hunger explains the drive only in part. Donors want the parties (and so, governments) to be beholden to them and to be preferred over their business competitors. It is a neat, cosy arrangement. It grows more blatant.
The parties in Australia now openly call for donations that provide access at rates of $10,000 to the Prime Minister or premier. It costs less to get to see a minister."
Political funding in Australia,"Parties are like football clubs – no matter how much money they get, they will spend it and then want more.
Former Victorian auditor-general Ches Baragwanath said it is naive to believe that political donors don't expect favours in return for their money."
Political funding in Australia,"See also
Campaign finance
Political finance
Political party funding
Party subsidies"
Political funding in Australia,"References
Other sources
Colin A. Hughes: Fifty years of campaign finance study in Australia, Democratic Audit of Australia, Discussion Paper no. 35 of December 2006 <[1]>
Iain McMenamin: Business, Politics and Money in Australia: Testing Economic, Political and Ideological Explanations, Working Papers in International Studies, no. 4 of 2008, Centre for International Studies, Dublin City University <http://www.dcu.ie>
Graeme Orr: The Law of Politics. Elections, Parties and Money in Australia, Sydney: Federation Press, 2nd edition, 2019.
Iain McMenamin: If Money Talks, What Does It Say? Corruption and Business Financing of Political Parties, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013."
Political funding in Australia,"External links
https://web.archive.org/web/20141022023215/http://www.idea.int/political-finance/country.cfm?id=15
http://www.idea.int/publications/funding-of-political-parties-and-election-campaigns/upload/foppec-p8.pdf"
Human trafficking in Australia,"Human trafficking in Australia is illegal under Divisions 270 and 271 of the Criminal Code (Cth). In September 2005, Australia ratified the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children, which supplemented the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime. Amendments to the Criminal Code were made in 2005 to implement the Protocol. 
Australia's response to human trafficking has been evolving significantly since 2005. From the government concentrating mainly on sex trafficking, to placing more focus on labour trafficking, forced marriage, organ removal and criminal exploitation.
According to the United States Department of State, 2018 Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP), Australia fully met the standards for the elimination of trafficking and was placed on Tier 1. The government proved to have made significant efforts during the reporting year by investigating more cases, identifying and referring more victims to services, convicting more traffickers, and administering programs to provide services to community groups and assistance to workers.
In 2017, the government investigated 166 trafficking cases, compared to the 105 of 2016, of which six defendants were prosecuted and five traffickers were convicted. Prosecutions from 2016 were continued in 2017 by the authorities against 14 defendants, in which one sex trafficker, and in another case four labour traffickers, were convicted.
The extent of human trafficking in Australia is difficult to quantify. However, it has been estimated that between 300 and 1000 persons are victims of trafficking a year. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) lists Australia as one of 21 trafficking destination countries in the high destination category.
The Australian Institute of Criminology has stated:"
Human trafficking in Australia,"Suspected victims of trafficking are in a unique position. Like other victims of crime, they may be deeply affected by their experience; but, unlike other victims of crime, they may also have a tenuous migration status in a foreign country, where they may speak little of the language and know only the people who have exploited them. In addition, there is the fear of being identified as a victim of crime. As a result, suspected victims of trafficking can be highly vulnerable and isolated.
Migrant sex workers targeted by anti-trafficking policing in Australia have had their human rights curtailed and their workplaces have been impacted in negative ways.
U.S. State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons placed the country in ""Tier 1"" in 2017."
Human trafficking in Australia,"Recent cases
In February 2010, two traffickers were convicted in Cairns Supreme Court on charges of possessing and using a slave after luring a Filipina woman to Australia and enslaving her as a domestic servant and concubine.
In late March 2010, a Tasmanian court sentenced one trafficker to ten years' imprisonment for prostituting a 12-year-old girl to more than 100 clients in 2009."
Human trafficking in Australia,"Federal legislation
In 1999, the Commonwealth amended the Criminal Code Act 1995 to implement the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children, supplementing the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organised Crime relating to slavery, sexual servitude and deceptive recruiting for sexual services.
Offences specifically relating to trafficking in persons were added to the Criminal Code in 2005 by the Criminal Code Amendment (Trafficking in Persons Offences) Act 2005. The amendment inserted people trafficking and debt bondage offences into the Commonwealth Criminal Code and amended the existing provisions related to deceptive recruiting for sexual services. The amendments reflected the growing recognition that people trafficking is not a problem which is restricted to the sex industry.
Criminal Code includes offences and maximum sentences for: "
Human trafficking in Australia,"slavery (25 years)
sexual servitude (15 years)
deceptive recruitment for sexual servitude (seven years).
Section 271 of the Criminal Code includes offences and maximum sentences for: "
Human trafficking in Australia,"trafficking in persons (12 years)
trafficking in children (25 years)
domestic trafficking in persons (12 years)
debt bondage (12 months).
The penalties are higher when children are involved.
Under the Migration Act 1958 (Cth) it is an offence for an employer, labour hire company, employment agency or other person to knowingly or recklessly allow a non-citizen without work rights to work, or to refer them for work. Following the Migration Amendment (Employer Sanctions) Act 2007, the exploitation of unlawful non-citizen workers are aggravating factors attracting a higher penalty. The maximum penalties are five years imprisonment, and/or fines of up to $33,000 (AUD) for people and $165,000 (AUD) for companies per worker.
Several federal laws support the investigation of trafficking offences. For example, the trafficking offences in the Criminal Code are specifically designated as serious crimes in the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979. Consequently, designated law enforcement agencies, including the Australian Federal Police, can seek permission to intercept relevant telephone calls and emails for the purposes of investigating trafficking offences. This information can be used as evidence in court. Information obtained through telephone interception has been important evidence in at least one Australian trafficking prosecution ( Sieders v R; Yotchomchin v R [2008] NSWCCA 187).
Trafficking offences in the Criminal Code are supported by the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002. If the matter involves a 'serious offence' (which includes the offences of slavery, sexual servitude and deceptive recruiting for sexual servitude), a judge can issue a monitoring order to require a financial institution to provide information about transactions conducted during a certain period. Ultimately, the regime allows for a court to order the restraint and forfeiture of proceeds of certain crimes. All Australian jurisdictions have legislation regarding proceeds of crime.
The National Children's Youth and Law Center reported 250 cases of child marriages in 2011 and 2013. The majority of cases being that the child was forced by family members to marry someone overseas without their full consent. The government strengthened the offence of forced marriage with the implementation of the Crimes Legislation Amendment Powers, Offences and Other Measures Act 2015. Which was first introduced in 2013.
Modern slavery in Australia involves mostly migrants, and a few Australia citizens. The majority of migrants are coming from India, the Philippines, Thailand and Afghanistan. In the 2015/16 financial year, there were 80 clients on the Support for Trafficking People Program (STPP) of which 68 were foreign citizens. The majority of Australian states and territories use the Fair Work Act 2009 to cover the domestic workers, providing a minimum employment standard and workplace protection. In 2016, the Migrant Workers Taskforce was established to intensify the government's commitment to stop the exploitation of vulnerable migrant workers. The Fair Work Act was amended in 2017 with the passing of the Fair Work Amendment (Protecting Vulnerable Workers) Bill by both Houses of Parliament.
In 2017, the government increased law enforcement efforts, where divisions 270 and 271 of the Commonwealth Criminal Code which pertain to sex and labour trafficking, identified maximum penalties of 12 to 25 years in prison and fines of up to AUD197,000 ($154,030). Forced labour is also criminalized in the criminal code with a recommended penalty of nine years in prison.
Assistant Minister for Home Affairs, Hon Alex Hawke MP, was committed to present the Parliamentary draft of the Modern Slavery Act by June 2018. The Act is to be a crucial legislative tool in order to combat and prevent human trafficking and slavery in Australia and overseas. On top of implementing the Act, the minister also announced the implementation of a 12-month trail of the Support for Trafficking People Program to assist girls and young women that are seeking help in forced marriage cases.
In January 2019, the Federal legislation set the Moder Slavery Act 2018 (MSA) into place, requiring companies in Australia to submit a Modern Slavery Statement to the Federal Government when it has a minimum annual consolidated revenue of $100 million, including the company and its subsidiaries. The statements need to address mandatory criteria from Part 2 of the Commonwealth Act, including the company's structure, operations and supply chains, the modern slavery risks in those areas, the necessary actions in which the company has taken to address those risks and its effectiveness, as well as state the consultation process with its subsidiaries throughout the Modern Slavery Statement process."
Human trafficking in Australia,"Other Australian jurisdictions
In addition to federal anti-trafficking laws, all jurisdictions have a range of offence provisions to cover related crimes, such as assault, sexual assault, forced prostitution, kidnapping and deprivation of liberty. State offence provisions have been used in conjunction with federal offence provisions in at least two prosecutions in Australia: Commonwealth DPP v Xu [2005] NSWSC 191 and R v Dobie (Unreported, Queensland District Court, Clare J, 23 December 2009)."
Human trafficking in Australia,"Government policy and strategy
In 2004 the Federal government launched the Commonwealth Action Plan to Eradicate Trafficking in Person, comprising four elements.  These are prevention, detection and investigation, criminal prosecution, victim support and rehabilitation
Building on this earlier work, in 2008 the Federal Government outlined its key measures in its Anti-Trafficking Strategy which included;"
Human trafficking in Australia,"dedicated Australian Federal Police teams to investigate people trafficking operations
a National Policing Strategy to Combat Trafficking in Women for Sexual Servitude
visa arrangements for potentially trafficked persons
victim support measures to assist victims of trafficking
Senior Migration Officer Compliance positions in Thailand, China and the Philippines to help prevent trafficking at its source
a targeted Communication Awareness Strategy providing information about trafficking and the help available
improved legislation to combat trafficking in persons
increased regional cooperation to combat people smuggling and trafficking in persons
support for the Commonwealth Director to Public Prosecutions to prosecute trafficking matters, including funding and training
research into trafficking trends in our region, including labour trafficking, and
return and reintegration support for victims of trafficking returning to their countries of origin.
In December 2008 the Australian Attorney-General established the National Consultation on Human Rights to consider the protection of human rights in Australia. More information about the National Consultation is available at Human Rights Consultation."
Human trafficking in Australia,"The visa system and victim support
Support for Victims of People Trafficking Program
The Federal government's Support for Victims of People Trafficking Program provides individualised case management and a range of support to victims. The program is integrated within the federal government's visa system.
A person is identified as eligible by the Australian Federal Police. Usually the person enters the Program on a Bridging Visa F (BVF) which is valid for up to 45 days.  Recipients of the BVF are not permitted to undertake paid employment.  The BVF may then be extended for a further 45 days on a case-by-case basis.
The Australian Government Office for Women administers the Program and has contracted the Australian Red Cross to provide case management services.
Individual case managers are responsible for ensuring the appropriate delivery of support services, to meet clients' individual needs.
The Australian Federal Police Annual Report 2008/2009 stated that the AFP has sponsored 146 people into the Support for Victims of People Trafficking Program administered by the Office for Women within the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs. This program commenced in 2004.
The number of trafficking visas issued between 2004–05 and 2009–10 were:"
Human trafficking in Australia,"As of July 2009, the Witness Protection (Trafficking) (Temporary) visa has been removed and merged into the Witness Protection (Trafficking) (Permanent) visa.
As of 1 July 2015, the Migration Legislation Amendment (2015 Measures No. 2) Regulation 2015 had the effect of renaming the Witness Protection (Trafficking) (Permanent) visa hto the Referred Stay (Permanent) visa.  The Migration Legislation Amendment (2015 Measures No. 2) Regulation 2015 also had the effect of phasing out the Criminal Justice Stay Visa so that future trafficked persons would only be placed on a Bridging Visa F."
Human trafficking in Australia,"2 Phase visa system for victims of human trafficking
Stage 1: Bridging Visa F (BVF) (Item 1306)
BVFs may be granted to 'persons of interest' to the police in relation to offences/alleged offences of people trafficking, sexual servitude or deceptive recruiting. It entitles the non-citizen person to stay lawfully in the community and out of detention. During this period the person is not eligible for any social security payments and may not work.
While suspected victims are on the BFV, clients of the program have access to following federally funded support, which is payable through Centrelink:"
Human trafficking in Australia,"secure accommodation (approximately $140 to $160 per night)
a living allowance ($170 per fortnight)
a food allowance ($170 per fortnight)
a one-off amount of $310 to purchase essentials such as clothing and toiletries
health care services including counselling
legal services (a maximum of three appointments per client are available throughout the program).
From commencement of the BFV on 1 January 2004 to 31 December 2007, 81 BFVs were issued relating to 78 people.
This visa is valid for 45 days and may be terminated at any time. On termination the person will lose any benefit of the victim support program and is obligated to leave Australia otherwise they will be detained and repatriated."
Human trafficking in Australia,"Stage 2: Referred Stay (Permanent) Visa
The Referred Stay (Permanent) Visa may be offered by the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP) to a trafficked person if:"
Human trafficking in Australia,"The referred stay applicant is in Australia
The Attorney‑General has, after taking into account information provided by a member of the Australian Federal Police of the substantive rank of Commander, or above, issued a certificate in relation to the referred stay applicant.
The Attorney‑General's certificate is to the effect that the referred stay applicant made a contribution to, and cooperated closely with, an investigation in relation to another person who was alleged to have engaged in human trafficking, slavery or slavery‑like practices. (It does not matter if the investigation fails to proceed to a stage where it is referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions.)
The person is not the subject of any related prosecutions.
The Minister (for Immigration) is satisfied that the person would be at significant personal danger were the person to return to their own country.
If the referred stay applicant meets the relevant criteria and accepts the offer from the DIBP to apply, the person may be issued with a Referred Stay (Permanent) Visa."
Human trafficking in Australia,"Victim Support Program to persons who leave Australia but return as witnesses
From 1 July 2007, a new phase of the victim support program is available to suspected victims of trafficking who have left Australia but who return as witnesses. They are provided with secure accommodation, living allowance and food allowance.
From 20 May 2004 to 31 January 2008, the service had provided support to 88 clients. The majority of clients were Thai women (62); far smaller numbers of clients were from other countries in Asia and Europe."
Human trafficking in Australia,"Effectiveness of the 'Support for Victims of People Trafficking Program'
The Commonwealth visa framework as evaluated in Trafficking and Slavery in Australia: An Evaluation of Victim Support Strategies reflects a law enforcement agenda where the human rights of trafficking victims are incidental to prosecutions. The visa framework falls short of protecting the human rights of trafficking victims who are unable to assist in the criminal justice process. Trafficking victims should be eligible for visas on the basis of their status as victims of trafficking, their safety needs and their need for victim support. Protection for trafficking victims should not be contingent on victims' ability to act as witnesses.
At present only through the visa system can victims of trafficking access the support for victims of trafficking that was introduced by the Action Plan. The victim support program provides support in phases reflecting the different phases of the visa system for suspected victims of trafficking.
It has been argued that the credibility of the alleged trafficking victims is inadvertently undermined by the government's decision to make victim support and visas dependent on the ability of a person to assist a prosecution or investigation into trafficking. Prosecutors have been reported as saying that victim support measures, including visa regimes for victims as witnesses are vital. However these issues need to be managed carefully as part of the investigation and prosecution process. Justice Keleman the trial judge in Kwok was reported as saying that income support measures could be seen as appropriate to facilitate the prosecution or 'on the other hand, as providing a powerful inducement to give false evidence'"
Human trafficking in Australia,"Legal reform
While trafficking is a crime involving people trafficking, security issues, immigration fraud and human rights abuses, a singular focus on criminal justice outcomes fails to assist many trafficked persons.
In Australian Trafficking Visas: 15 recommendations to better protect victims of human trafficking, 15 recommendations were mooted. Recommendations include but are not limited to improved public access to information about the trafficking visa framework, reform to the period, quality and humanity of protection afforded by the visa system, restructuring of decision making processes and the introduction of a new complementary protection/humanitarian visa for those persons who have trafficked and who are unable to participate in a criminal investigation or prosecution where there are factors of a compassionate or compelling nature.
In November 2008, the Australian government released its 457 Integrity Review containing a significant number of recommendations to improve subclass 457 visas and overcome latent workplace discrimination. Subclass 457 visas relate to the Australian temporary skilled migration program."
Human trafficking in Australia,"Law enforcement
As noted in Trafficking of women for sexual purposes the Office of the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions has of 31 January 2008, received briefs of evidence from the Australian Federal Police concerning 29 defendants alleged to have committed trafficking offences.
In its June 2008 annual report the AFP reported that since 1 January 2004, it has undertaken more than 150 assessments and investigations of allegations of trafficking-related offences including slavery, deceptive recruiting and/or sexual servitude. There were also two investigations where labour exploitation was the primary criminal conduct. These investigations have led to 34 people being charged with trafficking-related offences.
As of 1 October 2008 of the 34 people charged with trafficking related offences there has been only two cases involving the charges of trafficking in person under the federal Criminal Code and to date, there has been only one conviction under Australia's trafficking offences, Mr Keith Dobie. This is due in part to the fact that the relevant offences were introduced into the federal Criminal Code in 2005. Prior to their enactment, a number of trafficking and trafficking-related cases were prosecuted under sexual slavery and servitude offences which came into operation in 1999.
Cases can extend over a long period of time; for example in Queen v Wei Tang [2008] HCA 39, the defendant Wei Tang was first arrested in 2003 for sexual servitude and was found guilty in August 2008, following appeals to higher courts.
Likewise investigations can be long, complex and resource-intensive. The Melbourne AFP Transnational Sexual Exploitation and Trafficking Team (TSETT]) unit reports that between July 2005 and February 2006, they dedicated 2,976 hours of police time to a particular trafficking operation. This is in addition to the time applied by the other teams involved. The operation included identifying key evidence from 27,000 telephone intercepts, many of which were in a foreign language."
Human trafficking in Australia,"Trafficking cases
R v Yogalingham Rasalingam (2007) NSWDC (Unreported)
Mr Rasalingam, an Indian restaurant owner in Glenbrook in the Blue Mountains near Sydney, was charged with trafficking offences under the Criminal Code (Cth).
He was accused of bringing another man from his home town in southern India to Australia and forcing him to work seven days a week, sometimes more than 15 hours a day. During the trial, the victim testified that upon arrival in Australia, his passport and airline ticket were taken away from him, he was forced to sleep on the floor, and was told that he would be deported if he complained to the authorities.
Mr Rasalingam was charged with trafficking a person (s271.2(1B)) and with intentionally exercising control over a slave, (s270.3(1)(d)). The jury found him not guilty on both counts."
Human trafficking in Australia,"R v Dobie (Unreported, Queensland District Court, Clare J, 23 December 2009).
Keith Dobie was charged on 19 July 2006 with trafficking in persons, presenting false information to an immigration officer, and dealing in the proceeds of crime. Initially pleading not guilty he changed his plea to guilty and was sentenced for 5 years imprisonment. Mr Dobie is the first person in Australia to be convicted for these trafficking offences. On 7 January 2009 Mr Dobie sought leave to appeal the length of his sentence.
The prosecution argued that between 28 November 2005 and 17 April 2006 he was directly involved in the deceptive recruitment of at least two Thai women and was possibly preparing to bring further women from Thailand to Australia.
Emails sent between the women and Mr Dobie suggest that the women had previously worked in the sex industry in Thailand and were aware of the fact that they would be working as sex workers in Australia, but were deceived about the conditions of their stay and employment."
Human trafficking in Australia,"Story from the NSW Coroner’s Court
After the death of a Thai citizen (Ms Simaplee) in Villawood detention centre on 26 September 2001, the Deputy Coroner found that in September 2001 immigration officers detained Ms Simaplee following a raid on a Sydney brothel in Riley Street, Surry Hills.
While the Deputy Coroner, Carl Milovanovich, was unable to confirm her history of sexual slavery, this being outside his jurisdiction, he was concerned enough to urge law enforcement authorities to address the trafficking of women into prostitution with 'vigour and appropriate resources'. Three days later she died in an observation cell while being treated by detention centre staff for heroin withdrawal.
He also recommended that the Australian Department of Immigration and Citizenship and Australasian Correctional Management (ACM) facilities work together in identifying, assessing and providing the appropriate medical, community and translator services to women who might be identified as being victims of trafficking."
Human trafficking in Australia,"Sexual servitude cases
Queen v Wei Tang [2008] HCA 39
High Court held that the prosecution did not need to prove that the defendant knew or believed that the women were slaves. The critical powers the defendant exercised were the power to make each woman an object of purchase, the capacity to use the women in a substantially unrestricted manner for the duration of their contracts, the power to control and restrict their movements, and the power to use their services without commensurate compensation. It was held that the prosecution had made out the required elements of the offences.
Sieders v R; Yotchomchin v R [2008] NSWCCA 187. This case involved direct police-to-police cooperation, where the AFP acted in cooperation with the Royal Thai Police to simultaneously execute warrants of arrest in Australia and Thailand. The defendants were charged under the Commonwealth Criminal Code and convicted for conducting a business involving the sexual servitude of others, namely four Thai women who were subject to debt contracts of around $45,000 each. Sieders was sentenced to a maximum of four years imprisonment and Yotchomchin was sentenced to a maximum of five years.
The defendants attempt to appeal their conviction and sentence was dismissed by the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal. With the Court holding at 95 that the 'definition of sexual servitude [in the Commonwealth Criminal Code] ... is concerned only with a very specific respect in which there is a limitation on the freedom of action of the person in question. A person can be free to do a multitude of different things, but if she is not free to cease providing sexual services, or not free to leave the place or area where she provides sexual services, she will, if the other condition of the section is met, be in sexual servitude'.
Other Cases:"
Human trafficking in Australia,"Commonwealth DPP v Xu [2005] NSWSC 191
R v DS [2005] VSCA 99 – DS pleaded guilty to possessing a slave and engaging in slave trading. DS was sentenced to six years on appeal.
R v Kovacs [2007] QCA 143 – conviction of the Kovacs for the possession and use of a slave was overturned by the Queensland Court of Appeal and a re-trial ordered, on the basis of a failure of procedural fairness by the trial judge in dealing with the issue that the alleged slave consented to sex for payment."
Human trafficking in Australia,"Non-Sex Industry Labour Trafficking
Trafficking in persons crimes have also been detected outside of the sex industry.  In practice, these crimes tend to be referred to as ""labour trafficking"" or (non-sex industry) labour trafficking (reflecting the fact that sex work is either legal or decriminalized in most States and Territories).
An Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) report on Labour Trafficking, launched in November 2010 by the Minister for Home Affairs, examines ""what is known about labour trafficking in Australia, based on incidences of reported crimes, but also by drawing on information about unreported crime. It provides an assessment about the known or likely incidence of trafficking in persons that can occur in the agricultural, cleaning, hospitality, construction and manufacturing industries, or in less formal sectors such as domestic work and home-help"". 
The research suggests ""the existence of under-reporting, but a lack of awareness among a wide variety of 'front line' agencies and service providers that certain exploitative practices in a work context are in fact criminal under Australian law"". The research confirms that while the precise size of the labour trafficking problem remains unknown, there have been instances of unreported and/or unrecognised labour trafficking. The report gives examples of cases involving domestic workers, and workers in other sectors such as construction, manufacturing and agriculture.  
The report also noted that many participants interviewed for the research, including those working directly on anti-trafficking issues, were unsure where to draw the line between ""bad work"" and criminal conduct such as labour trafficking, and other participants were noticeably unaware that Australia's anti-trafficking laws could apply beyond to contexts outside the sex industry.  
The research notes that cases of unreported labour trafficking exist in an environment of broader unlawful conduct perpetrated against migrant workers in Australia.  As such, it is important for the anti-trafficking response to consider not only the most extreme instances in isolation, but also the broader environment that is arguably the breeding ground for more severe criminal conduct. 
The research raises a number of issues relating to law reform.   In particular, the research recommends ensuring: laws are clear, simple and relevant, through a focus on forced labour, servitude and other forms of labour-related forms of exploitation, and expanding criminal laws to cover lower threshold of exploitation, such as abuse of vulnerability for gain.
The report also notes the importance of building community awareness of this crime type particularly amongst front line service providers in the labour sector."
Human trafficking in Australia,"Uncovering trafficking
According to research conducted by the Australian Institute of Criminology in 2008 on the trafficking of women to Australia for the purpose of sexual exploitation, sources of information leading to trafficking investigations and referrals to the Australian Federal Police have occurred where:
1.	The suspected victim of trafficking called 000 (Emergency Services), which occurred in Commonwealth DPP v Xu [2005] NSWSC 191;
2.	The suspected victims of trafficking have sought help from their embassy in Australia;
3.	The suspected victims of trafficking sought help from the front desk of the local police station;
4.	The suspected victims of trafficking have sought help from brothel clients;
o	In Sieders v R; Yotchomchin v R [2008] NSWCCA 187 the victim sought help from a client, who then reported the matter to DIAC's Immigration Dob-in Line.
o	In Commonwealth DPP v Xu [2005] NSWSC 191, the alleged victim reported having sought help from several clients; none appeared to have reported the matter to the authorities. However, one ex-client provided the victim with practical assistance, in the form of a place to stay, once she was on her own in the Australian community; and,
5.	The suspicion of the state police was aroused as a result of proactive investigative activities of the illegal sex industry."
Human trafficking in Australia,"Trafficking victim support programs and other projects
Government anti-trafficking in persons projects
National Roundtable on People Trafficking
The purpose of the National Roundtable on People Trafficking (NRPT) is to strengthen Australia's response to people trafficking through a partnership between the Commonwealth Government and NGOs. The NRPT will seek to prevent trafficking, protect victims and prosecute offenders.
In March 2009, the NRPT launched Guidelines for Working with Trafficked People. This publication consists of 10 guidelines developed by NGOs to assist NGOs and government organisations in their work with trafficked people, namely:
1. Understand and protect the rights of trafficked people
2. Always act to protect people's safety
3. Negotiate informed consent
4. Provide appropriate referral information
5. Protect privacy and confidentiality
6. Provide culturally appropriate services
7. Provide professional and ethical services
8. Know how to respond to subpoenas and other requests for information
9. Know how to support witnesses in court proceedings
10. Recognise families and children have special needs
The guidelines also have a referral guide providing contact details of anti-trafficking NGOs and government organizations."
Human trafficking in Australia,"Asia Regional Trafficking in Persons (ARTIP) project
The Asia Regional Trafficking in Persons (ARTIP) Project is a $21 million program funded over 5 years that directly contributes to preventing human trafficking in the Asia Region. The purpose of the Project is to promote a more effective and coordinated approach to people trafficking by criminal justice systems of governments in the Asia region. ARTIP began in August 2006.
ARTIP was launched in August 2006, initially as an Australian partnership with Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Burma. Indonesia added in August 2007."
Human trafficking in Australia,"UNICEF's Sixth Country Program for Children (CPC VI]) in the Philippines – Children in Need of Special Protection component
Australia's contribution of A$22.8 million to the overall program is supporting the Government of the Philippines to implement the convention on the Rights of the Child through a national 'Child-Friendly Movement' (CFM). The program helps communities in their effort to provide universal immunisation, pre-natal care, child growth monitoring, education and child protection.
The child protection component focuses on the needs of children in armed conflict areas, and protecting children against trafficking. Partnerships are developed with local government and capacity building is provided for caregivers working with at-risk children to improve professional responses to child protection issues."
Human trafficking in Australia,"The Australia-China Human Rights Technical Cooperation Program (HRTC)
Since 1997, Australia has supported activities under the HRTC to help strengthen the promotion, protection and administration of human rights in China. Between 2002 and 2005 this included a series of training activities and workshops for officials and community-level workers on practical methods to combat trafficking of women and children, focused in the provinces of Guizhou and Sichuan. Among the activities supported was a regional anti-trafficking workshop involving officials from Vietnam and Thailand.
The HRTC has also supported many other activities in the legal reform and justice sector and women's rights. Issues addressed have included penitentiary reform (including reform in juvenile justice), training on criminal procedures and a series of workshops on domestic violence."
Human trafficking in Australia,"Return and Reintegration of Trafficking Victims from Australia to Thailand (Thai Returnees Project)
The goal of this project is to improve the capacity of referral agencies to support and reintegrate suspected victims of trafficking who return from Australia to Thailand. Initially the project will work with Thai agencies and NGOs to improve their ability to receive and care for returning Thais and others. The project will also work to improve their ability to monitor the reintegration of victims and to investigate and prosecute traffickers (who could be Australian or other nationalities).
Project outputs include a common operational framework for government and non-government agencies working on these issues in Thailand. Outputs will also include an information package on services available for victims once they return to Thailand and information brochures available in Bangkok airport.
This project is part of the Australian Government's $20 million initiative against people trafficking announced in October 2003. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) will manage the project."
Human trafficking in Australia,"Federal Government support for NGOs
In October 2008 the Australian Government announced $1 million to be provided to four non-government organisations, the Anti-Slavery Project, the Scarlett Alliance, the Australian Catholic Religious Against Trafficking in Humans and Project Respect."
Human trafficking in Australia,"State Government Support: Victorian Project for victims of trafficking
In October 2006, the Victorian Government announced funding for a state-based support program for victims of trafficking. The program is designed to assist victims of trafficking who need support but are not eligible for the Commonwealth program. This might include, for example, victims of trafficking who do not want to talk to the police, or victims of trafficking who may have talked to the police but have been unable to assist a current investigation. The program includes emergency accommodation and support services."
Human trafficking in Australia,See also
Human trafficking in Australia,"Crime in Australia
Blackbirding in Australia
Slavery in Australia"
Human trafficking in Australia,"
== References =="
Australian Antarctic Territory,"The Australian Antarctic Territory (AAT) is a part of East Antarctica claimed by Australia as an external territory.  It is administered by the Australian Antarctic Division, an agency of the federal Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. The territory's history dates to a claim on Enderby Land made by the United Kingdom in 1841, which was subsequently expanded and eventually transferred to Australia in 1933. It is the largest territory of Antarctica claimed by any nation by area.  In 1961, the Antarctic Treaty came into force. Article 4 deals with territorial claims, and although it does not renounce or diminish any pre-existing claims to sovereignty, it also does not prejudice the position of Contracting Parties in their recognition or non-recognition of territorial sovereignty. As a result, only four other countries — New Zealand, the United Kingdom, France, and Norway — recognise Australia's claim to sovereignty in Antarctica."
Australian Antarctic Territory,"Area
The AAT consists of all the islands and territory south of 60°S and between 44°38′E and 160°E, except for Adélie Land (136°E to 142°E), which divides the territory into Western AAT (the larger portion) and Eastern AAT. It is bounded by Queen Maud Land in the West and by the Ross Dependency in the East. The Australian Antarctic Territory is the largest of any claims to the continent, and covers nearly 5.9 million square kilometres. This makes up about 42% of Antarctica, and would cover about 80% of Mainland Australia. It also corresponds to roughly twice the size of Queen Maud Land, India, Argentina or Kazakhstan.
The territory is mostly inhabited by the staff of research stations. The Australian Antarctic Division administers the area primarily by maintaining three year-round stations—Mawson, Davis, and Casey—which support various research projects."
Australian Antarctic Territory,"Subdivisions
The territory is divided into nine districts, which are from west to east:"
Australian Antarctic Territory,"These regions are split into two separate areas geographically, with George V Land and Oates Land lying to the east of the French Territorial claim of Adélie Land, and all other districts lying to its west."
Australian Antarctic Territory,"Exclusive economic zone
Australia claims an exclusive economic zone (EEZ) from the Australian Antarctic Territory. However, the Australian proclamation of an Antarctic EEZ is contested.  The effect of Article IV of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty (which prohibits new territorial claims or the extension of existing claims in the Antarctic) would seem to be that an EEZ cannot be claimed in relation to territory to which that Treaty applies (south of 60° South). The provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) define the exclusive economic zone of a coastal state as up to 200 nautical miles (370 km) from the baseline from which the territorial sea is measured."
Australian Antarctic Territory,"Whaling
Whaling in Australian Antarctic territorial waters is controversial and has received international attention. Anti-whaling protest groups, in particular Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, have been active within the Australian Antarctic territorial waters. Sea Shepherd small boat crews have had multiple encounters with Japanese ships that claim to be on research expeditions while opponents argue this is only a ""cover"" for banned commercial whaling. The Australian Whale Sanctuary, in Australian Antarctic territory, is not recognised by the government of Japan. Anti-whaling legislation passed by the Australian Government applies to Australian territorial waters.  However, Australia's claims of sovereignty over the Australian Antarctic Territory—and thus sovereignty over Australian Antarctic territorial waters—are recognised by only the United Kingdom, New Zealand, France and Norway."
Australian Antarctic Territory,"Stations
Active and closed stations in the territory, from West to East:"
Australian Antarctic Territory,"History
The United Kingdom first claimed Victoria Land on 9 January 1841 and then claimed Enderby Land in 1930. In 1933, a British imperial order transferred most of the territory south of 60° S and between meridians 160° E and 45° E to Australia."
Australian Antarctic Territory,"That part of His Majesty's dominions in the Antarctic Seas which comprises all the islands and territories other than Adélie Land which are situated south of the 60th degree of South Latitude and lying between the 160th degree of East Longitude and the 45th degree of East Longitude is hereby placed under the authority of the Commonwealth of Australia.
Australian Antarctic Territory Acceptance Act 1933That part of the territory in the Antarctic seas which comprises all the islands and territories, other than Adelie Land, situated south of the 60th degree south latitude and lying between the 160th degree east longitude and the 45th degree east longitude, is hereby declared to be accepted by the Commonwealth as a Territory under the authority of the Commonwealth, by the name of the Australian Antarctic Territory. C2004C00416 /  Australian Antarctic Territory Acceptance Act 1933  ( Cth )
The borders with Adélie Land were fixed definitively in 1938. In 1947, Britain transferred Heard Island and McDonald Islands to the territory. On 13 February 1954, Mawson Station was established as the first Australian station on the continent proper."
Australian Antarctic Territory,"Recognition and promotion of Australian sovereignty
Australia's claim to sovereignty over the Australian Antarctic Territory is recognised by the United Kingdom, New Zealand, France and Norway. Japan does not recognise the Australian claim to the Australian Antarctic territorial waters in which Japanese ships conduct whaling.
In 2016, the Australian Government formulated an Antarctic Strategy and 20 Year ""Action Plan"" to improve overland transport capabilities and aviation access to the continent. The plan incorporated a strategy to protect the Antarctic environment and maintain an indefinite ban on mining and oil drilling. The construction of a research and resupply icebreaker vessel was also planned. The 25,000-tonne RSV Nuyina was delivered in 2021 and was immediately employed in support of the Casey Station. It is envisaged that the ship will support scientific research over the next 30 years.
Through ""Operation Southern Discovery"", elements of the Australian Defence Force also provide annual support for the Australian Antarctic Division and the Australian Antarctic Program (AAP) in regional scientific, environmental and economic activities. The Royal Australian Air Force provides air logistical support using C-17 transport aircraft supported by KC-30 tanker aircraft to supply Wilkins airfield in Antarctica."
Australian Antarctic Territory,"Mining in Antarctica
During the early 1980s, there was a brief debate in Australia on whether or not to allow mining on the mineral-rich continent. Several mining proposals have been discussed and have all been rejected.
On 9 August 2011, influential Australian think-tank, the Lowy Institute, published a report warning Canberra against complacency when it comes to its claim. The global treaty banning resource exploitation becomes reviewable in 2041, and some states may then decide to withdraw from it considering the continent's mineral deposits. These include coal seams, manganese, iron and uranium, while Antarctica's forecast oil reserves are estimated as among the largest in the world after Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. Lowy's national security fellow Ellie Fogarty said in the paper that Australia cannot adequately patrol its claim, lacking the kind of ski-planes it needs to reach some areas."
Australian Antarctic Territory,"Postage stamps
Australia issues postage stamps for the Australian Antarctic Territory. The first issues came in 1957, and sporadically thereafter, settling into a pattern of an annual issue by the 1990s. All have been Antarctic-themed, and all are valid for postage in Australia and its territories, including Antarctica."
Australian Antarctic Territory,"Telephone connections
Assigned the country calling code +672 1[0-4] XXXX, the four stations and the Aurora Australis operated by the Australian Antarctic Division can be reached by direct calling from anywhere in the world. The area codes are 10 for Davis, 11 for Mawson, 12 for Casey, 13 for Macquarie Island and 14 for Wilkins and the Aurora Australis, in each case followed by four additional digits."
Australian Antarctic Territory,"People
As of May 2018, the AAT was believed to have a population of around 80 people during winters and 200 during summers."
Australian Antarctic Territory,"See also
Australian Antarctic Building System"
Australian Antarctic Territory,"References
External links"
Australian Antarctic Territory,"Australian Antarctic Division
Australian Antarctic Gazetteer"
Mount Augustus (Western Australia),"Mount Augustus is located roughly 1,000 km north of Perth, in the Mount Augustus National Park in Western Australia.  The name is also given to the neighbouring pastoral lease, Mount Augustus Station. The local Wadjari people call it Burringurrah, after a Dreamtime figure, a young boy who was speared and turned into a rock. It has been a sacred site for thousands of years. 
It is a prominent inselberg that stands 1,106 metres (3,629 ft) above sea level, or approximately 860 metres (2,820 ft) above the surrounding plain, and covers an area of 4,795 hectares (11,850 acres). It has a central ridge which is almost eight kilometres (5 mi) long."
Mount Augustus (Western Australia),"Monolith–Anticline distinction
Mount Augustus is widely claimed in tourist promotional and information literature as the ""world's largest monolith"", but the claim does not originate from the geological literature, nor is it substantiated by any other scholarly research.
Mt. Augustus is more than twice the size of Uluru. Unlike Uluru, which is a monolith and, in general, devoid of plant growth, Mt. Augustus is an asymmetrical anticline."
Mount Augustus (Western Australia),"According to the Geological Survey of Western Australia, Mount Augustus is an asymmetrical anticline (rock layers that have been folded into an arch-like structure) which is steeper on its north-eastern side than the south-west.
The rocks consist of sand and gravel that were deposited by an ancient, south-easterly flowing river system that drained the region about 1,600 million years ago. This river system flowed over a faulted and eroded surface of 1,800–1,620 million-year-old granitic and metamorphic rocks. The river deposits consolidated to form sandstone and conglomerate, and were then buried beneath younger marine sediments, which were laid down when shallow seas covered the region between 1,600–1,070 million years ago."
Mount Augustus (Western Australia),"The rocks were buckled into their present-day structure about 900 million years ago when movement along faults in the underlying granitic and metamorphic rocks caused localised, strong, north-east directed compression. The marine sedimentary rocks that overlay the sandstone and conglomerate have since been eroded from Mount Augustus, but now form the hills around Cobra and Mount Augustus homesteads. Erosion has also removed sandstone and conglomerate from the north-western end of Mount Augustus to expose the underlying granitic rocks at The Pound."
Mount Augustus (Western Australia),"1894 gold rush
There was a gold rush in the 1890s due to local geology."
Mount Augustus (Western Australia),"Flora and fauna
Wattles, cassias and eremophilas dominate the plant life and the animal life include emus, red kangaroos, goannas, euros and birds of prey.  There are over 100 species of birds on and around Mount Augustus."
Mount Augustus (Western Australia),"Walking tracks
The climb to the summit and back can take up to 5 hours, and there are two trails (one class 4 and the other a class 5) to get there. There are a number of walking tracks to explore.
There have been a number of deaths on the summit walking trail. An inquest into the deaths by government authorities suggests to close the summit trail between September and March for the sake of unwary hikers who do not appreciate the treacherous conditions."
Mount Augustus (Western Australia),"Aboriginal history and rock engravings
Evidence of early Aboriginal habitation is depicted in the rock engravings around Mount Augustus. Many of the Dreamtime stories of the local Aboriginal Wajarri people can be viewed in the rock engravings at Mundee, Ooramboo and Beedoboondu. All of these are accessible on the loop walking trail."
Mount Augustus (Western Australia),"See also
Gill Pinnacle"
Mount Augustus (Western Australia),"
== Notes =="
Waste management in Australia,"Waste management in Australia started to be implemented as a modern system by the second half of the 19th century, with its progresses driven by technological and sanitary advances. It is currently regulated at both federal and state level. The Commonwealth's Department of the Environment and Energy is responsible for the national legislative framework.
The waste management has different effects and applications depending on the geographical, demographic and behavioural dynamics which it relates to. A number of reports and campaigns have been promoted.
The system is undergoing a process of reformation to establish a more consistent and circular economy-based legislation, a more reliable database and a stronger, more independent domestic industry. These factors have hampered the development of the industry and interstate relations."
Waste management in Australia,"Historical development
Pre-European settlement
Aboriginal middens are arrangements of bones, shells, ashes and other waste materials, usually related to meal consumption. Most of them are considered as relics of cultural and archaeological relevance. Size can vary and they can occupy entire coastlines for hundreds of metres. Middens have been described as the first forms of dumping sites in Australia. Seashells became an important source of lime in the 1800s and so middens, for example in the Sutherland Shire area, may have been mined for shells.
Differences with western-like disposal areas derive from the middens' purpose. Australian Indigenous people possess a culture which relates to land, sea and resources in a holistic way. As such, middens were used to organise resources and were not intended to, and did not, damage the landscape.
Most Aborigines conducted a nomadic way of life, and because they were those who moved, and not their ""refuses"", some of these sites had originated from continuous human presence over hundreds or thousands of years.
The low density population, its ecological footprint and the traits of the Australian environment led to a harmonised system in which waste was not contemplated as, and did not represent, an issue."
Waste management in Australia,"1788–1900
Sydney Cove became the place of the first permanent European settlement in Australia on 26 January 1788. In accordance with a study, that is also considered the date in which the country's waste disposal system started to represent a problem.
The period spanning from 1788 to 1850 was characterised by an out-of-sight, out-of-mind mentality towards garbage and waste. The concept was supported by the idea that the geography of Australia, and in particularly its vastness, would have allowed for an infinite time the exploitation of its areas as dumping sites. In most of the cases, residents were asked to independently dispose of their own waste (which was mostly organic) and the general lack of regulations resulted in very low hygienic conditions. These ultimately led to soil and water contamination, conditions that had consequences during the urban expansion in later years.
The initial absence of an industry that could have provided enough resources and materials for the colonies forced high rates of recycling. Household and other early forms of waste that could not be recycled or otherwise reused were left in the streets, dumped in rivers, or collected in the backyard, where acid was used to accelerate decomposition and diminish the smell.
Diaries and journals from travellers and residents in the first decades of Sydney's life reported a ""shameful situation"", which saw what at that time was a town of 50,000 people covered by various types of waste, flies and mosquitoes. Sydney Harbour was the major dumping site. Getting rid of waste in the sea (sea waste burial) was also a common practice, and beaches were often covered by residuals brought by tides."
Waste management in Australia,"The Gadigal clan, one of the original Sydney local communities, used to collect freshwater in a river prior the European colonisation. At the time of Captain Arthur Phillip looking for the ideal settlement site, in 1788, a primary requirement was that of a sufficient freshwater supply, and that river constituted a crucial discriminant in the choice of Sydney. After the arrival of the colonists, the stream has been reported to have become so polluted that it was ordered to be covered with sandstone. The ""Tank Stream"", as it is now known, still flows beneath Sydney.
Dr Edwin Chadwick,  with his publication ""Treatise on Fever"" (1830), catalysed the reforms of the British health system, but these did not promptly affect the Australian administrations. In the colony, proper hygienic practices -including waste management-, only started in the late years of the 19th century. This shift was partly due to the change in the administration nature of the colonies, which prior to that moment had limited the participation of the public in their affairs. Eventually, a more democratic and representative system was put into effect.
The waste classification system prior to federation in 1901 was not formalised and most refuse was directed to landfills or left in the streets. Exceptions were due to waste sea burials and to limited incineration practices, and required sorting in two additional streams characterised by flammable or sinkable waste. Recycling rates reduced, with only the low income classes inclined in pursuing these practices.
Melbourne was considered the world's dirtiest city in the 19th century. Its water and waste management systems were not able to keep up with the booming in population that followed the gold fever, hence the nickname ""Smellbourne"". Its hygienic conditions were described as ""fearful"" in 1847 by the council's Sanitary Committee, which also stated the necessity of building new infrastructures to lessen epidemic risks. Infections and diseases rates were high, compared to those from other world cities like London. Typhoid and diphtheria were not rare and by the 1870s the city serious hygienic issues, reaching high infant mortality rates.
The Royal commission proposed to design a board of works in 1888, which was eventually established in 1890 under the name of Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works (MMBW). The scheme that would have reformed the usage (at that time comprehensive of both freshwater supply and sewerage disposal) of Melbourne's Yarra River waters was launched during the depression which hit the city during the 1890s. The initial debt and difficulties did not stop its creation, and the building processes started in 1892.
By the end of the century, most sewage in Australia flowed underground and sewerage systems were integrated in the urban complexes. Professions like rat-catcher and scavenger were fully established and supported recycling and a minimum control over the diffusion of rats."
Waste management in Australia,"1900–1960
The councils' political asset renovation of the 19th century contributed only in part to the development of a systematic legislation. The major changes in waste management were driven by the widespread of diseases and epidemics, especially that of the Bubonic plague which affected Sydney at the beginning of the 20th century. The newly gained awareness towards public health allowed urban reorganisation and advances in sanitary standards.
In 1901 Australia gained the independence from the United Kingdom. The lack of a centralised power which the states were exposed to limited the influence that the federation exerted on them. The executive role was exercised locally, by the councils.
Landfills were the primary disposal sites. Incinerators were starting to be adopted as a result of the additional commercial value promoted by technological implementations. Their expensive nature previously led the Sydney council to decline the installation of one of such a plant, in 1889, but the plague which later spread in the area had the effect to reform priorities and justify the expenses.
The first decade of the century saw a rising demand of incinerators. A second accretion in the sector had place in the 1920s and it was largely due to the production of an Australian model, the Reverberatory Refuse Incinerator. In the same decade, the recycling of paper started in Melbourne.
WWII, technological advances and the clean air debate from overseas eventually imposed back landfill disposal over waste burning. During the Second World War the resources demand necessitated a strong recycling strategy, but by the end of the conflict priorities changed and recycling was discarded in favour of landfill disposal. Landfills also benefited from the technological advances acquired from the United States, and more sophisticated plants were built.
Hazardous and industrial waste were not known, or either ignored threats, and all wastes formed a general, unique stream that would have eventually ended up in landfill. Since the Fifties the industrial refuses received different attention and their disposal requirements improved. Leachate, the contaminated liquid which percolates through landfill material, was not prevented and this resulted in cases of environmental damages."
Waste management in Australia,"1960–1990
The population growth factor in 1871 was 27% in Sydney, 26% in Melbourne and 23% in Adelaide. They reached 56%, 65% and 79% respectively in 1961. The New South Wales capital counted more than 2,000,000 residents; Melbourne was close, having 1,911,000 inhabitants, and Adelaide 587,000. The increase in population boosted land reclamation, and landfill siting began to be more challenging.
Chemical and hazardous traits of waste began to be internalised in the disposal method evaluations since the Sixties, along with an augmented influence and regularisation by the Commonwealth. Standard landfills started not to accept certain types of waste, but these measures did not take into account the escalation of illegal practices which arose as a response (such as clandestine dumping).
The paper and newspaper recycling sector reached a 30% recycling rate. Deposit refunds for drink containers were shut down a decade later, in the 1970s, following the implementation of the recycling industry for bottles.
Public interest towards recycling and environmental protection arose greatly, yet the process of collecting recyclables was finite to specific geographic areas. The Canterbury Council was the first in differentiating the waste sorting into recyclables and household waste, in 1975.
Efforts were made especially for reducing visual pollution and, with it, litter. Clean Up Australia Day was first held in January 1989. More people started to recognise the issues related to litter and to the waste management practices, and the government evaluated the return of the deposit refund and the taxation of non-recyclable products. These were ultimately not implemented, except for South Australia."
Waste management in Australia,"1990–2000
The inappropriateness of the waste management strategies started to be evident in the last decade of the 20th century, with the cities undergoing a process of rapid population growth and the states being unable to contrast unregulated landfills.
Landfill was still the preferred disposal method, although incinerators and recycling proposal began to be pondered again as alternatives. Paper and glass differentiated collection were not rare.
The adoption of waste levies, recyclables sales and the agreements with various industry sectors allowed the creation of new means of introit. The main constraints were represented by the residents, with the majority not sensitised in the matter."
Waste management in Australia,"2000–present
The federal government gives ample autonomy to the single states, resulting in a miscellanea of laws, independent projects and objectives produced by each state still characterising the current waste management system. However, the Commonwealth has increasingly issued frameworks and policies with the aim of rendering the national waste management more consistent.
Australia is currently considered to be one of the greatest consumers of carbon and resources within the countries that relate to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. More advances, including in waste management, are needed to comply with the Paris emissions goals.
The national waste management framework is under implementation to establish a more consistent and circular-economy-based legislation, a more reliable database and a stronger, more independent domestic industry.
The waste management industry is currently worth about AUD$12.6 billion and contributes to the national economy with AUD$6.9 billion per annum."
Waste management in Australia,"Classification of waste
The final objective of classifying waste is that of preserving the healthiness of both humans and environment by appropriately defining its properties. Different classifications had been produced by multiple sources over the years, leading ultimately to a diverse range of systems and definitions.
Each state had implemented its own systems with specific terminologies. In the case of surveys and reports being provided by industries and businesses, additional classifications can apply. The same materials might be treated differently, in respect of the regulatory structures that categorise them as ""waste"" or ""resource"".
The National Waste Classification System was developed as a sub-project of the Australian Waste Database (AWD, 1990), but it was not widely implemented. Its benefits -for policymakers, local manufacturers and communities-, had been highlighted by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), and yet a 2011 study disclosed that only Tasmania and the Northern Territory were fully aligned with it, and only two states, namely NSW and WA, partly did so. In that occasion the Department of the Environment and Energy also expressed its commitment to submit a definitive, harmonised system. Advances towards a system standardisation are recent and correlated to legislative modifications occurred in the last fifteen years.
One of the definitions provided for ""waste"" has been that of the Victorian ""Environment Protection Act 1970"", which described it as ""any matter, whether solid, liquid, gaseous or radioactive, which is discharged, emitted or deposited in the environment in such volume, constituency or manner as to cause an alteration of the environment"". The 2018 National Waste Report defined waste as ""materials or products that are unwanted or have been discarded, rejected or abandoned."" That classification included recyclables and waste-to-energy materials within the waste category, and excluded those that were not subjected to reprocessing prior to being reused.
In general, three waste streams are identified in Australia:"
Waste management in Australia,"Municipal solid waste (MSW)
Commercial and Industrial (C&I)
Construction and Demolition (C&D)
Kerbside and hard waste collection are usually considered within the first category. Soft plastics, paper and organics are its key components.
Timber, plastic and metals characterise the second category. They are considered to represent an optimal and valuable source of recycling materials.
C&D waste products are usually inert, such as concrete, steel and earth that has been excavated."
Waste management in Australia,"Databases
Australian waste management had to comply over the years with a general scarcity of data from both businesses and institutions. Statistical analyses, when provided, had been of varying usefulness to the governmental organs.
Main issues have been attributed to the lack of consistency, methodology, field-related expertise and legislation effectiveness. In particular, the different systems, classifications and technical terminologies adopted by each jurisdiction, and required by the diverse stakeholders range and nature, increase the complexity in both the data collection and wrangling processes. Even where similarities are present, data can overlap. An inquiry made by a governmental office in 2006 reported the waste management sector data to be inconsistent, incomplete and subjected to biases.
The data level of confidence had underpinned the ability of producing resonant policies, and in particular those regarding a sustainable management of resources.
There had been attempts to create an harmonised system, however the success of such projects had been hampered by the management costs associated with reforming the legislation already in use. The first, not successful ones were made in the 1990s for reviewing the achievements of the 1992 ""National waste minimisation and recycling strategy"". The quality eventually improved in the following decade, but the different standards among the years also meant that trends could not be understood by just referencing to the various reports commissioned at that time.
A more consistent data system started to be implemented after the release of the 2009 ""National waste policy"". It was developed and ratified by all the states in 2015 and currently six of its annual versions represent the national waste database.
Validation and testing methodology are implemented by some researches to reduce biases and minimise errors occurrence."
Waste management in Australia,"Current management system
Principles
The framework onto which the legislation is currently working is what has been named ""The 3Rs plus 1"": reduce, reuse, recycle and recover energy. The approach is intended to be directed towards the circular economy principles. The system has received critics from researchers (who are not convinced of the actual circularity of the proposed economy), as well as from institutions that urge the concrete application of the principles thereof.
The main reason leading the critics is that a true circular economy should prefer the avoidance of waste over its reuse and recycle (in alignment with the waste hierarchy principles), while no clear actions have been made towards the former goal."
Waste management in Australia,"Waste hierarchy
The waste hierarchy describes the priorities linked to the waste management via a preferential order, on the basis of the efficiency of each of its strategies towards the production, use and disposal of a product. It is often represented as an inverse pyramid, grading from the top ""most preferable"" to the bottom ""least preferable"" solutions. The waste hierarchy sets efficiency as an aim, and over-consumption as an avoidable, unnecessary occurrence that can be diverted by appropriate changes in the consumer behaviour.
The disposal of waste serves, theoretically, as the worst-case scenario; in practice, the usage of landfills is widely adopted. This happens because the hierarchy is not suitable in every circumstances: the evaluation of costs-benefits needs to be implemented in its consultation.
Its application as a guide for national policies has been widely spread since the last decade of the 20th century, and it is central to the ""National Waste Minimization and Recycling Strategy"".
The various waste hierarchies implemented by each jurisdiction, although almost identical in functions and structures, have been enshrined in different acts, and at different times. Queensland describes it in the ""Waste Reduction and Recycling Act 2011""; in Victoria is part of the foundations of the ""Environment Protection Act 1970""; in NSW is mirrored by the ""Waste Avoidance and Recovery Act 2001""."
Waste management in Australia,"Policies and regulations
Federal waste-related legislation is under the jurisdiction of the Department of the Environment and Energy."
Waste management in Australia,"(1992) National Strategy for Ecologically Sustainable Development
The strategy was endorsed in 1992 and represented an action towards the Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD). ESD was defined in 1990 by the Commonwealth Government as ""using, conserving and enhancing the community's resources so that ecological processes, on which life depends, are maintained, and the total quality of life, now and in the future, can be increased"" and the same definition had been used in the strategy.
The National Waste Minimization and Management Strategy developed as a corollary."
Waste management in Australia,"National Waste Minimization and Management Strategy
The strategy was developed under the ""National Strategy for Ecologically Sustainable Development"" to serve as a framework with which improvements and effective measures could be coordinated. In particular, it focused on hazardous waste and waste disposal."
Waste management in Australia,"(2017) National Food Waste Strategy. Halving Australia's Food Waste by 2030
The document represents a guidance for Australian institutions, outlining the actions needed to be pursued to reduce food waste by 2030. It is inspired by the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 12: ""Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns"", and by the Country's commitment towards the reduction of gas emissions (heavily produced by organic compounds in landfills). The latter aligns with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change."
Waste management in Australia,"(2009, 2018) National Waste Policy: Less Waste, More Resources
The 2018 text succeed the National Waste Policy of 2009, and it represents the foundations on which governments and individual jurisdictions can relate in their legislative activities, while also stating their responsibilities. The policy encompasses the MSW, C&I and C&D streams, considering liquid, gaseous and solid waste and excluding radioactive materials.
A total of sixteen waste strategies are exposed. It will be in use until 2030 and, while setting the guidelines for governments, specific local and regional circumstances considerations for businesses and communities can still be pondered and implemented
The document presents itself as with a circular economy footprint. Waste avoidance and recycling implementation are two of the five principles on which it is based."
Waste management in Australia,"(2011) Product Stewardship Act 2011
Product stewardship refers to the regulations that set a product management strategy which ensure that each sector involved in the lifecycle of a product (including production and disposal), shares a responsibility towards its environmental and human impacts. In Australia its regulation on a national basis has started in 2011 with the ""Product Stewardship Act"".
The act states the voluntary, co-regulatory and mandatory product stewardship and it implements the guidelines with which products must be thought of in terms of environment, health and safety.
The Department of the Environment and Energy annually publishes lists in which new regulated products are considered and included.
The first scheme developed under the act was ""The National Television and Computer Recycling Scheme"", in which both governments and industries were considered responsible of the management of electronic media products. The last products introduced in its regulations include batteries, plastic microbeads and photovoltaic systems."
Waste management in Australia,"(2018) Threat Abatement Plan for the impacts of marine debris
Marine debris were considered and listed as a major threat to wildlife in ""Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act"" (EPBC) in 2003. Plastic is a prominent source of such debris and it was on this basis that the plan was established. In particular, it focuses on the actions needed in the research and in the understanding of the impacts of plastic and microplastics on marine environments, and on the actions needed to minimise their effects."
Waste management in Australia,"State regulations
In various states, including Queensland, Victoria and Northern Territory, waste management is considered a general environmental duty and breaching this duty could result in penalties.
Waste duties include:"
Waste management in Australia,"Finding a lawful place: a site that has the legal authorisation to receive the waste.
Classifying the waste: identify the industrial waste to share appropriate information to manage risks.
Transporting waste to reduce the risk.
Comply with additional duties if the waste is classified as priority waste."
Waste management in Australia,"Waste levy
The waste levy is a taxation imposed on the amount of waste disposed in landfills.
Waste levies can determine the preferential approaches of the industry over waste function by encouraging alternative or traditional disposal and recovery technologies.
In terms of environmental impacts, an efficient usage of the contribution should incorporate their costs and benefits into the management of values thresholds.
Queensland used to have a waste levy, but in 2013 the Newman government repealed it. The levy was considered at that time not effective both economically and environmentally, as it would have unnecessarily increased managing costs to businesses and promoted illegal dumping. Other states, in the meantime, taxed landfill usage. In NSW, for example, the levy was introduced in the ""Protection of the Environment Operations (Waste) Regulation 2014"" and in 2018–2019 the standard levy in the metropolitan area reached $141.20 per tonne ($81.30 per tonne in the regional area). Queensland is planning to reintroduce the levy on 1 July 2019 in most of its local government areas. It is projected that by the end of the first four years from the commencement of the levy, 70% of the incomes perceived will be redirected to councils, startups and other projects."
Waste management in Australia,"Production
Diverse factors are involved in the production of waste, namely economy, demography and geography.
Australia produces much waste; according to various studies, this is due to an economy based on an intensive use of materials, to population growth (as of September 2018, Australia counts more than 25 million people), population demographic and urban sprawl, and Gross domestic product GDP. In 2018, Australian GDP grew by 2.3%, and every year in Australia about 67 million tonnes of wasted are generated (~2.7tn per person). Municipal solid waste and commercial and industrial streams reduced their growth rates, while those of C&D increased in 2019.
The strategies adopted by lower chain links, as retailers, have also a role in the production or minimisation of waste. The general disbelief towards the positive effects of reusing and recycling have impacted the amounts generated.
About 20% of the total waste generation is due to coal in forms of ash and fly ash. Except for the Northern Territory and for Western Australia, 77% (or 150.9 TWh, terawatt per hour), of the total electricity provided by the National Electricity Market (NEM) in 2016–2017 was sourced from coal."
Waste management in Australia,"Littering
Littering is a major issue in Australia, with $180 million per year spent in NSW only.
A decrease in its occurrence has been registered, although Victoria and Western Australia have recorded an inverse trend. The former records 14,560 tonnes of litter generated per year, 75% of which is constituted of cigarette butts and packaging; in NSW the number increases up to 25,000.
In Australia members of the public can report littering practices to the local Environment Protection Authority (EPA) agencies, as declared by documents such as the Local Nuisance and Litter Control Act 2016 (SA). In Victoria, 20,000 reports are generated annually."
Waste management in Australia,"Single use plastics
According to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), 95% of the plastic packaging is discarded after a single use. In March 2019 the organisation published ""Solving Plastic pollution through accountability"", a report issued on an international basis and which urged governments to stop accepting projects contemplating the use of virgin materials. Additionally, it supported a global ban to single use plastics and requested the producers to be considered responsible for how their products are ultimately disposed of, and recycled. The single use plastics have been already banned in Europe.
In the same month of the WWF publication, Hobart the first capital in Australia to ban single-use plastics, although not without criticisms by the local businesses. The Tasmanian Small Business Council demanded a coordinated action between government and local businesses, that could have otherwise been damaged by a sudden and costly ban.
Other states are pondering the ban, such as SA and ACT, while in the meantime there are several cases of bans on plastic bags, like those in Queensland, Western Australia, Victoria and Darwin. South Australia banned them in 2009 already.
Companies and institutions, such as McDonald's, Starbucks and the Sydney Opera House, are banning the use of straws.
In July 2018, Coles banned plastic bags from its retail shops. The decision was followed by a consistent flux of critics from its shoppers and indecisions by the company. In NSW the decision of Coles and Woolworths to stop supplying single-use plastic bags set off many controversies. NSW is also the only state that has not yet formally took action against the use of single-use plastics, in what has been named the ""ban on bans"".
Advances in the reduction of single-use plastics are progressing on a nationwide view. The number of reusable cups sold and responsible cafes registered have fluctuated in 2018. Councils are repeatedly been asked questions by residents regarding the disposal of recycling, showing an increased interest in the subject matter."
Waste management in Australia,"Collection
Collection services vary in terms of types provided and areas in which they are implemented The National Waste Report 2018, which is built upon data as of 2016–2017, reported that some services can be absent in certain locations (Table 1). In the same years, kerbside collection was available in 90% of the households from all the states, with the exception of the Northern Territory. The organics collection represented the less developed one with only 42% of the households having access to it -less than half the figure for both recycling and garbage collections.
A research conducted by Pollinate and Planet Ark in 2018 reported that the most requested recycling services by the households regarded, in order of prominence, organics, soft plastics and e-waste."
Waste management in Australia,"SAP: service always, or nearly always provided; SUP: service usually provided; SRP service rarely, or sometimes provided."
Waste management in Australia,"Labelling
Uncoordinated labelling has impacted the sorting processes antecedent the waste collection dynamics, which have been also influenced by the households' generally low education on labelling systems and on contamination of recyclables."
Waste management in Australia,"A harmonised action has been taken by Planet Ark, PREP Design and the Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation, producing the Australasian Recycling Label (ARL) as a result. The label refers to each component of a package (for example, of both a bottle and its cap), and it states its end-of-use destination. The destination is distinguished in three categories: recyclables, not recyclables and conditionally recyclables. Conditionally recyclable products can be potentially recycled, but they might undergo further restrictions depending on the state or council. Examples of their destination can be either the red or yellow bins, or the store drop offs.
The system has been already implemented in the major market streams and some of its supporters include Nestlé, Unilever and Woolworths."
Waste management in Australia,"Waste bins
The requirements for colours, markings and designations are specified in AS 4123.7-2006 (R2017). The standards were first set in 2006 and they have been reconfirmed in 2017. The standards are also in use in New Zealand with most councils allowing the following in each waste bin:"
Waste management in Australia,"A 2018 report by Blue Environment estimated the average composition (by weight) of yellow-lid bins to mostly consist of paper (56%), followed by glass (25%), and then plastics, metals and other materials all in single figures. The adoption of a unique bin for a wide range of recyclables may cause contamination problems, but it has the side-effect of diminishing the number of trucks (and consequently air pollution), required for the collection processes. The contamination of the materials collected causes the diversion of recyclables to landfills. Most of the kerbside collected waste in 2016–2017 was disposed of in landfills."
Waste management in Australia,"Container deposit schemes
South Australia has introduced container deposit schemes (CDS) since 1977; Northern Territory established them in 2012. They were the only two operative schemes in 2016–2017. SA had a return rate in that period that almost doubled that of the NT, reaching 80% with 587 million containers sold.
New South Wales introduced its scheme in 2017 and was quickly followed by Australian Capital Territory and Queensland in 2018, Western Australia in 2020, and Victoria late 2023.
Collected containers have been treated both domestically and overseas."
Waste management in Australia,"Transport
The collection of solid and recyclables materials from households, industries and other places usually leads to the transport towards Materials recovery facility (MRF), transfer stations or landfill sites."
Waste management in Australia,"Materials recovery facilities (MRFs)
Materials recovery facilities, or materials reclamation facilities, or multi re-use facilities, receive the commingled materials from the collection trucks. They have the function of sorting and aggregate recyclables.
MRFs are generally similar in structure and require both manual and automatic procedures (see video in this section). The former are especially useful when the materials received are particularly contaminated and/or do not respect the requirements for being sorted. However, the majority of MRFs in the country have deficiencies in sorting co-mingled MSW, leading to a rise in the levels of contamination."
Waste management in Australia,"Recovery and reuse
Waste reuse identifies those dynamics that lead to the reuse of materials that have been included at some stage into the waste management processes. Waste reuse has more positive effects on the economy than recycling for two reasons: firstly, the former has the potential to employ more people, and secondly, the value of reused waste materials is higher than that of recyclables. Australia annually recovers about 2 million tonnes by waste-to-energy approaches.
Of all the Australian jurisdictions, Queensland is one of those with the worst recovery rates. It also appears to have low standards on an international basis. In the years spanning from 2007 to 2016, the state performances in the sector did almost not change at all. The estimates made by the Queensland's Department of Environment and Science revealed a recovery rate of less than 45% in the financial year 2016–2017. They represent a huge gap from those of the current leader, South Australia, which in the same year diverted from landfill more than 80% of its generated waste.
The figures for SA show that the geographical origin of waste, as well as its typology, strongly affect the diversion percentages. For example, C&D recorded a 89% recovery rate in the metropolitan area, and of 65% in the regional. However the commercial and industrial category performed better in regional SA (93%), rather than in the surroundings of Adelaide (82%). Municipal solid waste (MSW) diversion scored the lower percentages, reaching only 39% in the regional area.
The national recovered waste average floats around 58% to 61%. Queensland would need to divert almost 40% more than its current performance to reach it."
Waste management in Australia,"Recycling
The aim of recycling is that of producing new materials from old unused ones, without using raw materials. The recycling industry in Australia is crucial in the realisation of the National Waste Policy: Less waste, more resources objectives. It involves multiple sectors of waste management, and requires specific collection and sorting practices which precede the sale of recyclables. The industry has many points to improve, with low recycling rates, confusing rules, and lower rates compared to more developed countries. Despite these problems, Australia has begun investing more in recycling and waste management with new laws, grants, policies, and strategies to assist in these improvements.
It has been estimated that in the financial year 2009–10, the recycling sector was worth $4.5 billion (AUD), with an additional $5 billion if the entire waste management industry is considered. In South Australia, which is currently the leader in the sector, resource recovery activities employ almost 5000 people and contribute more than half a billion Australian dollars to the SA Gross State Product (GSP)."
Waste management in Australia,"Treatment
Thermal technologies
Incinerators, pyrolysis and gasification are some of the thermal treatments into which waste can be diverted. They might be accompanied by energy recover.
In Australia, the waste-to-energy approach is becoming by the time more favoured by both councils and industries.
The major environmental pros of these practices consist of the decreasing adoption of fossil fuels, whose use compared to that of waste fuels may potentially produce more carbon dioxyde."
Waste management in Australia,"Incinerator
Incinerators plants had sensibly developed over the years and now advanced pollution control devices enhance their environmental standards. The most up-to-date waste-to-energy plants ameliorate their ecological performances by capturing CO2 emissions produced by the combustion of fuels; carbon dioxide can also be then diverted and used by other processes. Pyrolysis and gasifications are some of the waste-to-energy approaches. These require the heating of waste in anaerobic conditions (without oxygen), to produce a fuel, the pyrolysis oil. The oil can subsequently be gasified to produce the syngas.
Technologies to manage the emissions from these plants exist, but Australians are sceptic and concerned about them. There are also critics relating to the idea that waste used as fuel could weaken the recycling industry. They are supported by the fact that Australia has a little domestic demand in the sector of recyclables. However, incinerators could be a tool for diverging contaminated materials from landfills in a way that promotes the waste hierarchy principles.
Living in the proximity of an energy-from-waste facility can lead to epigenetic modifications associated to heavy metals. Heavy metals have been reported to occur within a certain radius from the incinerators. Other toxic pollutants, including dioxins, have been documented to be produced by the combustion processes. Landfills generate methane, a greenhouse gas naturally produced, but it is still discussed whether its emissions might be better than those of incinerators.
The preference of incinerators over landfills might be advantageous in social and political terms. While the latter has an end-of-life (filling) and requires the jurisdictions to find new sites, the former, although sharing the characteristic of not being wanted by the nearby households, does not need to move over time and will mainly affect only a relatively small area.
Queensland and Victoria tends to incinerate more than other states. Western Australia started a project in 2018, while in NSW, in the same year, the construction of a waste-to-energy plant in western Sydney was refused."
Waste management in Australia,"Disposal
Landfill
Australia depends on landfill disposal. It represents a cheaper solution than others and this might have slowed down the advances in the recycling industry.
Landfill siting must consider multiple factors such as topography, local natural habitats and distances from the urban centres. Most of the landfills are found in the metropolitan area of the states' capitals, with a major concentration in the southwest and southeast of Australia. It results in a highly clustered overview, with three-quarters of the total amount of waste produced collected in only 38 sites. The number of landfills has decreased in the last 30 years, but they have become bigger and more sophisticated. NSW has the largest disposal plant in Australia.
Landfills are planned to manage the flow of leachate and gas produced by the waste. Products such as PVC, which contains phthalates, and timber, that can contain chromated copper arsenate (CCA) if it has been treated, can potentially release these components into leachate. Methane, a gas with a greenhouse effect potential at least 25 times more stronger than that of carbon dioxide (CO2), is emitted by biodegradable carbon sources materials within the landfill. Most advanced plants reuse methane emissions by combusting it in a waste-to-energy approach. A preferable solution -when considering waste hierarchy and climate change-, is that of adopting composting and special bacteria for limiting the amount of emissions produced."
Waste management in Australia,"National relations
States and territories
The last year in which Queensland imposed a landfill taxation was 2012. The emerging discrepancy between the levy legislation in Queensland and New South Wales supported the introduction of waste from interstate within the QLD borders, with the additional effects of pollution originated by transports.
These dynamics and the dominant role of the levy were confirmed in 2017 by the Supreme Court Judge who was in charge of an investigation commissioned by the Queensland offices. According to the investigation, the policy framework adopted by Queensland would had unlikely allowed a decrease in the quantity of waste from interstate. The prospect led to the recommendation of the re-introduction of the waste levy, and it was backed up by a positive response by the government. The levy is now expected to begin on 1 July 2019, and it will concern 39 out of 77 local government areas."
Waste management in Australia,"Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities
Within indigenous communities it can be more difficult to manage waste. This is particularly true where these communities live in remote areas, in which even machinery may be scarce. Transports, collection, associated costs and the indigenous way of thinking towards garbage are some of the main aspects that have been pondered.
The NSW ""Aboriginal Communities Waste Management Program"" and ""Aboriginal Land Clean Up and Prevention Program"" are some of the programs addressed to the Aboriginal communities."
Waste management in Australia,"International relations
United Nations
(1972) Environment Programme (UNEP)
The UNEP program was established in 1972 and it is recognised on an international basis. It coordinates the UN's environmental projects and supports environmental-focused strategies in developing countries."
Waste management in Australia,"(1992) Agenda 21.
The global, non-binding action plan was a product of the Earth Summit, a United Nations (UN) conference on environment and development held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from 3 to 14 June 1992. The main purpose of the conference was that to persuade the governments to include environmental concerns within their economic development strategies.
The Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC Act 1999), still in force, was the Australian response to the Agenda 21 commitments."
Waste management in Australia,"Basel Convention
The Basel Convention under the UNEP was ratified by Australia in 1992. Mainly focusing on international markets, in particular the international exports from richer to poorer countries, it had as main objective the control and regulation of hazardous waste disposal. As a legally binding agreement, it was supported in Australia by the Hazardous Waste Act, for which is considered as an offence the unregulated export of hazardous waste."
Waste management in Australia,"Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)
Under the OECD Australia has submitted in 2019 its third Environmental Performance Review related to the years 2017–2019. Strategies specifically linked to the Australian case on a national perspective are to be discussed between the organisation Environment Policy Committee members."
Waste management in Australia,"China and Asian markets
Australia used to rely on Asian markets, especially on China, for waste treatment and disposal.
Since the Chinese ""National Sword"" policy came into effect in 2018, the waste management industry entered a crisis: of the 1,248,000 tonnes (30% of the total produced per annum) of recyclable materials sent to China only in 2016–2017, 99% had been affected. As an interim solution, exports have since shifted to, and enlarged, alternative markets, such as those in Vietnam and Indonesia. An increasing number of Asian Countries is also planning to limit import rates, increasing the urgency of a shift towards the circular economy and a reliable domestic industry.
The domestic policies in Australia did not include any clause in sharing risks associated with commodity prices with the recycling industries. The Chinese import restrictions led a fall in these prices and forced many to stockpile their materials while waiting for new market opportunities."
Waste management in Australia,"Human behaviour
Waste management practices, especially avoidance and recovery related to household materials, have been linked to consumer comportment. Illegal practices as littering and dumping are also connected to it. Targeted education and awareness campaigns are likely to affect these practices and, consequently, the effectiveness of the management outcomes.  
Media coverage and government campaigns have positively affected the public eye towards the recycling issues. Topics as single use plastics and packaging have received particular attention in the last decade.
Recycling practices and recyclables production particularly depend on consumer awareness for future implementations. Industries, as well as communities, will be subjected to campaigns and their effectiveness is considered a challenge for local and state organisations.
Many cases of product-consumer dynamics are actually perceived as unsustainable by both residents and organisations, but Australians are seen expecting government and industry inputs to firstly react to them. More than 85% of residents, the Australian Council of Recycling (ACOR) stated, agree with recycling practices. Where these non-spontaneous initiatives are offered for free, as some which developed in South Australia, the feedback has been recorded as particularly positive.
Items such as photovoltaic cells and e-waste, however, are not feasible to dispose and usually require private expenses by the owners. In this case, the eco-prompt inspiring their discard is less apparent."
Waste management in Australia,"Campaigns and actions
Litter and illegal dumping
Litter report is a strategic mean used nation-widely as a supplement to EPA in its investigations; it has been implemented in all the states: NSW, QLD, VIC, TAS, WA, SA, ACT and NT.
In 2015, NSW launched RIDonline, an online platform (as of 2019, still accessible), where the public can report illegal dumping practices. One of its objectives is to help the state picturing an evidence base from which construct future management strategies."
Waste management in Australia,"(2017) EPA statewide ""tosser"" blitz
Researches have shown that only about a quarter of the NSW residents actually think they can be caught for littering, and that those who realise measures can be taken against them for littering are not that numerous.
During Easter time in 2017, EPA worked with other agencies, councils and companies such as McDonald's, on a statewide campaign against driver tossers. The aim of the project was to remind people that fines and measures can be directed for littering in any place and time."
Waste management in Australia,"Sensitization campaigns
(1980s) Do the right thing
The campaign aimed to sensitise and educate households about themes such as littering. The main media used was television, and it has been considered a successful campaign."
Waste management in Australia,"(1996–present) National Recycling Week
Started in November 1996 by PlanetArk, the National Recycling Week consists of an annual media campaign, still in action, with educative roles as objective. It aims to sensitise the public eye on themes such as recycling and responsible resource managing. The next event National Recycling Week will take place in November 2019."
Waste management in Australia,"Projects for people in need
Researches show that currently, in the world, there is enough to feed everyone, with about 3 billion people suffer from hunger or malnutrition. In Australia only, figures reach 3.6 millions.
Projects against food wasting had developed throughout the country, with the aim to feed people in need via edible products that would have been otherwise discarded."
Waste management in Australia,"Waste levy waiver for disaster waste
On the 13th of February 2024, high temperatures, strong winds and lightning strikes caused a power outage in Victoria which resulted in a blackout for more than 620,000 homes and business across the state. About 12,000km of power lines were impacted. Following the power outage, the Victorian government implemented a waste levy to dispose of disaster waste deposited or damaged on the 13th of February.
The free waste disposal is available to residents with proof of identity and proof of residence in a local government area impacted by the bushfires and storm on the day of disaster until the 30 April 2024."
Waste management in Australia,"Reports and surveys
(2000) Report of the alternative Waste Management Technologies and Practices Inquiry
The report was produced by the Alternative Waste Management Technologies and Practices Inquiry for the NSW government in 2000. Its purpose was to provide an informative background for the future waste management and technology implementations in the state. The framework onto which it was based on supported ecologically sustainable development and focused on technology, economy, society and environment.
The document started by questioning:"
Waste management in Australia,"""Why do some communities manage waste with alacrity while others seem overwhelmed by the task?""
""Are some communities wise in seeking value from waste, or should they choose least-cost disposal options?""
and structured the report on the investigation of them.
It provided the illustration of the ""triple manifesto"", defined as the close relation shared by the State or regional technologies, practices and strategies in the context of waste management. The manifesto led to state the necessity of considering the different benefits that can derive from the usage of waste as a resource, before opting for less productive solutions as landfills. On these premises, the Inquiry suggested a reform in the NSW strategies which were then based on the disposal of waste as a preferential approach."
Waste management in Australia,"(2009) Love Food Hate Waste
The NSW government started the Love Food Hate Waste program in 2009 and conducted a series of tracking surveys until 2017, having food waste as the key interest. Covered topics ranged from meal planning and waste value to government role expectations and media influences.
In 2017 the survey was conducted online and 1389 residents participated to it. The outcomes suggested that Love Food Hate Waste campaigns and the media contents had positively impacted certain population sectors.
It also showed how environmental concerns are seldom related to food waste. More people had started to realise that they could throw away much less organics, but advances in this direction recorded in the previous study in 2015 had declined and in NSW more food was being wasted. Only 61% of the residents practised five or more waste avoidance behaviours, and packaging was still considered as the primary source of waste.
The 2017 study differed from the others since it added another question to the survey, related to the perception of avoidability pertinent to food wasting. Up to 27% of NSW residents were shown to not consider peels and bones as waste, while younger respondents considered items such as unfinished drinks as ""unavoidable"". Expired products and unfinished meals were the most popular reasons for wasting food, and meal planning recorded a decrease since the previous survey. Older segments of the sample reported to consider portion size more often than the younger.
$1645.64 (AUD) was the weighted average answer when people were asked to estimate the annual waste costs produced. However, EPA had estimated at least $1260(AUD) more. 68% of the respondents, and 82% of those from an Asian background, supported the idea that the government should implement the reduction strategies in this waste category."
Waste management in Australia,"(2010–present) National Waste Report
The National Waste Report is a series of documents endorsed by the Australian Government. It started in 2010 and as of 2019 four reports have been produced: in 2010, by the Environment Protection and Heritage Council (EPHC); in 2013; in 2016, by Blue Environment Pty Ltd for the Department of the Environment and Energy; and 2018.
Their studies span one financial year each and provide statistics and commentary on several aspects of waste management by using different key focuses (for example, on a per capita basis). From 2016 onwards, the reports have been supported by the National Waste Data System (NWDS) and the National Waste Database."
Waste management in Australia,"(2017–2018) National report 2017-2018: National Litter Index
The National Litter Index of 2017–2018 was the twelfth survey conducted by Keep Australia Beautiful. Rather than answer to ""why"", its descriptive objectives regarded the ""where"" and the ""hows"" of littering nationwide. The index revealed that the counted amount of litter decreased of 10.3% in comparison to the previous year data, although in VIC and WA it had actually increased. The takeaway packaging was the category which differentiated the most, with a decrease of almost 17%. The major reductions were observed in NT (34%), and less of half that figure was recorded in NSW and SA.
In terms of sites, beach littering and shopping areas registered the biggest and smaller decrease respectively (22.5%, 12.9%). Thirty-eight litter items per one squared kilometre was the average estimated on a national basis, with retail strip malls as density hotspots."
Waste management in Australia,"(2018) Planet Ark National Recycling Week: From Waste War to Recycling Reboot
The survey was conducted in parallel by Pollinate and Planet Ark. It illustrated the recycling activities and perceptions of Australians, as well as undercover anecdotes and propose potential alternatives such as the circular economy."
Waste management in Australia,"(2019) Waste away: a deep dive into Australia's waste management
""Waste away: a deep dive into Australia's waste management"" was a podcast episode launched on 20 February 2019.
According to its participants, in NSW 72% of the people who have been surveyed would recycle more if a more reliable recycling system was offered. It revealed that in Victoria the knowledge about household waste collection was generally good, but such a result was not evident on landfill and recycling topics. It also showed that waste was generally accepted as an essential service, although the household responsibility was lower in the public eye compared to those of businesses, companies and government."
Waste management in Australia,"Issues
(1974–1998) Castlereagh Regional Liquid Waste Disposal Depot
In 1974, in Londonderry, Castlereagh, western Sydney, what was supposed to be a temporary plant was built. It was the response from the local government to an issue relating to the disposal of liquid waste in the metropolitan area of Sydney, which was worsening as a result of the clandestine activities and of the shut down of the previous plant in Alexandria, Sydney.
The disposal depot was originally scheduled to operate for a maximum of two years, exclusively disposing of non-toxic waste. De facto, operations protracted for more than twenty years under a series of legislative variations and approved extensions. It was only when the local residents organised themselves under the name of ""Londonderry Residents Action Group for the Environment"", aka R.A.G.E., in 1989, that an effective and definitive action was requested by the administrators. Inspections, that were funded by the Waste Service NSW, supported by RAGE and investigated by ""Total Environment Center"" (TEC), concluded that within the materials being treated as dangerously non-predictable miscellany of compounds - including hazardous ones - were introduced in the normal flow of waste in the plant. In addition, defaults in the system allowed liquids to escape as leachate, contaminating what had become in the meantime a residential area. RAGE alleged that numerous, misleading documents and reports were given by the Metropolitan Waste Disposal Authority, NSW (MDWA) and by the Waste Management Authority (WMA), which in turn reported to the police that no dispersion had ever occurred.
The plant was eventually closed in 1998, most likely as a result of political rather than environmental concerns."
Waste management in Australia,"(2000) Sydney Olympic Games preventive clean-up
The Olympic Games held in Sydney in 2000 succeeded a massive cleansing in the city, where unrecorded disposal sites containing hazardous waste were discovered."
Waste management in Australia,"Incidents
(2017, 2018) SKM Recycling Plants
In July 2017 and again in 2018, a recycling plant in Queensland, owned by SKM Recycling, took fire for several days, causing severe health, environmental and financial issues.
The Coolaroo plant had been receiving household recyclables from the Melbourne area, which it stockpiled as one of the consequences of China's National Sword  -ultimately increasing the risks for fire hazard. As a consequence, EPA blocked further waste flows in the facility in February 2019, causing the kerbside collections to be directed to landfills.
SKM Recycling have been legally prosecuted and charged with environmental offence in March 2019."
Waste management in Australia,"See also
Associations, organisations and community projects:"
Waste management in Australia,"Foodbank, a food relief organisation in Australia
Environment:"
Waste management in Australia,"Environmental economics
Environmental remediation
History:"
Waste management in Australia,"First Fleet – First official European colonists of Australia
Indexes and lists:"
Waste management in Australia,"List of waste management acronyms
List of waste types
International dynamics:"
Waste management in Australia,"Australia–China relations
Australia and the United Nations
Global waste trade
Phase-out of lightweight plastic bags
National dynamics:"
Waste management in Australia,"Adaptation to global warming in Australia
Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme
Container deposit legislation in Australia
Environmental issues in Australia
Mitigation of global warming in Australia
Statistics:"
Waste management in Australia,Greenhouse gas emissions by Australia
Waste management in Australia,"References
External links
National Waste Reporting Mapping Tool, interactive online platform with an Australian focus
Goulburn Bioenergy project"
Australian property market,"The Australian property market comprises the trade of land and its permanent fixtures located within Australia. The average Australian property price grew 0.5% per year from 1890 to 1990 after inflation, however rose from 1990 to 2017 at a faster rate. House prices in Australia receive considerable attention from the media and the Reserve Bank and some commentators have argued that there is an Australian property bubble. 
The residential housing market has seen drastic changes in prices in the past few decades. The property prices are soaring in major cities like Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane and Hobart. The median house price in Sydney peaked at $780,000 in 2016.  However, with stricter credit policy and reduced interest from foreign investors in residential property, prices have started falling in all the major cities.  When compared with the soaring prices of 2017, the housing prices fell by 11.1% in Sydney and 7.2% in Melbourne in 2018.  In 2022 the residential rental market has seen a significant increase in rents, which has been described as a ‘rental crisis’."
Australian property market,"Description
Composition
In 2011 there were 8.6m households with an average household size of 2.6 persons per household. Freestanding houses have historically comprised most building approvals, but recent data shows a trend towards higher density housing such as townhouses and units. Turnover rates vary across market cycles, but typically average 6% per year. Since 1999-2000 the proportion of households renting from state/territory housing authorities has declined from 6% to 3%  while the proportion renting privately increased from 20% to 26% in 2019-20."
Australian property market,"Regional variations
The Australian property market is non-uniform, with high variation observed across the major cities and regional areas."
Australian property market,"Sydney
In Sydney, as of March 2010, the Property Market's vacancy rate reached 0.53% signalling that the market is recovering, as these rates had reached 2% in August 2009. As of July 2015, the Property Market in Sydney has surged in the first Q of 2015, up 3.1%. Sydney's eastern and northern suburbs typically attract the highest prices, reflecting their desirability and premium location. The annual capital growth for houses and units in Sydney is 4.2% and 3.8% respectively."
Australian property market,"Key issues
Affordability
In the late 2000s, housing prices in Australia, relative to average incomes, were among the highest in the world. As at 2011, house prices were on average six times average household income, compared to four times in 1990. This prompted speculation that the country was experiencing a real estate bubble, like many other countries.
Foreign investment has also been identified as a key driver of affordability issues, with recent years seeing particularly high capital inflows from Chinese investors."
Australian property market,"Immigration to Australia
A number of economists, such as Macquarie Bank analyst Rory Robertson, assert that high immigration and the propensity of new arrivals to cluster in the capital cities is exacerbating the nation's housing affordability problem.  According to Robertson, Federal Government policies that fuel demand for housing, such as the currently high levels of immigration, as well as capital gains tax discounts and subsidies to boost fertility, have had a greater impact on housing affordability than land release on urban fringes.
The Productivity Commission Inquiry Report No. 28 First Home Ownership (2004) also stated, in relation to housing, ""that Growth in immigration since the mid-1990s has been an important contributor to underlying demand, particularly in Sydney and Melbourne."" This has been exacerbated by Australian lenders relaxing credit guidelines for temporary residents, allowing them to buy a home with a 10 percent deposit.
The RBA in its submission to the same PC Report also stated ""rapid growth in overseas visitors such as students may have boosted demand for rental housing"". However, in question in the report was the statistical coverage of resident population. The ""ABS population growth figures omit certain household formation groups – namely, overseas students and business migrants who do not continuously stay for 12 months in Australia."" This statistical omission lead to the admission: ""The Commission recognises that the ABS resident population estimates have limitations when used for assessing housing demand. Given the significant influx of foreigners coming to work or study in Australia in recent years, it seems highly likely that short-stay visitor movements may have added to the demand for housing. However, the Commissions are unaware of any research that quantifies the effects.""
Some individuals and interest groups have also argued that immigration causes overburdened infrastructure."
Australian property market,"Foreign investment in residential property
In December 2008, the federal government introduced legislation relaxing rules for foreign buyers of Australian property. According to FIRB (Foreign Investment Review Board) data released in August 2009, foreign investment in Australian real estate had increased by more than 30% year to date. One agent said that ""overseas investors buy them to land bank, not to rent them out. The houses just sit vacant because they are after capital growth."""
Australian property market,"Negative gearing
Australian property investors often apply the practice of negative gearing. This occurs when the investor borrows money to fund the purchase of the property, and the income generated by the property is less than the cost of owning and managing the property including interest. The investor is expecting that capital gains will compensate for the shortfall. Negative gearing receives considerable media and political attention due to the perceived distortion it creates on residential property prices. In anticipation of Labor being elected in the 2019 federal election, the banks issued less interest only loans which are used by many investors for negative gearing."
Australian property market,"Residential rental market
In 2022 the Australian residential rental market saw an annual increase in rents of 12%, the strongest increase in 14 years. Across Australia the vacancy rate was 1%, when a rate below 2% is considered very competitive with affordability constraints impacting tenants. A number of sources have described the situation as a ‘rental crisis’.
The primary reason for the rental crisis is a lack of supply due to a variety of reasons, including existing landlords selling their rental properties which are being purchased by owner-occupiers and some landlords using their properties on the short term rental market such as Airbnb. Other commenators cited a lack of social housing being provided by the government. The COVID-19 pandemic also impacted the rental market with shared households reducing in size and city workers moving to regional areas due to increased remote work."
Australian property market,"See also
Australian property bubble
Home ownership in Australia
Housing in Victoria"
Australian property market,"
== References =="
History of monarchy in Australia,"Australia is a constitutional monarchy whose Sovereign also serves as Monarch of the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Canada and eleven other former dependencies of the United Kingdom including Papua New Guinea, which was formerly a dependency of Australia. These countries operate as independent nations, and are known as Commonwealth realms. The history of the Australian monarchy has involved a shifting relationship with both the monarch and also the British government.
The east coast of Australia was claimed in 1770, by Captain James Cook, in the name of and under instruction from King George III. The colony of New South Wales was founded in the name of the British sovereign eighteen years later, followed by five more: Tasmania (1825), Western Australia (1829), South Australia (1836), Victoria (1851), and Queensland (1859)."
History of monarchy in Australia,"Royal visits before Federation 1901
Prince Alfred, fourth child of Queen Victoria, became the first member of the Royal Family to visit the burgeoning colonies of Australia.  He visited for five months in 1867, when he commanded HMS Galatea. He toured Adelaide, Melbourne, Brisbane, Tasmania and Sydney. The Melbourne Argus wrote on 26 November 1867: '[The Colony of] Victoria has not known in her thirty years' life a brighter day than yesterday. A Royal Prince, son of the greatest and noblest Queen that ever sat on the Throne of the British Empire, has landed on our shores, enjoyed our hospitality, and we are proud to know that we have done him honour worthy of ourselves and of the family he represents.'
On his second visit to Sydney, the only assassination attempt against a member of the royal family in Australia took place. While the prince picnicked at Clontarf, near Sydney, Henry James O'Farrell, a man of Irish descent, approached Alfred and shot at him, lodging a bullet in his spine. The attack caused indignation and embarrassment in the colony, leading to a wave of anti-Irish sentiment. The next day, 20,000 people attended a meeting to protest at ""yesterday's outrage""; Australians felt discomfited by the negative attention being drawn to their colonies.
After the prince spent five weeks in hospital, the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales voted to approve the erection of a monument to the event, ""in testimony of the heartfelt gratitude of the community at the recovery of HRH"", which became the Prince Alfred Hospital. The Prince granted the use of his coat of arms as the hospital's crest, and the institution later received royal designation from King Edward VII in 1902.
Fourteen years after the arrival of Prince Alfred, his nephews Princes George and Albert arrived to tour South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales, while midshipmen on HMS Bacchante."
History of monarchy in Australia,"Federation
On 1 January 1901 Australia became a nation and dominion of the monarchy.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, public concern over intercolonial tariffs, defence and immigration led to a meeting of colonial representatives in Melbourne in 1889. Dominated by the ""Father of Federation"", New South Wales Premier Sir Henry Parkes, they agreed in principle to a union of the Australian colonies under the British Crown.
A series of constitutional conventions prepared a constitution, which Australians then presented to London. On 1 January 1901, the six Australian colonies federated into one self-governing colony of the British Empire. This followed the granting of Royal Assent to the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act by Queen Victoria on 9 July 1900. Styled a Dominion from 1907, Australia was later referred to as a realm of the Crown from the 1950s onward, so as to reflect the equal status of Australia with the other countries under the shared Crown, which came into effect with the passage of the Statute of Westminster in 1931."
History of monarchy in Australia,"The death of the Queen – cast on the Empire a shadow like the blackness of an eclipse, and nowhere was that shadow darker than in Australasia – she was the symbol – the human embodiment – of the Empire..."
History of monarchy in Australia,"In 1901 Prince George (then the Prince of Wales and later King George V) returned to open the first Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, in Melbourne.
In 1920 Prince Edward, Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) visited Australia. The public called him the ""Digger prince"" (digger in Australian slang means an Australian soldier with a particular reputation for bravery and fair play).
In 1927, Prince Albert (later George VI) visited Australia to open the first Parliament to sit in Parliament House, Canberra, the Australian capital.
Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, came to assist in the celebrations of the centenary of the state of Victoria in 1932. In 1945 he was appointed Governor-General of the Commonwealth, against the advice of the Australian government. He was the only member of the Royal Family to serve as a viceroy in Australia."
History of monarchy in Australia,"The Statute of Westminster
During the 1926 Imperial Conference, the governments of the Dominions and of the United Kingdom endorsed the Balfour Declaration of 1926, which declared that the Dominions were autonomous members of the British Empire, equal to each other and to the United Kingdom. The Statute of Westminster 1931 gave legal effect to the Balfour Declaration and other decisions made at the Imperial Conferences. Most importantly, it declared that the Parliament of the United Kingdom no longer had any legislative authority over the Dominions.  Previously, the Dominions were legally self-governing colonies of the United Kingdom, and thus had no legal international status.  The Statute made the Dominions de jure independent nations.
The Statute took effect immediately over Canada, South Africa and the Irish Free State. However, Australia, New Zealand and Newfoundland had to ratify the Statute through legislation before it would apply to them.  Canada also requested certain exemptions from the Statute in regard to the Canadian Constitution.
Australian politicians initially resisted ratification of the Statute. John Latham, the Attorney-General and Minister for External Affairs under Prime Minister Joseph Lyons, was particularly opposed to ratifying the Statute, because he thought it would weaken military and political ties with the United Kingdom. Latham had attended both the 1926 Imperial Conference and the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, and he had much experience in international affairs. He preferred that the relationship between the United Kingdom and the Dominions not be codified in legislation.
However, other politicians supported the Statute, and the new independence it gave to Australia.
With the passage of the Statute of Westminster Adoption Act 1942, the British Parliament could no longer legislate for the Australian Commonwealth without the express request and consent of the Australian Parliament. The act received Royal Assent on 9 October 1942, but the adoption of the Statute was made retroactive to 3 September 1939, when Australia entered World War II."
History of monarchy in Australia,"The Isaacs appointment
An important change in the relationship between the Sovereign and the Australian government and the Governor-General of Australia was marked by the appointment of Sir Isaac Isaacs as Governor-General. Isaacs was the first Australian-born Governor-General. The Commonwealth Cabinet, headed by James Scullin, considered his name in 1930. Isaacs was Chief Justice and a Justice of the High Court.
Prime Minister Billy Hughes had asserted the right of dominion governments to be consulted on the choice of Governors-General in 1919. Prime Minister Edmund Barton had made a similar assertion two decades earlier. Hughes was invited to select the name of the Governor-General from a list of three (British) names made up by the Secretary of State of the Colonial Office. The choice was however recommended to the King, George V, by the Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs.
But the Commonwealth government directly nominating and recommending a Governor-General occasioned a controversy, both in the press at home and in Buckingham Palace. The Leader of the Opposition, John Latham, took the view that the federal executive councillors could advise the Governor-General, but not the King. George V was of the same opinion. The King's private secretary wrote to the secretary of State in London:"
History of monarchy in Australia,His Majesty feels strongly that it would be a grave mistake to give the Prime Minister of the Commonwealth an opportunity of naming the next Governor-General
History of monarchy in Australia," And George, believing that the Governor-General was the personal representative of the Sovereign, intervened directly. The Palace wrote:
The King feels that, with the change in the position of the governor-general (sic) made at the Imperial Conference of 1926, which divested them of all political power and eliminated them from the administrative machinery of the respective Dominions, leaving them merely as the representative of the Sovereign, more than ever His Majesty should be consulted in the selection of candidates, and indeed, subject of course to the concurrence of the British Prime Minister, be left to make the choice himself. Scullin raised the question of dominion governments directly advising the King on vice-regal appointments at the 1930 Imperial Conference. It was decided that the King should act on the advice of his dominion ministers. Still, Scullin had to go to London personally to persuade the King to appoint Isaacs. George reluctantly agreed. After Isaacs, two more British nominees followed: Lord Gowrie (1936–1945) and Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester (1945–1947). Nevertheless, the principle had been established that the Governor-General was the constitutional representative, not the personal representative, of the Sovereign. This was an important step in establishing the independence of the office.  In 1988, the commission established by the government of Bob Hawke to review the Constitution could report:"
History of monarchy in Australia,"Although the Governor-General is the Queen's representative in Australia, the Governor-General is in no sense a delegate of the Queen."
History of monarchy in Australia,"Secessionist Movement
The isolated, mineral-rich colony of Western Australia had been reluctant to federate. The Constitution does not list Western Australia as one of the original states. Discontent with federation lead to a referendum on 8 April 1933. In answer to the question 'are you in favour of the State of Western Australia withdrawing from the Federal Commonwealth established under the Commonwealth of Australia Constitutional Act (Imperial)?' the people of Western Australia voted in the affirmative by two to one."
History of monarchy in Australia,"The referendum brought the secessionist Labor government of Philip Collier to power. In 1934 the new government sent a delegation to London to petition the King, George V, and the British Parliament to overturn the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900. Such an act would have dissolved the Commonwealth and left the states free to federate anew or not as they wished. A joint committee of the House of Lords and House of Commons considered the petition, and rejected it in 1935. It did so on the grounds that it could not overturn the Act without the approval of the Federal Parliament."
History of monarchy in Australia,"Abdication of Edward VIII
On 10 December 1936 Edward VIII abdicated after it became clear that the British and Dominion governments would not accept his intended marriage to American divorcee and commoner, Wallis Simpson. The Statute of Westminster required the Dominion governments be consulted on matters relating to the succession. The Dominions Office in London proposed three solutions to the crisis to the governments of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India and Canada:"
History of monarchy in Australia,"marriage of the King to Simpson; Simpson would become Queen
a morganatic marriage (Simpson would not have the title or honours of a queen, and any issue would have no rights of succession)
abdication of the King.
Australia, South Africa and Canada chose abdication. India and New Zealand had no firm view.
According to Harold Laski, writing in The New York Times,"
History of monarchy in Australia,"This issue is independent of the personality of the King. It is independent of the personality of the Prime Minister. It does not touch on the wisdom or unwisdom of the marriage the King has proposed. It is not concerned with the pressure, whether of the churches or the aristocracy, that is hostile to this marriage. It is the principle that out of this issue no precedent must be created that makes the Royal authority once more a source of independent political power in the State."
History of monarchy in Australia,"According to this view, the constitutional independence of the Dominions was at stake. This event demonstrated the legal independence of the Dominion monarchies established by the Statute of Westminster."
History of monarchy in Australia,"Reign of Elizabeth II
In 1954, Queen Elizabeth II became the first reigning Australian monarch to visit Australia. Her presence provided a sense of certainty to the nation, as well as focusing world attention on Australia. Around 7 million Australians (of a total population of just under 9 million at the time) greeted her.
She returned on several occasions (a total of 15 official visits) and officiated at such important moments as the bicentenary in 1970 of James Cook's voyage along the East Coast of Australia; the opening of the Sydney Opera House in 1973; her Silver Jubilee in 1977; proclamation of the Australia Act in 1986; various events commemorating the bicentenary of the arrival of First Fleet and the opening of the new Parliament House in Canberra in 1988; the centenary of federation in 2000; her Golden Jubilee in 2002; and more.
The National Carillon in Canberra was dedicated by Elizabeth II on 25 April 1970. The Swan Bells in Perth include the twelve bells of Saint Martin-in-the-Fields that were cast between 1725 and 1770 by three generations of the Rudhall family of bell founders from Gloucester, under the order of the Prince of Wales, later crowned as King George II. Donated to Perth in 1988, they are known to have pealed as the explorer James Cook set sail on the voyage that founded Australia, and are the only sets of royal bells to have left England."
History of monarchy in Australia,"Queen of Australia
Elizabeth II was the first monarch to be styled sovereign of Australia. In 1953 the Australian Parliament passed two bills. The first was the Royal Style and Titles Act 1953. This added the word ""Australia"" to the Queen's titles. In 1973 a further Act removed ""Defender of the Faith"" from her Australian title. In 1958 Elizabeth amended the letters patent of Queen Victoria which constituted the office of Governor-General.
Until then Australian constitutional documents were signed by the monarch and counter-signed by a British minister of state. But now such documents were to be counter-signed by the Prime Minister of Australia. Further, they were to be sealed with the Royal Great Seal of the Commonwealth of Australia. Queen Victoria's letters patent had ordered a Great Seal for Australia in 1900, but it was never made. On 19 October 1955 Elizabeth, advised by Prime Minister Robert Menzies, issued a warrant for the Seal.
The Royal Powers Act 1953 further secured the Sovereign's new status as Queen of Australia by conferring on her powers that the Constitution did not give her. The Queen could now preside at Federal Executive Councils in person and open the Commonwealth Parliament. Elizabeth II performed both actions three times each during her reign.
On 30 May 1973 the prerogative of appointing Australian ambassadors to nations outside the Commonwealth was transferred to the Governor-General. Likewise the viceroy assumed authority to appoint high commissioners to Commonwealth countries. The line of communication between Sovereign and viceroy became the Australian High Commission in London, in place of the British High Commission in Canberra. When mention of the United Kingdom was removed from the Queen's titles in Australia in the same year, the government of the state of Queensland, concerned that this action was a first step towards declaring Australia to be a republic, sought to declare her ""Queen of Australia, Queensland and her Other Realms and Territories"", in order to ensure that the Monarchy would at least be entrenched in Queensland.
The action was blocked by the High Court of Australia in the so-called Queen of Queensland case in 1974. However, it highlighted the fact that the relation of the Australian states to the Crown was then independent of the relation of the Commonwealth to the Crown, and this paradox led to the Hannah and the Wran affairs which eventually led to the Australia Act of 1986."
History of monarchy in Australia,"The Dismissal, and the Hannah and Wran Affairs
The Australian monarch rarely intervenes in Australian affairs. During the 1975 constitutional crisis over the failure of Gough Whitlam's Labor government to secure supply, the Queen remained neutral, which both sides of the debate took to imply tacit approval. When Governor-General Sir John Kerr dismissed Whitlam, the Labor Speaker of the House of Representatives, Gordon Scholes, asked the Queen to revoke her viceroy's act. The Queen's Private Secretary replied:"
History of monarchy in Australia,"As we understand the situation here, the Australian Constitution firmly places the prerogative powers of the Crown in the hands of the Governor-General as the representative of the Queen of Australia. The only person competent to commission an Australian Prime Minister is the Governor-General, and The Queen has no part in the decisions which the Governor-General must take in accordance with the Constitution. Her Majesty, as Queen of Australia, is watching events in Canberra with close interest and attention, but it would not be proper for her to intervene in person in matters which are so clearly placed within the jurisdiction of the Governor-General by the Constitution Act."
History of monarchy in Australia,"The reluctance of the Queen of Australia to become involved in this high-profile political crisis involving the Commonwealth government contrasted with other instances when the monarch and her officers became directly involved in the politics of Australian states. In 1975, prior to the Dismissal, the Governor of Queensland, Sir Colin Hannah criticised the Whitlam government in a partisan manner. At the time, Hannah was commissioned Administrator, or acting governor-general, whenever John Kerr was out of the country. The Queen acted on Whitlam's advice to withdraw this commission. The United Kingdom government later advised the Queen not to dismiss him, on the grounds that it would be hard to justify the dismissal of Hannah for political involvement, when Kerr remained beyond reproach for his role in the 1975 constitutional crisis. She did, however, refuse to extend his term.
The Premier of Queensland, Joh Bjelke-Petersen argued that the Queen is to be advised by the state premier on her choice of governors, and so London ought not to advise the sovereign in the matter. Whitlam's successor, Malcolm Fraser, sought to have Hannah's commission restored. He was refused, and the British foreign secretary, Lord Carrington, then the principal adviser to the Queen on state matters, advised Hannah of his impropriety during Whitlam's term of office.
This episode greatly concerned the Australian state premiers on both sides of politics. They had governed in the belief that convention meant they were the Queen's advisers in state matters, not British ministers. London's actions were indicative of the direct relationship between the Queen of the United Kingdom and the Governors of the Australian states. This relationship now appeared to bypass the Queen's role as the Australian monarch, and her link to the Governor-General and the Commonwealth. Apparently the Queen of the United Kingdom still had direct powers over the Australian states where she acted in that role on the advice of her British ministers.
State governors had been dismissed by monarchs before. In 1917 George V had recalled Sir Gerald Strickland, Governor of New South Wales. Strickland had leaked to the press that he was about to dismiss the premier, William Holman. However, the King had been acting at the request of Holman, and the King had acted according to convention, on the advice of his chief minister.
In 1980 Neville Wran, the Premier of New South Wales, announced his intention to introduce a bill that would require the Queen to be advised by Australian state ministers alone on matters concerning the governance of that state.
Wran had tested the British ministers by requesting the Governor of New South Wales not be told of his impending re-appointment. When British officials ignored this request, Wran took it as proof of their willingness to interfere in Australian state affairs. Buckingham Palace was alarmed at the impending bill, and when it was passed through both houses of the New South Wales Parliament, Lord Carrington wrote to Sir Roden Cutler, the state's Governor, telling him that the Queen would refuse the Royal Assent to the bill. The secretary of the Premier's Department, Gerry Gleason, told the British Consul-General that New South Wales was 'being buggered about' and that the British needed their 'backsides kicked'.
The constitutional problem was resolved by the Australia Act 1986. By this Act all state governors are appointed by the Queen on the advice of the Australian state's Premier alone. British ministers have no constitutional authority to advise the Queen on any matter related to the Australian states. There is debate as to whether the actions of the Australian states have in effect made Queen Elizabeth their direct monarch the same way she is Queen of Australia, effectively making her the Queen of New South Wales, of Victoria, of Tasmania, of South Australia, of Western Australia, and also the Queen of Queensland."
History of monarchy in Australia,"Referendum on the monarchy
In the 1970s more Australians began to seriously reconsider Australia's constitutional framework. The constitutional crisis of 1975 occasioned many to question the role of the monarchy in a modern Australia. There were no serious attempts to alter the constitutional role of the Queen until the 1986 Australia Act. Nevertheless Australians were more conscious of being an independent nation, and there was a downplaying of the monarchy in Australia, with references to the monarchy being removed from the public eye (e.g., the Queen's portrait from public buildings and schools).
Public attitudes were quietly changing, though republicanism did not become a seriously considered proposition until 1991, when Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating formed the Republic Advisory Committee to investigate the possibility of Australia becoming a republic. Under Liberal/National Coalition Prime Minister John Howard, Australia held a two-question referendum. The first question asked whether Australia should become a republic with a president appointed by parliament, a bi-partisan appointment model which had previously been decided at a constitutional convention in February 1998.
The second question, generally deemed to be far less important politically, asked whether Australia should alter the constitution to insert a preamble. Neither of the amendments passed, with the question on the republic defeated by 54.4% in the popular vote and 6-0 in the states. While monarchists declared the result proof that the people were happy with the monarchy, republican voices stated that it was indicative of the lack of choice given in the republican model."
History of monarchy in Australia,"Four months after the referendum, the Queen returned to Australia in 2000. In Sydney, in a speech at the Conference Centre in Darling Harbour, she stated her belief in the democratic rights of Australians on all issues including that of the monarchy:"
History of monarchy in Australia,"My family and I would, of course, have retained our deep affection for Australia and Australians everywhere, whatever the outcome. For some while it has been clear that many Australians have wanted constitutional change... You can understand, therefore, that it was with the closest interest that I followed the debate leading up to the referendum held last year on the proposal to amend the Constitution. I have always made it clear that the future of the monarchy in Australia is an issue for you, the Australian people, and you alone to decide by democratic and constitutional means. It should not be otherwise. As I said at the time, I respect and accept the outcome of the referendum. In the light of the result last November I shall continue faithfully to serve as Queen of Australia under the constitution to the very best of my ability, as I have tried to do for the last 48 years."
History of monarchy in Australia,"The new millennium
In March 2006, organisers of the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne came under fire when it was announced that they would not play ""God Save the Queen"" at the ceremonies where the Queen was to open the Games. Despite the fact that the song is officially the Australian Royal Anthem, to be played whenever the sovereign is present, the games organisers refused to play it. After repeated calls from Prime Minister John Howard, organisers agreed to play eight bars of the Royal Anthem at the opening ceremony.
However, there remained speculation that the opening of the games could be ""thrown into chaos"" should thousands of Australians continue to sing ""God Save the Queen"" after the eight bars were complete, drowning out singer Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. In the end, with the crowd singing along, Dame Kiri sang Happy Birthday to the Queen, the rendition of which then turned into an abbreviated God Save the Queen, and at which point the majority of attendees at the stadium stood."
History of monarchy in Australia,"When Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd assumed office in 2007, he stated that the republic was not a priority for his first term. He did affirm that it formed part of the Labor policy platform. During a visit to Britain in April 2008 he stated his belief that the republican debate should continue. During the weekend of 19/20 April a meeting of various members of Australian society met in Canberra to come up with ideas for Australia's future. This has become known as the Australia 2020 Summit. The republic was floated again, and widely supported. Rudd came out in support and intimated that the republic may become a reality before the end of the reign of Elizabeth II. Former Prime Minister Julia Gillard (2010-2013 ) stated that she is a republican. However she wished an appropriate model of republic be explored before the issue was taken to the people again. Kevin Rudd did not flag the question of a republic during his second term of office as Prime Minister.
Malcolm Turnbull said of Queen Elizabeth's reign: ""She's been an extraordinary head of state, and I think, frankly, in Australia, there are more Elizabethans than there are monarchists.""
On 22 February 2009, Princess Anne represented the Queen at the National Bushfires Memorial Service in Melbourne. The Queen also showed her support for the people of Australia by making a personal statement about the bushfires and by also making a private donation to the Australian Red Cross Appeal. The Duke of Edinburgh was the first to sign a book of condolences at the Australian High Commission in London."
History of monarchy in Australia,"Monarchs of Australia
The monarchs of Australia are the same as those of the United Kingdom. The sovereigns reigned over Australia as monarchs of the United Kingdom until 1942 (by a legal fiction, from 1939). From that year they reigned as sovereigns in right of Australia, though the first to be accorded an Australian title, Queen of Australia, was Elizabeth II, in 1953. After the Queen's death in 2022, her son Charles III took over."
History of monarchy in Australia,"See also
History of monarchy in Canada
History of monarchy in the United Kingdom
Republicanism in Australia"
History of monarchy in Australia,"Notes
Citations"
History of monarchy in Australia,"
=== References ==="
Laws governing public demonstrations in Australia,"There are a variety of anti-protest laws in Australia that exist, each having a different form and designated place in the law. Internationally, protest laws can exist at the state or federal level, according to the country they are created in. Both state and federal laws can be used in the act of protest under criminal codes. Specifically in the circumstances of trespass and public assembly law is used to counteract protests."
Laws governing public demonstrations in Australia,"Protest laws in Australia
In Australia, there is a judicial recognition of the right to peaceful assembly. At the federal level protests laws are constituted under the Attorney-General of Australia's power. Within Australia, at the federal level there is a right to freedom of expression with the conditions that this does not; cause derogation, affect the reputation of others, cause harm to national security or incite violence.
At the state level laws are constituted by individual state governments and can vary largely. In Australia, there are various states that have a large amount of legislation surrounding protest laws. These states include the Australian Capital Territory, Queensland and Western Australia. In the states of Queensland and Western Australia mining is a large industry that is often met with protests and public demonstration. Therefore, within these states there is a larger amount of legislation relating to protests than in other areas of Australia. Additionally, as the Australian Capital Territory holds the capital of Australia, Canberra, protests are carefully regulated."
Laws governing public demonstrations in Australia,"Laws by jurisdiction
Federal
Protection of Persons and Property Act 1971
The Protection of Persons and Property Act 1971, states the application of the law in circumstances where public assembly or protest is conducted on protected land or against a protected person.  The act details how certain occasions of public protest could cause occasion for arrest or legal action to be taken. Clause 8 of the act states;
Where there is an assembly consisting of not less than twelve persons in a Territory and:
(a)  persons taking part in the assembly have conducted themselves in a way that has caused a member of a Police Force of the rank of Sergeant or above reasonably to apprehend that the assembly will be carried on in a manner involving unlawful physical violence to persons or unlawful damage to property;
(b)   the assembly is being carried on in a manner involving such unlawful violence or damage; a member of a Police Force of the rank of Sergeant or above may give a direction under this section"
Laws governing public demonstrations in Australia,"Trespass on Territory Land Act 1932
Australian protest law is not necessarily direct, rather legislation surrounding the place protests may occur are evident.  The Trespass on Territory Land Act 1932, dictates that if a person in any circumstance regardless of protest or not, is to be on territory land they will occur 5 penalty units from the state. This affects protests, as certain locations become inaccessible for demonstration."
Laws governing public demonstrations in Australia,"Australian Capital Territory
In Australia's Capital Territory, protests are allowed dependent on the location the protest is being conducted. Different areas of the territory are graded according to whether or not they require permits from the National Capital Authority or the Territory government for protests to be held. These different permissions are required for protest within the Australian capital as parliamentary zones and diplomatic areas are located within the ACT. "
Laws governing public demonstrations in Australia,"For approval of protests by the National Capital Authority in parliamentary and diplomatic zones, a protest works plan must first be submitted.  Furthermore, if a protest is to occur there are strict guidelines in place, to enhance public safety and facilitate fair access to public domains.  Some of the guidelines include; participants should arrive and depart from the location in an orderly manner, vehicles must not be used within the parliamentary precincts as part of the protest and participants must observe lawful directions issued by parliamentary security, Australian Federal Police or Australian Protective Service officers. Failure to obey these guidelines will result in arrest."
Laws governing public demonstrations in Australia,"New South Wales
In 2018, the New South Wales centre-right Coalition government passed anti-protest laws which came into effect on 1 July that year. The laws would give low-ranking government bureaucrats broad powers to ban protests. The laws were labelled a ""fundamental attack on democracy"" by a university law lecturer.
In 2019, there were calls to review ""two decades of 'piecemeal' legislation restricting freedom to protest at both state [NSW] and federal level"". The call came a week after protests and civil disobedience by Extinction Rebellion in Sydney, NSW, which resulted in many protestors being arrested. Many of the arrested protestors, including former Green Party federal MP Scott Ludlam, had ""absurd"" and possibly illegal bail conditions placed on them by the New South Wales Police which restricted the protesters freedom of assembly and freedom of association. However the NSW Coalition government said they had no plans to review protest laws."
Laws governing public demonstrations in Australia,"Queensland
Queensland follows the federal legislation Australia has created on protests and demonstrations whilst also having laws at the state level. Any public assembly or demonstration needs to give notice to the local police force five working days prior to the assembly being held. Opposition to the assembly will only occur if the demonstration will dispute the law. In Queensland the Peaceful Assembly Act allows the right for protests to be held and will only be restricted if public safety, public order or the protection of rights and freedoms is infringed.
In November 2019, the centre-left Queensland Labor government passed harsh anti-protest laws targeting environmental / climate-change activists who protested the construction of new coal mines in the state. United Nations human rights experts called the laws ""inherently disproportionate"". The Queensland government attempted to justify the laws by falsely claiming that protesters had ""booby-trapped"" locking devices used to secure them to objects/roads for protest."
Laws governing public demonstrations in Australia,"Tasmania
In 2016, the Tasmanian centre-right Coalition government attempted to pass a harsh anti-protest law, making it a crime to protest in forests which were going to be logged, among other places. The law was ruled unconstitutional by the High Court of Australia after a challenge was brought by former Green Party leader and environmental activist Bob Brown. The High Court ruled the laws unconstitutional because the breached the right to political communication, which is implicit in the Australian Constitution.
In 2019, the Coalition state government attempted to pass similar laws, again."
Laws governing public demonstrations in Australia,"Western Australia
Within Western Australia there is distinct legislation that prohibits certain types of protests from occurring. These prohibitions are highlighted within the Criminal Code Amendment (Prevention of Lawful Activity) Bill.  The act illustrates that a protest can be considered illegal or have its members involved arrested in the circumstances of trespass and intent to cause harm."
Laws governing public demonstrations in Australia,"
== References =="
High Court of Australia,"The High Court of Australia is the apex court of the Australian legal system. It exercises original and appellate jurisdiction on matters specified in the Constitution of Australia and supplementary legislation.
The High Court was established following the passage of the Judiciary Act 1903 (Cth). Its authority derives from chapter III of the Australian Constitution, which vests it (and other courts the Parliament creates) with the judicial power of the Commonwealth. Its internal processes are governed by the High Court of Australia Act 1979 (Cth).
The court consists of seven justices, including a chief justice, currently Stephen Gageler. Justices of the High Court are appointed by the governor-general on the formal advice of the attorney-general following the approval of the prime minister and Cabinet. They are appointed permanently until their mandatory retirement at age 70, unless they retire earlier.
Typically, the court operates by receiving applications for appeal from parties in a process called special leave. If a party's application is accepted, the court will proceed to a full hearing, usually with oral and written submissions from both parties. After conclusion of the hearing, the result is decided by the court. The special leave process does not apply in situations where the court elects to exercise its original jurisdiction; however, the court typically delegates its original jurisdiction to Australia's inferior courts.
The court has resided in Canberra since 1980, following the construction of a purpose-built High Court building, located in the Parliamentary Triangle and overlooking Lake Burley Griffin. Sittings of the court previously rotated between state capitals, particularly Melbourne and Sydney, and the court continues to regularly sit outside Canberra."
High Court of Australia,"Role
The High Court exercises both original and appellate jurisdiction.
Sir Owen Dixon said on his swearing in as Chief Justice of Australia in 1952:"
High Court of Australia,"The High Court's jurisdiction is divided in its exercise between constitutional and federal cases which loom so largely in the public eye, and the great body of litigation between man and man, or even man and government, which has nothing to do with the Constitution, and which is the principal preoccupation of the court"
High Court of Australia,The broad jurisdiction of the High Court means that it has an important role in Australia's legal system.
High Court of Australia,"Original jurisdiction
Its original jurisdiction is determined by sections 75 and 76 of Australia's Constitution. Section 75 confers original jurisdiction in all matters:"
High Court of Australia,"Section 76 provides that Parliament may confer original jurisdiction in relation to matters:
Constitutional matters, referred to in section 76(i), were conferred on the High Court by section 30 of the Judiciary Act 1903. Whilst it may seem that the inclusion of constitutional matters in section 76 means that the High Court's original jurisdiction regarding constitutional matters could be removed, in practice section 75(iii) (suing the Commonwealth) and section 75(iv) (conflicts between states) are broad enough that many constitutional matters would still be within its jurisdiction. The original constitutional jurisdiction of the High Court is now well established; the Australian Law Reform Commission has described the inclusion of constitutional matters in section 76 rather than section 75 as ""an odd fact of history"". The 1998 Constitutional Convention recommended an amendment to the constitution to prevent the possibility of the jurisdiction being removed by Parliament. Failure to proceed on this issue suggests that it was considered highly unlikely that Parliament would ever take this step.
The word ""matter"" in sections 75 and 76 has been understood to mean that the High Court is unable to give advisory opinions."
High Court of Australia,"Appellate jurisdiction
The court is empowered by section 73 of the Constitution to hear appeals from the supreme courts of the states and territories; as well as any court exercising federal jurisdiction. It may also hear appeals of decisions made in an exercise of its own original jurisdiction.
The High Court's appellate jurisdiction is limited by the Judiciary Act, which requires special leave to be granted before the hearing of an appeal. Special leave may only be granted where a question of law is raised which is of public importance, involves a conflict between courts or ""is in the interests of the administration of justice"".
Special leave hearings are typically presided over by a panel of two or three justices of the High Court. Parties are typically limited to an oral submission of 20 minutes, in addition to any written submissions."
High Court of Australia,"Appeals to the Privy Council
Appeals to the United Kingdom's Privy Council was a notable controversy when the Constitution was drafted. Section 74 of the Constitution as it was put to voters, stated that there would be no appeals to the privy council in any matter involving the interpretation of the Constitution or state constitutions.
The section as enacted by the Imperial Parliament was different. It prohibited appeals on constitutional matters, excepting where the High Court certified it appropriate for the appeal to be determined by Privy Council. This occurred only once, and the High Court has said it would never again grant a certificate of appeal.
On non-constitutional matters, the Privy Council regularly heard appeals against High Court decisions. In some cases the Council acknowledged that the Australian common law had developed differently from English law and thus did not apply its own principles. Other times it followed English authority, and overruled decisions of the High Court.
This arrangement led to tensions between the High Court and the Privy Council. In Parker v The Queen (1964), Owen Dixon CJ led a unanimous judgment rejecting the authority of the House of Lords decision in DPP v Smith, writing, ""I shall not depart from the law on this matter as we have long since laid it down in this Court and I think that Smith's case should not be used in Australia as authority at all."" The Privy Council overturned this by enforcing the UK precedent upon the High Court the following year.
Thirteen High Court judges have heard cases as part of the Privy Council. Sir Isaac Isaacs is the only judge to have sat on an appeal from the High Court, in 1936 after his retirement as governor-general. Sir Garfield Barwick insisted on an amendment to Privy Council procedure to allow dissent; however he exercised that only once. The appeals mostly related to decisions from other Commonwealth countries, although they occasionally included appeals from a state supreme court."
High Court of Australia,"Abolition of Privy Council appeals
Section 74 allowed parliament to prevent appeals to the Privy Council. It did so in 1968 with the Privy Council (Limitation of Appeals) Act 1968, which closed off all appeals to the Privy Council in matters involving federal legislation. In 1975, the Privy Council (Appeals from the High Court) Act 1975 was passed, which closed all routes of appeal from the High Court; excepting for those in which a certificate of appeal would be granted by the High Court.
In 1986, with the passing of the Australia Act by both the UK Parliament and the Commonwealth Parliament (with the request and consent of the states), appeals to the Privy Council from state supreme courts were closed off, leaving the High Court as the only avenue of appeal. In 2002, Chief Justice Murray Gleeson said that the ""combined effect"" of the legislation and the announcement in Kirmani ""has been that s 74 has become a dead letter, and what remains of s 74 after the legislation limiting appeals to the Privy Council will have no further effect""."
High Court of Australia,"Appellate jurisdiction for Nauru
Following an agreement between Nauru and Australia signed on 6 September 1976, the High Court became Nauru's apex court. It was empowered to hear appeals from the Supreme Court of Nauru in both criminal and civil cases, but not constitutional matters. There were a total of five appeals to the High Court under this agreement in the first 40 years of its operation. In 2017, however, this jumped to 13 appeals, most relating to asylum seekers. At the time some legal commentators argued that this appellate jurisdiction sat awkwardly with the High Court's other responsibilities, and ought be renegotiated or repealed. Anomalies included the need to apply Nauruan law and customary practice, and that special leave hearings were not required.
Nauruan politicians had said publicly that the Nauru government was unhappy about these arrangements. Of particular concern was a decision of the High Court in October 2017, which quashed an increase in sentence imposed upon political protestors by the Supreme Court of Nauru. The High Court had remitted the case to the Supreme Court ""differently constituted, for hearing according to law"".
On Nauru's 50th anniversary of independence, Baron Waqa declared to parliament that ""[s]everance of ties to Australia's highest court is a logical step towards full nationhood and an expression of confidence in Nauru's ability to determine its own destiny"". Justice Minister David Adeang said that an additional reason for cutting ties was the cost of appeals to the High Court. Nauru then exercised an option under its agreement with Australia to end its appellate arrangement with 90 days notice. The option was exercised on 12 December 2017 and the High Court's jurisdiction ended on 12 March 2018. The termination did not become publicly known until after the Supreme Court had reheard the case of the protesters and had again imposed increased sentences."
High Court of Australia,"History
Pre-establishment
Following Earl Grey's 1846 proposal to federate the colonies, an 1849 report from the Privy Council suggested a national court be created. In 1856, the Governor of South Australia, Richard MacDonnell, suggested to the Government of South Australia that they consider establishing a court to hear appeals from the Supreme Courts in each colony. In 1860 the South Australian Parliament passed legislation encouraging MacDonnell to put the idea to the other colonies. However, only Victoria considered the proposal.
At a Melbourne inter-colonial conference held in 1870, the idea of an inter-colonial court was again raised. A royal commission was established in Victoria to investigate options for establishing such a court, and a draft bill was put forward. This draft bill, however, completely excluded appeals to the Privy Council, causing a reaction in London which prevented any serious attempt to implement the bill through the British Imperial Parliament.
Another draft bill was proposed in 1880 for the establishment of an Australasian court of appeal. The proposed court would consist of one judge from each of the colonial supreme courts, who would serve one-year terms. However, the proposed court allowed for appeals to the Privy Council, which was disliked by some of the colonies, and the bill was abandoned."
High Court of Australia,"Constitutional conventions
The idea of a federal supreme court was raised during the Constitutional Conventions of the 1890s. A proposal for a supreme court of Australia was included in an 1891 draft. It was proposed to enable the court to hear appeals from the state supreme courts, with appeals to the Privy Council only occurring on assent from the British monarch. It was proposed that the Privy Council be prevented from hearing appeals on constitutional matters.
This draft was largely the work of Sir Samuel Griffith, then the Premier of Queensland. The attorney-general of Tasmania Andrew Inglis Clark also contributed to the constitution's judicial clauses. Clark's most significant contribution was to give the court its own constitutional authority, ensuring a separation of powers. The original formulation of Griffith, Barton and Kingston provided only that the parliament could establish a court."
High Court of Australia,"The draft was later amended at various conventions. In Adelaide the court's proposed name was changed to be the ""High Court of Australia"".
Many people opposed the idea of the new court completely replacing the Privy Council. Commercial interests, particularly subsidiaries of British companies preferred to operate under the unified jurisdiction of the British courts, and petitioned the conventions to that effect. Others argued that Australian judges were of a poorer quality than those of the English, and than the inevitable divergence in law that would occur without the oversight of the Privy Council; would put the legal system at risk.
Some politicians (e.g. George Dibbs) supported a retention of Privy Council supervision; whereas others, including Alfred Deakin, supported the design of the court as it was. Inglis Clark took the view that the possibility of divergence was a good thing, for the law could adapt appropriately to Australian circumstances. Despite this debate, the draft's judicial sections remained largely unchanged.
After the draft had been approved by the electors of the colonies, it was taken to London in 1899 for the assent of the British Imperial Parliament. The issue of Privy Council appeals remained a sticking point however; with objections made by Secretary of State for the Colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, the Chief Justice of South Australia, Sir Samuel Way, and Samuel Griffith, among others. In October 1899, Griffith made representations to Chamberlain soliciting suggestions from British ministers for alterations to the draft, and offered alterations of his own. Indeed, such was the effect of these and other representations that Chamberlain called for delegates from the colonies to come to London to assist with the approval process, with a view to their approving any alterations that the British government might see fit to make; delegates were sent, including Deakin, Barton and Charles Kingston, although they were under instructions that they would never agree to changes.
After intense lobbying both in Australia and in the United Kingdom, the Imperial Parliament finally approved the draft constitution. The draft as passed included an alteration to section 74, in a compromise between the two sides. It allowed for a general right of appeal from the High Court to the Privy Council, but the Parliament of Australia could make laws restricting this avenue. In addition, appeals in inter se matters were not as of right, but had to be certified by the High Court."
High Court of Australia,"Formation of the court
The High Court was not immediately established after Australia came into being. Some members of the first Parliament, including Sir John Quick, then one of the leading legal experts in Australia, opposed legislation to set up the court. Even H. B. Higgins, who was himself later appointed to the court, objected to setting it up, on the grounds that it would be impotent while Privy Council appeals remained, and that in any event there was not enough work for a federal court to make it viable.
The then Attorney-General Alfred Deakin introduced the Judiciary Bill to the House of Representatives in 1902. Prior efforts had been continually delayed by opponents in the parliament, and the success of the bill is generally attributed to Deakin's passion and persistence. Deakin proposed that the court be composed of five judges, specially selected to the court. Opponents instead proposed that the court should be made up of state supreme court justices, taking turns to sit on the High Court on a rotation basis, as had been mooted at the Constitutional Conventions a decade before. Deakin eventually negotiated amendments with the opposition, reducing the number of judges from five to three, and eliminating financial benefits such as pensions."
High Court of Australia,"At one point, Deakin threatened to resign as Attorney-General due to the difficulties he faced. In his three and a half hour second reading speech to the House of Representatives, Deakin said,The federation is constituted by distribution of powers, and it is this court which decides the orbit and boundary of every power... It is properly termed the keystone of the federal arch... The statute stands and will stand on the statute-book just as in the hour in which it was assented to. But the nation lives, grows and expands. Its circumstances change, its needs alter, and its problems present themselves with new faces. [The High Court] enables the Constitution to grow and be adapted to the changeful necessities and circumstances of generation after generation that the High Court operates.
Deakin's friend, painter Tom Roberts, who viewed the speech from the public gallery, declared it Deakin's ""magnum opus"". The Judiciary Act 1903 was finally passed on 25 August 1903, and the first three justices, Chief Justice Sir Samuel Griffith and justices Sir Edmund Barton and Richard O'Connor, were appointed on 5 October of that year. On 6 October, the court held its first sitting in the Banco Court in the Supreme Court of Victoria."
High Court of Australia,"Early years
On 12 October 1906, the size of the High Court was increased to five justices, and Deakin appointed H. B. Higgins and Isaac Isaacs to the High Court. Following a court-packing attempt by the Labor Prime Minister Andrew Fisher In February 1913, the bench was increased again to a total to seven. Charles Powers and Albert Bathurst Piddington were appointed. These appointments generated an outcry, however, and Piddington resigned on 5 April 1913 after serving only one month as High Court justice.
The High Court continued its Banco location in Melbourne until 1928, until a dedicated courtroom was built in Little Bourke Street, next to the Supreme Court of Victoria. That space provided the court's Melbourne sitting place and housed the court's principal registry until 1980. The court also sat regularly in Sydney, sharing space in the criminal courts of Darlinghurst Courthouse, before a dedicated courtroom was constructed next door in 1923."
High Court of Australia,"The court travelled to other cities across the country, where it would use facilities of the respective supreme courts. Deakin had envisaged that the court would sit in many different locations, so as to truly be a federal court. Shortly after the court's creation, Chief Justice Griffith established a schedule for sittings in state capitals: Hobart in February, Brisbane in June, Perth in September, and Adelaide in October. It has been said that Griffith established this schedule because those were the times of year he found the weather most pleasant in each city.
The tradition of special sittings remains to this day, although they are dependent on the court's caseload. There are annual sittings in Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane for up to a week each year, and sittings in Hobart occur once every few years. Sittings outside of these special occurrences are conducted in Canberra.
The court's operations were marked by various anomalies during World War II. The Chief Justice, Sir John Latham, served from 1940 to 1941 as Australia's first ambassador to Japan; however, his activities in that role were limited by a pact Japan had entered with the Axis powers prior to his arrival in Tokyo. Owen Dixon was also absent for several years of his appointment, while serving as Australia's minister to the United States in Washington. Sir George Rich acted as chief justice during Latham's absence."
High Court of Australia,"Post-war period
From 1952, with the appointment of Sir Owen Dixon as chief justice, the court entered a period of stability. After World War II, the court's workload continued to grow, particularly from the 1960s onwards, putting pressures on the court. Sir Garfield Barwick, who was attorney-general from 1958 to 1964, and from then until 1981 chief justice, proposed that more federal courts be established, as permitted under the Constitution. In 1976 the Federal Court of Australia was established, with a general federal jurisdiction, and in more recent years the Family Court and Federal Magistrates Court have been set up to reduce the court's workload in specific areas.
In 1968, appeals to the Privy Council in matters involving federal legislation were barred. In 1986, with the passage of the Australia Acts direct appeals to the Privy Council from state Supreme Courts were also closed off.
The life tenure of High Court justices ended in 1977. A national referendum in May 1977 approved the Constitution Alteration (Retirement of Judges) 1977, which upon its commencement on 29 July 1977 amended section 72 of the Constitution so as require that all justices appointed from then on must retire on attaining the age of 70 years.
The High Court of Australia Act 1979 (Cth), which commenced on 21 April 1980, gave the High Court power to administer its own affairs and prescribed the qualifications for, and method of appointment of, its Justices."
High Court of Australia,"Legal history
Historical periods of the High Court are commonly denoted by reference to the chief justice of the time. However, the chief justice is not always the most influential figure on the Court."
High Court of Australia,"Griffith court: 1903–1919
The first court under Chief Justice Griffith laid the foundations of Australia's constitutional law. The court was conscious of its position as Australia's new court of appeal, and made efforts to establish its authority at the top of Australia's court hierarchy. In Deakin v Webb (1904) It criticised the Victorian Supreme Court for following a Privy Council decision about the Constitution of Canada instead of its own authority.
In its early years Griffith and other federalists on the bench were dominant. Their decisions were occasionally at odds with nationalist judges such as Sir Isaac Isaacs and H. B. Higgins in 1906. With the death of Justice Richard O'Connor, in 1912; the nationalists achieved majority and Griffith's influence began to decline.
The early constitutional law decisions of the Griffith court was influenced by US constitutional law.
An important doctrine peculiar to the Griffith court was that of the reserved state powers. Under this doctrine, the Commonwealth parliament's legislative powers were to be interpreted narrowly; so as to avoid intruding on areas of power traditionally exercised by the state Parliaments prior to federation. Anthony Mason has noted that this doctrine probably helped smooth the transition to a federal system of government and ""by preserving a balance between the constituent elements of the Australian federation, probably conformed to community sentiment, which at that stage was by no means adjusted to the exercise of central power""."
High Court of Australia,"Griffith and Sir Edmund Barton were frequently consulted by governors-general, including on the exercise of the reserve powers."
High Court of Australia,"Knox, Isaacs and Gavan Duffy courts: 1919–1935
Knox court
Adrian Knox became chief justice on 18 October 1919. Justice Edmund Barton died soon after, leaving no original members. During the Knox court, Justice Isaacs Isaacs had strong influence.
Under the Knox court the Engineers case was decided, ending the reserved state powers doctrine. The decision had lasting significance for the federal balance in Australia's political arrangements. Another significant decision was Roche v Kronheimer, in which the court relied upon the defence power to uphold federal legislation seeking to implement Australia's obligations under the Treaty of Versailles."
High Court of Australia,"Isaacs court
Sir Isaac Isaacs was Chief Justice for only forty-two weeks; he left the court to be appointed governor-general. He was ill for most of his term, and few significant cases were decided in this time."
High Court of Australia,"Duffy court
Sir Frank Gavan Duffy was Chief Justice for four years from 1931; but he was already 78 when appointed to the position. He was not influential, and only participated in 40% of the cases during his tenure. For the most part he gave short judgements, or joined in the judgements of his colleagues. His frequent absence resulted in many tied decisions which have no lasting value as precedent.
Important cases of this time include:"
High Court of Australia,"Attorney-General (New South Wales) v Trethowan
The First State Garnishee case
Tuckiar v The King"
High Court of Australia,"Latham court: 1935–1952
John Latham was elevated to Chief Justice in 1935. His tenure is most notable for the court's interpretation of wartime legislation, and the subsequent transition back to peace.
Most legislation was upheld as enabled by the defence power. The Curtin Labor government's legislation was rarely successfully challenged, with the court recognizing a necessity that the defence power permit the federal government to govern strongly.
The court allowed for the establishment of a national income tax scheme in the First Uniform Tax case, and upheld legislation declaring the pacifist Jehovah's Witnesses denomination to be a subversive organisation.
Following the war, the court reigned in the scope of the defence power. It struck down several key planks of the Chifley Labor government's reconstruction program, notably an attempt to nationalise the banks in the Bank Nationalisation case (1948), and an attempt to establish a comprehensive medical benefits scheme in the First Pharmaceutical Benefits case (1945).
Other notable cases of the era include:"
High Court of Australia,"The Communist Party case
Proudman v Dayman
R v Burgess; Ex parte Henry"
High Court of Australia,"Dixon court: 1952–1964
Owen Dixon was appointed Chief Justice in 1952, after 23 years as a Justice on the court.
During his tenure the court experienced what some have described as a ""Golden Age"". Dixon had strong influence on the court during this period. The court experienced a marked increase in the number of joint judgements, many of which were led by Dixon. The era has also been noted for the presence of generally good relations among the court's judges.
Notable decisions of the Dixon court include:"
High Court of Australia,"The Boilermakers' case
Second Uniform Tax case
During Dixon's time, the court came to adopt by majority several of the views he had expressed in minority years prior."
High Court of Australia,"Barwick court: 1964–1981
Garfield Barwick was appointed Chief Justice in 1964.
Among other things, the Barwick court is known for controversially deciding several cases on tax avoidance and tax evasion, almost always deciding against the taxation office. Led by Barwick himself in most judgments, the court distinguished between avoidance (legitimately minimising one's tax obligations) and evasion (illegally evading obligations). The decisions effectively nullified the anti-avoidance legislation and led to the proliferation of avoidance schemes in the 1970s, a result which drew much criticism upon the court.
Notable decisions of the Barwick court include:"
High Court of Australia,"Bradley v Commonwealth
The Concrete Pipes case
The Seas and Submerged Lands case
The First and Second Territory Senators' cases
Russell v Russell
Cormack v Cope
Victoria v Commonwealth"
High Court of Australia,"Gibbs court: 1981–1987
Sir Harry Gibbs was appointed as Chief Justice in 1981.
Among the Gibbs court's notable jurisprudence is an interpretive expansion of the Commonwealth's legislative powers. Scholars have also noted a tendency away from the traditions of legalism and conservatism that characterised the Dixon and Barwick courts.
Notable decisions of the court include:"
High Court of Australia,"Koowarta v Bjelke-Petersen
The Tasmanian Dams case
Kioa v West
The Chamberlain case
A v Hayden"
High Court of Australia,"Mason court: 1987–1995
Sir Anthony Mason became Chief Justice in 1987.
The Mason court is known for being one of the most legally liberal benches of the court. It was a notably stable court, with the only change in its bench being the appointment of McHugh following Wilson's retirement.
Some of the decisions of the court in this time were politically controversial. Scholars have noted that the Mason court has tended to receive ""high praise and stringent criticism in equal measure"".
Notable decisions of the court include:"
High Court of Australia,"Cole v Whitfield
Dietrich v The Queen
Mabo v Queensland (No 2)
Polyukhovich v Commonwealth
Sykes v Cleary
Waltons Stores v Maher
This era is also notable for originating Australia's implied freedom of political communication jurisprudence; through the cases Australian Capital Television Pty Ltd v Commonwealth and Theophanous."
High Court of Australia,"Brennan court: 1995–1998
Gerard Brennan succeeded Mason in 1995.
The court experienced many changes in members and significant cases in this three year period.
Notable decisions of the court include:"
High Court of Australia,"Ha v New South Wales
Grollo v Palmer
Kable v DPP
Lange v ABC
The Wik case"
High Court of Australia,"Gleeson court: 1998–2008
Murray Gleeson was appointed Chief Justice in 1998. The Gleeson Court has been regarded as a relatively conservative period of the court's history.
Notable decisions of the court include:"
High Court of Australia,"Al-Kateb v Godwin
Egan v Willis
New South Wales v Commonwealth (Workchoices Case)
R v Tang
Re Wakim; Ex parte McNally
Sue v Hill
Western Australia v Ward
The Yorta Yorta case"
High Court of Australia,"French court: 2008–2017
Robert French was appointed Chief Justice in September 2008.
Notable decisions of the French court include:"
High Court of Australia,"Pape v Commissioner of Taxation
Plaintiff M70
Williams v Commonwealth"
High Court of Australia,"Kiefel court: 2017–2023
Susan Kiefel was appointed Chief Justice in January 2017.
Legal scholars have noted a shift in judicial style within the Kiefel court to one that attempts broad consensus. The frequency of dissenting judgements has decreased; and there have been relatively fewer decisions of a 4:3 split. Extrajudicially, Kiefel has expressed sympathy for judicial practices that maximise consensus and minimise dissent.
Additionally, it has been noted that Kiefel, Keane, and Bell frequently deliver a joint judgement when a unanimous consensus is not reached; often resulting in their decisions being determinative of the majority. This recent practice of the court has been criticised by the scholar Jeremy Gans, with comparisons drawn to the Four Horsemen era of the US Supreme Court.
Notable decisions of the Kiefel court include:"
High Court of Australia,"Re Canavan
Wilkie v Commonwealth
AB v CD; EF v CD
Pell v The Queen
Love v Commonwealth
Palmer v Western Australia"
High Court of Australia,"Gageler court: November 2023 – Present
Stephen Gageler was appointed Chief Justice in November 2023.
Notable decisions of the Gageler court include:"
High Court of Australia,"NZYQ v Minister for Immigration
Vanderstock v Victoria"
High Court of Australia,"Appointment process, composition, and working conditions
Appointment process
High Court Justices are appointed by the Governor-General in Council. The advice of the Council typically consists of the advice of the prime minister assisted by the Attorney-General for Australia.  Advice from the attorney-general is legally required by implication, because since 1979 the attorney-general has been required by statute to consult the attorneys-general of the states (but not the territories). Some reformers have advocated for states to have a determinative role.
Originally, no particular qualifications for appointment to the High Court were required by the Constitution or by statute. The only constitutional requirement is still, since 1977, that the appointee be under the compulsory retirement age of 70. Further qualifications were introduced by statute in 1979: that an appointee be a judge of a federal, state or territory court; or have been an Australian legal practitioner for at least five years. Unlike members of the Parliament, it is not necessary to be an Australian Citizen and a member of the Court may be a dual citizen.
The appointment process has been relatively uncontroversial.  This has, however, been due in part to the opacity of the process. There is no procedure for application, the only definite criteria are the minimal criteria above, and nothing is publicly known until an appointee is announced. Appointment to federal courts was extensively formalised in 2007, except for the High Court, and those reforms were reversed by the next federal government. Some recent attorneys-general have stated that they were consulting widely—to include, for instance, Australian Women Lawyers, the National Association of Commonwealth Legal Centres and the heads of Australian law schools.  However, the nature of the attorney-general's consultations remains almost wholly discretionary.
Some appointments to the High Court have displayed clear political influence. Three early justices had been conservative politicians prior to their appointment as chief justice; and justices Evatt, McTiernan, and Murphy were all Labor party politicians at some stage in their careers prior to being appointed to the High Court by a Labor prime minister."
High Court of Australia,"Composition
The High Court has seven justices—the chief justice and six others.
As of 2022 the High Court has had 44 justices, twelve of whom have been chief justice."
High Court of Australia,"Initial composition
The first High Court bench consisted of three justices: Samuel Griffith, Edmund Barton, and Richard O'Connor.
According to the contemporary press, among those considered and overlooked were Henry Higgins, Isaac Isaacs, Andrew Clark, John Downer, Josiah Symon, and George Wise.
Barton and O'Connor were both members of the federal parliament's government bench. Each appointee had participated in the drafting of the Constitution. All three have been described as relatively conservative justices for the time, and were strongly influenced by law of the United States in their constitutional jurisprudence."
High Court of Australia,"Expansion of the court
In 1906, at the request of the Justices, two seats were added to the bench, with Isaacs and Higgins being appointed.
After O'Connor's death in 1912, an amendment was made to the Judiciary Act expanding the bench to seven, which took place the following year.
Following Isaacs' retirement in 1931, his seat was left vacant, and an amendment to the Judiciary Act reduced the number of seats to six. This, however, led to some decisions being split three-all.
With the appointment of Justice Webb in 1946, the court returned to seven seats, and has had a full bench of seven justices since."
High Court of Australia,"Historical and Current demographics
Only seven of the High Court's fifty-six justices have been women."
High Court of Australia,"The first female appointee to the bench was Mary Gaudron (who was a justice from 1987 to 2003), the second was Susan Crennan (who was a justice from 2005 to 2015), and the third Virginia Bell from 2009 to 2021. 
As of October 2022, for the first time there is now a female majority of the justices on the current bench with justices Kiefel, Gordon, Gleeson, and Jayne Jagot (as replacement for Patrick Keane)
In 2017, Justice Kiefel became the first woman to be appointed Chief Justice.
Michael Kirby was the first openly gay justice of the Court. He was replaced by Virginia Bell, who is the first lesbian justice on the bench.
Twenty-eight appointees have been residents of New South Wales, twenty-five of which graduated from Sydney Law School. Sixteen have come from Victoria, eight from Queensland, and four from Western Australia. No resident of South Australia, Tasmania, or any of the territories has ever been appointed to the bench.
The majority of justices have been of Protestant backgrounds, with a smaller number of a Catholic background. Two Jewish members have been appointed, Sir Isaac Isaacs and James Edelman, making them the only members of the court to have a faith background other than Christianity. However, many justices have refrained from commenting publicly upon their religious views.
Almost all judges on the High Court have taken silk in some form prior to their appointment, in the form of appointment to King's Counsel (KC), Queen's Counsel (QC) or Senior Counsel (SC). The exceptions are Starke, McTiernan, Webb, Walsh, Kirby, French, Edelman and Jagot.
Thirteen justices of the court previously served in a Parliament, however no previous parliamentarian has been appointed to the court since Lionel Murphy in 1975."
High Court of Australia,"Working conditions
Salaries are determined by the Remuneration Tribunal. The regular justices receive $551,880, while the Chief justice receives $608,150. High Court judicial compensation is constitutionally protected from decrease during appointment.
The court typically sits for two weeks for each calendar month of the year, excepting for January and July in which no sitting days are held."
High Court of Australia,"Judicial associates
Each judge engages associates for assistance in exercising their functions. The usual practice is to engage two associates simultaneously for a one-year term. Additionally, the chief justice is assisted by a legal research officer employed by the court library.
Associates have varying responsibilities; typically their work involves legal research, assistance in preparation for oral arguments, tipping in court during oral argument, editing judgments and assisting with extrajudicial functions, such as speech-writing. Associates are typically recruited after having graduated from an Australian law school with grades at or near the top of their class. Hundreds of applications for associate positions are received by the High Court annually.
Many High Court associates have gone on to illustrious careers. Examples of former associates include Adrienne Stone and Nicola Roxon.
Three High Court justices served as associates prior to their elevation to the bench: Aickin to Dixon, Gageler to Mason, and Edelman to Toohey."
High Court of Australia,"Facilities
Building
The High Court of Australia building is located on the shore of Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra's Parliamentary Triangle. The High Court was designed between 1972 and 1974 by the Australian architect Christopher Kringas (1936–1975), a director of the firm Edwards Madigan Torzillo and Briggs. The building was constructed from 1975 to 1980. Its international architectural significance is recognised by the Union of International Architects register of Architectural Heritage of the 20th Century. It received the Australian Institute of Architects Canberra Medallion in 1980 and the award for Enduring Architecture in 2007. The High Court was added to the Commonwealth Heritage List in 2004."
High Court of Australia,"Online
The High Court makes itself generally available to the public through its own website. Judgment alerts, available on the Court's website and by email with free subscription, provide subscribers with notice of upcoming judgments (normally a week beforehand) and, almost immediately after the delivery of a major judgment, with a brief summary of it (normally not more than one page). All of the court's judgments, as well as transcripts of its hearings since 2009 and other materials, are made available, free of charge, through the Australasian Legal Information Institute. The court has recently established on its website an ""eresources"" page, containing for each case its name, keywords, mentions of relevant legislation and a link to the full judgment; these links go to the original text from 2000 onward, scanned texts from 1948 to 1999 and facsimiles from the Commonwealth Law Reports for their first 100 volumes (1903 to 1959); there are also facsimiles of some unreported judgments (1906–2002). Since October 2013, audio-visual recordings of full-court hearings held in Canberra have been available on its website."
High Court of Australia,"Gallery
See also
Australian court hierarchy
Judiciary Act 1903
Judiciary of Australia
Law of Australia
List of chief justices of Australia by time in office
List of High Court of Australia cases
List of justices of the High Court of Australia
List of law schools attended by Australian High Court justices"
High Court of Australia,"Notes
References
Attribution
This Wikipedia article was originally based on High Court of Australia, King Edward Tce, Parkes, ACT, Australia, entry number 105557 in the Australian Heritage Database published by the Commonwealth of Australia  2004 under CC-BY 4.0 licence, accessed on 20 May 2020."
High Court of Australia,"Further reading
Burnside, Sarah (2011). ""Australian Judicial Biography: Past, Present and Future"". Australian Journal of Politics and History. 57 (2): 221. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8497.2011.01593.x. ISSN 0004-9522.
Carter, David J.; Brown, James; Rahmani, Adel (2016). ""Reading the High Court at a Distance: Topic Modelling the Legal Subject Matter and Judicial Activity of the High Court of Australia, 1903–2015"" (PDF). University of New South Wales Law Journal. 39 (2): 1300. Archived from the original (PDF) on 19 February 2017.
Fricke, Graham (1986). Judges of the High Court. Hawthorn, Victoria: Hutchinson of Australia. ISBN 978-0-09-157150-4."
High Court of Australia,External links
High Court of Australia,"High Court of Australia official website
High Court Documentary, a short documentary on the High Court and its building.
The Highest Court Documentary film, 1998, DVD. Only film ever permitted to be made of the High Court in session, before video recordings of its proceedings.
Judiciary Act 1903 (Cth)
High Court of Australia Act 1979 (Cth)"
2000s Australian drought,"The 2000s drought in Australia, also known as the millennium drought, is said by some to be the worst drought recorded since European settlement.
The drought affected most of southern Australia, including its largest cities and largest agricultural region (the Murray–Darling basin). It commenced with low rainfall conditions in late 1996 and through 1997, and worsened through particularly dry years in 2001 and 2002. By 2003 it was recognised as the worst drought on record.
The year 2006 was the driest on record for many parts of the country and conditions remained hot and dry through to early 2010. The emergence of La Niña weather conditions in 2010 rapidly ended the drought, and led to floods in some locations, particularly in central and southern Queensland.
The drought placed extreme pressure on agricultural production and urban water supply in much of southern Australia. It has led to the construction of six major seawater desalination plants to provide water to Australia's major cities, and to changes in the management of water in the Murray–Darling basin, particularly the formation of the Murray–Darling Basin Authority."
2000s Australian drought,"Prelude to drought
Beginning in the second half of 1991, a very severe drought occurred throughout Queensland which intensified in 1994 and 1995 to become the worst on record.
By October 1994, part of the upper Darling River system had collapsed and the Condamine River had reverted to a series of ponds. Across the state 40% of Queensland was drought declared. From July to August 1995 the drought was further influenced by a strong El Niño weather pattern associated with high temperatures. According to Primary Industries Minister, Ed Casey, ""the drought affected region stretched in a 200 km to 300 km wide strip from Stanthorpe to Charters Towers"". So few wheat and barley crops survived, about half the usual for that year, that grains had to be imported from other states."
2000s Australian drought,"Geographic and seasonal characteristics, and compounding factors
The Bureau of Meteorology has characterised the Millennium Drought as primarily affecting:"
2000s Australian drought,"Southern Australia (rainfall in northern Australia was above average during the same period).
Cool season (April to October) rainfall, other than for Tasmania where rainfall was well below historical averages in both warm and cool seasons.
Although the period of the Millennium Drought was characterised by several El Niño weather patterns, which affect the entire southern Pacific region and typically bring hot and dry conditions to eastern Australia, it cannot be explained purely by natural variability. The Bureau of Meteorology concluded that climate change exacerbated the extent and severity of the drought.
The effects of the drought on water availability was compounded by historically high temperatures over the same period. The Bureau of Meteorology's head of climate analysis, David Jones, released statistics showing that in 2007 South Australia, NSW, Victoria, the ACT and the Murray–Darling basin all set temperature records by a very large margin. 2007 was the eleventh year in a row that the Murray–Darling basin had experienced above average temperatures and was (at that time) Australia's sixth-warmest year on record. Jones warned that ""There is absolutely no debate that Australia is warming... it may be time to stop describing south-eastern Australia as gripped by drought and instead accept the extreme dry as permanent."""
2000s Australian drought,"Timeline
1996 to 2000: patchy rainfall in the south-east
Dry conditions began to emerge in south-eastern Australia during late 1996 and accentuated during the strong 1997 El Niño event. Rainfall in 1998, 1999 and 2000 was closer to average, with isolated areas affected by rainfall well below average."
2000s Australian drought,"2001 to 2005: El Niño brings on strong drought conditions
According to the Bureau of Meteorology, much of eastern Australia experienced a dry 2001. 2002 was one of Australia's driest and warmest years on record, with 'remarkably widespread' dry conditions, particularly in the eastern half of the country which was again affected by El Niño conditions. It was, at the time, Australia's fourth-driest year since 1900.
The El Niño weather pattern broke down during 2003 but occasional strong rainfall in 2003 and 2004 failed to alleviate the cumulative effect of persistently low rainfall in south-eastern Australia, with some measurement stations having recorded below average rainfall for eight consecutive years. Rainfall in early 2005 remained below average, and better rainfall in the second half of the year again failed to break continuing drought conditions in the south-east."
2000s Australian drought,"2006 and 2007: extreme dry and hot conditions in the Murray–Darling basin
South-east Australia experienced its second-driest year on record in 2006, particularly affecting the major agricultural region of the Murray–Darling basin. Despite slightly above normal summer/autumn rainfall, the late-winter to mid-spring rainfalls failed, resulting in the 2006 annual rainfall being 40 to 60% below normal over most of southern Australia. The average rainfall in the state of South Australia was the lowest since 1900 with only 108.8 millimetres (4.28 in) of rain recorded compared to the normal winter/spring average of 376.6 millimetres (14.83 in). Across Victoria and the Murray–Darling Basin the season was the second-driest since 1900. While New South Wales' rainfall was boosted by above normal falls along the north coast of the state, the state's average rainfall for the season was the third lowest since 1900. The situation was exacerbated by temperatures being the highest on record since the 1950s.
In early 2007, senior weather forecasters predicted that the drought would ease along the east coast with a return to average rainfall from late February 2007. Forecasters believed that the El Niño effect that had been driving the drought since 2006 had ended.
However, this did not turn out to be correct as 2007 saw record temperatures across the south of Australia, and only patchy rain. Promising early year rains transitioned into a very dry July–October period. Heavy rainfall in June and July, particularly in coastal regions of New South Wales and in Victoria's Gippsland region, together with tentative forecasts of a La Niña event, brought hope that the drought may have ended. In August 2007, the Darling River flowed again after nearly a year of no flows; however, the Murray-Darling Basin experienced their seventh consecutive year of below-average rain and inflows into the Basin during the winter of 2007 were still amongst the lowest on record, though marginally better than those of the winter of 2006 which had been the driest on record.
At the end of 2007 the Bureau of Meteorology estimated that south-eastern Australia had missed the equivalent of a full year's rain in the previous 11 years."
2000s Australian drought,"2008 and 2009: continuing hot and dry conditions
2008 and 2009 saw continuing hot and dry conditions in south-eastern Australia, with occasional heavy rainfall failing to break the continuing drought. The effects of the drought were exacerbated by Australia's (then) second-hottest year on record in 2009, with record-breaking heatwaves in January, February and the second half of the year.
The drought in Sydney eased around April 2008 and Sydney's main water catchments reached 65 percent, 25 per cent fuller than they were at the same time the previous year. However, Victoria remained drought affected, with Melbourne's water supplies dipping to around 30% by July 2008. In Tasmania drought conditions worsened in 2008, with many areas reporting no significant rainfall for three years."
2000s Australian drought,"2010 and 2011: La Niña finally breaks the drought
Australia's weather pattern transitioned rapidly to a wet La Niña pattern during the autumn of 2010, resulting in record-breaking rains in the Murray-Darling basin and well above average rainfall across the south-east. For many locations this was the first year of above-average rainfall since 1996. The rainfall dramatically increased surface water storage and soil moisture, effectively ending the drought in the south-east.
While 70% of New South Wales was in drought at the beginning of 2010, the entire state was officially out of drought by December. The entire state experienced its wettest spring on record. Several rivers, including rivers in the outback had flooded several times, and many dams were overflowing, including the Burrendong, Burrinjuck and Pindari Dams. Canberra's dams were above 90% capacity.
The 2010 Victorian storms in March did little to help Melbourne's storage levels, but steady winter rains, and the 2010 Victorian floods in September, rapidly increased storage levels. Melbourne also recorded its average annual rainfall in 2010 for the first time since 1996, and its wettest spring since 1993. By 2011, Victoria was drought free for the first time in almost 15 years and was instead gripped by very wet conditions and severe flooding.
Queensland experienced heavy storms in December 2010 and January 2011, resulting in widespread flooding.
Despite Western Australia experiencing its fifth-wettest spring on record, drought in the South West, Gascoyne and Pilbara regions of Western Australia's intensified in 2010, with the regions experiencing their driest year on record. Perth's dams registered their lowest inflows on record with the city itself recording its third-driest year on record, along with the hottest spring on record.
In South Australia, only two regions in the Riverland remained in drought. Heavy rains elsewhere led to bumper harvests over much of the state, this in turn led to the largest mouse plague since 1993 across parts of South Australia, West Australia and Victoria. While some farmers tried to replant, in some areas many gave up as millions of mice covered their fields. Farmers often characterised the plague as being worse than the drought."
2000s Australian drought,"Effects of the drought
Agriculture
Agricultural production was severely affected. Australia's cotton production had dropped, with the smallest area planted in 20 years, a 66% reduction compared to five years earlier which was considered a ""normal"" year. The crop had been half its usual size for three of the previous five years. Water use by the industry fell by 37% between 2000/01 and 2004/05, due mainly to the drought. On the order of 20 cotton communities and 10,000 people directly employed by the cotton industry were impacted by the drought. The main areas affected were in New South Wales: Menindee where the area under production was reduced by 100%, Bourke had reduced the area under production by 99%, Walgett has reduced the area under production by 95%, the Macquarie River has reduced the area under production by 74% and the Gwydir River had reduced the area under production by 60%.  In Queensland the worst-affected areas were Biloela which reduced the area under production by 100%, at Dirranbandi there was a 91% reduction, Central Highlands had reduced the area under production by 82% and Darling Downs had reduced the area under production by 78%. Bourke had adequate water for only one cotton crop from 2001 to 2006. Stock feed was also becoming scarce and farmers were finding it difficult to feed cattle and sheep.  Dairy producers were hit particularly hard by the drought with 2004 a particularly bleak year in the sector, as a drought-caused drop in production sent revenue in the industry down by 4.5%."
2000s Australian drought,"Environment
In June 2008 it became known that an expert panel had warned of long term, maybe irreversible, severe ecological damage for the whole Murray-Darling basin if it did not receive sufficient water by October of that year.
The very low flow to the Lower River Murray in South Australia (over Lock 1) resulted in the lowest water levels in over 90 years of records. The lowest water levels during the extreme low flow period were reached in April 2009 and represented a 64% and 73% reduction in the volume of Lakes Alexandrina and Albert respectively. The low water levels and inflows meant there was no outflow from the lake system during the extreme low flow period. During this period the lake levels fell below mean sea level (approximately +0.2 m AHD) downstream of the barrages, reversing the usual positive hydraulic gradient from the lake to the sea. The seawater intrusion, lack of flushing, evapoconcentration and increased resuspension resulted in severe water quality impacts
Exposure and oxidation of acid sulfate soils due to falling water levels from 2007 to 2009 in the Lower River Murray and Lower Lakes also resulted in acidification of soils, lake and ground water. Large scale engineering interventions were undertaken to prevent further acidification, including construction of a bund and pumping of water to prevent exposure and acidification of Lake Albert. Management of acidification in the Lower Lakes was also undertaken using aerial limestone dosing.
Ironically, the easing of the drought led to a large blackwater (low dissolved oxygen) event across a large area of the River Murray during high flows in 2011. Organic carbon (dead plant material) that had been retained in the landscape during the drought was mobilised into the river system and the breakdown of this consumed dissolved oxygen.
The environmental legacy of the drought persists in parts of the system. For example, as of 2014 Lake Albert salinity was still elevated four years after the drought, and acidity persists in soils and groundwater."
2000s Australian drought,"Urban water
Australia had previously relied solely on water from dams for agriculture and consumption. The drought changed the way Australia treated its water resources. Because of the long-term effects of the drought now showing, many state governments attempted to ""drought-proof"" their states with more permanent solutions such as grey-water water-recycling, government rebates for home-owners to install water tanks, and tougher restrictions on industries.
The citizens of Toowoomba voted on, and rejected, a referendum on using recycled sewage water. As a result, no recycled sewage was added to Toowoomba's drinking supply.
Most Australian mainland capital cities faced a major water crisis with less than 50% of water storages remaining."
2000s Australian drought,"Sydney
Plans for a desalination project in Sydney were temporarily halted in 2005 after public opposition and the discovery of new underground aquifers. By late 2006, however, with Sydney's water storages plunging to their lowest levels since the 1950s – around 33% of capacity – the authorities decided to reinstate the project.  A$1.8 billion desalination plant was then constructed at Kurnell, in southern Sydney, opening in the summer of 2009–10.
The drought in Sydney eased around April 2008 and Sydney's main water catchments reached 65 percent, 25 per cent fuller than they were at the same time the previous year."
2000s Australian drought,"Melbourne
Melbourne had rain up to 90% below the average for September and October 2006, compounding the problem of extremely low rainfall from the preceding winter months. Melbourne had also experienced high temperatures throughout October causing increased evaporation of water in dams and reservoirs, which resulted in their levels falling by around 0.1% a day. As a result of all these factors Melbourne was put on tight water restrictions and as of July 2009, water levels in its dams were at a mere 27% of capacity.
Melbourne had had Stage 3a water restrictions from 1 April 2007, and narrowly avoided Stage 4 restrictions, with the minimum storage level of around 25.8% remaining above the threshold of 25% for enacting Stage 4. This led to the construction of the North-South Pipeline which would divert water out of the Goulburn River and supply it to Melbourne to meet water demands. Many towns in Victoria were close to running out of water, with some of the few Victorian towns without water restrictions being in the East Gippsland water area, where reservoir levels were above 80%.
The Victorian Government also began building a $3.1 billion 150Gl (gigalitre) desalination plant, one of the world's largest. When completed in 2011, it would be capable of supplying up to a third of Melbourne's water needs.
The 2010 Victorian storms in March did little to help Melbourne's storage levels, but steady winter rains, and the 2010 Victorian floods in September, rapidly increased storage levels. 2010 saw Australia officially record its wettest spring on record due to a moderate to strong La Nina developing over the region. Water restrictions were reduced to stage 3 on 2 April, and stage 2 on 1 September."
2000s Australian drought,"Brisbane
Brisbane water levels reduced to under 20% of capacity, having had no substantial inflow for five years.
Brisbane organised to be supplied via larger dams, a pipeline and possibly also recycling. The Gold Coast Desalination Plant was constructed at Bilinga, delivering water from 2009.
The drought in Queensland had mostly eased with Brisbane recording very heavy rain in May 2009, and premier Anna Bligh announcing that South East Queensland was no longer experiencing drought. Brisbane's dams were now at full capacity with the state in general experiencing its wettest spring on record. The end of the drought and heavy spring rains in Queensland culminated with devastating floods in December 2010 and January 2011."
2000s Australian drought,"Perth
In November 2006 Perth completed a seawater desalination plant that will supply the city with 17% of its needs.
In 2010 Perth's dams registered their lowest inflows on record with the city itself recording its third-driest year on record, along with the hottest spring on record."
2000s Australian drought,"Adelaide
In South Australia work on a small pilot desalination plant at Port Stanvac, costing $10 million and with a capacity of 100,000 litres per day, commenced in January 2008, and was completed on 4 August 2008. In 2007 the Federal Government pledged to contribute funds and construction began on a $1.1 billion desalination plant with a capacity of 50 gigalitres.
In June 2009 the South Australian Government announced that the plant's annual output was to be doubled from 50Gl to 100Gl, approximately 270 megalitres per day, providing up to 50% of Adelaide's domestic water supply."
2000s Australian drought,"Electricity supply
The drought had a material impact on Australia's National Electricity Market, particularly during autumn and winter 2007. It reduced output from major hydro-electric generators Snowy Hydro and Hydro Tasmania, and also constrained output from some coal-fired generators that use fresh water for cooling.
The Australian Energy Regulator found that these effects led to noticeably higher prices from around March 2007, but that these effects had largely eased by September."
2000s Australian drought,"Policy responses
National Plan for Water Security
Then Prime Minister John Howard responded to extreme weather conditions to announce a major water policy reform agenda in January 2007, known as the National Plan for Water Security.
This led to the passage of the Water Act (2007) by the Commonwealth Parliament, the formation of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority in 2008 and the publication of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan under the Gillard government in 2012."
2000s Australian drought,"Drought assistance
On 27 April 2012, Agriculture Minister Joe Ludwig stated that the two final areas in Australia receiving federal 'exceptional circumstances' drought support, Bundarra and Eurobodalla in New South Wales, would cease being eligible the following week. The Federal Government had provided $4.5 billion in drought assistance since 2001. The related move to end the exceptional circumstances interest rate subsidy program was criticised as premature by the NSW Farmers Association and National Farmers' Federation. Research has shown the failure of crops and the financial problems this brings about can lead to increased stress and even suicides in some cases. To counter this rural Victoria invested in improving their mental health services during the drought period of 2001 to 2007. This played a major role in reducing the number of drought related suicides during this period."
2000s Australian drought,"See also
Drought in Australia
Climate change in Australia"
2000s Australian drought,"
== References =="
Judiciary of Australia,"The judiciary of Australia comprises judges who sit in federal courts and courts of the States and Territories of Australia. The High Court of Australia sits at the apex of the Australian court hierarchy as the ultimate court of appeal on matters of both federal and State law.
The large number of courts in Australia have different procedural powers and characteristics, different jurisdictional limits, different remedial powers and different cost structures.
Under the Australian Constitution, the judicial power of the Commonwealth is vested in the High Court of Australia and such other federal courts as may be created by the federal Parliament. These courts include the Federal Court of Australia and the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia. Federal jurisdiction can also be vested in State courts.
The Supreme Courts of the States and Territories are superior courts of record with general and unlimited jurisdiction within their own State or Territory.
Like the Supreme Courts of the States, the Federal Circuit and Family Court and Federal Court are superior courts of record, which means that they have certain inherent procedural and contempt powers. But unlike their State counterparts, their subject-matter jurisdiction must be conferred by statute. Under the doctrine of ""accrued jurisdiction"", the Federal Court can, however, rule on issues outside its explicit jurisdiction, provided that they are part of a larger controversy that the court does have jurisdiction over.
The High Court has limited trial powers, but very rarely exercises them. It has ample power to transfer cases started there to another, more appropriate court, so that the High Court can conserve its energies for its appellate functions.
Common law and equity are administered by the same courts, in a manner similar to that of the Judicature Acts in the United Kingdom. Legal and equitable remedies may be pursued in the one action in the one court."
Judiciary of Australia,"Judges
Judges are appointed by the executive government, without intervention by the existing judiciary. Once appointed, judges have tenure and there are restrictions on their removal from office. For example, a federal judge may not be removed from office except by the Governor-General upon an address of both Houses of Parliament for proved misbehaviour. Judges in Australia are appointed by the Executive government of the relevant jurisdiction, and most judges have previously practised as a barrister. Federal judges may only serve until age 70. There is no constitutional limit on the length of service of state court judges, but state laws usually fix a retirement age. For example, in New South Wales, judges must retire at age 72, though they can remain as ""acting judges"" until age 76."
Judiciary of Australia,"Australian court hierarchy
The hierarchy consists of a variety of courts and tribunals at both the federal and State and Territory levels, with the High Court being the highest court in the Australian judicial system. A single body of Australian common law is applied in the various Australian courts, and ultimately determined by the High Court now that appeals to the (British) Judicial Committee of the Privy Council have been abolished."
Judiciary of Australia,"Superior and inferior courts
The High Court has described the concept of a superior court (and associated 'notions derived from the position of pre-Judicature common law courts') as having 'no ready application in Australia to federal courts.' Despite this, Australian courts are frequently characterised as either 'superior' or 'inferior.' The Federal Court and the supreme courts of each State and Territory are generally considered to be superior courts.
The Supreme Court of Victoria includes a specialist list in the Common Law Division known as the Commercial Court. The Supreme Court of Queensland has a similarly specialized docket known as the Commercial List.
There is no single definition of the term 'superior court' (or 'superior court of record'). In many respects Australian superior courts are similar to the Senior Courts of England and Wales. In Australia, superior courts generally:"
Judiciary of Australia,"have unlimited jurisdiction in law and equity, or at least are not subject to jurisdictional limits as to the remedies they may grant;
determine appeals, at least as part of their jurisdiction;
are composed of judges whose individual decisions are not subject to judicial review or appeal to a single judge;
are composed of judges entitled to the style and title The Honourable Justice; and
regularly publish their decisions in written form.
Inferior courts are those beneath superior courts in the appellate hierarchy, and are generally seen to include the magistrates' and district (or county) court of each State as well as the Federal Circuit and Family Court. Inferior courts are typically characterised by:"
Judiciary of Australia,"jurisdiction conferred by statute and limited as to subject matter or the quantum of relief; and
amenability to judicial review by a single judge of a superior court where a right of appeal is not available."
Judiciary of Australia,"Federal courts
These courts among them have jurisdiction over Commonwealth law, that is, law made by the Federal parliament of Australia."
Judiciary of Australia,"High Court of Australia
The High Court is the highest court in the Australian judicial hierarchy. It was created by section 71 of the Constitution. It has appellate jurisdiction over all other courts. It also has original jurisdiction in certain matters, including powers of judicial review. The High Court of Australia is paramount to all federal courts. Further, it has an constitutionally entrenched general power of appeal from the Supreme Courts of the States.
Appeals to the High Court are by special leave only, which is generally only granted in cases of public importance, matters involving the interpretation of the Commonwealth Constitution, or where the law has been inconsistently applied across the States and Territories. Therefore, in the vast majority of cases, the appellate divisions of the Supreme Courts of each State and Territory and the Federal Court are the final courts of appeal. 
Appeals from Australian courts to the Privy Council were initially possible, however the Privy Council (Limitation of Appeals) Act 1968 closed off all appeals to the Privy Council in matters involving federal legislation, and the Privy Council (Appeals from the High Court) Act 1975 closed almost all routes of appeal from the High Court. The Australia Act 1986 eliminated appeals from State Supreme Courts to the Privy Council. Appeals from the High Court to the Privy Council are now only theoretically possible in inter se matters with leave of the High Court under section 74 of the Constitution; however, the High Court has indicated it will not grant such leave in the future."
Judiciary of Australia,"Federal Court of Australia
The Federal Court primarily hears matters relating to corporations, trade practices, industrial relations, bankruptcy, customs, immigration and other areas of federal law. The court has original jurisdiction in these areas, and also has the power to hear appeals from a number of tribunals and other bodies (and, in cases not involving family law, from the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia.)
The court is a superior court of limited jurisdiction, but below the High Court of Australia in the hierarchy of federal courts, and was created by the Federal Court of Australia Act in 1976.
Decisions of the High Court are binding on the Federal Court. There is an appeal level of the Federal Court (the ""Full Court"" of the Federal Court), which consists of several judges, usually three but occasionally five in very significant cases."
Judiciary of Australia,"Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia
The Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia is an inferior and intermediate court formed from the merger of the Family Court and the Federal Circuit Court with jurisdiction over matters broadly relating to family law and child support, administrative law, admiralty law, bankruptcy, copyright, human rights, industrial law, migration, privacy and trade practices.
The Federal Circuit and Family Court is split into two divisions:"
Judiciary of Australia,"Division 1 is the former Family Court of Australia and is a superior court of record for dealing with family law matters. It contains 35 judges.
Division 2 is the former Federal Circuit Court of Australia, and deals with the bulk of family law matters prior to the establishment of the Court, as well as general federal law matters such as migration, bankruptcy and admiralty. It contains 76 judges, 55 of which are specialists in family law and the remainder experts in various areas of general federal law and migration.
The Court operate under the leadership of one Chief Justice, supported by one Deputy Chief Judge who hold a dual commission to both Divisions of the Court. A second Deputy Chief Judge assists in the management of the general federal law and Fair Work jurisdictions of Division 2."
Judiciary of Australia,"State and territory courts and tribunals
Each state and territory has its own court hierarchy, with varying jurisdiction of each court. However, all states and territories have a supreme court, which is a superior court of record and is the highest court within that state or territory. These courts also have appeal divisions, known by various names across the country, including the full court, court of appeal, and court of criminal appeal.
Decisions of the High Court are binding on all Australian courts, including state and territory supreme courts.
State and territory courts can sometimes exercise federal jurisdiction (that is, decide federal matters). However, an attempt by the states and the Commonwealth to pass legislation that would cross-vest state judicial powers in the federal courts was struck down by the High Court in Re Wakim; Ex parte McNally, as being unconstitutional. Notwithstanding this failure, however, both state and federal courts can exercise an ""accrued jurisdiction,"" which enables them to hear all legal issues arising from a single set of facts. This enables all courts to deal with virtually all issues arising from the facts of a case, provided that the particular court has jurisdiction to hear the principal cause of action.
Most of the states have two further levels of courts, which are comparable across the country. The district court (or County Court in Victoria) handles most criminal trials for less serious indictable offences, and most civil matters below a threshold (usually around $1 million). The magistrates' court (or local court) handles summary matters and smaller civil matters. In jurisdictions without district or county courts, most of those matters are dealt with by the supreme courts. In Tasmania and the two mainland territories, however, there is only a magistrates' court below the Supreme Court.
In three external territories (Norfolk Island, Christmas Island, and Cocos (Keeling) Islands) there is a supreme court and a magistrates' court or court of petty sessions. The supreme courts are staffed by judges of other courts, usually the Federal Court. Appeals from those courts lie to the full Federal Court. As these territories have very small populations, the courts only sit from time to time as needed.  The remaining external territories (including Antarctica) do not have permanent courts. In the event of a case arising from these territories, the courts of the ACT have jurisdiction.
All the states and territories, with the exception of Tasmania, have a civil and administrative tribunal. These hear cases relating to lesser state or territory administrative disputes (involving some individual, business or government body). These commonly involve actions by persons bound to act pursuant to some form of devolved legislation; such as environmental regulations or rental tenancy regulations.
A table of the court hierarchy and civil and administrative tribunals of the Australian states and territories follows here:"
Judiciary of Australia,"See also
Drug courts in Australia
Law enforcement in Australia
List of Commonwealth courts and tribunals
Victoria Bar Association"
Judiciary of Australia,"References
Further reading"
Judiciary of Australia,"Barker, Cat (12 September 2018). ""Crime and law enforcement: A quick guide to key internet links"". Parliament of Australia."
Water restrictions in Australia,"Water restrictions have been enacted in many cities and regions in Australia, which is the Earth's driest inhabited continent, in response to chronic water shortages resulting from the widespread drought. Depending upon the location, these can include restrictions on watering lawns, using sprinkler systems, washing vehicles, hosing pavement, refilling swimming pools, etc. Overpopulation, evidence of drying climates, coupled with corresponding reductions in the supply of drinking water has led various state governments to consider alternative water sources to supplement existing sources, and to implement ""water inspectors"" who can issue penalties to those who waste water. Many states describe the different levels of water restrictions in terms of ""stages"": starting at Stage 1, for the least restrictive, going up as far as Stage 8. The highest level reached in the current drought has been stage 7 for Kingaroy. There are different definitions given to each ""stage"" in different states."
Water restrictions in Australia,"Water restrictions by state or territory
Australian Capital Territory
There are presently four stages of temporary water restrictions which can be imposed by ACTEW Corporation:"
Water restrictions in Australia,"Canberra was subject to Stage 1 restrictions from 1 November 2005, which were increased to Stage 2 after a year on 1 November 2006. The continuing drought led to a further increase to Stage 3 from 16 December 2006; the restrictions were maintained at Stage 3 throughout 2007 and 2008. From 1 November 2010 Canberra moved to Permanent Water Saving Rules due to heavy rain bringing water storages close to capacity."
Water restrictions in Australia,"New South Wales
The different classification levels of water restrictions in New South Wales vary widely, and are set by the different authorities responsible for water throughout the state."
Water restrictions in Australia,"Sydney
The following levels have been used by Sydney Water to describe the different stages of water restrictions it has imposed. Level 3 Water Restriction Information is current as of 2009. Level 1 and Level 2 Water Restriction Information is current as of November 2019."
Water restrictions in Australia,"Sydney Water Restrictions (2019–present)
Level 1 Restrictions:
In late May 2019, it was announced that Sydney Water will be reinstating Level 1 water restrictions throughout the greater Sydney area. These restrictions began on 1 June 2019, as a result of an extremely dry year. As of 29 May 2019, Greater Sydney water supply levels are 53.4%, which is significantly lower than May 2018, in which supply levels were 73% in major catchments.
Level 2 Restrictions:
On 21 November 2019, the NSW government announced Level 2 water restrictions. These restrictions commenced on 10 December 2019, replacing the level 1 water restrictions. Level 2 restrictions have been brought in earlier than the Metropolitan Water Plan (2017) recommends, with dam levels currently at 46.1%. Premier Gladys Berejiklian, and Minister for Water, Property and Housing, Melinda Pavey announced the restrictions early as a precautionary measure, and to stave off the implementation of Level 3 restrictions later on.
Level 3 Restrictions:
Upon the commencement of the Level 2 water restrictions in December 2019, Minister for Water, Property and Housing, Melinda Pavey announced that Level 3 water restrictions should be expected early in the year of 2020.
Sydney Water Restrictions (2003–2009)
Falling dam levels prompted Sydney Water to impose Level 1 water restrictions on the Sydney area from 1 October 2003.
When these restrictions failed to stem the reduction in the city's water supplies as a result of continuing drought, and with dam levels dropping below 50 per cent, Level 2 water restrictions were introduced from 1 June 2004. Further reductions in dam levels to below 40 per cent of capacity led to an increase to Level 3 water restrictions from 1 June 2005. Level 3 water restrictions were in place as of February 2008. Since June 2009, though, Sydney Water replaced water restrictions with Water Wise Rules. The Rules include:"
Water restrictions in Australia,"All hoses must now have a trigger nozzle.
Hand held hoses, sprinklers and watering systems may be used only before 10 am and after 4 pm on any day – to avoid the heat of the day.
No hosing of hard surfaces such as paths and driveways. Washing vehicles is allowed.
Fire hoses may be used for fire fighting activities only.
To deal with its water shortage, New South Wales has followed the same path as Western Australia, in which a desalination plant for Sydney was built at an estimated cost of $1.3 billion. The Sydney Desalination Plant is to be turned on when Sydney's drinking water level reaches 60% capacity, and water restrictions will be in place when drinking water reaches 50% capacity.
Sydney Water has imposed fines of $220 for violations of the rules for individuals, $550 for businesses, and $2,200 for water theft. Rules are enforced by Sydney Water staff through random checks."
Water restrictions in Australia,"Regional NSW
As different towns in regional New South Wales take their drinking water from different sources, different levels of water restrictions apply. The levels or stages which apply in certain towns are as follows:"
Water restrictions in Australia,"Albury – no restrictions
Armidale – Level 5 from October 2019
Bathurst – Level 3 from 26 November 2019
Cobar – Stage 5
Dubbo – From Saturday 1 June 2019 Level 2 Water Restrictions are in place.
Gosford – Stage 4 from 1 October 2006
Goulburn had Stage 5 water restrictions imposed from 1 October 2004, and went on to win a National Water Conservation Award for Excellence due to the water which had been conserved. From 5 July 2007, Goulburn relaxed its water restrictions to Level 3.
Griffith – Stage 2 introduced on 27 November 2007
Leeton – Level 3 introduced on 9 October 2007 but lowered to level 2 on 1 November 2008
Newcastle – Level 1 from 16 September 2019
Orange – Level 5 from 6 October 2019
Port Macquarie – Stage 2 from September 2019
Taree – Level 3 from 11 November 2019
Wagga Wagga – Permanent Water Conservation Measure"
Water restrictions in Australia,"Northern Territory
The Territory's water resources are managed and protected by the Northern Territory (NT) Water Act 1992.
In 2017 the Northern Territory Government introduced Compulsory Water Conservation Measures to the Katherine region to take pressure off of their groundwater supplies. This meant:"
Water restrictions in Australia,"Odd numbered properties can only water from 6pm-8am on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays.
Even numbered properties can only water from 6pm-8am on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays.
No watering on Friday.
No watering on hard surfaces such as pavements, driveways, or road surfaces.
The Northern Territory do not currently have any restrictions in place."
Water restrictions in Australia,"Queensland
Some of the details of the different stages of water restrictions which apply in Queensland for the residential sector are as follows:"
Water restrictions in Australia,"Although some regions of Queensland have had traditionally high rainfalls, some regions of Queensland have been subject to the toughest water restrictions in place in Australia. The highest level of water restrictions reached the drought was stage 7 for Kingaroy. Toowoomba, Brisbane and South East Queensland reached Level 6 restrictions.
On 13 May 2005, 13 local councils in southeast Queensland, including those in Brisbane, agreed to impose Stage 1 water restrictions, due to drying dams.
These restrictions were increased to Stage 2 from 3 October 2005, which at the time were described as the ""toughest water restrictions in southeast Queensland's history"", except the Gold Coast which had been on Stage 5 restrictions since 2004.
Stage 3 water restrictions were imposed on the region from 13 June 2006 amid projections that water storage levels would drop to 5% within 26 months.
Water restrictions continued to increase, to Stage 4 from 1 November 2006, stage 5 from 10 April 2007, and up to Stage 6 from 23 November 2007.
The Queensland Water Commission has relaxed water restrictions, with the introduction of High Level Water restrictions as of 31 July 2008.
Other towns and regions of Queensland are subject to different levels of water restrictions, as set out below:"
Water restrictions in Australia,"Cairns – Level 1 restrictions from October 2002 till about January 2004.
Gold Coast – Stage 6 from 23 November 2007, Stage 5 from 10 April 2007, Stage 4 from 1 November 2006. The Hinze Dam, which is the Gold Coast's main water supply reached 100% in January 2008 and the coast now has no water restrictions.
Kingaroy – Stage 7 from 1 October 2007
Toowoomba – Stage 6 from 23 November 2007, Stage 5 from 26 September 2006. In 2006, the town council proposed the use of recycled wastewater to supplement town water from dams, however the scheme was rejected by the town's population and the town has since resorted to drilling artesian and sub-artesian bores as an alternative source of drinking water.
Townsville – Stage 2 from 15 November 2006, Stage 1 from 12 February 2007. As of 2020 only minor conservation measures are in place and a major pipeline from the Haughton River (Burdekin Dam) is well under construction providing long term water security to the city, council have stated water restrictions will be abolished once implemented.
Source: Queensland Water Restrictions, Queensland Water Commission"
Water restrictions in Australia,"South Australia
The different levels of residential water restrictions which have been applied to different regions of South Australia by SA Water are as follows:"
Water restrictions in Australia,"Different water restrictions levels apply to different parts of the state, depending upon the source of drinking water used in that region. SA Water have produced a map showing the current areas of water restrictions."
Water restrictions in Australia,"Areas using Murray River water
Adelaide and much of south-eastern South Australia takes its drinking water from the Murray River. Permanent water conservation measures were put into place in this region in 2003,
and as a result of the most severe drought to hit the region since the 1940s, Level 2 water restrictions were imposed from 22 October 2006 on those areas (including metropolitan Adelaide) which use water from the Murray River.
Even lower inflows to the Murray River over the course of 2006 led to the even tougher Level 3 water restrictions being imposed on the region from 1 January 2007,
which remain in place."
Water restrictions in Australia,"Other areas
The Eyre Peninsula draws most of its drinking water from underground basins,
which progressively became depleted through drought and high consumption, prompting the State Government to introduce water restrictions on the entire region from 6 December 2002, apart from Whyalla. The water restrictions for the peninsula remain in force as of 2008.
Conversely, the areas in the south east of the State, south of the town of Keith, are subject to the permanent water conservation measures.
Other areas in the state are not subject to water restrictions. These areas include Murray Mallee, areas north of Port Augusta, Kangaroo Island, Cockburn, Hawker, Melrose, Ororoo, Parachilna, Quorn, Warooka, Wilmington, Terowie, Yunta, Olary and Manna Hill.
The different levels of residential water restrictions which have been applied to different regions of South Australia by SA Water are as follows:
Permanent Water Conservation Measures Eyre Peninsula Level 2 Level 3
Reticulation sprinklers: 5pm–10am (6pm–10am in DST) 6pm–8am (8pm–8am in DST) 8pm–8am, 3 days/week Prohibited
Hand-held hose watering and drippers: Any time 1 day/week with trigger nozzle, 6–9am or 5–8pm."
Water restrictions in Australia,"Tasmania
Usually, there are no water restrictions for domestic consumption. 
Periodically, however, restrictions will be placed on how water can be used in domestic, commercial or rural areas.  Examples of such restrictions are:"
Water restrictions in Australia,"watering with a hose is permitted but not using a fixed sprinkler system,
being able to use sprinkler systems only during certain hours,
the initial wetting and final rinsing of a car may be done with the hose but washing must be done using a bucket,
washing a car is permitted using a bucket of water but not using the hose,
watering of sports grounds allowed only during certain hours,
watering stock is acceptable but not irrigating.
One purpose of such restrictions is to keep the dam levels up and ensure adequate water pressure for the fire department's needs in the event of fires."
Water restrictions in Australia,"Victoria
The different stages of water restrictions which apply in different areas of Victoria are based on the Victorian Uniform Drought Water Restriction Guidelines, which, however, have been modified by the inclusion of a Stage 3a, to reduce the likelihood of needing to impose Stage 4 restrictions in metropolitan Melbourne."
Water restrictions in Australia,The status of water restrictions in different regions of Victoria is as set out below:
Water restrictions in Australia,"Bairnsdale – Now off water restrictions and on permanent water saving rules as of 24 August 2007
Ballarat – Stage 3 from 1 January 2010, Stage 1 from 1 August 2010.
Bendigo area – Stage 3 from 1 January 2009
Broadford – Stage 4 from 1 February 2007
Geelong – Stage 3 from March 2010, Stage 1 from 3 October 2010
Central Gippsland – All towns on Permanent Water Saving Rules
Coongulla & Glenmaggie – Stage 4 from 24 February 2007
Horsham – Stage 1 from 14 October 2009
Mansfield area – Stage 4 for Mansfield from 16 December 2006, other areas nearby on Stage 1 and 2
Melbourne – Stage 1 from 28 August 2006, Stage 2 from 1 November 2006, Stage 3 from 1 January 2007, Stage 3a from 1 April 2007, Stage 3 from 2 April 2010, Stage 2 from 1 September 2010. As of 1 December 2012, Melbourne was taken off water restriction stages, but new permanent water restrictions were implemented.
Mildura – now off water restrictions and on permanent water saving rules as of 3 October 2010
Omeo – Stage 2 from 11 December 2006
North east region – Bright reverted to Stage 2 and Springhurst reverted to Stage 1 on 10 September 2007.  Most of the Murray towns went to Stage 4 on 1 July 2007 (e.g. Wodonga, Yarrawonga, Rutherglen etc.), and on 11 July 2007 Devenish, St James and Tungamah went to stage 3. As of 2010, most towns/cities in the North East have moved to Permanent Water Saving Rules thanks to flooding rain over winter and spring.
Source: Report and map explaining the restrictions in Victoria as of September 2006 and Water restrictions as of 2010"
Water restrictions in Australia,"Western Australia
The different stages of water restrictions which can currently be applied in Western Australia are as follows:"
Water restrictions in Australia,"Water restrictions have been employed in various Western Australian towns when poor rainfall has led to water shortages. For instance, in the summer of 1977–1978, Perth was subject to a total sprinkler ban.
Newman and Nullagine experienced water restrictions from 1991 and 1992 onwards as the result of drought.
Similarly, the resort towns of Yallingup and Dunsborough experienced water restrictions in 1997 during a heatwave,
and Kalgoorlie-Boulder had temporary water restrictions imposed during 1998 due to shortages in its reservoirs (which contain water pumped through the Goldfields Water Supply Scheme).
A Stage 1 ban on using reticulation sprinklers between 9.00 am and 6.00 pm was imposed on Perth residents in 1996,
and remains in place to this day. This was the first water restriction imposed on the state's most populous city since the total sprinkler ban in 1978. From September 2001, users of the Integrated Water Supply Scheme (covering Perth, its surrounds and towns on the Goldfields pipeline) were subject to Stage 4 restrictions, only permitted to use reticulation sprinklers two days per week, according to a roster.
The town of Northampton in the Mid-West encountered a water shortage in 2006 where its underground aquifer could not meet demand. Stage 5 watering restrictions were imposed,
and the Water Corporation resorted to carting tankers of water to the town to maintain the supply.
Stage 4 water restrictions were imposed in the South-West towns of Bridgetown, Balingup, Boyup Brook, Hester, Kirup, Greenbushes and Mullalyup from 13 October 2006.
On 1 October 2007, water restrictions were expanded to cover the entire state, including those towns serviced by utilities other than the Water Corporation. Under the new system, all areas of the state in the region south of Kalbarri and Kalgoorlie (including Perth and most of the state's population) which use scheme water are subject to Stage 4 restrictions.
Areas north of the dividing line are subject to Stage 2 restrictions.
Furthermore, whereas the water restrictions had previously only restricted the use of mains water to water gardens and lawns by sprinkler, under the new water restrictions unlicensed bore operators in Perth and its surrounds are restricted to watering their gardens three times per week.
This was to slow the depletion of underground aquifers from which Perth sources much of its drinking water.
Around November 2013 the water restrictions were removed from the Water Agencies (Water Use) Bylaws 2010 and added to the Water Services Regulations 2013
Efforts are being made to secure alternative water sources to ease water shortages in the Integrated Water Supply System. Integral to the Government's strategy is the construction of desalination plants to service Perth. One has already been constructed in Kwinana, which supplies 17% of the city's water consumption and is the largest desalination plant in both the Southern and Eastern hemispheres. A second desalination plant near Binningup was completed in 2011. A trial has also been announced to treat wastewater and pump it into underground aquifers to undergo natural filtration as it returns to the dwindling groundwater supply."
Water restrictions in Australia,"Water storage levels
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology collates national statistics (from 2009 onwards) for water storage levels and makes them available on their water storage web tool and via a water storage iPhone app.
Sources: Water Services Association of Australia, Melbourne Water [4]
(listed as percent)"
Water restrictions in Australia,"Criticism
Water restrictions have been criticised for hampering the economy and the lifestyles of people. The National Water Commission chief has argued that Australia needs a source of water that is independent of rainfall. Water desalination is touted as the solution for potentially unlimited water use. Former Australian Environment Minister, Malcolm Turnbull says that it does not make sense to have permanent water restrictions just as there are no electricity restrictions."
Water restrictions in Australia,"See also
Climate change in Australia
Drought in Australia
Peak water
Water data transfer format
Water supply and sanitation in Australia"
Water restrictions in Australia,"
== References =="
Socialism in Australia,"Socialism in Australia dates back at least as far as the late-19th century. Notions of socialism in Australia have taken many different forms including utopian nationalism in the style of Edward Bellamy, the democratic socialist reformist electoral project of the early Australian Labor Party (ALP), and the revolutionary Marxism of parties such as the Communist Party of Australia."
Socialism in Australia,"History
Pre-Federation
Like other hunter-gatherers, the various Aboriginal peoples of Australia practiced the sharing of resources, a practice which has been described as primitive communism. However, early white Australian socialists drew little or no inspiration from Aboriginal society.
Pre-federation Australian socialism was highly influenced by philosophical ideologies arising from the United States and the United Kingdom. Social scientists who had visited Australia at the time noted the lack of influence from continental socialist ideologies such as Marxism, labelling Australia as having ""socialism with no doctrine"". In particular, the works of the American author Edward Bellamy were highly influential, which advocated for the democratic nationalisation of all industry. The prominent Australian Socialist League was by the 1890s ""modelled on, of all things, Daniel De Leon's Socialist Labor party"". Due to the significant influence of American socialist writers, the political sociologist Robin Archer considered that pre-federation ""Australian leftism was more American than American leftism itself""."
Socialism in Australia,"Socialist colonies
In the late 1890s, the colonies of Cosme and New Australia were founded in South America by groups of Australian socialists.
The settlement of New Australia was founded in 1893 by the supporters of the utopian socialist William Lane. Lane's socialism was inspired by Edward Bellamy as well as his unorthodox belief that race played a role in preventing a socialist society from forming. Due to these beliefs, New Australia was built around the values of creating ""a brotherhood of English-speaking Whites"" which preserved the ""colour-Line"" which was seen as necessary in order to achieve communism. After conflict over Lane's supposed incompetent management, 58 colonists left New Australia in 1894 to found the colony of Cosme several kilometres south, and the original colony was soon after dissolved.
Founding of the Australian Labor Party
The predecessors to the then-democratic socialist Australian Labor Party were founded throughout the 1890s, with Labor formed through the merger of various unions and socialist parties. The ALP briefly took power at the state level in Queensland in 1899 - the first socialist government in the world at any level."
Socialism in Australia,"Post-Federation
Unions
The Waterside Workers' Federation of Australia was led by several Communist Party members during its history, such as Jim Healy. Under Healy, the Workers Federation went on strike in 1938 to prevent pig iron being shipped to Japan, to protest the invasion of China. In 1945, the union declared a ban on working Dutch ships, labelled the ""Black Armada"", during the Indonesian National Revolution.
Socialism was a major ideology behind the Builders Labourers Federation and the  green bans in the 1970s. The Victorian branch of the union was primarily led by members of the Maoist CPA (M-L) such as Norm Gallagher, while the New South Wales branch was led by members of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) such as Jack Mundey. In 1974, Gallagher and several affiliated Maoist workers occupied the New South Wales branch office and expelled CPA-affiliated unionists. After union officials, including CPA members, agreed upon the Prices and Incomes Accord in 1983 which traded lower rates of industrial action for parliamentary reforms, it signalled ""the end of the renegade, guerrilla actions of the BLF to stop work and take radical protest activities"". The union was de-registered shortly afterwards, during the Hawke Labor government, and members were blacklisted from working on construction sites."
Socialism in Australia,"Australian Labor Party
A number of socialists have been  influential figures in ALP history. Notable among them was John Curtin (Prime Minister of Australia), Jim Cairns (the Deputy Prime Minister of Australia under Gough Whitlam), Jack Lang (the radical Premier of New South Wales), Tom Uren, Eddie Ward, and many early figures in Labor history, including James Scullin and Ted Theodore, who introduced Labor's socialist objective. Labor has undertaken some democratic socialist measures during its times in government, as well as many more decidedly free market measures since the Hawke government. Ben Chifley famously attempted to nationalise Australian banks in the 1940s, a policy of the party only dropped in the 1970s.
Under Jack Lang during the Great Depression, the New South Wales branch of the Labor Party came to be dominated by the left wing. Socialisation units were established in party branches, advocating for the Labor government to begin to nationalise industry and abolish private property. Revolutionary elements were prominent; a sub-committee was established to produce strategies of socialism, producing the Payne Report. ""The Payne Report was a bombshell within the units and within the party. It called for ""social revolution, which means... complete destruction of the capitalist state apparatus... a dictatorship of the working class"" following a ""revolutionary conflict between the classes"". If it remained vague on key points, it was nonetheless the clearest statement ever produced by the socialisation units of a revolutionary strategy for socialism...""
Some recent, dissident figures in the party have attempted to pursue a more interventionist, democratic socialist agenda; Keating government minister Peter Baldwin ran on a Bennite programme, in which, ""He promised to revive the “dead letter” of the ALP’s commitment to socializing the means of production by advocating for the nationalization of industry as part of the next Labor government’s program. He argued that industrial democracy would be crucial to this goal.""
Some parts of the Labor Left continue to advocate for socialism. For example, the NSW Young Labor Left state on their website: ""We believe in participatory and representative democracy; trade unionism and workers’ control of industry; the abolition of exploitation for private profit; the implementation of the ALP’s socialist objective; environmentalism and sustainability; as well as feminism, queer rights, and First Nations justice."" Their policy proposals include support for an Australian Green New Deal, prison abolition, public ownership of industry, industrial democracy, and Labor Party democracy."
Socialism in Australia,"Contemporary era
Following the collapse of the communism in Europe from 1989 to 1991, belief in socialism collapsed, resulting in the fall of the Communist Party of Australia and the shift of Labor Left towards non-socialist ideologies. The Communist Party of Australia was dissolved and the assets of the Communist Party were thereafter directed into the SEARCH Foundation, a not-for-profit company set up in 1990 ""to preserve and draw on the resources of the Communist Party of Australia and its archives.""
During the fall of the Communist Party, several organisations and individuals moved toward the Greens movement. Several ex-Communist Party and Labor Left members joined the Greens NSW, inspired by the green ban movement. In Western Australia, members of the Alternative Coalition (consisting of members from the Communist Party of Australia, the Socialist Party of Australia, and the Democratic Socialist Party) merged with the Nuclear Disarmament Party to form Greens Western Australia. An Alternative Coalition member, Christabel Chamarette, later became senator in 1992. The Democratic Socialist Party established ""Greens Alliance"" parties in South Australia, Victoria, and the Australian Capital Territory. However, in 1992 following the formation of the Australian Greens federation, the DSP was proscribed and members were banned from entering the Green parties. The new Green parties were broad-left coalition, with the founding documents of the Sydney Greens stating:"
Socialism in Australia,"The Greens in Sydney come from many backgrounds. Environmental and resident activists. Nuclear disarmers. Dissidents from the Labor Party who have witnessed betrayals by both wings of that party. Feminists. Anarchists. Those inspired by the German Greens. Socialists of various kinds.
What is distinctive and unifying about this new force in Sydney is the emphasis on encouraging people’s self-confidence in their right to have their say, their right to democratically determine matters – whether they are large or small – which affect their lives.
In 1996 the Socialist Party of Australia, a splinter party from the CPA, changed its name to the Communist Party of Australia claiming the party was the rightful successor to the original party formed in 1920.
In 2001, several socialist organisations formed Socialist Alliance in an attempt for left unity. The organisations at foundation included the Democratic Socialist Perspective, International Socialist Organisation, Freedom Socialist Party, Socialist Alternative, Socialist Democracy, Worker-communist Party of Iraq, Workers League, Worker's Liberty, and Worker's Power. However, after several years, most affiliate organisations abandoned the Alliance. In January 2010, the last major organisation in the Alliance, the Democratic Socialist Perspective, voted to merge into the Socialist Alliance, in effect ceasing to exist as an affiliate organisation."
Socialism in Australia,"Socialist organisations in Australia
Political historian Geoff Robinson describes the contemporary left as a ""movement of parties and electoral campaigning"". There are currently two federally registered socialist parties which run in elections: the Socialist Alliance and the Victorian Socialists. Although Socialist Action and the Communist Party of Australia are not registered for federal elections, they have successfully contested local government elections in the City of Yarra and the City of Auburn. There are several organisations and parties which do not run in elections, either for ideological reasons or due to practical reasons, including the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist–Leninist), Socialist Alternative, and Solidarity."
Socialism in Australia,"Eco-socialism
Left Renewal
Left Renewal was established as a eco-socialist political faction of the NSW Greens in 2016."
Socialism in Australia,"SEARCH Foundation
Formed in 1990 as the successor organisation of the Communist Party of Australia."
Socialism in Australia,"Marxism–Leninism
Communist Party of Australia (Marxist–Leninist)
In 1961, the pro-China faction leader Ted Hill was expelled from the Communist Party of Australia during the events of the split between the USSR and China. Hill in the following years led a split from the party which cumulated in the formation of the Maoist Communist Party of Australia (Marxist–Leninist)."
Socialism in Australia,"Communist Party of Australia (1971–present)
In 1971, a group split from the Communist Party of Australia due to the party criticising actions of the Soviet Union, and formed the Socialist Party of Australia. In 1996, following the dissolution of the original Communist Party of Australia in 1991, the Socialist Party of Australia re-named itself to the Communist Party of Australia."
Socialism in Australia,"Australian Communist Party
In 2019, the Australian Communist Party split from the Communist Party of Australia due to disagreements surrounding united front tactics and relations with the Australian Labor Party. It operates the Community Union Defence League, a mutual aid organisation founded in 2016."
Socialism in Australia,"Trotskyism
Socialist Alternative
Formed in 1995 by expelled members of the International Socialist Organisation. In 2018, Alternative formed an electoral alliance with Socialist Alliance, forming the Victorian Socialists."
Socialism in Australia,"Socialist Equality Party
Initially formed in 1972 as the Socialist Labour League. In 2010, the SLL was refounded as the Socialist Equality Party."
Socialism in Australia,"Solidarity
Initially formed in 1971 as the Marxist Workers' Group, then later the International Socialist Organisation. In 1995 several members were expelled and formed Socialist Alternative. In 2008, the ISO merged with several other parties to form Solidarity."
Socialism in Australia,"Other
Communist Party of Australia (1920–1991)
The Australian Communist Party was initially established in 1920. Within the decade the party became aligned with the Soviet Communist International and renamed itself to the Communist Party of Australia. Following the 1930s, the party followed Marxist-Leninism, until the party became increasingly critical of the USSR in the 1960s. In 1967 the party ceased receiving funding from the USSR and from the 1970s onwards the party adopted eurocommunist theories. The Communist Party of Australia dissolved in 1991. The SEARCH Foundation was established as a successor organisation."
Socialism in Australia,"Socialist Alliance
Initially formed in 2001 by several socialist organisations in an attempt for left unity. However, by 2010, most constituent parties had left and the last major organisation in the Alliance, the ex-Trotskyist Democratic Socialist Perspective voted to merge into the Socialist Alliance."
Socialism in Australia,"Socialist Labor Party
Initially formed in 1887 as the Australian Socialist League. In 1901, the ASL formed the Socialist Labor Party to contest the 1901 Australian federal election. Between the late 1890s and 1905, the party shifted towards De Leonism. The party declined after the 1920s, however, the party maintained its newspaper The People until the early 1970s where it then ceased its activities."
Socialism in Australia,"Victorian Socialists
The Victorian Socialists is a democratic socialist party established in 2018. The party is an electoral alliance of various socialist parties, organisations, community groups and trade unionists."
Socialism in Australia,"Red Ant Collective
The Red Ant Collective is an group focused around anti-imperialism. It was founded in 2022."
Socialism in Australia,"Revolutionary Communist Organization
The Revolutionary Communist Organization is a multi-tendency pre-party formation based around programmatic unity. The group was formed in January 2023. The organization works to build a mass socialist workers party in Australia."
Socialism in Australia,"Timeline
1870 to 1960
1960 to Present
See also"
Socialism in Australia,"Anarchism in Australia
Australian Labor Party
Communist Party of Australia
Conservatism in Australia
Economic history of Australia
Feminism in Australia
Liberalism in Australia
List of political parties in Australia
Politics of Australia"
Socialism in Australia,"
== References =="
Australia in the Korean War,"Australia entered the Korean War on 28 September, 1950; following the invasion of South Korea by North Korea. The war's origins began after Japan's defeat in World War II, which heralded the end to 35 years of Japanese occupation of the Korean Peninsula. The surrender of Japan to the Allied forces on 2 September 1945 led to the division of Korea into two countries, which were officially called the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the Republic of Korea (ROK). The DPRK were occupied by the Soviet Union, and the ROK, below the 38th Parallel, were occupied by the United States (US).
Following failed attempts at the unification, North Korea invaded South Korea on 25 June, 1950 which caused the United Nations (UN) to call a resolution to protect South Korea from further aggression and occupation. The Liberal government of Australia, led by Prime Minister Robert Menzies, immediately responded to the resolution by offering military assistance. About 17,000 Australians served in Korea in between 1950 and 1953, with casualties numbering about 339 dead and 1200 wounded."
Australia in the Korean War,"Background
Soviet forces entered the Korean peninsula on 10 August 1945, followed a few weeks later by the American forces who entered through Incheon. US Army Lieutenant General John R. Hodge formally accepted the surrender of Japanese forces south of the 38th Parallel on 9 September 1945 at the Japanese General Government Building in Seoul. Although both rival factions had tried initially to diplomatically reunite the divided nation, it was the Northern faction that attempted to do so with military force. Troops from the Soviet backed Korean People's Army (KPA) crossed the 38th Parallel on 25 June 1950, starting a civil war. The invasion of South Korea was an unexpected action in the view of the United Nations. The same day the war had officially begun (25 June), the United Nations Security Council immediately drafted UNSC Resolution 82, which called for:"
Australia in the Korean War,"all hostilities to end and North Korea to withdraw to the 38th Parallel;
a UN Commission on Korea to be formed to monitor the situation and report to the Security Council;
all UN members to support the United Nations in achieving this, and refrain from providing assistance to the North Korean authorities.
With the commitment of Australian forces to the Korean War, the Australian government called for 1000 men who had prior military experience in World War II to enlist in the army for three years, with one year of overseas service in Korea, to be called Korean Force or K-Force. A portion of the force was to be recruited in Great Britain. At the end of their enlistment, personnel recruited from the United Kingdom could elect to be discharged in Australia, or to return to the UK. Their previous military experience in the Second World War would facilitate rapid deployment to Korea.
When the Korean People's Army crossed into South Korea on 25 June 1950, they advanced for Seoul, which was captured in less than a week. The lightly-armed Republic of Korea Army (ROKA) put up little resistance against the KPA, whereby their forces continued south toward the strategic port of Pusan. Within two days, the United States offered its assistance and the UN Security Council asked its members to help repel the attack under the auspices of the United Nations Command, headed by the United States. Australia promptly contributed No. 77 Squadron RAAF and the 3rd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (3 RAR), both of which were stationed in Japan under the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF).
No. 77 Squadron converted to P-51D Mustang fighters before arriving in Japan in February 1946 to participate in the British Commonwealth Occupation Force. Occupation duties proved uneventful, and No. 77 Squadron was preparing to leave Japan for Australia when the Korean War broke out and was quickly dispatched to Korea. They became the first UN air unit to enter the war, primarily in ground support, combat air patrol and escort missions. 3 RAR was rapidly committed as Australia's main land force contribution to the UN forces. After a period of intensive training and reinforcement in Japan, the battalion arrived in South Korea in late September 1950. The battalion formed part of the 27th Commonwealth Brigade and took part in the UN offensive into North Korea and the subsequent UN retreat from North Korea following the Chinese People's Volunteer Army (PVA) offensive in the winter of 1950–51. It was one of three units to receive the Presidential Unit Citation (US) after the Battle of Kapyong. In addition to combat personnel, the Australian military provided the majority of supply and support personnel to BCOF, which was superseded in 1952 by British Commonwealth Forces Korea (BCFK)."
Australia in the Korean War,"History
Australia's involvement
By the time 3 RAR arrived in Pusan on 28 September, the KPA was in retreat. Under UN Supreme Commander, General Douglas MacArthur, UN forces were conducting a successful amphibious assault at Inchon and a breakout from the Pusan Perimeter on the southern tip of the Korean peninsula. A steady advance began, driving the North Koreans northwards towards the 38th Parallel. In October, the UN forces began their advance into North Korea and 3 RAR were involved in its first major action near Pyongyang."
Australia in the Korean War,"By 21 October, the US 24th Infantry Division, with the 27th British Commonwealth Brigade leading, crossed the Taedong River at Pyongyang and headed north. The next day the Australians of 3 RAR took the lead in the advance, and C Company was the leading company."
Australia in the Korean War,"Battle of Yongyu
At 07:00 on 22 October 1950, C Company, 3 RAR advanced with 7 Platoon leading, mounted on tanks of D Company, US 89th Tank Battalion, followed by the rest of the company in motorized transport. At 09:00 and 1 mile (1.6 km) north of Yongyu, C Company came under fire from an apple orchard on the slopes of Hill 163 in YD 2354 (map grid location). It became apparent that C Company had driven into KPA which was in the process of forming up an attack on the Americans. At 09:30, 7 and 8 Platoons attacked the high ground east of the road, with 9 Platoon in reserve holding the road and northern flank.
The attacking platoons advanced uphill through the apple trees and, although outnumbered, the Australians pressed their attack. The platoons continued on to their objective, which was the vital ground. The KPA outposts were captured with comparatively little resistance, with the KPA's attention directed north around efforts to break out past the American forces. Thereafter, with the KPA's focus elsewhere, the advance by C Company was met with disorganized resistance.
The Australians reported approximately 150 KPA killed, 239 wounded, and 200 captured as a result of the action at a cost of seven wounded. The operations in Sunchon had achieved much more. The American 187 RCT claimed 3818 KPA captured, 805 killed, and 681 wounded for the loss of 46 jump casualties and 65 battle casualties. Despite heavy casualties, several hundred KPA remained in and around the battlefield. However, with the link up complete, re-deployment for the continuation of the advance commenced. Within the British Commonwealth Brigade, 1st Battalion, Middlesex Regiment passed through and assumed the lead in the drive towards the Yalu River. The Americans reassembled and drove north to rejoin their regiment which returned to Pyongyang by the other route. The Australians, along with the 1 United Kingdom Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders Regiment led by Lieutenant Colonel George Nielson, crossed the Taesong River and advanced towards Pyongyang."
Australia in the Korean War,"Chinese entry
There were increasing concerns from the Chinese that the UN offensive would continue past the Yalu River, and cross into China. There were some deliberations in the UN forces, including General MacArthur, that war with China would be necessary and that since KPA troops were being supplied by bases in China, those supply depots should be bombed. However, US President Harry Truman and the other leaders disagreed, and MacArthur was ordered to be very cautious when approaching the Chinese border. Except on some rare occasions, UN bombers remained out of Manchuria during the war.
On 8 October 1950, the day after American troops crossed the 38th Parallel, the threat eventuated when Chairman Mao Zedong ordered the People's Liberation Army's North East Frontier Force to be reorganised into the Chinese People's Volunteer Army. He then subsequently ordered the army to move to the Yalu River. Soviet aid was requested and the intervention was delayed while waiting for the requested help from the Soviets, with the planned attack postponed from 13 to 19 October. However, Soviet assistance was limited to providing air support no nearer than 60 miles (97 km) from the battlefront. 
The PVA first engaged UN troops on 25 October 1950, with 270,000 PVA troops under the command of General Peng Dehuai, in the Battles of Onjong, Unsan and Pakchon. Following their initial intervention the PVA withdrew, with the UN offensive renewed on 24 November in what was called the Home-by-Christmas Offensive. This triggered PVA to begin another offensive, called the Second Phase Offensive, which pushed the UN forces back in the west while in the east the UN forces were defeated at Chosin Reservoir. The UN forces began a retreat from North Korea and by the end of the year held a line north of Seoul. On the east coast UN forces were evacuated by sea from Hungnam. The PVA launched their third Offensive on 31 December, pushing back the UN forces and recapturing Seoul on 4 January. The UN began a series of counteroffensives beginning with Operation Thunderbolt on 25 January, recaptured Seoul on 16 March in Operation Ripper and advancing the UN lines north of the 38th Parallel in Operation Rugged and Operation Dauntless.
The PVA began a new Spring Offensive in April 1951 as the weather improved, also referred to as the Fifth Phase Offensive, with the intention of recapturing Seoul. The PVA launched a major assault between 22 and 25 April that resulted in a victory in the Battle of the Imjin River. At the same time, the UN repelled PVA forces at Kapyong."
Australia in the Korean War,"Battle of Kapyong
PVA forces of the 118th Division attacked the Kapyong Valley, and pushed ROK and New Zealand troops into retreat. Under heavy pressure, the ROKA 6th Division broke, and the line collapsed. ROKA soldiers poured through a gap under protective covering fire from Australians who were holding their section of the line despite heavy pressure."
Australia in the Korean War,"Australian troops from 3 RAR, and Canadian troops from Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry were ordered to halt this PVA advance. The mission of the men of the 27th British Commonwealth Brigade was to block the two approaches to Kapyong. In only a few hours, they managed to prepare defensive positions.
The PVA 118th Division engaged their two forward battalions on 23 April. In the early part of the battle the 1st Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment and the 16th Field Regiment of the Royal New Zealand Artillery were almost cut off. The resistance of forward positions, held by the 2nd Battalion, Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry (2 PPCLI), and 3 RAR, permitted the 1st Battalion, Middlesex Regiment to withdraw. It moved into place to provide a reserve.
The initial PVA attack at Kapyong engaged 3 RAR on Hill 504. The PVA then struck at the Canadian front. Continued assaults by PVA troops kept up the attack throughout the night of 23 April. After a night of fierce fighting, Major Bernard O'Dowd who was Officer Commanding of A Company, 3 RAR, managed to get through on a radio phone to a general of the 1st Marine Division. The response given was that the attacking unit no longer existed, and that it had been wiped out the night before. The PVA managed to infiltrate the brigade position by the morning of 23 April. The Australians and Canadians were facing the whole of the PVA 118th Division. The fighting eventually devolved, on both fronts, into hand-to-hand combat with bayonet charges. The Australians, facing encirclement, were ordered to make an orderly fall back to new defensive positions late in the day of 24 April.
2 PPCLI was completely surrounded. Captain Mills, in command of D Company, 2 PPCLI, was forced to call down artillery fire on his own positions on Hill 677 several times during the early morning hours of 25 April to avoid being overrun. It had to be resupplied by air drops during this desperate time. By dawn the PVA attack on the Canadian position had abated, and in the afternoon of 25 April the road through to the Canadians had been cleared of PVA, at which time the 2nd Battalion was relieved. The 16th Field Regiment, Royal New Zealand Artillery, also managed to withdraw and link up with the US Army's 72nd Heavy Tank Battalion. These units provided close heavy gun support.
During the withdrawal of the Australians, 4 men from B Company, 3RAR, formed a rearguard to hold off any flanking attacks. The four Australians held off three waves of PVA soldiers, killing at least 25 and wounding many more. After two days and two nights of fighting, the Australians had recaptured their positions, at the cost of 32 men killed and 53 wounded. For this contribution of stalling the PVA advance, 3 RAR received a United States Distinguished Unit Citation."
Australia in the Korean War,"Despite their enormous advantage in numbers the PVA troops had been badly outgunned. Their courage and tenacity could not overcome the well-trained, well-disciplined and well-armed Australians and Canadians. 
For their conduct of this engagement, Lieutenant-Colonel Bruce Ferguson of Australia, and Lieutenant-Colonel James R. Stone of Canada were each awarded the Distinguished Service Order. For Stone, it was the second bar to the DSO he had first won during Operation Olive in Italy in 1944."
Australia in the Korean War,"Battle of Maryang San (Operation Commando)
The second major battle the Australians fought in 1951 was Operation Commando. Operation Commando was the last major UN offensive thrust of the Korean War. It was an attack on a PVA salient in a bend of the Imjin River, designed to prevent the PVA/KPA from interdicting the UN supply lines near Seoul.
By July 1951, 3 RAR had come under the control of the 1st Commonwealth Division. Objectives of the 1st Commonwealth Division during Operation Commando, including the Australians, were Hill 355 and Hill 317.
The attack began on 3 October 1951 with the US I Corps (including four US Divisions, the 1st Commonwealth Division and the ROKA 1st Division) seizing the Jamestown Line destroying elements of the PVA 42nd Army, 47th Army, 64th Army and 65th Army, and after five days of intense combat, eventually forcing the PVA into retreat.
The operation was a success, and ended on 15 October, with a few hills south of the line still in PVA/KPA hands, requiring a follow-up operation (Operation Polecharge)."
Australia in the Korean War,"The official historian for the Korean War, Robert O'Neill, wrote of this battle: ""In this action 3RAR had won one of the most impressive victories achieved by any Australian battalion. In five days of heavy fighting 3RAR dislodged a numerically superior enemy from a position of great strength. The Australians were successful in achieving surprise on 3 and 5 October, the company and platoon showed high courage, tenacity and morale despite some very difficult situations, such as that of D company when the mist rose on 5 October and those of B and C Companies when the weight of enemy fire threatened their isolation of Hill 317 on 7 October ... The victory of Maryang San is probably the greatest single feat of the Australian Army during the Korean War"".
Australian casualties during Operation Commando were 20 dead and 89 wounded."
Australia in the Korean War,"Digging in
After 1951, both sides were in a type of combat comparable to the Western Front in World War I in which men lived in tunnels, redoubts, and sandbagged forts behind barbed wire fortifications. From 1951 to the end of the war, 3 RAR held trenches on the eastern side of the Commonwealth Division's positions in the hills northeast of the Imjin River. Across from them were heavily fortified PVA positions.
As the war continued, several other nations grew less willing to contribute more ground troops. Australia, however, increased its troop strength in Korea, by sending 1 RAR. This battalion arrived in Korea on 6 April 1952 and experienced its first major combat during Operation Blaze on 2 July. In March 1953, they were replaced by 2 RAR."
Australia in the Korean War,"RAN in Korea
Royal Australian Navy vessels had been stationed in Japan following the Japanese surrender ending World War II. Following North Korea's invasion of the South, RAN vessels stationed in Japan were put on immediate alert.
On 29 June Prime Minister Robert Menzies announced that the frigate HMAS Shoalhaven, stationed in Japan, and the destroyer HMAS Bataan, in Hong Kong would be placed under UN command in Korea. On 1 July, one day after President Truman committed American ground forces to Korea, the first Australian operation in Korea took place; HMAS Shoalhaven moved from Japan to Pusan escorting an American ammunition ship. On 27 July 1950, the destroyer HMAS Warramunga was also deployed.
During the landing at Wonsan on 26 October 1950, HMAS Warramunga provided gunfire support during the landing of US X Corps, however the landing was unopposed as ROK forces had already captured the area on 11 October. During the mass evacuation of troops and refugees in the city of Hungnam in December 1950, HMA Ships Bataan and Warramunga assisted in the evacuation. In October 1951, HMAS Sydney arrived in Korean waters to replace HMS Glory for a three-month tour. Sydney carried two squadrons of Sea Furies – 805 Squadron RAN and 808 Squadron RAN, and 817 Squadron RAN equipped with Fireflies. Sydney returned to Japan having lost only 9 aircraft, with 3 pilots killed, and having launched over 2,700 missions from her flight deck. Later in the war, 9 ships of the RAN participated in the naval blockade of North Korea."
Australia in the Korean War,"RAAF in Korea
The Royal Australian Air Force was heavily involved in the Pacific War during World War II. Following the Japanese surrender, No. 77 Squadron was selected as part of Australia's contribution to the British Commonwealth Occupation Force and, after converting to P-51D Mustang fighters, arrived in Japan in February 1946. Occupation duties proved uneventful, and No. 77 Squadron was preparing to leave Japan for Australia when the Korean War broke out in June 1950.
No. 77 Squadron was committed to action over Korea as part of the UN forces, and flew its first ground attack sorties on 2 July 1950, making it the first UN unit to see action.
No. 30 Communications Flight, No. 491 (Maintenance) Squadron, and No. 391 (Base) Squadron were attached to the UN Command in Korea and grouped into No. 91 (Composite) Wing in October 1950. No. 91 Wing was based in Iwakuni, Japan.
No. 77 Squadron fully deployed to Korea in October to support the UN advance into North Korea but was withdrawn to Pusan in November in response to the PVA counter-attack.
The Squadron was withdrawn to Japan in April 1951 to re-equip with Gloster Meteor jet fighters and returned to action with these new aircraft in July, where they met with greater success against the Soviet MiG-15 pilots. However, the MiGs were still far superior to the Meteor.
Following heavy losses from MiG-15 fighters, No. 77 Squadron operated in the ground attack role from December 1951 until the end of the war; it remained in South Korea on garrison duties until returning to Australia in November 1954."
Australia in the Korean War,"Battle of Sunchon
The Battle of Sunchon was an air battle fought near the city of Sunchon on 1 December 1951, 12 Gloster Meteor jets of the RAAF's No. 77 Squadron were attacked by 40–50 Chinese MiG-15s. Despite their Meteors having inferior maneuverability to the Soviet-built MiGs, the Australian pilots managed to score their first victories of the Korean War, for the loss of three aircraft. Accounts vary, with the Australians claiming at least 10 MiGs shot down, but Chinese and North Korean sources stated it was only one."
Australia in the Korean War,"Airfields used
Taegu
Pohang 10/50 11/50
Yonpo Airfield, North Korea 11/50 12/50
Pusan East (K-9) Air Base 12/50 04/51
Kimpo 7/51 03/54
Kunsan 3/54 10/54"
Australia in the Korean War,"Cessation of hostilities
On 29 November 1952, US President-elect Dwight D. Eisenhower fulfilled a campaign promise by going to Korea to find out what could be done to end the conflict. The Korean Armistice Agreement was signed on 27 July 1953, by the UN, North Korea, and China, President of South Korea Syngman Rhee refused to sign the agreement. When the Armistice Agreement was signed and the ceasefire came into effect the front line was back on approximately the 38th Parallel. Under the terms of the armistice a demilitarised zone (DMZ) was established along the front line, presently defended by North Korean troops on one side and by South Korean, American, and UN troops on the other. The DMZ runs north of the parallel towards the east, and to the south as it travels west.
After the war ended, Australians remained in Korea for four years as military observers. Australia gained political and security benefits, the most important being the signing of the ANZUS Treaty with the United States and New Zealand.
Of the 17,000 Australians who served in Korea, casualties numbered more than 1,500, of whom 339 were killed."
Australia in the Korean War,"Timeline of Australian involvement in Korea
See also
Australia in the Korean War 1950–53
Australian Army battle honours of the Korean War
United Kingdom in the Korean War
Canada in the Korean War
New Zealand in the Korean War
Korean War Memorial
United Nations Forces in the Korean War
Medical support in the Korean War"
Australia in the Korean War,"References
Further reading"
Australia in the Korean War,"The History of the UN Forces in the Korean War-2 (Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, United Kingdom) - ROK Ministry of National Defense Institute for Military History, 1981 (E-BOOK) Archived 9 July 2023 at the Wayback Machine
The History of the UN Forces in the Korean War-2 (Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, United Kingdom) - ROK Ministry of National Defense Institute for Military History, 1981 (PDF) Archived 5 June 2023 at the Wayback Machine
The History of the UN Forces in the Korean War-6 (Summary) - ROK Ministry of National Defense Institute for Military History, 1977 (E-BOOK) Archived 9 July 2023 at the Wayback Machine
The History of the UN Forces in the Korean War-6 (Summary) - ROK Ministry of National Defense Institute for Military History, 1977 (PDF) Archived 28 June 2023 at the Wayback Machine"
Australia in the Korean War,"The Korean War and the UN Forces - ROK Ministry of National Defense Institute for Military History, 2015 (E-BOOK) Archived 9 July 2023 at the Wayback Machine (in Korean)
The Korean War and the UN Forces - ROK Ministry of National Defense Institute for Military History, 2015 (PDF) Archived 9 July 2023 at the Wayback Machine (in Korean)
The Statistics of the Korean War - ROK Ministry of National Defense Institute for Military History, 2014 (E-BOOK) Archived 9 July 2023 at the Wayback Machine (in Korean)
The Statistics of the Korean War - ROK Ministry of National Defense Institute for Military History, 2014 (PDF) Archived 11 January 2021 at the Wayback Machine (in Korean)
The History of the UN Forces in the Korean War - ROK Ministry of National Defense Institute for Military History, 1998 (E-BOOK) Archived 9 July 2023 at the Wayback Machine (in Korean)
The History of the UN Forces in the Korean War - ROK Ministry of National Defense Institute for Military History, 1998 (PDF) Archived 9 July 2023 at the Wayback Machine (in Korean)
The Summary of the Korean War - ROK Ministry of National Defense Institute for Military History, 1986 (PDF) Archived 9 July 2023 at the Wayback Machine (in Korean)
The History of the Korean War-10:  The UN Forces (Australia, Belgium, Luxembourg, Canada, Colombia, Ethiopia, France, Greece, Netherlands) - ROK Ministry of National Defense Institute for Military History, 1980 (E-BOOK) Archived 24 June 2023 at the Wayback Machine (in Korean)
The History of the Korean War-10: The UN Forces (Australia, Belgium, Luxembourg, Canada, Colombia, Ethiopia, France, Greece, Netherlands) - ROK Ministry of National Defense Institute for Military History, 1980 (PDF) Archived 5 June 2023 at the Wayback Machine (in Korean)"
Australia in the Korean War,"Blaxland, John; Kelly, Michael; Higgins, Liam Brewin, eds. (2020). In from the Cold: Reflections on Australia's Korean War. Canberra: ANU Press. doi:10.22459/IFTC.2019. ISBN 9781760462734. S2CID 216222906.
Brown, Colin H (1997). Stalemate in Korea and How We Coped:The Royal Australian Regiment in the Static War of 1952–1953. Loftus, NSW: Australian Military History Publications. ISBN 978-0-9586693-9-9.
Forbes, Cameron (2010). The Korean War: Australia in the Giants' Playground. Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia. ISBN 978-1-4050-4001-3.
O'Neill, Robert (1981). Australia in the Korean War 1950–53. Strategy and Diplomacy. Vol. I. Canberra, Australian Capital Territory: Australian War Memorial. ISBN 0-642-04329-9.
O'Neill, Robert (1985). Australia in the Korean War 1950–53. Combat Operations. Vol. II. Canberra, Australian Capital Territory: Australian War Memorial. ISBN 0-642-04330-2."
List of Australian states and territories by gross state product,This is the most recent list of Australian states and territories by gross state product (GSP) and GSP per capita. Also included are the GSP and population growth tables as well as a comparison table showing the surplus/deficit between state final demand (SFD) and GSP for the same financial year. All the data was taken from the Australian Bureau of Statistics website.
List of Australian states and territories by gross state product,"States and territories by GSP per capita
States and territories by GSP growth and share of national economy
States and territories by population growth
States and territories by comparison between SFD and GSP
Historical gross state product (since 1989–90)
Gross State Product (million A$) since 1989–90"
List of Australian states and territories by gross state product,"See also
Economy of Australia
Home ownership in Australia
Median household income in Australia and New Zealand
States and territories of Australia"
List of Australian states and territories by gross state product,"
== References =="
Military history of Australia during World War II,"Australia entered World War II on 3 September 1939, following the government's acceptance of the United Kingdom's declaration of war on Nazi Germany. Australia later entered into a state of war with other members of the Axis powers, including the Kingdom of Italy on 11 June 1940, and the Empire of Japan on 9 December 1941. By the end of the war almost one million Australians had served in the armed forces, whose military units fought primarily in the European theatre, North African campaign, and the South West Pacific theatre. In addition, Australia came under direct attack for the first time in its post-colonial history. Its casualties from enemy action during the war were 27,073 killed and 23,477 wounded. Many more suffered from tropical disease, hunger, and harsh conditions in captivity; of the 21,467 Australian prisoners taken by the Japanese, only 14,000 survived.
Australian Army units were gradually withdrawn from the Mediterranean and Europe following the outbreak of war with Japan. However, Royal Australian Air Force and Royal Australian Navy units and personnel continued to take part in the war against Germany and Italy. From 1942 until early 1944, Australian forces played a key role in the Pacific War, making up the majority of Allied strength throughout much of the fighting in the South West Pacific theatre. While the military was largely relegated to subsidiary fronts from mid-1944, it continued offensive operations against the Japanese until the war ended.
World War II contributed to major changes in the nation's economy, military and foreign policy. The war accelerated the process of industrialisation, led to the development of a larger peacetime military and began the process with which Australia shifted the focus of its foreign policy from Britain to the United States. The final effects of the war also contributed to the development of a more diverse and cosmopolitan Australian society."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"Outbreak of war
Between World War I and World War II Australia suffered greatly from the Great Depression which started in 1929. This limited Australian defence expenditure and led to a decline in the size and effectiveness of the armed forces during the 1930s. In 1931, the Statute of Westminster granted the Australian government independence in foreign affairs and defence. Nevertheless, from the mid-1930s, Australian governments generally followed British policy towards Nazi Germany, supporting first the appeasement of Hitler and the British guarantee of Polish independence.
Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies asked the British government to notify Germany that Australia was an associate of the United Kingdom. On 3 September 1939, Britain declared war when its ultimatum for Germany to withdraw from Poland expired. Because the Statute of Westminster had not yet been ratified by the Australian parliament, any declaration of war by the UK applied to Australia by default. After the British informed Menzies of the declaration of war, the Governor-General of Australia issued a proclamation of the existence of war in Australia. Menzies' support for the war was based on the notion of an imperial defence system, upon which he believed Australia relied and which would be destroyed if the UK was defeated. This position was generally accepted by the Australian public, although there was little enthusiasm for war.
At the time war broke out in Europe, the Australian armed forces were less prepared than at the outbreak of World War I in August 1914. The Royal Australian Navy (RAN), the best-prepared of the three services, was small and equipped with only two heavy cruisers, four light cruisers, two sloops, five obsolete destroyers and a number of small and auxiliary warships. The Australian Army comprised a small permanent cadre of 3,000 men and 80,000 part-time militiamen who had volunteered for training with the Citizen Military Forces (CMF). The Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF), the weakest of the services, had 246 aircraft, few of them modern. While the Commonwealth Government began a large military expansion and transferred some RAAF aircrew and units to British control upon the outbreak of war, it was unwilling to immediately dispatch an expeditionary force overseas due to the threat posed by Japanese intervention.
The first Australian shot of the war took place several hours after the declaration of war when a gun at Fort Queenscliff fired across the bows of an Australian ship that failed to identify itself as it attempted to leave Melbourne without required clearances. On 10 October 1939, a Short Sunderland of No. 10 Squadron, based in England for re-equipment, became the first Australian and the first Commonwealth air-force unit to go into action when it undertook a mission to Tunisia."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"On 15 September 1939 Menzies announced the formation of the Second Australian Imperial Force (AIF). This expeditionary force initially consisted of 20,000 men organised into an infantry division (the 6th Division) and auxiliary units. The AIF was institutionally separate from the CMF, which was legally restricted to service in Australia and its external territories, and was formed by raising new units rather than transferring CMF units. On 15 November, Menzies announced the reintroduction of conscription for home-defence service, effective 1 January 1940. Recruitment for the AIF was initially slow, but one in six men of military age had enlisted by March 1940, and a huge surge of volunteers came forward after the fall of France in June 1940. Men volunteered for the AIF for a range of reasons, with the most common being a sense of duty to defend Australia and the British Empire. In early 1940, each of the services introduced regulations which prohibited the enlistment of people not ""substantially of European origin""; while these regulations were strictly enforced by the RAN and Army, the RAAF continued to accept small numbers of non-European Australians.
The AIF's major units were raised between 1939 and 1941. The 6th Division formed during October and November 1939, and embarked for the Middle East in early 1940 to complete its training and to receive modern equipment after the British Government assured the Australian Government that Japan did not pose an immediate threat. The division was intended to join the British Expeditionary Force in France when its preparations were complete, but this did not eventuate as Axis forces conquered France before the division was ready. A further three AIF infantry divisions (the 7th Division, 8th Division and 9th Division) were raised in the first half of 1940, as well as a corps headquarters (I Corps) and numerous support and service units. All of these divisions and the majority of the support units deployed overseas during 1940 and 1941. An AIF armoured division (the 1st Armoured Division) was also raised in early 1941 but never left Australia.
While the Government initially planned to deploy the entire RAAF overseas, it later decided to focus the force's resources on training aircrew to facilitate a massive expansion of Commonwealth air-power. In late 1939, Australia and the other Dominions established the Empire Air Training Scheme (EATS) to train large numbers of men for service in the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and in other Commonwealth air units. Almost 28,000 Australians eventually trained through EATS in schools in Australia, Canada and Rhodesia. While many of these men were posted to Australian Article XV squadrons, the majority served with British and other Dominion squadrons. Moreover, these nominally ""Australian"" squadrons did not come under RAAF control and Australians often made up a minority of their airmen. As the Australian Government had no effective control over the deployment of airmen trained through EATS, most Australian historians regard the scheme as having hindered the development of Australia's defence capability. Nevertheless, RAAF airmen trained through EATS represented about nine percent of all aircrew who fought for the RAF in the European and Mediterranean theatres and made an important contribution to Allied operations."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"North Africa, the Mediterranean and the Middle East
During the first years of World War II, Australia's military strategy was closely aligned with that of the United Kingdom. In line with this, most Australian military units deployed overseas in 1940 and 1941 were sent to the Mediterranean and Middle East where they formed a key part of the Commonwealth forces in the area. The three AIF infantry divisions sent to the Middle East saw extensive action, as did the RAAF squadrons and warships in this theatre."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"North Africa
The RAN became the first of the Australian services to see action in the Mediterranean theatre. At the time Italy entered the war on 10 June 1940 the RAN had a single cruiser (Sydney) and the five elderly destroyers of the so-called 'Scrap Iron Flotilla' at Alexandria with the British Mediterranean Fleet. During the first days of the Battle of the Mediterranean, Sydney sank an Italian destroyer and Voyager a submarine. The Mediterranean Fleet maintained a high operational tempo, and on 19 July, Sydney, with a British destroyer squadron in company, engaged the fast Italian light cruisers Bartolomeo Colleoni and Giovanni delle Bande Nere in the Battle of Cape Spada. In the running battle which followed, Bartolomeo Colleoni was sunk. The Australian ships spent much of their time at sea throughout 1940. Sydney's sister ship, Perth, relieved her in February 1941.
The Australian Army first saw action in Operation Compass, the successful Commonwealth offensive in North Africa which took place between December 1940 and February 1941. The 6th Division relieved the 4th Indian Division on 14 December. Although the 6th Division was not fully equipped, it had completed its training and was given the task of capturing Italian fortresses bypassed by the British 7th Armoured Division during its advance."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"The 6th Division went into action at Bardia on 3 January 1941. Although a larger Italian force manned the fortress, with the support of British tanks and artillery the Australian infantry quickly penetrated the defensive lines. The majority of the Italian force surrendered on 5 January, and the Australians took 40,000 prisoners. The 6th Division followed up this success by assaulting the fortress of Tobruk on 21 January. Tobruk was secured the next day, with 25,000 Italian prisoners taken. The 6th Division subsequently pushed west along the coast road to Cyrenaica and captured Benghazi on 4 February. The 6th Division withdrew for deployment to Greece later in February and was replaced by the untested 9th Division, which took up garrison duties in Cyrenaica.
In the last week of March 1941, a German-led force launched an offensive in Cyrenaica which rapidly defeated the Allied forces in the area, forcing a general withdrawal towards Egypt (April 1941). The 9th Division formed the rear guard of this withdrawal, and on 6 April, was ordered to defend the important port town of Tobruk for at least two months. During the ensuing siege of Tobruk the 9th Division, reinforced by the 18th Brigade of the 7th Division and British artillery and armoured regiments, used fortifications, aggressive patrolling and artillery to contain and defeat repeated German armoured and infantry attacks. The Mediterranean Fleet sustained Tobruk's defenders, and the elderly Australian destroyers made repeated supply ""runs"" into the port. Waterhen and Parramatta were sunk during these operations. Upon the request of the Australian Government, the bulk of the 9th Division was withdrawn from Tobruk in September and October 1941, and was replaced by the British 70th Division. The 2/13th Battalion was forced to remain at Tobruk until the siege was lifted in December when the convoy evacuating it was attacked, however. The defence of Tobruk cost the Australian units involved 3,009 casualties, including 832 killed and 941 taken prisoner.
Two Australian fighter squadrons also took part in the fighting in North Africa. No. 239 Wing, a Curtiss P-40-equipped unit in the Desert Air Force, was dominated by Australians, in the form of two RAAF squadrons—No. 3 Squadron and No. 450 Squadron—and numerous individual Australians served in RAF squadrons. These two squadrons differed from the other RAAF squadrons in the Mediterranean in that they were made up of predominantly Australian ground-staff and pilots; the other RAAF units had ground crews made up of mostly British RAF personnel."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"Greece, Crete and Lebanon
In early 1941 the 6th Division and I Corps headquarters took part in the ill-fated Allied expedition to defend Greece from an anticipated German invasion. The corps' commander, Lieutenant-General Thomas Blamey, and Prime Minister Menzies both regarded the operation as risky, but agreed to Australian involvement after the British Government provided them with briefings which deliberately understated the chance of defeat. The Allied force deployed to Greece was much smaller than the German force in the region and inconsistencies between Greek and Allied plans compromised the defence of the country.
Australian troops arrived in Greece during March 1941, and manned defensive positions in the north of the country alongside British, New Zealand and Greek units. HMAS Perth formed part of the naval force which protected the Allied troop convoys travelling to Greece and participated in the Battle of Cape Matapan in late March. The outnumbered Allied force, unable to halt the Germans when they invaded on 6 April, had to retreat. The Australians and other Allied units conducted a fighting withdrawal from their initial positions and naval ships evacuated them from southern Greece between 24 April and 1 May. Australian warships formed part of the force which protected the evacuation and embarked hundreds of soldiers from Greek ports. The 6th Division suffered heavy casualties in this campaign, with 320 men killed and 2,030 captured.
While most of the 6th Division returned to Egypt, the 19th Brigade Group and two provisional infantry battalions landed on Crete, where they formed a key part of the island's defences. The 19th Brigade was initially successful in holding its positions when German paratroopers landed on 20 May, but was gradually forced to retreat. After several key airfields were lost the Allies evacuated the island's garrison. Approximately 3,000 Australians, including the entire 2/7th Infantry Battalion, could not be evacuated, and were taken prisoner. As a result of its heavy casualties the 6th Division required substantial reinforcements and equipment before it was again ready for combat. Perth and the new destroyers Napier and Nizam also took part in operations around Crete, with Perth embarking soldiers for evacuation to Egypt."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"The Allied defeat during the Greek Campaign indirectly contributed to a change of government in Australia. Prime Minister Menzies' leadership weakened during the lengthy period he spent in Britain during early 1941, and the high Australian losses in the Greek Campaign led many members of his United Australia Party (UAP) to conclude that he was not capable of leading the Australian war effort. Menzies resigned on 26 August, after losing the confidence of his party and Arthur Fadden from the Country Party (the UAP's coalition partner) became Prime Minister. Fadden's government collapsed on 3 October, and an Australian Labor Party government under the leadership of John Curtin took power.
The 7th Division and the 17th Brigade from the 6th Division formed a key part of the Allied ground forces during the Syria–Lebanon Campaign, fought against Vichy French forces in June and July 1941. RAAF aircraft also joined the RAF in providing close air support. The Australian force entered Lebanon on 8 June, and advanced along the coast road and Litani River valley. Although Allied planners had expected little resistance, the Vichy forces mounted a strong defence and counter-attacks which made good use of the mountainous terrain. After the Allied attack became bogged down reinforcements were brought in and the Australian I Corps headquarters took command of the operation on 18 June.
These changes enabled the Allies to overwhelm the French forces, and the 7th Division entered Beirut on 12 July. The loss of Beirut and a British breakthrough in Syria led the Vichy commander to seek an armistice and the campaign ended on 13 July 1941."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"El Alamein
In the second half of 1941 the Australian I Corps was concentrated in Syria and Lebanon to rebuild its strength and to prepare for further operations in the Middle East. Following the outbreak of war in the Pacific most elements of the Corps, including the 6th and 7th Divisions, returned to Australia in early 1942 to counter the perceived Japanese threat to Australia. The Australian Government agreed to British and United States requests to temporarily retain the 9th Division in the Middle East in exchange for the deployment of additional US troops to Australia and Britain's support for a proposal to expand the RAAF to 73 squadrons. The Australian Government did not intend that the 9th Division would play a major role in active fighting, and it was not sent any further reinforcements. All of the RAN's ships in the Mediterranean also withdrew to the Pacific, but most RAAF units in the Middle East remained in the theatre.
In June 1942 four Australian N-class destroyers transferred to the Mediterranean from the Indian Ocean to participate in Operation Vigorous (11 to 16 June 1942), which attempted to supply the besieged island of Malta from Egypt. This operation ended in failure, and Nestor had to be scuttled on 16 June, after being bombed the previous day. After this operation, the three surviving destroyers returned to the Indian Ocean.
In mid-1942 the Axis forces defeated the Commonwealth force in Libya and advanced into north-west Egypt. In June, the British Eighth Army made a stand just over 100 kilometres (62 mi) west of Alexandria, at the railway siding of El Alamein, and the 9th Division was brought forward to reinforce this position. The lead elements of the Division arrived at El Alamein on 6 July, and the Division was assigned the most northerly section of the Commonwealth defensive line. The 9th Division played a significant role in the First Battle of El Alamein (1 to 27 July 1942), which halted the Axis advance, though at the cost of heavy casualties, including the entire 2/28th Infantry Battalion, which was forced to surrender on 27 July. Following this battle the division remained at the northern end of the El Alamein line and launched diversionary attacks during the Battle of Alam el Halfa in early September.
In October 1942 the 9th Division and the RAAF squadrons in the area took part in the Second Battle of El Alamein (23 October to 11 November 1942). After a lengthy period of preparation, the Eighth Army launched its major offensive on 23 October. The 9th Division became involved in some of the heaviest fighting of the battle, and its advance in the coast area succeeded in drawing away enough German forces for the heavily reinforced 2nd New Zealand Division to decisively break through the Axis lines on the night of 1–2 November. The 9th Division suffered a high number of casualties during this battle and did not take part in the pursuit of the retreating Axis forces. During the battle the Australian Government requested that the division be returned to Australia as it was not possible to provide enough reinforcements to sustain it, and the British and US governments agreed to this in late November. The 9th Division left Egypt for Australia in January 1943, ending the AIF's involvement in the war in North Africa."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"Tunisia, Sicily and Italy
Although the Second Battle of El Alamein marked the end of a major Australian role in the Mediterranean, several RAAF units and hundreds of Australians attached to Commonwealth forces remained in the area until the end of the war. After the 9th Division was withdrawn Australia continued to be represented in North Africa by several RAAF squadrons which supported the 8th Army's advance through Libya and the subsequent Tunisia Campaign. Two Australian destroyers (Quiberon and Quickmatch) also participated in the Allied landings in North Africa in November 1942.
Australia played a small role in the Italian Campaign. The RAN returned to the Mediterranean between May and November 1943, when eight Bathurst-class corvette were transferred from the British Eastern Fleet to the Mediterranean Fleet to protect the invasion force during the Allied invasion of Sicily. The corvettes also escorted convoys in the western Mediterranean before returning to the Eastern Fleet. No. 239 Wing and four Australian Article XV squadrons also took part in the Sicilian Campaign, flying from bases in Tunisia, Malta, North Africa and Sicily. No. 239 Wing subsequently provided air support for the Allied invasion of Italy in September 1943, and moved to the mainland in the middle of that month. The two Australian fighter bomber squadrons provided close air support to the Allied armies and attacked German supply lines until the end of the war. No. 454 Squadron was also deployed to Italy from August 1944, and hundreds of Australians served in RAF units during the campaign.
The RAAF also took part in other Allied operations in the Mediterranean. Two RAAF squadrons, No. 451 Squadron (Spitfires) and No. 458 Squadron (Wellingtons), supported the Allied invasion of southern France in August 1944. No. 451 Squadron was based in southern France in late August and September, and when the operation ended both squadrons were moved to Italy, though No. 451 Squadron was transferred to Britain in December. No. 459 Squadron was based in the eastern Mediterranean until the last months of the war in Europe and attacked German targets in Greece and the Aegean Sea. In addition, 150 Australians served with the Balkan Air Force, principally in No. 148 Squadron RAF. This special duties squadron dropped men and supplies to guerrillas in Yugoslavia and attempted to supply the Polish Home Army during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"Britain and Western Europe
While the majority of the Australian military fought on the Western Front in France during World War I, relatively few Australians fought in Europe during World War II. The RAAF, including thousands of Australians posted to British units, made a significant contribution to the strategic bombing of Germany and efforts to safeguard Allied shipping in the Atlantic. The other services made smaller contributions, with two Army brigades being briefly based in Britain in late 1940, and several of the RAN's warships serving in the Atlantic."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"Defence of Britain
Australians participated in the defence of Britain throughout the war. More than 100 Australian airmen fought with the RAF during the Battle of Britain in 1940, including over 30 fighter pilots. Two AIF brigades (the 18th and 25th) were also stationed in Britain from June 1940 to January 1941, and formed part of the British mobile reserve which would have responded to any German landings. An Australian Army forestry group served in Britain between 1940 and 1943. Several Australian fighter squadrons were also formed in Britain during 1941 and 1942, and contributed to defending the country from German air raids and, from mid-1944, V-1 flying bombs.
The RAAF and RAN took part in the Battle of the Atlantic. No. 10 Squadron, based in Britain at the outbreak of war to take delivery of its Short Sunderland flying boats, remained there throughout the conflict as part of RAF Coastal Command. It was joined by No. 461 Squadron in April 1942, also equipped with Sunderlands. These squadrons escorted Allied convoys and sank 12 U-boats. No. 455 Squadron also formed part of Coastal Command from April 1942, as an anti-shipping squadron equipped with light bombers. In this role the squadron made an unusual deployment to Vaenga airfield in the Soviet Union in September 1942, to protect Convoy PQ 18. Hundreds of Australian airmen also served in RAF Coastal Command squadrons, of whom 652 died. In addition to the RAAF's contribution, several of the RAN's cruisers and destroyers escorted shipping in the Atlantic and Caribbean and hundreds of RAN personnel served aboard Royal Navy ships in the Atlantic throughout the war."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"Air war over Europe
The RAAF's role in the strategic air offensive in Europe formed Australia's main contribution to the defeat of Germany. Approximately 13,000 Australian airmen served in dozens of British and five Australian squadrons in RAF Bomber Command between 1940 and the end of the war. There was not a distinctive Australian contribution to this campaign, however, as most Australians served in British squadrons and the Australian bomber squadrons were part of RAF units."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"The great majority of Australian aircrew in Bomber Command were graduates of the Empire Air Training Scheme. These men were not concentrated in Australian units, and were instead often posted to the Commonwealth squadron with the greatest need for personnel where they became part of a multi-national bomber crew. Five Australian heavy bomber squadrons (No. 460, No. 462, No. 463, No. 466 and No. 467 squadrons) were formed within Bomber Command between 1941 and 1945, however, and the proportion of Australians in these units increased over time. No. 464 Squadron, which was equipped with light bombers, was also formed as part of Bomber Command but was transferred to the Second Tactical Air Force in June 1943, where it continued to attack targets in Europe. Unlike Canada, which concentrated its heavy bomber squadrons into No. 6 Group RCAF in 1943, the RAAF squadrons in Bomber Command were always part of British units, and the Australian Government had little control over how they were used."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"Australians took part in all of Bomber Command's major offensives and suffered heavy losses during raids on German cities and targets in France. The Australian contribution to major raids was often substantial, and the Australian squadrons typically provided about 10 percent of the main bomber force during the winter of 1943–1944, including during the Battle of Berlin. Overall, the Australian squadrons in Bomber Command dropped 6 percent of the total weight of bombs dropped by the command during the war. Australian aircrew in Bomber Command had one of the highest casualty rates of any part of the Australian military during World War II. Although only two percent of Australians enlisted in the military served with Bomber Command, they incurred almost 20 percent of all Australian deaths in combat; 3,486 were killed and hundreds more were taken prisoner.
Hundreds of Australians participated in the liberation of Western Europe during 1944 and 1945. Ten RAAF squadrons, hundreds of Australians in RAF units and about 500 Australian sailors serving with the Royal Navy formed part of the force assembled for the landing in Normandy on 6 June 1944; overall, it has been estimated that about 3,000 Australian personnel took part in this operation. From 11 June until September 1944, the Spitfire-equipped No. 453 Squadron RAAF was often based at forward airfields in France and it and Australian light bomber and heavy bomber squadrons supported the liberation of France. RAAF light bomber and fighter squadrons continued to support the Allied armies until the end of the war in Europe by attacking strategic targets and escorting bomber formations. No. 451 and 453 Squadrons formed part of the British Army of Occupation in Germany from September 1945, and it was planned that there would be a long-term Australian presence in this force. Few RAAF personnel volunteered to remain in Europe, however, and both squadrons were disbanded in January 1946."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"War in the Pacific
In the view of Paul Hasluck, Australia fought two wars between 1939 and 1945: one against Germany and Italy as part of the British Commonwealth and Empire and the other against Japan in alliance with the United States and Britain.
Due to the emphasis placed on cooperation with Britain, relatively few Australian military units were stationed in Australia and the Asia-Pacific Region after 1940. Measures were taken to improve Australia's defences as war with Japan loomed in 1941, but these proved inadequate. In December 1941, the Australian Army in the Pacific comprised the 8th Division, most of which was stationed in Malaya, and eight partially trained and equipped divisions in Australia, including the 1st Armoured Division. The RAAF was equipped with 373 aircraft, most of which were obsolete trainers, and the RAN had three cruisers and two destroyers in Australian waters.
In 1942, the Australian military was reinforced by units recalled from the Middle East and an expansion of the CMF and RAAF. United States military units also arrived in Australia in great numbers before being deployed to New Guinea. The Allies moved onto the offensive in late 1942, with the pace of advance accelerating in 1943. From 1944, the Australian military was mainly relegated to subsidiary roles, but continued to conduct large-scale operations until the end of the war."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"Malaya and Singapore
From the 1920s, Australia's defence planning was dominated by the so-called 'Singapore strategy'. This strategy involved the construction and defence of a major naval base at Singapore from which a large British fleet would respond to Japanese aggression in the region. To this end, a high proportion of Australian forces in Asia were concentrated in Malaya during 1940 and 1941, as the threat from Japan increased. At the outbreak of war the Australian forces in Malaya comprised the 8th Division (less the 23rd Brigade) under the command of Major General Gordon Bennett, four RAAF squadrons and eight warships. The RAAF became the first service to see action in the Pacific when Australian aircraft shadowing the Japanese invasion convoy bound for Malaya were fired at on 6 December 1941. Australian units participated in the unsuccessful Commonwealth attempts to defeat the Japanese landings, with RAAF aircraft attacking the beachheads and Vampire accompanying the British battleship Prince of Wales and battlecruiser Repulse during their failed attempt to attack the Japanese invasion fleet."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"The 8th Division and its attached Indian Army units were assigned responsibility for the defence of Johor in the south of Malaya and did not see action until mid-January 1942, when Japanese spearheads first reached the state. The division's first engagement was the Battle of Muar, in which the Japanese Twenty-Fifth Army was able to outflank the Commonwealth positions due to Bennett misdeploying the forces under his command so that the weak Indian 45th Brigade was assigned the crucial coastal sector and the stronger Australian brigades were deployed in less threatened areas. While the Commonwealth forces in Johore achieved a number of local victories, they were unable to do more than slow the Japanese advance and suffered heavy casualties. After being outmanoeuvred by the Japanese, the remaining Commonwealth units withdrew to Singapore on the night of 30–31 January.
Following the withdrawal to Singapore the 8th Division was deployed to defend the island's north-west coast. Due to the casualties suffered in Johore most of the division's units were at half-strength. The commander of the Singapore fortress, Lieutenant General Arthur Ernest Percival, believed that the Japanese would land on the north-east coast of the island and deployed the near full-strength British 18th Division to defend this sector. The Japanese landing on 8 February took part in the Australian sector, however, and the 8th Division was forced from its positions after just two days of heavy fighting. The division was also unable to turn back the Japanese landing at Kranji and withdrew to the centre of the island. After further fighting in which the Commonwealth forces were pushed into a narrow perimeter around the urban area of Singapore, Percival surrendered his forces on 15 February. Following the surrender 14,972 Australians were taken prisoner, though some escaped on ships. These escapees included Major General Bennett, who was found by two post-war inquiries to have been unjustified in leaving his command. The loss of almost a quarter of Australia's overseas soldiers, and the failure of the Singapore Strategy that had permitted it to accept the sending of the AIF to aid Britain, stunned the country."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"Netherlands East Indies and Rabaul
While Australia's contribution to the pre-war plans to defend South East Asia from Japanese aggression was focused on the defence of Malaya and Singapore, small Australian forces were also deployed to defend several islands to the north of Australia. The role of these forces was to defend strategic airfields which could be used to launch attacks on the Australian mainland. Detachments of coastwatchers were also stationed in the Bismarck Archipelago and Solomon Islands to report on any Japanese operations there."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"At the start of the Pacific War the strategic port town of Rabaul in New Britain was defended by 'Lark Force', which comprised the 2/22nd Infantry Battalion reinforced with coastal artillery and a poorly equipped RAAF bomber squadron. While Lark Force was regarded as inadequate by the Australian military, it was not possible to reinforce it before the Japanese South Seas Force landed at Rabaul on 23 January 1942. The outnumbered Australian force was swiftly defeated and most of the survivors surrendered in the weeks after the battle. Few members of Lark Force survived the war, as at least 130 were murdered by the Japanese on 4 February, and 1,057 Australian soldiers and civilian prisoners from Rabaul were killed when the ship carrying them to Japan (Montevideo Maru) was sunk by the US submarine Sturgeon on 1 July 1942.
AIF troops were also dispatched from Darwin to the Netherlands East Indies (NEI) in the first weeks of the Pacific War. Reinforced battalions from the 23rd Brigade were sent to Koepang in West Timor ('Sparrow Force') and the island of Ambon ('Gull Force') to defend these strategic locations from Japanese attack. The 2/2nd Independent Company was also sent to Dili in Portuguese Timor in violation of Portugal's neutrality. The force at Ambon was defeated by the Japanese landing on 30 January, and surrendered on 3 February 1942. Over 300 Australian prisoners were subsequently killed by Japanese troops in a series of mass executions during February. While the force at Koepang was defeated after the Japanese landed there on 20 February and also surrendered, Australian commandos waged a guerrilla campaign against the Japanese in Portuguese Timor until February 1943. Voyager and Armidale were lost in September and December 1942, respectively, while operating in support of the commandos."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"In the lead-up to the Japanese invasion of Java a force of 242 carrier and land-based aircraft attacked Darwin on 19 February 1942. At the time Darwin was an important base for Allied warships and a staging point for shipping supplies and reinforcements into the NEI. The Japanese attack was successful, and resulted in the deaths of over 230 military personnel and civilians, many of whom were non-Australian Allied seamen, and heavy damage to RAAF Base Darwin and the town's port facilities.
Several Australian warships, a 3,000 strong Army unit and aircraft from several RAAF squadrons participated in the unsuccessful defence of Java when the Japanese invaded the island in March 1942. Perth formed part of the main American-British-Dutch-Australian Command (ABDACOM) naval force which was defeated in the Battle of the Java Sea on 27 February, during an attempt to intercept one of the Japanese invasion convoys. Perth was sunk on 1 March, when she and USS Houston encountered another Japanese invasion force while trying to escape to Tjilatjap on the south coast of Java. The sloop Yarra was also sunk off the south coast of Java when she was attacked by three Japanese cruisers while escorting a convoy on 4 March. Other Australian warships, including the light cruiser Hobart and several corvettes successfully escaped from NEI waters. An army force made up of elements from the 7th Division also formed part of the ABDACOM land forces on Java but saw little action before it surrendered at Bandung on 12 March, after the Dutch forces on the island began to capitulate. RAAF aircraft operating from bases in Java and Australia also participated in the fighting, and 160 ground crew from No. 1 Squadron RAAF were taken prisoner.
Following the conquest of the NEI, the Japanese Navy's main aircraft carrier force raided the Indian Ocean. This force attacked Ceylon in early April, and Vampire was sunk off Trincomalee on 12 April, while escorting HMS Hermes, which was also lost. The Australian Army's 16th and 17th Brigades formed part of the island's garrison at the time of the raid but did not see action."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"Buildup of forces in Australia
After the fall of Singapore, the Australian government and people expected an invasion soon. The Battle of Britain occurred after Dunkirk; ""the fall of Singapore opens the Battle for Australia"", Curtin said, which threatened the Commonwealth, the United States, and the entire English-speaking world. The fear was greatest until June 1942. Curtin said on 16 February:"
Military history of Australia during World War II,"The protection of this country is no longer that of a contribution to a world at war but the resistance to an enemy threatening to invade our own shore ... It is now work or fight as we have never worked or fought before ... On what we do now depends everything we may like to do when this bloody test has been survived.
Australia was ill-prepared to counter such an attack. The RAAF lacked modern aircraft and the RAN was too small and unbalanced to counter the Imperial Japanese Navy. Additionally, the Army, although large, contained many inexperienced units and lacked mobility. In response to this threat most of the AIF was brought back from the Middle East and the Government appealed to the United States for assistance. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill attempted to divert the 6th and 7th Divisions to Burma while they were en route to Australia, but Curtin refused to authorise this movement. As a compromise two brigades of the 6th Division disembarked at Ceylon and formed part of the island's garrison until they returned to Australia in August 1942."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"The perceived threat of invasion led to a major expansion of the Australian military. By mid-1942 the Army had a strength of ten infantry divisions, three armoured divisions and hundreds of other units. The RAAF and RAN were also greatly expanded, though it took years for these services to build up to their peak strengths. Due to the increased need for manpower, the restrictions which prohibited non-Europeans from joining the military ceased to be enforced from late 1941, and about 3,000 Indigenous Australians eventually enlisted. Most of these personnel were integrated into existing formations, but a small number of racially segregated units such as the Torres Strait Light Infantry Battalion were formed. A number of small units made up of Indigenous Australians were also established to patrol northern Australia and harass any Japanese forces which landed there; the members of these units did not receive pay or awards for their service until 1992. Thousands of Australians who were ineligible for service in the military responded to the threat of attack by joining auxiliary organisations such as the Volunteer Defence Corps and Volunteer Air Observers Corps, which were modelled on the British Home Guard and Royal Observer Corps respectively. Australia's population and industrial base were not sufficient to maintain the expanded military after the threat of invasion had passed, and the Army was progressively reduced in size from 1943 while only 53 of the 73 RAAF squadrons approved by the government were ever raised.
Despite Australian fears, the Japanese never intended to invade the Australian mainland. While an invasion was considered by the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters in February 1942, it was judged to be beyond the Japanese military's capabilities and no planning or other preparations were undertaken. Instead, in March 1942, the Japanese military adopted a strategy of isolating Australia from the United States by capturing Port Moresby in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, Fiji, Samoa and New Caledonia. This plan was frustrated by the Japanese defeat in the Battle of the Coral Sea and was postponed indefinitely after the Battle of Midway. While these battles ended the threat to Australia, the Australian government continued to warn that an invasion was possible until mid-1943."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"The collapse of British power in the Pacific also led Australia to reorient its foreign and military policy towards the United States. Curtin stated in December 1941 ""that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom."" In February 1942 the US and British Governments agreed that Australia would become a strategic responsibility of the United States and the Allied ANZAC Force was created specifically to defend the Australian continent. In March, General Douglas MacArthur arrived in Australia after escaping from the Philippines and assumed command of the South West Pacific Area (SWPA). All of the Australian military's combat units in this area were placed under MacArthur's command, and MacArthur replaced the Australian Chiefs of Staff as the Australian Government's main source of military advice until the end of the war. Australian General Thomas Blamey was appointed the Allied land force commander, but MacArthur did not permit him to command American forces. MacArthur also rejected US Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall's request that he appoint Australians to senior posts in his General Headquarters. Nevertheless, the partnership between Curtin and MacArthur proved beneficial for Australia between 1942 and 1944, as MacArthur was able to communicate Australian requests for assistance to the US Government.
Large numbers of United States military personnel were based in Australia during the first years of the Pacific War. The first US units arrived in Australia in early 1942 and almost 1 million US personnel passed through Australia during the war. Many US military bases were constructed in northern Australia during 1942 and 1943, and Australia remained an important source of supplies to US forces in the Pacific until the end of the war. Though relations between Australians and Americans were generally good, there was some conflict between US and Australian soldiers, such as the Battle of Brisbane, and the Australian Government only reluctantly accepted the presence of African American troops."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"Papuan campaign
Japanese forces first landed on the mainland of New Guinea on 8 March 1942, when they invaded Lae and Salamaua to secure bases for the defence of the important base they were developing at Rabaul. Australian guerrillas from the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles established observation posts around the Japanese beachheads and the 2/5th Independent Company successfully raided Salamaua on 29 June."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"After the Battle of the Coral Sea frustrated the Japanese plan to capture Port Morseby via an amphibious landing, the Japanese attempted to capture the town by landing the South Seas Force at Buna on the north coast of Papua and advancing overland using the Kokoda Track to cross the rugged Owen Stanley Range. The Kokoda Track campaign began on 22 July, when the Japanese began their advance, opposed by an ill-prepared CMF brigade designated 'Maroubra Force'. This force was successful in delaying the South Seas Force but was unable to halt it. Two AIF battalions from the 7th Division reinforced the remnants of Maroubra Force on 26 August, but the Japanese continued to make ground and reached the village of Ioribaiwa near Port Moresby on 16 September. The South Seas Force was forced to withdraw back along the track on this day, however, as supply problems made any further advance impossible and an Allied counter-landing at Buna was feared. Australian forces pursued the Japanese along the Kokoda Track and forced them into a small bridgehead on the north coast of Papua in early November. The Allied operations on the Kokoda Track were made possible by native Papuans who were recruited by the Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit, often forcibly, to carry supplies and evacuate wounded personnel. The RAAF and USAAF also played an important role throughout the campaign by attacking the Japanese force's supply lines and airdropping supplies to Australian Army units."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"Australian forces also defeated an attempt to capture the strategic Milne Bay area in August 1942. During the Battle of Milne Bay two brigades of Australian troops, designated Milne Force, supported by two RAAF fighter squadrons and US Army engineers defeated a smaller Japanese invasion force made up of Japanese Special Naval Landing Forces units. This was the first notable Japanese land defeat and raised Allied morale across the Pacific Theatre.
Australian and US forces attacked the Japanese bridgehead in Papua in late November 1942, but did not capture it until January 1943. The Allied force comprised the exhausted 7th Division and the inexperienced and ill-trained US 32nd Infantry Division and was short of artillery and supplies. Due to a lack of supporting weapons and MacArthur and Blamey's insistence on a rapid advance the Allied tactics during the battle were centred around infantry assaults on the Japanese fortifications. These resulted in heavy casualties and the area was not secured until 22 January 1943. Throughout the fighting in Papua, most of the Australian personnel captured by Japanese troops were murdered. In response, Australian soldiers aggressively sought to kill their Japanese opponents for the remainder of the war. The Australians generally did not attempt to capture Japanese personnel, and some prisoners of war were murdered."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"Following the defeats in Papua and Guadalcanal the Japanese withdrew to a defensive perimeter in the Territory of New Guinea. In order to secure their important bases at Lae and Salamaua they attempted to capture Wau in January 1943. Reinforcements were flown into the town and defeated the Japanese force in its outskirts following heavy fighting. The Japanese force began to withdraw towards the coast on 4 February. Following their defeat at Wau the Japanese attempted to reinforce Lae in preparation for an expected Allied offensive in the area. This ended in disaster when, during the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, a troop convoy was destroyed by USAAF and RAAF aircraft from the US Fifth Air Force and No. 9 Operational Group RAAF with the loss of about 3,000 troops.
The Papuan campaign led to a significant reform in the composition of the Australian Army. During the campaign, the restriction banning CMF personnel from serving outside of Australian territory hampered military planning and caused tensions between the AIF and CMF. In late 1942 and early 1943, Curtin overcame opposition within the Labor Party to extending the geographic boundaries in which conscripts could serve to include most of the South West Pacific and the necessary legislation was passed in January 1943. The 11th Brigade was the only CMF formation to serve outside of Australian territory, however, when it formed part of Merauke Force in the NEI during 1943 and 1944."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"Attacks on Australian shipping
The Japanese efforts to secure New Guinea included a prolonged submarine offensive against the Allied lines of communication between the United States and Australia and Australia and New Guinea. These were not the first Axis naval attacks on Australia; during 1940 and 1941, five German surface raiders operated in Australian waters at various times. The German attacks were not successful in disrupting Australian merchant shipping, though Sydney was sunk with the loss her entire crew of over 640 men in November 1941, in a battle with the German auxiliary cruiser Kormoran, off the coast of Western Australia.
Following the defeat of the Japanese surface fleet the IJN deployed submarines to disrupt Allied supply lines by attacking shipping off the Australian east coast. This campaign began with an unsuccessful midget submarine raid on Sydney Harbour on the night of 31 May 1942. Following this attack, Japanese submarines operated along the Australian east coast until August 1942, sinking eight merchant ships. The submarine offensive resumed in January 1943 and continued until June during which time a further 15 ships were sunk off the east coast. The 1943 sinkings included the hospital ship Centaur, which was torpedoed off Queensland on 14 May with the loss of 268 lives. The Japanese did not conduct further submarine attacks against Australia after June 1943, as their submarines were needed to counter Allied offensives elsewhere in the Pacific. A single German submarine, U-862, operated in the Pacific Ocean during the war, cruising off the Australian coast and New Zealand in December 1944 and January 1945. It sank two ships in Australian waters before returning to Batavia.
Considerable Australian and other Allied military resources were devoted to protecting shipping and ports from Axis submarines and warships. For instance, the RAN escorted over 1,100 coastal convoys the Army established coastal defences to protect important ports and a high proportion of the RAAF's operational squadrons were used to protect shipping at various times. Nevertheless, the use of these units for defensive tasks and the shipping casualties in Australian waters did not seriously affect the Australian economy or Allied war effort."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"New Guinea offensives
After halting the Japanese advance, Allied forces went on the offensive across the SWPA from mid 1943. Australian forces played a key role throughout this offensive, which was designated Operation Cartwheel. In particular, General Blamey oversaw a highly successful series of operations around the north-east tip of New Guinea which ""was the high point of Australia's experience of operational level command"" during the war."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"After the successful defence of Wau the 3rd Division began advancing towards Salamaua in April 1943. This advance was mounted to divert attention from Lae, which was one of the main objectives of Operation Cartwheel, and proceeded slowly. In late June, the 3rd Division was reinforced by the US 162nd Regimental Combat Team which staged an amphibious landing to the south of Salamaua. The town was eventually captured on 11 September 1943.
In early September 1943, Australian-led forces mounted a pincer movement to capture Lae. On 4 September, 9th Division made an amphibious landing to the east of the town and began advancing to the west. The following day, the US 503rd Parachute Regiment made an unopposed parachute drop at Nadzab, just west of Lae. Once the airborne forces secured Nadzab Airfield the 7th Division was flown in and began advancing to the east in a race with the 9th Division to capture Lae. This race was won by the 7th Division, which captured the town on 15 September. The Japanese forces at Salamaua and Lae suffered heavy losses during this campaign, but were able to escape to the north."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"After the fall of Lae, the 9th Division was given the task of capturing the Huon Peninsula. The 20th Brigade landed near the strategic harbour of Finschhafen on 22 September 1943, and secured the area. The Japanese responded by dispatching the 20th Division overland to the area and the remainder of the 9th Division was gradually brought in to reinforce the 20th Brigade against the expected counter-attack. The Japanese mounted a strong attack in mid-October which was defeated by the 9th Division after heavy fighting. During the second half of November the 9th Division captured the hills inland of Finschhafen from well dug in Japanese forces. Following its defeat the 20th Division retreated along the coast with the 9th Division and 4th Brigade in pursuit. The Allies scored a major intelligence victory towards the end of this campaign when Australian engineers found the 20th Division's entire cipher library, which had been buried by the retreating Japanese. These documents led to a code breaking breakthrough which enabled MacArthur to accelerate the Allied advance by bypassing Japanese defences."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"While the 9th Division secured the coastal region of the Huon Peninsula the 7th Division drove the Japanese from the inland Finisterre Range. The Finisterre Range campaign began on 17 September, when the 2/6th Independent Company was air-landed in the Markham Valley. The company defeated a larger Japanese force at Kaiapit and secured an airstrip which was used to fly the Division's 21st and 25th Brigades in. Through aggressive patrolling the Australians forced the Japanese out of positions in extremely rugged terrain and in January 1944, the division began its attack on the key Shaggy Ridge position. The ridge was taken by the end of January, with the RAAF playing a key supporting role. Following this success the Japanese withdrew from the Finisterre Range and Australian troops linked up with American patrols from Saidor on 21 April, and secured Madang on 24 April.
In addition to supporting the Army's operations on the New Guinea mainland, the RAN and RAAF took part in offensive operations in the Solomon Islands. This involvement had begun in August 1942, when both of the RAN's heavy cruisers, Australia and Canberra, supported the US Marine landing at Guadalcanal. On the night after the landing, Canberra was sunk during the Battle of Savo Island and the RAN played no further role in the Guadalcanal Campaign. RAAF aircraft supported several US Army and Marine landings during 1943 and 1944 and an RAAF radar unit participated in the capture of Arawe. The Australian cruisers Australia and Shropshire and destroyers Arunta and Warramunga provided fire support for the US 1st Marine Division during the Battle of Cape Gloucester and the US 1st Cavalry Division during the Admiralty Islands campaign in late 1943 and early 1944. The landing at Cape Gloucester was also the first operation for the RAN amphibious transport Westralia."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"North Western Area Campaign
The attack on Darwin in February 1942 marked the start of a prolonged aerial campaign over northern Australia and the Japanese-occupied Netherlands East Indies. Following the first attack on Darwin the Allies rapidly deployed fighter squadrons and reinforced the Army's Northern Territory Force to protect the town from a feared invasion. These air units also attacked Japanese positions in the NEI and the Japanese responded by staging dozens of air raids on Darwin and nearby airfields during 1942 and 1943, few of which caused significant damage. These raids were opposed by US, Australian and British fighters and suffered increasingly heavy casualties as Darwin's defences were improved. The Japanese also conducted a number of small and ineffective raids on towns and airfields in northern Queensland and Western Australia during 1942 and 1943.
While the Japanese raids on northern Australia ceased in late 1943, the Allied air offensive continued until the end of the war. During late 1942, Allied aircraft conducted attacks on Timor in support of the Australian guerrillas operating there. From early 1943, US heavy bomber squadrons operated against Japanese targets in the eastern NEI from bases near Darwin. The Allied air offensive against the NEI intensified from June 1943, to divert Japanese forces away from New Guinea and the Solomons and involved Australian, Dutch and US bomber units. These attacks continued until the end of the war, with the US heavy bombers being replaced by Australian B-24 Liberator-equipped squadrons in late 1944. From 1944, several RAAF PBY Catalina squadrons were also based at Darwin and conducted highly effective mine-laying sorties across South East Asia."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"Advance to the Philippines
The Australian military's role in the South-West Pacific decreased during 1944. In the latter half of 1943, the Australian Government decided, with MacArthur's agreement, that the size of the military would be reduced to release manpower for war-related industries which were important to supplying Britain and the US forces in the Pacific. Australia's main role in the Allied war effort from this point forward was supplying the other Allied countries with food, materials and manufactured goods needed for the defeat of Japan. As a result of this policy, the Army units available for offensive operations were set at six infantry divisions (the three AIF divisions and three CMF divisions) and two armoured brigades. The size of the RAAF was set at 53 squadrons and the RAN was limited to the ships which were in service or planned to be built at the time. In early 1944, all but two of the Army's divisions were withdrawn to the Atherton Tableland in north Queensland for training and rehabilitation. Several new battalions of Australian-led Papuan and New Guinea troops were formed during 1944, and organised into the Pacific Islands Regiment, however, and largely replaced the Australian Army battalions disbanded during the year. These troops had seen action alongside Australian units throughout the New Guinea campaign."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"After the liberation of most of Australian New Guinea the RAAF and RAN participated in the US-led Western New Guinea campaign, which had the goal of securing bases to be used to mount the liberation of the Philippines. Australian warships and the fighter, bomber and airfield construction squadrons of No. 10 Operational Group RAAF participated in the capture of Hollandia, Biak, Noemfoor and Morotai. After western New Guinea was secured No. 10 Operation Group was renamed the First Tactical Air Force (1TAF) and was used to protect the flank of the Allied advance by attacking Japanese positions in the NEI and performing other garrison tasks. The losses incurred whilst performing these relatively unimportant roles led to a decline in morale, and contributed to the 'Morotai Mutiny' in April 1945.
Elements of the RAN and RAAF also took part in the liberation of the Philippines. Four Australian warships and the assault transports Kanimbla, Manoora and Westralia—along with a number of smaller warships and support ships—took part in the US landing at Leyte on 20 October 1944. Australian sources state that Australia became the first Allied ship to be struck by a kamikaze when she was attacked during this operation on 21 October, though this claim was disputed by US historian Samuel Eliot Morison. Australian ships also participated in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, with Shropshire and Arunta engaging Japanese ships during the Battle of Surigao Strait on 25 October. The Australian naval force took part in the Invasion of Lingayen Gulf in January 1945; during this operation, Australia was struck by a further five Kamikazes which killed 44 of her crew and forced her to withdraw for major repairs. RAN ships also escorted US supply convoys bound for the Philippines. The RAAF's No. 3 Airfield Construction Squadron and No. 1 Wireless Unit also landed in the Philippines and supported US operations there, and 1TAF raided targets in the southern Philippines from bases in the NEI and New Guinea.
While the Australian Government offered MacArthur I Corps for service in Leyte and Luzon, nothing came of several proposals to utilise it in the liberation of these islands. The Army's prolonged period of relative inactivity during 1944 led to public concern, and many Australians believed that the AIF should be demobilised if it could not be used for offensive operations. This was politically embarrassing for the government, and helped motivate it to look for new areas where the military could be employed."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"Mopping up in New Guinea and the Solomons
In late 1944, the Australian Government committed twelve Australian Army brigades to replace six US Army divisions which were conducting defensive roles in Bougainville, New Britain and the Aitape-Wewak area in New Guinea. While the US units had largely conducted a static defence of their positions, their Australian replacements mounted offensive operations designed to destroy the remaining Japanese forces in these areas. The value of these campaigns was controversial at the time and remains so to this day. The Australian Government authorised these operations for primarily political reasons. It was believed that keeping the Army involved in the war would give Australia greater influence in any post-war peace conferences and that liberating Australian territories would enhance Australia's influence in its region. Critics of these campaigns argue that they were unnecessary and wasteful of the lives of the Australian soldiers involved as the Japanese forces were already isolated and ineffective."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"The 5th Division replaced the US 40th Infantry Division on New Britain during October and November 1944 and continued the New Britain Campaign with the goals of protecting Allied bases and confining the large Japanese force on the island to the area around Rabaul. In late November the 5th Division established bases closer to the Japanese perimeter and began aggressive patrols supported by the Allied Intelligence Bureau. The division conducted amphibious landings at Open Bay and Wide Bay at the base of the Gazelle Peninsula in early 1945, and defeated the small Japanese garrisons in these areas. By April the Japanese had been confined to their fortified positions in the Gazelle Peninsula by the Australian force's aggressive patrolling. The 5th Division suffered 53 fatalities and 140 wounded during this campaign. After the war it was found that the Japanese force was 93,000 strong, which was much higher than the 38,000 which Allied intelligence had estimated remained on New Britain."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"The II Corps continued the Bougainville Campaign after it replaced the US Army's XIV Corps between October and December 1944. The corps consisted of the 3rd Division, 11th Brigade and Fiji Infantry Regiment on Bougainville and the 23rd Brigade which garrisoned neighbouring islands and was supported by RAAF, RNZAF and USMC air units. While the XIV Corps had maintained a defensive posture, the Australians conducted offensive operations aimed at destroying the Japanese force on Bougainville. As the Japanese were split into several enclaves the II Corps fought geographically separated campaigns in the north, centre and southern portions of the island. The main focus was against the Japanese base at Buin in the south, and the offensives in the north and centre of the island were largely suspended from May 1945. While Australian operations on Bougainville continued until the end of the war, large Japanese forces remained at Buin and in the north of the island.
The 6th Division was assigned responsibility for completing the destruction of the Japanese Eighteenth Army, which was the last large Japanese force remaining in the Australian portion of New Guinea. The division was reinforced by CMF and armoured units and began arriving at Aitape in October 1944. The 6th Division was also supported by several RAAF squadrons and RAN warships. In late 1944, the Australians launched a two-pronged offensive to the east towards Wewak. The 17th Brigade advanced through the inland Torricelli Mountains while the remainder of the division moved along the coast. Although the Eighteenth Army had suffered heavy casualties from previous fighting and disease, it mounted a strong resistance and inflicted significant casualties. The 6th Division's advance was also hampered by supply difficulties and bad weather. The Australians secured the coastal area by early May, with Wewak being captured on 10 May, after a small force was landed to the east of the town. By the end of the war, the Eighteenth Army had been forced into what it had designated its 'last stand' area which was under attack from the 6th Division. The Aitape-Wewak campaign cost Australia 442 lives while about 9,000 Japanese died and another 269 were taken prisoner."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"Borneo campaign
The Borneo campaign of 1945 was the last major Allied campaign in the SWPA. In a series of amphibious assaults between 1 May and 21 July, the Australian I Corps, under Lieutenant General Leslie Morshead, attacked Japanese forces occupying the island. Allied naval and air forces, centred on the US 7th Fleet under Admiral Thomas Kinkaid, 1TAF and the US Thirteenth Air Force also played important roles in the campaign. The goals of this campaign were to capture Borneo's oilfields and Brunei Bay to support the US-led invasion of Japan and British-led liberation of Malaya which were planned to take place later in 1945. The Australian Government did not agree to MacArthur's proposal to extend the offensive to include the liberation of Java in July 1945, however, and its decision to not release the 6th Division for this operation contributed to it not going ahead.
The campaign opened on 1 May 1945, when the 26th Brigade Group landed on the small island of Tarakan off the east coast of Borneo. The goal of this operation was to secure the island's airstrip as a base to support the planned landings at Brunei and Balikpapan. While it had been expected that it would take only a few weeks to secure Tarakan and re-open the airstrip, intensive fighting on the island lasted until 19 June, and the airstrip was not opened until 28 June. As a result, the operation is generally considered to have not been worthwhile."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"The second phase of the Borneo campaign began on 10 June when the 9th Division conducted simultaneous assaults on the north-west on the island of Labuan and the coast of Brunei. While Brunei was quickly secured, the Japanese garrison on Labuan held out for over a week. After the Brunei Bay region was secured the 24th Brigade was landed in North Borneo and the 20th Brigade advanced along the western coast of Borneo south from Brunei. Both brigades rapidly advanced against weak Japanese resistance, and most of north-west Borneo was liberated by the end of the war. During the campaign the 9th Division was assisted by indigenous fighters who were waging a guerrilla war against Japanese forces with the support of Australian special forces.
The third and final stage of the Borneo campaign was the capture of Balikpapan on the central east coast of the island. This operation had been opposed by General Blamey, who believed that it was unnecessary, but went ahead on the orders of Macarthur. After a 20-day preliminary air and naval bombardment the 7th Division landed near the town on 1 July. Balikpapan and its surrounds were secured after some heavy fighting on 21 July, but mopping up continued until the end of the war. The capture of Balikpapan was the last large-scale land operation conducted by the Western Allies during World War II. Although the Borneo campaign was criticised in Australia at the time, and in subsequent years, as pointless or a waste of the lives of soldiers, it did achieve a number of objectives, such as increasing the isolation of significant Japanese forces occupying the main part of the Dutch East Indies, capturing major oil supplies and freeing Allied prisoners of war, who were being held in deteriorating conditions.
Australia's leadership changed again during the Borneo campaign. Prime Minister Curtin suffered a heart attack in November 1944, and Deputy Prime Minister Frank Forde acted in his place until 22 January 1945. Curtin was hospitalised with another bout of illness in April 1945, and Treasurer Ben Chifley became acting Prime Minister as Forde was attending the San Francisco Conference. Curtin died on 5 July 1945, and Forde was sworn in as Prime Minister. Forde did not have the support of his party, however, and was replaced by Chifley after a leadership ballot on 13 July."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"Intelligence and special forces
Australia developed large intelligence services during the war. Prior the outbreak of war the Australian military possessed almost no intelligence gathering facilities and was reliant on information passed on by the British intelligence services. Several small signals intelligence units were established in 1939 and 1940, which had some success intercepting and deciphering Japanese transmissions before the outbreak of the Pacific War.
MacArthur began organising large scale intelligence services shortly after his arrival in Australia. On 15 April 1942, the joint Australian-US Central Bureau signals intelligence organisation was established at Melbourne. Central Bureau's headquarters moved to Brisbane in July 1942, and Manila in May 1945. Australians made up half the strength of Central Bureau, which was expanded to over 4,000 personnel by 1945. The Australian Army and RAAF also provided most of the Allied radio interception capability in the SWPA, and the number of Australian radio interception units was greatly expanded between 1942 and 1945. Central Bureau broke a number of Japanese codes and the intelligence gained from these decryptions and radio direction finding greatly assisted Allied forces in the SWPA."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"Australian special forces played a significant role in the Pacific War. Following the outbreak of war commando companies were deployed to Timor, the Solomon and Bismarck islands and New Caledonia. Although the 1st Independent Company was swiftly overwhelmed when the Japanese invaded the Solomon Islands in early 1942, the 2/2nd and 2/4th Independent Companies waged a successful guerrilla campaign on Timor which lasted from February 1942 to February 1943, when the Australian force was evacuated. Other commando units also played an important role in the New Guinea, New Britain, Bougainville and Borneo campaigns throughout the war where they were used to collect intelligence, spearhead offensives and secure the flanks of operations conducted by conventional infantry.
Australia also formed small-scale raiding and reconnaissance forces, most of which were grouped together as the Allied Intelligence Bureau. Z Special Unit conducted raids far behind the front line, including a successful raid on Singapore in September 1943. M Special Unit, coastwatchers and smaller AIB units also operated behind Japanese lines to collect intelligence. AIB parties were often used to support Australian Army units and were assigned to inappropriate tasks such as tactical reconnaissance and liaison. AIB missions in Timor and Dutch New Guinea were also hampered by being placed under the command of unpopular Dutch colonial administrators. The RAAF formed a specially equipped unit (No. 200 Flight) in 1945 to support these operations by transporting and supplying AIB parties in areas held by the Japanese."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"Operations against the Japanese home islands
Australia played a minor role in the Japan campaign in the last months of the war and was preparing to participate in the invasion of Japan at the time the war ended. Several Australian warships operated with the British Pacific Fleet (BPF) during the Battle of Okinawa and Australian destroyers later escorted British aircraft carriers and battleships during attacks on targets in the Japanese home islands. Despite its distance from Japan, Australia was the BPF's main base and a large number of facilities were built to support the fleet.
Australia's participation in the planned invasion of Japan would have involved elements of all three services fighting as part of Commonwealth forces. It was planned to form a new 10th Division from existing AIF personnel which would form part of the Commonwealth Corps with British, Canadian and New Zealand units. The corps' organisation was to be identical to that of a US Army corps, and it would have participated in the invasion of the Japanese home island of Honshū which was scheduled for March 1946. Australian ships would have operated with the BPF and US Pacific Fleet and two RAAF heavy bomber squadrons and a transport squadron were scheduled to be redeployed from Britain to Okinawa to join the strategic bombardment of Japan as part of Tiger Force. Planning for operations against Japan ceased in August 1945, when Japan surrendered following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
General Blamey signed the Japanese Instrument of Surrender on behalf of Australia during the ceremony held on board USS Missouri on 2 September 1945. Several RAN warships were among the Allied ships anchored in Tokyo Bay during the proceedings. Following the main ceremony on board Missouri, Japanese field commanders surrendered to Allied forces across the Pacific Theatre. Australian forces accepted the surrender of their Japanese opponents at ceremonies conducted at Morotai, several locations in Borneo, Timor, Wewak, Rabaul, Bougainville and Nauru."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"Australians in other theatres
In addition to the major deployments, Australian military units and service men and women served in other theatres of the war, typically as part of British-led Commonwealth forces. About 14,000 Australians also served in the Merchant Navy and crewed ships in many areas of the world."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"Australia played a minor role in the British-led campaigns against Vichy French colonial possessions in Africa. In late September 1940, the heavy cruiser Australia took part in the unsuccessful British and Free French attempt to capture Dakar in which she sank a Vichy French destroyer. The Australian Government was not informed of the cruiser's involvement in this operation prior to the battle and complained to the British Government. Three Australian destroyers also took part in the invasion of Madagascar in September 1942. Closer to home, Adelaide played a significant role in ensuring that New Caledonia came under Free French control in September 1940, by escorting a pro-Free French Governor to Nouméa and taking station off the city during the popular protests which resulted in the Governor replacing the pro-Vichy authorities.
Australian warships served in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf through much of the war. From June to October 1940, HMAS Hobart took part in the East African Campaign, and played an important role in the successful evacuation of Berbera. In May 1941, Yarra supported an operation in which Gurkha troops were landed near Basra during the Anglo-Iraqi War. In August 1941, Yarra and Kanimbla took part in the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran, with Yarra sinking the Iranian sloop Babr near Kohorramshahr and Kanimbla landing troops at Bandar Shapur. A dozen Bathurst-class corvettes also escorted Allied shipping in the Persian Gulf during 1942.
While most Australian units in the Pacific Theatre fought in the SWPA, hundreds of Australians were posted to British units in Burma and India. These included 45 men from the 8th Division who volunteered to train Chinese guerrillas with the British Mission 204 in southern China and served there from February to September 1942. Hundreds of Australians also served with RAF units in India and Burma, though no RAAF units were deployed to this theatre. In May 1943, some 330 Australians were serving in forty-one squadrons in India, of which only nine had more than ten Australians. In addition, many of the RAN's corvettes and destroyers served with the British Eastern Fleet where they were normally used to protect convoys in the Indian Ocean from attacks by Japanese and German submarines."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"Prisoners of war
Just under 29,000 Australians were taken prisoner by the Axis during the war. Only 14,000 of the 21,467 Australian prisoners taken by the Japanese survived captivity. The majority of the deaths in captivity were due to malnutrition and disease.
The 8,000 Australians captured by Germany and Italy were generally treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. The majority of these men were taken during the fighting in Greece and Crete in 1941, with the next largest group being 1,400 airmen shot down over Europe. Like other western Allied POWs, the Australians were held in permanent camps in Italy and Germany. As the war neared its end the Germans moved many prisoners towards the interior of the country to prevent them from being liberated by the advancing Allied armies. These movements were often made through forced marches in harsh weather and resulted in many deaths. Four Australians were also executed following a mass escape from Stalag Luft III in March 1944. While the Australian prisoners suffered a higher death rate in German and Italian captivity than their counterparts in World War I, it was much lower than the rate suffered under Japanese internment."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"Like the other Allied personnel captured by the Japanese, most of the thousands of Australians captured in the first months of 1942, during the conquest of Malaya and Singapore, the NEI and New Britain were held in harsh conditions. Australians were held in camps across the Asia-Pacific region and many endured long voyages in grossly overcrowded ships. While most of the Australian POWs who died in Japanese captivity were the victim of deliberate malnutrition and disease, hundreds were deliberately killed by their guards. The Burma–Thai Railway was the most notorious of the prisoner of war experiences, as 13,000 Australians worked on it at various times during 1942 and 1943, alongside thousands of other Allied POWs and Asians conscripted by the Japanese; nearly 2,650 Australians died there. Thousands of Australian POWs were also sent to the Japanese home islands where they worked in factories and mines in generally harsh conditions. The POWs held in camps at Ambon and Borneo suffered the highest death rates; 77 percent of those at Ambon died and few of the 2,500 Australian and British prisoners in Borneo survived; almost all were killed by overwork and a series of death marches in 1945.
The treatment of the POWs prompted many Australians to remain hostile towards Japan after the war. Australian authorities investigated the abuses against Allied POWs in their country's zone of responsibility after the war, and guards who were believed to have mistreated prisoners were among those tried by Australian-administered war crimes trials.
Thousands of Axis POWs were held in Australia during the war. A total of 25,720 POWs were held in Australia: 18,432 Italians, 5,637 Japanese and 1,651 Germans. These prisoners were housed in purpose-built camps and were treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention. A total of 16,798 civilians were also interned. These included 8,921 Australian-resident ""enemy aliens"", while the remainder were civilians sent to Australia for internment by other Allied countries. On the morning of 5 August 1944, approximately half of the 1,104 Japanese held at a camp near Cowra, New South Wales, attempted to escape. The prisoners overwhelmed their guards and over 400 broke through the wire fences; however, every escapee was either recaptured or killed within 10 days."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"Home front
During the war the Australian Government greatly expanded its powers in order to better direct the war effort, and Australia's industrial and human resources were focused on supporting the Allied armed forces. The expansion of the government's powers began on 9 September 1939, when the National Security Act became law. This act enabled the government to introduce industrial conscription, and both men and women were ordered into essential industries. Rationing was first introduced in 1940, and was greatly expanded during 1942. The Government also strongly encouraged austerity and war bonds as a means of reducing demand for scarce resources.
Government policies to develop war-related industries were successful in increasing the sophistication of Australia's industrial sector and self-sufficiency in most categories of weapons. In the decades leading up to the war successive Australian governments had provided subsidies, tariffs and other incentives to encourage the development of military-related manufacturing sectors such as the production of aircraft, automobiles, electronics and chemicals. These secondary industries were integrated into a war economy during 1940 and 1941, and were able to meet most of the Army's needs by 1942. Government-led efforts to develop and manufacture advanced technology enjoyed some notable successes, including the development of lightweight radar sets, optical devices for artillery and equipment adapted for use in the tropics. Australian industry also developed new weapons which were mass-produced for the military, including the Owen submachine gun and a shortened version of the Ordnance QF 25 pounder. In addition, Australian scientists and pharmaceutical companies made important advances in the treatment of tropical diseases. Not all development projects were successful though: efforts to develop an Australian tank (the Sentinel) did not cease until after it had been rendered obsolete and unnecessary, and the development of Australian-designed advanced bomber and fighter aircraft—the CAC Woomera and CAC CA-15 respectively—were abandoned as the engines these aircraft required were not available and adequate US and British designs were produced under licence instead."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"The massive expansion of the military led to a critical shortage of male workers and increased female participation in the labour force. The number of Australian women in paid employment increased from 644,000 in 1939, to 855,000 in 1944. While this was only a five percentage point increase in the proportion of all Australian women who were working, large numbers of women moved from traditionally ""female"" roles such as domestic servants into ""male"" roles in industry. Female branches of the armed forces were established in 1941, and by 1944 almost 50,000 women were serving in the Women's Royal Australian Naval Service, Australian Women's Army Service and Women's Auxiliary Australian Air Force. Thousands more served with the civilian Australian Women's Land Army or undertook voluntary war work. Manpower shortages became an increasingly significant economic issue towards the end of the war, and the Australian military was reduced in size from 1944, to free up personnel for war industries and the civilian economy.
Industrial conscription and the drive to increase productivity led to an increasing degree of industrial unrest over time. Many workers were required to work long hours in poor conditions and were not able to change their employment due to the manpower laws. Poor work conditions were exacerbated by the Government's austerity measures reducing workers' standards of living. As a result, strikes and other forms of protest disrupted Australian production, especially from 1943 onwards. These protests attracted considerable criticism from other civilians and members of the military. In May 1943, the Government introduced policies which enabled workers who were undertaking unlawful industrial action to be conscripted into the military, but this had little impact due to the shortage of skilled labour in the industries most prone to industrial disputes.
World War II marked the beginning of a long period of Australian economic growth. The war greatly increased the size and importance of the Australian manufacturing sector and stimulated the development of more technologically advanced industries. As part of this trend many workers acquired relatively high skill levels and female labour force participation rates greatly increased. Many women were forced out of traditionally male-dominated industries after the war, however."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"After the war
World War II cost thousands of Australian lives and consumed a large portion of the national income. During the war, 27,073 members of the Australian military were either killed, died of wounds or died while prisoners of war. Of these, 9,572 were killed in the war against Germany and Italy and 17,501 in the war against Japan. Prisoners of war held by the Japanese made up nearly half of Australia's deaths in the Pacific. At least 386 Australian civilian seamen were killed during the war. Total Australian war expenditure was £2,949,380,000 and at its peak in 1942–43, military costs accounted for 40.1 percent of national income.
In the months after the war, Australian authorities were responsible for administering all of Borneo and the NEI east of Lombok until the British and Dutch colonial governments were re-established. While British and Indian forces in the west of the NEI became caught up in the Indonesian National Revolution, the Australians were able to avoid clashes with local nationalists. Australian forces were also responsible for guarding the 344,000 remaining Japanese in the NEI and Australian territories and administering war crimes trials in these areas. A volunteer force was formed as Australia's contribution to the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF) in Japan, and Australia provided the BCOF's headquarters and a high proportion of its personnel. This force later formed the nucleus of the post-war Australian Army, which included permanent combat units for the first time.
The Australian military was rapidly demobilised after the Japanese surrender. At the end of the war the military had a strength of nearly 600,000 personnel, of whom 224,000 were serving in the Pacific and 20,000 in Britain and other places. Demobilisation planning had begun at the end of 1942 with the final scheme being approved by the Government in March 1945. General demobilisation started on 1 October 1945, and was completed in February 1947. The process generally ran smoothly, though there were protests over delays at Morotai and Bougainville. Personnel were provided with training while they waited to be demobilised and the government provided post-demobilisation assistance with employment, loans, education and other benefits. Service women were given similar assistance to their male counterparts, but were placed under pressure to return to 'traditional' family roles.
World War II led to significant changes to Australian society. Economically, the war accelerated the development of Australia's manufacturing industry and led to a large fall in unemployment. The impact of World War II changed Australian society, and contributed to the development of a more cosmopolitan society in which women were able to play a larger role. The war also resulted in a greater maturity in Australia's approach to international affairs, as demonstrated by the development of a more independent foreign policy and the encouragement of mass immigration after the war."
Military history of Australia during World War II,"See also
Military history of the British Commonwealth in the Second World War
Military history of New Zealand during World War II"
Military history of Australia during World War II,"Notes
References
Further reading
External links"
Military history of Australia during World War II,"""Second World War"". Australian War Memorial. Archived from the original on 17 January 2008.
""Remembering the War in New Guinea"". Australia-Japan Research Project. Australian War Memorial. 2003.
""Australia's War 1939–1945"". Department of Veterans' Affairs. Archived from the original on 21 April 2017."
Australia Act 1986,"The Australia Act 1986 is the short title of each of a pair of separate but related pieces of legislation: one an act of the Parliament of Australia, the other an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. In Australia they are referred to, respectively, as the Australia Act 1986 (Cth) and the Australia Act 1986 (UK). These nearly identical Acts were passed by the two parliaments, because of uncertainty as to whether the Commonwealth Parliament alone had the ultimate authority to do so. They were enacted using legislative powers conferred by enabling Acts passed by the parliaments of every Australian state. The Acts came into effect simultaneously, on 3 March 1986.
According to the long title of the Australian act, its purpose was ""to bring constitutional arrangements affecting the Commonwealth and the States into conformity with the status of the Commonwealth of Australia as a sovereign, independent and federal nation"". The Australia Act (Cth and UK) eliminated the remaining possibilities for the United Kingdom to legislate with effect in Australia, for the UK to be involved in Australian government, and for an appeal from any Australian court to a British court. This act formally severed all legal ties between Australia and the United Kingdom.
At the time, the Commonwealth, state and UK acts were known as the ""Australia Acts"". However, in discussions of contemporary law (as opposed to legal history), the state Acts have performed their function, and thus the expression ""Australia Act(s)"" refers only to the Commonwealth and UK Acts."
Australia Act 1986,"Background
The Commonwealth of Australia was formed in 1901 by the federation of six British colonies, each of which became a state. The Constitution of Australia provided for a Commonwealth Parliament, with legislative power on a range of specified topics.  Some of these topics are exclusive to the Commonwealth, either expressly or by judicial implication; the others are exercised concurrently by the Commonwealth and the states, a relationship that since Federation the High Court of Australia has tended to interpret to the benefit of the Commonwealth;  while the residue of legislative power is left to the states, although all of the states’ legislative power is to be exercised consistently with Commonwealth legislation in the same field. That constitution was (and still is) contained in a British statute. The United Kingdom Parliament retained ultimate legislative power in relation to Australia.
The UK Parliament's power to legislate with effect for the Commonwealth itself was mostly ended with the Statute of Westminster 1931, when adopted by Australia in 1942 retroactive to 1939. The Statute provided (s 4) that no future UK Act would apply to a dominion (of which Australia was one) as part of its law unless the Act expressly declared that the Dominion had requested and consented to it. Until then, Australia had legally been a self-governing dominion of the British Empire, but with the adoption of the Statute became a (mostly) sovereign state.
However, s 4 of the Statute only affected UK laws that were to apply as part of Australian Commonwealth law, not UK laws that were to apply as part of the law of any Australian state. Thus, the Parliament of the United Kingdom still had the power to legislate for the states. In practice, however, this power was almost never exercised. For example, in a referendum on secession in Western Australia in April 1933, 68% of voters favoured seceding from Australia and becoming a separate dominion. The state government sent a delegation to Westminster to request that this result be enacted into law, but the British government refused to intervene on the grounds that this was a matter for the Australian government. As a result of this decision in London, no action was taken in Canberra or Perth.
In the 1980s, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand all began the process of severing their last constitutional links to the United Kingdom. Canada began by patriating its constitution in the Constitution Act, 1982, which was enacted by the British Parliament in the Canada Act 1982. New Zealand experienced a constitutional crisis in 1984, leading to a review of New Zealand's constitution. Australia was experiencing the same desire for constitutional modernisation."
Australia Act 1986,"Appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council
At federation in 1901, the supreme court of each colony became the supreme court of that state. In 1903, a High Court of Australia was established, one of whose functions was to hear appeals from the state supreme courts. The draft of the Constitution, that was put to voters in the various colonies and presented to the British government for embodiment in UK legislation, was that there was to be no appeal from the High Court to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in any matter involving the interpretation of the Constitution or of the constitution of a state, unless it involved the interests of some other dominion. However, the British insisted on a compromise. Section 74 of the Constitution as enacted by the Imperial Parliament provided two possibilities of appeal. There could be an appeal if the High Court issued a certificate that it was appropriate for the Privy Council to determine an inter se matter, i.e. a matter that concerned the constitutional relations between the Commonwealth and one or more states or between two or more states. Furthermore there could be an appeal with permission of the Privy Council. The Commonwealth Parliament was empowered to legislate to limit the latter path and it did so in 1968 and 1975; but legislation could only limit, not abolish.
Predictably, the High Court proved reluctant to grant certificates for appeal to the Privy Council. The discretion was exercised only once, in 1912. In 1961, delivering on behalf of the whole Court a brief dismissal of an application for a certificate, Chief Justice Sir Owen Dixon said: ""experience shows – and that experience was anticipated when s. 74 was enacted – that it is only those who dwell under a Federal Constitution who can become adequately qualified to interpret and apply its provisions"". In 1985, the High Court unanimously observed that the power to grant such a certificate ""has long since been spent"" and is ""obsolete"".
Although the path of appeal from the High Court to the Privy Council had been effectively blocked, the High Court could not block appeals from state supreme courts directly to the Privy Council. Nor did the Constitution limit, or provide for legislation to limit, such appeals. The expense of any appeal to the Privy Council in London had been a deterrent: in any year, there had never been more than a handful. Nonetheless, by the 1980s the possibility of appeal from a state supreme court was seen as outdated. In addition, in 1978 confusion over the relative precedential value of High Court and Privy Council decisions had been introduced when the High Court ruled that it would no longer be bound by Privy Council decisions."
Australia Act 1986,"Australian and British legislation
Disagreement existed as to whether the Commonwealth Parliament alone had sufficient authority to enact the Australia Act under s 51(xxxviii) of the Constitution, or whether an additional Act of the UK Parliament would be required. To put the legal status of the Australia Act beyond doubt, the Australian and British parliaments would each enact the Australia Act in substantially similar forms.
The plan to revamp both federal and state constitutional arrangements required each state parliament to pass its own enabling legislation. The long title of these state acts (such as the Australia Acts (Request) Act 1985 of New South Wales) was ""An Act to enable the constitutional arrangements affecting the Commonwealth and the States to be brought into conformity with the status of the Commonwealth of Australia as a sovereign, independent and federal nation"". The body of each state Act set out the state's ""request and consent"" as to both the Australian and the UK versions of the Australia Act.
The Governor-General of Australia, Sir Ninian Stephen, assented to the Australia Act (Cth) ""In the name of Her Majesty"" on 4 December 1985. However, Queen Elizabeth II was to visit Australia early in 1986 and, in acknowledgement of Australian sensibilities, it was arranged that she would assent to both versions of the Act and then proclaim them so that they would come into force at the same moment in both countries. She assented to the Australia Act 1986 (UK) on 17 February 1986 and on 24 February proclaimed that it would come into force at 05:00 Greenwich Mean Time (Coordinated Universal Time) on 3 March. Then, visiting Australia, at a ceremony held in Government House, Canberra, on 2 March 1986 the Queen signed a proclamation that the Australia Act (Cth) would come into force at 05:00 GMT on 3 March. Thus, according to both UK law and Australian law, the two versions of the Australia Act would commence simultaneously—the UK version at 05:00 GMT in the UK and, according to the time difference, the Australian version at 16:00 AEDT in Canberra. The ceremony was presided over by the Australian prime minister, Bob Hawke, to whom the Queen presented the signed copy of the proclamation, along with the assent original of the UK Act."
Australia Act 1986,"The Act
The Australia Act ended all power of the UK Parliament to legislate with effect in Australia – that is, ""as part of the law of"" the Commonwealth, a state or a territory (s 1). Conversely, no future law of a state would be void for inconsistency with (being ""repugnant to"") any UK law applying with ""paramount force"" in Australia; a state (like the Commonwealth) would have power to repeal or amend such an existing UK law so far as it applied to the state (s 3). State laws would no longer be subject to disallowance and reservation by the monarch (s 8) – a power that, anomalously, remains for Commonwealth legislation (Constitution ss 59 and 60).
Similarly, the Australia Act removed the power of the British government to be involved in the governing of an Australian state (ss 7 and 10). Specifically, only the state premier could now advise the King on appointment or removal of a state governor. 
Governors were vested with the ability to exercise all the powers of the monarch (except the power to appoint the governor), which the monarch was barred from exercising unless they were physically present within the state."
Australia Act 1986,"Amendment or repeal
Section 15 of the Australia Act sets out the procedure that the Act or the Statute of Westminster 1931 can be amended or repealed as part of the law of the Commonwealth, of a state or of a territory. Mirroring the procedure of Section 51(xxxviii) of the Constitution of Australia that was used to enact the Australia Act 1986 (Cth), any amendment to these two pieces of legislation requires the Commonwealth Parliament to act at the request or concurrence of all the state parliaments. As of 2020, neither the Australia Act nor the Statute of Westminster has been amended in this manner."
Australia Act 1986,"Appeals
Section 74 of the Constitution has not been amended, and the Constitution cannot be amended by legislation alone. Nonetheless, s 11 of the Australia Act goes as far as legislatively possible, to make s 74 a dead letter. Thus, for practical purposes, the Australia Act has eliminated the remaining methods of appeal to the Privy Council."
Australia Act 1986,"Legacy
The principal difference between the Commonwealth and UK versions of the Australia Act lies in the reference, appearing in the long title and preamble to the Commonwealth version but not present in the UK version, to Australia as ""a sovereign, independent and federal nation"". 
The High Court in Sue v Hill in 1999 did not rely upon the long title or the preamble, which conventionally do not have force of law. But it decided that the effect of the Australia Act 1986 (Cth) was that, at least from the date when the Act came into operation, Britain had become a ""foreign power"" within the meaning of Constitution section 44(i), so that a parliamentary candidate who had British nationality was ineligible to be a member of the Commonwealth Parliament. (Several more cases of British citizenship, as well as citizenship of other countries, in the Commonwealth Parliament came to light in the 2017–18 Australian parliamentary eligibility crisis.)
That view was taken in Sue v Hill by three members of the High Court, supported with misgivings by one other member. One of those who did not find it necessary to express an opinion on this point, Justice Michael Kirby, was in a later case to deliver a dissent in which he argued that section 6 of the Australia Act 1986 (Cth) was invalid. Section 106 of the Constitution guarantees that a state constitution may be altered only in accordance with its own provisions, hence not by the Commonwealth Parliament. However, both versions of the Australia Act contain amendments to the constitutions of Queensland (s 13) and Western Australia (s 14). In Kirby J's view in Marquet (2003), this was inconsistent with Constitution s 106, so that section 6 of the Australia Act (Cth) was not a valid exercise of Commonwealth legislative power. A majority, however, thought that it was sufficient that the Act had been passed in reliance on Constitution s 51(xxxviii), which gives the Commonwealth Parliament power to legislate at the request of the state parliaments.
In Shaw v Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (2003), the High Court held that the act ""gave voice to the completion of Australia's evolutionary independence ... it was a formal declaration that the Commonwealth of Australia and the Australian states were completely constitutionally independent of the United Kingdom""."
Australia Act 1986,"See also
Canada Act 1982; Constitution Act, 1982
New Zealand Constitution Act 1986"
Australia Act 1986,"Footnotes
References
Citations
Sources
Primary sources"
Australia Act 1986,Secondary sources
Australia Act 1986,External links
Australia Act 1986,"Privy Council appeals:
Privy Council Appeals from Australia (up to 1980 only, from AustLII). Retrieved 5 June 2011
Privy Council Decisions (complete, from BAILII). Retrieved 5 June 2011
National Archives of Australia, ""Documenting a Democracy"":
""Australia Act 1986 (Cth)"". Retrieved 2 October 2016.
""Queen Elizabeth II signs the Proclamation of the Australia Act (Cth), 1986"". Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 3 June 2011.
Transcript, Media release, 2 March 1986, Prime Minister Bob Hawke, Proclamation of the Australia Act 1986 (Cth) Retrieved 14 January 2020"
Median household income in Australia and New Zealand,"Median household income is commonly used to measure the relative prosperity of populations in different geographical locations. It divides households into two equal segments with the first half of households earning less than the median household income and the other half earning more.
New Zealand and Australia are gradually being economically integrated through a process known as ""Closer Economic Relations (CER)"". Their citizens are free to travel, live and work in either country. Information about their relative median household incomes is of interest, especially for those considering migration.
The latest release shows that the median gross household income in 2013–2014 was $80,704, and the average of all households was $107,276."
Median household income in Australia and New Zealand,"Median household income in NZ 2004–2008
Median weekly household income in NZ increased at a rate of about 3.5% a year from 2004 to 2008. In June 2004 it was (NZ)$992, June 2005 was $1,040, June 2006 was $1,129, June 2007 was $1,203, June 2008 was $1,271."
Median household income in Australia and New Zealand,"Median household income in NZ 2009–2011
Median weekly household income in NZ fell slightly or stagnated from 2009 to 2010 during the ""great recession"" period. In June 2009 it was $1,234 and June 2010 it was $1,236. In 2011 household incomes recovered to beyond the high of 2008 again – median weekly household incomes increased again to $1,289."
Median household income in Australia and New Zealand,"Median household income in 2007–2008
Income data for each state (or territory) has been converted to U.S. dollars using purchasing power parity for private and public consumption. This is done because it provides a more accurate and stable assessment of the true value of citizens' incomes in diverse countries."
Median household income in Australia and New Zealand,"Main source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Household Income and Income Distribution, Australia 2007–08 .
 Note : The NZ figure is Average Household Income and not Median Household Income. No source for Median Income found. The figure for NZ Median Household Income is likely to be slightly less. Note: GDP per capita cannot be used to predict median household income (See median household income)."
Median household income in Australia and New Zealand,"Median household income in 2011–2012
There were no significant changes in income between 2009–10 and 2011–12."
Median household income in Australia and New Zealand,"Median gross household income in 2013–2014
The median gross household income in 2013–2014 was $80,704."
Median household income in Australia and New Zealand,"Median gross household income in 2017–2018
The median gross household income in 2017-2018 is A$1,701 per week or A$88,695 per year. As of 30 June 2018 (end of fiscal year), one Australia dollar is equivalent of 0.7406 U.S. dollar. Using this exchange rate, the median gross household income in Australia is US$65,687 in 2017–18."
Median household income in Australia and New Zealand,"See also
Economy of Australia
Homelessness in Australia
Home-ownership in Australia
List of Australian states and territories by gross state product
Median household income
Poverty in Australia"
Median household income in Australia and New Zealand,"
== References =="
List of female cabinet ministers of Australia,"== See also ==
Cabinet (government)
Cabinet of Australia
Politics of Australia"
List of female cabinet ministers of Australia,"References
External links
List of female cabinet ministers of Australia"
Eastern Australian temperate forests,"The Eastern Australian temperate forests is a broad ecoregion of open forest on uplands (typically on the Great Dividing Range) starting from the east coast of New South Wales in the South Coast to southern Queensland, Australia. Although dry sclerophyll and wet sclerophyll eucalyptus forests predominate within this ecoregion, a number of distinguishable rainforest communities are present as well. 
Many systematic National and State Parks are distributed throughout New South Wales and Queensland, although the representation of habitats varies throughout the ecoregion. In some areas, eucalyptus woodlands and dry forests have been cleared for urban development or to enhance grazing. Before Europeans first arrived to Australia, the Border Ranges had one of the largest rainforests in Australia."
Eastern Australian temperate forests,"Geography
This ecoregion covers an area between Australia's east coast and the Great Dividing Range, starting just above Eden, New South Wales in the South Coast, which includes (parts of) the Blue Mountains to the west Sydney, and ending in south Queensland's Border Ranges. The Sydney metropolitan area is transitional with regions such as the greater west (or the Cumberland Plain Woodland) being virtually excluded from this biome since it predominantly contains dry sclerophyll, grassy woodlands and thus the region's vegetation community will be more similar to Temperate grasslands (i.e. savannahs). Though pockets of forested areas in Sydney, such as those in The Hills Shire to the north and Sutherland Shire to the south, which are relatively wet, do have regions within them that are part of Eastern Australian temperate forests (such as the Sydney Turpentine-Ironbark Forest and Blue Gum High Forest).
Eucalyptus communities meandering the coast in southern Queensland and northern New South Wales are usually wet sclerophyll wet forests, ranging from 30 percent to 70 percent closed canopy cover, with the understorey containing small broadleaved trees, vines, ferns and shrubs. Both wet and dry sclerophyll forests are the most predominant vegetation communities in the coastal corridor of south-eastern Australia, and would receive less rainfall than the rainforest communities.
Subtropical rainforest are complex closed-forests that are the most developed community in New South Wales, growing in warm, fecund sites having rainfall higher than 1,300 mm per year. They are predominantly found between the border of Queensland and New South Wales, near the Gold Coast, Coffs Harbour and Byron Bay.
Dry rainforests are low closed forests with irregular canopy that occur in sites with lower rainfall, ranging from 600 mm to 1,100 mm annual rainfall, generally in parts of the Blue Mountains and also near Narooma and Moruya in the south coast. Dry rainforest was distributed in southeastern Queensland where it occupied about half a million hectares, though it has now been broadly cleared for agriculture. There is a small dry rainforest community in southwestern Sydney, near Abbotsbury. Western Vine Thickets, another dry closed forest biome is found inland of New South Wales near Moree and Narrabri. 
Warm temperate rainforest are closed forests with far less diversity than the dry or subtropical rainforests, growing on low-nutrient soils. It is found scattered in the Blue Mountains, Central Coast, North Coast, the Illawarra escarpment near Wollongong and in isolated pockets in the South Coast. Cool temperate forests are found in the highlands in the northern areas of New South Wales. The Blue Mountains and Southern Highlands Basalt Forests and the Illawarra-Shoalhaven subtropical rainforest are a prominent forest community within the ecoregion.
The rainforest communities of this region exhibit ecological relations to other regions: the cool temperate rainforest is similar to the biome found in Tasmania, the warm temperate rainforest has links to the North Island of New Zealand, and the subtropical and dry regions are also found up north in the Queensland tropical rain forests ecoregion. The Blue Mountains area has over 90 eucalypt taxa, or 13% of the global dispersion."
Eastern Australian temperate forests,"Biome groupings
The ecoregion has a variety of vegetation communities in its scope:"
Eastern Australian temperate forests,"Eucalyptus open forests (dry and wet sclerophyll forests)
Eucalyptus tall open forest
Eucalyptus open forest
Eucalyptus low open forest
Eucalyptus open grassy woodlands
Closed forests (rainforests and vine thickets)
Subtropical rainforest
Littoral rainforest
Dry rainforest
Warm temperate/deciduous rainforest (southern and northern group)
Cool temperate rainforest
Western Vine Thickets
To note, the open eucalypt forest is a broad, crescent-shaped vegetation community that is found from Gladstone, Queensland to as far as Quorn, South Australia in the southwest, which incorporates Southeast Australia temperate forests in southern Victoria and the Mediterranean woodlands in western Victoria and eastern South Australia."
Eastern Australian temperate forests,"Climate
These are areas of eucalyptus forest on sandstone plateau, with smaller sections of cliffs, steep gorges with rainforest vegetation and sandy heath on the coasts. The climate is oceanic to the south and humid subtropical to the north. In the central areas of the Blue Mountains, rainfall averages from 1,100 to 1,400 mm annually.  Climate in the coastal regions is humid, with excessive rainfall (1200 mm to 1600 mm a year). Rainfall decreases as one moves inland to the New England region with Armidale receiving around 800 mm of rain each year on average. Winters in that city are cold and wet and higher elevations receive snowfall most years.
Further north in the Border Ranges, monthly summer temperatures vary from 21.5C maximum to 19.7C minimum. Corresponding winter temperatures from Mount Tamborine in the Border Ranges vary from 17.8C maximum to 12.3C minimum. Throughout the ecoregion, rainfall is concentrated in the summer. Towards the north of the ecoregion rainfall is lower (750 mm to 1100 mm per year) and more seasonal."
Eastern Australian temperate forests,"Flora
The dominant forest is peppermint eucalyptus trees, indeed it was the moisture from these trees which was originally thought to cause the blue mist that gave the mountains their name. Shrublands, shrubby woodlands (heaths), and affiliated sandplain vegetation are typical of the region's coastal area. The shrub species include, Epacridaceae, Myrtaceae, Rutaceae, Fabaceae, Proteaceae, and Cyperaceae. The Border Ranges is home to more than 1,200 vascular plants.
A variety of eucalyptus trees dominate areas of this large ecoregion, including: in southern Queensland and northern New South Wales (such as in around such as the Northern Tablelands) - tallowwood (Eucalyptus microcorys), blackbutt (Eucalyptus pilularis), brush box (Lophostemon confertus), flooded gum (Eucalyptus grandis), and Gympie messmate (Eucalyptus cloeziana); southern New South Wales - Sydney blue gum (Eucalyptus saligna), the grey ironbark (Eucalyptus paniculata), and blackbutt; and on the New South Wales coast  a stringybark (Eucalyptus eugenioides). Trees in the warm temperate forests include coachwood (Ceratopetalum apetalum), sassafras (Doryphora sassafras), and lillypilly (Acmena smithii) Typical trees in cool temperate forests include Eucryphia moorei and Antarctic beech (Nothofagus moorei).
There are particularly rich collections of endemic plants in a number of areas: the eucalyptus of the Blue Mountains; the rainforests of Border Ranges area in the McPherson Range including Mount Warning, Nightcap National Park, and Lamington National Park including Binna Burra; and the sand dunes of World Heritage Site Fraser Island and the Great Sandy National Park of southern Queensland. There are well-known areas of rainforest protected as the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia, containing distinct areas of subtropical rainforest in New South Wales, dry rainforest of southern Queensland (although most of this has been cleared for agriculture and pine plantations) and warm temperate rainforest south of Sydney. Finally the coasts are covered with shrubs, heath and other sand dune vegetation."
Eastern Australian temperate forests,"Fauna
Local wildlife includes velvet worms and koalas, while the birds of the forest include kookaburra kingfishers, gang-gang cockatoos, crimson rosellas and striated thornbills and a number of threatened birds including red goshawk (Erythrotriorchis radiatus), swift parrot (Lathamus discolor), regent honeyeater (Xanthomyza phrygia), Albert's lyrebird (Menura alberti), and eastern bristlebird (Dasyornis brachypterus). Overall , upwards of 60 reptiles, 65 mammals, and 275 birds have been transcribed in the Blue Mountains. The broad-headed snake and the stuttering frog also exist in the region."
Eastern Australian temperate forests,"List of national parks within the ecoregion
These parks are listed in a north to south order, starting from northern NSW down to the south coast of NSW (to note, not all plant communities within these parks have temperate forests, as some would grade to Mediterranean woodlands and/or subtropical forests, depending on the vicinity):"
Eastern Australian temperate forests,"Border Ranges National Park
Washpool National Park
Willi Willi National Park
Werrikimbe National Park
Cottan-Bimbang National Park
Barrington Tops National Park
Myall Lakes National Park
Brisbane Water National Park
Berowra Valley National Park
Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park
Dharug National Park
Blue Mountains National Park
Royal National Park
Marramarra National Park
Dharawal National Park
Budderoo National Park
Budawang National Park
Monga National Park
Deua National Park
Wadbilliga National Park
Mimosa Rocks National Park
Wadbilliga National Park"
Eastern Australian temperate forests,"See also
Sclerophyll
Blue Gum High Forest
Sydney Turpentine-Ironbark Forest
Ecology of Sydney"
Eastern Australian temperate forests,"References
External links
 Media related to Eastern Australian temperate forests at Wikimedia Commons
Eastern Australian temperate forests WWF Ecoregion Page"
Convicts in Australia,"Between 1788 and 1868 the British penal system  transported about 162,000  convicts from Great Britain and Ireland to various penal colonies in Australia.
The British Government began transporting convicts overseas to American colonies in the early 18th century. After trans-Atlantic transportation ended with the start of the American Revolution, authorities sought an alternative destination to relieve further overcrowding of British prisons and  hulks. Earlier in 1770, James Cook had charted and claimed possession of the east coast of Australia for Britain. Seeking to pre-empt the French colonial empire from expanding into the region, Britain chose Australia as the site of a penal colony, and in 1787, the First Fleet of eleven convict ships set sail for Botany Bay, arriving on 20 January 1788 to found Sydney, New South Wales, the first European settlement on the continent. Other penal colonies were later established in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) in 1803 and Queensland in 1824. Western Australia – established as the Swan River Colony in 1829 – initially was intended solely for free settlers, but commenced receiving convicts in 1850. South Australia and Victoria, established in 1836 and 1850 respectively, officially remained free colonies. However, a population that included thousands of convicts already resided in the area that became known as Victoria.
Penal transportation to Australia peaked in the 1830s and dropped off significantly in the following decade, as  protests against the convict system intensified throughout the colonies. In 1868, almost two decades after transportation to the eastern colonies had ceased, the last convict ship arrived in Western Australia.
The majority of convicts were transported for petty crimes. More serious crimes, such as rape and murder, became transportable offences in the 1830s, but since they were also punishable by death, comparatively few convicts were transported for such crimes. Approximately 1 in 7 convicts were women, while political prisoners, another minority group, comprised many of the best-known convicts. Once  emancipated, most ex-convicts stayed in Australia and joined the free settlers, with some rising to prominent positions in Australian society. However, convictism carried a social stigma and, for some later Australians, being of convict descent instilled a sense of shame and cultural cringe. Attitudes became more accepting in the 20th century, and it is now considered by many Australians to be a cause for celebration to discover a convict in one's lineage. In 2007, it was estimated that approximately four million Australians are related to convicts that were deported from the British Isles to Australia. The convict era has inspired famous novels, films, and other cultural works, and the extent to which it has shaped Australia's national character has been studied by many writers and historians."
Convicts in Australia,"Reasons for transportation
According to Robert Hughes in The Fatal Shore, the population of England and Wales, which had remained steady at 6 million from 1700 to 1740, began rising considerably after 1740. By the time of the American Revolution, London was overcrowded, filled with the unemployed, and flooded with cheap gin. Poverty, social injustice, child labour, harsh and dirty living conditions and long working hours were prevalent in 19th-century Britain. Dickens's novels perhaps best illustrate this; many government officials were horrified by what they saw. Only in 1833 and 1844 were the first general laws against child labour (the Factory Acts) passed in the United Kingdom. Crime had become a major problem. In 1784, a French observer noted that ""from sunset to dawn the environs of London became the patrimony of brigands for twenty miles around."""
Convicts in Australia,"Each parish had a watchman, but British cities did not have police forces in the modern sense. Jeremy Bentham strongly promoted the idea of a circular prison, but the penitentiary was seen by many government officials as a peculiar American concept. Virtually all malefactors were caught by informers or denounced to the local court by their victims. Pursuant to the so-called ""Bloody Code"", by the 1770s some 222 crimes in Britain carried the death penalty. Almost all of these were crimes against property, including such offences as the stealing of goods worth over 5 shillings, the cutting down of a tree, the theft of an animal, even the theft of a rabbit from a warren.
Because the Industrial Revolution economically displaced much of the working class, there was an increase in petty crime. The government was under pressure to find an alternative to confinement in overcrowded gaols. The situation was so dire that hulks left over from the Seven Years' War were used as makeshift floating prisons. Four out of five prisoners were in jail for theft. 
In the 1800s the Bloody Code was gradually rescinded because judges and juries considered its punishments too harsh. Since lawmakers still wanted punishments to deter potential criminals, they increasingly used transportation as a more humane sentence to execution. Transportation had been employed as a punishment for both major and petty crimes since the 17th century.
About 60,000 convicts were transported to the British colonies in North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, under the terms of the Transportation Act 1717. Transportation to the Americas ceased following Britain's defeat in the American Revolutionary War. (The number of convicts transported to North America is not verified, although it has been estimated to be 50,000 by John Dunmore Lang and 120,000 by Thomas Keneally.) The British American colony of Maryland received a larger felon quota than any other province."
Convicts in Australia,"Penal settlements
New South Wales
Alternatives to the American colonies were investigated and the newly discovered and mapped East Coast of New Holland was proposed. The details provided by James Cook during his expedition to the South Pacific in 1770 made it the most suitable.
On 18 August 1786, the decision was made to send a colonisation party of convicts, military, and civilian personnel to Botany Bay under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip, who was appointed as Governor of the new colony. There were 775 convicts on board six transport ships. They were accompanied by officials, members of the crew, marines, the families thereof, and their own children who together totaled 645. In all, eleven ships were sent in what became known as the First Fleet. Other than the convict transports, there were two naval escorts and three storeships. The fleet assembled in Portsmouth and set sail on 13 May 1787.
The eleven ships arrived at Botany Bay over the three-day period of 18 - 20 January 1788. It soon became clear that the bay would not be suitable for the establishment of a colony due to ""the openness of this bay, and the dampness of the soil, by which the people would probably be rendered unhealthy"". Phillip decided to examine Port Jackson, a bay mentioned by Captain Cook, about three leagues to the north. On 22 January 1788 a small expedition led by Phillips sailed to Port Jackson, arriving in the early afternoon:"
Convicts in Australia,"Here all regret arising from the former disappointments was at once obliterated; and Governor Phillip had the satisfaction to find one of the finest harbours in the world, in which a thousand sail of the line might ride in perfect security. The different coves of this harbour were examined with all possible expedition, and the preference was given to one which had the finest spring of water, and in which ships can anchor so close to the shore, that at a very small expence quays may be constructed at which the largest vessels may unload. This cove is about half a mile in length and a quarter of a mile across at the entrance. In honour of Lord Sydney, the Governor distinguished it by the name of Sydney Cove.
There they established the first permanent European colony on the Australian continent, within New South Wales, on 26 January 1788. The area has since developed as the city of Sydney.  This date is celebrated as Australia Day.
Initially the members of the first fleet suffered a high mortality rate, due mainly to starvation from shortages of food. The ships carried only enough food to provide for the settlers until they could establish agriculture in the region. There were an insufficient number of skilled farmers and domesticated livestock to achieve this. The colony had to await the arrival of the Second Fleet. The ""Memorandoms"" by James Martin provide a contemporary account of the events as seen by a convict from  the first fleet. The second fleet was a disaster and provided little in the way of help. In June 1790 it delivered additional sick and dying convicts, affected by the rigors of the lengthy journey. The situation worsened in Port Jackson.
Lieutenant-General Sir Richard Bourke was the ninth Governor of the Colony of New South Wales, serving between 1831 and 1837. Appalled by the excessive punishments doled out to convicts during their imprisonment and work assignments, Bourke passed 'The Magistrates Act', which limited the sentence a magistrate could pass to fifty lashes (previously there was no such limit). Bourke's administration was controversial. Furious magistrates and employers petitioned the crown against this interference with their legal rights, fearing that a reduction in punishments would cease to provide enough deterrence to the convicts.
Bourke, however, was not dissuaded from his reforms. He continued to combat the inhumane treatment of convicts, and limited the number of convicts assigned to each employer to seventy. There was limited oversight of treatment of assigned convicts. Bourke  granted rights to convicts who were freed after serving their sentences, such as allowing them to acquire property and serve on juries. It has been argued that the suspension of convict transportation to New South Wales in 1840 can be attributed to the actions of Bourke and other like-minded men, such as Australian-born lawyer William Charles Wentworth. It took another 10 years, but transportation to the colony of New South Wales was finally officially abolished on 1 October 1850.
If a convict was well behaved, the convict could be given a ticket of leave, granting some freedom. At the end of a convict's sentence, seven years in most cases, the convict was issued with a Certificate of Freedom. He was free to become a settler or to return to England. Convicts who misbehaved, however, were often sent to a place of secondary punishment, such as Port Arthur, Tasmania, or Norfolk Island, where they would suffer additional punishment and solitary confinement."
Convicts in Australia,"Norfolk Island
Within a month of the arrival of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove, a group of convicts and free settlers were sent to take control of Norfolk Island, a small island 1,412 kilometres (877 mi) east of the coast of New South Wales. More convicts were sent, and many of them proved to be unruly. In early 1789 they made a failed attempt to overthrow Lieutenant Philip Gidley King, the island's commandant. There were other hazards: HMS Sirius was wrecked on one of the island's reefs while attempting to land stores."
Convicts in Australia,"Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania)
In 1803, a British expedition was sent from Sydney to Tasmania (then known as Van Diemen's Land) to establish a new penal colony there. The small party, led by Lt. John Bowen, established a settlement at Risdon Cove, on the eastern side of the Derwent River. Originally sent to Port Philip, but abandoned within weeks, another expedition led by Lieutenant-Colonel David Collins arrived soon after.  
Collins considered the Risdon Cove site inadequate, and in 1804 he established an alternative settlement on the western side of the river at Sullivan's Cove, Tasmania. This later became known as Hobart, and the original settlement at Risdon Cove was abandoned. Collins was appointed as the first Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land.
When the convict station on Norfolk Island was abandoned in 1807–1808, the remaining convicts and free settlers were transported to Hobart and allocated land for resettlement.  However, as the existing small population was already having difficulties producing enough food, the sudden doubling of the population was almost catastrophic.
Starting in 1816, more free settlers began arriving from Great Britain. On 3 December 1825 Tasmania was declared a colony separate from New South Wales, with a separate administration."
Convicts in Australia,"The Macquarie Harbour penal colony on the West Coast of Tasmania was established in 1820 to exploit the valuable timber Huon Pine growing there for furniture making and shipbuilding. Macquarie Harbour had the added advantage of being almost impossible to escape from. Most attempts ended with fugitive convicts either drowning, dying of starvation in the bush, or (on at least two occasions) turning cannibal.  
Convicts sent to this settlement had usually re-offended during their sentence of transportation. They were treated very harshly, labouring in cold and wet weather, and subjected to severe corporal punishment for minor infractions. Several hundred non-indigenous black convicts were transported to Van Diemen's Land, most as punishment for speaking or acting against the British Empire.
In 1830, the Port Arthur penal settlement was established to replace Macquarie Harbour, as it was easier to maintain regular communications by sea. Although known in popular history as a particularly harsh prison, in reality, its management was far more humane than Macquarie Harbour or the outlying stations of New South Wales. Experimentation with the so-called model prison system took place in Port Arthur. Solitary confinement was the preferred method of punishment.
Many changes were made to the manner in which convicts were handled in the general population, largely responsive to British public opinion on the harshness of their treatment. Until the late 1830s, most convicts were either retained by the Government for public works or assigned to private individuals as a form of indentured labour.  From the early 1840s the Probation System was employed, where convicts spent an initial period, usually two years, in public works gangs on stations outside of the main settlements. They were then freed to work for wages within a set district.
Transportation to Tasmania ended in 1853 (see section below on Cessation of Transportation). Records on the individual convicts transported to Van Diemen’s Land or born there between 1803 and 1900 were being digitised as of 2019 as part of the Founders and Survivors project."
Convicts in Australia,"Port Phillip District
In 1803, two ships arrived in Port Phillip, which Lt. John Murray in the Lady Nelson had discovered and named the previous year. The Calcutta under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Collins transported 300 convicts, accompanied by the supply ship Ocean. Collins had previously been Judge Advocate with the First Fleet in 1788.  He chose Sullivan Bay near the present-day Sorrento, Victoria for the first settlement - some 90 km south of present-day Melbourne. About two months later the settlement was abandoned due to poor soil and water shortages and Collins moved the convicts to Hobart. Several convicts had escaped into the bush and were left behind to unknown fates with the local aboriginal people. One such convict, the subsequently celebrated William Buckley, lived in the western side of Port Phillip for the next 32 years before approaching the new settlers and assisting as an interpreter for the indigenous peoples.
A second settlement was established at Westernport Bay, on the site of present-day Corinella, in November 1826. It comprised an initial 20 soldiers and 22 convicts, with another 12 convicts arriving subsequently. This settlement was abandoned in February 1828, and all convicts returned to Sydney.
The Port Phillip District was officially sanctioned in 1837 following the landing of the Henty brothers in Portland Bay in 1834, and John Batman settled on the site of Melbourne.
Between 1844 and 1849 about 1,750 convicts arrived there from England. They were referred to either as ""Exiles"" or the ""Pentonvillians"" because most of them came from Pentonville Probationary Prison. Unlike earlier convicts who were required to work for the government or on hire from penal depots, the Exiles were free to work for pay, but could not leave the district to which they were assigned. The Port Phillip District was still part of New South Wales at this stage. Victoria separated from New South Wales and became an independent colony in 1851."
Convicts in Australia,"Moreton Bay
In 1823 John Oxley sailed north from Sydney to inspect Port Curtis and Moreton Bay as possible sites for a penal colony. At Moreton Bay, he found the Brisbane River, which Cook had guessed would exist, and explored the lower part of it. In September 1824, he returned with soldiers and established a temporary settlement at Redcliffe. On 2 December 1824, the settlement was transferred to where the Central Business District (CBD) of Brisbane now stands. The settlement was at first called Edenglassie. In 1839 transportation of convicts to Moreton Bay ceased and the Brisbane penal settlement was closed. In 1842 free settlement was permitted and people began to colonize the area voluntarily. On 6 June 1859 Queensland became a colony separate from New South Wales.  In 2009 the Convict Records of Queensland, held by the Queensland State Archives and the State Library of Queensland was added to UNESCO's Australian Memory of the World Register."
Convicts in Australia,"Western Australia
Although a convict-supported settlement was established in Western Australia from 1826 to 1831, direct transportation of convicts did not begin until 1850. It continued until 1868. During that period, 9,668 convicts were transported on 43 convict ships. The first convicts to arrive were transported to New South Wales, and sent by that colony to King George Sound (Albany) in 1826 to help establish a settlement there. At that time the western third of Australia was unclaimed land known as New Holland. Fears that France would lay claim to the land prompted the Governor of New South Wales, Ralph Darling, to send Major Edmund Lockyer, with troops and 23 convicts, to establish a settlement at King George Sound. Lockyer's party arrived on Christmas Day, 1826. A convict presence was maintained at the settlement for over four years. On 7 March 1831 control of the settlement was transferred to the Swan River Colony, and the troops and convicts were withdrawn.
In April 1848, Charles Fitzgerald, Governor of Western Australia, petitioned Britain to send convicts to his state because of labour shortages. Britain rejected sending fixed-term convicts, but offered to send first offenders in the final years of their terms.
Most convicts in Western Australia spent very little time in prison. Those who were stationed at Fremantle were housed in the Convict Establishment, the colony's convict prison, and misbehaviour was punished by stints there. The majority, however, were stationed in other parts of the colony. Although there was no convict assignment in Western Australia, there was a great demand for public infrastructure throughout the colony, so that many convicts were stationed in remote areas. Initially, most offenders were set to work creating infrastructure for the convict system, including the construction of the Convict Establishment itself.
In 1852 a Convict Depot was built at Albany, but closed 3 years later. When shipping increased the Depot was re-opened. Most of the convicts had their Ticket-of-Leave and were hired to work by the free settlers. Convicts also crewed the pilot boat, rebuilt York Street and Stirling Terrace; and the track from Albany to Perth was made into a good road. An Albany newspaper noted their commendable behaviour and wrote, ""There were instances in which our free settlers might take an example"".
Western Australia's convict era came to an end with the cessation of penal transportation by Britain. In May 1865, the colony was advised of the change in British policy, and told that Britain would send one convict ship in each of the years 1865, 1866, and 1867, after which transportation would cease. In accordance with this, the last convict ship to Western Australia, Hougoumont, left Britain in 1867 and arrived in Western Australia on 10 January 1868."
Convicts in Australia,"Women
Between 1788 and 1852, about 24,000 transportees were women, one in seven. 80% of women had been convicted of theft, usually petty. For protection, many quickly attached themselves to male officers or convicts. Although they were routinely referred to as courtesans, no women were transported for prostitution, as it was not a transportable offence."
Convicts in Australia,"Political prisoners
Approximately 3,600 political prisoners were transported to the Australian colonies, many of whom arrived in waves corresponding to political unrest in Britain and Ireland. They included the First Scottish Martyrs in 1794; British Naval Mutineers (from the Nore Mutiny) in 1797 and 1801; Irish rebels in 1798, 1803, 1848 and 1868; Cato Street Conspirators (1820); Scots Rebels (1820); Yorkshire Rebels (1820 and 1822); leaders of the Merthyr Tydfil rising of 1831; the Tolpuddle Martyrs (1834); Swing Rioters and Luddites (1828–1833); American and French-Canadian prisoners from the Upper Canada rebellion and Lower Canada Rebellion (1839), and Chartists (1842)."
Convicts in Australia,"Cessation of transportation
With increasing numbers of free settlers entering New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) by the mid-1830s, opposition to the transportation of felons into the colonies grew.  The most influential spokesmen were newspaper proprietors who were also members of the Independent Congregational Church such as John Fairfax in Sydney and the Reverend John West in Launceston, who argued against convicts both as competition to honest free labourers and as the source of crime and vice within the colony.  Bishop Bernard Ullathorne, a Catholic prelate who had been in Australia since 1832 returned for a visit to England in 1835.  While there he was called upon by the government to give evidence before a Parliamentary Commission on the evils of transportation, and at their request wrote and submitted a tract on the subject.
His views in conjunction with others in the end prevailed. The anti-transportation movement was seldom concerned with the inhumanity of the system, but rather the ""hated stain"" it was believed to inflict on the free (non-emancipist) middle classes.
Transportation to New South Wales temporarily ended 1840 under the Order-in-Council of 22 May 1840, by which time some 150,000 convicts had been sent to the colonies.  The sending of convicts to Brisbane in its Moreton Bay district had ceased the previous year, and administration of Norfolk Island was later transferred to Van Diemen's Land.
Opposition to transportation was not unanimous; wealthy landowner, Benjamin Boyd, for reasons of economic self-interest, wanted to use transported convicts from Van Diemen's Land as a source of free or low-cost labour in New South Wales, particularly as shepherds. The final transport of convicts to New South Wales occurred in 1850, with some 1,400 convicts transported between the Order-in-Council and that date.
The continuation of transportation to Van Diemen's Land saw the rise of a well-coordinated anti-transportation movement, especially following a severe economic depression in the early 1840s.  Transportation was temporarily suspended in 1846 but soon revived with overcrowding of British gaols and clamour for the availability of transportation as a deterrent.  By the late 1840s most convicts being sent to Van Diemen's Land (plus those to Victoria) were designated as ""exiles"" and were free to work for pay while under sentence.  In 1850 the Australasian Anti-Transportation League was formed to lobby for the permanent cessation of transportation, its aims being furthered by the commencement of the Australian gold rushes the following year.  The last convict ship to be sent from England, the St. Vincent, arrived in 1853, and on 10 August Jubilee festivals in Hobart and Launceston celebrated 50 years of European settlement with the official end of transportation.
Transportation continued in small numbers to Western Australia. The last convict ship, Hougoumont, left Britain in 1867 and arrived in Western Australia on 10 January 1868. In all, about 164,000 convicts were transported to the Australian colonies between 1788 and 1868 onboard 806 ships. Convicts were made up of English and Welsh (70%), Irish (24%), Scottish (5%), and the remaining 1% from the British outposts in India and Canada, Maoris from New Zealand, Chinese from Hong Kong, and slaves from the Caribbean.
Samuel Speed, who died 150 years after the arrival of the First Fleet, is believed to have been the last surviving transported convict. Born in Birmingham in 1841, he was transported to Western Australia in 1866 after deliberately committing a crime - setting fire to a haystack - in order to escape homelessness. He was conditionally released in 1869 and was granted his certificate of freedom two years later. He worked in construction and was not convicted of any further crimes, dying in Perth in 1938."
Convicts in Australia,"Legacy
In 2010, UNESCO inscribed 11 Australian Convict Sites on its World Heritage List. The listing recognises the sites as ""the best surviving examples of large-scale convict transportation and the colonial expansion of European powers through the presence and labour of convicts."""
Convicts in Australia,"Cultural depictions
Convict George Barrington is (perhaps apocryphally) recorded as having written the prologue for the first theatrical play performed by convicts in Australia, one year after the First Fleet's arrival. It is known as ""Our Country's Good"", based on the now-famous closing stanza:"
Convicts in Australia,"From distant climes, o'er wide-spread seas, we come,
Though not with much éclat or beat of drum,
True patriots all:  for, be it understood:
We left our country for our country's good.
The poems of Frank the Poet are among the few surviving literary works done by a convict while still incarcerated. His best-known work is ""A Convict's Tour of Hell"". A version of the convict ballad ""Moreton Bay"", detailing the brutal punishments meted out by commandant Patrick Logan and his death at the hands of Aborigines, is also attributed to Frank. Other convict ballads include ""Jim Jones at Botany Bay"". The ballad ""Botany Bay"", which describes the sadness felt by convicts forced to leave their loved ones in England, was written at least 40 years after the end of transportation.
Perhaps the most famous convict in all of fiction is Abel Magwitch, a main character of Charles Dickens' 1861 novel Great Expectations. The most famous convict novel is Marcus Clarke's For the Term of His Natural Life (1874), followed by John Boyle O'Reilly's Moondyne (1879). The Broad Arrow by Caroline Woolmer Leakey was one of the first novels to depict the convict experience, and one of the only to feature a female convict as its protagonist (Marcus Clarke drew on Leakey's book in writing For the Term of His Natural Life). Thomas Keneally explores the convict era in his novels Bring Larks and Heroes (1967) and The Playmaker (1987). Convicts feature heavily in Patrick White's take on the Eliza Fraser story, the 1976 novel A Fringe of Leaves. Convictism is canvassed in Bryce Courtenay's ""Australian trilogy"": The Potato Factory (1995), Tommo & Hawk (1997) and Solomon's Song (1999). The title character of Peter Carey's 1997 novel Jack Maggs is a reworking of Dickens' Magwitch character. Many modern works of Tasmanian Gothic focus on the state's convict past, including Gould's Book of Fish (2001) by Richard Flanagan, a fictionalised account of convict artist William Buelow Gould's imprisonment at Macquarie Harbour. Kate Grenville based the novel The Secret River (2005) on the life of her convict ancestor Solomon Wiseman.
Along with bushrangers and other stock characters of colonial life, convicts were a popular subject during Australia's silent film era. The first convict film was a 1908 adaptation of Marcus Clarke's For the Term of His Natural Life, shot on location at Port Arthur with an unheard-of budget of £7000. This was followed by two more films inspired by Clarke's novel: The Life of Rufus Dawes (1911), which draws on Alfred Dampier's stage production of His Natural Life, and the landmark For the Term of His Natural Life (1927), one of the most expensive silent films ever made. W. J. Lincoln directed many convict melodramas including It Is Never Too Late to Mend (1911), an adaptation of Charles Reade's 1856 novel about cruelties of the convict system; Moodyne (1913), based on John Boyle O'Reilly's novel; and Transported (1913). Other early titles include Sentenced for Life, The Mark of the Lash, One Hundred Years Ago, The Lady Outlaw and The Assigned Servant, all released in 1911. Few convict films were made after 1930; even the Australian New Wave of the 1970s, with its emphasis on Australia's colonial past, largely avoided the convict era in favour of nostalgic period pieces set in the bush around the time of Federation. One exception is Journey Among Women (1977), a feminist imagining of what life was like for convict women. Alexander Pearce, the infamous Tasmanian convict and cannibal, is the inspiration for The Last Confession of Alexander Pearce (2008), Dying Breed (2008) and  Van Diemen's Land (2009). The British film Comrades  (1986) deals with the transportation of the Tolpuddle Martyrs to Australia."
Convicts in Australia,"Notable convicts transported to Australia
Esther Abrahams – British Jew, who was one of the Jewish convicts (about 1,000 in all) and common-law wife of a leader of the Rum Rebellion.
George Barrington – pickpocket, superintendent of convicts and high constable of Parramatta
Samuel Barsby – one of the first two coopers in Australia and the first convict to be flogged
Joseph Backler – transported for passing forged cheques, became a colonial painter
William Bannon – transported from New Zealand to Van Diemen's Land for army desertion/theft. Escaped Port Arthur through the 'dog line' at EagleHawk Neck.
Billy Blue – a black man from Jamaica, New York, established a ferry service
James Blackburn  – Famous for contribution to Australian architecture and civil engineering
William Bland  – naval surgeon transported for killing a man in a duel; he prospered and was involved in philanthropy, and had a seat in the legislative assembly.
Mary Bryant – a famous escapee
William Buckley – famously escaped and lived with Aboriginal people for many years
John Cadman – had been a publican, as a convict became Superintendent of Boats in Sydney; Cadmans Cottage is a cottage granted to him.
Martin Cash – Famous escapee and bushranger
William Chopin – a convict whose work in prison hospitals in Western Australia grounded him in chemistry; on receiving a ticket of leave he was appointed chemist at the Colonial Hospital, but preferred to open his own chemist shop. He was later convicted of attempting to procure abortions.
Daniel Connor – sentenced to seven years transportation for sheep-stealing, became a successful merchant, by the 1890s one of the largest landowners in central Perth.
Daniel Cooper – successful merchant.
Constance Couronne – youngest female convict transported to Australia (10 years of age)
William Cuffay (convict and tailor) – Black London Chartist leader who became an important workers' rights leader in Hobart.
John Davies – co-founded The Mercury newspaper.
Margaret Dawson – First Fleeter, ""founding mother""
John Eyre – painter and engraver
William Field – notable Tasmanian businessman and landowner
Francis Greenway – famous Australian architect
William Henry Groom – successful auctioneer and politician, served in the inaugural Australian Parliament.
Michael Howe – bushranger, subject of the first work of general literature published in Australia
Laurence Hynes Halloran – founded Sydney Grammar School.
William Hutchinson – public servant and pastoralist.
John Irving – doctor transported on First Fleet, was the first convict to receive an absolute pardon.
Mark Jeffrey – wrote a famous autobiography
Jørgen Jørgensen – eccentric Danish adventurer influenced by revolutionary ideas who declared himself ruler of Iceland, later became a spy in Britain.
Henry Kable – First Fleet convict, arrived with wife and son (Susannah Holmes, also a convict, and Henry) filed 1st lawsuit in Australia, became a wealthy businessman
Lawrence Kavenagh – notorious bushranger
John ""Red"" Kelly – Irish convict and father of bushranger Ned Kelly
Solomon Levey – wealthy merchant, endowed Sydney Grammar School.
Simeon Lord – pioneer merchant and magistrate in Australia
Nathaniel Lucas – one of the first convicts on Norfolk Island, where he became Master carpenter, later farmed successfully, built windmills, and was Superintendent of carpenters in Sydney.
John Mitchel – Irish nationalist
Francis ""Frank the Poet"" McNamara – composer of various oral convict ballads, including The Convict's Tour to Hell
John Mortlock – a former marine
Thomas Muir – convicted of sedition for advocating parliamentary reform; escaped from N.S.W and after many vicissitudes made his way to revolutionary France.
Isaac Nichols – entrepreneur, first Postmaster
Kevin Izod O'Doherty – Medical student, Young Irelander who was transported for treason.
Robert Palin – once in Australia, committed further crimes, and managed to be executed for a non-capital offence
Alexander Pearce – cannibal escapee
Sarah Phillips – Prostitute from Bristol sent to Van Diemen's Land for theft. Later married ticket of leave convict James Ratcliffe who received a reward of twenty-five pounds for capturing a bushranger single-handed.
Elizabeth Pulley – First Fleet convict who married Anthony Rope; they had 8 children including the first male European child conceived and born in Australia.
Joseph Potaskie – first Pole to come to Australia.
William Smith O'Brien – famous Irish revolutionary; sent to Van Diemen's Land in 1849 after leading a rebellion in County Tipperary
John Boyle O'Reilly – Famous escapee, poet, and writer; author of Moondyne
William Redfern – one of the few surgeon convicts
Mary Reibey – businesswoman and shipowner
John Matthew Richardson – gardener and botanical collector who accompanied many expeditions of exploration in Australia such as John Oxley's 1823 and 1824 expeditions to what would become Queensland and Thomas Livingstone Mitchell's Australia Felix expedition to South Australia and Victoria in 1836.
Anthony Rope – First Fleet convict; pioneer farmer married to Elizabeth Pulley for 50 years; Ropes Creek and suburb Ropes Crossing named after them.
James Ruse – successful farmer
Henry Savery – Australia's first novelist; author of Quintus Servinton
Robert Sidaway – opened Australia's first theatre
Ikey Solomon – professional thief; inspiration for the character Fagin in Charles Dickens' novel Oliver Twist
James Squire – English Romanichal (Romany) – First Fleet convict and Australia's first brewer and cultivator of hops.
William Sykes – historically interesting because he left a brief diary and a bundle of letters.
John Tawell – served his sentence, became a prosperous chemist, returned to England after 15 years, and after some time murdered a mistress, for which he was hanged.
Samuel Terry – wealthy merchant and philanthropist.
Andrew Thompson – transported in 1791 aged 18, he rose to Chief Constable in the Hawkesbury district; major cereal farmer, businessman, ship owner, government official and largest private employer in the colony. In 1810 he was the first ex-convict to be appointed as magistrate.
James Hardy Vaux – author of Australia's first full-length autobiography and dictionary.
Mary Wade – one of the youngest female convict transported to Australia (13 years of age) who had 21 children and at the time of her death had over 300 living descendants.
William Westwood – bushranger and leader of the 1846 Cooking Pot Uprising
Joseph Wild – explorer
Solomon Wiseman – merchant and ferry operator on Hawkesbury River, hence town name Wisemans Ferry."
Convicts in Australia,"See also
British prison hulks
Convict assignment
Convict era of Western Australia
Convict hulk
Convict ships to New South Wales
Convict ships to Tasmania
Convicts on the West Coast of Tasmania
Cyprus mutiny
French ship Neptune (1818)
List of convicts on the First Fleet
Transport Board (Royal Navy)
Unfree labour
Convict crisis of 1849"
Convicts in Australia,"References
Citations
Sources
External links"
Convicts in Australia,"Searchable database of 123,000+ British Convicts sent to Australia - GenDatabase.com
Family History Convicts Research Guide – State Library of New South Wales
Convict life – State Library of New South Wales
Australian Convict Transportation Registers
The National Archives (UK)
Convict Transportation Registers database
The Albany Historical Society
Convict Queenslanders
Thomas J. Nevin's photographs of Tasmanian convicts 1870s at Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery
Thomas J. Nevin's photographs of Tasmanian convicts at the National Library of Australia
Visualisation of the British Convict Transportation Registry
The Convict Stockade
""Convicts and the British Colonies"". Australian Government. Archived from the original on 1 January 2016. Retrieved 8 May 2015.
State Records NSW (2010). ""Order-in-Council ending transportation to New South Wales, 22 May 1840"". Dictionary of Sydney. Retrieved 2 October 2015. [CC-By-SA]"
Australian government debt,"Throughout this article, the unqualified term ""dollar"" and the $ symbol refers to the Australian dollar."
Australian government debt,"The Australian government debt is the amount owed by the Australian federal government. The Australian Office of Financial Management, which is part of the Treasury Portfolio, is the agency which manages the government debt and does all the borrowing on behalf of the Australian government. Australian government borrowings are subject to limits and regulation by the Loan Council, unless the borrowing is for defence purposes or is a 'temporary' borrowing. Government debt and borrowings (and repayments) have national macroeconomic implications, and are also used as one of the tools available to the national government in the macroeconomic management of the national economy, enabling the government to create or dampen liquidity in financial markets, with flow on effects on the wider economy.
The net government debt is gross government debt less its financial assets, which is often expressed as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or debt-to-GDP ratio.
As of 31 August 2021 the total gross Australian government debt outstanding was A$834 billion, an increase of about A$273 billion from before 31 December 2019. As at 11 April 2017, the gross Australian government debt was $551.75 billion. The government debt fluctuates from week to week depending on government receipts, general outlays and large-sum outlays. Australian government debt does not take into account government funds held in reserve within statutory authorities such as the Australian Government Future Fund, which at 30 September 2016 was valued at $122.8 billion, and the Reserve Bank of Australia. Nor is the net income of these statutory authorities taken into account. For example, the Future Fund net income in 2014–15 was $15.61 billion, which went directly into the fund's reserves. Also, guarantees offered by the government do not figure in the government debt level. For example, on 12 October 2008, in response to the Economic crisis of 2008, the government offered to guarantee 100% of all bank deposits. This was subsequently reduced to a maximum of $1 million per customer per institution. From 1 February 2012, the guarantee was reduced to $250,000, and is ongoing.
Australia's net international investment liability position (government debt and private debt) was $1,028.5 billion at 31 December 2016, an increase of $5.4 billion (0.5%) on the liability position at 31 December 2016, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Australia's bond credit rating was rated AAA by all three major credit rating agencies as at May 2017. Around two-thirds of Australian government debt is held by non-resident investors – a share that has risen since 2009 and remains historically high."
Australian government debt,"History
Before 1979, the government borrowed using individual cash loans and a mechanism known as the TAP system. Under this system, the government would set a fixed yield, and the private market would finance as much public debt at this yield as it saw fit. If the market did not finance all the debt on offer, then the treasury was able to borrow the outstanding amount from the Reserve Bank of Australia at a concessionary rate of 1%. This allowed the government to finance its debt without limitation. In 2000, the then Deputy Chief Executive Officer of the AOFM, Peter McCray, remarked that this system was ""breaching what is today regarded as a central tenet of government financing—that the government fully fund itself in the market."" He also remarked that this form of funding implied ""reduced fiscal discipline"" on the government's side, leading to likely inflationary consequences, as well as adverse implications to the private bond market.
The government retired the TAP system and introduced a tender system for short-term Treasury Notes in December 1979 and for Treasury Bonds in August 1982. Under this system, bonds are issued in an auction where primary dealers bid against each other. Australian macroeconomist Professor Bill Mitchell notes that there is still no risk of the government being unable to finance itself because the Australian government issues its own currency and can always meet any financial liabilities that are denominated in that currency. The Australian government can never run out of its own currency.
During the Howard government, large budget surpluses resulted in a reduction of treasury bonds on issue. In 2002, the government conducted a review into how this would affect bond market participants. Consistent with the outcome of the review, the government decided to continue issuing debt in the form of treasury bonds despite the surplus to maintain the bond market. This was justified on the basis that a declining bond market would have negative implications to those looking to hedge interest rate risk using bond futures, financial market diversity, and those who use bonds as investment vehicles. In balance with continued issuance of liabilities, it was decided the government would continue to accumulate financial assets, thus expanding its balance sheet and increasing the exposure to financial risks. However, it was decided that the benefits of maintaining a bond market outweighed such risks.
The Howard government also saw the unwinding of the federal government's foreign currency liabilities, ending a long period during which the government had a significant exposure to currency risk. The debt portfolio is now managed to a benchmark with a zero foreign currency component."
Australian government debt,"Net government debt
Net government debt is defined by the International Monetary Fund as ""gross debt minus financial assets corresponding to debt instruments"". Financial assets corresponding to debt instruments include currency and deposits, debt securities and loans. In the context of the budget, general government sector net debt is equal to the sum of deposits held, government securities (at market value), loans and other borrowing, minus the sum of cash and deposits, advances paid and investments, loans and placements. The net debt to GDP ratio over time is influenced by a government surplus/deficit or due to growth of GDP and inflation, as well as movements in the market value of government securities which may in turn be influenced by movements in general interest rates and currency values.
Australia's net government debt as percentage of GDP in the 2016–17 budget was estimated at 18.9% ($326.0 billion); much lower than most developed countries. The budget forecasted that net government debt would increase to $346.8 and $356.4 billion in 2017–18 and 2018–19 respectively. However, despite continuing to rise in aggregate terms, growth in the economy means the government expects the proportion of debt to GDP to peak at 19.2% in 2017–18 before starting to fall thereafter.
The net government debt was negative (i.e. The Australian government had net positive bond holdings) in the 2006–07-year for the first time in three decades, from an original peak of 18.5% of GDP ($96 billion) in 1995–96. The reduction in net debt is attributable to the consistent budget surpluses in the mid-2000s."
Australian government debt,"Latest budget forecasts
The federal budget is the main mechanism that determines the government's net debt position from one period to the next. A surplus (revenue is greater than expenses) allows the government to pay down its debt while a deficit (expenses are greater than revenue) requires the government to issue more debt to cover the shortfall. The 2017 federal budget forecast a deficit of $29.3 billion, or 1.6% of GDP. The 2018 budget forecast a deficit of $18.2 billion. This would be Australia's eleventh consecutive budget deficit.
The 2017 budget forecast government spending to be in surplus in the 2020/21 fiscal year, while the 2018 budget forecast a surplus of $2.2 billion in 2019/20. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the government's debt level was forecast to be $629 billion in 2019/20."
Australian government debt,"Debt ceiling
A debt ceiling on how much the Australian government could borrow existed between 2007 and 2013.
The statutory limit was created in 2007 by the Rudd government and set at $75 billion. It was increased in 2009 to $200 billion, $250 billion in 2011 and $300 billion in May 2012. In November 2013, Treasurer Joe Hockey requested Parliament's approval for an increase in the debt limit from $300 billion to $500 billion, saying that the limit will be exhausted by mid-December 2013. With the support of the Australian Greens, the Abbott government repealed the debt ceiling over the opposition of the Australian Labor Party.
The debt ceiling was contained in section 5(1) of the Commonwealth Inscribed Stock Act 1911 until its repeal on 10 December 2013."
Australian government debt,"See also
Government budget
List of sovereign states by public debt
Taxation in Australia"
Australian government debt,"References
External links"
Australian government debt,"Australian Office of Financial Management
Katrina Di Marco, Mitchell Pirie and Wilson Au-Yeung: A history of public debt in Australia, Treasury, Commonwealth of Australia. (ca. 2011).
Debt Statistics for Australia"
Irish Australians,"Irish Australians (Irish: Gael-Astrálaigh) are ‌‍‍‍‍residents of Australia who are fully or partially of Irish descent. Irish immigrants and descendants have been a prominent presence in the Australian populace since the First Fleet's arrival in New South Wales in 1788.
Irish Australians have played a considerable role in the history of Australia. They came to Australia from the late eighteenth century as convicts and free settlers wanting to immigrate 
from their homeland. Some of those who were transported to Australia were prisoners of war, many of whom had fought in the 1798 Irish rebellion for independence, whereas others were settlers who struggled to establish their lives during the Irish famine and the harsh years in Ireland that followed. They made substantial contributions to Australia's development in many different areas. In the late 19th century, Irish Australians constituted up to a third of the country's population.
There is no definitive figure of the total number of Australians with an Irish background. At the 2021 Australian census, 2,410,833 residents identified themselves as having Irish ancestry either alone or in combination with another ancestry. This nominated ancestry was third behind English and Australian in terms of the largest number of responses and represents 9.5% of the total population of Australia. However this figure does not include Australians with an Irish background who chose to nominate themselves as 'Australian' or other ancestries. The Australian embassy in Dublin states that up to 30% of the population claim some degree of Irish ancestry."
Irish Australians,"History
Demographic history
Around 40,000 Irish convicts were transported to Australia between 1791 and 1867, including at least 325 who had participated in either the Irish Rebellion of 1798, the rebellion of 1803 or the Young Ireland skirmishes in 1848. Once in Australia, some were involved in the 1804 Castle Hill convict rebellion. Continual tension on Norfolk Island in the same year also led to an Irish revolt. Both risings were soon crushed. As late as the 1860s Fenian prisoners were being transported, particularly to Western Australia, where the Catalpa rescue of Irish radicals off Rockingham was a memorable episode.
Other than convicts, most of the laborers who voluntarily emigrated to Australia in the 19th century were drawn from the poorest sector of British and Irish society. After 1831, the Australian colonies employed a system of government assistance in which all or most immigration costs were paid for chosen immigrants, and the colonial authorities used these schemes to exercise some control over immigration. While these assisted schemes were biased against the poorest elements of society, the very poor could overcome these hurdles in several ways, such as relying on local assistance or help from relatives.
Most Irish emigrants to Australia were free settlers. The 1891 census of Australia counted 228,000 Irish-born. At the time the Irish made up about 27 percent of the immigrants from the British Isles. The number of Ireland-born in Australia peaked in 1891. A decade later the number of Ireland-born had dropped to 184,035. Dominion status for the Irish Free State in 1922 did not diminish arrivals from Ireland as Irish people were still British subjects. This changed after the Second World War, as people migrating from the new Republic of Ireland (which came into being in April 1949) were no longer British subjects eligible for the assisted passage. People from Northern Ireland continued to be eligible for this as British citizens. Only during the 1960s did migration from the south of Ireland reduce significantly. By 2002, around one thousand persons born in Ireland – north and south – were migrating permanently to Australia each year."
Irish Australians,"Irish and Aboriginal People
It has been argued that Irish Australians and Aboriginal people (including those of mixed descent) feel that there is a historical and sentimental link between the two groups. The shared oppression of Aboriginal and Irish people by the British is seen as giving them common historical ground.
The historian Patrick O'Farrell argued that (in contrast to other colonists) Irish Catholics treated Aboriginal people as equals, as evidenced by their willingness to intermarry, thus giving rise to the Irish surnames prominent among Aboriginal activists.
This argument has been questioned. It has been pointed out that under the new colonial and state administrations, a European-style surname was required for official records relating to Aboriginal people. The local police (often of Irish stock) collected the relevant census data and allocated their own names to Aboriginal people for official purposes. In addition, however, many such policemen fathered children to casual or long-term partners from Aboriginal communities."
Irish Australians,"Orphans
Over four thousand young female orphans from Irish workhouses were shipped to the Australian colonies at the time of the Great Famine (1848–50) to meet a demand for domestic servants. Some settlers greeted them with hostility and some were exploited or abused by employers and others. Although a number eventually died in poverty, others made upwardly mobile marriages, often surviving older husbands to experience long widowhoods. The Catholic Church only became involved in the 1870s, when its relief agencies in England were overwhelmed with Irish immigration. Even so, only about 10% of the resettlements were through Catholic agencies until after World War II. Australian Catholic groups began importing children in the 1920s to increase the Catholic population, and became heavily engaged in placing and educating them after World War II. The practice quietly died out during the 1950s."
Irish Australians,"Irish language
The first convicts and soldiers to arrive in Australia included a large number of Irish speakers, an example being private Patrick Geary, who in 1808 acted as court interpreter for Patrick Henchan, a convict accused of theft. An account from 1800 refers to convicts speaking Irish among themselves (this being regarded as evidence of conspiracy), and it was acknowledged in the 1820s that priests could not perform their duties in the colony of New South Wales without a knowledge of the language. There is a reference to Irish-speaking bushrangers in Van Diemen's Land in the early nineteenth century. 
The gold rushes of the 1850s attracted many Irish to the colony of Victoria, with a high proportion of Irish speakers. An Irish-speaking priest, Fr Stack, was appointed to minister to Irish miners in the gold-rush locality of Bendigo. Irish immigration was at its height in the 1860s, the main counties of origin being Clare, Tipperary, Limerick and Kilkenny, all of them areas where the language was still strong. Irish continued to be spoken in Australian country districts where the Irish had settled, and there is some evidence of its being transmitted to the next generation.
The Gaelic revival in Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century found a response in Melbourne and Sydney, with branches of the Gaelic League being established. The 1970s saw a renewal of interest in the language, chiefly among Australians of Irish descent, and there is now a network of Irish speakers in the major cities. The Department of Celtic Studies at the University of Sydney offers courses in Old Irish and Modern Irish, and Newman College (University of Melbourne) houses a collection of books and manuscripts in Irish often used by scholars. Australians have published fiction, poetry and journalism in Irish."
Irish Australians,"Australian Irish Sign Language
Alongside the oral Irish language, ISL (or Irish Sign Language) arrived with Dominican Nuns in 1875 with the construction of three schools where Australian Irish Sign Language (AISL) was taught. As a Francosign language, AISL is quite distinct from Auslan and other Banzsl languages, though it is also notably unrelated neither to Gaeilge nor to the numerous Australian Aboriginal sign languages.
AISL and the more dominant Australian sign language, Auslan, were used as the primary languages of Deaf instruction from the late 1800s to the early 1950s. By this point, however, with all sign languages experiencing the effects of oralism and audism, AISL has over time become relegated to small friend groups and select families."
Irish Australians,"Politics
Although Catholic Irish were not generally politically powerful, the large number of Irish combined with universal male suffrage made it possible for Irish to sometimes gain office, such as the Victorian premiers John O'Shanassy (1857, 1858–59, 1861–63) and Charles Gavan Duffy (1871–72). Peter Lalor was the leader of the 1854 Eureka Rebellion, later a conservative member of parliament.
Before 1890, Irish Catholics opposed Henry Parkes, the main liberal leader, and free trade, since both represented Protestant, English landholding and wealthy business interests. In the great strike of 1890 Cardinal Moran, the head of the church, was sympathetic toward unions, but Catholic newspapers were critical of organised labour throughout the decade. After 1900, Catholics joined the Labor Party because its stress on equality and social welfare appealed to people who were workers and small farmers. In the 1910 elections Labor gained in areas where the concentration of Catholics was above average, and the number of Catholics in Labor's parliamentary ranks rose."
Irish Australians,"World War I
Irish Catholics comprised a quarter of Australia's population in the early 20th century. They were largely working-class and voted for the Labor Party. The referendum on conscription in 1917, following the Easter Uprising in Dublin, caused an identification between the Irish, Sinn Féin, and the anti-conscription section of Labor. Pro-conscription forces exploited this, denouncing outspoken anti-conscription Catholics, such as Archbishop Mannix, and T. J. Ryan, the Premier of Queensland, for disloyalty. In general, Protestants, armed with the authority of tradition, championed the idea of Australia as an integral part of the Empire; and Catholics, freed from that authority by their Irish origins and their working-class affiliations, looked to the future by placing Australia first and the Empire second. There was no simple correlation between Catholicism, Protestantism and conscription, but the idea of an anti-conscription Catholic-Labor alliance stuck for many years. Immediately after the War, Mannix's outspoken support for the cause of Irish independence caused further division, culminating in his arrest on the high seas by the Royal Navy in 1920 to prevent his landing in Ireland."
Irish Australians,"Irish Australians in politics
Irish Australians have been prominent in Australian politics, primarily through the vehicle of the Australian Labor Party (ALP), whose support base was historically dominated by working-class Catholics of Irish descent. James Scullin was Australia's first Irish, as well as Catholic, Prime Minister in 1929. Labor Prime Ministers John Curtin, Ben Chifley and Paul Keating were also of Irish Catholic stock. Anthony Albanese, whose mother was Irish-Australian, was elected Prime Minister of Australia in 2022 as well.
The same was true in the twentieth century at a state level. In New South Wales for example Labor premiers James McGirr, Joseph Cahill and Jack Renshaw were Irish Australian, while Queensland had Labor premiers T. J. Ryan, Ted Theodore, William Forgan Smith, Frank Arthur Cooper, Ned Hanlon, and Vince Gair.
Conversely, conservative parties contained few Irish Catholics for most of the twentieth century. An exception was Prime Minister Joseph Lyons, who began his career in the ALP. The situation changed later especially following the Australian Labor Party split of 1955, which led many Catholics out of Labor via the Democratic Labor Party (DLP). The careers of Gerard Henderson, Frank Devine and Padraic McGuinness are illustrative of the drift by some Irish Australians away from Labor and towards the conservative side of politics in the later twentieth century."
Irish Australians,"Status
Walker (2007) compares Irish immigrant communities in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Great Britain respecting issues of identity and 'Irishness.' Religion remained the major cause of differentiation in all Irish diaspora communities and had the greatest impact on identity, followed by the nature and difficulty of socioeconomic conditions faced in each new country and the strength of continued social and political links of Irish immigrants and their descendants with the old country.
For much of the 19th and the 20th centuries, Irish Australians, particularly but not exclusively Catholics, were treated with suspicion in a sectarian atmosphere. The outlaw Ned Kelly (1855–80) achieved the status of a national folk hero; ballads, films and paintings have since 1878 perpetuated the legend. Kelly, who was hanged for murder, is often viewed romantically as the sort of treatment Irish Catholics in Australia could expect. In major cities such as Melbourne and Sydney, Irish social and political associations were formed, including the Melbourne Celtic Club, which survives today. The Irish settler in Australia, both voluntary and forced, was crucial to the survival and prosperity of the early colonies both demographically and economically. 300,000 Irish free settlers arrived between 1840 and 1914. By 1871, the Irish were a quarter of all overseas-born."
Irish Australians,"St. Patrick's Day
O'Farrell (1995) demonstrates the importance of St. Patrick to the Irish, whether northern or republican, Protestant or Catholic, and how Australian manifestations of the Irish festival evolved. St. Patrick's Day became an expression of Irish identity and was emblematic of Irish culture and traditional separatism that migrated with the Irish to Australia. The early immigrants to Australia from Ireland were mainly members of penal colonies; assemblies or any such expression of Irish culture were not permitted. St. Patrick's Day at first was the exception, because it was not highly political, was ecumenical and was subordinate to the wider recognition of Britain. It is first recorded as celebrated in the colony in 1795. In a series of letters, a P. Cunningham, stated that a St Patrick's Day ""jubilee"" Ball was being held in Sydney in 1826. The situation changed, however, in the 1830s with the growth of wealthy Irish Catholic emancipists and the introduction of Irish Catholic priests. These factors gave rise to conflicts and tensions that were to remain constant thereafter as the rise and decline of domestic Irish political movements influenced the Irish population in Australia. With the outbreak of World War I, imperatives imposed by the demands of war overshadowed Australian Irish sentiment."
Irish Australians,"Orange
The idea of fraternity and how to organise it was one of 19th-century Europe's invisible exports to the New World. Fitzpatrick (2005) explores the international diffusion of the Loyal Orange Institution, with comparative reference to Freemasonry, its main model. Three alternative explanations are discussed for its appeal outside Ireland: that it facilitated the assimilation of emigrants, transmitted 'tribal' Irish animosities to fresh contexts, or adapted itself to preexisting sectarian rivalries abroad. These hypotheses are tested using evidence from South Australia, where Orangeism flourished in the absence of heavy Ulster Protestant immigration. A collective profile of Orange South Australia is derived from lodge records showing age, religious denomination, and occupation, and the appeal of Orangeism is related to local political and religious contexts. In this case, Orangeism was primarily an export of organisational techniques rather than Irish personnel or bigotry."
Irish Australians,"Catholic clergy and nuns
The Catholic Church in Australia maintained a strong Irish identity. The first priests were Irish, beginning with Fr James Dixon who was permitted to minister in 1803. Irish Catholic separateness increased especially in the decades from the 1880s to the 1960s when state aid for church schools was withdrawn and the Church maintained a separate and separately funded school system. The leadership of the Australian Church was almost entirely Irish from 1883 to 1940, prominent Irish-born bishops including Cardinal Moran and Archbishop Kelly in Sydney, Archbishops Carr and Mannix in Melbourne and Archbishop Duhig in Brisbane. Many of the Catholic schools were run and staffed by Irish orders of nuns such as the Sisters of Mercy and Brigidines and Irish orders of brothers such as the Christian Brothers and Patrician Brothers. The Sisters of Charity worked in hospitals. Irish nuns such as Sr Mary Baptist De Lacy, Mary Gonzaga Barry and Mother Vincent Whitty were prominent in founding hospitals and schools.
McGrath (1995) demonstrates the success of the Catholic nuns who arrived in Parramatta, New South Wales, from Ireland in 1888, noting their group's growth from nine newcomers into a flourishing congregation of over two hundred women within sixty years. By the 1950s this group of women religious was responsible for 24 primary schools, five secondary schools, and two orphanages. In Australia they carried on the Irish tradition of the Sisters of Mercy and lived a monastic lifestyle. Their sparsely furnished bedrooms were referred to as cells. There was little or no heating. The sisters' spiritual practices reflected the 17th-century school of spirituality.
Their relationship to the clergy was one of devotion, dedication, and subordination, thus reflecting the status of women in the larger population. It was societal pressures from without that eventually led to the decline of the Sisters of Mercy as Australia moved into the 1960s. Radical re-evaluations forced a restructuring of the Catholic Church as a whole, and a rethinking of what kinds of service the Church would require in modern times."
Irish Australians,"Media
The Irish Echo (Australia) is a newspaper available in print and online, covering Irish news and other matters of Irish interest.
Tinteán is an online journal directed chiefly at Irish Australians. Its stated aim is to provide serious comment and an independent perspective on a wide range of Australian/Irish topics. It publishes some material in the Irish language.
An Lúibín is a fortnightly Irish-language newsletter, distributed online in Australia and overseas. It deals with language matters and also contains articles on folklore, literature and current affairs."
Irish Australians,"Sports
Irish Catholics have been the nation's largest minority throughout most of Australia's history. Their resistance to the elite Anglocentric establishment has keenly marked the development of sport. Mostly working class, the Irish played sports such as rugby league and Australian Rules football, while the Protestant majority often preferred cricket, soccer, rugby union and boxing. The tensions and contrasts between these two sporting cultures eventually built the attitudes and beliefs toward games and sports that Australians share today. Many Irish in Australia play gaelic games and the local gaelic athletic association is the Australasia GAA. Only Irish Australian soccer clubs they have helped to establish in Sydney Eastern Suburbs clubs Phoenix FC. [1]"
Irish Australians,"Present day
At the 2006 Census,  50,255 Australian residents declared they were born in the Republic of Ireland and a further 21,291 declared to have been born in Northern Ireland. Cities with the largest Irish-born populations were Sydney (12,730), Melbourne (8,950) and Perth (7,060).
At the 2011 Census, 2,087,800 Australians (10.4% of the total population) declared they had Irish ancestry either alone or in combination with another ancestry; only Australian and English ancestries were more frequently nominated.
Irish Australian settlement patterns are not significantly different from those of the Australian population as a whole – that is, a third live in New South Wales and a quarter live in Victoria, with 13 per cent living in Queensland (compared to only 18 per cent of the general population). Relatively few as a proportion reside in Western Australia (7.6 per cent of Irish Australians compared to 9.9 per cent of the general population).
The 2001 Australian census recorded that persons reporting some Irish Australian ethnicity accounted for 10.7 per cent of all responses in the Australian Capital Territory (42,540 responses), 10.2 per cent in Victoria (469,161 responses), 9.9 per cent in New South Wales (622,944), 9.7 per cent in Queensland (433,354), 7.8 per cent in Tasmania (42,552), 7.6 per cent in Western Australia (171,667), 7.5 per cent in the Northern Territory (18,325) and 6.7 per cent in South Australia (119,063)."
Irish Australians,"Irish language use
In the 2011 Census 1,895 persons were reported as using Irish as a household language, most of them in Sydney and Melbourne. This represents an increase from the figure of 918 in the 2006 Census. There are no official statistics regarding the use of Irish outside the home."
Irish Australians,"Popular culture
The Riverina priest ""John O'Brien"" (Fr Patrick Hartigan) celebrated rural Irish Australian Catholic culture in his popular poems of the early twentieth century such as 'The little Irish mother' and 'Said Hanrahan'. They formed the basis of a 1925 silent movie Around the Boree Log.
The Australian miniseries and historical drama Against the Wind deals with both the British rule of Ireland, and the development of New South Wales and Australia. Ruth Park's 1948 book The Harp in the South portrays the life of a Catholic Irish Australian family living in a Sydney slum. Other shows relating to Irish Australians include The Last Outlaw and Brides of Christ."
Irish Australians,"Notable people of Irish descent
Ned Kelly, Bushranger, outlaw and cultural icon. Known for wearing a suit of bulletproof armour.
Slim Dusty, Australian country music singer-songwriter, guitarist, producer and Australian cultural icon, first Australian to have a No. 1 international hit song with ""A Pub with No Beer"" originally adapted from a poem by Irish Australian poet Dan Sheahan.
Johnny O'Keefe, Australian rock and roll singer.
Doug Parkinson, Australian pop and rock singer.
Colleen McCullough, Australian author.
Katherine Knight, Australian murderer
Bill O'Reilly (cricketer), Australian cricketer, cricket writer and broadcaster.
Helen Reddy, Australian-American singer, actress, and activist.
Peter Lalor, Irish born Australian rebel and, later, politician who rose to fame for his leading role in the Eureka Rebellion.
Errol Flynn, Australian-American actor.
Julia Gillard, 27th Prime Minister of Australia, first female Prime Minister of Australia.
Anthony Albanese, 31st Prime Minister of Australia
Alan Joyce, Former CEO of Qantas, born in Ireland and emigrated to Australia in 1996.
John Howard, 25th Prime Minister of Australia
Jim Stynes, Australian Rules Footballer and Brownlow Medallist. Born in Ireland and emigrated to Australia in the 1980s.
Johnny Logan, double-time winner of the Eurovision Song Contest, born in Melbourne.
Steve Irwin, Australian zookeeper, conservationist, television personality, wildlife expert and environmentalist.
William McMahon, 20th Prime Minister of Australia
Julian McMahon, Australian actor
Luke Hemsworth, Australian actor.
Chris Hemsworth, Australian actor.
Liam Hemsworth, Australian actor.
Paul Hogan, Australian actor and comedian.
Jimeoin, Irish-Australian comedian and actor.
Joseph Lyons, 10th Prime Minister of Australia, legislated the creation of the Australian broadcaster that is now known as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in 1932, the first prime minister to have an Australian-born parent.
Arthur Fadden, 13th Prime Minister of Australia
Frank Costigan, Australian lawyer, Royal Commissioner and social justice activist, who presided over the Costigan Commission combating organised crime.
Tony Fitzgerald, Australian former judge, who presided over the anti-corruption Fitzgerald Inquiry.
Ben Chifley, 16th Prime Minister of Australia, expanded state welfare, increased Post-war immigration to Australia, established the Australian National University, established the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, established the Snowy Mountains Scheme.
Joseph Cahill, former Premier of New South Wales, championed and organised the idea and construction of the Sydney Opera House.
Edward Cassidy, Australian prelate of the Catholic Church, headed the Commission of the Holy See for Religious Relations with the Jews, promoted positive theological ties with Jews.
George William Torrance, Music composer, appointed Acting Head of Trinity College (University of Melbourne) in 1872, collaborated with Alfred William Howitt in the transcription of three songs performed by William Barak, the last traditional ngurungaeta (elder) of the Wurundjeri-willam clan
Michael Dwyer, known as the ""Wicklow Chief"", rebel leader fighting for religious freedom and Irish independence in and after the Irish Rebellion of 1798, former Chief of Police in Liverpool, NSW.
Les Darcy, Australian Heavyweight Champion boxer.
Pat Rafter, Australian former world No. 1 tennis player, first man in the Open Era to win Canada Masters, Cincinnati Masters and the US Open in the same year.
Mick Fanning, Australian ASP World Champion surfer and shark attack survivor.
Sarah Frances Fanny Durack, Australian competition swimmer, from 1910 until 1918 she was the world's greatest female swimmer across all distances from freestyle sprints to the mile marathon.
Michael Hutchence, Australian musician, singer-songwriter and actor.
Rupert Murdoch,  Australian-born American businessman, media proprietor, and investor.
Geoffrey Rush, Australian actor.
Kevin Rudd,  26th Prime Minister of Australia, gave the first national government Apology to Australia's Indigenous peoples in 2008.
Daisy Bates (author), journalist, welfare worker, compiled a dictionary of several Australian Aboriginal  dialects.
Rose Byrne, Australian actress.
Nicole Kidman, American and Australian actress and producer.
Elizabeth Debicki, Australian actress.
Robert O'Hara Burke, Australian explorer,  leader of the 1860 Burke and Wills expedition with the objective of crossing Australia from the south to the north.
John King (explorer), Australian explorer, sole survivor of the completed Burke and Wills expedition, first surviving non Aboriginal to cross Australia from south to north.
Paddy Hannan,  gold prospector whose lucrative discovery on 14 June 1893 set off a major gold rush in the area now known as The Golden Mile, the richest square mile in the world in Kalgoorlie-Boulder in Western Australia.
John Curtin, 14th Prime Minister of Australia, WWII Australian war time leader, extended pensions to cover Aboriginals.
H. V. Evatt, known as Doc Evatt, Australian politician and judge, former President of the United Nations General Assembly,  helped to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and was prominent in the negotiations that led to the creation of the State of Israel.
Millie Peacock, was the first woman elected to the Parliament of Victoria.
Frank Forde, 15th Prime Minister of Australia.
John McEwen, 18th Prime Minister of Australia.
Gerard Brennan, Australian High Court judge, wrote the lead judgement on the Mabo decision, which gave rise to the Native Title Act.
Lowitja O'Donoghue, Aboriginal Australian public administrator, inaugural chairperson of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission.
Melissa Doyle, Australian television and radio presenter.
Malarndirri McCarthy, Indigenous Australian Senator, former TV journalist, Federal Minister for Indigenous Australians.
Pat O'Shane, Australia's first Aboriginal magistrate.
Michael Kirby (judge), Australian former Justice of the High Court of Australia, appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council to lead an inquiry into human rights abuses in North Korea.
Heath Ledger, Australian actor and music video director.
Mick Doohan, Australian former Grand Prix motorcycle road racing World Champion, who won five consecutive 500 cc World Championships.
Ken Wyatt, Australian politician of English, Irish, Indian and Indigenous Australian descent, the first Indigenous Australian elected to the House of Representatives, the first Indigenous Australian to serve as a government minister and the first Indigenous Australian appointed to cabinet.
Captain Moonlite, Australian folk figure, former Anglican lay reader, soldier, public speaker and bushranger.
Geraldine Doogue, Australian journalist, radio and television presenter.
Glenn McGrath, Australian former international cricketer.
Michael Lynagh, Australian former rugby union player.
Norman Gilroy, known as ""Bluey"" Gilroy, first Australian-born Roman Catholic cardinal, first cardinal to be knighted since the Reformation, discouraged anti-communist Cold War hysteria in 1950s and helped ensure that there was no split in the New South Wales Labor Party.
Thomas Keneally, Australian novelist, playwright, essayist, and actor.  Author of non-fiction novel Schindler's Ark.  The first novel by an Australian to win the Booker Prize and is the basis of the film Schindler's List.
Peter Cosgrove, retired Australian Army General, former Governor-General of Australia, commander of the International Force for East Timor that prevented the ongoing slaughter of East Timorese Christians and enabled a democratic referendum and free elections and national independence in East Timor.
Shane Lowry, Australian professional soccer player.
Damien Leith, singer
Ben Chifley, politician
Sidney Nolan, artist"
Irish Australians,"See also
Australians
Anglo-Celtic Australians
Australia–Ireland relations
European Australians
Europeans in Oceania
Immigration to Australia
Irish Americans
Irish people
Welsh Australians
Irish diaspora
English Australians
Scottish Australians
Cornish Australians
Irish New Zealanders"
Irish Australians,"References
Further reading
Fitzgerald, Garrett, 'Estimates for baronies of minimal level of Irish-speaking amongst successive decennial cohorts, 117–1781 to 1861–1871,' Volume 84, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 1984
Haines, Robin F. Emigration and the labouring poor: Australian recruitment in Britain and Ireland, 1831–60 (Springer, 1997).
Hall, Barbara, Death or Liberty: The Convicts of the Britannia, Ireland to Botany Bay, 1797 (Hall 2006)
James Francis Hogan (1888), The Irish in Australia (Australian ed.), Melbourne: George Robertson & Company, Wikidata Q19090948
Hughes, Robert. The Fatal Shore. London: Routledge (1987)
Jupp, James. The Australian People: An Encyclopedia of the Nation, its People and their Origins (2002)
Arthur Patchett Martin (1889). ""The Irish in Australia"". Australia and the Empire: 135–156. Wikidata Q107340724.
Noone, Val, Hidden Ireland in Australia (Ballarat Heritage Services 2012)
O'Farrell, Patrick, Letters from Irish Australia (New South Wales University Press, 1984.)
O'Farrell, Patrick. The Irish in Australia: 1798 to the Present Day (3rd ed. Cork University Press, 2001)
Richards, Eric. ""How did poor people emigrate from the British Isles to Australia in the nineteenth century?"" Journal of British Studies 32.3 (1993): 250–279. online
Wells, Andrew, and Theresa Martinez, eds. Australia's Diverse Peoples: A Reference Sourcebook (ABC-CLIO, 2004)"
Irish Australians,"External links
Reid, Richard (2012). ""Irish in Sydney from First Fleet to Federation"". Dictionary of Sydney. Dictionary of Sydney Trust. Retrieved 4 October 2015.
Kildea, Jeff (2012). ""Celebrating St Patrick's Day in nineteenth-century Sydney"". Dictionary of Sydney. Dictionary of Sydney Trust. Retrieved 5 October 2015.
""Irish Catholic Australians"". Australian Catholic Historical Society. 2020. Retrieved 30 June 2021.
Documentary: The Irish In Australia: The Beat of a Distant Drum
https://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/not-just-ned/background
https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/mca/files/2016-cis-ireland.PDF"
Telecommunications in Australia,"Telecommunications in Australia refers to communication in Australia through electronic means, using devices such as telephone, television, radio or computer, and services such as the telephony and broadband networks. Telecommunications have always been important in Australia given the ""tyranny of distance"" with a dispersed population. Governments have driven telecommunication development and have a key role in its regulation."
Telecommunications in Australia,"History
Colonial period
Prior to Federation of Australia in 1901, each of the six Australian colonies had its own telephony communications network. The Australian networks were government assets operating under colonial legislation modelled on that of Britain. The UK Telegraph Act 1868 for example empowered the Postmaster-General to ""acquire, maintain and work electric telegraphs"" and foreshadowed the 1870 nationalisation of competing British telegraph companies.
Australia's first telephone service (connecting the Melbourne and South Melbourne offices of Robinson Brothers, a Melbourne engineering firm) was launched in 1879. The private Melbourne Telephone Exchange Company opened Australia's first telephone exchange in August 1880. Around 7,757 calls were handled in 1884.
The nature of the networks meant that regulation in Australia was undemanding: network personnel were government employees or agents, legislation was enhanced on an incremental basis and restrictions could be achieved through infrastructure. All the colonies ran their telegraph networks at a deficit through investment in infrastructure and subsidisation of regional access, generally with bipartisan support.
Government-operated post office and telegraph networks – the largest parts of the bureaucracy – were combined into a single department in each colony on the model of the UK Post Office: South Australia in 1869, Victoria in 1870, Queensland in 1880 and New South Wales in 1893."
Telecommunications in Australia,"At Federation (1901)
At Federation, the colonial networks (staff, switches, wires, handsets, buildings etc.) were transferred to the Commonwealth Postmaster-General's Department responsible for domestic postal, telephone and, telegraph services becoming the responsibility of the first Postmaster-General (PMG), a federal. With 16,000 staff (and assets of over £6 million) the PMG accounted for 80% of the new federal bureaucracy.
Public phones were available in a handful of post offices. Subscriber telephones were initially restricted to major businesses, government agencies, institutions and wealthier residences. Eight million telegrams were sent that year over 43,000 miles of line.
There were around 33,000 phones across Australia, with 7,502 telephone subscribers in inner Sydney and 4,800 in the Melbourne central business district.
Overseas cable links to Australia remained in private hands, reflecting the realities of imperial politics, demands on the new government's resources, and perceptions of its responsibilities."
Telecommunications in Australia,"After Federation
A trunk line between Melbourne (headquarters of the PMG Department) and Sydney was established in 1907, with extension to Adelaide in 1914, Brisbane in 1923, Perth in 1930 and Hobart in 1935."
Telecommunications in Australia,"On 12 July 1906 the first Australian wireless overseas messages were sent between Point Lonsdale, Victoria and Devonport, Tasmania. Australia and New Zealand ratified the 1906 Berlin Radio-telegraph Convention in 1907. The PMG department became responsible for some international shortwave services, particularly from the 1920s and for a new Coastal Radio Service in 1911, with the first of a network of stations operational in February 1912.
The Sydney–Melbourne co-axial cable was officially opened on 9 April 1962.
The coaxial cable infrastructure supported the introduction of subscriber trunk dialling between the cities and live television link-ups. After its commissioning in April 1962 the cable carried telegraph and telephone traffic. It also provided the first inter-city television transmission in Australia, allowing simultaneous television broadcasting in Melbourne and Sydney for the first time.
Optus was formed as AUSSAT, a government owned corporation, in 1981. It was privatized later in the 1980s under the Hawke Labor government. Telstra (previously known as Telecom), another government owned asset, was also privatized in 1997 under the Howard Liberal government."
Telecommunications in Australia,"Broadcasting in Australia
Australia developed its own radio broadcasting system, through its own engineers, manufacturers, retailers, newspapers, entertainment services, and news agencies. Initially hobbyists and amateurs were dominant, however with the Commonwealth Government setting up the first radio system, and business interests becoming increasingly involved, hobbyists and amateurs were marginalised. The Australian Labor Party was especially interested in radio because it allowed them to bypass the newspapers, which were mostly controlled by their opposition. Both parties agreed on the need for a national system, and in 1932 set up the Australian Broadcasting Commission was set up as a government agency largely separate from political interference.
The first commercial broadcasters, originally known as ""B"" class stations were on the air as early as 1925. Many were sponsored by newspapers in Australia, by theatrical interests, by amateur radio enthusiasts and radio retailers, and by retailers generally. Almost all Australians were within reach of a station by the 1930s, and the number of stations remained relatively stable through the post-war era. However, in the 1970s, the Labor government under Prime Minister Gough Whitlam commenced a broadcasting renaissance so that by the 1990s there were 50 different radio services available for groups based on tastes, languages, religion, or geography. The broadcasting system was largely deregulated in 1992, except that there were limits on foreign ownership and on monopolistic control. By 2000, 99 percent of Australians owned at least one television set, and averaged 20 hours a week watching it."
Telecommunications in Australia,"Television
As early as 1929, two Melbourne commercial radio stations, 3UZ and 3DB were conducting experimental mechanical television broadcasts – these were conducted in the early hours of the morning, after the radio stations had officially closed down. In 1934 Dr Val McDowall at amateur station 4CM Brisbane conducted experiments in electronic television.
Television broadcasting officially began in Sydney and Melbourne just prior to the Melbourne Olympic Games in November/December 1956 and then phased in at other capital cities, and then into rural markets. Many forms of entertainment, particularly drama and variety, proved more suited to television than radio, so the actors and producers migrated there.
It now includes a broad range of public, commercial, community, subscription, narrowcast, and amateur stations across the country. Colour television in the PAL 625-line format went to a full-time basis in 1975. Subscription television, on the Galaxy platform, began in 1995. Digital terrestrial television was introduced in 2001.
Australia moved from PAL 625 to DVB-T on 10 December 2013.
Subscription television, whether Foxtel or Netflix type services, has become more important and is one factor driving demand for the National Broadband Network."
Telecommunications in Australia,"Core technologies, the network, backhaul and the local loop
Copper cable and optical fibre networks
Prior to the government opening telecommunications to multi player competition the PMG (and later Telecom Australia) operated a vertically integrated system, providing the Core network, backhaul, ancillary networks and a range of services to end users.
With opening telecommunications to multi provider competition the government required Telstra to sell wholesale access to its core facilities and networks.
In the 2000s, larger ISPs began taking over more of the delivery infrastructure themselves by taking advantage of regulated access to the unconditioned local loop. As well as significantly reducing costs, it gave the service providers complete control of their own service networks, other than the copper pair (phone line from the exchange to the customer).
Telstra in 2006 proposed replacing its copper network with an optical fibre node network with the drop connection into end user premises being the existing copper cable. They abandoned this as under competition policy they would be required to open their network to competing carriers on a wholesale basis.
Further options were explored with the first Rudd government deciding to set up a National Broadband Network using Fibre to the Premises as the main carrier network, supported by satellite and wireless to remote areas.
After the election of the Abbott government in 2013 a Multi Technological Mix was implemented, replacing FTTP where development was yet to start with Fibre to the Node and also repurposing the Telstra and Optus hybrid fibre-coaxial networks."
Telecommunications in Australia,"Cable
In the late 1990s, Telstra and Optus rolled-out separate cable Internet services, focusing on the east coast."
Telecommunications in Australia,"Satellite
The Overseas Telecommunications Commission (OTC) was established by Australia in August 1946 with responsibility for all international telecommunications services into, through and out of Australia.
In 1981 Aussat Pty Ltd was established as a GBE to operate domestic satellite telecommunication and broadcasting services. Aussat's charter restricted it from acting as a competitor to Telecom, including a prohibition on interconnecting public switched traffic with Telecom's network.
Proposals for a merger of Aussat and OTC (thereby permitting national delivery of telecommunication services in competition with Telecom) were rejected in favor of disposal of the satellite operator to a non-government entity that would be allowed to compete with Telecom.
Satellites are used to provide telecommunications services in very remote areas. These are primarily the Optus satellites C1 D1 and D2.
There are also a number of satellite earth stations, which provide access points into the Australian networks:"
Telecommunications in Australia,"Intelsat has 10 earth stations, 4 for the Indian Ocean and 6 for the Pacific Ocean.
Inmarsat has 2 earth stations, which serve the Indian and Pacific Ocean regions.
SingTel Optus Earth Stations has several earth stations located in the major cities.
Sky Muster satellites operated as part of the National Broadband Network.
Telstra has a totals of 48 earth stations, Located between sites in Sydney, Perth and Bendigo serving both the Australian Continent, Asia-Pacific Ocean and Indian Ocean regions."
Telecommunications in Australia,"Submarine cables
Due to Australia's large size, sparse population, and relative remoteness to other countries, a significant amount of infrastructure is required for Internet communications. The vast majority of Australia's international telecommunications transit capacity is sourced from undersea several fibre-optic cables to Asia and the US: "
Telecommunications in Australia,"Southern Cross Cables to New Zealand, Hawaii and the US mainland with a capacity of 620 Gbit/s, with planned upgrade in Q2 2012.
Southern Cross Cables to Fiji, Hawaii and the US mainland with a capacity of 620 Gbit/s, with planned upgrade in the Q2 2012.
Australia-Japan Cable to Guam and Japan. Primarily used as an alternative path to the United States with a capacity of 320 Gbit/s.
Sea-Me-We3 to Indonesia and onto Asia, Middle East, the United States and other destinations with a capacity of 40 Gbit/s.
APNG2 (previously part of Pac Rim West) to Papua New Guinea with a capacity of 2x565 Mbit/s.
INDIGO-West (linking Perth to Jakarta and Singapore.
Gondwana-1 to New Caledonia.
TGA to New Zealand.
PPC-1 (a joint venture of PIPE Networks and Videsh Sanchar Nigam) to Guam with lit capacity of 80 Gbit/s, and potential capacity of 2.56 Tbit/s.
Telstra Endeavour to Hawaii with a capacity of 320 Gbit/s."
Telecommunications in Australia,"Telephony and related arrangements
The Postmaster-General's Department regulated telecommunications and operated telephone and related communications within Australia over the copper telephony network from federation up to 22 December 1975, replaced by the Postal and Telecommunications Department.
In mid-1975 the department was disaggregated by the Whitlam government into the two Government Business Enterprises: the Australian Telecommunications Commission (trading as Telecom Australia) and the Australian Postal Commission (trading as Australia Post) with a new Postal and Telecommunications Department. The change was intended to take account of the increase in the functions of the department to include all electronic media matters which had previously been the responsibility of the Department of the Media.
The 1982 Davidson Inquiry regarding private sector involvement in delivery of existing/proposed telecommunications services recommended ending Telecom Australia's monopoly.
In June 1991, legislation was passed allowing duopoly competition with Telstra, Optus Communications became Australia's second general telecommunications carrier. It was guaranteed access to Telecom's existing infrastructure on reasonable terms - meant to ensure its viability. Other players were prevented from entering the general telephone market until 1997.
Telecom Australia changed its name to Telstra in 1995 and has since been privatised. It faced growing competition in market niches such as long distance corporate voice and data services. Telstra was progressively privatised (33.3% 1997, 16.6% 1999, 33.3% 2006, with 17% transferred to the Future Fund.)
Numbers of licensed telecommunications carriers grew from: ~20 controlling facilities in Australia at 1998 (with several hundred entities providing services using those facilities to end users); to 99 at 2002."
Telecommunications in Australia,"Regulation
The Postmaster-General's Department regulated telecommunications and operated telephone and related communications within Australia over the copper telephony network from federation up to 22 December 1975, replaced by the Postal and Telecommunications Department.
On 1 July 2005, the Australian Communications & Media Authority (ACMA) brought together the Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA) and the Australian Communications Authority (ACA)."
Telecommunications in Australia,"General censorship
Internet censorship
On 31 December 2007, Stephen Conroy announced the federal government's intention to censor ""inappropriate material"" from the Internet. Under the proposed system any Australian who subscribes to an ISP would receive a ""clean"" version of the Internet. The Federal Government's stated aim is to protect children from accessing violent and pornographic websites. This plan was later abandoned and the Australian government continues to only block websites that violate online laws."
Telecommunications in Australia,"Internet
Permanent Internet access was first available in Australia to universities via AARNet in 1989. The first commercial dial-up Internet Service Provider (ISP) appeared in capital cities soon after, and by the mid-1990s almost the entire country had a range of choices of dial-up ISPs. Today, Internet access is available through a range of technologies, i.e. hybrid fibre coaxial cable, digital subscriber line (DSL), Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) and satellite Internet. The Australian Government, in partnership with the industrial sector, began rolling out a nationwide FTTP broadband network in July 2009.
The .au domain (ccTLD) was delegated to Robert Elz of the Australian Computing Science Network (ACSNet) in March 1986. From then, universities connected one at a time to allow for the sending and receiving of email and for use newsgroup facilities. An earlier restricted IP-based network, linking academic institutions within Australia, known as ACSNet, used the .oz domain. This domain was subsumed under .au to become .oz.au.
A permanent connection between AARNet and ARPANet was established in May 1989 by a satellite connection.
In 1992 there were two competing commercial ISPs expanding to excess of 100 by June 1995 [Internet Australasia Magazine], attributing some fifth of all AARNet traffic.
The Vice Chancellors' Committee sold all commercial customers with Telstra leading the commercial push of the Internet into Australia."
Telecommunications in Australia,"Broadband access
Broadband internet access is available in Australia using predominantly ADSL, plus cable, fibre, satellite and wireless technologies. Since July 2008 almost two thirds of Australian households have had internet access, with broadband connections outnumbering dial-up two to one. According to the recent ABS statistics the non-dial-up services outnumber dial up services 3.6 to 1."
Telecommunications in Australia,"xDSL
In 2000, the first consumer ADSL services were made available via Telstra Bigpond, at speeds of 256/64 kbit/s (downstream/upstream), 512/128 kbit/s, and 1500/256 kbit/s. Telstra chose to artificially limit all ADSL speeds to a maximum of 1500/256 kbit/s. As ADSL required access to the telephone exchange and the copper line – which only Telstra had – this allowed Telstra to be dominant due to the expense of roll-out for other companies and Telstra's established customer base. Other ISPs followed suit soon after; reselling connections purchased wholesale from Telstra.
In response to Telstra's monopolisation of ADSL provision other carriers installed their own DSLAMs. Internode
The presence of non-Telstra DSLAMs allowed the service providers to control the speed of connection, and most offered ""uncapped"" speeds, allowing the customers to connect at whatever speed their copper pair would allow, up to 8 Mbit/s. Ratification of ADSL2 and ADSL2+ increased the maximum to 12 Mbit/s, then 24 Mbit/s. 
In November 2007 the first Naked DSL product was announced by iiNet. Shortly after this other internet providers also started to provide DSL products without telephony service over copper, reducing line rental fees."
Telecommunications in Australia,"Telstra FTTN
Telstra proposed to upgrade to Fibre to the Node (FTTN) in 2006 but did not pursue the development because it would be required to share the network."
Telecommunications in Australia,"Wireless broadband
Wireless broadband in Australia is widespread, with many point-to-point fixed wireless broadband providers serving broadband-poor regional and rural areas, predominantly with Motorola Canopy and WiMAX technologies. Telstra's 2006 introduction of the ""Next G"" HSPA network (which reportedly covers 99% of the Australian population as of September 2008) with speeds advertised of being up to 14 Mbit/s stimulated investment in wireless broadband by competitors Optus, Vodafone and Hutchison Telecommunications, who are presently expanding their HSPA networks to cover 96–98% of the Australian population."
Telecommunications in Australia,"Rural coverage
Delivering competitive telecommunications services to regional and rural areas is a major issue, with Telstra having a Universal Service Obligation regarding telephony services. Government monies have been made available on a competitive basis to carriers to address broadband and mobile telephone blackspots and gaps in service provision."
Telecommunications in Australia,"National Broadband Network
The National Broadband Network was initially a fibre-to-the-home open-access network in planning and trial operation in Australia by the federal government. The national broadband network aimed to provide up to 1000 Mbit/s speeds and to connect to 93% of Australian households and businesses. This has since been revised under a Coalition government to a mixed-technology system relying largely on Australia's existing and largely depreciated copper networks. This revision aims for 50 Mbit/s to 100 Mbit/s, with consumer reports ranging from 1 Mbit/s to 100 Mbit/s. The government will hold a majority share (51%) in the network company, with the remainder being held by private firms. The Australian government had previously called for proposals to build a fibre-to-the-node  broadband network providing download speeds up to 100 and upload speeds up to 40 megabits per second. The government also utilises fixed wireless technology and satellite technology to provide fast broadband connection in rural area and very remote area. Fixed wireless provides speeds up to 50/20 Mbit/s. Satellite technology uses two Sky Muster communication satellites launched in 2015 and 2016 to provide fast broadband in very remote areas and offshore. It provides speeds up to 25/5 Mbit/s.
The network will be the largest single infrastructure investment in Australia's history."
Telecommunications in Australia,"Incidents
2023 Optus outage
On 8 November 2023 at around 04:00 AEDT, all Optus services, including wireless phone, internet, and mobile, stopped working. This led to over 10 million people and over 400,000 businesses without services provided by the telco. The outage lasted from 9-13 hours, with mobile coverage being the first thing restored."
Telecommunications in Australia,"See also
List of LTE networks
List of planned LTE networks
List of mobile network operators of the Asia Pacific region
Indigenous Remote Communications Association"
Telecommunications in Australia,"References
Further reading
Moyal, Ann (1984). Clear Across Australia: A History of Telecommunications. Nelson. ISBN 017006266X."
Telecommunications in Australia,"External links
Whirlpool – ""Whirlpool.net.au is a fully independent, non-commercial, community website, run by a team of unpaid volunteers, which is devoted to keeping the public informed about the state of broadband in Australia."" Australian ADSL news, information, and forums.
Internet Choice – Broadband Comparison website comparing a range of the leading internet providers in Australia."
List of diplomatic missions of Australia,"The  Commonwealth of Australia possesses an extensive network of diplomatic and consular missions. They are mostly maintained by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, with some smaller consular posts being run by Austrade. There are currently over 100 Australian missions overseas.
As Australia is a member of the Commonwealth of Nations, its diplomatic missions in the capitals of other Commonwealth countries are referred to as High Commissions (as opposed to embassies). Australia's diplomatic missions have a key focus on Commonwealth, Asian, and Pacific Islander countries.
Under the terms of the Canada–Australia Consular Services Sharing Agreement, the two countries provide consular services to each other's citizens at a number of locations around the world. At this time, there are 12 cities where Canadians can obtain consular services from Australian offices, and 19 locations where Canadian offices provide consular services to Australians. In an emergency, Australians can also seek assistance from British diplomatic missions around the world in the absence of an Australian consulate or embassy.
Honorary consulates are excluded from this listing."
List of diplomatic missions of Australia,"History
After federation in 1901, Australia's presence abroad was largely limited to state and Commonwealth agents and trade offices. The United Kingdom played a defining role in Australia's foreign policy, limiting its need for missions abroad.  In 1939 there were only two External Affairs officers posted overseas: one in London (known as Australia House), and one in Washington attached to the British Embassy.
The Second World War necessitated increased co-operation with foreign countries independent of the UK's Foreign Office. By 1940, a base of four missions had been established in Washington, Ottawa, London, and Tokyo, and as World War II progressed missions to Australia's wartime allies were established in Nouméa, Chongqing, and Moscow.
Australian diplomatic missions today number at over 100, although the number of Australian diplomats overseas has dramatically been reduced. Missions have been closed in Almaty, Damascus, Kupang, Lusaka, Algiers, Cape Town, Dar es Salaam, and Bridgetown."
List of diplomatic missions of Australia,"Current missions
Africa
Americas
Asia
Europe
Oceania
Multilateral organisations
Gallery
Closed missions
Africa
Americas
Asia
Europe
See also
Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
Foreign relations of Australia
Visa policy of Australia"
List of diplomatic missions of Australia,"Notes
References
External links"
List of diplomatic missions of Australia,"Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
Australian embassies, consulates and missions around the world"
Australia–United States relations,"Australia and the United States are close allies, maintaining a robust relationship underpinned by shared democratic values, common interests, and cultural affinities. Economic, academic, and people-to-people ties are vibrant and strong. At the governmental level, relations between Australia and the United States are formalized by the ANZUS security agreement, the AUKUS security partnership and the Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement. They were formally allied together in both World War I & World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, and the War on Terror, although they had disagreements at the Paris Peace Conference. Australia is a major non-NATO ally of the United States.
Both the United States and Australia share some common ancestry and history (having both been British colonies). Both countries have native peoples who were at times dispossessed of their land by the process of colonization. Both states have also been part of a Western alliance of states in various wars. Together with three other Anglosphere countries, they comprise the Five Eyes espionage and intelligence alliance."
Australia–United States relations,"Independent foreign policy
The political and economic changes brought on by the Great Depression and Second World War, and the adoption of the Statute of Westminster 1931, necessitated the establishment and expansion of Australian representation overseas, independent of the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office. Australia established its first overseas missions (outside London) in January 1940. The first accredited diplomat sent by Australia to any foreign country was Richard Gavin Gardiner Casey, appointed to Washington in January 1940.
The US Embassy opened in Canberra in 1943, constructed in a Georgian architectural style."
Australia–United States relations,"Military
In 1908, Prime Minister Alfred Deakin invited the Great White Fleet to visit Australia during its circumnavigation of the world. The fleet stopped in Sydney, Melbourne and Albany. Deakin, a strong advocate for an independent Australian Navy, used the visit to raise the public's enthusiasm about a new navy.
The visit was significant in that it marked the first occasion that a non-Royal Navy fleet had visited Australian waters. Many saw the visit of the Great White Fleet as a major turning point in the creation of the Royal Australian Navy. Shortly after the visit, Australia ordered its first modern warships, a purchase that angered the British Admiralty.
The United States and Australia both fought in World War I with the Allied Powers. However, at the Paris Peace Conference they disagreed over the peace terms for the Central Powers. While the U.S. delegation under President Woodrow Wilson favored a more conciliatory approach in line with Wilson's Fourteen Points, the Australian delegation under Prime Minister Billy Hughes favored harsher terms such as those advocated by French Premier Georges Clemenceau.
Australia forcefully pressed for higher German reparations and Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles against U.S. opposition. Although U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing had guaranteed German leaders that Germany would only be given reparations payments for damages it inflicted, Hughes tried to press for an expansive definition of German ""aggression"" so that the British Empire and Dominions, including Australia, could benefit. Hughes also opposed Wilson's plans to establish the League of Nations despite French and British support. Australia also demanded that it be allowed to annex German New Guinea as a direct colony rather than a League of Nations mandate, although on this point it was overruled when the United Kingdom and its other Dominions sided with the United States.
During World War II, US General Douglas MacArthur was appointed Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in the South West Pacific Area, which included many Australian troops. After the fall of the Philippines MacArthur's headquarters were located in Brisbane until 1944 and Australian forces remained under MacArthur's overall command until the end of World War II. After the Guadalcanal Campaign, the 1st Marine Division was stationed in Melbourne, and Waltzing Matilda became the division's march."
Australia–United States relations,"ANZUS
After the war, the American presence in the southwest Pacific increased immensely, most notably in Japan and the Philippines. In view of the cooperation between the Allies during the war, the decreasing reliance of Australia and New Zealand on the United Kingdom, and America's desire to cement this post-war order in the Pacific, the ANZUS Treaty was signed by Australia, New Zealand and the United States in 1951. This full three-way military alliance replaced the ANZAC Pact that had been in place between Australia and New Zealand since 1944.
Australia, along with New Zealand, has been involved in most major American military endeavors since World War II including the Korean War, Vietnam War, Gulf War and the Iraq War—all without invocation of ANZUS.   The alliance has only been invoked once, for the invasion of Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and The Pentagon.
Notably Australia, as a founding member of SEATO, directly supported the United States in the Vietnam War at a time when the United States faced widespread international condemnation from even many of its allies over the war. Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies feared the expansion of communism into Asia-Pacific countries, such as Indonesia and Malaysia, if the communists won the war and a resurgence of isolationism if the United States lost. Under Menzies's successor Harold Holt support for the war waned due to strategic differences between the U.S. Armed Forces and the Australian Defence Force and the changing strategic situation in the region with the 1965 Indonesian coup d'état and founding of ASEAN. In 1967 Holt refused to provide a larger troop commitment after a visit from President Lyndon B. Johnson's advisors Clark Clifford and Maxwell Taylor. Australia's increasing hesitance to continue the war led to its de-escalation and eventually President Richard Nixon's Vietnamization policy."
Australia–United States relations,"War on Terror
Following the September 11 attacks, in which eleven Australian citizens were also killed, there was an enormous outpouring of sympathy from Australia for the United States. Prime Minister John Howard became one of President George W. Bush's strongest international supporters, and supported the United States in the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and the Iraq disarmament crisis in 2002–03. Howard, Defence Minister Robert Hill, and Chief of the Defense Force Peter Leahy agreed to participate in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq through Operation Falconer in order to improve its relationship with the United States despite widespread domestic and international condemnation of the war.
In 2004 the Bush administration ""fast tracked"" a free trade agreement with Australia. The Sydney Morning Herald called the deal a ""reward"" for Australia's contribution of troops to the Iraq invasion.
However, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd indicated that the 550 Australian combat troops in Iraq would be removed by mid-2008. Despite this, there have been suggestions from the Australian government that might lead to an increase in numbers of Australian troops in Afghanistan to roughly 1,000.
In 2011, during US President Obama's trip to Australia, it was announced that United States Marine Corps and United States Air Force units will be rotated through Australian Defence Force bases in northern Australia to conduct training. This deployment was criticised by an editorial in the Chinese state-run newspaper People's Daily and Indonesia's foreign minister, but welcomed by Australia's Prime Minister. A poll by the independent Lowy Institute think tank showed that a majority (55%) of Australians approving of the marine deployment and 59% supporting the overall military alliance between the two countries.
In 2013, the US Air Force announced rotational deployments of fighter and tanker aircraft through Australia."
Australia–United States relations,"Political
Since 1985, there have been annual ministerial consultations between the two countries, known as AUSMIN. The venue of the meeting alternates between the two countries. It is attended by senior government ministers such as the Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Australian Minister for Defence, US Secretary of Defense and US Secretary of State.
In late July 2020, Australia's Foreign Minister, Marise Payne, and Defence Minister Linda Reynolds, flew to the US to attend the annual AUSMIN talks with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark Esper despite concerns about the coronavirus. The year's talks focused on growing tensions with China. In the joint statement following the meetings, the two countries expressed “deep concern” over issues including Hong Kong, Taiwan, the “repression of Uyghurs” in Xinjiang and China's maritime claims in the South China Sea, which are “not valid under international law”."
Australia–United States relations,"Australian tours by US presidents
The first Australian visit by a serving United States president was that of Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966 to seek support for Australia's ongoing involvement in the Vietnam War. Australia had previously sent advisers and combat troops to Vietnam. In 1992, George H. W. Bush was the first of four US presidents to address a joint meeting of the Australian Parliament."
Australia–United States relations,"United States tours by Australian Prime Ministers
Kyoto Protocol
Australia's Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, ratified the Kyoto Protocol on 3 December 2007, leaving the United States and Canada as the last major industrial nations not to ratify the agreement. Australia's previous government, led by Liberal John Howard, refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol citing, along with the United States, that it would ""damage their economies""."
Australia–United States relations,"Trump administration (2017–2021)
The first phone conversation between the United States President Donald Trump and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull took place in February 2017 and lasted around 25 minutes. During the call, Trump disagreed with Turnbull on a deal that had been made during President Barack Obama's presidency. The agreement aims to take about 1,250 asylum seekers into the United States, who are currently located on Nauru and Manus Island by Australian authorities. The deal will involve a swap of the 1,250 refugees located on Nauru and Manus with several thousand refugees originating in Honduras, Guatemala, and other Central American nations. Though the details of the trade were not made transparent to the public, a public briefing announced the deal would be applied only to existing refugees and that they would be resettled in America in the coming year.
On Twitter, 2 February 2017, Trump tweeted that the refugee agreement was a ""dumb deal"". Notwithstanding the disagreement, Vice President Mike Pence, while on a visit to Australia in April 2017, stated the United States will abide by the deal. In August 2017, The Washington Post released the full transcript of the meeting. In it, President Trump described the refugee deal as ""ridiculous"", ""rotten"", and ""stupid"". The President, angered by the discussion about refugees, said ""I have had it. I have been making these calls all day and this is the most unpleasant call all day. Putin was a pleasant call"". As at 16 November 2018 about 300 refugees have been resettled from Nauru under the refugee swap deal, some of whom want to return to Nauru.
In a video released by Channel Nine on 14 June 2017, Turnbull is seen mocking Trump at the Midwinter Ball.
In response to the growing threat of North Korea developing nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles, Prime Minister Turnbull, in August 2017, emphasized the alliance between Australia and the United States and his nation's commitment to aiding the United States with possible conflict stating, ""So be very, very clear on that. If there's an attack on the US, the ANZUS Treaty would be invoked and Australia would come to the aid of the United States, as America would come to our aid if we were attacked.""
In May 2018, the United States granted Australia a permanent exemption from the United States' worldwide 25% steel tariff, making Australia one of only four nations worldwide to be exempted. Several other countries generally considered to have close relationships with the United States, such as Canada, Mexico, and the European Union, did not receive permanent exemptions.
On 2 January 2019, Washington lawyer Arthur Culvahouse was confirmed US Ambassador to Australia, filling a post that had been vacant since John Berry left the post in September 2016."
Australia–United States relations,"Biden administration (2021–present)
AUKUS: Australia to acquire nuclear-powered submarines
On September 15, 2021, the leaders of Australia, the UK and the US announced ""AUKUS"":a new security partnership in the Indo-Pacific, building on the longstanding alliance between the three to share intelligence, deepen cooperation and help Australia build nuclear-powered submarine capabilities as China's influence grows.
Although China was not specifically mentioned in the news announcements, Beijing said that the deal would ""seriously damage regional peace and stability, exacerbate an arms race and harm international nuclear nonproliferation agreements."" For the first time the United States and the United Kingdom will share their top-secret nuclear submarine propulsion technology, which has a far longer range and lethal value than diesel-electric submarines. By making the deal, Canberra broke with Paris, canceling a deal to purchase less expensive, less effective French diesel-electric submarines. No nuclear weapons are involved, and the submarines will carry conventional weapons only. 
In March 2023, AUKUS announced that a new nuclear-powered submarine class would be built in the UK and Australia to be called the SSN-AUKUS that would include cutting edge US submarine technologies. Also, the US intends to sell Australia three nuclear-powered Virginia class submarines, subject to congressional approval, with the potential to sell up to two more if needed."
Australia–United States relations,"Trade
Trade between the United States and Australia is strong, as evidenced by the Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement. The United States is Australia's fourth largest export market and its second largest source of imports. The United States is also the largest investor in Australia while Australia is the fifth largest investor in the US.
Australia and the United States also provide significant competition for each other in several third-party exports such as wheat, uranium and wool and, more recently, in the information technology sector. Although the US has a sizable sheep population, American imports of lamb meat from Australia and New Zealand remain stronger than the domestic output."
Australia–United States relations,"Opinion polls
A 2020 poll by YouGov declared Australia as the most positively viewed foreign country by Americans, with 75% having a favorable opinion. It ranked behind only the United States itself, which had a 78% rating. In a 2022 poll by Australian think tank the Lowy Institute, the United States garnered a 65% positivity rating from Australians. In the poll, it ranked behind Tonga, France, Ukraine, Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand (who placed first with a rating of 86%). In the 2021 and 2020 versions of the poll, the United States garnered a rating of 62%. In 2015, the year before Donald Trump came into power, the United States had received a much higher rating of 73%.
According to a 2014 BBC World Service poll, 44 percent of Australians had a ""mainly positive"" view of the United States and 46 percent had a ""mainly negative"" view, for a net rating of −2 points. No similar survey was conducted to ascertain American perceptions of Australia. According to the 2012 US Global Leadership Report, 55% of Australians approve of US leadership, with 21% disapproving and 24% uncertain. In a more recent 2016 Pew Research poll, 60% of Australians approve of US leadership.
In 2017, a major poll conducted in Australia by the Lowy Institute showed that 77% believed an alliance with the US was important for security. However, the survey showed that 60% of Australians had developed an unfavorable view of the US as a result of President Donald Trump. The survey also showed that the US was no longer considered Australia's ""best friend"", a title now held by New Zealand.
A 2017 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center showed only 29% of Australians had confidence in the then US President Donald Trump, in contrast to the 87% who had confidence in his predecessor, Barack Obama. It also showed 70% of Australians had no confidence in President Trump. The annual Lowy Institute survey revealed that in 2018 only 55% of Australians believed that the US could act responsibly in the world. This was a drop from 83% in 2011 and a record low. The survey also revealed that 70% of Australians do not think that Trump could act responsibly, with only 30% believing otherwise."
Australia–United States relations,"Embassies
The US Embassy was the first embassy established in Canberra. In constructing it, the United States desired to show Australians something typically American while balancing this aesthetic with Canberra's natural environment."
Australia–United States relations,"Twin towns and sister cities
Adelaide, South Australia and  Austin, Texas
 Bayside, Victoria and  Nazareth, Pennsylvania
 Bega Valley, New South Wales and  Littleton, Colorado
 Bendigo, Victoria and  Baltimore, Maryland
 Bland, New South Wales and  Boring, Oregon
 Blue Mountains, New South Wales and  Flagstaff, Arizona
 Cairns, Queensland and  Scottsdale, Arizona
 Canterbury-Bankstown, New South Wales and  Colorado Springs, Colorado
 Cockburn, Western Australia and  Mobile, Alabama
 Darwin, Northern Territory and  Anchorage, Alaska
 Glen Iris, Victoria and  Glendale, California
 Gold Coast, Queensland and  Fort Lauderdale, Florida
 Shepparton, Victoria and  Novato, California
 Hawkesbury, New South Wales and  Temple City, California
 Lake Macquarie, New South Wales and  Round Rock, Texas
 Launceston, Tasmania and  Napa, California
 Lismore, New South Wales and  Eau Claire, Wisconsin
 Mackay, Queensland and  Kailua-Kona, Hawaii
 Melbourne, Victoria and  Boston, Massachusetts
 Mildura, Victoria and  Upland, California
 Northern Beaches, New South Wales and  Huntington Beach, California
 Orange, New South Wales and  Orange, California
 Perth, Western Australia and  Houston, Texas
 Perth, Western Australia and  San Diego, California
 Port Stephens, New South Wales and  Bellingham, Washington
 Sutherland, New South Wales and  Lakewood, Colorado
 Sydney, New South Wales and  Portland, Oregon
 Sydney, New South Wales and  San Francisco, California
 Tamworth, New South Wales and  Nashville, Tennessee
 Wyndham, Victoria and  Costa Mesa, California"
Australia–United States relations,"Quotes
""The United States is profoundly grateful for this relationship, for the affection and the warmth that has grown between our citizens. For many reasons our ties have grown. One of the most important is that we see in each other qualities that we prize and hope for in ourselves. We admire in each other the pioneering spirit that our forebears brought to the tasks of pushing back the frontiers and building nations.""
– Bill Clinton during his November 1996 speech to Australian Parliament."
Australia–United States relations,"See also
Australian Americans
American Australians
Australia Week
Australian–American Memorial
Embassy of Australia, Washington, D.C.
Embassy of the United States, Canberra
Friends of Australia Congressional Caucus
Quadrilateral Security Dialogue
US/Australia Parliamentary Friendship Group
USS Canberra (CA-70)
USS Canberra (LCS-30)
General:"
Australia–United States relations,"Foreign relations of Australia
Foreign relations of the United States"
Australia–United States relations,"References
Further reading
Armstrong, Shiro. ""The economic impact of the Australia–US free trade agreement."" Australian Journal of International Affairs 69.5 (2015): 513–537. online
Bisley, Nick. ""‘An ally for all the years to come’: why Australia is not a conflicted US ally."" Australian Journal of International Affairs 67.4 (2013): 403-418.
Camilleri, Joseph A. The Australia-New Zealand-US Alliance: Regional Security in the Nuclear Age (Routledge, 2019).
Cuthbertson, Ken. ""Australian Americans."" Gale Encyclopedia of Multicultural America, edited by Thomas Riggs, (3rd ed., vol. 1, Gale, 2014), pp. 179–188. online
Fernandes, Clinton. What Uncle Sam Wants: US Foreign Policy Objectives in Australia and Beyond (Springer, 2019).
Firth, Stewart. Australia in international politics: an introduction to Australian foreign policy (3rd ed. 2021). excerpt
Kelton, Maryanne.  ""More than an Ally""?: Contemporary Australia-US Relations (2008).
McDonald, Scott D., and Andrew T. H. Tan, eds. The Future of the United States-Australia Alliance: Evolving Security Strategy in the Indo-Pacific (2020) excerpt
Mackerras, Colin. ""China and the Australia-US relationship: A historical perspective."" Asian survey 54.2 (2014): 223–246. online
Moore, John Hammond, ed. Australians in America: 1876–1976 (University of Queensland Press, 1977).
Paul, Erik. Australia in the US Empire: A Study in Political Realism (2019) excerpt
Rimmer, Susan Harris. ""Australia's trade diplomacy and the Trans-Pacific Partnership:‘you’ve got to row your own boat’."" Australian Journal of International Affairs 70.6 (2016): 625-640.
Siracusa, Joseph M., and David G. Coleman eds. Australia Looks to America: Australian–American Relations, since Pearl Harbor (Regina Books, 2006).
Stuart, David. ""American trade with the British colony of New South Wales, 1792–1816—A reappraisal."" History Compass 18.12 (2020): e12641.
Tidwell, Alan. ""The role of ‘diplomatic lobbying’in shaping US foreign policy and its effects on the Australia–US relationship."" Australian Journal of International Affairs 71.2 (2017): 184–200.
Tow, William T. ""President Trump and the Implications for the Australia–US Alliance and Australia's Role in Southeast Asia."" Contemporary Southeast Asia 39.1 (2017): 50–57."
Australia–United States relations,External links
Australia–United States relations,"""Background Note: Australia"" US Department of State. August 2006. 11 October 2006
""Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement""  Australian Government. 2005. 28 October 2006
History of Australia - United States relations
CIA World Factbook
Embassy of Australia in Washington D.C.
Embassy of the United States in Canberra
Free Trade Agreement
Dynamics of the US trade with Australia from 2012 to 2017 Archived 24 April 2019 at the Wayback Machine"
European maritime exploration of Australia,"The maritime European exploration of Australia consisted of several waves of European seafarers who sailed the edges of the Australian continent. Dutch navigators were the first Europeans known to have explored and mapped the Australian coastline. The first documented encounter was that of Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon, in 1606. Dutch seafarers also visited the west and north coasts of the continent, as did French explorers.
The most famous expedition was that of Royal Navy Lieutenant (later Captain) James Cook 164 years after Janszoon's sighting. After an assignment to make observations of the 1769 Transit of Venus, Cook followed Admiralty instructions to explore the south Pacific for the reported Terra Australis and on 19 April 1770 sighted the south-eastern coast of Australia and became the first recorded European to explore the eastern coastline. Explorers by land and sea continued to survey the continent for some years after settlement."
European maritime exploration of Australia,"Pro-Iberian hypotheses and theories
Some writers have advanced the theory that the Portuguese were the first Europeans to sight Australia in the 1520s.
A number of relics and remains have been interpreted as evidence that the Portuguese reached Australia. The primary evidence advanced to support this theory is the representation of the continent of Jave la Grande, which appears on a series of French world maps, the Dieppe maps, and that may, in part, be based on Portuguese charts. However, most historians do not accept this theory, and the interpretation of the Dieppe maps is highly contentious. In the early 20th century, Lawrence Hargrave argued that Spain had established a colony in Botany Bay in the 16th century. Five coins from the Kilwa Sultanate were found on Marchinbar Island, in the Wessel Islands in 1945 by RAAF radar operator Morry Isenberg. In 2018 another coin, also thought to be from Kilwa, was found on a beach on Elcho Island, another of the Wessel Islands, by archaeologist and member of the Past Masters, Mike Hermes. Hermes speculated that the coins may suggest trade between indigenous Australians and Kilwa, or may have arrived via Makassan contact with Australia. Mike Owen, another member of the Past Masters group speculated that these coins may have arrived sometime after they had installed Muhammad Arcone on the Kilwa throne as a Portuguese vassal, from 1505 to 1506, or that the Portuguese had visited Wessel islands.
The French navigator Binot Paulmier de Gonneville claimed to have landed at a land he described as ""east of the Cape of Good Hope"" in 1504, after being blown off course. For some time it had been thought he landed in Australia, but the place he landed has now been shown to be Brazil (which is north-west of the Cape)."
European maritime exploration of Australia,"17th century
Dutch exploration
The most significant exploration of Australia in the 17th century was by the Dutch. The Dutch East India Company (Dutch: Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, ""VOC"", ""United East India Company"") was set up in 1602 and traded extensively with the islands which now form parts of Indonesia, and hence were very close to Australia already.
The first documented and undisputed European sighting of and landing on Australia was in late February 1606, by the Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon aboard the Duyfken. Janszoon charted the Australian coast and met with Aboriginal people. Janszoon followed the coast of New Guinea, missed Torres Strait, and explored and then charted part of the western side of Cape York, in the Gulf of Carpentaria, believing the land was still part of New Guinea. On 26 February 1606, Janszoon and his party made landfall near the modern town of Weipa and the Pennefather River, but were promptly attacked by the Indigenous people. Janszoon proceeded down the coast for some 350 km (220 mi). He stopped in some places, but was met by hostile natives and some of his men were killed. At the final place, he initially had friendly relations with the natives, but after he forced them to hunt for him and appropriated some of their women, violence broke out and there were many deaths on both sides. These events were recorded in Aboriginal oral history that has come down to the present day. Here Janszoon decided to turn back, the place later being called Cape Keerweer, Dutch for ""turnabout"".
That same year, a Spanish expedition sailing in nearby waters and led by Pedro Fernández de Quiros landed in the New Hebrides and, believing such to be the fabled southern continent, named the land ""Austrialia del Espiritu Santo"" (Southern Land of the Holy Spirit), in honour of his queen Margaret of Austria, the wife of Philip III of Spain. Later that year, De Quiros' deputy Luís Vaez de Torres sailed to the north of Australia through Torres Strait, charting New Guinea's southern coast, and possibly sighting Cape York in October 1606.
In 1611 Hendrik Brouwer, working for VOC, discovered that sailing from Europe to Batavia was much quicker if the Roaring Forties were used. Up to that point, the Dutch had followed a route copied from Arab and Portuguese sailors who followed the coasts of Africa, Mauritius and Ceylon. The Brouwer Route involved sailing south from the Cape of Good Hope (which is at 34° latitude south) into the Roaring Forties (at 40–50° latitude south), then sailing east before turning north to Java using the South Indian Ocean Current. The Brouwer Route became compulsory for Dutch vessels in 1617. The problem with the route, however, was that there was no easy way at the time to determine longitude, making Dutch landfalls on the west coast of Australia inevitable, as well as ships becoming wrecked on the shoals. Most of these landfalls were unplanned. The first such landfall was in 1616, when Dirk Hartog, employed by VOC, reached land at Shark Bay (on what is now called Dirk Hartog Island) off the coast of Western Australia. Finding nothing of interest, Hartog continued sailing northwards along this coastline of Western Australia previously unknown to Europeans, making nautical charts up to about 22° latitude south. He then left the coast and continued on to Batavia. He called Australia 't Landt van d'Eendracht—shortened to Eendrachtsland—after his ship, a name which would be in use until Abel Tasman named the land New Holland in 1644.
In 1619 Frederik de Houtman, in the VOC ship Dordrecht, and Jacob d'Edel, in another VOC ship Amsterdam, sighted land on the Australian coast near present-day Perth which they called d'Edelsland. After sailing northwards along the coast they made landfall in Eendrachtsland, which had previous been encountered and named by Hartog, before turning for Batavia.
Hessel Gerritsz was appointed on 16 October 1617 as the first exclusive cartographer of VOC, whose job included creating and maintaining charts of coastlines in the area. Gerritsz produced a map in 1622 which showed the first part of Australia to be charted, that by Janszoon in 1606. It was considered to be part of New Guinea and called Nueva Guinea on the map, but Gerritsz also added an inscription saying: "
European maritime exploration of Australia,"""Those who sailed with the yacht of Pedro Fernandes de Queirós in the neighbourhood of New Guinea to 10 degrees westward through many islands and shoals and over 2, 3 and 4 fathoms for as many as 40 days, presumed that New Guinea did not extend beyond 10 degrees to the south. If this be so, then the land from 9 to 14 degrees would be a separate land, different from the other New Guinea"".
All charts and logs from returning VOC merchants and explorer sailors had to be submitted to Gerritsz and provided new information for several breakthrough maps which came from his hands. Gerritsz' charts would accompany all VOC captains on their voyages. In 1627 Gerritsz made a map, the Caert van't Landt van d'Eendracht, entirely devoted to the discoveries of the West Australian coastline, which was named ""Eendrachtsland"", though the name had been used since 1619.
On 1 May 1622, Englishman John Brooke in the Tryall, a British East India Company owned vessel of approximately 500 tons, on the way to Batavia made the second English voyage to use Brouwer's southern route. He sailed too far east and sighted the coastline of Western Australia at Point Cloates (about 22° latitude south), although he mistook it for an island sighted in 1618 by Janszoon (and in 1816 named Barrow Island by Phillip Parker King). They did not land there, and a few weeks later were shipwrecked on an uncharted reef northwest of the Montebello Islands (about 20° latitude south, now known as Tryal Rocks). The shipwreck caused the deaths of 93 men, but Brooke, his son John and nine men scrambled into a skiff and the ship's factor Thomas Bright and 35 others managed to save a longboat. Brooke sailed separately to Java. Bright and his crew spent seven days ashore on the Montebello Islands, before sailing the longboat to Bantam in Java. This was the first recorded shipwreck in Australian waters and first extended stay in Australia by Europeans."
European maritime exploration of Australia,"In 1623, Jan Carstensz was commissioned by VOC to lead an expedition to the southern coast of New Guinea and beyond, to follow up the reports of further land sighted by Janszoon in his 1606 voyages to the south. Setting off from Amboyna in the Dutch East Indies with two ships, the Pera and Arnhem (captained by Willem Joosten Van Colster), he traveled along the south coast of New Guinea, then headed south to Cape York Peninsula and the Gulf of Carpentaria. On 14 April 1623, he passed Cape Keerweer. Landing in search of fresh water for his stores, Carstensz encountered a party of the local indigenous Australian inhabitants, who he described as ""poor and miserable looking people"" who had ""no knowledge of precious metals or spices"". On 8 May 1623, Carstensz and his crew fought a skirmish with 200 Aborigines at the mouth of a small river near Cape Duyfken (named after Janszoon's vessel which had earlier visited the region) and landed at the Pennefather River. Carstensz named the small river Carpentier River, and the Gulf of Carpentaria in honour of Pieter de Carpentier, Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies. Carstensz reached the Staaten River before heading north again. The Pera and Carstensz returned to Amboyna while the Arnhem crossed the Gulf of Carpentaria, sighting the east coast of Arnhem Land.
In 1627, François Thijssen ended up too far south and on 26 January 1627 he came upon the coast of Australia, near Cape Leeuwin, the most south-west tip of the mainland. Pieter Nuyts the VOC official aboard his ship gave Thijssen permission to continue to sail eastwards, mapping more than 1,500 kilometres (930 mi) of the southern coast of Australia from Albany, Western Australia to Ceduna, South Australia. He called the land 't Land van Pieter Nuyts (""The Land of Pieter Nuyts""). Part of Thijssen's map shows the islands St Francis and St Peter, now known collectively with their respective groups as the Nuyts Archipelago. Thijssen's observations were included as early as 1628 by Gerritsz in a chart of the Indies and Eendrachtsland
One Dutch captain of this period who was not really an explorer but who nevertheless bears mentioning was Francisco Pelsaert, captain of the Batavia, which was wrecked off the coast of Western Australia in 1629."
European maritime exploration of Australia,"In August 1642, VOC despatched Abel Tasman and Franchoijs Visscher on a voyage of which one of the objects was to obtain knowledge of ""all the totally unknown provinces of the kingdom of Beach"". This expedition used two small ships, the Heemskerck and the Zeehaen. Starting in Mauritius both ships left on 8 October using the Roaring Forties to sail east as fast as possible. On 7 November, because of snow and hail the ships' course was altered to a more north-eastern direction. On 24 November 1642 Abel Tasman sighted the west coast of Tasmania, north of Macquarie Harbour. He named his discovery Van Diemen's Land after Antonio van Diemen, Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies. Proceeding south he skirted the southern end of Tasmania and turned north-east, Tasman then tried to work his two ships into Adventure Bay on the east coast of South Bruny Island where he was blown out to sea by a storm, this area he named Storm Bay. Two days later Tasman anchored to the north of Cape Frederick Hendrick just north of the Forestier Peninsula. Tasman then landed in Blackman Bay – in the larger Marion Bay. The next day, an attempt was made to land in North Bay; however, because the sea was too rough the carpenter swam through the surf and planted the Dutch flag in North Bay. Tasman then claimed formal possession of the land on 3 December 1642.
In 1644 Tasman made a second voyage with three ships (Limmen, Zeemeeuw, and the tender Braek). He followed the south coast of New Guinea eastwards, missed the Torres Strait between New Guinea and Australia, and continued his voyage westwards along the north Australian coast. He mapped the north coast of Australia making observations on the land, which he called New Holland, and its people. From the point of view of the Dutch East India Company, Tasman's explorations were a disappointment: he had found neither a promising area for trade nor a useful new shipping route.
By the end of the Renaissance (1450 to 1650), every continent had been visited and mostly mapped by Europeans, except the south polar continent now known as Antarctica, but originally called Terra Australis, or 'Australia' for short. This geographical achievement was displayed on the large world map Nova Totius Terrarum Orbis Tabula made by the Dutch cartographer Joan Blaeu in 1648 to commemorate the Peace of Westphalia."
European maritime exploration of Australia,"A map of the world inlaid into the floor of the Burgerzaal (""Burger's Hall"") of the new Amsterdam Stadhuis (""Town Hall"") in 1648 revealed the extent of Dutch charts of much of Australia's coast. Based on Joan Blaeu's Nova et Accuratissima Terrarum Orbis Tabula (""A New and Most Accurate Chart of the Sphere of the Earth"") of the same year, it incorporated Tasman's discoveries. Although the original mosaic was worn flat, it was reproduced in 1748. This reproduction was left in storage for centuries before being restored after World War II as part of the Royal Palace of Amsterdam. It was also used as the basis of another mosaic in Canberra, focused specifically on the Australian section of the map of the eastern hemisphere. Tasman's discoveries also subsequently appeared on the Archipelagus Orientalis sive Asiaticus (""Eastern or Asiatic Archipelago"") published in the Kurfürsten Atlas (""Atlas of the Great Elector"").
Maps from this period and the early 18th century often have Terra Australis or t'Zuid Landt (""the South Land"") marked as ""New Holland"", the name given to the continent by Abel Tasman in 1644. Joan Blaeu's 1659 map shows the clearly recognizable outline of Australia based on the many Dutch explorations of the first half of the 17th century."
European maritime exploration of Australia,"In 1664, the French geographer Melchisédech Thévenot published his Relations de Divers Voyages Curieux (""Relations of Various Interesting Voyages""), including a map of New Holland. Thévenot divided the continent in two, between Nova Hollandia to the west and Terre Australe (""Southern Land"") to the east. He divided the continent on a line at longitude 135° east, which appears to have been on his initiative, as there was no such division in Tasman's journals or on his, Blaeu's, or Amsterdam Burgerzaal's maps or on any other Dutch maps of this period. Instead, Terra Australis or t'Zuid Landt appeared—if at all—as alternative names with Hollandia Nova in reference to the whole island. This 135° E. line seems to have represented Thévenot's understanding of the Zaragoza Meridian or Tordesillas antimeridian, dividing the Portuguese East Indies conquered by the Dutch Empire in a protracted conflict across the 17th century from the lands reserved under those treaties for the Spanish Empire and reclaimed by the act of possession of ""Austrialia"" carried out by Pedro Fernández de Quirós in 1606. This western limit of Spain's claim is shown on the 1761 map of the Spanish Empire by Vicente de Memije, Aspecto Symbolico del Mundo Hispanico (""Symbolic Presentation of the Spanish World"") and played a part in the British claim and division of the territory during the establishment of New South Wales in the late 18th century and Western Australia in the early 19th century."
European maritime exploration of Australia,"In 1696, Willem de Vlamingh commanded the rescue mission to Australia's west coast to look for survivors of the Ridderschap van Holland that had gone missing two years earlier. The mission proved fruitless, but along the way Vlamingh charted parts of the continent's western coast and as a result improved navigation on the Indian Ocean route from the Cape of Good Hope to the Dutch East Indies."
European maritime exploration of Australia,"Others
Englishman William Dampier came looking for the Tryall in 1688, 66 years after it was wrecked. Dampier was the first Englishman to set foot on the Australian mainland on 5 January 1688, when his ship the Cygnet was marooned in King Sound. While the ship was being careened he made notes on the fauna and flora and the indigenous peoples he found there. He made another voyage to the region in 1699, before returning to England. He described some of the flora and fauna of Australia, and was the first European to report Australia's peculiar large hopping animals. Dampier contributed to knowledge of Australia's coastline through his two-volume publication A Voyage to New Holland (1703, 1709). His book of adventures, A New Voyage around the World, created a sensation when it was published in English in 1697. Though he was briefly marooned on the northwest Australian coast on the trip described in this book, only his second voyage seems to be of importance to Australian exploration."
European maritime exploration of Australia,"18th century
In 1756, French King Louis XV sent Louis Antoine de Bougainville to look for the Southern lands. After a stay in South America and the Falklands, Bougainville reached Tahiti in April 1768, where his boat was surrounded by hundreds of canoes filled with beautiful women. ""I ask you"", he wrote, ""given such a spectacle, how could one keep at work 400 Frenchmen?"" He claimed Tahiti for the French and sailed westward, past southern Samoa and the New Hebrides, then on sighting Espiritu Santo turned west still looking for the Southern Continent. On June 4 he almost ran into heavy breakers and had to change course to the north and east. He had almost found the Great Barrier Reef. He sailed through what is now known as the Solomon Islands that, due to the hostility of the people there, he avoided, until his passage was blocked by a mighty reef. With his men weak from scurvy and disease and no way through he sailed for Batavia in the Dutch East Indies where he received news of Wallis and Carteret who had preceded Bougainville. When he returned to France in 1769, he was the first Frenchman to circumnavigate the globe and the first European known to have seen the Great Barrier Reef. Though he did not reach the mainland of Australia, he did eliminate a considerable area where the Southern land was not.
In the meantime, in 1768, British Lieutenant James Cook was sent from England on an expedition to the Pacific Ocean to observe the transit of Venus from Tahiti, sailing westwards in HMS Endeavour via Cape Horn and arriving there in 1769. On the return voyage he continued his explorations of the South Pacific, in search of the postulated continent of Terra Australis. He first reached New Zealand, and then sailed further westwards to sight the south-eastern corner of the Australian continent on 20 April 1770. In doing so, he was to be the first documented European expedition to reach the eastern coastline of Australia. He continued sailing northwards along the east coast, charting and naming many features along the way. He identified Botany Bay as a good harbour and one potentially suitable for a settlement, and where he made his first landfall on 29 April. Continuing up the coastline, the Endeavour was to later run aground on shoals of the Great Barrier Reef (near the present-day site of Cooktown), where she had to be laid up for repairs. The voyage then recommenced, eventually reaching the Torres Strait. At Possession Island Cook formally claimed possession of the entire east coast he had just explored for Britain. The expedition returned to England via the Indian Ocean and Cape of Good Hope.
In 1772, two French expeditions set out to find Terra Australis. The first was led by Marc-Joseph Marion Dufresne who found and named the Crozet Islands. He spent a few days in Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) where he made contact with the island's indigenous people (the first European to have done so). In Blackmans Bay he claimed Van Diemen's Land for France. He then sailed on to New Zealand where he and some crewmen were killed by Māori warriors. The survivors retreated to Mauritius. Also in 1772, the two ships of the second French expedition were separated by a storm. The leader turned back but the second in command, Louis Aleno de St Aloüarn, sighted Cape Leeuwin and followed the Western Australian coast north to Shark Bay. He landed on Dirk Hartog Island and claimed Western Australia in the name of French King Louis XV.
Tobias Furneaux on Adventure accompanied James Cook (in Resolution) on Cook's second voyage (1772–1775), which was commissioned by the British government with advice from the Royal Society, to circumnavigate the globe as far south as possible to finally determine whether there was any great southern landmass, or Terra Australis. On this expedition Furneaux was twice separated from his leader. On the first occasion, in 1773, Furneaux explored a great part of the south and east coasts of Van Diemen's Land, and made the earliest British chart of the same. Most of his names here have survived. On Cook's third voyage (1776–80), in 1777 Cook confirmed Furneaux's account and delineation of it, with certain minor criticisms and emendations, and named after him the Furneaux Group at the eastern entrance to Bass Strait, and the group now known as the Low Archipelago.
Cook's first expedition carried botanist Joseph Banks, for whom a great many Australian geographical features and the plant genus Banksia and a number of plant species, e.g. Grevillea banksii, were named. The reports of Cook and Banks in conjunction with the loss of England's penal colonies in America after they gained independence and growing concern over French activity in the Pacific, encouraged the foundation by the British of a colony at Botany Bay. The First Fleet led by Captain Arthur Phillip left England on 13 May 1787 to found a penal colony in Australia. It reached Botany Bay in mid-January 1788. Phillip had decided to move the settlement to Sydney Cove in Port Jackson, but the British ships were unable to leave Botany Bay until 26 January because of a tremendous gale.
Just as he was attempting to move the colony, on 24 January 1788 Jean-François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse arrived off Botany Bay. The French expedition consisted of two ships led by La Pérouse, the Astrolabe and the Boussole, which were on the latest leg of a three-year voyage that had taken them from Brest, around Cape Horn, up the coast from Chile to California, north-west to Kamchatka, south-east to Easter Island, north-west to Macao, and on to the Philippines, the Friendly Isles, Hawaii and Norfolk Island. The gale also prevented La Pérouse's ships from entering Botany Bay. Though amicably received, the French expedition was a troublesome matter for the British, as it showed the interest of France in the new land. To preempt a French claim to Norfolk Island, Phillip ordered Lieutenant Philip Gidley King to lead a party of 15 convicts and seven free men to take control of Norfolk Island. They arrived on 6 March 1788, while La Pérouse was still in Sydney.
The British received him courteously, and each captain, through their officers, offered the other any assistance and needed supplies. La Pérouse was 6 weeks in Port Jackson, where the French established an observatory, held Catholic masses, performed geological observations, and planted the first garden. Before leaving Sydney on 10 March, La Pérouse took the opportunity to send his journals, some charts and also some letters back to Europe with a British naval ship from the First Fleet—the Alexander. Neither La Pérouse, nor any of his men, were seen again. Fortunately the documents that he dispatched with the Alexander from the in-progress expedition were returned to Paris, where they were published.
In September 1791, the French Assembly decided to send an expedition in search of La Pérouse, and Bruni d'Entrecasteaux was selected to command the expedition. In 1792, d'Entrecasteaux landed and named Esperance in Western Australia and made many more discoveries and named many other places. The expedition suffered many difficulties, with d'Entrecasteaux dying on 21 July 1793 of scurvy. On 18 February 1794 the expedition vessels were surrendered to the Dutch authorities in the East Indies so that the new French Republican Government could not profit by them. Élisabeth Rossel, the most senior surviving officer, sailed from Java in January 1795 on board a Dutch ship taking with him the expedition's papers. The ship left Rossel at Table Bay but took the papers, but was captured by the British. After the Peace of Amiens in 1802, all the expedition papers were returned to Rossel, who was thus able to publish a narrative of the whole enterprise. In 1808 Rossel published the detailed Voyage de d'Entrecasteaux, envoyé à la recherche de Lapérouse produced by Charles-François Beautemps-Beaupré. The atlas contains 39 charts, of which those of Van Diemen's Land were the most detailed, and which remained the source of the English charts for many years. His expedition also resulted in the publication of the first general flora of New Holland."
European maritime exploration of Australia,"Later exploration from the sea
In 1796 (after settlement), British Matthew Flinders with George Bass took a small open boat, the Tom Thumb 1, and explored some of the coastline south of Sydney. He suspected from this voyage that Tasmania was an island, and in 1798 Bass and he led an expedition to circumnavigate it and hence prove his theory. The sea between mainland Australia and Tasmania was named Bass Strait. One of the two major islands in Bass Strait was later named Flinders Island by Philip Parker King. Flinders returned to England in 1801.
Meantime, in October 1800, Frenchman Nicolas Baudin was selected to lead what has become known as the Baudin expedition to map the coast of Australia/New Holland. He had two ships, Géographe and Naturaliste captained by Jacques Hamelin, and was accompanied by nine zoologists and botanists, including Jean Baptiste Leschenault de la Tour. He reached Australia in May 1801, being the first to explore and map a part of the southern coast of the continent. The scientific expedition was a great success, with more than 2500 new species described. The French also met Indigenous people and treated them with high respect. Many Western Australian places still have French names today from Baudin's expedition (Peron Peninsula, Depuch Island, Geographe Bay, Cape Naturaliste, Cape Levillain, Boullanger Island and Faure Island). The Australian plant genus Lechenaultia is named after Jean Baptiste Leschenault de la Tour and Guichenotia after Antoine Guichenot. In April 1802, the Le Naturaliste under Hamelin explored the area of Western Port, Victoria, and gave names to places, a number of which have survived. Ile des Français is now called French Island.
Flinders' work came to the attention of many of the scientists of the day, in particular the influential Sir Joseph Banks, to whom Flinders dedicated his Observations on the Coasts of Van Diemen's Land, on Bass's Strait, etc.. Banks used his influence with Earl Spencer to convince the Admiralty of the importance of an expedition to chart the coastline of New Holland. As a result, in January 1801, Flinders was given command of HMS Investigator, a 334-ton sloop, and promoted to commander the following month.
Investigator set sail for New Holland on 18 July 1801. Attached to the expedition was the botanist Robert Brown, botanical artist Ferdinand Bauer, and landscape artist William Westall. Due to the scientific nature of the expedition, Flinders was issued with a French passport, despite England and France then being at war. Flinders first sailed along the south coast to Sydney, then completed the circumnavigation of Australia back to Sydney."
European maritime exploration of Australia,"While each was charting Australia's coastline, Baudin and Flinders met by chance in April 1802 in Encounter Bay in what is now South Australia. Baudin stopped at the settlement of Sydney for supplies. In Sydney he bought a new ship, the Casuarina, a smaller vessel which could conduct close inshore survey work, under the command of Louis de Freycinet. He sent home the larger Naturaliste with all the specimens that had been collected by Baudin and his crew. He then headed for Tasmania and conducted further charting of Bass Strait before sailing west, following the west coast northward, and after another visit to Timor, undertook further exploration along the north coast of Australia. Plagued by contrary winds and ill health, it was decided on 7 July 1803 to return to France. The expedition stopped at Mauritius, where he died of tuberculosis on 16 September 1803. The expedition finally came back to France on 24 March 1804. According to researchers from the University of Adelaide, during this expedition Baudin prepared a report for Napoleon on ways to invade and capture the British colony at Sydney Cove.
The British suspected that the reason for Baudin's expedition was to try to establish a French colony on the coast of New Holland. In response, the Lady Nelson and the whaler Albion, both under direction of Lieutenant John Bowen, sailed from Port Jackson on 31 August 1803 to establish a settlement in Van Diemen's Land, and on 10 October 1803 a convoy of two ships HMS Calcutta and Ocean led by Captain David Collins carrying 402 people entered Port Phillip and formed a settlement near Sorrento. The first British to enter the bay were the crews of HMS Lady Nelson, commanded by John Murray and, ten weeks later, Investigator, commanded by Flinders, in 1802.
Investigator was declared unseaworthy, so in 1803 Flinders was compelled to return to England as a passenger on Porpoise (1799), together with his charts and logbooks. The vessel stopped in Mauritius, thinking that he would be safe because of the scientific nature of his voyages, though England and France were at war at the time. However, the governor of Mauritius kept Flinders in prison for six and a half years. As a consequence, the first published map of the full outline of Australia was the Freycinet Map of 1811, a product of Baudin's expedition. It preceded the publication of Flinders' map of Australia, Terra Australis or Australia, by three years. Flinders also published in 1814 his account of the voyage in A Voyage to Terra Australis, which was published just before his death at the age of 40."
European maritime exploration of Australia,"See also
Aboriginal Australians
Age of Discovery
Dieppe maps
European land exploration of Australia
Indigenous Australians
Jave la Grande
History of cartography
History of geography
History of Australia
Terra Australis
Terra incognita"
European maritime exploration of Australia,"References
External links
Explorers page at Project Gutenburg Australia
Australian Discovery page at Project Gutenburg Australia
original documentation from 17th Century Dutch exploration at Project Gutenburg Australia"
Diplomatic history of Australia,"The diplomatic history of Australia encompasses the historical events surrounding Australian foreign relations. Following the global change in the dynamics of international state of affairs in the 20th century, this saw a transition within Australia's diplomatic situation to broaden outside of exclusively commonwealth and western European nations. Its core relationship was with Great Britain until 1941, and with the United States and New Zealand since then as represented by ANZUS.  In the 21st century trade has soared with China. However relations have cycled back and forth from friendly to strained. For recent relations see also  Foreign relations of Australia."
Diplomatic history of Australia,"1901–1914: Post-Federation years
The Department of External Affairs was created upon the federation of the Australian colonies, but largely remained an appendage of the Prime Minister's Department. In the view of early governments, foreign policy meant ""relations with London on matters of imperial foreign policy on which Australia might have an interest"". Australia's first prime minister Edmund Barton was in favour of a uniform foreign policy for the British Empire, suggesting Australia could have no ""foreign policy of its own"" but expected that the British government would defer to the Australian perspective for ""regional"" imperial policy. Barton's successor Alfred Deakin took some of the first steps towards diplomatic independence by dealing directly with the Japanese consul-general, for which he was reminded by the Colonial Office that it ""expected Australia to conduct any dealings with a foreign power through London"". He also dealt directly with the U.S. consul in Sydney to engineer the visit of the Great White Fleet in 1908. His actions ""set a precedent for unilateralism"" in foreign policy that was followed by his immediate successors as prime minister, with a continued reliance on the British diplomatic service and policy-making apparatus and no efforts to develop Australian equivalents.
Deakin repeatedly lobbied the British government for greater consultation on imperial foreign policy and suggested the establishment of an imperial department of state to coordinate policy, as part of his broader support for an Imperial Federation. Outside of the prime minister, the Australian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom remained the most significant figure conduit for Australian foreign relations. The significance of the role was emphasised by the fact that its first three appointees (spanning from 1910 to 1927) were former prime ministers."
Diplomatic history of Australia,"1914–1931: World War I and aftermath
World War I brought about an increase in direct Australian interactions with nations outside the British Empire, prompted by strategic concerns including the fate of German territories captured by Allied troops during the war. Prime Minister Billy Hughes visited the United States in 1918 and ""in a series of meetings and speeches, called on the US to cooperate with Australia in ensuring postwar security in the Far East"". At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, Hughes led an Australian section within the British delegation and signed the Treaty of Versailles on behalf of Australia, as with other British dominions. Hughes lobbied powerfully for Australian interests at the conference, including the granting of League of Nations mandates over the former German New Guinea and Nauru and opposition to Japan's Racial Equality Proposal to protect the White Australia policy.
The 1920s marked ""the genesis of a distinct Australian foreign policy"", largely in response to changing power dynamics in the Pacific following the Washington Naval Conference of 1922 and the subsequent decline in British influence. However, in the short-term Australia continued to rely on ""the UK and its imperial machinery for diplomatic representation and economic and material security"". Following the 1923 Imperial Conference, attempts to formulate a uniform imperial foreign policy were largely abandoned in favour of a system of dominion ratification of British decisions. Governmental interest in foreign policy declined during the Great Depression as the Scullin government concentrated on internal economic matters. In 1929, internationalist Frederic Eggleston complained to a Senate committee that ""no parliament which is responsible for its own foreign policy has less discussion on foreign affairs than does the Australian Parliament""."
Diplomatic history of Australia,"Trade service and ""quasi-diplomatic"" appointments
The Hughes government sought to establish an independent trade commissioner service, having rejected a previous offer to share the British trade service. Trade and customs minister Jens Jensen's June 1918 report recommended the appointment of trade commissioners in Canada, Japan, Russia, South Africa and the United States, who ""would link with but not rely upon the British consular service"". However, for post-war budgetary reasons the scheme was significantly scaled back.
While not establishing formal diplomatic relations, Australia made a number of ""quasi-diplomatic"" appointments in the post-war period, who functioned as official representatives of the Australian government but held no diplomatic rank. These included appointment of Henry Braddon to the United States in 1918 with the title of ""commissioner"" and the appointment of Clive Voss as ""commercial agent"" in France in 1919. The American posting endured until 1930, with Herbert Brookes serving as the only ""commissioner-general for Australia in the United States"" until the position was abolished by the Scullin government for cost reasons.
In 1921, Australia appointed its first official representative in Asia, with the appointment of Edward S. Little as trade commissioner to China, based in Shanghai. Senator Thomas Bakhap undertook a trade mission to China in 1922 at the instigation of Hughes, and in the same year Egbert Sheaf was appointed as a trade commissioner to ""the East"", based in Singapore. The initial trade commissioner service was partially funded by state governments and ultimately failed due to a lack of support from Prime Minister Stanley Bruce and state premiers."
Diplomatic history of Australia,"1930s: Appeasement
During the 1930s, Australian foreign policy was centralised around the fear of war and an eagerness to appease Germany, Japan and Italy. The Australian government gave considerable support to the appeasement policies of the Chamberlain government in London regarding Germany. However, as a consequence of supporting Chamberlain, many Australians experienced fear due to Japan's strong military and aggressive foreign policy whereas Australia was still an evolving nation to wield any independent force in world affairs in the 1930s.
In 1934, the Lyons government despatched the Australian Eastern Mission to East Asia and South-East Asia, Australia's first diplomatic mission outside of the British Empire. The mission visited seven territories, concentrating on China, Japan and the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia), and has been identified as a milestone in the early development of Australian foreign policy. Latham publicly identified the mission as one of ""friendship and goodwill"", but also compiled a series of secret reports to cabinet on economic and strategic matters. He ""actively sought information about trading opportunities across Asia, entering into frequent and detailed discussions with prime ministers, foreign ministers, premiers and governors about Australia‘s trading and commercial interests, custom duties and tariffs"". His recommendations proved influential in the development of the Department of External Affairs as an independent department from the Prime Minister's Department and the appointment of Australia's first diplomats in Asia."
Diplomatic history of Australia,"World War II
At the beginning of World War II, Australia was part of the commonwealth of the British Empire, and expected the United Kingdom would guarantee its security in any conflict with Japan. On 3 September 1939, Prime Minister Robert Menzies announced, ""Great Britain has declared war on Germany, and as a result, Australia is also at war... There can be no doubt that where Great Britain stands, there stand the people of the entire British world"". Australia was the first nation to come to Great Britain's aid, sending its combat divisions to fight in the Middle East and North Africa.
The unprecedented Japanese attack on an American naval base at Pearl Harbour, Hawaii, on 7 December 1941, led to the formal entry of the United States into the war. Japanese attacks continued through Burma, Borneo, the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) and Malaya. The island of Singapore was strategically crucial for the British defence plan, however it was poorly defended and surrendered to the Japanese on 15 February 1942, with thousands of Australians as prisoners of war. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had given priority to the European war and was unable to assist the Australians. Australia Prime Minister John Curtin appealed to the US instead, ""Australia looks to America free of any pangs as to our traditional links of kinship with Great Britain."" This speech announced the shift of reliance from Great Britain to the United States."
Diplomatic history of Australia,"Relations with the United States
In March 1942 after the Japanese attacks on Darwin, U.S. President Roosevelt ordered General Douglas MacArthur to move the American base from the Philippines to Brisbane, Australia. By September 1943, more than 120,000 American soldiers were in Australia. The Americans were warmly welcomed at first but tensions grew evident. MacArthur worked very closely with the Australian government and took command of its combat operations. Fighting continued throughout Southeast Asia for the next two years. When the European war was declared over, Australia and the US still had a war to win against Japan. MacArthur promoted a policy of ""island hopping"" for his American troops while he suggested that the Australian troops should continue clearing and rounding up the Japanese from New Guinea, New Britain, Borneo and Bougainville."
Diplomatic history of Australia,"Communism and the Cold War era
Although the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the United States co-operated during World War II, the tensions between the two superpowers over economics (Communism versus capitalism), political authority (totalitarianism versus liberalism) and the fate of Europe (East versus West) escalated into the Cold War by 1947. Australia unequivocally stood by the American side and the Cold War became the preponderant influence on Australian foreign policy.
As the international community polarised into opposing alliances led by the respective superpowers, Australia too moved to strengthen its alliance with the United States. Along with the United Kingdom and France, Australia was a main ally of the US in the Asia-Pacific region. China (after 1949), North Vietnam (after 1954) and the USSR were all in one camp. Australians were once again reminded that the initiation of this cold war was similar to that of WWII, thus reinforcing the fear and need for security, from Asia. After the Chinese Communist Revolution and the North Korean infiltration of South Korea in 1950, Australia's foreign policy was influenced by growing concern over communist aggression. Australia increasingly looked to the US, as its new ""great and powerful friend"" for help to contain and fight communism. The Menzies government made a great effort of linking Australia to US foreign policy in the Asia-Pacific region. Two major alliance agreements were made between members of the Western Bloc in the 1950s: ANZUS, an agreement for aid in the event of an attack between Australia, New Zealand and the US and SEATO, an agreement guaranteeing defensive action in the event of an attack against the US, Australia, Great Britain, France, New Zealand, Thailand, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, and South Vietnam."
Diplomatic history of Australia,"Vietnam War
When communist North Vietnam infiltrated South Vietnam, the Western Bloc viewed it as a fundamental step in what could result in the communist subjugation of the democratic world. In a country gripped by this fear, the government's defence policy was dominated by the idea of ""forward defence"", in which Australia would seek to prevent the Communist ""thrust into South-East Asia"". The committal of troops to the Vietnam War was viewed as an attempt by the Menzies Government to strengthen the alliance with the USA following Great Britain's withdrawal ""east of Suez"".
With his arrival in October 1966, Lyndon Baines Johnson became the first US President to visit Australia. The visit came in the light of increasing international criticism over the war in Vietnam. The majority of Australians seemed to support the war, obvious from the return of the Liberal/Country Party in late 1966. Many Australians were however protesting against the war. They wondered why we had followed the United States into a war that they thought had nothing to do with them and were concerned at our apt readiness to fall in line with American foreign policy. The slogan used by Harold Holt - ""All the way with L.B.J."" - directly demonstrates this partnership which perhaps could be considered rather inequitable and profitable for the US. They were tired of military solutions and ""power politics"", and as one Labor politician said, ""tired of anti-communism as a substitute for common sense."" By 1970, the anti-war sentiment in the society had exploded into huge rallies, church services and candlelight processions. The moratorium movement represented a great range of people's opinions, from young political radicals to people who would not normally challenge government decisions and from mothers of conscripted men to prominent politicians, writers, academics, artists and church leaders.
The intensity of conflict in Australia over this issue contributed to the 1972 election of the first Labor government in 23 years. The new Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam immediately abolished conscription and withdrew troops from Vietnam. The US Signed a peace treaty for Vietnam in 1973, after withdrawing all of its troops in 1972. South Vietnam, however, was invaded and overwhelmed by North Vietnam in 1975."
Diplomatic history of Australia,"Détente with communism
The Whitlam government, a new type of Labor government, developed a general opposition to the US and especially President Nixon who they viewed as especially conservative and paranoid.  Whitlam announced that Australia was not automatically going to follow US defence policy any more and this annoyed the United States Government. In late 1972, when Nixon bombed North Vietnam, the controversial Tom Uren and two other left-wing politicians publicly attacked Nixon, resulting in an immediate halt in Australian/American cooperation. Instead Whitlam reached out to our geographically nearer neighbours, Asia. He eliminated the last remaining remnants of the White Australia Policy and introduced a new quota/permit system. With race no longer a barrier, substantial immigration from Asia began, especially from Vietnam. This immigration provided impetuous for the swing in Australia's foreign policy from the US to Asia and increased Australia's trade relations with Asia. In 1973, the People's Republic of China was officially recognised as the ""real"" China and it was realised that the move towards a more open political and trading relationship with China was a priority. Dr Stephen Fitzgerald was appointed as the first Australian ambassador to the People's Republic of China and Australian understanding and appreciation of China's history and culture was encouraged. The Whitlam government was leaving behind the racist ""yellow peril"" past and was poised for the move towards a multicultural Australia."
Diplomatic history of Australia,"Foreign Policy under Bob Hawke, 1983–1991
APEC
One of the most significant foreign policy achievement of the Government took place in 1989, after Hawke proposed a south-east Asian region-wide forum for leaders and economic ministers to discuss issues of common concern. After winning the support of key countries in the region, this led to the creation of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). The first APEC meeting duly took place in Canberra in November 1989; the economic ministers of Australia, Brunei, Canada, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and the United States all attended. APEC would subsequently grow to become one of the most pre-eminent high-level international forums in the world, particularly after the later inclusions of China and Russia, and the Keating government's later establishment of the APEC Leaders' Forum."
Diplomatic history of Australia,"Cambodia
Elsewhere in Asia, the Hawke government played a significant role in the build-up to the United Nations peace process for Cambodia, culminating in the Transitional Authority; Hawke's Foreign Minister Gareth Evans was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in negotiations. Hawke also took a major public stand in the aftermath of the Tiananmen square massacre in 1989; despite having spent years trying to get closer relations with China, Hawke gave a tearful address on national television describing the massacre in graphic detail, and unilaterally offered asylum to over 42,000 Chinese students who were living in Australia at the time, many of whom had publicly supported the Tiananmen protesters. Hawke did so without even consulting his Cabinet, stating later that he felt he simply had to act."
Diplomatic history of Australia,"United States
The Hawke government pursued a close relationship with the United States, assisted by Hawke's close friendship with US Secretary of State George Shultz; this led to a degree of controversy when the Government supported the US's plans to test ballistic missiles off the coast of Tasmania in 1985, as well as seeking to overturn Australia's long-standing ban on uranium exports. Although the US ultimately withdrew the plans to test the missiles, the furore led to a fall in Hawke's approval ratings. Shortly after the 1990 election, Hawke would lead Australia into its first overseas military campaign since the Vietnam War, forming a close alliance with US President George H. W. Bush to join the coalition in the Gulf War. The Australian Navy contributed several destroyers and frigates to the war effort, which successfully concluded in February 1991, with the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait. The success of the campaign, and the lack of any Australian casualties, led to a brief increase in the popularity of the Government."
Diplomatic history of Australia,"Commonwealth boycott of South Africa
Through his role on the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, Hawke played a leading role in ensuring the Commonwealth initiated an international boycott on foreign investment into South Africa, building on work undertaken by his predecessor Malcolm Fraser, and in the process clashing publicly with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who initially favoured a more cautious approach. The resulting boycott, led by the Commonwealth, was widely credited with helping bring about the collapse of apartheid, and resulted in a high-profile visit by Nelson Mandela in October 1990, months after the latter's release from a 27-year stint in prison. During the visit, Mandela publicly thanked the Hawke government for the role it played in the boycott."
Diplomatic history of Australia,"Foreign policy under Paul Keating, 1991 to 1996
Indonesia
Throughout his time as Prime Minister, Keating took a number of steps to strengthen and develop bilateral links with Australia's closest neighbours; he frequently said that there was no country in the world that was more important to Australia than Indonesia, and undertook his first overseas visit to the country, becoming the first Australian Prime Minister to do so. Keating made a conscious effort to develop a personal relationship with Indonesian President Suharto, and to include Indonesia in multilateral forums attended by Australia. Keating's friendship with Suharto was criticised by human rights activists supportive of East Timorese independence, and by Nobel Peace Prize winner José Ramos-Horta. The Keating government's cooperation with the Indonesian military, and the signing of the Timor Gap Treaty, were also strongly criticised by these same groups. It was alleged by some that Keating was overlooking alleged human rights abuses by the Indonesian government as part of his effort to dramatically increase Australia's cultural, diplomatic and economic ties with Asia."
Diplomatic history of Australia,"APEC
Following the creation of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Economic Forum by Bob Hawke, Keating developed the idea further, winning the support in 1993 of recently-elected US President Bill Clinton and Chinese Premier Li Peng to expand APEC to a full Leaders' Meeting. This led to APEC becoming one of the most significant high-level international summits, and at the 1994 APEC Leaders' Meeting, hosted by Indonesia, members agreed to the Keating government's proposals for what became known as the Bogor Declaration, which set targets for a significant increase in free trade and investment between industrialised APEC countries by 2010 and between developing APEC countries by 2020. In December 1993, Keating became involved in a diplomatic incident with Malaysia when he described Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad as ""recalcitrant"". The incident occurred after Mahathir refused to attend the 1993 APEC summit. Keating said, ""APEC is bigger than all of us – Australia, the U.S. and Malaysia, and Dr. Mahathir and any other recalcitrants."" The translation of the word ""recalcitrant"" into Malaysian rendered the word a more egregious insult, and Mahathir demanded an apology from Keating, threatening to reduce diplomatic ties and trade drastically with Australia, which became an enormous concern to Australian exporters. Some Malaysian officials talked of launching a ""Buy Australian Last"" campaign; Keating subsequently apologised to Mahathir over the remark."
Diplomatic history of Australia,"Foreign policy under John Howard, 1996 to 2007
East Timor
Although new Indonesian President B.J. Habibie had some months earlier agreed to grant special autonomy to Indonesian-occupied East Timor, his subsequent snap decision for a referendum on the territory's independence triggered a Howard and Downer orchestrated shift in Australian policy. In September 1999, Howard organised an Australian-led international peace-keeping force to East Timor (INTERFET), after pro-Indonesia militia launched a violent ""scorched-earth"" campaign in retaliation to the referendum's overwhelming vote in favour of independence. The successful mission was widely supported by Australian voters, but the government was criticised for ""foreign policy failure"" following the violence and collapse of diplomatic relations with Indonesia. By Howard's fourth term, relations with Indonesia had recovered to include counter-terrorism cooperation and Australia's $1bn Boxing Day Tsunami relief efforts, and were assisted by good relations between Howard and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono."
Diplomatic history of Australia,"War in Afghanistan
Howard had first met US President George W. Bush in the days before the 11 September terrorist attacks and was in Washington the morning of the attacks. In response to the attacks, Howard invoked the ANZUS Treaty. In October 2001, he committed Australian military personnel to the War in Afghanistan despite widespread opposition. Howard developed a strong personal relationship with the President, and they shared often similar ideological positions – including on the role of the United States in world affairs and their approach to the ""War on Terror"". In May 2003, Howard made an overnight stay at Bush's Prairie Chapel Ranch in Texas, after which Bush said that Howard ""...is not only a man of steel, he's showed the world he's a man of heart."""
Diplomatic history of Australia,"In April 2002, Howard was the first Australian prime minister to attend a royal funeral, that of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother. In October Howard responded to the 2002 Bali bombing with calls for solidarity. Howard re-dedicated his government to the ""War on Terror""."
Diplomatic history of Australia,"War in Iraq
In March 2003, Australia joined the US-led ""Multinational force in Iraq"" in sending 2,000 troops and naval units to support in the invasion of Iraq. In response to the Australian participation in the invasion, there were large protests in Australian cities during March 2003, and Prime Minister Howard was heckled from the public gallery of Parliament House. While opinion polls showed that opposition to the war without UN backing was between 48 and 92 per cent, Howard remained preferred prime-minister over the Leader of the Opposition, Simon Crean, although his approval ratings were lower compared to before the war."
Diplomatic history of Australia,"Multiculturalism  and the end of ‘white Australia’
This focus of multiculturalism and a focus on Asia in Australia foreign policy was not lost because of the dismissal of the Whitlam government in 1975; contact and understanding continued to grow during the following decade.   Australia’s imports of major weapons increased 65 per cent between 2005–2009 and 2010–14, making it the sixth largest importer in the world according to SIPRI."
Diplomatic history of Australia,"China
Relationships with China continued to improve until the Chinese government massacred thousands of students in the  Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989. Along with many other nations, Australia ceased diplomatic and trade relations with China for the next two years.
Relations between the two countries began to deteriorate in 2018 due to growing Australian concerns regarding Chinese political influence in various sectors of Australian society including Chinese students and residents,  the national and state governments, universities and  the media. There is sharp criticism regarding China's human rights policies regarding the treatment of Hong Kong and the Uyghur minority. Furthermore Canberra has been troubled by China's aggressive stance on the South China Sea dispute.  The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated tensions after Australia called for an international, independent inquiry into the origins of the disease. The subsequent restrictions that China made to its trade policies have been attacked as political retaliation and economic coercion against Australia. In 2021 Canberra disallowed the effort by the state of Victoria to join China's vast Belt and Road Initiative as a potential threat to Australia's security."
Diplomatic history of Australia,"Indonesia
Australia had a developing relationship was Indonesia. Whitlam did not object to the invasion of Portuguese Timor by Indonesian troops in 1975 because maintaining good diplomatic relations with Indonesia was considered the highest priority at the time. The government could only express regret for the Timorese people as they were not prepared to go to war. Hawke and especially Keating also supported Indonesia despite their continuing maltreatment of the East Timorese people. When John Howard was elected in 1996, he saw the opportunity to distinguish himself from the previous Labor approach to the East Timor conflict. Immediately he sent peacekeeping forces into East Timor and advocated Australia's support for their independence. The role of this support of an essentially Christian country against a Muslim nation was detrimental to Australia's reputation with other Muslim countries."
Diplomatic history of Australia,"Vietnam
Since the 1970s (when Vietnamese boat people started coming), wave after wave of refugees from distressed countries in Asia and elsewhere have sought haven in Australia. Many have died making the hazardous journey. How to deal with them has been a highly contentious political issue."
Diplomatic history of Australia,"Notes
Further reading
Australian War Memorial. Encyclopedia online with scores of topics
Bell, Coral. Dependent ally: a study in Australian foreign policy (1988), on ties to US and UK;  online
Bird, David (2008). J. A. Lyons, The Tame Tasmanian: Appeasement and Rearmament in Australia, 1932–39. Australian Scholarly Publishing. ISBN 9781740971577.
Bolton, Geoffrey. The Oxford History of Australia: Volume 5: 1942-1995. The Middle Way (2005) online
Bridge, Carl ed., Munich to Vietnam: Australia's Relations with Britain and the United States since the 1930s, (Melbourne University Press 1991).
Chieocharnpraphan, Thosaphon. Australian Foreign Policy under the Howard Government: Australia as a Middle Power? (2011)
Clark, Claire, Australian foreign policy: towards a reassessment (1973) online
Cuffe, Honae (2021). The Genesis of a Policy: Defining and Defending Australia's National Interest in the Asia-Pacific, 1921–57 (PDF). ANU Press. ISBN 9781760464684.
Davison, Graeme, John Hirst, and Stuart Macintyre, eds. The Oxford Companion to Australian History (2001) online at many academic libraries; also excerpt and text search
Dennis, Peter, Jeffrey Grey, Ewan Morris, and Robin Prior. The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History. 1996)
Edwards, P. G. Prime ministers and diplomats: the making of Australian foreign policy, 1901-1949 (1983) online
Firth, Stewart. Australia in International Politics: An Introduction to Australian Foreign Policy (2005)
Grant, Ian. A Dictionary of Australian Military History - from Colonial Times to the Gulf War (1992)
Gyngell; Allan, and Michael Wesley.  Making Australian Foreign Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2003)
Lee, David. Search for Security: The Political Economy of Australia's Postwar Foreign and Defence Policy (1995)
Lowe, David. Menzies and the 'Great World Struggle': Australia's Cold War 1948-54 (1999)
Macintyre, Stuart. The Oxford History of Australia: Volume 4: 1901-42, the Succeeding Age (1993) online
McLean, David. ""From British Colony to American Satellite? Australia and the USA during the Cold War,"" Australian Journal of Politics & History (2006) 52 (1), 64–79. Rejects satellite model. online at Blackwell-Synergy
McLean, David. ""Australia in the Cold War: a Historiographical Review."" International History Review (2001) 23(2): 299–321. ISSN 0707-5332
Millar, T. B. Australia in peace and war : external relations 1788-1977 (1978) online, 612pp
Murphy, John. Harvest of Fear: A History of Australia's Vietnam War (1993)
Schreuder, Deryck, and Stuart Ward, eds. Australia's Empire (Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series) (2008) excerpt and text search
Schedvin, Boris (2008). Emissaries of Trade: A History of the Australian Trade Commissioner Service (PDF). Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. ISBN 978 1 921244 57 5.
Serle. Percival, ed. Dictionary of Australian Biography (1949) online edition
Suri, Navdeep. ""Australia-China Relations: The Great Unravelling,"" (ORF Issue Brief No. 366, June 2020, , Observer Research Foundation.) online
Watt, Alan. The Evolution of Australian Foreign Policy 1938–1965, (Cambridge UP, 1967) online"
Diplomatic history of Australia,"Primary sources
Cotton, James, ed. Documents on Australian Foreign Policy: Australia and the World 1920-1930 (Canberra, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 2019), 960 pp.
Neale, R.G. Ed. Documents on Australian foreign policy, 1937-49: vol 1 1937-38 (1975) online"
Diplomatic history of Australia,"See also
Basic Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation
Canberra Pact
Colombo Plan
Pacific class patrol boat
Petrov Affair"
Immigration detention in Australia,"The Australian government has a policy and practice of detaining in immigration detention facilities non-citizens not holding a valid visa, suspected of visa violations, illegal entry or unauthorised arrival, and those subject to deportation and removal in immigration detention until a decision is made by the immigration authorities to grant a visa and release them into the community, or to repatriate them to their country of origin/passport. Persons in immigration detention may at any time opt to voluntarily leave Australia for their country of origin, or they may be deported or given a bridging or temporary visa. In 1992, Australia adopted a mandatory detention policy obliging the government to detain all persons entering or being in the country without a valid visa, while their claim to remain in Australia is processed and security and health checks undertaken. Also, at the same time, the law was changed to permit indefinite detention, from the previous limit of 273 days. The policy was instituted by the Keating government in 1992, and was varied by the subsequent Howard, Rudd, Gillard, Abbott, Turnbull, Morrison and Albanese Governments. The policy is regarded as controversial and has been criticised by a number of organisations. In 2004, the High Court of Australia confirmed the constitutionality of indefinite mandatory detention of non-citizens. However, this interpretation was overturned in a landmark decision, NZYQ v Minister for Immigration, in 2023, with the High Court concluding the practice was unlawful and unconstitutional.
Mandatory detention rules also apply to persons whose visa has been cancelled by the Minister, for example on character grounds, allowing such persons to be detained in immigration detention and deported, some after living in Australia for a long period. Furthermore, if a person has Australian citizenship and another citizenship, their Australian citizenship can be revoked."
Immigration detention in Australia,"Length of detention
There is no maximum time limit for detaining a person in Australia under immigration laws. The length of immigrant detention has steadily increased in the past decade, and as of May 2020, the average period of time for people held in detention facilities was 553 days. The Australian Department of Home Affairs provides updated monthly detention statistics.
In some cases, people have been held in detention for over 10 years, such as Ghader, an Ahwazi man from Iran who has been detained since 2010, and Said Imasi, a stateless man born in Western Sahara. Ghader has a daughter, born in 2015, whom he has not seen since she was a baby. In February 2019, Imasi made a legal challenge to the High Court of Australia, attempting to overturn the landmark Al Kateb v Godwin decision.
In June 2019, it was revealed that a Tamil man from Sri Lanka had been held in detention for 9 years. The man, who was blind, as well as mentally and physically disabled, was being held in Villawood Detention Centre at the time of publishing. In 2002–2003, the man was captured by the Sri Lankan Army and tortured, after which he fled the country. He was recognised as a refugee by Australia, but received an adverse security assessment from Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO)."
Immigration detention in Australia,"History of mandatory detention
Mandatory detention of asylum seekers (so called, ""unlawful arrivals"") in Australia was established by the Keating government by the Migration Reform Act 1992 which came into operation on 1 September 1994. It was originally intended as an interim measure. Controls on unauthorised arrivals were tightened under the subsequent Howard government, including under the Pacific Solution policy, contributing to a sharp decline in boat arrivals and, consequently, to numbers of people being detained. The Pacific Solution was dismantled by the Rudd government and partially restored under the Gillard government in response to increased boat arrivals and reported deaths at sea.
Mandatory detention was introduced to ""support the integrity of Australia's immigration program"" and ""management of Australian borders"" and to distinguish between those who have submitted themselves to offshore entry processes prior to arrival and those who have not. Under the policy, asylum seekers are mandatorily detained while they ""undergo an assessment process, including security and health checking, to establish if they have a legitimate reason for staying in Australia""."
Immigration detention in Australia,"Keating government (1992–1996)
Before 1992, the Migration Legislation Amendment Act 1989 had created a regime of administrative detention of unlawful boat arrivals. Although officers were obligated to arrest and detain anyone suspected of being an ‘illegal entrant’, detention was discretionary. Between November 1989 and January 1994, there was a ""second wave"" of unauthorised boat arrivals comprising eighteen boats carrying 735 people (predominantly Cambodian nationals).
By June 1992, there were 478 people in immigration detention of whom 421 were boat arrivals (including 306 Cambodians), compared to five in immigration detention in January 1985. The Keating government's interim measures in 1992 were contained in the Migration Amendment Act 1992, which set up a regime of mandatory detention, with bipartisan support. Immigration Minister Gerry Hand told Parliament in his Second Reading Speech:"
Immigration detention in Australia,"The Government is determined that a clear signal be sent that migration to Australia may not be achieved by simply arriving in this country and expecting to be allowed into the community ... this legislation is only intended to be an interim measure.
The Migration Amendment Act 1992 did impose a 273-day limit on detention, but specifically disallowed judicial review. The final scheme was contained in the Migration Reform Act 1992, which came into operation on 1 September 1994, which broadened the application of mandatory detention to all who did not hold a valid visa, and removed the 273-day detention limit. The Act also introduced detention charges (detention debts) whereby an unlawful non-citizen was liable for the costs of his or her immigration detention.
Non-citizens in Australia without a valid visa were to be considered unlawful and would have to be held in detention, though those who met certain criteria and were not considered flight or security risks could secure lawful status by means of a bridging visa – but bridging visas would not be made available to those who arrived in Australia without visas in the first place (such as boat arrivals). The government argued that this distinction was justifiable because visa overstayers had already submitted themselves to proper entry processing offshore and were therefore in a different category to those who had not and that boat arrivals had demonstrated a high likelihood of absconding where detention was not in place."
Immigration detention in Australia,"Howard government (1996–2007)
The Liberal-National Party Coalition led by John Howard defeated the Keating government in the 1996 federal election. In 1999 the Howard government created the temporary protection visa category for asylum seekers whose claims for refugee status had been accepted. These visas were granted only to unauthorised arrivals and were criticised because they left the refugee in limbo indefinitely. These people did not have rights to work, to family reunion, a right to return to Australia if they left, and their status was to be reviewed every three years.
Australia's immigration policies towards asylum seekers were a significant issue in the 2001 federal election. Howard said in a campaign policy speech:"
Immigration detention in Australia,"[W]e are a generous open-hearted people taking more refugees on a per capita basis than any nation except Canada. We have a proud record of welcoming people from 140 different nations.
But we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come... We will be compassionate, we will save lives, we will care for people but we will decide, and nobody else, who comes to this country.
The Tampa affair arose during the election campaign. Following the election, the Howard government made significant changes to Australia's immigration policy. It put in place a policy known as the Pacific Solution, which was enacted via an amendment to the Migration Act 1958, the Migration Legislation Amendment (Excision from the Migration Zone) (Consequential Provisions) Act 2001 reinforced the practice of mandatory detention, providing for the indefinite detention of asylum seekers. The policy was implemented by then Australian Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock. Under this policy, many islands were excised from the Australian migration zone, and asylum seekers were removed to third countries to determine their refugee status, namely at detention camps on small island nations in the Pacific Ocean. Also, a policy of turning back boats where possible was instigated. Howard's policies were often controversial, were criticised by some human rights groups and were the subject of protest both within and without detention centres. Through the final years of the Howard government, Australia's detention facilities were near empty, few boat voyages were being attempted and the practice of detention of children had been ended.
Also in 2001, the Border Protection Bill provided the government with the power to remove any ship in the territorial waters of Australia, use reasonable force to do so, provide that any person who was on the ship be forcibly returned to the ship, and guaranteed that no asylum applications may be made by people on board the ship.
Mandatory detention of asylum seekers was popular with sections of the Australian electorate. Some commentators argue that it helped Howard win the 2001 federal election. While the Australian Labor Party supported the policy as Opposition, in June 2005 a small backbench revolt in Howard's party led by Petro Georgiou and Judi Moylan resulted in some concessions to humanitarian concerns, including the promised release of long-term detainees and review of future cases by an ombudsman.
Many of those detained in Australia's detention centres between 1999–2006 have been asylum seekers from Iraq and Afghanistan who sought protection or asylum under Australia's obligations to the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. More than 80 percent of these were found to be refugees by the Immigration Department, with some decisions taking more than 8 months. Few asylum seekers were able to be repatriated.
On 6 August 2004, the High Court of Australia handed down its decision in the case of Behrooz v Secretary, Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs and held that the harsh conditions of detention did not render the detention unlawful. On the same day, the High Court also handed down its decision in Al-Kateb v Godwin which held that unsuccessful asylum seekers who could not be removed to another country, despite their wish to leave Australia, could continue to be held in immigration detention indefinitely."
Immigration detention in Australia,"National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention
Dr Sev Ozdowski OAM Human Rights Commissioner of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) held an inquiry into mandatory detention of children who arrived without a valid visa over the period 1999–2002 (with updates where possible – the report was completed in April 2004) . The vast majority of children arrived and were put into mandatory detention facilities with their families for indefinite periods of time with no real opportunity to argue their case before independent tribunal or court.  The inquiry found that between 1 July 1999 and 30 June 2003, 2184 children were detained after arriving in Australia seeking asylum without a visa. Approximately 14% of those children came to Australia alone (unaccompanied children). Most of them came from Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. Almost 98 percent of the Iraqi children were recognised as refugees;
The inquiry found that children detained for long periods of time were at a high risk of suffering mental illness. Mental health professionals had repeatedly recommended that children and their parents be removed from immigration detention. The inquiry found that the Australian government's refusal to implement these recommendations amounted to ""..cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of those children in detention"".
The inquiry also found that many basic rights outlined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child were denied to children living in immigration detention.
The key recommendations of the Inquiry were that children with their parents be released immediately into the community and that detention laws should be amended to comply with the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Howard government released the children and introduced limited changes to Migration Act 1958 as a result of the report."
Immigration detention in Australia,"Criticism
In October 2001, Human Rights Watch sent a letter to Australian Prime Minister John Howard regarding new legislation, the Migration Amendment (Excision from Migration Zone) (Consequential Provisions) Act 2001. The new act further strengthened the practice of mandatory detention, allowing for indefinite detention of unauthorised arrivals. The letter said:"
Immigration detention in Australia,"The recent legislation seriously contravenes Australia’s obligations to non-citizens, refugees and asylum seekers under international human rights and refugee law. As provided for in Article 2 of the ICCPR, the obligation to respect and ensure rights to all persons, including all non-citizens, applies throughout Australia’s territory and to all persons subject to Australia’s jurisdiction. We urge Australia, as we have already urged the US government in similar circumstances, to amend its new legislation or at a minimum to implement it in a manner that fully upholds fundamental norms of international human rights and refugee law.
The system of mandatory detention has been the subject of controversy. Opposition to the system on humanitarian grounds came from a range of religious, community and political groups including the National Council of Churches, Amnesty International, Australian Democrats, Australian Greens and Rural Australians for Refugees. Among the intellectual opponents of the system has been Professor Robert Manne, whose Quarterly Essay ""Sending Them Home: Refugees and the New Politics of Indifference"" (2004) called for an end to both mandatory detention and the temporary protection visa system on humanitarian grounds.
Throughout the controversy, Prime Minister John Howard and successive immigration ministers maintained that their actions were justified in the interests of protecting Australia's borders and ensuring that immigration law was enforced. A 2004 Liberal Party election policy document stated:"
Immigration detention in Australia,"The Coalition government's tough stance on people smuggling stems from the core belief that Australia has the right to decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come. Deterrence has been achieved through excision, boat returns, offshore processing and mandatory detention."
Immigration detention in Australia,"First Rudd government (2007–2010)
For the final few years of the Howard government, Indonesian boats carrying asylum seekers to Australia had virtually ceased and Australia's offshore detention centres were near empty. The newly elected Rudd government, under Immigration Minister Chris Evans, announced a series of measures aimed at achieving what it described as a more ""compassionate policy"". The Pacific Solution had involved offshore processing, a system of ""temporary protection visas"" for unauthorised arrivals, and a policy of turning back boats where possible. The Rudd government dismantled all three components, dubbing them ""ineffectual and wasteful"". Throughout 2009–2010, a flow of boat arrivals re-emerged.
In July 2008, the Australian government announced it was ending its policy of automatic detention for asylum seekers who arrive in the country without visas. While it remained committed to the policy of mandatory detention as an ""essential component of strong border control"", the Rudd government announced that detention would now be restricted to unlawful non-citizens who pose a threat to the community, those who refuse to comply with visa conditions, or those who need to be detained for the period of conducting health, identity and security checks. By 29 June 2011, the Australian Government had delivered on its commitment to move the majority of children in immigration detention into community–based arrangements.
The Government announced that aspects of the original detention system in Australia would remain, but asylum seekers will be released more quickly. They would only be detained for lengthier time periods if they are deemed to pose a risk to the wider community or have repeatedly breached their visa conditions. ""Boat people"" in excised areas will still be subject to mandatory detention and processed offshore, but the Government will move to hasten the process. Boat people will also be able to access legal advice and apply for an independent review of adverse decisions. Each detainee's circumstances and justification for ongoing detention will be scrutinised by the Immigration Ombudsman every six months. A Migration Amendment (Immigration Detention Reform) Bill 2009 to make these amendments, was introduced but lapsed without being passed.
The Migration Amendment (Abolishing Detention Debt) Act 2009 was passed by the Australian House of Representatives with several Liberal MPs threatening to 'cross the floor' and vote with Labor, and then passed into law on 8 September when the Senate passed the bill with the support of Senator Nick Xenophon, the Australian Greens, Liberal Senator Judith Troeth and at the last minute Steve Fielding. This act abolished the Keating-era policy whereby the government attempted to reclaim the costs of immigration detention from the detainee upon release.
Immigration Department figures in October 2009 showed no improvement in the speed of processing claims since the change of government. As a proportion of the immigration intake, Australia accepted fewer refugees in 2009 than it did at any time under the Howard government.
In October 2009, the MV Oceanic Viking was involved in an emergency operation rescuing 78 Sri Lankan asylum seekers in international waters within the Indonesian sea rescue zone. Those rescued were due to be landed in Indonesia, for transfer to an Australia-funded immigration detention centre on the Indonesian island of Bintan. However, the asylum seekers refused to disembark until 18 November, following assurances of fast-tracked processing of their cases for resettlement.
As of 29 March 2010, 100 asylum seeker boats had been intercepted within Australian waters during the life of the Rudd government.
On 9 April 2010, former Minister for Immigration Senator Chris Evans announced that, with immediate effect, no new applications for people from Afghanistan would be processed for six months; and for Sri Lankans, three months. Senator Evans was quoted as saying that this change would result in a higher rate of refusal of claims based on circumstances in these countries.
Following a complaint lodged in 2011 regarding the resulting indefinite detention, in 2013 the United Nations Human Rights Committee found Australia guilty of 138 counts of illegal detention, lack of judicial remedy, or inhumane or degrading treatment."
Immigration detention in Australia,"Gillard government (2010–2013)
The Gillard government undertook a series of adjustments to Australia's system of mandatory detention amid a growing stream of unauthorised boat arrivals. Julia Gillard and immigration minister Chris Bowen mooted various regional options for asylum seeker processing – notably East Timor and Malaysia – before reverting to Nauru and Manus Island in late 2012.
On 18 October 2010, Julia Gillard announced that changes would be made to Australia's mandatory detention policy, and that more children and families would be moved out of immigration detention centres into community-based accommodation, such as centres run by churches and charities.
To accommodate the reduction in detainees, the federal government announced that they would open two new detention facilities – a centre in Northam, 80 kilometres north-east of Perth, and an alternative place of detention in Inverbrackie, 37 kilometres north of Adelaide. Northam will house up to 1,500 single men and Inverbrackie will house up to 400 family members.
In a press conference, Prime Minister Gillard told media ""when we came to government we issued detention values about not having children in high security, behind razor wire, and obviously we have worked to deliver on those detention values."" She went on to say, ""obviously we want to see kids in school. I understand that in some particular cases the minister will work through this case by case, there may be some reasons why this may not always be possible, but in the ordinary course of things I want to see kids getting a good education.""
According to the Immigration Department, as of February 2011, there are currently 5,061 men, 571 women and 1,027 children under 18 living in detention. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that 382 of those under 18 arrived without their parents."
Immigration detention in Australia,"Department of Immigration and Citizenship statistics reflect that there were 4,783 people in immigration detention facilities and alternative places of detention, including 3,951 in immigration detention on the mainland and 832 in immigration detention on Christmas Island as at 31 January 2012.  The number of people in immigration detention who arrived unlawfully by air or boat as at 31 January 2012 was 6,031, representing about 94 per cent of the total immigration detention population. There were also 344 people (about five per cent of the total immigration population) who arrived in Australia lawfully and were subsequently taken into immigration detention for either overstaying their visa conditions, resulting in visa cancellation.
Following an extended period of increasing boat arrivals and deaths at sea, in May 2011 Gillard announced that Australia and Malaysia were ""finalising"" an arrangement to exchange asylum seekers for processed refugees (the plan was dubbed the ""Malaysia Solution"").  On 31 August, the High Court ruled that the agreement to transfer refugees from Australia to Malaysia was invalid, and ordered that it not proceed on the basis that it contravened human rights protections established under existing laws. The Government was unable to secure the support of the Greens or Opposition in the Senate for modifications to enable the Malaysia Solution to proceed and instead reverted to expanding onshore processing arrangements. Continued deaths at sea and ongoing boat arrivals kept the issue at the fore of policy debate during the term of the Gillard government, leading to a major Parliamentary debate on the issue in June 2012, as news reports reached Canberra of another fatal sinking off Christmas Island. The government sought changes to the Migration Act, to allow asylum seekers to be processed in Malaysia. The Greens opposed the Bill outright and called for greater opening up of Australia's borders. The Opposition opposed the Bill on human rights grounds and called for restoration of the Howard government's policies. The government allowed the possibility of returning processing to Nauru, on the condition that Malaysia was also permitted.
Unable to secure passage of the Bill through Parliament following the emotional debate, the government convened a panel chaired by Angus Houston to consider options. The Houston Report found that ""onshore processing encourages people to jump into boats"" and called for the re-opening of offshore processing at Nauru and Manus Island. Gillard endorsed the plan in August 2012."
Immigration detention in Australia,"Second Rudd government (2013)
On 19 July 2013 in a joint press conference with PNG Prime Minister Peter O'Neill and Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd detailed the Regional Resettlement Arrangement (RRA) between Australia and Papua New Guinea:
""From now on, any asylum seeker who arrives in Australia by boat will have no chance of being settled in Australia as refugees. Asylum seekers taken to Christmas Island will be sent to Manus and elsewhere in Papua New Guinea for assessment of their refugee status. If they are found to be genuine refugees they will be resettled in Papua New Guinea... If they are found not to be genuine refugees they may be repatriated to their country of origin or be sent to a safe third country other than Australia. These arrangements are contained within the Regional Resettlement Arrangement signed by myself and the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea just now.""
The actions taken by the Rudd government from July 2013 were the primary cause for the major reduction seen in boat arrivals over the 2013 – 2014 period, according to research conducted by former Immigration Department chief John Menadue and Australian National University migration expert Peter Hughes."
Immigration detention in Australia,"Abbott government (2013–2015)
During the 2013 federal election the Coalition parties led by Tony Abbott strongly campaigned on a ""stop the boats"" slogan. Following the election the newly elected Abbott government toughened policies to stop asylum seekers arriving by boat and launched Operation Sovereign Borders. A feature of the new government's policy was the total secrecy of the operations and treatment of persons intercepted at sea and those in immigration detention in general. The immigration minister stated that no immigrant who arrives in Australia by boat will be granted a visa, regardless of the legitimacy or otherwise of their claim. The Abbott government's policy was apparently successful because no IMAs have arrived in Australia since July 2014. The Abbot government also claimed responsibility for the overall decrease in boat arrivals during 2013 – 2014, however this was primarily due to policy enacted by the 2nd Rudd government (2013) shortly before the Abbott government took power in the 2013 Australian federal election. While this claim was incorrect, it was easy to effectively communicate as boat arrivals did decrease around the time of the Abbott government taking power.
In addition, the Abbott government has been more prepared to cancel visas on character grounds for people who have been lawfully present in Australia for some time, bringing them within the scope of the mandatory detention rules. Also, the Abbott government has passed legislation to strip Australian citizenship of dual nationals in some circumstances, rendering such persons non-citizens and subject to immigration detention for not holding a valid visa, and deportation.
In 2014, the Human Rights Commission published a report, The Forgotten Children, into children in Australian detention, both onshore and on Christmas Island, for the period January 2013 to September 2014 — covering the period of Labor and Coalition governments. The report was limited because the HRC was barred from visiting and inquiring as to the condition of children in offshore detention on Manus Island and Nauru. The report was damning of the treatment of children in immigration detention, at least in Australian territories.
In January 2015, the first refugees were moved out of Manus Island Regional Processing Center to a new detention center near Lorengau on Manus Island, in the midst of a hunger strike.
The condition of detainees in Nauru was reported in the Moss Review. The final report was produced 6 February 2015, and released on 20 March 2015."
Immigration detention in Australia,"Turnbull government (2015–2018)
On 30 November 2015 there were 3,906 people in Australia's immigration detention, including people in immigration detention facilities in Australia and in Australian-run facilities in other countries. 585 of these were in community detention (a form of detention separate from actual immigration detention facilities) in Australia proper. 70 were children in offshore immigration detention facilities, such as Nauru.
The time asylum seekers spent in Australian detention centres as stated by the Department of Immigration and Border Protection show that in December 2015 people in onshore immigration detention had been there for an average 445 days. The average detention period has increased since May 2014. There were 1792 people in onshore detention, including 91 children, and most were from Iran, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, China, Vietnam and Afghanistan.
On 26 April 2016, the Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea ruled that detention of asylum seekers on Manus Island was breaching their constitutional right to freedom and thus illegal, and ordered the Australian-run detention centre to close. However, Immigration Minister Peter Dutton iterated that the 850 asylum seekers were the responsibility of Papua New Guinea and would not come to Australia.
In September 2017, the Department of Immigration awarded a $423 million contract to Paladin Group, a little-known private military contractor, to manage the new centers at Lorengau. The closed-tender process of awarding of the contract, as well as Paladin's past record, attracted widespread criticism and controversy.
In November 2017, the last refugees in the Manus Island Regional Processing Centre were forcibly removed to West Lorengau Haus, Hillside Haus and East Lorengau Refugee Transit Center in Lorengau. Doctors Without Borders was denied access to asylum seekers and refugees.
On 20 December 2017, Peter Dutton was appointed Minister for Home Affairs, in charge of the newly-created Department of Home Affairs, to be responsible for national security, law enforcement, emergency management, transport security, border control, and immigration functions."
Immigration detention in Australia,"Morrison government (August 2018–2022)
Morrison, with Dutton still in place as Minister for Home Affairs, continued the policies of the previous Coalition governments towards asylum seekers, although they did promise to ensure that all children would be off Nauru by the end of 2018."
Immigration detention in Australia,"Medevac bill
On 12 February 2019, the Morrison government suffered the first substantive defeat on the floor of the House of Representatives since 1929, after the Labor Party and several cross-benchers supported amendments to the Home Affairs Legislation Amendment (Miscellaneous Measures) Bill 2018 (the Home Affairs Bill) proposed by the Senate. The proposed amendments would give greater weight to medical opinion in allowing the medical evacuation of asylum seekers to Australia from Nauru (in the Nauru Regional Processing Centre) and Manus Island (in the Manus Regional Processing Centre). Further amendments followed negotiations between the Opposition and the House of Reps cross-bench members, before the Senate considered and agreed to the amendments to its original amendments on the following day, 13 February. The proposed amendments would affect three laws, being the Migration Act 1958, the Customs Act 1901 and the Passenger Movement Charge Collection Act 1978. The amended legislation, which had become known as ""the Medevac Bill"", passed in the House by 75 votes to 74 and passed in the Senate by 36 votes to 34, being passed as the Home Affairs Legislation Amendment (Miscellaneous Measures) Act 2019.
The approval of two doctors is required, but approval may still be overridden by the home affairs minister in one of three areas. Human rights advocates hailed the decision, with one calling it a “tipping point as a country”, with the weight of public opinion believing that sick people need treatment.
In response to the bill passing into law, Scott Morrison announced the re-opening of the Christmas Island detention centre, intimating that this change in the law would provide the signal that people smugglers to begin operating again. In the days following, Dutton said that because of this change in the law, Australians on waiting lists for hospital treatment and those already in public housing were going to be adversely affected.
This was seen by Robert Manne as a turning point in Labor Party policy, after having had almost identical asylum seeker policies as the Coalition for the past five years. He also points out the numerous obstacles any potential people smuggler or asylum seeker would have to face, because the deterrent aspects of the policy are still firmly in place, and the new legislation applies only to the approximately 1000 people still on Nauru and Manus (of whom only a relatively small number will be allowed to access the urgent medical attention they need).
However, the 2018 ruling was overturned in December 2019, after 37 votes to 35 supported the government's move to repeal the law."
Immigration detention in Australia,"Move into detention (Aug 2019)
In August 2019, PNG’s immigration department transferred more than 50 men deemed to be non-refugees to the Bomana Immigration Centre, a detention centre next to the Bomana Prison in Port Moresby. Boochani reported that some men had been approved for a Medevac transfer, and were most likely being targeted. PNG officials said that they continued to encourage non-refugees to depart voluntarily. About 100 men are unable to be deported because their country of citizenship refuses to accept involuntary returns. Ian Rintoul said that many of those being detained are being deemed not to be refugees even though they have never had a refugee determination in PNG."
Immigration detention in Australia,"Criticism of government policy: 2010s
Recent global developments highlight the growing polarisation of the Australian public in relation to their government's policies. From late 2009, the increase in arrivals by boat fuelled a divide in public perception of people seeking asylum between sympathy and apathy. Following election victory by the Liberal/National coalition in 2013, the government mandatory detention policy has been widely criticised.  Protests against government policy continued to take place around Australia including activists disrupting the Australian Open men's tennis final in 2015. Demonstrators in the crowd and on court raised banners and wore t-shirts that read “Australia open for refugees”.
The Refugee Council viewed the immigration detention program as detrimental to Australia's interests in three ways: the people subjected to the detention programs endure inhumane conditions; those working in the detention centres often subjected to emotionally jarring situations; and Australia's reputation as a fair and just nation has been eroded. Timing is also of concern, with many refugees and asylum seekers reporting being detained for several years before receiving status determination from the government. The government often cites deterrence to frame the context in which their policies operate.
While the immigration detention program draws some support from the Australian public, the program's treatment of children in detention has been widely criticised. There has been great concern about the adverse impact detention centres have on the health, well-being and development of children. Particularly worrying was the use of detention centres previously used for adults to house children. Wickman Point, one such Alternative Place of Detention (APOD) was previously deemed only suitable for adults, with reports that children had been brought in to live concurrently with the adult population.
Re-detention occurs when those being detained by the immigration program are released on Temporary Protection Visas (TPVs) while their refugee status is being determined, or who have succeeded in obtaining refugee status and subsequently re-detained for often minor violations, sometimes with lack of access to legal advice. Unaccompanied children have been removed from care in the community and re-detained in closed communities."
Immigration detention in Australia,"2019: Report urges changes to policy
On 13 June, the Andrew & Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at the University of New South Wales published a paper citing seven principles which should be key to Australia's refugee policy, supported by law and evidence-based research. Professor Jane McAdam, director of the Centre, said that in the last 25 years, policy has changed direction, and that offshore processing, boat turnbacks and mandatory detention ""not only deny the humanity to people that applied and deflect problems elsewhere, but also violate many of our obligations under international law”."
Immigration detention in Australia,"Deaths in detention
From 2000–2018, there have been dozens of deaths in Australia's immigration detention facilities, as many as 20 of those were suicide. In one case, a man died after publicly setting himself on fire in Nauru Regional Processing Centre to protest how he was being treated. Several more people have committed suicide after release, due to mental health issues connected with their being detained."
Immigration detention in Australia,"Cases of wrongful immigration detention
In February 2005, it was revealed that a mentally ill German citizen holding Australian permanent residency, Cornelia Rau, had been held in immigration detention as an unauthorised immigrant for 11 months, after identifying herself as a backpacker from Munich under the name of Anna Brotmeyer.
An audit in May 2005 revealed 33 cases of people wrongfully detained under the Migration Act 1958. This included the case of a woman, Australian citizen Vivian Alvarez Solon, who was forcibly deported to the Philippines and who subsequently went missing. As of May, it was not known how many actually spent time in an immigration detention facility. By late May, Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone announced that more than 200 cases of possible wrongful immigration detention had been referred to the Palmer Inquiry. In October 2005, the Commonwealth Ombudsman revealed that more than half of those cases were held for a week or less and 23 people were held for more than a year and two of them were detained for more than five years. Australia's longest-serving detainee in immigration detention was at the time, Peter Qasim who was detained for almost 7 years before being released in 2005 on a bridging visa. However there has since been prisoners held for longer.
In 2006, the federal government made a $400,000 compensation payout to an 11-year-old Iranian boy, Shayan Badraie, for the psychological harm he suffered while being detained in Woomera and Villawood detention centres between 2000 and 2002.
In 2021, the Australian government was ordered to pay an Iraqi asylum seeker $350,000 in damages for unlawfully detaining him for more than two years."
Immigration detention in Australia,"See also
Asylum in Australia
Australian League of Immigration Volunteers
Australian migration zone
Boat arrivals in Australia 1976–2013
Immigration detention
Immigrant health in Australia
List of Australian immigration detention facilities
Operation Sovereign Borders
Pacific Solution
Stateless, a 2020 television miniseries"
Immigration detention in Australia,"References
External links
HREOC Report – A Last Resort? – Australia's Immigration Detention Policy and Practice
Migration Act 1958 (Cwth)"
List of Australian capital cities,"There are eight capital cities in Australia, each of which functions as the seat of government for the state or territory in which it is located. One of these, Canberra, is also the national capital. Section 125 of the Constitution of Australia specified that the seat of the national government, that is, the national capital, would be in its own territory within New South Wales, at least 100 miles (161 km) from Sydney. The Constitution specified that until this national capital was ready, the Parliament would sit in Melbourne. In 1927, the national capital was finally ready and the national government relocated from its former seat in Melbourne to Canberra within the Australian Capital Territory (or the Federal Capital Territory as it was known at the time).
In each state and internal territory, the capital is also the jurisdiction's most populous city. The Australian external territory of Norfolk Island has its official capital at Kingston, although this acts merely as the administrative centre of government; its de facto capital is Burnt Pine."
List of Australian capital cities,"
== References =="
Australian Financial Review,"The Australian Financial Review (AFR) is an Australian business-focused, compact daily newspaper covering the current business and economic affairs of Australia and the world. The newspaper is based in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia; owned by Nine Entertainment and has been published continuously since its founding in 1951. The AFR is published in tabloid format six times a week, whilst providing 24/7 online coverage through its website. In November 2019, the AFR reached 2.647 million Australians through both print and digital mediums (Mumbrella).
The Australian Financial Review started as a print-only weekly newspaper in 1951, before changing to a bi-weekly in 1961, and a daily newspaper in 1963. The paper now publishes multiple magazines and a supplementary weekend paper, which was launched in 1995. In that same year, the AFR website was also released, which helped to expand its readership base across all media. The AFR, along with most of Fairfax Media, was purchased by Nine Entertainment in 2018."
Australian Financial Review,"History
The Australian Financial Review newspaper started as a weekly publication in 1951, published by John Fairfax & Sons. The paper's main objective was to inform the Australian public on business life and news.
In 1961, the AFR converted to a bi-weekly, and then established itself as the first daily newspaper by 1963. Despite other newspapers claiming the title of the first daily national paper, Maxwell Newton was the editor in charge of taking the Financial Review from a bi-weekly to the first daily national paper. During 1961–62, the AFR's primary competitor was The Australian Financial Times, which was in operation for less than 12 months. In the 1960s and 1970s, the AFR developed a strong readership amongst a specialist business audience due to its neutral stance on domestic government policies. In the 1970s, despite the AFR's reputation as a national business daily, many saw it as the primary competitor for The Australian given its high proportion of readers in the AB demographic.
In 1995, Fairfax launched the Australian Financial Review Magazine in response to its growing readership across a wide-ranging audience. The magazine was published to cover topics other than business including leisure, politics, travel, sports, fashion, and other peripheral topics. In December 2019, the magazine recorded an average issue readership of 326,000. Since its launch in 1995, the AFR Magazine has won the 'Best Newspaper Inserted Magazine' (2013-2019), 'Newspaper Inserted Brand of the Year' (2019) and Mumbrella's 'Special Issue of the Year' (2019).
The magazine's founding was followed by the launch of the AFR's website in the same year, which started as a free online source of financial news.
In 1997, the AFR launched its Weekend Edition which extended the paper's publications into the weekend, with an explicit focus of targeting the growing readership base by providing news articles outside of the traditional finance setting.
In 2016, the AFR launched mobile and iPad compatible applications to provide its digital subscribers more accessibility to its news platform. This was aimed at allowing cross-platform accessibility without having to download two separate applications across different device platforms. The application carries similar features to the website including sections such as: Street Talk and Rear Window. The product management team decided to revamp the app due to the wide uptake of smartphones in the Australian market, and to improve their user-interface experience. The UTS Business School was the launch partner for the app, providing logistical advice on the app's delivery. The app's subscription price is included in the 'all premium digital subscription' bundle.
The Australian Financial Review has grown its product offerings since its beginnings as a finance newsroom. It has consistently been well received by the journalism sector as one of the most high-quality newsrooms across Australia. Since the 2000s, the AFR has launched BOSS (magazine for business leadership and strategy) and the Sophisticated Traveller magazine. In 2019, the Australian Financial Review recorded double-digit subscriber growth, as it continued to market its newspaper as the driver of Australian business-people's success and ambitions. In 2020, due to the newspaper company's expansion efforts across different readership bases, the AFR reached 2.647m Australians a month."
Australian Financial Review,"Evolution of paywall system
The AFR first introduced its paywall in 2006, charging online users to view its articles – a payment model that had not yet been utilised by any other Australian newspaper firm. The switch to a paywall was done because the newspaper company thought it could further monetise its niche business audience who could afford it. Following this change, the AFR continued to adjust the pricing of its subscription due to low subscriber growth.
In 2011, it newly introduced a freemium paywall in which only a small portion of articles were free. It has been noted that the AFR's website locks approximately 86% of its online content behind a paywall, higher than its closest competitor the National Business Review. This was aimed at increasing its digital readership which in 2011 amounted to 6,000 subscribers. In addition, it was later determined that the AFR's failures in attracting online subscribers was due to its paywall being too expensive. Its 2012 price of $59 AUD was notably higher than other international mastheads, including The New York Times which was priced at $37.84 AUD. As a result, the AFR has since lowered its digital subscription price to $29.50 AUD."
Australian Financial Review,"Nine Entertainment merger
The mega-cap deal that saw Nine Entertainment and Fairfax Media merge was inspired by initial chats between Hugh Marks (Nine CEO) and Nick Falloon (Fairfax chairman). The pair discussed how the two companies' assets could synergise, improve efficiencies, save costs and increase scale. During the lead up to the merger, there were a few roadblocks. In 2016, the proposed merger was not feasible due to government legislation surrounding media ownership. In addition, Nine Entertainment's board believed that its share price was undervalued and thus wanted to delay any acquisition until its fair value had been reflected. Amongst the delays in talks between the two parties, Fairfax had other suitors including private equity groups TPG Capital and Hellman & Friedman, which ended up walking away from the table.
In 2018, Nine Entertainment's board re-entered into talks with Fairfax of a potential merger after its share price had jumped following an upbeat earnings report. The proposed structure of the takeover was 0.3627 Nine shares plus $0.025 AUD per Fairfax share, composing a cash plus scrip deal. This represented a 21.9% takeover premium to Fairfax's last close, and valued Fairfax at $2313.8mm AUD. Once the deal was made, it was reported that Fairfax's portfolio newspapers, including the AFR, would maintain independence from Nine's media groups. As part of the proposed deal, Hugh Marks took over corporate control of the combined group with Fairfax CEO, Greg Hywood, stepping down.
The combined entity in 2018 was forecasted to have approximately 6,000 employees (inclusive of all the duplicate roles made redundant), major resources across all media types including print, TV, radio and online; and $3 billion in revenue.
The proposed merger was also put under review by the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) on antitrust measures. It was announced in November 2018 that the ACCC would not oppose the merger. The investigation looked at the merger's impact on the online news industry's competition and involved contacting numerous stakeholders. It was noted that the merger would most likely reduce competition in the domestic media market, but that it was not in breach of the Competition and Consumer Act. The main point of divergence between the two business' assets was that Nine Entertainment's news assets provided mass market news coverage whereas Fairfax Media's news assets provided more specialist coverage.
Despite the ACCC's ruling, there were a few stakeholders who voiced their concerns about the merger's impact on the Australian media industry's competitive landscape. Union groups such as the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, and the Journalists' union warned the ACCC that the mega-cap takeover would threaten the editorial independence of Fairfax Media's portfolio newspaper companies. Former prime minister Paul Keating also voiced his criticisms labelling the ACCC's decision as ""appalling"", considering that a more concentrated media industry would reduce coverage of city-specific political issues."
Australian Financial Review,"Features and operations
Newspaper sections
Within the AFR's daily newspaper, regularly scheduled sections include:"
Australian Financial Review,"World – news and analysis on global companies and the international business environment.
Chanticleer – the long-running business opinion column (begun July 1974) that looks into individual companies in-depth, analysing their operations, management and board of directors.
Accounting & Consulting – Targeted at senior executives and management, this section lays out lateral personnel movements within the finance sector, recent company news, and key participants in the industry
Education – provides information regarding professional development, the education sector, and news regarding company training
Companies & Markets – this section features in-depth analysis of the Australian business environment including equity markets, debt markets and the M&A industry
Legal Affairs – targeted at lawyers, this section provides coverage of the legal industry: its trends and news about the top law firms in Australia
Property – this section provides analysis of the Australian property market: house prices, commercial properties, developers, REITS, and others. Each major capital city has its own journalism team covering the respective property markets.
Life & Leisure – this two-day weekly insert focuses on more leisurely topics including fashion, travel, social media, jewellery, etc."
Australian Financial Review,"Products and operations
Across the AFR group, the team does not only publish newspapers. Its range of operations is listed below:"
Australian Financial Review,"The Australian Financial Review daily newspaper, founded in 1951, the paper aims to provide information regarding the Australian business landscape.
The Weekend Edition, delivered on Saturday, covers important business topics as well as general news and leisure-focused topics.
Afr.com, the AFR's news website, provides online access to a news database with topics including markets, politics, policy, property, and others.
Sophisticated Traveller – Since 2004, this quarterly magazine has been targeting high net worth individuals, covering content regarding luxury travel.
Australian Financial Review Magazine – Monthly inserted magazine providing content on high-profile business news, politics, fashion and luxury. The magazine was launched in 1995.
BOSS - This magazine aims to deliver content to Australia's business seniors about company management, leadership and influential trends.
LUXURY – A quarterly magazine covering trends in the luxury industry including watches, jewellery, fashion, and others."
Australian Financial Review,"Financial Review Rich List
The Financial Review Rich List aims to compile an annual ranking of the wealthiest Australian citizens. The list was first published in the BRW Magazine in 1984. Since its beginnings, the compilation of the list and its publishing have been taken over by the AFR, now being published annually in the Australian Financial Review Magazine and on the afr.com. Along with the names of the richest people, the list explicates the person or family's net worth and provides a short summary on the business activities and sector they are engaged in. The valuations are conducted by utilising a mix of publicly available information and private consultations. In 2019, the cut-off for making the Rich List was $472m AUD. In 2020, the cut-off was raised to $540m AUD."
Australian Financial Review,"Reporting
Reporting stance
During 1975 to 1983, when The Australian widely articulated its political stance on conservative liberalism, it had been noted that the AFR also promoted neo-liberalism through its news coverage and editorials, exerting influence on the business sphere of Australia and its elitist readership base. The newspaper has also been labelled as one of the propagators of radical liberalism during the 1970s – 1980s, shaping the policy debate surrounding market deregulation at that time. This was in line with the overarching political stance of all Fairfax Holdings owned newspapers, including The Sydney Morning Herald, which in the 1970s was also right-leaning in its political views. However, contrasting to The Australian, the AFR was still perceived as a newspaper with a strong sense of integrity in reporting facts, despite its editorial style leaning towards conservative business ideals.
In the wake of the 1987 stock market crash, the Australian news media sector was blamed for overlooking corporate corruption and wrongdoings, whilst publishing primarily favourable news articles handed to them from corporate PR teams. Also during this time, The National Times whIch was Australia's leading financial investigative journalism newspaper, shut down after the stock market crash. So during the 2000s, following the financial market failures and economic downturn of the 1990s, the AFR's reporting focus steered more towards business investigative journalism, scrutinising big corporations, government power and corruption. This was viewed as the AFR making reparations for its lack of scrutiny over the corporate sector in the lead-up to the stock market crash.
One major factor that allowed the AFR to undertake deep corporate investigations was that it did not need advertising revenue to stay afloat – its cover price was sufficient. On the other hand, all other daily mastheads needed company advertising to stay profitable. This afforded the AFR's editors the flexibility to pursue and publish news articles that shed a negative light on major companies without needing to be concerned about its financial impacts.
In the early 2010s, the AFR's political stance has been labelled as neutral. During the controversial 2013 tax debate regarding taxes for 'extraordinary' profits generated by mining companies, major mastheads from regions with high mining interests had almost four-fold the number of negative articles compared to positive articles. The Australian, the biggest national daily, had a large number of both positive and negative articles, but had a limited number of neutral articles. Out of all the daily mastheads, the AFR published the most articles surrounding the tax debate and also the most number of neutral articles."
Australian Financial Review,"Endoresments
Notable reporting
In November 2023, the AFR joined with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Paper Trail Media and 69 media partners including Distributed Denial of Secrets and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and more than 270 journalists in 55 countries and territories to produce the 'Cyprus Confidential' report on the financial network which supports the regime of Vladimir Putin, mostly with connections to Cyprus, and showed Cyprus to have strong links with high-up figures in the Kremlin, some of whom have been sanctioned. Government officials including Cyprus president Nikos Christodoulides and European lawmakers began responding to the investigation's findings in less than 24 hours, calling for reforms and launching probes."
Australian Financial Review,"See also
List of newspapers in Australia
Financial Review Rich List"
Australian Financial Review,"References
External links
Official website
Financial Review Smart Investor website
AFR TV website. Archived 9 October 2013 at the Wayback Machine."
Bibliography of Australian history,This is a bibliography of selected publications on the history of Australia.
Bibliography of Australian history,"Reference books
Barker, Anthony. What Happened When: A Chronology of Australia from 1788. Allen & Unwin. 2000. online edition Archived 23 November 2011 at the Wayback Machine
Bambrick, Susan ed. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Australia (1994)
Basset, Jan. The Oxford Illustrated Dictionary of Australian History (1998)
Davison, Graeme; Hirst, John; Macintyre, Stuart (2001). The Oxford Companion to Australian History. ISBN 978-0195515039. online at OUP also excerpt and text search
Day, Alan.  Historical Dictionary of the Discovery and Exploration of Australia. Scarecrow, 2003. 321 pp.
Docherty, J. C. Historical Dictionary of Australia (2007) (2001);
Galligan, Brian, and Winsome Roberts, eds. Oxford Companion to Australian Politics (2007); online at many academic libraries
Lewis, Wendy; Balderstone, Simon; Bowan, John (2006). Events That Shaped Australia. New Holland. ISBN 978-1-74110-492-9.
O'Shane, Pat  et al. Australia: The Complete Encyclopedia (2001)
Serle. Percival, ed. Dictionary of Australian Biography (1949) online edition
Shaw, John, ed. Collins Australian Encyclopedia (1984)
Taylor, Peter. The Atlas of Australian History (1991)
The Year-book of the Imperial Institute of the United Kingdom, the colonies and India: a statistical record of the resources and trade of the colonial and Indian possessions of the British Empire (2nd. ed. 1893) 880pp; Australia  = pp 521–718 online edition"
Bibliography of Australian history,"Surveys
Atkinson, Alan.  The Europeans in Australia: A History. Vol. 2: Democracy. (2005). 440 pp.
Basset, Jan. The Oxford Illustrated Dictionary of Australian History (1998)
Bolton, Geoffrey. The Oxford History of Australia: Volume 5: 1942–1995. The Middle Way (2005)
Clark, Manning. A History of Australia 6 vol (Melbourne University Press, 1962, 1968, 1973, 1978, 1981, and 1987)
Clarke, Frank G.  The History of Australia (2002). online edition Archived 24 February 2012 at the Wayback Machine
Day, David. Claiming a Continent: A New History of Australia (2001);
Hughes, Robert. The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding (1988). excerpt and text search
Kingston, Beverley. The Oxford History of Australia: Volume 3: 1860–1900 Glad, Confident Morning (1993)
Kociumbas, Jan. The Oxford History of Australia: Volume 2: 1770–1860 Possessions (1995)
Macintyre, Stuart. The Oxford History of Australia: Volume 4: 1901–42, the Succeeding Age (1993)
Macintyre, Stuart. A Concise History of Australia (2nd. ed. 2009) excerpt and text search ISBN 0-521-60101-0
Schreuder, Deryck, and Stuart Ward, eds. Australia's Empire  (Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series) (2008) excerpt and text search
Welsh, Frank. Australia: A New History of the Great Southern Land (2008)"
Bibliography of Australian history,"Journals
Australian Cultural History (last issue volume 28, 2–3, 2010)
Australian Economic History Review
Australian Historical Studies
Australian Journal of Politics and History
History Australia
Journal of Australian Colonial History 
Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society"
Bibliography of Australian history,"Specialty studies
Alomes, Stephen. A Nation at Last? The Changing Character of Australian Nationalism (1988)
Atkinson, Alan.  The Europeans in Australia: A History. Vol. 2: Democracy. Oxford U. Pr., 2005. 440 pp.
Thomas Brassey, 2nd Earl Brassey (1904). ""Studies in Australia in 1896: Paper read at the Royal Colonial Institute, February, 1897."". Problems of Empire: 197–232. Wikidata Q107160240.{{cite journal}}:  CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
Crowley; F. K. Australia's Western Third: A History of Western Australia from the First Settlements to Modern Times 1960 online edition
Davison, Graeme; Hirst, John; Macintyre, Stuart (2001). The Oxford Companion to Australian History. ISBN 978-0195515039. online at OUP also excerpt and text search
Day, David. Reluctant Nation: Australia and the Allied Defeat of Japan 1942–45 (1992),
Goodall, Heather. Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770–1972 (Allen&Unwin, 1996)
Edwards, John. Curtin's Gift: Reinterpreting Australia's Greatest Prime Minister, (2005) online edition Archived 23 November 2011 at the Wayback Machine
Hughes, Robert. The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding (1988). excerpt and text search
Keith, Arthur Berriedale (1921). War government of the British dominions. Clarendon Press. Australia., First World War
Kingston, Beverley. The Oxford History of Australia: Volume 3: 1860–1900 Glad, Confident Morning (1993)
Kociumbas, Jan. The Oxford History of Australia: Volume 2: 1770–1860 Possessions (1995)
Lowe, David. Menzies and the 'Great World Struggle': Australia's Cold War 1948–54  (1999) online edition
Macintyre, Stuart. The Oxford History of Australia: Volume 4: 1901–42, the Succeeding Age (1993)
Macintyre, Stuart. A Concise History of Australia (2004) excerpt and text search
McLachlan, Noel. Waiting for the Revolution: A History of Australian Nationalism (1989)
Martin, A. W. Robert Menzies: A Life (2 vol 1993–99), online at ACLS e-books
Reynolds, Henry. The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia (1990).
Ward, Smart. Australia and the British Embrace: The Demise of the Imperial Ideal (2001)"
Bibliography of Australian history,"Recent political history (since 1939)
Aulich, Chris, ed. From Abbott to Turnbull: A New Direction?  (Echo, 2016) excerpt
Bolton, Geoffrey. The Oxford History of Australia: Volume 5: 1942–1995. The Middle Way (2005)
Edwards, John. Curtin's Gift: Reinterpreting Australia's Greatest Prime Minister, (2005) online edition Archived 23 November 2011 at the Wayback Machine
Evans, Mark et al. eds. From Turnbull to Morrison: Understanding the Trust Divide (2019) excerpt
Kelly, Paul. The End of Certainty: Power, Politics & Business in Australia (2008); originally published as The End of Certainty: The Story of the 1980s (1994)
McDougall, Derek. ""From Malcolm Turnbull to ScoMo: crisis for the centre-right in Australia."" The Round Table 107.5 (2018): 557-570.
Manning, Paddy. Born to rule: the unauthorised biography of Malcolm Turnbull (Melbourne Univ. Publishing, 2015).
Martin, A. W. Robert Menzies: A Life (2 vol 1993–99), online at ACLS e-books
Megalogenis, George. The Longest Decade (2nd ed. 2009), politics 1990–2008
Moran, Anthony. Australia: Nation, Belonging, and Globalization Routledge, 2004 online edition
Turnbull, Malcolm. Fighting for the Republic (Hardie Grant Books, 1999).
Walsh, Mary, et al. The Revolving Door of Australian Prime Ministers (Melbourne University Press, 2019).
Weinert, Kim D., and Kieran Tranter. ""The empty centre: The Hollowmen and representations of techno-political elites in Australian public life."" Entertainment and Sports Law Journal, (2020) 18: 11, pp. 1–9. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16997/eslj.268ESLJ online; argues that the 2008–2009 Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) comedy ""The Hollowmen"" unveils an empty centre within the nation's public life."
Bibliography of Australian history,"Diplomacy and military
Australian War Memorial. Encyclopedia online with scores of topics
Bou, Jean. Light Horse: A History of Australia's Mounted Arm (Australian Army History Series) (2009)
Bridge, Carl ed., Munich to Vietnam: Australia's Relations with Britain and the United States since the 1930s, Melbourne University Press 1991
Dennis, Peter, Jeffrey Grey, Ewan Morris, and Robin Prior. The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History. 1996)
Firth, Stewart. Australia in International Politics: An Introduction to Australian Foreign Policy (2005) online edition
Grant, Ian. A Dictionary of Australian Military History – from Colonial Times to the Gulf War (1992)
Gyngell; Allan, and Michael Wesley.  Making Australian Foreign Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2003) online Archived 15 December 2018 at the Wayback Machine
Lee, David. Search for Security: The Political Economy of Australia's Postwar Foreign and Defence Policy (1995)
Lowe, David. Menzies and the 'Great World Struggle': Australia's Cold War 1948–54  (1999) online edition
McLean, David. ""From British Colony to American Satellite? Australia and the USA during the Cold War,"" Australian Journal of Politics & History (2006) 52 (1), 64–79. Rejects satellite model. online at Blackwell-Synergy
McLean, David. ""Australia in the Cold War: a Historiographical Review."" International History Review (2001) 23(2): 299–321. ISSN 0707-5332
Millar, T. B. Australia in peace and war : external relations 1788-1977 (1978) online, 612pp
Murphy, John. Harvest of Fear: A History of Australia's Vietnam War (1993)
Watt, Alan. The Evolution of Australian Foreign Policy 1938–1965, Cambridge University Press, 1967"
Bibliography of Australian history,"Second World War
""Second World War Official Histories"" 22 vol 1952–77; online"
Bibliography of Australian history,"Homefront
Hasluck, Paul The Government and the People, 1939–41 (1965) online vol 1; The Government and the People, 1942–45 (1970) online vol 2
Blum, Timothy. ""Profits Over Patriotism: Black Market Crime in World War II Sydney."" (2011). online
Butlin, S.J.  War Economy, 1939–42 (1955) online
Butlin, S.J.  and C.B. Schedvin, War Economy 1942–1945, (1977) online
Darian-Smith, Kate. On the Home Front: Melbourne in Wartime, 1939–1945. Australia: Oxford UP, 1990.
Fort, Carol. ""Regulating the labour market in Australia's wartime democracy."" Australian Historical Studies 34.122 (2003): 213–230.
Goot, Murray. ""Labor's 1943 landslide: Political market research, Evatt, and the public opinion polls."" Labour History: A Journal of Labour and Social History 107 (2014): 149–166. in JSTOR
McKernan, Michael. Australia During the Second World War: All In! (Nelson, 1983).
Mellor, D.P. The Role of Science and Industry (1958) online
Saunders, Kay. War on the Homefront: State Intervention in Queensland, 1938–1948 (1993)
Saunders, Kay. ""The dark shadow of white Australia: racial anxieties in Australia in World War II."" Ethnic and Racial Studies 17#2 (1994): 325–341.
Saunders, Kay. ""‘The stranger in our gates’: Internment policies in the United Kingdom and Australia during the two world wars, 1914–39."" Immigrants & Minorities 22#1 (2003): 22–43.
Spear, Jonathan A. ""Embedded: the Australian Red Cross in the Second World War."" (2007). online
Willis, Ian C. ""The women's voluntary services, a study of war and volunteering in Camden, 1939–1945."" (2004). online"
Bibliography of Australian history,"Economics, business and labour
Bramble, Tom. Trade Unionism in Australia: A History from Flood to Ebb Tide (2008) excerpt and text search
Clark, Victor S. ""Australian Economic Problems. I. The Railways,"" Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 22, No. 3 (May, 1908), pp. 399–451 in JSTOR, history to 1907
Collins, Jock, and Jock Collins. A shop full of dreams: Ethnic small business in Australia (Pluto Press Australia, 1995).
Cooper, Rae, and Bradon Ellem. ""The neoliberal state, trade unions and collective bargaining in Australia."" British Journal of Industrial Relations 46.3 (2008): 532-554.
Dyster, Barrie, and David Meredith. Australia in the global economy: continuity and change (Cambridge UP, 2012) except.
Fleming, Grant, David Merrett, and Simon Ville. The big end of town: Big business and corporate leadership in twentieth-century Australia (Cambridge University Press, 2004). excerpt, comprehensive history of corporate life since 1850s.
Hearn, Mark, Harry Knowles, and Ian Cambridge. One Big Union: A History of the Australian Workers Union 1886–1994 (1998)
Kirk, Neville. Labour and the Politics of Empire: Britain and Australia, 1900 to the Present(2011).
Merrett, David T., and Simon Ville. ""Financing growth: new issues by Australian firms, 1920–1939."" Business History Review 83.3 (2009): 563-589. online
Merrett, David, and Simon Ville. ""Tariffs, Subsidies, And Profits: A Re‐Assessment Of Structural Change In Australia 1901–39."" Australian Economic History Review 51.1 (2011): 46-70. online
Milton-Smith, John. ""Business ethics in Australia and New Zealand."" Journal of Business ethics 16.14 (1997): 1485-1497.
Nielsen, James F., Chris Terry, and Rowan M. Trayler. ""Business banking in Australia: a comparison of expectations."" International Journal of Bank Marketing (1998).
Panza, Laura, Simon Ville, and David Merrett. ""The drivers of firm longevity: Age, size, profitability and survivorship of Australian corporations, 1901–1930."" Business History 60.2 (2018): 157-177. online
Rafferty, Mike, and Serena Yu. Shifting risk: work and working life in Australia: a report for the Australian Council of Trade Unions (University of Sydney, Workplace Research Centre, 2010) online.
Ville, Simon, and David Tolmie Merrett. ""Investing in a Wealthy Resource-Based Colonial Economy: International Business in Australia before World War I."" Business History Review 94.2 (2020): 321-346. online
Wright, Chris F., and Russell D. Lansbury. ""Trade unions and economic reform in Australia, 1983–2013."" Singapore Economic Review 59.04 (2014): online"
Bibliography of Australian history,"Culture, society, race, ethnicity, gender
Arrow, Michelle. Friday on our minds: popular culture in Australia since 1945 (UNSW Press, 2009).
Babatunde-Sowole, Olutoyin O., et al. ""'Coming to a Strange Land' The West African Migrant Women’s Establishment of Home and Family in a New Culture Within Australia."" Journal of Transcultural Nursing 27.5 (2016): 447-455. online
Bennett, Bruce et al. The Oxford Literary History of Australia (1999)
Bennett, Tony, and David Carter. Culture in Australia: Policies, Publics and Programs (2001) excerpt and text search
Carey, Hilary. Believing in Australia: A Cultural History of Religions (1996).
Collins, Jock, and Jock Collins. A shop full of dreams: Ethnic small business in Australia (Pluto Press Australia, 1995).
Crawford, Robert. ""Selling modernity: advertising and the construction of the culture of consumption in Australia, 1900-1950."" ACH: The Journal of the History of Culture in Australia 24-25 (2006).
Fiske, John, Bob Hodge, and Graeme Turner. Myths of Oz: reading Australian popular culture (Routledge, 2016).
Harris, Anita. ""In a Girlie World: Tweenies in Australia."" Counterpoints 245 (2005): 209-223. online
Kapferer, Bruce. Legends of people, myths of state: violence, intolerance, and political culture in Sri Lanka and Australia (Berghahn Books, 2011).
Kleinert, Sylvia. and Margo Neale. The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture (2001)
Moran, Albert. Historical Dictionary of Australian Radio and Television (2007)
O'Brien, Patricia. ""Remaking Australia's Colonial Culture?: White Australia and its Papuan Frontier 1901–1940."" Australian Historical Studies 40.1 (2009): 96-112.
Peppard, Judith. ""Culture wars in South Australia: the sex education debates."" Australian Journal of Social Issues 43.3 (2008): 499-516.
Rutland, Suzanne D. The Jews in Australia (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Schneider, Tanja, and Teresa Davis. ""Advertising food in Australia: Between antinomies and gastro‐anomy."" Consumption, Markets and Culture 13.1 (2010): 31-41 online.
Skinner, Natalie, and Barbara Pocock. ""Work, life, flexibility and workplace culture in Australia: results of the 2008 Australian Work and Life Index (AWALI) Survey."" Australian Bulletin of Labour 36.2 (2010): 133-154.
Staniforth, Mark. Material culture and consumer society: dependent colonies in colonial Australia (Springer Science & Business Media, 2012).
Stratton, Jon. Uncertain lives: Culture, race and neoliberalism in Australia (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011).
Ward, Stuart. ""The “new nationalism” in Australia, Canada and New Zealand: Civic culture in the wake of the British world."" in Britishness abroad: Transnational movements and imperial cultures (2007) pp: 231-36.
Webby, Elizabeth, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature (2006)"
Bibliography of Australian history,"Environment and geography
Bolton, Geoffrey. Spoils and Spoilers: Australians Make Their Environment, 1788–1980 (Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1981).
Cathcart, Michael. The water dreamers: the remarkable history of our dry continent (2010) online review.
Doyle, Timothy, and Tsarina Doyle. Green power: the environment movement in Australia (UNSW Press, 2000).
Dunlap, Thomas R. Nature and the English Diaspora: Environment and History in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (Studies in Environment and History) (1999)
Frost, Lionel, and Seamus O'Hanlon. ""Urban history and the future of Australian cities."" Australian Economic History Review 49.1 (2009): 1-18. online
Garden, Donald S., and Mark R. Stoll. Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific: An Environmental History (Nature and Human Societies) (2005)
Howes, Michael. Politics and the Environment: Risk and the Role of Government and Industry (Routledge, 2013) compares Britain, USA and Australia.
Hutton, Drew, and Libby Connors. History of the Australian Environment Movement (1999) excerpt and text search
Lines, William J. Taming the Great South Land: A History of the Conquest of Nature in Australia (1999)
Powell, J. M. Watering the Garden State: Water, Land and Community in Victoria 1834–1988 (Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1989).
Pyne, Stephen J. Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia (Holt, 1991) excerpt.
Robin, Libby. ""Australia in global environmental history"" in A Companion to Global Environmental History Edited by J. R. McNeill and Erin Stewart Mauldin. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) pp 182–195.online.
Robin, Libby. Defending the Little Desert: The Rise of Ecological Consciousness in Australia (Melbourne University Press, 1998).
Rolls, E. They All Ran Wild: The Animals and Plants that Plague Australia (Angus and Robertson, 1969).
Seddon, George. Landprints: Reflections on Place and Landscape (Melbourne, Cambridge U Press, 1997) excerpt
Tranter, Bruce. ""Environmental activists and non-active environmentalists in Australia."" Environmental Politics 19.3 (2010): 413-429.
Tranter, Bruce. ""Leadership and change in the Tasmanian environment movement."" Leadership Quarterly 20.5 (2009): 708-724 online
Williams, Michael. The Making of the South Australian Landscape (Academic Press , 1974).
Wright, R. The Bureaucrat ’s Domain: Space and the Public Interest in Victoria 1836–1884, (Melbourne, Oxford University Press , 1989)."
Bibliography of Australian history,"Historiography
Attwood, Bain, and Fiona Magowan. Telling Stories: Indigenous History and Memory in Australia and New Zealand (2001) online edition
Bongiorno, Frank. ""'Real Solemn History' and Its Discontents: Australian Political History and the Challenge of Social History,"" Australian Journal of Politics and History (2010) 56#1 pp 6+ online edition
Bonnell, Andrew G.  and Martin Crotty,  ""An Australian 'Historikerstreit'? Review Article,"" Australian Journal of Politics & History (2004) 50#3 pp 425–433
Case, Jo. ""Who Killed Australian History?"" In History (6 March 2012) online
Coombes, Annie E. Rethinking Settler Colonialism: History and Memory in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa (Studies in Imperialism) (2006)
Davison, Graeme. The Use and Abuse of Australian History (2000) online edition
Gare, Deborah. ""Britishness in recent Australian historiography."" Historical Journal 43#4 (2000): 1145–1155.
Hirst, John, and Stuart Macintyre, eds, The Oxford Companion to Australian History (Melbourne, 1998); many articles have a historiographical component
McIntyre, Stuart. The History Wars (2nd ed. 2004) see History wars article
McIntyre, Stuart, and Julian Thomas, eds, The Discovery of Australian History 1890–1939 (Carlton, Vic., 1995)
McLean, David. ""Australia in the Cold War: A Historiographical Review"", The International History Review, Vol. 23, 2 (June 2001)
McQueen, Humphrey. Gallipoli to Petrov: Arguing with Australian History (1984),
Meaney, Neville. ""Britishness and Australian Identity: The Problem of Nationalism in Australian History and Historiography"", Australian Historical Studies, Vol. 32, 116 (April 2001),
Nugent, Maria. Botany Bay: Where Histories Meet (2005) online edition
Waterhouse, Richard. ""Locating the New Social History: transnational historiography and Australian local history"", Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society (2009) 95#1 pp. 1–17."
Bibliography of Australian history,"Primary sources
Kemp, Rod, and Marion Stanton, eds. Speaking for Australia: Parliamentary Speeches That Shaped Our Nation Allen & Unwin, 2004 online edition Archived 23 November 2011 at the Wayback Machine
Crowley, Frank, ed.  Modern Australia in documents, volume 1, 1901–1939 (1973); Modern Australia in Documents, 1939–1970 (1973) Wren Publishing, Melbourne. ISBN 978-0-85885-032-3"
Bibliography of Australian history,"
== References =="
Variation in Australian English,"Australian English is relatively homogeneous when compared with British and American English. The major varieties of Australian English are sociocultural rather than regional. They are divided into 3 main categories: general, broad and cultivated.
There are a number of Australian English-based creole languages. Differing significantly from English, these are not considered dialects of English; rather, they are considered separate languages. Notable examples are Torres Strait Creole, spoken on the Torres Strait Islands, Northern Cape York and South-Western Coastal Papua; the Norfuk language, spoken by some inhabitants of Norfolk Island, and Australian Kriol, which developed in and around the Sydney region in the days of early settlement, and now exists only in rural areas of the Northern Territory."
Variation in Australian English,"Sociocultural variation
Broad, general and cultivated Australian
Three main varieties of Australian English are spoken according to linguists: broad, general and cultivated. They are part of a continuum, reflecting variations in accent. They can, but do not always, reflect the social class, education and urban or rural background of the speaker.
Broad Australian English is recognisable and familiar to English speakers around the world. It is prevalent nationwide but is especially common in rural areas. Examples of people with this accent include Steve Irwin, Paul Hogan and former prime ministers Julia Gillard, Bob Hawke and John Howard.
In Australia, this dialect is sometimes called Strine /ˈstɹɑɪn/ (or ""Strayan"" /ˈstɹæɪən/, a shortening of the word Australian), and a speaker of the dialect may be referred to as an Ocker.  Tests indicated that the Broad speakers demonstrated a greater tendency for syllable assimilation and consonant elision, were more likely to use weak consonants or restricted intonation (narrow pitch range), were more likely to speak slowly (drawl), and further, showed a greater tendency to exhibit pervasive nasality. Diphthongs are usually pronounced longer as well. Along the East Coast, there is an approximate correlation between latitude and accent, being the further north one is, the more nasal/broad the accent. Nasality is already evident at the New South Wales/Queensland border.
General Australian English is the most common of Australian accents. It is especially prominent in urban Australia and is used as a standard language for Australian films, television programs and advertising. It is used by Hugh Jackman, Rose Byrne, Rebel Wilson, Chris Hemsworth and Eric Bana.
Cultivated Australian English has in the past been perceived as indicating high social class or education. Additionally, a study in 1989 reported that Cultivated Australian English speakers were being rated higher than Broad Australian English speakers in intelligence, competence, reliability, honesty, and status. In comparison, Broad Australian English speakers are rated higher in terms of humorousness and talkativity, similar to what was found in a study in 1975 comparing regional British accents to RP (Received Pronunciation). Cultivated Australian English also has some similarities to Received Pronunciation and the Transatlantic accent as well. In recent generations, it has fallen sharply in usage. However, the cultivated usages of [ɛɪ] in ""face"" and [aɪ] ""price"" have been integrated into the speech of some of the speakers of General Australian. [ɪi] for FLEECE is also within the General Australian range, as the ongliding of /iː/ is variable. Speakers with a Cultivated Australian accent include Cate Blanchett, Lisa Gerrard, Geoffrey Rush and former prime minister Malcolm Fraser."
Variation in Australian English,"Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander English
Australian Aboriginal English refers to a dialect of Australian English used by a large proportion of Indigenous Australians. It is made up of a range of forms which developed differently in different parts of Australia, and are said to vary along a continuum, from forms close to Standard Australian English to more non-standard forms. There are distinctive features of accent, grammar, words and meanings, as well as language use. The dialect is not to be confused with Australian Kriol language, which is not mutually intelligible with Australian English but in fact a separate language spoken by over 30,000 people. On the Torres Strait Islands, a distinctive dialect known as Torres Strait English, the furthest extent of which is Torres Strait Creole, is spoken."
Variation in Australian English,"Ethnocultural varieties
The ethnocultural dialects are diverse accents in Australian English that are spoken by the minority groups, which are of non-English speaking background. A massive immigration from Asia has made a large increase in diversity and the will for people to show their cultural identity within the Australian context. These ethnocultural varieties contain features of General Australian English as adopted by the children of immigrants blended with some non-English language features, such as the Afro-Asiatic and Asian languages.
From the 1960s and 1970s, major cities such as Sydney and Melbourne received large numbers of immigrants from Southern Europe and the Middle East (Italians, Greeks, Lebanese, Maltese, Croats, Macedonians, Turks etc.); the second generation of these immigrants can also have a distinct accent, in a similar fashion to the east coast of the United States with descendants of European migrants having the ""Jersey accent"".
Chinese-Australian English has the all-purpose exclamation ""aiyah!""/""aiyoh!"" (what a shame! - from Mandarin/Cantonese) and sometimes will end sentences with ""lah"" (from Singlish)."
Variation in Australian English,"Lebanese Australian English
Lebanese Australian English (LAusE) has been prescribed as a new dialect of Australian English. It is generally spoken by Australian speakers of Lebanese descent. Closely resembling the general Australian accent, the variety was based on the acoustic phonetic characteristics in the speech of young, Lebanese Australian male university students in Sydney, who speak English as their first language and also use vernacular Arabic. Compared to the standard Australian English, the students had minor vowel motion differences with striking voicing and related timing effects.
Other Middle Eastern Australians too, particularly in the Sydney area (in the 2006 census, 72.8% of Lebanese-Australians lived in Sydney) have a similar dialect. Among Arab Australians, words such as ""shoo"" (what's up) and ""yallah"" (let's go/goodbye). ""Habib"" has a use similar to mate (meaning friend), but can also be a pejorative word for males who assert themselves aggressively - a type of person obsessed with grabbing girls' attention, ""hotted-up"" (meaning modified or hot-rodded) cars and loud music. wallah is also used, meaning ""I swear to God"" or ""Really!"""
Variation in Australian English,"Regional variation
Although relatively homogeneous, some regional variations in Australian English are notable. The dialects of English spoken in the eastern states, where the majority of the population lives, differ somewhat to those spoken in South Australia, Tasmania and Western Australia. Another notable dialect is Torres Strait English, spoken by the inhabitants of the Torres Strait Islands. Torres Strait English, as distinct from Torres Strait Creole, developed separately to, but has been significantly influenced by, General Australian English.
The regional varieties of English can be distinguished in terms of vocabulary and phonology. With each local dialect taking words from various sources such as British, Irish and American English as well as local Aboriginal languages, it is in vocabulary where regional varieties are most distinct from each other. Regional phonological features may be inherited due to differing settlement patterns or may have developed locally."
Variation in Australian English,"Vocabulary
There are differences in the names of beer glasses from one area to another. In the 2000s, however, the range of glass sizes in actual use has been greatly reduced. In New South Wales, swimwear is known as swimmers or cossie and, in Queensland, it is togs. In border areas such as the Tweed Heads-Gold Coast area this can vary. In most other areas, the term bathers dominates. What is referred to by schoolchildren as a bag in most parts of Australia is known as a ""port"" by some Queenslanders. Further, the processed meat known as ""devon"" on the East Coast is known as ""polony"" on the West Coast, while in Central Australia (South Australia and the Northern Territory), the term ""fritz"" is used. Tasmania uses the term ""belgium"" for the same product.
Tasmanian English features numerous deviations from mainland vocabulary, including ""cordial"" to refer to carbonated soft drink. Tasmanian vocabulary also retains words from historic English dialects that have otherwise gone extinct - such as Jerry (fog), nointer (a mischievous child), and yaffler (a loud mouthed, obnoxious person), derived from an archaic word for the Green woodpecker. The Norfolk dialect word ""rummum"" (strange, odd person) has become ""rum'un"" (a scallywag, eccentric character).
Many regional variations are due to Australians' passion for sport and the differences in non-linguistic traditions from one state to another: the word football refers to the most popular code of football in different States or regions, or even ethnic groups within them. Victorians start a game of Australian rules football with a ball up, Western Australians with a bounce down; New South Wales people and Queenslanders start a game of rugby league football or rugby union football with a kick off, as do soccer players across Australia.
From 2004, the national governing body for Association football, (the Football Federation Australia), has promoted the use of ""football"" in place of ""soccer"". Several media outlets have adopted this use, while others have stuck with ""soccer"". However, use of the word ""football"" to mean either Australian football or rugby league, depending on the major code of the state, remains the standard usage in Australia. In all places, the specific name or nickname of the code (""soccer"", ""league"", ""union"" or ""Aussie rules"") can often be heard used for disambiguation.
The slang word footy has been traditionally associated with either Australian rules football (Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania, Northern Territory) or rugby league football (New South Wales, Queensland). Prominent examples in popular culture are The Footy Shows; also FootyTAB, a betting wing of the NSW TAB.
For many Australians, the verb barrack (or the accompanying noun form barracker), is used to denote following a team or club. Barrack has its origins in British English, although in the UK it now usually means to jeer or denigrate an opposing team or players. The expression ""root (or rooting) for a team"", as used in the United States, is not generally used in Australia (root is slang for sexual intercourse in Australia).
There are many regional variations for describing social classes or subcultures. A bogan is also referred to as a bevan in Queensland. These variations, however, have almost completely been replaced by the term bogan. Tasmania sometime uses the terms Chigger and Ravo, derived from the low-socioeconomic suburbs of Chigwell and Ravenswood, though bogan is also understood.
Australian English has adopted and adapted words from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages, often for place names (eg: Canberra, Wollongong, Geelong) or the names of animals (eg: kangaroo, kookaburra, barramundi) and plants (eg: waratah, kurrajong). A notable borrowing is ""hard yakka"" meaning hard work (from Yagara ""yaga"" meaning work)."
Variation in Australian English,"Phonology
Variation between /aː/ and /æ/
There exists significant regional variation in terms of the extent to which the trap–bath split has taken hold particularly before /nd/ (especially the suffix -mand), /ns/, /nt/, /ntʃ/ and /mpəl/. In words like chance, plant, branch, sample and demand, the majority of Australians use /æː/ (as in bad). Some, however, use /aː/ (as in cart) in these words, particularly in South Australia, which had a different settlement chronology and type from other parts of the country.. In parts of Victoria and South Australia, castle rhymes with hassle rather than parcel. Also, some may use /æː/ in grasp, gasp, plaque and rasp. The table below, based on Crystal (1995), shows the percentage of speakers from different capital cities who pronounce words with /aː/ as opposed to /æ/."
Variation in Australian English,"Centring diphthongs
In Western Australian English, the centring diphthong vowels in near and square are typically realised as full diphthongs, [iə] or [ia] and [eə] or [ea] respectively, whereas in the eastern states they may also be realised as monophthongs (without jaw movement), [iː] and [eː] respectively."
Variation in Australian English,"L–vocalisation
When /l/ occurs at the ends of words before pauses and before consonants it sometimes sounds like a vowel sound rather than a consonant. This is because /l/ is made with two different articulations. One of the articulations is like a vowel articulation and the other is more like a typical consonant articulation. When /l/ occurs at the ends of words before pauses and before other consonants, the consonantal articulation can be obscured by the vowel articulation. This makes the /l/ sound like /ʊ/.
The tendency for some /l/ sounds to become vowels is more common in South Australian English than that of other states. Milk, for example, in South Australia has a vocalised /l/, leading to the pronunciation [mɪʊ̯k], whereas in other states the /l/ is pronounced as a consonant."
Variation in Australian English,"Salary–celery merger
In Victoria, many speakers pronounce /æ/ and /e/ in a way that is distinct from speakers in other states. Many younger speakers from Victoria pronounce the first vowel in ""celery"" and ""salary"" the same, so that both words sound like ""salary"". These speakers will also tend to say ""halicopter"" instead of ""helicopter"", and pronounce their capital city (Melbourne) as . For some older Victorian speakers, the words ""celery"" and ""salary"" also sound the same but instead both sound like ""celery"". These speakers will also pronounce words such as ""alps"" as ""elps""."
Variation in Australian English,"Variation in /ʉːl/
The vowel in words like ""pool"", ""school"" and ""fool"" varies regionally."
Variation in Australian English,"See also
Australian English
Australian English vocabulary
Australian English phonology
Regional accents of English speakers"
Variation in Australian English,References
Variation in Australian English,"
== Bibliography =="
Homelessness in Australia,"Homelessness in Australia is a social issue concerning the number of people in Australia that are considered to be homeless. There are no internationally agreed upon definitions of homelessness, making it difficult to compare levels of homelessness across countries. A majority of people experiencing homelessness long-term in Australia are found in the large cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. It is estimated that on any given night approximately 116,000 people will be homeless and many more are living in insecure housing, ""one step away from being homeless"". A person who does not obtain any shelter is often described as sleeping 'rough'.
A person is considered to be homeless in Australia if they:"
Homelessness in Australia,"do not have access to safe, secure adequate housing, or, if the only housing they have access to damages, or is likely to damage, their health.
are in circumstances which threaten or adversely affect the adequacy, safety, security, or affordability of their home.
have no security of tenure – that is, they have no legal right to continued occupation of their living area.
Many homeless people in the central business districts (CBDs) of major cities have become beggars."
Homelessness in Australia,"2011 census homelessness figures
There were 105,237 people experiencing homelessness in Australia on census night in 2011. This equated to 1 in 200 Australians,
and represented an increase of 17% from the 2006 census, with the rate of homelessness increasing from 45 per 10,000 to 49 per 10,000 or an increase in population percentage terms of 0.04%.
People who are homeless in Australia are classified into one of six categories. These are:"
Homelessness in Australia,"improvised dwellings, tents, sleepers out
supported accommodation
people staying with other households
boarding houses
other temporary lodgings
severely overcrowded dwellings.
56% of people experiencing homelessness on census night were male and 44% female. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians were over-represented in homelessness data making up 25% (26,744)) of the homeless population, compared to 2.5% of the Australian population. 30% of those experiencing homelessness were born overseas above the % of the Australian population.
From 2006 to 2011 the number of people sleeping 'rough' decreased from 9% of the homeless population to 6%. There was also a significant increase (23%) in the number of people staying in homelessness services."
Homelessness in Australia,"2016 census homelessness figures
The number of homeless people in Australia jumped by more than 15,000 — or 14 per cent — in the five years to 2016, according to census data. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) said 116,000 people were homeless on census night in 2016, representing 50 homeless people per 10,000."
Homelessness in Australia,"2021 census homelessness figures
In the 2021 census for homeless figures, the number of people experiencing homelessness rose by an approximate 6067 people, an increase of 5.2% since the 2016 census. However the rate of homelessness decreased to 48 people per 10,000 compared to 50 people per 10,000 back in 2016."
Homelessness in Australia,"Causes
There are many causes of homelessness. The reasons for homelessness are many and varied and each individual's path to homelessness is different and unique. Some other reasons for homelessness are addictions, mental illness,
exiting care (foster care system or prison system), barriers facing refugees, debt, disability, unemployment, lack of support, blacklisting, poverty, and being kicked out of home. Some of the current homeless population in Australia were previously in large-scale residential institutions for the mentally ill. Deinstitutionalisation of people with mental illnesses began in Australia during the 1980s, and most now live in the general community."
Homelessness in Australia,"Costs
It has been estimated that a single homeless person costs the government $30,000 per year."
Homelessness in Australia,"Government responses
The Road Home – Federal Government White Paper
The Road Home was launched by former  Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in December 2008.  This White Paper sets an ambitious target to halve homelessness by 2020 and offer supported accommodation to all rough sleepers who need it.  Launching the White Paper, Kevin Rudd said, referring to the 105,000 homeless people in Australia ""A country like this should not have this problem, so large and longstanding, without being addressed, it's time we had a decent solution to this problem that has been around for a long time.""
The Road Home focuses future effort and investment into three strategies:"
Homelessness in Australia,"Turning Off the Tap: Early intervention services to prevent homelessness.
Improving and expanding services which aim to end homelessness: Ensuring that Services are more connected, integrated and responsive to achieve sustainable housing, improve social and economic participation and end homelessness for their clients.
Breaking the Cycle: Ensuring that people who become homeless are able to quickly move through the crisis system into stable housing with the support they need so that homelessness does not recur.
The Road Home was not implemented following the ousting  of the Rudd Government.  In 2019, before the launch of the documentary Life After The Oasis the National Youth  Commission published the Report Card which  shows only a start to the work required to reduce youth homelessness in Australia."
Homelessness in Australia,"Affordable housing
The Council of Australian Governments (COAG)'s National Affordable Housing Agreement (NAHA) subject to provisions of the Intergovernmental Agreement on Federal Financial Relations, defines and measures housing and homelessness services for the Commonwealth and the States and Territories. In 2008 Rudd announced that NAHA would ""deliver more longer-term housing for Australians who are homeless, more public and community housing and build and renew run down and overcrowded housing for Indigenous Australians living in remote areas."" NAHA's mandate includes a) social housing; assistance to people in the private rental market; support and accommodation for people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness; and home purchase assistance; b) (b) working towards improving coordination across housing related programs to make better use of existing stock and under-utilised Government assets and achieve better integration between housing and human services, including health and disability services; and c) reducing the rate of homelessness."""
Homelessness in Australia,"National Partnership Agreement on Homelessness (NPAH)
Since 2008, the National Partnership Agreement on Homelessness (NPAH) was formed to allow the Commonwealth Government to provide matching funding to hundreds of homelessness services. In response to the federal funding, states and territories typically match the Commonwealth’s contribution. The total annual NPAH funding is around $250 million per year which is directed to around 800 homelessness services around Australia.
In 2016, homelessness services across Australia began a #SaveNPAH campaign to ensure the Australian Government renews the funding package past 2017. The services stated that without the funding, services would be forced to cut back on essential programs and thousands of Australians would become homeless. The #SaveNPAH campaign succeeded in part, with the Australian government committing to a one year extension of funding."
Homelessness in Australia,"State Government initiatives
In South Australia, the State Government of Premier Mike Rann (2002 to 2011) committed substantial funding to a series of initiatives designed to combat homelessness. Advised by Social Inclusion Commissioner David Cappo and the founder of New York's Common Ground program, Rosanne Haggerty, the Rann Government established Common Ground Adelaide building high quality inner city apartments (combined with intensive support) for ""rough sleeping"" homeless people. The government also funded the Street to Home program and a hospital liaison service designed to assist homeless people who are admitted to the Emergency Departments of Adelaide's major public hospitals. Rather than being released back into homelessness, patients identified as rough sleepers are found accommodation backed by professional support. Common Ground and Street to Home now operate across Australia in other States."
Homelessness in Australia,"Ask Izzy
Ask Izzy is a mobile website which connects people experiencing or at risk of homelessness. They provide  essential services such as meals, housing, support and counseling. The website was developed by Infoxchange in partnership with Google, REA Group and News Corp."
Homelessness in Australia,"Youth homelessness
In the mid-1970s, evidence began to emerge that the traditional homelessness population predominantly consisting of middle aged or older males was changing. Instead, younger people began emerging in surveys of the homeless population. This change is attributed to the disproportionately high unemployment rates among young people at the time, inadequate unemployment benefits (particularly for teens who had left school), burgeoning inflation rates and increasing housing and rent costs. This change in demographic increased the demands made on the non-government welfare sector to accommodate homeless youth.
According to the 2006 census, there were over 44,000 young people experiencing homelessness. This means that about 43% of the Australian homeless population are infants, children or youth under the age of 25.  A particularly common form of youth homelessness in Australia is ""couch surfing"" whereby the person experiencing homelessness relies on the support of friends to sleep on their couch or floor.
Relationship breakdown and family conflict are often cited as common instigators of youth homelessness.
Youth Homelessness Matters Day is an annual event run across Australia that highlights youth homelessness and associated issues."
Homelessness in Australia,"Youth refuges
Youth refuges started appearing in Australia in the 1970s as a community based response to youth homelessness."
Homelessness in Australia,"New South Wales – In 1979 eighteen youth refuges in Canberra, including Caretakers Cottage, Taldumande Youth Services, Young People's Refuge among others, founded a peak body organisation to represent themselves to government. The peak body was named the Youth Refuge Action Group (YRAG) (later the name was changed several times over the years, including YRA, YRAA, YAA, and presently, Yfoundations)."
Homelessness in Australia,"Research
Post traumatic stress disorder and homelessness
A 2006 University of Sydney study of Sydney's homeless found a very high incidence of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) amongst the homeless."
Homelessness in Australia,"The Cost of Youth Homelessness in Australia
The Cost of Youth Homelessness in Australia was a longitudinal research study involving three survey waves of 298 young homeless Australians (aged between 15 and 24) and 96 unemployed and disadvantaged youth. The project was funded by the Australian Research Council with industry partners the Salvation Army, Anglicare and Mission Australia. Data collection was undertaken between 2012 and 2015 across Australia. Importantly the project found that over one-third of the homeless youth surveyed reported domestic violence had occurred prior to leaving home and nearly two-thirds had been in some form of out of home (state) care by the time they had turned 18. Half of the homeless youth surveyed reported they had been diagnosed with some form of mental health issue and that they were much more likely to have come into contact with the criminal justice system than the general population and similarly disadvantaged youth."
Homelessness in Australia,"Centre for Social Impact
The Centre for Social Impact's research sits on the bedrock of leading universities. They develop and bring together knowledge to understand current social challenges and opportunities to create a better world. Working ethically and with rigour, across disciplines and by ensuring people, community and organisations are central.
The focus over the next five years will be on reducing social inequality and understanding and addressing key complex social problems."
Homelessness in Australia,"Awareness days
Youth Refuge Week – occurred in the 1980s, was covered in the Australian press, with youth refuges participating in events.
Youth Homelessness Matters Day – begun in 2005, coordinated by the National Youth Coalition for Housing.
Homeless Persons' Week – originating from various churches and missions running winter vigils to remember people who had died on the streets, in 2007, Homelessness Australia began coordinating the event as a national awareness week."
Homelessness in Australia,"See also
Australian residential rental market
Poverty in Australia
Supported Accommodation Assistance Program
Home ownership in Australia
Public housing in Australia
Mental health:"
Homelessness in Australia,"Deinstitutionalisation
Homelessness and mental health
Post traumatic stress disorder
Psychological trauma"
Homelessness in Australia,"References
External links
Homelessness Australia
Homeless People & Homelessness
Rents fuel plight of homeless young
The University of Sydney: Study reveals stress (PTSD) factor in homelessness"
Anglican Church of Australia,"The Anglican Church of Australia, formerly known as the Church of England in Australia and Tasmania, is a Christian church in Australia and an autonomous church of the Anglican Communion. It is the second largest church in Australia after the Catholic Church. According to the 2016 census, 3.1 million Australians identify as Anglicans. As of 2016, the Anglican Church of Australia had more than 3 million nominal members and 437,880 active baptised members. For much of Australian history since the arrival of the First Fleet in January 1788, the church was the largest religious denomination. It remains today one of the largest providers of social welfare services in Australia."
Anglican Church of Australia,"History
When the First Fleet was sent to New South Wales in 1787, Richard Johnson of the Church of England was licensed as chaplain to the fleet and the settlement. In 1825 Thomas Scott was appointed Archdeacon of Australia under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Calcutta, Reginald Heber. William Grant Broughton, who succeeded Scott in 1829, was consecrated the first (and only) ""Bishop of Australia"" in 1836. "
Anglican Church of Australia,"In early Colonial times, the Church of England clergy worked closely with the governors. Richard Johnson, a chaplain, was charged by the governor, Arthur Phillip, with improving ""public morality"" in the colony, but he was also heavily involved in health and education. Samuel Marsden (1765–1838) had magisterial duties, and so was equated with the authorities by the convicts. He became known as the ""flogging parson"" for the severity of his punishments. Some of the Irish convicts had been transported to Australia for political crimes or social rebellion in Ireland, so the authorities were suspicious of Roman Catholicism for the first three decades of settlement and Roman Catholic convicts were compelled to attend Church of England services and their children and orphans were raised by the authorities as Anglicans.
The Church of England lost its legal privileges in the Colony of New South Wales by the Church Act of 1836. Drafted by the reformist attorney-general John Plunkett, the act established legal equality for Anglicans, Roman Catholics and Presbyterians and was later extended to Methodists.
A mission to the Aboriginal peoples was established in the Wellington Valley in New South Wales by the Church Missionary Society in 1832, but it ended in failure and indigenous people in the 19th century demonstrated a reluctance to convert to the religion of the colonists who were seizing their lands."
Anglican Church of Australia,"In 1842 the Diocese of Tasmania was created. In 1847 the rest of the Diocese of Australia was divided into the four separate dioceses of Sydney, Adelaide, Newcastle and Melbourne. Over the following 80 years the number of dioceses increased to 25."
Anglican Church of Australia,"Sectarianism in Australia tended to reflect the political inheritance of Britain and Ireland. Until 1945, the vast majority of Roman Catholics in Australia were of Irish descent, causing the Anglo-Protestant majority to question their loyalty to the British Empire. The Australian Constitution of 1901 provided for freedom of religion. Australian society was predominantly Anglo-Celtic, with 40% of the population being Anglican.
In the early years of the 20th century the Church of England transformed itself in its patterns of worship, in the internal appearances of its churches, and in the forms of piety recommended by its clergy. The changes represented a heightened emphasis on the sacraments and were introduced by younger clergy trained in England and inspired by the Oxford and Anglo-Catholic movements. The church's women and its upper and middle class parishes were most supportive, overcoming the reluctance of some of the men. The changes were widely adopted by the 1920s, making the Church of England more self-consciously ""Anglican"" and distinct from other Protestant churches. Controversy erupted, especially in New South Wales, between the politically liberal proponents of the Social Gospel, who wanted more Church attention to the social ills of society, and conservative elements. The opposition of the strong conservative evangelical forces within the Sydney diocese limited the liberals during the 1930s, but their ideas contributed to the formation of the influential post-World War II Christian Social Order Movement.
It remained the largest Christian denomination until the 1986 census. After World War II, the ethnic and cultural mix of Australia diversified and Anglicanism gave way to Roman Catholicism as the largest denomination. The number of Anglicans attending regular worship began to decline in 1959 and figures for occasional services (baptisms, confirmations, weddings and funerals) started to decline after 1966. In recent times, the Anglican and other Christian churches of Australia have been active in ecumenical activity. The Australian Committee for the World Council of Churches was established in 1946 by the Anglican and mainline Protestant churches. The movement evolved and expanded with Eastern and Oriental Orthodox churches later joining and by 1994 the Roman Catholic Church was also a member of the national ecumenical body, the National Council of Churches in Australia.
Since 1 January 1962 the Australian church has been autocephalous and headed by its own primate. On 24 August 1981 the church officially changed its name from the Church of England in Australia and Tasmania to the Anglican Church of Australia.
Although the Book of Common Prayer remains the official standard for Anglican belief and worship in Australia, An Australian Prayer Book (AAPB) was published in 1978 after a prolonged revision of liturgy. Another alternative service book, A Prayer Book for Australia (APBA), was published in 1995.
In 1985 the general synod of the Australian church passed a canon to allow the ordination of women as deacons. In 1992 the general synod approved legislation allowing dioceses to ordain women to the priesthood. Dioceses could choose to adopt the legislation. In 1992, 90 women were ordained in the Anglican Church of Australia and two others who had been ordained overseas were recognised. After decades of debate the issue of women's ordination, particularly as bishops, continues to divide traditionalists and reformers within the church. As of November 2013 five dioceses had not ordained women as priests and two had not ordained women as deacons. The most recent diocese to vote in favour of ordaining women as priests was the Ballarat diocese in October 2013. In 2008, Kay Goldsworthy was ordained as an assistant bishop for the Diocese of Perth, thus becoming the first woman consecrated as a bishop of the Anglican Church of Australia. Sarah Macneil was elected in 2013 to be the first female diocesan bishop in Australia. In 2014 she was consecrated and installed as the first female diocesan bishop in Australia (for the Diocese of Grafton in New South Wales).
The church remains a major provider of education and welfare services in Australia. It provides chaplains to the Australian Defence Force, hospitals, schools, industry and prisons. Senior clergy such as Peter Jensen, former Archbishop of Sydney, have a high profile in discussions on a diverse range of social issues in contemporary national debates. In recent times the church has encouraged its leaders to talk on such issues as indigenous rights; international security; peace and justice; and poverty and equity. The current primate is Geoffrey Smith, Archbishop of Adelaide, who commenced in the role on 7 April 2020 after Philip Freier stepped down on 31 March 2020.
Like other religious groups, the church has come under criticism in light of cases of sexual abuse by clergy and others."
Anglican Church of Australia,"2022 split
On 16 August 2022, the church experienced a split when some conservatives formed the breakaway Diocese of the Southern Cross. It is led by a former Archbishop of Sydney, Glenn Davies. The split was principally caused over same sex marriage among other issues. This diocese is backed by the current Archbishop of Sydney, Kanishka Raffel, and the Bishop of Tasmania, Richard Condie. In September 2022, the Diocese of Sydney voted to declare the church to be in a state of ""deep breach of fellowship"" as a result of the division. The diocese vowed to provide support for orthodox Anglicans both within the Anglican Church of Australia and the breakaway Diocese of the Southern Cross."
Anglican Church of Australia,"Demographics and structure
Until the 1986 census, Australia's most populous Christian church was the Anglican Church of Australia. Since then Roman Catholics have outnumbered Anglicans by an increasing margin. One rationale to explain this relates to changes in Australia's immigration patterns. Before the Second World War, the majority of immigrants to Australia had come from the United Kingdom – though most of Australia's Roman Catholic immigrants had come from Ireland. After World War II, Australia's immigration program diversified and more than 6.5 million migrants arrived in Australia in the 60 years after the war, including more than a million Roman Catholics.
Census data shows that as a percentage of population Anglican affiliation peaked in 1921 at 43.7%, and the number of persons indicating Anglican affiliation peaked in 1991 at 4 million. In the 2016 there were 3,101,000 Anglicans, representing 13.3 per cent of the population. (See accompanying graph.) 
Unlike other churches, the Anglican Church of Australia does not publish churchwide attendance statistics. In 2011, the National Church Life Survey estimated that 155,000 Australians attended an Anglican church weekly, down from 191,600 in 1991. However, the church does tabulate figures on clergy, which are used to allocate diocesan representation at General Synod. In 2015, there were 2,441 active bishops, priests and deacons in the church, up from 2,340 in 1991. 
The Australian church consists of twenty-three dioceses arranged into five provinces (except for Tasmania) with the metropolitical sees in the states' capital cities. Anglican clergy are concentrated in Australia's major cities, with the five metropolitical dioceses accounting for 64 percent of active clergy. When adding the mixed urban and rural dioceses of Canberra and Goulburn, Newcastle, Northern Territory and Tasmania, urban areas account for 79 percent of active clergy. The evangelical Diocese of Sydney is by far the largest diocese; in 2011, its 58,300 weekly attenders accounted for 37.6 percent of the Anglican Church's weekly attendance, and in 2015, the diocese's 688 active clergy accounted for 28.1 percent of the active clergy across the church.
Broughton Publishing is the church's national publishing arm."
Anglican Church of Australia,"Indigenous ministry
The National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Anglican Council (NATSIAC) appoints two Indigenous bishops for national work with indigenous people: the National Aboriginal Bishop (currently Chris McLeod) is based in South Australia (as an assistant bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Adelaide); while the National Torres Strait Islander Bishop (currently vacant) is based at Thursday Island, Queensland (as an assistant bishop of the Anglican Diocese of North Queensland). Gloria Shipp was the first woman elected Chair of NATSIAC."
Anglican Church of Australia,"Society, arts and culture
Welfare and education
Anglicans have played a prominent role in welfare and education since Colonial times, when First Fleet chaplain Richard Johnson was credited by one convict as ""the physician both of soul and body"" during the famine of 1790 and was charged with general supervision of schools. Today the church remains a significant provider of social welfare with organisations working in education, health, missionary work, social welfare and communications. Welfare organisations include Anglicare and Samaritans. The Anglicare network comprises 9000 volunteers beyond paid staff, who assisted some 940,000 Australians in 2016 in areas such as emergency relief, aged care, family support and assistance for the homeless.
There are around 145 Anglican schools in Australia, providing for more than 105,000 children. Church schools range from low-fee, regional and special needs schools to high-fee leading independent schools such as Geelong Grammar (whose alumni include Charles III and Rupert Murdoch) and The Kings School in Sydney. Anglican Schools Australia is the national schools network of the general synod."
Anglican Church of Australia,"Architecture
The first Church of England edifice was built in the colony of New South Wales in 1793. Today, most towns in Australia have at least one Christian church. One of Australia's oldest Anglican churches is St James' Church in Sydney, built between 1819 and 1824. The historic church was designed by Governor Macquarie's architect, Francis Greenway – a former convict – and built with convict labour. The church is set on a sandstone base and built of face brick with the walls articulated by brick piers. Sydney's Anglican cathedral, St Andrew's, was consecrated in 1868 from foundations laid in the 1830s. Largely designed by Edmund Thomas Blacket in the Perpendicular Gothic style reminiscent of English cathedrals. Blacket also designed St Saviour's Cathedral in Goulburn, based on the Decorated Gothic style of a large English parish church and built between 1874 and 1884.
St Paul's Cathedral, Melbourne, from a foundation stone laid in 1880, is a Melbourne landmark. It was designed by the distinguished English architect William Butterfield in Gothic Transitional.
Tasmania is home to a number of significant colonial Anglican buildings including those located at Australia's best preserved convict era settlement, Port Arthur. According to 19th century notions of prisoner reform, the Model Prison incorporates a grim chapel, into which prisoners in solitary confinement were shepherded to listen (in individual enclosures) to the preacher's Sunday sermon – their only permitted interaction with another human being. Adelaide, the capital of South Australia has long been known as the City of Churches and its St Peter's Anglican Cathedral is a noted city landmark.
The oldest building in the city of Canberra is the picturesque St John the Baptist Church in Reid, consecrated in 1845. This church long predates the city of Canberra and is not so much representative of urban design as it is of the Bush chapels which dot the Australian landscape and stretch even into the far Outback.
A number of notable Victorian era chapels and edifices were also constructed at church schools across Australia. Along with community attitudes to religion, church architecture changed significantly during the 20th century."
Anglican Church of Australia,"Ordination of women
Since 1985 the church has permitted the ordination of women on a diocesan basis. The first woman to be ordained was Marion Macfarlane, ordained to the ""Female Diaconate"" in 1884 in the Diocese of Melbourne. In 1992, the first women were ordained as priests, initially in the Diocese of Perth and then around the country. In 2008, the Diocese of Perth consecrated the first female bishop, the Rt Revd Kay Goldsworthy. In 2014, the Diocese of Grafton consecrated and installed the first female diocesan bishop, the Rt Revd Sarah Macneil. Bishop Kay Goldsworthy became the second female diocesan bishop when she was enthroned as bishop of Gippsland then in 2018 she was installed as Archbishop of Perth. The dioceses of Sydney, North West Australia and formerly The Murray did not ordain women as priests. In 2017, the Diocese of The Murray ordained its first female deacon, becoming the last diocese to ordain women to the diaconate. In August 2017, the Anglicans of Western Australia elected the Anglican Church of Australia's first female archbishop, Kay Goldsworthy. In a statement representing a conservative and complementarian view, Bishop Gary Nelson said that Archbishop Goldsworthy ""would not be recognised in her new role"" as the metropolitan for the province.
In June 2023 the Synod of The Murray voted to allow the ordination of women as priests and on 12 August 2023, Bishop Keith Dalby ordained three women and one man to the priesthood. 
Of the 23 Anglican dioceses in Australia, only two have never ordained women to the priesthood: the Diocese of Sydney and the Diocese of North West Australia. The Diocese of Armidale does not generally ordain women to the priesthood but two women were ordained priest for the Anglican girls school."
Anglican Church of Australia,"Same-sex unions and LGBT clergy
In the Seventeenth Session of the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Australia in 2017, the Anglican Church passed a motion recognising ""that the doctrine of our church, in line with traditional Christian teaching, is that marriage is an exclusive and lifelong union of a man and a woman, and further, recognises that this has been the subject of several General Synod resolutions over the past fifteen years"". In 2018, the then-Primate of Australia and Archbishop of Melbourne, Philip Freier, released an ad clerum reiterating the current position that clergy cannot perform a same-sex marriage.  In 2020, the church's highest court, the Appellate Tribunal, ruled that a diocese may authorise the blessing of persons in same-sex unions. At the same time, the church does not have an official stance on homosexuality itself.
During a meeting, the House of Bishops stated that they ""accept the weight of 1998 Lambeth Resolution 1.10 and the 2004 General Synod resolutions 33, 59 and 61–64 as expressing the mind of this church on issues of human sexuality ... and understand that issues of sexuality are subject to ongoing conversation"". A former primate, Peter Carnley, supported the blessing of same-sex relationships and supported ""recognition of lifelong friendships between two homosexuals which would give them the same legal status as a heterosexual married couple"". A spokesman for Phillip Aspinall, the Archbishop of Brisbane, stated that ""In effect it is an undertaking not to ordain, license, authorise or appoint persons whom the bishop knows to be in a sexual relationship outside of marriage."" At the same time, Archbishop Aspinall stated that he personally does not take an official position. Despite what the spokesman said, however, an Anglican priest came out as gay in 2005 in Melbourne. In the Diocese of Perth, ""there are gay and lesbian clergy serving in the priesthood."" Archbishop Roger Herft, as a diocesan bishop, ""support[ed] blessing gay unions"". In 2012, a bishop ""appoint[ed] a gay priest in a same-sex partnership to a Gippsland parish."" The Anglican Diocese of Sydney, the largest of the country, has expressed its opposition to same-sex unions and has been involved in the Anglican realignment as a member of the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans.
However, many clergy and bishops support same-sex unions. The Wangaratta and Ballarat dioceses have voted to support the blessing of same-sex civil unions. The dioceses of Wangaratta and Newcastle have approved of blessing rites for same-sex marriages. Blessings for same-sex unions are also permitted in the Diocese of Brisbane. In 2012, the Diocese of Gippsland appointed an openly partnered gay priest. In 2013, the Diocese of Perth voted in favour of recognising same-sex unions. Archbishop Roger Herft vetoed the Perth motion. In 2015, the Bishop of Wangaratta endorsed same-sex marriage legislation and some diocesan clergy offered to perform gay marriages when allowed to do so. In the Diocese of Grafton, former bishop Sarah Macneil took an affirming stance. Bishop Greg Thompson of the Diocese of Newcastle had taken a stance in favour of gay rights.
In 2015, an arm of the Anglican Church in Southern Queensland voted in favour of same-sex civil unions. Also, Bishop Kay Goldsworthy appointed an openly gay and partnered priest to another post. In response, the Sydney synod passed a resolution criticising the actions of the Dioceses of Gippsland and Wangaratta, and declaring a break ""of collegiality and fellowship"" with the dioceses.  In 2016, the Bishop of Ballarat declared his support for same-sex marriage. In April 2016, a parish in the Diocese of Perth blessed the union of a same-sex couple. At its general synod in 2017, a resolution was passed criticising the Scottish Episcopal Church for its acceptance of same-sex marriage as well as an additional resolution calling for the church in Australia ""to have a series of conversations on its understanding of sexuality"". Also in 2017, the Diocese of Perth in Western Australia elected Bishop Kay Goldsworthy as its archbishop. Goldsworthy said that she supports an ""inclusive"" approach to same-sex marriage. ""Archbishop Goldsworthy revealed that she had voted Yes in the same-sex marriage survey."" In 2022, Goldsworthy ordained an openly gay man in a civil partnership in Perth. 
Regarding transgender issues, there are dioceses and congregations with serving transgender clergy. In 2017, Archbishop Phillip Aspinall asked for ""prayerful support"" for the Revd Josephine Inkpin who had transitioned and come out as a transgender woman. ""The Archbishop of Brisbane Dr Phillip Aspinall supported Dr Inkpin and passed on her statement to clergy in July 2017, along with his wish that 'unhelpful speculation' might be avoided."" Inkpin continues to serve in the Brisbane diocese. She shared that the bishops and leaders of the Diocese of Brisbane ""have assisted in arrangements for enabling [her] public recognition of gender."" Inkpin, who is married to the Revd Penny Jones, one of the first female priests ordained in Australia, is the first openly transgender priest in Australia. The State Library of Queensland interviewed Inkpin and her wife about the intersection of gender, faith, religion and identity for their ""Dangerous Women"" podcast.
Controversy over LGBT issues caused a split from the church in 2022: a former Archbishop of Sydney, Glenn Davies, alongside two congregations, left the Anglican Church of Australia to form the newly-formed Diocese of the Southern Cross which is affiliated to the conservative Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (GAFCON). The split was endorsed by the Bishop of Tasmania, Richard Condie and the Archbishop of Sydney Kanishka Raffel, but was described as ""dangerous for the Church"" by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby."
Anglican Church of Australia,"Provinces and dioceses
The whole church is led by the primate, Geoffrey Smith, Archbishop of Adelaide.
The provinces and dioceses are listed with each diocese's bishop or archbishop:"
Anglican Church of Australia,"Province of South Australia (Metropolitan: Geoffrey Smith, Archbishop of Adelaide)
Adelaide (Archbishop: Geoffrey Smith)
The Murray (Vacant)
Willochra (Jeremy James)
Province of New South Wales (Metropolitan: Kanishka Raffel, Archbishop of Sydney)
Armidale (Rod Chiswell)
Bathurst (Mark Calder)
Canberra and Goulburn (Mark Short)
Grafton (Murray Harvey)
Newcastle (Peter Stuart)
Riverina (Donald Kirk)
Sydney (Archbishop: Kanishka Raffel)
Province of Victoria (Metropolitan: Philip Freier, Archbishop of Melbourne)
Ballarat (Garry Weatherill)
Bendigo (Matthew Brain)
Gippsland (Richard Treloar)
Melbourne (Archbishop: Philip Freier)
Wangaratta (Clarence Bester)
Province of Queensland (Metropolitan: Jeremy Greaves, Archbishop of Brisbane)
Brisbane (Archbishop: Jeremy Greaves)
North Queensland (Keith Joseph)
Northern Territory (Greg Anderson)
Rockhampton (Peter Grice)
Province of Western Australia (Metropolitan: Kay Goldsworthy, Archbishop of Perth)
Bunbury (Ian Coutts)
North West Australia (Darrell Parker)
Perth (Archbishop: Kay Goldsworthy)
Extraprovincial diocese
Tasmania (Richard Condie)"
Anglican Church of Australia,"Map of dioceses
A number of former dioceses have been merged into the current diocese or have formed other Anglican churches:"
Anglican Church of Australia,"Carpentaria (formerly part of the Province of Queensland, 1900–1996, and now part of the Diocese of North Queensland)
Kalgoorlie (formerly part of the Province of Western Australia, 1914–1973, and now part of the Diocese of Perth)
New Guinea (formerly part of the Province of Queensland, 1898–1976, and now the Anglican Church of Papua New Guinea)
St Arnaud (formerly part of the Province of Victoria, 1926–1976, and now part of the Diocese of Bendigo)"
Anglican Church of Australia,"Ecumenical relations
The church is a member of the Christian Conference of Asia."
Anglican Church of Australia,"Relation with the Anglican realignment
The Anglican Diocese of Sydney has been a leading name in the Anglican realignment, since they first opposed the sexuality policies of the Episcopal Church of the United States and the Anglican Church of Canada. Archbishop Peter Jensen attended the first Global Anglican Future Conference, in June 2008, in Jerusalem, and was the chairman of GAFCON. The Anglican Diocese of Sydney and the Anglican Diocese of North West Australia have declared themselves in full communion with the Anglican Church in North America, started in June 2009, which represents Anglican realignment in United States and Canada.
The Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans was launched in Australia on 26 March 2015, in a conference held in Melbourne that reunited 460 members, including 40 from New Zealand, and was attended by Archbishop Eliud Wabukala, from the Anglican Church of Kenya, their international chairman, Archbishop Stanley Ntagali, from the Anglican Church of Uganda, and Archbishop Glenn Davies, from the Anglican Diocese of Sydney. The then archdeacon of the Anglican Diocese of Melbourne, now bishop Richard Condie, of the Anglican Diocese of Tasmania, became chairman of FCA Australia.
The Anglican Church of Australia passed a motion at their General Synod on 7 September 2017, condemning the Scottish Episcopal Church decision to approve same-sex marriage as ""contrary to the doctrine of our church and the teaching of Christ"", and declaring itself in ""impaired communion"" with the province. It also expressed ""support for those Anglicans who have left or will need to leave (...) because of its redefinition of marriage and those who struggle and remain"", and presented their prayers for the return of SEC ""to the doctrine of Christ in this matter"" and the restoration of the impaired communion.
The Anglican Church of Australia was represented at GAFCON III, held in Jerusalem on 17–22 June 2018, by a 218 members delegation, which included Archbishop Glenn Davies of Sydney and  bishops Richard Condie of Tasmania, Gary Nelson of North West Australia and Ian Palmer of Bathurst.
In 2022 the Diocese of the Southern Cross, established as a company, became the first Anglican diocese in Australia to form outside the Anglican Church of Australia."
Anglican Church of Australia,"See also
Christianity in Australia
Anglican Communion sexual abuse cases
List of the first women ordained as priests in the Anglican Church of Australia in 1992"
Anglican Church of Australia,"References
Further reading
Blombery, Tricia (1996). The Anglicans in Australia. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service. ISBN 978-0-644-45913-6.
Breward, Ian. A History of the Australian Churches.
Bunting, Ian, ed. (1996). Celebrating the Anglican Way. London: Hodder & Stoughton. ISBN 978-0-340-64268-9.
Davis, John (1993). Australian Anglicans and their Constitution. Canberra: Acorn Press. ISBN 978-0-908284-14-6.
Elkin, A. P. (1955). The Diocese of Newcastle: A History.
Harris, John. One Blood: 200 Years of Aboriginal Encounter with Christianity.
Hilliard, David (1986). Godliness and Good Order: A History of the Anglican Church in South Australia. Netley, South Australia: Wakefield Press. ISBN 978-0-949268-45-7.
Judd, Stephen; Cable, Kenneth J. Sydney Anglicans: A History of the Diocese. Sydney: Anglican Information Office.
Kaye, Bruce Norman (1995). A Church Without Walls: Being Anglican in Australia. North Blackburn, Victoria: Dove. ISBN 978-1-86371-557-7.
Porter, Brian, ed. (1997). Melbourne Anglican: The Diocese of Melbourne, 1847–1997. Melbourne: Mitre Books. ISBN 978-1-86407-181-8.
Porter, Muriel (1989). Women in the Church: The Great Ordination Debate in Australia. Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-013041-6.
— (2006). The New Puritans: The Rise of Fundamentalism in the Anglican Church. Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Publishing. ISBN 978-0-522-85184-7."
Anglican Church of Australia,"External links
Official website
Anglican Communion: Anglican Church of Australia"
Animal attacks in Australia,"Wildlife attacks in Australia occur every year from several different native species, including snakes, spiders, freshwater and saltwater crocodiles, various sharks, cassowaries, kangaroos, stingrays and stonefish and a variety of smaller marine creatures such as bluebottles, blue-ringed octopus, cone shells and jellyfish.
It is estimated that there are about 100,000 dog attacks in Australia each year."
Animal attacks in Australia,"Land
Cassowary
Cassowaries have a reputation for being dangerous to people and domestic animals. The 2007 edition of the Guinness World Records lists the cassowary as the world's most dangerous bird. During World War II American and Australian troops stationed in New Guinea were warned to steer clear of them.
In his book Living Birds of the World from 1958, ornithologist Thomas E. Gilliard wrote:"
Animal attacks in Australia,"The inner or second of the three toes is fitted with a long, straight, murderous nail which can sever an arm or eviscerate an abdomen with ease. There are many records of natives being killed by this bird.
However, Gilliard did not include any such records or any references for them, and although this assessment of the danger posed by cassowaries has been repeated in print by authors including Gregory S. Paul (1988), and Jared Diamond (1997) recent research on hundreds of cassowary attacks has only been able to find one human death.
A 2003 study of attacks by the southern cassowary in Queensland found no wounds larger than punctures about 1.5 centimetres in diameter. Of 221 attacks studied, 150 were against humans. A total of 75% of these were from cassowaries that had been fed by people. In 71% of cases the bird chased or charged the victim. In 15% of cases they kicked. Of the attacks, 73% involved the birds expecting or snatching food, 5% involved defending natural food sources, 15% involved defending themselves from attack, 7% involved defending their chicks or eggs. Of all 150 attacks there was only one human death.
The one documented human death caused by a cassowary was that of Phillip Mclean, aged 16, and it happened on 6 April 1926. He and his brother, aged 13, were attempting to beat the cassowary to death with clubs. They were accompanied by their dog. The bird kicked the younger boy, who fell and ran away. Then the older boy struck the bird. The bird charged and knocked the older boy to the ground. While on the ground, Phillip was kicked in the neck, opening a 1.25 centimetre wound. Phillip got up and ran but died shortly afterwards from the haemorrhaging blood vessel in his neck.
Cassowary strikes to the abdomen are among the rarest of all, but there is one case of a dog that was kicked in the belly in 1995. The blow left no puncture, but there was severe bruising. The dog later died from an apparent intestinal rupture."
Animal attacks in Australia,"Dingoes
Dingo attacks in Australia are rare but can happen. Dingos are more of a danger to livestock such as sheep which is why the Dingo Fence was constructed. As wild dogs are large predators, they can be potentially dangerous to humans. The likelihood of wild dogs being a danger to humans depends to a large degree on how humans behave toward them. The more frequently these dogs are fed or scavenge human leftovers, the more likely it is that they lose all caution and sometimes react aggressively towards humans when they no longer receive or find food. Even when habituation to humans seems to be the cause for attacks, it is not clear what the ultimate cause for attacks and overall threat towards humans is. The first well documented case of a dingo attack on Fraser Island is from the year 1988. Already 60 years before, a newspaper account reported of problems with dingoes. Between 1996 and 2001 altogether 279 incidences with dingoes have been reported, with 39 of the cases assessed as ""major"" and one as ""catastrophic"". In April 2001 at Waddy Point on Fraser Island, a nine-year-old male was attacked and killed by two dingoes.
On 19 August 1980 a nine-week-old girl named Azaria Chamberlain was captured by a dingo near the Uluru and killed. Her mother was suspected and convicted of murder. Four years later she was released from prison when the jacket of the baby was found in a dingo den and the mother was therefore found innocent. This incident caused much outcry for and against the dingoes. To be better prepared for dingo attacks demands were made that a better recording of problematic cases should be implemented. Also non-lethal guns, spray cans with appropriate content, whips and aversive baits should be used to increase the caution of the dingoes. ""Problem-dingoes"" should be killed, since relocation attempts proved to be ineffective."
Animal attacks in Australia,"Emu
Emu attacks are rare but have occurred. When attacked, the emu will move in a zigzag pattern to prevent attacks from the wedge tailed eagle, or use kicking at close range. In 1932 many emus moved into farm territory in Western Australia, with the army called in to dispatch them in the so-called Emu War. Some attacks noted include in 1957 an emu charged a car, in 1904 an emu attacked a dog's owner after the dog attacked it, in 1873 an emu attacked children and a woman at Johnstone Park, Geelong. A man fell off a horse which was attacked by an emu in Bullarook in 1864 which went to court as Seagrave v Tarte, where the judge ruled the emu is ferae naturae."
Animal attacks in Australia,"Kangaroos
Kangaroo attacks in Australia are rare because kangaroos are usually docile; however, they can attack when provoked or cornered, and they have been known to kill dogs. Very occasionally they can attack even if not provoked. If there is a shortage of food, kangaroos will enter suburbs, and may attack (which may be unintentional or in self-defence), as noted in Melbourne and Canberra.
There were two incidents in 1999 and 2002, and 15 to 20 reports in the area between Coffs Harbour and Sydney. The New South Wales Court of Appeal ruled in Shorten v Grafton District Golf Club (2000) that a golf course had a duty of care to warn patrons of the danger of kangaroo attack, after a 13-year-old boy was injured by one in 1996.
The Queensland Department of Environment and Resource Management mentions kangaroos can be aggressive towards people, and advises that if approached by an aggressive kangaroo, people should keep it at a distance so that it cannot kick or scratch. An Animal Planet video on avoiding kangaroo attacks says the main defence is to keep moving out of the animal's kicking range.
Several of the attacks have been widely reported in international media. In particular a 1988 attack in the Grampians which was filmed was shown on World's Most Shocking Moments and reported elsewhere. The 1996 attack on the golf course in Grafton was shown on After the Attack and reported by National Geographic and others. The recent attacks in Sunbury were widely reported in Australia as well as international media. In March 2009 a kangaroo smashed through the window of a suburban house in Garran which also made international news.
A 77-year-old man has died in 2022 after being attacked by a kangaroo he had been keeping as a pet in Redmond, Western Australia. It is the first fatal kangaroo attack reported in Australia since 1936."
Animal attacks in Australia,"Magpies
The Australian magpie often swoops people in suburban areas. There are three known deaths from a magpie attack: one caused by tetanus, a second when an elderly cyclist crashed his bicycle while attempting to avoid being dive-bombed, and most recently in August 2021 a third death when a baby died as a mother tried to protect her from a swooping magpie. Magpies are ubiquitous in urban areas all over Australia, and have become accustomed to people. A small percentage of birds become highly aggressive during breeding season from late August to early October, and will swoop and sometimes attack passers by. These magpies may engage in an escalating series of behaviours to drive off intruders. Least threatening are alarm calls and distant swoops, where birds fly within several metres from behind and perch nearby. Next in intensity are close swoops, where a magpie will swoop in from behind or the side and audibly ""snap"" their beaks or even peck or bite at the face, neck, ears or eyes. More rarely, a bird may dive-bomb and strike the intruder's (usually a cyclist's) head with its chest. A magpie may rarely attack by landing on the ground in front of a person, lurching up and pecking at the face and eyes. Attacks begin as the eggs hatch, and tail off as the chicks leave the nest.
Magpie attacks can cause injuries, including wounds to the head and the eyes, with the potential for bacterial infections from a beak used to fossick in the ground. A case of anaphylaxis was reported after a Magpie attack. If it is necessary to walk near the nest, wearing a broad-brimmed or legionnaire's hat or using an umbrella will deter attacking birds, but beanies and bicycle helmets are not entirely effective, as birds can attack the sides of the head and neck. Magpies prefer to swoop at the back of the head; therefore, keeping the magpie in sight at all times can discourage the bird. Magpies are a protected native species in Australia, and it is illegal to kill or harm them. However, this protection is removed in some Australian states if a magpie attacks and harms a human, allowing for the bird to be killed if it is considered particularly aggressive (such a provision is made, for example, in section 54 of the South Australian National Parks and Wildlife Act)."
Animal attacks in Australia,"Snakes
Snake attacks in Australia which cause deaths are less common than they used to be due to increased medical knowledge and more readily available antivenom. Around half of all deaths from snakebites are caused by brown snakes. In Australia, the only continent where venomous snakes constitute the majority of species, the kraits, tiger snake and eastern brown snake inflict virtually all reported venomous bites. with the latter responsible for perhaps 60% of deaths caused by snakebite. Although Australian snakes are among the most venomous in the world (the inland or western taipan having the most toxic venom), wide access to antivenom has made deaths exceedingly rare, with only a few fatalities each year. Australian snakes are known to possess particularly potent venom: 10 of the world's most venomous snakes, as measured by LD50 in mice, inhabit the continent.
The estimated incidence of snakebites annually in Australia is between 3 and 18 per 100,000 with an average mortality rate of 4 per 100,000 per year. Between 1979 and 1998 there were 53 deaths from snakes, according to data obtained from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Between 1942 and 1950 there were 56 deaths from snakebite recorded in Australia. Of 28 deaths in the 1945–49 period, 18 occurred in Queensland, 6 in New South Wales, 3 in Western Australia and 1 in Tasmania.
Availability of antivenom has reduced the number of fatalities from tiger snake bite, which previously had caused the most fatalities. Four types of tiger snake ranked among the top 10 of the world's most venomous snakes. The inland taipan is the most venomous land snake in the world, but is only located in remote desert regions. The red-bellied black snake is common, but less venomous than other deadly snakes."
Animal attacks in Australia,"Spiders
There are spider attacks in Australia every year, but deaths are much less common, and are mostly in the very young or old. There have been 14 recorded deaths due to funnel-web spider bite.
Between 1963 and 1976 there were more than 2000 cases of redback spider bites reported to the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories. There are more than 250 cases of redback spider bite which receive antivenom each year. There are around 2000 redback spider bites each year, while antivenom for funnel-web spider bites has been given to more than 100 patients since 1980.
It is believed that thousands of people are bitten each year across Australia by the redback spider, although only about 20% of bite victims require treatment.
Besides the funnel-web spider and the redback spider, there is also the mouse spider which can cause severe illness in young children, although serious cases are rare. The white-tailed spider's bite can cause nausea and local pain."
Animal attacks in Australia,"Oceans, coasts and rivers
Blue-ringed octopus
The blue ringed octopus (Hapalochlaena maculosa) is only 10 cm long but carries enough tetrodotoxin venom to kill 26 adults, although records indicate it has only killed 3 humans. There is no blue-ringed octopus antivenom available. Very few cases of children being envenomated are reported."
Animal attacks in Australia,"Jelly fish
Jellyfish stings in Australia can cause death, with there being several venomous species of jellyfish including the box jellyfish and Irukandji jellyfish. Bluebottles are often mistaken for jellyfish but are in fact siphonophores."
Animal attacks in Australia,"Bluebottle
The Australian bluebottle is Physalia utriculus or Pacific man o'war (not to be confused with Physalia physalis), belongs to the phylum Cnidaria, which includes corals and sea anemones, and stings from it rarely cause death. Outside Australia the other species, Physalia physalis, are known as the ""Portuguese man o'war"".
The bluebottle is responsible for between 10,000 and 30,000 stings on the eastern coast of Australia each summer, with only around 500 in Western Australia and South Australia combined. In 2006, there were 26,000 stings in New South Wales, with 4,256 in Queensland.
There have only been a few recorded fatalities and none in recent times. In December 1939 a three-year-old boy was stung on the leg while walking in 200 millimetres (8 in) of water at Proserpine. His death was described as the fifth death from a Portuguese man o'war in 32 years. An eleven-year-old male was stung in March 1938 by a bluebottle near Darwin, dying a few minutes after being stung. A nineteen-year-old male was stung in January 1937 by a bluebottle at Branston, near Cairns. He was waist deep in water when stung and after moving 9 metres (30 ft) he collapsed and died. Salvatore Cantarelle, an Italian cane farmer received a fatal sting in December 1934 by a bluebottle at Coogarra Beach, near Tully Another youth also died in January 1930 from a fatal bluebottle sting at Picnic Bay, Magnetic Island, stung while bathing."
Animal attacks in Australia,"Box jellyfish
Box jellyfish (Chironex fleckeri) have caused more than 79 deaths in Australia since records began in the 1880s. Recent fatalities from box jellyfish stings include a 17-year-old boy in March 2021 swimming at a beach near Bamaga on Queensland's western Cape York; a seven-year-old girl in January 2006 at Umagico Beach near Bamaga; a seven-year-old boy in March 2003 near Cairns; and a 44-year-old male in April 2002 at Port Douglas."
Animal attacks in Australia,"Irukandji
Irukandji (Carukia barnesi) are found in Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia.
Between 1985 and 1997 from cases of Irukandji sting where location was recorded, there were 83.4% in Queensland, 9.1% in the Northern Territory, and 7.5% in Western Australia; 81.5% of cases occurred in the afternoon. In a fourteen-year period there were 660 Irukandji stings in Australia, which were recorded by Dr Fenner, a medical officer with Surf Lifesaving Australia. There were 159 Irukandji stings reported in Broome in a five-year period with 25% of those stung being hospitalised but no recorded deaths. There were 62 people reported being stung by Irukandji in Cairns in 1996; of these more than half occurred in December, 92% were stung on hotter than average days, with 63% occurring while swimming inside a stinger net enclosure on the beach. In summer 2001-02 there were 160 people stung by the middle of February, with around 100 of these in Cairns, and between 10 and 20 in Townsville, the Whitsundays, Great Keppel and Agnes Water. In January 2019, 19 people reported being stung in Queensland.
In January 2002 a 58-year-old male was fatally stung at Hamilton Island."
Animal attacks in Australia,"Cone shells
There are around 80 species of cone shell (Conus spp.) in Australian waters, some of which carry highly toxic venom when they are alive. A Conus geographus caused the death of a 27-year-old male in Hayman Island in 1935 after the man handled the cone and its radular tooth pierced his hand, injecting venom; he was unconscious by the time the launch returned to the mainland, and died on reaching the hospital."
Animal attacks in Australia,"Crocodiles
Crocodile attacks in Australia have occurred in the Northern Territory and Queensland. Nearly all crocodile attacks are caused by the saltwater crocodile, with the freshwater crocodile being smaller and less likely to attack.
Between 1971 and 2004 there were 62 crocodile attacks recorded, 17 of which were fatal. 39 of the attacks were in the Northern Territory (10 fatal), 15 in Queensland (5 fatal) and 8 in Western Australia (2 fatal). Of these attacks, the highest numbers occurred between September and December, although there was at least one in each month. All of the fatal attacks occurred while in water, rather than in a boat or on land.
From June 1981 to June 1991 there were 16 crocodile attacks reported in the Northern Territory, four of which were fatal.
The most recent fatal attacks include the October 2017 death of a grandmother who had gone missing a week prior to her remains and personal belongings being found inside a 4.3-metre crocodile; the January 2017 death of a 47-year-old man killed by a crocodile after attempting to wade across the East Alligator River at Cahill's Crossing near Kakadu National Park; and the death of 35-year-old Warren Hughes in March 2017 who was found two days after the spearfisherman's dinghy and speargun were discovered off Palmer Point, north of Innisfail, where investigations pointed to him being taken by a 4m crocodile. On 29 May 2016, 46-year-old Cindy Waldron was killed when she was dragged underwater during a late-night swim with a friend, who tried in vain to save her, at Thornton Beach in the Daintree National Park. On 17 May 2016, 75-year-old Noel Ramage drowned when a crocodile capsized his boat at Leaders Creek, Northern Territory.  In August 2014, 57-year-old Tran Van Lanh was taken by a crocodile on the Adelaide River when he waded into the water to free a fishing lure from a snag. In June 2014, 62-year-old fisherman Bill Scott was killed in front of his family by a 4.7 metre crocodile while on his boat in the Kakadu National Park. In January 2014 a 12-year-old indigenous boy was killed while swimming at Jabiru, Northern Territory. In August 2013 26-year-old Sean Cole was killed while racing a mate across the Mary River, 100 km from Darwin. An eleven-year-old girl was killed in 2009 in the Northern Territory; a five-year-old boy killed on 8 February 2009 in Queensland by a 4.3 metre crocodile; a 62-year-old man in September 2008 in Queensland while checking crab pots; a 37-year-old Canadian mine worker on 24 September 2005 at Picnic Beach, south of Umbakumba, who disappeared while snorkelling; a 22-year-old male in December 2003 at the Finniss River, 80 km SW of Darwin; and a 23-year-old female German tourist in 2002 at Kakadu, while swimming in a water hole. In February 2021 human remains were found inside the stomach of a 14-foot-long (4.2 meters) crocodile on Hinchinbrook Island, Queensland, which local authorities believed to likely belong to Andrew Heard, a 69-year-old fisherman who went missing from the area on 11 February (a second, 3m crocodile was also killed and examined).
Recent non-fatal attacks include a 60-year-old man who had been fishing on the banks of the McIvor River, near Hope Vale (Cape York, Queensland) who escaped the jaws of a crocodile by stabbing it in the head with a pocket knife as it dragged him into the river. A 32-year-old man was injured after a 5m crocodile jumped out of the water into his boat in Kakadu National Park on 24 April 2021. In January 2021 a 44-year-old man survived an attack from a 1.5m to 2m (4.9 ft to 6.5 ft) crocodile in Lake Placid, Queensland, by prising the crocodile's jaws from his head. on 7 May 2017 a 54-year-old man from the remote community of Palumpa was attacked by a 2m crocodile near the Daly River, suffering puncture wounds to his arm and chest. On 25 April 2016 a crocodile tried to drag 19-year-old Peter Rowsell from a tent by his foot at Palm Creek, in the Douglas Daly region of the Northern Territory. On 16 May 2015 29-year-old kitesurfer Chris Keeping fought off repeated attacks by a crocodile at Casuarina Coastal Reserve's Lee Point near Darwin. In April 2013 29-year-old Frenchman Yoann Galeran survived an attack at Nhulunbuy in Arnhem Land.
In Darwin Harbour, rangers routinely catch up to 300 crocodiles per year as part of a program designed to reduce the risk of fatal attacks. In November 2021, Banjo the Staffordshire bull terrier was attacked in the harbour by a crocodile estimated to be 2 to 3m long.
In 2022 Steve Irwin's son Robert was nearly attacked by a 12-foot crocodile while filming a television segment."
Animal attacks in Australia,"Sharks
The Australian Shark Attack File has recorded that since 1791 there have been 639 shark attacks in Australia with 190 of them being fatal. Since shark netting began in 1937, the number of deaths from sharks on beaches has been reduced in New South Wales, with only one fatal attack on a netted beach during that time. In Queensland there has not been a fatal attack on a netted beach since nets were introduced in the 1960s. There has been an average of 20 shark attacks per year since 2010.
The Australian Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts states precautions which can be taken to reduce the risk of shark attacks. These include avoiding swimming far from the shore, at the mouth of a river or on drop-offs to deeper water; avoiding swimming in dirty water, swimming alone or with domestic animals, near people fishing, not swimming at dusk or at night, and to leave the water if schools of fish behave erratically or group in large numbers.
Four species of sharks account for the vast majority of fatal attacks on humans: the bull shark, tiger shark, oceanic whitetip shark and the great white shark."
Animal attacks in Australia,"Stingrays
Stingray attacks in Australia usually cause minor cuts but have very occasionally led to deaths. There have been four recorded fatalities from stingray attacks in Australia. On 4 September 2006 Steve Irwin died from a stingray attack at Batt Reef near Port Douglas A twelve-year-old boy in 1988, who was hit by stingray jumping from the water, died six days later due to poison from the barb. Luigi Deguisto in June 1953 died at Weribee after a stingray punctured his thigh, piercing a vein. Sergeant Arthur Biggins died on 9 January 1945 at St Kilda Baths after a stingray wounded him in the heart. A 1938 death from a stingray attack of an 18-year-old girl in Auckland, New Zealand has sometimes been wrongly attributed as having happened in Australia."
Animal attacks in Australia,"Stonefish
Stonefish venom causes severe pain, poisoning and can cause death if not treated. The stonefish is the most venomous fish in the world. The stonefish has venom in its dorsal spines; when stepped on by a human, the venom is forced into the foot. Most stonefish stings occur when stepped on, it is less common for stings when the fish is picked up. Stonefish stings can occur on the beach, not just in the water, with stonefish being able to stay out of the water for up to 24 hours. They often cannot be seen easily as they look similar to rocks or coral. Stonefish antivenom is the second most administered in Australia.
Aborigines knew of the venom of the stonefish and had corroborees which involve re-enacting death from someone who trod on the fish. The Aborigines of Northern Australia and the Great Barrier Reef had different ways of preparing the fish for eating to avoid poisoning.
After stonefish poisoning, the amount of antivenom given depends on the number of puncture wounds from the stonefish spines. There were 25 cases of the use of antivenom for stonefish reported to Commonwealth Serum Laboratories for a one-year period between July 1989 and June 1990, with most from Queensland and four from the Northern Territory. There were 14 calls to the Queensland Poisons Information System in 2008 regarding stonefish poison Fatalities have included Dr J.L. Wassell ""some years"" before 1936 from a stonefish sting at the Great Barrier Reef, and in 1915 a fatal stonefish sting recorded at Thursday Island"
Animal attacks in Australia,"Unique and other cases
Most animals will defend themselves if in danger. Animals in which an attack on humans has occurred only in extreme circumstances or when provoked include: "
Animal attacks in Australia,"Buffalo – believed to have killed a 46-year-old man in 2005
Corella – many entered the town of Stawell and caused problems in 2004.
Eagle – Two wedge tailed eagles attacked a woman who was paragliding in championships at Killarney, Queensland in 2007.
Echidna – Girl who tried to rescue an echidna from a drain in Moe had her arm trapped by its quills and she had to be rescued.
Grouper – Swedish scuba diver attacked by one on the Great Barrier Reef in 2002.
Koala – Thieves received scratches and lacerations when they unsuccessfully tried to steal one at the Rockhampton zoo.
Platypus – There are a few cases of people being envenomated with platypus venom, including in 1992 and 1994.
Possum – A day care centre out on a field trip was attacked by a group of possums in the Oxford Falls suburb of Sydney, 1994. A family was also attacked by one in the Warrnambool suburb of Dennington in 2008.
Sea lion – 13-year-old girl attacked by a sea lion while surfing at Lancelin in 2007.
Sea snake – 2-year-old girl bitten by an Astrotia stokesii in Yeppoon. There have been some other cases but no fatalities in Australia.
Tasmanian devil – It was reported in 1899 that: ""many ghastly stories were afloat of their attacks upon escaped convicts who had taken to the bush.""
Wallaby – Several attacks occurred in 2008 at White Rock, near Cairns.
Whale — A man was crushed when a whale surfaced and landed on his boat.
There are also domestic animals common to most places which can attack humans such as domestic dogs, cats etc. It was estimated in 1991 there were up to 30,000 people going to hospital annually because of domestic dog attacks in Australia.
Other insects can also cause fatalities, such as wasps and bees. There have also been deaths due to mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria (now eradicated)."
Animal attacks in Australia,"See also
Fauna of Australia
Animal attacks in Latin America
List of fatal snake bites in Australia"
Animal attacks in Australia,"
== References =="
Australian Academy of Science,"The Australian Academy of Science was founded in 1954 by a group of distinguished Australians, including Australian Fellows of the Royal Society of London. The first president was Sir Mark Oliphant. The academy is modelled after the Royal Society and operates under a Royal charter; as such, it is an independent body, but it has government endorsement. The Academy Secretariat is in Canberra, at the Shine Dome.
The objectives of the academy are to promote science and science education through a wide range of activities. It has defined four major program areas:"
Australian Academy of Science,"Recognition of outstanding contributions to science
Education and public awareness
Science policy
International relations
The academy also runs the 22 National Committees for Science which provide a forum to discuss issues relevant to all the scientific disciplines in Australia."
Australian Academy of Science,"Origins
The Australian National Research Council (ANRC) was established in 1919 for the purpose of representing Australia on the International Research Council. The Council ceased to exist in 1954, replaced by the Australian Academy of Science."
Australian Academy of Science,"The Shine Dome
The Shine Dome (previously known as Becker House) is a well-known Canberra landmark, notable for its unusual structure, and colloquially referred to as ""The Martian Embassy"", an allusion to its shape and the fact that as the capital of Australia, Canberra is the home of foreign embassies. It was designed by architect Sir Roy Grounds, of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd. When completed in 1959 its 45.75-metre-diameter dome was the largest in Australia.
On 1 December 1956, the academy's building design committee met in Adelaide to look over plans submitted by six architects. The plan accepted involved a 710-tonne reinforced concrete dome, which had to be supported by 16 thin supports. The concrete is approximately 60 cm thick at the base supports, and 10 cm at the top. The dome supports itself, with no internal wall holding it up. It cost £200,000 to build. The foundation stone, laid on 2 May 1958 by Prime Minister of Australia, Robert Menzies, was originally part of the pier of the Great Melbourne Telescope constructed in 1869 under the supervision of the Royal Society and transferred to Mount Stromlo Observatory in the 1940s.
The building was named Becker House, for benefactor and Fellow of the Academy Sir Jack Ellerton Becker, in 1962. In 2000, it was renamed in honour of Fellow John Shine, who donated one million dollars to renovate the dome.
The interior contains three floors: on the ground level, the main auditorium, the Ian Wark Theatre, seats 156 people, the Jaeger Room for functions and meetings, the Becker Council Meeting Room and offices; the upper level includes a gallery to the theatre and the Adolf Basser Library; and the basement houses storage for historical records of science in Australia.
In 2016, the dome appeared in the television documentary series about Australian modernist architecture Streets of Your Town presented by Tim Ross.
On 20 January 2020 the Dome was seriously damaged by a hailstorm with smashed skylights and denting of the copper roof surface."
Australian Academy of Science,"Education
Science education is a main commitment of Australian Academy of Science. Current activities include following projects:"
Australian Academy of Science,"Primary Connections
Science by Doing
Nova: science for curious minds
reSolve: Mathematics by Inquiry
Science booklets
Brain Box"
Australian Academy of Science,"Fellows
The Fellowship of the Australian Academy of Science is made up of around 500 leading Australian scientists. Scientists judged by their peers to have made an exceptional contribution to knowledge in their field may be elected to Fellowship of the academy. Twenty new Fellows may be elected every year.
No more than two Fellows may be elected every three years on the basis of distinguished contributions to science by means other than personal research. A small number of distinguished foreign scientists with substantial connections to Australian science are elected as Corresponding Members.
Fellows are denoted by the letters FAA (Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science) after their name."
Australian Academy of Science,"Foundation Fellows
When the academy was founded in 1954 there were 24 members, known as the Foundation Fellows:"
Australian Academy of Science,"Presidents
Source:"
Australian Academy of Science,"Sir Mark Oliphant (1954–1957)
Sir John Eccles (1957–1961)
Sir Thomas Cherry (1961–1964)
Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet (1965–69)
Dr David Martyn (1969–1970)
Professor Dorothy Hill (1970)
Sir Rutherford Robertson (1970–1974)
Sir Geoffrey Badger (1974–1978)
Dr Lloyd Evans (1978–1982)
Professor Arthur Birch (1982–1986)
Professor David Curtis (1986–1990)
Professor David Craig (1990–1994)
Sir Gustav Nossal (1994–1998)
Professor Brian Anderson (1998–2002)
Dr Jim Peacock (2002–2006)
Professor Kurt Lambeck (2006–2010)
Professor Suzanne Cory (2010–2014)
Professor Andrew Holmes (2014–2018)
Professor John Shine (2018–2022)
Professor Chennupati Jagadish (2022–)"
Australian Academy of Science,"Awards
Early career awards:"
Australian Academy of Science,"Anton Hales Medal to recognise distinguished research in the Earth sciences;
Dorothy Hill Medal to recognise research in the Earth sciences by female researchers;
Fenner Medal, to recognise distinguished research in biology;
Gottschalk Medal, to recognise outstanding research in the medical sciences;
John Booker Medal, to recognise outstanding research in the sciences that underpin engineering;
Le Fèvre Medal, to recognise outstanding basic research in chemistry;
Pawsey Medal, to recognise outstanding research in physics;
Ruth Stephens Gani Medal, to recognise distinguished research in human genetics, including clinical, molecular, population and epidemiological genetics and cytogenetics.
Moran Medal to recognise outstanding research in one or more of the fields of applied probability, biometrics, mathematical genetics, psychometrics and statistics (awarded every two years).
Mid career awards:"
Australian Academy of Science,"Gustav Nossal Medal, to health researchers;
Jacques Miller Medal, to experimental biomedicine researchers;
Nancy Millis Medal for Women in Science.
Career awards recognising lifelong achievement:"
Australian Academy of Science,"David Craig Medal and Lecture, for researchers in chemistry;
Haddon King Medal, for researchers in earth science;
Hannan Medal, for researchers in mathematics;
Ian Wark Medal and Lecture;
Jaeger Medal, for researchers in earth science;
Thomas Ranken Lyle Medal, for researchers in mathematics or physics;
Macfarlane Burnet Medal and Lecture, for research in the biological sciences;
Matthew Flinders Medal and Lecture, for researchers in physical science;
Mawson Lecture and Medal, for researchers in earth science;
Ruby Payne-Scott Medal and Lecture, for women in science;
Suzanne Cory Medal, for research in the biological sciences.
Other awards include:"
Australian Academy of Science,"Academy Medal for outstanding contributions to science by means other than through scientific research;
Lloyd Rees Lecture, for lectures in chemical physics;
Selby Fellowship awarded to distinguished overseas scientists to visit Australia for public lecture/seminar tours."
Australian Academy of Science,"Other learned Academies
There are three other learned Academies in Australia, those of Humanities (Australian Academy of the Humanities), Social Science (Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia) and Technological Sciences and Engineering (Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering). The four Academies cooperate through the Australian Council of Learned Academies, formed in 2010."
Australian Academy of Science,"Arms
See also
List of Australian organisations with royal patronage"
Australian Academy of Science,"References
External links"
Australian Academy of Science,"Australian Academy of Science
Australian Academy of Science Building
Taxonomy Australia, a branch of the Australian Academy of Science"
Cabinet of Australia,"The Cabinet of Australia, also known as the Federal Cabinet, is the chief decision-making body of the Australian government. The Cabinet is selected by the prime minister and is composed of senior government ministers who administer the executive departments and ministries of the federal government.
Ministers are appointed by the governor-general, on the advice of the prime minister, who is the leader of the Cabinet. Cabinet meetings are strictly private and occur once a week where vital issues are discussed and policy formulated. There are several Cabinet committees focused on governance and specific policy issues, with administrative support provided by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. The outer ministry consists of junior ministers outside of Cabinet. There are also a number of assistant ministers (designated as parliamentary secretaries under the Ministers of State Act 1952), responsible for a specific policy area and reporting directly to a senior Cabinet minister of their portfolio. The Cabinet, the outer ministry, and the assistant ministers collectively form the full Commonwealth ministry of the government of the day. Officials and advisors are not allowed to attend Cabinet, with only Cabinet ministers and the three official note-takers that produce Cabinet minutes able to be present during deliberations. 
The Cabinet is a product of convention and practice. There is no reference to the Cabinet in the Australian Constitution and its establishment and procedures are not the subject of any legislation. The prime minister may determine the shape, structure and operation of the Cabinet and its Committees.
Decisions of Cabinet (formally known as Cabinet minutes) do not in and of themselves have legal force, requiring the endorsement from individual ministers, holders of statutory office, Parliament or the governor-general as advised by the non-deliberative Federal Executive Council—the highest formal executive body mentioned in the Constitution. In practice, the Federal Executive Council meets solely to endorse and give legal force to decisions already made by the Cabinet."
Cabinet of Australia,"History
Until 1956 the Cabinet comprised all ministers. The growth of the ministry in the 1940s and 1950s made this increasingly impractical, and in 1956 Liberal Prime Minister Robert Menzies created a two-tier ministry, with only senior ministers being members of the Cabinet, while the other ministers are in the outer ministry. This practice has been continued by all governments since, with the exception of the Whitlam government.
When the non-Labor parties have been in power, the prime minister has advised the governor-general on all Cabinet and ministerial appointments at his own discretion, although in practice he consults with senior colleagues in making appointments. When the Liberal Party and its predecessors (the Nationalist Party and the United Australia Party) have been in coalition with the National Party (or its predecessor the Country Party), the leader of the junior Coalition party has had the right to nominate his party's members of the Coalition ministry, and to be consulted by the prime minister on the allocation of their portfolios.
When the Labor Party first held office under Chris Watson, Watson assumed the right to choose members of the Cabinet. In 1907, however, the party decided that future Labor Cabinets would be elected by members of the Parliamentary Labor Party, the caucus, and this practice was followed until 2007. The prime minister retained the right to allocate portfolios. In practice, Labor prime ministers exercised a predominant influence over who was elected to Labor Cabinets, although leaders of party factions also exercised considerable influence.
Under two-tier ministerial arrangements introduced in 1987, each senior or portfolio minister was a member of the Cabinet. In 1996 this was modified by the Howard government, whereby two portfolio ministers, one being the attorney-general, were not members of Cabinet, and one portfolio had two Cabinet ministers. In subsequent Howard ministries, and the 2007 Rudd Labor ministry, all portfolio ministers were in the Cabinet.
Before the 2007 election, Kevin Rudd announced that if Labor won the election he would dispense with this tradition and appoint the ministry himself. In fact, the caucus rule requiring the election of ministers remains in place. At the first caucus meeting after the election, Rudd announced the members of his chosen ministry, and the caucus then elected them unopposed, thus preserving the outward form of caucus election."
Cabinet of Australia,"Composition
Members of both the House of Representatives and Senate are eligible to serve as ministers and parliamentary secretaries. A minister does not have to be a member of either house, but section 64 of the Constitution requires the minister to become a member within three months. The prime minister and treasurer are traditionally members of the House of Representatives, but the Constitution does not have such a requirement. As amended in 1987, the Minister of State Act 1952 permits up to 30 ministers. As members of one house cannot speak in the other, ministers in each house serve as representatives of colleagues in the other for answering questions and other procedures.
As of September 2023 every government since Federation has had senators serve as ministers. The Senate typically provides one-quarter to one-third of the ministry. Some former senators and others have proposed that senators should not be eligible to serve as ministers, stating that doing so is inappropriate for members of a chamber that act as the states' house and a house of review and because governments are only responsible to the House of Representatives. John Uhr and Senator Baden Teague state that an advantage of senators serving in ministries is that the Senate can compel them to answer questions about the government.
Since the introduction of the two-tier ministry, meetings of Cabinet are attended by members only, although other ministers may attend if an area of their portfolio is on the agenda. Cabinet meetings are chaired by the prime minister, and a senior public servant is present to write the minutes and record decisions.
Since 1942, every member of the Cabinet has been a member of the Australian Labor Party, the Liberal Party of Australia, or the National Party of Australia."
Cabinet of Australia,"Prime minister
The prime minister is responsible for the membership of the Cabinet, determines and regulates all Cabinet arrangements for the government and is the final arbiter of Cabinet procedures. As chair of the cabinet, the Prime minister sets the Cabinet’s agenda and determines when and where meetings take place. The Prime minister leads and guides discussion to achieve a collective response; however where a collective decision is not possible, the prime minister’s view is authoritative."
Cabinet of Australia,"Principles of operation
The Australian Cabinet follows the traditions of the British parliamentary cabinet system. This entails collective decision‐making and responsibility, Cabinet solidarity and confidentiality."
Cabinet of Australia,"Collective decision‐making and responsibility
The role of collective decision-making reflects the parliamentary tradition that the confidence given to governments by the House of Representatives is collective, rather than towards individual ministers. Similarly, the governor‐general, in acting on ministerial advice, needs to be confident that they only give effect to government policy. In practice this means that a decision of the Cabinet is binding on all members of the government, regardless of whether they were present when the decision was taken or their personal views. Issues are debated within the confidential setting of Cabinet meetings so that some form of consensus can be summarised by the prime minister, as chair of the Cabinet, to be recorded in the Cabinet minute."
Cabinet of Australia,"Cabinet solidarity
Cabinet collective responsibility is most obviously expressed in the principle of Cabinet solidarity. In governments using the Westminster system, members of the Cabinet must publicly support all government decisions made in Cabinet, even if they do not agree with them. Cabinet ministers cannot dissociate themselves from, or repudiate the decisions of, their Cabinet colleagues unless they resign from the Cabinet."
Cabinet of Australia,"Confidentiality
The principle of collective responsibility requires that ministers should be able to express their views frankly in Cabinet meetings in the expectation that they can argue freely in private while maintaining a united front in public when decisions have been reached. This in turn requires that opinions expressed in the Cabinet and Cabinet Committees, including in documents and any correspondence, are treated as confidential. As such, Cabinet documents are broadly immune from Freedom of Information Act requests. All Cabinet documents are destroyed once they are no longer needed or at a change of government, with the exception of Cabinet records and Cabinet notebooks which since 1986 are released after 30 years. Cabinet documents are considered the property of the political government of the day, with access by successive governments only granted by request. However, the documents themselves are not legally protected, allowing the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in 2018 to publish some Cabinet documents found in filing cabinets whose keys had been lost and subsequently sold at a government surplus auction. The documents revealed the inner workings of recent governments, and were characterised by the ABC as the largest breach of cabinet security in the nation's history."
Cabinet of Australia,"Cabinet committees
As with other Westminster system cabinets, Cabinet committees play an important role in the effectiveness of the Cabinet system and providing avenues for collective decision-making on particular policy issues. As of 2024, the Cabinet committees are:
The National Security Committee (NSC) focuses on major international security issues of strategic importance to Australia, border protection policy, national responses to developing situations (either domestic or international) and classified matters relating to aspects of operation and activities of the Australian Intelligence Community. Decisions of the NSC do not require the endorsement of the Cabinet. The NSC is chaired by the prime minister with the deputy prime minister as deputy chair and includes the attorney-general, the minister for foreign affairs, the minister for defence, the treasurer, the minister for immigration and border protection, and the Cabinet secretary.
The Expenditure Review Committee (ERC) considers matters of regarding expenditure and revenue of the Australian federal budget and the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook. Decisions of the ERC must be endorsed by the Cabinet. The ERC is chaired by the prime minister with the treasurer as deputy chair and includes the deputy prime minister, the minister for social services, the minister for health, the minister for finance, and the minister for revenue and financial services.
The Parliamentary Business Committee (PBC) considers priorities for the Australian government's legislation program and requests to the prime minister for the presentation of ministerial statements. Decisions of the PBC do not require the endorsement of the Cabinet. The PBC is chaired by the leader of the house with the leader of the government in the Senate as deputy chair and includes manager of government business in the senate, the deputy leader of the house, and the assistant minister to the prime minister.
The other committees are the Government Communications Subcommittee, the National Security Investment Subcommittee, the Net Zero Economy Committee and the Priority and Delivery Committee."
Cabinet of Australia,"Current Cabinet
Shadow cabinet
Led by the leader of the Opposition, the Opposition in parliament appoints from its ranks a shadow cabinet to monitor government ministers and present itself as an alternative government. The portfolios of shadow ministers usually correspond with those of the government. When the Liberal and National parties are in Opposition, the shadow cabinet is appointed by the leader of the Opposition in consultation with the leader of the Nationals. When Labor has been in Opposition, the caucus has elected the shadow ministry and the leader has allocated portfolios. Smaller opposition parties often appoint spokespersons for Cabinet portfolios, but these are not referred to as a shadow cabinet."
Cabinet of Australia,"See also
Albanese ministry
List of female cabinet ministers of Australia"
Cabinet of Australia,"Notes
References
General references
Specific references
Further reading
Weller, Patrick (2007). Cabinet Government in Australia, 1901-2006: Practice, Principles, Performance. University of New South Wales Press. ISBN 978-0-86840-874-3."
Law enforcement in Australia,"Law enforcement in Australia is one of the three major components of the country's justice system, along with courts and corrections. Law enforcement officers are employed by all three levels of government – federal, state/territory, and local.
Federally, the primary law enforcement agency is the Australian Federal Police (AFP), which has a wide mandate to enforce Australian criminal law and protect its national interests. There is also a number of other agencies that have powers confined to specific areas, such as customs and immigration (Australian Border Force), and white-collar crime (Australian Taxation Office, Australian Competition & Consumer Commission, Australian Securities & Investments Commission). Each branch of the Australian Defence Force (ADF) has its own military police which operates under the Joint Military Police Unit (JMPU). The ADF Investigative Service also forms part of the JMPU and is the primary agency for complex investigations that fall under the Defence Force Discipline Act.
General law enforcement duties are generally the responsibility of state police forces, who are in turn responsible to a state government minister (usually a Minister for Police). These forces carry out uniformed policing throughout the entire state in which they operate. Other state government agencies may also have investigative or enforcement powers for specific offences within their purview, such as fisheries. The Northern Territory is the only Australian Territory with its own police force, but in Australia's other territories (including the Australian Capital Territory) law enforcement is handled by the Federal Government, specifically the Australian Federal Police. Local governments may also employ their authorised officers, commonly known as council rangers, to enforce local government by-laws or certain state laws pertaining solely to the local government jurisdiction in which they're employed. Council rangers do not have full police powers unless they are sworn as special constables."
Law enforcement in Australia,"State police officers and Australian Federal Police officers routinely carry firearms, other state and federal law enforcement officers may carry firearms or other items for personal defence depending on their agency or the condition in which they're deployed. While on duty, an armed law enforcement officer's duty belt generally consists of a handgun, Taser, expandable baton, pepper spray, a set of handcuffs, ammunition magazines, gloves, torch, and a two-way radio."
Law enforcement in Australia,"Federal
Australian Federal Police
The primary federal law enforcement agency in Australia is the Australian Federal Police. The AFP was created in 1979, having been the result of an amalgamation of the now-defunct Commonwealth Police and Australian Capital Territory Police Force. It is responsible for the investigation of federal offences (crimes against the Commonwealth), and has federal jurisdiction throughout Australia. It provides protective services to federal government properties, government personnel, dignitaries and foreign diplomatic officials, and major airports.  It also provides regular law enforcement within external Australian territories, the Australian Capital Territory and the Jervis Bay Territory. The boundaries between the two levels of law enforcement are somewhat flexible, and both state and federal police cooperate on or transfer cases between each other depending on the specific circumstances.
The AFP also conducts operations overseas.  These include providing liaison officers to various overseas posts to assist in relations with various police forces overseas, providing community policing to assist in the development of foreign law enforcement agencies, and contributing to peacekeeping operations such as the RAMSI Mission in the Solomon Islands and the UN Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus.
The AFP forms part of Australia's National Intelligence Community."
Law enforcement in Australia,"Australian Border Force
The Australian Border Force is responsible for customs and immigration enforcement and border protection at Australia's ports as well as in Australian waters, and conducts investigations where the AFP does not have primary jurisdiction. Unlike AFP Officers, Border Force Officers do not have fully vested federal police powers, and can only exercise arrest and detain powers at airport and seaport jurisdictions. They may, however, detain persons for state or federal crimes or warrants until that person can be presented to a federal or state law enforcement officer with the appropriate powers. Australian Border Force officers have the authority to carry firearms when trained. In practice, only maritime, counter-terrorism,  and investigation officers carry firearms."
Law enforcement in Australia,"Australian Fisheries Management Authority
The Australian Fisheries Management Authority (AFMA) provides fisheries enforcement in Australia's Exclusive Economic Zone, officers are authorised under the Fisheries Management Act 1991 to board and search vessels, and search vehicles and persons suspected of committing fisheries offences and may also search shore-based installation under a search warrant or in other specific circumstances. AFMA officers may with or without a warrant, arrest a person suspected of committing a fisheries offence or an offence against environmental law, and authorised to carry personal defense equipment.  Like the Australian Federal Police and Australian Border Force, AFMA is overseen by the National Anti-Corruption Commission."
Law enforcement in Australia,"Australian Tax Office
The Australian Tax Office (ATO) is a revenue service responsible for tax collection throughout Australia. The ATO is overseen by the National Anti-Corruption Commission. ATO officers are provided limited law enforcement powers under the Excise Act 1901 and the Tax Administration Act 1953.  AFP and ABF officers are also provided powers under these Acts."
Law enforcement in Australia,"Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission
The Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC) is a standing commission to provide criminal intelligence to Federal and State law enforcement agencies and assists in criminal investigations. ACIC is formed under the Australian Crime Commission Act, and while the Commission itself does not have full law enforcement powers, law enforcement officers from state and federal agencies are routinely seconded to the ACIC to assist in its functions. Under the Australian Crime Commission Act ACIC members have a number of coercive powers to gather criminal intelligence. The Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC), is an independent criminology research institute formed under the ACIC, with the CEO of the ACIC also serving as the director of the ACI.  Like the AFP, ACIC is also part of Australia's National Intelligence Community."
Law enforcement in Australia,"National Anti-Corruption Commission
The National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) is a statutory anti-corruption commission responsible for investigating allegations of corrupt conduct by Commonwealth officials. The commission has the power to investigate Commonwealth ministers, public servants, statutory office holders, government agencies, parliamentarians, and personal staff of politicians and replaced the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity. The commission's powers are equivalent to that of a Royal Commission with the ability to compel witnesses and compel documents to be produced to the commission."
Law enforcement in Australia,"Military
Military Police, also known as Service Police, are the law enforcement branches of the services of a military tasked with enforcing and investigating offences violating military law. 
In Australia, each branch of the Australian Defence Force maintains its independent police force made up of military personnel from that service.  In the Australian Army, the Royal Australian Corps of Military Police conducts general law enforcement duties including security on military installations, investigations and close personal protection.  In the Royal Australian Navy, policing functions are undertaken by Coxswains.  In the Royal Australian Air Force, security and law enforcement duties are undertaken by Security Forces and Airfield Defence personnel.
Along with the independent service police forces is the Australian Defence Force Investigative Service (ADFIS), a special ADF unit made up of Investigators from each service's police and tasked with investigating more serious military offences.  All ADF policing agencies come under the umbrella of the Joint Military Police Unit (JMPU), an agency of the Australian Department of Defence led by the Provost Marshal and tasked with providing specialised military policing services and supporting civilian police in defence matters."
Law enforcement in Australia,"State/territory
Each state, as well as the Northern Territory, is responsible for maintaining its police force which is responsible for policing at the state and local levels. This involves general law and order, forensics, traffic policing, major crime, anti-terrorism branches, water police, search and rescue and in some states transit police. Local policing in the Australian Capital Territory, Jervis Bay Territory and Australian external territories is contracted to the Australian Federal Police (AFP). Each state has a Department of Corrections which looks after the jails and prisoners.
In some states, local governments employ by-laws officers or rangers to enforce local by-laws or ordinances relating to such matters as parking, dog ownership, retailing, littering, or water usage. These local government officers are not considered to be police forces as they generally only have the power to issue fines and do not have the same powers as state police. They may rely upon appointment as a special constable or legislated powers for their authority."
Law enforcement in Australia,"Police
State police also perform certain functions on behalf of the Australian government such as the enforcement of various Commonwealth Acts and regulations in conjunction with the Australian Federal Police and other Commonwealth officers.
The Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and Jervis Bay Territory are serviced by the  Australian Federal Police (AFP) ACT Policing.  The AFP also provide local policing the Australian external territories. 
While ACT Policing is under the jurisdiction of the Australian Federal Police, the following policing agencies are regulated by their respective state or territory government and are highly visible:"
Law enforcement in Australia,"Sheriffs
In recent years, the states and territories have returned the responsibility of recovering court-ordered fines to their sheriffs. In practice, the police often carry out the functions of sheriffs and bailiffs in rural and more sparsely populated areas of Australia.
The office of sheriff was first established in Australia in 1824. This was simultaneous with the appointment of the first Chief Justice of New South Wales. The role of the sheriff has not been static, nor is it identical in each Australian state. In the past, a sheriff's duties included: executing court judgments, acting as a coroner, transporting prisoners, managing the jails, and carrying out executions (through the employment of an anonymous hangman).
Currently, no Australian state provides for capital punishment. A government department (usually called the Department of Corrections or similar) now runs the prison system and the coroner's office handles coronal matters. In most states, the sheriff is now largely responsible for enforcing the civil orders and fines of the court by seizing and selling the property of judgment debtors who do not satisfy the debt, providing court security, enforcing arrest warrants, evictions, taking juveniles into custody, and running the jury system. In some states the duties of the Sheriff also extends to courtroom security. Some state sheriffs can also apply a wide range of sanctions ranging from suspending driver's licenses and car registration through to wheel clamping and arranging community service orders, and as a last resort can make arrests."
Law enforcement in Australia,"Fisheries
In addition to the Australian Fisheries Management Authority, each state and the Northern Territory have Fisheries officers authorised to enforce State and Federal fisheries laws within their state's jurisdiction. The powers of these fisheries officers vary from State to State but generally, these officers have the power to board vessels, search vehicles, vessels, and persons and conduct arrests all in relation to fisheries laws. In some States, such as New South Wales, fisheries officers are authorised to carry personal defense equipment like their Federal counterparts."
Law enforcement in Australia,"Local
Council rangers are officers employed by local government areas in Australia to enforce the by-laws (local laws in Western Australia); of those local governments and a limited range of state laws relating to such matters as litter control, animal control, dog and cat laws, fire control, off-road vehicles, emergency management, and parking. Unless they are also sworn in as special constables, as many are, rangers do not have full police powers. Council rangers are also referred to as local laws officers in some of Australia's eastern states. Most Council rangers have the power to issue fines that do not exceed a certain amount."
Law enforcement in Australia,"Advisory bodies and community groups
The Australia New Zealand Policing Advisory Agency (ANZPAA) was established in October 2007. ANZPAA is a joint initiative of the Australian and New Zealand Police Commissioners and is funded by contributions to Australia and New Zealand Police jurisdictions. ANZPAA is a non-operational policing agency that provides strategy and policy advice, and secretarial services to the ANZPAA Board on cross-jurisdictional policing initiatives that help enhance community safety and security. ANZPAA's strategic direction is set by ANZPAA’s board and the Australia New Zealand Council of Police Professionalisation (ANZCoPP, formerly Australasian Police Professional Standards Committee, APPSC).
The Australasian Police Professional Standards Committee (APPSC) was an organisation that served all police jurisdictions around Australia and New Zealand. It was the body for police education and training in Australia and New Zealand; the council comprising each of the police commissioners from Australia and New Zealand along with the president of the Police Federation of Australia and the president of the New Zealand Police Association. On 9 November 2007, APPSC roles and functions were amalgamated into ANZPAA. In 2013, APPSC was retitled to the Australia New Zealand Council of Police Professionalisation.
Crime Stoppers programs run in each state and on a national level. These programs collect information about crimes and pass them on to police, ensuring that the community can participate in fighting crime."
Law enforcement in Australia,"Controversies
Colonial legacy
Involvement of state law enforcement in suppressing Indigenous resistance to colonisation has been widely controversial. The New South Wales Mounted Police were formed following the Bathurst War between British colonists and the Wiradjuri people in 1824, and in modern Australia continue to be deployed as part of police presence at peaceful protests in many states.
Across colonial Australia, police forces were mobilised in violent conflict during the Australian frontier wars and were heavily involved in the many Indigenous fatalities that led to sharp decline of Indigenous populations since colonisation. The Queensland Native Police Force alone were responsible for an estimated 24,000 ""violent Aboriginal deaths"" between 1859 and 1897, as calculated by professor Raymond Evans in 2009.
Slavery in Australia was sanctioned by law (before being banned in 1901 following Federation) and was officially upheld by many police forces and government systems. In the Northern Territory, the Aboriginals Ordinance 1918 (Cth) allowed forced recruitment of Indigenous people and legal non-payment of wages, granting Protectors and police the right to uphold this arrangement."
Law enforcement in Australia,"Police misconduct and corruption
Transportation
By agreement between the various commissioners, most police cars in Australia are predominantly white, with a blue and white Sillitoe tartan checkered strip on the side. Historically, police fleets were composed predominantly of domestically built models such as the Holden Commodore and Ford Falcon. With the demise of Holden and Ford production in Australia, fleets have grown to include models such as the Chrysler 300, BMW 5 Series, Kia Stinger, Volkswagen Passat, Mercedes-Benz E-Class, and Hyundai Sonata. Prisoner transport vehicles are based on light commercial vehicles such as the Ford Ranger, Toyota Hilux, Holden Colorado, Mercedes Vito, or Volkswagen Transporter.
A wide range of vehicles are used for unmarked purposes to blend in with civilian vehicles."
Law enforcement in Australia,"Emergency lights on police vehicles are now generally blue and red; historically though, blue lights were used for police vehicles and red lights for fire engines and ambulances. Council Ranger vehicles are usually fitted with either magenta or orange coloured lights.
Most Australian police services have mounted police units that are prominently used for ceremonial purposes, although in New South Wales, South Australia, Western Australia, and Victoria the mounted police also undertake operational policing duties."
Law enforcement in Australia,"Defunct law enforcement agencies
Federal
Commonwealth Police - Replaced by the Australian Federal Police
Australian Protective Service - Merged into the Australian Federal Police
Federal Bureau of Narcotics - Functions now performed by the Australian Federal Police and Australian Border Force
Australian Customs and Border Protection Service - Merged with Immigration Detention and Compliance to form the Australian Border Force
National Crime Authority - Replaced by the Australian Crime Commission then renamed to Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission
Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity (ACLI) - Was a statutory agency with the purpose of investigating corruption and misconduct in Federal Law Enforcement agencies.  Replaced by the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC)."
Law enforcement in Australia,"State/territory
ACT Police Force - merged into the Australian Federal Police"
Law enforcement in Australia,See also
Law enforcement in Australia,"Australian court hierarchy
Crime in Australia
Immigration detention in Australia
List of Australian prisons
Punishment in Australia
Reasonable and probable grounds in Australia
Terrorism in Australia"
Law enforcement in Australia,"
== References =="
Aboriginal Australians,"Aboriginal Australians are the various Indigenous peoples of the Australian mainland and many of its islands, excluding the ethnically distinct people of the Torres Strait Islands.
Humans first migrated to Australia at least 65,000 years ago, and over time formed as many as 500 language-based groups. In the past, Aboriginal people lived over large sections of the continental shelf. They were isolated on many of the smaller offshore islands and Tasmania when the land was inundated at the start of the Holocene inter-glacial period, about 11,700 years ago. Despite this, Aboriginal people maintained extensive networks within the continent and certain groups maintained relationships with Torres Strait Islanders and the Makassar people of modern-day Indonesia. 
Aboriginal Australians have a wide variety of cultural practices and beliefs that make up the oldest continuous cultures in the world. At the time of European colonisation of Australia, the Aboriginal people consisted of complex cultural societies with more than 250 languages and varying degrees of technology and settlements. Languages (or dialects) and language-associated groups of people are connected with stretches of territory known as ""Country"", with which they have a profound spiritual connection. Over the millennia, Aboriginal people developed complex trade networks, inter-cultural relationships, law and religions.
Contemporary Aboriginal beliefs are a complex mixture, varying by region and individual across the continent. They are shaped by traditional beliefs, the disruption of colonisation, religions brought to the continent by Europeans, and contemporary issues. Traditional cultural beliefs are passed down and shared through dancing, stories, songlines, and art that collectively weave an ontology of modern daily life and ancient creation known as Dreaming.
Studies of Aboriginal groups' genetic makeup are ongoing, but evidence suggests that they have genetic inheritance from ancient Asian but not more modern peoples. They share some similarities with Papuans, but have been isolated from Southeast Asia for a very long time. They have a broadly shared, complex genetic history, but only in the last 200 years were they defined by others as, and started to self-identify as, a single group. Aboriginal identity has changed over time and place, with family lineage, self-identification, and community acceptance all of varying importance.
In the 2021 census, Indigenous Australians comprised 3.8% of Australia's population. Most Aboriginal people today speak English and live in cities. Some may use Aboriginal phrases and words in Australian Aboriginal English (which also has a tangible influence of Aboriginal languages in the phonology and grammatical structure). Many but not all also speak the various traditional languages of their clans and peoples. Aboriginal people, along with Torres Strait Islander people, have a number of severe health and economic deprivations in comparison with the wider Australian community."
Aboriginal Australians,"Origins
DNA studies have confirmed that ""Aboriginal Australians are one of the oldest living populations in the world, certainly the oldest outside of Africa"". Their ancestors left the African continent 75,000 years ago. They may have the oldest continuous culture on earth. In Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, oral histories comprising complex narratives have been passed down by Yolngu people through hundreds of generations. The Aboriginal rock art, dated by modern techniques, shows that their culture has continued from ancient times.
The ancestors of present-day Aboriginal Australian people migrated from Southeast Asia by sea during the Pleistocene epoch and lived over large sections of the Australian continental shelf when the sea levels were lower. At that time, Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea were part of the same landmass, known as Sahul.
As sea levels rose, the people on the Australian mainland and nearby islands became increasingly isolated, some on Tasmania and some of the smaller offshore islands when the land was inundated at the start of the Holocene, the inter-glacial period that started about 11,700 years ago. Scholars of this ancient history believe that it would have been difficult for Aboriginal people to have originated purely from mainland Asia. Not enough people would have migrated to Australia and surrounding islands to fulfill the beginning of the size of the population seen in the 19th century. Scholars believe that most Aboriginal Australians originated from Southeast Asia. If this is the case, Aboriginal Australians were among the first in the world to have completed sea voyages.
A 2017 paper in Nature evaluated artefacts in Kakadu. Its authors concluded ""Human occupation began around 65,000 years ago"".
A 2021 study by researchers at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage has mapped the likely migration routes of the peoples as they moved across the Australian continent to its southern reaches and what is now Tasmania, then part of the mainland. The modelling is based on data from archaeologists, anthropologists, ecologists, geneticists, climatologists, geomorphologists and hydrologists.
It is intended to compare this data with the oral histories of Aboriginal peoples, including Dreaming stories, Australian rock art, and linguistic features of the many Aboriginal languages which reveal how the peoples developed separately. The routes, dubbed ""superhighways"" by the authors, are similar to current highways and stock routes in Australia.
Lynette Russell of Monash University believes that the new model is a starting point for collaboration with Aboriginal people to help reveal their history. The new models suggest that the first people may have landed in the Kimberley region in what is now Western Australia about 60,000 years ago. They migrated across the continent within 6,000 years. A 2018 study using archaeobotany dated evidence of continuous human habitation at Karnatukul (Serpent's Glen) in the Carnarvon Range in the Little Sandy Desert in WA from around 50,000 years ago."
Aboriginal Australians,"Genetics
Genetic studies have revealed that Aboriginal Australians largely descended from an Eastern Eurasian population wave during the Initial Upper Paleolithic. They are most closely related to other Oceanians, such as Melanesians. The Aboriginal Australians also show affinity to other Australasian populations, such as Negritos, as well as to East Asian peoples. Phylogenetic data suggests that an early initial eastern lineage (ENA) trifurcated somewhere in South Asia, and gave rise to Australasians (Oceanians), Ancient Ancestral South Indian (AASI), Andamanese and the East/Southeast Asian lineage, including ancestors of the Native Americans. Papuans may have received approximately 2% of their geneflow from an earlier group (xOOA) as well, next to additional archaic admixture in the Sahul region."
Aboriginal Australians,"Aboriginal people are genetically most similar to the indigenous populations of Papua New Guinea, and more distantly related to groups from East Indonesia. They are more distinct from the indigenous populations of Borneo and Malaysia, sharing drift with them than compared to the groups from Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. This indicates that populations in Australia were isolated for a long time from the rest of Southeast Asia. They remained untouched by migrations and population expansions into that area, which can be explained by the Wallace line.
In a 2001 study, blood samples were collected from some Warlpiri people in the Northern Territory to study their genetic makeup (which is not representative of all Aboriginal peoples in Australia). The study concluded that the Warlpiri are descended from ancient Asians whose DNA is still somewhat present in Southeastern Asian groups, although greatly diminished. The Warlpiri DNA lacks certain information found in modern Asian genomes, and carries information not found in other genomes. This reinforces the idea of ancient Aboriginal isolation.
Genetic data extracted in 2011 by Morten Rasmussen et al., who took a DNA sample from an early-20th-century lock of an Aboriginal person's hair, found that the Aboriginal ancestors probably migrated through South Asia and Maritime Southeast Asia, into Australia, where they stayed. As a result, outside of Africa, the Aboriginal peoples have occupied the same territory continuously longer than any other human populations. These findings suggest that modern Aboriginal Australians are the direct descendants of the eastern wave, who left Africa up to 75,000 years ago. This finding is compatible with earlier archaeological finds of human remains near Lake Mungo that date to approximately 40,000 years ago. The idea of the ""oldest continuous culture"" is based on the Aboriginal peoples' geographical isolation, with little or no interaction with outside cultures before some contact with Makassan fishermen and Dutch explorers up to 500 years ago.
The Rasmussen study also found evidence that Aboriginal peoples carry some genes associated with the Denisovans (a species of human related to but distinct from Neanderthals) of Asia; the study suggests that there is an increase in allele sharing between the Denisovan and Aboriginal Australian genomes, compared to other Eurasians or Africans. Examining DNA from a finger bone excavated in Siberia, researchers concluded that the Denisovans migrated from Siberia to tropical parts of Asia and that they interbred with modern humans in Southeast Asia 44,000 years BP, before Australia separated from New Guinea approximately 11,700 years BP. They contributed DNA to Aboriginal Australians and to present-day New Guineans and an indigenous tribe in the Philippines known as Mamanwa. This study confirms Aboriginal Australians as one of the oldest living populations in the world. They are possibly the oldest outside Africa, and they may have the oldest continuous culture on the planet.
A 2016 study at the University of Cambridge suggests that it was about 50,000 years ago that these peoples reached Sahul (the supercontinent consisting of present-day Australia and its islands and New Guinea). The sea levels rose and isolated Australia about 10,000 years ago, but Aboriginal Australians and Papuans diverged from each other genetically earlier, about 37,000 years BP, possibly because the remaining land bridge was impassable. This isolation makes the Aboriginal people the world's oldest culture. The study also found evidence of an unknown hominin group, distantly related to Denisovans, with whom the Aboriginal and Papuan ancestors must have interbred, leaving a trace of about 4% in most Aboriginal Australians' genome. There is, however, increased genetic diversity among Aboriginal Australians based on geographical distribution."
Aboriginal Australians,"Carlhoff et al. 2021 analysed a Holocene hunter-gatherer sample (""Leang Panninge"") from South Sulawesi, which shares high amounts of genetic drift with Aboriginal Australians and Papuans. This suggests that a population split from the common ancestor of Aboriginal Australians and Papuans. The sample also shows genetic affinity with East Asians and the Andamanese people of South Asia. The authors note that this hunter-gatherer sample can be modelled with ~50% Papuan-related ancestry and either with ~50% East Asian or Andamanese Onge ancestry, highlighting the deep split between Leang Panninge and Aboriginal/Papuans.
Mallick et al. 2016 and Mark Lipson et al. 2017 study found the bifurcation of Eastern Eurasians and Western Eurasians dates  to least 45,000 years ago, with indigenous Australians nested inside the Eastern Eurasian clade.
Two genetic studies by Larena et al. 2021 found that Philippines Negrito people split from the common ancestor of Aboriginal Australians and Papuans before the latter two  diverged from each other, but after their common ancestor diverged from the ancestor of East Asian peoples."
Aboriginal Australians,"Changes about 4,000 years ago
The dingo reached Australia about 4,000 years ago. Near that time, there were changes in language (with the Pama-Nyungan language family spreading over most of the mainland), and in stone tool technology. Smaller tools were used. Human contact has thus been inferred, and genetic data of two kinds have been proposed to support a gene flow from India to Australia: firstly, signs of South Asian components in Aboriginal Australian genomes, reported on the basis of genome-wide SNP data; and secondly, the existence of a Y chromosome (male) lineage, designated haplogroup C∗, with the most recent common ancestor about 5,000 years ago.
The first type of evidence comes from a 2013 study by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology using large-scale genotyping data from a pool of Aboriginal Australians, New Guineans, island Southeast Asians, and Indians. It found that the New Guinea and Mamanwa (Philippines area) groups diverged from the Aboriginal about 36,000 years ago (there is supporting evidence that these populations are descended from migrants taking an early ""southern route"" out of Africa, before other groups in the area). Also the Indian and Australian populations mixed long before European contact, with this gene flow occurring during the Holocene (c. 4,200 years ago). The researchers had two theories for this: either some Indians had contact with people in Indonesia who eventually transferred those Indian genes to Aboriginal Australians, or a group of Indians migrated from India to Australia and intermingled with the locals directly.
However, a 2016 study in Current Biology by Anders Bergström et al. excluded the Y chromosome as providing evidence for recent gene flow from India into Australia. The study authors sequenced 13 Aboriginal Australian Y chromosomes using recent advances in gene sequencing technology. They investigated their divergence times from Y chromosomes in other continents, including comparing the haplogroup C chromosomes. They found a divergence time of about 54,100 years between the Sahul C chromosome and its closest relative C5, as well as about 54,300 years between haplogroups K*/M and their closest haplogroups R and Q. The deep divergence time of 50,000-plus years with the South Asian chromosome and ""the fact that the Aboriginal Australian Cs share a more recent common ancestor with Papuan Cs"" excludes any recent genetic contact.
The 2016 study's authors concluded that, although this does not disprove the presence of any Holocene gene flow or non-genetic influences from South Asia at that time, and the appearance of the dingo does provide strong evidence for external contacts, the evidence overall is consistent with a complete lack of gene flow, and points to indigenous origins for the technological and linguistic changes. They attributed the disparity between their results and previous findings to improvements in technology; none of the other studies had utilised complete Y chromosome sequencing, which has the highest precision. For example, use of a ten Y STRs method has been shown to massively underestimate divergence times. Gene flow across the island-dotted 150-kilometre-wide (93 mi) Torres Strait, is both geographically plausible and demonstrated by the data, although at this point it could not be determined from this study when within the last 10,000 years it may have occurred—newer analytical techniques have the potential to address such questions.
Bergstrom's 2018 doctoral thesis looking at the population of Sahul suggests that other than relatively recent admixture, the populations of the region appear to have been genetically independent from the rest of the world since their divergence about 50,000 years ago. He writes ""There is no evidence for South Asian gene flow to Australia .... Despite Sahul being a single connected landmass until [8,000 years ago], different groups across Australia are nearly equally related to Papuans, and vice versa, and the two appear to have separated genetically already [about 30,000 years ago]""."
Aboriginal Australians,"Environmental adaptations
Aboriginal Australians possess inherited abilities to adapt to a wide range of environmental temperatures in various ways. A study in 1958 comparing cold adaptation in the desert-dwelling Pitjantjatjara people compared with a group of European people showed that the cooling adaptation of the Aboriginal group differed from that of the white people, and that they were able to sleep more soundly through a cold desert night. A 2014 Cambridge University study found that a beneficial mutation in two genes which regulate thyroxine, a hormone involved in regulating body metabolism, helps to regulate body temperature in response to fever. The effect of this is that the desert people are able to have a higher body temperature without accelerating the activity of the whole of the body, which can be especially detrimental in childhood diseases. This helps protect people to survive the side-effects of infection."
Aboriginal Australians,"Location and demographics
Aboriginal people have lived for tens of thousands of years on the continent of Australia, through its various changes in landmass. The area within Australia's borders today includes the islands of Tasmania, K'gari (previously Fraser Island), Hinchinbrook Island, the Tiwi Islands, Kangaroo Island and Groote Eylandt. Indigenous people of the Torres Strait Islands, however, are not Aboriginal."
Aboriginal Australians,"In the 2021 census, people who self-identified on the census form as being of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander origin totalled 812,728 out of a total of 25,422,788 Australians, equating to 3.2% of Australia's population and an increase of 163,557 people, or 25.2%, since the previous census in 2016. Reasons for the increase were broadly as follows:"
Aboriginal Australians,"Demographic factors – births, deaths and migration – accounted for 43.5% of the increase (71,086 people). In turn, 76.2% of that increase was attributed to people aged 0–19 years in 2021, broken down as 52.5% for 0–4 year olds (births since 2016) and 23.7% for 5–19 year olds.
Non-demographic factors, which are complex to quantify, include persons identifying as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander in a particular census, and changes in census coverage and response – such as persons completing a census form in 2021 but not in 2016. These factors accounted for 56.5% of the increase in the Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander population (92,471 people). The increase was higher than observed between 2011–2016 (39.0%) and 2006–2011 (38.7%)."
Aboriginal Australians,"Languages
Most Aboriginal people speak English, with Aboriginal phrases and words being added to create Australian Aboriginal English (which also has a tangible influence of Aboriginal languages in the phonology and grammatical structure). Some Aboriginal people, especially those living in remote areas, are multi-lingual. Many of the original 250–400 Aboriginal languages (more than 250 languages and about 800 dialectal varieties on the continent) are endangered or extinct, although some efforts are being made at language revival for some. As of 2016, only 13 traditional Indigenous languages were still being acquired by children, and about another 100 spoken by older generations only."
Aboriginal Australians,"Groups and sub-groups
Dispersing across the Australian continent over time, the ancient people expanded and differentiated into distinct groups, each with its own language and culture. More than 400 distinct Australian Aboriginal peoples have been identified, distinguished by names designating their ancestral languages, dialects, or distinctive speech patterns. According to noted anthropologist, archaeologist and sociologist Harry Lourandos, historically, these groups lived in three main cultural areas, the Northern, Southern and Central cultural areas. The Northern and Southern areas, having richer natural marine and woodland resources, were more densely populated than the Central area."
Aboriginal Australians,"Geographically-based names
There are various other names from Australian Aboriginal languages commonly used to identify groups based on geography, known as demonyms, including:"
Aboriginal Australians,"Anangu in northern South Australia, and neighbouring parts of Western Australia and Northern Territory
Goorie (variant pronunciation and spelling of Koori) in South East Queensland and some parts of northern New South Wales
Koori (or Koorie) in New South Wales and Victoria (Aboriginal Victorians)
Murri in Central and Northern Queensland, sometimes referring to all Aboriginal Queenslanders
Nunga in southern South Australia
Noongar in southern Western Australia
Palawah (or Pallawah) in Tasmania
Tiwi on Tiwi Islands off Arnhem Land (NT)"
Aboriginal Australians,"A few examples of sub-groups
Other group names are based on the language group or specific dialect spoken. These also coincide with geographical regions of varying sizes. A few examples are:"
Aboriginal Australians,"Anindilyakwa on Groote Eylandt (off Arnhem Land), NT
Arrernte in central Australia
Bininj in Western Arnhem Land (NT)
Gunggari in south-west Queensland
Muruwari people in New South Wales
Luritja (Kukatja), an Anangu sub-group based on language
Ngunnawal in the Australian Capital Territory and surrounding areas of New South Wales
Pitjantjatjara, an Anangu sub-group based on language
Wangai in the Western Australian Goldfields
Warlpiri (Yapa) in western central Northern Territory
Yamatji in central Western Australia
Yolngu in eastern Arnhem Land (NT)"
Aboriginal Australians,"Difficulties defining groups
However, these lists are neither exhaustive nor definitive, and there are overlaps. Different approaches have been taken by non-Aboriginal scholars in trying to understand and define Aboriginal culture and societies, some focusing on the micro-level (tribe, clan, etc.), and others on shared languages and cultural practices spread over large regions defined by ecological factors. Anthropologists have encountered many difficulties in trying to define what constitutes an Aboriginal people/community/group/tribe, let alone naming them. Knowledge of pre-colonial Aboriginal cultures and societal groupings is still largely dependent on the observers' interpretations, which were filtered through colonial ways of viewing societies.
Some Aboriginal peoples identify as one of several saltwater, freshwater, rainforest or desert peoples."
Aboriginal Australians,"Aboriginal identity
Terminology
The term Aboriginal Australians includes many distinct peoples who have developed across Australia for over 50,000 years. These peoples have a broadly shared, though complex, genetic history, but it is only in the last two hundred years that they have been defined and started to self-identify as a single group, socio-politically. While some preferred the term Aborigine to Aboriginal in the past, as the latter was seen to have more directly discriminatory legal origins, use of the term Aborigine has declined in recent decades, as many consider the term an offensive and racist hangover from Australia's colonial era.
The definition of the term Aboriginal has changed over time and place, with the importance of family lineage, self-identification and community acceptance all being of varying importance.
The term Indigenous Australians refers to Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and the term is conventionally only used when both groups are included in the topic being addressed, or by self-identification by a person as Indigenous. (Torres Strait Islanders are ethnically and culturally distinct, despite extensive cultural exchange with some of the Aboriginal groups, and the Torres Strait Islands are mostly part of Queensland but have a separate governmental status.) Some Aboriginal people object to being labelled Indigenous, as an artificial and denialist term."
Aboriginal Australians,"Culture and beliefs
Australian Indigenous people have beliefs unique to each mob (tribe) and have a strong connection to the land. Contemporary Indigenous Australian beliefs are a complex mixture, varying by region and individual across the continent. They are shaped by traditional beliefs, the disruption of colonisation, religions brought to the continent by Europeans, and contemporary issues. Traditional cultural beliefs are passed down and shared by dancing, stories, songlines and art—especially Papunya Tula (dot painting)—collectively telling the story of creation known as The Dreamtime. Additionally, traditional healers were also custodians of important Dreaming stories as well as their medical roles (for example the Ngangkari in the Western desert). Some core structures and themes are shared across the continent with details and additional elements varying between language and cultural groups. For example, in The Dreamtime of most regions, a spirit creates the earth then tells the humans to treat the animals and the earth in a way which is respectful to land. In Northern Territory this is commonly said to be a huge snake or snakes that weaved its way through the earth and sky making the mountains and oceans. But in other places the spirits who created the world are known as wandjina rain and water spirits. Major ancestral spirits include the Rainbow Serpent, Baiame, Dirawong and Bunjil. Similarly, the Arrernte people of central Australia believed that humanity originated from great superhuman ancestors who brought the sun, wind and rain as a result of breaking through the surface of the Earth when waking from their slumber."
Aboriginal Australians,"Health and economic deprivations
Taken as a whole, Aboriginal Australians, along with Torres Strait Islander people, have a number of health and economic deprivations in comparison with the wider Australian community.
Due to the aforementioned disadvantage, Aboriginal Australian communities experience a higher rate of suicide, as compared to non-indigenous communities. These issues stem from a variety of different causes unique to indigenous communities, such as historical trauma, socioeconomic disadvantage, and decreased access to education and health care. Also, this problem largely affects indigenous youth, as many indigenous youth may feel disconnected from their culture.
To combat the increased suicide rate, many researchers have suggested that the inclusion of more cultural aspects into suicide prevention programs would help to combat mental health issues within the community. Past studies have found that many indigenous leaders and community members, do in fact, want more culturally-aware health care programs. Similarly, culturally-relative programs targeting indigenous youth have actively challenged suicide ideation among younger indigenous populations, with many social and emotional wellbeing programs using cultural information to provide coping mechanisms and improving mental health."
Aboriginal Australians,"Viability of remote communities
The outstation movement of the 1970s and 1980s, when Aboriginal people moved to tiny remote settlements on traditional land, brought health benefits, but funding them proved expensive, training and employment opportunities were not provided in many cases, and support from governments dwindled in the 2000s, particularly in the era of the Howard government.
Indigenous communities in remote Australia are often small, isolated towns with basic facilities, on traditionally owned land. These communities have between 20 and 300 inhabitants and are often closed to outsiders for cultural reasons. The long-term viability and resilience of Aboriginal communities in desert areas has been discussed by scholars and policy-makers. A 2007 report by the CSIRO stressed the importance of taking a demand-driven approach to services in desert settlements, and concluded that ""if top-down solutions continue to be imposed without appreciating the fundamental drivers of settlement in desert regions, then those solutions will continue to be partial, and ineffective in the long term""."
Aboriginal Australians,"See also
Notes
References
This article incorporates text by Anders Bergström et al. available under the CC BY 4.0 license."
Aboriginal Australians,"Further reading
""Start exploring Australian Aboriginal culture"". Creative Spirits. 24 December 2018.
""Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies"". AIATSIS.
""Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies"". AIATSIS.
""Aboriginal Art of Australia: Understanding its History"". ARTARK. Retrieved 28 August 2023."
Aboriginal Australians,External links
Aboriginal Australians, Media related to Aboriginal Australians at Wikimedia Commons
Federalism in Australia,"Federalism was adopted, as a constitutional principle, in Australia on 1 January 1901 – the date upon which the six self-governing Australian Colonies of New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, and Western Australia federated, formally constituting the Commonwealth of Australia. It remains a federation of those six original States under the Constitution of Australia.
Australia is the sixth oldest surviving federation in the world after the United States (1789), Mexico (1824), Switzerland (1848), Canada (1867), and Brazil (1891).
Relatively few changes have been made in terms of the formal (written) constitution since Australian federation occurred; in practice, however, the way the federal system functions has changed enormously. The most significant respect in which it has changed is in the degree to which the Commonwealth government has assumed a position of dominance."
Federalism in Australia,"History
Federation
Instigated by Henry Parkes' Tenterfield Oration of 24 October 1889, the Australian Colonies conducted a series of constitutional conventions through the 1890s. These culminated in a draft Constitution that was put to popular vote in the individual colonies, and eventually approved by the electors, after a final round of changes met the higher threshold of support required in New South Wales.  It was then passed into law by the Imperial Parliament in Britain as the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900, finalising the process of the Federation of Australia.
The rather desultory way in which federation proceeded reflected the absence of compelling urgency. The colonies saw some advantage in removing tariff barriers to inter-colonial trade and commerce, having a greater strategic presence, and gaining access to investment capital at lower rates; individually, though, none of these represented a driving force. Taken together with the emergence for the first time of a distinct sense of Australian national identity, however, they were collectively sufficient. This lack of urgency was also reflected in their desire to create a minimally-centralised union."
Federalism in Australia,"Federal features in the Australian Constitution
In its design, Australia's federal system was modelled closely on the American federal system. This included: enumeration of the powers of parliament (s. 51) and not those of the States, with the States being assigned a broad 'residual' power instead (s. 108); a 'supremacy' clause (s. 109); strong bicameralism, with a Senate in which the States are equally represented notwithstanding great disparities in population (s. 7); the division of senators into different cohorts on alternating electoral cycles (s. 13); the establishment of a supreme court empowered to declare actions of either level of government unconstitutional, the High Court of Australia (s. 71); and a complex two-step amending procedure (s. 128)."
Federalism in Australia,"Development of Australian Federalism
Since federation, the balance of power between levels of government has shifted substantially from the founders' vision.  The shift has transferred power from State governments to the Commonwealth government. While voters have generally rejected proposals to enhance the Commonwealth's authority through constitutional amendment, the High Court has obliged, with generous interpretation of the Commonwealth's enumerated powers. A major factor has been the way the Commonwealth government has monopolised access to the main revenue sources.
For the first two decades, Australian federalism stayed reasonably true to the ""co-ordinate"" vision of the framers.  In co-ordinate federalism, the Commonwealth and the States were both financially and politically independent within their own spheres of responsibility. This was reinforced by the High Court, which in a number of decisions in those early years rejected Commonwealth government attempts to extend its authority into areas of State jurisdiction.
A factor in the expansion of Commonwealth powers was Australia's involvement in the First World War. The turning point really came, though, with the High Court's decision in the 1920 Engineers Case, Amalgamated Society of Engineers v Adelaide Steamship Co Ltd, repudiating its early doctrines that had protected the co-ordinate model and the place of the States in the federation.
A system of co-operative federalism began to emerge in the 1920s and 1930s in response to both internal and external pressures.  Elements of cooperative federalism included: the establishment of the Australian Loan Council in response to intergovernmental competition in the loan markets; the co-ordination of economic management and budgetary policies during the Great Depression; and the establishment of joint consultative bodies, usually in the form of ministerial councils.
A second turning point came with the threat to Australia at the beginning of the Second World War and the Commonwealth government's mobilisation of financial resources.  The constitutional framework on tax allowed both the Commonwealth and States to levy taxes.  However, in 1942 the Commonwealth introduced legislation to give it a monopoly on income taxes.  It did this by providing financial grants to states (using the section 96 grants power), on the condition that they did not collect their own income taxes.  The validity of this scheme was upheld twice in the High Court.  ""Uniform"" income taxation levied by the Commonwealth became the principal instrument of Commonwealth financial domination and vertical imbalance in the Australian federal system (vertical fiscal imbalance). The system allowed the Commonwealth to intrude into traditional fields of State responsibility by means of specific purpose grants or loans to the States for purposes such as education, health and transport. Extensive use of these 'tied grants' by the Labor Government 1972–75 provided a ""work-around"" solution for the Australian Labor Party's long-standing frustration with the obstacles of federalism.  It thus helped diminish Labor's antipathy to the federal system in Australia.
Despite the centralisation of legislative and financial power, there are many areas where federal Parliament lacks the power to regulate comprehensively, even where such regulation might be seen to be in the national interest. This has led State and federal governments to co-operate to create regulatory regimes in fields such as the marketing of agricultural products and competition policy.
Over the years Australia has developed an increasingly comprehensive system of horizontal fiscal equalisation (HFE) aimed at ensuring that all jurisdictions have the same fiscal capacity in relation to their needs.  Since 1933, a statutory agency of the Commonwealth government, the Commonwealth Grants Commission, has been responsible for determining the way transfers are distributed among the States and Territories to accomplish this goal.  Since 2000, the net revenue of the GST, a national value-added tax, has been distributed as general purpose payments according to a strict levelling formula determined by the Grants Commission. Discontent with this arrangement led to a review inquiry in 2012."
Federalism in Australia,"Reform of the Federation
The reliance of the States on financial transfers from the Commonwealth, the high degree of ""overlap and duplication"", and the resulting policy conflict and confusion between the levels of government regularly generates criticism and calls for ""reform of the federation"".  The Rudd Labor government launched a series of reforms in 2009 designed to reduce the micromanaging character of specific purpose payments. Most recently, the Abbott Liberal-National Party Coalition government commissioned a White Paper on the 'Reform of the Federation'."
Federalism in Australia,"The Territories
In addition to the States, Australia has a number of Territories. Two of those are self-governing: the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and the Northern Territory (NT). The rest are administered by the Government of Australia. All are constitutionally under the authority of the Commonwealth parliament. The power to ""make laws for the government"" of the Territories, assigned to the Commonwealth Parliament by s 122 of the Constitution, is not confined by any words of limitation. It is generally assumed to be a plenary power, equivalent to the ""peace, order and good government"" powers of self-government assigned to the States by their own Constitution Acts.
However, the Constitution makes almost no provisions as to the role of the territories within the federation. For example, the Senate was to be composed of equal numbers of Senators from each state. A particularly troublesome matter was whether this excluded territories from participation in the Senate. Two seats each have been allocated to the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory, while each of the states has twelve. Although officially a separate internal territory, Jervis Bay Territory is counted as part of the Division of Fenner for the purposes of representation in the House of Representatives and the Australian Capital Territory for the purpose of representation in the Senate. Two of the three inhabited external territories, namely Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, are represented by the senators and representatives of the Northern Territory. Since 2019, Norfolk Island has been represented by the Senators for the Australian Capital Territory and by the House of Representatives member for Bean (since 2019) or Canberra (2016-19). It previously had no representation due to the higher degree of autonomy it possessed under self-government until 2015.
The Northern Territory referendum of 1998 narrowly rejected a statehood proposal for the Northern Territory. Admission of the Territory as a new State raises difficult questions about how much representation in parliament would be accorded a jurisdiction with such a small population."
Federalism in Australia,"Intergovernmental relations and executive federalism
In response to the increasing overlap between the two levels of government, Australian federalism has developed extensive practices of intergovernmental relations. At the peak of these are formal meetings between the Prime Minister, the premiers of the States, the Chief Ministers of the two self-governing Territories and the president of the Australian Local Government Association. In the early 1990s, those meetings were formalised as the Council of Australian Governments (COAG). With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the formal processes of COAG were set aside in favour of more frequent, immediate and collegial meetings of the heads of government christened ""National Cabinet"".
In 2005, the State and Territory governments established their own peak body, the Council for the Australian Federation (CAF), modelled on the Council of the Federation in Canada. However, CAF was active for only a few years and has fallen into disuse."
Federalism in Australia,"See also
Federation of Australia
Australian constitutional law
Timeline of the expansion of federal powers in Australia"
Federalism in Australia,"References
External links"
Federalism in Australia,"Council for the Australian Federation (official website)
Federalism Repository – articles"
Australian constitutional law,"Australian constitutional law is the area of the law of Australia relating to the interpretation and application of the Constitution of Australia. Legal cases regarding Australian constitutional law are often handled by the High Court of Australia, the highest court in the Australian judicial system. Several major doctrines of Australian constitutional law have developed."
Australian constitutional law,"Background
Constitutional law in the Commonwealth of Australia consists mostly of that body of doctrine which interprets the Commonwealth Constitution. The Constitution itself is embodied in clause 9 of the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act, which was passed by the British Parliament in 1900 after its text had been negotiated in Australian Constitutional Conventions in the 1890s and approved by the voters in each of the Australian colonies. The British government did, however, insist on one change to the text, to allow a greater range of appeals to the Privy Council in London. It came into force on 1 January 1901, at which time the Commonwealth of Australia came into being.
The Constitution created a framework of government some of whose main
features, and sources of inspiration, were the following:"
Australian constitutional law,"constitutional monarchy (British and existing colonial models)
federalism (United States model)
parliamentary, or ""responsible"", government (British and existing colonial models)
distinct textual separation of powers (US model)
direct election to both Houses of Parliament (then a novelty)
Governor-General as a representative of a monarch (existing colonial models, notably Canada)
requirement of a referendum for amendment of the Constitution (Swiss model)
only very limited guarantees of personal rights (rejection of the US model)
judicial review (US model)"
Australian constitutional law,"The Constitution and the High Court
The process of judicial review –  the ability of The High Court of Australia to declare legislation unconstitutional and therefore invalid – has its origin in American experience, where the right of the Supreme Court of the United States to strike down legislation deemed incompatible with the Constitution was first asserted by the Supreme Court itself in the seminal case of Marbury v. Madison in 1803. Although completely foreign to both British and Australian colonial experience, the framers of the Australian Constitution clearly intended that the practice would take hold in Australia, and even expressly adverted to it in the Constitutional text (in section 76). This power of judicial review of legislation for conformity with the Constitution has been exercised almost exclusively by the High Court of Australia, and almost invariably with a full bench of all its members, such as in the Communist Party case. Influence from American jurisprudence has occurred in specific cases.
A brief overview of the other listed features will provide a background for the doctrinal developments examined below."
Australian constitutional law,"Constitutional monarchy
Australia is a constitutional monarchy. Although the term ""Head of State"" is not used in the Constitution, it was intended that the Commonwealth (like the colonies) would continue to recognise the British Sovereign. ""The Queen"" (meaning Queen Victoria, defined to include ""Her Majesty's heirs and successors in the sovereignty of the United Kingdom""), was one of the three elements of Parliament, along with the Senate and the House of Representatives (section 1). Today, the King of Australia has replaced the King of the United Kingdom within Australia's parliament, but they happen to be the same person. The Monarch is represented in Australia by an appointed Governor-General. The executive power is vested in the Governor-General ""as the Queen's representative"" (section 61), as is the command-in-chief of the armed forces (section 68).
The Australian Constitution provides the Governor-General with a number of powers, including; the power to dissolve Parliament (Sections 5, 57), the power to refuse assent to bills presented to her (section 58) and the power to dismiss the government Ministers (section 64)., however, the practical use of such powers is restricted by constitutional convention, which mandate the Governor General to act on ministerial advice, except in exceptional circumstances. Because the conventions are not written in The Constitution, the limits of the Governor General's powers are unclear. Convention does, however, allow The Governor General to exercise some powers without ministerial advice in exceptional circumstances. These powers are known as reserve powers.
The reserve powers allow The Governor General to commission a Prime Minister when no party, or coalition of parties has a majority of seats in The House of Representatives and the power to dismiss a Prime Minister, who has been subject to a vote of no confidence in the House of Representatives.
The reserve powers may also include the power to dismiss a Prime Minister who is engaging in persistent illegal action (Governor Sir Philip Game of New South Wales dismissed Premier Jack Lang on this ground in 1932). However, it remains controversial whether they include the power to dismiss a Prime Minister who, while retaining the confidence of the House of Representatives, is not able to get the annual supply Bill passed by the Senate, as happened during the Australian constitutional crisis of 1975 when the Governor-General acted against the advice of Ministers.
The role of the Monarch is today even more circumscribed and amounts only to appointing (and, in theory, dismissing) a Governor-General on the advice of the Prime Minister, as well as performing (by invitation) certain ceremonial functions when personally present in Australia. See Constitutional history of Australia for further details on the development of the monarch's role in relation to Australia.
The importance of constitutional conventions in this area means that Australia cannot be said, strictly, to operate entirely under a written constitution, but has to some extent a system like the British unwritten constitution. However, it would be a mistake to exaggerate the importance of this aspect of Australia's constitutional arrangements:"
Australian constitutional law,"the reliance on constitutional convention is confined almost entirely to the relations between the Queen/Governor-General and the Ministers of State; and
more completely written constitutional systems also develop binding conventions: for instance, popular election to the Electoral College of the United States, though not mandated by the United States Constitution, has probably become a binding norm."
Australian constitutional law,"Federalism
Division of powers
The Constitution sets up the Commonwealth of Australia as a federal polity, with enumerated limited specific powers conferred on the Federal Parliament. The State Parliaments are not assigned specific enumerated powers; rather the powers of their predecessor colonial Parliaments are continued except insofar as they are expressly withdrawn or vested exclusively in the Federal Parliament by the Constitution. The framers rejected an alternative model, the Canadian, which has been described as ""an allocation of exclusive powers to both levels of government, not concurrent powers.""
The bulk of enumerated powers are contained in section 51 and section 52.  Section 52 powers are 'exclusive' to the Commonwealth (although some section 51 powers are in practice necessarily exclusive, such as the power with respect to borrowing money on the public credit of the Commonwealth in paragraph (iv), and the power to legislate with respect to matters referred to the Commonwealth by a State in paragraph (xxxvii)).  By contrast, the subjects in section 51 can be legislated on by both state and Commonwealth parliaments.  However, in the event of inconsistency or an intention by the Commonwealth to cover the field the Commonwealth law prevails (section 109).
Both concurrent (section 51) and exclusive (section 52) powers are stated to be ""subject to this Constitution"".  As a result, the Commonwealth's law-making power is subject to the limitations and guarantees in the Constitution (both express and implied). For example, section 99 forbids the Commonwealth from giving preference to any State or part of a State ""by any law or regulation of trade, commerce, or revenue"". And as discussed below, an implied guarantee of freedom of political communication has been held to limit the Commonwealth's power to regulate political discourse.
The list of powers assigned to the Federal Parliament is quite similar to that assigned by the United States Constitution to the Congress, but is in some respects broader: for instance, it includes ""astronomical and meteorological observations"", marriage and divorce, and interstate industrial relations.  The interpretation of similar heads of power – for instance the Trade and Commerce Power in Australia and the Commerce Clause in the US –  has in some cases been different.
The constitution also provides some opportunities for Federal-State co-operation: any State can ""refer"" a ""matter"" to the Commonwealth Parliament, and the Commonwealth Parliament can exercise, ""at the request or with the concurrence of the Parliaments of all the States directly concerned"", any power which, at the time of Federation, could be exercised only by the British Parliament."
Australian constitutional law,"Parliamentary structures
Representation in the House of Representatives is based on population and ‘original states’ have equal numbers in the Senate.  The two houses are equal in power except for certain restrictions in financial matters.  For example, the Senate may not amend a supply Bill, although as the Australian constitutional crisis of 1975 demonstrates, it may defer or refuse to pass such a Bill altogether; Bills to impose taxation or appropriate revenue may not originate in the Senate; and the Senate may not amend a Bill so as to increase taxation.
Again, federalism is evident in the process of constitutional amendment, which requires that the Bill to amend the Constitution be approved by a majority of electors overall and a majority of electors in a majority of States (that is, four out of the six).
Additionally, amendments ""altering the limits"" of a State or diminishing its proportional representation in Parliament require the approval of electors in that State."
Australian constitutional law,"Parliamentary government
It was assumed by the framers, in line with British and local colonial tradition, that the executive government would consist of Ministers who were members of Parliament and ""responsible"", that is, answerable, to it, and that the continued existence of the government would depend on it maintaining the confidence in the House of Representatives.
These arrangements, however, are only hinted at in the text of the Constitution. There is a requirement (section 64) that the ""Queen's Ministers of State"", who are nominally appointed by the Governor-General, be or swiftly become members of either House of Parliament. The existence of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, and the requirement for them to have the confidence of the House of Representatives, are not mentioned. Nonetheless, these have been fundamental features of Australian constitutional practice from the start. More recently, the principle of responsible government was reinforced by the High Court of Australia which upheld orders for a Minister of the government to table documents in the NSW Legislative Council after he refused to do so."
Australian constitutional law,"Separation of powers
The Constitution features a distinct separation of powers. Legislative power is dealt with in Chapter I, and is vested in the Federal Parliament (section 1). Executive power is dealt with in Chapter II, and is vested in the Governor-General as the Queen's representative (section 61). The judicature is dealt with in Chapter III, and is vested in the Federal High Court and ""in such other federal courts as the Parliament creates, and in such other courts as it invests with federal jurisdiction"" (section 71).
However, the Queen is an element of the Parliament as well as being head of the executive; and the Ministers of State who ""advise"" the Governor-General are actually required to be or become members of Parliament.
While there is no significant separation of the legislative and executive powers (the ""political branches""), the High Court has developed an increasingly stringent doctrine of the separation of the judicial power from the other two."
Australian constitutional law,"Direct election to both Houses of Parliament
The Constitution required direct election of members to both Houses of Parliament from the beginning (sections 7 and 24). This was a novelty at the time, since the national upper houses with which the framers were best acquainted were chosen by other means: indirect election by the State legislatures (United States Senate before the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913), executive appointment for life (Senate of Canada), or a combination of appointment for life and hereditary succession (British House of Lords)."
Australian constitutional law,"Referendum for constitutional amendment
The text of the Constitution was not presented to the British Parliament for formal enactment until it had been approved by the electors of the colonies.
On the same principle, any amendment to the Constitution requires approval at a referendum, by the process set out in section 128 of the Constitution. A double majority – a majority of electors and of a majority of states – is required.
Constitutional referendums were based on the Swiss practice. However, the Swiss use of the popular initiative in constitutional amendment was not followed, so that constitutional alterations, although they must be approved by the people, can only be initiated by Parliament.
The use of the referendum in initially adopting the Constitution, and its requirement for constitutional amendment, has been cited by justices of the High Court to argue that the Constitution is fundamentally based on popular sovereignty (rather than on the supremacy of the British Parliament, which is its technical legal foundation). This doctrine has achieved greater prominence since the cessation, in 1986, of all authority of that Parliament over Australia: see Constitutional history of Australia for details.
There have been 44 proposals for constitutional amendment put to the people since Federation. Of these, only 8 have passed."
Australian constitutional law,"Growth of federal power
Probably the most obvious development in Australian constitutional law has been the steady growth in the power of the federal government relative to the states.  Several factors could account for this, including:"
Australian constitutional law,"doctrines of constitutional interpretation which favour a broad reading of Commonwealth powers
the ""fiscal imbalance"" between the Commonwealth and the States (see Constitutional basis of taxation in Australia)
the development of new areas of competence which did not exist at Federation, and which have fallen to the Commonwealth
the growing importance of legislative areas that were always Commonwealth powers (for example, external affairs and trading corporations)
constitutional amendment or referral by the States
the willingness of Australian governments, including supporters of States' rights, to exercise their powers to the full"
Australian constitutional law,"Centralising interpretations
Reserved State powers doctrine and the Engineers case
Prior to 1920 the ""reserved State powers"" doctrine and ""implied inter-governmental immunities"" were used to preserve state power.  Reserved state powers holds that the Constitution should be read in a restrictive way so as to preserve as much autonomy as possible for the States. Implied intergovernmental immunities holds that Commonwealth and States are immune to each other's laws and cannot mutually regulate each other's governmental apparatus.
In 1920, the Engineer's case (after changes in the composition of the Court) swept away this doctrine. The court now insisted on adhering only to interpreting a statute ""expounded according to the intent of the Parliament that made it; and that intention has to be found by an examination of the language used in the statute as a whole"". There was to be no reading in of implications by reference to the presumed intentions of the framers.
As a result, the constitution is no longer read in a way which attempts to preserve the power of the states."
Australian constitutional law,"Broad interpretation of Commonwealth powers
Even before the Engineer's case, a line of judicial reasoning asserted that Commonwealth powers should be interpreted broadly rather than narrowly wherever possible.
After Engineers, this approach was reinforced.  For example, Section 109, regarding inconsistency between Commonwealth and State laws, was broadly interpreted.  Commonwealth law prevails not only where inconsistent obligations are imposed, but where Commonwealth legislation evinces an intention to ""cover the field"" by being the whole law on a particular subject. The Commonwealth can ""manufacture"" inconsistency by expressly stating that its legislation is intended to cover the field. However, an issue that was raised, without being conclusively resolved, in the Workplace Relations Challenge was whether the Commonwealth can ""clear the field"" by stating an intention that State laws are not to apply even if the Commonwealth does not enact other laws in their place.
The Commonwealth can only legislate with respect to an enumerated head of power, This does not mean that the law must be solely, or even predominantly, directed at that head of power. As long as it can be ""fairly characterized"" as a law with respect to an enumerated power, it is irrelevant that it could also be categorised as a law regarding some other subject matter.
Likewise, Parliament's motivation in passing the law is irrelevant. An example is environmental legislation. The Constitution does not provide the Commonwealth Parliament with any power to control the environment or its use.  Nonetheless, a very broad-ranging environmental protection Act could be passed relying on a combination of powers such as interstate and international trade, corporations, taxation, foreign affairs and so on.  The law can be supported by those powers although Parliament intended it to be an 'environmental law'.  Particularly in the last two decades, many Acts of very wide-ranging effect have been passed on just these bases, in fields as diverse as environment protection, privacy, and anti-discrimination, fields in which the Commonwealth has no direct power."
Australian constitutional law,"Fiscal imbalance
At the time of Federation, the colonies' main source of revenue consisted of customs and excise duties (income tax being still a newer notion). Since one of the main reasons for Federation was to create a common market, inevitably authority over these taxes was vested exclusively in the Commonwealth Parliament (section 90). It was acknowledged that this would create a situation where the Commonwealth would raise much more money than it could spend, whereas the States, being still responsible for most areas of law and of social infrastructure, would need to spend much more money than they could raise (the problem now known as ""vertical fiscal imbalance""). Although the framers were able to agree on a formula for distribution of the Commonwealth's surplus to the States in the first few years after Federation, they could not agree on a long-term formula. Accordingly, section 96 of the Constitution provides that the Commonwealth Parliament ""may grant financial assistance to any State on such terms and conditions as it thinks fit"".
One result of this has been that the Commonwealth has been able to make grants to the States on terms so specific as to amount to the virtual takeover of particular fields of competence. For instance, although the Constitution gives the Commonwealth no express power over education, by means of ""tied grants"" it has in fact become paramount in the field of tertiary education. Although any state has the option to refuse a grant, the consequences of doing so make this unattractive. Similarly, the Commonwealth has become dominant in the field of public hospitals, and a major player in the field of roads and other major infrastructure.
The Commonwealth has also come to monopolise income tax. Once the advantages of income tax were recognised, both the Commonwealth and the States levied income taxes. However, during World War II, the Commonwealth government decided to take over the collection of income taxes and return some proceeds to the States as grants. The Commonwealth passed legislation to levy income tax at a nationwide rate similar to the previous combination of Commonwealth tax and the various state taxes. Separate legislation then granted section 96 monetary grants to states if the State did not levy income taxes. In practice, it would be difficult for States to continue taxing.
This arrangement was twice challenged by the States in the High Court and twice upheld. In the Second Uniform Tax case the taxation part of the scheme was held to be valid based on the taxation power, and the grants held to be valid on the basis of the words 'terms and conditions' of section 96.
States are also at the mercy of the High Court's definition of an ""excise duty,"" which states cannot levy. The High Court has long stated the definition in terms such as ""an inland tax on a step in production, manufacture, sale or distribution of goods"". However, it does not include a mere fee for a licence to carry on a particular business or profession. Accordingly, the States had for a long time levied, with the compliance of the High Court, ""business franchise fees"" on retailers of products, particularly liquor and tobacco products.
These ""franchise fees"" were mostly calculated according to the value of the retailer's sales in a specific preceding period, rather than on the value of goods currently being sold. Although these seem similar to excise duties, a series of High Court precedents had effectively ""quarantined"" such fees from disallowance in the areas of liquor retailing, tobacco retailing, and petrol distribution. In 1997, by a bare majority, the High Court decided that this area of doctrinal quarantine was incoherent with the rest of the law relating to excise duties and removed it.
 The immediate result was the loss of some $5 billion (Australian) in the annual revenues of the States and Territories.
In 1999, the Commonwealth Parliament passed legislation introducing a new broad-based Federal indirect tax, the Goods and Services Tax; the revenue from this tax was to go entirely to the States and Territories in exchange for abolishing a range of other indirect taxes. By this stage, the financial dependence of the States on the Commonwealth had become almost complete."
Australian constitutional law,"New areas of competence
The development of various technologies during the twentieth century also added to the power of the centre. Section 51(v) of the Australian Constitution gives the Commonwealth Parliament power over ""postal, telegraphic, telephonic, and other like services"".  With little controversy, this power now covers radio, television, satellite, cable, and optic fibre technologies.
A greater struggle occurred over Commonwealth legislation in the field of aviation.  Commonwealth regulation is based on the interstate and international trade and commerce power.  Prima facie, it does not cover intrastate aviation.  However, a purely intrastate aviation industry is no longer economically feasible and separate systems of state regulation pose safety concerns.  As a result, the High Court held that all aviation has an interstate character, placing it within Commonwealth legislative power. In 1937 a referendum was submitted to the people giving the Commonwealth power over aviation, and that the referendum was rejected by the people. The rejection of a power by the people has never persuaded the Court that the Commonwealth should not exercise the power.
Another example concerns intellectual property. Although the Constitution gave the Commonwealth Parliament power over ""copyrights, patents of inventions and designs, and trade marks"", the enormous growth of electronic media content has given this power a much wider scope than could possibly have been envisaged at Federation."
Australian constitutional law,"New powers
The Commonwealth power has been extended by four constitutional amendments.  An amendment in 1910 and an amendment in 1928 allowed the Commonwealth to take over and manage state debts. An amendment passed in 1967 gave the Commonwealth power over Aboriginal affairs, which has had a significant effect particularly in the pastoral and central regions of Australia.
An amendment passed in 1946 gave the Commonwealth power to provide a wide range of social services.  This included unemployment and sickness benefits, maternity allowances, child endowment, and medical and dental services. Apart from defence, social services is the largest area of Commonwealth expenditure.  Along with the grants power, it is the basis for the Medicare scheme of universal health insurance.
The High Court decided that the corporations power was not broad enough to cover incorporation itself. This decision threatened the validity of Australian companies incorporated under commonwealth law.  The states used 'the referral power' to refer the power over incorporation to the Commonwealth Parliament."
Australian constitutional law,"The external affairs power
The Constitution gives the Commonwealth Parliament power over ""external affairs"". Originally this power had little content, because Australia's foreign relations were managed by the United Kingdom. As Australia gained independence and international personality, so did the significance of this power.
Australia's relations with other countries fall directly under the subject of external affairs. It includes relations with other British Dominions and further extends to relations with international organisations. The pursuit and advancement of friendliness with foreign governments is another vital aspect under the external affairs power. The High Court has held that the power covers the regulation of conduct that takes place outside Australia, suggesting that mere externality to Australia could enliven the power. In particular, Commonwealth legislation of 1998 that retroactively criminalised war crimes committed during World War II in Europe by Australian citizens was held a valid exercise of the external affairs power.
The power has also been held to extend to the implementation of international treaties, even if the subject matter of the treaty is otherwise not within Commonwealth power. In the case of Koowarta v Bjelke-Petersen, the High Court found that the Commonwealth had the power to implement the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination in the form of the Racial Discrimination Act. In the case of Tasmanian Dams Case, the High Court has upheld Commonwealth legislation forbidding the Tasmanian government from proceeding with a dam that would have submerged an area of Tasmanian government-owned land that had been declared a World Heritage Area under the World Heritage Convention to which Australia is a party. Land use is otherwise a State responsibility.
More recently, the external affairs power has been used to remove the States' power to criminalise male homosexual activity.  This followed an adverse report by the Human Rights Committee on Tasmanian provisions.  The Human Rights Committee was established under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Australia is a party. Rather than challenge the resulting Commonwealth Human Rights (Sexual Conduct) Act of 1994, the Tasmanian Parliament repealed the legislation in question.
Although it would appear that there is an open-ended potential for the Commonwealth to encroach on areas of traditional State competence through the external affairs power, to date it has been used with some discretion, if only because the use of the power in this way inevitably excites considerable political controversy."
Australian constitutional law,"The corporations power
The corporations power allows the Commonwealth to legislate on ""foreign corporations, and trading or financial corporations formed within the limits of the Commonwealth"". Although the width of the expression ""trading or financial corporations"" has never been authoritatively settled, it appears that it covers at least all commercial enterprises carried out under the corporate form.
As corporations have come to dominate the economy, the practical scope the corporations power has increased. For example, in 2005 the Commonwealth Parliament enacted the WorkChoices legislation, which, relying primarily on the corporations power, seeks to create a uniform national industrial relations system to the exclusion of both the States' and the Commonwealth's own industrial relations systems.  Previous systems were based on the 'conciliation and arbitration' power. The new legislation applies to all employees of a ""constitutional corporation."" A constitutional corporation is a corporation within the meaning of section 51(xx) of the Constitution.  The legislation also applies to employees of the Commonwealth and its agencies, and some others.  The expected coverage of this law is approximately 85% of the Australian workforce. That proportion is likely to increase as employers who operate as sole traders or in partnerships incorporate to take advantage of the new legislation's relatively ""employer-friendly"" provisions.
On 14 November 2006, the High Court by a 5-to-2 majority upheld the validity of the WorkChoices legislation against all the challenges that had been made to it in an action brought by each of the States and mainland Territories, as well as certain trade unions. The single majority judgment, while it did not expressly adopt, waved aside all the objections that had been argued against the ""object of command"" test for the validity of the exercise of the corporations power. Accordingly, the judgment suggests that, henceforth, it may be a sufficient basis of validity that Federal legislation be specifically addressed to constitutional corporations (""A constitutional corporation must..."", ""A constitutional corporation must not...""), without any additional requirement that the legislation also address some aspect of the status or activities of corporations which is specific to such entities. If this is correct, then given the preponderant role of corporations in the modern economy, the possibility exists for substantial Federal control of the greater part of the economy, with little if any regard to the traditional constitutional ""heads of power""."
Australian constitutional law,"Protection of rights
Access to the High Court
To a very large extent, the Constitution leaves it to Parliament to determine both the High Court's original jurisdiction (section 76), and the exceptions to, and conditions on, its power to hear appeals (section 73). However, the Constitution grants the Court some original jurisdiction directly, without the possibility of Parliamentary limitation (section 75). This includes matters in which ""a writ of Mandamus or prohibition or an injunction is sought against an officer of the Commonwealth"".
In recent years, the Parliament has all but eliminated the possibility of appeal against many decisions in the area of migration, especially in regard to applications for refugee status. However, since the Parliament is not constitutionally able to limit or abolish access to the High Court for the purpose of applying for one of these ""constitutional writs"", such applications have become a major means of challenging migration decisions. In 2014–15 94% of the applications for constitutional writs involved immigration matters."
Australian constitutional law,"No Bill of Rights
The Constitution contains no comprehensive set of human rights guarantees.  Factors sometimes cited for this include faith in the common law's protection of rights and a belief that a powerful Senate would effectively resist overzealous governments. The Constitution does contain protection for several specific rights. These include:"
Australian constitutional law,"right to vote in Commonwealth elections if one can vote in State ones (section 41)
freedom of religion, and prohibition of religious tests for Federal offices (section 116)
trial by jury in Federal cases tried on indictment (section 80)
""just terms"" for the compulsory ""acquisition"" of property by the Commonwealth (section 51(xxxi))
an ambiguously worded prohibition on discrimination against residents of other States (section 117)
All but the last of these have been read down by the High Court, at least relative to the content of the corresponding United States guarantees. On the other hand, since the 1990s the High Court has been developing a jurisprudence of rights said to be implied in the text and structure of the Constitution.
In addition, a constitutional requirement that ""trade, commerce, and intercourse among the States ... shall be absolutely free"" (section 92) was, for a time, interpreted as a guarantee of some degree of freedom from economic regulation by either Commonwealth or State Parliaments. The reference to ""intercourse"", on the other hand, has always been understood as guaranteeing a right to movement across State boundaries.
Although express protections for human and civil rights in the Constitution are scant, and have mostly been read down, some protections have been created by the High Court through its jurisprudence on the separation of powers and through its findings of rights implied by the text and structure of the constitutional document."
Australian constitutional law,"Express rights
As mentioned, there are five rights which the Constitution guarantees against the Commonwealth –  religious freedom, trial by jury, ""just terms"" compensation, free trade between the states, and protection against discrimination based on the state an individual lives in. (A referendum proposal to amend the Constitution to clarify these rights and to make them good also against the States was defeated in 1988.) As will be seen, guaranteed access to the High Court can itself amount to an important right. And the guarantee of free trade and commerce was for a time interpreted as something like an individual right."
Australian constitutional law,"Freedom of religion
The Constitution states that the Commonwealth ""shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth"" (section 116).
In determining what is considered a religion, the High Court has adopted a broad approach; demonstrating an unwillingness to create a limiting definition.
The prohibition on establishing any religion has had nothing like the impact that the corresponding ban on making a law ""respecting an establishment of religion"" in the
First Amendment to the United States Constitution has had in that country. The High Court, in rejecting a challenge to Federal funding of church schools,
 seemed to take the view that nothing less than an explicit establishment of a State Church as the official religion of the Commonwealth would come within the terms of the prohibition.
Section 116 also protects the right of a person to have no religion by prohibiting the Commonwealth from ""imposing any religious observance""."
Australian constitutional law,"""Just terms"" compensation
The Constitution gives the Commonwealth power ""with respect to ... the
acquisition of property on just terms"" in Section 51(xxxi). By contrast, the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution
contains a prohibition: ""nor shall private property be taken ... without just compensation"". The differences between acquisition and taking, and between terms and compensation, combined with the fact that the Australian provision is expressed as a positive grant of power coupled with a limitation, have been read so as to weaken the Australian guarantee relative to the American one.
The use of the term ""acquisition"" has been interpreted so as to require that the Commonwealth (or some other party for a Commonwealth purpose) actually acquire possessory or proprietary rights over the property in question, or at least some benefit: the mere extinguishment of a person's proprietary rights by the Commonwealth (or a prohibition on effectively exercising them) is insufficient to amount to an acquisition. And ""just terms"" has been taken to mean something less than ""just compensation""; in particular, it does not necessarily require payment to the owner of the value of the property when it was compulsorily acquired
The Australian film The Castle addresses this issue."
Australian constitutional law,"Protection against residency discrimination
Trial by jury for indictable offences
The constitutional guarantee that a trial on indictment for a federal offence must be by jury (section 80) has been rendered virtually worthless because the High Court has decided that it is applicable only to a trial that proceeds formally by way of indictment, and it is completely in Parliament's discretion to decide which offences are triable on indictment and which are not. This narrow view is confirmed in the majority judgement of Kingswell v the Queen. Powerful dissents to the effect that the section must be given some substantive meaning (the trial of offences of some specific degree of gravity must be by jury) have not prevailed.
On the other hand, where Parliament has prescribed jury trial, the Court has been willing to impose some content on that notion. In particular, it has insisted that conviction by a jury for a Federal offence must be by the unanimous agreement of the jurors –  a majority verdict will not suffice."
Australian constitutional law,"Freedom from economic regulation
The constitutional requirement that ""trade, commerce, and intercourse amongst the States ... shall be absolutely free"" (section 92) was for a considerable time interpreted as a guarantee of some degree of freedom from government regulation. A notable example of this line of jurisprudence was the High Court's disallowance of a Commonwealth Act which had the aim of nationalising the banking industry.
In 1988 following the decision in Cole v Whitfield, which was notable also for the Court's willingness to use the transcripts of the Convention debates as an aid to interpretation, the Court unanimously decided that what the section prohibited, in relation to interstate trade and commerce, were only ""discriminatory burdens of a protectionist kind"". That is, the section did no more than guarantee ""free trade"" (in the conventional sense) among the States. But in relation to ""intercourse"" (i.e. personal movement between States), the Court suggested that the scope of the guarantee would be much wider, and may even, in relation to some forms of such intercourse, be truly absolute."
Australian constitutional law,"Implied rights
Implied rights are the political and civil freedoms that necessarily underlie the actual words of the constitution but are not themselves expressly stated directly in the constitution. The High Court has held that no implication can be drawn from the Constitution which is not based on the actual terms of the Constitution, or on its structure. Since the 1990s the High Court has discovered rights which are said to be implied by the very structure and textual form of the Constitution. Chief amongst these is an implied right to freedom of communication on political matters. In addition, some protections of civil liberties have been the result of the High Court's zealous attempts to safeguard the independence of, and confidence in, the Federal judiciary."
Australian constitutional law,"Freedom of political communication
Two cases decided in 1992 established a new implied right to freedom of communication on political matters. The first case, Nationwide News Pty Ltd v Wills, concerned a Federal provision criminalising the ""bringing into disrepute"" of members of an industrial relations tribunal, and a prosecution under that provision of a person who had published a
newspaper article repeatedly describing such members as ""corrupt"" and ""compliant"". The second case, Australian Capital Television Pty Ltd v Commonwealth, concerned a Federal attempt to ban political advertising on radio and television during election periods and to strictly control it at other times, via a system of ""free time"" entitlements.
In both cases, the majority of the High Court reasoned that, since the Constitution required direct election of members of the Federal Parliament, and since moreover the Ministers of State were required to be or swiftly become members of that Parliament, the result was that ""representative democracy is constitutionally entrenched"". That being so, freedom of public discussion of political and economic matters is essential to allow the people to make their political judgments so as to exercise their right to vote effectively. Furthermore, since ""public affairs and political discussion are indivisible"", it is impossible to limit this necessary freedom to purely Federal issues:
it applies also to issues which might be the preserve of the State or local levels of government. Therefore, there is implied in the Constitution a guarantee of freedom of communication on all political matters.
The Court stressed that this freedom is not absolute, but the result in both cases was that the relevant Federal legislation was struck down. In the latter case, some strong dissents to the effect that limiting expenditure on political advertising in the electronic media might actually enhance representative democracy did not prevail.
Both these cases concerned the validity of Federal legislation. But two years later, the Court extended the implied guarantee into the area of private law, by holding that it also applied to limit the statutory and common law of defamation. A former chairman of a Commonwealth Parliamentary Committee on Migration claimed to have been defamed by a newspaper which had published a letter accusing him of bias, in his official capacity, towards people of his own ethnic background. By trial, it was conceded that the accusation was false. However the Court accepted a ""constitutional defence"" which was said (by three Justices) to operate when otherwise defamatory statements concerning the fitness of a public official to hold office were published without knowledge of, or recklessness as to, their falsity, and when publication was reasonable in the circumstances.
This case, however, and a series of following cases, failed to produce a clear statement of the operative principle which commanded the support of a majority of the Court. But in 1997 in Lange v Australian Broadcasting Corporation which involved the alleged defamation of a former Prime Minister of New Zealand a unanimous Court did state the operative principle. It rejected the ""constitutional defence"" of the migration-bias case just discussed, and instead expanded the scope of ""qualified privilege"", requiring the defendant to have actively taken reasonable steps to verify the accuracy of the published material, and also, in most circumstances, to have given the defamed person an opportunity to respond. On the other hand, the Court made it clear that the qualified privilege may extend to discussion concerning the United Nations and other countries, even where there is no direct nexus with the exercise of political choice in Australia. In McCloy v New South Wales, the High Court further endorsed the view that a qualified freedom of political communication exists and provided an updated and more detailed legal test.
The constitutional guarantee of freedom of political communication is, prima facie, far more restricted than the generalised guarantee of
freedom of speech and of the press in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. But it remains to be seen whether a suitable expansion of the notion of ""political communication"" may not lead, in time, to a similar result. In the migration-bias case, some of the Justices, while being careful to quarantine ""commercial speech without political content"", seemed to imply that the scope of ""political speech"" may nevertheless be very broad indeed. Mitchell Landrigan goes as far as arguing that the exception to the Anti-Discrimination Act 1977 (NSW) permitting the exclusion of women from ordination as priests infringes the right of women to ""rise to positions from which they may take part in political speech as [politically persuasive] religious leaders."" Any such constitutional protection would depend on a court finding that the anti-discrimination laws, first, effectively burdened political speech (as relevant to the Commonwealth Parliament) and, secondly, disproportionately burdened such speech."
Australian constitutional law,"Right to vote
The Constitution is silent as to many aspects of the democratic process, leaving these details to be provided by Parliament. The Constitution does however require in sections 7 and 24 that the members of Parliament be ""directly chosen by the people"". In 1975 two judges of the High Court suggested that these requirements may amount to a right to vote, holding ""the long established universal adult suffrage may now be recognized as a fact and as a result it is doubtful whether ... anything less than this could be described as a choice by the people."" In 1983 the High Court took a limited view of the right to vote in R v Pearson; Ex parte Sipka. The High Court Judge Michael Kirby, writing extrajudicially in 2000, said that ""...in Australia, there may be a basic right to vote implied in the text of the constitution itself"". Prior to 2006 prisoners were only disenfranchised if they were serving sentences of three years or more. 2006 legislation sought to disenfranchise all prisoners, regardless of the length of their sentence. The validity of the disenfranchisement was challenged by Vickie Roach who was serving a four-year gaol term for negligently causing serious injury in a car accident and her legal team comprised Ron Merkel, QC and Michael Pearce, SC.
In 2007 the High Court held in Roach v Electoral Commissioner that the requirement that members be ""directly chosen by the people"" conferred a limited ""right to vote"". In principle, these words guaranteed qualified universal franchise, and limited the Federal government's legislative power to limit that franchise. The court held that removing right to vote for serious misconduct was acceptable and that the previous legislation was valid, however imprisonment failed as a method of identifying serious criminal misconduct such that the 2006 amendments were invalid.
The 2006 legislation was again considered in Rowe v Electoral Commissioner, where the High Court held that amendments restricting the enrolment of voters once an election has been called were also invalid. *  The High Court subsequently held that closing the electoral roles 7 days after the issuing of writs was not a burden on the constitutional mandate that members of Parliament be directly chosen by the people. The right to vote does not involve a corresponding right not to vote. The High Court rejected a challenge to the 2016 Senate voting changes holding that both above the line and below the line voting were constitutionally valid methods for the people to choose their Senators."
Australian constitutional law,"Right to due process
As mentioned above, the fact that the Constitution prescribes a system of ""responsible"", or parliamentary, government means that there can be no meaningful separation of the legislative and executive powers, despite their distinct textual separation in the Constitution. However, the same consideration does not militate against a separation of the judicial power from the other two, and in fact the High Court has come to insist on this with some force. It has also held that the separation of the judicial power implies that a body exercising that power must do so in a manner that is consistent with traditional notions of what constitutes judicial process. The result may be a limited constitutional guarantee of due process.
The judicial power of the Commonwealth is vested, in Chapter III of the Constitution, in the High Court and such other courts as the Parliament creates or invests with Federal jurisdiction. In Australian constitutional jargon, such courts are called ""Chapter III courts"". The members of Chapter III courts may not be removed except by the Governor-General on an address from both Houses of Parliament on the ground of proved misbehaviour or incapacity; they otherwise hold office until the age of 70.
In separate cases in 1915, and 1918, the High Court held that ""judicial power"" (essentially, the power of interpretation of the law and enforcement of decisions) could not be invested in anything other than a Chapter III court, and specifically, in anything other than a body whose members have life tenure. In Kruger v Commonwealth (1997) the High Court considered claims by members of the Stolen Generation, including that their removal and subsequent detention without due process was in contravention of the Constitution. Dawson J,: p. 61  and McHugh J,: p. 142  held that the Constitution contained no general guarantee of due process of law. Toohey, Gaudron and Gummow JJ held that the removal of Indigenous children was not the exercise of judicial power, hence no question of due process arose.
The converse of the separation of powers is the decision of the High Court in Boilermakers' Case in 1956, that Chapter III courts cannot be invested with anything other than judicial power. To some extent the rigour of the separation of powers doctrine was softened by the Court's subsequent acceptance that judges could, constitutionally, be assigned functions in their personal capacity as judges rather than as members of a Chapter III court. But this raised the question of which such functions were compatible with the simultaneous holding of Federal judicial office. The answers offered by the Court have been controversial and involved some very fine distinctions: for instance, it has held that a power to authorise telephone interceptions is compatible, while a power to make recommendations concerning the protection of land which might be of heritage significance to Aboriginals is not compatible. The most striking application (and extension) of this ""incompatibility"" doctrine, however, has involved the Supreme Court of the State of New South Wales, a court that may be invested with Federal jurisdiction. Kable v Director of Public Prosecutions (1996) concerned a criminal law passed by the New South Parliament and directed at a single named individual (somewhat in the manner of a Bill of attainder).
The individual was a prisoner (under state law) whose sentence was about to expire but who was alleged to have made threats against the safety of various persons, to be carried out when released. The State Parliament enacted a law, applying only to him, which authorised the Supreme Court of New South Wales to make ""preventive detention orders"" for periods up to six months, with the possibility of renewal. The orders were to be made if the Court was satisfied, ""on the balance of probabilities"", that the person to whom the Act applied was ""more likely than not to commit a serious act of violence"".
It is clear that, had the Federal Parliament passed such an Act, it would be found invalid, as it was in effect a legislative judgment and so violated of the constitutional separation of the judicial power. However, the High Court found that the separation of powers was not a feature of the New South Wales constitution, so the State Act was not invalid on that ground.
The Act was found invalid, however, on the ground that since the Supreme Court of New South Wales had been invested with federal jurisdiction, it must not be required to perform a function ""incompatible"" with the exercise of the judicial power of the Commonwealth. To that extent, the States are not free to legislate as they please with respect to their own courts. A requirement to order the ""preventive detention"" of someone who has not been charged with any criminal offence was found ""incompatible"" with the exercise of Federal judicial power. In this rather circuitous manner, the High Court has found a limited constitutional guarantee of due process."
Australian constitutional law,"See also
Australian Constitution
Constitutional history of Australia
Separation of church and state in Australia
Separation of powers in Australia
Federalism in Australia
Referendums in Australia
Section 51 of the Australian Constitution –  federal heads of power
Trade and Commerce Power; Corporations Power; External Affairs Power
Section 109 of the Australian Constitution –  inconsistency between state and federal laws"
Australian constitutional law,"References
Bibliography
Tony Blackshield and George Williams, Australian Constitutional Law and Theory: Commentary and Materials (3rd ed., Federation Press, Annandale NSW, 2002)
John Quick and Robert Garran, The Annotated Constitution of the Australian Commonwealth (LexisNexis Butterworths, Sydney, [1901] 2002)
Leslie Zines, The High Court and the Constitution (4th ed., Butterworths, Sydney, 1997)
Greg Craven, ""Conversations with the Constitution"" (1st ed, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2004)"
Australian constitutional law,"External links
Full text of the Constitution from the Australian Attorney-General's Department"
Fiscal imbalance in Australia,"The fiscal imbalance in Australia is the disparity between the revenue generation ability of the three levels of governments in Australia relative to their spending obligations; but in Australia the term is commonly used to refer more specifically to the vertical fiscal imbalance, the discrepancy between the federal government's extensive capacity to raise revenue and the responsibility of the States to provide most public services, such as physical infrastructure, health care, education etc., despite having only limited capacity to raise their own revenue. In Australia, vertical fiscal imbalance is addressed by the transfer of funds as grants from the federal government to the states and territories."
Fiscal imbalance in Australia,"Vertical fiscal imbalance
Vertical fiscal imbalance in Australia is largely the product of the Commonwealth's takeover of income taxes in 1942, during World War II, and rulings of the High Court of Australia that made various state taxes unconstitutional under the Australian Constitution, in particular section 90 and section 109.
The Australian Constitution allows both States and the Commonwealth to raise revenue, but subsequent constitutional interpretation and political developments have limited state taxing powers and led to a vertical fiscal imbalance. Vertical fiscal imbalance means that the revenue-raising abilities of the governments do not coincide with their spending responsibilities. As Section 51 and other provisions of the constitution (such as section 52 and section 90) prescribe only limited legislative powers to the Commonwealth, Australian states have considerable obligations. For example, primarily, Australian states fund schools and hospitals. The result of the limitations on state taxing power is that the Commonwealth collects the money through taxes, and distributes that money to states. The power to distribute funds to states, on conditions, is contained in Section 96 of the Australian Constitution. As a result, the sphere of Commonwealth power has expanded through dictating policy through conditional grants. This limits the autonomy and power of the states in controlling policy."
Fiscal imbalance in Australia,"Loss of state income taxing power
Before 1942, consistent with the concurrent power in section 51(ii), both the states and the Commonwealth levied income taxes. However, in 1942 the Commonwealth attempted to gain a monopoly on income taxes by passing the Income Tax Act 1942 and the States Grants (Income Tax Reimbursement) Act 1942. The first act purported to impose Commonwealth income tax. The latter act said Commonwealth funding would be provided to the States only if they imposed no income tax. This latter act was premised on Section 96 of the Australian Constitution Act.
Section 96 of the Australian Constitution provides:"
Fiscal imbalance in Australia,"… the Parliament may grant financial assistance to any State on such terms and conditions as the Parliament thinks fit
The States Grant Act therefore placed the ""term and condition"" that states did not tax at all as a pre-requisite to funding. The Income Tax Act 1942, by setting high tax rates (i.e. that would reflect the combined current Commonwealth and State taxes) made imposing current tax rates unattractive or impossible for State governments. This was because the Income Tax Assessment Act 1942 said that individuals had to pay Commonwealth tax before State taxes. In effect, the scheme meant either the States had to accept grants and stop taxing, or decline grants and try to collect tax at rates which were unsustainable.
The High Court has interpreted ""terms and conditions"" very broadly. In South Australia v Commonwealth (1942) 65 CLR 373 (the First Uniform Tax case), the scheme was upheld. There is an opinion that the scheme, introduced in 1942, was upheld on the basis of the defence power in Section 51(vi). The Commonwealth re-enacted the scheme after the war. There was a second constitutional challenge in which the scheme was upheld on the basis of Section 96, in Victoria v Commonwealth (1957) 99 CLR 575 (the Second Uniform Tax case).
Since 1942, state have not imposed income taxes but have largely relied on Section 96 grants. In introducing the Goods and Services Tax (GST), the Commonwealth agreed to distribute GST revenues to the states according to a formula."
Fiscal imbalance in Australia,"Horizontal fiscal imbalance
Australia also has a horizontal fiscal imbalance, which arises because state and territory governments have different abilities to raise revenue from their tax bases and because their respective costs of providing public services differ. This imbalance is addressed by a horizontal fiscal equalisation (HFE) policy overseen by the Commonwealth Grants Commission. When the Commonwealth transfers funds to states and territories, it does not give each State a fixed amount or an amount proportional to the state's population relative to other states. Rather, it uses a formula to disburse funds to states on a needs-basis and its ability to raise its own revenue.
Australia has a formal horizontal fiscal equalisation (HFE) scheme, introduced in 1933, which distribute more funds to States and territories which have a lower capacity to raise revenue or have a greater cost burden, to enable each State and territory to have the capacity to provide services and the associated infrastructure at the same standard, if each made the same effort to raise revenue from its own sources and operated at the same level of efficiency.
Currently, the funds distributed to achieve HFE are the revenues raised by the Commonwealth from the goods and services tax (GST), currently about AU$50bn a year. The amount collected by the Commonwealth from GST is distributed by the federal Treasurer each year on the basis of advice provided by the Commonwealth Grants Commission.
Achieving HFE does not mean that the States are directed how to raise revenue or how to spend their funds. GST revenue grants from the Commonwealth are unencumbered and available for any purpose. Accordingly, HFE equalises fiscal capacity, not fiscal policies which remain for the States and territories to decide for themselves. It does not result in the same level of services or taxes in all States, direct that the States must achieve any specified level of service in any area, nor impose actual budget outcomes in accordance with the Commission's calculations."
Fiscal imbalance in Australia,"Specific purpose payments
Commonwealth grants to the states are of two types: "
Fiscal imbalance in Australia,"general purpose payments, which states can use for whatever purpose they choose, and
specific purpose payments (SPPs) (or tied grants), which are grants to states for specific projects decided by the Commonwealth, e.g. schools, hospitals, or roads.
The ability of the Commonwealth to make specific purpose payments without legislative authority was called into question in Williams v Commonwealth (2012) (also known as the ""School chaplains case""). The High Court held that section 61 of the Constitution, which had commonly been thought to grant the Commonwealth unfettered powers to enter into specific purpose payments to the States, did not extend to payments where there was no supporting legislation."
Fiscal imbalance in Australia,"See also
Fiscal imbalance
Equalization payments
Canada Pension Plan - unfunded liability
Commonwealth Grants Commission
Council of Australian Governments
Constitutional basis of taxation in Australia
General:"
Fiscal imbalance in Australia,"Constitutional economics
Australian federal budget
Federalism in Australia"
Fiscal imbalance in Australia,"
== References =="
Buddhism in Australia,"In Australia, Buddhism is a minority religion. According to the 2021 census, 2.4 percent of the total population or 615.822 of Australia identified as Buddhist. It was also the fastest-growing religion by percentage, having increased its number of adherents by 79 percent between the 1996 and 2001 censuses. The highest percentage of Buddhists in Australia is present in  Christmas Island, where Buddhists constitute 18.1% of the total population according to the 2016 Census. Buddhism is the fourth largest religion in the country after Christianity, Islam and Hinduism."
Buddhism in Australia,"Demographics
The change in demography of Buddhism in Australia is given:"
Buddhism in Australia,"2011 census data showed the Buddhist affiliated population had grown from 418,749 to 528,977 people, an increase of 20.8%. As Australia's population was estimated at 21.5 million at the time, according to the same census, the Buddhist population may be estimated at 2.46% of the population.
According to the 2016 census, the Buddhist population numbered 563,677 individuals, of whom 33% live in Greater Sydney, 30% in Greater Melbourne, and 8% each in Greater Brisbane and Greater Perth. The states and territories with the highest proportion of Buddhists are Victoria (3.07%) and New South Wales (2.78%), whereas those with the lowest are Queensland (1.51%) and Tasmania (0.79%).
The highest percentage of Buddhists are present in  Christmas Island, where Buddhism constitute 18.1% of the total population according to the 2016 Census. Buddhism was the largest religion in Christmas island till 2013, later Islam become the dominant religion there when Malays become biggest ethnic group in the island."
Buddhism in Australia,"History
The first clear example of Buddhist settlement in Australia dates to 1858. However, there has been speculation from some anthropologists that there may have been contact hundreds of years earlier; in the book Aboriginal Men of High Degree, A.P. Elkin cites what he believes is evidence that traders from Indonesia may have brought fleeting contact with Buddhism and Hinduism to areas near modern-day Dampier. Elkin interpreted a link between Indigenous Australian culture and Buddhist ideas such as reincarnation. He argued this link could have been brought through contact with Macassan traders. There was also speculation due to reports of Chinese relics appearing in northern Australia dating to the 15th century, although it may have been brought much later through trade rather than earlier exploration.
In 1851, the first large group of Chinese to come to Australia came as part of the gold rush, most of them staying briefly for prospecting purposes rather than mass migration. In 1856, a temple was established in South Melbourne by the secular Sze Yap group. This temple was also used for Taoism, Confucianism, various cultural deities and even astrological activities. However, no clerics from China ever came to Australia. While numbers of worshipers at the See Yup temple in South Melbourne varied over time (primarily due to the White Australia Policy), it has been in continuous use as a temple ever since.
The first Buddhist group to arrive in Australia was a troupe of acrobats and jugglers from Japan who toured in 1867. More arrived throughout the century, mostly involved in the pearling industry in northern Australia, reaching an estimate of 3600 on Thursday Island, and also in Broome and Darwin, Northern Territory.
The first Sinhalese Buddhists from Sri Lanka arrived in 1870 to work in sugarcane plantations. A community was believed to exist on Thursday Island in 1876. In 1882, a group of 500 left Colombo for Queensland, mostly in Mackay. The oldest remaining structure attesting to the establishment of Buddhism in Australia are two Bodhi Trees planted on Thursday Island in the 1890s, although the temple which once stood there no longer exists.
During the 20th century, the number of Buddhists gradually declined due to emigration and a lack of immigration caused by the White Australia Policy.
In 1891, the American Buddhist, Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, who was the co-founder of Theosophical Society came to Australia and participated in a lecture series, which led to a greater awareness of Buddhism in small circles of mainly upper-class society. One of the members of the Theosophical Society was future Australian Prime Minister Alfred Deakin, who had spent three months in India and Sri Lanka in 1890 and wrote a book which discussed spiritual matters, including Buddhism.
The first instance of a monk arriving in Australia was in 1910, when U Sasana Dhaja, born E.H. Stevenson in Yarmouth, arrived from Burma. Over the years, various monks visited Australia, but it was not until the 1970s that a resident monk (named Venerable Somaloka) arrived from Sri Lanka.
The first specific Buddhist group, the Buddhist Study Group Melbourne, was formed in Melbourne in 1938 by Len Bullen, but it collapsed during the Second World War. The Buddhist Society of Victoria was formed in 1953, and in 1956 the Buddhist Society of New South Wales was formed. From the 1950s until the 1970s, the Buddhist Societies were lay organizations which self-discussed Buddhism."
Buddhism in Australia,"In the late 1970s, Buddhism began to become more widespread, mainly due to immigration from South East Asia following the Vietnam War, as well as the spread to Western countries of Tibetan Buddhism, led by figures such as Lama Yeshe, who established religious institutions with resident monks, and Sogyal Rinpoche, during the 1980s, the founder of the Rigpa organization. This was supplemented by further immigration from Asia in the proceeding decades.
In 2009 in Australia four women received bhikkhuni ordination as Theravada nuns, the first time such ordination had occurred in Australia. It was performed in Perth, Australia, on 22 October 2009 at Bodhinyana Monastery. Abbess Vayama together with Venerables Nirodha, Seri, and Hasapanna were ordained as Bhikkhunis by a dual Sangha act of Bhikkhus and Bhikkhunis in full accordance with the Pali Vinaya.
Buddhism used to have the highest percentage growth of all religions in Australia, having had an increase of 79 percent in the number of adherents from the 1996 to the 2001 census. Since the 1986 census, the number of adherents has increased from 80,387 to around 370,345 in 2001. However, it started to decline from 2.5 percent in 2011 to 2.4 percent in 2016, although there is still an increase of about 34,700 Buddhists in the number of adherents."
Buddhism in Australia,"Buddhist temples
Bodhinyana Monastery
Dhammasara Monastery
Pháp Hoa Temple
Nan Tien Temple
Newbury Buddhist Monastery
Chung Tian Temple
Stream Entering Monastery (Tu viện Nhập Lưu)
Sunnataram Forest Monastery
Tara Institute"
Buddhism in Australia,"See also
Ajahn Brahmavamso
Ajahn Sujato
Ayya Nirodha
Geshe Acharya Thubten Loden
Geshe Sonam Thargye
Buddhism in New Zealand
Buddhism in Oceania
Great Stupa of Universal Compassion"
Buddhism in Australia,"References
Further reading
Croucher, Paul (1989). A History of Buddhism in Australia, Kensington, N.S.W. : New South Wales University Press
Halafoff, Anna;  Fitzpatrick, Ruth; Lam, Kim (2012). Buddhism in Australia: An Emerging Field of Study, Journal of Global Buddhism 13, 9-25
Daniel A. Metraux, ""Soka Gakkai in Australia"" in Nova Religio (8.1, July 2004).
Metraux, Daniel A. (2003). The Soka Gakkai in Australia: Globalization of a new Japanese Religion, Journal of Global Buddhism 4, 108-143
Spuler, Michelle (2000). Characteristics of Buddhism in Australia, Journal of Contemporary Religion 15 (1), 29-44
Spuler, Michelle  (2002). The Development of Buddhism in Australia and New Zealand.  In: Prebish, Charles S., and Baumann, Martin, (eds.) Westward Dharma: Buddhism beyond Asia. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, USA, pp. 139–151
Barker, Michelle (2007). Investments in Religious Capital: An explorative case study of Australian Buddhists Archived 22 March 2017 at the Wayback Machine, Journal of Global Buddhism 8, 65-80"
Buddhism in Australia,External links
Buddhism in Australia,"Article from Buddhism Today
Sri Lankan Buddhist temples in Australia"
Women in Australia,"Women in Australia refers to women's demographic and cultural presence in Australia. Australian women have contributed greatly to the country's development, in many areas. Historically, a masculine bias has dominated Australian culture. Since 1984, the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth) has prohibited sex discrimination throughout Australia in a range of areas of public life, including work, accommodation, education, the provision of goods, facilities and services, the activities of clubs and the administration of Commonwealth laws and programs, though some residual inequalities still persist.
In 2017, Australia was ranked the world's safest country for women by the New World Wealth research group."
Women in Australia,"History
Colonial New South Wales
Australia was established in 1788 as a penal colony. The population was predominantly male, with between 1788 and 1792, around 3546 male and 766 female convicts being landed at Sydney. This severe gender imbalance created a lot of social problems. Some of the women engaged in prostitution due to their economic circumstances, and because of the gender imbalance. The colonial administrations were anxious to address the gender imbalance. The first attempt to redress this imbalance was the voyage of the Lady Juliana, a ship chartered to carry only female convicts to New South Wales, but which became notorious on the trip and was nicknamed ""the floating brothel"". European men would also exchange European goods for sexual services from Aboriginal women."
Women in Australia,"Women came to play an important role in education and welfare during colonial times. Governor Macquarie's wife, Elizabeth Macquarie took an interest in convict women's welfare. Her contemporary Elizabeth Macarthur was noted for her 'feminine strength' in assisting the establishment of the Australian merino wool industry during her husband John Macarthur's enforced absence from the colony following the Rum Rebellion. The Catholic Sisters of Charity arrived in 1838 and set about providing pastoral care in a women's prison, visiting hospitals and schools and establishing employment for convict women. They established hospitals in four of the eastern states, beginning with St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney in 1857 as a free hospital for all people, but especially for the poor. Many other Irish nuns established hospitals and schools. Caroline Chisholm (1808–1877) established a migrant women's shelter and worked for women's welfare in the colonies in the 1840s. Her humanitarian efforts later won her fame in England and great influence in achieving support for families in the colony. Sydney's first Catholic bishop, John Bede Polding founded an Australian order of nuns—the Sisters of the Good Samaritan—in 1857 to work in education and social work. The Sisters of St Joseph were founded in South Australia by Saint Mary MacKillop and Fr Julian Tenison Woods in 1867. MacKillop travelled throughout Australasia and established schools, convents and charitable institutions. She was canonised by Benedict XVI in 2010, becoming the first Australian to be so honoured by the Catholic Church."
Women in Australia,"Late 19th-century suffrage
Australia had led the world in bringing women's suffrage rights during the late 19th century. Propertied women in the colony of South Australia were granted the vote in local elections (but not parliamentary elections) in 1861. Henrietta Dugdale formed the first Australian women's suffrage society in Melbourne in 1884. Women became eligible to vote for the Parliament of South Australia in 1895. This was the first legislation in the world permitting women also to stand for election to political office and, in 1897, Catherine Helen Spence became the first female political candidate for political office, unsuccessfully standing for election as a delegate to the Federal Convention on Australian Federation. Western Australia granted voting rights to qualified non-aboriginal women in 1899."
Women in Australia,"1901–1945
Women energetically participated in the war effort, with few signs of defeatism or resistance to government policies. In 1922, the Country Women's Association was formed with the intention to improve the lives of women in rural Australia. It has since expanded to become the largest women's organisation in the country."
Women in Australia,"Since 1945
In 1974, the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration granted women the full adult wage. However, resistance to women being employed in certain industries remained until well into the 1970s. Because of obstruction from elements of the Unions movement, it would take until 1975 for women to be admitted as drivers on Melbourne's trams, and Sir Reginald Ansett refused to allow women to train as pilots as late as 1979. In 1984, the Sex Discrimination Act became enforced, making sex-based discrimination and sexual harassment illegal. Criminalization of marital rape in Australia began with the state of New South Wales in 1981, followed by all other states from 1985 to 1992."
Women in Australia,"Analytical writings
Until the 1960s, the Australian national character was typically masculine. Only in more recent decades has attention been paid to the role and marginal status of women and minority groups. One of the earliest studies on the role of women in Australian culture was conducted by Miriam Dixson in her 1975 study, The Real Matilda. Dixson concluded that there was deep contempt for women in the Australian ethos and that the only role for women was within the family.
Marilyn Lake argues that the first stage of women's history in the 1970s demonstrated an angry tone, with a revolutionary critique that reflected its close connections with the women's liberation movement. By the late 20th century, women's history was less strident and more thoroughly integrated into social history and labour history. In the 21st century, the emphasis has turned to a broader horizon of ""gender relations"", which includes such concepts as femininity and masculinity."
Women in Australia,"Reproductive rights and health
Abortion in Australia was illegal in all circumstances until 1969, when the Menhennitt ruling in the R v Davidson case held that an abortion was legal if the physical or mental health or the life of the woman was endangered. That principle has become accepted throughout Australia. As of 2019, abortion on demand was legal (up to certain limits) in all Australian states and territories except for South Australia. It is estimated that a quarter to a third of Australian women will have an abortion in their lifetime, and the right to an abortion has strong popular support.
According to a 2017 study, abortions in Australia have an average cost of $560 after receiving the Medicare rebate, with some women also incurring extra costs from travel, accommodation, GP referrals, lost wages, childcare and medical tests. 34% of women surveyed reported they found payment for abortions difficult or very difficult. The maternal mortality rate in Australia is 5.5 deaths/100,000 live births as of 2015.
Australia, as of 2014, had a total fertility rate (TFR) of 1.8 babies born/woman, reflecting a sub-replacement fertility rate; the replacement rate is 2.1 children born/woman. This TFR has a recorded low of 1.74 in 2001, and a record high of 3.55 in 1961. The TFA has been below the replacement level since 1976."
Women in Australia,"Women in politics
Despite being given the right to stand for federal election in 1902, women were not present for the first 20 years of Australian politics until the 1921 election of Edith Cowan to the West Australian Legislative Assembly, and were not represented federally until the 1943 federal election when Dorothy Tangney and Enid Lyons were elected to the Senate and the House of Representatives, respectively. Lyons would go on to become the first woman to hold a Cabinet position in Robert Menzies' 1949 ministry. Women would not go on to lead a state or territory until Rosemary Follett was elected Chief Minister of the Australian Capital Territory in 1989. Australia's first female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard was appointed in 2010.
Since the 1970s, women have received increasing representation in the parliament. Despite examples such as in 2010 females holding every position above them in Sydney, (Clover Moore as Lord Mayor, Kristina Keneally as Premier of New South Wales, Marie Bashir as Governor of New South Wales, Julia Gillard as Prime Minister, Quentin Bryce as Governor-General of Australia and Elizabeth II as Queen of Australia) they still remain a minority in federal parliament, and as of 2021 number 37.9% (31.1% in the House of Representatives and 51.3% in the Senate), an increase of 5.9% from the previous election.
Dame Roma Mitchell was made the first female Justice of the Supreme Court of South Australia in 1965, at the recommendation of Don Dunstan, South Australia's 38th Attorney-General. She was still the only female judge in South Australia when she retired 18 years later in 1983 although Justices Elizabeth Evatt and Mary Gaudron had been appointed to federal courts by the Whitlam Government. It was not until 1993 that the second woman was appointed to the court, Mitchell's former student, Margaret Nyland."
Women in Australia,"Gender equality
Towards the end of the 19th century, married women first acquired the rights to hold property of their own, sue and be sued, enter into contracts, be subject to bankruptcy laws, be liable for the debts contracted before their marriage, and for the maintenance of their children. They acquired the same rights as held by unmarried women. Victoria passed the Married Women’s Property Act in 1884, New South Wales in 1879, and the remaining states between 1890–97.
A marriage bar had applied to employment of women in a large number of industries. The Commonwealth Public Service Act 1902 provided that every female officer was ""deemed to have retired from the Commonwealth service upon her marriage"". The very great majority of women were effectively blocked from non-secretarial positions in the Commonwealth Public Service. In 1949 women were allowed into the clerical division of the service. In November 1966, Australia was the last democratic country to lift the legislated marriage bar which had prevented married women from holding permanent positions in the public service.
The immunity for marital rape, whereby a spouse (typically the husband) could insist on sexual intercourse with the other spouse without their consent, was removed in all states and territories, either by statute or judicial decision, between late 1970s and early 1990s. The first Australian state to deal with marital rape was South Australia, under the progressive initiatives of Premier Don Dunstan, which in 1976 partially removed the exemption. Section 73 of the Criminal Law Consolidation Act Amendment Act 1976 (SA) read: ""No person shall, by reason only of the fact that he is married to some other person, be presumed to have consented to sexual intercourse with that other person"".
Since 1983, a married woman has been able to apply for an Australian passport without needing an authorisation from her husband.
Since 1984, the federal Sex Discrimination Act 1984 has prohibited discrimination throughout Australia on the basis of mainly sexism, homophobia, transphobia and biphobia, as well as sex, marital or relationship status, actual or potential pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, intersex status or breastfeeding in a range of areas of public life, including work, accommodation, education, the provision of goods, facilities and services, the activities of clubs and the administration of Commonwealth laws and programs.
In 1991, the marriage age in Australia of females was increased from 16 to 18, the age that had applied to males.
At November 2020, Australia’s national gender pay gap was 13.4%, with women’s average weekly ordinary full-time earnings across all industries and occupations being $1,562.00 compared to $1,804.20 for men."
Women in Australia,"See also
Convict women in Australia
List of Australian women artists
List of Australian women writers
List of Australian sportswomen
Women and government in Australia
Women in the Australian military
Women in Christmas Island
Women in the Cocos (Keeling) Islands
Anti-discrimination laws in Australia"
Women in Australia,"References
Primary sources
Daniels, Kay, ed. Australia's women, a documentary history: from a selection of personal letters, diary entries, pamphlets, official records, government and police reports, speeches, and radio talks  (2nd ed. U of Queensland Press, 1989) 335pp. The first edition was entitled  Uphill all the way : a documentary history of women in Australia (1980).
Teale, Ruth, ed. Colonial Eve: sources on women in Australia, 1788–1914 (Melbourne : Oxford University Press, 1978)"
Women in Australia,"Further reading
Alford, Katrina. Production or reproduction?: an economic history of women in Australia, 1788–1850 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1984)
Cunneen, Chris; Stubbs, Julie (January 2000). ""Male violence, male fantasy and the commodification of women through the internet"". International Review of Victimology. 7 (1–3). SAGE: 5–28. doi:10.1177/026975800000700302. S2CID 145573602. Filipino women in Australia
Damousi, Joy. Women Come Rally: Socialism, Communism and Gender in Australia 1890–1955 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994)
Damousi, Joy, and Marilyn Lake, eds. Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
Daniels, Kay, So Much Hard Work: Women and Prostitution in Australian History (Sydney: Fontana Collins, 1984)
Dixson, Miriam. The Real Matilda: Woman and Identity in Australia, 1788 to the Present (Penguin Books Australia, 1984)
Grimshaw, Patricia, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath and Marian Quartly. Creating a Nation (Ringwood: Penguin, 1994); a general history of Australia with emphasis on social history and gender
Grimshaw, Patricia. “The Australian Family: An Historical Interpretation,” in The Family on the Modern World ed. Alisa Burns, Gill Bottomley, and Penny Jools (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1983), pp 31–48.
Hercus, Cheryl. Stepping out of line: Becoming and being feminist (Psychology Press, 2005) excerpt
Lake, Marilyn. Getting equal: The history of Australian feminism (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999)
Lake, Marilyn (Winter 2013). ""Women's and gender history In Australia"". Journal of Women's History. 25 (4). Johns Hopkins University Press: 190–211. doi:10.1353/jowh.2013.0043. S2CID 143515435.
McMurchy, Megan, Margot Oliver, and Jeni Thornley. For love or money: a pictorial history of women and work in Australia (Penguin Books, 1983)
Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. Talkin'up to the white woman: Aboriginal women and feminism (Univ. of Queensland Press, 2000)
Ryan, Edna  and Anne Conlon. Gentle Invaders: Australian Women at Work (Melbourne: Penguin, 1975).
Saunders, Kay, and Raymond Evans, eds. Gender relations in Australia: Domination and negotiation (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992)
Sheridan, Susan. Along the Faultlines: Sex, Race and nation in Australian Women’s Writing 1880s–1930s (St Leonard, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 1995).
Smith, Michelle J., Clare Bradford, et al. From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literature, 1840–1940 (2018) excerpt"
Australia–Korea Free Trade Agreement,"The Korea–Australia Free Trade Agreement (KAFTA) is a bilateral agreement seeking to reduce trade and investment barriers between Australia and South Korea. The agreement, which came into effect on the 12th of December 2014 provides Australian goods exporters, service providers and investors with significantly improved access to the South Korean market. The trade agreement stems from decades of bilateral relations, encompassing security, trade and diplomatic ties from 1962, when then President Park Chung-Hee introduced a series of five-year plans designed to spur globalisation efforts and industrial development in Korea following the end of the Korean War."
Australia–Korea Free Trade Agreement,"Historical Background
Before the Korean War began on the 25 June 1950, Australian involvement in the Korean region was very limited, with the first documented contact between Korea and Australia occurring in 1889 when a group of missionaries from Australia arrived in Busan.  Bilateral relations between Australia and the ROK were fostered by both Australia's involvement in the UN Commission on Korea (1947) and during the Korean War (1950–53), with approximately 17000 Australian soldiers serving to aid the ROK during the Korean War . 1961 saw the establishment of full diplomatic relations between Australia and the ROK with The ROK consulate general in Sydney elevated to embassy status and the establishment of the first Korean ambassador in April 1962. Similarly, Australia established its embassy in Seoul in June 1962, with 2021 marking the 60th anniversary of full diplomatic ties between Australia and the ROK. The economic link between Australia & the ROK was also forged in the 1960s, when the ROK's rapid industrialization due to President Park Chung-Hee series of five-year plans required vast amounts of raw materials that could be supplied by Australia in substantial quantities. Historically, migration has underlined relations between Australia and the ROK, Korean migration to Australia began around the 1970 and has since increased over the decades with the population of Korean immigrants growing from 60 in 1970 to approximately 72 963 people of Korean ethnic origin having migrated under various categories including skilled and business migration. This shared bilateral history of Australia and Korea culminated over the five-year negotiation period of KAFTA, encompassing all aspects and provisions of the FTA, beginning with the Australian Labor Party Government under Kevin Rudd in 2009 and concluding under the Australian Liberal Party Government of Tony Abbot. Korea is now Australia's fourth largest trading partner and shares a variety of economic, strategic and political interests in the Asia-Pacific and global spheres."
Australia–Korea Free Trade Agreement,"The Agreement
Australian Trade Minister Andrew Robb and Korean Trade Minister Yoon Sang-jick, concluded negotiations on the Agreement in early December 2013 and the legally verified text of the agreement was initialed by Chief Negotiators on 10 February 2014. In April 2014, the Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott led a trade delegation to Japan, South Korea and China. The three economies accounted for more than half of all of Australia's two-way trade. On the South Korean leg of the mission, Abbott signed the Australia Korea Free Trade Agreement (KAFTA) with the government of Park Geun-hye in Seoul on 8 April. The agreement came into force on 12 December 2014.
According to Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Australia and Korea have ""one of the strongest and most complementary trading relationships in the Asia-Pacific region. The Korea-Australia Free Trade Agreement (KAFTA) reduces trade and investment barriers, making it easier for Australians to do business with Korea – our 4th largest trading partner."""
Australia–Korea Free Trade Agreement,"Provisions
This section provides an overview of the key provisions of KAFTA including:"
Australia–Korea Free Trade Agreement,"Trade in goods
Chapter 2 of the KAFTA agreement outlines the provisions of the agreement regarding ""Trade in goods"". The articles under this section outline the way in which trade can be conducted under the free trade agreement that is KAFTA.  For example, article 2.3 'Elimination of Custom duties' outlines that 'neither Party shall increase any existing customs duty, or adopt any new customs duty, on an originating good.' As well as that 'each Party shall progressively eliminate its customs duties on originating goods.'  Similarly, article 2.9 'Export Duties, Taxes or Other Charges' outlines that 'Neither Party shall adopt or maintain any duty, tax or other charge on the export of any good to the territory of the other Party, unless the duty, tax or charge is also adopted or maintained on the good when destined for domestic consumption.'"
Australia–Korea Free Trade Agreement,"Rules of Origin and Origin Procedures
This section of provisions relates to the protocols surrounding rules of origin and origin procedures within the KAFTA agreement. Rules of Origin and Origin Procedures are criteria which determine the origins of a good as well as the general requirements and conditions for a good to be traded as something that originated from a nation. The provisions of Rules of Origin and Origin Procedures within The KAFTA Agreement are outlined in this section and set the precedent for ""Originating Goods"", ""Wholly Obtained Goods"", and the ""Regional Value Content"". This section also provisions Origin Procedures including the ""Certificate of Origin"", ""Authorized Bodies"", ""Discrepancies and Variations"" as well as ""Record Keeping Requirements"", which are deemed essential by both nations in maintaining a productive trade relationship."
Australia–Korea Free Trade Agreement,"Customs Administration and Trade Facilitation
The objective of the provisions under the section Customs Administration and Trade Facilitation are to for both Australia and South Korea:"
Australia–Korea Free Trade Agreement,"Simplify the customs procedures of the cooperating states.
Ensure predictability, consistency and transparency in the application of customs laws, regulations and administrative procedures of the Parties.
Ensure the efficient and expeditious clearance of goods.
Facilitate trade between the Parties.
Promote cooperation between the customs administrations of Australia and South Korea.
In this section, the above objectives are attained by the provision of transparency measures, the harmonization of documents and data elements, the use of Automated Systems in the Paperless Trading Environment, Appeal Procedures, all of which are encapsulated by the KAFTA agreement."
Australia–Korea Free Trade Agreement,"Investment
The section covers the provisions pertaining to investment within and between Australia and South Korea. It encapsulates the majority of KAFTAs provisions regarding the financial sector, including National Treatment, which relates to the way in which each nations financial institution shall accord to investors of the other nation with treatment no less favorable than that it accords to its own investors.
Similarly, the Minimum Standard of Treatment clause within the Investment provision notes that ""Each Party shall accord to covered investments treatment in accordance with the customary international law minimum standard of treatment of aliens, including fair and equitable treatment and full protection and security."""
Australia–Korea Free Trade Agreement,"Cooperation
The objective of the section on Cooperation within the KAFTA FTA is to facilitate bilateral cooperation and promote an exploration of new cooperative activities between Australian and South Korea in the fields of agriculture, fisheries and forestry, building on top of already existing relationships in the political and business world between the two states to support mutual development and economic growth. This section on cooperation places large emphasis on cooperation in the industries of agriculture and Energy and Mineral Resources with the establishment of a joint Committee on Agricultural Cooperation as well as a joint Committee on Energy and Mineral Resources Cooperation."
Australia–Korea Free Trade Agreement,"Outcomes
Australian Goods Exporters
Due to KAFTA's provisions, around 99 per cent of goods exported from Australia to Korea are authorized to enter duty-free and/or with preferential access. For Australia's agricultural sector, tariffs were eliminated on Korean importation of raw sugar, bottled wine, wheat and some horticulture. Australia's beef industry has benefited from KAFTA with the ROK progressively reducing the 40 per cent tariff on beef by January 1, 2028. Australia's dairy industry has also seen benefits, receiving duty free quotas for cheese, butter and infant formula. The manufacturing, resources and energy sectors of Australia's economy have benefited as well, with the removal of all tariffs on their export to Korea progressively phasing out by January 1, 2023, these include tariffs on liquefied natural gas (LNG), unwrought aluminum and automotive parts. Tariffs on Australian pharmaceutical products have also been eliminated."
Australia–Korea Free Trade Agreement,"Australian Services Providers
KAFTA has provided Australian services exporters with preferential treatment in the Korean market, benefiting sectors including finance, legal, telecommunications and education. Outcomes include law and accounting firms have the capacity to establish representative offices in the ROK. On the December 12th, 2016, firms were given permission under the FTA to ""enter into cooperative agreements with local law firms"". The agreement also stipulates that Australian firm may establish joint ventures and hire local lawyers. For Australian Accountants, KAFTA has made it possible for them to establish offices in Korea and to provide consulting services on both international and Australian accounting laws in Korea. The agreement stipulated that by 12 December 2019, Australian accountants were able to work and invest within accounting firms in South Korea. KAFTA has enabled Australian education and engineering sectors to increase their capacity in the Korean market due to ""commitments to guarantee existing market access for Australian providers and work towards improving mutual recognition of qualifications."" In May 2015, Engineers Australia signed an agreement with the Korean Government which enhanced the recognition of Australian engineering professionals in the ROK."
Australia–Korea Free Trade Agreement,"Investors
According to the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade KAFTA has improved prospects for Australian investors/investments in Korea and Korean investors/investments in Australia. The FTA denotes that the ROK through the progressive reduction of market access barriers will provide greater entry for Australian's into the Korean market, similarly, the screening threshold for Korean investors in non-sensitive sectors has been loosened by Australia. The agreement also stipulates provisions to ensure ""non-discrimination, and protection and security for investments"". to enhance protection and certainty for Australian and Korean investors. Additionally, the Australian government in the FTA has altered the screening threshold for private Korean investors in ""non-sensitive"" sectors from 252 million AUD to $1.134 billion AUD. A key clause which has been an outcome of merit for the KAFTA agreement is the establishment of a ""negative list"" regime which simply presumes that a financial service is allowed ""unless specifically prohibited and commits Korea to allow new financial services it would permit its own financial institutions to provide."""
Australia–Korea Free Trade Agreement,"Regional Security
Whilst an FTA is principally economic in nature and an arrangement for liberalized trade, it often triggers security implications. The signing of KAFTA also underlines the shared security concerns of both Australia and Korea in the Indo-Pacific and the Korean Peninsula. Being two significant middle powers in the Asia-Pacific region, Australia and the ROK share strategic interests and have served in conflicts and peace keeping exercises in relation to non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction as well as events on the Korean peninsula that have threatened regional security. The frequency and tempo of military discussions, training exercises and industry cooperation is increasing between Australia and the ROK since KAFTAs inception. Similarly, the round of biennial foreign and defense minister meetings in 2019 placed emphasis on a ""common strategic outlook"". The signing of KAFTA has contributed to the recognition of Australia and the ROKs relationship being elevated to Comprehensive Strategic Partnership."
Australia–Korea Free Trade Agreement,"National Attitudes
Australian Attitudes
Attitudes towards the KAFTA free trade agreement have been both positive and concerned since its signing. The Australian Embassy in South Korea reported that after a year of the FTA, ""it is already making a big impact"", Citing statistics that Koreas exports to Australia rose by 7.5%. Similarly, Australian consumers have benefited from a larger access to Korean products, creating a positive attitude within the existing Korean population in Australia towards the agreement. Australian attitudes are also positive due to agricultural exports like beef, nuts and Brussels sprouts steadily increasing, creating a larger market for Australia's agricultural industry. KAFTA has also been viewed positively by Australians because Australian's stands to benefit from a robust South Korea more than many due to strong two-way merchandise trade, services trade and direct investment growth as well as the growth of people-to-people links formed by KAFTA. [1]
Some Australian attitudes have been more concerned. With Labor minister Penny Wong suggesting Australia's free trade agreement with South Korea should be scrutinized in greater depth. Citing a clause in the agreement which grants the Korean Government the right to reimpose large tariffs on Australian beef if exports grow by more than 2% a year. Similarly, Liberal backbencher at the time of KAFTAs signing Sharman Stone who represented the electorate of Murray in Victoria, a large agricultural electorate, criticised the FTA for failing to deliver reductions on a variety of Australian food exports."
Australia–Korea Free Trade Agreement,"Korean Attitudes
In 2014 KAFTA elevated the status of the economic relationship between South Korea and Australia, with South Korea becoming Australia's fourth largest trading partner as a result. Economically this has created a positive sentiment in the Korean market, with greater access to Australian mining and agricultural goods. Similarly South Korean Attitudes have been overall positive with Migration and education enriching the relationship between the two nations in the years since KAFTAs signing. Strategically, South Korea sits in a precarious position and the security relationship formed through KAFTA and diplomatic alignment has been a positive influence strategically for South Korea. Leading President Moon Jae-in to describe Australia as Korea's ""everlasting friend and partner""."
Australia–Korea Free Trade Agreement,"
== References =="
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,The Australia – United States Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA) is a preferential trade agreement between Australia and the United States modelled on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The AUSFTA was signed on 18 May 2004 and came into effect on 1 January 2005.
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"History of the FTA
The U.S. first proposed a free trade agreement with Australia as far back as 1945.  In more recent times, the prospect of an Australia-U.S. FTA was raised in the 1980s by the Hawke government. In 1991 U.S. president George H. W. Bush offered to begin FTA negotiation with Australia and New Zealand, but was turned down by Australian Labor Party Prime Minister Paul Keating.
It was not until early 2001, after the election of George W. Bush in the U.S. and with John Howard in power in Australia, that an Australia-U.S. FTA finally began to take shape.  In April 2001, President Bush signalled his interest in pursuing an FTA with Australia provided ""everything is on the table"".  Following this, in 2004, the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade commissioned a private consultancy – the Centre for International Economics (CIE) – to model the economic impacts of such an agreement.  Negotiations for the FTA began in March 2003 and after six rounds of negotiations held in Canberra, Hawaii and Washington, D.C., the text was finally agreed to in February 2004, and signed off on by Australian Trade Minister Mark Vaile and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick in Washington in May 2004.
The FTA was ratified by the United States Congress with the passage of the United States-Australia Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act. It was passed by the House of Representatives on 14 July 2004 by a vote of 314–109 and by the Senate on 15 July 2004 by a vote of 80–16, and signed into law by President George W. Bush on 3 August 2004.
In Australia, the agreement's implementing legislation, the US Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act 2004, was passed, with amendments, by the Senate on 13 August 2004. After some delay, the U.S. Administration accepted the amended Australian legislation as being consistent with implementation of the agreement.
The Agreement came into force in both countries on 1 January 2005."
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Provisions of the FTA
The text of the Free Trade Agreement is divided into twenty-three sections, listed and summarized as follows:"
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Establishment of the free trade area and definitions
This chapter lays the framework for the FTA. It states that the provisions are consistent with the relevant sections of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) 1994 and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). Both GATT and GATS are documents created by World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements and they lay the boundaries for subsequent bilateral agreements such as the Australian-U.S. FTA.
The chapter also sets definitions to be used throughout the agreement in order to assure uniformity."
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"National treatment and market access for goods
Chapter two of the FTA lays out conditions for what types of goods are subject to non-discriminatory treatment. Certain types of goods are fully applicable to the agreement immediately and some are phased in over a period of years or temporarily applicable.
The chapter also reminds the two countries that they must abide by the WTO rules applying what is called national treatment. ""National treatment"" means that each country will provide the same treatment to imported goods from the other country as if they were domestically produced goods.
Finally, the chapter established a Committee on Trade in Goods with the purpose of providing arbitration for each country to ""raise issues of concern in relation to tariffs, non-tariff measures, rules of origin and customs administration."""
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Agriculture
The agriculture section of the agreement outlines the system for eliminating most tariffs for agriculture products being traded between the two countries. It also agrees to eliminate export subsidies when the good in question is being exported to one of the two party countries.
Special tariff-rate quotas are part of the agreement. These quotas allow Australian producers to export increasing amounts of these products free of duty to the United States during the tariff elimination period. The following agricultural products are designated:"
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Beef
Dairy
Tobacco
Cotton
Peanuts
Avocados
The quota systems vary for the different products and are outlined, in detail, in this section.
The section also sets up a Committee on Agriculture with the purpose of providing ""a formal opportunity for Australia and the United States to discuss a wide range of agricultural issues relevant to the Agreement, including trade promotion activities; barriers to trade; and consultation on the range of export competition issues.""
Finally, the two countries have committed to working with the WTO on a multilateral scale to eliminate export subsidies to other WTO member countries."
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Textiles and apparel
Chapter four deals with the trade of textiles and apparel between the two party countries. The bulk of this section outlines the rules of origin provisions with regard to textile goods and safeguarding the domestic markets of the two countries. The agreement provides a mechanism to institute emergency action should the sudden increase in imports due to the reduction of tariffs lead to detrimental effects on the domestic industry of the importing country.
In addition, this section details the cooperation of Customs authorities for ensuring that the rules of the agreement are carried out and outlines possible actions which can be taken if the exporting country appears to be acting in bad faith."
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Rules of origin
The rules of origin section outlines the rules for determining the origin of the goods being traded in order to establish eligibility and also the method to determine the value of the goods traded.
For the purposes of the FTA, this section defines an originating good as those that:"
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"are wholly obtained or produced entirely in the country, such as minerals extracted there, vegetable goods harvested there, and live animals born and raised there;
are produced in the country wholly from originating materials; or
are produced in the country partly from non-originating materials.
The section also outlines supporting documentation and verifications that the goods being traded are, indeed, originating in the exporting country, as defined by the agreement. The responsibility for verification of the applicable conditions is given to the importer. Denial of preferential treatment and penalties may apply if proper verification is not provided by the importer upon request made by the importing country."
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Customs administration
This section outlines the requirements of the customs authorities to:"
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"promptly publish law, regulations, guidelines and administrative rulings,
administer customs laws in a uniform, impartial and reasonable manner,
provide advance rulings on tariff classifications and rules of origin within a given period of time,
provide some sort of administrative body to review customs determinations,
cooperate with each other on all reasonable matters, especially those involving suspicion of illegal activity,
protect the confidentiality of information provided in cooperation with other customs authorities,
impose their respective penalties for violations of customs laws and regulations,
promptly release goods consistent with ensuring compliance with customs laws,
apply risk management systems to concentrate on high-risk areas and facilitate low-risk areas, and,
maintain expedited procedures with respect to express shipments."
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Sanitary and phytosanitary measures
In conjunction with the existing WTO Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Agreement, this section sets up two committees to ensure that the SPS agreement provisions are followed."
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Committee on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Matters (provided with a mandate for ""increasing the mutual understanding of the SPS measures and regulatory processes of each Party as well as continuing the cooperative efforts of the Parties internationally"")
Standing Working Group on Animal and Plant Health (to help with the resolution of specific animal and plant health matters with the goal of resolving the problems with the least adverse effect on trade as possible)"
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Technical barriers to trade
This section acknowledges the rights and obligations of Australia and the United States to each other with respect to combating barriers to trade. These rights and obligations were laid out by the WTO Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade, which deals with standards, regulations, and conformity assessments, among other things.
Most of the section is language from both countries agreeing to share information on several levels of government regulation. They agree to attempt to accept each other's regulations and publish such rules and regulations in a timely manner in order to ensure transparency."
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Safeguards
The goal of the safeguards section of the agreement is to lay out an agreed upon structure to guard against severe adverse effects to each countries domestic industries during the transition period after lifting tariffs. The countries also agree to consider the exclusion from the application of global WTO safeguards imports from the other country where those imports are not a substantial cause of the injury to the domestic industry."
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Cross-border trade in services
Section 10 of the FTA gives clear meaning to the phrase ""cross-border trade in services"" and provides suppliers with an open environment in which to conduct their business. It requires that each country give the other's service suppliers national treatment or most-favored-nation treatment and prohibits many restrictions to market access and transfers."
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Investment
The investment chapter of the FTA provides clear definitions as to what investments are covered and gives cross-border investors assurances in order to make it as safe as if they were investing in their own country. Among other things, the section prohibits each country from imposing or enforcing any of the following requirements in relation to an investment in its territory:"
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"to export a given level or percentage of goods or services;
to achieve a given level or percentage of domestic content;
to purchase, use, or accord a preference to goods produced in its territory, or to purchase goods from persons in its territory;
to relate in any way the volume or value of imports to the volume or value of exports or to the amount of foreign exchange inflows associated with an investment;
to restrict sales of goods or services in its territory that an investment produces or supplies by relating such sales in any way to the volume or value of its exports or foreign exchange earnings;
to transfer a particular technology, a production process, or other proprietary knowledge to a person in its territory; or
to supply exclusively from its territory the goods that an investment produces or the services it supplies to a specific regional market or to the world market."
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Telecommunications
This section details agreed upon terms by both countries to assure fair trade between the telecommunications industries in each country. The rules specifically exclude measures relating to broadcast or cable distribution of radio or television programming.
Among other provisions, the agreement lays out rules for settling disputes among the members of the telecommunications industries in one country with the members in the other. It entitles enterprises to:"
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"seek timely review by a regulator or court to resolve disputes;
seek review of disputes regarding appropriate terms, conditions, and rates for interconnection; and
to obtain judicial review of a determination by a regulatory body."
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Financial services
This chapter is concerned with ensuring a non-discriminatory environment with regard to financial services. The section defines financial services as ""all insurance and insurance-related services, and all banking and other financial services, as well as services incidental or auxiliary to a service of a financial nature.""
The section further lays out the scope of its application as it applies to measures by either country that affect:"
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"financial institutions located in the territory of that country that are controlled by persons of the other country;
investors of the other country who have invested in financial institutions located in that country;
the investments of investors of the other country in financial institutions located in that country; and
cross-border trade in financial services by service suppliers of the other country."
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Competition-related matters
The parties agreed to minimise obstacles to the operation of each other's competition and consumer protection policies. Australia agreed that its governments at all levels would not provide any competitive advantage to any government businesses simply because they are government-owned. This provision is consistent with existing provisions of Australia's National Competition Policy"
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Government procurement
Subject to some exceptions, and the non-participation of some US states, the agreement required, in government and government agency procurement, that each party should accord to the other treatment no less favourable than the most favourable treatment accorded to domestic goods, services and suppliers."
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Electronic commerce
The parties agreed to co-operate on mechanisms to facilitate electronic commerce, not to impose customs duties on digital products and for each to apply non-discriminatory treatment to the digital products of the others."
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Intellectual property rights
Australia agreed to extend its copyright expiration period from 50 to 70 years after the author's death where copyright is calculated on the basis of the life of a natural person, and 70 years after the first performance or publication in other cases.
The agreement expands the rights of patent holders.
The agreement requires legal enforcement of digital rights management systems, however an Australian legislative committee has issued a report stating that this portion of the treaty has a ""significant flaw"": while the agreement provides permitted exceptions allowing the use of copyright access circumvention devices, it also disallows access to the tools used for such circumvention. The report goes on to term it a ""lamentable and inexcusable flaw"", an ""egregious flaw"", and even a ""flaw that verges on absurdity"". The committee expressed the strong view that the Government must find a solution to the flaw before implementing this portion of the treaty."
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Labour
Chapter 18 of the Agreement deals with labour, and is largely confined to general statements of principle.  The Parties reaffirm their obligations as members of the International Labour Organization (ILO) and their commitments under the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work and its Follow-up (1998) (ILO Declaration). The Agreement recognizes the right of each Party to establish its own labour standards, and to adopt or modify accordingly its labour laws, and states that each Party shall strive to ensure that its laws provide for labour standards consistent with the internationally recognised labour principles"
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Environment
Chapter 19 responds to concerns that parties may seek to gain trade advantages by relaxing environmental laws.
Article 19.2 states that ""The Parties recognise that it is inappropriate to encourage trade or investment by weakening or reducing the protections afforded in their respective environmental laws.""
Accordingly, each Party shall strive to ensure that it does not waive or otherwise derogate from, or offer to waive or otherwise derogate from, such laws in a manner that weakens or reduces the protections afforded in those laws as an encouragement for trade with the other Party, or as an encouragement for the establishment, acquisition, expansion, or retention of an investment in its territory."
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Transparency
Chapter 20 requires that:
Each Party shall ensure that its laws, regulations, procedures, and administrative rulings of general application respecting any matter covered by this Agreement are promptly published or otherwise made available in such a manner as to enable interested persons and the other Party to become acquainted with them.
and that
Each Party shall maintain judicial, quasi-judicial, or administrative tribunals or
procedures for the purpose of the prompt review20-2 and, where warranted, correction of final administrative actions regarding matters covered by this Agreement."
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme
See Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme"
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"U.S. attitudes to the FTA
After the FTA was signed, there were initially concerns that the American agricultural sector would lobby against the agreement, due to a fear that it could interfere with the government's farm subsidies program. However, the agreement, with time limits on importation of Australian agricultural products such as beef and sugar cane managed to allay the concerns of the American agricultural market (while greatly frustrating many Australian producers).
A coalition of trade unions and other groups did speak out against the agreement on the basis that it would cause similar problems to those experienced by NAFTA.
More substantial lobbying was undertaken by American pharmaceutical companies, who were concerned about the Australian Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. See below.
American manufacturing lobbies strongly supported the FTA.
On 15 July, both houses of the United States Congress gave strong support to the FTA. The agreement was also supported by Democratic Party Presidential nominee John Kerry.
Additionally, labour groups expressed concern regarding the agreement.  In a report to the USTR office, the Labor Advisory Committee (LAC) recommended that Congress reject the U.S.-Australia FTA because they believed the agreement failed to meet congressional negotiating objectives."
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Australian attitudes to the FTA
Support
The agreement became a major political issue leading up to the 2004 Elections. After a protracted period of negotiation under Howard government Trade Minister Mark Vaile, the agreement was strongly supported by the Howard government as an enormous potential gain to the Australian economy and as essential to the continuation of the U.S.-Australia alliance.
The government relied on estimates of the economic benefits of the FTA computed by the Centre for International Economics, a consultancy group. The leading group supporting the FTA was called Austa. Austa's arguments focused on the dynamic benefits of integration with the U.S. economy."
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Opposition
Criticisms of the FTA appeared from a number of sources and on a number of grounds:"
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Trade diversion
Economic theory suggests that bilateral agreements like the FTA will lead to trade creation between the parties directly involved, but will also cause trade diversion from third countries, offsetting any benefits. Bilateral agreements may also undermine multilateral agreements such as those associated with the World Trade Organization. Partly as a result of these factors, the estimates of benefits produced by the CIE and relied on by the government were disputed by most economists who made submissions to the Senate Committees inquiring into the topic, some of whom concluded that the agreement would reduce Australia's economic welfare."
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Intellectual property
The provisions of the AUSFTA in Ch 17 required Australia to offer stronger protection to American intellectual property. In particular, the minimum term of copyright was extended to 70 years after the author's death. Most economists and others interested in intellectual property issues regarded this as undesirable. A number of prominent American economists took the same view in the case of Eldred v. Ashcroft.
Other key changes included:"
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"special copyright term extension for photographs
broader definition of technological protection measures, narrow exceptions, and review process
protection of temporary copies
stronger protection of electronic rights management information
protection of pay television broadcasts
safe harbour provisions for Internet Service Providers
protection of performers' economic and moral rights in respect of sound recordings
broader civil and criminal offences
For a discussion of the copyright changes, see Rimmer, M.  ""Robbery Under Arms:  Copyright Law and the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement"""
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Local content provisions
Many in the Australian film and television community expressed concern over the effect of the agreement on government regulations enforcing a mandatory minimum of locally produced content on television. Since American content can be purchased by networks at a cost far less than the local production of Australian content, fears were raised that the agreement would result in the diminishing fraction of home-grown media being screened on Australian television networks and in Australian cinemas being reduced even further. As a result, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, as well as a number of prominent artists individually, argued for rejection of the FTA on the grounds that it would erode Australian culture."
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Manufacturing and agricultural sector
Australia as a whole is heavily reliant on the primary sector and the main benefits of a FTA between the two countries were seen to be increased access to the large, but heavily subsidised and protected, American market by Australian producers. In particular, the rural and regional-based National Party lobbied hard to have the agreement extend to the export of sugar. The eventual provisions of the agreement did not go as far as had been hoped, and as a result, some lobbyists for the sugar industry, notably independent Bob Katter, urged rejection of the FTA. However, many, such as then Premier of Queensland Peter Beattie, still felt that the agreement was a net gain for Australian agriculture and supported ratification on that basis.
The Australian manufacturing sector was another problematic area. Australian labour, wage and environmental protection standards are substantially higher than those of the US. The Australian Manufacturing Workers Union ran a high-profile campaign against the FTA on the basis that it would lead to manufacturing jobs being outsourced overseas."
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme
The Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) is a central component of the Australian healthcare system. The scheme provides reimbursement to community pharmacy for the costs of dispensing prescription medicines prescribed in accordance with the PBS Schedule, a comprehensive but closed formulary. Drugs are added to the formulary on the basis of an assessment of comparative effectiveness and cost effectiveness compared to the therapy most likely to be replaced in practice. The result is that where there is no evidence of incremental benefit, a drug may not be listed at a higher price than the comparator with the result that for many (but by no means all) drugs the prices for subsidy purposes are a great deal cheaper than in many other major markets.
While the scheme is very effective at keeping many drug prices low, pharmaceutical corporations in both the US and Australia are wary of the operation of the scheme, since they argue that higher drug prices are necessary to fund the costs of research and development. The American pharmaceutical companies claim that in enjoying low-cost medicines, Australians are essentially free riding on the costs of research performed in the U.S.
While companies have in particular criticised the process by which drugs are listed on the PBS, claiming that it lacks transparency, public health advocates have claimed that calls for transparency are merely an effort by drug companies to gain greater control over the process of listing. To a large degree the existing limitations on the transparency of the process are those that have been imposed by the industry itself. The text of the Agreement included text mandating transparency to the public, reflecting an offensive interest of Australia, thus creating a treaty level obligation to circumvent the efforts of the pharmaceutical industry to continue to frustrate public transparency of PBS processes.
Disquiet about the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme led to speculation that the American side would lobby heavily for its abrogation as an integral component of a free trade agreement. The Government was criticised, particularly by the Australian Democrats and Greens, for not doing enough to safeguard the operations of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, allegations which the Government strenuously denied. Some academics (such as Thomas Alured Faunce) claimed that the provisions of the Agreement would lead to increases in the prices of PBS medicines. However the relevant text was actually limited to issue of process and transparency, and contained no provisions that could affect price, and this was ultimately shown not to be the case."
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Ratification of the FTA
The Australian Government did not hold a majority in the Senate, and thus required the support of the opposition Labor party, the Greens, Democrats, or independent senators in order to secure ratification. The Government put heavy pressure on Labor Party leader Mark Latham to secure Opposition support of the agreement (knowing that Latham, among many Labor members, viewed the FTA as beneficial). The issue had divided the party, with the Left faction in particular arguing that Labor should reject the agreement.
Latham responded unexpectedly by making Labor's support of the FTA conditional on an amendment that would allegedly safeguard the PBS. This effectively turned the tables on Howard: if the Government refused the amendment as unnecessary, it opened itself to claims it was not safeguarding Australian interests; if it supported the amendment, it then tacitly admitted that the original terms of the agreement were inadequate. The bill was eventually amended and passed.
Latham's amendment proposals were supported by the Australian Medical Association, but dismissed as ineffective by the Greens and Democrats, who still argued for outright rejection of the FTA."
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Outcomes
In the year following the agreement, Australian exports to the U.S. declined, while U.S. exports to Australia increased. This followed the International Monetary Fund's prediction that the Australia-United States FTA would shrink the Australian economy marginally because of the loss of trade with other countries. The IMF estimated $US5.25 billion of extra U.S. imports entering into Australia per year under the FTA, but only $US2.97 billion of extra Australian exports to the U.S. per year. However, it remains unclear whether or not Australia's worsening trade deficit with the United States can be solely attributed to the FTA.  It may have been a lagged effect of an appreciation of the Australian dollar against the US dollar between 2000 and 2003.
For the U.S., the FTA improved the overall trade deficit situation, creating a trade surplus with Australia which rose 31.7% in the first quarter of 2005, compared to the same timeframe in 2004. U.S. exports to Australia increased 11.7% in the first quarter of 2005 to nearly $3.7 billion for the quarter.  Agriculture exports to Australia increased 20%.
According to Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade figures the imbalance in trade between the U.S. and Australia increased substantially during 2007. The United States became Australia's largest import source, with goods and services imported to a value of over A$31 billion. Australia's exports to the U.S., however, amounted to only $15.8 billion AU. It remains unclear what, if any, real benefits the agreement has produced.
In U.S. Fiscal Year 2006 (October 2005 through September 2006), which was the first full year during which E-3 regulations were in effect, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security recorded 2,123 admissions of Australian citizens as E-3 status foreign workers under the treaty. 9,294 admissions were recorded in U.S. Fiscal Year 2007 (October 2006 through September 2007).
According to Shiro Armstrong from the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University concluded, from over 10 years of dataset from the Productivity Commission suggests that Australian and US trade with the rest of the world fell - that there was trade diversion - due to AUSFTA after controlling for country specific factors. Estimates also suggest trade between Australia and the United States fell in association with the implementation of AUSFTA - also after controlling for country-specific factors. Shiro Armstrong also concludes Australia and the United States reduced their trade with the rest of the world by US$53 billion and are worse off than they would have been without the agreement."
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"See also
Rules of Origin
Market access
Free-trade area
Tariffs
E-3 visa program passed by the United States government in the aftermath of the AUSFTA.
Import sensitive product
United States-Australia relations
Australian free trade agreements:"
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Australia-Chile Free Trade Agreement
Australia New Zealand Closer Economic Relations Trade Agreement
Australia–United Kingdom Free Trade Agreement"
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"References
External links
Governmental links
Australian legislative committee report on the Technological Protections Measures aspects of the treaty
U.S. International Trade Commission Report on Australia-U.S. FTA
Congressional Research Service Report on Australia-U.S. FTA
U.S. Senate Finance Committee Hearing on Australia-U.S. FTA
U.S. House Ways and Means Committee Hearing on Australia-U.S. FTA
President's Message to the United States Congress on the AUSFTA"
Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement,"Media
Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement Media Archive"
Bushfires in Australia,"Bushfires in Australia are a widespread and regular occurrence that have contributed significantly to shaping the nature of the continent over millions of years. Eastern Australia is one of the most fire-prone regions of the world, and its predominant eucalyptus forests have evolved to thrive on the phenomenon of bushfire. However, the fires can cause significant property damage and loss of both human and animal life. Bushfires have killed approximately 800 people in Australia since 1851, and billions of animals.
The most destructive fires are usually preceded by extreme high temperatures, low relative humidity and strong winds, which combine to create ideal conditions for the rapid spread of fire. Severe fire storms are often named according to the day on which they peaked, including the five most deadly blazes: Black Saturday 2009 in Victoria (173 people killed, 2,000 homes lost); Ash Wednesday 1983 in Victoria and South Australia (75 dead, nearly 1,900 homes); Black Friday 1939 in Victoria (71 dead, 650 houses destroyed), Black Tuesday 1967 in Tasmania (62 people and almost 1,300 homes); and the Gippsland fires and Black Sunday of 1926 in Victoria (60 people killed over a two-month period). Other major conflagrations include the 1851 Black Thursday bushfires, the 2006 December bushfires, the 1974–75 fires that burnt 15% of Australia, and the 2019–20 bushfires. It is estimated that the 2019–2020 bushfires led to the deaths of at least 33 people and over 3 billion animals.
The gradual drying of the Australian continent over the last 6000 years has produced an ecology and environment prone to fire, which has resulted in many specialised adaptations amongst flora and fauna. Some of the country's flora has evolved to rely on bushfires for reproduction. Aboriginal Australians used to use fire to clear grasslands for hunting and to clear tracks through dense vegetation, and European settlers have also had to adapt to using fire to enhance agriculture and forest management since the 19th century."
Bushfires in Australia,"History
Before European settlement
According to Tim Flannery (The Future Eaters), fire is one of the most important forces at work in the Australian environment. Some plants have evolved a variety of mechanisms to survive or even require bushfires (possessing epicormic shoots or lignotubers that sprout after a fire, or developing fire-resistant or fire-triggered seeds), or even encourage fire (eucalypts contain flammable oils in its leaves) as a way to eliminate competition from less fire-tolerant species. Early European explorers of the Australian coastline noted extensive bushfire smoke. Abel Janszoon Tasman's expedition saw smoke drifting over the coast of Tasmania in 1642 and noted blackened trunks and baked earth in the forests. While charting the east coast in 1770, Captain Cook's crew saw autumn fires in the bush burning on most days of the voyage.: 50–51 
The fires would have been caused by both natural phenomenon and human hands. Aboriginal people in many regions set fire to grasslands in the hope of producing lusher grass to fatten kangaroos and other game and, at certain times of year, burned fire breaks as a precaution against bushfire.: 59  Fire-stick farming was also used to facilitate hunting and to promote the growth of bush potatoes and other edible ground-level plants.  In central Australia, they used fire in this way to manage their country for thousands of years."
Bushfires in Australia,"Flannery writes that ""The use of fire by Aboriginal people was so widespread and constant that virtually every early explorer in Australia makes mention of it. It was Aboriginal fire that prompted James Cook to call Australia 'This continent of smoke'."" However, he goes on to say: ""When control was wrested from the Aborigines and placed in the hands of Europeans, disaster resulted."" Fire suppression became the dominant paradigm in fire management leading to a significant shift away from traditional burning practices. A 2001 study found that the disruption of traditional burning practices and the introduction of unrestrained logging meant that many areas of Australia were now prone to extensive wildfires especially in the dry season. A similar study in 2017 found that the removal of mature trees by Europeans since they began to settle in Australia may have triggered extensive shrub regeneration which presents a much greater fire fuel hazard. Another factor was the introduction of gamba grass imported into Queensland as a pasture grass in 1942, and planted on a large scale from 1983. This can fuel intense bushfires, leading to loss of tree cover and long-term environmental damage."
Bushfires in Australia,"19th century
Australia's hot, arid climate and wind-driven bushfires were a new and frightening phenomenon to the European settlers of the colonial era. The devastating Victorian bushfires of 1851, remembered as the Black Thursday bushfires, burned in a chain from Portland to Gippsland, and sent smoke billowing across the Bass Strait to north west Tasmania, where terrified settlers huddled around candles in their huts under a blackened afternoon sky.: 386–387  The fires covered five million hectares around one quarter of what is now the state of Victoria. Portland, Plenty Ranges, Westernport, the Wimmera and Dandenong districts were badly hit, and around twelve lives were recorded lost, along with one million sheep and thousands of cattle.
New arrivals from the wetter climes of Britain and Ireland learned painful lessons in fire management and the European farmers slowly began to adapt – growing green crops around their haystacks and burning fire breaks around their pastures, and becoming cautious about burn offs of wheatfield stubble and ringbarked trees.: 387  But major fire events persisted, including South Gippsland's 1898 Red Tuesday bushfires that burned 260,000 hectares (640,000 acres) and claimed twelve lives and more than 2,000 buildings.
A map of 19th century Australian bushfires shows over 7,000 bushfires reported in contemporary Australian newspapers."
Bushfires in Australia,"20th century
Large bushfires continued throughout the 20th century. With increasing population and urban spread into bushland came increasing death tolls and property damage during large fires."
Bushfires in Australia,"1925–26: Gippsland fires and Black Sunday
During the 1925–26 Victorian bushfire season, large areas of Gippsland in Victoria caught fire, leading to the Black Sunday fires on 14 February, when 31 people were killed in Warburton, near Melbourne. These fires remain the fifth most deadly bushfires recorded, with 60 people killed over two months."
Bushfires in Australia,"1938–39 season and Black Friday
The 1939 fire season was one of the worst on record for Australia, peaking with Victoria's devastating Black Friday bushfires of 13 January, but enduring for the full summer, with fires burning the urban fringes of Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra, and ash falling as far away as New Zealand. The Black Friday fires were the third deadliest on record, with some 71 people killed and 650 houses destroyed. They followed years of drought and a series of extreme heatwaves that were accompanied by strong northerly winds, after a very dry six months. Melbourne hit 45.6 °C (114.1 °F) and Adelaide 46.1 °C (115.0 °F). In NSW, Bourke suffered 37 consecutive days above 38 degrees and Menindee hit a record 49.7 °C (121.5 °F) on 10 January.
New South Wales also lost hundreds of houses, thousands of stock and poultry, and thousands of hectares of grazing land.  By 16 January, disastrous fires were burning in Victoria, New South Wales and the ACT at the climax of a terrible heatwave. Sydney was ringed to the north, south and west by fires from Palm Beach and Port Hacking to the Blue Mountains. Fires blazing at Castle Hill, Sylvania, Cronulla and French's Forest in the city. Disastrous fires were also reported at Penrose, Wollongong, Nowra, Bathurst, Ulludulla, Mittagong, Trunkey and Nelligen. Meanwhile, Canberra faced the ""worst bushfires"" it had experienced, with thousands of hectares burned and a 72-kilometre (45 mi) fire front driven towards the city by a south westerly gale, destroying pine plantations and many homesteads, and threatening Mount Stromlo Observatory, Government House, and Black Mountain. Large numbers of men were sent to stand by government buildings in the line of fire."
Bushfires in Australia,"Black Friday
The state of Victoria was hardest hit, with an area of almost two million 2 million hectares (4.9 million acres; 20,000 square kilometres; 7,700 square miles) burned, 71 people killed, and whole townships wiped out, along with many sawmills and thousands of sheep, cattle and horses around Black Friday. Fires had been burning through December, but linked up with devastating force on Friday 13 January, plunging many areas of the state into midday blackness. The Stretton Royal Commission later wrote:"
Bushfires in Australia,"On [13 January] it appeared that the whole State was alight. At midday, in many places, it was dark as night. Men carrying hurricane lamps, worked to make safe their families and belongings. Travellers on the highways were trapped by fires or blazing fallen trees, and perished. Throughout the land, there was daytime darkness... Steel girders and machinery were twisted by heat as if they had been of fine wire. Sleepers of heavy durable timber, set in the soil, their upper surfaces flush with the ground, were burnt through... Where the fire was most intense the soil was burnt to such a depth that it may be many years before it shall have been restored...
The townships of Warrandyte, Yarra Glen, Omeo and Pomonal were badly damaged, and fires burned to the urban fringe of Melbourne, affecting towns including Toolangi, Warburton and Thomson Valley. In the Victorian Alps, the towns of Bright, Cudgewa and Corryong were also hit, along with vast areas in the west, in particular Portland, the Otway Ranges and the Grampians. Black Range, Rubicon, Acheron, Noojee, Tanjil Bren, Hill End, Woods Point, Matlock, Erica, Omeo, Toombullup and the Black Forest were also affected. Huge amounts of smoke and ash were generated, with reports of ash falling as far away as New Zealand."
Bushfires in Australia,"Legacy
After the bushfires, Victoria convened a Royal Commission. Judge Leonard Stretton was instructed to enquire into the causes of the fires, and consider the measures taken to prevent the fires and to protect life and property. He made seven major recommendations to improve forest and fire management, and planned burning became an official fire management practice."
Bushfires in Australia,"1966–67 and Black Tuesday
In the summer of 1967, Tasmania suffered its most destructive fire season, and Australia's fourth most deadly on record. A verdant spring had added higher than usual fuel to the state's forest floors, and strong northerly winds and high temperatures drove at least 80 different fires across the south-east, burning to within 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) of the centre of Hobart, the state capital. The infernos killed 62 people and destroyed almost 1,300 homes."
Bushfires in Australia,"1974–75 bushfire
In the summer of 1974-1975 (southern hemisphere), Australia suffered its worst recorded bushfire, when 15% of Australia's land mass suffered ""extensive fire damage"".  Fires that summer burnt an estimated 117 million hectares (290 million acres; 1,170,000 square kilometres; 450,000 square miles).
The fires killed six people,: 341  approximately 57,000 farm animals, farmers' crops, and destroyed nearly 10,200 kilometres (6,300 mi) of fencing.: 339–345"
Bushfires in Australia,"1980–1983
On 20 February 1980, a series of bushfires tore through the Adelaide Hills, 120 kilometres (75 mi) north of Adelaide, leaving more than 70 buildings destroyed and 75 farms affected by the fires. Three years later on 16 February 1983, about 180 fires in an event known as the Ash Wednesday bushfires caused widespread destruction across parts of South Australia and Victoria, burning an area of 3.74 million acres (1.51 million hectares; 15,100 square kilometres; 5,840 square miles)  of bushland and exceeding the loss of 75 people. The bushfires, caused by years of severe drought and extreme weather, were amongst the deadliest bushfires in Australian history during the late 20th century."
Bushfires in Australia,"1993–94 Sydney and NSW eastern seaboard bushfires
From 27 December 1993 to 16 January 1994, over 800 severe fires burned along the coastal areas of New South Wales, affecting the state's most populous regions. Blazes emerged from the Queensland border down the north and central coast, through the Sydney basin and down the south coast to Batemans Bay. The 800,000 hectares (2.0 million acres; 8,000 square kilometres; 3,100 square miles) spread of fires were generally contained within less than 100 kilometres (62 mi) from the coast, and many burned through rugged and largely uninhabited country in national parks or nature reserves. Dramatic scenes of the city of Sydney shrouded in thick bushfire smoke, and bushland suburbs on fire were broadcast around the world.
On 29 December, the Department of Bushfire Services was monitoring more than a dozen fires around the state, and homes were threatened in Turramurra by a fire in the Lane Cove River reserve, and a scrub fire had briefly cut off the holiday village of Bundeena in the Royal National Park, south of Sydney. The Age reported on 7 January that one-quarter of NSW was under threat in the worst fires seen in the state for nearly fifty years, as hundreds of firefighters from interstate joined 4,000 NSW firefighters battling blazes from Batemans Bay to Grafton. Fires in the Lane Cove River area at Marsfield, Turramurra, West Pymble and Macquarie Park were threatening hundreds of homes, and the fire in the Royal National Park raged toward Bundeena, where rescue boats evacuated 3,100 people caught in the path of the fire. With the Prime Minister Paul Keating on leave, Deputy Prime Minister Brian Howe, ordered 100 soldiers to join firefighting efforts and placed a further 100 on standby.
On 8 January, the Royal National Park fire swept into the southern Sydney suburbs of Como and Jannali where many homes would be destroyed, along with two schools a church and a kindergarten. The Como/Jannali fire burnt 476 hectares (1,180 acres) and destroyed 101 houses – more than half of the total homes lost in New South Wales during the January emergency period. Also on 8 January, fires had reached to within 1.5 kilometres (0.93 mi) of Gosford city centre, and some 5,000 people had been evacuated over that weekend with homes destroyed at Somersby and Peats Ridge.
By 9 January, more than 16,000 people were on standby for evacuation from the Lower Blue Mountains. Thousands of people were sleeping on the football field at the Central Coast Leagues Club, after the evacuation of Kariong, Woy Woy, Umina, Ettalong and Brisbane Waters. Much of Gosford, Kariong and Somersby had been evacuated, along with Terry Hill. Homes at Menai, Sutherland, Chatswood, Lindfield, Turramurra, Macquarie Park and Sydney's northern beaches had been lost. 60 fires were burning on the north coast, as firefighters battled infernos over 30 hectares (74 acres) from Coffs Harbour to the Queensland border. Fires were approaching towns in the Blue Mountains including Blackheath and in the Shoalhaven, including Ulladulla."
Bushfires in Australia,"Legacy
Some 20,000 firefighters were deployed against around 800 fires mainly along the coast and ranges. The fires caused mass evacuations, claimed four lives, destroyed some 225 homes and burnt 800,000 hectares (2.0 million acres; 8,000 square kilometres; 3,100 square miles) of bushland. They were met with amongst the largest firefighting efforts in Australian history. A lengthy Coronial inquest followed the fires, leading to the formation of the New South Wales Rural Fire Service. The Rural Fires Act 1997 was proclaimed on 1 September 1997."
Bushfires in Australia,"21st century
2003 Canberra bushfires
During 18–22 January 2003, almost 70% of the Australian Capital Territory's (ACT) pastures, pine plantations, and nature parks were severely damaged, and most of the Mount Stromlo Observatory was destroyed. Fires entered the suburbs of Canberra on 18 January 2003 and, in the following ten hours, four people died and over 490 were injured 470 homes were destroyed or severely damaged."
Bushfires in Australia,"2008–2009 and Black Saturday
Extreme bushfire conditions—Melbourne's maximum temperature was above 43.0 °C (109.4 °F) for three consecutive days for the first time since records had been kept, accompanied by strong winds on 7 February 2009, later to be known as 'Black Saturday'—precipitated major bushfires throughout Victoria, involving several large fire complexes, which continued to burn across the state for around one month. 173 people died in these fires and 414 were injured. 3,500+ buildings were destroyed, including 2,029 houses, and 7,562 people displaced. In terms of loss of life and property damage, the Black Saturday fires rank as the most devastating in Australian history. The 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission was called to investigate the Victorian government's strategy regarding bushfires."
Bushfires in Australia,"2019–2020
From September 2019 until March 2020, when the final fire was extinguished, Australia had one of the worst bushfire seasons in its recorded history. 2019 had been the hottest record year for Australia, with the bushfire season starting in June 2019. This caused massive damage throughout the country, with fires in each state and territory. The east coast experienced widespread destruction from mega-blazes, such as the Currowan bushfire, which was just one of many catastrophic bushfires during the 2019–2020 season. In terms of the area of land burnt, wildlife deaths, and damage to the environment, some of its permanent damage, such as the burning of remnant rainforest, the 2019–2020 fires were the worst in Australian history."
Bushfires in Australia,"2023–2024
Factors and causes
Human-caused
Many fires are as a result of either deliberate arson or carelessness, however these fires normally happen in readily accessible areas and are rapidly brought under control.  Man-made events include arcing from overhead power lines, arson, accidental ignition in the course of agricultural clearing, grinding and welding activities, campfires, cigarettes and dropped matches, sparks from machinery, and controlled burn escapes. They spread based on the type and quantity of fuel that is available. Fuel can include everything from trees, underbrush and dry grassy fields to homes. Wind supplies the fire with additional oxygen pushing the fire across the land at a faster rate. Electric power lines being brought down or arcing in high winds have also caused fires."
Bushfires in Australia,"Weather
In recent times most major bush fires have been started in remote areas by dry lightning. Some reports indicate that a changing climate could also be contributing to the ferocity of the 2019–20 fires with hotter, drier conditions making the country's fire season longer and much more dangerous.   During periods of drought, the fuel for wildfires is greater than normal, and bushfires combine to become megafires, generating their own weather and spreading fire further.
Strong winds also promote the rapid spread of fires by lifting burning embers into the air. This is known as spotting and can start a new fire up to 40 kilometres (25 mi) downwind from the fire front.
In New South Wales, dry Föhn-like winds originating from the Great Dividing Range abruptly raise air temperatures in the lee of that mountain range and reduce atmospheric moisture, thus elevating fire danger. This occurs because of the partial orographic obstruction of comparatively damp low-level air and the sinking of drier upper-level air in leeward of the mountains, which is heated because of the adiabatic compression."
Bushfires in Australia,"Natural phenomena
Large, violent wildfires can generate winds of themselves, called fire whirls. Fire whirls are like tornadoes and result from the vortices created by the fire's heat. When these vortices are tilted from horizontal to vertical, this creates fire whirls. These whirls have been known to hurl flaming logs and burning debris over considerable distances.
In the Northern Territory, fires can also be spread by black kites, whistling kites and brown falcons. These birds have been spotted picking up burning twigs, flying to areas of unburned grass and dropping them to start new fires there. This exposes their prey attempting to flee the blazes: small mammals, birds, lizards, and insects."
Bushfires in Australia,"Topography
Bushfires in Australia are generally described as uncontrolled, non-structural fires burning in a grass, scrub, bush, or forested area. The nature of the fire depends somewhat on local topography. Hilly/mountainous fires burn in areas which are usually densely forested. The land is less accessible and not conducive to agriculture, thus many of these densely forested areas have been saved from deforestation and are protected by national, state and other parks. The steep terrain increases the speed and intensity of a firestorm. Where settlements are located in hilly or mountainous areas, bushfires can pose a threat to both life and property. Flat/grassland fires burn along flat plains or areas of small undulation, predominantly covered in grasses or scrubland. These fires can move quickly, fanned by high winds in flat topography, and they quickly consume the small amounts of fuel/vegetation available. These fires pose less of a threat to settlements as they rarely reach the same intensity seen in major firestorms as the land is flat, the fires are easier to map and predict, and the terrain is more accessible for firefighting personnel. Many regions of predominantly flat terrain in Australia have been almost completely deforested for agriculture, reducing the fuel loads which would otherwise facilitate fires in these areas."
Bushfires in Australia,"Climate change
Australia's climate has warmed by more than one degree Celsius over the past century, causing an increase in the frequency and intensity of heatwaves and droughts. Eight of Australia's ten warmest years on record have occurred since 2005. A study in 2018 conducted at Melbourne University found that the major droughts of the late 20th century and early 21st century in southern Australia are ""likely without precedent over the past 400 years"". Across the country, the average summer temperatures have increased leading to record-breaking hot weather, with the early summer of 2019 the hottest on record. 2019 was also Australia's driest ever year since 1900 with rainfall 40% lower than average.
Heatwaves and droughts dry out the undergrowth and create conditions that increase the risk of bushfires. This has become worse in the last 30 years. Since the mid-1990s, southeast Australia has experienced a 15% decline in late autumn and early winter rainfall and a 25% decline in average rainfall in April and May. Rainfall for January to August 2019 was the lowest on record in the Southern Downs (Queensland) and Northern Tablelands (New South Wales) with some areas 77% below the long term average.
In the 2000s, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that ongoing anthropogenic climate change was virtually certain to increase in intensity and frequency of fires in Australia – a conclusion that has been endorsed in numerous reports since. In November 2019, the Australian Climate Council published a report titled This is Not Normal which also found the catastrophic bushfire conditions affecting NSW and Queensland in late 2019 have been aggravated by climate change. According to Nerilie Abram writing in Scientific American ""the link between the current extremes and anthropogenic climate change is scientifically indisputable"". In 2020, an international team of scientists found the hot and dry conditions that helped drive Australia's 2019–2020 bushfire crisis would be eight times more likely to happen if the earth warms by 2.0 °C (3.6 °F).
The bushfires have not only been made more likely and intense by climate change, but they also add to it. Until the 2019–2020 Australian bushfire season, the forests in Australia were thought to reabsorb all the carbon released in bushfires across the country. This would mean the forests achieved net-zero emissions. However, global warming is making bushfires burn more intensely and frequently and the 2019–2020 bushfires have already emitted 400 megatonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, according to the Copernicus monitoring programme. This is as much as Australia's average annual carbon dioxide emissions in just the past three months. These will increase Australia's annual greenhouse gas emissions, contributing to global warming, and heighten the likelihood of recurring megafires that will release yet more emissions."
Bushfires in Australia,"Carbon emissions
Until the 2019–2020 Australian bushfire season, the forests in Australia were thought to reabsorb all the carbon released in bushfires across the country. This would mean the forests achieved net-zero emissions. However, scientists now say that global warming is making bushfires burn more intensely and frequently and believe the 2019–2020 fires have already released approximately 350 million tonnes (390 million short tons) of carbon dioxide – as much as two-thirds of Australia's average annual carbon dioxide emissions (530 million tonnes (580 million short tons) in 2017) between October and December 2019. David Bowman, professor of pyrogeography and fire science at the University of Tasmania warned that so much damage has been done that Australian forests may take more than 100 years to re-absorb the carbon that has been released so far this fire season.
In January 2020, the British Met Office said Australia's bushfires in 2019–2020 were expected to contribute 2% to the increase in the atmospheric concentration of major greenhouse gases which are forecast to hit 417 parts per million, one of the largest annual increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide on record. Climate studies show that conditions which promote extreme bushfires in Australia will only get worse as more greenhouse gases are added to the atmosphere.
Southeast Australia experienced intensive and geographically extensive wildfires during the 2019–2020 summer season. The fires released substantial amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. However, existing emission estimates based on fire inventories are uncertain and vary by up to a factor of four for this event. Emission estimates are constrained with the help of satellite observations of carbon monoxide, an analytical Bayesian inversion and observed ratios between emitted carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. It is estimated emissions of carbon dioxide to be 715 teragrams (range 517–867) from November 2019 to January 2020. This is more than twice the estimate derived by five different fire inventories and broadly consistent with estimates based on a bottom-up bootstrap analysis of this fire episode. Although fires occur regularly in the savannas in northern Australia, the recent episodes were extremely large in scale and intensity, burning unusually large areas of eucalyptus forest in the southeast. The fires were driven partly by climate change, making better-constrained emission estimates particularly important. This is because the build-up of atmospheric carbon dioxide may become increasingly dependent on fire-driven climate-carbon feedbacks, as highlighted by this event."
Bushfires in Australia,"Seasonality
Bushfires in Australia can occur all year-round, though the severity and the ""bushfire season"" varies by region.
There is no formal definition for a single bushfire season across the whole of Australia.  There is no one terminology used for periods of fire activity.  The technical terms used for periods of fire risk and fire activity include fire weather season, fire danger season, bush fire danger period, fire danger period, fire permit period, restricted burning times, and, prohibited burning times, and fire season.
The term ""Australian bushfire season"", is a colloquialism broadly defined by common usage, from when the first uncontrolled fires start any time from June onwards, typically shortened to ""bushfire season"", and applies mainly to southern and eastern Australia. It can continue through to April. Central and northern Australia have two separately defined fire seasons. The colloquial term is typically used in conjunction with the technical terms when conveying information to the public.
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology defines five ""fire danger seasons"", being times of peak bushfire activity, roughly corresponding to broad bands of latitude across the Australian continent including winter and spring, across the most northern parts of Australia; spring; spring and summer; summer; and summer and autumn, across the most southern parts of Australia.
Each Australian state and territory jurisdiction defines periods of peak fire risk or fire activity differently. New South Wales has a default statutory ""bush fire danger period"" defined in law, from 1 October to 31 March. The state government can then declare different start and end dates for bush fire danger periods for each local government area within the state. In 2019 these started 1 August. Victoria declares a ""fire danger period"" for each local government area. Victorian fire danger periods typically start in October and finish as late as May. The South Australia Government declares a ""fire danger season"" for each local government area, potentially starting in October and finishing at the end of April. The Tasmanian Government declares fire permit periods for local government areas. In 2019 this commenced 31 October. Western Australia requires each local government area to declare its own ""restricted burning times"" roughly aligned with spring and autumn, and ""prohibited burning times"" roughly aligned with summer. The Northern Territory defines two broad ""fire seasons"", a northern fire season, which can run from April to November, and a central Australian fire season, which can run from October to March. The Government also refers to these as ""fire danger periods"".
Bushfire seasons are commonly grouped into years such as ""2019–2020 Australian bushfire season"" and typically apply to the season for southern and eastern Australia; from 1 June to 31 May annually."
Bushfires in Australia,"Lack of preventative measures
In the last ten years or so, government licenses have been granted to fire-prevention programs on Aboriginal lands in northern Australia. In this area Aboriginal traditions, which reduce the undergrowth that can fuel bigger blazes, revolve around the monsoon. Land is burned patch by patch using ""cool"" fires in targeted areas during the early dry season, between March and July. These defensive burning programs began in the 1980s and 1990s when Aboriginal groups moved back onto their native lands. Since this process began, destructive bushfires in northern Australia have burned 57% fewer acres in 2019 than they did on average in the years from 2000 to 2010, the decade before the program started.
Oliver Costello from the national Indigenous Firesticks Alliance stated that in southern Australia, Aboriginal knowledge systems of fire management are less valued than in the north. In the Kimberley area, the land council applies local resources and holds community fire planning meetings to ensure the correct people are doing the burning. Burn lines are approved by the group but Indigenous rangers set the fires, backed up by modern technology involving constant weather readings and taking into account the conditions of the day. Costello pointed out that northern Australia has developed a collaborative infrastructure for 'cultural burning' and noted that: ""There's no investment really outside of northern Australia Indigenous fire management of any significance."""
Bushfires in Australia,"Impact on wildlife and fauna
Bush fires kill animals directly and also destroy local habitats, leaving the survivors vulnerable even once the fires have passed.  Professor Chris Dickman at Sydney University estimates that in the first three months of the 2019–2020 bushfires, over 800 million animals died in NSW, and more than one billion nationally. This figure includes mammals, birds, and reptiles but does not include insects, bats or frogs. Many of these animals were burnt to death in the fires, with many others dying later due to the depletion of food and shelter resources and predation by feral cats and red foxes. Dickman adds that Australia has the highest rate of species loss of any area in the world, with fears that some of Australia's native species, like the Kangaroo Island dunnart, may even become extinct because of the current fires.
One study from the Australian government in 2020 and paints a stark picture: 272 plants and 55 animal threatened species in Australia had a significant portion of their known distribution within the fire footprint. A further 49 species had more than 80% of their modelled likely and known distribution range affected by the fires.
Koalas are perhaps the most vulnerable because they are slow-moving. In extreme fires, koalas tend to climb up to the top of a tree and curl into a ball where they become trapped. In January 2020 it was reported that half of the 50,000 koalas on Kangaroo Island off Australia's southern coast, which are kept separate to those on the mainland as insurance for the species' future, are thought to have died in the previous few weeks.
Wildlife ecologist Professor Euan Ritchie from Deakin University says that when fires have passed, frogs and skinks are left vulnerable when their habitats have been destroyed. Loss of habitat also affects already endangered species such as the western ground parrot, the Leadbeater's possum, the Mallee emu-wren (a bird which cannot fly very far), and Gilbert's potoroo. Beekeepers have also lost hives in bushfires.
Kangaroos and wallabies can move quickly trying to escape from fires. However, The Guardian reported in January 2020 that dozens, maybe hundreds of kangaroos ""perished in their droves"" as they tried to outrun the flames near Batlow in NSW. The most resilient animals are those that can burrow or fly. Possums often get singed, but can sometimes hide in tree hollows. Wombats and snakes tend to go underground.
Goannas can benefit from bushfires. Dickman says: ""In central Australia, we've seen goannas coming out from their burrows after a fire and picking off injured animals – singed birds, young birds, small mammals, surface-dwelling lizards, and snakes.""
Next to the impact on wildlife stands the impact on fauna and flora. 85% of the plants found in Australia are endemic. Likewise, various species of extinct varieties plants are only found in the forests of Australia. Many species are adapted to recover from bushfires by for example growing from seeds waiting dormant in nearby soils. But the 2019-20 Australian bushfire season occurred at a scale and intensity that is unprecedented according to wildlife ecologist Sarah Legge. During the 2019-2020 bushfires, 11 Australian bioregions, 17 major native vegetation groups were severely burnt. Also, up to 67%-83% of the globally significant rainforests and eucalypt forests and woodlands were severely burnt."
Bushfires in Australia,"Impact on humans
The most devastating impact on humans is that bushfires have killed over 800 people since 1851. In addition to loss of life, homes, properties, and livestock are destroyed potentially leaving people homeless, traumatised, and without access to electricity, telecommunications and, in some cases, to drinking water. here are some discussions about the number of people who were indirectly killed by the fires, but the number is most likely to lay somewhere around 400."
Bushfires in Australia,"Health
Bushfires produce particulate-matter pollution – airborne particles that are small enough to enter and damage human lung tissue. Following the Hazelwood fire in 2014, Fay Johnston, an associate professor of public health at the University of Tasmania's Menzies Institute for Medical Research, says young children exposed to smoke either as infants, toddlers or in the womb develop changes to their lung function. She says: ""Unborn babies exposed to the Hazelwood smoke were more likely to experience coughs or colds two to four years after the fires."" Other studies conducted in Australia show an increase in respiratory diseases among adults stemming from air pollution caused by bushfires.
As a result of intense smoke and air pollution stemming from the fires, in January 2020 Canberra measured the worst air quality index of any major city in the world. The orange-tinged smoke entered homes and offices buildings across the capital making breathing outside very difficult, forcing businesses and institutions to shut their doors. Studies show that residents of highly polluted cities also have an increased risk of heart attack, stroke, and diabetes. Professor Jalaluddin, a chief investigator with the Centre for Air Pollution, Energy and Health Policy Research, says: ""There is increasing evidence around air pollution and (the development of) neurological conditions, for example, Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's.""
Prof David Bowman, director of the Fire Centre Research Hub at the University of Tasmania, referred to the 2019–2020 fires as ""absolutely transformative and unprecedented"" in scale and stated, ""It's pretty much a third of the Australian population that has been impacted, with prolonged, episodic exposure and sometimes extreme health impacts."" Since September 2019, close to 3,000 firefighters have been out every day in NSW battling blazes. The NSW RFS stated that close to 90% of those are unpaid volunteers. David McBride, associate professor of occupational and environmental medicine at the University of Otago stated, ""They push themselves to the limit – they can suffer heat stress, which is a life-threatening injury, and end up with chronic bronchitis and asthma"".
Research conducted at the University of Tasmania estimated that bushfire smoke emitted during the 2019-2020 fire season was responsible for 417 excess deaths. PM2.5 levels in parts of Sydney reached nearly 400 μg/m3, a level described by the World Health Organisation as hazardous.
In Australia, studies show that most male infants with drastically higher average birth weights were born in severely fire-affected areas. This is attributed to the fact that maternal signals directly affect fetal growth patterns."
Bushfires in Australia,"Psychological problems
Psychological problems following a major bushfire appear to develop when people have a chance to stop and reflect on their experience. A study of 1,526 people who experienced significant losses in the 1983 Ash Wednesday bushfires found that after 12 months, 42% met the criteria for a psychiatric problem which is double the prevalence in an unaffected community. After twenty months this figure had dropped to 23%.
A typical example of how people are affected is described by the 2016 fire at Yarloop in Western Australia. It virtually destroyed the town (population 395) including 180 homes, historic timber workshops, factories, an old church, the old hospital, shops, the hotel, the fire station and a part of the school. Two people died. Damage to infrastructure included the Samson Brook Bridge, Salmon River Bridge and power infrastructure supplying thousands of homes in the area. Two years later, people from Yarloop were still suffering from trauma distress from the fire. Apart from the economic losses suffered by those who lived there, the dislocation to their lives was so great that many in the community were doubtful that the town would be rebuilt. The WA Government subsequently spent A$64 million rebuilding the town and the surrounding communities."
Bushfires in Australia,"Economic impact
Economic damage from 2009's Black Saturday fires, the costliest in Australia's history, reached an estimated A$4.4 billion. Moody's Analytics says the cost of the 2019–2020 bushfires is likely to exceed that figure and will cripple consumer confidence and harm industries such as farming and tourism. Medical bills from the current fires and smoke haze are expected to reach hundreds of millions of dollars with one analysis suggesting disruptions caused by the fire and smoke haze could cost Sydney as much as A$50 million a day. The Insurance Council of Australia estimates that claims for damage from the fires would be more than A$700 million, with claims expected to jump when more fire-hit areas become accessible. In January 2020, it was reported that the ANZ gauge of consumer confidence fell to its lowest level in more than four years.
In response to the current fires, the federal government announced that compensation would be paid to volunteer firefighters, military personnel would be deployed to assist, and an A$2 billion bush fire recovery fund would be established. New South Wales, which has been hardest hit by the crisis, has pledged A$1 billion focused on repairing infrastructure.
Economic activity has been adversely affected by these conditions for two years or more. Farm GDP has declined by 22 per cent since early 2017 and is expected to decline by a further 7 per cent over the remainder of 2019/20. This would take the decline in farm GDP since early 2017 to around 30 per cent – comparable to the decline observed during the 2002/03 and 2005/06 episodes of the Millennium drought. The direct effects of the recent bushfires are expected to reduce GDP growth across the December 2019 and March 2020 quarters by around 0.2 percentage points, with some recovery in the June quarter and beyond. However, there is uncertainty around this estimate."
Bushfires in Australia,"Photo from 2005–06
Official inquiries
After many major bushfires, state and federal governments have initiated inquiries to see what could be done to address the problem. A parliamentary report from 2010 stated that between 1939 and 2010, there have been at least 18 major bushfire inquiries including state and federal parliamentary committee inquiries, COAG reports, coronial inquiries and Royal Commissions. Another report published in 2015 stated there have been 51 inquiries into wildfires and wildfire management since 1939. The authors noted that Royal Commissions were not the most effective way to learn from past bushfire events. Many of the inquiries into bushfires have recommended ""hazard reduction burning"" intended to reduce the available fuel and have set targets to burn a certain percentage of forest each year to reduce risk. Planned burns are  difficult to do safely and many of the investigations and Royal Commissions have found these targets are seldom met. At the same time, fire management experts disagree on how effective planned burning is.
In January 2020, during the 2019–2020 bushfire season, Prime Minister Scott Morrison raised the prospect of establishing another royal commission, stating in an interview on ABC-TV 7.30 that any inquiry into the crisis would need to be comprehensive and investigate climate change as well as other possible causes. Letters Patent were subsequently issued for the Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements on 20 February 2020."
Bushfires in Australia,"Warnings
During the fire season, the Bureau of Meteorology provides fire weather forecasts. Fire agencies determine the appropriate Fire Danger Rating by considering the predicted weather including temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and dryness of vegetation. These Fire Danger Ratings are a feature of weather forecasts and alert the community to the actions they should take in preparation for the day. Ratings are broadcast via newspapers, radio, TV, and the internet.
In 2009, a standardised Fire Danger Rating (FDR) was adopted by all Australian states. This included a whole new level – catastrophic fire danger. The first time this level of danger was forecast for Sydney was in November 2019 during the 2019–2020 bushfire season. In 2010, following a national review of the bush fire danger ratings, new trigger points for each rating were introduced for grassland areas in most jurisdictions.
The Australian Fire Danger Rating System was adopted in September 2022, replacing the previous McArthur Forest Fire Danger Index. Its purpose is to provide an efficient and easy to understand way to communicate fire danger broadly to the community. Broken into 4 levels, it indicates the necessary actions to take and danger levels."
Bushfires in Australia,"Remote monitoring
Remote monitoring of wildfires is done in Australia. Geoscience Australia developed the (real-time) Sentinel bushfire monitoring system. It uses data from satellites to help fire-fighting agencies assess and manage risks. There is also MyFireWatch, which is a program based on an existing Department of Fire and Emergency Services program, redeveloped by Landgate and Edith Cowan University for use by the general public. Besides the use of satellites, Australian firefighters also make use of UAV's as a tool for combating fire. Technologist Angus Dorney has observed that ""[Australia's] fire services have developed in a largely tech-free environment"" and it will be necessary to support cultural change alongside technological solutions if promising technological advances are to live up to their potential."
Bushfires in Australia,"Regional management
The Australasian Fire Authorities Council (AFAC) is the peak body responsible for representing fire, emergency services, and land management agencies in the Australasian region."
Bushfires in Australia,"Queensland
The Rural Fire Service (RFS) is a volunteer-based firefighting agency and operates as part of the Queensland Fire and Emergency Services. Queensland Fire and Rescue are the professional firefighters that fight these fires across Queensland in the cities and the bush."
Bushfires in Australia,"New South Wales
Fire and Rescue NSW (FRNSW), the Forestry Corporation of NSW (FCNSW), the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) and the New South Wales Rural Fire Service (RFS) work together to manage and respond to fires across New South Wales."
Bushfires in Australia,"South Australia
The Country Fire Service is a volunteer-based fire service in the state of South Australia. The CFS operates as a part of the South Australian Fire and Emergency Services Commission (SAFECOM)."
Bushfires in Australia,"Victoria
In Victoria, the Country Fire Authority (CFA) provides firefighting and other emergency services to country areas and regional townships within the state, as well as large portions of the outer suburban areas and growth corridors of Melbourne not covered by the Metropolitan Fire Brigade.
Responsibility for fire suppression and management, including planned burning on public land such as State Forests and National Parks, which makes up about 7.1 million hectares (18 million acres; 71,000 square kilometres; 27,000 square miles) or about one-third of the State, sits with the Department of Environment, Land, Water, and Planning (DELWP)."
Bushfires in Australia,"Western Australia
The Department of Fire and Emergency Services (DFES) and the Department of Parks and Wildlife (P&W) have joint responsibility for bushfire management in Western Australia. DFES is an umbrella organisation supporting the Fire and Rescue Service (FRS), Bush Fire Service (BFS), Volunteer Fire and Rescue Service (VFRS), State Emergency Service (SES), Volunteer Fire and Emergency Service (VFES), Emergency Services Cadets and the Volunteer Marine Rescue Service (VMR)."
Bushfires in Australia,"Tasmania
The Tasmania Fire Service manages bushfires in Tasmania with the help of Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service and Forestry Tasmania."
Bushfires in Australia,"Guidelines for survival
Local authorities provide education and information for residents in bushfire-prone regions regarding the location of current fires, preservation of life and property and when to escape by car."
Bushfires in Australia,"Major bushfires in Australia
Bushfires have accounted for over 800 deaths in Australia since 1851 and, in 2012, the total accumulated cost was estimated at $1.6 billion. In terms of monetary cost however, they rate behind the damage caused by drought, severe storms, hail, and cyclones, perhaps because they most commonly occur outside highly populated urban areas.  The 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria claimed 173 lives over 21 days- the largest number of deaths recorded for any individual Australian bushfire or bushfire season. However, the severe fires of the summer of 2019–2020 affected densely populated areas including holiday destinations leading NSW Rural Fire Services Commissioner, Shane Fitzsimmons, to claim it was ""absolutely"" the worst bushfire season on record."
Bushfires in Australia,"See also
Aerial firefighting and forestry in southern Australia
List of Australian bushfire seasons
List of major bushfires in Australia
List of natural disasters in Australia
McArthur Forest Fire Danger Index
Pyrotron, a device designed to help firefighters better understand how to combat the rapid spread of bush fires
Wildfires in the United States"
Bushfires in Australia,"References
Australia Fires: A Visual Guide to the Bushfire Crisis BBC News, BBC, 31 January 2020"
Bushfires in Australia,External links
Bushfires in Australia,"Bureau of Meteorology
EarthWindMap – Current global map of fine particulates, including smoke, and hotspots, centred on Australia"
Geography of Australia,"The geography of Australia encompasses a wide variety of biogeographic regions being the world's smallest continent, while comprising the territory of the sixth-largest country in the world. The population of Australia is concentrated along the eastern and south-eastern coasts. The geography of the continent is extremely diverse, ranging from the snow-capped mountains of the Australian Alps and Tasmania to large deserts, tropical and temperate forests, grasslands, heathlands and woodlands.
The countries that govern nearby regions include Indonesia, East Timor, and Papua New Guinea to the north; the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and the French dependency of New Caledonia to the east; and New Zealand to the southeast."
Geography of Australia,"Physical geography
Australia is a country and an island located in Oceania between the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific Ocean. It shares its name with the country that claims control over it. Properly called the Commonwealth of Australia, its territory consists of the entire continent and smaller outlying islands. This makes it the sixth-largest country in the world by area of jurisdiction, which comprises 7,686,850 km2 (2,967,910 sq mi) (including Lord Howe Island and Macquarie Island), which is slightly smaller than the 48 states of the contiguous United States and 31.5 times larger than that of the United Kingdom.
The Australian mainland has a total coastline length of 35,821 km (22,258 mi) with an additional 23,860 km (14,830 mi) of island coastlines. There are 758 estuaries around the country with most located in the tropical and sub-tropical zones. A recent global remote sensing analysis suggested that there was 8,866 km2 (3,423 sq mi) of tidal flat area in Australia, making it the third-ranked country in terms of how much tidal flat occurs there. Australia has the third-largest exclusive economic zone of 8,148,250 km2 (3,146,060 sq mi). This EEZ does not include the Australian Antarctic Territory (an additional 5,896,500 km2 (2,276,700 sq mi)).
Australia has the largest area of ocean jurisdiction of any country on Earth. It has no land borders. The northernmost points of the continental mainland are the Cape York Peninsula of Queensland and the Top End of the Northern Territory, but the northernmost point of the country lies in the Torres Strait Islands.
The western half of Australia consists of the Western Plateau, which rises to mountain heights near the west coast and falls to lower elevations near the continental centre. The Western Plateau region is generally flat, though broken by various mountain ranges such as the Hamersley Range, the MacDonnell Ranges, and the Musgrave Range. Surface water is generally lacking in the Western Plateau, although there are several larger rivers in the west and north, such as the Murchison, Ashburton, and Victoria rivers.
The Eastern Highlands, or Great Dividing Range, lie near the eastern coast of Australia, separating the relatively narrow eastern coastal plain from the rest of the continent. These Eastern Australian temperate forests have the greatest relief, the most rainfall, the most abundant and varied flora and fauna, and the densest human settlement.
Between the Eastern Highlands and the Western Plateau lies the Central Lowlands, which are made up of the Great Artesian Basin and Australia's largest river systems, the Murray-Darling Basin and the Lake Eyre Basin.
Off the north-eastern coast of Australia is the world's largest coral reef complex, the Great Barrier Reef. The large and mountainous island of Tasmania, also a State of Australia, lies south of the south-eastern corner of the Australian mainland. It receives abundant rainfall, and has highly fertile soils particularly in comparison to the mainland."
Geography of Australia,"Geology
Australia is the lowest, flattest, and oldest continental landmass on Earth and it has had a relatively stable geological history. Geological forces such as the tectonic uplift of mountain ranges and clashes between tectonic plates occurred mainly in Australia's early prehistory, when it was still a part of Gondwana. Its highest peak is Mount Kosciuszko at 2,228 m (7,310 ft), which is relatively low in comparison to the highest mountains on other continents.
Charles Rowland Twidale estimates that between 10% and 20% of Australia's modern landscapes formed during the Mesozoic when the continent was part of Gondwana.
Australia is situated in the middle of the tectonic plate, and therefore currently has no active volcanism. Minor earthquakes which produce no damage occur frequently, while major earthquakes measuring greater than magnitude 6 occur on average every five years. The terrain is mostly low plateau with deserts, rangelands and a fertile plain in the southeast. Tasmania and the Australian Alps do not contain any permanent icefields or glaciers, although these may have existed in the past. The Great Barrier Reef, by far the world's largest coral reef, lies a short distance off the north-east coast."
Geography of Australia,"Regions
The Australian continental landmass consists of six distinct landform divisions.
These are:"
Geography of Australia,"The Eastern Highlands—including the Great Dividing Range, the fertile Brigalow Belt strip of grassland behind the east coast, and the Eastern Uplands
The Eastern alluvial Plains and Lowlands—the Murray Darling basin covers the southern part; also includes parts of the Lake Eyre Basin and extends to the Gulf of Carpentaria
The South Australian Highlands—including the Flinders Range, Eyre Peninsula, and Yorke Peninsula
The Western Plateau—including the Nullarbor Plain
The Central Deserts
Northern Plateau and Basins—including the Top End"
Geography of Australia,"Hydrology
Much of Australia's interior is arid; the low average annual rainfall and high temperatures mean interior rivers are often dry and lakes empty. The headwaters of some waterways are located in tropical regions where summer rains create a high rate of discharge. Flood events drastically alter the dry environment; thus the ecology of central Australia has had to adapt to the boom and bust cycle.
The Great Artesian Basin is an important source of water, the world's largest and deepest fresh water basin. Access to water from the basin has led to the expansion of grazing into areas that were previously far too dry for livestock. Towns and cities across the country sometimes face major water storage and usage crises in which restrictions and other measures are implemented to reduce water consumption. Water restrictions are based on a gradient of activities that become progressively banned as the situation worsens.
Billabong is the Australian name given to the oxbow lakes that can form along a meandering river's course. In a worldwide comparison of height, Australia's waterfalls are relatively insignificant, with the longest drop ranked 135th according to the World Waterfall Database."
Geography of Australia,"Political geography
Australia consists of six states, two major mainland territories, and other minor territories. The states are New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, and Western Australia. The two major mainland territories are the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory. Western Australia is the largest state, covering just under one third of the Australian landmass, followed by Queensland, South Australia, and New South Wales.
Australia also has several minor territories; the federal government administers a separate area within New South Wales, the Jervis Bay Territory, as a naval base and seaport for the national capital. In addition Australia has the following inhabited, external territories: Norfolk Island, Christmas Island, Cocos (Keeling) Islands, and several largely uninhabited external territories: Ashmore and Cartier Islands, Coral Sea Islands, and Heard Island and McDonald Islands.  Australia also claims a portion of Antarctica as the Australian Antarctic Territory, although this claim is not widely recognized."
Geography of Australia,"Human geography
Australians have settled in several capital cities and their suburban satellites at various points along a vast coastline. A significant immigrant population occupied these places with relatively little dispute and few inner city ghettoes. Australia’s mean population density is 3.3/km2, one of the lowest in the world.
Sport plays an important social and cultural role in Australia with more than 90% of adults having an interest in sport. English is the most common language in Australia. Australians enjoy a very high rate of private property ownership. Australians have a preponderance to engage in gambling, experiencing the largest per capita losses in the world."
Geography of Australia,"Climate
By far the largest part of Australia is arid or semi-arid. A total of 18% of Australia's mainland consists of named deserts, while additional areas are considered to have a desert climate based on low rainfall and high temperature. Only the south-east and south-west corners have a temperate climate and moderately fertile soil. The northern part of the continent has a tropical climate: part is tropical rainforests, part grasslands, and part desert.
Rainfall is highly variable, with frequent droughts lasting several seasons thought to be caused in part by the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. Occasionally a dust storm will blanket a region or even several states and there are reports of the occasional large tornado. Rising levels of salinity and desertification in some areas is ravaging the landscape.
Australia's tropical/subtropical location and cold waters off the western coast make most of western Australia a hot desert, with aridity a marked feature of the greater part of the continent. These cold waters produce little moisture needed on the mainland. A 2005 study by Australian and American researchers investigated the desertification of the interior, and suggested that one explanation was related to human settlers who arrived about 50,000 years ago. Regular burning by these settlers could have prevented monsoons from reaching interior Australia. The outback covers 70 percent of the continent."
Geography of Australia,"Natural hazards
Cyclones along the northern coasts, severe thunderstorms, droughts, occasional floods, heat waves, and frequent bushfires are natural hazards that are present in Australia."
Geography of Australia,"Environment
Current environmental issues include: soil erosion from overgrazing, industrial development, urbanization, and poor farming practices; soil salinity rising due to the use of poor quality water; desertification (partly as a result of the introduction by European settlers of rabbits); introduced pest species; clearing for agricultural purposes threatens the natural habitat of many unique animal and plant species; the Great Barrier Reef off the northeast coast, the largest coral reef in the world, is threatened by increased shipping and its popularity as a tourist site; limited natural fresh water resources; and threats from invasive species.
International agreements:"
Geography of Australia,"party to: Antarctic-Environmental Protocol, Antarctic Treaty, Kyoto Protocol, Biodiversity, China–Australia Migratory Bird Agreement, Climate Change, Endangered Species, Environmental Modification, Hazardous Wastes, Japan–Australia Migratory Bird Agreement, Law of the Sea, Marine Dumping, Marine Life Conservation, Nuclear Test Ban 1963, Nuclear Non-Proliferation, Ozone Layer Protection, Ship Pollution, Tropical Timber 1994, Ramsar Convention, Whaling
signed, but not ratified: Desertification"
Geography of Australia,"See also
References
This article incorporates public domain material from The World Factbook (2024 ed.). CIA. (Archived 2000 edition.)"
Geography of Australia,"Further reading
Miller, Gifford; Mangan, Jennifer; Pollard, David; Thompson, Starley; Felzer, Benjamin; Magee, John (2005). ""Sensitivity of the Australian Monsoon to insolation and vegetation: Implications for human impact on continental moisture balance"". Geology. 33 (1): 65–68. Bibcode:2005Geo....33...65M. doi:10.1130/G21033.1.
""Highest Mountains"". National Mapping – Fab Facts, Landforms, Australian Mountains. Archived from the original on 17 June 2005. Retrieved 7 July 2005.
Weatherley, A.H., ed. (1967). Australian Inland Waters and their Fauna. Eleven Studies (PDF, 19Mb). Canberra: Australian National University Press. OCLC 594806492."
Geography of Australia,"External links
(in English and French) Map of Australia from 1826
 Wikimedia Atlas of Australia
(in English) Water Usage in Australia"
Australian nationalism,"Australian nationalism is the ideology, movement and sentiment that emphasizes the identity, culture, and interests of Australia as a nation-state, asserting the identity of Australians as a distinct nation. It encompasses a range of beliefs and values that are often rooted in Australia's history, geography, and socio-political context. Key elements of Australian nationalism include a sense of national pride, attachment to Australian symbols such as the flag and national anthem, and a focus on promoting Australia's sovereignty and independence.
Historically, Australian nationalism emerged during the late 19th and early 20th centuries as Australia moved towards federation and gained independence from British colonial rule, developing itself in three pivotal historical traditions: the labour movement, the republican movement and the native-nationalist movement. It was shaped by factors such as the experiences of early settlers and the desire for a distinct Australian identity separate from British influence."
Australian nationalism,"History
Pre-Federation
By the early 19th century, Australia was governed as a series of six largely self-governing colonies that were spread across the continent and were part of the British Empire. The name Australia was popularised by explorer Matthew Flinders and first used officially by Governor Macquarie. Attempts to coordinate governance had failed in the 1860s due to a lack of popular support and lack of interest from the British government, but by the 1880s, and with the rise of nationalist movements in Europe, the efforts to establish a federation of the Australian colonies began to gather momentum. The British government supported federation as a means to cement British influence in the South Pacific.
Figures like William Wentworth, John Dunmore Lang and Banjo Patterson championed Australian identity during the colonial era."
Australian nationalism,"Post-Federation
Nationalistic sentiments increased as a result of Australia's participation in the First and Second World Wars, with concepts such as ""mateship"" becoming a cornerstone of Australian nationalism."
Australian nationalism,"See also
Eureka rebellion
Anzac spirit
Reclaiming Patriotism"
Australian nationalism,"Flags
Flags used by Australian Nationalists"
Australian nationalism,"
== References =="
Manufacturing in Australia,"Manufacturing in Australia peaked in the 1960s at 25% of the country's gross domestic product, and has since dropped below 10%. At one stage manufacturing employed almost a third of Australia's workforce.  Automotive manufacturing in Australia began in the 1920s and came to an end in 2017.
Australia's greatest manufacturing achievement was the manufacture of the Beaufort, a twin-engined torpedo bomber, during World War II.  Australia's manufacturing sector is diverse with the largest sub-industries being food, beverage and tobacco, machinery and equipment, petroleum, coal and chemicals and metal products."
Manufacturing in Australia,"History
The manufacture of small steam engines began in the 1830s.  The majority of Australia's manufacturing was undertaken in the capital cities and Newcastle because of their proximity to shipping and rail hubs. Working conditions were poor with little regard to health and safety. Child labour was endemic.  The clothing and footwear industries were particularly bad.  In 1901, Australia's first blast furnace began producing steel near Lithgow in New South Wales.  The furnace remains are now heritage listed as the Lithgow Blast Furnace.  Another steel mill was opened in 1915 in Newcastle by BHP. Soon more steelworks opened in Whyalla and Port Kembla.
Due to a lack of imports during World War I, Australia saw a boost to manufacturing. The steel industry saw an increase in production as did the manufacture of aspirin and chlorine. The 1920s saw the introduction of car manufacturing in Australia with both Ford and General Motors opening factories. The first Australian-made bottle of Coca-Cola was made in 1938. The Government Aircraft Factories was established in 1939 to manufacture aircraft in Australia.
Manufacturing in Australia experienced an exceptional boom during World War II and the two decades that followed. Local manufacturers were assisted by protectionist tariffs.  The Jackson Committee was established in 1974 by the Whitlam government of Australia to advise on policies for Australia's manufacturing industry.  The tariffs were cut in the 1980s and early 1990s.  Workers in iron, steel, auto, white goods, textiles, clothing and footwear industries were particularly hard hit.  It wasn't long before new markets in Asian countries such as China and Japan opened up with much cheaper imports now possible.
The contribution of manufacturing to Australia's gross domestic product peaked in the 1960s at 25%, and had dropped to 13% by 2001–2 and 10.5% by 2005–6.
In 2004–05, the manufacturing industry exported products worth $67,400 million, and employed 1.1 million people.
In 2000–2001, $3.3 billion was spent on assistance to the manufacturing industry, with 40% going to the textile, clothing and footwear industry and the passenger motor vehicle industry. At that time, manufacturing accounted for 48% of exports, and 45% of Australian research and development. From 2000, the resource boom saw the Australian dollar soar on exchanges, making exports expensive on the global stage and imports exceptionally cheap.
In 2007, the breakdown of manufacturing by state, and the fraction of gross state product (GSP) which it contributed, were as follows:"
Manufacturing in Australia,"Between 2001 and 2007, the approximate breakdown by industry changed as follows:"
Manufacturing in Australia,"Food processing
The food and beverage manufacturing industry is the largest in Australia.  The sectors include the following:"
Manufacturing in Australia,* Before the 2010 closure of the Port Lincoln Tuna cannery
Manufacturing in Australia,"Textile industry
Until trade liberalisation in the mid-1980s, Australia had a large textile industry.  This decline continued through the first decade of the 21st century. Since the 1980s, tariffs have steadily been reduced; in early 2010, the tariffs were reduced from 17.5 percent to 10 percent on clothing, and 7.5–10% to 5% for footwear and other textiles.
As of 2010, most textile manufacturing, even by Australian companies, is performed in Asia."
Manufacturing in Australia,"Motor vehicles
As of 2008, four companies mass-produced cars in Australia. Mitsubishi ceased production in March 2008, followed by Ford in 2016, and Holden and Toyota in 2017.
Holden bodyworks were manufactured at Elizabeth, South Australia and engines were produced at the Fishermans Bend plant in Port Melbourne. In 2006, Holden's export revenue was just under A$1.3 billion. In March 2012, Holden was given a $270 million lifeline by the Australian government. In return, Holden planned to inject over $1 billion into car manufacturing in Australia. They estimated the new investment package would return around $4 billion to the Australian economy and see GM Holden continue making cars in Australia until at least 2022. However, Holden announced on 11 December 2013 that Holden cars would no longer be manufactured in Australia from the end of 2017.
Ford had two main factories, both in Victoria: located in the Geelong suburb of Norlane and the northern Melbourne suburb of Broadmeadows. Both plants were closed down in October 2016.
Until 2006, Toyota had factories in Port Melbourne and Altona, after which all manufacturing was performed at Altona. In 2008, Toyota exported 101,668 vehicles worth $1,900 million. In 2011 the figures were ""59,949 units worth $1,004 million"". On 10 February 2014 it was announced that by the end of 2017 Toyota would cease manufacturing vehicles and engines in Australia.
In March 2012, a new Australian auto maker, Tomcar, announced they are to build a new factory in Melbourne."
Manufacturing in Australia,"Chemical industry
Australia has a chemical industry, including the manufacture of many petrochemicals.
Many mining companies, such as BHP and Comalco, perform initial processing of raw materials. Similarly, Australia's agriculture feeds into the chemical industry.  Tasmania produces 40% of the world's raw narcotic materials; some of this is locally converted into codeine and other pharmaceuticals in Tasmania by Tasmanian Alkaloids, owned by Johnson and Johnson, while GlaxoSmithKline processes some of the resulting poppy straw in Victoria."
Manufacturing in Australia,"Companies with manufacturing facilities in Australia
A partial list of companies operating manufacturing facilities in Australia, with their most important products."
Manufacturing in Australia,"Australian-owned
Consumer
Industrial
International
Companies that no longer manufacture in Australia
Companies that closed down, or moved manufacturing offshore.
Australian Owned:"
Manufacturing in Australia,"Pacific Brands Clothing
South Pacific Tyres (Ansell/Goodyear) Tyres
Downs & Son
International:"
Manufacturing in Australia,"Ford Australia
Holden (General Motors)
Sidchrome
Bridgestone
Mitsubishi Motors Australia
Nissan Motor Australia
Toyota Australia"
Manufacturing in Australia,See also
Manufacturing in Australia,"Australian Made
Ausbuy
Balance of payments of Australia"
Manufacturing in Australia,"
== References =="
2022 Australian federal election,"The 2022 Australian federal election was held on Saturday 21 May 2022 to elect members of the 47th Parliament of Australia. The incumbent Liberal/National Coalition government, led by Prime Minister Scott Morrison, sought to win a fourth consecutive term in office but was defeated by the opposition Labor Party, led by Anthony Albanese. Up for election were all 151 seats in the lower house, the House of Representatives, as well as 40 of the 76 seats in the upper house, the Senate.
The Australian Labor Party achieved a majority government for the first time since 2007, winning 77 seats in the House of Representatives. Albanese was sworn in as Prime Minister on 23 May 2022, becoming the fourth Labor leader to win government from opposition since World War II, after Gough Whitlam in 1972, Bob Hawke in 1983, and Kevin Rudd in 2007. Every state and territory except Tasmania swung to Labor on a two-party-preferred basis. The largest two-party preferred swing was in Western Australia (10.6%), where Labor won a majority of seats for the first time since 1990. The Coalition suffered severe losses, winning 58 seats, its lowest share in the House of Representatives since 1946, the first federal election contested by the Liberal Party. On election night, Morrison conceded defeat and announced he would resign as Liberal leader, and was subsequently replaced by Peter Dutton.
While the Coalition was soundly defeated, Labor did not achieve a landslide victory, as a result of electoral successes by independent candidates and the Australian Greens, with the crossbench swelling to 16 seats. Six formerly safe Liberal seats in urban and suburban areas, most held by the party and its predecessors for decades, were won by teal independents, unseating Liberal incumbents including Treasurer and Deputy Liberal Leader Josh Frydenberg. The Liberals also suffered large swings in a number of suburban seats that had long been reckoned as Liberal heartland. The Greens increased their vote share and won four seats, gaining three seats in inner-city Brisbane, the first time in the party's history it won more than one seat in the lower house. The combined major party vote for Labor and the Coalition was the lowest on record at 68.3%, while the minor party and independent vote was at its highest at 31.7%. Compared to 2019, Labor's primary vote dropped much less than the Coalition's, though Labor nevertheless recorded its lowest primary vote since either 1903 or 1934, depending on whether the Lang Labor vote is included.
In the Senate, Labor won 15 seats and retained its 26 seats overall in the chamber, while the Coalition fell to 32 seats, a four-seat drop from the previous parliament. The Greens won a seat in every state, an increase of 3 for a total of 12 seats overall, the party's largest ever representation in the Senate. One Nation returned its leader Pauline Hanson in Queensland to retain 2 seats overall, while the Jacqui Lambie Network won an additional seat in Tasmania to have 2 seats. In the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), independent candidate David Pocock won the second of two seats, the first time an ACT senator was not a Labor or Liberal party member. Lastly, a United Australia Party candidate won the sixth seat in Victoria. Labor required 13 votes from a crossbench of 18 (including 12 Greens) to ensure passage of legislation not supported by the Coalition.
The voter turnout of 89.82% in this election was the lowest in modern history, falling below 90% for the first time since 1922, prior to the introduction of compulsory voting in Australia."
2022 Australian federal election,"Background
Previous election
At the previous election in May 2019, the Liberal/National Coalition, led by Scott Morrison, formed a government after winning 77 seats in the House of Representatives, enough for a three-seat majority, whilst Labor claimed 68 seats and remained in opposition. A further six seats were won by other parties and independents, one each to the Greens, Centre Alliance, and Katter's Australian Party, and the remaining three by independents forming the crossbench. In the Senate, the Coalition made modest gains in most states and increased their share of seats to 35 overall, whilst Labor remained steady on 26, the Greens likewise on 9, One Nation and Centre Alliance down to 2 each, and Jacqui Lambie and Cory Bernardi's minor parties with 1 seat each. This meant the Coalition required four additional votes to pass legislation."
2022 Australian federal election,"Composition of parliament
The 46th Parliament was inaugurated on 2 July 2019. By this time the Labor Party had elected a new leader, replacing the outgoing Bill Shorten with Anthony Albanese.
In the Senate, Cory Bernardi's resignation in January 2020 allowed the Coalition to replace him with a Liberal member, increasing their share of seats in the Senate to 36. They retained this figure until Northern Territory senator Sam McMahon resigned from the Country Liberal Party in January 2022, four months before the election. She joined the Liberal Democratic Party on 8 April 2022.
In the House of Representatives, two Coalition MPs (Llew O'Brien and Darren Chester) departed their respective party-room caucuses, though retained their membership of the Morrison government. The government's share of seats in the House dropped when Craig Kelly, the member for Hughes, left the Liberal Party in August 2021 to become an independent and sit on the crossbench. This left the government with a one-seat majority (76 out of 151), though considering the position of the Speaker, who is obliged not to vote to create a majority where none is present, the government functioned from this point to the election in technical-minority status. On 7 April 2022, three days prior to the election being called, Liberal National Party MP George Christensen announced his resignation from the party and became an independent, dropping the government to 75 seats at the end of the parliamentary term.
There were two by-elections in the 46th parliament, both in 2020 in the seats of Eden-Monaro and Groom; in both instances, the by-elections were won by the incumbent party. Nick Champion resigned from the House of Representatives in February 2022 to contest the South Australian state election. A by-election was not held for his seat of Spence as it would be too close to the federal election."
2022 Australian federal election,"Events of the 46th Parliament
Throughout the duration of the 46th Parliament, Scott Morrison remained Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Party, and in so doing he became the first prime minister to serve a full term without facing a leadership spill since John Howard (1996–2007). Deputy Prime Minister and National Party leader Michael McCormack was challenged twice by his predecessor Barnaby Joyce, unsuccessfully in February 2020 and successfully in June 2021.
Key events during the second term and first full term of the Morrison government included the Black Summer bushfires, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the Parliament House sexual misconduct allegations, and the formation of the AUKUS security pact. Morrison won praise for his response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, including launching the National Cabinet and JobKeeper programs, but he struggled to manage the vaccination roll out and testing regime as new variants of SARS-CoV-2 emerged. He faced further criticism for holidaying in Hawaii during the Black Summer bush fires, being accused of lying by French President Emmanuel Macron in the aftermath of the AUKUS agreement, and lacking ambition on climate change during COP26.
The opposition Labor Party elected Anthony Albanese as party leader unopposed, 12 days after Bill Shorten lost the May 2019 election. The Albanese-led Opposition struggled to make an impact in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. His ""most significant policy announcement"" before 2022 was a commitment to reduce emissions by 43% by 2030 under a Labor government.
Australian Greens leader Richard Di Natale resigned in February 2020, replaced by the party's only lower house MP Adam Bandt, who was elected unopposed. Among minor parties, controversial figure Craig Kelly resigned from the Liberal Party and became the leader of Clive Palmer's United Australia Party in 2021."
2022 Australian federal election,"Change in party registration rules
In September 2021, legislation was passed to amend the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 and tighten rules surrounding the registration of political parties. Changes to party registration rules were reportedly the effect of an increase of parties on the Senate ballot, which resulted in the requirement of magnifying sheets for some voters to read the ballot, and a perception that voters would be misled by names of some minor parties.
The first change was the increase of membership requirements for a party from 500 to 1,500. This resulted in the federal deregistration of non-parliamentary minor parties who could not prove they had at least 1,500 members, including the Christian Democratic Party and Democratic Labour Party in March 2022.
The second change was that parties cannot have names that were too similar to political parties registered before them. This meant that new parties are prevented from registering a party name and/or logo ""too similar to an existing party's"". As for existing registered parties, a party may also object to a similar name and/or logo used by another party, if the latter party was registered later than the former party. If the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) is satisfied with the objection, it can uphold the objection, and the later-registered party will be registered within a month of the upholding, if an application to change the name and/or logo is not made or has been denied.
This ""similar name"" rule was used by the Liberal Party against the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and The New Liberals, with both objections upheld by the AEC. This forced The New Liberals to change its name to TNL to be registered and forced the LDP to apply to change its name to the Liberty and Democracy Party. The LDP then withdrew its name change application on 22 March 2022. As a result, on 1 April 2022, the AEC gave notice to the party that it would consider deregistering the party, giving one month for the party to appeal the notice. However, as the writs for the election were issued the following week on 11 April, the party register then would be ""frozen"" and this meant the party was allowed to contest the election with its current name.
The Labor Party also used the ""similar name"" rule against the Democratic Labour Party and the objection was upheld by the AEC, but the latter party was eventually deregistered for not meeting the membership number requirement."
2022 Australian federal election,"Party preselection issues
Both the Labor Party and Liberal Party experienced preselection issues, where they were unable to finalise candidates for many of the seats or the Senate as late as early April 2022, less than two weeks before the election was called. This resulted in the intervention by the parties' national executives or nominated committees to select the candidates and bypassing local voting by rank-and-file members. The New South Wales state division of the Liberal Party was unable to finalise candidates for many seats by March 2022 due to the alleged failure of Morrison's representative Alex Hawke to attend internal Liberal Party nomination review committee meetings and COVID-19 complications resulting in the inability to elect the state executive in November 2020. This had forced the federal executive of the party to temporarily dissolve the state executive on two occasions (4 to 8 March, and 27 March to 2 April) under the party constitution, and set up a committee to intervene in preselection processes. The committee was made up of Morrison, New South Wales Premier and Liberal leader Dominic Perrottet and former party president Chris McDiven.
While the Liberal state executive was dissolved, the committee was allowed to ""hand-pick"" party candidates for the election and bypass local pre-selection ballots. It endorsed the preselection of Hawke, minister Sussan Ley and backbencher Trent Zimmerman in their seats on 6 March, and endorsed candidates on 2 April for nine key seats that the party was trying to win, including Warringah, Hughes, Eden-Monaro, and Parramatta. Some party members sought to challenge the legitimacy of the committee's preselection in court, which would overturn the preselection of Hawke, Ley, Zimmerman and the other nine candidates. On 5 April, the New South Wales Court of Appeal ruled that the court had no jurisdiction to make decisions relating to the constitutions of political parties, thereby ruling the preselection of the 12 candidates valid. The legal challenge was further brought into High Court of Australia for appeal but was dismissed on 8 April, two days before the election was called.
The preselection process in the Victorian branch of the Labor Party had been taken over by the Labor Party National Executive in June 2020 until 2023 as a result of branch-stacking allegations within the party. Voting rights of all members were suspended and candidates would be chosen by the National Executive. In early March 2022, the Labor Senate ticket for Victoria for the May federal election had still not yet been decided. It was reported that Senators Kimberley Kitching and Kim Carr might face preselection challenges and could lose preselection for the Senate ticket in the election. Kitching died from a heart attack a week later, and Carr later decided to retire from the election. On 28 March 2022, the National Executive was able to finalise two new candidates to replace Kitching and Carr, and another candidate for the Division of Holt.
Preselection issues in the Labor Party were not limited to the Victorian branch. On the same day as the replacements for Kitching and Carr were finalised, the National Executive ""parachuted"" Andrew Charlton into the Division of Parramatta in New South Wales, bypassing a local preselection with three candidates from diverse ethnic backgrounds. This prompted a backlash from local party members and the incumbent retiring Labor member for Parramatta Julie Owens."
2022 Australian federal election,"Independents
In the 2013 federal election, the Voices for Indi organisation successfully backed independent candidate Cathy McGowan to defeat the incumbent Liberal member of parliament Sophie Mirabella in the Division of Indi. McGowan was reelected in 2016, retiring after two terms to be succeeded by fellow independent Helen Haines. McGowan's victory inspired the campaign of independent Zali Steggall in 2019, who defeated the Liberal former Prime Minister Tony Abbott in the seat of Warringah. In addition to Haines and Steggall's campaigns for reelection, the 2022 election saw the candidacy of several challengers who were in turn inspired by Steggall. Termed ""teal independents"" (denoting a mix of classical liberal blue and environmentalist green), these candidates contested in Liberal heartlands notably including Curtin, Goldstein, Kooyong, Mackellar, North Sydney and Wentworth. Each received funds from the political fundraising group Climate 200."
2022 Australian federal election,"Electoral system
Members of the House of Representatives are elected by instant-runoff voting, which in Australia is known as full preferential voting. Each electorate elects one member.
Senators are elected by single transferable vote and proportional representation. In states senators are elected from state-wide six-member districts, and in territories from territory-wide two-member districts.
Ballots are counted at least twice, at the polling place and, starting Monday night after election day, at counting centres."
2022 Australian federal election,"State of electorates
Redistribution
The Australian Electoral Commission is required, one year after the first sitting day for a new House of Representatives, to determine the number of members to which each State and Territory is entitled. If the number in any state changes, a redistribution will be required in those states. A redistribution will be postponed if it would begin within one year of the expiration of the House of Representatives. Demographic statistics for December 2019 released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics on 18 June 2020 were used to calculate the determination. The population counts confirmed that the number of seats in the House of Representatives was to return to 150, with Victoria gaining a seat (39), and Western Australia (15) and the Northern Territory (1) losing a seat each.
The abolition of the Northern Territory's second seat in the determination was controversial. Labor Party senators Malarndirri McCarthy and Don Farrell put forward a private senator's bill which would guarantee the Northern Territory a minimum two seats in the House of Representatives, with the bill referred to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters. In July 2020, election analyst Antony Green proposed to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters that the ""harmonic mean method"" be used to calculate the electoral representation entitlements for the territories. Green also blogged on the history of representation and its applications to states and territories in light of the 2020 redistribution and his advocacy proved persuasive. In October 2020, deputy prime minister Michael McCormack gave an assurance that the government and opposition would combine to overrule the AEC and maintain the Northern Territory's level of representation. The mechanism by which this would be achieved was unclear, however, with Senator Mathias Cormann stating that a two-seat minimum for the territories would be legislated. Mandating a minimum number of seats for the Northern Territory but not the Australian Capital Territory was seen as potentially inequitable, though the ACT's level of representation was not under threat. A 2003 report had also recommended against adopting mandatory minimum entitlements to seats in the House of Representatives for either of the territories.
Ultimately, the Joint Standing Committee recommended ""enacting a harmonic mean for allocating seats between states and territories, with appropriate public explanation to build understanding for the reform"". The Parliament passed the Electoral Amendment (Territory Representation) Act 2020 on 9 December 2020, amending the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 to use the harmonic mean method for determining representative entitlements for territories relative to states. Consequently, the Northern Territory will retain two seats in the House of Representatives at the next election, an outcome achieved without legislating any mandatory minimum level of representation."
2022 Australian federal election,"In March 2021, the AEC published its proposal for this redistribution, involving the abolition of the Division of Stirling in Western Australia, the creation of the new Division of Hawke in Victoria (named for former Prime Minister Bob Hawke), and the renaming of the existing Division of Corangamite to the Division of Tucker (in honour of Margaret Tucker, ""a Yorta Yorta woman, for her significant work to create a more equal and understanding society for Aboriginal people""). When the AEC published its final determinations in June 2021, the abolition of Stirling and creation of Hawke were confirmed, but Corangamite would not be renamed to Tucker over concerns that it would be vandalised as ""Fucker""."
2022 Australian federal election,"Election pendulum (House of Representatives)
Voter registration
Enrollment of eligible voters is compulsory. Voters must notify the AEC within 8 weeks of a change of address or after turning 18. The electoral rolls are closed for new enrollments or update of details about a week after the issue of writs for election. Enrollment is optional for 16- or 17-year-olds, but they cannot vote until they turn 18, and persons who have applied for Australian citizenship may also apply for provisional enrollment which takes effect on the granting of citizenship. A total of 17,228,900 people were enrolled to vote in the election, which meant that 96.8% of all eligible Australians were enrolled on the electoral roll."
2022 Australian federal election,"Election date
The constitutional and legal provisions that affect the choice of the election date include:"
2022 Australian federal election,"Section 12 of the Constitution says: ""The Governor of any State may cause writs to be issued for the election of Senators for that State.""
Section 13 of the Constitution provides that the election of senators shall be held in the period of twelve months before the places become vacant.
Section 28 of the Constitution says: ""Every House of Representatives shall continue for three years from the first sitting of the House, and no longer, but may be sooner dissolved by the Governor-General."" Since the 46th Parliament of Australia opened on 2 July 2019, it will expire on 1 July 2022.
Section 32 of the Constitution says: ""The writs shall be issued within ten days from the expiry of a House of Representatives or from the proclamation of a dissolution thereof."" Ten days after 1 July 2022 is 11 July 2022.
Section 156(1) of the CEA says: ""The date fixed for the nomination of the candidates shall not be less than 10 days nor more than 27 days after the date of the writ."" Twenty-seven days after 11 July 2022 is 7 August 2022.
Section 157 of the CEA says: ""The date fixed for the polling shall not be less than 23 days nor more than 31 days after the date of nomination."" Thirty-one days after 7 August 2022 is 7 September 2022, a Wednesday.
Section 158 of the CEA says: ""The day fixed for the polling shall be a Saturday."" The Saturday before 7 September 2022 is 3 September 2022, which was the latest possible date for the lower house election."
2022 Australian federal election,"Dissolution of parliament
The election was called by Morrison on 10 April 2022, when he visited the Governor-General advising the latter to prorogue Parliament and dissolve the House of Representatives. The Parliament was then prorogued and the House of Representatives dissolved the next morning."
2022 Australian federal election,"Election timeline
On 10 April 2022, the office of the Governor-General released documents relating to the calling of the election. The documents set out a timeline of key dates for the election."
2022 Australian federal election,"11 April – 9:29 am: Prorogation of the 46th Parliament
11 April – 9:30 am: Dissolution of the House of Representatives
11 April – Issue of writs
18 April – Close of electoral rolls
21 April – Close of candidate nominations
22 April – Declaration of nominations
9 May – Early voting commences
18 May – Close of postal vote applications
21 May – Polling day; commencement of terms for territory senators
13 June – Last day for receipt of declaration votes
28 June – Return of writs (last day)
1 July – Commencement of terms for state senators
The election period included three national public holidays: Good Friday (15 April), Easter Monday (18 April), and Anzac Day (25 April), as well as May Day and Labour Day in Northern Territory and Queensland, respectively, both falling on 2 May."
2022 Australian federal election,"Campaign events
Leaders' debates
The first leaders' debate was held at the Gabba in Brisbane in front of 100 undecided voters. Moderated by Sky News reporter Kieran Gilbert, Albanese was declared the winner, with 40 votes to Morrison's 35 and 25 still undecided. The first debate had 415,000 viewers.
The second leaders' debate was held at the Nine Studios in Sydney on 8 May. The debate was moderated by 60 Minutes journalist, Sarah Abo, with Channel 9 political editor Chris Uhlmann, Sydney Morning Herald chief political correspondent David Crowe and radio host Deb Knight asking questions of the leaders. The debate was broadcast nationwide on the Nine Network's main free-to-air channel, the network's streaming service 9Now, and the websites of the newspapers owned by the network: The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. The winner of the debate was to be decided through a viewer poll hosted on Channel 9's website. Although 49% of viewers preferred Albanese to be the better prime minister compared to 45% preferring Morrison, the debate was a 50–50 draw. Channel 9's moderation of the debate was subject to widespread criticism, with both Morrison and Albanese shouting over the top of one another and the moderator, and for the technical issues experienced by a web page run by Channel 9 to gather audience opinion. It was a ratings success, drawing in 641,000 viewers.
The third and final leaders' debate was held on 11 May on Channel Seven, whose political editor Mark Riley moderated the debate. To determine the winner of the debate, 150 undecided voters were surveyed in key electorates around the country. Albanese was victorious with 50% of the vote, with Morrison getting 34% of the vote, and 16% remaining undecided. Seven's debate was viewed by 811,000 people, the highest viewership of all three debates.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) pushed for a debate on their free-to-air channel, radio, and websites in the lead-up to polling day, which Morrison refused, as well as Liberal Party federal director Andrew Hirst, who gave no explanation. Morrison and Albanese accepted a debate on Channel Seven rather than on the ABC."
2022 Australian federal election,"Campaign
11 April: Labor Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese was unable to state the cash or unemployment rates in response to a question by a journalist. The question was widely described as a 'gotcha' question, and set-off a debate about the use of such questions.
13 April:
Labor said they would not commit to an increase in JobSeeker Payment after the election if they win.
A journalist asked Greens leader Adam Bandt what the current Wage Price Index was. Bandt told the journalist to ""Google it, mate"" and criticised a focus on ""basic fact checking"" rather than a ""contest of ideas.""
16 April:
Albanese said he would commit to an anti-corruption watchdog should Labor win the election.
The United Australia Party election campaign launch was held.
19 April: A debate was held at the National Press Club in Canberra between Minister for Agriculture and Northern Australia David Littleproud and Shadow Minister Julie Collins.
20 April:
Morrison continued to support his ""captain's pick"" to contest the seat of Warringah, Katherine Deves, despite her comments about transgender people and surrogacy.
First leaders' debate in Brisbane took place in front of 100 undecided voters, with Albanese declared the winner, with 40 votes to Morrison's 35 and 25 still undecided.
21 April: Albanese tested positive for COVID-19 and was unable to campaign in person for seven days.
22 April: Former Liberal foreign minister Julie Bishop and former defence chief Chris Barrie criticised the Morrison government for not doing enough to stop the Solomon Islands' security pact with China.
29 April:
Albanese came out of COVID-19 isolation.
The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) warns Pauline Hanson's One Nation over voter fraud claims in a cartoon attacking Labor. After that Social media Facebook and TikTok took down those videos from Pauline Hanson's social media accounts.
30 April: Shadow minister Bill Shorten said Labor would hold a royal commission into Robodebt if elected.
1 May: The Labor election campaign launch was held in Perth.
4 May: A debate was held at the National Press Club in Canberra between Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and Shadow Treasurer Jim Chalmers.
5 May:
Pauline Hanson's One Nation party was criticised for running ""ghost candidates"" in several electorates, who are neither campaigning in the lead-up to the election nor have an online presence. Additionally, many do not live in the electorates they are contesting. One Nation committed to run candidates in all seats.
A debate was held at the National Press Club in Canberra between Minister for Defence Peter Dutton and Shadow Minister Brendan O'Connor.
8 May: Second leaders' debate took place in Sydney.
11 May:
Albanese said that he supported an increase of 5.1% to the minimum wage or an additional $1 an hour, tied to the inflation rate, with criticism from Morrison claiming that it would result in increasing interest rates.
Third leaders' debate took place in Sydney.
13 May: A debate was held at the National Press Club in Canberra between Minister for Foreign Affairs Marise Payne and Shadow Minister Penny Wong.
15 May: The Liberal election campaign launch was held in Brisbane, six days before the election, where Morrison promised to allow people to purchase their first home using funds from their superannuation.
18 May:
Albanese addressed the National Press Club. Morrison is the first prime minister since 1969 not to address the National Press Club in the final week of an election campaign.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics released the March 2022 Quarter Wage Price Index of 0.7%, or 2.4% annually.
20 May: Telephone voting rules changed to allow Australians who have tested positive with COVID-19 after 6 pm on 13 May to vote by telephone.
21 May (Election Day): Morrison advised in a press conference that a boat with refugees from Sri Lanka had been intercepted and turned back by the Australian Border Force. Hours before polling stations close, voters across the country received a text message about the boat turnback, urging them to vote Liberal for border security. The ABC later revealed on 27 May that the act followed a direct request from the Prime Minister's Office to the Border Force in revealing the operation before it was completed."
2022 Australian federal election,"Preferences
Political parties recommend to voters how they should rank candidates through ""how-to-vote cards"" distributed by campaign volunteers near polling places. Parties often make agreements between themselves about these recommendations.
The Liberal National Party of Queensland recommended its voters direct their preferences to One Nation in the Senate and key Queensland seats. The Greens recommended its voters direct their preferences to Labor ahead of both the Coalition and minor right-wing parties such as the United Australia Party and One Nation for the House of Representatives and Senate, with preferences also recommended to be directed to independents endorsed by the various Voices groups in Liberal-held seats such as Goldstein, Mackellar, North Sydney, and Wentworth.
Pauline Hanson's One Nation said it would recommend that voters direct their preferences to Labor in five seats—North Sydney, Goldstein, Sturt, Longman, and Bass—all held by moderate Liberals. The United Australia Party recommended its voters direct their preferences to the Coalition ahead of Labor in marginal electorates, such as Bass, Chisholm, Dobell, Gilmore, Hunter and Macquarie, as well as all but four seats in Queensland, in addition to preferencing Liberal incumbents ahead of independent challengers in Mackellar, Wentworth, and Wannon. They also recommended its voters put incumbents last in their vote in Western Australia."
2022 Australian federal election,"Candidates
Candidates for either house must have been formally nominated with the Electoral Commission. The nomination for a party-endorsed candidate must be signed by the Registered Officer of a party registered under the Electoral Act; 100 signatures of eligible voters are required for an independent candidate as per section 166 of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918. A candidate can nominate for only one electorate, and must pass a number of qualifications. The Electoral Legislation Amendment (Modernisation and Other Measures) Act 2019 came into effect on 1 March 2019. A deposit of $2,000 was required for a candidate for the House of Representatives or the Senate, which is refunded if the candidate is elected or gains at least 4% of the first preference vote. Between 10 and 27 days must be allowed after the issue of writs before the close of nominations. At the close of nominations a total of 1,624 candidates had stood for election, of which 1,203 were House of Representatives candidates and 421 were Senate candidates.
In February 2022, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation revealed a failed attempt by the Chinese government to use a proxy to finance federal Labor candidates in New South Wales.
The 2022 election featured the largest number of Indigenous candidates in Australian history, with four running for the Coalition, eleven for Labor, seventeen for the Greens; and one candidate for the Socialist Alliance, seven candidates for the Indigenous-Aboriginal Party, one candidate for Katter's Australia Party, one candidate for One Nation, and one independent candidate. The Greens Victorian senate ticket were all Aboriginal."
2022 Australian federal election,"Parties
The table below lists party representation in the 46th Parliament when it was prorogued on 11 April 2022."
2022 Australian federal election,"Retiring members
The seat of Spence (SA) was vacant following the resignation of Nick Champion (Labor) on 22 February 2022 to contest the South Australian state election. A Senate seat in New South Wales was vacant following the resignation of Kristina Keneally (Labor) on 11 April 2022 to contest the lower house seat of Fowler in the election. A second Senate seat in Western Australia was initially vacant at the close of nominations following the resignation on 15 April 2022 of Ben Small (Liberal), who had discovered that he was ineligible on the grounds of dual citizenship. Having renounced his New Zealand citizenship, Small was re-appointed on 18 May 2022 and contested the election. George Christensen, previously a Nationals member, did not re-contest the seat of Dawson but ran instead for the Senate for One Nation.
The following Members of Parliament (MPs) and Senators did not contest the election."
2022 Australian federal election,"Labor
Sharon Bird MP (Cunningham, NSW) – announced retirement on 19 November 2021
Anthony Byrne MP (Holt, Vic) – announced retirement on 3 March 2022
Joel Fitzgibbon MP (Hunter, NSW) – announced retirement on 12 September 2021
Chris Hayes MP (Fowler, NSW) – announced retirement on 24 March 2021
Julie Owens MP (Parramatta, NSW) – announced retirement on 28 October 2021
Warren Snowdon MP (Lingiari, NT) – announced retirement on 10 December 2020
Senator Kim Carr (Vic) – announced retirement on 27 March 2022"
2022 Australian federal election,"Liberal
John Alexander MP (Bennelong, NSW) – announced retirement on 12 November 2021
Kevin Andrews MP (Menzies, Vic) – lost preselection on 31 January 2021
Nicolle Flint MP (Boothby, SA) – announced retirement on 26 February 2021
Greg Hunt MP (Flinders, Vic) – announced retirement on 2 December 2021
Steve Irons MP (Swan, WA) – announced retirement on 24 September 2021
Andrew Laming MP (Bowman, Qld) – announced retirement on 28 March 2021, disendorsed on 12 April 2021 after refusal to withdraw preselection nomination
Christian Porter MP (Pearce, WA) – announced retirement on 1 December 2021
Tony Smith MP (Casey, Vic) – announced retirement on 14 July 2021
Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells (NSW) – lost preselection 26 March 2022, announced retirement 2 April 2022"
2022 Australian federal election,"Nationals
Damian Drum MP (Nicholls, Vic) – announced retirement on 3 December 2021
Ken O'Dowd MP (Flynn, Qld) – announced retirement on 5 January 2021"
2022 Australian federal election,"Opinion polling
Newspaper endorsements
Most major Australian newspapers publish editorial endorsements in the week leading up to election day. As was the case at each of the past three elections, the majority of such editorials favoured the Coalition, with no papers having switched their endorsement from one party to another since 2019. Among the editorials supporting the Coalition were those of the two major national mastheads, The Australian and Australian Financial Review (AFR), and all but one of News Corp's capital city dailies and Sunday editions. Nine Entertainment Company's metropolitan dailies, such as The Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne-based The Age, both supported Labor, replicating their 2019 stance. Outside of the major media companies, editorials published by The Canberra Times, The Saturday Paper, and the Guardian Australia website opposed the Coalition; all three endorsed Labor, with the latter also supporting the Greens and teal independents.
Editors generally professed ""despondency"" at a perceived lack of ""broad vision"" on both sides, as well as a lack of attention to long-term issues like tax reform, housing affordability, stagnant productivity, and high public debt. Those endorsing the Coalition focused on Morrison's record rather than his platform. While chiding his propensity to ""bulldoze his way through situations, clumsily handling issues that required a deft touch, a soft word or a steadier hand"", The Australian credited Morrison's having ""steered a government and his country through the most extraordinary, almost indescribably difficult period of our lifetimes"", referring to low numbers of COVID-19 deaths and a strong economic recovery. The AFR contrasted this performance with a Labor ""pitch dominated by talking points and unburdened by any substantial policy"". Editors endorsing Labor focused on the issues of climate change and the establishment of a federal anti-corruption commission, judging the Coalition's efforts on both insufficient. For The Age, ""a change of government is needed to begin restoring integrity to federal politics and ... face up to the challenge of climate change."""
2022 Australian federal election,"Weekend editions
Metropolitan daily newspapers
Online publications
Regional newspapers
Results
House of Representatives
Senate
Seats changing hands
Members in italics did not re-contest their House of Representatives seats at this election."
2022 Australian federal election,"Maps
Aftermath and reactions
Domestic reactions
Morrison conceded defeat and resigned as leader of the Liberal Party; his successor was later decided at the next Liberal party room meeting to be Peter Dutton; both of the two formerly contested against each other during the 2018 Liberal Party of Australia leadership spills.
Albanese claimed victory and acknowledged Morrison's concession. He thanked his supporters, his colleagues, and his team for the win. He pledged to fulfill the promise of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, not to leave anyone behind, and to unite Australia for a better future. He promised to end the climate wars and to commit to the pledges he has made during the election campaign.
Australian Greens leader Adam Bandt celebrated his party's historic three seat gains in Queensland, two from the Liberals and one from Labor. He called this a historic ""greenslide"" as he thanked a record number of people in Queensland who voted Greens for the first time in this election.
Two days after the election, Governor-General David Hurley swore in Albanese, deputy leader Richard Marles, Jim Chalmers, and Senators Penny Wong and Katy Gallagher as an interim five-person government. Although counting was still underway, the swearing in was expedited due to an upcoming meeting of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue. The five ministers divided all portfolios between them until the full ministry was sworn in. According to ABC News, Hurley would not have sworn in Albanese without assurances that Labor could provide stable government, as well as legal advice that this was the proper course of action.
At his first press conference after being sworn in, Albanese announced that he received assurances that crossbenchers Rebekha Sharkie, Bob Katter, Andrew Wilkie, Helen Haines, and Zali Steggall would provide supply and would not support a no-confidence motion against the government.
This was the 27th and the last federal election under the reign of Elizabeth II, who passed away just four months later, after 70 years of service as the longest serving Australian monarch."
2022 Australian federal election,"International reactions
Several world leaders issued statements congratulating Albanese on his victory."
2022 Australian federal election," Canada: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau released an official statement congratulating Albanese on his victory.
 China: Premier Li Keqiang sent a message congratulating Albanese on his election win, ending two years of diplomatic freeze on a ministerial level between the two countries. He stated that China is ready to work with the new government and it is in the interests of both countries to have ""sound and stable relations"".
 Fiji: Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama congratulated Albanese and ""welcomed"" his plan for the Pacific ""to put climate first"". Leader of the People's Alliance, Sitiveni Rabuka, also congratulated Albanese and thanked Morrison.
 France: At a May 21 press conference, the then-outgoing foreign affairs minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said: ""I can't stop myself from saying that the defeat of Morrison suits me very well."" He was referencing Australia's cancellation of a French–Australian submarine deal under the Morrison government. President Emmanuel Macron also hinted at the deal when he called Albanese on 26 May, both vowing to ""rebuild a bilateral relationship founded on trust and respect"".
 India: Prime Minister Narendra Modi sent his congratulations to Albanese, highlighting his commitment to the Australia–India Comprehensive Strategic Partnership.
 Indonesia: President Joko Widodo congratulated Albanese on Twitter, saying that he looked forward to working with him on strengthening Australia–Indonesia relations through the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership and in particular the Indonesia–Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement. Subsequently, Jokowi said he was honored to have received Albanese's visit, as Albanese later visited Indonesia for his first bilateral visit after being sworn as Australia's 31st Prime Minister. In addition, Albanese accepted Jokowi's invitation to attend the 2022 G20 Bali Summit held later in 2022.
 Japan: Prime Minister Fumio Kishida offered Albanese his spoken congratulations for assuming the post of prime minister, and thanked Albanese for flying over to Japan promptly after the election, to attend a Quad leaders summit also featuring the leaders of India and the United States.
 New Zealand: Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern congratulated Albanese, stating that she was looking forward ""to working with him on a range of issues including supporting New Zealanders living in Australia, making trans-Tasman business even easier, deepening our partnership with our close friends in the Pacific, and advancing our interests on the world stage.""
 Papua New Guinea: Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea James Marape congratulated Albanese's win. He also thanked Morrison for his support for Papua New Guinea.
 Singapore: Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong sent a letter to Albanese congratulating his election win, citing their shared longstanding ties and expressed his desire to work with him to continue advancing Australia–Singapore relations.
 United Kingdom: Prime Minister Boris Johnson congratulated Albanese on Twitter, saying that he looks forward to working with him on strengthening Australia–United Kingdom relations on trade and AUKUS partnership. The leader of the UK Labour Party and opposition leader, Keir Starmer, congratulated Albanese for ending ""almost a decade of stale conservative rule"".
 United States: President Joe Biden called Albanese on 22 May, congratulating him and reaffirming the US' commitment towards their bilateral relationship with Australia. Ahead of the Quad summit taking place two days later, Biden appreciated Albanese's commitment towards the security alliance and his decision to participate in the summit.
Albanese also received messages of congratulations from the leaders of Bangladesh, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Samoa, Saudi Arabia, the Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam."
2022 Australian federal election,"See also
2022 Liberal Party of Australia leadership election
2022 National Party of Australia leadership spill
Post-election pendulum for the 2022 Australian federal election
Albanese government
Albanese ministry"
2022 Australian federal election,"Notes
References
External links
 Media related to Australian federal election, 2022 at Wikimedia Commons
Photographs of the 2022 federal election, State Library of Queensland
2022 North Queensland Election Day photographs, State Library of Queensland
Federal election 2022 photographs at polling booths in the Brisbane and Lilley electoral divisions / [photographer Shehab Uddin], State Library of Queensland"
Indigenous Australian art,"Indigenous Australian art includes art made by Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders, including collaborations with others. It includes works in a wide range of media including painting on leaves, bark painting, wood carving, rock carving, watercolour painting, sculpting, ceremonial clothing and sandpainting; art by Indigenous Australians that pre-dates European colonisation by thousands of years, up to the present day.
Australian Aboriginal Art is the oldest, unbroken tradition of art making in the world."
Indigenous Australian art,"Traditional Indigenous art
There are several types of and methods used in making Aboriginal art, including rock painting, dot painting, rock engravings, bark painting, carvings, sculptures, weaving and string art. Australian Aboriginal art is the oldest unbroken tradition of art in the world."
Indigenous Australian art,"Stone art
Rock art, including painting and engraving or carving (petroglyphs), can be found at sites throughout Australia. Examples of rock art have been found that are believed to depict extinct megafauna such as Genyornis and Thylacoleo in the Pleistocene era as well as more recent historical events such as the arrival of European ships.
The oldest examples of rock art, in Western Australia's Pilbara region and the Olary district of South Australia, are estimated to be up to around 40,000 years old. The oldest firmly dated evidence of rock art painting in Australia is a charcoal drawing on a small rock fragment found during the excavation of the Narwala Gabarnmang rock shelter in south-western Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. Dated at 28,000 years, it is one of the oldest known pieces of rock art on Earth with a confirmed date. It is thought this decorated fragment may have once formed part of a larger ceiling artwork, however, the shape of the original motif is unknown. The oldest reliably dated unambiguous, in-situ rock art motif in Australia is a large painting of a macropod from a rock shelter in Western Australia's Kimberley region, radiometrically dated in a February 2021 study at approximately 17,300 years old.
Gwion Gwion rock art (the ""Bradshaw rock paintings"", also referred to as Giro Giro""), initially named after Joseph Bradshaw, who first reported them in 1891, consists of a series of rock paintings on caves in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. A 2020 study puts this art at about 12,000 years old.
The Maliwawa Figures were documented in a study led by Paul Taçon and published in Australian Archaeology in September 2020. The art includes 572 images across 87 sites in northwest Arnhem Land, from Awunbarna (Mount Borradaile) area across to the Wellington Range. They are estimated to have been drawn between 6,000 and 9,400 years ago. The find is described as very rare, not only in style, but in their depiction of bilbies (not known historically in Arnhem Land) and the first known depiction of a dugong. The art, all paintings in red to mulberry colour apart from one drawing, and in a naturalistic style, had not been described in the literature before this study. They are large, and depict relationships between people and animals, a rare theme in rock art. Bilbies, thylacines and dugong have been extinct in Arnhem land for millennia. The art was first seen by the 2008-2009 researchers, but were only studied in field research lasting from 2016 to 2018. The figures were named by Ronald Lamilami, a senior traditional owner. According to Tacon, ""The Maliwawa back-to-back figures are the oldest known for western Arnhem Land and it appears this painting convention began with the Maliwawa style. It continues to the present with bark paintings and paintings on paper"". Taçon draws comparisons between the Maliwawa Figures and George Chaloupka's Dynamic Figures style, where the subject matter consists of about 89 percent humans, compared with 42% of the Maliwawa Figures. There is, however, much complexity and debate regarding the classification of rock art style in Arnhem Land.
Other painted rock art sites include Laura, Queensland, Ubirr, in the Kakadu National Park, Uluru, and Carnarvon Gorge.
Rock engraving, or petroglyphs, are created by methods which vary depending on the type of rock being used and other factors. There are several different types of rock art across Australia, the most famous of which is Murujuga in Western Australia, the Sydney rock engravings around Sydney in New South Wales, and the Panaramitee rock art in Central Australia. The Toowoomba engravings, depicting carved animals and humans, have their own peculiar style not found elsewhere in Australia.
The rock engravings at Murujuga are said to be the world's largest collection of petroglyphs and includes images of extinct animals such as the thylacine. Activity prior to the last ice age until colonisation is recorded."
Indigenous Australian art,"The first European discovery of aboriginal rock paintings took place on 14 January 1803. During a surveying expedition along the shores and islands of the Gulf of Carpentaria, British navigator and explorer Matthew Flinders made landfall on Chasm Island.
Within the island's rock shelters, Flinders discovered an array of painted and stenciled patterns. To record these images, he enlisted the ship's artist, William Westall. Westall's two watercolour sketches are the earliest known documentation of Australian rock art."
Indigenous Australian art,"Stone arrangements
Aboriginal stone arrangements are a form of rock art constructed by Aboriginal Australians. Typically they consist of stones, each of which may be about 30 cm in size, laid out in a pattern extending over several metres or tens of metres. Each stone is well-embedded into the soil, and many have ""trigger-stones"" to support them. Particularly fine examples are in the state of Victoria, where some examples have very large stones. For example, the stone arrangement at Wurdi Youang consists of about 100 stones arranged in an egg-shaped oval about 50 metres (160 ft) across. The appearance of the site is similar to that of the megalithic stone circles found throughout Britain (although the function and culture are presumably completely different). Although its association with Aboriginal Australians is well-authenticated and beyond doubt, the purpose is unclear, although it may have a connection with initiation rites. It has also been suggested that the site may have been used for astronomical purposes. 
Smaller stone arrangements are found throughout Australia, such as those near Yirrkala, which depict accurate images of the praus used by Macassan Trepang fishermen and spear throwers."
Indigenous Australian art,"Wood carvings
Wood carving has always been an essential part of Aboriginal culture, requiring wood, sharp stone to carve, wire and fire. The wire and fire were used to create patterns on the object by heating the wire with the fire and placing it on the wood carving.
Wood carvings such as those by Central Australian artist Erlikilyika shaped like animals, were sometimes traded to Europeans for goods.
The reason Aboriginal people made wood carvings was to help tell their Dreaming stories and pass on their group's lore and essential information about their country and customs. They were also used in ceremonies, such as the ilma.
Aboriginal people from the Tiwi Islands traditionally carved pukumani grave posts, and since the 1960s have been carving and painting iron wood figures."
Indigenous Australian art,"Textiles
In most Pacific areas the men oversee the art and architecture; the women oversee the art in felted cloth they would make from tree bark and plants. The art in clothing is supervised by the head woman in charge of the production. These detailed clothes were worn for rituals; each represented wealth and rank in the group. The sacred clothing is also used in trade goods and social and political relationships. Wearing the textile then removing it and giving it to another person helped to bond or reinforce friendship or alliances."
Indigenous Australian art,"Baskets and weaving
Baskets, sometimes coiled baskets, were created by twisting bark, palm-leaf, and feathers; some of the baskets were plain and some were created with feather pendants or feathers woven in the frame of the basket. The artists used mineral and plant dyes to colour the palm-leaves and bark of the hibiscus. These string bags and baskets were used in ceremonies for religious and ritual needs; the baskets might have been also used for carry things back to the village.
Basket weaving has been traditionally practised by the women of many Aboriginal Australian peoples across the continent for centuries."
Indigenous Australian art,"Jewellery
Aboriginal people created shell pendants which were considered high value and often used for trading goods. These shells were attached to string, which was handmade from human hair and sometimes covered with a type of grease and red ochre. This jewellery would sometimes be hung around a man's neck or waist for use during ceremonies."
Indigenous Australian art,"Kalti paarti
Kalti paarti carving is a traditional art form made by carving emu eggs. It is not as old as some other techniques, having originated in the nineteenth century."
Indigenous Australian art,"Symbols
Certain symbols within the Aboriginal modern art movement retain the same meaning across regions although the meaning of the symbols may change within the context of a painting. When viewed in monochrome other symbols can look similar, such as the circles within circles, sometimes depicted on their own, sparsely, or in clustered groups. Depending upon the group of which the artist is a member, symbols such as campfire, tree, hill, digging hole, waterhole, or spring can vary in meaning. Use of the symbol can be clarified further by the use of colour, such as water being depicted in blue or black.
Many paintings by Aboriginal artists, such as those that represent a Dreaming story, are shown from an aerial perspective. The narrative follows the lie of the land, as created by ancestral beings in their journey or during creation. The modern day rendition is a reinterpretation of songs, ceremonies, rock art, body art and ceremonies (such as awelye) that was the norm for many thousands of years.
Whatever the meaning, interpretations of the symbols should be made in context of the entire painting, the region from which the artist originates, the story behind the painting, and the style of the painting."
Indigenous Australian art,"Religious and cultural aspects of Aboriginal art
Some natural sites were sacred to them, and were also the location where seasonal rituals were performed. During these rituals the Aboriginal people created art such as feather and fibre objects, they painted and created rock engravings, and also painted on bark of  the Eucalyptus tetrodonta trees. While stories differed among the clans, language groups, and wider groups, the Dreaming (or Jukurrpa) is common to all Aboriginal peoples. As part of these beliefs, during ancient times mythic Aboriginal ancestor spirits were the creators of the land and sky, and eventually became a part of it. The Aboriginal peoples' spiritual beliefs underpin their laws, art forms, and ceremonies. Traditional Aboriginal art almost always has a mythological undertone relating to the Dreaming.
Wenten Rubuntja, an Indigenous landscape artist, says it is hard to find any art that is devoid of spiritual meaning:"
Indigenous Australian art,"Doesn't matter what sort of painting we do in this country, it still belongs to the people, all the people. This is worship, work, culture. It's all Dreaming. There are two ways of painting. Both ways are important, because that's culture. – source The Weekend Australian Magazine, April 2002
Story-telling and totem representation feature prominently in all forms of Aboriginal artwork. Additionally, the female form, particularly the female womb in X-ray style, features prominently in some famous sites in Arnhem Land. X-ray styles date back all the way to 2000–1000 BCE. It is an Indigenous technique where the artist creates conceptualised X-ray, transparent , images. The mimi, spirits who taught the art of painting to the Aboriginal people, and ancestors are ""released"" through these types of artwork."
Indigenous Australian art,"Graffiti and other destructive influences
Many culturally significant sites of Aboriginal rock paintings have been gradually desecrated and destroyed by encroachment of early settlers and modern-day visitors. This includes the destruction of art by clearing and construction work, erosion caused by excessive touching of sites, and graffiti. Many sites now belonging to National Parks have to be strictly monitored by rangers, or closed off to the public permanently."
Indigenous Australian art,"Torres Strait Islander art
Mythology and culture, deeply influenced by the ocean and the natural life around the islands, have always informed traditional artforms. Featured strongly are turtles, fish, dugongs, sharks, seabirds and saltwater crocodiles, which are considered totemic beings.
Elaborate headdresses or dhari (also spelt dari), as featured on the Torres Strait Islander flag, are created for the purposes of ceremonial dances. The dari was historically worn by Torres Strait warriors in battle. It is seen as a powerful symbol of the Torres Strait Islander people, today representing peace and harmony. World-renowned artist Ken Thaiday Snr has created elaborate dharis using modern materials in his contemporary artwork.
Torres Strait Islander people are the only culture in the world to make turtleshell masks, known as krar (turtleshell) in the Western Islands and le-op (human face) in the Eastern Islands.
Prominent among the artforms is wame (alt. wameya), many different string figures.
The Islands have a long tradition of woodcarving, creating masks and drums, and carving decorative features on these and other items for ceremonial use. From the 1970s, young artists were beginning their studies at around the same time that a significant re-connection to traditional myths and legends was happening. Margaret Lawrie's publications, Myths and Legends of the Torres Strait (1970) and Tales from the Torres Strait (1972), reviving stories which had all but been forgotten, influenced the artists greatly. While some of these stories had been written down by Haddon after his 1898 expedition to the Torres Strait, many had subsequently fallen out of use or been forgotten.
In the 1990s a group of younger artists, including the award-winning Dennis Nona (b. 1973), started translating these skills into the more portable forms of printmaking, linocut and etching, as well as larger scale bronze sculptures. Other outstanding artists include Billy Missi (1970–2012), known for his decorated black and white linocuts of the local vegetation and eco-systems, and Alick Tipoti (b.1975). These and other Torres Strait artists have greatly expanded the forms of Indigenous art within Australia, bringing superb Melanesian carving skills as well as new stories and subject matter. The College of Technical and Further Education on Thursday Island was a starting point for young Islanders to pursue studies in art. Many went on to further art studies, especially in printmaking, initially in Cairns, Queensland and later at the Australian National University in what is now the School of Art and Design. Other artists such as Laurie Nona, Brian Robinson, David Bosun, Glen Mackie, Joemen Nona, Daniel O'Shane and Tommy Pau are known for their printmaking work.
An exhibition of Alick Tipoti's work, titled Zugubal, was mounted at the Cairns Regional Gallery in July 2015."
Indigenous Australian art,"Contemporary Indigenous art
Modern Aboriginal artists
In 1934 Australian painter Rex Battarbee taught Aboriginal artist Albert Namatjira western style watercolour landscape painting, along with other Aboriginal artists at the Hermannsburg mission in the Northern Territory. It became a popular style, known as the Hermannsburg School, and sold out when the paintings were exhibited in Melbourne, Adelaide and other Australian cities. Namatjira became the first Aboriginal Australian citizen, as a result of his fame and popularity with these watercolour paintings.
In 1966, one of David Malangi's designs was produced on the Australian one dollar note, originally without his knowledge. The subsequent payment to him by the Reserve Bank marked the first case of Aboriginal copyright in Australian copyright law.
In 1988 the Aboriginal Memorial was unveiled at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra made from 200 hollow log coffins, which are similar to the type used for mortuary ceremonies in Arnhem Land. It was made for the bicentenary of Australia's colonisation, and is in remembrance of Aboriginal people who had died protecting their land during conflict with settlers. It was created by 43 artists from Ramingining and communities nearby. The path running through the middle of it represents the Glyde River.
In that same year, the new Parliament House in Canberra opened with a forecourt featuring a design by Michael Nelson Jagamarra, laid as a mosaic.
The late Rover Thomas is another well known modern Australian Aboriginal artist. Born in Western Australia, he represented Australia in the Venice Biennale of 1990. He knew and encouraged other now well-known artists to paint, including Queenie McKenzie from the East Kimberley / Warmun region, as well as having a strong influence on the works of Paddy Bedford and Freddy Timms.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s the work of Emily Kngwarreye, from the Utopia community north east of Alice Springs, became very popular. Although she had been involved in craftwork for most of her life, it was only when she was in her 80s that she was recognised as a painter. Her works include Earth's Creation. Her styles, which changed every year, have been seen as a mixture of traditional Aboriginal and contemporary Australian. Her rise in popularity has prefigured that of many Indigenous artists from central, northern and western Australia, such as Kngwarreye's niece Kathleen Petyarre, Angelina Pwerle, Minnie Pwerle, Dorothy Napangardi, Lena Pwerle, and dozens of others, all of whose works have become highly sought-after. The popularity of these often elderly artists, and the resulting pressure placed upon them and their health, has become such an issue that some art centres have stopped selling these artists' paintings online, instead placing prospective clients on a waiting list for work.
Current artists in vogue include Jacinta Hayes, popular for her iconic representation of ""Bush Medicine Leaves"" and ""Honey Ants"", Rex Sultan (who studied with Albert Namatjira), Trephina Sultan and Reggie Sultan, Bessie Pitjara and Joyce Nakamara, amongst others.
Despite concerns about supply and demand for paintings, the remoteness of many of the artists, and the poverty and health issues experienced in the communities, there are widespread estimates of an industry worth close to half a billion Australian dollars each year, and growing rapidly."
Indigenous Australian art,"Papunya Tula and dot painting
In 1971–1972, art teacher Geoffrey Bardon encouraged Aboriginal people in Papunya, north west of Alice Springs to put their Dreamings onto canvas. These stories had previously been drawn on the desert sand, and were now given a more permanent form.
The dots were used to cover secret-sacred ceremonies. Originally, the Tula artists succeeded in forming their own company with an Aboriginal Name, Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd, however a time of disillusionment followed as artists were criticised by their peers for having revealed too much of their sacred heritage. Secret designs restricted to a ritual context were now in the market place, made visible to Australian Aboriginal painting. Much of the Aboriginal art on display in tourist shops traces back to this style developed at Papunya. The most famous of the artists to come from this movement was Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri. Also from this movement is Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, whose Water Dreaming at Kalipinya twice sold at a record price, the second time being $486,500 in 2000.
The Papunya Collection at the National Museum of Australia contains over 200 artifacts and paintings, including examples of 1970s dot paintings."
Indigenous Australian art,"Issues
There have been cases of some exploitative dealers (known as carpetbaggers) that have sought to profit from the success of the Aboriginal art movements. Since Geoffrey Bardon's time and in the early years of the Papunya movement, there have been concerns about the exploitation of the largely illiterate and non-English speaking artists.
One of the main reasons the Yuendumu movement was established, and later flourished, was due to the feeling of exploitation amongst artists:"
Indigenous Australian art,"Many of the artists who played crucial roles in the founding of the art centre were aware of the increasing interest in Aboriginal art during the 1970s and had watched with concern and curiosity the developments of the art movement at Papunya amongst people to whom they were closely related. There was also a growing private market for Aboriginal art in Alice Springs. Artists' experiences of the private market were marked by feelings of frustration and a sense of disempowerment when buyers refused to pay prices which reflected the value of the Jukurrpa or showed little interest in understanding the story. The establishment of Warlukurlangu was one way of ensuring the artists had some control over the purchase and distribution of their paintings.
Other cases of exploitation include:"
Indigenous Australian art,"painting for a lemon (car): ""Artists have come to me and pulled out photos of cars with mobile phone numbers on the back. They're asked to paint 10-15 canvasses in exchange for a car. When the 'Toyotas' materialise, they often arrive with a flat tyre, no spares, no jack, no fuel.""
preying on a sick artist: ""Even coming to town for medical treatment, such as dialysis, can make an artist easy prey for dealers wanting to make a quick profit who congregate in Alice Springs""
pursuing a famous artist: ""The late (great) Emily Kngwarreye...was relentlessly pursued by carpetbaggers towards the end of her career and produced a large but inconsistent body of work."" According to Sotheby's ""We take about one in every 20 paintings of hers, and with those we look for provenance we can be 100% sure of.""
In March 2006, the ABC reported art fraud had hit the Western Australian Aboriginal Art movements. Allegations were made of sweatshop-like conditions, fake works by English backpackers, overpricing and artists posing for photographs for artwork that was not theirs. A detective on the case said:"
Indigenous Australian art,"People are clearly taking advantage...Especially the elderly people. I mean, these are people that, they're not educated; they haven't had a lot of contact with white people. They've got no real basic understanding, you know, of the law and even business law. Obviously they've got no real business sense. A dollar doesn't really have much of a meaning to them, and I think to treat anybody like that is just... it's just not on in this country.
In August 2006, following concerns raised about unethical practices in the Indigenous art sector, the Australian Senate initiated an inquiry into issues in the sector. It heard from the Northern Territory Art Minister, Marion Scrymgour, that backpackers were often the artists of Aboriginal art being sold in tourist shops around Australia: The material they call Aboriginal art is almost exclusively the work of fakers, forgers and fraudsters. Their work hides behind false descriptions and dubious designs. The overwhelming majority of the ones you see in shops throughout the country, not to mention Darling, are fakes, pure and simple. There is some anecdotal evidence here in Darwin at least, they have been painted by backpackers working on industrial scale wood production.
The inquiry's final report made recommendations for changed funding and governance of the sector, including a code of practice."
Indigenous Australian art,"Aboriginal art movements and cooperatives
Australian Indigenous art movements and cooperatives have been central to the emergence of Indigenous Australian art. Whereas many western artists pursue formal training and work as individuals, most contemporary Indigenous art is created in community groups and art centres.
Many of the centres operate online art galleries where local and international visitors can purchase works directly from the communities without the need of going through an intermediary. The cooperatives reflect the diversity of art across Indigenous Australia from the north west region where ochre is significantly used; to the tropical north where the use of cross-hatching prevails; to the Papunya style of art from the central desert cooperatives. Art is increasingly becoming a significant source of income and livelihood for some of these communities."
Indigenous Australian art,"Awards
The winners of the West Australian Indigenous Arts Awards were announced on 22 August 2013. From over 137 nominations from throughout Australia, Churchill Cann won the Best West Australian Piece (A$10,000) and North Queensland artist Brian Robinson won the Best Overall prize (A$50,000)."
Indigenous Australian art,"Traditional cultural expressions
Traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions are both types of indigenous knowledge, according to the definitions and terminology used in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and by the World Intellectual Property Organization's (WIPO) Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore. ""Traditional cultural expressions"" is used by WIPO to refer to ""any form of artistic and literary expression in which traditional culture and knowledge are embodied. They are transmitted from one generation to the next, and include handmade textiles, paintings, stories, legends, ceremonies, music, songs, rhythms and dance"".
Leading international authority on Indigenous cultural and intellectual property, Australian lawyer Terri Janke, says that within Australian Indigenous communities, ""the use of the word 'traditional' tends not to be preferred as it implies that Indigenous culture is locked in time""."
Indigenous Australian art,"Aboriginal art in international museums
Australian Indigenous art has been much studied in recent years and has gained much international recognition.
The Museum for Australian Aboriginal art ""La grange"" (at Neuchâtel, Switzerland) is one of the few museums in Europe that dedicates itself entirely to this kind of art. During seasonal exhibitions, works of art by internationally renowned artists are being shown. Also, the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, has an ""Oceania"" collection, which includes works by Australian Aboriginal artists Lena Nyadbi, Paddy Nyunkuny Bedford, Judy Watson, Gulumbu Yunupingu, John Mawurndjul, Tommy Watson, Ningura Napurrula and Michael Riley.
Two museums that solely exhibit Australian Aboriginal art are the AAMU Museum voor hedendaagse Aboriginal kunst (Museum of Contemporary Aboriginal Art, closed in 2017) in Utrecht, Netherlands, and the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia."
Indigenous Australian art,"See also
Australian art
Australian Aboriginal fibre sculpture
Dampier Rock Art Precinct
List of Indigenous Australian art movements and cooperatives
List of Indigenous Australian visual artists
List of Stone Age art
Memorial pole
National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award
National Indigenous Heritage Art Award
Panaramitee Style"
Indigenous Australian art,"References
Sources"
Indigenous Australian art,"Kampen-O'Riley, Michael (2006). Art Beyond the West. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. ISBN 978-0131751521.
Thomas, Martin; Neale, Margo, eds. (2011). Exploring the Legacy of the 1948 Arnhem Land Expedition. Canberra: ANU E Press. ISBN 9781921666452."
Indigenous Australian art,"Further reading
Bardon, G. (1979) Aboriginal Art of the Western Desert, Adelaide: Rigby
Bardon, G. (1991) Papunya Tula: Art of the Western Desert, Ringwood VIC: McPhee Gribble (Penguin)
Bardon, G. (2005) Papunya, A Place Made After the Story: The Beginnings of the Western Desert Painting Movement, University of Melbourne: Miegunyah Press
Den Boer, E. (2012). Spirit Conception: Dreams in Aboriginal Australia [PDF]. American Psychological Association
Donaldson, Mike, Burrup Rock Art: Ancient Aboriginal Rock Art of Burrup Peninsula and Dampier Archipelago, Fremantle Arts Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-9805890-1-6
Flood, J. (1997)  Rock Art of the Dreamtime:Images of Ancient Australia, Sydney: Angus & Robertson
Johnson, V. (ed) (2007) Papunya painting: out of the desert, Canberra: National Museum of Australia
Kleinert, S. & Neale, M. (eds.) (2000) The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture, Melbourne: Oxford University Press
McCulloch, S. (1999) Contemporary Aboriginal Art: A guide to the rebirth of an ancient culture, St Leonards (Sydney): Allen & Unwin
McIvor, Roy (2010). Cockatoo: My Life in Cape York. Stories and Art. Roy McIvor. Magabala Books. Broome, Western Australia. ISBN 978-1-921248-22-1
Morphy, H. (1991) Ancestral Connections, London: University of Chicago Press
Morphy, H. (1998) Aboriginal Art, London: Phaidon Press
Myers, F. R. (2002) Painting Culture: The making of an Aboriginal High Art, Durham: Duke University Press
Rothwell, N. (2007) Another Country, Melbourne: Black Inc.
Ryan, M. D. and Keane, M. and Cunningham, S. (2008) Indigenous Art: Local Dreamings, Global Consumption, in Anheier, Helmut and Raj Isar, Yudhishthir, eds. Cultures and Globalization: The Cultural Economy, London: Sage Publications, pp. 284–291
Senate Standing Committee on the Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (2007), Indigenous Art: Securing the Future – Australia's Indigenous visual arts and craft sector, Canberra: The Senate
Wright, F. (with Morphy, F. and Desart Inc.) (1999–2000) The Art and Craft Centre Story (3 vols), Woden: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission"
Indigenous Australian art,External links
Indigenous Australian art,"National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award: History
Culture Victoria – images and videos related to traditional art and artefacts
Australian Art Collector magazine's Guide to Indigenous Art Centres
""Country, memory and art: Understanding Indigenous art"", Howard Morphy, John Carty and Dr Michael Pickering Archived 6 March 2014 at the Wayback Machine, National Museum of Australia, audio on demand, 8 December 2010
Papunya Painting: Out of the Desert, National Museum of Australia online exhibition Archived 25 May 2012 at the Wayback Machine
Aboriginal Art Museum of Utrecht
Aboriginal Art Symbols and Symbolism"
Forests of Australia,"Australia has many forests of importance due to significant features, despite being one of the driest continents. As of 2009, Australia has approximately 147 million hectares of native forest, which represents about 19% of Australia's land area. The majority of Australia's trees are hardwoods, typically eucalypts, rather than softwoods like pine. While softwoods dominate some native forests, their total area is judged insufficient to constitute a major forest type in Australia's National Forest Inventory. The Forests Australia website provides up-to-date information on Australia's forests. Detailed information on Australia's forests is available from Australia's State of the Forests Reports that are published every five years."
Forests of Australia,"Forest types
There are 458 forest communities distributed across Australia. These have been grouped into the following seven native forest types, which are characterised by dominant species and the structure of the forest:"
Forests of Australia,"Rainforests
Melaleuca forests
Eucalypt forests
Casuarina forests
Callitris forests
Acacia forests
Mangrove forests
Plantation forests (softwood and hardwood) have been defined as an eighth group that covers trees planted for commercial use."
Forests of Australia,"Government
Policies
In Australia the states and territories are responsible for managing forests.  Guidance is primarily provided by the 1992 National Forest Policy Statement (NFPS). The NFPS allows for the inclusion of Regional Forest Agreements, which are 20-year plans for the management of native forests."
Forests of Australia,"Departments
Department of Primary Industry and Fisheries in the Northern Territory
Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry
Department of Primary Industries and its child agency Forests NSW
South Australian Forestry Corporation (trading as Forestry SA)
Forestry Tasmania
Department of Environment and Primary Industries
Department of Environment and Conservation"
Forests of Australia,"List of significant forests
Bushfires
Over the years, bushfires have destroyed a lot of trees and this in turn destroyed the habitat of many animals; most notably koalas numbers have decreased nearly 30% across Australia since 2018."
Forests of Australia,"Gallery
See also
Deforestation in Australia
Fauna of Australia
Flora of Australia
List of old-growth forests in Australia
National Reserve System
Protected areas of Australia
Forestry in Tasmania
Woodchipping in Australia"
Forests of Australia,"
== References =="
Architecture of Australia,"Architecture of Australia has generally been consistent with architectural trends in the wider Western world, with some special adaptations to compensate for distinctive Australian climatic and cultural factors. Indigenous Australians produced a wide range of structures and places prior to colonisation. Contemporary Indigenous practitioners are active in a broad range of built environment fields. During Australia's early Western history, it was a collection of British colonies in which architectural styles were strongly influenced by British designs. However, the unique climate of Australia necessitated adaptations, and 20th-century trends reflected the increasing influence of American urban designs and a diversification of the cultural tastes and requirements of an increasingly multicultural Australian society.
Iconic Australian designs include the UNESCO listed Sydney Opera House, Melbourne Royal Exhibition Building, Brisbane City Hall and the 11 remnant penal colony sites selected for World Heritage protection in 2010.
Towards the Federation of Australia there was a concerted movements to create a distinctively Australian styles along with the Australian nationalism movement, some of which incorporated decorative Australiana. While these attempts were largely unsuccessful due in part to cultural cringe, distinctively Australian styles of architecture had already evolved organically. Notable Australian architectural adaptations include the Queenslander and Federation styles of residential architecture."
Architecture of Australia,"History
In the period before European settlement of Australia, there were diverse forms of Indigenous architecture across Australia. The rich architecture traditions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples generally went unrecognised, and when it was recognised generally downplayed by the European Settlers. However, many early colonists and explorers including  Sir Thomas Mitchell and Charles Sturt recorded many Indigenous building styles including stone houses and houses grouped in villages. As a British colony, the first European buildings were derivative of the European fashions of the time.  As most of the colonialists where from England the first buildings reflected English ideas.
Georgian architecture is seen in early government buildings and the homes of the wealthy. The architect Francis Greenway, who appears on the Australian ten-dollar note designed early buildings in the Georgian style.  Examples include the Hyde Park Barracks, St James' Church and St Matthews Church at Windsor.
Another European style to gain favour in 19th century Australia, particularly in churches, was Gothic Revival architecture. Pointed arches, turrets, battlements and gothic ornaments could also be found on bank, insurance offices, university buildings and homes. One of the best examples of this style can be seen at the lower end of Collins Street in Melbourne."
Architecture of Australia,"With the Australian gold rushes of the mid-19th-century major buildings, largely in Melbourne and Sydney and to a lesser extent in regional capitals such as Ballarat and Bendigo were built in the style of Victorian architecture. From about 1850 to 1893 Italianate architecture was also popular as it allowed greater displays of prosperity through rich and ornate decorate features such as cast iron lace work and slate roofs.  Towards the end of the century the style was pushed to an extreme by some architects.  Buildings became over-burdened with excess columns, balustrades, exaggerated entrances and other lavish decorations.  Medley Hall in Carlton is an example of this style which became known as the Boom Style from 1880 to 1893.
One of the most significant architectural movements in Australian architecture was the Federation architecture style of the turn of the 20th century, where Australia began to play with the idea of a ""style of our own"", and the modern styles of the late 20th century which sought to reject historicism.
Walter Burley Griffin was an American architect and landscape architect who, with fellow architect Marion Mahony Griffin, played a key role in designing Canberra, Australia's capital city. A legacy of their unique architecture remains in a small number of Melbourne buildings and the Sydney suburb of Castlecrag. Castlecrag was planned by the Griffins and also features a number of houses designed in the organic Modernist style they developed after the Prairie School architecture that marked his earlier career in the United States.  The simple, flat-roofed cottages that the Griffins designed in Canberra used their innovative, patented techniques for concrete construction.
One of the most important local introduction to Australian architecture was the verandah.  As pastoralists took up land and built solid, single story dwellings the addition of verandahs proved popular as they provided shade and looked attractive.  They were often integrated into the symmetry of Georgian style homes.
Like elsewhere in the world, socio-political factors have played their roles in shaping Australian architecture. During the early 20th century, cities across Australia had placed building height limits, typically 150 feet (45 m), thus hampering the development of American-style skyscrapers until the limits were lifted in the late 1950s. Likewise the popular notion of the ""Australian Dream"", in which families seek to own their free-standing houses with backyards, meant that high-density housings were rare in Australia until the end of the 20th century. The design of housing in Australia after World War II, which was mostly undertaken by builders, has been described as poor aesthetically and environmentally.
Significant concern was raised during the 1960s, with green bans and heritage concerns responding to the destruction of earlier buildings and the skyscraper boom, particularly in Sydney and Melbourne, but affecting other major cities including Adelaide, Perth and Brisbane. Green bans helped to protect historic 18th-century buildings in The Rocks from being demolished to make way for office towers, and prevented the Royal Botanic Gardens from being turned into a carpark for the Sydney Opera House.  In Melbourne a battle was fought to preserve historic Carlton, Victoria from slum reclamation for public housing, while gentrification played a big part in the suburb's salvation. In Melbourne's city centre, the destruction was particularly profound: Whelan the Wrecker was a family owned and operated demolition company that operated from 1892 until 1992, which became well known through the 1950s, 70s and 80s when signs stating that ""Whelan the Wrecker is Here"" appeared on many of the grand Victorian era buildings of Marvellous Melbourne. One of the most lamented losses in Melbourne was the Federal Coffee Palace on Collins Street and the APA Building (inspired by Chicago's early skyscrapers) at 49 Elizabeth Street. Many of the destruction occurred after the International Modernism style arrived in Australia, making Australians particularly conscious about Victorian architecture they felt was ""dated"".
In the 21st century, many Australian architects have taken a more avant-garde approach to design, and many buildings have emerged that are truly unique and reflective of Australia's culture and values.  As a result, many Australian practices are beginning to expand their influence overseas rather than the reverse which was often the case. Melbourne is seen as the city at the forefront of design ideas.  Sydney is focusing on the humanist approach tending towards minimalism and architecture in Queensland is interested in outdoor rooms and the filtering of light. Furthermore, greater appreciation for Australia's historic architecture has led to increased heritage protection for many buildings in Australia's cities, though not all buildings are protected, and some allow for façadism if the interior is unsustainable or unsafe."
Architecture of Australia,"Australian architectural styles
Architectural styles have been basically exotic and derivative. Only recently have climate and environment played a major role.
During the 19th century, Australian architects were inspired by developments in England. From the 1930s on, North American and International influences started to appear.
Buildings were often heavily influenced by the origins of their patrons, hence while the British would like to be reminded of their Gothic churches and Tudoresque cottages of a perfect England, the Dutch, German, Polish, Greek, Italian and other nationalities would also attempt to recreate the architecture of their homelands."
Architecture of Australia,"Gallery
Victorian
Post-modernism
Residential
Australian architects
Significant architects include:"
Architecture of Australia,"Robin Boyd
John James Clark
Francis Greenway
Roy Grounds
Neville Gruzman
Harry Howard
Bryce Mortlock
Glenn Murcutt
John Horbury Hunt
Nonda Katsalidis
Joseph Reed
Harry Seidler
Walter Liberty Vernon
Mortimer Lewis
George McRae
Howard Joseland
James Barnet
Lily Isabel Maude Addison
Edmund Blacket
Beverley Ussher
Muir and Shepherd
Ruth Alsop
Brit Andresen
Beverley Bolin
Eva Buhrich
Stroma Buttrose
Kerry and Lindsay Clare
Louise Cox
Eleanor Cullis-Hill
Suzanne Dance
Maggie Edmond
Rosina Edmunds
Zahava Elenberg
Cassandra Fahey
Margaret Feilman
Margaret Findlay
Abbie Galvin
Jill Garner
Eli Giannini
Eileen Good
Kristin Green
Marion Mahony Griffin
Winsome Hall Andrew
Laura Harding
Ellison Harvie
Beatrice Hutton
Louise St John Kennedy
Helen Lochhead
Bill and Ruth Lucas
Kirsteen Mackay
Nellie McCredie
Margaret Pitt Morison
Elina Mottram
Phyllis Murphy
Andrea Nield
Ellice Nosworthy
Alexis Ord
Shelley Penn
Christine Phillips
Susan Phillips
Caroline Pidcock
Dimity Reed
Penelope Seidler
Mary Turner Shaw
Muriel Stott
Florence Mary Taylor
Jennifer Taylor
Cynthia Teague
Kerstin Thompson (
Yvonne von Hartel
Emma Young
Significant firms include:"
Architecture of Australia,"Ashton Raggatt McDougall
Bates Smart
Lyons (architecture firm)
Searle x Waldron
Kennedy Nolan"
Architecture of Australia,"Notable structures
There are many notable structures, of particular importance are:"
Architecture of Australia,"the Sydney Opera House, original design being by Jørn Utzon (UNESCO World Heritage)
the Brisbane City Hall
the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne (UNESCO World Heritage)
Federation Square, Melbourne
Parliament House, Canberra
Sydney Harbour Bridge"
Architecture of Australia,"See also
Urban planning in Australia"
Architecture of Australia,"References
External links
Australian Institute of Architects (AIA)
Australian Architects under World Architects www.world-architects.com
ArchitectureAU - online repository of Architecture Australia, the magazine of the Australian Institute of Architects
Australian Design Review
Gallery of Australian Architecture
Gallery of Federation Architecture
Gallery of Sydney Architecture
Australian Architects
Frank and Eunice Corley House Photographs ca. 1970, State Library of Queensland. Large collection of black and white photographs of houses in Queensland."
Australian and New Zealand Army Corps,"The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) was originally a First World War army corps of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. It was formed in Egypt in December 1914, and operated during the Gallipoli campaign. General William Birdwood commanded the corps, which primarily consisted of troops from the First Australian Imperial Force and 1st New Zealand Expeditionary Force, although there were also British and Indian units attached at times throughout the campaign. The corps disbanded in 1916, following the Allied evacuation of the Gallipoli peninsula and the formation of I ANZAC Corps and II ANZAC Corps. The corps was re-established, briefly, in the Second World War during the Battle of Greece in 1941. The term 'ANZAC' has been used since for joint Australian–New Zealand units of different sizes."
Australian and New Zealand Army Corps,"History
Original formation
Plans for the formation began in November 1914 while the first contingent of Australian and New Zealand troops were still in convoy bound for, as they thought, Europe. However, following the experiences of the Canadian Expeditionary Force encamped on Salisbury Plain, where there was a shortage of accommodation and equipment, it was decided not to subject the Australians and New Zealanders to the English winter, and so they were diverted to Egypt for training before moving on to the Western Front in France. The British Secretary of State for War, Horatio Kitchener, appointed General William Birdwood, an officer of the British Indian Army, to the command of the corps and he furnished most of the corps staff from the Indian Army as well. Birdwood arrived in Cairo on 21 December 1914 to assume command of the corps.
It was originally intended to name the corps the Australasian Army Corps, this title being used in the unit diary in line with the common practice of the time which often saw New Zealanders and Australians compete together as Australasia in sporting events. However, complaints from New Zealand recruits led to adoption of the name Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. The administration clerks found the title too cumbersome so quickly adopted the abbreviation A. & N.Z.A.C. or simply ANZAC. Shortly afterwards it was officially adopted as the codename for the corps, but it did not enter common usage amongst the troops until after the Gallipoli landings.
At the outset, the corps comprised two divisions; the Australian Division, composed of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Australian Infantry Brigades and the New Zealand and Australian Division, composed of the New Zealand Infantry Brigade, New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade, Australian 1st Light Horse Brigade and 4th Australian Infantry Brigade. The 2nd and 3rd Australian Light Horse Brigades were assigned as corps level troops, belonging to neither division.
Despite being synonymous with Australia and New Zealand, ANZAC was a multi-national body: in addition to the many British officers in the corps and division staffs, the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps contained, at various points, the 7th Brigade of the Indian Mountain Artillery, Ceylon Planters Rifle Corps troops, the Zion Mule Corps, several battalions from the Royal Naval Division, the British 13th (Western) Division, one brigade of the British 10th (Irish) Division and the 29th Indian Brigade."
Australian and New Zealand Army Corps,"Later formations
World War I
Following the evacuation of the Gallipoli peninsula, in December 1915, the Australian and New Zealand units reassembled in Egypt. The New Zealand contingent expanded to form their own division; the New Zealand Division. The First Australian Imperial Force underwent a major reorganisation resulting in the formation of two new divisions; the 4th and 5th divisions. (The Australian 3rd Division was forming in Australia and would be sent directly to England and then to France.) These divisions were reformed into two corps: I ANZAC Corps and II ANZAC Corps. I ANZAC Corps, under the command of General Birdwood, departed for France in early 1916. II ANZAC Corps, commanded by Lieutenant General Alexander Godley, followed soon after.
In January 1916, the 4th (ANZAC) Battalion, Imperial Camel Corps, was formed with Australian and New Zealand troops. The 1st and 3rd Battalions were Australian, while the 2nd Battalion was British. Then in March 1916, the ANZAC Mounted Division with three Australian and one New Zealand brigade, was formed for service in Egypt and Palestine. The division's name was abbreviated to the A. & N. Z. Mounted Division, to the ANZAC Mounted Division, and to the Anzac Mounted Division by the Australian, and the New Zealand official history. Also serving alongside the ANZAC Mounted Division in the Egyptian Expeditionary Force was the ANZAC Provost Police Corps, the 1st (ANZAC), 3rd (ANZAC), and 4th (ANZAC) Battalions, Imperial Camel Corps Brigade. There was also the 1st (ANZAC) Wireless Signal Squadron, which served with the British expeditionary force in Mesopotamia in 1916–1917. The acronym was not inclusive. One formation that had troops assigned from both Australia and New Zealand, during the war, and did not use it was the 5th Light Horse Brigade.
In early 1916, the Australian and, to a lesser extent, New Zealand governments sought the creation of an Australian and New Zealand Army, which would have included the New Zealand Division and all of the Australian infantry divisions, but this did not occur."
Australian and New Zealand Army Corps,"World War II
During World War II, the Australian I Corps HQ moved to Greece in March 1941 (Operation Lustre). As the corps also controlled the New Zealand 2nd Division (along with Greek and British formations), it was officially renamed ANZAC Corps on 12 April. The Battle of Greece was over in weeks and the corps HQ evacuated mainland Greece on 23–24 April, with the name ANZAC Corps no longer being used.
Some troops evacuated to Alexandria, but the majority were sent to the Greek island of Crete to reinforce its garrison against an expected German invasion from air and sea. Australians and New Zealanders were respectively deployed around the cities of Rethymno and Chania in western Crete with a smaller Australian force being positioned in Heraklion. The invasion began the morning of 20 May and, after the fierce Battle of Crete, which lasted ten days, Crete fell to the Germans. Most of the defenders of Chania withdrew across the island to the south coast and were evacuated by the Royal Navy from Sfakia. Many others evaded capture for several months, hiding in the mountains with generous assistance from the local Cretan population. Others who were captured and transported to Axis POW camps in mainland Europe were able to escape en route via Yugoslavia. Those who escaped found refuge with Chetniks and Yugoslav Partisans until they were either repatriated or recaptured by Axis forces."
Australian and New Zealand Army Corps,"Other conflicts
During the Vietnam War, two companies from the Royal New Zealand Infantry Regiment were integrated into Royal Australian Regiment battalions. These integrated battalions had the suffix (ANZAC) added to their name (for example, 4 RAR became the 4RAR/NZ (ANZAC) Battalion). An ANZAC battalion served as one of the infantry battalions of the 1st Australian Task Force (1 ATF) from early March 1968 until its withdrawal in December 1971. Due to the rotation of forces, there were a total of five combined battalions of this period.
The ANZAC Battle Group was the official designation of Australian and New Zealand units deployed to Timor Leste as part of Operation Astute. The battle group was established in September 2006."
Australian and New Zealand Army Corps,"ANZAC as an acronym
As well as referring to specific units, the term ANZAC also came to refer to soldiers themselves: originally those who participated in the Gallipoli landings, then all Australians and New Zealand soldiers in WWI and now more broadly to all Australian and New Zealander defence personnel. This use is reflected in ANZAC Day, which commemorates both the Gallipoli landings specifically and all Australian and New Zealand soldiers that have served or died in wars more broadly. 
During WWI, the term also referred to the location of the Gallipoli landings, in what is now known as Anzac Cove (also called simply Anzac at the time). Another use of the term is for Anzac biscuits, a kind of biscuit that is derived from those sent to soldiers during WWI."
Australian and New Zealand Army Corps,"Legal protection
The term ANZAC is protected through domestic legislation in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom and internationally in all of the 180 countries that are members of the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property. In Australia, the term cannot be protected as a trademark or design, nor used in trade, business or entertainment or as the name of any boat, residence or vehicle. However, the term may be used with prior approval from the minister for veterans' affairs when selling Anzac biscuits, where the recipe does not significantly deviate from the traditional recipe and the food is referred to only as Anzac Biscuits or Anzac Slice, not Anzac Cookies. Similar protections exist in New Zealand, under the responsibility of the minister for culture and heritage.
In response to lobbying by the Australian and New Zealand governments, in 1916 the United Kingdom introduced legislation prohibiting the use of the term in trade or business without the approval of the government of Australia or New Zealand. This resulted in the cancellation of around 29 already registered trademarks including ""Anzac Motor Company"" and ""Anzac Soap"". Before the act came into effect, a housing development received much criticism after selecting the name New Anzac-on-Sea as a result of a naming competition. The area was ultimately renamed to the current name of Peacehaven for reasons unrelated to the use of Anzac, as the naming competition fraudulently gave runners-up (practically every person who entered into the competition) the opportunity to buy land in the development that was too small for habitation.
Australia and New Zealand governments were unsuccessful post WWI in persuading other governments to introduce similar restrictions. However, in 2003 the countries successfully applied to register Anzac as an ""official sign, hallmark or emblem"" under the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, requiring signatory countries to refuse the registration of Anzac under their domestic trademark law."
Australian and New Zealand Army Corps,"See also
ANZAC day
Colour of War: The Anzacs, includes rare colour footage
Military history of Australia during World War I
Military history of New Zealand during World War I"
Australian and New Zealand Army Corps,"References
Bibliography
Further reading
External links"
Australian and New Zealand Army Corps,"Anzac Day Act 1995
Visit Gallipoli: Australian site about Gallipoli and the Anzacs, includes previously unpublished photographs, artworks and documents from Government archives. A site by the Australian Department of Veterans' Affairs.
Discovering Anzacs, includes service records and profiles from National Archives of Australia and Archives NZ for those who enlisted in WWI.
New Zealanders at Gallipoli
An ongoing collection of geo-mapped Australian & ANZAC War Memorial photographs.
Listen to an excerpt from a simulated recording of Australian troops docking in Egypt after their voyage from Australia to take part in the First World War on australianscreen online.
This recording was added to the National Film and Sound Archive's Sounds of Australia Registry in 2007
Measuring the ANZACS – a citizen science project
Seal, Graham: Anzac (Australia), in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
Monash University: One Hundred Stories (Online Exhibition)
Beersheba ANZAC Memorial Center"
"Albany, Western Australia","Albany ( AL-bən-ee; Nyungar: Kinjarling) is a port city in the Great Southern region in the Australian state of Western Australia, 418 kilometres (260 mi) southeast of Perth, the state capital. The city centre is at the northern edge of Princess Royal Harbour, which is a part of King George Sound. The central business district is bounded by Mount Clarence to the east and Mount Melville to the west. The city is in the local government area of the City of Albany. While it is the oldest colonial, although not European, settlement in Western Australia—predating Perth and Fremantle by over two years—it was a semi-exclave of New South Wales for over four years until it was made part of the Swan River Colony.
The settlement was founded on 26 December 1826 as a military outpost of New South Wales for the purpose of forestalling French ambitions in the region.: 61  To that end, on 21 January 1827, the commander of the outpost, Major Edmund Lockyer, formally took possession for the British Crown of the portion of New Holland not yet claimed by the Crown; that is, the portion west of the 129th meridian east, with the portion east already being claimed collectively by the Crown as New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land. During the last decade of the 19th century, the town served as a gateway to the Eastern Goldfields. For many years, it was the colony's only deep-water port, having a place of eminence on shipping services between Britain and its Australian colonies. The opening of the Fremantle Inner Harbour in 1897,: 51–55  however, saw its importance as a port decline, after which the town's industries turned primarily to agriculture, timber and later, whaling.
Contemporary Albany is the southern terminus for tourism in the region, and the state's south west, which is known for its natural environment and preservation of its heritage. The town has a role in the ANZAC legend, being the last port of call for troopships departing Australia in the First World War. On 1 November 2014, the Australian and New Zealand Prime Ministers opened the National Anzac Centre in Mount Clarence, Albany, to commemorate 100 years since the first ANZAC troops departed from King George Sound. Approximately 40,000 people attended the commemoration events held between 30 October and 2 November 2014.
An auxiliary submarine base for the US Navy's 7th Fleet was developed during the Second World War in the event the submarine base at Fremantle was lost. Also in the harbour was a Royal Australian Navy naval installation which provided for refuelling from four 5,100-tonne (5,000-long-ton) fuel tanks.: 26"
"Albany, Western Australia","Etymology
Upon its establishment in 1826, the settlement was named Frederick Town in honour of Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany. In 1831, the settlement was transferred to the control of the Swan River Colony and renamed Albany by Lieutenant-Governor James Stirling.: 55–115 
The name of the area in the Nyungar language of the Menang people is Kinjarling, which has been said to mean ""place of plenty"" and ""place of rain"". In 2020, the City of Albany began, as part of an official dual-naming project, to give prominence to Kinjarling as the city's Aboriginal name."
"Albany, Western Australia","Early history
Kinjarling was home to Menang Noongar tribes during the summer season. Early British explorers recorded evidence of fish traps located on Emu Point and on the French, now the Kalgan, River. Vancouver made attempts to find the inhabitants of the area but only found bark dwellings that were unoccupied. Later explorers made contact and were told to leave, but were accepted when they did not. Most of the British exploration was undertaken to survey the land and sea to assess the profitability of resources. The explorers occasionally noted encounters with Noongars. Native treatment laws and programs have affected the tribes since settlement."
"Albany, Western Australia","Heritage buildings
There are a number of heritage buildings in Albany;  see List of heritage places in the City of Albany and Category:Heritage places in Albany, Western Australia. These include:"
"Albany, Western Australia","The Old Farm, Strawberry Hill was established in 1827 as a government farm to feed the colonial soldiers stationed around King George's Sound. It is the oldest farm in Western Australia. The homestead, which became the home of the Government Resident in 1833, is an example of a colonial gentleman's residence. After a chequered history, the property was vested in the National Trust WA in 1964 and is now a house museum.
Patrick Taylor Cottage (1832), Western Australia's oldest surviving dwelling, built in 1832 by the Morley Brothers. It is now maintained by the Albany Historical Society.
St John's Church (1841–1848) is a stone building with shingled roofs in the Old Colonial Gothick Picturesque style. Set among trees, it was designed to be part of an overall contrived picturesque scene in the manner of an English garden landscape.
Scots Uniting Church (1892) was designed in the Victorian Academic Gothic style by Melbourne architect Evander McIver and built with local granite stonework.
The complex now known as The Residency Museum was established in 1850 as a depot for the Convict Establishment in Albany. It is an L-shaped, single-storied, masonry building with a timber framed, timber shingled roof. In 1873 it was converted into the Resident Magistrate's home. It now serves as a museum.
The Victorian Free Classical Revival style Town Hall (1888) is a two-storey stone building with a prominent clock tower, which dominates York Street, the main street of Albany. It has been put to many uses apart from council meetings, including public entertainment and public meetings of all kinds and even as the venue for the first regional meeting of the State Parliament.
The Old Post Office was built in two stages, the first was designed in 1869 by J Manning, the second, including a prominent tower, was designed in 1896 by George Temple-Poole. It now houses the Albany campus of the University of Western Australia.
The Court House, constructed of Albany brick and granite with a tiled roof, was designed in the Federation Romanesque style by the Public Works Department under the supervision of George Temple-Poole and Hillson Beasley in 1897.
Another example of the work of George Temple Poole is the limestone and shingle Federation Arts and Crafts style Cottage Hospital, designed in 1886 and completed in 1897. It is one of the oldest hospitals in the state and served as such until 1962. It is now occupied by the Vancouver Arts Centre (named after the explorer George Vancouver)."
"Albany, Western Australia","	Images of heritage buildings
		
			
			
		
		
			
			
		
		
			
			
		
		
			
			
		
		
			
			
		
		
			
			
		
		
			
			
		
		
			
			
		
		
			
			
		
		
			
			
		
		
			
			
		"
"Albany, Western Australia",Some of the above information is derived from the State Heritage Register where these places are registered. The assessment criteria contain more details.
"Albany, Western Australia","Population
As of the 2021 census, the urban population of Albany was 35,053 making it the state's sixth-largest population centre."
"Albany, Western Australia","Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people made up 4.1% of the population.
75.5% of people were born in Australia. The next most common countries of birth were England 7.2%, New Zealand 1.7%, Philippines 1.7%, 1.2% and Scotland 0.7%.
87.7% of people only spoke English at home. Other languages spoken at home included Filipino 0.6%, Tagalog 0.6%, Afrikaans 0.6%, Karen 0.5% and Italian 0.5%.
The most common religious denominations were Anglican 11.9% and Catholic 10.7%. 49.9% had no religion and 7.5% did not respond."
"Albany, Western Australia","Geography
The city centre of Albany is located between the hills of Mount Melville and Mount Clarence, which look down into Princess Royal Harbour. Many beaches surround Albany, with Middleton Beach being the closest to the town centre. Other popular beaches include Frenchman Bay and Muttonbird Island.
Albany is 418 km (260 mi) SSE of the state capital, Perth, to which it is linked by Albany Highway."
"Albany, Western Australia","Wine region
Albany is a sub-region of the Great Southern region of Western Australia."
"Albany, Western Australia","Coastline
The Albany coastline is notorious for deaths due to king waves washing people off rocks.  The Torndirrup National Park features some of the more rugged coastline in the area. However, there are many beaches that are safe and usable.
Betty's Beach was named after Betty Jones, who used to go camping there with her family, and was initially called Betty's Bay.
Frenchman Bay Beach is adjacent to the Torndirrup National Park, and was originally called Quarantine Bay, owing to the quarantine station set up by the British in 1826 on Mistaken Island at the northern end of Goode Beach"
"Albany, Western Australia","Misery Beach, located 20 km (12 mi) south of Albany, was so named owing to the location of the whaling station at Albany that operated until 1978, causing offal to be washed ashore at Misery Beach and its sand and waters to be stained red. However, the beach was named Tourism Australia Best Beach 2022 by Tourism Australia, described a ""[ticking] all the boxes of what the typical beachgoer is looking for — uncrowded, crystal-white sand, turquoise waters and a very dramatic granite backdrop"".
Other beaches include:"
"Albany, Western Australia","Emu Point
Gull Rock Beach, also known as Boiler Beach
Middleton Beach
Nanarup Beach
Muttonbird Beach
Cosy Corner
Two Peoples Bay, including Little Beach and Waterfall Beach"
"Albany, Western Australia","Climate
Albany has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate (Köppen Csb) with dry, warm summers, mild, wet winters, and pleasant springs and autumns.: 5  Summers have short spells of very hot weather, but cool ocean breeze brings relief, especially during evenings and nights. The city is situated on what is promoted as the ""Rainbow Coast"", an appropriate title given the frequency of days with both sun and drizzle or showers. Albany has 44.8 clear days annually, just slightly lower than Melbourne's 48.6 days.
July is the wettest month, with a long-term average of 144 mm (5.67 in). Rain in excess of 0.2 mm (0.01 in) occurs on two days out of every three during an average winter. The driest month is February with a mean of 22.9 mm (0.90 in).
Albany received a record amount of rain on 20 November 2008 when violent storms swept across the Great Southern region. The town was flooded after 113.8 mm (4.48 in) of rain fell in a 24-hour period, the highest amount recorded since rainfall records began in 1877. The wettest month on record was June 1920 when 292.8 mm (11.5 in) fell, while February 1877 and February 1879 remain the only rainless months."
"Albany, Western Australia","Industry
Albany's main industries are tourism, fishing, timber (wood chips) and agriculture. From 1952 to 1978 whaling was a major source of income and employment for the local population.
The Whaling Station, which closed operations in 1978 following a major conservation campaign, has been converted to a museum of whaling and features one of the 'Cheynes' whale chasers that were used for whaling in Albany. The station was the last operating land based whaling station in the southern hemisphere and the English-speaking world at the time of closure.
The Western Power Wind Farm is located at Sand Patch, to the west of Albany. The wind farm, originally commissioned in 2001 with 12 turbines, now has 18 turbines, driven by strong southerly winds, and can generate up to 80% of the city's electricity usage.
Albany has a number of historical sites including the Museum, Albany Convict Gaol, The Princess Royal Fortress (commonly known as The Forts) and Patrick Taylor Cottage, one of the oldest dwellings in Western Australia, c. 1832. Albany has a great deal of historical significance to Western Australia.
Natural sights along the rugged coastline include the 'Natural Bridge' and the 'Gap'. The beaches have pristine white sand. The destroyer HMAS Perth was sunk in King George Sound in 2001 as a dive wreck. Albany is also close to two low mountain ranges, the Porongurups and Stirling Ranges.
Albany is the southern terminus of the Bibbulmun Track walking trail.
Albany is the southern terminus of the Munda Biddi Trail off-road cycling trail.
Albany is home to HMAS Albany (based in Darwin) and the adopted home port of the Royal Australian Navy frigate HMAS Anzac. Albany is frequently visited by other warships."
"Albany, Western Australia","Transport
Albany has a city bus service run by Swan Transit under the TransAlbany brand with five town routes. Albany is connected to Perth with road-coach services via Walpole and Bunbury; via Katanning and Northam; via Kojonup and Williams. Transwa coaches also serve Jerramungup, Ravensthorpe and Hopetoun.
Rex Airlines, a national independent regional airline, provides 23 services a week between Perth and Albany Airport using 34-passenger turboprop Saab 340 aircraft.
Albany was served by the Albany Progress passenger train from Perth until 1978. The railway station reopened as a tourist information centre in 1994."
"Albany, Western Australia","Media
Albany radio stations include locally owned broadcaster GOLD MX and FLY FM as well as national broadcasters 783 Triple M (formerly 6VA and RadioWest), Vision FM, HitFM (formerly HOT FM), ABC Great Southern, ABC News, ABC Radio National, ABC Classic FM, Triple J, Racing Radio & Great Southern FM.
Below is a table showing the broadcast frequencies on which these services can be received."
"Albany, Western Australia","Localised television stations available in Albany include GWN7 (now Seven Regional), WIN Television Western Australia, West Digital Television, SBS and ABC Television Western Australia. Seven (formerly GWN7) broadcasts a half-hour news program for regional WA, Seven News Regional WA (formerly GWN7 News), at 5:30pm on weeknights with a district newsroom covering Albany and surrounding areas based in the city.
Below is a table showing the full suite of digital television services available in Albany.
These services are broadcast from Mount Clarence and cover the majority of the geographic area with some areas requiring a signal to be received from the Southern Agricultural site at Mount Barker. Both these transmission sites employ vertical polarity. Furthermore, a number of residents rely on receiving these services via satellite using the Viewer Access Satellite Television system."
"Albany, Western Australia","Local newspapers are the Albany Advertiser (established 1888) and The Extra (owned by Seven West Media Limited, publishers of The West Australian). Local radio stations GOLD MX and Fly FM are owned by local independent broadcaster BARRICADES MEDIA."
"Albany, Western Australia","Sport
Two of Albany's major sports facilities are Collingwood Park Stadium in Collingwood Park and Centennial Oval in Centennial Park. Collingwood Park is home to North Albany Football Club while Centennial Oval is home to Royals Football Club.
Albany Leisure and Aquatic Centre is the home of Albany Basketball Association. The Rainbow Coast Raiders of the State Basketball League played at the Albany Sports Centre (33 Barker Road) between 1989 and 1999. 33 Barker Road is now the home of Albany Indoor Beach Volleyball.
Albany Sea Dragons are the regions only rugby league club who partake in inter-regional WA competitions run by the NRL WA."
"Albany, Western Australia","Education
There are currently several primary schools, eight high schools and one university campus in the Albany area."
"Albany, Western Australia","Primary schools
Albany Primary School
Flinders Park Primary
Mount Lockyer Primary
Parklands School
Spencer Park Primary
Yakamia Primary
Woodbury Boston Primary School
OneSchool Global (Albany)
Little Grove Primary School
St Joseph's College
Great Southern Grammar
Bethel Christian School
Australian Christian College Southlands
John Calvin School"
"Albany, Western Australia","High schools
Albany Senior High School 7–12
Albany Secondary Education Support Centre 7–13
Australian Christian College - Southlands K-12
North Albany Senior High School 7–12
Great Southern Grammar K-12
St Joseph's College K-12
Bethel Christian School K-12
John Calvin School K-10
OneSchool Global - Albany 3-12"
"Albany, Western Australia","Universities
A campus of the University of Western Australia
Some courses delivered by Curtin University"
"Albany, Western Australia","TAFE
South Regional TAFE"
"Albany, Western Australia","Localities
Notable residents
See also
Albany Regional Prison
City of Albany
Electoral district of Albany
Port of Albany"
"Albany, Western Australia","Notes
References
Bibliography
External links
Albany travel guide from Wikivoyage
City of Albany
Albany - Official Tourism Site
Albany Entertainment Centre
Albany Historical Society (Inc)
Albany Tourism Guide along the Rainbow Coast
National Anzac Centre"
"Albany, Western Australia","Wikisource
 Texts on Wikisource:
""Albany (Australia)"". New International Encyclopedia. 1905.
""Albany"". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). 1911.
""Albany (Australia)"". Encyclopedia Americana. 1920."
Politics of Australia,"The politics of Australia operates under the written Australian Constitution, which sets out Australia as a constitutional monarchy, governed via a parliamentary democracy in the Westminster tradition. Australia is also a federation, where power is divided between the federal government and the states and territories. The monarch, currently King Charles III, is the head of state and is represented locally by the Governor-General of Australia, while the head of government is the Prime Minister of Australia, currently Anthony Albanese. 
The country has maintained a stable liberal democratic political system under its Constitution, the world's tenth oldest, since Federation in 1901. Australia is the world's sixth oldest continuous democracy and largely operates as a two-party system in which voting is compulsory. The Economist Intelligence Unit rated Australia a ""full democracy"" in 2022. 
Like other Westminster-style systems of government, Australia's federal system of government consists of three branches: the executive (the prime minister, the cabinet, other ministers, and government departments), the legislative (the Parliament of Australia), and the judicial (the High Court of Australia and other federal courts). The Australian government consists of the party or coalition that had majority support in the lower house and exercises both executive (as ministers) and legislative (through control of the House) power."
Politics of Australia,"The federal Parliament (as defined in section 1 of the Constitution) comprises the monarch and is bicameral (has two chambers): the House of Representatives (lower house) and Senate (upper house). The House of Representatives has 151 members, each representing an individual electoral district of about 165,000 people. The Senate has 76 members: twelve from each of the six states and two each from Australia's internal territories, the Australian Capital Territory and Northern Territory.
Separation of powers is the principle the power of state should be shared between multiple bodies, in order to avoid the concentration of power in one entity. The legislature proposes and debates laws that the executive then administers, and the judicial arbitrates cases arising from the administration of laws and common law. However, in accordance with Westminster system, there is no strict separation between the executive and legislative branches, with ministers required to also be members of the legislature. Only the High Court can deem if a law is constitutional or not.
The Australian system of government combines elements derived from the political systems of the United Kingdom (fused executive, constitutional monarchy) and the United States (federalism, written constitution, strong bicameralism), along with distinctive indigenous features, and has therefore been characterised as a ""Washminster mutation""."
Politics of Australia,"Federal nature
Australia is a federation, with different powers and responsibilities for the three levels of government: the federal government, the states and territories and local government.
The federal nature and the structure of the Parliament of Australia were the subject of protracted negotiations among the colonies during the drafting of the Constitution. The House of Representatives is elected on a basis that reflects the differing populations of the states. Therefore, the most populous state, New South Wales, has 48 members, while the least populated, Tasmania, has only five. But the Senate is elected on a basis of equality among the states: all states elect 12 senators, regardless of population. This was intended to give smaller states a significant influence on legislation through their senator's ability to block or amend legislation from the lower house. However due to the emergence of strong parties with senators that very rarely cross the floor, its role as a so called state's house is limited. The Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory, the only territories represented in Senate, each elect only two.
The federal government may only legislate on certain matters, with any remaining areas falling within the responsibility of the states. For example, the federal government has the responsibility for defence, inter-state trade and bankruptcy while the states have responsibility for healthcare and education. Additionally,the states can agree to refer any of their powers to the Commonwealth government via legislation, as has been done to allow the Commonwealth to regulate corporations. The federal government can also significantly influence state legislation by making tied grants (money which comes with certain conditions). This is a significant power due to high levels of vertical fiscal imbalance arising because of the limited revenue raising capabilities of the states.
In addition, Australia has several territories, two of which are self-governing: the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory. As these territories' legislatures exercise powers devolved to them by the Commonwealth, the Parliament of Australia has the authority to override their legislation and to alter their powers. Australian citizens in these territories are represented by members of both houses of the Parliament of Australia, albeit with less representation in the Senate. Norfolk Island was self-governing from 1979 until 2015, although it was never represented as such in the Parliament of Australia. The other inhabited territories: Jervis Bay, Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, have never been self-governing.
The third level of governance is local government, in the form of shires, towns or cities. The councils of these areas are composed of elected representatives (known as either councillor or alderman, depending on the state). Their powers are devolved to them by the state or territory in which they are located."
Politics of Australia,"Constitution
The Australian Constitution sets down the powers and responsibilities of many of the institutions of the Australian Commonwealth. However, the prime minister, the cabinet and the other principles of responsible government are not explicitly mentioned in the document, along with most of the realities of exercise of executive power. This reflected the British influence on the document with its unwritten constitution. 
The Parliament of Australia can propose changes to the Constitution. To become effective, the proposals must be put to a referendum of all Australians of voting age and must receive a double majority: a majority of all votes, and a majority of votes in a majority of states.
Section 1 of the Australian Constitution creates a democratic legislature, the bicameral Parliament of Australia which consists of the monarch and two chambers of parliament, the Senate and the House of Representatives. Section 51 of the Constitution provides for the Australian government's legislative powers and allocates certain powers (known as heads of power) to the federal government. All remaining legislative power is retained by the six states (previously separate colonies). Further, each state has its own constitution, so that Australia has seven Parliaments, with legislative power shared between them. The High Court of Australia arbitrates on any disputes which arise between the federal government and the states and territories, or among the states and territories themselves."
Politics of Australia,"The Crown
The monarch is the symbolic head of Australia and is ceremonially involved in all branches of the government, as a constitutive part of Parliament, formal holder of executive power and the person in whose name most criminal offences are brought. In a broader sense, the Crown represents the authority of the polity itself. However, in all these functions they are represented by the governor-general, whose appointment is the only mandatory function of the monarch. The monarch of Australia, currently Charles III, is also the monarch of the other Commonwealth realms, and the sovereign of the United Kingdom. The monarch is the head of state, however in almost all matters the governor-general performs the functions of the head of state, leading some commentators to contend that the governor-general is the head of state. As a constitutional democracy, the role is limited to constitutional and ceremonial duties. Although the governor-general is the King's representative, and exercises various constitutional powers in his name, other powers they independently exercise in their own right. The governor-general also represents Australia internationally, through making and receiving state visits.
Since at least the passage and adoption of the Statute of Westminster, the Monarch of Australia (along with the monarchies of the other dominions) is a separate office from the Monarch of the United Kingdom, despite being held by the same person. As such, in Commonwealth matters, the monarch is only advised by Commonwealth ministers. By the Royal Style and Titles Act 1953, the Australian Parliament gave the Queen the title Queen of Australia, and in 1973 titles with any reference to her status as Queen of the United Kingdom and Defender of the Faith as well were removed.
Under the conventions of the Westminster system the governor-general's powers are almost always exercised on the advice of the Prime Minister or other ministers. However, the governor-general retains some reserve powers, being powers not subject to the approval of another person or institution. These are rarely exercised, but during the Australian constitutional crisis of 1975 Governor-General Sir John Kerr used them to dismiss the prime minister when he failed to secure supply.
Australia has periodically experienced movements seeking to end the monarchy. In a 1999 referendum, the Australian people voted on a proposal to change the Constitution. The proposal would have removed references to the Queen from the Constitution and replaced the governor-general with a president nominated by the prime minister, but subject to the approval of a two-thirds majority of both houses of Parliament. The proposal was defeated. The Australian Republican Movement continues to campaign for an end to the monarchy in Australia, opposed by Australians for Constitutional Monarchy and Australian Monarchist League."
Politics of Australia,"The Parliament
The Parliament exercises the legislative power of the Commonwealth by enacting legislation. It also supervises the executive actions of the government, through activities such as question time and Senate estimates. The Australian Parliament is bicameral and consists of the King of Australia, the 76 member Senate (the upper house) and the 151 member House of Representatives (the lower house). The Australian government is responsible to the Parliament, of which they must be (or shortly become) members. In the Senate, 12 senators are from each State and 2 senators from the ACT and the NT respectively are elected by an optional preferential single transferable vote system. State senators serve staggered fixed six year terms, with half up for election each three years. Territory senators serve a non fixed term equal to that of the House of Representatives, usually around three years. The most recent general election was on 21 May 2022.In the House of Representatives, 151 members are elected using full preferential voting in single member electorates (also known as seats). Elections are held once at least every three years, however the prime minister (historically the Cabinet) may request the governor-general call a new election at any time (however, they retain the discretion to refuse if inadequate reasons for the election are given). However, as Senate elections must occur only during certain periods and as it generally politically advantageous (while not legally required) to hold House elections at the same time, elections are generally restricted to a ten month window between August and May every three years, with the last split election in 1970 and 1972. Unlike in the Senate, in which each state is represented equally, each state has a number of seats roughly proportional to its population; as such the house is also known as the people's house. The prime minister is selected from the House, needing the support of the majority of members in order to be invited to form a government.
Each chamber of Parliament has equal powers, with the exception that the Senate may not introduce ""money bills"" (new taxes or laws authorising expenditure). However, the Senate can still block supply (the annual bill authorising government expenditure), but this has only happened once, during the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis. 
Parliamentarians belong to either the government, the opposition or sit on the cross-bench (which includes independents and members of minor parties). The opposition consists of members of the second largest party or coalition in the House of Representatives. The Leader of the Opposition heads shadow cabinet, composed of shadow ministers who mirror, scrutinise and oppose government ministers and act as the government in waiting. Although the government, by virtue of commanding a majority of members in the lower house of the Parliament, can usually pass its legislation and control the workings of the House, the opposition can considerably delay the passage of legislation and obstruct government business if it chooses. The day-to-day business of the House of Representatives is usually negotiated between the Leader of the House, appointed by the prime minister, and the Manager of Opposition Business in the House, appointed by the Leader of the Opposition."
Politics of Australia,"The Executive Government
The executive's primary role is to implement the laws passed by the Parliament. Unlike the other two branches of government however, membership of the executive is not clearly defined. One definition describes the executive as a pyramid, consisting of three layers.  At the top stands The King, as the symbolic apex and formal repository of executive power. Below him lies a second layer made up of the prime-minister, cabinet and other ministers who in practice lead the executive. Finally, the bottom layer includes public servants, police, government departments and independent statutory bodies who directly implement policy and laws.
Executive power is also difficult to clearly define. In the British context, it was defined by John Locke as all government power not legislative or judicial in nature. The key distinction is that while legislative power involves setting down rules of general application, executive power involves applying those rules to specific situations. In practice however, this definition is difficult to apply as many actions by executive agencies are wide ranging, binding and conducted independently of Parliament. Ultimately whether a power is executive or legislative is determined on a case by case basis, and involves the weighing up of various factors, rather than the application of a strict test.
As most executive power is granted by statute, the executive power of the federal government is similarly limit to those areas in which the commonwealth is granted the power to legislate under the Constitution. They also retain certain powers traditionally part of the royal prerogative, such as the power to declare war and enter into treaties. Finally, there exists certain ""nationhood powers"", inferred by the High Court by implication from section 61 of the Constitution. These were defined by Justice Mason, as powers  ""peculiarly adapted to the government of a nation and which cannot otherwise be carried on for the benefit of the nation"". They have been found to include the power to provide financial stimulus payments to households during recessions and the power to prevent ""unlawful non-citizens"" from entering the country (during the Tampa affair)."
Politics of Australia,"Executive council
The Federal Executive Council is a formal body which exists and meets to give legal effect to decisions made by the Cabinet, and to carry out various other functions. All ministers are members of the council and are entitled to be styled The Honourable for life. The governor-general usually presides at council meetings, but in his or her absence another minister nominated as the Vice-President of the Executive Council presides at the meeting of the council. Since 1 June 2022, the vice-president of the Federal Executive Council has been Senator Katy Gallagher."
Politics of Australia,"Cabinet
The Cabinet of Australia is the council of senior ministers, responsible to the Parliament. The ministers are appointed by the governor-general, on the advice of the prime minister, who serve at the former's pleasure. Cabinet meetings are strictly private and occur once a week where vital issues are discussed and policy formulated. Outside the cabinet there is an outer ministry and also a number of junior ministers, called Parliamentary Secretaries, responsible for a specific policy area and reporting directly to a senior Cabinet minister.
The Constitution of Australia does not explicitly mention Cabinet; it existing solely by convention, with its decisions not in and of themselves having legal force. However, it serves as the practical expression of the Federal Executive Council, which is Australia's highest formal executive governmental body. In practice, the Federal Executive Council meets solely to endorse and give legal force to decisions already made by the Cabinet. All members of the Cabinet are members of the Executive Council. While the governor-general is nominal presiding officer, they almost never attends Executive Council meetings. A senior member of the Cabinet holds the office of vice-president of the Executive Council and acts as presiding officer of the Executive Council in the absence of the governor-general.
Until 1956 all members of the ministry were members of the Cabinet. The growth of the ministry in the 1940s and 1950s made this increasingly impractical, and in 1956 Robert Menzies created a two-tier ministry, with only senior ministers holding Cabinet rank, also known within parliament as the front bench. This practice has been continued by all governments except the Whitlam Government.
When the non-Labor parties are in power, the prime minister makes all Cabinet and ministerial appointments at their own discretion, although in practice they consult with senior colleagues in making appointments. When the Liberal Party and its predecessors (the Nationalist Party and the United Australia Party) have been in coalition with the National Party or its predecessor the Country Party, the leader of the junior Coalition party has had the right to nominate their party's members of the Coalition ministry, and to be consulted by the Prime Minister on the allocation of their portfolios.
When Labor first held office under Chris Watson, Watson assumed the right to choose members of his Cabinet. In 1907, however, the party decided that future Labor Cabinets would be elected by the members of the parliamentary Labor Party, (the Caucus) and the prime minister would retain the right to allocate portfolios. This practice was followed until 2007. Between 1907 and 2007, Labor Prime Ministers exercised a predominant influence over who was elected to Labor ministries, although the leaders of the party factions also exercised considerable influence. Prior to the 2007 general election, the then Leader of the Opposition, Kevin Rudd, said that he and he alone would choose the ministry should he become prime minister. His party won the election and he chose the ministry, as he said he would.
The cabinet meets not only in Canberra but also in state capitals, most frequently Sydney and Melbourne. Kevin Rudd was in favour of the Cabinet meeting in other places, such as major regional cities. There are Commonwealth Parliament Offices in each state capital, with those in Sydney located in 1 Bligh Street."
Politics of Australia,"The Judicature
As a federation, in Australia judicial power is exercised by both federal and state courts. However, unlike the UK's multiple legal systems there is only one legal system and like Canada and unlike the US there is only one common law of the nation, rather than a common law for each state. Additionally, unlike Canada and the US, there is no distinct federal common law.
Federal judicial power is vested in the High Court of Australia and such other federal courts created by the Parliament, including the Federal Court of Australia, the Family Court of Australia, and the Federal Circuit Court of Australia. Additionally, the Parliament has the power to enact laws which vest federal authority in state courts. Since the Constitution requires a separation of powers at the federal level, only courts may exercise federal judicial power; and conversely, non-judicial functions cannot be vested in courts.
State judicial power is exercised by each state's supreme court, and such other courts and tribunals created by the state parliaments.
The High Court of Australia is the supreme court in the Australian court hierarchy and the final court of appeal in Australia. It has both original and appellate jurisdiction, has the power of judicial review over laws passed by the Parliament of Australia and the parliaments of the states, and interprets the Constitution of Australia. The High Court is mandated by section 71 of the Constitution, which vests in it the judicial power of the Commonwealth of Australia. The High Court was constituted by the Judiciary Act 1903 (Cth). The High Court is composed of seven Justices: the Chief Justice of Australia, presently Stephen Gageler, and six other Justices.
The state supreme courts are also considered to be superior courts, those with unlimited jurisdiction to hear disputes and which are the pinnacle of the court hierarchy within their jurisdictions. They were created by means of the constitutions of their respective states or the self government Acts for the ACT and the Northern Territory. Appeals may be made from state supreme courts to the High Court of Australia.
Inferior courts are secondary to superior courts. Their existence stems from legislation and they only have the power to decide on matters which Parliament has granted them. Decisions in inferior courts can be appealed to the superior court in that area, and then to the High Court of Australia.
Until the passage of the Australia Act 1986, and associated legislation in the Parliament of the United Kingdom, some Australian cases could be referred to the British Judicial Committee of the Privy Council for final appeal. With this act, Australian law was made unequivocally sovereign, and the High Court of Australia was confirmed as the highest court of appeal. The theoretical possibility of the British Parliament enacting laws to override the Australian Constitution was also removed."
Politics of Australia,"Elections
At a national level, elections are held at least once every three years. The prime minister can advise the governor-general to call an election for the House of Representatives at any time, but Senate elections can only be held within certain periods prescribed in the Australian Constitution. Although it is possible to hold elections for the House and Senate separately, it is the convention to hold simultaneous elections for both houses; every national election since 1974 has been for both the House and the Senate.
House of Representatives elections are contested by all seats. Representatives are elected using the Australian instant-runoff voting system, in which the winning candidate obtains over 50% of votes after distribution of preferences; therefore, preference flows from lower-polling candidates are frequently significant in electoral outcomes. Senate elections are contested by half the senators from each state, except in the case of a double dissolution where all senators contest the election; senators representing the territories are elected and sworn into office simultaneously with the House of Representatives rather than the rest of the Senate. All senators are elected using the single transferable voting system of proportional representation, which has resulted in a greater presence of minor parties in the Senate. With the exception of a three-year period from 2005 to 2008, no party or coalition has held a majority in the Senate since 1981; this has required governments to frequently seek the support of minor parties or independent senators holding the balance of power in order to secure their legislative agenda.
Because the Senate's system of single transferable voting requires a lower quota than the House in order to obtain a seat, minor parties have often focused their election efforts on the upper house. This is true also at state level (only the two territories and Queensland are unicameral). Historically it has been comparatively rarer for minor parties and independents to win seats in the House of Representatives, although the size of the crossbench has been on an increasing trend since the 1990 federal election The most recent Australian federal election, which took place on 21 May 2022, saw the election of a historically large crossbench in the House of Representatives consisting of six minor party members and ten independents."
Politics of Australia,"State and local government
Australia's six states and the two largest territories are structured within a political framework similar to that of the Commonwealth. Each state has its own bicameral parliament, with the exception of Queensland and the two territories, whose parliaments are unicameral. Each state has a governor, who undertakes a role equivalent to that of the governor-general at the federal level, and a premier, who is the head of government and is equivalent to the prime minister. Each state also has its own supreme court, from which appeals can be made to the High Court of Australia.
State and territory elections occur every four years using fixed terms (except for Tasmania, where the premier decides the date of the election).
Queensland is regarded as comparatively conservative. Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory are regarded as comparatively left of centre. New South Wales, the largest state by population, as well as South Australia have often been regarded as politically moderate bellwether states. Western Australia, by contrast, tends to be more politically volatile; regarded as the most conservative state during the 2000–10s, it has lately swung to rank amongst the most left-leaning states in the country. It is also known for historical secessionist sentiments.
Local government in Australia is the lowest tier of government. Local governments are subject to the relevant states and territories. There is only one level of local government in Australia; with none of the distinctive local government types seen in other anglophone nations. Most local governments within the states have equivalent powers to each other; styles such as shire or city have only historical meaning."
Politics of Australia,"Ideology in Australian politics
The Australian party system has been described by political scientists as more ideologically driven than other similar anglophone countries such as the United States and Canada. In early Australian political history, class interests played a significant role in the division between the then-democratic socialist Australian Labor Party and a series of anti-Labor parties drawing on the liberal and conservative traditions (the predecessors of the modern Coalition of the Liberals and Nationals).
In contemporary Australian political culture, the Coalition (Liberal and National parties) is considered centre-right and the Australian Labor Party is considered centre-left. Australian conservatism is largely represented by the Coalition, along with Australian liberalism. The Labor Party categorises itself as social democratic, although it has pursued a liberal economic and social policy since the prime ministership of Bob Hawke.
Parliamentary Labor Party members such as Andrew Leigh have argued that the ALP should be reclassified as social liberal. The Labor Party still maintains its historical socialist objective in its constitution; however, it is seen by some as an ideological anachronism within the party.
In recent decades there has been a marked shift amongst the Australian electorate in providing their first preference votes to candidates not belonging to either of the two major parties. At the 2022 federal election 31% gave their preference to a non-major party candidate."
Politics of Australia,"Political parties
Organised, national political parties have dominated Australia's political landscape since federation. The late 19th century saw the rise of the Australian Labor Party, which represented organised workers. Opposing interests coalesced into two main parties: a centre-right party with a base in business and the middle classes that has been predominantly conservative and moderate, now the Liberal Party of Australia; and a rural or agrarian conservative party, now the National Party of Australia. While there are a small number of other political parties that have achieved parliamentary representation, these main three dominate organised politics everywhere in Australia and only on rare occasions have any other parties or independent members of parliament played any role at all in the formation or maintenance of governments.
Australian politics operates as a two-party system, as a result of the permanent coalition between the Liberal Party and National Party. Internal party discipline has historically been tight, unlike the situation in other countries such as the United States. Australia's political system has not always been a two-party system (e.g. 1901 to 1910) but nor has it always been as internally stable as in recent decades.
The Australian Labor Party (ALP) is a social democratic party. It is a left leaning party with tendency towards social welfare and government assistance programs. It was founded by the Australian labour movement and broadly represents the urban working and middle classes.
The Liberal Party of Australia is a party of the centre-right which broadly represents businesses, the middle classes and many rural people. Its permanent coalition partner at national level is the National Party of Australia, formerly known as the Country Party, a conservative party which represents rural interests. These two parties are collectively known as the Coalition. In only Queensland, the two parties have officially merged to form the Liberal National Party, and in the Northern Territory, the National Party is known as the Country Liberal Party.
Minor parties in Australian politics include a green party, the Australian Greens, the largest of the minor parties; a centrist party, Centre Alliance; a nationalist party, Pauline Hanson's One Nation; and a right-wing agrarian party, Katter's Australian Party. Other significant parties in recent years have included, the Clive Palmer led United Australia Party (not to be confused with the historical incarnation that was the predecessor to the Liberal party) and the socially conservative Family First Party, among others. Historically significant parties have included the United Australia Party, the Australian Labor Party (Anti-Communist), the Communist Party of Australia, the socially liberal Australian Democrats among others.
A collection of climate conscious, socially progressive and economically liberal independents known as the teals were elected in the 2022 election, taking many seats previously held by moderate Liberal Party members."
Politics of Australia,"Timeline
Since federation, there have been 31 prime ministers of Australia. The longest-serving prime minister was Sir Robert Menzies of the Liberal Party, who served for 19 years from 1939 to 1941, and again from 1949 to 1966. The only other prime minister to serve for longer than a decade was John Howard, also of the Liberal Party, who led for more than 11 years from 1996 to 2007. The Coalition and its direct predecessors have governed at the federal level for a large majority of Australia's history since federation: 30,791 days as compared to Labor's 14,439 days."
Politics of Australia,"Prime ministers' parties by time in office
Liberal Party of Australia – 18513 days
Australian Labor Party – 14439 days as of 18 August 2024
Nationalist Party – 5142 days (Party Deregistered)
United Australia Party – 3505 days (Party Deregistered)
Protectionist Party – 2442 days (Party Deregistered)
Commonwealth Liberal Party – 783 days (Party Deregistered)
Free Trade Party – 322 days (Party Deregistered)
Country Party – 84 days (Party Renamed)"
Politics of Australia,"House of Representatives primary, two-party and seat results
A two-party system has existed in the Australian House of Representatives since the two non-Labor parties merged in 1909. The 1910 election was the first to elect a majority government, with the Australian Labor Party concurrently winning the first Senate majority. Prior to 1909 a three-party system existed in the chamber. A two-party-preferred vote (2PP) has been calculated since the 1919 change from first-past-the-post to preferential voting and subsequent introduction of the Coalition. ALP = Australian Labor Party, L+NP = grouping of Liberal/National/LNP/CLP Coalition parties (and predecessors), Oth = other parties and independents."
Politics of Australia,"Historical party composition of the Senate
The Senate has included representatives from a range of political parties, including several parties that have seldom or never had representation in the House of Representatives, but which have consistently secured a small but significant level of electoral support, as the table shows.
Results represent the composition of the Senate after the elections. The full Senate has been contested on eight occasions; the inaugural election and seven double dissolutions.  These are underlined and highlighted in puce."
Politics of Australia,"See also
Far-right politics in Australia
List of sanctions involving Australia
Politics of New South Wales
Politics of Victoria
Politics of Queensland
Politics of Western Australia
Political donations in Australia
Political families of Australia
Proportional Representation Society of Australia"
Politics of Australia,"Notes
References
Specific references
General references
""Parliamentary Education Office"". Commonwealth of Australia.
Elder, D.R.; Fowler, P.E., eds. (2018). House of Representatives Practice (7th ed.). Canberra: Department of the House of Representatives. ISBN 978-1-74366-654-8.
Pyke, John (2020). Government powers under a Federal Constitution: Constitutional Law in Australia (2nd ed.). Pyrmont, NSW: Lawbook Co (Thomas Reuters). ISBN 978-0-455-24415-0. OCLC 1140000411."
Politics of Australia,"
== Further reading =="
Filipino Australians,"Filipino Australians (Filipino: Mga Australyanong Pilipino) are Australians of Filipino ancestry. Filipino Australians are one of the largest groups within the global Filipino diaspora. At the 2021 census, 408,836 people stated that they had Filipino ancestry (whether alone or in combination with another ancestry), representing 1.6% of the Australian population. In 2021, the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated that there were 310,620 Australian residents born in the Philippines."
Filipino Australians,"Population
Currently Filipinos are the third largest Asian Australian immigrant group behind Chinese Australians and Indian Australians. At the 2021 census, 408,836 people stated that they had Filipino ancestry (whether alone or in combination with another ancestry), representing 1.6% of the Australian population. In 2021, the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated that there were 310,620 Australian residents born in the Philippines.
At the 2021 census, the states with the largest numbers of people reporting Filipino ancestry were: New South Wales (152,804), Victoria (95,186), Queensland (73,805), Western Australia (46,785) and South Australia (21,257).
Females account for 61% while males represent 39% of Filipino Australians born in the Philippines."
Filipino Australians,"History
During the 1800s until the early 20th century, Broome became the pearling capital of the world. Filipinos worked as divers, crew, shell openers, and sorters. Eventually, they married with local women in Broome.
Filipinos were excluded from entering Australia under the White Australia policy. As a consequence, their numbers in Australia remained minimal; confined to descendants of those few Filipinos who had migrated to the north west pearling areas of Western Australia and the sugar cane plantations of Queensland prior to 1901; until the abolition of racially selective immigration policies in 1966. The 1901 census had recorded 700 Filipinos in Australia."
Filipino Australians,"Martial law in the Philippines, declared by former Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos in 1972, and the renunciation of the White Australia policy made Australia an attractive destination for Filipino emigrants, particularly skilled workers. Many Filipinos also settled in Australia from the 1970s onward as either migrant workers or the spouses of Australian citizens. Marriages between Filipinos and Australians rose very sharply from 1978, peaked in 1986, and remained high as of 2000, despite a dip in the early 1990s. The 1980s were the period of the greatest Filipino immigration, with 1987-1988 being the peak year."
Filipino Australians,"Media
The Philippine Times is Victoria's longest-running community paper. The first edition was published in November 1990."
Filipino Australians,"Notable people
Philippine-born
Aljin Abella, actor from the TV series Power Rangers Jungle Fury
Migo Adecer, singer, dancer, model, and actor
Jhoanna Aguila, singer, and The Voice Australia Season 3 contestant
Alyssa Alano, actress and model
Leila Alcasid, singer and songwriter
Joey Mead King, model, VJ, and TV and events host
Shar Mae Amor, singer and former Paradiso Girls member
Hannah Arnold, model and beauty queen, crowned Binibining Pilipinas 2021
Mig Ayesa, theatre actor and rock vocalist
Merlinda Bobis, writer
Shey Bustamante, reality show contestant
Arianne Caoili, chess player
Israel Cruz, singer
Kathleen de Leon Jones, original Hi-5 member
Felino Dolloso, theatre actor
Ben Gonzales, rugby league player
Sef Gonzales, convicted murderer
Nathalie Hart, actress
Fely Irvine, former Hi-5 member
Jal Joshua, singer, dancer, and Australia's Got Talent Season 3 1st runner-up
Alfred Nicdao, actor
Kylie Padilla, actress, singer and model
Yshrael Pascual, singer and The Voice Australia Season 1 contestant
Jim Paredes, singer, songwriter, member of APO Hiking Society trio
Rose Porteous, socialite
RJ Rosales, actor and musical theatre performer
Claire Ruiz, actress, singer, dancer, and model
Jerson Trinidad, singer and The Voice Australia Season 1 contestant
Guillermo Capati, civil and environmental engineer"
Filipino Australians,"Filipino ancestry
Abigail Adriano, singer and The Voice Kids Australia contestant
Chelsea Castillo, singer and Australia's Got Talent Season 3 finalist
Chris Cayzer, actor and singer
Kate Ceberano, singer
Genesis Cerezo, beatboxer and Australia's Got Talent Season 6 finalist
Sarah Christophers, former actress
Elizabeth Clenci, model and beauty queen, Miss Grand International 2017 2nd runner-up
Jessica Connelly, singer and former reality show contestant
Anne Curtis, actress, model, and singer
Jasmine Curtis-Smith, actress and model
Rod Davies, wing for Queensland Reds Super Rugby team
Jason Day, golfer
Ashley del Mundo, actress and former reality show contestant
Ezekiel Dimaguila, reality show contestant
Stef Draper, reality show contestant
Kai Espenido, reality show contestant
Alyssa Exala, reality show contestant
Karen Gallman, model and beauty queen crowned Binibining Pilipinas Intercontinental 2018 and Miss Intercontinental 2018
Ylona Garcia, singer
Kevin Gordon, Gold Coast Titans Rugby League player
Maxwell Gratton, CEO of Flying Disc Australia
Catriona Gray, singer and model crowned Miss World Philippines 2016, Miss Universe Philippines 2018 and Miss Universe 2018
Payne Haas, Brisbane Broncos Rugby League player
Sheralyn Hill, singer, The X Factor Australia Season 6 finalist, and former TRILL member
Jessica Jade, singer, The X Factor Australia Season 6 finalist, and former TRILL member
Mojo Juju, musician
Clinton Kane, singer
Kelebek, rapper, The X Factor Australia Season 5 finalist, and former Third Degree member
Stephanie Lacerna, singer and Idol Philippines contestant
Philip Lampart, reality show contestant
Michael Letts, rugby player
Vanessa Librea, singer and The Voice Australia Season 11 contestant
Jericho Malabonga, winner of the fourth series of Australian Survivor
Reyanna Maria, singer and rapper
Janette McBride, former actress
Michael McCoy, reality show contestant
Reef McInnes, Australian rules footballer
Natalie Mendoza, actress (Hotel Babylon)
Rebecca Jackson Mendoza, actress, singer, and dancer
Paul Merciadez, singer, dancer, and member of dance group Justice Crew
Bella Micucci, singer and The Voice Teens Philippines Season 2 contestant
Patrick Miller, Married at First Sight Australia Season 5 star
Montaigne, singer
Seann Miley Moore, singer, The X Factor U.K. Season 12 finalist, and The Voice Australia Season 10 contestant
Kenneth Moraleda, director & actor
Bobby Morley, actor from Home and Away and The 100 TV series
Charlotte Nicdao, actress
Cyrell Paule, Married at First Sight Australia Season 6 star
John Pearce, singer, dancer, member of Justice Crew, and member of children's music group The Wiggles
Lenny Pearce, singer, dancer, and member of Justice Crew
Mick Pennisi, basketball player
Chad Peralta, singer
Marlisa Punzalan, winner of the sixth series of The X Factor Australia
Iain Ramsay, professional football (soccer) player. Has chosen to represent the Philippines national football team at the international level.
James Reid, actor, singer, and dancer
Lauren Reid, model, actress, events and television host, and blogger
Sheldon Riley, singer, 2022 Australian Eurovision representative, The Voice Australia Season 7 2nd runner-up, The X Factor Australia Season 8 finalist
Nina Robertson, beauty queen crowned Miss Earth Australia 2017
Marissa Saroca, singer and The Voice of the Philippines Season 1 contestant
Nicole Schmitz, beauty queen and model crowned Binibining Pilipinas 2012, Miss International 2012 Top 15 finalist
Naomi Sequeira, actress and singer, Hanging with Adam & Naomi, The Evermoor Chronicles
Monique Shippen, model, singer and beauty queen crowned Miss Earth Australia 2018 and Miss International Australia 2019
Flip Simmons, theatre actor and musician
Starley, singer
Calmell Teagle, singer, The X Factor Australia Season 8 finalist, and former AYA member
Melanie Vallejo, actress from the TV series Power Rangers: Mystic Force
Michelle Vergara Moore, actress from the TV series The Time of Our Lives
Matthew Victor Pastor, film director
Iya Villania, singer, actress and model
Cyrus Villanueva, winner of the seventh series of The X Factor Australia
Craig Wing, Australian Rugby League player (South Sydney Rabbitohs)
Trinity Young, singer and The Voice Kids Australia contestant
Gwen Zamora, actress and model"
Filipino Australians,"See also
Australia–Philippines relations
Embassy of the Philippines, Canberra"
Filipino Australians,"References
External links
The Philippine Consulate General in Sydney
Embassy of the Philippines in Canberra
Pinoy Australia Information Forum
Bayanihan The Community Newspaper of Australia
Ang Kalatas Newspaper
Filipin-Oz News of Filipino's in Australia and Business Directory
Philtimes.com.au Australia's Filipino newspaper"
Indian Australians,"Indian Australians or Indo-Australians are Australians of Indian ancestry. This includes both those who are Australian by birth, and those born in India or elsewhere in the Indian diaspora. Indian Australians are one of the largest groups within the Indian diaspora, with 783,958 persons declaring Indian ancestry at the 2021 census, representing 3.1% of the Australian population. In 2019, the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated that 721,050 Australian residents were born in India.
Indians are the youngest average age (34 years) and the fastest growing community both in terms of absolute numbers and percentages in Australia.
In 2017–18 India was the largest source of new permanent annual migrants to Australia since 2016, and overall third largest source nation of cumulative total migrant population behind England and China, 20.5% or 33,310 out of 162,417 Australian permanent resident visas went to the Indians who also additionally had 70,000 students were studying in Australian universities and colleges, and Hindi (ranked 8th with 0.7% of total population) and Punjabi (ranked 10th with 0.6% of total population) are among the top 10 languages spoken in Australia. Among Indian origin religions, which also include non-Indians, are Buddhist (2.4% of total population or 563,700 people), Hindus (1.9% or 440,300) and Sikhs (0.5% or 125,900).
As of 2016, Indians were the highest educated migrant group in Australia with 54.6% of Indians in Australia having a bachelor's or higher degree, more than three times Australia's national average.
The long history of Indian migration to Australia has progressed ""from 18th-century sepoys and lascars (soldiers and sailors) aboard visiting European ships, through 19th-century migrant labourers and the 20th century's hostile policies to the new generation of skilled professional migrants of the 21st century... India became the largest source of skilled migrants in the 21st century."""
Indian Australians,"History
Pre-history migration of Indians (2300 BCE–2000 BCE)
A study of Indigenous Australian DNA has found that Indigenous Australians may have mixed with people of Indian origin about 4,200 years ago. The same study showed that flint tools and Indian dogs may have been introduced from India at about this time. A 2012 paper reports that there is also evidence of a substantial genetic flow from India to northern Australia estimated at slightly over four thousand years ago, a time when changes in tool technology and food processing appear in the Australian archaeological record, suggesting that these may be related. One genetic study in 2012 by Irina Pugach and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology has suggested that about 4,000 years before the First Fleet landed in Australia (in 1788), some Indian explorers had settled in Australia and assimilated into the local population in roughly 2217 BC. The study by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology found that there was a migration of genes from India to Australia around 2000 BCE. The researchers had two theories for this: either some Indians had contact with people in Indonesia who eventually transferred those genes from India to Aboriginal Australians, or that a group of Indians migrated all the way from India to Australia and intermingled with the locals directly."
Indian Australians,"Indian connection with European exploration of Australia (1627–1787)
Most early explorations of Australia by various European colonial powers had an Indian connection. Indians had been employed for a long time on the European ships trading in Colonial India and the East Indies. Many of the early voyages to the Pacific either started or terminated in India and many of these ships were wrecked in the uncharted waters of the South Pacific. In 1606, the Dutch East India Company's ship, Duyfken, led by Willem Janszoon, made the first documented European landing in Australia. In 1627 the south coast of Australia was accidentally discovered by the Dutch East India Company explorer François Thijssen and named 't Land van Pieter Nuyts, in honour of the highest ranking passenger, Pieter Nuyts, extraordinary Councillor of India. In 1628 a squadron of Dutch East India Company ships was sent by the Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies Pieter de Carpentier to explore the northern coast. These ships made extensive examinations, particularly in the Gulf of Carpentaria, named in honour of de Carpentier. 
Alexander Dalrymple (1737–1808), the Examiner of Sea Journals for the British East India Company, whilst translating some Spanish documents captured by Indian sepoys during the 1762 CE occupation of Philippines by the British India, found Portuguese navigator Luis Váez de Torres's testimony which led Dalrymple to discover and publish in 1770–1771 the existence of an unknown continent which he named as Terra Australis (or Southern Continent), this aroused widespread interest and prompted the British government in 1769 to order James Cook in HM Bark Endeavour to seek out the Southern Continent, which was discovered in June 1767 by Samuel Wallis in HMS Dolphin and named by him King George Island. The London press reported in June 1768 that two ships would be sent to the newly discovered island and from there to ""attempt the Discovery of the Southern Continent"". The British East India Trade Committee recommended in 1823 that a settlement be established on the coast of northern Australia to forestall the Dutch, and Captain J.J.G. Bremer, RN, was commissioned to form a settlement between Bathurst Island and the Cobourg Peninsula."
Indian Australians,"Colonial era (1788–1900)
Indian immigration from British India to Australia began early in history of Australian colony. The first Indians arrived in Australia with the British settlers who had been living in India.
The people of the first British fleet to establish a new colony, which landed on 26 January 1788, included seamen, marines and their families, government officials, and a large number of convicts, including women and children. All had been tried and convicted in Great Britain and almost all of them in England. However, many are known to have come to England from other parts of Great Britain and, especially, from Ireland; at least 12 were identified as black (born in India, Britain, Africa, the West Indies, North America, or a European country or its colony).: 421–4 
 In 1788, Indian crews from Bay of Bengal came to Australia on trading ships. After establishment of first European colony in Sydney in Australia in 1788 by the colonial British Indian Empire under the British East India Company, the company had exclusive right on control of all trade to and from the penal colony. These colonies multiplied and expanded to include whole Australia, various Islands in Oceania, initially colonies were established under the British Indian Empire including New Zealand which was administered as part of New South Wales until 1841.
Between 1788 and 1868 on board 806 ships in all about 164,000 convicts were transported to the Australian colonies, 1% were from the British outposts in India and Canada, Maoris from New Zealand, Chinese from Hong Kong and slaves from the Caribbean. British colonial convict ships from Britain and elsewhere to Australia frequently stopped over in India, many of which were built in India, and among those ships with convicts started the initial sail from India include HMS Duchess of York which sailed from Bengal in India and arrived at Port Jackson on 4 April 1807 carrying merchandise and rice also transported two military convicts, Hunter arrived on 20 August 1810, Indian arrived on 16 December 1810, Amboyna arrived in Australia on 1 January 1822, Cawdry arrived on 1 January 1826 from India and Ceylon, Edward Lombes on 6 January 1833, and Swallow arrived on 23 October 1836. Almorah sailed from Britain and stopped over at Madras and Bengal in 1818.
In the late 1830s, more Indians started to arrive in Australia as indentured labourers when the penal transport of convicts to New South Wales (which at the time also consisted of Queensland and Victoria) was slowing, before being abolished altogether in 1840. The lack of manual labourers from the convict assignment system led to an increase demand for foreign labour, which was partly filled by the arrival of Indians who came from an agrarian background in India, and thus fulfilled their tasks as farm labourers on cane fields and shepherds on sheep stations well. In 1844, P. Friell who had previously lived in India, brought 25 domestic workers from India to Sydney and these included a few women and children. Among the earliest Indians was a Hindu Sindhi merchant, Shri Pammull, who after arrived in 1850s built a family opal trade in Melbourne which still prosperously continues with his fourth-generation descendants. ""Initially, the migrants from India were indentured labourers, who worked on sheep stations and farms around Australia. Some adventurers followed during the gold rush of the 1850s. A census from 1861 indicates that there were around 200 Indians in Victoria of whom 20 were in Ballarat, the town which was at the epicenter of the gold rush.  Thereafter, many more came and worked as hawkers - going from house to house, town to town, traversing thousands of kilometers, making a living by selling a variety of products.""
From the 1860s, Indians, most of them Sikh, worked as merchants, industrialists, and businessmen to operate throughout outback Australia, as 'pioneers of the inland'. The 1881 census records 998 people who were born in India but this had grown to over 1700 by 1891.
Between 1860s to 1900 period when small groups of cameleers were also shipped in and out of Australia at three-year intervals, to service South Australia's inland pastoral industry by carting goods and transporting wool bales by camel trains, who were commonly referred to as ""Afghans"" or ""Ghans"", despite their origin often being mainly from British India, and some even from Afghanistan and Egypt and Turkey. Majority of cameleers, including Indian cameleers, were Muslims with a sizeable minority were Sikhs from Punjab region, they set up camel-breeding stations and rest house outposts, known as caravanserai, throughout inland Australia, creating a permanent link between the coastal cities and the remote cattle and sheep grazing stations until about the 1930s, when they were largely replaced by the automobile."
Indian Australians,"Since Federation (1901–present)
During the White Australia policy
From federation in 1901 until the 1960s, immigration of non-Europeans, including Indians, into Australia was restricted due to the enactment of the White Australia policy. The laws made it impossible for Indians to enter the country unless they were merchants or students, who themselves were only allowed in for short periods of time. Historians place the number of Indians in Australia at federation in 1901 somewhere between 4700 and 7600. According to the 1911 census, there was only 3698 'Indians' signifying a large decrease, with the trend continuing, with only approximately 2200 'Indians' in the country in 1921. After 1901 Immigration Restriction Act was introduced by the Australian Government the migration [of non-white migrants] from India was curtailed, but following India's independence from Britain in 1947, the number of Indian-born Anglo-western white British citizens emigrating to Australia increased, along with migration of mixed race European-Indians, such as Anglo-Indians, Dutch Anglo-Indians and Portuguese Indians. The 1901 Immigration Restriction Act, one of the first laws passed by the new Australian parliament, which was the centrepiece of the White Australia Policy aimed to restrict immigration from Asia, where the population was vastly greater and the standard of living vastly lower and was similar to measures taken in other settler societies such as the United States, Canada and New Zealand. While Labor Party wanted to protect ""white"" jobs and pushed for clearer restrictions, Free Trade Party's MP Bruce Smith said he had ""no desire to see low-class Indians, Chinamen or Japanese...swarming into this country... But there is obligation...not (to) unnecessarily offend the educated classes of those nations""."
Indian Australians,"During World War I (1914–1918) Indian and Australian troops were deployed together in several sectors, including in Europe, Middle East, Africa, Egypt and Turkey. During Gallipoli Campaign the Australians and New Zealanders troops were deployed to take part in the operation, although they were outnumbered by the British, Indian and French contingents, a fact which is often overlooked today by many Australians and New Zealanders. Australian nurses also staffed 10 British colonial hospitals in India.
During World War II (1939–1945) the hundreds of Australians were posted to British units in Burma and India. Hundreds of Australians also served with RAF units in India and Burma, and in May 1943 330 Australians were serving in forty-one squadrons in India, of which only nine had more than ten Australians. In addition, many of the RAN's corvettes and destroyers served with the British Eastern Fleet where they were normally used to protect convoys in the Indian Ocean from attacks by Japanese and German submarines."
Indian Australians,"Under multiculturalism
The end of White Australia policy saw a boom in migration of middle-class skilled professionals, by 2016 over 2 in every 3 migrants who arrived were skilled professionals mainly from India, UK, China, South Africa and Philippines, ""to work as doctors and nurses, human-resources and marketing professionals, business managers, IT specialists, and engineers...who were not fleeing war or poverty. The Indians in Australia are predominantly male, while the Chinese are majority female."" Indians are the largest migrant ethnic group in Melbourne and Adelaide, fourth largest in Brisbane, and likely to jump from third place to second place in Sydney by 2021. In Melbourne, the suburbs of Docklands, Footscray, Sunshine, Truganina, Tarneit and Pakenham have higher concentration of Indians specially the students. In Sydney, Parramatta [and neighbouring suburbs such as Harris Park and Westmead, etc.] have higher concentration of migrants. By 2019, the number of Indians grew at nine times the annual national average growth, and number of overseas student visas and post-study work visas also exploded.
Between 2007 and 2010, the violence against Indians in Australia controversy took place, and a subsequent Indian Government investigation concluded that, of 152 reported racially motivated assaults against Indian students in Australia in 2009, 23 involved racial overtones. In the year 2007–2008, 1,447 Indians had been victims of crime including assaults and robberies in the state of Victoria in Australia. In either case, the Victorian police refused to release the data for public scrutiny, the stated reason being that it was ""problematic: as well as 'subjective and open to interpretation'"". Indian media have accused the Australian authorities of being denialist. On 9 June 2009, Indian Prime Minister, addressing the Indian Parliament said that ""he was 'appalled' by the senseless violence and crime, some of which are racist in nature,"" Indian students held protests in Melbourne and Sydney, which were sparked by an earlier attack on Indians by Lebanese Australian men."
Indian Australians,"Demographics
783,958 persons declared Indian ancestry (whether alone or in combination with another ancestry) at the 2021 census, representing 3.1% of the Australian population. In 2019, the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated that 721,050 Australian residents were born in India.
At the 2021 census the states with the largest number of people nominating Indian ancestry were: New South Wales (350,770), Victoria (250,103), Queensland (93,648), Western Australia (77,357) and South Australia (43,598).
In 2009 there were an additional 90,000 Indian students studying at Australian tertiary institutions according to Prime Minister Rudd."
Indian Australians,"Historical population trends
This table only reflects the people who were born in India, and not all the people who have the Indian ancestry such as the second generation Indian Australians or the first generation Indian Australians from Indian diaspora nations e.g. Fiji, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Suriname, Guyana, etc. Prior to 1947 India's Independence and simultaneous partition, the Pakistani Australian and Bangladeshi Australian as nations did not exist as these were part of British India, hence these are also included in the demography of Australian Indians till 1947."
Indian Australians,"Indian languages
Hindi and Punjabi languages, with 159,652 and 132,496 speakers, are among top 10 language spoken at home in Australia. Other Indian languages and their respecting speaker in Australia are Tamil (50,161), Bengali (54,566), Malayalam (53,206), Gujarati (52,888), Telugu (58,435), Marathi (13,055), Kannada (9,701), Konkani (2,416), Sindhi (1,592), Kashmiri (215), and Odia (721). Number of Hindi speakers by state in 2018, were NSW (67,034), Victoria (51,241), Queensland (18,163), Western Australia (10,747), South Australia (7,310), ACT (3,646), NT (852), and Tasmania (639). 81% of Punjabi speakers are Sikhs, 13.3% are Hindus and 1.4% are Muslims."
Indian Australians,"Religion
With 92.6% of Indian Australians being religious, Indian Australians are a much more religious group than Australia as a whole (Australia being 46.1% irreligious), but less religious than India itself which is 99.7% religious. While India is 79.8% Hindu, 14.2% Muslim, 2.3% Christian, and 1.7% Sikh, Indian Australians are 45.0% Hindu, 20.8% Sikh, 10.3% Catholic, and 6.6% Muslim, with a significant over-representation of Sikhs and Christians and an under-representation of Hindus and Muslims."
Indian Australians,"Socio-economic status
In 2016, it was revealed 54.6% of Indian migrants in Australia hold a bachelor's degree or a higher educational degree, more than three times Australia's national average of 17.2% in 2011, making them the most educated demographic group in Australia.
India annually contributes the largest number of migrants to both Australia and New Zealand. According to census figures from 2016, among India-born residents in Australia, the median income was $785, higher than the corresponding figure for all overseas-born residents at $615, and all Australia-born residents at $688."
Indian Australians,"In popular media
""Indians and the Antipodes: Networks, Boundaries and Circulation"" 2018 book edited by Sekhar Bandyopadhyay and Jane Buckingham ""is the first book that seeks to juxtapose histories of Indian migration to Australia and New Zealand in a comparative framework to show their interconnectedness as well as dissimilarities. Side by side with stories of collective suffering and struggles of the diaspora, it focuses on individual resilience, enterprise and social mobility. It analyses 'White Australia' and 'White New Zealand' policies of the early twentieth century to point to their interconnected histories. It also looks critically at the more recent migration, its changing nature and the challenges it poses to both the migrant communities and the host societies."""
Indian Australians,"Notable Indian Australians
Indian ancestry
Anupam Sharma, Filmmaker, Australia Day Ambassador, film entrepreneur
Astra Sharma, Tennis player
Aravind Adiga, Novelist, winner of the 2008 Man Booker Prize
Purushottama Bilimoria, Professor at Deakin University
Anusha Dandekar, Actress
Shibani Dandekar, Actress
Chennupati Jagadish AC, pioneer in nanotechnology
Zinnia Kumar Scientist and International Fashion Model
Kersi Meher-Homji, Journalist and Author
Mahesh Jadu, Actor
Maria Thattil, Activist, Beauty Queen and Model of South Indian descent who was crowned Miss Universe Australia 2020 and placed Top 10 at Miss Universe 2020
Marc Fennell, film critic, technology journalist, radio personality, author and television presenter
Tharini Mudaliar, Singer and Actress who played a role in The Matrix Revolutions and Xena: Warrior Princess
Indira Naidoo, Newsreader
Neel Kolhatkar, Comedian
Pankaj Oswal, controversial businessman, accused of embezzlement
Vimala Raman, Actress
Chandrika Ravi, Actress
Pallavi Sharda, Actress
Partho Sen-Gupta, Filmmaker
Lisa Sthalekar, Captain of Australia Women's cricket team
Mathai Varghese, Mathematician and Professor at the University of Adelaide
Peter Varghese, Diplomat and Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (Australia)
Akshay Venkatesh, Mathematician
Kaushaliya Vaghela, former Victorian politician, community leader.
Guy Sebastian, Winner of 2003 Australian Idol, Singer and Songwriter
Isha Sharvani, Bollywood actress"
Indian Australians,"European–Indian ancestry
Prue Car, ALP MP for Londonderry in New South Wales
Christabel Chamarette, Senator from Western Australia from 1992 to 1996
Stuart Clark, Australian Cricketer
Chris Crewther, former Liberal MP for Dunkley
Samantha Downie, Australia's Next Top Model Contestant, Model
Jeremy Fernandez, ABC weekend presenter and reporter
Lisa Haydon, Bollywood Actress
Samantha Jade, Singer, Songwriter and Actress
Sam Kerr, Footballer
Daniel Kerr, Australian rules footballer
Roger Kerr, Australian rules footballer
Jordan McMahon, Australian rules footballer
Lauren Moss, ALP MP for Casuarina in the Northern Territory
Clancee Pearce, Australian Rules Footballer for Fremantle Football Club
Eric Pearce, former Hockey Player who represented Australia in 4 Olympics
Julian Pearce, former Hockey Player who represented Australia in 45 international matches
Rex Sellers, Cricketer and Leg Spinner who played for Australia in India in 1964
Dave Sharma, former Liberal MP for Wentworth
Lisa Singh, former ALP Senator representing Tasmania
Terry Walsh, Australian Hockey Player and Coach
Anne Warner, former Minister for Aboriginal and Islander Affairs, Queensland Labor Government
Rhys Williams, Professional footballer"
Indian Australians,"In fiction
Chloe Frazer, character from the Uncharted video game series."
Indian Australians,"See also
Australia–India relations
Fijian-Indian Australians
Non-resident Indian and person of Indian origin
Pakistani Australians
Bangladeshi Australians
Punjabi Australians
Australian Sikh Heritage Trail
Man Mohan Singh (pilot)
Romani people in Australia"
Indian Australians,"References
External links
Indian Magazine and Newspaper in Australia
Indians Living in Australia
Indian Communities in Australia"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Stations that are not included in the list are genuine internet radio stations that are not traditional AM, FM or DAB. The explanation of new internet radio broadcasting from the cloud and relying only on Wi-Fi can be found at Internet radio.
This is a list of radio stations that broadcast in Australia that are not internet radio stations.
The first digit of the callsign represents the state or territory: 1: ACT, 2: NSW and ACT, 3: VIC, 4: QLD, 5: SA, 6: WA, 7: TAS, 8: NT."
List of radio stations in Australia,"Australian Capital Territory (ACT)
Canberra
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,FM
List of radio stations in Australia,DAB+
List of radio stations in Australia,"New South Wales
Sydney Area
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,FM
List of radio stations in Australia,"Northeast
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,FM
List of radio stations in Australia,"Albury
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz – Raw FM – Dance Radio – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz – Faith FM – Religious station – Narrowcast
89.5 MHz – SBS Radio 1 – Multicultural Radio
98.5 MHz – The Light – Christian Community
99.3 MHz – Sky Sports Radio – Relay of Racing Radio – Narrowcast
100.9 MHz – ABC News Radio – Continuous news plus parliamentary broadcasts
101.7 MHz – 2APH – Vision Australia Radio (Radio For The Print Handicapped)
103.3 MHz – triple j – ABC National Youth Network
104.1 MHz – ABC Classic – Classical Music
104.9 MHz – Hit104.9 The Border – Southern Cross Austereo
105.7 MHz – Triple M The Border 105.7 – Southern Cross Austereo
106.5 MHz – ABC Goulburn Murray – ABC Local Radio
107.3 MHz – 2REM 107.3FM – Albury–Wodonga Community Radio
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"990 kHz – ABC Radio National
1494 kHz – 2AY – Ace Radio Network
1611 kHz – Vision Christian Radio
1701 kHz – SBS Radio 2 – Multicultural Radio
Note: Albury–Wodonga are twin cities, with Albury in New South Wales and Wodonga in Victoria. Therefore, listings of radio stations in either category can be received in both areas."
List of radio stations in Australia,"Alectown
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Armidale
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.8 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
92.1 MHz 2ARM – Community radio
100.3 MHz FM 100.3 – Broadcast Operations Group
101.1 MHz triple j – ABC
101.9 MHz ABC New England North West – ABC
103.5 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
104.3 MHz Sky Sports Radio Sky Channel – Relay of racing radio
106.9 MHz TUNE! FM – University of New England
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"720 kHz Radio National – ABC
1134 kHz 2AD – Broadcast Operations Group"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Ballina
87.6 MHz Three Angels Broadcasting Network – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing Narrowcast
101.9 MHz Paradise FM (2PAR) – Community radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Banora Point
87.8 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Baradine
89.7 MHz Fly Mega 89.7 – Narrowcast
88.8 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
93.0 MHz St. Louis Island – Narrowcast
97.2 MHz Radio SBS Australia – Narrowcast
97.5 MHz ABC News – Narrowcast
99.0 MHz Popular Australia – Narrowcast
100.0 MHz Music Gallery 100 – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Batemans Bay
87.8 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
100.5 MHz ABC News – ABC
101.9 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
103.5 MHz ABC South East – ABC
104.3 MHz Power FM – East Coast Radio
105.1 MHz Radio National – ABC
105.9 MHz 2EC – East Coast Radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Batlow
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Bathurst
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.9 MHz SBS Radio – Special Broadcasting Service – Multicultural
92.3 MHz 2MCE – Charles Sturt University – Community radio
95.1 MHz 2BS (formerly 2BS GOLD on 1503 AM) – Bathurst Broadcasters Pty Ltd
95.9 MHz triple j – ABC
96.7 MHz Radio National – ABC
97.5 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
98.3 MHz ABC News – ABC
99.3 MHz 2BXS – B-Rock FM – Bathurst Broadcasters Pty Ltd
100.1 MHz Life FM 100.1 – Bathurst Christian Broadcasters
100.9 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Tabcorp – Horse racing narrowcast
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.1 MHz Burraga Relay
89.3 MHz Blayney Relay
90.1 MHz Sofala Relay
1629 kHz Goanna Radio (Country music)"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Bega
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"93.7 MHz Edge FM – Community radio
99.3 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
100.1 MHz triple j – ABC
100.9 MHz Radio National – ABC
102.5 MHz Power FM – East Coast Radio
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"765 kHz 2EC – East Coast Radio
810 kHz ABC South East NSW – ABC"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Berridale
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Bombala
87.6 MHz GT-FM – Music Station – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
90.9 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing Radio – Narrowcast
91.7 MHz Snow FM – Relay of 97.7FM Cooma
92.5 MHz 2XLFM – Relay of 96.1fm Cooma
94.1 MHz ABC South East – ABC Local Radio
103.7 MHz Monaro FM – Community radio
Note: Most Services listed in the Bega, Eden & Cooma sections can also be heard in Bombala"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Bonalbo
91.3 MHz ABC North Coast – ABC Local Radio
92.1 MHz Radio National – ABC"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Bourke
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.0 MHz Radio Info – Tourist Radio
94.5 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
96.1 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Repeater of 1017 kHz Sydney – Tabcorp
98.5 MHz SBS Radio – SBS
100.1 MHz triple j – ABC
101.1 MHz Radio National – ABC
106.5 MHz 2CUZ – Indigenous community radio
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"585 kHz Outback Radio 2WEB – Community radio
657 kHz ABC Western Plains – ABC"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Bowral
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.0 MHz Oldies narrowcast
92.5 MHz Youth Radio – Community radio
102.9 MHz 2ST – Relay of 999 – Australian Radio Network
107.1 MHz Highland FM – Community radio
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,1215 kHz KIX Country – Australian Radio Network – Narrowcast Country music
List of radio stations in Australia,"Brewarrina
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Broken Hill
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Hype FM – Dance Music Radio Station – Narrowcast
94.9 MHz Cross FM – Narrowcast
100.5 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing/Sport – Narrowcast
102.1 MHz triple j – ABC National Youth Network
102.9 MHz Radio National – ABC
103.7 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
104.5 MHz ABC News – ABC
106.9 MHz Hill FM – Broadcast Operations Group
107.7 MHz 2DRY – Community radio
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"567 kHz 2BH
999 kHz ABC Broken Hill – ABC Local Radio
1656 kHz Radio 1656 AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Byron Bay
87.6 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing Narrowcast
88.0 MHz Three Angels Broadcasting Network – Narrowcast
99.9 MHz Bay FM (2BAY) – Community radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Casino
87.6 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing Narrowcast
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
107.9 MHz 2COW – Community radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Cobar
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.8 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
101.3 MHz triple j – ABC
102.9 MHz Cobarfm 102.9 – Community radio [1]
103.7 MHz Zoo FM – Broadcast Operations Group – Relay of 92.7 Dubbo
104.5 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing Radio Narrowcast
105.3 MHz SBS Radio 1 – SBS
106.1 MHz ABC Western Plains – ABC Local Radio
106.9 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
107.7 MHz Radio National – ABC
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,972 kHz 2DU – Broadcast Operations Group – Relay of 1251 Dubbo
List of radio stations in Australia,"Coffs Harbour
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Fine Music FM – Oldies narrowcast
88.0 MHz Raw FM – Dance Music narrowcast
91.5 MHz triple j – ABC
92.3 MHz ABC Coffs Coast – ABC Local Radio
100.5 MHz 2HC – Broadcast Operations Group
105.5 MHz Hit105.5 Coffs Coast – Southern Cross Austereo
106.3 MHz Triple M Coffs Coast – Southern Cross Austereo
107.1 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing Radio – Narrowcast
107.9 MHz 2AIR – Community radio
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,639 kHz 2HC – Broadcast Operations Group
List of radio stations in Australia,"Condobolin
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Cooma
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
90.5 MHz Monaro FM – Community radio
95.3 MHz Radio National – ABC
96.1 MHz 2XL – Capital Radio Network
96.9 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing Radio – Narrowcast
97.7 MHz Snow FM – Capital Radio Network
106.5 MHz SBS Radio 1 – SBS National Radio
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"1602 kHz ABC South East – ABC
Note: ABC Services listed in the Bega/Eden area section can also be heard in Cooma"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Coonamble
91.9 MHz 2MTM FM – Community radio
91.1 MHz Outback Radio 2WEB – Community radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Cootamundra
87.6 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing Radio-Narrowcast
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
102.9 MHz SBS Radio 1 – SBS
107.7 MHz Roccy FM – Broadcast Operations Group – Relay of 93.9 From Young"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Coraki
88.0 MHz Three Angels Broadcasting Network – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Corowa
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Cowra
87.8 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
95.9 MHz SBS Radio 1
99.5 MHz Roccy FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Deniliquin
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing narrowcast
99.3 MHz Radio National – ABC
100.9 MHz ABC News
102.5 MHz FM102.5 – North East Broadcasters
106.1 MHz FM Relay of 2QN
107.3 MHz SBS Radio 1 – SBS
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,1521 kHz 2QN – North East Broadcasters
List of radio stations in Australia,"Dubbo
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Country Mix – Country music
88.0 MHz Tourist Information Radio – tourist information and information about the area
88.9 MHz DCFM 88.9 – Dubbo Community Broadcasters – variety of music and talk
90.3 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing Radio
91.1 MHz Zoo FM – Broadcast Operations Group – Dubbo CBD Translator
92.7 MHz Zoo FM – Broadcast Operations Group
93.5 MHz Triple M Dubbo – Southern Cross Austereo
94.3 MHz Rhema FM – Community Christian
95.9 MHz ABC Western Plains – ABC
100.5 MHz SBS Radio – SBS
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,1251 kHz 2DU – Broadcast Operations Group
List of radio stations in Australia,"Eden
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz KIX Country – Australian Radio Network – Narrowcast country music
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
104.7 MHz Eden FM – Community radio
105.5 MHz 2EC – Relay of 765 kHz Bega – Australian Radio Network
107.1 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing Radio
107.9 MHz Radio National – ABC
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"1620 kHz Rete Italia – Italian Radio
Note: ABC Services listed in the Bega/Eden area section can also be heard in Cooma"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Evans Head
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing Narrowcast
88.9 MHz 88.9 FM (2RBR) – Community radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Forbes
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Forster & Tuncurry
93.5 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing Radio
101.5 MHz 2GLA – Great Lakes FM
100.3 MHz 2RE – Local Relay"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Glen Innes
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
106.7 2GEM FM (Translator of 93.5 Inverell)"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Gloucester
97.7 MHz The Breeze – Rebel Media
99.3 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing Radio – Narrowcast
100.1 MHz 2RE – Broadcast Operations Group – Relay from 1557
100.9 MHz ABC Mid North Coast – ABC Local Radio
102.5 MHz Radio National – ABC
103.3 MHz Max FM – Broadcast Operations Group – Relay from 107.3"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Goonellabah
87.6 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing Radio – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz Three Angels Broadcasting Network – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Gosford
FM
88.0 MHz Raw FM – Narrowcast dance music
92.5 MHz ABC Central Coast – ABC
93.3 MHz Radio Five-O-Plus – Oldies community radio
94.1 MHz todayscountry94one – Country music community radio
94.9 MHz Rhema Central Coast – Christian community
96.3 MHz CoastFM963 – Community radio
97.3 MHz Radio Yesteryear – Oldies community radio
98.1 MHz ABC NewsRadio – ABC
101.3 MHz Hit101.3 Central Coast – Southern Cross Austereo
104.5 MHz Star 104.5 FM – Nova Entertainment
107.7 MHz Triple M Central Coast – Southern Cross Austereo
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,801 kHz SEN Track – Sports Entertainment Network
List of radio stations in Australia,"Goulburn
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Raw FM
88.7 MHz triple j – ABC
89.5 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
90.3 MHz ABC Local Radio – ABC
93.5 MHz Eagle FM – (Capital Radio Network)
94.3 MHz Sky Sports Radio Racing Radio
99.9 MHz ABC NewsRadio – ABC
100.7 MHz KIX Country – (Capital Radio Network)
103.3 MHz 2GCR
107.7 MHz GNFM – Capital Radio Network
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,1098 kHz ABC Radio National – ABC
List of radio stations in Australia,"Grafton
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz – Narrowcast
87.8 MHz (West Grafton) – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz – Narrowcast
91.5 MHz triple j – ABC
92.3 MHz ABC Mid North Coast – ABC
97.9 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
99.5 MHz Radio National – ABC
101.5 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing Radio
103.1 MHz 2CVC Loving Life FM – Community Christian
103.9 MHz 2GF/T (Maclean) – Broadcast Operations Group
104.7 MHz 2CLR Archived 19 July 2008 at the Wayback Machine – Broadcast Operations Group
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"738 kHz ABC North Coast – ABC
1206 kHz 2GF – Broadcast Operations Group
1611 kHz Radio 16 NTC
1629 kHz Rete Italia – Italian-language"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Griffith
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing Radio
87.8 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
92.7 MHz SBS Radio – SBS
95.1 MHz 2MIA – Community radio
96.5 MHz triple j – ABC
97.3 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
98.1 MHz ABC News – ABC
98.9 MHz ABC Radio National
99.7 MHz hit99.7 Riverina MIA – Southern Cross Austereo
100.5 MHz ABC Riverina – ABC
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"963 kHz Triple M Riverina MIA – Southern Cross Austereo
1611 kHz Rete Italia – Italian Radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Gulgong
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Magic 87.6 – Classic Hits – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Gunnedah
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.8 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
97.5 MHz 2GGG – Broadcast Operations Group
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,1080 kHz 2MO – Broadcast Operations Group
List of radio stations in Australia,"Henty
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
96.7 MHz 2GHR Greater Hume Radio – Community radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Holbrook
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
96.7 MHz 2GHR Greater Hume Radio – Community radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Inverell
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
95.1 MHz Gem FM – Commercial
91.9 MHz STA FM Community Radio
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,1188 kHz 2NZ – Commercial
List of radio stations in Australia,"Ivanhoe
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Jindabyne
93.9 MHz Monaro FM – Community radio
94.7 MHz Snow FM – Relay of 97.7 MHz Cooma – Capital Radio Network
95.5 MHz ABC South East – ABC Local Radio
96.3 MHz 2XL – Relay of 918 kHz Cooma – Capital Radio Network
97.1 MHz Radio National – ABC
102.7 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing Radio – Narrowcast
104.3 MHz SBS Radio 1 – SBS"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Kandos
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Magic 87.6 – Classic hits - Narrowcast
88.0 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing Radio - Narrowcast
97.9 MHz [Real FM]"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Kangaroo Valley
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Katoomba
87.6 MHz Vintage FM
89.1 MHz BLU FM (2BLU) – Community radio
96.1 MHz CADA – Australian Radio Network
99.5 MHz Move FM – Midwest Radio Network
101.1 MHz 2LT – Midwest Radio Network"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Kempsey
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
103.1 MHz TANK FM (2WET) – Community radio
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,684 kHz ABC Mid North Coast – ABC
List of radio stations in Australia,"Kyogle
87.6 MHz Adventist Radio Australia – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing Narrowcast
104.3 MHz 2LM/T – Commercial"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Lightning Ridge
87.6 MHz Three Angels Broadcasting Network
89.7 MHz Opal FM – Community radio
90.5 MHz 2WEB ""Outback Radio"" – Community radio
91.3 MHz Now FM – Broadcast Operations Group – Relay of 98.3
92.1 MHz ABC Western Plains – ABC
92.9 MHz 2VM – Broadcast Operations Group – Relay of 1530
93.7 MHz Radio National – ABC
94.5 MHz SBS Radio – SBS
96.1 MHz 2CUZ – Community radio
98.5 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing Radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Lismore
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"900 kHz 2LM – Commercial
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz (South Lismore) Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
87.8 MHz Three Angels Broadcasting Network – Narrowcast
92.9 MHz River FM (2NCR) – Community radio
94.5 MHz ABC North Coast – ABC
95.3 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
96.1 MHz triple j – ABC
96.9 MHz ABC Radio National – ABC
98.5 MHz News Radio – ABC
98.9 MHz SBS Radio – SBS
100.9 MHz Triple Z FM (2ZZZ) – Commercial"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Lithgow
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"89.7 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing Radio
90.5 MHz EZY FM – Community radio
92.1 MHz ABC Radio National
101.1 MHz 2LT Blue Mountains – Midwest Radio Network
107.9 MHz Move FM – Midwest Radio Network
99.5 MHz Move FM Blue Mountains – Midwest Radio Network
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"900 kHz 2LT – Midwest Radio Network
1395 kHz ABC Local Radio – ABC"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Menindee
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Moree
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.8 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
98.3 MHz Now FM – Broadcast Operations Group
102.1 MHz SBS Radio – SBS
103.7 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing Radio
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,1530 kHz 2VM – Broadcast Operations Group
List of radio stations in Australia,"Mount Victoria
87.8 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Mudgee
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Magic 87.6 – Classic hits - Narrowcast
87.8 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
90.9 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing Radio
93.1 MHz Real FM – Broadcast Operations Group
99.5 MHz ABC Western Plains – ABC
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,1449 kHz 2MG – Broadcast Operations Group
List of radio stations in Australia,"Mullumbimby
87.6 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing Narrowcast
88.0 MHz Three Angels Broadcasting Network – Narrowcast
103.5 MHz Radio 97 AM (2MW translator) – Commercial"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Murwillumbah
972 kHz Radio 97 AM (2MW) – Broadcast Operations Group
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Muswellbrook
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"981 kHz 2NM 981 AM – Australian Radio Network
1044 kHz ABC Upper Hunter – ABC
1512 kHz Radio National – ABC (Newcastle station)
103.5 MHz Merriwa relay
104.1 MHz Murrurundi relay
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"94.5 MHz KIX Country – Australian Radio Network Narrowcast Country music
98.1 MHz Power FM 98.1 FM – Australian Radio Network
102.7 MHz Merriwa relay
101.7 MHz Mount Helen FM (defunct)
103.3 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Sky Channel
104.9 MHz ABC NewsRadio
105.7 MHz ABC Upper Hunter – ABC
96.9 MHz Murrurundi relay
101.9 MHz Armidale relay
107.7 MHz Also on 100.1 Murrurundi"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Nambucca Heads
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
105.9 MHz 2NVR – Nambucca Valley community radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Narrabri
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"1611 kHz Gold 1611 Wee Waa – Narrowcast
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
91.3 MHz 2MAX FM – Community radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Narrandera
91.1 MHz Spirit FM – Community radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Nevertire
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Newcastle
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"1143 kHz 2HD – Broadcast Operations Group – News/Talk/Classic Hits
1233 kHz ABC Newcastle – ABC
1341 kHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing Radio
1413 kHz SBS Radio – Multilingual talk and music
1458 kHz NewsRadio – ABC
1512 kHz Radio National – ABC
1629 kHz Radio 1629 – 2HRN Radio 1629 Newcastle (Timeless Memories, Country, Easy Listening)
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.8 MHz Newy 87.8 FM
88.0 MHz Raw FM
96.5 MHz 2CHR Cessnock (Community)
99.7 MHz Rhema FM (Christian Community)
100.5 MHz 2RPH – Radio Print Handicapped Network – Radio reading service
102.1 MHz triple j – ABC (National)
102.9 MHz Triple M Newcastle – Southern Cross Austereo – Adult variety
103.7 MHz 2NUR FM – University of Newcastle – Talk/Features/Special Interest (Community)
105.3 MHz New FM – Broadcast Operations Group – Hot Adult Contemporary
106.1 MHz ABC Classic – ABC (National)
106.9 MHz hit106.9 Newcastle – Southern Cross Austereo – Top 40
Internet Radio Stations
Central Coast Radio.com – Locally based with local presenters playing all genres, interviews, talk back, uniquely different entertaining shows."
List of radio stations in Australia,"Nimbin
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
102.3 MHz 2NIM – Community radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Nimmitabel
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Orange
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.0 MHz HIT Country 88 – Ad-Vance Media Works
94.7 MHz 2MCE – Community radio
101.9 MHz triple j – ABC
103.5 MHz Rhema FM – Christian Community
105.1 MHz Triple M Central West – Southern Cross Austereo
105.9 MHz hit105.9 Central West – Southern Cross Austereo
106.7 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing Radio
107.5 MHz FM107.5 – Community radio
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"549 kHz ABC Central West
1089 kHz Radio 2EL
Digital"
List of radio stations in Australia,Slice Radio – adult contemporary
List of radio stations in Australia,"Parkes
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"91.5 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing Radio
95.5 MHz ROK FM – Broadcast Operations Group
97.9 MHz 2LVR|Valley FM – Lachlan Valley community radio
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,1404 kHz 2PK – Broadcast Operations Group
List of radio stations in Australia,"Peak Hill
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
89.5 MHz Peak Hill FM – Community radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Perisher
98.7 MHz 2XL – Capital Radio Network
101.9 MHz Snow FM – Capital Radio Network"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Port Macquarie
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Raw FM – Dance Music
87.8 MHz [Adventist Radio Australia – Narrowcast]
92.7 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing Radio
93.5 MHz Super Radio Mid North Coast FM93.5 Radio 531AM
95.5 MHz ABC Mid North Coast – ABC
96.3 MHz triple j – ABC
97.1 MHz Radio National – ABC
98.7 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
99.9 MHz Rhema FM – Christian Community
100.7 MHz Triple M Mid North Coast – Southern Cross Austereo
102.3 MHz hit Mid North Coast – Southern Cross Austereo
103.9 MHz 2WAY-FM – Community radio
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"531 kHz Super Radio Mid North Coast FM93.5 Radio 531 AM
756 kHz ABC Mid North Coast – ABC"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Port Stephens
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Riot FM – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz Bay FM 99.3 – Narrowcast
95.1 MHz News Radio – ABC
95.9 MHz ABC Newcastle – ABC
97.5 MHz 2HD/T – Broadcast Operations Group
98.3 MHz ABC Radio National – ABC
100.9 MHz Port Stephens FM (2PSR) – Community radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Quirindi
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,96.3 MHz Liverpool Plains 96.3 FM – Community radio
List of radio stations in Australia,"Tamworth
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 & 87.8 MHz Heartland FM – Country music
88.9 MHz Tamworth's 88.9 FM – Community radio
89.7 MHz Rhema FM – Christian Community
90.5 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing Radio
92.9 MHz 92.9fm Tamworth – Super Radio Network
93.9 MHz Radio National – ABC
94.7 MHz triple j – ABC
103.1 MHz ABC Classic FM – ABC
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"648 kHz ABC New England – ABC
1287 kHz 2TM – Broadcast Operations Group
1629 kHz Rete Italia – Italian Radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Taree & Wingham
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Three Angels Broadcasting Network
96.3 MHz 2JJJ – triple j
103.3 MHz 2TLP – Community radio – Ngarralinyi Radio
104.7 MHz 2BOB – Community radio
105.7 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing radio
106.5 MHz Rhema FM Manning Great Lakes – Christian radio
107.3 MHz Max FM – Broadcast Operations Group
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"756 kHz ABC Mid North Coast – ABC
1557 kHz 2RE – Broadcast Operations Group"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Tenterfield
87.8 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
89.7 MHz TEN-FM (2TEN) – Community radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Tumut
96.3 MHz Sounds of the Mountains – Community radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Wagga Wagga
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"89.5 MHz 1RPH – Radio for Print H/C
93.1 MHz hit93.1 Riverina – Southern Cross Austereo
103.1 MHz Gundagai Relay
95.5 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Relay Of Racing Radio
101.1 MHz triple j – ABC
90.7 MHz SW Slopes Relay
101.9 MHz Life FM – Christian Community
102.7 MHz ABC Riverina – ABC
89.9 MHz SW Slopes Relay
103.5 MHz SBS Radio – SBS
103.1 MHz Coolamon Relay
95.1 MHz Gundagai Relay
98.7 MHz Junee Relay
94.7 MHz Tumut Relay
104.3 MHz ABC Radio National – ABC
89.1 MHz SW Slopes Relay
105.1 MHz News radio – ABC
91.5 MHz SW Slopes Relay
105.9 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
88.3 MHz SW Slopes Relay
107.1 MHz 2AAA – Community radio
107.9 MHz South Wagga Relay
97.9 MHz Junee Relay
99.1 MHz Coolamon Relay
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"1152 kHz Triple M Riverina – (2WG) Southern Cross Austereo
100.7 MHz Gundagai Relay
107.9 MHz Tumut Relay
1620 kHz Rete Italia"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Walcha
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.5 MHz ABC New England – ABC
89.3 MHz 2NEB – Broadcast Operations Group
90.1 MHz Radio National – ABC
Note: Most Services listed in the Tamworth section can also be heard in Walcha"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Walgett
88.0 MHz [Adventist Radio Australia – Narrowcast]
97.9 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
105.1 MHz Now FM – Relay of 98.3 MHz Moree – Broadcast Operations Group
106.7 MHz 2VM – Relay of 1530 kHz Moree – Broadcast Operations Group
104.3 MHz Outback Radio 2WEB – Community radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Warren
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Wee Waa
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"1611 kHz – Wee Waa's Gold 1611 – Gold Music Talkback and Sport
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Wellington
91.5 MHz Binjang 91.5 – Binjang Community radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"West Wyalong
87.8 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"White Cliffs
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Wilcannia
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
103.1 MHz Wilcannia River Radio – Wilcannia River Radio – Keeping It Alive
99.9 MHz Outback Radio 2WEB – Community radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Wollongong/Nowra
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz [Faith FM]
90.9 MHz ABC NewsRadio – ABC
93.3 MHz 2RPH – Radio for Print H/C – Future Service
94.1 MHz 2LIV (NineFourOne) – Christian Community
94.9 MHz Power FM Nowra – Australian Radio Network
95.7 MHz ABC Classic – Classical Music
96.5 MHz 96.5 Wave FM – Australian Radio Network
97.3 MHz ABC Illawarra – ABC
98.1 MHz i98FM – WIN Corporation
98.9 MHz triple j – ABC
99.3 MHz 2MM – Relay of Sydney narrowcast Greek-language radio
99.7 MHz Mac FM – Macedonian language narrowcast
100.7 MHz Radio Hertz – Macedonian language radio
101.1 MHz KIX Country – Australian Radio Network – Country Music Narrowcast Wollongong
103.7 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing Radio
104.5 MHz Triple U FM – Nowra community radio
105.3 MHz KIX Country – Australian Radio Network – Country Music Narrowcast Wollongong
106.9 MHz VOX FM – Community radio
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"603 kHz ABC Radio National – Also on 1431 kHz
999 kHz 2ST Talk/Classic Hits (relays on 91.7 MHz/102.9 MHz/106.7 MHz)
1035 kHz SBS Radio – SBS – Also on 1485 kHz
1314 kHz Sky Sports Radio Racing Radio (National Racing Radio Network)
1575 kHz SEN Track Sports Entertainment Network
1611 kHz Oldies Off Air"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Woodenbong
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Yass
100.3 MHz Yass FM – Community radio
107.9 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Young
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Sky Sports Radio – Racing Radio
87.8 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
92.3 MHz 2YYY – Community radio
93.9 MHz Roccy FM – Broadcast Operations Group
96.3 MHz ABC Riverina – ABC
97.1 MHz Radio National – ABC
98.7 MHz SBS Radio – SBS
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,1350 kHz 2LF – Broadcast Operations Group
List of radio stations in Australia,"Victoria
Melbourne
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"621 kHz ABC Radio National – ABC
693 kHz 3AW – Nine Entertainment
774 kHz ABC Radio Melbourne – ABC
855 kHz 3CR – Community radio
927 kHz RSN – Victorian racing industry
1026 kHz ABC News Radio – ABC
1116 kHz SEN 1116 – Sports Entertainment Network
1179 kHz 3RPH – Radio Print Handicapped Network
1224 kHz SBS Radio 1 – Special Broadcasting Service
1278 kHz Magic 1278 – Nine Entertainment
1377 kHz 3MP – Easy music – Ace Radio
1422 kHz 3XY – Narrowcast Greek language Radio
1503 kHz 3KND – South Eastern Indigenous Media Association – Narrowcast
1557 kHZ 2MM – Narrowcast Greek language Radio
1593 kHz SEN Track – Sports Entertainment Network
1611 kHz (Western Melbourne) Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
1620 kHz 3CW 1620 – Narrowcast Chinese language music service – Bayswater
1629 kHz 3CW 1629 – Narrowcast Chinese language music service – Williamstown
1638 kHz 2ME – Narrowcast Arabic language Radio
1656 kHz Rythmos Radio – Narrowcast Greek language Radio
1665 kHz (Eastern Melbourne) Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
1674 kHz Radio Haanji – Narrowcast Hindi language Radio
1683 kHz Hellenic Radio – Narrowcast Greek language Radio
1701 kHz Islamic Voice – Narrowcast Arabic language Radio
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Kiss FM – Narrowcast club music radio – Melbourne CBD
87.6 MHz Hillside Radio – Narrowcast local radio – Bayswater
87.6 MHz Surf FM – Narrowcast local radio – Frankston & Cranbourne
87.6 MHz Arabic Language Radio Narrowcast – Reservoir
87.8 MHz Kiss FM – Narrowcast club music radio – Melbourne's west
87.9 MHz Kiss FM – Narrowcast club music radio – Frankston & Mornington Peninsula
88.0 MHz DCFM 88 Diamond Creek – Narrowcast Electronic dance music radio – Diamond Creek
88.0 MHz J-AIR – Jewish Radio
88.3 MHz Southern FM (Melbourne Australia) – Southern Suburbs community radio
88.6 MHz Plenty Valley FM – Community radio
88.9 MHz Wyn FM – Community radio – Wyndham region
89.9 MHz Light FM – Christian community
90.7 MHz SYN 90.7 – Youth community
91.5 MHz smoothfm 91.5 – Nova Entertainment
92.3 MHz 3ZZZ – multicultural community
93.1 MHz SBS Radio – Special Broadcasting Service
94.1 MHz 3WBC – Whitehorse Boroondara region
94.9 MHz JOY 94.9 – LGBTQI+ community radio
95.7 MHz Golden Days Radio – Community radio
96.5 MHz 96.5 Inner FM – Heidelberg and Inner Northern Suburbs
97.1 MHz 3MDR Mountain Districts Radio – Dandenong Ranges
97.7 MHz Casey Radio Casey Radio – South Eastern Suburbs
97.9 MHz 979fm – Melton (community radio)
98.1 MHz Radio Eastern FM 98.1 – Outer Eastern Suburbs (community radio)
98.5 MHz Apple FM Bacchus Marsh
98.3 MHz 3RPP – Community radio – Frankston
98.7 MHz 3RPP – Community radio – Mornington
98.9 MHz North West FM – North Western Suburbs
99.1 MHz Yarra Valley FM – Community radio – Woori Yallock
99.3 MHz 3NRG – Community radio – Sunbury
100.3 MHz Nova 100 – Nova Entertainment
100.7 MHz Highlands FM – Community radio – Macedon Ranges
101.1 MHz KIIS 101.1 – Australian Radio Network
101.9 MHz Fox FM – Southern Cross Austereo
102.7 MHz 3RRR – Alternative Contemporary Music
103.5 MHz 3MBS – Music Broadcasting Society of Victoria – Classical Music
104.3 MHz Gold 104.3 – Australian Radio Network
105.1 MHz Triple M – Southern Cross Austereo
105.9 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
106.7 MHz PBS 106.7FM – Various music genres – Block Programming
107.5 MHz triple j – ABC
DAB+"
List of radio stations in Australia,"List of national programmes broadcast in Melbourne
List of Melbourne programmes"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Alexandra
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"102.9 MHz ABC Goulburn Murray – ABC
104.5 MHz Radio National – ABC
106.9 MHz UG FM – Community radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Apollo Bay
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.7 MHz 3OCR (OCR FM) – Community radio
95.9 MHz Mixx FM – Repeater of 106.3 MHz in Colac)"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Ararat
88.0 MHz Faith FM Network
92.9 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
98.5 MHz Mixx FM – Part of the Ace Radio Network"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Bairnsdale
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"97.5 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
99.9 MHz TRFM – Ace Radio – Repeater of 99.5
105.5 MHz Radio East Gippsland – Community radio
106.3 MHz Radio National – ABC
107.9 MHz ABC NewsRadio – ABC"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Ballarat
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.8 MHz Noise FM Three Angels Broadcasting Network
88.0 MHz Ballarat Visitor Radio (Operated by 3BA/Power FM)
94.3 MHz ABC NewsRadio
95.9 MHz SBS Radio
99.9 MHz Voice FM 99.9 – Community radio
102.3 MHz 3BA – Australian Radio Network
103.1 MHz Power FM 103.1 – Australian Radio Network
103.9 MHz Good News Radio – Christian radio
105.5 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
107.1 MHz triple j – ABC
107.9 MHz ABC Ballarat – ABC
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,1314 kHz Radio Sport National – (Racing and sports radio network re-broadcasting programs from Melbourne's Radio Sport National)
List of radio stations in Australia,"Bendigo
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.7 MHz 3BPH – Vision Australia Radio (Radio for the Print Handicapped)
89.5 MHz ABC NewsRadio – ABC
90.3 MHz triple j – ABC
91.1 MHz ABC Central Victoria – ABC
91.9 MHz hit91.9 Bendigo – Southern Cross Austereo
92.7 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
93.5 MHz Triple M Bendigo – Southern Cross Austereo
95.7 MHz SBS Radio – SBS
96.5 MHz KLFM – Community radio
98.3 MHz Gold Central Victoria – Relay of 1071 kHz
101.5 MHz Bendigo's Fresh FM – Community radio
105.1 MHz Life FM – Christian radio
106.7 MHz Phoenix FM – Community radio
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"945 kHz RSN Racing & Sport – (relay of 927 Melbourne- Horse Racing and Sports programming)
1071 kHz Gold Central Victoria – Australian Radio Network"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Bright
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Valley FM – Narrowcast
88.1 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
88.9 MHz Radio National – ABC
89.7 MHz ABC Goulburn Murray – ABC
92.9 MHz Alpine Radio – Community radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Casterton
104.5 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Castlemaine
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.0 MHz Radio 88 – Narrowcast Playing 60's Music
106.3 MHz KLFM – Community radio
94.9 MHz MAIN FM – Community radio
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Charlton
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz – Charlton Visitor Radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Chiltern
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Colac
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz Colac Visitor Information Radio
88.4 MHz Faith FM – Narrowcast
98.3 MHz 3OCR (OCR FM) – Community radio
104.7 MHz ABC NewsRadio Colac and surrounds – ABC
106.3 MHz Mixx FM – Ace Radio
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"1134 kHz 3CS – Ace Radio – Talk, Sport, Classic Hits"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Coleraine
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Corryong/Khancoban
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"89.7 MHz ABC Riverina – ABC
91.3 MHz Radio National – ABC
94.9 MHz Revival Time Radio – Christian radio
95.7 MHz Hit104.9 – Southern Cross Austereo – Relay of 104.9 from Albury
96.5 MHz Triple M – Southern Cross Austereo – Relay of 105.7 from Albury
98.1 MHz Radio National – ABC
99.7 MHz ABC Goulburn Murray – ABC"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Daylesford
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,87.6 MHz Orbit FM – Dance Culture radio – (Rebroadcast of Kiss FM Australia)
List of radio stations in Australia,"Echuca
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz Echuca Visitor Information Radio
104.7 MHz Radio EMFM – Community radio
The higher powered stations listed in the Deniliquin section can also be received in Echuca."
List of radio stations in Australia,"Falls Creek
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"94.1 MHz Triple M The Border 105.7 – Southern Cross Austereo – Relay of 105.7 from Albury–Wodonga
100.5 MHz Hit104.9 The Border – Southern Cross Austereo – Relay of 104.9 from Albury–Wodonga"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Geelong
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Visitor Information
87.8 MHz Kiss FM – Narrowcast dance music
88.0 MHz Visitor Information
89.3 MHz KIX Country – Narrowcast country music – Grant Broadcasters
93.9 MHz Bay FM – Grant Broadcasters
94.7 MHz 94.7 The Pulse – Community radio
95.5 MHz K-Rock – Grant Broadcasters
96.3 MHz 96three – Christian Community
99.5 MHz 3RPH – Vision Australia Radio (Radio for the Print Handicapped)
Note: Some Geelong stations are audible within parts of the Melbourne Metropolitan Area (especially in the southern bayside suburbs), and higher powered Melbourne-wide radio broadcasting stations can be heard in Geelong.
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"1341 kHz 3GL - playing rock and pop music from the 50's and 60's.  Geelong's original station, launched in 1930 before it was converted to FM as K-Rock in 1990.  Was relaunched on the 1st of April 2024, after a period of unofficial broadcasting with the old station sweepers of ""3GL on West Coast"" and ""Classic Hits"" from December 2023.  Owned by Grand Broadcasters and operated by Geelong Broadcasters, alongside K-Rock and Bay FM."
List of radio stations in Australia,"Hamilton
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.9 MHz Mixx FM – Part of the Ace Radio Network
91.7 MHz ABC NewsRadio – ABC
92.5 MHz Radio National – ABC
93.3 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
94.1 MHz ABC Western Victoria – ABC
94.9 MHz triple j – ABC
102.1 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,981 kHz 3HA – Part of the Ace Radio Network
List of radio stations in Australia,"Harrietville
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"94.5 MHz; Alpine Radio – Community Radio
98.7 MHz; ABC Goulburn Murray – ABC Local Radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Heathcote
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,87.6 MHz 87 FM (Danceradio)
List of radio stations in Australia,"Horsham
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.0 MHz Sport 927 – Relay Of Racing Radio
96.5 MHz Triple H – Community radio
99.7 MHz Radio National – ABC
101.3 MHz Mixx FM – Part of the Ace Radio Network
102.9 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"594 kHz ABC Western Victoria – ABC
1089 kHz 3WM – Part of the Ace Radio Network"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Kaniva
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Kilmore
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,98.3 MHz OKR FM – Community radio
List of radio stations in Australia,"Kyneton
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
100.7 MHz Highlands FM – Community radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Latrobe Valley/Central Gippsland
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Radio Sport National – Traralgon, Sale (Racing & Sports Radio Network re-broadcasting programs from Melbourne's Radio Sport National)
88.0 MHz Radio Sport National – Moe & Morwell (Racing & Sports Radio Network re-broadcasting programs from Melbourne's Radio Sport National)
88.0 MHz Latrobe City Council Info Radio (Traralgon City only)
91.9 MHz SEN Track – Racing radio
92.7 MHz Radio Sport National – Yarram – (Racing & Sports Radio Network re-broadcasting programs from Melbourne's Radio Sport National)
93.5 MHz 3RPH/T – Radio for the Print Handicapped (from Warragul)
94.3 MHz Triple M Warragul – Southern Cross Austereo
95.1 MHz ABC News – ABC
96.7 MHz triple j – ABC
97.9 MHz Triple M – Southern Cross Austereo
99.5 MHz 3TR FM – Part of the Ace Radio Network
100.7 MHz ABC Gippsland – ABC
101.5 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
103.1 MHz West Gippsland Community Radio Inc. 3BBR-FM
103.9 MHz Life FM – Christian radio
104.7 MHz Gippsland FM – Community radio
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"531 kHz 3GG Warragul
828 kHz ABC Gippsland – ABC
1242 kHz Gold 1242 – Part of the Ace Radio Network"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Leongatha
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.1 MHz South Coast FM – Community radio (also 89.1 MHz & 89.5Mz). Studio in Wonthaggi.
91.3 MHz SEN Track – Racing Radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Mallacoota
87.6 MHz – [Adventist Radio Australia – Narrowcast]
88.0 MHz – Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
101.7 MHz – 3MGB – Community Radio
103.3 MHz – ABC Radio National
104.9 MHz – ABC Gippsland"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Mansfield
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"99.7 MHz 3MCR – Community radio
103.7 MHz ABC Goulburn Murray – ABC
105.3 MHz Radio National – ABC"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Maryborough
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,99.1 MHz Goldfields FM
List of radio stations in Australia,"Marysville
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"89.3 MHz – Flow FM
98.5 MHz – UGFM – Community Radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Mildura
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz The Range – Country Music Narrowcast
87.8 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz Son-FM88 – Narrowcast (Christian)
89.1 MHz Rete Italia – Italian language narrowcast
97.9 MHz Triple M Sunraysia – Southern Cross Austereo
98.7 MHz SBS Radio – Multilingual
99.5 MHz hit99.5 Sunraysia – Southern Cross Austereo
100.3 MHz ABC NewsRadio – ABC
101.1 MHz triple j – ABC
102.7 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
104.3 MHz ABC Mildura Swan Hill – ABC
105.9 MHz ABC Radio National – ABC
106.7 MHz Hot FM – Community radio
107.5 MHz 3MPH – Vision Australia Radio (Radio for the Print Handicapped)
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"1359 kHz Radio Sport National – (Racing & Sports Radio Network re-broadcasting programs from Melbourne's Radio Sport National)
1467 kHz River 1467 – 3ML – Australian Radio Network
1611 kHz 1611AM – Oldies"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Mount Buller
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"91.3 MHz 3SR-FM – Southern Cross Austereo
93.7 MHz Star FM – Southern Cross Austereo"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Murrayville
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,103.5 MHz 3MBR – Community radio
List of radio stations in Australia,"Nagambie
88.0 MHz The Range – Narrowcast – Country Music"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Nhill
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Omeo
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"90.1 MHz Triple M – Southern Cross Austereo – Relay of 105.7 from Albury
90.9 MHz High Country Radio – Community radio – Omeo Town
92.5 MHz Hit104.9 – Southern Cross Austereo – Relay of 104.9 from Albury
97.3 MHz High Country Radio – Community radio – Omeo Region
99.7 MHz Radio National – ABC
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,720 kHz ABC Gippsland – ABC
List of radio stations in Australia,"Orbost
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"95.5 MHz Radio Sport National – (Racing & Sports Radio Network re-broadcasting programs from Melbourne's Radio Sport National)
97.1 MHz ABC Gippsland – ABC
98.7 MHz Radio National – ABC"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Ouyen
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,92.9 MHz 3MBR – Community radio – Relay of 103.5 from Murrayville
List of radio stations in Australia,"Port Campbell
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Portland
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"92.9 MHz 3HA – (Relay)
93.7 MHz Mixx FM – Ace Radio Network
96.9 MHz ABC Western Victoria – ABC
98.5 MHz Radio National – ABC
99.3 MHz 3RPC – Community radio
105.3 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,1611 kHz Rete Italia – Italian narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Rosedale
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,87.6 MHz Three Angels Broadcasting Network
List of radio stations in Australia,"Sale
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Radio Sport National – (Racing & Sports Radio Network re-broadcasting programs from Melbourne's Radio Sport National)
88.0 MHz Faith FM – Narrowcast
90.3 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
90.7 MHz 3REG – Community radio – Lakes Entrance
91.9 MHz Kids FM – Kids radio station
99.5 MHz TR-FM – Part of the Ace Radio Network – Central Gippsland
99.9 MHz TR-FM – Part of the Ace Radio Network – East Gippsland
100.7 MHz ABC Gippsland – ABC
103.9 MHz Life FM – Christian Community
105.5 MHz 3REG – Community radio – Bairnsdale only
106.3 MHz Radio National – ABC – Bairnsdale only
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"828 kHz ABC Gippsland – ABC
1242 kHz Gold 1242 – Part of the Ace Radio Network"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Seymour
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Hit Radio 87.6
99.3 MHz Music Narrowcast
103.9 MHz Seymour FM Community radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Shepparton
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Raw FM – Dance Music
88.0 MHz The Range – Country Music
94.5 MHz triple j – ABC
95.3 MHz Triple M Goulburn Valley – Southern Cross Austereo
96.1 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
96.9 MHz hit96.9 Goulburn Valley – Southern Cross Austereo
97.7 MHz ABC Goulburn Murray – ABC
98.5 MHz ONE FM 98.5 – Community radio
100.1 MHz 3SPH – Vision Australia Radio (Radio for Print Handicapped)
107.7 MHz ABC NewsRadio – ABC
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"1260 kHz RSN Racing & Sport – Relay of 927 kHz Melbourne
1413 kHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
1629 kHz Niche Radio Network – Narrowcast World Talk"
List of radio stations in Australia,"St Arnaud
106.1 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Stawell
87.6 MHz [Faith FM] – Christian radio
93.7 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Swan Hill
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"99.1 MHz Smart FM – Community radio
102.1 MHz ABC Mildura Swan Hill – ABC
103.7 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
105.3 MHz triple j – ABC
106.9 MHz Sport 927 – Relay of Racing Radio
107.7 MHz Mixx FM – Part of the Ace Radio Network
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,1332 MHz 3SH – Part of the Ace Radio Network
List of radio stations in Australia,"Swifts Creek
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"91.7 MHz High Country Radio – Community radio – Relay of 97.3 Omeo
103.5 MHz Radio National – ABC"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Terang
90.5 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Wangaratta
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Orbit FM – Relay of Kiss FM – Dance Radio – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz & 87.8 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
99.3 MHz RSN – Radio Sport National – Racing Radio – Narrowcast
101.3 MHz Oak FM – Community radio
102.1 MHz Edge FM – North East Broadcasters
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"756 kHz Radio National – ABC
1566 kHz 1566 3NE – North East Broadcasters"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Warracknabeal
100.5 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Warrnambool
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Orbit FM – Relay of Kiss FM (Port Fairy area)
89.7 MHz triple j – ABC
91.3 MHz ABC News – ABC
92.1 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
94.5 MHz 3YB FM – Ace Radio Network
95.3 MHz Coast FM 95.3 – Ace Radio Network
100.9 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
101.7 MHz Radio National – ABC
103.7 MHz 3WAY FM – Community radio
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"882 kHz 3RPH – Radio For The Print Handicapped
1602 kHz ABC Western Victoria – ABC"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Wedderburn
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,87.6 MHz Wedderburn Visitor Radio
List of radio stations in Australia,"Wodonga
88.4 MHz Wodonga Community Radio – TAFE radio – Narrowcast
89.5 MHz SBS Radio 1 – SBS – Narrowcast
98.5 MHz The Light – Community Christian
100.9 MHz ABC News Radio – ABC
103.3 MHz triple j – ABC
104.1 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
106.5 MHz ABC Goulburn Murray – ABC
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"990 kHz ABC Radio National – ABC
Note: Albury–Wodonga are twin cities, with Wodonga in Victoria and Albury in New South Wales. Therefore, listings of radio stations in either category can be received in both areas."
List of radio stations in Australia,"Woori Yallock
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
96.1 MHz ABC Melbourne – Relay of ABC Melbourne on 774 kHz
99.1 MHz 3VYV Yarra Valley FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Yarrawonga
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Yea
88.9 MHz UG FM – Community radio – Relay of 106.9 from Alexandra
93.7 MHz Hit93.7 – Relay of 96.9 from Shepparton – Southern Cross Austereo"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Queensland
Brisbane
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"612 kHz 612 ABC Brisbane (4QR) – ABC (Talk/News/Information)
693 kHz 4KQ – 693 SENQ Sports Entertainment Network
792 kHz 4RN – Radio National – ABC (Information Variety)
882 kHz 4BC – Nine Entertainment (Talk/News/Information)
936 kHz ABC NewsRadio – ABC (News)
1008 kHz Radio TAB (Betting/Racing)
1053 kHz SEN Track – Sports Entertainment Network Narrowcast
1116 kHz 4BH – Ace Radio Network (Easy Listening)
1197 kHz Switch 1197 (Youth community radio)
1296 kHz 4RPH (Radio for Print Handicapped)
1647 kHz Arabic Radio – relay of 2ME Radio Arabic from Sydney
1656 kHz VAC Radio (Chinese language)
1701 kHz Radio Brisvaani (Hindi language narrowcast)
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz/87.8 MHz/88.0 MHz (various suburbs) Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
87.8 MHz [Deception Bay] Faith FM Narrowcast (Christian)
88.0 MHz (Brisbane CBD) Planet Radio (Environmental narrowcast)
90.5 MHz Rebel FM (Logan) – Rebel Media
92.1 MHz The Breeze (Logan) – Rebel Media
93.3 MHz SBS Radio (International languages)
94.9 MHz River 94.9 – Australian Radio Network (Music Variety)
96.5 MHz 96five Family FM (Christian community)
97.3 MHz KIIS 97.3 – Australian Radio Network/Nova Entertainment (Music and Lifestyle)
98.1 MHz 4EB (Ethnic community radio)
98.9 MHz 98.9 FM (4AAA) (Indigenous community radio/Country music)
99.7 MHz 99.7 BridgeFM (4RED) (Redcliffe community radio; variety)
100.3 MHz Bay FM (4BAY) (Bayside community radio; variety)
101.1 MHz 101.1 FM (4CBL) (Logan community Radio; variety)
101.5 MHz 4OUR FM (Caboolture community radio; variety)
102.1 MHz 4ZZZ (Youth community radio)
103.7 MHz 4MBS (Classical music community radio)
104.5 MHz Triple M – Southern Cross Austereo (Rock/NRL)
105.3 MHz B105 FM – Southern Cross Austereo (New Hits)
106.1 MHz ABC Classic – ABC (Classical Music)
106.9 MHz Nova 106.9 – Nova Entertainment (New Hits/Dance/Youth)
107.7 MHz triple j – ABC (Alternative)
DAB+ (metropolitan and regional)"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Double J
ABC Country
ABC Extra
ABC Jazz
ABC Grandstand
SBS Chill
SBS PopAsia
The Edge Digital – Australian Radio Network
MBS Light – light classical
Mix '80s – Australian Radio Network
Mix '90s – Australian Radio Network
Chemist Warehouse Remix – Australian Radio Network
Koffee – Nova Entertainment
smoothfm – Nova Entertainment
Triple M Classic Rock Digital – Southern Cross Austereo
Koffee – Nova Entertainment
OldSkool Radio – Southern Cross Austereo
Australian Indian Radio – Online Hindi Radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Allora
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz [Three Angels Broadcasting Network] – Christian radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Aloomba
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Atherton
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
99.1 MHz SEN Track – Sports Entertainment Network"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Augathella
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.0 MHz Radio TAB – Relay from 1008 Brisbane
106.1 MHz 4VL – Smart Radio Group – Relay of 918 Charleville
107.7 MHz Radio National – ABC"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Ayr
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"96.1 MHz SBS Radio – SBS
97.1 MHz Sweet FM – Narrowcaster"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Babinda
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
94.1 MHz ABC Far North – ABC
94.9 MHz Kool FM – Coastal Broadcasters
95.7 MHz Radio National – ABC
102.5 MHz 4KZ – Coastal Broadcasters"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Barcaldine
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Beachmere
87.6 MHz [Adventist Radio Australia – Narrowcast]
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Beaudesert
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz [Adventist Radio Australia – Narrowcast]
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
89.7 MHz Radio TAB – Relay of 1008 Brisbane
90.5 MHz Rebel FM – Rebel Media
92.1 MHz The Breeze – Rebel Media
101.5 MHz Beau FM – Community radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Beechmont
87.8 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Beerwah
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Bell
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Biloela
87.6 MHz Radio TAB – TX Site: Commercial Hotel – Power: 1W
88.0 MHz KIX Country – Power : 1w
88.9 MHz Rebel FM – Owned by Rebel Media – TX Site: Banana Range – Power: 400w
89.7 MHz The Breeze – Owned by Rebel Media – TX Site: Banana Range – Power: 400w
90.1 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
94.9 MHz ABC Capricornia – Owned by: ABC – TX Site: Telstra Tower Biloela – Power: 10w
101.1 MHz Rebroadcast of 95.1 MHz Triple M Central Queensland – Owned and Maintained by: Callide Mine under permission from Southern Cross Austereo – TX Site: Mt Murchision – Power: 320w E.I.R.P
102.7 MHz Rebroadcast of 666 kHz 4CC – Owned and Maintained by: Callide Mine under permission from Australian Radio Network – TX Site: Mt Murchision – Power: 320w E.I.R.P
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,666 kHz 4CC – Owned by: Australian Radio Network – TX Site: 299 Burnett Hwy PROSPECT – Power: 2 kW
List of radio stations in Australia,"Blackall
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
95.1 MHz West FM – Relay of 104.5 Longreach
98.3 MHz Radio TAB – Relay of 1008 Brisbane
100.7 MHz 4LG – Relay of 1098 Longreach
103.1 MHz SBS Radio – SBS
107.9 MHz Radio National – ABC"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Blackwater
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Boonah
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
100.1 MHz Rim FM (Community radio)"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Bowen
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"93.5 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
92.7 MHz Radio National – ABC
98.3 MHz 4TO – Southern Cross Austereo – (relay from Townsville)
95.1 MHz Gem FM – Community radio
107.9 MHz hit103.1 Townsville – Southern Cross Austereo – (relay from Townsville)
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,1611 kHz Rete Italia – Italian Radio
List of radio stations in Australia,"Bundaberg
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"93.1 MHz 93.1 Bundaberg
93.9 MHz Hitz939 – Australian Radio Network
94.7 MHz Coral Coast FM (Community Radio)
95.5 MHz Radio TAB (Betting/Racing)
96.3 MHz Phoenix FM (Community Radio)
97.1 MHz KIX Country (Narrowcast) Australian Radio Network
98.5 MHz ABC Classic – ABC (Classical Music)
99.3 MHz triple j – ABC (Alternative)
100.1 MHz ABC Wide Bay – ABC (Talk/News/Music/Information)
100.9 MHz Radio National – ABC (Information Variety)
102.5 MHz The Breeze (Wide Bay) – Rebel Media
105.1 MHz Rhema FM (Christian Community Radio)
106.7 MHz Rebel FM (Wide Bay) – Rebel Media
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"855 kHz ABC Wide Bay – ABC (Talk/News/Music/Information)
1332 kHz 4BU – Australian Radio Network"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Cairns
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
87.8 MHz Orbit FM – Dance music narrowcast, simulcast of Kiss FM Australia
88.0 MHz Orbit FM – Dance music narrowcast, simulcast of Kiss FM Australia
89.1 MHz Cairns FM – Community radio
90.5 MHz SBS Radio – SBS
98.7 MHz 4CIM – Indigenous community radio
99.5 MHz Triple M Cairns – Southern Cross Austereo
101.1 MHz ABC NewsRadio – ABC
101.9 MHz Coast FM – Youth community radio
102.7 MHz Star 102.7 – Australian Radio Network
103.5 MHz hit103.5 Cairns – Southern Cross Austereo
104.3 MHz Radio TAB – Horse racing narrowcast
105.1 MHz Radio National – ABC
105.9 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
106.7 MHz ABC Far North – ABC
107.5 MHz triple j – ABC
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"801 kHz ABC Far North – ABC
846 kHz 4CA – Australian Radio Network"
List of radio stations in Australia,"North Cairns
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"93.9 MHz Radio National – ABC
94.7 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
95.5 MHz ABC Far North – ABC Local Radio
96.3 MHz ABC News – ABC
97.1 MHz triple j – ABC"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Cardwell
91.9 MHz Kool FM – Coastal Broadcasters"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Capella
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Chambers Flat
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Charleville
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz Radio Charlie – Narrowcast
101.7 MHz Triple C – Smart Radio Group
104.1 MHz Radio TAB (Betting/Racing)
107.3 MHz Radio National – ABC
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"603 kHz ABC Western Qld – ABC
918 kHz 4VL – Smart Radio Group"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Charters Towers
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
93.5 MHz SBS Radio – SBS
94.3 MHz Radio TAB – Relay of 1008 Brisbane
95.9 MHz hit95.9 Charters Towers – Southern Cross Austereo
96.7 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
97.5 MHz Radio National – ABC
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,828 kHz 4GC – Resonate Broadcasting
List of radio stations in Australia,"Chinchilla
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz [Three Angels Broadcasting Network FM] – Christian radio
95.5 MHz The Breeze – Rebel Media
97.1 MHz Rebel FM – Rebel Media"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Clermont
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
102.1 MHz 4HI – Smart Radio Group
103.7 MHz SBS Radio – SBS
104.5 MHz ABC Classic FM – ABC
106.1 MHz Radio TAB – Relay of 1008 Brisbane
107.7 MHz Radio National – ABC"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Cloncurry
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
89.3 MHz triple j – ABC
90.5 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
100.5 MHz ABC West Qld – ABC
103.7 MHz Radio TAB – Relay of 1008 Brisbane
105.3 MHz triple j – ABC
106.1 MHz SBS Radio – SBS
107.7 MHz Radio National – ABC
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,693 kHz 4LM – Smart Radio Group – Relay of 666 from Mount Isa
List of radio stations in Australia,"Collinsville
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Cooktown
101.7 MHz Rebel FM – Rebel Media
103.3 MHz Radio TAB (Betting/Racing)
105.7 MHz ABC Far North – ABC
107.3 MHz Radio National – ABC"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Cowley
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Crows Nest
87.6 Adventist Radio Australia – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Cunnamulla
102.9 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,1584 kHz 4VL (relay)
List of radio stations in Australia,"Currumbin
88.0 MHz – Country Music Narrowcast
104.1 MHz – Radio 97 AM (2MW translator) – Commercial"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Dalby
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.8 MHz Three Angels Broadcasting Network FM – Christian radio
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
89.9 MHz 4DDD – Community radio
94.3 MHz Radio TAB – Relay of 1008 Brisbane
95.9 MHz 4WK – Broadcast Operations Group – Relay of 963 from Toowoomba
97.5 MHz CFM – Southern Cross Austereo – Relay of 100.7 from Toowoomba
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"1611 kHz Rete Italia – Italian Radio
1629 kHz Hot Country – [2] Smart Radio Group [3] Country Music"
List of radio stations in Australia,"East Palmerston
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Darling Downs (Toowoomba/Warwick)
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Toowoomba City FM/Warwick Christian Radio
88.0 MHz and 87.8 MHz Power FM [4] Toowoomba–Lockyer Valley–Highfields district (Training Radio Station)
91.5 MHz Country FM (Country Music Narrowcast)
92.9 MHz Voice FM (Christian community radio)
93.7 MHz Radio TAB (Betting/Racing)
96.7 MHz ABC NewsRadio – ABC (News)
99.1 MHz Kids FM (Kids Narrowcast)
100.7 MHz hit100.7 Darling Downs – Southern Cross Austereo
102.7 MHz 4DDB (Community radio)
103.3 MHz triple j – ABC (Warwick repeater)
103.9 MHz 4TTT (Community radio)
104.1 MHz triple j – ABC (Toowoomba repeater)
105.7 MHz Radio National – ABC (Information Variety)
107.3 MHz ABC Classic – ABC (Classical Music)
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"747 kHz ABC Southern Queensland – ABC (Talk/News/Information)
864 kHz Triple M Darling Downs – Southern Cross Austereo
963 kHz 4WK – Broadcast Operations Group
1242 kHz 4AK – Broadcast Operations Group
1620 kHz The Breeze – Rebel Media
Brisbane FM stations are also audible in the Toowoomba area."
List of radio stations in Australia,"Emerald
87.6 MHz Adventist Radio Australia – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz KIX Country – Australian Radio Network
90.7 MHz ABC Classic FM – ABC (Classical Music)
92.3 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
93.9 MHz Radio National – ABC (Information Variety)
94.7 MHz Hit Central Queensland – Southern Cross Austereo
95.5 MHz Radio TAB (Betting/Racing)
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"1143 kHz 4HI – Resonate Broadcasting
1548 kHz ABC Capricornia – ABC
1611 kHz Hot Country – Macquarie Regional Radio Network"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Gayndah
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
91.5fm Burnett River Community radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Gladstone
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Adventist Radio Australia – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz KIX Country – Australian Radio Network
91.9 MHz 91.9 Fresh FM (Christian community radio)
93.5 MHz Hit Central Queensland – Southern Cross Austereo
94.3 MHz Radio TAB (Betting/Racing)
95.1 MHz Triple M Central Queensland – Southern Cross Austereo
95.9 MHz Radio National – ABC (Information Variety)
99.1 MHz ABC Capricornia – Australian Broadcasting Corporation (News/Talk/Information)
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,927 kHz 4CC – Australian Radio Network
List of radio stations in Australia,"Glen Aplin
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Glenden
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Glenlee
87.8 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Gold Coast
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Raw FM – Dance music narrowcast
87.8 MHz / 88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz Beach FM
88.5 MHz ABC Classic – Classical music – ABC
89.3 MHz 4CRB – Community radio
90.1 MHz Radio National – ABC
90.9 MHz 90.9 Sea FM – Contemporary hit radio – Southern Cross Austereo
91.7 MHz ABC Coast FM – ABC Local Radio – ABC
92.5 MHz Triple M Gold – Adult contemporary – Southern Cross Austereo
94.1 MHz Jazz Radio 94.1FM – Jazz music – Community radio
95.7 MHz NewsRadio – Rolling news – ABC
97.7 MHz triple j – Alternative music – ABC
99.4 MHz Rebel FM – Active rock – Rebel Media
100.6 MHz The Breeze – Classic hits – Rebel Media
102.9 MHz Hot Tomato – Adult contemporary
105.7 MHz Radio Metro – Youth – Community radio
107.3 MHz Juice107.3 – Christian community radio
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"1620 kHz SEN Track – Sports Entertainment Network
1692 kHz Station X – Adult contemporary [5]
DAB+"
List of radio stations in Australia,Rabbit Radio [6] – (Independent Culture Portal)
List of radio stations in Australia,"Goondiwindi
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
96.3 MHz Rebel FM – Rebel Media
98.7 MHz The Breeze – Rebel Media
88.7 MHz Now FM Archived 18 July 2008 at the Wayback Machine – Broadcast Operations Group
89.5 MHz 2VM – Broadcast Operations Group
90.3 MHz Radio TAB – Relay of Racing Radio
92.7 MHz ABC South Qld – ABC
94.3 MHz Radio National – ABC
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,1611 kHz Hot Country Radio Queensland
List of radio stations in Australia,"Gordonvale
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Gracemere
87.8 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,837 kHz ABC Capricornia
List of radio stations in Australia,"Greenmount East
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Gympie
96.1 MHz Zinc 96.1 – Australian Radio Network
91.5 MHz Cooloola Christian Radio (Christian Community Radio)
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,558 kHz 4GY
List of radio stations in Australia,"Highfields
87.6 MHz – Highfields FM
88.0 MHz – Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Ingham
96.9 MHz SEN Track Sports Entertainment Network
99.1 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Inglewood
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Injune
101.9 MHz KIX Country – Australian Radio Network"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Innisfail
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
98.3 MHz Kool FM – Coastal Broadcasters
531 kHz & 102.5 MHz 4KZ – Coastal Broadcasters"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Ipswich
87.6 MHz/88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz KIX Country – Australian Radio Network
94.9 MHz River 94.9 – serving the Ipswich/Lockyer Valley/Toowoomba area – Australian Radio Network"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Jimboomba
87.6 MHz/88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Julia Creek
87.8 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Kallangur
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Kilcoy
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz Three Angels Broadcasting Network – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Killarney
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Hervey Bay/Maryborough
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.8 MHz BayCity Gold Radio (Booral & Turtle Cove)
88.0 MHz BayCity Gold Radio (River Heads)
87.8 MHz Three Angels Broadcasting Network – Narrowcast
92.3 MHz KIX Country - Australian Radio Network
97.7 MHz ABC News Radio – ABC
98.5 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
99.3 MHz triple j – ABC
100.1 MHz ABC Wide Bay – ABC
100.9 MHz Radio National – ABC
101.9 MHz hit101.9 Fraser Coast – Southern Cross Austereo
102.5 MHz The Breeze (Wide Bay) – Rebel Media
103.5 MHz Triple M Fraser Coast – Southern Cross Austereo
106.7 MHz Rebel FM (Wide Bay) – Rebel Media
107.5 MHz Fraser Coast FM – Frasercoast Community Radio
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"855 kHz ABC Wide Bay – ABC
1161 kHz Radio TAB (Betting/Racing)"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Kingaroy
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
87.8 MHz Three Angels Broadcasting Network Australia [Narrowcast]
89.1 MHz hit89.1 South Burnett – Southern Cross Austereo
90.7 mHz CROW FM 90.7 (Local Music Station)
93.1 MHz Radio TAB (Betting/Racing)
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,1071 kHz 4SB – 4SB 1071 Archived 21 December 2009 at the Wayback Machine – Resonate Broadcasting
List of radio stations in Australia,"Longreach
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
99.1 MHz Radio National – ABC
102.1 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
103.7 MHz Radio TAB (Betting/Racing)
104.5 MHz West FM
106.1 MHz triple j – ABC
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"540 kHz ABC Western Queensland – ABC
1098 kHz 4LG Archived 19 December 2007 at the Wayback Machine"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Mackay
87.6 MHz Classic Gold 87.6 FM (Oldies Narrowcast)
87.8 MHz/88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
93.9 MHz KIX Country – Australian Radio Network
97.9 MHz ABC Classic – ABC (Classical Music)
98.7 MHz Triple M Mackay & The Whitsundays – Southern Cross Austereo
99.5 MHz triple j – ABC (Alternative)
100.3 MHz hit100.3 Mackay – Southern Cross Austereo
101.1 MHz ABC Tropical North – ABC (Talk/News/Information)
101.9 MHz Star 101.9 – Australian Radio Network
102.9 MHz Radio National – ABC (Information Variety)
103.5 MHz Radio TAB (Betting/Racing)
107.5 MHz 4CRM (Community radio)
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"1026 kHz – 4MK – Australian Radio Network
1647 kHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Maleny
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Mareeba
87.6 MHz Adventist Radio Australia – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz/92.3 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
97.9 MHz hit97.9 Tablelands – Southern Cross Austereo"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Miles
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
94.5 MHz Rebel FM – Rebel Media
101.3 MHz The Breeze – Rebel Media"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Millmerran
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz Three Angels Broadcasting Network Australia – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Mitchell
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
104.5 MHz 4ZR (Relay)"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Monto
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz Australian Visitor Radio
100.5 MHz The Breeze – Rebel Media
105.1 MHz Rebel FM – Rebel Media"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Moranbah
96.9 MHz – 4RFM Archived 22 August 2013 at the Wayback Machine Community radio
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Moresby
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Moura
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz KIX Country – Australian Radio Network
96.1 MHz ABC Capricornia
96.9 MHz ABC Radio National"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Mourilyan
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Mundubbera
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Murgon
87.6 MHz Adventist Radio Australia – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Mount Isa
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Adventist Radio Australia – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
100.9 MHz Mob FM – Community radio
101.7 MHz ABC Classic FM – ABC
102.5 MHz hit102.5 Mount Isa – Southern Cross Austereo
103.3 MHz Radio TAB – Relay from 1008 Brisbane
104.1 MHz triple j – ABC
106.5 MHz ABC West Qld – ABC
107.3 MHz Radio National – ABC
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,666 kHz Zinc666 – Smart Radio Group
List of radio stations in Australia,"Nanango
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"1692 kHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Adventist Radio Australia – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Narangba
87.8 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Nebo
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Normanton
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Nundah
87.8 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Nyngan
100.7 MHz Outback Radio 2WEB – Community radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Oakey
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Pittsworth
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Proston
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Quilpie
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
104.5 MHz 4VL (Relay)"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Rainbow Beach
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Rockhampton
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz/88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
92.7 MHz KIX Country (Country music) – Australian Radio Network
98.5 MHz 4YOU (Community radio)
99.9 MHz Radio TAB (Betting/Racing)
100.7 MHz 4US (Indigenous community radio)
101.5 MHz Triple M Central Queensland – Southern Cross Austereo
103.1 MHz Radio National – ABC (Information Variety)
104.7 MHz triple j – ABC (Alternative)
105.5 MHz ABC News – ABC
106.3 MHz ABC Classic – ABC (Classical Music)
107.9 MHz Hit Central Queensland – Southern Cross Austereo
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"837 kHz ABC Capricornia – ABC (Talk/News/Information)
990 kHz 4RO – Australian Radio Network
1584 kHz 4CC – Australian Radio Network"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Roma
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
94.3 MHz Radio TAB (Betting/Racing)
95.1 MHz hit95.1 Maranoa – Southern Cross Austereo
97.7 MHz ABC Classic – ABC (Classical Music)
103.3 MHz triple j – ABC (Alternative)
105.7 MHz ABC Local Radio – ABC (Talk/News/Information)
107.3 MHz Radio National – ABC (Information Variety)
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"1476 kHz 4ZR – Resonate Broadcasting
1611 kHz Hot Country 1611 – Smart Radio Group
1638 kHz Station X – Adult Contemporary"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Sarina
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"South Johnstone
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Springsure
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"St George
FM Radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision180 Radio – Narrowcast (Christian, youth)
102.1 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
105.3 MHz 4ZR (relay)
AM Radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,1611 kHz Hot Country 1611 – Smart Radio Group
List of radio stations in Australia,"Stanthorpe
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz Adventist Radio Australia – Narrowcast
90.1 MHz The Breeze – Rebel Media
91.5 MHz 4WK – Repeater of 963 service from Toowoomba – Broadcast Operations Group
93.1 MHz TAB Radio – Racing from Brisbane's 1008
97.1 MHz Rebel FM – Rebel Media
97.9 MHz hit100.7 Darling Downs – Repeater of 100.7 service from Toowoomba
98.7 MHz TEN-FM – Community radio
99.5 MHz 4AK – Repeater of 1242 service from Toowoomba – Broadcast Operations Group
100.3 MHz Triple M Darling Downs – Repeater of 864 service from Toowoomba"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Sunshine Coast
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Village FM Archived 31 May 2014 at the Wayback Machine – Narrowcast classic hits
87.6 MHz Yandina Adventist Radio Australia – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz Nambour Adventist Radio Australia – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz Caloundra Adventist Radio Australia – Narrowcast
88.7 MHz ABC Classic – Classical music – ABC
89.5 MHz triple j – Alternative music – ABC
90.3 MHz ABC Sunshine Coast – ABC Local Radio – ABC
91.1 MHz Hot 91.1 – Contemporary hit radio – Australian Radio Network
91.9 MHz 91.9 Sea FM – Contemporary hit radio – Great Southern Land Media Group
92.7 MHz 92.7 Mix FM – Adult contemporary – Great Southern Land Media Group
94.5 MHz ABC NewsRadio – Rolling news – ABC
101.3 MHz Noosa community radio
104.9 MHz Sunshine FM – Community radio
106.5 MHz 106five Rhema FM – Christian community radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Townsville
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Classic Gold 87.6 FM – Oldies Narrowcast
87.8 MHz Faith FM – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
94.3 MHz ABC News – ABC (News)
98.9 MHz KIX Country – Australian Radio Network
99.9 MHz Live FM (Christian community)
100.7 MHz Power100 – Australian Radio Network
101.5 MHz ABC Classic – ABC (Classical Music)
102.3 MHz 4TO FM – Southern Cross Austereo
103.1 MHz hit103.1 Townsville – Southern Cross Austereo
103.9 MHz 4TTT (Community radio)
104.7 MHz Radio National – ABC (Information Variety)
105.5 MHz triple j – ABC (Alternative)
106.3 MHz Star 106.3 – Australian Radio Network
107.1 MHz 4K1G (Indigenous community radio)
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"630 kHz ABC Far North – ABC Local Radio (Talk/News/Information)
891 kHz Radio TAB (Betting/Racing)"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Tully
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
92.7 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
90.3 MHz 4ZKZ (Hot FM) – Commercial
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,693 kHz 4KZ – Commercial
List of radio stations in Australia,"Wallangarra
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Warwick
87.6 MHz Three Angels Broadcasting Network Australia – Narrowcast
87.8 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
88.4 MHz [Adventist Radio Australia – Narrowcast]
91.9 MHz Cfm"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Whitsunday
93.5 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Winton
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Woodford
87.6 MHz Three Angels Broadcasting Network Australia – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Woongoolba
87.8 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Yeppoon
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
91.3 MHz Keppel FM – Community radio
96.1 MHz KIX Country – Australian Radio Network"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Yungaburra
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"South Australia
Adelaide
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"531 kHz Radio 531 Italian Language Radio – 5RTI
729 kHz ABC Radio National – ABC
891 kHz ABC Radio Adelaide – ABC
972 kHz ABC NewsRadio – ABC
1197 kHz 5RPH Adelaide – Radio for the Print Handicapped
1323 kHz Cruise 1323 – Australian Radio Network
1395 kHz FIVEaa – Nova Entertainment
1539 kHz Radio TAB (Betting/Racing of Radio TAB)
1611 kHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
1629 kHz SEN 1116 – Sports Entertainment Network
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Radio Italia Uno – Italian language radio
87.6 MHz (Aldinga Beach) Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
87.8 MHz (Willunga) Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
87.8 MHz (North East Suburbs) Faith FM – Seventh Day Adventist
87.8 MHz (Southern Suburbs) Faith FM – Seventh Day Adventist
88.0 MHz Faith FM – Seventh Day Adventist
88.0 MHz (Aldinga Beach) Faith FM – Seventh Day Adventist
88.0 MHz (Gawler) Faith FM – Seventh Day Adventist
88.0 MHz (Christie Downs) Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz (Mount Barker) Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
88.7 MHz Coast FM – Southern Suburbs
89.1 MHz Triple B FM – Barossa Valley
89.7 MHz PBA-FM – North Eastern Suburbs
91.9 MHz Nova 91.9 – Nova Entertainment
92.7 MHz Fresh 92.7 – Urban and Dance Radio for the Youth
93.7 MHz Three D Radio – Alternative
99.9 MHz 5MBS – (Music Broadcasting Society of SA)
100.3 MHz Power FM – Adelaide Hills (Eastern Adelaide)
100.5 MHz WOW FM – Western Suburbs
101.5 MHz Radio Adelaide – Radio Adelaide
102.3 MHz Mix 102.3 FM – Australian Radio Network
103.1 MHz 5EBI – Ethnic Broadcasters Inc
103.9 MHz ABC Classic – Classical music
104.7 MHz Triple M – Southern Cross Austereo
105.5 MHz triple j – ABC (Also at 95.9)
106.3 MHz SBS Radio – Special broadcasts
107.1 MHz SAFM – Southern Cross Austereo
107.9 MHz 1079 Life
DAB+"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Double J
ABC Country
ABC Jazz
ABC Grandstand
triple j Unearthed
SBS Chill
SBS Arabic 24
SBS PopAsia
SBS PopDesi
SBS Radio 1
SBS Radio 2
SBS Radio 3, BBC World Service simulcast
Buddha Hits
Dance Hits
Easy 80s Hits
Oldskool 90s Hits
Urban Hits
CW Remix
EBI DigitalWorld
The Edge – Australian Radio Network
IRIS
1079 Life
Mix 102.3 80s – Australian Radio Network
Mix 102.3 90s – Australian Radio Network
Triple M Classic Rock Digital – Southern Cross Austereo
Triple M Hard Rock Digital - Southern Cross Austereo
Triple M Soft Rock Digital - Southern Cross Austereo
Triple M 90s Digital - Southern Cross Austereo
smoothfm – Nova Entertainment
smooth chill – Nova Entertainment
Soundcloud Radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Adelaide Hills
87.6 MHz (Birdwood) Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz (Birdwood) Faith FM – Seventh Day Adventist
88.9 MHz Lofty 88.9 – Community radio
90.3 MHz SAFM – Southern Cross Austereo – Relay of 107.1
94.3 MHz 5MU – Australian Radio Network
95.1 MHz SBS Radio – SBS – Relay of 106.3
95.9 MHz triple j – ABC – Relay of 105.5
96.7 MHz Mix 102.3 – Australian Radio Network – Relay of 102.3
97.5 MHz ABC Classic – ABC – Relay of 103.9
98.3 MHz Triple M – Southern Cross Austereo – Relay of 104.7
99.1 MHz Nova 91.9 – Nova Entertainment – Relay of 91.9
99.9 MHz 5MBS – Classical music – Community radio
100.3 MHz Power FM (Adelaide Hills) – Australian Radio Network"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Bordertown
100.3 MHz Flow FM
106.1 MHz 5TCB – Community radio
87.6 MHz Faith FM (Christian radio)
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Balaklava
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Birdwood
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Ceduna
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
106.1 MHz Flow FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Cleve
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.8 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
99.5 MHz 5CC – Australian Radio Network – Relay of 765 kHz"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Coober Pedy
87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
98.1 MHz Radio TAB – Betting and racing radio
99.7 MHz Flow FM – Commercial radio
102.9 MHz CAAMA – Community radio
104.5 MHz Dusty Radio – Community radio
106.1 MHz ABC North and West SA – ABC
107.7 MHz Radio National – ABC"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Cowell
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,87.8 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Elliston
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Haslam
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,99.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Kadina
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
89.3 MHz Gulf FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Kapunda
99.5 MHz Flow FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Kimba
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
106.9 MHz Flow FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Kingston SE
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
107.3 MHz Flow FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Laura
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Lameroo
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,96.5 MHz Flow FM
List of radio stations in Australia,"Leigh Creek
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,97.7 MHz Flow FM
List of radio stations in Australia,"Lock
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Loxton
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
91.5 MHz 5RM – Australian Radio Network – Relay of 801 kHz
100.7 MHz Riverland Life FM – Community radio (Christian)"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Maitland
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,90.9 MHz Flow FM
List of radio stations in Australia,"Mannum
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Medlingle Hill
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Meningie
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,97.7 MHz Flow FM
List of radio stations in Australia,"Millicent
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,107.7 5THE FM – Community radio
List of radio stations in Australia,"Minlaton
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Minnipa
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Moonta
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Mount Gambier
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Faith FM (Christian radio)
88.0 MHz Radio TAB (Betting/Racing)
90.5 MHz Triple M Limestone Coast – Southern Cross Austereo
96.1 MHz SAFM 96.1 Limestone Coast – Southern Cross Austereo
100.1 MHz 5GTR FM – Community radio
102.5 MHz triple j – ABC
103.3 MHz Radio National – ABC
104.1 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
104.9 MHz Lime FM – Christian Community
105.7 MHz ABC NewsRadio – ABC
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"1476 kHz ABC South East SA – ABC
1629 kHz SEN SA – Sports Entertainment Network"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Murray Bridge
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz RiverCity FM – Narrowcast
96.3 MHz 5MU – Australian Radio Network
98.7 MHz Power FM (Murraylands) – Australian Radio Network"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Naracoorte
87.6 MHz Faith FM (Christian radio)
88.0 MHz Radio TAB – Racing Radio
89.7 MHz 5TCB – Community radio
99.3 MHz Lime FM – Christian radio – Relay of 104.9
100.9 MHz Star FM – Southern Cross Austereo – Relay of 96.1
1161 kHz ABC South East SA – ABC"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Normanville
87.6 MHz Radio 876 – Country/Easy listening"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Orroroo
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Paskeville
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Peterborough
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,91.1 MHz 5PBS – Community radio
List of radio stations in Australia,"Pinnaroo
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,96.5 MHz Flow FM
List of radio stations in Australia,"Poochera
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Port Augusta
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Port Kenny
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Port Lincoln
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Wild Country – Country music
87.8 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
89.9 MHz Magic FM – Australian Radio Network
92.3 MHz triple j – ABC
93.9 MHz 5CC – Australian Radio Network – Relay of 765 kHz
107.3 MHz ABC NewsRadio – ABC
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"765 kHz 5CC – Australian Radio Network
1485 kHz ABC West Coast SA – ABC"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Port Pirie
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.8 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz Radio TAB – Horse racing narrowcast
103.5 MHz triple j – ABC
105.1 MHz Trax FM – Community radio
105.9 MHz Magic FM – Australian Radio Network
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"639 kHz ABC North and West SA – ABC
1044 kHz 5CS – Australian Radio Network
1629 kHz 5AC 1629am Angel Christian Community Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Renmark
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"93.1 MHz Magic FM – Australian Radio Network
95.5 MHz TAB Racing Radio
101.9 MHz triple j – ABC
105.1 MHz ABC Classic FM – ABC
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"801 kHz 5RM – Australian Radio Network
1062 kHz ABC Riverland – ABC
1305 kHz ABC Radio National – ABC
1557 kHz KIX Country – Australian Radio Network"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Robe
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,107.3 MHz Flow FM
List of radio stations in Australia,"Roxby Downs
95.5 MHz Radio TAB – Betting and Racing Radio
96.3 MHz 5AU – Australian Radio Network – Repeater of 1044–1242 Service
97.9 MHz Flow FM – Remote Commercial Radio
100.3 MHz 105.9 Magic FM – Australian Radio Network
101.1 MHz triple j – ABC
101.9 MHz Radio National – ABC
102.7 MHz ABC North and West SA – ABC
103.5 MHz ABC Classic FM – ABC
105.5 MHz Rox FM – Community radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Spencer Gulf
103.5 MHz triple j – ABC
104.3 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
105.9 MHz Magic FM – Australian Community Media
106.7 MHz Radio National – ABC"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Smoky Bay
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Streaky Bay
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
99.3 MHz Flow FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Tailem Bend
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Two Wells
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,87.8 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Virginia
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Victor Harbor
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"89.3 MHz Fleurieu FM – Community Radio
90.1 MHz Happy FM – Community Radio
97.1 MHz 5MU – Australian Radio Network
99.7 MHz Power FM (Victor Harbor) – Australian Radio Network"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Waikerie
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
88.5 MHz Riverland Life FM – Community radio (Christian)
89.9 MHz 5RM – Australian Radio Network – Relay of 801 kHz"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Wallaroo
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,87.8 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Whyalla
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
107.7 Triple Y FM – Community radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Willunga
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,91.1 MHz Tribe FM – Community radio
List of radio stations in Australia,"Wirrulla
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Woomera
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
101.7 MHz Flow FM
103.3 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
104.1 MHz triple j – ABC
104.9 MHz SBS Radio 1 – SBS
105.7 MHz Radio National – ABC
107.3 MHz Triple R FM 5RRR – Community radio
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,1584 kHz ABC North and West SA – ABC
List of radio stations in Australia,"Yankalilla
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,94.7 MHz Fleurieu FM – Community Radio
List of radio stations in Australia,"Yorke Peninsula
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Gulf FM – 89.3 MHz [7] – Arthurton
Flow FM – 90.9 MHz [8] – Maitland"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Western Australia
Perth
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"585 kHz ABC News – ABC
657 kHz SEN Track – Sports Entertainment Network
720 kHz ABC Radio Perth – Local ABC
810 kHz Radio National – ABC
882 kHz 6PR – Nine Entertainment
990 kHz 990 6RPH Information Radio – Radio Print Handicapped Network
1080 kHz 6IX – Capital Radio Network/Grant Broadcasters
1116 kHz 6MM – Coast Radio
1206 kHz 6TAB – TAB Racing Radio – Racing Narrowcast
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
87.8 MHz Oz Urban Radio – Urban Music Narrowcast
87.8 MHz Magic FM (Easy 87.8) – Jazz Narrowcast
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
88.5 MHz VCA FM
89.7 MHz Twin Cities FM – Community radio
91.3 MHz 91.3 SportFM – Community sporting events
91.7 MHz 91.7 WAVE FM – West Coast Radio
92.1 MHz RTRFM – Public radio, music and arts community
92.9 MHz Triple M 92.9 – Southern Cross Austereo
93.7 MHz Nova 93.7 – Nova Entertainment
94.5 MHz Mix 94.5 – Southern Cross Austereo
95.3 MHz World Radio 6EBAFM – Multicultural community radio
96.1 MHz 96fm – Australian Radio Network
96.9 MHz SBS Radio – Special Broadcasting Service
97.3 MHz 97.3 Coast FM – West Coast Radio
97.7 MHz ABC Classic – National ABC
98.5 MHz 98.5 Sonshine FM – Christian community radio
99.3 MHz triple j – ABC
100.1 MHz Curtin FM 100.1 – University community radio
100.9 MHz Noongar Radio 100.9FM – Indigenous and Various Music
101.7 MHz Capital 101.7FM – Capital community radio/seniors community
102.5 MHz KCR 102.5FM – Perth Hills community radio – Kalamunda community radio
103.3 MHz [MAC FM] – Macedonian radio station
107.3 MHz Heritage FM – Community radio
107.9 MHz Radio Fremantle – Community radio
DAB+"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Double J
ABC Country
ABC Jazz
ABC Grandstand
SBS Chill
SBS PopAsia
My Perth Digital – Capital Radio Network
Hot Country – Grant Broadcasters
Capital Digital – Capital community radio (Perth) – seniors community
Sonshine Digital
Triple M Classic Rock Digital – Southern Cross Austereo"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Albany
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"630 kHz ABC South Coast – ABC Local Radio
783 kHz Triple M – Southern Cross Austereo
1611 kHz Gold MX – Barricades Media Pty. Ltd.
1629 kHz Rete Italia – Italian Broadcasting
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz 88FlyFM – Barricades Media Pty. Ltd.
92.1 MHz ABC News – ABC
92.9 MHz triple j – ABC
93.7 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
94.5 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
95.3 MHz HitFM – Southern Cross Austereo
96.9 MHz ABC Radio National – ABC
100.9 MHz Albany Community Radio
104.9 MHz Racing Radio – Racing and Wagering Western Australia
106.5 MHz HitFM – Southern Cross Austereo"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Augusta
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,97.1 MHz 2 Oceans FM (Augusta) – Augusta community radio
List of radio stations in Australia,"Beverley
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Brookton
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Broome
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"675 kHz ABC Kimberley – ABC
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Broome FM – Narrowcast
87.8 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
91.7 MHz SBS Radio – Special Broadcasting Service
93.3 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
94.9 MHz triple j – ABC
99.7 MHz Radio Goolari – Community radio
101.3 MHz Red FM – Redwave Media
102.9 MHz The Spirit Network – Redwave Media
104.5 MHz Racing Radio – Racing and Wagering Western Australia
106.9 MHz ABC NewsRadio – ABC
107.7 MHz Radio National – ABC"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Bunbury
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"621 kHz Spirit Radio Network – Sports Entertainment Network
684 kHz ABC South West – ABC
963 kHz Triple M 6TZ – Southern Cross Austereo
1017 kHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
1116 kHz 6MM
1152 kHz ABC News
1224 kHz Radio National – ABC
1629 kHz Three Angels Broadcasting Network Australia
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"93.3 MHz ABC Classic FM – ABC
94.1 MHz triple j – ABC
95.7 MHz hit FM – Southern Cross Austereo
96.5 MHz Harvey Community radio
97.3 MHz Coast FM
98.5 MHz Tourist Radio
101.3 MHz Collie Community Radio
103.7 MHz Bunbury Community Radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Carnarvon
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"666  kHz Classic Hits [9] Archived 10 August 2017 at the Wayback Machine
846  kHz ABC Carnarvon
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6  MHz Carnarvon FM
99.7  MHz Hot Hits [10] Archived 10 August 2017 at the Wayback Machine
101.3 MHz triple j (repeat of 99.3fm Perth)
106.1 MHz ABC News Radio (repeat of 585am Perth)
107.7 MHz ABC Radio National"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Cervantes
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
99.9 MHz Red FM – Redwave Media"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Coolgardie
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
97.9 MHz Hot FM Goldfields"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Coorow
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Corrigin
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Cranbrook
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Dalwallinu
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"531 MHz ABC Radio Dalwallinu
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
106.1 MHz Red FM – Redwave Media"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Denham
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"74.7 Red FM – Redwave Media
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
105.3 MHz Hot Hits 105"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Denmark
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Derby
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,101.1 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Dongara
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"828 kHz ABC Midwest & Wheatbelt – ABC
1008 kHz Racing Radio – Racing and Wagering Western Australia
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
88.6 MHz Racing Radio – Racing and Wagering Western Australia
94.9 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
96.5 MHz Red FM – Redwave Media
98.1 MHz Spirit Radio Network – Redwave Media
98.9 MHz triple j – ABC
99.7 MHz ABC Radio National – ABC
100.5 MHz Midwest Aboriginal Media Association
101.3 MHz ABC News"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Dwellingup
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
97.3 MHz Coast FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Esperance
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
102.3 MHz Hot FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Fitzroy Crossing
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"936 AM Wangki Yupurnanupurru Radio – Community Radio
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Geraldton
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"828 kHz ABC Midwest & Wheatbelt – ABC
1008 kHz Racing Radio – Racing and Wagering Western Australia
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.6 MHz Racing Radio – Racing and Wagering Western Australia
94.9 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
96.5 MHz Red FM – Redwave Media
98.1 MHz The Spirit Network – Redwave Media
98.9 MHz triple j – ABC
99.7 MHz ABC Radio National – ABC
100.5 MHz Midwest Aboriginal Media Association
101.3 MHz ABC News"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Gnowangerup
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Green Head
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Halls Creek
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,101.3 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Hyden
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Jurien Bay
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
103.1 MHz Red FM – Redwave Media
104.7 MHz Spirit Radio Network – Redwave Media"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Kalgoorlie
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"648 kHz ABC Goldfields–Esperance – ABC
981 kHz Triple M (formerly Radiowest 6KG)
1413 kHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz Racing Radio – Racing and Wagering Western Australia
95.5 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
96.3 MHz CAAMA Radio – Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association
97.1 MHz ABC Radio National – ABC
97.9 MHz HOT FM – Southern Cross Austereo
98.7 MHz triple j – ABC
100.3 MHz ABC News – ABC"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Katanning
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
94.9 MHz Hot FM – Southern Cross Austereo"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Kojonup
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Kondinin
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
92.3 MHz Red FM – Redwave Media"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Kulin
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Lake Grace
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Lancelin
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
102.3 MHz Red FM Lancelin
103.9 MHz Spirit Lancelin"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Leeman
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
103.7 MHz Spirit Radio Network – Redwave Media"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Leonora
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,98.5 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Margaret River
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"1611 kHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,100.3 MHz Hot FM – Southern Cross Austereo
List of radio stations in Australia,"Marble Bar
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Mandurah
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"91.7 MHz 91.7 THE WAVE FM – West Coast Radio
97.3 MHz 97.3 Coast FM – West Coast Radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Meekatharra
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
98.3 MHz Meeka FM – Community Radio
101.5 MHz Triple M – Southern Cross Austereo
103.1 MHz Hit FM – Southern Cross Austereo"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Merredin
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
105.1 MHz Hit FM – Southern Cross Austereo
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,1098 kHz Triple M – Southern Cross Austereo
List of radio stations in Australia,"Moora
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
90.9 MHz Red FM – Redwave Media"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Mount Barker
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"93.7 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
95.3 MHz HOT FM
106.5 MHz HOT FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Mount Magnet
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
102.5 MHz Red FM – Redwave Media"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Mukinbudin
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Mullewa
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Narembeen
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Narrogin
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"558 kHz ABC Great Southern – ABC Local Radio
918 kHz RadioWest – Southern Cross Austereo
1296 kHz Radio National – ABC
1422–1611 kHz 6GS – Narrowcast
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
92.5 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
96.3 MHz ABC News – ABC
98.1 MHz triple j – ABC
100.5 MHz Hot FM – Southern Cross Austereo"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Newdegate
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Newman
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
90.5 MHz Red FM – Redwave Media
92.9 MHz 6NEW – Newman Community Radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Norseman
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Northam
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"864 kHz Triple M formerly RadioWest – Southern Cross Austereo (Callsign 6AM)
1215 kHz ABC Central Wheatbelt – ABC
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
96.5 MHz Hot FM – Southern Cross Austereo
98.1 MHz triple j – ABC
98.9 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
99.7 MHz ABC News – ABC
101.3 MHz York FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Northampton
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
96.5 MHz Red FM – Redwave Media
98.1 MHz Spirit Radio Network – Redwave Media"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Onslow
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"100.3 MHz Hot Hits 99.7 relay
101.9 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Paraburdoo
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,98.1 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Pingelly
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Quairading
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Ravensthorpe
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Roebourne
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,97.7 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Southern Cross
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Tambellup
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Tom Price
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"100.9 MHz JJJ
102.5 MHz ABC RR
105.7 MHz Spirit FM
106.5 MHz Gumala Radio
104.1 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Toodyay
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
105.3 MHz Toodyay Community Radio – Local community radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Trayning
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Useless Loop
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"100.3 MHz ABC Local Radio
102.7 MHz triple j"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Wagin
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"558 kHz ABC Local Radio Great Southern – ABC
1422 kHz Radio Great Southern – Radio Great Southern
1611 kHz Easy Listening – Radio Great Southern
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Walpole
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Wickepin
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Wiluna
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Wongan Hills
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Wyndham
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"York
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Tasmania
Hobart
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"585 kHz Radio National – ABC
747 kHz ABC News – ABC
864 kHz 7RPH – Radio Print Handicapped Network
936 kHz ABC Radio Hobart – ABC
1080 kHz TOTE Sport Radio – Racing radio
1620 kHz NTC Radio Australia
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
92.9 MHz triple j – ABC
93.9 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
96.1 MHz Hobart FM (7THE) – Community radio (also translated on 92.1 MHz for areas south of Hobart)
99.3 MHz Edge Radio – Community radio
100.9 MHz Hit 100.9 – Southern Cross Austereo
101.7 MHz 7HOFM – Australian Radio Network
105.7 MHz SBS Radio – Multilingual
106.5 MHz Ultra106five – Christian radio
107.3 MHz Triple M Hobart – Southern Cross Austereo
DAB+"
List of radio stations in Australia,"ABC Radio Hobart
ABC Classic FM
Double J
ABC Jazz
ABC Country
ABC KIDS listen
ABC Grandstand
ABC News Radio
ABC Radio National
SBS Chill
SBS Radio 1
SBS Radio 2
SBS Radio 3
SBS Radio 4
SBS Arabic24
SBS PopAsia
SBS PopDesi
triple j
triple j Unearthed
107.3 Triple M
Hit 100.9
7HOFM
KIX Country"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Bagdad
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Bicheno
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
89.7 MHz ABC Northern Tasmania – ABC Local Radio
91.3 MHz Radio National – ABC
98.5 MHz Star FM – Community Radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Bridgewater
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Burnie
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
90.5 MHz ABC News – ABC
97.7 MHz TOTE Sport Radio – Racing Radio
100.9 MHz 7BU – Australian Radio Network
101.7 MHz Sea FM – Australian Radio Network
102.5 MHz ABC Northern Tasmania – ABC
106.1 MHz Coast FM Tasmania – Community radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Campbell Town
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Devonport
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"98.9 MHz 7AD – Australian Radio Network
100.5 MHz ABC Northern Tasmania – ABC
101.3 MHz TOTE Sport Radio – Racing radio
104.7 MHz Coast FM Tasmania – Community radio
107.7 MHz Sea FM – Australian Radio Network"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Fingal
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Geeveston
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Huon Valley
98.5 MHz Huon FM Website – Community radio – (Geeveston) 95.3 MHz
87.8 MHz Pulse FM Kingborough and Huon [11] Archived 19 April 2018 at the Wayback Machine – Youth Narrowcast Radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Huonville
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Kettering
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Kingston
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Latrobe
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Lauderdale
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Launceston
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"89.3 MHz LAFM (7LA) – Australian Radio Network
90.1 MHz Chilli FM (7EX) – Australian Radio Network
90.9 MHz triple j – ABC
91.7 MHz ABC Northern Tasmania – ABC
92.5 MHz ABC News – ABC
93.3 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
94.1 MHz Radio National – ABC
103.7 MHz & 96.5 MHz City Park Radio – Community radio
104.5 MHz SBS Radio 1 – SBS
105.3 MHz Way FM – Christian radio
106.9 MHz 7RPH – Relay of 864 from Hobart
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,1008 kHz TOTE Sport Radio – Racing Radio
List of radio stations in Australia,"Longford
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Midway Point
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"New Norfolk
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Faith FM – Christian radio
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Orford
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Penguin
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
106.1 MHz Coast FM Tasmania – Community radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Perth
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,87.8 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Queenstown
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
88.9 MHz triple j – ABC
90.5 MHz ABC Northern Tasmania – ABC
92.1 MHz 7XS – Australian Radio Network
95.3 MHz KIX Country – Australian Radio Network
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,630 kHz Radio National – ABC
List of radio stations in Australia,"Richmond
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Rosebery
102.7 MHz triple j – ABC
106.3 MHz ABC Northern Tasmania – ABC
107.1 MHz 7XS – Relay of 837 kHz from Queenstown – Australian Radio Network
107.9 MHz Radio National – ABC"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Scottsdale
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
95.7 MHz 7SD – Australian Radio Network
99.7 MHz Sea FM – Australian Radio Network
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,540 kHz 7SD – Australian Radio Network
List of radio stations in Australia,"Shearwater
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Sheffield
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Smithton
94.5 MHz 7BU – Relay of 558 kHz from Burnie – Australian Radio Network
88.9 MHz Coast FM Tasmania – Community radio
105.5 MHz triple j – ABC"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Somerset
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Sorell
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Strahan
88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
101.9 MHz triple j – ABC
105.1 MHz 7XS – Relay of 837 kHz from Queenstown
105.9 MHz Radio National – ABC
107.5 MHz ABC Northern Tasmania – ABC Local Radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"St Helens
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
90.5 MHz Chilli FM – Australian Radio Network
92.1 MHz 7SD – Australian Radio Network
93.7 MHz Star FM – Community Radio
96.1 MHz Radio National – ABC
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,1584 kHz ABC Northern Tasmania – ABC Local Radio
List of radio stations in Australia,"St Leonards
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"St Marys
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
100.3 MHz Star FM – Community Radio
101.1 MHz Radio National – ABC
102.7 MHz ABC Northern Tasmania – ABC Local Radio
103.5 MHz Chilli FM – Australian Radio Network
105.1 MHz 7SD – Australian Radio Network"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Triabunna
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
88.9 MHz Radio National – ABC
90.5 MHz ABC Radio Hobart  – ABC Local Radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Tunbridge
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Ulverstone
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
106.1 MHz Coast FM Tasmania – Community radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Wynyard
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,106.1 MHz Coast FM Tasmania – Community radio
List of radio stations in Australia,"Zeehan
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Northern Territory
Darwin
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"91.5 MHz Darwin FM – Narrowcast
92.3 MHz Top Country – Narrowcast
94.5 MHz First Nations Radio – Community radio
97.7 MHz Rhema FM 97.7 – Christian radio
100.1 MHz Hot 100 – Australian Radio Network
100.9 MHz SBS Radio – SBS
102.5 MHz ABC News – ABC
103.3 MHz triple j – ABC
104.1 MHz 104.1 Territory FM – Community radio
104.9 MHz Mix 104.9 – Australian Radio Network
105.7 MHz ABC Radio Darwin – ABC
107.3 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"657 kHz Radio National – ABC
1242 kHz RadioTAB (Betting/Racing) – Relay Radio TAB – Brisbane
1530 kHz Yolngu Radio – Aboriginal community radio
1611 kHz Rete Italia – Italian Radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Alice Springs
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
94.9 MHz triple j – ABC
95.9 MHz RadioTAB (Betting/Racing) – Relay Radio TAB – Brisbane
96.9 MHz Sun FM – Sun FM
97.9 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
98.7 MHz Tourist Gold FM
99.7 MHz Radio National – ABC
100.5 MHz CAAMA – Aboriginal community radio
102.1 MHz 8CCC – Community radio
104.1 MHz ABC News
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"783 kHz ABC Alice Springs – ABC
900 kHz 8HA"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Alyangula
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Borroloola
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Elcho Island
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Gapuwiyak
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Katherine
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"87.6 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
88.0 MHz KatCountry88 – Narrowcast
94.9 MHz ABC Classic
99.7 MHz triple j – 8JJJ
101.3 MHz 8KTR – Community radio
103.7 MHz Radio TAB
104.5 MHz CAAMA
105.3 MHz ABC NewsRadio – 8PNNN
106.1 MHz ABC Katherine – ABC Local Radio
106.9 MHz Mix FM
AM"
List of radio stations in Australia,639 kHz ABC Radio National
List of radio stations in Australia,"Lajamanu
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Milingimbi Island
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Nhulunbuy
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Numbulwar
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Ramingining
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Tennant Creek
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"102.1 MHz 8CCC – Community radio
104.5 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Yirrkala
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
List of radio stations in Australia,"Yulara
FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"88.0 MHz Vision Christian Radio – Narrowcast
95.7 MHz triple j – ABC
97.3 MHz Radio TAB (Betting/Racing) – Relay Radio TAB – Brisbane
98.1 MHz Radio National – ABC
98.9 MHz ABC Classic – ABC
99.7 MHz ABC Local Radio – Australian Broadcasting Corporation
100.5 MHz 8HA – Relay of 900 kHz
102.1 MHz CAAMA – Aboriginal community radio
105.3 MHz Tourist Gold FM"
List of radio stations in Australia,"Networks
Ace Radio
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
ABC Local Radio
ABC NewsRadio
Radio National
ABC Classic
triple j
Australian Radio Network
KIIS Network
Pure Gold Network
ARN Regional
Broadcast Operations Group
Capital Radio Network
Sports Talk
Faith FM
Nova Entertainment
Nova FM
smoothfm
Grant Broadcasters
Nine Entertainment
Southern Cross Austereo
Hit Network
Triple M
RadioWest
Radio Print Handicapped Network
RawFM Radio Network
Special Broadcasting Service
SBS Radio 1
SBS Radio 2
SBS National
Sky Racing
Sports Entertainment Network
Super Network
Three Angels Broadcasting Network
Victorian Racing Committee
Vision Christian Radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"See also
List of Australian television channels
List of ABC radio stations
List of Australian AM radio stations
Timeline of Australian radio
History of broadcasting
History of broadcasting in Australia
Community radio
Christian radio"
List of radio stations in Australia,"References
External links
Radio Heritage Foundation
Digital Radio Plus
Search ACMA's database
ACMA → List of transmitters with a licence to broadcast → Radio and TV broadcasting stations
Radio and Television Broadcasting Stations (Internet Edition 2022-01)
Australian Radio Stations
Australian Radio Online Archived 3 April 2016 at the Wayback Machine
Radio Garden"
East Australia hotspot,"The East Australia hotspot (which is now believed by some scientists to represent multiple hotspots including a southwestern Cosgrove hotspot) is a volcanic province in southeast Australia which includes the Peak Range in central Queensland, the Main Range on the Queensland-New South Wales border, Tweed Volcano in New South Wales, and the Newer Volcanics Province (NVP) in Victoria and South Australia. A number of the volcanoes in the province have erupted since Aboriginal settlement (46,000 BP). The most recent eruptions were about 5,600 years ago, and memories of them survive in Aboriginal folklore. These eruptions formed the volcanoes Mount Schank and Mount Gambier in the NVP. There have been no eruptions on the Australian mainland since European settlement.
Unlike most hotspots, the East Australia hotspot has had explosive eruptions similar to the runny lava flows of the Hawaii hotspot, the Iceland hotspot and the Réunion hotspot. The hotspot is thought to be explosive because basaltic magma interacts with groundwater in aquifers below the surface producing violent phreatomagmatic eruptions.
The cause of volcanism in the area is uncertain. Theories typically fall into one of two categories: the mantle plume theory and the plate theory. On the basis of the long duration of volcanic activity, its vast lateral extent, geochemistry of lavas, and seismic data, it has been proposed that the region is underlain by one or more deep mantle plumes which have forced magma up through points of weakness in the Indo-Australian Plate as it has moved northward over the source.
The lack of clear age progression across the province and the orientation of the NVP, which is orthogonal to plate motion, are inconsistent with a single plume model. Furthermore, seismic anomalies terminate at a depth of around 200 km, making the presence of a mantle plume unlikely. However subsections of the province such as the bimodal Central Volcanoes have definite linear age progression on the Hillsborourgh to Buckland linement and the Fraser to Comboyne linement. Similarly the Cenozoic leucitite volcanics of eastern Australia, some of which are under thicker continental crust than the coastal volcanics, are progressively younger towards the south, from Byrock in northern NSW to Cosgrove in northern Victoria. This is now interpreted as the Crosgove hotspot and has been extended southward to the Macedon-Trentham central volcano and the Newer Volcanics Province lava field in Victoria. 
Various tectonic causes have been proposed. Some studies have argued that volcanic activity results from a combination of edge-driven convection (small-scale, shallow mantle convection caused by a change in lithospheric thickness at the continental margin where thick continental lithosphere meets thinner oceanic lithosphere) and decompression of the crust from normal faulting caused by plate stresses. Another view is that extension from stresses brought about by changes in plate boundary configurations has caused severe lithospheric thinning resulting in decompression melting of the asthenosphere. Both of these models invoke shallow processes closely related to the operation of plate tectonics and so fall under the plate theory. Other models combine both plume and plate-tectonic processes. A 2022 synthesis, based on age and composition, suggests three different processes exist for the Cenozoic volcanoes found in eastern Australia and some are not hot spot volcanoes:  "
East Australia hotspot,"Oceanic type, high volume, age-progressive volcanism from deep mantle plume(s)
Continental, age progressive volcanism some from the same plume(s) mixed with different melts
Continental, low volume, non-age-progressive volcanism related to passive melting."
East Australia hotspot,"See also
List of volcanoes in Australia
Hawai'i hotspot"
East Australia hotspot,"References
External links
Volcanoes & Earthquakes in SE Australia from the University of Western Australia"
Geoscience Australia,"Geoscience Australia is an agency of the Australian Government. It carries out geoscientific research. The agency is the government's technical adviser on all aspects of geoscience, and custodian of the geographic and geological data and knowledge of the nation.
On a user pays basis it produces geospatial products such as topographic maps and satellite imagery. It is also a major contributor to the Australian Government's free, open data collections such as data.gov.au and portal.ga.gov.au."
Geoscience Australia,"Strategic priorities
The agency has six strategic priority areas:"
Geoscience Australia,"building Australia's resource wealth in order to maximise benefits from Australia's minerals and energy resources, now and into the future;
ensuring Australia's community safety so that Australian communities are more resilient to natural hazards;
securing Australia's water resources in order to optimise and sustain the use of Australia's water resources;
managing Australia's marine jurisdictions in order to maximise benefits from the sustainable use of Australia's marine jurisdiction;
providing fundamental geographic information in order to understand the location and timing of processes, activities and changes across Australia to inform decision-making for both natural and built environments; and
maintaining geoscience knowledge and capability in order to maintain an enduring and accessible knowledge base and capability to enable evidence-based policy and decision-making by government, industry and the community."
Geoscience Australia,"History
Geoscience Australia came into being in 2001 when the Australian Surveying and Land Information Group (AUSLIG) merged with the Australian Geological Survey Organisation (AGSO). Its history dates back almost to Federation in 1901 when it was decided to set aside land for the national capital. This decision led to the establishment of the Australian Survey Office in 1910, when surveying began for the Australian Capital Territory.
AUSLIG's main function was to provide national geographic information. It was formed in 1987, when the Australian Survey Office joined with the Division of National Mapping, which was formed in 1947. Another important component of AUSLIG was the provision of satellite imagery to industry and government, started by the Australian Landsat Station in 1979, renamed the Australian Centre for Remote Sensing (ACRES) in 1986.
AGSO's predecessor organisation the Bureau of Mineral Resources, Geology and Geophysics (BMR) was established in 1946; with the name changing to AGSO in 1992.
The BMR was a geological survey with the main objective was the systematic geological and geophysical mapping of the continent as the basis for informed mineral exploration.
Geoscience Australia's activities have expanded and today it has responsibility for meeting the Australian Government's geoscience requirements. This role takes the Agency well beyond its historic focus on resource development and topographic mapping to topics as diverse as natural hazards such as tsunami and earthquakes, environmental issues, including the impacts of climate change, groundwater research, marine and coastal research, carbon capture and storage and vegetation monitoring as well as Earth observations from space. Geoscience Australia's remit also extends beyond the Australian landmass to Australia's vast marine jurisdiction."
Geoscience Australia,"Summary of predecessor agencies
Facilities
It has a free place name search and its earthquake monitoring services can be freely accessed. The Library is the premier geoscience library in Australia providing services to geoscience organisations, universities, research centres, the mining and petroleum industries and the public."
Geoscience Australia,"Economic Demonstrated Resources
Geoscience Australia defines Economic Demonstrated Resources (EDR) as resources for which profitable extraction or production under defined investment assumptions
is possible For EDR, tonnages and grades are computed from samples of the resource taken from points spaced to provide assured resource continuity."
Geoscience Australia,"See also
Geological Survey of South Australia
Geological Survey of Western Australia
List of national mapping agencies"
Geoscience Australia,"References
External links
Geoscience Australia home page.
Geoscience Australia Data Discovery Portal.
Geoscience Australia Geological Digital Twin.
Community and Education Geoscience Discovery Digital Atlas.
Australian Mines Atlas.
Atlas of Australian Mine Waste.
Australian Fundamental Gravity Network (AFGN).
AusSeabed Marine Data Portal.
Critical Minerals Mapping Initiative.
Geochronology and Isotopes Data Portal.
Geophysical Archive Data Delivery System (GADDS).
AusH2 - Australia's Hydrogen Opportunities Tool.
MinEx CRC National Drilling Initiative.
Positioning Australia National Positioning Infrastructure.
Geoscience Australia in Google Cultural Institute.
As the cocky flies distance calculator
International Map of the World
XNATMAP's home page preserving NATMAP's (The Division of National Mapping) history and maintaining contact with the people who were part of that history."
Victoria (state),"Victoria, commonly abbreviated as Vic, is a state in southeastern Australia. It is the second-smallest state (after Tasmania), with a land area of 227,444 km2 (87,817 sq mi); the second-most-populated state (after New South Wales), with a population of over 6.7 million; and the most densely populated state in Australia (29.5 per km2). Victoria's economy is the second-largest among Australian states and is highly diversified, with service sectors predominating.
Victoria is bordered by New South Wales to the north and South Australia to the west and is bounded by the Bass Strait to the south (with the exception of a small land border with Tasmania located along Boundary Islet), the Great Australian Bight portion of the Southern Ocean to the southwest, and the Tasman Sea (a marginal sea of the South Pacific Ocean) to the southeast. The state encompasses a range of climates and geographical features from its temperate coastal and central regions to the Victorian Alps in the northeast and the semi-arid northwest.
The majority of the Victorian population is concentrated in the central-south area surrounding Port Phillip, and in particular within the metropolitan area of Greater Melbourne, Victoria's state capital and largest city and also Australia's second-largest city, where over three-quarters of the culturally diverse population live (35.1% of inhabitants being immigrants). The state is also home to four of Australia's 20 largest cities: Melbourne, Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo.
Victoria is home to numerous Aboriginal groups, including the Boonwurrung, the Bratauolung, the Djadjawurrung, the Gunai, the Gunditjmara, the Taungurung, the Wathaurong, the Wurundjeri, and the Yorta Yorta. There were more than 30 Aboriginal languages spoken in the area prior to European colonisation. In 1770 James Cook claimed the east coast of the Australian continent for the Kingdom of Great Britain. The first European settlement in the area occurred in 1803 at Sullivan Bay. Much of Victoria was included in 1836 in the Port Phillip District of New South Wales. 
Named in honour of Queen Victoria, Victoria was separated from New South Wales and established as a separate Crown colony in 1851, achieving responsible government in 1855. The Victorian gold rush in the 1850s and 1860s significantly increased Victoria's population and wealth. By the time of Australian Federation in 1901, Melbourne had become the largest city in Australasia, and was the seat of Federal government until Canberra became the national capital in 1927. The state continued to grow strongly through various periods of the 20th and 21st centuries due to high levels of international and interstate migration. Melbourne hosts a number of museums, art galleries, and theatres; in 2016 a sports marketing company named it the world's sporting capital.
Victoria has 38 seats in the Australian House of Representatives and 12 seats in the Australian Senate. At state level, the Parliament of Victoria consists of the Legislative Assembly and the Legislative Council. The Labor Party, led by Jacinta Allan as premier, has governed Victoria since 2014. The Governor of Victoria, the representative of the monarch in the state, is currently Margaret Gardner. Victoria is divided into 79 local government areas, as well as several unincorporated areas which the state administers directly."
Victoria (state),"History
Indigenous Victorians
The state of Victoria was originally home to many Aboriginal Australian nations that had occupied the land for tens of thousands of years before European settlement. According to Gary Presland, Aboriginal people have lived in Victoria for about 40,000 years, living a semi-nomadic existence of fishing, hunting and gathering, and farming eels.
At the Keilor Archaeological Site, a human hearth excavated in 1971 was radiocarbon-dated to about 31,000 years BP, making Keilor one of the earliest sites of human habitation in Australia. A cranium found at the site has been dated at between 12,000 and 14,700 years BP.
Archaeological sites in Tasmania and on the Bass Strait Islands have been dated to between 20,000 to 35,000 years ago when sea levels were 130 metres below present level allowing First Nations Peoples to move across the region of southern Victoria and onto the land bridge of the Bassian plain to Tasmania by at least 35,000 years ago.
During the Ice Age about 20,000 years BP, the area now the bay of Port Phillip would have been dry land, and the Yarra and Werribee rivers would have joined to flow through the heads then south and south west through the Bassian plain before meeting the ocean to the west. Tasmania and the Bass Strait islands became separated from mainland Australia around 12,000 BP, when the sea level was approximately 50m below present levels. Port Phillip was flooded by post-glacial rising sea levels between 8000 and 6000 years ago.
Oral history and creation stories from the Wada wurrung, Woiwurrung and Bun wurrung languages describe the flooding of the bay. Hobsons Bay was once a kangaroo hunting ground. Creation stories describe how Bunjil was responsible for the formation of the bay, or the bay was flooded when the Yarra River was created."
Victoria (state),"British colonisation
Victoria, like Queensland, was named after Queen Victoria, who had been on the British throne for 14 years when the colony was established in 1851. After the founding of the colony of New South Wales in 1788, Australia was divided into an eastern half named New South Wales and a western half named New Holland, under the administration of the colonial government in Sydney. 
The first British settlement in the area later known as Victoria was established in October 1803 under Lieutenant-Governor David Collins at Sullivan Bay on Port Phillip. It consisted of 402 people (five government officials, nine officers of marines, two drummers, and 39 privates, five soldiers' wives and a child, 307 convicts, 17 convicts' wives, and seven children). They had been sent from England in HMS Calcutta under the command of Captain Daniel Woodriff, principally out of fear that the French, who had been exploring the area, might establish their own settlement and thereby challenge British rights to the continent.
In 1826, Colonel Stewart, Captain Samuel Wright, and Lieutenant Burchell were sent in HMS Fly (Captain Wetherall) and the brigs Dragon and Amity, took a number of convicts and a small force composed of detachments of the 3rd and 93rd regiments. The expedition landed at Settlement Point (now Corinella), on the eastern side of Western Port Bay, which was the headquarters until the abandonment of Western Port at the insistence of Governor Darling about 12 months afterwards. Victoria's next settlement was at Portland, on the south west coast of what is now Victoria. Edward Henty settled Portland Bay in 1834."
Victoria (state),"Batman's treaty
Melbourne was founded in 1835 by John Batman, who set up a base in Indented Head, and John Pascoe Fawkner. From settlement, the region around Melbourne was known as the Port Phillip District, a separately administered part of New South Wales. Shortly after, the site now known as Geelong was surveyed by Assistant Surveyor W. H. Smythe, three weeks after Melbourne. And in 1838, Geelong was officially declared a town, despite earlier European settlements dating back to 1826. On 6 June 1835, just under two years before Melbourne was officially recognised as a settlement, John Batman, the leader of the Port Phillip Association presented Wurundjeri Elders with a land use agreement. 
This document, now referred to as the Batman treaty, was later given to the British government to claim that local Aboriginal people had given Batman access to their land in exchange for goods and rations. The treaty itself was declared void as Batman did not have permission from the Crown to establish Melbourne. Today, the meaning and interpretation of this treaty is contested. Some argue it was a pretence for taking Aboriginal land in exchange for trinkets, while others argue it was significant in that it sought to recognise Aboriginal land rights. The exact location of the meeting between Batman and the Kulin men with whom he made the treaty is unknown, although it is believed to have been by the Merri Creek. According to historian Meyer Eidelson, it is generally believed to have occurred on the Merri near modern-day Rushall Station."
Victoria (state),"Colonial Victoria
On 1 July 1851, writs were issued for the election of the first Victorian Legislative Council, and the absolute independence of Victoria from New South Wales was established proclaiming a new Colony of Victoria. Days later, still in 1851 gold was discovered near Ballarat, and subsequently at Bendigo. Later discoveries occurred at many sites across Victoria. This triggered one of the largest gold rushes the world has ever seen. The colony grew rapidly in both population and economic power. In 10 years, the population of Victoria increased sevenfold from 76,000 to 540,000. All sorts of gold records were produced, including the ""richest shallow alluvial goldfield in the world"" and the largest gold nugget. In the decade 1851–1860 Victoria produced 20 million ounces of gold, one-third of the world's output.
In 1855 the Geological Survey collected and determined the major ion chemistry for groundwater in Victoria. Immigrants arrived from all over the world to search for gold, especially from Ireland and China. By 1857, 26,000 Chinese miners worked in Victoria, and their legacy is particularly strong in Bendigo and its environs.
In 1854 at Ballarat, an armed rebellion against the government of Victoria was made by miners protesting against mining taxes (the ""Eureka Stockade""). This was crushed by British troops, but the confrontation persuaded the colonial authorities to reform the administration of mining concessions (reducing the hated mining licence fees) and extend the electoral franchise. The following year, the Imperial Parliament granted Victoria responsible government with the passage of the Colony of Victoria Act 1855. Some of the leaders of the Eureka rebellion went on to become members of the Victorian Parliament.
In 1857, reflecting the growing presence of Irish Catholic immigrants, John O'Shanassy became the colony's second Premier with the former Young Irelander, Charles Gavan Duffy as his deputy. Melbourne's Protestant establishment was ill-prepared ""to countenance so startling a novelty"". In 1858–59, Melbourne Punch cartoons linked Duffy and O'Shanassy to the terrors of the French Revolution.
In 1862 Duffy's Land Act attempted, but failed, through a system of extended pastoral licences, to break the land-holding monopoly of the so-called ""squatter"" class. In 1871, having led, on behalf of small farmers,  opposition to Premier Sir James McCulloch's land tax, Duffy, himself, was briefly Premier.
In 1893 widespread bank failures brought to an end a sustained period of prosperity and of increasingly wild speculation in land and construction. Melbourne nonetheless retained, as the legacy of the gold rush, its status as Australia's primary financial centre and largest city. In 1901, Victoria became a state in the Commonwealth of Australia. While  Canberra was being built, Melbourne served until 1927 as the country's first federal capital."
Victoria (state),"Geography
Victoria's northern border follows a straight line from Cape Howe to the start of the Murray River and then follows the Murray River as the remainder of the northern border. On the Murray River, the border is the southern bank of the river. This precise definition was not established until 1980, when a ruling by Justice Ninian Stephen of the High Court of Australia settled the question as to which state had jurisdiction in the unlawful death of a man on an island in the middle of the river. The ruling clarified that no part of the watercourse is in Victoria. The border also rests at the southern end of the Great Dividing Range, which stretches along the east coast and terminates west of Ballarat. It is bordered by South Australia to the west and shares Australia's shortest land border with Tasmania. The official border between Victoria and Tasmania is at 39°12' S, which passes through Boundary Islet in the Bass Strait for 85 metres.
Victoria contains many topographically, geologically and climatically diverse areas, ranging from the wet, temperate climate of Gippsland in the southeast to the snow-covered Victorian alpine areas which rise to almost 2,000 m (6,600 ft), with Mount Bogong the highest peak at 1,986 m (6,516 ft). There are extensive semi-arid plains to the west and northwest. There is an extensive series of river systems in Victoria. Most notable is the Murray River system. Other rivers include: Ovens River, Goulburn River, Patterson River, King River, Campaspe River, Loddon River, Wimmera River, Elgin River, Barwon River, Thomson River, Snowy River, Latrobe River, Yarra River, Maribyrnong River, Mitta River, Hopkins River, Merri River and Kiewa River. The state symbols include the pink heath (state flower), Leadbeater's possum (state animal) and the helmeted honeyeater (state bird). Ecological communities include Victorian Volcanic Plain grasslands, Northern Plains Grassland and Gippsland Plains Grassy Woodland, all of which are critically endangered.
According to Geoscience Australia, the geographic centre of Victoria is located in Mandurang at 36° 51' 15""S, 144° 16' 52"" E. The small rural locality is located 10 km (6 mi) south of Bendigo. Due to its central location and the region's historical ties to the gold rush, the town is widely regarded as the ""Heart of Gold"". The state's capital, Melbourne, contains about 70% of the state's population and dominates its economy, media, and culture. For other cities and towns, see list of localities (Victoria) and local government areas of Victoria."
Victoria (state),"Regions
Victoria is divided into distinct geographic regions, most commonly for the purposes of economic development, while others for land management (agriculture or conservation) and for censusing (statistical or meteorological) or electoral purposes. The most commonly used regions are those created by the state government for the purposes of economic development.
In addition to Greater Melbourne, the Victoria State Government has divided Victoria into five regions covering all parts of the state. The five regional Victoria divisions are:"
Victoria (state),"Barwon South West
Gippsland
Grampians
Hume
Loddon Mallee
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology defines regions for its own purposes, some of which share names with the economic regions, even though the exact boundaries may not correlate. As of November 2014, they are:"
Victoria (state),"Mallee
Wimmera
Northern Country
North East Victoria
East Gippsland
West & South Gippsland
Central Victoria
North Central Victoria
South West Victoria
Alpine Victoria
Melbourne"
Victoria (state),"Cities and towns
This is a list of places in the Australian state of Victoria by population. Urban centres are defined by the Australian Bureau of Statistics as being a population cluster of 1,000 or more people. The below figures broadly represent the populations of the contiguous built-up areas of each city:"
Victoria (state),"Climate
Victoria has a varied climate that ranges from semi-arid temperate with hot summers in the north-west, to temperate and cool along the coast. Victoria's main land feature, the Great Dividing Range, produces a cooler, mountain climate in the centre of the state. Winters along the coast of the state, particularly around Melbourne, are relatively mild (see chart).
The coastal plain south of the Great Dividing Range has Victoria's mildest climate. Air from the Southern Ocean helps reduce the heat of summer and the cold of winter. Melbourne and other large cities are located in this temperate region.
The Mallee and upper Wimmera are Victoria's warmest regions with hot winds blowing from nearby semi-deserts. Average temperatures exceed 32 °C (90 °F) during summer and 15 °C (59 °F) in winter. Except at cool mountain elevations, the inland monthly temperatures are 2–7 °C (4–13 °F) warmer than around Melbourne (see chart). Victoria's highest maximum temperature of 48.8 °C (119.8 °F) was recorded in Hopetoun on 7 February 2009, during the 2009 southeastern Australia heat wave.
The Victorian Alps in the northeast are the coldest part of Victoria. The Alps are part of the Great Dividing Range mountain system extending east–west through the centre of Victoria. Average temperatures are less than 9 °C (48 °F) in winter and below 0 °C (32 °F) in the highest parts of the ranges. The state's lowest minimum temperature of −11.7 °C (10.9 °F) was recorded at Omeo on 15 June 1965, and again at Falls Creek on 3 July 1970. Temperature extremes for the state are listed in the table below:"
Victoria (state),"Rainfall
Rainfall in Victoria increases from south to the northeast, with higher averages in areas of high altitude. Mean annual rainfall exceeds 1,800 millimetres (71 inches) in some parts of the northeast but is less than 280 mm (11 in) in the Mallee. Rain is heaviest in the Otway Ranges and Gippsland in southern Victoria and in the mountainous northeast. Snow generally falls only in the mountains and hills in the centre of the state. Rain falls most frequently in winter, but summer precipitation is heavier. Rainfall is most reliable in Gippsland and the Western District, making them both leading farming areas. Victoria's highest recorded daily rainfall was 377.8 mm (14.87 in) at Tidal River in Wilsons Promontory National Park on 23 March 2011."
Victoria (state),	Average temperatures and precipitation for Victoria
Victoria (state),"Demographics
At June 2022 Victoria had a population of 6,613,700. The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates that the population may well reach 7.2 million by 2050.
Victoria's founding Anglo-Celtic population has been supplemented by successive waves of migrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia and, most recently, Africa and the Middle East. Victoria's population is ageing in proportion with the average of the remainder of the Australian population.
About 72% of Victorians are Australian-born. This figure falls to around 66% in Melbourne but rises to higher than 95% in some rural areas in the north west of the state. Less than 1% of Victorians identify themselves as Aboriginal.
More than 75% of Victorians live in Melbourne, located in the state's south. The greater Melbourne metropolitan area is home to an estimated 4,850,740 people. Urban centres outside Melbourne include Geelong, Ballarat, Bendigo, Shepparton, Mildura, Warrnambool, Wodonga and the Latrobe Valley.
Victoria is Australia's most urbanised state: nearly 90% of residents living in cities and towns. State Government efforts to decentralise population have included an official campaign run since 2003 to encourage Victorians to settle in regional areas, however Melbourne continues to rapidly outpace these areas in terms of population growth."
Victoria (state),"Ancestry and immigration
At the 2016 census, the most commonly nominated ancestries were: "
Victoria (state),"0.8% of the population, or 47,788 people, identified as Indigenous Australians (Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders) in 2016.
At the 2016 census, 64.9% of residents were born in Australia. The other most common countries of birth were England (2.9%), India (2.9%), Mainland China (2.7%), New Zealand (1.6%) and Vietnam (1.4%)."
Victoria (state),"Language
As of the 2016 census, 72.2% of Victorians speak English at home. Speakers of other languages include Mandarin (3.2%), Italian (1.9%), Greek (1.9%), Vietnamese (1.7%), and Arabic (1.3%)."
Victoria (state),"Religion
In the 2016 Census, 47.9% of Victorians described themselves as Christian, 10.6% stated that they followed other religions and 32.1% stated that they had no religion or held secular or other spiritual beliefs. In the survey, 31.7% of Victorians stated they had no religion, Roman Catholics were 23.2%, 9.4% did not answer the question, 9% were Anglican and 3.5% were Eastern Orthodox. In 2017 the proportion of couples marrying in a civil ceremony in Victoria was 77.3%; the other 22.7% were married in a religious ceremony."
Victoria (state),"Age structure and fertility
The government predicts that nearly a quarter of Victorians will be aged over 60 by 2021. The 2016 census revealed that Australian median age has crept upward from 35 to 37 since 2001, which reflects the population growth peak of 1969–72. In 2017, Victoria recorded a TFR of 1.724."
Victoria (state),"Average demographic
The ""average Victorian"" according to the demographic statistics may be described as follows:"
Victoria (state),"Crime
In the year ending September 2020, the statistics were skewed by the introduction of six new  public safety offences relating to the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia. Total offences numbered 551,710, with 32,713 of these being breaches of Chief Health Officer Directions. The total offences occurred at a rate of 8,227 per 100,000 people, up 4.4% on the previous year. While there have been some dips along the way, the rate of recorded offences have increased year on year since 2011, when the figure was 6,937.7 offences per 100,000 people."
Victoria (state),"Government
Parliament
Victoria has a parliamentary form of government based on the Westminster System. Legislative power resides in the Parliament consisting of the Governor (the representative of the King), the executive (the Government), and two legislative chambers. The Parliament of Victoria consists of the lower house Legislative Assembly, the upper house Legislative Council and the monarch. Eighty-eight members of the Legislative Assembly are elected to four-year terms from single-member electorates.
In November 2006, the Victorian Legislative Council elections were held under a new multi-member proportional representation system. The State of Victoria was divided into eight electorates with each electorate represented by five representatives elected by Single Transferable Vote. The total number of upper house members was reduced from 44 to 40 and their term of office is now the same as the lower house members—four years. Elections for the Victorian Parliament are now fixed and occur in November every four years. Prior to the 2006 election, the Legislative Council consisted of 44 members elected to eight-year terms from 22 two-member electorates."
Victoria (state),"Premier and cabinet
The Premier of Victoria is the leader of the political party or coalition with the most seats in the Legislative Assembly. The Premier is the public face of government and, with cabinet, sets the legislative and political agenda. Cabinet consists of representatives elected to either house of parliament. It is responsible for managing areas of government that are not exclusively vested in the Commonwealth, by the Australian Constitution, such as education, health and law enforcement. The current Premier of Victoria is Jacinta Allan."
Victoria (state),"Governor
Executive authority is vested in the Governor of Victoria who represents and is appointed by the monarch. The post is usually filled by a retired prominent Victorian. The governor acts on the advice of the premier and cabinet. The current Governor of Victoria is Margaret Gardner."
Victoria (state),"Constitution
Victoria has a written constitution enacted in 1975, but based on the 1855 colonial constitution, passed by the United Kingdom Parliament as the Victoria Constitution Act 1855, which establishes the Parliament as the state's law-making body for matters coming under state responsibility. The Victorian Constitution can be amended by the Parliament of Victoria, except for certain ""entrenched"" provisions that require either an absolute majority in both houses, a three-fifths majority in both houses, or the approval of the Victorian people in a referendum, depending on the provision. To this day, not a single referendum has been held to change the Victorian Constitution."
Victoria (state),"Politics
Victoria is considered by some analysts to be the most progressive state in the nation. The state recorded the highest Yes votes of any state in the republic referendum and same-sex marriage survey. Victorians are said to be ""generally socially progressive, supportive of multiculturalism, wary of extremes of any kind"". Premier Jacinta Allan leads the Victorian Labor Party who replaced Daniel Andrews after his resignation in September 2023. Labor has been in power since the November 2014 Victorian state election.
The centre-left Australian Labor Party (ALP), the centre-right Liberal Party of Australia, the rural-based National Party of Australia, and the left-wing environmentalist Australian Greens are Victoria's main political parties. Traditionally, Labor is strongest in Melbourne's working and middle class western, northern and inner-city suburbs, and the regional cities of Ballarat, Bendigo and Geelong. The Liberals' main support lies in Melbourne's more affluent eastern suburbs and outer suburbs, and some rural and regional centres. The Nationals are strongest in Victoria's North Western and Eastern rural regional areas. The Greens, who won their first lower house seats in 2014, are strongest in inner Melbourne."
Victoria (state),"Federal government
Victorian voters elect 50 representatives to the Parliament of Australia, including 38 members of the House of Representatives and 12 members of the Senate. Since 1 April 2023, the ALP hold 25 Victorian house seats, the Liberals 10, the Nationals three, the Greens one, and independents the remaining three. The ALP and the Liberals hold four senate seats each, while the Nationals, Greens, UAP and an independent hold one seat each."
Victoria (state),"Local government
Victoria is incorporated into 79 municipalities for the purposes of local government, including 39 shires, 32 cities, seven rural cities and one borough. Shire and city councils are responsible for functions delegated by the Victorian parliament, such as city planning, road infrastructure and waste management. Council revenue comes mostly from property taxes and government grants."
Victoria (state),"Education
Primary and secondary
Victoria's state school system dates back to 1872, when the colonial government legislated to make schooling both free and compulsory. The state's public secondary school system began in 1905. Before then, only private secondary schooling was available. Today, a Victorian school education consists of seven years of primary schooling (including one preparatory year) and six years of secondary schooling.
The final years of secondary school are optional for children aged over 17. Victorian children generally begin school at age five or six. On completing secondary school, students earn the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) or Victorian Certificate of Education - Vocational Major (VCE-VM). Students who successfully complete their VCE (not including VCE-VM students) also receive an ATAR, to determine university admittance (unless the student is 'going unscored'.
Victorian schools are either publicly or privately funded. Public schools, also known as state or government schools, are funded and run directly by the Victoria Department of Education Department of Education and Training Victoria. Students do not pay tuition fees, but some extra costs are levied. Private fee-paying schools include parish schools run by the Roman Catholic Church and independent schools similar to British public schools. Independent schools are usually affiliated with Protestant churches. Victoria also has several private Jewish and Islamic primary and secondary schools. Private schools also receive some public funding. All schools must comply with government-set curriculum standards. In addition, Victoria has six government selective schools, Melbourne High School for boys, MacRobertson Girls' High School for girls, the coeducational schools John Monash Science School, Nossal High School and Suzanne Cory High School, and the Victorian College of the Arts Secondary School. Students at these schools are exclusively admitted on the basis of an academic selective entry test. Victoria also offers an online schooling system, called Virtual School Victoria, or VSV. 
As of February 2019, Victoria had 1,529 public schools, 496 Catholic schools and 219 independent schools. Just under 631,500 students were enrolled in public schools, and just over 357,000 in private schools. Over 58 per cent of private students attend Catholic schools. More than 552,300 students were enrolled in primary schools and more than 418,600 in secondary schools. Retention rates for the final two years of secondary school were 84.3 per cent for public school students and 91.5 per cent for private school students. Victoria has about 46,523 full-time teachers."
Victoria (state),"Tertiary education
Victoria has nine universities. The first to offer degrees, the University of Melbourne, enrolled its first student in 1855. The largest, Monash University, has an enrolment of over 83,000 students—more than any other Australian university.
The number of students enrolled in Victorian universities was 418,447 in 2018, an increase of 5.3% on the previous year. International students made up 40% of enrolments and account for the highest percentage of pre-paid university tuition fees. The largest number of enrolments were recorded in the fields of business, administration and economics, with nearly 30% of all students, followed by arts, humanities, and social science, with 18% of enrolments.
Victoria has 12 government-run institutions of technical and further education (TAFE). The first vocational institution in the state was the Melbourne Mechanics' Institute (established in 1839), which is now the Melbourne Athenaeum. More than 1,000 adult education organisations are registered to provide recognised TAFE programs. In 2014, there were 443,000 students enrolled in vocational education in the state. By 2018, the number of students in the sector had dropped by 40 per cent to 265,000—a five-year low which the education department attributed to withdrawal of funding to low-quality providers and a societal shift to university education."
Victoria (state),"Libraries
The State Library Victoria is the State's research and reference library. It is responsible for collecting and preserving Victoria's documentary heritage and making it available through a range of services and programs. Material in the collection includes books, newspapers, magazines, journals, manuscripts, maps, pictures, objects, sound and video recordings and databases. The state has public libraries in most LGAs (typically with multiple branches in their respective municipal areas) and academic libraries in universities, and some special libraries."
Victoria (state),"Economy
The state of Victoria is the second largest economy in Australia after New South Wales, accounting for a quarter of the nation's gross domestic product. The total gross state product (GSP) at current prices for Victoria was A$459 billion in June 2020, with a GSP per capita of A$68,996."
Victoria (state),"Agriculture
Victoria is Australia's second-largest agricultural producer in gross value of production, representing about 25 percent of Australia's total food production. There are 67,600 people employed in the agricultural industry, making it the 6th largest employer in the state. There are about 21,600 farms in the state, managing more than 11.4 million hectares or 50% of the state's total landmass, of which 40% was used for cropping and 50% for grazing. Victorian farms produce nearly 90% of Australian pears and a third of apples. The main vegetable crops include asparagus, broccoli, carrots, potatoes, and tomatoes.
More than 14 million sheep and 5 million lambs graze over 10% of Victorian farms, mostly in the state's north and west. Pgt standard race 126 was the most common Stem Rust (Puccinia graminis f. sp. tritici) race here from 1929 to 1941, as it was for the whole of Australia. First detected on Tasmania in 1954, standard race 21 was the most common race by the next year in this state, the southern part of NSW, and Tasmania. Leaf Rust (P. triticina) is known to have been present here, and throughout the continent, at least since European colonization. P. triticina pathotype 104-2,3,(6),(7),11 was first found here in 1984 and has contributed to populations ever since. It is considered to be foreign to Australia due to a difference in pathogenicity and due to its unique Pgm2 c allele.
Victorian farms produce nearly 90% of Australian pears and a third of apples. It is also a leader in stone fruit (Prunus) production. The main vegetable crops include asparagus, broccoli, carrots, potatoes and tomatoes. Last year, 121,200 metric tons (133,600 short tons) of pears and 270,000 metric tons (300,000 short tons) of tomatoes were produced. More than 14 million sheep and 5 million lambs graze over 10% of Victorian farms, mostly in the state's north and west. In 2004, nearly 10 million lambs and sheep were slaughtered for local consumption and export. Victoria also exports live sheep to the Middle East for meat and to the rest of the world for breeding. More than 108,000 metric tons (119,000 short tons) of wool clip was also produced—one-fifth of the Australian total.
Victoria is the centre of dairy farming in Australia. It is home to 60% of Australia's 3 million dairy cattle and produces nearly two-thirds of the nation's milk, almost 6.4 billion litres (1.7 billion US gallons). The state also has 2.4 million beef cattle, with more than 2.2 million cattle and calves slaughtered each year. In 2003–04, Victorian commercial fishing crews and aquaculture industry produced 11,634 metric tons (12,824 short tons) of seafood valued at nearly A$109 million. Blacklipped abalone is the mainstay of the catch, bringing in A$46 million, followed by southern rock lobster worth A$13.7 million. Most abalone and rock lobster is exported to Asia.
Most of Australia – including this state – imposed a moratorium on GM canola in 2003 to consider the positives and negatives. After consideration the ban here was lifted in 2008 and the state's produced a review of the effects of the moratorium and the expected economic and other effects of adoption or failure to adopt GM canola. The government finds a benefit of AUS$45 per hectare ($18/acre)/season over conventional.
Late in 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic began, and Australian agriculture was heavily impacted by the resulting supply chain issues. The scarcity of freight space and disruption to Chinese New Year purchases was particularly painful, with China being Australia's largest export market and a particularly large buyer of live seafood. As of 2022 there are almost 100 strawberry farms here, most close to Melbourne CBD in the Yarra Valley. They are represented by the Victorian Strawberries organization, who recommend varieties for production."
Victoria (state),"Manufacturing
Victoria has a diverse range of manufacturing enterprises and Melbourne is considered Australia's most important industrial city. The post-World War II manufacturing boom was fuelled by international investment, attracted to the state by the availability of cheap land close to the city and inexpensive energy from the Latrobe Valley. Victoria produced 26.4% of total manufacturing output in Australia in 2015–16, behind New South Wales at 32.4%.
Machinery and equipment manufacturing is the state's most valuable manufacturing activity, followed by food and beverage products, petrochemicals and chemicals. Prominent manufacturing plants in the state include the Portland and Point Henry aluminium smelters, owned by Alcoa; Geelong and Altona oil refineries; a major petrochemical facility at Laverton; and Victorian-based CSL, a global biotechnology company that produces vaccines and plasma products, among others. Victoria also plays an important role in providing goods for the defence industry.
Victoria proportionally relies on manufacturing more than any other state in Australia, constituting 8.6% of total state product; slightly higher than South Australia at 8.0%. However, this proportion has been declining for three decades; in 1990 at the time of the early 1990s recession manufacturing constituted 20.3% of total state output. Manufacturing output peaked in absolute terms in 2008, reaching $28.8 billion and has slowly fallen over the decade to $26.8 billion in 2016 (−0.77% per annum). Since 1990, manufacturing employment has also fallen in both aggregate (367,700 to 274,400 workers) and proportional (17.8% to 9.0%) terms. The strong Australian dollar as a result of the 2000s mining boom, small population and isolation, high wage base and the general shift of manufacturing production towards developing countries have been cited as some of the reasons for this decline.
Historically, Victoria has been a hub for the manufacturing plants of the major car brands Ford, Toyota and Holden; however, closure announcements by all three companies in the 2010s has meant Australia will completely lose their car manufacturing industry by the end of 2017. Holden's announcement occurred in May 2013 following Ford's decision in December the previous year (Ford's Victorian plants, in Broadmeadows and Geelong, closed in October 2016). Toyota followed suit in February 2014 with an expected announcement as without Holden or Ford, local supply chains would struggle to create the economics of scale required to supply one manufacturer."
Victoria (state),"Land
Victoria adopted the Torrens system of land registration with the Real Property Act 1862. The Torrens system did not replace the common law system but applied only to new land grants and to land that has been voluntarily registered under the Act, and its successors. The common law system continues to apply to all other private landholdings. Crown land held in Victoria is managed under the Crown Land (Reserves) Act 1978 and the Land Act 1958."
Victoria (state),"Mining
Mining in Victoria contributes around A$6 billion to the gross state product (~2%) but employs less than 1% of workers. The Victorian mining industry is concentrated on energy producing minerals, with brown coal, petroleum and gas accounting for nearly 90% of local production. The oil and gas industries are centred off the coast of Gippsland in the state's east, while brown coal mining and power generation is based in the Latrobe Valley.
In 1985, oil production from the offshore Gippsland Basin peaked to an annual average of 450,000 barrels (72,000 m3) per day. In 2005–2006, the average daily oil production has declined to 83,000 bbl (13,200 m3)/d, but despite the decline Victoria still produces almost 19.5% of crude oil in Australia. In the 2005–06 fiscal year, the average gas production was over 700 million cubic feet (20,000,000 m3) per day (M cuft/d) and represented 18% of the total national gas sales, with demand growing at 2% per year.  Campaigning resulted in a prohibition on onshore gas exploration and production in Victoria in 2014,. This was partially lifted in 2021 but the state retains a constitutional ban on fracking.
Brown coal is Victoria's leading mineral, with 66 million tonnes mined each year for electricity generation in the Latrobe Valley, Gippsland. The region is home to the world's largest known reserves of brown coal. Despite being the historic centre of Australia's gold rush, Victoria today contributes a mere 1% of national gold production. Victoria also produces limited amounts of gypsum and kaolin. Victoria's gold production is mostly derived from the Fosterville and Stawell Gold Mines."
Victoria (state),"Tourism
Tourism is a significant industry in the state of Victoria, Australia. The country's second most-populous city, Melbourne was visited by 2.7 million international overnight visitors and 9.3 million domestic overnight visitors during the year ending December 2017. Named the world's most liveable city from 2011 to 2017, Melbourne's culture and lifestyle have been increasingly promoted internationally, leading to average year-on-year growth of international visitors of 10% in the five years to 2017. Some major tourist destinations in Victoria are:"
Victoria (state),"The metropolis of Melbourne, particular its inner city suburbs (known also for shopping tourism) and the attractions of the city centre such as Melbourne Zoo, Melbourne Museum, the Melbourne Aquarium and Scienceworks, tourism precincts such as Melbourne Docklands, Southbank and St Kilda as well as cultural and sporting tourist icons such as Arts Centre Melbourne, the East End Theatre District, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Melbourne Cricket Ground, also known as the MCG, and the Eureka Tower, with the highest observation deck in the Southern Hemisphere, Skydeck 88.
Victoria has more than 2000 kilometres of coastline with hundreds of beaches.
The Goldfields region featuring the historic cities of Ballarat, Beechworth, Bendigo, Castlemaine, Maldon and Daylesford.
Natural attractions, such as The Twelve Apostles, Wilsons Promontory, The Grampians, the fairy penguins (particularly at Phillip Island and St Kilda), the Buchan Caves and the Gippsland Lakes.
The Dandenong Ranges (in particular the Puffing Billy Railway).
Healesville Sanctuary, which specialises in local Australian species.
Towns along the Murray River and Riverina including Echuca and Mildura including waterskiing.
Geelong and its famous Waterfront, Eastern Beach and Geelong West's Pakington Street.
The Bellarine Peninsula which features vineyards and historic resort towns such as Queenscliff, Drysdale and Portarlington.
The Werribee Park Mansion and Werribee Open Range Zoo.
The Surf Coast which features famous beaches such as Bells Beach, Torquay and Lorne
Mornington Peninsula, particularly for its wineries in Red Hill and secluded beaches in Mount Eliza and Mornington, The Pillars in Mount Martha, Arthur's Seat and the coastal attractions of Portsea, Sorrento and Flinders.
Yarra Valley (in particular Healesville Sanctuary and wineries).
Great Ocean Road, which features The Twelve Apostles, historic towns of Port Fairy and Portland, cliffs and whale watching and resort towns such as Lorne.
The Victorian Alpine Region, part of the Australian Alps, particularly for skiing.
The Central Victorian Highlands, ""High country"" are very well known for winter sports and bushwalking.
Wine regions across the entire state.
Other popular tourism activities are gliding, hang-gliding, hot air ballooning and scuba diving. Major events that explore cultural diversity, music and sports play a big part in Victoria's tourism. The V8 Supercars and Australian Motorcycle Grand Prix at Phillip Island, the Grand Annual Steeplechase at Warrnambool and the Australian International Airshow at Avalon and numerous local festivals such as the popular Port Fairy Folk Festival, Queenscliff Music Festival, Pako Festa in Geelong West, Bells Beach Surf Classic and the Bright Autumn Festival amongst others."
Victoria (state),"Transport
Victoria has the highest population density in any state in Australia, with population centres spread out over most of the state; only the far northwest and the Victorian Alps lack permanent settlement. As of October 2013, smoking tobacco is prohibited in the sheltered areas of train stations, and tram and bus stops, as is the use of e-cigarettes. Between 2012 and 2013, 2002 people were issued with infringement notices. The state government announced a plan in October 2013 to prohibit smoking on all Victorian railway station platforms and raised tram stops.  
The Victorian road network services the population centres, with highways generally radiating from Melbourne and other major cities and rural centres with secondary roads interconnecting the highways to each other. Many of the highways are built to freeway standard (""M"" freeways), while most are generally sealed and of reasonable quality."
Victoria (state),"Rail transport in Victoria is provided by several private and public railway operators who operate over government-owned lines. Major operators include: Metro Trains Melbourne which runs an extensive, electrified, passenger system throughout Melbourne and suburbs; V/Line which is now owned by the Victorian Government, operates a concentrated service to major regional centres, as well as long-distance services on other lines; Pacific National, CFCL Australia which operate freight services; Great Southern Rail which operates The Overland Melbourne—Adelaide; and NSW TrainLink which operates XPTs Melbourne—Sydney.
There are also several smaller freight operators and numerous tourist railways operating over lines which were once parts of a state-owned system. Victorian lines mainly use the 1,600 mm (5 ft 3 in) broad gauge. However, the interstate trunk routes, as well as a number of freight lines in the north and west of the state have been converted to 1,435 mm (4 ft 8+1⁄2 in) standard gauge. Two tourist railways operate over 760 mm (2 ft 6 in) narrow gauge lines, which are the remnants of five formerly government-owned lines which were built in mountainous areas.
Melbourne has the world's largest tram network, currently operated by Yarra Trams. As well as being a popular form of public transport, over the last few decades trams have become one of Melbourne's major tourist attractions. There are also tourist trams operating over portions of the former Ballarat and Bendigo systems. There are also tramway museums at Bylands, Haddon and Hawthorn.
Melbourne Airport is the major domestic and international gateway for the state. Avalon Airport is the state's second busiest airport, which complements Essendon and Moorabbin Airports to see the remainder of Melbourne's air traffic. Hamilton Airport, Mildura Airport, Mount Hotham and Portland Airport are the remaining airports with scheduled domestic flights. There are no fewer than 27 other airports in the state with no scheduled flights. The Port of Melbourne is the largest port for containerised and general cargo in Australia, and is located in Melbourne on the mouth of the Yarra River, which is at the head of Port Phillip. Additional seaports are at Westernport, Geelong, and Portland."
Victoria (state),"Utilities
Energy
Victoria's major utilities include a collection of brown-coal-fired power stations, particularly in the Latrobe Valley. One of these was the recently decommissioned Hazelwood Power Station, which was number 1 on the worldwide List of least carbon efficient power stations. The Victorian government is aiming to cut 40.6 mega tonnes of greenhouse gases emissions by 2025."
Victoria (state),"Water
Victoria's water infrastructure includes a series of dams and reservoirs, predominantly in Central Victoria, that hold and collect water for much of the state. The water collected is of a very high quality and requires little chlorination treatment, giving the water a taste more like water collected in a rainwater tank. In regional areas however, such as in the west of the state, chlorination levels are much higher. The Victorian Water Grid consists of a number of new connections and pipelines being built across the State. This allows water to be moved around Victoria to where it is needed most and reduces the impact of localised droughts in an era thought to be influenced by climate change. Major projects already completed as part of the Grid include the Wimmera Mallee Pipeline and the Goldfields Superpipe."
Victoria (state),"Sport
Victoria is the home of Australian rules football, with ten of the 18 Australian Football League (AFL) clubs based in the state. The AFL Grand Final is traditionally held at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on the last Saturday of September. The state has a public holiday the day before the Grand Final, which coincides with the AFL Grand Final parade.  The MCG is sometimes called he spiritual home of Australian rules football.
The Victorian cricket team play in the national Sheffield Shield cricket competition. Victoria is represented in the National Rugby League by the Melbourne Storm and in Super Rugby by the Melbourne Rebels. It is represented in the National Basketball League by Melbourne United and South East Melbourne Phoenix. It is also represented in soccer by Melbourne Victory, Melbourne City and Western United in the A-League. Melbourne has held the 1956 Summer Olympics, 2006 Commonwealth Games and the FINA World Swimming Championship.
Melbourne is also home to the Australian Open tennis tournament in January each year, which is the first of the world's four Grand Slam tennis tournaments, as well as the Formula One Australian Grand Prix, which is, on an annual basis, usually held in March or April. It hosted the Australian Masters golf tournament from 1979 to 2015. Victoria's Bells Beach hosts one of the world's longest-running surfing competition, the Bells Beach SurfClassic, which is part of The ASP World Tour. The Melbourne Vixens and Collingwood Magpies Netball represent Victoria in the National Netball League.
Victoria's Phillip Island is home of the Phillip Island Grand Prix Circuit which hosts the Australian motorcycle Grand Prix which features MotoGP (the world's premier motorcycling class), as well as the Australian round of the World Superbike Championship and the domestic V8 Supercar racing, which also visits Sandown Raceway and the rural Winton Motor Raceway circuit. Australia's most prestigious footrace, the Stawell Gift, is an annual event. Victoria is also home to the Aussie Millions poker tournament, the tournament with the highest potential proceeds in the Southern Hemisphere.
The main horse racing tracks in Victoria are Caulfield Racecourse, Flemington Racecourse and Sandown Racecourse. The Melbourne Spring Racing Carnival is one of the biggest horse racing events in the world and is one of the world's largest sporting events. The main race is for the $6 million Melbourne Cup, and crowds for the carnival usually exceed 700,000. Victoria was due to host the 2026 Commonwealth Games but withdrew on 18 July 2023 as a result of increased costs of holding the event.
Major professional teams include:"
Victoria (state),"Australian rules football (AFL): Carlton, Collingwood, Essendon, Geelong Cats, Hawthorn, Melbourne, North Melbourne, Richmond, St Kilda, Western Bulldogs
Basketball (NBL): Melbourne United, South East Melbourne Phoenix
Cricket (BBL): Melbourne Renegades, Melbourne Stars
Cricket (Sheffield Shield and Marsh One-Day Cup): Victoria cricket team
Netball (NNL): Melbourne Vixens, Collingwood Magpies
Rugby league (NRL): Melbourne Storm
Rugby union (Super Rugby): Melbourne Rebels
Soccer (A-League): Melbourne City, Melbourne Victory, Western United"
Victoria (state),"Sister states
Victoria has four sister states:"
Victoria (state),"Jiangsu, China (1979)
Aichi Prefecture, Japan (1980)
Busan, South Korea (1994)
Sichuan, China (2016)"
Victoria (state),"See also
Geography of Victoria
List of highways in Victoria
Protected areas of Victoria
Vicmap Topographic Map Series
List of places in Victoria by population"
Victoria (state),"Notes
References
Further reading
Victorian frontier history
Jan Critchett (1990), A distant field of murder: Western district frontiers, 1834–1848, Melbourne University Press (Carlton, Vic. and Portland, Or.) ISBN 0522843891.
Ian D Clark (1990), Aboriginal languages and clans: An historical atlas of western and central Victoria, 1800–1900, Dept. of Geography & Environmental Science, Monash University (Melbourne),  ISBN 0-909685-41-X.
Ian D Clark (1995), Scars in the landscape: A register of massacre sites in western Victoria, 1803–1859, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (Canberra), ISBN 0-85575-281-5.
Ian D Clark (2003), ""That's my country belonging to me"": Aboriginal land tenure and dispossession in nineteenth century Western Victoria, Ballarat Heritage Services, Ballarat."
Victoria (state),External links
Victoria (state),Government
Victoria (state),"Official website of the Victorian Government
Parliament of Victoria
Public Record Office Victoria
Victorian Heritage Database
Travel"
Victoria (state),"Official website of Tourism Victoria
Victorian Places website
Tourism Victoria's Online Image Library
General information"
Victoria (state),"Victoria at Curlie
 Geographic data related to Victoria (state) at OpenStreetMap"
Coat of arms of Australia,"The coat of arms of Australia, officially the Commonwealth Coat of Arms, is a formal symbol of the Commonwealth of Australia. It depicts a shield, containing symbols of Australia's six states, and is held up by native Australian animals, the kangaroo and the emu. The seven-pointed Commonwealth Star surmounting the crest also represents the states and territories, while golden wattle, the national floral emblem, appears below the shield.
The first arms were authorised by King Edward VII on 7 May 1908, and the current version by King George V on 19 September 1912, although the 1908 version continued to be used in some contexts, notably appearing on the reverse of the sixpenny coin."
Coat of arms of Australia,"Design
The escutcheon is the focal point of the coat of arms, contained within is the badge of each Australian state, the whole surrounded by an ermine border representing the federation of the states."
Coat of arms of Australia,"In the top half, from left to right, the states represented are New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland. In the bottom half, from left to right: South Australia, Western Australia, and Tasmania. Above the shield is the seven-pointed Commonwealth Star or Star of Federation above a blue and gold wreath, forming the crest. Six of the points on the star represent the original six states, while the seventh point represents the combined territories and any future states of Australia. In its entirety the shield represents the federation of Australia.
The red kangaroo and emu that support the shield have never been designated as official animal emblems of the nation. They owe their unofficial recognition to the fact that they are endemic Australian fauna (found only on that continent), and likely chosen because they are the most well-known native Australian animals large enough to be positioned together in scale holding up the shield. They symbolise progress and the nation moving forward as neither animal can easily walk backwards. Director of the Parliament House Art Collection, Justine Van Mourik has claimed that the kangaroo is, and must be seen to be, male, and this requirement led to a interpretation by John Coburn of the coat of arms for Parliament house to be rejected.
In the background is a wreath of golden wattle, the official national floral emblem, though the representation of the species is not botanically accurate. At the bottom is a scroll that contains the name of the nation. While almost always depicted, these elements are technically optional artistic flourishes as they are not described in the royal warrant for the arms."
Coat of arms of Australia,"Blazon
The official blazon of the Commonwealth was included in a royal warrant of King George V on 19 September 1912, that officially granted the arms. The blazon is as follows:"
Coat of arms of Australia,"Quarterly of six, the first quarter Argent a Cross Gules charged with a Lion passant guardant between on each limb a Mullet of eight points Or; the second Azure five Mullets, one of eight, two of seven, one of six and one of five points of the first (representing the Constellation of the Southern Cross) ensigned with an Imperial Crown proper; the third of the first a Maltese Cross of the fourth, surmounted by a like Imperial Crown; the fourth of the third, on a Perch wreathed Vert and Gules an Australian Piping Shrike displayed also proper; the fifth also Or a Swan naiant to the sinister Sable; the last of the first, a Lion passant of the second, the whole within a Bordure Ermine; for the Crest on a Wreath Or and Azure A Seven-pointed Star Or, and for Supporters dexter a Kangaroo, sinister an Emu, both proper.The following is the blazon for the 1908 coat of arms:
Azure on an Inescutcheon Argent upon a Cross of St. George cottised of the field five six pointed Stars of the second (representing the Constellation of the Southern Cross) all within an Orle of Inescutcheons of the second, each charged with a Chevron Gules, And for the Crest on the wreath of the Colours A seven pointed star Or—And for supporters On a compartment of grass to the dexter, a Kangaroo, to the sinster an Emu both proper, together with the motto ""Advance Australia""."
Coat of arms of Australia,"History
Following the federation of Australia, the first official coat of arms of Australia was granted by King Edward VII on 7 May 1908. The original design is thought to have been inspired by the 1805 Bowman flag, which showed the rose, shamrock and thistle supported by a kangaroo and emu. "
Coat of arms of Australia,"It consisted of a shield in the centre, the seven pointed star on a wreath as the crest above it, and a kangaroo and an emu using its foot to help the kangaroo to support the shield, all on a bed of green grass with a scroll containing the motto ""Advance Australia"". The selection of the kangaroo, the emu and the words, ""Advance Australia"" were tied together symbolically. The shield had a white background, with a red cross of Saint George, blue lines outside the cross, and a blue border containing six inescutcheons featuring a red chevron on white, representing the six states. The Scottish Patriotic Association was vocally opposed to the shield's design, noting that it should display the Union Jack to represent British and Irish settlers. These arms were used by the government and appeared on the sixpence coin from 1910 until 1963, and the threepence, shilling and florin from 1910 to 1936.
The 1908 arms were redesigned in 1911, and officially granted by George V on 19 September 1912. The redesign spurred much debate in Parliament. The member of Parliament for Wentworth, Willie Kelly, said:"
Coat of arms of Australia,"The emu and kangaroo are so built that they hardly fit into the heraldic atmosphere, and I think we make ourselves ridiculous when we endeavour to carry on the traditions of the Old World with some of the wild creations of our Australian fauna.
Despite objections, the kangaroo and emu now not having its leg up remained the shield bearers in the new coat of arms and were modified to appear more realistic. The principal reason for the redesign was the concern that Australia's states were not individually represented; that was achieved by showing each state's heraldic badge on the shield. The new coat of arms removed the bed of grass beneath the shield and changed the scroll to read simply ""Australia"". The colours in the wreath were also changed from blue and white to blue and gold. A background of two sprays of golden wattle was added, but it has never been an official part of the armorial bearings, although later golden wattle was proclaimed Australia's national flower on 19 August 1988.
The use of each state's badge had been a feature of the first Great Seal of Australia, introduced on 21 January 1904, where they surrounded the UK Royal Arms; according to Charles R. Wylie, badges were used because South Australia and Western Australia did not yet have coats of arms.
In 1954, the Menzies government engaged several artists (including Alistair Morrison, Alfred Cook, Cedric Emanuel and Eileen Mayo) to consider a redesign of the arms. While not wishing to change the major elements, the government ""was anxious"" to add a crown and remove the golden wattle (for ease of reproduction). Bill Taylor MP also suggested that the arms be reissued as a version of the royal arms, like the Canadian royal arms of 1921, to accord with Australia's greater independence following the Statute of Westminster 1931."
Coat of arms of Australia,"Use
The Commonwealth Coat of Arms is the formal symbol of the Commonwealth of Australia that signifies Commonwealth authority and ownership. The Arms are used by Australian Government departments and agencies, statutory and non-statutory authorities, the Parliament and Commonwealth courts and tribunals. Senators and Federal Members of the Australian Parliament may also use the Arms in the course of their duties as Parliamentarians. The coat of arms should never be used where it could wrongly imply a formal guarantee, sponsorship or endorsement by the Commonwealth. Use of the arms by private citizens or organisations is rarely permitted; however, there are provisions for use by sporting bodies and in educational publications. Use of the coat of arms without permission may breach the Competition and Consumer Act 2010, section 145.1 of the Criminal Code Act 1995 or section 39(2) of the Trade Marks Act 1995. The import of goods bearing the arms is also illegal according to the Customs (Prohibited Imports) Regulations.
There is a full colour version and nine heraldically correct official versions exist for single-colour reproduction.
The coat of arms was the basis of Queen Elizabeth's Personal Australian Flag, and since 1973 a slightly modified version has formed the basis of the Great Seal of Australia.
The coat of arms has appeared on Australian coinage since the coins for the Australian pound were minted in the early 20th century. Until 1936, the 1908 coat of arms featured on the reverse of all silver coins in regular circulation(3d, 6d, 1'/, 2'/). After 1936, the current coat of arms was featured on the reverse of the Florin (2'/), while the 1908 arms remained on the sixpence (6d). Since decimalisation in 1966, the current coat of arms has featured on the reverse of both variants of the 50-cent coin.
The coat of arms is used as badge of rank for Warrant Officers Class 1 (Army) and Warrant Officer (Navy and Air Force). A more stylised version is used as a badge of rank for Warrant Officer of the Navy, Regimental Sergeant Major of the Army and Warrant Officer of the Air Force.
Australians are sometimes erroneously claimed to be the only people who eat the animals on their coat of arms, and the combination of both kangaroo and emu meat in a single dish such as pie or pizza is known as the Coat of Arms."
Coat of arms of Australia,"States and territories
Cities
Coins
See also
Flag of Australia
National colours of Australia
Australian heraldry"
Coat of arms of Australia,"References
External links
Official website with more information
National Archives of Australia. Papers relating to the Commonwealth Coat of Arms Archived 21 August 2008 at the Wayback Machine
Online Exhibition commemorating the Centenary of the NSW Coat of Arms 1906–2006 The designer of the NSW Coat of Arms, William Gullick, was also involved in the creation of the Australian Coat of Arms"
Shipwrecks of Western Australia,"Over 1400 ships have been wrecked on the coast of Western Australia. This relatively large number of shipwrecks is due to a number of factors, including:"
Shipwrecks of Western Australia,"a long and very difficult coastline with very few natural harbours;
powerful storms and gales that are very common at certain times of the year (these winds are normally on-shore);
a long cyclone season rendering all sea travel hazardous and many harbours ineffectual in providing a safe haven;
the inability to accurately measure longitude until the late 18th century, and the tendency to reduce ships' travel time by keeping them in the ""Roaring Forties"" for as long as possible, which caused many ships to fail to turn north for the Indies at the right time."
Shipwrecks of Western Australia,"Listings
Most listings of the wrecks of Western Australia present them chronologically or group them into regions, areas or adjacent capes and coastal features, so as to divide the large number into manageable collections, thematic or regional studies. These groupings and individual data on each site can be seen in electronic databases and in a number of 'hard copy' works produced by a number of authors (e.g. the Australian Shipwrecks series, by Charles Bateson and then by Jack Loney appearing in both formats) and in focussing specifically on Western Australia, by the Department of Maritime Archaeology at the Western Australian Museum. Its CEO is charged with the responsibility of managing the wrecks lying offshore and in inland rivers and estuaries for both the State of Western Australia and the Commonwealth Government. A chronological listing of all known wrecks on the Western Australian coast, for example, appears in the three volume 'Unfinished Voyages' Series produced by Graeme Henderson with the assistance of other authors. Sarah Kenderdine produced an analysis of the historic wrecks of the Metropolitan coast. WA Museum volunteers and Honorary Associates, Peter and Jill Worsley, together with David Totty produced an analysis of wrecks on the mid-west coast. Other databases produced by the WA Museum include its 'Strangers on the Shore' listing. This work produced by cultural heritage student Lesley Silvester assisted by Michael Murray appears in both hard copy and electronic form and it documents the many interactions between Indigenous people and shipwreck survivors. They landed bereft of the trappings of power that are normally associated with those arriving for exploration, trading or commerce, rendering the interaction doubly of importance in analysing indigenous reactions to 'foreign' presence on their shores. The Australian Netherlands Committee on old Dutch Shipwrecks (ANCODS) provides details specific to the Dutch East India Company (VOC) ships lost on the coast, including a database on the artefacts raised. The VOC Society is another group providing information on the Dutch wrecks on the coast. Though concentrating on the Dutch East India Company, it also produces regional listings providing information on many shipwrecks. To assist researchers in obtaining detailed information on many of the wrecks (other than that appearing in its books, articles and journal entries) the WA Museum has made all its unpublished departmental reports available in PDF form. These deal with a wide variety of shipwreck-related issues."
Shipwrecks of Western Australia,"Regions
The WA Museum has also produced a series of pamphlets documenting wrecks in specific regions. Part of its 'wreck trail', or 'wreck access' concept welcoming visitors to shipwrecks as part of 'their' maritime heritage, these and the plaques placed above and below water at many sites are aimed towards cultural tourism, the recreational visitor and schools. Provision is also made for access to sites for people with disabilities, though this program produced with assistance from residents of the Rocky Bay Village is yet in its infancy. Sustainable visitation to the shipwrecks is welcomed and only three wrecks off the coast of Western Australia require a permit for entry to the site. These are the VOC ship Zuytdorp and the WWII adversaries Kormoran and HMAS Sydney. While also presenting its work in books, journals and other specialist outlets, the Department has also promulgated all its wreck reports to the web where they are available in PDF form. Appearing also are bibliographic and artefact databases, shipwreck projects and other data."
Shipwrecks of Western Australia,"Notable wrecks
The first known wreck on the Western Australian coast was the Trial (Tryall) in 1622. The Dutch East India Ship (VOC) Batavia, which was lost in 1629, is the best known, being the subject of many books, articles, an opera and numerous films. All the VOC ships following (see list below) have attracted considerable interest, partly because of the treasure they carried, the remarkable stories of their destruction and in some cases salvation, and also the possibility that in some cases survivors may have intermingled with the indigenous inhabitants. This is especially of interest at the wrecks of the Vergulde Draeck and Zuytdorp.
Other notable pre-colonial wrecks include Correio da Azia, a Portuguese Despatch vessel bound for Macau, and Rapid, an American China Trader bound for the Indies. These were both wrecked on the Ningaloo Reef, which like the Abrolhos Islands off Geraldton was a notorious ""ship trap"". Of the colonial-era wrecks, the James Matthews, a former slave ship, and the SS Xantho, an iron-hulled steamer with a unique ex-gunboat engine are the most prominent. Others prominent on the basis of their being excavated and on the amount of research conducted into them include the Elizabeth Belinda, Stefano, and Eglinton, all early wooden-hulled merchant vessels; the Sepia and Europa, iron barques; the Day Dawn, a former American whale ship; and the wooden whalers Star, Lively, and Lady Lyttelton. The iron-hulled SS Macedon, the composite barque Lady Elizabeth and the other Rottnest Island shipwrecks assume considerable prominence as a suite of sites presented in the ""wreck trail"", ""wreck access"" or ""museum-without-walls"" mode.
In the modern era, HMAS Sydney and the German auxiliary cruiser Kormoran, adversaries in World War II, have been the subject of extensive study. Both wrecks were discovered in 2008."
Shipwrecks of Western Australia,"Timeline of significant wrecks
This is a listing of all shipwrecks recorded on the WA Museum database."
Shipwrecks of Western Australia,"See also
ANCODS (Australian Netherlands Committee on Old Dutch Shipwrecks)
List of shipwrecks of Australia § Western Australia
Rottnest Island shipwrecks
Western Australian Museum § Maritime and Shipwrecks Museums"
Shipwrecks of Western Australia,"Notes
References
Henderson, Graeme (1988–2008). Unfinished Voyages: Western Australian Shipwrecks 1622-1900, 3 Vols. Nedlands, Western Australia: University of Western Australia Press.
Bateson, C. (1972). Australian Shipwrecks: including Vessels wrecked en route to and from Australia and some strandings . Volume 1 1622-1850. Sydney: Reed.
Loney, J. (1980–1987). Australian Shipwrecks 1850-1986 3 Vols. Sydney: Reed."
States and territories of Australia,"The states and territories are the second level of government of Australia. The states are administrative divisions that are self-governing polities that are partly sovereign, having ceded some sovereign rights to the federal government. They have their own constitutions, legislatures, executive governments, judiciaries and law enforcement agencies that administer and deliver public policies and programs. Territories can be autonomous and administer local policies and programs much like the states in practice, but are still legally subordinate to the federal government.
Australia has six federated states:  New South Wales (including Lord Howe Island), Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania (including Macquarie Island), Victoria, and Western Australia. Australia also has ten federal territories, out of which three are internal territories: the Australian Capital Territory, the Jervis Bay Territory, and the Northern Territory on the Australian mainland; and seven are external territories: the Ashmore and Cartier Islands, the Australian Antarctic Territory, Christmas Island, the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, the Coral Sea Islands, Heard Island and McDonald Islands, and Norfolk Island that are offshore dependent territories. Every state and internal territory (except the Jervis Bay Territory) is self-governing with its own independent executive government, legislative branch, and judicial system, while the rest only have local government status overseen by federal departments.
State and territory governments may legislate on matters concerning their citizens, subject to the limits of the federal constitution (notably section 51 and section 109). Each state and internal territory (except Jervis Bay Territory) has its own legislature, although the Federal Parliament can override territorial legislation. The federal High Court of Australia acts as a final court of appeal for all matters, and has the authority to override any state judiciary. While all states and internal territories have their own judicial system (subject to appeal to the High Court), most external territories are subject to the judiciary and legislature of either a state or internal territory. Excluding the Heard Island and McDonald Islands and the Australian Antarctic Territory (which are governed by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water), the external territories are governed by the federal Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts. Norfolk Island had its own legislature from 1979 to 2015.
Each state is a successor to historical British colonies, and each has its own constitution. The Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and Northern Territory for the most part operate indistinguishably from the states (for example, both have representation in the Parliament since 1948 and in the Senate since 1975), even though they do not have constitutional status as states and territorial legislation can be overridden."
States and territories of Australia,"Geography
Surrounded by the Indian, Pacific, and Southern oceans, Australia is separated from Maritime Southeast Asia and New Guinea by the Arafura Sea, the Timor Sea, and the Torres Strait, from Island Melanesia by the Coral Sea, and from New Zealand by the Tasman Sea. The world's smallest continent, Australia is also the sixth-largest country by land area and sometimes considered the world's largest island. Australia has a mainland coastline of 32,994 kilometres (20,502 mi) and claims an exclusive economic zone of about 8,200,000 square kilometres (3,200,000 sq mi)."
States and territories of Australia,"Borders
Australian Capital Territory borders
New South Welsh borders
Northern Territory borders
Queensland borders
South Australian borders
Tasmanian borders
Victorian borders
Western Australian borders"
States and territories of Australia,"States and territories
At Federation in 1901, what is now the Northern Territory was within South Australia, what are now the Australian Capital Territory and Jervis Bay Territory were within New South Wales, and Coral Sea Islands was part of Queensland. Ashmore and Cartier Islands was accepted by Australia in 1934 and was annexed to the Northern Territory prior to adoption of the Statute of Westminster in 1942, deemed effective from 1939; it has thus become part of Australia."
States and territories of Australia,"States
Territories
Internal territories
External territories
Each external territory is regulated by an Act of the federal Parliament. These Acts contain the majority of provisions determining the legal and political structure applying in that external territory. Under s 122 of the Australian Constitution the federal Parliament has plenary power to make laws for all territories including all external territories.
The Cocos (Keeling) Islands voted for integration in 1984. Together with Christmas Island, these two territories comprise the Australian Indian Ocean Territories. Commonwealth laws apply automatically to the territories unless expressly stated otherwise and residents of both external territories are associated with Northern Territory for federal elections. They are, thus, constitutionally part of Australia.
The Heard Island and McDonald Islands, although uninhabited, are treated as constitutionally part of Australia by the central government.
Norfolk Island's status is controversial, with the present (as of 2018) government taking measures to integrate the territory into Australia proper (including representation in parliament and compulsory voting). The Norfolk Islanders have not formally consented to this change in constitutional status and assert that they are not Australian."
States and territories of Australia,Notes
States and territories of Australia,"Former territories
Internal
Two internal territories established by the Australian federal government under Section 122 of the Constitution of Australia no longer exist:"
States and territories of Australia,"Central Australia (1926–1931), consisting of the area of the current Northern Territory south of the 20th parallel south
North Australia (1926–1931), consisting of the area of the current Northern Territory north of the 20th parallel south"
States and territories of Australia,"External
Two present-day Oceanic countries, Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Nauru, were administered by the federal government of Australia as de facto or de jure external territories for differing periods between 1902 and 1975."
States and territories of Australia,"Papua and New Guinea (1883–1975)
Territory of Papua:
1883–1902: A de facto part of Queensland (de jure British territory in 1888–1900)
1902–1949: An external territory of Australia
Territory of New Guinea: 1920–1949, under a League of Nations mandate. The territory was previously known as German New Guinea between 1884 and 1914; it was formally under Australian military occupation in 1914–1920).
Following World War II, the Papua and New Guinea Act 1949 placed the Territory of New Guinea in an ""administrative union"" with the Territory of Papua, and the combined Territory of Papua and New Guinea was created. However, both territories remained technically distinct for some administrative and legal purposes, until 1975, when the combined entity eventually was given independence as Papua New Guinea."
States and territories of Australia,"Nauru (1920–1968)
Nauru was previously under the German colonial empire as part of the German New Guinea.  Following World War I, the Australian government received a League of Nations mandate for Nauru. After World War II, the Territory of Papua, Territory of New Guinea and Nauru were all controlled by the Australian government as United Nations trust territories. Nauru was granted independence in 1968."
States and territories of Australia,"Statistics
The majority of Australians live in the eastern coastal mainland states of New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, and the Australian Capital Territory, which collectively forms 79% of the entire population of Australia (more than three-quarters of all Australians). Most of the major population centres are located east and south of the Great Dividing Range on the coastal plains and their associated hinterland regions."
States and territories of Australia,"Statistical divisions
The Australian Bureau of Statistics' (ABS) Australian Statistical Geography Standard describes several main statistical divisions of Australia:"
States and territories of Australia,"Mesh Block (MB) – the smallest area of division, MBs are rarely used for statistics and represent 30–60 dwellings, though some have no population or development. They are conventionally used as a way to ensure confidentiality of responses.
Statistical Area Level 1 (SA1) – SA1s are small areas of 200–800 people and are used to balance spatial detail and cross comparison in the Census of Population and Housing.
Statistical Area Level 2 (SA2) – SA2s are designed to represent financial and social interactions, such as a suburb or neighbourhood of 3,000–25,000 people (averaging at 10,000) and is often the smallest division used in statistical releases.
Statistical Area Level 3 (SA3) – SA3s are regional representations of local communities, generally containing similar characteristics, administrative boundaries, and labour markets, each having 30,000–130,000 people.
Statistical Area Level 4 (SA4) – SA4s are broader representations of labour forces in population centres, with 100,000–300,000 people in regional areas and 300,000–500,000 in metropolitan areas.
States and Territories
The ABS also defines other divisions such as the Greater Capital City Statistical Area Structure, Significant Urban Area Structure, Remoteness Structure, and Indigenous Structure. Other non-ABS divisions include Local Government Areas, Postal Areas, electoral divisions, and tourism regions."
States and territories of Australia,"Background and overview
The states originated as separate British colonies prior to Federation in 1901. The Colony of New South Wales was founded in 1788 and originally comprised much of the Australian mainland, as well as Lord Howe Island, New Zealand, Norfolk Island, and Van Diemen's Land, in addition to the area currently referred to as the state of New South Wales. During the 19th century, large areas were successively separated to form the Colony of Tasmania (initially established as a separate colony named Van Diemen's Land in 1825), the Colony of Western Australia (initially established as the smaller Swan River Colony in 1829), the Province of South Australia (1836), the Colony of New Zealand (1840), the Victoria Colony (1851) and the Colony of Queensland (1859). Upon federation, the six colonies of New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia, and Tasmania became the founding states of the new Commonwealth of Australia. The two territory governments (the Australian Capital Territory [ACT] and the Northern Territory [NT]), were created by legislation of the Federal Parliament—the NT in 1978 and the ACT in 1988.
The legislative powers of the states are protected by the Australian constitution, section 107, and under the principle of federalism, Commonwealth legislation only applies to the states where permitted by the constitution. The territories, by contrast, are from a constitutional perspective directly subject to the Commonwealth government; laws for territories are determined by the Australian Parliament.
Most of the territories are directly administered by the Commonwealth government, while two (the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory) have some degree of self-government although less than that of the states. In the self-governing territories, the Australian Parliament retains the full power to legislate, and can override laws made by the territorial institutions, which it has done on rare occasions. For the purposes of Australian (and joint Australia-New Zealand) intergovernmental bodies, the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory are treated as if they were states.
Each state has a governor, appointed by the monarch (currently King Charles III), which by convention he does on the advice of the state premier. The Administrator of the Northern Territory, by contrast, is appointed by the governor-general. The Australian Capital Territory has neither a governor nor an administrator. Instead, since the enacted of the Australian Capital Territory (Self-Government) Act 1988 (Cth), the functions of the head of the Executive – commissioning government, proroguing parliament and enacting legislation – are exercised by the Assembly itself and by the chief minister.
Jervis Bay Territory is the only non-self-governing internal territory. Until 1989, it was administered as if it were a part of the ACT, although it has always been a separate territory. Under the terms of the Jervis Bay Territory Acceptance Act 1915, the laws of the ACT apply to the Jervis Bay Territory insofar as they are applicable and providing they are not inconsistent with an ordinance. Although residents of the Jervis Bay Territory are generally subject to laws made by the ACT Legislative Assembly, they are not represented in the assembly. They are represented in the Parliament of Australia as part of the Electoral Division of Fenner (named the Division of Fraser until 2016) in the ACT and by the ACT's two senators. In other respects, the territory is administered directly by the Federal Government through the Territories portfolio.
The external territory of Norfolk Island possessed a degree of self-government from 1979 until 2015.
Each state has a bicameral parliament, except Queensland, which abolished its upper house in 1922. The lower house is called the ""legislative assembly"", except in South Australia and Tasmania, where it is called the ""house of assembly"". Tasmania is the only state to use proportional representation for elections to its lower house; all others elect members from single member constituencies, using preferential voting. The upper house is called the ""legislative council"" and is generally elected from multi-member constituencies using proportional representation. Along with Queensland, the three self-governing territories, the ACT, the Northern Territory, and Norfolk Island, each have unicameral legislative assemblies. The legislative assembly for the ACT is the only parliament with responsibility for both state/territory and local government functions.
The head of government of each state is called the ""premier"", appointed by the state's governor. In normal circumstances, the governor will appoint as premier whoever leads the party or coalition which exercises control of the lower house (in the case of Queensland, the only house) of the state parliament. However, in times of constitutional crisis, the governor can appoint someone else as premier. The head of government of the self-governing internal territories is called the ""chief minister"". The Northern Territory's chief minister, in normal circumstances whoever controls the legislative assembly, is appointed by the administrator.
The term interstate is used within Australia to refer to a number of events, transactions, registrations, travel, etc. which occurs across borders or outside of the particular state or territory of the user of the term. Examples of use include motor vehicle registration, travel, applications to educational institutions out of one's home state.
There are very few urban areas bifurcated by state or territory borders. The Queensland-New South Wales border runs through Coolangatta (Queensland) and Tweed Heads (New South Wales) and splits Gold Coast Airport.  Oaks Estate, a contiguous residential of Queanbeyan, was excised out of New South Wales when the Australian Capital Territory was established in 1909.  Some Urban Centres and Localities reported by the Australian Bureau of Statistics include some agglomerations of cities spreading across state borders, including Gold Coast–Tweed Heads, Canberra–Queanbeyan, Albury–Wodonga (New South Wales-Victoria) and Mildura–Wentworth (Victoria-New South Wales)"
States and territories of Australia,"Timeline
1788 – British Empire establishes the Colony of New South Wales across central and eastern mainland Australia, the island of Tasmania, both islands of New Zealand and Norfolk Island.
1803 – The Coral Sea Islands are claimed by New South Wales.
1825 – The island of Tasmania becomes the independent colony of Van Diemen's Land. New South Wales extends its borders further west in mainland Australia.
1829 – The British Empire establishes the Swan River Colony in western mainland Australia.
1832 – Swan River Colony is renamed the ""colony of Western Australia"".
1836 – The Colony of South Australia is established.
1841 – The islands of New Zealand become the independent colony of New Zealand. Much of eastern Antarctica is annexed by Britain as Victoria Land.
1844 – New South Wales transfers Norfolk Island to Van Diemen's Land.
1846 – Northern central and eastern Australia briefly become the independent Colony of North Australia, then are returned to New South Wales.
1851 – Southeastern mainland Australia becomes the independent colony of Victoria.
1856 – Van Diemen's Land is renamed the colony of Tasmania. Norfolk Island becomes the independent colony of Norfolk Island, however it is to be administered by the same governor as New South Wales.
1857 – Much of southern central mainland Australia becomes the independent colony of South Australia. The Cocos (Keeling) Islands are annexed by Britain.
1859 – Northeastern mainland Australia and Coral Sea Islands become the independent colony of Queensland.
1860 – A pocket of New South Wales territory remaining in southern central mainland Australia is transferred to South Australia.
1862 – Some of New South Wales' northern central mainland Australian territory is transferred to Queensland.
1863 – New South Wales' remaining northern central mainland Australian territory is transferred to South Australia.
1878 – Britain annexes Ashmore Island.
1883 – Queensland annexes southeastern New Guinea.
1884 – Southeastern New Guinea becomes the independent Territory of Papua.
1886 – The Cocos (Keeling) Islands are to be administered by the same governor as the Straits Settlements.
1888 – Christmas Island is annexed by Britain and incorporated into the Straits Settlements.
1897 – Norfolk Island is officially reintegrated into New South Wales.
1901 – New South Wales, Queensland, Tasmania, Western Australia, Victoria and South Australia federate into the Commonwealth of Australia. Queensland transfers the Coral Sea Islands to the federal government, creating a federal external territory.
1902 – Britain transfers Papua to Australia as an external territory.
1903 – The Cocos (Keeling) Islands are incorporated into the Straits Settlements.
1909 – Britain annexes Cartier Island.
1910 – Britain claims Heard Island and the McDonald Islands.
1911 – The state of South Australia transfers control of northern central mainland Australia to the federal government, creating the Northern Territory. A small pocket of New South Wales around the city of Canberra is transferred to the federal government (who are seated within it), creating the Federal Capital Territory.
1913 – New South Wales transfers Norfolk Island to the federal government, making it a federal external territory.
1915 – A small pocket of New South Wales around Jervis Bay is transferred to the federal government and incorporated into the Federal Capital Territory.
1920 – Following the defeat of the German Empire in World War I, the League of Nations establishes an Australian mandate in northeastern New Guinea, it becomes the external Territory of New Guinea.
1923 – Another conquered German territory, the island of Nauru, is established as an Australian mandate and external territory by the League of Nations, this time as a co-mandate with Britain and New Zealand.
1927 – The Northern Territory is split into two territories – North Australia and Central Australia.
1930 – The remaining territory in eastern Antarctica is annexed by Britain as Enderby Land.
1931 – North Australia and Central Australia are reincorporated as the Northern Territory. Britain recognises Australia as possessors of the uninhabited Ashmore and Cartier Islands, making them an external federal territory.
1933 – Britain transfers Victoria Land and Enderby Land to Australia, creating the Australian Antarctic Territory, with ongoing limited international recognition.
1938 – The Federal Capital Territory is renamed the ""Australian Capital Territory"".
1942 – The Japanese Empire conquers Nauru from Australia, Britain and New Zealand as part of World War II. Japan also conquers much of the Straits Settlements, including Christmas Island. The Cocos (Keeling) Islands are not conquered and are transferred to the Colony of Ceylon.
1946 – The United Nations, the successor to the League of Nations, renews its mandate of New Guinea to Australia.
1947 – Following the defeat of Japan in World War II, the United Nations returns Nauru to Australia, Britain and New Zealand as a joint mandate. Christmas Island returns to Britain and is incorporated into the Colony of Singapore. The Cocos (Keeling) Islands are also transferred to Singapore.
1949 – Papua and New Guinea are incorporated into the singular Territory of Papua and New Guinea. Britain transfers Heard Island and the McDonald Islands to Australia, creating a federal external territory.
1955 – Britain transfers the Cocos (Keeling) Islands to Australia, they become an external territory.
1958 – Britain transfers Christmas Island to Australia, it becomes an external territory.
1966 – The Republic of Nauru is established, ending Australian-British-New Zealander control of the island.
1975 – Papua and New Guinea becomes the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, ending British-Australian control.
1978 – Northern Territory gains self-government with certain Commonwealth control.
1979 – Norfolk Island gains self-government with certain Commonwealth control.
1989 – The Australian Capital Territory gains self-government with certain Commonwealth control. Jervis Bay becomes independent of the ACT, becoming the Jervis Bay Territory.
2015 – Norfolk Island loses self-government with full Commonwealth control."
States and territories of Australia,"Comparative terminology
Politics
Governors and administrators
Premiers and chief ministers
Parliaments
Parliament of New South Wales
Parliament of Victoria
Parliament of Queensland
Parliament of Western Australia
Parliament of South Australia
Parliament of Tasmania
Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly
Northern Territory Legislative Assembly"
States and territories of Australia,"Supreme courts
Supreme Court of New South Wales
Supreme Court of Victoria
Supreme Court of Queensland
Supreme Court of Western Australia
Supreme Court of South Australia
Supreme Court of Tasmania
Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory
Supreme Court of the Northern Territory
Supreme Court of Norfolk Island"
States and territories of Australia,"Police forces
New South Wales Police Force
Victoria Police
Queensland Police Service
Western Australia Police Force
South Australia Police
Tasmania Police
Australian Capital Territory Policing (performed by Australian Federal Police)
Northern Territory Police Force
Law enforcement in Norfolk Island, also provided by Australian Federal Police"
States and territories of Australia,"State and territory codes
See also
Australian regional rivalries
ISO 3166-2:AU, the ISO codes for the states and territories of Australia
List of adjectival and demonymic forms of Australian states and territories
List of Australian states and territories by Human Development Index
Proposals for new Australian states"
States and territories of Australia,Notes
States and territories of Australia,"
== References =="
History of Australia (1901–1945),"The history of Australia from 1901 to 1945 begins with the federation of the six colonies to create the Commonwealth of Australia. The young nation joined Britain in the First World War, suffered through the Great Depression in Australia as part of the global Great Depression and again joined Britain in the Second World War against Nazi Germany in 1939. Imperial Japan launched air raids and submarine raids against Australian cities during the Pacific War."
History of Australia (1901–1945),"From federation to war (1901—1914)
White Australia, protectionism and rise of Labor
The Commonwealth of Australia was proclaimed by the Governor-General, Lord Hopetoun on 1 January 1901, and Edmund Barton was sworn in as Australia's first prime minister. The new Commonwealth was a federation of the six former British colonies of Australia, which now became states. The new constitution established a federal government with defined powers, among the most important of which were external affairs, defence, immigration, taxation, race and customs and excise. 
The first federal elections were held in March 1901 and resulted in a narrow plurality for the Protectionist Party over the Free Trade Party. The Australian Labor Party (ALP) polled third. Labor declared it would support the party which offered concessions to its program, and Barton's protectionists formed a government, with Deakin as Attorney-General.
The Immigration Restriction Act 1901 was one of the first laws passed by the new Australian parliament. This centrepiece of the White Australia policy aimed to extend the restrictions on the immigration of Asians that had previously been enacted by the colonies. Like the colonial legislation, the Immigration Restriction Act used a dictation test in a European language to exclude Asian migrants, who were considered a threat to Australia's living standards and majority British culture. The government also ended the use of indentured South Sea Islander labour in the Queensland sugar cane industry and announced that the workers would be repatriated to their islands by 1906. Deakin stated that White Australia, ""is not a surface, but a reasoned policy which goes to the roots of national life, and by which the whole of our social, industrial and political organisation is governed.""
In 1902, the government introduced female suffrage in the Commonwealth jurisdiction, but at the same time excluded Aboriginal people from the franchise unless they already had the vote in a state jurisdiction."
History of Australia (1901–1945),"The Barton government also introduced a tariff on imports designed to raise revenue and protect Australian industry. However, the tariff was lower and less extensive than many protectionists wanted due to the need to attract sufficient support from Labor parliamentarians, who had a free vote on the issue and many of whom favoured free trade.
The three major parties all supported a system of Commonwealth conciliation and arbitration to settle industrial disputes extending across state borders, but Labor insisted that railway workers should be included in the system and preference be given to unionised labour. Disagreements about the legislation were instrumental in the fall of Deakin's Protectionist government in April 1904 and the appointment of the first national Labor government under prime minister Chris Watson. The Watson government itself fell in April and a Free Trade government under prime minister Reid successfully introduced legislation for a Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Court.
In July 1905, Deakin withdrew his support for the Reid government and again formed a Protectionist government with the support of Labor. The new government embarked on a series of social reforms and a program dubbed ""new protection"" under which tariff protection for Australian industries would be linked to their provision of ""fair and reasonable"" wages. In the Harvester case of 1907, H. B. Higgins of the Conciliation and Arbitration Court set a fair and reasonable wage based on the needs of a male breadwinner supporting a wife and three children. In 1908, the High Court of Australia struck down the New Protection legislation as unconstitutional.  However, the Harvester case set a standard for a basic wage which was subsequently used by the Conciliation and Arbitration Court when settling industrial disputes. By 1914 the Commonwealth, New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia used arbitration courts to settle industrial disputes and fix wages and conditions, while Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania used wage boards to achieve the same goals."
History of Australia (1901–1945),"Labor and anti-Labor
The base of the Labor Party was the Australian Trade Union movement which grew from under 100,000 members in 1901 to more than half a million in 1914. The party also drew considerable support from clerical workers, Catholics and small farmers. In 1905, the Labor party adopted objectives at the federal level which included the ""cultivation of an Australian sentiment based upon the maintenance of racial purity"" and ""the collective ownership of monopolies"". In the same year, the Queensland branch of the party adopted an overtly socialist objective.
In 1906, the federal Free Trade Party changed its name to the Anti-Socialist Party and in the December 1906 elections became the largest party with 38 per cent of the vote (compared with 37 per cent for Labor and 21 per cent for the Protectionists). Deakin's Protectionist government remained in power, but following the passage of legislation for old age pensions and a new protective tariff in 1908, Labor withdrew its support for the government and, in November, Andrew Fisher became the second Labor prime minister. In response, the Liberal-Protectionists, Anti-Socialists and conservative ""Corner"" group entered into a coalition known as the Fusion which formed a government under prime minister Deakin in June 1909. Reid stated that the question was whether Australia should follow a course of free enterprise or state control.
In the elections of May 1910, Labor won a majority in both houses of parliament and Fisher again became prime minister. The Labor government introduced a series of reforms including a progressive land tax (1910), invalid pensions (1910) and a maternity allowance (1912). The government established the Commonwealth Bank (1911) but referendums to nationalise monopolies and extend Commonwealth trade and commerce powers were defeated in 1911 and 1913. The Commonwealth took over responsibility for the Northern Territory from South Australia in 1911.
The anti-Labor parliamentary fusion was formalised as the Commonwealth Liberal Party under the former New South Wales Labor Party leader Joseph Cook. The Liberal Party narrowly won the May 1913 elections but Labor still controlled the Senate. The Cook government's attempt to pass legislation abolishing preferential treatment for union members in the Commonwealth Public Service triggered a double dissolution of parliament. Labor comfortably won the September 1914 elections and Fisher resumed office."
History of Australia (1901–1945),"External affairs and defence
With federation, the Commonwealth inherited the small defence forces of the six former Australian colonies. By 1901, units of soldiers from all six Australian colonies had been active as part of British forces in the Boer War. When the British government asked for more troops from Australia in early 1902, the Australian government obliged with a national contingent. Some 16,500 men had volunteered for service by the war's end in June 1902.
In 1884, Britain and Germany had agreed to partition the eastern half of New Guinea. In 1902, British New Guinea was placed under the authority of Australia which saw the territory as vital for the protection of shipping lanes. With the passage of the Papua Act of 1905, British New Guinea became the Australian Territory of Papua. Formal Australian administration of the territory began in 1906.
Under a 1902 agreement, Australia contributed to the cost of a Royal Navy Pacific fleet to provide for the nation's defence, but Britain reserved the right to deploy the fleet outside Australian waters. Following Japan's defeat of Russia in the 1904–05 war, concern about Japanese naval power led to calls for an Australian fleet. Deakin proposed the purchase of destroyers in 1906 and his government's Surplus Revenue Act of 1908 provided £250,000 for naval expenditure. The Fisher Labor government increased the naval budget and in 1911 established the Royal Australian Navy. In October 1913, the navy's first battle cruiser, Australia, arrived in Sydney harbour, accompanied by the new light cruisers Sydney and Melbourne.
In 1907, Deakin proposed compulsory military training for home defence, a measure that was supported by Watson and Hughes of the Labor party. The Labor party adopted the measure at its 1908 annual conference and in 1911 the Fisher government expanded the system of compulsory military training which had been introduced by the Deakin government the previous year. Defence expenditure increased from £1 million in 1908–09 to £4.3 million in 1913–14, when it accounted for a third of the Commonwealth budget."
History of Australia (1901–1945),"Economy and population
The breaking of the Federation Drought in 1903 heralded a period of strong economic growth. The economy grew by 75 per cent in the fourteen years to the outbreak of the First World War, with pastoralism, construction, manufacturing and government services leading the way. Rural industries were still the major employer (accounting for a quarter of all jobs) but manufacturing was fast catching up. While employment grew by 30 per cent during the period, employment in manufacturing increased by almost 70 per cent.
The Australian population also grew strongly, driven by a fall in infant mortality, increasing adult life expectancy, and a revival in state-subsidised immigration. The population increased from four million in 1901 to five million in 1914. From 1910 to 1914 just under 300,000 migrants arrived, all white, and almost all from Britain."
History of Australia (1901–1945),"First World War
Australia at war 1914–18
When the United Kingdom declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, the declaration automatically involved all of Britain's colonies and dominions. The outbreak of war came in the middle of the 1914 federal election campaign during which Labor leader Andrew Fisher promised to defend Britain ""to the last man and the last shilling."" Both major parties offered Britain 20,000 Australian troops. As the Defence Act 1903 precluded sending conscripts overseas, a new volunteer force, the Australian Imperial Force (AIF), was raised to meet this commitment."
History of Australia (1901–1945),"Public enthusiasm for the war was high, and the initial quota for the AIF was quickly filled. The troops left for Egypt on 1 November 1914, one of the escort ships, HMAS Sydney, sinking the German cruiser Emden along the way. Meanwhile, in September, a separate Australian expeditionary force had captured German New Guinea.After arriving in Egypt, the AIF was incorporated into an Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) under the British general William Birdwood. The Anzacs formed part of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force with the task of opening the Dardanelles to allied battleships, threatening Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire which had entered the war on the side of the Central Powers. The Anzacs, along with French, British and Indian troops, landed on the Gallipoli peninsula on 25 April 1915. The Australian and New Zealand position at Anzac Cove was vulnerable to attack and the troops suffered heavy losses in establishing a narrow beachhead. After it had become clear that the expeditionary force would be unable to achieve its objectives in the face of determined Turkish resistance, the Anzacs were evacuated in December, followed by the British and French in early January.
The Australians suffered about 8,000 deaths in the campaign. Australian war correspondents variously emphasised the bravery and fighting qualities of the Australians and the errors of their British commanders. By 1916,  Australian servicemen were commemorating 25 April, and the date soon became an Australian national holiday known as Anzac Day, centring on themes of ""nationhood, brotherhood and sacrifice"".
In 1916, five infantry divisions of the AIF were sent to the Western Front. In July 1916, at Fromelles, in a diversionary attack during the Battle of the Somme, the AIF suffered 5,533 casualties in 24 hours, the most costly single encounter in Australian military history. Elsewhere on the Somme, 23,000 Australians were killed or wounded in seven weeks of attacks on German positions. In Spring 1917, as the Germans retreated to the Hindenburg Line, pursuing Australian troops engaged them at the First Battle of Bullecourt and the Second Battle of Bullecourt, suffering 10,000 casualties. In the summer and autumn of 1917, Australian troops also sustained heavy losses during the British offensive around Ypres. Overall, almost 22,000 Australian troops were killed in 1917.
In November 1917 the five Australian divisions were united in the Australian Corps, and in May 1918 the Australian general John Monash took over command. The Australian Corps was heavily involved in halting the German Spring Offensive of 1918 and in the allied counter-offensive of August that year. Constituting about one tenth of the British and dominion soldiers on the Western Front, the Australian Corps was responsible for more than 20 per cent of the territory reconquered, prisoners captured and field guns taken in the counter offensive.
In the Middle East, the Australian Light Horse brigades were prominent in halting the Ottoman and German threat to the Suez Canal at Romani in August 1916. In 1917, they participated in the allied advance through the Sinai Peninsula and into Palestine. This included a light horse mounted charge at Beersheba in October which helped win the Third Battle of Gaza. In 1918, they pressed on through Palestine and into Syria in an advance that led to the Ottoman surrender on 31 October.
By the time the war ended on 11 November 1918, 324,000 Australians had served overseas. Casualties included 60,000 dead and 150,000 wounded—the highest casualty rate of any allied force. Australian troops also had higher rates of unauthorised absence, crime and imprisonment than other allied forces."
History of Australia (1901–1945),"The home front
Few Australians publicly opposed the war in 1914, and volunteers for the AIF outstripped the capacity to enlist and train them. There was also a surge in female participation in voluntary organisations such as the Red Cross and patriotic groups such as the One Woman, One Recruit League.  Anti-German leagues were formed and 7,000 Germans and other ""enemy aliens"" were sent to internment camps during the war.
In October 1914, the Fisher Labor government introduced the War Precautions Act which gave it the power to make regulations ""for securing the public safety and defence of the Commonwealth"". After Billy Hughes replaced Fisher as prime minister in October 1915, regulations under the act were increasingly used to censor publications, penalise public speech and suppress organisations that the government considered detrimental to the war effort.
Business uncertainty, the enlistment of young male workers, and the disruption of shipping and export markets led to a decline in economic output. The economy contracted by 10 per cent during the course of hostilities. Inflation rose in the first two years of war and real wages fell. Soon after becoming prime minister, Hughes abandoned a promised referendum to give the Commonwealth the power to control prices, although the government later used its wartime powers to regulate the prices of some basic goods. Lower wages and perceptions of profiteering by some businesses led, in 1916, to a wave of strikes by miners, waterside workers and shearers.
Enlistments also declined, falling from 35,000 a month at its peak in 1915 to 6,000 a month in 1916. Hughes returned from a trip to England and the Western Front in July 1916 and narrowly won a Cabinet vote to hold a referendum on conscription for overseas service. In September the New South Wales Labor Party expelled Hughes on account of the issue. Following the narrow defeat of the October 1916 conscription referendum, the state branches of the Labor party began expelling other prominent pro-conscriptionists. In November, Hughes and 23 of his supporters left the parliamentary party, and in January 1917 they formed a new Nationalist government with the former opposition. The Nationalists comfortably won the May 1917 elections and Hughes continued as prime minister.
Political and industrial unrest intensified in 1917. From August to October there was a major strike of New South Wales railway, transport, waterside and coal workers which was defeated after the Commonwealth and New South Wales governments arrested strike leaders and organised special constables and non-union labour. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was declared an unlawful organisation and more than 100 of its members were arrested. In September, protests by the Women's Peace Army in Melbourne resulted in extensive damage to shops and offices.
Following further falls in enlistments in 1917, Hughes announced a second referendum on conscription to be held in December. The referendum campaign proved divisive, with Hughes denouncing opponents of the measure as ""the Germans of Australia, the Sinn Féin and the IWW.""  The Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, Daniel Mannix, and the Labor premier of Queensland T. J. Ryan were prominent campaigners against conscription. The referendum was defeated by a wider margin than in 1916. An April 1918 recruiting conference including representatives of the Commonwealth government, State governments, employers and labour leaders also failed to reach agreement on measures to increase troop numbers. Enlistments in 1918 were the lowest for the war, leading to the disbandment of 12 battalions and mutinies in the AIF.
Gerhard Fisher argues that the government aggressively promoted economic, industrial, and social modernisation in the war years. but at the cost of liberal-democratic values. Irish nationalists and labour radicals were under suspicion as well. Racist hostility was high against toward nonwhites, including Pacific Islanders, Chinese and Aborigines. The result, Fischer says, was a strengthening of conformity to imperial loyalties and an explicit preference for immigrants from the British Isles."
History of Australia (1901–1945),"Paris Peace Conference, 1919
Hughes attended the Imperial War Conference and Imperial War Cabinet in London from June 1918 where Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa won British support for their separate representation at the eventual peace conference. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Hughes argued that Germany should pay the full cost of the war, but ultimately gained only £5 million in war reparations for Australia. Australia and the other self-governing British dominions won the right to become full members of the new League of Nations, and Australia obtained a special League of Nations mandate over German New Guinea allowing Australia to control trade and immigration. Australia also gained a 42 per cent share of the formerly German-ruled island of Nauru, giving access to its rich superphosphate reserves. Australia argued successfully against a Japanese proposal for a racial equality clause in the League of Nations covenant, as Hughes feared that it would jeopardise the White Australia policy.
Although Japan was allowed to occupy the German territories north of the equator, Hughes was alarmed by this policy. Hughes frequently clashed with US President Woodrow Wilson at the conference, telling him: ""I speak for 60,000 [Australian] dead"". Nevertheless, as a signatory to the Treaty of Versailles and a full member of the League of Nations, Australia took an important step towards international recognition as a sovereign nation."
History of Australia (1901–1945),"The inter-war years
The 1920s
After the war, Prime Minister Billy Hughes led a new conservative force, the Nationalist Party, formed from the old Liberal party and breakaway elements of Labor (of which he was the most prominent), after the deep and bitter split over Conscription. An estimated 12,000 Australians died as a result of the Spanish flu pandemic of 1919, almost certainly brought home by returning soldiers.
Following the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia the Communist Party of Australia was formed in 1920 and, though remaining electorally insignificant, it obtained some influence in the Trade Union movement and was banned during World War II for its support for the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the Menzies Government unsuccessfully tried to ban it again during the Korean War. Despite splits, the party remained active until its dissolution at the end of the Cold War.
The Country Party (today's National Party) formed in 1920 to promulgate its version of agrarianism, which it called ""Countrymindedness"". The goal was to enhance the status of the graziers (operators of big sheep ranches) and small farmers, and secure subsidies for them. Enduring longer than any other major party save the Labor party, it has generally operated in Coalition with the Liberal Party (since the 1940s), becoming a major party of government in Australia – particularly in Queensland.
Other significant after-effects of the war included ongoing industrial unrest, which included the 1923 Victorian Police strike. Industrial disputes characterised the 1920s in Australia. Other major strikes occurred on the waterfront, in the coalmining and timber industries in the late 1920s. The union movement had established the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) in 1927 in response to the Nationalist government's efforts to change working conditions and reduce the power of the unions.
Starting on 1 February 1927 (and lasting until 12 June 1931), the Northern Territory was divided up as North Australia and Central Australia at latitude 20°S. New South Wales has had one further territory surrendered, namely Jervis Bay Territory comprising 6,677 hectares, in 1915. The external territories were added: Norfolk Island (1914); Ashmore Island, Cartier Islands (1931); the Australian Antarctic Territory transferred from Britain (1933); Heard Island, McDonald Islands, and Macquarie Island transferred to Australia from Britain (1947).
The Federal Capital Territory (FCT) was formed from New South Wales in 1911 to provide a location for the proposed new federal capital of Canberra (Melbourne was the seat of government from 1901 to 1927. The FCT was renamed the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) in 1938.) The Northern Territory was transferred from the control of the South Australian government to the Commonwealth in 1911.
Jazz music, entertainment culture, new technology and consumerism that characterised the 1920s in the USA was, to some extent, also found in Australia. Prohibition was not implemented in Australia, though anti-alcohol forces were successful in having hotels closed after 6 pm, and closed altogether in a few city suburbs.
The fledgling film industry declined through the decade, over 2 million Australians attending cinemas weekly at 1250 venues. A Royal Commission in 1927 failed to assist and the industry that had begun so brightly with the release of the world's first feature film, The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), atrophied until its revival in the 1970s."
History of Australia (1901–1945),"Stanley Bruce became Prime Minister in 1923, when members of the Nationalist Party Government voted to remove W.M. Hughes. Speaking in early 1925, Bruce summed up the priorities and optimism of many Australians, saying that ""men, money and markets accurately defined the essential requirements of Australia"" and that he was seeking such from Britain. The migration campaign of the 1920s, operated by the Development and Migration Commission, brought almost 300,000 Britons to Australia, although schemes to settle migrants and returned soldiers ""on the land"" were generally not a success. ""The new irrigation areas in Western Australia and the Dawson Valley of Queensland proved disastrous"".
In Australia, the costs of major investment had traditionally been met by state and Federal governments and heavy borrowing from overseas was made by the governments in the 1920s. A Loan Council set up in 1928 to co-ordinate loans, three-quarters of which came from overseas. Despite Imperial Preference, a balance of trade was not successfully achieved with Britain. ""In the five years from 1924... to... 1928, Australia bought 43.4% of its imports from Britain and sold 38.7% of its exports. Wheat and wool made up more than two-thirds of all Australian exports,"" a dangerous reliance on just two export commodities.
Australia embraced the new technologies of transport and communication. Coastal sailing ships were finally abandoned in favour of steam, and improvements in rail and motor transport heralded dramatic changes in work and leisure. In 1918 there were 50,000 cars and lorries in the whole of Australia. By 1929 there were 500,000. The stage coach company Cobb and Co, established in 1853, finally closed in 1924. In 1920, the Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Service (to become the Australian airline Qantas) was established. The Reverend John Flynn, founded the Royal Flying Doctor Service, the world's first air ambulance in 1928. Dare devil pilot, Sir Charles Kingsford Smith pushed the new flying machines to the limit, completing a round Australia circuit in 1927 and in 1928 traversed the Pacific Ocean, via Hawaii and Fiji from the US to Australia in the aircraft Southern Cross. He went on to global fame and a series of aviation records before vanishing on a night flight to Singapore in 1935."
History of Australia (1901–1945),"Great Depression: the 1930s
Australia's dependence on primary exports such as wheat and wool was cruelly exposed by the Great Depression of the 1930s, which produced unemployment and destitution even greater than those seen during the 1890s. The Labor Party under James Scullin won the 1929 election in a landslide, but was quite unable to cope with the Depression. Labor split into three factions and then lost power in 1932 to a new conservative party, the United Australia Party (UAP) led by Joseph Lyons, and did not return to office until 1941. Australia made a very slow recovery from the Depression during the late 1930s. Lyons died in 1939 and was succeeded by Robert Menzies."
History of Australia (1901–1945),"Exposed by continuous borrowing to fund capital works in the 1920s, the Australian and state governments were ""already far from secure in 1927, when most economic indicators took a turn for the worse. Australia's dependence of exports left her extraordinarily vulnerable to world market fluctuations,"" according to economic historian Geoff Spenceley. Debt by the state of New South Wales accounted for almost half Australia's accumulated debt by December 1927. The situation caused alarm amongst a few politicians and economists, notably Edward Shann of the University of Western Australia, but most political, union and business leaders were reluctant to admit to serious problems. In 1926, Australian Finance magazine described loans as occurring with a ""disconcerting frequency"" unrivalled in the British Empire: ""It may be a loan to pay off maturing loans or a loan to pay the interest on existing loans, or a loan to repay temporary loans from the bankers.... Thus, well before the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the Australian economy was already facing significant difficulties. As the economy slowed in 1927, so did manufacturing and the country slipped into recession as profits slumped and unemployment rose.
At elections held in October 1929 the Labor Party was swept to power in a landslide, the former Prime Minister Stanley Bruce losing his own seat. The new Prime Minister James Scullin and his largely inexperienced Government were almost immediately faced with a series of crises. Hamstrung by their lack of control of the Senate, a lack of control over the Banking system and divisions within their Party over how best to deal with the situation, the government was forced to accept solutions that eventually split the party, as it had in 1917. Some gravitated to New South Wales Premier Lang, other to Prime Minister Scullin.
Various ""plans"" to resolve the crisis were suggested; Sir Otto Niemeyer, a representative of the English banks who visited in mid 1930, proposed a deflationary plan, involving cuts to government spending and wages. Treasurer Ted Theodore proposed a mildly inflationary plan, while the Labor Premier of New South Wales, Jack Lang, proposed a radical plan which repudiated overseas debt. The ""Premier's Plan"" finally accepted by federal and state governments in June 1931, followed the deflationary model advocated by Niemeyer and included a reduction of 20% in government spending, a reduction in bank interest rates and an increase in taxation. In March 1931, Lang announced that interest due in London would not be paid and the Federal government stepped in to meet the debt. In May, the Government Savings Bank of New South Wales was forced to close. The Melbourne Premiers' Conference agreed to cut wages and pensions as part of a severe deflationary policy but Lang, renounced the plan. The grand opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932 provided little respite to the growing crisis straining the young federation. With multimillion-pound debts mounting, public demonstrations and move and counter-move by Lang and the Scullin, then Lyons federal governments, the Governor of New South Wales, Philip Game, had been examining Lang's instruction not to pay money into the Federal Treasury. Game judged it was illegal. Lang refused to withdraw his order and, on 13 May, he was dismissed by Governor Game. At June elections, Lang Labor's seats collapsed.
May 1931 had seen the creation of a new conservative political force, the United Australia Party formed by breakaway members of the Labor Party combining with the Nationalist Party. At Federal elections in December 1931, the United Australia Party, led by former Labor member Joseph Lyons, easily won office. They remained in power under Lyons through Australia's recovery from the Great Depression and into the early stages of the World War II under Robert Menzies."
History of Australia (1901–1945),"Lyons favoured the tough economic measures of the ""Premiers' Plan"", pursued an orthodox fiscal policy and refused to accept NSW Premier Jack Lang's proposals to default on overseas debt repayments. According to author Anne Henderson of the Sydney Institute, Lyons held a steadfast belief in the need to balance budgets, lower costs to business and restore confidence and the Lyons period gave Australia stability and eventual growth between the drama of the Depression and the outbreak of the Second World War. A lowering of wages was enforced and industry tariff protections maintained, which together with cheaper raw materials during the 1930s saw a shift from agriculture to manufacturing as the chief employer of the Australian economy – a shift which was consolidated by increased investment by the commonwealth government into defence and armaments manufacture. Lyons saw restoration of Australia's exports as the key to economic recovery. The Lyons government has often been credited with steering recovery from the depression, although just how much of this was owed to their policies remains contentious. Stuart Macintyre also points out that although Australian GDP grew from £386.9 million to £485.9 million between 1931–1932 and 1938–1939, real domestic product per head of population was still ""but a few shillings greater in 1938–1939 (£70.12), than it had been in 1920–1921 (£70.04).
There is debate over the extent reached by unemployment in Australia, often cited as peaking at 29% in 1932. ""Trade Union figures are the most often quoted, but the people who were there…regard the figures as wildly understating the extent of unemployment"" wrote historian Wendy Lowenstein in her collection of oral histories of the Depression. However, David Potts argues that ""over the last thirty years …historians of the period have either uncritically accepted that figure (29% in the peak year 1932) including rounding it up to 'a third,' or they have passionately argued that a third is far too low."" Potts suggests a peak national figure of 25% unemployed.
Extraordinary sporting successes did something to alleviate the spirits of Australians during the economic downturn. In a Sheffield Shield cricket match at the Sydney Cricket Ground in 1930, Don Bradman, a young New South Welshman of just 21 years of age wrote his name into the record books by smashing the previous highest batting score in first-class cricket with 452 runs not out in just 415 minutes. The rising star's world beating cricketing exploits were to provide much needed joy to Australians through the emerging Great Depression in Australia and post-World War II recovery. Between 1929 and 1931 the racehorse Phar Lap dominated Australia's racing industry, at one stage winning fourteen races in a row. Famous victories included the 1930 Melbourne Cup, following an assassination attempt and carrying 9 stone 12 pounds weight. Phar Lap sailed for the United States in 1931, going on to win North America's richest race, the Agua Caliente Handicap in 1932. Soon after, on the cusp of US success, Phar Lap developed suspicious symptoms and died. Theories swirled that the champion race horse had been poisoned and a devoted Australian public went into shock. The 1938 British Empire Games were held in Sydney from 5–12 February, timed to coincide with Sydney's sesqui-centenary (150 years since the foundation of British settlement in Australia)."
History of Australia (1901–1945),"Second World War
Defence policy in the 1930s
Defence issues became increasingly prominent in public affairs with the rise of fascism in Europe and militant Japan in Asia. Prime Minister Lyons sent veteran World War I Prime Minister Billy Hughes to represent Australia at the 1932 League of Nations Assembly in Geneva and in 1934 Hughes became Minister for Health and Repatriation. Later Lyons appointed him Minister for External Affairs, however Hughes was forced to resign in 1935 after his book Australia and the War Today exposed a lack of preparation in Australia for what Hughes correctly supposed to be a coming war. Soon after, the Lyons government tripled the defence budget. With Western Powers developing a policy of appeasement to try to satisfy the demands of Europe's new dictators without war, Prime Minister Lyons sailed for Britain in 1937 for the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, en route conducting a diplomatic mission to Italy on behalf of the British Government, visiting Benito Mussolini with assurances of British friendship.
Until the late 1930s, defence was not a significant issue for Australians. At the 1937 elections, both political parties advocated increased defence spending, in the context of increased Japanese aggression in China and Germany's aggression in Europe. There was a difference in opinion over how the defence spending should be allocated however. The UAP government emphasised co-operation with Britain in ""a policy of imperial defence."" The lynchpin of this was the British naval base at Singapore and the Royal Navy battle fleet ""which, it was hoped, would use it in time of need."" Defence spending in the inter-war years reflected this priority. In the period 1921–1936 totalled £40 million on the Royal Australian Navy (RAN), £20 million on the Australian Army and £6 million on the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) (established in 1921, the ""youngest"" of the three services). In 1939, the Navy, which included two heavy cruisers and four light cruisers, was the service best equipped for war.
Scarred by the experiences of World War I, Australia reluctantly prepared for a new war, in which the primacy of the British Royal Navy would indeed prove insufficient to defend Australia from attack from the north. Billy Hughes was brought back into cabinet by Lyons as Minister for External Affairs in 1937. From 1938, Lyons used Hughes to head a recruitment drive for the Australian Defence Force. Prime Minister Lyons died in office in April 1939, with Australia just months from war, and the United Australia Party selected Robert Menzies as its new leader. Fearing Japanese intentions in the Pacific, Menzies established independent embassies in Tokyo and Washington to receive independent advice about developments.
Gavin Long argues that the Labor opposition urged greater national self-reliance through a buildup of manufacturing and more emphasis on the Army and RAAF, as Chief of the General Staff, John Lavarack also advocated. In November 1936, Labor leader John Curtin said ""The dependence of Australia upon the competence, let alone the readiness, of British statesmen to send forces to our aid is too dangerous a hazard upon which to found Australia's defence policy."". According to John Robertson, ""some British leaders had also realised that their country could not fight Japan and Germany at the same time."" But ""this was never discussed candidly at…meeting(s) of Australian and British defence planners"", such as the 1937 Imperial Conference.
By September 1939 the Australian Army numbered 3,000 regulars. A recruiting campaign in late 1938, led by Major-General Thomas Blamey increased the reserve militia to almost 80,000. The first division raised for war was designated the 6th Division, of the 2nd AIF, there being five Militia Divisions on paper and a 1st AIF in the First World War."
History of Australia (1901–1945),"War
On 3 September 1939, the Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, made a national radio broadcast:"
History of Australia (1901–1945),"My fellow Australians. It is my melancholy duty to inform you, officially, that, in consequence of the persistence by Germany in her invasion of Poland, Great Britain has declared war upon her, and that, as a result, Australia is also at war. "
History of Australia (1901–1945),"Thus began Australia's involvement in the six-year global conflict. Australians were to fight in an extraordinary variety of locations, from withstanding the advance of Hitler's Panzers in the Siege of Tobruk; to turning back the advance of the Imperial Japanese Army in the New Guinea Campaign. From bomber missions over Europe and Mediterranean naval engagements, to facing Japanese mini-sub raids on Sydney Harbour and devastating air raids on the city of Darwin."
History of Australia (1901–1945),"The recruitment of a volunteer military force for service at home and abroad was announced, the 2nd Australian Imperial Force, and a citizen militia organised for local defence. Troubled by Britain's failure to increase defences at Singapore, Menzies was cautious in committing troops to Europe. By the end of June 1940, France, Norway and the Low Countries had fallen to Nazi Germany and Britain, stood alone with its Dominions. Menzies called for ""all out war"", increasing Federal powers and introducing conscription. Menzies' minority government came to rely on just two independents after the 1940 election
In January 1941, Menzies flew to Britain to discuss the weakness of Singapore's defences. Arriving in London during The Blitz, Menzies was invited into Winston Churchill's British War Cabinet for the duration of his visit. Returning to Australia, with the threat of Japan imminent and with the Australian army suffering badly in the Greek and Crete campaigns, Menzies re-approached the Labor Party to form a War Cabinet. Unable to secure their support, and with an unworkable parliamentary majority, Menzies resigned as Prime Minister. The Coalition held office for another month, before the independents switched allegiance and John Curtin was sworn in Prime Minister. Eight weeks later, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
From 1940 to 1941, Australian forces played prominent roles in the fighting in the Mediterranean theatre, including Operation Compass, the Siege of Tobruk, the Greek campaign, the Battle of Crete, the Syria-Lebanon campaign and the Second Battle of El Alamein.
A garrison of around 14,000 Australian soldiers, commanded by Lieutenant General Leslie Morshead was besieged in Tobruk, Libya by the German-Italian army of General Erwin Rommel between April and August 1941. The Nazi propagandist Lord Haw Haw derided the defenders as 'rats', a term the soldiers adopted as an ironic compliment: ""The Rats of Tobruk"". Vital in the defence of Egypt and the Suez Canal, the Siege saw the advance of the German army halted for the first time and provided a morale boost for the British Commonwealth, which was then standing alone against Hitler.
With most of Australia's best forces committed to fight against Hitler in the Middle East, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the US naval base in Hawaii, on 8 December 1941 (eastern Australia time). The British battleship HMS Prince of Wales and battlecruiser HMS Repulse sent to defend Singapore were sunk soon afterwards. Australia was ill-prepared for an attack, lacking armaments, modern fighter aircraft, heavy bombers, and aircraft carriers. While demanding reinforcements from Churchill, on 27 December 1941 Curtin published an historic announcement:"
History of Australia (1901–1945),"""The Australian Government... regards the Pacific struggle as primarily one in which the United States and Australia must have the fullest say in the direction of the democracies' fighting plan. Without inhibitions of any kind, I make it clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom."" "
History of Australia (1901–1945),"British Malaya quickly collapsed, shocking the Australian nation. British, Indian and Australian troops made a disorganised last stand at Singapore, before surrendering on 15 February 1942. 15,000 Australian soldiers became prisoners of war. Curtin predicted that the 'battle for Australia' would now follow. On 19 February, Darwin suffered a devastating air raid, the first time the Australian mainland had ever been attacked by enemy forces. Over the following 19 months, Australia was attacked from the air almost 100 times.
Three reinforced infantry battalions awaited the advancing Japanese in an arc across Australia's north: Sparrow Force on Timor, Gull Force on Ambon and Lark Force on New Britain. These ""bird forces"" were overwhelmed: in early 1942, Lark Force was defeated in the Battle of Rabaul (1942) and Gull Force surrendered in the Battle of Ambon and through 1942–3, Sparrow Force engaged in a prolonged guerilla campaign in Battle of Timor. Captured Australian Prisoners of War suffered severe ill-treatment in the Pacific Theatre. Around 160 men of Lark Force were bayonetted after capture at Toll Plantation, while 300 of the surrendering Gull Force were summarily executed in the Laha Massacre and 75% of their comrades perished due to ill-treatment and the conditions of their incarceration. In 1943, 2,815 Australian POWs died constructing Japan's Burma-Thailand Railway In 1944, the Japanese inflicted the Sandakan Death March on 2,000 Australian and British prisoners of war – only six survived. This was the single worst war crime perpetrated against Australians in war."
History of Australia (1901–1945),"Two battle hardened Australian divisions were already steaming from the Mid-East for Singapore. Churchill wanted them diverted to Burma, but Curtin refused, and anxiously awaited their return to Australia. US President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered his commander in the Philippines, General Douglas MacArthur, to formulate a Pacific defence plan with Australia in March 1942. Curtin agreed to place Australian forces under the command of General MacArthur, who became ""Supreme Commander of the South West Pacific"". Curtin had thus presided over a fundamental shift in Australia's foreign policy. MacArthur moved his headquarters to Melbourne in March 1942 and American troops began massing in Australia. In late May 1942, Japanese midget submarines sank an accommodation vessel in a daring raid on Sydney Harbour. On 8 June 1942, two Japanese submarines briefly shelled Sydney's eastern suburbs and the city of Newcastle."
History of Australia (1901–1945),"In an effort to isolate Australia, the Japanese planned a seaborne invasion of Port Moresby, in the Australian Territory of New Guinea. In May 1942, the US Navy engaged the Japanese in the Battle of the Coral Sea and halted the attack. The Battle of Midway in June effectively defeated the Japanese navy and the Japanese army launched a land assault on Moresby from the north. Between July and November 1942, Australian forces repulsed Japanese attempts on the city by way of the Kokoda Track, in the highlands of New Guinea. The Battle of Milne Bay in August 1942 was the first Allied defeat of Japanese land forces.
Meanwhile, in North Africa, the Axis Powers had driven Allies back into Egypt. A turning point came between July and November 1942, when Australia's 9th Division played a crucial role in some of the heaviest fighting of the First and Second Battle of El Alamein, which turned the North Africa Campaign in favour of the Allies.
Concerned to maintain British commitment to the defence of Australia, Prime Minister Curtin announced in November 1943 that Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester was to be appointed Governor General of Australia. The brother of King George VI arrived in Australia to take up his post in January 1945. Curtin hoped this might influence the British to despatch men and equipment to the Pacific, and the appointment reaffirmed the important role of the Crown to the Australian nation.
On 14 May 1943, the Australian Hospital Ship Centaur, though clearly marked as a medical vessel, was sunk by a Japanese submarine off the Queensland coast. Of the 332 persons on board including doctors and nurses, just 64 survived and only one of the ship's nursing staff, Ellen Savage. The war crime further enraged popular opinion against Japan.
The Battle of Buna-Gona between November 1942 and January 1943, saw Australian and United States forces attack the main Japanese beachheads in New Guinea, at Buna, Sanananda and Gona. Facing tropical disease, difficult terrain and well constructed Japanese defences, the allies only secured victory with heavy casualties. The battle set the tone for the remainder of the New Guinea Campaign. The offensives in Papua and New Guinea of 1943–44 were the single largest series of connected operations ever mounted by the Australian armed forces. The Supreme Commander of operations was the United States General Douglas Macarthur, with Australian General Thomas Blamey taking a direct role in planning and operations being essentially directed by staff at New Guinea Force headquarters in Port Moresby. Bitter fighting continued in New Guinea between the largely Australian force and the Japanese 18th Army based in New Guinea until the Japanese surrender in 1945.
MacCarthur excluded Australian forces from the main push north into the Philippines and Japan. It was left to Australia to lead amphibious assaults against Japanese bases in Borneo. Curtin suffered from ill health from the strains of office and died weeks before the war ended, replaced by Ben Chifley.
Of Australia's wartime population of 7 million, almost 1 million men and women served in a branch of the services during the six years of warfare. By war's end, gross enlistments totalled 727,200 men and women in the Australian Army (of whom 557,800 served overseas), 216,900 in the RAAF and 48,900 in the RAN. Over 39,700 were killed or died as prisoners of war, about 8,000 of whom died as prisoners of the Japanese."
History of Australia (1901–1945),"The Homefront
The Australian economy was markedly affected by World War II. Expenditure on war reached 37% of GDP by 1943–4, compared to 4% expenditure in 1939–1940. Total war expenditure was £2,949 million between 1939 and 1945."
History of Australia (1901–1945),"Although the peak of Army enlistments occurred in June–July 1940, when over 70,000 enlisted, it was the Curtin Labor government, formed in October 1941, that was largely responsible for ""a complete revision of the whole Australian economic, domestic and industrial life."" Rationing of fuel, clothing and some food was introduced, (although less severely than in Britain) Christmas holidays curtailed, ""brown outs"" introduced and some public transport reduced. From December 1941, the Government evacuated all women and children from Darwin and northern Australia, and over 10,000 refugees arrived from South East Asia as Japan advanced. In January 1942, the Manpower Directorate was set up ""to ensure the organisation of Australians in the best possible way to meet all defence requirements."" Minister for War Organisation of Industry, John Dedman introduced a degree of austerity and government control previously unknown, to such an extent that he was nicknamed ""the man who killed Father Christmas.""
In May 1942 uniform tax laws were introduced in Australia, as state governments relinquished their control over income taxation, ""The significance of this decision was greater than any other… made throughout the war, as it added extensive powers to the Federal Government and greatly reduced the financial autonomy of the states.""
Manufacturing grew significantly because of the war. ""In 1939 there were only three Australian firms producing machine tools, but by 1943 there were more than one hundred doing so."" From having few front line aircraft in 1939, the RAAF had become the fourth largest allied Air Force by 1945. A number of aircraft were built under licence in Australia before the war's end, notably the Beaufort and Beaufighter, although the majority of aircraft were from Britain and later, the USA. The Boomerang fighter, designed and built in four months of 1942, emphasised the desperate state Australia found itself in as the Japanese advanced.
Australia also created, virtually from nothing, a significant female workforce engaged in direct war production. Between 1939 and 1944 the number of women working in factories rose from 171,000 to 286,000. Dame Enid Lyons, widow of former Prime Minister Joseph Lyons, became the first woman elected to the House of Representatives in 1943, joining the Robert Menzies' new centre-right Liberal Party of Australia, formed in 1945. At the same election, Dorothy Tangney became the first woman elected to the Senate.
Australian trade unions support of the war, after Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941. However, in spring 1940, the coal miners struck for higher wages for 67 days under communist leadership."
History of Australia (1901–1945),"The steps to full sovereignty
Australia achieved full sovereignty from the UK on a progressive basis. On 1 January 1901, the British Parliament passed legislation allowing the six Australian colonies to govern in their own right as part of the Commonwealth of Australia. This achieved federation of the colonies after a decade of planning, consultation and voting. The Commonwealth of Australia was now a dominion of the British Empire.
The Federal Capital Territory (later renamed the Australian Capital Territory) was formed in 1911 as the location for the future federal capital of Canberra. Melbourne was the temporary seat of government from 1901 to 1927 while Canberra was being constructed. The Northern Territory was transferred from the control of the South Australian government to the federal parliament in 1911.
In 1931, the Parliament of Britain passed the Statute of Westminster which prevented Britain from making laws for its dominions. After it was ratified by the Parliament of Australia, this formally ended most of the constitutional links between Australia and the UK, although Australia's States remained ""self-governing colonial dependencies of the British Crown"".
The statute formalised the Balfour Declaration of 1926, a report resulting from the 1926 Imperial Conference of British Empire leaders in London, which had defined Dominions of the British empire in the following way:"
History of Australia (1901–1945),"They are autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations."
History of Australia (1901–1945),"Australia did not ratify the Statute of Westminster 1931 until over a decade later, with the Statute of Westminster Adoption Act 1942. However, the ratification was backdated to 1939 to confirm the validity of legislation passed by the Australian Parliament during World War II. According to historian Frank Crowley, this was because Australians had little interest in redefining their relationship with Britain until after the crisis of World War II.
The final step to full sovereignty was the passing of the Australia Act 1986 in the UK. The Act removed the right of the British Parliament to make laws for Australia and ended any British role in the government of the Australian States. It also removed the right of appeal from Australian courts to the British Privy Council in London. Most important, the Act transferred into Australian hands full control of all Australia's constitutional documents.
Attempts to unite the Congregationalist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches failed in 1901–13 and again in 1917–25."
History of Australia (1901–1945),"Religion, science and culture
Religion
The Commonwealth constitution formalised the separation of church and state while guaranteeing freedom of religious worship. At federation, about 95% of the white population declared themselves Christian of which about 40% were Church of England, 20% Catholic, 14% Methodist and 10% Presbyterian. Religion had a strong ethnic element: most Australian Anglicans being of English descent, most Catholics of Irish descent and most Presbyterians of Scottish heritage.  Attempts to unite the Congregationalist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches failed in 1901–13 and again in 1917–25. 
School education was divided into separate state and Catholic education systems. Private schools with strong ties to the Protestant religions also provided schooling which mainly attracted more affluent families.  About 40% of adults attended church regularly, and the family and social lives of many Australians revolved around the local church. In 1908, the papal decree Ne Temere declared protestant and civil marriage rites invalid which exacerbated divisions between Catholics, Protestants and secularists.
The First World War also sharpened the religious divide. At first, all churches supported the war, but the Catholic hierarchy became increasingly opposed to conscription which led many protestants to question their patriotism. After the war, Catholics generally supported the Labor Party while the conservative parties had stronger support among Protestants. Freemasonry flourished in business and politics and was generally pro-British and anti-Catholic."
History of Australia (1901–1945),"Science
Federation brought an increase in national scientific organisations and centralised funding for the sciences. By 1943 there were about 500 scientific, technical and medical research institutions in Australia. Federal and state organisations were heavily involved in applied research for primary industry and manufacturing. Most research and funding was devoted to the life sciences. Museums multiplied and devoted themselves to the collection, classification and display of biological specimens and human artefacts, and the promotion of evolutionary science. Universities introduced more sub-disciplines of biology and botany. Research into plant physiology led to advances in agricultural production.
Earth sciences were also favoured because of their connection with agriculture and mining. The Australian Survey Office was established in 1910. Geological and meteorological research was integral to the Antarctic expeditions led by geologist Douglas Mawson in 1911-14 and 1929-31.
The First World War stimulated the foundation of the national Advisory Council of Science and Industry in 1916 which eventually became the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in 1926. The CSIR established a Radiophysics unit in 1939. Two Australian scientists, Eric Burhop and Mark Oliphant, were seconded to the allied atomic bomb project during WWII.
Medical research was boosted by federal organisations such as the Australian Institute for Tropical Medicine (1910), the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories (1916) and the National Health and Medical Research Council (1936). Macfarlane Burnett conducted important research into immunology in the 1930s and 1940s, and Norman McCallister Gregg first published his groundbreaking research into maternal rubella in 1941."
History of Australia (1901–1945),"Arts
In the first decade of the century, established writers such as Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson and new voices such as Steele Rudd Miles Franklin, Joseph Furphy and Henry Handel Richardson helped forge a distinctive national literature. The following decades saw the emergence of critically acclaimed poets such as Christopher Brennan, John Shaw Nielson and Kenneth Slessor. The Jindyworobak movement of the late 1930s sought to create a new Australian literature drawing on Aboriginal traditions.
Australian fiction in the 1930s and 1940s was dominated by popular novelists such as Ion Idriess. Eleanor Dark, Katherine Susannah Pritchard and Christina Stead attracted critical acclaim.
Painting was dominated by a conservative nationalism which prized Australian landscape painting in the Heidelberg School tradition.  Albert Namatjira became famous for fusing western landscape painting with traditional Aboriginal concern for country. A modernist reaction to the Heidelberg tradition spawned the work of artists such as Margaret Preston, Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker and photographer Max Dupain.
Local cinema flourished in the first two decades of the century, with films about bushrangers such as The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906) and rural comedies such as On Our Selection (1920) proving popular. Local film production, however, halved in the 1930s in the face of competition from Hollywood. Ken G. Hall and Charles Chauvel, nevertheless, were successful directors in this decade.
Before the First World War, Australian theatre was dominated by British drama, bushranger plays and rural comedies.  Attempts to establish an Australian national theatre were short-lived, but Louis Esson's The Time Is Not Yet Ripe (1912) was a notable work. In the inter-war years, Australian drama was fostered by the overtly political New Theatre Movement and small repertory theatres. Katherine Susannah Pritchard's Brumby Innes (1927) is notable. Poet Douglas Stewart wrote successful verse dramas for radio in the 1940s.
Australian composers of the period mostly produced conservative work based on mainstream British and European models. George Marshall-Hall was a British composer who migrated to Melbourne in 1891 and whose opera Stella (1909) is set in colonial Australia. Alfred Hill also composed operas including Auster (1922) and Ship of Heaven (1923). Percy Grainger was successful internationally for his short compositions in the style of British folk tunes although he also wrote longer orchestral pieces and experimental works. Alfred Hill and Margaret Sutherland are notable for their chamber music of the 1920s and 1930s. Clive Martin Douglas attempted to incorporate Aboriginal influences in his music and is notable for his operetta Kaditcja (1938) and his symphonic poem Carwoola (1939).
Australian popular songs before the First World War mostly drew on music hall and overseas trends such as ragtime. Nellie Melba remained popular on stage and in gramophone recordings. Local commercial record production began in 1926 and May Brahe's ""Bless this House"" (1927) became the most recorded Australian song. Jack O'Hagan wrote several successful songs with Australian themes including ""Along the Road to Gundagai"" (1922). Most Australian live music and recordings were heavily derivative of popular British and American styles such as the sentimental songs of the 1930s and swing music of the 1930s and 1940s."
History of Australia (1901–1945),"See also
History of Australia since 1945
History of broadcasting in Australia"
History of Australia (1901–1945),"References
Sources
Further reading
Bramble, Tom (2008). Trade Unionism in Australia: A History from Flood to Ebb Tide. ISBN 978-0521888035.
Bridge, Carl, ed. (1991). Munich to Vietnam: Australia's Relations with Britain and the United States since the 1930s. Melbourne University Press.
Day, David (1992). Reluctant Nation: Australia and the Allied Defeat of Japan 1942–45.
Dennis, Peter; Grey, Jeffrey; Morris, Ewan & Prior, Robin (1996). The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History.
Jupp, James, ed. (2002). The Australian People: An Encyclopedia of the Nation, its People and their Origins (2nd ed.).
McDonald, John (2002). Federation: Australian Art and Society, 1901–2001. National Gallery of Australia.
Samuels, Selina, ed. (2002). Australian Writers, 1915–50.
Ward, Russell (1977). A Nation for a Continent: The History of Australia, 1901–1975.
Watt, Alan (1967). The Evolution of Australian Foreign Policy 1938–1965. Cambridge University Press.
Welsh, Frank (2008). Australia: A New History of the Great Southern Land."
Mass media in Australia,"Mass media in Australia spans traditional and digital formats, and caters mostly to its predominantly English-speaking population. It is delivered in a variety of formats including radio, television, paper, internet and IPTV. Varieties include local, regional, state, federal and international sources of media, reporting on Australian news, opinion, policy, issues and culture.
Australia has been on a decline on the Press Freedom Index, in reflection of rising media censorship and intimidation of journalists in the country, including media companies maintaining close ties to political leaders, fueling doubts about editorial independence. Two giant firms dominate mass media in Australia – Nine Entertainment and News Corp Australia, a subsidiary of American-based News Corp. The country was ranked 19th out of 180 countries in 2018, before subsequently dropping to 26th out of 180 countries for 2020 and 39th in 2022."
Mass media in Australia,"Television
Free-to-air TV
New South Wales and Victoria were introduced to television in 1956, with the other states and territories following suit up to 1971 (the Northern Territory). Colour television was introduced in 1975.
In addition to the public broadcasters which are available to almost all of Australia's population, there are three major commercial television networks: the Seven Network, the Nine Network and Network 10. Most of Australia's heavily populated cities are serviced by all three networks. Some rural or regional areas may receive a more limited selection, often with some of the channels available showing programming from more than one of the major networks. An example of such a ""shared"" regional network is Imparja.
Digital free-to-air broadcasts commenced on 1 January 2001. Analogue broadcasts were originally intended to be phased out by 2008, however analogue phaseout was not achieved until 2013.
After heated debate in the early 2000s over a Bill that would have removed the foreign ownership restrictions of broadcasting TV licences, the Keating government chose to retain the foreign-ownership restrictions in its 1992 Broadcasting Act. The Howard government was set to remove this law sometime in 2007, having gained parliamentary approval to change the legislation in 2006.
In 2007, with Helen Coonan as communications minister, there were two significant changes. Foreign ownership limits were scrapped, government changed the cross-media ownership rules to allow ownership of two out of three media types."
Mass media in Australia,"Pay TV & Streaming Services
Approximately 25% of Australian households had access to pay television services by the end of 2005. The main provider is Foxtel in both metropolitan, regional and rural areas offering nearly all Australian channels via cable & satellite TV in capital cities, and mostly the same channels are offered by Foxtel via satellite TV (predominantly) in regional areas with the recent merger with Austar in 2012.
In mid-2016 the number of Australians with access to some form of pay television outstripped those with without. At the end of 2019 14.5 million Australians had access to some form of Pay TV or Subscription TV, with the combined audience of these platforms equalling almost 70% of the population. Netflix remains the market leader, although Foxtel and Stan have gained continual growth since entering the market. 
There are several smaller competitors offer a subset of channels – with Fetch TV entering the market in 2010 with a subscription service over a few ADSL2+ networks, and TransACT offering TV via its own VDSL, VDSL2 and FTTP/FTTH networks in Canberra and its Neighbourhood Cable network in parts of Victoria. Other providers of Internet television in Australia offer free content or PPV, but don't offer a subscription product. UBI World TV offers a number of ethnic satellite TV and Radio channels nationwide, and other small companies offer some channels via satellite, especially foreign services or free-to-air channels, and some channels are available over the Internet."
Mass media in Australia,"Netflix
Netflix was released in Australia and New Zealand 24 March 2015. As of February 2019, 11.2 million Australians had a Netflix subscription in their household, up 25% on a year before that.
Netflix has been criticised for not ""telling"" Australian stories by former ABC managing director Mark Scott. Research has found that Australian film and television made up less than 2% of Netflix's Australian catalogue in 2018. In 2020, the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission floated a proposal to subject Netflix to local content requirements. However, this proposal was ultimately rejected by the government."
Mass media in Australia,"Stan
Newspapers and news websites
Radio
Australia's first regular radio broadcasts began on 23 November 1923 with station 2SB (later to become 2BL) in Sydney. The ABC began broadcasting in 1932. [1] Talkback radio was first broadcast with 2UE in Sydney, just after midnight on 17 April 1967. ABC began experimenting with FM stations in the 1960s, but it wasn't until July 1980 that the first FM station commenced full operations.  Melbourne-based 3EON (now known as Triple M) was the first to air.
In 2009, there were 274 operational commercial stations (funded by advertising) and 341 community (publicly funded) radio stations.
National news radio broadcasters include the Australian Broadcasting Corporation which operates 4 national radio news networks (including ABC NewsRadio and Radio National), 53 local news stations through ABC Local Radio and several digital radio stations; and the Special Broadcasting Service which also delivers multilingual Australian-produced news content."
Mass media in Australia,"Regulation
Regulation of the media is principally assured by the Federal Government through its power to make laws governing telecommunications. The Australian states and territories also have important roles in this area, notably in the area of defamation law, although their laws may not conflict with a valid federal law. 
The Australian Communications & Media Authority (ACMA) is the broadcasting regulator for radio and television in Australia, and also the co-regulatory Online Content Scheme. Consumers who have complaints about programs on television and radio or certain types of content on the Internet can apply to the ACMA. The Commercial Television Code of Practice is a set of regulatory guidelines, registered with the ACMA, with which commercial television broadcasters should comply. 
The Australian Press Council is the self-regulatory body of the print media. The Council deals with complaints from the public about editorial material in newspapers and magazines published in Australia, and aims to maintain the freedom of the press."
Mass media in Australia,"Media ownership
Controls over media ownership in Australia are laid down in the Broadcasting Services Act 1992, administered by the ACMA. Even with laws in place Australia has a high concentration of media ownership compared to other western countries. Ownership of national and the newspapers of each capital city are dominated by two corporations, News Corp Australia, (which was founded in Adelaide but is now based from the United States) and Nine Entertainment – News Corp-owned titles account for nearly two-thirds (64.2 per cent) of metropolitan circulation and Nine-owned papers account for a further quarter (26.4 per cent).
The Australian Associated Press (AAP) is owned by a not-for-profit organisation. The AAP distributes the news and then sells it on to other outlets such as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Although much of the everyday mainstream news is drawn from the AAP, all the privately owned media outlets still compete with each other for exclusive pop culture news.
Rural and regional media is dominated by Australian Community Media, with significant holdings in all states and territories. Rural Press received a takeover offer from Fairfax Media in late 2006, and completed the merger on 8 May 2007.
There are rules governing foreign ownership of Australian media and these rules were loosened by Helen Coonan under the Howard Government via Act No. 129 of 2006 which allowed for changes to the cross-media and foreign ownership laws with the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Media Ownership) Bill 2006 . These changes came into effect in 2007 and are still in Force. The changes relaxed restrictions against cross-media ownership & control by a single company.
According to Reporters Without Borders in 2006, Australia was in 35th position on a list of countries ranked by Press Freedom; well behind New Zealand (19th) and United Kingdom (27th) (but well ahead of the US, ranked 53rd). This ranking was primarily due to the restrictions imposed by the recent anti-terrorism laws.  The problem, and the concentration of media ownership, was one of many mentioned on the television show Media Watch, broadcast on the government funded ABC. As of 2018 these rankings have changed with Australia moving up to 19th, New Zealand moving up to 8th and the United Kingdom falling to 40th."
Mass media in Australia,"News Media Bargaining Code
Media freedom
On 4 June 2019 the Australian Federal Police conducted a raid on the home of News Corp Australia journalist Annika Smethurst's home, looking for information connected to a story she had written a year earlier about new laws that would give the security forces new powers for surveillance over Australian citizens. Radio host Ben Fordham also said he was under investigation for some of his reporting.
The next day, the AFP raided the ABC over a story about alleged war crimes in Afghanistan. The search warrant allowed the police to ""add, copy, delete or alter"" any files they found on the computers.
The incidents caused an outcry of condemnation, even from the Reporters Without Borders, BBC and the New York Times.
In Australia itself, newspaper outlets normally driven by partisanship and advertising exhibited a surprisingly united show of protest on 21 October as they published front pages with the appearance of documents having been blacked out by government censors. The protest demanded journalists gain access to sensitive government material. Most of the larger media outlets formed a coalition, Right To Know, to represent the protest and demand six changes in legislation. The demands are, for the ability to contest any search warrant of a journalist or news entity while the search warrant is under request, reform of whistleblower protection, new limitations on which documents may be classified as secret, changes in freedom of information, exemption from national security laws enacted over the previous seven years, and reforms of defamation laws."
Mass media in Australia,"See also
Canberra Press Gallery
Censorship in Australia
Journalism in Australia
Australian media personalities (Category)
Australian Commercial Television Code of Practice
Convergence Review"
Mass media in Australia,References and notes
Mass media in Australia,"The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Media in Australia [2]
Kim Jackson, Parliament of Australia- Parliamentary Library, Media Ownership Regulation in Australia, 2003 [3]"
Australian English,"Australian English (AusE, AusEng, AuE, AuEng, en-AU) is the set of varieties of the English language native to Australia. It is the country's common language and de facto national language; while Australia has no official language, English is the first language of the majority of the population, and has been entrenched as the de facto national language since British settlement, being the only language spoken in the home for 72% of Australians. It is also the main language used in compulsory education, as well as federal, state and territorial legislatures and courts.
Australian English began to diverge from British and Hiberno-English after the First Fleet established the Colony of New South Wales in 1788. Australian English arose from a dialectal melting pot created by the intermingling of early settlers who were from a variety of dialectal regions of Great Britain and Ireland, though its most significant influences were the dialects of South East England. By the 1820s, the native-born colonists' speech was recognisably distinct from speakers in Britain and Ireland.
Australian English differs from other varieties in its phonology, pronunciation, lexicon, idiom, grammar and spelling. Australian English is relatively consistent across the continent, although it encompasses numerous regional and sociocultural varieties. ""General Australian"" describes the de facto standard dialect, which is perceived to be free of pronounced regional or sociocultural markers and is often used in the media."
Australian English,"History
The earliest Australian English was spoken by the first generation of native-born colonists in the Colony of New South Wales from the end of the 18th century. These native-born children were exposed to a wide range of dialects from across the British Isles. Similar to early American English, the process of dialect levelling and koineisation which ensued produced a relatively homogeneous new variety of English which was easily understood by all. Peter Miller Cunningham's 1827 book Two Years in New South Wales described the distinctive accent and vocabulary that had developed among the native-born colonists.
The dialects of South East England, including most notably the traditional Cockney dialect of London, were particularly influential on the development of the new variety and constituted ""the major input of the various sounds that went into constructing"" Australian English. All the other regions of England were represented among the early colonists. A large proportion of early convicts and colonists were from Ireland, and spoke Irish as a sole or first language. They were joined by other non-native speakers of English from Scotland and Wales.
The first of the Australian gold rushes in the 1850s began a large wave of immigration, during which about two percent of the population of the United Kingdom emigrated to the colonies of New South Wales and Victoria. The Gold Rushes brought immigrants and linguistic influences from many parts of the world. An example was the introduction of vocabulary from American English, including some terms later considered to be typically Australian, such as bushwhacker and squatter. This American influence was continued with the popularity of American films from the early 20th century and the influx of American military personnel during World War II; seen in the enduring persistence of such universally-accepted terms as okay and guys.
The publication of Edward Ellis Morris's Austral English: A Dictionary Of Australasian Words, Phrases And Usages in 1898, which extensively catalogued Australian English vocabulary, started a wave of academic interest and codification during the 20th century which resulted in Australian English becoming established as an endonormative variety with its own internal norms and standards. This culminated in publications such as the 1981 first edition of the Macquarie Dictionary, a major English language dictionary based on Australian usage, and the 1988 first edition of The Australian National Dictionary, a historical dictionary documenting the history of Australian English vocabulary and idiom."
Australian English,"Phonology and pronunciation
The most obvious way in which Australian English is distinctive from other varieties of English is through its unique pronunciation. It shares most similarity with New Zealand English. Like most dialects of English, it is distinguished primarily by the phonetic quality of its vowels."
Australian English,"Vowels
The vowels of Australian English can be divided according to length. The long vowels, which include monophthongs and diphthongs, mostly correspond to the tense vowels used in analyses of Received Pronunciation (RP) as well as its centring diphthongs. The short vowels, consisting only of monophthongs, correspond to the RP lax vowels.
There exist pairs of long and short vowels with overlapping vowel quality giving Australian English phonemic length distinction, which is also present in some regional south-eastern dialects of the UK and eastern seaboard dialects in the US. An example of this feature is the distinction between ferry /ˈfeɹiː/ and fairy /ˈfeːɹiː/.
As with New Zealand English and General American English, the weak-vowel merger is complete in Australian English: unstressed /ɪ/ is merged into /ə/ (schwa), unless it is followed by a velar consonant. Examples of this feature are the following pairings, which are pronounced identically in Australian English: Rosa's and roses, as well as Lennon and Lenin. Other examples are the following pairs, which rhyme in Australian English: abbott with rabbit, and dig it with bigot.
Most varieties of Australian English exhibit only a partial trap-bath split. The words bath, grass and can't are always pronounced with the ""long"" /aː/ of father. Throughout the majority of the country, the ""flat"" /æ/ of man is the dominant pronunciation for the a vowel in the following words: dance, advance, plant, example and answer. The exception is the state of South Australia, where a more advanced trap-bath split is found, and where the dominant pronunciation of all the preceding words incorporates the ""long"" /aː/ of father."
Australian English,"Consonants
There is little variation in the sets of consonants used in different English dialects but there are variations in how these consonants are used. Australian English is no exception."
Australian English,"Australian English is uniformly non-rhotic; that is, the /ɹ/ sound does not appear at the end of a syllable or immediately before a consonant. As with many non-rhotic dialects, linking /ɹ/ can occur when a word that has a final ⟨r⟩ in the spelling comes before another word that starts with a vowel. An intrusive /ɹ/ may similarly be inserted before a vowel in words that do not have ⟨r⟩ in the spelling in certain environments, namely after the long vowel /oː/ and after word final /ə/. This can be heard in ""law-r-and order"", where an intrusive R is voiced between the AW and the A.
As with North American English, intervocalic alveolar flapping is a feature of Australian English: prevocalic /t/ and /d/ surface as the alveolar tap [ɾ] after sonorants other than /m, ŋ/ as well as at the end of a word or morpheme before any vowel in the same breath group. Examples of this feature are that the following pairs are pronounced similarly or identically: latter and ladder, as well as rated and raided.
Yod-dropping generally occurs after /s/, /l/, /z/, /θ/ but not after /t/, /d/ and /n/. Accordingly, suit is pronounced as /sʉːt/, lute as /lʉːt/, Zeus as /zʉːs/ and enthusiasm as /enˈθʉːziːæzəm/. Other cases of /sj/ and /zj/, as well as /tj/ and /dj/, have coalesced to /ʃ/, /ʒ/, /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ respectively for many speakers. /j/ is generally retained in other consonant clusters.
In common with most varieties of Scottish English and American English, the phoneme /l/ is pronounced by Australians as a ""dark"" (velarised) l ([ɫ]) in almost all positions, unlike other dialects such as Received Pronunciation, Hiberno (Irish) English.
The wine–whine merger is complete in Australian English."
Australian English,"Pronunciation
Differences in stress, weak forms and standard pronunciation of isolated words occur between Australian English and other forms of English, which while noticeable do not impair intelligibility.
The affixes -ary, -ery, -ory, -bury, -berry and -mony (seen in words such as necessary, mulberry and matrimony) can be pronounced either with a full vowel (/ˈnesəseɹiː, ˈmalbeɹiː, ˈmætɹəməʉniː/) or a schwa  (/ˈnesəsəɹiː, ˈmalbəɹiː, ˈmætɹəməniː/). Although some words like necessary are almost universally pronounced with the full vowel, older generations of Australians are relatively likely to pronounce these affixes with a schwa as is typical in British English. Meanwhile, younger generations are relatively likely to use a full vowel.
Words ending in unstressed -ile derived from Latin adjectives ending in -ilis are pronounced with a full vowel, so that fertile /ˈfɜːtɑɪl/ sounds like fur tile rather than rhyming with turtle /ˈtɜːtəl/.
In addition, miscellaneous pronunciation differences exist when compared with other varieties of English in relation to various isolated words, with some of those pronunciations being unique to Australian English. For example:"
Australian English,"As with American English, the vowel in yoghurt /ˈjəʉɡət/ and the prefix homo- /ˈhəʉməʉ/ (as in homosexual or homophobic) are pronounced with GOAT rather than LOT;
Vitamin, migraine and privacy are all pronounced with /ɑɪ/ in the stressed syllable (/ˈvɑɪtəmən, ˈmɑɪɡɹæɪn, ˈpɹɑɪvəsiː/) rather than /ˈvɪtəmən, ˈmiːɡɹæɪn, ˈpɹɪvəsiː/;
Dynasty and patronise, by contrast, are usually subject to trisyllabic laxing (/ˈdɪnəstiː, ˈpætrɔnɑɪz/) like in Britain, alongside US-derived /ˈdɑɪnəstiː, ˈpæɪtrɔnɑɪz/;
The prefix paedo- (as in paedophile) is pronounced /ˈpedəʉ/ rather than /ˈpiːdəʉ/;
In loanwords, the vowel spelled with ⟨a⟩ is often nativized as the PALM vowel (/aː/), as in American English, rather than the TRAP vowel (/æ/), as in British English. For example, pasta is pronounced /ˈpaːstə/, analogous to American English /ˈpɑstə/, rather than /ˈpæstə/, as in British English.
Urinal is stressed on the first syllable and with the schwa for I: /ˈjʉːɹənəl/;
Harass and harassment are pronounced with the stress on the second, rather than the first syllable;
The suffix -sia (as in Malaysia, Indonesia and Polynesia, but not Tunisia) is pronounced /-⁠ʒə/ rather than /-ziːə/;
The word foyer is pronounced /ˈfoɪə/, rather than /ˈfoɪæɪ/;
Tomato, vase and data are pronounced with /aː/ instead of /æɪ/: /təˈmaːtəʉ, vaːz, ˈdaːtə/, with /ˈdæɪtə/ being uncommon but acceptable;
Zebra and leisure are pronounced /ˈzebɹə/ and /ˈleʒə/ rather than /ˈziːbɹə/ and /ˈliːʒə/, both having disyllabic laxing;
Status varies between British-derived /ˈstæɪtəs/ with the FACE vowel and American-derived /ˈstætəs/ with the TRAP vowel;
Conversely, precedence, precedent and derivatives are mainly pronounced with the FLEECE vowel in the stressed syllable, rather than DRESS: /ˈpɹiːsədəns ~ pɹiːˈsiːdəns, ˈpɹiːsədənt/;
Basil is pronounced /ˈbæzəl/, rather than /ˈbæɪzəl/;
Conversely, cache is usually pronounced /kæɪʃ/, rather than the more conventional /kæʃ/;
Buoy is pronounced as /boɪ/ (as in boy) rather than /ˈbʉːiː/;
The E in congress and progress is not reduced: /ˈkɔnɡɹes, ˈpɹəʉɡɹes/;
Conversely, the unstressed O in silicon, phenomenon and python stands for a schwa: /ˈsɪlɪkən, fəˈnɔmənən, ˈpɑɪθən/;
In Amazon, Lebanon, marathon and pantheon, however, the unstressed O stands for the LOT vowel, somewhat as with American English: /ˈæməzɔn, ˈlebənɔn, ˈmæɹəθɔn, ˈpænθæɪɔn/;
The colour name maroon is pronounced with the GOAT vowel: /məˈɹəʉn/."
Australian English,"Variation
Relative to many other national dialect groupings, Australian English is relatively homogeneous across the country. Some relatively minor regional differences in pronunciation exist. A limited range of word choices is strongly regional in nature. Consequently, the geographical background of individuals may be inferred if they use words that are peculiar to particular Australian states or territories and, in some cases, even smaller regions. In addition, some Australians speak creole languages derived from Australian English, such as Australian Kriol, Torres Strait Creole and Norfuk.
Academic research has also identified notable sociocultural variation within Australian English, which is mostly evident in phonology."
Australian English,"Regional variation
Although Australian English is relatively homogeneous, there are some regional variations. The dialects of English spoken in the various states and territories of Australia differ slightly in vocabulary and phonology.
Most regional differences are in word usage. Swimming clothes are known as cossies /ˈkɔziːz/ or swimmers in New South Wales, togs in Queensland, and bathers in Victoria, Tasmania, Western Australia and South Australia. What Queensland calls a stroller is usually called a pram in Victoria, Western Australia, South Australia, New South Wales, and Tasmania.
Preference for some synonymous words also differ between states. Garbage (i.e., garbage bin, garbage truck) dominates over rubbish in New South Wales and Queensland, while rubbish is more popular in Victoria, Tasmania, Western Australia and South Australia.
Additionally, the word footy generally refers to the most popular football code in an area; that is, rugby league or rugby union depending on the local area, in most of New South Wales and Queensland, and Australian rules football elsewhere. In some pockets of Melbourne & Western Sydney 'football' and more rarely 'footy' will refer to Association football. Beer glasses are also named differently in different states. Distinctive grammatical patterns exist such as the use of the interrogative eh (also spelled ay or aye), which is particularly associated with Queensland. Secret Santa () and Kris Kringle are used in all states, with the former being more common in Queensland."
Australian English,"South Australia
The most pronounced variation in phonology is between South Australia and the other states and territories. The trap–bath split is more complete in South Australia, in contrast to the other states. Accordingly, words such as dance, advance, plant, example and answer are pronounced with /aː/ (as in father) far more frequently in South Australia while the older /æ/ (as in mad) is dominant elsewhere in Australia. L-vocalisation is also more common in South Australia than other states."
Australian English,"Centring diphthongs
In Western Australian and Queensland English, the vowels in near and square are typically realised as centring diphthongs ([nɪə, skweə]), whereas in the other states they may also be realised as monophthongs: [nɪː, skweː]."
Australian English,"Salary–celery merger
A feature common in Victorian English is salary–celery merger, whereby a Victorian pronunciation of Ellen may sound like Alan and Victoria's capital city Melbourne may sound like Malbourne to speakers from other states. There is also regional variation in /ʉː/ before /l/ (as in school and pool)."
Australian English,"Full-fool allophones
In some parts of Australia, notably Victoria, a fully backed allophone of /ʉː/, transcribed [ʊː], is common before /l/. As a result, the pairs full/fool and pull/pool differ phonetically only in vowel length for those speakers. The usual allophone for /ʉː/ is further forward in Queensland and New South Wales than Victoria."
Australian English,"Sociocultural variation
The General Australian accent serves as the standard variety of English across the country. According to linguists, it emerged during the 19th century. General Australian is the dominant variety across the continent, and is particularly so in urban areas. The increasing dominance of General Australian reflects its prominence on radio and television since the latter half of the 20th century.
Recent generations have seen a comparatively smaller proportion of the population speaking with the Broad sociocultural variant, which differs from General Australian in its phonology. The Broad variant is found across the continent and is relatively more prominent in rural and outer-suburban areas.
A largely historical Cultivated sociocultural variant, which adopted features of British Received Pronunciation and which was commonplace in official media during the early 20th century, had become largely extinct by the onset of the 21st century.
Australian Aboriginal English is made up of a range of forms which developed differently in different parts of Australia, and are said to vary along a continuum, from forms close to Standard Australian English to more non-standard forms. There are distinctive features of accent, grammar, words and meanings, as well as language use.
Academics have noted the emergence of numerous ethnocultural dialects of Australian English that are spoken by people from some minority non-English speaking backgrounds. These ethnocultural varieties contain features of General Australian English as adopted by the children of immigrants blended with some non-English language features, such as Afro-Asiatic languages and languages of Asia. Samoan English is also influencing Australian English. Other ethnolects include those of Lebanese and Vietnamese Australians.
A high rising terminal in Australian English was noted and studied earlier than in other varieties of English. The feature is sometimes called Australian questioning intonation. Research published in 1986, regarding vernacular speech in Sydney, suggested that high rising terminal was initially spread by young people in the 1960s. It found that the high rising terminal was used more than twice as often by young people than older people, and is more common among women than men. In the United Kingdom, it has occasionally been considered one of the variety's stereotypical features, and its spread there is attributed to the popularity of Australian soap operas."
Australian English,"Vocabulary
Intrinsic traits
Australian English has many words and idioms which are unique to the dialect."
Australian English,"Commonly known
Internationally well-known examples of Australian terminology include outback, meaning a remote, sparsely populated area, the bush, meaning either a native forest or a country area in general, and g'day, a greeting. Dinkum, or fair dinkum means ""true"" or ""is that true?"", among other things, depending on context and inflection. The derivative dinky-di means ""true"" or devoted: a ""dinky-di Aussie"" is a ""true Australian""."
Australian English,"Historical references
Australian poetry, such as ""The Man from Snowy River"", as well as folk songs such as ""Waltzing Matilda"", contain many historical Australian words and phrases that are understood by Australians even though some are not in common usage today."
Australian English,"British English similarities and differences
Australian English, in common with British English, uses the word mate to mean friend, as well as the word bloody as a mild expletive or intensifier. 
Several words used by Australians were at one time used in the UK but have since fallen out of usage or changed in meaning there. For example, creek in Australia, as in North America, means a stream or small river, whereas in the UK it is typically a watercourse in a marshy area; paddock in Australia means field, whereas in the UK it means a small enclosure for livestock; bush or scrub in Australia, as in North America, means a wooded area, whereas in England they are commonly used only in proper names (such as Shepherd's Bush and Wormwood Scrubs)."
Australian English,"Aboriginal-derived words
Some elements of Aboriginal languages have been adopted by Australian English—mainly as names for places, flora and fauna (for example dingo) and local culture. Many such are localised, and do not form part of general Australian use, while others, such as kangaroo, boomerang, budgerigar, wallaby and so on have become international. Other examples are cooee and hard yakka. The former is used as a high-pitched call, for attracting attention, (pronounced /ˈkʉːiː/) which travels long distances. Cooee is also a notional distance: ""if he's within cooee, we'll spot him"". Hard yakka means ""hard work"" and is derived from yakka, from the Jagera/Yagara language once spoken in the Brisbane region. 
The word bung, meaning ""dead"" was originally a Yagara which was used in the pidgin widely spoken across Australia."
Australian English,"Places
Many towns or suburbs of Australia have also been influenced or named after Aboriginal words. The best-known example is the capital, Canberra, named after a local Ngunnawal language word thought to mean ""women's breasts"" or ""meeting place""."
Australian English,"Figures of speech and abbreviations
Litotes, such as ""not bad"", ""not much"" and ""you're not wrong"", are also used. 
Diminutives and hypocorisms are common and are often used to indicate familiarity. Some common examples are arvo (afternoon), barbie (barbecue), smoko (cigarette break), Aussie (Australian) and Straya (Australia). This may also be done with people's names to create nicknames (other English speaking countries create similar diminutives). For example, ""Gazza"" from Gary, or ""Smitty"" from John Smith. The use of the suffix -o originates in Irish: ó, which is both a postclitic and a suffix with much the same meaning as in Australian English. 
In informal speech, incomplete comparisons are sometimes used, such as ""sweet as"" (as in ""That car is sweet as.""). ""Full"", ""fully"" or ""heaps"" may precede a word to act as an intensifier (as in ""The waves at the beach were heaps good.""). This was more common in regional Australia and South Australia but has been in common usage in urban Australia for decades. The suffix ""-ly"" is sometimes omitted in broader Australian English. For instance, ""really good"" can become ""real good""."
Australian English,"Measures
Australia's switch to the metric system in the 1970s changed most of the country's vocabulary of measurement from imperial to metric measures. Since the switch to metric, heights of individuals are listed in centimetres on official documents and distances by road on signs are listed in terms of kilometres and metres."
Australian English,"Comparison with other varieties
Where British and American English vocabulary differs, sometimes Australian English shares a usage with one of those varieties, as with petrol (AmE: gasoline) and mobile phone (AmE: cellular phone) which are shared with British English, or truck (BrE: lorry) and eggplant (BrE: aubergine) which are shared with American English.
In other circumstances, Australian English sometimes favours a usage which is different from both British and American English as with:"
Australian English,"Differences exist between Australian English and other varieties of English, where different terms can be used for the same subject or the same term can be ascribed different meanings. Non-exhaustive examples of terminology associated with food, transport and clothing is used below to demonstrate the variations which exist between Australian English and other varieties:
Food – capsicum (BrE: (red/green) pepper; AmE: bell pepper); (potato) chips (refers both to BrE crisps and AmE French fries); chook (sanga) (BrE and AmE: chicken (sandwich)); coriander (shared with BrE. AmE: cilantro); entree (refers to AmE appetizer whereas AmE entree is referred to in AusE as main course); eggplant (shared with AmE. BrE: aubergine); fairy floss (BrE: candy floss; AmE: cotton candy); ice block or icy pole (BrE: ice lolly; AmE: popsicle); jelly (refers to AmE Jell-o whereas AmE jelly refers to AusE jam); lollies (BrE: sweets; AmE: candy); marinara (sauce) (refers to a tomato-based sauce in AmE and BrE but a seafood sauce in AusE); mince or minced meat (shared with BrE. AmE: ground meat); prawn (which in BrE refers to large crustaceans only, with small crustaceans referred to as shrimp. AmE universally: shrimp); snow pea (shared with AmE. BrE mangetout); pumpkin (AmE: squash, except for the large orange variety – AusE squash refers only to a small number of uncommon species; BrE: marrow); tomato sauce (also used in BrE. AmE: ketchup); zucchini (shared with AmE. BrE: courgette)
Transport – aeroplane (shared with BrE. AmE: airplane); bonnet (shared with BrE. AmE: hood); bumper (shared with BrE. AmE: fender); car park (shared with BrE. AmE: parking lot); convertible (shared with AmE. BrE: cabriolet); footpath (BrE: pavement; AmE: sidewalk); horse float (BrE: horsebox; AmE: horse trailer); indicator (shared with BrE. AmE: turn signal); peak hour (BrE and AmE: rush hour); petrol (shared with BrE. AmE: gasoline); railway (shared with BrE. AmE: railroad); sedan (car) (shared with AmE. BrE: saloon (car)); semitrailer (shared with AmE. BrE: artic or articulated lorry); station wagon (shared with AmE. BrE: estate car); truck (shared with AmE. BrE: lorry); ute (BrE and AmE: pickup truck); windscreen (shared with BrE. AmE: windshield)
Clothing – gumboots (BrE: Wellington boots or Wellies; AmE: rubber boots or galoshes); jumper (shared with BrE. AmE: sweater); nappy (shared with BrE. AmE: diaper); overalls (shared with AmE. BrE: dungarees); raincoat (shared with AmE. BrE: mackintosh or mac); runners or sneakers (footwear) (BrE: trainers. AmE: sneakers); sandshoe (BrE: pump or plimsoll. AmE: tennis shoe); singlet (BrE: vest. AmE: tank top or wifebeater); skivvy (BrE: polo neck; AmE: turtleneck); swimmers or togs or bathers (BrE: swimming costume. AmE: bathing suit or swimsuit); thongs (refers to BrE and AmE flip-flops (footwear). In BrE and AmE refers to g-string (underwear))"
Australian English,"Terms with different meanings in Australian English
There also exist words which in Australian English are ascribed different meanings from those ascribed in other varieties of English, for instance:"
Australian English,"Asian in Australian (and American) English commonly refers to people of East Asian ancestry, while in British English it commonly refers to people of South Asian ancestry
Biscuit in Australian (and British) English refers to AmE cookie and cracker, while in American English it refers to a leavened bread product
(potato) Chips refers both to British English crisps (which is not commonly used in Australian English) and to American English French fries (which is used alongside hot chips)
Football in Australian English most commonly refers to Australian rules football, rugby league or rugby union. In British English, football is most commonly used to refer to association football, while in North American English football is used to refer to gridiron
Pants in Australian (and American) English most commonly refers to British English trousers, but in British English refers to Australian English underpants
Nursery in Australian English generally refers to a plant nursery, whereas in British English and American English it also often refers to a child care or daycare for pre-school age children
Paddock in Australian English refers to an open field or meadow whereas in American and British English it refers to a small agricultural enclosure
Premier in Australian English refers specifically to the head of government of an Australian state, whereas in British English it is used interchangeably with Prime Minister
Public school in Australian (and American) English refers to a state school. Australian and American English use private school to mean a non-government or independent school, in contrast with British English which uses public school to refer to the same thing
Pudding in Australian (and American) English refers to a particular sweet dessert dish, while in British English it often refers to dessert (the food course) in general
Thongs in Australian English refer to British and American English flip-flop (footwear), whereas in both American and British English it refers to Australian English G-string (underwear) (in Australian English the singular ""thong"" can refer to one half of a pair of the footwear or to a G-string, so care must be taken as to context)
Vest in Australian (and American) English refers to a padded upper garment or British English waistcoat but in British English refers to Australian English singlet"
Australian English,"Idioms taking different forms in Australian English
In addition to the large number of uniquely Australian idioms in common use, there are instances of idioms taking different forms in Australian English than in other varieties, for instance:"
Australian English,"A drop in the ocean (shared with BrE usage) as opposed to AmE a drop in the bucket
A way to go (shared with BrE usage) as opposed to AmE a ways to go
Home away from home (shared with AmE usage) as opposed to BrE home from home
Take (something) with a grain of salt (shared with AmE usage) as opposed to UK take with a pinch of salt
Touch wood (shared with BrE usage) as opposed to AmE knock on wood
Wouldn't touch (something) with a ten-foot pole (shared with AmE usage) as opposed to BrE wouldn't touch with a barge pole"
Australian English,"British and American English terms not commonly used in Australian English
There are extensive terms used in other varieties of English which are not widely used in Australian English. These terms usually do not result in Australian English speakers failing to comprehend speakers of other varieties of English, as Australian English speakers will often be familiar with such terms through exposure to media or may ascertain the meaning using context.
Non-exhaustive selections of British English and American English terms not commonly used in Australian English together with their definitions or Australian English equivalents are found in the collapsible table below:
British English terms not widely used in Australian English"
Australian English,American English terms not widely used in Australian English
Australian English,"Grammar
The general rules of English Grammar which apply to Australian English are described at English grammar. Grammatical differences between varieties of English are minor relative to differences in phonology and vocabulary and do not generally affect intelligibility. Examples of grammatical differences between Australian English and other varieties include:"
Australian English,"Collective nouns are generally singular in construction, e.g., the government was unable to decide as opposed to the government were unable to decide or the group was leaving as opposed to the group were leaving. This is in common with American English.
Australian English has an extreme distaste for the modal verbs shall (in non-legal contexts), shan't and ought (in place of will, won't and should respectively), which are encountered in British English. However, shall is found in the Australian Constitution, Acts of Parliament, and other formal or legal documents such as contracts.
Using should with the same meaning as would, e.g. I should like to see you, encountered in British English, is almost never encountered in Australian English.
River follows the name of the river in question, e.g., Brisbane River, rather than the British convention of coming before the name, e.g., River Thames. This is also the case in North American and New Zealand English. In South Australian English however, the reverse applies when referring to the following three rivers: Murray, Darling and Torrens. The Derwent in Tasmania also follows this convention.
While prepositions before days may be omitted in American English, i.e., She resigned Thursday, they are retained in Australian English: She resigned on Thursday. This is shared with British English.
The institutional nouns hospital and university do not take the definite article: She's in hospital, He's at university. This is in contrast to American English where the is required: In the hospital, At the university.
On the weekend is used in favour of the British at the weekend which is not encountered in Australian English.
Ranges of dates use to, i.e., Monday to Friday, rather than Monday through Friday. This is shared with British English and is in contrast to American English.
When speaking or writing out numbers, and is always inserted before the tens, i.e., one hundred and sixty-two rather than one hundred sixty-two. This is in contrast to American English, where the insertion of and is acceptable but nonetheless either casual or informal.
The preposition to in write to (e.g. ""I'll write to you"") is always retained, as opposed to American usage where it may be dropped.
Australian English does not share the British usage of read (v) to mean ""study"" (v). Therefore, it may be said that ""He studies medicine"" but not that ""He reads medicine"".
When referring to time, Australians will refer to 10:30 as half past ten and do not use the British half ten. Similarly, a quarter to ten is used for 9:45 rather than (a) quarter of ten, which is sometimes found in American English.
Australian English does not share the British English meaning of sat to include sitting or seated. Therefore, uses such as I've been sat here for an hour are not encountered in Australian English.
To have a shower or have a bath are the most common usages in Australian English, in contrast to American English which uses take a shower and take a bath.
The past participle of saw is sawn (e.g. sawn-off shotgun) in Australian English, in contrast to the American English sawed.
The verb visit is transitive in Australian English. Where the object is a person or people, American English also uses visit with, which is not found in Australian English.
An outdoor event which is cancelled due to inclement weather is rained out in Australian English. This is in contrast to British English where it is said to be rained off.
In informal speech, sentence-final but may be used, e.g. ""I don't want to go but"" in place of ""But I don't want to go"". This is also found in Scottish English.
In informal speech, the discourse markers yeah no (or yeah nah) and no yeah (or nah yeah) may be used to mean ""no"" and ""yes"" respectively."
Australian English,"Spelling and style
As in all English-speaking countries, there is no central authority that prescribes official usage with respect to matters of spelling, grammar, punctuation or style."
Australian English,"Spelling
There are several dictionaries of Australian English which adopt a descriptive approach. The Macquarie Dictionary and the Australian Oxford Dictionary are most commonly used by universities, governments and courts as the standard for Australian English spelling.
Australian spelling is significantly closer to British than American spelling, as it did not adopt the systematic reforms promulgated in Noah Webster's 1828 Dictionary. Notwithstanding, the Macquarie Dictionary often lists most American spellings as acceptable secondary variants.
The minor systematic differences which occur between Australian and American spelling are summarised below:"
Australian English,"French-derived words which in American English end with or, such as color, honor, behavior and labor, are spelt with our in Australian English: colour, honour, behaviour and labour. Exceptions are the Australian Labor Party and some (especially South Australian) placenames which use Harbor, notably Victor Harbor.
Words which in American English end with ize, such as realize, recognize and apologize are spelt with ise in Australian English: realise, recognise and apologise. The British Oxford spelling, which uses the ize endings, remains a minority variant. The Macquarie Dictionary says that the -ise form as opposed to -ize sits at 3:1. The sole exception to this is capsize, which is used in all varieties.
Words which in American English end with yze, such as analyze, paralyze and catalyze are spelt with yse in Australian English: analyse, paralyse and catalyse.
French-derived words which in American English end with er, such as fiber, center and meter are spelt with re in Australian English: fibre, centre and metre (the unit of measurement only, not physical devices; so gasometer, voltmeter).
Words which end in American English end with log, such as catalog, dialog and monolog are usually spelt with logue in Australian English: catalogue, dialogue and monologue; however, the Macquarie Dictionary lists the log spelling as the preferred variant for analog.
A double-consonant l is retained in Australian English when adding suffixes to words ending in l where the consonant is unstressed, contrary to American English. Therefore, Australian English favours cancelled, counsellor, and travelling over American canceled, counselor and traveling.
Where American English uses a double-consonant ll in the words skillful, willful, enroll, distill, enthrall, fulfill and installment, Australian English uses a single consonant: skilful, wilful, enrol, distil, enthral, fulfil and instalment. However, the Macquarie Dictionary has noted a growing tendency to use the double consonant.
The American English defense and offense are spelt defence and offence in Australian English.
In contrast with American English, which uses practice and license for both nouns and verbs, practice and licence are nouns while practise and license are verbs in Australian English.
Words with ae and oe are often maintained in words such as oestrogen and paedophilia, in contrast to the American English practice of using e alone (as in estrogen and pedophilia). The Macquarie Dictionary has noted a shift within Australian English towards using e alone, and now lists some words such as encyclopedia, fetus, eon or hematite with the e spelling as the preferred variant and hence Australian English varies by word when it comes to these sets of words.
Minor systematic difference which occur between Australian and British spelling are as follows:"
Australian English,"Words often ending in eable in British English end in able in Australian English. Therefore, Australian English favours livable over liveable, sizable over sizeable, movable over moveable, etc., although both variants are acceptable.
Words often ending in eing in British English end in ing in Australian English. Therefore, Australian English favours aging over ageing, or routing over routeing, etc., although both variants are acceptable.
Words often ending in mme in British English end in m in Australian English. Therefore, Australian English favours program over programme (in all contexts) and aerogram over aerogramme, although both variants are acceptable. Similar to Canada, New Zealand and the United States, (kilo)gram is the only spelling.
Other examples of individual words where the preferred spelling is listed by the Macquarie Dictionary as being different from current British spellings include analog as opposed to analogue, guerilla as opposed to guerrilla, verandah as opposed to veranda, burqa as opposed to burka, pastie (noun) as opposed to pasty, neuron as opposed to neurone, hicup as opposed to hicough, annex as opposed to annexe, raccoon as opposed to racoon etc. Unspaced forms such as onto, anytime, alright and anymore are also listed as being equally as acceptable as their spaced counterparts.
There is variation between and within varieties of English in the treatment of -t and -ed endings for past tense verbs. The Macquarie Dictionary does not favour either, but it suggests that leaped, leaned or  learned (with -ed endings) are more common but spelt and burnt (with -t endings) are more common.
Different spellings have existed throughout Australia's history. What are today regarded as American spellings were popular in Australia throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the Victorian Department of Education endorsing them into the 1970s and The Age newspaper until the 1990s. This influence can be seen in the spelling of the Australian Labor Party and also in some place names such as Victor Harbor. The Concise Oxford English Dictionary has been credited with re-establishing the dominance of the British spellings in the 1920s and 1930s. For a short time during the late 20th century, Harry Lindgren's 1969 spelling reform proposal (Spelling Reform 1 or SR1) gained some support in Australia and was adopted by the Australian Teachers' Federation and minister Doug Everingham in personal correspondence."
Australian English,"Punctuation and style
Prominent general style guides for Australian English include the Cambridge Guide to Australian English Usage, the Australian Government Style Manual (formerly the Style Manual: For Authors, Editors and Printers), the Australian Handbook for Writers and Editors and the Complete Guide to English Usage for Australian Students.
Both single and double quotation marks are in use, with single quotation marks preferred for use in the first instance, with double quotation marks reserved for quotes of speech within speech. Logical (as opposed to typesetter's) punctuation is preferred for punctuation marks at the end of quotations. For instance, Sam said he 'wasn't happy when Jane told David to ""go away""'. is used in preference to Sam said he ""wasn't happy when Jane told David to 'go away.'""
The DD/MM/YYYY date format is followed and the 12-hour clock is generally used in everyday life (as opposed to service, police, and airline applications).
With the exception of screen sizes, metric units are used in everyday life, having supplanted imperial units upon the country's switch to the metric system in the 1970s, although imperial units persist in casual references to a person's height. Tyre and bolt sizes (for example) are defined in imperial units where appropriate for technical reasons.
In betting, decimal odds are used in preference to fractional odds, as used in the United Kingdom, or moneyline odds in the United States."
Australian English,"Keyboard layout
There are two major English language keyboard layouts, the United States layout and the United Kingdom layout. Keyboards and keyboard software for the Australian market universally uses the US keyboard layout, which lacks the pound (£), euro and negation symbols and uses a different layout for punctuation symbols from the UK keyboard layout."
Australian English,"See also
The Australian National Dictionary
Australian English vocabulary
New Zealand English
South African English
Zimbabwean English
Falkland Islands English
Diminutives in Australian English
International Phonetic Alphabet chart for English dialects
Strine"
Australian English,"References
Citations
Works cited
Further reading
External links"
Australian English,"Aussie English, The Illustrated Dictionary of Australian English
Australian National Dictionary Centre
free newsletter from the Australian National Dictionary Centre, which includes articles on Australian English
Australian Word Map at the ABC—documents regionalisms
R. Mannell, F. Cox and J. Harrington (2009), An Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology, Macquarie University
Aussie English for beginners—the origins, meanings and a quiz to test your knowledge at the National Museum of Australia."
Culture of Australia,"The culture of Australia is primarily a Western culture, originally derived from the United Kingdom. The unique geography of Australia and the cultural input of Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and other Australian people also influenced its culture. The British colonisation of Australia began in 1788, and waves of multi-ethnic migration followed. Evidence of a significant Anglo-Celtic heritage includes: the predominance of the English language, the existence of a democratic system of government drawing upon the British traditions of Westminster government, parliamentarianism and constitutional monarchy, American constitutionalist and federalist traditions, and Christianity as the dominant religion.
Aboriginal people are believed to have arrived as early as 60,000 years ago, and evidence of Aboriginal art in Australia dates back at least 30,000 years. Several states and territories had their origins as penal colonies, with the first British convicts arriving at Sydney Cove in 1788. Stories of outlaws like the bushranger Ned Kelly have endured in Australian music, cinema and literature. The Australian gold rushes from the 1850s brought wealth as well as new social tensions to Australia, including the miners' Eureka Stockade rebellion. The colonies established elected parliaments and rights for workers and women before most other Western nations.
Federation in 1901 was the culmination of a growing sense of national identity that had developed over the latter half of the 19th century -as seen in the works of the Heidelberg School painters and writers like Banjo Paterson, Henry Lawson and Dorothea Mackellar. The World Wars profoundly impacted Australia's national identity: World War I introducing the ANZAC legend, and World War II seeing a reorientation from Britain to the United States as the nation's foremost ally. After the second war, 6.5 million migrants from 200 nations brought immense new diversity. Over time, the diverse food, lifestyle and cultural practices of immigrants have been absorbed into mainstream Australian culture."
Culture of Australia,"Historical development of Australian culture
The oldest surviving cultural traditions of Australia—and some of the oldest surviving cultural traditions on earth—are those of Australia's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, collectively referred to as Indigenous Australians. Their ancestors have inhabited Australia for between 40,000 and 60,000 years, living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. In 2006, the Indigenous population was estimated at 517,000 people, or 2.5 per cent of the total population. Most Aboriginal Australians have a belief system based on the Dreaming, or Dreamtime, which refers both to a time when ancestral spirits created land and culture, and to the knowledge and practices that define individual and community responsibilities and identity. Conflict and reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians has been a source of much art and literature in Australia, and ancient Aboriginal artistic styles and iconic inventions such as the boomerang, the didgeridoo and Indigenous Australian music have become symbols of modern Australia.
The arrival of the first British settlers at what is now Sydney in 1788 introduced Western civilisation to the Australian continent. Although Sydney was initially used by the British as a place of banishment for prisoners, the arrival of the British laid the foundations for Australia's democratic institutions and rule of law, and introduced the long traditions of English literature, Western art and music, and Judeo-Christian ethics and religious outlook which shaped the Australian national culture and identity."
Culture of Australia,"The British Empire expanded across the whole continent and established six colonies. The colonies were originally penal colonies, with the exception of Western Australia and South Australia, which were each established as a ""free colony"" with no convicts and a vision for a territory with political and religious freedoms, together with opportunities for wealth through business and pastoral investments. However, Western Australia became a penal colony after insufficient numbers of free settlers arrived. Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, grew from its status as a convict free region and experienced prosperity from the late nineteenth century.
Contact between the Indigenous Australians and the new settlers ranged from cordiality to violent conflict, but the diseases brought by Europeans were devastating to Aboriginal populations and culture. According to the historian Geoffrey Blainey, during the colonial period: ""Smallpox, measles, influenza and other new diseases swept from one Aboriginal camp to another ... The main conqueror of Aborigines was to be disease and its ally, demoralization."""
Culture of Australia,"Calls for responsible government began to develop; William Wentworth established Australia's first political party in 1835 to demand democratic government for New South Wales and later was central in the establishment of Australia's first parliament. From the 1850s, the colonies set about writing constitutions which produced democratically advanced parliaments as constitutional monarchies with Queen Victoria as the head of state.Women's suffrage in Australia was achieved from the 1890s. Women became eligible to vote in South Australia in 1895. This was the first legislation in the world permitting women to stand for political office and, in 1897, Catherine Helen Spence, an Adelaidean, became the first female political candidate. Though constantly evolving, the key foundations for elected parliamentary government have maintained an historical continuity in Australia from the 1850s into the 21st century.
During the colonial era, distinctive forms of Australian art, music, language and literature developed through movements like the Heidelberg school of painters and the work of bush balladeers like Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, whose poetry and prose did much to promote an egalitarian Australian outlook which placed a high value on the concept of ""mateship"". Games like cricket and rugby were imported from Britain at this time and with a local variant of football, Australian Rules Football, became treasured cultural traditions.
The Commonwealth of Australia was founded in 1901, after a series of referendums conducted in the British colonies of Australasia. The Australian Constitution established a federal democracy and enshrined human rights such as sections 41 (right to vote), 80 (right to trial by jury) and 116 (freedom of religion) as foundational principles of Australian law and included economic rights such as restricting the government to acquiring property only ""on just terms"". The Australian Labor Party was established in the 1890s and the Liberal Party of Australia in 1944, both rising to be the dominant political parties and rivals of Australian politics, though various other parties have been and remain influential. Voting is compulsory in Australia and government is essentially formed by a group commanding a majority of seats in the Australian House of Representatives selecting a leader who becomes Prime Minister. Australia remains a constitutional monarchy in which the largely ceremonial and procedural duties of the monarch are performed by a Governor General selected by the Australian government.
Australia fought at Britain's side from the outset of World War I and World War II and came under attack from the Empire of Japan during the latter conflict. These wars profoundly affected Australia's sense of nationhood and a proud military legend developed around the spirit of Australia's ANZAC troops, who came to symbolise the virtues of endurance, courage, ingenuity, good humour, and mateship.
The Australian colonies had a period of extensive non-British European and Chinese immigration during the Australian gold rushes of the latter half of the 19th century, but following Federation in 1901, the Parliament instigated the White Australia Policy that gave preference to British migrants and ensured that Australia remained a predominantly Anglo-Celtic society until well into the 20th century. The post-World War II immigration program saw the policy relaxed then dismantled by successive governments, permitting large numbers of non-British Europeans, and later Asian and Middle Eastern migrants to arrive. The Menzies Government (1949-1966) and Holt government maintained the White Australia Policy but relaxed it, and then the legal barriers to multiracial immigration were dismantled during the 1970s, with the promotion of multiculturalism by the Whitlam and Fraser governments."
Culture of Australia,"Some States and Territories of Australia retained discriminatory laws relating to voting rights for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people into the 1960s, at which point full legal equality was established. A 1967 referendum to include all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the national electoral roll census was overwhelmingly approved by voters. In 1984, a group of Pintupi people who were living a traditional hunter-gatherer desert-dwelling life were tracked down in the Gibson Desert and brought into a settlement. They are believed to have been the last uncontacted tribe.
While the British cultural influence remained strong into the 21st century, other influences became increasingly important. Australia's post-war period was marked by an influx of Europeans who broadened the nation's vision. The Hawaiian sport of surfing was adopted in Australia where a beach culture and the locally developed surf lifesaving movement was already burgeoning in the early 20th century. American pop culture and cinema were embraced in the 20th century, with country music and later rock and roll sweeping Australia, aided by the new technology of television and a host of American content. The 1956 Melbourne Olympics, the first to be broadcast to the world, announced a confident, prosperous post-war nation, and new cultural icons like Australian country music star Slim Dusty and dadaist Barry Humphries expressed a uniquely Australian identity.
Australia's contemporary immigration program has two components: a program for skilled and family migrants and a humanitarian program for refugees and asylum seekers. By 2010, the post-war immigration program had received more than 6.5 million migrants from every continent. The population tripled in the six decades to around 21 million in 2010, including people originating from 200 countries. More than 43 per cent of Australians were either born overseas or have one parent who was born overseas. The population is highly urbanised, with more than 75% of Australians living in urban centres, largely along the coast though there has been increased incentive to decentralise the population, concentrating it into developed regional or rural areas.
Contemporary Australia is a pluralistic society, rooted in liberal democratic traditions and espousing informality and egalitarianism as key societal values. While strongly influenced by Anglo-Celtic origins, the culture of Australia has also been shaped by multi-ethnic migration which has influenced all aspects of Australian life, including business, the arts, cuisine, sense of humour and sporting tastes.
Contemporary Australia is also a culture that is profoundly influenced by global movements of meaning and communication, including advertising culture. In turn, globalising corporations from Holden to Exxon have attempted to associate their brand with Australian cultural identity. This process intensified from the 1970s onwards. According to Paul James,"
Culture of Australia,"this consciously created interlock of the image of the multinational corporation with aspects of Australia’s national mythology, has itself over the last decade [the 1970s to 1980s] contributed to the maintenance and evolution of those national themes. But paradoxically, during the same period it has reinforced Australia’s international orientation."
Culture of Australia,"Symbols
When the Australian colonies federated on 1 January 1901, an official competition for a design for an Australian flag was held. The design that was adopted contains the Union Jack in the left corner, symbolising Australia's historical links to the United Kingdom, the stars of the Southern Cross on the right half of the flag indicating Australia's geographical location, and the seven-pointed Federation Star in the bottom left representing the six states and the territories of Australia. Other official flags include the Australian Aboriginal flag, the Torres Strait Islander flag and the flags of the individual states and territories.
The Australian Coat of Arms was granted by King George V in 1912 and consists of a shield containing the badges of the six states, within an ermine border. The crest above the shield and helmet is a seven-pointed gold star on a blue and gold wreath, representing the 6 states and the territories. The shield is supported by a red kangaroo and an emu, which were chosen to symbolise a nation moving forward.
Green and gold were confirmed as Australia's national colours in 1984, though the colours had been adopted on the uniforms of Australia’s sporting teams long before this. The Golden Wattle (Acacia pycnantha) was officially proclaimed as the national floral emblem in 1988.
Reflecting the country's status as a constitutional monarchy, the Crown remains part of Australian public life, maintaining a visual presence through federal and state coats of arms, charitable and cultural  patronage, the names and symbols of public institutions and the governor-general and state governors, who are the monarch's representatives in Australian soil. Australian currency, including all coins and the five-dollar note, bears an image of the late monarch, Queen Elizabeth II. At least 14,9% of lands in Australia are referred to as Crown land, considered public land. There are many geographic places that have been named in honour of a reigning monarch, including the states of Queensland and Victoria, named after Queen Victoria, with numerous rivers, streets, squares, parks and buildings carrying the names of past or present members of the royal family."
Culture of Australia,"Language
Although Australia has no official language, it is largely monolingual with English being the de facto national language. Australian English is a major variety of the language which is immediately distinguishable from British, American, and other national dialects by virtue of its unique accents, pronunciations, idioms and vocabulary, although its spelling more closely reflects British versions rather than American. According to the 2011 census, English is the only language spoken in the home for around 80% of the population. The next most common languages spoken at home are Mandarin (1.7%), Italian (1.5%), and Arabic (1.4%); almost all migrants speak some English. Australia has multiple sign languages, the most spoken known as Auslan, which in 2004 was the main language of about 6,500 deaf people, and Australian Irish Sign Language with about 100 speakers.
It is believed that there were between 200 and 300 Australian Aboriginal languages at the time of first European contact, but only about 70 of these have survived and all but 20 are now endangered. An Indigenous language is the main language for 0.25% of the population."
Culture of Australia,"Humour
Comedy is an important part of the Australian identity. The ""Australian sense of humour"" is characterised as dry and sarcastic, exemplified by the works of performing artists like Barry Humphries and Paul Hogan.
The convicts of the early colonial period helped establish anti-authoritarianism as a hallmark of Australian comedy. Influential in the establishment of stoic, dry wit as a characteristic of Australian humour were the bush balladeers of the 19th century, including Henry Lawson, author of ""The Loaded Dog"". His contemporary, Banjo Paterson, contributed a number of classic comic poems including The Man from Ironbark and The Geebung Polo Club. CJ Dennis wrote humour in the Australian vernacular – notably in The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke. The Dad and Dave series about a farming family was an enduring hit of the early 20th century. The World War I ANZAC troops were said to often display irreverence in their relations with superior officers and dark humour in the face of battle.
Australian comedy has a strong tradition of self-mockery, from the outlandish Barry McKenzie expat-in-Europe ocker comedies of the 1970s, to the quirky outback characters of the ""Crocodile"" Dundee films of the 1980s, the suburban parody of Working Dog Productions' 1997 film The Castle and the dysfunctional suburban mother–daughter sitcom Kath & Kim. In the 1970s, satirical talk-show host Norman Gunston (played by Garry McDonald), with his malapropisms, sweep-over hair and poorly shaven face, rose to great popularity by pioneering the satirical ""ambush"" interview technique and giving unique interpretations of pop songs. Roy and HG provide an affectionate but irreverent parody of Australia's obsession with sport.
The unique character and humour of Australian culture was defined in cartoons by immigrants, Emile Mercier and George Molnar, and in the novel They're a Weird Mob (1957) by John O'Grady, which looks at Sydney through the eyes of an Italian immigrant. Post-war immigration has seen migrant humour flourish through the works of Vietnamese refugee Anh Do, Egyptian-Australian stand-up comic Akmal Saleh and Greek-Australian actor Nick Giannopoulos.
Since the 1950s, the satirical character creations of Barry Humphries have included housewife ""gigastar"" Edna Everage and ""Australian cultural attaché"" Les Patterson, whose interests include boozing, chasing women and flatulence. For his delivery of dadaist and absurdist humour to millions, biographer Anne Pender described Humphries in 2010 as ""the most significant comedian to emerge since Charlie Chaplin"".
The vaudeville talents of Daryl Somers, Graham Kennedy, Don Lane and Bert Newton earned popular success during the early years of Australian television. The variety show Hey Hey It's Saturday screened for three decades. Among the best loved Australian sitcoms was Mother and Son, about a divorcee who had moved back into the suburban home of his mother – but sketch comedy has been the stalwart of Australian television. The Comedy Company, in the 1980s, featured the comic talents of Mary-Anne Fahey, Ian McFadyen, Mark Mitchell, Glenn Robbins, Kym Gyngell and others. Growing out of Melbourne University and The D-Generation came The Late Show (1991–1993), starring the influential talents Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner, Jane Kennedy, Tony Martin, Mick Molloy and Rob Sitch (who later formed Working Dog Productions); and during the 1980s and 1990s Fast Forward (Steve Vizard, Magda Szubanski, Marg Downey, Michael Veitch, Peter Moon and others) and its successor Full Frontal, which launched the career of Eric Bana and featured Shaun Micallef.
The perceptive wit of Clive James and Andrew Denton has been popular in the talk-show interview style. Representatives of the ""bawdy"" strain of Australian comedy include Rodney Rude, Austen Tayshus and Chad Morgan. Rolf Harris helped defined a comic tradition in Australian music.
Cynical satire has had enduring popularity, with television series such as Frontline, targeting the inner workings of ""news and current affairs"" TV journalism, The Hollowmen (2008), set in the office of the Prime Minister's political advisory (spin) department, and The Chaser's War on Everything, which cynically examines domestic and international politics. Actor/writer Chris Lilley has produced a series of award-winning ""mockumentary"" style television series about Australian characters since 2005.
The annual Melbourne International Comedy Festival is one of the largest comedy festivals in the world, and a popular fixture on the city's cultural calendar."
Culture of Australia,"Arts
The arts in Australia—film, music, painting, theatre, dance and crafts—have achieved international recognition. While much of Australia's cultural output has traditionally tended to fit with general trends and styles in Western arts, the arts as practised by Indigenous Australians represent a unique Australian cultural tradition, and Australia's landscape and history have contributed to some unique variations in the styles inherited by Australia's various migrant communities."
Culture of Australia,"Literature
As the convict era passed—captured most famously in Marcus Clarke's For the Term of His Natural Life (1874), a seminal work of Tasmanian Gothic—the bush and Australian daily life assumed primacy as subjects. Charles Harpur, Henry Kendall and Adam Lindsay Gordon won fame in the mid-19th century for their lyric nature poems and patriotic verse. Gordon drew on Australian colloquy and idiom; Clarke assessed his work as ""the beginnings of a national school of Australian poetry"". First published in serial form in 1882, Rolf Boldrewood's Robbery Under Arms is regarded as the classic bushranging novel."
Culture of Australia,"Founded in 1880, The Bulletin did much to create the idea of an Australian national character—one of anti-authoritarianism, egalitarianism, mateship and a concern for the ""battler""—forged against the brutalities of the bush. This image was expressed within the works of its bush poets, the most famous of which are Henry Lawson, widely regarded as Australia's finest short-story writer, and Banjo Paterson, author of classics such as ""Clancy of the Overflow"" (1889) and ""The Man From Snowy River"" (1890). In a literary debate about the nature of life in the bush, Lawson said Paterson was a romantic while Paterson attacked Lawson's pessimistic outlook. C. J. Dennis wrote humour in the Australian vernacular, notably in the verse novel The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke (1915), while Dorothy Mackellar wrote the iconic patriotic poem ""My Country"" (1908) which rejected prevailing fondness for England's ""green and shaded lanes"" and declared: ""I love a sunburned country"". Early Australian children's literature was also embedded in the bush tradition; perennial favourites include Norman Lindsay's The Magic Pudding (1918), May Gibbs' Snugglepot and Cuddlepie (1918) and Dorothy Wall's Blinky Bill (1933).
Significant poets of the early 20th century include Kenneth Slessor, Mary Gilmore and Judith Wright. The nationalist Jindyworobak Movement arose in the 1930s and sought to develop a distinctive Australian poetry through the appropriation of Aboriginal languages and ideas. In contrast, the Angry Penguins, centred around Max Harris' journal of the same name, promoted international modernism. A backlash resulted in the Ern Malley affair of 1943, Australia's most famous literary hoax."
Culture of Australia,"The legacy of Miles Franklin, renowned for her 1901 novel My Brilliant Career, is the Miles Franklin Award, which is ""presented each year to a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases"". Patrick White won the inaugural award for Voss in 1957; he went on to win the 1973 Nobel Prize in Literature. Peter Carey, Thomas Keneally and Richard Flanagan are recipients of the Booker Prize. Other acclaimed Australian authors include Colleen McCullough, Nevil Shute, Tim Winton, Ruth Park and Morris West. Helen Garner's 1977 novel Monkey Grip is widely considered one of Australia's first contemporary novels–she has since written both fiction and non-fiction work. Notable expatriate authors include the feminist Germaine Greer and humourist Clive James. Greer's controversial 1970 nonfiction book The Female Eunuch became a global bestseller and is considered a watershed feminist text. Among the best known contemporary poets are Les Murray and Bruce Dawe.
David Unaipon is known as the first Indigenous Australian author. Oodgeroo Noonuccal was the first Aboriginal Australian to publish a book of verse. A significant contemporary account of the experiences of Indigenous Australia can be found in Sally Morgan's My Place. Contemporary academics and activists including Marcia Langton and Noel Pearson are prominent essayists and authors on Aboriginal issues.
Charles Bean (The Story of Anzac: From the Outbreak of War to the End of the First Phase of the Gallipoli Campaign 4 May 1915, 1921) Geoffrey Blainey (The Tyranny of Distance, 1966), Robert Hughes (The Fatal Shore, 1987), Manning Clark (A History of Australia, 1962–87), and Marcia Langton (First Australians, 2008) are authors of important Australian histories."
Culture of Australia,"Theatre
European traditions came to Australia with the First Fleet in 1788, with the first production being performed in 1789 by convicts. In 1988, the year of Australia's bicentenary, the circumstances of the foundations of Australian theatre were recounted in Timberlake Wertenbaker's play Our Country's Good."
Culture of Australia,"Hobart's Theatre Royal opened in 1837 and is Australia's oldest continuously operating theatre. Inaugurated in 1839, the Melbourne Athenaeum is one of Melbourne's oldest cultural institutions, and Adelaide's Queen's Theatre, established in 1841, is today the oldest purpose-built theatre on the mainland. The mid-19th-century gold rushes provided funds for the construction of grand theatres in the Victorian style, such as the Princess Theatre in Melbourne, established in 1854.
After Federation in 1901, theatre productions evidenced the new sense of national identity. On Our Selection (1912), based on the stories of Steele Rudd, portrays a pioneer farming family and became immensely popular. Sydney's grand Capitol Theatre opened in 1928 and after restoration remains one of the nation's finest auditoriums.
In 1955, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll by Ray Lawler portrayed resolutely Australian characters and went on to international acclaim. That same year, young Melbourne artist Barry Humphries performed as Edna Everage for the first time at Melbourne University's Union Theatre. His satirical stage creations, notably Dame Edna and Les Patterson, became Australian cultural icons. Humphries also achieved success in the US with tours on Broadway and has been honored in Australia and Britain.
Founded in Sydney 1958, the National Institute of Dramatic Art boasts famous alumni including Cate Blanchett, Mel Gibson and Hugo Weaving. Construction of the Adelaide Festival Center began in 1970 and South Australia's Sir Robert Helpmann became director of the Adelaide Festival of Arts. The new wave of Australian theatre debuted in the 1970s. The Belvoir St Theatre presented works by Nick Enright and David Williamson. The Sydney Opera House, inaugurated in 1973, is the home of Opera Australia and the Sydney Theatre Company.
The Bell Shakespeare Company was created in 1990. A period of success for Australian musical theatre came in the 1990s with the debut of musical biographies of Australian music singers Peter Allen (The Boy From Oz in 1998) and Johnny O'Keefe (Shout! The Legend of The Wild One).
In The One Day of the Year, Alan Seymour studied the paradoxical nature of the ANZAC Day commemoration by Australians of the defeat of the Battle of Gallipoli. Ngapartji Ngapartji, by Scott Rankin and Trevor Jamieson, recounts the story of the effects on the Pitjantjatjara people of nuclear testing in the Western Desert during the Cold War. It is an example of the contemporary fusion of traditions of drama in Australia with Pitjantjatjara actors being supported by a multicultural cast of Greek, Afghan, Japanese and New Zealand heritage."
Culture of Australia,"Architecture
Australia has three architectural listings on UNESCO's World Heritage list: Australian Convict Sites (comprising a collection of separate sites around Australia, including Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney, Port Arthur in Tasmania, and Fremantle Prison in Western Australia); the Sydney Opera House; and the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne. Contemporary Australian architecture includes a number of other iconic structures, including the Harbor Bridge in Sydney and Parliament House, Canberra. Significant architects who have worked in Australia include Governor Lachlan Macquarie's colonial architect, Francis Greenway; the ecclesiastical architect William Wardell; the designer of Canberra's layout, Walter Burley Griffin; the modernist Harry Seidler; and Jørn Utzon, designer of the Sydney Opera House. The National Trust of Australia is a non-governmental organisation charged with protecting Australia's built heritage.
Evidence of permanent structures built by Indigenous Australians before European settlement of Australia in 1788 is limited. Much of what they built was temporary, and was used for housing and other needs. As a British colony, the first European buildings were derivative of the European fashions of the time. Tents and wattle and daub huts preceded more substantial structures. Georgian architecture is seen in early government buildings of Sydney and Tasmania and the homes of the wealthy. While the major Australian cities enjoyed the boom of the Victorian era, the Australian gold rushes of the mid-19th century brought major construction works and exuberant Victorian architecture to the major cities, particularly Melbourne, and regional cities such as Ballarat and Bendigo. Other significant architectural movements in Australian architecture include the Federation style at the turn of the 20th century, and the modern styles of the late 20th century which also saw many older buildings demolished. The Queenslander is the primarily residential style of warm climate architecture developed in Queensland and northern parts of New South Wales.
Religious architecture is also prominent throughout Australia, with large Anglican and Catholic cathedrals in every major city and Christian churches in most towns. Notable examples include St Patrick's Cathedral, Melbourne and St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney. Other houses of worship are also common, reflecting the cultural diversity existing in Australia; the oldest Islamic structure in the Southern Hemisphere is the Central Adelaide Mosque (built in the 1880s), and one of the Southern Hemisphere's largest Buddhist Temples is Wollongong's Nan Tien Temple. Sydney's Gothic-style Great Synagogue was consecrated in 1878.
Historically, Australian pubs have also been noted for often distinctive designs.
Significant concern was raised during the 1960s, with developers threatening the destruction of historical buildings, especially in Sydney. Heritage concerns led to union-initiated green bans, which saved significant examples of Australia's architectural past. Green bans helped to protect historic 18th-century buildings in The Rocks from being demolished to make way for office towers, and prevented the Royal Botanic Gardens from being turned into a car park for the Sydney Opera House."
Culture of Australia,"Visual arts
Aboriginal rock art is the oldest continuous art tradition in the world, dating as far back as 60,000 years. From the Gwion Gwion and Wondjina imagery in the Kimberley to the Sydney rock engravings, it is spread across hundreds of thousands of sites, making Australia the richest continent in terms of prehistoric art. 19th-century Indigenous activist William Barak painted ceremonial scenes, such as corroborees. The Hermannsburg School, led by Albert Namatjira, received national fame in the 1950s for their desert watercolours. Leading critic Robert Hughes saw contemporary Indigenous art as ""the last great art movement of the 20th century"". Key exponents such as Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Rover Thomas and the Papunya Tula group use acrylic paints on canvas to depict dreamings set in a symbolic topography. Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri's Warlugulong (1977) typifies this style, popularly known as ""dot painting"". Art is important both culturally and economically to Indigenous society; central Australian Indigenous communities have ""the highest per capita concentrations of artists anywhere in the world"". Issues of race and identity are raised in the works of many 'urban' Indigenous artists, including Gordon Bennett and Tracey Moffatt."
Culture of Australia,"John Glover and Eugene von Guerard were among the foremost landscape painters during the colonial era. The origins of a distinctly Australian school of painting is often associated with the Heidelberg School of the late 1800s. Major figures of the movement include Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Frederick McCubbin. They painted en plein air, like the French Impressionists, and sought to capture the intense light and unique colours of the Australian bush. Popular works such as McCubbin's Down on His Luck (1889) and Roberts' Shearing the Rams (1890) defined an emerging sense of national identity in the lead-up to Federation. Civic monuments to national heroes were erected; an early example is Charles Summers' 1865 statue of the ill-fated explorers Burke and Wills, located in Melbourne.
Among the first Australian artists to gain a reputation overseas was the impressionist John Peter Russell in the 1880s. He and Charles Conder of the Heidelberg School were the only Australian painters known to have close links with the European avant-garde at the time. Other notable expatriates include Rupert Bunny, a salon painter of sensual portraits, and sculptor Bertram Mackennal, known for his commissioned works in Australia and abroad.
The Heidelberg tradition lived on in Hans Heysen's imagery of gum trees. Roy de Maistre and Grace Cossington Smith were pioneers of modernism in Australia. Jessie Traill and Margaret Preston excelled at printmaking; the latter artist advocated for a modern national art based on Aboriginal designs. The conservative art establishment largely opposed modern art, as did the Lindsays and Australian Tonalists. Controversy over modern art in Australia reached a climax when William Dobell won the 1943 Archibald Prize for portraiture. Despite such opposition, new artistic trends grew in popularity. Photographer Max Dupain created bold modernist compositions of Sydney beach culture. Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Joy Hester and Albert Tucker were members of the Angry Penguins, a group of expressionists who revived Australian landscape painting through the use of myth, folklore and personal symbolism. The use of surrealism allowed artists to evoke the strange disquiet of the outback, exemplified in Nolan's iconic Ned Kelly series and Russell Drysdale's The Cricketers (1948). The post-war landscapes of Fred Williams, Ian Fairweather and John Olsen border on abstraction, while the Antipodeans and Brett Whiteley further explored the possibilities of figurative painting.
Photographer Bill Henson, sculptor Ron Mueck, and ""living art exhibit"" Leigh Bowery are among Australia's best-known contemporary artists. Pro Hart's output of Australiana, Michael Leunig's poetic cartoons, and Ken Done's Sydney Harbor views are widely known through reproductions. Public artworks have sprung up in unlikely places, from the annual Sculpture by the Sea exhibitions to the rural folk art of ""Australia's big things"". Australian street art flourished at the turn of the 21st century, particularly in Melbourne.
Major arts institutions in Australia include the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, the National Gallery of Australia, National Museum of Australia and National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney. The Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart is the Southern Hemisphere's largest private museum."
Culture of Australia,"Cinema
Australia's first dedicated film studio, the Limelight Department, was created by The Salvation Army in Melbourne in 1898, and is believed to be the world's first. The world's first feature-length film was the 1906 Australian production The Story of the Kelly Gang. Tales of bushranging, gold mining, convict life and the colonial frontier dominated the silent film era of Australian cinema. Filmmakers such as Raymond Longford and W. J. Lincoln based many of their productions on Australian novels, plays, and even paintings. An enduring classic is Longford and Lottie Lyell's 1919 film The Sentimental Bloke, adapted from the 1915 poems by C. J. Dennis. After such early successes, Australian cinema suffered from the rise of Hollywood.
In 1933, In the Wake of the Bounty was directed by Charles Chauvel, who cast Errol Flynn as the leading actor. Flynn went on to a celebrated career in Hollywood. Chauvel directed a number of successful Australian films, the last being 1955's Jedda, which was notable for being the first Australian film to be shot in colour, and the first to feature Aboriginal actors in lead roles and to be entered at the Cannes Film Festival. It was not until 2006 and Rolf de Heer's Ten Canoes that a major feature-length drama was shot in an Indigenous language (Yolngu).
Ken G. Hall's 1942 documentary feature Kokoda Front Line! was the first Australian film to win an Academy Award. In 1976, Peter Finch posthumously became the first Australian actor to win an Oscar for his role in Network.
During the late 1960s and 1970s an influx of government funding saw the development of a new generation of filmmakers telling distinctively Australian stories, including directors Peter Weir, George Miller and Bruce Beresford. This era became known as the Australian New Wave. Films such as Wake in Fright, Walkabout and Picnic at Hanging Rock had an immediate international impact. These successes were followed in the 1980s with the historical epic Gallipoli, the romantic drama The Man From Snowy River, the comedy ""Crocodile"" Dundee, and the post-apocalyptic Mad Max series."
Culture of Australia,"The 1990s saw a run of successful comedies including Muriel's Wedding and Strictly Ballroom, which helped launch the careers of Toni Collette and Baz Luhrmann respectively. Australian humour features prominently in Australian film, with a strong tradition of self-mockery, from the Ozploitation style of the Barry McKenzie expat-in-Europe movies of the 1970s, to the Working Dog Productions' 1997 homage to suburbia The Castle, starring Eric Bana in his debut film role. Comedies like the barn yard animation Babe (1995), directed by Chris Noonan; Rob Sitch's The Dish (2000); and Stephan Elliott's The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) all feature in the top ten box-office list. During the 1990s, a new crop of Australian stars were successful in Hollywood, including Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett and Heath Ledger. Between 1996 and 2013, Catherine Martin won four Academy Awards for her costume and production designs, the most for any Australian. Saw (2004) and Wolf Creek (2005) are credited with the revival of Australian horror. The comedic, exploitative nature and ""gimmicky"" style of 1970s Ozploitation films waned in the mid to late 1980s, as social realist dramas such as Romper Stomper (1992), Lantana (2001) and Samson and Delilah (2009) became more reflective of the Australian experience in the 1980s, 90s and 2000s.
The domestic film industry is also supported by US producers who produce in Australia following the decision by Fox head Rupert Murdoch to utilise new studios in Melbourne and Sydney where filming could be completed well below US costs. Notable productions include The Matrix, Star Wars episodes II and III, and Australia starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman."
Culture of Australia,"Music
Indigenous music
Music is an integral part of Aboriginal culture as a way of passing ancestral knowledge, cultural values and wisdom through generations. The most famous feature of their music is the didgeridoo. This wooden instrument, used among the Aboriginal tribes of northern Australia, makes a distinctive droning sound and it has been adopted by a wide variety of non-Aboriginal performers.
Since the 1980s, Indigenous music has experienced a ""cultural renaissance"", turning to Western popular musical forms and ""demand[ing] a space within the Australian arts industry"". Pioneers include Lionel Rose and Jimmy Little, while notable contemporary examples include Archie Roach, Kev Carmody, the Warumpi Band, Troy Cassar-Daley and Yothu Yindi. Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu (formerly of Yothu Yindi) has attained international success singing contemporary music in English and in the language of the Yolngu. Christine Anu is a successful Torres Strait Islander singer. Among young Australian aborigines, African-American and Aboriginal hip hop music and clothing is popular.
The Deadly Awards are an annual celebration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander achievement in music, sport, entertainment and community."
Culture of Australia,"Folk music and national songs
The national anthem of Australia is ""Advance Australia Fair"".
The early Anglo-Celtic immigrants of the 18th and 19th centuries introduced folk ballad traditions which were adapted to Australian themes: ""Bound for Botany Bay"" tells of the voyage of British convicts to Sydney, ""The Wild Colonial Boy"" evokes the spirit of the bushrangers, and ""Click Go the Shears"" speaks of the life of Australian shearers. The lyrics of Australia's best-known folk song, ""Waltzing Matilda"", were written by the bush poet Banjo Paterson in 1895. This song remains popular and is regarded as ""the nation's unofficial national anthem"".
Well-known singers of Australian folk music include Rolf Harris (who wrote ""Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport""), John Williamson, and Eric Bogle whose 1972 song ""And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda"" is a sorrowful lament to the Gallipoli Campaign."
Culture of Australia,"Classical music
The earliest Western musical influences in Australia can be traced back to two distinct sources: the first free settlers who brought with them the European classical music tradition, and the large body of convicts and sailors, who brought the traditional folk music of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The practicalities of building a colony mean that there is very little music extant from this early period, although some samples of music originating from Hobart and Sydney date back to the early-19th century.
Nellie Melba traveled to Europe in 1886 to commence her international career as an opera singer. She became among the best-known Australians of the period and participated in early gramophone-recording and radio-broadcasting. The establishment of choral societies (c. 1850) and of symphony orchestras (c. 1890) led to increased compositional activity, although many Australian classical composers worked entirely within European models. Popular works such as Percy Grainger's ""Country Gardens"" (1918) were heavily influenced by the folk music of other countries and by a conservative British orchestral tradition.
In the mid 20th century, as the desire to express a uniquely Australian identity in music developed, composers such as John Antill
and Peter Sculthorpe drew influences from nature and Aboriginal culture, and Richard Meale turned to south-east Asian music. Nigel Butterley combined his penchant for international modernism with his own individual voice.
At the beginning of the 1960s Australian classical music erupted with influences, with composers incorporating disparate elements into their work, ranging from Aboriginal and Southeast Asian music and instruments, to American jazz and blues, and belatedly discovering European atonality and the avant-garde. Composers like Don Banks (1923–1980), Don Kay, Malcolm Williamson and Colin Brumby (1933–2018) epitomise this period. In recent times composers including Liza Lim, Nigel Westlake, Ross Edwards, Graeme Koehne, Julian Cochran, Georges Lentz, Elena Kats-Chernin, Richard Mills, Brett Dean and Carl Vine have embodied the pinnacle of established Australian composers.
Well-known Australian classical performers include: sopranos Dame Joan Sutherland, Dame Joan Hammond, Joan Carden, Yvonne Kenny, and Emma Matthews; pianists Roger Woodward, Eileen Joyce, Geoffrey Tozer, Leslie Howard and Ian Munro; guitarists John Williams and Slava Grigoryan; horn player Barry Tuckwell; oboist Diana Doherty; violinists Richard Tognetti and Elizabeth Wallfisch; cellist David Pereira; orchestras including the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, the Australian Chamber Orchestra and the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra; and conductors Sir Charles Mackerras, and Simone Young. Indigenous performers like didgeridoo-player William Barton and immigrant musicians like Egyptian-born oud virtuoso Joseph Tawadros have stimulated interest in their own music traditions and have also collaborated with other musicians and ensembles, both in Australia and internationally."
Culture of Australia,"Popular music
Johnny O'Keefe became the first Australian rock and roll artist to reach the national charts with his 1958 hit ""Wild One"". While American and British content dominated airwaves and record sales into the 1960s, local successes began to emerge, notably The Easybeats and The Seekers. The Bee Gees and AC/DC rose to prominence in Australia before going on to international success. Australian performers continued to do well at a local and international level into the 1980s, for example Cold Chisel, INXS, Nick Cave, Crowded House, Midnight Oil and Little River Band. Held since 1987, the ARIAs are Australia's premier music awards. Silverchair, Powderfinger, AC/DC, John Farnham, Jimmy Barnes, the Bee Gees, Savage Garden, Tina Arena, Vanessa Amorosi and Kylie Minogue are among the most successful artists in the awards' history. Singer-songwriter Paul Kelly, whose music style straddles folk, rock, and country, has been described as the poet laureate of Australian music. Spurred in part by the national expansion of ABC youth radio station Triple J, a string of successful alternative Australian acts have emerged since the 1990s, including You Am I, Gotye, Sia and Tame Impala.
Australian country music has developed a style quite distinct from its American counterpart, drawing more on Celtic folk and the Australian bush ballad tradition. Pioneers of popular Australian country music include Tex Morton in the 1930s and Smoky Dawson from the 1940s onward. Known as the ""King of Australian Country Music"", Slim Dusty released over 100 albums in a career spanning almost six decades; his 1957 hit ""A Pub With No Beer"" was the first Australian single to go gold. Dusty's wife Joy McKean penned several of his most popular songs. Other notable Australian country music performers include John Williamson who wrote the iconic song ""True Blue"", Lee Kernaghan, Adam Brand and Kasey Chambers. Olivia Newton-John and Keith Urban have attained success in the United States. The Tamworth Country Music Festival is held annually in Tamworth, the ""Country Music Capital of Australia"". During the festival the Country Music Association of Australia holds the Country Music Awards of Australia ceremony awarding the Golden Guitar trophies."
Culture of Australia,"Dance
The ceremonial dances of Indigenous Australians recount stories of the Dreamtime and have been performed for thousands of years. They usually consist of short, intensive rythmic and imitative sequences, accompanied by chants alluding to the myth of the characters danced, clapping with the hands or, sometimes, with a didgeridoo.
Bush dance is a traditional style of Australian dance with strong Celtic roots influenced by country music. It is generally accompanied by such instruments as the fiddle, accordion, concertina and percussion instruments."
Culture of Australia,"Television
Experiments with television began in Australia in the 1930s and television was officially launched on 16 September 1956 in Sydney. Colour TV arrived in 1975. The Logie Awards are the major annual awards for Australian TV.
While US and British television is popular in Australia, locally produced content has had many successes. Successful local product has included Homicide and Division 4 in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Play School and Skippy the Bush Kangaroo in the late 1960s, Matlock Police, The Sullivans, The Young Doctors, Number 96 and The Box in the 1970s, The Flying Doctors, Round the Twist, Prisoner and A Country Practice (1981–1993) in the 1980s, Blue Heelers, Neighbours and Home and Away in the 1980s and 1990s and Summer Heights High and H2O: Just Add Water in the 2000s. Since then shows like Packed to the Rafters, SeaChange and Wentworth have continued to help redefine Australian television. Many of the shows from the mid-1980s onwards have been exported and have sometimes been even more successful abroad, such as Steve Irwin's The Crocodile Hunter. Popular stars of Australian TV have included: the pioneer variety show hosts Graham Kennedy, Bert Newton, Don Lane and Daryl Somers, and contemporary talk show hosts Mike Willesee, Steve Vizard, Ray Martin, Mike Munro, Andrew Denton and Rove McManus. Popular international exports include the Bee Gees, Dame Edna Everage, Sir Les Patterson, AC/DC, The Fairies, Clive James, Geoffrey Robertson and The Wiggles."
Culture of Australia,"While Australia has ubiquitous media coverage, the longest established part of that media is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), the Federal Government owned and funded organisation offering national TV and radio coverage. The ABC, like the BBC in Britain, CBC in Canada, and PBS in the United States, is a non-commercial public service broadcaster, showing many BBC or ITV productions from Britain. The publicly funded Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) has a multicultural focus, broadcasting TV and radio programs in a variety of languages, as well as world news and documentary programming in English. SBS commenced as a commercial-free enterprise, but this changed in 2006 with the broadcasting of commercials between programs. In 2005, ABC and SBS accounted for 15.7% and 6.1% of the national ratings, respectively.
Commercial broadcasters include the Seven Network, the Nine Network and Network Ten on free-to-air broadcasting to the larger cities with affiliated regional networks like Prime Television and WIN Television broadcasting to regional areas. Foxtel, Austar and Optus Television have been the main providers of pay TV. Fox 8 and Sky News Australia are among the popular Pay TV channels. The Australia Network, established in 2001, is Australia's international television service, beaming to more than 44 countries across Asia, the Pacific and the Indian subcontinent.
The ABC has made a significant contribution to television drama with popular series like SeaChange and Brides of Christ, and to comedy with the 1970s hits Aunty Jack and The Norman Gunston Show and more recently Roy & HG, Kath & Kim and The Chaser's War on Everything. Debate about the role of the ABC continues; many assign it a marginal role, as commercial TV and radio stations are far more popular choices. Critics claim that Australian children view television programs imported largely from the US, however, the Australian Content Standard requires all free-to-air commercial networks to broadcast an annual minimum of 55% Australian content between 6 a.m. and midnight. American dramas and comedies rate well on Australian TV."
Culture of Australia,"Religion
Australia has no official state religion and the Australian Constitution prohibits the Commonwealth government from establishing a church or interfering with the freedom of religion. According to the 2011 Australian Census, 61.1% of Australians were listed as Christian. Historically, this proportion has been higher and a growing proportion of the population define themselves as irreligious, with 22.3% of Australians declaring ""no religion"" on the census. There are also growing communities of various other religions. From the early decades after federation, people from diverse religious backgrounds have held public office. The first Jewish Governor General, Isaac Isaacs, was selected by the first Catholic prime minister, James Scullin, in the 1930s. In the 21st-century, some prime ministers have identified as religious, others as non-religious."
Culture of Australia,"Christianity has had an enduring impact on Australia. At the time of Federation in 1901, 97% of Australians professed to be Christians. The Anglican Church (formerly Church of England) remained the largest denomination until 1986, when it was surpassed by the Roman Catholic Church. Australian Catholics were predominantly of Irish origin until post-World War II immigration brought more than a million Catholics from elsewhere in Europe. The Christian festivals of Christmas and Easter are national public holidays in Australia. Christian charitable organisations, hospitals and schools have played a prominent role in welfare and education since colonial times. In 2008, 20% of total students attended Catholic schools. Christian organisations such as the St. Vincent de Paul Society, the Salvation Army and Anglicare provide social services throughout Australia. Historically significant Christians include preachers David Unaipon, the first Aboriginal author, and the Reverend John Flynn, who founded the Royal Flying Doctor Service. Suffragette Catherine Helen Spence was not only Australia's first female political candidate, but also one of its first female preachers. Mary MacKillop, who co-founded an order of nuns in the 19th century, called the Sisters of St. Joseph, became the first Australian to be canonised as a Catholic Saint in 2010, and Sir Douglas Nicholls, a preacher and Aboriginal rights activist was the first Indigenous Australian to be appointed Governor of an Australian State."
Culture of Australia,"The proportion of the total population who are Christian fell from 71% in 1996 to around 61.1% in 2011, while people affiliated with non-Christian religions increased from around 3.5% to 7.2% over the same period. Buddhism increased most rapidly from 1.1% to 2.5%. Increased immigration from South-East Asia has been a major factor in this growth, but Australians of Anglo-Celtic origin have also shown increasing interest in Buddhism. Islam increased during the period from 1.1% to 2.2% with diverse communities concentrated mainly in Sydney and Melbourne. The history of the Jews in Australia dates back to the First Fleet, which brought Jewish convicts to Sydney in 1788. Today, many Jews in Australia originated as refugees and Holocaust survivors who arrived during and after World War II. Hindus came to Australia as laborers and merchants during the 19th century and numbers increased dramatically from the 1960s, more than doubling between 1996 and 2006.
The tradition and spirituality of Aboriginal Australians places great emphasis on the role of tribal Elders in passing down stories of the Dreaming, and skills and lessons for survival (such as hunting and tracking). The creation story and belief system of the Aboriginal tradition, known in English as the Dreamtime, reverences the land and the animals and spirits that inhabit the land and animals. European settlement introduced Indigenous Australians to Christianity, especially through ""missions"". There was a wide range of experiences of the missions by Aboriginal people."
Culture of Australia,"Public holidays
The day most strongly associated with Australian nationhood is Anzac Day. It specifically commemorates the landing of troops in the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915. The day is named in their honour but more generally commemorates all Australians who have fought in wars.
However, the national Australia Day holiday is celebrated on 26 January, the anniversary of the landing of the First Fleet in Port Jackson. That date marks the beginning of modern Australia and national awards are distributed to distinguished citizens for services to the community, as on the King's Birthday.
The Christian festivals of Easter and Christmas are public holidays in Australia. Christmas Day, 25 December, falls during the Southern Hemisphere summer.
The King's Birthday is generally observed on the second Monday in June, except in Western Australia, where it usually is observed in September or October to distance it from Western Australia Day.
New Year's Day is celebrated and coincidentally marks the date upon which the Australian colonies officially federated in 1901.
Labor Day is also a public holiday, but on different days throughout the nation."
Culture of Australia,"Cuisine
Contemporary Australian cuisine combines British and Indigenous origins with Mediterranean and Asian influences. Australia's abundant natural resources allow access to a large variety of quality meats, and to barbecue beef or lamb in the open air is considered a cherished national tradition. The great majority of Australians live close to the sea and Australian seafood restaurants have been listed among the world's best.
Bush tucker refers to a wide variety of plant and animal foods native to the Australian bush: bush fruits such as kakadu plums, finger limes and desert quandongs; fish and shellfish of Australia's saltwater river systems; and bush meats including emu, crocodile and kangaroo. Many of these are still seasonally hunted and gathered by Indigenous Australians, and are undergoing a renaissance of interest on contemporary Australian menus. The macadamia nut is the most famous bushfood plant harvested and sold in large quantities."
Culture of Australia,"Early British settlers brought familiar meats and crops with them from Europe and these remain important in the Australian diet. The British settlers found some familiar game – such as swan, goose, pigeon, and fish – but the new settlers often had difficulty adjusting to the prospect of native fauna as a staple diet. They established agricultural industries producing more familiar Western style produce. Queensland and New South Wales became Australia's main beef cattle producers, while dairy cattle farming is found in the southern states, predominantly in Victoria. Wheat and other grain crops are spread fairly evenly throughout the mainland states. Sugar cane is also a major crop in Queensland and New South Wales. Fruit and vegetables are grown throughout Australia. ""Meat and three veg"", fish and chips, and the Australian meat pie continue to represent traditional meals for many Australians. The post-World War II multicultural immigration program brought new flavours and influences, with waves of immigrants from Greece, Italy, Vietnam, China, and elsewhere bringing about diversification and of the typical diet consumed–leading to an increasingly gastronomical culinary scene.
Australia's 11-million-square-kilometre (4.2-million-square-mile) fishing zone is the third largest in the world and allows for easy access to seafood which significantly influences Australian cuisine. Clean ocean environments produce high quality seafoods. Lobster, prawns, tuna, salmon and abalone are the main ocean species harvested commercially, while aquaculture produces more than 60 species for consumption, including oysters, salmonoids, southern bluefin tuna, mussels, prawns, barramundi, yellowtail kingfish, and freshwater finifish. While inland river and lake systems are relatively sparse, they nevertheless provide some unique fresh water game fish and crustacea suitable for dining. Fishing and aquaculture constitute Australia's fifth most valuable agricultural industry after wool, beef, wheat and dairy.
Vegemite is a well-known spread originating from Australia. Iconic Australian desserts include pavlova and lamingtons. ANZAC biscuits recall the diet of Australia's World War I soldiers at the Battle of Gallipoli."
Culture of Australia,"Beverages
Australia's reputation as a nation of heavy drinkers goes back to the earliest days of colonial Sydney, when rum was used as currency and grain shortages followed the installation of the first stills. James Squires is considered to have founded Australia's first commercial brewery in 1798 and the Cascade Brewery in Hobart has been operating since 1832. Since the 1970s, Australian beers have become increasingly popular globally, with Foster's Lager being an iconic export. Foster's is not however the biggest seller on the local market, with alternatives including Carlton Draught and Victoria Bitter outselling it.
Billy tea was a staple drink of the Australian colonial period. It is typically boiled over a camp fire with a gum leaf added for flavouring.
The Australian wine industry is the world's fourth largest exporter of wine and contributes $5.5 billion per annum to the nation's economy. Wine is produced in every state, however, wine regions are mainly in the southern, cooler regions. Among the most famous wine districts are the Hunter Valley and Barossa Valley and among the best known wine producers are Penfolds, Rosemount Estate, Wynns Coonawarra Estate and Lindemans. The Australian Penfolds Grange was the first wine from outside France or California to win the Wine Spectator award for Wine of the Year in 1995."
Culture of Australia,"Clothing and apparel
Australia has no official designated national dress, but iconic local styles include bushwear and surfwear. The country's best-known fashion event is Australian Fashion Week, a twice yearly industry gathering showcasing seasonal collections from Australian and Asia Pacific Designers. Top Australian models include Elle Macpherson, Miranda Kerr and Jennifer Hawkins (Miss Universe 2004).
Major clothing brands associated with bushwear are the broad brimmed Akubra hats, Driza-Bone coats and RM Williams bushmen's outfitters (featuring in particular: moleskin trousers, riding boots and merino woolwear). Blundstone Footwear and Country Road are also linked to this tradition. Made from the leaves of Livistona australis, the cabbage tree hat was the first uniquely Australian headwear, dating back to the early 1800s, and was the hat of choice for colonial-born Australians. Traditionally worn by jackaroos and swagmen in the blow-fly infested Australian outback, the cork hat is a type of headgear strongly associated with Australia, and comprises cork strung from the brim, to ward off insects.
World-famous Australian surfwear labels include Billabong, Rip Curl, Mambo and Quiksilver. Australian surfers popularised the ugg boot, a unisex sheepskin boot with fleece on the inside, a tanned outer surface and a synthetic sole. Worn by the working classes in Australia, the boot style emerged as a global fashion trend in the 2000s. Underwear and sleepwear brands include Bonds, Berlei, Bras N Things and Peter Alexander Sleepwear.
The slouch hat was first worn by military forces in Australia in 1885, looped up on one side so that rifles could be held at the slope without damaging the brim. After federation, the slouch hat became standard Australian Army headgear in 1903 and since then it has developed into an important national symbol and is worn on ceremonial occasions by the Australian army."
Culture of Australia,"Australians generally have a relaxed attitude to what beachgoers wear, although this has not always been the case. At the start of the twentieth century a proposed ordinance in Sydney would have forced men to wear skirts over their ""bathing costume"" to be decent. This led to the 1907 Sydney bathing costume protests which resulted in the proposal being dropped. In 1961, Bondi inspector Aub Laidlaw, already known for kicking women off the beach for wearing bikinis, arrested several men wearing swim briefs charging them with indecency. The judge found the men not guilty because no pubic hair was exposed. As time went on Australians' attitudes to swimwear became much more relaxed. Over time swim briefs, better known locally as speedos after the Australian brand, became an iconic swimwear for males."
Culture of Australia,"Sport
Many Australians are passionate about sport, and it forms a major part of the country's culture and economy in terms of spectating and participation. Cricket is popular in the summer, and football codes are popular in the winter. Australian traditions such as grand finals and footy tipping are shared among the codes.
Australia's successes in events such as the Olympic Games, Commonwealth Games, World Cup competitions in cricket, rugby union, rugby league, field hockey, netball, and major tournaments in tennis, golf, surfing, and other sports are a source of pride for many Australians. Sports people such as Donald Bradman, Dawn Fraser, and Cathy Freeman remain in the nation's cultural memory and are accorded high civilian honours and public status."
Culture of Australia,"Cricket
Cricket is Australia's most popular summer sport and has been played since colonial times. It is followed in all states and territories, unlike the football codes which vary in popularity between regions."
Culture of Australia,"The first recorded cricket match in Australia took place in Sydney in 1803. Intercolonial contests started in 1851 and Sheffield Shield inter-state cricket continues to this day. In 1866–67, prominent cricketer and Australian rules football pioneer Tom Wills coached an Aboriginal cricket team, which later toured England in 1868 under the captaincy of Charles Lawrence. The 1876–77 season is notable for a match between a combined XI from New South Wales and Victoria and a touring English team at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, which was later recognised as the first Test match. A famous victory on the 1882 tour of England resulted in the placement of a satirical obituary in an English newspaper saying that English cricket had ""died"", and the ""body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia"". The English media then dubbed the next English tour to Australia (1882–83) as the quest to ""regain the ashes"". The tradition continues with the Ashes series, an icon of the sporting rivalry between the two countries.
Successful cricketers often become lasting celebrities in Australia. Sir Donald Bradman, who made his Test debut in the 1928–29 series against England, is regarded as the game's greatest batsman and a byword for sporting excellence. Other Australian cricketers who remain household names include Richie Benaud, Dennis Lillee and Shane Warne and others who pursued media careers after they retired from the game. Internationally, Australia has for most of the last century sat at or near the top of the cricketing world. In the 1970s, Australian media tycoon Kerry Packer founded World Series Cricket from which many international forms of the game have evolved.
Events on the cricket pitch have occasionally been elevated to diplomatic incidents in Australian history, such as the infamous Bodyline controversy of the 1930s, in which the English team bowled in a physically intimidating way leading to accusations of unsportsmanlike conduct."
Culture of Australia,"Football codes
Australian rules football is the most highly attended spectator sport in Australia. Its core support lies in four of the six states: Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania. Originating in Melbourne in the late 1850s and codified in 1859, the sport is the world's oldest major football code. The national competition, the Australian Football League (AFL), evolved from the Victorian Football League in 1990, and has expanded to all states except Tasmania. The AFL Grand Final is traditionally played on the last Saturday of September at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the sport's ""spiritual home"". Australian rules football culture has a strong set of rituals and traditions, such as kick-to-kick and barracking. International rules football is a hybrid sport of Australian football and Gaelic football devised to facilitate matches between Australia and Ireland.
Rugby union was first played in Australia in the 1860s and is followed predominately in Queensland, New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory. The national team is known as the Wallabies. Despite having a relatively small player base, Australia has twice won the Rugby World Cup, in 1991 and 1999, and hosted the 2003 Rugby World Cup. Other notable competitions include the annual Bledisloe Cup, played against Australia's main rivals, the New Zealand All Blacks, and the Rugby Championship, involving South Africa, New Zealand, and Argentina. Provincial teams from Australia, South Africa and New Zealand compete in the annual Super Rugby competition. Rugby test matches are also popular and have at times become highly politicised, such as when many Australians, including the Wallabies, demonstrated against the racially selected South African teams of the 1970s. Notable Australian rugby union players include Sir Edward Dunlop, Mark Ella and David Campese."
Culture of Australia,"In 1908, rugby league was established in Australia, by former rugby union players and supporters as a breakaway professional code. The new code gained and has maintained a wider following in Australia than rugby union, which remained amateur until the 1990s. The sport has roots in the working class communities of Lancashire and Yorkshire in Northern England, translating to similar areas in Sydney and Brisbane. The elite club competition is the National Rugby League (NRL), which features ten teams from New South Wales, four teams from Queensland, and one team each from Victoria, Australian Capital Territory and New Zealand. The season culminates in the NRL Grand Final. The New South Wales Blues and Queensland Maroons compete in the annual State of Origin series. Australia's national team, the Kangaroos, has contested all 15 Rugby League World Cup titles, winning 11 of them.
Despite attracting less media attention, spectators and sponsorship than Australian rules football and rugby league, soccer is Australia's highest participation football code, although in South Australia, Australian rules football is still the most-participated football code. During the second half of the 20th century many Australian soccer clubs were based around ethnic groups, mostly European. However, the national league was completely reformed in 2004. Australia's national male team, the Socceroos, has competed in the finals of five FIFA World Cup championships. In 2006 the Socceroos moved from the Oceania Football Confederation to the Asian Football Confederation, a much stronger confederation which has allowed the Australian team to avoid repetition of a history of missed World Cup qualifications in forced sudden-death playoffs. Australia won the 2015 AFC Asian Cup. Major international stars from Australia include Tim Cahill, Mark Viduka, Mark Schwarzer and Harry Kewell. In the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup, Australia's national women's team set an Australian TV rating record, averaging 7.13 million viewers in the semi-finals against England, after the previous game against France became the most viewed event of the year. The significant outpouring of community support for the team was dubbed by the media as ""Matildas fever""."
Culture of Australia,"Water sports
Australia's warm climate and long coastline of sandy beaches and rolling waves provide ideal conditions for water sports such as swimming and surfing. The majority of Australians live in cities or towns on or near the coast, and so beaches are a place that millions of Australians visit regularly.
Swimming is a popular pastime for Australians. In the early 1900s, members of the Australian Cavill family pioneered the crawl stroke (""Australian crawl"") and butterfly stroke. Australia is a world power in Olympic swimming, second only to the United States in total gold medals in the sport. Swimmers like Dawn Fraser, Kieren Perkins and Ian Thorpe have taken multiple gold medals. Most states have a compulsory school swimming program, so it is common for Australians to be competent in swimming and water safety.
Australians have a particular affinity for surf lifesaving, and surf lifesavers have a revered status in Australian culture. The world's first surf lifesaving club, Bondi Surf Bathers' Life Saving Club, was founded at Bondi Beach, Sydney, in 1906. Surf Life Saving Australia has conducted hundreds of thousands of rescues around Australia. Tens of thousands of Australians compete in surf lifesaving training and competitions, such as Ironman events.
In the summer of 1915, Duke Kahanamoku of Hawaii introduced surf board riding to Sydney's Freshwater Beach, amazing locals and starting a long-term love affair with the sport in Australia. Over 1 in 10 Australians surf recreationally, and more Australians have been declared world surfing champions than any other nation.
The Sydney to Hobart yacht race is a much anticipated fixture on the Australian sporting calendar. Australia won the America's Cup under skipper John Bertrand in 1983, becoming the first country other than the United States to win the race."
Culture of Australia,"Other sports
Horse racing has had a prominent place in Australian culture since the colonial era, with the first spectator sports event in Australia being Lachlan Macquarie's race meeting at Hyde Park, Sydney, in 1810. First run in 1861, the Melbourne Cup is known as ""the race that stops a nation"" for the enthusiasm with which Australians tune in for the annual race, and is said to encapsulate the country's twin obsessions of sport and gambling.
Basketball is popular in Australia in terms of participation, especially among children. The National Basketball League (NBL) began in 1979 and is contested by eight teams—seven from Australia and one from New Zealand. The Women's National Basketball League (WNBL) is the top women's basketball league, having begun in 1981, and the national women's team (the Opals) has won medals at the Olympics since 1994. Netball has the highest participation rate of any women's sport in Australia. Established in 2008, the ANZ Championship is the premier netball league in Australia and New Zealand, featuring five teams from each country. The Australian national netball team (the Diamonds) is considered the best in the world, having won 10 of 13 World Netball Championships.
The Australian V8 Supercars series is steadily growing in popularity across the world, where television coverage allows.
Australia regularly raises world champion field hockey teams. Australian cyclists have won international cycling competitions, most notably Cadel Evans' win in the 2011 Tour de France. In 2008, the Tour Down Under, centred around Adelaide, became the first UCI ProTour cycling race to be held outside of Europe. Among young people and within schools nationwide, various forms of handball or downball games have been among the most prevalent sports games for some decades."
Culture of Australia,"Snow sports are enjoyed in the Australian Alps and in Tasmania. Skiing in Australia was first introduced by Norwegian miners in the gold mining town of Kiandra in the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales around 1859. The sport remains a popular winter activity in the south-eastern states and territories. Major alpine skiing resorts include Thredbo, Perisher and Charlotte Pass in New South Wales; Mount Hotham, Falls Creek and Mount Buller in Victoria and Mount Ben Lomond in Tasmania. Extensive areas are available for cross country skiing within national parks including Kosciuszko National Park (NSW), Alpine National Park (VIC); Namadgi National Park (ACT) and in the Tasmanian Wilderness. Australia has long participated in the Winter Olympics and has won medals at the Games since the 1990s.
Increased interest and participation in American sports has led to opportunities for Australians to play at the top level in sports such as baseball, ice hockey and American football. Grant Balfour is a relief pitcher for the Tampa Bay Rays, and played in the 2008 World Series. The skill set of Australian rules footballers fits the mould of US National Football League (NFL) punters, and they stand out from their American peers with their ability to tackle returners. Two former AFL footballers competed in the 2009 NFC Championship game as punters, Saverio Rocca for the Philadelphia Eagles and Ben Graham for the Arizona Cardinals. Graham's appearance in Super Bowl XLIII made him the first Australian to play in the NFL's championship game. The first College Bowl game to feature two Australians was the 2012 BCS National Championship Game with punter Brad Wing from LSU and defensive end Jesse Williams for Alabama. In 2018, Nathan Walker, the first Australian drafted by an NHL team, also became the first to play on a Stanley Cup winning team, the 2018 Washington Capitals."
Culture of Australia,"Folklore
Australian stories and legends have a cultural significance independent of their empirical truth or falsehood. This can be seen in the portrayal of bushranger Ned Kelly as a mixture of the underdog and Robin Hood and an example of “the independence and the maverick spirit of early Australia”.
Militarily, Australians have served in numerous overseas wars, ranging from World War I through to recent regional security missions, such as East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan. Australian war culture generally consists of somber reflection and commemoration, focusing on “on-field heroism and sacrifice” rather than glory. An annual national holiday, Anzac Day, exists for this purpose. The Australian experience of defeat in the Gallipoli Campaign, the first iconic moment in modern Australia's involvement in war, is viewed by Australians with both pride for the fighting of the soldiers, and bitterness for the perceived negligence on the part of British commanders. The instances of bravery and determination displayed during the campaign for Gallipoli, as well as the mutual respect for their Turkish adversaries led by Kemal Atatürk, are seen as part of the ANZAC spirit. During the First World War, Australian soldiers were considered to be remarkably determined, united and hard-working. Many Australians knew how to ride and shoot prior to enlistment, making them talented recruits, but they were also infamous for their lax attitude towards formal parade ground discipline, a notoriety that the Australian soldiers reveled in. From this the notion of the larrikin Digger emerged, an important part of contemporary Australian identity."
Culture of Australia,"Attitudes, beliefs and stereotypes
Critics and scholars have sometimes scrutinised the Australian culture, with aspects of it loosely criticised for being kitsch, low-brow or rooted in poor taste. The term ""cultural cringe"" was coined to describe this entrenched national inferiority complex which assumes ideas and cultures of other places are automatically superior. Some links have been made between the cultural cringe and a perceived anti-intellectualism that has underpinned public life in Australia. Some commentators have noted a decline in the cultural cringe in the 21st century, with a ""social change"" and wider reverence for Australian culture.
The phrase ""the lucky country"", coined by Donald Horne, is a reference to Australia's weather, lifestyle, and history. Ironically, Horne was using the term to denigrate the political philistinism, a lack of innovation and criticise the complacency of Australian society in the early 1960s. Since he coined the phrase it has commonly been misapplied by both the media and general public to denote Australia's perceived fortunes. Despite Horne's lament that Australia had no ""major city"" that ""set the nation's trends"", a counter-cultural movement and intellectual scene known as the Sydney Push did emerge in Sydney in the 1940s–70s, of which feminist Germaine Greer was a noted member.
""Mateship"", or loyal fraternity is the code of conduct, particularly between men, although more recently also between men and women, stressing equality and friendship. The value of mateship is sourced in the difficulty of subduing the land. Unlike other cultures based on a nurturing landscape that they seek to protect from others, Australian settlers experienced great hardship and had to support each other in order to survive. The battle against the elements led to the nickname of a member of Australia's working class being the ""Aussie battler"".
An aspect of the mateship culture on language is that Australians have a propensity for the diminutive forms of names e.g. Hargrave → Hargie; Wilkinson → Wilko; John → Johnno; David → Davo; Hogan → Hoges; James → Jimmy → Jim → Jimbo. This is a display of affection and acceptance rather than belittlement. Any disloyalty to or poor treatment of their ""mates"" is treated harshly. Australians particularly dislike bragging or overly advertising one's own successes. The term ""tall poppy syndrome"" is commonly used to describe people who grow greater than their peers and are harshly criticised as being narcissistic, or ""up themselves"". Even the most successful and beautiful Australians are eager to proclaim how ordinary they are, to the extent that two-thirds of the highest earning households define themselves as middle class, lower middle class or even working class. This egalitarian social system makes Australians appear ""laid-back"", welcoming or relaxed to others. Most forms of address are by first name or nickname, even for authority figures.
The mateship culture combined with the original convict and then colonial culture has created an irreverence for established authority, particularly if it is pompous or out of touch with reality. Politicians, or ""pollies"", are generally disliked and distrusted. Politicians who seek to lead must comply to the views of the egalitarian electorate, who will punish any hint of arrogance or glory-seeking behavior. Voter turnout at elections had in fact been so low that compulsory voting was introduced for the 1925 federal election.
Mirroring the tall poppy syndrome which brings back to Earth the high fliers, the egalitarian Australian society has a traditional Australian support for the underdog. Australians will show support for those who appear to be at a disadvantage even when the underdog is competing against fellow Australians, such as in sporting events. Related to the underdog is the belief in a ""fair go"", which is said to be a key part of Australian culture and Australian society. One accepted definition of a ""fair go"" in this Australian sense is ""a chance, an adequate opportunity. Often used to describe a fair and reasonable course of action"".
The right to ""a fair go"" has been found to be the most highly rated value on a recent published survey of the opinion of Australian citizens. This belief sustains bipartisan political support for strong public health and education systems in Australia, as well as equal opportunity legislation to ensure people are not excluded from jobs or positions by their race, gender or sexual orientation.
This value is frequently cited by politicians who wish to associate themselves or their party with the positive connotations of this notion. There has been ongoing public and political discussion of the place and future of ""the fair go"" in Australian society. This is especially frequent with reference to economics issues and policies. The call for ""a fair go"" is also regularly used by advocates wanting to point out groups who have been overlooked or treated unfairly according to the expectations of treatment by the wider community. Recent examples of this include media presentation of the treatment of illegal immigrants asylum seekers, and refugees, as well as the community campaign in support of ""a fair go"" for the large group of Australian doctors who have been classified as ""non-vocationally registered general practitioners"" (non-VR GPs), and are subject to discriminatory pay and conditions compared to their colleagues, for identical work."
Culture of Australia,"See also
Australian Aboriginal culture
Torres Strait Islands culture
British culture
Australiana
Anglo-Saxon culture
Australian rules football in popular culture
Sport in rural and regional Australia"
Culture of Australia,"
== References =="
Australia–United Kingdom Free Trade Agreement,"The Australia–United Kingdom free trade agreement (AUKFTA) was signed 17 December 2021. The broad terms of the agreement had been agreed six months earlier, following almost a year of negotiations. It was the first trade agreement signed by Britain since leaving the European Union that was negotiated completely anew."
Australia–United Kingdom Free Trade Agreement,"Background
The United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum by 51.9 per cent of votes in favour to 48.1 per cent of votes against, in a decision referred to as Brexit. The United Kingdom subsequently left the European Union on 31 January 2020.
Polling conducted by YouGov from 7–8 September 2016, found that Australia was the country that Leave voters most wanted to sign a free trade agreement with, with 47 per cent ranking it as the top priority country.
In 2020, trade between the countries was valued at £13.9 billion. Australia accounts for 0.4 per cent of British exports and 1.3 per cent of imports."
Australia–United Kingdom Free Trade Agreement,"Negotiations
The United Kingdom and Australia started negotiations for a free trade deal on 17 June 2020. The broad terms of the agreement were agreed on 14 June 2021, following almost a year of negotiations.
On 15 June 2020, the Australian Government released its negotiating position. Two days later, on 17 June 2020, the UK Government also released its negotiation objectives, outlining what it would like to achieve in a free trade agreement."
Australia–United Kingdom Free Trade Agreement,"Farmers in the United Kingdom expressed concern that prices would be undercut by cheaper Australian imports. Australian beef production sits around 2.3 million tonnes (2.5 million short tons; 2.3 million long tons) of beef per annum, compared to 900,000 tonnes (990,000 short tons; 890,000 long tons) in the United Kingdom. Australian sheep meat production is around 700,000 tonnes (770,000 short tons; 690,000 long tons), 21⁄2 times the UK's output. The British government sought a 15-year cap on tariff-free imports to address these concerns. Polling conducted by Opinium Research found that 61 per cent of Britons prioritised protecting British farmers over signing new trade agreements, with 20 per cent prioritising signing new trade deals.
A year after negotiations began, the agreement was reached over dinner between Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison. The following day, the British government announced that an agreement had been reached in principle."
Australia–United Kingdom Free Trade Agreement,"Agreement
Australia secured a seven-fold increase in tariff-free access to the UK market for its beef and lamb exports, to be phased in after ten years. In return, British citizens under 35 can get working holiday visas for three years instead of the previous two, and Australian employers do not need to show economic necessity to hire them. Observers took the agreement as a sign that the British government, in negotiating future trade agreements with nations with large agricultural sectors, will favour the interests of consumers over farmers.
In mid-2022, as both governments worked towards final ratification, the deal began coming in for heavy criticism on the British side. The National Farmers' Union expressed concern about the possibility that Australian exporters could flood the British market and drive down prices, as well as the lack of any protections for geographical indicators on foods such as Cornish clotted cream. Food-safety groups like the Pesticide Action Network were alarmed that the agreement had no provisions requiring Australian produce comply with stricter British standards. In November, as the Australian parliament's ratification vote neared, George Eustice, a Brexit supporter who had until September been in the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and negotiated parts of the deal, reiterated these concerns on the floor of the House of Commons when he denounced the deal, which the British Parliament did not get to vote on, as one-sided, blaming former Secretary of State for International Trade Liz Truss for forcing an agreement to be reached swiftly to make then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson's government look good; he also called for the lead UK negotiation, Crawford Falconer, to be replaced.
British defenders of the agreement noted in response that Eustice had had his chance to block the agreement while he was in the government and did not. They further said that it was unlikely that Australia would be fully exploiting the new quotas, since it did not even meet the current ones and found it more profitable to sell to large markets closer to it in Asia due to the time and distance involved in shipping to the UK. The British government also argued that it had maintained food-safety standards, with Australia agreeing to its high sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) regulations for all food."
Australia–United Kingdom Free Trade Agreement,"Provisions
Under the terms of the agreement in principle, Australia would relax certain rules around working holiday visas for Britons under the age of 35."
Australia–United Kingdom Free Trade Agreement,"Areas Covered in the FTA and Contention Points
Trade in Goods:
Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS):
Customs and Trade Facilitation
Rules of Origin
Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT)
Good Regulatory Practices
Transparency, Publication, and Administrative Measures
Trade in Services, Including Telecommunications and Financial Services
Mobility
Digital Trade in Goods and Services and Cross-Border Data Flows
Investment
Intellectual Property
Procedural Fairness for Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices
State-Owned and Controlled Enterprises (SOEs)
Subsidies
Competition Policy
Labor
Environment
Anti-corruption
Trade Remedies
Settlement
General Provisions"
Australia–United Kingdom Free Trade Agreement,"Significance
On 15 June 2021, the British Secretary of State for International Trade and President of the Board of Trade, Liz Truss, said that the agreement ""paved the way"" for the United Kingdom to become a member of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). The United Kingdom formally applied to join the CPTPPP in February 2021 and began membership negotiations on 2 June 2021.
British government estimates suggest that an agreement would grow the British economy by £500 million over the course of 15 years, equivalent to a 0.02 per cent increase in GDP.
The Australian National Farmers' Federation welcomed the deal as an opportunity for increased Australian agricultural exports to the United Kingdom.
On 11 May 2022, the UK Government introduced a Trade Bill to ratify and bring into force the UK-Australia and UK-New Zealand Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) that were signed in December and February respectively.
The Australian Government confirmed it was ""confident"" the UK-Australia Free Trade Agreement would be ready to be put into action by year's end with thousands more young people set to be eligible for a working visa. The extended negotiation process between the two countries finally drew to an end late 2021 when the then-Johnson and Morrison governments signed the landmark deal.
On 17 November 2022, the Australian Government Joint Standing Committee on Treaties (JSCOT) handed down its report on the Australia–United Kingdom Free Trade Agreement (A-UKFTA). The committee made two recommendations:
The Committee recommended the Australian Government implements the recommendations of Report 193: Strengthening the Trade Agreement and Treaty Making Process in Australia, particularly in relation to greater consultation and transparency during the negotiating process, and providing independent modelling and analysis of trade agreements.
The Committee supports the Free Trade Agreement between Australia and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and recommends that binding treaty action be taken. Subsequently, on 22 November 2022, the treaty passed both Houses of Parliament.
A-UKFTA entered into force after Australia and the UK confirmed with each other in writing that they had completed their respective domestic requirements.
Notably, the A-UK FTA also strengthens the people-to-people links between Australia and the UK. Australian professionals now have the same access to the UK job market as nationals from the European Union, except the Republic of Ireland. From 31 January 2024, Australians up to the age of 35 (up from 30) will be able to apply for working holidays in the UK and stay for a maximum of three years instead of two."
Australia–United Kingdom Free Trade Agreement,"Response in Australia
The Lowy Institute was unstinting in its praise for the agreement. ""It is hard to overstate this achievement by the Australian negotiating team"", wrote Dmitry Grozoubinski, a commentator on its blog. While most often the ecstatic language of news releases announcing trade deals hid the lack of real accomplishments, ""[n]ot this time. This deal does what it says on the tin.""
""Remarkably, it is not clear what UK negotiators managed to extract in reciprocal concessions"", Grozoubinski continued, foreshadowing a theme that would later be sounded in British criticism of the deal. ""Sure Australia has agreed to eliminate its own tariffs, but that is somewhat like landlocked Switzerland offering to eliminate its navy. Unlike the UK, which has some formidable tariff walls around agriculture, Australia's tariffs are incredibly low and their elimination is unlikely to change anyone's commercial calculus."""
Australia–United Kingdom Free Trade Agreement,"Criticism in UK
In 2022, as the British government moved towards implementing the deal, agricultural interests were criticising it. Early in the year the UK chapter of the Pesticide Action Network (PAN) issued Toxic Trade, a report expressing concern that the agreement might weaken British restrictions on pesticide use by permitting the import of Australian crops grown under laxer standards—for example, Britain permits farmers to use just four organophosphates against the thirty-three allowed in Australia. It feared this might set a precedent for Britain making similar concessions in negotiating trade deals with other large countries that export produce in quantity such as the United States, India and Brazil."
Australia–United Kingdom Free Trade Agreement,"A June report on the proposed deal by the House of Lords's International Agreements Committee generally accepted it, but expressed concern that the government's haste to conclude it might have come at the expense of whatever negotiating leverage it had. The committee noted that the agreement failed to offer any protection to certain geographically-indicated British foods, such as Cornish clotted cream and Scotch whisky, allowing any Australian producer to use them for foods exported to Britain. It also expressed concern about the pesticide issue and other environmental concerns such as food grown on deforested land, and chastised the government for insufficient consultation with its devolved parliaments. ""The Government should take disappointment from UK stakeholders seriously"" it wrote. Compassion in World Farming, along with the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Which? and several other organisations, also put out a report expressing concern about the government compromising on animal welfare standards as well as food safety.
The following month the House of Commons' International Trade Committee, a cross-party group, joined the criticism. Scottish National Party MP Angus MacNeil, its chair, not only repeated the concerns expressed by PAN and the Lords' committee but said the treaty would bring minimal economic gain in return for those concessions. Since by its own calculations it would increase Britain's GDP 0.08 per cent, ""[t]he government must level with the public—this trade deal will not have the transformative effects ministers would like to claim"", he said. Consumers might benefit, the committee allowed, but only in very small ways such as slightly lower prices on Australian wine.
Specifically, the National Farmers' Union (NFU), was quoted in the report as to the competitive imbalance between British and Australian agriculture. ""British farmers are being asked to go toe-to-toe with some of the most cost-effective food producers in the world."", the NFU said. ""But there is scant evidence that the government has the vision to create the conditions to allow our farmers to compete ... we do believe that deals must be balanced in respect of offering reciprocal benefit."" The NFU had also lobbied heavily, but futilely, for beef and lamb quotas in the agreement to be based on carcass weight equivalent."
Australia–United Kingdom Free Trade Agreement,"In November, George Eustice, who up until two months before had been Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and thus involved in the negotiations, vociferously criticised the treaty in Parliament as ""not actually a very good deal for the UK."" He faulted Truss, who had dismissed him from his post at the beginning of her brief tenure as Prime Minister and was at the time of the negotiations Secretary of State for International Trade, for putting British negotiators ""on the back foot"" with her insistence that a deal be concluded before the end of the 2021 G7 summit in Cornwall, where Australian prime minister Scott Morrison was a guest and the two could announce the deal after dinner on the last night. He praised some aspects of the deal that his department had been the primary negotiator on, such as the phasing in of reduced agricultural tariffs over a 10-15 year period and recognition of British sovereignty in SPS standards, but ""overall the truth of the matter is that the UK gave away far too much for far too little in return.""
Eustice was particularly critical of one other person involved, Crawford Falconer, the New Zealand-born interim permanent secretary of the Department of International Trade (DIT): ""His approach always was to internalise Australian demands, often when they were against UK interests, his advice was invariably to retreat and make fresh concessions and all the while he resented people who understood technical issues greater than he did."" Eustice said Falconer should be replaced with ""somebody who understands British interests better than I think he's been able to.""
Other observers joined Eustice in another criticism: the government's failure to keep a promise to allow Parliament to debate the treaty. They contrasted that with Australia's final adoption of the treaty in late November following a full debate in both houses of its Parliament. But although both Truss and her predecessor, Boris Johnson, had promised the same on their end, Rishi Sunak, Truss's successor, who had campaigned for the Conservative Party leadership against Truss in part by criticizing the agreement although he ruled out renegotiating it, never put the deal up for a vote. ""Never again must our democracy be bypassed,"" tweeted NFU president Minette Batters, in response to Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese posting a picture of himself and Sunak shaking hands to announce the former's Parliament passing the deal. ""[E]very FTA must be scrutinised by Parliament.""
An economist with the Agriculture and Trade Commission (ATC), Catherine McBride, took the opposite tack in her criticism, arguing that the deal was too protective of British farmers, in the way it phased in the tariff reductions. The hard truth, she wrote in the Daily Express, was that the UK had long since passed the point where its farmers could grow enough food to feed the entire population, and needed imports of many farm products, particularly beef and lamb. Dairy farmers should not, McBride said, have to wait six years for tariff-free access to the Australian market so their cattle- and lamb-raising counterparts could be insulated from corresponding competition for fifteen. ""Protecting a bad business model (UK grazing) to the detriment of a good business (UK dairy farming) is economic madness"", she wrote. ""But, that is how protectionism usually plays out."""
Australia–United Kingdom Free Trade Agreement,"Response
In response to these criticisms, government spokespeople reiterated that the agreement would add to the British economy, that it would not compromise on food safety standards, and that the ATC had concluded that it had not. On the issue of geographical indications, they pointed out that Australia did not have any such protections for agricultural products, foodstuffs or spirits. ""Should they introduce such a scheme we have agreed to review our agreement with Australia to ensure the UK's finest products are protected"", they said. ""This is the strongest commitment that Australia has made towards setting up a GI scheme in any of its trade deals.""
Eustice's remarks drew a sharper response. A DIT source reminded The Guardian that Eustice had been in the Cabinet when the deal was approved there. ""If the deal was as bad as he claims, he would never have approved it."" Others felt it was an overreach for Eustice to so harshly criticise Falconer to the point of calling on him to be fired, since as a civil servant Falconer by convention cannot respond. ""I hope [Eustice] will see his way to apologising for it because it was completely unfair,"" said one government consultant, while Ben Ramanasaukas, a former advisor to Truss, called the former DEFRA secretary's remarks ""mean-spirited and wrong"".
But while Ramanasaukas agreed with Eustice and other critics that setting a deadline for the deal was a bad idea, he disagreed with other elements of their objections. ""They see it as a zero-sum game"", he said. ""They see imports as a bad thing."" By contrast, he argued they were ""fantastic for obvious reasons: lower prices for consumers and other businesses, more competition, thriving innovation.""
Others said it was important to place the deal in its full context. ""Given the importance of agricultural exports to both Australia and New Zealand,"" said one former British trade negotiator, ""it's hard to see how those deals would have happened if the UK hadn't made market access commitments in those areas."" Britain would also need both countries' support for its application to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, as they are already full members. Ed Conway, economics and data editor at Sky News, among others, noted when the deal was reached that the distance between the two countries was more of a constraint on trade than any tariffs or restrictions, especially since Australia had larger markets to sell to much closer at hand. Even at present, he said, Australian beef and lamb exports to the UK did not come anywhere near the quotas set during the EU era. He still cautioned that the sevenfold increase in the quotas would come much more abruptly than the government had represented it as.
Further, Conway pointed out, Australia had prior to Britain's EU accession been a much larger trading partner. In the mid-1950s, roughly 12.5 per cent of all British exports went to Australia, an amount that began falling before accession, to 1.6 per cent sixty years later. Conway saw the deal's terms as indicating that the UK would, in negotiating future trade deals with large agricultural nations, be moving away from EU-legacy protections for its farmers and toward the interests of consumers.
However, Nick von Westenholtz, director of trade for the NFU, pointed to caveats those arguments did not take into account. Primarily, he noted, they were based on the assumption that Australia's current trading relationships would remain the same for some time to come. If, he posited, China decided to drastically limit Australian meat imports for some reason, Australian producers might decide to take the full advantage allowed them of the British market in order to compensate, and Britain would not be able to do much about that. ""The UK government has reserved itself almost no recourse to managing imports if they start proving harmful to UK farm livelihoods.""
In Australia, Grozoubinski similarly noted that the British government's selling points for the agreement contradicted themselves. ""To farmers and their representatives, apoplectic about this deal, it has argued that Australian produce is unlikely to flood into the UK market, citing existing trading patterns and strong demand closer to home."" Yet, ""[c]onversely, in media commentary, press releases, and speaking to its more libertarian members the UK government primarily emphasised the benefits to consumers of cheaper or at least more plentiful access to Australian products, from Tim Tam biscuits to steaks."" But few consumers were likely to see those benefits, Grozoubinski noted, unless Australian products actually were to flood British markets at levels that would force prices down to the point of adversely affecting British farmers and other producers."
Australia–United Kingdom Free Trade Agreement,"See also
Australia–United Kingdom relations
Foreign relations of Australia
Foreign relations of the United Kingdom
Free trade agreements of the United Kingdom
Commonwealth free trade
List of bilateral free-trade agreements"
Australia–United Kingdom Free Trade Agreement,"Notes
References
External links
Summary of the Australian Government negotiating aims from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
The British Government's strategic approach to negotiations from the Department for International Trade
Press conference announcing the agreement in principle on 15 June from ABC News on YouTube
FTA Statement from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
FTA Statement from the Department for International Trade"
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO ) is the domestic intelligence and national security agency of the Commonwealth of Australia, responsible for the protection of the country and its citizens from espionage, sabotage, acts of foreign interference, politically motivated violence, terrorism and attacks on the national defence system. ASIO is a primary entity of the Australian Intelligence Community."
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"ASIO has a wide range of surveillance powers to collect human and signals intelligence. Generally, ASIO operations requiring police powers of arrest and detention under warrant are co-ordinated with the Australian Federal Police and/or with state and territory police forces. The organisation is comparable to that of the FBI (US) and MI5 (UK).
ASIO Central Office is in Canberra, with a local office being located in each mainland state and territory capital. A new $630 million Central Office, Ben Chifley Building, named after Ben Chifley, prime minister when ASIO was created, was officially opened by then prime minister Kevin Rudd on 23 July 2013."
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"Command, control and organisation
ASIO is the statutory body established and regulated under the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act 1979, responsible to the Parliament of Australia through the Attorney-General. ASIO also reports to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, Senate’s Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee and is subject to independent review by the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security. The head of ASIO is the Director-General of Security, who oversees the strategic management of ASIO within guidelines issued by the Attorney-General. The current Director-General of Security is Mike Burgess, who assumed office on 16 September 2019. There are also two Deputy Directors-General.
In 2013, ASIO had a staff of around 1,740. The identity of ASIO officers, apart from the Director-General, remains an official secret. While ASIO is an equal opportunity employer, there has been some media comment of its apparent difficulty in attracting people from a Muslim or Middle Eastern background. Furthermore, ASIO has undergone a period of rapid growth with some 70% of its officers having joined since 2002, leading to what Paul O'Sullivan, Director-General of Security from 2005 to 2009, called 'an experience gap'."
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"Powers and accountability
Special investigative powers
The special investigative powers available to ASIO officers under warrant signed by the Attorney-General include:"
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"Interception of telecommunications,
Examination of postal and delivery articles,
Use of clandestine surveillance and tracking devices,
Remote access to computers, including alteration of data to conceal that access,
Covert entry to and search of premises, including the removal or copying of any record or thing found therein, and
Conduct of an ordinary or frisk search of a person if they are at or near a premises specified in the warrant.
The Director-General also has the power to independently issue a warrant should a serious security situation arise and a warrant requested of the Attorney-General has not yet been granted.
An ASIO officer may, without warrant, ask an operator of an aircraft or vessel questions about the aircraft or vessel, its cargo, crew, passengers, stores or voyage; and to produce supporting documents relating to these questions."
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"Special terrorism investigative powers
When investigating terrorism, the Director-General may also seek a warrant from an independent judicial authority to allow:"
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"The compulsory questioning of suspects,
The detention of suspects by the Australian Federal Police, and their subsequent interrogation by ASIO officers,
Ordinary, frisk or strip search of suspects by AFP officers upon their detainment,
The seizure of passports, and
The prevention of suspects leaving Australia.
The Director-General is not empowered to independently issue a warrant in relation to the investigation of terrorism."
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"Immunity from prosecution
While the Act does not define any activities specifically to be legal, that is, to grant immunity for any specific crime, it does provide exceptions that will not be granted immunity. Section 35k (1) defines these activities as not being immune from liability for special intelligence conduct during special intelligence operations. That is to say, an ASIO operative would be deemed to have committed a crime if they were to participate in any of the following activities under any circumstances:"
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"An activity that causes death or serious injury,
Torture,
If the activity involves the commission of a sexual offence against any person, or
If the activity causes significant loss of, or serious damage to property."
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"Collection of foreign intelligence
ASIO also has the power to collect foreign intelligence within Australia at the request of the Minister for Foreign Affairs or the Minister for Defence. Known as Joint Intelligence Operations, and usually conducted in concert with the Australian Secret Intelligence Service the purpose of these operations is the gathering of security intelligence on and from foreign officials, organisations or companies."
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"Accountability
Because of the nature of its work, ASIO does not make details of its activities public and law prevents the identities of ASIO officers from being disclosed. ASIO and the Australian Government say that operational measures ensuring the legality of ASIO operations have been established.
ASIO briefs the Attorney-General on all major issues affecting security and they are also informed of operations when considering granting warrants enabling the special investigative powers of ASIO. Furthermore, the Attorney-General issues guidelines with respect to the conduct of ASIO investigations relating to politically motivated violence and its functions of obtaining intelligence relevant to security.
ASIO reports to several governmental and parliamentary committees dealing with security, legislative and financial matters. This includes the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security and the Senate’s Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee. A classified annual report is provided to the government, an unclassified edited version of which is tabled in federal Parliament.
The Office of the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security was established in 1986 to provide additional oversight of Australia’s security and intelligence agencies. The Inspector-General has complete access to all ASIO records and has a range of inquisitorial powers."
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"Relationships with foreign agencies and services
Australia’s intelligence and security agencies maintain close working relationships with the foreign and domestic intelligence and security agencies of other nations. As of 22 October 2008, ASIO has established liaison relationships with 311 authorities in 120 countries."
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"History
Pre-ASIO
The Australian Government assumed responsibility for national security and intelligence on Federation in 1901, and took over various state agencies and had to rationalise their functions. There was considerable overlap between the civil and military authorities. Similarly, there was also no Commonwealth agency responsible for enforcing federal laws. At the outbreak of World War I, no Australian government agency was dedicated to security, intelligence or law enforcement. The organisation of security intelligence in Australia took on more urgency with a perceived threat posed by agents provocateurs, fifth columnists and saboteurs within Australia.
In 1915, the British government arranged for the establishment of a Commonwealth branch of the Imperial Counter Espionage Bureau in Australia. The branch came to be known as the Australian Special Intelligence Bureau (SIB) in January 1916, and maintained a close relationship with state police forces, and later with the Commonwealth Police Force, created in 1917, to conduct investigations independent of state police forces. After the war, on 1 November 1919, the SIB and Commonwealth Police were merged to form the Investigation Branch within the Attorney General's Department.
During World War II, Commonwealth Security Service was formed in 1941 to investigate organisations and individuals considered likely to be subversive or actively opposed to national interests; to investigate espionage and sabotage; to vet defence force personnel and workers in defence-related industries; to control the issue of passports and visas; and was responsible for the security of airports and wharves, and factories engaged in manufacture of munitions and other items necessary for Australia’s war effort. It was also responsible for radio security. In June 1945 it produced a report warning of the danger of the Communist Party of Australia.
Robert Frederick Bird Wake, one of the foundation directors of ASIO, is credited with getting ""the show"" started in 1949, as claimed by Valdemar Wake, in his biography No Ribbons or Medals of his father's work as a counter espionage officer. Wake worked closely with Director-General Reed. During World War II, Reed conducted an inquiry into Wake's performance as a security officer and found that he was competent and innocent of the charges laid by the Army's commander-in-chief, General Thomas Blamey. This was the start of a relationship between Reed and Wake that lasted for more than 10 years. Wake was seen as the operational head of ASIO."
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"Establishment and 'The Case'
Following the end of World War II, the joint United States-UK Venona project uncovered sensitive British and Australian government data being transmitted through Soviet diplomatic channels. Officers from MI5 were dispatched to Australia to assist local investigations. The leak was eventually tracked to a spy ring operating from the Soviet Embassy in Canberra. Allied Western governments expressed disaffection with the state of security in Australia.
On 9 March 1949, Prime Minister Ben Chifley created the post of Director-General of Security and appointed South Australian Supreme Court Justice Geoffrey Reed to the post. On 16 March 1949, Chifley issued a Directive for the Establishment and Maintenance of a Security Service. The Security Service's first authorised telephone interceptions were in June 1949, followed in July by a raid on the Sydney office of the Communist Party of Australia. In August 1949, Reed advised the Prime Minister that he had decided to name the service the 'Australian Security Intelligence Organization'  [sic].
The new service was to be modelled on the Security Service of the United Kingdom MI5 and an MI5 liaison team (including Sir Roger Hollis) was attached to the fledgling ASIO during the early 1950s. Historian Robert Manne describes this early relationship as ""special, almost filial"" and continues ""ASIO's trust in the British counter-intelligence service appears to have been near-perfect"".
The Labor Government was defeated at the December 1949 federal election, and in March 1950 the new prime minister, Robert Menzies, appointed the Deputy Director of Military Intelligence, Charles Spry, as the second Director-General of Security, commencing on 9 July 1950. Wake resigned shortly after Spry's appointment. On 6 July 1950, a Directive of Prime Minister Menzies set out the Charter of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, which expanded on Chifley's 1949 Directive. ASIO was converted to a statutory body on 13 December 1956 by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act 1956 (later repealed by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act 1979, the current legislation as amended to 2007). Spry would continue to hold the post until January 1970. The spelling of the organisation was amended by legislation in 1999 to bring it into line with the Australian standard form 'organisation'.
The operation to crack the Soviet spy ring in Canberra consumed much of the resources of ASIO during the 1950s. This operation became internally known as ""The Case"". Among the prime suspects of the investigations were Wally Clayton, a prominent member of the Australian Communist Party, and two diplomats with the Department of External Affairs, Jim Hill and Ian Milner. However, no charges resulted from the investigations, because Australia did not have any laws against peacetime espionage at the time."
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"The Petrov Affair
5 February 1951 saw the arrival in Sydney of Vladimir Mikhaylovich Petrov, Third Secretary of the Soviet Embassy. An ASIO field officer identified Petrov as a possible 'legal', an agent of the Soviet Ministry of State Security (MGB, a forerunner to the KGB) operating under diplomatic immunity. The Organisation began gently cultivating Petrov through another agent, Dr. Michael Bialoguski, with the eventual goal of orchestrating his defection. Ultimately, Petrov was accused by the Soviet Ambassador of several lapses in judgement that would have led to his imprisonment and probable execution upon his return to the Soviet Union. Petrov feared for his life and accepted the defection life-line provided by ASIO.
The actual defection occurred on 3 April 1954. Petrov was spirited to a safe house by ASIO officers, but his disappearance and the seeming reluctance of Australian authorities to search for him made the Soviets increasingly suspicious. Fearing a defection by Petrov, MVD officers dramatically escorted his wife Evdokia to a waiting aeroplane in Sydney. There was doubt as to whether she was leaving by choice or through coercion and so Australian authorities initially did not act to prevent her being bundled into the plane. However, ASIO was in communication with the pilot and learned through relayed conversations with a flight attendant that if Evdokia spoke to her husband she might consider seeking asylum in Australia.
An opportunity to allow her to speak with her husband came when the Director-General of Security, Charles Spry, was informed that the MVD agents had broken Australian law by carrying firearms on an airliner in Australian airspace and so could be detained. When the aeroplane landed in Darwin for refuelling, the Soviet party and other passengers were asked to leave the plane. Police, acting on ASIO orders, quickly disarmed and restrained the two MVD officers and Evdokia was taken into the terminal to speak to her husband via telephone. After speaking to him, she became convinced he was alive and speaking freely and asked the Administrator of the Northern Territory for political asylum.
The affair sparked controversy in Australia when circumstantial links were noted between the leader of the Australian Labor Party and the Communist Party of Australia (and hence to the Soviet spy ring). H.V. Evatt, the leader of the Labor Party at the time, accused Prime Minister Robert Menzies of arranging the Petrov defection to discredit him. The accusations lead to a disastrous split in the Labor party.
Petrov was able to provide information on the structure of the Soviet intelligence apparatus in the mid-1950s, information that was highly valuable to the United States. It was by obtaining this information that the Organisation's reputation in the eyes of the United States was greatly enhanced.
In fact, when Brigadier Spry retired, the Deputy Director of the CIA sent the following tribute:"
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"The relationship between the CIA and ASIO started as a very personal one. The real substantive relationship started with Sir Charles' visit in 1955... Since Sir Charles' first visit, the relationships with ASIO have continued to become closer and closer until today we have no secrets, regardless of classification or sensitivity, that are not made available to ASIO if it is pertinent to Australia’s internal security... I feel, as does the Director, a type of mutual trust in dealing with ASIO that is exceeded by no other service in the world today."
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"The Cold War
ASIO's counter-intelligence successes continued throughout the Cold War. Following an elaborate investigation between 1961 and 1963, ASIO recommended the ejection of the First Secretary of the Soviet Embassy, Ivan Skripov, and his declaration as persona non-grata. Skripov had been refining Kay Marshall, an English-Australian woman as an agent for Soviet intelligence; however, she was in fact an agent of ASIO.
In April 1983, ASIO uncovered more Soviet attempts at espionage and Valery Ivanov, who also held the post of First Secretary at the Soviet Embassy, was declared persona non-grata. He was ejected from Australia on the grounds that he had performed duties in violation of his diplomatic status."
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"Penetration by the KGB
These successes were marred, however, by the penetration of ASIO by a KGB mole in the 1970s. Due to the close defence and intelligence ties between Australia and the United States, ASIO became a backdoor to American intelligence. Upon realising ASIO was compromised, the United States pulled back on the information it shared with Australia.
Following a strenuous internal audit and a joint Federal Police investigation, George Sadil was accused of being the mole. Sadil had been a Russian interpreter with ASIO for some 25 years and highly classified documents were discovered in his place of residence. Federal Police arrested Sadil in June 1993 and charged him under the Crimes Act 1914 with several espionage and official secrets related offences. However, parts of the case against him collapsed the following year.
Sadil was committed to trial in March 1994, but the Director of Public Prosecutions decided not to proceed with the more serious espionage-related charges after reviewing the evidence against him. Sadil's profile did not match that of the mole and investigators were unable to establish any kind of money trail between him and the KGB.
Sadil pleaded guilty in December 1994 to thirteen charges of removing ASIO documents contrary to his duty, and was sentenced to three months imprisonment. He was subsequently released on a 12-month good behaviour bond. It is believed that another ASIO officer, now retired, is suspected of being the mole but no prosecution attempts have been made.
In November 2004, former KGB Major-General Oleg Kalugin confirmed to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Four Corners programme that the KGB had in fact infiltrated ASIO in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
ASIO acknowledged in October 2016 that it had been infiltrated.
In 2023, the mole was identified as Ian George Peacock. Peacock's code name within the KGB was ""Mira""."
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"Sydney 2000 Olympic Games
ASIO began planning for the 2000 Olympic and Paralympic Games, held in Sydney, as early as 1995. A specific Olympics Coordination Branch was created in 1997, and began recruiting staff with ""specialised skills"" the following year. In 1998, ASIO ""strengthened information collection and analytical systems, monitored changes in the security environment more broadly, improved its communications technology and provided other agencies with strategic security intelligence assessments to assist their Olympics security planning"".
The Olympics Coordination Branch also began planning for the Federal Olympic Security Intelligence Centre (FOSIC) in 1998. FOSIC was to ""provide security intelligence advice and threat assessments to State and Commonwealth authorities during the Sydney 2000 Games""."
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"Surveillance of anti-coal activists
In 2012 it was reported that ASIO had been monitoring the actions of Australians protesting against the coal industry, and was increasing its efforts from previous years. Minister Martin Ferguson said that he was particularly concerned about protests relating to the Hazelwood power station in Victoria. An unnamed security source told The Age newspaper that ""providing advice and intelligence to safeguard [critical infrastructure] is clearly within ASIO's responsibilities... ASIO has a clear role, including protection against sabotage. And it's clear [environmental] activists pose a greater threat to energy facilities than terrorists."" A spokesperson for Attorney General Nicola Roxon described ASIO's responsibility in monitoring political action groups as ""limited to activity that is, or has the potential to be, violent for the purposes of achieving a political objective"". Australian Greens party leader Bob Brown described ASIO monitoring environmentalists as a ""political weapon"" used by the Government for the benefit of ""foreign-owned mining corporations""."
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"Chinese intelligence activity
Nicola Roxon, the Attorney-General of Australia, blocked Chinese, state-owned company Huawei from seeking a supply contract for the National Broadband Network, on the advice of the ASIO. The Australian government feared Huawei would provide backdoor access for Chinese cyber espionage.
In May 2013, ABC News claimed that China stole blueprints to the headquarters of the ASIO.
Sheri Yan and Roger Uren were investigated by ASIO on suspicion of spying for China. Uren, former Assistant Secretary responsible for the Asia section of the Office of National Assessments, was found to have removed documents pertaining to Chinese intelligence operations in Australia, and kept them in his apartment. Yan was suspected of undertaking influence operations on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party, and introducing Colonel Liu Chaoying, a military intelligence officer, to Australian contacts."
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"Royal commissions, inquiries and reviews
Royal Commission on Intelligence and Security, 1974–77
On 21 August 1974, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam announced the establishment of the Royal Commission on Intelligence and Security to inquire into Australia's intelligence agencies. Justice Robert Hope of the Supreme Court of New South Wales was appointed as Royal Commissioner. In 1977 the First Hope Commission made many findings about, and recommendations on, ASIO in the Fourth Report, some of which had been preempted by the Whitlam and Fraser governments. The commission marked the first review of the organisation and was fundamental to securing it as part of Australia's state defensive apparatus. In a secret supplementary report, much of which remains classified, Hope indicated his belief that ASIO's past conduct was the result of its infiltration by a hostile foreign intelligence agency. In a 1998 interview Hope stated that saw some of his major recommendations as having been wrong.
The Commission found that ASIO provided the CIA with information about prominent Australian politicians and government officials. The information included accusations of subversive activities and details of private lives."
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"Protective Security Review, 1978–79
Following the Sydney Hilton bombing in 1978, the government commissioned Justice Hope with conducting a review into national protective security arrangements and into co-operation between Federal and State authorities in regards to security. In the report concluded in 1979, Justice Hope designated ASIO as the agency responsible for national threat assessments in terrorism and politically motivated violence. He also recommended that relations between ASIO and State and Territory police forces be regulated by arrangements between governments."
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"Royal Commission on Australian Security and Intelligence Agencies, 1983–84
Following the publicity surrounding the expulsion of Valery Ivanov, First Secretary at the Soviet Embassy in Canberra, the Government established a Royal Commission to review the activities of Australian security and intelligence agencies. Justice Hope was again Royal Commissioner.
Justice Hope completed his report in December 1984. His recommendations included that:"
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"The security related activities which ASIO should investigate be redefined. References to subversion and terrorism be removed and replaced with politically motivated violence, attacks on Australia's defence system and promoting communal violence;
ASIO be given additional functions of collecting foreign intelligence and providing protective security advice; and that
A separate office of Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security be established.
Justice Hope also recommended that amendments to the ASIO Act provide that ""it is not the purpose of the Act that the right of lawful advocacy, protest or dissent should be affected or that exercising those rights should, by themselves, constitute activity prejudicial to security""."
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"Post-Cold War review, 1992
In early 1992, Prime Minister Paul Keating commissioned a review ""of the overall impact of changes in international circumstances on the roles and priorities of the Australian intelligence agencies"". In his statement of 21 July 1992, Keating said:"
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"Consistent with the philosophy of a separation of the assessment, policy and foreign intelligence collection functions, the Government considers that the existing roles of the individual agencies remain valid in the 1990s. The rationale outlined by Mr Justice Hope for ASIO as a freestanding, non-executive, advisory intelligence security agency remains relevant in the 1990s and the Government has therefore decided that ASIO should continue to have the roles and responsibilities laid down in existing legislation.
The Soviet threat certainly formed an important component of ASIO's activities, but threats from other sources of foreign interference and politically motivated violence have been important to ASIO for some time, and will remain so. However, the implications for ASIO of the changes in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe are more far-reaching than for the other agencies. The Government has therefore decided that while ASIO's capacity to meet its responsibilities must be maintained, there is scope for resource reductions.
The resource reductions mentioned were a cut of 60 staff and a $3.81 million budget decrease."
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"Inquiry into National Security, 1993
Following the trial of George Sadil over the ASIO mole scandal and from concern about the implications of material having been removed from ASIO without authority, the Prime Minister announced the appointment of Mr Michael Cook AO (former head of the Office of National Assessments) to inquire into various aspects of national security. The review was completed in 1994."
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"Parliamentary Joint Committee inquiries
The Parliamentary Joint Committee completed several reviews and inquiries into ASIO during the 1990s. The first concerned the security assessment process. Another was held in September into ""the nature, scope and appropriateness of the way in which ASIO reports to the Australian public on its activities"". The Committee concluded that ""the total package of information available to the Australian community about ASIO's operations exceeds that available to citizens in other countries about their domestic intelligence agencies."" Pursuant to this, recommendations were made regarding the ASIO website and other publicly accessible information."
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"Transfer to Home Affairs
In July 2018, then-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced the creation of the Department of Home Affairs - a new ministry to include the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Border Force, and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. This meant the transfer of ASIO away from the Attorney-General's Department, although the Attorney-General would remain responsible for approving ASIO warrants. This move was somewhat criticised, with John Blaxland from the Australian National University warning against tampering with a system that was ""arguably the envy of the world"", saying ""I have yet to see any compelling evidence that what we have is not working, or that there is a compellingly better option out there.""
In July 2024, it was reported that ASIO was to be moved back to its original setting within the Attorney-General's Department. Under the new arrangement, the Department of Home Affairs retains responsibility for national security policy, its design and implementation, while operational control of ASIO shifts back to the Attorney-General's Department."
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"Criticisms and controversies
Infiltration by Soviet spies
From the earliest years of ASIO's existence, possibly from its inception, the organization has been infiltrated by Soviet spies. This was admitted by ASIO beginning in 2016, though other sources had made earlier allegations that soviet spies had deeply infiltrated ASIO at nearly all levels of intelligence and operations."
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"Raids on ASIO Central Office, 1973
Accusations against ASIO were raised by the Attorney-General following a series of bombings from 1963 to 1970 on the consulate of Communist Yugoslavia in Australia by Croatian far-right militia. Attorney-General Lionel Murphy alleged that ASIO had withheld information on the group which could have led to preventative measures taken against further bomb attacks (however, Murphy was a member of the recently sworn-in Labor government, which still held a deep-seated suspicion of ASIO).
On 15 March 1973, Murphy and the Commonwealth Police raided the ASIO offices in Melbourne. While some claim the raid was disastrous, serving little purpose other than to shake-up both ASIO and the Whitlam government, the findings of such investigations were not published."
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"The Sydney Hilton bombing allegations of conspiracy, 1978
On 13 February 1978, the Sydney Hilton Hotel was bombed, one of the few domestic terrorist incidents on Australian soil. The Hotel was the location for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM). Three people in the street were killed – two council workers and a policeman – and several others injured. Former police officer Terry Griffiths, who was injured in the explosion, provided some evidence that suggested ASIO might have orchestrated the bombing or been aware of the possibility and allowed it to proceed. In 1985, the Director-General of Security issued a specific denial of the allegation. In 1991 the New South Wales parliament unanimously called for a joint State-Federal inquiry into the bombing. However, the Federal government vetoed any inquiry."
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"Anti-terrorism bungle, 2001
A few weeks after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States, mistakes led ASIO to incorrectly raid the home of Bilal Daye and his wife. It has been revealed that the search warrant was for a different address. The couple subsequently sought damages and the embarrassing incident was settled out of court in late 2005, with all material relating to the case being declared strictly confidential."
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"Kim Beazley-Ratih Hardjono investigation, 2004
In June 2004, Kim Beazley was accused of having a ""special relationship"" with Ratih Hardjono when he was defence minister. Hardjono was allegedly accused of ""inappropriately"" photographing a secure Australian Defence facility, working with the embassy ID, and having a close working relationship with her uncle, a senior officer in BAKIN (Indonesian Intelligence). In July, journalist Greg Sheridan contacted the then head of ASIO, Dennis Richardson, and discussed a classified operational investigation. Later in July members of the Attorney General's department were still investigating the original allegation, making Richardson's comments premature and inaccurate. The whole episode was a salient reminder to politicians in Canberra of the British experience of 'agents of influence' and honeypots. Ratih Hardjono was married to Bruce Grant in the 1990s."
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"Detention and removal of Scott Parkin, 2005
In September 2005, the visa of American citizen, Scott Parkin, was cancelled after Director-General of Security, Paul O'Sullivan, issued an adverse security assessment of the visiting peace activist. Parkin was detained in Melbourne and held in custody for five days before being escorted under guard to Los Angeles, where he was informed that he was required to pay the Australian Government A$11,700 for the cost of his detention and removal. Parkin challenged the adverse security assessment in the Federal Court in a joint civil action with two Iraqi refugees, Mohammed Sagar and Muhammad Faisal, who faced indefinite detention on the island of Nauru after also receiving adverse security assessments in 2005.
Prior to his removal, Parkin had given talks on the role of U.S. military contractor Halliburton in the Iraq war and led a small protest outside the Sydney headquarters of Halliburton subsidiary KBR. The Attorney-General at that time, Philip Ruddock, refused to explain the reasons for Parkin's removal, leading to speculation that ASIO had acted under pressure from the United States. This was denied by O'Sullivan before a Senate committee, where he gave evidence that ASIO based its assessment only on Parkin's activities in Australia. O'Sullivan refused to answer questions before a later Senate committee hearing after his legal counsel told the Federal Court that ASIO did not necessarily base its assessment solely on Parkin's activities in Australia."
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"Kidnap and false imprisonment of Izhar ul-Haque, 2007
On 12 November 2007, the Supreme Court of New South Wales dismissed charges brought against a young medical student, Izhar ul-Haque. ASIO and the Australian Federal Police had investigated ul-Haque for allegedly training with Lashkar-e-Toiba in Pakistan, a declared terrorist organisation under the  Security Legislation Amendment (Terrorism) Act 2002. However, the case against the medical student collapsed when it was revealed that ASIO officers had engaged in improper conduct during the investigation. Justice Michael Adams determined that because ul-Haque was falsely led to believe that he was legally compelled to comply with the ASIO officers, the conduct of at least one of the investigating ASIO officers constituted false imprisonment and kidnap at common law, and therefore key evidence against ul-Haque was inadmissible."
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"Archival material
Non-current ASIO files are stored at the National Archives of Australia, and can be released to the public under the Archives Act 1983 after 30 years, unless they fall into any of 16 exemption categories itemised in section 33 of the Archives Act."
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"See also
Australian Federal Police (AFP)
National Security Committee
Australian Intelligence Community
Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS)
Australian Signals Directorate (ASD)
Office of National Assessments (ONA)
Defence Intelligence Organisation (DIO)
Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation (AGO)
Oversight bodies
Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS)
Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security (IGIS)
Relevant legislation
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act 1979 (ASIO Act)
Intelligence Services Act 2001 (ISA)
Intelligence Services Amendment Act 2004
Overseas counterparts
Canada: Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS)
China: Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS)
New Zealand: New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS)
UK: Security Service (MI5) and GCHQ
US: National Security Branch of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (NSB/FBI)
Russia: Federal Security Service (FSB)
Japan: Japanese National Police Agency and Public Security Intelligence Agency (PSIA)"
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"References
Further reading
Wake, Valdemar Robert (2004). No Ribbons or Medals: The story of 'Hereward', an Australian counter espionage officer. Mitcham, South Australia, Australia: Jacobyte Books. ISBN 1-74100-165-X.ISBN 9781741001655 available from Digital Print, South Australia.
McKnight, David. Australia's Spies and Their Secrets. Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1994. ISBN 1-86373-661-1.
Fowler, Andrew: ""Trust and Betrayal"" (transcripts), Four Corners (ABC TV), 1 November 2004."
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation,"External links
Website: ASIO Website
PDF Document: Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act 1979 (Commonwealth)
PDF Document: Statement of Procedures –  warrants issued under Division 3 of Part III of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act 1979.
Parliamentary Library (22 April 2013). ""The house that ASIO built—a short history of the new Central Office of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation"". Department of Parliamentary Services. Archived from the original on 9 October 2022.
Open Australia Search: Parliamentary records mentioning ASIO."
Colonial forces of Australia,"Until Australia became a Federation in 1901, each of the six colonies was responsible for its own defence. From 1788 until 1870 this was done with British regular forces. In all, 24 British infantry regiments served in the Australian colonies. Each of the Australian colonies gained responsible government between 1855 and 1890, and while the Colonial Office in London retained control of some affairs, and the colonies were still firmly within the British Empire, the Governors of the Australian colonies were required to raise their own colonial militias. To do this, the colonial Governors had the authority from the British crown to raise military and naval forces. Initially these were militias in support of British regulars, but British military support for the colonies ended in 1870, and the colonies assumed their own defence. The separate colonies maintained control over their respective militia forces and navies until 1 March 1901, when the colonial forces were all amalgamated into the Commonwealth Forces following the creation of the Commonwealth of Australia. Colonial forces, including home raised units, saw action in many of the conflicts of the British Empire during the 19th century. Members from British regiments stationed in Australia saw action in India, Afghanistan, the New Zealand Wars, the Sudan conflict, and the Boer War in South Africa.
Despite an undeserved reputation of colonial inferiority, many of the locally raised units were highly organised, disciplined, professional, and well trained. For most of the time from settlement until Federation, military defences in Australia revolved around static defence by combined infantry and artillery, based on garrisoned coastal forts; however, in the 1890s improved railway communications between all of the eastern mainland colonies (Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia), led Major General Bevan Edwards, who had recently completed a survey of colonial military forces, to state his belief that the colonies could be defended by the rapid mobilisation of standard brigades. He called for a restructure of colonial defences, and defensive agreements to be made between the colonies. He also called for professional units to replace all of the volunteer forces.
By 1901, the Australian colonies were federated and formally joined together to become the Commonwealth of Australia, and the federal government assumed all defensive responsibilities. The Federation of Australia came into existence on 1 January 1901 and as of that time the constitution of Australia stated that all defence responsibility was vested in the Commonwealth government. Co-ordination of Australia-wide defensive efforts in the face of imperial German interest in the Pacific Ocean was one of the main reasons for federation, and so one of the first decisions made by the newly formed Commonwealth government was to create the Department of Defence which came into being on 1 March 1901. From that time the Australian Army came into being under the command of Major General Sir Edward Hutton, and all of the colonial forces, including those then on active service in South Africa, transferred into the Australian Army."
Colonial forces of Australia,"Background
Australia was first formally claimed by Great Britain on 22 August 1770 by James Cook RN, however it was not settled until 26 January 1788 with the arrival of the First Fleet. Frustrated in 1783 by the loss of their American colonies on the signing of the Treaty of Paris which formally ended the American Revolutionary War, the British sought a new destination for the transportation of convicts. The fleet, consisting of 11 ships, had arrived in Australia with just over 1100, of which around 750 convicts under the guard of marines, to establish a colony with convict labour at Port Jackson.
Initially the colony was run as an open prison under the governance of Royal Navy Captain Arthur Phillip. Later, as more free settlers were attracted to Australia and transportation was ceased in the mid-1800s, the nature of the colonies changed as Australia began to emerge as a modern, self-sustaining society and after the 1850s the colonies were progressively granted responsible government, allowing them to manage most of their own affairs while remaining part of the British Empire. Nevertheless, the Colonial Office in London retained control of some matters, including foreign affairs and defence. As a result, until the 1870s when the last imperial troops were withdrawn, British regular troops constantly garrisoned the colonies. During their postings to Australia, most of the regiments rotated duties in the various colonies, and often had detachments located in geographically diverse locations at the same time."
Colonial forces of Australia,"British garrison
Accompanying the First Fleet to Port Jackson were three companies of marines totalling 212 men under the command of Major Robert Ross, to guard the fledgling colony of Sydney and that of Norfolk Island, which had been established on 6 March 1788 to provide a food base and investigate supply of masts and flax for canvas for the Royal Navy. In 1790 the Second Fleet arrived, and the marines were relieved by a new force which was created specifically for service in the colony of New South Wales. With an average strength of 550 men, it was known as the New South Wales Corps. The first contingent of 183 men, under Major Francis Grose, arrived in New South Wales in June 1790. They were subsequently expanded with further contingents from Britain as well as free settlers, former convicts and marines who had discharged in the colony. Throughout the mid-1790s the New South Wales Corps was involved in ""open war"" along the Hawkesbury River against the Daruk people. Between 1786 and 1792 an ad hoc volunteer unit known as the New South Wales Marine Corps from the British Royal Navy was created to guard the convicts aboard the First Fleet to Australia and to preserve ""subordination and regularity"" in the penal colony in New South Wales."
Colonial forces of Australia,"On 4 March 1804, the New South Wales Corps was called into action to put down the Castle Hill convict rebellion. Also known as the ""Irish Rebellion"" and sometimes the second ""Battle of Vinegar Hill"" in reference to the uprising which took place in Ireland during the Irish Rebellion of 1798, it was a rebellion against British colonial authority that occurred when Irish convicts, led by Phillip Cunningham and William Johnson, along with many hundreds took up arms at Castle Hill and marched towards Parramatta, expecting support from the 1100 convicts from the river flat settlement at Green Hills, today's Hawkesbury. In response, martial law was declared and a detachment of 56 men from the New South Wales Corps under the command of Major George Johnston, marched all night to Parramatta and then pursued the rebels to near the modern Sydney suburb of Rouse Hill, where they engaged with the main rebel force consisting of about 230 to 260 men. A firefight followed between well trained and armed soldiers and the convicts after which the rebels dispersed. By the time that the fugitives had been chased down over the following days, at least 15 rebels had been killed and six were wounded, while another 26 had been captured, according to official records. Nine rebels were subsequently hanged.
Following the events of the Rum Rebellion, the New South Wales Corps was disbanded, reformed as the 102nd Regiment, and returned to England. At the same time, the various loyal associations were also disbanded. To replace the New South Wales Corps, in 1810 the 73rd Regiment of Foot arrived in the colony, becoming the first line regiment to serve in New South Wales under the Governorship of Lachlan Macquarie. The Highlanders were replaced by the 1st/46th (South Devonshire) Regiment of Foot, known as the ""Red Feathers"", who would serve in Australia until 1818.
In March 1810, the New South Wales Invalid Company was formed for veteran British soldiers and marines who were too old ""to serve to the best of their capacity"", and served mainly as post guards, for the supervision of convicts and other government duties. It was composed of veterans of the 102nd, and other units from veteran soldiers. By 1817 Lachlan Macquarie felt they were unable to perform even these duties, and recommended their disbandment. This was eventually done on 24 September 1822. However, three further veterans companies were raised in 1825 to ""relieve the garrison of police work"" for service in New South Wales, and stayed on duties until 1833.
From 1810 until the withdrawal of British forces from Australia in 1870, about 20,000 British soldiers, serving in 24 British infantry regiments undertook garrison duties in Australia on a rotational basis, along with elements of the marines, Royal Engineers and Royal Artillery. Many of these units were veterans of famous battles of the Napoleonic Wars, and ultimately 13 ""Peninsula regiments"" served in the colonies. While deployed, British Army regiments undertook a variety of duties. This included guarding convict settlements, hunting down bushrangers, suppressing armed resistance by Indigenous Australians, providing security on the goldfields, assisting local police to maintain public order, undertaking ceremonial duties and developing the infrastructure of the nation's military defences."
Colonial forces of Australia,"Initially these forces were based solely in New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land (later known as Tasmania), however, later they were sent to Western Australia, South Australia, the Port Phillip District (later known as Victoria), Queensland and the modern-day Northern Territory. Upon departure, most British regiments proceeded on to India where they saw further service. Many British soldiers, however, chose to stay in Australia, taking their discharge or transferring to the units that arrived to replace them.
The size of these forces varied over time. Initially the garrison was formed by only one regiment (battalion equivalent), however, in 1824 it rose to three. At its peak, in the 1840s, there were between four and six, although this fell to two in the early 1850s after the end of transportation and then to one by the end of the decade as troops were dispatched to India during the Indian Mutiny and to New Zealand to fight during the New Zealand Wars or were needed elsewhere in the British Empire. In the 1860s, Melbourne was used as the headquarters of the Australia and New Zealand Military Command, although by this time British forces in Australia consisted mainly of garrison artillery. The British regiments that garrisoned Australia were primarily raised in Britain; however, any Australian born subjects who wished to pursue a military career were obliged to join the British Army, until the formation of locally raised volunteer militia units after responsible self-government was granted in each of the Australian colonies after 1855. Although the British Army did not actively recruit in Australia, ""hundreds"" of Australians are believed to have joined British regiments. One Australian, Andrew Douglass White, served as an engineer officer at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, while another, Spicer Cookworthy, served as a subaltern in the 1st Regiment of Foot during the Crimean War.
In the mid-1860s the cost of maintaining forces in Australia became the focus of considerable debate in the House of Commons in Britain and as result in March 1862, it was ""resolved that those colonies which had achieved responsible government would have to bear the cost of their own internal defences"". Although the British continued to provide military forces in the way of 15 companies of infantry, these were paid for by the colonial governments in the form of a capitation payment. Additionally, between 1856 and 1870, several different companies/batteries of the Royal Artillery served in New South Wales, as well as engineer units, marines and various support units.
There was no guarantee that these troops would remain in Australia if war broke out elsewhere and as a result, in 1869, in response to requests for assurances in this regard the British government announced that the capitation fee would be increased and that troop numbers would be further increased. Finally, in 1870 the decision was made to withdraw the remaining regiment and as a result, by September with the departure of the 18th (Royal Irish), the withdrawal of British forces from Australia was completed, except for a small number of Royal Marines who would remain in the country until 1913,  and the local forces assumed total responsibility for the defence of the colonies. The influence of the British Army would continue to be felt, however, through fortifications and defences that were built and in the customs, traditions, uniforms, heraldry and organisational structure that developed in the colonial forces and which, through these links, have been maintained in the modern incarnation of the Australian Army."
Colonial forces of Australia,"Colonial armies
Overview
For the majority of the period from 1788 to 1870, the military forces of the Australian colonies consisted mainly of a garrison provided by the British Army. Nevertheless, an early attempt at forming local units came in the early 1800s when loyal associations were raised to assist British forces due to concerns about unrest amongst Irish convicts. These units were short lived, however, and were disbanded around 1810 following the arrival of regular British regiments. Although there was some debate in the colonies about forming locally raised units earlier, it was not until 1840 that the first unit was raised, when the Royal South Australian Volunteer Militia was formed. As a ""militia"" unit, although they were paid or partially paid and equipped via government funds, they were nevertheless citizen soldiers. Provisionally, the militia's establishment could be maintained by a compulsory ballot among men of certain ages who could be compelled to fight, albeit within certain prescribed territorial limits, and who were generally considered to be engaged for a fixed period of service to meet an obligation. Although this force ultimately proved unsuccessful, it sowed the seeds for further development later.
In the 1850s, the provision of responsible government to the colonies led to increased responsibility and self-reliance. Additionally, around this time there were growing security concerns following the French annexation of New Caledonia and the outbreak of the Crimean War, and these factors led to the raising of several ""volunteer"" units in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. These formations were unpaid and were required to provide their own uniforms, although the government furnished them with arms and ammunition. As a result of their status, these units had certain privileges that militia units did not possess such as the right to elect their own officers, the ability to choose the length of their service, and being exempted from military discipline. There was an important social distinction, too, with the volunteer forces being drawn mainly from the upper class due to being unpaid. Over time, the distinctions between volunteer and militia units became less clear as some volunteer units became paid or partially paid, lost their right to elect their officers and increasingly became regulated; likewise, the militia, by consequence of the fact that although possible and sometimes ""threatened"", the compulsory ballot was never enacted, was essentially a volunteer force as its establishment was always maintained by voluntary enlistment.
During the 1860s, as British troops were sent to New Zealand to fight in the New Zealand Wars the need for the colonies to provide for their own defence was highlighted further. In response volunteer units were raised in Tasmania in 1859, followed by Queensland a year later and Western Australia in 1861. The majority of the volunteers were located in Victoria, which was the largest and economically the most prosperous colony, and regardless of the efforts of these colonies, for the rest of the decade, the colonial forces were plagued by problems of discipline, a lack of purpose, obsolete equipment, heavy financial burdens upon members, poor training and a lack of command and control. Not only did this affect the efficiency of the colonial forces, it also resulted in considerable fluctuations in troop numbers. The dispatch of about several thousand volunteers to fight in New Zealand in the early 1860s also reduced the manpower available.
Further strategic concerns such as the American Civil War, Russian involvement in Afghanistan and the Franco-German War in the 1860s and 1870s, made defence reform an important item in many colonial parliaments and a number of committees and commissions were formed. The situation regarding the question of colonial defence measures had come to a head in 1870 when British forces stopped garrisoning the colonies. In response, the colonies took the first steps towards the creation of a regular or ""permanent"" force when small forces of infantry and artillery were raised in Victoria and New South Wales. Other reforms that took place around this time included the organisation of units into standard formations such as battalions, increased payments to volunteers, land grants for efficient service, the establishment of annual training camps – usually over Easter – the creation of cadres of professional soldiers, known as ""permanent staff"" to provide training, the requirement for officers and non-commissioned officers to pass exams and the establishment of minimum required attendance."
Colonial forces of Australia,"In the late 1870s the colonies began to consider working together to provide for the defence of the Australian continent when two British engineer officers, Major General William Jervois and Lieutenant Colonel Peter Scratchley arrived to serve as defence advisors to the colonial governments. The following decade a number of inter-colonial conferences were undertaken and this set the scene for further co-operation later, when Queensland and the other colonies worked together to annex parts of New Guinea due to concerns about German imperial interests in the Pacific in 1883. This continued when the six colonies worked together to fund and establish coastal defences on Thursday Island and at King George's Sound, near Albany in Western Australia in the mid-1890s, due to the recognised strategic importance of these points which ""commanded important trade routes"" to all the colonies. Further co-operation came when, in July 1899, the permanent artillery forces of Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria were grouped together to form the Royal Australian Artillery Regiment.
The early 1880s saw a rapid increase in the size of the colonial military forces. Between 1883 and 1885, the force rose from 8,000 to 22,000 men, although only roughly 1,000 of these were permanent soldiers. In 1885, unpaid volunteer soldiering returned following the dispatch of a contingent of New South Wales soldiers to fight in the Sudan led to fears of a Russian attack on Australia. The resultant wave of patriotism forced the colonial governments to allow citizens to form new units of ""second-line"" troops who were not as well trained as the paid volunteers or voluntary militiamen. This wave of patriotism resulted in the development of the concept of mounted infantry soldiers within Australian forces, which would later be used in the Boer War and in the First World War as the ""light horse"", and it was around this time that an Australian character arguably began to develop amongst the colonial forces.
In 1889, Major General Bevan Edwards surveyed the military forces of the colonies and recommended that the colonies should combine their military forces and recommending the creation of a unified force of between 30,000 and 40,000 men, which would be organised into standard brigades consisting of foot and mounted infantry, engineers and artillery that could be rapidly mobilised through the establishment of defensive agreements between the colonies. For the most part up until that time colonial defensive strategy had revolved around the principle of static defence by infantry forces supported by coastal artillery, however, Edwards argued that through co-operative measures such as the standardisation of equipment and training, unification of command and improvements in railway and telegraph communications, ""efficient defence"" would be possible.
In the following decade, after a number of inter-colonial conferences, in the mid-1890s plans began to be developed regarding the establishment of a federal voluntary militia, although this fell through due when colonial rivalries prevented it from being established. The 1890s were also a period of economic hardship in Australia, the result of which was a reduction in the size of the permanent forces in a number of colonies, decreased training opportunities, reductions in pay for militia and decreased turn out in volunteer units, although this last effect was largely turned around by the mid-1890s when members of the militia and permanent forces who had been turned out due to economic circumstances joined the ranks of the volunteers.
At the same time, industrial disputes in Victoria and Queensland, led to the call out of military forces. Although these deployments successfully restored peace, it arguably led to the distrust of the military by working class Australians which later, along with competing imperial and national priorities, shaped the provisions of the Defence Act (1903) which was enacted to establish the structure of the Australian Army after Federation and which firmly established the Army at that time as a ""home service army"" made up primarily of citizen soldiers.
In late 1899, the outbreak of fighting in South Africa against the Boers, resulted in the dispatch of contingents from all colonies and an increase in volunteers serving in local units in Australia. Finally, on 1 March 1901, three months after the Federation of Australia became a reality, the Australian Army was formed and all colonial forces came under its control. Upon establishment, the authorised strength of the colonial forces that were transferred amounted to 1,665 officers and 28,385 other ranks, of which only 115 officers and 1,323 were permanent. The actual strength was a little below this establishment, consisting of only 1,480 officers and 25,873 other ranks. This included forces that were at that time deployed in South Africa which were also transferred to the Commonwealth."
Colonial forces of Australia,"New South Wales
The first military forces raised in the colony of New South Wales were formed in June 1801, when ""loyal associations"" formed mainly from free settlers, were established in Sydney and Parramatta in response to concerns about a possible uprising by Irish convicts. Consisting of about 50 men each, and receiving training from non-commissioned officers of the New South Wales Corps, these associations are reputed to have been ""reasonably efficient"". In 1803, in light of the influx of Irish political exiles a concerned Governor Phillip King, raised the Governor's Body Guard, a mounted unit, drawing its personnel from emancipists and former convicts who had been of excellent behaviour during their sentences."
Colonial forces of Australia,"On 4 March 1869, when the New South Wales Corps went into action to put down the Castle Hill convict rebellion, the locally raised Governor's Body Guard conducted reconnaissance patrols in front of the New South Wales Corps as they advanced towards the rebels, militia personnel from the Sydney and Parramatta Loyal Associations had taken over the role of guarding strategic locations to free up men from the New South Wales Corps. This unit was later disbanded in 1810, however, following the departure of the New South Wales Corps and the arrival of regular British infantry regiments, while the Governor's Body Guard was eventually amalgamated with the Mounted Police in the mid-1840s, before eventually being disbanded in 1860.
Following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 reductions in the size of the British Army began concerning the then Governor of New South Wales, Lachlan Macquarie, and it was at this point that considerations were given to forming a militia force in the colony, consisting four troops of cavalry and eight companies of infantry. These plans, however, were not acted upon, as the British garrison was expanded in the 1820s. Further plans were made in the 1840s and early 1850s, but these also came to nothing. The first steps towards developing a defence manufacturing industry in Australia came in 1845, however, when 5.5-inch mortar shells went into production in Sydney to meet the demand for high trajectory fire support for British infantry attacks on Maori forts in New Zealand.
With the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854, however, a local voluntary force consisting of one troop of cavalry, one battery of artillery, and a battalion of infantry was raised. The infantry force, consisting of six companies, was known as the Volunteer Sydney Rifle Corps. At its peak, the size of the New South Wales forces at this time was 389 men, however, following the cessation of hostilities with Russia in Crimea, these forces struggled to maintain numbers and government funding.
By 1855 New South Wales had been granted responsible self-government and increasingly took responsibility for its own affairs. The colony remained within, and was fiercely loyal to, the British Empire, and while the Colonial Office continued to determine foreign policy, the decision was taken in London that the Australian colonies would need to start taking responsibility for their own defence. In 1860, as British Army units were being sent to New Zealand, New South Wales attempted to raise a volunteer force of 1,700 men. This number was almost achieved with 1,644 volunteers enlisting, who were formed into one troop of mounted rifles, three batteries of artillery, and 20 companies of infantry. To encourage enlistments, land grants were offered in 1867. It was not considered a success. In 1868, these were later organised into a battalion and regimental structure. The Volunteer Sydney Rifle Corps ceased to exist, being subsumed into the 20 company-strong 1st Regiment, New South Wales Rifle Volunteers. During the New Zealand Wars, although the colony had no official role, New South Wales contributed significantly to the 2,500 volunteers that were sent from Australia in 1863.
The 1850s and 1860s saw further development of the system of defensive fortifications around Sydney. As a result of concerns about Russian attack, the construction of Fort Denison was completed and in 1856 gunners from the Royal Artillery arrived to man the defences. In 1863, a select committee had been formed. As a result of its recommendations, batteries were established along the principles of ""outer"" and ""inner"" lines making use of the newer, rifled weapons that had become available, which were established in barbettes along the living rock around the harbour. In 1865 John Soame Richardson was appointed to the command of the military forces of New South Wales, with the rank of lieutenant-colonel.
In 1869 the decision to withdraw all British units in 1870 had been confirmed. By 1871 the withdrawal of British forces from New South Wales was completed, and the local forces assumed total responsibility for the defence of New South Wales. In order to meet this requirement, in 1870 the New South Wales government decided to raise a ""regular"" or permanent military force, consisting of two infantry companies and one artillery battery, which were raised the following year. The infantry companies were short lived, being disbanded in 1873, however, the artillery battery, known as 'A' Field Battery, was successfully established in August 1871 to replace the units of the Royal Artillery that returned to Britain. Nevertheless, the majority of the New South Wales military were part-time, volunteer forces, which around this time consisted of about 28 companies of infantry and nine batteries of artillery. The entire force was reorganised by the Volunteer Regulation Act of 1867, which also gave provision for land grants in recognition of five years service.
The 1870s saw major improvements to the structure and organisation of New South Wales' colonial forces. Land grants for service were abolished after the government became aware that some members were selling the land for profit rather that living on it themselves, and partial payments introduced. 1876 saw a second permanent artillery battery established, and a year later a third was added. In 1877, the Engineers Corps and Signals Corps were established while in 1882 and in 1891 the Commissariat and Transport Corps, later to be known as the Army Service Corps, were raised. The physical infrastructure of defence in the colony was also improved, largely due to the recommendations of Jervois and Scratchley, with new forts such as Fort Scratchley and Bare Island being built, while existing locations were upgraded with new rifled muzzle loading guns."
Colonial forces of Australia,"When the government of New South Wales received news in February 1885, of the death of General Charles Gordon at Khartoum during the short-lived British campaign against the Dervish revolt in the eastern Sudan, they offered the British forces there the service of New South Wales forces. The offer was accepted, and within two weeks a force of 30 officers and 740 men comprising an infantry battalion, with artillery and support units, was enrolled, re-equipped and dispatched for Africa. They were farewelled from Circular Quay in Sydney on 3 March 1885 by an enormous public gathering and marching bands. The contingent was led by John Soame Richardson. Charles Fyshe Roberts assumed command of the New South Wales forces in Richardson's absence.
The New South Wales Sudan contingent arrived at Suakin on the Red Sea on 29 March 1885. There they joined Lieutenant General Gerald Graham's two British brigade's efforts against Osman Digna. Within a month of arriving, the New South Wales detachment had seen action at Tamai, becoming the first Australian raised military force to do so. By May 1885, the campaign had been reduced to a series of small skirmishes, the most significant of which for the New South Wales contingent came at Takdul on 6 May. Shortly afterwards, the British government requested to deploy the contingent to India where there were concerns about Russian intentions in Afghanistan, however public opinion in the colony was against the deployment. They subsequently returned to Sydney by 23 June 1885. Despite their service, and their engagements at Tamai and Takdul, the New South Wales Sudan contingent was ridiculed by the media upon their return to New South Wales. Nevertheless, the contingent's efforts were recognised with an official battle honour – ""Suakin 1885"" – which was the first battle honour awarded to an Australian unit.
The New South Wales School of Gunnery was established at Middle Head in 1885, while full volunteers were instituted again that year. At this time it was decided to raise a volunteer corps of cavalry who although they were required to supply their own horses, were to also be partially paid, and had uniforms and weapons supplied. They were eventually formed as a light horse unit and were known as the New South Wales Lancers. Another unit to be raised at this time was the Upper Clarence Light Horse, which had initially been raised by its colonel, Sir Charles Chauvel, father of Harry Chauvel, with the intention of being sent to India if the Russians became involved in Afghanistan; the offer was later rejected, however, when the men were attested they swore to volunteer for overseas service. Previous mounted rifles were merged with the Lancers. A further four batteries of reserve artillery were raised in 1885, but disbanded in 1892. The permanent forces also added units of submarine miners and mounted infantry, which were also soon disbanded.
The 1890s saw much restructuring, amidst economic hardships, with many units being formed and disbanded soon after, or merged with other units. Training opportunities were also reduced as the planned annual camps of 1892 and 1893, and militia pay levels, were reduced. Between 1893 and 1896, Major General Edward Hutton, a British Army officer, commanded the New South Wales Forces. He would later be instrumental in establishing the newly formed Australian Army. In 1894, a small group of New South Wales officers were offered the opportunity to serve with units of the British Indian Army to gain operational experience. Following in the footsteps of Captain Henry Airey, an artillery officer who had served with the British in 1887 in the Anglo-Burmese War and received the first Distinguished Service Order awarded to an Australian, at Hutton's behest four New South Wales officers, including Captain James Macarthur-Onslow, took up the offer. After completing his secondment, Macarthur-Onslow volunteered to delay his return and took part in the Chitral Expedition in early 1895.
Many of the volunteer units that were raised around this time often had affiliations with expatriate groups, and names such as the Scottish Rifles, the Irish Rifles, the St. George's Rifles, and the Australian Rifles, reflected this. By 1897, there was also the 1st Australian Volunteer Horse and the Railway Volunteer Corps, and a ""National Guard"" of volunteer veterans. The colony also began recruiting a small number of doctors, nurses, supply troops and engineer and machine gun units were raised. By 1900, the Civil Service Volunteer Infantry Corps, the University Volunteer Rifles Corps, the Canterbury Mounted Rifles, the Drummoyne Volunteer Company, the Army Nursing Service Reserve and Army Medical Corps had also been added."
Colonial forces of Australia,"Hostilities commenced in the Boer War in October 1899, and all the Australian colonies agreed to send troops in support of the British cause. The First New South Wales Contingent arrived in South Africa in November 1899. New South Wales' contribution was the largest amongst all of the colonies, with a total of 4,761 men being sent prior to Federation either at the colony's or Imperial expense. A further 1,349 were sent later as part of Commonwealth forces. The total size of the New South Wales contingent over the entire war was 6,110 troops of all ranks, which was broken down into 314 officers, and 5,796 other ranks. These men served various units including the New South Wales Infantry Company, the New South Wales Lancers, the New South Wales Mounted Rifles, the New South Wales Citizens Bushmen, and the New South Wales Imperial Bushmen. One member of the New South Wales forces, Lieutenant Neville Howse, a doctor in the New South Wales Medical Corps, received the Victoria Cross for his actions during the war, rescuing a wounded soldier under fire at Vredefort in July 1900.
A small detachment of New South Wales permanent infantry were deployed to China in September 1900 as part of the New South Wales Naval Brigade during the Boxer Rebellion. They returned to Australia in March 1901 without taking part in any significant actions. A survey of New South Wales' military forces on 31 December 1900, the day before Federation, found that the active forces consisted of 505 officers and 8,833 other ranks, 26 nurses, and 1906 civilian rifle club members. In addition to these forces, there was an inactive reserve of 130 officers and 1,908 other ranks."
Colonial forces of Australia,"Tasmania
In 1802, amidst the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, concerns about French interest in Australia drove an expansion of the British colony. French explorers had been encountered in the Pacific and in order to secure any strategic locations within the southern station of the Pacific Ocean which might have been of use to France, King dispatched an expedition to settle Van Diemen's Land. John Bowen, a 23-year-old lieutenant, had arrived in Sydney aboard HMS Glatton, on 11 March 1803. King considered him the right man for the task, and towards the end of August 1803, Bowen left for Van Diemen's Land aboard the whaler Albion. Accompanying him were three female and 21 male convicts, guarded by a company of the New South Wales Corps, as well as a small number of free settlers. A second ship, the Lady Nelson, joined them and in early September 1803 a settlement was established at Risdon Cove.
At the same time David Collins departed from England in April 1803, aboard HMS Calcutta with orders to establish a colony at Port Phillip. After establishing a short lived settlement near the current site of Sorrento, he wrote to King, expressing his dissatisfaction with the location, and seeking permission to relocate the settlement to the Derwent River. Realising that the fledgling settlement at Risdon Cove would be well reinforced by Collins' arrival, King agreed to the proposal. Collins arrived at the Derwent River on 16 February 1804, aboard Ocean. The settlement that Bowen had established at Risdon Cove did not impress Collins, and he decided to relocate the settlement 5 miles (8.0 km) down river, on the opposite shore. They landed at Sullivans Cove on 21 February 1804, and created the settlement that was to become Hobart. Soon after this, Collins decided that coastal defence was needed. A redoubt was dug not far from the settlement, and two ship's guns were placed within.
In 1810, the colony's garrison, which had until that time been provided by the New South Wales Corps, was relieved. They were subsequently replaced by a British regular infantry unit, the 73rd Regiment of Foot, which rotated duties between Sydney and Hobart. The following year, when Governor Lachlan Macquarie toured the Hobart Town settlement, he was alarmed at the poor state of defence, and the general disorganisation of the colony. Along with planning for a new grid of streets to be laid out, and new administrative and other buildings to be constructed, he commissioned the building of Anglesea Barracks, which opened by 1814. The same year, the 73rd was replaced by the 46th (South Devonshire) Regiment of Foot, who subsequently undertook a series of operations against bushrangers. By 1818, the Mulgrave Battery, consisting of six guns, had been built on Castray Esplanade, on the southern side of Battery Point upon the orders of Lieutenant Governor William Sorell. In 1824 the battery was expanded to include two 13-pounders and four 9-pounders; two other guns, 6-pounder brass pieces, were positioned in Angelsea Barracks.
The period of 1828 until 1832 was a violent one in the history of Van Diemen's Land. The rising friction and continuing conflicts between settlers and indigenous Tasmanians led to a declaration of martial law by Lieutenant Governor George Arthur. British regiments came into open conflict with the Aboriginals in what has since been dubbed the ""Black War"". In 1830, during the ""Black Line"" incident, groups of armed settlers and even some convicts began a series of military style operations in an effort to push the Tasmanian Aboriginals into a small pocket of land on the Tasman Peninsula in an unsuccessful attempt to isolate them, and prevent further conflicts between the two groups.
In 1838 plans were drawn up for a more elaborate network of coastal fortifications. Money did not permit all of the batteries to be established, but work was begun on the Queens Battery, located at the site of the regatta ground on the Queens Domain. The battery was set back by delays and funding problems, and was not completed until 1864 having taken more than 24 years.
By 1840, the newly arrived commander of the Royal Engineers, Major Roger Kelsall, was alarmed to discover how inadequately defended the now growing colony was. He drew up plans for the expansion of the Mulgrave Battery, and an additional fortification further up the slopes of Battery Point. Work began the same year using convict labour, and soon the Prince of Wales Battery, consisting of 10 guns, was completed. Despite these improvements, the battery was badly sited. As a result, at the height of the Crimean War in 1854, a third battery, known as the Prince Albert Battery was completed even higher behind the Prince of Wales Battery. By 1862, the guns allocated to these batteries were: four 32-pounders in the Albert Battery, six 32-pounders and four 8-inch in the Prince of Wales Battery and seven 32-pounders and four 8-inch in the Queens Battery. Another two 32-pounders were located at Denison."
Colonial forces of Australia,"In the late 1840s the question of raising local forces was considered; the size of the British garrison in the colony at the time was around 1,500, which was deemed more than sufficient to meet the colony's needs. As a result, it was estimated that only two artillery companies were required to augment the British garrison, which could be raised from among the local populace. This proposal was not acted upon, however. Following the decline of British military presence in Tasmania, the Governor of Tasmania felt the need to establish military forces capable of defending the colony. In 1859, the first local forces were raised in Tasmania. These consisted of two batteries of ""volunteer"" artillery, the Hobart Town Artillery Company and the Launceston Volunteer Artillery Company, which had initially begun its service as an infantry unit under the designation of the Launceston Volunteer Artillery Corps. Twelve companies of ""volunteer"" infantry were also raised. This force totalled 1,200 men. The infantry units that were raised at the time bore titles such as the Freemasons Corps, the Oddfellows, the Manchester Unity, the Buckingham Rifles, The City Guards, the Kingborough Rifles, the Derwent Rifles and the Huon Rifles. By 1865, the size of the colony's volunteer force began to decline. Although the infantry companies were disbanded in 1867, the artillery was increased by one battery.
1870 saw the complete withdrawal of British forces from Tasmania, which left the colony virtually defenceless. The existing fortresses had fallen into a state of decay and it was decided that the Prince of Wales and Prince Albert Batteries were inadequate for the defence of the town. As a result, in 1871 work was begun on another battery but it was stopped when funding ran out. Even if work had been completed, though, the battery would have been ineffective as there were no artillerymen to service the guns, as the Hobart Artillery had ""practically ceased to exist"", a situation which had also affected the Queens Battery, consisting of 10 guns, by the time also. In 1871, the Russian corvette Boyarin entered the Derwent unexpectedly. Nevertheless, between 1870 and 1878, the government was unwilling to provide funds for local forces.
When funding became available again in 1878, the Tasmanian Volunteer Force was established under the provisions of the Volunteer Act; Windle St Hill was commandant of the local forces from June 1878 to May 1880. This force consisted of two artillery batteries and four companies of infantry in Hobart and another battery and two infantry companies in Launceston. The following year the Tasmanian Light Horse was raised in Launceston. 1880 saw a reorganisation as the force was re-designated the ""Local Forces of Tasmania"", which were formed into two divisions spread across the north and south of the colony. By 1882, when Russian ships – the Afrika, Plastun, and Vyestnik – again paid the colony a visit, the strength of the colony's military was 634 men. Further reorganisations under commandant Colonel William Vincent Legge in 1882–83 resulted in the establishment of an engineer corps establishment, the disbandment of the light horse and the withdrawal of the right of the volunteer forces to elect their officers.
In 1885 annual Easter training camps were established; that year the size of Tasmania's military force had grown to 974 men. Work on the Kangaroo Bluff Battery was also completed at this time with the arrival of two 12.5 ton cannons from England. The first shots were fired on 12 February 1885. The Alexandra battery was also finished in 1885, and a force of permanent artillery was raised the following year. However, by 1893, an additional ""auxiliary"" force of 1,500 had also been raised and three years later the regiment consisted of three battalions, numbered consecutively, which were based in Hobart, Launceston and in the north west.
The economic depression of the early 1890s resulted in a reduction in the size of the colony's permanent artillery. In addition drastic cuts in payments for stores, grants and training also occurred. By the middle of the decade Tasmania's permanent artillery was basically ineffective, having been reduced to just eight men. The colony's artillery holdings the following year were four 12-pounder breech loaded (BL) guns and two 2.5-inch rifled muzzle loaders (RMLs). Despite the lack of government funding, however, between 1895 and 1897 volunteer units held a number of unpaid training camps. In 1897, a reorganisation of Tasmania's infantry saw the creation of the Tasmanian Regiment of Infantry, which was established with three battalions. Government funded training recommenced in 1898 and the following year a mounted infantry force and a medical corps was formed."
Colonial forces of Australia,"During the Boer War, the first Tasmanian colonial force that was dispatched was an infantry company that had been raised solely from members of the Tasmanian colonial forces, which departed in October 1899. Together with companies from four other colonies, they initially formed the 1st Australian Regiment. They were later converted into a mounted force and assigned to the 4th Mounted Infantry Corps seeing action at Hout Nek, Zand River, Bloemfontein, Diamond Hill, Balmoral, Belfast, Karee Kloof, Brandfort, Vet River, Zand River, Elandsfontein, Johannesburg, and Diamond River before returning to Australia in December 1900. The colony's second contingent left in February 1900. Drawing its personnel both from serving soldiers and civilians who volunteered for service, who were grouped together in the Tasmanian Citizens Bushmen, it was a mounted infantry unit. These mounted infantry units were primarily made up of volunteers who had good bushcraft, riding and shooting skills. They subsequently served in Rhodesia and western Transvaal.
The first two Victoria Crosses awarded to Australians in that conflict were earned by Private John Bisdee and Lieutenant Guy Wylly, both members of the Tasmanian Bushmen, in action near Warm Bad in 1900. A total of 179 Tasmanian troops were provided at the colony's expense, while a further 375 were provided under Imperial funds. Another 303 Tasmanians served as part of Commonwealth units.
On 31 December 1900 the day before Federation, a survey of the strength of colonial forces found that the Tasmanian colonial forces consisted of 113 officers and 1,911 other ranks. Upon Federation, all of the Australian colonial forces came under the control of the Federal Government of Australia. As a result, the Tasmanian Mounted Infantry units were redesignated as the 12th Australian Light Horse Regiment in 1903, while the three battalions of the Tasmanian Volunteer Rifle Regiment were re-designated as part of the Citizens Military Force becoming the Derwent Infantry Regiment (Hobart), the Launceston Regiment (Launceston), and the Tasmanian Rangers (North West)."
Colonial forces of Australia,"Western Australia
In the early 19th century, rumours of plans for a French colony in Western Australia drove British authorities to establish their own. In December 1826 the 1st/39th Regiment arrived at the King George Sound Settlement. In 1827, Captain James Stirling sighted the area surrounding the Swan River as being suitable for agriculture, and upon his return to England in July 1828, lobbied for the establishment of a free settler colony, unlike the penal settlements of eastern Australia. The British Government assented, and a fleet led by Charles Fremantle, aboard HMS Challenger returned along with two other vessels, Parmelia and HMS Sulphur, including a detachment of the 63rd Regiment of Foot, arriving to establish the Swan River Colony in 1829. In 1831, the 1st/39th Regiment left King George Sound.
Following the establishment of the Swan River Colony (later known as Western Australia), a detachment from 2nd/40th Regiment who were garrisoned in Sydney at the time, was dispatched to the new colony. Following them, were detachments from most of the regiments that were also serving in New South Wales. In addition to the British garrison, a small locally raised unit, known as the Swan River Volunteers, was established in 1829; all settlers between 15 and 50 years of age were obligated to serve and were required to supply their own weapons. Although provisions were made to pay these volunteers, the organisation was not successful, however, as the settlements were dispersed over wide areas, making concentration difficult, while economic considerations meant that it was not fully supported by settlers. In the early 1850s, a force of ""enrolled pensioners"" – former soldiers – were sent to the colony to bolster the British regular garrison and to guard convicts.
The Swan River Volunteers were reformed in 1860, although this proved short lived. In 1861 the British garrison was withdrawn from Western Australia, and so that year an Act of Parliament was passed authorising the creation of a corps of volunteers. Around this time, the colony's military forces totalled about 700 men serving in foot and mounted infantry units, organised into the Western Australian Volunteer Force which was raised primarily in Perth, Fremantle and Pinjarra. By 1862 the force consisted of units such as the Perth Volunteer Rifles, the Fremantle Volunteer Rifles and the Pinjarra Mounted Volunteers. Training was hard to come by, and although the unit was enthusiastic, records show that discipline and poor attendance became a problem as the number of volunteers fell. In an effort to rectify the situation, by January 1869, the government had introduced regulations relating to training and attendance, and although the force remained volunteer, a system of payments was instituted for those who met the minimum requirement of attendance to be considered ""efficient"". Nevertheless, overall funding remained low and by 1872 there were just 365 men ""under arms""."
Colonial forces of Australia,"Although the situation improved, the force was still amateurish. A reorganisation followed, and on 17 June 1872 the Metropolitan Rifle Volunteers were formed, with companies in Fremantle, Guildford, Albany, Geraldton, Northampton and York. In 1872, a troop from the West Australian Mounted Volunteers was converted to a horse artillery unit when they were entrusted with two breech-loading 12-pounders that had previously belonged to the enrolled pensioners that had been sent to the colony to guard convicts prior to the end of transportation. Further reorganisation occurred and in 1874 the infantry units of Perth, Fremantle and Guildford were amalgamated administratively to form the 1st Battalion, Western Australian Volunteers. More changes came the following year when promotions for officers were tied to examination performance, and field and barracks training was made available for all ranks. Corps were brought together annually, normally over Easter to practice manoeuvres, during which smaller units were merged with larger units; training became more organised and professional instructors were enlisted. By 1880 mounted infantry units had been established in Bunbury and Perth; that same year the force of enrolled pensioners was disbanded.
In 1883, the colony's military became subject to British military law in the event of war, although under the provisions of the  Volunteer Force Regulation Act 1883 a number of limitations were placed on its application. Around 1884, the colony's volunteer infantry were grouped into five battalion-level organisations: the Western Australian Volunteers, the Metropolitan Rifle Volunteers, the Albany Rifle Volunteers, the Geraldton Rifle Volunteers and the Fremantle Rifle Volunteers. That same year, the first annual continuous training camp took place. Held over the Easter weekend, camps took place at Albion and Geraldton. By 1885, the size of the colony's military force was just 578 men, although this increased to just over 700 in 1890. During the Russian war scare of 1885, however, Western Australia's mobilisation was small compared to other the colonies and limited only to an Easter muster of under 400 men. At King George's Sound, strategically important as a coaling station, the local force, the Albany Rifles, had disbanded due to ""disorganisation and inefficiency"" and although another unit, the Albany Defence Rifles, was raised at this time to fill the void, it was disbanded shortly after the crisis abated.
Further annual camps took place in 1888 at Greenmount and at Guildford the following year. Nevertheless, when Edwards delivered his report into the state of military forces in Western Australia in 1889, his assessment was that ""they were of little value as [a] defence force"". In 1890, in an effort to encourage participation an efficiency bonus was introduced which saw payments being made to volunteers who paraded 12 times a year and completed basic musketry training.
An economic downturn occurred shortly after this however, and this, coupled with the increased costs of maintaining the volunteer force, affected the government's ability to provide funding for training. In early 1893, a force from the Plantagenet Rifles, a volunteer infantry unit, were trained as gunners to assist the permanent force of South Australian artillery that had were manning the fort at Albany. Due to improvements in the economic circumstances of the colonies after the depression in the early 1890s, eight new artillery pieces, 9-pounder RMLs, were purchased in 1894; although these were technically obsolescent, they were nevertheless an improvement on the two 12-pounder Armstrong guns that they replaced. In 1896, the colony's artillery consisted of eight 9-pounders of the RML type and two 12-pounder RBL guns.
From 1893 to 1898 an annual camp was held in the vicinity of Perth, bringing together most of the force, although units from remote regions continued to undertake their training in isolation. In 1897, a system of ""partial pay"" was instituted. In 1899, an artillery force was raised by the colony to take over duties at Albany; this force was known as the Albany Volunteer Garrison Artillery. In July 1899, the 1st Infantry Regiment was formed from the 1st Battalion, Western Australian Volunteers, with three companies in Perth and Fremantle and one in Guildford.
The outbreak of the Boer War saw troops from the colony being sent to South Africa to fight. During the conflict, 349 men were dispatched from Western Australia at state expense, while a further 574 were deployed and paid for through Imperial funds. Another 306 were dispatched as Commonwealth troops later after 1901. One member of the Western Australian Mounted Infantry, Lieutenant Frederick Bell, received the Victoria Cross during the conflict. By the time the men had returned from war, Australia had federated and become the Commonwealth of Australia, and the Western Australian Defence Force, which then consisted of one mounted infantry regiment, two field artillery batteries, two garrison artillery companies, and an infantry brigade consisting of five battalions, were amalgamated into the newly formed Australian Army. On 31 December 1900, the day before Federation, a survey of the strength of colonial forces found that the Western Australian colonial forces consisted of 135 officers and 2,561 other ranks."
Colonial forces of Australia,"South Australia
South Australia was the only British colony in Australia which was not a convict colony. It was established as a planned free colony, and began on 28 December 1836. As such, garrisons were not required as prison guards, unlike the other colonies. However, Governor John Hindmarsh was escorted on HMS Buffalo by a contingent of nineteen Royal Marines. They were assigned to protect him and left South Australia when he departed the colony on HMS Alligator on 14 July 1838. A lack of any form of defence however, led to the creation of the Royal South Australian Volunteer Militia, consisting of an infantry company and two cavalry troops, in 1840, although it was disbanded in 1851; for the final six years of its existence it had been a force that had existed on paper only. The first artillery pieces arrived in South Australia aboard Buffalo, which landed two 18-pounder cannons, but initially there were no moves to form an artillery unit, so the guns were operated by Royal Engineers. In 1844 a request for further pieces was sent to the British government and two years later two light 6-pounders, two 12-pounder howitzers and two Cohorn mortars arrived with an ammunition store of about 500 rounds for each weapon type.
Despite the setback of the first attempt to form a militia, the idea of self-support was entirely ingrained in the foundation of the South Australian colony, and so in 1854 the Militia Act was passed, which allowed for compulsory enlistment of a force of 2,000 men between the ages of 16 and 46, although this option was never pursued. On 4 November 1854, amidst concerns surrounding the Crimean War, a new attempt was made to raise local militia forces in South Australia. The government proclaimed a general order that established the South Australian Volunteer Militia Force, which was to be organised into two battalions, each consisting of six companies of between 50 and 60 men, which would be known as the Adelaide Rifles.  The men received 36 days training, and then returned to their civilian jobs until needed. This force was short lived though, being disbanded upon the end of the Crimean War in 1856. A small force of artillery – about two companies – and some cavalry were also raised during this time, although almost no training was carried out and the artillery was employed mainly to fire a single shot every day from Port Adelaide to mark noon. A request for a further consignment of artillery pieces had been sent to Britain in 1854, but it was not until 1857 that the guns arrived. Two 9-pounders, two 6-pounders and four howitzers were received at this time.
However, the colonial government still felt uneasy about being undefended and a ""war scare"" with the French prompted further legislative revision. The Volunteer Force was reformed in 1859, and soon numbered 14 companies. The Adelaide Volunteer Artillery and the Port Adelaide Volunteer Artillery were also raised at this time. Worldwide artillery shortages due to the demands of the belligerents involved in the American Civil War meant that plans to expand the colony's artillery holdings were thwarted; as a result South Australia's armament consisted of only two 9-pounders, four 6-pounders, two 24-pound howitzers, four 12-pound howitzers and two Cohorn mortars. By the following year, the numbers of infantry had increased to 45 companies with a total of 70 officers and 2,000 men of other ranks. On 26 April 1860, the Adelaide Regiment of Volunteer Rifles was formed. In 1865 South Australia became the first state to introduce partially paid volunteers, which was a system all of the other colonies were soon to follow. This was brought about by the enacting of the Volunteer Act (1865) which divided all military forces into active and reserve forces. Due to organisational problems and lack of equipment, the Adelaide Regiment of Volunteer Rifles was again disbanded in early 1866, only to be reformed again in May 1866. By 16 November 1867, the Adelaide Regiment of Volunteer Rifles had been re-designated as the ""Prince Alfred's Rifle Volunteers"" following the Duke of Edinburgh's visit to Australia, but lack of funding saw them disbanded. A company of expatriate Scottish immigrants had formed The Scottish Company in 1865, and reformed as The Duke of Edinburgh's Own on 18 November 1867. In 1868, the colony's Whitworth 12-pounder guns, which had been purchased the year before, were fired for the first time when they were exercised at Glenelg. That year the two artillery companies were merged to form the South Australian Regiment of Volunteer Artillery.
The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in France on 19 July 1870, led the South Australian Governor, Sir James Fergusson, to conduct a review of the colony's defences. He determined to reorganise the force into two battalions of 500–600 men, two artillery batteries, and four troops of cavalry. However, his proposals received little backing from the colonial parliament, and were rejected by newly re-elected Premier John Hart. Some politicians felt it would help alleviate the high unemployment the colony was suffering at the time, but the majority felt the enormous cost outweighed the potential benefits. Once again the issue of funding stood in the way of South Australia having an efficient and ready regular military force.
The issue continued to be debated until 1875 when interest in military expansion was renewed amongst the colonial politicians. The government had been quite unstable for the first five years of the 1870s, but settled in 1875, allowing for more stable planning. Once again affairs of empires played a part. Russia was once again being perceived as a threat by all of the colonial governments following the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78.  Politicians came under pressure from the press and campaign groups to expand the defensive capacity of the colony.
Finally in May 1877, the South Australian Volunteer Military Forces was reformed consisting primarily of 10 companies of the Adelaide Rifles. The success of raising those units did not stop the political arguments over the issue with wrangling between Governor Sir William Jervois and Premier John Colton temporarily suspending further development. Despite all of the political setbacks, the Adelaide Rifles had soon grown to 21 companies, and on 4 July 1877 a second battalion was formed. The second battalion comprised the companies from Mount Gambier, Unley, and Port Pirie together with the Duke of Edinburgh's Own of Prince Alfred Rifle Volunteers. Training intensified briefly for the duration of the Russo-Turkish War, and then resumed at normal levels, with the 2nd Battalion being amalgamated with the 1st Battalion."
Colonial forces of Australia,"The two artillery companies were reformed at this time under the guidance of Colonel Major Francis Downes, a Royal Artillery officer. The ""company"" designation was dropped and ""battery"" was adopted, with the two subunits being designated 'A' and 'B' Battery. The colony's armament was boosted by the arrival of eight RML 16-pounder heavy field guns. In 1879, following the British defeat by the Zulus at Isandlwana, South Australia offered to send a contingent of troops to aid the British response. This offer was rejected, however. Although provisions had been made for a permanent artillery force to be raised in South Australia this was not undertaken and instead the guns at Fort Glanville – completed and under the command of Lieutenant Joseph Maria Gordon by 1882 – as well as the colony's field artillery, were manned by volunteers.
By 1885, the second infantry battalion was again reformed, consisting of the same companies as previously. At this time, South Australia's military strength was 3,195 men. By this time, a second fort, at Largs had been established, while another, Fort Glenelg, had also been planned, although by 1888 it had not been built and its guns, two 9.2-inch pieces, had been left dumped in the sand near the site.
In 1889 a third battalion of infantry was raised, although it was short lived as it was disbanded in 1895. In 1893, as part of the combined efforts of the six colonies to secure strategic points around the continent, South Australia provided a small garrison of 30 permanent artillerymen to crew three 6-inch guns that were established at Albany in King George's Sound in Western Australia. Up until 1896, all South Australian units trained only once a year at Easter. The commitment of the men, and constant restructuring and reorganising, were in direct response to perceived threats to the colony. By 1896, the colony's arsenal of field guns consisted of 11 pieces, of which eight were 16-pounder RML types and three were 13-pounder RMLs. The following year, the two artillery batteries were ""brigaded"" together under the South Australian Artillery Brigade.
Upon the outbreak of hostilities in the Boer War, many men from various South Australian units volunteered to participate with the Australian contingent. Any regiments whose men participated later received King's Colours and battle honours. The colony contributed 1,036 personnel to the conflict under its own banner and another 490 were sent as part of Commonwealth forces.
On 31 December 1900, the day before Federation, a survey of the strength of colonial forces found that the South Australian colonial forces consisted of 135 officers and 2,797 other ranks. Following South Australia's admission to the Commonwealth of Australia, all of the South Australian forces were drawn into the Australian Army. The 1st Battalion of the Regiment of Adelaide Rifles was redesignated as the 10th Australian Infantry Regiment (Adelaide Rifles), the 2nd Battalion became the South Australia Infantry Regiment, 'G' Company became the South Australia Scottish Infantry (Mount Gambier), and 'H' Company Scottish became 'G' Company (Scottish) South Australia Infantry Regiment. The artillery was also reorganised, with 'A' Battery becoming No. 1 South Australian Battery, Australian Field Artillery."
Colonial forces of Australia,"Victoria
The first attempt to establish a settlement in what is now Victoria was made by David Collins who departed from England in April 1803, aboard HMS Calcutta with orders to establish a colony at Port Phillip. It proved to be unsuitable and as a result was subsequently removed to Van Diemen's Land. Several journeys and explorers passed the northern coast of Bass Strait in the interim, but it was not until John Batman journeyed from Van Diemen's Land in 1835 to establish a farming community at what was to become Melbourne that the new colony was established. The new settlement's prime locality between New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land, and the natural resources of the area saw it grow rapidly. Initially the settlement was governed directly from Sydney, but by 1840, it was proposed that it should be self-governing. This was achieved on 1 July 1851."
Colonial forces of Australia,"Although there had been some plans to form local forces as early as 1824, these came to nothing and as a result, as with New South Wales, in Victoria the Crimean War served as a catalyst for the raising of volunteer forces. With only a small force of British troops in the colony, there were concerns about a possible Russian attack. As a result, at this time two units were formed, these being the Melbourne Volunteer Rifle Regiment and the Geelong Volunteer Rifle Corps. Other branches of service, such as cavalry, artillery, engineers, signals and torpedo units were raised after this, with the funding for many of these units being derived from private sources. These forces included the Victorian Yeomanry Corps.
In late December 1854 the newly formed Victorian Government faced their first crisis. Three years earlier, in 1851, gold had been discovered in Ballarat, and soon after in Bendigo, triggering the Victorian gold rush. The government imposed heavy mining taxes, which caused a miners revolt, culminating in the Eureka Stockade. About 1,000 miners fortified a position, and at 3:00 am on 3 December 1854, a party of 276 members from the 1st/12th and 2nd/40th Regiments supported by Victorian police, under the command of Captain John Thomas, approached the Eureka Stockade and a battle ensued. The police took up holding positions on two sides of the stockade, with a further unit of mounted police held in reserve. On a third side mounted members of the 2nd/40th pressed in, supported by a combined storming party made up from members of the 2nd/40th and the 1st/12th Foot East Suffolk which approached from the north and south. The miners, about 150 strong – of whom 100 were armed – were no match for the military and they were routed in less than 15 minutes, with six soldiers and 34 miners being killed. A contingent of the 1st/99th Regiment, then serving in Tasmania, was dispatched to aid them, however they were not required. The result of this action was the effect that it had on public opinion surrounding the issue of the British garrison's presence in Australia; a gathering of citizens in Melbourne shortly after the incident at Eureka expressed a desire for the creation of a ""constitution under which there would be no troops in the colony but for part-time citizens soldiers recruited from among the community"".
When the Crimean War ended in 1856, many of the local units that had been raised declined as the enthusiasm of Victorians for military service dwindled. Around this time, the rifle regiments and corps that had been raised were converted to artillery. When British troops began to be redirected from the Australian colonies to New Zealand in the early 1860s there was renewed interest in Victoria for raising local forces to take over more of the responsibility for garrison duties. From 1861 Victorian forces undertook annual training at Easter with the first camp being undertaken at Werribee. The Volunteer Act was passed in 1863, and this legislation allowed the government to raise a voluntary force consisting of various arms including infantry and artillery. There were around 13 companies of infantry volunteers in Victoria at this time, From 1863 all mounted troops in Victoria became part of the Prince of Wales' Light Horse. By December 1863, along with the 13 companies of infantry, there was one company of engineers and seven of artillery.
In 1870, the Victorian Permanent Artillery Corps, consisting of about 300 men, was raised. The colony's first permanent, or ""regular"" unit, it was created to take over responsibility for manning the fortifications that the British garrison had occupied prior to their departure. They were also used to instruct volunteer artillery units. Throughout the rest of the decade, Victoria's military remained roughly the same size, although it obtained higher levels of efficiency as training opportunities were expanded and its organisation was improved. By the time that the British garrison was withdrawn in 1871, the Victorian military consisted of 206 permanent troops and 4,084 militia and volunteers. The following year, the various volunteer rifle companies were re-organised, being placed into battalion-level structures which saw the establishment of two metropolitan battalions, as well as a battalion in Ballarat and another in Mount Alexander. In January 1879, a survey of the colony's military forces determined that there were 228 permanent staff, all of which were serving in the artillery, and 3,202 volunteers serving in the cavalry, engineers, artillery and infantry."
Colonial forces of Australia,"In 1880 the permanent artillery units were disbanded, but were later reformed in 1882 as the Victorian Garrison Artillery Corps. In 1884, the volunteer system was abolished and in its place a partially paid militia, who were obligated to serve for a minimum number of days each year, was established. With the exception of these changes, the others that occurred at this time were largely administrative and most units that existed before 1884 remained in existence. The following year, the Victorian Mounted Rifles – who were the first unit to adopt the iconic slouch hat – were formed, primarily recruiting in rural areas where men had already established horsemanship skills and thus did not need further training and were able to provide and maintain their own horse. In late 1888 or early 1889, the Victorian Rangers, a rural infantry unit, was also raised. Both rural units were not paid well, but did receive small allowances, and were made up primarily of members of local rifle clubs.
On 20 September 1889, Alexander Bruce Tulloch was appointed Commandant of the Victorian Military Forces, with the local rank of Major-General.
In the early 1890s, economic hardships reduced the ability of many volunteer units to maintain regular attendance. Nevertheless, at the start of the decade the Victorian Mounted Rifles were used by the Victorian government to provide assistance to police during a maritime strike.
In December 1892, men of the Echuca Company of the Victorian Rangers nearly sparked an inter-colonial incident between New South Wales and Victoria, by accepting an invitation to cross the colonial border of the Murray River to nearby Moama, to attend a patriotic march. However, crossing the border in uniform and under arms would have legally constituted an ""invasion"", and would have been in contravention of the military law of both colonies. Despite the social context of the event, and the nature of the Rangers' acceptance, the incident upset members of both colonies' governments, who were opposed to either colony allowing troops from the other to enter their territory. The event was defused without incident, but served to highlight how tense the colonies were about defence at the time. Eventually permission was granted for the men to enter New South Wales, and they performed marches and manoeuvres in front of a large reception.
By 1896, Victoria boasted the largest artillery arsenal of all the Australian colonies, possessing nineteen 12-pounder BL guns, six 12-pounder rifled breech loaders (RBLs) and another six 6-pounders of the same type. The Victorian Scottish Regiment was formed in 1898 as a volunteer unit, and by 1901 other infantry units in the Victorian forces consisted of five battalions of militia, as well as the Victorian Rangers and the Victorian Railways Infantry, both of which were volunteer units.
Upon the outbreak of the Boer War in South Africa on 12 October 1899, men volunteered for active service from every Australian colony. Victoria's contribution was second only to New South Wales in size, and comprised 193 officers and 3,372 men of other ranks. The Victorian contingent was involved in a remarkable victory when 50 men from the Victorian Bushmen were involved in the Battle of Elands River in July 1900. One Victorian, Lieutenant Leslie Maygar, received the Victoria Cross during the conflict.
On 31 December 1900, the day before Federation, a survey of the strength of colonial forces found that the Victorian colonial forces consisted of 301 officers and 6,034 other ranks. Shortly after Federation, on 1 March 1901, the units of the Victorian forces were transferred to the Australian Army."
Colonial forces of Australia,"Queensland
The colony of Queensland came into being on 6 June 1859, when it was established as a separate entity from New South Wales. The task of raising a military force for the new colony was commenced shortly after this and the first formation, a troop of mounted rifles, was established in early 1860. Together with a small amount of infantry and artillery, the colony's military forces totalled about 250 men at this time, who were based primarily in Brisbane and Ipswich. Although they were maintained through the volunteer system, these soldiers were partially paid through a system of subsidies and grants that were provided to enable them to buy the equipment and ammunition required to perform their duties.
The Queensland Rifle Association (QRA) was formed on 15 May 1861. Although the Rifle Association was independent of the Queensland Volunteer Force, it was formed largely to hone the marksmanship of the Volunteer Force. The relationship between the Queensland Rifle Association and the military continued for almost a century, being formally dissolved in 1960 when Australian Army funding for competition prizes and ammunition was withdrawn.
In 1867, the Spring Hill and Fortitude Valley Volunteer Rifle Corps was raised."
Colonial forces of Australia,"In order to encourage men to serve, land grants of 50 acres (200,000 m2) were provided for soldiers who completed five years. Nevertheless, the colony's military force grew only marginally; by 1876 there were 415 men under arms in the colony's service. These were distributed across two batteries of artillery in Brisbane and Ipswich, some Brisbane-based engineers and six companies of infantry in Brisbane, Ipswich, Warwick, Rockhampton and Toowoomba. In an effort to rectify the lack of manpower, Queensland passed the  Volunteer Act in 1878. Within two years the size of the force had grown to 1,219 men. That same year, 1880, payments to volunteers for attending annual camps were stopped.
British forces had been stationed at Somerset on Cape York between 1865 and 1867 because of the recognised strategic importance of the Torres Strait to the Australian colonies as a whole. After their withdrawal, Queensland maintained a token force there, but it was widely recognised as inadequate to prevent any serious threat. A fortified coaling station and a more serious force was raised to be stationed upon Thursday Island in 1877. Later, in the early 1890s, more serious moves would be taken to garrison the island as part of a concerted effort by all six colonies to protect a number of strategic points around the Australian continent. Queensland's part in this was to contribute financially, along with Western Australia, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia, to the purchase of the three 6-inch guns that were installed on the island, and also to provide the 30-man garrison from their permanent artillery force."
Colonial forces of Australia,"Throughout the early 1880s it became apparent that the volunteer system was not effective in meeting the colony's defence needs. As a result, a committee was established to review the situation. The inquiry found that Queensland's military force ""lacked cohesion and discipline"", recommending that the force should be maintained through a combination of volunteers and militia. These recommendations were not initially implemented, however, in 1884 a ""dual system"" was created when the Volunteer Act was repealed and, under the provisions of the newly enacted Queensland Defence Act, a militia was established into which all males between certain ages became liable to be conscripted if required. This militia, a partially paid force, was established in the metropolitan areas of the colony, while unpaid volunteer units continued to exist in rural areas. A reserve of officers was also created at this time, which could be drawn upon in times of conflict. Three militia infantry units came into being as a result of this development, the Moreton, Wide Bay and Burnett, and Kennedy Regiments; these were supported by three volunteer units, the Queensland Volunteer Rifles, the Queensland Scottish Volunteers and the Queensland Irish Volunteers.
Around the same time the Queensland government felt alarmed by the threat of the expansion by the German colony of German New Guinea, and believed that by securing the southeastern quarter of the island of New Guinea, they could provide more safety for shipping through the Torres Strait. As a result, in April 1883 the colony annexed the Territory of Papua for the British Empire. The British government, opposed to further colonial expansion, initially repudiated the action, but a firmer commitment by the Australian colonial governments eventually led to southern New Guinea (Papua) being declared an official British protectorate on 6 November 1884. In response, Germany annexed the northern portion the following month, expanding Kaiser-Wilhelmsland."
Colonial forces of Australia,"That same year Queensland provided for its first permanent forces. These came in the form of a permanent artillery battery, designated 'A' Battery, which was authorised in December 1884 and raised the following March. That year, 1885, in response to concerns about a possible war with Russia due to tensions between that nation and the British in India, Queensland forces were called up for continuous service over the Easter period, exercising at Fort Lytton.
In 1889, as part of Edwards' review of colonial military forces, the Queensland artillery exercised at Fort Lytton and engineers demonstrated their capability by detonating a number of submarine mines. Edwards was sufficiently impressed, concluding that the colony's forces were ""fairly satisfactory"", although he stopped short of stating that they were efficient. By 1891–92, the colony's military force consisted of 91 permanent soldiers, 3,133 militia and 841 volunteers.
This progress was lost, however, in the early part of the following decade as the Australian colonies were gripped by an economic depression which had the effect of reducing the amount of money spent on defence. Although the defence force was mobilised in 1891 to quell a shearers' strike, austerity measures resulted in the cancellation of the annual camp in 1893 and the disbandment of a number of units. The following year, the permanent artillery, which had been sent to garrison Thursday Island, was reduced, however, by 1895 the situation had improved and defence spending was increased again and Queensland's permanent artillery was again expanded. Recruitment into the foot and mounted infantry increased at this time also. A survey of field gun holdings in the colony in 1896 showed that there were four 12-pounder BL guns, twelve 9-pounder RMLs and five 12-pounder RBLs."
Colonial forces of Australia,"In July 1899, as tensions between British and Boer settlers in South Africa grew, Queensland pledged a force of 250 men in the event of war. The Boer War subsequently broke out on 11 October 1899 and over the course of the conflict Queensland contributed the third largest force of all the colonies, consisting of 733 troops provided at State expense and 1,419 at Imperial expense, who served in the Queensland Mounted Infantry and Queensland Imperial Bushmen. Following Federation, a further 736 Queenslanders would serve in Commonwealth units. Troops from the Queensland Mounted Infantry were involved in the first significant Australian action of the war when they took part in an attack on a Boer ""laager"" at Sunnyside on 1 January 1900, during which they lost two men killed and two wounded.
On 31 December 1900, the day before Federation, a survey of the strength of colonial forces found that Queensland's colonial forces consisted of 291 officers and 3,737 other ranks. On 1 March 1901, Queensland's military personnel came under the control of the Australian Army. These included three multi-battalion militia infantry regiments and two single-battalion militia infantry regiments, and two volunteer units, the Queensland Rifles and the Queensland Teachers Corps."
Colonial forces of Australia,"Surviving structures of the Queensland colonial armies
A number of structures from the Queensland colonial armies still survive and are heritage listed, including:"
Colonial forces of Australia,"Drill Shed in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane
Fort Lytton and Lytton Hill Signal Station in Lytton, Brisbane
Drill Hall in Southport, Gold Coast
Kissing Point Fortification and North Ward Defence Complex in North Ward, Townsville"
Colonial forces of Australia,"See also
Notes
Footnotes"
Colonial forces of Australia,Citations
Colonial forces of Australia,"
== References =="
Australian gold rushes,"During the Australian gold rushes, starting in 1851, significant numbers of workers moved from elsewhere in Australia and overseas to where gold had been discovered. Gold had been found several times before, but the colonial government of New South Wales (Victoria did not become a separate colony until 1 July 1851) had suppressed the news out of the fear that it would reduce the workforce and destabilise the economy.
The Australian gold rushes changed the convict colonies into more progressive cities with the influx of free immigrants.
After the California Gold Rush began in 1848, many people went there from Australia, so the New South Wales government sought approval from the British Colonial Office for the exploitation of mineral resources, and offered rewards for finding gold."
Australian gold rushes,"History of discovery
The first gold rush in Australia began in May 1851 after prospector Edward Hargraves with others  claimed to have discovered payable gold near Orange, at a site called Ophir. Hargraves had been to the Californian goldfields and had learned new gold prospecting techniques such as panning and cradling. Hargraves was offered rewards by the Colony of New South Wales and the Colony of Victoria. Before the end of the year, the gold rush had spread to many other parts of the state where gold had been found, not just to the west but also to the south and north of Sydney.
The Australian gold rushes changed the convict colonies into more progressive cities with the influx of free immigrants. These hopefuls, termed diggers, brought new skills and professions, contributing to a burgeoning economy. The mateship that evolved between these diggers and their collective resistance to authority led to the emergence of a unique national identity. Although not all diggers found riches on the goldfields, many decided to stay and integrate into these communities."
Australian gold rushes,"In July 1851, Victoria's first gold rush began on the Clunes goldfield. In August, the gold rush had spread to include the goldfield at Buninyong (today a suburb of Ballarat) 45 km (28 mi) away and, by early September 1851, to the nearby goldfield at Ballarat (then also known as Yuille's Diggings), followed in early September to the goldfield at Castlemaine (then known as Forest Creek and the Mount Alexander Goldfield) and the goldfield at Bendigo (then known as Bendigo Creek) in November 1851. Gold, just as in New South Wales, was also found in many other parts of the state. The Victorian Gold Discovery Committee wrote in 1854:The discovery of the Victorian Goldfields has converted a remote dependency into a country of world wide fame; it has attracted a population, extraordinary in number, with unprecedented rapidity; it has enhanced the value of property to an enormous extent; it has made this the richest country in the world; and, in less than three years, it has done for this colony the work of an age, and made its impulses felt in the most distant regions of the earth."
Australian gold rushes,"When the rush began at Ballarat, diggers discovered it was a prosperous goldfield. Lieutenant-Governor Charles La Trobe visited the site and watched five men uncover 136 ounces of gold in one day. Mount Alexander was even richer than Ballarat. With gold sitting just under the surface, the shallowness allowed diggers to easily unearth gold nuggets. In 7 months, 2.4 million pounds of gold was transported from Mount Alexander to nearby capital cities."
Australian gold rushes,"The gold rushes caused a huge influx of people from overseas. Australia's total population increased nearly four-fold from 430,000 in 1851 to 1.7 million in 1871. Australia first became a multicultural society during the gold rush period. Between 1852 and 1860, 290,000 people migrated to Victoria from the British Isles, 15,000 came from other European countries, and 18,000 emigrated from the United States. Non-European immigrants, however, were unwelcome, especially the Chinese: The Chinese were particularly industrious, with techniques that differed widely from the Europeans. This and their physical appearance and fear of the unknown led to them to being persecuted in a racist way that would be regarded as untenable today.In 1855, 11,493 Chinese arrived in Melbourne. Chinese travelling outside of New South Wales had to obtain special re-entry certificates. In 1855, Victoria enacted the Chinese Immigration Act 1855, severely limiting the number of Chinese passengers permitted on an arriving vessel. To evade the new law, many Chinese were landed in the south-east of South Australia and travelled more than 400 km across country to the Victorian goldfields, along tracks which are still evident today.
In 1885, following a call by the Western Australian government for a reward for the first find of payable gold, a discovery was made at Halls Creek, sparking a gold rush in that state."
Australian gold rushes,"Pre-rush gold finds
1788: A hoax
In August 1788, convict James Daley reported to several people that he had found gold, ""an inexhaustible source of wealth"", ""some distance down the harbour (Port Jackson, Sydney)"". On the pretence of showing an officer the position of his gold find, Daley absconded into the bush for a day. For this escapade, Daley was to receive 50 lashes. Still insisting that he had found gold, Daley next produced a specimen of gold ore. Governor Arthur Phillip then ordered Daley to again be taken down the harbour to point out where he had found the gold.
Before being taken down the harbour, after being warned by an officer that he would be put to death if he attempted to deceive him, Daley confessed that his story about finding gold was ""a falsehood"". He had manufactured the specimen of gold ore that he had exhibited from a gold guinea and a brass buckle and he produced the remains of the same as proof. For this deception, Daley received 100 lashes. Many convicts continued to believe that Daley had found gold, and that he had only changed his story to keep the place of the gold find to himself. James Daley was hanged in December 1788 for breaking and entering and theft.
Some convicts who were employed cutting a road over the Blue Mountains were rumoured to have found small pieces of gold in 1815."
Australian gold rushes,"1820: Blue Mountains, New South Wales
F. Stein was a Russian naturalist with the 1819–1821 Bellingshausen expedition to explore the Southern Ocean. Stein claimed to have sighted gold-bearing ore while he was on a 12-day trip to the Blue Mountains in March 1820. Many people were sceptical of his claim."
Australian gold rushes,"1823: Bathurst region, New South Wales
The first officially recognised gold find in Australia was on 15 February 1823, by assistant surveyor James McBrien, at Fish River, between Rydal and Bathurst, New South Wales. McBrien noted the date in his field survey book along with, ""At E. [End of the survey line] 1 chain 50 links to river and marked a gum tree. At this place I found numerous particles of gold convenient to river."""
Australian gold rushes,"1834: Monaro district, New South Wales
In 1834, with government help, John Lhotsky travelled to the Monaro district of New South Wales and explored its southern mountains. On returning to Sydney in that same year, he exhibited specimens that he had collected that contained gold."
Australian gold rushes,"1837: Segenhoe, New South Wales
In 1837, gold and silver ore was found about 30 miles (48 km) from Segenhoe near Aberdeen. The find was described in the newspapers as the discovery of a gold and silver mine about 30 miles from Thomas Potter Macqueen's Segenhoe Estate, by a Russian stockman employed in the neighbourhood of the discovery, which was located on Crown land."
Australian gold rushes,"1839: Bathurst region, New South Wales
Paweł Strzelecki, geologist and explorer, found small amounts of gold in silicate in 1839 at the Vale of Clwyd near Hartley, a location on the road to Bathurst."
Australian gold rushes,"1840: Lefroy, Tasmania
Gold is believed to have been found in Northern Tasmania at The Den (formerly known as Lefroy or Nine Mile Springs) near George Town in 1840 by a convict. In the 1880s, this became known as the Lefroy goldfields."
Australian gold rushes,"1841–1842: Bathurst and Goulburn regions, New South Wales
The Reverend William Branwhite Clarke found gold on the Coxs River, a location on the road to Bathurst, in 1841. In 1842, he found gold on the Wollondilly River. In 1843, Clarke spoke to many people of the abundance of gold likely to be found in the colony of New South Wales. On 9 April 1844, Clarke exhibited a sample of gold in quartz to Governor Sir George Gipps. In that same year, Clarke showed the sample and spoke of the probable abundance of gold to some members of the New South Wales Legislative Council including Justice Roger Therry, the member for Camden and Joseph Phelps Robinson, then member for the Town of Melbourne. 
In evidence that Clarke gave before a Select Committee of the NSW Legislative Council in September 1852, he stated that the subject was not followed up as ""the matter was regarded as one of curiosity only, and considerations of the penal character of the colony kept the subject quiet, as much as the general ignorance of the value of such an indication."" Towards the end of 1853, Clarke was given a grant of £1,000 (equivalent to A$77,000 in 2022) by the New South Wales government for his services in connection with the discovery of gold. The same amount (£1,000) was voted by the Victorian Gold Discovery Committee in 1854."
Australian gold rushes,"1841: Pyrenees Ranges and Plenty Ranges, Victoria
Gold was found in the Pyrenees Ranges near Clunes, and in the Plenty Ranges near Melbourne in 1841; the gold was sent to Hobart, where it was sold."
Australian gold rushes,"From 1843: Victoria
Beginning in 1843, gold samples were brought several times into the watchmaker's shop of T. J. Thomas in Melbourne by ""bushmen"". The specimens were looked upon as curiosities."
Australian gold rushes,"1844: Bundalong, Victoria
A shepherd named Smith thought that he had found gold near the Ovens River in 1844, and reported the matter to Charles La Trobe, who advised him to say nothing about it."
Australian gold rushes,"1845: Middle Districts, New South Wales
On 12 December 1845, a shepherd walked into the George Street, Sydney, shop of goldsmith E. D. Cohen carrying a specimen of gold embedded in quartz for sale, with the gold weighing about four ounces (113 g), with the shepherd saying he had been robbed of double as much on his way to town. The shepherd did not disclose where he had found the gold; instead, he intimated that, if men were to take engagements with squatters, they, in addition to receiving their wages, may also discover a gold mine."
Australian gold rushes,"1846: Castambul, South Australia
Gold was found in South Australia and Australia's first gold mine was established. From the earliest days of the Colony of South Australia men, including Johannes Menge the geologist with the South Australian Company, had been seeking gold. ""Armed with miner's pick, numberless explorers are to be found prying into the depths of the valleys or climbing the mountain tops. No place is too remote"". 
Gold was found in January 1846 by Captain Thomas Terrell at the Victoria Mine near Castambul, in the Adelaide Hills, South Australia, about 10 miles (16 km) east of Adelaide. Some of the gold was made into a brooch sent to Queen Victoria. Samples were displayed at the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1851. Share prices rose from £2 to £30, but soon fell back to £3 when no further gold was found. Unfortunately for the investors, and everyone else concerned, the mine's total gold production never amounted to more than 24 ounces (680 g)."
Australian gold rushes,"1847: Victoria
Gold was found at Port Phillip (Victoria) by a shepherd. About April 1847, a shepherd took a sample of ore about the size of an apple, that he believed to be copper, into the jewellery store of Charles Brentani in Collins Street, Melbourne, where the sample was purchased by an employee, Joseph Forrester, a gold and silver smith. The shepherd refused to disclose to Forrester where he had obtained the nugget, but stated that ""there was plenty more of it where it came from"" on the station where he worked about 60 miles (97 km) from Melbourne. The sample was tested by Forrester and found to be 65 percent virgin gold. A sample of this ore was given to Captain Clinch who took it to Hobart."
Australian gold rushes,"1847: Beaconsfield, Tasmania
It is said that John Gardner found gold-bearing quartz in 1847 on Blythe Creek, near Beaconsfield, on the other side of the Tamar River from George Town."
Australian gold rushes,"1848: Wellington, New South Wales
Gold was found by a shepherd named McGregor at Mitchells Creek near Wellington, New South Wales, in 1848 on the Montefiore's squatting run, ""Nanima"". The Bathurst Free Press noted, on 25 May 1850, that ""Neither is there any doubt in the fact that Mr M'Gregor found a considerable quantity of the precious metal some years ago, near Mitchell's Creek, and it is surmised he still gets more in the same locality."""
Australian gold rushes,"1848: Bathurst, New South Wales
William Tipple Smith found gold near Bathurst in 1848. Smith, a mineralogist and manager of the Fitzroy Ironworks in New South Wales, had been inspired to look for gold near Bathurst by the ideas of Roderick Murchison, president of the Royal Geographical Society, who in 1844 in his first presidential address, had predicted the existence of gold in Australia's Great Dividing Range, ideas which were published again in ""The Sydney Morning Herald"" on 28 September 1847 suggesting that gold ""will be found on the western flanks of the dividing ranges"". Smith sent samples of the gold he found to Murchison. Governor FitzRoy visited the Fitzroy Ironworks, in late January 1849, and he was presented with ""an elegant knife, containing twelve different instruments, of colonial workmanship, (mounted in colonial gold) the steel of which was smelted from the ore taken from the Fitz Roy mine""."
Australian gold rushes,"1848–1884: Pre–gold rush finds in Western Australia
Gold was first detected in Western Australia in 1848 in specimens sent for assay to Adelaide from copper and lead deposits found in the bed of the Murchison River, near Northampton, by explorer James Perry Walcott, a member of A. C. Gregory's party:In 1852–53 rich specimens of gold-bearing stone were found by shepherds and others in the eastern districts, but they were unable afterwards to locate the places where the stone was discovered. The late Hon A. C. Gregory found traces of gold in quartz in the Bowes River in 1854. In 1861 Mr Panton found near Northam, while shortly afterwards a shepherd brought in rich specimens of auriferous quartz which he had found to the eastward of Northam, but he failed to locate the spot again.Various small finds were made up to 1882, when Alexander McRae found gold between Cossack and Roebourne, with one nugget weighing upwards of 9 dwt (14 g).
Edward Hardman, Government Geologist, found traces of gold in the East Kimberley in 1884. His report about his finds subsequently led to the discovery of payable gold and the first Western Australian gold rush."
Australian gold rushes,"1848–1850: Pyrenees Ranges, Victoria
Gold was found in the Pyrenees Ranges in 1848 by a shepherd, Thomas Chapman. In December 1848, Chapman came into the jewellery store of Charles Brentani, in Collins Street, Melbourne, with a stone that he had ""held for several months"". Chapman said that he had found the gold where he worked on Charles Browning Hall (later Gold Commissioner) and Edmund McNeill's station at Daisy Hill (near Amherst) in the Pyrenees Ranges. Alexandre Duchene and Joseph Forrester, both working for Charles Brentani, confirmed the stone contained a total of 38 ounces (1,077 grams) of 90 percent pure gold, and Brentani's wife Ann purchased the stone on behalf of her husband.
A sample of this ore was given to Captain Clinch, who took it to Hobart; Captain White, who took it to England; and Charles La Trobe. As a consequence of the gold find by Chapman, official printed notices were posted on a number of prominent places in the town (Melbourne) proclaiming the fact that gold had been found in Port Phillip (Victoria). The Bertini's shop was thronged by persons wanting to see the nugget and asking where it had been found. This find sparked a mini gold rush with about a hundred men rushing to the site. This could perhaps be categorised as the first, though unofficial, gold rush in Victoria, or perhaps the gold rush that was stamped out.
Charles La Trobe quickly put an end to the search for gold in February 1849 by ordering 10 mounted police, William Dana and Richard McLelland in charge of 8 native troopers, to 'take possession of the Gold-mine', 'prevent any unauthorised occupation of Crown Lands in the neighbourhood' (Hall and McNeill's station was leased from the Crown), dismiss the gold-seekers and prevent any further digging at Daisy Hill. The story was then dismissed by some of the press as a hoax. This did not stop people finding gold. In 1850, according to Brentani's wife Ann, the ""gold came down from the country in all directions"". She and her husband purchased as much as they could but had difficulty in supplying the money."
Australian gold rushes,"1849: Lefroy, Tasmania
The first substantiated find of gold in Tasmania was reported to have been made by a Mr Riva of Launceston, who is stated to have traced gold in slate rocks in the vicinity of The Den (formerly known as Lefroy or Nine Mile Springs) near George Town in 1849."
Australian gold rushes,"1849: Woady Yaloak River, Victoria
The following news item from the Geelong Advertiser of 10 July 1849 shows the attitude of scepticism towards gold finds that were being brought into towns like Geelong during the pre–gold rush period:GOLD. – A specimen of this valuable mineral was brought into town yesterday, having been picked up in a locality near the Wardy-yallock River. Of the identity of the metal there can be no mistake; but whether it was really taken from the spot indicated, or intended merely as a hoax or perhaps a swindle, it is quite impossible, at the present moment, to say. The piece exhibited, is of very small size; but, of course, as in all such instances, the lucky finder can obtain tons from the same spot by the simple mode of stooping down and picking it up.The attitude was completely different just a couple of years later in 1853 after the Victorian gold rushes had begun:Smythe's Creek, a branch of the Wardy Yallock river, is also attracting its share of the mining population, who are doing tolerably well. One very fine sample of gold has also been received in town during the week from the Wardy Yallock itself, found in the locality where the exploring party of last winter ended their labours. The parcel is small,- only 22 dwts. [34 g], but was obtained by one man in a week from very shallow surfacing."
Australian gold rushes,"1850: Clunes, Victoria
In March 1850, pastoralist William Campbell found several minute pieces of native gold in quartz on the station of Donald Cameron at Clunes. William Campbell is notable as having been the first member of the electoral district of Loddon of the Victorian Legislative Council from November 1851 to May 1854. In 1854, Campbell received a £1,000 reward (equivalent to A$91,000 in 2022) from the Victorian Gold Discovery Committee as the original discoverer of gold at Clunes. At the time of the find in March 1850, Campbell was in the company of Donald Cameron, Cameron's superintendent, and a friend. 
This find was concealed at the time because of the fear it would bring undesirable strangers to the run. Observing the migration of the population of New South Wales and the panic created throughout the whole colony, and especially in Melbourne, and further motivated by a £200 reward (equivalent to A$32,000 in 2022) that had been offered the day previous to anyone who could find payable gold within 200 miles (320 km) of Melbourne, on 10 June 1851, Campbell addressed a letter to merchant James Graham (member of Victorian Legislative Council 1853–1854 and 1867–1886) stating that within a radius of 15 miles of Burn Bank, on another party's station, he had procured specimens of gold. 
Campbell divulged the precise spot where the gold had been found in a letter to Graham dated 5 July 1851. Prior to this date, however, James Esmond and his party were already at work there mining for gold. This was because Cameron had earlier shown specimens of the gold to George Hermann Bruhn, a German doctor and geologist whose services as an analyst were in great demand. Communication of this knowledge by Hermann to James Esmond was to result in the discovery by Esmond on 1 July 1851 of payable quantities of alluvial gold at Clunes and lead to the first Victorian gold rush."
Australian gold rushes,"Notable gold finds that started rushes
February 1851: Orange, New South Wales
Edward Hargraves, accompanied by John Lister, found five specks of alluvial gold at Ophir near Orange in February 1851. In April 1851, John Lister and William Tom, trained by Edward Hargraves, found 120 grams of gold. This discovery, instigated by Hargraves, led directly to the beginning of the gold rush in New South Wales. This was the first gold rush in Australia. It was in full operation by May 1851, even before it was officially proclaimed on 14 May 1851. 
There were an estimated 300 diggers in place by 15 May 1851. Before 14 May 1851, gold was already flowing from Bathurst to Sydney, an example being when Edward Austin brought to Sydney a nugget of gold worth £35 (equivalent to A$6,000 in 2022), which had been found in the Bathurst District.
In 1872, a large gold and quartz ""Holtermann Nugget"" was discovered by the night shift, in a mine part owned by Bernhardt Holtermann at Hill End, near Bathurst, New South Wales. It was the largest specimen of reef gold ever found: 1.5 meters (59 inches) long, weighing 286 kg (631 lb), in Hill End, near Bathurst, and with an estimated gold content of 5,000 ounces (140 kg)."
Australian gold rushes,"April 1851: Castlemaine district and Clunes, Victoria
In January 1851, before Hargraves' find of gold in February 1851 at Ophir, George Hermann Bruhn left Melbourne to explore the mineral resources of the countryside of Victoria. On his trek, Bruhn found, on a date unknown, indications of gold in quartz about 2 miles (3.2 km) from Edward Stone Parker's station at Franklinford, between Castlemaine and Daylesford. After leaving Parker's station, Bruhn arrived at Donald Cameron's station at Clunes in April 1851. "
Australian gold rushes,"Cameron showed Bruhn samples of the gold that had been found on his station at Clunes in March 1850. Bruhn explored the countryside and found quartz reefs in the vicinity. ""This information he promulgated through the country in the course of his journey."" One of the people to whom Bruhn communicated this information was James Esmond, who was at that time engaged in erecting a building on James Hodgkinson's station ""Woodstock"" at Lexton about 16 miles (26 km) to the west of Clunes. This then indirectly led to the first gold rush in Victoria from Esmond's discovery of payable gold at Clunes in July 1851.
Bruhn forwarded specimens of gold to Melbourne, which were received by the Gold Discovery Committee on 30 June 1851. In 1854, Bruhn received a £500 reward (equivalent to A$46,000 in 2022) from the Victorian Gold Discovery Committee ""in acknowledgment of his services in exploring the country for five or six months, and for diffusing the information of the discovery of gold""."
Australian gold rushes,"June 1851: Sofala, New South Wales
Gold was found at the Turon Goldfields at Sofala in June 1851."
Australian gold rushes,"June 1851: Warrandyte, Victoria
On 9 June 1851 a reward of £200 (equivalent to A$34,000 in 2022) was offered to the first person to discover payable gold within 200 miles (320 km) of Melbourne. Henry Frencham, then a reporter for The Times, and shortly afterwards for The Argus, was determined to be one of the persons to claim this reward. On 11 June 1851, he formed one of a party of 8 to search for gold north and north-east of Melbourne. Only 2 days later, the party had dwindled to two men, Frencham and W. H. Walsh, who found what they thought to be gold at Warrandyte. At 5pm on 13 June 1851, Frencham deposited with the Town Clerk at Melbourne, William Kerr, specimens of gold. The next day, the headline in The Times newspaper was ""Gold Discovery"". 
On 24 June 1851, Frencham and Walsh lodged a claim for the reward offered by the Gold Committee for the discovery of a payable goldfield in the Plenty Ranges about 25 miles (40 km) from Melbourne. The claim was not allowed. The specimens were tested by chemists Hood and Sydney Gibbons who could not find a trace of gold, but this may have been because they had little expertise in the area. Even if they had determined that the samples contained gold, however, it was not payable gold. Frencham always claimed to have been the first to find gold in the Plenty Ranges.
On 30 June 1851, gold was definitely found about 36 km (22 mi) north-east of Melbourne in the quartz rocks of the Yarra Ranges at Anderson's Creek, Warrandyte, Victoria by Louis John Michel, William Haberlin, James Furnival, James Melville, James Headon and B.Gruening. This gold was shown at the precise spot where it had been found to Webb Richmond, on behalf of the Gold Discovery Committee, on 5 July, the full particulars of the locality were communicated to the Lieutenant-Governor on 8 July and a sample was brought to Melbourne and exhibited to the Gold Discovery Committee on 16 July. As a result, the Gold Discovery Committee were of the opinion that this find was the first publisher of the location of the discovery of a goldfield in the Colony of Victoria. 
This site was later named as Victoria's first official gold discovery. Michel and his party were in 1854 to receive a £1,000 reward (equivalent to A$91,000 in 2022) from the Victorian Gold Discovery Committee ""as having, at considerable expense, succeeded in discovering and publishing an available goldfield"". On 1 September 1851, the first gold licences in Victoria were issued to dig for gold in this locality, ""which was previous to their issue on any other Goldfield"". About 300 people were at work on this goldfield prior to the discovery of Ballarat."
Australian gold rushes,"July 1851: Clunes, Victoria
On 1 July 1851, Victoria became a separate colony, and, on the same day, James Esmond—in company with Pugh, Burns and Kelly—found alluvial gold in payable quantities near Donald Cameron's station on Creswick's Creek, a tributary of the Loddon, at Clunes, 34 km (21 mi) north of Ballarat. Esmond and his party found the gold after Esmond had been told by George Hermann Bruhn of the gold that had been found in March 1850 on Cameron's property at Clunes and that in the vicinity were quartz reefs which were likely to bear gold. Esmond rode into Geelong with a sample of their discovery on 5 July. News of the discovery was published first in the Geelong Advertiser on 7 July and then in Melbourne on 8 July:Gold in the Pyrenees. The long sought treasure is at length found! Victoria is a gold country, and from Geelong goes forth the first glad tidings of the discovery. Esmonds arrived in Geelong on Saturday with some beautiful specimens of gold, in quartz, and gold-dust in a ""debris"" of the same species of rock. The specimens have been subjected to the most rigid test by Mr Patterson, in the presence of other competent parties, and he pronounced them to be beyond any possibility of doubt pure gold...The particulars of the precise location, with Esmond's consent, was published in the Geelong Advertiser on 22 July 1851. Publication of Esmond's find started the first official gold rush in Victoria in that same month. By 1 August between 300 and 400 diggers were encamped on the Clunes Goldfield, but soon moved to other fields as news of other gold discoveries spread. Esmond was in 1854 to receive a £1,000 reward (equivalent to A$91,000 in 2022) as ""the first actual producer of alluvial gold for the market""."
Australian gold rushes,"July 1851: Bungonia and other finds, New South Wales
The following goldfields were discovered in New South Wales during July 1851:"
Australian gold rushes,"Bungonia (aka Shoalhaven),
Hill End,
Louisa Creek (now Hargraves) near Mudgee
Moruya"
Australian gold rushes,"July 1851: Castlemaine, Victoria
On 20 July 1851, gold was found near present-day Castlemaine, Victoria (Mt Alexander Goldfields), at Specimen Gully in today's Castlemaine suburb of Barkers Creek. The gold was first found by Christopher Thomas Peters, a shepherd and hut-keeper on the Barker's Creek, in the service of William Barker. When the gold was shown in the men's quarters Peters was ridiculed for finding fool's gold, and the gold was thrown away. Barker did not want his workmen to abandon his sheep, but in August they did just that. 
John Worley, George Robinson and Robert Keen, also in the employ of Barker as shepherds and a bullock driver, immediately teamed with Peters in working the deposits by panning in Specimen Gully, which they did in relative privacy during the next month. When Barker sacked them and ran them off for trespass, Worley, on behalf of the party ""to prevent them getting in trouble"", mailed a letter to The Argus dated 1 September 1851 announcing this new goldfield with the precise location of their workings. This letter was published on 8 September 1851. 
""With this obscure notice, rendered still more so by the journalist as 'Western Port', were ushered to the world the inexhaustible treasures of Mount Alexander"", also to become known as the Forest Creek diggings. Within a month there were about 8,000 diggers working the alluvial beds of the creeks near the present day town of Castlemaine, and particularly Forest Creek which runs through the suburb today known as Chewton where the first small township was established. By the end of the year there were about 25,000 on the field."
Australian gold rushes,"August 1851: Buninyong, Victoria
On 8 August 1851, an auriferous deposit of gold was found 3 kilometres west of Buninyong, Victoria, near Ballarat. The gold was discovered in a gully in the Buninyong ranges, by a resident of Buninyong, Thomas Hiscock. Hiscock communicated the find, with its precise locality, to the editor of the Geelong Advertiser on 10 August. In that same month prospectors began moving from the Clunes to the Buninyong diggings. Hiscock was in 1854 to receive £1,000 (equivalent to A$91,000 in 2022) reward from the Victorian Gold Discovery Committee as the substantial discoverer of the gold deposits of ""superior value"" in the Ballarat area."
Australian gold rushes,"August 1851: Ballarat, Victoria
On 21 August 1851, gold was found at Ballarat, Victoria, in Poverty Point by John Dunlop and James Regan. Ballarat is about 10 km (6.2 mi) from Buninyong and upon the same range. John Dunlop and James Regan found their first few ounces of gold while panning in the Canadian Creek after leaving the Buninyong diggings to extend their search for gold. However, Henry Frencham, a newspaperman who in June had claimed, unsuccessfully, the £200 (equivalent to A$17,000 in 2022) reward for finding payable gold within 200 miles (320 km) of Melbourne, had followed them and noticed their work. As a result, they only had the rich Ballarat goldfield to themselves for a week. 
By early September 1851, what became known as the Ballarat gold rush had begun, as reported from the field by Henry Frencham, then a reporter for The Argus. (Henry Frencham claimed in his article of 19 September 1851 to have been the first to discover gold at Ballarat [then also known as Yuille's Diggings] ""and make it known to the public"", a claim he was later to also make about Bendigo, and which resulted in the sitting of a Select Committee of the Victorian Legislative Assembly in 1890.)
In the report of the Committee on the Claims to Original Discovery of the Goldfields of Victoria published in The Argus newspaper of 28 March 1854, however, a different picture of the discovery of gold at Golden Point at Ballarat is presented. They stated that Regan and Dunlop were one of two parties working at the same time on opposite sides of the ranges forming Golden Point, the other contenders for the first finders of gold at Ballarat being described as ""Mr Brown and his party"".
The committee stated that ""where so many rich deposits were discovered almost simultaneously, within a radius of little more than half a mile, it is difficult to decide to whom is due the actual commencement of the Ballarat diggings."" They also agreed that the prospectors ""had been attracted there (Ballarat) by the discoveries in the neighbourhood of Messrs. Esmonds (Clunes) and Hiscock (Buninyong)"" and ""by attracting great numbers of diggers to the neighbourhood"" that ""the discovery of Ballarat was but a natural consequence of the discovery of Buninyong"".
In 1858, the ""Welcome Nugget"" weighing 2,217 troy ounces 16 pennyweight (68.98 kg) was found at Bakery Hill at Ballarat by a group of 22 Cornish miners working at the mine of the Red Hill Mining Company."
Australian gold rushes,"September 1851: Bendigo, Victoria
It has been claimed that Gold was first found at Bendigo, Victoria, in September 1851.
The four sets of serious contenders for the first finders of gold on what became the Bendigo goldfield are, in no particular order:"
Australian gold rushes,"Stewart Gibson and Frederick Fenton. Stewart Gibson was one of the two brothers who owned/leased the Mount Alexander North Run in 1851, and Frederick Fenton was the then manager/overseer and later owner. Fenton claimed that he and (his brother-in-law) Stewart Gibson had been together when in they found gold in a water-hole near the junction of Bendigo Creek with what later became known as Golden Gully in September 1851, just before shearing commenced, but they decided at the time to keep it quiet;
one or more of the shepherds living in the hut, named the Bendigo hut, on the Mount Alexander North Run near the junction of Bendigo Creek with what later became known as Golden Gully, a hut that was within yards of ""The Rocks"". These were James Graham (alias Ben Hall), Benjamin Bannister, and hut-keeper Christian Asquith, and/or a Sydney-born cook/shepherd who visited them at the hut named William Johnson. These men were mentioned in the evidence of many witnesses at the 1890 Select Committee;
one or more of Mrs Margaret Kennedy, Mrs Julia Farrell, and/or Margaret Kennedy's 9-year-old son from her first marriage, John Drane; and
one or both of the husbands of the two women named above. John ""Happy Jack"" Kennedy, was shepherd/overseer of the Mount Alexander Run who had a hut named after him on the Bullock Creek at what is today known as Lockwood South, and Patrick Peter Farrell was a self-employed cooper working on the Mount Alexander Run during the shearing season. Farrell gave evidence to the 1890 Select Committee that he had been the first to find gold, and Kennedy made similar claims during his lifetime which were published in his obituary in 1883.
According to the Bendigo Historical Society, it has today, contrary to the findings of the Select Committee of 1890, become ""generally agreed"" or ""acknowledged"" that gold was found at Bendigo Creek by two married women from the Mount Alexander North Run (later renamed the Ravenswood Run), Margaret Kennedy and Julia Farrell. A monument to this effect was erected by the City of Greater Bendigo in front of the Senior Citizens Centre at High Street, Golden Square on 28 September 2001.
This acknowledgement is not shared by contemporaneous historians such as Robert Coupe who wrote in his book Australia's Gold Rushes, first published in 2000, that ""there are several accounts of the first finds in the Bendigo area"". Also, as stated by local Bendigo historian Rita Hull: ""For decades many historians have made the bold statement that Margaret Kennedy and her friend Julia Farrell were the first to find gold at Bendigo Creek, but on what grounds do they make this statement?"".
On September 1890, a Select Committee of the Victorian Legislative Assembly began sitting to decide who was the first to discover gold at Bendigo. They stated that there were 12 claimants who had made submissions to being the first to find gold at Bendigo (this included Mrs Margaret Kennedy but not Mrs Julia Farrell, who was deceased), plus the journalist Henry Frencham who claimed to have discovered gold at Bendigo Creek in November 1851. (Frencham had previously also claimed to have been the first to have discovered gold at Warrandyte in June 1851 when he, unsuccessfully, claimed the £200 (equivalent to A$17,000 in 2022) reward for finding payable gold within 200 miles (320 km) of Melbourne; and then he also claimed to be the first to have discovered gold at Ballarat [then also known as Yuille's Diggings] ""and make it known to the public"" in September 1851.)
According to a Select Committee of the Victorian Parliament, the name of the first discoverer of gold on the Bendigo goldfield is unknown. The Select Committee inquiring into this matter in September and October 1890 examined many witnesses but was unable to decide between the various claimants. They were, however, able to decide that the first gold on the Bendigo goldfields was found in 1851 at ""The Rocks"" area of Bendigo Creek at Golden Square, which is near where today's Maple Street crosses the Bendigo Creek. As the date of September 1851, or soon after, and place, at or near ""The Rocks"" on Bendigo Creek, were also mentioned in relation to three other sets of serious contenders for the first finders of gold on what became the Bendigo goldfields, all associated with the Mount Alexander North Run (later renamed the Ravenswood Run).
They reasoned that:"
Australian gold rushes,"Many others have also claimed to have been the first to have found gold at Bendigo Creek.
Julia Farrell, deceased before the 1890 Select Committee, is never documented to have made this claim.
Margaret Kennedy also claimed to have found gold without the help of Julia Farrell whilst accompanied by her 9-year-old son John Drane.
Both their husbands, John ""Happy Jack"" Kennedy and Patrick Peter Farrell are also documented to have claimed to have been the first to have found gold, and were also seen at various times with their wives at the Bendigo Creek by witnesses.
When Margaret Kennedy gave evidence before the Select Committee in September 1890 she claimed to alone have found gold near ""The Rocks"" in early September 1851. She claimed that she had taken her (9-year-old) son, John Drane with her to search for gold near ""The Rocks"" after her husband had told her that he had seen gravel there that might bear gold, and that she was joined by her husband in the evenings. She also gave evidence that after finding gold she ""engaged"" Julia Farrell and went back with her to pan for more gold at the same spot, and it was while there that they were seen by a Mr Frencham, he said in November. She confirmed that they had been panning for gold (also called washing) with a milk dish, and had been using a quart-pot and a stocking as storage vessels.
In the evidence that Margaret Kennedy gave before the Select Committee in September 1890, Margaret Kennedy claimed that she and Julia Farrell had been secretly panning for gold before Henry Frencham arrived, evidence that was substantiated by others. The Select Committee found ""that Henry Frencham's claim to be the discoverer of gold at Bendigo has not been sustained"", but could not make a decision as to whom of the other at least 12 claimants had been first as ""it would be most difficult, if not impossible, to decide that question now""...""at this distance of time from the eventful discovery of gold at Bendigo"".
They concluded that there was ""no doubt that Mrs Kennedy and Mrs Farrell had obtained gold before Henry Frencham arrived on the Bendigo Creek"", but that Frencham ""was the first to report the discovery of payable gold at Bendigo to the Commissioner at Forest Creek (Castlemaine)"". An event Frencham dated to 28 November 1851, a date which was, according to Frencham's own contemporaneous writings, after a number of diggers had already begun prospecting on the Bendigo goldfield. 
28 November 1851 was the date on which Frencham had a letter delivered to Chief Commissioner Wright at Forest Creek (Castlemaine) asking for police protection at Bendigo Creek, a request that officially disclosed the new gold-field. Protection was granted and the Assistant Commissioner of Crown Lands for the Gold Districts of Buninyong and Mt Alexander, Captain Robert Wintle Home, arrived with three black troopers (native police) to set up camp at Bendigo Creek on 8 December."
Australian gold rushes,"In the end, the Select Committee also decided ""that the first place at which gold was discovered on Bendigo was at what is now known as Golden Square, called by the station hands in 1851 ""The Rocks"", a point about 200 yards to the west of the junction of Golden Gully with the Bendigo Creek."" (The straight-line distance is nearer to 650 yards [590 metres].) In October 1893, Alfred Shrapnell Bailes (1849–1928), the man who had proposed the Select Committee, who was one of the men who had sat on the Select Committee, and who was chairman of the Select Committee for 6 of the 7 days that it sat, gave an address in Bendigo where he gave his opinion on the matter of who had first found gold at Bendigo. Alfred Shrapnell Bailes, Mayor of Bendigo 1883–84, and member of the Legislative Council of Victoria 1886–1894 & 1897–1907, stated that: ...upon the whole, from evidence which, read with the stations books, can be fairly easily pieced together, it would seem that Asquith, Graham, Johnson and Bannister [the three shepherds residing at the hut on Bendigo Creek and their shepherd visitor Johnson], were the first to discover goldThe first group of people digging for gold at the Bendigo Creek in 1851 were people associated with the Mount Alexander North (Ravenswood) Run. They included, in no particular order:
The shepherd/overseer John ""Happy Jack"" Kennedy (c. 1816–1883), his wife Margaret Kennedy nee Mcphee (1822–1905), and her son 9-year-old John Drane (1841–1914). They also had with them Margaret's 3 younger daughters, Mary Ann Drane (1844–1919), 7; Mary Jane Kennedy (1849–1948), 2; and baby Lucy Kennedy (1851–1926);
The cooper Patrick Peter Farrell (c. 1830–1905) and his wife Julia Farrell (c. 1830–before 1870); and,
The shepherds employed at the Bendigo Creek, Christian Asquith (c. 1799–1857), James Graham (alias Ben Hall) and Bannister. They were to be joined by others who had been employed elsewhere on the Mount Alexander North (Ravenswood) Run than at Bendigo Creek, including cook/shepherd William Johnson (c. 1827–?), and shepherds James Lister, William Ross, Paddy O'Donnell, William Sandbach (c. 1820–1895) and his brother, Walter Roberts Sandbach (c. 1822–1905), who arrived at the Bendigo Creek to prospect in late November 1851.
They were soon joined by miners from the Forest Creek (Castlemaine) diggings including the journalist Henry Frencham (1816–1897).
There is no doubt that Henry Frencham, under the pen-name of ""Bendigo"", was the first to publicly write anything about gold-mining at Bendigo Creek, with a report about a meeting of miners at Bendigo Creek on 8 and 9 December 1851, published respectively in the Daily News, Melbourne, date unknown and 13 December 1851 editions of the Geelong Advertiser and The Argus. It was Frencham's words, published in The Argus of 13 December 1851, that were to begin the Bendigo gold rush: ""As regards the success of the diggers, it is tolerably certain the majority are doing well, and few making less than half an ounce per man per day.""
In late November 1851, some of the miners at Castlemaine (Forest Creek), having heard of the new discovery of gold, began to move to Bendigo Creek joining those from the Mount Alexander North (Ravenswood) Run who were already prospecting there. The beginnings of this gold-mining was reported from the field by Henry Frencham, under the pen-name of ""Bendigo"", who stated that the new field at Bendigo Creek, which was at first treated as if it were an extension of the Mount Alexander or Forest Creek (Castlemaine) rush, was already about two weeks old on 8 December 1851. Frencham reported then about 250 miners on the field (not counting hut-keepers). On 13 December Henry Frencham's article in The Argus was published announcing to the world that gold was abundant in Bendigo. Just days later, in mid-December 1851 the rush to Bendigo had begun, with a correspondent from Castlemaine for the Geelong Advertiser reported on 16 December 1851 that ""hundreds are on the wing thither (to Bendigo Creek)"".
Henry Frencham may not have been the first person to find gold at Bendigo, but he was the first person to announce to the authorities (28 November 1851) and then the world (via The Argus, 13 December 1851) the existence of the Bendigo goldfield. He was also the first person to deliver a quantity of payable gold from the Bendigo goldfield to the authorities when, on 28 December 1851—3 days after the 603 men, women, and children then working the Bendigo goldfield had pooled their food resources for a combined Christmas dinner—Frencham and his partner Robert Atkinson, with Trooper Synott as an escort, delivered 30 pounds (14 kg) of gold that they had mined to Assistant Commissioner Charles J. P. Lydiard at Forest Creek (Castlemaine), the first gold received from Bendigo."
Australian gold rushes,"Sep–Dec 1851: Other finds in New South Wales
1851 (undated): Other finds in New South Wales
1851 (undated): Other finds in Victoria
Gold was found at Omeo in late 1851 and gold mining continued in the area for many years. Due to the inaccessibility of the area there was only a small Omeo gold rush."
Australian gold rushes,"1851–1886: Managa and other finds in Tasmania
Woods Almanac, 1857, states that gold was possibly found at Fingal (near Mangana) in 1851 by the ""Old Major"" who steadily worked at a gully for two to three years while guarding his secret. This gold find was probably at Mangana and that there is a gully there known as Major's Gully. The first payable alluvial gold deposits were reported in Tasmania in 1852 by James Grant at Managa (then known as The Nook) and Tower Hill Creek which began the Tasmanian gold rushes. The first registered gold strike was made by Charles Gould at Tullochgoram near Fingal and Managa and weighed 2 lb 6 oz (1,077 g). Further small finds were reported during the same year in the vicinity of Nine Mile Springs (Lefroy). In 1854, gold was found at Mt. Mary. 
During 1859, the first quartz mine started operations at Fingal. In the same year James Smith found gold at the River Forth, and Mr. Peter Leete at the Calder, a tributary of the Inglis. Gold was discovered in 1869 at Nine Mile Springs (Lefroy) by Samuel Richards. The news of this brought the first big rush to Nine Mile Springs. A township quickly developed beside the present main road from Bell Bay to Bridport, and dozens of miners pegged out claims there and at nearby Back Creek. The first recorded returns from the Mangana goldfields date from 1870; Waterhouse, 1871; Hellyer, Denison, and Brandy Creek, 1872; Lisle, 1878 Gladstone and Cam, 1881; Minnow and River Forth, 1882; Brauxholme and Mount Victoria, 1883; and Mount Lyell, 1886."
Australian gold rushes,"1852 and 1868: Echunga, South Australia
Payable gold was found in May 1852 at Echunga in the Adelaide Hills in South Australia by William Chapman and his mates Thomas Hardiman and Henry Hampton. After returning to his father's farm from the Victorian goldfields, William Chapman had searched the area around Echunga for gold motivated by his mining experience and the £1,000 reward (equivalent to A$174,000 in 2022) being offered by the South Australian government for the first discoverer of payable gold. Chapman, Hardiman and Hampton were later to receive £500 of this reward, as the required £10,000 (equivalent to $1.75 million in 2022) of gold had not been raised in two months.
Within a few days of the announcement of finding gold, 80 gold licenses had been issued. Within seven weeks, there were about 600 people, including women and children, camped in tents and wattle-and-daub huts in ""Chapman's Gully"". A township sprang up in the area as the population grew. Soon there were blacksmiths, butchers and bakers to provide the gold diggers' needs. Within 6 months, 684 licences had been issued. Three police constables were appointed to maintain order and to assist the Gold Commissioner.
By August 1852, there were less than 100 gold diggers and the police presence was reduced to two troopers. The gold rush was at its peak for nine months. It was estimated in May 1853 that about £18,000 (equivalent to $2.78 million in 2022) worth of gold, more than 113 kg (4,000 oz, 250 lb), had been sold in Adelaide between September 1852 and January 1853, with an additional unknown value sent overseas to England.
Despite the sales of gold from Echunga, this goldfield could not compete with the richer fields in Victoria and by 1853 the South Australian goldfields were described as being 'pretty deserted'. There were further discoveries of gold in the Echunga area made in 1853, 1854, 1855, and 1858 causing minor rushes. There was a major revival of the Echunga fields in 1868 when Thomas Plane and Henry Saunders found gold at Jupiter Creek. Plane and Saunders were to receive rewards of £300 (equivalent to A$46,000 in 2022) and £200 (equivalent to A$31,000 in 2022), respectively.
By September 1868, there were about 1,200 people living at the new diggings and tents and huts were scattered throughout the scrub. A township was established with general stores, butchers and refreshment booths. By the end of 1868 though, the alluvial deposits at Echunga were almost exhausted and the population dwindled to several hundred. During 1869 reef mining was introduced and some small mining companies were established but all had gone into liquidation by 1871.
The Echunga goldfields were South Australia's most productive. By 1900, the estimated gold production was 6,000 kg (13,000 lb), compared with 680 g (24 oz), 1½lb) from the Victoria Mine at Castambul. After the revival of the Echunga goldfields in 1868, prospectors searched the Adelaide Hills for new goldfields. News of a new discovery would set off another rush. Gold was found at many locations, including Balhannah, Forest Range, Birdwood, Para Wirra, Mount Pleasant and Woodside."
Australian gold rushes,"1852–1869: Other finds in Victoria
1852–1896: Other finds in New South Wales
1857/8: Canoona near Rockhampton, Queensland
Gold was found in Queensland near Warwick as early as 1851, beginning small-scale alluvial gold mining in that state.
The first Queensland gold rush did not occur until late 1858, however, after the discovery of what was rumoured to be payable gold for a large number of men at Canoona near what was to become the town of Rockhampton. According to legend, this gold was found at Canoona near Rockhampton by a man named Chappie (or Chapel) in July or August 1858. 
The gold in the area had first been found north of the Fitzroy River on 17 November 1857 by Captain (later Sir) Maurice Charles O'Connell, a grandson of William Bligh, a former governor of New South Wales, who was Government Resident at Gladstone. Initially worried that his find would be exaggerated, O'Connell wrote to the Chief Commissioner of Crown Lands on 25 November 1857 to inform him that he had found ""very promising prospects of gold"" after having some pans of earth washed.
Chapel was a flamboyant and extroverted character who, in 1858 at the height of the gold rush, claimed to have first found the gold. Instead, Chapel had been employed by O'Connell as part of a prospecting party to follow up on O'Connell's initial gold find, a prospecting party which, according to contemporary local pastoralist Colin Archer, ""after pottering about for some six months or more, did discover a gold-field near Canoona, yielding gold in paying quantities for a limited number of men"". O'Connell was in Sydney in July 1858 when he reported to the Government the success of the measures he had initiated for the development of the goldfield which he had discovered.
This first Queensland gold rush resulted in about 15,000 people flocking to this sparsely populated area in the last months of 1858. This was, however, a small goldfield with only shallow gold deposits and with nowhere near enough gold to sustain the large number of prospectors. This gold rush was given the name of the 'duffer rush' as destitute prospectors ""had, in the end, to be rescued by their colonial governments or given charitable treatment by shipping companies"" to return home when they did not strike it rich and had used up all their capital. 
The authorities had expected violence to break out and had supplied contingents of mounted and foot police as well as warships. The New South Wales government (Queensland was then part of New South Wales) sent up the ""Iris"" which remained in Keppel Bay during November to preserve the peace. The Victorian government sent up the ""Victoria"" with orders to the captain to bring back all Victorian diggers unable to pay their fares; they were to work out their passage money on return to Melbourne. 
O'Connell had reported that ""we have had some trying moments when it seemed as if the weight of a feather would have turned the balance between comparative order and scenes of great violence"". According to legend, both O'Connel and Chapel were threatened with lynching."
Australian gold rushes,"1861–1866: Cape River and other finds in Queensland
In late 1861, the Clermont goldfield was discovered in Central Queensland near Peak Downs, triggering what has (incorrectly) been described as one of Queensland's major gold rushes. Mining extended over a large area, but only a small number of miners was involved. Newspapers of the day, which also warned against a repeat of the Canoona experience of 1858, at the same time as describing lucrative gold-finds reveal that this was only a small gold rush. The Rockhampton Bulletin and Central Queensland Advertiser of 3 May 1862 reported that ""a few men have managed to earn a subsistence for some months...others have gone there and returned unsuccessful"". 
The Courier (Brisbane) of 5 January 1863 describes ""40 miners on the diggings at present ... and in the course of a few months there will probably be several hundred miners at work"". The Courier reported 200 diggers at Peak Downs in July 1863. The goldfield covering an area of over 1,600 square miles (4,100 km2) was officially declared in August 1863. The Cornwall Chronicle (Launceston, Tasmania), citing the Ballarat Star, reported about 300 men at work, many of them new chums, in October 1863.
In 1862, gold was found at Calliope near Gladstone, with the goldfield being officially proclaimed in the next year. The small rush attracted around 800 people by 1864 and after that the population declined as by 1870 the gold deposits were worked out.
In 1863, gold was also found at Canal Creek (Leyburn) and some gold-mining began there at that time, but the short-lived gold rush there did not occur until 1871–72.
In 1865, Richard Daintree discovered 100 km (62 mi) south-west of Charters Towers the Cape River goldfield near Pentland in North Queensland. The Cape River Goldfield which covered an area of over 300 square miles (780 km2) was not, however, proclaimed until 4 September 1867, and by the next year the best of the alluvial gold had petered out. This gold rush attracted Chinese diggers to Queensland for the first time. The Chinese miners at Cape River moved to Richard Daintree's newly discovered Oaks Goldfield on the Gilbert River in 1869.
The Crocodile Creek (Bouldercombe Gorge) field near Rockhampton was also discovered in 1865. By August 1866 it was reported that there were between 800 and 1,000 men on the field. A new rush took place in March 1867. By 1868 the best of the alluvial gold had petered out. The enterprising Chinese diggers who arrived in the area, however, were still able to make a success of their gold-mining endeavours.
Gold was also found at Morinish near Rockhampton in 1866 with miners working in the area by December 1866, and a ""new rush"" being described in the newspapers in February 1867 with the population being estimated on the field as 600."
Australian gold rushes,"1867–1870: Gympie and other finds in Queensland
Queensland had plunged into an economic crisis after the separation of Queensland from New South Wales in 1859. This had led to severe unemployment with a peak in 1866. Gold was being mined in the state but the number of men involved was only small. On 8 January 1867, the Queensland Government offered a £3,000 (equivalent to A$476,000 in 2022) reward for the discovery of more payable goldfields in the state. As a direct result, 1867 saw new gold rushes.
More goldfields were discovered near Rockhampton in early 1867 being Ridgelands and Rosewood. The rush to Rosewood was described in May 1867 as having ""over three hundred miners"". Ridgelands with its few hundred miners was described as ""the most populous gold-field in the colony"" on 5 October 1867, but it was very soon overtaken and far surpassed by Gympie.
The most important discovery in 1867 was later in the year when James Nash discovered gold at Gympie, with the rush under way by November 1867."
Australian gold rushes,"J. A. Lewis, Inspector of Police arrived on the Gympie goldfield on 3 November 1867 and wrote on 11 November 1867:On reaching the diggings I found a population numbering about five hundred, the majority of whom were doing little or nothing in the way of digging for the precious metal. Claims, however, were marked out in all directions, and the ground leading from the gullies where the richest finds have been got was taken up for a considerable distance. I have very little hesitation in stating that two-thirds of the people congregated there had never been on a diggings before, and seemed to be quite at a loss what to do. Very few of them had tents to live in or tools to work with; and I am afraid that the majority of those had not sufficient money to keep them in food for one week...From all that I could glean from miners and others, with whom I had an opportunity of speaking, respecting the diggings, I think it very probable that a permanent gold-field will be established at, or in the vicinity of, Gympie Creek; and if reports-which were in circulation when I left the diggings-to the effect that several prospecting parties had found gold at different points, varying from one to five miles from the township, be correct, there is little doubt but it will be an extensive gold-field, and will absorb a large population within a very short period.The very rich and productive area, which covered only an area of 120 square miles (310 km2), was officially declared the Gympie Goldfield in 1868. In 1868 the mining shanty town which had quickly grown with tents, many small stores and liquor outlets, and was known as ""Nashville"", was also renamed Gympie after the Gympie Creek named from the aboriginal name for a local stinging tree. Within months there were 25,000 people on the goldfield. This was the first large gold rush after Canoona in 1858, and Gympie became 'The Town That Saved Queensland' from bankruptcy.
The Kilkivan Goldfield (N.W of Gympie) was also discovered in 1867 with the rush to that area beginning in that same year, and, as was commonly the case, before the goldfield was officially declared in July 1868.
Townsville was opened up in 1868, the Gilbert River goldfield (110 km from Georgetown) in 1869, and Etheridge (Georgetown) in 1870."
Australian gold rushes,"1868: Gawler region, South Australia
Gold found about 10 km south-east of Gawler in South Australia in 1868. Gold was found by Job Harris and his partners in Spike Valley near the South Para River. This was unsold Crown Land and was proclaimed an official goldfield with a warden appointed. On the second day there were 40 gold seekers, 1,000 within a week and, within a month, 4,000 licensed and 1,000 unlicensed diggers. Three towns were established nearby with about 6,000 people at their peak.
Alluvial gold was easily recovered when the gold was in high concentration. As the alluvial was worked out, companies were formed to extract the gold from the ore with crushers and a mercury process. By 1870 only 50 people remained, although one of the three towns, Barossa, lasted until the 1950s. South of the Barossa goldfield, the Lady Alice Mine in Hamlin Gully, discovered in 1871 by James Goddard, was the first South Australian gold mine to pay a dividend."
Australian gold rushes,"1870–1893: Teetulpa and other finds in South Australia
As settlers took up land north of Adelaide, so more goldfields were discovered in South Australia: Ulooloo in 1870, Waukaringa in 1873, Teetulpa in 1886, Wadnaminga in 1888 and Tarcoola in 1893.
Teetulpa, 11 km (6.8 mi) north of Yunta, was a rich goldfield where more gold was found than anywhere else in South Australia at that time. Teetulpa had the largest number of diggers of any field at any time in the history of South Australian gold discoveries. By the end of 1886, two months into the rush, there were more than five thousand men on the field. A reporter noted: ""All sorts of people are going – from lawyers to larrikins ... Yesterday's train from Adelaide brought a contingent of over 150 ... Many arrived in open trucks ... Local ironmongers and drapers were busy fitting out intending diggers with tents, picks, shovels, rugs, moleskins, etc."" Good mining at Teetulpa lasted about ten years. For a time, it had a bank, shops, hotel, hospital, church and a newspaper. The largest nugget found weighed 30 oz (850 g)."
Australian gold rushes,"1871–1904: Charters Towers, Palmer River, and other finds in Queensland
A significant Queensland goldfield was discovered at Charters Towers on 24 December 1871 by a young 12-year-old Aboriginal stockman, Jupiter Mosman, and soon moved attention to this area. The gold rush which followed has been argued to be the most important in Queensland's gold-mining history. This was a reef-mining area with only a small amount of alluvial gold., and as a result received negative reviews from miners who wanted easier pickings. Nevertheless thousands of men rushed to the field, and a public battery was set up to crush the quartz ore in 1872. The town of Charters Towers grew to become the second largest town in Queensland during the late 1880s with a population of about 30,000.
In 1872 gold was discovered by James Mulligan on the Palmer River inland from Cooktown. This turned out to contain Queensland's richest alluvial deposits. After the rush began in 1873 over 20,000 people made their way to the remote goldfield. This was one of the largest rushes experienced in Queensland. The rush lasted approximately 3 years and attracted a large number of Chinese. In 1877 over 18,000 of the residents were Chinese miners.
Port Douglas dates from 1873, and the Hodgkinson river (west of Cairns) from 1875.
The celebrated Mount Morgan was first worked in 1882, Croydon in 1886, the Starcke river goldfield near the coast 70 km (43 mi) north of Cooktown in 1890, Coen in 1900, and Alice River in 1904."
Australian gold rushes,"1871–1909: Pine Creek and other finds in the Northern Territory
Darwin felt the effects of a gold rush at Pine Creek after employees of the Australian Overland Telegraph Line found gold while digging holes for telegraph poles in 1871:There are numerous deposits of the precious metal at various localities in the Northern Territory, the total yield in 1908 being 8,575 ounces (243.1 kg), valued at £27,512 (equivalent to A$4,200,000 in 2022), of which 1,021 ounces (28.9 kg) were obtained at the Driffield. In June 1909, a rich find of gold was reported from Tanami... Steps are being taken to open up this field by sinking wells to provide permanent water, of which there is a great scarcity in the district. A large number of Chinese are engaged in mining in the Territory. In 1908, out of a total of 824 miners employed, the Chinese numbered 674."
Australian gold rushes,"1880: Mt McDonald, New South Wales
Donald McDonald and his party discovered two gold-rich quartz reefs at Mount McDonald, as they were prospecting the mountain ranges around Wyangala. This find resulted in the establishment of the township of Mt McDonald. By the early 1900s, mining declined, and the town slowly faded away."
Australian gold rushes,"1885: Halls Creek in the Kimberley, Western Australia
In 1872, the Western Australian Government offered a reward of £5,000 (equivalent to A$860,000 in 2022) for the discovery of the colony's first payable goldfield.
Ten years later, in 1882, small finds of gold were being made in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, prompting in 1883 the appointment of a Government Geologist. In 1884, Edward Hardman, Government Geologist, published a report that he had found traces of gold throughout the east Kimberley, especially in the area around the present-day town of Halls Creek."
Australian gold rushes,"On 14 July 1885, having been prompted by Hardman's report, Charles Hall and Jack Slattery found payable gold at what they called Halls Creek, in the Kimberleys, Western Australia. After working for a few weeks Hall returned to Derby with 200 ounces of gold and reported his find. Once this discovery became known it prompted the Kimberley Rush, the first gold rush in Western Australia. It is estimated that as many as 10,000 men joined the rush. On 19 May 1886, the Kimberley Goldfield was officially declared: Thousands of men made their way to the Kimberley from other parts of WA, the eastern colonies, and New Zealand. Most arrived by ship in Derby or Wyndham, and then walked to Halls Creek. Others came overland from the Northern Territory. Most had no previous experience in gold prospecting or of life in the bush. Illness and disease were rife, and when the first warden, C. D. Price, arrived on 3 September 1886, he found that ""great numbers were stricken down, in a dying condition, helpless, destitute of money, food, or covering, and without mates or friends simply lying down to die"". A few were lucky enough to locate rich alluvial or reef gold, but most had little or no success.In the early days of the gold rush no records or statistics were recorded for either the arrivals or deaths. Also, no-one knows how many died trying to get to Halls Creek across the waterless desert, or how many simply turned back. When men actually arrived at Halls Creek, dysentery, scurvy, sunstroke and thirst continued to take its toll. The Government applied a gold tax of two shillings and sixpence an ounce. It was a very unpopular levy as gold proved so hard to get. The diggers avoided registering and the Government had a great deal of trouble collecting the tax or statistics of any kind.
When C. D. Price arrived in September 1886, he reported that about 2,000 remained at the diggings. By the end of 1886, the rush had ceased. When in May 1888 the government considered claims for the reward for discovery of the first payable goldfield, it was decided that the Kimberley goldfield, which had proven disappointing, was insufficient to meet the stipulated conditions of a yield of at least 10,000 ounces (280 kg) of gold in a 2-year period passing through Customs or shipped to England, so no reward was paid out. (It is estimated that as much as 23,000 ounces [650 kg] of gold was taken from the fields around Halls Creek, but with much leaving the field through the Northern Territory.) Hardman's contribution was recognised, however, with a gift of £500 (equivalent to A$40,000 in 2022) to his widow Louisa Hardman. Another £500 was given to Charles Hall and his party."
Australian gold rushes,"1887–1891: Southern Cross, the Pilbara, and other finds in Western Australia
1887 The Yilgarn and 1888 Southern Cross
1887 saw the first discovery of gold in what was to be the huge Eastern Goldfields region. Gold-bearing quartz was found near Lake Deborah in the Yilgarn Hills north of what was to become the town of Southern Cross in October 1887 by the party of Harry Francis Anstey. Anstey and his party were prospecting in the area after having heard that a farmer had found a gold nugget in the Yilgarn while sinking a bore. Others in his party were Dick Greaves and Ted Paine, with Ted Paine being the first to see the gold. As a result of this find Anstey and one of his backers George Leake, the then Solicitor-General and future Premier of Western Australia, were in November 1887 granted a 60,000 acres (24,000 hectares) mining concession for prospecting purposes.
On 30 December 1887, after hearing directly from Anstey of the success of his party, Bernard Norbert Colreavy also discovered a gold-bearing quartz reef in the Golden Valley in the Yilgarn Hills, and on 12 January 1888 Colreavy's fellow party member, H.Huggins, discovered another gold-bearing quartz reef. They soon found and secured another seven more gold-bearing quartz reefs.
In May 1888 Michael Toomey and Samuel Faulkner were the first to discover gold-bearing quartz at the site of what became the town of Southern Cross on the Yilgarn Goldfield, about 50 km (31 mi) south-east of the Golden Valley. Party leader Thomas Riseley subsequently crushed and panned the samples that had been taken which confirmed that they had found gold, and Riseley and Toomey then proceeding to peg out their claim on behalf of the Phoenix Prospecting Company.
On the news of Anstey's find the Yilgarn Rush had begun in late 1887. The excitement of the gold rush intensified in early 1888 with the news of the discovery of Golden Valley (named for the Golden Wattle that grows there) by Colreavy and Huggins, and further intensified just a few months later with the news of the discovery of Riseley, Toomey and Faulkner, but the goldfield was not officially proclaimed until 1 October 1888. In 1892, the Government awarded Anstey £500 (equivalent to A$81,000 in 2022), and Colreavy and Huggins £250 (equivalent to A$41,000 in 2022) each, for the discovery of the Yilgarn goldfields. The Yilgarn Rush died out when news arrived of the rich discovery of gold to the east at Coolgardie in September 1892."
Australian gold rushes,"1888: The Pilbara
The Pilbara Goldfield was officially declared on the same day as the Yilgarn Goldfield, 1 October 1888. The government had offered £1,000 (equivalent to A$160,000 in 2022) reward for the first person to find payable gold in the Pilbara. This was shared by three men: explorers Francis Gregory and N. W. Cook, and pastoralist John Withnell. Gregory also discovered gold in a region known as Nullagine Proper in June 1888, and Harry Wells found gold in Marble Bar. As a result, the Pilbara Goldfield, which covered an area of 34,880 square miles (90,300 km2), was divided into two districts, Nullagine and Marble Bar. To support the Pilbara Rush, the government developed a railway line between Marble Bar and Port Hedland in 1891. Alluvial gold production started to decline in 1895, after which mining companies commenced deep-shaft mining."
Australian gold rushes,"1891: Cue
Gold was found at Cue in 1891 by Michael Fitzgerald, Edward Heffernan and Tom Cue. This became known as the Murchison Rush."
Australian gold rushes,"1892–1899: Coolgardie, Kalgoorlie, and other finds in Western Australia
1892: Coolgardie
In September 1892, gold was found at Fly Flat (Coolgardie) by Arthur Wesley Bayley and William Ford, who next to a quartz-reef obtaining 554 ounces (15.7 kg) of gold in one afternoon with the aid of a tomahawk. On 17 September 1892 Wesley rode the 185 km (115 mi) with this gold into Southern Cross to register their reward-claim for a new find of gold. Within hours had started what was at first called the Gnarlbine Rush. Overnight the miners who were flocked on the Southern Cross diggings moved to the more lucrative Coolgardie Goldfield. The reward-claim for Bayley's party for discovering the new goldfield was to be granted a 100-foot (30.5-metre) deep claim along the line of reef. This claim was said to cover an area of five acres (2.0 hectares). On 24 August 1893, less than a year after Arthur Bayley and William Ford's discovery of gold at Fly Flat, Coolgardie was declared a town site, with an estimated population of 4,000 (with many more mining out in the field).
The Coolgardie gold rush was the beginning of what has been described as ""the greatest gold rush in West Australian history"". It has also been described as ""the greatest movement of people in Australia's history"", but this is an exaggeration. The greatest movement of people in Australia's history was in the period 1851 to 1861 during the gold rushes to the Eastern states when the recorded population of Australia rose by 730,484 from 437,665 in 1851 to 1,168,149 in 1861, as against an increase of 20% of this amount for Western Australia in the period 1891 to 1901, a 137,834 increase of recorded population for Western Australia from 46,290 in 1891 to 184,124 in 1901."
Australian gold rushes,"1893: Kalgoorlie
On 17 June 1893, alluvial gold was found near Mount Charlotte, less than 25 miles (40 km) from Coolgardie, at what became the town of Hannan (Kalgoorlie). The announcement of this find by Paddy Hannan only intensified the excitement of the Coolgardie gold-rush, and led to the establishment in Western Australia's Eastern Goldfields of the twin towns of Kalgoorlie–Boulder. Prior to moving to Western Australia in 1889 to prospect for gold Hannan had prospected at Ballarat in Victoria in the 1860s, Otago in New Zealand in the 1870s, and at Teetulpa (north of Yunta) in South Australia in 1886. The first to find gold at Kalgoorlie were Paddy Hannan and his fellow Irishmen Thomas Flanagan and Daniel Shea: In the morning Flanagan was fetching the horses when he spotted gold on the ground. As others were camping nearby he kicked a bush over it, took careful note of his bearings, and hastened back to tell Hannan and Dan Shea, another Irishman who had joined them. They tarried there until the others had gone, then recovered Flanagan's gold and found much more! It was decided one should go back to Southern Cross, the nearest administrative centre, with the gold and seek a reward-claim from the Warden. Tess Thomson in her book Paddy Hannan, A Claim To Fame, reveals that it was Hannan who did so. Thus, Flanagan was the 'finder' and Hannan, who made the find public, was the 'discoverer', for ""dis-cover"" means what it says – ""to take the cover off"", in other words ""to reveal; to make public"" which a finder does not necessarily do.After Hannan registered their reward-claim for a new find of gold with over 100 ounces (2.8 kg) of alluvial gold, an estimated 700 men were prospecting in the area within three days. The reward for Hannan's party for discovering the best alluvial find ever made in the colony, and without knowing it one of the best reefing fields in the world, was to be granted a six acres (2.4 hectares) mining lease."
Australian gold rushes,"1893: Greenough River
Gold was found at Noondamurra Pool on the Greenough River, between Yuna and Mullewa in August 1893 causing a small rush to that area."
Australian gold rushes,"1893–1899: Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie
Other rich fields were found in the area around Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie in the period 1893–1899.
The population of Coolgardie is estimated to have reached 15,000 at its peak during the gold rush, and the town boasted over 26 pubs supplied by 3 breweries, 2 stock exchanges, 14 churches, 6 newspapers, and a courthouse. The population of Kalgoorlie–Boulder is estimated to have reached 30,000 at its initial peak during the gold rush with over 93 pubs supplied by 8 breweries, a stock exchange, churches, newspapers, and a courthouse. It took more than a century for the population to surpass its gold-frenzied peak when it reached 32,966 in 2013 before declining to 29,068 in August 2021.
In 1897, Coolgardie was the third largest town in Western Australia after Perth and Fremantle and the largest town in the Western Australian gold-mining districts, with a recorded population of 5,008, while Kalgoorlie–Boulder was the fourth-largest town in Western Australia and the second largest in the Western Australian gold-mining districts, with an estimated population of 3,400. (Kalgoorlie's recorded population was 2,018, while numbers for Boulder were not recorded. The estimate of 3,400 for Kalgoorlie–Boulder is based on the proportional numbers in Kalgoorlie and Boulder in the 1901 census.) The total estimated population for 1897 for the many settlements in the Coolgardie Magisterial Districts (which included Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie) was 17,645 (14,047 men and 3,598 women). Many more people were not residing in residential areas but were out in the field mining."
Australian gold rushes,"The 1901 census gives a greater idea of the population of the area, and the size of the gold rush. By 1901, the population of Kalgoorlie–Boulder Municipality had grown to 11,253 (6,652 Kalgoorlie, 4,601 Boulder) making it at that time the third-largest town in Western Australia after Perth and Fremantle and the largest town in the Western Australian gold-mining districts, while that of Coolgardie Municipality had fallen slightly to 4,249. The total population for the Coolgardie Magisterial Districts (which included Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie–Boulder) was 41,816 men, women and children, being: 8,315 in the Coolgardie Magisterial District centred on Coolgardie; 26,101 in the Coolgardie East Magisterial District centred on Kalgoorlie–Boulder; 4,710 in the Coolgardie North Magisterial District centred on Menzies; and 2,690 in the Coolgardie North-East Magisterial District centred on Kanowna:The far-reaching nature of the mining excitement (in Western Australia) drew men from all over the world...People immigrated from Africa and America, Great Britain and Europe, China and India, New Zealand and the South Sea Islands, and from mining centres in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, and South Australia.A website managed by the National Trust of Australia (WA) states:The gold rush transformed the Western Australian economy as gold production soared from 22,806 ounces in 1890 to 1,643,876 ounces in 1900 and this was matched by the fourfold increase in WA's population from 46,290 in 1890 to 184,124 reported in the 1901 census."
Australian gold rushes,"1906: Tarnagulla, Victoria
Gold was rediscovered near Tarnagulla on 6 November 1906 (Melbourne Cup Day) when a miner who had prospected the district for years obtained seven ounces of gold from a shaft nineteen feet (5.8 metres) deep. With some fairly large nuggets being found soon after, the so-called Poseidon rush, named after the horse that had won the Melbourne Cup that year, set in with ""men of all ranks and professions...trying their luck on the field"". Several of the nuggets were unearthed within a few inches of the surface. The largest weighed 953 ounces (27.0 kg), and two others weighed 703 (20 kg) and 675 ounces (19.1 kg), respectively. The shallow ground was soon worked out, but operations gave satisfactory results in the deeper alluvial until 1912."
Australian gold rushes,"See also
Notes
References
Sources and further reading
Ngai, Mae. The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics (2021), Mid 19c in California, Australia and South Africa
Webb, Martyn; Webb, Audrey (1993). Golden Destiny. WA: City of Kalgoorlie-Boulder. ISBN 0646142542."
Australian gold rushes,External links
Australian gold rushes,Audiovisual titles relating to the Australian gold rushes on Australian Screen
Dutch Australians,"Dutch Australians (Dutch: Nederlandse Australiërs) refers to Australians of Dutch ancestry. They form one of the largest groups of the Dutch diaspora outside Europe. At the 2021 census, 381,946 people nominated Dutch ancestry (whether alone or in combination with another ancestry), representing 1.5% of the Australian population. At the 2021 census, there were 66,481 Australian residents who were born in the Netherlands."
Dutch Australians,"History
Early history
The history of the Dutch and Australia began  with Captain Willem Janszoon, a Dutch seafarer, who was the first European to land on Australian soil in 1606.
The Dutch East Indies Company (VOC) had its headquarters in the Far East in Batavia (modern-day Jakarta) from 1619, but traded from many Asian harbours from 1602. The journey from the Netherlands to the Dutch East Indies would take more than a year by traditional route, but after the discovery of the Roaring Forties by Dutch captain Hendrick Brouwer, who established the so-called Brouwer Route in 1611 the voyage would be cut short by months, taking a trajectory along the southern latitudes of the Indian Ocean. By 1617 all VOC ships were ordered to take this route. The navigation technique of that time, known as dead reckoning, caused some ships to travel too far east so they sighted the Australian west coast, and a small number of them were wrecked there. Dirk Hartog made the first European landing of the Australian west coast with a pewter plate in 1616. Known ships wrecked off that include the Batavia, the Vergulde Dreak, the Zuytdorp and  the Zeewijk.  The wreck of the Batavia on Houtman Abrolhos during her maiden voyage, turned into a bloody mutiny led by Jeronimus Corneliszoon after the survivors had landed on an island and Commander Pelsaert had left to get help. On his return he court marshalled the mutineers, some were hanged. From the convicted mutineers, Wouter Loos and Jan Pelgrom the Bie were, because of their youth, put on the mainland with some provisions to fend for themselves. They became arguably the first convicts to be dumped on the mainland. The most famous Dutch seafarer to explore the Australian coasts is Abel Tasman, who was the first to circumvigate the continent in 1642–3. He established that the land was not the gigantic legendary southern continent that included the South Pole and he named it New Holland. Tasmania which Tasman had named Van Diemens Land and the Tasman Sea were eventually named after him. Most of the Australian coastline was first charted by VOC mariners, excluding the east coast and the eastern part of the south coast. The continent would be renamed ""Australia"" in the 19th century."
Dutch Australians,"20th century
A number of people from the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) found their way to Australia during World War II and joined Allied forces in the fight against the Japanese. The Dutch East Indies government operated from Australia during the war. Free Dutch Submarines operated out of Fremantle after the invasion of Java. The joint No. 18 and No. 120 RAAF squadrons formed at Canberra, and was a combined Dutch and Australian Squadron. It used B-25 Mitchell bombers, supplied by the Dutch Government before the war. The Netherlands East Indies Forces Intelligence Service (NEFIS) was based in Melbourne during the war.
Post-war settlers in Australia arrived as part of Australia's assisted migration program. Many arrived by sea on the MS Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, while others flew with KLM."
Dutch Australians,"Demographics
At the 2021 census, 381,946 people nominated Dutch ancestry (whether alone or in combination with another ancestry), representing 1.5% of the Australian population. At the 2021 census, there were 66,481 Australian residents who were born in the Netherlands."
Dutch Australians,"Notable Dutch Australians
See also
References
Further reading
External links
Netherlands–Australia, 1606–2006
Dutch in Australia at the Australian War Memorial
Dutch Club in South Australia"
Home ownership in Australia,"Home ownership in Australia is considered a key cultural icon, and part of the Australian tradition known as the Great Australian Dream of ""owning a detached house on a fenced block of land."" Home ownership has been seen as creating a responsible citizenry; according to a former Premier of Victoria: ""The home owner feels that he has a stake in the country, and that he has something worth working for, living for, fighting for.""
In 2016 there were about 9.9 million private dwellings in Australia, each with, on average, 2.6 occupants. In 1966 about 70% of dwellings were owner-occupied – one of the largest proportions of any country. The remainder were rented dwellings. About half of the owner-occupied dwellings were under mortgage.
Owner-occupied housing in Australia is not treated as an investment asset. Mortgage interest is not tax deductible as, for example, in the United States. An owner-occupied residential home is not subject to the capital gains tax on sale and is not counted in the assets test for Centrelink pension purposes. It is also not taxed for land tax, although such taxes are traditionally determined at a state level.
In the past, home ownership has been described as equalising; in postwar Australia, immigrant Australians could often buy homes as quickly as native-born Australians. Additionally, Australian suburbs have been more socio-economically mixed than those in America and to a lesser extent Britain. In Melbourne, for instance, one early observer noted that ""a poor house stands side by side with a good house.""
There are significant regional differences in rates of homeownership around Australia, reflecting average age differences (e.g., older age people tend to own houses more than younger people), as well as socio-economic differences."
Home ownership in Australia,"Statistics
In the 2015–16 Survey of Income and Housing, it was found that an estimated 30% of households owned their homes outright (i.e. without a mortgage) and 37% were owners with a mortgage. A further 25% were renting from a private landlord and 4% were renting from a state or territory housing authority.
Between June 1995 and June 2015, the proportion of households without a mortgage declined from 42% to 31%, while the proportion with a mortgage rose from 30% to 36%. Since 1999-2000 the proportion of households renting from state/territory housing authorities has declined from 6% to 3%  while the proportion renting privately increased from 20% to 26% in 2019-20. While a greater proportion of all renting households are renting from private landlords, there is an increased number of private renters receiving Commonwealth rent assistance.
Home ownership in Australia decreased to 67% in 2011, the lowest level in over 50 years. Tasmania has the highest home-ownership rate at 70%, and the Northern Territory the lowest at 46%.
As of the 2016 Census, home ownership in Australia had decreased to 65%."
Home ownership in Australia,"Property as an investment
The 25% of dwellings which are rented by private landlords may be considered income-producing or investment properties, and the private landlords as investors, though some owner-occupiers may also view their dwellings as investments. Private landlords generally collect rent from a tenant as taxable income, whilst an owner-occupier derives imputed rent from living in the dwelling, and is also not subject to capital gains tax. Similarly, the investor can claim expenses relating to the property, including property taxes, interest and depreciation, whilst the owner-occupier cannot. The rent paid by a tenant for private or domestic purposes is not generally an allowable deduction of the tenant, nor are any expenses relating to the property. 
A property investor can utilise calculations such as the Land-to-Asset Ratio. The land-to-asset ratio is a real estate valuation measure that compares the value of the land on which a property stands to the total value of the property - including the land, buildings, and any improvements. This ratio is particularly useful to property investors and agents as it helps determine the intrinsic value a piece of land holds in a property, thereby influencing its potential for appreciation and impact on returns.
The formula for calculating the land-to-asset ratio is very straightforward: Land-to-Asset Ratio = (Value of Land / Total Value of Property) * 100%"
Home ownership in Australia,"Affordability
Home ownership in Australia is becoming more exclusive. The ratio of the price of the average home to Australians' average income was at an all-time high in the late 1990s. Young people are buying homes at the lowest rates ever, and changes in work patterns are reducing many households' ability to retain their homes."
Home ownership in Australia,"Characteristics
New homes have increased in size  and hold fewer people on average than in the past. The proportion of houses with four or more bedrooms increased from 15% in 1971 to greater than 30% in 2001."
Home ownership in Australia,"Immigration to Australia
A number of economists, such as Macquarie Bank analyst Rory Robertson, assert that high immigration and the propensity of new arrivals to cluster in the capital cities is exacerbating the nation's housing affordability problem. According to Robertson, Federal Government policies that fuel demand for housing, such as the currently high levels of immigration, as well as capital gains tax discounts and subsidies to boost fertility, have had a greater impact on housing affordability than land release on urban fringes.
The Productivity Commission Inquiry Report No. 28 First Home Ownership (2004) also stated, in relation to housing, ""that Growth in immigration since the mid-1990s has been an important contributor to underlying demand, particularly in Sydney and Melbourne."" This has been exacerbated by Australian lenders relaxing credit guidelines for temporary residents, allowing them to buy a home with a 10 percent deposit.
The RBA in its submission to the same PC Report also stated ""rapid growth in overseas visitors such as students may have boosted demand for rental housing"". However, in question in the report was the statistical coverage of resident population. The ""ABS population growth figures omit certain household formation groups – namely, overseas students and business migrants who do not continuously stay for 12 months in Australia."" This statistical omission lead to the admission: ""The Commission recognises that the ABS resident population estimates have limitations when used for assessing housing demand. Given the significant influx of foreigners coming to work or study in Australia in recent years, it seems highly likely that short-stay visitor movements may have added to the demand for housing. However, the Commissions are unaware of any research that quantifies the effects.""
Some individuals and interest groups have also argued that immigration causes overburdened infrastructure."
Home ownership in Australia,"Foreign investment in residential property
In December 2008, the federal government introduced legislation relaxing rules for foreign buyers of Australian property. According to FIRB (Foreign Investment Review Board) data released in August 2009, foreign investment in Australian real estate had increased by more than 30% year to date. One agent said that ""overseas investors buy them to land bank, not to rent them out. The houses just sit vacant because they are after capital growth."""
Home ownership in Australia,"Inner-city apartment boom
To cope with the high demand of housing, the desirability in renting, and most significantly an influx of immigration, major Australian cities have seen a boom in high-rise apartment construction. According to ABC News and UBS, the number of cranes on Australian high-rise sites levelled out at a peak of 548 in 2017, having surged 323% since late-2013."
Home ownership in Australia,"See also
Australian property market
Poverty in Australia
Public housing in Australia
Housing in Victoria"
Home ownership in Australia,"References
External links
Home Owners And Renters"
Flora of Australia,"The flora of Australia comprises a vast assemblage of plant species estimated to over 21,000 vascular and 14,000 non-vascular plants, 250,000 species of fungi and over 3,000 lichens. The flora has strong affinities with the flora of Gondwana, and below the family level has a highly endemic angiosperm flora whose diversity was shaped by the effects of continental drift and climate change since the Cretaceous. Prominent features of the Australian flora are adaptations to aridity and fire which include scleromorphy and serotiny. These adaptations are common in species from the large and well-known families Proteaceae (Banksia), Myrtaceae (Eucalyptus - gum trees), and Fabaceae (Acacia - wattle).
The arrival of humans around 50,000 years ago and the settlement by Europeans from 1788, has had a significant impact on the flora. The use of fire-stick farming by Aboriginal people led to significant changes in the distribution of plant species over time, and the large-scale modification or destruction of vegetation for agriculture and urban development since 1788 has altered the composition of most terrestrial ecosystems, leading to the extinction of 61 plant species by 2006, and endangering over 1000 more."
Flora of Australia,"Origins and history
Australia was part of the southern supercontinent Gondwana, which also included South America, Africa, India and Antarctica. Most of the modern Australian flora had their origin in Gondwana during the Cretaceous when Australia was covered in subtropical rainforest.  Australian ferns and gymnosperms bear a strong resemblance to their Gondwanan ancestors, and prominent members of the early Gondwanan angiosperm flora such as the Nothofagus, Myrtaceae and Proteaceae were also present in Australia."
Flora of Australia,"Gondwana began to break up 140 million years ago (MYA); 50 MYA during the Eocene Australia separated from Antarctica, and was relatively isolated until the collision of the Indo-Australian Plate with Asia in the Miocene era 5.3 MYA. As Australia drifted, local and global climatic change had a significant and lasting effect: a circumpolar oceanic current developed, atmospheric circulation increased as Australia moved away from Antarctica, precipitation fell, there was a slow warming of the continent and arid conditions started to develop. These conditions of geographic isolation and aridity led to the development of a more complex flora. From 25 to 10 MYA pollen records suggest the rapid radiation of species like Eucalyptus, Casuarina, Allocasuarina, Banksia and the pea-flowered legumes, and the development of open forest; grasslands started to develop from the Eocene. Collision with the Eurasian Plate also led to additional South-east Asian and cosmopolitan elements entering the flora like the Lepidium and Chenopodioideae."
Flora of Australia,"The development of aridity and the old and nutrient poor soils of the continent led to some unique adaptations in the Australian flora and evolutionary radiation of genera – like Acacia and Eucalyptus – that adapted to those conditions. Hard leaves with a thick outer layer, a condition known as scleromorphy, and C4 and CAM carbon fixation which reduce water loss during photosynthesis are two common adaptations in Australian arid-adapted dicot and monocot species respectively.
Rising aridity also increased the frequency of fires in Australia. Fire is thought to have played a role in the development and distribution of fire-adapted species from the Late Pleistocene. An increase in charcoal in sediment around 38,000 years ago coincides with dates for the inhabitation of Australia by the Indigenous Australians and suggests that man-made fires, from practices like fire-stick farming, have played an important role in the establishment and maintenance of sclerophyll forest, especially on the east coast of Australia. Adaptations to fire include lignotubers and epicormic buds in Eucalyptus and Banksia species that allow fast regeneration following fire. Some genera also exhibit serotiny, the release of seed only in response to heat and/or smoke. Xanthorrhoea grass trees and some species of orchids only flower after fire."
Flora of Australia,"Biogeography
In biogeography and zoogeography, Australia alone is sometimes considered a realm (Australian realm), while some authors unite the area with other regions to form the Australasian realm.
In phytogeography, the area is considered a floristic kingdom (Australian kingdom), with the following endemic families, according to Takhtajan: Platyzomataceae (now included in Pteridaceae), Austrobaileyaceae, Idiospermaceae (now part of Calycanthaceae), Gyrostemonaceae, Baueraceae, Davidsoniaceae, Cephalotaceae, Eremosynaceae, Stylobasiaceae, Emblingiaceae, Akaniaceae, Tremandraceae, Tetracarpaeaceae, Brunoniaceae, Blandfordiaceae, Doryanthaceae, Dasypogonaceae and Xanthorrhoeaceae. It is also the center of origin of Eupomatiaceae, Pittosporaceae, Epacridaceae, Stackhousiaceae, Myoporaceae and Goodeniaceae. Other families with high occurrences are Poaceae, Fabaceae, Asteraceae, Orchidaceae, Euphorbiaceae, Cyperaceae, Rutaceae, Myrtaceae (specially Leptospermoideae) and Proteaceae."
Flora of Australia,"Vegetation types
Australia's terrestrial flora can be collected into characteristic vegetation groups. The most important determinant is rainfall, followed by temperature which affects water availability. Several schemes of varying complexity have been created. As of 2022, the NVIS (National Vegetation Information System) divides Australia's terrestrial flora into 33 Major Vegetation Groups, and 85 Major Vegetation Subgroups.
According to the scheme the most common vegetation types are those that are adapted to arid conditions where the area has not been significantly reduced by human activities such as land clearing for agriculture. The dominant vegetation type in Australia is the hummock grasslands that occur extensively in arid Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory. It accounts for 23% of the native vegetation, the predominant species of which are from the genus Triodia. Zygochloa also occurs in inland sandy areas like the Simpson Desert.
A further 39% of native vegetation is covered by a combination of:"
Flora of Australia,"Eucalypt woodlands found at the transition between hummock grasslands and higher rainfall areas where conditions still limit tree growth; the woodland may have a grass or shrubby understory. The largest area is in Queensland.
Acacia forests and woodlands that occur in semi-arid areas where tree growth is stunted. The dominant Acacia species varies with the location, and may include lancewood, bendee, mulga, gidgee and brigalow. The largest area is in Western Australia.
Acacia shrublands in semi arid and arid regions. The most common are mulga shrublands; the largest area is in Western Australia.
Tussock grasslands that occur in semi-arid and some temperate parts of Australia; they host a large variety of grasses from more than 10 genera. The largest area is in Queensland.
Chenopod/samphire shrubs and forblands that are widespread in the near-estuarine, arid and semi-arid areas. Species in chenopod communities are drought and salt tolerant and include the genera Sclerolaena, Atriplex, Maireana, Chenopodium and Rhagodia while samphire representatives include Tecticornia, Salicornia, Sclerostegia and Sarcocornia. Both South and Western Australia have large areas with this vegetation type.
Other groups with restricted areas of less than 70,000 square kilometres include tropical or temperate rainforest and vine thickets, tall or open eucalypt forests, Callitris and Casuarina forests, and woodlands and heath."
Flora of Australia,"Vascular plants
Australia has over 21,077 described species of vascular plants, these include the angiosperms, seed-bearing non-angiosperms (like the conifers and cycads), and the spore-bearing ferns and fern allies. Of these about 11% are naturalised species; the remainder are native or endemic. The vascular plant flora has been extensively catalogued, the work being published in the ongoing Flora of Australia series. A list of vascular plant families represented in Australia using the Cronquist system is also available.
At the higher taxonomic levels the Australian flora is similar to that of the rest of the world; most vascular plant families are represented within the native flora, with the exception of the cacti, birch and a few others, while 9 families occur only in Australia. Australia's vascular flora is estimated to be 85% endemic; this high level of vascular plant endemism is largely attributable to the radiation of some families like the Proteaceae, Myrtaceae, and Fabaceae."
Flora of Australia,"Angiosperms
The native Australian flora contains many monocotyledons. The family with the most species is the Poaceae which includes a huge variety of species, from the tropical bamboo Bambusa arnhemica to the ubiquitous spinifex that thrives in arid Australia from the genus Triodia. There are more than 800 described species of orchid in Australia. About one quarter of these are epiphytes. The terrestrial orchids occur across most of Australia, the majority of species being deciduous – their aboveground parts die back during the dry season and they re-sprout from a tuber when it rains.
Other families with well-known representatives include the alpine Tasmanian button grass, which form tussock-like mounds from the Cyperaceae; the genus Patersonia of temperate iris-like forbs from the Iridaceae; and, the kangaroo paws from the family Haemodoraceae. The Xanthorrhoea grass trees, the screw palms of the Pandanaceae and palms are large monocots present in Australia. There are about 57 native palms; 79% of these only occur in Australia. 
The dicots are the most diverse group of angiosperms. Australia's best known species come from three large and very diverse dicot families: the Fabaceae, the Myrtaceae and the Proteaceae. The Myrtaceae is represented by a variety of woody species; gum trees from the genera Eucalyptus, Corymbia and Angophora, Lillipillies (Syzygium), the water-loving Melaleuca and Bottlebrush and the shrubby Darwinia and Leptospermum, commonly known as teatrees, and Geraldton wax. Australia is also a centre of diversity for the Proteaceae, with woody, well-known genera such as Banksia, Dryandra, Grevillea, Hakea, the waratah and Australia's only commercial native food crop, the macadamia. Australia also has representatives of all three legume subfamilies. Caesalpinioideae is notably represented by Cassia trees. The Faboideae or pea-flowered legumes are common and many are well known for their flowers, including the golden peas, Glycine species and the Sturt's desert pea. The Mimosoideae is best known for the huge genus Acacia which includes Australia's floral emblem the golden wattle.
Many plant families that occur in Australia are known for their floral displays that follow seasonal rains. The Asteraceae is well represented by its subfamily Gnaphalieae, which included the paper or everlasting daisies; this group has its greatest diversity in Australia. Other families with  flowering shrubs include the Rutaceae, with the fragrant Boronia and Eriostemon,  the Myoporaceae with the Eremophila, and members of the Ericaceae with Victoria's Floral Emblem Epacris impressa."
Flora of Australia,"Amongst the most ancient species of flowering hardwood trees are the Casuarinaceae, including beach, swamp and river oaks, and Fagaceae represented in Australia by three species of Nothofagus. Trees of the Rosales are notably represented by the Moraceae whose species include the Moreton Bay Fig and the Port Jackson Fig, and the Urticaceae whose members include several tree sized stinging nettles; Dendrocnide moroides is the most virulent. There are also numerous sandalwood species including the quandongs and native cherry, Exocarpus cupressiformis. The bottle tree of the Sterculiaceae is one of 30 tree species from the Brachychiton. There are about 75 native mistletoes that parasitise Australian tree species, including two terrestrial parasitic trees, one of which is the spectacular Western Australian Christmas tree.
Australia's salt marshes and wetlands are covered by a large variety of salt and drought tolerant species from the Amaranthaceae which include the saltbushes (Atriplex) and bluebushes (Maireana and Chenopodium). Many of these plants have succulent leaves; other native succulents are from the genera Carpobrotus, Calandrinia and Portulaca. Succulent stems are present in many of the Euphorbiaceae in Australia, though the best known members are the non-succulent looking fragrant Wedding bushes of the genus Ricinocarpos. Carnivorous plants which favour damp habitats are represented by four families including the sundews, bladderworts, pitcher-plants from the Cephalotaceae, which are endemic to Western Australia, and the Nepenthaceae.
Aquatic monocots and dicots both occur in Australian waters. Australia has about 51,000 square kilometres of seagrass meadows and the most diverse group seagrass species in the world. There are 22 species found in temperate waters and 15 in tropical waters out of a known 70 species worldwide. Aquatic dicots include the mangroves; in Australia there are 39 mangrove species that cover 11,500 square kilometres and comprise the third largest area of mangroves in the world. Other native aquatic dicots here include water lilies and water milfoils."
Flora of Australia,"Gymnosperms
Gymnosperms present in Australia include the cycads and conifers. There are 69 species of cycad from 4 genera and 3 families of eastern and northern Australia, with a few in south-western Western Australia and central Australia. Native conifers are distributed across 3 taxonomic families (Cupressaceae, Podocarpaceae, Araucariaceae), 14 genera  and 43 species, of which 39 are endemic. Most species are present in wetter mountainous areas consistent with their Gondwanan origins, including the genera Athrotaxis, Actinostrobus, Microcachrys, Microstrobos, Diselma and the Tasmanian Huon pine, sole member of the genus Lagarostrobos. Callitris is a notable exception; species from this genus are found mainly in drier open woodlands. The most recently discovered species of conifer is the living fossil Wollemi pine, which was first described in 1994. Although many Australian conifers are referred to as 'pines', there are no members of the pine family (Pinaceae) native to Australia."
Flora of Australia,"Ferns and fern allies
Spore bearing vascular plants include the ferns and fern allies. True ferns are found over most of the country and are most abundant in tropical and subtropical areas with high rainfall. Australia has a native flora of 30 families, 103 genera and 390 species of ferns, with another 10 species being naturalised. The ""fern allies"" are represented by 44 native species of whisk ferns, horsetails and lycophytes. Ferns prefer a cool and damp environment since water is required for reproduction, the majority of Australian species are found in bushland   and rainforest, there are aquatic, epiphytic (Platycerium, Huperzia and Asplenium), and terrestrial species including large tree ferns from the genera Cyathea and Dicksonia."
Flora of Australia,"Non-vascular plants
The algae are a large and diverse group of photosynthetic organisms. Many studies of algae include the cyanobacteria, in addition to micro and macro eukaryotic types that inhabit both fresh and saltwater. Currently, about 10,000 to 12,000 species of algae are known for Australia. The algal flora of Australia is unevenly documented: northern Australia remains largely uncollected for seaweeds and marine phytoplankton, descriptions of freshwater algae are patchy, and the collection of terrestrial algae has been almost completely neglected.
The bryophytes – mosses, liverworts and hornworts – are primitive, usually terrestrial, plants that inhabit the tropics, cool-temperate regions and montane areas; there are some specialised members that are adapted to semi-arid and arid Australia. There are slightly fewer that 1,000 recognised species of moss in Australia. The five largest genera are the Fissidens, Bryum, Campylopus, Macromitrium and  Andreaea. There are also over 800 species of liver- and horn-worts in 148 genera in Australia."
Flora of Australia,"Fungi
The fungal flora of Australia is not well characterised; Australia is estimated to have about 250,000 fungal species of which roughly 5% have been described. Knowledge of distribution, substrates and habitats is poor for most species, with the exception of common plant pathogens."
Flora of Australia,"Lichens
Lichens are composite organisms comprising, in most cases, an Ascomycete fungus and a unicellular green alga, their classification is based on the type of fungi. The lichen flora of Australia and its island territories, including Christmas Island, Heard Island, Macquarie Island and Norfolk Island, currently comprises 3,238 species and infra-specific taxa in 422 genera, 34% of which are considered to be endemic."
Flora of Australia,"Use by humans
The first Australian plants recognised and classified in Linnaean taxonomy were a species of Acacia and Synaphea in 1768 as Adiantum truncatum and Polypodium spinulosum respectively by Dutch philologist Pieter Burman the Younger, who stated they were from Java. Later, both were found to be from Western Australia, likely to have been collected near the Swan River, possibly on a 1697 visit there of fellow Dutchman Willem de Vlamingh. This was followed by Cook's expedition making landfall at what is now Botany Bay in April 1770, and the early work of Banks, Solander and Parkinson. Botanical exploration was enabled by the
founding of the permanent colony at Port Jackson in 1788, and the subsequent expeditions along Australia's coastline.
The Australian flora was utilised by the Indigenous inhabitants of Australia. Indigenous Australians used thousands of species for food, medicine, shelter, tools and weapons. For example, the starchy roots of Clematis microphylla were used in western Victoria to make a dough that was baked, and the leaves of the plant were used as a poultice applied to skin irritations and blisters."
Flora of Australia,"Since European colonisation
Forestry species include a number of eucalypts used for paper and timber, huon pine, hoop pine, cypress pine, Australian Blackwood, and sandalwood from Santalum spicatum and S. lanceolatum. A significant area used by the pastoral industry is based on native pasture species including Mitchell grass, saltbush, bluebush, wallaby grass, spear grass, tussock grasses and kangaroo grass."
Flora of Australia,"Commercial use
Until recently the macadamia nut and Tetragonia tetragonoides were the only Australian food plant species widely cultivated. Although commercial cultivation of macadamia started in Australia in the 1880s, it became an established large-scale crop in Hawaii. The development of a range of native food crops began in the late 1970s with the assessment of species for commercial potential. In the mid-1980s restaurants and wholesalers started to market various native food plant products. These included wattles for their edible seeds; Davidson's Plum, desert lime, finger lime, quandong, riberry, Kakadu plum, muntries, bush tomato, Illawarra plum for fruit; warrigal greens as a leaf vegetable; and, lemon aspen, lemon myrtle, mountain pepper as spices. A few Australian native plants are used by the pharmaceutical industry, such as two scopolamine and hyoscyamine producing Duboisia species and Solanum aviculare and S. laciniatum for  the steroid solasodine. Essential oils from Melaleuca, Callitris, Prostanthera, Eucalyptus and Eremophila are also used medicinally. Due to the wide variety of flowers and foliage, Australian plant species are also popular for floriculture internationally."
Flora of Australia,"Conservation
Modification of the Australian environment by Indigenous Australians and following European settlement has affected the extent and the distribution of the flora."
Flora of Australia,"Threats
The changes since 1788 have been rapid and significant: displacement of Indigenous Australians disrupted fire régimes that had been in place for thousands of years; forestry practices have modified the structure of native forests; wetlands have been filled in; and broad scale land-clearing for crops, grazing and urban development has reduced native vegetation cover and led to landscape salinisation, increased sediment, nutrient and salt loads in rivers and streams, loss of habitat and a decline in biodiversity. The intentional and unintentional release of invasive plant and animal species into delicate ecosystems is a major threat to floral biodiversity; 20 introduced species have been declared Weeds of National Significance."
Flora of Australia,"Threatened plant biodiversity
As of 2006, 61 plant species were known to have become extinct since European settlement; and a further 1,239 species were considered threatened."
Flora of Australia,"Protected areas
Protected areas have been created in every state and territory to protect and preserve the country's unique ecosystems. These protected areas include national parks and other reserves, as well as 64 wetlands registered under the Ramsar Convention and 16 World Heritage Sites. As of 2002, 10.8% (774,619.51 km2) of the total land area of Australia is within protected areas. Protected marine zones have been created in many areas to preserve marine biodiversity; as of 2002, these areas cover about 7% (646,000 km2) of Australia's marine jurisdiction."
Flora of Australia,"Biodiversity hotspots
In 2003, the Australian Government's Threatened Species Scientific Committee identified 15 biodiversity hotspots in Australian and 85 characteristic ecosystems, as classified by the Interim Biogeographic Regionalisation for Australia. Some effort is being made to ensure each is represented within a protected area under Australia's Biodiversity Action Plan."
Flora of Australia,"See also
List of electronic floras
List of Australian floral emblems
List of extinct flora of Australia
List of flora on stamps of Australia
List of threatened flora of Australia
Systematic Census of Australian Plants
Region specific articles"
Flora of Australia,"Flora of the Australian Capital Territory
Flora of Western Australia
List of Nature Conservation Act endangered flora of Queensland
List of Nature Conservation Act extinct in the wild flora of Queensland
List of Nature Conservation Act rare flora of Queensland
List of Nature Conservation Act vulnerable flora of Queensland"
Flora of Australia,"References
Notes
General references
External links"
Flora of Australia,"Flora of Australia online Archived 2021-10-24 at the Wayback Machine
National Vegetation Information System
Flora of Australia (a newer resource)
Flora of Australia Online Archived 2021-10-24 at the Wayback Machine
Flora of Australia Online - Norfolk and Lord Howe Islands
Flora of Australia Online - Oceanic Islands excluding Norfolk and Lord Howe Islands
Australia's Virtual Herbarium
What's its name? A database for the Australian Plant Name Index
Census of Freshwater Algae in Australia
Australian Marine Algal Name Index
Australian National Botanic Gardens Fungi Web Site
Prehistoric Life - Plant Fossils of Australia Archived 2009-05-19 at the Wayback Machine Museum Victoria
ASGAP - Association of Societies for Growing Australian Plants"
Australian studies,"Australian studies forms part of the academic field of cultural studies. It involves an examination of what constructs Australia's national identity. This area of scholarship traditionally involves the study of Australian history, society and culture but can be extended to the study of Australian politics and economics. This area of scholarship also includes the study of Australia's Indigenous population, Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders.
Scholarship in Australian studies is offered at many Tertiary Institutions and topics within the field form part of the primary and secondary Australian Curriculum."
Australian studies,"Australian history
The study of Australian history involves the exploration of past events and significant people that define Australia's present. Scholarship in early Australian history encompasses the history of the Indigenous and colonial societies as well as the history of European colonisation and settlement. The studies of Aboriginal Australian history dates back 65,000 years ago when humans first populated Australia. The exact arrival of Aboriginal Australians has however been a topic of dispute among historians and archaeologists, with the accepted period being between 40,000 and 80,000 years. European colonisation and settlement in Australia in 1788 marks a prominent point in Australia's history. Within the study of Australia, there is criticism of the academic portrayal of Australian history. Historians and academics have argued that since European colonisation, Australians of European descent have recounted Australian history to ""favour the coloniser perspective"", oppressing the Indigenous Australian perspective."
Australian studies,"Australian society and culture
The study of Australian society and culture examines the historical and shifting social makeup of Australia and the resulting dominant cultures. An academic study in this field explores Australian society and culture both before and after European settlement and the migration of global miners to the country.
A study of Australia's society and culture before European colonisation, consists of Indigenous Australian colonies and their individual cultural beliefs. Post-Colonisation led to a form of ""Settler Society in the Australian Colonies"". The cultural study of this society involves an analysis of the interactions between the Indigenous people, European settlers and ""non-White immigrants"". 
A study into Australia's cultural shift from Indigenous to predominantly Western culture can be seen as a result of interactions between Indigenous Australians and European settlers. These interactions ranged from civil to violent, with the diseases brought to Australia by the Europeans taking a significant toll on the Indigenous population and culture. Historian Geoffrye Blainey believed, ""the main conqueror of Aborigines was to be disease and its ally, demoralisation"". European settlers had developed some resistance to Smallpox through early exposure, so when the disease broke out in Australia in 1789, these settlers were largely unaffected. However, without previous exposure to the virus, the Indigenous Australia population had no resistance and an estimated 70% were killed. Of the remaining indigenous population, many lost their land and culture when they were forced to resettle on reserves, and thousands of children were removed from their families and placed in institutions, becoming the Stolen Generations, unable to practice their ancestor's culture. This resulted in the social makeup of the country dramatically changing, and European culture becoming mainstream. 
A study into Australia's culture post-1980s, largely reflects its British penal history as well as the 'waves of migration from elsewhere in Europe and almost every other continent'. During the colonial era, English literature, Western art and Judeo-Christian religion dominated settler's cultural outlook. The Australian gold rushes then encouraged the migration of people from around the world to the Australian continent. This multi-ethnic immigration lead to a series of policies that favoured migrants from British descent such as the White Australia Policy. These were later dismantled by government promotion of multiculturalism, leading to increased migration of European, Asian and Middle Eastern people to Australia. While a study of contemporary Australian culture will still show the British cultural influence as remaining prominent, Australia's promotion of multiculturalism has led to other nation's influences becoming increasingly prominent."
Australian studies,"Australian politics and economics
Australian studies may also involve an analysis of Australian politics and economics. The study of Australian politics involves all aspects of Australia's past and present political system. This area of study can be divided into pre and post-federation. Pre-federation, Australia consisted of six British colonies ""under the law-making of the British Parliament"". 
After Federation in 1901, Australia established a ""federal system of government"" under the Australian constitution. Studies post-federation focus on Australia's political system as a representative democracy. This includes; the democratic system of government, the role of parliament in Australia, government departments, international programs and all government mandated policies and publications.
The study of Australian economics encompasses the Australian economy and the past and present economic environments. Within this field of study, common topics include; Australia's macro and micro economic structure, policies, trends, governance and the structure of the Australian economy in terms of industry contribution. Also relevant is the history and role of the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA). This field of study outlines the role of Australia's central bank and banknote issuing authority since the Reserve Bank Act 1959 was passed in 1960."
Australian studies,"Indigenous Australian studies
The scholarship of Indigenous Australian studies involves Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, history and beliefs systems. Australia's Indigenous people are made up of two distinct cultural groups; Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Within this field of study, the social and political influence of colonisation and decolonisation on Indigenous Australian groups is analysed. Some Academics believe that within this field of study, there is ""scant attention paid"" to how the colonisation process impacted social, economic and cultural experiences of Indigenous Australians today, such as the systemic disparities in health and between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians.
Indigenous Australian studies also examines contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture and society. This population is gradually growing from 2.5% of the population of Australia in 2011 to 3.3% in 2016. Since the 'Close the Gap' campaign was launched in 2007, in response to the Social Justice Report 2005, awareness and recognition of Indigenous civilisation and culture has grown significantly."
Australian studies,"Australian studies at educational institutions
Australian studies forms part of the Australian national curriculum and is offered by many Australian and international tertiary institutions."
Australian studies,"Australian Curriculum
The national curriculum in Australia, Australian Curriculum, is created by the Australian Government Department of Education, Skills and Employment and provides an outline of what students in primary and high school should learn. This outline is regardless of their location within Australia or school system. Within the Australian Curriculum, Australian studies is predominantly taught within the humanities and social sciences. The curriculum also stipulates two cross-cultural priorities that sit within the study of Australia; Asia and Australia's engagement with Asia, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures."
Australian studies,"Tertiary Institutions
Australian studies is a course offered at many tertiary institutions both within Australia and internationally. The subject can fall under broader disciplines such as Cultural Studies or Political and International Studies."
Australian studies,"Institutes
Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies
The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) is a government-funded institution focused on the ""diverse history, cultures and heritage"" of the Indigenous Australian Population. This institute was established under the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act 2013. The institute facilitates the studies and understanding of Indigenous Australians by collecting items of cultural value, conducting research on communities, publishing pieces of work by Indigenous Australians, and facilitating collaborations and partnerships with government, academic, corporate and community sectors."
Australian studies,"Australian Studies Institute
The Australian Studies Institute was founded by The Australian National University (ANU). The institute was established to promote the study of Australia as part of its 'Australia and the World' global engagement program. The institute is led by Professor Paul Pickering and facilitates various global engagement programs with universities and leading cultural institutions. These programs aim to promote the exchange of knowledge, research and resources between people studying Australia-related studies and the institute."
Australian studies,"Other Institutes
Australian Studies Centre in Beijing
American Association for Australian Literary Studies
Centre for Australian Studies, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń
Centre for Australian Studies, University of Cologne"
Australian studies,"Journals
Journal of Australian Studies (JAS)
Australian Literary Studies
Australian Studies
Australian Studies Journal | Zeitschrift für Australienstudien (ASJ|ZfA)"
Australian studies,See also
Australian studies,"Education in Australia
List of universities in Australia"
Australian studies,"
== References =="
Tourism in Australia,"Tourism in Australia is an important part of the Australian economy, and comprises domestic and international visitors. Australia is the fortieth most visited country in the world according to the World Tourism Organization. In the financial year 2018/19, tourism was Australia's fourth-largest export and over the previous decade was growing faster than national GDP growth. At the time it represented 3.1% of Australia's GDP contributing A$60.8 billion to the national economy.
In the calendar year up to December 2019, there were 8.7 million international visitors in Australia. Tourism employed 666,000 people in Australia in 2018–19, 1 in 21 jobs across the workforce. About 48% of people employed in tourism were full-time and 54% female. Tourism also contributed 8.2% of Australia's total export earnings in 2018–19. 
Popular Australian destinations include the coastal cities of Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, as well as other high-profile destinations including regional Queensland, the Gold Coast and the Great Barrier Reef, the world's largest reef. Other popular locations include Uluru, the Australian outback and the Tasmanian wilderness. The unique Australian wildlife is also another significant point of interest in the country's tourism."
Tourism in Australia,"Trends
Despite the global economic challenges and natural disasters in 2010–2011, Australia's tourism growth was supported by increased consumption (up 4.4% over the last few years, largely due to an increase in the number of international visitors). On the back of a strong Australian dollar, 2010–11 also saw a record 7.4 million short-term resident departures from Australia, an increase of 9.9% from 2009–10. Consumption by domestic tourists grew at less than half the pace of international tourists in 2010–11 (up 2.1% compared to 4.4%).
The Australian Government released the 2020 Tourism Industry Potential on 15 November 2010, which estimated the Australian tourism industry to be worth up to $140 billion in overnight expenditure. This growth will largely be due to key emerging markets, including China, which is estimated to be the largest economic contributor to Australian tourism by 2020. The number of Chinese visitors has more than doubled from 2006 to 2012 reaching a peak of 626,400 in 2012 and surpassing for the first time the number of arrivals from the United Kingdom. In 2013, China was Australia's fastest growing tourist market. By 2017 China surpassed New Zealand as the top source of visitors to Australia, and in 2019 Chinese visitors reached a peak of over 1.4 million and had contributed about A$12 billion to the Australian economy. According to Tourism Australia Managing Director Andrew McEvoy, the Chinese are the highest spending visitors to the country."
Tourism in Australia,"Visas
All visitors to Australia, apart from New Zealanders, require an Australian visa to enter the country. For most countries, a full visa is required. Passport holders of all European Union countries as well as all Schengen Area countries and European microstates can apply online for an eVisitor authorisation. Citizens of some OECD and some East Asian countries can apply for the similar Electronic Travel Authority authorisation."
Tourism in Australia,"History
From the colonial days, the idea of travel has been more natural to Australians than to people long-established at one from their homes, was prone to continue their search for wealth or security for a while, or, having settled down, to return to the old countries to visit their kin and refresh old memories. The opening of new lands, the establishment of industries and towns, and the consequent dispersal of people over Australia created a habit of mobility and enterprise which encouraged Australians to face the hardships of early travel by coach, on horseback or by ship. Even so, the slow and uncomfortable modes of travel and the vast distances separating Australian towns tended to restrict travel to essential journeys for purposes of trade, to pursue an occupation or to settle. This changed somewhat with the advent of rail travel.
The initial emphasis in tourism for purposes of pleasure was strongest on travel to resorts near the main population centres. These included the Blue Mountains in New South Wales and the hill and coast resorts close to Melbourne and other major Victorian cities. The existing railway services radiating from those cities, together with the 'feeder' horse-drawn, and later motor, coach transport connecting with the railways, rendered the State Government railway tourist bureaux the main means for selling intrastate, and even some interstate, travel.
Travel for all purposes increased steadily after the Second World War. This period saw the establishment of the Australian National Travel Association with bureaux in the UK and USA. The organisation received government funding on top of industry contributions and promoted the country 'vigorously' via a poster campaign, and from 1934–1974 via Walkabout magazine. From August 1946, Walkabout also doubled as the official journal of the newly formed Australian Geographical Society (AGS), founded with a £5,000 grant from ANTA, its banner subscript reading 'Journal of the Australian Geographical Society. This role is now filled by Australian Geographic magazine.  Later it became ‘Australia's Way of Life Magazine’ when supported by the Australian National Publicity Association and later the Australian Tourist Commission.
Tourism traffic continued to be mainly by rail, but also by sea, although the family motor era began in the 1930s to participate in the shorter intrastate traffic. A considerable fleet of passenger ships provided frequent and popular services linking most ports between Fremantle and Cairns. Other services linked Sydney and Melbourne with Tasmanian ports. The winter cruise of those days to Queensland ports could be regarded as the equivalent of today's drive or flight north for a winter holiday at the Gold Coast or a Barrier Reef Island, or today's shorter South Pacific cruises. The first cruises from Australia to New Zealand were organised in the summer of 1934–35, and Australians were travelling to Britain for as low as $78 in tourist class in the years immediately preceding the Second World War.
In the period following the Second World War the advent of new and improved methods of transportation, combined with rising standards of living and the energetic publicising of foreign destinations, developed international travel into a mass movement. New ocean liners shortened travelling time considerably, and travel by car and bus increased in many countries. Most of all, air travel became widely available, faster, safer, and cheaper. The beginning of the Jet Age in 1960, with larger aeroplanes carrying more than 100 passengers at speeds approximating 600 miles per hour, diminished the world by half in terms of time. Rising standards of living in the post-war period led to greater expenditure on tourism, thus making it more important to the national economy.
Australia has shared in this worldwide expansion of travel, particularly in respect of its domestic tourism. Because of the marked increase in incomes and private car ownership among large sections of the population, greater leisure time, three weeks of paid annual holidays (introduced first in New South Wales in 1958) and the introduction of long-service leave, thousands of Australians now travel by road into almost every part of the country. This has led to investment in the development of new and improved facilities, especially accommodation, of new resorts at dispersed points around Australia, and modifications in organisation and methods of tourist administration, development and promotion. These activities, in turn, have had an important influence on matters such as the improvement of highways and the opening up of national parks and foreshores.
A White Paper was produced analysing the tourist industry in Australia in 2003. A Tourism 2020 strategy was produced and implemented.
Prior to COVID-19 pandemic and Deltacron hybrid variant, domestic tourism in Australia continues to be a significant part of the tourism industry, representing 73% of the total direct tourism GDP and has taken on an even greater role. However, in 2021 during the pandemic, Australians travelled intrastate and also interstate when borders were open. From November 2021, borders for Australia were opened and fully vaccinated Australians were permitted to fly overseas without exemption, although the range of countries was added to Malaysia, Singapore, New Zealand, and other countries including Japan in December allowed to enter the country, from 1 December 2021.
Following the significant consultation on the replacement Tourism 2030 strategy, its launch was interrupted by COVID-19 leading to the Government Commissioning an Expert Panel led by the former Tourism Minister Martin Ferguson to provide recommendations.
Eventually, an updated Tourism 2030 document titled THRIVE (THe Re-Imagined Visitor Economy) 2030 strategy was finalised and published in March 2022. The document was updated to reflect the new Government's initiatives and policy priorities as well as industry actions and State and Territory support statements and launched on 17 March 2023."
Tourism in Australia,"Organizations
The Australian Trade and Investment Commission has tourism policy and programs responsibility in the Australian Government with Tourism Australia responsible for marketing Australia. State and territory government jurisdictions have tourism policy departments and/or tourism marketing authorities along with regional tourism organisations. The industry has a wide range of stakeholder bodies including the Australian Tourism Industry Council (ATIC), which includes promotion of the Australian Tourism Accreditation Program, the Australian Tourism Awards and Star Ratings Australia; the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry Tourism Chamber, and the Australian Tourism Export Council (ATEC)."
Tourism in Australia,"Marketing
Australia's international tourism campaigns have focused on Australia's laid back style, such as the 1980s advertising campaign featuring actor Paul Hogan telling American tourists ""I'll slip an extra shrimp on the barbie for you"", or its cheeky side, as in its controversial 2006 campaign in the United Kingdom using the Australian colloquialism slogan ""So where the bloody hell are you?"".
Tourism Australia's ""No Leave No Life"" campaign was launched in March 2009 by the Federal Minister for Tourism, the Hon. Martin Ferguson AM MP. This campaign was designed to remind employees of the personal and professional benefits of taking annual leave, and of taking that leave in Australia. On 30 June 2009, there were 126 million days of stockpiled annual leave in the Australian economy. At the end of the June 2010 quarter, this number had decreased to 117 million days, following falls in the preceding three quarters.
Tourism Australia's consumer campaign ""There's Nothing Like Australia"" invited Australians to share their favourite Australian place or experience with the world. The campaign is based on research conducted by Tourism Australia that showed Australians were eager to get involved in promoting their country. It was developed to involve Australians because they are the experts on what makes Australia unlike anywhere else. The core message, that ""There's Nothing Like Australia"" was designed for longevity through different mediums, audiences and activities."
Tourism in Australia,"Types of tourists
Tourists by country
International tourists
In 2019, the majority of international visitors to Australia were from China, New Zealand, the United States and the UK, with visitors from China growing substantially from the early 2000s. 
Growth in tourism in 2019 was led by education and holiday travel. Education visitors were up 5% to 586,000, with spending increasing by 8% to a record $12.7 billion. Holiday visitors were up 4% to almost 4 million, with spending growing by 6% to $16.9 billion."
Tourism in Australia,"Backpackers
Australia is popular for people engaging in backpacker tourism. Spending more time in Australia, these travellers tend to explore considerably more of the country. Many backpackers participate in working holidays enabling them to stay longer in the country. Working holiday visas for Australia are available for those aged 18 to 30 for most citizens from Western Europe, Canada, the United States, and some developed East Asian nations such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. More than 111,000 of these visas were issued between July and December 2022, compared to 23,000 over the same period in 2021. This brings them back in line with pre-pandemic levels. As a result of this, hostel revenue is projected to grow by 7.9% in the 2023-24 financial year."
Tourism in Australia,"Domestic tourism
The domestic tourism market is estimated at $63 billion. In 2009, the Australian domestic market experienced a 10% slump in the number of visitor nights. Domestic tourism in general and in particular free caravan and camping sites for overnight accommodation experienced strong demand in 2012.
Australians are big domestic travellers, with a profusion of seaside resort towns in every state (many located on or near good surfing beaches), mountain retreats, plentiful national parks, rivers, fishing locations, wine growing regions, as well as domestic visitation of the major tourist spots.  Domestic tourism peaks during the Australian school holidays.
In 2011, a leading Australian travel agent warned that low-cost carriers such as AirAsia and Jetstar who offered cheap packages to Asia threatened the domestic tourism market."
Tourism in Australia,"Markets
Attractions
Ecotourism
Australia has a diverse geography, containing many distinct geographical features and unique fauna. Ecotourism accounts for a large portion of Australia's domestic and international tourism, with two thirds of all international visitors in 2016 having engaged in nature tourism in some way. Popular activities include skiing, surfing, hiking, camping and whale watching."
Tourism in Australia,"Whale watching is available seasonally on almost all of Australia's subtropical coast. Boat tours are usually offered in coastal towns, although whales can be easily viewed from the shoreline. Whale watching hubs include Hervey Bay, Eden and Bateman's Bay."
Tourism in Australia,"Arts and cultural tourism
Many tourists that visit Australia engage with cultural tourism, including some 54% of international tourists and 26% of domestic tourists in 2015. Cultural tourism is most significant in Australia's urban areas, however most towns will offer some sort of heritage tourism."
Tourism in Australia,"Events
Year-round, Australia has many events, which attract both domestic and international tourists. The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras is an annual event that attractions thousands of international tourists.
The World’s second largest annual Arts festival The Adelaide Fringe (only smaller than The Edinburgh Festival Fringe) welcomed 2.7 million attendees in 2019.
The 2000 Sydney Olympics resulted in significant inbound and domestic tourism to Sydney. During the games, Sydney hosted 362,000 domestic and 110,000 international visitors. In addition, up to 4 billion people watched the games worldwide. The 2003 Rugby World Cup attracted 65,000 international visitors to Australia. Schoolies Week is an annual celebration of Year 12 school leavers in late November, many of whom travel to the Gold Coast, where in 2011 they were expected to boost the economy by $60 million."
Tourism in Australia,"Australia's icons
Major Australian icons for tourists to visit include:"
Tourism in Australia,"See also
Visa policy of Australia
List of World Heritage Sites in Australia
Tourism in Sydney
Tourism in Melbourne
Tourism in Brisbane
Tourism in Queensland
Tourism in Perth
Passenger Movement Charge
Australian National Travel Association"
Tourism in Australia,"References
External links"
Tourism in Australia,"Information About Australian Holidays & Travel
Tourism Australia
Tourism Research Australia
Department of Home Affairs
Austrade - Tourism Archived 2023-05-29 at the Wayback Machine"
Australian Public Service,"The Australian Public Service (APS) is the federal civil service of the Commonwealth of Australia responsible for the public administration, public policy, and public services of the departments and executive and statutory agencies of the Government of Australia. The Australian Public Service was established at the Federation of Australia in 1901 as the Commonwealth Public Service and modelled on the Westminster system and United Kingdom's Civil Service. The establishment and operation of the Australian Public Service is governed by the Public Service Act 1999 of the Parliament of Australia as an ""apolitical public service that is efficient and effective in serving the Government, the Parliament and the Australian public"". The conduct of Australian public servants is also governed by a Code of Conduct and guided by the APS Values set by the Australian Public Service Commission.
As such, the employees and officers of the Australian Public Service are obliged to serve the government of the day with integrity and provide ""frank and fearless advice"" on questions of public policy, from national security to fiscal policy to social security, across machinery of government arrangements. Indeed, the Australian Public Service plays a major part in Australian life by providing ""cradle to grave"" services with a degree of shared responsibility with the State and Territory governments. The Australian Public Service as an entity does not include the broader Commonwealth public sector including the Australian Defence Force, Commonwealth companies such as NBN Co or the Australian Rail Track Corporation, or Commonwealth corporate entities such as the Australian National University or the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The Australian Public Service does not include the civil services of the State and Territory governments.
Public servants are ultimately responsible to the Parliament of Australia via their respective portfolio Minister. The Australian Public Service Commission is responsible for promoting the values of the public service, evaluating performance and compliance, and facilitating the development of people and institutional capabilities. The Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet is the most senior public servant and plays a leadership role as the chair of the intergovernmental Secretaries Board made up of all Commonwealth departmental secretaries. The Australian National Audit Office, the Department of Finance, the Department of the Treasury, and the Attorney-General's Department also have whole-of-government oversight and management responsibilities.
As at June 2015, the Australian Public Service comprises some 152,430 officers alongside a further 90,000 people employed in the broader Commonwealth public sector. Accordingly, the Australian Public Service is one of the largest employers in Australia.
As of 2023 The Australian Public Service Wage bill was estimated at $AU 33 Bn.  out of the total Australian Federal Government Budget of $AU 600 Bn"
Australian Public Service,"History
The Australian public service was established at Federation of Australia on 1 January 1901. The departments established on that date were Attorney-General's, Defence, External Affairs, Home Affairs, Trade and Customs, Postmaster-General's, and Treasury.
The first public service appointments were made under section 67 of the Constitution of Australia, an arrangement that remained in place until the Commonwealth Public Service Act 1902 commenced on 1 January 1903, at which time there were 11,374 officials employed under the Act.
The Commonwealth Public Service Act 1922 introduced a new legislative framework commencing in 1923, and created the Public Service Board.
A section in both the 1902 and 1922 Acts stated that every female officer was deemed to have retired from the Commonwealth service upon her marriage. In November 1966 Australia became the last democratic country to lift the legislated marriage bar which had prevented married women from holding permanent positions in the public service.
In November 1996, Peter Reith issued a discussion paper, Towards a best practice Australian Public Service. The paper, among other things, recommended key elements which might need to be incorporated into a new streamlined and principles-based Public Service Act. After several years spent developing a new Act, the Public Service Act 1999 came into effect on 5 December 1999. The new Act introduced APS Values and a Code of Conduct into the Act for the first time. Public servants who breach the code of conduct can be demoted, fined, reprimanded or fired.
In 2010 a comprehensive reform agenda was introduced as outlined in Ahead of the Game: Blueprint for Reform of Australian Government Administration.The reforms were aimed at strengthening strategic direction, citizen engagement and staff capability across the APS."
Australian Public Service,"Functions and values
Geoff Gallop describes the spectrum of activities undertaken by staff in the APS as fitting into four work functions: service delivery; law making, rule making and policy development; tax collection and managing government finance; and monitoring and enforcing laws and regulations.
The APS Values are set out in section 10 of the Public Service Act 1999. The Values are mandatory and are intended to embody the principles of good public administration.
The APS Values were most recently revised in 2013, with the aim to comprise a smaller set of core values that are meaningful, memorable and effective in driving change. The values are stated in section 10 of the Public Service Act 1999 as follows:"
Australian Public Service,"Impartial: The APS is apolitical and provides the Government with advice that is frank, honest, timely and based on the best available evidence.
Committed to service: The APS is professional, objective, innovative and efficient, and works collaboratively to achieve the best results for the Australian community and the Government.
Accountable: The APS is open and accountable to the Australian community under the law and within the framework of Ministerial responsibility.
Respectful: The APS respects all people, including their rights and their heritage.
Ethical: The APS demonstrates leadership, is trustworthy, and acts with integrity, in all that it does."
Australian Public Service,"Composition
The Australian Public Service formally comprises all Australian Government departments and agencies where staff members are or can be employed under the Public Service Act 1999. At December 2021, there were 155,796 APS employees, up 4.8% from December 2020.  Staffing in Australian Public Service agencies accounts for around half of total employment in Australian Government administration. Public servants employed by the Commonwealth Government under legislation other than the Public Service Act include Australian Defence Force personnel, government business enterprise employees, parliamentary staff, Australian Federal Police staff and public servants under other Commonwealth agency-specific legislation.
In the decade to December 2012 the APS grew in numbers; there was also notable 'classification creep', in which a higher proportion of staff are employed at higher pay-grade levels. Before the 2013 federal election, the Coalition promised to reduce the size of the public service by at least 12000 jobs, through natural attrition. Joe Hockey told an Adelaide radio station in May 2013 that the Coalition planned for the loss of 12,000 public service jobs to be just a starting point in the first two years of a Coalition government."
Australian Public Service,"Demographics
57.9 per cent of all APS employees are women. 39.1 per cent of APS employees work in the Australian Capital Territory. At June 2013, the median age for ongoing APS employees was 43 years. Like the Australian population, the APS workforce has been ageing rapidly since the early 1990s.
At June 2013 the largest federal government agency was Services Australia with 33,658 employees, followed by the Australian Taxation Office with 24,274 employees and the Department of Defence with 22,330.
In 2009 there was a ratio of one APS official for every 135 Australians, compared to 1991 ratios of 1:106.
As of 2020 38.2% of the APS worked in the ACT, 17.6% in NSW, 17% in Victoria with the rest in other states and territories."
Australian Public Service,"Measuring APS performance
Beginning in 2009–10 all APS entities were required to report in accordance with the Outcomes and Programs Framework, whereby programs provide the link between Australian Government decisions, activities and their actual outcomes. In the Outcomes and Programs Framework, organisations identify and report against the programs that contribute to government outcomes over the budget and forward years. All APS agencies contribute to Portfolio Budget Statements that inform Parliament and the public of the proposed allocation of Government outcomes. Portfolio budget statements outline:"
Australian Public Service,"outcome statements, which specifically articulate the intended results, impacts or consequences of actions by the Government on the Australian community;
programs to address outcomes, which are designed to deliver benefits, services or transfer payments to target groups; and
resourcing information, deliverables and key performance indicators for each program.
Annual reports report performance of agencies in relation to services provided.
Prior to the introduction of the Outcomes and Programs Framework APS entities reported against an Outcomes and Outputs Framework, which had been introduced in 1999. Reforms have been progressively introduced to the APS with the specific aim of making it more efficient, accountable and responsive to community needs since the mid-1980s.
The Australian National Audit Office provides the Australian Parliament and the public with an independent assessment of selected areas of public administration in the APS, and assurance about APS financial reporting, administration and accountability."
Australian Public Service,"Benchmarking the APS
In November 2009 KPMG published a report benchmarking Australian Public Service performance against international public services. The report found that the APS measured up well against some of the world's leading public services. The report found that the APS is a high performer compared to other public services when it came to: being responsive to economic changes; being independent and values-based; and for proportions of women employed. It found that the APS performed poorly in: its capability for coordinated, informed and strategic policy; its mechanisms for integrating external stakeholders into policy development and service design; and its understanding of government priorities through an overarching framework."
Australian Public Service,"Public opinion and criticism
The APS is often the target of public criticism. For example, in 2013, the director, deregulation at the Institute of Public Affairs, Alan Moran, argued that the Australian Government was not seeking enough savings from a bloated Australian Public Service. In October 2013, newly appointed Defence Minister David Johnston told media he had 'inherited a mess' and that he believed that in the Defence department '23,000 public servants is too heavy.' The Noetic group said in 2014 that most Australian Public Service organisations could not demonstrate the benefits from large and expensive programs of work.
Other commentators, including political scientist Richard Mulgan, have argued that rhetoric in 2013 about a bloated APS is ill-informed and unsustainable, if service benchmarks are to be met. Rob Burgess, in a Business Spectator article in November 2012 argued that efficiency dividends imposed on the public service are actually delivering one of the world's leaner public sectors."
Australian Public Service,"Personnel organisation
All APS vacancies for ongoing and non-ongoing jobs for more than 12 months are notified in the APS Employment Gazette, a weekly electronic publication. Public service wages were decentralised in 1997, allowing individual APS agencies to negotiate their own pay deals.
Individual Australian Government agency websites also advertise jobs and some jobs are advertised on external job boards, such as in newspapers."
Australian Public Service,"Employment classifications
The Australian Public Service (APS) career structure is hierarchical.  The table below lists APS employment classification levels from lowest to highest."
Australian Public Service,"A  Position titles vary across APS agencies.
B  Total annual base includes base salary, plus benefits such as superannuation, annual base salary scales vary across APS agencies."
Australian Public Service,"Leadership
The Australian Public Service Commission (APSC) is responsible to the Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Public Service. The APSC is led by a Commissioner, who is tasked with promoting the APS Values, evaluating public service performance and compliance, and helping to build the capability of the Service.
The Government also recognises a role for the Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet for certain aspects of leadership of the APS."
Australian Public Service,"See also
List of Australian Government entities
Judiciary of Australia
Public Service Medal (Australia)
British Civil Service
Concepts:"
Australian Public Service,"Bureaucracy
Public administration
Public policy
Public sector
Public service"
Australian Public Service,"Notes
References and further reading
External links
Australian Federal Government
APS Jobs
Public Service Gazette (archived 19 June 2000)"
Royal Australian Air Force,"The Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) is the principal aerial warfare force of Australia, a part of the Australian Defence Force (ADF) along with the Royal Australian Navy and the Australian Army. Constitutionally the Governor-General of Australia is the de jure Commander-in-Chief of the Australian Defence Force. The Royal Australian Air Force is commanded by the Chief of Air Force (CAF), who is subordinate to the Chief of the Defence Force (CDF). The CAF is also directly responsible to the Minister for Defence, with the Department of Defence administering the ADF and the Air Force.
Formed in March 1921, as the Australian Air Force, through the separation of the Australian Air Corps from the Army in January 1920, which in turn amalgamated the separate aerial services of both the Army and Navy. It directly continues the traditions of the Australian Flying Corps (AFC), the aviation corps of the Army that fought in the First World War and that was formed on 22 October 1912.
During its history, the Royal Australian Air Force has fought in a number of major wars, including the Second World War in Europe and the Pacific, participated in the Berlin Airlift, Korean War, Malayan Emergency, Indonesia–Malaysia Confrontation, Vietnam War, and more recently, operations in East Timor, the Iraq War and subsequent intervention, and the War in Afghanistan.
The RAAF operates the majority of the ADF's fixed wing aircraft, although both the Australian Army and Royal Australian Navy also operate aircraft in various roles. The RAAF provides support across a spectrum of operations such as air superiority, precision strikes, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, air mobility, space surveillance, and humanitarian support. The RAAF has 252 aircraft, of which 84 are combat aircraft."
Royal Australian Air Force,"History
Formation
The RAAF traces its history back to the 1911 Imperial Conference that was held in London, where it was decided aviation should be developed within the armed forces of the British Empire. Australia implemented this decision, the first dominion to do so, by approving the establishment of the ""Australian Aviation Corps"". This initially consisted of the Central Flying School at Point Cook, Victoria, opening on 22 October 1912. By 1914 the corps was known as the ""Australian Flying Corps""."
Royal Australian Air Force,"First World War
Soon after the outbreak of war in 1914, the Australian Flying Corps sent aircraft to assist in capturing German colonies in what is now north-east New Guinea. However, these colonies surrendered quickly, before the planes were even unpacked. The first operational flights did not occur until 27 May 1915, when the Mesopotamian Half Flight was called upon to assist the Indian Army in providing air support during the Mesopotamian Campaign against the Ottoman Empire, in what is now Iraq.
The corps later saw action in Egypt, Palestine and on the Western Front throughout the remainder of the First World War. By the end of the war, four squadrons—Nos. 1, 2, 3 and 4—had seen operational service, while another four training squadrons—Nos. 5, 6, 7 and 8—had also been established. A total of 460 officers and 2,234 other ranks served in the AFC, whilst another 200 men served as aircrew in the British flying services. Casualties included 175 dead, 111 wounded, 6 gassed and 40 captured."
Royal Australian Air Force,"Inter-war period
The Australian Flying Corps remained part of the Australian Army until 1919, when it was disbanded along with the First Australian Imperial Force (AIF). Although the Central Flying School continued to operate at Point Cook, military flying virtually ceased until 1920, when the interim Australian Air Corps (AAC), with a wing each for the Army and the Navy, was formed as a unit of the Army. The AAC was succeeded by the Australian Air Force which was formed on 31 March 1921. King George V approved the prefix ""Royal"" in May 1921 and became effective on 13 August 1921. The RAAF then became the second Royal air arm to be formed in the British Commonwealth, following the British Royal Air Force. When formed the RAAF had more aircraft than personnel, with 21 officers and 128 other ranks and 153 aircraft.
As British aircraft manufacturers at the time were unable to meet Australian requirements, in addition to British production demands, the Australian government established the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation in 1936 and purchased some American aircraft."
Royal Australian Air Force,"Second World War
Europe and the Mediterranean
In September 1939, the Australian Air Board directly controlled the Air Force via RAAF Station Laverton, RAAF Station Richmond, RAAF Station Pearce, No. 1 Flying Training School RAAF at Point Cook, RAAF Station Rathmines and five smaller units.
In 1939, just after the outbreak of the Second World War, Australia joined the Empire Air Training Scheme, under which flight crews received basic training in Australia before travelling to Canada for advanced training. A total of 17 RAAF bomber, fighter, reconnaissance and other squadrons served initially in Britain and with the Desert Air Force located in North Africa and the Mediterranean. Thousands of Australians also served with other Commonwealth air forces in Europe during the Second World War. About nine percent of the personnel who served under British RAF commands in Europe and the Mediterranean were RAAF personnel.
With British manufacturing targeted by the German Luftwaffe, in 1941 the Australian government created the Department of Aircraft Production (DAP; later known as the Government Aircraft Factories) to supply Commonwealth air forces, and the RAAF was eventually provided with large numbers of locally built versions of British designs such as the DAP Beaufort torpedo bomber, Beaufighters and Mosquitos, as well as other types such as Wirraways, Boomerangs, and Mustangs.
In the European theatre of the war, RAAF personnel were especially notable in RAF Bomber Command: although they represented just two percent of all Australian enlistments during the war, they accounted for almost twenty percent of those killed in action. This statistic is further illustrated by the fact that No. 460 Squadron RAAF, mostly flying Avro Lancasters, had an official establishment of about 200 aircrew and yet had 1,018 combat deaths. The squadron was therefore effectively wiped out five times over. Total RAAF casualties in Europe were 5,488 killed or missing."
Royal Australian Air Force,"Pacific War
The beginning of the Pacific War—and the rapid advance of Japanese forces—threatened the Australian mainland for the first time in its history. The RAAF was quite unprepared for the emergency, and initially had negligible forces available for service in the Pacific. In 1941 and early 1942, many RAAF airmen, including Nos. 1, 8, 21 and 453 Squadrons, saw action with the RAF Far East Command in the Malayan, Singapore and Dutch East Indies campaigns. Equipped with aircraft such as the Brewster Buffalo, and Lockheed Hudsons, the Australian squadrons suffered heavily against Japanese Zeros.
During the fighting for Rabaul in early 1942, No. 24 Squadron RAAF fought a brief, but ultimately futile defence as the Japanese advanced south towards Australia. The devastating air raids on Darwin on 19 February 1942 increased concerns about the direct threat facing Australia. In response, some RAAF squadrons were transferred from the northern hemisphere—although a substantial number remained there until the end of the war. Shortages of fighter and ground attack planes led to the acquisition of US-built Curtiss P-40 Kittyhawks and the rapid design and manufacture of the first Australian fighter, the CAC Boomerang. RAAF Kittyhawks came to play a crucial role in the New Guinea and Solomon Islands campaigns, especially in operations like the Battle of Milne Bay. As a response to a possible Japanese chemical warfare threat the RAAF imported hundreds of thousands of chemical weapons into Australia.
In the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, imported Bristol Beaufighters proved to be highly effective ground attack and maritime strike aircraft. Beaufighters were later made locally by the DAP from 1944. Although it was much bigger than Japanese fighters, the Beaufighter had the speed to outrun them. The RAAF operated a number of Consolidated PBY Catalina as long-range bombers and scouts. The RAAF's heavy bomber force was predominantly made up of 287 B-24 Liberators, equipping seven squadrons, which could bomb Japanese targets as far away as Borneo and the Philippines from airfields in Australia and New Guinea. By late 1945, the RAAF had received or ordered about 500 P-51 Mustangs, for fighter/ground attack purposes. The Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation initially assembled US-made Mustangs, but later manufactured most of those used.
By mid-1945, the RAAF's main operational formation in the Pacific, the First Tactical Air Force (1st TAF), consisted of over 21,000 personnel, while the RAAF as a whole consisted of about 50 squadrons and 6,000 aircraft, of which over 3,000 were operational. The 1st TAF's final campaigns were fought in support of Australian ground forces in Borneo, but had the war continued some of its personnel and equipment would likely have been allocated to the invasion of the Japanese mainland, along with some of the RAAF bomber squadrons in Europe, which were to be grouped together with British and Canadian squadrons as part of the proposed Tiger Force. However, the war was brought to a sudden end by the US nuclear attacks on Japan. The RAAF's casualties in the Pacific were around 2,000 killed, wounded or captured.
By the time the war ended, a total of 216,900 men and women served in the RAAF, of whom 10,562 were killed in action; a total of 76 squadrons were formed. With over 152,000 personnel operating nearly 6,000 aircraft it was the world's fourth-largest air force."
Royal Australian Air Force,"Cold War
Postwar
During the Berlin Airlift, in 1948–49, the RAAF Squadron Berlin Air Lift aided the international effort to fly in supplies to the stricken city; two RAF Avro York aircraft were also crewed by RAAF personnel. Although a small part of the operation, the RAAF contribution was significant, flying 2,062 sorties and carrying 7,030 tons of freight and 6,964 passengers.
In the Korean War, from 1950 to 1953, North American Mustangs from No. 77 Squadron RAAF, stationed in Japan with the British Commonwealth Occupation Force, were among the first United Nations aircraft to be deployed, in ground support, combat air patrol, and escort missions. When the UN planes were confronted by North Korean Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15 jet fighters, 77 Sqn acquired Gloster Meteors, however the MiGs remained superior and the Meteors were relegated to ground support missions as the North Koreans gained experience. The air force also operated transport aircraft during the conflict. No. 77 Squadron flew 18,872 sorties, claiming the destruction of 3,700 buildings, 1,408 vehicles, 16 bridges, 98 railway carriages and an unknown number of enemy personnel. Three MiG-15s were confirmed destroyed, and two others probably destroyed. RAAF casualties included 41 killed and seven captured; 66 aircraft – 22 Mustangs and 44 Meteors – were lost.
In July 1952, No. 78 Wing RAAF was deployed to Malta in the Mediterranean where it formed part of a British force which sought to counter the Soviet Union's influence in the Middle East as part of Australia's Cold War commitments. Consisting of No. 75 and 76 Squadrons equipped with de Havilland Vampire jet fighters, the wing provided an air garrison for the island for the next two and half years, returning to Australia in late 1954.
In 1953, a Royal Air Force officer, Air Marshal Sir Donald Hardman, was brought out to Australia to become Chief of the Air Staff. He reorganised the RAAF into three commands: Home Command, Maintenance Command, and Training Command. Five years later, Home Command was renamed Operational Command, and Training Command and Maintenance Command were amalgamated to form Support Command."
Royal Australian Air Force,"South East Asia operations
In the Malayan Emergency, from 1950 to 1960, six Avro Lincolns from No. 1 Squadron RAAF and a flight of Douglas Dakotas from No. 38 Squadron RAAF took part in operations against the communist guerrillas (labelled as ""Communist Terrorists"" by the British authorities) as part of the RAF Far East Air Force. The Dakotas were used on cargo runs, in troop movement and in paratrooper and leaflet drops within Malaya. The Lincolns, operating from bases in Singapore and from Kuala Lumpur, formed the backbone of the air war against the CTs, conducting bombing missions against their jungle bases. Although results were often difficult to assess, they allowed the government to harass CT forces, attack their base camps when identified and keep them on the move. Later, in 1958, Canberra bombers from No. 2 Squadron RAAF were deployed to Malaya and took part in bombing missions against the CTs.
During the Vietnam War, from 1964 to 1972, the RAAF contributed Caribou STOL transport aircraft as part of the RAAF Transport Flight Vietnam, later redesignated No. 35 Squadron RAAF, UH-1 Iroquois helicopters from No. 9 Squadron RAAF, and English Electric Canberra bombers from No. 2 Squadron RAAF. The Canberras flew 11,963 bombing sorties, and two aircraft were lost. One went missing during a bombing raid. The wreckage of the aircraft was recovered in April 2009, and the remains of the crew were found in late July 2009. The other was shot down by a surface-to-air missile, although both crew were rescued. They dropped 76,389 bombs and were credited with 786 enemy personnel confirmed killed and a further 3,390 estimated killed, 8,637 structures, 15,568 bunkers, 1,267 sampans and 74 bridges destroyed. RAAF transport aircraft also supported anti-communist ground forces. The UH-1 helicopters were used in many roles including medical evacuation and close air support. RAAF casualties in Vietnam included six killed in action, eight non-battle fatalities, 30 wounded in action and 30 injured. A small number of RAAF pilots also served in United States Air Force units, flying F-4 Phantom fighter-bombers or serving as forward air controllers.
In September 1975, a group of 44 civilians, including armed supporters of the Timorese Democratic Union (UDT), commandeered an RAAF Caribou, A4-140, on the ground at Baucau Airport in the then Portuguese Timor, which was in the middle of a civil war. The Caribou had landed at Baucau on a humanitarian mission for the International Committee of the Red Cross. The civilians demanded that the RAAF crew members fly them to Darwin Airport (also RAAF Base Darwin) in Australia, which they did. After the Caribou arrived there, the Australian government detained the civilians for a short period, and then granted refugee visas to all of them. The Guardian later described A4-140 as ""the only RAAF plane ever hijacked"", and the incident as ""one of the more remarkable stories in Australia's military and immigration history""."
Royal Australian Air Force,"Recent history (1990–present)
Military airlifts were conducted for a number of purposes in subsequent decades, such as the peacekeeping operations in East Timor from 1999. Australia's combat aircraft were not used again in combat until the Iraq War in 2003, when 14 F/A-18s from No. 75 Squadron RAAF operated in the escort and ground attack roles, flying a total of 350 sorties and dropping 122 laser-guided bombs. A detachment of AP-3C Orion maritime patrol aircraft were deployed in the Middle East between 2003 and 2012. These aircraft conducted maritime surveillance patrols over the Persian Gulf and North Arabian Sea in support of Coalition warships and boarding parties, as well as conducting extensive overland flights of Iraq and Afghanistan on intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions, and supporting counter-piracy operations in Somalia.
From 2007 to 2009, a detachment of No. 114 Mobile Control and Reporting Unit RAAF was on active service at Kandahar Airfield in southern Afghanistan.
Approximately 75 personnel deployed with the AN/TPS-77 radar assigned the responsibility to co-ordinate coalition air operations. A detachment of IAI Heron unmanned aerial vehicles has been deployed in Afghanistan since January 2010.
In late September 2014, an Air Task Group consisting of up to eight F/A-18F Super Hornets, a KC-30A Multi Role Tanker Transport, an E-7A Wedgetail Airborne Early Warning & Control aircraft and 400 personnel was deployed to Al Minhad Air Base in the United Arab Emirates as part of the coalition to combat Islamic State forces in Iraq. Operations began on 1 October. A number of C-17 and C-130J Super Hercules transport aircraft based in the Middle East have also been used to conduct airdrops of humanitarian aid and to airlift arms and munitions since August.
In June 2017, two RAAF AP-3C Orion maritime patrol aircraft were deployed to the southern Philippines in response to the Marawi crisis.
In 2021, the Royal Australian Air Force commemorated its 100th anniversary. Later that year, on 29 November, the Hornet was officially retired from RAAF service, with a ceremony to mark the occasion taking place that day at RAAF Base Williamtown.
In January 2022, two RAAF P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft and one C-130J Hercules departed RAAF Amberley and Richmond to conduct aerial reconnaissance of Tonga in the wake of the 2022 Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha'apai eruption and tsunami. According to Australian Defence News, the flights were to ""help determine the extent of the damage [to Tongan infrastructure]… and inform future disaster support requests.""
In October 2023, the Australian Government announced that, in addition to a further round of A$31.6 million for military assistance for Ukraine, it would be sending a single E-7A Wedgetail. This aircraft, and the associated 100 personnel - mainly from 2 Squadron, would operate from Ramstein Air Base for a six month deployment under Operation Kudu. The stated objective of the deployment was to ""help ensure that vital support flowing to Ukraine by the international community is protected."""
Royal Australian Air Force,"Structure
Headquarters
Air Force Headquarters RAAF – Air Force Executive
RAAF Air Command – Air Force Combat Forces
Defence Space Command – tri-service integrated headquarters for space operations"
Royal Australian Air Force,"Force Element Groups
Air Combat Group – air combat capability
Air Mobility Group – air lift and aerial refuelling capability
Air Warfare Centre – information warfare, intelligence and capability development
Combat Support Group – combat support and air base operations capability
Surveillance and Response Group – surveillance and reconnaissance capability
Air Force Training Group – air force training capability and development"
Royal Australian Air Force,"Wings and squadrons
Flying squadrons
Non-flying squadrons
Wings
Equipment
Aircraft
Armament
Personnel
Strength
As of June 2018, the RAAF had 14,313 permanent full-time personnel and 5,499 part-time active reserve personnel."
Royal Australian Air Force,"Women
The RAAF established the Women's Auxiliary Australian Air Force (WAAAF) in March 1941, which then became the Women's Royal Australian Air Force (WRAAF) in 1951. The service merged with the RAAF in 1977; however, all women in the Australian military were barred from combat-related roles until 1990. Women have been eligible for flying roles in the RAAF since 1987, with the RAAF's first women pilots awarded their ""wings"" in 1988. In 2016, the remaining restrictions on women in frontline combat roles were removed, and the first two female RAAF fast jet fighter pilots graduated in December 2017. Air Force has implemented several programs to assist women who choose a pilot career. Entry to the Graduate Pilot Scheme is open to women who are currently undertaking a Bachelor of Aviation (BAv). Once qualified, women pilots are able to access the Flying Females Mentoring Network. Men and women are required to undergo the same basic fitness tests to become a pilot; however the standards are lower for females. For some roles, the requirement cannot be adjusted for safety reasons."
Royal Australian Air Force,"Ranks
The rank structure of the nascent RAAF was established to ensure that the service remained separate from the Army and Navy. The service's predecessors, the AFC and the AAC, had used the Army's rank structure. In November 1920 it was decided by the Air Board that the RAAF would adopt the structure adopted by the RAF the previous year. As a result, the RAAF's rank structure came to be: Aircraftman, Leading Aircraftman, Corporal, Sergeant, Flight Sergeant, Warrant Officer, Officer Cadet, Pilot Officer, Flying Officer, Flight Lieutenant, Squadron Leader, Wing Commander, Group Captain, Air Commodore, Air Vice-Marshal, Air Marshal, Air Chief Marshal, Marshal of the RAAF."
Royal Australian Air Force,"Officer insignia
Other ranks insignia
Uniforms
In 1922, the colour of the RAAF winter uniform was determined by Air Marshal Sir Richard Williams on a visit to the Geelong Wool Mill. He asked for one dye dip fewer than the RAN blue (three indigo dips rather than four). There was a change to a lighter blue-grey when an all-seasons uniform was introduced in 1972 by Chief of Air Force Air Marshal Colin Hannah. The original colour and style were re-adopted from 1 January 2000 under direction from the then CAF Air Marshal Errol McCormack. Slip-on rank epaulettes, known as ""Soft Rank Insignia"" (SRI), displaying the word ""AUSTRALIA"" are worn on the shoulders of the service dress uniform. When not in the service dress or ""ceremonial"" uniform, RAAF personnel wear the General Purpose Uniform (GPU) as a working dress, which is a blue version of the Australian Multicam Camouflage Uniform."
Royal Australian Air Force,"Roundel and badge
Originally, the air force used the red, white and blue roundel of the RAF. However, during the Second World War the inner red circle, which was visually similar to the Japanese hinomaru, was removed after a No. 11 Squadron Catalina was mistaken for a Japanese aircraft and attacked by a Grumman Wildcat of VMF-212 of the United States Marine Corps on 27 June 1942. After the war, a range of options for the RAAF roundel was proposed, including the Southern Cross, a boomerang, a sprig of wattle, and a red kangaroo. On 2 July 1956, the current version of the roundel was formally adopted. This consists of a white inner circle with a red kangaroo surrounded by a royal blue circle. The kangaroo faces left, except when used on aircraft or vehicles, when the kangaroo should always face forward. Low visibility versions of the roundel exist, with the white omitted and the red and blue replaced with light or dark grey.
The RAAF badge was accepted by the Chester Herald in 1939. The badge is composed of the St Edward's Crown mounted on a circle featuring the words Royal Australian Air Force, beneath which scroll work displays the Latin motto Per Ardua Ad Astra, which it shares with the Royal Air Force. Surmounting the badge is a wedge-tailed eagle. Per Ardua Ad Astra is attributed with the meaning ""Through Adversity to the Stars"" and is from Sir Henry Rider Haggard's novel The People of the Mist."
Royal Australian Air Force,"Music
The ""Eagles of Australia"" is the official march of the RAAF and is played as a quick march when the RAAF bands perform public duties in the capital. Composed by the RAAF's Director of Music, Squadron Leader Ron Mitchell (who was also director of the Air Force Band), it was officially adopted as the RAAF's new march music on 23 March 1983, replacing the Royal Air Force March Past, which had long been the RAAF's march as well as the marchpast of other Commonwealth air forces. Subsequently, journalist Frank Cranston wrote lyrics to the march and a musical score was produced by September of the following year."
Royal Australian Air Force,"Roulettes
The Roulettes are the RAAF's formation aerobatic display team. They perform around Australia and Southeast Asia, and are part of the RAAF Central Flying School (CFS) based at RAAF Base East Sale, Victoria. The Roulettes operate the Pilatus PC-21 and formations for shows are a group of six aircraft. The pilots learn many formations including loops, rolls, corkscrews and ripple rolls. Most of the performances are done at a low altitude of 500 feet (150 metres)."
Royal Australian Air Force,"Future procurement
This list includes aircraft on order or a requirement which has been identified:"
Royal Australian Air Force,"Up to 100 F-35A Lightning II (CTOL variant) with no fewer than 72 aircraft acquired to equip three operational squadrons and an operational conversion unit. The remaining aircraft will be acquired in conjunction with the withdrawal of the F/A-18F Super Hornets after 2020 to ensure no gap in Australia's overall air combat capability occurs. On 25 November 2009, Australia committed to placing a first order for 14 aircraft at a cost of A$3.2 billion with deliveries to begin in 2014. In May 2012, the decision to purchase 12 F-35s from the initial 14 order was deferred until 2014 as part of wider ADF procurement deferments to balance the Federal Government budget. On 23 April 2014, Australia confirmed the purchase of 58 F-35A Lightning II fighters in addition to the 14 already ordered. Up to a further 28 aircraft may be acquired. The first two Australian F-35A Lightning II fighters were rolled out in July 2014, and began flying training flights with the USAF 61st Fighter Squadron in December 2014.
A further seven Boeing P-8A Poseidons to be purchased and brought into service by the late 2020s, bringing the total number of aircraft to fifteen, was announced in the 2016 Defence White Paper.
Six MQ-4C Triton unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to expand the surveillance of Australia's maritime approaches, with the possibility of purchasing a seventh air frame. The drones will cost approximately A$6.9 billion over their entire life-time, with the fleet expected to be in service by late 2025. They will be based at RAAF Base Edinburgh however will regularly conduct missions from RAAF Base Tindal.
A possible further two KC-30As to support the incoming P-8A fleet, which would bring the total number of aircraft to nine, was announced in the 2016 Defence White Paper.
In May 2020, Boeing Australia unveiled the Airpower Teaming System (ATS), a joint partnership between the company and the RAAF. The Airpower Teaming System is an unmanned aircraft incorporating artificial intelligence; the aircraft is the first of its kind to be produced in Australia and the first aircraft to be designed and manufactured in Australia for over 50 years.
A$4–5 billion project to replace the BAE Hawk 127 lead-in fighter trainer was announced in the 2016 Integrated Investment Program that accompanied the 2016 Defence White Paper. The project has a timeframe of 2022 to 2033.
Four MC-55A Peregrine SIGINT and ELINT intelligence gathering aircraft, based on the Gulfstream G550, in a A$2.5 billion procurement.
In July 2020, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced that Australia would acquire the AGM-158C Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) for the F/A-18F Super Hornet. In September 2021, Morrison announced that Australia would acquire the AGM-158B Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM-ER) for the F/A-18F Super Hornet and F-35A fighters.
A$4.9–7.3 billion project to acquire a Medium Range Ground Based Air Defence capability to defend deployed airfields, command centres and other valuable assets from enemy air attack. The project has a timeframe of mid to late 2020s. The project had been named Medium Range Air and Missile Defence in the 2016 Integrated Investment Program. The project was also renamed and renumbered to AIR6502 Phase 1 from AIR6500 Phase 2 for the 2020 Force Structure Plan.
The full replacement and expansion of the existing 12 C-130J Super Hercules fleet to 20 aircraft. Announced in July 2023 by Defence Minister Richard Marles, the fleet expansion and renewal is budgeted at A$9.8 billion.
Australia plans to, via SCIFiRE, acquire a Mach 5-8 hypersonic air-launched cruise missile in collaboration with the United States, as of 2021, the date for the receiving of these missiles is stated at 5–10 years."
Royal Australian Air Force,"See also
Airfield Defence Guards
Australian Air Force Cadets
Australian Air Traffic Control
Australian Defence Force ranks and insignia
Royal Australian Air Force Maritime Section
Royal Australian Air Force VIP aircraft
Air Force (newspaper)"
Royal Australian Air Force,"Lists
List of air forces
List of current Royal Australian Air Force aircraft
List of aircraft of the Royal Australian Air Force
List of Royal Australian Air Force aircraft squadrons
List of Royal Australian Air Force independent aircraft flights
List of Royal Australian Air Force installations
List of ships of the Royal Australian Air Force"
Royal Australian Air Force,"Memorials and museums
List of Australian military memorials
Royal Australian Air Force Memorial, Brisbane
Royal Australian Air Force Memorial, Canberra"
Royal Australian Air Force,"References
Citations
Bibliography
Further reading
External links"
Royal Australian Air Force,"Official website 
Royal Australian Air Force on X
RAAF Air Power Doctrine"
English Australians,"English Australians, also known as Anglo-Australians, are Australians whose ancestry originates wholly or partly in England. In the 2021 census, 8,385,928 people, or 33% of the Australian population, stated that they had English ancestry (whether sole or partial). It is the largest self-identified ancestry in Australia. People of ethnic English origin have been the largest group to migrate to Australia since the establishment of the Colony of New South Wales in 1788.
English Australians are a subset of Anglo-Celtic Australians, who are themselves a subset of European Australians. Other subsets of Anglo-Celtic Australians (that is, Australians with ancestry originating in the British Isles) include Irish Australians, Scottish Australians and Welsh Australians. There is a tendency to refer to these ancestries collectively due to their long history in Australia and the high degree of intermixture which has occurred over centuries. In light of this history, there is a tendency for Australians with English or other Anglo-Celtic ancestries to simply identify their ancestry as 'Australian'."
English Australians,"History
18th and 19th centuries
New South Wales was established in 1788 by the British government as a penal colony. Visitors described the English character of Sydney for at least the first 50 years after 1788, noting the traditional English appearance of the churches overlooking the convict barracks. First-generation colonial Sydney residents were predominantly English. 160,000 convicts came to Australia between 1788 and 1850. Between 1788 and 1840, 80,000 English convicts were transported to New South Wales, with the greatest numbers coming between 1825 and 1835. The New South Wales Census of 1846 accounted for 57,349 born in England, 47,547 born in Ireland and 14,406 born in Scotland. Until 1859, 2.2 million (73%) of the free settlers who immigrated were British in origin.
Many more English people immigrated to Victoria by the gold rush of the 1850s. By 1854 there were 97,943 English-born people in Victoria. Immigration policies and assistance schemes helped maintain high levels of immigration from England. Of the 1 million immigrants who arrived between 1860 and 1900, just over half came from England.
Between 1840 and 1870 there were more Irish than English assisted migrants which did not change until the 1870s, when there were more English.
At least 75 per cent of all overseas-born people in Australia during the 19th century were from the British Isles. The proportion who had been born in England or Wales remained quite stable (at about 47 per cent) from 1861 to 1911, as did the proportion born in
Scotland (about 12 per cent).
English settlers more often came from the South than the North of England."
English Australians,"Post-Federation English immigration
Australians of English ancestry made up more than 50 per cent of the population at the time of Federation (1901). From 1922 the Empire Settlement Act assisted thousands of migrants from England. After the Second World War, even as immigration from other countries expanded dramatically, English citizens had almost unrestricted entry into Australia. Arthur Calwell, Minister for Immigration, wanted nine out of ten new immigrants to be UK-born. The majority of England-born migrants received assisted passages until the scheme was abolished in 1982.
Among the notable English-born were politicians such as Henry Parkes, and Joseph Cook; in retailing and media: John Norton, Anthony Hordern and John Fairfax.
Surges of English immigration in the 1910s, 1920s, 1950s and 1960s sustained the English-born as the largest single immigrant group throughout the 20th century. In 1978 Australians of predominantly English ancestry made up over 45 per cent of the population. English ancestry was reported by 6.6 million people (46%) in 1986, and 6.4 million (37%) in 2001. While the English-born continue to be well-represented among immigrants to Australia, the overall decline of English immigration to Australia since the 1980s has meant that the English-born are declining as a proportion of immigrants to Australia. Regardless, Australian society continues to be influenced by its strong English heritage."
English Australians,"Demographics
In the 2021 census, 8,385,928 people, or 33% of the Australian population, stated that they had English ancestry (whether wholly or partial)."
English Australians,"Cultural influence
People of English descent were by far the single most influential ethnic group in colonial Australia. The founding of Australia by English people is still evident in place names, Australia's common law legal system, popular dishes such as fish and chips and Sunday Roast and English as Australia's national language.
In Sydney, at least 50 suburban names are derived directly from 20 English counties, of which the largest numbers are from Kent, Surrey and London. Among the best known are Surry Hills, Croydon, Hornsby, Epping, Chipping Norton, Brighton-le-Sands, Bexley, Canterbury, Ryde, Kensington, Lewisham and Penshurst."
English Australians,"Notable people
English convicts transported to Australia
Prime Ministers
The majority of Prime Ministers of Australia have been of at least partial English ancestry. To date all Australian Prime Ministers have had whole or partial Anglo-Celtic ancestry."
English Australians,"Edmund Barton, 1st Prime Minister, 1901–1903 (English parents)
Alfred Deakin, 2nd Prime Minister, 1903–1904, 1905–08, 1909–10 (English parents)
Joseph Cook, 6th Prime Minister, 1913–1914 (born in Silverdale, Staffordshire, England)
Billy Hughes, 7th Prime Minister, 1915–1923 (born in London, England)
Earle Page, 11th Prime Minister, 1939 (father from London, England)
Robert Menzies, 12th Prime Minister, 1939–1941, 1949-66 (maternal grandparents born in Penzance, England)
Harold Holt, 17th Prime Minister, 1966–1967 (English descent)
John McEwen, 18th Prime Minister, 1967–1968 (partial English descent)
John Gorton, 19th Prime Minister, 1968–1971 (English father)
William McMahon, 20th Prime Minister, 1971–1972 (partial English descent)
Gough Whitlam, 21st Prime Minister, 1972–1975 (English descent)
Malcolm Fraser, 22nd Prime Minister, 1975–1983 (partial English descent)
Bob Hawke, 23rd Prime Minister, 1983–1991 (English descent; all great-grandparents born in England, seven from Cornwall, England and one from Cheshire, England)
Paul Keating, 24th Prime Minister, 1991–1996 (maternal English descent)
John Howard, 25th Prime Minister, 1996–2007 (partial English descent)
Kevin Rudd, 26th Prime Minister, 2007–10, 2013 (his 4th great-grandparents, convicts Thomas Rudd from London and Mary Cable from Essex, England)
Julia Gillard, 27th Prime Minister, 2010–2013 (paternal grandparents born in England)
Tony Abbott, 28th Prime Minister, 2013–2015 (English father; born in London, England of English, Dutch, Scottish and Welsh descent)
Malcolm Turnbull, 29th Prime Minister, 2015–2018 (maternal grandmother, May Lansbury (née Morle), born in England)
Scott Morrison, 30th Prime Minister, 2018 (English ancestry)"
English Australians,"See also
Australia–United Kingdom relations
Australian British
European emigration
Demographics of Australia
Anglo-Celtic Australians
European Australians
White people#Australia
Irish Australians
Scottish Australians
Welsh Australians
English diaspora
English Americans
English Canadians
European New Zealanders
Immigration to Australia
English New Zealanders
List of locations in Australia with an English name
English Argentines
English Chileans"
English Australians,"References
Further reading
Haines, Robin F. Emigration and the labouring poor: Australian recruitment in Britain and Ireland, 1831–60 (Springer, 1997).
Richards, Eric. Britannia's children: emigration from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland since 1600 (A&C Black, 2004) online.
Richards, Eric. ""How did poor people emigrate from the British Isles to Australia in the nineteenth century?"" Journal of British Studies 32.3 (1993): 250-279. online"
English Australians,"External links
James Jupp - Australian National University (2008). ""English"". Dictionary of Sydney. Retrieved 4 October 2015. (English in Sydney) [CC-By-SA]"
National Party of Australia,"The National Party of Australia, also known as The Nationals or The Nats, is a centre-right, agrarian political party in Australia. Traditionally representing graziers, farmers, and regional voters generally, it began as the Australian Country Party in 1920 at a federal level.  
In 1975, it adopted the name National Country Party, before taking its current name in 1982. Ensuring support for farmers, either through government grants and subsidies or through community appeals, is a major focus of National Party policy. The process for obtaining these funds has come into question in recent years, such as during the Sports Rorts Affair. According to Ian McAllister, the Nationals are the only remaining party from the ""wave of agrarian socialist parties set up around the Western world in the 1920s"".
Federally (and to various extents, in New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia), the Nationals have been the minor party in centre-right Coalition governments with the Liberal Party; its leader has usually served as Deputy Prime Minister. In Opposition the Coalition was usually maintained, but even otherwise the party still generally continued to work in co-operation with the Liberals (as had their predecessors the Nationalist Party and United Australia Party). Due to the closeness and integration of the two parties, as well as the declining vote of the Nationals in recent years, it has been proposed several times that the Liberals and the Nationals formally merge. In Queensland, for instance, the Country Party (later National Party) was the senior coalition party between 1925 and 2008, after which it merged with the junior Liberal Party to form the Liberal National Party of Queensland.
The current leader of the National Party is David Littleproud, who represents the Queensland electorate of Maranoa. He replaced Barnaby Joyce following a leadership spill in May 2022, after the Coalition's defeat in the 2022 federal election. The party's deputy leader is Perin Davey, Senator for New South Wales."
National Party of Australia,"History
The Country Party was formally founded in 1913 in Western Australia, and nationally in 1920, from a number of state-based parties such as the Victorian Farmers' Union (VFU) and the Farmers' and Settlers' Association of New South Wales. Australia's first Country Party was founded in 1912 by Harry J. Stephens, editor of The Farmer & Settler, but, under fierce opposition from rival newspapers, failed to gain momentum.
The VFU won a seat in the House of Representatives at the Corangamite by-election held in December 1918, with the help of the newly introduced preferential voting system. At the 1919 federal election the state-based Country Parties won federal seats in New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia. They also began to win seats in state parliaments. In 1920 the Country Party was established as a national party led by William McWilliams from Tasmania. In his first speech as leader, McWilliams laid out the principles of the new party, stating ""we crave no alliance, we spurn no support but we intend drastic action to secure closer attention to the needs of primary producers"" McWilliams was deposed as party leader in favour of Earle Page in April 1921, following instances where McWilliams voted against the party line. McWilliams later left the Country Party to sit as an Independent.
According to historian B. D. Graham (1959), the graziers who operated the sheep stations were politically conservative. They disliked the Labor Party, which represented their workers, and feared that Labor governments would pass unfavorable legislation and listen to foreigners and communists. The graziers were satisfied with the marketing organisation of their industry, opposed any change in land tenure and labour relations, and advocated lower tariffs, low freight rates, and low taxes. On the other hand, Graham reports, the small farmers, not the graziers, founded the Country party. The farmers advocated government intervention in the market through price support schemes and marketing pools. The graziers often politically and financially supported the Country party, which in turn made the Country party more conservative.
The Country Party's first election as a united party, in 1922, saw it in an unexpected position of power. It won enough seats to deny the Nationalists an overall majority. It soon became apparent that the price for Country support would be a full-fledged coalition with the Nationalists. However, Page let it be known that his party would not serve under Hughes, and forced his resignation. Page then entered negotiations with the Nationalists' new leader, Stanley Bruce, for a coalition government. Page wanted five seats for his Country Party in a Cabinet of 11, including the Treasurer portfolio and the second rank in the ministry for himself. These terms were unusually stiff for a prospective junior coalition partner in a Westminster system, and especially so for such a new party. Nonetheless, with no other politically realistic coalition partner available, Bruce readily agreed, and the ""Bruce-Page Ministry"" was formed. This began the tradition of the Country Party leader ranking second in Coalition cabinets.
Page remained dominant in the party until 1939, and briefly served as caretaker Prime Minister between the death of Joseph Lyons and the election of Robert Menzies as his successor. However, Page gave up the leadership rather than serve under Menzies. The coalition was re-formed under Archie Cameron in 1940, and continued until October 1941 despite the election of Arthur Fadden as leader after the 1940 election. Fadden was well regarded within conservative circles and proved to be a loyal deputy to Menzies in the difficult circumstances of 1941. When Menzies was forced to resign as Prime Minister, the UAP was so bereft of leadership that Fadden briefly succeeded him (despite the Country Party being the junior partner in the governing coalition). However, the two independents who had been propping up the government rejected Fadden's budget and brought the government down. Fadden stood down in favour of Labor leader John Curtin.
The Fadden-led Coalition made almost no headway against Curtin, and was severely defeated in the 1943 election. After that loss, Fadden became deputy Leader of the Opposition under Menzies, a role that continued after Menzies folded the UAP into the Liberal Party of Australia in 1944. Fadden remained a loyal partner of Menzies, though he was still keen to assert the independence of his party. Indeed, in the lead up to the 1949 federal election, Fadden played a key role in the defeat of the Chifley Labor government, frequently making inflammatory claims about the ""socialist"" nature of the Labor Party, which Menzies could then ""clarify"" or repudiate as he saw fit, thus appearing more ""moderate"". In 1949, Fadden became Treasurer in the second Menzies government and remained so until his retirement in 1958. His successful partnership with Menzies was one of the elements that sustained the coalition, which remained in office until 1972 (Menzies himself retired in 1966)."
National Party of Australia,"Fadden's successor, Trade Minister John McEwen, took the then unusual step of declining to serve as Treasurer, believing he could better ensure that the interests of Australian primary producers were safeguarded. Accordingly, McEwen personally supervised the signing of the first post-war trade treaty with Japan, new trade agreements with New Zealand and Britain, and Australia's first trade agreement with the USSR (1965). In addition to this, he insisted on developing an all-encompassing system of tariff protection that would encourage the development of those secondary industries that would ""value add"" Australia's primary produce. His success in this endeavour is sometimes dubbed ""McEwenism"". This was the period of the Country Party's greatest power, as was demonstrated in 1962 when McEwen was able to insist that Menzies sack a Liberal Minister who claimed that Britain's entry into the European Economic Community was unlikely to severely impact the Australian economy as a whole."
National Party of Australia,"Menzies retired in 1966 and was succeeded by Harold Holt. McEwen thus became the longest-tenured member of the government, with the informal right to veto government policy. The most significant instance in which McEwen exercised this right came when Holt disappeared in December 1967. John Gorton became the new Liberal Prime Minister in January 1968. McEwen was sworn in as interim Prime Minister pending the election of the new Liberal leader. Logically, the Liberals' deputy leader, William McMahon, should have succeeded Holt. However, McMahon was a staunch free-trader, and there were also rumours that he was homosexual. As a result, McEwen told the Liberals that he and his party would not serve under McMahon. McMahon stood down in favour of John Gorton. It was only after McEwen announced his retirement that MacMahon was able to successfully challenge Gorton for the Liberal leadership. McEwen's reputation for political toughness led to him being nicknamed ""Black Jack"" by his allies and enemies alike.
At the state level, from 1957 to 1989, the Country Party under Frank Nicklin and Joh Bjelke-Petersen dominated governments in Queensland—for the last six of those years ruling in its own right, without the Liberals. This was due to the bjelkemander, a malapportionment in electorates which gave rural voters twice the voting power compared to voters within the city. It also took part in governments in New South Wales, Victoria, and Western Australia.
However, successive electoral redistributions after 1964 indicated that the Country Party was losing ground electorally to the Liberals as the rural population declined, and the nature of some parliamentary seats on the urban/rural fringe changed. A proposed merger with the Democratic Labor Party (DLP) under the banner of ""National Alliance"" was rejected when it failed to find favour with voters at the 1974 state election.
Also in 1974, the Northern Territory members of the party joined with its Liberal party members to form the independent Country Liberal Party. This party continues to represent both parent parties in that territory. A separate party, the Joh-inspired NT Nationals, competed in the 1987 election with former Chief Minister Ian Tuxworth winning his seat of Barkly by a small margin. However, this splinter group was not endorsed by the national executive and soon disappeared from the political scene."
National Party of Australia,"National Country Party and National Party
The National Party was confronted by the impact of demographic shifts from the 1970s: between 1971 and 1996, the population of Sydney and surrounds grew by 34%, with even larger growth in coastal New South Wales, while more remote rural areas grew by a mere 13%, further diminishing the National Party's base. At the federal convention held on 2 May 1975 in Canberra, the Country Party changed its name to the National Country Party of Australia as part of a strategy to expand into urban areas. This had some success in Queensland under Joh Bjelke-Petersen, but nowhere else. The party briefly walked out of the coalition agreement in Western Australia in May 1975, returning within the month. However, the party split in two over the decision and other factors in late 1978, with a new National Party forming and becoming independent, holding three seats in the Western Australian lower house, while the National Country Party remained in coalition and also held three seats. They reconciled after the Burke Labor government came to power in 1983.
The 1980s were dominated by the feud between Bjelke-Petersen and the federal party leadership. Bjelke-Petersen briefly triumphed in 1987, forcing the Nationals to tear up the Coalition agreement and support his bid to become Prime Minister.  The ""Joh for Canberra"" campaign backfired spectacularly when a large number of three-cornered contests allowed Labor to win a third term under Bob Hawke; however, in 1987 the National Party won a bump in votes and recorded its highest vote in more than four decades, but it also recorded a new low in the proportion of seats won. The collapse of Joh for Canberra also proved to be the Queensland Nationals' last hurrah; Bjelke-Petersen was forced into retirement a few months after the federal election, and his party was heavily defeated in 1989. The federal National Party were badly defeated at the 1990 election, with leader Charles Blunt one of five MPs to lose his seat.
Blunt's successor as leader, Tim Fischer, recovered two seats at the 1993 election, but lost an additional 1.2% of the vote from its 1990 result. In 1996, as the Coalition won a significant victory over the Keating Labor government, the National Party recovered another two seats, and Fischer became Deputy Prime Minister under John Howard.
The Nationals experienced difficulties in the late 1990s from two fronts – firstly from the Liberal Party, who were winning seats on the basis that the Nationals were not seen to be a sufficiently separate party, and from the One Nation Party riding a swell of rural discontent with many of the policies such as multiculturalism and gun control embraced by all of the major parties. The rise of Labor in formerly safe National-held areas in rural Queensland, particularly on the coast, has been the biggest threat to the Queensland Nationals.
At the 1998 Federal election, the National Party recorded only 5.3% of the vote in the House of Representatives, its lowest ever, and won only 16 seats, at 10.8% its second lowest proportion of seats.
The National Party under Fischer and his successor, John Anderson, rarely engaged in public disagreements with the Liberal Party, which weakened the party's ability to present a separate image to rural and regional Australia. In 2001 the National Party recorded its second-worst result at 5.6% winning 13 seats, and its third lowest at 5.9% at the 2004 election, winning only 12 seats.
Australian psephologist Antony Green argues that two important trends have driven the National Party's decline at a federal level: ""the importance of the rural sector to the health of the nation's economy"" and ""the growing chasm between the values and attitudes of rural and urban Australia"". Green has suggested that the result has been that ""Both have resulted in rural and regional voters demanding more of the National Party, at exactly the time when its political influence has declined. While the National Party has never been the sole representative of rural Australia, it is the only party that has attempted to paint itself as representing rural voters above all else"",
In June 2005, party leader John Anderson announced that he would resign from the ministry and as Leader of the Nationals due to a benign prostate condition, he was succeeded by Mark Vaile. At the following 2007 election, the Nationals vote declined further, with the party winning a mere 5.4% of the vote and securing only 10 seats. Vaile announced his resignation as party leader which surprised his colleagues, as he had been expected to be re-elected unopposed following the election. He had planned the party leadership to go to Peter McGauran but the latter declined to stand. Warren Truss and Nigel Scullion were then elected unopposed as leader and deputy leader.
In 2010, under the leadership of Truss, the party received its lowest vote to date, at only 3.4%, however they secured a slight increase in seats from 10 to 12. At the following election in 2010 the national Party's fortunes improved slightly with a vote of 4.2% and an increase in seats from 12 to 15.
At the 2016 double dissolution election, under the leadership of Barnaby Joyce the party secured 4.6% of the vote and 16 seats. In 2018, reports emerged that the National Party leader and Deputy Prime Minister, Barnaby Joyce was expecting a child with his former communications staffer Vikki Campion. Joyce resigned after revelations that he had been engaged in an extramarital affair. Later in the same year it was revealed that the NSW National party and its youth wing, the Young Nationals had been infiltrated by neo-Nazis with more than 30 members being investigated for alleged links to neo-Nazism. Leader McCormack denounced the infiltration, and several suspected neo-Nazis were expelled from the party and its youth wing.
At the 2019 Australian federal election, despite severe drought, perceived inaction over the plight of the Murray–Darling Basin, a poor performance in the New South Wales state election and sex scandals surrounding the member for Mallee, Andrew Broad and former party leader Barnaby Joyce, the National Party saw only a small decline in vote, down 0.10% to attain 4.51% of the primary vote."
National Party of Australia,"State and territory parties
The official state and territorial party organisations (or equivalents) of the National Party are:"
National Party of Australia,"Political role
The Nationals see their main role as giving a voice to Australians who live outside the country's metropolitan areas.
Traditionally, the leader of the National Party serves as Deputy Prime Minister when the Coalition is in government. This tradition dates back to the creation of the office in 1968.
The National Party's support base and membership are closely associated with the agricultural community. Historically anti-union, the party has vacillated between state support for primary industries (""agrarian socialism"") and free agricultural trade and has opposed tariff protection for Australia's manufacturing and service industries. It is usually in favor of industrial development, opposing green politics.
""Countrymindedness"" was a slogan that summed up the ideology of the Country Party from 1920 through the early 1970s. It was an ideology that was physiocratic, populist, and decentralist; it fostered rural solidarity and justified demands for government subsidies. ""Countrymindedness"" grew out of the failure of the country areas to participate in the rapid economic and population expansions that occurred after 1890. The growth of the ideology into urban areas came as most country people migrated to jobs in the cities. Its decline was due mainly to the reduction of real and psychological differences between country and city brought about by the postwar expansion of the Australian urban population and to the increased affluence and technological changes that accompanied it.
The Nationals vote is in decline and its traditional supporters are turning instead to prominent independents such as Bob Katter, Tony Windsor and Peter Andren in Federal Parliament and similar independents in the Parliaments of New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria, many of whom are former members of the National Party. In fact since the 2004 Federal election, National Party candidates have received fewer first preference votes than the Australian Greens.
Demographic changes are not helping, with fewer people living and employed on the land or in small towns, the continued growth of the larger provincial centres, and, in some cases, the arrival of left-leaning ""city refugees"" in rural areas. The Liberals have also gained support as the differences between the coalition partners on a federal level have become invisible. This was highlighted in January 2006, when Nationals Senator Julian McGauran defected to the Liberals, saying that there was ""no longer any real distinguishing policy or philosophical difference"".
In Queensland, Nationals leader Lawrence Springborg advocated merger of the National and Liberal parties at a state level in order to present a more effective opposition to the Labor Party. Previously this plan had been dismissed by the Queensland branch of the Liberal party, but the idea received in-principle support from the Liberals. Federal leader Mark Vaile stated the Nationals will not merge with the Liberal Party at a federal level. The plan was opposed by key Queensland Senators Ron Boswell and Barnaby Joyce, and was scuttled in 2006. After suffering defeat in the 2006 Queensland poll, Lawrence Springborg was replaced by Jeff Seeney, who indicated he was not interested in merging with the Liberal Party until the issue is seriously raised at a Federal level.
In September 2008, Joyce replaced CLP Senator and Nationals deputy leader Nigel Scullion as leader of the Nationals in the Senate, and stated that his party in the upper house would no longer necessarily vote with their Liberal counterparts in the upper house, which opened up another possible avenue for the Rudd Labor government to get legislation through. Joyce was elected leader in a party-room ballot on 11 February 2016, following the retirement of former leader and Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss. Joyce was one of five politicians disqualified from parliament in October 2017 for holding dual citizenship, along with former deputy leader, Fiona Nash.
The 1987 Australian federal election was the last time the National party received over 10% of the vote and the 2007 Australian federal election was the last time the National party received over 5% of the vote for the House of Representatives."
National Party of Australia,"Queensland Liberal/National merger
Merger plans came to a head in May 2008, when the Queensland state Liberal Party gave an announcement not to wait for a federal blueprint but instead to merge immediately. The new party, the Liberal National Party, was founded in July 2008."
National Party of Australia,"Electoral results
Leadership
List of leaders
List of deputy leaders
List of Senate leaders
The Country Party's first senators began their terms in 1926, but the party had no official leader in the upper chamber until 1935. Instead, the party nominated a ""representative"" or ""liaison officer"" where necessary – usually William Carroll. This was so that its members ""were first and foremost representatives of their states, able to enjoy complete freedom of action and speech in the Senate and not beholden to the dictates of [...] a party Senate leader"". On 3 October 1935, Charles Hardy was elected as Carroll's replacement and began using the title ""Leader of the Country Party in the Senate"". This usage was disputed by Carroll and Bertie Johnston, but a subsequent party meeting on 10 October confirmed Hardy's position. However, after Hardy's term ended in 1938 (due to his defeat at the 1937 election), the party did not elect another Senate leader until 1949 – apparently due to its small number of senators.
Unlike the leader in the House of Representatives, the Senate leader has not always been a member of the ministry or shadow ministry at all times."
National Party of Australia,"Past heads of government and opposition leaders
Donors
For the 2015–2016 financial year, the top ten disclosed donors to the National Party were: Manildra Group ($182,000), Ognis Pty Ltd ($100,000), Trepang Services ($70,000), Northwake Pty Ltd ($65,000), Hancock Prospecting ($58,000), Bindaree Beef ($50,000), Mowburn Nominees ($50,000), Retail Guild of Australia ($48,000), CropLife International ($43,000) and Macquarie Group ($38,000).
The National Party also receives undisclosed funding through several methods, such as ""associated entities"". John McEwen House, Pilliwinks and Doogary are entities which have been used to funnel donations to the National Party without disclosing the source."
National Party of Australia,"See also
Young Nationals (Australia)
Leader of the New South Wales National Party
Katter's Australian Party
National Party of Australia leadership spill, 2007"
National Party of Australia,"Further reading
Aitkin, Don. The country party in New South Wales (1972)
Aitkin, Don. ""'Countrymindedness': The Spread of an Idea"", ACH: The Journal of the History of Culture in Australia, April 1985, Vol. 4, pp 34–41
Davey, Paul. The Nationals: the Progressive, Country, and National Party in New South Wales 1919–2006 (2006)
Davey, Paul. ""Politics in the Blood – The Anthonys of Richmond"" (2008)
Davey, Paul. ""Ninety Not Out – The Nationals 1920-2010"" (2010)
Davey, Paul. ""The Country Party Prime Ministers – Their Trials and Tribulations"" (2011)
Duncan, C.J. ""The demise of 'countrymindedness': New players or changing values in Australian rural politics?"" Political Geography, Sep 1992, Vol. 11 Issue 5, pp 430–448
Graham, B. D. ""Graziers in Politics, 1917 To 1929"", Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand, 1959, Vol. 8 Issue 32, pp 383–391
Leithner, Christian.  ""Rational Behaviour, Economic Conditions and the Australian Country Party, 1922–1937"", Australian Journal of Political Science, July 1991, Vol. 26 Issue 2, pp 240–259
Williams, John R. ""The Organization of the Australian National Party"", Australian Quarterly, 1969, Vol. 41 Issue 2, pp 41–51,
Manning, Paddy (1 April 2020). ""Inside the Nationals"". The Monthly. Retrieved 18 August 2020."
National Party of Australia,Notes
National Party of Australia,"
== References =="
Multiculturalism in Australia,"Multiculturalism in Australia is today reflected by the multicultural composition of its people, its immigration policies, its prohibition on discrimination, equality before the law of all persons, as well as various cultural policies which promote diversity, such as the formation of the Special Broadcasting Service.
According to the 2011 census, 26% of the population were born overseas and a further 20% had at least one parent born overseas. Aboriginal Australians make up approximately 2.5% of the population. Australia's diverse migrant communities have brought with them food, lifestyle and cultural practices, which have been absorbed into mainstream Australian culture.
From Federation until after the Second World War, Australia adhered to the White Australia policy. The policy was dismantled after the war by various changes to the immigration policy of the Australian government."
Multiculturalism in Australia,"History
Pre-Federation
Prior to European colonisation, the Australian continent had been inhabited by various Aboriginal peoples for around 60,000 years, and the Torres Strait Islands was inhabited by various groups of Torres Strait Islander peoples. Among them they spoke at least 250 mutually unintelligible languages (linguist Claire Bowern suggests up to 363), which included around 800 dialects. An estimated 120 of these were still spoken as of 2016, and several more are being revived through language revival programmes. 
Makassan trepangers (along with shipwrecked Dutch sailors) made contact with Indigenous Australians along the northern coast of Australia during the 17th and mid-18th centuries, although this did not lead to permanent settlement. Beginning with the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788, waves of European settlers began to emigrate to the Australian continent. By 1901, the Australian continent consisted of six British colonies, which in 1901 agreed to federate into one state."
Multiculturalism in Australia,"White Australia policy
The Immigration Restriction Act 1901, known informally as the White Australia policy, restricted non-European immigration to Australia from 1901 to 1973. The policy limited the ethnic and cultural diversity of the immigrant population. The policy was an attempt to preserve the ""Anglo-Saxon"" ethno-cultural identity of the Australian nation, promote European immigration, and to exclude persons who did not fit the European, predominantly Anglo-Celtic, character of Australian society. As the twentieth century progressed and the number of migrants from the United Kingdom became insufficient to meet labour shortages, immigrants came increasingly from other parts of Europe, such as Italy, Greece, Germany, the Netherlands, and the former Yugoslavia. The prevailing attitude to migrant settlement up until this time was based on the expectation of assimilation—that is, that migrants should shed their cultures and languages and rapidly become indistinguishable from the host population."
Multiculturalism in Australia,"Emergence of multiculturalism
From the mid-1960s until 1973, when the final vestiges of the White Australia policy were removed, policies started to examine assumptions about assimilation. They recognised that many migrants, especially those whose first language was not English, experienced hardships as they settled in Australia, and required more direct assistance. Governments also recognised the importance of ethnic organisations in helping with migrant settlement. Expenditure on migrant assistance and welfare increased in the early 1970s in response to these needs.
Following the initial moves of the Whitlam government in 1973, further official national multicultural policies were implemented by Fraser's conservative Coalition government in 1978. The Labor Government of Bob Hawke continued with these policies during the 1980s and early 1990s, and were further supported by Paul Keating up to his electoral defeat 1996. ""CALD"" (or Culturally and Linguistically Diverse) policies continue to be implemented at all levels of government and public service, such as medical support systems which cater specifically to non-English speaking residents.
The meaning of multiculturalism has been altered significantly since its formal introduction to Australia. Originally it was understood by the mainstream population as a need for acceptance that many members of the Australian community originally came from different cultures and still had ties to it. However, it came to mean the rights of migrants within mainstream Australia to express their cultural identity. It is now often used to refer to the notion that people in Australia have multiple cultural or ethnic backgrounds.
The overall level of immigration to Australia has grown during the last decades. Net overseas immigrants increased from 30,000 in 1993 to 118,000 in 2003–04, and 262,500 in 2016–17.
According to the 2011 census, 26% of the population were born overseas, with a further 20% having at least one parent born overseas. Of the population born overseas, 82% lived in the capital cities. Aboriginal Australians make up approximately 2.5% of the population. In 2008, Australia was ranked 18th in the world in terms of net migration per capita, ahead of Canada, the US and most of Europe.
According to the National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia in 2014, the Australian Government was concerned with three broad policy areas: cultural identity, social justice, and economic efficiency."
Multiculturalism in Australia,"Terminology
Members of a multicultural community who are not of Anglo-Australian background and/or not ""assimilated"", in that they are born elsewhere and speak another language at home, are sometimes referred to in policy discourse as culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD), particularly in Australia, where it was introduced in 1996 to replace non-English speaking background (NESB), as it goes beyond linguistic factors.  The term is mostly used to ""distinguish the mainstream community from those in which English is not the main language and/or cultural norms and values differ"", but is not inclusive of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, to whom a different set of attributes belong."
Multiculturalism in Australia,"Timeline
By 1973, the term ""multiculturalism"" had been introduced, and migrant groups were forming state and national associations to maintain their cultures, and promote the survival of their languages and heritages within mainstream institutions. Professor Jerzy Zubrzycki pursued multiculturalism as a social policy while chair of the Social Patterns Committee of the Immigration Advisory Council to the Whitlam Labor government.
The following is a timeline of government policies on and various bodies created to support multiculturalism over the years:"
Multiculturalism in Australia,"1973 – Al Grassby, Minister for Immigration in the Whitlam government, issued a reference paper entitled ""A multi-cultural society for the future"".
1975 – At a ceremony proclaiming the Racial Discrimination Act 1975, the Prime Minister referred to Australia as a ""multicultural nation"". The Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition made speeches demonstrating for the first time that multiculturalism was becoming a major political priority on both sides of politics.
1977 – the Australian Ethnic Affairs Council, appointed to advise the Fraser Liberal-Country Party Government, recommended a public policy of multiculturalism in its report Australia as a multicultural society.
1978 – the first official national multicultural policies were implemented by the Fraser government, in accord with recommendations of the Galbally Report in the context of government programs and services for migrants.
1979 – an Act of Parliament established the Australian Institute of Multicultural Affairs (AIMA), whose objectives included raising awareness of cultural diversity and promoting social cohesion, understanding and tolerance.
1986 – the AIMA Act was repealed by the Hawke government, which, in 1987, created the Office of Multicultural Affairs (OMA) in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. This was partly because of a poor reaction to their 1986 budget, which led to the need for better information to be gathered on multicultural issues, and it was recommended by the Jupp Review of Migrant and Multicultural Programs and Services. Putting it in PMC gave multicultural affairs the same status as women's and Aboriginal issues. Peter Shergold was appointed director, who turned the focus on the economic benefits of a culturally diverse society. OMA advised the PM and Minister for Immigration and Ethnic Affairs as well as the newly-established Australian Council of Multicultural Affairs, with Justice Sir James Gobbo as chair.
1989 – following community consultations and drawing on the advice of the Advisory Council for Multicultural Affairs (ACMA), the Hawke government produced the National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia, which had bipartisan political support.
1991 onwards – Paul Keating became Prime Minister, and the OMA was gradually wound down.
1994 – a National Multicultural Advisory Council was established to review and update the national agenda. Its report, launched in June 1995, found that much had been achieved and recommended further initiatives.
1996 – following the election of the Howard government in March 1996, OMA was absorbed into the then Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs at the end of June 1996, but with no resources. The last head of OMA, Bill Cope said that the new treasurer, Peter Costello, told the new minister, Phillip Ruddock, that all funds for multiculturalism were to be withdrawn, which was done in the August 1996 Budget.
1996 – Parliament endorsed the Parliamentary Statement on Racial Tolerance.
1997 – the Government announced a new National Multicultural Advisory Council (NMAC).
1999 – the Prime Minister launched NMAC's report, ""Australian Multiculturalism for a New Century: Towards Inclusiveness"".
December 1999 – in response to the NMAC report, the Government issued its multicultural policy, ""A New Agenda for Multicultural Australia"", and NMAC was wound up.
May 2003 – the government released its multicultural policy statement, ""Multicultural Australia: United in Diversity"". It updated the 1999 new agenda, set strategic directions for 2003–06, and included a commitment to the Council for Multicultural Australia.
December 2008 – the Australian Multicultural Advisory Council (AMAC) was officially launched.
April 2010 – AMAC presented its advice and recommendations on cultural diversity policy to government in a statement titled ""The People of Australia"".
February 2011 – ""The People of Australia – Australia's Multicultural Policy"" was launched.
August 2011 – the Australian Multicultural Council (AMC), replacing the Council for Multicultural Australia (CMA), was officially launched.
March 2013 – the government announced its response to the recommendations of the Access and Equity Inquiry Panel.
September 2013 – under new Administrative Arrangements Order, the Prime Minister transferred multicultural affairs from the Immigration portfolio into the new  Department of Social Services.
March 2017 – a new multicultural statement, ""Multicultural Australia – united, strong, successful"", was launched."
Multiculturalism in Australia,"Current bodies
As of September 2022, Multicultural Affairs is part of the Department of Home Affairs.
The Australian Multicultural Council's term runs from 2022 to 2025. It ""is a ministerially appointed body representing a broad cross-section of Australian interests that provides independent and robust advice to Government on multicultural affairs, social cohesion and integration policy and programs""."
Multiculturalism in Australia,"Opinions and criticism
The earliest academic critics of multiculturalism in Australia were the philosophers Lachlan Chipman and Frank Knopfelmacher, sociologist Tanya Birrell and the political scientist Raymond Sestito. Chipman and Knopfelmacher were concerned with threats to social cohesion, while Birrell's concern was that multiculturalism obscures the social costs associated with large scale immigration that fall most heavily on the most recently arrived and unskilled immigrants. Sestito's arguments were based on the role of political parties. He argued that political parties were instrumental in pursuing multicultural policies, and that these policies would put strain on the political system and would not promote better understanding in the Australian community.
Prime Minister John Curtin supported White Australia policy, saying, ""This country shall remain forever the home of the descendants of those people who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race""."
Multiculturalism in Australia,"Prime Minister Stanley Bruce was a supporter of the White Australia Policy, and made it an issue in his campaign for the 1925 Australian Federal election.It is necessary that we should determine what are the ideals towards which every Australian would desire to strive. I think those ideals might well be stated as being to secure our national safety, and to ensure the maintenance of our White Australia Policy to continue as an integral portion of the British Empire. We intend to keep this country white and not allow its people to be faced with the problems that at present are practically insoluble in many parts of the world.
Labor leader H. V. Evatt said in 1945 at the United Nations Conference on International Organization: "
Multiculturalism in Australia,"You have always insisted on the right to determine the composition of your own people. Australia wants that right now. What you are attempting to do now, Japan attempted after the last war [the First World War] and was prevented by Australia. Had we opened New Guinea and Australia to Japanese immigration then the Pacific War by now might have ended disastrously and we might have had another shambles like that experienced in Malaya.Historian Geoffrey Blainey achieved mainstream recognition as a critic of multiculturalism when he wrote that multiculturalism threatened to transform Australia into a ""cluster of tribes"". In his 1984 book All for Australia, Blainey criticised Australian multiculturalism for tending to emphasise the rights of ethnic minorities at the expense of the majority population and for being ""anti-British"", despite Britons being the largest ethnic group to have migrated to Australia. According to Blainey, such policies created divisions and threatened national cohesion. He argued that ""the evidence is clear that many multicultural societies have failed and that the human cost of the failure has been high"" and warned that ""we should think very carefully about the perils of converting Australia into a giant multicultural laboratory for the assumed benefit of the peoples of the world"".
In one of his numerous criticisms of multiculturalism, Blainey wrote:"
Multiculturalism in Australia,"For the millions of Australians who have no other nation to fall back upon, multiculturalism is almost an insult. It is divisive. It threatens social cohesion. It could, in the long-term, also endanger Australia's military security because it sets up enclaves which in a crisis could appeal to their own homelands for help.
Blainey remained a persistent critic of multiculturalism into the 1990s, denouncing multiculturalism as ""morally, intellectually and economically ... a sham.""
Historian John Hirst argued that while multiculturalism might serve the needs of ethnic politics and the demands of certain ethnic groups for government funding for the promotion of their separate ethnic identity, it is a perilous concept on which to found national policy. Hirst identified contradictory statements by political leaders that suggested the term was a nonsense concept. These included the policies of Prime Minister Bob Hawke, a proponent of multiculturalism while at the same time promoting a citizenship campaign and stressing the common elements of our culture, and anti-multiculturalism statements by Prime Minister Howard, who aroused the ire of multiculturalists who thought that he was suggesting closing down Italian restaurants and prohibiting the speaking of the Italian language when he proposed no such thing.
According to Hirst, multiculturalism denies the existence of a host Australian culture:"
Multiculturalism in Australia,"Insofar as multiculturalism makes what it calls 'Anglo-Celts' the equivalent of Italians and Turks, it denies the very notion of a host. [Multiculturalists assert] we are all immigrants of many cultures, contributing to a multicultural society. This may serve the needs of ethnic politics. As a serious historical or sociological analysis it is nonsense. To found policy on it may be perilous.
Critics have argued that multiculturalism was introduced as official policy in Australia without public support or consultation. According to academic Mark Lopez: ""Multiculturalism was developed by a small number of academics, social workers and activists, initially located on the fringe of the political arena of immigration, settlement and welfare. The authors responsible for versions of the ideology were also principal actors in the struggle to advance their beliefs and make them government policy"". Lopez asserts that through ""core groups and activists' sympathisers and contacts ... multiculturalism became government policy ... because the multiculturalists and their supporters were able to influence the ideological content of the Minister's sources of policy ... Contemporary public opinion polls implied ... in the general population, a widespread resentment, or a lack of interest, of the kinds of ideas advanced by multiculturalists. ... The original constituency for multiculturalism was small; popular opinion was an obstacle, not an asset, for the multiculturalists."" Furthermore, according to Lopez: ""Multiculturalism was not simply picked up and appreciated and implemented by policy makers, government and the major political parties ... [I]n every episode that resulted in the progress of multiculturalism, the effectiveness of the political lobbyists was a decisive factor. ... [Multiculturalism was] tirelessly promoted and manoeuvered forward"". However, the above argument have been contested by others, who note that ""Government sponsored conferences were in fact held at least once a year from 1950 to discuss immigration issues and to provide information for both government and the Australian public"".
Critics associated with the Centre for Population and Urban Research at Monash University argued in 1993 that both right and left factions in the Australian Labor Party have adopted a multicultural stance for the purposes of increasing their support within the party. A manifestation of this embrace of multiculturalism has been the creation of ethnic branches within the Labor Party and ethnic branch stacking.
In 1996, John Howard's Liberal-National Coalition was elected to government. Howard had long been a critic of multiculturalism, releasing his One Australia policy in the late 1980s which called for a reduction in Asian immigration. He later retracted the policy, citing his then position as wrong. Shortly after the Howard government took office, a new independent member of Parliament, Pauline Hanson, made her maiden speech in which she was highly critical of multiculturalism, saying that a multicultural society could never be strong. Hanson went on to form her own political party, One Nation. One Nation campaigned strongly against official multiculturalism, arguing that it represented ""a threat to the very basis of the Australian culture, identity and shared values"" and that there was ""no reason why migrant cultures should be maintained at the expense of our shared, national culture."".
Despite many calls for Howard to censure Hanson, his response was to state that her speech indicated a new freedom of expression in Australia on such issues, and that he believed strongly in freedom of speech. Rather than official multiculturalism, Howard advocated instead the idea of a ""shared national identity"", albeit one strongly grounded in certain recognisably Anglo-Celtic Australian themes, such as ""mateship"" and a ""fair go"". The name of the Department of Immigration, Multiculturalism and Indigenous Affairs was changed to the ""Department of Immigration and Citizenship"".  However, Australia maintained a policy of multiculturalism, and government introduced expanded dual-citizenship rights.
Following the upsurge of support for the One Nation Party in 1996, Lebanese-born Australian anthropologist Ghassan Hage published a critique in 1997 of Australian multiculturalism in the book White Nation. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from Whiteness studies, Jacques Lacan and Pierre Bourdieu, Hage examined a range of everyday discourses that implicated both anti-multiculturalists and pro-multiculturalists alike.
In exploring the discourse of multiculturalism others have argued that the threat to social cohesion and national identity have been overstated. For instance, Ramakrishan (2013) argues that the ""largely European"" cultural traditions of the population have been maintained despite greater ethnic diversity. Others have asserted that the emphasis on notions such as 'Identity, citizenship, social cohesion and integration' serves more as a catchphrase rather than pragmatic attempts to address the given issues."
Multiculturalism in Australia,"Celebrations of multiculturalism
A number of projects by government and non-government entities have been established to facilitate multiculturalism in Australia.
The capital, Canberra, developed a tradition of holding the National Multicultural Festival, held over a week in February. It was officially established in 1996.
Harmony Day was established in 1999  by the Howard government, to promote a singular and unifying notion of Australian-ness within multicultural policy."
Multiculturalism in Australia,"Multicultural awards
The Australian Multicultural Children's Literature Awards were awarded by the Office of Multicultural Affairs from 1991 to 1995,  and endorsed by the Children's Book Council of Australia. The award aimed ""to encourage themes of cultural diversity and to promote social harmony in books for Australian children"". There were three categories of awards: picture book, junior book, and senior book.
The NSW Multicultural Award has been part of the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards since 1980, under various names.
The Governor's Multicultural Award is an award presented by the Governor of South Australia since 2007. There are nine categories of awards.
The Premier's Multicultural Communications Awards are Australian journalism awards held each year by New South Wales Parliament and Multicultural NSW since 2012."
Multiculturalism in Australia,"See also
Council for Multicultural Australia
Criticism of multiculturalism
Cultural sensitivity
List of non-English-language newspapers in New South Wales
Multiculturalism in Canada
Multiculturalism in the United States
Multiculturalism in the United Kingdom
Special Broadcasting Service (SBS)"
Multiculturalism in Australia,"References
Further reading
Allan, Lyle (1983), 'A Selective Annotated Bibliography of Multiculturalism', in Social Alternatives (University of Queensland), Vol.3, No.3, July, pages 65–72.
Blainey, Geoffrey (1984), All For Australia, Methuen Haynes, North Ryde, New South Wales. ISBN 0-454-00828-7
Bostock, William W. (1977), Alternatives of Ethnicity, Cat and Fiddle Press, Hobart, Tasmania. ISBN 0-85853-030-9
Clancy, Greg (2006), The Conspiracies of Multiculturalism. The Betrayal That Divided Australia, Sunda Publications, Gordon, New South Wales. ISBN 0-9581564-1-7
Hirst, John (2005),  Sense and Nonsense in Australian History, Black Inc. Agenda, Melbourne, Victoria. ISBN 978-0-9775949-3-1
Lopez, Mark (2000), The Origins of Multiculturalism in Australian Politics 1945–1975, Melbourne University Press, Carlton South, Victoria. ISBN 0-522-84895-8
Sestito, Raymond (1982), The Politics of Multiculturalism, Centre for Independent Studies, St Leonards, New South Wales. ISBN 0-949769-06-1
Soutphommasane, Tim (2012) Don't go back to where you came from : why multiculturalism works, Sydney, N.S.W.: NewSouth Pub., ISBN 978-1-74223-336-9
Theophanous, Andrew C. (1995), Understanding Multiculturalism and Australian Identity, Elikia Books, Carlton South, Victoria. ISBN 1-875335-04-8"
Australian Senate,"The Australian Senate is the upper house of the bicameral Parliament of Australia, the lower house being the House of Representatives.
The powers, role and composition of the Senate are set out in Chapter I of the federal constitution as well as federal legislation and constitutional convention. There are a total of 76 senators: twelve are elected from each of the six Australian states, regardless of population, and two each representing the Australian Capital Territory (including the Jervis Bay Territory and Norfolk Island) and the Northern Territory (including the Australian Indian Ocean Territories). Senators are popularly elected under the single transferable vote system of proportional representation. Section 24 of the constitution provides that the House of Representatives shall as near as practicable, have twice as many members as the Senate.
The constitution grants the Senate nearly equivalent powers to the House of Representatives, with the exception that the Senate may not originate or amend money bills, but only reject or defer them. According to convention, the Senate plays no role in the formation of the executive government and the prime minister is drawn from the majority party or coalition in the House of Representatives. However, the government appoints a Senate leader and senators hold senior roles in the government as ministers of state and members of cabinet. Senators from the opposition likewise serve in the shadow ministry.
The Senate elects one of its members to serve as president, who exercises only an ordinary vote and has no casting vote. Since the late 20th century, it has been rare for governments to hold a majority in the Senate and the balance of power has typically rested with minor parties and independents. In practice, this means government bills cannot be assured of passage and regulations may be disallowed. The power to bring down the government and force elections by blocking supply also exists, as happened for the first and thus far only time during the 1975 constitutional crisis. Since major reforms in 1970, the Senate's role as a house of review has increased with the expansion of its committee system.
Senators from states ordinarily serve six-year terms, with half of the Senate up for re-election at each federal election along with the entirety of the House of Representatives. However, there is no constitutional requirement that Senate and House elections occur at the same time; the last Senate-only and House-only elections occurred in 1970 and 1972 respectively. The terms of senators from territories expire at the dissolution of the House of Representatives, typically at three-year intervals. Section 57 of the constitution provides for a double dissolution as a mechanism to break deadlocks between the House and Senate, whereby the entire Senate is dissolved and all seats made vacant.
Casual vacancies are filled by the relevant state or territory parliament, or by the corresponding state or territory government on an interim basis if the parliament is not in session. A constitutional amendment passed in 1977 provides that casual vacancies must be filled by a member of the same political party as the previous senator."
Australian Senate,"Origins and role
The Constitution of Australia established the Senate as the second chamber of the national parliament of the newly federated Australia. In contrast to countries employing a pure Westminster system the Senate plays an active role in legislation and is not merely a chamber of review. Instead of being modelled solely after the House of Lords, as the Senate of Canada was, the Australian Senate was in part modelled after the United States Senate, by giving equal representation to each state and almost equal powers with the lower house. This was done to give less populous states a real influence in the Parliament, while also maintaining the traditional review functions upper houses in the Westminster system. This has led to the description of a ""Washminster system"" to describe the Australian political structure.
Although the prime minister and treasurer, by convention (though not legal requirement), are members of the House of Representatives (after John Gorton was appointed prime minister in 1968, he resigned from the Senate and was elected to the House), other ministers may come from either house, and the two Houses have almost equal legislative power. As with most upper chambers in bicameral parliaments, the Senate cannot introduce or amend appropriation bills (bills that authorise government expenditure of public revenue) or bills that impose taxation, that role being reserved for the lower house; it can only approve, reject or defer them (as famously occurred in the lead up to the Dismissal). That degree of equality between the Senate and House of Representatives reflects the desire of the Constitution's authors to prevent the more populous states totally dominating the legislative process. The Australian constitution was enacted before the confrontation in 1909 in Britain between the House of Commons and the House of Lords, which ultimately resulted in the restrictions placed on the powers of the House of Lords by the Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949.
In practice, however, most legislation (except for private member's bills) in the Australian Parliament is initiated by the government, which has control over the lower house. It is then passed to the Senate, which has the opportunity to amend the bill, pass or reject it. In the majority of cases, voting takes place along party lines, although there are occasional conscience votes.
The Senate maintains a number of committees, which engage in a wide variety of inquiries. The results have no direct legislative power, but are valuable forums that raise many points of view that would otherwise not receive government or public notice."
Australian Senate,"Electoral system
The system for electing senators has changed several times since Federation. The original arrangement involved a first-past-the-post and block voting or ""winner takes all"" system, on a state-by-state basis. This was replaced in 1919 by preferential block voting. Block voting tended to produce landslide majorities and even ""wipe-outs"". For instance, from 1920 to 1923 the Nationalist Party held all but one of the 36 seats, and from 1947 to 1950, the Australian Labor Party held all but three.
In 1948, single transferable vote with proportional representation on a state-by-state basis became the method for electing senators. At this time the number of senators was expanded from 36 to 60 and it was argued that a move to proportional representation was needed to even up the balance between both major parties in the chamber. The change in voting systems has been described as an ""institutional revolution"" that has had the effect of limiting the government's ability to control the chamber, as well as helping the rise of Australian minor parties.
The 1984 election saw the introduction of group ticket voting, in order to reduce a high rate of informal voting that arose from the requirement that each candidate be given a preference, and to allow small parties and independent candidates a reasonable chance of winning a seat. This allowed voters to select a single party ""Above the Line"" to distribute their preferences on their behalf, but voters were still able to vote directly for individual candidates and distribute their own preferences if they wished ""Below the Line"" by numbering every box. Following 1981, the government has only had a majority in the Senate from 2005–2007; otherwise, negotiations with other parties and independents have generally been necessary to pass legislation.
Group tickets were abolished in advance of the 2016 election to reduce the number of senators of elected with a very small number of first preference votes as a result of the candidates of these micro-parties preferencing each other. In the place of group tickets, a form of optional preferential voting was introduced. As a result of the changes, voters may now assign their preferences for parties above the line (numbering as many boxes as they wish), or individual candidates below the line, and are not required to fill all of the boxes. Both above and below the line voting now use optional preferential voting. For above the line, voters are instructed to number at least their first six preferences; however, a ""savings provision"" is in place to ensure that ballots will still be counted if less than six are given. For below the line, voters are required to number at least their first 12 preferences. Voters are free to continue numbering as many preferences as they like beyond the minimum number specified. Another savings provision allows ballot papers with at least 6 below the line preferences to be formal. The voting changes make it more difficult for new small parties and independent candidates to be elected to the Senate, but also allow a voter to voluntarily ""exhaust"" preferences — that is, to ensure their vote cannot flow to specific candidates or parties — if none of the voter's candidate preferences are elected.
The changes were subject to a challenge in front of High Court of Australia by sitting South Australian Senator Bob Day of the Family First Party. The senator argued that the changes meant the senators would not be ""directly chosen by the people"" as required by the constitution. The High Court rejected Day's challenge unanimously, deciding that both above the line and below the line voting were consistent with the constitution."
Australian Senate,"Ballot paper
The Australian Senate voting paper under the single transferable vote proportional representation system resembles the following example (shown in two parts), which shows the candidates for Victorian senate representation in the 2016 federal election."
Australian Senate,"To vote correctly, electors must either:"
Australian Senate,"Vote for at least six parties above the thick black line, by writing the numbers 1-6 in party boxes. Votes with fewer than six boxes numbered are still admitted to the count through savings provisions.
Vote for at least twelve candidates below the thick black line, by writing the numbers 1-12 in the individual candidates' boxes. Votes with between six and twelve boxes numbered are still admitted to the count through savings provisions.
Because each state elects six senators at each half-Senate election, the quota for election is only one-seventh or 14.3% (one third or 33.3% for territories, where only two senators are elected). Once a candidate has been elected with votes reaching the quota amount, any votes they receive in addition to this may be distributed to other candidates as preferences, if there are still open seats to fill.
With an odd number of seats in a half-Senate election (3 or 5), 50.1% of the vote wins a majority (2/3) or (3/5).
With an even number of seats in a half-Senate election (6), 57.1% of the vote is needed to win a majority of seats (4/6).
The ungrouped candidates in the far right column do not have a box above the line. Therefore, they can only get a primary (number 1) vote from electors who vote below the line.  For this reason, some independents register as a group, either with other independents or by themselves, such as group B in the above example.
Names of parties can be shown only if the parties are registered, which requires, among other things, a minimum of 1,500 members."
Australian Senate,"Order of parties
The order of parties on the ballot papers and the order of ungrouped candidates are determined by a random ballot conducted by the Australian Electoral Commission."
Australian Senate,"Deposit
Candidates, parties and groups pay a deposit of $2,000 per candidate, which is forfeited if they fail to achieve 4% of the primary vote."
Australian Senate,"Public subsidy
Candidates, parties and groups earn a public subsidy if they gain at least 4% of the primary vote.  At the 2019 federal election, funding was $2.756 per formal first preference vote."
Australian Senate,"Membership
Under sections 7 and 8 of the Australian Constitution:"
Australian Senate,"The Senate must comprise an equal number of senators from each original state,
each original state shall have at least six senators, and
the Senate must be elected in a way that is not discriminatory among the states.
These conditions have periodically been the source of debate, and within these conditions, the composition and rules of the Senate have varied significantly since federation."
Australian Senate,"Size and nexus
Under Section 24 of the Constitution, the number of members of the House of Representatives has to be ""as nearly as practicable"" double the number of senators.
The reasons for the nexus are twofold: a desire to maintain a constant influence for the smaller states, and maintain a constant balance of the two Houses in the event of a joint sitting after a double dissolution. A referendum in 1967 to eliminate the nexus was rejected.
The size of the Senate has changed over the years. The Constitution originally provided for six senators for each state, resulting in a total of 36 senators.
The Constitution permits the Parliament to increase the number of senators, provided that equal numbers of senators from each original state are maintained; accordingly, in 1948, Senate representation was increased from 6 to 10 senators for each state, increasing the total to 60.
In 1975, the two territories, the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory, were given an entitlement to elect two senators each for the first time, bringing the number to 64. The senators from the Northern Territory also represent constituents from Australia's Indian Ocean Territories (Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands), while the senators from the Australian Capital Territory also represent voters from the Jervis Bay Territory and since 1 July 2016, Norfolk Island.
The latest expansion in Senate numbers took place in 1984, when the number of senators from each state was increased from 10 to 12, resulting in a total of 76 senators."
Australian Senate,"Term
Senators normally serve fixed six-year terms (from 1 July to 30 June). At most federal elections, the seats of 40 of the 76 senators (half of the 72 senators from the six states and all four of the senators from the territories) are contested, along with the entire House of Representatives; such an election is sometimes known as a half-Senate election. The seats of senators representing states elected at a half-Senate election are not contested at the next election, provided it is a half-Senate election. However, under some circumstances, the entire Senate (and the House of Representatives) is dissolved, in what is known as a double dissolution. Following a double dissolution, half the senators representing states serve terms ending on the third 30 June following the election (two to three years) and the rest serve a five to six-year term. Section 13 of the Constitution requires the Senate to allocate long and short terms amongst its members. The term of senators representing a territory expires at the same time as there is an election for the House of Representatives.
Section 13 of the Constitution requires that in half-Senate elections, the election of State senators shall take place within one year before the places become vacant. The actual election date is determined by the Governor of each State, who acts on the advice of the State Premier. The Governors almost always act on the recommendation of the Governor-General, with the last independent Senate election writ being issued by the Governor of Queensland during the Gair Affair in 1974.
Slightly more than half of the Senate is contested at each general election (half of the 72 state senators, and all four of the territory senators), along with the entire House of Representatives. Except in the case of a double dissolution, senators for the states are elected for fixed terms of six years, commencing on 1 July following the election, and ceasing on 30 June six years later.
The term of the four senators from the territories is not fixed, but is defined by the dates of the general elections for the House of Representatives, the period between which can vary greatly, to a maximum of three years and three months. Territory senators commence their terms on the day that they are elected. Their terms expire the day prior to the following general election day.
While there is no constitutional requirement for the election of senators to take place at the same time as those for members of the House of Representatives, the government usually synchronises the dates of elections for the Senate and House of Representatives. However, because their terms do not coincide, the incoming Parliament will for some time comprise the new House of Representatives and the old Senate, except for the senators representing the territories, until the new senators start their term on the next 1 July.
Following a double dissolution, all 76 senators face re-election. If there is an early House election outside the 12-month period in which Senate elections can occur, the synchronisation of the election will be disrupted, and there can be half-Senate elections without a concurrent House election. The last time this occurred was on 21 November 1970."
Australian Senate,"Quota size
The number of votes that a candidate must receive to be elected to the senate is referred to as a ""quota"". The quota is worked out by dividing the number of formal votes by one more than the number of vacancies to be filled and then adding one to the result. The 2019 senate election was a half senate election, so 6 senate vacancies were contested in each state. At this election, the quotas in each state were:"
Australian Senate,"Proportional representation of the states vs one vote one value
Each state elects the same number of senators, meaning there is equal representation for each of the Australian states, regardless of population, so the Senate, like many upper Houses, does not adhere to the principle of one vote one value. Tasmania, with a population of around 500,000, elects the same number of senators as New South Wales, which has a population of more than 8 million. Because of this imbalance, governments favoured by the more populous states are occasionally frustrated by the extra power the smaller states have in the Senate, to the degree that former Prime Minister Paul Keating famously referred to the Senate's members as ""unrepresentative swill"". "
Australian Senate,"The proportional election system within each state ensures that the Senate incorporates more political diversity than the lower house, which has historically been a two party body. The elected membership of the Senate more closely reflects the first voting preference of the electorate as a whole than does the composition of the House of Representatives, despite the large discrepancies from state to state in the ratio of voters to senators. This often means that the composition of the Senate is different from that of the House of Representatives, contributing to the Senate's function as a house of review.
With proportional representation, and the small majorities in the Senate compared to the generally larger majorities in the House of Representatives, and the requirement that the number of members of the House be ""nearly as practicable"" twice that of the Senate, a joint sitting after a double dissolution is more likely than not to lead to a victory for the House over the Senate. When the Senate had an odd number of senators retiring at an election (3 or 5), 51% of the vote would lead to a clear majority of 3 out of 5 per state. With an even number of senators retiring at an election, it takes 57% of the vote to win 4 out of 6 seats, which may be insurmountable. This gives the House an advantage in joint sittings but not in ordinary elections, where the Senate may be too evenly balanced to get House legislation through.
A party does not need the support of the Senate to form government (needing only a majority in the House of Representatives), however the Senate can block supply, effectively preventing the government from lawfully spending money. Whether a government facing a Senate that blocks supply is obliged to either resign or call an election was one of the major disputes of the 1975 constitutional crisis. However, even where the Senate does not block supply, they can still use their power to frustrate the legislative agenda of the government."
Australian Senate,"Parties
The overwhelming majority of senators have always been elected as representatives of political parties. Parties which currently have representation in the Senate are:"
Australian Senate,"The Coalition – Liberal Party of Australia, National Party of Australia, Liberal National Party of Queensland and Country Liberal Party
Australian Labor Party
Australian Greens
Pauline Hanson's One Nation
United Australia Party
Jacqui Lambie Network
Other parties that have achieved Senate representation in the past include the Australian Conservatives, Derryn Hinch's Justice Party, Family First Party, Australian Democrats, Palmer United Party, Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party, Nuclear Disarmament Party, Liberal Movement, Liberal Democratic Party and Democratic Labour Party.
Due to the need to obtain votes statewide, independent candidates have difficulty getting elected. The exceptions in recent times have been elected in less populous States — the former Tasmanian Senator Brian Harradine and the former South Australian Senator Nick Xenophon. David Pocock was also elected to represent the ACT at the 2022 election. It is less uncommon for a senator initially elected representing a party to become an independent, most recently in the cases of Senator Lucy Gichuhi not joining the Conservatives following its merger with Family First, Senators Rod Culleton and Fraser Anning resigning from One Nation, Senator Steve Martin being expelled from the Jacqui Lambie Network, and Lidia Thorpe resigning from the Australian Greens.
The Australian Senate serves as a model for some politicians in Canada, particularly in the Western provinces, who wish to reform the Canadian Senate so that it takes a more active legislative role.
There are also small factions in the United Kingdom (both from the right and left) who wish to the see the House of Lords take on a structure similar to that of the Australian Senate."
Australian Senate,"Casual vacancies
Section 15 of the Constitution provides that a casual vacancy of a State senator shall be filled by the State Parliament. If the previous senator was a member of a particular political party the replacement must come from the same party, but the State Parliament may choose not to fill the vacancy, in which case Section 11 requires the Senate to proceed regardless. If the State Parliament happens to be in recess when the vacancy occurs, the Constitution provides that the State Governor can appoint someone to fill the place until fourteen days after the State Parliament resumes sitting."
Australian Senate,"Procedure
Work
The Australian Senate typically sits for 50 to 60 days a year. Most of those days are grouped into 'sitting fortnights' of two four-day weeks. These are in turn arranged in three periods: the autumn sittings, from February to April; the winter sittings, which commence with the delivery of the budget in the House of Representatives on the first sitting day of May and run through to June or July; and the spring sittings, which commence around August and continue until December, and which typically contain the largest number of the year's sitting days.
The senate has a regular schedule that structures its typical working week."
Australian Senate,"Dealing with legislation
All bills must be passed by a majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate before they become law. Most bills originate in the House of Representatives, and the great majority are introduced by the government.
The usual procedure is for notice to be given by a government minister the day before the bill is introduced into the Senate. Once introduced the bill goes through several stages of consideration. It is given a first reading, which represents the bill's formal introduction into the chamber."
Australian Senate,"The first reading is followed by debate on the principle or policy of the bill (the second reading debate). Agreement to the bill in principle is indicated by a second reading, after which the detailed provisions of the bill are considered by one of a number of methods (see below). Bills may also be referred by either House to their specialised standing or select committees. Agreement to the policy and the details is confirmed by a third and final reading. These processes ensure that a bill is systematically considered before being agreed to.
The Senate has detailed rules in its standing orders that govern how a bill is considered at each stage. This process of consideration can vary greatly in the amount of time taken. Consideration of some bills is completed in a single day, while complex or controversial legislation may take months to pass through all stages of Senate scrutiny. The Constitution provides that if the Senate vote is equal, the question shall pass in the negative."
Australian Senate,"Committees
In addition to the work of the main chamber, the Senate also has a large number of committees which deal with matters referred to them by the Senate. These committees also conduct hearings three times a year in which the government's budget and operations are examined. These are known as estimates hearings. Traditionally dominated by scrutiny of government activities by non-government senators, they provide the opportunity for all senators to ask questions of ministers and public officials. This may occasionally include government senators examining activities of independent publicly funded bodies, or pursuing issues arising from previous governments' terms of office. There is however a convention that senators do not have access to the files and records of previous governments when there has been an election resulting in a change in the party in government. Once a particular inquiry is completed the members of the committee can then produce a report, to be tabled in Parliament, outlining what they have discovered as well as any recommendations that they have produced for the Government to consider.
The ability of the Houses of Parliament to establish committees is referenced in Section 49 of the Constitution, which states, ""The powers, privileges, and immunities of the Senate and of the House of Representatives, and of the members and the committees of each House, shall be such as are declared by the Parliament, and until declared shall be those of the Commons House of Parliament of the United Kingdom, and of its members and committees, at the establishment of the Commonwealth.""
Parliamentary committees can be given a wide range of powers. One of the most significant powers is the ability to summon people to attend hearings in order to give evidence and submit documents. Anyone who attempts to hinder the work of a Parliamentary committee may be found to be in contempt of Parliament. There are a number of ways that witnesses can be found in contempt, these include; refusing to appear before a committee when summoned, refusing to answer a question during a hearing or to produce a document, or later being found to have lied to or misled a committee. Anyone who attempts to influence a witness may also be found in contempt. Other powers include the ability to meet throughout Australia, to establish subcommittees and to take evidence in both public and private hearings.
Proceedings of committees are considered to have the same legal standing as proceedings of Parliament. They are recorded by Hansard, except for private hearings, and also operate under Parliamentary privilege. Every participant, including committee members and witnesses giving evidence, is protected from being prosecuted under any civil or criminal action for anything they may say during a hearing. Written evidence and documents received by a committee are also protected."
Australian Senate,"Holding governments to account
One of the functions of the Senate, both directly and through its committees, is to scrutinise government activity. The vigour of this scrutiny has been fuelled for many years by the fact that the party in government has seldom had a majority in the Senate. Whereas in the House of Representatives the government's majority has sometimes limited that chamber's capacity to implement executive scrutiny, the opposition and minor parties have been able to use their Senate numbers as a basis for conducting inquiries into government operations. When the Howard government won control of the Senate in 2005, it sparked a debate about the effectiveness of the Senate in holding the government of the day accountable for its actions. Government members argued that the Senate continued to be a forum of vigorous debate, and its committees continued to be active. The Opposition leader in the Senate suggested that the government had attenuated the scrutinising activities of the Senate. The Australian Democrats, a minor party which frequently played mediating and negotiating roles in the Senate, expressed concern about a diminished role for the Senate's committees.
In addition to review of legislation, the Legislation Act 2003 provides that the Senate may also disallow legislative instruments – typically regulations made by government ministers using powers delegated by relevant legislation. The same power is afforded to the House of Representatives, but is rarely exercised given the government's control of numbers in the lower house. The Legislation Act 2003 provides that any senator may move a motion disallowing a legislative instrument, which if passed within 15 days has the effect of repealing the instrument. The government may not enact an equivalent legislative instrument for a period of six months following the disallowal."
Australian Senate,"Voting
Senators are called upon to vote on matters before the Senate. These votes are called divisions in the case of Senate business, or ballots where the vote is to choose a senator to fill an office of the Senate (such as the President).
Party discipline in Australian politics is strong, so divisions almost always are decided on party lines. Nevertheless, the existence of minor parties holding the balance of power in the Senate has made divisions in that chamber more uncertain than in the House of Representatives.
When a division is to be held, bells ring throughout the parliament building for four minutes, during which time senators must go to the chamber. At the end of that period the doors are locked and a vote is taken, by identifying and counting senators according to the side of the chamber on which they sit (ayes to the right of the chair, noes to the left). The whole procedure takes around eight minutes. Senators with commitments that keep them from the chamber may make arrangements in advance to be 'paired' with a senator of the opposite political party, so that their absence does not affect the outcome of the vote.
The Senate contains an even number of senators, so a tied vote is a real prospect (which regularly occurs when the party numbers in the chamber are finely balanced). Section 23 of the Constitution requires that in the event of a tied division, the question is resolved in the negative. The system is however different for ballots for offices such as the President. If such a ballot is tied, the Clerk of the Senate decides the outcome by the drawing of lots. In reality, conventions govern most ballots, so this situation does not arise."
Australian Senate,"Political parties and voting outcomes
The strength of party discipline is demonstrated by how rare it is for members to vote against the position taken by their party. The exceptions are where a conscience vote is allowed by one or more of the political parties; and occasions where a member of a political party crosses the floor of the chamber to vote against the instructions of their party whip. Crossing the floor very rarely occurs, but is more likely in the Senate than in the House of Representatives.
When the government has a majority in the Senate, the importance of party discipline increases, as it is only backbenchers that may prevent the passage of government bills. While strong party discipline has been a feature of Australian politics since the emergence of the Labor Party in the early 1900s, as late as 1980 the Fraser government could not be assured that his party's majority in the Senate would translate to absolute control, with at least 12 senators prepared to vote against the government. Similarly, when the Howard government had a Senate majority between 2005 and 2007, the internal differences between members of the government coalition parties became more apparent. However due to the increase in party discipline, only two senators in this period crossed the floor: Gary Humphries on civil unions in the Australian Capital Territory, and Barnaby Joyce on voluntary student unionism. A more significant potential instance of floor crossing was averted when the government withdrew its Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals) Bill, of which several government senators had been critical, and which would have been defeated had it proceeded to the vote. The controversy that surrounded these examples demonstrated both the importance of backbenchers in party policy deliberations and the limitations to their power to influence outcomes in the Senate chamber.
In September 2008, Barnaby Joyce became leader of the Nationals in the Senate, and stated that his party in the upper house would no longer necessarily vote with their Liberal counterparts."
Australian Senate,"Where the Houses disagree
Double dissolutions and joint sittings
If the Senate rejects or fails to pass a proposed law, or passes it with amendments to which the House of Representatives will not agree, and if after an interval of three months the Senate refuses to pass the same piece of legislation, the government may either abandon the bill or continue to revise it, or, in certain circumstances outlined in section 57 of the Constitution, the Prime Minister can advise the Governor-General to dissolve the entire parliament in a double dissolution. In such an event, the entirety of the Senate faces re-election, as does the House of Representatives, rather than only about half the chamber as is normally the case. After a double dissolution election, if the bills in question are reintroduced, and if they again fail to pass the Senate, the Governor-General may agree to a joint sitting of the two Houses in an attempt to pass the bills. Such a sitting has only occurred once, in 1974.
The double dissolution mechanism is not available for bills that originate in the Senate and are blocked in the lower house.
On 8 October 2003, the then Prime Minister John Howard initiated public discussion of whether the mechanism for the resolution of deadlocks between the Houses should be reformed. High levels of support for the existing mechanism, and a very low level of public interest in that discussion, resulted in the abandonment of these proposals."
Australian Senate,"Allocating terms after a double dissolution
After a double dissolution election, section 13 of the Constitution requires the Senate to divide the senators into two classes, with the first class having a three-year ""short term"", and the second class a six-year ""long term"". The Senate may adopt any approach it wants to determine how to allocate the long and short terms, however two methods are currently 'on the table':"
Australian Senate,"""elected-order"" method, where the senators elected first attain a six-year term. This approach tends to favour minor party candidates as it gives greater weight to their first preference votes; or
re-count method, where the long terms are allocated to those senators who would have been elected first if the election had been a standard half-Senate election. This method is likely to be preferred by the major parties in the Senate where it would deliver more six-year terms to their members.
The Senate applied the ""elected-order"" method following the 1987 double dissolution election. Since that time the Senate has passed resolutions on several occasions indicating its intention to use the re-count method to allocate seats at any future double dissolution, which Green describes as a fairer approach but notes could be ignored if a majority of senators opted for the ""elected-order"" method instead. In both double dissolution elections since 1987, the ""elected order"" method was used."
Australian Senate,"Blocking supply
Because of the federal nature of our Constitution and because of its provisions the Senate undoubtedly has constitutional power to refuse or defer supply to the Government. Because of the principles of responsible government a Prime Minister who cannot obtain supply, including money for carrying on the ordinary services of government, must either advise a general election or resign. If he refuses to do this I have the authority and indeed the duty under the Constitution to withdraw his Commission as Prime Minister. The position in Australia is quite different from a position in the United Kingdom. Here the confidence of both Houses on supply is necessary to ensure its provision. In United Kingdom the confidence of the House of Commons alone is necessary. But both here and in the United Kingdom the duty of the Prime Minister is the same in a most important aspect – if he cannot get supply he must resign or advise an election.
The constitutional text denies the Senate the power to originate or amend appropriation bills, in deference to the conventions of the classical Westminster system. Under a traditional Westminster system, the executive government is responsible for its use of public funds to the lower house, which has the power to bring down a government by blocking its access to supply – i.e. revenue appropriated through taxation. The arrangement as expressed in the Australian Constitution, however, still leaves the Senate with the power to reject supply bills outright or defer their passage indefinitely – undoubtedly one of the Senate's most powerful abilities. 
This ability is, in part, due to the age of the Australian Constitution as it was written before the Liberal Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, H. H. Asquith, won his confrontation with the House of Lords and passed the Parliament Act of 1911.
The ability to block supply was exercised in the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis. The Opposition used its numbers in the Senate to defer supply bills, refusing to deal with them until an election was called for both Houses of Parliament, an election which it hoped to win. The Prime Minister of the day, Gough Whitlam, contested the legitimacy of the blocking and refused to resign. The crisis brought to a head two Westminster conventions that, under the Australian constitutional system, were in conflict – firstly, that a government may continue to govern for as long as it has the support of the lower house, and secondly, that a government that no longer has access to supply must either resign or be dismissed. The crisis was resolved in November 1975 when Governor-General Sir John Kerr dismissed Whitlam's government and appointed Opposition Leader Fraser as Prime Minister, on the condition that elections for both Houses of parliament be held.
In 2014, ABC news analyst Antony Green opined that the blocking of supply alone cannot force a double dissolution. There must be legislation repeatedly blocked by the Senate which the government can then choose to use as a trigger for a double dissolution."
Australian Senate,"Current Senate
2019 election
In the 2019 half-senate election, 40 seats were up for election: six from each state and two from each territory. The senate results were: Liberal/National coalition 19 seats, Labor 13 seats, Greens 6 seats, One Nation 1 seat, and Jacqui Lambie Network 1 seat."
Australian Senate,"2022 election
In the 2022 half-senate election, 40 seats were up for election: six from each state and two from each territory. The senate results were: Liberal/National coalition 15 seats (-4), Labor 15 seats (±0), Greens 6 seats (+3), Jacqui Lambie Network 1 seat (+1), One Nation 1 seat (±0), United Australia 1 seat (+1), and independent 1 seat (+1). The composition of the Senate after the election was:"
Australian Senate,"Liberal/National Coalition 32 seats
Labor 26 seats
Greens 12 seats
Jacqui Lambie Network 2 seats
One Nation 2 seats
United Australia 1 seat
Independent (David Pocock) 1 seat"
Australian Senate,"Historical party composition of the Senate
The Senate has included representatives from a range of political parties, including several parties that have seldom or never had representation in the House of Representatives, but which have consistently secured a small but significant level of electoral support, as the table shows.
Results represent the composition of the Senate after the elections. The full Senate has been contested on eight occasions; the inaugural election and seven double dissolutions. These are underlined and highlighted in puce."
Australian Senate,"See also
2019 Australian federal election
Canberra Press Gallery
Clerk of the Australian Senate
Double dissolution
Father of the Australian Senate
List of Australian Senate appointments
Members of the Australian Parliament who have served for at least 30 years
Members of the Australian Senate, 2022–2025
Women in the Australian Senate"
Australian Senate,"Notes
References
Further reading
External links"
Australian Senate,"Official website of the Australian Senate
Australian Parliament – live broadcasting
Senate StatsNet
The Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate
Australia's Upper Houses - ABC Rear Vision A podcast about the development of Australia's upper houses into STV proportional representation elected chambers."
Australian literature,"Australian literature is the written or literary work produced in the area or by the people of the Commonwealth of Australia and its preceding colonies. During its early Western history, Australia was a collection of British colonies; as such, its recognised literary tradition begins with and is linked to the broader tradition of English literature. However, the narrative art of Australian writers has, since 1788, introduced the character of a new continent into literature—exploring such themes as Aboriginality, mateship, egalitarianism, democracy, national identity, migration, Australia's unique location and geography, the complexities of urban living, and ""the beauty and the terror"" of life in the Australian bush."
Australian literature,"Overview
Australian writers who have obtained international renown include the Nobel-winning author Patrick White, as well as authors Christina Stead, David Malouf, Peter Carey, Bradley Trevor Greive, Thomas Keneally, Colleen McCullough, Nevil Shute and Morris West. Notable contemporary expatriate authors include the feminist Germaine Greer, art historian Robert Hughes and humorists Barry Humphries and Clive James.
Among the important authors of classic Australian works are the poets Henry Lawson, Banjo Paterson, C. J. Dennis and Dorothea Mackellar. Dennis wrote in the Australian vernacular, while Mackellar wrote the iconic patriotic poem My Country. Lawson and Paterson clashed in the famous ""Bulletin Debate"" over the nature of life in Australia with Lawson considered to have the harder edged view of the Bush and Paterson the romantic. Lawson is widely regarded as one of Australia's greatest writers of short stories, while Paterson's poems remain amongst the most popular Australian bush poems. Significant poets of the 20th century included Dame Mary Gilmore, Kenneth Slessor, A. D. Hope and Judith Wright. Among the best known contemporary poets are Les Murray and Bruce Dawe, whose poems are often studied in Australian high schools.
Novelists of classic Australian works include Marcus Clarke (For the Term of His Natural Life), Miles Franklin (My Brilliant Career), Henry Handel Richardson (The Fortunes of Richard Mahony), Joseph Furphy (Such Is Life), Rolf Boldrewood (Robbery Under Arms)  and Ruth Park (The Harp in the South). In terms of children's literature, Norman Lindsay (The Magic Pudding), Mem Fox (Possum Magic), and May Gibbs (Snugglepot and Cuddlepie) are among the Australian classics, while Melina Marchetta (Looking for Alibrandi) is a modern YA classic. Eminent Australian playwrights have included Ray Lawler, David Williamson, Alan Seymour and Nick Enright. Among prominent short story writers are Steele Rudd, Henry Lawson, Beverley Farmer, Kate Grenville, and Helen Garner.
Although historically only a small proportion of Australia's population have lived outside the major cities, many of Australia's most distinctive stories and legends originate in the outback, in the drovers and squatters and people of the barren, dusty plains.
David Unaipon is known as the first Aboriginal author. Oodgeroo Noonuccal was the first Aboriginal Australian to publish a book of verse. A ground-breaking memoir about the experiences of the Stolen Generations can be found in Sally Morgan's My Place.
Charles Bean, Geoffrey Blainey, Robert Hughes, Manning Clark, Claire Wright, and Marcia Langton are authors of important Australian histories."
Australian literature,"Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers and themes
Writing by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people
While his father, James Unaipon (c.1835-1907), contributed to accounts of Aboriginal mythology written by the missionary George Taplin, David Unaipon (1872–1967) provided the first accounts of Aboriginal mythology written by an Aboriginal: Legendary Tales of the Aborigines. For this he is known as the first Aboriginal author. Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920–1993) was a famous Aboriginal poet, writer and rights activist credited with publishing the first Aboriginal book of verse: We Are Going (1964). Sally Morgan's novel My Place was considered a breakthrough memoir in terms of bringing indigenous stories to wider notice. Leading Aboriginal activists Marcia Langton (First Australians, 2008) and Noel Pearson (Up from the Mission, 2009) are active contemporary contributors to Australian literature.
The voices of Indigenous Australians are being increasingly recognised and include the playwright Jack Davis and Kevin Gilbert. Writers coming to prominence in the 21st century include Kim Scott, Alexis Wright, Kate Howarth, Tara June Winch, Yvette Holt and Anita Heiss. Indigenous authors who have won Australia's high prestige Miles Franklin Award include Kim Scott who was joint winner (with Thea Astley) in 2000 for Benang and again in 2011 for That Deadman Dance. Alexis Wright won the award in 2007 for her novel Carpentaria. Melissa Lucashenko won the award in 2019 for her novel Too Much Lip, which was also short-listed for the Stella Prize for Australian women's writing.
Letters written by notable Aboriginal leaders like Bennelong and Sir Douglas Nicholls are also retained as treasures of Australian literature, as is the historic Yirrkala bark petitions of 1963 which is the first traditional Aboriginal document recognised by the Australian Parliament. AustLit's BlackWords project provides a comprehensive listing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Writers and Storytellers.
Writing about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples"
Australian literature,"At the point of the first colonization, Indigenous Australians had not developed a system of writing, so the first literary accounts of Aboriginal people come from the journals of early European explorers, which contain descriptions of first contact, both violent and friendly. Early accounts by Dutch explorers and by the English buccaneer William Dampier wrote of the ""natives of New Holland"" as being ""barbarous savages"", but by the time of Captain James Cook and First Fleet marine Watkin Tench (the era of Jean-Jacques Rousseau), accounts of Aborigines were more sympathetic and romantic: ""these people may truly be said to be in the pure state of nature, and may appear to some to be the most wretched upon the earth; but in reality they are far happier than ... we Europeans"", wrote Cook in his journal on 23 August 1770.
Many notable works have been written by non-indigenous Australians on Aboriginal themes. Examples include the poems of Judith Wright; The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith by Thomas Keneally, Ilbarana by Donald Stuart, and the short story by David Malouf: ""The Only Speaker of his Tongue"". Histories covering Indigenous themes include Watkin Tench (Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay et Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson); Roderick J. Flanagan (The Aborigines of Australia, 1888); The Native Tribes of Central Australia by Spencer and Gillen, 1899; the diaries of Donald Thomson on the subject of the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land (c.1935-1943); Alan Moorehead (The fatal Impact, 1966); Geoffrey Blainey (Triumph of the Nomads, 1975); Henry Reynolds (The Other Side of the Frontier, 1981); and Marcia Langton (First Australians, 2008). Differing interpretations of Aboriginal history are also the subject of contemporary debate in Australia, notably between the essayists Robert Manne and Keith Windschuttle."
Australian literature,"Early and classic works
For centuries before the British settlement of Australia, European writers wrote fictional accounts of an imagining of a Great Southern Land. In 1642 Abel Janszoon Tasman landed in Tasmania and after examining notches cut at considerable distances on tree trunks, speculated that the newly discovered country must be peopled by giants. Later, the British satirist, Jonathan Swift, set the land of the Houyhnhnms of Gulliver's Travels to the west of Tasmania.  In 1797 the British Romantic poet Robert Southey—then a young Jacobin—included a section in his collection, ""Poems"", a selection of poems under the heading, ""Botany Bay Eclogues,"" in which he portrayed the plight and stories of transported convicts in New South Wales.
Among the first true works of literature produced in Australia were the accounts of the settlement of Sydney by Watkin Tench, a captain of the marines on the First Fleet to arrive in 1788. In 1819,  poet, explorer, journalist and politician William Wentworth published the first book written by an Australian: A Statistical, Historical, and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and Its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land, With a Particular Enumeration of the Advantages Which These Colonies Offer for Emigration and Their Superiority in Many Respects Over Those Possessed by the United States of America, in which he advocated an elected assembly for New South Wales, trial by jury and settlement of Australia by free emigrants rather than convicts
The first novel to be published in Australia was a crime novel, Quintus Servinton: A Tale founded upon Incidents of Real Occurrence by Henry Savery published in Hobart in 1830. Early popular works tended to be the 'ripping yarn' variety, telling tales of derring-do against the new frontier of the Australian outback. Writers such as Rolf Boldrewood (Robbery Under Arms), Marcus Clarke (For the Term of His Natural Life), Henry Handel Richardson (The Fortunes of Richard Mahony) and Joseph Furphy (Such Is Life) embodied these stirring ideals in their tales and, particularly the latter, tried to accurately record the vernacular language of the common Australian. These novelists also gave valuable insights into the penal colonies which helped form the country and also the early rural settlements.
In 1838 The Guardian: a tale by Anna Maria Bunn was published in Sydney. It was the first Australian novel printed and published in mainland Australia and the first Australian novel written by a woman. It is a Gothic romance.
Miles Franklin (My Brilliant Career) and Jeannie Gunn (We of the Never Never) wrote of lives of European pioneers in the Australian bush from a female perspective. Albert Facey wrote of the experiences of the Goldfields and of Gallipoli (A Fortunate Life). Ruth Park wrote of the sectarian divisions of life in impoverished 1940s inner city Sydney (The Harp in the South). The experience of Australian PoWs in the Pacific War is recounted by Nevil Shute in A Town Like Alice and in the autobiography of Sir Edward Dunlop. Alan Moorehead was an Australian war correspondent and novelist who gained international acclaim.
A number of notable classic works by international writers deal with Australian subjects, among them D. H. Lawrence's Kangaroo. The journals of Charles Darwin contain the famous naturalist's first impressions of Australia, gained on his tour aboard the Beagle that inspired his writing of On the Origin of Species.  The Wayward Tourist: Mark Twain's Adventures in Australia contains the acclaimed American humourist's musings on Australia from his 1895 lecture tour.
In 2012, The Age reported that Text Publishing was releasing an Australian classics series in 2012, to address a ""neglect of Australian literature"" by universities and ""British dominated"" publishing houses—citing out of print Miles Franklin award winners such as David Ireland's The Glass Canoe and Sumner Locke Elliott's Careful, He Might Hear You as key examples."
Australian literature,"Children's literature
Ethel Turner's Seven Little Australians, which relates the adventures of seven mischievous children in Sydney, has been in print since 1894, longer than any other Australian children's novel. The Getting of Wisdom (1910) by Henry Handel Richardson, about an unconventional schoolgirl in Melbourne, has enjoyed a similar success and been praised by H. G. Wells and Germaine Greer.
Other perennial favourites of Australian children's literature include Dorothy Wall's Blinky Bill, Ethel Pedley's Dot and the Kangaroo, May Gibbs' Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, Norman Lindsay's The Magic Pudding, Ruth Park's The Muddleheaded Wombat  and Mem Fox's Possum Magic. These classic works employ anthropomorphism to bring alive the creatures of the Australian bush, thus Bunyip Bluegum of The Magic Pudding is a koala who leaves his tree in search of adventure, while in Dot and the Kangaroo a little girl lost in the bush is befriended by a group of marsupials. May Gibbs crafted a story of protagonists modelled on the appearance of young eucalyptus (gum tree) nuts and pitted these gumnut babies, Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, against the antagonist Banksia men. Gibbs' influence has lasted through the generations – contemporary children's author Ursula Dubosarsky has cited Snugglepot and Cuddlepie as one of her favourite books.
In the middle of the twentieth century, children's literature languished, with popular British authors dominating the Australian market. But in the 1960s Oxford University Press published several Australian children's authors, and Angus & Robertson appointed their first specialist children's editor. The best-known writers to emerge in this period were Hesba Brinsmead, Ivan Southall, Colin Thiele, Patricia Wrightson, Nan Chauncy, Joan Phipson and Eleanor Spence, their works primarily set in the Australian landscape. In 1971, Southall won the Carnegie Medal for Josh. In 1986, Patricia Wrightson received the international Hans Christian Andersen Award.
The Children's Book Council of Australia has presented annual awards for books of literary merit since 1946 and has other awards for outstanding contributions to Australian children's literature. Notable winners and shortlisted works have inspired several well-known Australian films from original novels, including the Silver Brumby series, a collection by Elyne Mitchell which recount the life and adventures of Thowra, a Snowy Mountains brumby stallion; Storm Boy (1964), by Colin Thiele, about a boy and his pelican and the relationships he has with his father, the pelican, and an outcast Aboriginal man called Fingerbone; the Sydney-based Victorian era time travel adventure Playing Beatie Bow (1980) by Ruth Park; and, for older children and mature readers, Melina Marchetta's 1993 novel about a Sydney high school girl Looking for Alibrandi. Robin Klein's Came Back to Show You I Could Fly is a story about the beautiful relationship between an eleven-year-old boy and an older, drug-addicted girl.
Jackie French, widely described as Australia's most popular children's author, has written about 170 books, including two CBCA Children's Book of the Year Award winners. One of them, the critically acclaimed Hitler's Daughter (1999), is a ""what if?"" story that explores mind-provoking issues about what would have happened if Adolf Hitler had had a daughter. French is also the author of the highly praised Diary of a Wombat (2003), which won awards such as the 2003 COOL Award and 2004 BILBY Award, among others. It was also named an honour book for the CBCA Children's Book of the Year Award for picture books.
Paul Jennings is a prolific writer of contemporary Australian fiction for young people whose career began with collections of short stories such as Unreal! (1985) and Unbelievable! (1987);  many of the stories were adapted as episodes of the award-winning television show Round the Twist.
The world's richest prize in children's literature has been received by two Australians, Sonya Hartnett, who won the 2008 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award  and Shaun Tan, who won in 2011. Hartnett has a long and distinguished career, publishing her first novel at 15.  She is known for her dark and often controversial themes. She has won several awards, including the Kathleen Mitchell Award and the Victorian Premier's Award for Sleeping Dogs, Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and the Aurealis Award, Best Young Adult Novel (Australian speculative fiction) for Thursday's Child and the CBCA Children's Book of the Year Award: Older Readers for Forest. Tan won this for his career contribution to ""children's and young adult literature in the broadest sense"". Tan has been awarded various literary awards, including the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis in 2009 for Tales from Outer Suburbia and a New York Times Best Illustrated Children's Books award in 2007 for The Arrival. Alongside his numerous literary awards, Tan's adaption of his book The Lost Thing also won him an Oscar for best animated short film. Other awards Tan has won include a World Fantasy Award for Best Artist, and a Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist."
Australian literature,"Expatriate authors
A generation of leading contemporary international writers who left Australia for Britain and the United States in the 1960s have remained regular and passionate contributors of Australian themed literary works throughout their careers including: Clive James, Robert Hughes, Barry Humphries, Geoffrey Robertson and Germaine Greer. Several of these writers had links to the Sydney Push intellectual sub-culture in Sydney from the late 1940s to the early 1970s; and to Oz, a satirical magazine originating in Sydney, and later produced in London (from 1967 to 1973).
After a long media career, Clive James remained a leading humourist and author based in Britain whose memoir series was rich in reflections on Australian society (including his 2007 book Cultural Amnesia). Robert Hughes has produced a number of historical works on Australia (including The Art of Australia (1966) and The Fatal Shore (1987)).
Barry Humphries took his dadaist absurdist theatrical talents and pen to London in the 1960s, becoming an institution on British television and later attaining popularity in the USA. Humphries' outlandish Australian caricatures, including Dame Edna Everage, Barry McKenzie and Les Patterson have starred in books, stage and screen to great acclaim over five decades and his biographer Anne Pender described him in 2010 as the most significant comedian since Charles Chaplin. His own literary works include the Dame Edna biographies My Gorgeous Life (1989) and Handling Edna (2010) and the autobiography My Life As Me: A Memoir (2002). Geoffrey Robertson KC is a leading international human rights lawyer, academic, author and broadcaster whose books include The Justice Game (1998) and Crimes Against Humanity (1999). Leading feminist Germaine Greer, author of The Female Eunuch, has spent much of her career in England but continues to study, critique, condemn and adore her homeland (recent work includes  Whitefella Jump Up: The Shortest Way to Nationhood, 2004)."
Australian literature,"Other contemporary works and authors
Martin Boyd (1893–1972) was a distinguished memoirist, novelist and poet, whose works included social comedies and the serious reflections of a pacifist faced with a time of war. Among his Langton series of novels—The Cardboard Crown (1952), A Difficult Young Man (1955), Outbreak of Love (1957)—earned high praise in Britain and the United States, though despite their Australian themes, were largely ignored in Australia.
Patrick White (1912–1990) became the first Australian to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973 ""for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature"". White's first novel, Happy Valley (1939) was inspired by the landscape and his work as a jackaroo on the land at Adaminaby in the Snowy Mountains, but became an international success and won the Australian Literary Society's gold medal. Born to a conservative, wealthy Anglo-Australian family, he later wrote of conviction in left-wing causes and lived as a homosexual. Never destined for life on the land, he enrolled at Cambridge where he became a published poet. White developed as a novelist, but also had major theatrical success—including The Season at Sarsaparilla. White followed The Tree of Man with Voss, which became the first winner of the Miles Franklin Award. A subsequent novel, Riders in the Chariot also received a Miles Franklin award—but White later refused to permit his novels to be entered for literary prizes. He turned down a knighthood, and various literary awards—but in 1973 accepted the Nobel prize. David Marr wrote of biography of White in 1991.
J. M. Coetzee, who was born in South Africa and was resident there when awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003, now lives in Adelaide, South Australia, and is an Australian citizen. Colleen McCullough's The Thorn Birds, 1977, is Australia's highest selling novel and one of the biggest selling novels of all time with around 30 million copies sold by 2009. Thomas Keneally wrote The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, 1972 and Schindler's Ark, 1982. This latter work was the inspiration for the film Schindler's List. Other notable Australian novels converted to celluloid include: Paul Brickhill's The Great Escape; Pamela Lyndon Travers' Mary Poppins; Morris West's The Shoes of the Fisherman and Bryce Courtenay's The Power of One.
Careful, He Might Hear You by Sumner Locke Elliott won the Miles Franklin Award in 1963, and was the subject of a 1983 Australian film. Author David Ireland won the Miles Franklin Award three times, including for The Glass Canoe (1976). Peter Carey has also won the Miles Franklin Award three times (Jack Maggs 1998; Oscar and Lucinda 1989; and Bliss 1981). He has twice won the Booker Prize with 1988's Oscar and Lucinda and 2001's True History of the Kelly Gang. DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little won the Booker Prize in 2003. Other notable writers to have emerged since the 1970s include Kate Grenville, David Malouf, Helen Garner, Janette Turner Hospital, Marion Halligan, Susan Johnson, Christopher Koch, Alex Miller, Shirley Hazzard, Richard Flanagan, Gerald Murnane, Brenda Walker, Rod Jones and Tim Winton.
James Clavell in The Asian Saga discusses an important feature of Australian literature: its portrayal of far eastern culture, from the admittedly even further east, but nevertheless western cultural viewpoint, as Nevil Shute did. Clavell was also a successful screenwriter and along with such writers as Thomas Keneally (see above),  has expanded the topics of Australian literature far beyond that one country. Other novelists to use international themes are David Malouf, Beverley Farmer and Rod Jones. The Secret River (2005) is an historical fiction by Kate Grenville imagining encounters between Aboriginal and colonial Australia which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.  The Slap (2008) was an internationally successful novel by Christos Tsiolkas which was adapted for television by ABC1 in 2011, and was described in a review by Gerard Windsor as ""something of an anatomy of the rising Australian middle class""."
Australian literature,"1991–1996: Grunge lit
Grunge lit (an abbreviation for ""grunge literature"") is an Australian literary genre usually applied to fictional or semi-autobiographical writing concerned with dissatisfied and disenfranchised young people living in suburban or inner-city surroundings. It was typically written by ""new, young authors"" who examined ""gritty, dirty, real existences"", of lower-income young people, whose lives revolve around a nihilistic pursuit of casual sex, recreational drug use and alcohol, which are used to escape boredom or a general flightiness. Romantic love is seldom, as instant gratification has become the norm.  It has been described as both a sub-set of dirty realism and an offshoot of Generation X literature. The term ""grunge"" is from the 1990s-era music genre of grunge.
The genre was first coined in 1995 following the success of Andrew McGahan's first novel Praise which had been released in 1991 and became popular with sub-30-year-old readers, a previously under-investigated demographic. Other authors considered to be ""grunge lit"" include Linda Jaivin, Fiona McGregor and Justine Ettler. Since its invention, the term ""grunge lit"" has been retrospectively applied to novels written as early as 1977, namely Helen Garner's Monkey Grip. Grunge lit is often raw, explicit, and vulgar, even to the point of Ettler's The River Ophelia (1995) being called pornographic.
The term ""grunge lit"" and its use to categorize and market this diverse group of writers and authorial styles has been the subject of debate and criticism. Linda Jaivin disagreed with putting all these authors in one category, Christios Tsiolkas called the term a ""media creation"", and Murray Waldren denied grunge lit even was a new genre; he said the works actually are a type of the pre-existing dirty realism genre."
Australian literature,"1998–2010s: Post-grunge lit
Post-grunge lit is a genre of Australian fiction from the late 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. It is called ""post-grunge lit"" to denote that this genre appeared after the 1990s Australian literary genre known as grunge lit. Michael Robert Christie's 2009 PhD dissertation, ""Unbecoming-of-Age: Australian Grunge Fiction, the Bildungsroman and the Long Labor Decade"" states that there is a genre called ""post Grunge [lit]"" which follows the grunge lit period. Christie names three examples of Australian ""post-grunge lit"": Elliot Perlman's Three Dollars (1998), Andrew McCann's Subtopia (2005) and Anthony Macris' Capital. Christie's dissertation interprets and explains these three post-grunge lit works ""as responses to the embedding of Neoliberalism in Australian and global political culture"".
Kalinda Ashton (born 1978) has been called a post-grunge writer, in part due to influences from grunge lit author Christos Tsiolkas. Ashton is the author of the novel The Danger Game. Samantha Dagg's 2017 thesis on grunge lit and post-grunge lit states that Luke Carman is a post-grunge writer. Carman's first work, a collection of interlinked semi-autobiographical short stories, explores the authentic experiences of working-class Australians in the suburbs, including issues such as drug addiction and a sense of disillusionment."
Australian literature,"Australian writing in languages other than English
Australia has migrant groups from many countries, and members of those communities (not always of the first generation) have produced Australian writing in a variety of languages. These include Italian, Greek, Arabic, Chinese, Vietnamese, Lao, Filipino, Latvian, Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Yiddish and Irish.
Comparatively little attention has been devoted to such writing by mainstream critics. It has been argued that, in relation to the national literary landscape, such literary communities have a quite separate existence, with their own poetry festivals, literary competitions, magazine and newspaper reviews and features, and even local publishers. Some writers, like the Greek Australian Dimitris Tsaloumas, have published bilingually. There are now signs that such writing is attracting more academic interest. Some older works in languages other than English have been translated and received critical and historical attention long after their first publication; for example, the first Chinese-language novel to be published in Australia (and possibly the West), The Poison of Polygamy (1909–10) by Wong Shee Ping, was published in English for the first time in 2019, in a bilingual parallel edition."
Australian literature,"Histories
History has been an important discipline in the development of Australian writing. Watkin Tench (1758–1833) - a British officer who arrived with the First Fleet in 1788 - later published two books on the subject of the foundations of New South Wales: Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay and Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson. Written with a spirit of humanity his accounts are considered by writers including Robert Hughes and Thomas Keneally to be essential reading for the early history of Australia/ Charles Bean was the official war historian of the First World War and was influential in establishing the importance of ANZAC in Australian history and mythology, with such prose as ""Anzac stood, and still stands, for reckless valor in a good cause, for enterprise, resourcefulness, fidelity, comradeship and endurance, that will never own defeat"". (see works including The Story of ANZAC: From the Outbreak of War to the End of the First Phase of the Gallipoli Campaign 4 May 1915, 1921).
Australia in the War of 1939–1945 is a 22-volume official history dedicated to Australia's Second World War efforts. the series was published by the Australian War Memorial between 1952 and 1977. The main editor was Gavin Long. A significant milestone was the historian Manning Clark's six-volume History of Australia, which is regarded by some as the definitive account of the nation. Clark had a talent for narrative prose and the work (published between 1969 and 1987) remains a popular and influential work. Clark's one time student Geoffrey Blainey stands as another to have deeply influenced Australian historiography. His important works include The Tyranny of Distance (1966) and Triumph of the Nomads: A History of Ancient Australia (1975). Robert Hughes' much-debated history  The Fatal Shore: The epic of Australia's founding (1987) is a popular and influential work on early Australian history. Marcia Langton is one of the principal contemporary Indigenous Australian academics and her 2008 collaboration with Rachel Perkins chronicles Australian history from an Indigenous perspective: First Australians. An Illustrated History."
Australian literature,"Writing and identity
A complicated, multi-faceted relationship to Australia is displayed in much Australian writing, often through writing about landscape. Barbara Baynton's short stories from the late 19th century/early 20th century convey people living in the bush, a landscape that is alive but also threatening and alienating. Kenneth Cook's Wake in Fright (1961) portrayed the outback as a nightmare with a blazing sun, from which there is no escape. Colin Thiele's novels reflected the life and times of rural and regional Australians in the 20th century, showing aspects of Australian life unknown to many city dwellers.
In Australian literature, the term mateship has often been employed to denote an intensely loyal relationship of shared experience, mutual respect and unconditional assistance existing between friends (mates) in Australia. This relationship of (often male) loyalty has remained a central subject of Australian literature from colonial times to the present day.  In 1847, Alexander Harris wrote of habits of mutual helpfulness between mates arising in the ""otherwise solitary bush"" in which men would often ""stand by one another through thick and thin; in fact it is a universal feeling that a man ought to be able to trust his own mate in anything"". Henry Lawson, a son of the Goldfields wrote extensively of an egalitarian mateship, in such works as A Sketch of Mateship and Shearers, in which he wrote:"
Australian literature,"They tramp in mateship side by side -
The Protestant and Roman
They call no biped lord or sir
And touch their hat to no man."
Australian literature,"What it means to be Australian is another issue that Australian literature explores. Miles Franklin struggled to find a place for herself as a female writer in Australia, fictionalising this experience in My Brilliant Career (1901). Marie Bjelke Petersen's popular romance novels, published between 1917 and 1937, offered a fresh upbeat interpretation of the Australian bush. The central character in Patrick White's The Twyborn Affair tries to conform to expectations of pre–World War II Australian masculinity but cannot, and instead, post-war, tries out another identity—and gender—overseas. Peter Carey has toyed with the idea of a national Australian identity as a series of 'beautiful lies', and this is a recurrent theme in his novels. Andrew McGahan's Praise (1992), Christos Tsiolkas's Loaded (1995), Justine Ettler's The River Ophelia (1995) and Brendan Cowell's How It Feels (2010) introduced a grunge lit, a type of 'gritty realism' take on questions of Australian identity in the 1990s, though an important precursor to such work came some years earlier with Helen Garner's Monkey Grip (1977), about a single mother living on and off with a male heroin addict in Melbourne share housing.
Australian literature has had several scandals surrounding the identity of writers. In the 1930s, a misunderstanding with a printer caused Maude Hepplestone's bush poetry collection ""Songs of the Kookaburra"" to be mistakenly lauded internationally as a modernist masterpiece. The 1944 Ern Malley affair led to an obscenity trial and is often blamed for the lack of modernist poetry in Australia. To mark the 60th anniversary of the Ern Malley affair, another Australian writer, Leon Carmen, set out to make a point about the prejudice of Australian publishers against white Australians. Unable to find publication as a white Australian he was an instant success using the false Aboriginal identity of ""Wanda Koolmatrie"" with My Own Sweet Time. In the 1980s Streten Bozik also managed to become published by assuming the Aboriginal identity of B. Wongar. In the 1990s, Helen Darville used the pen-name ""Helen Demidenko"" and won major literary prizes for her Hand that Signed the Paper before being discovered, sparking a controversy over the content of her novel, a fictionalised and highly tendentious account of the Nazi occupation of the Ukraine. Mudrooroo—previously known as Colin Johnson—was acclaimed as an Aboriginal writer until his Aboriginality came under question (his mother was Irish/English and his father was Irish/African-American, however he has strong connections with Aboriginal tribes); he now avoids adopting a specific ethnic identity and his works deconstruct such notions."
Australian literature,"Poetry
Poetry played an important part in early Australian literature. The first poet to be published in Australia was Michael Massey Robinson (1744–1826), convict and public servant, whose odes appeared in The Sydney Gazette. The first book of verse by a native-born Australian poet, Australasia, was published by explorer and author William Charles Wentworth in 1823, espousing his ideals of Australian identity. Charles Harpur and Henry Kendall were the first poets of any consequence.
Henry Lawson, son of a Norwegian sailor born in 1867, was widely recognised as Australia's poet of the people and, in 1922, became the first Australian writer to be honoured with a state funeral. Two poets who are amongst the great Australian poets are Christopher Brennan and Adam Lindsay Gordon; Gordon was once referred to as the ""national poet of Australia"" and is the only Australian with a monument in Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey in England. Both Gordon's and Brennan's (but particularly Brennan's) works conformed to traditional styles of poetry, with many classical allusions, and therefore fell within the domain of high culture.
However, at the same time Australia had a competing, vibrant tradition of folk songs and ballads. Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson were two of the chief exponents of these popular ballads, and 'Banjo' himself was responsible for creating what is probably the most famous Australian verse, ""Waltzing Matilda"". At one point, Lawson and Paterson contributed a series of verses to The Bulletin magazine in which they engaged in a literary debate about the nature of life in Australia. Lawson said Paterson was a romantic and Paterson said Lawson was full of doom and gloom. Lawson is widely regarded as one of Australia's greatest writers of short stories, while Paterson's poems ""The Man From Snowy River"" and ""Clancy of the Overflow"" remain amongst the most popular Australian bush poems. Romanticised views of the outback and the rugged characters that inhabited it played an important part in shaping the Australian nation's psyche, just as the cowboys of the American Old West and the gauchos of the Argentine pampa became part of the self-image of those nations."
Australian literature,"Other poets who reflected a sense of Australian identity include C J Dennis and Dorothea McKellar. Dennis wrote in the Australian vernacular (""The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke""), while McKellar wrote the iconic patriotic poem ""My Country"". Prominent Australian poets of the 20th century include Dame Mary Gilmore, A. D. Hope, Judith Wright, Gwen Harwood, Kenneth Slessor, Les Murray, Bruce Dawe and more recently Robert Gray, John Forbes, John Tranter, John Kinsella and Judith Beveridge."
Australian literature,"Contemporary Australian poetry is mostly published by small, independent book publishers. However, other kinds of publication, including new media and online journals, spoken word and live events, and public poetry projects are gaining an increasingly vibrant and popular presence. 1992–1999 saw poetry and art collaborations in Sydney and Newcastle buses and ferries, including Artransit from Meuse Press. Some of the more interesting and innovative contributions to Australian poetry have emerged from artist-run galleries in recent years, such as Textbase which had its beginnings as part of the 1st Floor gallery in Fitzroy. In addition, Red Room Company is a major exponent of innovative projects. Bankstown Poetry Slam has become a notable venue for spoken-word poetry and for community intersection with poetry as an art form to be shared.  With its roots in Western Sydney it has a strong following from first and second generation Australians, often giving a platform to voices that are more marginalised in mainstream Australian society."
Australian literature,"The Australian Poetry Library contains a wide range of Australian poetry as well as critical and contextual material relating to them, such as interviews, photographs and audio/visual recordings. As of 2018 it contains over 42,000 poems, from more than 170 Australian poets. Begun in 2004 by leading Australian poet John Tranter, it is a joint initiative of the University of Sydney and the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) with funding by the Australian Research Council."
Australian literature,"Plays
European traditions came to Australia with the First Fleet in 1788, with the first production being performed in 1789 by convicts : The Recruiting Officer by George Farquhar. Two centuries later, the extraordinary circumstances of the foundations of Australian theatre were recounted in Our Country's Good by Timberlake Wertenbaker: the participants were prisoners watched by sadistic guards and the leading lady was under threat of the death penalty. The play is based on Thomas Keneally's novel The Playmaker. After Australian Federation in 1901, plays evidenced a new sense of national identity. On Our Selection (1912) by Steele Rudd, told of the adventures of a pioneer farming family and became immensely popular.  In 1955, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll by Ray Lawler portrayed resolutely Australian characters and went on to international acclaim. A new wave of Australian theatre debuted in the 1970s with the works of writers including David Williamson, Barry Oakley and Jack Hibberd. The Belvoir St Theatre presented works by Nick Enright and David Williamson. Williamson is Australia's best known playwright, with major works including: The Club, Emerald City, and Brilliant Lies.
In The One Day of the Year, Alan Seymour studied the paradoxical nature of the ANZAC Day commemoration by Australians of the defeat of the Battle of Gallipoli. Ngapartji Ngapartji, by Scott Rankin and Trevor Jamieson, recounts the story of the effects on the Pitjantjatjara people of nuclear testing in the Western Desert during the Cold War. It is an example of the contemporary fusion of traditions of drama in Australia with Pitjantjatjara actors being supported by a multicultural cast of Greek, Afghan, Japanese and New Zealand heritage. Eminent contemporary Australian playwrights include David Williamson, Alan Seymour, Stephen Sewell, the late Nick Enright and Justin Fleming. The Australian government supports a website (australianplays.org The Home of Australian Playscripts | AustralianPlays.org) that aims to combine playwright biographies and script information. Scripts are also available there."
Australian literature,"Science fiction and fantasy
Australia, unlike Europe, does not have a long history in the genre of science fiction. Nevil Shute's On the Beach, published in 1957, and filmed in 1959, was perhaps the first notable international success. Though not born in Australia, Shute spent his latter years there, and the book was set in Australia. It might have been worse had the imports of American pulp magazines not been restricted during WWII, forcing local writers into the field. Various compilation magazines began appearing in the 1960s and the field has continued to expand into some significance. Today Australia has a thriving SF/Fantasy genre with names recognised around the world. In 2013 a trilogy by Sydney-born Ben Peek was sold at auction to a UK publisher for a six-figure deal ."
Australian literature,"Crime
The crime fiction genre is currently thriving in Australia, most notably through books written by Kerry Greenwood, Shane Maloney, Peter Temple, Barry Maitland, Arthur Upfield and Peter Corris, among others.
High-profile, highly publicised court cases and murders have seen a significant amount of non-fiction crime literature, perhaps the most recognisable writer in this field being Helen Garner. Garner's published accounts of three court cases: The First Stone, about a sexual harassment scandal at the University of Melbourne, Joe Cinque's Consolation, about a young man murdered by his girlfriend in Canberra, and This House of Grief, about Victorian child-killer Robert Farquharson. Each of Garner's works incorporates the style reminiscent of a fictional narrative novel, a stylistic device known as the non-fiction novel.
Chloe Hooper published The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island in 2008 as a response to the death of an Aboriginal man, Cameron Doomadgee, in police custody in Palm Island, Queensland."
Australian literature,"Literary journals
The first periodical that could be called a literary journal in Australia was The Australian Magazine (June 1821 - May 1822). It featured poetry, a two-part story and articles on theology and general topics. Most of the others that followed in the 19th century were based in either Sydney or Melbourne. Few lasted long due to difficulties that included a lack of capital, the small local market and competition from literary journals from Britain.
Most recent Australian literary journals have originated from universities, and specifically English or Communications departments. They include:"
Australian literature,"Meanjin
Overland
HEAT
Southerly
Westerly
Other journals include:"
Australian literature,"Quadrant
Australian Book Review
Island
Voiceworks
Wet Ink (now closed)
The Lifted Brow
Red Leaves / 紅葉
Kill Your Darlings
A number of newspapers also carry literary review supplements:"
Australian literature,Australian Literary Review
Australian literature,"Awards
Current literary awards in Australia include:"
Australian literature,"Anne Elder Award
The Australian/Vogel Literary Award
Children's Book Council of Australia
Ditmar Award Science Fiction (includes Fantasy & Horror)
Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry
Mary Gilmore Prize for a first book of poetry
Miles Franklin Award
New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards
Patrick White Award
Peter Blazey Fellowship
Prime Minister's Literary Awards
Queensland Premier's Literary Awards
Stella Prize
Victorian Premier's Literary Award
Western Australian Premier's Book Awards
Australian authors are also eligible for a number of other literary awards, such as the:"
Australian literature,"Booker Prize
Commonwealth Writers' Prize
Women's Prize for Fiction"
Australian literature,"Further reading
Books
Carter, David (2023). Carter, David (ed.). The Cambridge history of the Australian novel. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781009090049. ISBN 9781009090049.
Cummins, Joseph (2019). The 'imagined sound' of Australian literature and music. Anthem Press. ISBN 9781785270925. OCLC 1117339725.
Bartha-Mitchell, Kathrin (2023). Cosmological readings of contemporary Australian literature : unsettling the anthropocene. Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781003312154. ISBN 9781003312154. OCLC 1410114140.
Mukherjee, Riya (2024). Citizenship in Dalit and Indigenous Australian Literatures. Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781003300892. ISBN 9781003300892. OCLC 1381208006.
Khoo, Tseen-Ling (2003). Banana Bending: Asian-Australian and Asian-Canadian Literatures. McGill-Queen's University Press. ISBN 0-7735-2551-3. OCLC 651001993."
Australian literature,"Articles
Bayeh, Jumana. ""Arab-Australian Fiction: National Stories, Transnational Connections"". NC State University."
Australian literature,"See also
AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource
Australian film
Australian outback literature of the 20th century
Australian performance poetry
List of Australian novelists
List of Australian poets
List of years in Australian literature
Tasmanian literature
Tasmanian Gothic
Indigenous Australian literature
Category:Jewish Australian writers"
Australian literature,"References
External links"
Australian literature,"The Library of Australiana page at Project Gutenberg of Australia
Bibliography of Australian Literature to 1954 at Freeread
""AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource"" (2000-)
List of Australian Writers in English"
Music of Australia,"The music of Australia has an extensive history made of music societies. Indigenous Australian music forms a significant part of the unique heritage of a 40,000- to 60,000-year history which produced the iconic didgeridoo. Contemporary fusions of indigenous and Western styles are exemplified in the works of Yothu Yindi, No Fixed Address, Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu and Christine Anu, and mark distinctly Australian contributions to world music.
Australian music's early western history, was a collection of British colonies, Australian folk music and bush ballads, with songs such as ""Waltzing Matilda"" and The Wild Colonial Boy heavily influenced by Anglo-Celtic traditions, Indeed many bush ballads are based on the works of national poets Henry Lawson and Banjo Patterson.
Contemporary Australian music ranges across a broad spectrum with trends often concurrent with those of the US, the UK, and similar nations—notably in the Australian rock and Australian country music genres. Tastes have diversified along with post–World War II multicultural immigration to Australia, whilst classical music derives from European influences.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, the most recent and possibly only original genre of music to emerge from Australia outside of indigenous music came from Newcastle and Sydney as a genre known as Breakcore.[1]"
Music of Australia,"Indigenous music
Indigenous Australian music refers to the music of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. Music forms an integral part of the social, cultural and ceremonial observances of these peoples, and has been so for over 60,000 years. Traditional indigenous music is best characterised by the didgeridoo, the best-known instrument, which is considered by some to be the world's oldest. Archaeological studies of rock art in the Northern Territory suggest people of the Kakadu region were playing the instrument 15,000 years ago.
Contemporary indigenous Australian music has covered numerous styles, including rock and roll, country, hip hop, and reggae."
Music of Australia,"Artists
Jimmy Little is regarded as the first Aboriginal performer to achieve mainstream success, with his debut 1964 song ""The Royal Telephone"" highly popular and successful. In 2005, Little was presented with an honorary doctorate in music by the University of Sydney. Despite the popularity of some of his work, Little failed to launch indigenous music in the country—from the 1970s onwards, groups such as Coloured Stone, Warumpi Band, and No Fixed Address helped improve the image of the genre. It was Yothu Yindi that brought indigenous music to the mainstream, with their 1991 song ""Treaty"", from the album Tribal Voice, becoming a hit. It reached No. 11 on the ARIA Singles Chart. The band's performances were based on the traditional Yolngu dance, and embodied a sharing of culture. The success of Yothu Yindi—winners of eight ARIA Awards—was followed in by Kev Carmody, Tiddas, Archie Roach and Christine Anu, and numerous other indigenous Australian musicians."
Music of Australia,"Indigenous Australian music is unique, as it dates back more than 60,000 years to the prehistory of Australia and continues the ancient songlines through contemporary artists as diverse as: David Dahwurr Hudson, Warumpi Band, Wild Water, Saltwater Band, Nabarlek, Nokturnl, the Pigram Brothers, Blekbala Mujik, and Ruby Hunter."
Music of Australia,"Folk music
For much of its history, Australia's bush music belonged to an oral and folkloric tradition, and was only later published in print in volumes such as Banjo Paterson's Old Bush Songs, in the 1890s. The distinctive themes and origins of Australia's ""bush music"" or ""bush band music"" can be traced to the songs sung by the convicts who were sent to Australia during the early period of the British colonisation, beginning in 1788. Early Australian ballads sing of the harsh ways of life of the epoch and of such people and events as bushrangers, swagmen, drovers, stockmen and shearers. Convict and bushranger verses often railed against government tyranny. Classic bush songs on such themes include: ""The Wild Colonial Boy"", ""Click Go the Shears"", ""The Drover's Dream"", ""The Queensland Drover"", ""The Dying Stockman"" and ""Moreton Bay"".
Later themes which endure to the present include the experiences of war, of droughts and flooding rains, of Aboriginality and of the railways and trucking routes which link Australia's vast distances. Isolation and loneliness of life in the Australian bush have been another theme. ""Waltzing Matilda"", often regarded as Australia's unofficial national anthem, is a quintessential Australian folk song, influenced by Celtic folk ballads. Country and folk artists such as Tex Morton, Slim Dusty, Rolf Harris, the Bushwackers, John Williamson, and John Schumann of the band Redgum have continued to record and popularise the old bush ballads of Australia through the 20th and into the 21st century – and contemporary artists including Sara Storer and Lee Kernaghan draw heavily on this heritage.
Australia has a unique tradition of folk music, with origins in both the indigenous music traditions of the original Australian inhabitants, as well as the introduced folk music (including sea shanties) of 18th and 19th century Europe. Celtic, English, German and Scandinavian folk traditions predominated in this first wave of European immigrant music. The Australian tradition is, in this sense, related to the traditions of other countries with similar ethnic, historical and political origins, such as New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. The Australian indigenous tradition brought to this mix of novel elements, including new instruments, some of which are now internationally familiar, such as the didgeridoo of Northern Australia. A number of British singers have spent periods in Australia and have included Australian material in their repertoires, e.g. A. L. Lloyd, Martin Wyndham-Read and Eric Bogle."
Music of Australia,"Folk revival
Notable Australian exponents of the folk revival movement included both European immigrants such as Eric Bogle, noted for his sad lament to the battle of Gallipoli ""And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda"", and more contemporary artists such as Archie Roach and Paul Kelly. Kelly's lyrics capture the vastness of the culture and landscape of Australia by chronicling life about him for over 30 years. David Fricke from Rolling Stone calls Kelly ""one of the finest songwriters I have ever heard, Australian or otherwise."" In the 1970s, Australian Folk Rock brought both familiar and less familiar traditional songs, as well as new compositions, to live venues and the airwaves. Notable artists include the Bushwackers and Redgum. Redgum are known for their 1983 anti-war protest song ""I Was Only Nineteen"", which peaked at No. 1 on the National singles charts. The 1990s brought Australian indigenous folk rock to the world, led by bands including Yothu Yindi. Australia's long and continuous folk tradition continues strongly to this day, with elements of folk music still present in many contemporary artists including those generally thought of as Rock, Heavy Metal and Alternative Music."
Music of Australia,"Popular music
Early pop music
Australian composers who published popular musical works (e.g. Ragtime, light ephemera) in the early twentieth century include Vince Courtney, Herbert De Pinna, Jack Lumsdaine, Joe Slater, Bert Rache, Reginald Stoneham, Clement Scott and Herbert Cosgrove, among others. Demand for local works declined with recording and broadcast.
Possibly the first Australian song to compete with imported recordings was Good-Night Mister Moon by Allan Ryan and William Flynn"
Music of Australia,"Country music
Australia has a long tradition of country music, which has developed a style quite distinct from its US counterpart. The early roots of Australian country are related to traditional folk music traditions of Ireland, England, Scotland and many diverse nations. ""Botany Bay"" from the late 19th century is one example. ""Waltzing Matilda"", often regarded by foreigners as Australia's unofficial national anthem, is a quintessential Australian country song, influenced more by Celtic folk ballads than by American Country and Western music. This strain of Australian country music, with lyrics focusing on strictly Australian subjects, is generally known as ""bush music"" or ""bush band music."" The most successful Australian bush band is Melbourne's the Bushwackers, active since the early 1970s, other well-known country singers include Reg Lindsay, bush balladeer singer Buddy Williams, and entertainers Johnny Ashcroft and Chad Morgan.
Another, more Americanized form of Australian country music was pioneered in the 1930s by such recording artists as Tex Morton, and later popularized by Slim Dusty, best remembered for his 1957 song ""A Pub With No Beer"", and Smoky Dawson. Dusty married singer-songwriter Joy McKean in 1951 and became Australia's biggest selling domestic music artist with more than 7 million record sales. British-born country singer and yodeller, Frank Ifield, was one of the first Australian post-war performers to gain widespread international recognition. After returning to the UK in 1959 Ifield was successful in the early 1960s, becoming the first performer to have three consecutive number-one hits on the UK charts: ""I Remember You"", ""Lovesick Blues"" (both 1962) and ""The Wayward Wind"" (1963). ""I Remember You"" was also a Top-5 hit in the US.
Australian country artists including Olivia Newton-John, Sherrie Austin, and Keith Urban have achieved considerable success in the USA. In recent years local contemporary country music, featuring much crossover with popular music, had popularity in Australia; notable musicians of this genre include David Hudson, John Williamson, Gina Jeffreys, Lee Kernaghan, Troy Cassar-Daley, Sara Storer, Felicity Urquhart and Kasey Chambers. Others influenced by the genre include Nick Cave, Paul Kelly, the John Butler Trio, Jagged Stone and the Waifs. Popular Australian country songs include ""Click Go the Shears"" (Traditional), ""Lights on the Hill"" (1973), ""I Honestly Love You"" (1974), ""True Blue"" (1981), and ""Not Pretty Enough"" (2002)."
Music of Australia,"Children's music
Children's music in Australia developed gradually over the latter half of the 20th century. Some of the most recognised performers in that period were those associated with the long-running Australian Broadcasting Corporation series Play School, including veteran actor-musician Don Spencer and actor and singer Noni Hazlehurst. Children's music remained a relatively small segment of the Australian music industry until the emergence of groundbreaking children's group the Wiggles in the late 1990s. The multi-award-winning four-piece group rapidly gained international popularity in the early 2000s and by the end of the decade they had become one of the most popular children's groups in the world. The Wiggles now boasts a huge fanbase in many regions including Australasia, Britain, Asia, and the Americas.
In 2008, the Wiggles were named Business Review Weekly's top-earning Australian entertainers for the fourth year in a row, having earned A$45 million in 2007. They have been called ""the world's biggest preschool band"" and ""your child's first rock band"". The group has achieved worldwide success with their children's albums, videos, television series, and concert appearances. They have earned 18 gold, 13 platinum, three double-platinum, and ten multi-platinum awards; additionally 15 ARIA Awards for Best Children's Album (making ARIA history as the most awarded ARIA winner in the one category), received the ARIA for Best Australian Live Act, and been inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame.
By 2002, the Wiggles had become the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's (ABC) most successful pre-school television program. They have performed for over 1.5 million children in the US between 2005 and 2008. They have won APRA song writing awards for Best Children's Song three times and earned ADSDA's award for Highest Selling Children's Album four times. They have been nominated for ARIA's Best Children's Album award nineteen times, and won the award twelve times. In 2003, they received ARIA's Outstanding Achievement Award for their success in the U.S. and were also inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 2011.
Peter Combe, Patsy Biscoe and Hi-5 are other notable names within the industry."
Music of Australia,"R&B and soul music
R&B soul music had a significant impact on Australian's music, although it is notable that many seminal recordings in this genre by American acts of the late 20th century were not played on Australian radio. Anecdotal evidence suggest that racism was a key factor—in his book on the history of Australian radio, author and broadcaster Wayne Mac recounts that when a local Melbourne DJ of the 1960s played the new Ike and Tina Turner single ""River Deep Mountain High"" it was immediately pulled from the playlist by the station's program manager for being ""too noisy and too black"".
Renée Geyer is an Australian singer who came to prominence in the mid-1970s, has long been regarded as one of the finest exponents of jazz, soul and R&B idioms. She had commercial success as a solo artist in Australia, with ""It's a Man's Man's World ""Rock historian, Ian McFarlane described her as having a ""rich, soulful, passionate and husky vocal delivery"". Geyer's iconic status in the Australian music industry was recognised when she was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame on 14 July 2005.
Parallel with Geyer's success, American born vocalist Marcia Hines emerged as one of Australia's most successful solo singers. She first came to prominence in the early 1970s with critically acclaimed roles in the local stage productions of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar (in which she was the first African-American to play the role of Mary Magdalene) before launching a solo career. By the late 1970s she was one of Australia's top singing stars, winning several Queen of Pop awards and hosting her own national TV variety series.
Following their initial dissolution in 1982 Cold Chisel lead vocalist Jimmy Barnes embarked on a successful solo career that has continued from the 1980s to the present. Many of Barnes' albums have featured versions of songs from these genres and his chart-topping album Soul Deep (1991) consisted entirely of covers of classic 1960s soul/R&B covers. Australian soul singer/songwriters like Daniel Merriweather, has after several successful collaborations with artists such as Mark Ronson, released his official debut album, Love & War, in June 2009. It entered the UK Albums Chart at number two. After launching his career as the winner of an early series of Australian Idol, soul singer/songwriter Guy Sebastian has also made an impact on this genre in Australia winning awards at the Urban Music Awards Australia and New Zealand for Best Male Artist and Best R&B Album. Sebastian's recent release ""Like it Like That"", was the highest selling Australian artist single in 2009 and charted at No. 1 for two consecutive weeks
In 2004, Australian Idol finalist Paulini's debut single ""Angel Eyes"" and album One Determined Heart both reached number one on the ARIA charts and were certified platinum. Paulini earned ARIA No. 1 Chart Awards for both the single and album. Her second album Superwoman included the singles ""Rough Day"" and ""So Over You"", and earned Paulini two nominations at the 2007 Urban Music Awards for 'Best R&B Album' and 'Best Female Artist'.
2006 Australian Idol runner-up Jessica Mauboy made her musical solo debut in 2008 with the single ""Running Back"", which featured American rapper Flo Rida, and peaked at number three on the ARIA Singles Chart, eventually being certified double platinum. Her debut album Been Waiting earned her seven nominations at the 2009 ARIA Music Awards, winning the award of 'Highest Selling Single' for ""Running Back""."
Music of Australia,"Reggae
Reggae had success on the radio charts in Australia in the early 1980s when Toots and the Maytals, the first artist to use the term ""reggae"" in song, went to number one with their song ""Beautiful Woman"". Early reggae groups from Australia include No Fixed Address."
Music of Australia,"Rock and pop
Australia has produced a wide variety of rock and popular music, from the internationally successful groups AC/DC, INXS, Nick Cave, Savage Garden, the Seekers, or pop divas Delta Goodrem, Kylie Minogue to the popular local content of John Farnham, Jimmy Barnes or Paul Kelly. Indigenous Australian music and Australian jazz have also had crossover influence on this genre. Early Australian rock and roll stars included Col Joye and Johnny O'Keefe. O'Keefe formed a band in 1956; his hit Wild One made him the first Australian rock'n'roller to reach the national charts. While US and British content dominated airwaves and record sales into the 1960s, local successes began to emerge – notably the Easybeats and the folk-pop group the Seekers had significant local success and some international recognition, while AC/DC had their first hits in Australia before going on to international success."
Music of Australia,"A pivotal event was the 1970 radio ban, which lasted from May to October that year. The Ban was the climax of a simmering ""pay for play"" dispute between major record companies and commercial radio stations, who refused to pay a proposed new copyright fee for playing pop records on air. The dispute erupted into open conflict in May 1970—many commercial stations boycotted records by the labels involved and refused to list their releases on their Top 40 charts, while the record companies in turn refused to supply radio with free promotional copies of new releases.
An unexpected side-effect of the ban was that several emerging Australian acts signed to independent labels (who were not part of the dispute) scored hits with covers of overseas hits; these included the Mixtures' cover of Mungo Jerry's ""In the Summertime"" and Liv Maessen's cover of Mary Hopkin's Eurovision song ""Knock, Knock Who's There?"".
Despite commercial radio resistance to the more progressive music being produced by bands like Spectrum and Tully, acts as diverse as AC/DC, Sherbet and John Paul Young were able to achieve major success and develop a unique sound for Australian rock. From 1975, key agents for the increased exposure of local music were the nationally broadcast ABC-TV television pop show Countdown, which premiered in late 1974, and Australia's first non-commercial all-rock radio station Double Jay, which opened in January 1975. Hard rock bands AC/DC and Rose Tattoo and harmony rock group Little River Band also found major overseas success in the late 1970s and early 1980s, touring all over the world. Meanwhile, a score of Australian expatriate solo performers like Helen Reddy, Olivia Newton-John and Peter Allen became major stars in the US and internationally. Icehouse also formed in the late 1970s.
Pop magazines such as Go-Set (which began in 1966), the Daily Planet, and television programs such as Countdown promoted Australian popular music to the youth market."
Music of Australia,"1980s
The 1980s saw a breakthrough in the independence of Australian rock—Nick Cave said that before the 1980s, ""Australia still needed America or England to tell them what was good"". An example of Australians breaking free from convention came in TISM. Formed in 1982, the band is known for its anonymous members, outrageous stage antics, and humorous lyrics. In the words of the band, ""There's only one factor left that makes us work. And that factor, I think, we've burned away, with the crucible of time, into something that's actually genuine.""
Men at Work, Divinyls, and Hoodoo Gurus, all formed between 1979 and 1981, became hugely successful worldwide. Men at Work's ""Down Under"" hit number one in Australia, Europe, the UK, Canada, and the United States, and was considered the theme song of Australia's successful showing at the 1983 America's Cup. Hoodoo Gurus, meanwhile, hit it big on the US college circuit—all of their 1980s albums topped the chart. At the same time, a number of Australian bands relocated to the U.K. and particularly London to further their artistic and commercial endeavours, among whom were the Moodists, the Go-Betweens, the Birthday Party with guitarist Rowland S. Howard, Laughing Clowns, Foetus, SPK, the Triffids, and Peter Loveday."
Music of Australia,"Grunge
Grunge is a subgenre of alternative rock and a subculture that emerged during the mid-1980s in Australia and in the Pacific Northwest U.S. state of Washington. The early grunge movement in the US revolved around Seattle's independent record label Sub Pop and that region's underground music scene. By the early 1990s its popularity had spread, with grunge bands appearing in California, then emerging in other parts of the United States and in Australia, building strong followings and signing major record deals. Mark Arm, the vocalist for the Seattle band Green River—and later Mudhoney—stated that the term had been used in Australia in the mid-1980s to describe bands such as King Snake Roost, The Scientists, Salamander Jim, and Beasts of Bourbon. Arm used grunge as a descriptive term rather than a genre term, but it eventually came to describe the punk/metal hybrid sound of the Seattle music scene.
Several Australian bands, including Cosmic Psychos and Feedtime are cited as precursors to grunge, their music influencing the Seattle scene through the college radio broadcasts of Sub Pop founder Jonathan Poneman and members of Mudhoney. Chris Dubrow from The Guardian states that, in the late 1980s, Australia's ""sticky-floored...alternative pub scene"" in seedy inner-city areas produced grunge bands with ""raw and awkward energy"" such as X, Feedtime and Lubricated Goat. Dubrow said ""Cobain...admitted the Australian wave was a big influence"" on his music. Everett True states that ""[t]here's more of an argument to be had for grunge beginning in Australia with the Scientists and their scrawny punk ilk.""
From being discovered in mid-1994 with their debut single ""Tomorrow"" to their 1995 debut album Frogstomp (which sold more than 4 million copies worldwide), Silverchair were considered by some to be grunge's ""last stand"". The band's trio of teenagers—Ben Gillies on drums, Daniel Johns on vocals and guitars, and Chris Joannou on bass guitar—were still in high school when the album went to number one in Australia and New Zealand."
Music of Australia,"1990s: Indie rock
The 1990s saw continued overseas success from groups such as AC/DC, INXS, Men at Work, Midnight Oil, the Bad Seeds, and a new indie rock scene started to develop locally. Sydney-based Ratcat were the first new band to achieve a mainstream following, while bands such as the Hoodoo Gurus got off to a slower start; their debut album Stoneage Romeos earned a small following but failed to captivate a mainstream that at the time ""didn't get it"". Later reviews described the band as ""integral to the story of Aussie indie music"", influencing bands including Frenzal Rhomb and Jet. The band became an ARIA Hall of Fame inductee. The Church, meanwhile, was highly successful in the 1980s, only to see their careers diminish in the next decade; 1994's Sometime Anywhere saw the band recede from a mainstream audience.
Alternative rock began to gain popularity midway through the 1990s, with grunge and Britpop styles especially popular, resulting in a new wave of Australian bands. Some—such as Savage Garden, the Living End and Silverchair—also gained quick success in the United States, while You Am I, Jebediah, Magic Dirt, Something for Kate, Icecream Hands and Powderfinger gained more success locally. Bands such as Regurgitator and Spiderbait were hit heavily by the post-grunge backlash, losing in sales and critical acclaim.
Much of the success of rock in Australia is attributed to the non-commercial Australian Broadcasting Corporation's radio station Triple J, which focuses heavily on Australian alternative music, and has done so since its formation as 2JJ in 1975. Throughout the station's history, they have helped jump start the careers of numerous bands, through programs such as Unearthed, the Australian Music program Home & Hosed and the Hottest 100.
The Big Day Out festival has showcased Australian and international acts, with line-ups spanning multiple genres, with an alternative focus. It has become highly popular amongst musicians; Foo Fighters lead singer Dave Grohl said ""We play the Big Day Out because it's the best tour in the world. You ask any band in the world – they all want to play the Big Day Out, every single one of them."" Other festivals, such as Homebake, Livid, and Splendour in the Grass, are also rock focused, and together with Big Day Out are ""united by the dominant presence of the indie-guitar scene"". Australia made its first appearance in the Eurovision Song Contest 2015 after being granted a spot in the final by the EBU."
Music of Australia,"Electronic and dance music
Electronic music in Australia emerged in the 1990s, but takes elements from funk, house, techno, trance, and numerous other genres. Early innovators of the genre in Australia include Whirlywirld and Severed Heads, who formed in 1979 and were the first electronic group to play the Big Day Out. The band achieved long-term success, winning an ARIA Award in 2005 for ""Best Original Soundtrack"" for The Illustrated Family Doctor, where lead singer Tom Ellard said the band would never fit into mainstream music.
The genre has developed a following, to the point the University of Adelaide offers an Electronic Music Unit, teaching studio production and music technology. The School of Synthesis was also set up in Melbourne by renowned artists including Davide Carbone to specifically cater to Australian Electronic producers. Traditional rock bands such as Regurgitator have developed an original sound by combining heavy guitars and electronic influences, and rock-electro groups, most notably Rogue Traders, have become popular with mainstream audiences. The genre is most popular in Melbourne, with multiple music festivals held in the city. However, Cyclic Defrost, the only specialist electronic music magazine in Australia, was started in Sydney (in 1998) and is still based there. Radio still lags somewhat behind the success of the genre—producer and artist manager Andrew Penhallow told Australian Music Online that ""the local music media have often overlooked the fact that this genre has been flying the flag for Australian music overseas"". Pnau's first album, Sambanova, was released in 1999, at a time when many in Australia considered electronic music to be a dying breed. Nonetheless, the band travelled around the US and Europe, and slowly made a name for themselves, and for a rebirth of electronic music in the country.
Several festivals started developing over time; these festivals include: Defqon 1, IQON, Masters of Hardcore, Utopia,"
Music of Australia,"Grime
Grime is a British electronic genre that emerged in the early 2000s, derivative of electronic music such as UK garage and jungle, and draws influence from dancehall, ragga, and hip hop. The style is typified by rapid, syncopated breakbeats, generally around 140 bpm, and often features an aggressive or jagged electronic sound. Rapping is also a significant element of the style, and lyrics often revolve around gritty depictions of urban life.
Australian grime emerged in 2010 after UK-born artist Fraksha released his mixtape It's Just Bars. Fraksha is widely regarded as a pioneer of the scene in Australia. Fraksha, alongside fellow MC's Scotty Hinds, Diem and Murky, formed the first Australian based grime collective, Smash Brothers, in 2010. Smash Brothers pioneered what became Australian grime music, and were known for their high energy performances. For the most part, few members initially released a lot of music other than Fraksha, but all were active in the raving scene where they exposed many to grime music. They also worked with UK based artists such as Skepta, Foreign Beggars and Dexplicit. Another first for Fraksha was the launch of Melbourne radio show The Sunday Roast on KissFM with Affiks, dedicated to grime and Dubstep music. In 2011 he started the first Australian grime night alongside Affiks and Artic called 50/50. Fraksha in 2011 performed in New Zealand alongside UK grime pioneer Dizzee Rascal.
The resurgence grime was experiencing in the UK during the mid 2010s also reached Australia. The sound's resurgence also affected the popularity of grime in Australia, with various other Australian MC's picking up the sound with success, such as Diem, Alex Jones, Shadow, Talakai, Nerve, Wombat and Seru."
Music of Australia,"Art music
Classical music
Jazz
The history of jazz and related genres in Australia extends back into the 19th century. During the gold rush locally formed blackface (white actor-musicians in blackface) minstrel troupes began to tour Australia, touring not only the capital cities but also many of the booming regional towns like Ballarat and Bendigo. Minstrel orchestra music featured improvisatory embellishment and polyrhythm in the (pre-classic) banjo playing and clever percussion breaks. Some genuine African-American minstrel and jubilee singing troupes toured from the 1870s. A more jazz-like form of minstrelsy reached Australia in the late 1890s in the form of improvisatory and syncopated coon song and cakewalk music, two early forms of ragtime. The next two decades brought ensemble, piano and vocal ragtime and leading (mostly white) American ragtime artists, including Ben Harney, ""Emperor of Ragtime"" Gene Greene and pianist Charley Straight. Some of these visitors taught Australians how to 'rag' (improvise unsyncopated popular music into ragtime-style music).
By the mid-1920s, phonograph machines, increased contact with American popular music and visiting white American dance musicians had firmly established jazz (meaning jazz inflected modern dance and stage music) in Australia. The first recordings of jazz in Australia are Mastertouch piano rolls recorded in Sydney from around 1922 but jazz began to be recorded on disc by 1925, first in Melbourne and soon thereafter in Sydney. Soon after World War II, jazz in Australia diverged into two strands. One was based on the earlier collectively improvised called ""dixieland"" or traditional jazz. The other so-called modernist stream was based on big band swing, small band progressive swing, boogie woogie, and after WWII, the emerging new style of bebop. By the 1950s American bop, itself, was dividing into so-called 'cool' and 'hard' bop schools, the latter being more polyrhythmic and aggressive. This division reached Australia on a small scale by the end of the 1950s. From the mid-1950s rock and roll began to draw young audiences and social dancers away from jazz. British-style dixieland, called Trad, became popular in the early 1960s. Most modern players stuck with the 'cool' (often called West Coast) style, but some experimented with free jazz, modal jazz, experiment with 'Eastern' influences, art music and visual art concept, electronic and jazz-rock fusions.
The 1970s brought tertiary jazz education courses and continuing innovation and diversification in jazz which, by the late 1980s, included world music fusion and contemporary classical and jazz crossovers. From this time, the trend towards eclectic style fusions has continued with ensembles like The Catholics, Australian Art Orchestra, Tongue and Groove, austraLYSIS, Wanderlust, The Necks and many others. It is questionable whether the label jazz is elastic enough to continue to embrace the ever-widening range of improvisatory music that is associated with the term jazz in Australia. However, mainstream modern jazz and dixieland still have the strongest following and patron still flock to hear famous mainstream artists who have been around for decades, such as One Night Stand players Dugald Shaw and Blair Jordan, reeds player Don Burrows and trumpeter James Morrison and, sometimes, the famous pioneer of traditional jazz in Australia, Graeme Bell. A non-academic genre of jazz has also evolved with a harder ""street edge"" style. The Conglomerate, The Bamboos, Damage, Cookin on Three Burners, Black Money John McAll are examples of this.
See:"
Music of Australia,"Andrew Bisset. Black Roots White Flowers, Golden Press, 1978
Bruce Johnson. The Oxford Companion to Australian Jazz OUP, 1987
John Whiteoak. Playing Ad Lib: Improvisatory Music in Australia: 1836–1970, Currency Press, 1999"
Music of Australia,"Sacred music
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders
The most ancient musical traditions in Australia transmit the beliefs of the Aboriginal Dream Time. The Ntaria Choir at Hermannsburg, Northern Territory, has a unique musical language which mixes the traditional vocals of the Ntaria Aboriginal women with Lutheran chorales (tunes that were the basis of much of Bach's music). Baba Waiyar, a popular traditional Torres Strait Islander hymn shows the influence of gospel music mixed with traditionally strong Torres Strait Islander vocals and country music. The Australian Aboriginal singer-songwriter Jimmy Little found success in the genre. His gospel song ""Royal Telephone"" (1963) was the first No.1 hit by an Aboriginal artist."
Music of Australia,"Church Music
Australian composers of church music include George Savin De Chanéet, John Albert Delany, Edwin Fowles, Nathan Isaac, Alfred Wheeler, Christian Helleman, Guglielmo Enrico Lardelli, Arthur Massey, Frederick Augustus Packer, William Robert Knox, George William Torrance, Alberto Zelman, Ernest Edwin Mitchell (-1951) and Tharawal Aboriginal Tom Foster."
Music of Australia,"Christian
Christian music in Australia arrived with the First Fleet of British settlers in 1788 and has grown to include a variety of genres including classical music, hymns, Christian rock, country gospel, and Christmas music. St Mary's Cathedral Choir, Sydney, is the oldest musical institution in Australia, from origins in 1817. Major recording artists from Johnny O'Keefe (the first Australian Rock and Roll star) to Paul Kelly (folk rock), Nick Cave (the critically acclaimed brooding rocker) and Slim Dusty (the King of Australian country music) have all recorded Christian themed songs. Other performing artists such as Catholic nun Sister Janet Mead, Aboriginal crooner Jimmy Little and Australian Idol contestant Guy Sebastian have held Christianity as central to their public persona. Today, Christian music in Australia ranges widely across genres, from Melbourne's St Paul's Cathedral Choir who sing choral evensong most weeknights; to the Contemporary music that is a feature of the evangelical Hillsong congregation."
Music of Australia,"Christmas music
Annually, Australians gather in large numbers for traditional open-air Christmas concerts in December, such as the Carols by Candlelight of Melbourne, and Sydney's Carols in the Domain. Australian Christmas carols like the Three Drovers or Christmas Day by John Wheeler and William G. James place the Christmas story in an Australian context of warm, dry Christmas winds and red dust. As the festival of Christmas falls during the Australian summer, Australians gather in large numbers for traditional open-air evening carol services and concerts in December, such as Carols by Candlelight in Melbourne and Carols in the Domain in Sydney."
Music of Australia,"Gospel music
Australian country music's most successful artist Slim Dusty recorded a number of country gospel songs, with which he liked to finish his live shows. In 1971, he released the Gospel album Glory Bound Train, featuring the eponymous hit Glory Bound Train, and other songs of a Christian theme. Glory Bound Train was in turn the song selected to conclude the tribute concert held at Tamworth after his death. The ""Concert for Slim"" was recorded live on January 20, 2004, at the Tamworth Regional Entertainment Centre, and an all star cast of Australian musicians sung out the show with Slim's Glory Bound Train."
Music of Australia,"Funding
In March 2019, the Australian government announced an injection of funding worth A$30.9 million in the contemporary music sector. The funding covers support of live music venues, investment for Indigenous music, mentorship programs and music exports."
Music of Australia,"See also
APRA AMCOS
Australian hip hop
Culture of Australia
Australia in the Eurovision Song Contest
Australian Musician
Australian Music Examinations Board
Category:Australian musicians
List of music festivals in Australia
List of Australian composers
List of Indigenous Australian musicians, Indigenous musicians and groups
Encyclopedia of Australian Rock and Pop
Australian music charts
Culture of Melbourne#Music"
Music of Australia,"References
Further reading
Books and articles
Agardy, Susanna and Zion, Lawrence (1997). ""The Australian Rock Music Scene"", in Alison J. Ewbank and Fouli T. Papageorgiou (eds.), Whose master's voice? the development of popular music in thirteen cultures, Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut, Ch. 1. ISBN 0-313-27772-9
Agardy, Susanna. (1985), Young Australians and Music, Australian Broadcasting Tribunal, Melbourne.ISBN 0-642-09805-0
Bebbington, Warren (ed.) (1998). The Oxford companion to Australian music. Oxford. ISBN 0-19-553432-8.
Homan, Shane and Mitchell, Tony (eds) (2008). Sounds of then, sounds of now: Popular music in Australia, ACYS Publishing. ISBN 978-1-875236-60-2."
Music of Australia,"Online
""Australian singles and album charts, 1966-1974"". GO-SET Magazine.
Gregory, Mark. ""Australian Folk Songs"". ""A comprehensive bibliography and discography and 93 articles about Australian folk songs and the Folk Revival... 1103 Songs and Poems"", includes recently discovered original material published by Trove.
""Australian Traditional Music Archive"". Australian Traditional Music Archive.""A searchable collection of tunes with associated supporting biographical and documentary material and recorded examples.
Darby, Stephen. ""Open Australian Tune Book"".
Donoughue, Paul (13 August 2020). ""Swedish songwriters punch above their weight in the pop world. Could Australia emulate that success?"". ABC News. Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Djubal, Clay (15 January 2014). ""About"". Australian Variety Theatre Archive: Popular Culture Entertainment: 1850-1930.
Kimball, Duncan. ""Australasian Music and Popular Culture 1964-1975"". Milesago.
Musée d'ethnographie de Genève Audio clips: Traditional Australian music. (in French)
Walker, Clinton Australian Music Book Bibliography"
Music of Australia,"Organisations
National Film and Sound Archive homepage
""Home page"". Music Australia.
""Australian Music Centre Online: Breaking Sound Barriers"". Australian Music Centre. ""The national service organisation dedicated to the promotion and support of art music in Australia."""
Invasive species in Australia,"Invasive species in Australia are a serious threat to the native biodiversity, and an ongoing cost to Australian agriculture. Numerous species arrived with European maritime exploration and colonisation of Australia and steadily since then. There is much ongoing debate about the potential benefits and detriments of introduced species; some experts believe that certain species, particularly megafauna such as deer, equids, bovids, and camels, may be more beneficial to Australia's ecosystems than they are detrimental, acting as replacements for extinct Australian megafauna.
Management and the prevention of the introduction of new invasive species are key environmental and agricultural policy issues for the Australian federal and state governments. The management of weeds costs A$1.5 billion on weed control and a further $2.5 billion yearly in lost agricultural production."
Invasive species in Australia,"Causes
Both geologic and climatic events helped to make Australia's fauna unique. Australia was once part of the southern supercontinent Gondwana, which also included South America, Africa, India and Antarctica. Gondwana began to break up 140 million years ago (mya); at 50 mya, Australia separated from Antarctica, and was relatively isolated until the collision of the Indo-Australian Plate with Asia in the Miocene epoch, 5.3 mya. As Australia drifted, it was isolated from the evolutionary pressures in the rest of the world. Other examples of island isolation include Madagascar, New Zealand, Socotra, the Galapagos and Mauritius. The geographic isolation of Australia created a sharp division between Australian fauna and Asian fauna at the Wallace line."
Invasive species in Australia,"Humans arrived in Australia between 80,000 and 65,000 years ago, living alongside megafauna for 20,000–25,000 years before the megafaunal extinctions that were likely caused by, or partly contributed to by, late Pleistocene climate change; however the full reason for the extinctions is still unclear and human hunting or habitat changes through fire-stick farming may also have contributed to the extinctions. This left Australia with much of its keystone species extinct, leaving the ecosystems altered and far more vulnerable to invasion.
Dingoes probably arrived in Australia between 5,400 and 4,600 years ago, long after the first humans, spread rapidly across the continent and probably contributed to the extinction of even more native species such as the thylacine and Tasmanian devil.The current period of invasive species introduction began in 1788 with the arrival of the first European settlers. The population density in Australia beyond the coastline and major cities has been very low since the arrival of European settlers, and there are large tracts of land where it is very difficult for people to manage even large feral animals like camels, horses, donkeys and water buffalos."
Invasive species in Australia,"Invasive species
Fungi and bacteria
Invasive fungi and bacteria in Australia affect many native plants and animals and agricultural crops. Citrus canker was found twice in the Northern Territory in the 1900s, and was eradicated each time. In 2004, an outbreak of citrus canker occurred in Australia, and many Queensland citrus orchards have been burned to remove the disease. The destruction worked, however the disease was once again detected in April 2018 and confirmed in May 2018 in Northern Territory and Western Australia. The Oomycete Phytophthora cinnamomi, commonly known as wildflower dieback or jarrah blight, has created a massive problem in some types of native vegetation – especially jarrah forest and banksia woodland."
Invasive species in Australia,"Animals
Australia is host to 56 introduced invasive vertebrate animal species. They can be categorised in the following ways:"
Invasive species in Australia,"Invasive – species has a tendency to spread their range into new areas or plague their range
Ferals – defined as animals imported for domestic purposes (i.e. pets, recreational use – such as hunting – or beasts of burden) that have gone wild.
Pests – animals that have a direct effect on human standard of living or the environment/ecosystems in areas where they are present, have a high rate of reproduction and are difficult to control
Animals causing most public concern and economic and ecological damage include:"
Invasive species in Australia,"Control
Various programs exist to control invasive species in Australia. A cane toad control program aims at preventing the spread of the species towards Darwin and Western Australia, and involves trapping. Red Foxes, feral cats, feral dogs and feral pigs are often baited, although the use of 1080 (sodium fluoroacetate) is also known to affect native animals such as the quoll and Tasmanian devil, though the most common and effective method is shooting. 1080 is ideal in the south-west of Australia because a native plant contains the same toxin – therefore most native animals have developed immunity to it. Other species are either open to hunting as a sport (such as the deer) or subject to government sponsored culling programs. Dromedary Camels and Water buffalo are often shot from helicopters."
Invasive species in Australia,"Bounties
Several bounty programs have assisted in the eradication of larger sized pests in Australia.
Ironically, many early bounties were paid for the extermination of native species that were considered a pest to farmers. The Tasmanian tiger or thylacine was one such program that caused extinction, whilst the Tasmanian devil, spotted quoll, and Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle all became seriously threatened by bounties.
At various times, bounties have been in place for invasive species such as wild-living domestic dogs (including the dingo) and fox. A beer-for-toads bounty has been publicised for cane toad control in the Northern Territory.
In 2002, a Victorian Fox Bounty Trial began to test the efficacy of fox bounties which have been in place intermittently since 1893 (only 30 years after introduction). The study showed no reduction in fox impacts, and that the project may even have been counterproductive. The evaluation also found that a sustained annual reduction of 65% is required to achieve real declines in red fox populations.
Feral cat bounties in Queensland have also been considered to counter the growing problem. The dingo is subject to various controversial bounty systems in Australia. The Australian dingo was itself introduced before European settlement, yet has been considered native of the mainland in most cases both the pure breeds and the Dingo-dog hybrids are considered pests to livestock."
Invasive species in Australia,"Invasive insects and terrestrial arthropods
Insects are the second costliest class of invasive species in Australia, behind only the mammals. Fire ants in Australia (Solenopsis invicta) are estimated to cost A$1.72 billion (2021) (equivalent to A$1.83 billion or US$1.33 billion in 2022) annually, making up 71% of the total costs of invasive insects. This is followed by the Queensland fruit fly (Bactrocera tryoni) making up 12% of the total costs, the Pacific fruit fly (Bactrocera philippinensis) making up 9%, and the bollworm (Helicoverpa) making up 7%.
Yellow crazy ants (Anoplolepis gracilipes), black Portuguese millipedes (Ommatoiulus moreletii), Western honey bees (Apis mellifera), and European wasps (Vespula germanica; known elsewhere by the common name ""German wasps"") are considered to be problematic species. The elm leaf beetle (Xanthogaleruca luteola), discovered in Victoria in 1989, devastates exotic elm trees, themselves imported, and a parasite wasp species as well as the beetle's natural enemy the parasitic fly (Erynniopsis antennata) were in turn introduced in 2001 in an effort to control the pest."
Invasive species in Australia,"Control
The red imported fire ant in particular, with its venomous stings, poses a direct threat to human lifestyle. Although control is extremely difficult and spread quickly, the species is currently effectively quarantined to South East Queensland.
Both the honey bee and European wasp are well established and now impossible to eradicate in Australia. Honey bees take over potential nesting hollows for native animals and are very hard to remove once established.
The yellow crazy ant is currently quarantined to Christmas Island where it has had a significant environmental impact. The primary impact is the killing and displacing of crabs on the forest floor."
Invasive species in Australia,"Invasive birds
Introduced birds considered pests include the common myna, the common starling, the spotted dove and rock pigeon (common pigeon).
Initially introduced to control locust plagues, the Indian myna breeds prolifically in urban environments in the eastern states. The myna poses a serious threat (such that it has been listed in the World Conservation Union's world's 100 worst invasive species). The bird has caused human health concerns due to the spread of mites and disease. It has also been known to force native birds and their eggs from their nests.
The rock pigeon in particular has acidic faeces and can damage human property, including historic stone buildings."
Invasive species in Australia,"Control
Historically, control programs have struggled to curb the expansion and proliferation of invasive bird populations in Australia. A new program in Canberra has reversed this trend regarding mynas. Since 2006, the Canberra Indian Myna Action Group (CIMAG) has implemented an effective control scheme, based upon large-scale trapping conducted by volunteers. As of June 2013, the Action Group has recorded over 45,000 myna captures in the Canberra region since 2006. This has reduced the myna's prevalence in the Canberra region from a ranking of third most prevalent bird species in 2006, to twentieth in 2012. This has correlated with anecdotal evidence of increased nesting activity and prevalence of native species in the Canberra region. Other volunteer organisations in Australia have begun to adopt the CIMAG model with similar success.
Starlings and sparrows are currently closely monitored in south-eastern Western Australia.
Despite the number of rock pigeons, many people continue to feed the birds bread crumbs and assist them to breed in great numbers. It is not illegal to feed pigeons in Australia, and many local proposals to cull pigeons have been rejected.
Programs promoting indigenous plantations to attract native birds are an alternative method of promoting native species rejuvenation though this has caused issues with the explosion in the Noisy miner population."
Invasive species in Australia,"Invasive freshwater fish species
Invasive freshwater fish species in Australia include carp, brown trout, rainbow trout, redfin perch, mosquitofish (Gambusia spp), weather loach, and spotted tilapia among others. Some introduced freshwater fish species have had devastating impacts on Australia's endemic freshwater fish species and other native aquatic life. For example, in much of south eastern Australia's freshwater systems introduced carp (often incorrectly called ""European"" carp) dominate the lowland reaches, while introduced trout species almost completely dominate the upland reaches. While the damaging impact of carp is well recognised, little in the way of control measures have been employed to control their spread. Their ability to colonise almost any body of water, even those previously considered to be beyond their physical tolerances, is now well established."
Invasive species in Australia,"Invasive marine species
A number of marine pests have arrived in Australia in the ballast water of cargo ships. Marine pests include the black-striped mussel (Mytilopsis sallei), the Asian mussel, the New Zealand green-lipped mussel, and the European shore crab. The Northern Pacific seastar in Tasmania, Inverloch, and Port Phillip has caused much localised environmental damage."
Invasive species in Australia,"Invasive plant species
Weeds invade natural landscapes, waterways, and agricultural land. Originally, plants were most likely to be considered weeds if they had a direct economic impact, especially on agricultural production. However, growing environmental consciousness since the 1970s has led to the recognition of environmental weeds; plants which have adverse effects on the natural ecosystem of an area. A list of Weeds of National Significance (WONS) was created in 1999 and updated in 2012 and now has 32 taxa.
Not just the prickly pear: Hudson's Pears - Cylindropuntia tunicata and C. rosea - are also cacti of agricultural significance in Queensland.
Weed management costs the Australian economy A$4 billion yearly; weeds are considered the second greatest threat to biodiversity after land clearing. Almost half of Australia's 220 declared noxious weeds (under legislation) were introduced deliberately, one third of these as garden ornamentals."
Invasive species in Australia,"Management of invasive species
The management of invasive species is carried out by individuals, conservation groups, and government agencies.
The Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service is responsible for ensuring that no new species with the potential to become invasive species enter Australia. To raise public awareness, Australian Quarantine has featured Australian celebrity nature lover Steve Irwin on a series of television commercials, with the message Quarantine – Don't mess with it.
Several scientific bodies are involved in research for the control of invasive species. The CSIRO has released several successful biological pest control agents and developed chemical agents for pest and weed control. For example, the CSIRO released myxoma virus to control wild rabbits in Australia.
Rabbit haemorrhagic disease escaped containment from an Australian Government research facility and spread across Australia. Rabbit hemorrhagic disease was subsequently legalised for the control of wild rabbits. The moth Cactoblastis cactorum was introduced for the control of prickly pear, and the salvinia weevil Cyrtobagous salviniae for the control of aquatic weed Salvinia. More doubtful biological controls were the cane toad, which was introduced to control the sugar cane destroying cane beetle; instead the cane toad ate anything and everything else—the beetle was not its preferred food source given choice. The cane toad in Australia has become the biological control that is most infamous for having been a complete failure as well as becoming an environmental nightmare. Walter Froggatt, an economic entomologist, warned of this likelihood at the time. It has also led to much public concern and caution when considering the introduction of new biological controls.
Another example of a poorly researched introduced biological control is the sap sucking lantana bug (Aconophora compressa) also from South America that was introduced into Australia in the 1995 to eat the lantana. Unfortunately, the lantana bug also attacks other trees including fiddlewood trees which has caused distress to some gardeners. The lantana bug had been tested for six years on 62 different plants. Aconophora compressa was the 28th insect introduced to control lantana in about 80 years.
More successfully, the Australian Dung Beetle Project (1965–1985), led by Dr. George Bornemissza of CSIRO's Division of Entomology, introduced 23 species of dung beetle to Australia in order to biologically control the pestilent population of bush flies. These flies, along with other species of fly and parasitic worm, use the dung as a breeding and feeding ground. The rolling and burying activity of the dung beetles means that the dung is removed from the pasture land, which had the effect of reducing the bush fly population by 90%, as well increasing soil fertility and quality by recycling the dung back into the soil.
Cooperative Research Centres for weed management and pest animal control, have been established by the federal government. They coordinate research and funding between a number of university and government labs for research into control of invasive species.
Non government organisations have also been established to fight invasive species, for example, the Invasive Species Council (ISC). The ISC are a policy, advocacy, lobbying, research, and outreach group on matters related invasive species.
Volunteer groups, such as SPRATS, have also made very significant contributions to fighting invasive species, in their case removing sea spurge from large areas of Tasmanian coastline."
Invasive species in Australia,"Claimed ecological benefits
While negative impacts by introduced flora and fauna are often featured, some researchers argue that there could be positive aspects of introduced species to provide ecological benefits to native ecosystem in Australia. 
Herbivores in general may benefit local biodiversity by creating mosaics of vegetation and helping native plants to expand their ranges, and may contribute to decline wildfires; mega-herbivores most notably the feral camels may fill lost ecological niches of extinct Australian megafauna including Diprotodon and Palorchestes, where this may also apply for others (such as cattles and horses and donkeys and deers), and would also drop fire risk, and smaller herbivores such as hog deer or feral goats may also suppress introduced grasses and wildfires. 
Carnivores such as the introduced red foxes or cats may control the number of rats – and rabbits – and eradication of these carnivores may damage native ecosystem indirectly."
Invasive species in Australia,"Economic impact
A 2021 study looking at the economic impact of invasive species estimated that invasive species had cost Australian farmers A$390 billion in the past 60 years, with feral cats way ahead of the pack at nearly A$19 billion. Rabbits are next, at around A$2 billion, followed by fire ants, annual ryegrass, pigs, parthenium, foxes, ragwort, cucumis melons, and common heliotrope."
Invasive species in Australia,"World Trade Organisation and Australia's quarantine regulations
The World Trade Organisation specified quarantine regulations are weaker than Australia's fairly stringent regulations controlling the importing of raw produce. Following Australia's membership of the WTO, many forms of raw produce once banned have commenced import, with potentially adverse effects and controversy; for example, regarding proposals to import apples from New Zealand or bananas from the Philippines.
Australian quarantine regulations such as those limiting banana imports from developing economies have been recognised as protectionist trade barriers by economists including Kevin Fox, head of Economics at the Australian School of Business. 
The weakening of restrictions on importing raw produce into Australia mandated by the World Trade Organisation Future may pose risks of introducing exotic disease organisms. Case examples include, Chytrid fungus that is threatening numerous Australian frog species with extinction and mass pilchards deaths in the Southern Ocean from 1995 onwards that are suspected to have been caused by a virus that may have been brought in with imported pilchards."
Invasive species in Australia,"See also
Invasive species in New Zealand
Environmental issues in Australia
Fauna of Australia
List of invasive plant species in New South Wales
Where Do Camels Belong?"
Invasive species in Australia,"References
External links"
Invasive species in Australia,"Invasive Species Council
Full list of noxious weeds in Australia (pdf)
CSIRO Cane Toad research page
CSIRO Research on Introduced Marine Pests
The Cooperative Research Centre for Australian Weed Management
CSIRO marine pest fact sheets
The Department of Environment and Heritage, Invasive Species
Weeds of National Significance
The Cooperative Research Centre for Pest Animal Control
feral.org.au
Rabbit Information Service
Fisheries Western Australia – Introduced Marine Species Fact Sheet
""Distribution maps for vertebrate pests"". NSW Department of Primary Industries. Retrieved 12 November 2020.
""Invasive species"". Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. 15 October 2021."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"The 2019–20 Australian bushfire season, or Black Summer, was one of the most intense and catastrophic fire seasons on record in Australia. It included a period of bushfires in many parts of Australia, which, due to its unusual intensity, size, duration, and uncontrollable dimension, was considered a megafire by media at the time. Exceptionally dry conditions, a lack of soil moisture, and early fires in Central Queensland led to an early start to the bushfire season, beginning in June 2019. Hundreds of fires burnt, mainly in the southeast of the country, until May 2020. The most severe fires peaked from December 2019 to January 2020.
The fires burnt an estimated 24.3 million hectares (243,000 square kilometres), destroyed over 3,000 buildings (including 2,779 homes), and killed at least 34 people. According to the University of Tasmania’s Menzies Institute, bushfire smoke was responsible for more than 400 deaths, reported by the Medical Journal of Australia.
In December 2023 the Sydney Morning Herald reported a large volume of smoke in the Sydney basin resulted from the so called Gospers Mountain ""megablaze"" after the NSW Rural Fire Service lost control of back burning in November and December 2019. It was claimed that three billion terrestrial vertebrates – the vast majority being reptiles – were affected and some endangered species were believed to be driven to extinction. The cost of dealing with the bushfires was expected to exceed the A$4.4 billion of the 2009 Black Saturday fires, and tourism sector revenues fell by more than A$1 billion. Economists estimated the bushfires – Australia's costliest natural disaster in history – may have cost over A$78–88 billion in property damage and economic losses. Nearly 80% of Australians were affected by the bushfires in some way. At its peak, air quality dropped to hazardous levels in all southern and eastern states, and smoke had been moving upwards of 11,000 kilometres (6,800 mi) across the South Pacific Ocean, impacting weather conditions in other continents. Satellite data estimated the carbon emissions from the fires to be around 715 million tons, surpassing Australia's normal annual bushfire and fossil fuel emissions by around 80%.
From September 2019 to March 2020, fires heavily impacted various regions of the state of New South Wales (NSW). In eastern and north-eastern Victoria, large areas of forest burnt out of control for four weeks before the fires emerged from the forests in late December. Multiple states of emergency were declared across NSW, Victoria, and the Australian Capital Territory. Reinforcements from all over Australia were called in to assist fighting the fires and relieve exhausted local crews in NSW. The Australian Defence Force was mobilised to provide air support to the firefighting effort and to provide manpower and logistical support. Firefighters, supplies and equipment from Canada, New Zealand, Singapore and the United States, among others, helped fight the fires. An air tanker and two helicopters crashed during operations, killing three crew members. Two fire trucks were caught in fatal accidents, killing three firefighters.
By 4 March 2020, all fires in NSW had been extinguished completely (to the point where there were no fires in the state for the first time since July 2019), and the Victoria fires had all been contained. The last fire of the season occurred in Lake Clifton, Western Australia, in early May.
There has been considerable debate regarding the underlying cause of the intensity and scale of the fires, including the role of fire management practices and climate change, which during the peak of the crisis attracted significant international attention, despite previous Australian fires burning much larger areas (1974–75) or killing more people (2008–09). Politicians visiting fire impacted areas received mixed responses, in particular Prime Minister Scott Morrison. An estimated A$500 million was donated by the public at large, international organisations, public figures and celebrities for victim relief and wildlife recovery. Convoys of donated food, clothing and livestock feed were sent to affected areas."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Overview
Starting from late July early September 2019, fires heavily impacted various regions of the state of New South Wales, such as the North Coast, Mid North Coast, the Hunter Region, the Hawkesbury and the Wollondilly in Sydney's far west, the Blue Mountains, Illawarra and the South Coast, Riverina and Snowy Mountains with more than 100 fires burnt across the state. In eastern and north-eastern Victoria, large areas of forest burnt out of control for four weeks before the fires emerged from the forests in late December, taking lives, threatening many towns and isolating Corryong and Mallacoota. A state of disaster was declared for East Gippsland. Significant fires occurred in the Adelaide Hills and Kangaroo Island in South Australia and parts of the ACT. Moderately affected areas were south-eastern Queensland and areas of south-western Western Australia, with a few areas in Tasmania being mildly impacted."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"On 12 November 2019 catastrophic fire danger was declared in the Greater Sydney region for the first time since the introduction of this level in 2009 and a total fire ban was in place for seven regions of New South Wales, including Greater Sydney. The Illawarra and Greater Hunter areas also experienced catastrophic fire dangers, and so did other parts of the state, including the already fire ravaged parts of northern New South Wales. The political ramifications of the fire season have been significant. A decision by the New South Wales Government to cut funding to fire services based on budget estimates, as well as a holiday taken by Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, during a period in which two volunteer firefighters died, and his perceived apathy towards the situation, resulted in controversy.
As of 14 January 2020, 18.626 million hectares (46.03 million acres) had burnt or was burning across all Australian states and territories. Ecologists from The University of Sydney estimated 480 million mammals, birds, and reptiles were lost since September with concerns that entire species of plants and animals may have been wiped out by bushfire, later expanded to more than a billion.
In February 2020 it was reported that researchers from Charles Sturt University found that the deaths of nine smoky mice were from ""severe lung disease"" caused by smoke haze that contained PM2.5 particles coming from bushfires 50 kilometres away.
By the time the fires had been extinguished there, they destroyed 2,448 homes, as well as 284 facilities and more than 5,000 outbuildings in New South Wales alone. Twenty-six people were confirmed to have been killed in New South Wales since October. The last fatality reported was on 23 January 2020 following the death of a man near Moruya.
In New South Wales, the fires burnt through more land than any other blazes in the past 25 years, in addition to being the state's worst bushfire season on record. NSW also experienced the longest continuously burning bushfire complex in Australia's history, having burnt more than 4 million hectares (9,900,000 acres), with 70-metre-high (230 ft) flames being reported. In comparison, the 2018 California wildfires consumed 800,000 hectares (2,000,000 acres) and the 2019 Amazon rainforest wildfires burnt 900,000 hectares (2,200,000 acres) of land.
Whereas these bushfires are regarded by the NSW Rural Fire Service as the worst bushfire season in memory for that state, the 1974–75 bushfires were nationally much larger consuming 117 million hectares (290 million acres; 1,170,000 square kilometres; 450,000 square miles). However, due to their lower intensity and remote location, the 1974 fires caused around A$5 million (approximately A$36.5 million in 2020) in damage. In December 2019 the New South Wales Government declared a state of emergency after record-breaking temperatures and prolonged drought exacerbated the bushfires.
Due to safety concerns and significant public pressure, New Year's Eve fireworks displays were cancelled across New South Wales including highly popular events at Campbelltown, Liverpool, Parramatta, and across Sydney's Northern Beaches, and as well in the nation's capital of Canberra. As temperatures reached 49 °C (120 °F), the New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian called a fresh seven-day state of emergency with effect from 9 am on 3 January 2020.
On 23 January 2020, a Lockheed C-130 Hercules air tanker (N134CG) crashed at Peak View near Cooma while waterbombing a blaze. The aircraft was destroyed, resulting in the death of the three American crew members on board. It was one of eleven large air tankers brought to Australia for the fire season from Canada and US. Reaching the crash site proved difficult due to the active bushfires in the area. The crash was located in dense bushland, and spanned approximately 1 kilometre (0.62 mi). An investigation was begun by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) to determine the cause of the accident.
A preliminary ATSB report was released on 28 February. One fact determined was that the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) was faulty and "" … had not recorded any audio from the accident flight."" As of December 2020 the investigation had not been completed.
On 31 January 2020, the Australian Capital Territory declared a state of emergency in areas around Canberra as several bushfires threatened the city, having burnt 60,000 hectares (150,000 acres)."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"On 7 February 2020, it was reported that torrential rain across most of south-east Australia had extinguished a third of extant fires; with only a small number of uncontrolled fires remaining by 10 February."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Fire potential
The Garnaut Climate Change Review of 2008 stated:"
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Recent projections of fire weather (Lucas, et al., 2007) suggest that fire seasons will start earlier, end slightly later, and generally be more intense. This effect increases over time, but should be directly observable by 2020.
To describe emerging fire trends the study by Lucas and others defined two new fire weather categories, ""very extreme"" and ""catastrophic"".
The analysis by the Bushfire CRC, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, and CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research found that the number of ""very high"" fire danger days generally increases 2–13% by 2020 for the low scenarios (global increase by 0.4 °C (0.72 °F)) and 10–30% for the high scenarios (global increase by 1.0 °C (1.8 °F)). The number of ""extreme"" fire danger days generally increases 5–25% by 2020 for the low scenarios and 15–65% for the high scenarios."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"In April 2019 a group of former Australian fire services chiefs, Emergency Leaders for Climate Action, warned that Australia was not prepared for the upcoming fire season. They called on the next prime minister to meet the former emergency service leaders ""who will outline, unconstrained by their former employers, how climate change risks are rapidly escalating"". Greg Mullins, the second-longest serving fire and rescue commissioner in New South Wales and now a councillor with the Climate Council, said he thought the coming summer was going to be ""the worst I have ever seen"" for fire crews, and renewed his calls for the government to take urgent action to address climate change and stop Australia's rising emissions.
In August 2019 the federally funded Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC published a seasonal outlook report which advised of ""above normal fire potential"" for southern and southeast Queensland, the east coast areas of New South Wales and Victoria, for parts of Western Australia and South Australia. In December 2019, the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC updated their advice of ""above normal fire potential""."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Regions affected
The Australian National University reported that the area burned in 2019–2020 was ""well below average"" due to low fuel levels and fire activity in unpopulated parts of Northern Australia, but that ""despite low fire activity overall, vast forest fires occurred in southeast Australia from southeast Queensland to Kangaroo Island."""
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"New South Wales
The NSW statutory Bush Fire Danger Period normally begins on 1 October and continues through until 31 March. In 2019–20, the fire season started early with drought affecting 95 percent of the state and persistent dry and warm conditions across the state. Twelve local government areas started the Bush Fire Danger Period two months early, on 1 August 2019, and nine more started on 17 August 2019. In the week preceding 10 February 2020, a wide band of heavy rain swept through most of coastal New South Wales, extinguishing a significant number of fires; it left 33 active fires, of which five were uncontrolled, all located in the Bega Valley and Snowy Mountains regions. Between July 2019 and 13 February 2020, the NSW Rural Fire Service reported that 11,264 bush or grass fires burnt 5.4 million hectares (13 million acres), destroyed 2,439 homes, and approximately 24 megalitres (5.3 million imperial gallons; 6.3 million US gallons) of fire retardant was used."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"North Coast
On 6 September 2019, the northern parts of the state experienced extreme fire dangers. Fires included the Long Gully Road fire near Drake which burnt until the end of October, killing two people and destroying 43 homes; the Mount McKenzie Road fire which burnt across the southern outskirts of Tenterfield, and severely injured one person, destroyed one home and badly damaged four homes; and the Bees Nest fire near Ebor which burnt until 12 November and destroyed seven homes.
A major fire began in Chaelundi State Forest, west of Nymbodia, Fire spread south west of Grafton during an intense growth period of the fire where it became a PyroCumulonimbus and over ran the village of Nymboida, destroying 80 houses. Smaller fires in the area include the Myall Creek Road fire."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Mid North Coast
In the Port Macquarie-Hastings area, the first fire was reported at Lindfield Park on 18 July 2019, burning in dry peat swamp and threatened homes at Sovereign Hills and crossed the Pacific Highway at Sancrox. On 12 February 2020, the fire was declared extinguished after 210 days, having burnt 858 hectares (2,120 acres), of which approximately 400 hectares (990 acres) was underground; near the Port Macquarie Airport. The peat fire was extinguished after 65 megalitres (14 million imperial gallons; 17 million US gallons) of reclaimed water were pumped into adjacent wetlands; followed by 260 millimetres (10 in) of rain over five days. In the Port Macquarie suburb of Crestwood a fire started on 26 October from a dry electrical storm. Water bombers were delayed the following day in attempts to bring the fire burning in swampland to the south west of Port Macquarie under control. A back burn on 28 October got away from New South Wales Rural Fire Service (NSWRFS) volunteers after a sudden wind change pushing the fire south towards Lake Cathie and west over Lake Innes. Port Macquarie and surrounding areas were blanketed in thick smoke on 29 October with ongoing fire activity over the following week caused the sky to have an orange glow.
A fire burnt in wilderness areas on the Carrai Plateau west of Kempsey. This fire joined up with the Stockyard Creek fire and together with the Coombes Gap fire and swept east towards Willawarrin, Temagog, Birdwood, Yarras, Bellangary, Kindee and Upper Rollands Plains. Land around Nowendoc and Yarrowich was also burnt. As of 6 December 2019, this fire burnt nearly 400,000 hectares (988,422 acres), destroying numerous homes and claiming the lives of three people.
North-west of Harrington near the Cattai Wetlands a fire started on 28 October, this fire threatened the towns of Harrington, Crowdy Head and Johns River as it burnt north towards Dunbogan. This fire claimed one life at Johns River, where it also destroyed homes, and burnt more than 12,000 hectares (29,653 acres)."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"At Hillville, a fire grew large due to hot and windy conditions, resulting in disorder in the nearby town of Taree, to the north. Buses were called in early to take students home before the fire threat became too dangerous. On 9 November 2019, the fire reached Old Bar and Wallabi Point, threatening many properties. The following two days saw the fire reach Tinonee and Taree South, threatening the Taree Service Centre. Water bombers dropped water on the facility to protect it. The fire briefly turned in the direction of Nabiac before wind pushed it towards Failford. Other communities affected included Rainbow Flat, Khappinghat, Kooringhat and Purfleet. A spot fire jumped into Ericsson Lane, threatening businesses. It ultimately burnt 31,268 hectares (77,260 acres).
At Dingo Tops National Park a small fire that started in the vicinity of Rumba Dump Fire Trail burned down the ranges and impacted the small communities of Caparra and Bobin. Fanned by near catastrophic conditions, the fire grew considerably on 8 November 2019 and consumed nearly everything in its path. The small community of Caparra lost fourteen homes in a few hours as the bushfire continued towards the small village of Bobin, where numerous homes and the Bobin Public School were destroyed in the fire. Fourteen homes were lost on one street in Bobin. The NSWRFS sent out alerts to people in Killabakh, Upper Lansdowne, Kippaxs, Elands, and Marlee to monitor conditions.
2019 Rally Australia, planned to be the final round of the 2019 World Rally Championship, was a motor racing event scheduled to be held in Coffs Harbour across 14–17 November. A week before the rally was due to begin, the bushfire began to affect the region surrounding Coffs Harbour, with event organisers shortening the event in response to the deteriorating conditions. With the situation worsening, repeated calls from competitors (most of which were European-based) to cancel the event prevailed with the event cancelled on 12 November.
In late December 2019, fires started on both sides of the Pacific Highway around the Coopernook region. They burnt 278 hectares (687 acres) before they were brought under control."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Hunter
In the Hunter region, the Kerry Ridge fire burnt in the Wollemi National Park, Nullo Mountain, Coricudgy and Putty state forests in the Mid-Western Region, Muswellbrook and Singleton local government areas. The fire was extinguished on 10 February 2020, having burnt approximately 191,000 hectares (471,971 acres) over 79 days."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Blue Mountains and Hawkesbury
The Gospers Mountain Fire was ignited by lightning on 26 October near Gospers Mountain in the Wollemi National Park. Over the following 16 days the fire burnt an estimated 56,000 ha (140,000 acres) and was largely managed by the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service. On 11 November the NSW Rural Fire Service took control of fire management and issued a pre-emptive Section 44 declaration ahead of anticipated deteriorating conditions.
Around 11 November 2019, the NSW Rural Fire Service devised a strategy to contain the Gospers Mountain Fire using primary roads, major fire trails and an over-reliance on large-scale strategic backburning. This strategy was calculated to result in an area burnt of 450,000 ha. Under this strategy eight strategic backburns were carried out by the NSW Rural Fire Service, generally many kilometres from the edge of the Gospers Mountain Fire, with each backburn failing and escaping containment. This caused the fire to significantly increase in size. In each instance the NSW Rural Fire Service described the escaped backburns as the ""Gospers Mountain Fire"", even though in many cases, the backburns were ignited separately. The area burnt by these escaped backburns accounted for over 130,000 hectares - nearly a quarter of the total size of the Gospers Mountain Fire."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Escaped Backburns
On 15 November, at Putty Road, Wallaby Swamp Trail and Staircase Spur Trail at Colo Heights
On 19 November, at Putty Road, Barina Road and Wheelbarrow Ridge Road at Colo Heights
On 4 December, at Cerones Track, Colo Heights
On 5 December, at Upper Colo Road, Colo Heights
On 5–6 December at Mountain Lagoon, between Colo Heights and Bilpin
On 7 December, at Glowworm Tunnel Road on the Newnes Plateau
On 12 December, at Blackfellows Hands Trail at Newnes Plateau
On 14 December at Mt Wilson Road (Mt Wilson Backburn)"
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Mt Wilson Backburn
At 10am on 14 December the NSW Rural Fire Service commenced a large backburn in the Mount Wilson area. Due to poor fire weather conditions and heavy fuel loads, the backburn quickly grew out of control, threatening houses in Mount Wilson. The escaped backburn spread east of Mount Wilson Road and on 15 December, under deteriorating conditions, impacted Mount Tomah, Berambing and Bilpin. Due to confusion around the source of the fire and inaccurate warnings, many impacted residents were unaware that the escaped backburn posed a threat to their properties. The fire destroyed numerous houses and buildings, and then jumped the Bells Line of Road into the Grose Valley."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"On 19 December 2019 the fire caused by the escaped RFS Mt Wilson backburn crossed south of the Grose River. This section of the fire was then annexed by the NSW Rural Fire Service, which declared a new fire called the Grose Valley Fire. On 21 December, a catastrophic day, the escaped RFS Backburn impacted Mount Victoria, Blackheath, Bell, Clarence, Dargan and Bilpin, resulting in the destruction of dozens of homes. Homes were also lost in Lithgow due to previously escaped Glow Worm Tunnel and Blackfellows Hands Trail backburns.
The NSW Rural Fire Service reported the Gospers Mountain Fire as contained on 12 January 2020, stating that the fire was caused by a lightning strike on 26 October. On 4 February 2020 the escaped Mt Wilson Backburn was declared out. The amount of area burnt by the original Gospers Mountain Wildfire remains contested, as a significant portion of the fire was caused by multiple, separate backburns which increased the fire area. On 10 February 2020, NSW Rural Fire Service announced a torrential rain event over the preceding week had extinguished the Gospers Mountain fire.
Smaller fires in the area include the Erskine Creek fire. Additional fires in Balmoral, at the south eastern extent of the Blue Mountains, were also caused by NSW Rural Fire Service backburning.
The Gospers Mountain fire was widely reported as the largest forest fire ever recorded in Australia, burning more than 500,000 hectares. A significant amount of the final burnt area was a result of escaped backburning operations by the NSW Rural Fire Service. 81% of the Blue Mountains World Heritage Area burned."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Sydney
On 12 November 2019, under Sydney's first ever catastrophic fire conditions, a fire broke out in the Lane Cove National Park south of Turramurra. Under strong winds and extreme heat the fire spread rapidly, growing out of control and impacting the suburban interface across South Turramurra. One house caught alight in Lyon Avenue, but was saved by quick responding firefighters. As further crews arrived and worked to protect properties, a C-130 Air Tanker made several fire retardant drops directly over firefighters and houses, saving the rest of the suburb. The fire was ultimately brought under control several hours later, with one firefighter injured suffering a broken arm.
Because of the bushfires occurring in the surrounding regions, the Sydney metropolitan area suffered from dangerous smoky haze for several days throughout December, with the air quality being eleven times the hazardous level on some days, making it even worse than New Delhi's, where it was also compared to ""smoking 32 cigarettes"" by Associate Professor Brian Oliver, a respiratory diseases scientist at the University of Technology Sydney.
On 10 December 2019 the fire impacted the south-western Sydney suburbs of Nattai and Oakdale, followed by Orangeville and Werombi, threatening hundreds of houses and resulting in the destruction of one building. The fire continued to flare up sporadically, coming out of the dense bush and threatening properties in Oakdale and Buxton on 14 and 15 December. The fire moved south-east towards the populated areas of the Southern Highlands and impacted the townships of Balmoral, Buxton, Bargo, Couridjah and Tahmoor in far south-western Sydney. Substantial property losses occurred across these areas, in particular multiple fire trucks were overrun by fire, with several firefighters taken to hospital and two airlifted in critical condition. Later that night, two firefighters were killed when a tree fell onto the road and their tanker rolled, injuring three other crew members. The situation deteriorated on 21 December when the fire changed direction and attacked Balmoral and Buxton once more from the opposite side, with major property losses in both areas. On New Year's Eve there were fears of this fire impacting the towns of Mittagong, Braemar, and surrounding areas.
On 31 December 2019, a grass fire broke out in the sloped woodlands of Prospect Hill, in Western Sydney, where it headed north towards Pemulwuy along the Prospect Highway. The fire impacted a large industrial area and threatened numerous properties before being brought under control by 9:30 pm. Approximately 10 hectares (25 acres) and a number of historic Monterey pine trees were burnt.
The Sydney City fireworks display was allowed to continue with a special exemption from fire authorities, despite protests. Despite warnings from authorities, numerous fires were sparked across Sydney as a result of illegal fireworks, including a blaze which threatened properties at Cecil Hills in Sydney's south west.
On 4 January 2020, Sydney's western suburb Penrith recorded its hottest day on record at 48.9 °C (120.0 °F) making it the hottest place on Earth at the time.
On 5 January 2020, a fire broke out in bushland at Voyager Point in Sydney's south-west, spreading rapidly under a strong southerly wind and impacting numerous houses in Voyager Point and Hammondville. As the fire moved north, authorities closed the M5 Motorway due to smoke conditions and prepared for the fire to impact the New Brighton housing estate. Firefighters on the ground assisted by numerous waterbombing aircraft held the fire south of the motorway and prevented any property losses, containing the fire to 60 hectares (150 acres)."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Southern Highlands
In late October 2019, a number of fires started in remote bushland near Lake Burragorang in the Kanangra-Boyd National Park south-west of Sydney. Due to the extreme isolation of the area and rugged inaccessible terrain, firefighters struggled to contain the fires as they began to spread through the dense bushland. These multiple fires ultimately all merged to become the Green Wattle Creek fire. The fire continued to grow in size and intensity, burning towards the township of Yerranderie. Firefighters undertook backburning around the town whilst helicopters and fixed wing aircraft worked to control the spread of the fire. The fire passed Yerranderie but continued to burn through the national park towards south-western Sydney. On 5 December under severe weather conditions, the fire jumped the Lake Burragorang and began burning towards populated areas within the Wollondilly area."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"On 19 December 2019, the fire continued east towards the Hume Highway (resulting in its closure for several hours), impacting the township of Yanderra. Over the following days as the fire continued to progress to the south east, both Yerrinbool and Hill Top were threatened by the fire.
As well as expanding to the south and east, the fire also spread in a westerly direction, headed towards Oberon. The Oberon Correctional Centre was evacuated in anticipation of the advancing fire impact along its western flank. On 2 January, the fire hit the popular and historic Jenolan Caves area, destroying multiple buildings including the local fire station. The centrepiece of the precinct, Jenolan Caves House, was saved. On 10 February 2020, NSW Rural Fire Service announced a torrential rain event over the preceding week had extinguished the Green Wattle Creek fire."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"South Coast
On 30 December 2019 weather conditions drastically deteriorated across the south-eastern areas of the state, with major fires breaking out and escalating in the Dampier State Forest, Deua River Valley, Badja, Bemboka, Wyndham, Talmalolma and Ellerslie, hampering firefighters already stretched by the Currowan, Palerang and Clyde Mountain fires. As temperatures were forecast to reach 41 °C (106 °F) on the South Coast, Premier Berejiklian declared a seven-day state of emergency on 2 January 2020 with effect from 9 am on the following day, including an unprecedented 14,000-square-kilometre (5,400 sq mi) ""tourist leave zone"" from Nowra to the edge of Victoria's northern border.
A blaze on the South Coast started off at Currowan and travelled up to the coastline after jumping across the Princes Highway, threatening properties around Termeil. Residents in Bawley Point, Kioloa, Depot Beach, Pebbly Beach, Durras North and Pretty Beach were told to either evacuate to Batemans Bay or Ulladulla or stay to protect their property. One home was lost. As of 2 January 2020, the Currowan fire was burning between Batemans Bay in the south, Nowra in the north, and east of Braidwood in the west. The fire had burnt more than 258,000 hectares (640,000 acres) and was out of control. The Currowan fire had merged with the Tianjara fire in the Morton National Park to the south west of Nowra; and the Charleys Forest fire had grown along the fire's western flank; and on the fire's southern flank, the fire had merged with the Clyde Mountain fire.
By 26 December 2019, the Clyde Mountain fire was burning on the southern side of the Kings Highway, into the Buckenbowra and Runnyford areas. Around 4 am on 31 December, the fire had crossed the Princes Highway near Mogo, and the highway was closed between Batemans Bay and Moruya. Around 7 am on 31 December, the fire impacted the southern side of Batemans Bay, causing the loss of around ten businesses and damage to many others. The fire also crossed the Princes Highway in the vicinity of Round Hill and impacted the residential suburbs of Catalina, as well as beach suburbs from Sunshine Bay to Broulee. Residents and holiday makers were forced to flee to the beaches. On 23 January this fire escalated back to emergency level as the blaze roared towards the coastal town of Moruya, a town largely unaffected by bushfires in recent weeks.
At nearby Conjola Park, numerous homes were lost as the embers jumped across Conjola Lake, landing in gutters and lighting up houses. On one street there were only four houses still standing. As of 2 January 2020, at least two people died and a woman was missing. Isolated hamlets of Bendalong and Manyana and Cunjurong Point were additionally ablaze, with holiday-makers evacuated on 3 January 2020. As of 6 January 2020, all are still without power.
As of 5 January 2020, in the Bega Valley Shire, the Border fire that started in north-eastern Victoria was burning north into New South Wales towards the major town of Eden, and had impacted the settlements of Wonboyn and surrounding areas including Kiah, Lower Towamba and parts of Boydtown. Part of the fire was burning in inaccessible country and continued to head in a north-westerly direction towards Bombala as well as northerly to just south of Nethercote. The fire had burnt more than 60,000 hectares (150,000 acres) and was out of control. On 2 February 2020 in the Bega Valley, the 177,000-hectare (437,377-acre) Border fire pushed north, while three other bushfires in the south-west had merged into one. Kristy McBain, the Bega Valley shire council mayor, said more than 400 properties and homes had been lost after 34 days of fire activity in the area.
On 9 February 2020, NSW Rural Fire Service announced a torrential rain event over the preceding week had extinguished both the Morton and Currowan fires, with the latter having burnt 499,621 hectares (1,234,590 acres) over 74 days and destroying 312 homes."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Riverina
On 30 December 2019, the Green Valley fire burning east of Albury near Talmalmo (which had started the day prior) developed into an unprecedented fire event for the Snowy Valleys as a result of extreme local conditions. The smoke plume rose to an estimated 8,000 metres (26,000 ft) and developed a pyro-cumulonimbus cloud, becoming a firestorm. The result was extreme, the wind was described by crews on the ground as in excess of 100 km/h (62 mph), with spot fires starting over 5 km (3.1 mi) ahead of the main fire front.
Firefighters described what they believed to be a tornado generated by the fire storm, which began flattening trees and flipped a small fire vehicle. The tornado then impacted a crew of firefighters working to protect a property, flipping their tanker over and trapping the crew inside, who were then overrun by fire. One firefighter was killed with multiple others injured, with one airlifted to Melbourne and two to Sydney."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Snowy Mountains
The Dunns Road fire was believed to have been started by a lightning strike on 28 December in a private pine plantation near Adelong. In the Snowy Valleys local government area, by 2 January 2020 the Dunns Road fire had burnt south of the Snowy Mountains Highway in the Ellerslie Range near Kunama. Over 130,000 hectares (320,000 acres) was burnt and the fire was out of control. The NSWRFS issued an evacuation order to residents in the Batlow and Wondalga areas. Residents and visitors to the Kosciuszko National Park were evacuated and the national park was closed. 155 inmates from the Mannus Correctional Centre near Tumbarumba were evacuated.
On 3 January 2020, the Dunns Road fire burnt from Batlow into Kosciuszko National Park, burning much of the northern part of the park. The fire caused significant damage, severely damaging the Selwyn Snow Resort, destroying structures in the town of Cabramurra and almost completely destroying the heritage-listed precinct (and birthplace of skiing in Australia) of Kiandra. Kiandra's historic former courthouse was left with only its walls standing after a fire so hot that the glass and aluminium in the windows melted. A number of high country huts, including Wolgal Hut and Pattinsons Hut near Kiandra, were also feared to have been destroyed. By 11 January three fires had merged – the Dunns Road fire, the East Ournie Creek, and the Riverina's Green Valley fire – and had created a 600,000-hectare (1,482,632-acre) ""mega-fire"", burning south of the Snowy Mountains."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"On 23 January 2020, a Lockheed C-130 Hercules large air tanker crashed near Cooma while waterbombing a blaze, resulting in the death of the three American crew members on board.
On 1 February 2020, emergency warnings were issued for the Orroral fire and the Clear Range fire threatening Bredbo north of Cooma."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Victoria
On 21 November 2019, lightning strikes ignited a series of fires in East Gippsland, initially endangering the communities of Buchan, Buchan South and Sunny Point. On 20 December, the Marthavale-Barmouth Spur expanded, greatly endangering the community of Tambo Crossing."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"The first day of two-day cricket tour match between a Victoria XI and New Zealand in Melbourne was cancelled due to extreme heat conditions.
On 30 December 2019, there were three active fires in East Gippsland with a combined area of more than 130,000 hectares (320,000 acres), and another in the north-east of the state near Walwa heading south-east towards Cudgewa. An evacuation warning was issued for the East Gippsland town of Goongerah, which is surrounded by high-value old growth forests, as well as Cudgewa. On the same day, a fire broke out in the Plenty Gorge Parklands, situated in Melbourne's northern suburbs between Bundoora, Mill Park, South Morang, Greensborough and Plenty.
Fires reached the town of Mallacoota by around 8 am AEDT on 31 December 2019. At 11 am AEDT 31 December, fires had begun to approach the vacation town of Lakes Entrance. Despite the recommendation that large portions of East Gippsland be evacuated, approximately 30,000 holiday makers chose to remain in the region. Approximately 4,000 people, including 3,000 tourists, remained in Mallacoota as the fire began making its closest approach to the town, cutting off roads in the process; Mallacoota had not been issued with an evacuation warning on 29 December. On 3 January, approximately 1,160 people from Mallacoota were evacuated on naval vessels HMAS Choules and MV Sycamore.  In the rural hamlet of Sarsfield 200 of the 276 properties in the area were impacted by fire with 73 dwellings lost and 49.2% of the landscape burnt.
On 2 January 2020 at 11 pm AEDT, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews declared a state of disaster under the provisions of the Victorian Emergency Management Act for the shires of East Gippsland, Mansfield, Wellington, Wangaratta, Towong, and Alpine, and the alpine resorts of Mount Buller, Mount Hotham, and Mount Stirling. Emergency Management Commissioner Andrew Crisp stated that 780,000 hectares (1,900,000 acres) had burnt including 100,000 hectares (250,000 acres) near Corryong in the state's north-east and that fifty fires were burning. On 3 January, Andrews said two people were confirmed dead from the East Gippsland fires.
On 6 January 2020, Andrews said that bushfires had burnt through 1.2 million hectares (3 million acres) in Victoria's east and north-east and that 200 homes were confirmed lost.
On 13 January 2020, two bushfires were burning at emergency level in Victoria despite milder conditions, one about 8 km east of Abbeyard and the other in East Gippsland affecting Tamboon, Tamboon South and Furnel.
On 23 January 2020, there were still 12 fires burning in Victoria, the strongest in East Gippsland and the north-east. The Buldah fire in East Gippsland was at watch and act level and the rest were on advice level. Most of the 44 fires sparked by dry lightning were quickly dealt with by firefighters. Heavy rain in the Melbourne region brought little relief to bushfire-affected regions. Andrews said that the rains could bring new dangers for firefighters, including landslides.
On 30 and 31 January 2020, very hot weather occurred in Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia that brought high fire danger with several uncontrolled bushfires still burning. An Emergency Warning was issued for Bendoc, Bendoc Upper, and Bendoc North on 30 January.
On 20 February 2020, the huge East Gippsland bushfire that had burned for three months was declared ""contained"" by Bairnsdale incident controller Brett Mitchell. Recent rainfall also contributed to the Omeo, Anglers Rest, Cobungra, Bindi, Hotham Heights, Glen Valley, Benambra, Swifts Creek, Omeo, Ensay, Tongio, the Blue Rag Range, Dargo and Tabberabbera bushfires all being contained.  The Snowy complex fire in the far east was the single major remaining fire still burning in Victoria.
All significant fires in Victoria, including the Snowy Complex fire, were declared contained on 27 February 2020."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Queensland
On 7 September 2019 multiple out of control blazes threatened townships across south-eastern and northern Queensland, destroying eleven houses in Beechmont, seven houses in Stanthorpe, and one house at Mareeba. On the following day the heritage-listed lodge and cabins at the iconic Australian nature-based Binna Burra Lodge were destroyed in the bushfire that consumed residential houses in Beechmont the previous day.
A large fire impacted the Peregian Beach area on 9 September, on the Sunshine Coast, severely damaging ten houses. In December 2019, Peregian Springs and the surrounding areas came under threat by bushfires for the second time in a couple of months. No homes in Peregian Springs area were confirmed lost in this bushfire.
Due to deteriorating fire conditions and fires threatening homes across the state, on 9 November a State of Fire Emergency was declared across 42 local government areas across southern, central, northern and far-northern Queensland. 14 homes were destroyed in the Yeppoon area during mid November 2019.
On 27 October a fire started in inaccessible Defence land at the Canungra Military Area.  Firefighters attempted to contain the fire with extensive water bombing until weather conditions improved.  On 8 November, the fire broke through the containment line and impacted 30 houses in Lower Beechmont, resulting in the evacuation of the village.  All houses were saved, though a shed and several outbuildings were lost.
On 11 November a fire started in the Ravensbourne area near Toowoomba, which burnt through over 20,000 hectares (49,000 acres) of bush across several days, destroying six houses. At 8 am the air quality in Brisbane reached unprecedentedly poor levels (Woolloongabba PM2.5 238.8 μg/m3). Queensland's chief health officer, Dr Jeannette Young, urged residents to stay indoors and to not physically exert themselves.
On 13 November a water bombing helicopter crashed while fighting the blazes threatening the small community of Pechey. While the Bell 214 helicopter was completely destroyed, the pilot walked away with minor injuries.
On 23 November the state of fire emergency was revoked and extended fire bans were put in place in local government areas that were previously affected under this declaration.
On 6 December a house fire broke out in Bundamba and quickly spread to nearby bushland and was placed under a watch and act alert by the Queensland Fire and Emergency Services that afternoon. The following day, after worsening conditions, the fire was upgraded to an emergency warning and began to threaten homes in the local community. The fire destroyed a shipping container filled with fireworks, and residents within the 3-square-kilometre (1.2 sq mi) exclusion zone were ordered to evacuate. One home was destroyed.
On 8 November a bushfire broke out in forestry to the west of the township of Jimna, causing Queensland Fire and Emergency services to issue a ""watch and act"" alert. The fire caused the evacuation of the entire town."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"South Australia
On 11 November 2019 an emergency bushfire warning was issued for Port Lincoln in the Eyre Peninsula, with an uncontrolled fire travelling towards the town. The South Australian Country Fire Service ordered ten water bombers to the area to assist 26 ground crews at the scene. SA Power Networks disconnected power to the town."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"A large fire broke out on Yorke Peninsula on 20 November 2019 and threatened the towns of Yorketown and Edithburgh. It destroyed at least eleven homes and burnt approximately 5,000 hectares (12,000 acres). The fire was believed to have started from a sparking electrical transformer. A Boeing 737 water-bombing aircraft from New South Wales in addition to South Australian Air Tractor AT-802s were used to protect the town of Edithburgh.
On 20 December fires took hold in the Adelaide Hills, and near Cudlee Creek in the Mount Lofty Ranges. Initial south-easterly winds put the towns of Lobethal and Lenswood in the line of the fire, and by the next morning the winds had changed to north-north-west, threatening other towns. The fires killed one person, more than 70 houses were destroyed, as well as over 400 outbuildings and 200 cars. Yearly Christmas celebrations at Lobethal were cancelled. volunteers from around the Adelaide and Mount Lofty Ranges areas responded to the unfolding incident; this resulted in a number of fire trucks being overrun by the fast moving fire. One of the trucks involved was Seaford 34. The crews were attempting to prevent the fire from crossing Croft Rd at Cudlee Creek when a wind change pushed the fire front towards them. The crews took shelter in their truck until the fire front passed. The crews were taken back to Lobethal were they continued to assist community members whilst on foot with asset protection as the fire front moved through.
Also on 20 December, an out-of-control bushfire took hold near Angle Vale, starting from the Northern Expressway and burning through Buchfelde and across the Gawler River. At 11:07 am ACDT the fire was burning under catastrophic weather conditions and an emergency warning was issued for Hillier, Munno Para Downs, Kudla, Munno Para West and Angle Vale. One house was destroyed.
Another emergency warning was issued on 3 January for a fire near Kersbrook. At its largest extent, the warning area overlapped with areas that a few days earlier had been in warnings for the Cudlee Creek fire. Water bombers delivered 21 loads in just over an hour before darkness fell, and 150 firefighters on 25 trucks plus bulk water carriers and earthmoving equipment limited the advance of the fire to 18 hectares (44 acres).
On Kangaroo Island starting in the Flinders Chase National Park, the Ravine bushfire burnt in excess of 15,000 hectares (37,000 acres) and a bushfire emergency warning was issued on 3 January 2020 as the fire advanced towards Vivonne Bay and the town of Parndana was evacuated. On 4 January it was confirmed at least two people died. As of 6 January 2020 approximately 170,000 hectares (420,000 acres), representing about a third of the island, had been burnt. Fires remained burning out of control, with firefighters working to contain and control fires before potentially hot windy weather scheduled for later in the week. Following fire damage to a water treatment plant, residents were asked to conserve water and some water was carted into island towns. There were concerns for the future of threatened wildlife, such as glossy black cockatoos, Kangaroo Island dunnarts, and koalas. Authorities stated that any koalas taken to the mainland for treatment cannot return to the island in case they bring diseases back with them."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Western Australia
Two bushfires burnt in Geraldton on 13 November, damaging homes and small structures.
A fire broke out in Yanchep at 2:11 pm on 11 December, immediately triggering an emergency warning for Yanchep and Two Rocks. The fire led to a service station exploding. On 12 December, temperatures in excess of 40 °C (104 °F) exacerbated the fire, and the emergency warning area doubled including parts of Guilderton and Brenton Bay further north. On 13 December, increased temperature conditions resulted in the fire burning in excess of 5,000 hectares (12,000 acres), with the fire front over 1.5 kilometres (0.93 mi) in length. As of 13 December 2019, the emergency warning area stretched from Yanchep north to Lancelin over 40 km (25 mi) away. By 16 December, the fire was considered contained and the alert downgraded to watch and act. Approximately 13,000 hectares (32,000 acres) were burnt; only two buildings were damaged, both within the first day of the fire starting.
In December fires in the region around Norseman blocked access to the Eyre Highway and the Nullarbor Plain and caused the highways of the region to be blocked, so as to prevent any recurrence of the 2007 death of truck drivers on the Great Eastern Highway.
Between 26 December 2019 and 1 January 2020, as a result of a lightning strike, a fire tore through 40,000 hectares (99,000 acres) of land in Stirling Range National Park in the southwest of the state, burning more than half of the park. The pyrocumulus cloud from the fires could be seen 80 km (50 mi) south in Albany. By New Year's Day 2020 a crew of 200 firefighters brought the fire back to advice level without any loss of life or major property damage (a park ranger hut and hiking tracks were destroyed). However, conservationists raised concerns for the potential loss of rare and unique flora and fauna that live in the park, which contains over 1500 such species within its boundaries, including a rare population of quokkas (one of few in mainland Western Australia). A local politician, firefighters, farmers and tourism operators called on Western Australian Emergency Minister Fran Logan to invest in local firefighting assets for the area to make sure the tourist destination was properly protected.
The last fire of Western Australian 2019–20 bushfire season started in Lake Clifton, within the Shire of Waroona, on 2 May and was extinguished on 3 May. The Lake Clifton area was severely damaged during the 2010–11 bushfire season."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Tasmania
In late October 2019, four bushfires were burning near Scamander, Elderslie, and Lachlan. Emergency warnings were issued at Lulworth, Bothwell, and Lachlan. A large fire near Swansea also burnt over 4,000 hectares (9,900 acres). Lightning strikes subsequently started multiple fires in Southwest Tasmania. On 20 December 2019, a fire was started in the north east, which spread to 15,000 hectares (37,000 acres) and destroyed one home; a man was charged with starting the fire.
Two fires continued to burn in January 2020. A fire in the Fingal Valley, in north-eastern Tasmania, started on 29 December, and a fire at Pelham, north of Hobart, started on 30 December. As of 16 January 2020 the Fingal fire had burnt over 20,000 hectares (49,000 acres) and the Pelham fire over 2,100 hectares (5,200 acres)."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Australian Capital Territory
In the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), the national capital Canberra was blanketed by thick bushfire smoke on New Year's Day from bushfires burning nearby in New South Wales. That day the air quality in the capital was the worst of any city in the world, at around 23 times the threshold to be considered hazardous. Conditions continued the next day, and Australia Post stopped postal deliveries in the ACT to keep workers safe from smoke. The first death directly linked to the poor air quality was also recorded on 2 January. An elderly woman had been travelling from Brisbane to Canberra by plane. When she exited the plane onto the smoke-flooded tarmac, she suffered respiratory distress and then died. On 2 January 2020, the ACT declared a state of alert; that was extended on 12 January as the merged Dunns Road fire burnt seven kilometres (four miles) from the Territory's south-west border. Smoke from nearby bushfires continued to severely impact Canberra's air quality intermittently throughout January 2020.
From at least 6 January 2020 a bushfire near Hospital Hill in the Namadgi National Park had started; it was extinguished on 9 January.
On 22 January 2020 a bushfire started in Pialligo Redwood Forest; it reached emergency level, threatening Beard and Oaks Estate. The next day a second bushfire started, the Kallaroo Fire, which later during the day merged with the Redwood Forest fire forming the Beard Fire; the fire jumped the Molonglo River and threatened the suburbs of Beard, Harman and Oaks Estate as it burnt 424 hectares (1,050 acres). Canberra Airport was closed for a day. The fire destroyed one facility, four outbuildings, and three vehicles."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"On 27 January 2020 a bushfire started in the Orroral Valley in the Namadgi National Park. At 1:30 pm, an Army MRH-90 Taipan helicopter conducting reconnaissance for landing sites for remote area firefighting teams attempted to land for a break when their landing light ignited a fire in dry grass. The aircrew waited until landing at Canberra Airport at about 2:15 pm to notify the ACT Emergency Services Agency meanwhile a fire tower had spotted white smoke at 1:49 pm and a search had commenced to locate the fire. By the morning of 28 January the fire had grown to 2,575 hectares (6,360 acres) and was 9 kilometres (5.6 mi) from the town of Tharwa. An emergency warning was declared for Tharwa and the southern suburbs of Canberra – particularly Banks, Gordon, and Conder — just after 1:30 pm AEST on 28 January. Chief Minister Andrew Barr described the fire as the biggest threat to Canberra since the 2003 Canberra bushfires. At midday on 31 January, Barr declared a state of emergency for the ACT, the first time such action had occurred since the 2003 fires. As the Orroral Valley Fire burned out of control, many instances of ‘disaster tourism’ were reported from suburban south Tuggeranong, with people driving to the suburbs to see the fire and take photographs; in turn blocking traffic. The Orroral Valley fire was downgraded to ""advice"" status on 5 February and declared to be out on 27 February."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Northern Territory
The Northern Territory went through a relatively average annual bushfire season with respect to area of land burnt, in comparison to the scale of bushfires witnessed in other areas of Australia. Despite this, approximately 6.8 million hectares (17 million acres) was burnt, an area which contributed significantly to the total area burnt by bushfires in the nation. Five homes were lost to bushfires in the Territory."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Precedents
There have been a number of large scale bushfires recorded in Australian history. The widespread 1938–1939 fires in Victoria, NSW, South Australia and the ACT similarly gained international headlines when the fires entered the Sydney suburbs, as did the 1994 eastern seaboard fires. The 1851 Black Thursday bushfires shocked colonial Australia with their ferocity, burning a quarter of what is now Victoria (around 5 million hectares (12 million acres)). Lesser known is that about 117 million hectares (290 million acres), or 15 per cent of Australia's land mass, experienced fire in the summer of 1974–5. NSW was again badly affected, and three people killed. However, the fires were mainly in sparsely populated inland areas. The five most deadly blazes were: Black Saturday 2009 in Victoria (173 people killed, 2000 homes lost); Ash Wednesday 1983 in Victoria and South Australia (75 dead, nearly 1900 homes); Black Friday 1939 in Victoria (71 dead, 650 houses destroyed), Black Tuesday 1967 in Tasmania (62 people and almost 1300 homes); and the Gippsland fires and Black Sunday of 1926 in Victoria (60 people killed over a two-month period).
Nationally, Australian National University described the 2019 fire year as ""close to average"" and the 2020 fire year as ""unusually small""."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Environmental effects
In mid-December 2019, a NASA analysis revealed that since 1 August, the New South Wales and Queensland bushfires had emitted 250 million tonnes (280 million short tons) of carbon dioxide (CO2). A September 2021 study using satellite data estimated the CO2 emissions of the fires from November 2019 to January 2020 to be ~715 million tons, about twice as much as earlier estimates. By comparison, in 2018, Australia's total carbon emissions were equivalent to 535 million tonnes (590 million short tons) of CO2, – the greenhouse gas emissions surpassed Australia's normal annual bushfire and fossil fuel emissions by ~80%. While the carbon emitted by the fires would normally be reabsorbed by forest regrowth, this would take decades and might not happen at all if prolonged drought has damaged the ability of forests to fully regrow.
In December 2019, the air quality index (AQI) around Rozelle, an inner suburb of Sydney, hit 2,552 or more than 12 times the hazardous level of 200. The level of fine particle matters, known and measured globally as PM2.5, around Sydney was also measured at 734 micrograms (0.01133 gr) or the equivalent of 37 cigarettes. On 1 January 2020, the AQI around Monash, a suburb of Canberra, was measured at 4,650, or more than 23 times hazardous level and peaked at 7,700.
On New Year's Day 2020 in New Zealand, a blanket of smoke from the Australian fires covered the whole South Island, giving the sky an orange-yellow haze. People in Dunedin reported smelling smoke in the air. The MetService stated that the smoke would not have any adverse affects on the weather or temperature in the country. The smoke moved over the North Island the following day, but began breaking up and was not as intense as it was over the South Island the previous day; meanwhile, wind from the South Pacific Ocean dissipated the smoke over the South Island. The smoke affected glaciers in the country, giving a brown tint to the snow. On 5 January 2020, more smoke wafted over the North Island, turning the sky in Auckland orange. By 7 January 2020, the smoke was carried approximately 11,000 kilometres (6,800 mi) across the South Pacific Ocean to Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Ecological effects
Prof. Chris Dickman, a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science from the University of Sydney, estimated on 8 January 2020 that more than one billion animals were killed by bushfires in Australia; while more than 800 million animals perished in New South Wales. The estimate was based on a 2007 World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) report on impacts of land clearing on Australian wildlife in New South Wales that provided estimates of mammal, bird and reptile population density in the region. Dickman's calculation had been based on conservative estimates and the actual mortality could be higher. The figure provided by Dickman included mammals (excluding bats), birds, and reptiles; and did not include frogs, insects, or other invertebrates. Other estimates, which include animals like bats, amphibians and invertebrates, also put the number killed at over a billion.
A 2020 study estimated that at least 3 billion terrestrial vertebrates alone were displaced or killed by the fires, with reptiles (which tend to have higher population densities in affected areas compared to other vertebrates) comprising over two-thirds of the affected, with birds, mammals, and amphibians comprising the other third.
Ecologists feared some endangered species were driven to extinction by the fires. Though bushfires are not uncommon in Australia, they are usually of a lower scale and intensity that only affect small parts of the overall distribution of where species live. Animals that survived a bushfire could still find suitable habitats in the immediate vicinity, which was not the case when an entire distribution is decimated in an intense event. Besides immediate mortality from the fires, there were on-going mortalities after the fires from starvation, lack of shelter, and attacks from predators such as foxes and feral cats that are attracted to fire-affected areas to hunt. At least one species, the Kate's leaf-tailed gecko, had the entirety of its habitat burnt by the fires, while the long-footed potoroo had over 82% habitat burnt. While many endangered species managed to persist through the fires, albeit with severely impacted populations that will not survive in the long-term without major human influence, other species such as the Kangaroo Island micro-trapdoor spider and the Kangaroo Island assassin spider have not been sighted since.
On Kangaroo Island, Australia's third-largest island and known as Australia's ""Galapagos Island"", a third of the island was burnt. Large parts of the island are designated as protected areas and host animals such as sea lions, penguins, kangaroos, koalas, pygmy possums, southern brown bandicoots, Ligurian bees, Kangaroo Island dunnarts and various birds including glossy black cockatoos. NASA estimated that the number of dead koalas could be as high as 25,000 or about half the total population of the species on the island. A quarter of the beehives of the Ligurian honey bees that inhabited the Island were believed to have been destroyed. Both the Kangaroo Island dunnart and Kangaroo Island subspecies of the glossy black cockatoo are endangered and are only found on Kangaroo Island. Before the fires, there were fewer than 500 Kangaroo Island dunnarts and about 380 Kangaroo Island glossy black cockatoos.
The loss of an estimated 8,000 koalas (Phascolarctos cinereus) caused concerns. They are considered vulnerable to extinction, though not functionally extinct.
Due to the extremely dry conditions, some remnant areas of rainforest that—unlike most Australian vegetation—have not evolved and adapted to fire, were burnt in 2019–2020. This may have permanently reduced the extent of the 80-million year old rainforests, which were already scarce due to previous land clearing for agriculture and logging. Smaller, isolated remnant pockets of rainforest were totally destroyed and unlikely to recover, leading to local extinctions of rainforest flora and fauna. It was notable that the normally wet rainforest areas on the margins of schlerophyll forest, did not perform their usual role as a barrier to the spread of fire but were burnt.
Moreover, the fires caused widespread phytoplankton blooms by causing oceanic deposition of wildfire aerosols, enhancing marine productivity. While these increased oceanic carbon dioxide uptake, the amount – estimated to be slightly more than 152±83.5 million tons – did not counterbalance the ~715 million tons of CO2 the fires emitted."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Archaeological effects
Fire damaged 500-year-old rock art at Anaiwan in northern New South Wales, with the intense and rapid temperature change of the fires cracking the granite rock. This caused panels of art to fracture and fall off the huge boulders that contain the galleries of art.
At the Budj Bim heritage areas in Victoria the Gunditjmara people reported that when they inspected the site after fires moved across it, they found ancient channels and ponds that were newly visible after the fires burned much of the vegetation off the landscape.
After fire burnt out a creek on a property at Cobargo, NSW, on New Year's Eve, a boomerang carved by stone artefact was found."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Domestic response
New South Wales
The New South Wales Rural Fire Service is the lead agency for bush fires in New South Wales and formed the bulk of the primary response to the fires, mobilising thousands of firefighters and several hundred firefighting vehicles. They were heavily supported by Fire & Rescue New South Wales, as well as the NSW National Parks & Wildlife Service and the Forestry Corporation of NSW, who hold jurisdiction over national parks and forests across the state respectively. Additional local firefighting resources were also used from agencies such as Air Services Australia and Sydney Trains.
Numerous interstate agencies deployed firefighting resources into New South Wales, including several hundred firefighters from the Victorian Country Fire Authority, along with crews from the Melbourne Metropolitan Fire Brigade, the South Australian Country Fire Service, the South Australian Metropolitan Fire Service, the South Australian Department of Environment and Water, and the Queensland Fire and Emergency Service.
Despite the substantial loss of property and loss of life, firefighters as of January 2020 managed to save over 16,000 structures from direct fire impact in addition to countless lives.
Multiple other New South Wales emergency services assisted in the response, including NSW Ambulance that provided ongoing pre-hospital care to victims of the fires including firefighters, NSW Police that worked to ensure public safety was maintained through road closures and evacuations and the NSW State Emergency Service that assisted with logistical support. With brush-tailed rock-wallabies and much of the indigenous wildlife population in parts of New South Wales were left without food or water, the NSW National Parks & Wildlife Service airdropped approximately 1,800 kilograms (4,000 lb) vegetables on the known habitats. A joint operation by the NSW National Parks & Wildlife Service and NSW Rural Fire Service was mounted to protect the critically endangered Wollemia pines growing in Wollemi National Park. Fire retardant was dropped from air tankers, and an irrigation system was installed on the ground by specialist firefighters, who were lowered into the area by winches from helicopters."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Commonwealth
On 24 December 2019, the Morrison government announced that volunteer firefighters employed in the Commonwealth public service would be offered at least 20 working days paid leave. On 29 December 2019, it announced that volunteer firefighters who have been called out for more than 10 days would be able to receive financial compensation. On 4 January 2020, it announced that it would lease four waterbombing planes including two long-range DC-10s and two medium-range for use by state and territory governments.
On 5 January 2020, the Prime Minister announced the establishment of the National Bushfire Recovery Agency, funded initially with A$2 billion, under the control of former Australian Federal Police Commissioner, Andrew Colvin."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Military
On 5 December 2019, the Australian Defence Force (ADF) commenced Operation Bushfire Assist to support state fire services in logistics, planning, capability, and operational support. Activities the ADF has undertaken as part of the Operation have included Air Force aircraft transporting firefighters and their equipment interstate, Army and Navy helicopters transporting firefighters, conducting night fire mapping, impact assessments and search and rescue flights, use of various defence facilities as coordination and information centres and for catering and accommodation for firefighters, liaison between state and federal government services, reloading and refuelling for waterbombing aircraft, deployment of personnel to assess fire damage and severity, and provision of humanitarian supplies.
On 31 December 2019, the Defence Minister announced the ADF would provide assistance to East Gippsland, in particular the isolated high-fire-risk town of Mallacoota, deploying helicopters including a CH-47 Chinook and C-27J Spartan military transport aircraft to be based at RAAF Base East Sale and two naval vessels, HMAS Choules and MV Sycamore, with the vessels also able to assist in south-east New South Wales if required. On 1 January 2020, the ADF deployed additional military staff establishing the Victorian Joint Task Force 646 (Army Reserve 4th Brigade) and the following day the New South Wales Joint Task Force 1110 (Army Reserve 5th Brigade). On 3 January 2020, HMAS Choules and MV Sycamore evacuated civilians from Mallacoota bound for Westernport.
On 4 January 2020, following a meeting of the National Security Committee, the Morrison government announced a compulsory call-out of Army Reserve brigades to deploy up to 3,000 reserve personnel full-time to assist with in the Operation. Additionally, Defence announced that it would deploy HMAS Adelaide to support other Navy ships in evacuations and relief, as well additional Chinook helicopters and military transport aircraft to RAAF Base East Sale. The same day, Chinook helicopters evacuated civilians from Omeo; and Spartan aircraft evacuated civilians from Mallacoota on 5 January."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Community organizations
The response of volunteer organisations and charities was also considerable, with WIRES Wildlife Rescue working to rescue and treat injured wildlife, Rapid Relief Team Australia raising money for victims, providing meals for firefighters and assisting with two bulk water tankers, Team Rubicon Australia providing debris removal and helping with the cleanup of fire affected areas, the Animal Welfare League fundraising and assisting injured animals, and St John Ambulance Australia and Australian Red Cross providing support at evacuation centres across New South Wales.
On 1 December 2019 WWF-Australia launched the ""Towards Two Billion Trees"" plan to aid the koala bushfire recovery. It aims to stop excessive tree-clearing, protect the existing trees and forests, and restore native habitat that has been lost. The ten-point plan for the next ten years foresees to grow 1.56 billion new trees and save 780 million trees.
On 4 January 2020 Architects Assist was established, representing over 600 Australian architecture firms providing their services pro bono to the individuals and communities affected by the bushfires (together with approximately 1500 architecture student volunteers)."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"International response
Political figures from outside Australia including Donald Trump, Cory Booker, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Bernie Sanders, Greta Thunberg, and Elizabeth Warren all publicly commented about the fires. People in the entertainment industry such as Tina Arena, Patricia Arquette, Cate Blanchett, Russell Crowe, Ellen DeGeneres, Selena Gomez, Halsey, Nicole Kidman, Lizzo, Bette Midler, Pink, Margot Robbie, Paul Stanley, Jay Park, Jonathan Van Ness, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and Rosé also made statements about the fires. Some of the aforementioned people have also donated or raised funds.
On 4 January 2020, Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh sent a message of condolence to Governor-General David Hurley, sending their ""thoughts and prayers to all Australians at this difficult time"". The Queen indicated in her message that she was ""deeply saddened"" to hear of the fires and their devastating impact on the country, and expressed her thanks to emergency service workers. On 8 January 2020, Prince Charles issued a video message expressing his despair at the ""appalling horror"" of the fires. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex also issued messages to Australia, Crown Princess Mary of Denmark, who is of Australian heritage, published an open letter where she and her husband, Crown Prince Frederik, expressed their condolences to the victims and respect for the firefighters."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"International aid
Canada
Four deployments totalling 87 Canadian firefighters were sent through the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre. It was the first time since 2009 that Canadian personnel were deployed to Australia. The Canadian government also sent a CC-17 plane of the Royal Canadian Air Force with 15 personnel on 27 January to further aid with transport and provide airlift support."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Fiji
The government of Fiji deployed the Fiji Military Forces humanitarian assistance and disaster relief platoon and engineers to assist in the bush fire rehabilitation."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"France
On 6 January, French President Emmanuel Macron stated he could help out with the bushfires. A team of five French firefighting experts arrived in Australia on 9 January to determine possible options for French and European support."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Indonesia
On 1 February, (Satuan Setingkat Peloton) SST Zeni, an Army engineering platoon unit, would be dispatched to Australia. A total of 38 personnel, consist of 26 army engineers, 6 Korps Marinir personnel, 4 Air Force facility construction personnel, and 2 TNI Medical Department personnel. The team landed in RAAF Base Richmond in New South Wales on the same day, according to the Indonesian Embassy on 3 February 2020, the troops will be deployed on the Blue Mountains area."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Japan
On 15 January, the Japanese government sent two C-130 aircraft of the JASDF, along with 70 other Self-Defense Force personnel to assist in transport and other efforts in combating the bushfires. The aircraft left Komaki Air Base and flew to RAAF Base Richmond in New South Wales the next day."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Malaysia
On 5 January, Malaysia offered its assistance through a statement by Deputy Prime Minister Wan Azizah Wan Ismail. On 13 January, Malaysia officially deployed over forty firefighters to assist with the bushfires. Twenty others from government agencies would also be involved with the mission."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"New Zealand
Over fifty New Zealanders were deployed to Australia in both direct fire fighting and support roles. In January 2020, New Zealand also deployed elements of the Royal New Zealand Air Force and New Zealand Army including three NH90 helicopters, two Army combat engineer sections, and a command element. A specialist six person animal disaster response team were deployed by non-profit Animal Evac New Zealand on 8 January to New South Wales, assisting with wildlife rescue and supported by SAFE. The team was the first international specialist animal rescuers to arrive and included vets, animal management officers as well as animal disaster and technical animal rescue experts. A second team of four arrived on 13 January. The teams partnered with local wildlife centres to successfully rescue and relocate several injured animals. as well as advising residents in fire danger zones on their animal evacuation plans."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Papua New Guinea
The Government of Papua New Guinea offered to send 1,000 military and other personnel to Australia to assist with the response to the bushfires. Australia accepted 100 Papua New Guinea Defence Force personnel."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"The Philippines
The Philippine Red Cross pledged to donate $100K to Australia, while various Filipino personalities pledged support for the victims of the bush fires. The women-led Teduray people of Maguindanao initiated a sacred rain-making ritual for Australian victims, calling on the fire goddess Frayag Sarif's intercession to bring rain to the country."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Singapore
Singapore deployed two Chinook helicopters and 42 Singapore Armed Forces personnel stationed at Oakey Army Aviation Centre to RAAF Base East Sale in Victoria."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"United Arab Emirates
The United Arab Emirates sent 200 volunteers from the Emirates Red Crescent to help fight the fire, including Emirati astronaut Sultan Al Neyadi. A Twitter campaign and hashtag #mateshelpmates was launched by the Dubai Expo 2020 aiming to raise donations to help those affected by the fires in Australia. To increase awareness, Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world's tallest tower, lit up in solidarity with Australia."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,United States
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"The United States deployed 362 firefighters, including 222 from the United States Department of the Interior, to Australia to help combat the fires. Firefighters from other parts of the US also helped with the fires., On 23 January, three US firefighters died in the crash of a C-130 fire fighting aircraft, north east of Cooma in New South Wales."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Other countries
Several other countries have offered assistance:"
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"On 7 January, Denmark offered 50 firefighters via the Danish Emergency Management Agency that were on a standby and could move on a short notice, but it was deemed unnecessary by the Australian Government, which at that point said that they had sufficient material, manpower and organisation to deal with the remaining fires.
On 6 January 2020, the Romanian Ministry of Internal Affairs responded to the Civil Protection Mechanism (EUCPM) and prepared 70 firefighters to be deployed in Australia through the Emergency Response Coordination Centre (ERCC) of the European Union. Australia rejected this, as well as the EU call for more bushfire help.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu tweeted that Turkey is ready to provide all required assistance, while Turkey's Melbourne consulate donated $14,500 to Queensland Fire and Emergency Services.
The Foreign Ministry of Ukraine notified Australia that the Ukrainian government is ready to send 200 seasoned firefighters to help fight the fires. Ukraine's Foreign Minister also noted that ""The fires in Australia have not left the Ukrainians indifferent.""
Some Pacific nations have also stated that they could send some aid."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Causes
Australia is one of the most fire-prone countries on earth, and bushfires form part of the natural cycle of its landscapes. However, factors such as climate trends, weather patterns and vegetation management by humans can all contribute to the intensity of bushfire seasons, and the most destructive fires in Australian history have usually been preceded by extreme high temperatures, low relative humidity and strong winds, which combine to create ideal conditions for the rapid spread of fire.
Scientific experts and land management agencies agree that severely below average fuel moisture attributed to record-breaking temperatures and drought, accompanied by severe fire weather, are the primary causes of the 2019–20 Australian bushfire season, and that these are likely to have been exacerbated by long-term trends of warmer and drier weather observed over the Australian land mass. Nonetheless, the political nature of many of the crisis and its associated issues has also resulted in the circulation of large amounts of disinformation regarding the causes of the fire activity, to the neglect of credible scientific research, expert opinion, and previous government inquiries."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Ignition
Lightning was the major cause of ignition of fires during the 2019–20 fire crisis in NSW and Victoria.  The official NSW Bushfires Inquiry (with advice from the New South Wales Rural Fire Service) concluded ""Lightning, often in remote areas, started most of the bush fires that became very large, damaging and hard to suppress.""
The NSW Bushfire Inquiry report found that, while thunderstorm activity was comparable to a normal year, lightning strikes were more likely to start a fire due to hot, dry conditions. Additionally, some fires became so large they generated pyrocumulus clouds and dry lightning, sparking more blazes.
The Inquiry also noted a small percentage of fires started from human causes, (including powerlines, machinery and amateur hazard reduction burns on private rural properties) but that fires caused by suspected arson were a ""very small proportion of the area burnt"".
Further, ABC News reported arson was of little impact – accounting for around 1% of NSW fires and 0.3% of Victorian fires by 18 January 2020. The NSW Rural Fire Service referred numerous individuals to the NSW Police; 24 people were charged with arson, allegedly starting bushfires. Queensland police reported that 114 out of 1,068 fires ""were found to be deliberately or maliciously lit""."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Drought and temperature
A likely contributor to the bushfire crisis was the ongoing drought in eastern Australia – the most severe on record for some fire affected areas. Exacerbating the effects of diminished rainfall in this drought has been a record breaking run of above average monthly temperatures, lasting 36 months to October 2019. The combination of heat and drought caused critical low fuel moisture content, with Victoria Country Fire Authority Response Controller Gavin Freeman stating that the ""underlying dryness"" of the bush has led to exceptionally high fire danger. Although Australia has naturally experienced high rainfall variability and hot summers for millennia, the country has experienced an increase of nearly 1.0 °C (1.8 °F) in average annual temperatures since 1900, decreases in average rainfall in southeastern Australia since 1990, with the country's worst recorded droughts occurring within the 21st century. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) stated that on account of projected future climate change, hot days will become more frequent and hotter (very high confidence), and the time in drought is projected to increase over southern Australia (high confidence). In October 2019 David Littleproud, the Australian Minister for Water Resources, stated that he ""totally accepts"" the link between climate change and drought in Australia, as someone who has experienced it first hand."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Climate change
Climate and fire experts agree that climate change is a factor known to result in increased fire frequency and intensity in south east Australia, and although it should not be considered as the sole cause of the 2019–20 Australian fires, climate change is considered very likely to have contributed to the unprecedented extent and severity of the fires.
Australian scientific organisations, including the CSIRO clearly acknowledged the role of climate change and record drought in the unprecedented bushfire season. The Australian Academy of Science stated ""The scientific evidence base shows that as the world warms due to human induced climate change, we experience an increase in the frequency and severity of extreme weather events.""
The crisis has led to calls for more action to combat climate change. In December 2019, Australia had been ranked worst in terms of policy, and sixth worst overall, out of 57 countries assessed on the Climate Change Performance Index, with the Morrison government labelled ""an increasingly regressive force."" Originally downplaying the role of climate change in causing the fires, Prime Minister Morrison eventually conceded that climate change was one of ""many factors"" involved and added that Australia was ""playing its part"" in the international effort against climate change. That said, the Morrison government has received some criticism on its 2030 emission reduction targets. Several members of the governing Liberal Party were criticised internationally for climate change denial, with backbencher Craig Kelly called ""disgraceful"" during an interview with the hosts of Good Morning Britain for denying any link between climate change and the fires, and the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation receiving ""angry"" feedback from listeners after airing an interview in which former Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott said the world was ""in the grip of a climate cult."" Prior to the worst phases of the bushfires, in an interview in November 2019, former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull said the party had struggled with the issue of climate change denial for more than a decade because it had become an issue of ""identity"" rather than fact, and criticised News Corporation for being a ""long-time promoter"" of climate denialism. The chief executive of the Council of Small Business Organisations Australia said bushfire preparations had been ""stymied"" by the federal government, because ""there are people within government who firmly believe there is no such thing as climate change or that human beings don't have an impact upon it, and they are adamant that no extra work or extra effort should ever happen because they don't believe in climate change.""
The NSW Bushfire Inquiry into the causes of the fires published their findings in July 2020. The Inquiry found that climate change played a major role in the summer's fires."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Public reaction and speculation over causes
During, and immediately after the crisis, Australian public concern over climate change increased, reflecting the scientific evidence that climate change had exacerbated the fires. This increased criticism of the conservative government's climate policy. Protests were held in the midst of the crisis, although some were criticised for their timing and use of resources, including by the Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews.
Conservative politicians and media primarily blamed a lack of prescribed burning and fire break management, although such assertion has subsequently been heavily criticised and disproven by scientific experts. Accompanying this was a claim that environmental groups were responsible for the crisis by inhibiting prescribed burning, despite environmental groups holding negligible political power.
Furthermore, the amount of prescribed burning in southeastern Australia has been stated to have increased in recent years, following the recommendation for increased prescribed burning from the 2009 Black Saturday Royal Commission. Experts suggested that prescribed burning has been more difficult to achieve given recent trends towards warmer and dryer conditions. Experts have also cast skepticism on the effectiveness of fuel reduction treatments, citing research that suggests that prescribed burning does little to stop bushfire and save property in south east Australia, with climate and weather conditions having primary influence.
The effect of previous prescribed burns in slowing the 2019–20 Australian fires and assisting fire suppression efforts remains unclear, although in many instances the fires were observed to burn through cleared agricultural land and forest recently affected by unplanned and prescribed burns, owing to the extreme weather conditions and dryness of vegetation. Of particular note, the damaging Currowan fire burnt through a large area of Morton National Park subject in 2017 to one of the largest prescribed burns ever successfully conducted in NSW. In relation to the blame of prescribed burning, Professor of Pyrogeography and Fire Science David Bowman stated ""These are very tired and very old conspiracy theories that get a run after most major fires,"" and that they were ""an obvious attempt to deflect the conversation away from climate change."" In the lead up to another Federal inquiry into state land management, Professor of Bushfire Behaviour and Management Trent Penman added ""If there was a silver bullet on bushfires we'd have found it by now, after the 51 [bushfire] inquiries since 1939,"" and that ""blindly putting money into prescribed burning won't stop the problem"". Despite evidence to suggest that fuel loads played a minimal role in the 2019–20 Australian fires, there are calls to open up Australian protected lands to industry, particularly logging and grazing, to reduce fire fuel, with these calls having so far mainly stemmed from individuals and businesses with interests in such industries, and have resulted in the circulation of large amounts of disinformation."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Misinformation and contested reporting
During, and immediately after the fire season, misinformation and false reports circulated on various commercial media outlets and social media, including claims about the extent of the fires, its precedents and causes, and matters like funding of fire fighting services."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Misleading maps and graphics
A number of maps giving an exaggerated impression of Australia's fires went viral online, and were published by major news outlets. It was reported by news.com.au that ""Some bushfire maps have been criticised for misleading people about the location and size of the fires, with a map used by the ABC in the US appearing to show the entire east coast of Australia on fire, as well as a strange line of fires through the centre of the country... "" One image created by Anthony Hearsey spread widely on Twitter and by celebrities including Rihanna was wrongly interpreted as a map showing the live extent of fires, when in fact it sought to present one month of data of locations where fire was detected, according to NASA's Fire Information for Resource Management System. Maps showing ""hotspots"" were spread online as comprehensive fire maps, giving an exaggerated impression of the extent of fires. Photographs of previous Australian bushfires were also being wrongly published as current and maps that exaggerate the extent of the fires, or include both past and present fires."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Exaggerated extent of arson
The Guardian reported ""Bot and troll accounts are involved in a 'disinformation campaign' exaggerating the role of arson in Australia's bushfire disaster, social media analysis suggests... The false claims are, in some cases, used to undermine the link between the current bushfires and the longer, more intense fire seasons brought about by climate change."" The report cited a study by Queensland University of Technology senior lecturer on social network analysis Dr Timothy Graham, who examined content published on the #arsonemergency hashtag on Twitter. Giovanni Torre wrote for The Telegraph that ""Australia's bushfire crisis has led to what appears to be a deliberate misinformation campaign started by climate-change deniers claiming arson is the primary cause of the ongoing fires...
Social media accounts, including Donald Trump Jr's Twitter account, circulated the false claim that 183 people had been arrested for arson during the Australian fire crisis...""  In 2021, the Australian Press Council determined the news report that 183 arsonists had been arrested ""was not misleading"".  183 people were subject to legal action, but only 24 for ""deliberately-lit bushfires"". An opinion piece for The Conversation website stated ""In the first week of 2020, hashtag #ArsonEmergency became the focal point of a new online narrative surrounding the bushfire crisis. The message: the cause is arson, not climate change. Police and bushfire services (and some journalists) have contradicted this claim [...] We’ve observed both troll and bot accounts spouting disinformation regarding the bushfires on Twitter."" The article also argued that a disinformation was underway to downplay the role of climate change in causing the fires. The vice.com website wrote ""Research conducted by the Queensland University of Technology showed that Twitter accounts with the characteristics of bots or trolls were spreading disinformation about the responsibility of arsonists and Greens."" The Guardian accused News Corp of furthering arson disinformation.
RMIT's FactCheck found no evidence to support the claims of arson being a major factor in the bushfires."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Funding for the Rural Fire Service
Incorrect reports were disseminated that the New South Wales Government, led by Premier Gladys Berejiklian, had cut funding to fire services. NSW Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons, in response to the funding cut claims, stated ""that it is rubbish, it is misinformation, it's being misrepresented and I think it is disgracefully being misrepresented here today"". He also stated that ""not only has our budget not been cut, we are enjoying record budgets. We have got more money today than we have ever had before in the history of the organisation"". Debate and controversy continue to surround previous funding cuts to fire management agencies, with other reports noting recent funding cuts to the National Parks & Wildlife Service, which is responsible for the planning and enforcement of prescribed burns in NSW national parks."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Hazard reduction
Along with other misinformation, claims were made that Australian Greens politicians had control over - and blocked - hazard reduction efforts by fire services. The Greens' policy supports hazard reduction, and did so at the time. Additionally, as state governments are responsible for fire management, and the Greens at the time held only a small percent of seats in any state parliament, it is unclear how they could have had any control over fire management practices.
However, as The Guardian reports ""Despite the evidence, a claim persists that a major contributing factor of Australia's devastating fire season... is not climate change but a conspiracy by environmentalists to 'lock up' national parks and prevent hazard reduction activities such as prescribed burning and clearing of the forest floor""."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Other false reports
Fires would clear land to benefit a high-speed rail project.
Islamic State was somehow responsible or involved.
The fires were a false flag operation deliberately lit by climate change activists."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Political response
Ongoing political and social debate has surrounded many aspects of the 2019–20 Australian fire crisis, particularly regarding the causes and future prevention of such fire activity, and the role of climate change. Amid a conservative government that has received noted criticism for its climate change inaction and support for fossil fuel industries, growing acknowledgement within the nation's politics and society of the issue of climate change in Australia resulted in a highly political agenda to the crisis response. The governing Liberal and National parties, accompanied by numerous news outlets associated with climate change denial, firmly deflected responsibility away from the record-breaking drought affecting the country and its associated links to climate change observations and projections.
Conversely, scientific experts have asserted the influence of climate change, drought, prolonged fire weather, and contextualised the limited role of prescribed burning and arson in influencing the crisis. The political and social response to the crisis has been marked notably by political blame shifting, the circulation of large amounts of disinformation, and political disregard for scientific research, expert opinion, and previous government inquiries.
On 24 January, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian and NSW Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons announced a state memorial for people impacted by the bushfires in New South Wales, which was held on 23 February at Sydney Olympic Park."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Criticism and controversy
Further controversy surrounded prime minister Scott Morrison for taking an overseas family holiday to Hawaii, United States, during the bushfires. These criticisms also applied to New South Wales Minister for Emergency Services David Elliot, who went for a holiday in Europe. Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk was also criticised for holidaying on a cruise ship while fires were active in the state.
While travelling throughout fire-affected towns in New South Wales, Morrison was filmed attempting to shake the hands of two residents in Cobargo who had refused to shake his outstretched hand. Morrison was criticised for grabbing and then shaking their hands despite their refusals. In an interview with Andrew Constance, NSW Liberal MP for Bega, Constance described the incident stating ""the locals probably gave him the welcome he probably deserved"". Morrison did not appear concerned with the criticism, later stating, ""people are angry, and if people want to direct that at me, that is up to them"".
On 4 January, volunteer firefighter Paul Parker, from Nelligen, rose to fame after he stopped his firetruck next to a Channel 7 news crew, and used colourful language to denounce what he perceived as an inadequate response by Morrison.
Soon after, Morrison released a video on behalf of the Liberal Party regarding deployment of military assets to respond to the bushfire crisis, for which he was widely criticised. The video was perceived as an inappropriate and an untimely political advertisement, with former ABC broadcaster Barrie Cassidy calling it ""absolutely obscene,"" journalist Peter van Onselen saying it was ""beyond inappropriate"", and British political commentator Piers Morgan characterising it as ""one of the most tone-deaf things I've ever seen a country's leader put out during a crisis."" The Australian Defence Association, a public-interest watchdog dealing with defence issues, said the video was ""milking ADF support to civil agencies fighting bushfires"" and was a ""clear breach of the (reciprocal) non-partisanship convention applying to both the ADF & Ministers/MPs."" NSW Rural Fire Service Commissioner Fitzsimmons said it was ""disappointing"" to learn of the announcement of military assistance from the media and not the government directly. Morrison was further criticised for a ""donate"" button on a Liberal Party website page which misleadingly led to a donations page for the Liberal Party itself, rather than bushfire relief; the button was later removed. In 2021 the documentary film Burning by Eva Orner addressed the 2019–2020 Australian bushfires from several different perspectives, placing a particular focus on the inactions of Morrison.
English writer and journalist Jeremy Clarkson was reprimanded for writing a column that stated ""God didn't want people to live in Australia"", where he suggested Anglo Australian residents to ""come home"" because Australia is ""God's laboratory"" and is a ""place far, far away where he could house all his experiments that had gone wrong"". He then concluded, ""Plainly, God is embarrassed. Because he's decided to set fire to it...which means people must accept that Australia isn't meant for human habitation"". Although Clarkson was attempting to be humorous with his comments, he was heavily criticised on social media for being insensitive and disrespectful to the victims."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Royal commission and other inquiries
On 12 January 2020, the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison outlined a proposal to establish a royal commission into the bushfires. Requiring the approval of the state and territory governments, the Commonwealth Government drafted terms of reference. A number of organisations raised objections to the commission of inquiry, citing cost, length and the emotionally exhausting process; and that previous inquiries had failed to implement many of their recommendations. On 20 February 2020, Morrison released the letters patent confirming the establishment of the Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements, chaired by Air Chief Marshal Mark Binskin  (Retd), a former Chief of the Australian Defence Force, and supported by the Hon Dr Annabelle Bennett  and Professor Andrew Macintosh, a specialist in climate risk and impact management. The final report was published on 30 October 2020, and contained 80 recommendations across 21 topics.
On 5 December 2019 David Littleproud, the Minister for natural disasters and emergency management, announced that the House of Representatives Standing Committee on the Environment and Energy would conduct an inquiry into the ‘efficacy of past and current vegetation and land management policy, practice and legislation and their effect on the intensity and frequency of bushfires and subsequent risk to property, life and the environment’. The Royal Commission's report was presented to the Governor-General on 28 October 2020 and published on 30 October 2020. On 14 January 2020, the Victorian Premier, Daniel Andrews, announced an independent investigation into the 2019–2020 bushfire season in Victoria. On 31 January 2020, the NSW Premier, Gladys Berejiklian announced an independent investigation to review the causes, preparation and response to the bushfires in New South Wales."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Other names
The term black summer has become a common term for the 2019–20 bushfire season, for example, the Australian Red Cross uses this phrase as a blanket term for the fires. An episode of Four Corners titled Black Summer comprised an audio-visual media collation of material provided by people impacted by bushfires and was broadcast in early February 2020. The Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, in an address to the Australian Parliament labelled the bushfire season as the black summer as he outlined a proposal to establish a royal commission into the bushfires:"
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"These fires are yet to end and danger is still before us in many, many places, but today we gather to mourn, honour, reflect and begin to learn from the black summer that continues."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Donations
Philanthropists, corporate organisations, celebrities, and sportspeople donated to various fundraising appeals for bushfire victims and firefighters; estimated to total A$500 million as of 19 January 2020. Following a representative sample, a report issued by the Fundraising Institute of Australia estimated that 53 percent of all adult Australians donated to a bushfire appeal. 
Andrew Forrest and his wife, Nicola, donated A$70 million; and the Paul Ramsay Foundation donated A$30 million. In November, James Packer pledged A$1 million to support the NSWRFS. As the impact of the bushfire season spread, the Crown Resorts Foundation and the Packer family Foundation pledged a further A$4 million to volunteer fire services in NSW, Victoria and Western Australia – all states in which Crown has resorts. The Murdoch family donated A$5 million; the Micky and Madeleine Arison Family Foundation, A$1.5 million; and donations of A$1 million each were received from the Pratt Foundation, John and Pauline Gandel, Mike Cannon-Brookes, Scott Farquhar, and the Haines and the Perich families. Justin Hemmes donated A$500,000.
Corporate organisations to make donations or pledges included the Seven Group and Kerry Stokes' private investment firm, ACE Capital Equity, a combined total of A$10 million; Tim Cook from Apple, an undisclosed amount; the NAB and News Corp Australia, A$5 million each; Coles Group, A$4 million (of which A$3 million was in gift cards); the Australian Football League, A$2.5 million; BHP, A$2 million; Westpac and Woolworths, A$1.5 million each; Facebook, A$1.25 million; and Amazon, the ANZ Bank, the Atlassian Foundation, the Commonwealth Bank, Orica, Qantas, and Rio Tinto, A$1 million each; and Canva and the San Diego Zoo, A$500,000 each.
Leonardo DiCaprio donated US$3 million (A$3.4 million) via Earth Alliance; Kylie Jenner, US$1 million; Ellen DeGeneres, A$1.5 million; and donations of A$1 million were received from Sir Elton John and Chris Hemsworth and family. Pink donated US$500,000 (A$720,000), tweeting that she is ""totally devastated watching what is happening in Australia right now."" Metallica donated A$750,000; and donations of A$500,000 were received from Nicole Kidman and her husband, Keith Urban, Kylie and Dannii Minogue and their family, and Bette Midler. The Wiggles performed a concert on 17 and 18 January, and on 16 February at Stadium Australia in Sydney, the Fire Fight Australia concert featured local and international acts. The Down to Earth benefit concert raised over A$1 million and featured performances from Angus & Julia Stone, Tash Sultana, Gang Of Youths, and others.
Tennis players, led by Nick Kyrgios, pledged to donate money for every ace served during the Australian summer of tennis. Many cricket players, such as international representatives Chris Lynn, Glenn Maxwell, D'Arcy Short, Matthew Renshaw and Fawad Ahmed pledged to donate money for every wicket and/or six during the remainder of the Australian cricket season. Shane Warne and Jeff Thomson, retired Australian cricketers, donated their baggy green Test cricket caps and Thomson also donated a playing vest for online auction. Warne's cap was purchased by the Commonwealth Bank with a bid of A$1,007,500; and Russell Crowe's Rabbitohs cap was auctioned with a winning bid in excess of A$500,000. Footballer Mathew Ryan, goalkeeper for Premier League club Brighton & Hove Albion and the Australia national team announced he'll donate $500 for every registered save by an English Premier League goalkeeper on the weekend of 11–12 January 2020. Australian stars who were playing in the 2019–20 NBA season collectively donated in excess of A$1 million; and Lewis Hamilton, a Formula One driver, donated US$500,000.
Comedian Celeste Barber launched a fundraising appeal with a target of raising A$15,000, however it went on to raise over A$50 million, making it the largest fundraiser ever held on Facebook. A telethon conducted with the Sydney New Year's Eve fireworks raised more than A$2 million.
Irish YouTuber Jacksepticeye raised over $200,000 on 26 January through a charity live stream.
The German search engine Ecosia gave approximately €19200 to Reforest New. They have given all the profits from 23 January 2020 to the Reforest New project. The trees are being planted in Byron Bay."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Scams and fraud
Multiple media outlets reported that the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission received 86 reports of bushfire-related scams. It came as increased requests for cash driven donations leveraging crowdfunding platforms like GoFundMe, or as a result of false links posted on Twitter. It prompted some organisations to provide a list of approved and vetted charities online to reduce fraud.
In January 2020 a parliamentary inquiry into the NSW government's council grants scandal was expanded to scrutinise allegations of pork barrelling after it was revealed only $2.5 million of the $177 million first round relief fund was allocated to NSW Labor-held seats. Although the practice is not illegal in Australia it has been widely perceived as a form of sanctioned corrupt conduct."
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"See also
2020s in political history
2020s in environmental history"
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Climate of Australia
Fire ecology § Australian eucalypt forests
List of fires and impacts of the 2019-20 Australian bushfire season
List of major bushfires in Australia
List of natural disasters in Australia
List of wildfires
List of largest fires of the 21st-century
Wildfire § Prevention"
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"Notes
References
External links"
2019–20 Australian bushfire season,"EarthWindMap – Current global map of airborne particulates less than 1 micrometre in diameter, including smoke, centred on Australia
MyFireWatch – Government of Western Australia site mapping fires and vegetation every 2–4 hours from satellite data
Fanner, David; Leaver, Becca; Ball, Andy; et al. (February 2020). ""Counting the cost of the bushfires: Australia's summer of dread"". The Guardian. A collection of articles, ahead of a new series entitled The frontline: inside Australia's climate emergency.
How heat and drought turned Australia into a tinderbox ABC News (19 February 2020). Storyline covering events, with satellite imagery."
Constitution of Australia,"The Constitution of Australia (also known as the Commonwealth Constitution) is the fundamental law that governs the political structure of Australia.  It is a written constitution, that establishes the country as a federation under a constitutional monarchy governed with a parliamentary system. Its eight chapters sets down the structure and powers of the three constituent parts of the federal level of government: the Parliament, the Executive Government and the Judicature.
The Constitution was drafted between 1891 and 1898 at a series of conventions conducted by representatives of the six self-governing British colonies in Australia: New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia and Tasmania. This final draft was then approved by each state in a series of referendums from 1898 to 1900. The agreed constitution was transmitted to London where, after some minor modifications, it was enacted as section 9 of the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900, an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It came into effect on 1 January 1901 at which point the six colonies became states within the new Commonwealth of Australia.
The Constitution is the primary, but not exclusive, source of Australian constitutional law, alongside constitutional conventions, state constitutions, the Statute of Westminster 1931, the Australia Acts 1986, prerogative instruments and judicial interpretations of these laws by the  High Court of Australia.
The document may only be amended by referendum, through the procedure set out in section 128. This requires a double majority: a nationwide majority as well as a majority of voters in a majority of states. Only eight of the 45 proposed amendments put to a referendum have passed. Proposals to amend the document to recognise Indigenous Australians and to become a republic are the subject of significant contemporary debate. The most recent referendum occurred on 14 October 2023, in which a proposed amendment to establish an Indigenous Voice to Parliament was rejected."
Constitution of Australia,"History
Prior to Federation
Political movements to federate the Australian colonies grew to prominence in the mid 19th century. Multiple motivations existed for increased political co-operation between the colonies; including a desire to regulate inter-colonial tariffs.
Tensions existed, however, between the larger colonies and the smaller ones, and in the degree to which each colony embraced protectionist policies. Those tensions and the outbreak of the American Civil War harmed the political case for federalism in the 1850s and 1860s.
In 1889 the Federal Council of Australasia was established. It arose out of a fear of the growing presence of German and French colonies in the Pacific, and a growing Australian identity. The council could legislate on certain subjects but did not have a permanent secretariat, an executive, or independent source of revenue. Perhaps most problematically New South Wales, the largest colony, did not join the body.
A series of conferences to discuss federalism was promoted by the premier of New South Wales Henry Parkes; the first held in 1890 at Melbourne, and another at Sydney in 1891. These conferences were attended by most colonial leaders.
By the 1891 conference the federalist cause gained momentum. Discussion turned to what the proper system of federal government ought to be. A draft constitution was drawn up at the conference under the guidance of Sir Samuel Griffith, but these meetings lacked popular support. An additional problem was that this draft constitution sidestepped some critical issues like tariff policy. The 1891 draft was submitted to colonial parliaments; however, it lapsed in New South Wales. After that event other colonies were unwilling to proceed.
In 1895, the six premiers of the Australian colonies agreed to establish a new convention by popular vote. The convention met over the course of a year from 1897 to 1898. The meetings produced a new draft which contained substantially the same principles of government as the 1891 draft, but with added provisions for responsible government.
Some delegates to the 1898 constitutional convention favoured a section similar to the bill of rights of the United States Constitution, but this was decided against. This remains the case, with the Constitution only protecting a small and limited number of constitutional rights.
To ensure popular support, the 1898 draft was presented to the electors of each colony. After one failed attempt, an amended draft was submitted to the electors of each colony except Western Australia. After ratification by the five colonies, the bill was presented to the British Imperial Parliament with an address requesting Queen Victoria to enact the bill.
Prior to the bill's enactment, a final change was made to ensure that a right of appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council from the High Court remained. Several colonial chief justices and other conservative and financial interests had called for amendments to be made in London, with the British government also objecting to the proposed bill. Businessmen feared that an Australian court would be unduly influenced by local interests, whilst the UK wished to ensure that no local judgments would cause embarrassment internationally or within the British Empire. Additionally, the restriction went against plans to create a new court of appeal for the whole empire. Following the amendment, restrictions on Privy Council appeals for some constitutional cases remained, with any further restrictions on appeals imposed by the Australian Parliament required to be ""reserved for Her Majesty's Pleasure"", meaning subject to approval by the UK government.
After this and some other minor changes, the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act became law after receiving royal assent on 9 July 1900. This act, also known as the covering act, also authorised the Queen to proclaim the actual act of federation, which was done by Queen Victoria on 17 September 1900, to take effect on 1 January 1901. Prior to this Western Australia then agreed to join the Commonwealth to ensure it would be an ""original state"" alongside the other five colonies."
Constitution of Australia,"After Federation
At Federation, six British colonies became a single federated nation. Some British Imperial laws remained in force, together with those of the Australian colonies although, according to Robert Menzies, ""the real and administrative legislative independence of Australia"" was never challenged after federation.
The power of the British Imperial Parliament to legislate with effect in Australian federal law was restricted by the UK's passage in 1931 of the Statute of Westminster, adopted into Australian law by the Statute of Westminster Adoption Act 1942. The adoption act acceded Australia to the Statute of Westminster retroactively, with the date set to 3 September 1939, when Australia along with the rest of the British Empire entered World War II."
Constitution of Australia,"The Statute did not however remove the ability for the UK to appoint state governors, make laws that applied to the states and an appeal to the UK Judicial Committee of the Privy Council still existed for certain court cases. These remaining constitutional links to the United Kingdom were removed in 1986 with the passage of the Australia Act, leaving Australia fully independent of the British Parliament and legal system.
In 1988, the original copy of the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act from the Public Record Office in London was lent to Australia for the purposes of the Australian Bicentenary. The Australian Government requested permission to keep the copy, and the British Parliament agreed by passing the Australian Constitution (Public Record Copy) Act 1990. The copy was given to the National Archives of Australia.
A curiosity of the document's history is that the act remains in force as a statute of the UK, despite Australia's subsequent independence.
Under traditional legal theory, the Constitution is binding by virtue of the UK parliament's paramount authority over Australian law; however, various members of the High Court and some academics have expressed the view that the Constitution now derives its legal authority from the Australian people. Others contend this question is ultimately not a legal one, with the binding force of the Constitution the grundnorm ('basic norm') or starting premise of the Australian legal system.
Following the 2017–18 Australian parliamentary eligibility crisis, there was discussion of whether to retain or replace the current constitution. Former prime minister Bob Hawke advocated for getting ""rid of the constitution we've got"", and replacing the Constitution with a system that does not include states."
Constitution of Australia,"Commemoration
Constitution Day is observed on 9 July, the date Queen Victoria assented to the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act in 1900. The date is not a public holiday.
Constitution Day was first held on 9 July 2000 to mark the centenary of the Constitution in the lead up to the Centenary of Federation.
Further events have not been widely held since 2001. The day was revived in 2007 and is jointly organised by the National Archives and the Department of Immigration and Citizenship."
Constitution of Australia,"Document structure and text
Covering clauses
The Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900 (Imp) was granted royal assent on 9 July 1900. It consists of nine sections.
Section 9 contains the Constitution itself. Since the Constitution itself is divided into sections, sections 1 to 8 of the Act have come to be known for convenience as the ""covering clauses"". The second covering clause is interpretive, specifying that throughout the Act references to ""the Queen"" are references to ""Her Majesty's heirs and successors in the sovereignty of the United Kingdom"". Considering the emergence of a separate Australian monarchy, on one view the plain reading of this section suggests that it ensures that whoever is the monarch of the UK is automatically the monarch of Australia as well. However, other academics have suggested that this clause merely ensures that references to ""the Queen"" are not restricted to whoever was the monarch at the time of the enactment (i.e. Queen Victoria) and extends the meaning of the phrase to whoever is the currently lawful monarch under Australian succession law. As these laws are not automatically the same as those of the UK, it is theoretically possible for the separate people to be monarch of the UK and Australia via either of the countries passing diverging succession legislation. As such, to ensure that both positions are held by the same person, any succession laws must be changed in each Commonwealth realm, as was done most recently following the Perth Agreement."
Constitution of Australia,"Preamble
The Constitution Act contains a preamble. It does not discuss Western Australia due to the late date which it agreed to join Federation. The preamble names all states except Western Australia, mentions God and recognises that the Australian people have agreed to unite under the Constitution. It ends with the standard enacting clause of the United Kingdom by recognising the authority of the Queen and the UK Parliament."
Constitution of Australia,"WHEREAS the people of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, and Tasmania, humbly relying on the blessing of
Almighty God, have agreed to unite in one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain
and Ireland, and under the Constitution hereby established:
And whereas it is expedient to provide for the admission into the Commonwealth of other Australasian Colonies and possessions of the Queen:
Be it therefore enacted by the Queen's most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows:"
Constitution of Australia,"Main document
The Constitution is divided into eight chapters, collectively containing 128 sections. The first three chapters state the respective powers of the legislature, executive, and judiciary. This split into three chapters has been interpreted by the High Court in the Boilermakers' case as giving rise to a substantive separation of powers doctrine in Australia."
Constitution of Australia,"Chapter I: The Parliament
Chapter I: The Parliament sets up the legislative branch of government. It consists of the monarch, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. It provides for the number of representatives to attend each body, and provides that the representatives attending both must be chosen directly by the electorate.
Each electorate of the House of Representatives is apportioned equally by population, whereas senators are allocated unevenly between ""original states"", the territories, and future states (of which none presently exist). The House of Representatives is required to have twice as many members as the senate. Chapter I also defines the role of the monarch in relation to the Parliament, although the monarch's own powers over legislation are now regarded as defunct.
The chapter notably also provides for the powers of the Commonwealth parliament. The Parliament is not granted plenary power by the Constitution. Section 51 contains a list of topics Commonwealth Parliament is permitted to legislate upon (known as the heads of power). States may also legislate upon these topics, but Commonwealth law prevails in the event of inconsistency between the laws. Section 52 contains a brief list of topics that only the Commonwealth may legislate upon.
Some relevant powers of the governor-general are provided here: to summon, prorogue or dissolve the Parliament, and to give or refuse royal assent to federal bills.
Other matters dealt within the chapter include eligibility issues for voting or standing in elections; and miscellaneous matters regarding parliamentary procedures and allowances."
Constitution of Australia,"Chapter II: The Executive Government
Chapter II: The Executive Government sets down the powers of the executive government. Executive power is vested in the monarch and exercisable by the governor-general, who appoints the Federal Executive Council and is to act with its advice. The governor-general is empowered to appoint and dismiss ministers, and is the Commander-in-Chief of the Australian armed forces. However, the Constitution does not set out explicitly the constitutional conventions of responsible government that require the governor-general to act on the advice of ministers and the existence of cabinet and the prime minister. This was intentional on the part of the framers of the constitution, however the High Court has found these principles arise as a matter of implication."
Constitution of Australia,"Chapter III: The Judicature
Chapter III: The Judicature sets up the judicial branch. Commonwealth judicial power is vested in a federal supreme court to be called the High Court of Australia. The Parliament is authorised to create federal courts, and to vest the exercise of federal judicial power within the courts of the states. Section 74 (now defunct) provides for the circumstances in which an appeal may be made to the Queen in Council, section 75 provides for the High Court's jurisdiction, and section 80 guarantees trial by jury for indictable offences against the Commonwealth."
Constitution of Australia,"Chapter IV: Finance and Trade
Chapter IV: Finance and Trade deals with commercial matters within the federation. Section 81 prescribes all Commonwealth revenue to a Consolidated Revenue Fund, and section 90 gives the Commonwealth exclusive power over custom and excise duties. Section 92 is notable for prescribing ""absolutely free"" trade and commerce between the states. Section 96 allows the Commonwealth to make grants on terms determined by Parliament. Section 101 sets up an Inter-State Commission, now defunct."
Constitution of Australia,"Chapter V: The States
Chapter V: The States contains provisions dealing with the states and their role in the federal system. Sections 106–108 preserve the powers of the states, section 109 provides that Commonwealth legislation prevails over that of a state to the extent of any inconsistency. Section 111 provides for surrender of state territory to the Commonwealth, section 114 forbids states to raise military forces without Commonwealth permission, and also forbids the Commonwealth to tax property of a state government and the reverse. Section 116 forbids the Commonwealth to establish a national religion, to impose any religious observance or prohibit the free exercise of any religion, or to impose a religious test for office."
Constitution of Australia,"Chapter VI: New States
Chapter VI: New States allows for the establishment or admission of new states, and allows Parliament to provide for representation of the territories. It also provides that state boundaries must require the consent of a state before alteration by referendum."
Constitution of Australia,"Chapter VII: Miscellaneous
Chapter VII: Miscellaneous contains provisions on varied topics. Section 125 establishes Melbourne as the nation's temporary capital, while providing for the eventual capital to be established within New South Wales but no less than one hundred miles (160 km) from Sydney. In 1911, New South Wales ceded to the Commonwealth what is now the Australian Capital Territory. Canberra was built within it and declared the national capital in 1913. Section 126 permits the governor-general to appoint deputies. Section 127 provided that ""aboriginal natives"" were not to be included in headcounts for electoral purposes. That section was removed by referendum in 1967."
Constitution of Australia,"Chapter VIII: Alteration of the Constitution
Chapter VIII: Alteration of the Constitution is a single section providing for amendments. It prescribes that alterations may only occur through a referendum bill being approved at a national referendum. A national referendum under this section requires a double majority to be valid, which consists of a majority of votes nationally, and a majority of votes in a majority of states."
Constitution of Australia,"Schedule
The Constitution also contains a schedule setting out the wording of the oath and affirmation of allegiance. Under section 42, parliamentarians are required to take this oath before taking their seat.
The oath reads:"
Constitution of Australia,"I, A.B., do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Victoria, Her heirs and successors according to law. SO HELP ME GOD! ...
(NOTE—The name of the King or Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland for the time being is to be substituted from time to time.)
Other oaths or affirmations of office are made as a matter of convention by a prime minister, ministers and parliamentary secretaries upon appointment to their office. The wording of these oaths are not set by statute and are set by the government of the day. This convention has been in place since 1901."
Constitution of Australia,"Unwritten conventions
Constitutional conventions are an important part of the Australian Constitution. Some notable conventions include the existence of the Prime Minister of Australia as head of a Cabinet composed of senior ministers. Another is that the governor-general in exercising executive powers must in almost all circumstances act on the advice of the prime minister. Despite being unwritten, they are understood by the High Court to be incorporated by implication within the document. For example, the convention under responsible government that the governor-general may only appoint as prime minister a member with the support of the majority of the House of Representatives follows from the requirement that ministers must sit in Parliament and money cannot be spent by the executive government unless authorised by law (passed by the House).
While normally the governor-general may only act according to advice given by ministers, in certain circumstances the governor-general may act without advice, and according to their own discretion, using the reserve powers. Two common example of these powers is the power to appoint the prime minister (the choice usually limited to the person who can command the confidence of the lower house) and the discretion to refuse to grant an early election. The most famous example of the use of the reserve powers occurred in 1975 where the Governor-General Sir John Kerr controversially dismissed Prime Minister Whitlam after the Senate refused to pass supply until an early election was called."
Constitution of Australia,"Unwritten conventions during the dismissal
The nature of constitutional conventions gave rise to controversy during the dismissal of the Whitlam government in 1975. In that episode, the Governor-General Sir John Kerr dismissed the Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, and appointed the Liberal Opposition leader Malcolm Fraser as caretaker Prime Minister on the understanding that he would immediately call an election (which he then won). This crisis arose due to the breach of the convention that, in the event of a Senate vacancy, the state government would nominate a replacement from the same political party. This convention was broken by the Lewis government of New South Wales. Notably, this unwritten convention was later formally incorporated into the written constitution via national referendum in 1977. Additionally, the Governor-General Sir John Kerr argued that Gough Whitlam had broken an alleged convention that a prime minister who cannot obtain supply must either request that the Governor-General call a general election, or resign. This view remains controversial, with no consensus amongst legal experts as to whether this convention exists. While the convention that a prime minister must have the confidence of the House of Representatives to govern is accepted as a principle of responsible government, whether this convention extends to requiring the confidence of the Senate to pass supply remains subject to often partisan debate."
Constitution of Australia,"Interpretation
The High Court is responsible for interpreting the Constitution. The legal doctrines historically applied by the court its process have varied. Some such doctrines have included the separation of powers, intergovernmental immunities, and reserved state powers.
While the document does not include a bill of rights, some rights and restrictions are expressly stated. Among these are the right to trial by jury for indictable offences, the right that any property compulsory acquired by the Commonwealth be on ""just terms"", the right to freedom of religion and the right against discrimination based on state residence.
The High Court has also read a number of important legal implications into the document. One of these is the freedom of political communication, the other is a freedom of interference from voting in elections. Both doctrines are born of the section 7 and section 24 requirements that representatives in Australia's houses of parliament be ""directly chosen by the people"". These implications, which limit Commonwealth legislative power, have been characterised as ""freedoms"" or ""guarantees"" instead of ""implied rights"" meaning that they are directed to limiting government power (instead of guaranteeing access) and do not apply between individuals. However, Adrienne Stone has argued that the High Court's purported distinction between a ""right"" versus a ""freedom"" is misleading and little more than semantic."
Constitution of Australia,"Alterations to the Constitution
Amendment to the Constitution requires a referendum in which the amending act is approved by a majority in at least four states, as well as a nationwide majority: a double majority. This reflects the commitment to federalism within the constitution, to ensure that any changes to the document cannot be approved solely with the support of the more populous states."
Constitution of Australia,"Past referendums and amendments
Forty-five proposals to amend the Constitution have been voted on at referendums, only eight of which have been approved. The eight proposals that have been approved are:
1906 – Senate elections – amended section 13 to slightly alter the length and dates of senators' terms of office.
1910 – State debts – amended section 105 to allow the Commonwealth to take over debts incurred by a state following Federation.
1928 – State debts – inserted section 105A to ensure the constitutional validity of the financial agreement reached between the Commonwealth and state governments in 1927.
1946 – Social services – inserted section 51(xxiiiA) to extend the power of the Commonwealth over a range of social services.
1967 – Aboriginal Australians – amended section 51(xxvi) to allow the Commonwealth to make laws for Indigenous Australians and repealed section 127 so that Indigenous Australians would be included in population counts for constitutional purposes.
1977 – Senate casual vacancies – amended section 15 to ensure casual vacancies in the Senate would be filled by a member of the same political party.
1977 – Referendums – amended section 128 to allow residents of Australian territories to vote in referendums.
1977 – Retirement of Judges – amended section 72 to mandate a retirement age of 70 for judges in federal courts.
This low success rate reflects a reluctance of Australian voters to approve changes, rather than the onerous requirements of section 128; only 3 of the 36 failed referendums received a national majority of votes without a majority of states. All but one of the successful referendums also received a majority in each of the states, with exception of the 1910 State Debts referendum which succeeded despite a no vote of 66% in New South Wales."
Constitution of Australia,"Proposals for amendment via British legislation
In the first decades after Federation, before Australia's constitutional relationship with the United Kingdom had been clarified, two serious attempts were made to amend the constitution via a British act of Parliament, in order to circumvent the referendum provisions of section 128:"
Constitution of Australia,"In 1917, during World War I, Prime Minister Billy Hughes sought to amend the Constitution to allow for the constitutionally required federal election to be postponed, thereby extending the term of his government. The House of Representatives passed a motion by 34 votes to 17 calling on the British Parliament to amend the Constitution Act; Hughes had already secured the support of the British Government for his tactic. However, the equivalent motion in the Senate was defeated after Nationalist senators Thomas Bakhap and John Keating crossed the floor. Hughes then called the 1917 federal election, which saw his government re-elected.
In 1934, the Western Australia Government petitioned the British Parliament to amend the Constitution Act to allow it to withdraw from the Federation. This followed a 1933 referendum in which the state voted to secede from the rest of Australia, the results of which were rejected by the Federal Government. The petition, presented by former premier Hal Colebatch, was heard by a joint select committee of the House of Commons and House of Lords, which rejected it on the grounds that it broke the principle of non-interference in Dominion matters recently codified in the Statute of Westminster 1931."
Constitution of Australia,"Existing major amendment proposals
Multiple ongoing debates exist regarding changes to the Australian Constitution. These include debates on the inclusion of a preamble, proposals for an Australian republic, and formal recognition of Indigenous Australians through a Voice to Parliament."
Constitution of Australia,"Inclusion of a preamble
The British act containing the Constitution includes a preamble drafted during the 1897–8 constitutional conventions. Since the 1980s, there has been in increasing calls to change or replace this preamble. Despite receiving several submission, the 1988 Constitutional Commission rejected such a change due to the difficulty of drafting a proposal that would be accepted by all Australians and recognise Indigenous Australians, as well as their view that such a change should not be done unless the entire constitution was rewritten.
Following this, the 1998 Constitution Convention recommended the inclusion of a new preamble, alongside their recommendation that Australia become a republic. However, this recommendation was ultimately taken up by a constitutional monarchist, then prime minister, John Howard. A draft, penned by Howard with the assistance of the poet Les Murray, was heavily criticised by the Labor party, Indigenous leaders and the wider public. A modified version was released one day before the passage of legislation that authorised the 1999 referendum. This proposal was again opposed by the Labor party and was eventually defeated with a 60% no vote. While debate around the preamble was minor compared with the debate around the republic, concerns were raised by opponents about the justiciability of the preamble, especially by those that opposed the inclusion of human rights guarantees in the document and by those who felt the court had become unduly ""activist"" in the wake of the Mabo decision."
Constitution of Australia,"Republic proposals
Debates on whether Australian should become a republic have existed since Federation.
In November 1999 a referendum was held as to whether the Queen and the Governor-General ought be removed from the Constitution, to be replaced with a President. The referendum rejected the change."
Constitution of Australia,"Indigenous recognition and voice
Since 1910, there have been calls for constitutional reform to recognise Indigenous Australians. In 1967, the Constitution was amended providing the Commonwealth with the power to legislate for all Indigenous Australians by removing the restriction preventing the Commonwealth from legislating in states. At the same time, a limitation on including all Indigenous Australians in population counts for constitutional purposes was removed, which in 1967 was relevant only to section 24. Since those reforms, other proposals have emerged. Guaranteed parliamentary representatives, a constitutionally recognised voice, and an inclusion of Indigenous Australians in a preamble to the Constitution are all proposals that have been made to reform the Australian Constitution to recognise Indigenous Australians.
In his Closing the Gap speech in February 2020, Prime Minister Scott Morrison reinforced the work of the Referendum Council, rejecting the idea of merely symbolic recognition, supporting a voice co-designed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, ""using the language of listening and empowerment"". The Labor Party has supported a voice enshrined in the Constitution for a long time, and so have many of Australia's left-leaning minor parties. However, many right-wing and regional groups opposed the change. A referendum to prescribe a Voice to Parliament in the constitution failed in 2023."
Constitution of Australia,"Other Labor Party supported amendments
Alongside support for an Australian republic and the Voice to Parliament, the 2023 National Parliament for the Labor Party also supports amendments to:"
Constitution of Australia,"recognise local government
implement fixed four-year terms for both the Senate and the House of Representatives (as a change from the current fixed six-year term for senators, with half elected each three years, and an unfixed maximum three-year term for members of parliament)
reform ""matters of territory rights""
The platform states that the later two reforms should be progressed through a new independent Australian Constitutional Commission."
Constitution of Australia,"Cultural impact
The Constitution is often described as ""virtually invisible"" within Australian culture and mainstream political discourse. It is especially compared to the US constitution and the centrality of it to the country's civil religion. The Australian Constitution, in contrast, barely pierces the national consciousness, with one survey in 2015 finding that over a third of Australians had not heard of it. Unlike the US constitution, which through the words ""We the People"" describes itself as an expression of the national will, the Australian Constitution is contained within an act passed by the United Kingdom and its authority is described as deriving from the consent of the Queen and the UK Parliament. Additionally, it contains no explicit statement of values, aspirations or rights nor does it describe an ""objective order of values"", as in the German Basic Law. This ""thin"" nature of the Constitution is celebrated by some academic, judicial and political commentators, and lamented by others."
Constitution of Australia,"See also
State constitutions and territory self government Acts:
Constitution of New South Wales
Constitution of Victoria
Constitution of Queensland
Constitution of South Australia
Constitution of Western Australia
Constitution of Tasmania
Australian Capital Territory self government Act
Northern Territory self government Act
Constitutionalism – concept used to study the historical development and common features of constitutions
Rule of law – concept underlying constitutional states"
Constitution of Australia,"Notes
References
Citations
Sources
Primary sources"
Constitution of Australia,Secondary sources
Constitution of Australia,"Further reading
Saunders, Cheryl; Stone, Adrienne, eds. (2018). The Oxford Handbook of the Australian Constitution. Oxford: Oxford U.P. ISBN 9780198738435."
Constitution of Australia,External links
Constitution of Australia,Records of the Australasian Federal Conventions of the 1890s
Catholic Church in Australia,"The Australian Catholic Church or Catholic Church in Australia is part of the worldwide Catholic Church under the spiritual and administrative leadership of the Holy See. From origins as a suppressed, mainly Irish minority in early colonial times, the church has grown to be the largest Christian denomination in Australia, with a culturally diverse membership of around 5,075,907 people, representing about 20% of the overall population of Australia according to the 2021 ABS Census data.
The church is the largest non-government provider of welfare and education services in Australia. Catholic Social Services Australia aids some 450,000 people annually, while the St Vincent de Paul Society's 40,000 members form the largest volunteer welfare network in the country. In 2016, the church had some 760,000 students in more than 1,700 schools.
The church in Australia has five provinces: Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney. It has 35 dioceses, comprising geographic areas as well as the military diocese and dioceses for the Chaldean, Maronite, Melkite, Syro-Malabar (St Thomas Christians), and Ukrainian Rites. The national assembly of bishops is the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference (ACBC). There are a further 175 Catholic religious orders operating in Australia, affiliated under Catholic Religious Australia. One Australian has been recognised as a saint by the Catholic Church: Mary MacKillop, who co-founded the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart (""Josephite"") religious institute in the 19th century."
Catholic Church in Australia,"Demographics
Since the 1980s, Catholicism has been largest Christian denomination in Australia, constituting around one-quarter of the overall population and becoming slightly larger than the Anglican and Uniting churches combined. Up until the 2016 census, adherents had been recorded as growing both numerically and as a percentage of the population; however, the 2016 census found a fall in both overall numbers and the percentage of Catholics as a proportion of Australian residents, with 5,291,839 Australian Catholics (around 22.6% of the population) in 2016, down from 5,439,257 in the 2011 census (25.3% of the population). This was repeated again in 2021, with the numbers dropping to 5,075,907 people, representing about 20% of the overall population of Australia according to the 2021 ABS Census data.[1]
Until the 1986 census, Australia's most populous Christian church was the Anglican Church of Australia. Since then, Catholics have outnumbered Anglicans by an increasing margin. The change is partly explained by changes in immigration patterns. Before the Second World War, the majority of immigrants to Australia came from the United Kingdom and most Catholic immigrants came from Ireland. After the war, Australia's immigration diversified, and more than 6.5 million migrants arrived in the following 60 years, including more than a million Catholics from Italy, Malta, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Croatia and Hungary.
At the 2016 Census, the ancestries with which Australian Catholics most identified were English (1.49 million), Australian (1.12 million), Irish (577,000), Italian (567,000) and Filipino (181,000).
Despite a growing population of Catholics, weekly Mass attendance has declined from an estimated 74% in the mid-1950s to around 14% in 2006.
There are seven archdioceses and 32 dioceses, with an estimated 3,000 priests and 9,000 men and women in institutes of consecrated life and societies of apostolic life, including six dioceses that cover the whole country: one each for those who belong to the Chaldean, Maronite, Melkite, Syro-Malabar and Ukrainian rites and one for those serving in the Australian Defence Forces. There is also a personal ordinariate for former Anglicans, which has a similar status to a diocese."
Catholic Church in Australia,"History
Arrival and suppression
Since time immemorial, indigenous people in Australia had performed the rites and rituals of the animist religions of the Dreamtime. Among the first Catholics known to have sighted Australia were the crew of a Spanish expedition of 1605–6. In 1606, the expedition's leader, Pedro Fernandez de Quiros  landed in the New Hebrides, believing it to be the fabled southern continent. He named the land Austrialis del Espiritu Santo Southern Land of the Holy Spirit. Later that year, his deputy Luís Vaz de Torres sailed through the Torres Strait between Australia and New Guinea.
The permanent presence of Catholicism in Australia came rather with the arrival of the First Fleet of British convict ships at Sydney in 1788. One-tenth of all the convicts who came to Australia on the First Fleet were Catholic, and at least half of them were born in Ireland. A small proportion of British marines were also Catholic.
Just as the British were setting up the new colony, French captain Jean-François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse arrived off Botany Bay with two ships. La Pérouse was 6 weeks in Botany Bay, where the French, besides other things, held Catholic Masses. The crew conducted the first Catholic burial, that of Father Louis Receveur, a Franciscan friar who died while the ships were at anchor at Botany Bay.
Some of the Irish convicts had been transported to Australia for political crimes or social rebellion in Ireland, so the authorities were suspicious of Catholicism for the first three decades of settlement.
Catholic convicts were compelled to attend Church of England services and their children and orphans were raised by the authorities as Anglicans. The first Catholic priests arrived in Australia as convicts in 1800 – James Harold, James Dixon and Peter O'Neill, who had been convicted for ""complicity"" in the Irish 1798 Rebellion. Fr Dixon was conditionally emancipated and permitted to celebrate Mass. On 15 May 1803, in vestments made from curtains and with a chalice made of tin, he conducted the first Catholic Mass in ""New South Wales"". The Irish-led Castle Hill Rebellion of 1804 alarmed the British authorities and Dixon's permission to celebrate Mass was revoked. Fr Jeremiah O' Flinn, an Irish Cistercian monk, was appointed as Prefect Apostolic of New Holland and set out from Britain for the colony, uninvited. Watched by authorities, Flynn secretly performed priestly duties before being arrested and deported to London. Reaction to the affair in Britain led to two further priests being allowed to travel to the colony in 1820 – John Joseph Therry and Philip Conolly. The foundation stone for the first St Mary's Church, was laid on 29 October 1821 by Governor Lachlan Macquarie.
The absence of a Catholic mission in Australia before 1818 reflected the legal disabilities of Catholics in Britain and the difficult position of Ireland within the British Empire. The government therefore endorsed the English Benedictine monks to lead the early church in the colony. The Reverend William Bernard Ullathorne (1806–1889) was instrumental in influencing Pope Gregory XVI to establish the hierarchy in Australia. Ullathorne was in Australia from 1833 to 1836 as vicar-general to Bishop William Morris of Mauritius, whose jurisdiction extended over the Australian missions."
Catholic Church in Australia,"Emancipation and growth
The Church of England was disestablished in the colony of New South Wales by the Church Act of 1836, which also provided equal funding of Protestant and Catholic churches. Drafted by the Catholic attorney-general John Plunkett, the act established legal equality for Anglicans, Catholics and Presbyterians and was later extended to Methodists. Nevertheless, social attitudes were slow to change. A laywoman, Caroline Chisholm (1808–1877), faced discouragements and anti-Catholic feeling when she sought to establish a migrant women's shelter. She worked for women's welfare in the colonies in the 1840s, though her humanitarian efforts later won her fame in England and great influence in achieving support for families in the colony."
Catholic Church in Australia,"The church's most prominent early leader was John Bede Polding, a Benedictine monk who was Sydney's first bishop (and then archbishop) from 1835 to 1877. Polding requested a community of nuns be sent to the colony and five Irish Sisters of Charity arrived in 1838. While tensions arose between the English Benedictine hierarchy and the Irish, Ignatian-tradition religious institute from the start, the sisters set about pastoral care in a women's prison and began visiting hospitals and schools and establishing employment for convict women. In 1847, two sisters transferred to Hobart and established a school. The sisters went on to establish hospitals in four of the eastern states, beginning with St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney, in 1857 as a free hospital for all people, but especially for the poor.
At Polding's request, the Christian Brothers arrived in Sydney in 1843 to assist in schools. Again jurisdictional tensions arose and the brothers returned to Ireland. In 1857, Polding founded an Australian religious institute in the Benedictine tradition – the Sisters of the Good Samaritan – to work in education and social work. While Polding was in office, construction began on the ambitious Gothic Revival designs for St Patrick's Cathedral, Melbourne, and the final St Mary's Cathedral in Sydney.
In 1845, Polding established the Australian Holy Catholic Guild of Saints Mary and Joseph. Some parishes have memorials dedicated to deceased members and friends. One such is at St Patrick's Boorowa, New South Wales. Examples of the Guild's reporting to members and election of office bearers can be seen in the Freeman's Journal. In 1848, they met under St Patrick's Church at the intersection of George and Hunter streets and had 250 members at that time. Records of the association, from 1845 to 1996, are held at the NSW State Library and this includes a copy of the constitution of the guild.
Establishing themselves first at Sevenhill, in the newly established colony of South Australia in 1848, the Jesuits were the first religious order of priests to enter and establish houses in South Australia, Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory – Austrian Jesuits established themselves in the south and north and Irish in the east. The goldrush saw an increase in the population and prosperity of the colonies and called for an increase in the number of episcopal sees. When gold was discovered in late 1851, there were an estimated 9,000 Catholics in the Colony of Victoria, increasing to 100,000 by the time the Jesuits arrived 14 years later. While the Austrian priests traversed the Outback on horseback to found missions and schools, the Irish priests arrived in the east in 1860 and had by 1880 established the major schools of Xavier College in Melbourne and in Sydney St Aloysius' College and Saint Ignatius' College, Riverview – which each survive to the present.
During 1869 and 1870, some Australian based clergy attended the first Vatican Council in Rome.
Despite anti-Irish lobbying by English Catholic bishops and the British government, Irish cleric Patrick Francis Moran won the favour of Pope Leo XIII and was appointed Archbishop of Sydney in 1884, arriving in New South Wales on 8 September. A prominent figure in Australian Catholic history, he became Australia's first cardinal the following year after being summoned back to Rome, and presided over Plenary Councils of Australasia in 1885, 1895 and 1905 which laid the foundations for Church structure in the 20th century. The Australian colonies had hitherto relied heavily on immigrant clergy. In 1889, Moran founded St Patrick's College, Manly, intended to provide priests for all the colonies. Moran believed that Catholics' political and civil rights were threatened in Australia and, in 1896, saw deliberate discrimination in a situation where ""no office of first, or even second, rate importance is held by a Catholic"".
In Rome in 1884, Moran had met the Venerable Mary Potter and invited her to send a group of her newly established Little Company of Mary sisters to Australia in order to establish a local congregation. Six pioneering sisters arrived in Sydney in November 1885, commencing work caring for the sick and dying. Establishing a convent at Lewishman, they had nearly fifty members within just five years. In 1889 they opened a small hospital at Lewisham. Under the leadership of Mother Mary Xavier Lynch from 1899, the hospital would grow to be one of Sydney's leading general hospitals and nursing schools. Mother Mary Xavier established a new hospital at Adelaide in 1900 and Wagga Wagga in 1926, and despatched sisters to found hospitals in New Zealand and South Africa. In 1922 she became the order's first provincial of Australasia, and is remembered as one of Australia's most noted hospital and nursing administrators.
The Catholic Church also became involved in mission work among the Aboriginal people of Australia during the 19th century as Europeans came to control much of the continent. According to Aboriginal anthropologist Kathleen Butler-McIlwraith, there were many occasions when the Catholic Church attempted to advocate for Aboriginal rights, but the missionaries were also ""functionaries of the Protection and Assimilation policies"" of the government and so ""directly contributed to the current disadvantage experienced by Indigenous Australians"". The missionaries themselves argued that they protected children from dysfunctional aspects of indigenous culture.
With the withdrawal of state aid for church schools around 1880, the Catholic Church, unlike other Australian churches, put great energy and resources into creating a comprehensive alternative system of education. It was largely staffed by sisters, brothers and priests of religious institutes, such as the Christian Brothers (who had returned to Australia in 1868); the Sisters of Mercy (who had arrived in Perth in 1846); Marist Brothers, who came from France in 1872; and the Sisters of St Joseph, founded in Australia by Mary MacKillop and Fr Julian Tenison Woods in 1867. MacKillop travelled throughout Australasia and established schools, convents and charitable institutions but came into conflict with those bishops who preferred diocesan control of the institute rather than central control from Adelaide by the Josephite religious institute. MacKillop administered the Josephites as a national religious institute at a time when Australia was divided among individually governed colonies. She is today the most revered of Australian Catholics, beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1995 and canonised by Benedict XVI in 2010. Catholic schools flourished in Australia and by 1900 there were 115 Christian Brothers teaching in Australia. By 1910 there were 5000 religious sisters teaching in schools."
Catholic Church in Australia,"Federation
The Australian Constitution of 1901 guaranteed Freedom of Religion and the separation of church and state throughout Australia. Australia's first Catholic cardinal, Patrick Francis Moran (1830–1911), had been a proponent of Australian Federation but in 1901 he refused to attend the inauguration ceremony of the Commonwealth of Australia because precedence was given to the Church of England. He was criticised in The Bulletin for speaking against racist immigration laws and he alarmed Catholic conservatives by supporting Trade Unionism and the newly formed Australian Labor Party.
The Catholic Church was rooted in the working class Irish communities. Moran, the Archbishop of Sydney from 1884 to 1911, believed that Catholicism would flourish with the emergence of the new nation through Federation in 1901, provided that his people rejected  ""contamination"" from foreign influences such as anarchism, socialism, modernism and secularism.  Moran distinguished between European socialism as an atheistic movement and those Australians calling themselves ""socialists""; he approved of the objectives of the latter while feeling that the European model was not a real danger in Australia. Moran's outlook reflected his wholehearted acceptance of Australian democracy and his belief in the country as different and freer than the old societies from which its people had come. Moran thus welcomed the Labor Party and the Catholic Church stood with it in opposing conscription in the referendums of 1916 and 1917. The hierarchy had close ties to Rome, which encouraged the bishops to support the British Empire and emphasize Marian piety."
Catholic Church in Australia,"Between the wars
Another Irish cleric, Archbishop Daniel Mannix (1864–1963) of Melbourne, was a controversial voice against conscription during World War I and against British Empire policy in Ireland. He was also a fervent critic of contraception. In 1920, the Royal Navy prevented him landing in his Irish homeland. In the Melbourne St Patrick's day parade of 1920, Archbishop Mannix participated with fourteen Victoria Cross recipients. Yet despite early 20th century sectarian feeling, Australia elected its first Catholic prime minister, James Scullin, of the Australian Labor Party in 1929 – decades before the Protestant majority of the United States would elect John F. Kennedy as its first Catholic president. His successor, Joseph Lyons, a devout Irish Catholic, split from Labor to form the fiscally conservative United Australia Party – predecessor to the modern Liberal Party of Australia. His wife, Dame Enid Lyons, a Catholic convert, became the first female member of the Australian House of Representatives and later first female member of cabinet in the Menzies Government. With the place of Catholics in the British Empire still complicated by the recent Irish War of Independence and centuries of imperial rivalry with Catholic European nations, as prime minister, Lyons travelled to London in 1935 for the silver jubilee celebrations of King George V and faced anti-Catholic demonstrations in Edinburgh, then visited his ancestral homeland of Ireland and also had an audience with the Pope in Rome.
The Australian congregation known as Our Lady's Nurses for the Poor was founded by Melbourne-born mystic Eileen O'Connor and Fr Ted McGrath in a rented home at Coogee in 1913. A deeply religious youth, O'Connor had suffered a damaged spine when she was three years old and lived in a wheelchair with a painful disability. McGrath, the parish priest of Coogee, found accommodation for her widowed mother and family and was impressed by her courage. O'Connor told McGrath that she had experienced a visitation from the Virgin Mary, and McGrath shared with her his hope to establish a congregation of nurses to serve the poor. Eventually, a group of seven laywomen gathered around O'Connor and elected her as their first superior. Directed by the largely bed-ridden O'Connor, they visited the sick poor and nursed the frail aged. O'Connor died in 1921 of chronic tuberculosis of the spine and exhaustion. She was 28. Initially a group of laywomen, Our Lady's Nurses for the Poor later formed themselves into a religious community of sisters under vows and their work continues in Sydney, Newcastle and Macquarie Fields. In 2018, Australia's bishops voted to initiate her cause for sainthood and the Holy See granted her the title Servant of God.
In October 1916, the Catholic Women's Social Guild (now Catholic Women's League) was formed in Fitzroy, Victoria, and Mary Glowrey became the inaugural president. Glowrey was one of the first women to study medicine at Melbourne University. She later went to India to become a missionary nun, founding the largest non-government healthcare system in that country. She was accorded the title Servant of God in 2013 and her cause for sainthood is underway.
The Australian Army Chaplains Department was promulgated in 1913, and 86 Catholic chaplains went on to serve in the army during World War One. As well as conducting church parades and religious services, chaplains organised activities to improve the morale and welfare of the troops. Fr John Fahey from Perth was the longest-serving front-line chaplain of the conflict. Assigned to the 11th battalion, he was the first chaplain ashore on Gallipoli, after disregarding orders to stay on the ship.
During the Second World War, the Australian-administered Territory of New Guinea was invaded by Japanese forces. Some 333 Martyrs of New Guinea are remembered from all denominations during WW2, including 197 Catholics. On  Rabaul, Australians and Europeans found refuge at the Vunapope Catholic Mission, until the Japanese overwhelmed the island and took them prisoner in 1942. The local Bishop Leo Scharmach, a Pole, convinced the Japanese that he was German and to spare the internees. A group of indigenous Daughters of Mary Immaculate (FMI Sisters) then refused to give up their faith or abandon the Australians and are credited with keeping hundreds of internees alive for three and half years by growing food and delivering it to them over gruelling distances. Some of the Sisters were tortured by the Japanese and gave evidence during war crimes trials after the war. Indigenous Rabaul man Peter To Rot found himself in charge of the mission at Rakunai after the internment of the Europeans. He took on their work of teaching the faith, presiding over baptisms, prayer and marriages and caring for the sick and POWs. When the Japanese outlawed these practises, he continued them in secret, was exposed by a collaborator and sent to a labour camp where he was executed. Pope John Paul II declared him a martyr in 1993 and beatified him in 1995."
Catholic Church in Australia,"Post-war immigration: A more diverse church
Until about 1950, the Catholic Church in Australia was overwhelmingly Irish in its ethos. Most Catholics were descendants of Irish immigrants and the church was mostly led by Irish-born priests and bishops. A number of rural areas had high proportions of Irish and a strongly Catholic culture. From 1950 the ethnic composition of the church began to change, with the assimilation of Irish Australians and the arrival of Eastern European Displaced Persons from 1948 and more than one million Catholics from countries such as Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, Germany, Croatia and Hungary, and later Filipinos, Vietnamese, Lebanese and Poles around the 1980s. There are now also strong Chinese, Korean and Hispanic Catholic communities.
For a long time, Irish-Australians had a close political association with the Labor Party. The changing ethnic composition of Australian Catholicism and shifting political allegiances of Australian Catholics saw Catholic layman B. A. Santamaria, the son of Italian immigrants, lead a movement of working class Catholics against Communism in Australia and the formation of his Democratic Labor Party (DLP) in 1955. The DLP was formed over concerns of Communist influence over the trade unions and Labor Party. The movement was not approved by the Vatican, but it siphoned a proportion of the Catholic vote away from the Labor Party, contributing to the success of the newly formed Liberal Party of Robert Menzies, which held power from 1949 to 1972, which, in return for DLP preferences, secured state aid for Catholic schools in Australia in 1963. Along with a sharp decline in sectarianism in post-1960s Australia, sectarian loyalty to political parties has diminished and Catholics have been well represented within the conservative Liberal and National parties. Brendan Nelson became the first Catholic to lead the Liberal Party in 2007. Former prime minister Tony Abbott is a former seminarian who won the party leadership after defeating two other Catholic candidates for the post. In 2008, Tim Fischer, a Catholic and former deputy prime minister in the Howard government, was nominated by the Labor prime minister, Kevin Rudd, as the first resident Australian ambassador to the Holy See since 1973, when diplomatic relations with the Vatican and Australia were first established."
Catholic Church in Australia,"Post Second Vatican Council
Since the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s, the Australian church has experienced a decline in vocations to the religious life, leading to a priest shortage. On the other hand, lay leadership in education and other areas has expanded, and about 20% of Australian school students attend a Catholic school. While the numbers of nuns serving in Australian health facilities declined, the church maintained a strong presence in health care. The Sisters of Charity continued their mission among the sick, opening Australia's first HIV AIDS ward at St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney, in the 1980s. Declining vocations and increasing complexities in the health care technologies and management saw religious institutes like the Sisters of Charity and Sisters of Mercy amalgamating their efforts and divesting themselves of daily management of hospitals.
Following Vatican II, new styles of ministry were tried by Australian religious. Some rose to national prominence. Fr Ted Kennedy began one such ministry in Sydney's inner city Redfern presbytery in 1971 – an area with a large Aboriginal population. Working closely with Catholic Aboriginal laywoman ""Mum"" Shirl Smith, he developed a theology which held that the poor had special insights into the meaning of Christianity, worked as an advocate for Aboriginal rights and often challenged the civil and church establishment on questions of conscience. In 1989, Jesuit lawyer Fr Frank Brennan AO founded Uniya, a centre for social justice and human rights research, advocacy, education and networking. Uniya focused much of its attention on the plight of refugees, asylum seekers, and Indigenous reconciliation. In 1991, Fr Chris Riley formed Youth Off The Streets, a community organisation working for young people who are ""chronically homeless, drug dependent and recovering from abuse"". Originally a food van in Sydney's King's Cross, it has grown to be one of the largest youth services in Australia, offering crisis accommodation, residential rehabilitation, clinical services and counselling, outreach programs, drug and alcohol rehabilitation, specialist Aboriginal services, education and family support. Melbourne priest Father Bob Maguire began parish work in the 1960s, but became a youth media personality in 2004 with the beginning of a series of collaborations with irreverent satirist John Safran on SBS TV and Triple J radio.
The year 1970 saw the first visit to Australia by a Pope, Paul VI. Pope John Paul II was the next Pope to visit Australia in 1986. At Alice Springs, the Pope made an historic address to indigenous Australians, in which he praised the enduring qualities of Aboriginal culture, lamented the effects of dispossession of and discrimination; called for acknowledgment of Aboriginal land rights and reconciliation in Australia; and said that the church in Australia would not reach its potential until Aboriginal people had made their ""contribution to her life and until that contribution has been joyfully received by others"".
In 1988, the Archbishop of Sydney, Edward Bede Clancy was created a cardinal and during the Australian Bicentenary celebrations led the religious ceremonies for the opening of Parliament House, Canberra. Pope John Paul II visited Australia for the second time in 1995, to perform the rite of beatification for Mary MacKillop, founder of Australia's Josephite Sisters, before a crowd of 250,000.
From the late 1980s, cases of abuse within the Catholic Church and other child care institutions began to be exposed in Australia. In 1996, the church issued a document, Towards Healing, which it described as seeking to ""establish a compassionate and just system for dealing with complaints of abuse"". In 2001, an apostolic exhortation from Pope John Paul II condemned incidents of sex abuse in Oceania. Impetus for the Towards Healing protocols was in part led by Bishop Geoffrey Robinson, who would later call for large scale systemic reform of the church globally in his 2007 book Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church: Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus. The Australian Catholic Bishops Conference did not endorse the book. Pat Power, the Auxiliary Bishop of Canberra & Goulburn, wrote in 2002 that ""the current crisis around sexual abuse is the greatest since the Reformation. At stake is the Church's moral authority, its credibility, its ability to interpret the 'signs of the times' and its capacity to confront the ensuing questions."" Pope Benedict XVI officially apologised to victims during World Youth Day 2008 in Sydney and celebrated a Mass with four victims of clerical sexual abuse in the chapel of St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney, and listened to their stories."
Catholic Church in Australia,"In 2001, in Rome, Pope John Paul II apologised to Aboriginal and other indigenous people in Oceania for past injustices by the church: ""Aware of the shameful injustices done to indigenous peoples in Oceania, the Synod Fathers apologised unreservedly for the part played in these by members of the church, especially where children were forcibly separated from their families."" Church leaders in Australia called on the Australian government to offer a similar apology.
In 2001, George Pell became the eighth Archbishop of Sydney and, in 2003, became a cardinal. Pell supported Sydney's bid to host World Youth Day 2008. In July 2008, Sydney hosted the massive youth festival led by Pope Benedict XVI. Around 500,000 welcomed the pope to Sydney and 270,000 watched the Stations of the Cross. More than 300,000 pilgrims camped out overnight in preparation for the final Mass, where final attendance was between 300,000 and 400,000 people.
In February 2010, Pope Benedict XVI announced that Mary MacKillop would be recognised as the first Australian saint of the Catholic Church. She was canonised on 17 October 2010 during a public ceremony in St Peter's Square. An estimated 8,000 Australians were present in the Vatican City to witness the ceremony. The Vatican Museum held an exhibition of Aboriginal art to honour the occasion titled ""Rituals of Life"". The exhibition contained 300 artefacts which were on display for the first time since 1925.
In the late 20th and early 21st century, Catholicism in Australia has been growing numerically, while remaining relatively stable as a proportion of the population and facing a long-term decline in numbers of people following vocations to the religious life. In 2016, the Catholic education sector ran 1,738 schools, accounting for some 20.2% of Australian school students. There were also two Catholic universities – University of Notre Dame Australia and the Australian Catholic University. Catholic Social Services Australia, the church's peak national body for social services, had 52 member organisations providing services to hundreds of thousands of people each year. Catholic Health Australia was the largest non-government provider grouping of health, community, and aged care services.
The church was among the secular and religious institutions examined at the 2013-2017 Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, which reported that abuse cases by Catholic personnel had peaked in the 1970s, with around 4400 cases and alleged cases over the 6 decades prior to the inquiry. In 2017, there were 5.5 million Australian Catholics. Gerard Henderson stated that statistics presented to the Royal Commission indicated that children were safer in a Catholic religious institution in Australia during the years studied than in any other religious institution (state institutions were not studied, so a statistical comparison could not be made)."
Catholic Church in Australia,"Social and political engagement
Introduction
Catholic people and charitable organisations, hospitals and schools have played a prominent role in welfare and education in Australia ever since colonial times when Catholic laywoman Caroline Chisholm helped single, migrant women and rescued homeless girls in Sydney. In his welcoming address to the Catholic World Youth Day 2008 in Sydney, the prime minister, Kevin Rudd, said that Christianity had been a positive influence on Australia: ""It was the church that began first schools for the poor, it was the church that began first hospitals for the poor, it was the church that began first refuges for the poor and these great traditions continue for the future""."
Catholic Church in Australia,"Welfare
A number of Catholic organisations are providers of social welfare services (including residential aged care and the Job Network) and education in Australia. Australia-wide these include: Centacare, CatholicCare Caritas Australia, Jesuit Refugee Service, St Vincent de Paul Society, Youth Off The Streets. Two religious institutes founded in Australia which engaged in welfare and charity work are the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart and the Sisters of the Good Samaritan. Many international Catholic religious institutes also work in welfare, such as the Little Sisters of the Poor who work in aged care. Catholic Social Services Australia is the peak body for Catholic welfare agencies and has 54 member organisations in metropolitan, regional and remote Australia. Members include diocesan-based Centacare and CatholicCare agencies and those under the stewardship of religious orders."
Catholic Church in Australia,"Health
Catholic Health Australia is the largest non-government provider grouping of health, community and aged care services in Australia. These do not operate for profit and range across the full spectrum of health services, representing about 10% of the health sector and employing 35,000 people.
Religious institutes founded many of Australia's hospitals. Irish Sisters of Charity arrived in Sydney in 1838 and established St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney, in 1857 as a free hospital for the poor. The Sisters went on to found hospitals, hospices, research institutes and aged care facilities in Victoria, Queensland and Tasmania. At St Vincent's they trained leading surgeon Victor Chang and opened Australia's first AIDS clinic.  In the 21st century, with more and more lay people involved in management, the sisters began collaborating with Sisters of Mercy Hospitals in Melbourne and Sydney. Jointly the group operates four public hospitals, seven private hospitals and 10 aged care facilities.
The English Sisters of the Little Company of Mary arrived in 1885 and have since established public and private hospitals, retirement living and residential aged care, community care and comprehensive palliative care in New South Wales, the ACT, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia, Queensland (Cairns) and the Northern Territory.
The Little Sisters of the Poor, who follow the charism of Saint Jeanne Jugan to ""offer hospitality to the needy aged"", arrived in Melbourne in 1884 and now operate four aged care homes in Australia.
In 1895, Perth's Bishop Matthew Gibney sent a request for help to the Sisters of St John of God in Wexford, Ireland to care for people suffering from typhoid fever during the 1890s gold rush. They established a hospital in Kalgoorlie in the late 1890s, followed shortly by another in the Perth suburb of Subiaco. These services developed into St John of God Health Care, which now operates 24 hospitals and facilities across Western Australia, New South Wales, Victoria, and New Zealand."
Catholic Church in Australia,"Education
By 1833, there were around ten Catholic schools in the Australian colonies. Today one in five Australian students attend Catholic schools. There are over 1700 Catholic schools in Australia with more than 750,000 students enrolled, employing almost 60,000 teachers. Mary MacKillop was a 19th-century Australian religious sister who founded an educational religious institute, the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart. Other Catholic religious institutes involved in education in Australia have included: Sisters of Mercy, Marist Brothers, Christian Brothers, Loreto Sisters, Benedictine Sisters and Jesuits.
As with other classes of non-government schools in Australia, Catholic schools receive funding from the Commonwealth Government. Church schools range from elite, high cost schools (which generally offer extensive bursary programs for low-income students) to low-fee local schools. Notable schools include the Jesuit colleges of St Aloysius and Saint Ignatius' College, Riverview in Sydney, Saint Ignatius' College, Adelaide and Xavier College in Melbourne; the Marist Brothers St Joseph's College, Hunters Hill, the Christian Brothers' High School, Lewisham, the Society of the Sacred Heart's Rosebay Kincoppal School, the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary's Loreto Kirribilli, the Sisters of Mercy's Monte Sant' Angelo Mercy College, the Christian Brothers' St Edmund's College, Canberra and Aquinas College, Perth – however, the list and range of Catholic primary and secondary schools in Australia is long and diverse and extends throughout metropolitan, regional and remote Australia: see Catholic Schools in Australia
The Australian Catholic University opened in 1991 following the amalgamation of four Catholic tertiary institutions in eastern Australia. These institutions had their origins in the 1800s, when religious institutes became involved in preparing teachers for Catholic schools and nurses for Catholic hospitals. The University of Notre Dame Australia opened in Western Australia in December 1989 and now has over 9,000 students on three campuses in Fremantle, Sydney and Broome."
Catholic Church in Australia,"Politics
Church leaders have often involved themselves in political issues in areas they consider relevant to Christian teachings. In early Colonial times, Catholicism was restricted but Church of England clergy worked closely with the governors. Early Catholic missionary William Ullathorne criticised the convict system, publishing a pamphlet, The Horrors of Transportation Briefly Unfolded to the People, in Britain in 1837. Sydney's first archbishop, John Bede Polding, was influential in the preparation of the Australian bishops' pastoral letter on Aboriginal People in 1869 which advocated for Aboriginal rights and dignity.
Australia's first Catholic cardinal, Patrick Francis Moran (1830–1911), was politically active. He was a proponent of Australian Federation; he denounced anti-Chinese legislation as ""unchristian"" and opposed antisemitism. He became an advocate for women's suffrage and he stood for election to the Australasian Federal Convention in 1897, but in 1901 he refused to attend the inauguration of the Commonwealth of Australia because precedence was given to the Church of England. He alarmed conservatives by supporting trade unionism and ""Australian socialism"". Archbishop Daniel Mannix of Melbourne was a controversial voice against conscription during World War I and against British policy in Ireland.
Mum (Shirl) Smith, a celebrated Redfern community worker, assisted by the Sisters of Charity, worked in the courts and organised prison visitations, medical and social assistance for Aboriginal People. Fr Ted Kennedy of Redfern and Fr Frank Brennan, a Jesuit, have been high-profile Catholic priests engaged in the cause of Aboriginal rights.
In 1999, Cardinal Edward Bede Clancy wrote to the then prime minister, John Howard, urging him to send an armed peacekeeping force to East Timor to end the violence engulfing that country. In 2006, an Australian Greens senator, Kerry Nettle, called on the health minister, Tony Abbott, to refrain from debating the abortion drug RU486 because he was Catholic. Cardinal George Pell concerned himself publicly with traditional issues of Christian doctrine, such as supporting marriage and opposing abortion, but also raised questions about government policies such as the Work Choices industrial relations reforms and the mandatory detention of asylum seekers."
Catholic Church in Australia,"Australian Catholic politicians
Australia elected its first Catholic prime minister, James Scullin of the Australian Labor Party in 1929. He was succeeded by Joseph Lyons of the United Australia Party who was prime minister from 1932 to 1939, and remains Australia's longest serving Catholic prime minister. The first woman elected to the House of Representatives was his wife, Enid Lyons (United Australia Party), who was a Catholic convert. Australian Catholic women have achieved a number of significant milestones in the history of Australian politics. The first woman to be elected as leader of a state or territory was Catholic Rosemary Follett, who won the first ACT election in 1989. The first woman Premier of NSW was Labor's Kristina Keneally, a Catholic with a Master's degree in Catholic systemic theology. Dame Roma Mitchell, a devout Catholic, served as Governor of South Australia from 1991-1996, the first woman to be appointed governor of an Australian state. Dame Roma had also been a Supreme Court Judge, University Chancellor, Human Rights campaigner and advocate for Aboriginal people. Following her death, the ABC reported ""Those who were close to Dame Roma Mitchell say her deep Catholic faith guided every aspect of her life, giving her the strength and ambition to campaign for social change and her philosophy of generosity and kindness"".
The Australian Labor Party had largely been supported by Catholics until layman B. A. Santamaria formed the Democratic Labor Party over concerns of Communist influence over the trade union movement in the 1950s. The war-time prime minister, John Curtin (Labor), was raised Catholic. Ben Chifley (Labor) also served as prime minister from 1945 to 1949. In more recent decades, Catholics have led all major parties and served as Prime Ministers and Opposition leader. Labor prime ministers Paul Keating (1991–1996) and Kevin Rudd (2007–2010, 2013) were both raised Catholic (though Rudd now identifies as an Anglican). Tim Fischer was Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the National Party between 1996 and 1999, was a practising Catholic and later served as the Australian Ambassador to the Holy See between 2008 and 2012.
The three Liberal Party Leaders of the Opposition between 2007-2013 - Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott - were all Catholics. Abbott brought the Party to office in 2013 and was succeeded by Turnbull as Prime Minister in 2015. As the connection of the conservative parties to Catholicism has increased in recent decades, so the formerly strong connection between Labor and Catholicism has waned. Nevertheless, since losing office in 2013, the Labor Party has been led by Jesuit educated Bill Shorten and the current Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who describes himself as a ""cultural Catholic"". Shorten, now an Anglican, wrote in his book The Common Good, that he is grateful for his Jesuit education and takes inspiration from the invocation of the Jesuit Pedro Arrupe to be ""men for others"". Politicians including Prime Minister Tony Abbott, and NSW Premier John Fahey studied for the priesthood before politics. Michael Tate served as a minister in the Labor Hawke government and then, after politics, became a Catholic priest."
Catholic Church in Australia,"Arts and culture
Architecture
Most towns in Australia have at least one Christian church. St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney, follows a conventional English cathedral plan, cruciform in shape, with a tower over the crossing of the nave and transepts and twin towers at the west front with impressive stained glass windows. With a length of 106.7 metres (350 ft) and a general width of 24.4 metres (80 ft), it is Sydney's largest church. Built to a design by William Wardell from a foundation stone laid in 1868, the spires of the cathedral were not finally added until the year 2000. Wardell also worked on the design of St Patrick's Cathedral, Melbourne – among the finest examples of ecclesiastical architecture in Australia. Wardell's overall design was in Gothic Revival style, paying tribute to the mediaeval cathedrals of Europe. Largely constructed between 1858 and 1897, the nave was Early English in style, while the remainder of the building is in Decorated Gothic.
Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, has long been known as the City of Churches. North of Adelaide 130 kilometres (81 mi) is the Jesuit old stone winery and cellars at Sevenhill, founded by Austrian Jesuits in 1848. A rare Australian example of Spanish missionary style exists at New Norcia, Western Australia, founded by Spanish Benedictine monks in 1846. A number of notable Victorian era chapels and edifices were also constructed at church schools across Australia.
Along with community attitudes to religion, church architecture changed significantly during the 20th century. St Monica's Cathedral in Cairns was designed by architect Ian Ferrier and built in 1967–68 following the form of the original basilica model of the early churches of Rome, adapted to a tropical climate and to reflect the changes to Catholic liturgy mandated at Vatican II. The cathedral was dedicated as a memorial to the Battle of the Coral Sea which was fought east of Cairns in May 1942. The ""Peace Window"" stained glass was installed on the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. In the later 20th century, distinctly Australian approaches were applied at places such as Jamberoo Benedictine Abbey, where natural materials were chosen to ""harmonise with the local environment"" and the chapel sanctuary is of glass overlooking rainforest. Similar design principles were applied at Thredbo Ecumenical Chapel built in the Snowy Mountains in 1996."
Catholic Church in Australia,"Film and television
Australian films on Catholic themes have included:"
Catholic Church in Australia,"Molokai: The Story of Father Damien (1999), directed by Paul Cox and starring David Wenham. The film recounts the life of the Belgian Saint Fr Damien of Molokai who devoted his life to the Kalaupapa Leprosy Settlement on the Hawaiian island of Molokai.
Mary (1994), written and directed by Kay Pavlou and starring Lucy Bell, a biopic recounting the life and works of Mary MacKillop, Australia's first saint of the Catholic Church.
The Passion of the Christ (2004) was directed and co-written by Australian trained actor-director Mel Gibson (who was raised a Traditionalist Catholic in Australia).
Oranges and Sunshine (2010), directed by Ken Loach and starring Emily Watson, Hugo Weaving and David Wenham. The film is based on the true story of Margaret Humphreys, an English social worker who uncovers the scandal of a scheme to forcibly relocate poor children to Australia and Canada. Many of the children suffered sexual, physical and emotional abuse at the hands of the Christian Brothers in Australia.
The Devil's Playground (1976) directed by Fred Schepisi and starring Simon Burke, Nick Tate, Arthur Dignam and John Frawley. The film is semi-autobiographical and tells the story of 13-year-old Tom Allen, training to be a religious Brother in the De La Salle Order.
Television programs on Catholic themes have included:"
Catholic Church in Australia,"Revelation (2020) directed by Nial Fulton and Sarah Ferguson. A three-part documentary on the sexual abuse of children by priests and religious brothers. Ferguson interviewed Father Vincent Ryan and Brother Bernard McGrath during their criminal trials in Sydney.
The Devil's Playground (2014), directed by Rachel Ward and Tony Krawitz and starring Simon Burke, John Noble, Don Hany, Jack Thompson and Toni Collette. The series picks up 35 years after the events of Fred Schepisi's film. Tom Allen, now in his 40s is a respected Sydney psychiatrist and father of two children. After accepting an offer to counselling priests, he uncovers a scandal.
Sisters of War (2010) is a telemovie based on the true story of two Australian women, Lorna Whyte, an army nurse and Sister Berenice Twohill, a Catholic nun from New South Wales who survived as prisoners of war in Papua New Guinea during World War II.
Brides of Christ (1991), starring Naomi Watts and guest starring Russell Crowe, was a television miniseries produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). Set in a Sydney convent school, it dealt with the struggles of both the nuns and the young students to adapt to the many social changes taking place within the church and the outside world during the 1960s.
The Abbey (2007), an ABC documentary series filmed in the Jamberoo Benedictine Abbey, followed five women from very different backgrounds and with very different views about spirituality as they lived a 33-day program introduction to monastic living devised and implemented by the nuns.
Coverage of religion is part of the ABC's Charter obligation to reflect the character and diversity of the Australian community. Its religious programs include coverage of Catholic (and other) worship and devotion, explanation, analysis, debate and reports. Catholic Church Television Australia is an office with the Australian Catholic Office for Film & Broadcasting and develops television programs for Aurora Community Television on Foxtel and Austar in Australia."
Catholic Church in Australia,"Literature
The body of literature produced by Australian Catholics is extensive. During colonial times, the Benedictine missionary William Ullathorne (1806–1889) was a notable essayist writing against the Convict Transportation system. Later Cardinal Moran (1830–1911), a noted historian, wrote a History of the Catholic Church in Australasia. More recent Catholic histories of Australia include The Catholic Church and Community in Australia (1977) by Patrick O'Farrell and Australian Catholics (1987) by Edmund Campion.
Notable Catholic poets have included Christopher Brennan (1870–1932); James McAuley (1917–1976); Bruce Dawe (1930-2020) and Les Murray (1938–2019). Murray and Dawe were among Australia's foremost contemporary poets, noted for their use of vernacular and everyday Australian themes. Emblematic of the Christian poets could be McAuley's rejection of Modernism in favour of Classical culture:"
Catholic Church in Australia,"Christ, you walked on a sea
But you cannot walk in a poem,
Not in our century.
There's something deeply wrong
Either with us or with you.
Many Australian writers have examined the lives of Christian characters, or have been influenced by Catholic schooling. Australia's best-selling novel of all time, The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough, writes of the temptations encountered by a priest living in the Outback. Many contemporary Australian writers have attended or taught at Catholic schools
Catholic news publications have existed since 1839. They currently include: The Catholic Weekly from Sydney; The Catholic Leader, published by the Brisbane Archdiocese; and Eureka Street Magazine which is concerned with public affairs, arts, and theology and is run by the communication division of the Jesuit religious order."
Catholic Church in Australia,"Music
St Mary's Cathedral Choir, Sydney, is the oldest musical institution in Australia, from origins in 1817. Major Catholic-raised recording artists from Johnny O'Keefe to Paul Kelly have recorded Christian spirituals. Paul Kelly's Meet Me in the Middle of the Air is based on Psalm 23. Catholic nun Sister Janet Mead  achieved significant mainstream chart success. New South Wales Supreme Court Judge George Palmer was commissioned to compose the setting of the Mass for Sydney's World Youth Day 2008 Papal Mass. The Mass, Benedictus Qui Venit, for large choir, soloists and orchestra, was performed in the presence of Pope Benedict XVI and an audience of 350,000 with singing led by soprano Amelia Farrugia and tenor Andrew Goodwin. ""Receive the Power"", a song written by Guy Sebastian and Gary Pinto, was chosen as the official anthem for the XXIII World Youth Day (WYD08) held in Sydney in 2008.
Australian Christmas carols like the Three Drovers or Christmas Day by John Wheeler and William G. James place the Christmas story in an Australian context of warm, dry Christmas winds and red dust and are popular at Catholic services. As the festival of Christmas falls during the Australian summer, Australians gather in large numbers for traditional open-air evening carol services and concerts in December, such as Carols by Candlelight in Melbourne and Carols in the Domain in Sydney."
Catholic Church in Australia,"Art
The story of Christian art in Australia began with the arrival of the first British settlers at the end of the 18th century. During the 19th century, Gothic Revival cathedrals were built in the colonial capitals, often containing stained glass art works, as can be seen at St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney, and St Patrick's Cathedral, Melbourne. Roy de Maistre (1894–1968) was an Australian abstract artist who obtained renown in Britain, converted to Catholicism and painted notable religious works, including a series of Stations of the Cross for Westminster Cathedral in London. Among the most acclaimed of Australian painters of Catholic themes was Arthur Boyd. He painted a Biblical series, and created tapestries of the life of St Francis of Assisi. Influenced by both the European masters and the Heidelberg School of Australian landscape art, he placed the central characters of the Bible within Australian bush scenery, as in his portrait of Adam and Eve, The Expulsion (1948). The artist Leonard French, who designed a stained glass ceiling of the National Gallery of Victoria, has drawn heavily on Christian story and symbolism through his career."
Catholic Church in Australia,"Saints and other venerated Australians
Some of the Australians honoured by the Catholic Church to be saints or whose cause for canonisation is still being investigated include:"
Catholic Church in Australia,"Saints
Mary MacKillop, founder of the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart of Jesus
Venerated: 13 June 1992
Beatified: 19 January 1995
Canonised: 17 October 2010"
Catholic Church in Australia,"Servants of God
Caroline Chisholm, a married laywoman of the Archdiocese of Canberra-Goulburn
Eileen Rosaline O'Connor, a laywoman of the Archdiocese of Sydney and founder of the Society of Our Lady's Nurses for the Poor
Mary Glowrey (Mary of the Sacred Heart), a professed religious of the Society of Jesus Mary Joseph
Constance Helen Gladman (Mary Rosina), a professed religious of the Daughters of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart"
Catholic Church in Australia,"Other open causes
Ellen Whitty, a professed religious of the Sisters of Mercy
Irene McCormack, a professed religious of the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart"
Catholic Church in Australia,"Visits of saints' relics
Australia has hosted the major relics of a number saints:"
Catholic Church in Australia,"Peter Chanel, protomartyr of the South Seas (4 May 1849 to 1 February 1850)
Therese of Lisieux (2002), and together with her parents Louis Martin and Marie-Azélie Guérin (2020)
Margaret Mary Alacoque (2005)
Pier Giorgio Frassati for the Sydney World Youth Day (2008)
Francis Xavier (2013)"
Catholic Church in Australia,"Visits by saints during their lifetime
Teresa of Calcutta (1969, 1981)
Pope Paul VI (1970)
Pope John Paul II (1986, 1995)"
Catholic Church in Australia,"Organisation
Within Australia the church hierarchy is made of metropolitan archdioceses and suffragan sees. Each diocese has a bishop, while each archdiocese is served by an archbishop. Australia has no living members of the College of Cardinals following the death on 10 January 2023 of the previous Archbishop of Sydney, George Pell. The national assembly of bishops is the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference (ACBC), headed by Timothy Costelloe SDB, the Archbishop of Perth. There are a further 175 autonomous Catholic religious orders operating in Australia, generally affiliated under Catholic Religious Australia, headed by Sr Monica Cavanagh RSJ.
The church in Australia has five provinces: Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney. There are seven archdioceses: Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra and Goulburn, Hobart, Melbourne and Perth. There are 35 dioceses, comprising geographic areas as well as the Australian Defence Force and dioceses for the Chaldean, Maronite, Melkite and Ukrainian rites. There is also a personal ordinariate, principally for former Anglicans, which has a similar status to a diocese. 
 There is also the Australian vicariate of the international personal prelature of the holy cross and opus dei. Rev Paul Hayward, a member of the canon law society of great britain and ireland published in 2013 a helpful article expanding on the theme of territorial and personal jurisdictions. In May 2024, Pope Francis published a short letter to parish priests throughout the world offering three suggestions, the first beginning; ""I ask you first to live out your specific ministerial charism in ever greater service to the varied gifts that the Spirit sows in the People of God. It is urgent to discover with faith, the many and varied charismatic gifts of the laity, be they of a humble or more exalted form..."" In 2017, there were an estimated 3,000 priests and 9,000 men and women in institutes of consecrated life and societies of apostolic life."
Catholic Church in Australia,"Australian Catholic Bishops Conference
The Australian Catholic Bishops Conference is the national body of the bishops of Australia. The Conference is headed by Perth Archbishop, Timothy Costelloe SDB. It is served by a secretariat, based in Canberra, under the management of the Reverend Brian Lucas. The conference meets at least annually.
A list of Australian Prelates by name can be found at gcatholic dot org. See footnote:"
Catholic Church in Australia,"Archdioceses and dioceses
Catholic Religious Australia
Australia's autonomous Catholic religious orders are affiliated under Catholic Religious Australia (CRA), which is the public name of the Australian Conference of Leaders of Religious Institutes (ACLRI). This is the peak body for leaders of the religious institutes and societies of apostolic life resident in Australia. It represents more than 130 congregations of sisters, brothers and priests. It is established by the authority of the Holy See in Rome and is tasked with promoting, supporting and representing religious life in the Australian church and in the wider community and with facilitating co-ordination and co-operation of religious with church bodies and with other authorities including with episcopal conferences and with individual bishops. The organisation is presently led by Josephite Sister Monica Cavanagh."
Catholic Church in Australia,"See also
Catholic Church by country
Broken Rites & Catholic sexual abuse scandal in Australia
Christianity in Australia
List of Catholic cathedrals in Australia
List of Catholic dioceses in Australia
List of saints from Oceania
Religion in Australia
Category:Catholic Church in South America"
Catholic Church in Australia,"References
Further reading
O'Farrell, Patrick (1977). The Catholic Church and community in Australia: a history. West Melbourne, Australia: Thomas Nelson. p. 463.
Campion, Edmund (1987). Australian Catholics. Ringwood, Australia: Penguin. p. 280.
Franklin, James (2023). Catholic Thought and Catholic Action: Scenes from Australian Catholic Life. Brisbane: Connor Court Publishing. ISBN 9781922815354.
Brennan, Frank (12 July 2008). ""The Australian Religious Landscape through Catholic Eyes, on the Eve of World Youth Day 2008"". Eureka Street. Jesuit Communications Australia. Archived from the original on 5 March 2011. Retrieved 16 July 2008."
Catholic Church in Australia,"External links
Catholic Church in Australia's official website
Australian Catholic Bishops Conference official website
Australian Catholic Historical Society
Timeline of Australian Catholic History
Australian Catholic Biographies
Website of Patrick O'Farrell, historian of Catholic Australia
""Catholic Church in Australia"". Catholic-Hierarchy."
Electoral system of Australia,"The electoral system of Australia comprises the laws and processes used for the election of members of the Australian Parliament and is governed primarily by the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918. The system presently has a number of distinctive features including compulsory enrolment; compulsory voting; majority-preferential instant-runoff voting in single-member seats to elect the lower house, the House of Representatives; and the use of the single transferable vote proportional representation system to elect the upper house, the Senate.
The timing of elections is governed by the Constitution and political conventions. Generally, elections are held approximately every three years and are conducted by the independent Australian Electoral Commission (AEC)."
Electoral system of Australia,"Conduct of elections
Federal elections, by-elections and referendums are conducted by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC)."
Electoral system of Australia,"Voter registration
In Australia, voter registration is called enrolment, which is a prerequisite for voting at federal elections, by-elections and referendums. Enrolment is compulsory for Australian citizens over 18 years of age who have lived at their current address for at least one month. Residents in Australia who had been enrolled as British subjects on 25 January 1984, though not Australian citizens, continue to be enrolled. They cannot opt out of enrolment, and must keep their details updated, and vote. (These comprise about 9% of enrolments.)"
Electoral system of Australia,"Electoral rolls
The AEC maintains a permanent Commonwealth electoral roll. State and local elections are today based upon the Commonwealth electoral roll, maintained under joint roll arrangements, though each state and territory regulates its own part of the electoral roll. The same enrolment application or update form can be used for Commonwealth, state and local rolls."
Electoral system of Australia,"Enrolment of electors
Special rules apply to citizens going or living outside the country, to military personnel and to prisoners, all of which do not reside at their normal residential address for electoral purposes. Homeless people or those otherwise with no fixed address have a particular problem with registration, not having a current address to give. Enrolment is optional for 16- or 17-year-olds, but they cannot vote until they turn 18. A person can register or update their details online or by mailing in a paper form.
If a change of address causes an individual to move to another electorate (electoral division), they are legally obliged to notify the AEC within 8 weeks. The AEC monitors house and apartment sales and sends a reminder (and the forms) to new residents if they have moved to another electorate, making compliance with the law easier. The AEC conducts periodic door-to-door and postal campaigns to try to ensure that all eligible persons are registered in the correct electorate. An individual has 8 weeks after turning 18 to register and the 8-week period also applies to update of details. Failure to enrol or update details can incur a fine."
Electoral system of Australia,"Closing of electoral rolls before an election
Federal and state electoral rolls are closed for new enrolments or update of details before each election. For federal elections, they are closed 7 days after the issue of writs for election. The closing dates vary for state and territory elections. Historically, most new applications and updates are received after an election is called, before the closing of rolls."
Electoral system of Australia,"Prisoners
Persons who are serving prison terms may be disqualified to vote, based on the length of their sentence. Federally, prisoners serving a full time prison sentence of less than three years must enrol and vote in federal elections. There are varying laws for prisoners' eligibility to vote in state or territory elections:"
Electoral system of Australia,"In the Australian Capital Territory and South Australia, all prisoners are eligible.
In Victoria, prisoners must be serving a sentence of less than five years to be eligible.
In Queensland, Tasmania and the Northern Territory, prisoners must be serving a sentence of less than three years to be eligible.
In New South Wales and Western Australia, prisoners must be serving a sentence of less than one year to be eligible.
Despite those serving short sentences being allowed and required to vote, voter turnout amongst prisoners is low. In 2010, a Victorian government review found only 26% of prisoners serving less than three year sentences were enrolled, despite them being eligible and legally obliged to do so. At the 2013 federal election, only 2 prisoners at the Silverwater Correctional Centre voted, according to the general manager of the prison."
Electoral system of Australia,"Public funding of political parties
To receive federal public funding, a political party must be registered under the Electoral Act, which requires that they have at least 1500 members. All nominations for party-endorsed candidates must be signed by the Registered Officer of a registered party. The name of registered parties appear on ballot papers. Separate registers of parties are maintained for each state and territory, with their own membership requirements.
To receive public funding, a candidate (party-endorsed or independent) must receive at least 4% of the first preference vote in the division or the state or territory they contested."
Electoral system of Australia,"Nomination
Candidates for either house must formally nominate with the Electoral Commission. The nomination for a party-endorsed candidate must be signed by the Registered Officer of a party registered under the Electoral Act. Fifty signatures of eligible voters are required for an independent candidate.
A deposit of $2,000 is required for a candidate for the House of Representatives or the Senate. (Before March 2019, the deposit for the House of Representatives was $1,000.) This deposit is refunded if the candidate is elected or gains at least 4% of the first preference vote.
Between 10 and 27 days must be allowed after the issue of writs before the close of nominations.
The name and political affiliation of candidates who are disendorsed by or resign from a party after the close of nominations, continue to appear on the ballot paper, and they stand as independents. However, complications arise for senate candidates in that position in respect of voting ""above the line"" as party lists would also have been registered."
Electoral system of Australia,"Election day
The date and type of federal election is determined by the Prime Minister – after a consideration of constitutional requirements, legal requirements, as well as political considerations – who advises the Governor-General to set the process in motion by dissolving either or both houses and issuing writs for election for the House of Representatives and territorial senators. The Constitution of Australia does not require simultaneous elections for the Senate and the House of Representatives, but it has long been preferred that elections for the two houses take place simultaneously. The most recent House-only election took place in 1972, and the most recent Senate-only election took place in 1970. The last independently dated Senate election writ occurred during the Gair Affair in 1974. Federal elections must be held on a Saturday which has been the case since the 1913 federal election.
Subject to those considerations, an election for the House of Representatives can be called at any time before the expiration of the three-year term of the House of Representatives The term of the House of Representatives starts on the first sitting day of the House following its election and runs for a maximum of three years, but the House can be dissolved earlier. The date of the first sitting can be extended provided that ""There shall be a session of the Parliament once at least in every year, so that twelve months shall not intervene between the last sitting of the Parliament in one session and its first sitting in the next session, but subject to the requirement that the House shall meet not more than 30 days after the date appointed for the return of the writs."" The actual date of the election is later. Between 10 and 27 days must be allowed for nominations, and the actual election would be set between 21 and 31 days after the close of nominations. Accordingly, between 31 and 58 must be allowed after the issue of the writs to the election.
The term of senators ends on 30 June either three (for half the senators if it follows a double-dissolution) or six years after their election. Elections of senators at a half-Senate election must take place in the year before the terms expire, except if parliament is dissolved earlier. The terms of senators from the territories align with House elections. The latest date that a half-Senate election can be held must allow time for the votes to be counted and the writs to be returned before the newly elected senators take office on 1 July. This took over a month in 2016, so practically, the date in which a half-Senate election is to take place must be between 1 July of the year before Senate terms expire until mid-May of the expiry year.
A double dissolution cannot take place within six months before the date of the expiry of the House of Representatives."
Electoral system of Australia,"Constitutional and legal provisions
The Constitutional and legal provisions which impact on the choice of election dates include:"
Electoral system of Australia,"Section 12 of the Constitution says: ""The Governor of any State may cause writs to be issued for the election of Senators for that State""
Section 13 of the Constitution  provides that the election of senators shall be held in the period of twelve months before the places become vacant.
Section 28 of the Constitution says: ""Every House of Representatives shall continue for three years from the first sitting of the House, and no longer, but may be sooner dissolved by the Governor-General."" Since the 46th Parliament of Australia opened on 2 July 2019, it will expire on 1 July 2022.
Section 32 of the Constitution says: ""The writs shall be issued within ten days from the expiry of a House of Representatives or from the proclamation of a dissolution thereof."" Ten days after 1 July 2022 is 11 July 2022.
Section 156 (1) of the CEA says: ""The date fixed for the nomination of the candidates shall not be less than 10 days nor more than 27 days after the date of the writ"". Twenty-seven days after 11 July 2022 is 7 August 2022.
Section 157 of the CEA says: ""The date fixed for the polling shall not be less than 23 days nor more than 31 days after the date of nomination"". Thirty-one days after 7 August 2022 is 7 September 2022, a Wednesday.
Section 158 of the CEA says: ""The day fixed for the polling shall be a Saturday"". The Saturday before 7 September 2022 is 3 September 2022. This is therefore the latest possible date for the lower house election."
Electoral system of Australia,"Voting system
Compulsory voting
Voting is compulsory at federal elections, by-elections and referendums for those on the electoral roll, as well as for State and Territory elections. Australia enforces compulsory voting. People in this situation are asked to explain their failure to vote. If no satisfactory reason is provided (for example, illness or religious prohibition), a fine of up to $170 is imposed, and failure to pay the fine may result in a court hearing and additional costs. About 5% of enrolled voters fail to vote at most elections. In South Australia, Tasmania and Western Australia voting at local elections is not compulsory. In the other states, local council elections are also compulsory.
Compulsory voting was introduced for the Queensland state election in 1915, for federal elections since the 1925 federal election, and Victoria introduced it for the Legislative Assembly at the 1927 state election and for Legislative Council elections in 1935. New South Wales and Tasmania introduced compulsory voting in 1928, Western Australia in 1936 and South Australia in 1942.
Though the immediate justification for compulsory voting at the federal level was the low voter turnout (59.38%) at the 1922 federal election, down from 71.59% at the 1919 federal election, its introduction was a condition of the Country Party agreeing to form an alliance with the then minority Nationalist Party. Compulsory voting was not on the platform of either the Stanley Bruce-led Nationalist/Country party coalition government or the Matthew Charlton-led Labor opposition. The change took the form of a private member's bill initiated by Herbert Payne, a backbench Tasmanian Nationalists senator, who on 16 July 1924 introduced the bill in the Senate. Payne's bill was passed with little debate (the House of Representatives agreeing to it in less than an hour), and in neither house was a division required, hence no votes were recorded against the bill. It received Royal Assent on 31 July 1924 as the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1924. The 1925 federal election was the first to be conducted under compulsory voting, which saw the turnout rise to 91.4%. The turnout increased to about 95% within a couple of elections and has stayed at about that level since. Compulsory voting at referendums was considered when a referendum was proposed in 1915, but, as the referendum was never held, the idea was put on hold.
It is an offence to ""mislead an elector in relation to the casting of his vote"". An ""informal vote"" is a ballot paper that does not indicate a clear voting preference, is left blank, or carries markings that might identify the voter. The number of informal votes is counted but, in the determination of voter preferences, they are not included in the total number of (valid) votes cast. Around 95% of registered voters attend polling, and around 5% of House of Representatives votes are informal.
When compulsory voting was introduced in Victoria in 1926 for the Legislative Assembly, the turnout increased from 59.24% at the 1924 state election to 91.76% at the 1927 state election, but the informal vote increased from 1.01% in 1924 to 1.94% in 1927. But when it was introduced for the 1937 Legislative Council election, which was not held on the same day as for the Legislative Assembly, the turnout increased from 10% to only 46%.
The requirement is for the person to enrol, attend a polling station and have their name marked off the electoral roll as attending, receive a ballot paper and take it to an individual voting booth, mark it, fold the ballot paper and place it in the ballot box. There is no explicit requirement for a choice to be made, the ballot paper is only to be 'marked'. According to the act, how a person marks the paper is completely up to the individual. Despite the risk of sanctions, the voter turnout at federal elections is dropping, with 1.4 million eligible voters, or nearly 10% of the total, failing to vote at the 2016 federal election, the lowest turnout since compulsory voting began. At the 2010 Tasmanian state election, with a turnout of 335,353 voters, about 6,000 people were fined $26 for not voting, and about 2,000 paid the fine. A postal vote is available for those for whom it is difficult to attend a polling station. Early, or pre-poll, voting at an early voting centre is also available for those who might find it difficult to get to a polling station on election day."
Electoral system of Australia,"Debate over compulsory voting
Following the 2004 federal election, at which the Liberal–National coalition government won a majority in both houses, a senior minister, Senator Nick Minchin, said that he favoured the abolition of compulsory voting. Some prominent Liberals, such as Petro Georgiou, former chair of the Parliament's Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, have spoken in favour of compulsory voting.
Peter Singer, in Democracy and Disobedience, argues that compulsory voting could negate the obligation of a voter to support the outcome of the election, since voluntary participation in elections is deemed to be one of the sources of the obligation to obey the law in a democracy. In 1996 Albert Langer was jailed for three weeks on contempt charges in relation to a constitutional challenge on a legal way not to vote for either of the major parties. Chong, Davidson and Fry, writing in the journal of the right wing think tank the CIS, argue that Australian compulsory voting is disreputable, paternalistic, disadvantages smaller political parties, and allows major parties to target marginal seats and make some savings in pork-barrelling because of this targeting. Chong et al. also argue that denial is a significant aspect of the debate about compulsory voting.
A counter argument to opponents of compulsory voting is that in these systems the individual still has the practical ability to abstain at the polls by voting informally if they so choose, due to the secrecy of the ballot. A spoilt vote does not count towards any political party and effectively is the same as choosing not to vote under a non-compulsory voting system. However, Singer argues that even the appearance of voluntary participation is sufficient to create an obligation to obey the law.
In the 2010 Australian election, Mark Latham urged Australians to vote informally by handing in blank ballot papers for the 2010 election. He also stated that he feels it is unfair for the government to force citizens to vote if they have no opinion or threaten them into voting with a fine. An Australian Electoral Commission spokesman stated that the Commonwealth Electoral Act did not contain an explicit provision prohibiting the casting of a blank vote. How the Australian Electoral Commission arrived at this opinion is unknown; it runs contrary to the opinions of Chief Justice Sir Garfield Barwick, who wrote that voters must actually mark the ballot paper and deposit that ballot into a ballot box, and Justice Blackburn who was of the opinion that casting an invalid vote was a violation of the Act.
Tim Evans, a Director of Elections Systems and Policy of the AEC, wrote in 2006 that ""It is not the case, as some people have claimed, that it is only compulsory to attend the polling place and have your name marked off and this has been upheld by a number of legal decisions."" Yet, practically, it remains the fact that having received a ballot paper, the elector can simply fold it up and put it into the ballot box without formally marking it, if the elector objects, in principle, to casting a vote. However, the consistently low number of informal votes each election indicates that having attended, had his or her name marked off, very few electors then choose not to vote formally.
Proponents of compulsory voting have promoted benefits such as the difficulty for coercion to be used to prevent disadvantaged people (the old, illiterate or disabled) to vote, and for obstacles to be put in the way of classes of individuals (ethnic/coloured; either registration requirements or placement of voting booths) as often happens under other voting systems. They also suggest jury duty and compulsory military service as vastly more onerous citizen's compulsions than attending a local voting booth once every few years."
Electoral system of Australia,"Ranked (or preferential) voting
Australia uses various forms of ranked voting for almost all elections. Under this system, voters number the candidates on the ballot paper in the order of their preference. The preferential system was introduced for federal elections in 1918, in response to the rise of the Country Party, a party representing small farmers. The Country Party was seen to have split the anti-Labor vote in conservative country areas, allowing Labor candidates to win on a minority vote. The conservative federal government of Billy Hughes introduced preferential voting as a means of allowing competition between the two conservative parties without putting seats at risk. It was first used in the form of instant-runoff voting at the Corangamite by-election on 14 December 1918. The system was first used for election for the Queensland Parliament in 1892. In the form of single transferable voting, ranked voting was introduced in the Tasmanian House of Assembly in 1906 as a result of the work of Andrew Inglis Clark and Catherine Helen Spence, building on the original concept invented in 1859 by Briton Thomas Hare, and following the use of STV in Tasmanian state elections in the 1890s.
Preferential voting has gradually extended to both upper and lower houses, in the federal, state and territory legislatures, and is also used in municipal elections, and most other kinds of elections as well, such as internal political party elections, trade union elections, church elections, elections to company boards and elections in voluntary bodies such as football clubs. Negotiations for disposition of preference recommendations to voters are taken very seriously by candidates because transferred preferences carry the same weight as primary votes. (A vote is only transferred if use of the earlier preference means the ballot cannot be used effectively.)
Political parties usually produce how-to-vote cards to assist and guide voters in the ranking of candidates. When parties declare how they are preferencing other parties, typically in the lead-up to an election, they are declaring how they will instruct their supporters via these cards: there is no mechanism in the electoral system for inter-party preferences."
Electoral system of Australia,"Secret balloting
Secret balloting was implemented by Tasmania, Victoria and South Australia in 1856, followed by other Australian colonies: New South Wales (1858), Queensland (1859), and Western Australia (1877). Colonial (soon to become States) electoral laws, including the secret ballot, applied for the first election of the Australian Parliament in 1901, and the system has continued to be a feature of all elections in Australia and also applies to referendums.
The Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 does not explicitly set out the secret ballot but a reading of sections 206, 207, 325 and 327 of the Act would imply its assumption. Sections 323 and 226(4) do however, apply the principle of a secret ballot to polling staff and would also support the assumption.
Proxy voting is not permitted at federal and state elections."
Electoral system of Australia,"Alternative voting methods
Most voting takes place with registered voters attending a polling station on election day, where they are given a ballot paper which they mark in a prescribed manner and then place it into a ballot box. However, alternative voting methods are available. For example, a person may vote by an absentee ballot whereby a voter attends a voting place which is not in the electoral district in which they are registered to vote. Instead of marking the ballot paper and putting it in the ballot box, the voter's ballot paper is placed in an envelope and then it is sent by the voting official to the voter's home district to be counted there. Other alternatives are postal voting and early voting, known as ""pre-poll voting"", which are also available to voters who would not be in their registered electoral districts on an election day.
A form of postal voting was introduced in Western Australia in 1877, followed by an improved method in South Australia in 1890. On the other hand, concerns about postal voting have been raised as to whether it complies with the requirements of a secret ballot, in that people cast their vote outside the security of a polling station, and whether voters can cast their vote privately free from another person's coercion.
In voting for the Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly, voters may choose between voting electronically or on paper. Otherwise, Australian elections are carried out using paper ballots. If more than one election takes place, for example for the House of Representatives and the Senate, then each election is on a separate ballot paper, which are of different colours and which are deposited into separate ballot boxes."
Electoral system of Australia,"Electoral reform
There are organisations, such as the Proportional Representation Society of Australia (PRSA), and political parties, such as the Australian Greens, that support changing the electoral system to the House of Representatives to that of a proportional representation system."
Electoral system of Australia,"Allocation process
Allocation process for House of Representatives (instant-runoff/alternative vote)
The main elements of the operation of preferential voting for single-member House of Representatives divisions are as follows:"
Electoral system of Australia,"Voters are required to place the number ""1"" against their first choice of candidate, known as the ""first preference"" or ""primary vote"".
Voters are then required to place the numbers ""2"", ""3"", etc., against all of the other candidates listed on the ballot paper, in order of preference. (Every candidate must be numbered, otherwise the vote becomes ""informal"" (spoiled) and does not count.)
Prior to counting, each ballot paper is examined to ensure that it is validly filled in (and not invalidated on other grounds).
The number ""1"" or first preference votes are counted first. If no candidate secures an absolute majority (more than half) of first preference votes, then the candidate with the fewest votes is excluded from the count.
The votes for the eliminated candidate (i.e., from the ballots that placed the eliminated candidate first) are re-allocated to the remaining candidates according to the number ""2"" or ""second preference"" votes.
If no candidate has yet secured an absolute majority of the vote, then the next candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. This preference allocation is repeated until there is a candidate with an absolute majority. Where a second (or subsequent) preference is expressed for a candidate who has already been eliminated, the voter's third or subsequent preferences are used.
Following the full allocation of preferences, it is possible to derive a two-party-preferred figure, where the votes have been allocated between the two main candidates in the election. In Australia, this is usually between the candidates from the Coalition parties and the Australian Labor Party."
Electoral system of Australia,"Alternative allocation methods for Senate (single transferable vote)
For the Australian Senate, each State constitutes one multi-member electorate. Currently, 12 senators are elected from each State, one half every three years, except in the case of double dissolution when elections for all 12 senators in each State take place. The number of senators to be elected determines the 'quota' that guarantees election under quota-preferential voting (Single transferable voting). For a half-Senate election of 6 places to be filled, the quota in each State is 14.28% (calculated using the formula 1/(6+1)), while after a double dissolution the quota is 7.69% (calculated using the formula 1/(12+1)). The AEC also conducts a special recount after a double dissolution using a half-Senate quota for the purpose of allocating long and short terms so that rotation of senators can be re-established, however the Senate has never used the results to allocate terms, despite two bipartisan senate resolutions to use it.
The federal Senate electoral system from 1984 to 2013, and those currently used for some state legislatures, provide for simultaneous registration of party-listed candidates and party-determined orders of voting preference, known as 'group voting tickets' or 'above the line voting' which involves placing the number '1' in a single box and the vote is then allocated in accordance with the party's registered voting preferences. The AEC automatically allocates preferences, or votes, in the predetermined order outlined in the group voting ticket. Each party or group can register up to three group voting tickets. This highly complex system has potential for unexpected outcomes, including the possible election of a candidate who may have initially received an insignificant primary vote tally (see, for example, the Minor Party Alliance at the 2013 federal election). An estimated 95% of all votes are cast 'above the line'.
The alternative for Senate elections from 1984 to 2013 was to use 'below the line voting' by numbering a large number of individual candidate's boxes in the order of the voter's preference. To be valid, the voter placed sequential numbers against every candidate on the ballot paper, and the risk of error and invalidation of the vote was significant.
In 2016, the Senate voting system was changed again to abolish group voting tickets and introduce optional preferential voting.  An ""above the line"" vote for a party now allocates preferences to the candidates of that party only, in the order in which they are listed.  The AEC directs voters to number 6 or more boxes above the line.  If, instead, voters choose to vote for individual candidates in their own order of preference ""below the line"", at least 12 boxes must be numbered.  (See also Australian Senate#Electoral system)."
Electoral system of Australia,"Gerrymandering and malapportionment
Malapportionment occurs when the numbers of voters in electorates are not equal. Malapportionment can occur through demographic change or through the deliberate weighting of different zones, such as rural v. urban areas. Malapportionment differs from a gerrymander, which occurs when electoral boundaries are drawn to favour one political party or group over others.
There is no scope for malapportionment of Senate divisions, with each State constituting one multi-member electorate, though no account is taken of differences in the relative populations of states.
For the House of Representatives, members are elected from single member electorates.
Australia has seen very little gerrymandering of electoral boundaries, relevant only for the House of Representatives and State Legislative Assemblies, which have nearly always been drawn up by public servants or independent boundary commissioners. But Australia has seen systematic malapportionment of electorates. All colonial legislatures before Federation, and the federal parliament after it, allocated more representation to rural districts than their populations merited. This was justified on several grounds, such as that country people had to contend with greater distances and hardships, that country people (and specifically farmers) produced most of the nation's real wealth, and that greater country representation was necessary to balance the radical tendencies of the urban population.
However, in the later 20th century, these arguments were successfully challenged, and by the early 21st century malapportionment was abolished in all states. In all states, electoral districts must have roughly the same number of voters, with variations allowed for rural areas due to their sparse population. Proponents of this concept call this ""one vote, one value"".
For the 2019 Federal election, most electorates contained between 105,000 and 125,000 voters. However, in Tasmania 5 electorates contained between 73,000 and 80,000 voters, because the Constitution (s.24) grants Tasmania a minimum of 5 members in the House of Representatives."
Electoral system of Australia,"Examples
The most conspicuous examples of malapportionment were those of South Australia, Queensland and Western Australia."
Electoral system of Australia,"South Australia
In South Australia, the 1856 Constitution stipulated that there must be two rural constituencies for every urban constituency.
By the early 1960s, the urban-rural voter ratio was almost exactly reversed: more than two-thirds of the state's population lived in Adelaide and its suburbs, but the rural areas elected two-thirds of the legislature. This was despite the fact that by this time, rural seats had on average one-quarter as many voters as urban seats: in one of the more extreme cases, a vote in the rural seat of Frome was worth 10 times a vote in an Adelaide seat.
The setup allowed the Liberal and Country League to stay in office from 1932 to 1965, the last 27 of these under Thomas Playford. However, from 1947, the LCL lost by increasing margins in terms of actual votes, and in 1953, even retained power despite losing the two-party vote and Labor winning a majority of the primary vote. Largely because Playford was the main beneficiary, the setup was called ""the Playmander"", although it was not strictly speaking a gerrymander.
The gross inequities of this system came into sharp focus during three consecutive state elections in the 1960s:"
Electoral system of Australia,"In 1962, Labor won 54.3% of the two party vote, a margin normally large enough for a comprehensive victory, but came up one seat short of a majority as it only managed a two-seat swing, and Playford was able to continue in power with the support of two independents.
While the Playmander was overcome when Labor defeated the LCL in 1965, the rural weighting was strong enough that Labor won only a one-seat majority, despite winning 54.3% of the two-party vote.
In 1968, the LCL regained power despite Labor winning the popular vote with 53.2% to the LCL's 46.8%, as Labor suffered a two-seat swing, leaving both parties with 19 seats each before conservative independent Tom Stott threw his support to the LCL for a majority.
Playford's successor as LCL leader, Steele Hall, was highly embarrassed at the farcical manner in which he became Premier, and immediately set about enacting a fairer system: a few months after taking office, Hall enacted a new electoral map with 47 seats: 28 seats in Adelaide and 19 in the country.
Previously, there had been 39 seats (13 in Adelaide and 26 in country areas), but, for some time, the LCL's base in Adelaide had been limited to the wealthy eastern crescent and the area around Holdfast Bay.
While it came up slightly short of ""one vote, one value"", as Labor had demanded, the new system allowed Adelaide to elect a majority of the legislature, which all but assured a Labor victory at the next election; despite this, Hall knew he would be effectively handing the premiership to his Labor counterpart, Don Dunstan.
In the first election under this system, in 1970, Dunstan won handily, picking up all eight new seats.
After Premier Don Dunstan introduced the Age of Majority (Reduction) Bill in October 1970, the voting age in South Australia was lowered to 18 years old in 1973."
Electoral system of Australia,"Queensland
In Queensland, the malapportionment initially benefitted the Labor Party, since many small rural constituencies were dominated by workers in provincial cities who were organised into the powerful Australian Workers' Union. But after 1957, the Country Party (later renamed the National Party) governments of Sir Frank Nicklin and Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen tweaked the system to give the upper hand to their rural base and isolate Labor support in Brisbane and provincial cities.  In later years, this system made it possible for Bjelke-Petersen to win elections with only a quarter of the first preference votes. On average, a Country/National seat took only 7,000 votes to win, compared with 12,000 for a Labor seat.  Combined with the votes of the Liberals (in Queensland, the National Party had historically been the senior partner in the non-Labor coalition), this was enough to lock Labor out of power even in years when Labor was the biggest single party in the legislature.  This ""Bjelkemander"" was not overcome until the final defeat of the Nationals in 1989. Under new Labor premier Wayne Goss, a revised map was enacted with 40 seats in Brisbane and 49 in the country.  Seats had roughly the same number of voters, with a greater tolerance allowed for seats in rural areas."
Electoral system of Australia,"Western Australia
Western Australia retained a significant malapportionment in the Legislative Assembly until 2008. Under the previous system, votes in the country were worth up to four times the value of votes in Perth, the state's capital city. On 20 May 2005 the state Parliament passed new electoral laws, removing the malapportionment with effect from the following election. Under the new laws, electorates must have a population of 21,343, with a permitted variation of 10%. Electorates with a land area of more than 100,000 km2 (39,000 sq mi) are permitted to have a variation of 20%, in recognition of the difficulty of representing the sparsely populated north and east of the state. Large districts would be attributed an extra number of notional voters, equal to 1.5% the area of the district in square kilometres, for the purposes of this calculation. This Large District Allowance will permit large rural districts to have many fewer voters than the average district enrolment. The Office of the Electoral Distribution Commissioners gives the following example: Central Kimberley-Pilbara district has 12601 electors and an area of 600038 square kilometres. The average district enrolment for WA is 21343. Central Kimberley-Pilbara thus obtains 9000 notional extra electors, bringing its notional total to 21601, which is acceptably close to the average district enrolment.
A modified form of malapportionment was, however, retained for the Legislative Council, the state upper house. Rural areas are still slightly overrepresented, with as much as six times the voting power of Perth on paper. According to ABC election analyst Antony Green, the rural weighting in the Legislative Council is still significant enough that a Liberal state premier has no choice but to include the National Party in his government, even if the Liberals theoretically have enough seats in the Legislative Assembly to govern alone.
This situation remained until November 2021, when the Electoral Legislation Amendment (Electoral Equality) Bill 2021 was passed, replacing the malapportioned regions with a single state-wide electorate of 37 members. GVTs were also replaced by optional preferential voting. The changes will take effect in the 2025 state election."
Electoral system of Australia,"The Parliament
The Parliament of Australia is a bicameral (two-house) parliament. It combines some of the features of the Parliament of the United Kingdom with some features of the United States Congress. This is because the authors of the Australian Constitution had two objectives: to reproduce as faithfully as possible the Westminster system of parliamentary government, while creating a federation in which there would be a division of powers between the national government and the states, regulated by a written constitution.
In structure, the Australian Parliament resembles the United States Congress. There is a House of Representatives elected from single-member constituencies of approximately equal population, and there is a Senate consisting of an equal number of senators from each state, regardless of population (since 1975 there have also been senators representing the territories).
But in function, the Australian Parliament follows the Westminster system. The Prime Minister holds office because they can command the support of the majority of the House of Representatives, and must resign or advise an immediate election if the house passes a vote of no-confidence in their administration. If they fail to do so, he risks dismissal by the Governor-General. All ministers are required to be members of Parliament (although the constitution permits a person who is not currently a member of parliament to hold a ministerial portfolio for a maximum period of three months)."
Electoral system of Australia,"The House of Representatives
The Australian House of Representatives has 151 members elected from single-member constituencies (formally called ""Electoral Divisions"", but usually called seats or electorates in Australia; see Australian electorates) for three-year terms. Voters must fill in the ballot paper by numbering all the candidates in order of their preference. Failure to number all the candidates, or an error in numbering, renders the ballot informal (invalid). The average number of candidates has tended to increase in recent years: there are frequently 10 or 12 candidates in a seat, and at the Wills by-election in April 1992 there were 22 candidates. This has made voting increasingly onerous, but the rate of informal voting has increased only slightly.
The low rate of informal voting is largely attributed to advertising from the various political parties indicating how a voter should number their ballot paper, called a How-to-Vote Card. On election day, volunteers from political parties stand outside polling places, handing voters a card which advises them how to cast their vote for their respective party. Thus, if a voter wishes to vote for the Liberal Party, they may take the Liberal How-to-Vote Card and follow its instructions. While they can lodge their vote according to their own preferences, Australian voters show a high degree of party loyalty in following their chosen party's card.
A disinterested voter who has formed no personal preference may simply number all the candidates sequentially, 1, 2, 3, etc., from top to bottom of the ballot paper, a practice termed donkey voting, which advantages those candidates whose names are placed nearest to the top of the ballot paper. Before 1984, candidates were listed in alphabetical order, which led to a profusion of Aaronses and Abbotts contesting elections. A notable example was the 1937 Senate election, in which the Labor candidate group in New South Wales consisted of Amour, Ashley, Armstrong and Arthur—all of whom were elected. Since 1984, the listed order of candidates on the ballot paper has been determined by drawing lots, a ceremony performed publicly by electoral officials immediately after the appointed time for closure of nominations."
Electoral system of Australia,"Lower house primary, two-party and seat results since 1910
A two-party system has existed in the Australian House of Representatives since the two non-Labor parties merged in 1909. The 1910 election was the first to elect a majority government, with the Australian Labor Party concurrently winning the first Senate majority. A two-party-preferred vote (2PP) has been calculated since the 1919 change from first-past-the-post to preferential voting and subsequent introduction of the Coalition. ALP = Australian Labor Party, L+NP = grouping of Liberal/National/LNP/CLP Coalition parties (and predecessors), Oth = other parties and independents."
Electoral system of Australia,"Counting votes in elections for the House of Representatives
The House of Representatives uses full preferential voting, which is known outside Australia by names such as ""instant runoff voting"" (IRV) and ""alternative voting"".
When the polls close at 6 pm on election day, the votes are counted. The count is conducted by officers of the Australian Electoral Commission, watched by nominated volunteer observers from the political parties, called scrutineers, who are entitled to observe the whole voting process from the opening of the booth. The votes from each polling booth in the electorate are tallied at the office of the returning officer for the electorate. If one of the candidates has more than 50% of the vote, then they are declared elected. Australian politics are influenced by social and economic demographics, though the correlation between ""class"" and voting is not always simple. Typically, the National Party will poll higher in rural seats. The Liberal Party and the Australian Labor Party are not as easily generalised. In a strong seat, the elected party might win up to 80% of the two-party-preferred vote.  In the 2004 federal election, the highest winning margin in a seat was 25.1%, with most seats won by a margin of less than 10%.
In the remaining seats, no single candidate will have a majority of the primary votes (or first-preference votes). A hypothetical result might look like this:"
Electoral system of Australia,"On election night, an interim distribution of preferences called a TCP (two-candidate-preferred) count is performed. The electoral commission nominates the two candidates it believes are most likely to win the most votes and all votes are distributed immediately to one or the other preferred candidate. This result is indicative only and subsequently the formal count will be performed after all ""declaration"" (e.g. postal, absent votes) votes are received.
In this example, the candidate with the smallest vote, Davies, will be eliminated, and his or her preferences will be distributed: that is, his or her 4,000 votes will be individually re-allocated to the remaining candidates according to which candidate received the number 2 vote on each of those 4000 ballot papers. Suppose Davies's preferences split 50/50 between Smith and Jones. After re-allocation of Davies's votes, Smith would have 47% and Jones 37% of the total votes in the electorate. White would then be eliminated. Suppose all of White's preferences went to Smith. Smith would then have 53% and would be declared elected. Johnson's votes would not need to be distributed."
Electoral system of Australia,"Exhausted preferences
The exhausted counts correspond to votes that ought to be informal, if strictly following the rules above, but were deemed to have expressed some valid preferences. The Electoral Act has since been amended to almost eliminate exhausted votes.
Section 268(1)(c) of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 now has the effect of making the vote of any elector that does not preference every candidate on the ballot paper an informal vote as opposed to counting the vote until the voter's preference exhausts."
Electoral system of Australia,"Two-party majorities, swings and pendulums
Since 1984 the preferences of all candidates in House of Representatives seats have been distributed, even if this is not necessary to determine the winner of the seat. This is done to determine the percentage of the votes obtained by the winning candidate after the distribution of all preferences. This is called the two-party-preferred vote. For example, if (in the example given above), Smith finished with 58% of the vote after the distribution of Johnson's preferences, Smith's two-party vote would be 58% and the seat would be said to have a two-party majority of 8%. It would therefore need a two-party swing of 8 percentage points to be lost to the other side of politics at the next election.
Once the two-party majorities in all seats are known, they can then be arranged in a table to show the order in which they would be lost in the event of an adverse swing at the next election. Such tables frequently appear in the Australian media and are called election pendulums or sometimes Mackerras pendulums after the political scientist Malcolm Mackerras, who popularised the idea of the two-party vote in his 1972 book Australian General Elections.
Here is a sample of the federal election pendulum from the 2001 election, showing some of the seats held by the Liberal-National Party coalition government, in order of their two-party majority. A seat with a small two-party majority is said to be a marginal seat or a swinging seat. A seat with a large two-party majority is said to be a safe seat, although ""safe"" seats have been known to change hands in the event of a large swing."
Electoral system of Australia,"Redistributions
The boundaries of Australian electoral divisions are reviewed periodically by the Australian Electoral Commission and redrawn in a process called redistribution.
The Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 requires that all seats have approximately an equal number of enrolled voters. When the Commission determines that population shifts within a state have caused some seats to have too many or too few voters, a redistribution is called and new boundaries are drawn up.
Redistributions are also held when the Commission determines (following a formula laid down in the Electoral Act) that the distribution of seats among the states and territories must be changed because some states are growing faster than others."
Electoral system of Australia,"House casual vacancies
If a member's seat becomes vacant mid-term, whether through disqualification, resignation, death or some other possible reason, a by-election may be held to fill the casual vacancy. A member may resign by tendering the resignation to the Speaker, as required by section 37 of the Australian Constitution, or in the absence of the Speaker to the Governor-General. A resignation is not effective until it is tendered in writing to the Speaker or Governor-General. If a redistribution has taken place since the last election, the by-election is held on the basis of the boundaries at the time of original election."
Electoral system of Australia,"Senate
The Australian Senate has 76 members: each of the six states elects 12 senators, and the Northern Territory (NT) and the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) each elect two senators. The several other Australian Territories have very small populations and are represented by Northern Territory and ACT Senators (for example, Christmas Island residents are represented by NT Senators, while Jervis Bay Territory and Norfolk Island residents are represented by ACT Senators).
Senators for the states serve six-year terms, with half the senators from each state usually being elected at each federal election. The terms of the territory senators coincide with the duration of the House of Representatives.
The Senate is elected both proportionately and preferentially, except that each state has an equal number of seats so that the distribution of seats to states is non-proportional to the total Australian population. Thus, although within each state the seats proportionally represent the vote for that state, overall the less populous states are proportionally stronger in representation for their population compared to the more populous states.
At the 2013 federal election, the Senate election, contested by over 50 groups, saw extensive ""preference deals"" (legitimate manipulation of group voting tickets), resulting in the election to the Senate of Ricky Muir from the Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party, who had received only 0.5% of first-preference support. This exploitation of the system was alleged to undermine the entitlement of voters ""to be able to make real choices, not forced ones—and to know who they really are voting for"".
Following the 2013 election, the Abbott Liberal government announced it would investigate changing the electoral system for the Senate in order to prevent the preference system being abused. On 22 February 2016, the Turnbull Liberal government announced several proposed changes. The changes had the support of the Liberal/National Coalition, the Australian Greens, and Nick Xenophon − a three-vote majority. The Senate reform legislation passed both houses of the Parliament of Australia on 18 March 2016 after the Senate sat all night debating the bill.
The changes abolished group voting tickets and introduced optional preferential voting, along with party logos on the ballot paper. The ballot paper continues to have a box for each party above a heavy line, with each party's candidates in a column below that party's box below the solid line. Previously, a voter could either mark a single box above the line, which triggered the party's group voting ticket (a pre-assigned sequence of preferences), or place a number in every box below the line to assign their own preferences. As a result of the changes, voters may assign their preferences for parties above the line (numbering as many boxes as they wish), or individual candidates below the line, and are not required to fill all of the boxes. Both above and below the line voting are now optional preferential voting. For above the line, voters are instructed to number at least their first six preferences, however, a ""savings provision"" still counts the ballot if less than six are given. As a result, fewer votes are classed as informal, however, more ballots do ""exhaust"" as a result (i.e. some votes are not counted towards electing any candidate). For below the line, voters are required to number at least their first 12 preferences. Voters are still free to continue numbering as many preferences as they like beyond the minimum number specified. Another savings provision allows ballot papers with at least 6 below the line preferences to be formal, catering for people who confuse the above and below the line instructions; an additional change to the savings provision will also accept below the line votes with a higher number of sequence errors than previously, treating the sequence as stopping at the first error (missed or repeated numbers).
As a result of these reforms, it is now much less likely that a candidate with such a minuscule primary vote as Muir's in 2013 could win election to the Senate. ABC electoral psephologist Antony Green wrote several publications on various aspects of the proposed Senate reforms.
Usually, a party can realistically hope to win no more than three of a state's Senate seats. For this reason, a person listed as fourth or lower on a party ticket is said to be in an ""unwinnable"" position. For example, incumbent Liberal South Australian Senator Lucy Gichuhi was ranked fourth on the Liberal ticket for the 2019 election, a move that commentators believed made it difficult, if not impossible, for her to win another term."
Electoral system of Australia,"Senate count
The form of preferential voting used in the Senate is technically known as the ""Unweighted Inclusive Gregory Method"".
The system for counting Senate votes is complicated, and a final result is sometimes not known for several weeks. When the Senate vote is counted, a quota for election is determined. This is the number of valid votes cast, divided by the number of senators to be elected plus one.
For example, here is the Senate result for the state of New South Wales from the 1998 federal election. For greater clarity the votes cast for 50 minor party and independent candidates have been excluded.
The quota for election was 3,755,725 divided by seven, or 536,533."
Electoral system of Australia,"Enrolment: 4,031,749
Turnout: 3,884,333 (96.3%)
Informal votes: 128,608 (03.3%)
Formal votes: 3,755,725
Quota for election: 536,533"
Electoral system of Australia,"In this table, the group number allocated to each list is shown with the number of quotas polled by each list. Thus, ""Q:2.7073"" next to the Labor Party list indicates that the Labor candidates between them polled 2.7073 quotas.
It will be seen that the leading Labor and Liberal candidates, Hutchins and Heffernan, polled more than the quota. They were therefore elected on the first count. Their surplus votes were then distributed. The surplus is the candidate's vote minus the quota. Hutchins's surplus was thus 1,446,231 minus 536,533, or 909,698. These votes are multiplied by a factor (called the ""transfer value"") based on the proportion of ballot papers preferencing other parties. ABC Election commentator Antony Green believes that this method distorts preference allocation.
After Hutchins's surplus votes were distributed, the count looked like this:"
Electoral system of Australia,"It will be seen that virtually all of Hutchins's surplus votes went to Faulkner, the second candidate on the Labor ticket, who was then elected. This is because all those voters who voted for the Labor party ""above the line"" had their second preferences automatically allocated to the second Labor candidate. All parties lodge a copy of their how-to-vote card with the Electoral Commission, and the commission follows this card in allocating the preferences of those who vote ""above the line."" If a voter wished to vote, for example, Hutchins 1 and Heffernan 2, they would need to vote ""below the line"" by numbering each of the 69 candidates.
In the third count, Heffernan's surplus was distributed and these votes elected Tierney. Faulkner's surplus was then distributed, but these were insufficient to elect Forshaw. Likewise, Tierney's surplus was insufficient to elect McDonald.
After this stage of the count, the remaining candidates in contention (that is, the leading candidates in the major party tickets) were in the following position:"
Electoral system of Australia,"All the other candidates were then eliminated one by one, starting with the candidates with the smallest number of votes, and their votes were distributed among the candidates remaining in contention in accordance with the preferences expressed on their ballot papers. After this process was completed, the remaining candidates were in the following position:"
Electoral system of Australia,"Sutton was then eliminated. 80% of Sutton's preferences went to Ridgeway, giving Ridgeway more votes than McDonald. McDonald was then eliminated, and 93% of his preferences went to Ridgeway, thus giving him a quota and the fifth Senate seat. Ridgeway's surplus was then distributed, and 96% of his votes went to Forshaw, thus giving him a quota and the sixth seat. Oldfield was the last remaining unsuccessful candidate. Provision for exhausted votes has been made in the current arrangements by providing that the last candidate does not require a quota, just a majority of the remaining votes. However it leaves the possibility that the election could fail, if the number of exhausted votes exceeded two quotas, making it impossible for the second last candidate to reach a quota. With above the line voting running at around 95%, this possibility is extremely remote.
A final point needs to be explained. It was noted above that when a candidate polls more votes than the quota, their surplus vote is distributed to other candidates. Thus, in the example given above, Hutchins's surplus was 909,698, or 1,446,231 (his primary vote) minus 536,533 (the quota). It may be asked: which 909,698 of Hutchins's 1,446,231 primary votes are distributed? Are they chosen at random from among his votes? In fact they are all distributed, but at less than their full value. Since 909,698 is 62.9% of 1,446,231, each of Hutchins's votes is transferred to other candidates as 62.9% of a vote: each vote is said to have a transfer value of 0.629. This avoids any possibility of an unrepresentative sample of his votes being transferred. After each count the candidate's progressive total is rounded down to the nearest whole number. This means that a small number of votes are lost by fractionation in the final count.
If at the end of the Senate count the two candidates remaining have an equal number of votes, the Australian Electoral Officer for the state shall select one at random."
Electoral system of Australia,"Senate casual vacancies
If a senator's seat becomes vacant mid-term, through disqualification, resignation, death or other cause, the legislature of the relevant state or territory chooses a replacement senator. A senator may resign by tendering their resignation to the President of the Senate or to the Governor-General, as required by section 19 of the constitution. A resignation is not effective until it is tendered in writing to the President or Governor-General."
Electoral system of Australia,"Double dissolutions
Under the Australian Constitution, the House of Representatives and the Senate generally have equal legislative powers (the only exception being that appropriation (supply) bills must originate in the House of Representatives). This means that a government formed in the House of Representatives can be frustrated if a Senate majority rejects or delays passage of its legislative bills.
In such circumstances, Section 57 of the constitution empowers the Governor-General to dissolve both the House of Representatives and the Senate (termed a ""double dissolution"") and issue writs for an election in which every seat in Parliament is contested. The Governor-General would usually take such action only on the advice of the Prime Minister."
Electoral system of Australia,"See also
Elections in Australia
Electoral systems of the Australian states and territories
Political groups (Australia)"
Electoral system of Australia,"References
Further reading
External links
The Parliament of Australia
The Australian Electoral Commission
Adam Carr's Australian Election Archive
Proportional Representation Society of Australia"
Australian Secret Intelligence Service,"The Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS ) is the foreign intelligence agency of the Commonwealth of Australia, responsible for gathering, processing, and analysing national security information from around the world, primarily through the use of human intelligence. The service was formed in 1952, however its existence remained secret within much of the government and to the public until 1972. ASIS is a primary entity of the Australian Intelligence Community. 
ASIS is part of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) portfolio and has its headquarters in Canberra. Its director-general, currently Kerri Hartland, reports to the minister for foreign affairs. The service is comparable to the CIA (US) and MI6 (UK)."
Australian Secret Intelligence Service,"History
On 13 May 1952, in a meeting of the Executive Council, Prime Minister Robert Menzies established ASIS by executive order under s. 61 of the Australian constitution, appointing Alfred Deakin Brookes as the first director-general of ASIS. The existence of ASIS remained secret even within the Australian Government until 1972.
Its Charter of 15 December 1954 described ASIS's role as 'to obtain and distribute secret intelligence, and to plan for and conduct special operations as may be required'. ASIS was expressly required to ""operate outside Australian territory"". A Ministerial Directive of 15 August 1958 indicated that its special operations role included conducting ""special political action"". It also indicated that the organisation would come under the control and supervision of the Minister for External Affairs rather than the Minister for Defence. At the time, ASIS was substantially modelled on the United Kingdom's Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6. ASIS was at one time referred to as MO9.
On 1 November 1972, the existence of ASIS was sensationally revealed by The Daily Telegraph which ran an exposé of recruitment of ASIS agents from Australian universities for espionage activities in Asia. Soon after The Australian Financial Review published a more in-depth piece on ASIS, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), and the then Joint Intelligence Organisation (JIO), Defence Signals Division (DSD) and Office of National Assessments (ONA). It stated that ""[t]he ASIS role is to collect and disseminate facts only. It is not supposed to be in the analytical or policy advising business though this is clearly difficult to avoid at times"". The Ministerial Statement of 1977 stated that the ""main function"" of ASIS was to ""obtain, by such means and subject to such conditions as are prescribed by the Government, foreign intelligence for the purpose of the protection or promotion of Australia or its interests"".
On 21 August 1974, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam established the Royal Commission on Intelligence and Security (the first Hope Royal Commission, 1974–77) to investigate the country's intelligence agencies. On 25 October 1977, Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser publicly announced the existence of ASIS and its functions on a recommendation of the Commission.
In 1992, two reports were prepared on ASIS by officers within the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and the Office of National Assessments for the Secretaries Committee on Intelligence and Security (SCNS) and the National Security Committee (NSC). The Richardson Report in June examined the roles and relationships of the collection agencies (ASIO, ASIS and DSD) in the post-Cold War era. The Hollway Report in December examined shortfalls in Australia's foreign intelligence collection. Both reports endorsed the structure and roles of the organisations and commended the performance of ASIS.
The Intelligence Services Act 2001 (ISA) converted ASIS to a statutory body. The Act set out the functions of ASIS and the limits on those functions. Use of weapons by ASIS were prohibited (except for self-defence). Conduct of violent or para-military operations was also curtailed. The Act authorised the responsible minister to issue directions to the agency and required Ministerial authorisation for intelligence collection activities involving Australians, but limited the circumstances in which that could be done. The Act requires the responsible minister to make rules regulating the communication and retention of intelligence information concerning Australian persons, and provides for the establishment of a parliamentary oversight committee, then called the Parliamentary Joint Committee on ASIO, ASIS and DSD.
The Intelligence Services Amendment Act 2004 removed ISA prohibitions on ASIS operatives carrying firearms (but only for protection) and allows ASIS to work with foreign intelligence agencies such as the CIA or MI6 in the planning of paramilitary and violent operations provided ASIS is not involved in the execution of the operations."
Australian Secret Intelligence Service,"Royal Commissions examining ASIS
Three Royal Commissions have examined, among other things, ASIS and its operations: in 1974 and 1983 (the Hope Royal Commissions), and in 1994 (the Samuels and Codd Royal Commission)."
Australian Secret Intelligence Service,"First Hope Royal Commission
On 21 August 1974, the Whitlam Government appointed Justice Robert Hope to conduct a Royal Commission into the structure of Australian security and intelligence services, the nature and scope of the intelligence required and the machinery for ministerial control, direction and coordination of the security services. The Hope Royal Commission delivered eight reports, four of which were tabled in Parliament on 5 May 1977 and 25 October 1977. Aside from the observation that ASIS was ""singularly well run and well managed"", the report(s) on ASIS were not released. Results from the other reports included the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act 1979, the establishment of the ONA and the passage of the Office of National Assessments Act 1977."
Australian Secret Intelligence Service,"Second Hope Royal Commission
On 17 May 1983, the Hawke Government reappointed Justice Hope to conduct a second Royal Commission into Australia's intelligence agencies. The inquiry was to examine progress in implementing the previous recommendations; arrangements for developing policies, assessing priorities and coordinating activities among the organisations; ministerial and parliamentary accountability; complaints procedures; financial oversight and the agencies' compliance with the law. As with the first Hope Royal Commission, the reports on ASIS and DSD, which included draft legislation on ASIS, were not made public."
Australian Secret Intelligence Service,"Samuels and Codd Royal Commission
In response to a Four Corners TV program aired on 21 February 1994, the Minister for Foreign Affairs Gareth Evans announced on 23 February 1994 a ""root and branch"" review of ASIS. The Government appointed Justice Gordon Samuels and Mr Mike Codd to inquire into the effectiveness and suitability of existing arrangements for control and accountability, organisation and management, protection of sources and methods, and resolution of grievances and complaints. The Royal Commission reported in March 1995.
Four Corners reporter Ross Coulthart made allegations regarding intelligence held by ASIS on Australians. He claimed that ""ASIS secretly holds tens of thousands of files on Australian citizens, a database completely outside privacy laws"". The allegation was investigated and denied by Samuels and Codd (see below), but the Minister did acknowledge that ASIS maintained files. The Minister said: ""ASIS does have some files, as one would expect in an organisation of that nature, even though its brief extends to activities outside the country rather than inside. They are essentially of an administrative nature."" However, Samuels and Codd did find that certain grievances of the former officers were well founded. They appeared to support the officers' concerns regarding the grievance procedures:"
Australian Secret Intelligence Service,"Bearing in mind the context in which the members of ASIS work, it is not surprising that there should develop a culture which sets great store by faithfulness and stoicism and tends to elevate conformity to undue heights and to regard the exercise of authority rather than consultation as the managerial norm.
However, Samuels and Codd observed that the information published in the Four Corners program was ""skewed towards the false"", that ""the level of factual accuracy about operational matters was not high"", and, quoting an aphorism, that ""what was disturbing was not true and what was true was not disturbing"". They concluded that the disclosure of the information was unnecessary and unjustifiable and had damaged the reputation of ASIS and Australia overseas. The commissioners stated that ""evidence presented to us of action and reaction in other countries satisfies us that the publication was damaging"": They rejected any suggestion that ASIS was unaccountable or ""out of control"". They said, ""its operational management is well structured and its tactical decisions are thoroughly considered and, in major instances, subject to external approval"". They recommended that complaints regarding ASIS operations continue to be handled by the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security (IGIS) but that staff grievances be handled by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.
In addition to their recommendations, Samuels and Codd put forward draft legislation to provide a statutory basis for ASIS and to protect various information from disclosure. The Samuels and Codd Bill, like the bulk of the reports, was not made public."
Australian Secret Intelligence Service,"Activities
Since 2004, ASIS has been running anti-people smuggling operations inside countries such as Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Indonesia.
In 2013, intelligence provided by ASIS was crucial to the capture, after a 14-month manhunt, of a rogue soldier from the Afghan National Army, who had killed three Australian soldiers. The joint operation involved ASIS, AGO, the Defence Intelligence Organisation and Australian Signals Directorate, along with Britain's MI6 and Special Air Service, the United States' CIA and National Security Agency, and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence."
Australian Secret Intelligence Service,"In 2021, ASIS had deployed a small team to provide security and to help with the evacuation of Australian nationals and the nation's informants during the Kabul airlift in Afghanistan."
Australian Secret Intelligence Service,"Controversies
ASIS in Chile 1973
An ASIS station was established in Chile out of the Australian embassy in July 1971 at the request of the CIA and authorised by then Liberal Party Foreign Minister William McMahon. New Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was informed of the operation in February 1973 and signed a document ordering the closure of the operation several weeks later. On 1 July 1973, the ASIS station in Chile reported that it had shut down and destroyed all records. However, the last ASIS agent did not leave Chile until October 1973, one month after the CIA-backed 1973 Chilean coup d'état had brought down the Allende government. Two officers of ASIO were also based in Santiago, working as migration officers during this period. The incident was one of two that caused a confrontation between Whitlam and Bill Robertson, the director-general of ASIS, which culminated in Robertson's sacking on 21 October 1975, with effect from 7 November, just four days before Whitlam's own dismissal in the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis. Whitlam said Robertson had disobeyed instructions by delaying the closure of the ASIS station in Chile in 1973 and not informing Whitlam that ASIS had an active agent in East Timor in 1975. Robertson disputed the details in a personal statement lodged with the National Archives in 2009.
ASIS's involvement in Chile was revealed in 1974 when Whitlam set up the First Hope Royal Commission to investigate Australia's security services. Whitlam told parliament that ""when my government took office, Australian intelligence personnel were working as proxies of the CIA in destabilising the government of Chile"". After the coup by Augusto Pinochet, Whitlam's government created a special program for Chilean refugees to come to Australia. Under the program, about 6,000 Chileans came to Australia between 1974 and 1981 and hundreds more joined them as part of a family reunion program.
The National Archives of Australia holds documents related to ASIS operations to help the CIA undermine the government of Allende in the years 1971-1974. In 2021, the archives refused a request from Clinton Fernandes, professor of International and Political Studies at the University of New South Wales, to access records relating to ASIS operations in Chile. Heavily redacted versions of some documents were released to Fernandes in June 2021. The documents show that the ASIS base in Chile assisted the CIA's destabilisation of Allende's government by handling CIA-recruited Chilean assets and filing intelligence reports to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. In November 2021, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) upheld the decision to reject Fernandes's request for access to the documents. The AAT said the release of documents would ""cause damage to the security, defence or international relations of the Commonwealth"". Most of the AAT hearing was held behind closed doors, because Attorney-General Michaelia Cash issued a public interest certificate, suppressing the disclosure of evidence provided by ASIS, ASIO and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade."
Australian Secret Intelligence Service,"The Favaro affair
During the lead-up to Indonesia's invasion of East Timor in 1975, ASIS paid a Dili-based Australian businessman, Frank Favaro, for information on local political developments. The leaking of his identity in late 1975 was another factor in the confrontation between Whitlam and Robertson. Bill Robertson disputed the reason for his dismissal in documents lodged with the National Archives in 2009."
Australian Secret Intelligence Service,"The Sheraton Hotel incident
On 30 November 1983, ASIS garnered unwanted negative attention when a training operation held at the Sheraton Hotel, now the Mercure (Spring Street), in Melbourne went wrong. The exercise was to be a mock surveillance and hostage rescue of foreign intelligence officers. In March 1983, ASIS had begun training a covert team of civilians at Swan Island in Victoria whose role was to protect or release Australians who may be threatened or captured by terrorists overseas. The military in 1981 had established a counter-terrorist unit for operations only in Australia. The personnel involved in the training operation included ten operators, four ASIS officers and six ASIS civilian trainees, and two commandos from the Army Reserve 1st Commando Regiment with a sergeant participating as an observer in the hotel foyer.
The training operation involved junior officers who had undergone three weeks' prior training and who were given considerable leeway in planning and executing the operation. The mock hostage rescue was staged on the 10th floor of the hotel without the permission of the hotel's owner or staff. When ASIS operators were refused entry into a hotel room, they broke down the door with sledgehammers. The hotel manager, Nick Rice, was notified of a disturbance on the 10th floor by a hotel guest. When he went to investigate, he was forced back into the lift by an ASIS operator who rode the lift down to the ground floor and forcibly ejected Rice into the lobby. Believing a robbery was in progress, Rice called the police. When the lift started returning to the ground floor, ASIS operators emerged wearing masks and openly brandishing 9mm Browning pistols and Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns, two of them with silencers. They forced their way through the lobby to the kitchen, where two getaway cars were waiting outside the kitchen door. Police stopped one of the cars and arrested the occupants – two ASIS officers and three ASIS civilian trainees – who refused to produce any form of identification.
Within two days, the minister for foreign affairs, Bill Hayden announced that an ""immediate and full"" investigation would be conducted under the auspices of the second Hope Royal Commission, which was still in progress. A report was prepared and tabled by February 1984. It described the exercise as being ""poorly planned, poorly supervised and poorly run"", and recommended that measures be taken in training to improve planning and eliminate adverse impacts on the public.
Victoria Police conducted their own investigation but were frustrated because ASIS Director-General John Ryan refused to cooperate. Bill Hayden offered to provide the real names of the seven officers involved, in confidence. Premier of Victoria John Cain told Hayden that ""as far as the police were concerned, there was no such thing as information in confidence"".
Following the incident, The Sunday Age disclosed the names, or the assumed names, of five of the operators involved. The journalist noted that ""according to legal advice taken by The Sunday Age there is no provision that prevents the naming of an ASIS agent"". Although not included within the public version of the report, the Hope Royal Commission prepared an appendix that would appear to have dealt with the security and foreign relations consequences of The Sunday Age's disclosure of participants' names. Subsequently, in A v Hayden, the High Court held that the Commonwealth owed no enforceable duty to ASIS officers to maintain confidentiality of their names or activities.
At the time of the Sheraton Hotel incident, the extant Ministerial Directive permitted ASIS to undertake ""covert action"", including ""special operations"" which, roughly described, comprised ""unorthodox, possibly para-military activity, designed to be used in case of war or some other crisis"". Following the incident and the recommendations of the Royal Commission, the covert action function was apparently abolished. The functions of ASIS can be found in section 6 of the Intelligence Services Act, as can those functions which are proscribed by the act.
Ultimately, in executing the operation, the operators were found to have used considerable force, menacing a number of the staff and guests with weapons and physically assaulting the hotel manager. Hope found Ryan to be at fault for authorising the training operation in a public place using concealed weapons. Ryan resigned in February 1984. Hope said it was not part of his terms of reference to make findings or recommendations on whether any individual had committed any offence. However, he did note that the individuals could potentially be prosecuted by the State of Victoria with a long list of criminal offences, including possession of firearms without a licence, possession of prohibited implements (including machine guns, silencers and housebreaking tools), aggravated burglary in possession of a firearm, common assault, wilful damage to property, possession of a disguise without lawful excuse and numerous motor vehicle offences. More than a year after the raid, the Victorian Director of Public Prosecutions concluded that while certain offences had been committed, including criminal damage and assault with a weapon, there was insufficient evidence to charge any person with a specific offence.
Victorian Holdings Ltd, the company managing the hotel, subsequently took legal action against the Commonwealth on behalf of itself and 14 hotel staff. The matter was settled out of court; the hotel was offered $300,000 in damages. The total payout to the hotel and staff was $365,400."
Australian Secret Intelligence Service,"Involvement in Papua New Guinea
Between 1989 and 1991, ASIS came under scrutiny following allegations relating to its role and activities in Papua New Guinea. It was alleged that ASIS had been involved in training Papua New Guinean troops to suppress independence movements in Irian Jaya and Bougainville. In 1997 it was alleged that ASIS and DSD had failed to collect, or the Government had failed to act upon, intelligence regarding the role and presence of Sandline contractors in relation to the independence movement in Bougainville."
Australian Secret Intelligence Service,"Four Corners program
Towards the end of 1993, ASIS became the subject of media attention after allegations were made by former ASIS officers that ASIS was unaccountable and out of control. The Sunday Telegraph alleged that ""ASIS regularly flouted laws, kept dossiers on Australian citizens ... and hounded agents out of the service with little explanation"". In particular, it alleged that agents were being targeted in a purge by being threatened with criminal charges relating to their official conduct, reflecting a pattern which suggested to some that ASIS or a senior ASIS officer had been ""turned"" by a foreign intelligence service.
On 21 February 1994, Four Corners ran a program which aired the key allegations. Two former ASIS officers made claims regarding cultural and operational tensions between ASIS and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. They claimed that embassy staff had maliciously or negligently compromised activities involving the running of foreign informants and agents and the defection of foreign agents to Australia. They claimed that their grievances had been ignored and that they were ""deserted in the field"" and made scapegoats by ASIS. The officers and the reporter, Ross Coulthart, also made claims regarding operational activities and priorities: the officers claimed that ASIS advice had been ignored by DFAT and the reporter repeated claims regarding ASIS operations aimed at destabilising the Aquino Government in the Philippines. He also made claims regarding ASIS assistance to MI6 in the Falklands War, in Hong Kong and in Kuwait for the benefit of British interests, including commercial interests, and potentially to the detriment of Australian national interests. The bulk of the personal statements by the officers concerned their private grievances. They raised two issues of public interest regarding the effect of secrecy on the operation of grievance procedures and the extent to which the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade was aware of or in control of ASIS operations. The reporter directly raised the issue of the appropriateness of ASIS operations, particularly with respect to priority setting in overseas postings and operations, cooperation with foreign intelligence services, and the privacy of Australian persons and organisations. By implication, the program queried the extent to which ASIS was or should be accountable to the Minister, to Government and to Parliament.
The following day, the Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs called for an independent judicial inquiry into the allegations. He expressed particular concern about the nature of ASIS cooperation with foreign agencies and the defects in ASIS grievance procedures. He later called for the inquiry to examine the ""poisoned relationship between ASIS and DFAT"". A Democrats spokesperson called for a standing parliamentary committee.
Two days after the program aired, the Samuels and Codd Royal Commission was convened by Minister for Foreign Affairs Gareth Evans."
Australian Secret Intelligence Service,"Ratih Hardjono, Bruce Grant and Gareth Evans
On 19 February 2000, Singapore journalist Susan Sim accused Ratih Harjono of working for her uncle, a senior BAKIN (Indonesian intelligence service) intelligence officer while working for the President of Indonesia. Earlier in her career as a journalist, Ratih was married to Bruce Grant, who during this period was senior policy adviser to Gareth Evans, co-authoring the book, Australia's foreign relations: in the world of the 1990s.  Gareth Evans was responsible for ASIS from 1988 to 1996."
Australian Secret Intelligence Service,"Alleged management and staffing problems
In 2005, The Bulletin ran an article based on allegations by serving ASIS officers that alluded to gross mismanagement of intelligence operations, staff assignments, and taskings, particularly with respect to the war on terrorism. The unnamed officers pointed out various problems within the agency that were plaguing the organisation's ability to collect vital and timely intelligence. By this, they meant the recruitment of ""...young mostly white university educated agents with limited language skills and little knowledge of Islam against poor, zealous extremists intent on becoming suicide bombers"", the ""inappropriate"" assignment of ""...young female IOs [intelligence officers] against Islamic targets..."", in addition to poor staff retention rates, and general lack of officers possessing significant practical field experience. The officers also cited a lack of proper support given to intelligence officers tasked against terrorist targets, and the doctoring of intelligence by ASIS management, as also contributing to the lack of progress of the agency in the war on terrorism."
Australian Secret Intelligence Service,"Australia–East Timor spying scandal
It was revealed in 2013 that ASIS planted devices to listen to the East Timorese government during negotiations over the Greater Sunrise oil and gasfields."
Australian Secret Intelligence Service,"See also
Australian intelligence agencies"
Australian Secret Intelligence Service,"Notes
References
Credit
A large portion of the history of ASIS in this article was adapted from the Parliament of Australia Bills Digest No. 11 of 2001–02 of Intelligence Services Act 2001."
Australian Secret Intelligence Service,"External links
ASIS home page Archived 16 August 2015 at the Wayback Machine
Open Australia Search: Parliamentary records mentioning ASIS."
Australian legal system,"The legal system of Australia has multiple forms. It includes a written constitution, unwritten constitutional conventions, statutes, regulations, and the judicially determined common law system. Its legal institutions and traditions are substantially derived from that of the English legal system, which superseded Indigenous Australian customary law during colonisation. Australia is a common-law jurisdiction, its court system having originated in the common law system of English law. The country's common law is the same across the states and territories.
The Australian Constitution sets out a federal system of government. There exists a national legislature, with a power to pass laws of overriding force on a number of express topics. The states are separate jurisdictions with their own system of courts and parliaments, and are vested with plenary power. Some Australian territories such as the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory have been granted a regional legislature by the Commonwealth.
The High Court is Australia's apex court. It has the final say on the judicial determination of all legal matters. It hears appeals from all other courts in the country, and is vested with original jurisdiction.
Prior to colonisation, the only systems of law to exist in Australia were the varied systems of customary law belonging to Indigenous Australians. Indigenous systems of law were deliberately ignored by the colonial legal system, and in the post-colonial era have only been recognised as legally important by Australian courts to a limited degree."
Australian legal system,"History
Indigenous customary law
Indigenous Australian customary law varied between language groups, clans, and regions. It developed over time from accepted norms within indigenous societies. The laws regulated human behaviour and relationships, mandated sanctions for misdeeds, and connected people with the land and each other through a system of relationships.
Such law is often intertwined with cultural customs, stories, and practices. These customs were and are passed on intergenerationally through oral tradition, often incorporated within cultural works such as songlines, stories and dance."
Australian legal system,"Reception of English law
The laws of England had evolved over centuries, with the common law emerging following the 1200s. This law was introduced to Australia through the colonisation of Australia by the British. By 1824, a court system based on the English model had been established through Acts of the British Parliament. The New South Wales Act 1823 provided for the establishment of a Supreme Court with the power to deal with all criminal and civil matters ""as fully and amply as Her Majesty's Court of King's Bench, Common Pleas and Exchequer at Westminster"". Inferior courts were also established, including courts of General or Quarter Sessions, and Courts of Requests.
Despite the presence of indigenous inhabitants, Australia was determined to be ""settled"" rather than ""conquered"" and as a result all English law ""applicable to the new
situation and condition of the infant colony"" applied, as opposed to the continuation of indigenous laws. This was confirmed by the Australian Courts Act 1828 an act of the Imperial Parliament which had the effect of ensuring that all English common and statute law up to  28 July 1828 was to have effect in New South Wales and Tasmania, and later Victoria and Queensland when they separated from New South Wales. The reception of English law in Western Australia and South Australia was later deemed by statute to have occurred on 1 June 1829 and 28 December 1836 respectively.
The earliest civil and criminal courts established from the beginnings of the colony of New South Wales were rudimentary, adaptive and military in character. Although legality was not always observed, the courts limited the powers of the Governor, and the law of the colony was at times more egalitarian than in Britain.
Representative government emerged in the 1840s and 1850s, and a considerable measure of autonomy was given to local legislatures in the second half of the nineteenth century. Colonial Parliaments introduced certain reforms such as secret ballots and female suffrage, which were not to occur in Britain until many years later. Nevertheless, Acts of the United Kingdom Parliament extending to the colonies could override contrary colonial legislation and would apply by ""paramount force"". New doctrines of English common law continued to be treated as representing the common law of Australia. For example, the doctrine of the famous case of Donoghue v Stevenson from which the modern negligence law derived, was treated as being latent already within the common law at the time of reception."
Australian legal system,"Federation and divergence
Following a number of constitutional conventions during the 1890s to develop a federal nation from the several colonies, the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act (Imp) was passed and came into force on 1 January 1901. Section 9 of this act contains Australia's constitution, to this day within a British act.
Following federation, Britain's role in the government of Australia became increasingly nominal in the 20th century. However, there was little momentum for Australia to obtain legislative independence. The Australian States did not participate in the conferences leading up to the Statute of Westminster 1931, which provided that no British Act should be deemed to extend to the dominions without the consent of the dominion. The Australian Government did not invoke the provisions of the statute until 1942. The High Court also followed the decisions of the Privy Council during the first half of the twentieth century.
Complete legislative independence was finally established by the Australia Act 1986, passed by the United Kingdom Parliament. It removed the possibility of legislation being enacted at the consent and request of a dominion, and applied to the States as well as the Commonwealth. It also provided for the complete abolition of appeals to the Privy Council from any Australian court. The Australia Act represented an important symbolic break with Britain, emphasised by Queen Elizabeth II's visit to Australia to sign the legislation in her legally distinct capacity as the Queen of Australia.
Legislative independence has been paralleled by a growing divergence between Australian and English common law in the last quarter of the 20th century. In addition, a large body of English law received in Australia has been progressively repealed in state parliaments, such as in New South Wales by the Imperial Acts Application Act 1969."
Australian legal system,"Sources of law
Constitutional law
The Australian colonies were federated into 'The Commonwealth' in 1901. To achieve this, the British Parliament enacted a written constitution drawn up by the Australian colonists. The document was influenced by constitutional systems of the UK, the United States, and Switzerland.
Australia's constitution 'establishes the form of the federal government and sets out the basis for relations between the Commonwealth and the states'. Chapter I defines the role and powers of the legislature, Chapter II defines that of the Executive, and Chapter III defines that of the Judiciary.
In addition to the document's text, Australian constitutional law is affected by the structure of the document. The division of the three branches of government into chapters is understood to establish a Separation of Powers doctrine in Australia.
It is also known that a number of unwritten constitutional conventions are present within the document. E.g. the constitutional doctrines of responsible government, and the requirement of the governor-general to accept the advice of the prime minister.
The Australian constitution is notable for not containing a bill of rights, and express constitutional restrictions upon Commonwealth power are minimal in number and scope. Nevertheless, some restrictions upon Commonwealth power have been recognised by implications drawn constitutional sections unconcerned with the establishment of rights. The stipulations of Section 7 and 24 that the members of the respective Commonwealth legislatures be 'directly chosen by the people'; have been interpreted by the High Court as giving rise to doctrines protecting freedom of political communication, and a right to vote.
The constitution may only be amended by a national referendum, a provision inspired by the Swiss Canton system.
The respective state governments of Australia also have constitutional documents, many of which have carried over from the colonial era. Those documents, however, are amenable to state legislation, and thus do not bind on the respective state parliaments in the same way that the Commonwealth and the States are bound by Australia's written constitution as supreme law. (see also: Marbury v. Madison)"
Australian legal system,"Statute law
The legislative powers of the federal Parliament are limited to those set out under an enumerated list of subject matters in the Constitution. These powers include a power to legislate on matters ""incidental"" to the other powers. The Parliament of the Commonwealth can also legislate on matters referred to it by the Parliament of one or more States."
Australian legal system,"In contrast, with a few exceptions the State legislatures generally have plenary power to enact laws on any subject. However, federal laws prevail in the event of collision, according to Section 109 of the Constitution of Australia.
The process of creating a statute involves a Bill being drafted, usually by Parliamentary Counsel. The Bill is read, debated and sometimes amended in both houses of parliament before being approved. Once a bill has been passed it must be assented to by the representative of the sovereign. Legislation may also be delegated to local councils, statutory authorities or government departments. Usually, this is done in respect of minor statute laws such as road rules.
Most statutes are applied by administrative decision makers rather than judges. When laws are brought before a court, judges are not bound to select an interpretation proffered by one of the parties and instead their role is to seek an objective interpretation of the law.
The jurisprudence of statutory interpretation is not settled in Australia. Interpretive doctrines such as the literal rule, the golden rule, and the mischief rule; must comply with the Commonwealth's mandate in the Acts Interpretation Act that statutes be interpreted according to their purpose. The legitimate role of extrinsic materials is not settled law in Australia."
Australian legal system,"Common law
Australia's common law system originated in the system of common law in the UK. Although similarities remain, and the influence of UK common law decisions remain influential on Australian courts, there exists substantial divergence between each system.
Until 1963, the High Court regarded decisions of the House of Lords binding, and there was substantial uniformity between Australian and English common law. In 1978, the High Court declared that it was no longer bound by decisions of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.
The High Court has declared that Australia's system of common law is uniform across all states: this may be contrasted with other jurisdictions, like the United States, that have maintained distinct systems of common law within each state."
Australian legal system,"International law
Australia has entered into many treaties. Treaties are not automatically incorporated into Australian domestic law upon signature or ratification (aside from those terminating a state of war).
The role of treaties in influencing the development of the common law is controversial. The text within a treaty is a valid interpretive aid to an act which attempts to give effect to that treaty.
By reliance on the external affairs power, matters subject of a treaty may be legislated upon by the Commonwealth Parliament; even in the absence of the matter among other the heads of power."
Australian legal system,"See also
Law of the United Kingdom
Law of the United States"
Australian legal system,"References
Further reading
Rosemary Barry, ed. The Law Handbook. Sydney: Redfern Legal Centre Publishing, 2007.
John Carvan. Understanding the Australian Legal System. Sydney: Lawbook Co., 2002.
Justin T. Gleeson, Ruth C. A. Higgins & Elisabeth Peden, eds. Historical foundations of Australian law. Annandale: Federation Press, 2013."
Australian legal system,External links
Australian legal system,"""Jurisdiction and hierarchy of courts"". State Library of NSW.
Australian Government - Attorney-General's Department
Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII)
Australian Law Reform Commission
Federal Register of Legislation
Australian Treaties Library"
Template:Largest cities of Australia,== References ==
Template:Largest cities of Australia,"Notes
^a All population figures from ABS Regional Population, 2021, using Greater Capital City Statistical Area figures for capital cities (excluding Canberra) and Significant Urban Areas for all other cities"
Template:Largest cities of Australia,"
=== References ==="
German Australians,"German Australians (German: Deutsch-Australier) are Australians with German ancestry. German Australians constitute one of the largest ancestry groups in Australia, and German is the fifth most identified European ancestry in Australia behind English, Irish, Scottish and Italian. German Australians are one of the largest groups within the global German diaspora."
German Australians,"History
Germans have been in Australia since the commencement of European settlement in 1788. At least seventy-three Germans arrived in Australia as convicts."
German Australians,"19th century
Germans formed the largest non-English-speaking group in Australia up to the 20th century."
German Australians,"Old Lutherans
Old Lutherans emigrated in response to the 1817 Prussian Union and organized churches both among themselves and with other German speakers, such as the Kavel-Fritzsche Synod.
Although a few individuals had emigrated earlier, the first large group of Germans arrived in South Australia 1838, not long after the British colonisation of South Australia. These ""Old Lutherans"" were from Province of Brandenburg (then a Prussian province), and were trying to preserve their traditional faith. They emigrated with the financial assistance of George Fife Angas and the Emigration Fund. Not all subsequent arrivals shared this religious motivation, but the Lutheran Church remained at the centre of the German settlers' lives right into the 20th century."
German Australians,"Forty-Eighters
Forty-Eighters is a term for those who participated in or supported the European Revolutions of 1848. Many emigrated as a result of those revolutions. In particular, following the ultimate failure of the ""March Revolution"" in Germany, a substantial number of Germans immigrated to Australia. See Forty-Eighters in Australia."
German Australians,"20th century
By 1900, Germans were the fourth-largest European ethnic group on the continent, behind the English, Irish and Scots. By 1914, the number of German-Australians (including the descendants of German-born migrants of the second and third generation who had become Australians by birth) was estimated at approximately 100,000.
Throughout both world wars Australians of German ancestry were considered an ""enemy within"" and a number were interned or deported – or both. The persecution of German Australians also included the closure of German schools, the banning of the German language in government schools, and the renaming of many German place names. To avoid persecution and/or to demonstrate that they commit themselves to their new home, many German Australians changed their names into Anglicised or Francophone variants. During WWII, Australia was also place of incarceration of 2,542 ""enemy aliens"" deported from Britain, composed of many of the Austrian and German nationals who were expelled in a blanket deportation, and numerous Italian citizens. Notorious for the inhumane treatment present during the voyage, the 2,053 anti-Nazis, 451 prisoners of war, and approximately 55 Nazi sympathisers and others departed from Liverpool via HMT Dunera shortly after the Fall of France in 1940.
After the Second World War, Australia received a large influx of ethnic German displaced persons who were a significant proportion of Australia's post war immigrants. A number of German scientists were recruited soon after the War through the ESTEA scheme some of them coming by migrant ships such as the SS Partizanka. In the 1950s and 1960s, German immigration continued under assisted migration programs promoted by the Australian Government. By July 2000, Germany was the fifth most common birthplace for settler arrivals in Australia after United Kingdom, Ireland, Italy and New Zealand. By 1991, there were 112,000 German-born persons in Australia."
German Australians,"World War I
The internment camps were maintained by the Australian Army during World War I. At the time, they were also described as concentration camps. Old prison buildings in Berrima and Trial Bay Gaol were initially used as locations for camps in New South Wales.
The largest internment camp in WWI was the Holsworthy Internment Camp, located west of Sydney. There were camps in Berrima; Bourke; Holsworthy and Trial Bay (all New South Wales); Enoggera, Queensland; Langwarrin, Victoria; the Molonglo camp at Fyshwick, Australian Capital Territory; Rottnest Island, Western Australia; and Torrens Island, South Australia. Smaller and temporary internment camps were also established on Bruny Island, Tasmania; Fort Largs, South Australia; and Garden Island, Western Australia. The camp on Rottnest Island, which operated from the end of 1914 until the end of 1915, housed 989 people in September 1915. Among this group were 841 Australian and Austrian internees, as well as 148 prisoners of war. According to a statement by the Australian War Memorial organisation, there were a total of 7,000 people interned over the course of World War I, including roughly 4,500 Germans and British people of German background who had already been living in Australia for a long time. This meant approximately 4.5% of the German-Australian population were held in internment camps.
One of the largest internment camps for imprisoned officers and soldiers of the Imperial German Navy from the warzones in the Pacific, in China and in Southeast Asia, was the Trial Bay Gaol. Among those interned were German and Austrian business people who had been captured on ships, as well as wealthy, high-standing Germans and Austrians living in Australia who were assumed to be sympathising with the enemy. The camp was opened in August 1915 and at its peak contained as many as 580 men. The internees were held in solitary cells within the prison, with the exception of those with a high social or military rank, who were kept in cabins on the bay. The prisoners were free to swim, fish, and sunbathe on the beach or play tennis in the prison yard on a court they had built themselves. In 1916 they held a theatre performance of the comedy Minna von Barnhelm by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. They had their own orchestra and in 1917 created their own newspaper named Welt am Montag (World on Monday), which was published once a week. In memory of the four Germans who died in the camp, the internees built a monument on the hill at Trial Bay. The internees were transferred in 1918 due to fears that German warships would be able to land in the bay. They were moved to the Holsworthy internment camp near Sydney, now Holsworthy Barracks. After it became known that graves of the Allied forces in Germany had been vandalised, the internees' monument was destroyed. It was once again constructed in 1960 and now leads the way to the memorial site on the hill.
Some Australians believed that the prisoners were being treated too well. However, they were under constant surveillance, their post was censored and contact with the outside world (as well as contact with internees from other camps) was not allowed.
Many internees from Western Australia were transported to camps in New South Wales, including the 193 German marines from the SMS Emden which had been defeated by HMAS Sydney.
After the war ended, the camps were shut down and most of the occupants were deported, but German immigration was only made legal again in 1925. The German population increased slowly as a result and eventually came to a halt in 1933 with Adolf Hitler's rise to power."
German Australians,"World War II
In World War I, the majority of internees were of German heritage. However, in World War II, a large number of Italians and Japanese were also imprisoned. The internees, which included women and children, had come from more than 30 different countries, including Finland, Hungary, Portugal and also the Soviet Union. In addition to the Australian residents who were imprisoned, there were also people of German and Japanese descent who were captured overseas and brought to Australia. These people came from England, Palestine, Iran, present-day Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, New Zealand and New Caledonia. The first of these groups arrived on the HMT Dunera from England in 1940 and their destination was the Hay Internment Camp in New South Wales.
The internment camps in WWII were constructed for three reasons: residents could not be allowed to support Australia's enemies, the public needed to be placated, and those who had been captured overseas and transported to Australia had to be housed somewhere. All Japanese people were immediately imprisoned, but it was only after the war criminals of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were discovered that Germans and Italians were sent to the internment camps. This was especially true for those living in northern Australia, because that was where the enemy was expected to invade. More than 20 percent of Italians in Australia were held in internment camps as well as a total of 7,000 people with connections to the enemy, 1,500 of which who were British nationals. 8,000 people from overseas were detained in Australian camps and in 1942, the camps were at their largest, with a total of 12,000 internees in the country. In addition to British people of German origin, Australian fascists could not escape imprisonment: leading members of the Australia First Movement were interned, including Adela Pankhurst and P. R. Stephensen."
German Australians,"Demographics
German Australians constitute one of the largest ancestry groups in Australia, and German is the fifth most identified European ancestry in Australia behind English, Irish, Scottish and Italian. German Australians are one of the largest groups within the global German diaspora. At the 2021 census, 1,026,135 respondents stated that they had German ancestry (whether alone or in combination with another ancestry), representing 4% of the total Australian population. At the 2021 census, there were 101,255 Australian residents who were born in Germany.
At the 2021 census, states and territories with the largest numbers of residents nominating German ancestry were Queensland (309,723), New South Wales (242,546), Victoria (212,907), South Australia (135,225) and Western Australia (78,337). German Australians are therefore overrepresented on a per capita basis in Queensland and South Australia.
In December 2001, the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs estimated that there were 15,000 Australian citizens resident in Germany.
According to census data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2004, German Australians are, by religion, 32.8% Lutheran, 21.7% Catholic, 16.5% Anglican, 24.8% No Religion and 4.2 Other Religions.
In 2001, the German language was spoken at home by 76,400 persons in Australia. German is the eighth most widely spoken language in the country after English, Chinese, Italian, Greek, Arabic, Vietnamese, Spanish, and Tagalog."
German Australians,"Culture
The Australian wine industry was the creation of German settlers in the nineteenth century.
The Goethe-Institut is active in Australia, there are branches in Melbourne and Sydney.
The South Australian German Association has held the annual traditional Adelaide Schützenfest in Brooklyn Park Australia"
German Australians,"Education
There are the following German international schools in Australia:"
German Australians,"German International School Sydney
Deutsche Schule Melbourne"
German Australians,"Media
Historically, German newspapers were set up by early settlers, with many being forced to close or merge due to labour shortages caused by the Victorian gold rush of the 1850s-1860s. A number of the earliest South Australian newspapers were printed primarily in German, and these included:"
German Australians,"Die Deutsche Post für die Australischen Colonien (1848–1850) – Adelaide: Australia's first non-English newspaper
Suedaustralische Zeitung (1850–1851) – Adelaide
Deutsche Zeitung für Süd-Australien (1851) – Tanunda
Adelaider Deutsche Zeitung (1851–1862) – Adelaide: this was also the first German language newspaper to publish an entertainment supplement, Blätter für Ernst und Scherz.
Süd Australische Zeitung (1860–1874) – Tanunda/Adelaide
Australisches Unterhaltungsblatt (1862–1916) – Tanunda: a supplement to the Süd Australische Zeitung and Australische Zeitung
Tanunda Deutsche Zeitung (1863–1869) – Tanunda; later renamed Australische Deutsche Zeitung
Australische Deutsche Zeitung (1870–1874) – Tanunda/Adelaide: a Melbourne edition of the newspaper was also printed 1870–1872.
Neue Deutsche Zeitung (1875–1876) – Adelaide: opposition newspaper to Australische Zeitung
Australische Zeitung (1875–1916) – Tanunda/Adelaide: formed by the merger of Süd Australische Zeitung, and Australische Deutsche Zeitung; closed due to WWI
Australische Zeitung (1927–1929) – Tanunda: attempted revival
Adelaider Post (1960–1962) – Adelaide: South Australian edition of the Sydney-based Die Woche in Australien.
Neue Australische Post (1984–1993), Salisbury
The Special Broadcasting Service airs a German-language radio program on SBS Radio 2 every weekday from 7 PM to 8 PM. They also air German broadcaster Deutsche-Welle's Der Tag news program every morning as part of its WorldWatch programming block."
German Australians,"Missions founded by Germans
Killalpaninna Mission (1866 – 1915): Founded by Johann Friedrich Gößling and Ernst Homann, and two lay brethren, Hermann Vogelsang and Ernst Jakob; later joined by Strehlow.
Hermannsburg, Northern Territory (1877 – 1982?): Founded by A. Hermann Kemp (sometimes spelt Kempe) and Wilhelm F. Schwarz of the Hermannsburg Mission in Germany.
Aurukun Mission (1904 – 1913), originally Archer River Mission Station, Queensland: Founded by Moravians Rev. Arthur Richter and his wife Elisabeth
Bathurst Island Mission (1911 – 1978), founded by Francis Xavier Gsell
La Grange Mission at Bidyadanga (1955/6–1985)"
German Australians,"Notable Australians of German ancestry
German missionaries
There were many German missionaries who emigrated to Australia, established mission stations and worked with Aboriginal Australians, in some cases helping to preserve their languages and culture."
German Australians,"1838: Rev. Clamor Wilhelm Schürmann (1815–1893) and Christian Gottlob Teichelmann (1807–1893) established and ran the Pirltawardli (or Piltawodli) Native Location in Adelaide from 1838 to 1845, learning the local Kaurna language, teaching the Kaurna in their own language and translating texts. Later Samuel Klose joined them. Their work provided the basis for a language revival in the 21st century, after the language was all but extinct.
1892: Carl Strehlow was an anthropologist, linguist and genealogist who served on two Lutheran missions, Killalpaninna Mission (also known as Bethesda) in northern South Australia from 1892, and then, from October 1894, Hermannsburg, Northern Territory (also known as Finke River), renowned for its artists, with his wife Frieda Strehlow. They were the parents of noted anthropologist Ted Strehlow.
1901: German Pallotine missionaries took over the running of the mission station at Beagle Bay Mission in Western Australia.
La Grange Mission at Bidyadanga (1955/6–1985), was run by Thomas Bachmair (1872–1918). Considered an ""enlightened"" mission, there was a strong emphasis on enculturation and respect for traditional customs and obligations."
German Australians,"See also
Barossa German
European Australians
Forty-Eighters
German New Zealanders
German settlement in Australia
Goethe-Institut
History of the Lutheran Church of Australia
Immigration to Australia
List of Australian place names changed from German names
Lutheran Church of Australia
Temple Society Australia
German diaspora
Australia–Germany relations"
German Australians,"Notes
References
Further reading
Lehmann, Hartmut. ""South Australian German Lutherans in the second half of the nineteenth century: A case of rejected assimilation?"" Journal of Intercultural Studies 2.2 (1981): 24–42. online
Lehmann, Hartmut (1985). ""Conflicting Linds of Loyalty: The Political Outlook of the Australischer Christenbote, Melbourne, 1867–1910"". Journal of Intercultural Studies. 6 (2): 5–21. doi:10.1080/07256868.1985.9963275.
Petersson, Irmtraud. German Images in Australian Literature from the 1940s to the 1980s (P. Lang, 1990)
Seitz, Anne, and Lois Foster. ""Dilemmas of immigration—Australian expectations, migrant responses: Germans in Melbourne."" Journal of Sociology 21.3 (1985): 414–430. online
Tampke, Jurgen (2008). ""Germans"". Dictionary of Sydney. University of New South Wales. Retrieved 4 October 2015. (Germans in Sydney)
Tolley, Julie Holbrook. ""A social and cultural investigation of women in the wine industry of South Australia"" (thesis, 2004) online"
German Australians,"External links
Zivil Lager (Internment Camp): World War One Prisoners Of War At Trial Bay (online exhibition)
The Enemy At Home: German Internees in World War One Australia (online exhibition)
Interview with Sophie Schütt about South Australian Documentary (in German)
South Australia on German TV – article about Sophie Schütt travel documentary
German Australian Aliens of Militarism
German missionaries in Australia
Deutsch Krone Project"
Economy of Australia,"Australia is a highly developed country with a mixed economy. As of 2023, Australia was the 13th-largest national economy by nominal GDP (gross domestic product), the 19th-largest by PPP-adjusted GDP, and was the 21st-largest goods exporter and 24th-largest goods importer. Australia took the record for the longest run of uninterrupted GDP growth in the developed world with the March 2017 financial quarter. It was the 103rd quarter and the 26th year since the country had a technical recession (two consecutive quarters of negative growth). As of June 2021, the country's GDP was estimated at $1.98 trillion.
The Australian economy is dominated by its service sector, which in 2017 comprised 62.7% of the GDP and employed 78.8% of the labour force.   At the height of the mining boom in 2009–10, the total value-added of the mining industry was 8.4% of GDP. Despite the recent decline in the mining sector, the Australian economy has remained resilient and stable and did not experience a recession from 1991 until 2020. Among OECD members, Australia has a highly efficient and strong social security system, which comprises roughly 25% of GDP.      
The Australian Securities Exchange in Sydney is the 16th-largest stock exchange in the world in terms of domestic market capitalisation and has one of the largest interest rate derivatives markets in the Asia-Pacific region. Some of Australia's largest companies include Commonwealth Bank, BHP, CSL, Westpac, NAB, ANZ, Fortescue, Wesfarmers, Macquarie Group, Woolworths Group, Rio Tinto, Telstra, Woodside Energy and Transurban. The currency of Australia and its territories is the Australian dollar, which it shares with several Pacific nation states.
Australia's economy is strongly intertwined with the countries of East and Southeast Asia, also known as ASEAN Plus Three (APT), accounting for about 64% of exports in 2016. China in particular is Australia's main export and import partner by a wide margin. Australia is a member of the APEC, G20, OECD and WTO. The country has also entered into free trade agreements with ASEAN, Canada, Chile, China, South Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Japan, Singapore, Thailand and the United States. The ANZCERTA agreement with New Zealand has greatly increased integration with the economy of New Zealand."
Economy of Australia,"History
20th century
Australia's average GDP growth rate for the period 1901–2000 was 3.4% annually. As opposed to many neighbouring Southeast Asian countries, the process towards independence was relatively peaceful and thus did not have significant negative impact on the economy and standard of living. Growth peaked during the 1920s, followed by the 1950s and the 1980s. By contrast, the late 1910s/early 1920s, the 1930s, the 1970s and early 1990s were marked by financial crises."
Economy of Australia,"Economic liberalisation
From the early 1980s onwards, the Australian economy has undergone intermittent economic liberalisation. In 1983, under prime minister Bob Hawke, but mainly driven by treasurer Paul Keating, the Australian dollar was floated and financial deregulation was undertaken."
Economy of Australia,"Early 1990s recession
The early 1990s recession came swiftly after the Black Monday of October 1987, as a result of a stock collapse of unprecedented size which caused the Dow Jones Industrial Average to fall by 22.6%. This collapse, larger than the stock market crash of 1929, was handled effectively by the global economy and the stock market began to quickly recover. But in North America, the lumbering savings and loans industry was facing decline, which eventually led to a savings and loan crisis which compromised the well-being of millions of US people. The following recession thus impacted the many countries closely linked to the US, including Australia. Paul Keating, who was treasurer at the time, famously referred to it as ""the recession that Australia had to have."" During the recession, GDP fell by 1.7%, employment by 3.4% and the unemployment rate rose to 10.8%. However, the recession did assist in reducing long-term inflation rate expectations and Australia has maintained a low inflation environment since the 1990s to the present day."
Economy of Australia,"Mining
Mining has contributed to Australia's high level of economic growth, from the gold rush in the 1840s to the present day. The opportunities for large profits in pastoralism and mining attracted considerable amounts of British capital, while expansion was supported by enormous government outlays for transport, communication, and urban infrastructures, which also depended heavily on British finance. As the economy expanded, large-scale immigration satisfied the growing demand for workers, especially after the end of convict transportation to the eastern mainland in 1840. Australia's mining operations secured continued economic growth and Western Australia itself benefited strongly from mining iron ore and gold from the 1960s and 1970s which fuelled the rise of suburbanisation and consumerism in Perth, the capital and most populous city of Western Australia, as well as other regional centres."
Economy of Australia,"Global financial crisis
The Australian government stimulus package ($11.8 billion) helped to prevent a recession.
The World Bank expected Australia's GDP growth rate to be 3.2% in 2011 and 3.8% in 2012. The economy expanded by 0.4% in the fourth quarter of 2011, and expanded by 1.3% in the first quarter of 2012. The growth rate was reported to be 4.3% year-on-year.
The International Monetary Fund in April 2012 predicted that Australia would be the best-performing major advanced economy in the world over the next two years; the Australian Government Department of the Treasury anticipated ""forecast growth of 3.0% in 2012 and 3.5% in 2013"", the National Australia Bank in April 2012 cut its growth forecast for Australia to 2.9% from 3.2%., and JP Morgan in May 2012 cut its growth forecast to 2.7% in calendar 2012 from a previous forecast of 3.0%, also its forecast for growth in 2013 to 3.0% from 3.3%. Deutsche Bank in August 2012, and Société Générale in October 2012, warned that there is risk of recession in Australia in 2013.
While Australia's overall national economy grew, some non-mining states and Australia's non-mining economy experienced a recession."
Economy of Australia,"2020 recession
In September 2020, it was confirmed that due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Australian economy had gone into recession for the first time in nearly thirty years, as the country's GDP fell 7 per cent in the June 2020 quarter, following a 0.3 per cent drop in the March quarter. It officially ended at the beginning of December 2020."
Economy of Australia,"Data
The following table shows the main economic indicators in 1980–2021 (with IMF staff estimates in 2022–2027). Inflation under 5% is in green."
Economy of Australia,"Overview
Australia's per-capita GDP is higher than that of the UK, Canada, Germany and France in terms of purchasing power parity. Per Capita GDP (PPP) Australia is ranked 18th in the world (CIA World Factbook 2016). The country was ranked fifth in the United Nations 2022 Human Development Index and sixth in The Economist worldwide quality-of-life index 2005. In 2014, using constant exchange rates, Australia's wealth had grown by 4.4% annually on average after the financial crisis of 2007–2008, compared with a 9.2% rate over 2000–2007. Australia's sovereign credit rating is ""AAA"" for all three major rating agencies, higher than the United States of America.
The emphasis on exporting commodities rather than manufactures underpinned a significant increase in Australia's terms of trade during the rise in commodity prices since 2000. However, due to a colonial heritage a lot of companies operating in Australia are foreign-owned and as a result, Australia has had persistent current account deficits for over 60 years despite periods of positive net merchandise exports; given the net income outlay between Australia and the rest of the world is always negative. The current account deficit totalled AUD$44.5 billion in 2016 or 2.6% of GDP.
Inflation has typically been between 2 and 3% and the pre-GFC cash rate typically ranged between 5 and 7%, however, partly in response to the end of the mining boom the cash rate has recently been steadily falling, dropping from 4.75% in October 2011 to 1.5% in Aug 2016, then to 1.25% in June 2019 and 1.0% in July 2019. The service sector of the economy, including tourism, education and financial services, constitutes 69% of GDP. Australian National University in Canberra also provides a probabilistic interest-rate-setting project for the Australian economy, which is compiled by shadow board members from the ANU academic staff.
Rich in natural resources, Australia is a major exporter of agricultural products, particularly wheat and wool, minerals such as iron ore and gold, and energy in the forms of liquified natural gas and coal. Although agriculture and natural resources constitute only 3% and 5% of GDP, respectively, they contribute substantially to Australia's export composition. Australia's largest export markets are Japan, China, South Korea, India and the United States.
At the turn of the current century, Australia experienced a significant mining boom. The mining sector's contribution to overall GDP grew from around 4.5% in 1993–94, to almost 8% in 2006–07. The services sector also grew considerably, with property and business services in particular growing from 10% to 14.5% of GDP over the same period, making it the largest single component of GDP (in sectoral terms). This growth has largely been at the expense of the manufacturing sector, which in 2006–07 accounted for around 12% of GDP. A decade earlier, it was the largest sector in the economy, accounting for just over 15% of GDP.
In 2018 Australia became the country with the largest median wealth per adult, but slipped back to second highest after Switzerland in 2019. Australia's total wealth was estimated to be AUD$10.9 trillion as of September 2019."
Economy of Australia,"Regional differences
Between 2010 and 2013, much of the economic growth in Australia was attributed to areas of the country where mining- and resource-based industries and services are mostly located. Western Australia and the Northern Territory are the only states that have economic growth. During 2012 and 2013 Australian Capital Territory, Queensland, Tasmania, South Australia, New South Wales and Victoria experienced recessions at various times. The Australian economy is characterised as a ""two-speed economy"". From June 2012 to March 2013 Victoria experienced a recession. In 2012 the Government of Victoria cut 10% of all jobs in the public service. The period since has seen these trends reversed with Western Australia and Northern Territory, who are heavily dependent on mining, experience significant downturns in GDP while the eastern states returned to growth, led by strong upturns in NSW and Victoria."
Economy of Australia,"Taxation
Taxation in Australia is levied at the federal, state, and local government levels. The federal government raises revenue from personal income taxes and business taxes. Other taxes include the goods and services tax (General Service Tax), excise and customs duties. The federal government is the main source of income for state governments. As a result of state dependence on federal taxation revenue to meet decentralised expenditure responsibilities, Australia is said to have a vertical fiscal imbalance.
Besides receipts of funds from the federal government, states and territories have their own taxes, in many cases as slightly different rates. State taxes commonly include payroll tax levied on businesses, a poker-machine tax on businesses that offer gambling services, land tax on people and businesses that own land and most significantly, stamp duty on sales of land (in every state) and other items (chattels in some states, unlisted shares in others, and even sales of contracts in some states).
The states effectively lost the ability to raise income tax during the Second World War. In 1942, Canberra invoked its Constitutional taxation power (s. 51 (ii)) and enacted the Income Tax Act and three other statutes to levy a uniform income tax across the country. These acts sought to raise the funds necessary to meet burgeoning wartime expenses and reduce the unequal tax burden between the states by replacing state income taxes with a centralised tax system. The legislation could not expressly prohibit state income taxes (s. 51(ii) does not curtail the power of states to levy taxes) but the federal government's proposal made localised income tax extremely difficult politically. The federal government offered instead compensatory grants authorised by s. 96 of the Constitution for the loss of state income (State Grants (Income Tax Reimbursement) Act 1942).
The states rejected Canberra's regime and challenged the legislation's validity in the First Uniform Tax Case (South Australia v Commonwealth) of 1942. The High Court of Australia held that each of the statutes establishing Commonwealth income tax was a valid use of the s. 51(ii) power, in which Latham CJ noted that the system did not undermine essential state functions and imposed only economic and political pressure upon them.
The Second Uniform Tax Case (Victoria v Commonwealth (1957)) reaffirmed the court's earlier decision and confirmed the power of the federal government's power to make s. 96 grants conditionally (in this case, a grant made on the condition that the recipient state does not levy income tax).
Since the Second Uniform Tax Case, a number of other political and legal decisions have centralised fiscal power with the Commonwealth. In Ha vs. New South Wales (1997), the High Court found that the Business Franchise Licences (Tobacco) Act 1987 (NSW) was invalid because it levied a customs duty, a power exercisable only by the Commonwealth (s.90). This decision effectively invalidated state taxes on cigarettes, alcohol and petrol. Similarly, the imposition of a Commonwealth goods and services tax (GST) in 2000 transferred another revenue base to the Commonwealth.
Consequently, Australia has one of the most pronounced vertical fiscal imbalances in the world: the states and territories collect just 18% of all governmental revenues but are responsible for almost 50% of the spending areas. Furthermore, the centralisation of revenue collection has allowed Canberra to force state policy in areas well beyond the scope of its constitutional powers, by using the grants power (s.96) to mandate the terms on which the states spend money in areas over which it has no power (such as spending on education, health and policing).
Local governments (called councils in Australia) have their own taxes (called rates) to enable them to provide services such as local road repairs, local planning and building management, garbage collection, street cleaning, park maintenance services, libraries, and museums. Councils also rely on state and federal funding to provide infrastructure and services such as roads, bridges, sporting facilities and buildings, aged care, maternal and child health, and childcare.
In 2000, a goods and services tax (GST) was introduced, similar to the European-style VAT."
Economy of Australia,"Employment
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) seasonally adjusted estimates, the unemployment rate increased 0.1 points to 4.2% in July 2024 while the labor force participation rate remained increased 0.2 points to 67.1%. The participation rate for 15- to 24-year-olds decreased by 0.2 points to 70.4% while the unemployment rate for this group remained steady at 9.7%. According to the ABS, in July 2024, the underemployment rate decreased by 0.1 points to 6.4%, while the underutilisation rate (the unemployed plus the under-employed) remained steady at 10.5% in trend terms.
According to Roy Morgan Research the unemployment rate in April 2019 was 8.9%, while Australian workers who were considered either unemployed or underemployed was estimated to be 17.7% (2.381 million) in the same month. Around 4.219 million were estimated to be in part-time employment.
In 2007, 228,621 Newstart unemployment allowance recipients were registered, a total that increased to 646,414 or 5.3% of the total labour force by March 2013. As of December 2018, the number of Newstart recipients stands at 722,923 or 5.4% of the labour force.
The accuracy of official unemployment figures has been brought into question in the Australian media due to discrepancies between the methods of different research bodies (Roy Morgan versus the ABS), differing definitions of the term 'unemployed' and the ABS' practice of counting under-employed people as ""employed"".
As of February 2024, the Australia labour force were employed in the following industries (seasonally adjusted) :"
Economy of Australia,"Employment for newly qualified professionals
According to the Australian Graduate Survey done by Graduate Careers Australia, full-time employment for newly qualified professionals from various occupations (around four months after the completion of their qualifications) experienced some declines between 2012 and 2015. Some examples are:"
Economy of Australia,"The Graduate Careers Survey 2014 explained, ""However, GCA's Beyond Graduation Survey (BGS) indicates that the middle- and longer-term outlook is very positive, with the employment figures for 2010 graduates growing by 14 percentage points three years later."" The Beyond Graduation Survey 2013 included 12,384 responses and the Graduate Careers Survey 2014 survey included 113,263 responses (""59.3 per cent of the almost 191,000 Australian resident graduates who were surveyed responded to the AGS."")
The professional associations of some of these occupations expressed their criticism of the immigration policy in 2014."
Economy of Australia,"States and territories ranked by unemployment rates
Note: All data in the table above is seasonally adjusted."
Economy of Australia,"Sectors
Industry
Mining
In 2019, the country was the 2nd largest world producer of gold; 8th largest world producer of silver; 6th largest world producer of copper; the world's largest producer of iron ore; the world's largest producer of bauxite; the 2nd largest world producer of manganese; 2nd largest world producer of lead; 3rd largest world producer of zinc; 3rd largest world producer of cobalt; 3rd largest producer of uranium; 6th largest producer of nickel; 8th largest world producer of tin; 14th largest world producer of phosphate; 15th largest world producer of sulfur; in addition to being the 5th largest world producer of salt. The country is also a major producer of precious stones. Australia is the world's largest producer of opal and is one of the largest producers of diamond, ruby, sapphire and jade. In non-renewable energies, in 2020, the country was the 30th largest producer of oil in the world, extracting 351.1 thousand barrels / day. In 2019, the country consumed 1 million barrels / day (20th largest consumer in the world). The country was the 20th largest oil importer in the world in 2018 (461.9 thousand barrels / day). In 2015, Australia was the 12th largest world producer of natural gas, 67.2 billion m3 per year. In 2019, the country was the 22nd largest gas consumer (41.9 billion m3 per year) and was the 10th largest gas exporter in the world in 2015: 34.0 billion m3 per year. In the production of coal, the country was the 4th largest in the world in 2018: 481.3 million tons. Australia is the 2nd largest coal exporter in the world (387 million tons in 2018) 
In 2014–15 mineral extraction in Australia was valued at 212 billion Australian dollars. Of this, coal represented 45,869 million, oil and natural gas 40,369 million, iron ore 69,486 million, gold ore 13,685 million, and other metals 7,903 million.
Coal is mined primarily in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. Fifty-four per cent of the coal mined in Australia is exported, mostly to East Asia. In 2000–01, 258.5 million tonnes of coal was mined, and 193.6 million tonnes exported. Coal provides about 85% of Australia's electricity production. In fiscal year 2008–09, 487 million tonnes of coal was mined, and 261 million tonnes exported. Australia is the world's leading coal exporter.
The Australian mining corporations Rio Tinto Group and BHP are among the largest in the world.
Rio Tinto's Argyle mine in Western Australia was the second-largest diamond mine in the world. The Argyle mine opened in 1983 and has produced more than 95 per cent of Australia's diamonds, including some of the world's most valuable pink and red diamonds. Due to the depletion of ore, Argyle closed in 2020—the closure was expected to reduce Australia's yearly diamond output from 14.2 million carats to 134.7 thousand carats."
Economy of Australia,"Manufacturing
The manufacturing industry in Australia has declined from 30% of GDP in the 1960s to 12% of GDP in 2007.
In 2008, four companies mass-produced cars in Australia. Mitsubishi ceased production in March 2008, followed by Ford in 2016, and Holden and Toyota in 2017.
Until trade liberalisation in the mid-1980s, Australia had a large textile industry. This decline continued through the first decade of the 21st century. Since the 1980s, tariffs have steadily been reduced; in early 2010, the tariffs were reduced from 17.5 per cent to 10 per cent on clothing, and 7.5–10% to 5% for footwear and other textiles.
As of 2010, most textile manufacturing, even by Australian companies, is performed in Asia."
Economy of Australia,"Agriculture
In 2019, the value added from agriculture, fishing and forestry combined made up approximately 2.1% of Australia's GDP. 60% of farm products are exported. Irrigation is an important and widespread practice for a country where many parts receive low rainfall. Agriculture, forestry and fishing was the second-strongest  industry from 2013 to 2015, with the number of employees growing from 295,495 in February 2013 to 325,321 in February 2015."
Economy of Australia,"Services
IT-related jobs (such as computer systems design and engineering) are defined as Professional, Scientific and Technical Services by the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations of Australia. IT job creation occurs mostly in the state capital cities of Australia."
Economy of Australia,"Finance
Australia's ""big four banks"" (National Australia Bank, Commonwealth Bank, Australia and New Zealand Banking Group and Westpac) are among the 'World's 50 Safest Banks' as of April 2012.
Between 1991 and 2013, 36,720 mergers and acquisitions with a total known value of US$2,040 billion with the involvement of Australian firms have been announced. In the year 2013, 1,515 transactions valued at US$78 billion had been announced which was a decrease in terms of numbers (−18%) and value (−11%) compared to 2012. The largest takeover or merger transaction involving Australian companies was the 2007 takeover of the Coles Group by Wesfarmers, totalling A$22 billion."
Economy of Australia,"Tourism
In the financial year 2017/18, tourism represented 3.1% of Australia's GDP contributing A$57.2 billion to the national economy. Domestic tourism is a significant part of the tourism industry, representing 73% of the total direct tourism GDP.
In calendar year 2018, there were 9.3 million visitor arrivals. Tourism employed 646,000 people in Australia in 2017–18, 5.2% of the workforce. About 43.7% of persons employed in tourism were part-time. Tourism also contributed 8.0% of Australia's total export earnings in 2010–11."
Economy of Australia,"Creativity and culture
Growing importance is being given to the economic contribution of the creative industries to the national economy. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) recompiles statistics about the export and import of goods and services related to the creative industries. The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has assisted in the preparation of national studies measuring the size of over 50 copyright industries around the world. According to the WIPO compiled data, the national contribution of Creative industries varies from 2% to 11% depending on the country.
The Australian Copyright Council (ACC) has been consistently compiling reports using the WIPO-guided framework on the impact of the copyright-based industries to Australia's economy in 2011, 2012, and 2014. In the most up-to-date WIPO-supported study published in 2017, the copyright industries contributed $122.8 billion to the Australian economy in 2016 amounting to  7.4% of Australia's total economic output. The 2016 figure represented an increase of $8.5 billion compared to 2011, with a growth in value added growing at 1.4% per annum (since 2011). Further, it found that these industries generated more economic output than the manufacturing, health care and mining sectors in 2016, and moved from being the 7th largest industry in 2011 to the 3rd in 2016."
Economy of Australia,"Media
In 2018, Australia was ranked 19th out of 180 countries in accordance to press freedom. The media industry is highly consolidated, with News Corp Australia and Nine Entertainment publishing the majority of popular newspapers, owning multiple television and radio stations, and providing the two major Australian streaming services, Binge and Stan. Other major media companies include Ten Network, Seven West Media and the national broadcasters ABC and SBS."
Economy of Australia,"Education
School attendance is compulsory in Australia, from the age of 5 up until approximately 16 (although it varies between each state and territory). Australia also has an adult literacy rate that was estimated to be 99% in 2003.
In the Programme for International Student Assessment, Australia regularly scores among the top five of thirty major developed countries (member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). In 2018 there were 525,054 international students in Australia, comprising a market of 32,2 billion A$."
Economy of Australia,"Logistics
Infrastructure
Transportation
Australia's total transport activity contributed 7.9% to GDP in 2020-21, being highly dependent on road transport. It is estimated that roads contribute to more than A$245 billion, to the economic activity, significantly serving to agriculture, forestry, fishing, manufacturing and construction industries. There are more than 300 airports with paved runways. Passenger rail transport includes widespread commuter networks in the major capital cities with more limited intercity and interstate networks. The Australian mining sector is reliant upon rail to transport its product to Australia's ports for export."
Economy of Australia,"Energy
The Australian economy is dependent on imported crude oil and petroleum products, the economy's petroleum import dependency is around 80%—crude oil + petroleum products."
Economy of Australia,"Trade and economic performance
In the second half of the 20th century, Australian trade shifted away from Europe and North America to Japan and other East Asian markets. Regional franchising businesses, now a $128 billion sector, have been operating co-branded sites overseas for years with new investors coming from Western Australia and Queensland.
In the late 19th century, Australia's economic strength relative to the rest of the world was reflected in its GDP. In 1870, Australia had the highest GDP per capita in the world due to economic growth fuelled by its natural resources. However, as Australia's population grew rapidly over the 20th century, its GDP per capita dropped relative to countries such as the US and Norway. However, the Australian economy has been performing nominally better than other economies of the OECD and has supported economic growth for over 20 consecutive years. According to the Reserve Bank of Australia, Australian per capita GDP growth is higher than that of New Zealand, US, Canada and The Netherlands. The past performance of the Australian economy has been heavily influenced by US, Japanese and Chinese economic growth."
Economy of Australia,"Australian national debt
Australia's net external debt exceeded $1 trillion in April 2017 as a result of Australia's structural current account deficits. Although these deficits have narrowed over the last decade due to an increase in net merchandise trade, this effect has been partly offset by the return of Australian government debt; net federal debt was estimated at $326.0 billion in the 2016–17 federal budget of which 60% is owed to foreigners. The entirety of the debt has been accumulated through ten straight budget deficits as Australia had negative net government debt (i.e. The Australian government had net positive bond holdings) a decade earlier in the 2006–07 fiscal year."
Economy of Australia,"Chinese investment
There is substantial export to China of iron ore, wool and other raw materials, and over 120,000 Chinese students study in Australian schools and universities. China is the largest purchaser of Australian debt. In 2009, offers were made by state-owned Chinese companies to invest $22 billion in Australia's resource extraction industry.
The Signing of the China-Australia Free-Trade Agreement, signed November 2014, has the potential to drastically increase Chinese Investments as agriculture and services become more lenient.
Australia's special investor visa program introduced in 2012 encouraged Chinese investment. The visa program fast-tracks visas and eases the residency requirement for a permanent visa for those ready to invest over five million Australian dollars into state government bonds, specific infrastructure and property investments. Wealthy Chinese interested in direct investment began looking to Australia after Canada started scaling back its investment visa program in 2012 and eliminated its main investor visa program in 2014. In early 2014 it was reported that the Australia's special investor visa was granted to 65 mostly Chinese millionaires who brought over $440 million into the country. By 2017, almost 90% of the more than 1,300 foreigners who used Australia's special investor visa program were from China. Australia also has an investor visa program with a required investment of one million Australian dollars but with more restrictions and a lengthier period of time to get a permanent visa.
In 2017, it was reported that Australia is the third-most popular destination for Chinese to invest wealth offshore, with a 7% increase in Chinese private wealth flowing into Australia while interest in the top two investment destinations, Hong Kong and the United States, fell by 18% and 3%, respectively. In 2017 there were 1.6 million high-net-worth Chinese (with at least 10 million Chinese yuan to invest) and 24 per cent of the 3,000 wealthy Chinese surveyed had private investments in Australia. Migration was one of the top three reasons for Chinese investment offshore.
In 2018, in the Lowy Institute poll there had a sharp rise in the proportion of the Australian population who say the Australian government is ""allowing too much investment from China"".
This number rose from 56 per cent in 2014 to 72 per cent in 2018."
Economy of Australia,"Trade agreements
Australia's balance of payments
In trade terms, the Australian economy has had persistently large current account deficits (CADs) for more than 50 years. One of the factors that undermines balance of payments is Australia's export base, making it highly vulnerable to the volatility in the prices of commodity goods. In addition, due to a colonial heritage a lot of companies operating in Australia are foreign-owned and, as a result, Australia's net income outlay between it and the rest of the world is always negative; this results in persistent current account deficits even when there is a positive export.
Dependent upon commodities, the Australian government endeavoured to redevelop the Australian manufacturing sector. This initiative, also known as microeconomic reform, helped Australian manufacturing to grow from 10.1% in 1983–1984 to 17.8% in 2003–2004.
There are other factors that have contributed to the extremely high current account deficit in Australia such as lack of international competitiveness.
However, as Australia's CAD is almost entirely generated by the private sector, as outlined in Professor John Pitchford's 'Consenting Adults Thesis' in the early 1990s, there is an argument that the CAD is not a significant issue. Historically, Australia has relied on overseas capital to fill the gap between domestic savings and investment, and many of these investment opportunities could not have been pursued if Australia did not have access to foreign savings. This suggests that Australia's apparently low savings level and CAD are not necessarily a significant problem. As long as the investment that is being funded by overseas capital inflow generates sufficient returns to pay for the servicing costs in the future, the increase in foreign liabilities can be viewed as sustainable in the longer term."
Economy of Australia,"Personal wealth
According to the 2011 Credit Suisse Global Wealth report, Australia's wealth per adult had quadrupled over the past decade, and its total wealth was US$6.4 trillion. In the report Australia was the second-wealthiest country in the world behind Switzerland based on average wealth per adult, and had the highest median wealth in the world (US$222,000, nearly four times the amount of each US adult) and a proportion of people with wealth above US$100,000 that was eight times the world average. This was attributed to a resilient Australian dollar, property ownership levels and a strong labour market. Compared to the rest of the world, very few Australians had a net worth of less than US$1,000, which was attributed to relatively low credit card and student loan debt. In 2013, Australia was identified by the Credit Suisse as retaining its 2012 position as the nation with the second-highest average wealth per adult (US$403,000); however, the nation's poverty rate was also reported to have increased from 10.2% in 2000–01 to 11.8% at the time of the 2013 report on global wealth.
Despite the economic slowdown, in the 2014 Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report, Australia continued to have the second-highest average wealth per adult (US$430,800) and the highest median wealth (US$225,400), with a total wealth of $7.2 trillion. The average level of real assets (US$319,700) was the second-highest in the world after Norway and 60% of gross household assets. The report explained that this partly reflects a large endowment of land and natural resources relative to population, and also high urban real estate prices. Only 6% of Australians had a net worth below US$10,000, compared to 29% in the US and 70% for the world as a whole. The average debt was 20% of gross assets. The proportion of people with wealth above US$100,000 was the highest in the world (eight times the world average). Australia had 3.8% (1,783,000 people) of the top 1% of global wealth holders while having 0.4% of the world's adult population. The wealth share by Australia's top decile was 51.1% in 2000, 50.7% in 2007, and 51.1% in 2014. In 2016, Australia continued to be the second-wealthiest nation in terms of wealth per adult.
In 2017, Australia was the world's top destination for millionaires, beating the United States for the second consecutive year. An estimated 11,000 millionaires moved to Australia in 2016, compared with the 10,000 who moved to the United States. Australia was especially attractive to Chinese millionaires due to its relative proximity, cleaner environment, political and economic stability, and investor visa programs. Also, the primary reason for millionaires leaving China is top schools abroad that will give their children a better education and career connections."
Economy of Australia,"Mergers and acquisitions
All in all over 43,150 deals have been completed national, inbound or outbound Australia. This cumulates to an overall value of US$2,554 billion. There was a strong upward trend between 1989 and 2007. In this peak year almost 3,100 deals took place, which is almost 60% more than in 2017, the current low. Australian companies are particularly investing in the fields of metals and minerals (15% of all deals from Australia into foreign countries). Runner-up is the oil and gas industry with only 6.4%.
Here is a list of the top 10 deals with participation of Australian companies as the acquirer or target company:"
Economy of Australia,"Poverty
In 2022 ACOSS released a report revealing that poverty is growing in Australia, with an estimated 3.3 million people, or 13.5% of the population, living below the internationally accepted poverty line of 50% of a country's median income. It also estimated that there are 761,000 (17.7%) children under the age of 15 that are in poverty."
Economy of Australia,"Homelessness
There were 105,237 people experiencing homelessness in Australia on census night in 2011. This equated to 1 in 200 Australians, and represented an increase of 17% from the 2006 census, with the rate of homelessness increasing from 45 per 10,000 to 49 per 10,000.
The number of homeless people in Australia jumped by more than 14,000—or 14 per cent—in the five years to 2016, according to census data. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) said 116,000 people were homeless on census night in 2016, representing 50 homeless people per 10,000."
Economy of Australia,"Climate change
See also
Australia and the World Bank
Home ownership in Australia
Poverty in Australia
List of Australian states and territories by gross state product
Median household income in Australia and New Zealand
Ranked list of states and territories of Australia"
Economy of Australia,"Notes
References
Further reading
Millmow, Alex. A History of Australasian Economic Thought (Routledge, 2017), 250 pp. online review"
Economy of Australia,External links
Economy of Australia,"Australian Bureau of Statistics
Department of Finance Archived 3 January 2023 at the Wayback Machine
Australia – OECD"
Medicare (Australia),"Medicare is the publicly funded universal health care insurance scheme in Australia operated by the nation's social security agency, Services Australia. The scheme either partially or fully covers the cost of most health care, with services being delivered by state and territory governments or private enterprises. All Australian citizens and permanent residents are eligible to enrol in Medicare, as well as international visitors from 11 countries that have reciprocal agreements for medically necessary treatment.
The Medicare Benefits Schedule lists out standard operating fees for eligible services, called the schedule fee, and the percentage-portion of that fee that Medicare will pay for. When a health service charges only how much Medicare will pay, this is called a ""bulk billed"" service. Providers can charge more than the schedule fee for services, with patients responsible for the ""gap payment"". Most health care services are covered by Medicare, including medical imaging and pathology, with the notable exception of dentistry. Allied health services are typically covered depending on meeting certain criteria, such as being related to a chronic disease, and some private hospital costs may be partially covered. Public hospital costs are funded through a different system.
The scheme was created in 1975 by the Whitlam government under the name ""Medibank"". The Fraser government made significant changes to it from 1976, including its abolition in late 1981. The Hawke government reinstated universal health care in 1984 under the name ""Medicare"". Medibank continued to exist as a government-owned private health insurer until it was privatised by the Abbott government in 2014."
Medicare (Australia),"History
Health insurance prior to Medibank
From early in the European history of Australia, friendly societies provided most health insurance which was widely adopted. The states and territories operated hospitals, asylums and other institutions for sick and disabled people not long after their establishment, replicating the predominant model of treatment in the United Kingdom. These institutions were often large and residential. Many individuals and groups ran private hospitals, both for profit and not-for-profit. These were particularly active in providing maternity care.
The Invalid and Old-Age Pensions Act 1908 (Cth) provided a pension to people ""permanently incapacitated for work"" and unable to be supported by their families, providing they also met race and other requirements. This provided money that recipients could spend on their care and assistance.
The federal government's Repatriation Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme was established in 1919 for Australian servicemen and women who had served in the Boer War and World War I. This allowed them to receive certain pharmaceuticals for free. In 1926, the Royal Commission on Health found that a national health insurance scheme should be established. Legislation to do so was tabled in parliament in 1928, 1938 and 1946, but did not pass each time. It was strongly opposed by the friendly societies and medical practitioners.
From 1935 to the 1970s, paid sick leave was gradually introduced into federal employment awards until 10 days sick leave per year (with unused days rolling over into future years) became standard.
In 1941 the Curtin government passed the Pharmaceutical Benefits Act, however it was struck down as unconstitutional by the High Court in 1945.
Another Curtin government action in 1941 was the beginning of the ""Vocational Training Scheme for Invalid Pensioners"". This provided occupational therapy and allied services to people who were not permanently incapacitated, to help them gain employment. In 1948, this body became the Commonwealth Rehabilitation Service, and its work continued.
Under the Chifley government Hospital Benefits Act 1945, participating states and territories provided public hospital ward treatment free of charge. Non-public ward treatment for people with health insurance was subsidised by the Commonwealth. This led to an increase in the number of Australians covered by private health insurance plans.
Then from 1946, Queensland's Cooper government introduced free public hospital treatment in that state. This was retained by future Queensland governments.
A 1946 referendum changed the constitution so that the federal government could more clearly fund a range of social services including ""pharmaceutical, sickness and hospital benefits, medical and dental services.""
And so in 1948, the establishment of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) expanded the earlier ex-soldier only scheme to all Australians. The Labor government who introduced this had hoped to introduce further national healthcare measures like those of Britain's National Health Service, however they were voted out of office in 1949, before they had sufficient Senate support to pass the legislation. The incoming Menzies government wound back the PBS, with it continuing in a more limited form than originally planned.
In 1950, the Menzies government established the Pensioner Medical Service, providing free GP services and medicines for pensioners (including widows) and their dependants. (This was enabled by the Social Services Consolidation Act (No 2) 1948).
The National Health Act 1953 reformed the health insurance industry and the way hospitals received federal funding. Health Minister, Dr Earle Page, said that these changes would ""provide an effective bulwark against the socialisation of medicine."" The federal government began to offer some subsidy for all private health insurance funded services. The very poor received free health care. In 1953, private health insurance covered all but 17% of Australians. By 1969, 30% of all private health insurance costs were being paid by the federal government. While the creators of the 1953 scheme had intended that the subsidised private health insurance would fund 90% of health costs, it only covered between 65 and 70% between 1953 and 1969.
In 1969, the Commonwealth Committee of Inquiry into Health Insurance (the ""Nimmo Enquiry"") recommended a new national health scheme. The Gorton government under Health Minister, Dr Jim Forbes, provided free private health insurance for the unemployed, seriously ill workers (on sickness benefit), the severely disabled (on special benefit), new migrants, and households on a single minimum wage. In September 1969 the National Health Act was amended, and the scheme came into effect on 1 January 1970.
In 1972, 17% of Australians outside of Queensland had no health insurance, most of whom were on low incomes."
Medicare (Australia),"Medibank (1975–1976)
The Whitlam government, elected in 1972, sought to put an end to the three-tier system by extending healthcare coverage to the entire population. Before the Labor Party came to office, Bill Hayden, the Minister for Social Security, took the main responsibility for developing the preliminary plans to establish a universal health scheme.
According to a speech to Parliament on 29 November 1973 by Mr Hayden, the purpose of Medibank was to establish the ""most equitable and efficient means of providing health insurance coverage for all Australians.""
The Medibank legislation was one of the bills which led to a double dissolution on 11 April 1974, and was later passed by a joint sitting on 7 August 1974. Parliamentarians planned for Medicare to be funded by a 1.35% income tax (exempting people on a low income). However, this was rejected by the Senate, so it was instead funded from consolidated revenue.
Medibank started on 1 July 1975. In nine months, the Health Insurance Commission (HIC) had increased its staff from 22 to 3500, opened 81 offices, installed 31 minicomputers, 633 terminals and 10 medium-sized computers linked by land-lines to the central computer, and issued registered health insurance cards to 90% of the Australian population."
Medicare (Australia),"Medibank Mark II (1976–1981)
After a change of government at the December 1975 election, the Fraser government established the Medibank Review Committee in January 1976. This led to legislative changes, and the launch of 'Medibank Mark II' on 1 October 1976. It included a 2.5% income levy, with taxpayers having an option of instead taking out private health insurance. Other changes included reducing rebates to doctors and hospitals. Over the following years, universal free hospital access ceased in almost all hospitals, with only the poor receiving free access.
Also that year, the Fraser government passed the Medibank Private bill, which allowed the HIC to enter the private health insurance business. It was to become the dominant player in that market. 
In 1978, bulk billing was restricted to pensioners and the socially disadvantaged. Rebates were reduced to 75% of the schedule fee. The health insurance levy was also scrapped that year. The next year, Medibank rebates were cut further. In 1981, access to Medibank was restricted further, and an income tax rebate was introduced for holders of private health insurance to encourage its uptake. Finally, the original Medibank was dissolved entirely in late 1981, leaving behind Medibank Private as a government-operated private health insurer."
Medicare (Australia),"Medicare (1984–current)
On 1 February 1984, the original Medibank model was reinstated by the Hawke government, but renamed Medicare to distinguish it from Medibank Private which continued to exist. The first Medicare office opened in Bankstown on 1 February 1984."
Medicare (Australia),"Coordinated Care Trials
In 1995, the Keating government initiated experiments to find more economically efficient ways of delivering health services. This took the form of Coordinated Care Trials held from 1997 to 1999. They funded a care coordinator for around 16,000 individuals with complex health needs. The trials found that few cohorts benefited from this form of care.
Further trials were held in 2002 to 2005. They found that people with particularly complex needs could be more effectively treated with coordinated care."
Medicare (Australia),"Medibank Private privatisation
In 1997, Medibank Private was separated from the Health Insurance Commission and became its own government-owned enterprise. In 2014, it was then fully privatised by the Abbott Government."
Medicare (Australia),"Medicare Access Points
Extending the Medicare office network, from 2004 many of its services became available through Medicare Access Points in small towns at some community resource centres, state government agencies, pharmacies, post offices and other locations. These were closed in 2011, as HICAPS handled most transitions, and telephone and online services could provide additional service from the home."
Medicare (Australia),"Easyclaim and successors
Easyclaim was launched in 2006, under which a patient would pay the medical practitioner the consultation fee and the receptionist would send a message to Medicare to release the amount of rebate due to the patient's designated bank account. The rebate amount would take into account the patient's concession status and thresholds. In effect, the patient only pays the gap. In recent years, this has largely been replaced with the National Australia Bank service HICAPS (Health Insurance Claim at Point of Sale). For providers not using HICAPS, patients can make claims on-the-spot (where Medicare will pay the patient at a later date), online, through the Medicare mobile apps, or at joint Medicare-Centrelink Service Centres.
Services like these have greatly reduced the need for people to visit Medicare service centres, all of which have been merged into Centrelink or myGov shopfronts."
Medicare (Australia),"Diabetes Care Project
From 2011 to 2014, the Diabetes Care Project trailed a coordinated care model that was similar to those used in the earlier Coordinated Care Trials. It was found that this model provided health benefits to those involved, however the cost of care was not significantly different."
Medicare (Australia),"My Health Record
The National Electronic Health Transition Authority (NEHTA) was established in July 2005 to develop a national electronic health record system. The result was the Personally Controlled eHealth Record, which launched in July 2012. In 2015, this was renamed My Health Record. NEHTA was disbanded in 2016, and replaced with the Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA). By July 2019, around 89% of Australians had a record."
Medicare (Australia),"myGov and Express Plus Medicare app
myGov, an online platform for accessing and supplying personal information with the Australian Government was launched in May 2013. It became an important way for people to access their Medicare payment details. The connected Express Plus Medicare app was released in July 2013."
Medicare (Australia),"National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS)
A long-standing criticism of the Medicare schedule was its limited coverage of services to improve the lives of people with disability. This was addressed when the 2013 Australian federal budget (ALP) established the National Disability Insurance Scheme, which was progressively rolled out across the country between 2013 and 2020. It provides funding for health services beyond those in the Medicare schedule, and is administered by the National Disability Insurance Agency, an independent government agency."
Medicare (Australia),"Health Care Homes
9000 patients were involved in the Health Care Homes trial held from 2017 to 2021. The ""Homes"" were medical practices, who were funded to produce health care plans for individual patients with complex needs. The trials did not improve patient outcomes, and did not decrease treatment costs."
Medicare (Australia),"Digital Medicare Card
From March 2023, Medicare Card holders gained the option of being able to add a digital Medicare Card to their myGov app, removing the need to carry a physical card."
Medicare (Australia),"Medicare Urgent Care Clinics
The 2023 Australian federal budget delivered by the Albanese Government funded the creation of Medicare Urgent Care Clinics. The clinics are designed to provide care for emergent but non-life threatening presentations, reducing the burden on local emergency departments. Their operation has been contracted to various bodies, mainly for-profit primary health companies. Several state and territories have opened similar clinics, such as the Priority Primary Care Centres in Victoria and Minor Injury and Illness Clinics located within satellite hospitals in Queensland."
Medicare (Australia),"MyMedicare
The 2023 Australian federal budget (ALP) established MyMedicare. It aims to create a stronger relationship between patients and their main primary health provider, initiated by a voluntary registration by patients with a single practice of their choice. Patients taking up the scheme are funded for longer telehealth sessions with GPs, and have access to expanded bulk-billed telehealth services if they are in certain targeted groups. MyMedicare participants are also eligible for more Medicare funded services if they are frequent hospital users or in residential aged care.
Towards the end of the campaign for the 2016 Australian federal election, a text claiming to be from ""Medicare"" was sent to certain electorates around the nation, saying ""Mr Turnbull's plans to privatise Medicare will take us down the road of no return. Time is running out to Save Medicare."" Leader of the Liberal Party, Malcolm Turnbull, had not announced such plans, and the Department of Human Services denied sending the message. It had instead been sent by the Queensland branch of the Australian Labor Party. The furore over the text brought attention to the value of Medicare to Australians. The affair was widely dubbed ""Mediscare,"" which in turn was used to describe fears of the Liberal National Party's alleged devolution of Medicare."
Medicare (Australia),"Operation of the scheme
Services Australia
Services Australia, previously the Department of Human Services, is the statutory agency responsible for operating the Medicare scheme. Medicare Australia was the responsible agency for the scheme until it was dissolved in 2011 into the Department of Human Services. Currently, Services Australia operates the scheme in consultation with the national Department of Health and Aged Care, and provides assistance for other related programs such as the Australian Organ Donor Register."
Medicare (Australia),"Unique patient and provider identifiers
Medicare issues to eligible health professionals a unique Medicare provider number to enable them to participate in the Medicare scheme and for Medicare to pay a benefit. The number is unique to that individual at one given location, so providers may have more than one provider number if they work at multiple locations. The provider number is required to appear on any invoices or receipts for a service, any prescriptions that are eligible for the Pharmaceutical Benefit Scheme, or any referrals to another provider a Medicare-eligible service like a specialist appointment, medical imaging or pathology services.
Services Australia also issues each patient enrolled with the scheme a unique Medicare card and number which is required for a benefit to be made. More than one person can be listed on a given card and an individual can be listed on more than one card. The Medicare card or a digital alternative is used to make a claim at the time of paying for a service in Australia, or used to prove eligibility for medically necessary care in other countries that hold a reciprocal agreement with Australia. Medicare cards can also be used as part of identity verification processes with government agencies and financial institutions."
Medicare (Australia),"Payments for health services
The Department of Health and Aged Care sets a schedule of fees for services that Medicare will contribute to the costs of, called the Medicare Benefits Schedule or MBS. The minister for health and aged care determines the items on the MBS, based on the recommendation of the Medicare Services Advisory Committee. The MBS lists what the government considers a standard cost of that service (the schedule fee) and a percentage of that standard fee that Medicare will cover. The dollar value of the percentage of the schedule fee that Medicare will pay is called the Medicare benefit. For example:"
Medicare (Australia),"The percentage of the schedule fee will be either 100%, 85%, or 75% depending on the circumstances of the ""episode of care"":"
Medicare (Australia),"100% - for general practice services provided by general practitioners, or a practice nurse on behalf of a GP for Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander patients.
85% - for specialist services, such as specialist appointments, pathology tests, and medical imaging.
75% - for services provided to a patient admitted in a recognised hospital, or a hospital-substitution services covered by private health insurance."
Medicare (Australia),"Bulk billing and gap payments
Service providers can choose how much to charge patients for services, including above or below how much Medicare will pay, with patients responsible for the difference. A 2012 study of the OECD found that Australia was the only country out of the 29 surveyed that gave service providers the right to charge more or less than the rebate amount.
When a provider chooses to only charge the patient as much as the Medicare rebate for an eligible service, and directly charges Medicare instead of the patient, this is called a ""bulk billed"" service. As Medicare covers the entire cost of the service, the individual patient does not have to pay anything. Most providers will only bulk bill concessional patients (people with concession cards, or aged 16 years or under), although some will bulk bill all eligible services for all eligible patients. The government pays an additional subsidy, called the Bulk Billing Incentive Payment, to providers when they bulk bill services for concessional patients.
If a provider chooses to charge above the Medicare rebate amount (whether that be above the schedule fee, or if Medicare does not pay 100% of the schedule fee), the individual patient is charged a ""gap payment"". For most services, the patient is responsible for paying the gap. 
Many industry and professional groups, such as the Australian Medical Association (AMA), maintain their own list of recommended fees that their members can use to base their charges off. For example, the AMA's List of Medical Services and Fees recommends that general practitioners charge $102 for appointments lasting less than 20 minutes. The Medicare schedule fee for the corresponding item code is $41.40, with Medicare paying 100% of the schedule fee for GP services. A doctor that elects to charge the AMA fee will result in the patient being charged the difference of $60.60 as an out-of-pocket cost for the appointment. If a doctor charges less than the AMA recommended fee, the gap payment will decrease, and vise versa."
Medicare (Australia),"Fee indexation
Since the introduction of the MBS, the items listed have been subject to annual indexation aimed at keeping the Medicare benefit in-line with the costs of delivering care. At the inception of the Medicare system, the MBS schedule fees were the same as the AMA List of Fees. Since then, the difference between MBS schedule fees and actual service fees, particularly AMA fees, has grown significantly with increasing costs to patients.
In 2012, the Gillard Government introduced a two-year freeze on indexation as a temporary budget measure. This freeze was however repeatedly extended by the Turnbull and Morrison governments until July 2020. It is estimated that the prevented indexations saved the scheme a total of $3.9 billion.  While the rate of bulk billed services remained steady during this period, the gap payment for providers already charging above the MBS amount increased. On 25 March 2018, the Labor Party announced that, if elected, it would remove all remaining indexation freezes, noting how the Morrison government's continued indexation freezes were leaving ""families paying higher out-of-pocket costs to visit the doctor.""
In the 2017–18 federal budget, the Turnbull government began to re-fund indexation after reaching agreements with the AMA and Royal Australian College of General Practitioners for their continued support of government projects such as the My Health Record system. Indexation resumed by providing $1 billion to index GP items from July 2017, specialist consultation items from July 2018, specialist procedures and allied health from July 2019, and diagnostic imaging from July 2020. 
The 2024 indexation rate is 3.5% and is applied to most general practitioner, allied health and medical imaging services from 1 July 2024.
The AMA continues to petitions yearly for increases to MBS payments for services provided by its members, taking the stance that the MBS payments are decreasing in real terms due to annual inflation and that MBS indexation has not kept up. Their annual ""Gaps Poster"" calculates that despite average Consumer Price Index growth of around 3% each year, the MBS has only increased between 1.2% and 2.5% for most items between 1995-2012 (with no increase to medical imaging or pathology services)."
Medicare (Australia),"Private hospital and allied health services
All patients that are eligible for Medicare are also eligible for state and territory public hospital services, which are typically free for most patients and funded under an agreement between the federal government and state and territory governments called the National Health Reform Agreement. 
Patients in public hospitals that elect to be treated as private patients and patients in private hospitals will have some costs charged by doctors covered at the admitted patient rate (currently 75% of the schedule fee). Hospital costs not listed on the MBS, or where the cost is greater than the Medicare benefit, can be paid by private health insurance or by the patient. For MBS listed services provided to hospital inpatients, where the patient also holds private health insurance for that service, the private health insurer must contribute at least the remaining 25% of the schedule free. If a doctor chooses to charge more than the schedule fee, the private health insurer may contribute towards the gap depending on the insurance policy.
Some allied health rebates are limited to patients with a chronic disease where the GP has initiated a General Practitioner Management Plan, Team Care Arrangements, a Mental Health Case Conference, or is related to a specific disease or diagnosis. Referrals made for conditions covered by one of these may attract Medicare benefits where the service would otherwise not be eligible. These include services such as physiotherapy, podiatry and audiology. Optometry services can be provided without referral, while dentistry is not covered at all. Where the service is not covered by Medicare, private health insurance policies may provide an annual ""extras"" balance that can be used to contribute towards these costs.
For patients receiving mental health care, Medicare provides up to 10 fully covered individual and group counselling sessions per year as part of the Better Access Scheme. To access these, patients need to create a ""mental health care plan"" with their GP. The Better Access Scheme also covers the cost of other mental health supports, including care from related professions such as occupational therapists, social workers, general practitioners and psychiatrists."
Medicare (Australia),"Medicare Safety Net
The first Medicare Safety Net, setting a maximum amount per year someone could pay for MBS-listed out-of-hospital services, was added in 1991. (It is now known as the Original Medicare Safety Net). The Extended Medicare Safety Net was added in 2004, providing similar assistance for heavy users of scheduled medical services.
To provide additional relief to those who incur higher than usual medical costs, Medicare safety nets have been set up. These provide singles and families with an additional rebate when an annual threshold is reached for out-of-hospital Medicare services. A basic safety net exists for all Australians, with an extended safety net for some families.
The thresholds for both safety nets are indexed on 1 January each year to the Consumer Price Index."
Medicare (Australia),"General safety net
Under the original Medicare safety net, once an annual threshold in gap costs has been reached, the Medicare rebate for out-of-hospital services is increased to 100% of the schedule fee (up from 85%).  Gap costs refer to the difference between the standard Medicare rebate (85% of the schedule fee) and the actual fee paid, but limited to 100% of the schedule fee. The threshold applies for all Medicare cardholders and is $560.40 for 2024."
Medicare (Australia),"Extended safety net
The extended Medicare safety net was first introduced in March 2004. Once an annual threshold in out-of-pocket costs for out-of-hospital Medicare services is reached, the Medicare rebate will increase to 80% of any future out-of-pocket costs (now subject to the extended safety net fee cap) for out-of-hospital Medicare services for the remainder of the calendar year. Out-of-pocket costs are the difference between the fee actually paid to the practitioner (subject to the fee cap) and the standard Medicare rebate.
When introduced, the general threshold for singles and families was $700, or $300 for singles and families that hold a concession card and families that received Family Tax Benefit Part A. On 1 January 2006, the thresholds were increased to $1,000 and $500 respectively. From then the extended safety net was indexed by the Consumer Price Index on 1 January each year.
Since 1 January 2010, some medical fees have been subject to an safety net fee cap, so that the out-of-pocket costs used in determining whether the threshold has been reached are limited to that cap. The extended safety net fee cap also applies for any rebate that is paid once the EMSN threshold is reached. The items subject to a cap has expanded since 2010, the latest being in November 2012."
Medicare (Australia),"Funding of the scheme
Medicare levy
Medicare is presently nominally funded by an income tax surcharge, known as the Medicare levy, which is currently 2% of a resident taxpayer's taxable income. However, revenue raised by the levy falls far short of funding the entirety of Medicare expenditure, and any shortfall is paid out of general government expenditure.
The 2013 budget increased the Medicare levy from 1.5% to 2% from 1 July 2014, ostensibly to fund the National Disability Insurance Scheme. The 2017 budget proposed to increase the Medicare levy from 2% to 2.5%, from 1 July 2018, but this proposal was scrapped on 25 April 2018.
When the levy is payable, it is calculated on an individual's entire taxable income, and not just the amount above the low-income threshold."
Medicare (Australia),"Private Health Insurance Levy and Lifetime Health Cover (LHC)
In 1997, the Howard government implemented a higher level of Medicare levy for high income earners where they did not have a private health insurance policy. The purpose being to relieve strain on Medicare and the public health system by encouraging those that could afford it to receive care in the private system.
From the start of 1999, a 30 per cent rebate on the cost of private health insurance became available to further encourage people to take out private health insurance. 
From 2000, the Lifetime Health Cover (LHC) initiative came into effect to encourage people to take out private health insurance with hospital coverage earlier in life. Individuals 31-year or older, and not exempted, are charged an additional 2% on any private hospital insurance policy they purchase for each year after their 30th birthday that they do not have coverage. They are required to pay this additional loading, up to a maximum of 70%, for 10 years, and the federal government rebate does not include the cost of LHC. After 10-years of continuous coverage, the loading is then removed."
Medicare (Australia),"Low income exemptions
Low income earners are exempt from the Medicare levy, with different exemption thresholds applying to singles, families, seniors and pensioners, with a phasing-in range. Since 2015–16, the exemptions have applied to taxable incomes below $21,335, or $33,738 for seniors and pensioners. The phasing-in range is for taxable incomes between $21,335 and $26,668, or $33,738 and $42,172 for seniors and pensioners."
Medicare (Australia),"Eligibility
The following groups of people have access to fully-covered health care in public hospitals via the Medicare system:"
Medicare (Australia),"Australian citizens
New Zealand citizens who have lived in Australia for six months or more over the previous year
Permanent residents
People who have applied for permanent residence
Temporary residents covered by a ministerial order
Citizens or permanent residents of:
Norfolk Island
Cocos (Keeling) Islands
Christmas Island
Lord Howe Island"
Medicare (Australia),"Reciprocal agreements
International visitors from 11 countries have subsidised access to medically necessary treatment under reciprocal agreements. Reciprocal Health Care Agreements (RHCA) are in place with the United Kingdom, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, Norway, Slovenia, Malta, Italy, Republic of Ireland, and New Zealand, which entitles visitors from these countries limited access to public health care in Australia (often only for emergencies and critical care), and entitles eligible Australians to reciprocal rights while in one of these countries."
Medicare (Australia),"Exclusions
Asylum seekers in Australia who have applied for a protection visa and whose bridging visa had expired have no access to services like Medicare, and no Centrelink payments or other social services, and are not allowed to work. It was estimated in July 2022 that there were around 2000 people in this situation.
Prisoners, including children in juvenile detention, are not eligible for Medicare while imprisoned. Incarcerated patients are instead entitled to health services, which are funded and/or provided by the state or territory corrections or health department. The level of care available, however, is far below the level given to people with Medicare, and many health services and medications are inaccessible to incarcerated patients as they are considered too expensive to pay for them without Medicare funding."
Medicare (Australia),"See also
Health care in Australia
Medicare card (Australia)
Medicare (Canada)
Medicare (United States)
National Health Service"
Medicare (Australia),"References
Citations
Sources
External links
Medicare (Australia) Official website
Department of Health and Aged Care Bulk Billing Rates
APH Background Brief on Medicare (to 2004)
Medicare Benefits Schedule Online
Department of Health and Aged Care – Overseas Visitors' Health Cover
What is Medicare in Australia?
Making Medicare: The Politics of Universal Health Care in Australia Archived 11 April 2020 at the Wayback Machine
The Making of Medibank
Before Bob Hawke's Medicare, a visit to hospital forced many Australians into bankruptcy
Medicare: The making and consolidation of an Australian institution
Medicare ephemera material collected by the National Library of Australia
Adventures in Health Risk"
Japan–Australia Economic Partnership Agreement,"The Japan–Australia Economic Partnership Agreement (JAEPA) is a trade agreement between Australia and Japan. The negotiations for the agreement were concluded in 2014 and it took effect on January 15, 2015."
Japan–Australia Economic Partnership Agreement,"Background
Australia's negotiations for an agreement with Japan began under the Howard government in 2007. In April 2014, Australia's Prime Minister Tony Abbott led a trade delegation to Japan, South Korea and China. The three economies accounted for more than half of all of Australia's two-way trade. On the Japanese leg, Abbott was received by Emperor Akihito and, secured the key elements of a free trade agreement with the government of Shinzo Abe.
A number of concessions were secured for Australian agricultural exporters, while Australian tariffs on electronics, whitegoods and cars were to be lowered. Negotiations for the agreement began under the Howard government in 2007. Abbott said, ""This is the first time that Japan has negotiated a comprehensive economic partnership agreement or free trade agreement with a major economy, particularly a major economy with a strong agricultural sector."" Prime Minister Abe traveled to Australia in July to sign the Japan–Australia Economic Partnership Agreement, and address the Australian Parliament.
Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs said: ""The agreement will provide valuable preferential access for Australia's exports and is by far the most liberalising trade agreement Japan has ever concluded. Australia and Japan are natural partners with highly complementary economies. The agreement will bring our economies and societies even closer and underpin a strong relationship for many years to come.""
While the prior tariff on new car imports from Japan was eliminated, the agreement included a flat $12000 fee on imports of used vehicles from Japan."
Japan–Australia Economic Partnership Agreement,"After
With the commencement of the Japan free trade agreement in 2015, employers no longer need to offer jobs to locals or to prove that none could fill vacancies before Japanese nationals eligible for 457 visas are employed."
Japan–Australia Economic Partnership Agreement,"
== References =="
Australian Bureau of Statistics,"The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) is an Australian Government agency that collects and analyses statistics on economic, population, environmental, and social issues to advise the Australian Government.
The bureau's function originated in the Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, established in 1905, four years after Federation of Australia; it took on its present name in 1975. The ABS conducts Australia's Census of Population and Housing every five years and publishes its findings online."
Australian Bureau of Statistics,"History
Efforts to count the population of Australia started in 1795 with ""musters"" that involved physically gathering a community to be counted, a practice that continued until 1825. The first colonial censuses were conducted in New South Wales in 1828; in Tasmania in 1841; South Australia in 1844; Western Australia in 1848; and Victoria in 1854. Each colony continued to collect statistics separately despite attempts to coordinate collections through an annual Conference of Statisticians. The first simultaneous census across all the Australian colonies occurred in 1881. A national statistical office was subsequently proposed to develop comparable statistics.
The Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics (CBCS) was established under the Census and Statistics Act 1905. Sir George Handley Knibbs was appointed as the first Commonwealth Statistician. The bureau was located in Melbourne – at that time the temporary seat of federal government – attached to the Department of Home Affairs. In 1928, the bureau relocated to Canberra, where in 1932 it was subsumed within the Department of the Treasury.
The first national census, which deployed about 7300 collectors, occurred in 1911. Although coordination and data sharing were facilitated by CBCS, each state in Australia initially had its own statistical office and worked with the CBCS to produce national data. Some states faced challenges in providing a satisfactory statistical service through their own offices, resulting in mergers with the CBCS. The Tasmanian Statistical Office was transferred to the CBCS in 1924, and the New South Wales Bureau of Statistics amalgamated into it in 1957. The final unification of all state statistical offices with the CBCS occurred in the late 1950s under the guidance of Sir Stanley Carver, who was the New South Wales Statistician acting as the Commonwealth Statistician.
In 1974, the CBCS was abolished and replaced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). The Australian Bureau of Statistics Act 1975 established the ABS as a statutory authority headed by the Australian Statistician, who reported to the federal Treasurer.
In 2015, the Australian Government announced a $250 million five-year investment in the ABS to modernise its systems and processes."
Australian Bureau of Statistics,"Census of population and housing
Once every 5 years, the ABS conducts the Australian Census of Population and Housing as stipulated under federal law in the Constitution of Australia. The most recent was conducted on 10 August 2021. Statistics from the census were published on the ABS website in June 2022.
The census aims to accurately measure the population, number of dwellings in Australia, and a range of their key characteristics. Census data is used for defining electoral boundaries, planning infrastructure, establishing community services, and formulating public policy."
Australian Bureau of Statistics,"2016 census
In 2016, the ABS conducted its census largely online through its website and logins rather than through paper forms. The bureau took the form offline for 43 hours from 8:09 pm on 9 August until 2:29 pm on 11 August. On 10 August, the Australian Statistician, David Kalisch, stated that the website was closed after denial-of-service attacks from an overseas source targeted the online form; ""the first three were successfully repelled and the fourth one caused the difficulty that then led us to bring the system down as a precaution"". A comprehensive review by Alastair MacGibbon, Special Adviser to the Prime Minister on Cyber Security, tabled in October, concluded that five distributed denial-of-service attacks – in which incoming traffic from many different sources ""floods"" the site – had occurred. They had been much smaller than attacks experienced by other Australian Government websites and the preventable outages had resulted from a failed geoblocking strategy, compounded by a hardware failure when the contractor, IBM, attempted to reboot the system after the fourth attack. There was no indication that the census data was insecure or was compromised. Many recommendations of the review included that the ABS should strengthen its approach to managing the performance of outsourced ICT suppliers and that the ABS ""should draw upon the lessons it takes from the Census experience to help to guide and to advocate for the cultural change path it is following"".
A Senate inquiry was held into the 2016 census, reporting in November and making 16 recommendations including externally conducted privacy impact assessments, engagement with the non-government sector, reporting breaches of census-related data, open tendering, and stability in funding the bureau. An independent panel was also established by the Australian Statistician to help to ensure the quality of the 2016 census."
Australian Bureau of Statistics,"2021 census
The 2021 census was conducted during the height of the global Covid-19 pandemic. In obtaining data from 10,852,208 dwellings, it exceeded the ABS target. The dwelling response rate was 96.1%, an increase from 95.1% in 2016."
Australian Bureau of Statistics,"Publications
The ABS publishes monthly and quarterly economic information spanning interest rates, property prices, employment, the value of the Australian dollar, and commodity prices. Publications include things such as: the Key Economic Indicators, Consumer Price Index, Australian National Accounts, Average Weekly Earnings, and Labour Force."
Australian Bureau of Statistics,"Other major publications
Outside the main economic indicators, the ABS has several other major publications covering topics including:"
Australian Bureau of Statistics,"Health: The 2011–12 Australian Health Survey was a survey on health and wellbeing conducted in Australia. The survey included a biomedical component with respondents having the option of providing biomedical samples such as blood and urine for testing. This allowed the survey to capture detailed health information about health conditions in the community. A secondary component of the Australian Health Survey asked respondents to keep a food diary, which was used to obtain a view of the nutritional intake and dietary preferences of the nation.
Crime: The ABS publishes crime statistics such as individual releases covering offenders, victims of crime, the corrections system and prisons. The Australian crime rate statistic for 2021 was 0.74, a 13.51% decline from 2020.
Demography: The ABS publishes many demographic releases including data on population, population growth and projections, interstate and overseas migration, births, deaths and overseas arrivals and departures.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander statistics: The National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey (NATSISS) collects information on the social situation of Indigenous Australians, including data on health, education, culture, and labour force participation. The ABS also collects data related to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders through the Australian Health Survey as well as in many other regular publications in the areas of demography, education, employment, and more.
Education: The major education publications are Childhood Education and Care, Schools, and Education and Work. They look at all aspects of education in Australia from preschool up to undergraduate and postgraduate study.
Environment: The ABS has publications on environmental topics covering energy and water use, conservation activities undertaken by households, land management, farming, and more.
Research and Innovation: The ABS has been undertaking surveys to collect estimates from Australian organisations regarding expenditure on and human resources devoted to research and development (R&D) in Australia since 1978. The results allow the nature and distribution of Australia's R&D activity to be monitored by government policy analysts and advisers to government, businesses, and economists.
In August 2017, the Treasurer issued a directive to the ABS to undertake a statistical collection into the views of Australians on the electoral roll about same-sex marriage. This is now referred to as the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey.
The ABS previously published the Yearbook Australia, from 1908 to 2012 under various ISSNs and titles (Commonwealth yearbook, Official yearbook of the Commonwealth of Australia).
The ABS publishes an annual report with a detailed description of the bureau's activities during the preceding year, accounting for its use of public resources and performance against planned outcomes."
Australian Bureau of Statistics,"International engagement
The ABS engages in international and regional statistical forums including the United Nations Statistical Commission (UNSC), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Committee on Statistics and Statistical Policy (CSSP), and the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) Conference for European Statisticians (CES).
The ABS has a partnership with DFAT to deliver statistical and institutional capability building programs for the Indo-Pacific region, both in-country and by hosting development visits. The ABS has also hosted international development and study visits from countries including China, Japan, Canada, Korea, and Nepal."
Australian Bureau of Statistics,"Australian Statistician
Since 1975, the head of the ABS has been known as the ""Australian Statistician"". The title has been previously known as the ""Commonwealth Statistician"".
The incumbent since 11 December 2019 is David Gruen. Previous incumbents have included David Kalisch and Brian Pink. Pink retired in January 2014. Ian Ewing acted in the role from 13 January to 14 February 2014, and Jonathan Palmer acted from 17 February to 12 December 2014."
Australian Bureau of Statistics,"See also
ANZSIC – Australian and New Zealand standard industrial classification, an industry classification developed jointly with Statistics New Zealand
Demography of Australia
SEIFA – Socio-economic indexes for areas, the Australian indexes of social advantage and disadvantage, created by the Australian Bureau of Statistics
Census and Statistics Act 1905"
Australian Bureau of Statistics,"References
External links
Official website
Australian Bureau of Statistics (statistics.gov.au) at the Wayback Machine (archive index)
Year Book Australia
""Measuring Australia's Progress"""
Department of Defence (Australia),"Defence Australia is a department of the Government of Australia charged with the responsibility to defend Australia and its national interests. Along with the Australian Defence Force (ADF), it forms part of the Australian Defence Organisation (ADO) and is accountable to the Commonwealth Parliament, on behalf of the Australian people, for the efficiency and effectiveness with which it carries out the Government's defence policy.
The head of the department, who leads it on a daily basis, is the Secretary of the Department of Defence (SECDEF), currently Greg Moriarty. The Secretary reports to the Minister of Defence, Richard Marles."
Department of Defence (Australia),"History
Australia has had at least one defence-related government department since Federation in 1901. The first Department of Defence existed from 1901 until 1921. In 1915, during World War I, a separate Department of the Navy was created. The two departments merged in 1921 to form the second Department of Defence, regarded as a separate body.
A major departmental reorganisation occurred in the lead-up to World War II. The Department of Defence was abolished and replaced with six smaller departments – the Defence Co-ordination (for defence policy, financial, and administrative matters), three ""service departments"" (Army, Navy, and Air), the Supply and Development (for munitions and materiel), and Civil Aviation. The current Department of Defence was formally created in 1942, when Prime Minister John Curtin renamed the existing Department of Defence Co-ordination. The other defence-related departments underwent a series of reorganisations, before being merged into the primary department over the following decades. This culminated in the abolition of the three service departments in 1973. A new Department of Defence Support was created in 1982, but abolished in 1984.
In May 2022, the department was renamed Defence Australia.
The Australian Department of Defence, along with the Australian state and other governments are known to fund the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), a defence and strategic policy think tank based in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory."
Department of Defence (Australia),"Defence Committee
The Defence Committee is the primary decision-making committee in the Department of Defence, supported by six subordinate committees, groups and boards. The Defence Committee is focused on major capability development and resource management for the Australian Defence Organisation and shared accountability of the Secretary and the Chief of the Defence Force.
The members of the Defence Committee are:"
Department of Defence (Australia),"Organisational groups
As of 2016 the Department of Defence consists of ten major organisational groups:"
Department of Defence (Australia),"Associate Secretary Group – provides administrative, legal and governance services including audit and fraud control, security and vetting, the Judge Advocate General, and communications and ministerial support.
Chief Information Officer Group – leads the integrated design, cost effective delivery, and sustained operation of Defence information
Chief Finance Officer Group – to drive the financial and management improvement programs for Defence
Capability Acquisition and Sustainment Group (CASG) –  Australia's largest project management organisation and its mission is to acquire and sustain equipment for the Australian Defence Force, created through the amalgamation of the Capability Development Group and Defence Materiel Organisation in 2015.
Defence People Group – human resource outcomes across the Defence employment cycle from strategy and policy development, through to implementation and service delivery
Defence Estate and Infrastructure Group – consolidated service delivery organisation for Defence that enables Defence capability by working in partnership to deliver integrated services through a highly capable workforce
Defence Science and Technology Group – lead agency charged with applying science and technology to protect and defend Australia and its national interests
Defence Strategic Policy and Intelligence Group – provides policy advice and coordination for strategy and intelligence for Defence, including overseeing the Defence Intelligence Organisation, Australian Signals Directorate, and the Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation"
Department of Defence (Australia),"Diarchy
The Chief of the Defence Force (CDF) and the Secretary of the Department of Defence (SECDEF) jointly manage the Australian Defence Organisation (ADO) under a diarchy in which both report directly to the Minister for Defence and the Assistant Minister for Defence. The ADO diarchy is a governance structure unique in the Australian Public Service."
Department of Defence (Australia),"List of departmental secretaries
The Secretary of the Department of Defence (SECDEF) is a senior public service officer and historically the appointees have not come from military service."
Department of Defence (Australia),"See also
Australian Defence Organisation
Current senior Australian Defence Organisation personnel
Minister for Defence
Minister for Defence Science and Personnel
Minister for Veterans' Affairs
Minister for Defence Industry
List of Australian Commonwealth Government entities
Department of the Army (Australia)
Department of the Navy (Australia)
Department of Air (Australia)
United States Department of Defense
United Kingdom Ministry of Defence
Canadian Department of National Defence
New Zealand Ministry of Defence"
Department of Defence (Australia),"References
External links
Department of Defence website
""Defence Organisational Structure Chart"" (PDF). Department of Defence. Commonwealth of Australia. 21 September 2015.
""Defence Senior Leaders"". Department of Defence. 2016.
""Dennis Richardson AO"". Biography of the Secretary of the Department of Defence. Department of Defence. 2016."
Outline of Australia,"This outline of Australia is an overview of and topical guide to various aspects of the country of Australia:
Australia refers to both the continent of Australia and to the Commonwealth of Australia, the sovereign country. The continent of Australia, the world's smallest continent, is in the Southern Hemisphere and borders both the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. The Commonwealth of Australia comprises the mainland of the Australian continent, the major island of Tasmania, other nearby islands, and various external territories. Neighbouring countries are Indonesia, East Timor, and Papua New Guinea to the north, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and New Caledonia to the north-east, and New Zealand to the south-east.
The Australian mainland has been inhabited for at least 50,000 years by Aboriginal Australians. After sporadic visits by fishermen from the north and then European discovery by Dutch explorers in 1606, the eastern half of Australia was later claimed by the British in 1770 and initially settled through penal transportation as part of the colony of New South Wales, commencing on 26 January 1788. As the population grew and new areas were explored, another five largely self-governing Crown colonies were established during the 19th century."
Outline of Australia,"General reference
Pronunciation:  
Common English country name: Australia
Official English country name: The Commonwealth of Australia
Common endonym(s): Land Down Under
Official endonym(s): Australia
Adjectival(s): Australian
Demonym(s): Aussie (colloquially)
Etymology: Name of Australia
International rankings of Australia
ISO country codes: AU, AUS, 036
ISO region codes: See ISO 3166-2:AU
Internet country code top-level domain: .au"
Outline of Australia,"Geography
Geography of Australia"
Outline of Australia,"Australia is:
a continent
a country
a nation state
a Commonwealth realm
a megadiverse country
Location:
Australia is a region or subregion of:
The World (Australia is a continent on the planet Earth)
Southern Hemisphere and Eastern Hemisphere
Oceania
Australasia
Australia lies between:
Indian Ocean
Pacific Ocean
South Pacific Ocean
Southern Ocean
Time zones:
Australian Eastern Standard Time (EST) (UTC+10), Australian Eastern Summer Time (EDT) (UTC+11)
Australian Central Standard Time (CST) (UTC+09:30), Australian Central Summer Time (CDT) (UTC+10:30),
Australian Western Standard Time (WST) (UTC+08)
Extreme points of Australia (mainland)
Northernmost Point – Cape York, Queensland (10°41' S)
Southernmost Point – South Point, Wilsons Promontory, Victoria (39°08' S)
Westernmost Point – Steep Point, Western Australia (113°09' E)
Easternmost Point – Cape Byron, New South Wales (153°38' E)
Highest Point – Mount Kosciuszko  2,228 m (7,310 ft)
Lowest Point – Lake Eyre  −15 m (−49 ft)
Land boundaries:  none
Coastline:  25,760 km
Population of Australia: 25,694,393 people  (December 2020) – 54th most populous country
Area of Australia:  7,741,220 km2 (2,988,900 sq mi) – 6th largest country
Atlas of Australia
Surveying in Australia"
Outline of Australia,"Environment
Environment of Australia"
Outline of Australia,"Climate of Australia
Bushfires in Australia
Climate change in Australia
Effects of global warming on Australia
Ecoregions of Australia
Environmental issues in Australia
Renewable energy in Australia
Geothermal power in Australia
Solar power in Australia
Wind power in Australia
Geology of Australia
National parks of Australia
Protected areas of Australia
Wildlife of Australia
Flora of Australia
Fauna of Australia
Birds of Australia
Mammals of Australia"
Outline of Australia,	Iconic wildlife of Australia
Outline of Australia,"Geographic features
Islands of Australia
Lakes of Australia
Mountains of Australia
Volcanoes in Australia
Rivers of Australia
Valleys of Australia
Waterfalls of Australia
World Heritage Sites in Australia"
Outline of Australia,"Regions
Ecoregions in Australia"
Outline of Australia,"Multi-state regions
Barkly Tableland
Capital Country
Eastern states of Australia
East Coast of Australia
Lake Eyre basin
Murray–Darling basin
Northern Australia
The Nullarbor
Outback
Southern Australia"
Outline of Australia,"Administrative divisions
States and territories of Australia"
Outline of Australia,"States
New South Wales
 Victoria
 Queensland
 Western Australia
 South Australia
 Tasmania"
Outline of Australia,"Territories
Mainland territories
Australian Capital Territory
 Northern Territory
 Jervis Bay Territory"
Outline of Australia,"External territories
Ashmore and Cartier Islands
 Australian Antarctic Territory
 Norfolk Island
 Christmas Island
 Cocos (Keeling) Islands
 Coral Sea Islands Territory
 Heard and McDonald Islands"
Outline of Australia,"Municipalities
Local government in Australia"
Outline of Australia,Cities of Australia
Outline of Australia,"Demography
Demographics of Australia"
Outline of Australia,"Government and politics
Form of government: Federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy
Capital of Australia: Canberra
Elections in Australia
1901 – 1972 – 1974 – 1975 – 1977 – 1980 – 1983 – 1984 – 1987 – 1990 – 1993 –  1996 – 1998 – 2001 – 2004 – 2007 – 2010 – 2013 – 2016 – 2019 – 2022
Australian electoral system
Compulsory voting
Preferential voting
Divisions of the Australian House of Representatives
Human rights in Australia
Political parties in Australia
Liberal Party of Australia
Australian Labor Party
National Party of Australia
Australian Democrats
Australian Greens
Political scandals of Australia
Republicanism in Australia
Taxation in Australia"
Outline of Australia,"Federal government
Government of Australia"
Outline of Australia,"Branches of the government
Separation of powers in Australia"
Outline of Australia,"Executive branch
Head of state: King of Australia (King Charles III)
Head of state's representative: Governor-General (David Hurley)
Head of government: Prime Minister of Australia (Anthony Albanese)
Cabinet
Federal Executive Council"
Outline of Australia,"Legislative branch
Parliament of Australia
Australian monarch
Australian Senate
Australian House of Representatives
Opposition Leader (currently: Peter Dutton)"
Outline of Australia,"Judicial branch
Judiciary of Australia"
Outline of Australia,"High Court of Australia
Australian court hierarchy
Constitution of Australia"
Outline of Australia,"Military
Australian Defence Force (ADF)"
Outline of Australia,"Command
Commander-in-chief: Governor-General as the King's representative.
Minister for Defence of Australia (Richard Marles)
Forces
Army of Australia: Australian Army
Navy of Australia: Royal Australian Navy
Air force of Australia: Royal Australian Air Force
Special forces of Australia
Military history of Australia
Australian Defence Force ranks"
Outline of Australia,"Foreign relations
ANZUS
Australia–United States relations
Australia–New Zealand relations
Australia–Indonesia relations
Australia–China relations
Australia–Japan relations
Anglo-Australian relations
Australia and the United Nations"
Outline of Australia,"International organisation membership
The Commonwealth of Australia is a member of the:"
Outline of Australia,"Law and order
Law of Australia"
Outline of Australia,"Citizenship
Cannabis in Australia
Constitution of Australia
Crime in Australia
Law enforcement in Australia
National law enforcement agencies
Australian Border Force (ABF)
Australian Federal Police (AFP)
Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC)
Australian Crime Commission (ACC)
Australian Securities & Investments Commission (ASIC)
Australian Taxation Office (ATO)
Regional law enforcement agencies – the following policing agencies are regulated by their respective State or Territory Government and are highly visible:
Australian Capital Territory Police
New South Wales Police Force
Northern Territory Police
Queensland Police Service
South Australia Police
Tasmania Police
Victoria Police
Western Australia Police"
Outline of Australia,"State and territory governments
Governors of the Australian states
Parliaments of the Australian states and territories
Premiers of the Australian states
Government of New South Wales
Government of Queensland
Government of South Australia
Government of Tasmania
Government of Victoria
Government of Western Australia
Government of the Australian Capital Territory
Government of the Northern Territory"
Outline of Australia,"Local government
Local government in Australia"
Outline of Australia,"History
Prehistory of Australia
Australian archaeology
European exploration of Australia
History of Australia (1788–1850)
History of Australia (1851–1900)
History of Australia (1901–1945)
Australian Federation
Australia in World War I
Australia in World War II
Stolen Generations
History of Australia since 1945
Constitutional history of Australia
Immigration history of Australia
Postage stamps and postal history of Australia"
Outline of Australia,"History of states
History of New South Wales
History of Queensland
History of South Australia
History of Tasmania
History of Victoria
History of Western Australia"
Outline of Australia,"Culture
Culture of Australia"
Outline of Australia,"Architecture of Australia
Architecture of Western Australia
Australian architectural styles
Australian art
Indigenous Australian art
Cinema of Australia
Australian cuisine
Dance in Australia
Festivals in Australia
Australian folklore
Humour in Australia
Languages of Australia
Australian Aboriginal languages
Australian Aboriginal English
Australian English
Australian literature
Media of Australia
Television in Australia
Cinema of Australia
Music of Australia
Australian music charts
Australian country music
Australian hip hop
Australian jazz
Australian rock
Indigenous Australian music
Music of immigrant communities in Australia
National symbols of Australia
Coat of arms of Australia
Flag of Australia
National anthems:
Official national anthem: Advance Australia Fair
Royal anthem: God Save the King
People of Australia
Australian diaspora
Australian of the Year
Prostitution in Australia
Public holidays in Australia
World Heritage Sites in Australia
Theatre of Australia"
Outline of Australia,"Economy and infrastructure
Economy of Australia"
Outline of Australia,"Economic rank, by nominal GDP (2007): 14th (fourteenth)
Agriculture in Australia
Telecommunications in Australia
Internet in Australia
Reserve Bank of Australia
List of pizzerias in Australia
List of restaurant chains in Australia
Currency of Australia: Dollar
ISO 4217: AUD
Economic history of Australia
Energy in Australia
Energy in Australia
Energy policy of Australia
Effects of global warming on Australia
Garnaut Climate Change Review
Coal in Australia
Carbon capture and storage in Australia
Geothermal power in Australia
Solar power in Australia
Wind power in Australia
Health care in Australia
Median household income in Australia and New Zealand
Mining in Australia
Coal mining in Australia
Australian Securities Exchange
Tourism in Australia
Visa policy of Australia
Transport in Australia
Airports in Australia
Rail transport in Australia
Road transport in Australia
Tunnels in Australia
Water supply and sanitation in Australia"
Outline of Australia,"State economies
Economy of New South Wales
Economy of Queensland
Economy of South Australia
Economy of Tasmania
Economy of Victoria
Economy of Western Australia"
Outline of Australia,"Education
Homeschooling and distance education in Australia
Public and private education in Australia
Universities in Australia
Group of Eight"
Outline of Australia,"States education
Education in New South Wales
Education in Queensland
Education in South Australia
Education in Tasmania
Education in Victoria
Education in Western Australia
Education in the Australian Capital Territory"
Outline of Australia,"Religion and belief systems in Australia
Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology
Irreligion in Australia
Religion in Australia
Buddhism in Australia
Christianity in Australia
Catholicism in Australia
Protestantism in Australia
Hinduism in Australia
Islam in Australia
Judaism in Australia
History of the Jews in Australia
Sikhism in Australia"
Outline of Australia,"Sport
Sport in Australia"
Outline of Australia,"Australia at the Olympics
Australia at the Commonwealth Games
Football in Australia
Soccer in Australia
Australian rules football in Australia
Rugby union in Australia
Rugby league in Australia
Cricket in Australia
Golf in Australia
Field hockey in Australia
Motorsport in Australia
Tennis in Australia
Basketball in Australia
Netball in Australia
Swimming in Australia
Swimming Australia
List of Australian records in swimming
Women's swimming in Australia
Skiing in Australia
Australian horse racing
Winter sport in Australia"
Outline of Australia,"See also
All pages with titles beginning with Australia
All pages with titles beginning with Australian
All pages with titles containing Australia
All pages with titles containing Australian
Index of Australia-related articles
List of Australia-related topics
List of articles about Australia and New Zealand jointly
Member states of the Commonwealth of Nations
Members states of the Group of Twenty
Member states of the United Nations
Outline of geography
Outline of Oceania
List of place names of Dutch origin"
Outline of Australia,"References
External links
 Wikimedia Atlas of Australia"
Outline of Australia,Detailed map of Australia
Australian New Wave,"The Australian New Wave (also known as the Australian Film Revival, Australian Film Renaissance, or New Australian Cinema) was an era of resurgence in worldwide popularity of Australian cinema, particularly in the United States. It began in the early 1970s and lasted until the mid-late 1980s. The era also marked the emergence of Ozploitation, a film genre characterised by the exploitation of colloquial Australian culture."
Australian New Wave,"Background
The Australian film industry declined after World War II, coming to a virtual stop by the early 1960s. The Gorton (1968–71) and Whitlam governments (1972–75) intervened and rescued the industry from its expected oblivion. The federal and several state governments established bodies to assist with the funding of film production and the training of film makers through the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, which fostered a new generation of Australian filmmakers who were able to bring their visions to the screen. The 1970s saw a huge renaissance of the Australian film industry. Australia produced nearly 400 films between 1970 and 1985, more than had been made in the history of the Australian film industry.
In contrast to pre-New Wave films, New Wave films are often viewed as fresh and creative, possessing ""a vitality, a love of open spaces and a propensity for sudden violence and languorous sexuality"". The ""straight-ahead narrative style"" of many Australian New Wave films reminded American audiences of ""the Hollywood-maverick period of the late 1960s and early '70s that had just about run its course""."
Australian New Wave,"Notable films
1970s
1980s
Notable figures
Many filmmakers and actors launched international careers through their work in the Australian New Wave."
Australian New Wave,"Legacy
Several films of the Australian New Wave are regarded as classics of world cinema and have been ranked among films considered the best. Published in 2004, The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made includes Walkabout, Mad Max, Breaker Morant, Gallipoli, Mad Max 2, The Year of Living Dangerously and Dead Calm. In 2008, Empire magazine chose Mad Max 2 and The Year of Living Dangerously as two of the 500 Greatest Movies of All Time, ranking in at #280 and #161 respectively. The 2011 book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die features Walkabout, Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, My Brilliant Career, Mad Max and Gallipoli (winner of multiple AACTA Awards). Since its re-release in 2009, Wake in Fright has been assessed as one of, if not the greatest, Australian New Wave film.
The term ""glitter cycle"" refers to a subgenre of eccentric Australian comedies that came to prominence in the early 1990s, spurning a post-new wave revival of Australian film. These films are noted for their celebration of Australian popular culture, camp aesthetic, colourful makeup and costuming, and musical performance pieces. Prominent glitter films include Strictly Ballroom (1992), Muriel's Wedding (1994), The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) and Love Serenade (1996). Other prominent post-new wave revival films of the 1990s include The Big Steal (1990), Proof (1991), Romper Stomper (1992), Babe (1995), Shine (1996), Kiss or Kill (1997), and The Castle (1997).
In 2008, director Mark Hartley released Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!, a documentary film celebrating the romps of the Australian New Wave of 1970s and 1980s low-budget cinema and includes George Miller, Quentin Tarantino and Barry Humphries.
Media theorist Theodore Scheckles argues that the post-1970 period of Australian cinema attempted to ""revise the traditional Australian hero and problematize that revision"" asserting the best films of this era will be viewed ""as films, not as pieces of Australiana"". Likewise Michael Walsh argues that the period represents not an ""over nationalist"" period of Australian cinema, but an adaption of Australian cultural tropes, culture and history to an American mass market."
Australian New Wave,"See also
List of New Wave movements"
Australian New Wave,"References
External links
Film Reference Encyclopedia – ""Australian New Wave: The Comedies""
New York Times – ""Australia Prides Its 'New Wave' of Films"" article, 15 February 1981"
Deserts of Australia,"The deserts of Australia or the Australian deserts cover about 2,700,000 km2 (1,000,000 sq mi), or 18% of the Australian mainland, but about 35% of the Australian continent receives so little rain, it is practically desert. Collectively known as the Great Australian desert, they are primarily distributed throughout the Western Plateau and interior lowlands of the country, covering areas from South West Queensland, Far West region of New South Wales, Sunraysia in Victoria and Spencer Gulf in South Australia to the Barkly Tableland in Northern Territory and the Kimberley region in Western Australia.
By international standards, the Great Australian desert receives relatively high rates of rainfall or around 250 mm (9.84 in) on average, but due to the high evapotranspiration it would be correspondingly arid. No Australian weather stations situated in an arid region record less than 100 mm (3.94 in) of average annual rainfall. The deserts in the interior and south lack any significant summer rains. The desert in western Australia is well explained by the little evaporation of the cold sea current of the West Australian Current, of polar origin, which prevents significant rainfall in the interior of the continent. About 40% of Australia is covered by dunes. Australia is the driest inhabited continent, with the least fertile soils.
In addition to being mostly uninhabited, the Great Australian Desert is diverse, where it consists of semi-desert grassy or mountainous landscapes, xeric shrubs, salt pans, gibber (stony) deserts, red sand dunes, sandstone mesas, rocky plains, open tree savannahs and bushland with a few rivers and salt lakes, which are mostly seasonally dry and often have no outflow in the east. The 3 million km2 (1.2 million sq mi) desert is among the least modified in the world. The Australian desert has the largest population of feral camels in the world."
Deserts of Australia,"History
Geological
The area's geology spans a geological time period of over 3.8 billion years, therefore featuring some of the oldest rocks on earth. There are three main cratonic shields of recognised Archaean age within the Australian landmass: The Yilgarn, the Pilbara and the Gawler cratons. Several other Archaean-Proterozoic orogenic belts exist, usually sandwiched around the edges of these major cratonic shields. The history of the Archaean cratons is extremely complex and protracted. The cratons appear to have been accumulated to form the greater Australian landmass in the late Archaean to meso-Proterozoic, (~2400 Ma to 1,600 Ma).
Chiefly the Capricorn Orogeny is partly responsible for the assembly of the West Australian landmass by connecting the Yilgarn and Pilbara cratons. The Capricorn Orogeny is exposed in the rocks of the Bangemall Basin, Gascoyne Complex granite-gneisses and the Glengarry, Yerrida and Padbury basins. Unknown Proterozoic orogenic belts, possibly similar to the Albany Complex in southern Western Australia and the Musgrave Block, represent the Proterozoic link between the Yilgarn and Gawler cratons, covered by the Proterozoic-Palaeozoic Officer and Amadeus basins."
Deserts of Australia,"Aboriginal
Indigenous Australians have lived in the desert for at least 50,000 years and occupied all Outback regions, including the driest deserts, when Europeans first entered central Australia in the 1800s. Many Indigenous Australians retain strong physical and cultural links to their traditional country and are legally recognised as the traditional owners of large parts of the Outback under Commonwealth Native Title legislation.
Aboriginal tribes and clans have been nomadic in the desert areas for thousands of years. They subsisted on the local flora and fauna, now known as bush food, and made sure that their sources of drinking water remained intact. The nomads moved in clearly demarcated tribal areas. For example, important tribes living in the desert areas include the Arrernte, Luritja and Pitjantjatjara. The latter tribe's sphere of influence extended from Uluṟu to the Nullarbor Plain. The Dieri tribe lives in a large area of the Simpson, Strzelecki and Tirari deserts.
The rock art and archaeological site at Karnatukul was, until recently, estimated to have been inhabited for up to 25,000 years, and known as the site of the oldest continuous recorded occupation in the Western Desert cultural region. Karnakatul shows one of the earliest uses of firewood, and habitation continued through times of extreme climate change, when the desertification occurred as the polar ice sheets expanded. The oldest examples of rock art, in Western Australia's Pilbara region and the Olary district of South Australia, are estimated to be up to around 40,000 years old. The oldest firmly dated evidence of rock art painting in Australia is a charcoal drawing on a small rock fragment found during the excavation of the Narwala Gabarnmang rock shelter in south-western Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory.
The isolated desert areas remained undeveloped for a long time. For example, the Spinifex people first had contact with whites in the 1950s, when they were expelled from their tribal lands because of nuclear weapons testing (1950–1963) by the British and Australian governments. The Pintupi Nine, a group of nine Aboriginal people of the Pintupi tribe, lived a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the Gibson Desert until October 1984, when they first encountered whites as they left the desert. Both discoveries were sensations at the time.
Large parts of the Australian desert areas are part of the Desert Cultural Area. Important cultural sites include Uluṟu and Kata Tjuṯa. Aboriginal Australians of the desert produced many important artists, one of the first and most famous being Albert Namatjira, who was born in Hermannsburg in the Great Sandy Desert. About a third of Australia's deserts are now Aboriginal lands. A very large part of it is managed by them as a nature reserve. A number of tribes have land use rights for almost all other desert regions. Today, numerous Aboriginal peoples live in settlements in the deserts."
Deserts of Australia,"European
The Strzelecki Desert was named in 1845 by explorer Charles Sturt after Polish explorer Paul Edmund Strzelecki.
The first European to cross the Great Sandy Desert was Peter Egerton Warburton. He arrived on the Western Australian coast badly exhausted and blind in one eye. He owed his survival to Charley, an Aboriginal tracker. The British explorer Ernest Giles, who crossed the desert in 1875, gave it the name Great Victoria Desert. It is dedicated to Queen Victoria. From 1858 onwards, the so-called ""Afghan"" cameleers and their beasts played an instrumental role in opening up the Outback and helping to build infrastructure.
The Sturt Stony Desert was named by Charles Sturt in 1844, while he was trying to find the inland sea which he believed lay at the centre of Australia. In 1866 Peter Egerton Warburton's expedition reached the Tirari desert from the west. The Overland Telegraph line was constructed in the 1870s along the route identified by Stuart. In 1865 the surveyor George Goyder, using changes in vegetation patterns, mapped a line in South Australia, north of which he considered rainfall to be too unreliable to support agriculture. British explorer Ernest Giles named the Gibson Desert in memory of Alfred Gibson, who went missing during an 1873–74 expedition.
The Tanami Desert was named by explorer and prospector Allan Davidson. He only assigned the name on his second expedition to this desert region, which ended in 1900. ""Tanami"" was the original Aboriginal name for two rock caves with clear drinking water.
The Simpson Desert got its name from Allen Simpson, a geographer who ventured into this desert in 1845. The name was suggested by explorer and geologist Cecil Madigan. In 1936, Edmund Colson became the first white man to cross the Simpson Desert. Before that, the great Australian explorers Charles Sturt and David Lindsay had failed. While the early explorers used horses to cross the Outback, the first woman to make the journey riding a horse was Anna Hingley, who rode from Broome to Cairns in 2006. 
The nuclear weapons trials carried out by the United Kingdom at Maralinga and Emu Field in the 1950s and early 1960s have left areas contaminated with plutonium-239 and other radioactive material."
Deserts of Australia,"Regions
A large contiguous desert area is formed by the Tanami, Greater Sands, Lesser Sands, Gibson and Greater Victoria Sands in western Australia and a smaller one by the Simpson, Sturt, Strzelecki and Tirari Deserts in the east. Spatially isolated between Great Victoria Sand and Simpson lies the small Pedirka Desert, which spreads out over the geological Pedirka Sedimentary Basin. The Small Sandy Desert connects to the Great Sandy Desert and is similar in terms of landscape and vegetation. The Western Desert, which describes a cultural region of Australia's indigenous people, includes the Gibson, Great Victoria, Great Sand and Small Sand deserts in the states of Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia.
Most of the inhabitants of the area are Indigenous Australians. There are other areas in Australia designated as desert that are not related to the Australian deserts mentioned above. On Kangaroo Island off the coast of South Australia is an area of two square kilometres (0.77 sq mi) called the Little Sahara, a formation of several sand dunes on its south coast. In Victoria, about 375 km (235 mi) west of Melbourne, there is still the Little Desert National Park. The Painted Desert is 121 kilometres (75 mi) northwest of Coober Pedy in South Australia.
The almost treeless Nullarbor Plain in southern Australia, made of limestone, are also known as the Nullarbor Desert."
Deserts of Australia,"Geography
There are four known types of terrestrial deserts:"
Deserts of Australia,"continental (or remote) deserts
tropical (or zonal) deserts
shelter deserts
coastal deserts
Australian deserts generally meet the first three criteria, although some coastal desert areas exist in Western Australia. The great ocean circulation in the south of the continent and the cold sea currents in the southern zone play the fourth crucial role, indirectly at the origin of the long periods of continental drought by imposing high atmospheric pressures. As for the fifth hypothesis of cold or frozen deserts, as absurd as this assertion may appear in present-day Australia, they existed several million years ago. Geomorphologists thus explain a number of spectacular rock formations, from the Mount Olga or Uluru to the over-deepened wave of the wind rocks, by involving a thaw of (peri)glacial formations followed by wind action over a long period. The sand ridges have a trend of SSE-NNW and continue parallel for great distances.
Areas of the formerly desert outback, deserts such as the Simpson Desert from west to east or mountainous regions such as the Arckaringa Hills are characterized by ocean landscapes of charred rocks, called gibberss. As noted by early Australian explorers such as Ernest Giles large portions of the desert are characterized by gravel-covered terrains covered in thin desert grasses and it also contains extensive areas of undulating red sand plains and dunefields, low rocky/gravelly ridges and substantial upland portions with a high degree of laterite formation. The sandy soil of the lateritic buckshot plains is rich in iron in the Gibson Desert. Several isolated salt-water lakes occur in the centre of the region and to the southwest a system of small lakes follow paleo-drainage features. The desert proper is uninhabitable and the environment remains unmarred, while the greener fringe is used for sheep grazing."
Deserts of Australia,"Waterbodies
Lakes in the regions (most of which are dried up saline lakes), include:"
Deserts of Australia,"Rivers and creeks, which are sparse and generally ephemeral, in the Australian desert include:"
Deserts of Australia,"Biodiversity
Vegetation
Two types of semi-desert, referred to as ""grassland"" in Australia, occur in the Australian deserts: Tussock – or Mitchell grasslands are found in the desert areas of the Northern Territory, South Australia and western Queensland. The annual precipitation that falls on these marl and alluvial soils covered with grasses of the Astrebla genus ranges from 150 to 500 mm (6 to 19.5 in). Trees cannot take root on the heavy clay soils, and they are riddled with bushfires. Spinifex or hummock semi-desert grows spiny- headed grasses (Spinifex) in clumps, next to free areas as green Triodia pungens and blue-grey Triodia basedowii. Zygochloa dominates on the sand dunes of the Simpson, Strzelecki and Tirari deserts. In large areas of desert, semi-desert grasslands with mulga bushes (Acacia aneura) predominate.
Semi-desert savannas with low-growing acacia species cover large areas in the south of the arid zone, where 200 to 500 mm of precipitation falls in winter and summer. The acacia species, called mulga, grow on the plains, mountain slopes and hills of the deserts. In connection with the bushfires, which are mainly ignited by the spinifex grasses, the non-resistant mulga bushes burn, which then no longer grow back. There is evidence that Aboriginal people did not start bushfires in mulga landscapes. The desert areas covered by mulga are also threatened by deforestation, extensive livestock farming and fuel wood production. At the eastern end of the arid zone is the so-called Witchetty Bush. This area is home to the endemic species of acacia, Acacia kempeana, which feeds the wood borer larva, the witchetty maggot, up to three inches in size. It is high in protein and was an important part of the Aboriginal diet.
Eucalyptus woodland thrives along the dry riverbeds. Grasses grow on the soil under the eucalypts. Chenopodiaceae shrubs, which usually do not exceed 1.5 m (5 ft) in height, are found in the southern desert areas. They are salt plants that grow on both dry and saline soils. In the deserts there are permanent or percolating patches of freshwater formed in rocky areas or in sandstone canyons. Bluebush and saltbush species grow in heavier soils. Between the sand ridges, the areas of wooded steppe consist of Eucalyptus gongylocarpa, Eucalyptus youngiana, and Acacia aneura (mulga) shrubs scattered over areas of resilient spinifex grasses, particularly Triodia basedowii. Most of the area is covered by hummock grasslands (Triodia spp.), with a few eucalypts, acacias, grevilleas, and bloodwoods (Corymbia chippendalei and Corymbia opaca) are found on sand hills. The vegetation of the dunefields of the Tirari Desert is dominated by either Sandhill Wattle (Acacia ligulata) or Sandhill Cane-grass (Zygochloa paradoxa) which occur on the crests and slopes of dunes. Tall, open shrubland also occurs on the slopes.
In drier areas, species including Old Man Saltbush (Atriplex nummularia), Cottonbush (Maireana aphylla) and Queensland Bluebush (Chenopodium auricomum) form a sparse, open shrubland, whereas swamps and depressions are frequently associated with Swamp Cane-grass (Eragrostis australasica) and Lignum (Muehlenbeckia florulenta). The intermittent watercourses and permanent waterholes associated with tributaries of Cooper Creek support woodland dominated by River Red Gum (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) and Coolibah (Eucalyptus coolabah). Numerous salt lakes form after heavy rainfall and at times fill the underlying salt flats. The salt lakes occupy relatively small areas in the desert areas. For example, a major salt lake is Lake Eyre, which spans areas of the Gibson and Tirari deserts and fills up completely and then dries up about once every 25 years. Seventeen headwaters have formed in the deserts as a result of the subsurface Great Artesian Basin, one of the largest freshwater basins in the world. The water coming out of the springs is rich in minerals. The springs partially form the habitat of endemic fish and the spring area is overgrown with rare plants. Numerous springs have dried up due to extensive agricultural use in the last 100 years. Threats to biodiversity include wildfires, feral animals, weeds, and uncontrolled grazing."
Deserts of Australia,"Wildlife
Significantly fewer animals live in the Australian deserts than in the Australian coastal regions. The most common creatures in Australia's arid regions are insects, such as termites and ants, which are of great importance to the ecology. Animals in the desert include feral camels, dingoes, goannas (including the large perentie) and numerous species of lizards and birds. Mammals include bilbies, mulgara, common brushtail possum, rufous hare-wallaby, burrowing bettong, the black-flanked rock-wallaby, marsupial moles, rufous hare-wallabies, yellow-footed rock wallaby, western grey kangaroos, and red kangaroos. Some of the bird-life found within the desert include the rare Alexandra's parrot, wedge-tailed eagles, Australian bustard, the mulga parrot, the scarlet-chested parrot and the chestnut-breasted whiteface (Aphelocephala pectoralis) found on the eastern edge of the Great Victoria Desert and the malleefowl of Mamungari Conservation Park.
About 103 species of mammals lived there at the time of European colonization, of which 19 are extinct, such as the desert bandicoot (Perameles eremiana), the numbat (Myrmecobius fasciatus) and the long-tailed bouncy mouse (Notomys longicaudatus). The main survivors are small rodents, insectivorous bats, marsupials, kangaroos and wallabies. A major threat to vegetation are the free-roaming camels in the desert. Over 300 species of birds live in the desert areas, including emus, ratites, parrots, cockatoos, owls and raptors. The desert includes many types of lizards, including the vulnerable great desert skink (Egernia kintorei), the Central Ranges taipan (discovered in 2007), and a number of small marsupials, including the endangered sandhill dunnart (Sminthopsis psammophila) and the crest-tailed mulgara (Dasycercus cristicauda). One way to survive here is to burrow into the sands, as a number of the desert's animals, including the southern marsupial mole (Notoryctes typhlops), and the water-holding frog do.
Reptiles live in large numbers in the deserts, for example the woma python, thorny devil, bearded dragon, monitor lizard, frilled dragon and geckos. Frog species that have adapted to drought, such as the Desert Trilling Frog (Neobatrachus centralis) and the Desert Tree Frog (Litoria rubella), can also occur. The most numerous species of lizards in the world can be found in the Australian desert, there are over 40 species of them there. In addition to fish, the few permanent freshwater holes are also home to mussels, crustaceans and insects. 34 species of fish occur in Lake Eyre and others at the artesian springs (e.g. at Dalhousie Springs in South Australia). Over 40 species of frogs have been observed after heavy rains.
The Dingo Fence was built to restrict movements of dingoes and wild dogs into agricultural areas towards the south east of the continent. Predators of the desert include the dingo (as the desert is north of the Dingo Fence) and two large monitor lizards, the perentie (Varanus giganteus) and the sand goanna (Varanus gouldii). Many introduced species have affected the fauna and flora of Australia's desert regions. The Australian feral camel affects native vegetation, partly because Australian desert vegetation evolved without any major herbivores present. Uncontrolled access to more sensitive areas by four-wheel-drive vehicles is also an issue. Feral cats have reduced the populations of bilbies and mulgara."
Deserts of Australia,"Climate
Australia's climate is mostly determined by the hot, sinking air of the subtropical high-pressure belt (i.e. Australian High). Dry conditions are associated with an El Niño–Southern Oscillation in Australia. Vegetation in arid areas is primarily dependent upon soil type.
The average annual rainfall in the Australian desert ranges from 81 to 250 mm (3.2 to 9.8 in), which would make it a semi-arid climate. But a massive evaporation rate makes up for the higher than normal desert rainfall. Central Australia is arid, with the driest areas averaging 150 mm (5.91 in) of rainfall each year. Thunderstorms are relatively common in the region, with an annual average of 15 to 20 thunderstorms. Summer daytime temperatures range from 32 to 50 °C (90 to 122 °F); winter maximum temperatures average between 18 and 23 °C (64 and 73 °F), though will be more warmer in the north.
Extensive areas are covered by longitudinal dunes. The northwestern region of the desert is one which gives rise to the heat lows which help drive the NW monsoon. There, almost all rain comes from monsoon thunderstorms or the occasional tropical cyclone rain depression. Frost does not occur in most of the area in the far north. The regions bordering the Gibson Desert in the far southeast may record a light frost or two every year, with frost being more prevalent in the Tanami region. Away from the coast winter nights can still be chilly in comparison to the warm days. Minimum winter temperatures dip to 6 °C (43 °F) in most parts of the desert."
Deserts of Australia,"Tourism
Tourism is a major industry across the Great Australian desert, and commonwealth and state tourism agencies explicitly target Outback Australia as a sought after destination for domestic and international travelers. Tourism Australia explicitly markets nature-based and Indigenous-led experiences to tourists. In the 2015–2016 financial year, 815,000 visitors spent $988 million while on holidays in the Northern Territory alone. At Katjarra, there are two camping spots, with shed tanks and long-drop toilets, and Indigenous rangers are available to show tourists the part of the range that is open to the public.
Riversleigh, in Queensland, is one of Australia's most renowned fossil sites and was recorded as a World Heritage site in 1994. The 100 km2 (39 sq mi) area contains fossil remains of ancient mammals, birds and reptiles of Oligocene and Miocene age.
There are several popular tourist attractions in the desert, which include:"
Deserts of Australia,"Mining
Other than agriculture and tourism, the primary economic activity in the vast and sparsely settled desert is mining. Owing to the almost complete absence of mountain building and glaciation since the Permian (in many areas since the Cambrian) ages, the outback is extremely rich in iron, aluminum, manganese and uranium ores, and also contains major deposits of gold, nickel, copper, lead and zinc ores. Because of its size, the value of grazing and mining is considerable. Major mines and mining areas in the Outback include opals at Coober Pedy, Lightning Ridge and White Cliffs, metals at Broken Hill, Tennant Creek, Olympic Dam and the remote Challenger Mine. Oil and gas are extracted in the Cooper Basin around Moomba. The Tanami Desert features The Granites gold mine and Coyote Gold Mine.
In Western Australia the Argyle diamond mine in the Kimberley is the world's biggest producer of natural diamonds and contributes approximately one-third of the world's natural supply. The Pilbara region's economy is dominated by mining and petroleum industries. Most of Australia's iron ore is also mined in the Pilbara and it also has one of the world's major manganese mines."
Deserts of Australia,"Transport
The outback is reticulated by historic tracks with excellent bitumen surface and well-maintained dirt roads. The Stuart Highway runs from north to south through the centre of the continent, roughly paralleled by the Tarcoola-Darwin railway line. There is a proposal to develop some of the roads running from the south-west to the north-east to create an all-weather road named the Outback Highway, crossing the continent diagonally from Laverton, Western Australia (north of Kalgoorlie), through the Northern Territory to Winton, in Queensland. Air transport is relied on for mail delivery in some areas, owing to sparse settlement and wet-season road closures. Most outback mines have an airstrip and many have a fly-in fly-out workforce.
Roads in the desert include:"
Deserts of Australia,"Towns
Although the desert covers about three-quarters of the continent, it only supports around 800,000 residents – less than 5% of the Australian population. In addition, there are approximately 1,200 small Indigenous communities, of which almost half have a population of fewer than 100 people. The Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS) started service in 1928 and helps people who live in the outback of Australia. In former times, serious injuries or illnesses often meant death due to the lack of proper medical facilities and trained personnel. Young Indigenous adults from the Gibson Desert region work in the Wilurarra Creative programs to maintain and develop their culture. Indigenous Australians in the desert regions include the Kogara, the Mirning and the Pitjantjatjara. Aboriginal populations have been increasing in this region."
Deserts of Australia,"Inhabited areas within the Great Australian desert include many towns and as well as some cities, such as:"
Deserts of Australia,Northern Territory
Deserts of Australia,New South Wales/Victoria
Deserts of Australia,Western Australia
Deserts of Australia,Queensland
Deserts of Australia,South Australia
Deserts of Australia,"Languages and people
The Aboriginal languages with the most speakers today in the desert include Upper Arrernte, Walmajarri, Warlpiri, and the Western Desert languages within the Western Desert cultural bloc, such as the Wati languages, the Panyjima language, Wangkatha, Noongar language, the Yankunytjatjara dialect and the Pitjantjatjara dialect. There is also the Adnyamathanha language in South Australia. Other (extant) language clusters include the Kalkatungic languages, Ngarna languages Arandic languages, Ngumpin–Yapa languages, Warumungu languages, Ngayarda languages, Kanyara-Mantharta languages and Thura-Yura languages. Most of these languages belong in the Pama–Nyungan language family.
Ethnic groups include the Kartudjara, Warumungu people, Pitjantjatjara, Panyjima people, Kuyani, Yankunytjatjara, Kunapa, Manjiljarra, Ayerrereng, Yuruwinga, Yulparija and the Maduwongga."
Deserts of Australia,"Popular culture
Popular movies set or filmed in the Australian desert include:"
Deserts of Australia,"See also
Bushland
Irrigation in Australia
Outback
The bush"
Deserts of Australia,"References
Further reading
Johnson, John & Catherine de Courcy.(1998) Desert Tracks Port Melbourne, Vic. Lothian Books. ISBN 0-85091-811-1"
Deserts of Australia,External links
Deserts of Australia,"The Australian Landscape, A Cultural History – A four-part program exploring the way Europeans and Aboriginal people have engaged with the desert, through art, science and religion, from ABC Radio National
Encarta (Archived 2009-10-31)
World Book
World Wildlife Fund, ed. (2001). ""Simpson desert"". WildWorld Ecoregion Profile. National Geographic Society. Archived from the original on 8 March 2010."
Australian wine,"The Australian wine industry is one of the world's largest exporters of wine, with approximately 800 million out of the 1.2 to 1.3 billion litres produced annually exported to overseas markets. The wine industry is a significant contributor to the Australian economy through production, employment, export, and tourism.
There is a $3.5 billion domestic market for Australian wines, with Australians consuming approximately 500 million litres annually. Norfolk Islanders are the second biggest per capita wine consumers in the world with 54 litres. Only 16.6% of wine sold domestically is imported.
Wine is produced in every state, with more than 60 designated wine regions totalling approximately 160,000 hectares; however Australia's wine regions are mainly in the southern, cooler parts of the country, with vineyards located in South Australia, New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia, Tasmania and Queensland. The wine regions in each of these states produce different wine varieties and styles that take advantage of the particular Terroir such as: climatic differences, topography and soil types. The major varieties are predominantly Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Merlot, Semillon, Pinot noir, Riesling, and Sauvignon blanc. Wines are often labelled with the name of their grape variety, which must constitute at least 85 percent of the wine."
Australian wine,"History
Vine cuttings from the Cape of Good Hope were brought to the penal colony of New South Wales by Governor Phillip on the First Fleet (1788). Wine produced from this was initially for household use.
An attempt at wine making from these first vines failed, but with perseverance, other settlers managed to successfully cultivate vines for winemaking, and Australian made wine was available for sale domestically by the 1820s. In 1822 Gregory Blaxland became the first person to export Australian wine, and was the first winemaker to win an overseas award. In 1830 vineyards were established in the Hunter Valley. In 1833 James Busby returned from France and Spain with a serious selection of grape varieties including most classic French grapes and a good selection of grapes for fortified wine production.
Wine from the Adelaide Hills was sent to Queen Victoria in 1844, but there is no evidence that she placed an order as a result. The production and quality of Australian wine was much improved by the arrival of free settlers from various parts of Europe, who used their skills and knowledge to establish some of Australia's premier wine regions. For example, emigrants from Prussia in the mid-1850s were important in establishing South Australia's Barossa Valley as a winemaking region. In smaller scale, winemakers from Switzerland also helped in establishing Geelong wine region in Victoria in 1842.
In 1853, Australia had less than six hundred hectares of grapes, with only a portion used for winemaking.
Early Australian winemakers faced many difficulties, particularly due to the unfamiliar Australian climate. But because it is also warm, dry, and Mediterranean overall, making Australia ideal for wine production, they eventually achieved considerable success. ""At the 1873 Vienna Exhibition the French judges, tasting blind, praised some wines from Victoria, but withdrew in protest when the provenance of the wine was revealed, on the grounds that wines of that quality must clearly be French."" Australian wines continued to win high honours in French competitions. A Victorian Syrah (also called Shiraz) competing in the 1878 Paris Exhibition was likened to Château Margaux and ""its taste completed its trinity of perfection."" One Australian wine won a gold medal ""first class"" at the 1882 Bordeaux International Exhibition and another won a gold medal ""against the world"" at the 1889 Paris International Exhibition. That was all before the destructive effects on the industry of the phylloxera epidemic.
Australia has rapidly become a world leader in both the quantity and quality of wines it produces. For example, Australian wine exports to the US rose from 578,000 cases in 1990 to 20,000,000 cases in 2004 and in 2000 it exported more wine than France to the UK for the first time in history.
The industry has at times suffered from its own productivity. In the late 1980s, governments sponsored growers to pull out their vines when Australia was a net importer of wine. Low grape prices in 2005 and 2006 have led to calls for another sponsored vine pull. Cleanskin wines were introduced into Australia during the 1960s as a means to combat oversupply and poor sales.
During the Black Summer bushfires of 2019 to 2020, winemaking was adversely affected in production areas struck by fire or smoke, which affects flavour through smoke taint. The Adelaide Hills wine region was particularly badly hit, losing up to 30% of is vineyards. Some winemakers found innovative ways to get around the problem of tainted grapes.
In 2020, China placed taxes of more than 200% on Australian wines at a time when China was Australia's most lucrative market. As relations between the two countries improved the tariffs were removed in March 2024.
In 2024, in part due to overproduction as well as falling consumption, Australian vignerons uprooted millions of vines."
Australian wine,"Grape varieties
Major grape varieties are Shiraz, Pinot noir, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Chardonnay, Sauvignon blanc, Sémillon, and Riesling. The country has no native grapes, and Vitis vinifera varieties were introduced from Europe and South Africa in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Some varieties have been bred by Australian viticulturists, for example Cienna and Tarrango. The most widely cultivated grape variety in Australia is Shiraz.
About 130 different grape varieties are used by commercial winemakers in Australia.  Over recent years many winemakers have been rediscovering so-called ""alternative varieties"" other than those listed above.  Many varieties from France, Italy and Spain, for example Petit Verdot, Pinot grigio, Sangiovese, Tempranillo, Nebbiolo, Malbec, Barbera, Arneis, Fiano (grape) and Viognier are becoming more common. Wines from many other varieties are being produced.
Australian winemaking results have been impressive and it has established benchmarks for a number of varietals, such as Chardonnay, Pinot noir and Shiraz. Moreover, Australians have innovated in canopy management and other viticultural and in wine-making techniques, and they have a general attitude toward their work that sets them apart from producers in Europe. Australian wine-makers travel the wine world as highly skilled seasonal workers, relocating to the northern hemisphere during the off-season at home. They are an important resource in the globalisation of wine and wine critic Matt Kramer notes that ""the most powerful influence in wine today"" comes from Australia."
Australian wine,"GSM blends
GSM is a name commonly used for a red wine consisting of a blend of Grenache, Shiraz (Syrah), and Mourvèdre. Blends where Shiraz is the main component are sometimes referred to instead as SGM.
This blend originated from those used in some Southern Rhône wines, including Châteauneuf-du-Pape, though it is also found in South Australia, California (particularly Paso Robles, originating with Tablas Creek Vineyard), and Washington (Columbia Valley); smaller production exists in Argentina and South Africa. A very similar blend is traditional to Priorat (in Catalonia, Spain), still based on Garnacha (Grenache), but adding Mazuelo (Carignan), Syrah, and Merlot (same GS, different M's).
Grenache is the lightest of the three grapes, producing a pale red juice with soft berry scents and a bit of spiciness. As a blending component, it contributes alcohol, warmth and fruitiness without added tannins. Shiraz can contribute full-bodied, fleshy flavours of black fruits and pepper. It adds colour, backbone and tannins and provides the sense of balance such blends require. Mourvèdre contributes elegance, structure and acidity to the blend, producing flavours of sweet plums, roasted game and hints of tobacco."
Australian wine,"Production
Australia's most famous wine is Penfolds Grange. The great 1955 vintage was submitted to competitions beginning in 1962 and over the years has won more than 50 gold medals. The vintage of 1971 won first prize in Syrah/Shiraz at the Wine Olympics in Paris. The 1990 vintage was named 'Red Wine of the Year' by the Wine Spectator magazine in 1995, which later rated the 1998 vintage 99 points out of a possible 100. Wine critic Hugh Johnson has called Grange the only First Growth of the Southern Hemisphere. The influential wine critic Robert Parker, who is well known for his love of Bordeaux wines, has written that Grange ""has replaced Bordeaux's Pétrus as the world's most exotic and concentrated wine"".
Other red wines to garner international attention include Henschke Hill of Grace, Clarendon Hills Astralis, D'Arenberg Dead Arm, Torbreck Run Rig and other high-end Penfolds wines such as St Henri shiraz.
Australia has almost 2000 wine producers, most of whom are small winery operations. The market is dominated by a small number of major wine companies.  The largest wineries are the Casella winery in Yenda, NSW (Yellow Tail wines) and the Berri Estates winery in Glossop, SA.  The ownership of wineries varies but their location has largely been the same since the introduction of stainless steel tanks in the 1990s, there was a major change in the wine industry in the 1980s when local winegrower cooperatives ceased operations or were privatised.
The majority of grapes are grown in warm climate regions, including the Riverina, Murray Valley and Riverland wine regions, located in southern NSW, north western Victoria and South Australia. A 2019 report by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission examined grape production in these areas and the myriad competition and consumer issues facing growers."
Australian wine,"Major wine regions
The information included on wine labels is strictly regulated. One aspect of this is that the label must not make any false or misleading statements about the source of the grapes. Many names (called geographic indications) are protected. These are divided into ""South Eastern Australia"", the state names, zones (shown in the map), regions, and subregions. The largest volume of wine is produced from grapes grown in the warm climate Murray-Darling Basin zones of Lower Murray, North Western Victoria and Big Rivers. In general, the higher-value premium wines are made from smaller and cooler-climate regions.
The South Australian wine industry is responsible for most of the production of wine in Australia. In recent years, the Tasmanian wine industry has emerged as a producer of high quality wines. In particular, the Tamar Valley has developed a reputation for its Chardonnay and Pinot noir, which are well suited to the cooler Tasmanian climate. Queensland is also developing a wine industry with over 100 vineyards registered in the state. Some notable wines are produced in the high-altitude Granite Belt region in the state's extreme south, production is centred on the towns of Stanthorpe and Ballandean."
Australian wine,Some well-known wine-producing regions include:
Australian wine,South Australia wine regions
Australian wine,Victoria wine regions
Australian wine,New South Wales wine regions
Australian wine,"Western Australia wine regions
Greater Perth:"
Australian wine,South Western Australia:
Australian wine,Great Southern:
Australian wine,Tasmania wine regions
Australian wine,Queensland wine
Australian wine,"Export markets
The Australian Wine export market was worth 2.8 billion Australian dollars (A$) a year in June 2007, having grown at 9%pa. Of this about A$2 billion is accounted for by North America and the UK. 2007 statistics for the North American market show that Australian wine accounted for a 17% share of the total value of US imported wine, behind France with 31% and Italy with 28%.
New marketing strategies developed for the key UK market encouraged customers to explore premium Australian brands while maintaining sales of the lower-margin high-volume brands, following research that indicated a celebratory dinner was more likely to be accompanied by an inferior French wine than a premium Australian wine. This is partly due to exchange rate fluctuations, making Australian wines appear much cheaper than French wines in the UK and hence perceived as being of poorer quality. While this situation may be somewhat mitigated by the continued rise in the Australian dollar during 2010, the stronger currency threatens to weaken Australian exports to the crucial US market.
Australian wine accounts for a very large imported wine market share in South Asian countries and is the second largest imported wine in India with a market share of 16%. Australia was China's largest supplier of imported wine, a standing achieved in part by free-trade agreements established between the two countries. However, in retaliation for the Australian government's support of an inquiry into the origins of Covid-19, China imposed tariffs of over 200% on Australian wine in October 2020. These tariffs have been lifted as of April 2024 following an improvement in relations between the two countries.
Canada is the fourth-largest export market for Australian wines with the major exporting provinces being British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec. With the restrictions on the sale of Australian wine being removed in British Columbia, Australian wine will be on more shelves in the province with lower tariffs."
Australian wine,"Government spending
Australian wine research and production is supported by the government through partnerships with the publicly funded CSIRO and Wine Australia worth  $18 million. In an average year, alcohol production in Australia is estimated to produce between $3.3 and $5.5 billion in taxable income."
Australian wine,"See also
References
Sources
External links
Wine Australia"
Telephone numbers in Australia,"The Australian telephone numbering plan governs the allocation of telephone numbers in Australia. It has changed many times, the most recent major reorganisation by the Australian Communications and Media Authority taking place between 1994 and 1998."
Telephone numbers in Australia,"Overview
For landline telephony, Australia is geographically divided into four areas, three of which cover more than one state or territory. All local telephone numbers within the four areas have eight digits, consisting (mainly) of a four-digit exchange code and a four-digit local line number. The national significant number consists of a single-digit area code followed by the local eight-digit number, a total of nine digits. Calling within Australia a landline telephone in an area other than that of the caller, the telephone number is preceded by the Australian trunk prefix 0 and the area code: 0x xxxx xxxx."
Telephone numbers in Australia,"00 International and Emergency access (see below for details)
01 Alternative phone services
014 Satellite phones
0163 Pager numbers
0198 Data numbers (e.g. 0198 308 888 is the dial-up PoP number for Telstra)
02 Geographic: Central East region (NSW, ACT, small parts of Victoria)
03 Geographic: South-east region (VIC, TAS)
04 Digital Mobile services (3G, 4G, 5G and GSM)
0550 Location Independent Communication Services
07 Geographic: North-east region (QLD)
08 Geographic: Central and West region (SA, NT, WA, small part of NSW)
1 Non-geographic numbers (mostly for domestic use only; see below for details)
The current numbering plan would appear to be sufficient to cope with potential increase in demand for services for quite some time to come. The 06 and 09 area codes are unused.  In addition, each other area code has large number ranges unallocated.
When dialling from outside Australia, after dialling the appropriate international access code, it is necessary to dial the country code for Australia (61) followed by the nine digit national significant number. (The + symbol is used to represent the International Access Code, e.g. +61 3 xxxx xxxx for a number in Victoria/Tasmania or +61 4xx xxx xxx for a mobile number). Some numbers beginning with a 1 may be dialled without any replacement, after dialling the required international access code and the country code.
Australian local numbers have eight digits, conventionally written in the form xxxx xxxx. Mobile numbers are written in the form of ten digits, when dialed within Australia, the 0 must be included, and 4, which indicates the service required is a mobile number. Mobile numbers are conventionally written 04xx xxx xxx. If a landline or mobile number is written where it may be viewed by an international audience (e.g. in an email signature or on a website) then the number is often written as +61 x xxxx xxxx or +61 4xx xxx xxx respectively.
The Australian national trunk access code, 0, is not used for calls originated from locations outside Australia."
Telephone numbers in Australia,"Geographic numbers
Fixed-line telephone numbers
Within Australia, dialing a number in another area requires dialing the trunk code 0, followed by the area code, and then the local number.
In major centres, the first four digits specify the CCA (Call Collection Area, also known as an exchange), and the remaining digits specify a number at that exchange, up to 10,000 of which may be connected. Smaller exchanges in more remote areas may mean that no more than 100 numbers could be connected to such exchanges.
To access numbers in the same area, it is necessary only to dial the eight digits concerned.  To access a number in another area it is first necessary to dial the trunk code of 0, followed by the area code (2, 3, 7 or 8) and then the specific local number.
The area codes do not exactly match state/territory boundaries. Notable are the part of New South Wales around Broken Hill (a large part of the state's area but less than 1% of its population), which uses (08) 80xx numbers, and Wodonga, which is in Victoria but is within the New South Wales (02) area code. Similarly New South Wales border towns including Deniliquin and Buronga are within the South East (Victorian) (03) area code, and Tweed Heads within the North East (Queensland) (07) area code. Physical exchanges can be allocated one or more prefixes and modern technology allows sub-sets of these number ranges to be allocated to switching entities physically located at a distance from the exchange in which their controlling terminal is located. (Thus, the concept of what a ""telephone exchange"" is can become somewhat blurred.)
Landlines use an open dialling plan: if the caller's phone shares the same area code as the called phone, the area code may be omitted. For example, a call from the number (02) 5551 5678, to the number (02) 7010 1111, will be connected if the caller dials only 7010 1111. Similarly, a person who dials 7010 5678 on a land-line or mobile phone in Melbourne (i.e., within the 03 area) will be connected to 03 7010 5678. For this reason, landline numbers are often specified without the area code. If a person's number and the destination number share the same area code, then the area code is not required, even if it is not a local (untimed) call.
However, the full international number must always be dialled, since the Australian telephone network has the capability to recognise when the destination required is either international, in a different national area or within the local area and to switch and charge the call accordingly.  Thus, it is strongly recommended that telephone numbers should be stored in mobile phones in the form of the full international number, should the owner of the phone be likely to use the phone concerned in an area away from home, either within Australia or internationally."
Telephone numbers in Australia,"Mobile phones
Within Australia, mobile phone numbers begin with 04 or 05 – the Australian national trunk code 0, plus the mobile indicator 4 or 5 – followed by eight digits. This is generally written as 04XX XXX XXX within Australia, or as +61 4XX XXX XXX for an international audience.  This format is the result of mobile carriers advertising numbers in such a way so as to clearly identify the owning telco prior to mobile number portability, introduced on 25 September 2001.  Prior to MNP, mobile operators generally reserved number ranges in blocks of 04 xy z.
The xy-digit codes (sometimes xy z) are allocated per network. Since the introduction of number portability, there is no longer a fixed relationship between the mobile phone number and the network it uses.
In 2015 the 05 prefix (other than 0550) was also reserved for digital mobile phones as a part of the Telecommunications Numbering Plan 2015. However, as of 2019 no numbers have been allocated with this prefix.
Within Australia, mobile numbers must always be dialed with all 10 digits, regardless of the caller's location."
Telephone numbers in Australia,"List of geographic numbers
Geographical areas are identified by the first few digits of the local number:"
Telephone numbers in Australia,"Central-East region (02)
02 37	Armidale, Tamworth, Northern Tablelands
02 38	Bowral, Crookwell, Goulburn, Marulan
02 39	Griffith, Wagga Wagga, Riverina
02 40	Newcastle, Lower Hunter
02 41	Newcastle, Lower Hunter
02 42	Wollongong
02 43	Gosford, Central Coast
02 44	Batemans Bay, Moruya, Nowra
02 45	Windsor, Richmond
02 46	Campbelltown
02 47	Penrith, Blue Mountains
02 48	Bowral, Crookwell, Goulburn, Marulan
02 49	Newcastle, Lower Hunter
02 50	Albury, Corryong, Wodonga
02 51	Canberra, Queanbeyan, Yass
02 52	Canberra, Queanbeyan, Yass 
02 53	Bathurst, Orange
02 54	Bega, Merimbula, Tathra, Cooma
02 55	Port Macquarie, Kempsey, Taree, Lord Howe Island, Muswellbrook
02 56	Murwillumbah, Grafton, Lismore
02 57	Armidale, Tamworth, Northern Tablelands
02 58	Bourke, Dubbo, Far West
02 59	Griffith, Wagga Wagga, Riverina 
02 60	Albury, Corryong, Wodonga
02 61	Canberra, Queanbeyan, Yass
02 62	Canberra, Queanbeyan, Yass
02 63	Bathurst, Orange, Cowra
02 64	Bega, Merimbula, Tathra, Cooma
02 65	Port Macquarie, Kempsey, Taree, Lord Howe Island, Muswellbrook
02 66	Coffs Harbour, Grafton, Lismore, Murwillumbah
02 67	Armidale, Glen Innes, Gunnedah, Inverell, Moree, Narrabri, Tamworth
02 68	Bourke, Dubbo, Cobar
02 69	Griffith, Wagga Wagga, Riverina
02 7	Sydney
02 8	Sydney 
02 9	Sydney"
Telephone numbers in Australia,"South-east region (03)
03 32	Geelong, Colac
03 33	Ballarat
03 34	Bendigo
03 40	Mildura, Balranald
03 41	Traralgon, Bairnsdale
03 42	Geelong, Colac 
03 43	Ballarat
03 44	Bendigo
03 45	Warrnambool
03 47	Wangaratta
03 48	Deniliquin, Numurkah, Shepparton
03 49	Mornington 
03 50	Mildura, Balranald
03 51	Traralgon, Bairnsdale
03 52	Colac, Geelong
03 53	Ballarat
03 54	Bendigo
03 55	Warrnambool, Casterton, Portland
03 56	Drouin, Foster, Warragul, Wonthaggi
03 57	Wangaratta
03 58	Deniliquin, Shepparton
03 59	Mornington, Pakenham, Rosebud, Warburton, Yarra Ranges
03 61	Hobart
03 62	Hobart
03 63	Launceston
03 64	Devonport, Burnie, Queenstown
03 65	Devonport, Burnie, Queenstown
03 67	Launceston
03 7	Melbourne
03 8	Melbourne
03 9	Melbourne"
Telephone numbers in Australia,"North-east region (07)
07 2	Brisbane, Bribie Island
07 3	Brisbane, Bribie Island
07 40	Cairns, Far North Queensland
07 41	Bundaberg, Kingaroy, Maryborough
07 42	Cairns
07 43	Bundaberg, Kingaroy
07 44	Townsville, North Queensland
07 45	Toowoomba, Roma, south-west
07 46	Toowoomba, Roma, South West
07 47	Townsville, North Queensland
07 48	Rockhampton, Mackay
07 49	Rockhampton, Mackay, Gladstone
07 52	Sunshine Coast, Esk, Nambour, Gatton, Caboolture
07 53	Sunshine Coast, Esk, Nambour, Gatton, Caboolture 
07 54	Sunshine Coast, Esk, Nambour, Gatton, Caboolture
07 55	Gold Coast, Tweed Heads (NSW), Beaudesert
07 56	Gold Coast, Beaudesert
07 57	Gold Coast, Beaudesert
07 70	Cairns, Far North Queensland
07 75	Inglewood, Toowoomba
07 76	Inglewood, Toowoomba
07 77	Townsville, North Queensland
07 79	Rockhampton, Mackay, Gladstone"
Telephone numbers in Australia,"Central and West region (08)
08 25	Riverland, Murraylands 
08 26	Ceduna
08 51	Port Hedland
08 52	Perth
08 53	Perth
08 54	Perth
08 55	Bullsbrook East, Northam, Pinjarra (Mandurah)
08 58	Albany
08 60	Kalgoorlie, Merredin, Goldfields-Esperance
08 61	Perth
08 62	Perth
08 63	Perth
08 64	Perth
08 65	Perth
08 66	Moora
08 67	Bridgetown, Bunbury
08 68	Albany
08 69	Geraldton
08 70 Adelaide
08 71	Adelaide
08 72	Adelaide
08 73	Adelaide
08 74	Adelaide
08 75	Riverland, Murraylands
08 76	Ceduna
08 77	South East
08 78	Mid North
08 79 Northern Territory (Alice Springs, Darwin)
08 80	Broken Hill (NSW)
08 81	Adelaide
08 82	Adelaide
08 83	Adelaide
08 84	Adelaide
08 85	Riverland, Murraylands, Barossa Valley
08 86	Ceduna
08 87	South East
08 88	Mid North
08 89	Northern Territory (Alice Springs, Darwin)
08 90	Kalgoorlie
08 91	Derby [inc. Cocos/Keeling & Christmas Islands.]
08 92	Perth
08 93	Perth
08 94	Perth
08 95	Bullsbrook East, Northam, Pinjarra (Mandurah)
08 96	Moora
08 97	Bunbury, Busselton, Bridgetown, Collie, Harvey
08 98	Albany
08 99	Geraldton"
Telephone numbers in Australia,"Notes
List of non-geographic numbers
Mobile phone numbers (04, 05)
Each mobile phone company is allocated numbers in blocks, which are listed below. However mobile number portability means an individual number might have been ""ported"". There are also many MVNOs which use numbers from their wholesaler or might have their own ranges.
ACMA planned to introduce the ""05"" range for mobile numbers in 2017, when the ""04"" range was expected to be exhausted. So far, no such numbers have been introduced."
Telephone numbers in Australia,"The numbers 0491 570 156, 0491 570 157, 0491 570 158, 0491 570 159 and 0491 570 110 are reserved for fictitious use."
Telephone numbers in Australia,"Satellite phone numbers (014)
Numbers beginning with 014 are predominantly used for satellite services. Parts of the 014 prefix had previously been used as a 9 digit, AMPS mobile phone access code.
The 01471 prefix is the ten-digit replacement for the previous, nine-digit ITERRA satellite phone code 0071 xxxxx. Prior to its use for ITERRA (and other satellite services). These numbers were allocated in March 1999.
0145xxxxxx numbers are used for services utilised on the Optus network in Australia. This is predominantly used for MobileSat and Thuraya mobile satellite services. These numbers were allocated in December 1992: 222,000 with the rest ""spare"".
The prefixes 0141, 0142, 0143, 0145 and 0147 are set aside for satellite systems; the rest of the 014 prefix range is currently not allocated to any other service type. There is not a lot of demand for these services, and many satellite phones now have normal mobile phone numbers (prefix 04), so it is not likely for the entire 014 range to be allocated to satellite services."
Telephone numbers in Australia,"Location independent communications service (0550)
These numbers are designed for VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) systems, where they work like a fixed number but not allocated on a geographical level. It is possible that LICS numbers will be absorbed into mobile numbers in the future, as they provide similar features. Indeed, the July 2012 variation of the numbering plan allocated the rest of the 05 range to digital mobile numbering."
Telephone numbers in Australia,"Data numbers (0198)
All calls to 0198 numbers are a ""local call"" cost like 13 and 1300 numbers but are used for Internet service provider access numbers. They are used both with dial-up modems and ISDN."
Telephone numbers in Australia,"Obsolete numbers
Most numbers that are no longer used have been removed from the Telecommunications Numbering Plan 2015, whether in previous variations or in this complete replacement. (See below)
However, the 0163 prefix is still allocated for use with pagers. This was reduced from 016 in a variation to the previous numbering plan. As of March 2011 only 1000 numbers were allocated, and by the end of 2012 there were none allocated."
Telephone numbers in Australia,"List of non-geographic numbers (domestic use)
The following codes are not generally dialable from international points, but used in domestic dialling:"
Telephone numbers in Australia,"000 – Emergency (Police, Fire, Ambulance)
106 – TTY emergency (for the hearing-impaired)
11 – Community services
1100 – Before You Dig Australia (to prevent inadvertent damage to underground cables or infrastructure)
112 – Alternative access to Emergency Services (Police, Fire, Ambulance; diallable from GSM mobile phones only)
119x – Information services (e.g. 1194 was time and 1196 was weather (both disabled from 1 October 2019))
12 – Network services
1221 – International faults reporting service
1222 – Call costs and enquiries service
1223 – Directory assistance
1225 – International directory assistance
123x – Premium operator services (e.g. 1234 is Sensis personal assistance)
124xx – Other operator services (e.g. 12456 is Sensis Call Connect)
125xxx – Telstra mobile services (e.g. 125111 is Telstra mobile customer service)
1268x, 1268 xxxx and 1268 xxx xxx – Internal network services
127 – Testing numbers (e.g. 12722123 reads your number from a Telstra line, 12723123 reads your number for an Optus line) (length varies), dial 12722199 then hang up and the call is returned by the exchange (used to test handset functionality)
1282 – Call information service
128xx – Call information service
13 xx xx and 1300 xxx xxx – ""Local Rate"" calls, except for VoIP and mobile phone users
1345 xxxx – Local rate calls (only used for back-to-base monitored alarm systems)
14xx – Carrier override prefixes (e.g. 1411 is the override prefix for the Telstra network; see below for details)
180 xxxx and 1800 xxx xxx – FreeCall
183x – Caller identification override prefixes (1831 blocks caller-id sending while 1832 unblocks caller-id sending)
188 xxxx – Premium SMS (since moved to 19 range)
189 xx – Calling card service
19 xx xx and 19xx xxxx – Premium SMS
190x xxx xxx – Premium rate services (usually 1902 and 1900)
Some notes:"
Telephone numbers in Australia,"These numbers do not have a Trunk Access Code prefix (0).
The 106 number is believed to be the first nationwide TTY emergency service in the world.
13 xx xx, 1300 xxx xxx and 1800 xxx xxx numbers can provide source-based routing, used by organisations such as pizza chains that advertise one number nationwide that connects customers to their nearest store.
Virtually all FreeCall numbers in use are 1800 xxx xxx, though some organisations do use the shorter 7-digit version.
Some of these numbers are dialable from locations outside Australia. It is up to the individual owner to set this up correctly (for 13 and 18 numbers at least) (e.g. +61 13x xxx)
911 will not re-route to triple zero as the prefix 911x has been allocated to landlines under the current numbering plan. 911 may redirect to 000 when using a mobile phone, like 112, but it is not encouraged as knowledge of these numbers causes confusion"
Telephone numbers in Australia,"Emergency services numbers (000, 106, 112)
000 is the primary emergency telephone number in Australia. Secondary emergency numbers are 106 (for use by the hearing impaired with a TTY terminal) and the international GSM mobile emergency telephone number 112.
Increased awareness of the 112 emergency number in Australia has led to the potential for confusion over which number to call in an emergency. As a secondary emergency number, 112 is not guaranteed to work from all technologies; most notably, it does not work from landlines. In order to encourage use of 000, mobile telephones imported commercially into Australia are required to be programmed to treat 000 in the same fashion as 112 (i.e. dialling with key lock enabled, use of any carrier, preferential routing, etc.). On older or privately imported (e.g. roaming from another country) telephones, 000 may not receive such preferential treatment."
Telephone numbers in Australia,"Local Rate and FreeCall numbers (13, 180)
Australia uses the free call prefix 1800 for 10 digit freecall numbers. This is similar to the North American or NANPA prefix 1–800, but while in North America, the 1 is the long-distance or toll prefix and 800 is the area code; 1800 in Australia is itself a ""virtual area code"" (prior to the introduction of 8-digit numbers, the free call code was 008). There are also seven digit freecall numbers beginning with 180 – the only numbers currently allocated begin with 1802.
The 13 and 1300 numbers are known as Local Rate Numbers or SmartNumbers.  They are also known as priority 13, and priority 1300 numbers.  These work across large areas (potentially the whole of Australia) and charge the caller only a low cost, routing the call to the appropriate place in a given area. For example, a company could have the number 139999 and have the telephone company set it up so that calls made in Melbourne would route to their Melbourne number, calls made in Brisbane to their Brisbane number, and calls made anywhere else in Australia route to their Sydney number, all at a local charge cost to the caller. 13 numbers were not available before the introduction of the current 8-digit local numbering plan. Businesses looking for local callers tend to connect to a ""1300"" number. Note that these numbers are called ""Local Rate"" and not ""Local"" numbers, so do not necessarily cost the same as a local call: Indeed, many (landline and mobile) phone plans do not even include them in the ""included"" credit and/or charge them at a higher rate than ""normal"" numbers.
Though promoted as ""local call rate"" calls, calls to 13 and 1300 numbers cost more than a local call fee for those people using VoIP and having all local and national calls free.
1800, 1300 and 13 numbers are reverse charge networks. Other than the length of the number, the differences between a 13 number and a 1300 number is that the shorter number has a higher fee for the owner of the number: there should be no difference in cost to the caller. A call to an 1800 is free when dialled from a landline, and mobile phones since 2014. It depends on the individual mobile plan as how 13 and 1300 numbers are charged: all plans no longer charge for 1800 but 13 and 1300 may still be charged at a high rate, or outside included calls.
These numbers ""forward"" to a geographic or mobile number. The recipient is usually charged at a set rate per second for each call, depending on plan and destination."
Telephone numbers in Australia,"Premium numbers (19)
190x (not to be confused with 0198) is the prefix for premium rate services (e.g. recorded information, competition lines, psychics, phone sex, etc.). (Prior to the introduction of 8-digit local numbers, the prefix was 0055.) 190 numbers incur a rate as charged by the provider – either at a per-minute rate (limited at $5.50 per minute) or a fixed rate (up to $38.50 per call). The latter method is most often used for fax-back services, where a timed charge is not appropriate. Costs of 190 calls for competitions involving chance are also often limited by state legislation to $0.55 per call. (In the previous numbering plan, 0055 numbers were limited to three bands: Premium Rate, Value Rate and Budget Rate, with per minute rates of $0.75, $0.60 and $0.40 respectively.)
Other numbers beginning with 19 are used for premium-rate SMS services. These were originally trialled using the 188 prefix. These can range from a standard SMS cost (usually 25c), up to 55c for competition use, to several dollars for other uses, such as unique bid auctions."
Telephone numbers in Australia,"International access
The main international prefix is 0011. (E.164 international format is supported from phones with the ability to dial the '+' symbol.)
There are other codes for using a non-default carrier or a special plan:"
Telephone numbers in Australia,"0014 will route through the Primus network
0018 will route through the Telstra network
0019 will route through the Optus network
Formerly, 0015 would route through Telstra on a special mode for international faxing. Telstra has retired this code.
Carrier selection codes (14xx) are now also used, and carrier pre-selection is widely used."
Telephone numbers in Australia,"Carrier selection codes
These four-digit numbers are dialled before the destination number to complete and bill a call by a carrier other than the subscriber's service provider. For example, to use AAPT to call a number in Tokyo, Japan, subscribers would dial 1414 0011 81 3 xxxx xxxx, or to use Optus to call a number in Perth they would dial 1456 08 xxxx xxxx. It is not clear if all these prefixes will actually work. Not all carriers have interconnect agreements with each other"
Telephone numbers in Australia,"1410 – Telstra
1411 – Telstra
1412 – TPG (Was Chime)
1413 – Telstra
1414 – TPG (Was AAPT)
1415 – Vodafone
1422 – Premier Technologies
1423 – TPG (was Soul Pattinson)
1428 – Verizon Australia
1431 – Vodafone Hutchison
1434 – Symbio Networks
1441 – TPG (was Soul Pattinson)
1447 – TransACT
1450 – Pivotel
1455 – Netsip
1456 – Optus
1464 – TPG (Was Agile)
1466 – Primus
1468 – Telpacific
1469 – Lycamobile
1474 – Powertel
1477 – Vocus
1488 – Symbio Networks
1499 – VIRTUTEL"
Telephone numbers in Australia,"Supplementary control services
1831 – Block Caller ID sending
1832 – Unblock Caller ID sending"
Telephone numbers in Australia,"Other numbers and codes
Test numbers
Telstra Landline Test numbers
12722123 – Playback the last connected or current landline number (add 1832 in front for private numbers)
12722199 – Ringback the current landline number
Telstra payphone test numbers
12722101 - will only take 1¢ per metering pulses
0488076353 - will test the SMS function of the phone
Optus landline test numbers
1272312 – Playback the last connected or current landline number
1272399 – Ringback the current landline number
From other subscribers including VoIP providers
1800801920 – Playback the last connected or current landline number
Other
12711 – Current long-distance Carrier Name"
Telephone numbers in Australia,"Historical numbering plans
2010s
Many old numbers were officially removed from the Telecommunications Numbering Plan in the 2015 version, whether in the replacement version or a previous variation."
Telephone numbers in Australia,"018 AMPS phone numbers are completely removed.
0500 Personal Numbers are removed.
Unused prefixes such as 114 mass calling service are removed."
Telephone numbers in Australia,"1990s
0055 numbers were previously premium-rate numbers, but have been moved into 190 numbers before 1999.
The original toll-free area code was 008, but the format was changed to 1800.
Directory assistance used various numbers: 013 for local calls, 0175 for other national calls, and 0103 for international. The two domestic numbers have been replaced with 1223, while 0103 was replaced with 1225. Other numbers for directory assistance, often with a call connection option, exist depending on the carrier.
011 was initially the code for the operator, 0011 later became the international exit code.
014 was originally the number for the time, (later 1104), which was changed to 1194 in 1976.
0176 was originally the code for the operator when calling from a Public Telephone. It became the code for the reverse-charge call operator, which was moved to 12550. Alternatively 3rd-party companies exist. See Collect call#Australia"
Telephone numbers in Australia,"1960s
Up to this time, the maximum size of an Australian telephone number was six digits.
Until the early 1960s, the first one or two digits of telephone numbers in metropolitan areas were alphabetic, with each letter representing a distinct number on the telephone dial. Each one-letter or two-letter code signified an exchange within an urban area. Rural and regional areas typically relied on manual exchanges, or only one automatic exchange for the whole town, so rural and regional numbers did not feature these letter prefixes. The use of a letter-number combination also served as a memory aid as it was easier to remember than a string of digits in the days when such things were not as common.
Unlike the three (or fewer) letters associated with each of the numbers on the dials of telephones of the UK Director telephone system, which was used in London and other large British cities, Australia used a system of letters associated with the ten digits available on a telephone dial, where each of these letters were chosen because their ""name"" (when pronounced, in English) could not be confused with any of the other nine letters of the English/Latin alphabet which were also used.
Since the initial digits of 1 and 0 (ten) were not used, this gave the telephone company concerned up to 8 regions with main exchanges and up to ten sub-exchanges in each metropolitan area – a total of up to 80 individual exchanges of 10,000 numbers in each with up to only 800,000 individual ""numbers"" in any metropolitan area concerned. This limited capacity led to the need for a seven- or eight-digit numbering system, to allow for more ""numbers"" within a given area.
Because of the growth of the telephone network, Australia now has eight-digit telephone numbers within four areas.
This former alphanumeric scheme was significantly different from the current system used for SMS messages.
The former alphanumeric scheme was:"
Telephone numbers in Australia,"A = 1;
B = 2;
F = 3;
J = 4;
L = 5;
M = 6;
U = 7;
W = 8;
X = 9;
Y = 0
The letters did not relate to any exchange name. For example, the exchange prefix for Essendon was FU (which translated to 37 and later became the 37x [then 937x] exchange used by the whole City of Essendon [which became the City of Moonee Valley in late 1994]). Although Melbourne city numbers began with 6, it was only rarely, and probably by accident, that any other exchanges had matching letters. Numbers using the old alphanumeric scheme were written as ab.xxxx, for example FU 1234 (the actual train of digits sent to the phone was ""371234"") or MW 5550 (685550). Seven-digit numbers started appearing as early as 1960, and were all numerical from the start. There were still some six-digit numbers and at least one five-digit number in Melbourne as late as 1989, but by the 1990s, they all had been converted to seven-digit numbers. Footscray used six-digit numbers in exchange code 68 until 1987, when they were changed to 687 or 689.
The old call back number was 199, and could be used on public payphones, and private numbers too. This was moved to a new number 12722199."
Telephone numbers in Australia,"See also
Former Australian dialling codes
Telecommunications in Australia
Telephone numbers in Norfolk Island"
Telephone numbers in Australia,"References
ITU allocations list"
Telephone numbers in Australia,"External links
List of Telephone Exchanges
Excel file of exchange prefixes via Telstra Wholesale site
Telecommunications Numbering Plan 1997
Telecommunications Numbering Plan 2015
All Areas by Prefix (archive.org snapshot of old version of official site)
All Areas by Prefix (official site - expand heading Geographic numbers)
All Areas by Prefix (ATO) Archived 18 March 2022 at the Wayback Machine
Australia Phone Number
Best Australia Vitrual Number"
Indo-Australian Plate,"The Indo-Australian Plate is a major tectonic plate that includes the continent of Australia and the surrounding ocean and extends north-west to include the Indian subcontinent and the adjacent waters. It was formed by the fusion of the Indian and the Australian plates approximately 43 million years ago. The fusion happened when the mid-ocean ridge in the Indian Ocean, which separated the two plates, ceased spreading. Contemporary models suggest at present there is a deformation zone between the Indian and Australian plates with both earthquake and global satellite navigation system data indicating that India and Australia are not moving on the same vectors northward. These observations are consistent with earlier evidence that the Indian Plate and Australian Plate have been acting as separate plates for at least the last 3 million years. In due course, some expect a localized boundary to reform between the Indian and Australian plates."
Indo-Australian Plate,"Regions
Australia-New Guinea (Mainland Australia, New Guinea, and Tasmania), the Indian subcontinent, and Zealandia (New Caledonia, New Zealand, and Norfolk Island) are all fragments of the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana. As the ocean floor broke apart, these land masses fragmented from one another, and for a time these centers were thought to be dormant and fused into a single plate. However, research in the early 21st century indicates plate separation of the Indo-Australian Plate may have already occurred."
Indo-Australian Plate,"Characteristics
The eastern side of the plate is the convergent boundary with the Pacific Plate. The Pacific Plate sinks below the Australian plate and forms the Kermadec Trench and the island arcs of Tonga and Kermadec. New Zealand is situated along the southeastern boundary of the plate, which with New Caledonia makes up the southern and northern ends of the ancient landmass of Zealandia, which separated from Australia 85 million years ago. The central part of Zealandia sank under the sea.
The southern margin of the plate forms a divergent boundary with the Antarctic Plate. The western side is subdivided by the Indian Plate that borders the Arabian Plate to the north and the African Plate to the south. The northern margin of the Indian Plate forms a convergent boundary with the Eurasian Plate, which constitutes the active orogenic process of the Himalayas and the Hindukush mountains.
The northeast side of the Australian Plate forms a subduction boundary with the Eurasian Plate in the Indian Ocean between the borders of Bangladesh and Burma and to the southwest of the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Borneo. Along the northern Ninety East Ridge under the Indian Ocean there appears to be a weakness zone where the Indian and Australian plates are going different ways. The subsidence boundary through Indonesia is reflected in the Wallace line."
Indo-Australian Plate,"Plate movements
The eastern part (Australian Plate) is moving northward at the rate of 5.6 cm (2.2 in) per year while the western part (Indian Plate) is moving only at the rate of 3.7 cm (1.5 in) per year due to the impediment of the Himalayas. In terms of the middle of India and Australia's landmasses, Australia is moving northward at  3 cm (1.2 in) per year relative to India. This differential movement has resulted in the compression of the former plate near its centre at Sumatra and the division into the separate Indian and Australian plates again.
A third plate, known as the Capricorn Plate, may also be separating off the western side of the Indian Plate as part of the continued breakup of the Indo-Australian Plate."
Indo-Australian Plate,"Separation
Recent studies, and evidence from seismic events such as the 2012 Indian Ocean earthquakes, suggest that the Indo-Australian Plate may have broken up into two or three separate plates due primarily to stresses induced by the collision of the Indo-Australian Plate with Eurasia along what later became the Himalayas, and that the Indian Plate and Australian Plate may have been separate since at least 3 million years ago."
Indo-Australian Plate,"
== References =="